1
25
10
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1979/45244/PEdmondsonF1704.2.jpg
da3a5ea981e1b41eae49f62369dbb911
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
Edmondson, Eddie
Fred Edmondson
F Edmondson
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-11-03
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Edmondson, F
Description
An account of the resource
8 items. The collection concerns Sergeant Fred 'Eddie' Edmondson (Royal Air Force) and contains his log book and photographs. He flew operations as a flight engineer and bomb aimer with 35 Squadron.
The collection was loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Ron and Catherine Eccles and catalogued by Lynn Corrigan.
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
D S Flight Defford
Description
An account of the resource
A group of 21 uniformed men all wearing side caps. They are arranged in three rows, of nine, eight and four in front of an Anson. A Lincoln is behind with hangars in the background. The group is arranged around a sign reading 'D.$. Flight. Defford'. Eddie is seated third left in the second row.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Worcestershire
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PEdmondsonF1704
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
aircrew
Anson
Lincoln
RAF Defford
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/934/36538/MLovattP1821369-190903-74-01.1.pdf
fb8bdc0a3359bad330631a99725ecf91
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/934/36538/MLovattP1821369-190903-74-02.1.2.pdf
518e2b514f18dba39e9302770bce90ba
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Lovatt, Peter
Dr Peter Lovatt
P Lovatt
Description
An account of the resource
117 items. An oral history interview with Peter Lovatt (b.1924, 1821369 Royal Air Force), his log book, documents, and photographs. The collection also contains two photograph albums. He flew 42 operations as an air gunner on 223 Squadron flying B-24s. <br /><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/1338">Album One</a><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2135">Album Two</a><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Nina and Peter Lovatt and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-09-27
2019-09-03
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lovatt, P
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
The Offensive Phase
Volume Two of Two
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Peter Lovatt
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Norway--Trondheim
France--Brest
Russia (Federation)
England--Hartland
England--Beer Head
Europe--Elbe River
England--Dover
England--Folkestone
England--London
France--Bruneval
France--Pas-de-Calais
Germany--Lübeck
Germany--Rostock
England--Norwich
England--Cheadle (Staffordshire)
England--Salcombe
England--Sidmouth
France--Cherbourg
France--Boulogne-sur-Mer
France--Dunkerque
France--Cassel
England--Salisbury
Russia (Federation)--Kola Peninsula
Russia (Federation)--Arkhangelʹskai︠a︡ oblastʹ
Germany--Berlin
Poland--Szczecin
France--Desvres
France--Arcachon
France--Nantes
France--Chartres
France--Reims
England--Swanage
England--Malvern
England--Plymouth
France--Lorient
England--Lincoln
Scotland--Edinburgh
England--Hull
England--London
England--Bristol
France--Montdidier (Hauts-de-France)
England--Guildford
France--Poix-du-Nord
Germany--Mannheim
Czech Republic--Pilsen Basin
England--Harpenden
France--Morlaix
Spain--Lugo
Spain--Seville
England--Radlett (Hertfordshire)
Germany--Cologne
France--Boulogne-Billancourt
Germany--Rostock
Germany--Essen
Germany--Schleswig-Holstein
Belgium--Liège
Germany--Bremen
England--High Wycombe
Germany--Osnabrück
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
England--Sizewell
Germany--Peenemünde
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Munich
Germany--Kassel
England--Crowborough
England--Huddersfield
Netherlands--Den Helder
England--Mundesley
Germany--Schweinfurt
Europe--Baltic Sea Region
Atlantic Ocean--Bay of Biscay
Germany--Braunschweig
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Wolfenbüttel
Germany--Magdeburg
France--Limoges
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Munich
Germany--Schweinfurt
Germany--Augsburg
France--Yvelines
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Kiel
Poland--Poznań
France--Dieppe
Turkey--Gallipoli
Egypt--Alamayn
Egypt--Cairo
Morocco
Algeria
Italy--Sicily
England--Ventnor
England--Beachy Head
France--Abbeville
France--Somme
France--Seine River
England--Southampton
England--Portsmouth
Scotland--Firth of Forth
Iceland
England--Brighton
France--Normandy
France--Cherbourg
England--Littlehampton
England--Portland Harbour
France--Amiens
Netherlands--Arnhem
France--Normandy
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
France--Le Havre
France--Arromanches-les-Bains
France--Bayeux
Belgium--Wenduine
France--Beauvais
England--Ditchling
England--Henfield (West Sussex)
England--Canterbury
England--Crowborough
England--Dover
England--Chiswick
Netherlands--Hague
Sweden
Belgium--Antwerp
Germany--Aachen
Germany--Trier
Germany--Siegfried Line
Netherlands--New Maas River
Netherlands--Waal River
Russia (Federation)--Kaliningrad (Kaliningradskai︠a︡ oblastʹ)
Germany--Darmstadt
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Braunschweig
Netherlands--Walcheren
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Cologne
Europe--Ardennes
Belgium--Bastogne
Germany--Leuna
Germany--Essen
Germany--Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Ulm
Rhine River Valley
Germany--Mittelland Canal
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Castrop-Rauxel
Germany--Hannover
Belgium--Houffalize
Germany--Neuss
Germany--Grevenbroich
Germany--Dülmen
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Magdeburg
Germany--Bonn
Germany--Kamen
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Chemnitz
Germany--Dessau (Dessau)
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Kiel
England--Coventry
Italy
Poland
France
Great Britain
Egypt
North Africa
Germany
Belgium
Czech Republic
Netherlands
Norway
Russia (Federation)
Spain
Turkey
Europe--Frisian Islands
England--Milton Keynes
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Devon
England--Dorset
England--Gloucestershire
England--Hampshire
England--Herefordshire
England--Kent
England--Middlesex
England--Norfolk
England--Staffordshire
England--Suffolk
England--Surrey
England--Sussex
England--Wiltshire
England--Worcestershire
England--Yorkshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Warwickshire
Russia (Federation)--Poli︠a︡rnyĭ (Murmanskai︠a︡ oblastʹ)
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. Coastal Command
Royal Navy
United States Army Air Force
Wehrmacht. Luftwaffe
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
178 printed pages
Description
An account of the resource
A continuation of Peter's thesis on electronic warfare during the war.
Language
A language of the resource
eng
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
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MLovattP1821369-190903-74-01
1 Group
100 Group
101 Squadron
109 Squadron
141 Squadron
169 Squadron
171 Squadron
192 Squadron
199 Squadron
214 Squadron
218 Squadron
223 Squadron
239 Squadron
3 Group
4 Group
462 Squadron
5 Group
617 Squadron
8 Group
aircrew
B-17
B-24
Beaufighter
Bennett, Donald Clifford Tyndall (1910-1986)
Chamberlain, Neville (1869-1940)
crash
Defiant
Do 217
Fw 190
Gee
Gneisenau
Goering, Hermann (1893-1946)
H2S
Halifax
Halifax Mk 3
Hampden
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
He 111
Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945)
Hudson
Ju 88
Lancaster
Me 110
Me 410
mine laying
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
Mosquito
navigator
Oboe
Operational Training Unit
P-51
Pathfinders
radar
RAF Defford
RAF Downham Market
RAF Farnborough
RAF Foulsham
RAF Little Snoring
RAF North Creake
RAF Northolt
RAF Oulton
RAF Prestwick
RAF Sculthorpe
RAF St Athan
RAF Swannington
RAF Tempsford
RAF Upper Heyford
RAF Uxbridge
RAF West Raynham
RAF Wittering
Scharnhorst
Stalin, Joseph (1878-1953)
Stirling
Tirpitz
training
Typhoon
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
Wellington
Window
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/934/36497/MLovattP1821369-190903-62-01.1.pdf
e9891efa9d1c16d6be963b2ca020c36f
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/934/36497/MLovattP1821369-190903-62-02.1.1.pdf
bdbdeeb28a2c1b19b1ed1f87649c704c
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
Lovatt, Peter
Dr Peter Lovatt
P Lovatt
Description
An account of the resource
117 items. An oral history interview with Peter Lovatt (b.1924, 1821369 Royal Air Force), his log book, documents, and photographs. The collection also contains two photograph albums. He flew 42 operations as an air gunner on 223 Squadron flying B-24s. <br /><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/1338">Album One</a><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2135">Album Two</a><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Nina and Peter Lovatt and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-09-27
2019-09-03
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lovatt, P
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
The Radio War Waged by the RAF Against Germany 1940-1945
Description
An account of the resource
A thesis written by Peter in 2002, for his Phd.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Peter Lovatt
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2002-07
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
England--London
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
England--Norfolk
England--Norfolk
France--Dieppe
France--Cherbourg
England--Norwich
England--Swanage
England--Malvern
Germany--Berlin
England--Cornwall (County)
Canada
Newfoundland and Labrador
England--Devizes
France--Paris
England--Chatham (Kent)
Austria
Poland
England--Cheadle (Staffordshire)
England--Daventry
England--Orford Ness
England--Aldeburgh
England--Bawdsey (Air base)
Scotland--Dundee
Scotland--Perth
England--Christchurch (Dorset)
Russia (Federation)
Scotland--Firth of Forth
Germany--Baden-Baden
Germany--Krefeld
Germany--Borkum
Denmark
Norway
Germany--Bredstedt
France--Brest
Netherlands
Germany--Husum (Schleswig-Holstein)
Norway--Klepp
Germany--Stollberg (Landkreis)
Netherlands--Den Helder
Netherlands--Bergen op Zoom
France--Seine-Maritime
France--Cape La Hague
France--Manche
France--Morlaix
Germany--Lörrach
Italy--Noto
England--Tunbridge Wells
England--Harpenden
England--Somerset
England--Henfield (West Sussex)
England--Petersfield
France--Dieppe
England--Portsmouth
Scotland--Orkney
England--Rochester (Kent)
England--Essex
France--Le Havre
England--Hagley (Bromsgrove)
England--Gloucestershire
England--Bridport
England--Coventry
England--Bristol
France--Cassel
France--Poix-du-Nord
England--Radlett (Hertfordshire)
England--Henfield (West Sussex)
England--Cheadle (Staffordshire)
France--Bayeux
England--Kingsdown (Kent)
England--Harleston (Norfolk)
France--Barfleur
France--Cape La Hague
France--Le Mont-Saint-Michel
France--Cancale
France--Penmarc'h
France--Groix
France--Saint-Nazaire Region
France--Saint-Malo
England--Seaton (Devon)
England--Salisbury
Wales--Swansea
England--Droitwich
France--Brittany
England--Manchester
England--Chatham (Kent)
France--Chartres
France--Vannes
Poland--Lubin (Województwo Dolnośląskie)
Egypt
Libya
England--Lydd
England--Helston
England--Chivenor
England--Marske-by-the-Sea
England--Nottingham
England--Birmingham
Slovakia
Czech Republic
Italy
France
England--Milton Keynes
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Devon
England--Dorset
England--Hampshire
England--Herefordshire
England--Kent
England--Northamptonshire
England--Staffordshire
England--Suffolk
England--Sussex
England--Wiltshire
England--Worcestershire
England--Yorkshire
England--Lancashire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Warwickshire
Germany--Kleve (North Rhine-Westphalia)
France--Ouessant Island
Great Britain Miscellaneous Island Dependencies--Jersey
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 Air Force. Fighter Command
Wehrmacht. Luftwaffe
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Personal research
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
80 printed sheets
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MLovattP1821369-190903-62-01
100 Group
101 Squadron
109 Squadron
214 Squadron
218 Squadron
Anson
B-17
B-24
Blenheim
bombing
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
Do 217
Gee
Gneisenau
Goering, Hermann (1893-1946)
ground personnel
H2S
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
He 111
Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945)
Hudson
Ju 52
Ju 88
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
Oboe
P-51
Pathfinders
Photographic Reconnaissance Unit
radar
RAF Biggin Hill
RAF Boscombe Down
RAF Defford
RAF Martlesham Heath
RAF Oulton
RAF St Athan
RAF Waddington
RAF Wyton
Scharnhorst
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
Wellington
Whitley
Window
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1441/29093/BPerkinsFWJPerkinsFWJv1.1.pdf
399a52b273385620102351e9d4c96d5e
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Perkins, Frederick William James
F W J Perkins
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-09-17
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. 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
Perkins, FWJ
Description
An account of the resource
23 items. The collection concerns Frederick William James Perkins (1143173 Royal Air Force) who served as an engineer on radar research and as an armourer in the middle east. Collection and contains a memoir, propaganda leaflets and photographs.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by F Perkins and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[underlined]The Memories of LAC Fred Perkins[/underlined]
Frederick William James Perkins
Leading AirCraftman (LAC) 1143173
Main Service: Fitter Armourer General, Liberator Bombers, Middle East Theatre.
Joined Full Time Service 23 May 1941
Began Overseas Service 13 August 1943
Ended Service 26 May 1946
Transcribed from the dictated 2015 memories of Fred Perkins, aged 94.
[underlined]Joining and Basic Training[/underlined]
I volunteered to join the Royal Air Force in February 1941. I went to Worcester to volunteer and I wanted to be an aircrewman. I was enrolled and sent up to Padgate, in Lancashire, to be tested for an aircrew roll. Straight off, I could see what I was up against for a place in aircrew training. Everyone else was from a university at a time when being a student meant you were the cream at the top, and I knew I didn’t stand a chance. They accepted me into the RAF but put me on deferred service for aircrew. I got sent back into civi-street and I had a card that said I was in deferred service so I couldn't be put into another branch of the military, but could get called up at any time to the RAF. Eventually I was called up and sent to a different airbase for training as an engineer, instead.
[underlined]First Posting[/underlined]
I had my first proper posting down in RAF Christchurch, by Bournemouth (the airfield no longer exists). It was a radar research place, then, and they were experimenting on improving the radar system that had just been invented. I was assigned as general ground crew to part of the Telecommunications Flying Unit (Later the Radar Flying Unit). It was civilian billets at that point, a couple of us in each house: one airman and one technician. They were quite big houses and they looked out over the sea. Being on the south coast, the beach and the bottom of the gardens were strung with thick barbed-wire in case of invasion by boat. On a Friday, I went to the Paymaster General, to collect the rent, twentyfour and sixpence for the week, bed and breakfast. Often, in the morning, we would have to go out and round up the New Forest ponies that would wander onto the airstrip in the night. We had to get the tractor and move them off before the planes could take off. One day, I was walking past the Flight Officer’s office, an old cricket pavilion, and he said to me “You wanted to be aircrew, didn’t you?” I said I did. He said “I’ve got just the job for you. Go down to the flight office and pick up a parachute, then go up to the end of the
[page break]
runway”. When I got to the end of the runway, not much more than a grass strip, there was an aircraft called a FaireyBattle. It was a lovely aircraft with a Rolls-Royce engine, and it was all metal. They were supposed to be a fighter-bomber but weren’t very good, so they were being used for training radar. It was perfect for radar testing as the metal body was great for screwing all these little di-pole reflectors into. So I got in this thing, in the back as an observer and lookout, and off it took, the wingtips wobbling as it went over the grass. We went out over the Channel and I was to look out for German fighters. In those days, the Germans were there, only twenty nine miles away in France. We flew out over the Channel, then came back in and they would test the radar detection zones with the aircraft to determine the distance and direction that the early warning system would work. We would go out into the Channel, come back in, then down towards the west coast and over Torquay, then come back to Christchurch. As we came back in, the pilot said “How do you feel, you look a bit green?” I told him “I feel a bit green!” He told me to come back the next day, and sure enough we went up again, almost in the same area, then off towards Southampton to test that coverage. Southampton was an important area with all the docks. I felt a bit ill, then, with all the ducking and diving there, what with having to avoid all the barrage air balloons and the like. I went up a number of times, as a look-out. When I wasn’t in the back of the FaireyBattle, I would work on the petrol bowsers. They carried a thousand gallons of highoctane petrol, with a fifty gallon oil tank dragged behind. I would fill up the aircraft fuel and make sure the engines and controls were well oiled. I had a few days leave, then. When I came back, I asked if there was any chance of going up again in the ‘Battle. The Flight Officer said “You’ll be lucky, the aircraft was shot down over the Channel!” No-one knew what had happened, it had disappeared over the Channel, and that was it. They carried on the effort with several other planes, but I didn’t get to go up again. We weren’t at Christchurch for that long. We built some dome huts to live in, moving out of civilian billets, and I remember one night playing cards in one of these huts. The Germans came along and dropped some bombs right down the back of us and I thought they’d hit us directly. The explosions blew out the candles and plunged us into darkness and I thought for a moment that I was dead. We had a lot of aircraft there: Beaufighters, Mosquitoes, FaireyBattles, others, all fitted up with radar and camouflaged with trees and nets. Parts of the airfield were hit, but the bombs missed all the planes, they didn’t touch any of them. I nearly got hit several times. One night I went to the cinema and there was a raid. The Lyon's Cafe, on the corner, got hit and when we came out of the shelter, the cafe wasn't there anymore. Another time, I was cycling from Christchurch to the nearby airfield of Hurn. I heard the sirens go off, so I was peddling like mad, and all of a sudden I heard a swissssh. A line of bombs was dropped in front of me, in between Christchurch and Bournemouth. Of course, now the Germans knew where we were. They knew we were developing radar in such a way, and that it was such an important technology. They knew where we were, and seeing as we were just the other side of the Channel to them, it was too dangerous to stay. We had to move.
[page break]
We spent three days getting everything into the back of lorries, three dozen of them, and we moved up to Salisbury Plains. From there, we used the cover of darkness to go north. The lads in the back had no idea where we were going. We just piled into the back of some jeeps and followed the lead truck. Eventually, we arrived at Defford, in Worcestershire, just east of Malvern. It was just fields of tall grass and broad beans, when we got there, and the sweet smell hit us as we got out of the jeeps. We had to get the farmer out to plough the fields before we could use them. After the planes had arrived, we built a better runway and we stayed there for some time. RAF Defford was born and we carried on with radar work. You can still see some of the radar dishes there, today. One day, I was helping the top engineer with one of the fighters. He was having problems getting the oil pressure up in the engine and was revving the engine very high. The plane was jumping up and down with the vibrations until it jumped right over the chocks holding it in place. It started off down the runway with the engineer inside. It took him to the bottom of the runway to put the breaks on and get it stopped. We had to tow it back up the field with a truck, eventually, when everybody had finished laughing!
[underlined]Full Time Fitter Training[/underlined]
After that, I was called up to Kirkham, in Lancashire (what is now HM Prison Kirkham) for a training course for fitters and armourers. The course would normally have run for several years, but was condensed down into about fourteen months for us. (Between 1939 and 1945 RAF Kirkham trained 72,000 British and allied service men and women. In November 1941 Kirkham became the main armament training centre for the RAF, with 21 different trades and 86 different courses on equipment and weapons varying from 22 riffles to 75mm guns.) We were trained by Rolls Royce civilian trainers. There were about five hundred of us in a big hangar, twenty-five in a row, each section with an instructor. The training was great, there was no better training than the RAF. I used to enjoy it, I was quite keen on the job. We were trained in a number of different trades including blacksmithing, tin smithing, copper smithing, hydraulics, the lot. They took you from scratch. We had weeks of filing and grinding six-inch blocks of steel. You would file it flat, by hand, or make dove-joints, splits, rivets. Then you would start over on a new piece. The raw material would come on a tip-up truck and would be dumped in a pile for you to grab a piece when you needed it. It was easy to take a bit more of the metal off, but if you made a mistake and took too much off, you couldn't put it back on, you'd have to start again! We had the best tools, too. We had some lovely sets of tools, especially later when I was working on the Liberators. I had a big leather wallet with about twenty files in it: flat, smooth, round, square. We had to work with very fine tolerances, when we made or filed the work, because these things would end up as crucial parts of an airplane and if they failed, or didn't fit properly, the plane could crash and the crew could die. Right from the start, the trainer came over and said “That’s not the first time holding a hammer, is it? You seem to know what you’re doing.” I told him that I had come straight
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from making ceramic and steel fireplaces, on civi-street, so this was something I had been taught before. We had lots of planes to train on, too. There were six big hangars at Kirkham. Six big hangars with full sized bombers, spitfires, hurricanes, and a night-fighter called a Boulton-Paul Defiant with a turret at the back and painted black. About half-way through, the Adjutant called me into his office and said “You volunteered for aircrew when you joined.” I said “Yes, but they didn’t seem to be too eager at the time, there was no place for me on the aircrew course so they sent me to another squadron to be ground-crew.” The adjutant said “Well, there’s a place for you now.” I told him I wasn’t very interested now, I was training to be a fitter and was halfway through the course. He said “It’s not what you want, Perkins, it’s what the air force wants!” This was fair enough. They were keen, at that time, to get people onto the aircrew section because by that point, the Germans were shooting people out of the sky faster than we could train new men. However, because I had spent so long training to be an armourer, already, they had me finish my course. By the end of the fourteen weeks training, I was a Special Armourer, as opposed to the basic Armourer I was to begin with, which meant that I could work on just about anything and put me into the top group. As soon as I was finished, I was put on the list to be called up for posting overseas.
[underlined]Leaving Liverpool for the Middle East [/underlined]
As soon as my training was finished, I was to report to Liverpool, which was close to where I already was. On Sunday afternoon, we set off for Liverpool. When we got there the docks were full of all these big ships. We were headed for the Empress of Australia, a former cruise liner converted to a troop carrier. There were lots of men getting on her, very few were air force, most were army, marines and commandos. There were, I think, four thousand of us. We set off at around 8pm in the evening, three or four tugs pulling us into the Mersey. By 9pm, the Navy dropped two depth charges because they thought there was a German submarine in the vicinity. We didn’t know what was happening. They dropped these depth charges and I thought we’d been hit by a torpedo! I thought “Oh well, we won’t be going any further.” But instead, the Captain throttled up to full power and we shot out of the area as quick as the ship could go. Everyone was vaccinated, before we got onto the ship, and a few days later my elbow and arm swelled right up with vaccine fever. It took two days for the doctors to get to me, there were only a few on board and if you missed them on their round you had to wait until the next day. When they found me, they put me straight into the hospital quarters where I was waited on for a couple of days, which was lovely. Of course, when there were so many of us on the ship, finding a space for a hammock was very difficult. They were strung up everywhere with no space in between. If you weren’t there to keep a claim on your slot, like if you spend several days in the hospital, you lost your place.
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We left British waters and went out into the Atlantic, where we sailed around for about a month. We had some ships on the left of us, some on the right, but we were waiting to make up a big convoy. I think we joined a Canadian convoy to make up the numbers. We eventually went down towards Gibraltar. There were, I think, two aircraft carriers, three destroyers, us, some others. About forty odd ships in the convoy as we went through the mouth into the Mediterranean. I think we were the first allied convoy to go through the Mediterranean. Before that, to get to Egypt, the ships had to go all the way round Africa. We could see Gibraltar in the mist, with the Germans on the left, and we knew they had fast boats with torpedoes on them. We went through the strait on the North African side, down passed Benghazi. We spent about a week sailing along there because it was quite a way. I constantly thought we were going to get hammered as soon as the Germans realised we were there but we never saw more than a few German planes in the distance. It was a miracle, really. I heard the ships behind us, in later convoys, got hit, and I remember seeing a tanker in flames, on the horizon. The thing that I remember the most, about going though the Med, was the heat and smell when we hit North Africa. From spending a month in the cold Atlantic, the heat that hit us, coming of Morocco, was like an oven. The smell was strong, too, like spices. Every country I have been in has its own smell. We were so close to the coast, following it all the way around, that you could see people walking on the beach.
[underlined]Palestine and Egypt [/underlined]
We pulled into Port Said, at the mouth of the Suez Canal, on Sunday morning. We had to use pontoons to disembark and walk across to the land because the ship was so big it couldn’t get close enough to let us off. We all had two kit-bags and a Sten gun each. Of course, when we went across the pontoons it was a bit wobbly as there were so many troops getting off. Most of the troops got off first and went along the Suez Canal. Thousands and thousands of them, marching twenty miles down the side of the Suez. We didn’t go that way, there were maybe fifty or sixty of us from the RAF and we went straight to Cairo. It was a Sunday afternoon, but for the people over there it was like a weekday. We drove up to Cairo airport and there was a transit camp for RAF personnel. We were posted, from there, all over the Middle East. It was just tents on sand and we were posted off individually as needed. I was there for two or three weeks. I got to see the Pyramids, at that point. I went right inside with just a little wick candle to light the way. If you blew out the flame it was pitch black. Right inside, as far as you could go, I got. Right into the King's Chamber. I also saw the small hole that went up to the sky and lined up with a certain star at a particular time of the year. I was able to go back, as well, in 1943. About twenty of us were eventually sent off, by train, through the Sinai to Palestine. I was stationed at RAF Lydda (now Ben Gurion International Airport) in Tel Aviv. We stopped there in a small camp, just a tent village. It was a small airstrip to begin with, only small aircraft could use it, so the RAF built it up. We stripped out all of the orange trees,
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levelled the land and built a proper runway for the bombers. It was probably one of the first parts of the Middle East Bomber Command. We were attached to the Special Airborne division for a couple of months. At that point, we were sending off the bombers on bombing runs to attack the Germans. I broke my leg in Palestine. It had been raining and the ground was very slippery, but we were playing football. I played a lot of football in the RAF, and a lot before too. We had some big games when I was overseas: it was something to entertain the men so it was very popular. I always played Inside Right for the RAF teams and on that day we were playing the Army. They were all tough as hell and just as rough. I got the ball and played it down the wing. I went to kick the ball across the pitch and these two army guys both tackled me and fell across my leg. I broke both the leg and the ligament. They just moved me to the side line and didn't take me off anywhere else until the match had finished! There weren’t any ambulances over there, so I was put in the back of a pick-up wagon. It felt like part of my leg was going in one direction, and the rest in another. They drove me to Nazareth to the make-shift hospital. It was a convent, converted for military use for injured servicemen in the Mediterranean. They fixed me up and plastered my leg. The next day, I thought my leg was itching. The hospital was riddled with bugs and they had gotten into my cast. I had to push them out with sticks and flush them out with water because they were eating my leg. A day later, they took us all out of the hospital, because of the infestation, and put us on a first-aid train. It was like a cattle-wagon full of stretchers. It was open-sided and I thought it would be chilly but as it was Palestine it was nice and warm. They brought us all cups of tea, bread, cheese and a pickle. The train took us to a huge hospital in the middle of Palestine, a huge place, full of all the wounded troops from all over the Middle East. I had my leg in plaster for quite some time, so I was in a wheelchair for a bit. There was this one guy who said they had a cinema, so he took me off to see it. We had to go down a steep hill to get to the cinema. He was pushing me in the wheelchair and fell over as we were going down the hill. Off I went, bouncing down the hill and there was a ditch at the bottom of the hill. I hit the ditch, the chair went over and the wheel was spinning in the air – I can still see it now. All the others did was stand there, laughing their heads off! After that, I joined the 5th Bomber Conversion Unit, working on Liberators. This eventually changed to the 1675 Heavy Conversion Unit and moved back down to RAF Abu Sueir, in Egypt, near to the Suez Canal. I was there for two and a half years. From that airfield, you could see ships going through the main canal. Most of the time it was the tops of the ships in the distance. We couldn’t see the water, just the dunes between us and them, so it looked like the ships were going through the sand. I went swimming in the Suez, on more than one occasion. The last time I did was when I nearly drowned. My mate and I watched a big ship go by and waited for about five minutes before we went in, but it wasn't long enough. I went in and the undercurrent from the ship's wake dragged me under and pushed me down. I fought it but didn't get anywhere and I didn't think I would ever come back up. Luckily, I eventually got out of the current and made it back to the surface, but my lungs were burning like mad.
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[underlined]The Planes[/underlined]
For most of my overseas time, I worked on Liberators (American B-24s). We had nine Liberators and six fighters: three spitfires and three hurricanes. Liberators were my favourite. They had a good payload and were easy to get inside when you were ‘bombing up’ with the bomb trolley. They weren’t too far up in the air, so you could almost walk in and you pushed the bomb trolley right into the bay. You would put the swan-hook of the winch through the eye of the bomb and you would roll the winch up until the bomb sat in between the two saddles, one on each side. Then you would tighten the saddles on the bottom to keep the bombs steady when the plane was flying. After that, you would put in the detonators into what we called the pistol, at the back of the bomb. You’d put the arming vane into the pistol, followed by the safety pin. The vanes and pins would be kept in a box, fifty yards away from the plane, in case anything happened, and you‘d put the arming vanes into the bombs, to make them live, before the planes took off. I remember one time, we had just finished ‘bombing up’ one side of a Liberator. Everything was in place, all ready to go, and a flight technician went into the aircraft to go through the checklist. He accidentally pulled the wrong lever and all the bombs suddenly fell out onto the ground. Of course, we ran in every direction to get away from the bombs. Not only could they have gone off if the safety pins came out, but they were damn heavy chunks of metal that would roll, as well. You could either get crushed or blown up. Or both. We shot off in every direction and didn’t stop until we were hundreds of meters away. Finally, the technician came out with a red face. I’ve never run so fast in my life! We were more angry, though, about having to sort it all out afterwards. It took us hours to check the bombs, make sure they were safe and then re-fit them. There was lots of sweating, swearing and blinding. We kept the planes and bombs separate, most of the time. The planes were spaced out a long way apart, sometimes it was a fifteen mile round trip to fit all the planes, a mile or so there and back for each separate plane. They needed to be spaced in case there was a bombing raid on the airfield. You didn’t want all the planes and all the ammunition to go up in one lucky hit. We had a big building, in Abu Sueir, that was just for the armoury. We had guns and ammunition and other such things stored there. A big brick place. I was in charge of the munitions and there were three or four guards posted there at all times. There was thick netting and wire, all the usual things, and the guards were supposed to patrol around the outside. I went there, early one mourning, with an officer to inspect the building. When we got there, there was this big hole in the wall, at the back, where all the guns and ammunition were kept. The guards were there, and I asked what was going on, but they just mumbled. Someone’d stolen it all! They left about two or three camels and donkeys there. They had loaded all the guns and ammo they could carry on donkeys and stole off into the night. They must have been disturbed because they left a couple of animals. They’d broken through a double brick wall! They probably waited for an aircraft to come and then hammered like wild on the brick wall under cover of the noise of the aircraft engine.
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The Liberators were very loud when they took off, they had four engines, and would go on lots of bombing runs over the Mediterranean countries. Sometimes they would drop saboteurs into Italy and Albania. The Liberators would go over in the middle of the night and drop these guys, they were SAS or similar, that type of person. When they did raids in Turkey, we would fit them up to drop leaflets over the enemy territory informing them we would be bombing there in twenty-four hours, giving the civilians time to clear out of the area. For fun, sometimes we would add old crates of waste from the naafi. The crates would be wooden and would whistle when they were dropped, like bombs, and the enemy wouldn’t know if it was a bomb that hadn’t exploded. We dropped supplies, too, all kinds of supplies. Medicines, ammunition and supplies for allied troops. We dropped a lot of medicine in all the areas. They had yellow parachutes on then so you could see them. Of course, the people would gather these parachutes and keep them. The local blankets and beds were rough as hell, so people would take the parachutes as they were nice smooth silk. As a Special Armourer, I also worked on the guns. They were mainly .5’s (0.5 calibre, 12.7mm Browning Gun) which were a good gun. On the Liberator, you’d have probably about 6 stations where you had at least two .5 guns. They did away with the rearturret’s upper guns because when they fired, the crew would have two guns firing each side of their ears, and they didn’t like that very much. But, as I said, the Liberators were easy to work on. You had two side gunners, two .5’s in a side slot. The swivel range of these was limited with a cable. If the gunners were new or got a bit panicky, they could swing the gun round hard and break the cable or stretch it. We would have to reset the cable after each run. We’d get a guy with a long rod, stuck in the end of the barrel, to simulate where the bullets would go. The guy outside would walk around and we would clamp up the new cable inside to where we wanted the range of movement to be. You’d have to stop the range about six feet from something you didn’t want to hit because when you fire the guns, you get a cone of fire and had to build in some leeway. You also had to make sure that if the cable stretched again on the next flight, the gunner couldn’t shoot off the plan’s wing or tail if the cable allowed the gun to turn further than it should. The Spitfire was another one we had to change the guns on. They had .303 guns, there were eight of them. A lot of the British planes had the 303’s, which were no good at all, they had no firepower, they were like pea-shooters. The Americans used all .5s, they were definitely a better firepower. With the fighters, you would put the plane on a trestle, in the flying position, and you had a target about five hundred and fifty feet in front. You had a periscope on the gun and you lined it up to the target so that all the bullets converged in the same place. On occasion, we fitted a 20mm canon, one on each wing, but you had to have a little bit more of an anchorage if you did that on a Spitfire, because of the extra recoil. The 20mm had a special recoil-spring, a square spring. You had to have a special clamp to squash and compress it, as it was so strong to deal with the extra force of the canon when it fired. You’ve probably seen the canons in the old war films where the 20mm would strafe enemy trains.
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There were different types of ammunition, too. You’d have armour piecing shells, but we never liked them because they would wear out the barrel on the canon. You’d have incendiary ones, normal shells, they were both fine. But we used the canons more on the Hurricanes because those planes were more substantial. So we used to like to put them there. The Hurricanes also had a bit more room to move about with. The Spitfires were cramped to mount the guns. You had to be careful on the Spitfires, more than the Hurricanes, because the Spitfires used to catch fire. There was excess oil, sometimes, in the Spitfire exhaust cylinders, that could be left behind. So the flight mechanics would stand by with fire extinguishers in case the thing caught fire when it was started. The mechanic who was testing the plane would keep the engine going to blow out the flames because it was too late by that point to do anything else. We had a lot of problems with the Spitfires, out in the desert, because they were so light and flimsy, compared to the Hurricanes. You’d see them land at the end of the runway and not come any further. When you got down to the end of the strip, the thing would be tipped up on its nose! The front end would be dug into the ground. It was too front heavy and easily caught gusts of wind. It caused no end of trouble for us and the pilots. All sorts of things would happen, or go wrong, when I was out there in the Middle East. One bomber came back late, from a run over Greece. It finally came into view, coming from the Sinai towards us in Abu Sueir, over the Suez Canal. As it was nearing the end of the runway, there was this tremendous bang and the plane just blew up! We never found out what had happened. When we got to the site of the wreckage, it was all just burning fragments, too little to find anything else. It wasn’t like now with forensic teams to check every last millimetre. On another occasion, a plane came in without the undercarriage down. It scrapped along the ground and everyone was okay, but the plane was a write-off. We had to winch it up, put it on a large lorry and take it off for spares. We often had to clean out the planes, once they had returned from a bombing run. The aircrew would be trapped in these things for many hours and there was often waste that needed cleaning out. Some of the crew would get airsick and there would be vomit. Sometimes the Germans would attack the planes and shoot at them and if the plane was hit, there may be blood as well. What ever it was, we sluiced it all down with paraffin. One time, a Liberator came back with fewer crew than it left with. The plane didn't get into combat, but the rear gunner was missing. The hatch was open and the guy was gone. We thought he must have had enough and jumped out. It happened, sometimes, if someone decided they couldn't take it anymore. Being an aircrewman could be very stressful and sometimes someone would just snap.
[underlined]Local Wildlife[/underlined]
The difficulties of living out there were not limited to the aircraft. I went to a lot of places, but they all taught you to get used to varied, tough conditions. In one place there were four of us sleeping on a concrete hangar floor. Out in the desert, it was just sand and
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dust and tents. You had to check your bed, or hammock or what ever, for snakes before you got in for the night. Every morning, you‘d have to turn your boots upside down and hit them with a stick to get any scorpions out! You’d get bedbugs and things, the way we got rid of those was to thrown paraffin over the bed and blankets, then watch all these things come scurrying out. The paraffin evaporated off quickly in the desert. I slept in the armoury, quite often. I remember having to turn the light on, at night, because the scorpions would come in under cover of darkness and run across the floor. The light would dazzle them and you could hit them with a stick. I remember, as well, one night I was lying in a bed and a snake fell onto the mosquito net. I was in Palestine at the time and thought a terrorist had lobbed a grenade into the room. But I thought “If it is going to go off, it goes off, I’m not getting out of bed!” The next morning, the Palestinian guard came round, whilst I went off for breakfast, and he found the snake coiled up in the warmth of my blankets. When I came back, he’d already hit it with the butt of his rifle and laid this four foot snake out on the floor. We’d get eaten alive by mosquitoes, too, quite often, especially in Abu Sueir. We would work at night, as often as not, refitting the bombers for an early morning raid. We’d work under arclight, the Sweetwater Canal ran right along the side of the aerodrome and the light would draw the mosquitos right to us. There were bigger animal pests, too. There were a lot of stray dogs there, and they had a lot of diseases. Every Tuesday morning, early, I had to go around with a rifle and shoot any strays. On one particular day, I was doing my rounds and some wild dogs were running across the field. So I got my rifle and shot all three of them. When I got closer, to collect the bodies and burn them, I saw that one of the dogs was an alsatian. It was only then that I realised that only two of the dogs were wild, and they were chasing the alsatian. The alsatian was the pet of the Chief Engineer, and I had shot it, too. The Chief was okay about it, the dog should have been locked up and had gotten loose, but I still felt bad. What ever the problems you dealt with them because you were all in it together. You had comrades. You didn’t fight amongst yourselves, the comradeship was so unique, you stuck together as a unit, you had a great temperament and it all blends in to those harsh conditions. You put your life in everyone else’s hands, so you trust them, you look after each other. It’s hard to understand when you are in another walk of life.
[underlined]Iraq [/underlined]
When the European war ended, there was nothing left for us to do in Egypt, so I was allocated to another post and taken into the Navy Fleet Air Arm. I was sent to Basra, in Iraq: RAF Shaibah. There wasn’t much of anything there, before the RAF got there. It was built for the war. They were short on fitter-armourer generals. There were only five of us there. When you were a fitter general it meant that you could do everything. The work ranged right from the cameras that were fitted along side the guns for reconnaissance and records, to the fluid for the hydraulic systems that operated the turrets. You had to bleed and feed that fluid at different times of the day because it would expand and contract with the big temperature ranges you got in the desert.
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I taught some of the local Iraqi army how to shoot. They had guns but they didn't have any proper training on how to shoot correctly. Every Friday afternoon I would take these guys to the range and teach them how to sight up a gun, how to adjust the fore- and back-sights to correct the bias. The foresights would often take a bashing, being on the tip of the barrel, and the men would be rough with the guns and knock the irons. Teaching the Iraqis to keep the gun sights lined up meant the difference between being able to hit their targets and missing by miles. One day, one of the recruits shot wide at something. The round ricocheted and hit a tractor in the fuel tank. There was a hell of a bang, a lot of shouting in different languages, and a tractor on its side, blown over by the explosion. The Iraqis were friendly, but the Sudanese were a problem. We had an open-air cinema and we were all sitting round watching a film. There was a lot of banging going on and we thought it was the film. That was until someone shouted "Duck!" It was the Sudanese, driving around in the desert nearby, shooting off their rifles! Everyone was more annoyed with the disruption than with the threat of being shot! Then the Japanese war ended and there was no more use for us at all.
[underlined] Coming Home [/underlined]
I was in the RAF until my last posting in Iraq in 1946. I remember leaving Shaibah in a Dakota transport plane, heading back to towards Egypt. We took off and the plane was overloaded with troops and gear. After a short while into the flight, there was a huge sandstorm right in front of us, thousands of feet high and tens of miles wide. We couldn’t get over the top as we were already overloaded, so the pilot tried to go through. I felt the pressure of the sand hit the plane, then there was a huge gust of wind and the plane went over on its side and scythed through the air, dropping like a stone. We were lucky we didn’t hit the deck and all get killed. I thought I’d been out there for four, five years, survived the whole war and nearly been wiped out on my way home! Once I got to Egypt, I came back across the Mediterranean on a ship from Alexandria. It took a week to cross the sea to France, Toulon. I remember the harbour was absolutely packed with ships that had been sunk. (The French had scuttled their own fleet to prevent the Germans from getting their hands on them). The locals had very little to eat, at that point, and almost no bread. On our ship we had so much bread that it had gone stale by the time we arrived in Toulon and it was all thrown overboard into the sea. I don't know why it wasn't saved, but I remember loads of loaves of bread floating in the sea. When we got into port, you couldn't buy even a biscuit! We stayed in what was left of the German’s camp, there, for a week or so before heading to Calais. It was several days across France, by train, mostly at night. I remember it was a moon-lit night as we passed Paris and I could see the Eiffel Tower in the moonlight. I also remember taking a walk out into the fields, when we stopped for an hour at one point, just walking through the crops.
[page break]
We finally crossed the Channel, back into Dover, at about ten at night. The next morning, I was de-mobbed in Stratford. I got my de-mob suit, a quick medical, my money and was out of the gate. As quick as that I was out of the Air force. Done. When you come out of the service, you do feel a bit lost. You had a regimented life in the service, and they looked after you. The RAF looked after you really well, but when you leave, it’s all down to you. You have to completely adjust yourself. It’s probably harder to come out than it ever was going in. You had to work all times of the day. In the service, you are paid to work 24 hours a day and you work for 23 hours 59 minutes. I wasn't relieved to be out of the air force, to be honest. We travelled so much, spent so long in different countries, that I felt immune to much of the feelings of 'home'. No matter where you went, you were the same person, you weren't excited, you weren't depressed, you just went with it. I never thought "Thank God I survived that" or "I made it through". You had to be immune to all of that, if you wanted to keep your sanity. So much happens to you, and you are pushed and pulled in all directions that you just had to go with the flow. It was almost like brain-washing, in a good way. "Do as you are told, go where we tell you and you will be taken care of" was the feeling you got in the RAF. They looked after you, as much as they could. You never knew what the enemy was going to do, but you knew those around you had your back. If you didn't keep that in mind, you would have gone mad. I had about six weeks of leave stored up, when I was de-mobbed, at the end of which they called me and asked if I wanted to go back into the air force. I would have been sent back to Iraq but I’d already done several months over my time. Twice they asked me back, but by then I’d had enough. We all had.
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
The memories of LAC Fred Perkins
Description
An account of the resource
Covers joining the RAF, training as an engineer and first posting to RAF Christchurch which undertook radar research. Writes of life and flying as observer in Fairey Battle on radar measurement flights. The unit then moved to RAF Defford. Goes on to describe his training as a fitter and armourer and his journey to the Middle East before arriving in RAF Lydda Palestine. Provides details of life and activities in middle east bomber command working on B-24. He then moved back to RAF Abu Sueir in Egypt. Gives account of working on B-24 as well as Spitfire and Hurricane aircraft. Gives account of armourers work on all three aircraft. Provides a paragraph on local wildlife. After the war was sent to RAF Shaibah in Iraq and he describes life and activities there. Concludes with description of journey home.
Creator
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F W J Perkins
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Twelve page printed document
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
BPerkinsFWJPerkinsFWJv1
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Worcestershire
England--Pershore
England--Dorset
England--Bournemouth
Egypt
Middle East--Palestine
Israel
Israel--Tel Aviv
England--Hampshire
England--Lancashire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941-05-23
1943-08-13
1946-05-26
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
David Bloomfield
aircrew
animal
B-24
Battle
bomb trolley
bombing up
Defiant
demobilisation
fitter airframe
fuelling
ground crew
Hurricane
military living conditions
military service conditions
observer
petrol bowser
RAF Abu Sueir
RAF Defford
RAF Kirkham
RAF Padgate
recruitment
service vehicle
Spitfire
sport
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1401/27312/LMooreD1603117v2.1.pdf
8031b7ca16f67fab2f6e5956b15bf27d
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
Moore, Dennis
D Moore
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
2015-05-06
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
Moore, D
Description
An account of the resource
37 items and two albums.
The collection concerns (1923 - 2010, 1603117, 153623 Royal Air Force) and contains his log books, documents, photographs and two albums. He flew operations as a navigator with 218 and 15 Squadrons.
Album one contains photographs of his family and his training in Canada.
Album Two contains photographs of his service in the Far East.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Terrence D Moore and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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
Dennis Moore flying log book. Two
Description
An account of the resource
Flying log book for D Moore, navigator, covering the period from 28 June 1951 to 4 June 1959. Detailing his instructor duties and navigator duties with Flying Training Command, telecommunications flying Unit and Radar Reconnaissance Flying Unit. He was stationed at RAF Shawbury, RAF Lindholme, RAF Shinfield Park, RAF Defford and RAF Pershore. Aircraft flown in were Wellington, Anson, Valetta, Proctor, Chipmunk, Prentice, Balliol, Devon, Canberra, Hastings, Lincoln, Ashton, Dakota, Meteor, Vampire, Wayfarer, Whirlwind, Marathon, Varsity, Shackleton and Hermes.
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
LMooreD1603117v2
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
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Berkshire
England--Shropshire
England--Worcestershire
England--Yorkshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1951
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958
1959
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
aircrew
Anson
C-47
Lincoln
Meteor
navigator
Proctor
RAF Defford
RAF Lindholme
RAF Pershore
RAF Shawbury
Shackleton
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1088/19916/MRamseyNGC19191216-170217-020001.1.jpg
2a91569c2c109b767cade68418ac7852
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1088/19916/MRamseyNGC19191216-170217-020002.1.jpg
7f79523a0cec38dbdb8c12c22705277a
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
Ramsey, Neil
Neil Gordon Creswell Ramsey
N G C Ramsey
Description
An account of the resource
Five items. An oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Neil Ramsey DFC (b. 1919, Royal Air Force), two cartoons and two memoirs. He flew operations with 105 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Neil and Susan Ramsey and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-07-03
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Ramsey, NGC
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[inserted] [underlined] PETER BOGGIS [/underlined] [/inserted]
[inserted] PLEASE RETURN TO:- [/inserted]
[inserted] Exe. 3. [/inserted]
[underlined] T.F.U DEFFORD. [/underlined]
In January I943 [sic] I was posted to Telecommunications Flying Unit, Defford near Worcester. This was the sharp end of the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Malvern, known briefly as T.R.E., where all the various radar devices for the R.A.F. were thought up in pursuance of the war and tested out by the flying unit at Defford. T.R.E. moved from Swanage on the South coast after the Bruneval raid had captured large chunks of the German Wurtzberg their early warning radar system, and it was thought they might retaliate. Malvern Boys Public School was taken over and T.R.E. moved in with their equipment and scientists, known as Boffins, some well known names among them including Bernard Lovell later Sir Bernard of Joddrell Bank fame.
T.F.U. Defford consisted of two wings, Defensive (Fighters etc) and Offensive (Bombers and Coastal Command), and being a Bomber type I was posted to the latter: THIS ACCOUNT DEALS ONLY WITH this wing.
We had a variety of aircraft including the Lancaster Mks. I, II, III, Halifax Mks. I, II, Stirling Mks. I, III, Wellington Mks. Ic, II, III, Blenheim Mk. IV, Hudson, Mosquito and a few others, and the pilots were expected to fly all of these. We had no dual – just a demonstation [sic] circuit and Pilots Notes – so were a bit vulnerable if anything went wrong. Fortunately emergencies were rather rare and accidents few. The Boffins flew on most of our flights as well as Specialist Navigation Officers and occasionally Signals Officers. A lot of the testing was on H2S and warning devices for air gunners, airborne search radar for Coastal Command. We also did early trials on G.C.A. and equipment for lacating [sic] dinghies – one pilot earning himself a well-merited A.F.C. by volunteering to parachute at night in midwinter into the Irish Sea.
Security at Defford was very tight and R.A.F. Police were everywhere: aircrew needed special passes signed by the Station Commander to enter the aircraft, and aircraft were not permitted to land elsewhere or stay away overnight without his authority. On one occasion I had to fly a Lancaster to Wyton for the A.O.C. 8 Group to carry out some tests on a new stabilised H2S. Air Commodore Bennett, as he then was, flew the aircraft himself with me as a passenger and the Group Navigation Officer working the radar. After an hour’s flying over Nottingham and Leicester (for some reason these two cities were usually the targets for H2S testing – probably a good picture on the screen) Bennett landed and he and the navigator seemed pleased with the project. As there was a party in the Mess that night and I had done a tour of ops previously at Wyton I boldly asked the A.O.C. if he wouln’t [sic] loke [sic] to do further testing the next day. After all if you don’t ask . . . . . He might well have said Yes, bring the aircraft back to-morrow, and that would have served me right. But instead he said “I presume you want to go to the party?” and when I replied Yes I did he went to the nearest telephone and spoke to the C.O. at Defford and told him he was very pleased with the equipment and would like to try it out again the next day, and he would accept responsibility for the aircraft staying overnight. Then he turned to me and said “There you are Boggis, enjoy your evening. 0900 hours take-off, don’t be late.” A pretty reasonable gesture I thought.
While on the subject of security I must mention an incident involing [sic] the U.S.A.A.F. By the end of I943 [sic] we had two Flying Fortresses attached to Defford, equipped with H2S and flown by their own crews. Supposedly they were subject to the same security regulations as we were. When the Americans started up their Pathfinder Force they threw an Inaugaral [sic] party at Alconbury and several of us went from Defford, but not allowed to fly there we went by car. Imagine our surprise on arrival to see both the Defford BI9’s [sic] on the airfield, complete with their radar domes for all to see. Then walking along a corridor in one of the buildings we passed the skipper of one of these BI9’s [sic] with an American nurse on his arm. Someone asked him where his navigator was and he said “Down at the radar section” (few people knew the Americans had radar in those days). The nurse said “Gee, you got radar here,” and he replied “Sure, Honey.” But to his credit he told here he couldn’t show her it.
Later we discovered that the Americans had filled these two aircraft with nurses
[page break]
from their hospital near Malvern and flown them up to Alconbury. Goodness knows how they smuggled them onto the base at Defford, let alone into the aircraft!
One of our pilots had an unfortunate accident: half way down the runway on [inserted] [circled 1] [/inserted] take-off he found he had got ‘George’ in, tried to overpower it but was not successful and ended up going through the fence that surrounded Station Headquarters and came to rest outside the Station Commander’s Office. No one was injured and the aircraft was only slightly damaged, repairable on Unit.
The C.O. rushed out of his office and into the aircraft, grabbed [inserted] [circled 2] [/inserted] the first person he saw, who happened to be a civilian Boffin and shouted at him “What happened?” and this fellow, despite being a bit shaken, replied with commendable sang-froid “I don’t know: why don’t you ask the Pilot?” The outcome was that the pilot in due course was sent to the Brighton Disciplinary Course for two weeks, which we all took a very dim view of, especially as he had been an acting Squadron Leader in Bomber Command with a DSO and DFC. He came back from it none the worse for wear with horrific stories of what went on there, and amazingly without too much bitterness. These Discip courses, I feel, were never intended for this sort of thing and I don’t think would have happened in Bomber Command: but Defford was not in Bommber [sic] Command and these things were viewed differently on non-operational stations. We were always rather apprehensive in case we did something silly like a taxying accident. Sure enough an incident did occur to me: I was taxying a Stirling to the hangar when the brakes failed and although I quickly switched all engines off the aircraft slowly rolled down the gently slope to the hangar doors. Visions of Brighton loomed large before me, particularly as the propellor boss of one engine just touched the hangar door. The dent on the boss was insignificant and luck was on my side as the engineering Officer who saw the incident quickly had the boss replaced and we thought no one would be any the wiser. But people talk of course and several days later the acting C.O. of [inserted] [circled 3] [/inserted] my Wing sent for me and asked why I had not reported this incident and that I should consider myself lucky that I was not up before the Station Commander. However he said he was not going to pursue it further and that was the end of the matter. Sad to say he died heroically a year later when shot down flying a Stirling at Arnhem.
Flying back on one occasion from an experimental sortie I thought I would see how A [sic] Lancaster would cope, firstly on two engines, and then on one engine. I was flying at 20,000 ft and with two fans feathered the aircraft could just maintain height (this was the Merlin engine type): with three feathered I had to put it into a gentle glide path to keep up the airspeed. I was most impressed with the performance. What the Boffins thought of some of our antics I can’t imagine, but I reckon they were pretty long suffering. Here’s how a fellow aircrew member saw my little experiment at the time.
[underlined] Peter Boggis. [/underlined]
[inserted] [underlined] DECEMBER 1992 [/underlined] [/inserted]
[inserted] [circled 1] Brian Smithers.
[circled 2] Group Capt. King.
[circled 3]. Squadron Leader Gilliard. [/inserted]
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
Telecommunications Flying Unit, Defford
TFU Defford
Description
An account of the resource
Neil Ramsey's account of his time at the Telecommunications Flying Unit, Defford, Worcester. The unit was divided into a defensive and an offensive section and because of his experience he was posted to the bomber section.
Various aircraft were fitted with radar equipment for testing and evaluating. He discusses several incidents and accidents involving his and other aircraft.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Peter Boggis
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1992-12
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two typewritten sheets
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MRamseyNGC19191216-170217-020001,
MRamseyNGC19191216-170217-020002
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
United States Army Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Worcester
England--Nottingham
England--Leicester
England--Worcestershire
England--Leicestershire
England--Nottinghamshire
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
B-17
Bennett, Donald Clifford Tyndall (1910-1986)
Blenheim
Distinguished Flying Cross
Distinguished Service Order
H2S
Halifax
Halifax Mk 1
Halifax Mk 2
Hudson
Lancaster
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 2
Lancaster Mk 3
military discipline
Mosquito
Pathfinders
radar
RAF Alconbury
RAF Defford
RAF Wyton
Stirling
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1088/19915/MRamseyNGC19191216-170217-010001.2.jpg
96fce692965c789b70c41b567e4bed62
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1088/19915/MRamseyNGC19191216-170217-010002.2.jpg
f9d0ecabf754e2a6eb6fb5d9143a9329
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
Ramsey, Neil
Neil Gordon Creswell Ramsey
N G C Ramsey
Description
An account of the resource
Five items. An oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Neil Ramsey DFC (b. 1919, Royal Air Force), two cartoons and two memoirs. He flew operations with 105 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Neil and Susan Ramsey and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-07-03
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Ramsey, NGC
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[inserted] PLEASE RETURN TO:- [/inserted]
N.G.C. RAMSEY, D.F.C., [underlined] People I remember at Defford. [/underlined]
[inserted] ENC. 4. [/inserted]
Firstly the party at the Rose and Crown, Severn Stoke, March 8th I944: I too have a copy of the cartoon by Budd – He was a N.C.O. aircrew member who did numerous cartoons of members of “A” Flight, including Peter and myself. I was depicted a a [sic] “shooting man” in plus-fours with F/Lt sripes [sic] on the shoulder. He always signed himself Budd and I can’t remebre [sic] his name unless it was Burton (see under) Fortunately I got those attending to sign the back of the photoed [sic] cartoon and can give the names as follows: S/Ldr. Ronnie Smith D.F.C., L. Hopkins, W. Scullard, J.R. Crawford, Duncan Chisholm, - M. Darcy, Ron Leavers, J. Millar, Fred Carmichael, - Burton and N.G.C. Ramsey.
Talking of shooting and Tony (not Jimmy) Meade, he and I were shotting companions and on one occasion went shooting rabbits on Bredon with the F/Sgt i/c “A” Flight groundcrew – his name escapes me although I can still picture him, he lived out on a farm on Bredon, hence the shooting there.
Boffins: Boffin Bruce who never wore socks, a real eccentric. Mr Fry who had been in some sort of explosion and was disfigured. There was also a young Scot. I think working on Monica who could not ride a bike. Our geat [sic] delight was to put him on one and give him a push, he immediately fell off.
Ronnie Smith did take a Lanc under the railway bridge over the Severn, I remember the mid-upper was Dunc. Chisholm who arrived back somewhat shocked. It was after a lunchtime session at the pub on the main road we used to cross on our way from Upton on Severn to Dafford. [sic] Dunc. Chisholm once took over the drums at a dance in Tewkesbury – he was superb – and told us he had once played with Fats Waller. He was as you say Canadian. By the way the session at the pub was brought about by a complete clampdown (fog) and a Met. report giving no hope of a clearance. We arrived back at camp to find a complete clearance and a Lanc. to fly. Give Ronnie his due he took it himself rather than drop someone else in.
There was an Oboe re-union at the R.A.F. Club in I983 it was attended by Dr. F. E. Jones and John Hooper who organised it. There is to be another one on 22nd March, I993 again organised by John E.N. Hooper, 8, Meadow Close, Hinchley Wood, Esher, KT10 0AY. I see Dr Jones is not listed as attending so I presume he has died meantime. Others attending from HQ/AM/TRE are listed as E.L.T. Barton, AVM Sid Bufton, Sir Clifford Cornford, Sir Edward Fennesay, O.G. Williams and of course John Hooper. These name [sic] may be of interest to some of you.
I will now list others I remeber [sic] or have knowledge of:
[underlined] Gp. Capt. J.A. Macdonald. [/underlined] I last met him when I was Senior Ops. Controller at (1950) Transport Command H.Q. I had to see in Royal Flights and he was then Commandant of London Airport. An amusing episode occurred at “A” Flight offices when, one day, Wg. Cdr. Johnny Claydon was working under my car fitting big-end bearings. Groupie arrived and shouted come out from under that car, imagine his surprise to find not an erk (a heinous offence) but the Cg. Cdr. Flying. All he said was “Oh it’s you Johnny”.
Lt. Cdr. Millward last heard of a senior executive of BEA in the early fifties.
Wg. Cdr. Jackson, a boffin in uniform, maybe a liason [sic] officer. He had an office close to “A” flight and was reputed to be the owner of The News of the World and a friend of Churchill.
Wg. Cdr Johnny Claydon, was the son of a garage proprietor at Deal, hence the episode above, given his expertise.
Flt. Lt. Brian Smithers usec [sic] to play Chopin’s No. 1 Piano concerto at the same time as the recording by Rubinstein. I last met him in a night club in Athens. The band were on strike and Brian, then a Captain with BOAC (I945) was still playing the same piece. I recognised it from the bar, went over to the pianist and it was Brian.
Moore: There were two Moores, the first must have left soon after I got to Defford since my wife and I took over his quarters in Upton. Was it “Dinty”?
[page break]
Lawrence Moore.
He was a very keen bridge player.
S/Ldr. Vernon Motion, a real smoothie in the Offensive Section. Reputed to be a stockbroker, lived out in Tewkesbury.
F/O Jimmy Duff – Second i/c Armoury drove a smart SS 100
F/Lt Jack Etchells – believed related to one of the chiefs at Dunlop – drove a I939 drophead coupe M.G. Jack was by way of being a friend of mine and I would like to hear what became of him. We made up a foursome of car owners, Johnny Claydon, 2 1/2 litre SS, Ronnie Smith, Drophead Coupe Humber, Jack M.G. and myself Daimler Light I5.
One of the Navs. was named Tait, with connections to my home town, Boston. I think he has a DGM (escaper?) or maybe Army co-op, on second thoughts.
The Signals officer whose name eludes me drove a Singer Le Mans Coupe.
Sdn. Ldr. Randall was, I think more specialised.
I recently met:
Ted (Tony) Barton who was definitely there when we were, he was I gather, a M.T. fitter. He now owns a fleet of coaches in Sleaford, Lincs. I did not know him at Defford; but we compared notes at a recent birthday party.
Vic. Haley M.N. (escaper) and Taffy Bidder [brackets] Were both killed in a Mosquito, nightflying [sic] at the PFF Conversion Flight at Warboys. They were going on to OBOE on either 105 or 108. I went through Warboys just afterwrds [sic] on my way to 105 Sqn. [/brackets]
Canadians –
F/O Ed. Higgins, married a WAAF officer in Tewkesbury Abbey and last heard of they were living in Toronto. Ed used to go home with me to Boston and on visiting new friends he recognised a picture of Boston “Stump”. The other couple had emigrated and they wrote back to their parents. Ed, in fact, knew the girl’s father whom he had met with me at the local farmer’s club.
Bourassa (not, I Think, Bourgasser) was a French Canadian.
Flying Officer Johnny Turnbull married Flight Off. Joan Turnbull.
Another WAAF Officer (from Tunbridge Wells area) was Pam Turnbull, she was the Cypher Officer and I remember that she, Johnny Clayden and I visited the cinema on the eve of “D” Day. They knew it was on, I discovered afterwards.
I do remember the other names in the letters received from Peter; but unfortunately my log book is missing so I have to rely on my failing memory.
I must add a word about Griff. He was reuted [sic] to have been a Trawler Skipper before the war and his SSC. In any event he was a very keen and remarkable sailor. After the war all Commands had a prize yacht, liberated from the German Baltic fleet. I did my first trip with Griff when I was a T.C. H.Q. and he taught me to sail. In I952 I navigated “Sea Lion” in the Cowes-Dinard R.A.R.C. race and we won “A” Div. of Class 1 (The big boys). The following year I was posted to Abingdon a few days before the race. I reported to H.Q. to see the Group Captain (Griff, of course). The Adjt. said the Gp. Capt. never sees new arrivals; but I persuaded him to tell Griff. He rushed out of the office and said “what the hell are you doing here, Neil, you should be preparing for the I953 race” I said I thought it not a good idea to start on a new Squadron by disapearing [sic] and he said “Character building sports take precedence over flying any day. However I persuaded him that my new Squadron Commander might have different views. A really great chap Griff.
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
People I remember at Defford
Description
An account of the resource
An article written by Neil Ramsey referring to a cartoon drawn by 'Budd'. He details the social life and personalities on the base including Ronnie Smith who flew a Lancaster under a Severn railway bridge. Reference is made of an Oboe reunion in 1983. He lists a few of the attendees.
Creator
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Neil Ramsey
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Neil Ramsey
Format
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Two typewritten sheets
Language
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eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
Identifier
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MRamseyNGC19191216-170217-010001,
MRamseyNGC19191216-170217-010002
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Severn Bridge (Railroad bridge)
Greece--Athens
England--Boston
Canada
Ontario--Toronto
Ontario
Greece
England--Lincolnshire
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.
1944-03-08
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
aircrew
arts and crafts
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
Distinguished Flying Cross
entertainment
ground personnel
Lancaster
Mosquito
Oboe
Pathfinders
radar
RAF Abingdon
RAF Defford
RAF Warboys
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/358/9540/LHayleyCA1463437v1.1.pdf
1d7dfc7af85642fd8b30ffce42664f2b
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
Hayley, Jack
Jack Hayley
C A Hayley
Cecil A Hayley
Description
An account of the resource
Eight items. Collection consists of a log book, an interview and other items concerning Flight Lieutenant Cecil 'Jack' Alison Hayley DFC. Items include photographs of aircraft and people, a letter concerning his Distinguished Flying Cross and well as newspaper cuttings concerning operations, his wedding and the award of the Distinguished Flying Cross. After training he completed tours on 625 Squadron at RAF Kelstern, then 170 Squadron at RAF Hemswell before going on to a bomber defence training flight flying Hurricanes and Spitfires.
This collection was donated by Jack Hayley and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Hayley, CA
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
2016-02-25
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
Jack Hayley’s Royal Canadian Air Force pilots flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
Pilots flying log book for Jack Hayley, covering the period from 9 June 1942 to 30 June 1950. Detailing his flying training, operations flown and post war flying. He was stationed at, RAF Newquay, RAF Clyffe Pypard, RAF Heaton Park, RCAF Moncton, RCAF Dewinton, RCAF Estevan, RAF Harrogate, RAF Bournmouth, RAF Little Rissington, RAF Windrush, RAF Docking, RAF Madley, RAF Peplow, RAF Sandtoft, RAF Hemswell, RAF Kelstern, RAF Dunholme Lodge, RAF Peterborough, RAF Scampton, RAF Defford and RAF Celle. Aircraft flown were, Magister, Tiger Moth, Stearman, Anson II, Oxford, Dominie, Wellington, Halifax, Lancaster, Master, Spitfire, Hurricane, Lincoln, York, Hoverfly, Prentice, Tudor, Meteor, Devon, Mosquito, Harvard, Vampire, Wayfarer, Firefly, Canberra, Brigand, Valetta, Auster, Hastings, Athena and Shackleton. He flew a total of 31 operations, 8 daylight and 4 night operations with 625 Squadron and two daylight and 17 night with 170 Squadron. Targets in Germany and France were, Le Havre, Frankfurt, Rheine-Siezbergen, Eikenhorst, Calais, Neuss, Fort Frederick, Duisberg, Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Bochum, Duren, Wanne-Eickel, Frieberg, Karlsruhe, Leuna, Essen, Ludwigshaven, Ulm, Osterfeld, Nurnberg, Munich, Merseburg-Leuna and Zeitz. He flew as a second pilot on operations with Flight Lieutenant Banks and Flying Officer Eckel.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
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
LHayleyCA1463437v1
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.
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
1947
1948
1949
1950
1944-09-05
1944-09-06
1944-09-12
1944-09-13
1944-09-17
1944-09-20
1944-09-23
1944-09-25
1944-09-26
1944-10-11
1944-10-14
1944-10-15
1944-10-19
1944-10-20
1944-10-27
1944-10-30
1944-10-31
1944-11-01
1944-11-02
1944-11-03
1944-11-04
1944-11-05
1944-11-16
1944-11-18
1944-11-19
1944-11-27
1944-11-28
1944-12-04
1944-12-06
1944-12-07
1944-12-12
1944-12-15
1944-12-17
1944-12-31
1945-01-02
1945-01-05
1945-01-07
1945-01-08
1945-01-14
1945-01-15
1945-01-16
1945-01-17
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
France
Great Britain
Germany
Alberta--De Winton
England--Gloucestershire
England--Hampshire
England--Herefordshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
England--Shropshire
England--Wiltshire
England--Worcestershire
England--Yorkshire
France--Calais
France--le Havre
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Celle
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Düren (Cologne)
Germany--Essen
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Freiburg im Breisgau
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Leuna
Germany--Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Germany--Merseburg
Germany--Munich
Germany--Neuss
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Osterfeld
Germany--Rheine
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Ulm
Germany--Wanne-Eickel
Germany--Zeitz
New Brunswick--Moncton
Germany--Duisburg
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
England--Cornwall (County)
Saskatchewan--Estevan
Germany--Düsseldorf
New Brunswick
Saskatchewan
Alberta
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
1667 HCU
170 Squadron
625 Squadron
83 OTU
83 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
bombing
Dominie
Flying Training School
Halifax
Halifax Mk 5
Harvard
Heavy Conversion Unit
Hurricane
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 3
Lincoln
Magister
Meteor
Mosquito
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
RAF Clyffe Pypard
RAF Defford
RAF Dunholme Lodge
RAF Heaton Park
RAF Hemswell
RAF Kelstern
RAF Little Rissington
RAF Madley
RAF Peplow
RAF Peterborough
RAF Sandtoft
RAF Scampton
RAF Windrush
RCAF Estevan
Shackleton
Spitfire
Stearman
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/597/8866/ALeatherdaleF151018.1.mp3
0656231076eab0f126437dd54aae5a5b
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
Leatherdale, Frank
F Leatherdale
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Leatherdale, F
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Squadron Leader Frank Leatherdale DFC (b. 1922, 151162 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a navigator with 7 and 115 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-18
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.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
GR: It’s Squadron Leader Frank Leatherdale.
AM: OK. [laugh] So, my name’s Annie Moodie. I’m working as a volunteer for the International Bomber Command Centre in Lincoln and we’re recording memories of Bomber Command veterans for the learning centre in Lincoln so that there’ll be there as a record for future generations. And, I am in Norwich today and with Squad— Squadron Leader Frank Leatherdale and it’s the 18th of October 2015. So, thank you for agreeing to this. And, maybe can — if you can just tell me a little bit about your early days. Where you were born and what did your parents do?
FL: I was born in Thornton Heath, which is part of Croydon these days, almost London, but — and educated at the City of London Freemen’s School at Ashtead, um, not that my father was a Freeman. He — we were day pupils there, my brother and I, um, and I was born on 3rd of November 1922. We’d better start there and [clears throat] when I finished school war had just started. July, I finished and, um, I was still too young to join the RAF. They wouldn’t have me until I was eighteen so I joined the local Defence Volunteers, which was before the Home Guard, and I was a bit of a nob [?] on aircraft recognition because I used to make Skybird models. These were 1:72nd wooden scale models of various aircraft and if you’d been filing away at a piece of wood you know that shape when you see it in the sky very well. And this was known in our DV and so they made me a fulltime aircraft spotter and, um, whenever the air raid alarm went I had to leap in my bike, cycle up the road about three or four hundred yards, to where a house had a very good vantage point all round. This was in Leatherhead in the North Downs and the people at this house on the corner left a window open downstairs so I could reach in and grab their telephone. So, this was known as Point L21. Whenever I got there I had to put two numbers, one was the Leatherhead Police Station, the other was a number in the Brooklands Defence. I never did find out quite where it was but it was an Army number. Anyway, and then I reported what I saw and I never saw great droppings of parachutes or anything like that but I did see aircraft and, on one occasion, I was watching the sky and saw this flash out of the corner of my eye, to the south east, and I thought, ‘That’s funny, what was that?’ And the only equipment I had was what we had in the family. I didn’t get any government equipment. So, I just got some little binoculars and I looked through this thing. There was a group of some twenty-odd aircraft coming across and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s unusual,’ and wondered what the flash was I saw and I reckoned then they were Messerschmitt Jaguars which I’d just read about it. The Messerschmitt Jaguar was a version of the 110 fighter but the bomber version with the glass nose. In fact, later on we learnt that they only built about three of these things but it was reported as a new type in our journals. And, um, anyway, I thought they were going to try and get down to London through the back door’ sort of thing, coming over our way. And —
GR: In fact, this would have been, this was 1940 while the Battle of Britain was —
FL: Sorry?
GR: Was this 1940 [unclear] during the Battle of Britain?
FL: October 1940 yes. And so I reported these aircraft through, to the numbers that I had to ring and I found that, whilst we had air raid warning at Leatherhead, um, it hadn’t reached Brooklands. Their sirens hadn’t gone, which was a bit odd, someone slipped up there but, nevertheless, I didn’t think these things were going to Brooklands. I thought they were going to try to get round, as I say, to London from the north, from the north to west through the back door but they got over at Esher and then they then just peeled off. It was like watching something at the Hendon air display in the peacetime. But they just came down one after the other and bombed the Vickers works at Brooklands. They didn’t touch Hawker’s on the other side of the airfield, thank God, but the trouble was, that as the sirens hadn’t gone, they didn’t respond to my warning, which was, would have given them about five minutes. They would have to be pretty quick off the mark. But one of the bombs hit their canteen and it was lunchtime and two hundred workers were killed there with that bomb. Luckily for us, a Polish Squadron based at Croydon, with Hurricanes, had seen these aircraft approaching Brooklands and the chappie in charge of them said, ‘We’d better go and investigate this.’ And they just managed to get there and attack them as, as they were breaking away from their dives and they shot one down, and the Bofors guns got another one and, um, that was it. Well, when the raid was over I jumped on my bicycle and cycled up to where I’d seen this smoke coming up from the one that had been shot down by the Hurricanes in fact, but it didn’t matter. But being an excited schoolboy (I was only seventeen) I didn’t write down how many there were or what it was. I could so easily have looked at this wreck on, burning on the ground and identified it. I, in fact, took a piece of wreckage of it, which is in the museum at Brooklands now. It’s only a little piece of metal. So, as I said, we weren’t very sure what these aircraft were but we eventually found out that they were a fighter bomber. The Germans only built three Jaguars [slight laugh]. These were just their normal fighter bomber Messerschmitt 110. Anyway, I eventually joined the RAF after that and wanted to be a pilot, like we all did, and was sent out to Canada, to the Empire Air Training Scheme, and I went out right across to Calgary and we were flying Tiger Moths at the Elementary Flying Training School and, very quickly, I didn’t have many hours, I got my log book. I had only twelve hours altogether, um, learning to fly this thing but I crashed one on take-off. A lot of people had trouble landing. I had no trouble guessing my height off the ground. I could land them beautifully. It was take-off that got me and when you open up the engine on a, any aeroplane but particularly a thing like a Tiger Moth there’s a vertex, vortex of air going back onto the tail plane and if you don’t do something about it that’s going to push that tail round so the pilot has to take off some of the rudder to keep the thing straight. I was told all this and I thought, ‘Well, that was easy.’ And then I was given a flight commander’s check and this was when I did a ground loop on take-off, spun round, and, you know, well what happened there? Well, of course the undercarriage collapsed. Not a lot of damage done but worrying. Anyway, I was given another check by a more senior instructor and the same thing happened. I did another ground loop. Years later I realised what I think what was happening was that my first instructor was only quite soon, only just been appointed, a pilot himself and, um, and when he said I’d got control he was still on the controls, quite unwittingly I should think. And so, as we were starting to take off he was working the rudder but didn’t know he was. And so I thought, ‘Oh this is fine.’ Off we went but when the flight commander gave me the check he didn’t have his feet on the rudder bar and I had [emphasis] control when he said I had and, um, and of course I didn’t do anything about correcting this swing until I saw the nose starting to move on the horizon and so then I started to over-correct in the opposite direction and that caused the ground loop. So, I was re-mustered, um, and sent down to a training unit right across the other side of Canada to be re-mustered as an air observer. And well, I was all very upset by that but still, I did what I was told, and became an air observer and qualified as such in February ‘43. Oh, I had been sick in hospital in the meanwhile, in Canada, with glandular fever but anyway, so that put me back a bit. And I eventually, afterwards, realised that how lucky I’d been because the most of the pilots on my first course had a very rough time of it. Many of them were killed when they eventually got across Europe and I always thought, ‘Well, I’d rather be a live navigator than a dead pilot.’ Until I was a sergeant na— navigator with the flying Os, we had in those days, I won’t tell you what we used to call them but you know what [laugh]
GR: I know what [laugh].
FL: And, um, came back to England and joined 115 Squadron up at Witchford, just outside Ely, and when we formed up as a crew an Australian pilot said would I be his navigator and I said, ‘Yes.’ And I’m glad I did. He was a very nice chap and a very good officer and he selected the rest of our crew as he was going round in this big hangar meeting people as we did in those days. It was all very voluntary. And so, we got to 115 Squadron flying the Lancaster Mark 2s. Now, the Lanc 2 had Hercules engines so many people thought they were Halifaxes, looking at them quickly. Of course they’d got these Hercules engines but it was a Lancaster Mark 2 and a damn good aircraft because the Hercules engines had got more power than a Merlin so it was rather like having four — a Hercules was an equivalent four Merlins so we could lift a heavier bomb load. Our difficulty was, we also gobbled up more fuel, especially at high altitude. Anyway, quite shortly our pilot was — went into Ely Hospital with pneumonia and they wouldn’t let us wait for him to come out. They sent another pilot up to take over the crew and he was a Canadian and probably a far better pilot than our Australian chap but nothing like the officer that the Australian was. The Australian really was a good officer, had us all trained and — right, this Canadian, he’d come back from a raid and said, ‘Where have we been?’ [laugh] If we’d been shot down, you know, he wouldn’t have a clue where he was. And that was Mack all the time. He was sitting up late at night playing cards with his oppos in the billets and, um, there was one occasion when, in the following morning — oh, I by this time I was a flying officer and so was the pilot, um, anyway, we were down for flying that night and I looked at Mack and I thought, ‘I’m not flying with you tonight.’ His eyes were little slits and red. He’d been up half the night playing these cards with his — and smoking away there. And after, well years after the war I — oh, the raid was cancelled, thank goodness, so nothing happened, but I went to the flight commander, who was George Mackie, a very famous — also a, a navigator, well a flying O [laugh] and I said, you know, ‘Had I gone to you and told you this at the time what would you have done?’ He said, ‘Well, I’d have had to court martial him.’ And I thought it’s a good thing I didn’t. He was a good pilot as I say. But anyway, we got through our thirty trips on that first tour and I, myself, had only done twenty-nine. Because of the change of pilots we were, most of the crew, were one short. However, I was awarded an assessment of above average and so I thought if we went to Pathfinders we’d get more money. And this is a little tale that needs to be told, that when the Pathfinder Force was formed — and, of course, the shot rate was pretty high. Clearly, you were out in front of the main force, they were coming along, and just these few aircraft out in front to mark the targets and our air officer commanding number 8 Group wanted to get us more money and Air Ministry said, ‘No, we’re not paying you danger money. That’s not how we work.’ So he went tick, tick, tick, tick. He promoted everybody one rank and got his money for us. So everybody was happy and, um, there we were and the rest of the crew were mostly made up to officers. They were sergeants or one was a flight sergeant. And so we went to 7 Squadron. After training at the Pathfinder Training Unit you went to Oakington just outside Ely —
GR: Did you have a break in between? Sorry Frank in between finishing your first tour and then going did you have a break, did you have —
FL: No, no. We, we carried straight on.
GR: Oh you went straight through.
FL: And, um, and I think well, I’m going to volunteer for Pathfinders, are the chaps are coming with me? Well the pilot didn’t want to, being Canadian he was going to go back to Canada and do more training, um, and the flight engineer didn’t want to because he’d just got married on one of the deep leaves that we had at the end of our ops. The rest of them came with me and joined, we joined Pathfinders and we picked up a new pilot there. And, in fact, we didn’t have, we had several different pilots in Pathfinders. It wasn’t a sort of regular crew. The rest of us were but the pilots seemed to come and go. And so, we staggered through a tour on Pathfinders, and we had — twice we were master bombers on the raids so that was good and when I finished there, I was assessed as above average and I thought, ‘Well, that was pretty good.’ But assessed as above average in a Force which was itself was above average. Anyway, I was then I posted to the Radar Research Establishment down at Defford which did all the flying for all the boffins at the Intelligence Communication Radar Establishment at Malvern and, um, I was the station navigation officer at Defford and they had all sorts of aircraft there so this was great fun for me. I liked flying in different planes and, um, anyway I did a lot of flying with the CO of the bomber flight. There was a bomber fight, a coastal flight and things like that at Defford, a naval flight as well, and this pilot, the CO of A Flight, was a chap called Ken Letchford [?] DSO and bar, DFC, from his Pathfinder days. Anyway, I did quite a lot of flying with him and got on very well with him and I flew with a lot of other pilots as well and, um, one of the jobs we were working on was Doppler navigation and the boffins were sitting at the back of a, another Mark 2 Lancaster actually and I had to align the nose, looking at the road or ground ahead, and the boffins would say, ‘We’ve got a return coming up at two miles.’ And I’d say, ‘Yes there’s a motorcycle there,’ or whatever it might be so, eventually, over time they would learn what these returns were on their Doppler. A car would give them this sort of picture and something else would give something different and so on. Well, this meant very low, a lot of it was very low level flying, and Ken Letchford would get right down on the deck, which is what the boffins wanted, so that their Doppler radar looked along the ground. This was just after the Germans had broken through in the Ardennes and, um, so there was a bit of a hurry on to get this equipment working because, at the time of the German breakthrough, which was a bit foggy, the air wasn’t able to give much support to the American sector where the Germans had attacked. Anyway, I would be lying there in the nose and all down the Bristol Channel you’d get these little blocks with a pole and a little light on it for, to warn the shipping, a little — fishing smacks and things, and Ken would go over [slight laugh] and down the other side. Well, when you switch the microphone on in an aeroplane you get a swooshing noise and as soon as I switched on Ken would say, ‘It’s alright Frank. I know where it is.’ And he always did, while most pilots would lose have lost it under the nose, they’d no longer see it, but his skill was he always knew right where it was, and sure enough, as I say, up and down the other side and so there it was. Anyway, one of the pilots I was flying with was — it was the first time I’d flown in a Beaufighter and he’d done his ops on Beaufighters, this chap, and, um, we had a, or the boffins had, a radar station on the Welsh coast, at a place called Brawdy, so that they could work out over Fishguard Bay and so we’d gone down there for, to take some equipment to them. On the way back this pilot decided to beat up Porthcawl and he dived down on the beach at Porthcawl as we were flying back home and to get in the Beaufighter the navigator had to go up through the bottom of the back compartment. The main spar separated you from the pilot’s cabin, no way through physically, and it was the general practice and I did the same as I’d been shown to leave my parachute pack on the airborne interception equipment and, anyway, as the pilot had dived down on Porthcawl, pulled up afterwards, he pulled a lot of G and I was crushed down in my seat and hanging on the sides of the plane and I could feel myself slipping down. And the floor of my compartment was the door which I had climbed in through and it had put the extra load and the extra negative G had snapped the lock on it and that meant I’d slid out a bit so my intercom plug pulled out of the socket and I couldn’t talk to the pilot at all. Thank God he was the man he was because, not only was he an experienced Beaufighter pilot, he’d also done the test flying on Beaufighters at Bristols and as soon as this door started to open he felt the change of trim. So, he thought, ‘Crickey.’ You know, he could guess what was happening and so he quickly put the plane into a bump, and a bump is a reverse loop, and you can — and coming down like that and again had he continued he would have done up and done the loop but he just, just pulled up. So, anyway he stuck the nose down quickly and that got me [unclear] back into my seat with positive G instead of negative G and, um, I was able to plug in and say I was still there and he said, ‘Yes right. We’ll carry on.’ And we got home alright. Just after he’d left Defford, which he was wing CO there at this time, a chap Peter Gibb, he set the world record for a jet aircraft altitude climb. He was — had gone to, back to Bristol’s as a test pilot and, um, he set this thing at about sixty thousand feet or something [clears throat] and about a fortnight later he thought, ‘Well, I can better this.’ Bristols had different engines so he got them to fit more powerful Bristol engines to this Canberra and he went up, and he left the navigator out so it would reduce his weight, and set another world record, which might be even still there to this day. Certainly all the time war was on it was still the record, of about sixty-five thousand feet. Anyway, as I say, I flew with several interesting people, many of them much medal-ridden. One, a chap called Trousdale, he was a New Zealander really, um, but he got the DFC and an AFC and he was also awarded a Dutch [emphasis] DFC because he’d done intruder work in his Beaufighter and he bombed bridges and barges and things like that. Anyway, the Dutch DFC is like ours but is — where the DFC’s got blue and white stripes and the Air Force Cross has got red and white stripes, the Dutch one has got orange [emphasis] and white stripes so, until such time we was issued our campaign medals, these three medals were together. Later on, of course, the Dutch one, being Dutch, would become at the end of his row of medals with the — so you would have the DFC, the AFC, then the campaign medals and then this Dutch one but until that time they were these things and then he was an outstanding chap to look at, he’d got all these strips of different colours. Anyway, he was a very good pilot and, um, one of the flights I did with him, he decided to go in a B17. We had one Flying Fortress, an American Boeing B17. We also had a Liberator there. Anyway, we had to go down to Geschborn, Eschborn [emphasis] in Germany to pick up some equipment which the boffins had left there. As the Army advanced across Germany they got parcelled this stuff up to bring it back to examine it more carefully in this country. And we went over to pick this up and we had to land at Croydon airport coming back, both to clear Customs and to dump off this package of radar equipment, which was going to go Air Ministry to get it in their hands quickly. And so, as we came into land I had wonderful seat right in the nose of this B17. I was navigating on a thing called a Bigsworth board, which was a mobile chart table really. How I came by it? I don’t know. I must have found it somewhere in some odd corner of a RAF station I’d been on. It was from the First World War really. But anyway, it was a very good mobile chart table, and as we flew up the Thames and then turned south to go into Croydon, over the houses, which I hadn’t seen before because they didn’t go that way, bombers obliviously at night but even in daylight we wouldn’t fly over London. Anyway there we were having to fly over London, all these houses, incredible, and we came in and Croydon was a grass aerodrome, didn’t have built-in runways at that time, and I’d been there as a boy, before to war, to see airliners go in and out and, um, I thought, never thought I’d come and land here so it was quite an experience for me to land there. Anyway, um, when I’d finished my two years as a station navigation officer at Defford I was sent to the Pathfinder Training Unit as an instructor and I hadn’t been there very long when the CO said, ‘Oh Frank, go and get your kit. The AOC wants to take a Lanc up.’ The AOC, this was Bennett, Air Vice Marshall Bennett, the most famous navigator in the world, you couldn’t get a — you know, what he hadn’t done, a tremendous man. Anyway, the reason he wanted to go on this flight whilst we had target indicator bombs, which were red and green and one or two yellows but we, our boffins couldn’t get blue and the Germans would make up false target indicators, which they would fire up with their anti-aircraft guns, and try and make people bomb the wrong place so, if they could get a blue marker then the Germans would have — apparently one Dave Brocks [?] said, ‘We’ve got the thing for you. We’ve got a blue marker.’ And so Bennett, being the man he was, said, ‘Right, I want to see it.’ And so, this is why he took a crew made up of other instructors at the Pathfinder Training Unit and, um, I must admit I wasn’t unworried. I was right on my toes because I was ready, knowing that Bennett was an efficiency man, and we took off from Warboys where we were. You could see the Wash and the ranges on it but of course coming the other way I knew very well — but he would knew where he because he knew the place was like the back of his hand. Anyway, I kept the thing right up to date on my G Box. If he asked for a course I could give it to him immediately. And anyway, these marker things, what Brocks had done was to fill marker bomb case with chopped up blue paper and so, when it was burst in daylight, this showered down and make quite a little blue cloud of — in the sky but quite hopeless for a crew to see it and in daylight not at all. So he wasn’t very pleased with that but it was interesting. Well when we landed — By the way Bennett wrote a book on air navigation, I think it might be still the book on it and I had it in my RAF bag and so we landed and I said, ‘Would you mind Sir autographing my book.’ ‘No lad!’ [laugh] I thought he’d be happy to do it. And he turned round to the wireless operator, sorry the flight engineer, and said, ‘And get your microphone checked.’ And this chap had been stuttering and stammering all the way through the flight and I didn’t know him from Adam, of course, it was just other instructors pulled together to make this crew up for the CO, AOC, and he turned round to this flight engineer and said, ‘Get your microphone checked, lad.’ And the chap looked a bit red faced but still. There wasn’t anything wrong with his microphone at all. He was just scared of Bennett. Couldn’t say two words together but you didn’t need to be scared of Bennett. If you were doing your job he would back you to the hilt but if you weren’t doing your job that was another matter. He would soon see you were going to — and he was a great one for training and even when we were on the Squadron we never wasted time. If you weren’t on ops for some reason you’d be sent off on a training exercise. Now, I didn’t worry about this because I could see the benefit of it. It speeds up your work, certainly as a navigator, if you keep in practice every day but some of the boys didn’t like this. They thought it — they would rather go into town [slight laugh] and relax and so on. But anyway, there we were that was Bennett’s method and I think it saved a lot of lives and improved a lot efficiency. So —
GR: So where are we in war time now?
AM: 45? Or 44?
FL: Well, the war came to an end.
AM: 45?
FL: Well, I was eventually demobbed and, um, oh, whilst I was at Defford at the radar establishment I was working on equipment called Airfield Controlled Radar, 3X, X stands for ten centimetre waveband and I said to the wing commander of flight and I said, ‘Look if I’m here to use this equipment and help the boffins I need to get trained as an air traffic control officer.’ He said, ‘Yes I can understand that.’ So I was sent off just on — as duty from Defford to the Air Traffic Control School at, er, Edgeware. I became a — qualified an air traffic control officer so, when I came to be demobbed, I got myself a job with the Ministry of Civil Aviation and, um they were all ex-RAF chaps of course. I was posted to the area control at Uxbridge and one Saturday the boys were going off to lunch and they said, ‘Frank, you’d be alright looking after things.’ I said, ‘Yes, no trouble.’ And a little Airspeed Oxford came in up in, er, distress having flying from the Channel Islands to Southampton lost an engine and this was November, which was not the sort of time to come down in the Channel, cold water and so on. Anyway, as soon as the emergency arose and did what we would have done the RAF always and I picked up the telephone, got through to Mountbatten in Plymouth and said, ‘We’ve got a problem here. Can you have a launch standing by?’ So they said, ‘Yes.’ And alerted a launch somewhere up, probably in Southampton, to get ready to fish someone out of the water. Well, the aircraft landed in Southampton so didn’t leave anyone on tenterhooks waiting for this emergency that no longer existed. I made another telephone call to Mountbatten to say, ‘Thank you very much, stand down, all is OK.’ Come Monday morning, the senior air traffic controller at this centre, who had been at Croydon before the war and how he dodged the war I don’t know but he was in air traffic —, and he, the plane was so antiquated, it wasn’t true. I mean, the RAF had been using radio telephony for ages but not these boys. They were sending turns to land at their simple air fields by WT, on the Morse code, so it meant carrying a wireless operator in the aircraft to trans— for the messages between the air and the ground. Anyway, this chap came in Monday morning and said, ‘What are these two telephone calls to Mountbatten?’ And I explained what it was and he said, ‘Oh no, no, no. You mustn’t do that. Only the Minister can ask the RAF to help. You should have sent a telegram (or a signal he put it but that turned out to be a telegram) to the Minister asking if he would give permission to help these poor blokes.’ Well, by that time they’d had been dead if they had landed in the deep and so I was so infuriated and instead of taking humble pie I said, ‘That is ridiculous, the cost of two telephone calls.’ And all the correct procedures, a far as I was concerned, and the bad thing would have been if I’d left them standing by and hadn’t told them the chap had landed safely. So anyway, instead of eating humble pie, that very morning I had a letter from the Air Ministry in my pocket offering me a permanent commission in the RAF. At this time I was still a volunteer, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. And I thought I don’t know what to do about this but that made up my mind, and I said, ‘I’m going back to the RAF.’ And that was the start of my proper RAF career in post-war days. I did a tour on Lincolns at Waddington and, um, and then I had been doing quite a lot of work on evasion and escape. There was an organisation, the Air Ministry Air Intelligence 9 it was called, and it taught people how to evade and so on and they used to lay on exercises to train people and each station might have one operation perhaps only once a year perhaps, but it laid on that the air crew go off as if they were invading, evading and told they would be dropped off of coaches and they didn’t know where they were, they wouldn’t be told where they were, they had to find out where they were just as if they’d bailed out and, um, and the local police and some army units usually provided opposition for them, trying to catch them. Almost the first exercise that I did, actually organising it, I thought well it’s — when these chaps are caught and brought in to the Police Headquarters, the Police Headquarters were regions around the country, they were being interrogated and I realised that this was not teaching them very much at all because there was no fear at all so they wouldn’t, wouldn’t know quite what, how to react to it. So I had myself, hired myself from Mos Bros an army officer’s uniform as a captain in the artillery with some war medals — oh, and I should say I’d been awarded the DFC in Pathfinders, so I had an MC on this uniform, and the exercise started and I was at the Police Headquarters where these chaps who were caught brought in and I had two big labels put on doors of two different rooms, one saying ‘RAF Interviewer’ and one saying RA— ‘Army Liaison Officer’. So, they would come in and they had been told, of course, to say nothing until the exercise ended on the Monday, the course was over a weekend, and various chaps were brought in and, much to my surprise, one of them was the station commander of RAF Coltishore and he’d decided to go on the run with the boys and he got caught. So anyway, he came in and to me as an Army Liaison Officer and he started to tell me all about the exercise, where they were going, where the [unclear] were and I was taking all this down and when he’d gone I went round to the wing commander policemen who was in charge of the opposition and said, ‘Look if we let this information out it’s the end of the exercise because there’s no point in it so we’ll keep this quiet until Monday morning.’ But then I had to put my report into Air Ministry, which I did, group captain so and so said this, that and the other. He was livid [emphasis]. He was going to have me court martialled wearing a uniform to which I wasn’t entitled, a medal to which I wasn’t entitled and, of course, it had all been laid on by Air Ministry, quite legitimately as far as I was concerned before-hand, and this station commander was none other than a chap called Bing Cross who was always a bit of a firing one. So anyway, that was that. Oh, and then the Suez operation came up and at this time I was at Upwood which was a Canberra station. I was in charge of the ground support system there and, when it as over, it was decided that proper, um, honour should we say, should be given to those who took part and Prince Michael, I think it was, came round and I had to lay out a graphic, get all these photographs that had been taken during the operation in Suez and, of course, you could speak to all the air crew of the squadrons that had gone from Upwood. Well, of course, naturally with such a high ranking visitor the air officer commanding Upwood, which was 1 Group, was Gus Walker, a little man who’d lost an arm during the war when he was rescuing a team, a crew of a bomber that crashed on his airfield at Flintham [?], a wonderful man, and anyway he was there and Cross turned up to represent his squadrons that had taken part in Suez and so Gus Walker, this 1 Group Air Vice Marshal, started to tell Bing Cross, the Air Vice Marshal of 3 Group, about me and I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ And Cross turned round to Gus Walker and said, ‘I know him.’ [laugh] And, much to my surprise, told this tale about himself. I didn’t think he was like that. He’d forgotten over the years perhaps but, um, anyway, he told Gus Walker all about me so that was that.
AM: Gosh, where, where did you —
FL: And then I went out to Korea with the Army still on this evasion and escape drop. I was an Air Ministry liaison officer, the only one north of — well only one in Korea really, certainly —
GR: That’s while the Korean War was on?
FL: Korean Headquarters where I had a little tent and each new lot of soldiers coming in I had to brief them on evading and so on. Well, of course, evading in Korea was very different from evading in this country. I mean, you couldn’t walk around and pretend you were anything other than what you were, with your white face and so on. But, um, so really it was a question of teaching them how to live off the land rather than how to evade but, anyway, that’s what we did and so for two years I was doing that, not only with the Army, I was, I went out onto the boats, HMS Ocean and HMS, oh, the other one. Anyway, there were two aircraft carriers [sneeze] and also I used to work with the Americans, 5th Air Force. I went out on the other coast to one of their big aircraft carriers and spoke to their air crew and so on.
GR: And that would be the early ‘50s, wouldn’t it? 1952, ’53?
AM: No later than that. It’s later than that isn’t it —
GR: The Korean War was ’53.
FL: Anyway, I went back to — well, Air Force Technical Training Command, working in research branch, that was interesting, no flying really, and then from that back — well to 115 here at Marham then, and flying Washingtons, B59s, as the Americans called and I was flight commander on B Flight.
GR: When did you finish in the RAF, Frank?
FL: Sorry?
GR: When did you finish in the RAF the second time around?
FL: Yes —
Frank’s wife: We always forget don’t we?
AM: ‘80s?
FL: Well, oh, from that I was given command of 220 Squadron with Thors, ballistic missiles, so for that I had to go to America to be trained as a launch control officer and ,um, then came back and was stationed up the road at Swaffham, north Ickenham, and when I my tour of duty was finished with that, the only job open for a squadron leader of my seniority, was to run the officers’ mess at one of the three bomber stations and I thought, ‘My God, going from missiles to messes, you know, what is the RAF coming to?’ [laugh] I had long realised that it was a pilot’s Air Force and didn’t have the same promotion chances as navigators. It’s changed now. You’ve got quite a few navigators right up the top but not in those days. If you weren’t a pilot you got nowhere so I thought, ‘Well, I’ll come out.’ And, um, sorry, I can’t think of the year. It doesn’t really matter.
AM: No, it desn’t matter.
FL: So that was the end of my RAF career, running this officers’ mess. In fact, it got me a job in civil life but that’s another story and you won’t want to know about that [laugh]. It’s probably about some of the things in Bomber Command and there’s one flight that I would like to record —
AM: It’s on.
FL: And that’s with 115, from when I was at Witchford. 115 was a big squadron and A and B Flights had used up all the letters of the alphabet because our code letters were KO for 115 Squadron so you had KO, then the roundel and then the aircraft identification A, B, C, whatever it might be. Well, when they got round to C Flight, as I said, they’d used up all the letters of the alphabet so, instead of having KO as the number we had A4. Well, it was a big A and little 4 like a Q and this particular night we’d been down to bomb Friedrichschafen on the —
GR: Maltese [?] coast.
FL: There’s a big lake there now.
Frank’s wife: Lake Constance?
FL: The Messerschmitt factory was in — it was a terrible night, stormy, thunder clouds, bouncing around and I was feeling quite sick. I did suffer from air sickness a great deal in rough aircraft. Anyway, we got down there, markers went down, we bombed the target and turned to come back when we did I didn’t get much help on the way down fixing our positon. And so I knew we obviously — Friedrichschafen that was the name of the place. I knew we’d been at Friedrichschafen when we bombed so from that I could work out what the average speed wind had been since we took off and I thought I’d use this average wind to get home. And the wireless operator couldn’t get me any bearings. Because of these thunderstorms the radio waves had been bounced off the thunderclouds and so the DF direction systems couldn’t help us. It was us on them or them on us. But we got back to where it was over Witchford to Ely and, in those days, all the aircraft had a radio transmission in the aircraft to speak to the ground but it had a limited range of nine miles, deliberately, because there was so many airfields that if it was any wider the ether would be absolutely cluttered with talking so, anyway, we got to where we should have been over Witchford, over Ely, and calling up for a turn to land, deathly quiet, nobody about, no other aircraft, nobody answering. So I thought, ‘Well that’s odd.’ Well, if the wind has changed well we would have been blown this way so I’d go north for ten minutes but then the wind may have gone the other way so I’d go west for ten minutes, still trying to find Witchford, and we had a system, if you were lost you called out ‘Darky’. That was the call sign to get help and any ground station hearing somebody calling ‘Darky’ would answer it with the name of their station. As I said, we were limited to nine miles so you knew you would be within nine miles of that airfield, um, but anyway, nobody answered our Darky call and we went north ten minutes, west ten minutes, north ten minutes, west ten minutes and all the time the bright lights on the fuel tanks were glowing red and I thought, ‘Oh my God, you know, we’re going to be in trouble here.’ And then, just as I was going to tell the crew to — I think I did tell them actually, yes, we sat on the Mae West dinghy, individual pack, and but you didn’t have it clipped to your parachute harness. Normally we just sat on it, that was it, but when you wanted to use it you had to clip it on to the side of your parachute harness otherwise you wouldn’t have a dinghy. So, I warned the crew to hook on their dinghy’s and just at that point we were going north and the rear gunner spotted a searchlight to the rear, to, in other words, to the south and just shining a single searchlight on the cloud. Well, that was, er, quite a normal procedure for showing where an airfield was, a Sandra light it was called, a single searchlight, so we turned to go towards that and I thought, ‘Hang on. We’re going south and we might have been blown a long way south to start with and we could be going to France.’ And we knew the Germans had set up airfields in northern France, along the coast, to make them look like RAF airfields to try and say, ‘Come on in boys. This is where you are.’ Just to capture you, capture the aeroplane, so we carried a little bomb in the aircraft and coming down on hostile country this was to be put in the wing over the fuel tank and then you ignited it, it was an incendiary bomb, and it would burn the aircraft up. And that was the job of the wireless operator was to get out through the hatch on top and go and do this once we’d landed. Anyway, we did quite agree and what I told them to do was for the gunners to protect the aircraft while he was going to do that. Of course, he couldn’t get out until the aircraft had landed, obviously. Anyway, as we got down into the circuit, once we’d broke through this layer of cloud, we could see where the searchlight was shining on the cloud, reflecting all around like daylight underneath, and one of the gunners said, ‘Cor, this is a Messerschmitt over there and a Dornier over there.’ Oh yes, this is one of those German places so I said, ‘Look, gunners stay in their turrets and fight off anyone who comes while we get out and get this bomb burning.’ Well, I used to carry a Mouser pistol because I didn’t like the idea of the RAF only giving you a Bentley 38 with six rounds of ammunition. It wasn’t going to last you very far on the continent but a friend of my fathers had captured this Mouser nine millimetre in the fighting in Russia after, as the First World War ended, and he’d had given it to me so I had this thing. Well, I was going to go to the door and help fight off any Germans coming to try and capture the aircraft and as the tail hit the runway, as we landed, the engines cut, we were right out of fuel. I thought, ‘Goodness me we couldn’t ever get any closer than that.’ Well, we knew it was really low because we’d had red lights on the fuel tanks for some while but, of course, as the engines cut the lights went out because it was the dynamos in the engines that kept the lights going. So, I went on back down to — in the darkness to fiddle with the outside door. Well, it was opened from the outside and a good old English voice said, ‘Oh, 115 Squadron.’ Oh no, there’s something funny about this because, as I said, we didn’t carry 115 letters. We weren’t marked up as KO we were marked as A4 so I thought I’ll put my pistol behind me [laugh] you know, and we found we had landed — oh, sorry as we were approaching it through the static we did pick up the words, ‘Something Ford Bridge standing by.’ I thought Stamford Bridge. Can’t be Yorkshire but it might have been. But anyway where are we? And it turned out what we’d now call Blackbushe, down near Woking . And, um, so it transpired our gunners were quite right, what was happening was that this was just before — well, D -Day hadn’t happened but they were getting ready for it and they got such German aircraft as they caught and assembled there, so that pilots could learn to fly them, so that when the invasion took place they could get over and bring German aircraft back to us. But I was so shattered after that I said, ‘I’m so sorry I can’t stand any more after this. I’m going to resign.’ Of course, it wasn’t just me. It was six other aircraft and they were relying upon me and I failed them. So anyway, when we eventually got back to our base at Witchford the following day, um, the station navigation officer went through my work and said, ‘I couldn’t find any mistakes here. It’s just you didn’t have the information that you needed.’ Well, I said, ‘That’s true. I couldn’t get any information on the way back.’ So, we were just lucky and I said, ‘Well, as a navigator or as an old flying O, I was trained as a gunner. I could go and fly with somebody else in the turret. It didn’t worry me. I’d be quite happy to fly in the turret.’ But the crew said, ‘No, we want you as our navigator.’ I said, ‘Well, you know, we went all through the business of laying mines and mines and so on.’ But we stayed together and carried on with Pathfinders.
AM: Crikey.
GR: Wonderful.
FL: That was a very dodgy, that was the most frightening flight I had.
AM: The dodgiest one of the lot.
FL: Sorry?
AM: The dodgiest one of the lot. You just can’t imagine actually that moment of landing and no fuel. Two more minutes, three more minutes and — gosh. I’ll switch back off again then.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Frank Leatherdale
Creator
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Annie Moody
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-10-18
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ALeatherdaleF151018
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
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00:59:36 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Frank was an aircraft spotter for the Local Defence Volunteers and volunteered to join the Royal Air Force as a pilot. He went to Calgary in Canada on the Empire Air Training Scheme, where he few Tiger Moths at the Elementary Training School. He was, however, re-mustered as an air observer and qualified in February 1943.
Frank joined 115 Squadron at RAF Witchford, where his crew was formed and flew in Lancaster Mk 2. His first tour consisted of 30 trips, although they only completed 29 because of a change of pilots. He then joined 7 Squadron, part of the Pathfinder Force. He trained at the Pathfinder Training Unit and went to RAF Oakington where they were twice Master Bombers. After his tour, Frank was posted to the Radar Research Establishment at RAF Defford as station navigation officer. It involved several different aircraft and flights (bomber, coastal, naval). He describes several of the interesting people he flew with and the work on Doppler navigation. Frank was subsequently sent to the Pathfinder Training Unit as an instructor and recounts a flight with Air Vice Marshal Bennett, investigating blue target indicator bombs.
After Frank was demobilised, he worked initially as an air traffic control officer before accepting a permanent commission into the RAF. Frank goes on to describe his post-war RAF activities.
Squadron Leader Frank Leatherdale was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his work in Pathfinders.
Contributor
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Sally Coulter
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Worcestershire
Canada
Alberta
Alberta--Calgary
115 Squadron
220 Squadron
7 Squadron
aircrew
B-17
B-29
Beaufighter
Bennett, Donald Clifford Tyndall (1910-1986)
bombing
crewing up
Distinguished Flying Cross
Lancaster
Lancaster Mk 2
Lincoln
Master Bomber
navigator
observer
Pathfinders
radar
RAF Defford
RAF Marham
RAF Oakington
RAF Waddington
RAF Witchford
searchlight
training
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/358/6094/AHayleyCA160224.2.mp3
24880b7e4d452a04df441ffcc72a2c71
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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Hayley, Jack
Jack Hayley
C A Hayley
Cecil A Hayley
Description
An account of the resource
Eight items. Collection consists of a log book, an interview and other items concerning Flight Lieutenant Cecil 'Jack' Alison Hayley DFC. Items include photographs of aircraft and people, a letter concerning his Distinguished Flying Cross and well as newspaper cuttings concerning operations, his wedding and the award of the Distinguished Flying Cross. After training he completed tours on 625 Squadron at RAF Kelstern, then 170 Squadron at RAF Hemswell before going on to a bomber defence training flight flying Hurricanes and Spitfires.
This collection was donated by Jack Hayley and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Identifier
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Hayley, CA
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2016-02-25
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the, Thursday the 25th of February 2016 and I’m sitting here with John Longstaff-Ellis talking to Cecil Alison Hayley.
JCAH: No.
CB: Otherwise known as Jack and his wife Barbara about Jack’s experiences in the war but can we just start in your earliest recollections Jack?
JCAH: Yes.
CB: Of family life and -
JCAH: Yes.
CB: And how you came to join the RAF.
JCAH: Yes. Yes. Well, I was born in Caterham as I say. My father had an ironmonger’s business in the Croydon Road, Caterham it’s, ‘cause there was lower Caterham and upper Caterham. We were in the lower, lower Caterham and I was I was born over the shop, over the ironmonger’s shop. So earliest recollections I was the youngest of three boys and I was five years younger than my eldest and three and a half years younger than my, the middle one. Harold was the eldest and Leslie was the middle one. I have very few recollections of life before primary school which was at Caterham Board School they called it. It’s on Croydon Road, Caterham which I suppose I started when I was, I don’t know, five I suppose and then, well while I was there I, my interest in those early days, well when I was old enough was Scouting. I started off as a Wolf Cub and went on to Scouting but can I just I stop there.
[machine paused]
JCAH: The thing is my secondary school, ok. So if we could start again. Are you ready to start again?
CB: Yeah.
JCAH: Ok. Right. I I went to my secondary school which was Purley County School which, when I started there was near Purley but they had, had to extend the school and make a completely new building and the new school was built at Chalden and I used to cycle from Caterham up, because it was up on the hill, I had to go through Caterham on the hill and I was interested in rugby, I used to play rugby. I wasn’t very interested in cricket but I did join the school cadet corps when I was at Purley County School and I learned to play the bugle there in the band. So that took me up to the age of eighteen when I left school which was 1938, no, seventeen, that’s right. 1938. And my first job was with a small insurance company in the city and our offices were in the Royal Exchange and I was on the mezzanine floor looking out of the window right across to the Bank and Bank Square, the Mansion House and the Bank of England. It was a beautiful position to be in. Anyway, I suppose I was there until, where are we, ‘39, probably 1940, the office, oh no it was before the war they, in 1938 they obviously decided they would move out of London and we moved to Aylesbury and the offices at Aylesbury and my wife happened to be the secretary to the district manager at at the branch there at Aylesbury and she managed to fix me up with accommodation in Stoke Mandeville, Moat Farm and I was well fed there during the war. It was a lovely place to be. Anyway, we, my wife and I, her parents were farming in Weston Turville and I used to enjoy going over to the farm and taking part in the farming activities and eventually, well we got engaged so now we’re coming up, I, of course, I was eighteen when war broke and, but it wasn’t, for some reason or other it wasn’t ‘til 1941 they started taking any interest in me and my service and I had interviews and I, at that time I hadn’t any great ambition to go flying because my family history was in, in the navy and I assumed perhaps I would go in to the navy. But then they were desperate to get young, young chaps to join as air crew so I was persuaded to join the air force and my first, I had to report to the Lord’s Cricket Ground at St John’s, St John’s Wood which was the, what they called the Number 1 Air Crew Receiving Centre which was abbreviated as ACRC and in typical RAF slang became marcy tarcy [laughs]. So, yes I was probably there for probably two or three weeks getting kitted out and being introduced to RAF life and from my first part of training was Initial Training Wing at Newquay in Cornwall and there I did our usual square bashing and getting training in aircraft recognition and Morse, all these sort of things before, so I was probably there four or five months I suppose in Newquay and then yes I heard that I was being, of course by this time of course I knew I’d been selected for air crew training but then we had to go through what they called a grading school which was at Cliffe Pypard near, near Lyneham. Up on the top of the hill. A little small airfield and I think we flew Magisters there and we had twelve hours in which to go solo and if we didn’t go solo, unless there was any other particular reason, you continue pilot training then we were selected for pilot training and of course the alternative was trained as a navigator. So Cliffe Pypard. Yes. Could I just stop a minute there?
[machine paused]
JCAH: So from there we were sent to Heaton Park in Manchester which was the Air Crew Disposal, Dispersal Centre and eventually we were allocated to a convoy going out from Glasgow to take us across, across the Atlantic to Canada. We actually landed in New York and took the train up to Monkton in New Brunswick where we were held pending being sent on to our first training station. So I was there about a couple of weeks and then we took a train journey from New Brunswick across to Calgary and I think we started on the Monday and we got there on the Friday [laughs]. The only main stop we had was at Winnipeg where I think we changed trains and the local ladies were very good to us and came along with all sorts of goodies and they treated us very well and from there we went on to Calgary. I think it was the Friday we arrived and of course the steam trains then were fired by, by wood. Wood fired steam trains, and we used to wake up every morning covered in wood soot. Not a very comfortable journey. Anyway, so having arrived at Calgary we were posted to the 31 Elementary Flying Training School at De Winton where we flew Stearmans mostly. Boeing Stearmans during the day but we also flew Tiger Moths. The American, the Canadian Tiger Moth which had the luxury of a canopy above us instead of being an open cockpit and we used, we used to fly those mainly to introduce us to instrument flying but the main training was on the Stearmans so that took us from September ’42 to, yes to the end of November ‘42 when we were, I was posted to Number 38 Flying Training School at Estevan in Saskatchewan in the middle of the prairies in the middle of the winter. It was pretty harsh but it’s surprising how we coped really and of course the accommodation was all centrally heated you know. Anyway, so we were flying the Anson there. The Canadian Anson with the Jacob engines and it had the luxury of hydraulic undercarriage instead of, you know the British Anson you wound up as well. I don’t know. About eighty winds. So that was, but it’s interesting as well of course a lot of the time we were landing on snow which was very, you had very little references to judge your height and it was a good, good training. And well we did all the normal things. Cross country training of course, instrument flying as well as all our ground training in navigation. Did a lot of Morse code training, aircraft recognition, those sort of things and eventually we completed, I completed my training in April ‘43 and qualified for my wings which I was very proud of and then we were returned to Monkton to the dispersal centre at Monkton for our return journey across the Atlantic and while we were there there was, I remember this, Jimmy Edwards had been training out there and he and a few others managed to get together and produce a show for us which was good fun. Anyway, so we, I was going to say on our outward cruise we had a bit of a panic because one of the ships was torpedoed and it wasn’t ‘til after we got back that there was a news item in the new New York papers of the torpedoing of this ship, it was a cargo ship who managed to struggle into New York so that was interesting. But of course I, whilst I was at Monkton I was commissioned before I came home and so the journey home was far more luxurious in the Ile de France. It was, had been converted into a troop ship so yes we were living in luxury. A little episode, if I could go back to the outward cruise. We were in an American convoy and the sister ship of the one we were in had been, gone down with fire so there were very strict no smoking rules on deck, no below deck. You could smoke above deck and I was caught smoking below deck and my punishment was to work in the kitchen which, this was the officer’s mess and it was nice to pick all up the titbits, the luxury titbits such as oysters, fried oysters. So it wasn’t a bad punishment. Anyway, returning, the home trip was as I say very comfortable and so we, let’s see, we, the first posting was to Harrogate which was another personnel receiving centre and then on to Bournemouth for some reason or other and then we started, we went to Little Rissington which is a suburb of, of the big flying training station. No. Yes. No. That’s right we went to Little Rissington and then we were posted to a satellite of Little Rissington at Windrush and there we were flying Oxfords to get acclimatised to a different type of flying in this country as compared with Canada with the wide open spaces and roads that went either north west or east west. North, east, south and east, west. It was quite different and then of course coping with the restricted areas and so on in this country and during that time I, we did some instrument flying training at the Beam, what they called the Beam Approach Training Flight at Docking where we, they had an approach system which was pretty primitive. Anyway, we were only there oh about ten days and then I finished my training at Madly in September ‘43 and was then posted to a radio school at Madly, west of Hereford on the River Wye and there we were flying radio cadets. I was flying the Domini, the RAF version of the Rapide and the other flight was flying Proctors and single aircraft, single engine aircraft. I must say the old Rapide was very reliable and quite nice to fly. The only snag was there was no seat as such. You were just sat on a cushion with your legs stretched out in front of you which after an hour or so could be pretty, you could get a bit stiff. Anyway, it was an interesting period and we could just choose where we flew just as long as getting practice of operating in the air there, the radio equipment and I got to know the area quite well. The Black Mountains and going north to Cheshire and out that way. So that was, that took me up to March 1944 and at that stage I was about to start my operational training but a little incident. I, my wife and I had arranged to get married in November ‘43. Let’s see, ’43 perhaps and but, that’s right, I was at Madley and a week before we were getting married I was told that I was going on a course and it was they called a junior commander’s course and this was up in Inverness and I thought if any course I was going to go on I thought it was going to be an operational course but to spend, to, prior to my wedding arrangements for the sake of a stupid administrative course was, there was no way I could talk them out of it. Consequently our honeymoon arrangements went by the board and so we got married on the Saturday, yes and that Saturday night we spent in a hotel off The Strand. I think it was the Surrey Hotel if I remember rightly and most of the night was spent in the basement because of the air raid [laughs]. So that was my honeymoon night and the following day I, we had to get, I had to get on a train all the way to Inverness which in those days was it was impossible to find a seat on the train so we just had to squat on our kit in the corridor. So all in all that was a bit of a disaster. So having done that I was then posted in March ‘44 to 83 Operational Training Unit at Peplow. That’s in, in the Midlands. And there I flew the Wellington and I was there for about three months. I forget how many hours we flew but one little incident. The Wellington is infamous for its brake pressure. You had to watch your brake pressure all the time and the dispersal areas there were pans, dispersal pans and the land just dropped away from around the dispersal pan and I suddenly discovered I was out of brake pressure and I had to lurch over the side and down the slope, which I got a red endorsement which was eventually cancelled but that was an unfortunate incident. It learned me a lesson. Taught me a lesson. So Peplow [unclear] Park. Air crew. Yes. So having completed training on a Wellington I then went on to the Heavy Conversion Unit at Sandtoft which was in the Hull area. That sort of area. And I suppose we did about thirty or forty hours on the, on the Halifax and then on to the Lancaster Finishing School at Hemswell and that was October ‘44. I was there only for just over two weeks and I had my first training, first appointment to a squadron which was 625 squadron at Kelstern and I was there for nearly two months when 170 squadron was reformed. It was previously a reconnaissance squadron beginning of the war and was disbanded and was reformed at, at Kelstern and I was, we were first of all at a little place called Dunholme Lodge. It was very much a wartime station and it was right alongside, on the, from Scampton on the opposite side of the Ermine Street, the main road to the north and I suppose it was only, I don’t know, might be four miles separating us from Scampton and consequently we had to have a common circuit around both airfields and this all got a bit fraught and I think they decided it was bit too dangerous and we were, I was posted then back to Hemswell and I, well finished my training, finished my tour on 170 squadron on the 15th of April ‘45. If we could just stop there. Yes. Just -
[machine paused]
CB: We’re talking about Lancaster and Halifax so -
JCAH: Yes.
CB: How, what, what were the differences between those then Jack?
JCAH: Well I mean -
CB: And which did you like?
JCAH: The Halifax was quite a heavy aircraft to fly and quite difficult to land successfully. It was quite hard work but the Lancaster was quite different. It was so easily controlled. The controls were more positive but not, not heavy and the manoeuvrability was so much better than the Halifax and the, I suppose as far as the air crew positons it was the same, similar. It simply, you had a Perspex canopy over you as pilot and of course no heating. You just relied on winter clothing to keep warm. So, no, the experience of training, going on to Lancasters was quite remarkable really. The sheer manoeuvrability and particularly when it come to using corkscrews to avoid fighters. Giving maximum deflection all the time. But no so as far as -
CB: What about rate of climb? Was there a difference in that?
JCAH: Yes. I think probably it was better. I think, I think with the four Merlins I can’t remember what the Halifax had in the way of engines.
CB: Well the early ones had Merlins and then they went to -
JCAH: Yeah.
CB: The Bristol Mercuries. .
JCAH: Yes. Hercules.
CB: The Hercules. Yes.
JCAH: Yeah. No. I think it had a climbing and of course I suppose the maximum ceiling was around about twenty thousand feet. We were normally operating, I suppose, about eighteen, eighteen thousand feet. That sort of height. So going back, going, talking about actual incidents during my ops I suppose I’ll just of give a summary of -
CB: What was your first raid?
JCAH: Sorry?
CB: What was your first raid?
JCAH: Yes. It was with another crew to introduce me to what was, what happened during a bombing raid and this was an operation on Le Havre in daylight. Yes. So 625 squadron I had, I did twelve sorties with 625 before going on to 170 squadron and I did nineteen sorties with 170 squadron. Making a total of thirty one sorties all together and total flying time during my operations was a hundred and eighty one hours. By that time I had just reached a thousand hours altogether when I finished my tour. But I suppose one particular incident comes to mind when we were over Dusseldorf and we were coned by searchlights and of course you’re a sitting duck then to all the ackack anti-aircraft fire in the area and I simply stuck the nose down and called to the engineer for full power and I shall never forgive him saying, ‘What?’ when I was wanting immediate power [laughs] and you see he was questioning what I was saying. I said, ‘Full power,’ and so we just stuck the nose and just got out of the area as quick as possible. But on return we’d no, had no injuries in the crew but the aircraft was pretty well peppered and on landing I realised that my starboard tyre had burst and that was obviously lurching down. I kept it as straight as I could for as long as I could and then I just veered off on to the grass to clear the runway for the other aircraft coming in but looking at it the next morning was, it was out of commission. That, my aircraft was TCD. Our squadron letter was TC and I, I was D-Dog. I don’t think we had a P. TCP [laughs] Anyway, I suppose in about three or four days it was back in working order and I successfully finished my tour. So -
CB: Just -
JCAH: Yes.
CB: Go back on a couple of things.
JCAH: Yes. Ok.
CB: The crews. So you crewed up.
JCAH: Oh yes.
CB: At OTU. How did that work?
JCAH: Sorry?
CB: You crewed up at OTU.
JCAH: That’s right.
CB: How did that work?
JCAH: They were just, well we had, no we didn’t have an engineer I don’t think.
CB: No.
JCAH: No. No. Just pilot, navigator, signaller and I think we had one gunner. That’s right. But then going on to the heavy aircraft we were, we were seven. Pilot, flight engineer, navigator, radio operator, bomb aimer and two gunners. Mid-up and two guns. Seven. No. It’s amazing how crew selection, we were just left to mix with each other and somehow we gelled and and I I was very successful, very lucky with my crew I think. My navigator in particular. He was, he was excellent. There was one occasion when we had no aids at all from the target, I forget which target it was and we were completely on dead reckoning radar based on past information on winds and so on but he got us home safely and we managed to recognise landfall on the English coast and got in safely but no, I was, and I was glad that I was eventually awarded the DFC and he was awarded the DFC as well. That pleased me no end because he was a great cont, made a good contribution to the operation of the crew. So you just -
CB: So you got, got a crew. Sorry.
JCAH: Sorry? Yes?
CB: Yes, just, you got a crew at OTU. Normally there was six on the Wellington.
JCAH: We didn’t have a -
CB: Yeah. But some flew with four.
JCAH: Yeah.
CB: Was there a shortage of gunners and bomb aimers?
JCAH: I’m just trying to think whether we had two gunners at that stage. That I can’t quite remember. We certainly didn’t have a second pilot but then again -
CB: They were probably -
JCAH: I suppose, did we? I think we must have had a bomb aimer because we had to practice bombing.
CB: Yeah.
JCAH: Yes. We must have had a bomb aimer so that was at, on the Wellington.
CB: So when you were at, when the crew selection took place who was, were they gelling on you or how -
JCAH: It’s difficult -
CB: Or had some of them already got together? What happened?
JCAH: We got chatting to one another. I mean they had no means of knowing what my performance as a pilot was like and it was all a question of trust. But as I say it worked out very well. Yeah.
CB: So when you got to the HCU you then got the, a flight engineer.
JCAH: Yes. Flight engineer.
CB: And was he allocated to you or how did that happen?
JCAH: No. I think much the same thing happened. Of course we had a crew then to decide amongst us who we liked really, or who appealed to us.
CB: Yeah.
JCAH: So that made it easier so, so -
CB: How many of the crew were commissioned other than you?
JCAH: My navigator was commissioned and strangely enough my mid-upper gunner which was unusual for a gunner, to have a commissioned gunner. And the rest of them were non-commissioned.
CB: And how did the crew get on in the, in flight and -
JCAH: Yes. I think -
CB: In the evening.
JCAH: You had to avoid being too familiar on the operations and you had to be strict on your intercom identifying each other as a pilot and not by name, that sort of thing so there was no misunderstanding. But yes my, yes my radio operator, he was Australian. A young Australian but he gelled very well. In fact we had a Bridge crew on board, the radio operator, the navigator my, the mid-upper, all four of us played bridge and we always had a pack of cards with us when we were sitting around waiting for something to happen which was good fun. So -
CB: Socially? So in the time off did the crew do things together or did there -
JCAH: Oh yes.
CB: Tend to be factions?
JCAH: No. Not at all. Of course we were in separate messes obviously but we were, certainly at Dunholme Lodge, we were billeted as a crew in old nissen huts with a coke boiler in the middle and the fumes that used to come off that boiler were quite, well sulphurous put it that way and not very, but anyway, we survived that but of course our messes, we used separate messes but we used to, in the evenings we used to obviously go out to the pub together and relax.
CB: So you were married. Were any of the others married?
JCAH: My engineer I think was married. My navigator wasn’t then I don’t think. No. No. I think my engineer and I were was the only ones who were married.
CB: Where was your wife during the war?
JCAH: She was in Aylesbury and -
CB: With her parents.
JCAH: Yes. On the farm at Weston Turville. Of course you had to be careful in those days just what you said on the telephone. You couldn’t really say anything about your operational activities at all but no we kept in touch and obviously an anxious time for her. But -
CB: How did you manage to get time together?
JCAH: During the tour I think we only had one occasion when we were, had a period of two or three days leave when we could get together. But I do remember when we were on OTU my wife managed to come and join us. She stayed at a local hotel and she managed to meet my basic crew at that time but that was the only time really we got together. Yeah.
CB: You didn’t manage to get loan of a small plane to fly in to Halton.
JCAH: [laughs]. No. No.
CB: Or Westcott.
JCAH: Yes because my father in law’s farm actually bordered on to the airfield at Halton at Weston Turville and just before the war an auto Gyro crashed.
CB: Right.
JCAH: On the airfield and in their hall they had the joystick from the remains of the auto Gyro I remember. Anyway that’s all a bit irrelevant.
CB: So you finished your tour.
JCAH: Yes.
CB: So that was when?
JCAH: It was February 1944.
CB: Yes. ‘45. ’44.
JCAH: ’45.
CB: Yeah.
JCAH: I beg your pardon ‘45 and then there was an extraordinary posting was on to 1687 bomber defence training flights flying Spitfires and Hurricanes if you please. Coming off Lancasters this was quite, quite a different experience but we used to do, practice fighter affiliation.
CB: Yes.
JCAH: On the squadron bombers.
CB: Where was that?
JCAH: That was back at Hemswell strangely enough. Actually yes actually they were at Scampton when I first joined them and then they went back to Hemswell and as I say we used to fly Spitfires during the day and the Hurricanes at night.
CB: Oh did you? What were they like?
JCAH: Well they were, I mean they didn’t compare with the Spitfires. The handling and manoeuvrability. It was a steady, steady old aircraft but the Spitfire was great fun to fly. So manoeuvrable. Mind you there were times when I really didn’t know what I was up to. In fact it was in 19, where are we? ’47. We had the first open day after the war. Hemswell open day and part of the programme was the three of us were doing a tail chase and supposedly bombing a target in the middle of the airfield and the cloud base was only around about a thousand feet and we, all three of us winged over and I suddenly realised I really hadn’t got enough height to pull out of this dive and this hangar was coming out on my right and I was literally [stalling all around this dive?] and I honestly thought that this was it. Anyway, when I taxied in after this flight I had about twenty yards of telegraph wire on my tail wheel which shows you how close I was to the ground.
CB: It thrilled the audience.
JCAH: Oh yes. You know. Highly delighted.
CB: Yeah.
JCAH: But I never heard the result of the loss of telephone communications in the area [laughs].
CB: Yes.
JCAH: I never did hear.
CB: What was the significance of having the fighter, the Spitfire for day affiliation and the Hurricane for night?
JCAH: Well really the Spitfire with the narrow undercarriage it was quite tricky to land particularly in a crosswind. It was very, you were sort of teetering all the time whereas the Hurricane the undercarriage went outwards, that’s right and so you had a wider wheel base and they were more stable in the landing process. Apart from that, I think that was the main reason why we used to fly Hurricanes at night. But there were times. The Lancaster used to have little blue lights on the tail side of the wing tips and there were times when I thought I was chasing these two blue lights only to find I was chasing a star. Got into all sort of peculiar situations. So I wasn’t a great night fighter pilot. [laughs]
CB: How long were you there?
JCAH: Let me see. Hurricanes. ’45. Well, I have it in here. Yes. [pause] Yes I was there about eighteen months. Yeah. Yes.
CB: End of ’46.
JCAH: Yes. October ‘46 I finished my tour there.
CB: Then what?
JCAH: Well it disbanded. The unit disbanded and I I was put on to headquarters duties I think. I was, when the chaps were demobbed they had what they called a release book which gave a little history and I had to make a little summary of the person’s history but really not knowing much about them at all but I used to make up some complimentary remarks but that was the main thing I was doing there.
CB: Where was that?
JCAH: Sorry?
CB: Where?
JCAH: Still at Hemswell.
CB: Right.
JCAH: As I say Hemswell took up a very big part in my RAF career at that time because then Lincolns were brought into Hemswell and I joined 83 squadron on Lincolns. The intention was they were being trained for operations in the Far East against Japan.
CB: Right.
JCAH: And of course that didn’t come off and so I finished on 83 squadron in March 1949 and it was then that I was posted to Defford. What they called the Telecommunications Flying Unit doing, flying the equipment from the Radar Research Establishment, airborne experience and that really was quite a remarkable unit because they were using aircraft which weren’t required for their original duties. Consequently while I was on the heavy flight, what did I here? So I was flying Lincolns, Yorks, a Tudor 7 and a Wayfarer. This was on the, we had a heavy flight and a light flight, you know, flight and when we had a slack period in heavy flight I used to go across to fly some of the lighter aircraft which included Meteor, Meteor 7, Mosquito, Vampire, Firefly, Canberra, Brigand and we had had some communication aircraft. Valetta and the, the Devon, the service version of the De Havilland Dove which we used for communication flying but I mean on one month I had nine different aircraft on my logbook.
CB: Amazing.
JCAH: But that -
CB: So you enjoyed that.
JCAH: Pardon?
CB: You enjoyed that.
JCAH: Well, it was, it was good fun and it was amazing you used to go across to the light flight and you’d get the handbook out and just chat with the chaps because I mean, well a Mosquito did have two pilots but I mean, the others, the Meteor and the Canberra and the Vampire had all single seat and you couldn’t get any dual training and you just had a chat with the chaps who were flying and read the pilots notes and off you went.
CB: So was the Meteor the first jet that you flew?
JCAH: It was either the Meteor or the Vampire. It looks as though, yes.
CB: And did -
JCAH: Yeah.
CB: And did you go in a training version of that for your first flight in jet?
JCAH: No. I think probably not formal training but went along with one of the other chaps who was flying it regularly. Yes that was quite an experience.
CB: Because the Meteor 7 is a T7 isn’t it?
JCAH: Sorry?
CB: The Meteor 7 is a trainer. T7.
JCAH: Oh right.
CB: And –
JCAH: Yes. And, yes, and the Meteor 4 if I can remember. Yes.
CB: Was a single seater.
JCAH: Yes. So that’s the way we went on.
CB: So when did you finish that?
JCAH: Where are we? Yes in May 1952.
CB: What was your wife’s name?
JCAH: Noreen.
CB: Noreen.
JCAH: Noreen.
CB: How is that spelled? N O R E E N.
JCAH: N. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. And did she come up to stay with you then at that time? Were there quarters?
JCAH: Yes. Now we’re talking about 1947 and it was only then that we were allowed to make arrangements to live out locally. We were with our wives and families, if you had them and I found a little cottage. It was, well it was attached to a bigger, still a cottage but we were just one up and one down and this was in Kirton Lindsey which was just north of Hemswell and it was about, yes, about seven miles. I used to cycle from there to Hemswell but the extraordinary thing with this little cottage was that the downstairs floor was wooden and the bedroom was a concrete floor. It was quite extraordinary and of course we had a little scullery, a little small scullery which we used as a pantry and an old coal range which we used to cook on. So it was all rather primitive but we were so pleased to be living together and, yes it wasn’t ‘til, yes, that was Hemswell. It wasn’t until I got to Defford that we had official married quarters but being a wartime station there were just single bed accommodation and I think where we were used to be the WAAF area when WAAFs were there and as I say they were just single brick quarters but we had, I think we had two bedrooms and a kitchen and bathroom so it was comparative luxury from our original -
CB: But that was an air force -
JCAH: Sorry?
CB: That was an air force building.
JCAH: Yes. Actually at Defford the, it was a Ministry of Supply station and it was just the aircrew who were the service, RAF element. So the interesting thing was as my, as I say my grandson is in a practice in Malvern.
CB: Malvern.
JCAH: Malvern. Yes. And living in Worcester and we, it was about a couple of years ago we paid a visit to them and I said I would like to go back to the Defford area and see what’s left because the flying discontinued there. They went to, moved to Pershore but there was still they had these big aerial discs on the airfield but I discovered they’d got a little museum there because Defford during the war was a very important station developing all the radar stuff and they’ve got a little exhibition there and my grandson introduced me as being, being there just after the war and they were very interested in this and they were talking about this road, Swimming Pool Road and of course the airfield was built on the Croome Estate, the Earl of Coventry’s estate and the entrance to our mess area was one of the big arches from the estate and the road leading from the arch up to where our mess was was known as Swimming Pool Road and they couldn’t understand this. Anyway, I was able to tell them we had a fire reservoir outside the mess which we took advantage of and used it as a swimming pool and we knew it as well that’s how it got its name but I was able to tell them the origin of the name which is quite interesting. So we’ve diverted a bit.
CB: We have. But after Defford, so May ‘52 where did you go from that?
JCAH: Yes. I went, for my sins I was posted to Germany as a station adjutant at RAF Celle. This was in August ‘52 and it was a big station. We had three flying squadrons with Venoms. They had Vampires and then Venoms and three RAF regiment squadrons and various other [unclear] so it was a big station and a lot of activity of course. Not being au fait with administration it was very daunting to say the least and not only that, one of the subsidiary jobs was married, married quarters, I was responsible for married quarters and the problem of allocating quarters to people who were desperate, you know, to come back from England and get quarters and that caused all sorts of problems but fortunately I hadn’t been there long when they posted a WAAF officer who took over that. That part. But what else? Oh yes I was responsible for the station police and there were some police dogs there and that was all part of my responsibility. So really it was two and a half years but I made some very good friends there at the time. Particularly amongst the RAF regiment squadrons and two particular families I stayed with them until they died. All four of them died now. But as I say, we had, it’s surprising when you’re away from home, posted away from home you make your entertainment in the mess and we had a lot of fun with fancy dress balls and all that sort of thing and there were compensations.
CB: Now this was a former Luftwaffe station.
JCAH: Yes.
CB: So the facilities were pre-war Luftwaffe.
JCAH: Yes. The accommodation -
CB: What was that like?
JCAH: Was very good. Yes. The mess. The mess accommodation was excellent and we had, you know, properly built married quarters. Yeah. That side of it was, was excellent you know. And of course I, I’ve got a, I haven’t mentioned my, the birth of my granddaughter, sorry, my daughter Anthea. Yes we were at -
CB: When was that?
JCAH: Yes, we were at Defford when she arrived. She was originally supposed to be born at a nursing home at Upton on Severn but she was an awful mess. She was upside down and extended and they decided they couldn’t cope with her at the nursing home and I had to take her into Birmingham. This was mid-winter and we’d had a lot of snow and it had thawed and then frozen and I had as my first car was an old standard 10, pre-war standard 10 where the suspension was almost nil. My poor wife driving over this corrugated ice all the way to Birmingham was quite extraordinary. Anyway, she arrived safely on the 5th of June, sorry the 5th of January 1951 and of course I had to wait, when I went out to Germany I had to wait probably three or four months before married accommodation was available but anyway she was, I suppose she was about two. Yeah, ‘53 and we, in those days in Germany you were, you were provided with a housekeeper so, and Renata, our housekeeper she also acted as a nurse to Anthea and they got on, she loved my daughter and it meant that we could go away and leave her with her and go on trips down the Rhine and this sort of thing. So -
CB: So when did you leave Celle?
JCAH: Celle? Yes. It was, my records run out. It was in about March ‘55. Yes I had just about two and a half years out in Germany and I was then posted to Transport Command and –
CB: Where was that?
JCAH: I did a conversion training on Hastings at Dishforth and then I joined 24 squadron at Abingdon on Hastings. I suppose at the end of ‘55. Yeah. The conversion training was only about forty or fifty hours and that was the beginning of another interesting period in my flying career because as I say I was on 24 and we used to say in brackets C Commonwealth squadron because it, they posted quite a few Commonwealth people on 24 squadron and our squadron leader, he was a squadron commander was an Australian and there were various other people from the Commonwealth but most of my experience on Hastings was flying out to Australia to send, fly supplies and personnel to the Woomera guided weapons range and also to the, oh dear, [unclear] they, they were just preparing for the atom bomb going up there.
CB: Christmas Island.
JCAH: Well no. That was the H bomb. This was the first atom bomb. Actually I think they had blown up one. Well this was a big preparation and of course we spent a lot of time, flights, we used to bring supplies and personnel to, we used to fly out of Edinburgh Field, the RAF base near Adelaide and it so happened I did have some relations living in Adelaide so it was quite convenient to be able to look them up but I, we were actually there. Maralinga, that’s right, was the, where the bomb went off and I was actually there when they exploded the atom bomb. That was quite an experience and everybody, every individual had to be accounted for before they set off the bomb and we were told obviously to face away and we were told when we could turn back and see and well it was pretty hefty sound when the bomb went off but the interesting thing was all the, they sent up rockets which left tracers going in different directions to indicate the direction of what was happening to the air following the bomb and the next day, I think it was the next day or might have been the day I was, I had to fly some samples from Maralinga up to Edinburgh. What am I saying? To Darwin. A civil flight to take them back to the UK and I was told how low I could fly. I could fly over the area but it was just like the face of the moon. All arid and, but to see these white clad figures walking across there was quite remarkable and of course the radio just went berserk to some extent and I had a strange feeling of saliva drying up in my mouth. It was quite definite and whether it was the effect of the radio activity, I suppose it must have been. Anyway, that was that and then of course then the H bomb came along and we were supplying, flying supplies out to that out to Christmas Island. Yes. That, let me think. Yes I’ve got to try and recap.
CB: We’ll have a break.
JCAH: Yeah.
[machine paused]
JCAH: Early ‘57 when we were flying out to Christmas Island.
CB: Right.
JCAH: To prepare for the –
CB: You were still on Hastings then.
JCAH: Yeah.
CB: Yes.
JCAH: But we used to, while we were on Christmas Island we used to take flights up to Honolulu to fly supplies for the station there. It was mostly boxes of whisky [laughs] but all sorts of things we used to go up to Honolulu to keep the Christmas Island supplied which was quite a nice diversion. So, yes, by then, we started off, 24 squadron started off at Colerne and then they moved, sorry at Abingdon and then we moved to Colerne near Bath and eventually we finished up at Lyneham and by, and then of course the Britannia came along so I joined 99 squadron at Lyneham in August 1959 and started training on the Britannia. So that was 1959. Lots of interesting flights. I know we took the Cranwell cadets out to, I’ll have to see if I can find it, the equivalent, the American air force equivalent of Victors. I wish I could find it now. Anyway, that was quite interesting and we were well looked after by the American air force in, it’s on the east side of the mountains in America. And my mind is beginning to go blank.
CB: Ok.
JCAH: So well that’s all sorts of interesting flights on the Britannia.
CB: So how long were you flying the Britannia?
JCAH: Yes. Let’s have a look. [pause]. 1960 [pause] ‘61. Yes, I finished flying the Britannia in February 1962 and they wanted to make way for the young second pilots coming on to become captains so they decided the older ones would stand down and I then went to Benson on the, at the, in the operations room at Benson which would be ‘62. I’m running out of – and I was there ‘62 to ’64 and I was told I was going to Aden on a year’s unaccompanied tour and, well, I was expecting to retire within the next year or eighteen months and I said, ‘No but I’m retiring shortly.’ And I obviously wanted to do a bit of preparation before leaving the service but no they wouldn’t be moved so I had to spend a year on my own in Aden and that was at the time just before we pulled out and it was getting pretty uncomfortable out there. The bombs being dropped all over the place. In fact we had one occasion where we were in, I was at headquarters Middle East at Steamer Point and on one occasion where a bomb went off in the mess and the chap who was laying it made a mess of it and blew himself up and fortunately nobody else. It was intended to go off later on in the day. And another occasion we were entertaining, it was dining in night and this, I was sitting with some nurses, RAF nurses and this grenade landed on this, this girl’s soup plate and it didn’t go off. Oh dear. And so, but that’s the sort of life we lived out there. It was pretty uncomfortable that year. I did manage to get home, I think for a week, at one period. So that was ‘65 and then my final tour in the RAF I was at Odiham in the ops room there which was then headquarters of 38 Group which was a part of Transport Command. And I always remember watching England win the World Cup on television there while I was there and then I finally retired in 1967.
CB: From Odiham.
JCAH: From Odiham. Yes.
CB: Yeah.
JCAH: And, yes, I was just wondering, I mean, I was looking around for some civil appointment and I got to hear about the CAA wanting ex RAF people as operations officers and I managed to pass an interview for that. So, well, that was ‘67 and I started off with the accident and investigation branch, in the Adelphi I remember, in London and then I was, I used to go to court cases where there were people being summoned for low flying and all this sort of thing and I used to be the operational advisor to the legal people but that was only for a short time and then I went in to the licensing department. Of course it was, let me think, yes it was air ministry I think still when I was there. Then it became the Department of Trade and Industry, no, no, became Board of Trade and then finally Department of Trade and Industry. This was the time when Heath was trying to cut down on civil service and he decided that he wanted to offload the air ministry side to another separate authority and that’s when the CAA was formed. So, yes, I was, yes it was quite interesting [flight?] licencing and I eventually chaired ICAO. You know, the International Civil Aviation Organisation was in Montreal and I was put on to a group in, at Montreal to update the licensing aspects of what they called Annexe One of the international convention and this was the, what did they call it? Anyway the licencing aircrew, licensing requirements for the various licenses. There was the commercial pilot’s licence, the air and transport licence and eventually I did chair this committee and we finally produced amendments which I never saw implemented but I gather later that they were, I heard that they were implemented. What was the other thing?
CB: So when did you retire from the, from that?
JCAH: 1984.
CB: 1984.
JCAH: ’84.
CB: Yeah.
JCAH: Yes. Yes, it was. I used to get quite a few chaps from the service that I knew who were coming along and I had one chap in particular he, there was the Air Registration Board Examination to qualify to fly a particular aircraft and they had this qualifying exam and he was trying to give me past papers but they just didn’t publish them and he was one of these chaps, you know, he was trying to be clever to try the easy way out. Anyway, that was a minor incident. So I retired on my, virtually on my birthday April ‘84 and I’d been retired about four weeks and my wife died.
CB: Ah.
JCAH: Yes and obviously we’d made all sorts of plans.
CB: Oh dear.
JCAH: And of course I haven’t mentioned how I came to Wokingham. How, to live in Wokingham. It was when I’d finished my tour in Germany we decided we would put our, try and to put some roots down somewhere because my daughter was coming up for schooling and I was going in to Transport Command and be away a lot. Anyway, we went up to the Ideal Home Exhibition and saw these houses and liked the look of them and were told they were being built in Wokingham. I’d never heard of Wokingham. Anyway, we came down and had a look where they were building and the town and we liked it and so that was in 1955. December ‘55 we actually moved in. Where are we? Yes, that’s right, come back, 1955 we actually moved in and I’ve been here ever since in Wokingham but, so having, my wife having died we were living in rented accommodation at the time because we were intending to move to -
BH: I thought you’d look at me. No. I can’t remember.
JCAH: It’s silly. I know the place so well. The name is not, just not coming. I’ll think of it.
CB: Right. Around here was it?
JCAH: Sorry?
CB: Was it around here?
JCAH: No. Up in the Midlands.
CB: Ok.
JCAH: Near Leicester.
CB: Ah.
JCAH: I know the place.
CB: But not in Rutland.
JCAH: Yes. In Rutland and the capital of Rutland was.
CB: Oakham.
JCAH: Oakham. Thank you very much and we’d actually put a deposit down for a house in Oakham. I wasn’t all that keen on it but my wife had become disenchanted with Wokingham and we’d had friends at Cottesmore who we used to visit regularly and of course Rutland Water had been developed then. It was all very nice in that area but in, of course my wife then died while we were still negotiating. The people we were buying from hadn’t got a house and they were trying to find a house. It suited me because I hadn’t actually retired when we, but anyway my wife having died I wasn’t going to move up there on my own and I sold the house and during that period when the prices were really escalating and it did me a good turn financially by this period while we were waiting. Anyway, I was, so I was then looking around for somewhere to live and I came down here and I didn’t know this existed and I thought well this is a nice place. It would be nice here. And I walked down the bottom of the road here and a retired clergyman who used to help us at All Saints Church, he saw me and I told him, you know, I was looking for a house and how nice it was. He invited me in. I walked back up to Wokingham and I met a lady who was my next door but one neighbour in my first house in [Frogall?] Road and she asked me how I was getting on. I said I was getting on alright but I was just looking for a house and I’d just been down to Milton Gardens and how nice it was. She said, Well I’ve just had lunch with a lady and she told me, and who lived in Milton Gardens and told me she was putting her house on the market the following Monday so I immediately got in touch with her and we settled it without agents or anything and that’s how I came to number eleven over there. So that was, where are we in dates?
BH: It was about ‘90 wasn’t it?
JCAH: Yes.
CB: Well, you retired in ‘84.
BH: I was still working –
JCAH: Well -
BH: I was still working when you -
JCAH: Yes, it was the end of ‘84 that I actually moved in.
CB: Yeah.
JCAH: So I knew Barbara before through the church and she used to play tennis with my wife so we knew each other but I know we were neighbours for seven years and I used to be in the kitchen over there getting ready to go out and play golf and I used to see Barbara going, and poor girl going out to work and here I am going off to play golf. Anyway, it was, it took seven years before we, well we did one or two things together didn’t we? And went to concerts together and one thing and, well I used to have Christmas parties, I was chairman of the Residents Association and I used to have a Christmas party and Barbara always used to come over and help me clear up afterwards. It gave me a good impression anyway. So in the end -
CB: Got all the ticks.
BH: You waited until I retired -
JCAH: That’s right.
BH: Before he proposed.
JCAH: And I said, ‘This is stupid, why don’t we get together?’ And I came over here.
CB: Very good. Smashing.
JCAH: So there we are.
CB: That’s been great.
JCAH: The end of a fairy tale.
CB: Well the whole thing -
JCAH: The fairy tale ending.
CB: Worked very well didn’t it?
JCAH: Yeah.
CB: Thank you very much for that. There’s just one thing and that is fast backwards to your promotions. So you started as an SAC because you were well educated.
JCAH: Yes and I was commissioned.
CB: And then how did it go from there?
JCAH: I was commission at the end of my training when I got my wings.
CB: Yes.
JCAH: I was at Monkton. I, I, yes. I was because I remember going and buying my uniform.
CB: Yeah.
JCAH: In Monkton. In the town. And then of course while I was at Defford the first station commander there I didn’t get along at all. I had a dispute about the married quarters and somebody else wanting the same one. Anyway, I wasn’t very popular there and he didn’t recommend me for a PC. And then the next chap came along and I got on very well with him and he recommended me for my permanent commission and I’d taken promotion exam and I’d taken the Staff College Qualifying Exam and did all I could and, well this would be 1951 and they decided that they’d put an age limit of thirty on appointments to permanent commission and I’d just gone over, over the thirty so that was the end of that but I was quite keen to stay on in the air force and I settled for this limited promotion one. Commission.
CB: So you were already a flight lieutenant.
JCAH: Yes. Oh yes. Yes. I finished up the war as a flight lieutenant.
CB: Yes.
JCAH: And that was confirmed. I was an acting flight lieutenant at the time.
CB: Yeah because you were acting VR.
JCAH: Yes and I was eventually confirmed and I stayed as a, as a old flight lieutenant but as I say I enjoyed my RAF career and a lot of interest.
CB: Well Jack Haley thank you very much indeed.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Jack Hayley
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-02-24
Contributor
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Julie Williams
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
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:27:23 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AHayleyCA160224
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Description
An account of the resource
Jack Hayley was born in Caterham and worked for an insurance company before he joined the Royal Air Force and trained to be a pilot. He trained to fly in Canada and after going through an Operational Training Unit in England, he was posted to 625 Squadron at RAF Kelstern. And after completing twelve operations he joined 170 Squadron where he completed a further nineteen operations. While waiting for operations he would play bridge with other members of his crew. After his tour he was posted to 83 Squadron and served with Transport Command in Germany, Australia and Aden. He was present during the testing for the Atom bomb and also flew supplies to Christmas Island in advance of the hydrogen bomb test.
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 Air Force. Transport Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
Germany
Great Britain
Yemen (Republic)--Aden
Christmas Island
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Düsseldorf
Yemen (Republic)
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1938
1940
1941
1944
1945
170 Squadron
625 Squadron
83 OTU
83 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
crewing up
Distinguished Flying Cross
Dominie
Flying Training School
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Hurricane
Initial Training Wing
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lincoln
love and romance
Magister
Meteor
military living conditions
Mosquito
Nissen hut
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
Proctor
RAF Clyffe Pypard
RAF Defford
RAF Dunholme Lodge
RAF Hemswell
RAF Kelstern
RAF Little Rissington
RAF Madley
RAF Peplow
RAF Sandtoft
RAF Windrush
RCAF Estevan
Spitfire
Stearman
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
York