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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/241/3386/ACrawleyF151222.1.mp3
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Title
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Crawley, Fred
Fred Crawley
F Crawley
Fred Crawley DFC
Description
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One oral history interview with Squadron Leader Fred Crawley DFC (146012 Royal Air Force).
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-12-22
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Crawley, F
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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PL: Hello. I’m Pam Locker and I’m here today in Enfield interviewing Squadron Leader Fred Crawley DFC and the date is the 22nd of December 2015. So, Fred, can I just start by saying thank you very very much indeed on behalf of the International Bomber Command Memorial Trust for agreeing to talk to us and I know you’ve lots of things that you want to say so please, please do start. What I’d like to hear first of all is how you got in to the RAF in the first place.
FC: Well, I thought about the beginning of this and I thought to myself well what I could do, I could tell you, Pam as the interviewer just three lines of information and that would be my career. The first thing I would tell you I spent six and a half years in the RAF from 1939 May to the last day of 1945. I did over a thousand hours flying in doing what I did and I did seventy four operations against Europe. Twenty nine of those came on four engine Halifaxes and the forty five came on the Mosquito Pathfinder squadron. That was all continuous but the amazing part of the story really is the amazing change that happened in my career, not of my doing but what the authorities decided to do with me. So I will start by enrolment. I enrolled in what was known as the Volunteer Reserve, the VR, in May 1939 by leaving the office where I was being trained as an accountant and went to London in Embankment and there I was interviewed. First, for fitness to see if I was fit to be considered at all and despite having had appendicitis the year before and having happened on the Saturday morning when the local hospital had no doctor. They just had a student and he made a complete and utter mess of it and the RAF doctors who examined me on the day I enrolled said, ‘You’ll never fly with that wound.’ So I said, ‘Well, don’t be silly because I’ve been playing football and cricket ever since,’ So I said but if you say it, well they gave me such a pummelling I thought they would break it open but they didn’t and in the end they said, ‘Ok. You’re fit to have an interview,’ and my interview took place the same afternoon with an elderly, well ranked, he was an air commodore and all he said to me, ‘I suppose you want to be a pilot.’ I said, ‘Oh no. No. No, I don’t want to be a pilot. I want to be a navigator.’ ‘Why then. I’ve heard about this.’ Heard about navigation. I thought the first step which told me something really important and I said, ‘Well I, I’m interested in all things mathematical,’ I said, ‘I went to a good grammar school. I’ve been in employment for a year. I’m eighteen years of age and I would like to go in and train as a navigator’. Accepted. Then things started to move quite quickly. We had a few lectures in London and then I was posted to what was called ITW the Initial Training Wing and that turned out to be at Bexhill and it didn’t take long to see why. I thought I was fit despite my appendicitis operation but Bexhill pebbles, if you pound up and down Bexhill pebbles you get fit and we were without anything really except training, drilling, guarding at night with broomsticks and that finished with one of the most laughable things I’ve ever heard. It didn’t take long. It was just over two months and we went to the Delaware Pavilion which was quite a famous pavilion in Bexhill and there the chap in charge was once again an elderly, high ranking, I think he was an air commodore too, and at the end of his speech he said to me, ‘You who are about to die, I salute you.’ And I thought we’re back in Roman times. And so there was just dead silence and then muffled laughter and so that was the introduction to the RAF and almost immediately we were posted. We were all going to be navigators so the whole building was filled with would be navigators. That told you something. We were short of navigators and they were trying to redress the balance and we were posted to Scotland to Scone airfield which is just north of Perth. It was a grass airfield and I started in fact about it was there wasn’t one RAF personnel on the station. Not one. The navigation training was given by retired sea captains, the aircraft, which happened to be DH Rapides, de Havilland Rapides, they were flown by retired civil airline pilots over seventy and we did all our training but it was a wonderful training because they were not satisfied, if you didn’t understand they would go over it and over it and over it again to make sure you did and when you were in the air the pilots would respond. For example, would say, ‘Are you lost?’ ‘Yes, I’m lost.’ ‘Well down there is Lord Inverary’s place. I was playing golf there yesterday and you notice a strange building? That’s their home.’ And that was the attitude. I loved it. It was so friendly but those old people, those old sea captains, those old pilots, they were the salt of the earth and so we had a very marvellous training but nothing was skipped and we had a longer training than was normal. But all things come to an end and we left Perth to go to a place in North Wales for bombing and gunnery training. I couldn’t pronounce the name because it was P W L L H E L I which is pronounced Pwhelli. Well, we found out when we got there that that was where we got out and we were met and we were taken for bombing and that was done by old Fairy Battles which had become worn out and open cockpit Demons. Biplanes. So you could see it was using the rubbish really that we had only to use and so that went on and then we left there and, where did we go then? Oh then we went to Penrhos which was for bombing and gunnery and we did have a wooden platform built out on Aberystwyth Bay and you were supposed to try and hit it. Well there was one snag because they were very small bombs that you used because we couldn’t afford to waste any real bombs and I for one couldn’t find anyone who had hit it but so it was. We left there then to come away -
PL: Can I just ask you a little bit more about that?
FC: Yeah.
PL: So you would go up in just that little open -
FC: Cockpit.
PL: And then what? And there would be a bomb dropped from? How did that happen?
FC: Well the bombing was done from the Fairy Battles which were outmoded. They went to France I was going to talk to you about that. They went to France when war broke out and the French had of course, the French, made the fundamental mistake of relying on the Maginot Line but left the end open for the Germans to walk around the end and our 12 squadron, I think it was, were sent and they were literally wiped out. They destroyed a few bridges here and there but that was all. They did no good at all in stopping the advance of the Germans. So there we were and we were at the end of my training and I was posted then to my first operational squadron which I did on 12 squadron and that was on the Oxford Road at Benson. Well it was a crew of three. The pilot was in an open cockpit. He sat up in front. You couldn’t reach him from the inside and at the back was me as navigator facing forward and behind me, back to, was an air gunner/wireless operator with a single Lewis gun with a pan on top and that was our defence. The only other thing that was terrible about it was that if you got down inside to bomb then you had to pull the slide back and right in front of you there was the radiator for the Merlin engine which just about singed your hair off but that was life but of course in a way it was exciting because I was going to France. I was being trained for France and in being posted to Benson they had this off shoot of that to train people to replace the losses in France and that’s how it worked. In the meantime we were utilised. We used to attack our own forces, the military and bomb them or give them experience of low flying aircraft attacking them head on. Well, we didn’t have any bombs and this is perfectly true, we were given bags of flour and they were tied at the neck and we used to drop them over the side and hopefully hit a tank and one day I did. I was the only one who did but I did and it went straight down the turret which was open and the chap standing in it and it covered him with white flour. I never had the skill to do it again but anyway it was good fun. That was then for Benson in its prime but of course all things come to an end and the powers to be soon realised it was a waste of time sending our dilapidated aircraft to France to be shot down like flies by the Germans fighters who were so much better and the French had nothing at all. They pulled 12 squadron back and so I therefore never got further training in 12 squadron. I was then posted to my next move and so - I’m trying to see now what I put down. They decided that in going from Benson I would be well used in training others. I must have been giving a good impression that I had done fairly well because I never, I couldn’t get away from this training others as an instructor and so I was sent to Prestwick and they had a racket going there in my view. I’ve got to be careful what I say. I think I’ll withdraw that Pam because that might have repur but it was run by a private firm and they had one four engine old Fokker, a German plane, fixed undercarriage. It made the noise of twenty five devils when it took off and we crammed forty or fifty pupils in that with a small table to write on and we tried to teach them navigation and it didn’t work. So they then got a few Ansons and that was better. The old lady of the air force who I loved actually. I flew them myself as a navigator and so I was there at Prestwick for a time and then it was obviously costing a lot of money paying this private firm and I was moved down to, lower down the coast of Scotland to, where are we, [pause] oh yes I went then to Penrhos which was a navigation school and there I had a happier time. They were equipped with Ansons mainly and then I was posted yet again to another training place in Scotland and I kept, I was there until, flying Fairy Battles again, which weren’t used in France anymore and the replacements that came back from there. So the accent was always on training. Training, training, training and so in the end I began to get a bit annoyed and I said to the CO of, of the training station look I didn’t come in to the air force to train others. I want to do something for myself. So, at long last I was posted to [pause] forgive me, I went from Prestwick to [?] I was posted to an operational squadron of Lancasters by myself. Now in the air force it’s very dangerous to be on your own. If you’ve got six other blokes you regularly fly with you form a compact seven and you trust each other but to go by yourself, it’s a nasty position to be in but however I went to 106 squadron at Coningsby and the man in charge happened to be Guy Gibson of fame and he said, ‘Well we’ve got a navigator who’s permanently sick, he’s really ill. So,’ he said, ‘I think the chances are he won’t come back and the crew that you will go with are experienced and they will be pleased to have you.’ And I thought wow and would you believe I hadn’t been there for two or three days and I got my first op and that was to Poland so I was chucked in at the deep end and we went to Danzig Bay and we laid five very large mines in the harbour. Very cleverly done too. One mine perhaps would let two ships over before it got, this one would let four ships go over, this one would only allow one to go up so it shut the harbour right down for a very long time till they got them all up. So I thought right [?] and would you believe luck run out again because the first part of the war I had no good luck in it at all. The chap came back from sick. He wasn’t very well but he passed fit for operations so I was out of a job and I said to Gibson, ‘Look. What are we going to do?’ ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I’ll fit you into a good crew.’ So I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to be the odd bod fitting in an odd place. I want to be posted and pick up a crew of my own and fly with them.’ And so, so he said, ‘Right. I’ll get you posted. Well I was sent back to Prestwick but much to my utter amazement it wasn’t to teach others. I was pulled in to the CO’s office and he said, ‘We’ve got a special job for you.’ ‘Oh what am I going to do?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘We are going to ask you to lead formations of the American 8th Air Force from Prestwick down to their bases in East Anglia.’ I said, ‘Why do you do that?’ ‘Because they are getting lost going from Prestwick to East Anglia.’ And I can understand that. Where they were training if they came across a town there can only be one town because there’s no other town near it but when they get over here of course one town merges into the next one and the poor souls they just, they lost some aircraft too. Crashes. And in the end I had a wonderful time with the American 8th Air Force. They’d do anything for me. They supplied my mother, who lived in London, with butter, eggs and that’s what, that’s what they gave me as, ‘Thank you very much.’ So happy times. Here we go. And so having got away from 106 I was then with the 8th Air Force until, again they did get the idea how they could get from Prestwick to East Anglia without having someone to lead. I was given a special aircraft, a B25 Mitchell, a twin engine and a pilot whose name, would you believe it, was Lieutenant John Haig. Now, I liked whisky and here was a chap with a whisky name and we were great friends by the time we parted but parted again. I had to say, ‘Look, this has got to stop. I must, I must get on to a proper squadron and so I got posted to, much to my amazement from 5 group where Gibson was to Yorkshire, 4 group, on Halifaxes and I went to Marston Moor where they had an OTU, an Operational Training Unit and you were there to pick up a crew and well when I found the crew they were short of a navigator and I thought how odd. That’s the second time this has happened to me. What’s the matter with the chap? Well, he’s not the right type. When he gets angry he loses his temper, he breaks all his pencils and says, ‘’m not doing any more navigation.’ Well they were a young crew. A very young crew. I was the oldest at twenty one, I think. Yeah, twenty one, and so anyway we introduced ourselves and we got to the stage where we were doing the last night circuits and bumps, you know, as you do, with an instructor pilot on board. Well, in the Halifax a navigator’s position on take-off is on the rest bed in the middle of the aircraft. It’s simply because his navigation equipment is up front in the nose and so we did two or three. It was in February ’43. A rotten night. Very dark. Windy. They kept changing the runway to suit take-off better and he said to the pilot, I heard him say it, ‘Well you’re not too bad. Do one more then call it a day.’ He got out and we took off. Well, by this time I’d got fed up lying on the rest bed and I decided to do something about it so I said to the mid upper gunner, ‘Look you’ve had your turn. Can we change places? You come and have a rest on the rest bed and I’ll go in your turret and I can at least see what’s going on.’ No problem. ‘Yes, fine.’ He was fed up being up there himself so we took off and then all bad things happened. We were only just off the ground at about five hundred feet possibly when fire broke out in the starboard outer. So you remember the pictures of Concorde with all the gaps and there it was and we, everything was done that could be done. The fire extinguisher was pressed, the fire didn’t go out and it was trailing back and so all I heard at all was somebody said, ‘My God. We’re low,’ and with that there was a big bang and I went out like a light. Now that aircraft happened, by sheer luck, to be landed on a downhill field so it hit, it didn’t dig in, it bounced. The tail section broke off with the tail gunner in it two fields that way. I was thrown out. I didn’t know how, what had happened but I found out after the middle section broke off from the front section and I was catapulted but I had no shoes, no socks, no trousers on, and I was half in and half out of a bush. The rest of it was down another field and burning like fury and I saw one bloke come to the edge but he fell back in and he’d obviously had it. Well, of course this was on Marston Moor. There were no roads on Marston Moor so they could see the fire but they couldn’t get to it but the MO, the Medical Officer, he had a motorbike so he eventually managed it although he came off the motorbike several times. He got to me because when I came around, the reason I came around my feet were in a small pool of burning petrol and it was the pain of that that brought me around but the experience that I had then was bang, but then you’re going down a long, long black shaft and I was saying to myself if I reach the bottom I shall die. If I reach the bottom I shall die but then a voice out of the darkness, ‘Is there anybody there?’ And it was the farmer whose farmhouse we just missed on the way down and I yelled and said, ‘Yes I’m here.’ And he was, he had his small son of about six or seven with him and he picked me up, carried me on his shoulders and took me to his farmhouse. Laid me on the floor. And the MO got to me there and he filled me up with morphine and then of course I went out for a light, well, as a light and I woke up next morning in York Military Hospital lying on a stretcher in the corridor. Then I found I couldn’t move anything this side at all. Everything didn’t work. Legs, arms, shoulders anything, and they were very painful. I then saw the senior medic in York Military and he said, ‘How are you?’ So I said, ‘Terrible.’ I said, ‘What’s happened?’ So he said, ‘Well I’m puzzled by you,’ he said, ‘You haven’t broken a bone in your body. I’ve been all over you,’ he said. So I said, ‘Well what’s happened?’ So he said, ‘Well, what did you do immediately before the crash?’ I said, ‘I was looking at the fire.’ Of course I was. So I turned the turret around to look at it and so we were going that way you see and I was looking this way so I took everything on this side and he said, ‘What has happened is the force of the crash,’ which must have been a hundred and sixty knots or something like that, a hundred and fifty possibly, he said, ‘All your nervous systems have been so pulverised but,’ he said, ‘If you think you’re in pain now it’s nothing to what you will experience when it starts to recover.’ And it was true. It was agony. So I stayed in York Military. I had facial burns, burns to my legs and I was transferred to Rauceby near Ely Burns Hospital and there of course once again luck on my side. They had just got a new technique to deal with burns which applies to this day and they treated me and the only way Joyce could tell subsequently that when I got hot you could see that there was this side. You could see the outline of the fire and the legs too. And so there I was. So I was in hospital for a month and when I came out they said, ‘Go and have some leave.’ I was arrested in London because they thought I was drunk. I was taken to the SP’s hut and I said, ‘Well I’ve just come out of the burns hospital. I can’t put my coat on because I can’t do it.’ He took me into a pub and bought me a half a pint of beer and got me on the train home. So eventually I go back. I go back to Marston Moor.
PL: Did anybody else survive that?
FC: Well there were seven crew members. The tail gunner and I were the two survivors. The other five died. Two on impact and three from their injuries subsequently and it’s on the internet. My daughter-in-law found the account of this and all the pictures on the internet. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve still got it somewhere. Yeah. So back I go to Marston Moor. So I’ve been in the air force quite some time. I haven’t done anything worth talking about so when I got back to Marston Moor it was difficult to believe but they said, ‘Well, we are a navigator short in a crew.’ Ah. So I said, why, why, ‘Why, are they short?’ ‘Well he’s got a bad temper.’ it was exactly -
PL: Same chap?
FC: And I was convinced it was going to happen to me again and so when I saw the crew I’d got from a young innocent crew I’d got, I mean I was the oldest at twenty one and ok I was a bit older now. This was a Canadian pilot and and these people were a different calibre altogether. And to cut a long story short no trouble. We did our training at the OTU and we were posted to 158 on the East Yorkshire coast and that was my introduction to the operational theatre but I’ve wrote down here I’d been in the air force nearly four years and I’d done one op. Poor return. But then of course as so often happens in life things started to get better. We had, we did a full tour on 158 near Bridlington. I got the DFC and the pilot got the DFC for that and I was then posted to an OTU to train others and I thought I’m back to training again and this kept on dogging me. I get pulled in again but mind you to go to Blyton which was near Gainsborough, dreadful place. Wartime airfield. Nissen huts running in condensation. You couldn’t get a dry shirt and so I got very friendly with the adjutant who happened to be a West End actor. Unfortunately, I can’t remember his name now but he was quite somebody to reckon with at the time and he said, ‘Isn’t this a dreadful station?’ I said, ‘Yes it is.’ So he said, ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said, ‘Suppose we put on a show.’ ‘Doing what?’ I said. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I thought of a mannequin parade. We’ve got some lovely, young, beautiful WAAFs. I’ll go to London and I’ll get all the dresses and you write the music,’ ‘cause I used to play a lot in those days. ‘You write the music and there’s a WAAF, there’s a WAAF officer, she’s a good pianist we’ll tune one of the WAAF pianos so we got two pianos and you write the music.’ So I thought, ‘I don’t think I can do that.’ ‘So,’ he said, ‘The first thing you’ve got to do you’ve got to retune the NAFFI piano to match the Grand in the mess. Never try it,’ he said, ‘It drives you nuts.’ However, we did it and there we were and so he went to London and he came back. Well, when he showed me some of these dresses it left nothing to the imagination, Pam and I said, ‘It won’t do,’ I said, ‘You’ll have a riot because,’ I said, ‘The erks at the back, they’ll be on the stage grabbing them.’ So he said, ‘No they won’t. No.’ He, so he said, ‘Let’s give it a try with nobody in attendance.’ Well no we asked the CO to attend. So he said, ‘Well I can’t see anything wrong with it,’ But one girl was a very pretty girl. She took one look at the dress she was going to wear and she said, ‘I’m not wearing that.’ So he said, ‘Look. Nothing will happen. It will be like a graveyard. They will be so mesmerised by you and your,’ well to cut a long story short again it went ahead and it was true there wasn’t a murmur. I concocted something that was [in a Strauss?] nice and easy, bouncy stuff, you know and the WAAF, she was a lovely pianist and we did well there but when the girls came on in these wonderful dresses, I mean they left nothing to the imagination I can assure you, there wasn’t a murmur and they went out to thunderous applause and we then toured the area to the other airfields with it and so the time at this terrible airfield went quite well. But again I wasn’t happy because I had to go around the night skies with these to make sure they were doing alright and sometimes when I saw them do I thought, ‘Oh dear. You won’t last long.’ And so I thought to myself, ‘I must get out of this somehow.’ How am I going to do it? Well I had a particular friend at Bomber Command Headquarters in York and so I phoned him up and said, ‘What have you done with my application for Mosquito Pathfinders?’ ‘Oh I didn’t know you’d sent one in, Fred.’ ‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘It’s been in a long time.’ I said, ‘I thought you were craving for navigators,’ because what they were doing they were taking pilots who’d got through the initial training, hadn’t done much flying, but putting in an experienced navigator with him. Only a crew of two you see and that made it compact but I said, ‘Well see what you can do.’ He came back to me and said, ‘I found your application.’ I hadn’t sent one in so he was lying in his teeth. So I said, ‘I’m so pleased. When can I go?’ So I said, ‘Like tomorrow?’ ‘Well if you want to go that quickly.’ So I did. I went the next day and I went to Warboys just near Huntingdon and there they were all being selected. Sprog pilots with experienced navigators and they would have had to have done a tour on something to be considered. Well, in that group of inexperienced pilots was a chap that worked in the same office as me in peacetime and who I knew very well and so it was obvious. I phoned his wife before I went and I said, ‘When is Mark coming down?’ ‘Tomorrow,’ she said. He’d been training at Lossiemouth in North Scotland and so we met and I saw the chap who was dealing with the matching. I said, ‘Look, I know him very well. Is it alright with you?’ ‘Yes. You take him.’ So my crew was established. Now, he wasn’t a particularly good pilot to start with. He became one and I was well satisfied with him and we did forty five trips as Pathfinders and of course with Pathfinders you’ve got radar. I had two types of radar. Gee in the nose and H2S up here. Do you know what I’m talking about? No. Well a Gee is a two wireless stations transmission of beam and you’ve got an oscilloscope and you measure the strength of each beam and where they meet that’s where you are. So that was the simple thing. The H2S is something quite different. This was a scanning machine which rotated a hundred and twenty degrees like that in the nose and you could illuminate any building ahead of you to a hundred and twenty degrees wide. You couldn’t take a back bearing. If you’d gone past it you couldn’t do it but with H2S, H2S is the symbol for hydrogen sulphide isn’t it? You know, bad eggs. I mean somebody had a sense of humour and so those two, navigation I was always fascinated by. In fact I loved what I was doing and but mind you the Mosquito, a lovely aircraft and I’ve listened people say marvellous aircraft and I think to myself, ‘Yes, it was,’ but it was, it had it drawbacks. For example, it was so cold. The engines could never give you enough warmth. They gave you a pipe which were supposed to stuff up your trouser leg, you know, to preserve your manhood sort of thing but it was only a trickle of warmth and at the blister at the side, thick ice, that thick. But the windscreen always freezed [they covered that?] But again no toilet. Now if you fly for five hours in freezing cold there’s things happen to the human body and the pilot had a tube between his legs, it came up as a nozzle here and the navigator had to try and get it down there but you know nobody worried about that because it was a wonderful aircraft to fly and so we developed our own skills there because when he came it was bumps-a-daisy for landing. He couldn’t get it right and so I said, ‘Well I think it’s too much to ask. You’re having to do too many things. I’ll do some of them. For example I’ll put the wheels down. I’ll put the flaps down. I’ll call out the airspeed.’ And, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Would you?’ I said, ‘Oh yeah.’ And we even gravitated to when we were on our way back having bombed and marked oh and by the way the radar screen, you always took a picture of it and if it wasn’t a picture of the target you didn’t get it, you didn’t get credited. It was tough. The WAAF officers used to develop it and in the morning when you came down from your sleep they had a big blackboard and there was the target and your ribbon, you know, O-Orange that’s your picture and if you had a picture of a herd of cows you weren’t there and you didn’t get it. So you had to work for your points. So there it was and that went on and on. There was never any talk of giving up because in Pathfinders once you got, you know your special brevvy as you did. It shows you in the picture there you never talked about giving up. You just went on. I’m sure, we had one bloke who did flip and he was found at 2 o’clock in the morning walking around the perimeter track and it was too much. But he went to hospital, he came back and finished his tour. Yes, it’s amazing what people did in those days and so I continued with him and I actually went on the last raid of the war which was in 1945 to Kiel where the Germans had set up their puppet government and do you now that was one of the worst trips I’ve ever experienced because there was nothing happening. No searchlights, no flak, nothing. It was eerie but I kept on thinking, ‘What if the engines pack up? The last war raid that’s likely to be. War is going to be cancelled tomorrow and I get shot down. I ditch in the North Sea.’ And it wasn’t until I saw the lovely cluster of searchlights that always appeared on the English east coast to welcome you home I thought, ‘Oh isn’t it lovely.’ Now, you would think that was the end of my career because the war had finished. I had done, as I said to start with, a thousand hours flying. More than a thousand hours flying. I’d done seventy four trips and I had done six and a half years’ service but no when the war finished myself and one other chap were given a weeks leave. It looked perfectly normal, perfectly normal. I said, ‘Oh that’s very nice.’ And of course I knew my co very well. I was friends with him after the war and he said, ‘Go and enjoy it. Go and enjoy it. You’ve earned it.’ You know. I should have twigged that something was in the wind but I didn’t. I had a nice weeks leave. I was reunited ‘cause we weren’t married then. We knew each other. We’ve known each other ever since babies because our mothers were great friends so we will be married sixty seven years and we are now in our sixty eighth year and so I called on her. We had a lovely weeks leave. And it was that that started it ‘cause I said, ‘Oh we must do more of this,’ you know, and we were married within six months or so and [laughs] when I got back from leave I saw the same CO and he said, ‘You’re posted.’ ‘Oh yes? Where to? Somewhere nice?’ ‘Oh yes. Very nice,’ he said. So I said, ‘Where?’ ‘Italy,’ he said. ‘Italy? But the war’s over.’ ‘Well I’m sorry. You’ve been chosen.’ ‘Am I going by myself?’ ‘No. We’re sending a pilot with you so the two of you are going.’ ‘Mosquitos?’ ‘Yes.’ I thought this is all very fishy. So he said, ‘But you’ll have to go by boat.’ To Italy. So off we went the very next day to Morecambe. We got on the Empress of India or a boat of that ilk and it took us a couple of weeks to get to Naples but right out to Atlantic and down the Med and into Naples and there I was met and billeted near the base of Mount Vesuvius. Nice, nice billet provided you remembered to walk on the duck boards because if you walked on the sand it took the skin off your feet because it was so hot. So, anyway, I was met by the duty officer and he said, ‘We’ve got you all lined up,’ he said, ‘Stay the night here and we’ll get the train to the airfield.’ ‘Train?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Don’t you know where you’re going?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘You’re going to Foggia,’ which is right in the middle of Italy towards the south. Oh well. Anyway, on the way in the train I was very lucky. I’ve been lucky too because I sat in the same compartment with two army officers who had been on leave and had been in the area and they were starting to ask questions, ‘First time out old boy?’ you know, he says. Well they could tell by my knees ‘cause my knees were white. I said, ‘Yes. I’ve just come.’ ‘Oh. Have you got a gun?’ So I said, ‘Well yes but it’s in my kit bag.’ I’d never had any reason to fire a gun. So, he said, ‘Well get it out and load it and always wear it,’ he said. So I said, ‘Why? What’s happening?’ He said, ‘Well it’s very very dangerous out here,’ because they had literally got to starvation by the end of the war and they were ripe to take anybody’s food, clothing, transport or anything. And so I had [?] at Naples airfield. I had Foggia in the middle and I had Bari airfield on the east coast. The Adriatic coast. And so he said, ‘I’ve been detailed to give you two days run around the area.’ So I said, ‘Oh well that’s something. Yeah.’ So he said, ‘But do come prepared. You must wear your gun and you must be prepared.’ He said, ‘Never stop for anybody.’ ‘Never stop for anybody?’ ‘No. Like this,’ he said and out in front was a small village and out of a side turning came a poor old chap. He must have been fifty or sixty on a very rickety bike and he deliberately drove in front of us. So I expected him to stop. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘This is it. Don’t take him on. He’s not what he seems to be.’ I said, ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘I’m going to run him over.’ And he, well he tried but that chap was off that bike so nimbly we went over the bike but we didn’t go over him and of course all his cohorts were -
PL: Hiding.
FC: Behind the wall. And the other trick was to get the girls to pull their skirts up on the mountain roads all by themselves you see but the blokes were all behind the wall and it was very dangerous. And that was after the war had finished. And so that went on and by then I realised I had the most wonderful job I’ve ever had in my life. Never mind about air force. My job, I was in charge of three airfields. The three I’ve mentioned. Naples, Foggia and Bari and in each airfield there was a marshalling area for all, any kind of military personnel who was due to go home for leave, demob or whatever and my job was to get the aircraft from this country to these three airfields to take them there and I could, I had a very powerful radio station. I could order seven hundred aircraft at the drop of a hat. The power. It was marvellous, you know. You don’t, you can’t believe you’ve got that power and there they were all coming into the three places. The colonel or the major in charge of the army camps, they got all the details ready and they were loaded on the aircraft and they all came back to this country. You couldn’t do better than that. I could have made a fortune because everybody wanted to get on the planes but of course they had to take their time. I only did it once and that was because a chap came in, came to see me in the administration building where I was and he said, ‘Can you help me get home out of turn?’ I said, ‘No.’ I dare not do it. ‘Everybody is allotted a day. I can’t do it. Why should you be so particular?’ ‘Well,’ he said, he looked embarrassed for a minute, he said, ‘I’ll be frank with you,’ he said, ‘My girlfriend lives in Milan, she’s pregnant and she’s going to have a baby tomorrow. Now, if you could drop me off tomorrow I can be with her when she has the baby.’ Well, I didn’t know what to do but one of the Lancs that came in I knew the pilot very well and I said to him, ‘Do you think you can sneak a landing at Milan, drop my bloke off and take off like the hounds of hell were after you?’ He said, ‘I’ll do it.’ And that chap gave me a travelling American suitcase so you could take all your gear and it never creased and that was the only thing I ever got out of it. And then it all finished when my number came up ‘cause I had a very early number having been in so early. I found that it was my turn to go and I thought well this time I will get a Mosquito to take me home. No. All the RAF effort was controlled from Caserta in Northern Italy and they told me point blank, ‘I’m Sorry. You’ve got to go home on the train.’ Anyway, we had an Italian train allotted to us, no windows because they’d all been blown out and this was December. Bitterly cold. And the only thing that saved my life was I met my old batman and he had a primus and so he made tea every half hour. I had a stinking cold. I think I almost had pneumonia and he kept us going on that. When we got to Milan we changed trains to the Swiss railway. Lovely. Oh luxury and at every station we stopped at, ‘We hope you will come and have your holidays here.’ You know. Well listen to this when we got to the French border it was the smallest tank engine I’ve seen in my life and it had to pull this whole long train to Calais. Well it had to stop every hour to fill more water in the thing but eventually we got to Calais and, as I say, up to Birmingham for demob and that in a nutshell is my story.
PL: What an extraordinary story.
FC: Yeah.
PL: What an extraordinary story.
FC: It is. I mean could put all sorts of fine detail on it but I think it would spoil it because I think, it’s a true story. I have a job reading my notes so I stumbled a bit here and there but what it taught me was and I only got to this conclusion when I had finished putting these notes together for you. It was obvious to me that they had singled me out to be of the utmost use in training others. They weren’t interested in me getting on to an operational squadron. They’d much rather get the through pull of dozens of fellows. Much better return on paper. Yeah. But then you see four years in. One op. Six and a half, seventy four ops. So they all came in the end but they were the killing years. 1943 was dreadful. I mean the losses were so high. I mean, you could sit and have your eggs and bacon before you took off. When you came back sometimes there wouldn’t be one crew on the table. There was one table. The losses yeah. And touches still come flooding back because on Mosquitos they were really some of the elite if you like. I mean they were blokes with long flying experience because pilots had caught up a bit now. The navigators had been at it a long time. We lost some. We lost one or two perhaps a week. Never found out why. But of course Gibson himself had been killed in a Mosquito, but that was a boob. That was his navigator killed him but he changed over the wrong petrol tank. Still not many people know that. But -
PL: Sorry, what did he do? He changed over the tanks?
FC: Sorry?
PL: He changed over the tanks.
FC: Changed, yeah, the navigator had to do that.
PL: Right.
FC: Because the cocks, he sat in his seat here. The cocks were down there.
PL: Right.
FC: Now, it was very easy, so it was an unwritten rule that the navigators and of course when we were flying Mosquitoes we used, there were drop tanks underneath the wings, papier mache. There was two tanks in the wings and two tanks in the centre piece. Two tanks there. Now if you weren’t careful you had a couple of pints in that one, a couple of pints in this one, a couple of pints in that one. If you were caught when you got brought back ‘cause the weather had closed in you had it all over the place. You didn’t want that so we used to drain every tank dry so ok the drop tanks cause you would jettison those. They were made of papier mache you wouldn’t get a second and then move to the wings because that’s where the shells were going through and you would have fire so drain those and leave it so the centre section ‘cause if you were hit in the centre section you were, you were gone anyway and so we worked that out so we always had every drop of petrol, when we were coming in to land and coming out of markers and watching the beacons we had all our fuel in one place so if we were diverted because the weather packed up, we didn’t get too many. I think the met people did a wonderful job during the war. Far better than they do now sometimes and so petrol in one place. In the heavies you learned the hard way. Now we were raw recruits in East Yorkshire but it wasn’t long before you realised that if you stayed straight and level over there somebody would creep underneath you and - so don’t stay still but move to the side a bit. Get somebody else to take your place. And we and I was the main instigator in this sort of thing. I used to think about these things and say, ‘Well don’t do it.’ It’s a bit of a drudgery you know and of course you had to do it if you saw a fighter. You corkscrewed then but, but I think so many of the crew that were pushed in to these four engine Lancs and the Halifaxes they hadn’t had enough training and that didn’t get put right until 1944 when, of course, the German air force was marvellously organised. Their radar was every bit as good as ours but they used it for a totally different purpose. We used radar to find a target, they used the radar to find you. And they did. And they had directly you crossed their coast they were then saying, ‘Well, where’s he going? Where are they going? Are they going that way or that way or that way,’ and they had got everything organised to pass you on and they did. Pass you on box to box and that’s how it went and one thing that I shall never forgive the RAF for in 1943, round about September, October time, I suppose it was obvious something new was happening because you got these terrible explosions in the sky and it was obviously an aircraft blowing up and you thought well why are they getting so many? Well, we found out afterwards but the RAF said it was because the Germans were firing decoy shells which exploded and made it look like an aircraft going down but when you’re near it you can see it’s an aircraft going down. And that was dreadful because it was so many.
PL: So why were they saying that? Was that just about morale?
FC: Well just to get you, yes it was. That’s to stop you sort of getting the wind up. But as I said at the time when you’re looking at it you’re in no doubt what it is. Yeah. Yeah. And they were red hot. I only had one dodgy time on the Mosquitos because they were so fast they had to be in the position to catch you. And so what they did was as standard we went to Berlin more often than not because we had two types of oboe squadron. Mosquito squadrons. I had one type of radar and the other type of Mosquito had a different type of radar which was used for the Ruhr Valley because the Ruhr Valley was always covered in smoke and dust from the manufacturing. You couldn’t find it and so they controlled the Mosquito entirely from take-off. They took off, set course and they would give them changes of direction and they would even get you in a line which went right through the target and tell you when to drop [targets?] whereas we had to find them and in our case the Germans knew what we were at because the best way to find a target is to identify something near it or comparatively near it which you could see on radar and radar picks out buildings or more particularly, water. So if you go over a big lake you can see it because there is no response at all from water and so the great lakes north west of Berlin and about a twelve minute run in to Berlin stood out on the radar and it was a dead reckoning and so once you got there and took the line, altered course, twelve minutes you were there. You couldn’t miss but they put all their fighters around the great lakes and one of them was educated in this country and he would come on our frequency, he got our frequency taped and he would say, ‘Good evening gentlemen. You’re a little late this evening but we can see you all right,’ because we were the end of the contrail of course and they were up above us because they had the super chargers ME109Fs. They were up above. They could see our contrails. We had three markers per target so the three of us were very close together. They made a lot of contrails dead stick and they would come down, they could dive, they could get the speed to catch them but they had to get us first shot otherwise they were gone through us and they would never catch us up again but, but he would talk to you all the way. He would talk to you all the way in and say, you know, ‘Just stay like that, we’ve got that,’ and he –
PL: So they were really really -
FC: Yes.
PL: Messing with your heads and -
FC: Oh yeah. It was a war of psychology really, you know. He knew exactly how to ruffle people. Yeah. Yeah. And he would talk to you like that.
PL: So, so -
FC: But there is about the story of my RAF life.
PL: It’s just an extraordinary story. It really is. Do, do, I get the impression then that you, did you feel safer in the Mosquitos?
FC: Oh it was so much faster. Yeah
PL: Did you sort of feel in control of the situation more?
FC: A German fighter could outrun you but only in the diving mode so they used the height to catch you and of course we were flying, we always flew at twenty six and a half thousand. Don’t ask me why. Someone at the air ministry rather thought that’s a large figure so they won’t dream of, but always twenty six and a half thousand. Sometimes somebody would say alright we’ll make it thirty thousand but very rare and of course we were, time and time again the target was Berlin because we didn’t need any escort. No escort could keep up with us and so we always went the same way across the north German plains and came back the same way taking bearings on Hamburg, Mannheim and all those places as they came up on the radar screen. Yeah. Yeah
PL: I’ve heard a lot about the relationships within the crews and you talked a little bit about that earlier on.
FC: Yeah.
PL: With that dreadful crash but on base did you, I mean obviously you were in pairs in the Mosquito. Did you all socialise together and form relationships or -
FC: Well in my case because I knew Mark Wallace so well we shared a room. Didn’t have to. You were just allotted a room. We had batwomen instead of batmen by then of course [?] but they were the salt of the earth. They would defend you so that you got some sleep and they would make up their own boards and put them, “Quiet. Operational crew sleeping.” And they’d do your uniform and oh they were the salt of the earth. I always had a tremendous affection for them because they were all in the forty to fifty group, years of age, yeah but they wouldn’t take anything for the, you know, extras. Go treat yourself to something. No. They wouldn’t do that. No. They were really wonderful and of course again we were lucky here ‘cause whereas the Yorkshire one was a wartime airfield I can tell you something about that too but you might want to pack up. Upwood was a peacetime camp so it was all beautifully laid out and the mess was all brick built, everything was brick built. It’s still there. It’s just a massive American hospital now. Not working except for the local airfields. They treat any airmen from their local airfield but it’s there to deal with a calamity like, you know, a multiple train crash or something.
PL: So where is that?
FC: It’s just outside of a place called Ramsey which is just near Huntingdon.
PL: Right.
FC: Yeah.
PL: Right.
FC: And the airfield is called Upwood and it’s still there. I’ve been there. I was taken there by the mayor and of course they wouldn’t leave me alone. They’d say, ‘Was it like this when you were here?’ I said, ‘Yeah. Oh you changed that,’ or, you know, and then you get a magnificent meal you know, oh dear that was a lovely time. George came with me and of course the mayor was one of the, well he wasn’t a real relative but he, we were very great friends and he said well I’ll take you there. I’m invited to bring friends and so I did. Yeah.
PL: Lovely.
FC: Yeah.
PL: Tell me about the Yorkshire airfield.
FC: Well, it was, as the name suggests, a wartime airfield. It was built probably in late part of 1941 or thereabouts and it was all nissen huts except for the control tower. That was made of brick. And it’s another odd thing about my time in the RAF I was always, a squadron normally has two flights A and B. Sometimes, if they’re big enough they have C as well but normally it’s A and B and never, never was in A. I was always in B and I placed some importance to that because I thought I want to be in B for luck. And so as it was a poor airfield you can guess I was a bit of a rogue in those days I got back one morning about half past two in the morning. We’d had our debriefing and so on and we went back to the nissen hut and I thought, ‘Oh this is awful.’ Running in condensation. Well I had -
PL: This is the Yorkshire airfield.
FC: Yeah. Yeah.
PL: So, different from the one down in -
FC: Huntingdon.
PL: Bladon, Bladon, Was it Bladon near -
FC: Blyton.
PL: Blyton yes. Where you had the show.
FC: Yes.
PL: Right.
FC: No that was pretty stark.
PL: Right. Yeah. Ok. Fine.
FC: So that was alright. But I wasn’t flying this particular night and I missed the last bus back to the airfield. That’s me, you know. So I thought, ‘What do I do?’ I gave myself up. I went to the local police station. ‘Can I sleep in one of your cells?’ And they said, ‘No. We can’t do that. That’s for locking up prisoners.’ So I said, ‘Well, what am I going to do?’ ‘Oh, that’s no trouble. If you go along the main road to,’ I can’t remember the square number but it was Beaconsfield Terrace, ‘And the second house as you go in, ask for Mrs Wilson.’ I said, ‘What will she do?’ ‘She’ll give you a bed for the night and breakfast in the morning in time to get the bus back.’ So I said, ‘Really?’ So I went there. I trudged down to Beaconsfield Terrace. I saw this lovely Yorkshire grandmother she was and she looked at me and she said, ‘My God you’re thin.’ Well of course I was. I hadn’t long been out of hospital. I’d been flying on ops as well. So, ‘Come in. We’ll have to get some flesh on you,’ she said. And she took to me like and she, I stayed at Mrs Wilson’s so I had an arrangement from then on. I thought well if I can do it this far I can go a bit further. As the adjutant, I always made a friend of the adjutant because he’s the all-powerful admin. So I said to him, ‘Look, can we have an arrangement? If I phone you and say its Fred here you can tell me if I’m wanted back or not and if you say no I’ll stay in Bridlington and I’ll get the afternoon bus.’ So he said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘What if it changes?’ I said, ‘Well I’ll leave you a number to ring just in case something pops.’ It worked like a charm. I was never let down by the adjutant. I never got caught. I used to get the afternoon bus in and she fed me up. I used to have hot milk and whisky at eleven in the morning. No charge. And she used to make the life of the butcher on the corner of the square a misery because, ‘Look at him. Look. He’s hardly got a bit of flesh on him. Give him something.’ And do you know that continued after the war.
PL: Really.
FC: Joyce and I, we were married by now. We used to go up there for holidays.
PL: How lovely. Whereabouts was that in Yorkshire?
FC: Bridlington.
PL: And this was at Bridlington.
FC: Yeah.
PL: You said about Bridlington.
FC: Yes. In the main square. Yeah.
PL: Fantastic.
FC: Yes lovely, lovely women she was. My boys she used to call us. My boys. I had two brothers. One was in the navy on North Atlantic convoys on the, on one of the small, I forget what they called them now, small boats. Terrible time. My eldest brother was too old to serve as a combatant. He was, he was put in, some sort of officer in charge of a prisoner of war camp in Cornwall so he had a lovely war did my brother, Harry. Of course they’re all dead now. Everybody’s dead. But er but we met once only. My brother Bob and he come up with his wife. Yeah. Stayed at Mrs Wilson’s of course. He had the front bedroom on the first floor. Now, Mrs Wilson had one weakness. Her drink was port and brandy. I thought that’s a killer. I couldn’t take it. I’ve never been very good at strong drink. I like a whisky with lemonade. That’s the sort of stuff I like. And so she said, ‘We’ll have a celebration.’ So, ‘righto,’ my brother was there with his wife. The whole of my crew. Now the whole of my crew were all younger than me and she bought them all a port and brandy. Well you can imagine what it did to these kids. I mean at twenty three now, I was, I was the oldest. They were out like lights so they all went to bed early. We heard them all collapse on the bedroom floor. Somebody went up and put them to bed but the thing I always remember with some amusement my brother was just an ordinary sailor, a matlow as they called them. Never try and undress a sailor because we couldn’t get, his wife and I we were so convulsed with laughter we put him to bed in his uniform in the end because we couldn’t get it off. But they were the good times. Yeah. Yeah.
PL: And he survived the war. Your brother. That was in the navy.
FC: He survived the war. Yes. Yes. He was never caught by a submarine or anything and he did it all the war. Backwards and forward to the States. Yeah. Bore a charmed life. Yeah. Harry was -
PL: Talking about the lucky, about being lucky, being lucky, the B squadron was lucky. Did lots of you, were you, were you sort of superstitious in that way? Was there a sort of -
FC: I think everybody -
PL: Did people have charms.
FC: Flying is superstitious really. You, for example you would never dream of dressing to fly except in one way. For example, you always put something on first and then something on second and if you do it wrong you’d strip, start again. I’ve done that. I’ve done that a dozen times. Never change that. No.
PL: How funny.
FC: Yeah and you get an affection for a particular aircraft. That’s the funny thing you see. You know, I had an amazing experience. We had an [laughs] am I boring you?
PL: Not at all.
FC: Oh. Because we had great losses in 1943 and our replacement aircraft used to be flown in by little girls dressed in a beautiful white uniform and they had the time of their lives because they always stayed the night in the mess and then they were picked up. Nobody asked any questions and so and they were right royally entertained but now and again a particular aircraft, I nearly always flew in O-Orange or P-Peter and one of those photographs is O-Orange.
PL: What does O-Orange and P-Peter mean?
FC: Well, each, each aircraft has its squadron letters which in, in Yorkshire was NP but then on the other side of the roundel that was on all our aircraft the NP was on the left of the roundel but the letter of the aircraft was on the right. So you, A flight was from A to H, I think it was, and then B flight was from say L to, no, yeah L to Z and so you identified yourself as you were coming in. You’d say O-Orange
PL: Right. Right, I see.
FC: So, you see, they knew who you were. But we had one occasion which, it really accentuated superstition because the little girl brought the aircraft in. There was three of them. They brought in three Halifaxes from the factory but we were operating that night and we were one aircraft short so we had to bring one of these new arrivals in to the raid and it happened to be the one that was given to us because our own aircraft had been so badly damaged it couldn’t fly and I said, ‘What’s its letter?’ It hadn’t got a letter. It had just come from the factory. It’s got a squadron letter NP but no individual because they didn’t know what it was going to be. Well, I said, ‘Well that’s alright. We’ll call her O-Orange. So we did. We thought of her as O-Orange. That aircraft flew like a gem. It was fast. It was trouble free. It gave us no trouble. We had no trouble finding the target. We had no trouble with enemy fighters. Everything was perfect. I said, ‘We’ll keep this one.’ So we all went to bed. When we came down to the flight offices there’s the chap in charge of maintenance said, ‘Sorry about your aircraft.’ I said, ‘What aircraft?’ ‘Well, the one you flew last night.’ ‘Yes. Wonderful aircraft. We want to keep it.’ ‘It’s finished.’ ‘Finished?’ I said. ‘It will never fly again.’ I said, ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s got a major fault in it.’ For that one raid it didn’t show it. Anyway, it was loaded on a Queen Mary vehicle and taken away in one piece. It never flew again. It was broken up and made into another one.
PL: Good gracious.
FC: I know. And that convinced me -
PL: So that had two flights.
FC: Just that one.
PL: It was delivered and then it went on the raid. How extraordinary.
FC: Extraordinary isn’t it? Yeah. But people did have a, did get a love, it was always a kind of love anyway, you know because for example in the Mosquitos we had one old timer. It was, it was operational but it didn’t have all the modern amendments. For example, the windows at the side were flat whereas in the new version it had big blisters so you could see backwards and that poor thing it kept on going and going and going but I never liked it and we were sitting at the end of runway waiting to take off. It was dark. It was a night take off and S-Sugar it was, with the side windows flat was sitting in front of us. As was the first one to take off in front of us and we saw it go down the runway, we saw him lift off but then the tail lights started to do this and he, obviously something terrible happened to it and it went straight out of control, straight in to the bomb dump of another airfield. Boom. Nobody knew what happened. Poor Mark said, ‘What on earth was that?’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about a thing. Just concentrate on what you’re doing.’ Yeah. So, yeah, poor old S-Sugar had a poor end. Yeah.
PL: Goodness me.
FC: I could tell you a story. One more story about the Mosquitos. Now, our, our losses of course were so little compared to the big ones. After all we had two fellows to lose instead of seven, for one thing and of course the big ones were much more vulnerable. Well, on this particular occasion we had marked very successfully. A lovely picture on the screen showed we were right on the dot and we, the bomb doors shut, pictures taken and dive and turn to come home and we were coming back across the north German plains at about twenty two thousand, something like that ‘cause we were gradually losing height and picking up a bit of extra speed and I started to feel very uncomfortable. I’ve told so many writers about this it’s almost as if I, you know, it happened yesterday. Well, I said to Mark, ‘Is everything alright?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘Let’s have a good check all around. You check yours and I’ll check mine.’ Couldn’t find anything so I thought, well, sat down, got on with my work and this feeling came back. I said to Mark, ‘There’s something wrong here. I know what I’ll do.’ We had a little extra astrodome and if you got your head into it you could see backwards so I said, ‘I’ll have a good look around. Perhaps somebody’s on our tail somewhere.’ Anyway, I got under the astrodome and I had wonderful eyesight in those years. I could see things in the dark that most people couldn’t which I’ve now lost of course, completely and I said, ‘Well I can’t find anything, Mark,’ and I sat down but as I sat down something down there caught my eye. I couldn’t see it when I tried to see it so I thought, ‘I know. I’ll wait for my eyes to get adjusted here and I’ll look again,’ and there about a thousand feet down but flying the same course was a single engined plane. Couldn’t be mine. Couldn’t be one of ours. We had no single engines during that so it was obviously one of these 109Fs and so I said, ‘I’ve got him.’ I said, ‘I can see him now.’ ‘What’s he doing?’ he said, I said, ‘Well he’s not doing anything. He’s just flying parallel to us about a thousand feet down,’ but I then began to notice he was getting a little bit closer all the time. Very, very, very slowly. And I said, ‘Oh I know what he’s going to do. He’s going to get as close as he dare and then he’ll come up, firing as he comes up.’
PL: Underneath. Yeah.
FC: So I said, ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Let’s turn around and go back into Germany.’ ‘What?’ he said. I said, ‘Let’s turn right around and go right around and go back into Germany for three or four minutes. Then come back on the course again.’ Exactly what we did. I sat down. I felt quite comfortable but in a few minutes the feeling was back and so was he. He’d done exactly the same as we had. So I thought this is no, no pupil here this is a really experienced bloke and this time he was definitely closer. So I said, ‘Now, get ready now Mark. Do the same again but dive. Stuff the nose right down,’ and as I said that up he was coming and as we turned he came and he was firing but of course we’d dropped out of his firing range. He gave up after that and I knew he’d given up ‘cause I felt fine. So I think you do get senses of things. Yeah. No more trouble. I said, ‘He’s gone Mark. We can proceed.’ And that’s I think I could bore you to death if I carried on.
PL: No. It’s, absolutely, honestly it has been fascinating hearing you. Really. Are there any other stories you want to share?
FC: Pardon?
PL: Are there any other stories you want to share?
FC: Well, I suppose the story that haunts me all my life, has done and still does, is when I crashed on Marston Moor because I think I was half dead. When I was going down, when we hit there was this colossal bang and blackness and I was out but I was conscious, no, I was aware that I appeared to be going down a long black shaft. Not terribly fast but I was saying to myself, ‘If I reach the bottom I shall die,’ and I’m convinced that had I reached the bottom and been conscious when I did I would have died. So I have no fear of death at all. None at all. I mean we often talk about it, Joyce and I. She’s ninety four. I’m ninety five. I’m ten months older than her and we talk about it. Now, what we have done we have decided we will not go into a home so we’ve persuaded our daughter who has a lovely house in Royston, a big house, to build on it a suite for us and we’ll pay for it. Now, it’s all been done. We have stayed in it. It’s a little bit smaller than we had hoped because when they started to build they had to do something in the building of whatever and so it is a little bit smaller but it’s beautifully done and so when one of us goes the survivor, when all the battels are cleared up will go and live with our daughter and I’ve got the most wonderful family in the world.
PL: How lovely.
FC: My daughter and son are and their spouse’s, well, no I’ll qualify that. No. One of the, my daughter’s husband is an absolute gem. He’s just like a son to me. I say my two boys. Yeah. My son’s wife is not so easy but she’s alright but I often think of that time and I’ll never forget it. It comes back to me. Yeah. And to think that you could survive. Just think, you’re coming down and you hit the ground at about a hundred and sixty miles an hour. That breaks off, the next bit breaks off and the front stays there, huge fire and I’m out here somewhere in a bush. No socks, no shoes, no trousers.
PL: And if you hadn’t have gone up into the top -
FC: Ah that’s the point. If I hadn’t have asked that chap to change places with me I would have been where he was and I would have been flying up from there as I was but he died in my position and he was quite glad to do it because he was bored to tears of course. He’d done it three times already. He didn’t want to do it a fourth time, ‘Yes,’ so we changed over. I actually saw the fire start because, you know, you’ve got your big cupola turret. I happened to be looking down and saw the first globule of flame and I thought, ‘That’s odd.’ Then suddenly there was a long streamer of fire and going back toward the tail end and so I called him up and I said, ‘I think we’ve got a problem with the starboard outer.’ ‘Oh good gracious. Yes,’ turned the petrol off but one thing ‘cause the chap who was CO was Cheshire. Leonard Cheshire. He was my CO at Marston Moor and he said, ‘Well what did you do?’ I said, ‘Well in the front they did everything right except for one thing. They did not feather the prop,’ So the prop was windmilling and dragging that wing down and that did it. And the fire of course did the rest, you know, but they were so inexperienced. They had very little flying between them.
PL: But it’s amazing that you dared go back up again. Were you not terrified when you went back in to the air?
FC: Well I, when I went back to Marston Moor and they told me they’d got another crew whose navigator [laughs] I thought, ‘Oh no. I can’t take that again.’
PL: No. No. No
FC: So I thought, ‘Oh well.’ But of course you can’t refuse. I mean you’re under control from the air force and, but when I saw them I thought well these are a different kettle of fish and the chap, the Canadian pilot, he had hands like ham bones. You know. When he got hold of the [cold column?] he dwarfed it but even then he hadn’t got these [?] you see. It was his first trip and it could have gone so badly wrong because on the first trip which they gave you always what was called a gardening trip. A gardening trip. What do you mean by a gardening trip? Laying mines. And so three newcomers to the squadron took off together on this night and we were going across Denmark in to the Kattegat and putting the mines down in the shipping lanes. Well, there were only three of us flying from that squadron that night and we were the last to get off and the other two were on our left so we were following here but they kept on drifting further and further left and my pilot kept on giving a touch on the rudders to follow them and I said, ‘Don’t do that. They’re not right.’ Drifting away, ‘They’re not on track.’ He did, well he didn’t know me so I got set up but when it got dark he couldn’t see them so I gave him an alteration of course, brought him back where I knew he ought to be and we found Terschelling Island which was the turning point, went over the point of the island, into the Kattegat, down the lanes, no problem at all. Back again to Terschelling Island, home and we were home and in the debriefing room all finished. No sign of the other two. I thought, ‘Oh dear, we haven’t lost them already have we?’ Anyway, they turned up very very late, they had got lost and then been chased up and down the Norwegian coast by fighters but they got away with it but that taught me a lesson so I said to Smith, the pilot, ‘If you ever do that to me again I’ll finish with you.’ I said, ‘I’m navigating. If I say you ought to turn right, turn right.’ If I’d have said it’s raining cats and dogs outside he’d have believed me from then on and they all got their commissions in turn and it was an all commissioned crew in the end.
PL: How wonderful.
FC: Yeah. Yeah.
PL: And that’s photograph that you showed me.
FC: Yes. That’s the photograph. Yeah.
PL: So, what, so what was the relationship like between navigator and pilot then? Was that -
FC: Ah well you had to have good relationship. I mean when you think of a pilot what is he doing? He’s sitting in a seat. He’s strapped in as tight as he can be. He’s staring into the dark, darkness. He can see all the terrible things that are going on. Aircraft going down in flames and so on you know but he’s got to what his instruments and so he doesn’t, and the compasses. His job is just to do what he’s told and do it well but then of course you’ve got to think about other things because the Germans devised the JU88 and also the ME110 where they, underneath, no on the top of their aircraft they had upward firing cannon. It was called schragemusik. You may have heard of it?
PL: Ahum.
FC: Well of course what they did was if you got a bloke flying along straight and level they’d come along underneath. The gunners couldn’t see him unless he did, the aircraft was doing something like and then he would manoeuvre his German aircraft out, to right or left, it wouldn’t matter and he would fire into the wing where all the petrol was. Boom. Gone. If you manoeuvred he’d let you go because he could find somebody who won’t and I got very friendly with a number of German night fighter pilots when I had a writer here. His name was Williams and he said they knew straightway whether the aircraft they were looking at was one that knew the ropes or didn’t and if they started to jink about it was too difficult to pick somebody that starts. And I had a wing commander once who came from Training Command, took over and of course they only flew occasionally, wing commanders, on ops. Anyway, in my, Smithy was not well so as a natural choice he turned to me and said, ‘I’m taking your crew.’ ‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘I don’t like that,’ because not only was he green but he wouldn’t listen. So when I said to him, ‘I think it would be a good idea if we did a bit of jinking and weaving.’ ‘I’m the pilot here and I will do what I think fit.’ I couldn’t believe my ears. So I said, ‘Well we have learnt sir, from experience, that if you stay straight and level you gradually find that someone is underneath you and the gunners won’t see him if you don’t move anything.’ ‘I’ll decide when we do that.’ He lasted two trips and he was shot down. That’s the sort of thing. So, gradually, throughout your tour you were learning all the time. Little things happen and, ‘Oh I must remember that.’ You know.
PL: Because it might just save my life. After the war did you, did you sort of, was it a big shock at the end of the war, you know, your transition into doing other things? I mean were you -
FC: Oh the worst time of my life was in the aftermath of war and demob because Pam, I went back to where I came from. They paid me a small salary throughout the war which was very nice. I was training to be an accountant in a big commercial enterprise. When I went back there all the men that didn’t go had the top jobs and all the people below them were their girlfriends. I’m not joking. They were all their girlfriends or [?] so there was nothing for me at all. I went back as an office boy. I came out as an office boy really at eighteen and I went back in exactly the same and the secretary had the gall to call me down when I went back ‘cause he phoned me up and said, ‘I’m so glad you survived,’ you know. ‘Jolly good show chaps,’ you know. ‘When can you come back?’ I said, ‘Well I’ll start on Monday if you like.’ I’ve never had a day’s unemployment in my life. So he said, ‘Well that’s great,’ he said, ‘We’ll make sure we look after you.’ The first morning I got back he called me down and I thought well he’s going to call me down for a drink. I really did. And when I walked in, ‘Oh it’s good to see you. Lovely to see you.’ Something in the boss changed and he said, ‘Let’s get one thing clear,’ he said, ‘You may be able to take an aircraft from A to B and bomb it to blazes but you’re no good to me unless you can do the job which earns money.’ And I thought, ‘Well.’ So I was thinking all the old boys have got the top jobs, the girls underneath them got the second row. Where do I fit in? There is nowhere. So I thought well I don’t know what I’m going to do so I decided the only way to do it was to do two jobs so I went to work for a football pools and I worked Saturday evening and all day Sunday and I earned more money doing that because I love maths. Permutations and combinations were my bread and butter. I loved it. And so old Alfie Coates, it was Coates of course, which was quite near. They’re down in Edmonton. We were living in Palmers Green and he took a shine to me. I soon got on to the top rank of payment and he said to me, ‘I’d like you to come to work for me,’ and I was tempted because I was earning more on the Saturday night and Sunday than I was getting for the full week but I thought, no. You never knew what was going to happen because they were all Jews of course and [laughs] he said, ‘Well I must use your skills,’ he said, ‘You don’t, don’t sit in the factory. Come in to my private office and we’ll give you all the syndicate coupons,’ you know and they put thousands and thousands of lines and very complicated. I might only do five coupons the whole night because there were so many lines but I loved it and that was so satisfying but I learned one of the major lessons of life and that is what you can do as discipline with staff if you have the guts to do it and this came about because with Coates they got so much bigger and bigger and bigger their throughput got bigger and bigger and bigger they wanted more time so they then started to say, well, Saturday evening, all day Sunday. Can you come in Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evening? Well, of course if you’ve got a young family of course I couldn’t do that so what he did in the end was, he said, ‘Well, I’ll take people who can work Saturday evening and Sunday out to lunchtime but if you can’t work beyond lunchtime come to my desk and tell me why.’ So I watched this parade of people going up to the desk and I watched them coming back. They obviously hadn’t got their own way at all but what I never expected ever to see in England all the exit doors were barricaded, locked and a guard put on so nobody could leave the factory and he never got taken. Human rights? I mean, he broke every law imaginable but he never got taken to task and I thought, yes, if you’ve got the guts to do it you’ll get away with it because those chaps had to have the money. They were all fighting for money to support their family and their wife and they would do anything to do it. I did it myself. But then of course things do change. We had a change of chief accountant and somehow my face fitted. He was hated as a man and as the chief accountant but for me he had all the time in the world and he was a lay preacher. Now, of course I was a church goer in those days and I was an organist at the church and I used to read the lessons and so on so I had some sympathy for him and so he said to me one day, ‘Do you think you could drive me to the station to go on holiday?’ I said, ‘Of course.' That was another brick in the cement. All building the wall. And his wife took a shine to me. She was the mothering type. She took to me. It was embarrassing. She always wanted to give me things. And I said, ‘No you mustn’t do that,’ but where he was concerned he suddenly said to me, ‘I think you’re wasted where you are.’ He said, ‘What would you say if I gave you a department of your own?’ I said, ‘I’d say thank you very much and I’ll go for it.’ I finished up, he gave me one, he gave me two, he gave me three, he gave me four and it was damned hard work but I learned the lesson, never complain about the hard work. That’s not what pleased him and I watched one of the other departments that I hadn’t got. The chap who used to work to 5.36 no less on a Friday afternoon for the weekend. Well, of course there comes a time when you’re doing dividends and so on and this chap came in, very close to 5.36 and this chief accountant said to him, ‘How are you getting on.’ ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’m in a bit of trouble ‘cause I’m a bit behind.’ ‘Why is that?’ ‘Well, we haven’t got the work done.’ ‘Yes I know that. Why is that?’ You know this was the kind of, I thought, ‘You idiot. Fancy, you’re provoking,’ what happened in the end he said, ‘Look I’m a reasonable man,’ the chief accountant said, remember Friday evening, 5.36 knocking off time he said, ‘I’ll be generous,’ he said, ‘You let me have that at 9 o’clock on Monday morning and we’ll call it square.’ And the chap said, ‘Thank you very much sir,’ and walked out. Now I don’t know when the penny dropped but I said to him, that’s the chief accountant, ‘You’re the wickedest man I’ve never met,’ and he laughed his hat off because nobody had ever spoken to him like that and from then on we were not master and pupil. We got on like a house on fire and in the end, unfortunately, he died in my arms because he said because we used to go out together around the area ‘cause it was a big area. We were in the Enfield offices and had our meeting with the manager there and said, ‘Well this is not good enough, do this,’ and he, my chap said, ‘Well I’ll go down to the car now. You finish up Fred and I’ll write up my notes and give them to the typist when I get back and they’ll have it ready for the next morning,’ and it was in the local manager’s hands the next morning. You see, pressure. So I said, ‘Ok.’ And I finished up and when I got to the car he was slumped like this and he’d had a heart attack.
PL: Oh my goodness.
FC: And although I yelled for the manager, the local manager to come down and drive the car and I got behind him and I massaged his heart but I couldn’t save him. He died. I think died shortly after we got to the [?] but and that and then life was good. I had four departments. I had a beautiful office over the main door at the south end. I was then promoted to be the manager of two large warehouses where we introduced a system whereby it was all computerised and a crane picked it up and put it down and put it, and then of all things I got the sack. Why? We had a steering group where we all prepared and I asked a question of the eastern board, Eastern Electricity Board’s chairman, I said, ‘Can we go anywhere to see this system working?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why is that?’ ‘Because there isn’t one.’ I said, ‘You’re buying on spec that it’s going to work.’ And he said, ‘Oh it will work.’ I said, ‘How do you know that? You haven’t seen it work have you?’ ‘No.’ Anyway, I said, ‘Well you’re going to have to use a system of contractors which will be liable to failure instead of using solid [states?] I knew a bit about things then and he said, ‘Oh no. That’s old hat,’ he said, ‘We’re going to do exactly as I say.’ Then he appointed me as the manager. Well it never did work and it wasn’t capable of working but of course who do you blame? You blame the bloke in charge and, you know I, Joyce and I used to go down to the warehouse at 8 o’clock on a Sunday evening, cure all the faults on the cranes, automatic cranes, get it all loaded so the lads could pick at 8 o’clock on Monday morning. Nobody knew we were doing it. I even drove a ten tonnes lorry to get supplies down to Harold Hill in Essex on a Sunday night. Nobody knew. And of course I’d have been sacked if they’d have found out but I had such a host of friends now from Harold Hill who realised that I was facing getting the sack because I hadn’t, well I’d driven bigger things than a car, yes, but a ten tonnes rigid full of parts and machines and at the end of course they weren’t satisfied with output of the factory and so we had a meeting and they said, ‘Well, regretfully we’ll have to say we’ve got to have you out.’ I said, ‘Well that’s alright. I fully expected this. In fact I anticipated what you came here for,’ because in the interval they had a spare engineer. They didn’t know what to do with him. He was a very objectionable bloke too so they put him down with me and even said that he has got authority over you but where he made his terrible mistake, he loved sailing so he used to disappear from the factory at Friday lunchtime and come back Monday lunchtime. Never saw him. So he had no idea what was going on. Not a sausage. So of course I all I said to them when they literally sacked me, the secretary of the board was a very old friend of mine and he said to me, ‘I think you’ve been treated abominably.’ I said, ‘Well that’s life. ‘It happens.’ He said, ‘But there’s a job going in Hemel Hempstead but it’s going back to accounting.’
PL: How funny.
FC: ‘How strange,’ I said. But then he said the chap that’s leaving has been promoted and he was very good. It’s the best area on the board. You’ll have a job to beat him. And I said, ‘Well I’ll try.’ And I got there. I got the job by merit and I made that district the best in the board.
PL: How funny.
FC: And then of course once you’re known the deputy chairman said, phoned me one afternoon and said, he never announced who he was, he said, ‘Are you going to be in this afternoon?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ So he said, ‘I’ll come, I’ll be over shortly,’ and he came over and he said, ‘I’m moving you.’ I said, ‘Oh I’m just enjoying myself here,’ I said, ‘It’s a lovely life here. It’s cushy. The entertainment is lovely you know. We go for walks at lunchtime.’ So I said, ‘What’s the job?’ And I dreaded it. It’s the trouble shooter for the board. So if anybody’s in trouble Charlie goes and sorts it out and gets it right. And in this area which was Pinner. Which you may know. Yeah. The offices were just, well you know where it is the manager was permanently sick, was never there, just take it over and get it back. So I did. And that’s where I retired from.
PL: Good gracious.
FC: And I closed that factory down as I retired because we’d moved on and we brought other premises. You know.
PL: So did you never miss your navigational skills? Did you, did you ever think I’d have love to have carried on with something or -
FC: Well you see I tried to -
PL: Flying or -
FC: I tried, well I tried to get into civil flying but I was knocked about so much. So, that, I I had a fictitious medical category. So, you know you get A1 or A2 or whatever. I was called, I was RAF A3B. There isn’t such a category but I was. That was me.
PL: So what did it mean?
FC: It meant that he shouldn’t be flying at all but as he wants to go and fly let him fly and that’s how I went through with the Mosquitos. I was always A3B after that crash but everybody sort of turned a blind eye and said well if he wants to fly let him fly. And I must say I look back and it’s only one of pleasure I look back on because I met some wonderful friends. I met some wonderful characters. Really. I mean one of the pilots was a policemen in the Met police. Totally different from my own who was very careful, nursed an aircraft. This fellow, this policeman his idea was thrash it. Get home first. Why? ‘Cause you got the meal first you see. [laughs] And he was always back first. I never knew why but I said to him quietly one day, ‘One of these days you’re going to get caught.’ ‘Why so?’ I said, ‘Because you’re racing back. You’re using more petrol and you won’t have enough petrol to contain the diversion. I said, ‘Think on it Alec because,’ I said, ‘One of these days you’ll regret,’ but when it came, he should have been a fighter pilot because he was an artiste. I mean you couldn’t tell he was down because I flew with him four or five times when my pilot was sick. You couldn’t tell he was down. He was shhhhh shhh shhh wonderful wonderful pilot. Natural pilot.
PL: So did he get caught?
FC: No. No, he didn’t. He saw the war out and he, he I had to laugh because he liked to drink. He married the owner of a pub whose husband had died. [laughs] Now if that’s not -
PL: So he was lucky to the last.
FC: Well there you go. Yeah. Yeah. I can look back and say I was frightened many times. You can’t go off it but generally speaking I look back with pleasure because you get so skilled in what you’re doing ‘cause in navigation the rule was you fixed your position with radar, you plot it, extend it forward three minutes, alter course in three minutes so it’s six minutes. I did that in three. So I got my fix and in three minutes I altered course. I never got out of the stream so everybody else was there. It made all the difference. You were never a low one that could be picked off by anybody that was about.
PL: So do you think, how do you think your experiences changed you for the rest of your life or -
FC: Well I’m lucky to have the loveliest woman in the world. I mean, to me the thing where Joyce is concerned we only had two children but I would have been quite happy with one but David was very dangerously ill before he was one and finished up in Great Ormond Street but I won’t go into that but she was an only child and she said, ‘That’s wrong. I think we ought to have two children,’ So we had, we got Gillian and my two to me they are the salt of the earth. They’re wonderful. If I have a preference its only because naturally a father thinks a little bit more of his daughter I think. And she, she’s lovely. And I’ve had a wonderful life. Wonderful life. Joyce has been the kindest, the most efficient ok she’s got trouble now. She’s a very bad knee which, every time she goes to the hospital to get it done they find her blood pressure has gone up so they won’t do it. And so I said, ‘Just give it up old girl. You’re never going to get it,’ because she suffers from [Coates?] syndrome, you know. She goes to the doctor her blood pressure goes up. Never win. You know. I hope -
PL: Well Fred –
FC: I haven’t bored you
PL: You have, I’ve been absolutely fascinated. You haven’t bored me for one second.
FC: Oh I’m glad of that.
PL: But I guess there’s just one last question that I’d like to ask you and that is what are your thoughts about how Bomber Command were treated after the war?
FC: Badly. Well of course it hasn’t been handled well this side. First of all let me preface by, I feel very strongly. You’ve touched on a rise, well I won’t speak.
PL: You must say whatever you want to say. This is your moment.
FC: Well, Fighter Command saved this country to start with by not allowing the German air force to rule the skies and to allow an invasion and nobody can take that away but Fighter Command unlike Bomber Command had good aircraft in the Spitfire and the Hurricane. A good match for anything the Germans had, in fact slightly better and they were able to hold their own. Their trouble was pilots. They didn’t have enough pilots and Dowding said very, very strongly, ‘I wish I had more pilots,’ but of course it wasn’t quite as bad as it might have been because we had the university air squadrons, we had the club squadrons and they all had got some training and they were able to slot in. Mind you some of them flew with very little flying hours, I know that, but so did the Germans. They had to bring [?] so there was a parity there which at least gave them a chance of holding their own and so it proved it be and of course they were in foreign territory coming from France. We were on our home territory. If they baled out we could fly again where the Germans once they were shot down they were shot down. They were finished. So gradually they, and Hitler gave up any idea of an invasion but if you look at the history of Bomber Command. Are you alright?
PL: Yeah.
FC: Yeah.
PL: Fine for batteries.
FC: If you look at Bomber Command, the Bomber Command had not been dealt with properly. When we went to war we had no decent bomber aircraft. What we did have we sent to France. They were shot down like flies and in the end it was given up as a bad job and that’s where I first come in the picture when I go to Benson. I’m being trained to replace somebody killed in France. Ok but of course on paper things were happening. New designs were emerging. The Fairy Battle was never a bomber worth talking about. It was a crew of three. Pilot, open cockpit. Couldn’t get at him. One single Lewis gun at the back and nowhere to do navigation. Hopeless. Absolutely. But it served the purpose of giving our military on the ground some experience of being attacked by low flying air and the laugh of the flour bags. So, gradually we got replacements. We got the Wellington. We got the Whitley. We got the Hampden, the Hudson but they were not really satisfactory. They were only twins but of course the Germans made exactly the same mistake. They never went for four engine. The only four engine they ever had was the Fokker Wulf which they put on the convoy routes and so of course they made their mistakes as well but they were never really successful and of course above all else the thing in my book which turned the balance was the advent of radar. Now, we and Germany were well on track for being first. In the end it was a tight race and I think the Germans got radar more or less the same time we did but totally different motives. We were keen on two things with radar, defending our country by detecting incoming aircraft but more importantly finding targets in the dark which we could not do. I mean you can’t just circle around in the dark and hope to pick up something and we couldn’t find the targets and so when we got radar along came the better aircraft to equip it and so we had three. The foremost in the public mind was the Lancaster. Then came the Halifax and then came the Stirling. Now the Stirling really was the poor man’s plane. It was big, cumbersome, slow, couldn’t get the altitude and really was although they flew through the war I always felt desperately sorry for them. I know one or two people who flew them, one particularly well and I said, he was always down there. We were up here and the Lancasters were a bit further up and so gradually we not only got better aircraft but we got radar as well and they became standard. We could find places in the Ruhr because we had two types of radar. The type that finds the targets in the Ruhr were controlled from this country. Two radio stations and you flew on a beam and as long as you got your fix, crossed swords, you flew and kept it if you bring it back and then they would tell you when to mark. I didn’t get that. I got the other one. I got the H2S which was totally different, which was long range. It was, it was a signal which was radiated by the aircraft and so it swept on this, on those, a hundred and twenty degrees like that and I, if I went over a town I could take a bearing on it. I’d get a fix. Never let me down. Never let down once and Gee was marvellous. Gee had its limitations ‘cause the Germans were very clever. They learned how to block it out. And so you got Gee to the enemy coast or just short of it and then they jammed it, you know and so I feel that we were totally wrong when dear old Chamberlain you know, was trying to give us peace in our time, as he said, and then he said, ‘I regret to say we are now at war with Germany.’ Of course we were at war with Germany. I could see it at eighteen coming and that’s why I decided to go in the RAF. I didn’t want to be in the infantry and I didn’t particularly want to be on the waves so I went with that and so I think we were poorly led at the start of the war. We were ill prepared and only the natural gifted talents of our beloved country and the men that would give their lives for it could got us back into it in the end and I think that at the end and to answer your specific question when it then started that Churchill took sides against Dresden I thought don’t they realise the only reason we bombed Dresden was because Stalin asked us to. Dresden was the rail and road junction where all the pulling back of the German forces were going through and it was wood and so of course it burned. I went and looked at it. We’d been to Berlin. I said, ‘Let’s go and have a look at it,’ because we were quite confident by then about what we were doing. And nobody has had the guts to say well, A) Stalin asked to have it bombed because it will reduce his losses as they were pursuing the fleeing Germans and of course the nature of the town being wood it was catastrophic but it was no more catastrophic than Hamburg in 1943. I went to Hamburg two nights running, I should have gone the third night but the aircraft was u/s and that, I saw a town as big as Hamburg on fire from end to end and thousands of people died in their cellars from suffocation because the fires were so intense they had a fire storm and that destroyed all the oxygen in the cellars and so they couldn’t breathe. And so Dresden was no exception but Churchill, I felt he thought he was on a weak wicket here and he, to our dismay anyway, I thought he just let the blame go to Bomber Command. No. Old Butcher Harris, he knew what he was doing. After all, think back in the war. What were we trying to do? We were trying to bomb individual factories which we couldn’t find. When we got radar well you could find the town but you couldn’t find the factory. You didn’t know what it looked like. It took Butcher Harris a long time to convince Churchill we ought to bomb the towns because if you knock the houses down the workers won’t be able to go to work and you’ve effectively stopped production. And so it did and of course time after time you could, well I used to always navigate by the fires, you know. As you were going across the north German plains you go across Mannheim and Frankfurt and all those places you could see where they’d been because of the fires but all those chaps didn’t go to work the next day and so the production dropped and in the end well they either did one or two things. They either had to take the factory, get it undercover, mountains something or caves and transfer all the people that worked there to it and that’s the way they survived in the end. Yeah. So I think and then of course when it came to supporting Bomber Command there was not a voice raised. Not a sausage. And I still think that memorial opposite the RAF club in Piccadilly is is abominable. Do you realise they’ve dressed them up in uniform which we never used. They’re old fashioned clothes. They were the days of open cockpits. So -
PL: Goodness.
FC: Really, you know, so often I see people on the television. They’re usually gunners or wireless operators and they talk about wonderful aircraft to fly. They didn’t do anything to make it fly. Only two people did that. The pilot flew it and the navigator got it to the place it wanted to go to and let’s face it if you didn’t get to where you wanted to get to the pilot is superfluous but most pilots would agree with that and they would say well they were sitting there in the dark. Very little light. I mean the lighting in those things was an anglepoise lamp attached to the outside which came over your shoulder with a nozzle at the end and in that nozzle was cardboard with a pinhead opening and the light [of emmission?] came through that and you were navigating on your knees, you know and people, I mean these blokes how could they know that? They had no experience and it always tickles me, of course, ‘What did you do?’ ‘I was a wireless operator.’ Well he sat down below and he used to listen to the German night fighter controllers, usually wetting his pants as he did so ‘cause the bloke I had he would come eyes as big as saucers and say, ‘They got so and so, all up. We’re going to get a terrible pasting.’ I said, ‘Yeah. Alright well we’ll deal with it when we come to it. Go back and tell us what’s happening.’ But I felt so sorry that we hadn’t got somebody in authority who could have said, ‘Don’t talk rubbish. Tell what the real reason was why we destroyed Dresden.’ Why did we destroy Hamburg then ‘cause that was a burn out. Thousands upon thousands of people killed in their cellars. Doesn’t that merit an equal comment to Dresden, but of course Dresden was wood. Made it worse. It just jumped from one place to another ‘cause all the initial load were all incendiaries. Get the fires going, drop the bombs in, kill the firefighters. Yeah. It’s very sad because, you know, now and again one of the things, I hope you don’t mind me saying this.
PL: No. Not at all.
FC: One of the things that appals me we have got so many women in parliament now. You know they come on the box and they talk with great authority and I think how old is that one? Twenty three. Twenty seven perhaps. But you know they talk as if they’ve lived a life of experience. Hands on, you know but they can’t have done. They’re not old enough. Mind you they sometimes get men that are no better. And one thing I do admire is the vitality of these girls. They work and they speak well too. Yeah. So, but I sometimes I think to myself I don’t thing they have the right to say that to me. [laughs] And how does she know? But there you are looking at an old, irascible, sort of awkward old boy.
PL: I think that’s perfectly fine.
FC: Well there you are. I must say it’s been a pleasure to see you.
PL: Well it’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to you.
FC: I wondered how could I talk? That’s a big task. When you talked about an hour and a half I thought to myself well you’ll be lucky to get away with an hour and a half if you really are going for it but you’ve been very generous. You’ve just let me ramble on.
PL: Not at all. I think it’s been an amazing story and -
FC: Yeah.
PL: I’d just like to say thank you very very much indeed.
FC: Jolly good.
PL: For sharing that with us.
FC: Oh well it’s my pleasure to meet you too. I would love to meet your husband and perhaps that might happen one day. Who knows?
PL: He’s, I’ll switch off here.
FC: Yes. Ok.
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ACrawleyF151222
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Interview with Fred Crawley DFC
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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eng
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02:05:36 audio recording
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Pam Locker
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2015-12-22
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Fred Crawley joined the Royal Air Force in 1939 when he was 18 years old. While at an operational training unit he survived a crash which killed five members of his crew. He was treated in hospital at RAF Rauceby for burns. After training he completed 74 operations as a navigator with 158 and 139 Squadrons.
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
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1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
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Julie Williams
139 Squadron
158 Squadron
aerial photograph
aircrew
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
crash
Distinguished Flying Cross
entertainment
Gee
ground personnel
Guinea Pig Club
H2S
Halifax
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
medical officer
Mosquito
navigator
Operational Training Unit
Pathfinders
perception of bombing war
RAF Benson
RAF Blyton
RAF hospital Rauceby
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Penrhos
RAF Upwood
RAF Warboys
superstition
target photograph
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/245/3391/ADaviesLR160623.1.mp3
a4870b2e7bfecdfd1ab8315388ac65f5
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Title
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Davies, Leslie Roy
Leslie Roy Davies
Leslie R Davies
Leslie Davies
Les Davies
L R Davies
L Davies
Description
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One oral history interview with Leslie Roy "Les" Davies (434138 Royal Australian Air Force).
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-06-23
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Davies, LR
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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DG: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. My name is Donald Gould and I’m interviewing Les Davies at his home in French’s Forest. A suburb of Sydney. Les, how old you are you please?
LD: I’m going on ninety two at the moment going on, they tell me, ninety three. Hopefully. And —
DG: Well you’re going jolly well. Even at seventy, seventy three I don’t know if I’m going to get that far.
LD: I’m sure you will.
DG: Where were you born?
LD: I was born in Gympie in Queensland, Australia and I started off as a porter in the railways actually. But I had to leave school early, at fifteen because of the — I came from a big family of nine children. It was the Depression years. And anyway that’s what happened. And I performed various things in the railways but all the time I had my eye on joining the air force because I had seen such things as Errol Flynn in “Dawn Patrol” and there was a Moth that used to fly, a Tiger Moth that used to fly over our the top of our house in Gympie. I longed to be in the cockpit of it. To cut a long story short I, I finally was admitted in to the air force but as a trainee. As a — what would you call me? An air crew guard. As an air crew guard you wore a white flash in your cap waiting for an opening to come whereby you could be inducted into the air crew instead of on the temporary ground staff. So I went before the categorisation board and they categorised me to be trained as a pilot. And so when that opportunity came around I grabbed it of course and learned to fly a Tiger Moth and went on to fly Avro Ansons. But unfortunately I had a couple of mishaps. Careless perhaps. I took it too close to the wind. I was too close to a tree in the training and I had an instructor with me and as a result of that damage that I could have done to the aircraft and myself they took me off for training for a pilot and I thought well if I can’t get into the war in the front of plane I’m going to jolly well get in at the back. So I volunteered to become an air gunner.
DG: How old? How old were you when you, when you started to do this training?
LD: Eighteen. Eighteen.
DG: Eighteen.
LD: Yes.
DG: And what, what age were you, did you say when you left school?
LD: Oh, I was fifteen.
DG: Fifteen.
LD: Yes.
DG: Did you, did you do — go to work? Were you working.
LD: I was working as a porter initially in the railways. In fact as a kitchen boy initially and then they gave me the job of being a sort of a guard on a diesel locomotive that went between various towns in Queensland. And that was a lot of fun.
DG: And so you were doing that for a few years until you were —
LD: Until, until I was eighteen So — yes.
DG: Right. And so after that, after those mishaps what, what happened then?
LD: Well I was posted to Evans Head Gunnery School which is in Northern New South Wales in Australia. And I was put through the course there for about six weeks. And after six weeks I was qualified as an air gunner with the rank of sergeant and with a number of friends who were in the same boat who’d been scrubbed as pilots. I sort of well left Evans Head and went and embarked on a ship to England.
DG: How [pause] you were, you were eighteen when you, when you started this training.
LD: Yes. Yes.
DG: And what year would have been? What — ?
LD: Well I was —
DG: Had the war had started then?
LD: Yes. Oh yes. October ’42.
DG: Ok. So the war, so the war was going and you, and you, was it your idea to go? You wanted to go to the war.
LD: Well the Japanese were starting to look longingly at the Australian mainland and that was an incentive. Because you know, you didn’t want to see anything nasty happen there. One of my things I had to do while I was waiting to be called up in to aircrew was to man a petrol dump site in Evans Head and that was pretty scary in the dead of night. We used to camp out in canvas tents. And these great drums of petrol or whatever it was used to explode next to you and you’d swear that the Japanese had landed, you know. But anyway, that was just for a period of months and then I was sort of taken off that.
DG: So at that stage, you, you thought you may have been fighting the Japanese?
LD: Yes. Exactly.
DG: Right. So after you’d got, you’d got scrubbed from pilot training and you were training as an air gunner — where did you do that training?
LD: All at Evans Head. Yes. I’d say most, well practically all of it at Evans Head Gunnery School.
DG: And you joined in about ’42. So, when did you, you finished that training. What happened after that?
LD: I was posted to Melbourne. I’m sorry — to Sydney. And after a week or so of being fitted out with uniforms and all that stuff I was put on a ship with five hundred other guys to England. And once in England we were posted to Brighton. We were given a little bit of pay. And then we were, we were sent to Lichfield. I should say to you that on the way over from Australia via the United States we were subject to inspections by the Customs Authority in the United States. And there was five hundred of us and our commanding officer was told afterwards that they were the fittest young fellas that the authorities had ever seen in San Francisco.
DG: Right.
LD: Yes. So that was pretty good too. And if I could just continue —
DG: Yes.
LD: With travelling across the United States. It was beautiful Pullman cars and all that stuff. And I remember we called in to Chicago South and the first thing we saw were these paper boys who were singing out something. And the next thing I saw the hoarding and it was, “Fats Waller dead.” Fats Waller was, of course a great icon in the jazz field.
DG: Yeah.
LD: So we were in New York for some time before being put on board the Queen Elizabeth. There was five hundred Aussie airmen and we were about to take off across the Atlantic and thousands of GIs landed on the ship as well. And of course we had managed our sea legs before arriving in to the States but these poor guys. Once we got on the Atlantic in the Queen Elizabeth they were sick as dogs and we had to drink, had to drink all their Coca Cola and eat all their ice cream and all their goodies [laughs] Someone had to do it.
DG: That must have been hard. Was that sort of thing in short supply for you people or in Australia?
LD: It hadn’t got to that stage. No.
DG: Really .
LD: No. But the Americans were very lavish with the catering for their troops.
DG: Yeah. Well did they eat better than the Australians? Or on the ship I suppose you would because [unclear].
LD: We ate it all because they were, you know, so sick.
DG: Oh yes. Yes. Yeah.
LD: But the Queen Elizabeth itself it was a very rough ride across the Atlantic. And of course it was by itself. It wasn’t in convoy. It was too fast for that. It went almost up to the North Pole before coming down into, into Scotland to disembark us.
DG: Why did it head so far north? To keep away from the —
LD: U-boats.
DG: U-boats? Yes. Yeah. Right. And so you arrived. Where did you land in England?
LD: Greenock. Greenock. In Scotland.
DG: In Scotland and then down to Brighton.
LD: Down to Brighton.
DG: And then?
LD: Up to Lichfield then.
DG: Whereabouts is Lichfield?
LD: Leicestershire I think.
DG: Oh right. Right.
LD: In the Midlands. Yeah.
DG: Ok. And how —
LD: Well it’s interesting because we arrived there and one of the first things they said to us was, ‘Ok. Get yourselves a crew together.’ They didn’t say to us, ‘You, Davies will go to such and such a crew,’ and, ‘You, O’Neil you’ll be over there.’ They left it up to the airmen themselves to crew up. And Brian and I who were good mates. Gunners also were were tramping along around the station one day and Brian spied this chap coming towards us. A flying officer. A pilot. And it turned out to be someone — a very close friend. So he became our skipper. And before very long we had the required seven people. And we went all through the war together and it’s a long story but unfortunately three of them got killed. And we had good comeraderie in the crew. Six Australians and one Englishman. They sent us — the flight engineer was from England.
DG: Yes. Well they would be familiar with Rolls Royce.
LD: Rolls Royce yeah.
DG: The aircraft. Would get their aircraft wouldn’t they? You said three of your crew were killed.
LD: Yeah.
DG: You obviously didn’t go — did they get killed on one of the missions?
LD: No. What happened was, Don was we’d finished our tour of operations. We did thirty four ops. And of course because the war was getting close to ending, it was January ’44, they started training people to take Liberator aircraft over to the continent and pick up POWs and people like that. And that’s exactly what happened to our crew. Brian, the other gunner, and myself — we were no longer required there. The flight engineer — he was required. The navigator was required. The pilot, of course, McNulty was required. And, but unfortunately, unfortunately during training when Pat was being trained to fly these Liberators to the Continent one of the operations was to shut down more than one engine. Whether it was required I’m not, I’m not sure but that’s what happened. And they shut a couple of engines down on one side I’m told and when it came to start up again they couldn’t start it. Something to do with the petrol cocks, you know, couldn’t, instead of, instead of organising themselves with the rich mixture of fuel it wasn’t enough to start the engine. So Pat was killed and so was Tex Potter our wireless operator and also killed was our flight engineer.
[phone ringing]
DG: Just pausing for a moment.
[recording paused]
DG: So you, that was that. The crew that were killed. All those other members of your crew. When you were crewing up in — was that in Lichfield that you were crewing up?
LD: We were crewing up in Lichfield.
DG: Yes.
LD: And it was before we embarked on operations.
DG: And how did, how did you find that system where they got you to select your own crews? How did you find? Did that work?
LD: I think it worked pretty, pretty well. Other crews that we met seemed to get on very well together. There were also a few hiccups from time to time too. You know where people didn’t fit in but it would have been very rare.
DG: Yes. And after, after your training in Lichfield, what? What happened then?
LD: We moved up to Marston Moor. In Lichfield we were flying Wellingtons and then we moved up to Marston Moor for conversion to Halifax 2s.
[pause]
DG: Yes.
LD: They had Halifax 2s and we were quite amazed at the versatility of the Halifax to tell you the honest truth. And it wasn’t very long before we were out of there and down to Driffield where 466 Squadron was operating from. And we were there for the rest of our tour.
DG: So, you were, you started on Wellingtons but then went straight to the Halifax.
LD: Wellingtons at Lichfield.
DG: Right.
LD: And Halifaxes at Marston Moor.
DG: And how long were you at Marston Moor?
LD: Oh. I’d have to consult my —
DG: Oh no. Just a short time?
LD: Would have been only a week or two.
DG: Oh I see.
LD: Something like that.
DG: Right. Right. Ok. And then, then you were at Driffield.
LD: Yes.
DG: And did you remain there for the duration of the war?
LD: I was there for the duration of the war. Yes.
DG: And what were the, what was daily life like on the base? What was, what was your routine?
LD: Well there was a billiard table out in the middle of the concourse there. As far as I recall. Not that I played a lot of it. We — that’s a very good question Don actually. We had lectures still. In the gunnery section for example we used to convene down there most mornings when we weren’t flying. Or if we weren’t flying sometimes we’d visit the pub in the appropriate hours and — yes.
DG: You were at, so you were at the local pub in town.
LD: Yeah. In the village.
DG: How far, the village yeah, how far was the village from you?
LD: I think it was pretty close but I didn’t spend as much time there as a lot. It was called The Black Swan. I think it was called The Black Swan. And the Australians christened it The Mucky Duck or something like that as they do, you know.
DG: I think, I think I might have heard that. Yes. Yes.
LD: And —
DG: Carry on —
LD: I really can’t answer that question all that well. Perhaps we might come back to that.
DG: Yeah. Yeah. Well what was it — if you were, if you were going to be flying that night what was the, what was the routine? On a day like that.
LD: Well they’d, they’d ground you of course.
DG: When would you find, would you find out the night before you were flying the next day or you would just?
LD: Not the next day. Probably just when —
DG: On the day you were flying.
LD: Very short notice. I think from memory.
DG: Yes.
LD: Very short notice And, but one thing I must be thankful for was the American Forces Radio. All the latest tunes were broadcast. I’m still trying to work out where the heck I got my radio from but Frank Sinatra and all these guys were — we used to listen to them sometimes to get to sleep, you know.
DG: Right. Right.
LD: We lived in — we were all NCOs at that stage. We lived in quite a large hut which had a, which had a utensil in the middle of it which took wood or coal I think it was. And it was for, we used to use it for frying our eggs and that which — we used to visit farms around the place and the farmers would give us eggs and we’d toast them or cook them on these — what would you call them? I need some help here.
DG: An Combustion heater of some sort.
LD: Combustion A heater. That’s what it was.
DG: Right.
LD: And it was, you know, we enjoyed ourselves when we weren’t flying.
DG: You did some cooking yourself?
LD: Yes. Yes.
DG: Oh right. What about the mess?
LD: [laughs] well that’s a good question. We used to, we used to eat out. We had pushbikes too. We used to go around the villages on our pushbikes. Sometimes if you’d had a few bottles of beer, Aston Worthington or something like that in your jacket and you fell over or if your bike collided with something you were lucky not to get speared by the fragments of glass that came out of the bottle of course. But I think our whole focus was on trying to put behind us the immediacy of what we were about to be embarking on.
DG: You were sort of trying to keep that at the back of your mind were you?
LD: Yes.
DG: Just keeping about your daily life.
LD: That’s right.
DG: And exclude the rest.
LD: That’s right. And you looked forward to mail from home of course. And I think, from memory, at that stage the NAAFI trucks used to come around and you’d get tea and they’d give you bread and all sorts of things. Anyway, they used to cater for us. Something like a coffee shop in these except that it was on wheels.
DG: What — sorry. No, go on.
LD: I think we, once we started operations it became a little more grim. You know. I remember the first time I was on an operation. We were somewhere. Flying to the Ruhr I think in daylight and we were at twenty thousand feet or so. There might have been thirty or so aircraft around you at roughly the same height. And suddenly the big Halifax next to you was upside down with little discs, parachutes falling out of it. And I think then I thought to myself, Les, this is, this is no joke. This is, this is what’s happening. You’re in the air force now. All the fun of training and enjoying life and being looked after. You were on your own virtually up there. And I think that’s, that’s when I started to get, you know, ill. It was a serious business we were engaged in really.
DG: You said that you would, you’d be involved in these activities. Go off on your bicycle and you might go in to the pub and you’d try to keep the thoughts of flying out of your head.
LD: Yeah.
DG: When you were, when you were going on a mission that morning, well once you knew you were going and I suppose had briefing. How did you feel then? Course you’d be thinking about that sort of thing then wouldn’t you?
LD: Yes. You would be Don but you’d also be busy. You know. You had to sort of get your kit ready and get your parachute and all that stuff. But let me tell you about the night we arrived at Driffield from Marston Moor. We had three or four other crews that we were very friendly with and we arrived at Driffield this evening, for the first time and we went to the sergeants mess. And sitting in front of the fire was Terry Kenyon and his crew. We were very close to them. And they had a couple of nights before been on their first mission to a place called Sterkrade in the Ruhr. And they were telling us the most horrendous stories about how terrible it was. The flak, you know, all that stuff. And so that was our baptism there. But within a week or two the squadron was ordered to fly to, fly to the same target — Sterkrade. And they were shot down.
DG: Oh right.
LD: [unclear] well the [unclear] part of that was that they were all killed except the flight engineer who, who became a prisoner of war. But when they were describing their first target that had been so horrendous we put some of it down to bravado and stuff like that but when they failed to return, within a couple of weeks from bombing the same target we realised that this was really serious stuff, you know.
DG: Yes. Yes. And what, what were some of the targets that you bombed?
LD: Mostly in the Ruhr valley. The one that I just mentioned Sterkrade, Essen. Cologne. Gelsenkirchen and other places.
DG: Some of these targets no doubt there would have been civilians around who would naturally get killed with bombing. How did you feel about that?
LD: Well you’re always, I always went back to the briefing before the flight and invariably our targets were industrial sites. Factories etcetera. And I was aware of the fact that we were contributing to the war effort by attacking these targets. And I guess it’s pretty hard to turn back all these years Don and remember what exactly your state of mind was.
DG: Yes. Yes.
LD: Of course, don’t forget we were constantly on the defensive for being shot down.
DG: Oh most certainly. Yes.
LD: Very much so.
DG: Yes.
LD: And I know from my position as mid-upper gunner it was, there was some pretty horrendous things going on. And you, that concentrated your mind marvellously, you know. When we came out of the targets the Captain, Captain McNulty used to always say, ‘Are you alright Les?’ ‘You alright Brian?’ And he’d go around the aircraft just to check that everyone was safe and sound. What else can I tell you about that?
DG: No. That’s fine. What do, what do you — there’s been a bit of talk about Dresden and some of those sort of places. Having been in Bomber Command how do you feel about some, not just Dresden but some of these? How do you feel about that sort of thing now?
LD: Well, a lot —
DG: If you don’t want to answer —
LD: Yeah. I have come to the conclusion that Dresden was a big mistake but it was understandable in so much as I understand it there were industrial targets being targeted and also they didn’t [pause] I wasn’t there by the way, they didn’t count on these firestorms that erupted and started the whole thing off because we had been to Duisburg on a thousand, on a bomber mission and it wasn’t anything like that that we could see.
DG: Yes. How many missions did you complete?
LD: Thirty four.
DG: Thirty four. And did you, did you have any memorable experiences on these? Anything. Something, you mentioned one that the Halifax that turned that upside down.
LD: Yeah. That was something. Yeah. There was a —
DG: Other things like that?
LD: There was an encounter with a Messerschmitt 410 one night when we were retuning. It was a bright moonlight night and cloud cover. Beautiful white clouds right beneath us and I looked up. My turret never stopped moving. I moved it all the time. Around in circles, up, guns up and down. I noticed this Messerschmitt sitting up behind our port bow about to attack us and I warned the skipper and he — I gave him, first time I could talk to the skipper and give him orders to corkscrew to the port and as soon as the Messerschmitt flicked up his wings and prepared to come in I gave the order to corkscrew port. And we went into this corkscrew thing and lost, lost the aircraft altogether. It disappeared into the cloud below us. On another occasion I got a very large piece of shrapnel hit within six inches I suppose, of my head. And I wasn’t very pleased about that.
DG: You said that you saw the Messerschmitt coming in on the port.
LD: Yes.
DG: On the port bow.
LD: Yes.
DG: And you told the pilot to corkscrew to port.
LD: Only when, when [pause] they had a curve of pursuit the bomber, the bomber would be there, the Messerschmitt up here and he’d come in like this to get you. The trick was as soon as he flicked up to come in you went down like this.
DG: He was coming in on your, he was coming in on your port.
LD: Yes.
DG: So you were corkscrewing to the right to try and get underneath him.
LD: Well he was up here, he flipped over and we corkscrewed down there like that.
DG: I’m just thinking the reason for going to port instead of starboard that’s if you were going to starboard he’d be able to follow you whereas if you’re going to port he’s got to go around.
LD: Crossed over.
DG: He’s got to turn again to come back at you.
LD: Yes. That’s right.
DG: Yes.
LD: And he didn’t. He didn’t.
DG: How was, how was the Halifax’s manoeuvrability?
LD: Very good. Very good. A very difficult aircraft to fly though I think. From things that have been said.
DG: How was its manoeuvrability compared with the Lancaster?
LD: I think the Lancaster might have been as well. I’m loyally showing it compared. We were very jealous about the reputation of the Halifax. The Halifax 3. And of course Lancaster squadrons got the publicity. Or a lot of it.
DG: Yes.
LD: Good luck to them.
DG: And when the, when did you finish flying?
LD: January ’44.
DG: Oh right. So —
LD: So I was —
DG: That was before D-day.
LD: After D-Day.
DG: D-day was June ’44.
LD: Was it. I think we started flying in August ’43 — ’44.
DG: Right.
LD: 1944. And finished in February.
DG: February.
LD: January. January ’45.
DG: ’45. Right. And what was your last mission? Do you remember what that was?
LD: Yes. It was to Leipzig and it took eight hours and fifty minutes or something. And it was in support of the Russians at Leipzig. In support of the Russians against the German’s military.
DG: Did you, when you, when you came back from that mission did you know at that stage that that would be your last? Or was it just another mission and you were still waiting for another one.
LD: No. I don’t think we knew that it was the last one. And in fact we volunteered to come back out in the air force to Australia because the Japanese war was going on but that didn’t eventuate.
DG: And how, how did you feel when you, when you found out that it was your last mission?
LD: I think we got on pretty good. I can’t, I can’t remember specifically what we did but [pause] and I was given a commission too at that stage because it was quite, quite acceptable.
DG: When did you achieve flying officer?
LD: I was —
DG: When did you receive that?
LD: That was when the ops ended.
DG: Oh right.
LD: Yeah.
DG: And after you’d, well when you’d finished flying what happened to you then?
LD: Well I went on leave down to my relatives in London. Where I stayed before. And I also rode a bike from London down to Cornwall. Just to see the countryside. Just waiting to be posted back. Back to Australia.
DG: And how long did it take before you were sent back here?
LD: Well I can remember celebrating the end of the European war in Brighton in May. So I was still there. I was sort of flying around between probably about between February and May. March, April, May. Plenty of leave and that sort of thing.
DG: Yes. And what happened? Where did you arrive in Australia?
LD: We arrived in Sydney. Hang on. Just let me get this straight. I shipped. It was, it was Brisbane. How did we get to Brisbane? I think we came up by train from Sydney.
DG: Right. Yes. And what, what happened? The war was still going on in Japan. So did you, did you have any thoughts that something might happen to you then? That you might be involved in that or wasn’t that a consideration?
LD: I think we picked up on the fact that the war was getting pretty close to finishing there as well. And they had plenty of facilities already out here. I think we realised that we were about to be demobbed. Which we were.
DG: And what did you do then? What happened to you after that? You left the air force.
LD: I was a bit unsettled. I had left school at fifteen so the first thing I did was enrol and matriculated to the University of Queensland. And I was there only one year and I got a bit footloose and I went and worked with my brother on the dairy farm. And that’s what happened there.
DG: Where’s his dairy farm?
LD: It was in a place called Kin Kin up in, up in Queensland.
DG: Right.
LD: And it was, he gave me a bit of land and said, ‘That’s yours for as long as you’re here.’ Because, besides having a dairy farm he cropped beans and things like that. He gave me the use of a stump jump plough for ploughing the fields. And I bought a horse named Peter for eight pounds to pull the plough.
DG: Right.
LD: Yeah.
DG: And how long were you doing that?
LD: I’d say the best part of a year doing that. Yeah.
DG: And what did you do after?
LD: I came down to Sydney and I thought I’m going to write the great Australian novel. You know. But I got sidetracked there. That sort of petered out.
DG: And what sort of work did you do?
LD: Well I went and worked in the taxation department for a year. And then the Commonwealth Bank. I went and worked for the Commonwealth Bank. But when I arrived in Sydney I didn’t know much about the place and I wanted lodgings so I went to a place called Palmer Street in East Sydney which I knew nothing about but there was an ad for a place. And I was interviewed by a landlady there and it turned out that she was the estranged wife of someone who lived in the same little village of Kin Kin that I lived in. So the odds against me arriving there from a five hundred, six hundred people village to a city of over a million must have been pretty, pretty high. But she thought I was spying on her actually [laughs] And the other thing I did was I got the typewriter thing working. I thought I’ve got to get a job. There were some ads in the paper. One was Woolworths, one was the Marine Cadets. One or two or others. I wrote off. I didn’t even get an interview and the reason why? I typed my letters up and I put on the top Palmer Street, East Sydney and it was a renowned brothel area.
DG: Oh yes. Yes. In those days it was.
LD: Yeah. So that put a stop to my [unclear]
DG: And what, what sort of work did you do then? Later on? Where did you finish?
LD: Well I finished. I’m basically a writer and I finished up working for, after the bank — I was a publicity officer for the bank for a while. And then I was head hunted by this employers group of seven thousand companies and in due course I was made a director there and I stayed there for thirty five years.
DG: Oh right. So you’re still involved in that side of it although you didn’t write the great Australian novel.
LD: [laughs] No. Well I I’ve written you know. A lot of economics and stuff you know.
DG: Right. Do you still keep in touch with some of your friends from Bomber Command?
LD: Not really. You see my, my friends were all from Queensland.
DG: Ah yeah. Yes.
LD: And after the war I sort of came down here. And I did catch up with them for a few years after the war but, you know, you sort of disconnect after a time.
DG: Yes. And how do you feel? Well how were you treated as coming from Bomber Command after the war?
LD: I don’t think I was treated any different from anyone else really.
DG: Right. Right. Well I think that just about covers it Les.
LD: Oh. Ok then.
DG: Thank you very much indeed.
LD: [unclear]
DG: No. That’s not to worry about.
LD: That’s good.
Dublin Core
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ADaviesLR160623
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Interview with Les Davies
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Sound
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eng
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00:42:21 audio recording
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Pending review
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Donald Gould
Date
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2016-06-23
Description
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Les Davies grew up in Australia and worked as a railway porter before joining the Royal Australian Air Force. After initially training as a pilot he flew 34 operations as a mid upper gunner with 466 Squadron from RAF Driffield. He had been forced to leave school at fifteen and so one of the first things he did on his return to Australia was to enrol at the University of Queensland to continue his education.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
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Australia
Great Britain
England--Yorkshire
Temporal Coverage
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1942
1943
1944
1945
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Julie Williams
466 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
Anson
bombing
crewing up
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
Operational Training Unit
pilot
RAF Driffield
RAF Lichfield
RAF Marston Moor
Tiger Moth
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/294/3449/AMarshallAH161012.1.mp3
97bb1339dd8d17f832ee3984a665229f
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Title
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Marshall, Alfred
Alfred Higgins Marshall
Alfred H Marshall
Alfred Marshall
A H Marshall
A Marshall
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Alfred Higgins Marshall (1861844 Royal Air Force).
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-10-12
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Marshall, AH
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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Hello. My name is Pam Locker and I’m in the home of Mr Alfred Higgins Marshall of [redacted] on Wednesday the 12th of October 2016. And Fred, can I just say first of all thank you very much indeed on behalf of everybody for agreeing to share your memories with us.
AM: You’re welcome.
PL: So, if we start by just maybe perhaps you’d like to just talk a little bit about your, your young life and how you got to be in Bomber Command.
AM: Well, initially I’ve no idea. I mean, I took the what they called the school leaving certificates in those days and the schools didn’t open and I went to see the headmaster and he said, ‘You will be coming back to school won’t you?’ I said, ‘No. I’ve got, it’s about time I contributed something to the family because in two years’ time I’ll be in the forces.’ So that was how it started. And as I say, you know war broke out. My Dad and I joined the LDV et cetera and we stayed in that. After that I went to, it was an air force training place, thing which was about navigation. And I think that was the first inkling that I had. But also in 1938 seven of us went on, went camping at Middleton in Teesdale. And four of us went into the RAF, two went into the navy and one became a doctor, he went to university. And that had a bearing on me as well. And out of those four I was the only survivor. And the two lads that went in the navy one was shipwrecked. Well, he was, his boat was sunk in the Mediterranean. He was a prisoner of war until he was liberated in 1942 when the, you know, in the North African campaign. And I had lots of other friends who went into the Bomber Command or went into the air force as it was then and unfortunately most of those died. I mean, I left and I went to, when I joined up that was in, my dad took me to Newcastle. Of course initially what I wanted to do I wanted to go into the Merchant Navy. My parents wouldn’t agree. So I stayed on and I went to Newcastle with my dad and he said, ‘Do you want to volunteer for the air force?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ So I went and volunteered for the air force, told my mother and she went berserk. And I mean really he was thinking of the war being the same as the First World War. Because he went right through from 1915 to 1918. And he, I mean the conditions that they had were horrendous. So he didn’t want me to have that so he took me to volunteer for the air, for the air force. And I was, that was on December the 13th [laughs] On January the 1st I was enlisted in to the air force. And then I was on, they sent me home for about a few months and then I was called up. And as I say I went away with from Birtley with two lads. Two other lads. Neither of them survived. I was the only one. And from there on it just took off and I drifted into Bomber Command. That’s how I got there. In Bomber Command we had, well actually I did part of the first tour on Wellingtons. And then we tried, we converted on to Halifaxes and picked up a mid-upper gunner and an engineer and then continued. Finished the first tour. Then continued, because we’d picked two boys up, five of us were entitled to nine months rest period which we didn’t do. We discussed it over a few pints of beer and we agreed that we would carry on for the sake of the other two lads. So we carried on with the second tour consecutively. And that’s it really. I mean I can give you the details of what we did et cetera. I mean on the first tour, as I say the first part of the first tour was on Wellingtons. And what we, 100 Group were on Special Duties and 192 Squadron were investigating enemy radar. And B Flight was Wellingtons — A flight was Wellingtons, B Flight was Halifaxes and C Flight was Mosquitoes. And we also had on our squadron an American reconnaissance unit. So it was all, it was all very hush hush. All our correspondence was vetted before it went off so what the family got at home I don’t know because you weren’t allowed to tell anybody anything about what we were doing. It was so secret. And the logbook shows SD Operations. Full stop. And as I said the first part of the tour on Wellingtons was immediately off the Dutch coast and maybe about five ten mile off the Dutch coast and the idea, the rear of the aircraft was packed with special equipment and we had a special operator interpreting whatever we found. If he found a signal we phoned it inland and I mean it was, it was seemed to be quite easy to us because that area was where the German night fighters were based and it’s strangely enough we went through it completely. Never saw a night fighter. But there were two of us flying from each end and the other crew always were attacked by night fighters. So, well the book that was issued at Lincoln, you know when we went down to the erection of this there was a chap called Donaldson there. Wing Commander Donaldson. Well, he was our wing commander so he flew on the opposite leg to us. And this was all night flying. And they were attacked by night fighters. We weren’t. So they put us on daylight and we flew daylight with a Spitfire cover. And then after that we converted on to Halifaxes and because of their longer range we were then involved in most of Germany. I mean actually we were supposed to be the last Bomber Command Wellington to operate. And I’ve got a photograph to prove that. But we weren’t because the crew, the last crew to operate on our flight the skipper was cashiered because he came back, couldn’t get his undercart down and pancaked on the runway which was forbidden. So he was cashiered and they were the last crew that flew on Wellingtons. So that’s it. It’s a long story that.
PL: Can we just clarify this because it’s a fascinating, it’s a fascinating story. The role of your crew. So you would navigate in —
AM: Yes.
PL: And the, all this kit, this electronic kit that was at the back of the plane.
AM: Yes.
PL: Were they finding out where radar was operating from?
AM: It was mainly radar but it was, it was mainly the V-1s that, which were starting at that time and we wanted to locate where they were being fired from. We were also, when we were flying in daylight there was a V-2 went up from The Hague and we, we witnessed that and it was, it was unbelievable. I don’t know whether we were the first crew to see a V-2 or not. But when we were on the, on the station there was a terrific bang and it was one of these V-2s which had exploded at a place called Dereham in Norfolk, and then we heard it coming because it was travelling faster than the speed of sound. So you heard the bang and then you heard the thing coming. It was weird. You couldn’t understand it at the time but that’s, that’s what it was.
PL: So then you would take that information back or —
AM: We took the information back.
PL: And that was your role.
AM: Every trip we went back. Every crew was interviewed or interrogated by the intelligence people.
PL: And so presumably you could be sent anywhere where they thought —
AM: Well, I mean we were mainly on the, on the Dutch coast. The northern, off the Frisian Islands. Down. Up to Denmark and places like that. But you were limited in the time you could fly in a Wellington, you know. I mean I’ve got to say a strange story but the nearest thing that we took that we had, we took a WAAF officer on leave to Cambridge. And we landed at this ‘drome at Cambridge and immediately the engines cut out because the bomb aimer was supposed to check that the nacelle tanks were full and we were switched on to the nacelle tanks for landing and he didn’t do it because the ground crew always did it. And we landed, just landed and both engines cut out because there was no petrol. [laughs] So that was the nearest escape we had.
PL: So that was just, so you were already landed and stopped.
AM: We, the wheels just touched down and both engines cut. Which could have been disastrous if it [pause] but we laughed about it.
PL: Was there a bit of an exchange in the aircraft with that?
AM: Yeah. So —
PL: A little bit of an exchange in the aircraft over that incident.
AM: Well, we had a good laugh about it. I mean of course you didn’t really criticise each other. I mean you were flying as a team. I mean there was never any animosity or anything like that.
PL: So, so what year was this that you started?
AM: Well, it was 1941 that I volunteered. That was, and that was, and this is January the 1st 1942. And then from there I went to ITW. Elementary Flying School. Then we were transferred to Canada to do our training. Came back and did the, we went on to, from there you went on Advanced Training Wing which was in Llandwrog in North Wales. And then we went from there to Wing which is an Operational Training Unit. And from there you would normally go and convert on to either Lancasters but we were transferred straight from the squadron, from the ITW straight to the squadron. So we missed that course out and we eventually had to go and convert later on that year on to the Halifaxes. Which we did at Marston Moor.
PL: So how old were you when you first joined Bomber Command?
AM: Twenty, well I was eighteen when I first joined up. And then when you went into Bomber Command it was maybe nineteen forty — end of ’42.
PL: And this, this particular squadron, were you, did you volunteer for that squadron?
AM: No.
PL: Or were you chosen in a particular way? Was it just random?
AM: You were selected mainly on the, on the operations that you did at the Operational Training Unit. And they selected the best crews there because it was all Special Duties and it had to be so accurate. Because on one of the operations if you had to, well, we dropped you heard about dropping silver paper. You know. And we used to carry out spoof raids because you might be, you might be going to a target down here and so the main force would go there but they’d send a spoof raid which was mainly 192 Squadron, well 100 Group and you used to throw silver paper out which when they picked it up they thought it was a pukka raid because these strips of silver paper were half the wavelength of the [pause] It was all clever stuff. And if you were a minute early or two minutes late on your datum point you had to write an explanation. I don’t know how that happens so it was really, you know you had to be we were chosen to go to that squadron because of our ability at OTU. I mean, my skipper I mean he used to volunteer to fly with the main force and go just as a passenger. He was an Australian and he did that just for experience.
PL: So did you stay with that squadron for the whole of the war?
AM: Yes. Until, until the war against Germany finished and then we were transferred to — actually what we, what we had to do then, I mean we could, I could have volunteered for Transport Command or something like that. But we’d done our tour. We were entitled to a rest period. And so we took the rest period and then eventually we ended up as, in Canada. No. I beg your pardon. I’m ahead of myself now. We were — they sent, they sort of give you a ground trade. So although I was a warrant officer navigator I was an AC 2 equipment accounts. And all I did was write my name on the top of the paper and passed out [laughs] I didn’t answer any of the questions. Just passed. And from there I was sent to India. Of course they, they couldn’t get, they couldn’t find employment for all the people who were being demobbed so they sent them to India. And I was out there for eleven months and I did nothing except draw my pay.
PL: So quite an experience.
AM: So it was. It was quite it was quite interesting out there. I mean it was an experience which I would never had otherwise but, otherwise. But in general, I mean you know I’ve attended lectures about, from historians about what Bomber Command did and how ineffective they were and how barbaric it was. Well, I accept that in the early days it was like tally-ho. And they used to go off. They were given the target. Many of them didn’t find it because they didn’t have the electronic equipment or radar equipment to navigate properly. It was all on DR and maybe didn’t find the targets. With their resources they got shot down and their losses were tremendous in the early days. They were flying Blenheims and Wellingtons and things like that. But, and Arthur Harris, I mean, I mean I think really he did an awful lot towards the war. I mean a lot of people said it was barbaric. Well, not once were we, when we were briefed when we were going was it said, ‘You’re going to bomb civilians.’ It was always a strategic target and the one, the thing that comes to mind is Dresden. I mean at that time Dresden was already twenty miles from the Russian border. And we bombed Dresden during the night. The Americans did it too. But after Stalingrad, the Battle of Stalingrad the Germans retreated and were regrouping in that area. And as I said this New Zealand crew went to Dresden and it was a fire attack. But what we, our brief was that we were to disrupt the reorganisation. That was the brief. It wasn’t that we had to destroy Dresden. And it was really these fire bombs there. You see Harris’s idea was instead of just haphazardly one aircraft followed by another aircraft flying in a stream the ground forces ARP could cope with it. He said you’ve got to fly in a stream and you’ve got to be through that target in ten minutes so that the concentration was too much for the ground forces. And the only thing that comes to my mind in, I mean they changed the method of bombing. And that was if you had a conventional bomb it went into the ground and it dug a hole and that was it. I mean there was a terrific explosion. But they then developed these four thousand pound bombs which were tin cans really, strapped together. One thousand pounds each strapped together to make up and I mean and they hit the ground, blasted and demolished the property so therefore civilians must have been killed. Also, I mean I listened to a lecture in Newcastle by a chap from Exeter University and he’s written several books on this and he castigated Bomber Command for being inaccurate et cetera. Well, when you were bombing you didn’t bomb the target you bombed the flares which the Pathfinders put down. And there was one raid at Essen where Germans put dummy path, dummy flares down and all the bombs of our thousand bomber raid went in to that field. So after that they developed what they called the master bomber technique. And the master bomber used to fly lower than the main force and identify the target. So when the Pathfinders came along he could tell them where they’d gone wrong. So where you had red, green and yellow so if the red ones were the wrong ones you’d tell them where to put the green. And so you then really bombed the target. And I think that was more precise then what the Americans did because the Americans flew in daylight and they flew in formation. And I did go on to, when I was at Marston Moor went on to the B12s and the equipment that they had for navigation was abysmal. I mean it couldn’t be compared with what we had. But the armament that they had was terrific. And they, when I was working actually I worked with a chap who was a colonel in the American Air Force and he said ‘we carpet bombed.’ And they went through the target and dropped their bombs to make sure that they hit something. Whereas we were bombing specific things. And that’s the, that’s the thing which never came through from any of these historians. So —
PL: So, talking, talking about the way Bomber Command has been treated since the war do you think that that was a political decision?
AM: Well, it was political as far as Churchill was concerned in so much that he was all in favour. I mean the thing that you’ve got to remember that German civilians did not know there was a war on. I mean because Hitler controlled the whole of Europe and the people in Germany, there was no blackout or anything. And it was only the air force who let them know that there was a war on. And we flew all those years, long before the D-Day landings without any back up from anybody. And it was just to keep the war, keep the people, in the German’s minds that there was a war. And they got the biggest shock of their life when Berlin was bombed. And they started it and we finished it. And that’s my view of the of the air force because they were really, what was written about them was so far from the truth it was unbelievable really. Otherwise you wouldn’t have done it.
PL: It’s taken a long time to get recognition.
AM: A long time to — ?
PL: Get recognition.
AM: Oh it has, I mean, I don’t know how it came about but for years I mean you used to read the papers and they used to say it was a waste of time, the German people were as strong as ever but they weren’t. They couldn’t have been once the bombing came because we were doing it at night time and the Americans were doing it during the daylight because all they were doing was map reading. And it took, an example is that in 100 Group the main force was stood down because of some leakage of information. So they had an operation just to keep them on their toes and the American Air Force, 8th Air Force acted as Pathfinders. And as I said before they had no navigational equipment and they marked the whole of Northern Germany [laughs] And we just bombed, because with, there was a system called Gee which was, you had two stations — one in North Africa and one somewhere up in Iceland. And they sent out beams and where they intersected you could navigate. You could set them up and you could navigate within four hundred yards which was amazing really. And a lot of people did drop their bombs on Gee. And that was amazingly put on our aircraft on 192 Squadron. We had Gee. We had H2S which is your own transmitter which sends out transmissions and you can really see and it shows you rivers, coastlines, towns et cetera. But the German night fighters could home in on this and shoot you down so there was generally H2S silence, you know from four degrees east. So you couldn’t do that. But H2S was great. You could, because it was just like map reading like the American’s did. And then we also had another system called Loran which was like the, it was for Transport Command really. And it took, you took two position lines. In DR navigation you’re flying along a path and to find out where you are you take a reading or a compass reading on a certain point, wait a few minutes and take another reading and then you transfer this line and where those two lines crossed that’s where you are. But that was only accurate within, you know, because the aircraft flies like that and it was accurate within about twelve miles or something like that. But as I say Gee you could navigate within, well say four hundred metres. Which, I developed a system with my bomb aimer and we could get further west, further east than the majority of crews because the Gee system, it sent up signals and when you, what they called strobed them it became like a, like a hillock and the others on the other side so if you kept those two together you could navigate further. Because Germany were no idiots. They were clever as well. I mean they used to jam the radar and the Gee by putting up what they called Grass or Railings. And if you lost that signal you couldn’t find it again. So, I mean but we were too clever for our own good and we went to Potsdam. And the winds were two seventy five mile an hour. And that’s, and then the Met men said, ‘When you pass through this point you’ll pass through a front and the winds will veer to three forty at forty.’ But I got to the point and I was getting readings of two seventy. So I had to alter my flight plan and waste eight minutes. So we wasted eight minutes. As a result we ended up ten minutes late on the target. And strangely enough the chap that I worked with when I was at BOC he lived in Low Fell, he was over the target at the same time. There were two, two of us over the target. We got coned by the blue searchlights and we put the nose down and the speed went off the clock and the gyro compass toppled. So we just flew on the P6 compass and ended up, well I thought it was Lisle but the wireless operator read what they called a pundit, which is a flashing light and he gave me that and I said, ‘Well that’s near Paris.’ So we didn’t know what to do so we just flew on until I thought well we’ve got to get rid of H2S. I’ll switch it on and I’d altered course north because we were about to hit the coastline. And the skipper said, ‘Oh. That’s the Thames Estuary.’ ‘That’s — sorry but you’re wrong. It’s le Havre.’ It’s going the other way. So we map read back there, back from there on Gee. But they were the sort of —
PL: So did you have a gunner with you? Were you, were you able to defend yourselves? Did you have a gunner with you?
AM: I had two gunners. I had a mid-upper gunner and a rear gunner. And, in that sort of thing [laughs] I mean they could be looking at a Perspex screen and you could see a dot on it, the odd dirt. Is that an enemy aircraft? And there was only once that we ever had to take evasive action from night fighters. But another thing not known is that a lot of, I mean you’re supposed to fly at a certain height within a stream five miles wide but a lot of people flew just above that to avoid the flak. We never did that. We always went through the flak because if you flew above the flak you were liable to be attacked by night fighters who could home on to you. And we lost more aircraft through night fighters than what we did through flak. So we took the option. And I can remember we, there was a chap flew with us. We went to Dortmund and we went through the flak. We got hit, turned on our backs and we came back and although you thought the aircraft had been blown apart there were three tiny holes in the aircraft. One took the top off the skipper’s knuckle. One came in beside the wireless operator’s leg. Another just missed the rear gunner. But they were only three tiny holes and you’d thought the plane had been blown apart. And I mean that was the sort of, that was one of the few times that we had any, that we got involved in anything like that. We were more than fortunate but I think it was a lot of good management as well because we never had any speech on the aircraft other than commands. Others they used to have Joe Loss playing the music. I flew with one, one crew as a passenger and they were, they had Joe Loss on and it was like, it was terrible. I couldn’t, I couldn’t bear it really. But we only spoke, you know, on commands. When we had to. So that’s the story.
PL: So you were obviously a very tight crew. Did you fly with the same crew throughout?
AM: We flew with the same crew throughout. And you lived as a crew. I mean we had, both the Canadians got promoted. They got commissions. I was recommended for a commission twice. And on the first time I refused to go forward because there was a superstition that you don’t accept a commission while you’re on operational duty. So I was, when we finished the tour I was recommended to go forward again. And I got turned down which, what they was said was that it was because they were over staffed on officers in the navigation section. A lad that was flying with us who refused to fly with us again because we went through the flak got a commission. But that was just the luck of the draw.
PL: So, tell me about your last, your last flight.
AM: The last flight was on —
PL: You knew that was going to be your last flight did you?
AM: Not really. It was in April. I think it was April the 24th and the war finished on May the 8th. I can tell you where I went to [pause] April the 24th to Dortmund. That was the last flight that we did. I’ve got Donald’s signature so many times in there. He was quite a good bloke actually. I mean he’d gone right through from the Battle of Britain. Right through the war and survived. Lovely bloke though.
PL: So tell me a little bit about what happened next.
AM: Well, we were sent on an indefinite leave after the war. And then as I said you know we were regraded to a ground force then on equipment accounts. I ended up in a place called Kankinara which is in India. Which was like an old jute station. Oh the pong was terrible. I mean we were living in absolute luxury. But outside, I mean there were just hovels. There were people living in, about forty people living in a room this size and I mean they had meat hanging up, you know. It was covered in flies. And bowls of currants — you went like that [clap] and it was flour. And that was the sort of conditions that they Indians were living under yet we were living in these palatial places which obviously the people of the East India Company had lived in. But I mean it’s strange in Calcutta. I mean the temperature used to get up to about eighty but in the morning there would be a white frost. So we were wearing blues, you know and then you’d change in to khaki.
PL: So, did you experience any of the, any of partition of India?
AM: Yes. I was in Bombay at the time when they were fighting for independence. And as I say I was in fact I was trained as, in. I worked in the services thing. But I went to, I went to Bombay I was in pay accounts. And all, all I did was go through a list of things which had thumbprints on it and stamp them and say yes. But we were then, because we had been in aircrew we knew because of all the riots in Bombay et cetera of course they used to throw stones from vehicles et cetera. And we were, used to go, what they called garrey guards and we used to have sten guns and we’d go back and we were going along this road and we got through. And when we couldn’t get through because the streets were absolutely jammed full of people we turned to come back and there was a tree being felled across the road. So we jumped out and all of about forty of them were trying to get through a door about this size [laughs] and they were saying, ‘Sahib,’ but I mean so we did that. We sort of transported the civilians back to their place where they were living and that’s the, that’s the only involvement we’d got in that. But it was definitely there and I mean they had to bring tanks in eventually. But eventually they did get their independence.
PL: So then you went home. So then you went home.
AM: I did.
PL: And what happened then?
AM: When I came home, well I got married in 1945 and while I was out there could have gone on to British Overseas Airways but I promised not to fly again [laughs] And I came home and it would, it’s a pity because I enjoyed flying. But I came home and they were bound to give you your job back. Well, I went back to BOC and I worked there. Eventually went in to the purchasing side. Became purchase, I was there for, including your war service, thirty years. Got my watch to prove it [laughs] And then, but our eldest son who was taking his what they call O levels now, and it meant that I was going to have to transfer down to the London area. Nobody was very happy so stayed in this area. And eventually I went to Hartlepool and my daughter wouldn’t move down to Hartlepool because she said, ‘You didn’t move for our Neil.’ [laughs] So that’s right I was going to move to Shotton Village, a nice estate, and you wouldn’t. You said, ‘I’m not moving.’ [laughs] So, and that was it. So I stayed with BOC and then eventually they moved me to London which wasn’t a particularly good move. And from there I went from BOC to Foster Wheeler. I then transferred. I got into the off shore industry. Then I went to Charlton-Leslie which was, it was a part of the BT Group and they were in to the offshore and that was just about collapsing. So I transferred and went to NEI and I was working in the nuclear industry. And then I retired at sixty five. So I’ve been retired now twenty eight years.
PL: So did you keep in touch with the rest of your crew?
AM: We used to meet. Well, actually rather strange. I mean when we picked up an engineer he was Geordie. He came from Newcastle. I thought great another Geordie in the crew. But he was the strangest lad. I mean I can remember him, we were at the, we used to report to the flights and the NAAFI wagon used to come around. And he said to me, he said, ‘Can you buy me a cup of tea and a wad.’ I said, ‘Oh that’s ok. I have some.’ So I bought him a cup of tea and then at lunchtime he says, ‘Can you lend me a half a crown to get a packet of cigarettes?’ I said, ‘But you’ve got a pound note in your wallet.’ He said, ‘I don’t want to break into it.’ [laughs] And we used to go out for a drink and there were eight of us with pints of beer. And Taff, Welshman he used to drink rough cider and after he’d had two he was legless [laughs] And, but Green who was the engineer, we got wise to him and said, ‘Right. You’re first shout.’ So he stopped coming out with us. So we lived as a, not as a seven man crew but as a six man crew. It’s unfortunate because he missed an awful lot. And unfortunately I think they’re all dead now. I’m the only survivor. But you asked about meeting. Well, the two Australians went back to Australia obviously. But the bomb aimer, the mid-upper gunner and the rear gunner and myself used to meet down in Tring because my eldest son lived in Tring and the, Taff was a Welshman. Came from Newport. Chas the bomb aimer came from Cheltenham. And Pete from Leicester. And that so that’s it. When we went down to visit Neil we always got together. And we did that for years didn’t we? We used to meet every year and it was good to meet up again. And we used to have a meal together and then just disburse. And then after that well Chas died. Lung cancer actually. And then we were, we had another meeting and Taff, he bought, he always had a desire to buy one of these luxurious cars. He bought it and within ten minutes of where we were meeting he had an accident. And he damaged his chest et cetera. Well, he died subsequently and then there was only Pete and I and as I say we used to meet and we went to Elvington to see this Halifax. And then after that it just died but as far as I’m concerned I think the, well Laurie Mottler was about ten years older than what we were. So he would be a hundred and something if he was here. And Gibby was older than us so I think they all must be dead now. And that brings us up to date really.
PL: Well, Fred, that’s an amazing story. Thank you very much indeed.
AM: I don’t think you’ll print all that.
PL: Is there, is there anything else that you’d like to talk about?
AM: I don’t know. Not really. Except that I was appalled by some of the stuff that was put in the newspapers about Bomber Command. I mean we were portrayed as being sadists, didn’t care but it wasn’t like that at all.
PL: Well thank you very much indeed for your interview.
AM: That’s the first time I’ve told that story for a long, long time.
PL: It’s a wonderful story. Thank you very much indeed.
[recording paused]
PL: So we’re recommencing the tape and Fred you were just telling me about —
AM: Well the raids on Dresden and Chemnitz, in that area they were tactical because the German army was regrouping after the defeat at Stalingrad. And to avoid them regrouping we bombed them and it was for that reason that we were briefed. It was nothing to do with scaring the population or killing civilians or anything. And because it was so near, it was only twenty miles from the Russian Front they gave us a Union Jack.
PL: But this was, where was it you bombed? It wasn’t Dresden.
AM: We went to Chemnitz.
PL: Yeah.
AM: And I mean we only carried a token bomb just for the cover up to show that we were in Bomber Command. They didn’t want people to know that we were on Special Duties. And that was one of the things that we did. I mean we only carried maybe five hundred pounds or a thousand pounds of conventional bombs or these aluminium fire bombs. But —
PL: But you wore —
AM: But that was interesting that.
PL: A Union Jack badge.
AM: Yes. Well you hung it around your neck.
PL: And you hung it around your neck.
AM: Yeah. And that was it.
PL: And that was in case —
AM: Well, it was sufficient to show that you were British. To get through the Russian lines. So —
PL: And you were telling me about the New Zealand crew. Some New Zealanders.
AM: The New Zealand. Well, they were only in our billet for a short while. I mean, for example I mean there was seventeen. Was there fifteen or seventeen in our billet? And there was, the only people who survived were the C Flight crew. There was a navigator and a special operator in our billet. There was a lad called Tommy Campbell which was sad really. He was a Canadian and he flew as a spare bod as we called them and he used to throw Window out. And he’d done twenty nine operations and they put the number up to thirty three for a tour. And he did thirty two and they put it up to thirty six. And on his thirty fourth operation, well they got hit by flak. And the chap who was one of the special operators asked him to jump and he wouldn’t and he had to push him out of the road and jump. And Tommy stayed and he was killed. But he was afraid to jump. And that was at a place called Rheinau. So there was those were missing and this New Zealand crew, so and out of the fifty or something there were only five of us left. So that was the odds that were, you know. They said there was fifty percent loss in aircrew in Bomber Command. And it comes always back to that figure. I mean I went, we had three lads from Birtley. I was the only one that survived. The lads that I went camping with I was the only one. But it always came back to this tremendous figure of the loss of people who actually operated. Because I think there was only a hundred and ten thousand operated but there were about three hundred thousand trained and they didn’t operate at all. These are facts which don’t come to light really.
PL: Thank you Fred. Thank you for that additional piece of information.
AM: What?
PL: Thank you very much for that additional information.
AM: Oh, you’re welcome.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AMarshallAH161012
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Alfred Marshall
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Format
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00:51:47 audio recording
Creator
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Pam Locker
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-10-12
Description
An account of the resource
Alfred Marshall volunteered for the Royal Air Force and was called up to serve with two others from his home town of Birtley, neither of whom survived the war. He flew operations as a navigator with 192 Squadron from RAF Foulsham including Special Operations. He discusses the use of navigational aids including Gee, H2S and Loran and describes flying through and being hit by anti aircraft fire. He also speaks of the strategic aims of the bombing of areas including Dresden and how this has been perceived. He finished his service in India and later worked in the off shore and nuclear energy industries.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
India
England--Norfolk
England--Yorkshire
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Carolyn Emery
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942-01-01
1945
100 Group
192 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
fear
Gee
H2S
Halifax
navigator
perception of bombing war
RAF Foulsham
RAF Marston Moor
superstition
training
V-2
V-weapon
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/185/3629/LSayerT591744v1.1.pdf
83e258c6faf6ed7815681549299d9b06
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Sayer, Tom
Tom Sayer
T Sayer
Description
An account of the resource
13 items. An oral history interview with Flying Officer Thomas Sayer DFM (1922 - 2021, 591744 54901 Royal Air Force), two log books, service material, newspaper cuttings and photographs. After training as a pilot in the United States of America, Tom Sayer flew Halifaxes with 102 Squadron at RAF Pocklington. He was commissioned in 1944 and became an instructor.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Tom Sayer and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-02-17
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Sayer, T
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Tom Sayer's Royal Canadian Air Force pilot's flying log book. Book one
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LSayerT591744v1
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. Coastal Command
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942
1943-02-22
1943-02-25
1943-02-28
1943-03-03
1943-03-06
1943-03-09
1943-03-12
1943-03-15
1943-04-30
1943-05-25
1943-05-26
1943-05-27
1943-05-28
1943-05-29
1943-05-30
1943-06-11
1943-06-12
1943-06-19
1943-06-20
1943-06-21
1943-06-22
1943-07-13
1943-07-14
1943-07-15
1943-07-16
1943-07-24
1943-07-25
1943-07-26
1943-07-30
1943-07-31
1943-08-09
1943-08-10
1943-08-11
1943-08-12
1943-08-13
1943-08-17
1943-08-18
1943-08-23
1943-08-24
1943-08-25
1943-08-27
1943-08-28
1943-08-30
1943-08-31
1943-09-01
1943-09-05
1943-09-06
1943-09-27
1943-09-28
1943-09-29
1943-09-30
1943-10-04
1943-10-05
1943-10-08
1943-10-09
1944-07-18
1944-07-19
1944-09-01
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
France
Germany
Great Britain
United States
Alabama
Florida
England--Gloucestershire
England--Yorkshire
Georgia--Atlanta
France--Le Creusot
France--Montbéliard
Germany--Aachen
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Essen
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Krefeld
Germany--Leverkusen
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Munich
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Peenemünde
Germany--Wuppertal
Italy--Milan
Germany--Düsseldorf
England--Cornwall (County)
Italy
Georgia
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Description
An account of the resource
Royal Canadian Air Force pilot's flying log book for Sergeant Tom Sayer from 28 July 1941 to 17 December 1944. Detailing training and operations flown with Coastal Command and Bomber Command. After training in the United States and Canada he served at RAF Linton on Ouse, RAF Marston Moor, RAF Pocklington. Aircraft flown were Stearman, Vultee, Harvard, Oxford, Blenheim, Whitley, Halifax, Anson, Horsa and Stirling. He carried out a total of 35 complete operations as a pilot, eight antisubmarine patrols with 10 OTU from RAF St Eval, one with 76 Squadron from RAF Marston Moor and 25 with 102 Squadron from RAF Pocklington on the following targets in France, Germany and Italy: Aachen, Berlin, Bochum, Dusseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Hannover, Krefeld, Le Creusot, Leverkusen, Mannheim, Milan, Montbeliard, Munich, Nuremberg, Peenemunde and Wuppertal. His first or second pilots on operations were Sergeant Carrie, Sergeant Hewlett, Sergeant Lewis, Pilot Officer Mann, Sergeant Green, Flying Officer Phillips, Sergeant Davis, Sergeant Henderson, Sergeant Thorpe, Sergeant Miller, Flight Sergeant Cummings and Flying Officer Kay. He then became an instructor and glider tug pilot. The log book is well annotated and contains printed training material. He completed one additional special operation 18 July 1944 with 620 Squadron from RAF Fairford ‘(SAS. 3 chutists, 24 containers 4 paniers [sic])’ and 1 September 1944 from RAF Ringway ‘parachute jump 600’ singly into lake.’
10 OTU
102 Squadron
1652 HCU
17 OTU
620 Squadron
76 Squadron
81 OTU
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
Blenheim
bombing
bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943)
Bombing of Peenemünde (17/18 August 1943)
Flying Training School
Halifax
Halifax Mk 1
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
Halifax Mk 5
Harvard
Heavy Conversion Unit
Horsa
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
RAF Fairford
RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor
RAF Leconfield
RAF Linton on Ouse
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Ossington
RAF Pocklington
RAF Ringway
RAF Sleap
RAF St Eval
RAF Stanton Harcourt
RAF Tilstock
RAF Upwood
Stearman
Stirling
submarine
training
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/81/7914/LGodfreyCR1281391v10001.2.pdf
2bb4feee369606f050f7e0e0563b6922
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
Godfrey, Charles Randall
Subject
The topic of the resource
World War (1939-1945)
Description
An account of the resource
64 items. The collection concerns Flight Lieutenant Charles Randall Godfrey DFC (b. 1921, 146099, Royal Air Force) and consists of his logbook and operational notes, items of memorabilia, association memberships, personnel documentation, medals and photographs. He completed 37 operations with 37 Squadron in North Africa and the Mediterranean and 59 operations with 635 Squadron. He flew as a wireless operator in the crew of Squadron Leader Ian Willoughby Bazalgette VC.
The collection has has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by David Charles Godfrey and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Godfrey, CR
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-11-18
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
Charles Godfey's observer's and air gunner's flying log book
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LGodfreyCR1281391v10001
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Belgium
Egypt
France
Libya
Greece
Germany
Gibraltar
Great Britain
Netherlands
Scotland
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Belgium--Haine-Saint-Pierre
Egypt--Alexandria
Egypt--Cairo
Egypt--Ismailia (Province)
Egypt--Marsá Maṭrūḥ
Egypt--Tall al-Ḍabʻah
England--Berkshire
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Cumbria
England--Devon
England--Gloucestershire
England--Hampshire
England--Kent
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
England--Northumberland
England--Oxfordshire
England--Rutland
England--Shropshire
England--Suffolk
England--Wiltshire
England--Worcestershire
England--Yorkshire
France--Angers
France--Caen
France--Creil
France--Mantes-la-Jolie
France--Nucourt
France--Rennes
Germany--Wiesbaden
Germany--Berchtesgaden
Germany--Bottrop
Germany--Chemnitz
Germany--Dorsten
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Düren (Cologne)
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Essen
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Kleve (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Germany--Mainz (Rhineland-Palatinate)
Germany--Merseburg
Germany--Mönchengladbach
Germany--Munich
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Osnabrück
Germany--Osterfeld
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Troisdorf
Germany--Wanne-Eickel
Germany--Wesel (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Wesseling
Greece--Ērakleion
Greece--Piraeus
Libya--Darnah
Libya--Tobruk
Netherlands--Hasselt
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Scotland--Moray
Germany--Münster in Westfalen
England--Cornwall (County)
North Africa
Libya--Banghāzī
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Libya--Gazala
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1942-03-23
1942-06-10
1942-06-11
1942-06-12
1942-06-13
1942-06-14
1942-06-15
1942-06-16
1942-06-17
1942-06-18
1942-06-19
1942-06-20
1942-06-22
1942-06-23
1942-06-24
1942-06-25
1942-06-26
1942-06-28
1942-06-29
1942-07-02
1942-07-03
1942-07-05
1942-07-08
1942-07-09
1942-07-10
1942-07-12
1942-07-13
1942-07-15
1942-07-16
1942-07-17
1942-07-19
1942-07-20
1942-07-25
1942-07-26
1942-07-28
1942-07-29
1942-07-31
1942-08-01
1942-08-06
1942-08-07
1942-08-08
1942-08-09
1942-08-14
1942-08-15
1942-08-16
1942-08-17
1942-08-18
1942-08-19
1942-08-21
1942-08-22
1942-08-23
1942-08-24
1942-08-25
1942-08-26
1942-08-27
1942-08-28
1942-08-29
1942-08-30
1942-08-31
1942-09-01
1942-09-03
1942-09-05
1942-09-06
1942-09-08
1942-09-09
1944-05-06
1944-05-08
1944-05-12
1944-05-13
1944-05-27
1944-05-28
1944-05-29
1944-06-05
1944-06-07
1944-06-08
1944-06-09
1944-06-12
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1945-01-23
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1945-04-11
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1945-05-05
1945-05-07
1945-05-15
1945-05-22
1945-06-08
1945-06-18
1945-08-03
1945-08-05
1944-06-06
1944-08-03
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Description
An account of the resource
Observer's and air gunner's flying log book for Pilot Officer Godfrey from 3 of February 1941 to 25 of September 1945 detailing training schedule, instructional duties and operations flown. Aircraft flown were Dominie, Proctor, Wellington, Hampden, Anson, Defiant, Martinet, Stirling, Lancaster, C-47 and Oxford. He was stationed at RAF Manby, RAF Bassingbourn, RAF Harwell, RAF Lossiemouth, RAF Downham Market, RAF Hemswell, RAF Wittering, RAF Abingdon, RAF Upper- Heyford, RAF Upwood, RAF Gillingham, RAF Cranwell, RAF Melton Mowbray, RAF Church Fenton, RAF Market Drayton, RAF Waddington, RAF Upavon, RAF Sywell, RAF Carlisle, RAF Linton-On-Ouse, RAF Newbury, RAF Cottesmore, RAF Brize Norton, RAF Exeter, RAF Andover, RAF Hampstead Norris, RAF Hythe, RAF Gibraltar, RAF St Eval, RAF El Dabba, RAF Shaluffa, RAF Abu Sueir, RAF Almaza, RAF Blyton, RAF Ingham, RAF Marston Moor, RAF Leeming, RAF Acklington, RAF Middleton St. George, RAF Newmarket, RAF Moreton-in-Marsh, RAF Leconfield, RAF Skipton-on-Swale, RAF Wyton, RAF Warboys, RAF Westcott, RAF Gravely and RAF Worcester. He completed 37 operations with 37 Squadron in North Africa and the Mediterranean and 59 operations with 635 Squadron to targets in Belgium, France and Germany. Targets included: Heraklion, Piraeus, Derna, Tamimi, Benghazi Harbour, Gazala, Mersa Matruh, Ras El Shaqiq, El Daba, Tobruk, Fuqa, Quatafiya, Düren, Munster, Mantes- Gassicourt rail yards, Haine St. Pierre rail yards, Hasselt rail yards, Rennes, Angers rail yards, Caen, Ravigny rail yards, Nucourt, Wesseling oil refineries, L’Hey, Kiel, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Notre Dame, Trossy St. Maximin, Karlsruhe, Merseburg, Essen, Ludwigshafen, Duisburg, Dusseldorf, Mönchengladbach, Troisdorf, Dortmund, Nuremberg, Hannover, Munich, Gelsenkirchen, Mainz, Wiesbaden, Osterfeld, Kleve, Wanne- Eickel, Chemnitz, Wesel, Worms, Hemmingstedt, Dorsten, Bottrop, Osnabruck, Berchtesgaden, Ypenburg and Rotterdam. Notable events are that Charles Godfrey undertook a search and rescue operation in a Defiant and during the operation to Trossy St Maximin 4 August 1944 his aircraft, Lancaster ND811, was brought down by anti-aircraft fire. Whilst he survived and evaded, his pilot, Ian Willoughby Bazalgette was awarded the Posthumous Victoria Cross. The hand written notes added to the end of the log book give a description to the crash, and his attempts to evade capture. Pilot Officer Godfrey also took part in Operation Manna, Operation Exodus and Operation Dodge.
11 OTU
15 OTU
20 OTU
37 Squadron
635 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
Anson
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
bombing of the Normandy coastal batteries (5/6 June 1944)
Bombing of Trossy St Maximin (3 August 1944)
C-47
Cook’s tour
Defiant
Dominie
evading
Hampden
killed in action
Lancaster
Martinet
missing in action
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
Pathfinders
Proctor
RAF Abingdon
RAF Andover
RAF Bassingbourn
RAF Blyton
RAF Brize Norton
RAF Carlisle
RAF Church Fenton
RAF Cottesmore
RAF Cranwell
RAF Downham Market
RAF Graveley
RAF Hampstead Norris
RAF Harwell
RAF Hemswell
RAF Ingham
RAF Leconfield
RAF Leeming
RAF Linton on Ouse
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Manby
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Melton Mowbray
RAF Middleton St George
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Newmarket
RAF Skipton on Swale
RAF St Eval
RAF Sywell
RAF Upavon
RAF Upper Heyford
RAF Upwood
RAF Waddington
RAF Warboys
RAF Westcott
RAF Wittering
RAF Wyton
shot down
Stirling
tactical support for Normandy troops
training
Victoria Cross
Wellington
wireless operator
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Cutts, Ernest
Ernest Cutts
Ernie Cutts
E Cutts
Description
An account of the resource
14 Items. One oral history interview with Ernest Cutts. Ernest Cutts enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force, and trained as an air gunner in Australia. He flew on 34 operations as a rear gunner with 466 Squadron from RAF Driffield, flying Halifaxes.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Ernest Cutts and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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
2015-10-01
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Cutts, E
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Ref No. - 43 stands for the year of enlistment, 1716 means I was the 1716th person
to enlist in the R.A.A.F Air Crew,. in that year.
I was the youngest of a family of seven (4 boys, 3 girls) from the small township
of BIRCHIP, in the MALLEE district in the North West of VICTORIA. When I turned
18 in 1943, my three older brothers were already serving in the Armed Forces,
one in the army in New Guinea, one in the Middle East in the army one in
the Air Force in Darwin, also one of my sisters was serving with the Australian
Air Force Nursing service. My two older sisters were married to service personel
serving overseas. Therefore as soon as possible after I turned 18 on 2.4.43,
I enlisted in the R.A.A.F Air Crew, seemed it was “the thing to do”, and because
The youth of Australia, felt it was their duty to defend their country.
My first posting was to No.1 Recruit Training School at Somers, Victoria.
6 weeks.
From Somers I proceeded to West Sale, Victoria , 3 B.A.G.S. (Bombing and
Gunnery School) – 3 weeks – My first flying experience took place on 24 Nov.
1943. At conclusion of this school, I qualified as an Air Gunner, and automatic
promotion to the rank of Sergeant on 9.12.43.
Dec. 43. Embarked on troop ship NEW AMSTERDAM, (pre-war flag ship of the
Dutch Merchant Navy) A 6 week sea voyage to Scotland, via Durban and Cape
Town, South Africa, Freetown capital of Sierra Leone, around the west and
north of Ireland to North Scotland, near Glasgow.
Like all Australian Air Crew, we proceeded to No.1 Personel Depot in Brighton,
South England, spent two weeks in this Holding Depot, waiting for allocation
for further flight training.
Posted to 27 Operational Training Unit in Litchfield, county of Staffordshire,
central England., where I was allocated to an Australian Air Crew as one of
Aircraft gunners. Introduction for all air crews to medium sized bombers.
This was where we were first welded together as an aircraft crew and underwent
first operational training for all air crew members. April to June. During
this time D DAY took place, and though not fully trained, we were on “ Alert
Readiness” if required.
I then had my first leave in War Tim England., awaited posting to Advanced
Operational Flying School at 1625 H.C.U. (Heavy Conversion Unit) at Marsden
Moor, Yorkshire. Were introduced to Halifax Mark II Heavy 4 engine bombers.
This training took approx. 6 weeks. Jul to Sep. 44.
Pre –operational leave, then on 26/9/44 we were posted to No. 466 R.A.A.F
Squadron. (In England all R.A.A.F Bomber Squadrons were designated with prefix
“4”) at Driffield, Yorkshire, England.
Whilst serving in this Squadron our crew completed 34 operational bombing
raids over Germany and occupied Holland. Some of the cities are listed below.
DUISBERG _ RHUR VALLEY. 1057 aircraft participated in this raid.
HANOVER, ESSEN, COLOGNE, GELSENKIRCHEN, MAINZ, CHEMNITZ, WAPPERATAL.
I completed my 34th tour on 15th March 1945.
If Aircrew survived 30 operations, it was normal practise for that crew to
be withdrawn from further bombing raids.
[Page Break]
-2-
After completion of active service with 466 Squadron, I was posted back to
27 Operational Training Unit (O.T.U.) at Litchfield, as an instructor until
V.E. DAY (Victory in Europe) 3 months later.
The Commanding Officer of 27 O.T.U. was selected to form a new squadron of
R.A.A.F. personal, currently serving in England, to return to Australia,
with the very latest bomber aircraft “ The Lincoln”, to instruct R.A.A.F.
personel in Australia, in the use of this aircraft, for the purpose of bombing
Japanese mainland. The Commanding Officer of this squadron, requested
that I join his crew.
While waiting for this operation to take place, our new crew were employed
flying to Berlin in Germany and Bari in Italy, bringing home British prisoners
of war. After three such trips the war against Japan ended.
WORLD WAR II HAD ENDED.
Shortly after, along with all Australian Aircrew, I returned to Australia,
on the British troop ship, ATHLONE CASTLE, via the Suez Canal and Bombay,
India, arriving at Port Melbourne in Nov. 45, aged 20 years and 7 months. My
family and many other families were waiting to welcome us home.
Thereafter, I was quickly demobilized and returned to my pre-war occupation
with the Post Master General’s Department.
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
Ernest Cutts' memoir
Description
An account of the resource
Two typewritten pages detailing the life of Ernest Cutts. He was the youngest of seven children, born in NW Victoria, Australia. He enlisted as aircrew on his 18th birthday and was posted to No 1 Recruit Training School in Victoria. Next he went to RAAF West Sale to learn air gunnery. On completion of this in December 1943 he sailed to Scotland.Then he transferred to 27 Operational Training Unit at Lichfield after which 1652 Heavy Conversion Unit, Marston Moor. Operationally he served with 466 squadron at Driffield. He completed 34 operations by 15th March 1945. He was then posted to 27 Operational Training Unit at Lichfield as an instructor. Whilst waiting a transfer to Australia he did three trips as part of Operation Dodge bringing prisoners of war back to Britain. On demobilisation in Australia he returned to work at the Post Master General's department.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ernest Cutts
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1999-09-01
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
BCuttsECuttsEv10001, BCuttsECuttsEv10002
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
Great Britain
Italy
England--Yorkshire
England--Brighton
England--Lichfield
Victoria
England--Staffordshire
England--Sussex
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Claire Monk
Sally Des Forges
1652 HCU
27 OTU
466 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bombing
Heavy Conversion Unit
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operational Training Unit
RAF Driffield
RAF Lichfield
RAF Marston Moor
recruitment
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/244/8008/LCuttsE431716v1.2.pdf
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Cutts, Ernest
Ernest Cutts
Ernie Cutts
E Cutts
Description
An account of the resource
14 Items. One oral history interview with Ernest Cutts. Ernest Cutts enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force, and trained as an air gunner in Australia. He flew on 34 operations as a rear gunner with 466 Squadron from RAF Driffield, flying Halifaxes.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Ernest Cutts and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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
2015-10-01
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Cutts, E
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
Ernest Cutts’ air gunner's flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
Air gunner's log book for Ernest Cutts, rear gunner, covering the period 23 November 1943 to 21 September 1945. Detailing his flying training, operations and post war flying. He was stationed at RAF West Sale, RAF Litchfield, RAF Marston Moor, RAF Driffield and RAF Metheringham. Aircraft flown in were Oxford, Battle, Wellington, Halifax and Lancaster.Included are photograph of the types of aircraft flown on the relevant pages, plus a photo of an Me 410 which they shot down. He flew 34 operations, 14 Daylight and 20 Night, with 466 Squadron. Targets were, Sterkrade, Kleve, Bochum, Duisberg, Essen, Domburg, Cologne, Gelsenkirchen, Hagen, Soest, Dortmund, Hannover, Hanau, Saarbrucken, Stuttgart, Mainz, Wanne-Eickel, Goch, Kamen, Chemnitz, Hemmingstedt, Wuppertal and Bottrop. His pilot on operations was Flying Officer McCallum. He also flew Operation Spasm to Berlin and operation Dodge to Bari with 467 Squadron.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
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
LCuttsE431716v1
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Netherlands
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Bottrop
Germany--Chemnitz
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Essen
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Goch
Germany--Hanau
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Kamen
Germany--Kleve (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Mainz (Rhineland-Palatinate)
Germany--Oberhausen (Düsseldorf)
Germany--Soest
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Wanne-Eickel
Germany--Wuppertal
Italy--Bari
Netherlands--Domburg
Victoria
Germany--Saarbrücken
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Hagen (Arnsberg)
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
1944-10-06
1944-10-07
1944-10-09
1944-10-14
1944-10-15
1944-10-21
1944-10-23
1944-10-25
1944-10-29
1944-10-30
1944-11-04
1944-11-06
1944-11-30
1944-12-02
1944-12-05
1944-12-18
1944-12-30
1944-12-31
1945-01-01
1945-01-05
1945-01-06
1945-01-14
1945-01-22
1945-01-23
1945-01-28
1945-01-29
1945-02-01
1945-02-02
1945-02-04
1945-02-07
1945-02-08
1945-02-09
1945-02-26
1945-02-27
1945-03-02
1945-03-05
1945-03-06
1945-03-07
1945-03-11
1945-03-12
1945-03-13
1945-03-15
1945-09-12
1945-09-13
1945-09-18
1945-09-21
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
1652 HCU
27 OTU
466 Squadron
467 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
Battle
bombing
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 3
Me 410
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
RAF Driffield
RAF Lichfield
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Metheringham
training
Wellington
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mabey, Bernard Charles
B C Mabey
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Mabey, BC
Description
An account of the resource
Nine items. An oral history interview with Leading Aircraftsman Bernard Mabey (b. 1925, 3008464 Royal Air Force), his dog tags, some service material, and two photographs. He served as an air frame mechanic at the Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Marston Moor.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Bernard Charles Mabey and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-11-28
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
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is Monday the 28th of November 2016 and we’re in Southend talking to Bernard Mabey and he operated in the engineering activities in the RAF. What are your earliest recollections of life Bernard?
BM: I was born in Canning Town in a small terraced house. My father was an electrician and I went to primary school in Canning Town until the age of, from the age of five until eleven and then I won a scholarship to a Central School in Forest Gate at the age of eleven and then that was 1936. And of course when war was declared my school, that Central School had been evacuated to Ipswich, just outside Ipswich. I went with them for, I was only with them a couple of months at Ipswich. In fact I was at Ipswich when war was declared so obviously we were evacuated before war started. And I had a sister who was also evacuated to Oxford so, and I had a brother. I was in a family of three. My brother who was working in London. The government decided that then all the evacuees our parents had to pay a contribution towards their keep. So my father, and all I was doing, I wasn’t being educated all I was doing was digging up the grass areas around this primary school in Nacton which is just outside Ipswich and my father said, ‘You’re no point in digging, or staying up there digging. You can come home and get a job.’ So on my fourteenth birthday I went up to London [coughs] up to London, to Snow Hill at Holborn which was a big like unemployment centre and I got a job in a small commercial artists’ as an office boy. I didn’t like it so then I got the job myself with a firm of estate agents and surveyors in Plaistow. This would be in the new year. That would be 1940, early 1940 at, I think, fifteen shillings a week and I stayed with them ‘til I got called up at the age of eighteen. The firm already had one person called up and what they were doing they were paying all the time they were in the forces, half wage. Well my salary when I got called up was about two pounds a week. So I was on a pound a week from the firm. It was a guarantee that you had a job to come back to. I went to Cardington to get uniform and that photograph up there of all the crowd is when we were got our uniform. And from there after about what four or five days we were shipped up to Skegness to do our square bashing for eight weeks and we were parked in all the empty hotels along the seafront and we used to use the old canteen that was at Butlins empire down the far corner for our food. And that was not a very pleasant time. It was in the winter. There was no heating on in these hotels. There was nothing on the floor. It was just bare floorboards and you used to wake up in the morning, my bed was along the bay window and you wake up in the morning your blankets were damp from the dew coming off from the sea ‘cause, you know, you could see it just out the window. And, but after eight weeks I was extremely fit because I used to, when I was at school, going back to that time I did box for the school. I became a member of West Ham Boxing Club and I boxed in the Great Britain Schoolboy Championships.
Other: Oh.
BM: But I was only what, about, oh under six stone. I was a very small lad. But apparently they thought I was good because I was fast and West Ham were a very good boxing club. One of the best in the country. Anyway, after passing out at Skegness I had, I was posted then to training down at Locking for air frame mechanic. If you were going on engines you would go to Cosford. If you were going on air frames you would go to Locking and that’s where we went and that was, but going back to what you were saying earlier the reason I chose to go in to the air force was because A) I had joined the Air Training Corps in 1941 because we’d moved out of London then down to Laindon because of the bombing. I mean people don’t realised I don’t think that when they started the Blitz it went on for about, oh, certainly longer than a month. Every night. You used to come home from work and my mother would have tea ready. We would eat that and by eight o’clock we were down in the shelter because by five past eight the sirens would certainly go and it was, you could more or less bank on it coming like that and it wouldn’t go all clear ‘til 3 o’clock in the morning.
CB: Fifty seven days continuous.
BM: Oh yes. And that went on, as I say, for well over a month. I think it went on for more like two months. And I was reading in an article since then that West Ham which, that was in the borough of West Ham lost twenty five percent of their housing stock during the blitz and when you consider that most of their housing stock were terraced houses, and small terraced houses it was quite a lot of damage done and, well during my time working there before I got called up. I worked for this firm of estate agents and there were people getting called up as well and so the rent collectors was not a reserved occupation and so they said, ‘Right. As part of your training Mabey you will do two days a week rent collecting. Which you look after the property and you collect the rents.’ So consequently you’re cycling around on a push bike around the East End of London and, with a satchel and you finish a day with about a hundred pounds in rents but all that few years up to the age of eighteen I never got troubled once, you know. Honesty then was quite prominent. But you saw the tragedy of a lot of women that were left alone with kids ‘cause their husbands had been called up and it was pretty gruesome because a lot of them couldn’t pay their rent and they just vanished overnight. And some of the properties vanished overnight as well because you would go around there the next morning you’d find a big hole. That was just part of my education I suppose because my schooling had finished at the age of fourteen and so when I go into the air force my brother already was in the air force. He was nearly, what, two years older than me. He wanted to be air crew but he was turned down because he was colour blind but I still followed him and I also went for air crew but I was similarly colour blind as well [laughs]. So he finished up a flight mechanic on engines and I finished up, it was not my choice, they just tell you, I finished up flight mechanic on air frames and that was it. And they taught me that down at Locking as I say. I think it was about an eighteen week course. It was after that you’d, then you could look upon the possibility of getting seven days leave. So you’d gone six months plus with no leave at all. And my posting was to Marston Moor, Yorkshire which was very enlightening because bearing in mind that at Skegness discipline was very very strict. To stand in front of a corporal you had to stand to attention. You didn’t speak until you were spoken to. And if you stood in front of a sergeant you felt you were seeing God and that carried on to some degree when you were doing your training at Locking because they were all corporals and sergeants, the instructors. So then you get your kit bag and all your gear and you go up to a squadron in, on Marston Moor which was a wartime ‘drome constructed with nothing of the niceties that you saw at say, ultimately I saw at Waddington anyway. But I remember there you got up to York Station and on York Station there was a shed that you report to and they would say, ‘Where are you were posted to?’ And they would have transport available for you to ship you up to Marston Moor. Go to Marston Moor, go in to the orderly room, hand over the papers, ‘Oh yes, you’ll be, you want to see Sergeant Edie.’ Oh yeah. So I walked over to the hangar and I see a chap there and I say, ‘Can you tell me where Sergeant Edie is?’ ‘Yeah he’s up there on the trestle working on that Halifax.’ So he then just turned around to him, ‘Harry. Someone to see you.’ So he got down from the trestle and I walked up to him. Of course immediately stood to attention and, ‘Sergeant. My name is Mabey.’ And he looked at me. He said, ‘What are you standing like that for? Cut that out.’ He said. ‘That doesn’t happen,’ he said, ‘And my name is not sergeant. It’s Harry.’ And that was suddenly from as I say living in a disciplined atmosphere to get to that and of course when you go to work they give you a bike in, at Marston Moor because the runway was built, a few office buildings, a control tower and things around it and a couple of hangars but accommodation was in nissen huts scattered around and I was in one of four nissen huts on the Wetherby to York Road. Side of the road. Public road. People going by. And there was, you were all and that was accommodated something over a hundred people and no toilets. No washing facilities. You got a stand by tap outside if you wanted water and you’ve got a bike. So you worked out that if you want to go to the toilet there’s the block over there but if you also want to go and have breakfast there’s a block over there and if you’ve got to go to the hangar there’s a block over there so you’ve got the bike and if you got up a bit late in the morning you’d got a choice. What do you want to do most of all? Then you finished up you wouldn’t have breakfast because you knew the NAAFI van would come around about half past nine, 10 o’clock and you’d get a cup of tea and a cake. And that’s what it was like. But you’re going to the canteen of a night time and you’d pull out a couple of slices of bread and a mug of tea which you would put on the stove and toast the bread and warm the tea. So you would ‘cause there were no other comforts. I mean I can say that I never ever had sheets until the last three months of my four years in the air force. All we had was blankets. No pillow cases. Just a bare straw field biscuit. You had three of those and three blankets and you’d sleep on one blanket and have two wrapped around you together with your great coat when it got cold. And on top of that clothes rationing had been going on in the country for a couple of years so pyjamas were a no-no. You couldn’t afford to use clothing coupons to buy pyjamas when you were at home and so consequently when you get in to the air force you ain’t got pyjamas so you just go to bed in your pants and freeze and it was, but the question of wearing a collar and tie never existed. You wore your battle dress with a sweater which you got from the Red Cross. A white sweater and you got white socks from the Red Cross. You know, thick socks which you wore with your wellington boots with the tops turned down and this is where you worked with overalls because the aircraft were always parked out on the dispersal points which were like circles of concrete sprung off the perimeter track. The only time they were in the hangars was when they were going through a minor inspection or a major inspection. Daily inspections, they would be done out in the open. And the daily inspections were the chap on the engines would just run the engines. If the crew had made any complaints about that was not right, that was not right all you did was a daily inspection on the air frame which consist of you’d check the tyres and there used to be a few splits in the tyres. You’d go and get a gun with a rubber handle you know to insert a patch into the tyre but then the next day you’d look at that. It’s been up and it’s landed and that’s gone, come out again. It was very, I wouldn’t say it was poor but the patches didn’t work and it was just like a liquid rubber that you pressed into it. And of course all the controls on those aircraft are in cables. They’re not like electronics now. And all along the fuselage inside you’d got all the cables. Like cables going from the cockpit to the rudder or the elevators and you’d just get hold of the turn buckles and you’d just have to check all those and tighten them all up and then it was ready to go again as far as the, as far as the air frame was concerned unless there was any dents or holes in them. Then you’d have to put a patch on them and that was it. And I lasted there right through ‘til D-Day. VE day because I remember on VE day we had some new chaps had come in from Chittagong. India. They’d been out there servicing aircraft that were dealing with Burma and places like that and they’d been out in the sun too long because they were potty. They’d just announced, you know, VE day. We weren’t allowed to come home and these were just running around the huts banging out the windows with a broom and things like that you know. But there was no celebration on camp really. We just carried on. Some of them said, ‘We’re going home,’ but we weren’t really allowed to. Whether they ever did I don’t know, but and then after that I was sent to, on a fitter’s course, a short fitter’s course to turn me into what they called a Group 1 Trade, Mechanics Group 2. You can get to LAC and you get no higher. That’s you finished. But if you go on to a fitter’s course that’s a higher grade, more money and you can go up to, oh, warrant officer if necessary. And the reason being that when they assembled the Tiger Force in Waddington, this is where they were going to be based, they wanted highly trained mechanics and fitters. They had more training and more competence so, and that’s when I was shipped after that down to Waddington and the Yellow Fever inoculation. But we didn’t have much work to do because it was the people who was doing all the work were the pilots doing training, landing, cross country runs you know and that sort of thing and so we got, I think oh, seven days embarkation leave. I got that about three times. In fact people at home were saying, ‘What the hell are you doing home again?’ And we were there as I say right until VJ Day and so they then asked for volunteers and they didn’t get any to take part in a Victory Parade so the group captain said, ‘Well just take two hundred men out of that lot.’ They had nothing else for us to do and so we were shipped down to Kensington Gardens. And then after that, yes they, my posting came through and I went to [Witney] which was just outside Cambridge and it was Group Headquarters. Lovely ‘drome, you know. Very modern like Waddington was but I was posted to work in the station workshop standing at a bench making modifications for Lancasters and so on. You know, small brackets that had to be modified and so on. Doing that from nine ‘til five with collar and tie on, looking very smart. I remember one day I came out of there and I started walking and someone then shouted at me and I stopped. He said, ‘Airman, you didn’t salute me.’ I said, ‘No. I didn’t see you Sir.’ ‘Oh. He said, ‘What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘I work in the station workshop.’ ‘I see. Well you get a haircut. You need, badly need a haircut. You get a haircut and report to my office tomorrow morning.’ And I thought to myself well if that’s the sort of life so I put in a request and I think they thought they were doing me a favour because living in Laindon a posting to Cambridge is, you know, fairly easy. You could hitch hike home. So they said right if he doesn’t like it there we’ll send him somewhere and they sent me down to Somerset. And I was then servicing, it was a servicing echelon that I was on repairing or servicing Avro Yorks because after the war Avro Yorks were used by Montgomery, Field Marshal Smuts, his was there and they come in for a service and they were lovely aircraft to work on because you would walk all over them. Outside and inside. No problem. Very big. And there I was being a fitter on air frames and I was in charge of a small group of chaps. So one day a new Avro York arrived from the makers, Lancasters and so we had to do what they called an acceptance inspection and, ok. I looked over it inside and outside and the only thing I could find wrong with it was the fact that the undercarriage when it was parked you had what they called a jury strut. That is a metal pole that is framed between the spar of the main plane and also the leg of the undercart and there wasn’t one there. So, so I put it on my report and then the chap who was responsible for the engines he started running them up and well the chocks were there. Everything was all alright. He was running the engines over well they’d also done another modification inside the cockpit. There’s a blower switch. Don’t ask me what. It’s really hot air and cold blower for the engines. Now what that does I do not know but it was not my, more or less part of my employment so that was the engine bloke and there was the undercarriage lever. They’d switched them around for some unknown reason. So this bloke was running the engines and when he thought to select the hot and cold air he pulled the lever but unfortunately that was the undercarriage and so consequently you’ve got a lovely new Avro York. No camouflage on it, you know. It had come straight from out of the manufacturers. It slowly as we stood and watched it slowly go forward. The chocks held it back, the undercart had folded and then the props were going around. They started churning up the tarmac and then it stopped. Well you know where you get, I think the best way to describe it is a cottage loaf which has a bit with the crease in the middle like that whereas the fuselage was like that. Like that. That’s just simply how it went. Collapsed through the middle from the weight and then the circus began. The sergeant came out of the shed, did his nut, went running off to someone. And then a warrant officer came out. He did his nut. Went off to someone. Engineering officer, the flight lieutenant, ‘Oh that was terrible.’ And then the squadron leader came and of course then it finished up with the group captain came out and the person responsible for the engines who was, he was put under close arrest poor so and so. And we had very little work to do then so that’s when I got posted down to Membury which had a lodging, to join a lodging squadron. Still a squadron of Bomber Command but they were lodging on Transport Command territory and that was at Membury which is just outside Newbury. Now that was a terrible hole. In fact after a few weeks it was examined by the Air Ministry and they condemned it. Unfit. And so we were then transferred away from Membury which was a good thing because on the last couple of nights we were at Membury, I remember this quite clearly there were a few what I call rebels in the, in the camp as it were and we went in to Lambourn. The racing area you know to see what was in the nightlife. Having a night of drinks before we moved off. There wasn’t much doing except we came across a hall where they had a do going on and a couple of them went up to the door, knocked on the, ‘Could we come in?’ It was the local hunt ball. Now, you know [laughs] they don’t look kindly on yobs and they still, these ones persisted. I wasn’t looking for trouble so I came away but apparently, and I only learned this the next morning when we were getting ready to go off to our new station, they were allowed in but they were whisked straight through the hall into the back room where they were calmly knocked about in no uncertain way and they looked rough the next day. Bruised and cut because they had dared to, you know more or less visit the local hunt ball. But and then we went up to Netheravon and Netheravon that was a squadron there of Dakotas. The same squadron we had from Membury. We moved them across. And that was rather amusing. I mean bearing in mind I’d got back in to the squadron habit of being, not wearing a collar and tie, just wearing your sweater again and battle dress. So we flew in our aircraft, air crew were, carried us obviously you know. We went as passengers with our personal belongings and all our equipment went by road on truck and that’s how we moved out of Membury and arrived at Netheravon. Now, Netheravon had a complete boundary to it so in other words you had a gate, had a sentry and what have you but when we got there bearing in mind it was also headquarters for Transport Command. One of the units there. So we went straight in to the NAAFI to have a drink and you could see all the way around the NAAFI that the office staff there, the WAAFs all looking smart and elegant and drinking their nice cups of tea and suddenly about thirty or forty yobs come in looking not very smart, not very tidy and all they did was go to the beer tent and start supping beer. Then we had someone who could play the piano and that was it. We transformed the place but, and I was there for what, about nine months, twelve months, and I finished up there. I got demobbed from there. They sent me up but it was the best years of my life in the air force because I was an LAC then, fitter trade and I used to play a bit of cricket and I played for the local, our own squadron and ok they could do with more members so the station picked me to play as well and then part of the Group they picked me to play so I used to go in to the hangar on a Monday morning during the cricket season and the flight lieutenant engineering officer turned around to me and he said, ‘We’ll do the jobs rota. Well now, maybe. How many days cricket are you playing this week?’ I said, ‘Well sir, I’ve got a match on Wednesday, another one on Friday and I’m playing on Sunday.’ ‘Oh. So do you mind if we can fit you into work in between those days?’ [laughs] But that was the only time when I really enjoyed the company because you know the captain of the cricket team in most stations is invariably one squadron leader or a wing commander. Someone you never, you’d rarely get a chance to speak to and all the other are flight lieutenants, flying officers, several sergeants and that’s it. If you get a couple of airmen in it you’re lucky and so they make a lot of fuss of you and I got on extremely well with them, you know. We got to the Group final at cricket and we played at Abingdon in the Group final and it was drizzling with rain and we went out to field in the first innings and we had a, in our team we had a fast bowler who was a Middlesex colt. So a pretty good player and he started bowling with a new ball on a wet wicket, a damp wicket and it finished and I was filled in the slips. And of course this, this batsman he just clipped it slightly, came straight at me. Went right through my hands and hit me there, split it open. I went down on a bit of a muddy, you know, damp pitch in my whites, blood all over the place and then the rain came and so the match was abandoned. But we finished up, we re-played it at Kodak. You know Kodak the camera ground? They had a factory at Harrow just outside London and a big sports ground which large companies did and we played on that, the replay. I know it must have been around about the August time because that was the last match I played and they looked upon it as my demobilisation party. We stopped off in a pub just outside Harrow from the coach. All of us went in there and got really sloshed [laughs]. Now, I think most probably that is my, well the only other thing I can remember then is going up to Preston to get my demobilisation pack. And what I remember clearly then is getting on a bus outside the depot at Preston to go to the station wearing my uniform as usual but with a Trilby hat [laughs]. And that’s where, and of course I got eight weeks demobilisation which meant I was being paid up till almost the end of October which rounded off just about the four years. But my firm had been paying me a pound a week so I then went back to them and renewed my working life with them. But I was fortunate in some respects because at Netheravon they had a forces preliminary exam and I took, well I attended to classes of an evening and I passed it and in fact it’s on the book there. I passed that which enabled me to bypass my professional examination which I later took after I went back into civilian life. The preliminary examination. It was like the equivalent to what you used to call matriculation. So when I later started studying after I got back in to civilian life as a surveyor I didn’t have to go through the preliminary exam. I went straight in for my intermediate exam and then final. So I put it to good use and of course I was lucky enough to qualify and that would be in ’48/49. ’49. And I wanted to earn more money ‘cause there was the only way I got to qualify really was by working, oh what, four nights a week. Evening classes every night and then I got qualified. Bearing in mind my education had finished at the age of fourteen you know that was an achievement to get something but I couldn’t have got anything else otherwise and so, but the firm was still old fashioned and I said, ‘Well I was thinking about getting married,’ you know and he said, ‘Well maybe, you know when you’re married come and see me and we’ll increase your wage.’ I said, ‘Well I’ll never get married on that basis.’ So I joined, I did the horrendous thing, I joined a Ford Motor Company in their property department. In other words I broke out from being in practice but I became their property manager after a few years and from there my career rocketed, you know. I became in demand. I was head hunted twice and I finished up as a managing director of, well the share capital of the company was a million pounds fully paid up share capital and we were making, and I started that company for them. That’s what I was head hunted for. So I had a very very good life then but of course my wife became rather ill and so in the, what, in the early eighties I had a decision to make. Should I give up my job and take care of my wife or just carry on and let me wife, no. So I gave up my job and I was very gratified because my wife then lived for another twenty years. So, you know, that was the right thing to do. That’s, I never regretted it. It would most probably have killed me if I’d have carried on myself. So, you know, it was a very fast life ‘cause I was building, I became a specialist in development of industrial estates. Because, when you bear in mind that before the war factories were put up where the families of the owners decided it would be convenient. The planning laws were very limited. So consequently then war came and every factory in this country was expanded but in a what, a ship shape ad hoc situation and they were not very well designed and a lot of them got knocked out and consequently when war finished this country needed a base to prosper and that base was the development of industrial estates where you’d got a large industrial area where you put factories on it. They did it out to a little point where you could build warehouses on industrial estates but you could not put factories without permission from the Board of Trade and the Board of Trade wanted you to go where they thought unemployment was. In other word up north, Scotland, Liverpool, those sorts of places. So consequently we started persevering with buying large existing factories and modifying them to units. We worked on this principal that if you’d gone with a large factory, I mean I’m talking about factories of three hundred, four hundred thousand square feet and there were factories of that kind scattered around the country. If you’d have gone to the planners with a scheme to, you know, segregate them all in to smaller units say ten thousand feet, something like that, you’d never have got permission. They would never have granted it. So what we did, in other words we designed how we were going to cut that large building up into units and show what modifications had to be done to the elevations but not disclose the fact that the internal layout was going to be reduced to many units. So consequently then we could offer factories to people where they wanted them and that’s where, because you know in those days you couldn’t finance. Most factories that were built before the war they were built out of a loan from the bank and things like that. Whereas really they finished up under the scheme I had going with institutions, hedging funds and insurance groups and it worked very profitably. In fact I would say that I’ve been involved in building factories in most of the major towns in this country. I mean I’ve travelled a lot around this country. But it was a good life. You know. Anyway, I may have left out a lot.
CB: Where, where did you meet your wife?
BM: I met my wife in, very simply, my mum bless her. She used to be a dress maker and when we moved down to Laindon, when we came out of London and moved down to Laindon because our house had been in London had got badly damaged she used to make dresses and my late wife came to her through a friend of hers and my mum used to make dresses for her. Then when I got demobbed she was very friendly with my mother and she often used to come around there and I’d be sent out the room while these ladies started measuring herself and so on and so forth. I said I wanted to stay but they wouldn’t let me [laughs] and we got friendly and that was it.
CB: She was from, she was from the local area.
BM: Oh yes. She lived in Laindon. She’d lived in Laindon since before the war.
CB: What did she know about the RAF?
BM: She wouldn’t know. In fact she felt rather bitter about the RAF because she’d lost her husband and it took me quite a time, I mean we got married in ‘52 and if I tell you that the, although we went abroad on holidays we didn’t go by plane until the 70s. She didn’t like, didn’t want to fly. She had an aversion against flying and the way I got around it was we went for a weekend over to the Channel Islands. I said we’d do a short trip like that. We flew from Southend to Jersey and gradually weened her off it. But she wasn’t, she wasn’t very keen on the air force because she wasn’t treated very badly but she wasn’t treated very well I don’t think.
CB: So what happened to her husband?
BM: Well, he, he was buried in Belgium and –
CB: What was he flying?
BM: A Lanc. He was coming back from a trip, an operation over the Ruhr Valley and he was flying over Belgium back and they got shot down and all the crew were destroyed. But other than just the odd letter, the initial letter of, from the commanding officer she never had any conversation with RAF after that. You know, she went out there once I think before, this would be the ‘40s and saw the grave but she was, I suppose, in some respects, to put it very crudely she was almost abandoned you know, because in those times, I don’t know whether you’ve heard this before, it’s quite possible that there were squadrons that were used to take the brunt. Do what you’d call the bread and butter jobs and you know all the new, new boys coming out of qualifying as pilots would most probably be shipped down to those stations. They become almost like cannon fodder and if they were any good they would be shipped then across to 9 squadron or 617 squadron or a couple of other top squadrons.
CB: So what squadron was he?
BM: He was in 100 squadron.
CB: And how many operations had he done?
BM: Ten. He was on his tenth one when he got shot down.
CB: And when was that?
BM: That would be 1943.
CB: What was your wife’s name?
BM: His name?
CB: Your wife’s name.
BM: Armon. Her maiden name was Jee. J double E. But her married was Armon. A R M O N.
CB: Now you were in London during the war when the bombing was taking place.
BM: Yes.
CB: So, what was your first experience of bombing?
BM: First experience. It was on the Saturday that the Blitz really started and that Saturday I was going from, I’d taken a bus from Canning Town up to Stepney going to a cinema. I think it’s still up there on Commercial Road at Stepney, the Roxy, to see a film. I got as far as Poplar and the bus stopped because the siren had gone up and we were all offloaded off the bus and this was by a pub at Bedet Road in Bow and they had a surface air shelter there and we all herded in to that and first time then you looked up and the sky was full of black spots which were the aircraft all flying in formation and then they started dropping their bombs. There were a bit of hysterics coming from some of the females in this shelter and we were stuck there I know until about oh five, five, 6 o’clock. Eventually the all clear was given and we were allowed back out and I can remember walking down because the main road through Canning Town, we lived in a road that was right off the main road and I remember walking down that road about oh 6 o’clock and I could see my mother stood at the gate looking to see whether I was coming or not. And that’s what I, that’s the first memory I have of –
CB: And how close were the bombs dropping to where you were?
BM: Well they were dropping all around the place, you know. Not, not close enough to cause any damage to anyone around them but Stepney was just around the back of Limehouse where all the East India Docks were which is where they were attacking all the time. And it was quite, I suppose, continuous was about the best way to describe it. There was, you know, quite a lot of noise and so on and so forth.
CB: So the raids started at what sort of time?
BM: That would have been round about oh 2 o’clock I would think.
CB: In the, in the daytime.
BM: In the afternoon. Yeah.
CB: In the afternoon. Right. Ok.
BM: Yeah.
CB: And then on future days?
BM: On what?
CB: On the days after that?
BM: On the days after that never, not much during the day. It was always then around about 8 o’clock at night till 3 o’clock in the morning and that was continuous and of course then and when I moved to Laindon I still had to stay on duty because even, although I was only in my teens we were all on the rota to do fire watching. Although there was an air raid warden in that area our offices were in a parade of shops either side the road and so consequently we, they all had to provide two or three people every night to do fire watching.
CB: So would you explain what is fire watching and how did that work?
BM: Well fire watching was merely that you would, if they were dropping any incendiary bombs.
CB: Where would you be situated?
BM: You’d be situated in the office but when the warning went up you would then go to the front door and you would stand in the front porch and if there was any incidents take place then you would be, have to deal with them and get the fire brigade if necessary if it became too big or deal with it yourself.
CB: So your job was partly to summon help.
BM: Yeah.
CB: To deal with the fires.
BM: Yes. You were only there to be the eyes. To bring in the air raid wardens ‘cause there was always wardens about.
CB: So in the raids then, how much damage did you see and –
BM: You wouldn’t see, see much in the area I was at to be honest. I saw more of it when I went out during the day working.
CB: Yeah.
BM: But fortunately the parade of shops either side the road didn’t get damaged at all.
CB: So when you were out working your job was to collect the rents.
BM: Yeah.
CB: And just how did you do that and what were the reactions of the people?
BM: Well, when you say how did you do it? You’re just knocking on doors and each house knew which day they would be paying the rent. Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, something like that and they knew the time you were going to be there and consequently if you were going down one particular road you would hit the first door. Knock that and they would come to the door and within a few minutes you would see them all appearing all the way along and you just go through them, you know. But I never ever came up against people that were afraid of the future. They were quite, you know, loyal and quite brilliant in their attitude you know. They didn’t fear the bombing. They just thought it part of life. It’s quite amazing really.
CB: Families were quite close to each other in those day so –
[Phone ringing]
CB: Oh we’ll just stop for a mo.
[Recording paused]
BM: Yeah. Well their reaction was quite superb. You didn’t, they didn’t walk around in fear. They didn’t. They felt that as far as they were concerned you know, they, they couldn’t lose. It was quite amazing their attitude and these were all in poor, what you would call poor living accommodation. They were terraced houses. I think the rents used to be something like around about eight, nine shillings a week. So no cheap money. And they led a poor life. Most of their husbands were all called up.
CB: So the fact that husbands had been called up and were in the forces had what sort of effect on their ability to pay?
BM: It had a tremendous effect because a lot of them were really on the bone of their whatsits, you know. They just couldn’t afford to pay and some didn’t pay.
CB: What did you do when they didn’t pay?
BM: Well if you could find them. We always used to say they’d emigrated to Canvey Island. That’s where. Because they used to. I mean I can recall many cases that people who were owing the landlord. Some of them about thirty or forty pounds which in those days was a lot of money.
CB: Huge.
BM: And they just couldn’t afford to pay it and so what they did they just vanished overnight and you could never find them. It gets wroted off. Because I think they used to get an allowance from the military but that was poor compared to what they really needed. They had hard times and that was why, what used to amaze me, they were having a hard time but they still had a smile on their face. You know they were quite jolly.
CB: So you were living in Laindon which was slightly out of town but in their situation a number of them were finding that their houses had been demolished.
BM: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: What was happening then?
BM: Well they, [pause] I suppose, I don’t know, they really, they could always get repairs because during the war there was a government department, War Damage Commission which we used to have to apply to for repairing costs and ok you would get an immediate payment to cover for tarpaulins to go over the roof and also to put up windows. Cover windows. And then you would have to put forward a request for further monies when you had to do the permanent repairs which you didn’t rush to do because no sooner you’d done any further repairs they’d all be damaged again. So you know it was, in fact, that was there was more work. The collecting of the rents was limited to, say, what three hours a week. The work was getting the temporary repairs done to the property in that week. You’d have to sit down and work out with a contractor. You had a local builder that you’d employ to do these temporary repairs and so in other words you know it was all part of one’s training that you were looking after not only the collection of the rents but the management of the actual property. Because all those properties were most probably privately owned by family trusts and people like that or local businessmen.
CB: Now when you joined the RAF you came across a number of people from completely different parts of the country. How did your relationships develop?
BM: In Yorkshire, I found the people around Yorkshire were wonderful people. You know you would go out of a night time to a pub in a little village, villages like Spofforth. Used to go to Harrogate, Spofforth, Knaresborough and Boroughbridge and they would make a fuss of you. ‘You don’t want to go back to camp yet. Come back with us and ham and eggs. Have supper.’ Now, I’m saying this, I don’t want to upset you but you never had the same conviviality in Lincolnshire. You used to walk into a pub in Lincoln, they wouldn’t take no notice of you. You know. Used to call them a miserable lot of so and so’s. [laughs]. Now don’t get upset.
CB: I’m devastated.
BM: Are you from Lincolnshire?
CB: Rutland.
BM: Pardon?
CB: Rutland.
BM: Rutland. Oh well.
CB: Better place.
BM: Better. Yes. No Lincolnshire was recognised. We all used to say this and yet it’s strange because last year my eldest son on his computer he saw that a large hotel in Lincoln was offering a good deal. Luxurious hotel. Took up his lady friend. They went up there for three or four days and he said they had a wonderful time. I said, ‘Well that’s not my experience of Lincolnshire. Of Lincoln.’
CB: Lincoln town or other places?
BM: Lincoln town.
CB: Why did you think that was?
BM: I don’t know. I don’t know. I didn’t go into Lincoln town very much because Waddington was such a well built and organised station as it were and you know you could get all the comforts you want in their NAAFI and so on and so forth and rarely did we go out.
CB: No.
BM: And certainly when I was at Skegness we never did go out. Well I say we never. I did on one occasion because on the seafront in Skegness there was a little sort of Esplanade café come dance floor and we were allowed out ‘til about 9 o’clock at night so I thought well I’d go over there. I used to do a lot of dancing before I got called up so, but I didn’t realise that there you had hobnailed boots didn’t you? During your training.
CB: Sure.
BM: And of course I went in to that place and asked a young lady to dance in hobnailed boots and I was very popular.
CB: Particularly when you trod on her toe.
BM: Precisely. So that was the only time I went out in Skegness. Yeah.
CB: And did you ever, did you get relationships with people that lasted throughout the war?
BM: No. No.
CB: You didn’t have a best friend of any kind who started with you?
BM: No. No.
CB: You played the, played the market.
BM: No, I didn’t, [pause] I got friendly with some of the females during my stint in Yorkshire but it didn’t develop into anything that really, no. Not of any consequence.
CB: Right.
BM: Never continued writing to them after I left or anything like that. When I left I left. You know.
CB: All the stations had WAAFs.
BM: Yeah.
CB: In their own area so how did the, how did you link together there in the NAAFI and –
BM: Well.
CB: In the messes?
BM: In the NAAFI they used to, you know we used to be friendly but if you had a dance they always used to go to the air crew. They were the air crew following you know. They wouldn’t dance with the likes of an LAC.
CB: Of the erks. Yes.
BM: I’m afraid to say that was a fact.
CB: Yeah.
BM: But no. The air crew used to come in. I was at a dance, on New Year’s Eve we’d have a dance and they’d take up all the birds. But er –
CB: Quite upsetting really.
BM: Yeah. [Laughs] although some of them used to work with me.
CB: Yes.
BM: You know they were –
CB: Did they?
BM: Some of them used to be flight mechanics. Certainly a lot of them on the electrical side of the trade. Wireless and so on. The cleaner jobs. But not on the dirty jobs.
CB: So out on the flight line what were you doing there?
BM: Pardon?
CB: Out on the flight line on dispersal what was your task and how did the, a day go?
BM: Well. The day. You used to [pause] you’d be always doing, check your aircraft and when it was all very clear, ok. You would be just tidying around your dispersal point. Make sure that the concrete area was clearly defined so that when they, they would go and fly into it, not fly but they would motor into it.
CB: Taxi into it.
BM: Yeah. Taxi into it. And then they would of course turn.
CB: Yeah.
BM: And you would guide them on that turn and so you would make sure that area was clear and ok. You would then go up to the dispersal hut and stay in there until they came back.
CB: So how many planes did you have a responsibility for?
BM: Well you’d only have responsibility for about two.
CB: Right.
BM: There was enough to go around from that point where we were.
CB: And you were in a section responsible for the two aircraft so what were the component parts of the people? You were dealing with what aspect specifically?
BM: What? Of the aircraft?
CB: Yes.
BM: Well I’d be responsible for the hydraulics like on the undercarriage. The oleo legs that used to, well the ones that go up and down inside the casing. The tyres. The wheels and the tail plane mechanics and also the ailerons and all the controls and that would be it.
CB: And the hydraulics were fed from one of the engines. Which was that?
BM: Well the brakes were operated pneumatically but the hydraulics were operated as you say from the engines.
CB: So there was a power take off from one of the engines on the starboard side was it? The starboard inner.
BM: I can’t remember. I can’t remember on that one.
CB: What other trades were there operating at the dispersal?
BM: There would be engines. And there would be wireless and there would be electrics but the, the munitions people they always used to load up. They’d come out with their trolley and put what armaments they had to put on in the guns and so on and the bombs. And that was it. That’s [pause] there was nothing else from that point of view and then as I say you would just sit and wait.
CB: So the aircraft would be prepared for use. Who was the senior person in your section?
BM: It would be a corporal. He would be, he would be the one that would sign up the air worthiness and so on.
CB: And he would provide that documentation to whom?
BM: He would see, he would show that to the pilot when he came out. In other words the pilots used to. People used to say did you have much contact? As an AC2, AC1 no. No contact at all. Even as a LAC no contact because the aircrew used to get there, go to their briefing.
CB: Yeah.
BM: And they’d come out to the dispersal point in their car, in their coach and they would just get out. You’d be standing there not far away but as far as they was concerned the coach would come up close to the entrance of the aircraft. They’d get out, into the aircraft and off. And ok the only people they would see would be the corporal or the sergeant. Whoever it was responsible that everything was all alright.
CB: Yeah. Did the flight engineer get involved in the signing off of the aircraft?
BM: The flight engineers I don’t believe really started operating until about 1945.
CB: No. They were there with the big aircraft. So there was a flight engineer in all the four engined aircraft. So your Lancaster, Lancasters had flight engineers and I was just curious to know whether they liaised with the ground crew.
BM: Well I was on Halifaxes.
CB: Halifaxes first.
BM: And I can’t remember ever seeing a flight engineer on a Halifax.
CB: They were always there. Yeah.
BM: In what year?
CB: Well from ’43. So the twin engined planes didn’t have flight engineers but –
BM: No. I accept that.
CB: Every four engine aircraft had a flight engineer.
BM: No but it was a concept that didn’t come out to till later.
CB: Yeah. So when –
BM: I’ve got a feeling they didn’t come out ‘til about ’44.
CB: When the, when the aircraft landed –
BM: Yeah.
CB: Then what happened? Were you all there to receive it as soon as it arrived?
BM: Well we we were in the flight hut.
CB: Flight office. Yeah.
BM: Which was up by the, and we would just go over to the dispersal point and then we would soon pick it up on the perimeter track and flag it in.
CB: Right.
BM: And that was it.
CB: Yeah.
BM: The crew would get out in to the coach and off and we would just then close it all up. Put the chocks down and so on and so forth.
CB: So the aircraft would always have the potential for developing faults.
BM: Oh yeah.
CB: So who would do the communication of that and to whom?
BM: Well the pilot used to if there was any faults on it the pilot would give that in his report.
CB: Right.
BM: To the sergeant.
CB: Ok.
BM: And ok they would decide whether then it was a major or a minor.
CB: Yeah.
BM: If it was a minor ok we would deal with it around on the dispersal point.
CB: Sure.
BM: If it was a major one it could go in to the hangar.
CB: Yeah. And what about damage? How often were your aircraft damaged?
BM: They got damaged but not very much. Not to that degree.
CB: What sort of damage did they come back with?
BM: Some of them came back with ammunition holes in it which you would do a little patch on it and things like that.
CB: How was the patch administered? Was it a fabric or was it a metal?
BM: No. Metal.
CB: So how was it attached?
BM: Attached with rivets. Used to use the pop rivet gun. Cut a piece of metal. It was very, I wouldn’t say shambolic but it was just to do it very quickly. You would cut a piece of metal to cover the area and then you would drill the four corners, pop rivet it and then go around later all the way through. You know, get rivets.
CB: Yeah.
BM: Quite.
CB: So you’d secure it first.
BM: Oh yeah.
CB: And then you put the extra rivets.
BM: Extra rivets in in between.
CB: Now what about painting afterwards? How did you do that?
BM: Well be able to just put a bit of a drop of paint on it but they didn’t worry too much about that. Some of those aircraft they looked horrible with the, with the paint job. I mean, you know, you just had some paint and you just brushed it, brushed it on.
CB: But it always had paint would it?
BM: Oh yeah.
CB: Because aluminium’s shiny.
BM: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: What would you say was your most abiding memory of your time in the RAF?
BM: I suppose that when I was at Netheravon the aircraft then had to be, they were all camouflaged, had to be stripped back to their bare metal again. What you would call peacetime and that was a so and so of a job because you had to put paint stripper. And getting it all off by hand it was not very pleasant.
CB: How long did that take?
BM: Pardon?
CB: How long did that take?
BM: Oh we had, what, a squadron of about twelve aircraft and it took quite a time.
CB: What were the planes?
BM: Dakotas.
CB: Right. So this is at the end of the war.
BM: Yeah.
CB: So they were taking the, because they war had ended they were taking the camouflage off were they?
BM: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: And then what were they applying?
BM: Nothing.
CB: Right. So just aluminium.
BM: Just the bare aluminium and also at the same time we were fitting seats in to them. Like tubular seats. There was one other job that when I was at Marston Moor I had a petrol leak on one of the Halifaxes and I had to take out the petrol tank which was located in the wings and you’ve got to get up on a trestle to more or less get them and they are all, they were not rivets. There’s a sort of a square panel that is screwed into the main plane, main wing and they’re like cheese headed screws and then every, about oh half an inch apart all the way around and in those days you didn’t have [rapid?] screwdrivers and so me being an AC2 at the bottom of the ladder that was your job Mabey. Get that all off. So you’d spend ages getting every screw off, dropped the flap and then disconnect the tank and before you completely disconnected there was always some aircraft fuel still inside. You’d have to load that into a fifty gallon drum, the surplus and then you could drop the tank and when you dropped the tank you put a new one in and then go back again all good. The only advantage was that you knew then you had some cleaning material to clean your uniform because we used to clean our uniforms in aircraft fuel and then lay them out in the wings to dry and –
Other: Goodness.
CB: So you had a particular aroma that not everybody appreciated.
BM: I agree. Yes. That was most probably.
CB: They smelled you coming,
BM: [Laughs] That was most probably one of the worst periods of my life. Yeah.
CB: Now the fuel tank. That’s because it had had battle damage in it was it?
BM: Some were. Some were not but it was for one I particularly remember. It had, it hadn’t had battle damage it was just, it had become worn.
CB: Oh.
BM: And it had to be replaced.
CB: Now dealing with that was very dangerous so how, because of the potential for a spark so how was that handled with the screwdrivers and everything?
BM: Well it was, you just didn’t, you know I agree on reflection most probably it was a fire hazard but you didn’t consider it. You know, you just had to get that tank out because it needed, it needed to be replaced.
CB: I wondered if there were special procedures.
BM: No.
CB: For safety. Because the plane could be lost.
BM: Yeah.
CB: Never mind the AC plonk.
BM: Yeah. I don’t think there, most probably could have been but I can’t recall them quite frankly.
CB: Oh. After the war did you consider joining any associations? Squadron or RAFA. British Legion.
BM: Well. I joined RAFA when I was still in the air force at Netheravon. They came to you and this would be in 1947 because I used to wear the RAFA badge on my battle dress although that was not legal but I did join them. But when I ultimately got demobbed belonging to an Association regarding the air force was not foremost in my mind you know. I mean the point is that I had other things to think about then. In fact the strange thing is I only started, I had to go into hospital about, oh this would be about four years ago and in the next bed next to me was the chairman of the local branch of the RAFA Southend. And we started talking and spoke about the air force and he said to me, you know, ‘Why aren’t you a member?’ I said, ‘Haven’t had time. I’ve been busy.’ You know. I had a hectic life. ‘Well,’ he said, you know, ‘You should join. We could do with more members.’ And I did join and then my wife passed away and I became rather active but then the committee decided rather, in my book, foolishly that some of them were going to resign and meant that then the branch had to be closed. And the branch was closed.
CB: What sort of people were there? What backgrounds in the RAF were the people who were -?
BM: I could never find out. I could never find out because they were rather stand-offish a little. I could never really get to know them quite well. Not to that degree in those few years and they were, I don’t know. Most of them came from what we called Leigh area and they, I always talk about them that they were people who have curtains around their dustbins. You most probably get them in many towns and they and so consequently they seemed to prefer abandoning the concept of an RAF association and turning it in to a luncheon club and I didn’t. I said no. And I’ve been proved right because the silly fools, my membership was transferred to Basildon, right. Basildon now I know are doing exactly what Southend have done. They’ve got about five members that are active. That’s all. So really what should have happened is that, and there’s another branch that’s going to go exactly the same at Thurrock so you’ve got three branches there because the membership is falling, you know, we’re getting older. And so consequently what they should have done is said well look we’ve got when we still had about twenty five members attending meetings on a monthly basis. Keep Southend. Transfer Thurrock and Basildon into Southend. You’ve got your younger committee members and you’ll keep going and now they are going to finish off without any branch in this area at all. Rather foolish. But because some of them felt that well they didn’t want to carry on in their capacity as chairman because their wives were not in good health or something like that. I can understand it up to a point but don’t take the drastic action.
CB: No.
BM: And they did and so now they’ve got nothing.
CB: Did you get the impression that some of, that more of them were air crew or ground crew or what?
BM: Oh well with the RAF Association especially in Southend there was an aircrew branch of it.
CB: Oh.
BM: And they, they used to have their own little meetings.
CB: Oh [laughs]. Right.
BM: And you know, one particular chap I used to talk to who was in the Aircrew Association and the strange thing is, of my age, when he finished his training as a pilot they liked him as an instructor so they sent him out to Canada to finish his career in Canada teaching. So as far as he was concerned he’d been across the pond. He hadn’t seen any of the war at all.
CB: No.
BM: And to me it seemed a tragedy that they even split them because the aircrew in total should have still mixed with the others and that was confirmed at where we went the other day. I can’t think of its name now.
CB: What? At Aces High in Wendover.
BM: Yeah. At Wendover. I mean on that table there were two squadron leaders, one wing commander and a warrant officer.
CB: Yes.
BM: And also me.
CB: Yeah.
BM: A leading aircraft man. And they just treated me handsomely.
CB: They did.
BM: Oh yes. They had no side of it at all and this is the way it should have been.
CB: Yes.
BM: Ok. When you get in front of them in uniform you stand to attention.
CB: Of course.
BM: You recog, but you’re not doing that for the individual. You are doing that for the uniform and that was a little thing but they shouldn’t, they shouldn’t cause any segregation at all because –
CB: Right.
BM: It’s strange because I went to one particular meeting and there was a chap there. He came up to me and he started talking. He was an ex-major in the army and he said this, it was the, oh [pause] it was a special club that they’d formed that did the Normandy landings and he said, ‘You should join.’ I said, ‘Join? I didn’t take part in the Normandy landings.’ ‘What do you mean you didn’t take part? You said you were in uniform didn’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I had a couple of cookhouse blokes working for me. You could say they didn’t take part in the Normandy landings. No. I know they didn’t but we couldn’t have done it without their, them cooking our meals and we wouldn’t have done the Normandy landings without the air force as a back-up. Everyone in the forces at that particular time must have made some form of contribution towards that Normandy invasion.’ And this is was it’s all about isn’t it? They try and segregate it and well they always looked upon you, some of those air crew, a few in civilian life look upon you with an air of superior quality which is wrong. But –
CB: Hurtful.
BM: Well in business ok. As far as I was concerned you know I was top of the list so they, they didn’t worry me.
CB: No.
BM: Simple as that.
CB: I think we’d better take a pause. Thank you.
[Recording paused]
CB: So after the war you returned to civilian life in 1947.
BM: Yeah.
CB: From then onwards what was your perception of the general public’s attitude towards people who’d been in the RAF?
BM: They didn’t, on reflection of what I’ve seen lately I realise now that their reception was not as good as it should have been. We all just carried on and as far as I was concerned I don’t think I ever was approached from the time I got demobbed at ’47 you know because there was still a certain creeping in, an air of resentment that there had been a few people that had dodged their responsibilities either through religious grounds or other things and, or reserved occupation and I saw that particularly when I went to Ford Motor Company because I used to be in a specialised department so consequently I had access to a lot of places because I used to have to go to them. And I can remember on occasions when you would meet superintendents who were responsible for the production of cars in quite a large area and they would be an ignorant pig. And you’d think to yourself, well mister, I’m sorry I wouldn’t even employ you to stick stamps on an envelope but because they’d been in a reserved occupation they had a clear field to be promoted. Not because they’d earned it but there was no one else to fill the position and so consequently you had a a backlog like that there and they didn’t want to talk to you about what you’d done in the air force because they hadn’t done it themselves. So they didn’t. They had nothing to discuss. And that was the same in a lot of cases so I mean I can remember in fact the first when I got back the couple of conscientious objectors they’d risen within that small private company quite well because they used to read the bible every lunchtime. They’ sit in the office reading the bible whereas you would go and eat a sandwich they would read the bible but they couldn’t be touched. But they certainly took promotion when it was offered to them and I know, I know of one particular case where people when they went for their medical they pleaded on certain occasions. They got away with it. One particular prominent chap who lives in Southend he did anyway. He was in the medical when I went for the medical because I came to Southend to get my medical and he told me, he said, ‘I had a motor bike accident six months ago. I’m going to tell them I keep on getting headaches,’ and this is what he did and he was classified grade 3. Yeah. And so all the time I used to see him in Laindon when I used to come home on leave there was he you know running around in a flash car and everything else. I know. So the air force and the same with the army, same with the navy those who served they didn’t get the treatment that they should have got I don’t think.
CB: The recognition.
BM: Yeah. And [pause] but now and the strange thing is the recognition you get now is overwhelming. I mean, you know, I’ve only done two book signings and it’s opened my eyes. I didn’t realise the sincerity that goes in it. I mean people just don’t want you to sign their book. All they want to do is say hello, thank you and shake your hand. That’s more important to them than your signature which astonishes me. I didn’t, because that sort of feeling didn’t exist when you first got demobbed. Anyway. [laughs].
CB: Thanks.
[Recording paused]
CB: Victory Parade.
BM: Pardon?
CB: For the Victory Parade.
BM: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
BM: And we had Lee Enfield 303 you know. We were carrying that around. And it’s a twenty mile area, route that we’d taken. We’d got up to Tottenham Court Road and we’d just turned into Oxford Street and we had the air force band in front of us and they played the Dambusters March and that was set alight all the people almost and the cheers and the applause was absolutely overwhelming. I’ll remember that till I pop off you know. It was really, it put a lump in your throat and especially in Oxford Street. It’s all these buildings with windows above them and there were people at the windows and they were throwing coins.
CB: Were they?
BM: And bars and chocolate. The bloke next to me got hit by a bar of chocolate of all things you know. And this, this was happening there. You couldn’t stop to pick the stuff up.
CB: No.
BM: You had to just had to carry on walking.
CB: Amazing.
BM: And then of course with all processions they do stop for a little while to more or less they get a bit of a backlog don’t they?
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
BM: And then you’re amongst it all and you’re more or less really –
CB: Yeah.
BM: Visibly making a fuss of you.
CB: Yes. The unleashed appreciation.
BM: Yeah. But –
CB: Extraordinary. Very touching actually.
BM: That was touching and but that is soon forgotten you know.
CB: Right. We’re stopping now.
[Recording paused]
CB: Raids. We’ve talked about civilians Bernard but what about RAF and military people’s reactions to the raids?
[Pause]
Other: Do you mean the raids that took place over Germany?
CB: No. The British. The German raids on Britain I meant to say. So where you were stationed.
BM: Well er as I say some of them it was –
CB: So at Locking for instance. At Locking.
BM: At Locking it was a novelty to them. Others who had experienced it in their own town I mean like they’d had, you’d had Coventry, you had Liverpool, you had Southampton and Plymouth. They’d all had a going over.
Other: The Midlands. The Black Country.
BM: Yeah.
Other: Where I came from.
BM: Yeah. They had some. Well they were attacking there. In some respects they were attacking the, I mean in the Midlands it was where a lot of the machinery.
Other: Where all the manufacturing took place.
BM: All the manufacturers. So therefore it was in some respects a legitimate target.
Other: Yes.
BM: But London wasn’t.
Other: No. That was aimed at the population.
BM: Yeah.
Other: To break the will of the population.
BM: So, and Plymouth I suppose it had naval history but not to that degree. And Southampton also but they were really docks areas. That’s what they seemed to want to go for.
CB: Yeah.
BM: And it didn’t –
CB: But particularly in your experience actually in the RAF you mentioned Locking so –
BM: Yeah.
CB: What? When there were raids in in the Bristol area.
BM: Well they, yeah. Well they didn’t –
CB: What was the reaction of the people in Locking?
BM: Well they were a bit afraid that the war was coming too close to them to some degree whereas others just seemed to think well it was a novelty idea because it wasn’t a consistent attack. It was just a spasmodic attack here and there. I mean the major towns where they hit in this, like you say, Liverpool, Coventry, the Midlands area, London they were continuous attacks for a period of time and they were solely, I don’t think they were other than to destroy the population.
CB: The will of the people.
BM: Yeah. They weren’t after the, ok that was their excuse they were going for targets but it didn’t bother them you know but –
CB: You mentioned other some of your fellow RAF people’s reaction at Locking.
BM: Yeah. Well they just became hysterical because it was something they’d never experienced and they were frightened and they were spoken very sharply by some of the non-commissioned officers in the, in the whats-the-name. In the shelters. As they said you know, ‘You’re a disgrace. Control yourself.’
CB: Oh you’re talking about actually in the shelter?
BM: Oh yes. Yes.
CB: The air raid shelter.
BM: Some of them like I say were hysterical and in tears. They were frightened. Simple as that. Because they had not experienced it but others you know who had experienced it it didn’t bother them. In fact they looked at it logically and said you know they’re not going to attack us they’re attacking over there. But this is life isn’t it?
CB: Yeah. Now you got leave every six months but you would get forty eight hour passes.
BM: Yeah.
CB: How far were you able to go and what happened to you then?
BM: Well in forty eight hour passes I came home. Mainly because I knew I would get warmly welcomed by my parents because my brother was overseas. I think he was over there for about oh three or four years.
CB: Where was he stationed?
BM: He was stationed in Egypt then Sicily, Italy, Yugoslavia, Palestine. You know, he had a pretty rough time of it but of course he was on Fighter Command so therefore that was where the fighters were operating.
CB: Yeah.
BM: I mean bombers could operate from this country to go places.
CB: So you were shift work effectively. Was, did you work on a seven day or a five day week?
BM: We worked normally on a five day week but there was an occasion when they suddenly decided that they would work on a shift principal. In other words you worked something like around about ten days on right the way through and this was some clown from the air ministry had come down and set this up when I was at Marston Moor. And so in other words we then, you worked say for about ten days and you would have about three days off. And ok some of those time is spent catching up on the sleep you’ve lost and I’ll always remember on this particular occasion when this system was brought in I had not slept during the period I should have been off. So I went on duty and we were sat in the dispersal hut. The aircraft had gone off. This was about oh about 9 o’clock at night and I was tired. It was a cold night and there was a nice big fire in the centre of this you know and I just nodded off to sleep didn’t I? And they tried to wake me when the aircraft came back and I wasn’t having any [laughs] and the sergeant was not very pleased. Yeah. By the time I did eventually come round the aircraft had landed, been parked up and that was it and I’d done nothing. But the only good thing about that scheme it was, it was a way to keep the aircraft, giving them more flying time but it didn’t work and really the only good thing about it was that you could in other words once you’d seen the aircraft off say at about 8 o’clock at night 12 o’clock you’d go into the canteen and you could get your meal.
CB: Yeah.
BM: And invariably it used to be steak and chips.
CB: Did it?
BM: Yeah. Oh they’d give you a good meal for that. That time in the morning. And that was the only good thing about it but on that particular occasion I even missed my meal as well. Yeah. But it wasn’t very successful because during the day you were expected to catch up sleep. Well in a nissen hut with about thirty blokes a few of you still trying to get some sleep was hopeless.
CB: Now technically you were part of a squadron were you?
BM: Yeah.
CB: What was that squadron number?
BM: It was a conversion unit, Heavy Conversion Unit.
CB: Ok. Sixteen –
BM: 1652 HCU
CB: Right. Heavy Conversion Unit.
BM: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
BM: And they used to do, during the day, cross country, circuits and bumps, circuits and landings and then when they were needed they used to go on operations as well to make up the numbers. That’s the way it worked. This was just their training with heavy aircraft. In other words they’d done all their, they’d got their pilot’s licence wings working on twin engined aircraft but before they let them loose on a Lanc or a Halifaxe they had to do a couple of weeks.
CB: Yeah. So these were all Halifaxes.
BM: Yeah. Yeah. ‘Cause the Halifaxes were not looked upon as superior as the Lanc because the Lanc could fly faster. The Lanc could fly higher. Halifaxes used to fly at around about a hundred and eighty at around about oh ten thousand feet whereas a Lanc would go a bit faster than that and they could fly at twelve, fifteen thousand feet. Higher if necessary.
CB: How reliable were the aircraft?
BM: I would say I never had much experience, if any at all, where the aircraft reliability was put to question. You know, they say that the Stirling was crap. That was a bad aircraft. But I didn’t work on a Stirling. I nearly did. I got posted down to Stoney Cross at Southampton when I was, when I finished at Waddington. And I went all the way down there, kit bag all my gear and they said, ‘Well you’re about three weeks too late. Your squadron moved out to Italy three weeks ago.’ And that was a squadron of Stirlings. And so I was stuck at Stoney Cross in the middle of the New Forest whilst the Air Ministry sorted out where they would then put me. [laughs]. But that was –
CB: When did you go to Waddington and how long were you there?
BM: I went to Waddington it was most probably, VE day. A couple of weeks after VE day I should imagine. And Waddington I left soon after the Victory Parade in London.
CB: Because you were part of the Tiger Force.
BM: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Good. Thank you.
[Recording paused]
CB: So at the end of the war Ron, you’d think, a number of people thought that at the end of hostilities then everybody could leave.
BM: Yeah.
CB: But actually it was spread out. Why was that?
BM: It was spread out I think for economic reasons because they didn’t want to flood the market with labour so much and secondly they devised a scheme which gave you a demob number which was calculated on the age, your age and your years of service. So if like me you were called up at the age of eighteen and you’d only done, what, about four years my demob number was 57. I always remember that as Heinz [laughs].
CB: Yeah.
BM: And that was, and when 57, in other words you were all given a number, what your demob number and that would then give an indication when you were going to be demobbed and you used to watch. Ok they’re working on 45 at the moment so it’s weeks before you got yours and I think it was just a question off pushing too many people on to the job market too soon. That’s the only reason I could see for it.
Other: But weren’t people tempted to desert when the war ended and just get home as quickly as they could?
CB: Good point.
BM: It’s strange you should say that because it never occurred to me. In fact when I was at Waddington we were under instructions that when VJ day was declared, you know, you do not go out of camp and we were still on duty but some of the chaps and I can recall at least three or four possibly said, ‘To hell with them’. You know. The war’s over now. And they simply went home that weekend.
Other: Yeah.
BM: Now whether they ever got caught at it I don’t know but they certainly went off and they hitchhiked because I remember one particular chap, he wanted to get to London. You know, ‘I’m getting there. That’s it.’ So there was that attitude among some but to me it never occurred because as far as I was concerned you know it was the wrong thing to do. You’re still under orders. You know.
CB: Yeah.
BM: It’s the same after the war was finished you would wonder why anyone would still, especially I had a job ready to go back to. Why can’t you let me go? Well I’m going to go myself then. What are you going to do? Well they had the power to court martial you and they had the power to punish you. So it never really entered my head you know.
Other: I suppose you’d got in to a frame of mind.
BM: Yeah.
Other: Where you accepted orders.
BM: Yeah.
Other: You know, you’d been in the forces for four years.
BM: This is it.
Other: And what you do is accept orders.
BM: That’s right. Yeah.
Others: Yeah. It’s interesting isn’t it?
BM: It is. Because the way, the way especially nowadays I mean the younger element today are much more belligerent and I can imagine them saying, ‘Well, you know, I’m off. That’s me. The war’s finished. I’m done. I’ve done my bit.’ But it’s not like that is it? Really.
Other: No.
BM: It er –
Other: But these days’ people don’t have a sense of duty like they used to. The population at large seventy year ago, eighty years ago.
BM: Yeah.
Other: Generally people had a sense of duty and a sense of public responsibility.
BM: Yeah.
Other: These days’ people don’t have that.
BM: No. No.
Other: They don’t have a sense of duty. It’s, it’s an old fashioned concept unfortunately.
BM: Well I was brought up by a rather Victorian father. You know. He was strict. It didn’t do me any harm though. But er –
CB: But that was only thirty years after the end of the Victorian era.
BM: Yeah.
CB: So it’s not surprising that that was the attitude is it?
BM: Yeah.
CB: Right.
[Recording paused]
BM: The night before there was a dance on again tonight and –
CB: This is the Knaresborough Caravan Park.
BM: A few birds around.
CB: Yeah.
BM: Yeah.
CB: Keep going.
BM: And anyway we went around on our bikes and we picked up these birds in this dance and of course two of us took these two birds back. They’d come from Leeds. Their parents owned a caravan and that was there and we went back to the caravan with these girls. Left our bikes parked outside, inside the caravan. I was a bit backward in those sort of activities because I’d led rather a sheltered life in London with Victorian parents so I didn’t really do anything I should be ashamed of. I put it to you as carefully as that but anyway we fell asleep. Woke up around about 5 o’clock and of course we were on duty at 8 o’clock. At Marston Moor. And so we just said, ‘We’re off,’ you know and we got out this caravan to walk across the fields with these [unclear] there was a bloody farmer who owned the caravan park. ‘Hey,’ he said, [unclear?]. ‘Cheerio.’ On the bike, down the hill out of Knaresborough fast got back to camp in time. Yeah. Quite a narrow squeak that was but –
CB: If he’d have had a pitchfork it would have been uncomfortable.
BM: But then the other thing is that I got friendly with a family in Spofforth in Yorkshire and the daughter’s twenty first birthday. So of course in the village of Spofforth they had the village hall for this twenty first birthday party and we went over there and we knew the parents but I’d been, you know, going casually around with the daughter, the other daughter who happened to be a married woman incidentally but it was all good and clean. So anyway they said, ‘Well, will you look after the bar in the hall? Would you do that?’ ‘Yes. That’s alright.’ So I got behind this bar in this village hall and there were people coming in and, ‘Yes. I’ll have one with you.’ And of course as they had a drink I was having one was well. So by midnight we were well and truly sloshed and of course the villagers use the hall with their own accoutrements as it were so therefore they had to clear the village hall after all the festivities had taken place and I can remember pushing a wheelbarrow up the main street in Spofforth with all these glasses and food and leftovers on and it was as we were pushing it along well and well and truly sloshed it was dropping off as we went. Tinkling away there. Yeah. They were happy days though really.
Other: Well you remember the good bits.
BM: Oh yeah. Yeah we were.
Other: You remember the good bits.
BM: As I say we had some. When I finished in the air force and I started having to come down to reality that you know I had had very little education. I had to think about what I was going to do with my life and I started studying and I started working. As I say evening classes four nights a week. I could still find time to play cricket and play football in the season and I used to think, I don’t know, we moaned all the time. I was four years in the air force but on reflection I’d had four good years and you miss it. In other words, you know, it occurred to me why didn’t I sign on? I would have been immediately made a corporal and a corporal fitter then you’re on the ranks of promotion and what have you so you do reflect. I mean people moan about it but you do reflect. When you look at it in reality you didn’t do so bad.
Other: Well the thing that you did was you went in and you made the most of it and ended up with a proper trade.
BM: Yeah.
Other: A lot of people did National Service and did nothing.
BM: Yeah.
Other: They wasted two years of their lives.
BM: Yeah.
Other: Did nothing at all but at least you actually learned a trade and got a lot of valuable knowledge and experience and enjoyed yourself more as a consequence really.
BM: Yeah.
CB: The, you mentioned married women.
BM: Yeah.
CB: Now the reality of course is that there were plenty of people who were married whose husband, the women’s husbands were at the war.
BM: Yeah.
CB: So how did this work? It was quite innocuous sort of thing but were they at the dances? And how did this work?
BM: Oh it used to. I’m talking about this lady at Spofforth. Her husband was in the Middle East and as far as I was concerned we used to go dancing. We used to drink and we used to play, they had that, in this pub where we used to go to they had the, the skittles.
Other: Oh I know.
BM: In other words, you know, ok, as far as I was concerned the only intimacy, if you like that took place was I kissed her and that was it. Didn’t go any further. And that’s that may have been I don’t know a bit naïve of me but I was most probably a bit naïve at that sort of thing and you know I was never a womaniser to that degree. In fact to be very, extremely personal is the fact that my late wife was the only woman I’ve ever slept with. So it’s as simple as that. I used to have a fling with these ladies but it only was kissing and that was it. So I didn’t do any harm.
CB: All honour was satisfied.
BM: Pardon?
CB: All honour was satisfied.
BM: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
BM: I mean I remember going, and this would be at, at Locking, there was a corporal WAAF there and went to a dance and she was a good dancer and I danced with her. So therefore all the time I was there when there was a dance on she was there. She was available to be a partner on the dance floor but directly I got her outside, ‘Hey. I’m a married woman. Off you go.’ It was as simple as that. And ok nowadays this attitude is completely different but in those days it wasn’t.
Other: Yeah the worlds a changed place.
BM: Well, you know, you could, ok you were told even by your chief medical officer when you were first called up they showed you various pictures of the problems if you get any sort of disease and so on through sexual activity and so therefore you just kept clear of it and in those days you didn’t have the protection that these youngsters have today and that is a problem.
CB: Right.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Bernard Charles Mabey
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-11-28
Type
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Sound
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AMabeyBC161128
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Pending review
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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.
Description
An account of the resource
Bernard Mabey was born in London and experienced the Blitz at first hand. He was a member of the Air Training Corps in 1941 before volunteering for the RAF. He trained as an air frame mechanic at RAF Locking. His first posting was RAF Marston Moor which was a Heavy Conversion Unit. He was surprised by the change in approach to discipline between training and his first posting. He describes aspects of repairing aircraft. He enjoyed playing cricket for the station. After the war he became an industrial property developer.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Yorkshire
England--Wiltshire
England--London
Temporal Coverage
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1940
1941
1943
1945
1947
Format
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02:05:19 audio recording
bombing
C-47
civil defence
demobilisation
dispersal
entertainment
faith
firefighting
fitter airframe
flight mechanic
ground crew
ground personnel
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
military discipline
military living conditions
military service conditions
Navy, Army and Air Force Institute
perimeter track
RAF Locking
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Netheravon
RAF Waddington
sanitation
sport
Tiger force
training
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/576/8845/AGoughH150922.2.mp3
c57cda680fc05053c4ed864f4febb674
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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Gough, Harry
H Gough
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Gough, H
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Warrant Officer Harry Gough (1925 - 2016, 1590911 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a rear gunner with 10 Squadron.
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
2015-09-22
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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AM: Ok so it’s Tuesday 22nd September 2015 and we are in Tingly near Wakefield and this is Annie Moody for the International Bomber Command Centre and I’m talking today to
HG: Harry Gough.
AM: Harry Gough. So if you would Harry would you just tell me a little bit about your childhood, and where you were born and what your parents did.
HG: I was born in Dewsbury, er Dewsbury Moor actually. My father at that time was er worked in the steel industry at Click Heaton up to me being probably six or seven and then he er decided to leave that and er go into the licensing trade being er, what is it, er steward at a working men’s club that would be when I was six or seven er.
AM: What was it like being a child working in a, er living near a working men’s club then, where you living there in it?
HG: No no we lived away from it
AM: Oh, Oh
HG: But er at that time, funnily enough we were only on about this a few days ago er the way families were brought up, I think it was when Victor was up er, I was the youngest of seven and the house we had a small terraced house (pause) you couldn’t say it was a one up and one down but that’s basically what it was one large bedroom and a small one at the top of the landing so that was the earliest I remember being there er.
AM: What about the bathroom and toilet, where were they?
HG: Oh no bathroom (laughs) there there were sink in the corner
AM: And a tin bath
HG: Tin bath yeah and a toilet way up the yard and er you prayed every day that it didn’t you didn’t have heavy rain (laughs) er but we moved into a council house at that time when I was seven and er there again seven of us and it was a three bedroomed council house you know people just wouldn’t have that today would they and er from there er went to the local school, broke my leg playing football er recovered from that and we moved into a public house then in Dewsbury the Great (unclear) Hotel in Dewsbury and we were there for two years transferred our interest to Leeds another pub, another two years, or less than two years, back to Morley (unclear) Morley and that another pub eventually er and that when my schooling finished that would be 1939
AM: So how old were you then?
HG: Fourteen
AM: Fourteen
HG: My eldest my second eldest brother he worked in the textiles and he had to work at Putsey and he had to go by bike from Morley to Putsey on the night shift his wage was twenty six bob a week so he’d had enough of that and he volunteered for the army me being the stupid lad, oh no I’m not stupid, er if he was having action I wanted it as well so I wanted to go in the boys army along with him er, my father agreed to it but er mother said no you’re not and that was the end of that up to er 41 and er I joined the air training corps local squadron at Morley and er in there until volunteering for the air force in 43 and er eventually accepted and I did the er air crew assessment at Doncaster and er they were full up with pilots and full up with navigators
AM: Everybody wanted to be a pilot
HG: (Laughs) that’s right (laughs) right well if you got to be a gunnery course that’s it well I wanted to fly anyway so it was August 43 when I eventually went and er signed on down at Lords cricket ground, lad at 18 years old and going to London you know, never been out of his home town I don’t think, occasional holiday but not many of those I kind of remember going on holiday with my parents more than once
AM: How did you get to London then did you go on the train?
HG: Train yeah yeah, I suppose you get on the train and follow the crowd (laughs) er when we were there our initial signing and initial whatever it is medicals and er up to er for a fortnight to three weeks and then back up into Yorkshire to Bridlington
AM: So in that three weeks what were you doing?
HG: er getting kitted out
AM: What sort of things?
HG: Medicals er several injections whatever they call them er but er my sister was stationed in London at the time she was in the WAFS and er we met up a few times at er I think it was just routine things er drills whatever marching to the London zoo for meals and er yeah and I met up with a gunner we met on the first day we were there
AM: What was he called?
HG: Bill Field from Chester we were about the same age and er we were together right the way through to finishing flying
AM: Really
HG: We did a gunnery course did our basic training in Bridlington over to Belfast or near Belfast for gunnery school
AM: What was the gunnery school like what sort of things were you doing there did you have to strip em and put em back together and all that sort of stuff
HG: No no you had to do theory work on the guns but er mainly it was er rifle shooting for the clay pigeon shooting er then up in the Avro Ansons for air to air gunnery
AM: So when you say air to air what were you shooting at
HG: A draw yeah there’d be another Emerson dragging a draw if you were lucky he ate it (laughs)
AM: Did you
HG: Well I got a percentage of it whether that’s true or not I don’t know I think they just put this percentage out to get you through and make sure you had a rear gunner or something.
AM: Mmm
HG: But er that was I finished there New Year’s Eve we left New Year’s Eve in 43 that was it so from August I’d done all the basic training air gunnery training and passed out as a Sergeant air gunner before I was nineteen
AM: Blimey
HG: When you think about that you know think about that lady how stupid can it be but er it wasn’t just me everybody was on it er and after a short period at home then oh we finished up in Scotland on New Year’s Eve at Stranraer bit frightening (laughs) as an eighteen year old a bit frightening
AM: Laughs
HG: But er nevertheless we caught the train early morning and er early morning made our way home. After a few days at home up to er Kinross forest in Kinross in Scotland
AM: Scotland again
HG: That was for er crewing up and er operational training
AM: So how did the crewing up go cos’ you’d already got your mate with you
HG: Yes we stuck together all the time did Bill and I and er I don’t remember er well
AM: Who chose who?
HG: (Pause) I think the pilot chose us (laughs) why he did I don’t know er
AM: Maybe he could see there were two mates together and he wanted…
HG: Yes I think that had a lot to do with it we’d been together as pals and Harry Harrison the pilot er then he’d already met the er navigator Johnny Hall from Bradford from there we all got together Scottish wireless operator Cockney lad for a flight engineer and er I don’t remember where he come from South Midlands somewhere… Leicester and er how long did that last probably January late February early March
AM: So that’s where you flew together as a crew then
HG: Crew yes flying Whitley’s doing all the basic things turning dinghy’s over in the bath (laughs) when you can’t swim it’s er a bit of a nightmare but we got through it er
AM: Why turning dinghy’s over in the bath, in case you got shot down
HG: Yeah in case you got shot down
AM: Or crash landed in the sea
HG: Yeah yeah and er flying Whitley’s er the flying coffin some of the cross countries that we did six hours in the rear turret of a Whitley not very nice but it was enjoyable because that’s what I wanted to do er from there we went to er Marston Moor er heavy conversion unit flying the Halifax Mk 2.
AM: Right
HG: Which you don’t get to know until later that was the worst period of your service flying in a Halifax Mk 2 you were safer flying in the Mk 3 and 4 going on operations
AM: Why was that?
HG: They were very unreliable er basically because of the engine I think er and the tail unit the tail unit of the Halifax changed a great deal and they put revised engines in then and they were a much sounder aircraft
AM: Right
HG: But er we didn’t get none (unclear) you were in a death trap really (laughs) but er we got through that and we floated about then in Yorkshire for some reason (unclear) and Maltby, Driffield just for nightly stays and things like until we got posted to a squadron which was Melbourne ten squadron
AM: And there was ten squadron
HG: Mmm from there well
AM: What was your first operation like then
HG: What was it like
AM: Well can you just, I can’t imagine how it must of felt
HG: (Pause)
AM: I bet you can’t remember (laughs)
HG: No I can’t remember, no I can’t remember (pause)
AM: Bacon and eggs
HG: (Laughs) oh aye coming back to bacon and eggs that’s what that’s what you looked forward to but never when they all went out on operations did I ever think that I wouldn’t get back never never entered my head that I would never get back
AM: Did you have any close shaves
HG: (Pause) I suppose there were one or two where er the fighters were about but er in the main there were I think the biggest (unclear) were the night operations which you know they were a bit backwards at coming forwards at coming up in the dark they’d wait till the Yanks went over in the day light and have a go at them
AM: Have a go at them
HG: But er anti-aircraft fire unnerving but even then never entered my head that er I wouldn’t get back
AM: And you were right
HG: Mmm
AM: What was it like ‘cos you were the rear gunner so as you’re coming away bombs have been dropped?
HG: That’s right
AM: And you can see
HG: Yeah
AM: What’s, what’s happened
HG: Oh the in most cases the place was ablaze down below and er I suppose you think at the time oh great we’ve done a good job
AM: Yeah
HG: It isn’t until later days you know was it all that good you know what damage did we do I mean innocent people were killed but this is years later you think about this
AM: I was gonna say that because at the time you were doing it
HG: We were doing what we would been trained to do and er got satisfaction out of doing it as well but er pub visits at the night when you weren’t on operation a little bit naughty at times but er
AM: I’m gonna have to ask you, in what way naughty
HG: Well I don’t know it er probably drink more than what you should really
AM: You’re still only twenty by this time nineteen
HG: Nineteen yes I finished flying before I was twenty so I were only well at that time you were what you called kids at eighteen you weren’t adults at all you were classed as kiddies really
AM: Did you fly with the same crew all the way through
HG: Yes yes stuck together all the way through thirty three operations
AM: Thirty three, blimey, I can see we’ve got your log book is there anything
HG: Laughs
GR: Well your first operation was a daylight
HG: Yeah it was
GR: According to this yeah Macer Owen
HG: Taverni was it
GR: Yeah Macer Owen…and your last op was Christmas Eve (Laughs)
HG: Yeah yeah fly from the 23rd (unclear) the 24th
AM: And you said to me before about the fact that it was Christmas Eve and that was your last one
HG: Yeah
AM: About your mum and dad
HG: Yeah at the time it never struck me at all that it was any different to any other operation or you know you feel a sense of relief that the operations are over but it was only oh much later that I thought about these things. I don’t know what my parents were really thought about me being in the Air Force and what I was doing what it meant to them but what a Christmas box it must have been if that’s the way they thought about that I wasn’t in danger of being shot down or losing my life or whatever er after that particular time I never mentioned it to them in fact it was after they’d both passed I think my dad thought about it but er
AM: Yeah so what did you do after you finished your operations
HG: Oh dear I got kicked about and er
AM: (Laughs) did you do any training or TU stuff
HG: No I went into air traffic control actually
AM: Ahh
HG: Er when they finally got me settled down at Shawbury which was the number one flying training school was it, that’s where the (unclear) flew from when we went over the North Pole wing commander Mcclurough I think it was er I did a few months there I was there up to er VE day which was in May wasn’t it
AM: Mmm
HG: 45 and on VE day I travelled to Valley on the Isle of Anglesey and I was there until after VJ Day, (pause) VJ day what a night
AM: (Laughs)
HG: There was a black and tan drink then wasn’t there Guinness and beer black and tan
GR: That’s right yeah
AM: Mmm
HG: Still only twenty and I’m drinking black and tans I didn’t eat anything for four days (laughs)
AM: Laughs
GR: Laughs
HG: That’s when I learnt how to drive er air traffic control there was a (unclear) out there are you alright, yes I’m alright, never driven a van in my life (laughs) and there was some…how do I start this thing, (laughs) and away I went, but er bit precarious but er
AM: On a road or
HG: No no on the air field on the air field
AM: Just as well
HG: Yeah (laughs) well from the mess to the er traffic control and whatever to the end of the runway and back and things like that but er and from there not long after VJ Day I went back to Shawbury again well just how long I was there I can’t remember can’t remember and by this time I’d er already got my Flight Sergeant that was late 44 I got my Officer late 45 when I was still at Shawbury and then went to various places then just two or three days stopping at one near Warrington I can’t remember I can’t remember what place it was
AM: I wonder why, why were they moving you about like that?
HG: To find getting a posting you just couldn’t get (unclear) to come out I did want to come out anyway because I had the chance to come out on was it class B release or something because I worked in the textiles before I went in and there was no way that I’m going back into textiles after being in the air force and the excitement that I’d had or the life that I’d had and they kick you about a bit until er they get you a posting and I finally got a posting to er Austria just outside Vienna (Schwechat) but in the meantime for some reason that I don’t know why and I always thought it was a bit unfair you had to re-muster and you lost your seniority rank you were taken down from Warrant Officer back down to sergeant in rank but not in pay you still got your Warrant officers pay and it always hit me that er you know you’ve done this, you’ve volunteered for this, you’ve done your flying you’ve done your duty and everything that’s been asked of you and you’ve been fortunate enough to get through and then they demote you which didn’t seem fair to me at all, er but as I say the money was still there you were a Sergeant with a Warrant Officer’s pay and er went to Vienna (pause) mid July 46 July 46 that’s right er (pause) yeah and I enjoyed that er in air traffic control again er the surrounding area you were in the Russian border so you had to be very careful what you were doing but you were allowed out of camp and there was woodlands and through the woodlands you got to the er river what is it in Vienna come on Clarice what river is it in Vienna
AM: I can’t think I should know and I can’t it’s not erm
HG: I’ll be dammed
AM: No it’s gone I can’t remember
GR: Could be the Rhine
HG: No
GR: The Rhone
HG: No
AM: I can’t remember either
HG: Crazy isn’t it, crazy
AM: I’ll find it after, the river in Vienna anyway
HG: Yeah er out of camp and through this woodland I actually walked on the river it was that cold it was frozen over it was really really cold but er the camp that’s about itas much as I can remember about it other than we often visited Vienna itself not nightly but certainly two or three nights a week and really enjoyable and er the diesel in the truck that took us down would often freeze up so you were stuck there in the middle of the night (laughs) trying to keep warm
AM: Laughs
HG: But er I suppose the most that I remember about that there were three of us myself a Geordie lad ex air crew and a Scotch lad ex air crew and we got to like our drinks a little bit I always remember one afternoon we were drinking in the bar and we drunk that bar absolutely dry
AM: There’s a there’s a thread running through this story isn’t there (laughs)
HG: (Laughs) we drank that bar absolutely dry we finished up drinking port of all things and we sat in this bar and an electric light, (pause) can’t be a fire can’t that and it was and er the electrics in upstairs room had caught fire and er everybody had to bail out of course and this Scots lad he went absolutely berserk and we were just across from the er guard room and er the three of us were taken into the guard room and this guy was given morphine to quieten him down he was really really bad so that was almost the end of my service in Vienna we got kitted out and put in with the airmen for the rest of our stay there but er came back to er Blackpool and we were de-mobbed
AM: You were de-mobbed so you did leave in the end
HG: Yes
AM: What did you do afterwards, not textiles?
HG: Oh dear er I did for a very short period my brother worked in the textiles then my elder brother er and I batted it out (unclear) while the money lasted you know (laughs) er eventually I had to get a job so I went there and er oh I think three or four week I’m not sticking this (laughs) and er what did I do from there oh cigarette people Ardath cigarette people they had er they were based in Leeds and I met Gladys then well we’d known each other years but we got together then and er I was there for quite a while months not years months and then we got married February 48 wasn’t it
GH: Mmm
HG: And er these people kind as they are you know oh yes you can have a week off it’s your summer holiday that’s fine as long as I can have a week off we got married had the week off and went down to Kent on our honeymoon and came back and gave my notice in (laughs) they can’t do that to Harry and er from there I went into engineering in Bradford not a very happy time because I was working with people who’d been er what do they call when they weren’t called up
AM: Erm not (unclear) to subject as if they’d been in a reserved occupation
HG: Like a reserved occupation and you’re working with these guys and (unclear) so that didn’t last very long either (laughs) er and from then I went to the Gas Board
AM: Right
HG: In 49 and er that’s been my life I suppose ever since
AM: You stayed there ever since
HG: The Gas Board er finished and had a period with the water authority and I had one spell in between the Gas Board and the water what was that er what do they call it fibre glass moulds making moulds out of fibre glass and it was the summer of 49 I don’t know if you remember it and it was absolutely scorching I think it was 49 48 48 49
GH: There weren’t many in 48
AM: Late forties must’ve been 48
HG: Yeah around 48 49 really scorching and a perspex roof and you could see all this fibre glass
AM: I was gonna say dust I would imagine it’s
HG: Floating about I though oooh Harry (laughs) get out
AM: You don’t want that on your lungs
HG: That was enough of that so from there I went to an outside job with the water authority and thankfully was able to stay there
AM: Stay there ever since
HG: Until I retired
AM: and you know you said just just going back to the bombing bit for a minute you said that at the time what everybody’s said to me we had to do it that’s what we were there for you did it
HG: That’s right
AM: But later on you did start to think about
HG: Yes you did yes you did
AM: The women and children and what have you
HG: And I think what brought that to my mind more than anything was er Munich ‘cos they really did we never went to Munich but er they really did flatten Munich and there must’ve been thousands of innocent people that died because of that and er (pause) were we doing the right thing that’s the way I thought of it later but er but at the time yes that’s what you joined up for that’s what you volunteered for they want you to do it get it done
AM: And that was to bring the war to an end
HG: That’s right yeah
AM: Excellent, I’m going to switch off now.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Harry Gough
Creator
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Annie Moody
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-09-22
Type
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Sound
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AGoughH150922
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Pending review
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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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00:30:08 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Harry Gough was born in Dewsbury, he finished school in 1939 aged fourteen, joined the Air Training Corps in 1941 and volunteered for the Air Force in 1943. He recounts his training as an air gunner and flying over the North Pole. After flying operations he was posted to Austria as an air traffic controller. He was demobbed and after the war he worked for the Gas Board and Water Authority.
Contributor
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Carron Moss
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Austria
Great Britain
Austria--Vienna
England--Shropshire
England--Yorkshire
Wales--Anglesey
Temporal Coverage
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1939
1941
1943
1944
1945
1946
10 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
Anson
crewing up
guard room
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Initial Training Wing
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
promotion
RAF Bridlington
RAF Kinloss
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Melbourne
RAF Shawbury
RAF Valley
training
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/634/8904/PRobinsonD1601.1.jpg
6f5724486c610bd863a402940f8cc060
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/634/8904/ARobinsonD160911.2.mp3
4f37bc0e490f864de3f1ed0ae6cedfbd
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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Robinson, Douglas
D Robinson
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Robinson, D
Description
An account of the resource
Six items. An oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Douglas Robinson (1922 - 2017 1215638, 170413 Royal Air Force) and five photographs. He flew operations as a pilot with 158 Squadron and became a prisoner of war.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Douglas Robinson and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-09-11
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DR: Unfortunately, when I came to Oundle people started calling me Dougie and if I, if there’s one thing -
GR: You don’t like. Yeah.
AM: Right. We won’t do that. Right. Here goes then. So, my name’s Annie Moody and I’m a volunteer with the International Bomber Command Centre and today we’re in Oundle and it’s the 11th of September 2016 and I’m with Flight Lieutenant Douglas Robinson and he’s going to tell us his story. So I’m going to start off, if I may, just asking what your date of birth was.
DR: Date of birth.
AM: Yeah.
DR: 27th of July 1922.
AM: ’22. Right. And where were you born Doug?
DR: Where?
AM: Where were you born?
DR: I was born in Skegness.
AM: Skeggy. And what, what did you parents do? What was your family background? What was your family like?
DR: Well my father was a retired warrant officer from the Indian army and that’s, that was it. He was retired. He did a job as Registrar of births and deaths for the district around there. Well the, not the district. Skegness and one or two surrounding villages.
AM: Yeah. Did you have brothers and sisters or -
DR: Sorry?
AM: Did you have brothers and sisters?
DR: Yes. I had three of each. Three brothers. Three sisters.
AM: Right.
DR: My eldest brother also went in to the Indian army but he, not until during the war and he was commissioned into the Indian army. Had to come out I’m afraid when they gave India independence.
AM: Right. And what about schooling? What was your schooling like?
DR: Skegness Grammar School.
AM: Yeah. Did you enjoy it?
DR: Well. I didn’t dislike it. Didn’t really enjoy it.
AM: No.
DR: It was alright at times.
AM: How old were you when you left? Sixteen.
DR: Sixteen.
AM: Sixteen. So you would be, that would have been 1938.
DR: Yes. 1938. Around there.
AM: So what did you do when you left school?
DR: I went into a bank. The, have you heard of the TSB? I started as a junior clerk in the TSB and it was strange actually because it was a brand new office. They built it and you know there was no business there and there was the manager and me. The manager was only in his early twenties. He lost his life in the navy during the war.
AM: Right.
DR: I don’t know whether you’ve heard about it but there was a [terrible buzzing noise from interference on microphone -] [a ship, a naval ship escorting the Queen Mary from the [?] across the Atlantic bringing American troops and I think it was the Mary was a lot faster than the cruiser that he was on and so it zigzagged to keep the -] And one day bright sunshine as it is today, middle of the afternoon the ships came together and neither of them gave way and the Mary went straight through it, total loss of life. He was on that. His widow, she was, she’s dead now, she got a pension from Cunard as a result of that.
AM: Blimey.
DR: [?]
AM: So there you were though, a bank clerk with your, with your young manager.
DR: Yeah.
AM: And along came the war.
DR: [not then?] What made you join, what made you join the RAF?
DR: I don’t really, I don’t really know. I did a year in “dad’s army,” The local defence volunteers and then I don’t know I began to think I ought to be doing a bit more -
AM: Ok.
DR: For the war than this.
AM: What were you actually doing in the defence, in “dad’s army” then?
DR: Well we used to guard things that didn’t need guarding. The electricity power station, power thing and the gas works and the funny one was the telephone exchange because they’d built a new post office at Skegness and the telephone exchange was on the top floor so you’d be defending the telephone exchange but people would be coming for posting letters anyway[laughs] I mean.
AM: When you say defending it, defending it with what?
DR: Rifles.
AM: Oh you actually had rifles.
DR: For a year I had a 303 rifle and, I think it was fifty rounds of ammunition in my bedroom every night.
AM: Did you ever, did you ever use it in anger?
DR: No. No. We practiced firing but we never used it in anger.
AM: Yeah. So -
DR: There was -
AM: Sorry. Go on.
DR: There was a scare, a national sort of scare about September of 1940 that the invasion was about to start and we were called out with one of the local, one of the army units that was stationed locally and went out in to the country and spent a cold night out there. Came back next day when it was all cancelled.
AM: But I interrupted you ‘cause I asked you how come you joined the RAF.
DR: Well as I say I felt I ought to do a bit more and I think, oh what really eventually did it. One of my jobs at work was to go to the post office and I went in one day and they’d got a leaflet there which was in sort of three sections and the first one it was about pilots joining and they got twelve and six pence per day I think it was and the next one was navigators and they also got twelve and six pence a day and the third one was gunner eight and sixpence a day so I thought well I can’t fly, well I’ll never be able to fly and I’d done reasonably well in my school certificate maths so I thought well navigator must involve mathematics so I went. I sent this form off to become a navigator and I went to Lincoln for an interview. I’m not sure whether it was at Lincoln or if it was somewhere else but anyway there was a board of three officers. I think it was a group captain and he said, ‘Why do you want to become a navigator?’ And I told him and he said, ‘Well, why don’t you want to be a pilot?’ And I said, ‘I don’t think I could, could do that,’ so he said, ‘Well, I think you could. Would you be guided by me?’ And so I said, I said in my ignorance, I said, ‘Well if I went on a pilot’s course and failed it could I then become a navigator?’ ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘You’ve my assurance on that.’ It shows how green I was. But anyway I agreed to become a pilot and that was it.
AM: And that was that. So, so talk me through it then. What happened? So they’ve decided you’re going to do pilot training,
DR: Yes.
AM: How did that all start? Where did you go first for -
DR: Well first of all I went down to a place near Torquay. Babbacombe near Torquay and I got in a flight there of about thirty five of us and it was my first experience of RAF jiggery pokery because the NCO in charge of the flight said, ‘I know the postings clerk and for,’ I think it was, ‘sixpence a head I can get you posted where you want to go,’ you see so we all wanted to go to the same place. So I paid my sixpence and all the rest of it and we paraded in the little theatre they’d got there on a Saturday for the posting and of course they posted the wrong Robinson. He, he went on my sixpence. So I had to sort of stay there. I stayed the next week and went along for the posting things and I wasn’t on that one. Then on the next week I found out the, I found the NCO who I’d paid my money to and I said, ‘Look I’m fed up being here. Get me posted this week or else.’ And I got posted but instead of going where the others had gone to Torquay I was posted up to Scarborough and I did my initial training at Scarborough and from there I went to Southern Rhodesia.
AM: Right.
DR: To do my flying training.
AM: How did you get to southern Rhodesia?
DR: By troop ship. Really packed with troops. They were going to -
AM: Where did it sail from?
DR: Sorry?
AM: Where did it sail from? Can you remember?
DR: It actually sailed from Glasgow. We were, we were in West Kirby in the Wirral for a few days and then they took us up to Glasgow and we sailed from the Clyde in a convoy, a big convoy. Called at Freetown on the way and then around to Durban.
AM: How long did it take? Ish.
DR: It seemed forever but -
AM: Yeah.
DR: We were in Freetown for several days whilst they refuelled and one thing and another and then as I say went around to Durban.
AM: Were there any scares while you were on the boat?
DR: Not going out. No.
AM: No.
DR: No. We were all at, we had a big convoy. We had, I was trying to think of the battleship that was with us. It was in Freetown near us. It went on from there to the Far East and when they sank the Prince of Wales it was sunk at the same time. I can’t thing which one it was now.
GR: Was that the Repulse?
DR: Repulse.
GR: Repulse. Yeah.
DR: Yes. Repulse I remember sailing past it as we went out of Freetown. Went. Yeah.
AM: So there you are a boy from Skegness.
DR: Sorry?
AM: So here you are a boy from Skegness.
DR: Yes [laughs]
AM: In Rhodesia.
DR: Yes. Yes.
AM: So what was that like? What?
DR: Well it was, it wasn’t bad at all really. We, there was a transit camp we went to first which was the old, it was a showground really and we were in the cattle shed, cattle, where they used to display the cows and so on, had the things on the floor we sat on but it was alright. That was just near Bulawayo. Then we went up to what was then, well now Harare anyway and that’s when I started my flying training. Initial training.
AM: So what was the training like? How did you -
DR: Training on Tiger Moths. And I had a very nice Australian instructor. Very good with me otherwise I wouldn’t have passed but –
AM: How, how did they go about teaching you to fly?
DR: Well he sat in the front cockpit and I sat in the back and communicated by tubes but, but he, he told you what you do and you would do a movement with him and then he’d tell you to do it on your own. It wasn’t really all that difficult.
AM: Could you drive a car at the time?
DR: No. No.
AM: No.
DR: I learned to fly eleven years before I learned to drive a car.
AM: The reason I ask that is because it’s pretty much the same I guess. Somebody’s showing you how to do it and then you do it.
DR: Yeah.
AM: And how long was that training? Were there any alarms and scares in that?
DR: That, that initial training we started at the beginning of November and finished at Christmas.
AM: Right.
DR: And then –
AM: So quite quick.
DR: Moved back down towards Bulawayo for the service training which there were two lots of stations, for service training. One for single engine aircraft by and large expected to go on to fighters and the other for twin engine so we went on the twin engines, the old Oxfords.
AM: How did they decide which you were going to be?
DR: Well you were asked your preference but you didn’t necessarily get it but they obviously had a certain number to post to each place and they made up the number if, but I went on the one I wanted to do actually. The twin engine one. And -
AM: So what did you go on to then then as a twin engine -?
DR: That was the Oxford. It was a –
AM: Right
DR: Wooden aircraft actually. It was designed, it was a nice little aircraft actually.
AM: Yeah. Tell me a bit more about the training then. Any alarms and scares or did it all go smoothly?
DR: Well, yeah, I had a, had a little prang on night flying. The airfield there, it had, it was strange ‘cause it was a grass airfield but there was a concrete thing across one end which we taxied on. You’d land and get on there and beyond that there was a lot of wasteland which was sort of elephant grass you know and that, this night I took off. I think it was my first night solo and I took off but didn’t do it very well and I finished off skidding along the ground in this elephant grass. So I got out and started to walk back and I met the crash thing coming. He said, ‘Have you seen the pilot of that aircraft?’ And I said, ‘Well I am the pilot.’ [laughs] So that was it. But that was all. That wasn’t much. It wasn’t very scary. I mean, just slid along the ground.
AM: Just skidded. It was like a skid.
DR: It was just, I mean, you know, people weren’t overjoyed with you [laughs].
AM: I was going to say, well that was going to be my question. What happened? How much damage did you do to it?
DR: Oh I -
AM: And what happened as a result?
DR: I imagine, I don’t know really what they did. Whether it was written off or not. It probably was. I don’t know. But no. We, we got away with it.
AM: And what happened as a result? Did you just get a telling off or just -
DR: Yeah I got a bit of a telling off and that was about it, about it but the funny thing was they immediately rush you to sick quarters because they think you know there must be some [laughs] you must have some injury, internal if not, but I was in sick quarters overnight I think. That’s all. And then I had to go down to the flight and went with an instructor around, around the low flying area. Supposed to get over your nerves or something.
AM: Climb back on the bike.
DR: Yeah.
AM: So to speak.
DR: Yeah. So that wasn’t really much though.
AM: So what next? You’ve -
DR: Well when we eventually passed out from there and got our wings and so on we went on a train down to Cape Town and then we got on a troop ship that was coming back to this country, almost, there were a few people on but there was about a hundred of us from Rhodesia and there were also some people who had been on air crew training in South Africa. I’ve got a book by one of them in there. Coming back we got on this ship in Cape Town, the Oronsay which was, there was a line called the Orient Line and they only had about four or five ships and they all started with the letters OR Orient, Orion, Orontes and so on and we’d been on our way to Free, going to go to Freetown on the way back, on our way and then in the early morning when it was still dark there was a horrible bang [laughs] and a torpedo came in. I heard the torpedo hit, hit the ship, I heard it hit the things, heard the in-rush of water and I heard the torpedo go bang and I thought it’s time to get up so we got out. There wasn’t, there was no panic. People went quite quickly but quietly upstairs. Unfortunately when we got on deck, well I suppose we knew it before we got on deck but my boat station was on the port side but it had developed a great list to starboard which was where the torpedo had gone in. So all the boats on the starboard er on the port side couldn’t be lowered so which, so went around to the starboard side and there didn’t seem to be any. They’d all either gone or, so I went, I went back to the port side and they had several rafts there and I let one of these rafts go and it went down into the darkness and I thought well there’s not much point in following that. I didn’t know where it had gone so when I went back around and where, oh there was a boat about to go, the last boat. I met a friend of mine actually on the way around and so we went to get on this boat and the chap standing in the thing said, ‘Just room for one more,’ and my friend got on first. He said, ‘Room for one more.’ My friend said, ‘Can’t you get my friend on? There’s room for,’ ‘No, only room for one.’ So he got on and I didn’t [laughs].
AM: So then what happened?
DR: Well there were, this ship, I think with it being a converted ship, you know it was a peacetime liner and they’d converted it for a troop ship and they’d got it so that they’d got one boat inside another. Both used the same lowering gear, what do they call them? Davits or whatever and somehow they’d managed to lower this one right on top of the other and it was across it.
AM: Right.
DR: And so quite a number, well half a dozen people had gone down and were trying to get the top one off so I thought well I might as well go and have a go with that so I went down the ropes and having a go, put my shoulder to it and all the rest of it. You couldn’t budge it at all. It was [?]. We saw the captain’s boat go down, the captain get in and his officers and they started to go away and we thought well, you know, this is a bit odd but anyway he came back for us.
AM: Right.
DR: So we got off in his boat although after a while he transferred us to other boats to even the load out. So that was it.
AM: So where did you all get? So you’re all there in the lifeboats. Where did you get to?
DR: Well -
AM: And had it, had the main the ship sunk by this time?
DR: Sorry?
AM: Or –
DR: Well we, no it was, we were all in these lifeboats. I think there were about sixteen lifeboats successfully launched and we’re all sort of around the ship and the captain decided that it wasn’t going to sink so he started calling for volunteers among his crew to go back and sail the thing and I thought, anyway he’d no sooner done that then there was another great bang and another one, another torpedo went in. I think, I think they fired another three and eventually the thing instead of being listing it righted itself but then it gradually went down, the stern went down and the -
AM: Yeah.
DR: Nose came up and then down she went.
AM: That was it. So what happened to the lifeboats? How did you -
DR: Lifeboats.
AM: How did you come ashore then?
DR: Well we rowed for eight days.
AM: Eight days.
DR: Eight days yeah. Actually the first night it rained and rained and I had the misfortune to sit or probably, probably the good fortune to sit near the pump and it were only a little diddly thing you did this with. I was doing that all night, pumping but everybody else was baling so probably I had the easy job but we, we had to pump a few times and then after about, as I say eight days, we tied up actually, we tied nine boats in a row. It was the captain’s idea we’d stay together. I think we had nine boats in our row and there was six in the other I think. Six or seven. And after the first night we never saw the others again. They sort of disappeared but our nine stayed together. On the eighth day the, a lot of the crew were getting a bit restless. They said it would be better to be separate. We’d make more progress if we were separated and in the early afternoon the captain said, ‘Alright. Separate.’ We all separated and we’d no sooner separated than somebody spotted a Sunderland Flying Boat. It was only a little dot miles away. I mean people started sending up flares and I wondered what was happening and then I realised what it was. This Sunderland came over and circled us and dropped a few things with food in and he was in touch with the CO in Freetown and they said they’d be sending a destroyer out to us at midnight. So we sat patiently in the boat until midnight and then this destroyer appeared and we thankfully went up the scramble nets and we just sort of -
[machine pause]
GR: Life boats.
DR: I think so. I think so.
GR: Yeah.
DR: I’m not, I wouldn’t be certain.
GR: And did all the lifeboats make it to the dest -?
DR: Well some of, there were different stories. You see our nine, our nine stayed together and we were all picked up, I think, at that time, taken in.
GR: By the destroyer. Yeah.
DR: By the destroyer. Taken into Freetown but of the others some, some were adrift for about twelve days I think.
GR: God.
DR: And some were picked up by the Vichy French.
GR: Yes. Of course.
DR: Taken in to Dakar
GR: Yeah.
DR: And they were interned there for some time and there were quite a few ladies actually. Well half dozen or more. I think they were nurses. I know there was a squadron leader and his wife. Well, time expired and coming back and his wife -
GR: Yes.
DR: And what happened to her I’m not sure but apparently when they interned these blokes in Dakar they took these ladies to the border with, I forget what the British territory was but whatever it was.
AM: I can’t think.
DR: And they just set them loose and they were quite a few days trekking to the nearest place.
GR: And you never saw anything of the U-boat, the U-boat didn’t come after the survivors or –
FR: For years I thought it was a U-boat and people said that it had.
GR: You’d better record that.
DR: People had said it had surfaced and the captain -
GR: No.
DR: But it actually wasn’t a U-boat. It was an Italian ship, Italian submarine.
GR: Submarine. Right.
DR: Called the, I forget what it, I’ve got a book, a little book there.
GR: Yeah.
DR: But it was written by one of the chaps who was trained in Southern Rhodesia, er in South Africa and he actually became, he was, he’d been a foreign officer clerk and he went back to the foreign office and he became ambassador in Norway I think and somewhere else and is now sir somebody.
GR: Sir Archie Lamb.
DR: Archie Lamb. That’s right.
AM: Goodness me. That came as a, all of that came as a surprise because I don’t think you knew that did you?
GR: No.
AM: No.
GR: No. No.
AM: So you all finally get back, I mean I’ve got loads of questions I could ask like what did you eat and drink on the boat?
CR: I was going to say –
AM: Were there provisions on the boat?
DR: Sort of you know emergency rations. Small biscuits. Probably two or three of those a day. Horlicks tablets. You remember Horlicks tablets? Well we had those. They were nice. The funny thing was there was a lad from Spalding. I think he was a member of the crew, I think he was a steward or something and he was in the lifeboat with me and he didn’t like Horlicks tablets so I got all his Horlicks tablets [laughs] and then we had some water and they had a thing like a test tube. They used to bring it up about and you’d half full of that and you’d watch everybody drinking ‘cause you were making it last as long as you can you know swilling it around.
AM: Was anybody in charge on the boats or –
DR: Yes.
AM: Making sure that -
DR: Yes. One of the crew was in charge of it.
AM: Right.
DR: I forget what they called him now. I don’t know whether, whether it was his position on the ship or whether it was just, bosun. They called him bosun. Whether it was ship’s bosun or if it was just his title for being in charge of the lifeboat I never knew.
AM: But you all got back so -
DR: Yes. We got, we got back.
AM: So you all got back then. How did you all get back to Britain from there?
DR: Well we, the destroyer took us into Freetown and we didn’t get, we even get ashore in Freetown. They ferried us across to another troop ship which was actually a Greek, had been a Greek ship the Nea Hellas and we were on that coming back. There was apparently a bit of scare that it was being shadowed by a, but anyway we never, never got worried by it. It was never. We got back to England alright.
AM: So that was that. So then what happened? So you’re now a qualified pilot.
DR: Oh yes I was a qualified pilot. Well we landed at Glasgow. As the air force would arrange these things they put us in a train and took us down to Bournemouth. And the Bournemouth was run by, it was a receiving place for the Canadians mainly and it was run by the Canadians and there was a Canadian group captain there. Oh, whilst we were on the boats the merchant navy blokes had said to us, ‘When you get home you’ll get twenty eight days leave. Survivors leave. We all get it,’ he said. ‘You’ll get it.’ So when we got back we asked for this survivors leave and do you know what we got? They said you get twenty eight days. We got seven days. And that is the, that is how I got the title of my book. We had a, paraded in a cinema in Bournemouth and a group captain came on because he was welcoming the Canadians to this country and so on and he said something about, ‘Welcoming you to this country.’ He said, ‘Some of you have had great experiences in getting to this country but then life is a great experience. Adventure. Life is a great adventure.’ So I thought when I wanted a title for my book I thought that’s it. The group captain’s given it to me.
AM: So you’re in Bournemouth.
DR: Hmmn?
AM: Then I’m just trying to think chronologically of what happens next. Do you carry on with your training but go to Heavy Conversion Unit? What? I can’t remember what order things come after that.
DR: Yes, yeah from I’m not sure where, we went first to Operational Training Unit.
AM: Yes.
DR: To get crewed up.
AM: Right.
DR: Started at a place called Wymeswold and finished at Castle Donington which now of course is East Midlands Airport.
AM: Yes.
DR: And that was on Wellingtons and from there we went to Marston Moor which I’ve already told you about. Meeting Cheshire. And from there to 158 squadron.
AM: Ok. Do you want to tell me the Leonard Cheshire story again for the recording? Tell me the Leonard Cheshire story again for the recording.
DR: Well the night after we got to Marston Moor we decided we’d go in to York and three of us went to get on the bus but the bus had gone so we went out on to the road and decided to thumb a lift which sergeants weren’t supposed to do and we were, it was quite a long road. We could see a car approaching and we stood there thumbing and suddenly realised it was an RAF car and as it got nearer we could see it was an officer driving and when he pulled up we could see that he’d got four rings on his sleeve and he was a group captain. And he said, ‘Alright. Get in.’ So the other two jumped in the back and I had to get in, open the front passenger, well I opened the front passenger door and his cap was on the seat and so momentarily, momentarily you don’t know what to do. So do I, I can’t touch his cap, I can’t sit on the seat while it’s there but anyway eventually he said, ‘Don’t sit on my bloody hat.’ So I picked the thing up, put it over the back and got in.
AM: And he took you to York and dropped you off at –
DR: Bettys Bar. Yes. You’ll finish up there anyway.
AM: So, anyway, so back to the chronological order. You’ve crewed up. How did they crewing up go? Who chose who?
DR: Crewing up well yes it was, it was reasonably good. I was in a hut and I got to know ‘cause they bring in, I mean if they’re making say twenty crews they bring in twenty pilots, twenty navigators, twenty bomb aimers and so on and I was in this hut with quite a number of other people of various trades, and I got to know a number of the wireless operators and I met them actually in a pub in Loughborough as well and they’d got an air gunner with them so the four of us seemed to go out quite a lot together. I had to make a decision which wireless operator I had. I could only have one of them and so I selected one and so that was my wireless operator and my rear gunner. I needed a navigator and a bomb aimer. There was a navigator we’d got quite friendly with and I asked him to be my navigator and he said he’d already agreed to be somebody else’s but he would find me somebody who was, and he found me a navigator. A very nice bloke and a good navigator and the navigator found me a bomb aimer. It was funny actually because all the bomb aimers, bomb aiming had only just, bomb aimer as a, as a trade had only just been introduced and they were trying to popularise it I think and so they commissioned most of them. I think of the twenty, twenty five that we had there were only three who were non- commissioned.
AM: Right.
DR: So nobody wanted the non-commissioned ones. They thought there must be something wrong with them if they [laughs] so I got a commissioned one and that was the initial crew until we went to -
GR: Heavy Conversion Unit.
DR: Heavy Conversion Unit on to Halifaxes when we got another gunner and a flight engineer.
AM: And a flight engineer yeah.
DR: And they were just detailed to me so I didn’t get a chance to -
AM: Ok. But you got the full gang.
DR: So I got the full gang but didn’t always keep them I’m afraid. The rear gunner I had, we were very friendly together but one night he refused to fly. Well, he didn’t refuse to fly. We, we were going to Berlin actually and we taxied around, do you know Lissett?
GR: Lissett, yes. Yeah.
DR: Well normally we could approach the runways on either way. This particular night as it happened we were all coming from one direction and it was very fortunate because I got the green light and as I got the green light to go on to the runway this gunner said to me, ‘I don’t think I ought to go.’ I said, ‘What did you say?’ He said, ‘I don’t think I ought to go.’ And I thought well I can’t go anywhere. What do I do? I can’t, can’t call up the flight control because of the radio silence but as I say with the other side being vacant I just taxied straight over and parked on the, on the taxi -
GR: On the side. Yeah.
DR: The, the other side and I thought well air traffic control are going to see me there. They’re going to think well what the heck’s he doing? And they’ll find out and fair, true enough, after a little while the officer in charge of night flying was Brian Quinlan. I don’t know if you knew Brian. He came out on his motorbike and I said to my, my temper by this time was a little frayed and I said to this gunner, ‘You’d better get out and tell this officer what you’ve just told me.’ So he got out and within a few minutes Brian Quinlan appeared in the cockpit and he said, ‘Taxi back. Taxi to the next intersection, you know, where the runway came in, turn and come back again and wait here.’ Which, which I did. And when he got, when I’d no sooner got back there then he appeared on the runway on his motorbike with a spare gunner on the pillion and this poor bloke got in, got in the rear turret and that was it. We went away.
AM: And what happened to the other one? Just disappeared.
DR: Yeah. Well yeah.
AM: Lack of moral fibre.
DR: He was court martialled and it was a sad old time really. I had to go as a witness. I don’t know who I was witnessing for but I mean I, but it was, I felt sorry for him in a way because he looked so dejected and you know he’d been a nice enough bloke.
GR: How many operations had you flown by then?
DR: I don’t know. I should think probably about eight or something like that.
GR: About eight. Yeah. Ok.
DR: What, what he, I think what probably happened the one the previous one we’d done was Milan and it was over nine hours and it was in, coming back anyway, it was in bright daylight and he, I think he was a bit nervy all the way. He kept saying, ‘What’s that on the port starboard, on the port bow Paddy?’ Paddy, being the mid upper and Paddy in a broad Irish accent, ‘Och it’s only, only a bit of cloud,’ you know, and this sort of thing but you could tell really. I mean at the time I never thought anything of it but afterwards, after the refusal to fly and so on it struck me that his nerve had gone by that time I think.
GR: Because when you flew back from Milan it was complete, you flew back over France didn’t you?
DR: Over Switzerland.
GR: Over Switzerland.
DR: And France.
GR: And France yeah. In daylight.
DR: Yeah.
AM: What, what, so when he was court martialled what did they actually do with him?
DR: Well. Well he was court martialled. The funny thing was they questioned, when they questioned me it was strange they wanted to see was he actually ordered to fly. Well I mean they didn’t order for a standing place, ‘You’ll fly tonight’. ‘You’ll fly tonight.’ I mean it wasn’t like that. Just a board went up and the names of the pilot was on and -
GR: Yeah.
DR: You took that crew went and that was it but he was actually as I say court martialled. Ordered to be reduced to the ranks and to serve eighty four days detention but the AOC didn’t confirm it so he got away with it.
AM: Right.
DR: He got off and Calder I don’t know whether he rang me, or spoke to me one day and said, ‘As he wasn’t found guilty he’s still on the strength of the squadron and I don’t suppose you want him back do you?’ I said, ‘You’re right there.’ [laughs]
AM: That’s a no then. Yeah. So what did they do with him? Did he stay or -
DR: I don’t know what happened to him eventually.
AM: As ground crew or -
DR: I don’t know what happened to him eventually.
AM: Yeah.
DR: He would be posted away I think somewhere.
AM: Yeah.
GR: Yeah.
DR: But it was, I don’t know, a pity, you know how Group Captain Pickard was at -
GR: Yeah.
DR: He wasn’t there in my time. He was there before I got there but he had a couple of horses at a farm there and our dispersal we lived on was one field away and this gunner was a real horsey type so he used to go and look after these horses. Groom them and one thing or another and then we [laughs] we used to ride them down to the pub [laughs]. Well we used to get on and they knew the way to the pub and so we’d go. There were three of us. One would ride a bike and the other two would go on a horse and we’d tie them up outside the pub and have a drink or two and then they’d know their own way home and of course we lost all that when he went but –
AM: We’ve jumped a little bit because we’ve gone from the Heavy Conversion Unit. What we didn’t say was that you were posted to 158 squadron at Lissett.
DR: Yeah that’s right.
AM: So I’m just. So you’re on 158 squadron now.
DR: Yes.
AM: So the stray bod that you got did you keep him or did you get another?
DR: No. No. He, I got another one.
AM: Right.
DR: I got a Canadian.
AM: And kept him.
DR: Yes. I kept him. I was with his, one of his sons and two daughters last week at 158.
AM: Wonderful.
DR: They come over every year.
AM: I’m going to jump again now then. So I know that you’ve done a number of operations now and I know that you either have done or are going to do Berlin.
DR: Yes.
AM: So tell me about Berlin and what happened.
DR: Well this night of course with having this kerfuffle with the, we were about fifteen, twenty minutes late taking off so I tried to make that up as best I could but it could, got to Berlin and nearly everybody else had gone so we had the whole Berlin defences to ourselves and it’s a long way across Berlin and it was very, very well very, very lonely flying across it. We think there was a fighter had a good, started to attack but I’ve an idea that it was a Mosquito was around and chased him I think so we didn’t get attacked. We got over quite safely that time.
AM: That time.
GR: Yeah.
AM: So tell me about -
GR: How many times did you go to Berlin?
DR: Three.
GR: Three.
AM: Three.
GR: Yeah.
DR: It was -
AM: So, on the third one -
DR: On the third one we were, we’d just dropped the bombs, the bombs had gone and there was an almighty bang. It really was. I’m sure it was a direct hit and the nose of the aircraft just started going up, straight up in the air which isn’t very healthy, I mean it could go into a stall in no time but I just could not seem to get it to stop and I said, ‘Prepare to bale out,’ because I thought we’ve had it and I realised the moment I’d said that the intercom was dead so I thought I’ve got to do something about this. I got a chap, you know we used to take a, when a crew came to the squadron he usually did an operation with an experienced crew.
AM: Yes.
DR: Well, and I’d got this chap, second pilot. I got him to put his leg across my legs and push on the control column. I was, I’d got it under my knees like that and he was pushing with his leg and we flew I think for over two hours, two and a half hours like that and the nose was trying to come up all the time and it was just above stalling I think. And I flew along. The Baltic was on the right and I thought to myself, shall we go to Sweden? And I thought, incidentally, we were all supposed to be on leave, we should have gone on leave that night. It was an incentive to get back but I was thinking about Sweden and of course I knew nothing about Sweden. With my boyhood knowledge I thought it was very mountainous so you know how could we flying in to mountains trying to get, so I decided I wouldn’t go to Sweden. We’d try and get home so we kept on and weeventually got to the Dutch coast and we were there at the time we were supposed to have been back at Lissett. We’d got winds against us of very nearly a hundred miles an hour. The aircraft was only just above stalling speed and I thought well I’m not going to go, I couldn’t risk going across the North Sea. We wouldn’t have got, we wouldn’t have got any more than half way across. If that. So I thought, and by this time we were down to five or six thousand feet. I can’t really remember but there was a light flak battery firing at us and doing a bit of damage so I thought well the only thing is we’re over a friendly country. Bale out and we might get in with the underground and you know so I baled them out.
AM: If the intercoms had gone how did they know to bale out?
DR: The only way, actually, the flight engineer. I told him to go around and tell everybody to bale out which he did. He, and then he came back and I said, ‘Have they all gone?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Well you’d better go then’. Of course we stowed his chute and my chute together and he was supposed to get the chute, two out, bring me mine, put his on and go. He came back and he said, ‘One of them was damaged.’ ‘So I said, ‘Well you’d better take the other one then.’ ‘No. No. I can’t. I can’t leave you.’ I said, ‘No you get in. Take, put that on. Get out.’ And he argued and I’m not going to argue and told him three times to get out so I said, ‘Well if you’re going to stay you’d better get back in to the rest position and brace for,’ I didn’t know, you know I realised I’d got to somehow get the thing down and I flew along looking for a decent, a good field and eventually, well it wasn’t long actually before I saw a field I thought I could do it -
AM: Was it daylight by now?
DR: No. It was -
AM: ‘Or dawn?
DR: Yes in-between sort of thing. Yes. It was sevenish in the morning. Something like that. And it was, I think it was lighter looking down than when you actually got on the ground. Anyway, we got down and skidded to a stop and got out and had a, well the funny thing was I thought I’d better go back and see if he’s alright and this is [laughs] this is the truth I walked back to him and instead of being braced he was standing up and he said, ‘Are we down?’ ‘Who the heck’s flying this thing?’ [laughs]. You know.
GR: Well that’s a compliment to the pilot.
DR: It was. Yeah. Anyway we got out the escape hatch and then we were having, I thought we’d have a quick look at the damage and we were having a look and as you say it was half-light or not quite half-light and he said, suddenly said to me, ‘There’s somebody the other side of the aircraft.’ And so I went around. I thought the only thing to do, whoever it is, oh and he said, ‘He’s got a gun.’ I thought well the only thing you could do is confront the chap so I walked around and didn’t need any confront, he was friendly. He said something about, I don’t remember whether he said, ‘Have you had a meal?’ Or, ‘Would you like a meal?’ And I thought, I was thinking I want to get away from this aircraft as far as I can as quickly as I can so I refused it and we walked. We left the thing and we walked on. We walked out through a village and up a country road and there was a bend in the road and there was a farmhouse there and the farmer outside so we went to him and asked if he could give us a drink of water or something and we had a drink of water and I asked him where we were and he brought out a little school atlas and, ‘There.’ And there just about covered the Netherlands. [laughs]. I thought well I was a little bit clued up about –
AM: Yeah.
DR: Which country it was. Anyway, we went in his house and to get to his house you went through a cowshed. I noticed there was a sort of hay loft sort of thing you know so I asked him if he, if we could get up there and he said, you know shook his head and talked about the Germans you know, shoot him and so on. I can understand his point of view.
AM: Yeah.
DR: So we decided, well I decided we wouldn’t stay and we got out of the house and two Dutch policemen came around the bend on bikes and they came to us. One was a young bloke and the other was a bit older and they, I don’t know for certain but it seemed to me that the young chap wanted to turn us in and the older one wasn’t very happy. He looked as if he was a bit tearful actually but anyway they, he had to go along with what the younger one wanted to do so they took us back to the village we’d come through and telephoned the Germans. And that was it.
AM: And for you the war is over.
DR: Hmmn?
AM: For you the war is over.
DR: Yes. Well, that, that was the greeting yes. For you the war is over.
AM: So what year are we in now? Is this -
DR: That was January ’44.
AM: ’44.
DR: January the 29th ‘44.
AM: So when the Germans came and got you where, then what?
DR: Well they took us to what was obviously a house which they’d taken over as a sort of place for their troops to live in and we were there most, so funny actually because they made us turn our pockets out and all this sort of thing and Lofty the engineer he’d taken an orange out of the, that we had in the flying rations and of course he’d got this orange and he put it on [laughs] and it was so funny ‘cause there were Germans coming in and poking it. You know. They’d never seen an orange before [laughs] But we were there most of the day and then they took us down to the station, local station and we went by passenger train up to Leeuwarden. I don’t know whether that’s the pronunciation L E E W A R D E N. And there was an NCO in charge of us and two other blokes and the NCO, he walked in front with a drawn pistol and one of the others walked at the side of us and the bloke with a submachine gun walked behind us and I thought well if you let off with that you’re going to get your mate in front here as well but anyway they paraded us through a long street in Leeuwarden and it was so funny I mean there were people walking past victory signs, thumbs up and there was a tram car came along and it just kept pace with us and you could see all the passengers in there doing this -
AM: Thumbs up and -
GR: Victory signs.
AM: V for victory to you.
DR: And we were sort of, yes. Acknowledging it all. I mean, it was, it was so funny really because it wasn’t what they were intending but they were showing off to the Dutch that they’d got the, you know -
AM: They’d captured you.
DR: Yeah. They got the terror fliegers and all the rest of it and anyway they took us along in to a big compound. Well a sort of parade area. It was a naval barracks and they opened a cell door and pushed us, well didn’t really push us, made us go in and there was all my crew there except one. They’d picked them all up except one.
AM: All of you. The whole lot. Did they know that they were your crew?
DR: I don’t know. I imagine so. I imagine so. And he, actually he, the one that was missing wasn’t really one of my crew, my mid upper gunner was a Southern Irishman and we were all supposed to go on leave that night. Well he used to get a couple of days extra for travelling to Southern Ireland and he’d already gone so this chap that was with me, this Canadian standing in and of course they hadn’t got him and he was the only one who did make it to the underground.
AM: Right.
DR: Apparently some farmers found him. They’d got the little pens out for the sheep to go in, supposed to be lambing or something and they found him hiding in one of these and so they took him in and looked after him for a time and I don’t really know the full story but he was eventually picked up with the underground in Antwerp or somewhere so he they’d got him quite a way away but he were betrayed and that was it. He was finished in another prison camp. I never met him again. He didn’t get, I did meet him again in a reunion after the war but I didn’t during the war. We thought he was dead. I thought he must have had an accident baling out and you know and that’s it. And -
AM: We, we spoke to someone else who exactly the same thing happened and I think the escape line, the escape line was the KLM line.
DR: Yeah.
AM: That he’d been, and exactly the same. Captured at Antwerp.
DR: Yes.
AM: So the whole lot of you there minus one. And where did they take you from there?
DR: From, yeah, they took us, the same night I think they took us to a Luftwaffe station. Actually it was a Dutch station it was about the biggest or only sort of regular air force station. I can’t remember its name. And we were in the cells there for the best part of a week I suppose. They tried to interrogate us and so on and then from there they took us to Amsterdam and we were incarcerated in Amsterdam jail for a week or so. Yeah.
AM: Where did you end up? Which prison camp did you end up in?
DR: Sorry?
AM: Which prison camp did you end up in?
DR: Well, from, after we go into the interrogation place we went to, or I went to, some of us went to Stalag Luft 6 which was up on the borders of East Prussia and Lithuania. We were there until July of ‘44 when the Russians were pushing the Germans back. The Germans had got right in to Russia.
AM: Yeah.
DR: And the Russians pushed them back and we could actually hear the artillery fire and we were beginning to get a bit worried about what might happen if we were liberated by the Russians but anyway they then took us, not all of us but I was one that was taken, they took us to, in the cattle trucks down to Memel which was in the port of Lithuania. I don’t know what it is now. I couldn’t pronounce its name now but it was called Memel. We were put in a little tramp, in the hold of a tramp ship which was filthy and we were about, I think we were about four days from there to, oh dear, I forget the name of the port now.
GR: Don’t matter.
AM: No. It don’t matter.
GR: Don’t matter.
DR: A German port in
GR: Yeah
DR: Sort of [?] When we got off into cattle trucks again and we had, I think, one night. Oh they, as we got off that, the boat they handcuffed us in pairs. I thought I was being clever and I asked if anybody was left handed so we had could have one left hand and one right but we didn’t. I got this Canadian but apparently he was right handed too but he had his right hand handcuffed to my left and we were, officially we were handcuffed together for about three or four days but we soon learned how to take them off actually.
AM: Oh good.
DR: So people were taking them off.
AM: I’m just thinking when you’re doing the necessary -
DR: Yeah.
AM: Ablutions and things like that you don’t necessarily want to be handcuffed –
DR: That’s right.
AM: To someone.
DR: No. We, people soon learned the key of a corned beef tin came handy with that. It used to be out -
AM: But where did you get the key of a corned beef tin from?
DR: Off the corned beef tin. Red Cross parcels.
GR: Red Cross Parcels.
DR: Red Cross parcels.
AM: Oh so that was your rations. Right. Ok.
DR: Anyway, we and then we got to Stalag Luft 4 and we had a very rough reception there. We got, we got to the station, or the siding, very early in the morning and it was a really hot day and they kept us in the cattle wagons ‘til about two in the afternoon and we got, got out and of course to try and carry all your, what belongings you had, I mean, for example I had a greatcoat. We were wearing greatcoats. It was the easiest way to carry them and it was really hot. And anyway about 3 o’clock they got us out of the things and we lined up and there was a German officer got up, and he, he’d got, he’d got an immaculate white tunic on. Oh really. And instantly, instantly became known as the ice cream man. But he was obviously in charge and they marched us out on to the, on to the road, lined up and there was a lot of cadets, naval cadets that came and they were all armed, all, and he ordered them to fix bayonets which wasn’t a very friendly thing to do and we started walking along, or marching along this road and they started saying –
GR: Thank you.
DR: They started saying, ‘Quicker. Quicker. Quicker’ and we were getting, until eventually we were sort of running and then we were in a wooded thing then suddenly they turned left and there was steep hill and we were going up this hill and they then tried, they were then aiming to jam you in your backside with these bayonets and of course people were throwing all their stuff away to lighten the load. I’d got a haversack thing on my back which I couldn’t take the stuff out so the Canadian who was running with me he got it open. He was throwing stuff out and we ran up this road and you could see people with blood coming down them, and I passed one poor lad I knew. I don’t, I can’t remember his name but I knew and the chap he was with had obviously passed out and he was there -
AM: And he’s still handcuffed.
DR: Handcuffed to him. Couldn’t move. You could see he was absolutely terrified the poor lad. He was only a very young lad I think. And then we got to the, eventually got to the top of the hill and turned and about a half a mile away was the prison camp and we, we got there. I hadn’t been touched actually until I got there and then one of them got his rifle up and started having a go at my ribs but he didn’t really do anything hard. He tried and didn’t. And then they called them off and we went into the vorlager, sort of first place. Not right in to the camp and we were there all night.
AM: When you said, you said they were cadets so were they just, were they teenagers or young. Young.
DR: Well I suppose they were, no I suppose they were eighteen year olds.
AM: Right.
DR: Sixteen, eighteen year olds. Yeah. But, they’d, all the other guards of their own but a lot of them, but it was, it’s always been known as, ‘the run up the road.’
AM: Yeah. So how long were you in there for then? Where are we now? July did you say? July 44?
DR: July then until February of the next, of the next year when we started on the Long March.
AM: So you did the Long March.
DR: Three months of that.
AM: And what was the worst bit of that?
DR: Sorry?
AM: What was the worst bit of that?
DR: The weather. It was so cold. Snow and ice and sleeping out at, some nights, we did sleep outside some nights. Most nights they found a barn or something like that more or less but we had one or two nights out. But one night we went to a farm and there were three large farm buildings in a row with thatched roofs and I think they put some of their own transport in one. In the end one. We were pushed in the centre one and some army prisoners in the left hand one and we were tight in this thing. When we, they’d got straw in the floor and when we laid down at night we were head to toe in a row and touching each one. It was as close as that and during the night we heard an aircraft flying over and we could hear it approach and it dropped a bomb on the, and it hit the thing where they’d put all their stuff and it flew away again. Came around machine gunning and I was lying down there. I could see tracer bullets coming through the straw you know and he hit the wall on the side and before there was a little ring of fire and it just spread like mad and it was, the whole lot was going and people just sort of got up and walked out and that’s it. They didn’t really run.
AM: No.
DR: But um -
AM: Did you, did you see it? Was it an allied?
DR: Sorry?
AM: Was it a British plane or a German?
DR: Oh we take it that it was probably a Mosquito. We’ve always called it the Mossie raid. I mean we were just guessing at that. We sort of -
AM: Yeah.
DR: I think it would be an allied one.
AM: Then when –
DR: I think there were, there were three or four of our blokes were killed.
GR: And then towards the end of the long march I presume you walked into allied hands.
DR: Well yes. We were very, it was a great day to remember. We, we were stopped in a village and we sort of spent the night in a barn and this, and I got up to make the coffee and there was Americans with us as well and I suddenly heard an American voice shouting, ‘The limeys are here. The limeys are here.’ And looked and it was the 6th Airborne Division coming through the village.
GR: Brilliant.
AM: Yeah.
DR: What a day that was.
GR: What a day that was.
DR: And they were throwing tins of their rations to us you know and we didn’t eat half of them, more than we, actually it was, everybody was just having a good time.
AM: What condition were you in by then?
DR: Well -
CR: He looked a bit thin on the photographs.
DR: Yeah I was very thin and I think I got frostbitten feet. They were always cold. We was lousy. [laughs].
AM: Yeah.
DR: But apart from that we weren’t too bad.
AM: So how did you get back home then from that, that stage?
DR: Well, they, the 6th Airborne asked us to stay there that day because they were bringing all their stuff through and then we get up to, oh what was the name of the place, what was the place where Montgomery took the -
GR: Luneburg Heath.
DR: Yes.
GR: Luneburg Heath. Yeah.
DR: Well that was the town.
GR: Yeah.
DR: And we had to get up there the next day and it was quite a thing because people were pinching bikes and cars and all sorts of things to get up there and we were a bit slow off the mark. We couldn’t find anything but we found a bloke who was going out in a pony and trap thing so we got on board there and I sat, jiggling mind you it was a beautiful sunny day. It was quite a nice ride, trip and we eventually we got to a village and we stopped for a drink. Went in the pub and demanded a drink and of course when we got out the pony had gone but one of the Canadians, our Canadians came along driving a bus so we piled on to this bus and it was so funny ‘cause there were Germans were walking back on the side of the road and everybody was trying to get a good hat.
GR: Souvenir.
DR: If you could see an officer with a nice smart hat. Boom. [laughs] No. It was. I got a sword.
CR: Yes you got a sword didn’t you?
DR: Going through a village, a great big pile of swords so I got out and had a look and picked one I liked and still got it.
AM: Wonderful. Might have to have a photo of that.
DR: Sorry?
AM: We might have to -
GR: Have a photograph of that.
AM: Take a photo of that. How did you eventually get back though to England?
DR: Well, we, we were flown back. RAF Dakota.
GR: Dakota. And back to England was you? Was you demobbed straight away?
DR: No. No. Actually I stayed in the air force for three years after the war.
GR: Oh.
AM: You were probably deloused first weren’t you?
DR: Hmmn?
AM: They deloused you first.
CR: They deloused you.
DR: Oh yeah.
GR: Yeah.
CR: You were lousy when you came back.
DR: They more or less did that when we landed. We landed at a place called Wing. I don’t know.
AM: Yes. Yeah.
DR: And I was posted to Wing.
GR: Yeah. We know Wing.
DR: Soon after but they arranged it quite well actually. They sort of deloused you and they set it out like a restaurant or café and the ladies would bring you tea and coffee and then the buses took us into Aylesbury and put us on a train up to Cosford.
GR: Yeah.
DR: And then I went on leave from Cosford.
AM: Had you been able to tell your parents? Did your parents know that you were alive?
DR: Yes. Yes. Actually, yeah, I think the Red Cross had told them that I was.
AM: Right. Ok.
DR: And the night we got back the RAF gave us forms that we could send telegrams. So we got telegrams to say we were back.
AM: Yeah.
DR: But -
AM: And that was that but you stayed in for another three years.
DR: Yes. What happened was that when I was shot down I was a flight sergeant but had been interviewed for a commission and the commission came through backdated about a month before I was [laughs] before I was shot down. So I came, when I came back I was actually a flying officer and it rather appealed to me. I thought well here I am, a flying officer, I’ve never been in an officers mess in my life and I was when I got back though and I thought, they gave us interviews to see what we wanted to do and I said, ‘Well I would like, I want to stay on flying.’ And, ‘Oh well, you know everybody wants to do that who wants to stay in.’ People who, others just want to get out. And I applied for a permanent commission and when they put me on flying I thought that’s it I’m getting my permanent commission but it wasn’t so. I extended my service for two years and towards the end of the two years I extended another year. At the end of that time I had a letter telling me that the king thanked me for my services but he didn’t want me anymore. [laughs] So that was that.
AM: Thank you and goodbye.
GR: Yeah.
AM: In the, in that three years though you were flying. Where? Whereabouts? What -
DR: I flew Lancasters then instead of Halifaxes.
AM: Yeah.
DR: Yeah I flew. I was in, well, we had to more or less had to go, start our training again. What happened you see there people there who’d been POWs four or five years so they had, obviously had to have a refresher course if they wanted to go on and so they didn’t really just make a refresher course for us they stuck us on the course that the new entrants was doing, you know, people doing for the first time which was alright. We went back on to Oxfords and I did Oxfords and then on to Wellingtons and then on to the Lancaster Conversion Unit and then from there I went to the central signals establishment which was at, we did about, I think I did a bit over a year there and Cicely and I lived out. It was just after we got married actually I went there and -
GR: ’Cause that’s the one question we’ve never asked. Did you two know each other during the war?
DR: No.
CR: No.
GR: No.
CR: I didn’t even know him.
GR: Right.
DR: Yeah it was quite an interesting job on central signals. We used to, well we got various things. There were two squadrons, one calibration squadron their job was to go around calibrating the approach landings. I forget what they were called it now. The blind flying approach.
GR: Yeah.
DR: That was their main job. We were the development squadron. We were supposed to develop, test fly new things but of course we were test flying things that had been used during the war [laughs] and, but we had other things to do. We used to test the Gee coverage over France and Holland and so on and over Wales and Ireland and so on. We used to have a route to fly and pinpoints to go over and it had two cameras in the aircraft which took pictures simultaneously. One of the ground and one of the set so that they could be compare the -
AM: Right.
GR: Yeah.
AM: Yeah.
DR: But invariably one of them went wrong so they’d say, ‘Let’s do it again.’ But it was quite interesting. We also had to, people that were doing the calibrating and what not in Germany we used to have to take them over with all their equipment and fetch them back and so on. That was a bit of bind but one of the funniest, probably the funniest thing in my career was when I went to fetch a load back once and they weren’t ready. I went on the Friday and they weren’t ready. They was going to be ready on the Saturday morning so I said, ‘Well I want to be off by 8 o’clock at the latest,’ And they got to get all their equipment there and so on. But anyway when we eventually got them in the aircraft it was the COs monthly parade on the airfield. Lutzendorf I think it was and they’d no parade ground, they used to parade on the runway. So I was about to taxi out and the parade was getting on, forming up on thing there and my temper was getting a little frayed to say the least so I had words with air traffic control and then after a few minutes they came back and said, ‘Well the parade’s going to march off the runway onto the overshoot area until you’ve gone so you’re alright to go along there, turn and take off.’ So I, ‘Fair enough. I can do that.’ And they all marched off and I got along there and I turned, as I turned I opened up the throttle up. All the caps went. [laughs]
AM: Wonderful.
DR: Didn’t stop to see them sorting them out.
AM: And off you went into the wide blue yonder. What did you do after the, after you’d left the RAF?
DR: Sorry?
AM: What did you do after you’d left the RAF?
DR: I went back to the bank.
AM: To the bank.
DR: Yeah. Eventually. Yeah.
AM: At Skegness?
CR: He did one flight in a Lanc over Biggin Hill didn’t you? The first Biggin Hill.
DR: Yeah. Well yes just before I came out. It was the first time they’d done this Battle of Britain day thing you know and all the stations wanted a Lancaster. They all wanted a Lancaster and -
CR: Winston Churchill was there.
DR: And I think our people agreed to supply about four or five or something. Well I wasn’t going to do it on this Saturday. I know they didn’t put my name down for it anyway and then my boss, the squadron leader, said to me, he said, ‘Why don’t you come with me?’ he said, ‘I’m going down to Biggin Hill. We’ll have a day out’. So I said, ‘Alright.’ So that was on the Monday. On the Tuesday he went off on leave. He said, ‘I’ll see you on Saturday morning.’ ‘Alright.’ On the Friday afternoon air traffic got on to me to say Biggin Hill had been on the phone and they would like the Lancaster to go down today for obvious reasons. They’d only got a short runway and if you make a mess of it they can clear the mess up before the crowds come in tomorrow. I mean that was obvious what it was. So, you know they said Duchy is on leave. You’ll have to bring it so I thought fair enough. I took it down and -
GR: Sorry to interrupt you but when you do flights like that -
DR: Yeah.
GR: How many crew did you have? Did you have like a flight engineer with you, a radio operator?
DR: I think I had a navigator, a radio operator and, an engineer, I think.
GR: Yeah. So the four of you.
DR: I don’t think we needed any more than that.
GR: Yeah. Sorry.
DR: I had a lot of odd bods who wanted to get away for the weekend you know. Poured out when I said that.
AM: But you didn’t really need a rear gunner.
GR: No [laughs]
DR: But no it was funny actually and of course it was a big display.
GR: Yeah.
DR: The guest of honour was Winston Churchill.
GR: It was the first Biggin Hill Air Show.
DR: Yes. The first Biggin. Yeah. Winston Churchill was and the funny thing was that, you see nearly all the other things were fighters and doing aerobatics and so on and the CO of the squadron came to me and he said, ‘Would you do three engine flying?’ So I said, ‘Yes. I can do three engine flying. I’ll do two engine flying.’ ‘Oh that would be nice,’ he said. Afterwards I thought I’m an idiot because we were supposed to practice three and two engine flying but the maximum height, rather the minimum you weren’t, I think for two engine flying you weren’t supposed to come below five thousand feet. So I thought well five thousand feet they won’t see me. So Winston Churchill’s going to be down there. What the heck do I do? I think eventually I compromised a bit but I didn’t, I didn’t go the full hog down to a thousand feet or anything like that. We went down a bit below what we were supposed to do. I did the two and two on one side look spectacular.
GR: What you flew with two -
DR: Two on one side.
AM: So both on one side.
DR: Yeah.
GR: And both -
AM: Going and the other one’s not.
DR: Yeah.
AM: Does that not make you –
GR: Yeah.
DR: No.
AM: Swing around.
DR: You hold it alright and the -
AM: Ok.
DR: But the big shock, the only trouble you get is if, if they cool down to much and you can’t get the flaming things started [laughs]
GR: I’m sure you were alright.
DR: Yeah but -
CR: Would you like a cup of tea or anything?
AM: I think we’re done. I think we’re done actually.
GR: Yeah.
AM: I’m going to switch off now.
[machine paused]
GR: It wasn’t Len McNamara was it?
DR: Sorry?
GR: It wasn’t Len McNamara.
DR: No I don’t think so. I don’t think it was McNamara. No.
GR: Because Len had rear gunners.
AM: The one question I would have asked as well was just, so you flew the Halifax operationally but then the Lancaster after so which -
DR: Yeah.
AM: Was your favourite and what are the pros and cons of the two?
DR: Well I’m still a Lanc, er a Halifax man.
GR: Halifax.
DR: I think it’s nicer to handle. Certainly nicer to get in and out of and you know there was not a lot to choose between them I think but it’s on things like that that I would judge it.
GR: And to be fair everybody who we’ve asked the question of who -
AM: Prefers Halifax.
GR: Served on Lancs and Halifax they all said the Halifax.
DR: Halifax. Yeah.
GR: They said, ‘Alright the Lanc -
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 Douglas Robinson
Creator
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Annie Moody
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
2016-09-11
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ARobinsonD160911
PRobinsonD1601
Conforms To
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Pending review
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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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01:33:56 audio recording
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Lithuania
Zimbabwe
Germany--Berlin
Lithuania--Šilutė
Great Britain
Lithuania--Klaipėda
Mediterranean Sea
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940-09
1944
Description
An account of the resource
Douglas was in the Local Defence Volunteers before joining the Royal Air Force as a pilot. After Babbacombe, he did initial training at Scarborough and then in Rhodesia. Initial flight training in Harare on Tiger Moths was followed by service training on Oxfords at Bulawayo. Douglas had an eventful passage home when his troop ship, the Oronsay, was torpedoed by Italian submarine Archimede and he spent eight days in a lifeboat.
After returning to the UK, Douglas went to an Operational Training Unit to get crewed up, initially at RAF Wymeswold and then RAF Castle Donington on Wellingtons. He went to RAF Marston Moor and on to 158 Squadron at RAF Lissett on Halifaxes where he describes an encounter with Group Captain Leonard Cheshire. Douglas relates how a rear gunner refused to fly and was court martialled.
Douglas flew three operations to Berlin and on the third took a direct hit. After most of the crew baled, he managed to land in the Netherlands before being taken prisoner. Stalag Luft VI, on the border of East Prussia and Lithuania, was followed by Stalag Luft IV after the Russians approached. For three months Douglas was part of the Long March before being rescued by the 6th Airborne Division and flown back home.
Douglas stayed on for three years after the war. He was posted to RAF Wing and went up to Cosford as a flying officer. He attended a Lancaster Conversion Unit and flew Lancasters. He finished at a development squadron at the Central Signals Establishment. He recalls flying a Lancaster at the first Biggin Hill Air Show in front of Winston Churchill.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sally Coulter
158 Squadron
aircrew
animal
bale out
bombing
Cheshire, Geoffrey Leonard (1917-1992)
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
crewing up
forced landing
Gee
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
military discipline
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
prisoner of war
promotion
RAF Lissett
RAF Marston Moor
Stalag Luft 4
Stalag Luft 6
strafing
submarine
Sunderland
the long march
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/998/9671/PWardEM16010044.1.jpg
8d5d763bd011aead70cd64efc9260660
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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Ward, Mary. Album
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-12-14
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Ward, EM
Description
An account of the resource
42 items. The album concerns the work of 517 Squadron Meteorological Flight at RAF Shawbury, RAF Chivenor and RAF Brawdy. It contains photographs of aircraft and staff at work and on leave.
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
Flying Officer Ron Ward
Description
An account of the resource
Formal photograph of 175740 Flying Officer Ron Ward, in uniform, with meteorological observer's half wing. Captioned 'Ron Ward', 'RAF Service August 1944 - 1946', 'Photo 1946, MORLEY'.
Page has hand written log of his flights at Empire Air navigation School in 1946, flying in Lancaster, Lancastrian 'Aries' and Halifax. Also a list of the RAF stations he was stationed at from 1939 to 1946.
Identifier
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PWardEM16010044
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
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
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One b/w photograph on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Text
Text. Personal research
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Devon
England--Lincolnshire
England--Shropshire
England--Yorkshire
Wales--Pembrokeshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
aircrew
ground personnel
Halifax
Lancaster
Lancastrian
meteorological officer
RAF Brawdy
RAF Chivenor
RAF Linton on Ouse
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Pocklington
RAF Shawbury
RAF Waddington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/700/10101/PBeasleyDG1727.1.jpg
3e6476a4caca883b605d7c511cc297fb
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/700/10101/ABeasleyDG180326.2.mp3
d30a8491f63c56f32a83d26c6d06fe2d
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
Beasley, Doug
Douglas George Beasley
D G Beasley
Description
An account of the resource
14 items. An oral history interview with Doug Beasley (b.1925, 1876732 Royal Ar Force) and photographs of aircrew. He flew operations with 76 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Doug Beasley 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
2017-11-03
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
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Beasley, DG
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DK: So, I’ll just introduce myself. So, it’s David Kavanagh for the International Bomber Command Centre interviewing Doug Beasley at his home on the 26th of, where are we? March 2018. So if I just put that there.
DB: Yeah.
DK: If I keep looking over I’m just making sure it’s working.
DB: It’s working.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Right. Yeah.
DK: It is. Sometimes get caught out with the batteries going or something.
DB: They’re quite good those aren’t they?
DK: They are nice. A very handy little —
DB: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: Little bit of kit that. Right. So, if I can just ask you —
DB: Yeah.
DK: What were you doing immediately before the war?
DB: Well, I, I was still at school when war was declared but in, when I was [pause] yeah I left school and when I was sixteen I started work in, in a company called British Glues and Chemicals Limited.
DK: Oh right.
DB: And I was studying really accountancy. I also was in the Air Training Corps immediately I was sixteen. And that meant that as soon as I was eighteen I went to, to the Aircrew Reception.
DK: Right.
DB: Selection.
DK: Yeah.
DB: People.
DK: Was the Air Force your first choice then?
DB: Oh yes. Yeah. Well, I was in the Air Training Corps.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
DB: And the, three months later I was in the RAF. And the reason was, I was accepted as pilot, navigator, bomb aimer which everybody wanted to be and they said, ‘But it will be at least a year before you join up.’ And I said, ‘Well, all my friends have gone into the RAF as well.’ And the new position of flight engineer was just coming in.
DK: Right.
DB: And they talked, well I don’t say they talked me into it but you acted as second pilot anyway.
DK: Yeah.
DB: So, so —
DK: If I could just take you back a bit.
DB: Yeah.
DK: What was the first things you had to do when you joined the Air Force? Because presumably there was a bit of square bashing going on or something. Or —
DB: Well, yeah, the first thing was I joined up at of all places Lord’s Cricket Ground.
DK: Right.
DB: And thirty thousand of us turned up there. And as I’m a cricket fan I’m part of the history of Lord’s, you see.
DK: Oh excellent.
DB: So, and we —
DK: You, have you ever been out to bat there, Doug?
DB: Hmmn?
DK: You’ve not been up to bat. No. No.
DB: No. No. No. Nothing like that but —
DK: That’s what I always wanted to do.
DB: There’s a special plaque up in Lord’s Cricket Ground.
DK: Yes. I’ve seen that. Yeah.
DB: So we were there for three weeks and then funnily enough I was, I then went to the Initial Training Wing which was [pause] I found all these things.
DK: Ok.
DB: Which was at Torquay.
DK: So if just say this for the recording then.
DB: Yeah.
DK: So you were at Number 3 Initial Training Wing.
DB: Yeah.
DK: C Flight of number 2 Squadron. And that was in October 1943.
DB: That’s right. Yeah.
DK: So whereabouts are you then? Are you —
[pause]
DK: Ah.
DB: The names there as well.
DK: You haven’t changed much.
OJ: I couldn’t find him earlier [laughs]
DK: So they were all sort of the same age as you then were they?
DB: Well, no they weren’t.
DK: Oh right.
DB: I was explaining to my grand-daughter a lot of them were policemen.
DK: Oh.
DB: And they were not allowed to join until they were thirty years old.
DK: Right.
DB: So I found myself, all that back row were policemen basically.
DK: They do, and now you’ve said they do look a lot older don’t they?
DB: Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And —
DK: So how old would you have been in October ’43?
DB: I was just, I was just eighteen then.
DK: Eighteen.
DB: Yeah. Eighteen and a quarter. Yeah.
DK: So presumably they couldn’t join earlier because they were in a Reserved Occupation.
DB: Yeah. They couldn’t join earlier.
DK: Yeah.
DB: No. I mean we were you know the younger ones. I don’t know how many were in the same category as me but I always seemed to be about the youngest at the moment, you know.
DK: Right.
DB: But I think it was because of this Air Training Corps I was in. As soon as I was eighteen I was interviewed and then three months later I was in the RAF. And that was when I joined up to Lord’s Cricket Ground you see.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: So 3 ITW was based where?
DB: Torquay.
DK: Torquay. Right.
DB: Yeah. Yeah. And we were there for about six weeks I think. Yeah.
DK: And what used to happen at Torquay then?
DB: Well, that was, that was when they really [laughs] they really, you got, you got a pretty awkward flight sergeant looking after you and they were basically getting us absolutely fit. There was a lot of running going on etcetera. But it was your initial training for the RAF.
DK: Right.
DB: Yeah. On that.
DK: Was it something you took to well at the time?
DB: Well, yes. Well, there’s a lot worse places than, to be than Torquay. So that was quite interesting. Yeah. And then after that I started my basic training which was at St Athans.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Which was one of the largest, well I think it was the largest place in the, outside Singapore. Something like that anyway. And I was there then for, oh that was quite intensive training. Yeah.
DK: And was that training to be a flight engineer?
DB: Oh yeah. Very definitely.
DK: So you didn’t, you said you tried to join as a pilot.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Bomb aimer. Navigator.
DB: Yeah.
DK: But was turned down for that then presumably.
DB: Well, I wasn’t, I wasn’t really turned down. I could have taken it if I was prepared to wait twelve months.
DK: Right.
DB: But as I mentioned most of my friends had joined the RAF.
DK: Right.
DB: And, well I didn’t want to miss it.
DK: Yeah.
DB: I know that sounds a bit foolish but —
DK: So, what was the training like then at St Athans? What did you have to do?
DB: Well, it was, it was very comprehensive really because I wasn’t ever trained as an engineer. But of course the most important subject you had to be good at was mathematics because in the air you did everything.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And so there was a lot of basic training on engines and stuff like that but what, what was really always mentioned was it’s what we had to do in the air.
DK: Right.
DB: If things went wrong. And of course there was a lot of basic training because the pilot and myself were the liaison group with the engineers. Ground engineers. So it was pretty intensive. The training.
DK: So, at St Athan did they actually have aircraft that you worked on or was it all parts?
DB: Yeah. Well, there were aircraft there but part of the training was we went to Speke Airport.
DK: Right.
DB: Where at that time they were producing Halifax aircraft which I was on, and so we saw, saw them in production then and I think we spent about three or four days there.
DK: Right.
DB: Really learning all about the thing. And, and that was the first time I saw a lady pilot, you know taking off.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Because it was an airport.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Well, it still is. Liverpool Airport now. So that was quite an interesting background. And then after that I went straight to the Heavy Conversion Unit. I mean, and that’s, that was immediately on to four engine aircraft.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And the flight engineer, we were all flight engineers there in the Heavy Conversion Unit and I think I was there a good two or three months ahead of the crew.
DK: Right.
DB: Because the ordinary crew went to Operational Training Units, and what happened was then they came to the Heavy Conversion Unit and we flight engineers all lined up and, and the respective pilots came along and —
DK: Picked one of you.
DB: Picked. Well, it was quite interesting with mine because he was a Canadian and he was thirty one years old. And he just said, ‘What’s your name?’ So, I said, ‘Beasley.’ He said, ‘No. Christian name,’ you see.
DK: Right.
DB: So I said, ‘Doug.’ He said, ‘My name’s Doug.’
DK: Yeah.
DB: So we had something in common straight away. And so it was a funny form of selection.
DK: Yeah.
DB: What crew you were in.
DK: Do you think that, do you think that worked well then with the pilot just coming up and choosing his flight engineer?
DB: Well, it did as far as we were concerned. Yes. I know of no complaints at all. We all, we all got on very well. The two gunners were British. One was Welsh.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And one was English.
DK: Can you remember your pilot’s name? Doug?
DB: Yeah. Kerr. K E R R.
DK: Kerr.
DB: I’ve actually as a matter of interest I only found this the other day myself but it’s, I’ve got somewhere here photographs of them all. All —
OJ: I thought I’d be nosey.
[pause]
DK: Oh wow.
DB: That’s, that’s the same as that one.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
DB: That was one of my pals. That was when I first joined up.
DK: Yeah.
DB: But that was the, that was the pilot. Kerr. Pilot Doug Kerr. This was July 1944.
DK: Just, just for the recording.
DB: Yeah.
DK: That’s Kerr. K E R R.
DB: K E R R. Yes.
DK: Dg Kerr.
DB: The navigator was Alec Marshall.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And then that was the bomb aimer. Jerry Lowe.
DK: Jerry Lowe. Yeah.
DB: The wireless operator was Mel Magee. And these, these were the two gunners.
DK: So the two gunners.
DB: Yeah.
DK: The mid-upper gunner was?
DB: Vic Hewitt.
DK: Vic Hewitt.
DB: Yeah. And Wally Hearn.
DK: Wally Hearn.
DB: Yeah.
DK: That was the rear gunner.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah. Yeah. So I only found this the other day.
DK: Wow.
DB: So that was quite interesting.
DK: That’s superb that.
DB: I think, I think it just goes on to all sorts. Well, I think there’s another one here. This is with the crew.
DK: Right.
DB: That’s me there. And this was another part there. This is the —
DK: That’s the Halifax in the background there, isn’t it?
DB: That’s right.
DK: This was the Heavy Conversion Unit at Marston Moor.
DB: Yeah. That’s right.
DK: The Heavy Conversion Unit at Marston Moor.
DB: That’s right. Yeah.
DK: I’m just saying this loudly for the recording.
DB: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: Oh wow.
DB: So, and then the, you were at Heavy Conversion Unit for, well I was the lucky one. I had already had experience of the Halifax and they hadn’t you see.
DK: No. So what had they trained on then before?
DB: Well, they were, on Operational Training Unit was on Wellington aircraft.
DK: Right.
DB: And so there was six of them in the Wellington. Training. And I just didn’t go into Wellingtons at all. I went straight on to the, where the flight engineer had to be you see. Yeah.
DK: So was it the Heavy Conversion unit then the first time you actually flew?
DB: Yeah. Yes. And I was flying with, with well the trainee flight engineer people.
DK: Right.
DB: Yeah. And it was quite a hectic course you know because you were then taught how you had to handle the four-engine aircraft. Eight petrol tanks and all the, everything the flight engineer should know basically. So it was, it was quite a course. And then I, the rest had done ordinary flying but they hadn’t flown in a Halifax before.
DK: Yeah.
DB: So we had a trainee. An instructor for the pilot.
DK: Yeah.
DB: But nobody was with me. I was, I was on my own.
DK: You were on your own.
DB: Right from the word go.
DK: So how did you feel then when you had your first take off in a Halifax?
DB: Well, I had done.
DK: Yeah. Done it before. Yeah.
DB: I’d done plenty of flying before.
DK: Yeah.
DB: With, with the instructors.
DK: Yeah.
DB: So, so I did, you know but that time well I was I had to know it all, you know. And, and then the first time I flew with the crew I mean the, the rest of them they didn’t know what the flight engineer was for or anything particularly.
DK: Yeah.
DB: So that was when we started to form as a complete crew.
DK: Right.
OJ: And was that still when you were eighteen?
DB: Yes. I was. No. I was nineteen.
OJ: So you were nineteen then.
DK: Nineteen now.
DB: Nineteen.
OJ: Flying a plane at nineteen.
DB: No. I was nineteen by then. Yeah. Yeah.
OJ: Gosh.
DK: So your pilot then was quite, for most of the pilots quite a bit older then if he was in his thirties.
DB: Yeah. They called him pop.
DK: Yeah.
DB: He was naturally —
DK: The old man of thirty.
DB: Naturally grey haired.
DK: Yeah.
DB: But he was, he was a wonderful character. Extremely good and we, you know while we were at Heavy Conversion Unit we learned our business really. What it all meant.
DK: So at Heavy Conversion Unit what were you doing? Were you going on cross country flights?
DB: Oh yes. We were doing day flights. Night flights.
DK: Yeah.
DB: The lot. And even one, one was dropping leaflets over enemy territory. Not, not anything too serious but in the end it counted as our first op.
DK: Right. Right. So your first operation was from the Heavy Conversion Unit.
DB: Yeah. Yeah. And then of course what happened after we finished at Heavy Conversion Unit which I think it was August ’44 we then went to [pause] well, Holme on Spalding Moor.
DK: Right.
DB: Which was the 76 Squadron base. Previously 76 Squadron were in [pause] I said the name of the [pause] but it’s a famous —
DK: Linton on Ouse.
DB: Linton on Ouse.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And the famous one there was Leonard Cheshire you see.
DK: Yeah.
DB: So we were we were quite a famous Squadron because of him.
DK: You didn’t meet Cheshire there then?
DB: No. But at Holme on Spalding Moor, in the Memorial Gardens there is a special thing for him.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah. That’s at Holme on Spalding Moor.
DK: Right.
DB: No. We never met him because by that time when I was flying he was, he was in the Pathfinder.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Pathfinder Force. And, and of course as you know he was in the crew that dropped the atom bomb.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
DB: And I think that was what made him do the work he did afterwards. So we then went to the Squadron and in pretty rapid time we, we did our first operation.
DK: Right.
DB: Which I think I —
OJ: One of these.
DK: The logbook.
DB: The logbook.
OJ: That.
DB: That’s the one. I think it was [pause] it was August I think if my memory is right.
[pause]
DB: 17th of August.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And these, these were the sort of —
DK: Right.
DB: Before. And that was our first operation on the 27th —
DK: So is that first op?
DB: So we were there say from the 7th, after about a week.
DK: Is this a week?
DB: No. I’ve, this is when I was just flying as the engineer.
DK: Right.
DB: No crew.
DK: So just for the recording then —
DB: Yeah.
DK: When you were at the Heavy Conversion Unit you were flying Halifax 2s and 5s.
DB: That’s right. Yeah.
DK: And they were with the Merlin engines.
DB: Yeah. They were.
DK: Right.
DB: Yeah. Yeah. And then we went to the radial engines. So this is when I, my own crew, there’s the Marston Moor.
DK: So just for the recording again.
DB: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: It’s 1652 Heavy Conversion Unit at Marston Moor.
DB: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And, you know this is where I was learning my stuff. Second engineer.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Every time. And I flew with those people there. And then this was when I started doing the real, real —
DK: With your crew.
DB: Real. Yeah.
DK: So that’s between the 4th of July ’44.
DB: Yeah.
DK: And the 7th of August ’44.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Oh, no. Carry on. It’s the 12th. It’s the 12th, the 12th of August.
DB: Right through to that, yeah. We did about sixty one hours one way and another.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
DB: In the Heavy Conversion Unit and they counted that one as an op you see.
DK: So your first operation then was the French coast.
DB: Yeah. 12th of August. Yeah.
DK: A bullseye.
DB: We were dropping leaflets and stuff like that.
DK: So that’s referred to as a bullseye.
DB: Yes. Yeah.
DK: This one.
DB: Yeah. It —
DK: Ok.
DB: And then this is when the real —
DK: Right.
DB: This is when we converted to the Halifax 3 so we had —
DK: With the radial engines.
DB: Yeah. You know, those first parts were basically learning.
DK: Yeah.
DB: With the radial engines.
DK: Did you find much of a difference between the Merlin-engined Halifax and the Bristol Hercules?
DB: No. Not really. The basics were the same as far as the flight engineer was concerned. I mean our main responsibility was looking after the fuel and keeping the balance of the aircraft right. So we were, we were, well I was always pleased. There was always plenty to do. You know.
DK: So that —
DB: Yeah.
DK: So the fuel systems were similar.
DB: In both.
DK: In both aircraft.
DB: Yes. Yeah. It was just the engines that were different.
DK: Yeah.
DB: There has always been an argument that the best aircraft of all was the Lancaster with radial engines. The Lancaster 2.
DK: 2, yeah.
DB: But well I noticed even last night they kept mentioning the Lancaster all the time and, but it’s the, it’s one of those funny things. It was the Spitfire all last night. No mention of the Hurricane, you know.
DK: The Hurricane. Yeah. Yeah.
DB: This always upsets us a little bit.
DK: Yeah. I’m not surprised.
DB: But that’s the way it goes and then —
DK: So you joined 76 Squadron on the 17th of August ’44.
DB: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: And you’re flying your first operation on 25th of August ’44.
DB: Yeah. And that was —
DK: So that was an operation to Watten.
DB: Yeah. That was the, this was the V-1. The V-1 unit.
DK: I’ll spell that for the recording.
DB: That’s in Calais.
DK: That’s W A T T E N.
DB: Yeah. Watten. And, and that was, in fact you’ll notice it was in daylight, which was most unusual and they always say the first one is, is can be fatal. A lot of people went on their first op and this was quite hairy. We, in my diary we saw three aircraft shot down and we were hit by anti-aircraft fire and we lost an engine. So that was a good start, you know. And anyway we survived it and —
DK: So you came back on just three engines.
DB: Three engines. Yeah. And of course when we got back, when you land damaged it’s the pilot and myself with the ground crew and it was quite frightening, you know. What we saw there. But I’ve never forgotten what my pilot said. He said, ‘Well, one thing I’m pleased about is, we all did what we had to do.’ And I’ve never forgotten that.
DK: Yeah.
DB: But that was really what crews were all about.
DK: Yeah.
DB: So, so it was a good baptism in a way.
DK: Did you find that because of that danger you kind of bonded then as a crew? If you’re doing your, your part.
DB: Well, it did, it did a lot of good. Yes. I mean we all got to know each other reasonably well but not, not in, not in actual duties like that.
DK: Yeah.
DB: So, yes it did do a lot of good because it paid off, you know.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah.
OJ: And you were saying three planes got shot down. Were you the only ones that came back? Or how many others? How many others went out on that?
DB: Well, we didn’t lose any in our Squadron but there were three we saw shot down.
DK: From other Squadrons.
DB: We had to take evasive action when we lost an engine. Well, I mean it momentrally things aren’t right. You know.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And you know I’m, I’m saying to the pilot, ‘Feather the engine,’ and he does what he has to do but of course we’re taking evasive action as well and we found ourselves going over Dunkirk and I think I’ve mentioned that in the diary and we saw another one shot down there and so we were lucky.
DK: Yeah.
DB: We survived it. The first one.
DK: And that was flak that damaged the engine.
DB: Oh yeah.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah. I mean it was very, I mean they were heavily defended those V-1 sites and this was when it was really at its peak. The V-1s. And we did a lot of, a lot of French flying in those early stages. Yeah.
DK: So, obviously it’s just after D-Day, isn’t it, so?
DB: That’s right. Yeah.
DK: So your, so your next operation then was two days later. The 27th of August.
DB: Yeah.
DK: And that was to —
DB: And that was a place called Homburg. Yeah.
DK: Homburg. Homburg.
DB: And again that was a daylight one as well. And then you’re, there are all sorts of things here. There was Le Havre, look. We went there.
DK: So, Le Havre on the 10th of September.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Yeah. I’ll just read these out for the recording.
DB: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: So the 10th September Le Havre. 15th of September Kiel.
DB: Yeah. That was the first German one. Yeah.
DK: 20th of September Calais.
DB: Yeah.
DK: 23rd of September Neuss. Near Dusseldorf.
DB: Yeah. Near Dusseldorf. Yeah.
DK: Near Dusseldorf. That’s N E U S S.
DB: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: Then where are we? 25th of September.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Calais.
DB: Yeah.
DK: And then 26th of September Calais again.
DB: Yeah. So it was quite, quite a busy month one way and another. Yeah.
OJ: Can I just take a look at [unclear]
DB: Yeah. And then we go in to sort of October.
DK: Ok.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Can I read those out for the recording?
DB: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: So 7th of October was Kleve. 9th of October — Bochum. 14th of October — Duisburg. 15th October — Wilhelmshaven. 25th of October — Essen. 28th of October — Westkapelle.
DB: Yeah. Its Walcheren Island.
DK: Walcheren Island. Yeah.
DB: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: And then 30th of October — Cologne.
DB: Yeah.
DK: And then the 31st of October — Cologne again.
DB: Yeah.
DK: And those, those were all at night then were they?
DB: No. Where it’s in red they were at night.
DK: Oh right. Sorry. Yeah.
DB: Yeah. Yeah. So it was pretty hectic going. And then November.
DK: So, November then.
DB: Yeah.
DK: 2nd of November — Dusseldorf.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Another back there. 6th of November — Gelsenkirchen. 16th of November — Munster.
DB: Yeah.
DK: 21st of November Sterkrade. S T.
DB: Sterkrade.
DK: Sterkrade.
DB: Yeah.
DK: S T E R K A E E and then 29th of November — Essen.
DB: Yeah.
DK: I’ll get back to those in a moment.
DB: Yeah.
DK: So what was, what was it like then? Operations actually over Germany?
DB: Well, all, they were always heavy flak. You were lucky if you didn’t get anti-aircraft fire and, of course it always looks a lot worse at night. Although having said that that first operation we did where we lost an engine it wasn’t much fun in daylight when when, when you’re under a lot of pressure. The main problem at night was, I mean I think there was one of those, I think it was one of the Cologne ones where we were the thousand aircraft and the mind boggles. A thousand aircraft over the target in twenty minutes.
DK: Yeah.
DB: You know, its —
DK: Could you, could you actually see much at night though from your aircraft?
DB: Well, at night time there were no lights on or anything like that. In daylight sometimes you were supposed to be flying at say twenty thousand feet and sometimes the aircraft couldn’t get up to that. Not necessarily your own. So you could have some below that if the aircraft wasn’t as good as, we were lucky. We had fairly new aircraft. These Halifax 3s. So sometimes we seemed to be above but it was not much fun if they opened the bomb doors.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And a lot of that happened of course and hit aircraft below them. So none of the German targets were, were easy, you, you, because the fighter force was pretty engaged at that stage, you know. So there was very seldom. It was either heavy anti-aircraft fire and of course where the fighters were concerned they tend to come up underneath you.
DK: Right.
DB: Yeah. They were, they were quite good.
DK: Can you recall actually seeing any German fighters?
DB: Oh yeah. We were hit by one. I’d have to look in my diary —
DK: Yeah.
DB: To see which one it was but we, we were attacked by a night, a Junkers 88. In fact, if you go in there.
OJ: Do you want me to have a look with me?
DB: What are we up to?
DK: Up to 29th of November.
DB: Yeah. Yeah. If you —
OJ: That’s December.
DB: Yeah. Yeah. I can’t remember. It’s in the diary.
OJ: November the 18th or was it November the —
DB: Well —
DK: Would it be in the logbook somewhere?
DB: Yeah. It’s in the, no it wouldn’t be in the logbook I don’t think.
DK: [unclear] ok.
OJ: That’s in to November.
DB: If you can —
DB: That’s November 6th
DK: Oh, here we go. It is in the logbook actually. 12th of January 1945. Attacked by Junkers 88.
DB: Oh, yeah. Yeah. That’s right. That’s when it gets [laughs] Yeah. Well, that’s good I put it in there. Hanover. Yeah. I thought. I said Cologne didn’t I? So that was pretty, pretty you know it was mainly German targets and it was about that time when we, you know a tour of operations was thirty.
DK: Right.
DB: But the weather was so bad and I really genuinely mean that. Terrible the weather was. And we took off sometimes when, when we shouldn’t have done one way and another. And, and we the weather, the weather was so, so bad that what they did instead of doing thirty they brought in a points system. So you had three points for French targets, four points for German targets and because of that instead of doing thirty we ended up doing thirty eight, you see. And this was all because of the bad weather. The replacement crews couldn’t come in. And if you look at the last eight that we did and you’ve got to remember psychologically we’d got away with it —
DK: Yeah.
DB: For the thirty. And this coincided with the Ardennes Offensive and we, that was, you know that was before we’d done thirty. When the Ardennes Offensive was on. We went to a place called St Vith, and it was, we were going to take off on the Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and finally took off on Boxing Day because of thick fog. And we took off in thick fog because we had to go to St Vith. It was so critical. This was when the Germans were —
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
DB: Getting the upper hand. And it was, it was very heavily defended but it was a daylight as well and we, I think well we saved the day for them.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Because it was the railway station we took and they were reinforcing.
DK: Right.
DB: Reinforcing the troops.
DK: And that was to support the American troops on the ground was it?
DB: Well, yes.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
DB: And it was very difficult. And when we got, when we were going back we still couldn’t land at Holme on Spalding Moor because the fog was still thick, and so we got diverted to East Fortune and I always remember it. We’d never been to East Fortune. This is in, in Scotland and I, I remember saying to the pilot, ‘There’s no going around again,’ because it was pretty hairy. We were on, we were, you’re not ever quite empty but it was quite serious. Anyway, he was a good pilot and we landed.
DK: So you were down to your last drop of petrol.
DB: Yeah. And in fact we had thirty gallons left. Which is nothing in a four engine aircraft.
DK: No.
DB: And then we went back and the weather was, was, that would be around Christmas time when we did the St Vith one.
DK: Yeah.
DB: When we had to go. Then we got onto the last date and again it was, it was, the weather was unbelievably bad. And this was when the Russians were asking Bomber Command to help them out and because, you know they were winning but they didn’t have the heavy bomber force and we were, we were attacking troop concentrations and everything else. And the trip we did was a place called [pause – pages turning] Let me just get the page. These were the last eight there.
DK: Yeah.
DB: We, we went to, to Böhlen which, we were the diversionary flight for Dresden.
DK: Right. Yes. Yeah.
DB: And it’s only recently I realised that. So look at that flying time. Eight hours twenty minutes you see.
DK: Eight hours twenty minutes in the air.
DB: Yeah. And so sometimes when you’re the diversionary raid that is to draw the fighters away. But it, I don’t think they were expecting it. The Germans. So in a funny sort of way we, we got away with it. Then if you notice the next night, again to help the Russians, eight hours.
DK: To Chemnitz.
DB: Eight hours five minutes again.
DK: Yeah.
DB: So those last ones, this is, I mean we were on borrowed time in my book. But you know you notice there that there’s the thirty eighth one. So the last two were daylight ones.
DK: Right.
DB: So it’s —
DK: So then just go through them. Böhlen was on the, where are we? That was on the 13th of February.
DB: Yeah.
DK: And then Chemnitz on the 14th of February.
DB: Yeah.
DK: And then the last two. 23rd of February — Essen.
DB: Yeah.
DK: 24th February.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Near Dortmund. Kamen.
DB: Yeah. Yeah. That was our last one.
DK: Both daylight.
DB: Then. Yeah.
DK: So what was it like flying daylight at that stage?
DB: Well, the last two were daylight. I mean Essen is always a worry because it was very heavily defended etcetera and they weren’t, I mean the Germans were suffering a bit then with, there wasn’t much fighter opposition towards the end. But funnily enough saying that after I finished flying, I don’t know whether this has been mentioned before but I think it was in April our, our Squadron were badly affected. The Luftwaffe made their last, and they followed the bombing, bombing fleet back to bases and quite a few of my friends they were shot down over, over our own ‘drome. And I think in total we lost about twenty aircraft that night but that was the last fling of the Luftwaffe.
DK: Yeah.
DB: They never gave up.
DK: No. No.
DB: Unbelievable really. So that virtually covers the flying part. But the other thing which is relevant is after I finished flying I became an instructor at Operational Training Units.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And this is where it was Wellington aircraft and it was where my crew trained. All of them. And that, that was interesting. And I think it was in 1946 it was my first time I’d ever been to Southampton and I was nominated to be the air sea rescue officer.
DK: Right.
DB: And the course was at Calshot, near here. And it’s something I’ll never forget because it was about a month’s course and of course you realise what you didn’t know when you were flying. But on the, towards the end of the course we were all told we were going to have some very important visitors, and it was McIndoe’s.
DK: Right.
DB: The famous surgeon.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
DB: And what he’d arranged is we were all aircrew on this course, and this was part of his mental treatment and we were told, each one had a gorgeous nurse with him, and I think it was a coachload that came. And I’ll never forget it as long as I live. It’s very difficult talking to people who haven’t got a face basically. But they were talking as, as if they because that was his secret. He said, ‘You’re no different now than you were before.’
DK: Yeah.
DB: And mentally he’d got them and they were conversing and of course it was very clever, with other aircrew. You know. And it was very upsetting for all of us.
DK: Yeah.
DB: As you can imagine. But that was something which is very relevant to the flying.
DK: Did he —
DB: To experience that.
DK: Until that time then it hadn’t really crossed your mind about what could happen then and the dangers and the fires and whatever.
DB: Well —
OJ: Did you kind of not think about it?
DB: I think it’s it —
OJ: Yeah.
DB: I think its [pause] yeah.
DK: [unclear]
DB: Of course we’d lost, we’d lost crews.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And funnily enough it was only just recently — three aircraft were lost and in three cases they were sharing our billet. The crew.
DK: Right.
DB: And that’s pretty awful you know but you’ve got to remember they weren’t dead. They were missing.
DK: Right.
DB: I know now what’s happened to them but you didn’t know. So it is very difficult to [pause] I think it’s because you think it’s never going to happen to me, but it comes pretty near to it when you’re asked to leave the billet and then they collect all their belongings.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And the same night there’s a new crew in.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah. It’s very very difficult to comprehend that sort of thing.
DK: How did you get on with the new crew when they came in? Did you, was it more difficult to make friends with them then?
DB: Well, no. No. Well, you were just aircrew.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
DB: And, and I mean they were always in awe of us if, particularly when we’d done about twenty five. They always reckoned if you could get to twenty you stood a chance.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: Did you find then, did you feel you were more confident then, the more operations you did?
DB: Well, now it’s very, yes you’re more confident as a crew. Yeah. Because you knew each other inside out.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Sort of thing. But I wouldn’t say you were any more confident because it might be your turn.
DK: Yeah.
DB: You know. And I always felt sorry for the ones who had done twenty plus and then went missing.
DK: Yeah.
DB: That sort of thing. And the worst ones for us were that last eight. And look, look where they were. You know. So that made it worse.
DK: Can I just take you back to, as I say this is the 5th of January 1945.
DB: Yeah.
DK: And this is Hanover and you’re attacked by a Junkers 88.
OJ: That’s Jan 14th.
DB: Yeah.
DK: So you’re in Halifax 3 NA218.
DB: Yeah. What date was that?
DK: It was the 5th of January. January 1945.
DB: 5th of January.
OJ: That’s Jan 14 —
DB: Yeah. Here we are. Yeah. Hanover. Yeah.
DK: Do you do you want to read it out?
DB: Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yes, I will do.
DK: Yeah.
DB: “Tonight our target was Hanover. This was a trip on which we were over enemy territory for quite a long while. Everything was ok until we started our run up.” That’s to the target. “A Junkers 88 attacked us from a head on position and slightly below and raked us with machine gun and cannon fire. It was shaky for a minute or so and we were hit but nothing vital had been put out of action. On return we found damage to the wings, fuselage and starboard rudder. In places it was just like a pepper pot. When one shell went right through the starboard inner air intake but by some chance it never hit the propeller. We considered ourselves very lucky as nobody was hurt. The flak was moderate at the target and we dropped our eight and a half thousand pounds of bombs through cloud.” So it, but one remarkable thing was I sat behind the pilot and, and the bullets, we heard them, you know. They were that close. And the pilot was just a slight bullet —
DK: Grazed.
DB: Grazed.
DK: Grazed. Yeah.
DB: So that was how close it was.
DK: Yeah. And that was in his neck.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
DB: That was how close it was. But of course we didn’t know that ‘til, in fact he didn’t really know it until we got back that he was bleeding a bit, you know. But that was a bit shaky because again you had to take evasive action and if my memory is right we went down from about twenty something thousand feet to about ten thousand feet taking evasive action. And of course at the end of that you don’t know quite where, where you are and the navigator eventually gave a course and it, it turned out to be a reciprocal course which is easily, easy to do. But fortunately one of the gunners said, ‘I think we’re going the wrong way,’ [laughs] and [pause] it wasn’t a joke at the time.
DK: Yeah.
DB: But we, we successfully, that’s why you know, you rely a hundred percent on your crew and it was all put to right in no time at all. Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And of course I come into my own when, something like, because sometimes what I think it was on that particular one we couldn’t make contact with the rear gunner and that was my job. I was the roaming one, you know.
DK: Right. Yeah.
DB: And had to go. But everything was alright you know. But so it was tricky. Yeah.
DK: So when you can’t hear anything from the rear gunner what do you have to do?
DB: Well, I just go down and I’ve still got, you know I’ve got all my equipment including the intercom and all that and when I, when I got down there I think in in the excitement he’d obviously taken evasive action and his thing had just come out.
DK: Right.
DB: Yeah. So it was nothing to worry about.
DK: Right.
DB: But it wasn’t easy. I had to go up and down the plane a few times because once we had [pause] well, it could have been quite serious. We, we, you know when the bombs have gone and on this particular one there was one sticking. And that’s again, I have to be the one who goes down to the bomb bays and in this case it wasn’t noticeable at all. And then, also to make certain that all the bombs have gone when you get over the Channel on the way back you open the bomb doors again and, everything all right. The next morning, ‘Will Flying Officer Kerr and Flight Sergeant Beasley report to the commanding officer’s, immediately.’ And we didn’t know what it was for. And this this was when this thousand pound bomb had, was somehow icebound or, or I don’t know what it was. And of course after we’d you know opened the bomb doors and everything else and of course what happens is when you landed at night they don’t open the bomb doors ‘til the morning.
DK: Right.
DB: And the ground crew immediately spotted this.
DK: So the thousand pound bomb was still in the bomb bay the next morning.
DB: Yeah. It was hanging loose.
DK: Loose.
DB: And of course, I mean we, you know you’re not quite on Christian name terms with the commanding officer but he’s a pilot like.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Like an aircrew like yourself and he said, ‘Well, I can’t say you’re inefficient,’ he said, ‘Because you’ve done —’ I think it was about twenty odd ops we’d done. And he said, ‘These things happen.’ But it was a bit disconcerting you know.
DK: So you wouldn’t have known. Well, you didn’t know you were landing with a bomb on board.
DB: Yeah. Well, we landed with a loose con. Yeah. Yeah. Or probably that loosened it but it certainly wasn’t visual to spot it.
DK: Yeah. Yeah. So how did you visually see the bombs? Was there something you looked down.
DB: Well first of all the bomb bay was open and then you get a pretty good view. You knew where the bombs were.
DK: Right.
DB: Supposed to be. It wasn’t easy. It was quite easy to make a mistake and the saving grace was always opening your bomb doors over the ocean.
DK: So if there were any hung up they’d drop.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
DB: They, and we never, we’ll never know to this day what the real story was but we ended up with one loose one in the bomb bay.
DK: I bet that gave the ground crew a bit of a shock the next morning.
DB: Well, they were very nice about it because [laughs] because you know what anybody says the ground crews were unbelievable.
OJ: Did you have —
DB: There’s no other word for it.
OJ: Different ground crew or was it the same one each time?
DB: Oh, it was the same one all the time.
OJ: So you had a really good relationship with them.
DB: Yeah. Yeah. And of course when you finished your tour of operations it’s a real, real good booze up. All. Everybody. Yeah.
DK: As, as the flight engineer then did you have to, did you want to know all about the mechanics of the aircraft? So did you talk closely —
DB: Oh yeah.
DK: To the ground crew about what they were doing?
DB: Oh yeah. I had a working knowledge of everything.
DK: Yeah. Yeah. So as they were working on something you would know about it.
DB: Yeah. What happened was if there was something wrong with the aircraft it was the pilot, myself and one of the ground crew who, who went up. You know. You’d see in my logbook it’s quite often that we, when we were having the aircraft tested.
DK: Right.
DB: And no, they, I, I always felt well one of my friends from the Squadron now he was ground crew and they had one night when the, when their, when the plane didn’t come back and he was, he was making the comment, he said ‘We always wonder where it was something we hadn’t done,’ you know. That was the relationship between them.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And it must be very upsetting.
DK: That must be difficult for him. That —
DB: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: He was thinking had you done something wrong.
DB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DK: So your, the crew itself did you used to socialise with them at all? Did you?
DB: Oh yes. We went everywhere.
DK: What did you used to do off duty?
DB: There are photographs.
DK: Yeah.
DB: I think in there somewhere where, where we’re all out, I don’t know I think it’s in this one but —
OJ: On the razzle [laughs]
DK: On the razzle [laughs] in pubs and things.
DB: No. But we were, we were socially I don’t think it’s in yeah there’s, there’s where we were fumigating the billet at seventy —
DK: Right.
DB: So, that’s when we first arrived there. And they were nissen huts. I never lived in anything other than nissen huts.
DK: So, what, what were you actually fumigating for then? Because there would be —
DB: Well, because it was a nissen hut which, which was awful.
DK: Right. Yeah.
DB: Yeah. It looked awful. Yeah.
DK: Nasty bugs in there.
DB: And they were very cold.
DK: Right.
DB: Yeah. Yeah, and so, you know all the crew were —
DK: So there was nasty bugs in there was there?
DB: That’s right. Yeah. You know. There’s where we were out on the river.
DK: Oh wow.
DB: Having a —
DK: So just for the recording its —
DB: Yeah. We all, we all —
DK: You’re off duty at Knaresborough.
DB: That’s right. Yeah.
DK: And that’s July 1944. So you’re in a boat there are you? A rowing boat.
DB: That’s right. Yeah.
DK: Are you there?
DB: I’d be there somewhere. Unless it was me took the photograph.
DK: The photo.
DB: Oh. There’s me there.
DK: Oh, right. Ok.
DB: Yeah. Yeah. But so we we were always together and —
DK: Can I?
DB: The other remarkable thing about it was we, we and you will probably find this goes on we had six, seven days leave every six weeks.
DK: Right.
DB: When we were flying. And the bomb aimer and the wireless operator they always came to our house. We lived in Welwyn Garden City then, and they always came to our house and my sister was only talking about it the other day. She was fourteen at the time I think, and she said the wireless operator as soon as he came in he’d put his photographs up on the mantlepiece. He said, ‘I’m in a home now,’ you know. And she remembered this, these things very vividly.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah. And my father always enjoyed them turning up because with them being Canadians they had all sorts of goodies. And it was funny. Our crew. It’s most remarkable. Three, three didn’t drink, and four didn’t smoke. Including myself. That was most unusual then, you know.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
DB: Most unusual. So my father did very well with cigarettes. Yeah.
DK: So where would you go on your off duty times then? Where did you used to go on your off duty times then?
DB: Well, mainly York.
DK: Right.
DB: Yeah. Because York, when we had a stand down it was York where we mainly went to. Sometimes we went to Goole. And Market Weighton was another place near. And the village. The village was quite good at Holme on Spalding Moor. There was a very good pub there. In fact, when we have our reunions we still go there.
DK: You go there. To the same pub.
DB: Yeah. Yeah. And, and it’s still a good pub.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Oh right.
DB: Yeah.
DK: If I could just go through the log book again.
DB: Yeah, by all means.
DK: Just to say. I think we got up to the 31st of October didn’t we?
DB: Yeah.
DK: Oh no we didn’t we got to November here. So just for the recording again then so just carrying on the 17th of December ’44, Duisburg. 26th of December it’s —
DB: That was, yeah that was the Ardennes Offensive one.
DK: The Ardennes Offensive.
DB: Yeah.
DK: So, the 29th of December — Koblenz. 30th of December — Cologne. 1st of January 1945 — Dortmund. 5th of January — Hanover where we know you were attacked.
DB: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: By the Junkers 88. So the 14th of January Saarbrucken. I’ll just whizz through these if you don’t mind. 1st of Feb Mainz, 2nd of Feb Wanne-Eickle.
DB: Wanne-Eickle. Yeah.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
DB: Yeah. Bonn. That’s a well-known one.
DK: Yeah. 4th of Feb — Bonn. 7th of Feb — Goch. 13th of Feb —
DB: That’s a long one.
DK: Böhlen.
DB: Yeah.
DB: Böhlen near Leipzig.
DB: Yeah.
DK: In support of the Dresden raid.
DB: Yeah.
DK: 14th of Feb Chemnitz. 20th of Feb near Dusseldorf. 23rd Of Feb — Essen. 24th Of Feb Kamen, and that was the last.
DB: Yeah.
DK: The thirty eighth.
DB: Yeah.
DK: And so, and that’s total flying here. Total. So operational flying hours. That’s your total flying.
DB: Yeah.
DK: So, well that’s seventy nine hours five minutes daylight, and a hundred and twenty two forty night time. That’s a total two hundred and one hours forty five minutes.
DB: That’s pretty, pretty good.
DK: In thirty eight operations.
DB: Yeah. It was quite funny.
DK: Just put that down for the recording.
DB: I’ve never looked at the [pause ] my wife and myself we, we had, in the rubber business we were, and we were going of all place to a rubber conference in Essen.
DK: Right.
DB: And on the way there we, we stopped at a place called Munster. And I [pause] and the cathedral there was badly damaged and they had an arrangement with the Coventry one.
DK: Yes. Yeah.
DB: And I said to my wife that I was flying at that time, and do you know that was the first time I’d looked in my logbook. I fact, I had job to find it. Yeah. And I was on it.
DK: Yeah.
DB: The Munster raid there and it, it was, that was I had been to Germany on business but I’d not been to where I’d been.
DK: On [unclear] yeah. Yeah.
DB: Well, I went to Cologne.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Because they were the main. They were the difficult ones.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Cologne. Essen. Well, they were all difficult but you remembered that you, if Essen came up on the board you weren’t very happy to go there because it was heavily defended you know.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: So how did that make you feel then? You were going to Germany on business.
DB: Well, I —
DK: Is it something that was in the back of your mind at the time when you were there?
DB: No. I think the worst was over. You know. When I went, it could have been almost twelve months after the war ended when I I’m talking about.
DK: Yeah.
DB: In fact it could have been longer than that, and things were almost normal back in Germany by then. It was, it was probably later than what —
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah. It would have been. It would be in the 1980s. Well, that’s a long time.
DK: A long time afterwards. Yeah.
DB: After the war you see. So things were getting back to normal. But I, I was, you do get brainwashed you know. You hated the Germans and I very much disliked the Japanese because one of the neighbours where we lived in Welwyn Garden City he came back and well just looking at him was enough. Terrible. And but they were brainwashed as well, weren’t they?
DK: Yeah.
DB: So were the Nazis, so, and you can still see it really.
DB2: If I can just intervene a minute.
DB: Yeah.
DB2: We went to the church in in Munster. Or part of the Cathedral. And part of it had been bombed. Was it the entrance? Entrance lobby that had been bombed?
DB: Yeah. Yeah.
DB2: And [pause]
DB: Yeah. That was Munster was it? Yeah. I’ve mentioned that.
DB2: Yes. Well, it’s on my mind. Munster.
DB: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah.
DB2: A university town.
DK: Yes. Yeah.
DB2: For two reasons. But it’s a university town and the Cathedral had been bombed.
DK: Yeah.
DB2: Part of it.
DK: Yeah.
DB2: And over the, you know a sign had been put up, “May we forgive each other as He forgives us all.” He.
DK: Yeah.
DB2: The capital H.
DB: Yeah.
DB2: Forgives us all.
DK: Yeah.
DB2: Which I thought was rather beautiful.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Yes.
DB2: And the, the students, the university students were some of the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen. Men and women. They were supreme examples of the human race.
DB: Hitler Youth.
DB2: And yes.
DB: Yeah.
DB2: They were obviously the start.
DB: That’s right. I’d forgotten that. Yeah.
DB2: The start. The start of another of Hitler’s dreams you know.
DK: Yeah.
DB2: Yes.
DB: Well, at the end of the war when the war was ending we were warned that the, the main if if you crashed or whatever happened you, if you were picked up by the Luftwaffe you were alright. If you were picked up by the Gestapo you weren’t.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And if you were picked up by the Hitler Youth you weren’t.
DK: Yeah.
DB: They were absolutely brain washed, you know.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And they were fighting right to the end. Yeah. Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah.
DK: If I could just ask just very briefly what would a raid actually involve? When you got up in the morning what sort of procedures did you go through?
DB: Well, first of all you were warned that we were flying.
DK: Operations were on.
DB: That operation was on. And you didn’t know where you were going of course. And then you, in other words you had you had to be aware that that evening or whatever daylight whatever it was you were flying so you took the suitable precautions and then you were called for briefing.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And we had separate briefings. All, we went to the engineer’s department. The navigation department. We never knew where we were going but we all, and the gunners we were told what the bomb load was and everything else, but we never knew the target until we actually went into the actual briefing. And then sometimes it was, and none of them were good news but some were better than others [laughs] you know.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
DB: Yeah. Yeah. So that was basically the procedure.
DK: Yeah. And then you went out to your aircraft at that point.
DB: Oh yes. You went out to your aircraft and of course it [pause] there was a very good article. A book just written. Been written for the, you know with this anniversary.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And he, in the book it says that in the aircraft the main people who were working all the time were the pilot, the flight engineer and the navigator.
DK: Is that the Patrick Bishop book?
DB: Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah. And I’d never looked at it that way but I was glad because I thought well I was occupied most of the time.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
DB: And I was. The only time I wasn’t occupied was when we were over the target and I was up in the astrodome. But you know all the petrol was right.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Alright, when we lost an engine that gets a bit difficult. But —
DK: Yeah. Was that, on the Halifax I’m not too sure. Whereabouts are you in relation to the pilot?
DB: Yeah. I’m sitting right behind him.
DK: Right behind him. Right.
DB: And the idea behind that and this was the, normally if I’d have been in a Lancaster all the time I’d be sitting next to the pilot you see. But it was very clever in the Lanc, in the Halifax. I was sitting immediately behind him. And the bomb aimer assisted him on take-off, you know. And then there was a clear entrance all the way down the aircraft so that if anything went wrong the crews could get out much easier than they could in the Lancaster, you see.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
DB: It annoyed me a bit last night. I don’t whether you watched.
DK: I did. Yes.
DB: The programme.
DK: Yes.
DB: It annoys me every time. It was Lancaster.
DK: Yeah.
DB: No mention of the Halifax.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And then it went on to Spitfire. No nothing on the Hurricane. And then it went on to, no mention of a Wellington aircraft.
DK: No. No.
DB: Which was a very critical one.
DK: And then when you looking on later our next door neighbour here he flew —
DK: Do you want to just —
DB: And he flew, he flew Victors. Next door. No mention of the Victor. The Vulcan bomber.
DK: Really?
DB: Yeah.
DK: Is that a neighbour who flew Victors then?
DB: One of my neighbours. Yeah.
DK: Oh right. Ok.
DB: Yeah. Yeah. My next door neighbour here.
DK: Oh right.
DB: This is, you know after.
DK: Yeah.
DB: But he flew in just as awkward circumstances and it’s always the same. I mean, I’ve nothing against the Lancaster but funny enough it’s been proven that the Halifax was a much more versatile aircraft.
DK: Yeah.
DB: I mean it served on Coastal Command. It took paratroopers.
DK: Pulled gliders.
DB: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And it even dropped off spies in various places.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And, and, there was in fact there was an article the other day about the Halifax where one crew they, they were right out in the middle of the Atlantic somewhere and they attacked this U-boat and sunk it, but the U-boat also put the Halifax down and they were, six of them got out and it was somebody local here as it turned out.
DK: Oh right.
DB: They, six of them were in the dinghy for eight days and survived. And how they [pause] they were trying to get, get fish. And when I did this course you know on this air sea rescue the thing, the last, well one of the last days we were there we were in the Solent and they put us in a dinghy at 8 o’clock in the morning. This was in March. And left us. And we were there ‘til it went dark. So that was one day, and then the air sea rescue boat came out and picked us up. And that was enough for me.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
DB: It was enough. I thought to myself how can, but of course you’ve no choice have you if your shot down. Yeah.
DK: I noticed that the TV programme last night didn’t even mention Coastal Command, did it?
DB: No. It didn’t.
DK: And the U-boats that were attacked and all the rest of it.
DB: That’s right. No. It was, it was a good programme but not —
DK: Yeah. The usual suspects.
DB: Yeah.
DK: The Spitfire, the Lancaster and the Vulcan.
DB: And of course the, the thing that annoys us most of all was, was, they had to mention Dresden. You know. That’s automatic. Particularly with the BBC, you know. And that’s unfair as well. And in fact one of the things I did for a friend of mine he, he, he was talking about Dresden and etcetera and the last magazine that came out from Bomber Command was the truth about Dresden. I don’t know whether you’ve read —
DK: Yeah.
DB: The last Bomber Command. And I’d written about the last eight for this friend of mine. And of course we were on that. On the raid indirectly. On the thing.
DK: Yeah. On a diversionary.
DB: And I think this article said they first of all claimed it was three hundred and fifty thousand were killed and in the end, I mean it’s it was a terrible number but it was twenty five thousand, you know.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah. But all these do-gooders they don’t understand do they?
DK: No.
DB: But what I like was the Dambusters pilot, err bomb aimer who’s the only one left now.
DK: Yeah.
DB: What’s his name?
DK: Johnny Johnson.
DB: Johnny Johnson. Yeah. His article. He was, he’s fed up with it. I don’t know whether he was on the raid.
DK: Yes. I’ve met him a few times.
DB: Yeah. Well, he always says, ‘Were you there?’
DK: Yeah.
DB: And of course they never were. ‘Did you know the circumstances at the time?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, keep your bloody mouth shut.’ You know. And, and I thought well I couldn’t put it better myself.
DK: Sums it up doesn’t it?
DB: Yeah. It does. Yeah. Yeah.
DK: Ok. Well that’s great. Just one final question. I think you’ve really answered it there but all these years later how do you look back on your time in Bomber Command?
DB: Well, I’m glad I did what I did. You know. I don’t think I’d want to do anything else.
DK: No.
DB: At all. And I did what I wanted to do which was to serve in Bomber Command.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah. So I’ve no regrets at all about it.
DK: Did you stay in touch with your crew after the war?
DB: Well, we did up to a point. In fact, I found, found a letter from the navigator and the wireless operator but with I think the answer is that you want to forget the war when it ends. And the first time I ever thought about it was, it was in the 1980s I think it was, and we’d, we had a place in Spain. In fact, we’ve still got it but we, we were on our way back and we stopped at a hotel. We came in at Plymouth and we stopped in this hotel and there was a fella there who, he had the aircrew [pause] what did they call, they called it the Aircrew Association you see. And I said ‘What’s all that?’ And he, he said, ‘Well, the Aircrew Association’s just been formed.’ And this was in the 1980s you see.
DK: Right. Yeah.
DB: And that was the first time it had ever registered. And I said, ‘Well. I was in the aircrews,’ and I said, ‘How do I apply to get in to the Aircrew Association?’ You see. So he told me how to do it. And they kept saying he was too young that fella [laughs] A nice compliment. So, but anyway I wrote and thanked him so he knew it was genuine, you know.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Because they check you out at the Air Ministry. So and, and so I joined the Aircrew Association and then not long afterwards I got a phone call again saying, ‘We’re now forming the Squadron Association.’
DK: Right.
DB: And that was how the 76 Squadron Association, and this was in the 1980s. So it’s only resurfaced since that.
DK: After then.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Did you leave the RAF soon after the war then?
DB: Yeah. I left in 1947.
DK: Right.
DB: Yeah. And funnily enough I think I said in what we talked I ended up in Swinderby. That was the last station I was on. And in the Operational Training Unit there.
DK: Right.
DB: So can’t be much nearer to Lincoln can it?
DK: No.
DB: Than that. Yeah. So I know I know Lincoln quite quite well. So I I was thinking of staying in the RAF because I was invited, invited to because anyway the remarkable thing was I’d also heard that the Halifax had been converted. I forget what they called it. The Hastings or something like this, and it, it was commercial flying. And all they needed was a pilot and, and navigator and, and first engineer.
DK: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
DB: Like a second pilot I would have been. So I applied for this job and he said, ‘You’ve got all the qualifications,’ he said, ‘But we can’t appoint you.’ So I said, ‘Why is that?’ He said, ‘You’re not old enough.’ And you had, you had to be twenty four then.
DK: So how old were you at the time?
DB: Twenty two.
DK: So you were twenty two. You’d flown thirty eight operations.
DB: Yeah.
DK: In Halifaxes.
DB: Yeah.
OJ: And how many hours?
DK: Yeah. Well just operational over two hundred and one hours.
DB: Yeah.
DK: And they wouldn’t let you fly the civilian version.
DB: Yeah. They were most embarrassed.
DK: Right.
DB: But that was the rule. The ruling at the time. And funny enough, well I ended up alright anyway but if if I’d have flown with them I’d have eventually ended up with BOAC.
DK: So you could have carried on.
DB: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: Flying with the airlines.
DB: Funnily enough you know when the Squadron Associations were formed one of my best friends who was in the same flight as I was he knew my pilot extremely well and he went on that, and I told him. And he said, he said, ‘I only just made it, Doug,’ as well. You had to be twenty four. Yeah. Unbelievable.
DK: Absolutely.
DB: Yeah. And I’ve never forgotten that. So I could have carried on flying but I went to the accountancy work.
DK: I think it was the Halton. The civilian version.
DB: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah.
DK: The civilian version of the Halifax.
DB: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah. So it was quite interesting to be. So —
DK: Bonkers isn’t it?
DB: You talk more about it now than, I mean from 1940, well when I came out let’s say 1950 to 1980 you never really really talked about it. I was in the RAF Association but the only thing I remember there was they did the Dambuster film. 1953. And that was a story in itself really. One of my friends there, all you had to be was in 617 Squadron you see and he didn’t serve on the Dambusters raid but he was in 617 Squadron, and we had another fella who was a member and he said he was on 617 Squadron, you see. So again you had to do it through the Air Ministry and all this.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
DB: And this fella who was the chairman at the time he said, ‘We’ve got a problem, Doug,’ he said, ‘This other fella. He’s never even been in the RAF.
DK: Oh.
DB: So,’ he said, ‘You’ll have to help me out when he comes in.’ So he duly turned up, and this Harry, Harry Nutall his name was, he said, ‘Have you had your invitation yet to the premier of the Dambusters film?’ ‘No. No,’ he said, ‘I can’t understand it.’ So he said, ‘Well, let me tell you something,’ he said, ‘You’re not going to get an invitation. You’ve never been in the RAF.’ And we never saw him again. And it just shows that some —
DK: Yes.
DB: I think they kid themselves to believe it.
DK: Yeah. Walter Mitties. Walter Mitties they’re called.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And I’ve never forgotten that.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And that was the only time really it came to life. Because after that again it all went back.
DK: Yeah.
DB: But now it’s, I mean you know the Bomber Command Memorial in London.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Is quite something isn’t it?
DK: Have you, did you get to the unveiling of that?
DB: Oh yeah.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah. Well, all the family came to that.
DK: Yeah. I was at that.
DB: That was a memorable moment that. Yeah.
DB2: You couldn’t get him away.
DB: That was quite something wasn’t it?
DB2: Yes.
DB: Yes.
DK: So what are your feelings on the new Memorial then?
DB: Well, I think it’s going to be good. I’m looking forward to seeing it but I’ve made up my mind as well that, you know at one time we, we weren’t going to go to the official one and now I’ve got the feeling well I should go you know.
DK: Yeah. Yeah. Right.
DB: Sort of thing. But I want to go again because this time it’s more important because that Memorial must, must be quite something. To see all those names on.
DK: It is. Yeah.
DB: Yeah. It’s very emotional I should think. Yeah. And funnily enough one of my, one of my, well best pal, in fact I’ve got his, you know looking through this stuff. He flew when it was much more dangerous than I was. He was on the Nuremburg raid.
DK: Right.
DB: And he survived. He survived that and he went to Ceylon afterwards. It just says, “Ceylon Air Force,” and I’ve just found a letter from him where it was dated September the something 1945, and then there’s a note on there. Went missing in October that year. And I am concerned that his name goes on this board.
DK: Right.
DB: Yeah. Because I’ve got his name, rank and number. He was a warrant officer like I was you know.
DK: So that was, what year was that then?
DB: ’45 when he went missing.
DK: Right.
DB: Yeah. But he’d served a full tour. Yeah.
DK: But the war had ended though presumably.
DB: Well, yes it had because he was obviously sent to the Far East.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
DB: To carry on there. So he’d started there but he just went I don’t know where.
DK: Yeah.
DB: I never got the detail.
DK: I know this is a bit of an issue at the moment.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Because those on the Memorial are those that served with Bomber Command within the UK.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Those that went to the Far East.
DB: Yeah.
DK: And even the Middle East.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Aren’t included. If that’s where they were.
DB: Yeah. I read that article about that.
DK: Even though they might have served in the UK. I know we’re trying to get around that.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Not get around it. That’s the wrong phrase. But to include them.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Yeah. They want to include those that were in both the Middle East flying bombers. And Italy. And then the Far East.
DB: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: So at some point, all being well he should appear on there.
DB: Yeah.
DK: But not, unfortunately not at the moment.
DB: No.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah. because he was serving in the Far East you see.
DK: Can you —
DB: Because we were, we were —
DK: Can you remember his name?
DB: Yeah. I’ve got his, I’ve got his —
OJ: Is it in the office?
DB: Can you just.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Look on the desk in there Tavie. You’ll see a letter in there from him.
DK: Cool.
DB: And his name rank and number is all on there.
DK: Yeah.
DB: He was a warrant officer like I was. He finished his tour of operations. He did the Nuremberg raid so he, he was always about six months to a year ahead of me.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah. And he —
DK: They went —
DB: There’s a letter from him which is dated September ’45 and then I heard in October.
DK: Right.
DB: He went.
OJ: He knows exactly what he’s talking about.
DB: His number is on, on here. Everything. Yeah. That’s, I think that’s my, that’s his writing.
DK: Right.
DB: And I think that’s my sister’s writing, but I’ll have to find out. But I think here is his, yeah his full rank and number are on there you see.
DK: Oh right. So —
DB: Yeah.
DK: That’s warrant officer JE Topple.
DB: Topple yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DK: Can you remember what JE stood for?
DB: John. John Topple.
DK: So, he’s, for the recorder he is Warrant Officer John E Topple.
DB: Yeah.
DK: T O P P L E.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Service number 1874884. And he was with 99 Squadron in Ceylon.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
DB: But he’d done a full tour of operations before.
DK: Right.
DB: Yeah. In the UK.
DK: He went missing out there.
DB: Yeah. But you know he was on when it was at its worst.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
DB: So I feel I his mother and my sister were only talking about it the other day. She always thought he’d knock on the door some time, you know. Yeah. But so I don’t know the circumstances but —
DK: No. But he went missing in September 45. Or October.
DB: Yeah. Went missing October the 7th 1945. So —
DK: Right.
DB: I don’t know what he was doing out there particularly.
DK: 99 Squadron then were flying the Liberators out there.
DB: Oh, were they?
DK: So he was on the four engine bombers.
DB: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: So they stayed in the Far East for quite some time after the war.
DB: Did they? Yeah. Yeah. He was still active service. Well, I was still really until 1947 really. Yeah. Yeah.
DK: That’s even more of an issue actually because it’s actually someone on bombers in the Far East.
DB: Yeah.
DK: After the war has ended.
DB: Yeah. But —
DK: Officially. Though still on active service. Yeah.
DB: Yeah, but he served in. I forget what squadron he was on in the UK.
DK: Right.
DB: But he did a full tour. He did his thirty ops anyway. Yeah.
DK: Well, it’s something, certainly something we need to look into.
DB: Yeah. Yeah. But I feel it’s my duty to, you know. You know.
DK: I know this is you know the Memorial round there and the names on there it is expanding.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Because a lot of the records only showed those who died on operations.
DB: Yeah.
DK: While the aircraft was in flight.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Some of those who died when came back.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Aren’t included.
DB: No. I know that.
DK: So, that’s why some records say fifty five thousand.
DB: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: But our records are showing fifty six thousand.
DB: Yeah.
DK: It’s increasing.
DB: Yeah. I think in our book which is, you know there’s a 76 Squadron book. We’ve got, we’ve got everything in there.
DK: Yeah.
DB: And I know we were about seven hundred. Over seven hundred casualties.
DK: And that’s one Squadron.
DB: One Squadron.
OJ: That’s scary.
DB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DK: Ok. We’ll press on.
DB: Quite a lot of detail as well.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, it’s been good for me to go through everything.
DK: Excellent. It’s been great for me. I’m rather conscious of how long we’ve been but thanks very much for that.
DB: Yeah.
DK: Just for the recording can I just have your name.
OJ: Yeah. I’m Octavia Jackman.
DK: And your grandmother’s name?
OJ: Doreen Beasley.
DK: That’s excellent.
DB: Oh you’re still there.
OJ: I’m still there.
DK: Ok. Well, thanks very much for that. I’ll switch the recording off now.
DB: Yeah.
[recording paused]
DK: So that’s completion of a tour of 76 Squadron. February 1945.
DB: Yeah. Well, that [pause]
DK: So who’s, do you remember who that is there?
DB: Yeah. That’s the, that’s the navigator.
DK: Yeah.
DB: That’s the wireless operator. Pilot. Rear gunner and myself. I don’t know where the other two are on it.
DK: Yeah.
DB: Yeah. But I don’t know where that photograph is now.
DK: Right.
DM: With the —
DK: With the ground crew.
DB: Wait a minute.
OJ: Which one?
DB: I had it’s it’s I did I did find it. Is this some old photographs?
OJ: That’s your whole envelope of photographs. And you’ve got —
DB: Yeah. I think. I think [pause] No. That, that’s 76 Squadron, you know dinners, and all that sort of thing. But there is one somewhere of, of all the ground crew as well.
DK: Yes. It’s unfortunate it’s not in the album isn’t it?
DB: Oh, wait a minute. I’ll tell you where it is. It’s in my other room.
OJ: Do you want me to go up?
DB: It’s in there isn’t it.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Doug Beasley
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
David Kavanagh
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-03-26
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ABeasleyDG180326
Format
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01:21:34 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
At the start of the war, Doug Beasley left school at 16 to start work. Initially a member of the Air Training Corps, he was sent for aircrew selection when he became 18. There was a 12-month wait to enlist as a pilot, so he opted to become a flight engineer. He joined Number 3 Initial Training Wing in Torquay, after spending three weeks at Lord’s Cricket Ground, in October 1943. Many of his fellow intake were ex-police officers, older as they were not released from the police until they were 30 years old. After six weeks he was posted to RAF St Athan for basic training as a flight engineer on Halifaxes, then to 1652 Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Marston Moor. It was here that he was formed in to a flight crew when they transferred from their Operational Training Unit. At this stage they were flying the Halifax II and V. It was with this unit that he flew his first operation, a leaflet dropping operation over France on 12th August 1944. He joined 76 Squadron at RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor flying the Halifax III. He describes in detail many of his operations, mainly over Germany. One in particular occurred in January 1945 when his aircraft was attacked by a Ju 88 night fighter. Though struck by many bullets and cannon shells nothing vital was damaged though the pilot’s neck was grazed by a bullet. After completing his tour of operations, 38 rather than the normal 30, he became an instructor with an operational flying unit flying Wellingtons. In 1946 he became the Air Sea Rescue officer attending a course at RAF Calshot. He left the RAF in 1947 to return to civilian life.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Nick Cornwell-Smith
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
England--Torquay
England--Devon
England--London
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
England--Yorkshire
France
Germany
Great Britain
Germany--Essen
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-10
1944-08-12
1945-01
1946
1947
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
1652 HCU
76 Squadron
air sea rescue
aircrew
bombing
crewing up
flight engineer
ground crew
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
Halifax Mk 5
Heavy Conversion Unit
Initial Training Wing
Ju 88
Lancaster
McIndoe, Archibald (1900-1960)
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
propaganda
RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor
RAF Marston Moor
RAF St Athan
RAF Torquay
training
V-1
V-weapon
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/797/10779/PDeanJEH1701.2.jpg
bceede6a4853b1983c889df55bddcadc
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/797/10779/ADeanJEH170913.1.mp3
6f47adb3b5809113563fa431fe9e92f6
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
Dean, John Eric Hatherly
J E H Dean
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with John Dean DFC (1922, 173978 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a navigator with 77 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-09-13
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Dean, JEH
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DM: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is David Meanwell. The interviewee is John Dean. The interview is taking place in Mr Dean’s home in Westerham in Kent on the 13th of September 2017. Ok, John if you could perhaps tell me where and when you were born and a bit about your early life.
JD: Yeah. Well, I was born at Edmonton in North London in 1922 which means that I’m ninety four. Ninety five next birthday. And I grew up mainly in London but my family moved out when I was about twelve and we went to, to live in Middlesex. And I remember on the morning of the 15th of August 1940 standing outside the house where I lived with my parents and watching a German aircraft which I think was an FW190 being pursued by a Spitfire. This was in, coming from North London and the FW190 had smoke coming out of its engines and obviously the Spitfire had [coughs] had shot it down. It was pursuing it until it crashed. And from that moment on I decided I wanted to be a Spitfire pilot. And as I was just over eighteen I was able to go to the RAF recruiting office in London and I joined up. I joined up on the 1st of November 1940 when I was eighteen years and four days, four days, five days old. So that was my introduction to the Air Force. Unfortunately, I didn’t achieve my ambition of becoming a Spitfire pilot because although I did elementary and basic flying training on, on Tiger Moths and later on Harvards I met my Waterloo on Harvards because I developed this annoying habit of landing the aircraft about thirty feet above the runway. So [laughs] they took me off Harvards and sent me to a navigation school in, in Canada in fact which was quite interesting and I did my training there and came back, and I was, ultimately found myself in Bomber Command with 77 Squadron.
DM: When, when you went to Canada you went by ship I assume.
JD: Yes. Sure.
DM: Was that sort of eventful or was it an easy, an easy trip?
JD: Well, only eventful to the extent that it was very uncomfortable because we went out in a very small Dutch vessel called the Volendam. And it was only about, I don’t know twenty five thousand tonnes or so. A very small ship and there were masses of us crowded in this small ship. And for most it took fourteen days to cross the Atlantic, and most of the time we were in a violent storm and the number of people who were sick on each other. I can remember it, you know with some horror really. But on the way back we came back on the Queen Mary which was then a troop ship and that did the trip in three and a half days so that wasn’t too bad. Yes.
DM: Whereabouts in Canada did you train?
JD: Well, we went eventually, initially to a place called Saskatchewan. Swift Current in Saskatchewan and we went by train from Halifax and that took, as far as I can recall it took about four days to get to, to Swift Current which was then a tiny hamlet but today I gather its quite a rather large township. And there I did some flying training on, on Harvards, and as I say my training came to an end and I then went back. Was transferred to a place called Chatham in New Brunswick to do my navigation training.
DM: So you came back to the UK. Trained as a navigator. So, I suppose the next thing, was it crewing up that happened next?
JD: Yeah. We went to [pause] it was either 1652 or 1658 Heavy Conversion Unit at, it was either Marston Moor or Lisset. I can’t remember precisely and there I got crewed up with an Australian pilot called [Gallant Lee] and he had already acquired all the other crew members and it was, it was the flight engineer who approached me asking me if I was looking for crew. So I said yes and that’s how, you know I met my crew. And as soon as that happened of course we were posted off to, to 77 Squadron and we did half our tour with Bill [Gallant Lee] at Elvington.
DM: What type of aircraft were you flying?
JD: Halifaxes. We started off in the early Halifaxes with inline engines. The Merlins. And of course they were very much underpowered. Anyway, we did half the tour with Bill [Gallant Lee] the Australian and then he was grounded with sinus trouble. So, we were then transferred back to I think it was 1652 Heavy Conversion Unit which was then Marston Moor to find another pilot which we did. And he was a South African. A flight lieutenant called Smiler Welch. And he was called Smiler because he was never seen to smile. Typical RAF humour, you know. So we got back to the squadron with Smiler Welch, and he immediately became a flight commander which meant that we didn’t operate very often. Perhaps once every two or three weeks rather than every other night. So it meant that we took about six months to complete our tour. So all in all we were on the squadron for a year to complete a tour. Which was much longer than most people of course. Anyway, we, we were successful in completing our tour of thirty three ops which included six mine laying trips, which as you probably know was each mine laying trip was counted as a half. And then that took us up to July or, yeah July or August 1944 and at the end of my tour I was transferred back to Marston Moor as an instructor. And that lasted for about six months until about December 1944, or January of forty, no. It must have been a bit later because we were posted. Oh, incidentally yes I acquired a new crew at Marston Moor and at the end of the six months training we were posted to India. And we were all packed up ready to go when the war ended fortunately. So we didn’t go to India. So I stayed on. I forgot to mention at the end of my training my crew and I were transferred to Transport Command and we stayed on in Transport Command until I left the RAF in 1947.
DM: So we go back to I suppose really you could say that your operation, your thirty flights or more because you did some mine laying flights was sort of split into two halves with two different pilots.
JD: Yeah.
DM: As you said the chap who had the problem with his sinuses and then the South African. Were they both similar in their outlook or —
JD: Completely different.
DM: Right.
JD: Yeah. Bill [Gallant Lee], he took a violent dislike to me when we met [laughs] He used to refer to me as, ‘That bloody pommie,’ you know [laughs] And anyway eventually we settled our differences and got on extremely well. And I liked Bill. He was a very straight talking Australian as most, most Australians are and he died, oh it must be about ten or fifteen years ago and I was very sorry to hear that. Yeah. Completely different to Welch. He was a very, what’s the word I’m looking for? He never said very much and —
DM: Taciturn, I suppose.
JD: Gave the impression he was terribly unhappy with life generally, you know. And whereas my flight engineer, unfortunately he died two years ago he kept in touch very closely with Bill [Gallant Lee] in Australia and actually visited him. With Smiler Welch he, at the end of the war he disappeared from our orbit and we never heard from him again. And I don’t know whether he’s still alive or not. I did try to find out some years ago by writing to somebody in South Africa. There’s an organisation which is connected to the RAF but they had never heard of him. Anyway, so that was Welch. A completely different cup of tea.
DM: Have you any particular memories from operations? Any close calls? Any sort of particular horrors, or —
JD: During our tour?
DM: Yes.
JD: Well, yes I mean it is extraordinary. I’ve always, I still think this, I thought it for some time. I think it’s extraordinary how in the midst of such horror going on with aircraft being shot down and being, catching fire and so on we virtually sailed through our thirty three ops with hardly a scratch. I did think there were a number of people who experienced the same thing, but there were one or two incidents where we came very close to meeting our doom as it were. One was a case where we were bombed by another aircraft and this was on a daylight raid. Not a daylight raid. A night raid to a place called Lens which was a big, big marshalling yard in France and it was so important that the Pathfinders had lit up the place with their flares so when we got there it was just like daylight and there were about three hundred and fifty aircraft converging on this place, Lens. And as we were doing our bombing run the flight engineer, Derek who was standing up next to the pilot and on the Halifax there was an astrodome immediately above where the engineer worked. He looked up and he said, he said, ‘There’s an aircraft right above us.’ And then there was a pause of a few seconds and he said, ‘There’s a bomb coming down.’ And a few seconds later it hit the aircraft and came in to the Halifax. Well, we were a bit, well to say a bit scary was probably an understatement but we just waited for this damned thing to explode but it didn’t. And then after about a minute or so the pilot said to the engineer, ‘Derek, go back and see what it is.’ And he undid his, his intercom and went back and then a few seconds later he came back on and said, he said, ‘I’ve got the bomb. It’s a twelve pound oil bomb.’ And by that time the, the aircraft that that had dropped it had moved off but Derek knew sufficiently enough, enough about aircraft to identify it as being a Stirling. And then there was a debate in the aircraft I remember. Half the crew wanted to take the damned thing back, the bomb. And the other half wanted to get rid of it.
DM: Which half were you with?
JD: What?
DM: Which side were you on?
JD: I wanted to keep it actually [laughs] and then the pilot intervened and said, ‘Enough of this bloody nonsense. Get rid of it.’ And so Derek got rid of it. So that was a very close call because I gather that there were untold instances of aircraft being bombed but nobody lived to tell the story. But we were probably very lucky. And then we had one or two encounters with, with night fighters which was a bit scary and on one occasion we were very severely hit by an anti-aircraft shell which completely disabled all our electrics. It didn’t interfere with the flying ability of the aircraft strangely enough. The engines kept working. But it meant that when we got back to UK we had no means of communicating with the ground and at the same time we, I was operating a navigational aid called Gee. You’ve probably heard of it. And that didn’t work, and it was still very dark when we got back to the UK and none of us had a bloody clue as to what, where we were. So we were stooging around UK looking for somewhere to land and then we saw this runway lit up and so we just went, went in and landed and of course we were unable to tell the people who we were so they started firing at us with, [laughs] well, I suppose it must have been some sort of cannon or something. Fortunately, they were very bad shots. Anyway, we landed and we couldn’t open the hatch to get out because this anti-aircraft shell had damaged the door so they had to, the people, the people on the ground had to go off and get a long piece of wood and smash the door in. So, and then we found out that we’d landed at a, what was it called? [pause] What was the name of the training unit before an HCU?
DM: Oh.
JD: It’s something like an Initial Training Unit or something.
DM: Yes. Yes.
JD: Anyway, it was, it was Silverstone which later became, you know the motor racing place, and they were training crews for Bomber Command using Wellingtons. So that, you know what was a nice ending to the story too. Again, what could have been quite a nasty ending because we were lucky to find an aircraft. I think we had about ten minutes petrol left when we landed. Yeah. So one or two quite narrow escapes, but from which we, we emerged successfully as it were.
DM: Was that the only time you got lost or did you have other — ?
JD: No [laughs] To my everlasting and undying shame we got completely lost on my first operation which was to Mannheim. And Mannheim is, let me see, it is, it is northwest of Berlin and it is situated between Berlin and the north coast of Germany. Up near [pause] I can’t, it’s, it’s sort of in the Lubeck, Lubeck area, where the coast is. And the route planners took us up north of, of the northern coast over the North Sea so that to give the impression to the Germans we were heading for Berlin, and then about fifty miles short of Lubeck we had to turn a sharp right and approach Mannheim from the north. Well, somehow and I don’t know how it was I turned right about twenty miles west of Lubeck instead of fifty. No. The other way around. Sorry. We turned right which is what we should have done so that it took us down to the west of Mannheim, and I remember the flight engineer saying after we’d flown, after we’d turned right for about an hour or so the flight engineer saying, he said, ‘It’s very strange,’ he said, There’s a big, big fire on our, on our port side.’ He said, ‘I wonder what that is.’ So I had a look at my chart and then I realised I’d made a gigantic error. So I said to, it was still Bill [Gallant Lee] then, I said, ‘Bill, I’m dreadfully sorry. I’ve made a complete cockup,’ I said, ‘We’ve turned too early.’ And I said, ‘Mannheim is on our left.’ And he said, ‘Ok.’ So he turned the aircraft to the left and we, instead of approaching Mannheim from the north we were on the west side of Mannheim and we were meeting aircraft coming out of Mannheim having dropped their bombs. So, again it was rather a perilous thing to do but we did it. We went back and dropped our bombs on Mannheim and managed to get through. So when I can, you know I think it was an example of the guardian angels looking after us really. But when I got back we had to, I had to discuss, you know the trip with the squadron navigation officer which was the usual thing and he looked at me and he said, ‘John, you are bloody lucky aren’t you to be here?’ And he was right actually. But that was the only time I got lost I think.
DM: When you were training navigators after your, you know, when you went to the HCU to be trainer was that mainly ground based or was there a lot of flying?
JD: On the contrary, no. We, most of the time we spent in the air. This was at Chatham, in New Brunswick. Most of the time we were flying Ansons and you know, the training at Brunswick I do recall was very exhaustive, and we were trained by Canadian instructors and they were very, very good and passionate about the job they were doing, you know. And we spent, I can’t remember exactly I’d have to refer to my logbook, but we spent a great number of flying hours in Ansons training and one of the things we did was to take, we did quite a lot of training on aerial photography. And somewhere in the house here I’ve got quite a lot of photos of, taken from Ansons. A very slow, sort of noisy aircraft but very interesting.
DM: When you were a trainer so, because you did some training between your tours I think, didn’t you?
JD: Yeah. Well, I was with [pause] I did my, yeah I was an instructor at I think it was 1652 Heavy Conversion Unit and of course there we flew again. I think it was Wellingtons. I can’t remember. But my job was to, again mainly in the air. I did very little instructing on the ground. I used to go up with trainee navigators as part of their training to observe what they were doing and to correct them if I thought they were doing anything wrong. So I did quite a lot flying there.
DM: Where were you based when you were doing that?
JD: I think that was Marston Moor. I should have got my logbook with me but I think that that would tell me. But I think it was Marston Moor. Quite near York. A celebrated historical place, of course.
DM: Indeed.
JD: Yeah.
DM: Yeah. So, I assume that included night exercises as well as daytime flying.
JD: Sorry, the —
DM: Night exercises as well as daytime when you were assessing the navigators.
JD: Oh yes. Sure.
DM: Was that, did you feel safe? Or —
JD: Well, yes because [pause] did I feel safe? Well, I suppose I did [laughs] Yes. I mean we were using, we were using Gee and whereas Gee was jammed over, over Europe, in Britain it wasn’t of course and it was an excellent navigation aid that I recall. So we were never lost at all. So I felt you know completely confident that we’d get back all right.
DM: So then you were supposedly going to go to India but as you say that didn’t happen because the war ended. And then, but you were in Transport Command.
JD: Yes. We were. After the war we were transferred from Elvington in Yorkshire to a place called Stradishall in, in Suffolk and that was about twenty five miles south of Bury St Edmunds. And Stradishall Aerodrome was a peacetime RAF base so that all the buildings were pre-war RAF buildings, including the officers mess because by that time I’d been commissioned. And whereas previously in, at Elvington we had to bunk down in in Nissen huts at Stradishall we had posh buildings and rooms to ourselves you know. So that was quite a step up in the social world as it were. Yeah. And the aerodrome of course was right next to Stradishall village. A tiny village. About two or three hundred people and it was there, of course I met my wife and got married.
DM: So, she was a local girl was she?
JD: Yeah. She was the wife of the local vicar so, and I met her in a pub dare it be said. Yeah. So, that was Stradishall and we operated out of Stradishall flying a variety of aircraft including the York which was the model, the civilian version of the Lancaster. And the York was the first aircraft where we were allowed to smoke. In Halifaxes and I understand Lancasters and certainly Wellingtons it was absolutely taboo to smoke in aircraft. Unlike the Americans where they used to issue out cigars if you wanted them I gather. But in the York I don’t know why but we were allowed to smoke. Most of us did smoke then of course so that we did. But we used [pause] yes. Smoke. Sorry, Yorks and Stirlings, and the Stirlings were found to be not very stable aircraft, and there were a number of crashes both her in the UK and also enroute. And the route to India took us via Libya. That was the first stop. I remember that it took us ten hours from our base in Stradishall to get to the first bit. The first landing stage in Libya. So we were pretty worn out then, and then after we’d spent a night there and then the next stage was Cairo West which as the name indicates is west of Cairo and that only took about, about eight hours. Seven or eight hours. And then we went from Cairo West to Habbaniya or Habbaniya I’m not quite sure which is the right pronunciation, in Iraq which was an RAF base. A peacetime base. And we landed there for refuelling and then after a few hours we took off, and then we went through to Karachi which was the end of my journey. Although on one occasion we went down to Madras so the whole of that trip was of course very interesting. And I remember on one occasion we were going in to Habbaniya or Habbaniya in Iraq and there was some natives on the ground who started, who had rifles and they started firing at us. So the pilot said to ground control, he said, ‘What the hell’s happening?’ And the controller said, ‘Well, go around and disappear for a minute because we’ve got a little tribal war going on.’ And apparently in that area one tribe used to fight with another sort of every other Wednesday, you know, and that sort of thing. And when we appeared we were another choice target and fortunately they were very bad shots. Anyway, that was quite exciting.
DM: What sort of things were you carrying?
JD: Well, mainly war material but it was all boxed up so we didn’t, we didn’t know what it contained. We assumed it was things like guns and other stuff which, which couldn’t be left in India. And occasionally half a dozen people but not very many because the aircraft wasn’t really converted to carry passengers. It was mainly boxes and we never knew quite was in them. It could have been bombs I suppose but they never told us. Also we were able to, I remember on one occasion we were allowed to bring, I think it was one item which we brought locally in Karachi and most of the, most of my crew bought carpets so there were quite a large proportion of the air craft was taken up with carpets. Anyway, we got those through. Yes. Happy days.
DM: Did you used to fly things out to India or was it an empty aircraft?
JD: Sorry? No. As far as I recall we flew out empty. I can’t remember [pause] Yeah. I don’t think we took anything out. It was, we were just meant to bring things back. Quite why they used aircraft to do this I never found out because it would have been a damned sight cheaper to use, you know ships. I suspect that those boxes contained, you know what we would refer to as secret material of some kind but they never told us. Never told me anyway. I suppose the pilot knew. And in those days of course when you’re young you tend to accept things without question don’t you?
DM: That’s true.
JD: Which we did.
DM: So you were doing that for about two years.
JD: Yeah. Again, I’d have to refer to my logbook. Yeah. Actually, I’ve got the chronological times a bit wrong. I was transferred from Elvington, the squadron to Marston Moor as an instructor in July 1944 and that went on until December 19 — 1944. January. And then in January 1945 I’d forgotten to mention I was transferred from Marston Moor to [pause] to Stradishall. That’s right. I’m sorry. I think I said that I went from Elvington to Stradishall. That’s not the case. I went from Marston Moor to Stradishall where we were formed up as 51 Squadron and it was 51 Squadron who did all the flying to India. So, I hope you can make —
DM: Yeah.
JD: Sense of all that. And so we flew from India from, from [unclear] flew to India from Stradishall from about January 1945 to July ‘47. Just over two years.
DM: Did you volunteer for that or did you not have any choice?
JD: We were just told, you know.
DM: Right.
JD: There was no question of —
DM: Yeah. Yeah.
JD: Yeah. Well, they had to. I mean, now that it is all over of course one realises that Bomber Command HQ had to find somewhere to put all its aircrew, surviving aircrew you know so that they could become gainfully employed. And I suppose Transport Command was the obvious choice really. I mean I don’t know how many other members of 77 Squadron ended up in Transport Command. All that I know is that we were told to go there. We went.
DM: Could you have stayed on longer if you’d wanted to?
JD: Yes. I could and in fact that was my intention. I wanted to stay on in the RAF but my wife, well we got married fairly, fairly soon after we met really. Oh yes. It was at Stradishall on 51 Squadron after I’d got married there that we, I was posted, we were posted to India. And when I said, told my wife about this she said, ‘Do you really want to go?’ And I said, ‘No.’ And she said, ‘Well, I don’t want you to go either. What about coming out of the RAF?’ So, that was why I left really.
DM: Right. What did you do when you came out?
JD: Well, I spent some time trying to find out what I wanted to do and eventually came up with the, with the answer that I wanted to be a surveyor. And at that time the Royal Institution of Charted Surveyors which I wanted to become a member of had arranged training courses at various places and I applied for one and I got a training place. And this was at [pause] somewhere near Reading I think it was. I can’t remember. And that training lasted for about six months to give us a basic, a basic idea what a surveyor did and then the rest of the time in order to qualify I got a job at Ipswich where my wife was living and did home study to qualify. And that took me about three years and then eventually I sat their exams and did qualify and I became an Associate Member of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors. But I then did, having qualified it sounds strange to say this but I found it very difficult to get a job, a paid job and this was because so many people had decided to travel this route because of this, the availability of this training. And the only job I could find was in Manchester and I went home and told my wife. She said, ‘I’m not going to Manchester.’ I said, ‘Well, what will we do?’ She said, ‘Well, we must find something else to do.’ And then I spoke to a colleague of mine who’d, he wasn’t . He didn’t train as a surveyor. He’d done something else. And he said, ‘Why don’t you write to — ’ he said, ‘I do know that they need surveyors abroad. Why don’t you write to the Colonial Office and ask them if they’ve got any vacancies?’ Which I did, and they wrote back. Well, I went up for an interview and they wrote back six weeks later and said, “Dear Mr Dean, we can offer you, thank you for coming for an interview. We can offer you a post in Hong Kong.” And I really wanted to go but my wife wasn’t very keen so I wrote back and said, “Well, thank you very much. Do you have anything a bit sort of a bit nearer? Say, like Africa?’ And they wrote back strangely enough and said yes and they offered me another job in Northern Rhodesia. So that’s where I went and I spent fifteen years there. Not as a surveyor. I went out, they said to me that the only job available at the time was as an administrator. So I went out as a, what was called a district officer and spent, you know fifteen years there. And that was quite good fun. Africa of course was, well I don’t know about today of course. It’s a bit, it’s a bit sort of full of guns and dictators but in our time of course it was very peaceful and the conditions of work were very good. We used to do a tour of three years and get six months leave and that sort of thing. Ostensibly, the six months leave was because of the unhealthy living conditions but where we were in Northern Rhodesia we found it extremely healthy but fortunately the authorities hadn’t caught up with that.
[telephone ringing – interview paused]
DM: So you came back, I suppose. Back to the UK.
JD: Yeah. Came back to the UK and I got a job as a, with a national training organisation where eventually I became a personnel manager and that, that lasted until about fifteen years when the training organisation I was with closed down. And so for the second. Oh yes. I was with, I was in Northern Rhodesia until it became independent. It became Zambia and I stayed on. It became, Northern Rhodesia became independent in October 1964 and I stayed on for a couple of years until, until ’64. Yeah. Until ‘66 ’67. And then I decided that it was time to retire and come back because there really wasn’t much future in Zambia for white civil servants quite naturally. So I came back and I managed to find a job as I say with this training organisation where I became personnel manager and that lasted for fifteen years until the organisation closed down. And then I became, I was very lucky because I was out of work for about two or three months which I found extremely boring. Then I don’t know quite how it happened but I managed to find a job as, as bursar to a school in Kent and that lasted until well past retiring age. So, again I was very lucky.
DM: Did you keep in touch with people from the Air Force?
JD: Yes. Well, I kept in touch with, I’d already said the pilot, by that time of course Bill [Gallant Lee] our first pilot had died and Smiler Welch, the second guy, pilot had just disappeared. But I kept in close touch with Derek Compton, my flight engineer and we used to meet up occasionally. He lived down in Dorset at Christchurch and he died about two years ago. I also met up with my wireless operator who lived in Liverpool and I did a trip up there to meet him. I got along with him extremely well. And I also met, I also met the rear gunner. Butch Sutton. He was called Butch because he was the son of a butcher you know. RAF term. The bomb aimer I didn’t keep in touch with because he lived in Scotland and the rear gunner [Kitch May] sorry, the mid-upper gunner [Kitch May] lived in Cornwall. But I used to, we used to correspond [Kitch May] and so for a few years anyway I kept in touch with most of the crew but towards the end it was because they, you know how it is you stop writing and stuff like that. But with Derek Compton my flight engineer I stayed with him several times and unfortunately the poor chap died about two years ago. So yes I did keep in touch and also 77 Squadron formed a Squadron Association which I joined and we formed, when I say we members in the south of England formed a sub-branch because the main meeting was up in Yorkshire I believe. Anyway, there were about a dozen or so of us in the south who formed this sub-branch and we used to meet every May at [pause] I’m afraid my memory isn’t very good these days, a town down [pause] I can’t remember where it is. The town begins with M but it doesn’t matter the name of the place. We used to meet at the White Horse in this town starting with M and there were about a dozen or so of us and we used to meet sometimes with our wives or girlfriends, whatever and chat and have lunch you know. And I used to meet Derek Compton my engineer there. He was there on every occasion. And I used to pick up another navigator from 77 Squadron who was badly shot up over [pause] again my memory lets me down. It’s a big, a big port in France. In Brittany. Beginning with B I think it is.
DM: [unclear]
JD: Can you remember it? You can’t. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. But the poor chap got badly shot up and virtually lost an eye so he was grounded and he lived at [pause] oh dear. Again, my memory for places. He lived at [pause] well about thirty miles from here towards Guildford. Near Guildford. He lived near Guildford and I used to get there and because, because of his eye he couldn’t drive and he, he had a very nice Mercedes car. And when we first met he said to me, ‘Will you drive me to the reunion?’ I said, ‘Of course I will,’ I said, ‘But there’s one condition.’ He said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘You let me drive your Mercedes.’ And he said yes. So once a year I got the opportunity of driving this magnificent car down to wherever it was. And the poor chap he developed dementia and eventually was admitted to a home. You know, a nursing home and died there about three years ago. But he and I, we knew each other from, from the squadron and we got on extremely well. And he, he ended up as a director of operations with British Airways so he had done very well. But I remember one of his drawbacks was on the way down, driving in this car of his he kept on saying to me, ‘Now, do you know where you are, Dean?’ you know [laughs] And I used to tell him, I used to say, ‘For God’s sake, shut up otherwise we shall get lost.’ But we had a good relationship and I’m sorry, I was very sorry he died, you know. Yeah. Those were most of the people who went, who attended these, these May meetings. Of course, it got to a point where it was difficult for them to drive or get to to the meetings. So we abandoned it or it was abandoned about two years ago. And it was started I remember that the whole this, this sub-branch was started by a man called Varley, who was another navigator who I knew and he unfortunately he died to. So I’m beginning to think I’m about the only one left from 77 Squadron. There must be others. Talking about the survivors I was interested to find out quite recently how many Bomber Command aircrew are left alive today. And I’ve always thought it was about between three and four thousand and I tried to get in touch with the Bomber Command Association of which I used to be a member but I gather that’s been completely disbanded now because there are so few members. And then on the internet, I use the internet quite, quite a lot on Facebook I came across this Bomber Command history forum and in the forum was somebody there call Dee mentioned the IBCC. You probably know about this lady, Dee.
DM: I’ve heard.
JD: You know about her. Well, she in fact put me in touch with the IBCC or reminded me because I’d been in touch before and I posted this question on Facebook and she came back and said she’d spoken to somebody at IBCC and they thought it was just over two thousand. But nobody really knows because no records have been kept have they?
DM: No. No.
JD: So, it’s all guesswork really but I think two or three, between two or three thousand is right. I mean immediately after the war there was something like a hundred and twenty thousand left. But the war, that’s what we are talking about? Getting on for seventy years ago now, aren’t we? So, there can’t be many left.
DM: No. Do, do —
JD: Yeah.
DM: Do you remember your time with Bomber Command with fondness or —
JD: With —?
DM: With fondness or —
JD: Yes. Well, it’s, no I don’t know about fondness. Yeah. I mean let’s be, let’s be honest it was a pretty scary time. Although as an individual I never felt that I was, I was going to get killed. I always thought that I was going to survive and I think this may have been due to the fact that when one is young, I was twenty or so you never think anything is going to happen to you. Well, obviously I was always optimistic. But I must confess that before each trip when we were sitting outside the aircraft waiting to get in and start the engines and they’d always happen for about a half an hour it then suddenly dawned on you what you are doing, you know. And then I do remember getting a bit apprehensive then. But once in the aircraft as the navigator I was busy from, you know the first, from the first minute as it were until the end of the trip. And that meant that one I was occupied and didn’t have time to think about you know being attacked. And it now, you know it’s occurred to me since that the other members of the crew sitting there staring out into the darkness they must have been petrified I should think most of the time but they obviously never mentioned it. Yes. I mean, I think probably a navigator in Bomber Command probably had the best job really because he was occupied as I say all the time and mark you one thing I missed was, was looking out of the aircraft and seeing what was happening all around us. Although, I did go up and I’d see. I used to get permission from the pilot to go up and stand by him when we were going in to the bombing run watching things happen and I think I wasn’t frightened at all. I was absolutely fascinated with what was going on, you know. And then of course you could see other aircraft all around you all being lit up and so on. So, yes it was something that one would never see again. Oh yes. I recall we did one trip early on in our tour. I think it was our second or third operation to Milan and that was quite an interesting trip because first of all it took almost nine and a half hours which was a hell of a long time. Secondly, the route took us over the Alps and we were flying on a bright moonlight night and it lit up the Alps dramatically and we were about I suppose the Alps go up to about fourteen or fifteen thousand feet and we were at sixteen so there wasn’t much between us you know because sixteen was about the maximum height, I think for a Halifax. Perhaps seventeen after a bit of a struggle. Anyway, we had a dramatic view. Fantastic view of the Alps both going and coming and then after we crossed the Alps we could see Milan in the distance because Milan is quite near the Alps, lit up and we could see searchlights waving. And then the nearer we got the searchlights stopped and when we got there we could also see anti-aircraft bursts in the sky and when we got there they completely stopped. So there were no searchlights and no anti-aircraft fire when we got there and I gather this was quite common that the Italians manning these things on the ground decided they’d leave, you know if we were there [laughs] Which was nice for us. So that was quite, I think we were meant to bomb some factories near, near the main railway station in Milan. And I gather according to the Bomber Command Diaries, you know that big fat book that the raid was very successful and we hit the factories. But that was quite an interesting trip. But on one I think on that same trip [pause] it was the same trip the pilot of a Stirling aircraft won the VC that night and it came, I’ve got a story upstairs about him. His name was Aaron, I think it was Aaron Smith. I’m not sure. But on the way, on the way down just before they got to Milan they were fired at by another Stirling aircraft and to this day nobody knows quite why the other Stirling aircraft did this because nobody owned up to it but it was presumed that the other Stirling aircraft just missed, he identified the other, you know the Stirling wrongly and took it to be an enemy aircraft. Anyway, he fired at this guy’s aircraft and he got badly badly injured and could no longer fly the aircraft. So the crew took him back and laid him down in the back of the aircraft and I think it was the [pause] I can’t remember whether it was either the flight engineer or the navigator took — no. It was the flight engineer. That’s right. He took over flying the aircraft because he had some instruction and they decided to abandon the bombing. So they released the bombs and they fell somewhere else. And then they decided that it would be dangerous to try and go back over the Alps to the UK and they decided to head for Sicily which was about I don’t know, I suppose and hundred and fifty miles south of where they thought they were. And then, oh yes the other thing was that the damage included putting out the radio. So they had no communication with the ground so they couldn’t find out where to land in Sicily. But eventually the wireless operator he managed to get some communication going with an aerodrome called Bone in North Africa. In Libya. And it was the only Allied air base in Libya at the time. Anyway, I don’t know how the wireless operator did it but he managed to speak to Bone and Bone said, ‘You must abandon the idea of trying to land in Sicily because there’s an invasion taking place and there’s a lot of fighting and we can’t advise you where to land.’ He said, they said, ‘You must try and head for Bone,’ and so they altered course and did that and eventually got there and this guy Aaron somebody, the pilot, he decided to get back in to the pilot’s seat to fly the aircraft and eventually he landed this aircraft despite the fact he was badly injured and he died nine hours later. And he got a VC for that. So that was quite an unfortunate dramatic ending for him. For the crew.
DM: Did you ever visit subsequently any of the cities that you bombed?
JD: Did I ever —?
DM: Visit any of the cities that you bombed?
JD: Only Berlin. Yeah. I went to Berlin about five years or six years ago and of course the area which was bombed of course have you been to Berlin?
DM: No.
JD: No. The area that was bombed has been rebuilt but it’s instead of, it’s been rebuilt with mainly glass buildings. Very modern. So you get no, you get no sense of an area that was completely obliterated and it’s a, you know an interesting city but I think that they built they rebuilt most of it in glass or so. A mistake really because in other parts of Europe where cities have been rebuilt they’ve rebuilt particularly in France they’ve rebuilt them in the style they were originally. An example of that was Caen where Caen was effectively demolished by Montgomery in order to get his troops on the move as it were. At great cost to civilians living there. But after the war they rebuilt Caen as it was and to go there you’d never think a bomb had been dropped anywhere near. But that didn’t happen in Berlin unfortunately. There we are. Yeah. I can’t remember. No. I’ve not been to, oh yes I’ve been to Milan. Ah yes. Of course, I’ve been to Milan. Great place Milan. And we actually went to the, yes we flew to Milan. We were going to go to a place called Genoa in Italy. Or Genoa. I don’t know how you pronounce it. Genoa. And we flew to Milan and got on a train at Milan. So we actually went to Milan Station but there was obviously no evidence of the bombing so, but I’m impressed with Italian railways. Very cheap and very fast. Unlike the UK of course. So yes but I mean no in terms of visiting immediately after the war and this took place from Elvington we were instructed to do what were they called?
DM: Oh, are these the Cook’s Tours?
JD: Sorry.
DM: Cook’s Tours.
JD: That’s it.
DM: Yes.
JD: And we did two of these. We took, we took a number of people. I didn’t know who they were, I presumed they were VIPs of some kind over, we flew over the Ruhr and we flew over Essen and Mannheim and one or two other places very low. About we couldn’t have been more than about two or three hundred feet perhaps. No. A thousand. I don’t know. I can’t remember. But low enough to see the damage very effectively. So we did that and yeah, I think we were all taken aback by the immense amount of the damage which we’d caused and subsequently I didn’t realise then but in later years I realised that Bomber Command it did what it had to do and it was probably very necessary that we did what we had to do but what we had to do was quite barbaric. But I think that, I think we, I don’t think there was ever a question of whether we should have done it. I think we should have done it. What should have happened was for war to be avoided, I think. I’ve become very anti-war. I think a lot of people who took part in the war have. But yeah, I mean, I think I mean in London of course people suffered to a certain extent.
DM: Yeah. When you said that you grew up in Edmonton and Middlesex.
JD: Sorry?
DM: You said you grew up in sort of Edmonton and Middlesex.
JD: Yeah. I was out of London when the bombing took place but —
DM: Were your family still there or —
JD: No. No. None of my family live there now. No.
DM: Were they there during the war though?
JD: Oh, indeed. Sure. Yeah.
DM: So they all came through the bombing of London.
JD: They survived you know.
DM: Yeah.
JD: Because they weren’t in, they weren’t in central London. They were out in the suburbs. Wood Green which is a suburb and I don’t think, I don’t think any bombs were dropped there at all. No. It’s [pause] yes the I suppose you know since the war there’s been an enormous amount of literature hasn’t there and books written about Bomber Command. And I think that [pause] Well, I think that what we did played an enormous part in, in the defeat of Nazi Germany. I mean had that Bomber Command not done what it did then presumably all the German troops that were used for anti-aircraft purposes and I gather it totalled something like two million presumably those troops could have been released to fight elsewhere. Presumably against, on the Eastern Front against Russian and that might have made all the difference really. I don’t know. So, although I think what we did was, was not very nice I think it was completely and utterly necessary to get rid of this terrible scourge in Europe. And at the time of course when I was on the squadron I hadn’t really read very much about what was going on Germany. I don’t think many people had at that, at that stage because there wasn’t much news coming out of Germany in the nineteen, the late 1930s and early 40s. And as a young man I wasn’t as interested then as I am now in what happened in the past. So we were largely unaware of what was happening in Europe. But I remember having a feeling, you know then on the squadron that what we were doing was necessary. That we had to defeat these so and sos in Germany without really knowing about them. About all the horrors that were going on. But with that I don’t know we never spoke. Something we never discussed. I never remember discussing this with any of my colleagues. I think we were too busy thinking about other things like, you know going out to the pub or whatever or something like that you know.
DM: Yes.
JD: Very good.
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 John Eric Hatherly Dean
Creator
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David Meanwell
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-09-13
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ADeanJEH170913, PDeanJEH1701
Conforms To
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Pending review
Format
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01:03:02 audio recording
Language
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eng
Spatial Coverage
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Canada
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
North Africa
England--Suffolk
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Mannheim
England--Yorkshire
Italy--Milan
Saskatchewan--Swift Current
Saskatchewan
Description
An account of the resource
John Dean’s childhood memory of watching a Spitfire and a German aircraft having a dogfight in the sky above him spurred him to want to become a Spitfire pilot. He didn’t achieve his aim of becoming a Spitfire pilot and instead became a navigator. On one operation the Flight Engineer noticed the Lancaster immediately above them and then saw the bomb fall from it and in to their own aircraft from where the crew argued what to do with it. On his first operation he realised to his horror that he had turned the aircraft too early and they were far off target but they managed to rectify their mistake and complete the operation.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940-08-15
1944-12
1945-01
1652 HCU
51 Squadron
77 Squadron
aircrew
bomb struck
bombing
Fw 190
Harvard
Heavy Conversion Unit
navigator
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Stradishall
Spitfire
Stirling
Tiger Moth
training
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/831/10818/PGallagherGCK1701.2.jpg
18f2a784cc197099b741e796bea0c630
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/831/10818/AGallagherGCK170925.1.mp3
c266a866d675842ed4d97ce7c9b8a05c
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
Gallagher, Charles
Gordon Charles Kilbride Gallagher
G C K Gallagher
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. An oral history interview with Flying Officer Charles Gallagher DFC, (b.1924, 191699 Royal Air Force) and a photograph. He trained as a navigator / bomb aimer and flew operations with 76 Squadron
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Charles Gallagher and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-09-25
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Gallagher, GCK
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: So, this interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive. The person being interviewed is Gordon Charles Kilbride Gallagher known as Charles.
CG: That’s it.
CB: And my name is Cathy Brearley and I am the interviewer. Also present in the house is Mrs Mary Rose Gallagher who is Charles’ wife and the date is Monday the 25th Of September 2017. So —
CG: Cathy, great to meet you.
CB: Thank you very much and first of all I would like to thank you very much for giving us this interview. It’s very kind of you. Thank you. So —
CG: Pleasure.
CB: So, could you start off by telling me a little bit about whereabouts you were born and where you grew up?
CG: I was born in a little village, in those days on the, well it’s still of course on the banks of the River Trent outside Nottingham my father being clergyman of the parish. Wait a minute. He was rector or vicar. He was rector, that’s right, of Wilford village. That proves in nineteen [pause] deary me 1924, I lived there for the first six years of my life and then my father exchanged parishes with one named South Brent on Dartmoor in Devon where I had a wonderful boyhood which took in all the country sports. I’m ashamed to say of one but it was natural at the time but that was otter hunting. And they asked me to, having been out one day they asked me to, within the, to be the hunt whip which was moving in the front of the pack of hounds up rivers, lakes and so on. And I just loved it.
CB: So where, how old were you when war broke out?
CG: War. When the war broke out I was, I was fifteen and let’s see now, I was fifteen and I had just gone to Blundell’s School in the West Country about, thirteen miles out of, north of Exeter. I loved the five years I was at Blundell’s. I’ve always been tremendously keen on doing sports. Cricket and rugby. And then, let’s see now, what happened next that I really loved and remembered because I was jolly lucky. I loved all these activities at school and then went up to Cambridge in the, to join the Cambridge Royal Air Force Squadron. You maybe wanted to ask why on earth I joined the Air Force. It was two principal reasons. One, during the Battle of Britain I was there. We endlessly talked what was going on and really it was as simple as this. We had one objective. The aircrew uniform and the second was the inspiration from the men who wore them. After six months at Cambridge which I dearly loved, wonderful, wonderful university I moved up to [pause] from Cambridge I flew while I was there in the old squadron at Duxford and was finally assessed for which category of aircrew I was going to train for. It turned out that I did, I missed the pilot but got navigator, bomb aimer training combined and moved to South Africa on a wonderful passage. First of all we started at Manchester, Heaton Park where the drill, the drill sergeant had the thickest neck I’ve ever seen on a human being. He was the Heavy Weight Champion of Great Britain at the time. Boxing. And then a fantastically moving fortnight. I may be a day or two out. It was about a fortnight with a party of, I thought wonderful ladies who regarded themselves largely responsible for the Air Force because we lived with them for about, as I say a fortnight and then moved on either to South Africa or to Canada. I went with a wonderful bunch of young men aged eighteen and a half on the [pause] now what? I’ll remember it later. The troop ship, which took five weeks to get us to Cape Town and then on finally to [pause] what’s that wonderful place, port on the east coast that escapes me? It’ll come to me later. But we were greeted as all of the members of the British services were greeted. By an incredible lady known as the White Lady. The Lady in White, and she greeted us. Greeted us with the old song, “Songs of England,” which was a wonderful experience. It really was unique. Then transferred down to East London which was what? I’ve forgotten exactly how long we had, we had down there but it was the best part of six months. Yes. Six months, and then on to our Flying School. A place called Oudtshoom in the, in a little desert on the east side of South Africa having had an incredibly amusing weekend because we got lost. They sent us down to Cape Town, to the Air School there and we were not actually meant to have gone there. It was to Oudtshoom where we had another three or four months before we graduated as, in our case about thirty of us, navigator, bomb aimer and then finished up in, there was one little Air School where we did gunnery, in addition. And then finally just after Christmas back to the UK. I’ve done nearly too much talking.
CB: No. No. No. That’s all interesting. So how long did it take on the troop ship? It must have taken several weeks, was it?
CG: What? Going out to.
CB: Back to the UK.
CG: Going out to South Africa took five weeks.
CB: Yeah.
CG: Which was a heck of a long time.
CB: Yeah.
CG: It was due to having to dodge submarines and one thing or another. We went practically over to South America before turning east and arriving in to Cape Town to a wonderful welcome.
CB: What sort of things did you do on the ship?
CG: On the ship?
CB: To keep, to keep busy for five weeks.
CG: That was fascinating. We did a very healthy amount of physical stuff to keep us fit and it was just even looking at endless sea during the five weeks it [pause] the fascination of it then. It’s difficult to describe.
CB: What was the food like on the ship?
CG: Food was absolutely wonderful as long as you avoided one thing. They used to serve mealies. The chefs used to serve mealies instead of porridge which was, for me was Teflon and sand but still we get over that. And one thing was delightful. When the chef who was serving the mealies passed you behind you never never to ask for the salt when he asked you the inevitable question because all he did to give it to you and he gave it to you in large quantities was lean forward and it was everything running off his forehead went into your stuff.
CB: Very unfortunate.
CG: There you are. You asked me, Cathy. I’ll tell you [laughs]
CB: Yes [laughs] So, after your training you came back to the UK. Whereabouts did you come to?
CG: First of all we went to Millom, in Cumberland where we simply did acclimatise European conditions. Flying. Then on to [pause] a peaceful little village in the Cotswolds to Operational Training Unit where we flew Whitleys. I always thought a Whitley was rather to be compared with an elephant as far as the flying was concerned. Not, in no way attractive. That’s all really I would want to say about Whitley except that we did one of the most important and fascinating things in my life there. At [pause] oh, what was the name of the place?
CB: Stanton.
CG: Stanton Harcourt.
CB: Stanton Harcourt near Abingdon.
CG: That’s it.
CB: Yeah.
CG: Abingdon was a regular station. That, that was, I was just going on to say a wonderful, wonderful thing in my life happened there. The crewing up. And it was fascinating. We formed our own crew. It was the last thing we expected. It was just simply eighty, eighty of us. Seven in a crew. Twelve. Anyway, seven aircrew and [pause] first of all we were completely gobsmacked when we were told. We were marched into this hangar and were told to crew up. We never never expected to have to do it ourselves but actually it turned out marvellously well. I don’t know whether it was Jim, the navigator or myself that spotted him first but what mattered was that we spotted him. One man sitting on his own reading something or other. I’ve forgotten what. And Mac MacFarlane became one of the great friends of my life. He’s still alive. He’s ninety five now. Not very well sadly. I’m ninety three. But we’ve been life-long friends and this was a magical occasion being able to pick our own crew. We just went round spotting people. We really didn’t know much about their flying ability as members of the crew but we knew whether we liked them or not and that played an enormous part.
CB: So, who were the other crew members?
CG: Sorry?
CB: Who were the other crew members apart from yourself and MacFarlane?
CG: Well, I remember —
CB: MacFarlane.
CG: The pilot obviously who turned out to be not only a top class, and Jim and I of course absolutely latched on to this. We discovered that he’d been a trainer in America after he’d passed his own pilot training. He went on and trained Americans for a year. Now, that of course gave him a huge amount of experience and we thought this is just the man we’re looking for so we, we asked him, knowing that he was going to be the boss [laughs] We asked him if we might join his crew rather than, ‘Will you come and join our crew?’ I remember that so well. But this was all the wonderful light but fabulous sense of humour that Bomber Command eventually possessed. And I’m sorry if I’m diverting again for a moment but that is why I came to be able to continue a question from people I talked to while selling my book later was, ‘How the hell can you stand there, look me in the eye and say that they were the, one of the best in my life when half of you were killed.’ And I said it was simple. It was a combination of comradeship, probably towering above all others and sense of humour because it gave you the balance in your life that you had to lead and that you can’t have wanted to leave because the brilliance of the training amongst other things. It taught you [pause] it taught you with a sense of humour to get the balance in your life that you had to have and finally of course the sense of humour was one of the most wonderful ways of breaking tension. Tension that is bound to come in the conditions you were in and one wisecrack from a member of the crew at a time it didn’t disturb your concentration. It just built your ability to do your work. Yes. And the extraordinary effect it had actually and I didn’t discover this for about thirty years, on your later life in Civvy Street. How to handle people. If we all could learn that lesson we wouldn’t have half the problems in life the way internationally we’re going through now, and internally. I hope that gives you a bit of an idea Cathy, of why I was able to answer that question. Why was it? Well, five eventually years of your life so happy.
CB: Lifelong friendships.
CG: It was.
CB: And who, who else was there with you then? Who was your rear gunner?
CG: Our rear? We had a rear gunner and an upper gunner. We had a flight engineer who was a little wee Jock as we called him.
CB: Sorry?
CG: Wonderful little Scotsman.
CB: What did you call him?
CG: A wonderful little gunner.
CB: Wee?
CG: Wee Jock.
CB: Oh, wee Jock. Yes.
CG: The skipper was a wonderful skipper and he was a big Jock [laughs]
CB: Do you remember their actual names?
CG: Oh Lord, yes. Jim Portwood, navigator. Mac MacFarlane. Walter MacFarlane. We called him Mac. Then you had the two gunners. Jack. I’ll call him Jack for the moment. I forget his surname. I never called him by it. The mid-upper gunner. And for the first twenty trips because he was on his second tour he only had to do twenty trips. Jack. Jack. Jack. The second Jack. No. We called him just Jock. Sorry. Big tall chap. And he left us after twenty trips and we took on a little fella. Absolutely brilliant man. No [laughs] It’s all in my logbook.
CB: It may come back to you.
CG: I can’t remember.
CB: So, you crewed up.
CG: Yes.
CB: And then where did you go to after that?
CG: We crewed up. And the other thing that was so wonderful we never, all of us, all of seven from different backgrounds, different lives altogether and the comradeship was superb. It had to be.
CB: Yeah. Of course.
CG: There weren’t options. I’ll tell you what.
CB: So, was that when you then joined 76 Squadron? Was that when you joined 76 Squadron?
CG: 76. We went through the historic battlefield at Marston Moor to do our operational conversion to Halifax bombers. And then of course one was aware of the intense rivalry but continuing tremendous comradeship when we met up with the Lanc boys. Lancaster bombers based in Lincoln.
CB: Yeah.
CG: We were based in Yorkshire. A little place called Marston Moor.
CB: What sort of things did the conversion training focus on?
CG: Sorry?
CB: What sort of things did the conversion training focus on because you had been flying in Whitleys?
CG: Whitleys. Halifaxes.
CB: And then, yeah. What sort of things was the training actually focused on?
CG: Endless, [pause] how you, how you do forget some things. Landings and take offs but the —
CB: As a navigator was there a huge difference?
CG: Sorry?
CB: As a navigator was there a big difference for you? In the different aircraft.
CG: Oh yes.
CB: Yeah.
CG: We, we grew to love the Halifax. I thought the Whitley was a ridiculous thing but —
CB: And what sort of system did you use in the Halifax for navigation?
CG: Well, I —
CB: Did you use Astro navigation?
CG: Oh well, I was, I was navigator bomb aimer.
CB: Oh, you spent more time as a bomb aimer.
CG: Once [unclear] and I met up at Stanton Harcourt.
CB: Right.
CG: We realised one could do [laughs] I shouldn’t be saying this should I but one could do both and the other could do one. So, it was obvious. And we were also great personal friends.
CB: What was life like at the base on the days when you weren’t flying? What sort of things did you spend time doing when you were not flying?
CG: When I was —
CB: Not flying. When you were at the base.
CG: Yes. We were cramming in as much time in to York as we could. We had two buses permanently based at Holme on Spalding Moor that would take us into York whenever we were allowed to go and I’m sure you can guess all the kinds of things we did when we got there.
CB: And the local people were very welcoming.
CG: Sorry?
CB: The. the local people were very welcoming.
CG: Oh.
CB: Hospitable.
CG: Yes. Wonderful. But the village was not really pleasantly walkable.
CB: No.
CG: It was a bit of a distance. But the pubs in the village were altogether different. Different [sadly]
[recording paused]
CB: So as a bomb aimer then whereabouts exactly in the aircraft were you?
CG: Next to the pilot. That’s when he’s going home when he’s not, actually in the action part of the bomb aimer is simply on the bombing run. But I did quite a bit on, oh radar and various other things to help the navigator.
CB: So, you were lying down.
CG: Lying down on the bombing run and in control. In other words, you were telling the pilot exactly what to do. The bombing run would be sounding from the bomb aimer. ‘Left. Left.’ ‘Right.’ [pause] ‘Bombs gone.’ That would be roughly there. That sort of thing. But it would be, have to be on the pilot’s return what he said was always wonderful. It reminded me every time particularly Mac with his voice. Particular, steady quiet control. It was, it was so effective on the crew. It really was. If you heard a joke he, even if it wasn’t a worried voice it wasn’t actually doing that, certainly to him but, but it was concerning. Now, Mac had this extraordinary control. Quite a steady, and authoritative voice.
CB: Was it difficult to communicate with each other when you were, you were in the aircraft because it must have been very noisy?
CG: It could be very noisy but as opposed to the Americans, I must say this because I have a lot of time for the Americans but they could be shouting. You couldn’t hear them sometimes. I’m taking it from the, largely from the very good film of some of their things, “Twelve O’clock High,” for instance. It was, they were very good. They really did. But they were, in their communications they were much noisier. There’s no question about that.
CB: How long did it take to get from, how long was the flight typically from home to where we went.
CG: Well, in total we were away for eight hours if we were on the Eastern Front. Their Eastern Front. For instance, to give you an idea, in the article that I’ve written now to go into the new edition I talk about one episode when we were diverted. I wanted to put it in because there was nothing like it before on the American 8th Air Force. The [pause] the Liberator and the Flying Fort, Flying Fortress in reverse order because it was in reverse order, their numbers. Far more Forts. But I loved it because it enabled me to talk about the type of men they were and they had so much in common with the training. We’re not on the air, are we?
CB: Yes. We are recording now.
CG: Oh.
CB: I started it when I asked about your crew position.
CG: That’s fine. That’s fine.
CB: Yes. Yes. We are recording. So, how did you feel when you were setting off? Did you feel afraid?
CG: Wonderful moment. This is the training because this, I forgot to tell you about our training. Why it was so incredibly effective. They trained you in many ways just as though you were a hairdresser or anything you care to think of. Just doing it as a, it’s a job. You don’t think, ‘Oh crikey. I’m going —’ You might quietly sort of say, for a second but your whole attitude during the day when you’d heard what the target was. It was based on very differently at times but you were trained. That’s what, I volunteered to do it. All flying people, submariners, people like that, they wanted to do it.
CB: And were you told just immediately before you set off what the target was?
CG: Yes.
CB: That was something you found out at the very last minute obviously.
CG: We had a full briefing. Supposing, supposing it was a maximum effort and around about twenty four aircraft were going from the squadron you would get a rumour very often when you woke up in the morning but always the target would be announced. Announced at briefing where all twenty four men multiply it by seven if you will and, and it would be that number of men who were going on that particular trip and that would be all be in one room having gathered at briefings at something like 5 o’clock in the afternoon. Don’t forget we operated in winter so we left earlier. So we were getting in to Germany in the dark.
CB: So, was it mainly night flights that you did?
CG: Yes. But we did quite a lot of daylights and the time we got so badly beaten up was in daylight. Holland. Battle of Osnabruck it was, sort of thing and to get to the target we’d had to turn left and the American Fortresses turned right to get past each other I remember. But I’ll tell you just out of interest really that we were really smashed up. A hundred and ninety six, I think it was holes in the aircraft. Some of them, you know that size.
CB: Three feet wide.
CG: Yes.
CB: By two feet deep. Goodness.
CG: Yeah. So, the outer framework on the aeroplane just blown away.
CB: It’s amazing you survived that.
CG: The under-gun turret I remember which luckily wasn’t used that day [pause] That was shot clean out. But —
CB: So, had anybody been there it would have been a different story wouldn’t it?
CG: Oh, just gone. But — [pause]
CB: A hundred and ninety six.
CG: It’s in the old Osnabruck and it was absolutely incredible how you could cause so much damage, one engine gone and seven of you would sit there and only the flight engineer had his arm slightly [pause] We pulled his leg endlessly for weeks afterwards because he went and put up the wound and survived and it might have been a scratch of a rose. But it, it was a genuine war wound what I’ve been told. He did it just for fun.
CB: That must have been real teamwork then to have brought that aircraft back home.
CG: Sorry?
CB: It must have been real teamwork to have brought that aircraft back home.
CG: Well, yes. I think the thing that appeals to people when they talk to me about it afterwards was that the skipper had said, told us to bale out and he called it, and he wrote the article on it and he called it his mutiny and of course he —
CB: His mutiny.
CG: With a big smile on his face. We just said, ‘No. We can’t possibly let you try and land this thing on your own. We shall stay.’ But it’s worth reading. I have one for you. We had to do the North Sea in in the dark. On one occasion in fog, and I think if I can find it —
[pause]
CG: It’s from my old school. They’ve bought eighteen books on the —
CB: Blundell’s. Yes.
CG: On the first one. That was, she, she I’ll show it to you because it’s been honestly very typical.
CB: That’s lovely if they’re doing some work.
CG: Yeah.
CB: In schools.
CG: Oh, they are.
CB: At that particular school.
CG: And she, she has an extraordinary—
CB: On people who were students.
CG: I will show you the diary. The school diary later because it shows a group of about twenty five thirty people that, she is a development officer there and she takes some, I think one group a year around the battlefields of Europe to teach them history because she thinks it’s the best way.
CB: It is. Absolutely.
CG: Of course, it really does teach them history. You’ve got the date of when we went on to Dakotas, haven’t you?
CB: Yes. The Dakotas. You did the conversion training in June 1945.
CG: Right.
CB: According to your logbook.
CG: Now —
CB: And then went on ops in the August.
CG: That is completely accurate.
CB: Yes.
CG: The old logbook.
CB: Yes. So, what was the Dakota like then to fly in?
CG: Lovely.
CB: Was it?
CG: Oh, it was a lovely aircraft. Totally different. But it was a joy to be in it.
CB: And that’s a troops carrier. So you did that for some weeks.
CG: And that we did when we got to India and you’ve got all the dates there on flying out to India and when we got to India we arrived at Mauripur which is again there, I think [pages turning]
CB: What was it like there apart from very different?
CG: Yes. Totally different atmosphere but we had great fun in a way. And we went down to [pause] then we were very soon went on to Poona which was a lovely place surrounded by hills and beautifully green and not desert at all, like Mauripur. We loved it.
CB: And that was still moving troops around in that area.
CG: That was. Yes. Can I, we picked them up at [pause] a place on the east coast. A big port. It should be there.
[pause]
CB: Not Wadi Halfa.
CG: No. That’s beyond.
CB: No.
CG: That was on the way out.
CB: Masirah?
CG: That was in the sort of Egypt area.
CB: Mauripur. Poona.
CG: Carry on.
CB: Just looking —
CG: Sorry about the state it’s in.
CB: Just looking at the logbook now. [pause] So after being in Broadwell.
CG: Yes.
CB: Whereabouts did you go to from there?
CG: From Broadwell, I think we went, that’s when we changed from [pause] Yes, it must have been because we were 76 Halifax Squadron towing these gliders around full of troops and they were, that was all in preparation for the attack on Singapore. Then one night we were having one hell of a party. I shall never forget it. I don’t remember it in detail but I shall never forget it. And what happened then? Then we were told at the end of the evening as it got to the end of the evening they said, ‘Right. It’s all off boys.’ The bombs were dropped on Japan. So, no need to go out to bomb.
CB: And that was Hiroshima.
CG: And that was still towing them in with our Halifaxes. And then it was all on again. About a week later we got another counter telegram telling us to, that it was on again and to train on Dakotas for India.
CB: Yes.
CG: Still to India but for a different purpose. For bringing internally the prisoners of war around.
CB: So, you went to India.
CG: Yeah.
CB: And you were in Karachi for about a year.
CG: I think, do you know, how about this for a memory this was all of seventy three years ago. We left on the 16th of September. See if that’s right. Or don’t. Do whatever you like. Have a look at it.
CB: It’s alright. So, you left on the16th of September. Which year?
CG: ‘45. And took us four or five weeks. No. It didn’t. I’ve gone without looking at that.
CB: So, you went out to India.
CG: But it would have taken us probably about inside ten days obviously and then I taught my skipper to play cricket and squash at Poona [laughs] He was a great guy. I excused him not being able to play cricket because after all he was a Scotsman.
CB: What was life like in Poona?
CG: Very good.
CB: Was it?
CG: Very good. We, we had one wonderful evening. Absolutely wonderful. We walked back into the mess one evening, always did look on the notice boards straight away because there were sometimes goodies going and there was a goodie going. It was a theatre. I can’t remember offhand. Its somewhere but I can’t remember quite if I put it in the book or not. The theatre. A famous, a famous show of some sort or another and then that was followed by the Governor of India putting notices on the board. The governor was from that area. You know, the governor of Bombay. That’s right. He had a house or something out there or his palace I suppose and he sent two officers from the Navy, Army, and Air Force around here, invitation to his evening to a Welsh Choir which was touring India at the time. We thought this was too good to be true and luckily we were the first two in there so we nailed it. And I’m telling this story because I shall never forget. Never. In there, and when we got there they’d probably been invited to something else earlier in the day or something were the top princes of India both Muslim and Hindu which we found fascinating. Otherwise, you had the Maharajas and whatever they called the Muslim and I shall never forget the Welsh Choir and we never forgot it. Any of us. That they played the [unclear] before finally obviously the British national anthem. And the, all these Indian nobles stood stiffly to attention and we hadn’t moved because the Welsh were still, we hadn’t realised that we should stand when they and so that was wonderful but it was just seeing them standing there in millions of pounds worth of jewellery. Dripping with it. Oh, it was fantastic. it was. It was very moving. Very moving.
CB: So, it was the —
CG: I’m sorry about all that.
CB: That’s interesting. So that was the [pause] where you were there was sort of known as the first and the last.
CG: Something we did.
CB: Yeah.
CG: When we were in Poona.
CB: Yeah. So, they, you were, the work you were involved with then was flights that were internal flights around India.
CG: Yes.
CB: And obviously there were troops coming and going from there to the Far East.
CG: Yes.
CB: And yours was the first.
CG: Yes. I think we probably, probably did a few but it was mainly prisoners of war. Thin as rakes. And I had complete diversion I won’t spend any time on it but I had lunch with Mary the other day with one of those men. Aged now a hundred and eight. No, he was ninety eight. Incredibly well, healthy man who had been a prisoner of war. And some of the stuff he’d had to go through. Some of the things will never be known. But we couldn’t understand how he looked so well.
CB: It’s good that he did.
CG: In the book.
CB: Good that he did. So, you had two different kind of experiences in India. You said one was very much in the desert and the other place in India was —
CG: Cricket.
CB: Not in the desert at all.
CG: Cricket.
CB: Cricket. What was the desert like? Apart from hot, obviously?
CG: Mauripur. Mauripur was another beautiful place. It was a fascinating place. Something, something we’d never seen before. I mean that’s the best I can say really. Poona was utterly beautiful and that’s why I got some very good cricket but later in the turn of the year I got up this cricket team because I suddenly realised, we all did that there wasn’t that much for us to do.
CB: Were you kept busy when you were in Mauripur? In the desert. Did you do a lot of flying.
CG: No.
CB: Or did you have a lot of time where —
CG: Not a lot.
CB: You weren’t.
CG: We did a bit. We went down to Jiwani as soon as we got there. The little place on the south coast of Arabia somewhere called Jiwani. No airfield. Just a sort of a dirt track and we landed out there. They were completely out of water. No water at all. So, they said, ‘Hey, we need something to drink. We’ve got nothing and it’s boiling.’ So, we, the first job we did when we got to India was to load up with water and go down there and landed on this old track I remember and exactly, [pause] Let’s get this right. ’46 yes. Exactly forty years later I took my youngest daughter to to India, on up to Kashmir and coming back I was standing at the, with her having coffee at the, oh what aeroplanes were they? Anyway, they were BOAC aeroplanes and I forget what, I don’t know first of all what the things are but he we got chatting and talking about old days and he said, ‘Well, come up to the flight deck and sit and we’ll have a chat.’ So, lovely and I took Katie up there with me and it was really great fun. I put that in this book.
CB: And whereabouts were you when the war ended?
CG: When the war ended I was in the back end of, oh sorry I beg your pardon when the Jap war ended? The whole thing?
CB: Well, victory in Europe.
CG: In Europe, by the 8th I was on the squadron and that night I think it was I shot up to Scotland. I just forget where and I can’t remember why we didn’t all go but we didn’t and out of the front door of the house came a very pleasant looking woman. Turned out to be his sister and he was very very fond of her, I remember and she smiled. She said, ‘Right. Off.’ And we, ‘Oh God.’ The telegram had just arrived. We’d just left the squadron that morning and, “Return to the squadron immediately.” We got back there. The place was absolutely buzzing with excitement. They said we’re off and the only thing they could tell us, they couldn’t even tell us where other than the Far East. So, then all the excitement started again.
CB: So, for you because of where you were based.
CG: In —
CB: Victory in Europe, the 8th of May didn’t mean —
CG: Oh yes.
CB: The end of —
CG: No.
CB: Your operations and your work, did it?
CG: We didn’t leave Portreath until, I’m sure I’m accurate on this until the 15th or the 16th of September 1945. Although it was only just after the war ended in May. So we’d been about what? May? June? So, five months.
CB: And then when your Service had finished did you stay in the RAF? You didn’t. You left, didn’t you?
CG: No. I had a wonderful life. I mean, it’s all a series of a wonderful part of life. I wrote to British South American Airways and said, ‘Can I have a job please?’ And I got a ground job and I found it fascinating. They were doing passenger handling and it was a really interesting job and anyway I got that and do you know within a month I got a call from the head of passenger handling. He said, ‘We’re posting you out to, I’ll tell you where in a moment, when —' so and so, ‘Comes back.’ So I realised it was an overseas posting. Where did they send me but Bermuda. Oh, Bermuda. It’s gorgeous.
CB: How long were you there for?
CG: Sorry?
CB: How long were you there for?
CG: I was there, only there for three months. They warned me it wouldn’t be more than that but I mean, sheer heaven.
CB: And you were awarded the DFC.
CG: Yes. I was.
CB: When was that? Was that —
CG: They always look the same don’t they? When was it? I’ve got that upstairs, torn up, half torn up it’s all I’ve got left of it but sending over my father in England to me in, and I was then in Poona I think. Which just said you’ve got the DFC.
CB: So, he knew before you did.
CG: Hmmn?
CB: He knew before you did.
CG: Yes. And —
CB: It must have been difficult for your parents.
CG: Well, they were the people in the war I was so sorry for. I mean they always knew when a telegram arrived what it was. And mother got one and —
CB: Was that for a specific act? Your DFC. Was that awarded for a particular event?
CG: I think, quite honestly I think it was a sort of a rather particularly successful tour.
CB: Yes.
CG: And having a good crew.
CB: Yeah.
CG: And that was what I believed it was and I’m sure of it. And I always felt sad that the other four members of the crew didn’t get one. Jim got one. Mac got one. I got one. But there we are.
CB: Indeed. Well, thank you. Thank you very much for your time and thank you for giving us this interview.
CG: Not at all. I hope I’ve covered all you wanted to know.
CB: I’m sure. I’m sure. Thank you very much.
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 Charles Gallagher
Creator
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Cathy Brearley
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-09-25
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AGallagherGCK170925, PGallagherGCK1701
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
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00:57:13 audio recording
Description
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Charles Gallagher was born in a small village outside Nottingham where his father was rector of the local church. At the age of six the family moved to South Brent on Dartmoor where Charles enjoyed country sports and helped with the local hunt. At secondary school he enjoyed cricket and rugby before going up to Cambridge where he joined the university air squadron. On joining the Royal Air Force he was selected for navigator/bomb aimer training: after a five week journey by troop ship to Cape Town he commenced his training near East London in South Africa. Charles then attended an Operational Training Unit in the Cotswolds before transferring to RAF Stanton Harcourt where he joined his crew as bomb aimer. He described the process of crewing up and how in his case it led to a lifelong friendship with one of his crew. After flying Whitleys which he described as an ‘elephant’ of an aircraft he was posted to 76 Squadron and transferred to flying Halifax aircraft at No. 165 Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Marston Moor. Charles recalled one operation on Osnabrück while stationed at RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor where his aircraft returned with 196 holes in the fuselage. The pilot ordered the crew to bail out but they stayed with the aircraft which made it back to base. In June 1945 the squadron converted to C-47s and flew to India with Transport Command. On return Charles joined British South American Airways on ground passenger handling, including a short posting to Bermuda.
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Yorkshire
England--Yorkshire
England--Oxfordshire
South Africa
South Africa--East London
Germany
Germany--Osnabrück
India
Temporal Coverage
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1945-06
Contributor
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Jim Sheach
Julie Williams
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
76 Squadron
aircrew
bomb aimer
bombing
C-47
crewing up
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
military ethos
Operational Training Unit
RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Stanton Harcourt
training
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/837/10827/PGoldbyJL1701.1.jpg
a45bc6d8a3e3b396aa60a0e197184a52
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/837/10827/AGoldbyJL171025.2.mp3
eeb8f152cb68ea23e18042b8b5151712
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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Goldby, John Louis
J L Goldby
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with John Goldby (1922 - 2020, 1387511, 139407 Royal Air Force). He was shot down and became a prisoner of war in December 1944.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by John Goldby and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-10-25
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Goldby, JL
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DM: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is David Meanwell. The interviewee is John Goldby. The interview is taking place at Mr Goldby’s home in Keston in the county of Kent on the 25th of October 2017. Ok, John. Well, if you’d like to perhaps kick off. Tell us a bit about where you were born and about growing up.
JG: Yes. I was born in Bexley, Kent in 1922. The next thing, the following year the family moved to Sidcup and my home until I joined up was in Sidcup. I went to what was then called the Sidcup County School before that was then turned into a grammar school and I went, started there in 1931 and I stayed there until the end of the summer 1939. From there on I, until I joined up I worked for a private bank, Brown Shipley and Company in the City of London. And I worked for them until I joined up in May 19 — 1941.
DM: What, when you, what prompted you to join the air force as opposed to going into another service?
JG: Well, my reason for the air force was I had a friend who was at the school who was about a year older than I was and as soon as he could join anything he joined the air force and became a Spitfire pilot. I thought that’s just the thing. One, one great advantage is if something happens to you when you’re at ten twenty thousand feet up there’s a chance of something might come to your rescue in those twenty thousand feet. Whereas if you are shot on the battlefield that’s where you’ll lie. And if you fall in the water in certain circumstances in the Navy that’s where you’ll end because the water is very cold. I stayed with the bank until such time as I, as I was actually called up because until I was eighteen I wasn’t allowed to go. But when the time came in 1941 I joined and I was, had been recorded as being fit for either pilot or navigator training. Because at that time it was the beginning of the expansion of Bomber Command to the four engine aircraft which meant there were now there was a bomb aimer and a navigator and as it happened the extra body and above that was a flight engineer.
DM: Where? When you say you signed up and then you were called up?
JG: Yes.
DM: To go and train. I assume that was the next thing.
JG: That’s right.
DM: Where did that happen? Where did you go for that?
JG: They were, the receiving wing as it was called was in Babbacombe in, in Devon and I went down there on the 31st of May 1941. After a couple of months or so then started ground, with air crew ground training. Morse code and all that sort of thing. Aircraft recognition. The sort of basic things which would then enable me to go on to flying training. In fact, some of my ground training was up here at Kenley which was a fighter aircraft airfield and was involved in the Battle of Britain or had been by the time I got there. And that was a number, there were quite a lot of these actual operational stations which housed training. Ground training for aircrew. Eventually, having done ground training I was then allocated a position in Air Observer School for training, as they were called then air observers. And the one, and then they were allocated on the basis of alphabetical order. And there were five of us in on the list whose initial was G. And the five of us who’d been looking forward to going to either South Africa or Canada or somewhere exotic like that found ourselves going to the Isle of Man. And I thought what a jolly place to be for the cold winter because that’s where I started training in October 1941 and I stayed there until May 1942. And then it was to Operational Training Unit. And in those days Operational Training Unit, the individual aircrew got together and formed a crew. It was virtually sort of go and find someone who you liked, feel you would like to fly with. It wasn’t mandatory as far as I know who you were allocated or I was and then people were added of course. A pilot who was in army uniform and in fact he had opted to change to aircrew which of course you could do if you wanted to go aircrew. And that’s another thing with the police. The police were allowed to leave and join up for aircrew duties. And so we had, we had a lot of police in our intake if you like who’d done all sorts of jobs in the police. And I flew, we used to fly in pairs on navigational training. And the extraordinary thing really for navigational training we were flying Blenheims which were actually operational aircraft. And it was the fastest aircraft I think I flew in the whole war. That’s — and I flew with a chap who had been a policeman in Glasgow. Actually, he was a mobile policeman. Anyway, the bombing training was from Hampdens, both of those aircraft were of course twin-engine. And then, and air gunnery we flew in, again in Blenheims firing at a drogue. And the training there lasted from the October ’41 to May ’42 and then back to this country. And then in the June on we went to [pause] can we stop it for a moment?
[recording paused]
JG: Still training. An Operational Training Unit which was at Stanton Harcourt which was a subsidiary to, or satellite to RAF Abingdon. When having or while we were there my pilot went on the first thousand bomber raid in, in May ’42 as a sort of, as a second pilot. Then in June, on the 25th of June ’42 we flew as a crew to Cologne in a Whitley. That was on the three days before my twentieth birthday which was the 25th of June 1942. We flew on the 25th. Did I say 25th? The 28th of June is my birthday.
DM: Right.
JG: Did I make a mistake there?
DM: That’s ok. So your birthday’s the 28th of June.
JG: 28th
DM: You flew on the 25th.
JG: The 25th
DM: A few days before. Yeah.
JG: Having finished there at OTU we then went to RAF St Eval. And the policy at that time was that crews that were now finished OTU, certainly from 4 Group went down to do a number, or several months’ worth of flying in Whitleys in, on an anti-submarine role. An anti-submarine role.
DM: So, St Eval is in Cornwall. Is that right?
JG: Cornwall.
DM: Yeah.
JG: That’s right. We, we used to fly ten hour sorties from there and when we came back the next day we were absolutely clear. We didn’t do anything that day. In fact we couldn’t probably hear anything that day but because the conditions of course in the Whitley are pretty cramped. But we had to do the ten hours and the following day was a free day. The next day we were briefed on what the flight was to be the following day. And that was the pattern. And you had a free day, briefing and then the next day you flew. I did, as far as I can recall — one of the problems I have is that my, I never retrieved my logbook following becoming a POW when all my stuff was taken and distributed. So, one way or another I didn’t ever get my book back and I’ll say a bit more about that later. Anyway, after that, after our period down there in Cornwall we came back up to Yorkshire to the, to a Conversion Unit on the four engine aircraft. And that was when I joined or after that period in a, in the Marston Moor was the Conversion Unit in Yorkshire. And we flew then with, now with the extra crew the [pause] I suppose we spent about a month there and then as a crew we went to RAF Linton on Ouse and joined 78 Squadron which was at that time commanded by Wing Commander Tait, T A I T. Known as Willie Tait and who ended his career, I suppose it would have been when he took on the final sortie against the Tirpitz. He, I don’t know — there was a programme on last night. Was of the 617 Squadron and the, and the nine aircraft that flew on this final sortie and demolished the Tirpitz, it was about the fourth or fifth time they’d done it. Had not had a big enough bomb which of course had to be designed by Barnes Wallis who was the author, if you like, of the bomb, the bouncing bomb. Anyway, Willie Tait was a bit of a frightening man. He was not popular because he was so blooming strict and didn’t fraternise really with other aircrew. And it was particularly noticeable because Linton on Ouse was shared between 78 Squadron with Willie Tait and 76 Squadron with Leonard Cheshire and they were so different it’s hardly true. So, we arrived there in October and we started operations. Starting with what we used to call, or was called gardening. That’s mine laying. Which counted for only one operation. People disappeared on those things so how they could justify going down for, on a half an op, I don’t know. And I stayed there with 78 Squadron until March ’43. That was, that was’ 42. ’43, I had gone down at the end of February ’43. I was commissioned and I went down to London to get kitted out. I came back and I developed a raging throat infection. It turned out to be an abscess and I was put into hospital and I never re-joined 78. I then went on sort of sick leave and eventually I had the tonsils out at the time of my 21st birthday before then going on to the sort of thing that one did at the end of a tour of operations which was as an instructor. And that’s when I went in that year down to Moreton in Marsh flying Wellingtons. I stayed there [pause] I’m getting a bit. Will you turn it off a bit?
[recording paused]
JG: My time at Moreton in Marsh lasted until the spring of 1944. Following that I completed a bombing leader course at the Armaments School at RAF Manby in January 1944. At the end of that I then went to RAF Riccall. This was another of the Conversion Units. Yeah. And from there, after doing the bombing leader course I went from the — to this. To Riccall. RAF Riccall which was the conversion [pause] I’d better have it off.
[recording paused]
JG: Riccall. RAF Riccall, on a refresher course before joining a Squadron. And that’s where I was on D-day. So, by the time I reached 640 Squadron it was the end of June 1944 and that’s where I went to take up the post of bombing leader.
DM: When you went — so you were on your new base.
JG: Yes.
DM: You were now a bombing leader. Did you have a crew?
JG: No.
DM: Or were you a sort of a spare bod?
JG: That’s right.
DM: As they said.
JG: That’s right. Yes. Well, I’ve got in my notes down here. In that position I was supposed to stay. Fly no more than two operations a month which was not very much. And I was the one who selected when I would go and with whom. Sensibly and logically really the ones I went on I was actually taking the place of somebody in the crew who was not able to go on that particular flight. Illness or whatever reason. And I was flying, we were coming up to Christmas and I am sure that I had by that time I had done, I’d flown twelve operations and the one that I was going on was to be my thirteenth actually of my second tour. I decided that I was going to have to do at least one anyway in December. So I selected one on the 6th of December because that was where the usual permanent bomb aimer was ill. So, I took his place. So I was flying with that crew for the first time ever. The only one of them, of the crew, commissioned was the pilot. I knew him because we were both commissioned. But the rest of the crew non-commissioned I hadn’t met before even. And of course I made the great mistake that I’d picked the wrong one. It was, shouldn’t have been a particularly dangerous one but anyway over Germany and this is now where there’s a bit of a gap in what happened because I see I’m actually have been recorded as being shot down. I always doubted that because the manner in which we crashed. There was, we weren’t attacked by anything. And what I believe and I’m hoping I will get one day confirmation of this, we collided with a German night fighter. And the reason I say that is because in the report that I got back from the Air Ministry things apparently a night fighter was lost that night in that area and reported a collision. And the circumstances of the accident lead one I think to conclude that it’s certainly much more likely to have been a collision because from going from the pilot completely under control to immediately losing control and I conclude, and most people think it’s much more likely I think that we collided with this thing and it took our tail off because in no time at all we were in a spin. And as we spun down it was impossible to get out of the aircraft because the, what do you call it force?
DM: The G Force.
JG: G. Yes. Really. You couldn’t lift a hand to get out. And then they, there was this crashing sound which I believed was we were hitting the ground. I thought well this is it but in fact within seconds I suppose it would be only I found myself outside in the fresh air on a dark December night. I had my parachute pack on because I’d already put that on as soon as there was an emergency and I opened that up and then descended by parachute. And there was not a sound or a sign of anything which was connected with the accident. So the aircraft had gone down. I was now floating down. Way behind it I suppose. And I don’t believe that was as a result of an actual physical attack. But being shot down it certainly wasn’t. The evidence points to that I think. I’ve tried to find out more about that. With a bit of luck my elder son who is coming down at the beginning of December is going to review records to see if he can find out any more about it. Or if there is any way one can get through Germany. I don’t suppose there’s anything anyway. They won’t have kept much of that sort of record. But we’ll see. But I’ve always had an open mind about this. So, how I came down I don’t know. But I came down in a flooded field. I didn’t realise at the time but I looked down and saw this expanse of water. I couldn’t make it out because we were nowhere near the sea or any large expanse of water. And I came down. I thought I had broken my right leg. I was holding my leg in both hands, both arms because of the pain and the trousers torn. Blood all over the place. And I went in left leg first and sprained my leg because it turned out to be a flooded field which was not very helpful. Fell over and got soaking wet. I spent a bit of time in some bushes trying to find out what was wrong with me if I could and then sort of get myself composed enough to move on. Eventually I did. I moved on in the direction of some houses. I knew by compass the heading of course. I had no idea where I was on the ground. How far I’d fallen before I opened the parachute. Anything like that. So, I eventually got into a farmyard and into an open cart and I examined my body to see what was wrong and also to get rid of my wet things which were very wet. The only trouble was I was going to have to sort of wring them out and put them back on again. Which I did. And while I was in the cart, presumably members of the farm came out, calling out, ‘Is there anybody there?’ Or what I assumed was what they were after. Of course, I kept quiet and they would go away and enable me then to start my escape. Eventually I got out of the farm. I realised I had just flesh wounds on my right leg. It was nothing really serious but my hands were cut, my face was cut. Anyway, off I went in the early hours of the next morning. The 7th. I was walking down a country lane actually with not a sound or sign of anybody when I was stopped by a guard, an armed guard who I believe to have come from the local Luftwaffe station. Anyway, by now I was a prisoner of course and from then on I spent a bit of time there while they organised my — oh no. What am I talking about? No. I was put into a hospital. It was a civil hospital run by nuns. And the four of us who had survived this accident which was me, the flight engineer, the wireless operator and the navigator we, we were not too far dispersed on the ground when we landed. So that they got us together and then planned, I presume what they were going to do with us. And fortunately for me the flight engineer and I were put into hospital where we were very well treated. The flight engineer was very badly injured. He’d broken all sorts of his body and the extraordinary thing is with him we were in this room together, we talked together all the time because there was no one else to talk to and he had not realised what had happened to him. Where he was. He could not remember anything following taxiing out to take off the night before. The 6th. And he never did as far as I know. But he was in a very bad way and he was still in hospital when I left which was somewhere towards the mid to I haven’t got the actual date of this. January. One day a guard appeared at my door and I was told to dress and follow him in about, at least six inches of snow outside and as this was going to be my first walk following the parachute descent I wasn’t too happy about it. But fortunately he had a bicycle and I was allowed to push it in the manner of the zimmer really while he walked beside me. We went to the local Luftwaffe station and then a few days later two guards arrived and started me on my way down to the Frankfurt. The Dulag Luft Interrogation Centre where I was, everyone was when you arrived there you go in to solitary and they liked to make it as unpleasant for you as they can. The bed was just two or three struts across the frame. A blanket and a pillow and that was basically it. If you wanted to use the lavatory you had to operate a little lever on the inside of the thing, of the room which indicated to the guard outside that you wanted to go. Whereupon they either came or they didn’t which was a bit, could be difficult. So you really had to plan in advance. And then of course once you were in there, you got to the loo as soon as you got there and if you wanted to sit down they shouted, ‘Come out.’ And made it, everything was made unpleasant. The food we had for breakfast we would have coffee, and [pause] I think that’s about it. But there would have been the bit of black bread anyway with nothing much on it. If anything. At lunchtime it would be a watery soup. And then an evening meal was the black coffee again and with bread and a bit of something on it. The heating, the room was heated by a radiator which was, made the room, when it was on it was unbearably hot. During the night they would turn it off so you would awaken frozen stiff. And that was where you stayed until they let, said they’d had enough of you in interrogation. There was nothing much really I could have told and everything that they had, they’d had members of my crew already through there so I was having to be careful about what I said. They said, ‘You were a flight lieutenant bomb aimer. You must have been the bombing leader.’ Which they knew quite a lot about but which I denied but whether they believed me I don’t know. But eventually I was on my way and the, we were after, yeah there was a spell while they gathered a number of people to make it worth shipping them off to a POW camp I suppose. But then we would go from there by train to the POW camp. We had no idea where it was going to be but we were led to believe it was somewhere in East Germany. And we then, we discovered eventually what our destination was and that we were going by train via Berlin. Which we were not looking forward to. But we were in ordinary carriages of compartments with ten in each. We took it in turns to sleep on the carriage rack. Luggage rack. Otherwise you couldn’t stretch out at all. After several days and I’m not quite sure how long actually but we arrived at Stalag Luft 1, and it’s address is Barth. B A R T H. In fact — will you turn it off again?
[recording paused]
DM: Ok.
JG: I’ll go from where we left Dulag Luft following interrogation at about 1 pm on Saturday 13th and arrived at Wetzlar at 6am on the Sunday. Where that is I don’t know but the distance between the two camps was a little over forty miles. Here we stayed until the following Saturday living twenty four men to a room and eating three times a day in the mess hall. It was at this camp we had Red Cross clothing issued. Two — what they were I don’t know, two packets of American cigarettes and a subsequent issue of ten a day while we were there. Most important was the shower. My first decent wash in Germany. On Saturday January the 20th 1945 of course we’re talking about here a party of eighty of us left for Stalag Luft 1 situated at Barth on the Baltic coast. The journey was expected to last anything from four to seven days and we were there and we were provided with a half a Red Cross parcel per men together with a ration of a fifth of a loaf of bread per day. We travelled in a carriage. Ten men to a compartment and the coach was hooked on to those engines and shunted back and forth in the manner of a freight car. We never actually left the carriage throughout the journey. We ate very well but sleep was difficult and we were relieved to hear that we were making good time. On route we passed through Berlin where we had to wait several hours for the next and last connection. It was a sigh, with a sigh of relief that we left the capital and continued on our way. On Monday evening at 4.50 or 4.30 we arrived at Barth. We spent the night in the railway carriage and on Tuesday morning marched to the camp some three miles north. On arrival we had a shower and our clothing was deloused. Later we were issued with mugs but also knife, fork and spoon and palliases and pillows. Once again we slept in rooms built to hold twenty men. The beds they arranged in three tiers. That evening we had a very welcome bowl of hot barley soup. And our first night’s sleep since we left Wetzlar. And that’s that. The rest of it is really conditions in the camp.
DM: Were you reasonably well treated in the camp?
JG: Oh yes. Yeah. They had sort of given up on us really I think. The only thing is one didn’t mess about. If you didn’t, if you came outside your hut after curfew you could be shot. They wouldn’t worry about it. And while we were there I think at least one person was outside when he shouldn’t have been and was shot.
DM: Did you get news of how the war was going? Was there a sort of —
JG: Oh yes.
DM: A bush telegraph or —
JG: Yes. Yes. Well, there were some parts of the camp had radios of course. Secret radios. I don’t think we were ever issued anything by the authorities but we knew exactly what was going on. And eventually we got the news that we — of course Hitler was declared dead at the end of April. And the camp commandant on our side, he was the senior allied officer was a chap, an American fighter pilot and he he came on the communications system and said that the Germans were going to evacuate the camp. And he had said to them, ‘What will you do if we refuse to come?’ And they said, ‘We’ll leave you behind.’ And of course we knew that the Russians were getting very very close and the Germans were of course terrified of these murderous people who they, ahead of the regular organised army came up and just did what they liked. And their behaviour was dreadful. And the population was pretty well scared stiff of them. At the beginning of May, I’ve not, I haven’t got the date of it I think. Or have I? [pause] Yes.
[pause]
JG: Yes. We were following Hitler’s death. Then things were collapsed on the German side quite considerably. But before that, in the March we had, we had the RAF prisoners had a briefing in which we were told that plans were afoot for us to break out of camp. The whole of the camp would break out. The RAF would act as armed guard to the main body of prisoners going back west who would have been American. And as we were going, ‘How do we break out of this place then?’ ‘Arms will be dropped to you,’ we were told. This was the sort of rubbish that came from Whitehall. You know, that sort of thing. Absolute, well as I say complete rubbish. And we came out of the briefing and we were flabbergasted. And I was, walked out with a pilot from 4 Group who had been the pilot of a Halifax which was involved in a head on collision over Cologne. I can’t imagine anything much worse than that. Having a aircraft — and he was the only survivor. But the fun, or interesting thing it was the first occasion he was wearing a seat parachute. Up until then the pilots only had the ordinary pack which clipped on. Whereas, they had, at the end of the war, a bit late, at the end of the war they were issued with a seat pack so that if something happened and the aircraft came adrift [pause] Is it on? Then they would get away with it and it was the first occasion he’d worn it. And of course this was the first occasion he really needed it. You know. He said, well he thought it was rubbish and we were a bit taken aback and alarmed. Because if people were going to the extent of dropping arms to us they obviously wanted us to use them and we, having got that stage in our lives having survived we didn’t want to stick out our necks much longer. Particularly now. It’s obviously at the end of the war. Hitler is now dead and things are going to move quite fast. Anyway, we, we sat waiting for news of our evacuation and it was, nothing seemed to be happening until a group captain from our own side got through to the lines in Lubeck to allied headquarters to find out what was going on. Only to find of course nothing was going on. But as a result of that arrangements were made for the US Air Force, 8th Air Force, the B17s to come and pick us up and take us home. Adjoined, quite close to the camp was a Luftwaffe base which by now of course the Russians moving in it was now part of Russia as far as they were concerned. And no way were they going to allow any aircraft, allied aircraft in there until Eisenhower got behind it when he heard that we were not. He wasn’t going to have for a start any idea that we should break out and march west. It was the last thing he wanted. He’d got enough people rushing around the place. And he didn’t sort of want gash POWs. And so we were to stay where we were. And as a result of that RAF chap getting through to our lines and getting some action how much longer we would have been there goodness knows. And then [pause] now, I’ve got here at the end of the war, our time in the camp with the Germans. Now, having gone that Monday the 30th of April 1945 the Germans have been demolishing detector installations and equipment in the flak school which on this airfield. By the evening most of the items have left the camp and it looks as though we shall be left here in the care of the senior administrative office. Many heavy explosions in the flak school and on the aerodrome around. There was no count on today, parade tonight but the Jerry major appeared to be tired. At 9pm the somebody [pause] Well, anyway, 9pm we were told that from 8am tomorrow, that’s the 1st we would no longer be POWs as the commandant was officially handing over. We had an extra biscuit, butter and marmalade to celebrate. Tuesday the 1st of May — today the guard posts are occupied by Americans wearing MP armbands. That’s Military Police of course instead of the usual old goons which was our name for the German guards. A white flag flies over the camp. The rumours are thick and fast and everyone is wondering when we shall get away. The Russians are supposed to be pretty close. The latest is that they are two kilometres south of Barth. The bürgermeister of Barth is said to have shot himself. At 1pm we heard the BBC news and now at 14.20 we are listening to, “Variety Band Box.” Tonight at 22.15 approximately a Russian lieutenant and either a civilian or Russian soldier arrived. Cheers echoed throughout the compound. We’d been awaiting this for some time. Good Old Joe. The main Russian body captured Stralsund, which is on the coast, tonight, today. Listened to the BBC news. Public House time it to be extended on VE Day. I hope we’re home for it. At 22.30 it was announced that Hitler is dead. I hope it was one of Berlin, was in one of Berlin’s sewers. Perhaps these will capitulate now. Lights on until midnight by order of Colonel Zemke. He was the allied commander I was talking about. Special cup of hot milk at 23.15. More Russians expected tomorrow. Water shortage. On the Wednesday the 2nd the Russians said we were to march out and be packed in preparation to leave at 6pm. One Red Cross parcel issued to each man for the journey. We ate several meals in quick succession to get rid of our [pause] this is the one [pause] yes. We had to get rid of [pause] Red Cross parcel stocks. Share out the ones that we had left. Then we were told to be ready to march in the morning and a little later we heard that the march was not definite. Most of us left camp in the evening to have a look around. Some even got into Barth. Rumours are flying out, hope it’s true, British and Russians are supposed to have linked up in the north. Chaos reigned all day. Poor water situation. German armies in Italy and Austria surrendered to Alexander. Monty’s boys in Lubeck. Russian. Russians in Rostock. Berlin has fallen. Hamburg declared an open city. I’ve been told the airfield is becoming clear of mines. We may be flown out. Hope it’s true and that the kites —
[pause]
JG: I heard earlier today that we’re in contact with London, Washington and Moscow to see what they intended to do. Or for us to do. A colossal [pause] comparatively speaking, announced all day. The water situation a bit better. From midnight tonight we use Russian time. An hour in advance of our present time. Friday the 4th — airfield expected to be clear by 2pm. All Germans in northwest Germany, Holland, Denmark, Heligoland were ordered by Admiral Doenitz to surrender unconditionally. This is to take effect from 08.00 tomorrow Saturday the 5th of May 1945. Saturday the 5th of May — a Russian general inspected our barracks in the morning. In the afternoon Marshall Rokossovsky to some [pause] oh no, came to report with Colonel Zemke. A very tough looking bunch. One of the generals made a speech to some of us in Russian. An American colonel arrived by jeep from our lines and made final arrangements for our evacuation. Wish they would get a move on. Listened to a radio recording of the signing of the unconditional surrender by the German staff. The commentary was by Monty. The 6th. Sunday the 6th — still waiting. The colonel repeated his former broadcast saying things were being done for our evacuation. Monday the 7th — a lieutenant colonel of the 6th airborne Division came to Wismar today to reassure us and we needed some reassuring too that we could expect to be flown out within the next few days. He could not say which day it would be but would definitely be only a matter of a few days. Question — how long or short is a few days? Apparently, we shall be flown back to England. Good deal. Other POWs are still being flown back by Lancs. [pause] Daks and Commandos are being used. Twenty five in a Dak, forty in a Commando. Most POWs have to be helped into aircraft. They were given a shock here. We shall run like stink when the kites come. I’ve heard that tomorrow is VE day and the following day a holiday. I’m bloody annoyed that we’re not going to, we’re going to miss the celebrations and so is everyone else. Saturday, Sunday the 6th of May — saw a Russian concert this afternoon and it was very good. No one or very few understood a word but what the hell. Monday the 7th of May — at the moment, 21.50 Russian time someone, I think it’s Alfredo Campoli, is playing a composition on the violin which I heard once at one of the St John’s socials. St John’s being the Parish church in Sidcup where I come from. It has just been announced that the BBC have broadcast a message to the effect that Stalag Luft 1, Barth, Pomerania has been liberated and the next of kin are being informed. Goebbels, his wife and daughters took poison apparently. War ends after five years and eight months. Unconditional surrender made at 2.41 French time today to Field Marshall Montgomery. Location Reims. Or Reims. Tuesday the 8th of May — I’ve just heard the prime minister’s speech declaring that the European war is at an end. The ceasefire officially takes place at 00.01 tomorrow. Wednesday, May 9th but fighting, except for some of the Resistance in Czechoslovakia ceased on Thursday morning. It is VE day and this morning I spent some time sun bathing on the peninsula north of the camp. I hope soon to be doing the same in England very soon. Listened to the King’s Speech. I guess the family were listening too. Do they know where I am? I wonder. And did they hear the announcement on the radio last night to the effect that we had been liberated by the Red Army. Lancs landed in Germany for the first time and flew back with four thousand five hundred POWs. Come on boys. Let’s get out of here. Wednesday the 9th of May— sunbathing again today. Allied parade this morning. A Russian officer made a speech to us. Same old story. Be patient for a few more days. Plenty of rumours floating around [pause] At 08.00 hours on BBC radio all men at Stalag Luft 1, Barth, near Stralsund, Pomerania, Germany are to remain in the camp and not make for the allied lines. Well, I don’t know whether anyone did. Thursday, the 10th of May — on KP again today. You know, that’s cleaning up the camp. Ten thousand more POWs flown out by five hundred BC aircraft and we’re still here. Colonel Zemke made an appalling speech again tonight. He’s going to get out all souvenirs. The rumour is that all British personnel are going to be taken by transport to Wismar and flown home from there. Also, that we should have been there yesterday. Group Captain Weir is said to have gone to try and get us out. He may have split with Colonel Zemke. I hope so as Zemke hasn’t a bloody clue. Listened to ITMA. Last time I heard it was on Wednesday the 6th December. I was changing in my room for the op and could hear it on someone else’s radio. That was of course the day on which I went down in Germany. Friday the 11th — sunbathed again today. There’s a meeting of the wheels, you know they were the top men, tonight. Final arrangements for our evacuation are said to be the subject of discussion. Group Captain Weir seems to have been arranging with the Russian commander of the area, Colonel General Batov for aircraft to land here to take us out. Colonel Zemke has just announced that aircraft expected here tomorrow or on Sunday. Russian passports are being signed up in preparation. It really looks as if we are going to move soon. Squadron Leader Evans had to fill in forms of interrogation which he signed. This gives us clearance, a clearance chit to be presented on arrival in England which should hasten our departure from the Receiving Centre. A cabinet order said that all POWs are to be with their families within twenty four hours of arriving in England. Length of leave is uncertain. Nearly eighty thousand POWs have been returned to England so far. There can’t be many more. Eisenhower has just repeated his, ‘stay put’ message. The 12th, Saturday the 12th — Group Captain Green on parade this morning said evacuation was to begin this afternoon. Sick quarters are first on the list. Then come the British personnel in the following order and its by blocks eight, nine, ten, eleven etcetera. So we were in a good position. What’s the betting I click for a cleaning job which would mean a delayed departure. At 2pm the first US aircraft arrived at Barth aerodrome. Two Daks for hospital cases and the rest Fortresses. Joe here is in charge, that’s me, in charge of operation [unclear] so I shan’t get away until tomorrow. The rest of the boys in the room buzzed at 3pm. Six lads and I stayed from 3pm until 9pm cleaning up. What a bloody awful job. Managed to get a shower at the end of it. Packed for the morning, nearly losing my fags as the Yanks still in the compound were on the prowl and almost swiped them. Saturday the 13th of May — paraded at 6.30am and after roll call we marched out to the airfield. At 7.30am the first Forts arrived. We were then split into groups of twenty five and as each Fort came around the perimeter track we embarked. That was Sunday the 13th. We were airborne at 8.30am and flew fairly low direct to England having a very good look at Bremen and Hamburg enroute. As we were using Russian time we had to put our watches back one hour to correspond with double British summertime. PBST. We landed at Ford in Sussex at 11.30. This completed the trip I set out on on December the 6th last. It took a bloody long time for my liking. Too long. I have recalled the following dream I had some time during my incarceration. Obviously, it was prompted by my fear that my family didn’t know my fate in the dream. I returned home to reassure the family that I was safe, in reasonable shape and in a POW camp. Having told the family this I prepared to leave, much to their puzzlement. ‘Why,’ they asked, ‘Did you, now home do you propose to leave?’ ‘Because I’m still a POW and my place is in that German POW camp,’ [laughs] I replied. And that took me to the end of the war.
DM: So, that was the diary you kept.
JG: Yes.
DM: When you were in the camp. Yes.
JG: That’s right. And that I didn’t much do much until the last days. Little point really.
DM: So, you obviously then had leave after you got home.
JG: That’s right.
DM: Repatriation leave.
JG: Yes.
DM: When did you actually leave the air force the first time?
[pause]
JG: I don’t [pause] I’m not sure that I’ve got it.
DM: It doesn’t matter precisely.
JG: Yes. It was —
DM: It was in 1945 was it?
JG: Yes.
DM: That you left.
JG: That’s right. Yes. What happened was that after the end of leave, which was extensive I did an air traffic controller course and I ended my days in the RAF as an air traffic controller at Henlow in Bedfordshire. And it must have been September I think. I’m trying to think when I got it [pause] Righto. Thank you.
DM: When you left the air force —
JG: Yes.
DM: What did you do in Civvy Street?
JG: I had a number of jobs. The last one was an, with an insurance company called Friends Provident. They’re still around. Quite a minor one I think. But I had, the first job I had was [pause] air freight. It was a company that dealt with arranging air freight in and out of the country. We were based in Victoria. It was a fiercely boring thing. And —
Other: You didn’t go back to Brown Shipley did you?
JG: No. I often wonder what would have happened had I because Brown Shipley’s still around.
DM: What prompted you to join up again in 1949?
JG: The fact that I was bored stiff and really and I was by now living in what we used to call digs in Reading and coming home to Sidcup at the weekends. And I didn’t really enjoy it much. And so it was when this announcement was made I thought, ‘Oh I can’t do worse than this.’ And if I’m going to go back on my terms because what I want now I want to settle down. If possible to get a house. I want to make some solid progress and get employment which I can guarantee until normal retirement age because I’ve not got much in the way of money. Certainly the RAF would provide the income that I was looking for and if I can get in with my flight lieutenant rank. And also, I actually had the nerve to talk about a permanent commission. And to my amazement that’s what happened. And I’ll never know whether the chap who was by now Air Marshall Sir John Whitley who had been the station commander at, at St Eval in 1942 when I was there and whom I was interviewed by him on the way to getting a commission and I wrote and reminded him of that. Whether it had any affect I just don’t know. I’d like to think it did and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he hadn’t sort of put a recommendation in on my behalf. Anyway, that’s in I went. And 31st of May 1949 and I — my first Squadron. I went having done a number of courses to 1949. Refresher navigation courses. I then went to a course where I went as a navigator to a pilot whose name was Wing Commander Oxley and this was a organised — I’m not sure what exactly it was called but it was at [pause] now —
[pause]
JG: I have to turn this off again. I’m very sorry.
[recording paused]
JG: Obviously then, this refresher training thing I was posted.
[pause – doorbell rings]
JG: To RAF Swinderby at an Advanced Flying School and where we flew Wellingtons and I flew with the pilot Wing Commander Oxley between September and November. In late December of ’49 I was posted to Number 236 Operational Conversion Unit at RAF Kinloss, Scotland flying Lancasters. Until April the 5th of April when I was posted to 38 Squadron Luqa, Malta flying Lancasters on maritime operations.
[pause]
JG: Apart from maritime operations which included various Naval and air force. Naval and air operations, training operations and also on air sea rescue duties.
[pause]
JG: At the beginning of 1953 where I was then posted to Number 1 Maritime Reconnaissance School. And that was at St Mawgan in Cornwall. And during my time there I found myself recruited to take part in the Queen’s coronation and I, for the spell which included the coronation I went up to Henlow. And we were trained in basically marching long distances. And I took part in the actual Review on the 2nd of June 1953. And then subsequently in the July I took part in the Queen’s RAF Review of the — at [pause] well I think it was the RAF Review. The Queen’s Review of the RAF took place at Odiham in Hampshire. And that was [pause] I haven’t got the actual date. Later in 1954 I was posted to headquarters, 64 Group Home Command at Rufforth, York as PA to the AOC. Non-flying apart from accompanying the air commodore and visits. From ’56, September ’56 to the 23rd of January I attended a Bomber Command Bombing School, Lindholme. Navigation training for the V force. In summer that year I was posted instead to Air Ministry, London Air Intelligence Branch. And in October 1960 I was posted as assistant air attaché, British Embassy, Paris. I retired from the RAF in May 1962 and in September I joined Shellmex and BP Limited soon to become separate companies. I stayed with Shell until retiring in June 1982. And that’s really leaves me coming out.
DM: The, near the beginning you were saying that because you were a POW.
JG: Yes.
DM: You didn’t have your hands on your logbook.
JG: That’s right.
DM: And you didn’t get it back. And that was one of the ones that was ultimately destroyed I assume.
JG: Yes. As far as I know if you want to record it.
DM: It’s going. Yeah.
JG: When I came back I made enquiries and I discovered that in October or November 1960 [pause] Either ’59 or ’60. When did I go? [pause] Yes. It would be October 1960. A decree had gone out earlier that year, no in that month, it was certainly while I was in Paris the Air Ministry issued a decree to say that the, there were a lot of logbooks unclaimed and unless you claimed the thing by whatever date it was, I don’t know, they would be destroyed. And so by the time I came back and I didn’t know that, I didn’t get that news while I was in Paris and I can’t, and I’m surprised they didn’t think to tell people all over the place. Or else I just missed it. But anyway the fact is then any enquiries I made just drew a blank. So, there’s no point really. It isn’t, doesn’t exist anywhere unless someone thought oh I’ll have this. But why they would do that I don’t know.
DM: No.
JG: I can’t imagine it’s of any interest to anybody but me. But it’s been a nuisance really because [pause] well just all I’ve got, I’ve got it here but the as soon as I rejoined of course I got another logbook and that’s the one I’ve got. But it doesn’t help looking back at things that happened during the war.
DM: No.
JG: The only one of interest that, it was an event which occurred while I was on 78 Squadron at Linton on Ouse and it’s documented actually in Bomber Command records. It — we took off from Linton on the 11th of December 1942 heading for Italy. So, we were virtually a flying petrol tank with one or two little bombs. Anyway, we took off and immediately one of the engines caught fire and the situation was such that we had to get out of it. Out of the aircraft. Fortunately, Linton is not all that distance from the North Sea, although it is the other side of Yorkshire. And so what we proposed to do, the initial plan was to drop our bombs in the sea or where they could be safely dropped and come back and land. But the situation was getting rapidly out of hand and so it was a question of dropping the bombs first thing and then, if possible to have a crash landing somewhere. However, and as I was a bomb aimer down in the front I had to get rid of the hatch so that we were going to drop out of it. That’s the way we were going to go. But I soon had to tell the pilot, ‘We’re going to be far too low to bale out.’ So, he said, ‘Well, I’ll see if I can crash land somewhere.’ But by this time it was getting worse than that. He said, ‘I don’t know. I think I can reach the sea.’ And that’s what we did. We ditched in the North Sea. Just a few miles out, three miles out from Filey and we all got away with it. There was no, had we stayed much longer of course we could very well have burned up. But we did, we got down in the water and we got picked up. Interestingly enough we were picked up by fishermen who had just landed in Filey and had looked back to see this aircraft going into the sea and turned their boats around and came out to pick us up. And, but some of those poor chaps got some stick because what they should have done because some of them were lifeboatmen they should, they should have gone, and gone out with the lifeboat. So they weren’t very popular when the lifeboat did come out and found out some of their men were actually there having done the job for them virtually. Because we didn’t need any help other than something to take us back to land. Now, I was recently, a few years ago now I was contacted by someone by the name of Paul Bright who had written or was writing actually, he hadn’t finished it — a book called, “Aircraft Activity Over the East Riding of Yorkshire,” which included not only RAF but Luftwaffe things. How he got it I don’t know. Anyway, he had got the records of 78 Squadron and this ditching thing and he [pause] he got in touch with me via the chap who wrote 640 Squadron history and as a result of that I was, gave this chap Paul Bright all the information and he’s included it in his book. There’s the thing, “On a Wing and a Prayer,” about what happened from my time in 78. And I’ve been in touch with him. We’ve been, both T and I have met a number of times when we’ve gone up that way and also because the — we’ve been going up there to the Memorial of 640 and at the same time met Paul Bright. But I don’t know what’s happened. A book which I’ve got a copy of I think. A member of the family must have it but it’s, it’s a most extraordinary detailed book of what happened in the air over the East Riding during the war. And including what’s happened to various air crew including German air crew.
[pause]
JG: And I’m in touch with him every time something significant comes up. Like today for example. I told him about the organisation that was going ahead on behalf of Bomber Command in that area. And I don’t know whether he has been in touch but of all the information I’ve had of course is via Carol and her visits up there.
DM: Ok.
JG: Right.
DM: In September 1944 whilst engaged on an attack on a synthetic oil plant the aircraft in which Flight Lieutenant Goldby was flying was severely damaged by heavy anti-aircraft fire. One engine was hit and rendered useless. Three petrol tanks were holed and a shell fragment entering the bomb aimer’s compartment damaged his equipment. Despite intense physical discomfort and shock Flight Lieutenant Goldby continued calmly to direct his captain onto the target. This determination and skill resulted in a successful attack. This officer has participated in many operations over enemy territory and among his targets have been such heavily defended areas as Essen and Duisberg. He is now engaged on his second tour of operations and in his capacity as bombing leader has been a source of inspiration to his section and has materially contributed to the high standard of efficiency attained. And therefore, the DFC was awarded.
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 John Louis Goldby
Creator
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David Meanwell
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-10-25
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AGoldbyJL171025, PGoldbyJL1701
Conforms To
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Pending review
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Format
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01:30:05 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
John Goldby was born in Kent but the family moved to London the year after. He was inspired to join the RAF when a schoolfriend joined and became a Spitfire pilot. John believes that it was a mid-air collision with a night fighter that led to his crash. He became a Prisoner of War at Stalag Luft 1. He kept a detailed diary of events leading to his eventual liberation and return to the UK. After demob he was soon bored with Civvy Street and returned to the RAF. He had an interesting post-war career including time as air attaché to the British Embassy in Paris.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Barth
Germany--Berlin
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941-05
1942-05
1944
1945-01-20
1945-04-30
1945-05-05
640 Squadron
78 Squadron
aircrew
Blenheim
bomb aimer
bombing of Cologne (30/31 May 1942)
Distinguished Flying Cross
ditching
Dulag Luft
Halifax
Hampden
Lancaster
mid-air collision
observer
Operational Training Unit
prisoner of war
RAF Linton on Ouse
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Riccall
RAF St Eval
RAF Stanton Harcourt
Stalag Luft 1
training
Wellington
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/847/10843/PGurneyDAE1602.1.jpg
213c9d7ea12cb029557e2d41b837f49d
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/847/10843/AGurneyDAE160128.2.mp3
f4cc013d1e7647ff367ff12d43479fde
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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Gurney, Derek
Derek Alec Edwards Gurney
D A E Gurney
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with Warrant Officer Derek Gurney (1925 - 2018, 31006156 Royal Air Force) and two photographs. He served as a Halifax air gunner on 10 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Derek Gurney and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-01-28
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Gurney, DAE
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: Right. I’m in Hemel Hempstead. My name is Chris Brockbank and it’s the 28th of January 2016. And I’m with Derek Gurney and his partner Barbara. And he’s just about to start talking about his experiences from the earliest days through the RAF and afterwards. Derek. Tell me where your family came from and your earliest recollections please.
DG: Good afternoon everybody. I don’t know what to say really but anyway I was born in Hemel Hempstead and I was the eldest of six. And we was over [unclear] one day and funny thing. The R101 come over.
CB: The airship.
DG: A massive thing. Anyway, that was with my granny and of course I was living in Hemel Hempstead. In Apsley. It was [pause] what was it? C of England School and one day the mistress asked for any volunteers in the church in Apsley. Apsley Church. So we were in Apsley Church singing in the carol. Carols. You know. That was two nights during the week and three days Sundays. Keep us quiet. Then —
CB: So, where were you at school?
DG: I was at school in Apsley. Apsley Church. Apsley Church School.
CB: Church School.
DG: That’s it.
CB: Yeah. Ok.
DG: Then come the Easter time they moved the school up to Crabtree Lane. A brand new school. And I was only up there for three months and I started work. I got a job in the printing in Apsley. Apsley Dickerson’s School. And after eighteen months I was getting fed up because the war had started so I wanted to get in engineering. Anyway, I was lucky enough to get a job at De Havilland’s building the Mosquitoes. Marvellous machine. Then come eighteen I had to sign on. Sign my medical for joining up. Anyway, I had to go back there a second time because I had my leg in plaster. Jumped off the scaffolding off De Havilland’s and broke my ankle. Anyway, I was called up December the 20th 194 —
CB: ‘4.
DG: ‘3.
CB: ‘3.
DG: 1943, joined up. We had to go to the St John’s Wood. ACRC. Have new clothes. Having new clothes there. Get your medicals, did PT, uniforms given to us. We had to do swimming, partly drill. Then we were there. We had to move on to Initial Training Wing, Bridlington. That was more [pause] more towards the air force. We had to go to Flamborough Head for our rifle shooting on the range and do the Morse code from Flamborough Head to the beach at Bridlington. From there we come home ready for the next posting which was Bridgnorth. Elementary Gunnery School doing more sitings and pyrotechnics. Run through the guns backwards and forwards. Know how to take the gun to pieces. Sent home again. Right. The next journey was up to Inverness. Gunnery School flying the Ansons. Come all the way and generate, bring your training right up to scratch. Do your dinghy drills, your swimming, your siting. In siting you were in two hangars during the week with the curved screen checking your training of the guns on to film. Coming around with a camera. And there we was on the Ansons. You’d go along the Moray Firth shooting. You’d got to be briefed when you landed. If you saw anything practice for when you go on the [pause] operations anyway. You could see Invergordon across the bay. And there was an Anson err a Dakota down with a troop ship down there. We didn’t know what that was then. But when the war finished I found out it was Montgomery checking the invasion procedure. Well, passed the — you get your brevet and you’re sent home again. Go back. Go backing up to Lossiemouth. Long old ride standing up in the corridor. And we were there and you were there for crewing up. We were all put in a, in a room. You join up. Anyway, we, had a pilot and he was an instructor but he was only one obviously wanted to get into more flying. Mitchells or Mosquitoes. But anyway, in the end he got us. Six of us. No. No engineer come along. So, we do our training with the old Wellington bombers. Enough to put you off. One Wellington blew up and there was another one with its wing off. Fell off. And we went down to see that after we’d been flying ourselves. Went down and had a look. Walked along the coast and there was a body there. We had to go and tell the rescue people then run as quick as we could to the pub because they closed at nine in Scotland. Anyway, go back. Then home. Home. Another posting to [pause] Con Unit.
CB: The Operational Conversion Unit or the Heavy Conversion Unit?
DG: Heavy Conversion Unit.
CB: Yeah. Which was where?
DG: 1652. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. That —
DG: Anyway —
CB: That was at Marston Moor.
DG: Marston Moor. That’s it. Marston Moor. So, we go down to the airfield. There’s a flight lieutenant there going to show our pilot how to fly a Halifax. [unclear] They knew each other. Our pilot taught this bloke how to fly Tiger Moths. So, that was a good start. So, coming through Conversion Unit we was on the Merlin engines. We got through that. Anyway, before we could change on to the squadrons they changed our engines so we had to do the whole procedure again on the Hercules. So that put us right back. Plus a bit of snow. Right. That brings us right up to November. So, we said, ‘Well, we’ve been here six months. Let’s, let’s see Christmas then go back on the squadron.’ So, right. So they let us go on the Con Unit until after Christmas. Anyway, we go to join 10 Squadron, Melbourne. Right next to Elvington. Then we said, ‘Right. We want leave.’ And they said, ‘Well do a couple of ops first.’ So, we had to run through with them being checked out with the others. How the pilot was going with his crew and get passed out by then. So, we’d done a couple of ops. They were in the paper they were. Done a couple of ops and then done our leave. And carried on then doing our time which I’ve got all written down in the book there.
CB: Ok.
DG: My different flights. And anyway we were doing day. Day bombing. And one nasty one was Bayreuth. Terrific one that was. Anyway, we were lucky. That was daylight and we didn’t see anything. Anyway, I think, no and the very last one we could feel something was getting better and we had this setting for Heligoland. Heligoland. It didn’t come off that night. They changed it that night. Flew the next. The next night. The next day rather. It was a daylight trip. Then sent — got another leave and we come back. They’d just been to the other one. Wangerooge. Wangerooge — that was the last trip of the war over our way. And, right, so all we were doing then was putting, putting bombs on the machines and dropping in The Wash. Anyway, we went to get on to the aeroplane that day and they said, ‘You’re going home.’ ‘Let us go do it.’ ‘No. You’ve got to go home now.’ So that was it. They got our kit together, signed out and sent home you know. The crew comes to see us off the station and they sent us home. Right then. Waiting. In the War Office meant give us something so we was called up, up to Lissett to pick a ground trade. Right. Pick a ground trade. Get out the gates. So, I put in for driving. Right. Got the next order. Got to report up to Blackpool. I forget the name. So, driving school up near Blackpool. In training for driving. Two weeks schooling in the British School of Motoring. Small. Small fifteen hundred weights, fifteen tonners, heavy goods, arctics. Right. Pass out. You’ve got to pass out. Sent home for another posting. The next posting [unclear] again. Blackpool again. Get up there. You’re going to Egypt. You take your kit off. Load of kit. Small kit bag. Sent there on a, on board the train. Night train. Funny thing it even stopped in Apsley. I could see my house but being on a troop train going to London. We were sent to North Weald. That’s right. Up there we were waiting. Nothing going to fly us from North Weald. We were just waiting there to catch an aeroplane which was going to be from Devon. Merryfield. They said, well when we were at North Weald they said, ‘Right. Catch the 12 o’clock train from Waterloo. We’ll trust you to get down to Merryfield. You’re going to fly off at 2 o’clock in the morning.’ At 2 o’clock in the morning we jumped on the Liberator. We tried to get two or three drinks but only got one. They had one drink and filled the water bottle with cider. Flew off. Flew off towards India. And after, what was it [pause] Castel Benito. We couldn’t get in to that next place because there’s a sandstorm. That’s further on. Got as far as [pause] what was it? Palestine.
CB: Aqir.
DG: What was that place? That big place in Palestine. Big place.
CB: Aqir.
DG: No. No. The big place where the troops were.
[pause]
CB: Don’t know.
DG: [pause] Of course the interesting bit I met there.
CB: Who did you meet there? Who did you meet there?
DG: The squadron leader from Lossie.
CB: What was he doing?
DG: He was flying a Harrow.
CB: Oh.
DG: Yeah. Good bit to put in.
CB: Yeah. Great aeroplane of the 1930s. 20s.
DG: Well, when I was at school I used to cycle round [unclear] and see them.
CB: Oh, did you? Yeah.
DG: And the Hampdens on the ground.
CB: Yeah.
DG: I was on the bridge.
CB: Right.
DG: What’s that place?
CB: It’ll come back to you in a minute. Ok. So where do you go next?
DG: Right. We got away from Middle East. The Middle East there. We were going to fly towards India so the next stop was Sargodha. Just a two hour fuel up. Carry on to Karachi. Arrived at Karachi. It was dreadfully hot. Very hot. I could hardly move. Three days there on my back waiting for the aeroplane to take us to Poona. Anyway, the aeroplane was a Dakota. Funny thing. It was the old squadron boys were flying so I knew the crew that were going down to Poona. We get down to Poona and I went in to see the CO and asked if I could get a posting here. He said yeah. Yeah. But no. That didn’t work out in the end. And we were sent to Worli the training camp. There we used to have to get up four in the morning to wait for our posting to our destination where we were going to work. Anyway, we were sent to — stop. Stop. Sent to [pause] oh blow me. The one place I forget the name. [pause] I had it yesterday. Five letters.
CB: Well, we’ll come back to it. It wasn’t Delhi.
DG: Tilda. Right. Tilda. Went to Tilda and nobody there. Nobody there. So, we wait for the next train. It took us to Bilaspur. We rung up from the station to the station to get transport. Anyway, come, come and picked us up. They thought it was big load of drivers. They’d come from their work from Delhi. That’s what we were going to join with these sort of people. Anyway, we get to Bilaspur camp. Got into the camp and to our billets. And there we are. Collecting vehicles from different airfields. It was our job to clean them up. Make them fit to be put on the road and take them up to Delhi. Delhi. Which is quite a long way between [Arpora?] Gwalia. Agra. Jhansi. Up. The road up till we get to Delhi. Palham. Is it? Palham. That’s it. Go up there and get rid of the vehicles. Get organised coming down. That’s it. We were at Delhi now.
CB: Right.
DG: Delhi. Get all the vehicles off. Get our train tickets. Go back to [pause] to Bilaspur. That’s going back to Bilaspur. Back to the grind. [pause] At Bilaspur we were there out in the wilds you know. Just mud huts and poor farmers. They didn’t wear feet. Ate with their fingers. There anyway we, he wanted somebody to go. Go to do a trip to Calcutta. And of course us three new, new people, we were given the job. We were sent to Calcutta by train. Pick up these three vehicles and bring them across to Calcutta. Four hundred miles across country. No roads. So we were sent up the Grand Trunk Road and around. Fifteen hundred miles. It’s a long old trip. Took us about a week. And we were driving and one of the, one of the lorries got a bit weak in the motor so we chained them all together. Three together. More, more movement. And then we stopped later on. Smethy said, ‘It’s getting dark here.’ So, ‘No. It’s not too bad.’ Well, it was dark but he’d still got his sunglasses on so that was it. Carried on. Get back ok. Alright. We got back [pause] back. Still collecting vehicles from different places. Wash them down [laughs] I used to have wash them down. They gave me the pump. The Scammel water pump. This Scammel water pump they made for farming. So, being a farmer I had to be awake didn’t I? Sometimes. Anyway, we had a fire. A hut fire. Right. Put that there. Used that. Too much water on so we had big one with a load of water on. Put it in a pit. Filled that up and go back to the fire and put that out. Right. Then we were sent, sent to a posting to 329 MU Calcutta. We get there and we were on a different system. You were picking these vehicles up and taking them to Delhi but some of them were in, still in their cases so we had to put them on the railway. Cases. Anyway, the crane got stuck one day. We tried to pull it out with two Matador diesel lorries but that wouldn’t work so we had to tie it to the train to pull it out. That done the trick. There’s a picture of me in the picture swinging from the crane. Anyway, off, off to Delhi. You form up. A hundred and twenty vehicles. Who’s driving? Who’s leading? Me. We were off. We’re off and funny thing we got an officer that was sent down from Delhi to be in charge of us. And he was in charge. It was Ron from Luton. Anyway, goes on and we stop half way. And there’s a picture of him. Poor Don. I’ll tell you the story later. Carried on up to Delhi. Had a puncture. Had a puncture. Fifty miles out from Delhi. No spares. So, I had to wait. Wait a couple of hours. We tried filling the tyre with, with straw. That got us another ten miles, maybe twenty. Didn’t it? Anyway, he comes along and picked us up. It was ok. We were at Delhi waiting to come home then. Anyway, this Ron, he picks us up for a flight home. So, lovely. 4 o’clock in the morning. Right. We have to go down to Delhi town, be weighed, catch the plane and sent back. Picked up at Dum Dum. Back to work at [310?] MU. Right. [310] MU. We done most of their work. We ended up at Dum Dum airfield. And we, we were just moving around, taking the trucks down to the scrapheap and doing different jobs. I was on the mail. Taking the mail down to, to Calcutta. And taking people on their day off into Delhi. Into Calcutta rather. We had to drive through the village, stopping. No stopping. It’s too dangerous. Right. That’s it. That’s it. That’s all we were doing. Waiting then. Waiting for our posting home. I’d been offered a trip by the Navy but they wouldn’t let me go. All the papers were in Bombay so had to wait for the papers. That’s it. Get back to Worli. Waiting for the, waiting for the drive home. Big boat. Empress of Scotland. Used to be the Empress of Japan. And funny thing they give me the job of looking after the people when they come on the boat and took them all around. Funny old job. Nothing really. Anyway, two weeks. Two weeks on the boat. Get home to Liverpool. In the middle of, middle of the bay there. Waited till the tide was right. Got home. Right. Up, up to Blackpool again for demob. What the place was. What’s the place now? [unclear] town just north of Preston.
CB: Lytham St Annes. Morecambe.
DG: Yeah. Put Lytham.
CB: Ok.
DG: But at Lytham St Annes we were demobbed. I was, I had an overcoat put on. I’d come from the hot place so the other people from England had a raincoat and they told me how [laughs] That’s it. Sent home. Got home. Got home about 8 o’clock at night, I think. Got home. We still going on?
CB: So, when you [pause] We can have a break. We’ll have a break now.
[recording paused]
DG: That’s off.
CB: Hang on. So, Derek just tell us what happened when you finished gunnery school and you got to the OTU. Then people, gunners, elected to be the tail gunner or the mid-upper. How did you become the mid-upper and how did you feel about it?
DG: I felt, ‘Right. If we have a direct hit the turret goes off at the back and you can get away with it.’ You’re dead in the middle.
CB: Right.
DG: But then once you’ve been flying a while. Right. You’re either, the aeroplanes and there all missing or missing there. They’re going to come into the middle one of the ways. But it’s funny that most of the gunners got it because they used to finish up in the back didn’t they? But in the Halifax you got four machine guns but you haven’t got so much ammo.
CB: Oh. Four machine guns in the mid-upper.
DG: Yeah.
CB: Right.
DG: And you haven’t got the deflector like Lanc.
CB: No.
DG: The wheel. We’d got a backlight interference.
CB: Yes.
DG: So, we can come straight through. Anyway, I I fired over the top of the tailplane once one day and said, ‘Are you alright?’ [laughs] Tom. Tom. ‘Are you alright, Tom?’ I thought I’d shot the rear gunner.
CB: So, did some people shoot the aircraft from mid-upper? Did they damage the plane?
DG: No. No. No.
CB: Because the deflector worked.
DG: I think there’s an aerial that, you used to get that down sometimes.
CB: Yeah. Get rid of that. Yeah. So once you got into the job why did you like being a mid-upper gunner?
DG: Well, for my own satisfaction. I knew what everybody, everything — I would have been different in the back. You’re cut off from the rest. You just, just got that. I felt better. I used to ask for bank and search because going underneath. Bank and search. Go one way. Just before the target so there’s nothing sitting underneath us.
CB: Right.
DG: Ok.
CB: So what you’re talking about is you say to the pilot you want him to bank the plane so you can look underneath to see if there’s anything shadowing you. Is that right? So, did you do that each, each raid?
DG: Yeah. But not the daylights [laughs]
CB: No.
DG: You could see them coming in couldn’t you?
CB: Yeah.
DG: Anyway, that Heligoland trip. Heligoland I think. I saw a 163 go over. Way up.
CB: That’s the rocket plane.
DG: Yeah. He went to the back, see. Wasn’t coming down in the middle was he?
CB: No.
DG: He went to the back.
CB: And what did he do?
DG: [laughs] Said good luck to him.
CB: No. No What did he do?
DG: I don’t know. It was too far back isn’t it?
CB: Right.
DG: About four or five miles aren’t they?
CB: Right. Ok.
DG: You was on Lancs, were you?
CB: No. No. I was after the war. So —
DG: Oh, blow me. Yeah.
CB: So, so the question really is with the 162 what did you think it was going to do to you?
DG: 163 isn’t it?
CB: 163 I mean. Yeah.
DG: Oh, find the straggler at the back and have him.
CB: Right.
DG: Once a straggler is on his own because he only wants one lot of bullets after him.
CB: Right.
DG: And he was going to come straight through isn’t he?
CB: Because he’s gliding anyway. Yeah. Ok.
DG: I’m trying to think. Just south of Blackpool.
CB: So, just, just carrying on with being in this turret. The gunners that — what is the role of the gunners and how did you manage your situation? So what did you shoot at?
DG: Nothing.
CB: Right. Why didn’t you shoot at anything?
DG: You could have given the game away.
CB: Right.
DG: Where you are.
CB: Right.
DG: You give the game away and somebody over there says, ‘Oh he’s over here.’
CB: Yeah.
DG: ‘Over there.’
CB: Yeah. Because you’re talking about in the dark aren’t you?
DG: Oh yeah.
CB: Because in the daylight you can’t give the game away.
DG: In daylight you just — that one we saw. I saw one when I was on the ground at Inverness. I was going on guard duty or something.
CB: Yeah.
DG: And I saw it go right over. It was a 410 going back to Norway see. Well, if you think of it Loch Ness. Straight up to Norway. So, he’d done a reconnaissance.
CB: Yeah.
DG: Over the sea.
CB: Yeah.
DG: And gone back to report the boats.
CB: This is a Messerschmitt 410 you’re talking about.
DG: 410. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
DG: He was way high though.
CB: Yeah. So what I’m getting at is what was the policy for gunners when enemy aircraft were around.
DG: If it come too near you shoot at them.
CB: Right.
DG: As I say, ‘Corkscrew go,’ [unclear] And of course he’s got to keep — you know about the gunnery sighting in the back? You’ve got to pick up the different points when you’re doing the corkscrew.
CB: Right. So just describe who calls the corkscrew?
DG: The one that seen him.
CB: Ok. Right. So it’s you or the tail gunner.
DG: Yeah. Me or the tail gunner.
CB: Ok.
DG: Yeah. I say, ‘Give me a dive and search.’ So we’d go.
CB: Yeah. So —
DG: Right. I said, you know we only need to go a little way, ‘Ok. Ok. Pull up.’
CB: Just talk us —
DG: Don’t muck about.
CB: Talk us through the corkscrew. So, you see something. How, how does it work?
DG: He’s something, and he’s watching it and if he gets rid of it and keeps quiet the German that’s attacking you —
CB: Yeah.
DG: He’s got so he’s buzzing off somewhere else.
CB: Yes.
DG: They can see him.
CB: Yeah.
DG: They think they can see him see.
CB: Yeah.
DG: So he’s going to find someone else.
CB: Yes.
DG: Going out over here.
CB: But just let me take you back. So you can see the German aircraft.
DG: No. No. You can — I saw the reflection of some anti-aircraft —
CB: Oh.
DG: Or something. I could see, could see the pipes going up.
CB: Right.
DG: It was only from there up to the top.
CB: Yeah.
DG: Diving starboard go.
CB: Right. So you, you get a visual of some kind.
DG: Yeah.
CB: What do you tell the pilot?
DG: Tell him to dive straight away.
CB: Ok. Left or right?
DG: Starboard.
CB: Always.
DG: Right.
CB: Starboard. Right. Ok. And so he pulls it over to the starboard side.
DG: Yeah and he’s diving down.
CB: What does he do? How long does he stay at that position?
DG: Until he could resume course.
CB: Right. But he pulls it around.
DG: Yeah. You tell him to pull out.
CB: So how far does he go down? He pulls out when you tell him.
DG: Well, as soon as I can. As soon as I —
CB: Yeah. Ok.
DG: I mean to say he’s gone over the top.
CB: Right.
DG: He might fly somewhere else and try to come back to you.
CB: Yeah. Ok. Right. So —
DG: And that dive I put when we nearly had that. Our own kite nearly — I can still see it now. Just the top of the ceiling here.
CB: So you’re —
DG: I can still see it.
CB: You’re flying along and another Halifax — it’s approaching.
DG: Yeah. It comes in.
CB: From the side was it?
DG: He’s coming in.
CB: Or behind.
DG: But then you’re going on. You’ve still got your eyes going and — dive dive. Straight away.
CB: Yeah. But was it coming in from behind or what?
DG: Straight away. Straight across the front.
CB: Oh right.
DG: Just on the front of us. We’d have gone, smashed right into it.
CB: So the pilot reacted really quickly.
DG: ZA. ZA D. D-Dog. And if you ever meet anybody from 10 Squadron ask them about D-Dog.
CB: Was it one of your aircraft?
DG: Yeah. ZA. ZA’s. ZA squadron. I think they went onto Brize Norton with ZAs.
CB: So, you weren’t able to talk to him afterwards.
DG: No. At debriefing —
CB: Yeah.
DG: You see. One of our own. I suppose they’ve all got it down somewhere. It’s all written down in somebody’s history.
CB: Ok. Now change. Going back to the OTU.
DG: Yeah.
CB: You arrived at the OTU. How did you do the crewing up? What was the process?
DG: You were into one room.
CB: Yeah.
DG: You know.
CB: Was it a room a hangar? Was it a room or was it a hangar?
DG: Just a room I think.
CB: Ok.
DG: Just a room.
CB: And how did you? What was the process for crewing up?
DG: Well, just crewing up and asking different people. We had the pilot and, ‘Do you want a couple of gunners?’ And, you know, ‘Ok,’ he said. George. Ernie George. Ernie George. That’s his name. Ernie George. The pilot. The pilot’s crew’s, the crew’s in the book. The crew’s name.
CB: So, who made the decision on the crew?
DG: Well, we just, the navigator gets to him to say hello straight away you know. Of course he’s only one officer. You see we were all non-commissioned and of course once he’d done a couple of ops he’s given the FO straight away.
CB: So the crew joins up.
DG: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Ok. And how well did the crew get on?
DG: Marvellous. Marvellous. Well, were you in a bomber crew at all?
CB: No.
DG: No. It’s different. It’s different. Not the same language.
CB: So, so when you then went to the HCU you got an engineer. So —
DG: Well, you were all in the same billet see.
CB: Yeah. But you got an engineer at the HCU because —
DG: We had an engineer. A Scotsman.
CB: How did you get a hold of him?
DG: Marvellous.
CB: No. No. How did you get crewed?
DG: He was the oldest one of the lot.
CB: How did you get hold of him? How was he, how did he join the crew? Was he selected or was he just told to join you?
DG: I don’t know. I don’t know. He might have been like us. Looking for a pilot. Nothing else to do with the rest of the crew. It’s the pilot.
CB: Right.
DG: You might say we’re the pilot you know.
CB: Yeah. So that’s what I’m getting at really. In the initial crewing up it’s the pilot who makes the decision is it?
DG: Yeah.
CB: Is it?
DG: Yeah. He might have already got, talked to somebody see.
CB: Yeah. Right.
DG: But that’s what you all missed, didn’t you?
CB: Ok.
DG: Were you flying on the big stuff?
CB: No. On fighters.
DG: So, so —
CB: Oh right. You was all up the bill then.
DG: On the practical, well on the practical side the pilot is making the decision of who’s in the crew but is it because you go to the pilot and ask him and say to him we want a pilot?
CB: You ask one pilot. He said —
DG: Or he comes over to you.
CB: ‘I’ve got gunners,’ you know.
DG: Yeah.
CB: So go to another pilot.
DG: Ok. Right.
CB: And then the engineer joins. So the crew at the HCU worked really well.
DG: Yeah. Everything. Yeah. You’ve got to. That’s why they come up and check. Check your crew. The CO or somebody.
CB: Yeah.
DG: Comes and checks you with a normal flight.
CB: Yeah.
DG: And we were told we was a marvellous crew.
CB: Good.
DG: Well, for one trip we missed it because I think I said to Bob we’d got our engine’s running. I said, ‘I can see oil coming off the trailing edge.’ He couldn’t fix it.
CB: Right.
DG: So we missed that trip.
CB: Right.
DG: And you missed that trip you’re lost.
CB: Yeah.
DG: You was on your own.
CB: Of course.
DG: You wished you’d gone but you could be dead.
CB: Yeah.
DG: It’s funny.
CB: Yeah, because you wanted to go.
DG: A funny feeling.
CB: Everybody else went.
DG: Yeah. Your group.
CB: Yeah. And what was the relationship with the ground crew?
DG: Well, we were the new people on the squadron. We used to get different ones, but I mean to say it’s not easy. They still, they tended the steel. With Weppy I don’t know if he’s a navigator or what. He’s, he used to make them laugh. He, he got a story in that squadron book. It’s all at the back.
CB: Right. So what —
DG: I can tell you about it. It’ll give you a good laugh.
CB: We’ll, look in the squadron book because that’s really helpful. Thank you. So, I’m just trying to establish how the air crew got on with the ground crew.
DG: Oh marvellous. I didn’t try to eat all my stuff in case we got shot down coming through. So, I used to give my chocolate to the ground crew.
CB: When you got back.
DG: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
DG: Or whatever we got.
CB: Ok. And what was the ground crew’s attitude towards your aircraft?
DG: Oh marvellous. They knew. They knew we were doing a rough old job. The people that are off probably on a non-compatible squadron because they used to come and see you off as well.
CB: Oh they did. Right.
DG: Yeah. In a bomber, bomber place.
CB: And talking about seeing you off what relationship did the crew have with the WAAFs?
DG: Well the most thing really was the getting in to town and having a good old drink but sometimes perhaps there was the dance.
CB: Just as the crew. Yeah.
DG: A dance on the squadron where you just used to dance and that was it. You danced with her, you danced with that one. Danced around.
CB: Sure.
DG: We were at a dance on the squadron one night [laughs] and the wireless op could be a bit mad. He went and bit the COs tie off. Where’s my, where’s my crown? I haven’t got my crown yet. [laughs] He bit the CO’s tie off.
CB: So, he didn’t get a crown.
DG: No. A dance. And another thing just before Christmas we had, no, no after Christmas. No, no, it was on the squadron. We were supposed to be going somewhere. They were going to move it and they didn’t in the end. And the rear gunner smashed the window in the WAAFs depot. You know, where they had the dance. Their food. The place where they had the food I think. He smashed the window. So the w/op goes and does it. Go to hospital. He’d got this great big bandage on. And he used to, didn’t used to cut his hair. So he always got this long hair. Addy Asquith. He got this long hair. We said, ‘Right. We’re going to get him. Get him when he comes through the gate.’ Up the road in the Nissen hut, ‘Let him get through the gate.’ He went through the gate on the bike.
Other: I haven’t heard half of this.
DG: And another thing you know when I was saying about the jam jar in the working man’s place yeah you got a jam jar. All used to go for a cup of tea, a glass [unclear] someone goes and puts the tin can over the CO’s chimney [laughs] Mad.
CB: Was this the squadron commander who takes it in his stride? Or the station —
DG: Yeah.
CB: Or the station commander.
DG: Well if you know Baildon I think his name was Baildon there. He wasn’t a pilot. He was a navigator when the chap with us was gone. And he was one of my trips. He was in Heligoland. No. When we were shot up and the pilot had to land away. I haven’t done that story with you have I?
CB: Go on.
DG: The Germans come over and started shooting everybody up at certain times.
CB: On the airfields.
DG: Yeah.
CB: Right.
DG: It’s well known wasn’t it? So, a lot of them came over. Anyway, our skipper. Some of them were landing at Melbourne but our skipper landed down at Benson and he come away a couple of days after. And three of us woke up, walked around and around a brick toilet. If you woke the others up they’d moan at you wouldn’t they if nothing happened? But the funny thing about that we’d been held up three weeks for the last night cross country on the Wellingtons with the weather. That’s three weeks. So, we get down to the squadron. Right. We’d done a bit of flying. We flew this night when the dickie, just the pilot flew dickie. Second dickie. And it was an aeroplane shot, a Canadian one shot down and one of the chaps bailed out and got, this guy I know said, ‘Well that was Hazell.’ Another Canadian but he was with him at OTU. But it’s the funny incidents I worked out that he was in the same boat as us. Had to work, had to wait for the nice weather. And he’s on his second dickie. The same as us. It’s funny how you can work that out. And when we was up at Coningsby the other week with the, the other week, or months ago now wasn’t it. I asked the Canadians if they, they’ve nothing to do with —
CB: Canwick Hill.
DG: The wartime people. Well, it’s a big country isn’t it?
CB: Yeah. Huge. Now, if we’re talking about the end of the war with your operations but what experience did you have of LMF? People with LMF. Lacking moral fibre.
DG: In there. In there is a flight lieutenant. Flight Lieutenant Bastard, his name.
Other: Was he?
DG: And he got shot up one night. Shaking. So were the gunners. The Perspex had gone off the mid-upper and the Perspex had gone off the tail gunner as well. There was no bottom on the tail gunner and it missed them. They were going LMF. Anyway, he must have talked them round to them and he was on an op the next night and he got shot up again. Being, it shot the hole in the elsan and up the side of the flap as well. Ray, in the book we used to get, the common, “The Intercom.” You’ve see one of them? “The Intercom.” I found one the other day. Yesterday I think. So in the comment he sees he’s an air commodore now.
CB: Oh right.
DG: It’s the only place I saw his name again.
CB: Right.
DG: He was an air commodore.
CB: But I don’t get the point. He — the plane was shot up.
DG: Yeah.
CB: And there was bad damage.
DG: Oh yeah.
CB: TO the back. The middle and the back with the Perspex.
DG: Yeah.
CB: But where was, what’s the link with lacking moral fibre?
DG: To put it this way they didn’t bring all the Perspex.
CB: Right.
DG: Gone.
CB: Right.
DG: You was. That’s it. You’re going to die.
CB: Ok. But he didn’t refuse to fly.
DG: They would do. He talked them out of it.
CB: That’s. Yeah. Ok.
DG: Yeah. He talked them out of it.
CB: So the pilot talked out talked the gunners out of it.
DG: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Because they were lucky to be alive.
DG: Yeah.
CB: In the circumstances.
DG: Yeah. Everybody really.
CB: Right. Yeah.
DG: Well, he might have told them that.
CB: Yeah.
DG: Nice. Yeah.
CB: Ok.
DG: Of course, if you’re going to crash, you know you were on fire the poor pilot stopped there and puts it on automatic pilot.
CB: So, any, did you know of any other experiences of LMF? Did you hear about —
DG: No. But we had a chap when we was at Con Unit. Used to have a shower, get dressed and write a letter home, then go to bed. Come for his second tour.
CB: So, what do you mean by that?
DG: Gone a bit away [laughs]
CB: Right.
DG: Nobody, nobody said anything to him would they?
CB: No. What happened next?
DG: Well, I mean to say we, we was, that’s it, we was on this driving course at Weeton. Weeton the driver’s course. Weeton. And the aircrew making out they’ve got some cuts and taking the fall that they’ve gone [unclear] because they’d been aircrew. Making out they’d got. Making out, but I mean they say if someone goes LMF you see somebody and you don’t see them again.
CB: Right.
DG: You don’t know if they’ve been shot down or what.
CB: Right.
DG: But over the grapevine you hear so and so’s crashed. There was one crashed in the hills somewhere and just the two gunners got out. Another time the two gunners had gone. See that old boy that died that was in [pause] doing the stuff. The Hungarian or something. During the war he had a crash and he was the only one that got out of it. His tail hit a tree and he was the only one that survived. But he was six months in dock.
CB: Because of physical damage or mental?
DG: Physical, I believe.
CB: Ok.
DG: Yeah. He only lived at Tring.
CB: Right.
DG: Jack. Didn’t you, you didn’t meet up with him, did you?
CB: I didn’t. No.
DG: With Bill.
CB: Changing the subject again. Promotion. How did the promotion system work and why were you promoted after the war to warrant officer?
DG: To what?
CB: Well, you were a warrant officer.
DG: Yeah.
CB: How did the promotion timing and system work?
DG: I don’t know.
CB: So, as soon as you qualified as a gunner.
DG: You get your brevet and that’s it.
CB: Yeah.
DG: Put the tapes on.
CB: Yeah. Ok. As a [pause] what rank?
DG: Sergeant still.
CB: Right. How long?
DG: It comes through automatic.
CB: How long? How long before you became a flight sergeant?
DG: About six months I suppose. I got it. I don’t know where I was when I — about twelve months.
CB: And how long before you became a warrant officer?
DG: About around the twelve months or a bit over the top of that.
CB: Right. So you were promoted to warrant officer when you weren’t flying any longer.
DG: Yeah. I was a warrant officer when I wasn’t flying any longer. In India.
CB: Yeah. Ok. Good. Thank you very much.
DG: But still we used to work and that’s it. Nobody interfered with us.
CB: No.
DG: We knew what we’d got to do. No messing about.
CB: No.
DG: I mean to say if you, in Civvy Street you get somebody that’s not the right touch isn’t there but [pause[ we just used to do our work.
CB: Yeah.
DG: Get your crate of vehicles in. In these trucks. Course you, you were wearing what we called mosquito boots. The leg hooks up to there because of snakes.
CB: Yeah. I can imagine. Going back to your early days you were in the Air Training Corps.
DG: Yeah.
CB: When you were at school.
DG: 1187 Hemel Hempstead.
CB: Right.
DG: I was in it when it first started.
CB: When was that?
DG: Cor 19 — it must have been 1952.
CB: It was in the war you were in.
DG: Yeah. And —
CB: 1942.
DG: Yeah. Yeah. Probably in 1941 but —
CB: Yeah.
DG: We used to have the, the meetings at the school up Crabtree Lane. You know Crabtree Lane.
CB: Yeah.
DG: We used to walk down to Dickersons, in to the firehouse, get six rifles and march back up and done a bit of a parade with the rifles. Walk back down to the firehouse and take the guns back. And we had a band as well because I used to play the drums.
CB: Did you?
DG: I’d got this broken ankle in plaster. I used to [laughs] I used to cycle to Watford there.
CB: Played it quicker.
DG: With my broken ankle in plaster. Working. Alright. Well, we was working on flying controls most of the time.
CB: Were you? So what did you actually do at the Mosquito works? The De Havilland works in Hatfield.
DG: No. Leavesden.
CB: Oh, Leavesden. Ok.
DG: Leavesden.
CB: Right.
DG: It was Halifaxes was the other end wasn’t it?
CB: Yeah. Right. So what did you do on the Mosquitoes? What was your role?
DG: Most of the time was on flying controls. Very good.
CB: Right. So how — which part of the flying controls?
DG: All of them.
CB: Right. So from the control column.
DG: From the control you got the all, all the cables were numbered up. Numbered up. The trimmers. And you put your wheels, wheels on. You know. Down in the centre section.
CB: Yeah. So you assembled the flying controls.
DG: We were assemblers. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
DG: And one time we was asked to stop overnight. Done a day’s work. Do a night’s work and put the tailplane on. Put the tailplane and the fin. Well you’ve got, got trim trade comes across the —
CB: Right.
DG: Spar there. Trim. And we used to have — put the wax string and the trim tab in the dinghy box. I was small. I could get inside the dinghy box and do the figure of eight wax string.
CB: Right. So you were doing that for quite some time.
DG: Yeah. About eighteen months I think. That’s all.
CB: And then what?
DG: They called me up.
CB: Right. So, why did you go to the RAF and not to the other forces?
DG: I couldn’t get, well, I could have gone in the army but to me [pause] to me I thought well I’ve got two years training. I didn’t know they’d do a small course for about five or six months in gunnery school. I was ready by the summer. I couldn’t go in. Well, I went. Went to the medical place at the school in St Albans. I knew all the planes. So, the bloke that showed me, he wasn’t going to let me go ground crew was he if I knew all those aeroplanes?
CB: Right.
DG: Say, ‘Oh no. They’re full up.’
CB: Because in the ATC you were able to learn a lot of these things while you were an ATC cadet. About the aeroplane.
DG: We took an, we took an Airspeed Oxford cylinder off.
CB: Could you? Right.
DG: And that’s a Cheetah engine isn’t it? With like the things over the top. I can still remember those flaps over the double Cheetah engines. Yeah.
CB: So that, you got in to the RAF. What attracted you particularly?
DG: Nothing.
CB: To the RAF.
DG: I didn’t want to go in it. I didn’t want to join.
CB: No. But you, you had —
DG: Had to.
CB: Yeah. So, you’d rather have carried on in the aircraft works.
DG: Oh yeah. I was really enjoying that. Well, you’re a gunner. You’re doing a job. Alright, you’re a gunner. But I was doing something. I wasn’t learning any more was I?
CB: No.
DG: Well, learning. Still, it was the same in the gliding club. Used to put things together. And somebody used to have, we put a door on the back of this trailer, you know, make a door for it. You know. Alright. Another time another chap in flying a K7. You know the K7?
CB: Yeah.
DG: You do so and so then come and help me. You know. Fly with him in the K7. Go and help him.
CB: So, when you were working in the De Havilland works what did you have to do at night? Did you have to do fire watching sometimes?
DG: No. No. No. No. Probably they got mostly the people that used to live local for that wouldn’t they?
CB: Right. Right.
DG: So much time —
CB: How did you get back to home? Was there a bus or how did you get? On the train was it?
DG: Train. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
DG: Well — working there?
CB: Yeah.
DG: Cycle.
CB: Oh, you cycled.
DG: Always cycled. It took us twenty minutes. Ten minutes to get to the Ovaltine the back way and ten minutes to get through to De Havilland’s.
CB: Right.
DG: Because we’d go through the back way. Right the back there’s a little lane going up. It goes down and up. And the policeman on the door. You got, got a pass to get through. So, I was on the other side of the De Havillands.
CB: So, in the Works, the De Havilland’s Works what was the work force? Made up of young people like you? What other people were there?
DG: There was other people.
CB: What type of people?
DG: Some of them come from [unclear] of course a chap, one of the chappies I was working with used to work at Airspeeds’ down at Portsmouth. I mean, I think we’d done some work up there with my brother in law and I met Mick, at least one that I used to work with during the war there. He was on the machine. Well, when, when I come out the air force I went up there and there was only work on the machines and I said, I’ve been three years outside I don’t want to go inside. So, I put in for a job as a carpenter. Done a carpentry course.
CB: Where did you do that?
DG: At Watford.
CB: And then what did you do?
DG: Come out and done carpentry.
CB: Where? For yourself or for a builder?
DG: No. It was a lovely little job. Salford and Radlett. And he was an air force chappy on the ground crew. Me and him used to get on lovely. Used to get on lovely.
CB: So what was his, what did his business do?
DG: It was his business.
CB: Making what?
DG: Houses.
CB: Right.
DG: Yeah.
CB: So, he was a carpenter or —
DG: Yeah. And I come through the course, you know. Do a six months course.
CB: So, what — did he build the whole house or was he still a carpenter?
DG: Well, no. Just the wood work.
CB: He did the wood work.
DG: Went with the brother in law. But he was living in a bungalow and anyway decided he could make it into a house. So took the roof off. Put the roof back on. Then he climbed up a ladder for too long. His wife was moaning. Climbing up a ladder to bed.
CB: How long did you stay with that?
DG: Oh, run out of work. Then I got a job over at Berkhamsted.
CB: What were you doing there?
DG: Carpentry. Carpentry.
CB: For what?
DG: For a —
CB: A builder.
DG: Oh yeah. The carpentry. I forget the company. The company. Anyway, his driver was off one week and the boss was driving the lorry. He said, ‘Can you drive a lorry?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And it was a Austin tipper. I knew where the tipper was as well because my mate got one and I’d been driving his for a while. Yeah. Just, well, he said, ‘Do you want to drive one day?’ Got a load of gravel from Leighton Buzzard and took it to Ricky. He was driving. He could see I could drive better than him. Right. You went on a driving course you know and a couple of pilots failed driving. Funny.
CB: Strange.
DG: Funny.
CB: Yeah.
DG: But some people don’t go through. Well, we was on a driving thing one night. It was pouring with rain. You’d got the WAAF at the side of you. Just as escort. Night driving thing. And she went to sleep. Into the lorry in front.
CB: So you had an interesting time.
DG: As I said when I came out the air force and got a motorbike. And after a couple of years I got a racing bike and had it on the grass. It was from Brooklands. 1925 racing bike on the Brooklands. And there’s Surtees. Young Surtees. We used to see young Surtees and his dad but he’d be running about. Didn’t want to drive in the sidecar with his dad. And he was racing solo. Grey. Grey. HRD. I passed him. It was the end of the start at Stokenchurch. You know Stokenchurch?
CB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DG: Well I passed him at the bend. Of course he’d got, the bike was too big. I was on the 350, he was on the 500. He went [unclear] on the corner. He’d had it hadn’t he? Mad.
CB: Now, you said you did a lot of gliding. How did you get into that?
DG: Well, the wife at the time. I wanted a dinghy. She said, ‘No. None of us like swimming. Go for this.’ So, I went down and had a talk with them. She said, ‘Have a flight.’ I had a flight. She said, ‘Take it over.’ I wouldn’t because I knew you were flying on the stall but I joined the next. If a woman can do it I can do it.
CB: So you did.
DG: I think in about [unclear] months I was solo. I had yellow jaundice and I was on the sick. Free wasn’t I? Course at the start if that was a good day I used to go over there. But if it was a rough day. She said, ‘Well, you’d better come on the rough day because you’ve got to learn circuits and bumps.’ I didn’t want to stop up, did I?
CB: So, how many years did you fly as a glider pilot?
DG: Was I still flying when you came here?
Other: You told me about thirty years.
DG: I used to fly didn’t I?
Other: Yeah.
DG: Yeah.
Other: Yeah. Yeah. I used to come over with you didn’t I?
CB: Took Barbara up.
Other: No. I wouldn’t go up. I could have gone up many a time but I didn’t.
DG: You must have heard John Jeffries at Dunstable. He’s still flying.
CB: Is he?
DG: Yeah. They wouldn’t let him instruct anymore.
CB: No.
DG: But I suppose he can, easy going to choose can’t he?
CB: Yeah. We’ve covered an awful lot of things, Derek and that’s really interesting. Thank you very much. I think we’ll draw it to a close now because you need a bit of a rest
DG: You could stop here all night couldn’t you?
CB: Yeah. Well, that’s ok.
Other: He’ll be asleep when you’ve gone.
CB: And I might need to catch up with you again. Thank you.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Derek Gurney
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
2016-01-28
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AGurneyDAE160128
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending OH summary
Format
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01:02:48 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
Derek Gurney was working at the De Havilland Works before he volunteered for aircrew. While on training he saw one Wellington blow up and another with a broken wing. He was posted to 10 Squadron, RAF Melbourne for his tour. On one operation they nearly collided with another aircraft. After his tour Derek trained as a driver and was posted to India.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
India
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Helgoland
India--New Delhi
India--Bilāspur (Chhattīsgarh : District)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942
1943
10 Squadron
1652 HCU
air gunner
aircrew
bombing
bombing of Helgoland (18 April 1945)
crewing up
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Me 163
Operational Training Unit
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Melbourne
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/860/11102/AHarrisNG160128.2.mp3
617dde8eedd97b1d29cf4bc164b586a4
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Harris, Neil
Neil Gibson Harris
N G Harris
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Neil Harris (b. 1920, 56027 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a navigator with 578 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-01-28
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Harris, NG
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
BW: Alright. This is Brian Wright, I am interviewing Flight Lieutenant Brian Wright DFC of Bomber Command on Thursday, the 28th of January 2016 at his home in Lidham and the time is twenty past three in the afternoon. Just to start us with a formal question, if you wouldn’t mind so, could you just confirm your full name, rank on leaving and your service number please?
NH: Neil Gibson Harris, 56027, Flight Lieutenant.
BW: Ok. And I believe you are born in November 1920 in Bournemouth.
NH: 27/11/1920, yes.
BW: What was your family like, you lived with your parents, of course, did you have any brothers or sisters?
NH: Yes, I had two brothers and one sister we, fairly wide range, my eldest brother was nine years older than me and my sister was six years younger than me. So, was a spread of fifteen years between us, we are a working-class family, thank you, but very close.
BW: And what was the area like where you were growing up, was it [unclear]?
NH: Very pleasant indeed, oh, suburban, but very pleasant. Although basically a lower middle-class type area.
BW: And you were at school in Bournemouth during that time?
NH: Yes.
BW: I understand that you left school at fourteen.
NH: Fourteen, school called East Howe.
BW: East Howe.
NH: Yes.
BW: And did you have any qualifications?
NH: No, there weren’t, there were no qualifications available in those days. Not at fourteen, no, just, you just left school at fourteen and started working. And I went to work in the East Dorset brickworks as an office boy but by the end of nine months, I was rang into [unclear] office and my salary went, my wages went from seven and six to fifteen schillings, the works manager didn’t, gave me all his work to do [laughs]
BW: Just [unclear] you with it.
NH: So, I went from there to Bowmakers, which is a banking facilities company in Bournemouth, where I upgraded my position quite a bit, I was a proper clerk, a junior clerk.
BW: And from there I understand you went into the civil service.
NH: No, not the civil service, no, I went straight into the Air Force from there.
BW: Oh, I see, so you were [unclear]
NH: As an apprentice, as an apprentice. No, I’ve never been in the civil service, No, I went, that was, I was fifteen when I went to Bowmakers and I was nearly seventeen when I joined the RAF as an apprentice at Halton.
BW: Ok, and this would be 1937, so that would be
NH: That would be 1930, no, earlier, yes, ’37, that’s right, yes, ’37, September ’37.
BW: And what attracted you to join the RAF, what was your interest in that?
NH: Well, there were half a dozen or so, junior clerks, they all had had benefit of grammar school type of education, which is different to the one that I had and I, three or four of them were interested in the RAF, two of them, like myself, became apprentices, and one of them became an acting private officer
BW: I see.
NH: And a man named Haynes, he was a Battle of Britain pilot eventually, he was killed eventually too, got a DFC, shot down five, after that I don’t know anything about him but he didn’t survive the war, that’s all I know.
BW: A shame. And so, what prompted you to join the RAF, did you sense that the war was coming or did you [unclear]?
NH: Well, I think It’s the effect of three or four of us talking about the RAF and doing quite a nice job, had a pleasant working situation at Bowmakers but we wanted more excitement, I think. And of course I wanted more education, I, leaving school at fourteen I still felt I’d liked to have gone to a public school, there’s no chance of me doing that but RAF Halton provided a fairly good substitute, we had school and workshops and plenty of sport, which is what I wanted.
BW: And was there a good social life as well?
NH: Oh, no, social life, no, you weren’t allowed out [laughs], no, there’s three years hard regime but you had plenty of sports, but never saw a girl [laughs], no, we were all frustrated [unclear] [laughs]
BW: And so you
NH: It was a good training, excellent, marvellous training of course.
BW: And so, your trade in the engineering branch was what?
NH: I was a fitter 2A, a fitter to airframe.
BW: Ok.
NH: I managed to get in because the expansion scheme had started and the entries became much larger so I [unclear] an examination of three set papers, quite large, got a couple of them here somewhere, and I’m quite impressed by the standards that they required. So I did a lot of private study, my second brother was a very clever man, young man, he helped me a lot, he was an, he was a really highly, he became a highly qualified engineer and he helped me a lot, I managed to scrape in and but by that time, entries were getting to something like nine hundred or a thousand, so two entries a year, and of course the expansion scheme has started because of the threat of Hitler and there were, so, we were, before that time it was, you were called fitter twos and you did both engines and airframes, they split us up, the aircrafts were becoming more complicated and so you either became airframe, a fitter airframe or a fitter engine and then you did your three year, it’s a three year training, you did your three year training either as a fitter to airframe or a fitter to engine, and then the scheme was that after you’d been out on a normal squadron, and had practical experienced, you went back and did another year and that would be a conversion, if you did airframes before then you did a year on engines or vice versa so then you became a fitter one, so that’s basically how the training worked.
BW: And so, you get a good grounding not just in the structure of the aircraft but also the powerplants as well.
NH: You would, by that time but of course the war intervened from my entry and we stayed as fitter 2A’s of course but I got off and I took the easier route and managed to get onto aircrew. And but they wouldn’t let me, as soon as I finished my training, I volunteered for aircrew, but they wouldn’t release me until enough people, the war started by then but they wouldn’t release me to go onto aircrew duties until they had enough people in from, to be converted to trades, you know, as engineering trades and I could leave, so it took me nearly eighteen months from the time of being selected to being called up.
BW: So they needed enough people to be in the pool to replace you
NH: That’s right, that’s
BW: Because they could allow the engineers to move on.
NH: Yes
BW: [unclear]
NH: That’s right, yes.
BW: And what attracted you think to aircrew, was is, there simply more money, cause there was flying pay [unclear] or was it [unclear]?
NH: I wanted the glamour.
BW: Alright.
NH: A little bit it was there but I [laughs], I wanted to be a fighter pilot.
BW: I see.
NH: Yeah.
BW: And did that involve more tests and [unclear]?
NH: Not until you got onto, when I was eventually called up of course then by that time of course there the whole process was so huge that there are bottlenecks and so every stage it took time because you had to wait until you could move on to the next stage, the, either, whether held up training or something of that sort so, we start off at the ITW, which in my case was, well, first of all it started off in London, at the air crew receiving centre and we were all there, we live, we ate at the zoo, I remember,
BW: At London Zoo.
NH: At London Zoo, and lived in flats, in luxury flats in North West London and marched to the zoo for our meals.
BW: Right.
NH: But that, again, took a long time before we moved on and the next stage was to go on to the Initial Training Wing, where you did an eight week course and learned navigation and various other skills but there was a bottleneck there, I remember I went down to Brighton for a, just to occupy time, and eventually, although I’d been called up in November, November ’41, that’s right, and I was at Wick at the time when, as a fitter, on the, we were protecting the convoys coming into Liverpool but we’d been stationed at Stornoway on the Outer Hebrides,
BW: That’s where Wick is, is that right?
NH: Pardon?
BW: That’s where Wick is.
NH: No, Wick, no, Wick is on the north east coast.
BW: Ok.
NH: And now we moved over there with Hudsons, we had started with Ansons and changed over to Hudsons, when we moved up to Stornoway and then from Stornoway, we moved over to Wick. But whilst we were at Wick, I was called up for aircrew duties and that was in November ’41, I happened to be on leave at the time in Bournemouth so I got recalled from Bournemouth to Wick, which was to go back to London [laughs] to start my aircrew duties and as I say, then, we had, we hung around in Regent’s Park waiting for the next stage, well the first stage of training and that didn’t happen, this was in November ’41 and we didn’t get to Stratford until about the end of January, February ’42 and then we had this eight week course at Stratford learning navigation, doing drill, all RT and all the rest of it.
BW: So you travelled in a very short time to the length and breadth of the country cause you’ve gone from a short period of time in Brighton right up to the north of Scotland to work on aircraft protecting the convoys and then, across the other side of Scotland, then back down again, and called for [unclear] training
NH: Well, just go back a little bit, when I left, when I graduated from Halton, well, I graduated as a, what’s the right word, as an aircraftsman first class, normally I’d have an entry at, say, of a hundred, well take a hundred, apprentices leaving but ten would pass out as leading aircraftsmen, ten or fifteen would pass out as leading aircraftsmen, aircraftsmen first class, about sixty or so would pass out as aircraftsmen first class and the remainder would pass out as AC2 but the rate of pay was quite significant, a leading aircraftsman would get forty two schillings a week, which was a big rise from five and six pence,
BW: Yeah, absolutely.
NH: Yeah. So, I passed out an AC1 which is 31, 31 of 31 and six pence a week, which is quite good, I, [laughs].
BW: And was that more than you were earning in the bank previously?
NH: Oh, yes, oh yes, in the bank I was getting seventeen and six, I think it was, might have gonna up, to nearly a pound, but no, seventeen to six a week, yes,
BW: So you almost doubled
NH: No, I, and of course, as an apprentice, I’m only getting three schillings a week, for the first two weeks and then five and six pence for the last week, that’s the third week. And then when I passed out as an AC1, I would have jumped up to thirty-one and six pence a week, which is magnificent,
BW: I believe at some point during your early training, you caught pneumonia and had to be sort of
NH: Oh that was before, that was at the end of my training,
BW: Oh, I see.
NH: Yes, this was, the war had started October, November, I caught pneumonia almost [unclear] they had to, they called my mother to come up because they thought I wouldn’t live but M & B was the new drug which they’d produced and that saved my life I think because but always touch and go anyway, when I recovered and I came out, my entry had, the whole thing was telescoped, you see, did a three year course, when the war started, all sports afternoons were stopped, we worked longer hours, and the whole thing was telescoped from the three years to a much shorter one but so we were on that at the time that I went into hospital with pneumonia and when I came out, my entry had finished and they’d gone, so I was left on my own, they gave me some Christmas leave and when I came back, I just studied on my own for a few weeks and passed out on my own as an AC1. I probably had passed out as an AC2 [laughs]. So, I’ve been lucky that way.
BW: So, there was no parade for you then, unfortunately, they just allowed you
NH: No, I just, no.
BW: So you graduated [unclear]
NH: I went down to Thorney Island under 48 Squadron, which is at Coastal Command, we had Ansons then, as I said, and then we, as an AC1. Is it all getting a bit garbled for you?
BW: No, no, that’s perfectly fine. So, during your time at Thorney Island then, which is near Chichester,
NH: Yeah.
BW: You were still as a tradesman, you were an aircraftman
NH: That’s right
BW: First class
NH: Yeah.
BW: What was it like there, what sort of air, you said Ansons then, have other aircraft there too? [unclear] and Blenheims, would you work on them at all or?
NH: No, only Ansons.
BW: Ah, ok.
NH: Yeah. And of course we were there to protect the shipping coming up to Southampton and to the docks along the south coast but then, when the invasion of the low countries came, it was too dangerous and the shipping was moved up to Liverpool, Liverpool and Glasgow and so we followed the shipping up to Liverpool and we were stationed at Hooton Park.
BW: I see. So around the time of the Battle of Britain and when the invasion was looking imminent during the summer of 1940,
NH: Yeah.
BW: You and your squadron, 48 Squadron, actually moved up to Liverpool.
NH: To Liverpool and we were there for about a year I think before we moved up to, because then there were all bombed badly and the submarine menace became bigger and we moved, and so the shipping was moved further up into Glasgow and so we moved up to Stornoway,
BW: I see.
NH: And then to Wick. Don’t quite know why we did that, we were on Hudsons by that time.
BW: How did you find them to work on?
NH: Well of course [unclear] much, they’d hydraulics of course which you know, on the Anson it was a wind up undercarriage, took a hundred and twenty turns to get the wheels up, well of course there was much more hydraulics on the Hudsons, very modern by comparison with the Anson.
BW: And so, you mentioned earlier about having completed your trade training, you were called up for aircrew which is in November ‘41 thereabouts, did you apply to be a pilot or did you?
NH: Yes, I wanted to be a pilot, yeah, I wanted to be a glamourous pilot and go out with girls [laughs]
BW: [laughs] And what happened to enable the change [unclear]?
NH: Well you see that, everything, as I said, was taking so long with bottlenecks everywhere, they decided to change from being a two pilot crew to one pilot and introduced bomb aimers and bomb aimers very often failed pilots, [unclear] capable of getting an aircraft back perhaps in an emergency as the pilot was no longer capable, that was the, so, the some man crew then became a pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, wireless operator, engineer and two gunners, that’s a Halifax or Lancaster.
BW: Ok.
NH: And so then of course they had a business of what they called grading and so all of us who wanted to be pilots, we had to go to a grading school and fly Tiger Moths and be graded and although we went solo, I did a very poor final test so they graded me down, I’m afraid I messed it up, I made a mess of the spin, that sort of thing but so that was very disappointing but so they transferred me to being a navigator.
BW: I see.
NH: And others who were the same, were either navigators or bomb aimers did navigator or bomb aimer training.
BW: Ok. And so, until this stage you’ve been training on Tiger Moths
NH: Tiger Moths
BW: As a pilot
NH: Yeah
BW: But I believe you were sent abroad to Canada so you
NH: Well then, then of course I went to, yes, that’s right, I went to Rivers, near Winnipeg, went over on the Queen Elisabeth, just newly constructed, that was in, that was in September ’42, yes, September ’42, oh, because of the bottleneck we gone down to Eastbourne for further navigation, for navigation training, so we did a further navigation course down there, that was after we’d failed, we failed to become pilots and went down and became navigators, this is the start of our navigation course at Eastbourne, so did a few weeks there and then we moved across, up to, somewhere near Manchester, where we stayed there before we were shipped up to Glasgow to get onto the Queen Elisabeth.
BW: And what was it like going across to Canada?
NH: Oh, quite good, I mean, we were only a few thousand aircrew going across to, a mixture of pilots and navigators, most of the pilots went down south to Texas or somewhere like that and we went to a place called Mana, called Rivers in Manitoba, in the middle of Canada, about a hundred and twenty miles from Winnipeg and so we were only going out, we were only about two or three thousand I think aircrew under training or going for training. Coming back, I, and I came back on the same boat, we landed in New York, then went to up to Moncton in Canada on the East Coast and then across to, had two or three weeks there, it’s all bottlenecks all the time before we were posted to Rivers at Manitoba, that took a three day rail journey from
BW: Wow.
NH: And we got there about the middle of September.
BW: So just in time before the winter set in.
NH: Just setting in, yes, a week or two later they froze, they sprayed a compound of water and that was the ice rink for the rest of the winter, yeah.
BW: So, did you get much flying in during that time?
NH: Oh yes, yes, yes, in Ansons again, bitterly cold because we had to do astro training was the big feature and we had to open the hatch and these pilots of course shuddered at the cold air coming in but we had to take our, take these, you know, all these [unclear] and stuff, fortunately in Canada, you know, you get these wonderful clear nights, and the stars and everything so visible, it was a, for doing astro navigation, it was ideal.
BW: So you had to
NH: But it was still to bloody cold.
BW: So you actually had to open the hatch mid flying in order to take reading the stars.
NH: Yeah, and take the reading, well, the stars you wanted, yeah. But navigation was simple in Canada because the nights were clear and the days were, cold and brisk, you know, you could see for miles, you could, you get airborne at Rivers, hundred and twenty miles from Winnipeg, and of course you could see Winnipeg because it is, all the lights were still on in Canada
BW: No blackout.
NH: No. And there’s only a few towns there anyway and you knew exactly which town, by the size, so navigation was simple.
BW: What was life like there in general, did you manage to travel out or did you meet any Canadians, at least some aircrew were stationed off base or b&bs and things but presumably you [unclear]
NH: Oh no, we lived, oh no, we were right in the prairies, we just the camp,
BW: So just yourselves and
NH: Place called Brandon, was about twenty five miles away, [unclear] I never went there, once or twice, we did get down to Londa, to Minneapolis [unclear] at Christmas there over the Christmas period but we managed to work our way down there for a, for the Christmas break
BW: And did you stay
NH: Rather special
BW: And did you stay over in hotels and things and [unclear]
NH: No, we stayed with, while went to the US the United States organisation, you know, like the Red cross naffy or whatever but being American at that time was very well appointed, we had written to them before saying we are coming, and they phoned us out, we stayed with a professor, while he was away, on national service, he was a Lieutenant colonel American Air Force but he was a professor at Minneapolis University and we stayed with him, with his wife, five of us.
BW: And was that your crew that you went with then?
NH: No, not, we weren’t crewed up then, we were just five navigators under training.
BW: Ok. And from there you, I believe, you passed out as sergeant observer navigator
NH: Sergeant observer navigator, yes,
BW: You graduated while you were in Canada.
NH: That’s right, yes, came back to Moncton to wait for our journey home, which again was on the Queen Elisabeth from New York. And then back in Glasgow, by avoiding the U-boats, but because we were so fast, they couldn’t, they couldn’t get any nearer but both the Queen Mary and the Queen Elisabeth both scootered across the Atlantic, coming back it was very different than coming out, we brought all the American troops, about fifteen thousand American troops on board.
BW: So this is pretty much at the height of the Atlantic war, then, isn’t it? When the [unclear]
NH: Yes, this is, this would be March ’43 now and we are just beginning to get over the U-boat, we are just beginning to get control of the U-boat menace, it was in ’42 the U-boat menace was at its highest, and it was a serious problem, well still was but we, yeah, we are getting on top of it by the time I came back in ’43.
BW: And so from there you went to
NH: We went to Harrogate, we were all, Harrogate was the assembly point and we were all assembled, officers went into the Majestic and sergeants went into the Grand Hotel in Harrogate, do you know them?
BW: Yes, I’ve been
NH: And the Majestic
BW: I’ve been to one, yes.
NH: Yeah. So
BW: Very nice [unclear] hotels
NH: We didn’t mind that at all, this was March, we had a couple of weeks leave in Bournemouth and back and then we were kept hanging around again, waiting to go on to our onto the OTU, which is the next step in our training, operational training unit, and that took some time, I remember, in order to occupy us they sent us up to Perth, to a flying training school that flew Tiger Moths around the, the name of the river near Perth, do you know it? Tay, is it, Tay?
BW: Tay.
NH: Lovely, anyway, lovely week, I think it was only a week or ten days, just a way of keeping us amused, before we, eventually we did get to the operational training which was at Kinloss, in northern Scotland.
BW: And was that number 19 OTU, [unclear]
NH: I don’t remember the number, [unclear] on my log book. But it’s, yes, operational at Kinloss and we were on Whitleys, so we are on a different aeroplane now. And this will be, by the time we did that, it’s August, August ’43, so it’s already taken me from November ’41 and now we are in, at August ’43,I got my navigator’s brevy but I still haven’t got, I’m still not operationally trained, that we did on a Whitley.
BW: Right. So it’s taken you, as you say, approximately two years, they needed two years
NH: yeah.
BW: To get to that operational training unit.
NH: Yeah. That’s right, yeah. And that finished for about the end of October, beginning of November ’43,
BW: Ok.
NH: So I think it be the end of October, we were posted, we were crewed up there, that was the big feature and I, you all join up together, you look around and you see who you’d like to fly with. I joined up with a chap named, sergeant, he was a sergeant, Sergeant Wilkinson, we liked the look of one another I suppose, so he and I joined and that was the usual pattern, you and the pilot joined up and you skited around and gathered in the rest of the crew which at this stage we would be five, wireless operator, gunner and a gunner.
BW: And this I believe commonly took place in just a big hangar, they amalgamated all together
NH: No, that’s right, yes
BW: And they just left them
NH: Left us to sort ourselves out, yes, a funny system.
BW: And so, you crew up with Sergeant Wilkinson,
NH: Sergeant Wilkinson, yeah.
BW: And do you recall the names of the other crew members?
NH: No, I can’t. No, I’m afraid I can’t. Oh, George Dugray, yeah, a French Canadian, oh, that was later, no, he’s the bomb aimer, oh yes, he was there too. Did George Dugray? Anyway, he joined us on the next one, the heavy conversion unit, when we got on to the Halifaxes.
BW: So
NH: He was a French-Canadian bomb aimer
BW: So if you were five crewmen initially, what were going to be flying at that point when you initially met Wilkinson and Dugray?
NH: Well, we only knew that we would probably Halifaxes or Lancasters were most likely.
BW: I see.
NH: Well the possibility of a Mosquitoes if we were lucky.
BW: So, where were you when you were looking for your crew and when you were getting yourselves together, was this at Burne or was this elsewhere?
NH: Oh no, this was at the operational training unit at Kinloss
BW: Kinloss.
NH: At Kinloss,
BW: I see.
NH: Yes, that’s when you came together
BW: I see.
NH: And up to that time we’d all been navigators but as you know you are split up and you find your crew, so with them we flew as a crew then, pilot, navigator, did we have a bomb aimer? I suppose we did have Dugray as bomb aimer, wireless operator, not an engineer, gunner. That’s right, yes, that’ll be it. That’s the five, isn’t it? One gunner, engineer, no, one gunner, bomb aimer, navigator, pilot. And wireless operator. So then, then you had to do, you went through the whole, all the daylight flying, night flying and of course very different flying conditions in Kinloss in Scotland, the blackout and very few aids and it was a very difficult and hazardous training period and a lot collided into the mountains through inexperience cause that’s what we were, totally inexperienced and there was a lot of fatalities there. So, it wasn’t an easy time.
BW: What sort of aids were you working with as a navigator then at this point?
NH: I’d be twenty-one, twenty one.
BW: What sort of navigational aids or equipment were you using at this time?
NH: Oh, hardly any
BW: So was
NH: Radio, we could get the old radio bearing, navigation and that’s it
BW: Was it all dead reckoning
NH: Otherwise dead reckoning, yeah, and that was one of the troubles as where people, they got lost and they sended through cloud and hit the high ground.
BW: And roughly how long were you on the OTU?
NH: That’s about six to eight weeks, we went the end of August, it’ll be eight weeks and we finished round about the end of October, beginning of November.
BW: So, this is October, November ’43.
NH: That’s right, yeah, yeah. And then of course we still hadn’t finished, then we got to go to the heavy conversion unit, flying the sort of aeroplanes we were going to fly on operations, which in our case was the Halifax and that was when we were posted to Rufforth to a heavy conversion unit at Rufforth which is about four miles out of York.
BW: And you were onto Halifaxes at that point.
NH: Yeah.
BW: Did you acquire any more crew members at all [unclear]?
NH: Oh yes, that’s where the engineer came, and the second gunner, that’s it. Yes, that’s right, Dugray, he did join us up at [unclear] and so were five when we went down to Rufforth and then we were joined by the other, by the mid upper gunner and by the flight engineer.
BW: Do you happen to recall their names at all or?
NH: No. I can’t.
BW: That’s alright.
NH: I can’t. Hardly anyone finished, I was the only one that finished the op, a full round of ops, they all disappeared one way or another. Well, you see, Wilkinson who I became, who became a good friend, splendid, a good looking chap too, and he became, he was going to go to university, he, when we finished our training at Rufforth, preparing to go to a squadron, we had finally finished our training and now we are fully qualified but it was quite usual for pilots to go on an experience exercise and he was sent on to do a run on on an operation on Berlin and that was the end of him and so we didn’t have a pilot and that kept us waiting again.
BW: And do you recall who eventually came
NH: Yes, I’ve got his name, what’s his name? Oh Gosh, my memory’s gone, I’m afraid,
BW: That’s alright.
NH: It’s in the logbook, he was a flying officer, so now as a sergeant I was being teamed up with a flying officer, who’d been posted from Hemswell. Well, Hemswell was a station, was a Bomber Command station in 4 Group and it achieved a terrible reputation for not pressing on to the target and Harris, the Bomber Command chief came up, called them all sorts of names, and closed the station down, Hemswell, everybody was posted, and I got one of those.
BW: I see.
NH: And so we did our, we did [unclear] game, so we had to train together again on the Halifax from Rufforth and that took us until well after Christmas, during which time I met my wife, who, the girl that became my wife.
BW: And how did you meet her?
NH: Oh, I met her at a dance, and she’d gone with, oh, she had arranged to meet a girlfriend at the Grey Rooms in York, I don’t know if you know it.
BW: No, I don’t.
NH: Oh, it was a lovely place, oh, we all got there, all the, York was full of aircrew, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians particularly and Brits and a few Americans and of course there wasn’t much in York then, everything was closed down but there was a lovely dance place, the Dugrey Rooms, and that’s where we all went, to meet girls and that’s where I met my wife.
US: Sorry, after Williams your pilot, you then had Houston.
NH: Williams, Williams, that’s right. Flying officer Williams, he was the one who was, came to Rufforth from Hemswell we, I having lost Wilkinson and what you say the name was?
US: Williams.
NH: Williams. Oh, he had, I eventually found out he was called Turnback Williams, we are not going to the target? I’ll on that, busy
BW: Part of the reason Harris talk to these guys.
NH: Yeah. Yeah, that’s right so I did all my, I completed all my training with, as a, with him, with Williams, and from there at the end from February 44, now is it? End of 44, yes, Paul Williams of course, when he was sent out on his second Dickey for experience, that was at the height of the Berlin raids, and the losses were huge, we’d been, we’d been on those of course, if he’d come back from his, from his trip of experience
BW: Second Dickey means like a second pilot
NH: Second pilot experience, yes, yeah, so he didn’t come back and I wrote to his father and I got a nice, I might have it somewhere a nice letter from his father who is a stockbroker in London and anyway so I saw that with Williams then we completed another bit of training before we went off to the squadron which I say was about the end of February ’44.
BW: And this was the newly formed 578 Squadron.
NH: And that was the newly formed, yes, they were only formed about three months before
BW: And they were specifically
NH: From Snaith.
BW: And they were specifically flying Halifaxes Mark III as they were one of the first
NH: I was jolly lucky to get on one of those cause it was just as good as the Lancaster, radial engines Bristol and they could get up to the required height and carry a similar amount of bombs, splendid.
BW: So, your first sortie with 578 would be in February as you say,
NH: In March
BW: In March
NH: Then in February, then again the training was so much, I mean they wouldn’t escort, again got ourselves familiarised with the Mark Iii and done a couple of training runs before we were then considered to be operational and that took place in March and it was during that time the Nuremberg raid and of the pilots at Burton on the squadron, he got a posthumous VC.
BW: Did you know him?
NH: No, I didn’t know him, no, no, I’d only been on the squadron a week or so but I didn’t know him, I know, no, I didn’t know him, I didn’t really know him, I didn’t know anybody really, we kept to ourselves a
BW: You tend to associate with your crew if anything
NH: Just with the crew, didn’t mix much with anybody else, you stuck pretty close into the crew and as I had a girlfriend now in York I scuttled off there [laughs].
BW: So, it was looking pretty serious with your girlfriend
NH: Already started to look serious, yes, yeah, we got engaged in April, after I’d done about five operations. I took her down to Bournemouth to meet my family.
BW: Right. And so, what were the accommodation facilities like at Burne, this is where your 578 Squadron
NH: They weren’t bad, it was a brand-new place, you know, all Hudson.
BW: Were you billeted with the crew?
NH: Oh yes, yes, I, we were in huts of course but as sergeants we had little privileges, the sergeant’s mess and that sort of thing, reasonably comfortable of course, we were well-fed as aircrew, the local people, we always had eggs before we went and that sort of thing, things which people couldn’t get on the ration we had plenty of, plenty of chips too cause at the age of twenty one, twenty two I [unclear] of chips [laughs]
BW: [unclear]
NH: [unclear]
BW: And were you the only crew in the billet sometimes or there were two crews in there or?
NH: I think we were the only one, as far as I can remember we were the only one.
BW: And at this time there was a CO in charge
NH: Yes.
BW: Wing Commander Wilkey Wilkinson, do you recall him?
NH: Oh, I do very well, yes, he’s one chap I do remember, and I’ve never been a hero worshiper but I would think I would put him into that category. Marvellous chap, good looking, tall, great sense of humour, great, young, handsome, had every quality, but you knew that if Wilkinson was flying it was gonna be a bad one, he’d only, he wouldn’t take the easy ones, he’d always took the bad ones, great leader, he was on his second tour, too, very nice chap too because then of course I, to going on a bit further, I was with Williams, I did two operations with Williams, I didn’t remember what it was I didn’t like but I didn’t like it, I went to see Williams in great trepidation but I didn’t know what Williams I never spoke to Wing Commanders, they were far too elevated, but I went to see him and so I did my night flying with Williams so I said, we must have talked a bit, I can’t remember, so he said right leave with me, I’ll fix you up with somebody else and I went then to, I was teamed up then with Houston, Jock Houston, and we stayed together all the time, finished together, got commissioned together, got a DFC together.
BW: And so, you when you went from your crew flying with Williams at this point
NH: Yes
BH: To make the change to another crew
NH: Yes, the others all, I [unclear], yes, yeah.
BW: [unclear]
NH: [unclear]
BW: [unclear]
NH: Well, Williams did finish his tour, yes, but I don’t know who he flew, he finished the tour.
BW: The other members of your crew didn’t pick up your sense of
NH: No,
BW: [unclear]
NH: Not as far as I know. No, no.
BW: And you mentioned about Wilkinson, there’s a description here which seems to chime with what you commented about it and it’s only a short description if I can read it to you, it says, he was described by those who knew him as a tall, loose end fellow, the first impression that a stranger might have of him was that he was rather irresponsible, care-free, vague individual, but on closer acquaintance he would seem that he had one of the kindest, gentlest and most sympathetic
NH: Oh, I think that was pretty accurate
BW: Could possess
NH: Yes
BW: He had the knack of inspiring confidence in his crew, when flying I can’t remember anything disturbing him, he was huge with his men
NH: No, no. There’s my little story in that book he’s flying a strange aircraft, an unusual aircraft and he’s got an army man, and army major alongside him but oh, they couldn’t get the flaps down and the army major says to Wilkinson, can you fly this without flaps? He said, well, you are just about to find out [laughs].
BW: And it says of him because he was awarded a DSO he said, he inspired powers of leadership, great skill and determination, qualities which have earned him much success, his devoted squadron commander, his great drive and tactical abilities used in large measure to the high standard of operation to assume the squadron
NH: Yeah, he did, yeah, briefing were always made a pleasure by him being here, he made them quite different, we quite looked forward to his briefing
BW: And when you, you mentioned about him when he going out on a bad raid, were you aware that if he briefed it, it was gonna be a bad one or was it the case [unclear] the raids?
NH: No, not particularly, no, but you knew that if he was on it, it wouldn’t be an easy one.
BW: But he, he always gave the briefing whatever the raid was.
NH: Oh yes, oh yes.
BW: There was only a few at the time
NH: That’s right, yeah, yeah. Yes, I remember his briefing, that is one thing I do remember quite well. Always something to look forward to. I remember a young WAAF officer looking at him I think, Gosh, I’d like a young woman to look at me like that [laughs].
BW: So, by now you are on the early part of your tour and initially it looks like you got operations mainly over Germany, are there any other particular raids through March that you recall?
NH: No, they were all a great big jumble mainly, I, oh, there is one when we lost a lot of aeroplanes.
BW: That night be Nuremberg presumably.
NH: No, not Nuremberg, I didn’t do Nuremberg, there is some, somewhere like, oh, retro memory for names, the size of the Ruhr, a fairly long trip and I remember coming out, they’d briefed us to come down from the target area right down to five thousand feet, it seemed odd tactic, I remember going up with another navigator to Nuremberg, I don’t like this and he said, I wish we weren’t doing this one and he didn’t come back. We lost six that night. So, I don’t know what that tactic was all about.
BW: So, at this time, when you
NH: Oh, I’m trying to remember the name, that, Karlsruhe,
BW: Karlsruhe. And so at this when you were doing operations, you’ve gone from the billet to the ops room to be briefed, you’ve had your briefing, just talk me through then what you would do from there in terms of boarding the aircraft, the checks you would do, what sort of things would be going on then.
NH: Well, we had our own, quite a lot of instruments, we had Gee for example, the bomb aimer would have his stuff but I would have all my charts, gee charts, ordinary plotting charts, what were they called? [unclear] and then the Gee charts, all rather luminous, astro navigation, [unclear] anyway, waste of time most of the time but always had to do it, sextant, all the stuff had to be checked and so, you know, that took up quite a long time, you did that some with the pilot, checking the routes and marking off certain points on it.
BW: And H2S was coming in at this time.
NH: Oh, we didn’t have H2S.
BW: That wasn’t on your aircraft.
NH: We didn’t have it, no,
BW: And was the Gee equipment located right where you position were?
NH: Right in front like that
BW: Ok.
NH: Had a table, table, yeah.
BW: In some aircraft [unclear] different.
NH: And that, that was an incredibly, wonderful instrument I had, of course the Germans were jamming it as much as they could and you’d lose it, you’d, what it did help you to do was to get an accurate wind, cause that’s so incredibly important, if you got an accurate wind then doing jet reconning isn’t going to be too bad and you could get Gee fixes right up to inside the Dutch coast so it gave you a whole string of fixes and a whole comprehension of the wind you know was established by the time you got there. And then, the same thing coming back, you, I’d have, I’d be searching madly to get the signals eventually appearing and it’s marvellous when the, when they just started to appear on your radar screen, and you’d, and you’d get a proper fix, because when you tried astro navigation or even wireless, there were so many errors involved.
BW: Was your pilot good in terms of sticking to the course? Was he [unclear] following your instructions?
NH: Oh yes, of course, oh yes, oh yes, very good, you know, if I take an astro shot, they had to keep very steady because you have a steady platform to get, I don’t know if you know about sextant?
BW: Yes.
NH: You know, yes, getting the star dive into the bubble and holding it there, if the plane lurches up you’ve lost the, it, you’ve gotta get it back again,
BW: And so, you found that you worked quite well presumably [unclear]
NH: Oh, very well, with Houston, terrible memory for names, I even forget my own sometimes
BW: What was it like actually in the environment of a Halifax then, was it pretty roomy, has a reputation of being a fairly roomy aircraft.
NH: Not bad, not bad really
BW: [unclear]
NH: No, no, not when you compare it [unclear] like the Whitley
BW: And I believe the heating, say for example in a Lancaster kept the wireless operator and the navigator pretty warm
NH: yes
BW: Is it similar in a Halifax or not?
NH: Ah, yeah, pretty I was never cold, I never remember being cold,
BW: How did it feel in your flying kit? Was it [unclear]
NH: I didn’t wear much, had a Mae West on, and a parachute harness of course and that was, oh, and an aircrew sweater, and that was about it, don’t [unclear], I think flying boots, yes, yeah, flying boots, cause you could if you were, if you bailed out and you landed, you could cut the top off and they looked like ordinary shoes, ordinary boots
BW: And so you were pretty comfortable in the interior of the Halifax.
NH: Oh, pretty, reasonably comfortable.
BW:
NH: Yes, yes, I had a good desk and all the instruments that I needed. Wind thing, what you call, wind setting, forgot what they called, wind, don’t they use that much, you had to be [unclear] sort of view the sea at eighteen thousand feet, you can’t do that
BW: Did you find that you had to use oxygen much if you were above [unclear] feet or?
NH: Oh yes, about ten thousand feet, most certainly.
BW: Were most of your ops above that [unclear]?
NH: Oh yes, as soon as you get to, well pretty well from five thousand feet or even before, I can’t remember exactly but you certainly wouldn’t want to be [unclear] oxygen above ten thousand feet
BW: You noted as well one particular date you were in the air on the night of D-Day.
NH: Yes, yes.
BW: Do you recall the briefing for D-Day primarily?
NH: No
BW: Were you aware that is was gonna be the start of the invasion?
NH: Well, we were all suspicious but nobody knew anything definite but of course so much everybody knew that D-Day was gonna come soon but that anything definite not until we, well, we were, the target was an easy one on the Northern Coast of France, just inside, gun batteries of some sort, and we bombed that but as we are coming back, and as we are coming back near [unclear], both the gunners shouted out, all the shipping that they could see and so all this shipping was just on the invasion, that was June the 6th.
BW: What sort of time would that be, was it early morning?
NH: About three or four o’clock in the morning. It be in the logbook there. Be about that time.
BW: The gun battery that you mentioned, was it Mont Fleury,
NH: Right.
BW: And that was covering Gold Beach, which was one of the British invasion beaches.
NH: Yeah, yeah. Cause we did two or three, Montgomery, that was later on, after the armies had got established but got held up by the Germans and Montgomery requested Bomber Command to drop their bombs on the German, where the Germans were and we did that, we got a letter of thanks from him because that’s form where the armies could move on.
BW: Were you made aware of the results of the bombing on that particular D-Day mission?
NH: Not really, no, not until we got this letter from Montgomery thanking us for, yeah, I can’t think that we got any particular, no. Of course, we were taking photographs all the time, and we were given some sort of marking for the accuracy and the standard and that was posted up on the boards.
BW: Did it feel like a competition, where you
NH: A little bit like that, oh yes, a little bit like that. Bomb aimers, you know, we, in that book [unclear] claims that we were used for these targets because we had a bomb aiming accuracy record.
BW: Quite [unclear]
NH: No, but, I think that, what is, my God, the insignia of the squadron has got
US: An arrow
NH: A arrow, isn’t it? A bomb aiming accuracy or something is called.
US: Just called accuracy.
NH: Accuracy, yes, yes. So we had this supposedly reputation. I don’t know [laughs].
BW: Well, the gun position that was there at Gold Beach was actually a target given to the Green Howards, the army regiment that was to assault that.
NH: Oh, was that? Oh, was it?
BW: And that particular action was where sergeant major Stanley Hollis got the VC, [unclear] boxes near that battery. So coincidentally the raid that you were on happened to be the target which sergeant major Hollis was the only VC on D-Day.
NH: That’s interesting too. Yeah, yeah.
BW: There was only one [unclear] I can see on that raid and that was a Halifax flown by squadron leader Watson
NH: OH yes.
BW: Who was shot down
NH: yes.
BW: [unclear]
NH: I think I’ve seen the name but I don’t know him. No, no.
BW: So, at this time during April, May, June, most of your targets are in France
NH: Yes
BW: With the idea of supporting D-Day [unclear]
NH: Yeah, D-Day the invasion, yes, yes,
BW: And that continues
NH: [unclear] targets of course, by comparison with the Ruhr and Berlin
BW: And by easy that I assume that they were lighter, more lightly defended, is that right?
NH: Not so much that they’re but quicklier have a long, the big thing somewhere like Nuremberg or Berlin, even if you got to, you had a long trail back to UK and the German fighters knew that and would wait for the trail of bombers coming out of the target and shooting them out then but so and they had a long time to do it whereas going to somewhere Paris or somewhere like that, they didn’t have that length of time to do it.
BW: did you encounter many fighters that you [unclear]?
NH: No, I can’t remember, well, I think the most famous of course was the concentration, I did a daylight on the Ruhr in September and then you saw the concentration, what a concentration of bombers looked like cause we flew at night and we didn’t see how it really looked. But on this occasion we flew daylight to the Ruhr in September and I flew with a strange crew, which is slightly unsettling, their navigator had gone sick or something, and but then you saw aircraft colliding and of course you saw all the bombs dropping from other aircraft dropping so, you know, getting so close to releasing their bombs on you and the gunners would be shouting out, you know, he’s right over, he’s right over us now, and quite often it did happen that bombs from one aircraft hit another one, underneath.
BW: Did it happen on that occasion when you were?
NH: No, no, I never saw it actually happen,
BW: Just [unclear].
NH: No, I did, I did see aircraft, the other thing was collisions, when you got several hundred aircraft, well, at nighttime you don’t know what has happened, whether there’s a collision or whether they’re being shot by ack-ack, but at daylight you could see and I did see a collision, two aircraft hitting one another,
BW: And what, how could you describe what [unclear]?
NH: No, I can’t, we turned away and it was gone but didn’t see anybody come out.
BW: And so during [unclear]
NH: No explosion, that’s all.
BW: And so, during the raid on Stuttgart, during the daylight, could you see, did you get a chance to see clearly the formation? The bomber formation?
NH: Oh, not really, no, you know, of course you know that they are at night because you get into their slipstream, so you know and that’s what you want, of course you want to be close, you don’t want to be isolated that’s when they can pick you off, the whole object of flying in a gaggle or stream was to protect one another with your, what’s the stuff? Window and, you know, confuse the enemy defenses radar so you were conscious at nighttime, but you didn’t see the full horror of it.
BW: And what was your impression during the daylight raid?
NH: Well, I thought, how the hell can you get through that lot? Approaching the Ruhr, this is a lovely September afternoon and you could see the smoke hovering over the Ruhr from such a long way away, I got a feeling we could see it almost from the Dutch coast, and then you think, then of course within the smoke, which is just the puffs of smoke from the ack-ack, you could see the brusts of the showers, well, there’s no penetration, you cannot penetrate that lost, but looks, it probably looks worst than it really is.
BW: In each case your pilot kept on, there was no consideration of turning back [unclear] target?
NH: Oh no, no, but no, no, we were, I think we were pretty that way, we did what we had to do, and although it is nerve-racking when the bomb aimer is insistent on, you know, my God, why doesn’t he press the bloody button? It was he said, bomb’s gone, yeah, that we could turn away.
BW: Were there any occasions where you had to make a second run over the target or not?
NH: Not exactly the, I ‘m not quite sure but I do know that we’ve been approaching the target and we’ve been told to hold off, the Pathfinder, the master bomber is directing us from underneath, usually in something like a Mosquito and he is calling us by our codename whatever, main force, main force, whatever the code, and he said and he’d be telling us, the bomb, overshoot the red TI’s or bomb the green markers or in one case he couldn’t tell because of the smoke and he couldn’t get accurate and he told the whole force to orbit, that was a nasty experience too,
BW: And the whole force at this stage [unclear]
NH: Would have to turn and wait and come in again until he could give the instructions on which markers to attack, they were of course people like, who has got the VC?
BW: Cheshire?
NH: Cheshire, yeah. Incredible people they were. They would stay, I mean, they would stay on the target for the whole time, going round and round, giving the directions to the main force, and asking for new TI’s or something like that if he wanted it.
BW: So, moving on from the D-Day operations, the squadron was then tasked with hitting the V-Weapon sites
NH: Yes, we, those were fairly easy targets, just inside the Dutch and French coast, yeah. We [unclear] several of those, three or four of those.
BW: Do you recall much about what was explained to you about the targets, we know now that they were being [unclear], did you know that?
NH: I don’t think so, I can’t remember, no, I just know that they were, well eventually of course when the flying bombs came up cause they came up, they came off fairly earlier, in was about August wasn’t it? July, August? Well, after, well then we knew them, that sort, they were that sort of targets, not until they, they’d actually arrived.
BW: So, from there through July and August, I think in total you flew thirty-nine operations, right?
NH: Thirty-nine altogether, yes. And of course the normal operation, prior to that., had ben thirty but because we were getting these easy French targets, they made us do thirty nine. And I, when they did say you’re finished, I was quite surprised, I’d thought they’d keep me I wasn’t all that bothered, I was getting used to it and it think sorry there won’t be an end you just carry on to the end and I accepted that I think.
BW: So you would have gone on for the duration of the war.
NH: Yes, I was slightly surprised when they said, you can stop and get.
BW: And what happened at that point, how was it explained to you your tour would end? What happened [unclear]?
NH: No explanation, I was just told that I would be posted on a certain day to in this case to Marston Moor as an instructor. But of course before that I’d been commissioned, Jock Houston and myself both got commissioned and we both got and then shortly after that we both got DFCs. Oh, we got that after I left the squadron, we got them afterwards, we were commissioned before we left the squadron, about a month or so before and then we got the DFC about a month or so after we left the squadron.
BW: And did you go to the palace to receive the DCF [unclear]?
NH: No, it came in the post, it came in the post with a letter from King George, signed by King George and that was stolen, we had a burglary and some bastard stole it, including the letter which was in some respect more important than the DFC. I got the DFC changed
BW: And that was soon after, that was soon after you’d been awarded it, it happened or was it
NH: No, no, it happened, oh, about twenty years ago.
BW: So still, right, still, as recently as that.
NH: Yeah, but we were in Muscat in Oman and this burglary happened whilst we were away.
BW: But you managed to get a replacement for
NH: I got a replacement, yes, they charged me a hundred pounds for it but it’s not quite the same cause I haven’t got the letter from King George.
BW: A shame. And so how was your relationship at this point with your girlfriend, cause you’ve been on pos, a pretty intense period through [unclear].
NH: Oh, well, every, you see, I suppose, in some respects I missed out a bit, I was very friendly with Jock but the other I, I went and had a beer occasionally with them but I was so eager, I was so wrapped up with Dorothy that every opportunity, I just speared off into York and I didn’t spend much time on the squadron but I, I used to take my inflight rations, because we got chocolate and chewing gum and other things and I couldn’t eat them, I was too frightened to eat them, and so I’d take them into York ands give them to her, I ran up to her office, which is on the fourth story of the LNER headquarters building in York and bang on her door and give her my inflight rations, sweets and chocolate mostly cause these things were rationed at that time.
BW: And that must have made your visits special for her.
NH: Yeah [laughs].
BW: [unclear]
NH: Yeah. Well if I wasn’t flying that night, I’d rush into York and rush up and tell her I’d be there and wait for, meet her after she left work.
BW: At what stage during the day would you find out whether or not you were on ops or not?
NH: Well, usually in the morning, you round about, just round about midday as I remember you’d know whether you’d go and operate that night or not. I do remember one occasion when we, we thought we were going to operate and that was when the flight engineer we’d, it was in June cause its, the nights were brighter, I think we were due for a take-off about ten o’clock and it was getting dusk and as usual everything goes very quiet, you wait for the start-up pistol and all engines would then start revving up, start the engines up and revving up, make a crescendo of noise of course when you’ve got sixteen or eighteen four-engines, all going and on this occasion there is always a little pause, you see you check your aircraft, you check everything and then you sort of hang around for a few minutes, I was there waiting for the [unclear] pistol, signal to get in and start up and on this occasion the flight engineer, we’d done about fourteen trips, he said, I’m not going tonight, and he wouldn’t, he said he wasn’t going, so of course the tower had to be informed that we weren’t, we had a crew deficiency and everybody came out then, the CO and the flight engineer leader and the medical officer and they took him to the rear engine to talk to him and took him off and we thought, well, by this time all the other aircraft had started up and are travelling round the peri-track looking at us curiously wondering what, why we hadn’t started up and we are waving them to say, well, clear off, we’re not going but then the engineer nearly came rushing out saying I’m [unclear] [laughs] so we had a start-up and all we did like that.
BW: So you then got, were you having to get back in the aircraft at this point?
NH: Oh, of course, yes. And off we had to go but then we were Tail End Charlies and that’s another thing you don’t like you don’t wanna be amongst the gaggle.
BW: And so you, how did you feel being at the back of the bomber stream then?
NH: Well, I suppose we must have made it up, you know, put a bit [laughs] more throttle on and we, I think we reached them in the end because what you do, you assemble at same point or something like that, that’s the usual thing, the squadrons all take off from the various aerodromes, say in Yorkshire and Spurn Point was a favorite assembly point and you’d set off from there, which there is no formation, you just keep in the stream, and so of course by the time the assembly had taken place and they had set off, we were catching up.
BW: How did you feel during the flight having had [unclear]?
NH: I didn’t like it, I didn’t like it [laughs] I [unclear] much more nervous, well, I’ve always felt nervous but felt a lot more nervous that night and that’s a clear memory of one flight I do have, yeah.
BW: You mention that just feeling nervous and feeling that you could have your inflight rations when you were airborne, you managed to overcome that, did you [unclear].
NH: [unclear] do it, no, chewing gum, I had the chewing gum but didn’t need anything else, coffee, I’d have, I’d drink the coffee and eat and the chewing gum but I was too frightened to eat anything else [laughs]. I waited for my eggs and bacon, egg and chips like got back.
BW: Did you recall the rest of the crew felt in a similar way?
NH: I think they felt similar, fairly similar, yeah, I think so, I think we all felt pretty much the same.
BW: Did you ever talk about it?
NH: No, no, that’s a strange thing, it’s only in the last few years that I’ve ever talked about it, Dorothy never wanted me to hear me talk about it and I never did, I never thought about it and it’s only sort of more or less than she died that I’ve given it any thought.
BW: And at the time did you talk to your crew mates or did they tell you how it felt on the operations night?
NH: No, never talked about it, never, never, no, it’s a, I look back a lot of it and I think, this is a bit strange really cause I think about it a lot now and talk about it quite a bit but for thirty or forty years never thought about it, hardly, hardly, [unclear].
BW: And how does it feel now, reflecting back on that time?
NH: Well, it’s a different time, you know, it’s something which I didn’t, something which is very different to anything, but you know it’s an experience which you’d never imagined that you’d go through really.
BW: And you mentioned now at this stage of your career that you’d come off operations, you were then posted to Marston Moor as instructor.
NH: That’s right, yes, for six months, six months tour and then we got married in June and when I came back from my honeymoon, I was told I was posted back onto operations to go with Tiger Force against Japan.
BW: And is this June ’45?
NH: This is June ’45, the war, the European war had ended and that ended in May, was it May? Yeah, is it.
BW: That’s right.
NH: Yeah and I’ve finished my six months rest and so I was posted back onto a second tour which happened to be with, what I called the force?
BW: Tiger Force.
NH: Sorry?
US: Tiger.
NH: Tiger Force, with Tiger Force. Yes, [unclear] to, and we were going to do something similar to what we did against Germany. That was, but that was on Lincolns, was it Lancasters or Lincolns? Wasn’t Halifaxes? Either Lancasters or Lincolns, I got the feeling it was Lincolns. Cause then after the war I flew in, I was on 50 Squadron which was at Waddington.
BW: At Waddington.
NH: Yeah, that was after the war, that was in 1950, talking about 1947, ’48, no, ’48.
BW: So you were earmarked to go with Tiger Force out to the Far East
NH: Yeah. We did
BW: Did that happen?
NH: yeah. No, no, we did our training and we didn’t have to do much, it was, you know, becoming acquainted, with a slightly new aircraft and we were all experienced people, all done our tour of ops, all being instructors so we are a very experienced crew we did, we just did a little bit of familiarization and we are ready to go and then they dropped the atom bomb so we didn’t go and we all got split up then.
BW: So you were all prepared to go and then you continued your post first to a training as a crew
NH: Yes
BW: Together and I guess you were all I guess earmarked at the same to go to the Far East but
NH: Yeah
BW: But you said it didn’t happen
NH: No, and we would have gone of course if they hadn’t dropped the atom bombs.
BW: And so, just talk us through your subsequent career which I believe involved transport command, fighter command
NH: Well of course [unclear] lot of funny little jobs like on a recruiting center and I was eventually had a sort of a career posting as an instructor at the RAF [unclear] at Cosford which was, if I’d played my cards right, would have done me some good, but I didn’t, I volunteered for flying, I have tried to go back on flying and they posted me back on transport command, but then Dorothy was expecting her babies and after a while I asked much to their irritation I think and it never did me any good, they posted me back to Bomber Command.
BW: And where did you get posted to?
NH: To, well, first of all I did a conversion, I became a navigator, bomb aimer, I did a bomb aiming course at Lindholme, near Doncaster and then from there I was posted to 50 Squadron at Waddington and that was when Dorothy had her babies, twins, and we all moved into quarters at Waddington and I became adjutant to 50 Squadron and my Co’s a man named Peach and that was a most enjoyable experience, I really enjoyed that time, we flew Lincolns.
BW: I was going to ask actually because at this time Jet aircraft are becoming more widely [unclear].
NH: [unclear] was just coming into service, yes, in Bomber Command.
BW: Did you get a chance to fly in it?
NH: No, I didn’t. No, no.
BW: And so what happened after that, were you involved at all in the Berlin airlift for example or not?
NH: No, because, as I say, I would have been if I stayed on transport command, that’s where I didn’t do myself any good by asking for this, but I didn’t know that Berlin airlift, I would have I wish I could have done that now but I got this request answered and was posted to 50 to Bomber Command but I made a mistake though.
BW: And at what stage did you become flight controller?
NH: Well, this is a, from Waddington I was posted to Scampton as an instructor, again I wish I’d protested and I and stayed on longer but I, we were posted to Scampton, as an instructor and then I hadn’t been offered a permanent commission but they did offer me a restricted permanent commission but it had to be either in the air traffic control branch or the fighter control branch, so I chose the fighter control branch, I wish I, somehow I wish I could afford that more and stay, and let me stay on aircrew and I think I’d have prospered more so then I, I did the course on fighter control and yeah that’s and from there I was posted to Patrington, how do we call those units? Fighter control unit.
BW: And this was at Patrington?
NH: Patrington, yeah.
BW: Patrington.
NH: In East Yorkshire.
BW: Ok.
NH: And then I went from, from there I became training officer and that was a nice post I became training officer to the Hull fighter control unit, [unclear] unit, based at Sutton, that was most enjoyable.
BW: What did you like about it?
NH: Well, I was my own boss, I was both adjutant for a long while, was adjutant and training officer, I had the use of the staff car, say I was my own boss, we had a nice house in Withernsea, no, not in Withernsea, in
US: Wasn’t Cottingham?
NH: Cottingham. In Cottingham, yeah. Nice house in Cottingham, we had some pleasant friends in the village and that was a most enjoyable time, I was very, I became very popular with the people, with the auxiliary people who were of course all civilians but I enjoyed their company I got on well with them so that was quite a nice [unclear], from there so I did a full tour there and then we were posted to Germany doing, well doing an operational job, you know, fighter control unit first of all at [unclear] and then at [unclear].
BW: And that I suppose saw you through to, through the Sixties and
NH: Yeah, and right up until
BW: The Seventies
NH: Yes, I did a year in Borneo on my own and joined the confrontation, nobody knows about that, do they? When we fought the Indonesians I’d, of course that was a year what they called an unaccompanied tour, we were based on a little island called Labuan on the north coast of Borneo, which is enjoyable up to a point but I didn’t like being separated all that time from the family.
BW: What sort of things were you doing out there?
NH: Oh well, the Indonesians were trying to control the whole of Borneo and they were claiming it but we said no, the northern part, including, what’s the oil rich place? Begins with a b. Brunei. Kuching and, that’s Kalimantan and then, we said, no, that all belongs to Malaysia, Malaysian federation which at that time includes Singapore but the Indonesians wanted the whole of Borneo as part of the Indonesia so we said, no, you can’t have it, this is all, so we had a four year war, we didn’t call it a war, we called it a confrontation.
BW: Is this the Malaysian insurgency?
NH: Yeah. Yeah, well, it is an insurgency, but of course Singapore was part of it and Malaysia so we eventually Indonesia gave up and accepted the status quo as we said it should be and we had Javelins at that time so we were controlling Javelins along the border, which was way undefined, you couldn’t and of course we had Gurkas out there and Indonesians were scared stiff of them and it was good jungle warfare, very good for anybody who wanted an army career it was ideal training, not too many casualties, a couple of hundred or so were killed, but we had, but we have radar jamming, Lincolns, not Lincolns, Hastings, we had Hastings out there doing our radar jamming and we controlled the Javelins, we had our Javelins which would come onto the island and jet airborne wherever we saw anything that might be a useful target. So I commanded that little unit, I had about sixty or seventy men and all radar equipment, that sort of little encampment of my own, was quite nice and six officers, and seventy men and we had a marvelous time, laughed like anything, all the time, oh yeah, drank a lot, we drank the hell of a lot. Dorothy never stopped saying how shocked she was [laughs] [unclear].
BW: And so after late Fifties through the Sixties
NH: Yes, that’s the Mid Sixties, the confrontation finished in ’66, well, that’s when I came back, I came back in June ’66, and the confrontation stopped just after that and then I came back to, oh, Scotland again, to, up to Buchan, is it Buchan?
US: Peterhead, yeah.
NH: Peterhead, yeah. Peter, yeah, Peterhead, Buchan. Onto a, well, there we are looking at, we are looking after, looking at Russian aircraft, that was the interesting part there was watching for the Bisons and what not coming out of the Russian bases up at, you know, beyond.
BW: Beyond Murmansk and.
NH: Beyond Murmansk, yeah. They’d come out into the Atlantic, they’d be picked up by the Norwegian radar and we would [unclear] them then to come down between the Iceland gap and the
BW: Faroe islands.
NH: Faroe islands, Shetlands, my memory is terrible, anyway we were waiting for them to come through, past the Iceland gap and they’d go out into the Atlantic while we had a flight of, what were they in those days, not the Javelins, what was after the Javelins? Hunters, Hunters? What were the ones before the Lightning? No, it was the Lightnings, the Lightnings, of course it was. Yeah, the Lightnings, we had Lightnings up at Kinloss, or Lossiemouth? Lossiemouth, they were up there on the and the Americans had Phantoms in Iceland so we would scramble when we, as soon as we saw these coming, being handed over, they were handed over to us by the Norwegians, we probably couldn’t see them then but then when we knew they were there and eventually they would appear on our radar and certain time after that we would scramble the fighters from Lossiemouth and the Phantoms from Reykjavik and at first the Lightnings didn’t have the range to get to them and very frustratingly they would turn back because of lack of fuel, the Phantoms would come on and make the interception and then come onto Scotland and land, but then when the Lightning Mark VI came in, we could make the interception properly and return. But that was quite interesting for a while because we also had radar up on top of the Faroes, right on top, no, not the Faroes, the Shetlands, right up on the top island, Saxa Vord, that’s, there’s a radar station up there, so there, that was a bit of an interest and then I was finally posted back to Germany and that, did my final tour in Germany on a NATO, on a NATO post. We had a German commandant then, Brigadier, German, he was, by that time the Germans had bene reconstituted but we had control of the fighter element, the Germans weren’t allowed to control, we were [unclear] of course for, to intercept the Russians in case there was any sort of attack but we had, but they had to have RAF controllers out there, the Germans, under all their constitutional rules weren’t allowed to do this so although they provided all the manning for it, we did the actual operating of the stand-by fighters, what did we have then? Lightnings, did we? Lightnings, yes, Lightnings, and they were at places like Laarbruch, Bruggen and somewhere else, there were three, Gutersloh, yes, we had the triangle of those three and then of course Monchengladbach.
BW: And so
NH: So I finished my tour there and made a lot of good friends, [unclear] we were Germans, Dutch, British and that very pleasant finished my career really, made some good friends who stayed friends right up till now, those who survived, even the Germans, the German commandant of the German regiment, he became, I still talk to him every week on the telephone [laughs]
BW: And so
NH: Oberst Wolfgang Ostermar
BW: Wolfgang Ostermar
NH: Wolfgang, yeah, we went on holidays together, became very close, you know.
BW: And is he a similar age to you?
NH: A year younger.
BW: So he’d been around the year, presumably in opposing forces when you [unclear]
NH: He was, he was, and he was taken prisoner by the Americans.
BW: Really? Did
NH: But he’s an Anglophile, speaks excellent English, same as his wife does. Did his training, of course he became a fighter controller but trained by us in Britain.
BW: Do you recall briefly what his wartime service was? Was he a pilot or a gunner or [unclear]?
NH: No, he was ground staff.
BW: Right. So there was no chance of him being
NH: When we’d been on holiday together, people made romantic conclusions, you know, a German and a British exile, sorry, good friends,
BW: But it wasn’t
NH: Not like that, no.
BW: And so you left the RAF and NATO
NH: Yeah.
BW: What was your civilian career, what did you, did you [unclear]?
NH: I enjoyed the last couple of years, I did a correspondence course which is organized by the service, my [unclear], what did I do?
US: Agency and business studies.
NH: Agency and business studies, that’s right, yes, and it was such an easy posting in Germany I was able to do this with a lot of enjoyment and I thought, well, I can go in human relations or something like that, I’m made for that and it meant a two week course in a [unclear] to start with, then about eighteen months correspondence, finishing up the six weeks again at Chelsea and we happened to be in the Chelsea barracks near the Chelsea officer’s mess but we were told, the Chelsea officer’s, the guards officers not the, not any ordinary mess it’s the guards officer’s mess and we were told very strictly we were not, we may be officers but we were not entitled to go into the guards officer’s mess [laughs].
BW: You mentioned before we started the interview you were security on the ton air project
NH: Well I, having got the H&C, I wrote lots and lots of letters people offering my services and I got reasonable replies from quite a number and I was offered several jobs, I eventually left the air force in November 1970 and I came up here, [unclear] they seemed puzzled as I, I wanted to come up here, why do you want to come up here then? [laughs] because I suppose hopefully you are going to offer me a job. So, they did in fact, I became assistant to the chief designer, they offered me two jobs actually, they offered me a job on Tornado cockpit which was still on the drawing board, I could have either be that job or be assistant to the chief designer, so I said, I’m not qualified to cock pit design work, so I think I better take the other one so I did that, which was quite a nice job, I learned a tremendous amount cause I worked in the main drawing office with him and got to know all the chaps and what they were doing and of course I say the Tornado was still on the drawing board it goes now in production but that was still very much a live product. And so I got to learn in eighteen months so I did that [unclear], I learned a lot and then the chap who is the chief security officer was an ex wing commander and I had, and he still, I want, I want to retire very soon, do you want to take my job over? So, that’s promotion anyway, so I did, I took, George Kennedy, wing commander George, he’d been an ex apprentice like me, but much earlier, and when he, well, I went and joined him as his assistant, first of all about eighteen months, two years, and then took over completely when he retired and that really was a splendid job because the Tornado was still not flying but it was full of classified information and working with the Germans and the Italians, our own Ministry of Defenses and who of course were very hard on us if we gave any information away it was all very and of course the Cold War was on, you know, and Munich we had plenty of Cold War suspects and [unclear] around Munich, eager to get hold of the information about the Tornado.
BW: And so, you were very limited about what you could and couldn’t say at the time.
NH: Oh yes, very much, yes, but it’s very, eventually I did get hold of because these technical people and engineers [unclear], the last thing they wanted to know was about is security, they want to show off their knowledge and they want to write papers and get their names noticed and things like that their ego, you know publicity, whereas we of course, the security side, wanted to restrict it, well, not because we ourselves wanted it, the Ministry of Defense, they provided the contracts and if we broke the rules, they would start threatening that there would be a loss of contract work. So that’s I, I managed to, because I had experience in aircraft all, you know, I think I was able to work all the people like flight test engineers, the flight crews, the [unclear] like Paul Millet, who is the chief test pilot at the time but he took over from, oh, famous wartime pilot, forgot the, I’ll get it in a minute, anyway I had a good time because I got on well with these people.
BW: And so, looking back at your career and the association you have with Bomber Command, how does it feel now looking back?
NH: Well, occupies my thoughts continuously cause I’m on my own now, I’ve been on my own for nearly elven years, it occupies a tremendous amount of time, I can’t read but I do have listening books which I enjoy and music but otherwise I, I have to use my own thoughts to pass the time and I do it a lot.
BW: And have you been able to keep in touch with progress in terms of the memorials to Bomber Command, how do you feel about the tributes and memorials that have been paid these days?
NH: Well, I love it and Dorothy and I went once to St Paul’s, that would be about, oh, about the year 2000, and I can’t even remember what it was for, is for, I know the chap who was the, oh gracious me, trying to remember, he was head of the air force, and he was also president of Bomber Command.
BW: The name that speaks to my mind are Paul Enteder.
NH: No, long after him, no, long after them.
BW: I see.
NH: He’s about my age.
BW: I see.
NH: Oh Gosh, anyway, we did go to this ceremony at St Paul’s cathedral, it be about three or four years before she died so, be about 2000 or something like that, we had a Lancaster flying over York, we all came out of the service and assembled on the steps, but what was the question?
BW: Have you been to Hyde Park memorial [unclear]?
NH: No, I’d like to, near the Green Park one, you mean?
BW:
NH: No, I haven’t, but I know of it and I and Tony Iveson , who was, this is how I did have a connection with, because he was in 4 Group the time as I was, and he led all the staff to make the memorial, he was on, I heard him on Desert island Discs, he’s dead now, but I couldn’t see it if I went I couldn’t see it.
BW: yeah.
NH: I used to, well, I am a member of the IMF club still but I haven’t’ ben there for three or four years.
BW: How do you, what are your thoughts about the memorial center that’s been set up in Lincoln, the International Bomber Command Center?
NH: I don’t know anything about it.
BW: They have now unveiled the memorial spire and the walls which have the names of all the fifty five thousand and something aircrew who were lost during the war and they are now building, or going to start building the Chadwick Center which will house documents, artifacts, there will be audio recordings as well such as this one, the digital
NH:
BW: That will be in the memorial center in Lincoln
NH: Is that a new purpose build
BW: It’s just outside, it’s on one of the hills outside of Lincoln.
NH: Oh! When is it going to be opened?
BW: The center should be opened later this year
NH: There will be a lot of publicity attached to that one. Pretty sure I can’t see much.
BW: I just wondered whether you’d be informed of it and today
NH: I haven’t been informed of it, I’d like to know about it but I can’t do, I can’t see it, so , you know, provided, I hope I shall hear about it.
BW: Well, I can post the details out to you and the information
NH: Right, yes,
BW: You know
NH: I’d like that. Because if I can’t read, Anthony can read it out to me.
BW: Yeah. So
NH: But I’m restricted in movement and everything else now, I don’t really want to go anywhere.
BW: I see. The, there aren’t any other questions that I have for you, are there any other particular recollections that may have come to mind you wish to talk about or else, anything else I may have missed?
NH: I’m sure there will be when you’re gone [laughs], I can’t, I think, oh, I’ve surprised myself [unclear]
BW: Well, it’s been very interesting to talk to you, you’ve given an awful lot of information
NH: Is it?
BW: [unclear] very happy with that.
NH: [unclear], I seen, I’m very happy with that. That’ll give me a better pleasure anyway.
BW: Thank you very much for your time.
NH: Ok.
BW: [unclear] Thank you.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Neil Harris
Creator
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Brian Wright
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-01-28
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AHarrisNG160128
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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01:53:47 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
Description
An account of the resource
Neil Harris wanted to join the RAF because he was looking for an exciting life experience and an opportunity for further education. He started as a flight mechanic before training as a pilot. Remembers being trained in different locations across the country, from Brighton to Kinloss, in Scotland. Mentions a particular night, when they took off late and had to catch up with the bomber stream. Flew with 48 and 578 Squadron. Shares his memories of D-Day, when he was targeting a gun battery in Northern France. Remembers his life after the war, when he was sent to Indonesia in the 60s during the Borneo confrontation.
Contributor
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Peter Schulze
Spatial Coverage
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Canada
Germany
Great Britain
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Nuremberg
Scotland--Wick
France
France--Ver-Sur-Mer
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-06-05
1944-06-06
50 Squadron
578 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
bombing
bombing of the Normandy coastal batteries (5/6 June 1944)
crewing up
Distinguished Flying Cross
fitter airframe
Gee
ground crew
ground personnel
Halifax
Halifax Mk 3
Hudson
Lincoln
love and romance
Master Bomber
navigator
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operational Training Unit
pilot
promotion
RAF Burn
RAF Halton
RAF Kinloss
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Rufforth
RAF Waddington
Tiger force
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/870/11111/AHextellGJE160104.2.mp3
37d80c475d2be9fba2485ea100ad6789
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
Hextell, George
George Joseph Edwin Hextell
G J E Hextell
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Warrant Officer George Hextell (1141319 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a flight engineer with 51 Squadron and became a prisoner of war.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-01-04
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Hextell, GJE
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
GH: Yes well, I’m [unclear] Hextell, Hextell, I was a WO, my number 1141319.
MJ: So, how did you manage to get into the RAF then?
GH: How did I manage to get into this? Well, as I say, I was conscription, in 1940, all called up, all the people, the young people, and then I was [unclear] going to be dragged into the army, I thought when I got into the RAF I couldn’t be a pilot, cause I thought, I haven’t got the education for that, I going underground staff cause I worked in a factory, Morris motors, in Birmingham and I went into Birmingham and signed up one Saturday lunchtime, I hadn’t finished my job, and I wanted to know what happened to me cause I was called up after two or three days and posted to Warrington Padgate RAF training station where I did my square bashing and all that stuff and as I say, I hadn’t packed my job and eventually my mother had to get into the factory and tell the bastards I had joined, what did he do that for? They said, you know, there was a job here for him, if he wants it, I thought, no, so I trained as a flight mechanic, cause I was interested in wheels [unclear] and cars and engines and I went to after about three or four months at Padgate I was posted to number 5 school of technical training at Locking in Somerset and I went on a course on engines and aircraft there, you know, and I was there till end of 1941 and I passed out after that was posted to Scotland, Castletown, right up in the north of Scotland, you could almost see Norway, from where we were but we were only there about two or three weeks and [unclear] library, not doing much, any odd jobs and then we were eventually posted, as I say, to number 5 school of technical training Somerset, big long train ride down from up in Scotland and, I was there till the end of 1941 as I say when I got posted to Scotland and all I did, I worked and see all these different engines and aircraft, you know, worked on the Merlin engine, you know, and when I’d finished that they sent me to a maintenance echelon in Kent, [unclear] End, I worked on the maintenance echelon, squadrons came and went but I, we’re always permanent there like, you know, and Spitfires and all I could remember during there the Battle of Dieppe, when they landed in Dieppe in 1942, that was in September, that was disastrous, I remember that morning and I got up early, about five o’clock as something was on but nobody, oh, the second front started but that’s what it was, it turned out to be, Dieppe and they after the German [unclear] headquarters at Lorient and of course a lot of casualties, a lot of Canadian soldiers took part, a lot got killed, lot got captured and [unclear] after that we went to, so Dieppe, we just servicing the Spitfires that’s all, I was an engineman and we just served the Merlin engine up you know and it was good but, stop there for [unclear]. Well it was [unclear] at Gravesend but one day the engineer officer called us all in and wanted to know who wanted volunteer as flight engineers on the four engine aircraft that were coming into service, the Lanc, Halifax and the Stirling and of course there was three of us there, I put me name down for it, and I said, oh I can’t do any [unclear] but I was the only one who passed the medical, we had to go up to Euston House in London, aircrew candidate selection board and they explained to us all about how to fly, you know, [unclear] up and dark nights and flying over the oceans and that, you know and [unclear] and all this kind of thing you know but I went through with it and I was sent to St Athans in South Wales near [unclear], Cardiff and I did a course there and these four engine bombers would come in and they what they wanted to know was, there was a great big crowd of us volunteered and all the chaps going in for the Lancaster, you know, cause it got a famous name but and the squadron leader, I remember, he got us all lined up in the hangar, a big long queue of us and he said to stop any argument about who wants to go on, which was the best aircraft. He divided us up into three and he said that’s it, Stirlings, Halifaxes, Lancasters. Well, I got the Halifax, I went into the Halifax, and that’s how I came to be trained, trained at St Athans. And that’s a while I was posted to Marston Moor into Yorkshire and that was a conversion unit, number ten conversion unit and where pilots and aircrew met up and cause you see the crew I got in eventually had been flying on Whitleys then at St Eval in Cornwall on Coastal Command but they all stuck together and of course I was coming up [unclear] a conversion unit so it was there I turned up with them and became the flight engineer and of course there was seven of us in the crew, pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, rear gunner, mid upper gunner and all like that and that’s how I came to be with 51 Squadron. But it was only [unclear] I don’t know what they’d done before but, quite a bit before we went on our operations but the first operation we went on was mine laying off the Dutch coast, dropping mines in the sea and we used to have a naval officer explaining how important it was just [unclear] dropping it in the right place and the right height and all this kind of thing, that was the first flight I flew but of course I did many, we did many hours [unclear] circuit and bombs training, I mean the pilot was, all the crew was getting trained and I was getting trained as well in [unclear] that’s how I came to be with them but as I say the 51 squadron was only like just four men, and there was not many before, you see, you know a lot of names but I didn’t know many because I wasn’t there that long and I went there in the end of January ’43 and we went on, I went on two bombing raids with a crew, with our crew to Lorient in France and one night I went with my own crew and another time I stood in for somebody who was absent for another crew, they’re all officers, pilots, navigators, they was all officers, and I flew with them and I remember the first night we went on, we got back at about three o’clock in the morning and we couldn’t get back to our [unclear] I was stationed at Snaith in Yorkshire, East Yorkshire and couldn’t get back on our own drome so we had to land at Stowe-in-the-Wold in Gloucestershire and everybody, I think it was the first time I’ve seen these giant four engine bombers, you know, and all the people came out and looked at it, they were a big aircraft it was and after that I came to be [unclear] but as I say we did two operations in Lorient but that’s all I did and I just saw the operation mine laying, two to Lorient and on the fourth operation we did on Dusseldorf on the 27th of January ‘43 and I thought, oh, blimey, that’s done it, cause the briefing officer told us it was a heavily defended area, well we knew that because of all the Ruhr and all the places around there, Essen and all those places, I mean, it’s taken a heavy toll of our aircraft but of course it, well, it didn’t bother me and you know, but I thought we’ll get through it alright. But we were shot down over Holland, got over the North Sea alright into Holland, never heard a word, everything quiet and then next thing, I was sitting, I was standing in the middle of the fuselage, putting a flare in a flare shoot for taking photos with the cameras, you know, when the bombs dropped and whilst I stood there all of a sudden on the starboard side, right that at [unclear] machine gun bullets you know [mimics machine gun fire] couldn’t believe it, you know, couldn’t understand it, [unclear] one side or the other, he caught the port engine which controls all the hydraulics and pumps and that and the aircraft and I thought, oh, that was, looking into the astrodome it caught fire, the wing caught fire and I was horrified and the pilot was trying to save it but the aircraft you know dodged about and that but we were going down and we were all rushing, putting our parachutes on and the next thing I knew was I was flying through the air and the second pilot was a New Zealander, he explained it he could he’s written a little book about from where he came from in New Zealand who landed off, and as we were blown out, I was blown out, there was three of us out of the seven and three escaped, the New Zealander, our wireless operator and myself, the other four chaps got killed, pilot, navigator, the bomb aimer and rear gunner. I’ve never heard a word from them at all. And it was in Mill in Holland, place called Mill and it was five past six took off and from up in Yorkshire, ten past eight I was in a prison cell in Holland. Germans wanted to know, you know, why come bombing our women and children, and all I said, well, for the simple reason that you are coming and bombing our women and children and then of course they [unclear] interrogated me and I was there about a week I think and we went to the Dulag Luft interrogation centre and were there a while. Then they sent us to Amsterdam in a big prison, a big prison or whatever it was, big [unclear] and we were locked up in solitary confinement and had a lot of questions asked, you know, and were there about a week and one Sunday they transferred us from Amsterdam onto a train to take us to in [unclear] was Stalag VIII-B but they renamed it later Stalag 344 because Sagan, the Stalag Luft 3 where the air, the air people, where the aircrew prisoners went, they were full, the two, to many, so I had to go to a Stalag but this was at Lamsdorf in Upper Silesia near the Polish border, what’s the name? [unclear] I think or something like that and that was where I ended up but I know the night we flew, we had a brand new aircraft, it had only come from the manufacturers the day before but it hadn’t got a mid-upper turret [unclear] you got [unclear] hadn’t got a mid-upper turret on this particular one, the wing commander said it will give you more speed and all the rest of it you know and [unclear] he didn’t need a mid-upper gunner, so Taffy Jones, our mid-upper gunner he didn’t fly with us that night, he got away with it but as I say, I mentioned a second pilot, but I forgot to mention that before we took off at six o’clock at night from Snaith and staff come up and the group captain came up with this chap and he was a New Zealander, Jack Cardey and he said, I want this chap to fly with you tonight, he said, it’ll give him a bit of experience and that was the first time we met him and he got on board and that was his experience, he became a POW, and I’ve heard from him once or twice but not lately but yes, that’s how I came to be in Poland. Yes, capacity of the Halifax I think it was eleven hundred and ninty gallons but the first flight engineer, the idea was to run the engines as quickly as possible, to have the throttles open all the time, you know, to give, put [unclear] and get the engines to performing properly and another thing before take-off you were testing your engines before one by one and ramp them up to about three thousand ribs [unclear] a minute and then switch one of the magnetos off, there’d be a drop of one of the rears, I think, what was it so many percent, five percent was it, you were allowed if you that went below that [unclear] was faulty, yes, all the four engines [unclear] two magneto on each side of the Merlin was a marvellous engine [unclear] this is a backdrop somewhere ok, ok for take-off. Yes, it was quite an experience but we got through it alright and as I say with Jack Cardey, second pilot who flew with us, he didn’t act as a pilot, as I say, he was only a passenger, he was more than a passenger than I was. But he was in the Royal New Zealand Air Force and I think he’d come from Wellingtons and flown Wellingtons before. And of course at Snaith where I was stationed, 51 Squadron, they’d done all our operations from there and we hadn’t been there for long, as I say, there was only like just four men squadron up and I didn’t know any of the people that went before, you know, I mean, you just mentioned I knew a lot of people who [unclear], well I wouldn’t know, I think I knew about two, a Canadian, [unclear] Stewart or somebody like that and I know I went to Berlin one night and back or something, Slim Stewart, he was a Canadian, but no, as I say, I didn’t have enough time there to get to know anybody, I knew the group captain Grey, he was a station commander, I was in b flights squadron leader Moore, [unclear] Moore, h flights was name Russell, squadron leader Russell, and quite alright, yes I was, but as I say, we didn’t do many operations but [unclear] good the Germans were, night fighters, defences and that and as I say, we didn’t know this fighter was creeping up on us, never heard a word, never heard a word from the rear gunnery and I was horrified as I stood there and saw the tracer coming through the fuselage, you know, it caught fire, but as I say, we were blown out, that how [unclear] Netherland the cottage to walk up to the door and by [unclear] you do see these [unclear] but I was found myself floating through the air, and I saw lights going out in front of me going round and round a big roulette wheel, always remember it, and I was [unclear] I better pull this, the ripcord and I landed as I thought was a field but it was a bit of a built up area than that and I laid there for a bit I thought [unclear] a fine death or [unclear] something like that you know people come running up the Dutch farmer and he came up to me and I said, where am I? Where am I? And he said, Nederland, Nederland, I thought, where the hell is that, suddenly dropped the Netherlands, you know, and up to his house, he’s got two young daughters, they’re all clever [unclear] they brought [unclear] and money and souvenirs and [unclear] but they said that there was a couple of priests there who [unclear] quickly, they said, we’ll hide this, you know, that [unclear] a parachute and I said, we’ll have to notify the Dutch police, I presume they had to do it with any prisoners, there was a Lancaster shot down in the same area at the same time cause they picked the crew up with us and we were in this Dutch policeman’s house, he’s a Dutch police and I said notify them and he said, well, we’ll have to notify the Germans and they sent a minibus and when they opened up the doors, there was George Farmer, our wireless operator, he was a member of our crew and he’s a New Zealander and also a Lancaster crew as well, I think they were all intact, they picked them up in the same area and next thing I say I was being interrogated at a local station wanted to know where I’d come from, what the squadron was, bomb load was carrying, what [unclear] was and everything else, where you’re stationed, you know, and all that kind of business and yeah and as I say, I spent the night [unclear] and fetched up in front of this chap of the Luftwaffe, he wanted to know every day where we come from and what we were doing and all the rest of it, next thing we went to Dulag Luft [unclear] interrogation the treating of all the and then Dulag Luft, went to Amsterdam and I saw the big army place there, our second pilot, he’s been since the end of the war [unclear] travel I don’t know but I mean [unclear] we’ve been to Holland and we’ve sorted the place out with the war graves commission, we’ve been to the scene where our four chaps were buried because we had to identify them, cause the Germans said, you have to come and identify your crew and that got to [unclear] a church or somewhere and they took us down and there was four wooden coffins and there were the bodies lying in there and I said early, most of identify to let the people know, you know, but I couldn’t look at them because it upset me but [unclear] Farmer, our wireless op, he was thirteen years older than me, a bit more mature and he identified them, apparently they are buried in an air force base but after a while we in Holland that they buried them in this place where we went on a weekend in May and May is a big [unclear] first two or three days in May there were all flags flying out in Holland and, you know, as I know you come from England they will treat you well and really good. [unclear] Well, what I would like to do is to, you mentioned one chap [unclear] where he went to, I want to know how many miles we did from when we came after the camp in 1945 on that march, I mean, the names of the first, we went to Lamsdorf on the 22nd of January 1945, we could hear the Russian gunfire on the Eastern Front [unclear] and an Anson came over the Channel to evacuate the camp and we got ready to move out, we got nothing, bits of food stored up, which we took with us and out to the dark then they found us a barn, they herded us all in this barn, that’s where we slept and that’s we did, [unclear] months and months and as I say, it was the 22nd of January and [unclear] about April time before we never knew where we were like you know, I didn’t know then, I should have loved to know, I know the name of some of the important towns as Gorlitz, went from Lamsdorf to Gorlitz, oh, that was a terrible place, [unclear] Russian prisoners there, they treated them like, well, dogs, [unclear], never forget, filthy place [unclear] about a week and then moved us on the road, we never went to another camp, we went to, I can remember Jena, you know where, there are the famous optical lense [unclear] and what is the other place, where they did the porcelain? In German, Meissen [unclear], Meissen, heard about Meissen ceramic wares, marvellous, innit? [unclear] To plot the route we took and what we covered many miles [unclear] I said, end of January in April ’45 and the Germans got to be [unclear] you know and they used to catch you every morning, every night but I was with three of the [unclear] family wireless operator and we met up with another chap who was a [unclear] bloke some kind of destroyer in the Mediterranean and he decided to leave the company [unclear] like you know and we stayed, they put us in a barn one night and we stayed up there all the next day until it got dark, then we headed across the fields cause one got a compass, we could hear the Russian gunfire on our right in the East we could hear the Allied gunfire, the Americans and British on the left and we headed towards them and I know it was a terrible cold [unclear] in the [unclear] it was one of the coldest winters that I experienced.
MJ: Did you have a coat this time?
GH: Pardon?
MJ: Were you lucky enough to have a coat?
GH: A coat?
MJ: Yeah.
GH: Yes, I had a grey coat, yes, had a grey coat and one of us got a [unclear], a little [unclear] or a little saucepan. And I remember, the next morning when we woke, we [unclear] in this forest, we woke up, decided to have a cup of tea, [unclear] now we had a cup of tea, we lit a fire, made this tea and after a bit we sent a German, young German officer coming across, we thought, [unclear], this is the end, you know, [unclear] come around and put you hands up but all he said, he knew we were British and all he said was, don’t forget to put the fire out when you’re finished cause the smoke will attract aircraft in [unclear] always remembered saying that and we thought, oh, we got away with it, he got his Luger on the side, you know, he could have shot us easy, there’s four of us and the next day we saw a bloke, we were near a village, we saw a bloke with a big loaf of bread, a big cart with a loaf of bread, and we wondered where this bread had come from and we stopped him and asked him and he says, American tanks and troops so many kilometres down there, is the Third American army, the sixth army division, the Third American Army, General Patton and it was they who took care of us, they wanted us to go with them, they got a spearhead going through towards [unclear], come with us, they said, I said, no, we want to go home, we want to get back to England and they took us day by day, with these big six wheeler transport used to bring the supplies in, they took us back a few miles each day towards Paris and that, that’s where we finished up in Paris, one [unclear] did the time, that flew us from Paris to, forget the place now, I remember we had lunch [unclear] fish our fish is the best of all the Sunday lunch I’ve ever known, interrogated as quarter [unclear] as regards the performance of the aircraft, any spies, any stool pigeons, anybody like that, it was a bloke, forget his name, dammit, he was notorious but then I knew all about him and I don’t know what happened to him. But yes that was Lamsdorf for [unclear] yes. As I say, German officers sent for us, sent for me one day and in the main office and there was a German guard behind me walking with his rifle always walking behind you [unclear] shoot me but he wanted to know what my attitude was to the Russians, what my attitude was to the Russians, now they were dead scared of the Russians, yes, dead scared of the Russians, what do you think? I said, [unclear] if they attacked England, you know, I joined up and attacked them like to defend the country [unclear] saying that you know, wanted to know what my attitude was [unclear], I don’t know If I was the only one but they sent me two or three times and I, he was American cause he said to me, he said I’m a goddam American in the German, the German army, you know, and I could say, what are you doing in the German army [unclear] and things like that [unclear] I don’t know but that did happen, yes, want to know what your attitude was, what the British attitude to the Russians were, was alright, the Russians were alright, yes [coughs]. [unclear] to the camp, the barb wire, look out through the barb wire, see the typical German trees and the greenery enough in the spring and summer was nice, in the winter was bloody awful, I mean, there’s a [unclear] and you could hear the dogs patrolling the outside of the guard [unclear] you know, and there are all lights [unclear] and you went in the door of the hut, was a great big bulk kind of thing that they used in the night in case you had to [unclear] you know you couldn’t [unclear] the compound the [unclear] conditions were bloody helpless, just a [unclear] shed with a lot of wooden seats with [unclear], no cover, it’s not awful in the summer, terrible at [unclear] you know and it was whilst speaking earlier about the Dieppe prisoners, the Canadians, a lot of French Canadians killed and I reckoned, the Germans reckoned that our people took the German prisoners and chained them up with the result that we finished up in chains, you could just get under your pocket, handcuff [unclear] and you walk about like that, you sat, you sat [unclear] every morning, detail two or three blokes [unclear] big [unclear] all the chain across and bring them up from the office and then put them on you know, you walk about like that all day and if you wanted to tend to the nightshift, you get somebody of the German to unlock them, [unclear], we did all that, did all that and the parcels, [unclear] they were coming through but of course had always blame the RAF for bombing the railways or the Russians, was always blaming them, [unclear] the parcels, what you expect, we can’t get the transport, you’re bombing the railways and all that business but when we did get them, I mean, used to go down and I mean, I forget what country [unclear] parcel [unclear] us but perhaps put a pair of socks inside, just a pair of socks and [unclear] chocolate and cigarettes and of course the Germans all that when they used to go in the office and collect the parcels, this is a private parcel [unclear] that I [unclear] and cigarettes had stuck in [unclear] any messages inside and things like that you know and yeah and oh there’s a lot of chocolate, well of course that was the currency, soap and chocolate, you could get away with it, if you could bribe the Germans with that definitely and one of the blokes did and then another thing, you could go out on a working party if you wanted, if you felt that way inclined, go out on a working party, you’d pick somebody who looked you like [unclear] same way [unclear] and all this stuff and [unclear] identity, I’d go and [unclear] you [unclear] on a German farm, you know, work on a farm, get food and all that, get as much food as I wanted, you know, [unclear] like that, yeah, but we had the chance to do all that but [unclear] what you do to your [unclear] and I [unclear] by going, you know, to work you’re helping them, if you’re not, you’re not helping them and that was the idea but the parcels obviously they [unclear] parcel pretty good and milk and all that kind of stuff and there used to be one [unclear] every week was the M & V meat and veg bourse, they decided the cook house, the British blokes working in the cook house [unclear] German, they take a tin of meat and vegetable out to you parcel every week and cook it up for you kind of business that used to be great but of course there was a lot of racket going down there with blokes pinching more than one tin and all that, you say lot of that going on meat and veg always [unclear] and but we still lived alright work in twos parcel you get a parcel two a week [unclear] Tuesday or Thursday I think he does and collect the parcel and two of us living on the one parcel for two or three days and they try and get another one [unclear] part of our beds, there’s a little, have a little cupboard and a shelf and tins of this and tins of that and tins the other and cause I remember when [laughs] we had, came over the tannoy that we got load the camp at two o’clock in the afternoon the German commandant came over and he said that, you know, you gotta be ready for two o’clock, it was all queuing [unclear] all blankets and all that, you know, and we got tins of condense milk and all that kind of stuff [unclear] you know I remember I was sick of the bloody[unclear] wouldn’t let it fall under the Germans or under the Russians and, yeah, we took all this food and when they threw us, the first night when they threw us into this barn, great big barn, with straw on the floor and no lights and anything, no [unclear] and nothing like that and I felt sick and I wanted to be sick and I remember I got some new handkerchiefs had been more than seven days before and I was sitting all these handkerchiefs and that, you know, I’ll always remember that, sick as an [unclear], get up the next morning, you don’t know where you are going, what you were doing, I asked for a drink of water, no one would give you one, someone would give you drink of water, others wouldn’t, had promised you some [unclear] potatoes, cooked potatoes in big wicker baskets at the end of the day but you never got at the end of the day, you never got them, cause I [unclear] one or two of the German officers I reported it [unclear] one of them books down there I mentioned his name [unclear] what his name was but what happened I don’t know but they weren’t very, as I say, they never treated us, they never treated us too bad, anybody getting beat up or anything, cause lots of people, as you say, [unclear] to us, French Canadians captured at Dieppe, there were Sikhs and Indians and all kinds of, Palestinians [unclear] a year, the interrogator, he was a Palestinian, [unclear] Zelba, I don’t remember his name, and he used to do all our deals for [unclear], he used to get us a bit more coal to put [unclear] brickets to put on the stove, in the [unclear], you know to keep warm and we used to give him cigarettes and [unclear] and he used to bribe the German guard, he could speak German, he was born in Hamburg, as I say, he joined, he was with the RAF in Cyprus, and when Cyprus fell of course he was captured [unclear] Germany [unclear] collect cigarettes and all that, that’s how we used to get our stuff, listen to the radio every night [unclear] the bulletin come round, anybody caught with radios [unclear] every so often they would come and have a search they turn you all outside on a day like this, they turn outside early in the morning and they’d be out there all the bloody day, turning all your bed was ripped out, all that, you know [unclear] and put in detention, you know, and he ran away and the Jerry guard on a, it was on a Sunday and we was all lined up outside we saw all this going on and he ran away the chap did and the German guard got down on his knees and shot this bloke you know, he told him to halt and all that but he wouldn’t and that was going out on working party, yeah, but of course we gotta a senior British medical officer in the camp and he used to look after and he complained [unclear] and the leader of the camp was a regimental sergeant major [unclear] during some [unclear] and he had the badge at the back of the camp because [unclear] artillery [unclear] once and they always wore the at the back [unclear] he’s a camp leader but, you see, he outer perimeter [unclear] look at the people strolling and on a Sunday afternoon in the summer, I was looking and also he was looking [unclear] and former [unclear] and they had a dance round there and you could study, got to night school and [unclear] did a bit of that but [unclear] a bit smoking and could have a bit of walk now and again, you know, yeah, waiting for the news every night how far the Russians had got, how far, yeah, it was an experience, but as I say, really [unclear] one thing trying to get [unclear] more to do a book on the great escape or something but it was written by the one of them Tornado pilots or navigator who got shot down and of course [unclear] the forty’s war was lighter and he [unclear] but [unclear] I can’t read properly although I do a lot of reading. I met a German air force officer and he stopped and talked to us, spoke perfectly English and he said he was sorry for what we’ve been treated and he got us for that night, he got us in his barracks kind of place, like a German naffy, we [unclear], we could eat a German eat [unclear] in their naffy and he got us some brickets to put on the stove and there was straw on the floor, pallet on the floor, and pack of ten or twenty Polish cigarettes [unclear] concession [unclear] for what we’ve been through and we’ve be going through cause that was a [unclear] German, I remember I loved to know where we went and how many miles w covered, I never got to know that [unclear] laughing but I was a bit more serious on that and of course I combed me hair and do myself up but when our working party went out that was the main gates past the office where all the girls worked, checking identities and that cause look at your photo and, you know, oh that’s not you, you’re somebody else and used to be play the band and then march out and I knew a couple of guards, officers, forget what I was in, was in the cavalry, I was six foot, very look smart when I went out and that was to intimidate the Germans cause I looked a real scruffy lad. I think it was on the route to, perhaps on the route to Lamsdorf and they put us in a waiting room and there was all German soldiers in their uniform sitting, all [unclear] drinking and eating but we had to head up the corner, was about half a dozen or more of us and I remember the pipes was on, was warm in there, I mentioned it was warm and this one German, he says, we’ll make you sweat before long, you know, make it hot for you, always remember that, we were there cornered up in the corner, no sitting at the tables, long long waiting [unclear] the station in the waiting room, no, they wouldn’t let us sit at the table, on the chairs [unclear] on the floor and when they took us to one Sunday lunch on they took us to get on the train to go to across to this camp, all the Dutch people was crowding round us cause we stood there in a circle, was guards there with the rifles just waiting for the train to come and the Dutch people would inquisitive, you know, and I was given just a [unclear] and laughing at the Germans backs, you know, [unclear] that them kind of things, you could see [unclear] definitely.
MJ: On behalf of the International Bomber Command I’d like to thank George Hextell, Warrant Officer, from Squadron 51 for his recording on the 4th of January 2016 at one thirty. Once again, thank you again.
GH: Right.
MJ: And that was one hour and
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with George Hextell
Creator
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Mick Jeffery
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-01-04
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AHextellGJE160104
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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00:55:04 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
George Hextell joined the RAF as a flight engineer and flew operations with 51 Squadron on Halifaxes. After being shot down over Holland, he became a prisoner of war. Gives a detailed account of how his capture, imprisonment and liberation. Describes various episodes from the POW camp Stalag VIIIB: living conditions; food barter; witnessing an attempted escape.
Contributor
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Peter Schulze
Spatial Coverage
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France
Great Britain
Poland
Netherlands
France--Dieppe
Poland--Łambinowice
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1942
1945
51 Squadron
aircrew
Dulag Luft
final resting place
flight engineer
flight mechanic
ground crew
Halifax
mechanics engine
mine laying
prisoner of war
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Padgate
RAF Snaith
RAF St Athan
recruitment
shot down
Spitfire
Stalag 8B
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1001/11341/BHiltonPHiltonPv1.2.pdf
4df75a71f26ae98e9ae65a7e04afb7fd
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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Joseph, David
D Joseph
Description
An account of the resource
22 items. The collection concerns Flight Sergeant David Joseph (1576383, Royal Air Force) and contains his decorations, log book, memoirs, correspondence and a list of prisoners of war at Stalag Luft 4. He flew operations as a pilot with 76 Squadron from RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor until his aircraft was shot down on 18 March 1944 on an operation to Frankfurt and he became a prisoner of war. The collection also contains a letter to Mrs Ramsay about the loss of her son, Flying Officer Kenneth Ramsay and photographs of his final resting place. <br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Brian Joseph and catalogued by Barry Hunter.<br /><br />Additional information on Kenneth Grant Ramsay is available via the <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/223173/">IBCC Losses Database</a>.
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
2018-05-22
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
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Joseph, D
Transcribed document
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Transcription
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[Blank front page of booklet]
[Page break]
Written by Paul Hilton.
[Underlined] CHIEFY [/underlined]
On the night of 1st June, 1942, Bomber Command mounted the second of the now famous thousand bomber raids on Germany. The night before, amidst much publicity, we had taken part in the first thousand raid on Cologne, my first as Captain of a 4 engined Halifax.
All 35 Squadron (at Linton-on-Ouse) returned safely that night and we all felt that at last we were doing something positive to help the war effort.
The Germans were somewhat taken by surprise and our overall casualties were low considering the number of aircraft taking part.
On 1st June our target was to be Essen in the Ruhr valley with Krupps as the pinpoint.
Tremendous excitement and enthusiasm was general with ground crews as well as aircrews and we all attended briefing and prepared for the take off with hopes for another successful show.
In due course we were taken to our dispersal point in the usual trucks where we unloaded parachutes, harnesses, charts etc., and duly went through the run up and check procedures. We had air tested our aircraft that morning and everything was still functioning satisfactorily, so in due course form 700 was presented to ne for my signature by the LAC of our ground crew.
I signed and then with all four engines running we started the slow crawl from our dispersal point towards the end of the main runway.
We must have moved about 50 yards when one of the ground crew ran in front of us furiously waving two torches. I pulled up smoothly, strict RT silence of course, and soon someone shouted up through the front escape hatch “return to dispersal.” We managed to turn the heavily laden Halifax and return, where I was told to switch off engines. Flight Sergeant (Chiefy) McKay, a dour little Scot then appeared and told us we had a glycol leak in our port inner engine. How did he know?
[Page break]
- 2 -
He said he could smell it. He had just happened to be walking behind our aircraft when he caught a whiff. No doubt, we couldn’t go.
I was furious, how long to fix it. Not tonight, too bad.
The rest of the Squadron were all taking off and disappearing into a black sky, and soon all was quiet. We trooped back disconsolately to the Sergeants Mess feeling very dejected and sorry for ourselves. Once again, our Squadron operated without loss, only this time we had missed out.
On reflection, however, we would almost certainly have lost that engine either during take off or very soon afterwards and the thought has often gone through my mind, would a 20 year old pilot with just 400 hours in his log book have coped with an aircraft full of fuel and 6,500 lb of HE and incendiary bombs. I know I would have tried a landing had we managed to get airborne, but who knows.
I can’t remember if I thanked “Chiefy” for almost certainly saving us. I don’t think I ever bought him a drink in the Mess. If he is still around I should like to do it sometime. You see we didn’t have much time, we were shot down the next night, so perhaps it didn’t matter much after all.
[Page break]
[Underlined] Gone for a Burton [/underlined]
Early in May 1942 I returned to my old station “Linton on Ouse” in Yorkshire, where I had previously served with 58 Squadron on Whitley Vs. I had been with “58” from October 1941 until they joined Coastal Command at St. Eval in Cornwall early in April 1942. At this point I elected to convert to Halifaxes at “Marston Moor” near York and managed to get posted back to Linton where I joined 35 Squadron.
With 58 I had survived the winter as a second pilot, sitting helplessly in the right hand seat for five operations and in March had successfully completed the customary two “Nursery Trips” as Captain.
During May I was crewed up and together we did a number of cross countries and other details working up towards the big thousand bomber raids starting with Cologne on 30th May.
Both my parents lived in Seremban, Malaya and with the entry of Japan into the war, they had been forced to make their way with other Europeans to the Island Fortress of Singapore. The surrender stunned us all and I had anxiously awaited any news of my parents whereabouts.
I had lived through the winter at Linton and had no illusions as to our chances of survival on Bomber Command. Both 58 and 35 had had their share of losses. Of the course of six pilots at Driffield just after Christmas on a blind approach procedures course, I was by then the only survivor.
Singapore had fallen in February and the chances of either of my parents reaching safety by now seemed somewhat remote but with the complete lack of news there was nevertheless a remote chance that one or the other might still turn up.
I thought in that case, particularly my mother might need some financial assistance which would ultimately be my responsibility. If I was around, I would be able to arrange a dependant’s allowance, but in my absence, this might be a bit difficult.
[Page break]
- 2 -
I decided to seek the advice of the Squadron Accounts Officer and had an interview with the Flying Officer Assistant i/c Accounts. He listened to my unusual story and was obviously at a loss to comment. He was used to straightforward questions with answers neatly tabulated in his little book or covered by the syllabus of his Chartered Accountants examinations and seemed reluctant to pass this on to higher authority. He paused for a while and then at last drew himself up in his chair and with great deliberation said, “Well Sergeant, if you are afraid of going for a Burton, why don’t you make a will?
My total assets, £25 in the Post Office Savings Bank and a broken down Austin 7 in the car park, seemed unlikely to be much help in the support of either parent for any length of time and I felt that further discussion was unlikely to lead anywhere so I thanked him kindly and took my leave.
I intended bringing the matter up with “Welfare”. I believe we had someone in that capacity, or more to the point, Wing Commander Marks or my flight commander, Sq.Ldr. Peveler. I knew either of these two would have raised the roof, but I determined to await an appropriate moment.
I had often wondered what “gong for a burton” was really like and very soon on the night of 2nd June I found out.
Incidentally, neither of my parents were in need of any help I could have given them. My father stayed the whole time in Changi Jail, Singapore, but Mother nearly made it. She was on board one of the last ships to leave Singapore, the “Vyner Brook”, a small coastal steamer loaded with refugees which was bombed off the south east coast of Sumatra. Mostly women and children, they were all interned in camps at “MuntoK” and “Palembang” where more than half of them, including my mother, succumbed to the rigours of malnutrition and tropical diseases.
Bomber Command crews had a slim chance of survival whilst actually flying but once we became “Kriegies” (POWs), thanks to a comparatively civilised enemy and thank God also for the Red Cross, most of us lived to tell the tale.
[Page break]
[Underlined] Curse my luck. [/underlined]
Not many of us fighting on the Allied side ever thought we would welcome the sight of advancing German troops. In my case, I reckon they arrived just in time to save my life.
I was pilot of a “Halifax” returning from a raid on Essen in the Ruhr valley on the night of 2nd June, 1942 when we were unfortunately jumped by three JU 88 night fighters. It was a clear night with a full moon, our exhaust flames must have been clearly visible for a considerable distance and the fighters soon made short shrift of both our inner engines. Our two gunners put up a spirited fight despite the unequal battle between out 303 rifle bullets and the enemy’s canon fire, but the action was inexplicably broken off, leaving us limping homewards on our two outer engines.
We were just sorting ourselves out when alas our starboard outer developed an internal glycol leak, whether it was overstressed or due to enemy action we shall never know, but this meant the end and I had to give the inevitable order, “Bail Out”.
We were a bit low by then and when my turn came, the thought of ditching on what looked like a patch of swamp or water seemed my best chance. I turned off course towards this area but very soon found this to be ground mist obscuring a row of trees and some houses. Too late, I was on the point of a stall and mushed into a house. The starboard wing was ripped off at the root and the remainder of the aircraft spun around in a flat cartwheel through 180 degrees. I was in fact thrown backwards in my seat.
I must have been unconscious for a second or so as when I came round, the port outer engine had just caught fire. I then had a violent struggle with the escape hatch over my seat. It moved at last and then I managed to crawl out onto the top of the fuselage and jump down onto the port wing. The dinghy was inflating and I just had enough presence of mind to grab the package of iron rations as I passed.
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My first reaction was to get clear as quickly as possible, there were still several hundred gallons of high octane too close to the burning engine, so I started running towards the cover of the trees I could see almost alongside in the moonlight.
I ran between two of them and was just about to go along the road that they were bordering when there was a piercing scream of “Halt” from right behind me. Almost immediately I was prodded with a viscious [sic] jab from a rifle muzzle in the small of my back.
A terrified lone German sentry had just escaped being hit by the Halifax which by now was nicely ablaze and too darned close for safety. My captor didn’t seem to be aware of our imminent danger and continued prodding and screaming in a hysterical manner. I wondered where his trigger finger was. The safety catch would certainly be off and guns, I was always taught, were dangerous and shouldn’t on principle ever be pointed at anyone. My greatest fear was that he would let the darned thing off by accident. He was so excited that anything could happen. He might do it on purpose, “The Englishman started to run”, no one would disbelieve him. Perhaps his family had been bombed in Cologne three nights before. Such thoughts raced through my mind. The fire was getting hold of the port wing and I knew all those gallons of high octane were bound to go up at any moment. Any minor explosion would make him jump and pull the trigger inadvertently. The prodding and screaming continued, how long could this last, my all too short twenty years seemed almost over. A pity, I had so much to experience and done so little. This was the moment of truth. I felt so helpless and had no control of the situation and this was when I really knew what fear was. I was hot but the sweat running down my back was cold. A minor bang, one of the outer wing tanks had blown up and another prod. I was still there, but how long could this go on. Suddenly a torch shone in the distance and I heard some shouts and saw another torch. Fortunately my sterical [sic] captor saw and heard them too, and the tension began slowly to ease, eventually after what seemed an eternity, I was surrounded and someone had the sense to move us all away to a safer distance. Just in time, the main wing tanks went up with a muffled roar and we could all feel the blast of heat. My original captor melted into the background. I never even saw him but could hear his excited story being related in the distance.
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I stood for a while with my liberators and we watched the remains of the Halifax burning furiously. A fearsome sight, one I hope never to get too close to. I remember one of the troops found my parachute harness and “Mae West” life jacket which I had dumped in the field in my haste and I was then led off to the local barracks. I was later to find out this was in St. Leonard near Brecht in Belgium, right in the middle of an intense curfew area, literally crawling with German troops.
I was taken inside and led to a standard German army double tier bunk bed, complete with wood wool palliasse, a type I was to get to know so well over the next three years. I suppose I must have been suffering from a certain amount of shock as I lay down, boots and all and went out like a light.
I didn’t have time to curse my luck at having been shot down, but later I came to realise that far from being unlucky I had in fact survived a whole succession of miracles in the short space of less than half an hour.
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[Underlined] FOR YOU THE WAR IS OVER [/underlined]
By now we were some way inside Germany en route from Cologne to Frankfurt in a corridor type railway coach. We were free to wander along to the toilet and our three guards had completely relaxed. They undid their belts and left their revolvers lying on the seats. After one visit to the toilet I actually sat for some time on one of these weapons and only moved off because it was somewhat uncomfortable.
I was dressed in the usual clothing, battledress, submarine sweater and, of course, the inevitable flying boots, the old green canvas type, fur lined, in which one shuffled along as if wearing oversized carpet slippers. The thought of being able to walk any distance, let alone run from a train in broad daylight, was quite out of the question.
When first captured in Belgium the story was quite different. I was pounced upon within minutes of stepping from the blazing wreckage of the Halifax, and the local German army unit and the Feldgendarmarie kept a very close watch on my every movement. They handed me over to the Luftwaffe in Antwerp airport who continued the process. Sitting on a toilet seat looking at a jackboot keeping the door open is an unforgettable experience and quite puts one off the job in hand.
Our guards on the train were flying types, one Feldwebel (Sergeant) and two Obergefreighters (sort of Corporals). One spoke a little French and with him I tried to carry on something of a conversation. I learned he was a Navigator and had recently seen service on the eastern front. He and his comrades would get a couple of days leave near home after escorting us to Dulag Luft, the reception and interrogation centre at Frankfurt.
The time was early June 1942. The Germans were at the height of their success. Tobruk had recently fallen and their troops were at their furthest points in the Caucasus. Our position was not encouraging. Singapore had
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fallen only four months previously, but we still endeavoured to keep up the appearance of high spirits, even though we knew we were in for a long wait. Sooner or later the obvious remark had to come. My navigator friend grinned from ear to ear and said, “For you the war is over”. I smiled back and said, “Yes, aren’t we lucky, but for you it has not yet started.”
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[Underlined] GOOD APPETITE [/underlined]
We always called him Cyril. This wasn’t his real name but that of the chap with whom he had swopped identities. I was one of the large mob of new Kriegies brought in to Luft 3 Sagan just after the thousand bomber raids on Cologne and Essen in May and June 1942. We were housed in 39 and 40 Blocks, but somehow a few old Kriegies from Lamsdorf, the big Army Stalag, had been pushed in with us. Most of the batch from Lamsdorf were swop overs.
When Goering decided to bring all the RAF Kriegies together at Sagan, quite a mixed bag was collected and Cyril was one of these. What his real name was I have quite forgotten. It was unpronounceable. He was from Israel, ‘Palestine’ in those days, and he had served in the British Army, Military Police I think, and was captured in Greece. I believe he was born in Riga but had emigrated to Palestine when quite young. He already spoke a number of languages, Russian, Polish, German, French and, of course, Hebrew and Yiddish. Only English seemed to have escaped him and so, finding himself among British soldiers was a blessing in disguise. He soon set about the task of learning the best of English with all the necessary Anglo-Saxon descriptive adjectives. When I knew him these were apt to get somewhat out of context, especially when he got excited, with comic results.
I an effort to learn better English he decided to swop identity with an RAF navigator. As a private soldier he had to go out on working parties and at Lamsdorf many RAF sergeants swopped over to get out of the camp with the obvious possibilities of escape.
At Sagan, Cyril made the best [sic] use of the library, such as it was, and was soon one of the best read among us. I was also trying to learn German and Cyril was always a great help. He had a great sense of humour and was able to tell a joke against himself.
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English, it would appear, is about the only language that does not have an expression equivalent to “Bon Appetite” or “Guten Apetit”. We only have “Cheers” or “Bung Ho”, or some other equally fatuous expression before we drink, but, alas, nothing before we eat. Whilst in his early days at Lamsdorf, Cyril was endeavouring to say the right thing to his British Army comrades and one day noticed one of his friends just about to start on a bowl of soup. He quite naturally made a literal translation of “Bon Appetite” and said, “Good appetite my friend”. His friend stopped short, looked up and said, “What do you mean ‘Good Appetite’? Of course I have a ****ing good appetite!”
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[Underlined] 40 HOMMES 8 CHEVAUX [/underlined]
It would be interesting to know just how many thousands, nay, millions, of troops, prisoners, internees and others have travelled, some on their last journeys, in this famous four wheeled French rail wagon in both the last two wars. I can well remember our trips from Heydekrug (East Prussia) to Thorn and later from Thorn to Fallingbostel during the summer of 1944.
The side doors were opened wide and each end was crossed off with barbed wire spread over wooden frames. A small door or gate was built in for access.
Three guards occupied the central area, about one third in total, and 24 prisoners were confined to each end. Space was somewhat limited and we all lay heads to the outside with a pile of feet in the middle. No toilets were provided. On long trips prisoners had to wait until the train stopped and were then allowed out in batches to operate in the countryside. The two trips I remember were relatively short and there were no stops for calls of nature, however, during daylight we were allowed singly to come through our little holes in the wire and pass water along the line through the side door, hanging on to the vertical rail on the side of the wagon.
I recall the journey from Thorn to Fallingbostel was by night and at first light the queue started. This became a verbal process among us and my turn was some way down the line, by which time I was nearly desperate and had built up a good head of steam. At last it came and I scrambled through the hole and clung on to the vertical rail with my right hand, with my left I feverishly undid the remaining metal trouser buttons (they were always popping off, no zips in those days), and started literally groaning with relief.
At this point or shortly before, the train had been slowing up and to my horror (I was still a bit embarrassed), I saw that we were slowly approaching a level crossing on the outskirts of a German village. About
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thirty citizens of Hitler’s Reich were patiently waiting to cross and I passed slowly by, just out of reach, still in full spate.
I noticed no reaction from my hosts, so I can only assume that they were used to being shown respect by their captives in this manner. Needless to say, my embarrassment soon passed and I enjoyed my unique point of vantage. I even had an almost uncontrollable urge to give a Nazi salute which I thought would be appropriate, but of course, my right hand was fully occupied in holding on to the rail at the side of the door. A pity, I felt this would have completed the performance.
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[Underlined] “Welche Nummer” [/underlined] (What Number)
There are few more morale shattering sounds than that of a heavy cell door shutting behind you and the bolt going clonk in the lock. There is something positive and very final about it and it gives one a feeling of complete helplessness. There you are, it’s no good banging on the door, no one will take any notice.
It was early autumn 1943 in Stalaf [sic] Luft 6 Heydekrug in East Prussia near the Baltic coast. One particular morning an unusual number of ‘Ferrets’ (security troops) in dark blue overalls with all their tools had descended on our barrack block. They were proceeding to turf us out and to tear the place apart. I don’t know what they were looking for, a tunnel perhaps, but they meant business. In the initial confusion we were all milling around and I happened to be close to a table where a lot of the tools had been laid, hammers, crowbars, jemmys, saws, screwdrivers and a large pair of pliers. I took a fancy to the pliers and when no one was looking they quickly disappeared into my trousers pocket. Unfortunately, when I grabbed them they were open and in my haste they clicked shut. One of the Ferrets heard this, looked round and started asking his friends whether any of them had picked up his pliers. I took this as a cue to get lost and started to saunter out of the block. I looked for anyone I knew to off load but before I could get a dozen paces away out of the door I was grabbed and hauled up before the security officer, Major Peschel. He growled something which I suppose meant “Lock him up”, and there I was in the so called “Cooler”.
The cell was six feet wide and nine feet long. It had a double bunk bed with a complete set of boards but no palliasse, a stool and a metal jug for water. The tiny barred window had a “Lichtfanger, a wooden partition on the outside allowing a view of sky or a small area immediately beneath the window.
I sat down on the stool for a while to assess the situation. I was there for I knew not how long, so I supposed I had better make the best of it. I was allowed to send a note into the camp for a few things,
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tooth brush, razor, knife, fork and spoon, and a couple of books. One was a German Grammar which I was steadily ploughing through. Now here was a chance, I could really get some useful work done and might even get some help from my jailers.
There were about half a dozen other inmates in the twelve cells and one soon learned how to make contact and to know the ‘drill’ or mode of life. The legendary W/O John Snowdon was already there doing one of his numerous stretches, so advice was readily available.
The cooler was a rectangular building with only one entrance. The guard room was just inside the door. A corridor with six cells on either side had a toilet at the far end. I forget what type and a fire bucket of sand near the toilet served as a post box. Only one inmate was allowed out at any one time apart from the half hour daily exercise when we walked around in a large circle, well spaced apart.
When you wanted to visit the toilet you knocked on your door. The duty guard would come out of the guardroom and shout “Welche Nummer” to which you had to reply (in German of course) the number of your cell. In my case “Sieben Bitte” (seven please). He would then say “Komme sofort” (coming) and go back and fetch the key to your cell. He would then have to hang around while you operated, no doors or partitions, and when complete lead you back to your cell and by then someone else might be waiting to take their turn.
The cooler was outside the main compound but in the so called “Vorlager” an outer area but still within the main outer barbed wire fence. Our own medical officer had pronounced the cooler water unfit to drink so we had to have bottled water from the main camp cook house. To this was added milk and sugar and tea or coffee. It was understood that the guards helped themselves which was allowed for at the cookhouse. Food was another problem. We were supposed to be on bread and water with one day of normal food in every three. Sometimes if the guards were willing. A prisoner on his good day would be sent in enough food to feed the others as well. It depended on the guards. There were two shifts of 24 hours each with an “Unterofficier” (Corporal) and two or three men.
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One of these shifts I remember well. We didn’t see much of the Corporal, but I got to know “Bruno”, a thick set chap with closely curled hair and “Franz”, a tall, gangling, untidy type with spectacles somewhat out of line. He had no pretensions as a soldier. It wasn’t for the sake of cigarettes or any other form of bribery but Franz and Bruno both wanted a quiet life and seemed to respond to common courtesy. Impatient inmates who shouted abuse and banged on their cell doors generally had to wait while those of us who “cottoned on” got the best service, or at least the best of what was going. As I was trying to learn German I was soon learning all the best polite phrases and making good progress through my grammar book.
As the cooler emptied somewhat (the population was always fluctuating), the service improved. We dropped to about three inmates and by then Franz used to knock on my cell door first thing in the morning and I would say “Come in” and Franz would hand me my coffee in bed. With a cheerful “Guten Morgen Herr Hilton” we would converse for a while, any news, the weather etc. We both seemed to know instinctively that this was the sensible way to behave. It cost nothing and generally made the best of a bad job. We were not alone in this. At another time in the same cooler I heard tell of a German guard trying to learn English who was taught to say “Good morning, Sir. Your coffee, Sir.” I never managed that, but to both Franz and Bruno I was always Herr Hilton, even though they were both considerably older than I. But alas, all good things come to an end. One night the Heydekrug tunnel broke and unfortunately only five or six managed to get away, the remaining thirty odd being dug out and pushed straight into the cooler with us.
Chaos reigned for a day with up to four to a cell until all were documented and the majority sent back to the main camp to await their turn for the customary sentence of fourteen days.
For the rest of my time in the cooler we stayed two to a cell. No more coffee in bed and I was now subjected to a companion who talked incessantly.
One had to wait ones turn, quite a long time on occasion, for the inevitable trip to the toilet. On one of these poor Franz quietly apologised to me for the deterioration in the service, but hoped I would understand.
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[Underlined] The Hero’s Return [/underlined]
Appearances do seem to have a marked effect upon the way one is treated through life and the healthy, robust figure usually commands respect. The invalid or under-nourished, on the other hand, has often to struggle to keep his place in society and to attract any attention.
I had just returned from Germany after three years as a P.O.W. I was one of the first batch to be released and we had gone through the RAF reception depot at Cosford rather before they were ready for us. Although they had done a surprisingly good job, they had nevertheless omitted to order enough badges of rank so the first of us, mostly Warrant Officers due to automatic promotion, were sent home on leave in Airmen’s tunics and greatcoats with no badges on our sleeves. Not that we cared much for that but these things seem to make a difference in a somewhat class conscious society.
I was released early in April 1945. Most of our camp were marched eastwards towards the River Elbe, but because I had spent most of the winter in our camp hospital with a chronic form of bronchitis and a bout of pneumonia thrown in, I was left behind in our camp hospital. My 6ft. 2 inch bone structure was carrying an all up weight of about eight stone with a “Belsen Horror” like expression to match. RAF Cosford clothing stores had done their best, but I was never an easy one to fit anyway.
I left Cosford on leave with new kit but also as much of my old kit as I could manage to salvage which had survived the delouser. I think we were done at least three times, clothes and all. DDT was squirted up sleeves and trousers with reckless abandon until I was quite raw in many sweaty and tender areas.
I passed through London and deposited my considerable collection of kit at the Services left luggage office on Victoria Station. I wanted to visit the hairdresser in the catacomb under the station. A haircut was long overdue, “these things were important then”.
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I settled in the chair for the first proper haircut for some considerable time. I thought that this was also a special occasion and I would be having to kiss a number of female relatives within the next two hours or so, so on completion of the haircut I suggested a shave. The barber stroked my 23 year old chin contemptuously with the back of his hand and said, “You don’t need a bloody shave.”
To this day I have still never had a shave at a barber’s.
I crept back to the left luggage office and started to load up my two kit bags and haversack only to hear a loud Australian voice, which could be heard halfway across the station, “Why don’t you hang your ( ) out mate”, a well known coarse service expression meaning if you load up like a horse why not dress like one.
In the compartment of the train to Haywards Heath I was obliged to listen to the sad tale told by an ATC officer of a young clerk who had recently been jailed for masquerading as a Wing Commander, complete with DSO’s, DFC’s etc., and who had given thrilling lectures to factory workers and ATC squadrons. It was considered by all to be a huge joke and such a pity the poor lad was jailed. The authorities certainly lacked a sense of humour.
I am afraid I couldn’t comment. I had known too many real ones, mostly now dead, and if anything I felt sick. I crouched further into my featureless greatcoat and when we arrived at Haywards Heath I loaded myself up again like a horse and crept quietly home.
[Page break]
[Underlined] CORNED BEEF [/underlined]
I had just arrived back from Germany and was unpacking my kit. Apart from being equipped with new clothing from Cosford, a specially organised reception centre for ex-POWs, my belongings were meagre. I had a half kit bag of new gear and a small army rucksack which I had acquired just before leaving Thorn the previous August.
I took out the few items brought from Germany, tin mug, fork and spoon, toothbrush etc., and a small tin, 1/2lb I believe, of Corned Beef. I can’t remember when I first got hold of this tin, sometime during the last autumn when Red Cross stocks were still available. These petered out during the winter and we had been subject to very small issues for some time, leaving us on German non-working civilian daily rations, i.e. 400 gm bread, margarine and jam to cover this, and about 1/2 litre thin swede soup (pea soup Sundays).
Being a careful sort of chap I usually had a few odd bits left over, a small tin of jam but not much else. Once opened, a tin of meat had to be eaten and I had managed to hold on to the corned beef for the last emergency. I remember eating one in the cattle truck ride from Thorn to Fallingbostel, digging the meat out with my pocket knife and gnawing at a piece of hard bread. My reactions were to do that again, but I then thought ‘Why, here I am back home in civilisation, I can’t behave like that now’, so I took the tin downstairs to the kitchen and handed it to my aunt.
I was staying with my father’s two sisters, one was married with a daughter a little older than myself. Despite the war time shortages, my relatives always kept up appearances and did their best to live in proper style. The next lunch time was no exception.
The highly polished dining room table was, as usual, set with place mats and lace doilies. The sub [sic] shone on the cut flower vase and the two sparkling cruets. Each place set with two, or was it three, knives, forks,
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serviettes in silver rings, the lot. Salad was the order of the day with the usual salad creams, vinegar etc., and then, somewhat to my surprise, a large plate was produced upon which stood in solemn state, a small naked piece of corned beef. My long treasured tin had been breached at last.
My uncle, an engineer, took great pride in his ability to carve and was always meticulous in the sharpening process. I remember this day he paid particular attention to a long corrugated knife which he then used with great dexterity on the tiny lump of corned beef. Wafer thin slices soon started to fall to one side and at last these were dealt out rather like cards.
At this point my cousin came into the room and exclaimed, “Corned beef, Mummy! Where did you get that?”. “Paul brought it”, was the prompt reply. Here my other aunt joined in, an ex-nursing sister and sometime deputy matron with a voice and manner to match, “Paul brought it! Good heavens, we haven’t seen corned beef for months.”
Like most ex-POWs I was suffering from so called “withdrawal symptoms” and I was quite unable to add anything to the conversation. My throat contracted and it was some time before I was able to swallow. My thoughts at this point were ‘What’s the use.’ I soon forgot this incident and only remembered it about ten years later when I was able to regard it with some humour.
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[Blank back sheet of booklet]
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
Flying Stories by Paul Hilton
Description
An account of the resource
Nine accounts of flying activities during the war.
Additional information about this item has been kindly provided by the donor.
'David Joseph's son Brian met Paul Hilton in the 1980's through work, and he was wearing a prisoner of war tie. In conversation it became clear that Paul had some common experiences with David's, and a meeting was arranged. They had been in the same camps and on some of the same forced marches, had many common memories, but had never previously met.'
Creator
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Paul Hilton
Format
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20 typewritten sheets
Language
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eng
Spatial Coverage
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Germany--Essen
Belgium
Belgium--Antwerp
Poland--Toruń
Lithuania--Šilutė
Germany
Lithuania
Poland
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Bad Fallingbostel
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Conforms To
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Pending review
Identifier
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BHiltonPHiltonPv1
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Type
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Text
Text. Memoir
Contributor
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Anne-Marie Watson
35 Squadron
58 Squadron
bombing
bombing of Cologne (30/31 May 1942)
dispersal
displaced person
Dulag Luft
fear
ground crew
Halifax
Ju 88
prisoner of war
RAF Cosford
RAF Driffield
RAF Linton on Ouse
RAF Marston Moor
Red Cross
sanitation
shot down
Stalag 8B
Stalag Luft 3
Stalag Luft 6
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/944/11387/PMakensL1701.2.jpg
05b7ba41508ba4dde289a303dae307f7
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/944/11387/AMakensL170117.1.mp3
f837a144815b5928751ae6cb9c78ae50
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
Makens, Louis
L Makens
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Sergeant Louis Makens (1921 - 2018, 1442236 Royal Air Force). He flew six operations as an air gunner with 196 Squadron before being transferred to 76 Squadron. He joined a new crew as a mid under gunner and their Halifax was shot down 18/19 March 1944 on his first operation with them. He became a prisoner of war and took part in the long march.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-01-17
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Makens, L
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DK: Right. So this is David Kavanagh for the International Bomber Command Centre interviewing Louis Maken.
LM: No. No. No.
Other: Louis.
DK: Louis. Sorry. Sorry. Louis Makens.
LM: My grandson. He don’t like it.
DK: Misinformed. I was misinformed [laughs] 17th of January 2017. If I put that there.
LM: Yeah.
DK: If I keep looking down I’m not being rude I’m just making sure it’s still working. I’ve only been caught out by the technology once. It was a bit embarrassing.
LM: It wouldn’t take a lot to catch me out.
Other: No. It wouldn’t.
DK: Right. Ok. What I’m going to ask you first of all was going back now what were you doing immediately before the war?
LM: I worked on a farm.
DK: Ok.
LM: Market gardening and ordinary agriculture on a farm.
DK: Ok. So and then war started. What made you then want to join the RAF?
LM: We had, we were called up weren’t we? We had to register and I went for an interview and they gave me the choice of what you’d like to do and not being very smart I volunteered for air crew.
DK: Right.
LM: And went back to work and I suppose it must have been about a few months. Something like. I was about nineteen I got my call up papers saying to report to Uxbridge.
DK: Right.
LM: That was where they had done all the interviewing.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And they asked you silly, well not silly little questions I suppose but half multiplied by half. That was one of the questions on, at the interview. And another one was if the Suez Canal got blocked how would the transport, how would they get cargo around to England?
DK: Oh right.
LM: And which was a long way around.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
LM: The Cape of Good Hope, wasn’t it? And from then on I just had my papers come in. Called up. Report to Uxbridge and then from Uxbridge I went to a place called Padgate. We were kitted out at Padgate and I actually volunteered wireless operator air gunner.
DK: Right.
LM: And I’d done Blackpool in 1942 and there were some old hangars there where we used to do Morse Code [coughs] Morse Code in and I had a spell there and they asked for straight air gunners which was a lot quicker course.
DK: Right.
LM: Why? I don’t know why I volunteered for that. I don’t know to this day. Anyway, I volunteered and I was taken off the course there and from then on I had a life of leisure.
DK: Right.
LM: I went to a place called Sutton Bridge. That was a fighter OT Unit.
DK: Yeah.
LM: General duties. From Sutton Bridge the whole squadron moved up to Dundee and under the Sidlaw Hills. And there was a Russian aircraft landed at the airfield at Dundee.
DK: Oh right.
LM: And the camouflage was really marvellous.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And that was where I was on general duties up there as well. What we were doing going around with little bits and pieces. Anything. Anything there was to do which you’d gather what general duties mean.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
LM: Everything. And then I was called to, I got my call up from —
DK: Just stepping back a bit you never found out what the Russian aircraft was doing there then.
LM: Yes. Molotov.
DK: Oh right. Ok.
LM: Molotov came over.
DK: Oh.
LM: I’m sorry about that I should have —
DK: Did you actually see him?
LM: Yeah. No I never. No. No.
DK: No. Oh right.
LM: Only saw the plane at a distance.
DK: Oh right.
LM: Oh yeah.
DK: Wow.
LM: And it was quite funny really because I wouldn’t have believed it. There was a Scottish lad worked with me and he said to me, ‘Louis,’ he said, ‘How would you like to my parents and just meet my parents and just have a cup of tea with them.’ They lived in Dundee.
DK: Yeah.
LM: I had to get him to interpret what they said. I [pause] Dundee was really broad and I felt a really Charlie because you had to say, ‘Sorry. What did you say?’ and I had, I had to say things like that. But from there on I got called back to a place called Sealand.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
LM: And that’s where I met up with two lads who had already been the same thing as me further afield but they’d been on a wireless so they had decided to remuster as well. Quicker course. We’ll get in to action. Silly weren’t we?’ Anyway, Stan Gardiner was one of them and Harold Lambourn and how, I think Stan Gardener was a welterweight boxer. I didn’t realise that at the time.
DK: Oh right. Yeah.
LM: But I often wonder. We parted because they remustered as pilots.
DK: Right.
LM: And I remustered to straight air gunner. Well, while we were at Sealand we used to go with a Polish squadron and fly with a Polish squadron in Lysanders. Dive bombing for the ack ack training. And we used to fly up the Dee and almost looked up at the houses because you approached and then they’d quick climb and then dive on their guns.
DK: Yeah.
LM: But then I was posted to, from there I left them and I was posted to [home] house in London. That’s where we done the Lord’s Cricket Ground. Was it Lords or the Oval? One of those. And that’s where we’d done gas training and things like that and from there I was posted on to Bridlington and that’s where I done my gunnery, ITW for the second time.
DK: Right.
LM: And from there I was posted on to Stormy Downs.
DK: What did, what did the training involve then at ITW?
LM: At the ITW?
DK: Yeah.
LM: It was back to square one. You know what I mean by square one? Square bashing.
DK: Oh right.
LM: But we did go in to, Bridlington had on the front there was a shooting range. A twelve bore shooting range. Clay pigeons.
DK: Yeah.
LM: I won the competition and won twelve shillings and sixpence. And there was —
DK: You obviously went into the right duties then as an air gunner.
LM: I came away the best shot of the lot. I suppose I must have been. But no. But cutting it short there at Bridlington and then Stormy Down. From Stormy Down we went to Stradishall.
DK: Yeah.
LM: First we were on Wellingtons and then Stradishall was conversion on to Stirlings.
DK: Right.
LM: Now, I think —
DK: Just stepping back can you remember what it was you were flying at Stradishall? Just —
LM: Stirlings at Stradishall. I’m trying to think where I’d done my OTU. I’m not so sure where the Wellington, when I’d done the OTU on. I went to so many places. I’m not sure if I could swear blind.
DK: No.
LM: Where the Wellingtons were stationed. Where we, they had so many of them.
DK: Yeah.
LM: But I finished up at Stradishall and that’s where we were crewed up and already crewed up and I happened to be the seventh member of the crew.
DK: Right.
LM: Which I was a top gunner. A mid-upper.
DK: How did the crewing up work?
LM: Just, I was just introduced to them.
DK: Right.
LM: They were already crewed up.
DK: Right.
LM: But as they —
DK: They needed a gunner.
LM: As a yeah. They had to have a top gunner.
DK: Yeah.
LM: For the start of the four engines. Then finished Stradishall. And that’s where I’d done the odd circuits and bumps and that sort of thing. And one particular night I was laying in bed and I heard this machine gun fire and it was a Focke Wulf had come back that night. I got up the next morning. A Focke Wulf had come back and shot one of our planes down doing circuits and bumps and the only one hurt or I think I’m sure the news was that he got killed and he was Canadian. And he was a screened pilot. What we called a screened pilot.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Was one who, you know —
DK: Already done a tour.
LM: Already done his tour and I think he was teaching us to land.
DK: And he was killed in a, back in the UK while training others.
LM: Yeah. A fighter come back with the bombers to wherever they were going to or from and must have picked up Stradishall and that was how. So the next night we had to go. I was on the next night on circuits and bumps and of course the warning was if there’s a bandit in the area all the ‘drome lights would go out.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And of course, what happened? All the lights went out didn’t they? And we were still stooging around, stooging around, stooging around, waiting for well we didn’t know what was going to happen. Everybody was on edge and all of a sudden the lights come on. It was a dummy run. So we were a bit relieved about that but then after my OTU there and the, and the conversion at Stradishall I was posted to 196 Squadron Witchford.
DK: Right. Ok.
LM: As the mid, mid-upper gunner.
DK: Still on Stirlings.
LM: Still on Stirlings.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Yeah.
DK: So what were your thoughts about the Stirling then when you first saw it and flew in it?
LM: Well, as we went to Stradishall they stood behind almost on the edge of the road where we went.
DK: Right.
LM: And they were massive and if you can imagine what a Wellington was like. Quite low down.
DK: Yeah.
LM: You could almost touch the nose. These Stirlings. They’re twenty two foot to the nose in the air. I have to be careful what I say if this is going down on there. But —
DK: We can edit the bits out later.
LM: Well, yeah. You’ll better cut this piece out because I think what happened our pilot who he’d been out in Rhodesia, flying out in Rhodesia and I think when he saw them he got a fright.
DK: Really?
LM: We had [laughs] we had some near misses. Or near tragedies. When you come in to land you’ve got your three lights. Red too low.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Green. Lovely. Amber too high. We would come in on no lights at all.
DK: Right.
LM: Nose down. And I just used to sit there like that. ‘Christ, what’s he doing?’ And I could have landed the plane quite easily because when you sit in that top turret a beautiful view and I used to sit on the beam like that and check, check, check and I could get that to a tee. I’m not boasting about how. I couldn’t fly a plane anyway. But the bomb aimer, the wireless operator he had his parachute like that every time we landed and we came in —
DK: Not giving the pilot confidence is it? Or having confidence in your pilot if he’s doing that.
LM: No. None whatsoever.
DK: No.
LM: We’d been to Skagerrak mine laying and we came in this night and I got caught sharp a bit. Get down a bit. Down a bit. A bit high. Came in. Bang. We hit the ground, smashed the undercarriage up.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Soared up unto the air and of course came down again and the undercarriage had gone because we went down on to one wing and slid, as luck would have it we went off the runway onto the grass. We never did land on the runway or take off on it. There was either run off at the end or whatever. Oh, you have got to watch what you put on there haven’t you? [laughs] He might be alive. I don’t know what happened. Later on I was, we didn’t, we went on, went from Witchford to Leicester East. Irby.
DK: Right. Just going back to Witchford can you remember how many operations you did from there?
LM: Altogether there was six.
DK: Right.
LM: That was the seventh one. Number seven on the night we got shot down.
DK: Right.
LM: And that was the first time on the first raid we’d done with, first I’d done with Halifaxes.
DK: Right. So when did you convert to the Halifax then?
LM: Well, I didn’t convert. I was just, we were made surplus.
DK: Right.
ILM: We went towing gliders and that sort of thing and eventually that was what they called we were transferred to what they called the AEAF. That’s the Allied Expeditionary Air Force so therefore they decided they didn’t want a top turret. Extra drag. Which you would get wouldn’t you?
DK: Yeah.
LM: With the top turret on so we were made redundant in a way.
DK: Right.
LM: And there were six of us were taken off 196 Squadron and we were posted to Marston Moor and from Marston Moor we were then sent up to Holme on Spalding Moor. They had then fitted a gun emplacement, a beam if you’d like to call it that underneath the plane.
DK: And that’s on the Halifaxes.
LM: That was on the Halifaxes.
DK: It was like a belly gun in effect.
LM: A mid-under they called it.
DK: Yeah. Right.
LM: It wasn’t a turret as such it was just a, it was a piece of metal stuck on the bottom as near as near as I can explain it.
DK: Right.
LM: You had a .5 between your legs.
DK: Was that something the squadron itself had done or was it an official —
LM: It was what they were trying to get.
DK: Yeah.
LM: We were getting so many attacks from below.
DK: Right.
LM: Because as you know you can’t see below your own height can you?
DK: Yeah.
LM: It’s very difficult to see. You can see upwards but you can’t see below your own horizon.
DK: And were you aware at the time that a lot of the attacks by the Germans were from underneath?
LM: It was known.
DK: It was known.
LM: It was well known.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Oh yes. Yeah. That was well known. That was the idea of fetching this gun underneath.
DK: Right.
LM: And the Germans knew very well that we were [pause] well no protection underneath at all coming up from —
DK: So, you’re now with 76 Squadron at this point.
LM: That was 76 Squadron.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
LM: Yeah.
DK: So, you’re now in the, in the belly.
LM: That’s it.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Well, I had never met my crew that I flew on that night with.
DK: Right.
LM: We went to briefing. We went, we’d done a little bit of training on it. There weren’t all that much more training to do. It was only sort of getting used to a .5 and that sort of thing and a fair old go on that.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And the first time I actually met my crew was when I was a prisoner of war.
DK: Oh right.
LM: Well, after I’d been shot down I should say.
DK: Right. So you only did the one operation [unclear]
LM: That was the very first one.
DK: And you were shot down.
LM: We were shot down the very first night. There was six of us went and I think there were three of us allocated to go that night.
DK: Right.
LM: March the 18th 1944. I should have been at a wedding.
DK: Can you recall where the operation was to?
LM: Yes. Oh yeah. Frankfurt.
DK: Frankfurt. Ok.
LM: Yeah. Frankfurt. And we were about twenty, twenty minutes from the target.
DK: Right.
LM: And everything was quiet. Not a very good thing in a way and we hadn’t crossed any borders as such for anti-aircraft or anything like that and every now and again the pilot would just call up and say, ‘Are you alright?’ And so forth, ‘Gunner.’ So forth. And the next thing I knew there was a blaze of bullets, well incendiaries, you couldn’t see the bullets. Incendiaries. And I sat in the turret like that you see facing the rear and the bullets came through, went between my legs. Almost. I was stood. They went between my legs. Well, there was the pilot looking out the front. There was the navigator [pause] could have been I suppose. The bomb aimer should have been in the, in the astrodome looking out. Top gunner in the top turret. The only two of us who saw the bullets were myself and the rear gunner.
DK: And this was from a German aircraft presumably.
HLM: That was [laughs] that’s hard to say.
DK: Oh right.
LM: I don’t know. We never saw the plane. It was head on.
DK: Right [unclear]
LM: So was it one of ours?
DK: Ah.
LM: Well, I’ll never know.
DK: No.
LM: I don’t think so.
DK: No.
LM: But they were fairly heavy. It weren’t small machine gun fire so it could well have been a night fighter. And when you think that no one up front saw the tracers at all.
DK: Were they an experienced crew do you know? Or —
LM: Were they —?
DK: Were they an experienced crew that you —
LM: They’d done, they’d done seven nights. They’d already done seven operations.
DK: Right. Ok [unclear]
LM: Yeah. And four that night.
DK: Right.
LM: Yeah. Yeah. They weren’t over experienced. Like I was I suppose. But, but they hadn’t, they, I sometimes think how ever I got away with being missed in that dustbin when you think of the midair of that aircraft wing as mid —
DK: Yeah.
LM: Fuselage.
DK: It’s, you’re in there then.
LM: That’s right. That little bit underneath.
DK: Yeah. Do you know what other damage was done to the aircraft then? Or —
LM: Well, we caught on fire.
DK: Right.
LM: Yeah. They hit the inboard. The inboard starboard engine and I thought well that’s all right. With the old extinguishers put the flames out. Anyway, we went on a little while and there was quite a, it was getting quite light then because we were on fire and the pilot, David Josephs was my pilot. Never knew him at the time.
DK: Yeah.
LM: But I found out later on and he said, ‘Prepare to bale out.’ Which is the first thing, isn’t it? So I opened my hatch up and just stood there. Kept on the intercom. Kept on oxygen and the top gunner he’d already got out of his turret and he came down and opened the back hatch.
DK: Right.
LM: And he must have thought because it was quite light because of the flames and so forth and he thought, I think he thought I’d been hit because I was still in the turret and standing up. He came back and he went to get a hold of me like that and I went, ‘Ok. I’m alright. I’m alright. I’m ok.’ Well, the pilot hadn’t told us to bale out then. But he did eventually say, ‘Right. Well, better get out. Bale out.’ So that was myself and the top gunner. We went to the back hatch and when you go out you have to roll out otherwise you’re likely to hit the tailplane or the fin.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
LM: Which is easily done. So it was quite comical in a way. It must have been a comedy act. We stood near the hatch or laid near the hatch arguing who was going out first. I’d, I’d seen it happen. People who baled out and they’d extinguished the flames, the [unclear] switch or something like that.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And put the flames out and they’d flown back.
DK: Right.
LM: I thought I’m not going to be, I’m not going to be here on my own so we, Spider went out first and I toddled out behind him. But I went out with my arms folded like that because when I put my parachute on you don’t wear it all, you sort of have it beside you.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
LM: So I quick put on my hooks.
DK: So you [unclear] then
LM: Clipped them on the hooks.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
LM: And I think what happened you’re supposed to leave, lose speed count up to seven because you’re travelling at a hundred and something, a hundred and eighty mile an hour. The first thing I knew, bang. The parachute had, whether the slipstream caught my hands and my parachute, must have pulled the parachute, the rip cord.
DK: Yeah.
LM: The next thing I knew that was bang. Oh, the pain, the jerk on your neck. People don’t realise it’s a —
DK: As the parachute opened.
LM: Oh yeah.
DK: Yeah.
LM: It almost feels like you break, you know.
DK: So is it is it a chest ‘chute you’ve got then?
LM: Yeah. Chest.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Chest it was. No seated ones then. We always carried them and just stuck them in the little hole at the side of the, of your turret.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And anyway, I don’t know how long it was coming down but when I looked down I thought, oh shite. Water. I thought I can’t be over water. That’s one thing I always dreaded. Coming down in the, in the sea. And what it was the plane was on fire and that had gone down and there was snow on the ground and little hillocks that looked like waves.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
LM: And [unclear] It just looked like a patchwork of little waves. Anyway, the lower I got they disappeared. Anyway, I hit, the next thing I knew I was laying on my back groaning. I can remember now as if it was yesterday I laid there and thought oh, oh. I sort of shook myself up and of course up I got and I tried to pull the parachute in and got caught on a tree.
DK: Right.
LM: Right on the edge of a wood. As I went to pull the parachute in I thought, oh Christ there’s someone there. One of my old crew. So I sort of called out. No answer. It was just somebody falling in.
DK: Yeah.
LM: It wasn’t a crew at all. It was a piece of grass that was just doing that with the back light, the back sight of the flaming plane where it had gone down on the horizon.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Was casting this little piece of grass going along. I could imagine someone pulling a parachute in.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Anyway, I couldn’t get the parachute off the tree. I tried to get it down and I had to leave. What I’d done I just curled up under a hedge and I don’t know where the hell [pause] escape kit. Lost it. I had it, you had it park it on the side of your leg and it must have come out as I was upside down or —
DK: What would have been in the escape kit you’d got [unclear] ?
LM: Oh, you’d got a map.
DK: Right.
LM: Chocolate. One or two. Quite little bits of ration material.
DK: Right.
LM: A compass, etcetera but I lost them and so I curled up under a hedge and I had to sleep until it was daybreak. And I got up the next morning and when I woke up and I thought now sun is coming up in the east. If I go towards the sun I might make my way to France. But I wasn’t anywhere near France, was I? [laughs] Not really. I wouldn’t have met, I don’t think I would have, I don’t know. But anyway, I knew I wanted to go east because of the sun coming up and Germany here, France going in that direction sort of business and I thought if I make my way that way I might be able to come up against somebody but I went and I travelled for a day and never saw anybody. The next day I was walking what do you do? I covered my, took my boots and covered them up. I was lucky in a way digressing a little bit normally you know the old flying boot we used to have?
DK: Yeah.
LM: The old fleecy lined things.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Huge things. Well, I hadn’t. My equipment hadn’t arrived at 76 Squadron so I borrowed the squadron leader’s equipment. His flying boots. And we had, I had an electrically heated suit.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Because it was cold. We are talking about twenty two frost and I had an electrically heated suit. That’s your socks and just a jacket and I had his size elevens flying boots. Normally your flying boots fly off which they will do quite easily. That just shows the force of the parachute opening doesn’t it?
DK: Yeah.
LM: And how I kept them on I can only imagine I had electrically heated socks inside them. That’s how I think, the only way I can think I kept those shoes or flying boots three times the size of mine.
DK: So they were wedged in there with the sock.
LM: They must have been fairly —
DK: Yeah.
LM: No end of people. That’s the, my pilot lost his.
DK: Yeah.
LM: He was walking about with a, when I saw him last, the first time I met him he had got pieces of rag wrapped around his feet and that was one of the problems. Getting frostbite.
DK: Yeah.
LM: I think I got a little bit of frostbite on that ear and it’s still there. But lucky I didn’t get any more and no one else did. Anyway, I eventually I got, I did walk into two, I’d compare them with our Home Guard.
DK: Right.
LM: Two old boys walking over a bridge and where the village was, God knows, I have no idea and these two old lads walked towards me and all of a sudden they walked towards, crossed the road towards me like that and he pulled out a big revolver and I, that’s it. So I put my hands up. ‘Flieger. Flieger.’ And they took me back to their headquarters all dolled out with Hitlerites and all that sort of thing on the wall and they weren’t very, they didn’t seem too bad. They were the oldest of people and they took me to their little headquarters and then they had to get the Army to come and pick me up and they took me to another, somewhere else. Got above, it was only a walk from somewhere else to there. Well then, they sent in ex-RAF. The Luftwaffe.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Two of them came and picked me up and I was a little bit lucky in a way because we were walking along. They didn’t bother too much about whether you’d got hit or not. The Germans didn’t care. If somebody hit you with a hammer even. We was walking along and it was a Hitler Youth I think. Something in that region. He came up, he said, a lot of them spoke good English. He said, ‘Did you raid Cologne? Were you on a raid on Cologne?’ I said, ‘No. No. No. No.’ I said, ‘This was my first raid. First time.’ Well, it was a lie because I’d already got the 1939 43 Star on my tunic.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And he didn’t think nothing. He couldn’t have been, he couldn’t have fathomed that one out because well he probably didn’t know what they, what it was anyway.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And he just went away because Cologne was awful one wasn’t it? That was an awful thing.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And eventually they took me to their barracks and they were good. They gave me, the Germans, they gave me a lovely piece of black bread and jam. I’d had one taste of it and I threw it across the bloody cell. I thought, oh Christ and I couldn’t eat it. I just could not eat it. Which I learned different later on. Well, I went and laid on this old bunk of a bed sort of thing and the next thing I knew there was a boot in my back and they, then they brought the pilot. They’d got the pilot.
DK: Right.
LM: And one, I think that was the rear gunner. They’d picked them up as well. And that’s the first time I had met my pilot.
DK: Bizarre.
LM: And we were on our own until we got on with the crew itself.
DK: Yeah.
LM: But for some reason David Josephs, name spelled Joseph, J O S E P and do you remember Keith Josephs?
DK: The politician?
LM: Yes.
DK: Oh yes. Yes.
LM: He was the dead spit.
DK: Oh Right. Oh.
LM: Exact. Exact. Well he palled, why I don’t know.
DK: Yeah.
LM: He palled up with me.
DK: Right.
LM: Not his crew.
DK: Did you think he was related then or —
LM: Well, I would have swore blind he was. He never said. We never spoke about private life. We never told each other what we’d done, or what we did or what we hadn’t done or anything like that. It was just you met them and that was it.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Like when we left we never left any, I often wish I had have done. Kept in touch perhaps with two of the lads I escaped with. I would have loved to have known what happened to them.
DK: No.
LM: But you don’t. You’re so keen to just carry on. Carry on. Carry on regardless of what goes on around you really. It’s —
DK: So were you then sent to a proper prisoner of war camp at that point?
LM: I was taken back. Now this is the bit that really peeved me at one time because I often think of it. They took me back to Frankfurt.
DK: Right.
LM: And I saw Frankfurt’s Railway Station what they were doing to Germany that we were doing or we were getting over in London and I thought the very same thing. There was people on the station with a, one particular person there was a woman with a little child and they’d got a basket, a linen basket like that between them.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And I suppose they were trying to get out. Mind you that was two days after they’d been bombed quite a bit then day and night you see. We were full incendiary. That was all we carried that night was incendiaries.
DK: Yeah.
LM: But that, then I’d done solitary confinement. They put you in solitary there and there was a raid on that night and that [pause] we had all sort of a, there was solitary confinement and there was a blind you could almost it was like a slab of blind and the light, you could even see the lights flashing through this sort of one of these old plated blinds sort of things.
DK: But flashes of the explosions.
LM: Yeah. Of the, of the raid.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Yeah. And I was there three days and they asked you all sorts of questions and a corporal he must, think he was a corporal he looked like it to me. Got a couple of stripes of some sort and he came down and he interviewed so forth to this. He’d got a big list where I’d come from. You only say what you know. Or you’re supposed to say name, rank and [pause] name, rank and whatever.
DK: I was going to ask that. If I could just take you back a bit did you have training as to what to do if you were caught as a —
LM: None whatsoever. We were —
DK: Ok [laughs]
LM: We were just told the general thing. Name, rank and number.
LM: It was a general thing. Name, rank and that’s all.
DK: So you had no other training if you ever were captured.
LM: No. No. that’s all we, never even had trained parachute jumping. Never had. Never had a [pause] The art is the falling over and rolling over you see.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Well, I hit the ground straight legged.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And I think that’s why I knocked myself out. I think that’s the reason. I must have hit the ground straight legged.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Instead of doubling up and falling over.
DK: Yeah. And rolling. Yeah.
LM: Which is the correct way.
DK: Yeah.
LM: I knew the way but you can’t tell how far off the ground you are you see.
DK: At night. Yeah.
LM: And the last fifteen feet or the last little bit was like jumping off the wreck and like jumping off a fifteen foot wall when you hit the ground quite hard.
DK: Yeah.
LM: So that was part and parcel. They’d never done, I don’t know if it was the pilot’s fault or not. I don’t know ‘til this day if he should have made his crew take part in —
DK: Training. Yeah.
LM: Escaping or whatever or what to say what not to say. No one else did. We never had any training of that at all.
DK: And, and dinghy practice. Did you ever have any of that?
LM: No. we were, I did learn to swim.
DK: Right.
LM: At Blackpool and if we could swim a width.
DK: Right.
LM: That’s all you had to do.
DK: So you had no training on what to do if you crashed on water, baling out or — [unclear]
LM: No, we had none.
DK: No.
LM: I think some did.
DK: Yeah.
LM: We had no training whatsoever.
DK: Wow.
LM: Never had. They just, all they told us was when you go out to roll over the hatch.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Rather than the other way.
DK: Avoiding the —
LM: I had seen a lad. He had knocked his teeth out. He’d hit the tailplane. But apart from that we didn’t. It was —
DK: Yeah.
LM: The discipline I suppose we were treated very leniently.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Because when I I thought I was going to get out of a church parade so when I joined up they say religion. I said none. I thought I’ll get out of church parade doing this and they put atheist on my dog tags.
DK: Oh right.
LM: So they were on until the day I lost them.
DK: Oh right. Can I just take you back then to Frankfurt? You were interrogated there after three days.
LM: Yes.
DK: Solitary confinement, so you’ve only given name, rank and serial number and that. What happened after? Next after that?
LM: They don’t [pause] they will keep you there and keep asking you questions and they showed me a list. I thought good God. They could have shown, they could have told me much more than I knew. I couldn’t. I couldn’t. If I’d have wanted I couldn’t have told them anything.
DK: So their intelligence then on the aircraft, the squadron —
LM: They knew every airfield. They knew every airfield and what there was. They got this map of every, almost every airfield in this country.
DK: Wow. Did they know who was based there on these airfields?
LM: They knew the squadrons as well. They’d got the squadrons down. My old squadron 196.
DK: Yeah.
LM: That was down there. I may have shown that because I thought 196 I just and the realised then that —
DK: Yeah.
LM: You don’t think that they’re using you know on the spur of the moment. I thought 196 and Witchford.
DK: So they had all that intelligence. Did they have names at all as to who the commanding officers were?
LM: No idea.
DK: No. No.
LM: No. I don’t. What on the German side you mean?
DK: On the other side. Yeah.
LM: No. I wouldn’t. No. No. There was the treatment we got in the prison camp we can’t grumble.
DK: Right.
LM: I mean we went over there.
DK: Can you remember which prison camp it was?
LM: Yeah. After leaving, after leaving Frankfurt.
DK: Yeah.
LM: On the old cattle trucks and we were going along and I thought oh whatever is that smell? Christ. And there was a lot of us in this cattle truck. I didn’t realise at the time it was an American and he had been, he must have been loose a little bit for a while before he got caught because he’d got frost bite and his foot had got gangrene and I’d never smelled anything like it. He sat with his shoe off and he was like that and I realised then what he’d got. And his foot was absolutely. I don’t know what it was like inside the sock but he’d obviously got frost bite and it had turned to gangrene.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And we called at a place called Sagan. That’s Stalag Luft 3.
DK: So it’s Stalag Luft 3.
LM: That’s the officers.
DK: Yeah.
LM: That’s the officer’s camp.
DK: Right.
LM: Stopped at the officers off or whatever there was to get off there and from there on we travelled through Poland by train and I can’t tell to this day how long so I weren’t one of those who made notes of where we were, what we’d done, it was just one of those things. You accepted what had happened and eventually arrived at a place called [pause] up in Lithuania [pause] Sally, what was the name of it?
Other: I weren’t there grandad.
LM: Anyrate, it was not, not all that far away from, now when you get to my age that happens you know. You lose your train of thought a little bit don’t you?
DK: I do now [laughs]
Other: Yes. So do I [laughs]
LM: But no, I —
DK: So it was a camp in Lithuania.
LM: Stalag Luft, no, Stalag Luft 6.
DK: Stalag Luft 6. Right.
LM: Up in Lithuania.
DK: Right.
LM: That’s right.
DK: Ok. Ok.
LM: Anyway, with the name Twy, I think it was [Twycross] or something like that. We were the furthest north of any camp.
DK: I was going to say that’s someway east isn’t it you were?
LM: Yeah. We were right up near the Russians.
DK: Russians. Yeah.
LM: Because it was a bit [pause] Dixey Dean. A great footballer wasn’t he?
DK: Yeah.
LM: He was our camp leader.
DK: Oh right.
LM: Yeah. Dixie Dean.
DK: Did you get to know him well?
LM: No. No.
DK: No.
LM: Oh no. Didn’t. Well, I knew him.
DK: Yeah.
LM: But he didn’t converse with very [pause] He could speak fluent German.
DK: Right.
LM: Been a prisoner of war for a long while and he used to go to Sagan the officer’s camp and converse with the Germans there on the conditions of camp and all that.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Because he knew the Geneva Convention backwards.
DK: Oh right.
LM: And when we could, 19th June 1944 when, the Second Front —
DK: Yeah.
LM: Now, they knew that in the camp but no one said.
DK: So, it was a decoy then.
LM: They wouldn’t let us know.
DK: No. Right.
LM: They knew that Dean and his escape, whatever they were radio, they’d got a radio because they used to come around and give us the news each night. Someone would come around and just and sometimes a German would do that.
DK: Yeah.
LM: The old goon would.
DK: So how big was the camp there? How many prisoners were there roughly.
LM: I don’t know but I’d hazard a guess. In our camp compound alone there would be one, two, three, four, five, six, sixteen, six, eight. Oh, three or four hundred if not more.
DK: Right.
LM: Yes. They were all officers. All NCOs.
DK: NCOs. Yeah.
LM: And then —
DK: And what were you in? Were you in sort of cabins or Nissen huts or —
LM: One long, one long hut.
DK: One long hut.
LM: There were bunks.
DK: Right.
LM: And if the weather was nice and we were going on parade and roll call then some of the lads would play up and they would nip up or make a count wrong. We reckoned they could only, they could only count in fives the Germans. So we said they could only count in their fives and the lads would play up a bit. But if it was raining.
DK: Yeah.
LM: We used to put a head out the end of the pit and they would come along and count you and we behaved ourselves then.
DK: Right.
LM: But there was a case where we came, we could, later on it must have been getting towards August we could hear the Russians from where we were.
DK: Right.
LM: The tales we heard about what happened to the Russian guards and the German guards when they got taken by the opposite side.
DK: Yeah.
LM: They didn’t take prisoners.
DK: No.
LM: They didn’t take either side. They didn’t touch the prisoners but the guards they shot them. So there was no love lost between them.
DK: No. So —
LM: Well eventually, yeah —
DK: As I say could you briefly describe what the camp looked like? Presumably you’d got barbed wire as a —
LM: Yeah.
DK: Watch towers and —
LM: Yeah. You had the old, I’ve got a couple of paintings upstairs that a fella had done in the prison camp.
DK: Right. Right. So it’s a compound thing.
LM: It was a big, what it amounted to was, was a big area.
DK: Right.
LM: And your huts one, two, three, four. Long huts. About must have been more than twenty yards I suppose all tiered both sides. You had an odd table in the middle and around the outside of that was your walking area.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Always had that. Then you had a warning wire. They called it a warning wire. That was just a little board that ran along. You mustn’t put your foot over that otherwise they would shoot you.
DK: Yeah.
LM: If you put your foot over the warning wire. Then you had your barbed wire.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And then the goons were up in their —
LM: In towers.
LM: Towers.
DK: And you were just watched the whole time.
LM: Oh yes. Yeah. Yeah.
DK: So, what, what did you do to pass the time because days must have —
LM: Walk around the, we weren’t allowed to go out. Now, early on they were allowed to go out as working parties but there were so many RAF tried to escape.
DK: Right.
LM: Escape. And they stopped it. We weren’t allowed outside the camp. Once you were in there you didn’t come out until they wanted to move you which they did us. From the Russians you see.
DK: Right.
LM: And no, we weren’t allowed outside the camp.
DK: And —
LM: It was —
DK: And with the restraints there would have been were you treated well then? Or treated [unclear]
LM: In the camp there was no hard [pause] no. But I don’t think I would say I was treated badly. We went over there to kill them but to me we were treated fairly. Geneva Convention. They abided by that.
DK: And what was the food you got then?
LM: Well, that, now that’s sauerkraut.
DK: Right.
LM: And there was an American parcel and an English parcel. Now, the English parcels, well obviously England was struggling to even feed their own people, weren’t they? So they weren’t the serviceability of the package wasn’t very good because we would get in the British parcel or English parcel we would get condensed milk.
DK: Right.
LM: Well, that weren’t, that wouldn’t keep. But the American parcels were in a nice cardboard box and we’d get oh quite a little bit of chocolate etcetera etcetera and you know different things in there.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And used to tide us over. You’d only get a parcel between perhaps four or five or six or seven of you.
DK: And are these parcels that have gone through the Red Cross then?
LM: Yeah.
DK: So they were done, made up in Britain or America by the International Red Cross.
LM: They were already sent. Yeah.
DK: Somehow —
LM: They were the Red Cross. Yeah.
DK: Right.
LM: But they used to puncture them before they came. They couldn’t empty them but they could puncture the tins before they came in.
DK: Right.
LM: And this went on until when we, we knew the Russians weren’t far away. We could hear gunfire in the distance and we were told this and that, this and that. And then eventually they said we would have, they were going to move us out of the camp to another camp. So we deserved what we got in a way because there used to be what they called in the American parcel it was called klim. It was a lovely powdered milk. It was milk spelled backwards.
DK: Oh right. Yes.
LM: See. That was called klim. Milk spelled backwards.
DK: Yeah.
LM: We had, when you said did they treat us alright we weren’t badly treated as such at all but the food weren’t, it was a bit sparce. I mean we got a loaf of bread and that was black bread between seven.
DK: Right.
LM: And no argument as one would cut it up in seven pieces and you just had a slither of a loaf. No argument at all about how big yours was and how small it was or whatever.
DK: I suppose you had to get on with your fellow prisoners then.
LM: Oh yes. Yes. Because you could soon lose your old temper. I’ve seen that happen but not not very often. Not very often because when well I suppose in a way we were very, everybody was an individual in their way because we weren’t like the Army as such. We didn’t mix like the Army did because you were a crew on a crew.
DK: Yeah.
LM: You just kept your crew. You had somebody look after you when you went in for your meals and so forth in the sergeant’s mess and that sort of thing. But then we had, they told us we were going to evacuate to a port. We had to walk to a port called Memel. That was in the Baltic.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Well, we could hear the Russians firing and so forth and whatever was happening and we decided we couldn’t take all this stuff with us because we’d got quite, as we came out of the camp they were crafty in a way because before we came out of the camp we thought well we’ll not, we won’t leave anything. What people can eat or do so we had Oleo margarine and they were tins about that big. Quite a lot we had of that. And we stood them up and we were throwing these tins at each other. Had the bloody tins stood up. And there was also this klim milk. Now that was really you mixed that up and it would make, you could make a real nice cream of it.
DK: Right.
LM: So we thought we’re not leaving that. So what we’d done I don’t know whether you’d call it carbolic soap. What they used to call Sunlight? You know the old, what they used to wash.
DK: Yeah.
LM: The old ladies used to wash with. We grated that up. We put that in with the milk and we left it there and I reckon the Germans must have, they must have tried that and instead of them getting a nice cream there was this powdered milk. This powdered milk all mixed in with the little grated —
DK: Just soap.
LM: We even powdered up.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Just like the milk so they really couldn’t say look at it and think I ain’t very keen on this. So I, we did pay for it later on. And anyway they marched us to this port called, it was Memel and had to go down in a coal ship. We had to go down this hatch and you left all your, whatever equipment you’d got you had to leave that on the deck.
DK: Yeah.
LM: So we said, ‘We’re not going down there. Not going down a bloody hole in a ship and go through the Baltic.’ They said, ‘If you don’t go down we’ll put the hoses on you.’ And they threatened to hose us with the, they’d got these hoses on deck and so forth so we did actually go down in to the hold of the ship. But there weren’t room to sit. Not to lay down especially. You could just squat.
DK: Yeah.
LM: The trouble was that some of the lads all they had to escape was a ladder, a vertical ladder to this little sort of porthole and some of the lads got a bit of diarrhoea as well because it wasn’t long before the food sort of affected people.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And if they wanted to go to the toilet which a lot did. They couldn’t stomach, some people couldn’t stomach this sauerkraut and things like that so they did have to go to the toilet pretty regular. I was one of the opposite. Absolutely. And anyway, we went to go down in to the ship and away we go and they had what they called the old [unclear] and that was for the mines.
DK: Right.
LM: To ships against mines. We’d already mined that with, with these acoustic they were quite a huge mine. About, they’d be about fifteen foot long.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Twelve, thirteen, fifteen long what we used to drop and that was a bit of a risk because you had to —
DK: So you would actually drop mines in to the Baltic.
LM: Yes. Yeah.
DK: And were now —
LM: I hadn’t dropped them in to the Baltic but I had elsewhere.
DK: Yeah.
LM: The RAF had.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
LM: And they would [pause] they would, that was a bit of a hazardous old job because you had to come down almost to zero feet. You cut your, you dropped your flaps just to sort of give you a bit of buoyancy and you cut your speed down as low as possible. Just above stalling speed. You’d be down to perhaps a hundred and twenty mile an hour and only about two or three hundred feet high.
DK: Yeah.
LM: So if you were lucky you didn’t go over a flak ship but if you did then they could just blow you to smithereens. So that was, people used to say that used to count as a half an op.
DK: Yeah.
LM: But it alright maybe it weren’t because you used to go there, come back and never see a thing.
DK: But you were still on an operation.
LM: You were lucky, you were lucky if you to just get by and —
DK: Yeah.
LM: And never even have anybody fire at you but no, we I suppose the prison camp weren’t too bad and we’d done three seventy odd hours on that boat and you were allowed up on deck one at a time so you could just imagine how long, I don’t know how many I wouldn’t like to say hazard a guess how many were down in the hold of that ship. Hundreds of us. Sitting there. And we came to a place called Swinemünde.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
LM: You’ve heard of Swinemünde have you?
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
LM: Have you? Nuremburg was laying there. One of their battle cruisers?
DK: Right.
LM: They took us off the ship and we went, had to get in these cattle trucks and the barbed wire was across the centre of the carriage. You had a half a door, half a door where the prisoners could get in. The other half was for the guards to get in.
DK: Right.
LM: And we had to take our shoes off but what have we got and put them through the barbed wire into the side where the guards were. And then the Germans used to pee in them at night if they didn’t want to get out, couldn’t get out. They used to use them as a toilet.
DK: Wonderful.
LM: And while we were there there was a raid on or supposedly. It weren’t really a raid I don’t think because I learned afterwards that was only one plane and they put a smokescreen over the whole docks and the Nuremberg opened fire on that. It was an American plane, broad daylight and the cattle trucks you could see daylight appear between the wood. Those guns exploding, the vibration we weren’t all that far away from Nuremberg itself.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And so anyway that’s when they took us out from there. They took us across down to a place called [pause] it was quite a way we went. I don’t know the name of the place really. I couldn’t say because they were the same as us. They did block, there were no names on villages or anything like that.
DK: Yeah.
LM: We eventually arrived at our destination and I never heard this. I can honestly say I never heard it. Some of the lads who wrote, if you read the book called, “The Last Escape” they said the Germans, they could tell. They could hear them sharpening their swords, their bayonets. But I didn’t hear it. To be truthful I never heard any. Maybe if I’d heard it I wouldn’t have paid much attention to it anyway. So they unloaded us from the trucks and then made us line up in fives and I’d got this kit bag. As luck would have it I’d got my kit bag. When I got off the boat I’d got this kit bag with my name on and I grabbed that and so I carried that with me and whatever stuff you could carry on your own.
DK: Yeah.
LM: You, or somebody sorted out later on and they loaned us, took off, we come, they lined us in fives. The same old thing again and these, all the guards at that particular time that started off were young Naval lads.
DK: Right.
LM: And we reckoned they came off that they were coming from a Naval dockyard just to see. To escort us to this camp Stalag Luft 4B.
DK: Right.
LM: Not far from Stettin. Well, everybody had got their kit and I stood like that and with the kit bag down the front and this German lad came along and I’ve still got a wound, a star there I think. One of them, he stuck a bayonet in you see. He said, ‘Pick it up. Pick it up.’ So I looked at him and that’s where he stuck the bayonet. As luck would have it it went in to my finger and it came up against my belt. An old hessian sort of RAF belt. Oh. And they had to pick it up and hold it there while we were just waiting. Then they they all —
DK: Your hand’s bleeding presumably at this point.
LM: Very little.
DK: Oh right.
LM: Hardly any blood.
DK: Right.
LM: I reckon it just went right to the bone.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Quite painful. I’ve got a little scar there now which, which you can see some left me a little bit of a scar there. They’re still there today. And they started, we had to march off and it weren’t a march at all. We had to run. Well just imagine they started on the lads up the front and while they carried their kit they kept —
DK: Yeah.
LM: Jabbing. Jabbing. Jabbing, and one lad had over seventy bayonet wounds we counted on him when we got the other end and until they’d dropped their kit they kept sticking the bayonet in and so of course we being quite tail enders we were, it was like steeple chase. And then of course then they got on to us and we, when we started off we’d some little bits and odds and pieces what we’d accumulated.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Picked up here and there. When we got to the camp we’d got absolutely nothing. I’d got a shirt on, trousers, shoes and that was my lot.
DK: And everything else had been lost up the road.
LM: Everything we had to drop.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And they had machine guns all lined up beside this sort of, more or less an old cart track we had to run up and some bright erb at the back was firing a rifle or a, I believe it was the officer with a, with a revolver and we never stopped. Nobody stopped to find out who it was. We just had to run and we actually thought not combined but individually I think ninety nine percent of us thought we would run into a hole. A pit. We did. I did. I thought we was going to be shot because they’d already done that. That had already happened to prisoners. They’d took them and shot them and we again we thought this is what was happening. No one said that to each other. Never said it to each other but afterwards when we got to camp people said, ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘Well, I began to think that’s what was happening.’
DK: Yeah.
LM: And people did but they never spread it because no way would there have been any escape because they’d got machine guns lined up each side of this old dirt track and when we got to the other end I mean that was just, we were just covered in dust. It was in August so it was the middle of the summer.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And there was a fella who used to sleep right next door to me. His name was [Mcilwain]. I’ll never forget him. Well, in, while we were in the camp there was a little Pole and he was watching the Americans at the game of baseball when it was, we played it with a softball. And he was stood around here like that and one of the lads had a whack at the ball and it threw out and it hit him in the teeth and knocked his teeth out. He was a little Pole. Quite a small lad. And when we got the other end of the camp I was with [McIlwain] and [McIlwain] got hit with a rifle butt. And when we got, when we eventually got to the camp this little Pole said, ‘Cor,’ he said, ‘I was knackered.’ The language you used to pick up there. ‘I was knackered,’ he said. ‘But when I saw [McIlwain] get hit with a rifle butt,’ he said, ‘He just went like that and carried on he said, ‘I could have run on for miles.’ So, I mean there was a lot of, there was a lot of —
DK: Humour.
LM: Fun.
DK: Yeah.
LM: I mean, it was a place where you could see the funny side of it but not when, it wasn’t all that funny but later on when you look back.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And anyway, we were at that camp and then we stopped there until February 1945 and then —
DK: How were you treated in the second camp once you got there?
LM: Not badly. Not badly. All our huts were off the ground there. They were better huts.
DK: Right.
LM: And you went up a corridor in the middle and your rooms were off each side. Two, four. Two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen. Sixteen in a hut.
DK: Right.
LM: Two there. Two here on each side of the door and they had a tortoise stove and David [Dewlis?] was on the bunk above me and I slept in the bottom one and the lad on the next bunk to me was a New Zealander.
DK: Yeah.
LM: A lovely lad. Long Tom we called him. He was Long Tom. He was about six foot three and he used to sing the Maori’s farewell and a little tear would run down his cheek. Oh yeah. He decided that, he didn’t make a habit of singing it but every now he would sing that little old song. I know the words to that right off. Oh yeah.
DK: I’m quite conscious we’ve been talking for an hour. Do you want to take a break or something.?
LM: I don’t mind. Yes. Yeah. Lovely.
DK: Yeah. Shall we just stop there for a moment?
Other: Yeah. That’s fine.
DK: It’s just I’m rather conscious.
[recording paused]
LM: Fine. Yeah. Yeah. Lovely.
DK: Ok. So I’ll put that back there again. So just to be — talking about the cold weather and the movements.
Other: Yeah.
DK: And prisoners. So just to recap then it’s, it’s February 1945 and you’re in the second —
LM: ’45. Yeah.
DK: And you’re in the second camp and they’re not treating you too badly. What’s happened then?
LM: January. February. They said that due to unforeseen circumstances, they didn’t say why, or why or not, or not we’d got to go. We’d got to move out of the camp and they were going to march us out of the camp. I think we were then what was there, there was somebody else interfering or something was happening and we had to move camp. That was up near Stettin we were and we could see vapour trails. While we were there vapour trails used to go up and we thought they were taking the weather. Apparently, what we were watching was the V-1s and V-2s take off.
DK: Right.
LM: Didn’t know that at the time but going back a little bit I remember a JU88 was fitted with jet engines before ours.
DK: Right.
LM: They had a jet engine fitted to a JU88. No. Yeah 88 not the 87. That was a Stuka.
DK: Right. Yeah.
LM: But the, the eighty eight, yeah. And we weren’t —
DK: You saw one of those fly by then did you?
LM: You could hear them.
DK: Hear them. Right. Yeah.
LM: And see.
DK: Yeah.
LM: You could see them when they came over and you would think that sounds unusual for an aircraft engine and —
DK: Yeah.
LM: And they must have developed that before we did because that was the Germans who brought on the atomic bomb wasn’t it? For the Americans.
DK: Yes.
LM: Their scientists.
DK: Yeah. And the rockets to the moon.
LM: Yeah.
DK: Yes. Von Braun.
LM: Yes. Yeah. And no we were told that we had got to move and we said the treatment we’d had we were not going to go out of the camp. Silly thing to say but there we are. We are not going to move. We are going to stay where we are because we got treated so badly to go to that camp we said we wouldn’t go out of this one and the major, he was an old Prussian. When you say Prussian they were the old Germans weren’t they?
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
LM: And I reckon he was quite an oldish fella. Upright. Real slim, upright. Lovely he was. And he said he would come with us so there would be no ill treatment at all. And we didn’t get ill treated at all. We said we’d come out but the number of people within one or two days had to fall out. Blisters on their feet, had diarrhoea or something like that and my pilot David Josephs, that’s what made me think he was a bit of a politician’s son, he was, David was taken off after a second, I think it was two days he walked with us. After then they had to take him off in the little bandwagon. Whether he went to hospital I don’t know. I never knew. Even when we came home I never knew what had happened to him.
DK: No.
LM: And I kept in touch with him. Oh yeah. We kept in touch. And but at, he was, walked for an hour and we’d have a rest but when you get up again your feet began to tell on you. But that didn’t make no difference to me I’d been so used to talking over rough ground and so forth that didn’t come hard.
DK: Right.
LM: But people used to say, ‘How did you get on with monotonous walking?’ I said, ‘Yeah. What you do, all you do was just look at the persons feet in front.’ And that was just, it was just a tag along behind each other.
DK: Did you know roughly how many people were in this column as you remember?
LM: Oh, I haven’t a [pause] The whole camp.
DK: So —
LM: And there was not just us.
DK: Right.
LM: There were lots of others as well.
DK: So it could be thousands or —
LM: Oh yes. Walking through Germany what they said one morning we got was if you get attacked which there was. I didn’t see any of it to be truthful but some of them were attacked by Typhoons flown by New Zealanders and the idea was half of you would dash. We used to walk through tracks usually. Never, if you went through a village that was occasionally and the funny thing when we went through a village we used to stand up, pull ourselves up and sing and march. And the Germans didn’t like that and the guards didn’t like it either. And then after you got through the village it was like this, sort of striding along but when you walked through a village you put your parts on and started singing. But there was some got shot up.
DK: Did the villagers react to that at all?
LM: They left, the would leave water out but we weren’t allowed to touch it.
DK: Right.
LM: Because there was so much change of water. I don’t think it would have affected me at all.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Because I’d even later on I even drank out of a blasted river and so I don’t but other people it upset very quickly.
DK: Yeah.
LM: People were suffering with diarrhoea and that sort of thing and anyway we started off and a lot fell out. A lot fell out with diarrhoea, bad feet and that sort of thing. And we would have what they called after eight days you’d have a rest.
DK: What happened to those who did fall out and couldn’t —
LM: Took them back to somewhere. Hospital or something like that to give them a bit of treatment I think.
DK: Right.
LM: I couldn’t say. I don’t know what happened to them.
DK: Ok.
LM: I think, well they got back because David he got back.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And we used to write to each other just at Christmas time.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And —
DK: So how long were you on this march for? How many days roughly?
LM: February [pause] And I actually wrote a letter home. Air mail home to my mother on April the 29th. So we were walking from more or less I think somewhere in the middle of February.
DK: To the end of the war basically.
LM: Yeah. February. March.
DK: April.
LM: April. The end of April. But I had, we at the end of the march we had to during the march we could barter sometimes with the farmer. And I had a lovely Van Heusen shirt which had been sent to me by somebody so I swapped this shirt for a kilo of fat pork. Well, we had been walking across Germany with [unclear] and a biscuit perhaps a day. So you can tell what our stomachs were like. They weren’t very lined at all.
DK: Yeah.
LM: They weren’t lined at all.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And I swapped that. I said to Tom and, two of us. Long Tom and Leftie and we’ll fry it down. We’ll cut it into like chips and we’ll fry it down because to eat it as raw meat you couldn’t do that so that’s what we thought we would do. We stuck it in an old klim tin.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Lit a little fire and that night we were in this barn and the old rats would run over you and we got lousy as well. Oh, crikey yeah. And they were, they were big lice as well and we went and curled up and went to sleep. Made a sleeping bag and I used to tuck that right under your head so that no rats or anything could get in with you. And they used to run over you but you used to sort of knock them off.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And squeak and go off ahead and that night we went and [laughs] in the barn and I heard Tom, Long Tom up he got, out he went. The next thing Leftie the other side of me he was gone. And do you know I feel sick. Sick as a [pause] I feel. I’m not being sick I’m not going to. I didn’t buy that stuff to be sick. No way. And I wouldn’t go out. I laid there and I would not be sick. And I thought I’ll imagine I’m drinking a cup of cocoa and I was drinking this cup of cocoa and in the bottom of it was these chips. So it was, it was so awful that had [pause] we had lost all the lining off our stomachs. You passed blood. You would actually pass blood.
DK: So over these weeks then did you have the same German guards or were they changed?
LM: The Germans. Oh, you never knew who was with you.
DK: Right.
LM: Yeah. Some, they didn’t walk all the way with us —
DK: I was going to say —
LM: We would have different guards.
DK: You wouldn’t have different guards all the time then.
LM: Oh yes.
DK: Yeah.
LM: They were all old. Usually the old ones.
DK: Right.
LM: The old Luftwaffe as well.
DK: Right.
LM: And we walked. There was, I think there was something like, yeah, something about four hundred miles we’d done or something similar to that and then they were going to take us back towards the Russians. We’d just come over the River Elbe and I said to my two mates, Long Tom and Leftie, I said, ‘I’m not going back over that blasted river.’ They said, ‘Well, you know, I don’t fancy going back to the bloody Russians the other side.’ So we had said if we see a chance we’ll make a run for it. Well, we were going through this. We always walked through woods, lots of woods off the main track and so forth so we got a gap. ‘Ok, Tom.’ Off we, we ran off. Off we went. Mind you the guards I don’t think they were shooting at us. Never hit us anyway. They was a few shots going off but we carried on running and we came to a river. A little river. It was about as wide as this room and mind you this was time, that was in March time so a bit cold. So we thought if we cross the river, we were playing games I suppose, if we cross the river the dogs won’t be able to pick us up.
DK: Yeah.
LM: But the river was running quite, quite fast and there was little saplings been cut down beside the river so I picked one of these up and I gave it to Leftie and Leftie went across and held this stick you see and chucked one in the water, walked across sideway. So I went across and I held this stick for Tom to hold on to a branch and then come across this what we’d laid in the river. And there was a shot rang out and Tom lost his balance and he went backwards in the river. Got all his clothes on so he got out obviously and we made our way as we thought we had heard of [Saltau?] and that was where the Americans were.
DK: Right.
LM: We thought if we get to the Americans we’d be alright. Well, we got to the edge of a, it was a sort of a spinney we went through and then we came to the finish of the woods was that were open fields. So we stopped there and we decided we’d sort of camouflage ourselves. We’d put a bit of stick in. I had a, I had a German type Africa Corps hat which was a mistake I found out later but [pause] So we put this hat on and I’d got that and somebody knitted it somewhere along the line and we waited until it had got slightly dusk and then we decided we would come out of this little old wood and make our way as we thought towards Saltau. We just came out and we could hardly believe it. We turned left. I can see it even now. Turned, came out of this little wood. We turned left and walked along and we went, ‘Bloody hell.’ There was three blokes laid in the ditch. A little ditch. It wasn’t a ditch as such it was just a dry ditch. Say it that way.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Three Americans err three Australians. Three Australians laid in that ditch just been shot down and they had got escape equipment and everything. But they were also full of beans. Eggs and bacon. So just imagine us three weighing about seven stone and they had just, we’d just walked across Germany. Four or five hundred miles across there and they had just been shot down full of beans. And we walked at night and potato fields, it didn’t matter what was in the way we just walked according to the compass. And I remember particularly we came to a fence of barbed wire. A bit silly. We climbed over the fence of barbed wire. We had to walk across and all of a sudden we started to go in and in and in. Our feet began to get rather mud wet. They come up and I said to the others, I said, ‘Run. For Christ’s sake, run.’ And we ran and we ran through a bloody bog. We didn’t realise how silly we were and we came to another barbed wire, another fence and climbed over that. That was to take the animals out.
DK: Oh. Ok.
LM: That’s what we reckoned.
DK: Yeah.
LM: To keep the animals out of this.
DK: Bog. Yeah.
LM: This bog. We got the other end we took our shoes and socks off and wrang our socks out and they were full of this sort of mud. And anyway we carried on and we used to stop for about have a sort of an hour and then sat down and you would sweat, sweat, sweat when you were walking. Then you stop for five minutes. Ten minutes you’d freeze. Really we were so weak I suppose that, of course the Australians weren’t weak they weren’t weak were they?
DK: I was going to say they were —
LM: They were, oh they were fit as fiddles.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
LM: Oh yeah and anyway we, we dodged here, dodged there and carried on and eventually we came up and we heard people in the foreground as we were going in front of us. They were German troops. Walked right into them. So I reckon he was a middle of the range officer and of course they caught us and we had to go over and he looked at us and I reckon he thought what a shower and he gave us some little tablets or sweet or whatever you’d like to call them. They were about an inch long and about a half inch wide and like the old throat lozenge.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Remember the throat one?
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
LM: Well, these were white. I reckon they were vitamin tablets. He handed them out to us and he got the corporal to walk back with us to a little village called Bispingen. And we came back to this little village and that’s where he left us. In a hotel.
DK: Right.
LM: We were put up in this hotel and that night we went out. All six of us went out. We was talking to the German people which was no man’s land then you see.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And we were saying to the woman there, one woman Tom was talking to, he could speak fairly good German and about Saltau, she said, ‘oh,’ this is the honest truth this is, ‘Don’t go. Don’t go to Saltau. The Americans are there,’ she said, ‘They shoot anything that moves.’
DK: Yeah. They still do.
LM: That was a yarn but she said that’s what the Germans said.
DK: Yeah.
LM: She said, ‘Don’t. I wouldn’t go to Saltau.’ So we, we stayed there. Lovely hotel. We weren’t allowed to go upstairs.
DK: So —
LM: We had to sleep downstairs.
DK: So you were put up in a hotel by the Germans.
LM: Yeah. Yeah. They left us there. They didn’t want us. We were, we were a menace.
DK: Do you think the Germans at this point knew the war was lost and it just wasn’t worth —
LM: Yes. Yes, because another time they might have shot us mightn’t they?
DK: Yeah.
LM: And anyway, we were in no man’s land so they were retreating quite badly. And anyway, one particular day the sun was shining lovely. We set outside this hotel enjoying ourselves and there was a German lorry came around from the little village to where the centre of the village was. Another hotel further up the road. Came around the corner. All of a sudden it stopped and out they got and made a dive for it. Couldn’t make much out of it you see. And then I heard this plane and then looked up. There was one Spitfire. One Spitfire just going along. Of course, we, we were from, they knew us.
DK: Yeah.
LM: I mean they weren’t going to shoot us were they? They knew. There was us sitting on the front of this blasted hotel, ‘Oh yay.’ I thought you, daft sods weren’t we? A Spitfire up there never knew who we, I said to Tom, I said, ‘He could have turned around and shot us, Tom. Couldn’t they?’ But no. They were our friends weren’t they? You could see the funny side of it. Ignorant weren’t we? Plain ignorant.
Other: Yeah.
LM: Didn’t care. Anyway, we sat [laughs] they gave us a bowl of soup each day. They made a bowl of soup and there was pork cut into little old squares but they weren’t, they weren’t really all that nourishing. Weren’t all that good. Anyway, we were very pleased with it. And then a young lad came down to us. He said, ‘A Panzer. Panzer. A British Panzer.’ So lovely. Away we go. We ran up and around the corner and thought double double. There was a bloke on a half track or one of these little Bren carriers it was.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
LM: We had to double up to them. Didn’t know who we were you see because I’d got this blasted African Corps hat on and so, anyway we had to run up to them and he stood there and when he realised who we were and then of course they gave us cigarettes and so forth. But they then put us in the hotel right at the top of the street where we ran to when they was coming in to the village. So the next morning I wrote a letter. One of the Army lads gave me an air mail to write home and that was how I remember the 29th of April when I first wrote home to my mother to say that I was ok. And the next morning they said, ‘Right. The truck will, you get in the truck it will stop twice. The second time it stops you get out and you will go back to the [echelon].’ That’s the depot isn’t it.’
DK: Yeah.
LM: So Long Tom, Leftie and myself. We got in one truck and the three Aussies got in another. So we’re, off we go. Off we go. Funny. Eventually we stopped. The Army lads said, ‘What are you doing here?’ Well, we said, ‘You’ve got to stop twice and we’re going back to the [echelon].’ He said, ‘We weren’t stopping,’ he said, ‘You should have been in the other truck.’ So there’s us three.
DK: Oh no.
LM: We’re on patrol with the blasted Army. They gave me a rifle and put me on a half-track and I thought they said the war was over for us. It doesn’t look much like it. We’re going along the road and they’re firing at bloody copse over the other side. A little old copse there.
DK: Yeah.
LM: I suppose Germans are in. They was firing. These people was firing at something. The lads up the front. So here we carried on. We went, we had a stop at this little village and we weren’t very nice. The Army weren’t very nice.
DK: Do you want me to stop?
LM: Can you turn —? Yeah.
[recording paused]
LM: Yes.
Other: Yeah.
LM: Yes.
DK: Right. So I’ve got it switched back on again. So there we go. We’ll move that there. So you’re now with the British Army.
LM: Yeah.
DK: What’s happened next then?
LM: Well, while we were with them on their, on patrol we got an old vehicle. A little old sort of a Austin 7.
DK: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
LM: In one of these villages and Tom said he could drive you see and we got this thing started. It started up and we were driving around the village in this little motor and we called and went in the shop. It was a baker’s shop. They sold everything I suppose not just bread, they had cakes and everything in there and they couldn’t wait to give us stuff. We weren’t in uniform as such. I mean not really. We were, we were looked like bedraggled bloody gypsies really. I mean just imagine what we were like. Thin as rakes.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And we went in a shop and the German women said, ‘Your bread.’ And the bread we had, the old black bread that weren’t nice at all. That had got a thick layer of Greece on the bottom. But when we, they gave us a loaf of brown bread that was like cake. It was just like cake to eat. Their brown bread. Ordinary brown bread after eating black bread and but anyway we, eventually we got back. They dropped us off and two days we were there on patrol and then they took us back. We got back to the [echelon] and had to go through a de-louser.
DK: Yeah.
LM: DDT. Take all your clothes off. Shave because that’s where the lice grow on and when I came for a medical well first of all they were spraying DDT out of a hose from a container with no masks on. I mean that stuff now. That hangs in people’s bodies. You can’t get rid of it can you?
DK: Yeah. It’s banned, isn’t it?
LM: DDT.
DK: Yeah. It’s banned.
LM: And they were just spraying this all over you, under your arms, everywhere. And I wonder how many people got affected with that. The Army lads were doing it.
DK: It’s carcinogenic. It can cause cancers.
LM: They did all the spraying. Awful stuff.
DK: So its banned now.
LM: But anyway, we had to shave yourself and and the doctor said to me, he said, ‘Ahh,’ he said, ‘Impetigo.’ I said, ‘I don’t think so sir.’ He said, ‘Yes, that’s what I —’ I said, ‘ I don’t think so.’ I said, ‘It’s lice.’ I said, ‘That’s where I’ve scratched myself.’ ‘No. No. No. No.’ So he gave me one of those blue bottles. Years ago you used to get these bottles of blue weren’t they?
DK: Yeah.
LM: From your medical —
DK: Yeah.
LM: Perhaps you don’t remember. You’re not old enough to know that. They were poisonous stuff sort of business. And you’d get them an old blue bottle about that tall. I never used it. I come home and just washed myself. It went. It wasn’t impetigo at all. It looked like it I suppose because —
DK: Scratching.
LM: And you could, the lice was nearly as big as my little nail. They were huge. Just think of them crawling over yourself.
Other: Oh, I feel sick now.
LM: We never had any in the camp though. It weren’t ‘til we came out on the march until we got lousy. There was no lice in the camp whatsoever.
DK: So how did you get back to the UK then?
LM: I came back. We were taken to [Machelen] Airfield.
DK: Right.
LM: Picked up by, they kitted us out with Army clothes then.
DK: Right.
LM: Took all our old, took our old rubbish away and gave us a new Army uniform sort of business and I was picked up on a, I can’t tell you where, I’ve no idea where we actually got to. The airfield we flew from in a Dakota.
DK: Right.
LM: And I sat in this Dakota and there was a lad came up in the, on the aircraft. He said, ‘Have you flown before?’ I looked. I said, ‘Yes. Yeah. Yeah.’ He said, ‘Oh that’s alright,’ he said, ‘We just wondered if you had never flown before.’ I never said nothing. I thought no. He don’t know any different does he like.
DK: No. I suppose some of the Army POWs may not have flown because they would have been shipped out of there.
LM: That’s right.
DK: Captured. And that was the first time they flew.
Other: Yeah.
LM: Of course, there were lots of them. I mean we had lads we called them the Wizards of Oz. There was three of them. I don’t know how they came in our hut but I reckon they swapped over with some RAF lads.
DK: Right.
LM: That’s how we always reckoned they were, they kept themselves to themselves but we reckoned, we used to call them the Wizards of Oz. there was three of them. They never give any, never said nothing you know didn’t talk much. They were Army boys really and they swapped I reckon.
Other: Oh.
LM: With three RAF lads.
DK: So did, do you think you were flown back from somewhere in Germany?
LM: Yes. Yeah.
DK: So you were in Germany.
LM: Yes
DK: So can you remember where you arrived back in the UK?
LM: Yes. Brize. Not Brize Norton. Cosford.
DK: Cosford. Right. Ok.
LM: Cosford. Yeah. Came back to Cosford. I think it was Cosford we came back. If it weren’t Cosford we landed at that’s where we got rekitted.
DK: Right.
LM: At Cosford. What was the other one where they brought all the, repatriated all these prisoners a little while ago?
DK: Oh Lyneham.
LM: No. No. No. Down that same place.
DK: There’s Brize Norton.
LM: Brize Norton.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Not Brize Norton. Was it Brize Norton?
DK: Yeah. There’s Lyneham and then Brize Norton and —
LM: Lyneham was another one.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
LM: I think it was Cosford I came back to.
DK: Right. Ok.
LM: And they sent us on leave for six weeks. All they gave me was four for some reason. They only gave me a pass for four weeks. I didn’t mind. I didn’t, I weren’t bothered all that much.
DK: Was there any sort of debriefing about your time as a POW? Did they ask you any questions?
LM: Yes. When we came home they, we had to go and stand in front of a board.
DK: Right.
LM: And they did, just weren’t all that interested I don’t think. I don’t think they didn’t seem to worry much. I mean, we, I don’t think they were enquiring about names or anything like that. They just, well, to be honest I don’t think they didn’t give a shite about us.
DK: No.
LM: They couldn’t wait to get us home and get us on leave it seemed to me and of course I don’t think they wanted us in the RAF all that long or whether they did or not I don’t know. We were probably getting paid too much and anyway when we came home you had the chance to remuster. I volunteered. Like a bit of a silly bugger I volunteered to go out to Japan.
LM: Right.
That’s why. I said I’d fly, I said I’d love to go and fly out to Japan now and fight out there. I thought what a bloody a dickhead wasn’t I?
Other: You didn’t know did you?
LM: What. No, he said, ‘No. We wouldn’t let you to do that again.’ They said no. Wouldn’t be allowed to do that. And anyway, I took a course on, back to Morse Code.
DK: Right.
LM: I was going to do that sort of thing and I thought oh no. This isn’t for me and actually I couldn’t concentrate at all. I couldn’t concentrate. My concentration was just gone so I remustered then to a teleprinting course and we used to send, write letters home. How quickly you can pick up a typewriter.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And you had an old metronome on the desk in front of you.
DK: Yeah.
LM: You had your big blackboard. You know I expect. And no numbers or letters on the keyboard. You had to feel them. Always work from the middle bar. And, ‘Oh, shit I’ll never do this.’ But how quickly —
Other: Where is your typewriter?
LM: Huh?
Other: What happened to your typewriter, grandad?
LM: Don’t mention about my typewriter what I bought and my [pause] they gave my typewriter away.
DK: Shall we turn this off again? [laughs]
LM: They couldn’t wait. I paid forty five pounds. No. sorry. Not quite that. I thought I’ll go upstairs the other night. I thought I’ll go up. I’ll do a bit of, I’ll get my old typewriter out of the spare room because my right hand isn’t very good now. I had a bit of a stroke but I had that. That was like what they called deprivisation.
DK: Right.
LM: And I get a little pension for that. But I was ages before I got it. Nobody came. I went in A1 obviously. I came out a down B2. Never said nothing about giving me a pension though. Not a thing. Couldn’t give a damn.
DK: Well presumably, well you clearly weren’t in the best of health when you came back.
LM: No. No.
DK: But was there any medical care that you received or —
LM: No. No. I went. No. No one bothered.
DK: No.
LM: No. No. No. If you went sick you went sick. If you didn’t you didn’t. Simple as that and I just —
Other: [unclear] ever since.
LM: I took the, then I thought this seemed good to me I said what I’ll do because they didn’t mind you remustering. They knew what state we were in I suppose.
DK: Yeah.
LM: For we weren’t in the best of mental state I don’t think then. We’d got so lax and not having to do anything. Sort of just walk around a bloody compound and I mean I weren’t too bad I was only thirteen months but some of them four or five years and I took a driver’s test and I came out the, out in Blackpool and the School of Motoring. The initials —
DK: Oh, the British School of Motoring [[ yeah.
LM: Up near Blackpool. Weeton.
DK: Right.
LM: In Blackpool. And the corporal said, another lad in the back, they were Austin 7, 10s like, he said. Went out the back around these you could see the hills in front of you in the distance, sort of the wasteland at the back of Blackpool. We got away to the front, still a bit of waste ground. He said, ‘Now, I want you to get to the top of that hill in top gear.’ And there was a gateway down there. I put my foot right down and went up that hill like a bomb. Yeah. No trouble. We got pulled up and loaded on and the boy in the back he said, ‘You scared the life out of me.’ I said, ‘Why?’ he said, ‘Well you nearly hit that gate post.’ I said ‘[unclear] Through there. I said, ‘He said, the corporal said to me he wanted me to get to the top of the hill in top gear.’ He wanted me to stall it you see, didn’t he?
DK: Yeah.
LM: Wanted me to start off on a hill but I didn’t. I foot rode up this blasted hill.
DK: So, what year did you actually leave the RAF then?
LM: I had two ranks.
DK: Right.
LM: Warrant officer air gunner and an AC2 driver.
DK: So you left as an AC2.
LM: Yes [laughs] Yes, I don’t, but I passed. I could drive anything when I came out.
DK: And what year was that that you came out then?
LM: 1946.
DK: Right.
LM: Came out in ’46 and started work in, my leave was up on the 6th of September 1946 and I started work on the 6th. On a Tuesday.
DK: Doing what? What was your career after that then? What did you do?
LM: Well, I thought I really loved to work on the land.
DK: Machelen Right.
LM: I loved the horses.
DK: So did you?
LM: Especially.
DK: Did you go back to —
LM: No. There wasn’t no money in it then was there?
DK: Right.
LM: So, Vic Bale, how I knew, I went to school with him he ran foremen men at Fiddlers Garages at Stowmarket.
DK: Right.
LM: He said to me, he said, ‘Lou,’ he said, ‘Are you —.’ Oh before then I, yeah that’s right. Yes. Yes. He said, ‘Lou, are you looking for a job?’ I said, ‘No. Not really, Vic.’ I said, ‘Not for a while. Just see my leave out and I’ll have a look around,’ I said, ‘There’s plenty of place in Stowmarket.’ He said, ‘Well, my dad you see has just gone as a foreman down at the old chemical works.’ He said, ‘There’s a firm, a Swedish firm going to make boards, building boards from straw.’ So I thought well I knew old Harry, his dad. I knew him well. So I went down. ‘Yes, boy.’ He said, ‘Yes, boy. You can start tomorrow if you like.’ I said, ‘Lovely Harry. I’ll start. Make it Tuesday.’ I said, ‘That’s the end of my leave.’ So I went and that’s where I started and I was the first one to start there. Then there was another lad. He was a Dunkirk lad.
DK: Right.
LM: Frank [Wasp]. He joined the next day. And then another lad he was in the Army he was a PT instructor. He joined on the Friday. So that we three started off at [unclear]
DK: [unclear]
LM: And the bloke who came to show us how to run [unclear] hadn’t a bloody clue. He hadn’t a clue. Not any idea.
DK: So just stepping back a bit have you stayed in touch with any of the, either your crew at the time or those that you escaped with?
LM: Well. No. Never. I’d have loved to. This was what I was saying earlier on. We never kept, the only one, now I had a letter come from some while ago now from the flight engineer.
DK: Right.
LM: When we were shot down. Did I know, he’d got my address from David Joseph’s wife —
DK: Right.
LM: Because David used to write to me. Well, when I say write it was a postcard at Christmas and all we wrote on it, “How are you? Ok? Having a nice time? Cheerio.” And that’s all that was said.
DK: So you stayed in touch with your pilot for a few years.
LM: Only on a —
DK: On a card.
LM: His mother used to write to my mother.
DK: Right.
LM: During the war. During that war and David he, what made me think he was a Joseph, the old Keith Josephs offspring they lived in Shakespeare Country.
DK: Right. Yeah. They must be related.
LM: Then I got —
DK: Yeah.
LM: Then I got a card come from him. “We’ve changed our address. I’ve now bought a farm at Bourton on the Water.” So we were on, me and the wife were on holiday. We called at Bourton on the Water. There’s a river runs through the street there isn’t there?
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
LM: A lovely place.
Other: Bourton on the Water.
LM: And I went into a Post Office. I said to the lady I said, Mock Hill, Pockhill Farm it was called. I went into the Post Office. I said, ‘Hello dear.’ I said, ‘You wouldn’t know the whereabouts of a David Josephs who live in Pockhill Farm would you?’ She said, ‘Yeah. They’re just up the road there on the right hand side.’ But he had died then. He’d had a brain haemorrhage.
DK: So you never met him again.
LM: I never met him. No.
DK: I’m rather conscious of time. I’ve just got one final question.
LM: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: And it’s really about how after all these years you feel about and you look back on your time in the RAF and a POW. How do you feel about that now? Is it something —
LM: I sometimes wish I’d have taken, what I ought to have, I sometimes think why didn’t I get a reserved job on the land? I could have been I don’t know. I wouldn’t have been I don’t know. I wouldn’t have been in a position I finished up with now at anyrate.
DK: Yeah.
LM: I had a good number when I, when I retired. A production manager at [unclear] when I retired so I wouldn’t, I was well looked after. The old governor I think sometimes that was a good thing that I went through that because otherwise I think I would have been on the farm until the day I died.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Or the time I retired. But I didn’t and —
DK: So in a strange way it was —
LM: It altered my life altogether because, yes.
DK: Some good came out of it.
LM: Because I suppose in a way I wouldn’t have gone, well a little example. When I was at school we had one day out in a year. Sunday school.
DK: Yeah.
LM: Had to go to Sunday school every Sunday. Stowupland and Creeting St Peter. I used to live at Creeting St Peter and that we used, they’d come from Stowup and pick us up at Creeting St Peter. Now, I’ve never been out of the village because we used to get to Jacks Green, that’s just nearly into Needham and somebody would ask, ‘Can you see the sea yet?’ That’s how naïve we were. Hadn’t been out of the village. When I went to London that was the first time I’d ever been in London in my life.
DK: Yeah.
LM: And I got on the Underground and it didn’t bother me at all.
DK: Yeah.
LM: No, I just asked a porter. I wasn’t afraid to ask and mostly the black ones were ever so helpful. Oh yeah.
DK: Better turn this off quick.
LM: Well, they were and in those days —
DK: Yeah. Yeah. No.
LM: I’m sorry Sally but —
Other: No, that’s fine, grandad.
LM: I didn’t say that.
DK: It was actually because we had full employment then that there weren’t enough people to work on the Underground so recruitment was actually done in the West Indies to get people.
LM: Oh right.
DK: To come over and work on the Underground and London Transport. Ok. Well, at that point we’d better stop. Well thanks very much for that.
LM: Yes.
DK: I’m turning this off now.
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Interview with Louis Makens
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David Kavanagh
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-01-17
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AMakensL170117, PMakensL1701
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Description
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Louis Makens worked as a farm worker before the war but volunteered for aircrew. He discusses his training on Wellingtons and operations flying Stirlings with 196 Squadron including a crash landing, and glider towing. His Halifax was shot down 18/19 March 1944 on the way to Frankfurt. It was his seventh operation, but his first as a mid under gunner with 76 Squadron from RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor. He became a prisoner of war and discusses that as an extra gunner with a new crew, he only got to know his pilot David Joseph during captivity. He describes his capture and treatment and the conditions at Stalag Luft 6, the contents of Red Cross parcels, and the prisoners' attitude to the guards. He describes the conditions on the long march through Germany away from the advancing Russians. Eventually he found the advancing Allied army. After the war, he was remustered as a driver and was demobbed in 1946. He found employment with Stramit manufacturing strawboard building material.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
Lithuania
Poland
England--Yorkshire
England--Suffolk
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Lithuania--Šilutė
Poland--Świnoujście
Poland--Tychowo
Lithuania--Klaipėda
Temporal Coverage
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1944-03-18
1945-02
1945-06-19
1946-09-06
Format
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01:42:22 audio recording
Contributor
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Julie Williams
196 Squadron
76 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bale out
bombing
evading
Fw 190
Halifax
Initial Training Wing
Lysander
mine laying
Operational Training Unit
prisoner of war
RAF Bridlington
RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Sealand
RAF Stormy Down
RAF Stradishall
RAF Witchford
shot down
Stalag Luft 4
Stalag Luft 6
Stirling
strafing
the long march
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1072/11530/APetersC150428.1.mp3
4b4db26db9a98983d38ba4614e6d0b76
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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Peters, Cyril
Cyril Ebenezer Peters
C E Peters
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Cyril Peters DFC (1331907 Royal Air Force). He served as a flying instructor at the Advanced Flying Training School, RAF South Cerney and flew operations as a pilot with 77 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-04-28
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Peters, C
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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MJ: This is an interview for the International Bomber Command Centre with —
CP: Flight lieutenant.
MJ: Flight Lieutenant Cyril Peters DFC.
CP: Air Force at Cambridge in 1940 when I was nineteen. I was attested, sworn in and given a number 1331907 and sent to Uxbridge for three days assessment training. At the end of my three days at Uxbridge I was informed that I was accepted as U/T aircrew and should wear a white flash in my forage cap. Initial training was done at Scarborough at Number 10 Initial Training Wing, living in the Grand Hotel which the RAF had requisitioned. Fifty two of us on the course for two months. At Scarborough we battled with navigation, instruments, air frames, engines, Morse code — sending and receiving eight or nine words per minute. Guns. I learned to take a machine gun apart to bits and put it back together again. Never ever fired on in anger but I could take one to bits. Air Force law. You name it we studied it as well as running up and down the hills at Scarborough with a full pack and rifle. Ostensibly to instil discipline into us. At the end of the course we were on parade outside the Grand Hotel in three ranks with our kit bags when were marched around to stores. We broke off in single file and walked to the stores and inside we were each given some extra kit which we stuffed in the top of our kit bags and kept our mouths shut. We had long since learned that if you opened your mouth to ask the simplest and most sensible of questions it was deemed you were challenging authority. You were charged with the offence and you would either get seven or fourteen days jankers. So we kept our mouth shut. We were trained from Scarborough.
[Telephone ringing.]
CP: Excuse me.
[Recording paused]
CP: We were trained from Scarborough and after a brief stop in Manchester we arrived at Gourock where we boarded the French liner the Louis Pasteur. In the very early ‘30s the Louis Pasteur had held the Blue Ribband for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic. She was a twenty five knot liner but how many hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of U/T aircrew were on the Louis Pasteur I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess. There were thousands on board. She was bursting at the seams. We steamed off into the North Sea with a cruiser ahead, a destroyer either side as escort and we belted across the North Sea like a dose of salts. In a matter of two and a half, three days we were berthed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, had been trained down to Toronto and after two weeks in Toronto were informed our flying training was to be done in America. In Arizona. At number 4 British Flying Training School. BFTS. A flight sergeant was put in charge and we were put on the train at Toronto for Chicago. When we reached Port Huron which, I think was the last station on the Canadian side the flight sergeant shouted out, ‘Get your civvies out and put them on and put your cap badge in your lapel so I shall know who you,’ so and so’s, ‘are.’ Being a flight sergeant in ‘41 I can assure you he wasn’t interested in so and so’s. His language was far more colourful. So I opened my kit bag and there on the top were civvies which we took out and put on and we put our cap badge in our lapel as chiefy had told us so knew who we so and so’s were. We had to enter America as civilians. The American government weren’t sticking their necks out by entertaining foreign troops in their country at all. We were civilians. When we arrived in Chicago, at the terminal in Chicago from Toronto the [pause] Chicago is like London. Once you go into one terminal and you need to go out in another direction you had to change terminals. The taxis that had been employed to transport us to the other terminal drove on the platform, up to within a foot of the carriage in which we were travelling. And I reckon, with luck I stepped one foot on the platform and with my kitbag I was in the taxi. And lined up in two rows just outside the taxis, the whole length of the platform, motorcycle police wheel to wheel. And as soon as we were all on board the taxis we drove through Chicago with a police escort either side. And when we reached the other terminal the same applied. The taxis drove on the platform to within a yard of the carriage in which we were to travel and again I reckon, with luck, I stepped one foot on the platform with my kit bag — I was in the carriage. And lined up, in two rows just outside of the taxis, the whole length of the platform, motorcycle police wheel to wheel. And as soon as we were all on board the train moved off. Very slickly organised. The train journey across America was three or four days. The train stopped every night at 6 o’clock for thirty minutes so we got out and wandered around. One of the drivers blew his hooter at twenty five past so you ran like a stag and made the train to clamber on because when he started at half past six you knew he wouldn’t stop until the next night at 6 o’clock. You had to be on board. We got off in Arizona at a town called Mesa. Mesa is situated about fifty miles due south of the capital, Phoenix and we were bussed ten to twelve miles out into the desert to 4 BFTS. We were classified as Number 4 course at 4 BFTS. Numbers 1, 2 and 3 had done their previous six, twelve and eighteen week training under the American Air Force at Thunderbird Field and they came in to 4 BFTS just before we arrived. When we arrived there was a hut for the sheriff, for his rifle and twin revolvers. There were four corner accommodation blocks over an area of desert. No paths. No tarmac. No nothing. Anywhere. There was a mess hut because they’d got to feed us and a control tower. That was it. Twelve rows of aeroplanes. Four rows of Harvards — the 86s, the advanced trainer. Four rows of Vultee — the intermediate trainer. And four rows of Stearmans — the primary trainer. And that’s it. This 4 BFTS was a private venture by Southwest Airways Incorporated. And boy oh boy did they ever get their fingers out. In a matter of three or four weeks the area inside the four corner accommodation blocks was grass. On it had been built a cadet lounge with easy chairs and magazines from England which we could enjoy if we had time from our studies. All the paths were laid. A parade ground had been put down. One hangar was completely built and the second was half way up. Considering that was a private venture they really got their fingers out. We started flying September 1941. Fifty two of us. On March the 13th 1942 — thirty two of us. Twenty had been scrubbed for lack of aptitude. We were on parade outside our accommodation block in three ranks. We were marched around to stores. We broke off in single file and walked to stores and inside we were each given a handful of sergeant’s stripes, a pair of wings, made to sign for them and told to bog off and sew them on. A most intriguing and surprising Wings Parade. And the next day we left Mesa for Chicago, Canada and home. Pearl Harbour had occurred early December ’41. From this time America were in an emergency and we were allowed to wear uniform the whole time. In camp, out of camp, anytime. So we were coming back to Chicago in uniform. And boy oh boy what a difference that kick up the backside had made to the Chicagoans. A more friendly, likeable, pleasurable people it would have been difficult to meet. Had I accepted all the two hundred packets of Camels and Lucky Strikes I’d been offered I should have needed a trailer to have towed them in. Very generous. Very warm. Very friendly. We enjoyed, we walked, we enjoyed our walk through to the other terminal. We were, we left Chicago and we were trained in to Canada. To Moncton. And at Moncton we boarded the steamship Banfora. SS Banfora. A pre-war cattle ship. And I say this quite simply because a contingent of the Canadian army marched on the Banfora to come with us to the UK and join their compatriots and with fifteen minutes they walked off. You could stuff it. They certainly weren’t going to travel on such rubbish accommodation, not on your nelly. It didn’t matter to the powers that be. They merely filled it with aircrew. They knew we daren’t mutiny. If we did we would either be shot or clapped in jail. And so we came home in convoy, on the Banfora, a pre-war cattle ship. The American instructors had recommended me for single engine day fighters. Spits and Hurris which is what I wanted. When I got back to the UK the lords at the Air Ministry decided my single engine aeroplanes should be a Tiger Moth and a Magister. I was sent to Number 6 Flying Instructor’s School operating at Scone near Perth in Scotland and within two months I was a qualified flying instructor to teach basic exercises to solo standard. Not to wing standard. Just to solo standard. So we taught straight and level flying, medium turns left and right, gliding turns left and right, climbing turns left and right, take offs and landings and taxiing control on the ground. That was all. And I had eight students. Four in the morning. Four in the afternoon. And detailed to fly five hours every day. The locals at Scone had convinced us that the only way to enjoy their honey was to drink it neat and chase it with a half pint of beer, a whisky beer chaser. And I could buy a whisky beer chaser in Scone mess for eight old pence. That’s just over tuppence in modern parlance. And I was sure, when it came time to my posting from the flying school there was nowhere in England where I could buy a whisky beer chaser for eight old pence so I elected to stay at Scone. I did my first year or so at Scone. It was July the 13th ’43 when I received the King’s pleasure — was appointed to a King’s Commission and posted to 11 EFTS – to 9 EFTS operating at Ansty near Coventry. I arrived at Ansty, reported to my boss, the wing commander flying. He didn’t want me at Ansty. His four flights were full but his two flights at his satellite at Southam needed instructors so I was sent to Southam. I got to Southam and I reported to the CO. The flight lieutenant. He said to me, ‘Here at Southam we’ve got twenty Tiger Moths. Bowsers to feed them. If you want a bed tonight to lay your head on you’d better get in to Southam and find one. If not – hard luck.’ So I pulled into Southam and I got digs with an elderly widow, Mrs Paxton who had living with her her nephew Ted. Ted was a very highly skilled motor mechanic who for years had been servicing all the police vehicles in the area and the police were determined not to lose him. So they made him a war reserve copper which kept him there all the war to do their servicing. To get from Ansty, from Southam dead across country to the village where I was born, Gamlingay which was between Biggleswade and St Neots on the A1, a little bit east of that, if it was a short leave I barely got to Gamlingay in time to turn around and come back. And I said to Ted, ‘I’d better buy myself a vehicle.’ So he said, ‘Well if you go along to the local garage they’ve got two.’ So I went along and they had a 1929 Austin 7 with a part fabric body, reconditioned engine – ten pounds. They had a 1931 Austin 7 with a non-reconditioned engine – five pounds. I knew that my, that the fuel on my vehicle would have would always be at least fifty percent paraffin so I opted for the non-reconditioned engine. Five pounds. Registration number HX 4819. She smoked well but by God she went well. I kept her and a year later when I’d been posted to Yorkshire I sold her for a tenner. So she did me proud did old HX 4819. The Rolls Royce works at Ansty had been completing the building of the Mosquito aircraft before flight testing them and delivering them to squadrons for operational use. And it was quite obvious in very early spring of ’44 that Mosquitoes were far more urgently required than pilots because snap you fingers over night the EFTS was shut down. There wasn’t a Tiger Moth in the vicinity and twenty of us pilots had been posted to an Advanced Flying Unit at South Cerney near Cirencester in Gloucester flying the twin-engined Airspeed Oxford for eighty hours. So we got out but on the bomber trail not the fighter. After AFU the next stage was OTU. Kinloss, the satellite at Forres. Forres, the satellite of Kinloss had just emptied its crews out to the next stage of training so a whole batch of us were posted in to fill it up again. Here we were to fly the Armstrong Whitworth Whitley, the old flying coffin. Flat out, nose down, one twenty indicated if you were lucky. A pre-war bomber. Ye Gods. The second day at Forres we were detailed to report to a large briefing room. Inside were every aircrew trade. Pilots, navs, bombs, wops, gunners. No engineers. We didn’t need engineers on the Whitley. And here we crewed up and I started picking my crew. I saw a pilot officer bomb aimer, six foot three, built like a tank. And I thought Ye Gods what a great asset he’d be if later on you were at a local pub and got in a fix. So I went over to him and I said, ‘You’ve got yourself a skipper. I’m Pete.’ He said, ‘I’m Cliff. Cliff Lamb. And I know a navigator.’ I said, ‘Dig him out.’ So we dived in the motley throng and he dug out a five foot, a pilot officer navigator. Five foot nothing. Slim as a bean pole. Pilot Officer J E E Viella. John Viella. Black hair, black eyes. I said, ‘Ok John. You’ve got yourself a skipper. I’m Pete. What cooks?’ ‘Father ran from Mussolini in the early ‘30s to London. I’ve done all my schooling in London. I’m in my second year of accountancy and I’ve joined the air force. How long have you been flying?’ Which rather took me aback. I said, ‘Since 1941.’ ‘How many hours have you done?’ ‘I don’t know. Twelve, thirteen hundred.’ ‘Well we’d better get ourselves a couple of gunners and a W/op.’ He thought I’d just transferred trades and I would have what anyone normally through the trade would be. About two hundred and fifty hours. I’d been kicking around a bit longer. The three of us saw a gunner on his own by the side of the room holding a bottle and we three agreed anybody holding a bottle, irrespective of what was in it, was recommending himself. So we went over to him and said, ‘You’ve got yourself a crew. I’m Pete. The skipper.’ He said ‘I’m Sergeant GWC Jack from Grantown on Spey. I’m nineteen and I’m a rear gunner.’ We said, ‘Smashing job, you’re in.’ He said, ‘I know a mid-upper and a W/op.’ We said, ‘Go and dig him out.’ So he went and dug out Sergeant Haines, a mid-upper. Sergeant Will the W/op. We had a full crew. Our work on the Whitley was eighty hours. Usually in six, roughly six hour cross country’s day or night. On each cross country there’d be some bombing practice for the bomb aimer and some gunnery practice for the gunners. We had trouble with our wireless op. On every trip after an hour, after two hours he pronounced his radio unserviceable. Took it to bits and spread all the bits over [coughs] sorry.
[recording paused]
CP: And he took his radio to bits and spread it over the floor of the Whitley which meant that from that time the navigator never ever received any help from the radio for his navigation. Thank the lord he was an ace. Give John a minute with his sextant on the sun, moon, any star. He knew all the constellations. Betelgeuse. Cassiopeia. I got an exact fix. Never ever on any operation day or night was I ever off course. Which is why I’m alive today and talking to you in my nineties. He was brilliant without a shadow of a doubt. This culminated in the last trip. We’d landed. We were in dispersal doing our rundown checks and switching off. And I called to Will, ‘Get your things together, pack your bags and bog off. You’re out.’ And his great chum, the mid-upper, Haines said, ‘I’ll go with him.’ Now, when you get rid of two bits of dead wood from your crew at the drop of a hat there’s only one reason. Old Lady Luck is firmly on your shoulders, and she’s been there ever since. We were posted to an Advanced Flying Unit – Marston Moor, where they were flying the four-engined Halifax Mark 2 and Mark 5. Fifty hours. We picked up our engineer, Sergeant Ted Millington. We had, at the end of our six we were posted to 77 Squadron operating at full Sutton on the Halifax. Full Sutton is near Elvington. We arrived at Full Sutton and when you get [pause] — ages, I was twenty three. The navigator John and the engineer Ted were twenty two. Jock in the tail was nineteen. We managed to pick ourselves up a spare wireless op, Ross, Ross Tinian. A flight sergeant. Ross and Cliff, the bomb aimer they were both old men. They were twenty eight. They were old geezers. So we had a crew without a mid-upper gunner but when we got to a squadron every time I operated I had either Flying Officer Harris as my mid-upper or Flying Officer Davis. Davis was an Aussie. And I was lucky. Everytime they either flew with me. On the two occasions when I didn’t have Harris then I had Davis. So I was very lucky. Once you get to a squadron you’re converted to their aircraft and they were flying the Halifax Mark 3 with radials. And the difference between the Mark 2 and 5 and a Mark 3 was phenomenal. I could get a Mark 3 with a full bomb and fuel load up to twenty thousand plus without any trouble at all. I would have been poorly placed to have got a Mark 2 or a 5 up beyond twelve, fourteen thousand feet, without a shadow of doubt. The difference was quite remarkable. After you’re converted you’re detailed to fly second pilot with an experienced crew and I flew with Flight Lieutenant Taylor and his crew. A night operation to the Ruhr, to Essen — six and a half hours. It was Flight Lieutenant Taylor’s twenty ninth trip so he’d got one more to do before he got a fresh job. Then I was detailed to fly with Flying Officer Charlesworth. Again to the Ruhr. A night trip. Six and a half hours to Duisburg. It was Charlesworth’s fifteenth trip so he’d got fifteen more to do before he got a fresh job. And then I was as free as the air to operate with my own crew. And the first target we bombed was Bingen. Bingen was a town way, way south on the Rhine. Its claim to notoriety was the fact it had fairly extensive marshalling yards. And through those marshalling yards regularly, numerous times weekly, came troop trains loaded with reinforcements from Austria and from Munich for the German front line. And a hundred and five of us were sent out this night cock up the contract. Pick off the marshalling yards and apparently intelligence found out for us afterwards we’d done a good job because no more [laughs] no more troop trains ever came through Bingen from then on. At the end of that trip we were in dispersal doing rundown checks and switching it off and I said to myself, ‘Pete if that was an indication of what you’re tour is going to be like. You’ve got it made. You’re going to make this.’ I’d seen little, no flak on the way in to the target, over the target, out from the target. On the way home we hadn’t been molested or searched for or shot at. It had been a piece of doddle. You get stupid thoughts when you’re twenty three and in charge of a bomber don’t you? I’d like now to give you this map. And this was an actual map of a trip that I did on my eighth trip on my tour to an oil refinery in between Bohlen and Dresden and Leipzig. In the Dresden area between Leipzig and Chemnitz. Our boss, Bomber Harris insisted concentrated bombing was vital. He insisted concentrated bombing often swamped defences and once you got defences swamped then the middle and end of an attack could be as accurate as the opening. If you’re going to swamp, if you are going, and four hundred of us were detailed to bomb Bohlen this night. The four hundred of us would go through. The first hundred at seventeen thousand feet. Five minutes. The second hundred, eighteen thousand feet. Five minutes. The third hundred, nineteen thousand feet five minutes. And the rest twenty thousand five minutes. Twenty minutes — the job’s done. Two thousand tonnes of bombs on the ground. When you think that the Germans, the most weight of bombing they dropped on us was three or four hundred tons, you can understand two thousand just swamps them. They had nothing to fight against it at all. And we thought this was smashing. We thought Bomber Harris deserved a pat on the back for that. We thought that was smashing. If you’re going to control your area you’ve got to, if you’re going to concentrate them you’ve got to control them and so Bomber Command laid down the route we were to fly and I must admit considerable thought had been given to these routes that they gave us. We were detailed this night to leave base at nine thousand feet and we left there at nine thousand feet. Flying due south to Reading at one seven five. When we were going to this part of Germany we always turned over Reading. It gave the locals a morale booster if they heard four or five hundred bombers going out. They’d think, ‘By crikey somebody’s getting their backside kicked tonight. We hope the boys come back.’ We hoped we all came back too. From Reading we turned south easterly and we flew over the English coast at C, the French coast at D, to position E. From E we flew due, roughly due easterly to F. Still at 175. Now if you can continue that line from E to F straight on with your fingers it’s making for Frankfurt, Mannheim, Mainz. So if you’re defending Germany and you’ve picked up the stream you think that’s the target and you can get your night fighters up around. Once we get the night fighters up they could only be up two hours and then they had to go home for a drink. We’re going to be four hours to the target and four hours back again. So it’s good if we can get them up. But long before we get anywhere near Frankfurt, Mannheim, Mainz we turn north easterly to G. Now, on this leg we change from 160 [pause] from 175 to 160 so we’re climbing. We’re climbing to bombing height and so you can say I’m at seventeen thousand feet before I get to G. And G is actually just about, if you move it with your finger is going for Kassel. Fresh target. Before we get anywhere near Kassel at G we turn a little bit more to the east to H. Still at 160. But if you follow a route from G to H with your fingers it’s making for Leipzig. Fresh target. And this was how it was done. To fool up the German defences. We’re changing. We’re going to — because after H we turn north easterly and we’re actually making for Berlin. And he were always dodgy about Berlin. But long before we got anywhere near Berlin at I we turned just below due east and to J. And here we’re just north of Leipzig so that there’s no danger and then we turn on our bombing run to K. At 160, Cliff, the bomb aimer sat in the seat on my right all the trip until we got to the target area when he slid down, went to the nose of the aeroplane. Got his bomb sight ready. And his job now — he had, two jobs, two things. First to identify the target. He’d seen stacks of photographs and pictures of the target at main briefing and the wing commander had given tremendous insight into it. He now had to select it on the ground and pick it out. Once he’d got it picked out then he had to make sure it crossed his bomb sight on the centre line to the aiming point when he pressed the button. Bombs gone. As the skipper, once you heard, ‘Bombs gone,’ your natural inclination was to shove on full power and belt the hell out of there. But that wasn’t possible because when he, when he pressed the button, bombs gone he activated the camera and the camera took five pictures one after the other across the target in thirty seconds. During those thirty seconds you were allowed to increase your speed by ten. That was a big morale booster I can assure you. Once you got an indication from your dash that the camera had finished then it was full power up to two hundred and belt the hell out of there. Once we left the target our speed is now two ten and after five minutes from the target we’d lower height to seven thousand feet. And we fly back over Germany at seven thousand feet until we come to Frankfurt, Mannheim, Mainz where there’s light flak to twelve so we climb up to fourteen. Keep at fourteen until we’re well clear and then we let down to eight thousand feet. And we fly at eight thousand feet via Reading back to the Humber. At the Humber we let down to two thousand feet and join Full Sutton and land. My trip was a little bit different. We set course at nine thousand feet for Reading. We turned across the English coast at C, the French coast at D, to position E. From E we flew to F at one seven five. From F we got our climbing one sixty. And at seventeen thousand feet we level. And after G the starboard inner engine decided to pack up. There was no flak. No night fighters. It was a pure mechanical failure. So it was switch off, fuel off, feather the prop. Speed now back to one forty and I needed left rudder to keep straight. I now had the option of coming back. Dropping down four thousand feet, turning one eighty degrees and coming home on my tod with a full bomb load. I hadn’t got a full petrol load. Of the just under two thousand gallons I started with I’d probably used up three fifty, four hundred but I’d still got sixteen hundred gallons left which was a lot of fuel. If they couldn’t pick me up to predict me they’d alerted a couple of fighters to come up and shoot me down. So I said to the crew, ‘I suggest we stay with the stream, using them for cover.’ When there are four hundred of you every radar screen is covered on the ground. Swamped. And instead of bombing at H plus 4 which was my time on target we’d bomb at H plus twenty at the end of the attack. And instead of bombing at seventeen thousand feet we’d bomb at fourteen thousand feet. And the crew said, ‘Ok skip. Press on.’ Whenever I’d done practice flying at Full Sutton at two and three engines it had been in the Halifax with a couple of hours of fuel on board. The boys don’t fully bomb up and fully tank up an aeroplane for you to go and play with obviously. So I’d never flown one under this configuration at this height and I boobed. Instead of getting there at H plus twenty we were twenty minutes late. We got there nearer H plus forty. But our boss’s theory was right. Defences had been swamped. If there were a half a dozen gunners firing at us that was all. And that was in scare mongering. Cliff picked to go on the ground and bombed it. We took our five pictures. No question of changing speed. I was stuck at one forty and so we turned away and when we came to let down to seven thousand feet we were still at one forty. I remembered that when we were bombing the North German ports Wilhelmshaven, who were Hamburg. We had crossed the North Sea at five hundred feet above the water. When you’ve got three or four hundred bombers, each with four fans whipping around flying at five hundred feet the prop wash is a bit disturbing. So you thanked the lord when you got near the Frisian Islands and you climbed up to bombing height and stayed there. So I thought if we stayed under bombing height like that it might be an idea to go down lower than seven thousand feet. And I went down to four thousand feet. And I must admit the whole way back even through Frankfurt, Mannheim, Mainz nobody fired a gun at us. We were completely clear the whole time. We stayed on the course that they’d laid, command had laid down for us and we were probably in the Frankfurt, Mannheim, Mainz area when the starboard outer, I presume it had been keeping watch on the starboard inner all night thinking Ye Gods he has had a night off. I’ve worked my socks off for this driver. I’m fed up. I’m going to pack up but to let him know I’m going to pack up I’ll make sure there’s a slight explosion and a sheet of flame from the starboard outer which there was. And the driver recognised it was going to pack up so it was switch off, fuel off, feather the prop and I pressed the graviner button. I’d got four graviner buttons. One for each engine. And it flooded the engine with foam which I hoped would douse all flames and it did. Speed was now back to one thirty and I’d got on full left rudder. My left knee locked. That was one improbable out of the way and I controlled the attitude of the aeroplane with power. If I put on too much power the strength of the engines rolled me and turned me to the right. If I took off too much power I rolled and turned to the left. So it was a case of juggling. We ran into cloud. Clouds are very handy. You can hide in it. We knew night fighters were around but this cloud contained icing to the extent that I was rather concerned if we stayed in it indefinitely the build up might be awkward. So we had to get out of it. To go below it might be a problem because it could be on the ground. So it was a case of climbing out of it. To climb I needed power. So it was a case increasing power very slightly so that I could still keep the wings level and keep straight and wait. Wait for my slight increase of power to give me a slight increase of speed, five and whip that five into height ten feet and wait for my five. Another ten feet. There was no panic. We were three seventy, three hundred and seventy five four hundred miles to England, it would take me a good two and a half hours at least to get there so there so was no hurry. And we uched, jigged, gripped our way up to six thousand five hundred feet. We were clear of cloud and I reckoned six five would be ok to cross the drink to UK. So we levelled at six five. I now checked with the nav, with Johnny. I was a bit concerned at the time we’d taken to uch up to six. And he confirmed what I thought, we were nearing the front line. This thought was under the auspices of the trigger happy American gunners and our own gunners, neither of whom liked aero engines. They shot, the American gunners shot them out of the sky irrespective of whose they were. Our own gunners were a bit more selective. So I called the W/op and said, ‘Break the seal on the IFF and switch it to distress.’ In his compartment he had a six inch square back box. The IFF. Identification Friend or Foe. It had a switch that was off, that was wired off and on the wire was a seal. And the wireless ops were warned by the signals leaders back at Full Sutton that if on any trip they interfered with that seal on the strip they’d be court martialled. But this was an emergency. Ross broke the seal, switched it on and immediately, way on the port horizon came three airfield sandra lights. The searchlights at the corner of the airfield intertwining. And on the starboard horizon three more. These were two emergency airfields. That was Woodbridge in Suffolk and that was Manston in Kent. They had picked up our emergency drill and lit themselves up. I made for Manston. When I reached Manston I did the circuit. When I was nicely placed on base leg I throttle back, did a glide approach and landing on the amber runway. Once we were on the ground I used my inner engine to get me through the red runway on to the peri track when I stopped and switched off. Waited for a tractor to come and hook on and tow us in, which they did. They picked us up, took us, debriefed, fed us, bedded. Sleeping in full flying kit that night I think we kept warm. They got us up in the morning. Fed us. Gave us a warrant to London, across to Kings Cross and up to York. And when we walked on the platform at Kings Cross station of the York train we had a bit of a snozzle. The very first compartment we came to, there was no corridor, had a great big notice filling one window completely — “Reserved for crashed aircrew.” And this got the billy goat of our rear gunner. He snatched the door open, ripped it off the window and tore it to shreds and threw it down. ‘What the hell are they talking about? We haven’t had a crash landing. We made a normal landing. Get their facts right.’ ‘It doesn’t matter Jock. We’ve got a compartment. Let’s get in.’ We were all carrying our parachutes. When you’d signed for your parachute you didn’t leave it out of your sight. If you didn’t hand it back in it could cost you sixty or seventy quid to replace and that was a lot of money then. We were carrying — we were in full flying kit. We got in, dumped our stuff, got to York and we were picked up. Taken to Full Sutton. When we reached full Sutton my immediate boss, the wing commander flying, wanted a full report of our sortie which I gave him. And three weeks later I was in the mess and I picked up the Daily Mail, and on the, on the front page were headlines, “Two engines failed but he went on.” And when I saw it I thought well goodness me some other geezer’s having a bash at this. But reading the article it was talking of Flight Lieutenant Peters and his trip over Germany. And some three weeks later I was called in to the CO’s office of group captains. Inside was our AOC, the group captain and my immediate boss Wing Commander Forbes. And the AOC pinned a bit of this ribbon under my wings, congratulated me and wished me a safe and satisfactory tour as did the group captain and Wing Commander Forbes. And that was it. Many many many many many many many months later my Distinguished Flying Cross arrived by post with an apologetic letter from the king. He was sorry he couldn’t hand it to me personally. He was far too busy. Probably handing out awards to sportsmen. Anyway, he sent it by post and he wished me a long and happy life. And considering I’m now in my ninety fourth year and still pressing on he was right.
[recording paused]
After leaving the air force I went into teaching. I taught until 1952 when I returned to flying with air work at Royal Air Force Digby flying the Tiger Moth. After a year flying Tiger Moths I returned to the air force in which I served for fifteen years. Finishing at Royal Air Force College, Cranwell. I then returned to education in Sleaford and finished up my education in ’86 when I retired and I’ve been retired ever since.
MJ: This is the end of the interview with Flight Lieutenant Cyril Peters DFC on the 29th at 12:30.
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Interview with Cyril Peters
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Mick Jeffery
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-04-28
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Sound
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APetersC150428
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Pending review
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00:44:32 audio recording
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
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Cyril Peters joined the Royal Air Force at Cambridge in 1940 and trained as a pilot in Canada and the United States. On his return to Great Britain he served as an instructor before flying operations as a pilot with 77 Squadron. He became a teacher after the war.
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Canada
Great Britain
Germany
United States
England--Kent
England--Yorkshire
Arizona--Phoenix
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bingen (Rhineland-Palatinate)
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Essen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
New Brunswick--Moncton
Nova Scotia--Halifax
Arizona
New Brunswick
Nova Scotia
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
4 BFTS
77 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
British Flying Training School Program
Distinguished Flying Cross
Flying Training School
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
Halifax Mk 5
Harvard
Initial Training Wing
military service conditions
Oxford
pilot
RAF Ansty
RAF Elvington
RAF Full Sutton
RAF Manston
RAF Marston Moor
Tiger Moth
training
Whitley
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1181/11752/PWagnerHW1701.2.jpg
6a7763552d25d2c08c9178b97a3f8dee
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1181/11752/AWagnerH160504.1.mp3
d0604bd27c672862fb31f835ffeebaa3
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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Wagner, Henry Wolfe
H W Wagner
Description
An account of the resource
15 items. Two oral history interviews with Sergeant Henry Wolfe Wagner (1923 - 2020, 1604744 Royal Air Force), his memoirs, documents and photographs. He flew operations as a navigator with 51 Squadron from RAF Snaith and became a prisoner of war. He was demobbed in 1946 and returned to education where he remained until his retirement.
The collection was catalogued by Trevor Hardcastle.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-05-04
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Wagner, HW
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Transcription
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JH: This is Judy Hodgson and I’m interviewing Henry Wagner today for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. We are at Mr Wagner’s home and it is the 4th of May 2016. Thank you Henry for agreeing to talk to me today. Also present at the interview are Steve Drawbridge and Tony Hiddle. Friends of Henry. Ok. So, if you’d like to tell us a little bit about yourself. When and where you were born and your early years.
HW: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I was born in 1923 in Ireland but, and for a long time retained Irish citizenship because my mother and father were both Irish. But we came over to England when I was three years old. What the reason for coming over here was I don’t know. My father, my father was a clerk in the Holy Orders. He took a Theology degree at Dublin University. And my mother came from a well-established old Irish family. In fact, she played, played country golf when she was in Ireland. And I and my brothers took up golf, in our, when we were about ten years old. And it’s always been one of my great interests in life. We came over to England and settled down near a little village near Reading where my father set up a dentistry practice and he was always interested in shooting. In game shooting. And he used to gather friends round and with their twelve bores and they would do clay pigeon shooting. And that was one of his great interests. So, he was a dentist and, and a fairly well known game shot because he used to write articles for a magazine at the time called, “The Shooting Times” and “British Sportsman.” Anyway, he deserted the family and again I don’t know the reasons behind it all. I was too small to have any interest in that sort of thing. And left my mother with four boys to look after and no real, not much source of income. My father stumped up a bit from time to time but then packed it in and he had to be chased to carry on. How she did it I don’t know. One mother looking after four boys and a house. Doing all the housework as well. I’ve got to take my hat off to people like that. And we moved to Henley after a time, where they have the regatta and the going wasn’t all that easy financially then. We lived in a council house in not a very salubrious sort of a neighbourhood. But my next brother, there were three brother you see. I was the second one. The third one down, Richard was only a year younger and he and I used to play golf together. In fact, he became quite a good golfer. Handicap down to six eventually and my handicap never came down to lower than twelve. But we played, well certainly twice a week. I went to, was successful in passing the examination to go to Henley Grammar School which was a long established Grammar School. A great tradition behind it. And about a third of children could get Grammar School education. The rest stayed at the, what were called Secondary Modern schools in those days. But at Henley Grammar School I found my main interests were in languages, geography, mathematics. Though I was never any good or much good at. But more about that later. I took school certificate there. Played rugby there. They didn’t play association football it was, Grammar Schools always played rugby and I became a captain of one of the houses. The school was divided into three sections. Three houses which used to compete with each other on the sports fields. And I was captain of Periam House. He rugby team on the rugby fields. We used to play other Grammar Schools around about. So that became my other favourite sport. So we had golf, rugby. By the time I left school — I took the school certificate and then stayed on for the higher school certificate or A level I believe it’s called now and was accepted to go to Reading University. And I would have gone there when I’d be, let’s see, fifteen years, when I was sixteen or seventeen years old. By the time, by the time I went to University the war had already started and it wasn’t going very well. We weren’t prepared for war where the Germans had been preparing for war for years and years. So things were, things were hard. Rationing was hard. Food was scarce. You got — bread was rationed. Jam was rationed. Cooking fats. Butter. Well pretty well everything in fact. Tinned food. Sardines. Pilchards and that sort of thing. They were all in short supply and we used to, in fact our four boys rather we all had our own one jam pot. One pound jam pot a month. And we sort of used to look at this at tea time. Look at the other, the other lad, the other chap’s pots of jam to see how they were getting on with theirs. It was very, things were very, in short supply. There was, soap was rationed. Sweets were rationed. You had to buy sweets which would, you were sure would last for a long time in your mouth. You ate them slowly. You didn’t have chocolate which would be gone in no time. You had the toffees and that sort of thing that would last. So, Reading University now. We were, lived seven miles from Reading University and I didn’t live at the University. I lived at home but we used to go in to Reading every day. I used to go into Reading every day by bicycle. I had to bike into Reading and at the end of the day bike home again. So that was, that was fourteen miles of exercise every day anyway. Sometimes I’d go in on Saturdays because I, for some reason I didn’t play rugby at University. What took my fancy, because this always happened at Henley Grammar School as well, cross-country running was another favourite other sport, other activity at Henley Grammar School. I joined the cross-country club at Reading University and we used to hold triangular matches against other Universities such as Bristol or Southampton or wherever and I mean you didn’t get, you didn’t get, anybody could take part in it. You didn’t get selected. There was, a cross-country team doesn’t have sort of four or six or eight members or whatever there might be. Anybody who’s interested can have a go and of course the better ones were always encouraged. Well, everybody’s encouraged for that matter. So it was mostly cross-country running at University. And also the, so they had the war having started I went to the University in, let’s see 1940. You could, men at the University could either, could join the Cadet Force. They only had an Army Cadet Force. So we, it’s alright, I don’t want to go into the army but every, all the others seemed to be joining the army cadets. I suppose I’d better do the same. No interest in it whatever but after a time, after about a year, the University opened, started Air Training Corps. A Cadet Force. University Air Squadron. That’s what I was trying to think of. And where you could train, anybody from the Army Cadet Force could transfer to the University Air Squadron and so I welcomed that change there. We, it was run as, the squadron commander was appointed. He was the one of the University staff in fact. Professor Miller who was head of geography and also he was Dean of the Faculty of Science. He hadn’t got any Air Force training you understand but he was the, he was in charge. To bring real Air Force personnel into it the Air Force supplied us with a Flight Lieutenant Jordan who was a fighter pilot. Had been a fighter pilot. His flight, he’d been in, his aircraft had caught fire and he was shot down. The aircraft caught fire and he was badly burned about the face. But he was, you looked up to him as one who had been there. He’d been there before you. And also a Sergeant Linton who was an ex-air gunner who’d been shot down in the, in North Africa and he had walked back through the desert back to our own lines. And he was, so he was put in charge of weapons training and that sort of thing in the University Air Squadron. And there were lectures on meteorology which, which Squadron Leader Miller was well trained to do of course being a geographer. And outside lecturers used to come along to talk about Air Force law and organisation and all that sort of the thing and we used to go flying at weekends. Flight Lieutenant Jordan could take us over to Woodley Aerodrome which was about three or four miles away where Miles aircraft were built and he used to take us for a, well we looked on them as joy rides. They were classified as air experiences. So, all in all it was good. The time came for, when I was of an age to be called up and which was at the end of two years at University and I went up to London and, for an interview board and, ‘Why do you want to go into aircrew?’ and so on. I had always been interested in flying. When my brother and I were about ten, what would we be? Ten. Eleven. Twelve. That sort of age. We used to have those, buy those model gliders that you shoot. You had like, they were on a catapult and we used to go to a field near our house. We used to do a lot of kite flying and that sort of thing and always had an interest in flying. Yes. And the, the Air Force accepted me for aircrew training. And as a pilot. I was accepted for pilot training. The system was that some lads being interviewed just chose, well I’d like to be a navigator, or I’d like to be bomb aimer or I’d like to be a gunner or whatever but most put down pilot first of all. And those that failed could either choose one of the other categories. So, it was called the PNB scheme. Pilot, navigator, bomb aimer. And, and those three trades you were trained abroad in those because you needed flying experience. The gunners, air gunners they’d be mostly recruited from, from the ground staff at the various airfields and squadrons and they could be trained there and then because they, it didn’t take an awful lot of training to be a gunner. You had to know how to operate the equipment and services and cure stoppages and how to aim off or deflection shots according to the speed of the other aircraft and so on. They didn’t need very extensive training. They could, that could be carried out by their own squadrons. So, alright. Well, I’m in the PNB scheme then. I’ve been accepted to train abroad as a pilot. But before, before all that I was you got so those who were going to be who were selected to be trained as pilots were sent to different aerodromes around the country where, where flying clubs had been before the war mostly. There were some aircraft manufacturers who had their own aerodromes of course to, you got to fly the stock off when it’s built after all. But the, these were called grading schools and you were, you were taken in charge by a, by a proper Air Force instructor. A very experienced Air Force instructor. And he would teach you the how to fly the, a Tiger Moth. There’s a picture of a Tiger Moth in there in fact and the two seater bi-plane. Not all that easy to fly really but the aim was, or the standard was that you had to have, you had to have gone solo by your ten hours instruction. If you hadn’t gone solo in less than ten hours then you were automatically rejected and put on to your next choice you see. So we used to fly when I was at Brough up near Hull on the, on the Humber Estuary and we used to take off, used to take off and fly over the circuit. Went along beside the Humber then up across the river. Along the south side and back north again across, across the River Humber and a circuit took about a quarter of an hour. So, well it was enjoyable. After, I went solo after a month or so after nine and three quarter hours so I was home and dry there. And I thought, right, that’s all set up now. I’m going to be a pilot. So back on leave after that. And the next call up was for a posting abroad to carry on the, carry on the pilot training. Some people went to Canada where they had the Empire Air Training Scheme. Some went to Rhodesia which is now Tanzania isn’t it? And some went to South Africa and the chap that went solo before me on this particular day he went, he happened, Ron Waters who was at the University Air Squadron with me he went to Canada and completed his training out there. I went to South Africa and did my training down there. So you never knew where you were going to get sent to. Hold on a minute.
[recording paused]
HW: So, after grading school I was posted. I went on leave and then was posted to Liverpool for embarkation for South Africa. We, nobody told us we were going to South Africa but we’d been provided with, with khaki shorts and a pith helmet. A sun helmet and khaki gear so we knew it was going to be somewhere hot. So we embarked on the steamship Strathmore. We set sail from Liverpool around the north of Ireland. We were crowded down below. The accommodation was, there was no room to move about down below. You had a table. Table. Tables for about a dozen people where the food was served up to and that’s where you were fed. You had to sling hammocks for sleeping purposes but they were uncomfortable and most people settled for sleeping just on the floor or on the tables. And we set sail around the north of, of Ireland and the sea was really rough. It was. The boat was swooping. Not just up and down but sideways as well. And most people could be seen hanging over, up on the deck, hanging over the rails and depositing the contents of what they’d had for their last meal. It was uncomfortable until you got your sea legs after a few days. And the weather turned warmer the further you went south. So we went out, out, far out into the Atlantic. We were, the Strathmore was a fast steamship. It wasn’t escorted at all by destroyers to keep away German U-Boats. It just relied on speed. And the first port of call was Freetown in Sierra Leone. As we, as we entered the harbour we heard, we observed destroyers depth charging not far off so the Germans were around about. After a couple of days there we went out into the Atlantic again. Down south, round the south of South Africa and in to the port of Durban. This was, for us this was a real holiday. We’d come away from hard up England and we were, the weather was lovely and warm. We had the access to as much as sweets, chocolates, that sort of thing, as we wanted. And my first purchase was a can of sweetened condensed milk which I consumed in no time flat. Also, being Durban there was, Durban I should say was a transit camp because from there everybody came into Durban but then they were allocated from there to different, different training airfields. So there wasn’t much. It was just, you were it was just a place where you waited for your next posting. We could go down to the down to, down to the sea at Durban and Durban beach. And it was good swimming down there. The Indian ocean. The water was warm. The weather was warm. There was, the food was good. So it was real relaxation until, well I stayed there about what about two or three weeks I should say and then a posting came through to a training aerodrome in the Orange Free State, called Kroonstad. Here the training I should say wasn’t carried out by, by RAF officers or staff. It was carried out by members of the South African Air Force. So, I had a Lieutenant Goddard as my, my tutor. Not one of the easiest of men to get on with but maybe, maybe trainee pilots do get on their instructor’s nerves sometimes. And they’re always quite outspoken. They never, they never console you. They never mince their words. If they mean one thing they say it unmistakably. And so, so after, it didn’t take long before Lieutenant Goddard and Mr [unclear] said, ‘This bloke’s alright for a solo. We can let him get on with it.’ From Kroonstad] we used to fly north for about seven or eight miles. Still in Tiger Moths. They still used Tiger Moths in South Africa. Fly north to an auxiliary airfield called Rietgat which was not much more than the highveld with a barbed wire fence around it and a hut where you could, you could shelter or food. Have your food and, or have a rest. So, after I’d done by the sense of a bit of solo in England and the solos that I went on at Rietgat and Kroonstad I’d done, I’d done ten hours solo on Tiger Moths and it was no, no great hassle at all. It was very enjoyable in fact. The, the Lieutenant Goddard got out one day, oh I should say Kroonstad was a very small area. You could get a Tiger Moth off alright provided, but it was, you had to make sure you only just cleared the fence one end and since the Tiger Moth had no brakes it just ran on and on and on and you would stop not far before you got to the fence the other end. Just enough space to rev the engine up and put full rudder on and turn around and taxi back to where the instructor was. Right. Back to Lieutenant Goddard. He got out, he said, ‘Bring it back down,’ he said, ‘Do your one solo. One solo circuit,’ he said, ‘Don’t hang about. Don’t mess about now,’ he said, ‘I want to get back to Kroonstad because I’ve got another student waiting for me.’ So he got, strapped up his control column so that it couldn’t move and I was, I was in total control. He got out. Oh he took his, no he took he took his control column out with him. You could just unscrew it and he took it out so it didn’t catch on anything, you see. So turned around. Taxied back to the take off point, opened up and off we go. Nice take off. Yes. Up, up, up and away. Around. Around. Around. Cross wind leg. Downwind leg. Cross wind leg. And turn in for the finals. And I thought to myself I’m not going to get over that bloody fence. I said, I’m too low down. So I opened up and took off and went around again. Did another circuit. Coming around the second time I thought to myself I’m going to clear that fence this time alright. And I did clear it by far too great a distance so the aircraft ran on and on and on and on and I thought this isn’t going to stop before it gets to that barbed wire fence. But fortunately it did stop. Just. The propeller still turning. Not enough space in front of me to open up the engine and put full rudder on and turn. So only one thing to do here. I undid my harness, got out, walked around to the back of the Tiger Moth. Caught hold of the, the tail skid. Pulled it backwards by main force until I thought there was enough space to take off. To open up again. Got back in. Strapped in. Back to lieutenant, and as I’d come in the last time I noticed him down in the corner of the field and he’d got his joystick in his hand and he was waving it. I thought I’ve got to get in this time. And when I got back he said, barked like that, he says, ‘Bring it back to Kroonstad,’ he said, ‘Make a good job of it because this is the last time you’re ever going to be at the controls.’ So back I went. The chief flying, I was given the chief flying instructor’s test and he agreed. Well yeah maybe he’s not the man for the job. Of course I was terribly disappointed because, well I’d failed. And I was going to have to do some other sort of job that didn’t really interest me. So, I got posted back to Pretoria which was another sort of a holding unit and they, from there they dispersed people onto navigator’s courses or bomb aimer’s courses. And after a few weeks I got posted to Port Elizabeth for elementary navigational training because navigation was in its infancy in those days. There was no electronics or anything of that sort. It was all done with charts and dividers and rulers and compasses of various sorts. And bearings and radio bearings and you had to learn about all that sort of thing and you got a test at the end. After, oh sort of meteorology that came into it as well and after about what, a month maybe there was a test. Just a theory test of course and, and I passed that all right. And the next step was to go to a South African Air Force aerodrome where you would put it all into practice and show that you could navigate an aircraft. I got posted to Port Alfred. Quite a small place down on the coast. Well as the name suggests of course, down on the coast. Pretty primitive sort of a place. Still, you were still on holiday from the hardships of life in England in wartime conditions and from there they did the training on Ansons. Avro Ansons. A sort of a workhorse of Air Forces all over the world. All over the world in fact. Avro Anson. A very, very stable reliable sort of aircraft. Never heard of any, any one of them suffering from engine failure or, or anything of that sort. You could rely on that. The pilots were South African Air Force pilots. And they took off at a time maybe two navigators and you. One would be for that particular trip the first navigator who would do all the work on the charts with the, with dividers and lines and calculations and time of arrival. And the other one obtained radio bearings for the first navigator to plot. Or with the, or visual bearings by looking out of the window and see, seeing what was down below and checking with a map that he’d got in front of him. He could see what township that was, you were over, for instance. Or using another thing called the astro compass which wasn’t a magnetic compass at all. It was more of a bearing place. He would take bearings on railway junctions and anything that would appear on his map he would keep constant check and pass the bearings to the first navigator to put on to his, on to his chart. And of course everything the first navigator did was in, in his, he had to enter up in his logbook. Without going in to much detail for instance the navigator had to work out the difference between the true airspeed, the airspeed that the pilot had got in front of him on his instrument panel but that was, that’s the higher you go, the lower you go so the air pressure’s different and it registered different. It doesn’t register the speed that you’re were actually going at. It records the speed that you’re going at through the air but not over the ground necessarily so you had to carry out an adjustment to that and tell the pilot what height, what speed you wanted to, him to put to fly at on his, on his air speed indicator. It was, it was a complicated business. It was solid, unremitting brain work. Anyway, there was nothing much to report of the, of the flying training. It was, it was all proceeding. I could cope with all that alright. Didn’t have any great difficulty and passed the, passed the practical tests and log keeping and all that sort of thing and was, by the time you’d done that you were considered qualified. And all the aircrew were guaranteed then to wear a brevet. The one wing brevet with an N in the middle for navigators. So, the picture in there. And the brevets were pinned on to a passing out parade with all due ceremony and you were given sergeant’s stripes. Yeah. That’s a bit of a sore point. Some, some were, some were given sergeant’s stripes and some were granted commissions which I thought, you know, that’s a bit, ‘How? Why didn’t I get a commission? Why do I get a sergeant’s stripes? Why did Walker, get a, why is he a pilot officer and I’m a sergeant?’ And I must have had some sort of a flaw as far as the Air Force was concerned and evidently not considered to be officer material. So it was off to the sergeant’s mess for me and so on. Sew sergeant’s stripes on, and, and sew the brevet on and wait for the next move to take place which would be back to, back to England again. Being, being qualified now and so as a navigator. Of course, back in England things had changed a bit because they were moving into the electronic age then with, with computers and a lot of the work being done by, by means such as that rather than the, rather than taking radio bearings. So it was going to need, further training was going to be needed. But the last, the last few times in the last few weeks at the, at Kroonstad while nobody was, nobody wants to make life awkward for you. You could do more or less as you pleased provided you behaved yourself. So used to go, used to go swimming and used to go to the pubs and the, the various service clubs and always welcomed. Got on very well with the South Africans. There was always a welcome from them. So my time in South Africa was, as far as relations with other people went, except for, except for Lieutenant Goddard of course, were always very cordial. So it was back to England again then on the troopship [pause] oh dear. Athlone. I think I’ve got that right. No. It was the Union Castle boat. Anyway, never mind about that. It was, it went from Durban and it was, by this time the Mediterranean had been opened up a bit. Tunisia had been, the desert had been more or less cleared and we, the ship was going to go up the east coast of Africa and up through the Red Sea and into, up through the Suez Canal. That’s right. What the, oh I was thinking of Panama, yes the Suez Canal and out in to the Mediterranean and we crossed. Went through the Mediterranean. Called in at, after leaving Durban we called in at [pause] at Kenya. What’s the city? What’s the sea port? Mombasa. Yeah. Called in at Mombasa and let off some, some South African Air Force people. Then went on. The next stop was in Tunisia. No. I’m wrong again. The next stop was in Sicily at Syracuse to let South African troops off there. Then through the Mediterranean. Through the straights of Gibraltar. Out into the Atlantic. Up round, up the coast of Portugal. Through, across the Bay of Biscay. Along the English Channel and in to the Thames Estuary and tied up at Tilbury. Yeah. So all very interesting. All very easy going. Nobody making life difficult. And you had to do a bit of duty now and again. For instance sometimes keeping you would be going up on watch and keeping watch for submarine periscopes for instance. That sort of thing. Or, or down in the, in the place where we, oh we had, sergeants had bunks. I think they were four high. Yeah. Yeah. I got the, I was unfortunate in getting the top bunk in a series of four. Which meant clambering up there. But well I didn’t mind that so much but there was a deck head light just above where my head was so the light was on all night long. But just one of those things you might say. And so back to England and on leave. No. Where did we go from England? To [pause] on leave. And I was posted up to oh yes, West Freugh which was up in Scotland. For, to complete, to carry on training in, because while navigating in South Africa being more or less open country with the odd town and village dotted about here and there in England navigating over big industrial area called for a different, different approach to the whole business. So up to West Freugh [pause] which is near the Mull of Kintyre over on the western side of the country. So most of our training flights went out westwards or, or north westwards. Out over the Irish Sea or Northern Ireland but you couldn’t go over southern Ireland of course. They were sort of a neutral country, and if you came down there you’d get interned. So you had to go up over the north of, north of Scotland and over the Ailsa Craig. Isle of Arran and places like that. And used to come back usually to the Isle of Man. And then back up back up to West Freugh again. Still in Ansons so there were still no electronics. It was still basic navigation. But as I said where the basic navigation in South Africa was very easy basic navigation in England in thick cloud or rain storms or the fact that you couldn’t see the ground or industrial areas it took more getting used to. It wasn’t an easy job. You couldn’t just look out of the window and say. ‘Oh yes. I know where we are.’ So, but not bad conditions. Air Force people I always found were inclined to treat you as, as a fellow. They, they weren’t so keen to boss you about. As long as you were carrying on doing your job and they, you let them get on and do their job and as far as training went then they were they were quite happy to accept you on a friendly basis. I lived in the sergeant’s mess and as I say everything went quite, quite nicely. A lot of the navigation was carried out by night time because, because the bomber force, proper bomber force operated mainly by night. So you had to get used to the, in the dark and not being able to see the ground. No lights. No, no street lights or anything of that sort down below. It was become, becoming acclimatised to flying in a different sort of, under different sort of conditions. So this went on ‘til, in the end after this training went on for about [pause] about three months I suppose. Yeah. Somewhere about that and you were qualified to, to proceed to the next stage of training which would be converting to heavier aircraft. The Air Force at the time was, wasn’t very well equipped with heavy aircraft. It’s the, the most reliable of all the bombers, of the bombers was the Wellington. There was, there was another one about the same size. The Armstrong Whitworth Whitley which I was unfortunate enough to draw a place where they trained on Whitleys. The Hampden wasn’t really a heavy bomber as such. They couldn’t carry a very big bomb load or go very far for that matter. The Fairey Battle was a light bomber which would only be used for dropping bombs on concentrations of enemy troops or bridges or railway junctions. That sort of thing. So from West Freugh I went on leave and, with the, with the instruction that when my leave was up I was to report to Abingdon near Oxford which was an old established Air Force aerodrome. And it, from there, well in fact there was no flying at all from there when I got there because they were just having runways made but their satellite was called Stanton Harcourt about ten miles away. And the flying took place from Stanton Harcourt in these Whitleys. Dreadful old machines. Ugly to look at. You could, they didn’t inspire you to take any pride. You could imagine men taking a pride in their Spitfires. The appearance of them gave you confidence. The Whitley didn’t give you any confidence at all. It just made you depressed to think what an ugly looking creature it was. No electronics in it of course. You got, you had to climb up but you climbed into the fuselage up a little ladder and then you made your way up a long fuselage. Then you came to the wing route, passed through the fuselage which was about two feet thick I suppose. You had to clamber over that. Work your way through a sort of a tunnel in the, in the structure, wing route structure, to get to the navigation table. And when you got there that was no great shakes because there wasn’t very much room there anyway. And you checked the escape hatches because there was, apart from the door you came in by there was only one other way out and that was a hole in, a trap door in the floor down in the nose. And to get down there you had to clamber down there. It was an awkward journey but you checked, always checked that the escape hatches, everything moved fairly freely and made sure that — no good in an emergency arriving there and you think, I can’t get this so and so handle open. Where do I go from here? So, well in particular it was the slow moving aircraft. It cruised at I suppose maybe a hundred and forty, a hundred and sixty as far as I can remember. I can’t remember exactly. Oh, I’ve missed out one thing. I can’t remember where it comes in. The formation of the crew. It must be when I came back from South Africa. Oh I’ve got to backtrack. Backtrack a little bit and go back to when I arrived at Abingdon in the first place. And there were, at any one time way a new posting when all the last lot were being cleared out all the new intake would consist of twenty pilots, twenty navigators, twenty bomb aimers, twenty radio operators, forty gunners and that was it. So, everybody was put in to one big hangar. All this lot. And the instruction was, ‘Right. We’ve got enough people here to form twenty crews for a heavy bomber.’ Twenty crews. A heavy bomber has a crew of seven, so ‘But you’ll find that you won’t have, be able to form a crew of seven because there will be no flight engineers here yet.’ Because, I’ll come back to that later. So the instruction was right the door was shut. Ok. Get busy. Sort yourselves out into crews. Into a crew. Pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, radio operator and two gunners. That’s six of you. So you sort of looked around and think oh, ‘Yeah well, what do we, where do we go from here?’ And I still can’t explain how it worked. Pilots, and you’d sort of look up and no I don’t like the look of him. Well, I’ll try that, no he’s got already fixed up. He’s got a navigator. Others were bomb aimers and so on were looking around for a likely. And then a pilot and a bomb aimer came over to me and said, ‘Are you fixed up?’ I said, ‘No. In fact, I’m not. They said, ‘Well would you like to join us?’ I said, ‘ Well yes, yes please.’ And so, so that had got one two three of us. Then he looked, or they looked or mainly the pilot doing it of course because it was his responsibility to form his own crew, to fill in the other vacancies. And so we got six of us. There was no flight engineer to make the seventh member for a heavy bomber because we were only training on Whitleys and twin-engined aircraft didn’t need a flight engineer. Four engined did but a twin-engined the pilot could look after the sort of engines himself as well as flying the aircraft. So the flight engineer would join us later. So we started off on these Whitleys. One particular flight I can remember in a Whitley. We set off from — what was the name of the place? Not [pause] what name did I say for the — not Abingdon. Anyway, we set off south westwards. You always flew away from Germany really because there was, the air space was less crowded. Set off down towards, we were routed to go down to Falmouth and over to the Scilly Islands and out into the Atlantic at some latitude and longitude point. Nothing there but just a point on the map and that was where you turned and started coming back again. So we were on our way out into the Atlantic and the weather was getting worse and worse. There was low pressure coming in which meant there was, it was coming from the southwest. Therefore the, the winds would be anti-clockwise and, and the low pressure would mean that the clouds were being forced downwards all the time. It was getting lower and lower. We couldn’t see anything down below and over the land you wouldn’t have been able to see anything else and in a Whitley that was no joke. So the pilot said, ‘I’m not going on in this,’ he says. By the way, about, I’ll come back to where I stopped in a minute. About names. The pilot was a warrant officer who had done some instructional training himself but nothing operational. The rest of us were all sergeants and, but there was never any, warrant officers they were always addressed as sir. The only non-commissioned officers were addressed as sir but he, we never addressed him as sir. Name. Our names fell into place and they were used without any hesitation. So he was, being Wilfred Bates, he wasn’t known as Wilfred. He was. We referred to when we were speaking to him as Wilf. Now, I was for some reason they balked at the Henry. They never called me Henry at all. I was known, always known as Wag. The bomb aimer, Lesley Roberts was known as Robbie. The, the mid-upper gunner was Thomas Worthington but known as Tommy. The rear gunner, Robert Thomas was known as Bob. So, and the flight engineer, when we got him, Eric Berry he was known as Berry but I was always Wag. And I didn’t, and even after that, all through the Air Force career even in, even in Germany I was always known as Waggy or Waggy. Anyway, yes the pilot said, ‘I’m not going along with this Wag,’ he said, this is absolutely pointless.’ He said, ‘I’m turning around. Give me a course back over Cornwall and back to, back to base. We got over Cornwall and the cloud cleared, lifted a little bit and there was a hole in the cloud. And I said to, I said, ‘Wilf, there’s a hole in the cloud down below. If we go down we get underneath I’ll be able to see the ground and establish my position.’ So we went down through the hole in the cloud. I established the position as Falmouth. And he said, he said, ‘Right,’ he said, ‘Now, give me a course to the nearest aerodrome. I’ve had enough of this.’ He said, ‘Where, where can we put down?’ I said, ‘Well, St Eval is the nearest.’ So the bad weather had closed in again and he said, well he said, ‘Are we going to be able to land at St Eval?’ So the radio operator got the ok and, and he got a radio bearing of the St Eval and we homed on the St Eval beam and put down there. And so that was the end of that particular flight. Stayed there and had our dinner there and by the time the afternoon wore on we could get back to, back to Abingdon again. So that was the sort of difficulties you experienced on Whitleys. No other particular Whitley flight stays in my memory. They were all humdrum sort of things but ranging far afield. Ranging far up into the, out in to the northwest. Out in to the Atlantic. Down Cornwall direction. But mostly lasting about, about five, five or six hours and it was a bit of a strain in that I was working for, with solid brain work for five or six hours. Checking temperatures, wind velocities, radio bearings. Working out the distance to the next point or turning point. Time of arrival. It’s, six hours solid brain work is pretty wearing. While the rest of the crew of course having a pretty easy time. The bomb aimer, you’d think to yourself he’d have a particularly easy time because there weren’t any. Anyway, he was, the bomb aimer at all times even operational was an assistant navigator. He could be given pieces of apparatus to work. For instance I could, on Halifaxes I could ask him to take a bearing on the, on the Gee set while I took a bearing on the air position indicator. Or the other way around because the two things needed to be done at the same time. And so while he did, I put him on to the air position indicator mostly because that was, that was the easier thing to operate and I didn’t want to overstress him let’s say [laughs]. But we worked well together. There was never any, any hassle at all. But when the time came for, I forget what took place at the end of the [pause] Abingdon was an OTU or Operational Training Unit. In the early days by the time you’d finished on Whitleys and Wellingtons you were considered to be ready to sent, be sent on operations. But with the advent of heavy bombers and the advent of new radar and radio equipment and techniques and so on it was realised that you needed a further stage to get you ready to operate heavy bombers such as the Stirling, the Halifax and Lancaster. Stirling was a disappointment. It was too heavy. It hadn’t got the weight lifting capacity. It couldn’t get up as high as the Halifaxes and Lancasters. So it didn’t do an awful lot of bombing but it had other uses such as, they could do glider towing, jamming enemy radar and that sort of thing. But you needed, but for operational bombing, bombing just meant dropping bombs and causing as much damage as you could to the German war effort the, the crews needed a further training. So other units, new units were set up called Heavy Conversion Units. HCU. And the one I went to. Oh, I went to was at Snaith up in Yorkshire. Not far from, not far from Doncaster. And [pause] have I got this right? No. No, the squadron was, sorry, the one I went to was at Swanton Morley. No. That’s not correct. That’s down by Abingdon isn’t it? Oh dear. Oh dear. Could you turn it off?
[recording paused]
The Heavy Conversion I went to was at Marston Moor near York. This was in 4 Group and they would be flying Halifaxes from there because 4 Group flew only Halifaxes. And Lancasters went to 3 Group which was further South Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. So we were converting on to, on to the four-engined Halifax and of course we would need a flight engineer. And that’s where Eric Berry joined us to make up the seven man crew. So the aircraft themselves were, well they were what the Americans referred to as war weary. They’d done their whack. They’d been damaged possibly. Repaired. They’d served their time and they weren’t in the most reliable condition but the ground staff did a wonderful job keeping them flyable and usable anyway. So we got our seven crew now and we’re ready to start genuine bombing, Bomber Command training. This incorporated the use of new equipment as well, because by this time Gee, the Gee set had been fitted into all bomber aircraft. I should explain that the Gee set was, relied on transmissions from the ground from three stations. A slave station, an A station and a B station and these were transmitted and they could be picked up by the Gee set receiver in a bomber and the, which the navigator worked of course and by taking, he could get his bearings off there. He could get his position off there and plot these bearings as he got the information that he got on the Gee set on to a special map that he’d got on his navigation table. And he could establish your position to within a quarter of a mile. Later on, over the Ruhr to within a quarter of a mile. In my estimation, over England it was even better than that. It was spot on to, to within a hundred yards or so. So it was amazing. Night time, thick cloud, no view of the ground, no view of the stars. No view of anything at all in fact. And you could establish your position to within a hundred yards. Marvellous. So I could get my position off the, off the Gee set. At the same time I’d get the air position from the bomb aimer, plot the two of them, join those two up and I’d got the wind direction and speed. So I could look ahead. I could plan my course to the next turning point knowing that the wind velocity would be different because of course as you fly through a weather system whether a cyclone or an anti-cyclone the wind direction and, no not the velocity the wind direction is certainly going to change and you’ve, you can, you need to constantly update your knowledge of what the wind velocity is and maybe even look ahead and in your own brain build in a few degrees extra to compensate for the change that you know is going to carry on happening. It was all, it all sounds a bit vague but it became second nature in time. If I got the bearing that I wanted, that I wanted the aircraft to fly to to get to the next turning point or the target or whatever I’d work out, work it out on the chart and then add on or take off a few degrees as to whether I thought the wind was veering or backing. So a little bit of brain work had to come in extra off the cuff. And there were other things to think of too. When you were approaching a turning point if there was, if it was a sharp, suppose you were coming up and then turning on to making a sort of a sharp turn to the next turning point it was no good telling the pilot there, ‘Turn on to that next course,’ because he would be, he would do that. You had to tell him half a minute before so that he could get the aircraft onto a turn ready to come onto that correct line that you’d got on your chart. So even with all the aids and so on it was still not nothing that you could sit back and leave it to, leave it to the machinery to do. But no. In later days I used to, this is not all that long, well yes it is. It’s maybe ten, maybe twenty years ago now I used to teach navigation at the Wisbech Air Training Corps and we used to go over to get, you used to go over to Marham at times where they had, what was the — ?
Other: Chipmunks or something.
HW: Hmmn?
Other: Chipmunks were they there, Henry. There.
HW: The large aircraft that they had. A Victor.
Other: Oh the Victor or the [unclear]
HW: Yeah. Yeah.
Other: Oh yes the V days.
HW: And to show the lads what the navigational equipment’s like and we had the station navigation officer would conduct us round and show us around the aircraft and then show us the navigation system and he’ll say, he’ll say, ‘You see, you’ve got, in a Victor you’ve got two navigators. One is the navigator radar who takes all the bearings and the other is the navigator plotter who plots it all on the charts and works out the new courses.’ So, you see the equipment changing like that in techniques and tactics have to change to keep up with it. It was, they were always very supportive. I said to the navigator, a plotter and then the navigator radar, I said, How often do you need to take bearings?’ He said, ‘Well about every, about every ten minutes or so. I said, ‘Well what do you do in the meantime then?’ He said, ‘Well. Read a book.’ [laughs] And they, the navigator, these two navigators at their combined navigation table they were facing back into the, towards the tail of the aircraft and right by the side — suppose this is, suppose you are sitting at the navigation table and the door, the entry door is in the fuselage was just to the right of the navigation table. So what happened in an emergency was that the pilot would do whatever’s necessary to get that door open or, or ejected. I don’t know what they did. Whether they, but anyway the two navigators were standing or siting handy and all they had to do was stand up, take a couple of steps to the right and they were out of the door because they were on parachute seats you see. Or they had parachute packs on. But yes. Tactics changed. Now where had we got to? Back to, back to Marston Moor I think. Yes. Well, there’s not much more to say about Marston Moor. Oh well, yeah. The favourite pub. I used to go out for some reason with the mid-upper gunner. I don’t know why I used to go with him in particular. Perhaps he was a good drinker [laughs] perhaps he was the best drinker. We took, got station bikes and we used to bike up to Tockwith. Up near Selby anyway. And I might be — anyway we got the station bicycles and we used to go up to this pub which was in a little village and it wasn’t near an operational Air Force station but used to get quite a few ground staff. It seemed to be a favourite one for ground staff. There was no electricity laid on. The stone flagged floor, the deal tables and the two landladies both, both pretty old, wore clothes entirely of black. Long black dresses and hair done up in buns and so on. They’d bring out, when it got dark bring out Aladdin lamps which worked like primus stoves. You could pump them up and they would provide the illumination. They’d bring those out and put them on the table and a singsong would develop. And the, one of the favourite one I can remember was, “Knees Up Mother Brown.” And one of the landladies, when prompted would always get up on the table and we would all sing, “Knees Up Mother Brown,” and she would caper about on the table. And she must have been in her eighties anyway. So, and but everybody got on well. I mean there were a lot of WAAFs there. There must have been a station where they needed, perhaps a clerical station of some sort. I don’t know but there were a lot of WAAFs there. But there was no standing on ceremony. No ranking or anything of that sort. We were all in there for a booze up so that was it. And then chucking out time. Chucking out time in those days was very rigid.
Other: 10 o’clock.
HW: Yeah. Chucking out time was at 11 o’clock. No. Chucking out time. If you stayed after chucking out time the landlady or landlord could be prosecuted for allowing drinking out of hours. So a quarter of an hour before chucking out time they’d give you, give you a warning. They’d ring a bell like a ships bell. And you knew if you wanted another pint to get one now and drink it in a quarter of an hour. And the police used to hover around outside pubs to check that there wasn’t any drinking after hours. They’d come in and have a look. So anyway.
[recording paused]
HW: So, after Heavy Conversion Unit at Marston Moor we were now a fully qualified operational aircrew. Fit to be set loose against the Germans. So posting took place then to, to individual bomber squadrons. From Marston Moor of course being in 4 Group we knew we were going to be on Halifaxes and our crew under Warrant Officer Bates was posted to Snaith which was near Doncaster. This was only a wartime aerodrome. It wasn’t it, wasn’t a pre-war one like with the, with the big buildings, comfortable buildings. It only had Nissen huts, wartime hangars, runways had been laid of course because heavy bombers heavily loaded needed, they needed a hard surface. They didn’t want, no good having them sinking in to soft mud in the winter time. Heavy Lancaster and a Halifax were almost exactly the same from the performance point of view. So I won’t differentiate between them. The weight of a heavy bomber fully loaded was sort of the aircraft itself, bombs, petrol, the crew and all that. The whole, the whole lot weighed some thirty tons. The take-off weight was about thirty tons so obviously you don’t need you need you don’t need soft earth underneath a thirty tonne weight so Snaith did at least have runways. The buildings themselves were sergeant’s mess, comfortable enough and nobody hassled you at all. Nobody bothered you. If operations weren’t on you were, the navigators used to head for the navigation section really and you could read over there or you could, you could talk to other people over there. You could look up info. Get any new information. You could make yourself a cup of coffee over there. It was it was easy going. You were accepted by the station navigation officer as a fully qualified navigator and from that point of view you were on the same footing as he. Sorry. On the same footing as he was. He was running the place, yes but from the navigational point of view you were on the same level and he accepted you as such. Right. So, to start with we did a few cross-country’s on the, on the Halifaxes at Snaith. You didn’t have our own particular aircraft. You used what aircraft was, that aircraft was available. Some pilots did have their own aircraft but we never got around to that. So we did cross-countrys of about some, about eight hours each. Long, long cross-countrys using new navigational equipment. One, I still used Gee but there had been a new one developed called [pause] oh dear, my memory’s getting something dreadful. Sorry. Maybe it’ll come back to me in a minute or two. Yeah. It’s come back to me now. H2S. H2S. You’ll say well that’s that’s the chemical formula for sulferated hydrogen isn’t it? That smells like, well politeness. Anyway, there you go. And with the people, the person who created, christened it H2S said yes, sulferated hydrogen. This H2S, like the sulferated hydrogen it stinks. So he hadn’t thought much of it. But it worked on a different system. The Germans could jam Gee because it depended on signals being sent out. Being sent out from Britain. H2S depended on signals being sent out by each aircraft itself. It had a revolving scanner underneath which as it went around it projected electronic beams and the Germans could pick those up so if you put the H2S on, if everybody had the H2S on then the Germans would have plenty of bearing. Oh, there’s an aircraft there. Look there’s another. There’s another. And so I preferred to switch, not to use H2S if possible. It was very useful over the coast but because beams projected by the H2S if they, if they came down from the aircraft and hit a building they were reflected back up to the aircraft itself which was acceptable. If they, if they went over and hit the sea they were reflected off that. They just went up and on their way so you could see what was sea clearly and you could see what was buildings clearly. So near coastlines or in estuaries or near big rivers it was useful but another reason why I didn’t leave it on for very long was that the German fighters realising that H2S were, transmissions were being made by bombers they developed a radar for their own fighters. Developed a radar where if you switched on your H2S he could, the German fighter pilot looking at his, looking at his radar would say, ‘There’s one over there. Right,’ And home in on him and creep on him gradually without him being aware of the fact. So, so that’s why I preferred to not to. Anyway, Gee was a better bet. It was a safer bet. But, but so the German pilots started, they started using their, their radar. They’d take a quick look. See an H2S transmission and then head in that direction and switch off. And then they’d take another quick peep. And so they kept, they kept just taking a peep so they knew they were going in the right general direction. So Bomber Command developed a piece of apparatus which overrode the German pilot switch and switched on his radar and left it switched on. He couldn’t switch it off. So, so it was a constant battle back and forth, back and forth. Something was developed, a counter was found. Something else. And so everything that was developed something was developed to, to neutralise it. So, right. The first two, the first two operations I went on. The first one, they were both daylight in fact and the first one was extremely easy. It was to a small town just just over the German border which the Germans at that time, the German border with France that is, the Germans had just been moved back out of France to a town called Soest, S O E — no. I’ve got it wrong. Julich. J U L I C H. And that was, they were using that as a garrison town and a reinforcement town and they were bringing their, back their rear troops up and to that town. That was their focal point and they were dispersing them along to wherever was necessary. So it only meant that we were over German held territory for about ten minutes or so which was, well it was a bonus. And of course the Germans hadn’t got their heavy anti-aircraft fire properly organised because it was too near the battlefront. The heavy anti-aircraft armament was near the big cities. So there was very little flak and we were able to fly in at a low, a low height of twelve thousand feet. We dropped our bombs at twelve thousand feet. The bomb load was normally the same. Normally about, about five tons. Something like that. A mixture. And maybe a two thousand pounder. A couple of thousand pounders, a few five hundred pounders, incendiaries if it was a target that would burn. So we dropped our bombs in. Dropped our bombs in Dropped our bombs, turned around, back home again and it was all over in no time. No hassle. Just across country in effect. Although Lancasters were attacking a town further south called Düren and looking out at the time when we were over our target I saw a Lancaster blow up over there. Just a big explosion. Anyway, the next one was, the next operation was at Munster which is in the north of, well it’s north of the Ruhr anyway. It’s not in a big industrial area. It’s, I don’t know what reason it was being attacked for but also a daylight and the opposition — very little in the way of opposition. Not very much flak. Not very — no fighters seen. It was it was a piece of cake again. I should say for anti-aircraft fire, light anti-aircraft fire was, was something to be reckoned with up to ten thousand feet. From there onwards it went on to 88 millimetre flak where the, with the cells bursting from there. Bursting at whatever height they’d been fused for. At any height up to over twenty thousand feet. So there were those two sorts of flak. They could and the opposition from German fighters, they were armed with cannon which shot, which fired a sort of a pattern. Their, their machine, their cannon belts were made up the same as their machine guns and the same as ours I think. In groups of five. We had in our machine gun bullets belts. We had two ball ammunition. Ordinary bullets. Two ball. One armour piercing, one incendiary and one tracer. So, so those, those groups of five as the gunner was operating his machine guns these, these were passing through in blocks of five. Tracers so as you could see where they were going. Red incendiaries so that they would set the, set the, perforate the petrol tanks, set the aircraft on fire. On fire. Also armour piercing and the two ball for general havoc. Anyway, that was Munster. And as I say then after that the remaining six that I did, I did eight altogether, the remaining six were all on heavy industrial targets. All, all in the Ruhr. Yeah. That vast German industrial complex. And they were at the, it was, it was a complex of so many cities that the whole thing merged together into one sort of a general area. They were cities like Duisburg, Essen, Cologne and so on. They were so much joined together. They were separate cities as well. So the, so much built joined together that bombs could safely be dropped there and they were going to do some damage. We were targeted on factories. Steelworks. Coking plants. Electricity supply places. Aircraft factories. Transport factories. Railway junctions and marshalling yards. That sort of thing. But as I say we were given that. That point. And that’s what we’d set the bomb, the bomb aimer would set his bombsights up according to that information. But even if you missed your target you were still going to, you were still going to bomb out some workers or were going to cause damage, houses. And really the amount of labour that was needed, was caused, with the amount of workers that Germany had to keep in Germany because of the depredations of Bomber Command. That gets entirely overlooked. Because when you come to think of it you’ve got to keep the firemen at home haven’t you? Fire brigades. You’ve got to keep the gunners, the anti-aircraft gunners there. You’ve got to keep the hospitals staffed and working. You’ve got to keep the population fed. You’ve got to, you’ve got to clear all bomb damage. All the rubble and so on. You’ve got to keep the lorries available for doing that. You’ve got, it’s just the amount of labour that Bomber Command caused to be held at home instead of being used in the actual ground fighting. And also, of course their fighters. They needed fighters to attack Bomber Command and so many fighters that could be used on the front line had to be held at home. And it’s generally overlooked what an enormous contribution, apart from the damage to the German factories and so on occasionally the sidelining damage that was done, caused by Bomber Command is, well you just, you see pictures of cities that have been bombed and you don’t realise then the amount of work that has gone to clearing that lot. Of course, as far as bomber crews were concerned the greatest fear was coming down in a parachute over a city that you were in the process and in fact you could get, well, down, well land in the city and be killed by bombs dropping from your own lot. So that was the greatest fear. Bomb. The large cities were covered by mainly by a ring, not a complete ring, by a belt of anti-aircraft fire. They knew that the bombers would be coming from the west so they got there. They had a ring of heavy anti-aircraft guns and, and then if over the target itself they didn’t, not so much heavy anti-aircraft guns the fighters would roam in that area. So they had the bombers had to contend with the anti-aircraft fire, collision with other aircraft because there were so many coming in at any one time. The risk of collision was very great. Bombs dropping from other aircraft flying a bit higher up than you were. The chances of trouble were only all too present. So back to, so you could you got the, you were on the final leg. Imagine now we’re on a final leg to the target of the Krupps Steel Works at Essen. The biggest industrial, the most concentrated industrial area in Germany and obviously of prime importance. So we’re on the run up. About ten minutes before we get there the bomb aimer says to me, ‘I’ll get my bombsights set up and all ready,’ because he guided the pilot in over markers laid by Pathfinder Force just previously. If they were visible. If not he’d have to use his bombsight. The information as he’d already keyed in to his bombsights as to where to drop the bombs. But of course it wouldn’t be so accurate but as I say any damage was beneficial to us, so we’re on the money. So about, so he lies down in front of his bombsight and he’s got, he’ll say to the pilot about a minute before, ‘Bomb doors open.’ And then he’ll guide the pilot up and he’ll be saying to him, ‘Left. Left. Left. Steady. Steady. Steady. Right. Right. Steady. Steady. Steady. Steady. Bombs gone.’ And then he’d have to fly on. We’d have to fly on, on that same course for a half a minute because it took that long for the bombs to get, to get down to the ground because in that half minute, when that half minute was up the cameras in the aircraft would photograph the point of impact. And so when we got back home, I mean you might not be able to see very much, just, just a lot of fires and just a lot of rubble but anyway that was a draw. Fly on half a minute and then after that turn for home. And the route home could be a bit more direct. On the way out it had to be a bit, not straightforward with a good sort of different legs in it so the Germans wouldn’t know, wouldn’t say oh yes he’s heading for Osnabruck. They’d say, well he’s heading towards the Ruhr. Yeah. And then in fact it looks as if it goes to be a bit the northern section of the Ruhr. So they get their fighters up there waiting and then the bomber force would turn and go down. Everything was done to try and confuse them. To catch their forces often by some sort of offbeat move. Army Co-operation Command used to fly Mosquitoes. What was it? Who’s flying Mosquitoes. Bomber Support Group. They used to patrol in Mosquitoes over German airfields, fighter airfields and catch any coming in to land or prevent any taking off and just, just make life impossible for them so they’d hang about. Bomber Support Group they were a great help in that. As I say various, many moves were made to try to, to try to reduce losses as much as possible. Anyway, so we did eight. As I say the eighth trip, all the others had been on the industrial areas of the Ruhr except for one Osnabruck which was nothing special to say about that. The, the eighth trip we were down for, marked down for an attack on Duisburg. Yes. Well ok we’d been there before. No big deal. So all the flight planning was taking place at briefing by the station commander of why we were going there in the first place. The navigation officer, the, the meteorological officer, the bombing leader, and they would all give information as their, the people they were talking to needed to know. So, so and then the station commander comes on, ‘Well, there you are lads. Off you go. Give them a good pasting won’t you?’ Or sometimes he said, ‘Well I shall be coming with you tonight lads so watch out. I’ve got my eye on you.’ That sort of thing. It was all done in a good humoured sort of way. And many a commanding officer failed to return from this. You know, it just, it was the luck of the gods. An anti-aircraft shell could hit him as well as somebody who was on their first trip. So, it was, it was so much was a matter of luck. Some hundred thousand men flew with Bomber Command and of those figures vary a little bit from here and there but some fifty seven thousand were killed. So over half were killed. So the chances of — you had to do thirty trips. That was called a tour. And if you did your thirty trips you got rested for six months and sent to Heavy Conversion Units or something like that to carry on. To give training. And then you come back for another twenty trips. So with fifty trips to do and the loss rate being on average four percent fifty trips tells me that in twenty five you’ve had your lot. If you survived any beyond the twenty five you were lucky. If you, if you get caught in less than twenty five you can’t complain. And of course some figures vary again. Some, I think, I think it was some, no I’m not, I have the figure of four thousand in mind but it must be higher than that were shot down and taken prisoner survived and came down by parachute or crash landed and got taken prisoner. I’m not sure about the figure there. Anyway, to come back to the last trip to Duisburg the weather forecast was supposed to be, oh the meteorological officer said it was reasonable. The forecast wasn’t all that bad. ‘You should be fairly, there will be rain storms at times but it should have cleared over the target by the time you get there. You may have a bit of difficulty with the weather but it’s not enough to, to cancel the operation. So be prepared for a bit of rough weather.’ But the weather, as I said it was part of the navigator’s job to calculate wind velocity and direction and the first, as soon as we were airborne and set course and we were, got up to a reasonable height and I checked the wind velocity I thought this is nowhere near. This is far stronger than, than was forecast. We were forecast for twenty thousand feet somewhere about forty knots. You know the difference between a knot and a [laughs] about forty knots and the further, the one that I calculated at twenty thousand feet was a hundred and two knots. Which would be about a hundred and ten statute miles an hour and so the force became widely scattered. Nobody, I think some navigators thought to themselves, ‘No. A hundred and two? A hundred and two? No. I’ve made a mistake somewhere. Go back. Use the Met forecast.’ Where others would think — ‘Yeah, I made a bit of a mistake. Let’s say, let’s say eight knots.’ So it just caused widespread confusion. So, and by the time we arrived over the target there was no sign of any target marking at all. So the, as we were, as we approached I gave the bomb aimer the aiming point position to put on his bombsight and he dropped his bombs according to that. And, and we turned away and headed, well we did the extra half minute which we were supposed to do and took a photograph of nothing at all in fact. And then turned for home and so we were heading it’s not all that far from the Ruhr to the German border in fact. But that was where the Germans fighters were. They caught on to the fact that the target had been, most aircraft had seemed to drop their bombs over in the Duisburg area and now they’ll be heading roughly north west back for England again. So, and, and one caught us. We turned away and were going quite nicely. Everything seemed to be in order for an orderly return to England. It was the only worry would be with the wind at a hundred and two knots are we going to have the fuel to get there? But anyway you keep going as long as you can. Just bear that one in mind. But so everything seemed to be going alright. Everything was in working order and then a call came through on the intercom, on the intercom [pause] Yeah. Yeah. ‘Corkscrew left. Corkscrew left.’ And you were familiar with the corkscrew of course and it would be going, it would be going and so it meant that one of the gunners. Mid-upper probably. I don’t know. You can’t tell. Had seen a, had spotted a German fighter and he knew he was positioning for an attack. So there was a spiral and, and then and then as the German fighter was manoeuvred further that turned into a diving turn. Diving turn left. Did I say corkscrew right?
Other: No. Corkscrew left.
HW: Corkscrew left. Oh, well there would be a diving turn to the right and so on and the other way round depending which side the German fighter was attacking from. There were two types of German fighter. There was the Junkers 88, a twin-engined one which had a pilot, upward firing cannon which, which of course cannon fired explosive shells. It could. We had no downward looking radar because our downward looking radar was called Monica. The German fighters were homing on to that so that wasn’t used any more. Then he could come along underneath undetected, match his speed with the speed of the bomber fix his, sight his cannon on the precise spot he was going to fire at. And then, as I said the wing tanks were the favourites. Yeah. The other method was by and there were more of these than Junkers 88 was a Messerschmitt 110 which had a crew of three. Which had a crew of two, err a crew of three. The pilot, a radar operator and a gunner. And so the, his method of attack was that he would stand up high up and to one side or another. Usually to the right, to the bomber’s going that way he would be to the bomber’s right hand side and behind because his speed was going to be greater than the one and he was, he could pick his point. If the bomber, if the bomber the bomber was flying sort of straight and level he would come down and aim at the spot that he wanted to set on fire. He could open fire with his cannons and the machine gunner in the turret could use the, could use the machine guns and the, the radar operator of course was carrying out his order. I have in my possession the, the fighter pilot’s report of the aircraft, of three aircraft who, which shot down bombers at that, around about that area and that time. And I’ve got the full report of each pilot and his gunner and his radar operators as well in German and of course I’ve had those, I’ve got photocopies of those and so I know the name of the blighter that shot us down. And I thought, I’ve had them translated into English of course but, but I thought to myself at the time, or well I hope they get those [pause ] and then I thought — no. No. Not fair. They’re only doing their duty the same as we are. You couldn’t, the only thing I’ve got against them is that they succeeded [laughs] So, so, ok our wing tanks were on fire. The engineer standing just behind the pilot says, ‘Wilf, we’re on fire.’ And I looked back up, up the stair from my position down in the nose and I could see a roaring mass of flame just behind the, where the, where the wing root was because burning petrol came swilling into the fuselage. Through the, through the wing root and of course also that was where the oxygen bottles were stored and they got, they’d have gone off like bombs themselves. A nearly the empty petrol tank was going to explode like a bomb and the, oh the burning petrol coming into the fuselage would have so weakened the main spar that it would have just melted. So it was obvious that nothing could be done. The pilot had no hesitation in giving the order and every member of the crew immediately he gave the order, ‘Jump. Jump.’ it was — I was the first one to answer, ‘Navigator jumping.’ And, and then I could get off. Each person had to acknowledge in turn that they’ve heard. That they had heard. If anybody was too, was badly injured and couldn’t move he would say on his intercom and the pilot would, if possible but what can you do if a chap can’t? It was as much as a man could do to look after himself without dealing with other people as well. So, ‘Navigator jumping.’ Off with the helmet and oxygen mask and intercom microphone and kick a leg away, the legs of the navigation table which was on the, on the port wall and it just flopped down against the wall. When I stood up my seat which was attached to the starboard wall was on springs and it just folded itself up when I stood up. So I left a big open space. There was a trap door on the floor. About, about what shall we say? Three feet by two possibly. All I had to do was bend down, turn a handle in that trap door, raise it, when you’ve got it about the vertical you can lift it off its hinges. So I lifted that, lifted it off its hinges, turned it diagonally and dropped it through. Dropped it through the hole and there was a big open space with me [knocking sound] ready to go. So all I had to do was just slip through. And the others, the bomb aimer should have been, why he didn’t come next I just don’t know. But then the radio operator would have been the third out through that hatch. The other crew members would get out where ever they could in fact. So as I stood on the front, on the, on the edge of this hole, the front edge of this hole facing backwards. Not facing into the slipstream you understand. Facing backwards. As I dropped through so my parachute pack which was on my chest caught on the front of the, the exit hatchway. Caught on the front and lifted it up. Up above my head. So I had to reach up behind my back. Try and pull it down. Pull it down a bit. The escape, the handle on the parachute pack was facing backwards of course, it had flopped up. Facing back. Pulled that big metal ring and it, it released the little pilot chute inside. A little parachute which was on springs so that little parachute sprang open and as the air got in it it got into the slipstream so it took, pulled out the main canopy of the parachute and so and then once the, once the air got into that main canopy then, then that was ok. It was opened and you were on the safe side. But, but I thought after, after falling for, well not very long, a few seconds I saw the flashes of lightning, thunder. You don’t get thunderstorms in December. I thought — no. That’s not, it’s not thunderstorms. It’s anti-aircraft shells bursting [laughs] I dropped through that lot fairly quickly. So, but it was an easy enough descent by that time but my main worry was that I knew that the when the air, when I jumped out of the aircraft it was behind British lines in, in Holland. The Germans had just been pushed back across the River Maas and they, the British forces were up to one bank of the Maas and the Germans, well they’d moved back a few miles from the river into, into safe territory. We were going to have to cross the River Maas somehow too if we were ever going to get into Germany. So that was the Germans. So we moved back till so we got a good gunnery range in front of us and if they tried to cross we got them. But I knew quite well that on the average if the wind was a hundred and two knots or a hundred and two miles an hour or down to a hundred and ten miles an hour on the way down —suppose at ground level it’s forty miles an hour so that means, that means sort of, that means that the average wind speeds from my descent is going to take, I’m going to, it’s going to take me from fourteen thousand feet. It’s going to take me about a quarter of an hour to get down. And in a quarter of an hour I’m going to drift fifteen miles anyway. So if I drift fifteen miles I’m going to cross the River Maas and drift about twelve miles into German territory. So if the wind had been an east wind of course, the other way around that would have been me home and dry. But the west northwest wind, it was taking me over fifteen miles on my parachute. I thought that’s a bit much really and, but as I said well I could say to myself this is what’s going to happen. There’s no good whingeing about it so, but I’ve got to be ready. And getting near the ground I couldn’t see because it was raining at the time as well and it’s, there were no lights of any sort. This was about 6 o’clock in the morning and so it wasn’t really light. It was, it was just beginning to get light. And I came down through the branches of an apple tree or it might have been a plum tree for all I know. I wasn’t in any position to assess the fruiting capabilities of the tree. Came down through this tree and hit the ground. Now the instructions were when you hit the ground, when you, when you come down by parachute in enemy territory you’ve got to, the first thing you do is roll your parachute and hide it. Well mine was draped over the top and tangled up in the branches of the tree so I thought well that one’s not on. I couldn’t roll my parachute up and hide it. Furthermore, on looking up at the, it was in the back garden of a house this tree. And looking up at the bedroom windows I saw a curtain apart and a face looked out like that. There was no good hanging around here. I took my Mae West life jacket off and threw that, yeah I still had it on coming down. And threw that down and headed down the side of the house out through the front gate. Realised I was in a little village but with houses well scattered. It wasn’t, it wasn’t packed together. I turned left. Why I turned left. One way’s as good as the other I suppose. And I heard marching feet so I turned the other way [laughs] walked about, oh about a quarter of a mile through the village and out into the open fields. A German soldier was walking down the road towards me and I thought, I just said to him as I went past, ‘Morgen,’ [laughs] and he said, ‘Morgen,’ and he went on his way. He, he was on the same bit as me. If I don’t cause him any trouble he won’t cause me any. So I went on my way and by this time it was almost broad daylight. I kept clear of roads as far as possible and walking across country my plan was to walk. Walk southwards in to occupied France, no France wasn’t occupied then. Walk north westwards, get up behind, because our forces were in Holland. This was about the time of Arnhem. Walk around. If I’m clear around that corner and hide up in, in Holland. Wait till the German advance over, overtook the British sorry the British advance overtakes me and I’ll be free again. So that was the general intention. Walk northwest. Right. So I’ve got his far. Almost broad daylight. It was cold. I was wet. Still suffering I suppose a bit of shock about the turn that events had taken. But in this barn I noticed that there was a ladder leading up to the loft. And I went up. I thought that’s a good place to hide. Walked up the ladder, went up the ladder, found it was full of hay. Oh yes. Comfortable as well. Took off the wet flying suit which was no point in doing really. I thought I’ll stuff that with hay but that wasn’t, looking back I was, that was futile. But anyway I’ll get a bit of sleep. So I managed to drift off. Oh I examined what I had to assist me. I’d got, I’d got what we called a Pandora’s Box. It was a little, a little plastic box. Fairly thin. Maybe, maybe about six inches wide and four inches tall and, and bent around like that so that it would fit nicely inside the, the flying, the thigh pocket on your flying suit. So I had that. I had, and in it there were Horlicks tablets, barley sugars, chewing gum. I don’t know why chewing gum. Energy tablets. Water for your purifying tablets, rubber water bottle like a, like a football bladder in fact. A compass. I don’t remember anything else — oh money. I must admit I can’t remember the other thing. Oh a map. Yeah. A map, printed on silk of the area that we were flying over. And so, so I rationed myself to two barley sugars a day and four Horlicks tablets and I thought that I’d got to make that last a week. If by the end of the week if there’s no hope of anything else I’ll have to chuck it in. So, so, so after that there was, there was nothing else. I had no — oh yes. Yes I did. I had a, always carried inside my flying suit a 38 Webley revolver. Aircrew were allowed to draw revolvers if they wanted them. You didn’t have to but if you wanted one because there were stories about what had happened. I don’t know whether they’re authentic or not but stories about aircrew coming down in areas that had been bombed and getting strung up on lamp posts and shot and beaten with iron bars and so on. I thought to myself if I get a crowd converging on me there’s one in this six shot. One for myself but five of them are coming with me. So, you know, I had that as well. So I used to, I’d walk by night time then to avoid detection and find somewhere to hide up for the day. Sleep for the day. Once I’d dug out the — some straw out of a, like a haystack but it was straw stacks so it was fairly loose. I dug out a hole. Burrowed in there and I was hidden. Well hidden for the day and fairly warm as well. Another time I was approaching a farm house. Well it was open country but as I said I always stuck to open country if possible. In open country, but it looked a bit dilapidated. I thought I don’t know. I thought surely nobody lives there. I thought if there’s nobody lives there it would be a good place to hide up. So I walked up the bit of a path to the door, front door and as I as I got almost to the door the door opened. An old German lady looked out with a little girl standing, standing beside her. The little girl about three years old I suppose. I should think she was the, her husband was probably called up. This was their, their — she would be this child’s grandmother. That’s what I’m trying to, I’m trying to say. And she was white haired and wore glasses and so on. And she looked at me and there’s me standing there with a six shot revolver. I thought [laughs] I thought, poor old soul. I thought put it away again. I felt a real heel threatening an old German lady with a revolver. Anyway, she, sorry, sorry she beckoned me inside and she gave me a slice of bread and an apple and a drink of milk. And so, so then I left her. I went out. She, she said, ‘Herr Paulsen come. Herr Paulsen come.’ I didn’t know who Herr Paulsen was but I thought well I don’t want to know anybody who’s got H E R R in front of their name so I left her to it and, but it was broad daylight then. I walked about. I hid up as soon as I could in a copse full of wet brambles and so on, and blackberry bushes and that sort of thing. And so that’s how I spent the rest of that day. On we walks. Nothing else much too report really. Another time, getting, about four or five days [pause] yeah, yeah about, about four, about five days I was getting lightheaded by that time with nothing. Nothing to eat except these few tablets. There were no crops in the fields. No fruit in the fields or anything of that sort. I was getting lightheaded. Not thinking clearly. I came to a railway embankment and I thought, oh yeah, there was no, no level crossing or anything of that sort but I’ve got to climb over that thing. Up and over and down the other side. I thought — no. No. What am I doing? All I’ve got to do is climb up on to the track, walk along the track until I come to a station, buy a ticket and get back home again. So after about a quarter of a mile or so I must have come to myself. No. What the hell am I doing? Then I got down off the track. I went on my way. So then the night after that, still hungry and not thinking very clearly instead of sticking to the fields, this was night time of course, I always walked at night. Walking I walked down the main road of the village intending to sort of be through and out the other side. But unfortunately as I walked, stumbling along by this time I heard, ‘Halt verdacht.’ Oh blimey. And a click of a rifle bolt. And I thought oh well there you go. I said, I know little bit of German. I don’t know how I come by it but the odd word or two. I got this, ‘Halt,’ and the click of the rifle bolt and I said ‘Ich binn, ich binn ein Englisher flieger’ and that’s, that was enough German. He said, he said, he’d got the rifle bolt, he said, ‘Hände hoch.’ I got that, ‘Put your hands up.’ And then he said, he said get the order right oh yeah he had a dugout nearby with, with a little a fire. A stove, inside. That was his sentry post in fact. He said, ‘Komm.’ And he walked along behind me and he, he said ‘Ein, ein’ I thought or something which obviously meant in. Get inside. So I went inside and there was a bunk in there and floor boards and this sort of wood burning stove. And that was where he, that was his sentry post and, and he didn’t quite know what, sort of, what to do next. I said, I don’t know if my German was correct or not. I said with, one hand like that said, ‘Ich habe hier eine pistole.’ I don’t know what the German is for pistol. Do you?
Other: No [laughs]
HW: Anyway, but he got the meaning meant something. He said, ‘Ah,’ I put my hand back up a bit. He said, ‘Ah,’ he said and he mimed it [pause] and said, ‘Langsam. Langsam,’ which I gathered meant ‘slowly.’ He said, what he was meaning was take it out and put it on the table but slowly. No sudden movement like that or else you get, that’s your lot. So after that was done he gave me some of his bread, some of his rations and some bread and some pate that also went with it and a drink of coffee out of his, acorn coffee it would have been of course, out of his, out of a flask and I had to wait until he said, he motioned that I should take off my wet flying suit and lay it down over in front of the, in front of his heater and that I should lie on the floor and if, he made the sign that people that make when they’re going to sleep. His hand beside the side of his head inviting me to go to sleep in the warmth and that. So I thought what a decent old bloke. He doesn’t want any trouble. I’m in shape to give him any trouble so let’s take it from there. So I went to sleep. Proper sleep I’d had for a long time. And then the next morning his relief arrived from a nearby German aerodrome. There was a German aerodrome I found out later at a town called Alpen. It was a fighter aerodrome. Yeah. A fighter aerodrome. And it was about, poss about three miles. Something like that away. And I was going to get taken by the, by my old, my old friend, he was by that time. I was going to get taken over back to Alpen Aerodrome and handed over in to official German custody. So I was lucky really in because I’ve heard of people since the war. People who’d been handed over to the police, the ordinary civilian police who usually worked hand in glove with the Gestapo. I got, I was going to be handed over to the Service. And not just army but my own type of Service — the Air Service, as well. So I struck it lucky. So when we got [pause]
[recording paused]
HW: Ok. So I walked with this, with this German guard I suppose. He was an old chap really. Like an English home guard. And he took me to Alpen, this German fighter aerodrome. I was taken into the officer’s mess there and was obviously a sort of a curio to them in there for them to see one of the individuals that they had been fighting against. They were interested in my flying clothing in particular. Particular flying boots. A lambswool flying, lined flying boots. And the, well all the flying equipment really. None of them could speak English and I couldn’t speak German but one of them could speak French. And I could. He asked me questions in French. I answered him in French and then he translated it into German for all his mates. So one of the questions he, he said. ‘How many times have you been over Germany?’ I said this was the eighth time. He said, ‘Only eight times?’ He said, ‘I have been over London sixty six times.’ Anyway, they gave me what meal they were having. It was only a sort of spaghetti bolognaise in fact. And then I got shunted off into where I was, the side room where I ate that and then taken down to a cellar and kept there all night with a German just outside the door, well a locked door, with a rifle. And yeah, that was next day I was taken by one of their, one of their police to the railway station and taken to down, down, down Germany to Frankfurt. We went to the Ruhr first. Went to Dusseldorf Railway Station where we had to change trains and, and then we went on down south to Frankfurt. And I was taken, handed over to the reception camp I suppose, well not a camp. It was a sort of a proper building. A reception centre where all crew, air crew went. Were taken for interrogation. Put in a single, taken up, put into a single cell with a little barred window high up and a wooden bunk. And that was it really. There was a blanket. A couple of blankets sort of thing. And my boots, shoes, boots, flying boots were taken away and put outside the door. I wasn’t allowed to keep those. I hadn’t anything else that was of any use. Oh they took my navigationers, navigator’s watch. And the next day I was taken up for interrogation. All aircrew were interrogated separately. Well, pilots, navigators and bomb aimers and radio operators. It’s not much good interrogating gunners because they didn’t know much. Navigators, he wanted, the officer interrogating me wanted to know what height we were flying, what bomb load did you have, what was your exact route into the target and so on and so on. And but there wasn’t much I could, well there wasn’t much I was prepared to. I said, ‘You know sir I’m only obliged to tell you my name, rank and, and’ —
Other: Number.
HW: Name, rank and [pause] Oh well never mind. I was only, with regards information I was only obliged to obey the Geneva Convention. He said, he says, ‘There’s one or two questions about you sergeant, he said, ‘You have been wondering about in Germany you say for six days.’ He said, ‘But we have no aeroplane that you flew in. What aeroplane? Where is your aeroplane that crashed? Where are the other?’ He said, ‘And you have no identity tag.’ He said. I said, ‘No. The string back home broke before I came out that last trip. I was going to put some fresh string on when I got back.’ He said, ‘No disk. No identification. You will not say what squadron you came from. You will not say what your target,’ he said, ‘That was the night of Duisburg raid.’ I said, ‘Well yes it was.’ So, so anyway, he, I got taken back to my cell again. The next day I was called for another. He gave me, he gave me another go and he said, ‘Yes sergeant,’ he said, ‘We have had another crew in from 51 Squadron and they say, they confirm that your aircraft did not come back from Duisburg.’ He said, ‘So I can see how why you cannot identify yourself,’ And he said he accepted the fact that I was telling him the truth. I told him as much as I was going to and he, and he said now about, ‘We have settled that. Now, about your route into the, what other targets have you attacked? What other targets has 51 Squadron?’ I thought well I’ve said quite enough now and I thought, ‘I can’t say any more sir.’ He thought ok. He gave up on that but it was a comfortable office he had with nicely carpeted. A big, big desk, smelling richly of cigar smoke and, oh well. Anyway, went down to this holding unit down at Oberursel where all prisoners are sent. All prisoners. Air Force prisoners went. And I went, I met there a chap called John Trumble who I did training with, navigator as well, training as South Africa and when he saw me he said, ‘Waggy,’ and we stayed together for all the rest of the time. Got sent over by train in cattle trucks. You know, forty men to a truck. That sort of a thing. Six horses or forty men. From there right over to the far side of Germany bordering Poland. Near the Polish border at, near Dresden err Chemnitz no. I’m not sure. Right over the very far corner, southwestern corner of Germany you might say, to a prison camp, Stalag Luft 7 at Bankau. B A N K A U. And this was for air force, Royal Air Force non-commissioned officers. I’d only been there three days, no, four days when, and it was quite established camp. They were the proper bunks and there wasn’t a lot of rubbish about. The food, the food was nicely organised and so on but then the Russians were moving close and the Germans said, ‘We’re going to move you out of here.’ So they marched us out one night. One night the, in fact Russian aircraft were bombing not very far away so we knew the Russians were getting close. But the Germans weren’t going to hand us over to the Russians. They were going to keep us because prisoners were good bargaining counters for them. They wanted to hang on to prisoners because they knew, really they knew how the war was going to finish. So we marched out. They’d given us a little time to get our few possessions together. Our few Red Cross items that we’d acquired. For instance a blanket and pyjamas and shaving kit and a few, a toothbrush and a few, a knife, fork and spoon. A few things like that. And off we went and oh it was hard marching. We used to march. They used to put us up in farmyards. In, in barns. In farmyards where you just lay on the ground in, or on straw if you were lucky. Feeding was by, they had a what sort of a thing, a boiler on wheels that they used to take used to drag round. It was, they used to do soup in it mainly. Cabbage soup or swede soup or something of that sort. Dreadful stuff. Used to issue a bit of bread each day and a bit of margarine. That’s about it I think. Oh a few potatoes. Yeah. Yeah. And so we walked through this bitter winter weather. We were stumbling along. Through thick snow quite often. One particular night there was a blizzard. You could rake your fingernails down your face and you wouldn’t feel anything. It was just numb. So anyway, this marching, well it wasn’t marching it was just staggering along really. And they used to put us up as I say in these barns and the next day we’d be off again. And this went on about six days through terrible winter weather. Until we came to a town called Goldberg where they put us on to, they got rail transport organised to take us to a camp called, to Stalag 3A called Luckenwalde. Near Berlin. Southwest of Berlin. And so we were, things took a turn for the better there. Mind this when we got to Luckenwalde it was an old established camp but proper brick built. It was built as a prison camp but it was, being a proper huts with wooden floors you didn’t have to sleep the earth floors or anything of that sort. And grossly overcrowded because there were other nationalities there. There were, there were Poles, there were Russians, there were Norwegians. Oh, there were all sorts there. And we, there was only room for us. The Germans put straw on the floor and wood. Wood straw. And we used to let, each person had a little area sort of as wide as he was and as long as he was and stretched out on the floor. The barrack blocks were each barrack block used to send up each day well twice, twice a day yeah to the cookhouse. And cookhouse well it was in the morning it was, there was nothing to eat. It was just water. Now, they, they brought they said the man in charge of each hut said, ‘How many men want their coffee made up as coffee, their tea made up as tea and how many want it left dry to smoke?’ [laughs] So through the rest of the day there was nothing to do really but lie on the floor. It was dirty. There was no, you had hang your blankets out on the wire, barbed wire each day to air to get the smell out of them. The wash place was dirty. Later in the day the main meal would consist of potatoes and soup again. A bit of bread. Sometimes a little bit of pate. But, but we made do with the Red Cross parcels. If we hadn’t had the Red Cross parcels I don’t know where we’d have been. The Geneva Convention says that the prisoners must be given the same rations as the home service back area troops. If the back area troops in Germany were living on what we got they must have been pretty hard up. Anyway, there was nothing to do all day. We used to go out, walk around the compound and well that was it. And oh we got the news read every day because, because our, our somebody had got and made a little radio set with bribing the German guards to bring in the odd valve and the battery. Bribing them with cigarettes. That was the general currency. Cigarettes out of Red Cross parcels. So they used to pick up the man who had this little radio set used to pick up the BBC news every day and come around to the huts and read it out loud to each one. So we knew what was happening. That was one thing to look forward to. Otherwise just snooze, slept, talked. There was nothing else to do until the Russians got close and we, the Germans were talking about moving us to some other place to, so they could keep their control of prisoners. But they never, they never made that. The Russians arrived one day and Russian tanks were knocking down the barbed wire. And we were, we were, or our senior British officer said that we were to stay put. We weren’t to go out roaming around the country. We were to stay put because things would get disorganised. Anyway, he said there’s safety in numbers. So we stayed there and after a time the Russians provided us with food of a sort but nothing much. But anyway when we had stayed there I was with this John Trumble. By this time firm friends with him. And we, I said to him, ‘Look John, these Russians aren’t going to let us go. They’ve held on to us. There’s no reason why we can’t go, link up, is there? They’ve linked up with the British. There’s no reason why we can’t go.’ I said, ‘I don’t like the look of it John.’ He said, ‘No,’ he said, ‘Waggy,’ he said, ‘Let’s go.’ So we put the news around amongst sort of a couple of dozen of us around about. ‘Yes. Ok mate. Ok. We got the message. We see what you mean. Yeah. We’re coming with you.’ So we slipped out against the orders of the senior British officer and after we’d walked about four miles or so I suppose we saw a convoy of lorries coming towards us. British lorries. So one of them stopped. We got aboard. He said, ‘I’ll take you lads back,’ he said, ‘The other lorries are going down to the camp to collect the rest of the lads.’ So we got into this lorry and went back. Crossed the River Elbe into British held territory and we were free. So, but those that stayed, those lorries that went to collect the rest of the RAF prisoners, the Russians wouldn’t let them go and they never did. They were never heard of again. I think the Russians thought hello, navigators, engineer, flight engineers, pilots if we got some, a bit top up here we’ll keep them. It’s all, it’s all in it’s all in there. So we stayed at this British Air Force aerodrome. Shönebeck it was called. And after two days the Dakotas came and picked us up, took us back to Brussels. There we were handed over to the, oh they were American Dakotas by the way. Taken back to Brussels. We were handed over and British Dakotas came and took us back to England. We landed at Wing near Aylesbury and we were back. Welcomed back into, into Air Force, Air Force ways again. Given uniforms and sent on leave and so on. So that was that. So that’s Air Force career pretty well finished. We used to get called back now and again for just a couple of weeks. I went back to one, what’s one down there [pause] near Stamford? What’s the?
Other: Wittering? Wyton? Wittering?
HW: Yeah. Went down to Wittering. Yes. And they called us back. Not that they wanted us back but they just wanted to let us know that they, we were still under their control. So after those stages the war finished of course and I went back to University and I’d done two years at University before being called up. So I went back in the January and did two terms to get back into the way of things. Then I had two more years to do my degree. And then I had a year to do for a diploma in education because I was going to be a teacher, you see. So, so and that all went through satisfactorily. The University were very good. The Air Force was very generous. They paid my University fees. All that sort of thing. And it all went nicely. I got a job in, after my teaching training was and so forth I got a job in an independent school. St Johns School in Leatherhead which was a minor public school, teaching French and Latin. Those were my two degree subjects. And I was in charge of rugby there which, and had a jolly good time there in fact. The head master was a very liberal minded man. Prefects were allowed to smoke in their studies. They, they were allowed to have, to brew coffee and to so on in their studies. And they had radio sets in their studies. He treated, he treated them as gentlemen and the one thing that annoyed him more than anything else was if a boy could be accused of ungentlemanly behaviour. Anything else he’d accept. But ungentlemanly behaviour oh. But as I say liberal minded you know. I said to him once about, we used to the crew rugby team used to some of us used to get together now and again. Talk over next Saturdays run and thinking about the captain I said, ‘Would it be alright, sir if I took Warrington down in to, down to the Globe down in Leatherhead. We’ll have a dinner and a couple of pints. A couple of pints.’ He said, ‘Yes. Yes, that would be alright Mr Wagner. Don’t bring him back completely drunk will you?’ So they were happy times. But I moved from there eventually after four years because I wanted to get back into the state system. I was also paying in to the state retirement. The pension system. So I applied for a job in the, at a Grammar. Dear me. Someone gave me a hollow tooth.
[pause]
HW: Yes. A Grammar School near Reading and where I was second in command of the French Department and I taught Latin as well. Taught French and Latin and took a great interest in their rugby and joined Marlow Rugby Club which played all. All my remaining rugby was played at Marlow Rugby Club. They made me an honorary life member for the rest of my days for services to the club. So well, anyway I’d be in this Grammar School I taught at in Reading. I was standing at the window of my classroom one day looking out over the playing fields and it was raining. It had been raining for quite a few days. I thought in another twenty years I’m going to be standing at the same window at this same blasted rain. I’ve got to have a complete change. So I looked in the “Times Education Supplement” for postings abroad. I was married by this time by the way. Yeah. And we were buying our own house. So I thought do a complete change and found one advertised in Kenya. So, for French and Latin. I thought, well there you go. I thought well they were the wrong sort to be learning Latin for, but anyway [laughs] Because at the station at the Delamere High School there were a third Africans, a third Asians and a third Europeans so there was a good mix. And of course they all had to pay. There was no such thing as free schooling out there. They all had to pay school fees so parents made sure that they didn’t waste their, waste their time in school. You got a child a bad report, a word to their parents and that soon brought about a change. We had a daughter by this time. Helen. She went to Kenya High School which was a girl’s boarding school and she only came home once every other weekend. They were allowed home. Otherwise apart from holidays that was the only time we saw her. Phillip was five years old went to, went to Nairobi Cathedral School which was a sort of an infant school you might say. He wasn’t five years old yet. So, but the wife of the canon at the Nairobi Cathedral, she taught. She ran the little school that they had. As an aside, it’s difficult to know, I don’t want to waste your time on this really, but it was run on traditional lines. She was there to teach. You were there to get taught and you were going to get taught. In the old traditional way. No play way. Anyway, it came around to the time of the Christmas pantomime. Traditional. And the usual Mary in the manger and all the, so Phillip was selected as Joseph. Right. So parents were invited of course into this performance and Joan and I were sitting there knowing that Phillip was a good big part and on he came. On to the stage with, with the usual sort of dishcloth around his head and a nightdress, a white nightdress on. All that sort of thing. And the head mistress had said, told the children, ‘We’ll try a new way this year. We’re not going to have the usual talk. You’ve got to do it like it happens at your house. Like when your mummy — when your daddy comes home what does your mummy say to him? And what does he say to her. And you’ve got to carry on like that.’ So Phillip arrives on. Mary’s there holding a big, a big doll and Phillip says, Mary says, ‘Welcome home Jesus. Nice to see you again.’ And Jesus says, Jesus says, ‘Oh yes, I’m glad to be home again Mary.’ And how’s this no, I’m getting it wrong aren’t I? Joseph. And how’s, Joseph says, ‘How’s little Phillip?’ I’m making a pigs ear of this. ‘How’s little Jesus been?’ And Mary says, ‘He hasn’t been a good boy at all. Yeah. In fact he’s been a right little bugger all day.’ And I can imagine Mary’s face. She’s told them to say things that happen just at home. And all the parents are sitting there [ laughs ] . Anyway, I became deputy head at this Queen’s Girl’s School. The head, when the head mistress was on leave I was a head teacher, principal for a whole term and then it got taken over. The Africans took it back they, we knew they were going to take it back. They took it back. Put their own staff in. Most of the Europeans had gone by then. From the whole country in fact. And so it was time for us to go and we went back to our, the house that we had started buying in Reading and settled down there and things went on from there quite normally. I joined, went back to Marlow Rugby Club. I took up, oh no. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Went back to my old job that I had before and the headmaster said, ‘Yes. We’ll take you back Mr Wagner but would you guarantee to stay for two years? I don’t want somebody coming in and then he’ll settle down for a term and then he’ll start looking for a head of department’s job.’ ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘I’ll stay for two years.’ And after two years, when the two years were nearly up I got this job at the Queen’s Girl’s School in Wisbech. Teaching just, of course they don’t do Latin there. And carried on there. I worked there for, until I did nine years there. And when I was eighty, eighty one yeah [pause] Eighty one? Fifty eight. It was 1981 [laughs] when I was fifty eight. My wife had died. Helen had married and left home. Phillip was still at school on, doing A levels. And the house was all paid for and I thought well it was a job I didn’t really like. I was more of a warder than a teacher I thought well if I take it easy I can make do on my on the what I’ve got saved up and the teacher’s pension until I get the old age pension. So it worked. And I took up, I played golf a lot with Steven’s father. With one of the teachers who was at the Queen’s Girl’s School. Norman Davis. Used to go on holiday with them. I took up, I was down on Dartmoor. I used to do a lot of long distance walking on Dartmoor. And down there once I saw a chap, a couple of chaps driving up in a Land Rover and they, I was sitting in my car at the time and they took down from the roof a hang glider, unfurled it, rigged it, took it up one of the tors and I watched them. One of them launched off. I thought, ‘Cor. I’ll have a go at that.’ So when I got back, back home again I got a look, searched around and found that over near [pause] not Thetford. It was near Downham Market there’s a hang gliding school and I thought well, so I went over and enquired and they said, ‘Well yes. If you want to.’ It was a school not a club. You see it was a training school. So I went over there and did my first year I got an elementary certificate. The second year I got club pilot’s certificate so I could join, I was regarded as being a fully trained hang glider and I could fly. I could join a club and fly hang gliders. Which I did and I carried on. I can go back to the same place. They were quite happy for me to go back and fly their gliders but I wasn’t on any training course because I’d, so they thought, knew it all. So I did a lot of hang gliding there. They’re plenty of pictures in there. It was good. And then Phillip who had taken his own private pilot’s licence in powered aircraft and powered gliders and ordinary gliders. He came over. I said I’ll stay, he said, ‘Can I go on one of these hand glider courses if I don’t have a birthday present?’ I said, ‘Never mind about that Phillip I’ll come with you and pay for it.’ And so he got his own hang glider club pilot’s certificate as well. And there we are. That takes me up to the present. Oh went I over when they did the bungee jumping. Yeah. That was one thing I’d always wanted to do. And the, you know when I put the, I signed the you know the.
JH: That happened when you were, when you were ninety. Was that when you were ninety?
HW: Yes. That’s right. Signed the, what is it, what is the permit to fly?
Other: Disclaimer. Disclaimer form.
HW: Just the word.
JH: Disclaimer.
Other: Yeah.
JH: Disclaimer form.
Other: Yeah. It admonishes them from any responsibility.
HW: Yeah. It’s just word has gone. The word when you sign something saying it’s all —
JH: The waiver. Waiver.
HW: Yeah. Disclaimer.
Other: That’s the word.
JH: Yeah. Yeah.
HW: Yeah so and that’s taken me out of the thing. I’ve given up the long distance walking because I get back pain. And that’s why Steven is doing so much work in the garden. But up to that everything’s going nicely and I’ve been extraordinarily lucky with health.
JH: Ok. Well, thank you Henry for your time to record this interview today. Thank you very much.
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 Henry Wolfe Wagner. One
Creator
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Judy Hodgson
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-05-04
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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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03:13:51 Audio recording
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AWagnerHW160504, PWagnerHW1701
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
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
Henry Wolfe Wagner was born in Ireland. The family moved to England when he was young and settled near Reading. Henry attended Reading University for two years joining the University Air Squadron. He then volunteered for the RAF and began training as a pilot. He went to South Africa for his training. He was put forward to begin training as a navigator when his pilot training was interrupted. After returning to Great Britain and completing his training he was posted to 51 Squadron at RAF Snaith. On their eighth operation his crew were attacked by a night fighter over Duisberg. Henry managed to walk for several days before he was caught and became a prisoner of war. He was sent to Stalag Luft 7 at Bankau before undertaking the Long March.
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
Poland
South Africa
Germany--Duisburg
England--Yorkshire
Poland--Tychowo
Alps
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Requires
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Henry was born in Ireland and held Irish citizenship. He talks of his family and schooling, but the Second World War had begun before he began attending Reading University in 1940. He joined the University Air Squadron which lead to him choosing the RAF and aircrew training when ‘called up.’ Sent of South Africa to begin learning to become a pilot Henry found himself transferred to the navigator training path when he failed to become a pilot. He gained his Navigator’s brevet and the rank of Sergeant on his graduation.
Henry returned to the UK and was posted to RAF West Freugh, Scotland, then RAF Abingdon to learn about the differences in flying in European weather. He crewed up at Abingdon before moving to the HCU RAF Stanton Harcourt. On being posted to 4 Group HCU RAF Marston Moor he learnt that he would be flying Halifax aircraft and the final member of his crew joined them. Here they learnt about the Gee navigation system. Once the left this base, they were classed as an operational aircrew.
Henry’s crew was posted to RAF Snaith near Doncaster. He explains how it was a constant race to keep ahead technologically ahead of the German. Henry tells of the operations he went on to Julich, Munster, and six in the Ruhr area (Duisburg etc.). He details the types of target, and the kinds of defences the targets have.
After talking of the losses sustained by Bomber Command during the Second World War, Henry describes his final flight during which the aircraft bombed the target successfully but on it’s return journey was shot down. Henry was the only member of the crew to successfully bail out. He describes the small survival kit that the RAF had issued him with and his evasion the any Germans until he was caught and initially placed in the Luftwaffe’s care. He was sent via Frankfurt to Stalag Luft 7 which was for RAF NCOs at Bankau. After the Russian front drew near to the camp, the POWs were sent to the already overcrowded prison camp of Stalag 3A Luckenwalde. The prisoners were only able to take a few items from Red Cross parcels like blankets, shaving kits, toothbrushes, etc. While they were marching in the bitter winter 1944/45, they often had to stay in farm building, were mainly given soup to eat.
Henry describes life in Stalag 3A, and how he came to be liberated. He was flown to RAF Wing and returned to Reading University to complete his education and become a teacher.
Henry details his post-war life in teaching and with his family.
Claire Campbell
51 Squadron
aircrew
crewing up
Dulag Luft
evading
fear
Gee
H2S
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
navigator
prisoner of war
RAF Abingdon
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Snaith
RAF West Freugh
shot down
Stalag 3A
Stalag Luft 7
the long march
Tiger Moth
training
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1183/11755/PWalkerS1702.2.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1183/11755/AWalkerS170108.2.mp3
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Walker, Stephen
Stephen Michael Walker
S M Walker
Description
An account of the resource
40 items. An oral history interview with Stephen Walker about Ronald Cecil Walker (b 1924) photographs and documents.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Stephen Walker and catalogued by Trevor Hardcastle.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-01-05
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. 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
Walker, S
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 8th of January 2017 and I’m here with Stephen Walker to do a proxy interview for his father, late father, Ronald Cecil Walker. And they lived in the Salisbury area. So in practical terms what are the earliest recollections you have of your father and what he did?
SW: Well my first memories are really as a young boy. Mainly standing by or sitting by the back door watching dad walk up the garden path in his long grey raincoat having finished his day at work and looking forward to seeing him there. So that’s really my first memories of him as a boy. He was a keen sportsman. He liked his football and his badminton which he very much did in his early days as a lad and then through to being an adult as well. I did go and see one movie with him as a young boy which obviously would have stuck in my mind because it was the Battle of Britain. But that’s the only movie we ever saw as a father and son team. But he, those are my memories really initially as a small boy.
CB: Right. So the question next is what did father do? Where was he born and when? And what did the family do?
SW: He was born on the 19th of October 1923 in West End, Southampton. He was one of four boys and two sisters. Born to Frederick Austin Walker and Lillian Maud Walker. And Frederick’s — his father’s occupation was a shopkeeper. And again in Southampton. So that’s his father’s role. With regard to Ron in his early days he attended, school wise, he was at the Deanery School in Southampton. He spent, in fact all of his schooling time at the Deanery School. Whether it be the junior school or the senior school.
[recording paused]
SW: With regard to when dad left school. That was in December 1937. He left the Deanery Senior School and he went out into the workplace and secured work with an accountancy firm as a junior clerk. So that was his first steps in to the workplace which, I guess is probably linked to the fact, in some way that his own father was dealing with figures and shop-keeping and retail. That, that type of thing so, and that’s what he did. And then in 1941 he joined the Air Training Corps. Number 424 Squadron in Southampton.
[recording paused]
SW: So after joining the Air Training Corps in December 1941 he joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve and he joined the RAF because two of his other brothers — family wise they decided that one would join the army, one would join the navy and one would join the RAF. And so Ron joined the RAF in December ‘41. He formed part of a process that was pilot/navigator/bomb aimer. So he was assessed as being most suitable for the bomb aimer role.
[recording paused]
SW: From Southampton, having joined the Volunteer Reserve he went on to ACRC at Lord’s. And then, I believe, on to Scarborough for his initial training. And post that initial training he was then sent out to Canada. A place called Defoe which was a Royal Canadian Air Force, 5 Bombing and Gunnery School. Exactly how much time he spent out there I’m not sure but on his return from Canada he went to the Climate Assimilation School and then to the Heavy Conversion Unit at Marston Moor. And from there on to 102 Squadron at RAF Pocklington in 1942.
[recording paused]
Both Marston Moor and Pocklington are in Yorkshire which is where he spent his time and then moving on from there as a bomb aimer flying Halifaxes with 102 Squadron. With regard to some of the missions they are currently being researched to get finer detail with regards to his ORBs and exactly what happened. I’m waiting for results. The information from Cranwell. But he did his full tour and the information that I do have would have included operations to Cologne, Osnabruck, Sterkrade, Nuremberg, Witten and Mainz and I have some details with regard to the Halifax that he would have flown on those occasions which would have been PP179. And MZ426 on the operation to Mainz. But subject to receiving more information from Cranwell I should be able to fill in a lot more details with regards to his ORBs.
CB: Do you have any information about whether the aircraft was hit by flak or fighters?
SW: I don’t. No. There is nothing that I have by way of the personal scrapbook that I made when he passed away that shows any aircraft that he was either in at the time but it could quite be possible but I don’t have anything that can confirm that.
CB: So accompanying this on a memory stick we’ve a lot of pictures and narrative.
SW: Yes.
CB: Which can be matched up and we’ll top up later.
SW: Yes. Yeah.
CB: Good.
SW: A lot of further information to come with regard to that. That background.
CB: Now, when he ended the war — what rank?
SW: He ended the rank as a warrant officer which we’ve identified from his uniform and the hats and in the photographs that I have. So yeah that was his leaving rank.
CB: Good. Thank you very much. Thank you Steve.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Stephen Walker
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Chris Brockbank
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-01-08
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AWalkerS170108, PWalkerS1702
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:06:50 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Second generation
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Canadian Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
Stephen’s father, Ronald Cecil Walker, was born in Southampton in 1923. On leaving school he worked as a junior clerk with an accountancy firm. In 1941 he joined the Air Training Corps, 424 Squadron, in Southampton and in December the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve where he was accepted to train as a bomb aimer. He trained with the Royal Canadian Air Force, 5 Bombing and Gunnery School, at Dafoe in Canada. His next posting was to the Climate Assimilation School and then to the Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Marston Moor. In 1942 he joined 102 Squadron at RAF Pocklington where he flew Halifaxes with the same squadron. His full tour included operations to Cologne, Osnabrück, Sterkrade, Nuremberg, Witten and Mainz. He finally left the RAF as a warrant officer.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sue Smith
Steph Jackson
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
Great Britain
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Osnabrück
Germany--Oberhausen (Düsseldorf)
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Witten
Germany--Mainz (Rhineland-Palatinate)
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Saskatchewan--Dafoe
Saskatchewan
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942
102 Squadron
aircrew
bomb aimer
bombing
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Pocklington
training
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Donaldson, David
David Donaldson
D Donaldson
Description
An account of the resource
309 Items and a sub-collection of 51 items. Concerns Royal Air Force career of Wing Commander David Donaldson DSO and bar, DFC. A pilot, he joined the Royal Air Force Reserve in 1934. Mobilized in 1939. he undertook tours on 149, 57 and 156 and 192 Squadrons. He was photographed by Cecil Beaton at RAF Mildenhall in 1941. Collection contains a large number of letters to and from family members, friends as well as Royal Air Force personnel. Also included are personal and service documents, and his logbooks. In addition, there are photographs of family, service personnel and aircraft. After the war he became a solicitor. The collection also contains an oral history interview with Frances Grundy, his daughter.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Anna Frances Grundy and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-06-02
2022-10-17
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
Donaldson, D
Grundy, AF
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[inserted] 12A[/inserted]
R.A.F. Station
Marston Moor
nr. York
2.1.45
Dear Sir,
Do you mind if I have a quiet 'bitch'? Not exactly a 'bitch' but I would like to let you know the full facts of our conversion which you may or may not know.
When we left Foulsham we were led to believe that our course would only consist of circuits and bumps and then returning to Foulsham for our X-countries & other training. This we old the C.I. here & he informed us that he would look into it. Now[squiggle deleted] we are to do the full course with the exception of bombing.
[page break]
2/ That was not our only disappointment. On this station they have just adopted a new system of maintenance. This amazing system provides two aircraft per flight for local flying. If one of these kites goes U/S you may or may not get a replacement. F/S P[?]ayne and myself are the only ones who have flown so far. We each have one hour to our credit. The course minus bombing is going to take ten to twelve weeks.
The time wasted here is terrific of the three weeks here, the first one was take up in lectures and since then we have done practically nothing. Some crews do G.D duties like wood chopping and the navigators were on one occasion asked to scrub floors.
I am quite sure that we
[page break]
could complete the same number of hours in half the time if we could return to Foulsham. I realise that having us recalled may be out of your hands but I thought you ought to know these facts.
I hope I haven't bored you too much, Sir, but my chest is much clearer now.
The very best of luck for the New Year from the exiled boys of 192.
Yours truly
DWorrad F/O
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to David Donaldson from D Worrad
Description
An account of the resource
Complains about being misled on the content of their conversion course and new engineering practice which has resulted in little flying. Says they could complete the course in half the time if they were allowed to return to Foulsham
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
D Worrad
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1945-01-02
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Three page handwritten letter
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EWorradDDonaldsonDW450102
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--Norfolk
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-01-02
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Frances Grundy
Heavy Conversion Unit
RAF Foulsham
RAF Marston Moor
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1213/16073/EDonaldsonDWWorradAE440106.1.jpg
73e9e07cbac0273f8dcc6fa527381d75
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
Donaldson, David
David Donaldson
D Donaldson
Description
An account of the resource
309 Items and a sub-collection of 51 items. Concerns Royal Air Force career of Wing Commander David Donaldson DSO and bar, DFC. A pilot, he joined the Royal Air Force Reserve in 1934. Mobilized in 1939. he undertook tours on 149, 57 and 156 and 192 Squadrons. He was photographed by Cecil Beaton at RAF Mildenhall in 1941. Collection contains a large number of letters to and from family members, friends as well as Royal Air Force personnel. Also included are personal and service documents, and his logbooks. In addition, there are photographs of family, service personnel and aircraft. After the war he became a solicitor. The collection also contains an oral history interview with Frances Grundy, his daughter.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Anna Frances Grundy and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-06-02
2022-10-17
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
Donaldson, D
Grundy, AF
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[inserted] 13A [/inserted]
R.A.F. Station
Ref:- 192/C.2151/F2. 6th January 1944
Dear Worrad,
Thank you very much for your letter of the 2nd January.
I am very sorry you are all having such a wretched time. Apart from forwarding your complaint on, there is little I can do at the moment as we have no aircraft which will be available for training. Later on I hope that “A” Flight aircraft will be available and then we may be able to get some of you back to complete your training here.
Serviceability is always poor at Conversion Units and I should hardly think that the recent weather has been much help for the flying programme.
I hope it won't be long before we manage to get some of you back and in the meantime heres [sic] wishing you a very happy New Year.
Yours
D.W.D.
Pilot Office A.E. Worrad,
Officers' Mess,
R.A.F. Station,
Marston Moor,
Nr. York.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter from David Donaldson to Pilot Officer A E Worrad
Description
An account of the resource
Commiserates with him over lack of available aircraft at conversion unit. Mentions possibility of training on squadron aircraft in the future.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-01-06
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EDonaldsonDWWorradAE440106
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--Norfolk
England--Yorkshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-01-06
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.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
David Donaldson
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One-page typewritten letter
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Frances Grundy
Heavy Conversion Unit
RAF Foulsham
RAF Marston Moor
training