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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/798/11748/PDelfosseJEC1701.2.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/798/11748/AVanDammeJEC170727.1.mp3
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Delfosse, Jack
John Edward Charles Delfosse
J E C Delfosse
John Edward Charles Van Damme
J E C Van Damme
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with Jack Delfosse (1924 - 2020, 3032135 Royal Air Force) and two photographs. He flew operations as a pilot.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Jack Delfosse 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
2017-07-27
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
Delfosse, JEC
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CJ: This is Chris Johnson and I’m interviewing John Edward Charles Delfosse today for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. We are at a residential home in Hythe, Kent and it’s Thursday 27th of July 2017. Also present at the interview is John’s daughter, Cara. Well, thanks very much for agreeing to talk to us today. So could we start please perhaps by you telling us where and when you were born and what the family background was?
JD: The family background. My father was a lieutenant in the Belgian Army on the left of the canal at Yser. The Germans were on one side and the Belgians held it right down to Nieuwpoort. And then the Germans had smashed Ypres so badly, you know all the, they had Vickers machine guns which kept them. They just chucked the bodies in to the river. All covered with the blood all over. And the Belgians had to take over the whole of the line. The whole load. Look after their you know, father had Vickers machine guns. And then when the Second World War started, he said, ‘I don’t want you to be involved in any military action like that. I want you to get a Reserved Occupation.’ So, I said, ‘Fair enough.’ We went down to Paddington Moor Hospital and Dr Moran who was afterwards the physician who used to accompany Churchill every visit. Flew, he flew all over the world with Dr Moran. I became a medical student. I got halfway through the course and then they gave me the leg of a girl to dissect. It was stuffed and it was kept so bad I said ‘God, I can’t stick this. I’m not going to.’ And I walked out. I finished medical stuff. I walked straight onto the tube down to Euston House, to the basement where RAF recruiting was taking place. There were ten other chaps there and we got through all the tests. Eye tests, colour blindness.
Other: Dad.
JD: Teeth, ears, all the rest of it.
Other: Where were you brought up?
JD: Hmmn?
Other: Where were brought up?
JD: Highgate School.
Other: Ok. So —
JD: And a prep school first where they got us prepared for entry into Highgate.
Other: And where were you born?
JD: In Crouch End, in South East err North East London.
Other: Ok.
JD: Crouch End.
Other: And where were mum and dad from? Your mum and dad.
JD: They were both born in Ghent.
Other: Belgium.
JD: In Belgium. But that was long before the First World War.
Other: Yeah. We’re just talking about you. What happened when you were growing up? So, when you were growing up where did you used to go?
JD: I went to Highgate School, and I got passed out.
Other: You used to go to Belgium a lot didn’t you?
JD: Oh yes. We —
Other: For holidays.
JD: Every holiday. We had a villa in Le Zoute, right up against the Dutch border. We spent every single holiday there. Now, what else?
Other: And your mum. What happened with grandad and grandma? They, they ended up coming to England, didn’t they? From Belgium.
JD: Yeah. Well, my father said, ‘I’ve seen so much here and the Germans will be back again. You just wait. We’re going to sell and live in England.’ So we set up. We had a house in Folkestone and lived there for quite a time until the Second World War. And then the Second World War he said, ‘I don’t want you to join any military force’, and I was a med student as I told you, but then I couldn’t stick it and I went down to Euston House, in the basement and volunteered. Passed all the tests. And there were, in the end there was a board of four senior officers, well decorated. Two in front and two on the side. And they said, ‘Why do you want to fly?’ I said, ‘I’ve already learned to fly with my grandfather’s Stinson Reliant.’ And he said, ‘Where did you go to school?’ I said, ‘Highgate, just up the hill from here.’ And one of them stood up and said, ‘He’s alright. He’s an old Cholmeleian.’ And that was it. I was in.
CJ: So, so you chose the RAF because you could already fly.
JD: Yeah. And they said we haven’t got enough training schools available. Go back to your local aerodrome in [unclear] . We’ll give you a badge with RAF VR on it and the teachers locally teach all the kids their navigation, Morse code, marching. An RAF bloke taught the marching. And I was there for about, oh about a year and then the brown letter arrived, “Report to Viceroy Court”, and I reported early in the morning. I had the number 27 bus going near our house which went straight past there. Very good. In the basement of Viceroy Court there was a big dip down where they had a car park. It was all benches so, breakfast cooking. Went down there and they gave us a meal straight away, and I sat opposite Richard Attenborough. The actor who’d been in, “Brighton Rock,” you know, and I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ He said, ‘I’m volunteering.’ I said, ‘Well, you’re a bit short aren’t you?’ But he ended up at Manby as a, trained as a rear gunner until the Air Ministry realised that he had this acting ability and they made propaganda films with him to show, you know what happens if a member of a member of the crew is a coward and lets the rest down and things like that. And this was up at Heaton Park. We had to stand with capes, ground capes on us. It was pouring with rain. They sprayed water on us to indicate the rain because it’s always raining up there. Got soaked to the skin. And there we are.
CJ: So that was your initial training. And then —
JD: Initial training. And then at Heaton Park as I say was a step up, you know. They had various hut assortments. I was [pause] I put, was put in a hut. One side we had us RAF VR blokes and the others were University Air Squadron blokes and they thought they were a bit, bit upper class even though I’d been to university myself. Anyway, I refused to, I got the cigarette ash thing in the tea in the morning every time a draft came up because I wouldn’t cross the Atlantic with the submarines. And eventually there was, on the [pause] the corporal noticed on my docs that I’d been a medical student. He said, ‘So, you’re good at carving with a knife.’ He said, ‘Report up to the master butcher.’ A tiny room at the top. Big boxes, wide boxes, square boxes — lambs’ liver from New Zealand, and he said, ‘Carve those up before lunch.’ Gave me big boots and an apron and all the rest of it. And I did and they took them off me and they went to the WAAFs who did the cooking.
CJ: Sorry. Could you just explain the, why you were putting cigarette ash in your tea?
JD: Yeah. Well, that was to get off from, get the heart attack, the heart beating. It appears to be like a heart attack but of course it isn’t. To get me off the draft, you know. I didn’t want to cross a submarine. They’d had to, they used pre-war liners and they used to put the Italian and German prisoners right at the bottom. The aircrew on the top. Training air crew on the top and they’d lost one or two of those and they’d all gone down. So, naturally I wasn’t very keen. So that’s what it is.
CJ: So how did the training continue then after you’d finished carving up the meat?
JD: Well, I got that down to the hut and joined my unit. And they said they wanted volunteers for a new type of training. Air Ministry training type C. So, I and my best friend Ginger Brookes, a bright red-haired fellow, we went and volunteered together, and they put us on a train to Anstey, Northampton, and we were stuck in a hut there. The university one side and us the other side. And lower down there the three Free French Air Force pilots who had already trained as pilots, but they had to go for some training to learn English commands and things like that. I could speak French and I got on very well with them. Anyhow, we, we’d taken part our air bus err aircrew bus to a little short field by the side of a road near a farm and if you got through in four hours, went solo within four hours you were naturally a pilot, you know, you passed as pilot. And we only had one bloke who didn’t. He landed on top of another Tiger Moth and he was chucked out straight away [laughs]. Later I heard he was a Commissioner for Refugees and he was with the United Nations. He was a Danish bloke. And then we went up to Church Lawford, and when we arrived we could see these fifteen Harvards, you know, camouflaged and yellow underneath. And they gave us wonderful training up there. The first instructor I had was a chap called Duck. A very pale fellow. Unfortunately, every time that other people saw him in my aircraft they would go, ‘Quack. Quack. Quack. Quack’, and he applied for a transfer and we got another one. A chap who had been a Warrant Officer in the Battle of Britain, and he was really nice. Really good. And he, he one day there was clamp on and he said, ‘Jump in the back and I’ll fly from the front.’ And he took off and we climbed in the mist and tight turns, circled around up like that. He counted the numbers of seconds the runway was on went straight back down and lo and behold the runway was right in front of us. Came down in one piece. Fantastic. He was the best instructor I ever had. Warrant Officer. And then after that we got our wings. Air Marshal Inglis, and he said, as he pinned the wings on you he said, ‘Congratulations. You’ve saved us so much money. What do you want to apply to go on to later on? I said, ‘Well, I want to be an airline pilot after the war.’ So he said, ‘Alright. We’ll put you on bombers. There were two of us [unclear] and we passed out and I went to 21 OTU at Moreton in the Marsh which is along, it’s called the Fosse Way. Delfosse [laughs] we got to, they were using old Wellingtons that had been in the desert and if you landed heavily all the sand came up in your eyes [laughs] all the time. Well, one day one of these Wimpies it came in and I could, I could see the roads from Moreton in the Marsh to Chipping Campden, and they had a graveyard there, all the white crosses [unclear] time, and the engine coughed. And I got it down safely and I reported this to the engine bloke. And he said, ‘Impossible,’ he said, ‘I checked it personally.’ I said, ‘Well, it happened, I can assure you.’ And that afternoon we did ground training and another crew took over, and the crew who took over were a Cranwell trained bloke. And when they came back in the evening we could hear them going over and suddenly there was an enormous bang and crash and it burst in to flames at the back of Chipping Campden, and I thought, ‘my God, that’s a stroke of luck’. You know. Sheer luck again. And after that went on to the Lancaster training place near Rutland. You know, up on the hill there was a Conversion Unit. And I was on 619 Squadron. We were trained as a back-up to 617. And we did all the training with 617 including getting the leaves and branches in the air intakes, you know. Hitting the target of water over Derwent Water and climbing up quickly from the hills. And then they did their job, and we were very sad for them of course. They did the job even though they lost the, about twenty eight men in the process. Then they, we did the Eder Dam. Guy Gibson. He led them through this. There was a church on the hill and a very difficult approach. But the bloke who did it had to try thirteen times and he eventually hit the dam and broke it. But the trouble was the water flowed down a long, an enormous volume of water went down and there was a Russian prisoner of war camp there and they were all, ten thousand of them they couldn’t get out, they were drowned, just like that. What a waste of life. And we were very sad for them. Afterwards they, the London and the south coast were being bombarded by the V-1s and V-2 rockets and me and another chap who knew the French coast pretty well. We could speak French. We volunteered to go and see if we could destroy them. And we, the Resistance would send the coordinates and it might be in a farmyard building or if one place was in rogue village with canvas over the top. And we managed to knock out most of them. The other bloke he and I eventually got the whole lot knocked out. And then the Germans ended up on the coast in Holland, pushed further back by the Canadians and the Air Force, and they started bombarding the Antwerp docks. In the process they had these unstable rockets. Very short range. And they must have hit Antwerp itself and lots of blokes were killed in Antwerp. People anyway. Men, women and children. So that was inevitable of course. And then after that, after the war that’s when I went on Silver City’s.
CJ: So do you remember, just coming back to the wartime do you remember how many operations you flew?
JD: Oh, it must have been about twenty. Twenty five. Something like that. And —
CJ: And apart from the Eder Dam are there any of the operations that particularly stand out? Any difficult ones or —
JD: No. We were very lucky you know. We got, you could always see. There was a ramp for the V-1s. And you could see that because they had four round pitch with forty millimetre Oerlikon guns, but they didn’t open up until it was apparent that you had actually found it. And when you flew along the line there was a better chance of hitting if you fly up the line then across it. They found that when they got to the Falklands and that only got the one bomb on the runway. So, we knocked all those out. And after the war I went to Silver City Airways really.
CJ: So, could you tell us about Silver City? Where you were flying from and what the aircraft were?
JD: Yeah.
CJ: And where you were going?
JD: It was the Bristol freighters that they’d used in Australia to get cows frozen in the farms direct. Stuck in these freighters. Take them down to Sydney. Put them on the ships to bring to, feed the people in England, you know, during the war. And then the Silver City realised after the war there was a lot, a lot of money to be had flying these film stars and various famous people like Peter Townsend, Margaret’s boyfriend. I actually went around the corner and nearly knocked him over [laughs] And anyway in the back of the aircraft you know there were all these cigarettes, boxes full of cigarettes. It was the flight attendants’ duty to sell as many cigarettes as possible. And one day the flight attendant was crawling over these cars. There was a racing green Bentley and he looked down and he thought what I wouldn’t give for that racing green Bentley, and the seat next door had a cushion, a bit of white sticking out. He pulled it out. Hundreds of hundred pound banknotes. They were — a hundred pound banknotes were rare things in those days. And he set up a garage in, in — what’s the town now? Not [unclear] but the one next door. I can’t remember the name of it. The garage is still there. Absolutely amazing.
CJ: So, the aircraft were carrying passengers and cars.
JD: Oh yeah. Passengers and cars. And one of the tricks was as you — there were special crew who unloaded the cars. They’d unload them and would deliberately bang them so the exhaust dropped off. I used to go in a café there and I’d pick up two bottles of [unclear] cheap red wine, bring it back and eventually I built up a wonderful collection of wine at home.
Other: What about times, dad when you were in the RAF. You know, when you used to fly low with, to say hello to some of your girlfriends or — [pause] remember?
JD: Oh, yeah. We used to. When I was on the training with the Harvards we’d fly down the canals you know, before Wittering. And the land falls away. It’s full of canals. And we would fly low and chuck this, we’d come up a bank and the Land Girls there would chuck toilet paper at them. Just to let us know that we’d been there. They got a lot of free toilet paper those girls.
CJ: And on, sorry just coming back to the raids that you, where you were bombing the V-1 launch ramps.
JD: Yeah.
CJ: I take it this would be low level with just a small number of aircraft was it?
JD: Yeah. I think one aircraft at a time used to do that and if you spotted the glint of the thing you made sure that you climbed up. That’s when they opened up on you. But luckily we just got a few holes in it. And we saw the bombs actually explode all the way up the ramp to destroy it.
CJ: And was there ever any fighter activity around the ramps?
JD: No.
CJ: Or were they not expecting you because it was a single aircraft.
JD: No. They’d lost so many fighters by that time that they hadn’t got that many left. Mind you there’s a few very good examples of FW 190s and 190s restored. My son found them in a museum in Southern Germany. Masses of German aircraft in there. Completely restored.
CJ: Ok. So you were working with Silver City. So you were flying as a pilot then.
JD: I was a pilot.
CJ: Yeah.
JD: And the chap next door on one trip we had Carolyn was in a carry cot on my assistant’s knee. She was in a carry cot. A little tiny baby. And then that was because I’d flown for Silver City before and I had a complimentary free pass, you know, to do that.
CJ: And where were you flying from and to?
JD: Oh, Silver City’s were flying from Lydd. A metallised runway. And we used to do one, two trips to Le Touquet. The third trip was to Ostend err to Calais and then the fourth trip was to Ostend but we had to climb up because there was anti-aircraft. Belgian anti-aircraft gun training area. And you went right up and then you had to come right down, land at Ostend and many of the people in the cars they were warned not to drive on the left. But of course they forgot and they drove on the left. And the next time you come around you’d find dozens of cars wrecked completely. Head on collisions. Brought back again. Oh dear.
CJ: And so when, when did you leave Silver City?
JD: I left Silver City oh after about, they moved to, to Southend Airport with the larger DC4s that could, they could lift them up and put about twenty cars in. And that was when I left Silver City’s. I wasn’t — it was too far to drive.
Other: One very important thing. What about who did you marry?
JD: Oh, I married a girl in the Westminster place where all the film stars married. There’s a photograph of her. Me in a lovely suit. And —
Other: How did you meet her?
JD: She worked at my parents’ pet shop.
Other: In Folkestone.
JD: And I’d broken my —I was in the drawing office at De Havilland. We were designing the Comet. I was electrical port inspector where two parts were clashing together. And I was, I’d broken my arm and I was up in the, my attic room and this girl came up with a cup of tea, and I thought oh she’s a nice looking girl, you know. When it was healed I got my car out and we went all over the place in the car, and then we got married in this place where the film stars are. But her, her, my father wouldn’t come to it because he knew she was a bit of a flirty type. And the wedding reception was held in Castle Hill Avenue, paid for by the mother. And I had a big caravan then and I knew she loved cats and we used to, I drove her to the zoo at Bekesbourne and we looked at all these tigers and leopards and panthers and things like that. Great time we had, and —
Other: How long were you married for dad?
JD: Hmmn?
Other: How long were you married for?
JD: Leonie?
Other: To Leonie. Yeah.
JD: Well, we had two girls first and then she suddenly disappeared. Where she was. Where she went to. We found out later that she met an IRA man who knew she had money from her grandmother. Her grandmother was a wealthy woman, and presumably she’s still in — what’s the name of the town in Ireland? Main town in Ireland.
Other: Belfast.
JD: She’s in — hmmn?
Other: Belfast or Dublin.
JD: Dublin. That’s right. She’s either running a dress shop or she’s lying at the bottom of the River Liffey because they pinched all her money, that’s all they were after.
Other: You’ve got a son. So you had three children.
JD: Yeah. Later on.
Other: How old were they when she left?
JD: When she left you were, you were still very young. Still very young.
Other: David was three.
JD: Yeah.
Other: I was four and Pat was seven.
JD: Patricia was the oldest. You were second and David was very very young. I knew I had a house which was on where they had been the last V-2 to land in Folkestone had hit, and there was a school right across the road. So in the morning I gave them a good breakfast. Then went across to school. Had lunch at school. In the evening came back. Good supper. Bath and all the rest of it.
Other: So you brought up three kids by yourself.
JD: Oh yeah.
Other: That’s fine.
JD: Bathed them and then put them to bed. And repeated the process day after day.
CJ: And you said you’d been working as a draughtsman for De Havilland on the Comet. So what work were you doing after that that brought you to Folkestone?
JD: Well, when the Comets crashed it didn’t appear to be any good staying locally there, so I came back to Folkestone and settled down with my parents in a, in a second floor flat. You know the road that goes to the motorway now. That was a gravel road and then there was the golf course on the right, and we lived there. The chap who lived above us with his Scottish wife was an estate agent in Hythe. He died and I’d meet her you know, the Scottish lady, in the town. We were great friends. Had meals together and things like that. You know, took her out to lunch. There’s a model of the Lancasters on the window ledge there.
CJ: And after the war did you manage to keep in touch with any of your old crew members?
JD: Yeah. I was going, I went up to London for an interview for a job and on the way back had to wait in the train so I went in to the cafeteria. And I was sitting at, on my table and across the other side suddenly there’s Stan Lewis, my rear gunner, sitting there. And I’d saved his life in the, in the training over Bristol Channel. You know, they, we used to go over the Bristol Channel and wave the aircraft backward and forward and he always used to shoot the drogue down with depressing ease. And one day we were over the Bristol Channel and he didn’t reply, so I sent one of the other chaps back to see. He was blue in the face so I dived immediately straight down below ten thousand. Got some air in him and he told his wife, ‘That’s the man who saved my life. I wouldn’t be here now today if it hadn’t been for him.’ Great, great amusement.
CJ: So did you have crew reunions or squadron reunions?
JD: No. Never been. Never been to one. Never been to one.
CJ: And how do you feel about how Bomber Command were treated after the war?
JD: Well, there was a RAFA Association bloke in Deal and I went to see him. I said, ‘What would have happened if I had been killed during the war?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s just too bad. You wouldn’t have got anything. No pension. No nothing.’ That’s when I said, ‘Thank you very much,’ and left the RAFA and never went back. And then later on I drove buses for East Kent Road Car Company. You know, double deckers. All sorts of buses. Electric controlled drive single deckers.
Other: So he could look after the kids.
JD: Ones with [unclear] there from Scotland and had a great time and eventually ended up on National Express. Went to, used to take a trip to Catterick where the Americans used to come over to do the tour of Europe. And as they got out when I took them back they put the hat on the doorstep and they used to fill it up with dollars. And I got that three or four times. I had a hell of a lot of dollars then and converted them into English money of course. And that’s when Cazzie got me a flat because I was living in a motor caravan, but then I got glaucoma in this eye and I realised I couldn’t —
Other: The time he went around Europe.
JD: And I met a German lady doctor at a place in Spain, and she said, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘I’m going to Morocco.’ And she said, ‘Oh I’d love to go there.’ And she had a little terrier dog. When we got to [pause] I forget where it was. The town where you booked the tickets for the trip over to Morocco. She went in front of me.
Other: In Spain.
JD: When I drove in there was a blonde girl talking to her, and I said, ‘Who was that?’ And she said, ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘She said she and her husband had all their money stolen. Have you got some money to give us?’ I said, ‘You didn’t let her look in her handbag did you?’, because this husband and wife are doing that trick all over Germany and Spain.’ And she said, ‘Yes. She saw right into my purse.’ You know. So I said, ‘My God.’ Anyway, we went to look for a place to park up for the night where the dog could walk on the beach, and as we walked on the beach I kept looking back to make sure the caravan was there and when we got back I got in my caravan and sure enough there must have been somebody in this row of houses had seen it and they got into her caravan somehow and they pinched all our money, keys, house number everything. Passport, the lot. I said, ‘Well, I’ve got my Visa card and I’ll escort you all the way back to Perpignan in France’, and when we got there she got her money back but she said, ‘You can’t go back to Spain now. It’s the water. Wet season. All the rivers will be flooded.’ She said, ‘Lake Constance and Bodensee is just as nice. Come back home with me.’ So I went back and lived in this enormous house she had and I had my set of rooms one side and she had her set the other side, and funnily enough my oldest daughter is a water diviner and she found that the dividing line between the rooms was the water, water running underneath the house. Quite a big surprise. Anyway —
CJ: You had some adventures since the war.
JD: Oh yeah. We went all over Europe.
Other: [unclear] split up with a split screen for your camper van.
JD: Because my son had met this Turkish girl at the English School of Languages in Kosovo I believe, or something and he’d fallen in love with her. [unclear] her name was. She was a nice looking girl. Brought her up to me. They got married but the father wouldn’t come over because he’d trained at Heidelberg in Germany and he didn’t feel happy in England. And the mother paid for the reception. Lovely reception.
Other: How long were you travelling for around Europe?
JD: Oh, quite a few years.
Other: How long do you think? Twenty years?
JD: No. No. No.
Other: Fifteen? Ten years?
JD: Five years or so. Went everywhere. All over Spain. Portugal. All the way down to Hungary when the trouble at Sarajevo was on, and great fun.
Other: You’ve always been an adventurer.
JD: But the mother loved cats, so I took her once to the zoo at Bekesbourne and we saw the tigers and the black panthers and the other cats, and had a great time. She was the sort of woman I’d have married myself if she wasn’t already married.
Other: She was something.
JD: Great fun.
CJ: Well, thanks very much for talking to us today. That was great.
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 Jack Delfosse
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Chris Johnson
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-07-27
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AVanDammeJEC170727, PDelfosseJEC1701
Format
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00:37:09 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
Jack was born in London and went to Highgate School where he learnt navigation, Morse code and marching. On leaving he became a medical student but left half way through the course. He then joined the Royal Air Force and initially trained on Harvards in Northampton. After gaining his pilot qualification, he flew Wellingtons before joining 619 Squadron with Lancaster bombers. Jack had carried out about 20 to 25 operations, including an attack bombing V-1 launch ramps. After the war Jack went to Silver City working as a pilot for a while. He moved to Folkestone and met his wife at his parents’ shop, they eventually married and had three children. She left Jack when the children were still young and he brought them up.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Northampton
England--Northamptonshire
England--Kent
England--Folkestone
United States
Belgium
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
21 OTU
619 Squadron
bombing
crash
Harvard
Lancaster
love and romance
Operational Training Unit
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
training
V-1
V-weapon
Wellington
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/572/8841/AFroudJ160516.2.mp3
b9f785857b8781991f29989631bb29b6
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
Froud, James
J Froud
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Froud, J
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with James Froud (1922 - 2019, 1801660 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as an air gunner with 44 and 83 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-05-09
2016-05-16
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
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DP: This interview is being conducted for the IBCC Bomber Command, the interview is, the interviewer is Dave Pilsworth, the interviewee is Jimmy Froud, the interview is taking place at Mr Froud’s home, xxxx Bury St Edmunds on the sixteenth of May, time is, twelve ten.
JF: [inaudible] from the thirtieth of the eighth to the fourteenth of the ninth, apparently, er, we then went on leave, came back and went to, [pause] [background noise] a quick check, I must have gone straight [pause] [background noise] to
DP: Interview paused
JF: There’s a lot of operations, I did, with Warrant Officer Price, as a spare gunner, one was to Danzig, one was to Stuttgart, Danzig was badly pranged and a lot of people got, unfortunately, er, [pause] [background noise] then, it looks as if we pursued a load of training, for, the lads using radar, wire runs, those were the runs, er, to bombing ranges, you’ve probably heard of those before, er, there’s a number of them there, ok [pause]
DP: Interview paused
[inaudible]
JF: With the crew, with 83 Squadron, Bergen, that’s in Norway of course, erm, and on the way back we were diverted to, ooh, Sutton, I expect, but er, our base was unavailable due to fog, but don’t put all that detail in if it’s unnecessary, strangely enough, the next operation, was on, the first of the eleventh, [pause] and that was a daylight, to Homberg, not Hamburg, Homberg, in the Ruhr, and that was when it was daylight we did, we then [unclear] interest, did a ran, across country, that was Belgium and France, that was checking the [unclear] how set out, we were hit by flak, and er, returned to base, duty not carried out, it’s written up, we did loads of daylight flying, for practise and night fighter affiliation, duty not carried out [emphasis], so, we just need to go onto the ops don’t we, [background noise]
AP: Interview paused
JF: Ops, Mitchell, as a flying officer, Heilbronn, H-E-I-L-B-R-U-double N [spelt out] er, that’s a bombing raid I take it, Heilbronn, it must have been in France, wasn’t it, and the one after that, because this log book got damp once, it’s a job to see, and that was on the sixth of the twelfth, to Giessen, G-I-E-double S -E-N [spelt out] six hour trip, must have been just a bombing trip, sorry we was, Pathfinder first, we were probably flare force, we dropped the flares to light the target up, but that sort of detail I didn’t put in because it didn’t affect me at all, again, about the ninth of the first, at forty five, went to Munich, eight hours forty, again, I just sit in the rear and, let the boys work at the front, and I assume it was marking the target, or just putting flares down, we move on to several ariel, forty five, well, the eighteenth, Bohlen, Leipzig, sonar [unclear] thirty trip, [pause] not sure, what, where that, was, is, in the first months, no, second month, er, second of the first, no, already done that, anyway, Gravenhurst, which was the Dortmund-Ems canal, er, I can remember that erm, that was five hours forty five, the following day, we were told that it had been successful, by a Spitfire out on recognition, er, reconnaissance and looked down and seen this ditch, which had previously been a canal, anyway, they were usually fairly quickly repaired, actually, [pause] er, I’m trying to, about the twentieth of February, Horten, H-O-R-T-E-N [spelt out]that’s in Norway, and that’s U-boat pens, now, we bombed that, and I remember going on leave, sometime later, and being told off by a mate, who, being stationed up there, he said we’d hit the brewery and he was not pleased [laughs] because we got his beer [laughs] ah, the third of March, that’s my birthday, er, operation schme, I don’t know how you pronounce that
AP: Schmedehausen
JF: Yeh, good, I’ll accept that, Dortmund-Ems canal, was that the last one, anyway, and then, again, Bohlen, that’s B-O-H-L-E-N, [spelt out] Leipzig, nearly a nine-hour trip, eight fifty-five, sixth of the third, oh, these are pretty close together, Operation Sassnitz, that’s in the Baltic Sea apparently, eight hours, thirty, any idea?
AP: No, for the record, interview paused
JF: No, ok, [background noise] Lutenzendorf L-U-T-Z-E-N-D-O-R-F [spelt out] that’s Leipzig again, we also bombed Arsbeck, as briefed, and we were diverted to wing, and so, that was, on the fourteenth, on the sixteenth and went to Wurzburg, that’s W-U-R-Z-B-U-R-G [spelt out] seven hours, twenty, that was the sixteenth of the third, er, [background noise] I’ve got half a blank page here, I don’t know why that is
AP: For the record, interview paused, just for the record, interview re-started
JF: And so, we’re now, or did we do, had we done, Lutenzendorf, I think we done that haven’t we, oh, don’t matter, oh, with, seventeenth of the fourth, Cham, Bavaria, that’s Germany isn’t it, [pause] seven hours, fifty, no idea what it was, well, just, eighty, erm, Pathfinder duties, oh, here’s one to Tonsberg in Norway, that’s the twentieth of the fourth, so we’re getting near the end of the war probably, I think that’s the last one, I don’t know [pause] [background noise] yep, that’s it, [background noise] I now, we were then, after a while, preparing to go out to the Far East, we, the plan was to take the mid upper turret off, dangerous thing to do, and put a fuel tank, petrol tank there, they did it to one aircraft we, didn’t like the look of it but we did what we were told, or we went LMF, [laughs] so, we had actually finished operations, I’m afraid, that last one was Tonsberg, I should recognise it, [pause] [background noise] erm, [pause] [unclear]
AP: Just for the record, interview paused
JF: Erm, we [background noise] [unclear] we jettisoned, incendiaries, in the North Sea, there’s a big ditch, below the ocean, and they had to locate it and drop, er, the incendiaries, they were a bit dicey those things, very dangerous, they were made hexagonal, in shape, about a foot long, and the firing pin was located so that they were all packed together in a tight bunch, and dropped so that, they would scatter, now, obviously, pretty dicey things to have around, so, the air force wanted to get rid of them, and we dumped quite a few, er, [background noise] still flying with Mitchell, we’re doing flight affiliation and wire runs
AP: What was involved with fighter affiliation? Roughly
JF: Erm, you’d have a fighter up [unclear] we got to using Spitfires, and er, he’d do attacks on you, and we’d have a camera, mounted, on your gun sight, only little tiny things they were, [unclear] and er, they would record, er, the fighter attacking and when you got back they would be processed by a photo, photographic section, and then, and the films were assessed on a screen er, [pause] now, [pause] [background noise] I continued doing practise, bombing, and, cross countries, cross country duty not carried out, I don’t know why, recalled to base, that’s unusual, I wonder why that was? [background noise] ah, [emphasis] sorry, Mitchell, apparently, disappeared after the eighth of the sixth, he went, he didn’t say goodbye or [unclear] just went and er, we then had another fella, Flying Officer Clayton, erm, and we were doing the same things, you know, preparing to go to the Far East, er, [background noise] it was all training, we did radio range, [unclear] that would be done with the wireless op, [unclear] fighter affiliation, fighter affiliation, fighter affiliation, fighter affiliation, loads of that, so taken a pair of guns away with us and told us to [unclear] bloody air force, [pause] ah, now, [pause] [background noise]
AP: Just for the record, interview paused
JF: Yes, here, I’ve moved from, 44 Squadron, sorry from, 83 Squadron, to a heavy conversion unit, and that, [pause] oh, here we are, I was at Coningsby up to the thirty first, of the, tenth, forty five, and then I went to Finningley, Finn-in-ley [emphasis] which was a Bomber Command instructors course, and then, from there, on the tenth of the eleventh forty five, went to North Luffenham, which was a heavy conversion unit, er, and we were training people, up until, no those dates are wrong, [pause] [unclear]
AP: Just for the record, interview paused
JF: And I was at Cambridge, when we, was demobbed, and we used to meet quite regularly, [background noise] er, and he, but he died a few years ago, poor John, which probably was a good thing in a way because he’d gone blind or almost blind and he wasn’t taking it very well, a bit niggly on the phone, or some at
AP: What was his surname?
JF: Norman, Johnny Norman, yeh, poor John, [background noise]
AP: For the record, interview paused
JF: Conversion unit, so screened gunner, that means, actually, screened gunner it says, then air gunner that means, that’s a number of trips that we did, to, Moreton- in- the- Marsh and [unclear] to dump aircraft, [background noise] [pause] and we were up to the ninth of September, er, forty-six, we’re still flying as a screen gunner, fighter affiliation, and, those, airlift to Lindholme, fighter affiliation
AP: Is this the conversion unit, sixteen, sixty, wasn’t it?
JF: Sixteen, fifty-three, conversion unit, that’s the last
AP: For the record, interview, paused
JF: Tenth, forty-six, [background noise] could have come out on class B, class B, you got, two weeks leave, I think, not long, and er, you were back into civvy street [laughs] and I came out on a class A, which is the normal class, we got a bit longer leave, and I, I’d reached that stage where I hadn’t made my mind up whether I wanted to stay in or not, but I couldn’t see, what I could be doing, ‘cos, I realised, that, erm, the aircraft that we were flying, would have had to change, and the gunners would not be used, needed, if you’ve got fast enough aircraft, you don’t need air gunners, which is surplus baggage [laughs]
AP: So, what did you actually, do, once you were actually demobbed?
JF: I was, I was a plumber apprentice, up until the time, I went into the RAF, and I went back to plumbing, er, until, I was happily married, and, I did, quite a number of exams, sorry, quite a bit of training at er, evening class, er, and got qualifications, and eventually went to, Bolton, which was a training course, its, attached to Manchester University, and er, there were all sorts of, different trades there, building trade, printing, er, our friend along the road, he was a, I don’t know quite what he did actually, but he was in the, typewriting and that type of stuff, so, having got trained, you had to get a job, there was no guarantee of a job, but, I got a job at Reading Tech, er, stayed there about nine years, a job came up here, for a higher position, so, I came up here, finished up as deputy head in the construction department, and then, when I was old enough, I was demobbed
AP: When you came down here was you with, did you go to West Suffolk College?
JF: Yes
AP: For the record, interview now finished at twelve forty-two with Jimmy Foud
JF: Froud [laughter]
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 James Froud. Two
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Dave Pilsworth
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
2016-05-16
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AFroudJ160516
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Format
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00:25:19 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
As part of the Pathfinder Force, Jimmy explains that they did a lot of training using radar, wire runs and bombing ranges, as well as radio range with the wireless operator. Jimmy also describes the fighter affiliation they carried out. They sometimes marked targets or drop flares.
Jimmy refers to several operations with 83 Squadron to places in Norway and Germany, including cross country runs across France and Belgium. They experienced being hit by anti-aircraft fire. The final operation was to Tønsberg in Norway. They also jettisoned incendiaries into the North Sea. Jimmy moved from 83 Squadron to RAF Coningsby, followed by RAF Finningley, a Bomber Command instructors’ course, and RAF North Luffenham, a Heavy Conversion Unit. Jimmy did a number of trips to RAF Moreton in the Marsh; to dump aircraft. He was at Cambridge when demobilised.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Gloucestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Rutland
England--Yorkshire
Norway--Tønsberg
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
France
Belgium
Germany
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sally Coulter
83 Squadron
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
Heavy Conversion Unit
incendiary device
Pathfinders
RAF Coningsby
RAF Finningley
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF North Luffenham
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/217/3357/ABrownJM170405.2.mp3
8f4fa77e938c5a0b3f81064e719677af
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
Brown, John M
John M Brown
Jack Brown
John Brown
J M Brown
J Brown
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with John "Jack" Brown (b. 1921, 423662 Royal Australian Air Force).
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-04-05
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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Brown, JM
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JM: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Jean McCartney, the interviewee is John, or Jack as he is better known, Brown. The interview is taking place at Mr Brown’s home in Sylvania, New South Wales, on the 5th of April 2017. Also present is Mr Brown’s daughter, Jan. Okay Jack, let’s start at the beginning, you were born in July 1921 I believe.
JB: Right.
JM: At Carlingford. Now was that at a hospital or at a home?
JB: At home.
JM: At home. I thought it might have been. So how long did the family live around Carlingford for? Any rough idea?
JB: No.
JM: No, okay.
JB: They lived there a long while.
JM: A long while.
JB: Yeah.
JM: And is that where you grew up? Did you go to school round there?
JB: No, I went to school at Rose Bay.
JM: Oh, Rose Bay, right. So did you travel from Carlingford to Rose Bay?
JB: Oh, actually I grew up around Rose Bay.
JM: Oh, so you moved over.
JB: They, my parents moved.
JM: Moved, right.
JB: So I just was with them.
JM: Yes, that’s okay. So you moved to around Rose Bay and what primary school did you go to?
JB: The one at Rose Bay.
JM: Rose Bay, okay.
JB: They had the place opposite, and it was run by brothers. And so, I got, had a twin brother and so we went to school there.
JM: Right. And did that also have High School, or did you go somewhere different for High School?
JB: No, I went to school there, I remember going to school there and then I joined the Air Force when Japan came into the war.
JM: Yes. Did you finish school, erm, did you do your Intermediate Certificate?
JB: Did I do?
JM: Do your Intermediate Certificate, at high school.
Jan: High School.
JM: My what?
JB: I studied after I left school.
JM: No, no I’m asking you did you finish at school. And you left at fourteen did you?
JB: Yes.
JM: Okay, and when you were at school, did you do anything in particular there, you know, sort of sporting teams or get involved in anything?
JB: Tennis.
JM: Tennis?
JB: I was a very good tennis player and we, I won a championship there, but then I left there and went into the Air Force.
JM: Right, I think you actually did some work after you left school. I think you were in at, telegram boy. And then -
JB: Ah yes.
JM: And then that’s when you -
JB: Well you’ve got most of my history.
JM: I just want to hear your recollections to see what you have to say. It’s different hearing it from a person as opposed to reading about it. Because what we’re talking about here is that Jack’s life has been written up in a book called “The Sitting Duck Squadron” by Andy Larson, but as I say, it’s one thing to read about it, but it’s more –
JB: More intimate.
JM: More intimate if I can actually hear the words from you and what your recollections are. So, I mean there’s a couple of things about this time as well, is that you were living through the Depression years, and your parents obviously were having to cope with you.
JB: Yes. They weren’t well off.
JM: They weren’t well off. And you had one brother did you have any other?
JB: And three sisters.
JM: And three sisters. So you had a fairly -
JB: And the three sisters, actually they’re Gary’s daughters, and they’re now three owners here with me of this establishment and the one up in the top corner there.
Jan: That’s his daughters.
JB: That’s my granddaughter, she drew that.
JM: Goodness me!
Jan: No, she’s taking about whether you’ve got sisters and brothers, dad. You’ve got auntie Gloria, she was the only sister you had.
JM: Right. Okay.
JB: I’m finding it hard to remember.
JM: Yes, well it’s a long, long time ago. Okay. So what, after you left school, which I guess you left school early at fourteen because of the Depression.
JB: At fourteen.
JM: And everyone needed to try and get some work, so you went into, became a telegram boy, with the Post Office, and then you did some study and you went into the public service, you passed your public service exams, and became a public servant and you were, that’s when you first started with the Department of Interior.
JB: Right.
JM: Right? Yes, so and then after that is when you enlisted.
JB: In the Air Force.
JM: In the Air Force, and you had a gap between when you signed on.
JB: I had a what?
JM: A gap. You had to wait. You signed up in -
JB: Ah yes, I waited a few months.
JM: You signed up in December 1941 and.
JB: I think that, is that written in the book?
JM: Book, yes. And then you actually started your ITS in July 1942.
JB: What’s ITS?
JM: Your initial training.
JB: Ah yes.
JM: At Bradfield Park.
JB: Yes, that’s it. You’ve got it all. Well it’s in the book I think.
JM: Yes, and then after you did your initial training you went to Temora for your, when you started to fly, to do, start your pilot training.
JB: I did.
JM: So you were flying Tiger Moths at this point.
JB: Yes. You’ve got it all. I think it’s all in the book is it?
JM: Yes, but not everyone is going to be able to read the book.
JB: Oh, I see.
JM: So we need to have a little chat to be able to –
JB: To recognise.
JM: To have it available to other people because, as I say, it’s not possible for everyone to read the book.
JB: No, that’s right, I had to wait a few months. When I first joined, I joined the day Japan came into the war, but I didn’t get called up until a few months later and then I went to, I went to Temora.
JM: Yes. And do you remember anything, before you went to Temora, Sydney Harbour, the Japanese submarines in Sydney Harbour, do you remember anything about that?
JB: Ah yes, I do. We were living at Rose Bay then and so we were quite close to what was going on and I remember the fact that they got into the harbour and they sank the ship.
JM: The Kuttabul, yes.
JB: Yes.
JM: Did you, were you around at the like, did you hear, were you at home, did you hear any noises at any time? You can’t remember that.
JB: I can’t remember. Oh no. I remember them being there.
JM: Yes, yes. Well when you then went off to Temora and started your training, flying then on Tiger Moths, that was the first time you had been in a plane, I would assume. How did that feel?
JB: Well, the first time, they take you up and they put you through all these exercises and after that I thought oh, what am I doing here, like it was something that I hadn’t expected and I thought oh, I wasn’t happy. But I was tied up to the Air Force, so I just went through my course at Temora and then from there I went to Point Cook. I think that’s in the book.
JM: Yes, that’s right. And were there any scary experiences when you were flying around in the country there, or what?
JB: Oh it was no fun [much laughter].
JM: No? And why was it no fun?
JB: It was bloody dangerous! [Laughter] It was no fun, and you know, when I got my wings, I was kept back in Victoria for an extra, er, extra study for about a week or a fortnight, and then, I left then, I was going, I don’t know where I was going, I think I was going on leave and I got pulled up by the Commonwealth Police and, I had a jacket on, and they questioned me and blah, so that was no trouble and then I took my coat off and they saw that I was an officer and oh, they were horrified because they shouldn’t be interrogating me, as an officer. So they took me in hand and oh, they really looked after me and so, and then I finished up going to England. Went through, went through the United States.
JM: Yes, you went, you had an interesting trip, you went via the Panama Canal. Yes.
JB: Yeah. That’s right. You’ve got it all.
JM: Yes. But again it doesn’t really tell me about what you saw, what you, what sort of conditions were on the ship. Did you have to do any watches on the trip? Or anything like that?
JB: Oh no, it was just a holiday.
JM: Just a holiday. How many were in each cabin?
JB: It was packed with ex Army people, Americans, and they were being sent home because they were ill, or something, and it was twenty four hours a day, but I had a room to, I had an area to myself, which was very good, because I was an officer, and so that was a bit of a trip with me, but I had somebody with me. I think I had one of my family.
JM: No, you wouldn’t have a family member, no.
JB: Oh, I wouldn’t. Anyway.
JM: So what do you remember about going through the Panama Canal? Does that bring back any memories for you at all, or not?
JB: That was most interesting because you’d go along and then you’d stop, and then they’d have to fill the.
JM: The locks.
JB: [Door shutting] The lock again, to get through. So that happened and er, hang on, one time I had another person in the, in my room I think. Well no, I think that was when I went back and she fell out and hurt her head. That’s another occasion.
JM: Yes, now that’s another occasion, right. So then you went from, so did you have some leave in New York? Did you have some, after you arrived in New York did you have a little bit of leave to look around before you left again?
JB: Ah, they sent us out on leave to a particular area and there was a sergeant with me, and we went to this place, and he was a Colonel, and he was involved in some way with the Forces, and the chap who was with me wasn’t happy, so he left, but I stayed and they had a, they used to have a tennis competition. Did I mention this in the book?
JM: I don’t remember that bit, no.
JB: So they had this tennis organisation and I was a pretty good tennis player, and so I trounced them and they, they were shocked because they’d, they had a group that used to meet and play tennis and what have you, and they thought they were pretty good, but oh, they were no hope with me! So they got astounded at that. But I forget how long I was there. And then from there I went to Kidlington.
JM: Well went to Brighton to start with –
JB: Ah, Brighton, yeah, but then -
JW: And then after Brighton you did go to Kidlington, that’s right.
JB: That’s right. Alhough was it Kidlington that I was just talking about.
JW: Oh okay, right.
JB: Where I stayed.
JM: Right, right, okay. And so, and it was here that you were doing your advanced training, advanced flying training.
JB: At Moreton in the Marsh?
JM: That was when you got to OTU. So anything about Kidlington that stands out, any particular memory about Kidlington?
JB: About Kidlington? Oh, Kidlington was very interesting. The er, ah, what can I say? I was involved in an organisation at Oxford and the, Kidlington was just a training, er from Kidlington I went straight into the Air Force, into the battalion.
JM: From there you went to the OTU at Moreton on Marsh.
JB: From Moreton in the Marsh I went to Uxbridge.
JM: Yes, but let’s go back for a minute to Kidlington, ‘cause when you were there you had some leave at times, didn’t you, and you went up to Scotland, with a couple of other Scottish.
JB: Ah, well I did, you’re bringing back memories to me. I went up to Scotland and, actually, I met my wife there, only I didn’t marry her there, it was after the war.
JM: That’s right, but that’s where you first met, your wife Rita.
JB: Yes.
JM: Yes, in Edinburgh. What did you think of Edinburgh when you first got there, sort of?
JB: I liked Edinburgh.
JM: You liked Edinburgh?
JB: Yes, it was a fascinating place. It had, it’s got the castle up on the top and then they used to walk from there to, well barracks I call it, but it was a castle, Uxbridge Castle. And ah, I liked it.
KM: Yeah, Edinburgh. That’s good. Okay, well let’s go to, so then you got to OTU at Moreton on Marsh. And this was, I presume you did a conversion course to Wellingtons just before you went to OTU because you were flying Wellingtons when you got to OTU.
JB: We were flying Wellingtons at Kidlington.
JM: Ah, okay, alright, Wellingtons there as well, right.
JB: So from there I went to Moreton in the Marsh and then from Morton in the Marsh I was sent to Uxbridge and that’s where the Prime Minister operated, from there. We flew off from there on operations for a while and then I went over to Europe.
JM: Okay, well we’ll come to that in a moment. But just, the OTU is, where you crewed up, so, well at least I’m assuming that’s where you crewed up because that was the normal place for the crewing up to happen, so how did you choose your navigator and your bomb aimer and your gunners?
JB: There.
JM: There. How did you know any of these other chaps, or did they have friends, or?
JB: I did, I, they, queued people up and then I would select them.
JM: On what basis, what, you know, because you liked the look of them, or did you have a few words with them and wait to hear them speak, and then?
JB: I forget now.
JM: You forget now, right.
JB: I selected three people, and one of them, I think he was a sergeant, and he flew with me on one occasion and I thought I can’t, I’m not going to have this bloke, so I dumped him. I said I, ‘you can’t fly with me’ and so then they lined up other people and that’s, I finished up with three officers and oh, we became great pals.
JM: Great pals, that’s right.
JB: We survived the war and I got in, kept in touch with them afterwards. I still keep in touch with a couple of the sons of one of the.
JM: One of the chaps.
JB: One of chaps, yeah.
JM: Now I’m interested that you had fewer crew, that you didn’t seem to have a wireless operator in your crew, that seemed a little different to me, that you didn’t have a wireless operator.
JB: Well I think, I did have a wireless operator, but he didn’t operate as a wireless operator, he operated down below, as an observer.
JM: He was the observer was he, right?
JB: Yes, and he used to take the photographs. I think I explained in the book that we used to fly out about eight o’clock at night.
JM: Yes, well we’ll come to that in a mo. Well, in fact we will come to that now, because after you completed your training at OTU you went, you were posted to 69 Squadron. Now you said that you were posted straight off to this squadron which was flying Wellingtons, and didn’t go off to, posted off to a Lancaster Conversion Course which was what a lot of the chaps did, do you know why you were selected to go to 69 Squadron?
JB: No, I don’t.
JM: Or did you choose, did you put your hand up for it?
JB: No!
JM: You just got told you were going - Brown you’re going to 69.
JB: I was told I was going there and I didn’t know what it was or anything. And when I got there, I found that we operated from there, over, in connection with the invasion force. [Pause] And well, with the invasion forces, I never expected to survive the war. Most of the crew who I trained with down at, in Victoria, they were all killed, except one fellow who flew with me, and we used to get shot to pieces, and he got wounded and he went to hospital. He got wounded down below and his, and I saw him after the war. He came from Newcastle, but he, oh he never flew again, no. On our operations we’d get shot to pieces.
JM: Yes, and let’s, because it is a very different activity to what most other people were doing because they, 69 Squadron, wasn’t a very big squadron as I understand it.
JB: On no.
JM: No. And what 69 Squadron was doing was photographic reconnaissance, is that right? And to do that photographic reconnaissance you had to fly in very low?
JB: No.
JM: Drop flares?
JB: Oh, yeah. We used to fly about eight thousand feet, but when it was good weather I used to get down lower and then rise when I got to the target, then we’d drop flares, at eight thousand feet. Then we’d come down and photograph at a thousand feet and the activity, and you mentioned about, that church, at Lincoln was it?
JM: Lincoln, yes.
JB: Lincoln. I operated, I went through that church, and I operated from there. I was to photograph it later on, which I did, but it was a well known church and we, anyway I photographed that but, now where are we up to? Where I went to the squadron?
JM: Yes, so when you were in the squadron and we were just talking about what the squadron actually did in terms of having to drop the flares. The flares provided enough light for you then to do the photographing, because you were photographing troop movements mainly was it, or what else?
JB: I’ll tell you why it was established. The Wellington had a certain speed and it worked with the camera. They could, they knew what was going on during the day because they could see and they operated, but they didn’t know what was going on at night. So they established this squadron and, to establish the activities at night. And we used to fly out at eight thousand feet, drop flares, and it was just like daylight. Then we’d come down to a thousand feet and photographed what we saw and that’s how we operated. But I survived that war; nearly everybody on the squadron, they were all killed because it was, when you came down to a thousand feet, you were so well lit up.
Jan: Vulnerable.
JB: And we’d get hit, but the Wellington could take a lot of activity because of its construction, and I used to get hit many times and we got hit this time and he got wounded, this chap, and he never flew again. And I saw him after the war but he was a mess. But I survived the war.
JM: You did, that’s right. And in fact, to start with, you were based in England, but then, after about eight or so missions, you got moved over to Belgium and you were based in.
JB: Ah yes, we were stationed at Kidlington was it?
JM: Oh that was, that was for your earlier training. No, you were based at Northolt, near, where Heathrow is today.
JB: From Northolt, yeah, yeah, and from Northolt, well I left.
JM: The squadron was moved over to near Brussels, to Melsbroek.
JB: Yeah, that’s right, we went over on the continent. And then after the continent, I think I came back to England didn’t I?
JM: You did, after you finished your thirty five missions.
JB: You’ve got it all there.
JM: Yes, but again, I’m interested to hear you talk about it, and particularly as I say, that you had, you know, some very hairy experiences.
JB: Oh yeah. Well one night in particular we were flying over Germany or somewhere and I saw all this flak and what have you, oh, it was like daylight, and I thought oh, isn’t that good, we’re not going there [phone rings] next minute we turn right and we headed right over it and then up on top is an aircraft. It was hit by searchlights and we were way down below, it was way up, twenty thousand feet, and next thing, they all baled out, up there; they got hit and they all baled out. I don’t know what happened to them, but they would have landed, but the activity down below, oh, was really. And I was down below in all that activity, but I got out of that and survived.
JM: You survived, that’s right. And then on the tenth operation, your tenth trip was particularly hairy, wasn’t it?
JB: Was that the one I was just talking about?
JM: Well, it could be, because you ended up having -
JB: Most trips were very dicey because we dropped the flares and it was like daylight and we came down at a thousand feet, which is nothing. So we’d get a lot of activity, lot of ambushing, the plane would get hit but the Wellington construction was such that it could take it.
JM: It could take it, that’s right. But on the tenth flight you had a lot of, for some reason the camera didn’t want to be very cooperative and you ended up having to do three runs before you could actually get the -
JB: That’s the tenth trip was it.
JM: Well that’s what the book tells me, yes.
JB: But the book wouldn’t tell you much.
JM: No. It doesn’t that’s why I’m trying to get a few more little details of your personal memories of it.
JB: Well they were all dicey because it would be like daylight and we’d come down and a thousand feet is nothing so we would get hit, but the Wellington was a plane that could take a pasting.
JM: That’s right, so on this trip you had, you had to go round three times, and so you got hit every time you went through when you were, because the camera wasn’t taking the photos and then you, on the third run, you finally got there and then you had to go off to another area and you had exactly the same problem, the camera didn’t, still took a while.
JB: That’s recorded is it? Well that’s true.
JM: Yes, and then when you finally were able to turn for home you ended up only having one engine to fly on ultimately.
JB: [Laugh] That, what was in that book was correct. And that was one trip that I came back on one engine.
JM: Which with the Wellington only having two engines that doesn’t leave you with much, but yes!
JB: Well I wasn’t sure it would fly us on one engine, but it did.
JM: It did.
JB: And we got back home and I landed, but I landed at the wrong ‘drome! Did I mention that?
JM: Not really, no.
JB: Well when we came back, they had organised a strip that we [emphasis] knew and only the pilots that were operating knew that they could fly on this trip, and so I came back on that, but what had happened was another crew, they came in but they were followed by a German plane. And the German plane shot them down, they were all killed, and then he, the German plane was left over Brussels. And I was contacted, and it was ready to attack me, well it did, but it got shot down and the rear gunner, he got a decoration for that and er, but the plane, the German plane, couldn’t get out because it didn’t know the route out. It got in because it followed the plane, but once it got in was saddled, so we shot it, they said to me ‘what do we do with it?’ and I said ‘shoot it down!’ So we shot it down and he was killed; he was one of their best pilots. So I rang the, I got in touch with [indecipherable] and said ‘look, I’ll bring his body back’, and they said oh great. So I did. But I also had two young girls on it, who had said to me, ‘oh look we want to come on your trip as observers’, and I said ‘oh, I’m not happy about that.’ Anyway, they got on the plane, and so when I flew the German back to Germany, I dropped his body and two, the two girls came out too, but they were dead of course. And they got on the plane and they didn’t have any oxygen so, you know, they didn’t survive. So the two girls, I dropped the German and then the two girls’ bodies came out and they were returned to India – they were, they came from India.
JM: Goodness!
JB: And they were recognised as being very efficient, you know, but stupid, for sneaking on the plane, and anyway, that was an interesting story.
JM: Story, yes.
Jan: That’s wild!
JB: Hey?
Jan: That’s wild!
JM: So, the point is that, with that trip, that you ended up having to do three attempts to get the photographs, not once but twice and because the plane was so damaged and bringing it back on the one engine, meant that you ended up being awarded a DFC. For that particular trip.
JB: I forget exactly what I, was awarded the DFC for what trip.
JM: Well that, and everything, and all the other experiences.
JB: And afterwards the Queen, I got awarded the Victoria Cross.
JM: No, I’m not sure that you, that happened.
JB: No, it didn’t happen then.
JM: No.
JB: It happened later. The, what happened, my crew, or you know, were awarded not the Victoria Cross, the highest award that a civilian could get, although I wasn’t a civilian and I was awarded that and the Queen, she knew this, she said, I was getting some other award, and she said that I was the bravest sergeant in the Australian Army.
Jan: Air Force.
JM: Air Force, right.
JB: World War Two. And she said so I’m going to award him the Victoria Cross. So I’ve got that now. Did I mention that in the book?
JM: No. You’re confused.
Jan: You got the DFC, but you never got the VC.
JB: No, I’ve got a –
Jan: The DFC, Distinguished Flying Cross.
JB: Then I’ve got another award which was given to me by the British Army and then the Queen, she had read everything, and she gave me the Victoria.
Jan: No, dad, you didn’t get that one, you’ve got the DFC, and you’ve got a couple of other ones, but you don’t have the Victoria Cross.
JB: Not, I only got that recently, not recently, I mean you know.
JM: Anyway, after you finished your thirty five missions, um, or ops, you finished, that finished your tour and so you ended up having some leave, in Paris.
JB: Having to what -
JM: You had some leave.
JB: Ah, right.
JM: After you finished your thirty fifth op, [throat clear] pardon me, you took some leave in Paris and had a look around Paris, and went to quite a few shows there.
JB: Yeah, and I got involved with the girls, they used to put on a show, they would see these girls, and the girls used to strip off and [laughter] and I went on one of these trips and I saw the girls, and I, the couple of girls that I saw were Australians! And anyway I didn’t have sex with them or anything, no [laughter].
Jan: I’m glad! Thanks for that information dad! [Much laughter]
JB: I don’t know why I didn’t! But.
Jan: Too much information!
JM: So after your leave you got posted to Newcastle, to assist with some training up there. You became a trainer -
JB: Ah, yeah.
JM: Which didn’t impress you very much like that, no.
JB: I didn’t like that and I finished up there.
JM: Yes, you did. Well the only saving grace to that was you were near, much closer to Edinburgh and so could go and see Rita more often, or more easily I should say.
JB: I wasn’t married then.
JM: No, no, you weren’t married but you just were still just good friends and you would go and visit her and her mother.
JB: I did. I visited, yes.
JM: The two of them.
JB: Her mother, I forget now.
Jan: Nana Cullen, your favourite.
JB: Yeah. [Much laughter]
Jan: Don’t you say a word!
JB: You know more about it than I do!
JM: Anyway, let’s, you finished up there and you came back to Australia, and you were discharged in December 1945 and so you went, because you had been working with the Commonwealth Department of Interior, you went back into the Commonwealth Department of Interior. You at no stage contemplated going into private sector, you decided to always be a public servant?
JB: Ah, well I don’t know, but I thought oh well, I’ll just go back into the public, and I, the head of the, that department, he really [emphasis] liked me, and he was going, well he supported me to become the head of the whole department and then, but he got married again and his wife made him leave the government. So he left the government, so I was sort of left on my own.
JM: Yes. So you had a very long career with the Department of the Interior. You moved around: you went from Sydney to Canberra, for a very brief stint, and then back to Sydney, and in amongst all of that Rita came out and joined you and you got married and had a happy ending there after all there.
JB: You’ve got it all.
JM: And then you went ultimately back to Canberra for, in the late fifties and the early sixties and then down to Melbourne.
JB: And from Melbourne I was to become the head of, I was brought back to Canberra and I was to become head of the department, but it didn’t happen because the head of the department, he got married and his wife made him leave the Air Force so I didn’t have a supporter.
JM: Mmm. That’s right. So, but anyway you ended up back in Sydney and that’s where you retired from, in 1973, so then that gave you and Rita a chance to do a bit of travel. You went trotting around here and there did you?
JB: Yeah, went all round the world. Went to, back to Edinburgh, and to that place that you mentioned, and then on the continent, went to this place where, that the girls used to operate, you know.
JM: Into Paris, into.
JB: Over in Europe. Went there, went and saw the girls there, and it, I had a most interesting time.
JM: And it meant that you’ve ended up with a pretty full life one way and another.
JB: Oh, absolutely. Most interesting life, and I never really expected to survive the war, never [emphasis]. I was one of the few who survived, and now I’m, how old am I?
Jan: Ninety five.
JB: Ninety five now, and they reckon I will live to be a hundred and get a letter from the Queen if she’s still alive. [Chuckle]
JM: Well that would be good. And you mentioned that you did stay in touch with some of your crew members, after the war.
JB: Oh well they, my own crew, they’re dead, but one of them had two sons.
JM: Sons, yes. Were all of them - there were no other Australians, they were all English, Scottish chaps that were on your crew?
JB: Oh, they were all English, all English.
JM: Yes, yes.
JB: Although this chap that got wounded, he was an Australian. What happened was, we didn’t drop bombs or anything.
JM: No, that’s right.
JB: We used to just photograph. Then they decided that we would drop bombs, and I said ‘oh, I’m not going to drop any bombs, I‘ve nearly finished my tour and I’ll just do the normal thing’ and that is exactly what happened. I didn’t drop any bombs, but they did. I should [emphasis] have, because, oh, I could have caused havoc, but I went to that church that you’re talking about, and went through that and my operations were most interesting, but most dangerous.
JM: Most dangerous, that’s right, exactly. And the sons of that crew member, are they still in touch with you? Yes?
JB: Yes, yes. Every year I get a card - I think that might be one there. I get a card from them and I send them a card: the two sons. And one of them, his wife, I used to communicate with her, and when I went back in England, used to take her around, but she’s passed away.
JM: Right. Well, that’s certainly been -
JB: That’s about the end.
JM: Yes, it is about the end. It’s been a very, very full life and a very significant number of events occurred for you during your, particularly your war service, it was a very tough time.
JB: Well the war service was very difficult, and very dangerous.
JM: Very dangerous, that’s right.
JB: Very dangerous. I think, I think I was the only survivor of, of that area and it was most interesting, but you know, very dangerous, and I, one of my last trips, I flew out and I was, used to fly low [machine noise] if the weather was good, and I got fired on and I found the headquarters and said, told them that I’d got fired on, on the way out, and I said and ‘what I’m going to tell you is, that is where the bombs are.’ That’s, they had bombed the place and they hadn’t hit the target, and I said ‘that [emphasis] is where the target is.’ And so the next day when I’m flying, they had blown the place up, they’d hit the target and I was told and I was given a photograph. They had taken a photograph during the day, and it had been devastated and so that was most interesting. I got credit for that. Then, but, I came back from that, from the training flight and they.
Jan: It’s noisy.
JM: It's terrible!
JB: I got [indecipherable] injured on the training flight and I thought oh, I don’t think, I lost control of the ailerons, and I thought I don’t know that I can fly this plane home. So anyway, ah well, I’ll try, and I did and I landed at a terrific speed and you know, I survived and straight from that flight I was put on a special flight with the C, Commanding Officer and we went up in this plane and it was one of the jets that had just come out and he hadn’t flown that one before and he said ‘you’re the best pilot I’ve got’, nobody had ever told me that before, ha! And he said ‘so I’m taking you on this trip’ and he said ‘And I’ve never flown this plane before’ , it was one of the jets that had just come out, with the jet engines, so we come down in that and he said on the way down, he said, ‘now you’re my co-pilot, I’ve never landed this plane before but I want you right alongside!’ [Laugh] So I, jeez, what am I doing with this bloke? He’s never flown this plane before, he’s now going to land it and he’s never landed it and he says to me if something happens to me, you land it! [Laugh] I had a most interesting life.
JM: Mmm. That’s right.
JB: Anyway, he landed it all right.
JM: Well, he must have because you’re here to tell the tale today, so that’s all good.
JB: I know, I am!
Jan: He still is! You still have got an interesting life. [Laugh]
JM: Anyway, well I thank you very much for spending some time with me and sharing your stories, and I do appreciate it very much. So I thank you Jack, indeed.
JB: Oh no. That’s no problem. You’ve got one of those books have you? At home?
JM: No, I don’t have it at the moment, but we can sort that out shortly.
JB: I’ll give you one.
JM: Okay. Thank you very much, Jack, we’ll finish up there, thank you.
JB: Can you get one?
Jan: Yep.
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ABrownJM170405
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Interview with John "Jack" Brown
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
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eng
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01:00:12 audio recording
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Jean Macartney
Date
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2017-04-05
Description
An account of the resource
Jack Brown was born and spent his early life in Australia, leaving school at fourteen doing odd jobs before joining the civil service and then the RAF. He talks about his initial training before travelling to England and joining 69 Squadron. Jack describes carrying out operations taking photographs in difficult circumstances and being awarded the DFC, as well as more relaxing times on leave. After the war Jack returned to Australia but did return to Europe as a tourist after his retirement.
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
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Australia
Belgium
France
Great Britain
England--Gloucestershire
England--Oxfordshire
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Anne-Marie Watson
Carolyn Emery
aircrew
bombing
Distinguished Flying Cross
Operational Training Unit
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
searchlight
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1153/11711/AThomasJH180122.1.mp3
43e5b7f773f7c286c6aad8364097a955
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Title
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Thomas, John Henry
J H Thomas
Description
An account of the resource
Seven items. Collection concerns John Henry Thomas (b. 1923, 424515 Royal Australian Air Force). He flew operations as a pilot with 102 Squadron. Collection contains an oral history interview, memoirs of his service and other events and a painting.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by John Thomas and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2018-01-22
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Thomas, JH
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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JH: Good morning, this is John Horsburgh and today I’m interviewing John Thomas. John was a pilot with 102 Squadron, Ceylon Squadron, flying Halifax heavy bombers 1944 1945. So this is one of the interviews for the, being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre in Lincoln, in UK, which is being opened this year, incidentally, and it’s part of the oral history project. We are at Foster in New South Wales, at John’s home. [Tone] Good morning John, thank you for being available for the interview.
JT: That’s fine.
JH: And perhaps we can start, as we always do in these, when you were born, your birthdate and where, and something about your childhood, your parents and schooling, and then we’ll talk about when you came to join up. So when were you born?
JT: 14th September, 1923, at Waverley, in Sydney.
JH: And so your parents, I gather your, your father came out from England originally.
JT: Yes, that’s right, in 1910, as a twenty one year old.
JH: Did he, did he see any service in the first world war?
JT: No, no, but his father had served in the Royal Navy and his grandfather had served in the British Army.
JH: So you were born in Waverley and were you brought up there?
JT: No, we lived in Woollahra, initially, until I was nine years old and then we moved to Bondi. And lived in Bondi until I was fifteen and then moved to North Bondi, into a larger house and I went to school initially at Woollahra to the Holy Cross Convent primary school,then at St. Anne’s Bondi Beach primary school, and then to St. Charles Waverley, Christian Brothers Primary School and then went to St Mary’s College in the city for high school.
JH: So a real Sydney-sider.
JT: Yes.
JH: And so when you left school what did you do?
JT: I was apprenticed as a cabinet maker to a firm called Ricketson Thorpe. At this stage, it was the start of 1940 and I left school in fourth year. And somebody had decided I should get some experience, they possibly foresaw that I’d be going into the services and instead of doing the final year at school they put me in amongst men to get some real experience. Unfortunately, when it came to joining up, enlisting, Ricketson Thorpe had become a reserved industry because they were making parts for aircraft. However, the foreman, who was a World War One Digger, said ‘Ignore that, if you want to go, go and enlist’. Which I did. But this brought me in to conflict with the commissioner for manpower, a Mr Bella, Bellmore, B e l l e m o r e, but because he was fat everyone referred to him as Mr Bellymore! [Laugh] He, he must have taken an instant dislike to me, I’m joking, he realised no doubt that an apprentice position was not being filled, so he was looking for an apprentice who would be full time there and of all places he sent me to was the taxation department where I got shuffled from branch to branch. But then the Army called me up, which they shouldn’t have done ‘cause I was on the air force reserve and I finished up in Ciara, and well the showground to start with Ciara, and then Albury. I missed two air force call up because of a cranky Army major who reckoned I was in the Army for keeps. But eventually a recruiting flight lieutenant came round and he had me on the train to Sydney the following morning.
JH: What was it that, early on, that you decided to sign up for the air force?
JT: The, I thought initially, the in time, no doubt, I’d be conscripted and I, it was going to be my choice not theirs and the best way that I could do the most was to, if I was fit enough, to join aircrew. It turned out I was fit enough, and that was the reason: it was I felt I could do the most there.
JH: So your training started at Bradfield Park I believe.
JT: Number two initial training unit. Three months there, or twelve weeks actually. And then in February, in January, sorry, in December, early December went to Narrandera, eight weeks at Narrandera on the BFTS on Tiger Moths, seventy hours flying time, and in early February went to Point Cook which was an eighteen week course, finishing in, on the, received my wings on 25th of June 1943, went on embarkation leave, went to, then went to Brisbane by train, embarked on the, an American transport ship the Nordern, eleven thousand ton ship, which made a eighteen day non-stop trip to San Francisco. Disembarked there, and went to Angel Island, an American Army base in San Francisco Bay, four days there, with trips into San Francisco, then went up to Oakland, got on the train and went across America, and the transport was far superior to anything in Australia. Got to New York, went aboard the Aquitania, two days later it sailed for Greenock, a five and a half day trip, solo, with four thousand aircrew and I think it was seven thousand, seven thousand eight hundred American troops on board. Two meals a day, rather cramped, but quite an experience. Landed in Greenock, overnight trip to Brighton. We were, went on leave, disembarkation leave, went over to Wales for seven days, came back and another chap and I by the name of Ken Jagger, who incidentally I had gone to primary school at Waverley with, we were sent to Hullavington, the Central Flying School, for testing, this was testing the standard of training throughout the Empire Air Scheme. So we flew there with squadron leaders and wing commanders. And that station had ninety six types of aircraft on it and we went, crawled over every one of them! Went back to Brighton and from there was posted to Church Lawford in, what county was that? I can’t remember the name of the country, anyway it was near Rugby, and did three months there, including a BAT course, where instead of flying under the hood flew normally because it was in fog and rain all the time, perfect conditions, did twenty hours on the BAT course, then was sent to a holding depot, drome course at Snettersfield, which we spent three weeks there, couldn’t fly because the weather kept getting, cancelling flying. From there went to Acast, went to Moreton in the Marsh and did a nine week course, Operational Training Unit on Wellingtons and it was there my instructor, Flying Officer Duncan Dobbie, known as Drunken Duncan, on one occasion we went over to the satellite to pick up an aircraft, arriving back at Moreton, on a wet, windless day, on the shortest runway, pointing towards the six hundred foot hill, says do a flapless landing. I objected, but under instruction, I took the order, under protest, did the flapless, flapless landing, and we aquaplaned all the way down the runway, ran into a ploughed field, furrows at right angles, aircraft stood on its nose, my harness was perished, safety harness was snapped, I was flung into, headfirst into the windscreen. Didn’t know it at the time, but suffered total spinal compression, for which later I became a TPI.
JH: Jack, what type of aircraft was that?
JT: That was a Wellington.
JH: The Wellington. Yes.
JT: I was taken up to the hospital, the young doctor dressed, put a field dressing on the cut on my hand, and gave me some headache tablets.
JH: A TPI for those who don’t know what a TPI -
JT: Totally and Permanently Incapacitated, the, which I got in, I received that in 1989. It took them all that time to find out what the problem was, with my spinal problem. So from Moreton in the Marsh we went to an aerodrome in Yorkshire, called Acaster Melbis which was a -
JH: Had you crewed up at this stage?
JT: Yes, we crewed up at Moreton in Marsh.
JH: Okay. Tell me a little about how that happened, and how you all came together and a bit about your crew.
JT: Well, the, you’re just all put in a room of all the different categories and it’s up to you to sort yourself out.
JH: Yeah. And you had some mates there already?
JT: No.
JH: Or you didn’t know these people, other pilots.
JT: I only knew other pilots.
JH: Other pilots. You didn’t know -
JT: No. I didn’t know any of the other people. Ross was the first one, Ross Pearson was the first one. I thought he looks a likely looking lad. And then the, flight, we picked up our bomb aimer who’d been older than us, twenty eight year old, Jack White, had done his bomb aiming, he was a scrubbed pilot, he had done the bomb aiming course in Canada and had been an instructor there on the bomb aiming for some seven months, so we thought we had an experienced bomb aimer, which he was. Then we, sorry, I’m wrong there. The first bomb aimer we picked up was a Polish, and we picked him up, then we picked up the rear gunner, then the navigator, then the mid upper gunner. But there was no sort of order to it, you sort of, you were grabbing people in case there, no one else was left. We only did a couple of flights when the Polish bomb aimer decided that he wasn’t, didn’t want to stay with a non-Polish crew, he wanted to go to a Polish squadron. He went and saw the Chief Ground Instructor who bowed to his wishes, and we stood around then for the next month, waiting for the next intake.
JH: Yes.
JT: And that’s when Jack White came along and we grabbed, as soon as we saw him we grabbed him straight away. So we did our training there in Moreton in the Marsh, went on to Acaster Melbis which was a ground training establishment there run by the Kings Royal Rifle Corps and the Grenadier Guards. And we had simulated parachute training, unarmed combat, and all sort of things went on there. And it was there that we did the, a test, a night flying, a night eyesight test, which was a four day thing where you wore these extra dark glasses all the time. I’m just going to get [paper shuffling].
JH: Just pausing for a short break here. Back again.
JT: Yes. We’re back at this point where we’re doing this night eyesight testing for night vision. It’s a four day course, you wear these extra dark glasses, where you can only see a metre and a half in front of you at the most, and you go through all these exercises, training exercises and tests, but also a physical test which is carried out in the gym, and you play a form of hockey, but instead of a puck you’ve got a rope figure eight. I believe its an Irish game, but in the RAF they called it shinty for obvious reasons. Hacked on the shins! People used to come from far and wide on the station to watch these matches ‘cause they were so comical. Because of your lack of vision, often you lost contact with where the figure eight was and you had a couple of blokes hacking away and then nothing there! It was comic to watch. People would hit go to follow it and they’d be running in the wrong direction! It was entertainment and but quite unexpected. However this was a very effective programme because the improvement in night vision could be anything up to four hundred per cent. Quite remarkable.
JH: Yeah. My dad told me once they used to eat carrots. They used to think eating carrots all the time would improve night vision. Did you do that?
JT: Yes, and the reason given later on was that the Ministry of Agriculture Production because they were growing such huge quantities of carrots in England, in Britain, they were encouraging people to eat them and so they put out this story that it was good for the night vision. However, in recent years research by food scientists has revealed that it does [emphasis] help night vision! Haha! Yes. So that was Acaster Melbis. From there we went to Riccall, 16 58 Heavy Conversion Unit.
JH: And by, by now you were becoming a crew, getting to know each other.
JT: This is where we picked up the flight engineer.
JH: The flight engineer, yes.
JT: And I had as my flying instructor there, Squadron, my rear gunner was John Williamson, and my English flying instructor at Riccall was Squadron Leader John Williamson, and one of the finest gentlemen I’ve ever met in my life. Wonderful man; wonderful instructor. And I had never liked the Wellington, I considered it, because of its geodic construction, because it wallowed and mushed a bit in the air. It was a pleasure to get on, back to an aircraft that was directing its controls. I took the Halifax like a duck to water and it, it was a very pleasant time there at Riccall, except for something we witnessed, an episode there that was quite frightening. We were marching back to lunch one day and, this was a number of aircrews, we, marching along, and in comes a Mosquito, making an emergency landing, and his problem, it was a night flying Mosquito, with Polish pilot and navigator, they’d been up for a test flight, the undercarriage had failed to come down properly, one leg had come down and locked, the other leg had come down half way, couldn’t, and neither could be retracted. So after some violent aerobatics to try and shake it down, it was decided he’d make a landing, and he came in, fire wagons and ambulance were waiting at the ready at the end of the runway, he came in, landed hard [emphasis] which snapped the leg that was down, it went up through the wing, he went into the belly landing position, but when it went through the wing it set the fuel tank on fire. Here it is scooting along the runway, and by the time it got down to about thirty mile an hour, they jettisoned their hood, were both out running along the starboard wing and jumped off.
JH: Still going along.
JT: And rolled on the grass safely. The aircraft burnt out, and the following, when the following day, they pushed the engines to the side, and the following day there were these two little molten masses that had been the merlin engines and they filled a hole in the runway that was about six hundred by six hundred and about eight hundred mils deep caused by the fire. So that was quite a thing to watch, but while it was scooting along the runway, it also, the fire had set the ammunition off and the twenty millimetre cannons and 303s were shooting straight ahead, which happened to be a railway line at right angles to the end of the runway and there was a train going past.
JH: Oh!
JT: And all the people were watching the, this display, until the guard ran along and told them there was ammunition and then the train appeared to be empty. However, nobody was hit, fortunately.
JH: That’s an amazing story.
JT: Yeah. So from Riccall, we went to Pocklington, to 102 Squadron and that’s when I converted there, in the first week, on to the mark three, which was noticeably, outperformed the twos that I’d trained on at Riccall, and from there we started our operations.
JH: So your first, I’m sure you’ll never forget your first operations.
JT: My first operation was unsuccessful. The first operation was a flying bomb site in France and -
JH: Poisson.
JT: It was a night trip, it was, the only night that I can remember the sky being totally black, because there was a layer of cloud at about four thousand feet, we were flying south at two thousand feet and shortly after take off, the Gee packed up. So when we got down to where the point where the point was where we turn eastwards towards the French coast and the bomb site, we were well west of where we should have been, in fact I think we may have been over London as we were lucky we weren’t fired upon. So when we turned east, suddenly the target area was all lit up and it was so far away, the raid was all over, we were still headed towards it, so all we could do was head back to base, which we did. And when we got back to base, the, er I, on the way back we asked Darky for guidance, and Darky guided us to base, but unfortunately being a first time operation pilot I was very green, I never thought to ask the controller should I go and drop the bombs out in the safety zone, and he never suggested it, he also was a beginner. So we landed with our full bomb load. Safely. Fortunately. But I got a bit of a bollocking from the Wing Commander. This was before Wing Commander Wilson had arrived. This was the earlier Wing Commander whose name I can’t remember.
JH: Wow! And I suppose if you return early you, you get an extra grilling at the debriefing to show why you, you turned back. Is that correct?
JT: Yeah, well we turned back, as I explained to them, we couldn’t find the target, and when we sighted the target it was all over, was too late to go there. We couldn’t find it anyway, by that time.
JH: So the next raid you did, the next raids I believe were daylight raids.
JT: Yes, day light raids.
JH: Yes. What was the target on those?
JT: Those were, if I remember correctly were -
JH: In Paris.
JT: The next one, that’s right, no, the second one was a bomb site, flying bomb site, and the third one was, Paris, the railway yards in Villiers, and that was a daylight.
JH: So what was, this is in 84, what was the morale like on the station? D-Day had happened, things were, the tide was turning.
JT: Well we were at Riccall. Ah, well this is interesting. We were at Riccall when D-Day occurred. We were in the hut getting ready to go to breakfast. And a chap, one Canadian had a radio, and suddenly we heard the announcer, he’s yelling and saying ‘D-Day, D-Day!’; we hear the announcement that troops had fought and landed on the coast of France. It was a vile day with south west winds and low cloud at, on the French coast, but at Riccall it was a lovely sunny day, very pleasant with a light wind blowing. Totally opposite to what was happening where the troops were. So when we got, by the time we got to the squadron yes, morale was quite good on the squadron. But we still had quite considerable losses. What, in my time on the squadron we lost thirty three aircraft. The worst being one time we were on leave, we were on our six day leave and on the Monday night the squadron lost five aircraft, on the Tuesday night the squadron lost five aircraft, and on the Wednesday night they lost three. They lost thirteen aircraft in three nights. And practically all of them were pilots, crews on their first trip.
JH: Hmm. People have told me that the crews tended to bond together quite a bit and not, not generally making friends with other crews so much.
JT: We did there.
JH: We did there, yeah, yeah. So, then, looking at the sorties looked like you were quite busy August, September, October. Perhaps you’d like to mention, you’d like to single out any particular raids there, in that period?
JT: The Duisburg raid. But before I get to Duisburg, 8th of August.
JH: Here we are, Belle Croix. Ah, yes! What about talking about the Falaise Gap.
JT: Yes. That’s it. This was the episode, the Falaise Gap. This was the British Army and the Canadian First Army were held up because the ground in between them and the town of Caen was so bomb cratered that the tanks couldn’t travel there. So it was decided we’d carry out a raid with thousand pound bombs which would level the whole area and we were carrying twelve one thousand pounders, flying at twelve thousand feet, there two hundred and thirty aircraft on the raid and we were in the first wave, and very much up towards the front of the first wave.
JH: How were the targets marked, Jack, on that?
JT: Oh, there was a sodium line of flares in front of the army which was called the bombing line which we had to be beyond and we were to be six hundred yards beyond that before any bombs were dropped. We had just released our bombs when there was a huge [emphasis] explosion in the forest the best of half a mile to the left of us. And as it turned out subsequent, there was a seven thousand pound bomb dump plus a Panzer bivouacked in the forest. The blast, the explosions of the seven thousand ton dump set fire to the forest and the Panzer was virtually destroyed and the personnel, for the most part, about two thirds apparently, and a lot of them were burnt to death. The raid was immediately cancelled because of the, the effects of this huge explosion of the bomb dump, and we thought we’d been hit by flak because we, I lost contro,l the air started to flutter down but it was the blast causing it and we flew out of it and we were safe. It took me years later to figure and I think I have figured it out that the aircraft that dropped its bombs on the bomb dump, at the moment that the bomb aimer was dropping his bombs, I think he hit the slipstream of the aircraft in front of him, it tilted the aircraft to about a forty five degree angle which skewed the bombs into the forest. And that’s my reading, understanding and reading of it anyway.
JH: Hmm. What was the, the outcome on the ground? Were they, they made rapid progress I presume.
JT: No, they, the raid was cancelled, see.
JH: Yes.
JT: No, what happened was, it was replanned for another day.
JH: Yeah. They still couldn’t get through.
JT: Still couldn’t get through.
JH: The bad ground.
JT: So the, another raid was planned on which Halifaxes and Lancs went in again, but we weren’t on it, and they cleared the ground and the troops were able to go through and capture Caen.
JH: Hmm. It’s an amazing story. What about, you were telling me about a near miss. Was that on one of these raids?
JT: No, Duisburg is the next one.
JH: Yes, let’s talk about that. Yeah.
JT: Duisburg, it was a, yes, October, 14th of October ‘44. Was a lovely sunny day, we were due on target at 10am. This was a massive [emphasis] raid, it was the ten thousand ton raid on Duisburg. Bomber Command in the morning at 10am, USAAF at around midday or a little later, and then Bomber Command back at eleven o’clock that night. We were on the 10am one and about twenty minutes before, we were on the approach to Duisburg, about twenty minutes before the target, looked across to, down to the right and here we could see five V2s on a hardstanding and just one of them, one of them took off but, and it headed towards England. Then a little later they fired a second one which took on a distorted path and flew away as though it was headed towards Sweden. Then the third one fired, and it went towards, right back out of control and headed toward Russia, the eastern front. Then the fourth one, by this time we were up level with them, the fourth one took off, rose about three hundred feet in the air, fell back and blew the whole place to pieces.
JH: My goodness.
JT: We applauded.
JH: My goodness. Yeah. Completely unexpected that incident, yeah. Hmm. Yes. Well, that, that’s an interesting one.
JT: Yes.
JH: You were telling me also, before we were chatting, um, a Halifax from 35 Squadron came up.
JT: That was on Kiel, not me. Back there on Kiel.
JH: Ah. You got a good tip on night flying.
JT: On night flying. How to avoid the night fighters.
JH: Perhaps you’d like to tell me a bit.
JT: Yes, I’ll go back to that one, that date there, which was the Kiel raid. There, there it, yes.
JH: Kiel, yes, August 1944.
JT: Yes. The Kiel raid was a night raid. It was a strange night, it was misty, but visibility was about half a mile, I think it, maybe there was moonlight, and it could have been moonlight. Anyway, we were flying through this, straight and level, along this there not an aircraft in sight anywhere, none of ours, couldn’t see any other bombers, then the rear gunner reported an aircraft behind us and coming up astern. He wasn’t sure what it was until it got a bit closer and then he said oh it’s another Halifax. This Halifax came up and overtook us and it was weaving all the time, weaving, weaving and undulating in flight, and I realised what it was, it was a Pathfinder flying up through the main force and he gave, I took the tip: do not [emphasis] ever fly straight and level because you’re a sitting duck target. Keep moving, skid, undulate up and do everything unexpected and that way you were a difficult target. Which I proceeded to do on the rest of my tour. I think that has a lot to do with me being here today.
JH: It’s a good story Jack. So, tell me a little about life on the base by then, Pocklington.
JT: Oh, Pocklington. A wonderful base. A very good, good mix of, very [emphasis] mixed crowd. The most mixed crowd of any outfit I’ve ever been with. I think I’ve a note of it here in one of. Now where is it. Where is it, I can’t find it. Anyway, I’ll do it from memory.
JH: Yes, that’s fine. Oh dear! The wind!
JT: The wind. I hope this, the wind isn’t interfering with your sound.
JH: I think it’ll be okay.
JT: Anyway, there were English, when I say English, they were Scot, there were Welsh, there were Irish, there were Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, one American, one from Trinidad, who, a black man who was a dentist: a navigator, South Africans, one Rhodesian. One Rhodesian, can’t think of any others.
JH: I think you’ve covered – quite a few countries!
JT: That’s an amazing mix and they got on very, very well, the silly jokes: the Rhodesian was Vernon Fitt, Flying Officer Fitt so they all asked him if his sister was Miss Fitt [laughter]. The Canadians called us the bike troops, we called them the redskins, we all called the New Zealanders the mud islanders, the and the showers was called the Commonwealth Club and, because no Englishmen went there, [laugh] we’re a bit derogatory and of course we called the Englishmen pongos in those days. But everybody did it in good spirits.
JH: Good spirit.
JT: And it was all a big laugh. And we had some extraordinary characters, there was Warrant Officer Dixon was a Canadian bomb aimer, a man of great wit and charm, and when he went up for his commission the Group Captain said to him, ‘I see you’ve done four years of university but you’ve only passed two years of arts. And I see on the record that your father is a doctor and your four brothers and a sister are doctors. How do you explain your situation?’ He said, ‘Sir, I am the white sheep of the family!’ It didn’t stop him getting his commission. [Laughter] And another episode, this was our first day, the first morning we woke up on the squadron and it gives you an idea of the humour and wit that was all the time there. The tannoy would go, the tannoy would go and play the bugle. Chief Engineering Officer, he was a world war one man, and one of his duties was, he was the officer in charge against black marketeering within the RAF, and associated, tradesmen associated with this. So, whenever he found any evidence of it, the black market items were confiscated. In some cases these were chicken, which we dined on in the officers mess. [laughter]
JH: Yeah, of course!
JT: So, he was a very useful man, this Wing Commander Hill.
JH: I’m sure he was.
JT: And most likeable with it. The Group Captain was a real character too, and I used to look at this old, old elderly man who would listen to our, come and sit down and listen to our debriefings, and as a twenty year old, of course I thought this, what I figured to be a fifty six year old man or thereabouts, you know, this is an old fuddy duddy, no doubt he was world war one. But I found out later that this Group Captain used to get in his car with a flying suit on, and a parachute, and drive out to the runway where the aircraft were taxying out towards take off point, and Ron Horton got signalled to a stop, and the Group Captain climbed aboard, and sat behind, beside him the whole trip, never said a word, thanked him when they got back and got out, and got in his car.
JH: Thanks for the lift!
JT: Shortly after the aircraft turned off the runway and went back so that he was in the debriefing room when the crews came in.
JH: How about that.
JT: What a character!
JH: Yes. And very popular by the sound of it. Yeah.
JT: Oh, and the, we were a base so we had a Air Commodore. Our Air Commodore was Air Commodore Gus Walker, later Air Vice Marshal Sir [emphasis] Gus Walker. He, he was an Air Commodore at twenty seven years of age, the reason being he was a Group Captain at twenty four and CO of a Lancaster squadron airfield, and the spare aircraft one night, the, the incendiaries dropped out of the aircraft and were burning on the ground, under the cookie. And he jumped in his car and raced towards it, got out and was running, his idea is he’s going to run and start up the engine and taxi it clear, but when he was a certain distance from the aircraft the cookie went off and it blew his arm off, at the elbow. Lucky it didn’t kill him.
JH: Could have been worse, yeah.
JT: Yes. But when he, when they came to, he was such a cool customer, when the ambulance arrived he said, ‘Find that arm, it’s got a perfectly good glove on it.’ That’s the sort of man he was. He was a most interesting character, and again, one of nature’s gentleman.
JH: Yes. So that, you were telling me before about a very near miss. Which raid was that on? Was that your first tour or the second tour?
JT: No, that was, I was just one tour. This was Hannover,
JH: Yes.
JT: If you turn up Hannover.
JH: Let me have a look here.
JT: It’s near the end.
JH: Okay, just looking through the list here. Here’s Hannover, in January, a night raid, near collision. 5th of January ‘45.
JT: 5th of January, ’45. Yes. It was a clear night, no moon, starlit. We were travelling on our way in to Hannover, and I think it was about ten minutes or so before the target, suddenly out of the corner of my right eye I caught sight of a fighter, of a, and it was an FW190 went straight across in front of us, travelling slightly [emphasis] down, and in that instant you, you’re not sure whether you saw it or not, but you know you did, but it’s happened so fast, it’s, everything is in recollection. And I though, goodness me, that was an FW190, painted black, shiny black, his canopy was open and I could see the pilot, I could see his oxygen mask, I could see his shiny black leather jacket, I could see the crease of the shoulder. And then I thought, how close was that, how far, that was a cricket pitch, no more. So when I, later on, on the ground I started putting it all together and figured it out there was point two of a second, and worked out the closing speed was roughly three hundred and eighty mile an hour. He didn’t see us, and when I, at debriefing when I went to the, said to the, told the story to the debriefing officer and said he was flying with his canopy open, ‘That’s impossible,’ he said, ‘no one could fly it’s too cold because it was minus forty five degrees.’ However, the following day in the mess, he came up to me at lunchtime and said, ‘you were right about that FW190. I’ve been in touch with headquarters in London and that you cannot fly a 190 at night with the canopy closed because the glare from the exhaust dazzles you, dazzles on the windscreen, and you can’t see.’ I said so they fly freezing. However, I was glad he was point two of a second ahead because if we’d have collided, he’d have killed the, immediately killed the flight engineer and myself no doubt about it, and no doubt about himself, and the others would have had to find their way out.
JH: I’m assuming most of the crew blissfully unaware!
JT: Totally unaware, I was the only one who saw him.
JH: Yes, so did you go down the pub that night and explain it with the crew?
JT: I explained it to them, I didn’t explain until the following day and the, and they were quite shocked by it.
JH: Incredible. And I believe you’ve, you’ve done a painting of it.
JT: I’ve done a painting of that.
JH: From memory obviously.
JT: Yes. And one, John, John, oh he was a geologist. John, a member of 466 Squadron, you’d know him. John Mac, I can’t think of his surname.
JH: Oh well, I’m sure we’ll find out later. Yeah.
JT: Yes. Anyway, what was I going to mention about him?
JH: About the painting.
JT: Oh yes, he got me to do, to get a print, a photo print of it, which he kept for some time and then sent on to the War Memorial in Canberra.
JH: Oh fantastic!
JT: Yeah, and I’ve shown John here a copy of it and shown the original that’s hanging in the hallway.
JH: Well, I’d like to see that after the interview.
JT: I’m going to rework it so it can be viewed without having to put a torch on it.
JH: Yes. That’s excellent. Well, we’re scanning through, we’re sort of coming, coming to the end of some of the raids here, are there any, any particular ones in the second, the later part of the tour you’d like to bring to mind?
JT: There was the, the one that, the last daylight on Gelsenkirchen.
JH: Yes.
JT: That’s a night.
JH: Do you realise that was the same day, seventy three years ago. 22nd of January.
JT: Oh right, right.
JH: How about that.
JT: Yeah. Now -
JH: Seventy three years.
JT: Seventy three years ago. Turn over to the next page, the Gelsenkirchen was one of our last. Is it there? Is it not.
JH: Well it’s here, it’s written down there, but just, there’s no details.
JT: No, that’s a night raid.
JH: Night raid.
JT: No, we went to Gelsenkirchen, that was earlier.
JH: Okay, let’s look back. Just looking back here. Here we are. The 11th of September, 1944. Gelsenkirchen, daylight raid on the oil refinery. Yes.
JT: The, this was the one, that we were approaching the target, this is a target which twelve hundred yards long, by I think it was eight hundred yards wide. Very small target, very [emphasis] heavily defended: eighty eight guns, eighty eight millimetre, ack ack everywhere. As we are approaching the target, we, we came up, and turned on to the target, so as we’re coming up I’m looking across at the target at about forty five degrees, and the flak is enormous, it’s just like patches everywhere in the sky. And at this stage Ross Pearson looks out the window and sees it and says to the navigator sitting alongside in front of him, ‘look at that, some poor bugger’s have got to face that,’ and the navigator said to him ‘we turn on to that target in three minutes time.’ Scared the daylights out of Ross. I turned on to the target and looked at it, and I thought we’ll never get through this, this is it, where we finish. However, when we got into the target area it, I realised this was a box barrage which was not aimed at any particular aircraft, and what we were seeing was all the puffs that had been fired at the earlier aircraft and when we got through it, when we got into the zone, it wasn’t that intense, but we heaved a sigh of relief when we got out of it.
JH: Was, were there any night fighters?
JT: No, that was a daylight.
JH: Oh, this was a daylight. Yeah, yeah.
JT: And of course we had fighter escort.
JH: Yeah. Which was the raid you mentioned you had heavy fighter support? Like four hundred.
JT: That was that Falaise Gap.
JH: That was the Falaise Gap. Four hundred fighters.
JT: Yeah, two hundred, two hundred Mustangs and two hundred Spitfires.
JH: Yes.
JT: But one other one, I’ve forgotten which one it was, it could well have been either that -
JH: Have a look through.
JT: I’ll tell you which one it was. It was a daylight. Ah yes, it was probably this one: Cleve.
JH Cleve, this is 7th October 1944, daylight raid.
JT: And our escort that day was two hundred plus Mustangs, basically American. So we’re on our way into the target in this great bomber stream, and suddenly the rear gunner said, ‘fighter four o’clock low’. So I look back and I can see this fighter coming round, and he said, the rear gunner says, ‘it looks like a FW109,’ then he said, as it got a bit closer he said, ‘oh no it’s a Mustang,’ and the mid upper gunner joined in and said ‘yes it’s a Mustang.’ So, but he kept coming, and I said if he gets too close, just fire a warning burst, I said to the mid upper gunner, ‘fire a warning burst, not at him, but just fire a warning burst.’ However, when he got to a certain distance he did a, he came right up like that, and did a barrel roll and went off. [Laughter] So he was a, some light-hearted, cheeky American fighter pilot who was having his, probably his first close look at a Halifax.
JH: That is interesting. So normally, you know, when you have a huge fighter escort like that for the raid on Falaise. How would they deploy? Were they to one side?
JT: You didn’t se. No. You didn’t see much of them because most of them were up high.
JH: They’re up high. Yes.
JT: Or way out to the left, way out to the right, or ahead or behind. He was the closest we ever saw. We saw, we did see them up high, quite a number, but, you know, they were probably six or seven thousand feet at least above us.
JH: Yes.
JT: Very interesting thing comes out of that, I picked up two: the FW190 which is a much-feared fighter, met its match in a very unusual way. The Thunderbolts, and this is interesting, the RAF tend to sneer a bit at the Thunderbolt because it was so heavy, but do you know they turned out fourteen thousand Thunderbolts, Republic, and the Americans were very happy with them, for good reason. On those massive Fortress and Liberator raids over Germany, the absolute top cover were Thunderbolts because if a Mustangs or others down lower got jumped by a 190 it would be a Thunderbolt come to the rescue because it was the only aircraft that could overtake a 190 in a dive, and a 190 knew once a Thunderbolt it got on his tail in a dive it was curtains.
JH: Yes, and the higher ceiling for the Thunderbolt. So they were sitting up there.
JT: Yes. It was up high, they flew top cover all the time.
JH: That’s an interesting comment, yeah. Okay, well, any more raids to talk about? Did you engage any fighters on any of these?
JT: Ah! We, we had a, we had a couple of oh yes, yes, there was, um, two, two things: there was, one of the last raids, one of our last raids was, there were that many fighters around I never stopped weaving. I was, you could see the, see aircraft being shot down, there were so many aircraft being shot down, you weren’t seeing the actual fighters, but you were seeing aircraft being hit, and you knew that they were - and they hung with us for about oh probably twenty, twenty five minutes on the return flight from the target, before we sort of flew out of it, and there was an occasion or there was an occasion when we were, oh yes, a couple of occasions, one occasion was where there was a burst of flak near us on the right, so I moved a bit further away to the left, and then there was another burst of flak much closer [emphasis] up on the right, and as I start to move away from it – tracer. 20mm tracer came through it, and unfortunately I got into a dive to the port and went over the top of us, but obviously a ME109 or FW190 had come through that flak and fired at us, and it was the flak that attracted my attention, tracer got out of the way
JH: If you hadn’t seen the tracer you wouldn’t have seen him.
JT: We’d have possibly been hit. The other one was, that on one raid, a night raid, I was asked to take Major, Major Bathgate, an artillery expert, on the flight, ‘cause he wanted, they needed to study the flak. So we were approaching the target and the flak burst over the right, he said, ‘can you go a bit closer?’ So very reluctantly I steered over towards the flak and then a burst ahead of that, another burst ahead of it. He said, ‘go closer if you can.’ So we went up two lots of flak that we went uncomfortably [emphasis] close to. I would never have done it without him on board, but it satisfied him. ‘Oh yes, its 88 mil, right we don’t need to look at any more.’ And I heaved a sigh of relief on that occasion. The other occasion that I haven’t mentioned, I don’t know which, I can’t remember.
JH: Yes. Is it Mulheim?
JT: No, that was daylight.
JH: That’s a daylight one. Yeah.
JT: No, that was a night raid with him. It was one of the late ones. It was -
JH: Have you had - we’re just looking through, um, Dusseldorf was in November.
JT: It could have been that.
JH: Or you had Wilhelmshaven.
JT: No, it could have been Dusseldorf.
JH: Yeah.
JT: Dusseldorf yeah, it was either that, either one of those.
JH: Night fighter firing and missing.
JT: Ah, that was, that, no it was Cologne was the one with Major Bathgate.
JH: Okay. Righto. You mentioned before the Mulheim raid, the daylight raid.
JT: That was the one where the air speed indicator failed on take off.
JH: Hmm. And you continued with the operation, with the raid, you were committed with the full bomb load.
JT: Yeah, we took off, it flew, the aircraft flew off fortunately, it wasn’t the engines, it was the airspeed indicator, but we, did a slow, climb slowly as a result of that, to avoid stalling, we got to operational height and of course we had no air speed indicator, no bomb sight and no Gee: navigational aid. However, because it was daylight and the bomber stream was visible, we joined it and went to the target. But when we got to the target, in order to drop our bombs I formated on another aircraft, I think he was new, and jumpy and I though he’ll be a bit early with his bombs gone, so I said to the bomb aimer, ‘I’ll count to four and then you release,’ which we did, and we got an aiming point, so he was well short with his bombs. The other occasion I haven’t mentioned, and I think this might have been, yes I think it might have been on that, on the Magdeburg raid. Pretty certain it was.
JH: Magdeburg, here we are, in January, a night raid. Yeah.
JT: It’s the only occasion which I was ever coned by searchlights. I got away from single searchlights quite easily. but this time the blue, the blue radar searchlight picked me up and it was absolutely dazzling, [emphasis] so I went into, did a couple of corkscrews, and realised how helpless that was, no help at all, hopeless. So I went to the top of the corkscrew and then suddenly went into a, almost vertical wingtip position, and put the nose right down and went into a screaming dive to port, and we lost something like six thousand feet, and got up to about well over three hundred mile an hour on the airspeed indicator, but we shed all searchlights. And thus I realised that’s the only way to get out of it, coning, was to put it into the steepest possible dive.
JH: Pretty extreme manoeuvre.
JT: Conversation with other pilots, post, after I’d been screwing, they had had the same experience and had got out of it the same way.
JH: Well Jack, that Magdeburg, that was your last but one raid, and then you, I think you did one more operation, correct? Correct, yeah. Would you like to talk about how it all wound up, that was the end of the operations. So what, what happened after your last operation?
JT: Ah, the, oh yes, this Wing Commander Barnard from Coastal Command, and the rigid disciplinarian; one of the customs when you’re on your last raid, is you don’t have to come back in your order, you can come back as fast as you like and be there as early as, home as possible. So what happened three of us were finishing on the one night. What happened was, we all called up bang bang bang I was the third one to call up.
JH: Do you call pancake? Is that the?
JT: No, the permission to land.
JH: Permission to land, yeah.
JT: And he is in the debriefing room, but they hear, can hear the, what is going on in the Tower, re broadcast. As soon as he heard me call up, ‘That man is not flying according to regulation, put him on a charge when he lands.’ The debriefing officers had considerable trouble persuading him it was a relished custom that on your last trip you come back hell for leather. So it gives an insight into the character of the man.
JH: So, you weren’t court martialled!
JT: No. So anyway you land. We were, it was quite interesting.
JH: By the way, did you know that was your last operation by the way?
JT: Oh yes. Yes, we were operating on a point system. Three points for a non-German target, four points for a German target and that took us to I think a hundred and nineteen points. And anyway, when you land -
JH: I think they call them fly-bys now – small joke, sorry!
JT: Good joke, yes, good fly-bys. When you got to the debriefing room, immediately inside was somebody with a keg of rum and coffee, and the idea was that you had a coffee royal. And the man dishing it out was always, on 102 Squadron, was Padre Paddy, gee, I’ve forgotten his name. Anyway, this was a Roman Catholic priest, a Queenslander, who’d been in Rome when Italy came into the war, and he was interned ‘cause he was living outside the Vatican, he was interned. However, later, under Red Cross, he was repatriated to England and he was sent to see a Bishop in London and he thought, ‘oh this is my, I’ll get my trip back to Australia.’ And he arrives at this Bishop, English Bishop and the English Bishop says to him, ‘right, well now, you’re going to the RAF Pocklington as the Roman Catholic Padre.’ ‘ I thought I was going back to Australia!’ ‘Well you can think again, you’re going to Pocklington.’ [Laugh] So he was, he was a character, a very fit athletic bloke, captained our football team and he was the disher out of the coffee and the rum, very heavy on the rum.
JH: That’s good to hear. I’m sure you appreciated that!
JT: Great chap. We appreciated him no end.
JH: So, that was your last operation.
JT: So having finished, you get, there’s this a great feeling of relief. You’re left four days on the, you stay there for another four days and soak it all up.
JH: Yup
JT: Take your ground staff out and to the pub and buy them beers as a thank you.
JH: Yes.
JT: And give them, as Australians we gave them tinned fruit, and tinned cake and stuff like that, on that night as well.
JH: Yes. And you had to hand over your Halifax to another crew.
JT: Crew. Which went on to do, V Victor, which I’d taken over as a new aircraft, because somebody lost the original V Victor, another crew, and then that V Victor went on and was, at the end of the war, had done fifty trips and was pensioned off.
JH: Pensioned off, yes.
JT: So we were very happy. We had a wonderful [emphasis] ground staff. The, our flight sergeant in charge of them was a terrific bloke. He was a man, I think, you know, he was no chicken, he was thirty four or thirty five. A very experienced man.
JH: Yes. Yes.
JH: Did they ever, tell me, did they ever come up on a trip?
JT: Ah yes, not on a trip, but they used to go on test flights.
JH: Test flights. Yes.
JT: Oh yes. We were always eager to have a test flight. We were always eager to invite them on a test flight.
JH: Yes. Good insurance policy.
JT: We also took them on a, on a, when we did a test bombing, you know, you’d practice bombing. We did a couple of practice bombings on the squadron, so we took along as many as we could.
JH: Yes.
JT: I enjoyed those trips.
JH: Yes.
JT: That was one of them. The one, the one trip that ended on a sour note.
JH: Really.
JT: One bombing raid. We went on this bombing raid, ‘cause at night you’re on oxygen all the time. Anyway, we’re on oxygen [sniff] – ‘oh god that tastes awful!’ Hmm, and next thing, you’re burping and then after a while you’re passing wind! And we got back, and I said to the chappie who’s looked after the oxygen, he was a, what was he? Was the electrical fitter was he? Or, anyway, he was one of the fitters, ‘What’s wrong with that oxygen?’ So he tested it; oh,’ he said, ‘its gone sour.’ ‘Oh get that out of there!’
JH: Gone sour.
JT: Yeah, the oxygen gone sour.
JH: Really. Never heard of that.
JT: And sour oxygen is no good for the intestines, plays up with them no end. [Laughter] So that’s, as I say, that’s the one trip that ended on a sour note.
JH: Yes. Literally. So, I expect you had some leave coming.
JT: Yes. Went on, the, you go in and see the adjutant, who was another charming gentleman, a flight lieutenant Englishman who’d been in world war, decorated from world war one, Mac somebody, lovely bloke, here’s your leave pass, seven days leave, and we’ll post your log book on to you ‘cause it’s getting a green endorsement.
JH: Right.
JT: And I’ll notify when you come back. No, wait a minute, ah yes, when you come back, we notify you your posting. That’s right.
JH: Yes.
JT: So and we’ll post your log book on to you wherever you’re posted to. So I get back, I go and have the seven days leave. Get back and I’m posted back to pock, Moreton on the Marsh, which I didn’t particularly like as a station, because Group Captain Elliot, stuttering Sam, was a very unpleasant CO, disliked by everybody, ground staff, aircrew. He was a, rather unpleasant character. He, there was a seniors officers mess, was a separate building. He commandeered it, and took it over, and confiscated all the cream blankets that the officers had and that became the home of he and his paramour, he had a live in girlfriend.
JH: Oh I see.
JT: And he was a problem. For example there’s a, example quoted of an aircraftsman who’d been AWOL goes up on a charge in front of him, and he, ‘I-I-I s-sentence you to-to-to se-se-se-se,’ and the aircraftsman made the mistake: he said, ‘seven days, sir’. ‘Y-y-y-yes n-n-now its f-f-four-fourteen.’ That’s the sort of bloke he was. And I’m in my flight office in one day. There were two Moroccan pilots, they’d, they were long, warrant officers, they’d been out in the middle east and been right through that campaign, they were instructors, and their surname was Al-Azraki. So I pick up, answer the phone in the flight office: it’s Stuttering Sam. ‘W-w-will you send down w-w-warrant officers warrant officer al-alza-alza-alza, he went on, alza-alza-alza, and I was so tempted to say Raki, no I’m gone, so I waited and waited finally he got Varaki out.
JH: Yeah.
JT: Sent them down They were going for their commission interview.
JH: Yes.
JT: The, he had, the sergeant in charge of the mess was a fat creep and he was, he was his spy. He used to report back to him everything that went on in the mess.
JH: I’m sure you soon figured that out, you chaps.
JT: So they, this bloke rode a motorbike, so they used to take his motorbike and hide it! Then he, then stuttering Sam decided the mess needed repainting, which it didn’t, so he got it done. So what they did, I don’t know who did it, but they got a boot, tied it on to a long pole, dipped it in mud and put footprints right across the ceiling. [Laughter]
JH: That’s in the officers mess? Yes. Wonder if it’s still there? We could go on for hours, you know. But let’s, let’s talk about how, repatriation do you call it, isn’t it, coming back here, finishing up there, demobilisation, repatriation.
JT: Right, we, we stayed at Moreton in the Marsh till the 22nd June 45, went to Brighton holding there, transit depot and I came home on the, left, left Brighton on the 15th of September.
JH: Yes.
JT: On the, came home on the ship called the Stratheden, which had just been refurbished for passenger use again - the dining room. So the dining room was serving passenger food.
JH: I wonder if Don Browning came back on that?
JT: I don’t know. I don’t remember him being on it. Anyway the cooks were Ghanese, and they served, on their menu every day was a curry, amongst other things.
JH: Yes.
JT: I had a different curry every day,
JH: Yes.
JT: I went and had curry every day, went right through their whole list.
JH: Yes. Menu.
JT.: Whole menu of curries, before I had something else.
JH: And you still like curry?
JT: I Love curry!
JH: I bet you do!.
JT: Their curries were fantastic. The whole, the meals were absolutely terrific. Came back here, land in Sydney, Bradfield depot, Bradfield as a transit depot.
JH: Yes.
JT: Was finally discharged on the, I think it was the 9th of December 1945. And in 1946 I took the opportunity of completing my schooling. On the CRDS, did twelve months and did the Leaving Certificate, Then went to Sydney Technical College and became a Quantity Surveyor, five year course there.
JH: Oh right. Yes.
JT: They don’t call them quantity surveyors any more, they call them, they became a degree course at University of Technology at the University of New South Wales and they’re called building surveyors.
JH: Yes, yes. And so what about family? You met your wife in Sydney.
JT: Yes. The, unfortunately, I had one daughter, only had one child the first marriage, my wife, first wife died.
JH: I see. Yes.
JT: And I married Elizabeth who had three children, so we put the two families together and we were all one family, that’s how I got a son. My stepson Bruce is my son Bruce.
JH: Geologist
JT: No, no, that’s my, that was my son-in-law.
JH: Son-in-law.
JT: My daughter Kit, my own daughter Kit married Michael Bonneybrook. He was the geologist. I wish I could remember the name of that machine they were using that he few with all the time. He went all over the world, he was in the, he went to America, Canada, Peru, Brazil, China, India, various countries in Africa, all over the place, all over the world.
JH: Geology, geologist is being a paid traveller.
JT: Unfortunately, his father - incidentally who was a quantity surveyor, and actually taught quantity surveying in Queensland at the university - his father suffered from cardiomyopathy and died at about, probably seventy years of age, but Mike got it at fifty eight and died.
JH: Oh, that’s sad.
JT: Very unfortunate because he was a wonderful bloke.
JH: Yes. It sounds like you had a successful career, and now you’re up here on the coast.
JT: I was, as a quantity surveyor, I retired, they finally found something was wrong with my spine.
JH: From that compression?
JT: I retired, not, they hadn’t found the full compression. I initially I went to the repat back in 1947 I think it was, or ‘48. But I struck an unfortunate doctor there and he was not interested in pensions or treating people, he was interested only in knocking people back; that was his modus operandi. But in 1957 I found a doctor who had the sense to send me for x-rays. But he – only upper back x-rays - and they discovered I had this problem, spinal compression and so in 1957 I retired - ill health. But the doctor who discovered this, he said, ‘You’re not to sit around,’ he said. ‘Go and pick apples,’ he said, ‘what I’m saying is, do something that’s physical, you’re not sitting down, but you’re doing something, you’re moving a lot,’ he said, ‘that’ll help your condition.’
JH: Yes.
JT: So that’s how we came to, we went to Bonville and we bought this property which was running horses at the time, the previous owner, next door, one side of us was a macadamia orchard and the other side was avocados. We looked at them both and we decided avocados was the way to go. But we put avocados in on the like a slope, a hill on the back, put them in on the slope, but on the other land, we got interested in peaches and nectarines, out those in, but towards the end of our time there I took all those out, because I’d reasoned out that if you reshape the land and the hills and valleys, you could grow avocados on the flat, on the hills, which I did, put in avocados there.
JH: Yes, okay
JT: And that was successful. But at 64 I’d had enough, and by that time I’d been to another doctor who finally said we’ll have a full [emphasis] spinal x-ray and he said you’ve had total spinal x-ray and that’s when he recommended me for the full TPI. And amongst those things they send you to a to a psychiatrist. And the psychiatrist says to me, he’s a character, he said ‘Do you know why you’re here?’ I said, ‘I suppose you’re going to decide whether I’m sane or not!’ He said, ‘oh no, that’s not the reason you’re here,’ so he said, ‘tell me how your accident happened.’ I told him. And he said. And I, ‘A strange thing,’ I said, ‘that man’s name will never leave me: Flying Officer Duncan Dobbie.’ He said ‘do you know why you remember that man’s name?’ he said, ‘Because he tried to kill you: your subconscious tells you he tried to kill you that day. It was such a foolish action, that could have resulted in death. So your subconscious says: he was trying to kill that’s why you’ll never forget his name.’ Interesting wasn’t it.
JH: Isn’t that interesting.
JT: He was quite a funny man, that, it was a very funny interview.
JH: You probably made his day, Jack.
JT: Ah, he said, something or other, but he said, you’re lucky he said, ‘cause they, if they break a leg they shoot horses! [chortle] Character.
JH: One question I’ve got is since you’ve retired and so on, how, have you kept in touch or did you, keep in touch with your crew through the years?
JT: Yes, we kept in, Ross kept in touch with the navigator, the bomb aimer, Jack White, the Australian who went early, ill health, he disappeared because, in Sydney, he was, he was a bit of a wild man in a way, we lost track of him completely.
JH. Yes. Yeah.
JT: The, Derek Turner became a solicitor, he died at 68, in England, he was from Newcastle on Tyne.
JH: That’s early. Yes.
JT: He, Ross kept in touch with him and through Ross I kept, you know, left messages, but he died at 68, so that’s a long time ago.
JH: Yeah. 1990. Yeah.
JT: He was a wild one, English boy.
JH: RAF. John Hughes. Yes.
JT: We lost touch with him from the day we, the crew broke up. Nat, now Nat was thirty six years old when he joined us as a crewman. So, he was dead a long time ago.
JH: Yes. What was his background? That’s a German sounding name.
JT: He was Jewish.
JH: Ah!
JT: He was a brave man. He was a Jew, flying over Germany, if we’d got shot down, and he had a lot of trouble, he was an orthodox Jew, because, with his food.
JH: Yes. Because I know some, from what I’ve read, changed their names, on their log book. Or in their name and number.
JT: Yeah, well he, I tried to get special diet for him, and he said, ‘oh no don’t bother, don’t bother, I’ll manage,’ you know. But he’d been a police, a physical training instructor in the London police.
JH: This is Sergeant Nat Goldberg, we’re talking about. A mid upper gunner, RAF.
JT: Yeah. Now Flying Officer Davis was the Welshman, and he only flew five trips with us, so we lost him pretty early.
JH: Yes. You mentioned that.
JT: John Williamson became, he was a Melbourne boy, became a bricklayer, we kept in touch with him. Then he went into a nursing home and suddenly he wasn’t answering our phone calls or cards, Christmas cards, so he’d died.
JH: So how many are with us, at the moment, of the crew?
JT: I’m the sole survivor now.
JH: Really.
JT: Ross was the second last.
JH: Yes, I knew Ross. Yes, yes. Another thing I often ask, and we’re encouraged to ask, is you know, reflecting back, about the, your thoughts about the campaign: how effective it was, you know, the controversies, lack of campaign medal. I’d just like to get your thoughts on that, if, if you would like to?
JT: Yes. I’ve got a few thoughts on this.
JH: Some people haven’t talked about it.
JT: The, there’s a few little points there. One is the, [cough] I’ve mentioned already to you, about the engineer who designed the bomb platform of the Halifax, should have been sacked and someone else redesign it, and it should have been lengthened and that, the shape of the fuselage or the seat. Now, early, fairly early on, well 1943, they put that smooth rounded nose on the Halifax. I often wondered why they didn’t cut out the gun turret and do the same to the Lanc, ‘cause it would have saved them all that weight of the turret, the guns, and ammunition and given the bomb aimer a better nose to the front of the aircraft and it would have possibly added slightly to its speed. Interesting, you know, interesting little one.
JH: They fell short didn’t they, to make things safer and more efficient and better aircraft, from what you say.
JT: Now, the other one that I really [emphasis] object to, when you look at it, in the American Air Force, the Liberator and the Fortress, they only had nine cylinder engines, which turned out twelve hundred horse power each. They were turbo-charged. They, the, they performed on that horse power way [emphasis] above by comparison with our engines, because of the turbo-charging. Now there was a mark four Halifax which was going to be with turbo charged engines, but it was abandoned. Now if the Halifax had turbo-charging as well as its later on fuel injection, the performance of those engines in the aircraft would have been considerably enhanced. Why? Question why. Now these things happen, or don’t happen. I have the suspicion there were some real fuddy-duddys in Handley Page and they should have got rid of them. And I’ll be a real heretic here: I’d have brought someone in, a couple of aircraft designers from Douglas, because of the Douglas Boston, the shape from very early in the war. They could have helped out no end. But, to get them to work as a team probably was, would have been a problem. The other one, this is now criticism Bomber Command planning, and this goes right back to, up to Bomber Harris territory here. You’re going into a target, there’s heavy flak around the target. Why didn’t they bomb the flak? [emphasis] Why weren’t certain aircraft sent in to bomb the flak, also bomb the searchlights. And I feel we didn’t bomb German airfields enough. These sort of things.
JH: Yes. Well, that’s a very interesting question, and I have thought about that, about the flak, why wasn’t that a target in itself? Was it because that if they bomb the flak, then the fighters know you know what the target is right away?
JT: But you’re already at the target, you know, they already know where, they’ve already worked that out because they’ve got the fighters there and they are anyway, once you’re in the flak range.
JH: TYes. hat is an interesting question you raise.
JT: There’s another point there, as I found out, one of the on a course with at Point Cook, Malandra, Point Cook, Jeff Rees, Jeff got to England and he had exceptional sight, he and a fellow called Ross Roberts, both had exceptional eyesight. They had these violet blue eyes, and they both had, the, twenty four was the number, maximum number on the eyesight, night vision test, these blokes rattled off the twenty four first go. What happened to them, while we were at Brighton, they were sent up to a room, and an Australian Squadron leader interviewed them, decorated bloke, said how would you like to fly Mosquitos, night fighters, and they didn’t go to where we went, they went straight through on Airspeed Oxfords, into Blenheims, into something else and into the Mosquito night fighters. He’s told me subsequently that they used to fly in, used to go out and strafe the German airfields as the fighters were starting to take off, and then after they strafed the airfields they would go up and join in the bomber stream, looking for German night fighters. So they did that much, but I think they could have done more in the strafing of night fighter airfields. And certainly, the bombing of the, with the searchlights and the flak, rocket firing Mosquitos would have been the answer. More accurate.
JH: Yeah. You raise a good question there, maybe that’s a line of research to find out just why that didn’t happen. What about the, your reflections on the impact of bomber command in the war, you know, the civilian casualties, this kind of thing?
JT: Well, the, I think it became apparent with the bombing of London, that it was total war. Civilians were not going to be exempt. So, if English, if United Kingdom civilians weren’t exempt, Germans weren’t exempt. It’s as simple as that. The fact that we were killing Germans, they were going to oppress us anyway, I had no second thoughts on that, and definitely when it comes to Dresden, I got no second thoughts on that because I have what I consider to be some inside information there, and if the facts, if they are facts, certain things explain it. Now, a chappie I know was deputy, his aircraft was deputy master bomber on Dresden. They were sent to Dresden because it was a major rail centre [cough] and Joe Stalin had asked Churchill to bomb Dresden, the railway yards, because it was the place where tanks were being, going through to the eastern front. Now not far from Dresden was a prisoner of war camp. There were two Australians in the prisoner of war camp there. They were at a Bomber Command reunion, and they said, for three weeks prior to the bombing, tanks were going through on flattops, endless stream to the eastern front. Now, okay they bombed Dresden, so that part’s okay. Now what caused the firestorm, and if this information is correct, it’s self explanatory, we used to use an incendiary bombing cannister, which was about that long, like that, and weighed about a pound and a quarter, and I think there was something like a hundred and sixty pounds weight in the cannister. On Dresden I was told, I don’t know whether it’s right or not, for the first time they were using a new incendiary, a thirty five pound bomb, that went in the, there were two, there were, in the cannister, there were three, and three are six and three deep, I think it was. No: that’s right. Eighteen. Eighteen times thirty five, yeah, that’s it. Now what happened: these created a much more intense firestorm than the little ones, and instead of just burning what they aimed at it just went right through it.
JH: Yes.
JT: Now that’s an explanation. Now all these people running around: ‘They should never have bombed Dresden. It was a sacred city of pottery and antiques’. Blah, blah, blah. Those people don’t know what they, they were never there. They were never, you know, anyone who was never on a bombing raid at night, shouldn’t talk, about the bombing campaign, criticise it. Because, you’ve gotta experience it to know what it was about. I think, overall it was very effective and two instances verify it. What was his name? The German?
JH: Spiers?
JT: Spiers? Told Hitler, and Goebbels, having viewed the damage, at Cologne I think it was, or in the Ruhr, he told them straight: we can’t survive this, we can’t win the war, they’re gonna wipe us out. Now I take that of Spier before, over anyone speaking English! The second one was - which I think is a classic - we all know the V!, we all know the V2, how many people know the V3? Do you know the V3?
JH: No. No I don’t.
JT: Right. I’ll tell you the story of the V3. There’s a town called Limoges, France. PRU aircraft picked up enormous [emphasis] activity taking place. A concrete structure was being built. This huge [emphasis] enormous thing, like that, mushroom shape. And it was obviously going to be something big, enormous. And then they started: the base went in and then they started putting in these barrels, gun barrels, enormous, hundred foot long gun barrels. All set in concrete. At different, all at varying angles, very slightly different angles, very slightly different angle that way, varying slightly in elevation, lateral elevation, And at that stage, British and American intelligence had a big meeting about it, and a lot of them were: ‘lets bomb it now!’ Someone very wisely said, ‘no, let’s wait until they’ve finished the last pour, the last pour, still all wet, then we’ll hit it.’ So, in, I think it was probably November. This is V3. What it was, there were all these hundred foot long gun barrels, all pointing at London, all slightly different angles and lateral and elevation so would have wiped out the whole of London. Number one fires, number two fires, number three -
JH: Like a salvo.
JT: One after the other. By the time they get back to number one it’s cooled, they can fire again. So it’s endless barrage. Would have destroyed London. This is V3. So, came the night, or day. I don’t know whether it was day or night. But this was the, I think it’s the same squadron that bombed the Tirpitz, 617.
JH: Yes.
JT: Given the job of bombing Limoges, with twelve thousand pounders. So, in they go, you can imagine the manpower. All these, also they said, we won’t destroy the workers because they’re all forced labour, foreigners, you know, they’re not German. But you imagine the number of barrows, trucks, the amount of concrete mixing mixers, to pour all that concrete, because it’s feet deep. So it’s finished, the last pour, in goes the Lancs with the twelve thousand pounders and I don’t know, I can’t remember if it’s six or eight went into it, just blew it to blazes, distorted it: the Germans abandoned it, couldn’t do anything with it.
JH: Wow, what an impact that had!
JT: That’s V3.
JH: Yeah, yeah.
JT: All that labour, all that concrete, all those highly prized gun barrels that were built at Krupps. All wiped out. Whoever that man was that, let’s wait till the end, could have been Eisenhower.
JH: End of the argument.
JT: It could have been Eisenhower. ‘Cause he was the one who, post war, when they were sending those balloons over Europe, over Russia, at forty thousand feet, and they came to him and said we’ve got balloons that’ll go at eighty thousand feet. No, we won’t use them, because they’ll develop the counter. Let’s, let them use all their efforts on our forty thousand. And not until we are totally exhausted, do we use the eighties.
JH: That’s an amazing story.
JT: So I reckon it could have been him at Limoges: we wait until then. Because his two most famous stories that sum up Eisenhower. Churchill, ‘Ike, I wish you would not say “schedule” I wish you would say “shedule.”’ ‘I will, when you say, tell me what, “shule, shule” you went to!’ And, and the other one, the big reception in London, some English woman said to, ‘General Eisenhower did you ever meet General MacArthur?’ Of course MacArthur was being the flavour of the month. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘I did dramatics under him for four years in the Philippines! I studied dramatics under him for four years in the Philippines!’ [much laughter]
JH: Well, Jack just to finish off, what about a comment on the campaign medal, the lack of campaign medal for Bomber Command?
JT: Oh, I think that was terrible and I can’t understand it, because you know, it, I think it’s because of Dresden. And unlike what he was in every other respect because he was as tough as old boots, Winnie lost his marbles on that one, he took fright at Dresden because in his victory speech he mentioned the boys of fighter command, he never mentioned bomber command.
JH: Correct. Yes.
JT: But I’ll finish with a top note with Winnie. This is a delight. He goes into a toilet somewhere in, one big club in London and he goes to the urinal, and this very posh English gentlemen comes in alongside and goes to the next urinal and Winnie turns round and just starts to walk straight out. The fellow turns round from the urinal and says,[clears throat] ‘At Eton they taught us always to wash our hands after going to the toilet.’ and Winnie’s at the door by this time, and looks back and says, ‘At Harrow, they taught us not to piss on our hands.’ Isn’t that a classic!
JH: [Laugh] That’s a classic. Well, what an incredible interview, Jack, I think on that note we’ll sign off. Oh, wait a minute.
JT: I’ve got two episodes.
JH: Oh, stop press! Hang on!
JT: Two comics. One of them: Jack White the bomb aimer was in the, as the three down the front. If they had to relieve themselves there was a flare chute in the step, you lifted a lid and urinated down the flare chute. Jack White does it and very foolishly gets too close to the metal, touched it [slap sound]. And of course at those temperatures, you freeze on. There’s an enormous scream. The bomb aimer didn’t bat an eyelid, he just picked up his, he had a coffee thermos flask, he just tipped it on him, the screams are even louder, but it released him!
JH: Oh my goodness!
JT: The other episode was, I mean this Jack, you know, he could be a pain in the neck at times see, the mid upper gunner had a quick release: he lifted his seat up and clicked it. Now if he wanted to get out in a hurry, he just hit this little lever and the seat just fell down. So if Jack White for some reason went down the back of the aircraft when we were training, walk past and [flick sound] he’d flip it and would drop poor old Ned out on the floor. He did it twice, Ned said, ‘that’s it, you do that again I’ll deal with you on the ground.’ So we, I think Munster, the first daylight on Munster, we were in the, the first time I heard flak, if you can hear flak you’re going to get hit: because it sounds like growling lions. The lions are growling and suddenly bang! We hear this, a piece of flak comes in through the starboard fin, the rudder, goes in, hits the floor, bounces up, hits the quick release on that seat, drops him on the floor. He screams out: ‘Jack you bastard!’ The bomb aimer in the nose says, ‘What did I do?’ It bounced up, hit the framework in the aircraft, hit the floor again, bounced up and in that photo I showed you, where is it? The spar, [paper shuffling] where is it? The one with the -
JH: Looking for the photo, I think you’ve got it there somewhere.
JT: Inside the aircraft. Or did you put it in the -
JH: No, I think you’ve got it there, in the pile. We’re looking for a photo. Oh, here it is, under here.
JT: Oh good.
JH: There you go. Photo is the cockpit of the Halifax.
JT: See that spar across there, it had hit the floor back here and flew up and hit the spar there, must have been very [emphasis] close to that, hit the spar there, flew back and landed on my helmet. It cut the leather, I put my hand up, in gloves, and I could feel the terrific heat through the glove, grabbed hold of it and threw it down on the floor. Put my hand up, again, felt the cut about that long in, about that long in the helmet and sort of felt inside it, and the leather shammy when I felt it, was intact. It was a piece about like that and about that thick, and it had part of the plywood floor where it had hit it embedded in it, and that’s the path.
JH: So it lost a bit of its sting by the time it hit your head.
JT: Yes. It had come to a stop by the time it hit me.
JH: Yeah yeah.
JT: But it went twang, bang, bang, BANG! I heard the bang when it hit that spar. And strangely enough it didn’t dent the spar. Which when I got on the ground later I looked up and I expected to see a dent in it. No dent. So that’s extraordinary.
JH: Yes. That’s amazing. Well, thanks very much Jack, I really enjoyed listening to this, and a really good interview.
JT: I’m now talked out.
JH: You’ll be on the records forever in Lincoln at the Bomber Command Centre now. Okay, thank you.
JT: Right, so if I am, Con, Jimmy Constaff, Jimmy, Jimmy Constaff, yeah.
JH: What’s this?
JT: I’m trying to think of a bloke’s name. I want to put it in there. So that if he’s ever, a very short Englishman, was a pilot in C flight with me, Jimmy, Constaff, if you ever, hear, listen to this Jim, my regards.
JH: Okay!
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 Henry Thomas
Creator
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John Horsburgh
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
2018-01-22
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.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AThomasJH180122
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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01:53:00 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
John Thomas was born in Australia and joined the RAF in 1943. After doing his initial training in Australia he travelled to the UK via America. Further training, including an accident and night vision tests, led to 102 Squadron and a full tour of operational sorties. He tells tales of avoiding anti-aircraft fire, fighter support, being coned by searchlights, V3, crew antics and rum rations. On return to his homeland he became a quantity surveyor then a farmer before a TPI award as a result of his earlier accident, in 1989. John also shares his views on wartime aircraft and policy.
Contributor
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Anne-Marie Watson
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
France
Germany
Great Britain
England--Gloucestershire
England--Yorkshire
France--Falaise
France--Limoges
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Magdeburg
New South Wales--Narrandera
New South Wales--Sydney
Victoria--Point Cook
Victoria
New South Wales
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-06
1944-08
1944-09-11
1944-10-07
1945-12-09
102 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
crash
Fw 190
Halifax
Halifax Mk 3
Heavy Conversion Unit
Mosquito
P-47
P-51
pilot
RAF Acaster Malbis
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Pocklington
RAF Riccall
searchlight
Tiger Moth
training
V-2
V-3
V-weapon
Wellington
-
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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
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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/155/2173/WhitworthJ.1.jpg
24bd96b9837be57b873fc91da711adcf
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/155/2173/AWhitworthJL160622.1.mp3
035dbbe8410756ff1b3360461b4b946f
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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Whitworth, John
J Whitworth
John Leslie Whitworth
J L Whitworth
Description
An account of the resource
17 items. The collection consists of an oral history interview with Flying Officer John L Whitworth (b. 1921), one photocopy, seven pilot’s navigation charts and eight photographs which include seven target photographs. John Whitworth was a pilot and flew Mosquitos with 162 Squadron Pathfinders from RAF Bourn in 1944 and 1945.
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
2016-06-22
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Whitworth, JL
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
PL: Hello, my name is Pam Locker and I’m in the home of Mr John Leslie Whitworth of *** Harrogate, HG2 0NTand it’s the 22nd of June 2016.
JW: Yes
PL: So John, can I just start by saying on behalf of the International Bomber Command Memorial Trust, an enormous thank you for agreeing to talk to us and share your memories.
JW: My pleasure.
PL: Can I start with your — start at the beginning?
JW: Yes, I came from a large family, eight, born in Sutton Coldfield. I was number seven, five elder sisters, one older brother and one younger brother. My father and mother — for many years my father had, before the war, had a very substantial motor, er, motor car showroom business, service station, everything, which the war killed There was no business, it collapsed completely. My father was too honest. He paid out everybody, every employer and everything, and started up and expanded this cycle business. A very wonderful father, er, man, with all these kids he educated. I was educated at Bishop Peter’s School, Sutton Coldfield, a famous old grammar school. Anyway, I was, I was then being trained as an articled clerk, chartered accountancy. The war came, we struggled a bit. My younger brother, because of the collapse of my father’s business, couldn’t go to university, so I’ve always been very, very bitter about Germans. I don’t like Germans. I don’t trust them anymore or anything and the sooner we get far away from them in the European Union the better. But that’s me. Anyway (pause), England, Britain was hit very hard. Along came Dunkirk. To me, we looked after ourselves marvellously. Got our army back. Like everybody else I’d already signed up to go in the Air Force, put on reserve and everything. After the complete collapse I joined the Home Guard with all my powers, the whole lot. To say that Britain couldn’t look after itself is rubbish. We did, we had to then, we’d got nothing. Thousands of little boats went across and got people back from the Channel and to say we fought on our own, cannot live without the European Union, is rubbish. We can, we’ve done it once and we can do it again. Anyway, in the Home Guard, name Whitworth. Everybody had volunteered for aircrew, all my friends, or the Fleet Air Arm. We were at the end of the queue. It was 1940 [laugh]. It was 1941 before I eventually went in the Air Force, signed up down at Cardington in the week and then training at Torquay, at ITW, and then flying training at Sywell, near Northampton. Learned to fly Tigers. At that time, er, most training was going on in Britain. I went down to Lyneham where, to learn to fly Oxfords, um, and literally we were almost the last [emphasis] of aircrew, bomber aircrew at any rate, trained in Britain. Everything went to Canada, Rhodesia and everything, all the whole lot. I was almost the last one. Learnt to fly Oxfords, and then went to Moreton in the Marsh. What was I doing in ’42? I got my wings. I didn’t get a commission because [laugh], I’ll say this, I was marched in for my final interview in front of the group captain and everything, and a certain Warrant Officer Marsh said, ‘This gentleman has not had — this candidate has not had the courtesy of having a haircut’. I was not a long haired — it was about like — I was not — well of course — well that ruined that. I got my wings at Little Rissington, er, sergeant pilot, posted very rapidly to Moreton in the Marsh, which — Wellingtons — which was the feeder station for crews, Wellington crews, all going out to the Middle East. Trained there, formed a crew and the second pilot, a Geordie, two Australians, three Brits, two Australians, and a New Zealander. A mixed-up crew. Wonderful. Great. Always remember going together. When you first got together on Wellingtons, you’re all stuck in a crew room and you sort yourselves out and a nice looking fella, there’s his picture there, called Brian Hurd, walked up to me, looked at me, looked at me, said, ‘My name’s Brian Hurd. Do you want a good navigator?’ I said, ‘I’m John Whitworth’, I said, ‘I’m one pilot to two but I think I shall be captain’. I jolly well intended to be anyway [laugh], I knew I was better than the other lad who’d asked to fly with me. Formed up, we trained there, down to Portreath, Cornwall. Waited for a week for a following wind in a brand new Wellington. Gibraltar. A night’s sleep. Off to Malta. As we got near Malta, we knew we, we were getting there [slight laugh]. It was getting evening then. It was a long flight. It’s a long flight, seven hours, with no friends either side. There wasn’t any going to Gibraltar. If you didn’t make it, well nobody would see what’s [unclear], you know, occupied [unclear], one or the other and it was the same down there. As we stood there, there was flak going up. It was an air raid. Oh, it was good to see. It was the only time in my life I’ve ever been glad, as a bomber pilot, to see flak. That was ours [emphasis], shooting at the Germans [laugh] who were raiding it and stopped it. In we went and they were - pow! All over the plane, gave our three passengers a pop! Gone. In twenty minutes we were gone, up to Egypt, non- stop. When we got to Egypt, straight down into unit, tied up in the central transit camp. We hadn’t had any sleep of any sort for thirty-six hours. That was it. That was what happened to everyone. Posted almost immediately to 37 Squadron, Wellingtons, at Abu Suier, near Ismailia, and started my first tour.
PL: Who were your passengers?
JW: Three army fellas. A sergeant and an officer who were all — I think were a bit huffy. I mean in a Wellington, you’ve no room. We said, ‘Make yourself as comfortable as you can on the bed’. And that’s it. He sort of got the idea he could come up the front. Were all sergeants, even a lieutenant, and well, it meant nothing to us at all, ‘Behave yourself. Don’t be sick’. [unclear] And then, ‘Don’t be sick. Here’s some bags. Don’t be sick in my aeroplane’. They listened to me. They weren’t. When he went back, he said, ‘We were flown out from Malta by a little bastard sergeant who pushed us around and said, ‘Don’t be sick’’. And I meant it. [unclear] I always remember, ‘Don’t be —’ [laugh] Well that was it. I’d tell my passenger. Never mind them. If someone’s sick in your aeroplane it stinks and clearing up and anyway, that was our squadron. Almost immediately I was informed that I’d have to do a number of operations as a second pilot, er, and learn the trade, fair enough, before I got my captaincy. I did — my crew didn’t like that, especially as the fella that took over — his name was Pierce, it was Pilot Pierce. I went up, took — had to take a plane up to Tel Aviv in Palestine and while I was there, he went on his first op with my crew, crashed on take-off and my great friend Alex Sutcliffe, the New Zealander, who’d come all the way from New Zealand, trained, trained with me. He used to come home, met my family, and they liked him. He was a quiet country lad, was lovely, was killed on his very first — hadn’t even done his first op. Anyway, but I came back from Palestine and they said Alex was killed last night. Oh God, they crashed and he as front gunner, was in the fuselage. It set on fire and he had difficulty getting out. They got him out but he was badly burned and died. A particularly terrible tragedy for someone who’d come all the way from New Zealand to help us and flown all the way, halfway back to the Middle East and everything, had friends and everything, was killed. Anyway, now I’m going to tell you, I was lucky that I didn’t get commissioned. When it came through on the Squadron later on, all the things came through. There was no Marsh to muck it up. I was commissioned later on Squadron but I was lucky in my crew,the whole way because we were all sergeants and I made wonderful friends for the time they lived. We operated from there. I did two ops, on the third op I went to Tobruk, which was a seven hour flight. Three hours or so each way, three and a half hours over the target. On the second flight an engine started to play up, seized up, lost a propeller. Wellingtons lost — would lose, the best Wellington, best for petrol, would lose a hundred feet a minute, so if you were at eighty, eight thousand feet we’d got eighty minutes flying. That was three hours flying to do back. We got a fair bit the way back but eventually we gradually sank, sank, sank down and we were getting back towards the lines and we just flew into the ground. No option. No don’t jump out in the desert in a parachute or anything like that. No option, you, you stuck together, we crashed, all walked out. The pilot I was with was good but we combined well on that crash. I still had quite a bit to do with it. We could have landed better, I can say that now. I said it then and I say it now, I was a better pilot than the fella I was attached with but that was it. Anyway we walked out. We walked, oh, I suppose this was about 2 o’clock in the morning, and we walked all through the night across the desert. The desert was pretty flat scrub like bracken, you know, all through into daylight. And believe you me, when you’re walking to save your life or to avoid being captured, you walk. We carried ten gallon of water, which was in every Wellington strapped to the ladder, and the six of us walked and there wasn’t a grumble all the way of any description. We walked and walked and walked. And dawn came up and we kept walking and it got hotter and hotter but we still walked. Er, it was est— estimated we’d done over twenty, twenty-five kilometres which was somewhere between ten to fifteen miles but we walked and we weren’t sure whether we’d got over the lines. We were well south of the lines on the edge of [unclear], a depression there and the walking wasn’t bad but we didn’t know if it was mined. We didn’t know anything, we just walked. We weren’t really certain but we thought we were — had reached safety, but there was no trouble that far south which we’d deliberately come. The navigator had got us there, er, and suddenly we looked and there coming down the sand, a wadi, a shallow depression there, was a truck in desert colouring and everything, you couldn’t — no markings on it at all and we looked at it and somebody said, ‘Oh God. Look at those front mudguards’. They were flat. British trucks were Bedfords, curved mudguards. The Germans and Italians were — militar had a big flat front at the top where they could load a mach or you could load three chaps when you were escaping or going forward to the mach and you could sit on there and hang on. These had got flat mudguards. We dropped down on the ground in a little huddle, all six of us there. I had got a thirty-eight pistol that the pilot had, all the pilots had those, carried them. Don’t know why but we did. [laugh] We had a little conflab. What can we do? There’s nowhere to run. No, we mustn’t get separated. We just got to give up. I mean, the fella got out and he’d got a machine gun, obvious a — never knew what sort it was — it was a machine gun and that and if he shoots [unclear] all packed up, we got to give up and the captain, Mick Marne, said, ‘If anyone’s got to give up, it’s my responsibility’. Tied the handkerchief on his pistol, hands up and walk towards the truck, and I suppose this truck was a hundred and fifty, two hundred yards away, and he got about halfway holding this up. I see it so clearly, you know, in my mind and this chap standing in the front of the truck with this and just watching him come. And all of sudden he started [applause], yelling and jumping, ‘He’s British, he’s British, he’s British’. It wasn’t an American truck they were using. This was a research salvage unit, four wheel drive, desert truck with American flat mudguards. Oh God. Oh, a cup of tea that’s all we thought of. They were out looking for crashed aircraft, all other manner of vehicles picking up spares or anything and that’s it. Anyway, we had cup of tea, that’s all we could think of. Out came a primus stove and we had a cap of tea. Picked us up. We got in the back of that truck. Steel floor, steel floor with a few bits, nothing else, no, nothing at all. And that was the best seat I’ve ever sat on. We were safe and we headed off for the nearest airport which, well was about — I suppose at this time it was about 11 o’clock in the morning, 11 o’clock, and we headed off - bump, bump, bump - and bump on our bottoms in the back, no, no padding, [laugh], all there was the steel floor and some parts that they’d got which had at least been strapped so they didn’t get — and off we went to back to Cairo, Almaza airport. Another truck and we were back, all six of us. The only injury was a fellow called Barlow, he’d whitish fair hair, almost snowy, he got a terrific black eye, that was the only thing and we were back home. And thank heaven. We were known to the — by the signals we’d sent back as we came back that we were somewhere in the desert, and not even, nothing had been sent back to England about missing or anything. They were waiting for some news so no bad news had been sent back. And we were back. Now, I said I’m lucky. I’m lucky and possibly one of the luckiest people who ever got in the Air Force. Two days later, we were all lined up for another operation, again to go — this was August the 2nd and August the 4th or August the 1st or thereabouts.
PL: 19—
JW: 70 Squadron was the other squadron and they were sending about fifteen aircraft on another operation. It was all Tobruk at that time it was because that was —
PL: What year was this, John? What year was this?
JW: This was 1942. This was August 1942. We’d flown out in June. This was August. Er, the captain was a pilot officer. Alright. He seemed a decent bloke. He wasn’t — we were all sergeants. We took our kit out before going to briefing [cough], five of us, myself and — and I was second pilot. I was not in charge anyway. Just seeing that was everything before going to briefing. The aircraft, thirty aircraft, were all down the side of the airfield, not all in a line but all round the edge waiting and we were the front one at an angle. The others were all straight, and the other four got in, the plane, checking the thing and I was in the front talking to an airmen. I don’t know what it was, something about the aircraft or something, and then I heard this noise, a noisy aircraft in the circuit, obviously not running properly, and I watched it and it was a Boston, an American light bomber but part of the South African Air Force, and it was coming round and it was in trouble, and it came round and, didn’t realise at the time, he came round downwind, had to. The other four in the aircraft hung on, one in the rear turret, and I was with the airmen in the front and I watched, watched it. I was right by the ladder, instead of climbing up, I just watched it, watched, and watched and he came down and touched down at the end of the runway, bounced and he completely lost it, lost control completely and he headed straight for us, absolutely — we’re number 1. Aircraft 1, 2, 3, we’re — straight for us. All I could do was scream something to the others, nothing, could do nothing, and I ran with the airman, just ran and, er, as we ran, there was this a terrific petrol explosion behind us as the two hit - woof! And the fully, fully bombed up, all these aircraft had all got five— five hundreds on board, and we dived into a slip trench which was put fairly close behind in case of German low flying attacks, which didn’t happen but could have happen. This was the nearest thing, you dived in, we dived in there, lay down and the first bomb went off and blew, blew — I was suppose I was thirty, thirty yards, forty yards from where it blew up, blew it to bits, a piece of geodetic that big landed on the back of the airmen in front of me and - pow! We rolled over, over and over. I said, ‘We’ve got to run’. The two of us just scampered off as hard as we could go and I never saw that airman again, no reason to, and I ran and ran and ran, er, get into a proper air raid shelter, which I found another bomb had gone off in an aircraft, and dived in. Well of course nobody but the people out there and flying control could see what happened. Everybody thought it was an air raid, these bombs were going off, there was aircraft somewhere, Jerrys or something, Italians were bombing us and these were bombs and the whole of the air raid warnings had gone off and everybody was in the shelters and everything. The natives working were running screaming and, oh dear, and I collapsed in the shelter and two of my friends were there, one of which was Brian Hurd, his picture’s there, my previous navigator, and they took me off to the, the sick quarters and, er, which time, there were one or two people coming in, and took me back and I was given this injection and I was put to bed by two of them, put to bed, and — but for the rest of the night, um, this aircraft and the others caught fire and five blew up and a number of others were damaged in that, in it, and of course the whole airfield was chaos. So, I know but I really — the next day I was — I just never got out of bed but anyway I survived. Eight, eight air crew in that collision, two survived. Our rear gunner, he got out of the rear cockpit somehow or other. He was injured. I never saw him again. That was the only survivor out of eight. Now there was lucky for you and I hadn’t got a scratch. Our air gunner, the New Zealander, he was taken — I know he was taken to a hospital in Cairo. What was he? He was injured. I never saw him again. But there was luck. I was one survivor out of eight or half as, or one of two and I was burned here on the — I’ve got all the reports. In, in the reports this was the worst damaged aircraft and airfield at Abu Suier of any axis air raid in the whole [emphasis] of the North Africa campaign. It’s in the RAF records that this was the worst and I was a survivor. Anyway, there we are. I was attached to it then and attached to another crew who —
PL: John, can I just ask you, what about the other planes? Were other, I mean I imagine it to be like a domino effect.
JW: Yes, all five in a row were set on fire and blew up.
PL: Goodness.
JW: Five and we were all one crew.
PL: Did any of the other crews managed to escape?
JW: And others were damaged. Somewhere or other I’ve got the report with the numbers of them. But it says in the records that was the most damage done by any air raid and it was done, done by ourselves.
PL: Did any of the other crews manage to escape?
JW: They all got away. Er, probably in, in the one or two others they hadn’t come out. We’d just gone out with our kit and it happened in that minute or two. That was all. We were only out there three minutes but nobody else was hurt or anything and I was a survivor and that was it. Myself and the airman, he was alright. There, there we are. I survived that. Went on to do — that was three ops, another thirty-four, after I did about ten. Well for one thing I had to do was as second pilot, because this was the crew I should have inherited, was getting near, the captain was getting near the end of his tour and I should have inherited but they’d gone. And so I’ve got to be found a place in another crew and, and there wasn’t one with a place coming up for a while so I had to do, I think I did about another ten and then I got — took over a crew which I kept right to the end. Did another thirty-four ops. Two hundred and fifty hours [laugh]. It’s all there. All in that book.
PL: Goodness me. And did you —
JW: Anyway, er, I finished the tour up at — we got moved forward at that time. Of course, there was the big advance. The — if you could be exciting in the Wellington bombers. Jerry was streaming back, streaming back and we, at night, we bombed them. And the front line, the British front line, they had a strip of lights wherever they’d got to. So anything west of that was the Germans or Italians. We’d bomb that at quite low level, er, all the battle area and groups and that were lit up by Aboukir by the Fleet Air Arm who were in Alexandria, who weren’t very far away, but they were on a carrier that was stuck, they were stuck, they were stuck and they did a very good job of blooming hitting it and in a flat area, after bombing, we used to go down to low level, about three hundred feet, and empty our machine guns on anything we could see and back, er, that was introduced by the squadron commander, the Australian Rankin, who couldn’t do enough to kill Germans. He’d got some reason. It started, Rankin, said, ‘When you come back at low level anything, there’s not big bombs, you’re at three feet, anything you can see west of the British lights shoot at’. [laugh] And we had these big Wellingtons. That’s what they were there for. Strafers. It made a bit of variety [laugh] but anyway, I finished my tour, back to Cairo, there at Cairo stuck in a transit camp for ages waiting for a way back. There was nothing. You couldn’t go up the Mediterranean or anything. You got to get — eventually the Americans sent up a very good, er, military airline, a military airline, which flew us across the southern Sahara to West Africa to Lagos and there, then we sat at Lagos waiting for a boat until an absolute hell ship came, which was full, full of coloured troops in the basement. They were going up to Freetown for some reason I don’t know, and, er, as we flew, we sailed from Lagos to Freetown which was a week’s journey, covered by a rickety old armed trawler [laugh], so they could only draw water from one side for some reason. The Cap Cadoran was her name. This was a French merchant boat which we converted into a troop carrier. As we did so we got a bigger list and when we eventually arrived in Freetown we’d got a list like that [laugh]. Well that meant going down into the mess decks or anything like that, you got steps like that or the other side [laugh], there you climbed up them or go down, either up or down, according to which side. Oh dear, that meant that one day someone with buckets of porridge were coming into, from the cook, cook area into eating (we ate and slept in this area) and someone slipped and the buckets fell down the steps and everybody got a bit, you know what I mean [laugh]. It was a joke, anyway. We said, ‘Did you get any porridge today?’ Up to Freetown and there were these coloured troops and the rest were all returning aircrew, there was a hell of a lot of them. All parts of Bomber Command were there, all the volunteers, Canadians, New Zealanders and Australians and when we got to Freetown, they absolutely — we were going home. We’d have literally got in a row boat and rowed across, if you could think of it [laugh]. They weren’t. They went, they were just going from there to, the Aussies and New Zealanders were getting further from home again and the Canadians weren’t getting any nearer really and they refused to move until they’d inspected — and literally — it wasn’t a strike, it wasn’t a mutiny, it was a plain fact. They just stated that we shall not to move off this boat until we can expect the next and rightly so as I say. All the Brits, we agreed with them but we were going home. We’d row a blooming thing. They weren’t. Anyway we were put on — oh, several big troop ships came up from South Africa, all loaded with prisoners of war and, and other people going back to the European, going to — South African troops as well going up to Europe. We were put on a Dutch boat which was good and, er, they formed up a huge, huge quarry, huge convoy in Freetown which has a huge harbour, and almost with them I think we had a cruiser and three destroyers and about, I think it was six troop carriers, and right smack in the middle, protected all around, was the Warspite Battleship which had been — had come all the way round. It was badly damaged somehow or other by an air raid in the Mediterranean, and it come down through and was on its way back to Britain for repair but they stuck that right in the blooming middle, which we — it was correct. It was proper battle order, but to RAF blokes to have the blooming Navy in a warship with us all round [laugh], it was funny. We came up, back up and stopped off at the Canaries for a while, while the battleship refuelled and destroyers, and we just walloping along and nothing but we had — we heard some explosions a long away which we believe was someone expected something and let off one of the depth charges but never knew. Up to Liverpool, back on leave, a week or two’s leave and I was posted down to Wing to a Wellington Instructor Unit. I’d been there as a sergeant. While there my flight sergeant came through and was called up and my commission had came through on December the 5th 1942 and I was commissioned in February. Hung on for a week or so to get my uniform and everything and I was then — oh, the chief ground instructor seemed to think I’d, I’d make a good ground instructor, probably because I could speak reasonable English [laugh] and that, and sent me on a number of courses, a PO and a flying course, that was on Oxfords, and did well on that and then I went on a ground instruction course. Oh, a great course at Luffenham Airfield, how to intruct, which was a very instructive course, taught how to, how to make a speech, and how to tell things and everything, things which were so handy in later life, how to put it together and things. Very, very good — how to bomb things. It was a very, very good course. Then I went on an engine handling course down at Bristol. And then, then they decided they wanted a squadron air sea rescue officer, so I went on an air sea rescue course, um, took, told how to land an aircraft in the sea in fog. But no way you could pass on and no way of practising that except above the clouds, try it on the clouds and that [unclear]. I spent a whole lot of, a whole period there, early days, and then I was put straight in ch— second in the ground instruction area, er, airmanship, and I had a cushy job, absolute cushy job. Formed up a golf team. We used to sneak off for an afternoon and that sort of thing up to, up to the local golf course at Leighton Buzzard and, oh dear and, er, I had a great friend called Atkins, he was an engineer. He’d done a tour on Stirlings and we got on like a house on fire, and he was a keen golfer and he suddenly found out I was a golfer. He said, ‘I hear you play’. Yes, I was one handicap. ‘Oh’, he said, ‘Let’s — I play off about seven up at Liverpool way’. He said, ‘Let’s go up and hire us some clubs at the nine hole course at Leighton Buzzard’. And off we went up there and across. Saw the pro. Oh yes, he’d hire us some clubs, some very old ones and he didn’t have any idea. He just thought we were people trying it out. And some old balls and that and we had a few holes. Anyway, we came in and he apologised. He said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry about these’. And he went off up the [unclear]. You couldn’t make it up. Anyway we joined up and, oh dear, it was a really cushy number there. Really was. We could disappear out for the afternoon. We both joined the local club and played in competitions and organised the team. And, um, on one great occasion I remember, always and so will he, we went and played and he said, ‘I’ve got a car’. And the original leave petrol I got when I was demobbed right at the beginning lasted about 18 months [laugh]. I mean, we found it and never really had to use our own petrol but you went in the right garage and you got a coupon for one and we’d say, ‘Come on, come on. We’re rested air crew, bomber air crew. What can you do for us?’ And, you know, ‘C’mon, where’s the gaffer?’ I never got away with less than five gallons from the one [laugh]. We always had petrol. Anyway, he said, ‘Ashridge is a good course just down by [unclear] not very far away’, he said. That’s the famous course where Henry Cotton, who we knew was in the Air Force, is, was pro and everything. ‘Let’s go down and have a weekend stay in the hotel nearby at Ashridge’. And we went down there and played golf. Went down the Friday, that’s right, the Friday evening, booked in the hotel. Nice and comfortable. We didn’t earn a lot of money but we got enough to stay and we went up to Ashridge and played golf on the Saturday, and met a number of people, and got chatting about this and aircrew and God knows what, and, um, someone said, ‘Oh, Henry Cotton is back in his house just down the road. He was a pro there and been a pro there’. He said, ‘He’s back there and he comes up to play occasionally’. Henry had been invalided out. He was invalided because he’d got stomach ulcers, duodenal ulcers, which you had to have a special diet and you were straight out in the Forces because they couldn’t do it. And, ‘He’ll probably be around’, and we said we’d like to meet him, you know. We were equivalent in rank in any case to what he’d been, and in any case in the Air Force, he was non-aircrew. We were pretty, pretty snooty, you know, especially after operations. You’d done a tour of ops and you looked down on everybody else, which we had. And we came in and there was Henry Cotton and we were introduced to him and had a long chat and that sort of thing and, er, I don’t know, we got on and we were going to play on the Sunday morning and then go off. And we said we were there and he said, ‘I must be playing tomorrow afternoon with my wife, Toots’. Toots, she was a South American, I think it was, a nice person. He said, ‘Would you like to join us for a few holes?’ Join Henry Cotton! Ay? Henry Cotton! Good Lord yes, definitely yes and we had nine holes with Henry Cotton. That was something. In my golfing career people said, ‘Who’d you played with?’ I’d say, ‘Oh yes, I’ve played with Henry Cotton’. ‘What?’ [laugh] True. The only boast in all my life, but the great Henry Cotton. Anyway, er, it came to a point in September ‘44 I’d been where life was too easy, er, my greatest pal was shot down at Arnhem in Thunderbolts, attacking, and I volunteered to go back on ops and Fox started to form up a Lancaster team. One or two people came up and, er, started touring and, um, Charlie — what’s his — the chief engineer, said, ‘I hear you’re going back on ops, Lancs, John’. I didn’t call him Charlie. ‘Yes Sir. Yes Sir. Yes Sir. I’m going’. He said, ‘Well, I can get you on Mosquitos’. I said, ‘What? Mosquitos’. I mean, they were only really coming out as the fastest propeller plane in the world, and faster than anything, absolutely, well bombers. ‘I can get you onto those’. What? Oh golly, and off I went to Mosquitos. No, first I had to pass the high altitude test, which was three times in a decompression chamber, the equivalent of thirty-five thousand feet, so you that didn’t get the bends. I mean Mosquitos operated at around thirty thousand feet and some people get the bends, you know, at around thirty thousand feet. Of course, you never did it on heavies or anything else and I remember sitting in there, didn’t dare move, you know, in case, in case you got a pain. Anyway I passed it and was on — I went straight off onto a Mosquito Training Unit and onto the squadron. And the Mosquitos, not just an ordinary squadron, a squadron being formed for Pathfinder Force. We were — we did spoofs and everything for the other Pathfinders, the Bennetts and — a light night striking force and Mosquitos attached to it. We did spoofs and things, window in front of the heavies and that, all sorts of things. I did fifty ops on Mossies. Twenty-one to Berlin.
PL: Goodness. I’m sorry John. I don’t understand, what’s spoofs? When you say spoofs, what do you mean?
JW: [laugh] Spoofs. What it is, a spoof, we went in front of the main force when they were going to a target and that, and then we branched off, like wherever it was going, we branched off to another target, bunging out this window, these bits and pieces, to give it that we were a much bigger force, deliberate to take — they thought that the Pathfinders who were in the front were going to so and so, and we used to go towards that, alert the German fighters, they’re going Berlin. Everything they thought, ‘cause of Mosses, they thought it was Berlin. Thought the heavies were going there but they weren’t. They were going to another target. And that was it. And that was the lot to my job. And then we, I was moved from 142 to 162 — 142 was a stick it squadron on the worst station in Bomber Command, the ground and lodge, all mud. Oh, we were glad to get posted from there. I did about ten ops, mainly to Berlin, from there and we were posted to 162 at Bourn, which is a nice station, with another Mossie squadron, and, er, not too big a mess and no mud, [unclear] was shocking. This, this was October, you know, October ’40, blimey, October ’44 and it was terribly wet. Terribly. You couldn’t go anywhere without wellingtons or flying boots, awful place, and not even a decent pub which [laugh] — and we were posted to Bourn, which was near Cambridge, and that was where I finished up. Completed fifty ops from there just in time, just before the war ended, and back to Group and two tours. I was — if you were a fighter and you got five killed, you were considered an Ace. In Bomber Command there was no such thing as that, but if you survived two tours as a pilot you were, you were a Bomber Baron. That’s what I acquired. A Bomber Baron. It meant nothing. It meant nothing. It was just a phrase. I’d done two tours and I could go up to Group, Pathfinder Force, and could pick anything I wanted. And at that time, I meant to stay in the Air Force and I wanted to go onto a Dakota transport unit to learn how to fly those, which would be good if I wanted to carry through to civilian flying. I went up there. They said. ‘That’s easy, but there’s a cracking good job for you I can put you on at Pershore’, which was quite near home. A ferry unit, Number 1 Ferry Unit. They were ferrying aircraft, Mosquitos, out to India and everything like that, for the huge build up at that time for the big attack planned, Army, Navy and Air Force, on Malaya and Singapore and they were pouring out. And I went out there and then a posting came to go to Islamabad, Number 9 Ferry Unit in India, which was a very established station and I thought, ‘Oh, there’d be something of a job out there’, which there was. And I took it, I needn’t have gone as I’d done one overseas tour. I needn’t have gone, but I did go and ended up there and, of course, out there we were getting everything ready, and everything all ready to — the most experienced going right to the forward ‘drome so that when the big attack came, we could take aircraft to where they captured an airfield and established a unit, and we moved down there, Rangoon, and we were all ready and someone came and said, ‘There a great big bomb. Huge bomb. We think the war will be over’. It was the atomic bomb and it was all over. And, um, we were stuck there. Nobody wanted to know anything or anyone. There was nobody wanted aircraft, nothing. All the chaps could think was, ‘How can we get home? How? ’ Army, Navy, the lot. We were stuck there, absolutely. I was the second in command of the ferry flight at Maubin there, and, er, Squadron Leader Poutney, he was posted to somewhere else. He’d got his permanent commission, he was posted somewhere and I was appointed CO, Temporary Acting Squadron Leader, Temporary Acting Confirmation Flight Lieutenant Whitworth to Supervisor disbandment of the unit. Just somebody had seen I was a trained chartered accountant and must have thought I could do something, which I did. I did a good job, ended up being posted down to another unit, the group, the group communication flight to disband it as well and I ended up with nothing but an aeroplane and the first one — two aeroplanes and I got instruction for everything, every blooming thing, everything off, where it went in. The crews, all the crews, all the ground crews but nothing for the aeroplanes. I left them, but obviously the, the things were in control. And it had been a ferry crew had come and collected, abandoned them there and the second [unclear]. Anyway, I could see I’d get a good job but it would be in administration and I hadn’t stayed in the Air Force as pilot. And up came my demob number and I came home and out.
PL: So how did you get home?
JW: How did I get home?
PL: Yes.
JW: Boat. Boat. All the way from Rangoon across the Ind— oh, nice boat. Empress of Canada, nice boat but jammed full of troops, jammed full. And the officer’s thing was absolutely a mess. The first day out of — oh, two sittings for food and, er, we sailed out into the Indian Ocean there, south Indian Ocean, and I thought, oh, this is going to be a slog, we’ll be a week up to Colombo. Got to cross this and one in the know said, ‘Don’t worry’, he said, ‘Don’t worry, Sir. Once we get out and starts to roll a bit there won’t be two sitting for meals. Half of these blokes which you’ll never see again’. And we didn’t. Oh, whether they only had every other meal. There was no crowding in the mess for food or anything [laugh] and I never had to worry about seeing these people. And there was not half of them I never saw again, and it was quite a comfortable trip up to Colombo, er, collected a few more, off then and up the — across the South Indian Sea and round Aden, and up through the Suez Canal and up to Hyéres, not far from a port quite near Marseille and they landed us there and the boat was immediately going back. And we came by train across France, right through to the channel ports and across and that was it. And, er, I was demobbed and within a week and then of course I was dead lucky. Dead lucky. I survived everything and then a further great bit of luck occurred. I really didn’t want — I did go back to the office accountancy people for a while. I shouldn’t have been, I shouldn’t have had to take the intermediate exam. I should have gone straight to the final. To be quite candid, having been in charge of two big units, with rather responsible jobs for the last few years, sitting down, swatting and doing — taking the exam I didn’t know what to do. My father — my brother was also coming home and he was going into the business which my father had built up quite a bit, his cycle business, quite considerable. I got in and I looked around all sorts of things, I went out to New Zealand flying, flying crop spraying, I got that and it was a bloody great thing. Canada. And, as I saym I had five sisters and four of them were married, substantially, and one of them, name of George, nice fella, came to me and said, ‘I hear you’re giving up accountancy?’ I said, ‘Yes, George. I really don’t know I’m going what to do. I’m trying to make up my mind to whether go to Canada or something like that or fly with one of the smaller airlines’. He said, ‘Well, I’ve inherited a small engineering manufacturing business’, he said, ‘It’s going alright. Would you like to join me?’ I couldn’t believe my ears. I couldn’t, I couldn’t believe my ears. Anyway I joined him and we worked damned, damned hard and everything and built it up to a substantial business over the next period. Really wasn’t expecting it. And I got married, got married to Audrey, who I’d met before the war and had always — we were parted for seven years but she was the girl and we got married. We had money, we had children and enough money to send them to good schools and was very comfortably off. Very comfortably off, er, right, right until getting towards retirement and I was — George had then retired and died and I was managing director, Chairman and managing director. It was a substantial company and things were getting hard. They were — things were getting, you know, a bit tough about then, er, and I was, I was sixty-one and took one job instead of the sales director. I said, ‘I’ll handle this’. And I made a mess of it. It was a very [unclear] Leyland on trucks. It was a big, big contract. I didn’t make a mess of it but I went and they said, ‘You didn’t do us good’. I was never a great salesman but, ‘You didn’t do a good job on that. Barry Watkins would have done a lot better, got much better terms. You’re over the hill’. And I retired at sixty-two. Came out. There we are. There we are.
PL: So what about the golf, John? What about the golf?
JW: I — oh dear. As soon as I got back straight back to Walmley, a good club. And straight — I got back, I was one handicap and I got down to scratch in 1950, which at that time I was thirty-eight, and for three years, and then in 1953, they altered all the calculations of the handicaps and everybody went up and I went up to three. And I got back to one. I never got back to scratch again. But I was in the County team, I won the County championship, I won the knockout and a few other things and I had very good years, very good years, a lovely wife, two boys, money, nice cars. I lived well. But then —
PL: Wonderful. Wonderful.
JW: As I say then at this time when I reached sixty I retired, I took early retirement, I took early retirement. It cost me as everything was based on the last three years. It cost me, but there we are. I wasn’t hard up. Then we lived in the same house. Bought the house, rented the house when we first got married in ‘54, I bought the house, nice house, in a nice area and everything, Oxford, in my front room. I remember buying it. I had good friends in, in the business and costed it all for me and everything and said you should buy. This was in 1957. You should, um, you should be able to buy this for about four thousand, four thousand three hundred, which was a good market price for a very nice house with land around it too. And I bought it in the front room and I got to our figure and my wife walked out the room. I wasn’t sure she wanted this house but I bought it for four thousand six hundred and I went out and she was crying in the hallway, ‘Oh John. I did so want I this house, you know’. I said ‘I’ve bought it’, ‘What?’ Oh, what, my wife moved, what, grabbed her handbag and tore back in and said there were things she’d lined up to buy in the Oxford area. We bought it and lived in it for fifty-four years until, until she died. Extended it and everything. Nice house, nice house, extended it and added a granny flat for the wife’s father. I lived well but I never thought I’d live to ninety-five, you know. Pension wasn’t great. It wasn’t bad but I’ve got plenty of capital which I’ve spent quite a bit of it, living well, but I thought all the rest of my family had gone into the eighties, and one sister did go into her nineties but, as I say, I never thought I’d live to ninety-five [laugh].
PL: Amazing. Amazing.
JW: Here I am now, still able to get round, losing my teeth [laugh].
PL: But not your memory?
JW: No. Not my memory, no, no.
PL: So John how did you, how do you about feel about how the veterans of Bomber Command have been treated over the years?
JW: How what?
PL: How the veterans form Bomber Command were treated over the years?
JW: Oh, it was a dreadful long time before they gave us the clasp. We shouldn’t have had anything. I mean, in the Middle East, I got the Africa Star and clasp for North Africa on it. At home, got the Air Crew Europe thing but nothing else, nothing else. But there were, considering there were fifty-three thousand, your chances, as I say, Mosquitos yes, Lancs a different matter, different matter.
PL: Did you feel that you were more in —
JW: There were a lot of gongs dished out but an awful lot of them, they were dished out and dead the next week and that sort of thing. People think they didn’t but they were. There was, but the people that got ‘em were dead. And the survivors, well there were quite a few. As I say, I survived and got the DFC and that but it took a long while for them to, to really acknowledge that clasp, Bomber Command, at long last, um, what’s his name? Our Prime Minister, he did authorise it. It should have gone through a long, long time and really I don’t think Churchill did enough and the end of the war to appreciate — to be honest I don’t think he realised that we’d lost fifty-three thousand volunteers, fifty-three thousand of volunteers, not one was pushed in. Everyone was volunteers and all educated, even, even, I mean, my brother was trained as a pilot and got through, served his flying training school in Canada and was near getting his wings but he couldn’t navigate. Jim couldn’t navigate. My brother could never learn how to read maps and getting near his final wings flying test he got lost in Canada and had to land and find out where he was and ring through and they sent for him and everything. And he couldn’t navigate. He couldn’t — he could go to the other side of Birmingham, Sutton Coldfield, and have a job to find his way back. Although it meant going north I don’t think he ever could put the sun and time together. I mean, you know, even in summertime. South, the suns around the 12 o’clock or, or a bit earlier than that to read summer time and east and west and all that and he could never do that. I don’t know why. I don’t know why. He was a damn good engineer. He’d be a blooming good pilot. He should have — he was scrubbed as a pilot right, right at the end of his flying course, right at the very end he was scrubbed. Well, I mean, um, the three categories of pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, the top one. Well [slight laugh] navigator, bomb aimer navigation was essential. So, he — there was no training. He would have made a good flight engineer, really good one, engineering trained and everything. He was really good. He knew all about — but there weren’t any in Canada. All the engineers, nearly all were trained in, in Britain or from British people who had been fitters, etcetera, in Canada and had gone out there. That’s where the basic trained and so of course.
PL: So what did he do?
JW: He became a gunner and put on a squadron, 462 Squadron, which was an Aussie squadron with Aussies, er, up here, up in this part of the world, 5 Group, and then they were transferred down to 100 Group, special duties, and this, in effect, this squadron that used to go around with several wireless operators picking up German radio and [unclear] language. Sometimes they had a German with them and just mucking them up, you know, jamming all the transmissions and that was his job. He did twenty-seven ops and survived. [unclear] two back. There we are. That’s it. But we should have had much more recognition. We should have had that Bomber Command clasp in ‘44, ‘45 long, long ago not just — not just, what’s it? Since I’ve come up here. It’s coming two years ago. It’s two or three years ago. We should have had that. There we are.
PL: Well John, it’s been an absolutely fascinating interview. Thank you so much for your generosity.
JW: I’ve been the luckiest bloke, luckiest bloke to survive. I survived everything. I survived everything even, even in Mosquitos. We were hit over Hamburg with the flak which came through in front, twenty-five thousand feet. It was always a bit of a mystery because very rarely did they get their flak up but we had one hit us and a piece of shrapnel came through the nose of the aircraft and went between — pilot and navigator sat there — between us and thudded in behind, and a bit of Perspex from it flicked my navigator’s eyebrow and, of course, we got a blooming hole in the front and a three hundred mile an hour wind coming in. And I turned and he pulled his mask down and of course, at twenty-five thousand feet, you bleed quite profusely, any — oh God, blooming blood all down here and I remember grabbing him and forcing him to — he pulled his mask off and doing this but it was only a nick. I remember dragging my handkerchief out and stuffing it down and getting him round, and, er, it was alright, and cleaned up a bit of blood spilt, caused two lumps. It was horrible but it was only a nick. That had gone through, missed him and missed me at eye level.
PL: Did you feel more in control what was going to happen to you being in Mosquitos rather than being—
JW: We were?
PL: Being in Mosquitos, did you feel you were more in control?
JW: Oh, absolutely. Mosquitos were marvellous. For a start, they were a two man crew, pilot and navigator or pilot, AI operator sitting. It was two men team. Absolutely. It really was. Whether you was fighter, intruder, Pathfinder, the navigator and the pilot, you worked together one hundred percent. No good pilot was any good without a good navigator, especially on — any plane you had to have a good navigator — but Mosquitos, the two of you were a team and I had a cracking navigator, Canadian, Bill Todd, he was a superb navigator, never failed. He could read H2S radar like — and so it was printed in plain language and that sort of thing. He was — he never took us over. I mean, I’ve got the route cards of many of my ops. We flew near, whenever we were going to Berlin, we flew up north near around Bremen or anything, to wake them up, waje them up, wake them up, down to Berlin. Wherever we went, Magdeburg in the middle, whatever it is, we always flew near, not over [slight laugh] they’d shoot at us, near to — to wake, wake never — Berlin, Berlin they never had any peace, ever. I’ve got copies of, er, from Goebbels’ diaries where he writes, ‘The Mosquitos were here again last night. We never get a good sleep every night’. But anyway, there we are. But the Mosquito was superb. It was a marvellous aeroplane. The film done on the Mosquito, “333, 233 Squadron” an operation where supposedly to a — Mosquito squadron to a heavy water plant in Norway and everything. You see them going off, these well-known film stars, the captain, squadron leader, I think his navigator was only a warrant officer or something, which was extraordinary for a start. I’m sure he was only a flight serg. You see them going up and doing the whole lot, and they come back and the pilot gets out first, oh well, well, you know, well, he comes down before the navi. That’s impossible, that’s a physical impossibility. In a Mosquito the pilot has to get in first, get in it and the navigator comes up and sits alongside him. The entry’s blocked, pull the ladder up, shut the trap. To get out, the navigator has [emphasis] to go first, he just has to and the pilot follows but no, in the film they come back and the pilot gets out, the wonder boy gets out first. Oh, every Mosquito pilot navi is infuriated about that film. They’re infuriated. Physical impossibility or damn near. You have to get the navigator in last and out first. There’s no room. No room. One can’t get past the other. [laugh] That’s infuriating. Oh dear. Any Mossie navigator that’s seen that says, ‘That’s blooming impossible’ [laugh]. Well, chatting to my flight commander he became, he became CO, Wing Commander, what’s his name? Peter MacDermot at Honington, where that film was made. They got these six Mosquitos and that and did that film. I brought it up. He said. But no, no, the star’s got to come out the plane, the great pilot, and it’s the blooming navigator that took him there and that’s it. Rubbish, rubbish. But anyway —
PL: Well, John, is there’s anything else at all that you would like to add?
JW: Well, oh dear me, I could rattle on forever, can’t I? Rattle on forever. No, I’ve been a very lucky chap. I’ve had a great life. I had a super wife, super wife, artist, mother, good looking, prettiest girl, super wife. Sixty-one years, everything. Look at that. She — those are all, my wife did all these. And that one, I always remember that. She did one or two like that in our kitchen, a nice big kitchen, we extended it. And the “Kippers by Candlelight” was the thing.
PL: “Kippers by Candlelight”
JW: It was a bit of fun. She liked doing things like that. And I remember a pal of mine coming in, Robin Lewis, always a bit of a wag, he looked at that and said, ‘Kippers’, he said, ‘don’t they look sexy?’ Do you know, they were known ever since, Audrey’s sexy kippers [laugh]. No reason at all. That’s always Audrey’s painting. It was Audrey’s sexy kippers [laugh].
PL: Well that sounds a very good note to end on, the sexy kippers.
JW: The sexy kippers. Well anything you want you can always give me a ring, anything, anytime. Would you like another cup or tea or biscuit or anything?
PL: I’d love one. Thank you so much.
JW: No. [laugh]
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Interview with John Whitworth
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eng
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AWhitworthJL160622
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Creator
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Pam Locker
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-06-22
Format
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01:21:44 audio recording
Contributor
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Christine Kavanagh
Vivienne Tincombe
Description
An account of the resource
John Leslie Whitworth was born in Sutton Coldfield. Signed up for the Royal Air Force in 1940, finally being called up for service in 1941, before starting his training at the Initial Training Wing in Torquay, followed by more training at RAF Sywell in Northamptonshire. John was posted to RAF Moreton on the Marsh, which was a feeder station for the Wellington bomber crews, and he tells of meeting a lifelong friend called Brian Hurd, who was his navigator. John reminisces of his overseas posting to Egypt, to 37 Squadron at Abu Suweir, and flying over Gibraltar where he describes his first sighting of flak. John tells of his sadness of the death of his close friend, and also of his crash into the desert, after the Wellington he was piloting lost a propeller, his journey across the desert, and his subsequent rescue. Retells the story of a South African Air Force Boston which crashed into parked aircraft at Abu Suier in August 1942. Tells of his posting to a Wellington Instruction Unit, his training at RAF North Luffenham, and his love of golf. In September 1944, John volunteered to go back on operations, and was assigned to 142 Squadron flying Mosquitos working with the Pathfinder force, before being transferred to 162 Squadron, before finally being posted to ferrying Mosquitos to India. John completed two full tours with Bomber Command and was into his third when the Second World War ended. After the war, John became involved in his brother-in-law’s Engineering Manufacturing business, which he took over when his brother in law died.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Devon
England--Northamptonshire
England--Gloucestershire
England--Rutland
England--Torquay
Egypt
Gibraltar
India
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1942-08
1944-09
142 Squadron
162 Squadron
37 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
Boston
crash
Distinguished Flying Cross
grief
Initial Training Wing
Mosquito
navigator
Pathfinders
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF North Luffenham
RAF Sywell
RAF Torquay
sport
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/977/11388/PMarriottMW1701.1.jpg
5a3b61b21b2d24a22ae4c152815572a8
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/977/11388/AMarriottMW170824.2.mp3
15135eb3b22eaf671462d807e1ddf2e0
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
Marriott, Maurice William
M W Marriott
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Sergeant Maurice Marriott (b. 1924, 1627148 Royal Air Force). He flew as a navigator with 194, 96 and 110 Squadrons.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Maurice Marriott 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
2017-08-24
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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Marriott, MW
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is Thursday the 24th of August 2017. And I’m in Duston, Northampton with Maurice Marriott to talk about his life and times. So, Maurice what are your earliest recollections of life?
MM: I think my, one of the things I recall is my grandmother’s pub that she ran in Wansford near Peterborough. I remember the, the skittle room and the people in there. In particular I can remember the skittles being thrown and the noise they made.
CB: And what did your parents do?
MM: My father was a railway clerk on the LMS railway. And my mother was originally a school, schoolteacher.
CB: Yeah. And where did you go to school?
MM: I went to school in Northampton. Stimpston Avenue School in Northampton to start off. Then Campbell Square Intermediate School. And then Northampton Technical College after that. When I was twelve years old I think it was when I started at Northampton Technical College taking Commercial Studies.
CB: And what age did you leave school?
MM: I left school, my father had previously died when I was eight years old and I left school early because a job came up on the railway as a clerk which was, in those days was considered quite a good job. And I went for an interview and I got that job and I left school when, just when I was just over fifteen years old.
CB: And what did you do in this job?
MM: That was a clerk on the railway. Which I continued until I joined the RAF. I had various different jobs, at I worked at different places. Wolverton, Northampton and Bletchley and in the Goods Department. Then I was a claims clerk on, that was on, based at Northampton station.
CB: Did you enjoy that?
MM: Well, yes. It was, yeah quite a friendly, you know, crowd and everything. Yes. I wasn’t, you know it wasn’t particularly exciting. I was offered another job. A better job. But the railway wouldn’t release me. And I went to a tribunal in the end but they still wouldn’t release me. So I had to stop there until I joined up. They told me I couldn’t join up. It was a reserved occupation. I said, ‘Well, I’m already, I’ve already volunteered and I’ve got my number and everything.’ Previously four of us went down and joined up together in Northampton. And I told them that I’d already volunteered for the Air Force.
CB: Did they all join the Air Force as well in the end?
MM: They all joined. Three of us went to Cardington. Well, four of us went to Cardington and three of us passed out PNB — pilot, navigator, bomb aimer. And the fourth one failed the medical and he, he went in as ground staff and unfortunately he, he, we were all seventeen years old but he was already a smoker and he stopped smoking and, and was on the ground staff. And then he re-mustered as aircrew and as a flight engineer he was killed soon after he started flying. That was —
CB: On ops. Had he got to operations?
MM: On ops. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
MM: And we were still, that was just after we, I think it was just after we, we were on deferred service for a time, the three of us. We couldn’t join for PNB training until we were eighteen and a half years old. And I think, think it was just about when we joined up he was killed. He was killed on the, as a flight engineer on ops.
CB: He was older than you was he?
MM: Pardon?
CB: He was older than you.
MM: No. He was the same age as us. Yeah.
CB: Extraordinary. Yeah. Just taking a step back the war started soon after you started your employment on the railway. So 1939 was —
MM: Yes.
CB: When you were fifteen, wasn’t it?
MM: Yes.
CB: So, what —
MM: Well I, when the war started I was still fourteen.
CB: Yes.
MM: And, and yes, well [pause] yes, it was. Sorry, I’m just a bit —
CB: It’s alright. So the war started when you were still fourteen.
MM: Yeah.
CB: What do you remember about the starting of the war?
MM: Well, I remember hearing the announcement that you know we, at that age we were all very keen on listening to the radio. No television of course. But we all listened to the radio and kept apace with what was going on and, you know, we heard the announcement that we were at war. And at, and that is probably soon after then when I started taking an interest in in aeroplanes. Although I’d previously, as a boy I used to go with, with a Sunday school teacher who used to have a Lagonda and used to take us boys looking at the aircraft at Sywell. And I suppose from that day I was interested in aircraft. And then when I was about fifteen I suppose I joined the Air Training Corps and I couldn’t wait to be called up. So I volunteered.
CB: Yes.
MM: To go in the Air Force.
CB: So the other options were Army or Navy. Did you consider those at all?
MM: I never considered them. No.
CB: Right. And what was your aim in aircrew? What task did you want to do?
MM: I think like everyone else we all wanted to be pilots. I think nearly everyone that joined up thought you know that was the glamorous job. Pilot.
CB: In 1940 there was the calamity of Dunkirk. How much did you learn about that?
MM: Well, I remember quite clearly there was a lot of Frenchmen came to Northampton and I remember where they were. A lot of them were billeted on the Kettering Road near St Michael’s Avenue and I used to talk to them about various things. Practiced my French. A lot of school boy French. And used to talk to them about their experiences and one thing and another.
CB: And what was their general demeanour? How did they feel about their circumstances?
MM: Well, they were all, you know it was quite upsetting really for them of course. They didn’t know. They were there. Got nothing to do sort of thing and they were just waiting to find out. They had to be told what was going to happen to them sort of thing. They didn’t know and I would imagine they eventually joined the Free French Army and one thing and another. Under De Gaulle, you know.
CB: So there was a camp set up was there?
MM: No. There wasn’t a camp. I don’t know what happened to all the Frenchmen in the end there.
CB: Right.
MM: That’s all very vague to me now.
CB: Of course.
MM: It’s all a long time ago now.
CB: So, with the ATC activity in mind what were you doing as an ATC cadet?
MM: Well, I used to go you know with you know, make friends with a lot of the boys who was in the ATC and we used to go there and sort of learn all about, you know sort of Morse. Morse and drilling and keeping fit. You used to go to the gym with the ATC and sort of do various, you know gym activities. You know, on the pommel horse and one thing or another. And I was quite athletic in those days. I used to do a lot running. I used to run the mile and one thing and another. But —
CB: And RAF Sywell was quite near.
MM: That’s right.
CB: So what opportunities did you have to go there?
MM: Yes. I, yes I flew from there with Wing Commander Mackenzie who was CO at, of the Number 5 EFTS at Sywell and he took me up for a, and we did a few aerobatics which I think he tried to frighten me. Which I think he did [laughs]
CB: What did that do to your resolve?
MM: I was more, more determined than, than ever to get in the Air Force. Yes.
CB: The railway workers at the time. What sort of people were they?
MM: Oh, well they were you know quite a nice crowd. A lot of, sort of girls and young when I was at, in Northampton at the, at one of the places I worked for a while. At Far Cotton it was called. Far Cotton. A lot of girls there. Comptometer operators. And, oh we had quite a bit of fun in between working but we worked hard as young, young lads and that there. And in those days we had to do shorthand and typing and one thing and another which I, one of the exams I passed to get on the railway in those days.
CB: And then there were a lot of older people were they?
MM: Oh, yes.
CB: Who couldn’t be called up.
MM: Yeah. Yes. A lot of them that were sort of near retiring age I suppose. Yeah. But — yeah.
CB: And the railways were busy.
MM: Oh, yes.
CB: All the time.
MM: Everything went by rail in those days and came to, and all the deliveries were done by drays. Horse and drays around the towns. Used to come in to, and be unloaded in Northampton at the Castle Station goods depot sort of thing. And all delivered around the town in horse drawn, horse drawn drays.
CB: So were there many lorries in those days?
MM: Yes. There were a few lorries but most of them were, they used to do the heavy deliveries from Far Cotton in most of the broken down sort of lorries. Old. Second hand. And there were still some big lorries that went to [pause] with solid tyres that delivered the grain to, to the breweries which were quite near the depot. Yeah.
CB: And there’s still a brewery in the middle of the town.
MM: Yeah. Yes. Just on the —
CB: The Carlsberg one, yeah.
MM: The Carlsberg brewery now. There were two breweries there. Northampton Brewery Company and Phipps. Phipps Brewery. Yeah.
CB: So, you said that you volunteered in ’43. July. But they wouldn’t take you because you weren’t old enough. And you —
MM: No. ’42.
CB: ’42.
MM: I volunteered in ’42.
CB: ’42, yes.
MM: Yeah.
CB: I meant to say. Right. And you then joined in ’43.
MM: Yes.
CB: Where did you go?
MM: You couldn’t go for aircrew training until you were eighteen and a half.
CB: Right.
MM: I went on July the 5th 1943.
CB: Yeah.
MM: To ACRC. Aircrew Recruiting Centre at London.
CB: Yeah.
MM: Lord’s Cricket Ground.
CB: Yeah. How long were you there?
MM: I think probably about a month in London at Grosvenor Court. I spent some days in sick bay with vaccine fever after my smallpox inoculation. But then I, when I came out of there I had a rifle put in my hand and was one of the, to line the route for General Sikorski’s funeral at, who was the Polish, I think sort of Premier. Whatever he was.
CB: Army commander.
MM: Pardon?
CB: Army commander. Yes.
MM: Yes. And we all lined up which I, I nearly collapsed after my vaccine fever thing.
CB: Oh really. Yeah.
MM: Stood there with a rifle in my hand at the [pause] in London and waited for the cortege. The cortege to come by. And nearly collapsed.
CB: He’d been killed in an air crash in Gibraltar.
MM: That’s right. Yes. Yeah.
CB: So, from ACRC where did you go next?
MM: After that it was Scarborough. 17 ITW at Scarborough. I was based in the Adelphi Hotel which was two big houses on the front knocked together. And Scarborough was all, all RAF. All the hotels and everywhere in Scarborough were RAF there. They were sort of I suppose quite a few hundred RAF there in Scarborough at that time.
CB: So that was the 17 Initial Training Wing.
MM: Yes.
CB: What did you do when you were there?
MM: There we did, we used to drill on the front there. The corporal used to have us drilling there. And we did quite an intensive course. Law and administration, engines, basic rules of engines. Navigation. And sort of, it was quite, quite an intensive course really, you know. Every day we used to all go down to the classrooms and there were some lectures on, on different subjects there. Maths and navigation was the main thing but —
CB: Yeah.
MM: Yeah.
CB: Because everybody was air crew but this was the PNB selection.
MM: That was the PNB scheme.
CB: Yes.
MM: Yes.
CB: Ok. And a bit of drill.
MM: Pardon?
CB: And some drill.
MM: Drill. Yes. We used to drill along the front there. There was always some of the holidaymakers that were still there used to watch us drilling. Yeah. It was a beautiful, beautiful summer anyway in 1943.
CB: And how long were you there?
MM: Can we stop for a minute?
CB: Yeah. Just pause there.
[recording paused]
CB: So, from Scarborough.
MM: Right.
CB: Where did you go?
MM: Went to Brough. Brough near Hull.
CB: Yeah.
MM: For on the EFTS on Tiger Moths.
CB: Yeah.
MM: We were all aspiring pilots in those days.
CB: Yeah.
MM: And I, I did about five hours flying there which I thought I was doing very well and we, but when I had my solo check I didn’t do a particularly good landing and that was the end of my flying as a pilot. Which I think obviously we couldn’t all pass as pilots because an air crew’s, mind you there’s only one pilot, so they got to fail quite a number. I think in the early days most when they were short of fighter pilots they kept on until they passed as pilots. When they wanted pilots. But when I went there I think they’d got a surplus of pilots and they failed quite a number of us. And I finished up as a navigator.
CB: So what did they do with you next?
MM: Then we were [pause] they’d, I think they didn’t know where to send us all. I did one period down at Beaulieu in Hampshire, in the New Forest. I spent a bit of time in the ops room. There was a Coastal Command mainly, but there was also a Typhoon squadron up on there but I was in the ops room and then various other little jobs around there. I met, I met, one of the things I recall there is meeting a Liberator coming in with Air Marshall Cunningham. Air Chief Marshall. I think he was an air chief marshall probably, Cunningham coming in and Air Chief Marshall Sholto Douglas and a few other high ranking officers were waiting to greet him. And when Air Chief Marshall Cunningham got out of the Liberator he came straight up to me before anyone else. I’d still got my white flash on and he said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘There’s two corporals flew with me. Can you find them and give them some English money?’ And he gave me several pounds to give to them. He said, ‘I don’t think they’ve got any English money with them. Can you give it?’ And that was that [laughs]
CB: Your claim to fame.
MM: Yeah.
CB: So where did you go from there?
MM: And I think from there I went back to Scarborough for a little while at another, just messing about there. I don’t think we did very much there except we did a few, I remember cross country running and one thing or another for a few weeks just wasting time sort of thing. And then I went to Heaton Park, Manchester which was a holding unit before you went abroad. And I, I spent Christmas there at the end of 1943. And after that I, I think I went to Morecambe after that and before going to Canada. And I remember we went to Canada on the Queen Mary. We went one night to, to Scotland and boarded the Queen Mary there. We were taken out by DUKWs to the Queen Mary and went off during the night to Canada on the Queen Mary to New York.
CB: When you say DUKW these are the swimming lorries.
MM: Yeah.
CB: The DUKW.
MM: The, yeah.
CB: Yeah.
MM: Yes. That’s right. Yes. We, and then —
CB: So you went to New York.
MM: Went to New York. And then we went by train from New York to Toronto which was another big holding unit. And when we got to Toronto there was a scarlet fever epidemic there at this depot. This big exhibition place where we were billeted. And there were hundreds of us there. We were confined there for about, I think it was about five weeks and not allowed to, well weren’t supposed to leave the, the camp. The site there. The only break we, we, they used to march us along the shores of Lake Ontario every, every morning and, and then, then we went back to the, the depot. To the, where we were billeted. And while we were there they used to send film stars and well known people to keep us amused while we were there which would entertain us. There was, it was a big hall there. They used to come and entertain us all. Well known film stars used to come. And they used to put on wrestling matches and all sorts of things to amuse us. And after that I was sent to, as a navigator to Number 1 Central Navigation School at Rivers, Manitoba which is between Winnipeg and Regina. Half way between the two. And that was another, that was quite an intensive course there. From there I think I was there for about five months flying in Ansons and [pause] which we did, you know sports. You know football matches. It was very hot and we had football matches in between our studies but the studies were quite intensive and hard work for some of us who left school early. But about half the, half the course I was on there were ex-university boys and it probably wasn’t so hard for them. But I found it quite hard. But I ploughed through it and eventually graduated there.
CB: So you went, just going back a moment you were an AC2 in Britain.
MM: Yeah.
CB: When you got to Canada what did they do about your rank?
MM: Yeah. Well, as soon as you graduated you were either a pilot officer or a sergeant and I was a sergeant. You know, graduated as a, sort of half of the course were sergeants and half were pilot officers. And I say the, the course was the astro navigation was very hard and not very accurate I’m afraid. The [pause] and after the, after we graduated I, we went back. We, towards we were due to depart from Halifax, Nova Scotia but they asked some of us, it was going to be about four or five weeks wait there before we were sent, sent home and they asked some of us if we wanted to go apple picking. So, two of us volunteered. Well, more than that I suppose but two of us volunteered to go to one farm and we had a, we thought we were going to have quite a nice time there but we had to work hard. The farmers told us, ‘Oh no. We’ve got got to pay, pay wages for you to come here,’ So we used to put ladders up the trees and run up there, pick the apples and roll them down a hill. I think, put them in to barrels and roll them down a hill. But on our weekends off or something we used to hitchhike down to St John and we had all various little experiences going down there with different people we hitchhiked with. I can remember one hitcher, hitchhiking in a, in a car with a farmer. A farmer with a bottle of wine and I can remember that’s when the bonnets used to open both sides and as we were going along they used to open up and sort of like an aircraft you know. It used to, the bonnet used to come up each side as he was drinking his wine. Various. But yeah. That was good fun. Then we came back to [pause] eventually we were, we left from Halifax, Nova Scotia and went back to Liverpool. Then we continued with our training. We, we were at Harrogate for a time and, then I think from there we went to, to, I went to Llandwrog in North Wales on Ansons again on a, it was mainly sort of map reading and low flying course on Ansons. And after we completed that, that course we went to Moreton in the Marsh on Wellingtons. That was a Wellington OTU. Operational Training Unit.
CB: 21 OTU.
MM: Yes. And which was mainly Australians there and I think they wanted five more RAF aircrew to make up crews there and I was, I crewed. We were all sort of put in a room there and we made up crews. All got together and made up crews and I joined a crew of Australians there who, you know we all palled up you know very well together. And we spent some weeks there. That was quite an intensive course there again doing all sort of training in Gee navigation. Gee. And I got various other sort, types of navigation. One thing and another. And cross countrys. Cross country exercises. And then eventually we, we moved to 1654 Conversion Unit on to Lancasters at Wigsley.
CB: Near Lincoln.
MM: Lincoln. Near Lincoln, yes. And I, I can remember the first landing we made there after Wellingtons. We did, it wasn’t a very good landing. We came down with a bit of a bump but after that our pilot was, never did it, you know he was alright after that but the first landing wasn’t [laughs] wasn’t as it should have been. And shall we stop there?
CB: Did he have an instructor with him?
MM: We did the first time. Yes.
CB: For his bad landing.
MM: Yes. There would be, I think. For him. Yeah.
CB: Ok. We’ll stop there.
[recording paused]
CB: I’d just like to go back to Canada.
MM: Yes.
CB: When you were doing your navigation training.
MM: Yes.
CB: What was the most memorable thing about the landscape that you were flying over?
MM: Well, it was quite, quite [pause] it was mainly prairie, sort of thing around there. But there were various [pause] I suppose the change of winds was the main thing for, for navigators. You set off with one wind direction and then all of a sudden you found out the wind had changed which was quite confusing for, you know when we were in our training. As I recall it there were very often two of us. A second navigator and a first navigator and the, and one of them was doing map reading and the other was doing the plotting and that. But, but you know we had, it was quite difficult for them. For, you know some youngsters who were, you know flying for the first time. The, and a lot depended on the pilot we’d got. Whether he was very cooperative or not. They were all young chaps who had just graduated. Well, the pilots who didn’t want to be doing that job. They wanted to be sort of, they were hoping, a lot of them were hoping to go where the action was.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
MM: But, but —
CB: Because it’s a featureless landscape.
MM: Pardon? Yes.
CB: A featureless landscape.
MM: That’s right. Yes.
CB: So map reading must have been quite difficult.
MM: Yes. It was yes. But we had the turning points and that. And the timing and everything was, you know you’ve got to, all our plots and everything were marked afterwards so you’ve got to be, you know trying to do everything correctly and take the drift. You know, have drift sight and everything. You had to get the right drift on the, for the winds and everything.
CB: Yeah. So that’s an interesting point you said about the winds changing. So how did you go about establishing what the wind was doing? How does a drift sight work?
MM: Well, you get to know how much drift. You know, you’ve got your course and your track and you could tell how much, how many degrees of drift you’d got on it. It’s all quite complicated but we’d got the Dalton computer.
CB: Yeah.
MM: Which was our main little, no not a computer as you know it these days.
CB: No. No.
MM: But it was a mechanical sort of thing. No batteries or anything like that with it.
CB: A little, little aluminium box.
MM: Yeah.
CB: With a dial on it.
MM: Quite. Got all sorts of things on it, you know but there was quite a lot to, sort of a difference in height and you know temperatures and all sorts of different things. But yeah, I remember its quite, quite a lot to learn as young navigators.
CB: Yes. And of course it wasn’t all daylight.
MM: No, used to, at night that was, you know, when we’d do, did astro navigation. That was really difficult. You sort of got your head in the astrodome, you know, and sort of which, you know if the, if the, with the turbulence you’re knocking your head on the astrodome or something and you were trying to get the right star to identify, you know through the app. Through the sextant. And then when you got it there were all sorts of adjustments to make with the chart. With the sort of tables and things. I can’t remember much about it now but it, it was very there were so many different adjustments to make for, allowances for the, for the variations on the astrodome and all sorts of other things. As I say it’s all a bit vague to me now.
CB: Yes. Just to clarify that the astrodome is the transparent bubble on the top of the aircraft.
MM: That’s right. Yes.
CB: The sextant hangs from a pin in the middle of the astrodome does it?
MM: No.
CB: You just have to hold it.
MM: You do, you hold it. Yeah.
CB: Right.
MM: Hold it. Yes.
CB: Yeah. And you’re taking readings. Shot readings.
MM: Readings.
CB: Of stars.
MM: Yeah.
CB: At a timed point.
MM: Yes.
CB: And you then look at the tables.
MM: Yes.
CB: And you do a series of those to find out where you are.
MM: Yes. You can get, you know fixes you can identify one star.
CB: Yeah.
MM: And another one a different angle to, to fix your point but it took so long to do it and of course well it wasn’t so bad in, in Ansons but a fast aircraft, you know you’d be miles away before you could get the answer to —
CB: Yeah.
MM: You know, get your position. But it wasn’t a very, you were lucky if you could get within I’d say ten miles of where it should be I should think.
CB: By taking fixes.
MM: By, yeah.
CB: Yeah. Ok. Thank you. We’ll stop there.
[recording paused]
CB: You talked a moment ago about being at the OTU and crewing up with Australians.
MM: Yeah.
CB: How did that work and how did you get on with them?
MM: Well, I think, as I recall it they were all, we were all in a room together. I don’t know how many there’d be. Quite a, quite a lot of us in the same room. We all seemed to mix together and all of a sudden you, you sort of palled up with a little group and you know, you sort of blended in somehow.
CB: Who was the driving force in the selection? Would it be everybody had focussed on a pilot or how else might it have been carried out?
MM: I can’t really recall exactly how it happened but somehow I suppose it was. Yes, the pilot. Shepherdson his name was. A little, you know, not a very tall chap and we all sort of suddenly grouped together and as I say it was sort of pot luck somehow that we all blended in and we all got on very well after that. We, and then we, we eventually bought a car between us. I bought it in Northampton and we went, went back. Our little Ford 10. And we used to go about at Wigsley in this Ford 10, EHK 233 [laughs] Which I eventually acquired when the, when we, when the war ended I finished up with the car.
CB: So you’d go out in, all get in the car so — the crew is five isn’t it?
MM: Pardon?
CB: The crew is five.
MM: Six of us I think then.
CB: Six. Ok.
MM: And eventually I think there were seven when we acquired a flight engineer.
CB: Yeah.
MM: But —
CB: So it was an Australian crew. What was their Australian motivation for being in Britain to fight the war?
MM: Well, I think, you know [pause] I don’t know. I think that was, they were quite sort of loyal to Britain in those days and I’d say like all young men they, you know wanted to get in the, where there’s some action. You know. Yeah.
CB: Could you say a spirit of adventure?
MM: A spirit. Yes. It was really. Yeah.
CB: So when you got —
MM: You all, you all think at the time that nothing is going to happen to you.
CB: No.
MM: It’s, it might happen to the others but, but you, some, yeah.
CB: We’ll stop for a mo.
MM: Yeah.
[recording paused]
CB: Just on the motivation of the Australians. What was — how strong was their sense of purpose would you say?
MM: I think it was very strong. Yes. I mean I was in a, in a nissen hut full of Australians. The only Englishman in this thirty six foot nissen hut and I, I think they were quite sort of loyal to England in those days. Yeah. But the best part of it was they all used to have parcels come over from Australia and they used to share them and I used to join in [laughs] with whatever was. I finished up with a nice little sheepskin sort of waistcoat thing, you know. Which they, you know someone gave me there but they shared all the parcels that came.
CB: How many crews in each nissen hut?
MM: I should think there’d be about four. Four. About four. Four or five crews I suppose.
CB: Right.
MM: In a nissen hut. Yeah. They were all, you know beds on each side of the hut.
CB: Yeah. So you then went to the HCU at Wigsley, and there you acquired a flight engineer. What was he?
MM: He was an Englishman. Yeah. But I can’t really remember much about him. I think [pause] I believe he was a pilot who was, as I say in those days there were a lot of surplus pilots around and I believe it was a pilot who was sort of acting as flight engineer.
CB: Yes, they did a bit of that.
MM: Yeah.
CB: They re-mustered.
MM: Yeah. But of course they’d still keep their wings on. That was, you know they never took the pilot’s wings off if they had graduated as a pilot but —
CB: Well, that’s interesting.
MM: Yeah.
CB: Because from the interviews some of them maintained their pilot’s brevet.
MM: Yeah.
CB: Some of them had to give that up and wear an engineer’s brevet. In other words the E.
MM: Did they?
CB: And if then re-mustered again as a pilot they could return —
MM: Yeah.
CB: To wearing the pilot’s brevet.
MM: Yeah. I don’t know anything about that, you know.
CB: How did he feel to being re-mustered to engineer?
MM: Well, I I don’t think they’d think, the pilot wouldn’t think much to that because the pay would be less for a flight engineer than a pilot. But I’m a bit vague on that so I [pause] Yeah.
CB: Just take a break there.
MM: Yes.
[recording paused]
MM: Yes.
CB: So it’s a bit difficult when you come in to an established crew.
MM: Yes.
CB: As an engineer. How did you actually fit in to the crew?
MM: Yes. I think he fitted in alright. Yes. But —
CB: He could take the Australian banter.
MM: Yes [laughs] Yes. We, yeah we all got on well together, our crew. The air gunner used to come on leave with me. I’ve got a picture of him somewhere at, outside that house there on the end.
CB: On the wall.
MM: Leaning on the car that we got. The Ford 10. And he was very very fond of my next door but one neighbour’s daughters [laughs] When he wrote to me afterwards he often sent his regards to them.
CB: Yeah. But did you keep in contact with him after the war?
MM: Not very much. They went back and were all demobbed pretty well straight away. When the, when the Japanese war finished they seemed to all get demobbed.
CB: Yes.
MM: And I didn’t keep up. They wrote to me a few times and I suppose mainly, you know I was still pretty busy over there, you know. We did all the airline work on Dakotas and I was pretty busy and mainly my fault. I wished afterwards I’d have kept up the correspondence but I lost touch with them altogether.
CB: Yeah. Well, easily done.
MM: They wrote. They wrote to me, you know. Kept writing. But I eventually lost touch with them all.
CB: Different motivation.
MM: Yeah. Well, you, you know I was pretty busy over there one way and another and —
CB: Ok.
MM: Yeah.
CB: But just going back if I may we were at the HCU. So at the HCU what was the main activity? So you’re on to Lancasters there.
MM: Yeah. Well, we did sort of various parachute drill and things like that and I think, I don’t know whether I’ve got any —
CB: You’d be flying a lot of cross countrys.
MM: Yes.
CB: As a navigator.
MM: Yes.
CB: You were kept pretty busy, were you?
MM: Yes.
CB: What date are we talking about for the HCU?
MM: Well, the dates [pause]
CB: Just checking the book. I’ll just stop it a mo.
[recording paused]
MM: 5th of May ’45. My first flight.
CB: At the HCU.
MM: At the HCU.
CB: So the Europe, the war in Europe had finished three weeks earlier.
MM: Yeah. What date did the war finished?
CB: 8th of May.
MM: 8th
CB: 1945.
MM: Oh, I remember. Oh I must have been before then because I remember when the war finished. You know, all the station was in uproar sort of thing and you know all, went on all night sort of thing. I think war was, end of the war was declared probably in the early hours or at night or something.
CB: Good excuse for a piss up.
MM: Everything was, everyone was there rejoicing on the station, sort of thing.
CB: Yeah.
MM: Yeah.
CB: Would you say that it was [pause] although there was the rejoicing that it was a bit of a mixed reaction on the basis that you hadn’t had the action.
MM: Well, there wasn’t that, you know. At the time you know all we wanted to get in to, to go on ops, of course.
CB: Of course you did.
MM: In retrospect we were glad we didn’t, you know. When you think about that afterwards you’re glad you didn’t go on ops. But at the time we, you know we were all hoping to go on ops. But —
CB: So here we’re talking about the latter days of training.
MM: Yeah.
CB: To what extent were the crews aware of the loss rates in the front line, in the squadrons?
MM: Well, I think they were very very aware of it all, yeah. Yeah. I mean we, you know most of us knew people who had got killed and one thing and another. You know. Yeah. Some of my, you know good friends that were killed early on. I was saying the chap I joined up he went to Cardington but he was killed quite early on.
CB: Yeah.
MM: And others as well. You know, a friend of mine that I knew.
CB: Your instructors would on balance have been people who had already done at least one tour.
MM: Yes, yeah.
CB: To what extent did they talk about the practicalities of being on ops?
MM: Yeah. Oh yeah.
CB: Did they talk about that with you?
MM: I suppose, you know if we asked they would but I mean I don’t think they volunteer to talk about it very much.
CB: Right.
MM: And afterwards of course I knew you know you, know when you’re demobbed and everything then years afterwards I knew a lot of them. They were on ops. I’ve got books, you know books written by them and that sort of thing and that I’ve met and knew.
CB: Yeah.
MM: But they’d talk about it but —
CB: After the HCU which squadron were you posted to and where was that?
MM: Well, I went out to [pause] We were sent out from, went out from Lyneham. Sent out as a crew, I mean, after. After HCU we went with the, with this, some of this crew here.
CB: The picture.
MM: That crew.
CB: That picture in there.
MM: Yeah.
CB: Five of you.
MM: Went to Leicester East.
CB: Oh yes.
MM: On Dakotas. And which we did another intentive course there on pannier dropping and glider towing and all that sort of thing. Then we went down to Ibsley near Bournemouth on a glider snatching. That was an interesting operation. You know, come down and snatch the gliders. Hadrian gliders down there and, you know I did some I sat in, sat in the gliders sometimes and waiting to be snatched up. You were all tensed up waiting to be snatched up. And they used to snatch us up [laughs] and anyway when you do go up, you know it was quite good fun, you know. That was —
CB: A huge acceleration.
MM: Pardon?
CB: Huge acceleration.
MM: Yeah.
CB: So the bomber —
MM: It was taken up a bit by a winch in the Dakota. There’s a winch there that takes up a bit of the slack but not very much. It still, you know all of a sudden you’re sort of doing eighty ninety miles an hour sort of thing. Yeah.
CB: So how does this work? The Dakota has a cable on a winch inside the fuselage.
MM: Yeah. A long —
CB: It lets it out.
MM: Yeah. There’s a long hook.
CB: A hook on the end.
MM: A hook. Yeah. Snatches. Yeah.
CB: And it snatches a rope that’s held between two posts is it? On the ground.
MM: Yeah. Yeah. And of course it’s got to come down pretty low, you know.
CB: Brilliant.
MM: You know, fair sort of aircraft the Dakota. You know that.
CB: Yeah. But the Dakota itself is going to be pulled back by the snatch so —
MM: Yeah.
CB: They’re —
MM: A little bit of the jolt is taken up by this winch. This long steel, you know. I don’t know how, how much you know say perhaps a couple of hundred or a hundred yards —
CB: Yeah.
MM: Perhaps of cable you know that, you know that takes up a bit of the slack but—
CB: And then it pulls it in. Winches it in does it?
MM: Winches it in. Yeah.
CB: Right. So how far does the glider fly behind the tug?
MM: Well, it wasn’t very far. I suppose perhaps — I’m not sure now. Twenty five yards perhaps behind, yeah. To do your release, yeah.
CB: Yeah. They’ve got to dodge the airstream of the tug.
MM: Yeah.
CB: Right. We’ll stop there for a mo.
[recording paused]
CB: Cover this. One of your pilots was a man called Schuoua .S C H U O U A. What, what nationality was he?
MM: Well, he was sort of Argentinian but he’d been to England. He spoke perfect English. Better English than the lot of us. And his people were sort of in, in to textiles or something. He’d got plenty of money anyway because he, I remember he used to get short of money and wire home for another, another hundred pound or something. That was you know a fortune to us in those days. But oh, he was a great lad. He, of course he spoke Spanish was his native language but he said, ‘I’m Don Enesto Shuoua.’ [pause] But —
CB: Yeah. So he came out with you.
MM: Yes, he went and then had no sooner got out there then he was sort of demobbed.
CB: Was he?
MM: He was sent. Yeah. He came back home again.
CB: Went back to Argentina.
MM: Yeah.
CB: So when [pause] what we didn’t, we need to follow on from really is for, which we will do in a moment, is you went then to Lyneham as a crew.
MM: Yes.
CB: To go to, where did you go to?
MM: As, we went from there our first stop was Sardinia. We went on a cold miserable day in November and arrived in Sardinia on a beautiful hot day, where there was a, and where we spent the night there was a Italian aircraft which had crashed quite close to where we were billeted at. I can’t recall now just how far from us it was but that was that. And then we went by various routes to, well eventually we got to Karachi via [pause] I think it’s all down in the book.
CB: Yeah. Ok. But where did you go from Karachi? That was where, you were stationed there was it?
MM: Yeah. I was at, we were at Mauripur which was the outskirts of Karachi. I spent my twenty first birthday there. We were in a tent there. A small, small tent there. I spent my twenty first birthday with a bottle of whisky in a small tent there [laughs] And from Karachi went via Empire Flying Boat, the Caledonia, the name of it was to, to Calcutta. Spent a few days in Calcutta and then went from Calcutta to Chittagong by Dakota. We were picked up by Dakota and spent Christmas. Christmas Day we were in, in Chittagong. And went from, after that we spent a few days in, in Chittagong and then we went by Liberty ship. A Liberty ship. I think there were two crews of us then. We picked up another crew there. Two crews went by Liberty ship down to Rangoon. And there we were [pause] We went from Rangoon to 194 Squadron which was at Mingaladon Airport which was just outside Rangoon where we thought we’d be eagerly awaited but we were rudely awakened to the fact that no, they sort of didn’t. Didn’t care whether we were or not [laughs] sort of thing. We were given tents, implements to go and clear a bit, a bit of the jungle and put, put our big tents up there and make ourselves at home. Which we did. We cleared the jungle and, and cut down bamboo to put little, all around the tents to keep the snakes out. And put this like felt, they called it [unclear] or something on the, on the ground and we made it made our own beds there with bamboo. And oh, we, we you know quite enjoyed doing all this in the end.
CB: Built yourself a little village did you?
MM: Yeah, we, yes we were sort of all our all the tents were crowded around together sort of thing in the area and, you know officers and sergeants and everything were all mixed in together there really. But —
CB: What rank have you achieved by now?
MM: I was still a sergeant. I didn’t, however I eventually got a, got my crown and became a flight sergeant and then they stopped automatic promotions then, you see.
CB: Yeah.
MM: I was just, I think I was a month away from getting warrant officer but they stopped —
CB: Yeah.
MM: The automatic promotions.
CB: Meanwhile, what were you doing with 149 Squadron. Dakotas flying.
MM: 194.
CB: 194.
MM: Yeah. We were, we did all, we did all the airline work in the Far East. Well, really between, between Calcutta and well, we flew to Japan as, as well. All around that area. I didn’t actually go to Japan but some of the squadron did. You know, went to, when we eventually got to — we eventually finished up at Hong Kong. Finished at Hong Kong but then did quite a regular run to Japan. But I was mainly, mainly between. I was flying mainly between sort of Calcutta and Hong Kong and went down to, you know all the different places — Malaya and Singapore. And I went up to Shanghai once. All around that area. Our usual run was Calcutta, Rangoon, Mingaladon, Bangkok, Saigon and Hong Kong, but we used to do all various routes around there, you know. Kuala Lumpur and all different routes.
CB: Who were the people you were ferrying? Or was it largely freight?
MM: No. Mainly they had to have a good reason for flying. They were all sort of VIPs and I remember we had a, we’d got a general and all his staff we were taking from I don’t know where we started off from but when we were coming in to land at Hong Kong which was Kai Tak Airport, was a very dangerous airport. And it wasn’t the usual runway that we landed on. It was the one that was across. You could only land. You couldn’t overshoot or anything. There was hills the other side.
CB: Right.
MM: And we landed, landed there, we’d got crates of, apart from the general and his staff there were crates of rats we were carrying to the medical department for some reason or other. And we landed with a bit of a bump and one of, one the crates burst open and the rats got out. On the reception there was, waiting for his general at Kai Tak Airport there was a sort of reception committee waiting for this general and his staff and we were still trying to catch the rats and get them back in the crates.
CB: A bit of a delay then was there?
MM: Yes.
CB: But you got them all in the end.
MM: Yes. Yeah. But we had many many different experiences in, you know while we were doing different [pause] We, we had to. One of them was a belly landing in bad weather. We were going from Bangkok to Mingaladon, Rangoon. But we got caught in a, in a bad thunder storm and had to do an emergency landing. Belly landing in Burma, near Ye. The name of it Y E. We managed to sort of pick out a little, what was a little paddy field but unfortunately when we landed the mud, they used to put mud banks around this little paddy field to keep the water in the paddy field. It had all dried up and it was like hitting a brick wall. And we hit this brick wall and twisted the aircraft around and finished up tail first skidding across this little paddy field and got away with it with seventeen passengers on board. Which I’ve got pictures of. The various, some of—
CB: This was a wheels up landing.
MM: Yeah. And —
CB: The Dak wheels stick down slightly.
MM: Yeah.
CB: Don’t they?
MM: But, yeah. But it sort of ripped off an engine as we landed.
CB: Oh right.
MM: And you know, smashed the aircraft up a bit. But I was the only one who wasn’t strapped in. I’d got no, in the navigator’s seat there wasn’t a belt or anything. It was a, and I, but I sort of opened the door to tell, to shout to the passengers in there who were all strapped in to brace. I shouted out, ‘Brace,’ and slammed the door and then I tried to keep myself in the cabin but I was thrown around the cabin and I, funny how you, you know you hear about these things but you don’t believe it but all my life sort of flashed before me.
CB: Because you thought it was terminal. Yeah. Thinking of, as a navigator here we are in the Far East with huge expanses of sea and jungle were there beacons? How did you navigate in those areas?
MM: There was only, the only aid we had was the Eureka.
CB: Oh right. Yeah.
MM: Which I’d already done a course on, on Oxfords while I was at Leicester East. I had a few days course. I think it was about a week’s course on Oxfords. It’s in my logbook there so, but on Eureka which was a very easy thing. You knew what you but there were only two or three beacons in the Far East. There was one in Hong Kong and I think there was another one at, I think there was one at Saigon and one at Mingaladon I believe. But very few. They were about the only aid we had.
CB: So these are actually long range signals so —
MM: Yeah.
CB: How did you —
MM: A hundred miles.
CB: Oh, only a hundred miles.
MM: A hundred miles. When you got within —
CB: So how did it —
MM: A hundred miles you could home on to. You knew where you were and you could home on to the, on to the beacon. They were very useful.
CB: Could you just describe how Eureka worked? So there was a beacon at your destination but what are you doing to use it?
MM: Well it, a very simple thing as I recall it. It, you got a, on this instrument you could, it was [pause] just a line with and you could tell which side of the line you were on and —
CB: It was a cathode ray tube with a —.
MM: Pardon?
CB: A cathode ray tube.
MM: That sort of thing. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
MM: And you could, you could, you knew which side of the line you were on you could home, home right in on the beacon. Very easy to, to use.
CB: Because it showed you in a blip which side of the line you were.
MM: Yes. Yes. That’s right, yeah. Yes. It was a sort of, as I recall it, yeah it was like a long blip thing. The movement. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. A sort of a variation of the blind landing system.
MM: Yeah.
CB: Right. But apart from that because the distances were huge —
MM: Yeah. But it was all sort of dead reckoning, you know, just, but —
CB: Were there intermediate beacons of any kind?
MM: No. No. There was just these one or two out there and the only other thing you could, the only other aid besides all dead reckoning sort of thing was I think occasionally, very occasionally I used the sextant for a position line on the sun.
CB: Right.
MM: That’s when you could get a fix but you could get a position line onto the sun. But nothing else. It was [pause] but quite, you know quite often say from Hong Kong to Saigon that was all sea, you know. You got [high land] all on one side but but it was all sea ‘til you — well not, you could, no it wasn’t all sea but halfway sea anyway. Then and you got on to sort of Cambodia and that. What was Cambodia. That was all, you know when we were there it was French Indo China down Saigon. Yeah.
CB: But you tried to take a direct route rather than keep close to the land.
MM: Yeah. Yeah. I did that dozens of time down there you know but you were always glad when you got terrain. I think it was. You were always glad when you, you know you got to land sort of thing.
CB: Why did the squadron relocate to Hong Kong?
MM: Well, that was British of course. Hong Kong. At that time it was British and I think they thought that was the best place to be sort of thing. We thought so as well. It was very nice there [laughs]
CB: So, in Hong Kong what was the social life like?
MM: Very good. Yeah. That was good there.
CB: Did you meet any interesting people?
MM: In those, in those days I mean Hong Kong was British and the Chinese you know sort of, they got on well with the British and they you know respect us. We were sort of in charge sort of thing anyway. But I had various experiences there when we went to what they called the New Territories. Used to go swimming out there. Got on a, going on the main road along there and there was a lot of trouble there and the big, all arguing and doing a lot of [pause] people all around there. And as soon as I got there I was, you know I was only a sergeant or flight sergeant or something there and I managed to quell it all [laughs] but, you know it wouldn’t happen these days sort of thing.
CB: It was an argument between Hong Kong people was there?
MM: There was all the sort of, a lot of new territories people. They used to carry their wares into, into Hong Kong you know.
CB: From China.
MM: [unclear] bars and one thing and another and all their, you know stuff they had grown and all that sort of stuff to sell in Hong Kong. And I think it was arguing with other Chinese. I think there was some Chinese army there or something. I forget now. It’s all very vague. But, you know they had a, there was a bus there, I think. They’d held up the, held up this bus and they were all arguing and doing and —
CB: You managed to quell the riots.
MM: Yes [laughs]
CB: Yeah. And what sort of interesting people did you meet there?
MM: Well, one of the, when we were on one of our trips we got Compton Mackenzie. Sir Compton Mackenzie he eventually became wasn’t he? And we were taking him, we were supposed to be taking him from Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. I think it was to Calcutta and there was, there was a Mandarin and people seeing him off. He’d been to, he was writing a book or something and he was there with his secretary and, and they were seeing him off there. He was amongst other passengers there. We used to have various interesting people that we used to take about but, but anyway we took off from, from there. We had an engine failure on, soon after we took off which wasn’t very nice [laughs] So, we had to fly around for a bit. Try and use up some of our petrol. Then we had to, we eventually landed again and went through the same procedure again the following day on a different aircraft. With a different aircraft. And when, and when we got down to Saigon we stopped at Saigon. We always used to stop the night at Saigon which we liked very much. We liked Saigon then. And we took off from there and I was talking to Compton Mackenzie and he said, I should, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘A pity we can’t see Angkor Watt.’ You know the, where everyone goes to see these days which wasn’t far from Saigon. I said, ‘Well, as long as you don’t put it in your book when you write your book about your travels in the Far East I think we can divert a little bit. It’s not far off our route and we’ll fly over it.’ So, we did that and he was pleased as punch. But he was the one who wrote, “Whisky Galore.” And all that, you know. They made a film of it.
CB: Yes.
MM: “Whisky Galore.” But he seemed an old man to us then but you know then I looked as though in the obituary in the paper and I realised he was only, I think he was in his late sixties in those days. Which of course was an old man in those days.
CB: These flights. How long were they?
MM: Well, we did so many different flights there. It’s all in my book there, you know. I mean from, from Rangoon to Bangkok was about, average about two and a half hours I suppose. Bangkok to Saigon was probably three hours. And a lot of them were say down to Singapore. We were going down to Singapore we used to stop at Saigon first and refuel and that would be another, you know down there was probably three hours. Four hours perhaps. Averaged at about sort of four hours I suppose.
CB: When you were out in the Far East you were stationed in Hong Kong as we were talking about just now.
MM: Yeah.
CB: At what stage did you know when your demob was coming up?
MM: Well, my number was fifty four. We all knew our numbers and they used to get demobbed by numbers sort of thing and you kept tabs of, you know when your number was coming up. But anyway I elected to stay on an extra three. I signed on for another three months because I got married there you see.
CB: Right.
MM: So —
CB: Tell us about meeting your wife.
MM: Well, we, we met in, on Hong Kong island. She was waiting for a tram to go, go to, I think it was a dance. And we got talking and it all developed from there over the months.
CB: What was Phyllis doing?
MM: Phyllis. Yeah.
CB: What was she doing in Hong Kong?
MM: Well, she was there during the war, you know. She was born there. That was her home. Her father was a British, you know. He was from Taunton. He was, worked for the, you know, British Colonial.
CB: Yeah. The Colonial Service.
MM: Service. Yeah. And —
CB: As a civil servant.
MM: Yeah. But you know he had died just before the war and her mother was, her mother was Peruvian actually. And, but you know it’s a long story but she was sort of hidden in a convent as a, as an Italian but, which at the time was on the opposition side anyway which, and of course it was occupied by the Japanese and — but they were, they were on the Japanese side at the beginning of the war of course. But —
CB: So when you met her she was on her way to work or what she was doing?
MM: No. I think then she was on her way to a dance hall. There used to be dances on in Hong Kong, you know. We might even have been going to the same dance. We used to go to a dance. I think it was, I don’t know whether it was the Yacht Club or something like that. And but [pause] that was all.
CB: So when were you married?
MM: March the 17th 1947.
CB: So, how long were you engaged for?
MM: Well, I suppose probably a couple of months or something. Something like that.
CB: And you deferred your —
MM: I deferred.
CB: Demobilisation, to do it.
MM: Yeah.
CB: Kept flying in that time did you?
MM: Pardon?
CB: Did you keep flying at the time?
MM: Kept flying. Yeah.
CB: So you were, when were you actually demobbed?
MM: That was, be sort of about August. August I think it was. 1947
CB: Right.
MM: Yeah.
CB: How did you feel about the end of your service?
MM: Well, for a time I was sort of kept thinking about going back in the Air Force. Didn’t know what to do quite. Yes. And you know it was all [pause] you know kept, you know, as I say I went as an agricultural student. I handed my notice. They kept my job open of course on the railway and they, they were very annoyed when I said I’m not coming back. They said, ‘Oh, we kept your job open,’ and all the rest of it. Didn’t they?
CB: Because you were going to college.
MM: Pardon?
CB: Because you were going to Agricultural College were you?
MM: Yeah. When I, when I told them I was going to they said, ‘We kept your job open and you should come back to us, you know. We want you to come back.’ And one thing or another but I said, ‘No. I’ve finished with clerical work.’ As I thought.
CB: [unclear] So you didn’t return to the railway.
MM: No.
CB: So, how did you, what did you do then?
MM: Well, I kept waiting for the course to start. And the unemployment people said, ‘Well, you’ve got to do something eventually,’ and for a few weeks I went in a stores for a firm here. Blackwood Hodge in Northampton. I was only there a few weeks then and then the course started and I went as a, you used to have to go to lectures. You know, agricultural. To somewhere in town. We used to have lectures on farming and that and then I had this. Went on this to this college in the not the well it was at Malton, Malton Park Farm.
CB: Yeah.
MM: It wasn’t a college. Malton Park Farm. It was St Andrew’s Hospital College. Farm I mean. Yeah.
CB: How long were you there?
MM: About seven months.
CB: And then what?
MM: Then I bought a small holding not far from here which is now all built on. I’d got about eighty fruit trees and I kept supplying half of Northampton with, with a lot of people had their hens in the back garden then. I used to sell, you know eight week old pullets and one thing and anther, you know. And one thing and another. Kept pigs. I don’t know. I used to go all around all the farms collecting the eggs and selling them to the shops and one thing or another. Fruit and so on. I’ll say, then I got a temporary job on the central in those days British Electricity Authority. Which eventually became Central Electricity Generating Board which lasted thirty years until they closed down two power stations. Did the administrative work for closing down Northampton Power Station.
CB: Did you?
MM: And Leicester Power Station.
CB: How did you get in to that?
MM: Then I elected not to move anywhere else and I, I finished up at British Timken which was just a stone’s throw away. I could walk there. Spent ten years there. My last ten years of working life there. Which I quite enjoyed.
CB: What did you do there then?
MM: Well, I was a, when I joined they said, ‘Well you wouldn’t want — ’ I was on the professional and executive list or something at Leicester. I wasn’t on the unemployment thing. And they didn’t send me any jobs to apply for or anything. And so eventually I got a job here just as there were strikes on in the engineering department and everything else. And they said, ‘Well, there’s only one job going. That’s a foreman’s clerk.’ I said, ‘Well, try me.’ You know. So I went and had an interview and got the job as a foreman’s clerk. Which was, you know just a little clerical job. I thought that would do me. I was already on a pension from the Electricity when I was fifty five so [laughs] and but then there was another job came up there as a [pause] as a clerical, and an engineering clerical worker or something. It was partly clerical and partly engineering. It was a technician sort of thing which developed eventually. I was called a technician there which I quite enjoyed you know. We tested in the, tested all the bearings from all over the world from the British Timken factories in America and Australia and Africa and everywhere else in the world. We’d test them. And I was there until I retired at sixty five.
CB: Didn’t you do well. Good. We’ll stop there.
[recording paused]
MM: Which wasn’t very nice.
CB: So the cunims are ahead of you.
MM: What?
CB: The cumulonimbus are ahead of you.
MM: Yeah.
CB: And are they, how big are they?
MM: They built up so quickly and we, we couldn’t get over them in those days.
CB: No.
MM: I mean we usually used to like to fly at five or six thousand feet or something like that.
CB: Oh, I see. Right.
MM: But sometimes you know you would try and get over them or you would see one, a bank of cloud and by the time you got to it they sort of rose so quickly. That was the trouble out there.
CB: Is this over the —
MM: There were more aircraft lost I think during the war and that with the weather than anything else.
CB: Oh, were they?
MM: And accidents and that.
CB: And are the cunims on the edge of the land or are they in the middle of the ocean?
MM: Well, they were all over. All over that area, you know. It’s the heat and everything. In the mornings that’s all we liked to take our early start and but they built up so quickly with the heat and you know they was so much weather. You know, rain and one thing and another they built up so quickly. We used to try and get an early start.
CB: On your planes you had IFF did you, effectively so that or some kind of beacon so people could keep an eye on you.
MM: No. Not as far as I know. No.
CB: I mean if you went down.
MM: No. I don’t know.
CB: Or if the plane went down how would they find you?
MM: No. No. As far as I know there was no, nothing [pause] I mean the wireless operators, you know they’d, you know if, if you’d got a chance the wireless operator would you give the rough position, you know, lat and long and sort of thing. Latitude and longitude and where. That was what we did when we came down in Burma. I was very proud of that. Latitude and longitude was dead on. So [laughs]
CB: What was the crew comprised of? Two pilots.
MM: Well, there was the pilot and, and the air steward was very often another pilot. He was acting steward because there was such a surplus of pilots and one of our air stewards was a pilot. [Bernardus] a big tall handsome bloke he was. Only a young chap and I’ve got a picture of him somewhere and he was one of our air stewards. But, but another one was, I had several different air stewards at different times. There was the wireless operator and navigator. So, you know there were usually four of us.
CB: What was the air steward’s job? Keeping you watered?
MM: Well, he was, you know he was taking sandwiches and looking after the passengers. You know.
CB: How many could you take at a time? Passengers.
MM: Well, capacity was twenty six. Sometimes there weren’t twenty six but that was the most we could take.
CB: They’d have luggage with them.
MM: Yeah. Not much but you know very often it was just sort of hand luggage and but, I mean one when we came down in you know our belly landing they could all carry their luggage. I think afterwards. It’s funny, until I knew this was going to take place I was looking for things to [pause] I know, and what not and I [pause] Ah, what’s this now. This was another [laughs] another thing I found. One of our things we had to do on one of our courses was ship recognition. We used, that was —
CB: Right. So, this is, this is —
MM: Had to a recognise ships you know.
CB: Yes
Other: Not easy
CB: Of all nationalities those. That’s got different —
MM: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: British. American.
MM: Yeah.
CB: Japanese.
MM: But —
CB: Those, they are warships.
MM: I was looking for, looking for maps. I say my son and his wife were just going to Canada and these are some of my actual maps that went around Rivers.
CB: Are they really?
MM: You know.
CB: Yeah.
MM: He’s going quite close and I was finding these. And I found my name on them somewhere but some of the routes we took but —
CB: What would you say was the most memorable thing for you in the war?
MM: I suppose one of the most memorable things was when we did our belly landing.
CB: After the war. Yes.
MM: After the war. Yeah. That was after the war but —
CB: But in the war itself was there something that stood out? Particularly memorable.
MM: Well, all through the war you know before I joined up even we used to keep in touch by, you know on the radio. We were always eager with what was happening everywhere. You know. Surprising that as you can’t imagine you know as a fourteen, fifteen, sixteen year old. Nowadays you can’t. But in those days we sort of knew everything that was happening you know in the Middle East or you know. It was always on the on the radio. All the different, you know what had happened everywhere. And we all used to talk about it and, you know keep in touch.
CB: And when you knew about your brother dying in —
MM: My —
CB: Who was it? A relative? A relative of yours.
MM: My son.
CB: Oh, I beg your pardon. In the war.
MM: That was my —
CB: No. No. In the war.
MM: During the war.
CB: Yeah.
MM: No. He was one of our, a chap I joined up with.
CB: Oh the chap you joined up with.
MM: Yes. Yes.
CB: Your friend.
MM: Yes.
CB: Yes. How did you feel about that? How did you feel about that?
MM: Well, you know. Just one of those things that you know we obviously, we you know thought what a shame it was, you know and all that.
CB: Yeah.
MM: But he was one of various friends of ours you know. Now, another boy I was quite friendly with near, I grew up with. You know. Geoff Boyson his name was. He was he was an air gunner. He was killed quite early on in the, you know in the war soon after he joined up. And several others. But you know it was just one of those wartime things you know. You, nothing you could do about it but you were you know very sorry about it all but —
CB: So the four of you who joined together as far as them and their families were concerned how did you keep in touch with what went on with them?
MM: Well, the, one of them, one of the four he, he didn’t. He finished up as, on a, on a navigator’s course but he didn’t pass. And, you know I saw him afterwards and everything but I don’t know what he was doing. What he did really after that. But he didn’t continue as air crew anyway. And the other one who I was [pause] he became a navigator and I was best man at his wedding and everything but he, he didn’t do much. He passed as a navigator but after that I don’t really know what he did. He didn’t do any more flying. But a lot, a lot of them that when the war finished they finished up as they made them in charge of transport or all sorts of different things. I’ve got a, sort of various books there written by one of them. One of them was, “Avenging in the Dark.” it’s called. I don’t know where it is now. He did two tours. He, he died after you know a few years ago now but he’s exactly a year older than me. He did a tour. A tour on Stirlings and a tour on American B17s.
CB: Oh, did he?
MM: Which not many people knew that the RAF used B17s.
CB: For a short time, yes.
MM: Yeah.
[recording paused]
CB: You talked about the different backgrounds of the people you were being trained with.
MM: Yeah.
CB: How well did the different backgrounds gel or did they tend to be —
MM: Well, you know we all mixed together. I mean my, probably my best friend there was ex-university but we never talked about it. I don’t know what he did at university or anything but, but we all got on well together but I know he didn’t get a commission and he said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘My people will be so disappointed. They’re expecting me to get a — ’ Most of the university boys got a commission you see. But —
CB: But he didn’t.
MM: He didn’t. No.
CB: What, what did, he would end up as what?
MM: Well, he was sergeant.
CB: Yeah.
MM: Same as me, you know. And then of course we all went to I don’t know what happened to him but as I say people made friends with them and then all posted to different places.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
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 Maurice William Marriott
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
2017-08-24
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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AMarriottMW170824, PMarriottMW1701
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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01:47:18 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
Interested in aircraft through the Air Training Corps, Maurice joined the Royal Air Force in 1942 and went to Cardington. In July 1943 he went to the Air Crew Reception Centre at Lord’s Cricket Ground, followed by 17 Initial Training Wing in Scarborough. Elementary Flying Training School on Tiger Moths in Brough saw him become a navigator rather than a pilot. He was in the operations room at Beaulieu and describes an encounter with Air Marshal Coningham. Maurice was sent to Heaton Park and Morecambe before sailing to Canada and 1 Navigation School at Rivers, Manitoba. He discusses the difficult wind changes and how a Dalton computer was used to work out drift. He recounts the difficulties of astro navigation at night. Maurice flew on Ansons before returning to Britain.
RAF Harrogate and RAF Llandwrog on Ansons, were followed by Wellingtons at an Operational Training Unit at RAF Moreton in the Marsh. Maurice crewed up with Australians and trained on Gee navigation. He eventually moved to the 1654 Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Wigsley on Lancasters. The war finished before going on operations.
Maurice went to Leicester East on C-47 where he did a course on pannier dropping and glider towing (Hadrian gliders). He went from Lyneham to Karchi, stopping off in Sardinia. Maurice was stationed at Mauripur. He travelled to Calcutta and Chittagong, then Rangoon and 194 Squadron at Mingaladon airport. They did airline work in the Far East, ferrying VIPs, including Compton Mackenzie. Navigation was with Eureka and dead reckoning. He finished at Hong Kong where Maurice married. Demobilisation was in August 1947.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Sally Coulter
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Burma
Canada
China
Great Britain
India
Burma--Rangoon
China--Hong Kong
England--Northampton
England--Scarborough
India--Kolkata
England--Northamptonshire
England--Yorkshire
Canada
Manitoba
Manitoba--Rivers
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1945
110 Squadron
1654 HCU
21 OTU
aircrew
Anson
C-47
crewing up
forced landing
Gee
Heavy Conversion Unit
Initial Training Wing
Lancaster
navigator
Operational Training Unit
RAF Harrogate
RAF Leicester East
RAF Llandwrog
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Wigsley
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/509/8411/ADobleRG151117.1.mp3
445d6be24eaf87a7eca4d9a422544675
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
Doble, Ronald George
R G Doble
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Doble, RG
Description
An account of the resource
13 items. An oral history interview with Ronald George Doble (3030256 Royal Air Force) his log book, service documents and photographs. George Doble served as a wireless operator / air gunner with 97 Squadron
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-11-17
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.
Requires
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Andrew St.Denis
Sergeant Ronald Doble – 3030256. Was born in London and initially served in the Air Training Corp, No,336 Squadron before joining the RAF aged 18, towards the end of WWII. Starting training for Radio Operator and Air Gunner, but switching to focus on Gunnery, this was on Wellington’s at Morton-in-Marsh. Completing training at No.1660 Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Swinderby and then No.1653 HCU at RAF Lindholme, both in Lancaster’s the war in Europe had finished. Joining No.97 Squadron at RAF Hemswell, flying in Lincoln’s he flew as a rear gunner and took part in equipment tests such as Rebecca/Eureka, Radio Navigation equipment. After leaving the RAF Ronald entered an apprenticeship as a panel neater, building body’s for Talbots and Sunbeams at Rootes Group.
Factual ‘CV’
20 August 1945 – 9 November 1945: No 2 Air Gunnery School at RAF Dalcross – Aircraft: Wellington.
10 November 1945 - 1 November 1946: 21 Operational Training Unit at Moreton-in-Marsh – Aircraft: Unknown.
1 November 1946 – 9 November 1946: 1660 HCU at RAF Swinderby – Aircraft: Lancaster.
10 November 1946 – 26 March 1947: 1653 HCU at RAF Lindholme – Aircraft: Lancaster.
27 March 1947 – 1 July 1947: 97 Squadron at RAF Hemswell, Lincolnshire – Aircraft: Lincoln.
Biography
Born in Hammersmith, London to a working-class family, Ronald George Doble recounts his service in the RAF before leaving in 1947. Doble left school, aged thirteen, to work behind a guillotine cutting metal. Upon witnessing the bombing of London during the Second World War, Doble joined the fire watchers, tasked with dealing with the fallout of oil bombs before making the choice to join the RAF, beginning at the Air Training corps. Soon after he was sent to Grove court air crew receiving centre. Here he recalls a memory of a group of him and his new friends playing around with a mess tin which flew through the window and fall onto a flight sergeant with fifty men on parade. Doble was then sent to Yatesbury, where he was picked up as a wireless operator air gunner, undergoing a nine-month course.
Finding that there was no longer any use for his position, Doble went to Clapham, London where he took an educational course in preparation for taking the aptitude test at RAF Regiment Locking. Upon passing the test, he was posted to the Initial Training Wing at Bridgenorth. Once completing training at Bridgenorth, Doble was moved to Dalcross Air Gunnery school before proceeding to move to Moreton-in-Marsh, 21 operational training unit, then to the 1965 HCU and then finally ending up in Hemswell in Lincolnshire. However, when he and other gunners began to be de-ranked, they made the decision to leave the RAF and chose to continue an apprenticeship in Filey, making Sunbeams, Talbots, and Humbers Bodies. Within this job, Doble would get lead poisoning before being left without a job and finishing his career as a panel beater on car repairs in Haddenham.
This collection including an oral interview, with reference to stories ranging from attempting to carry a piano out of a building during a bomb attack and getting stuck and running out of oxygen whilst attempting to do a drogue firing. https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/8411 There are also multiple photographs detailing the different services he was part of and the men he served with, as well as some of the aircrafts he flew. One such photograph shows Doble as well as other RAF airmen being introduced to King George VI and his family with an ‘x’ added by a fellow airman to show Doble amongst the men. https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/17743 The collection includes an article about a Bomb Aimer and Navigator who refused to fly, destroying their maps in the process. Despite being allowed to fly after this event, they did so again and was ultimately charged with Lack of Moral Fibre. https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/17746 Finally, Doble’s log and service and release book shows his service across his entire career as well as the aircrafts he flew in each place, something which he explores within his oral interview. Upon his release, Doble was described as an ‘extremely capable and efficient worker… of a very pleasant and cheerful nature’, and once again his interview serves to reflect the type of man he was and still is. https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/17747
Amy Johnson
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: So this is the introduction to the interview that I’m having with Mr Ron Doble. My name’s Chris Brockbank and we’re at [omitted] Haddenham, and we’re going to be talking about his experiences, er, in training and, er, in life in general with the RAF and what he did afterwards and he was with 97 Squadron. So Ron, would you mind starting please with what your earliest recollections were, your family and how you came to join the RAF?
RD: Well I was born, er, in London, in Hammersmith, um, from a very working class people, my family, er, my father was a driver on the Great Western Railway and my mother was an ex— believe it or not, nun, who was kept by the nuns and ill-treated etcetera, which is something, but there you go, um, and she left or got out of it and met my father and they both got married. Then I was born and that was it. I lived in Richard’s Street, which was, um, very near the Gaumont British Studios where the film stars used to come and I used to look down there and see some of them getting out of their cars, very interesting actually. From there I, I left school, at, er, just nearly fourteen and the war had just started. I didn’t do a great deal regarding that but I joined the ATC, Air Training Corps, 336 Squadron it was, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time there [cough] beg your pardon and, um, during this time of course the war had just more or less started and, er, all we could think about was, or all I [emphasis] could think about, was to get into the RAF and do flying and be a great heroic person [laugh] and shoot down thousands of aircraft and how wonderful it would be, not realising really it would have been a nightmare in some cases, maybe not for the likes of me myself personally but for the likes of people that I know, have known and known very well, great friends. I then went to — oh dear, where did I join up in London?
CB: At Lords.
RD: Yeah. Went to Lords, had a bit of breakfast, got kitted out with the stuff and then sent from there to Grove Court [background noise] to Grove Court which was, er, Air Crew Receiving Centre and while we were there we were put to really rigorous, um, oh dear, discipline [emphasis] but being all youngsters, of course, you always had a bit of fun altogether, sort of thing, and one thing or another, and it was a great laugh in a way. In other ways it wasn’t but there you go. So what happened, one of the things that happened there, we were put into rooms next to each other, this lot in this room and us lot in this room, and we thought we would go and have a little mess around with the other lot, not anything violent or anything like that, just a laugh. So away we went and, er, somebody joined this mix-up, er, picked up a biscuit, a set of biscuits, which were three mattresses that were on the bed for you, for your sleeping, and he, he just got into this crowd of guys all messing around but within that was a mess tin and, unfortunately, the mess tin took off and went through a window, and we were all flabbergasted so we all shot to the window and looked out, low and behold, the grass and things had fallen on a, a flight sergeant with, with fifty guys on parade down below. So we thought, ‘Oh my God.’ So we went to our rooms quickly but that wasn’t not quick enough because the next second up come the flight sergeant, Chiefie we used to call him, and, um, we were all put on a charge. So that was a good start [laugh] for the start of our — whatever. Anyway we were marched in front of the, um, guy in charge of the place, group captain, and it was quick march, quick march, left right, left right. Walked in and saluted and he said, ‘Right disgraceful, absolutely disgraceful going on. This is not what we do or should do.’ So he said, ‘Therefore I’m giving you five days confined to barracks and each one of you will pay threepence halfpenny for all the damage that you’ve caused.’ So we thought, ‘Right.’ Left, right, left right and out we went, and that was the end of that. The confined to barracks was nothing really, let’s face it, because we weren’t allowed out or went on relief from there for the period of time we were there which was, er, about six weeks. [cough] What happened then was we were sent to — that’s right, Yatesbury. I was because I was picked as a wireless operator air gunner. This was a nine month course, um, which was to take me nearly to the end of the war. But anyway, what happened then was we all, well not all of us, part of us went off to Yatesbury. We did a radio course and learnt the Morse code and things and then we were suddenly told that they didn’t want radio wireless operators anymore. So that curtailed my training there and we were sent back, typical business, but sent back to Scarborough which was another receiving centre for aircrew. And while we were there the powers that be thought, ‘Right we’ll give them something to do.’ So they put us on a so-called aptitude test and this aptitude test was to determine whether you were fit and able to be aircrew or other things, OK? So away we went. We had to march so far, run so far, swim. Swimming, by the way, um, I should always remember being in the little place where you changed and then waiting to see whether they gave you a slip, and the slip was like a little loin cloth to cover your vital parts up but the flight sergeant came along and said, ‘What the hell are you waiting here for some of you guys.’ And we said, ‘Well, where’s the slip? He said, ‘No bloody slip here.’ He said, ‘You get in that water.’ He said, ‘And the swimmers will help the non-swimmers.’ So we all jumped in and did our bit and then got out [cleared throat]. We had various, various things, mental things as well. One of them that really struck me was the fact that put in front of you was, was a box, in the box was squares of wood, painted on top was half black and half white and you had so many seconds to turn these things round to see how many you could do, and what surprised me quite a bit was that some of the guys turned them round completely so at the end of it there was hardly any score, which was amazing really. Anyway, that went on and then we were told, ‘Right, you’ve done that. You’re going to Locking, RAF Regiment place, Locking.’ We got there and we were kitted out with army stuff and boots and gaiters and given, um, a rifle — and, er, didn’t know what to do with it but, um, anyway while we were there we were put to different things such as crawling through tunnels [background noise] and one thing or another. So we got through that and then posted on the — at Scarborough posted on a notice board would be exactly what you, your aptitude made of what you were capable of. But I must stress that when you joined up you knew what you were going to be, or supposed to be, if you passed the test, but with this thing you went to it and it was just luck of the draw, that’s all I can say. Because some of us got through and much to my amazement, I was really chuffed, I got through as an air gunner, fine, three-month’s course, yeah? So — but some of them didn’t get thorough, didn’t reach these — full [?] marks so they were designated, believe it or not — don’t forget that we were all volunteers — they were designated to be Paratroops, um, down the coal mines or in the Army and then there was a big clear out then. And then we were posted to ITW, Initial Training Wing, at Bridgenorth.
CB: Right, we’ll stop there just for a mo. [interview stopped at 0:13:42:9 and restarted 0:13:45:07]
RD: Before we went to ITW, sorry I’m getting a bit mixed we were sent to [ cough] Clapham, in London, Wandsworth and we were put on an educational course [slight laugh] and we went to the — we were stationed at Victoria Rise, which was a, a block of, um, rooms on the hill, and we were marched from there to the tram and the tram took us down to Wandsworth College and we went in the College and we’d do four or five hours learning different things, which was, which was quite good actually and, of course, big head here put his foot in it again because on, on the desk [cough] beg your pardon, was a, a pressure thing, what do you call it? A U-tube and he was showing us the way you, you varied the pressure. So big head here thought, ‘Oh well, I’ll have a go at that.’ So instead of blowing carefully I went there and went like that and the whole lot of mercury, well part of it, shot out the top of this tube and went all over the place and mercury is like little ball bearings. So we got all the lads to go round and pick up all these little ball bearings and put it back in the tube before the teacher come back. We thought it was funny but I didn’t at the time. Just something, one of the bloody stupid things I normally did. So there we go. So what happened then was we were there and we done that and then we were going on to ITW but, a big but, during this time we were sitting there and all of a sudden this aircraft, er, came over and it was quite low and quite noisy. And we thought, ‘Oh good God, I wonder what that is.’ And the thing cut out and went down and we were on the hill and then we just saw a big bang and, er, that was the V1. So the V1 thing started coming over then. What happened then was the course was abandoned at the college, as normal, and we were given, four of us, each, each of us four, four lads were given a truck with a driver and we were told to go to these bomb sites and help out with rescuing people or helping in general. Well, regarding rescuing people that was ridiculous really. I mean, you’re walking over, er, debris and stuff and, er, I know it sounds awful but it [background noise] probably did more damage than [unclear] anyway we were taking off of that and told us that, um, we’ll be responsible for all valuables and moveable objects in these bombed out buildings, er, and one instance was whilst we went to a four storey building, we looked around for valuables, we took those and I must impress none of these guys, none of us kept one penny of anything that we found but [cough] it was handed over to the van driver so, OK, and he had to report back and hand that in, um, anyway we got to the — one of the points was we got to the top story of this four [cough] four-storey building and there was a grand piano there. So we were told we’d have to move the grand piano and the only way you could move the grand piano was to put it out of the shattered window. There was no frame or anything and lower it down on straps. Well, the guy that was with us was supposed to have been a removal van, man so we put the strap around. It was one strap and a couple of ropes and we, we managed to lift this piano up and put it on the ledge of the window [cough] and then the guy said, ‘Right give it a little push and then we’ll lower it down.’ So we gave it a little push and, low and behold, the piano just disappeared down. The ropes went through our hands, we couldn’t hold it, and it hit the bottom of this place in the area and made a lovely booming sound but that was the end of thing. So really and truly we didn’t achieve a lot there. But we did, we did help, I must admit we did help. So then we were, we were went to ITW at Bridgenorth, Initial training Wing Bridgenorth, and then we did our ITW there and then from there I went on to Dalcross I think, which is now Inverness.
CB: Airport.
RD: Dalcross, um, I forget the name of the — similar[?] something — Air Gunnery School and that was really something, that really was something, but by now of course the war was getting very close to the end. So got in these Wellingtons and, er, it is most odd but I got a picture up there, you can see later, you probably know anyway they were just, er, lattice work and fabric [cough] but very very strong, very reliable, anyway I got in that, my first time in there I was given a suit and, er, all the bits and pieces. And away we went and we had to do drogue firing, and, er, air to sea firing and also, er, camera work with Spitfires and Hurricanes, um, that’s right, yep. Spitfires and Hurricanes, um, that’s right, yep. Well, this course was to me the, the height of what I had to achieve because I didn’t want to fail this. This is what from a little lad in the ATC up till then I had to get in that Lanc or whatever and do, um, some work. So anyway the end of that came and I did very well, um, and they made a new idea of, of drogue firing which was called a quarter cross under. And, amazingly enough, I got a hundred and sixteen hits out of six hundred rounds and another one I got what? Thirty-two hits I think. It’s in the logbook. And when I got — passed all the tests and I did very well actually and, er, the guy handing out the wings congratulated me on my scoring, sort of thing, so I was quite chuffed about that. From there we went to Moreton-in-Marsh which was 21 Operational Training Unit and again on Wellingtons but these were really doing the job, flying around and God knows what. So I’d only done about twenty odd hours at Dalcross and nothing high altitude so when I got there I was put amongst a pool of half a dozen guys and there was a chap there called Squadron Leader Corbesley [?] and, and his crew [cough] and they were well into their course but their gunner was sick with appendicitis so, low and behold, out come the boss of the gunnery section and said, ‘Right Doble, you done well on the final test you can do well on this I’m sure.’ So he put me in the crew with Pete Corbesley, um, oh I forget their names now, bless them. The bomb aimer Ted Heywood [?]— anyway, so away we went. Now this flight was a high altitude bombing flight and also a night-time drogue firing. Right, so I’ve got all the kit on and everything and I’d never done this before. It was a four hour or five hour trip [cough] oxygen and all the rest of it. So in the turret I got, which was good. I managed to get in that. That was OK, lovely, and away we went on our, on our, on our, um, job. We did the bombing and all the rest of it and then I had to do the drogue firing. Now, nobody had told me much about what to do because I’d missed that part of the course or I’d been shoved in halfway through. What I had to do was to get out the turret, put the little emergency bottle on, put the drogue down the flare chute and let it out on a winch, and then get back in and look for the drogue, which was — had a little light inside, fire at it when I’m finished, come back, wheel it in and do it. Right, I went out, I got in the turret, looked and I thought, ‘That’s funny, where’s the drogue?’ And then I saw this thing doing a complete circle behind the aircraft [slight laugh] and the drogue had gone out there and hadn’t streamed so it was just like a parcel. And when I looked and this thing’s whirling round I thought, ‘My God.’ All I could think was whether it would cut the tail off. Obviously it couldn’t but I thought, ‘Oh gee whiz,’ so and the skipper said, ‘You OK gunner?’ I said, ‘Yeah I’m just starting now.’ So I fired a few rounds and all the rest of it and then I quickly got out, put the bottle on and had to wind this thing back. So I wound it back and then I had a nice silk scarf and that got tangled up winding in the wings. So I had to wind it back a bit and get the scarf out and fiddling about and then suddenly I felt a bit woozy but anyway I managed to get the drogue in, undid it and — yeah and then I thought, ‘Right I’ll get back in now.’ But I felt a bit odd. So as I tried to move I couldn’t really move properly and I looked down and this little bottle I think had, I think they had about fifteen minutes, I’m not sure but I think they had, um, and it had run out. So there so there I was stuck halfway down at the end of this dark tunnel, um, gasping for breath and there are things on the side where you can get it in but you can’t really see them. And lucky enough [clears throat] the navigator pulled his curtain back and had a look and I said, er, you know, ‘Can you help me, you know?’ Sort of thing. So he come down and looked and said, ‘Oh yeah,’ and plugged it in and said then I was OK. I got back in the turret and away we went. We did the job and got back and I thought, ‘My goodness me. That was the [clock chimes] first long range high altitude trip and it was a nightmare.’ [laugh] All because of my own fault possibly but there you go. That went on there and there was another a bit of a thing. The Wellies were getting a bit old by now and, um, one little thing was in the turret I felt a bit of wet and God knows what and when I looked the hydraulic pipe had broken and saturated me with hydraulic oil. So that was one thing and, um, the next thing was, on another trip we did, um, I was in the turret and a big cloud of smoke and stuff come up through the turret and I thought, ‘Oh my God. It’s going to catch alight.’ [clock chimes] So I quickly got out the turret and I said to the skipper, ‘Skipper, it looks as if the turret’s on fire.’ [slight laugh] I mean, I know it sounds funny but it’s not funny, it’s not [slight laugh]. So he said, ‘Well is there any flames? I said, ‘No, no, no there’s no flames.’ So he said, ‘Right, well stand by it and see what happens.’ And then I said, ‘Oh, it’s alright now.’ The smoke had disappeared. So he said, ‘Oh good.’ He said, ‘OK then. Carry on. Get back in your turret.’ Well, I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘I’m not getting back in there.’ I said, ‘Because if it’s on fire this thing might fall off or something.’ I said, ‘No, I’ve had enough of that’. So he said, ‘Yeah, OK gunner come up front.’ So I went up front and it was a twin flying thing, a Wellington with twin controls, and I sat in there in the — this seat and the skipper was there and [cough] I finished, finished that. He let me fly the thing but I couldn’t ruddy fly it, you know. I sat there and he said, ‘OK, you take over governor and see how you get on.’ So it was night time so I didn’t know what to do. I thought, ‘Well if I hold the stick still then the thing just goes.’ So I held the stick still and then all of a sudden all the dials started going round. Well my little brain said, ‘Oh blow me, I’m over speeding, there’s too much power.’ You know, so I leant forward to get the throttles and he said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘Well I’m throttling back.’ ‘Don’t do that.’ He said [cough], ‘Look out there.’ He said, ‘And you’ll see the horizon, even though it’s dark.’ He said, ‘Where’s the horizon?’ And of course the horizon was up there [unclear] long way down so he, he sorted that out and we landed and that was the end of that. OK. [background noise]
CB: Yeah, you only had yourself to look after.
RD: Absolutely, you know, it was your responsibility. If something happened well that’s it. It was just bad luck. But getting back to my opinion about it all was the fact that — I know for a fact that lots of these aircraft were, were, um, destroyed. I mean, Nuremburg I think was one and another one, Leipzig, um, where you got ninety-five aircraft knocked down in one night.
CB: Yeah.
RD: Um, that is one of the reasons why we went on all this business to start of my career, if you can call it that. They wanted air gunners. Oh and something I missed out by the way —
CB: That’s OK.
RD: I’m sorry about that.
CB: No don’t worry. We can pick it up. What, what did you miss out?
RD: Well, what happened was, when we were at St Johns Wood, at the ACRC, um, they called for volunteers but air gunners. Now we were all different grades. Well, obviously I went down ‘cause I wanted to be an air gunner and so, being stupid, [noise] it’s only a three month course or something like that and I’ll be on operations, um, so we all queued up and along came the groupie [?] and he talked to some and talked to some and he come to me and he said, ‘How old are you son?’ I said, ‘Eighteen Sir.’ He said, ‘Well bugger off!’ And, er, I went with a few of the others, you know. So he was quite human, put it that way. I mean I was only a kid wasn’t I? Let’s face it. We were all kids, high spirited and, er, mind you we learnt quick, well I [emphasis] didn’t. The people that did these ops, hundreds of ops and things, tours, they were incredible people. The other thing that strikes me as well — can I go on? Was the fact that, as you know, if you didn’t do the op — [background noise]
CB: Now here’s your tea Ron —
RD: Yes, thank you very much.
CB: So some of these people —
RD: [noise] Shall I carry on? So, some of these people, as you know, I’ve known an instance of a guy who done thirty ops and he was told he’d got to do an extra five, um, you know, before he was taken out and he said, ‘I’m not doing it.’ He said, ‘ I’ve had enough. I’ve done my bit and that’s it.’ And that’s where this business of LMF comes in and they were sent to Eastchurch, where the LMF place was, and they were demoted, AC2s, and, er, I don’t know, just, used as spare parts I suppose. But it was awful really, absolutely terrible, um, and quite a few, quite a few did that. I don’t know and that’s, that’s what gets me [emphasis]. If I’d done quite a few ops, how would I have felt? I don’t know now. I would love to have known but you don’t know. But there you go. Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah, OTU. So we finished up at OTU. My pilot, by the way, was a squadron leader. He was quite important and he was a Spitfire photo reconnaissance pilot originally and he was on a high flying operation over Italy at the time and he was, er, shot down and he was captured by the Italians and put in a prisoner camp. But the, the Italians surrendered and left the Germans there but when this happened he got away and he was transported back to England, believe it or not, and that’s when he came onto the OTU for multi-engined aircraft to go back, back to that and he was getting on a bit as well, so that’s it. So from there we went to 1653 HCU. I can’t quite remember.
CB: At North Luffenham?
RD: It was Lindholme, Lind— I don’t know. Some of them we were — one of them in there in my book we were sent to the Heavy Conversion Unit there and then moved halfway through to another operational place, airfield.
CB: OK. 1653 was North Luffenham.
RD: Yeah, was it? Oh well, I might have it wrong, I might even have it wrong, it was North Luffenham. But anyway, from there we went to, um, a squadron, that’s it, in Lincolnshire.
CB: Just before we get on to that could you just explain what you please did at the HCU?
RD: Oh, yeah, well what we did at — sorry. Obviously — what happened at the Conversion Unit was, you come from Wellingtons, which were rather a sparse looking aircraft, but ground [?] crew very reliable, to the Lanc which got a bit more room, er, the turrets weren’t much better than the old, er, Wellington, um, and what we did there was, um, touch and go and all the rest of it. And then, um, high flying and bombing etcetera and when we finished that we went on to squadron, I think it was — yeah, the squadron I was at was Hemswell in Lincolnshire. Hemswell, that’s right and when I got there I my pilot [unclear] and the crew but he had a heart problem, poor old boy, and, er, he was demoted from squadron— from wing commander down to squadron leader, sorry, and, er, we never saw him again. So I was left again without a crew. So again I’m the spare Charlie. So we all sat in the gunnery place and then along pops the gunnery leader and said, ‘Right, Doble, you’re flying with so and so. Right, Doble, you’re flying with so and so.’ And I flew away with Squadron Leader Bretherton. I think this is a well-known name, I’m not sure, but he was a nice guy. [clears throat] But all this time, all this time, things are moving regarding the air crew itself. Um, a — and I can understand it really, with the sergeant ground crew were sharing their mess with youngsters, sergeants, um, with nothing like their service or whatever. And it wasn’t, wasn’t a very happy scene at that time and they were obviously looked at, it was looked into and the powers that be said, ‘Well, as from — whatever date it was — you won’t be sergeants any more, you’ll be gunners in grades. There’ll be Gunner 2 and Gunner 1 and Master Gunner and your rank would not be there. It will be there but it will be a crown with, um, G2, G1 or Master, Master Gunner.’ And that was equivalent to sergeant, flight sergeant and warrant officer. The war had ended and I still hadn’t got into it and that was — that did it for me as far as I was concerned [cough]. I was pushed from pillar to post, didn’t do a great deal of flying and I got a bit fed up. So I thought, ‘Right I’m going to leave.’ So I left. We all got together actually and said we were fed up with this business and, I don’t know, about twenty of us decided we’d leave the RAF and — oh sorry, during this time the thing that came out was you could serve three years or five years if you wanted to, early on, and we had all signed up for three years and you were given fifty pounds a year for the three years, for a five — no, for the three years, that’s right. So we signed up, fine. Sorry, this is before things happened, sorry, before the squadron. Sorry about that. So we’d all signed up so what happened when we got to Hemswell, the war had ended, we were messing around and we all decided then — they’d de-ranked us and we were fed up with it. So we thought, ‘Right what we’ll do we’ll leave.’ And there was a clause in the thing that you signed that said if you had an apprenticeship, um, you could say that you want to continue with your apprenticeship and you’d be let off the signing up [cough] so about twenty-five of us turned up outside the office and we all marched in one by one into the boss and we all said, ‘We want to continue with our apprenticeship serg.’ And there was no messing about. It was, ‘OK that’s it, OK that’s it.’ And that was the end of it. I was sent to Filey, near Scarborough, kitted out with my suit and trilby hat and stuff and, er, released from the RAF. And then I came home and I was fed up really, I really was and, um, the other thing was coming back into Civvy Street was most strange because I was only a kid when I went in and I’d lived with loads of people and then suddenly bumph you’re out and you were on your own. And living in London there wasn’t much going on there as far as I was concerned and money was tight. So, um, that’s what we did.
CB: Where was your apprenticeship? Where was your apprenticeship?
RD: Oh sorry, yeah, that was at Rootes, Rootes Group in Acton, and we were making Sunbeams, Talbots and, um, Humbers bodies and during this time I was there, of course, I was working on all these things. I was a panel beater. And, er, there was lots of lead used on these old bodies. They don’t use it now, but what it was was when they were assembled they were hand assembled, so there was no real strict conforming, so when they came off the body with the doors the doors wouldn’t fit. The body was all weird. So it all had to be jacked out and messed about and then the joints were, were spot-welded, so that had to be covered with lead and I got the job of, amongst other guys, finishing lead so I did that and, um, got lead poisoning. So what happened then was my teeth started feeling awful and my gums — and I couldn’t at a piece of bread. So I went to the hospital and they said, ‘Well there’s only one thing for it. We’ll have to take all your teeth out.’ So they took all my teeth out and by then Rootes, Rootes Group had shut down their production on Talbots and we were out of a job but my union [emphasis] had taken up the lead poising business because there were others obviously. There were some that were really bad. They could hardly walk with this business. It got into their bones. So, um, that was it and then what happened then was I got a letter from the union with a cheque and the cheque was for a hundred pounds which I suppose nowadays would be — what, a thousand? And that was it, in settlement of my claim but obviously some of the old boys never made it I don’t — anyway that was it. So we left that. What did I do then? [cough] Um, oh that’s right, I took up motor cycling. I mean, that was good. My little bike was passing cars on the road and the rest of it. So I took up motor cycling. I met my dear wife and she used to sit on the back and terrified but she liked it. But we had good fun and I met lots of people and I, I got a job, er, as a panel beater on car repairs in Haddenham, where we are now, across on the estate, industrial estate, and I did that until I retired. And then when I retired I took up the Air Crew Association and I met some lovely people. Ah they were great guys. They are now [emphasis]. Look at, look at my mate here, you know. They are, they’re so helpful and lovely, all of them. And that’s what I done and I became the welfare officer. At one time we’d left [unclear] when I was squadron bomb aimer and, er, we used to go round all the guys and cheer them up or have a chat, exactly, more or less like you guys are doing really, all voluntary, but well done and absolutely loved doing it. And then, er, as time went on and I gave that up. I used to organise lots of trips, didn’t I? And one of the trips I, I managed to get was I wrote to, um, the Mem— Memorial Flight, Lincoln, and they wrote back and said, ‘Yeah, come up and we’ll give you a flight.’ So I went up with two of my mates [cough] I think that’s [unclear] there and, low and behold, and we got a trip in a Lancaster, which was quite nice. What else did we do?
CB: I’m going to stop it there because your drink is —
RD: Oh yeah —
CB: [background noise] Now after refreshments we’re just picking up on a few things now. So Ron, er, it’s difficult to understand when you haven’t experienced it what it was like in gunnery training. What was the first thing they did to teach you how to shoot from an aircraft?
RD: Right, so what they did was, um, you first go on the rifle range, obviously, at the gunnery school and then you would go to a turret, um, which was fired into the butts and then you sat in that and, er, you operated it and you fired it and that was fine. Then you were taught, um, the amount of deflection you gave to each aircraft, so you had to learn — yeah, really — I still — you had to learn the wing span of the aircraft. So you had to identify the aircraft. If it’s an ME109 — I forget now, I’ve got it somewhere, it’s thirty-odd feet, and then you had to, um, in your mind, give a little bit of leeway or whatever there and then the other thing was — it was silly really, in my opinion, but I’m, I’m probably wrong, but all the training was done by what they called curve pursuit. That’s what they called it. It’s in the book somewhere.
CB: And what did that mean?
RD: Curve pursuit — it meant you fly here and the aircraft would come here, the Spitfire or Hurricane or whatever, and supposedly a German aircraft, and it would come round and then it would —
CB: In a curve.
RD: Start firing and then break down or break down that way. So you had to give your deflection and it would be — I forget now, um, anyway you had to gradually bring it in to the, to the dock and the dock would be when that’s right astern.
CB: OK.
RD: But the attacking aircraft would never get into that positon because they come along that like and then they dived down and away. They wouldn’t make a dead, a dead shot.
CB: OK but if I can just ask you another question there though because these are technical phrases really? So what do you mean by deflection?
RD: Well deflection is when the bullet leaves the gun you got — it’s got to go from there to the aircraft and also the aircraft is moving at a speed so you’ve got to fire —
CB: Ahead of it.
RD: In front of the aircraft all the time and gradually decreasing it, you get what I mean? There’s the sight there. It starts off there, um, and you’re gradually decreasing the, the deflection until its zero right behind you.
CB: Cause as it gets close —
RD: But you get —
CB: Yes but the further away it is the greater the deflection because the bullet has to go further.
RD: That’s right and then the bullets wouldn’t strike anyway really. The proper, proper range, where you can do damage really was two hundred yards but you opened fire at six hundred yards.
CB: Rihgt, OK. And how many rounds were there in — for each gun?
RD: Oh, there were hundreds. There used to be in the old aircraft there used to be a can and they’d fill it up but these aircraft, the Wellie as well, they found there was not enough bullets so in the aircraft hallway up there’s a big, um, storage thing —
CB: A drum.
RD: A steel box, steel box, and they’re laid like that, flexible links [cough] and they’d go down this chute onto the power, power roller sort of thing, right, that drags them along and it would go along there, quite a good, a nice job, under the turret —
CB: This is the rear turret?
RD: Yep. And then to the guns so you’d have one, two, three, four, four of each, and once you’d put them in the breach and locked it down then, when you fired, the strength of the round going in pulled the bullets along so, you know, they just kept feeding in, sort of thing.
CB: Yeah, OK.
RD: [cough] Very uncomfortable, um, and the controls were like a motorbike controls, um, left, right, up, down and triggers. No heating, um, but they did have one plug which would be for an electric suit and if you were lucky enough you got an electric suit. They did have them but they were a bit troublesome. But anyway, on this particular night, I had an electric suit and we did a high, high trip and it was absolutely freezing cold, um, your eyes ice up and you got to watch the oxygen because, er, your spittle sort of goes in the oxygen tube and then it ices up, so you got to make sure it’s clear by cracking it, you know, so you can breathe. How many people passed out or whatever I don’t know but that’s what you had to do, um, what else was there?
CB: So the gunsight itself, what is like that?
RD: Oh yeah, it was the old-fashioned one —
CB: Was a circle, was it?
RD: It was just a little round thing like that with a hood, that’s all, with a sight that’s projected by light at the bottom, know what I mean?
CB: So there was spot in the middle of it, was there?
RD: A dot in the middle.
CB: Yeah, a dot.
RD: And a circle.
CB: Right and —
RD: And when the aircraft got close, um, you got it right on the outside and you gradually decreased it. It was all luck of the draw really. And then — oh, yes, that’s right, the electric suit — so this one — another drama — I plugged in the suit and, er, when you’re high up you tend to sweat a little bit, believe it or not, just on the back of the neck and things and, of course, this bloody suit when I moved my neck like that it was going [buzzing sound] it was sending a small charge through. Oh dear and this part here was beautifully warm, really, really, really warm. This was there so I had to keep turning it off and get freezing cold, turn it on and get it warm and everything. Anyway what happened when I got back I complained, took it off, and low and behold, my jumper had — a big polo neck thing had a ruddy big hole in it [laugh] and it went through that and it went onto my battle dress [laugh]. It didn’t burn my skin but what was happening it was shorting out there [cough] and burning my clothes [laugh]. That was another saga and that was it.
CB: You were lucky not to get fried.
RD: Well yeah [laugh] but it was, it was so damn cold. It really, really was.
CB: So what temperature would it have been outside?
RD: Jesus, I don’t know, I don’t know, minus twenty?
JL: Probably more than that, depends what height you were at.
CB: More likely to be minus forty.
RD: Forty yes, you know, that is —
CB: But very cold anyway.
RD: That’s bloody cold. But one plane I flew in at the Conversion Unit had been an ex-squadron Lancaster, it’s time had expired or whatever, and it been sent to the Conversion Unit and I saw pictures of this as well, it did happen. The visibly with perspex and the turret visibly really is very limited because the guns were there, the sight’s there, and you’ve got panels, so what they did they cut the hole, um, glass area off —
CB: The back.
RD: So yeah. So when I got in this thing you were literally sat there with nothing, just obviously the guns and stuff, but, um, cor that must have been bloody cold but they did it. Thing is they had to do it, didn’t they? Because, you know, they were losing aircraft left, right and centre. And the other thing is, the silly thing that I think is, um, quite a while before, um, these ops become more frequent, um, they were losing aircraft. They couldn’t understand it. What was happening, as you all know now probably, was the fact that they had these Messerschmitt would, would up and firing cannon at an angle. Well, you’re sitting here and you can’t see down there, and these things used to come along like that and just blast the old cannon into the aircraft. And that’s it, you — well they’d always put it into the wing, not to the fuselage, because with the bomb load they could kill theirselves — put it into the wing, engine caught fire and that’s it. They knew about this but the thing was to put a turret in — the first Lancaster, the very very first Lancaster built — I don’t know whether you know this — but there was an under turret. But the powers that be, they were on about bomb load, so they took the turret out and made more space for a bomb bay [cough] so they were coming underneath there and doing that. So, um, one squadron, I think it was 77, a Halifax Squadron, um, they cut a hole and put a .5 drill on the mounting, um, to make sure that they could see what was going on underneath but I don’t think that was very good. But that was where most of the casualties were, underneath, firing, not direct, not this silly curve pursuit thing. They wouldn’t do that, that was daft. Then the Lanc, er, the Lincoln was a stretched Lanc really, very nice, different, a little bit of comfort and in the turret totally different. There were 2.5s [cough] pardon, two half inch Browning and, er, a little desk. It was amazing really. You could put your hands out and a single column which fired by a button on top and you could do all this and that would do all that instead of doing all this and the sight was, um, what they called a gyro-sight. It was on the front — was — it had ME109, FW190, Heinkel 111 and the idea was you identified the aircraft you turned this thing round to whatever aircraft you identified, which would feed into this system, the wing span, and the sight itself would be, I think — let me think, yeah, diamonds, yeah, you understand?
CB: Yep.
RD: Little white diamonds, one in the middle, and when you moved the turret these diamonds in this screen would, would — were black. You know what I mean? You know, you would start off there, they were black, and when you come astern it would — and that was the gyro-sight, which is quite successful really, but how many were shot down like that I don’t know. It was quite a nice sight and the heating was incredible, there was heating as well, um, quite comfortable actually, very good [cough].
CB: OK. Just going back to gunnery school, how did they teach you to do deflection shooting before you got in the turret?
RD: Well — no —
CB: Clay pigeon?
RD: Yeah.
CB: So how much of that did you do?
RD: That’s it.
CB: How much of that did you do?
RD: It was quite a bit and you know it’s the usual thing you’d start behind there so the clay went out like that. You had to deflect, you know, because the thing’s dropping isn’t it? Fire and then you go on the quarter which is again, er, more or less, a detraction and then on the beam, which would be, um, full [?] deflection and then on the spar [?], which would be going the other way, you do less. It’s quite — you know, it was fairly easy because you didn’t sight it. Well people must know, you just covered the clay, you know what I mean? And — but you had to follow on and that was the thing.
CB: It was to [unclear]
RD: So many, you know, so many would sight it up and stop and pull the trigger and, of course, it was too late but it was the flow. That’s it.
CB: And that, that taught you the importance of flow?
RD: Yeah. So that was it.
CB: And fast forward when you went to 97 Squadron.
RD: Sorry?
CB: You went to 97 Squadron. Did you — so was the war in Europe over by then?
RD: Yeah. We were called the —
CB: The Tiger Squadron.
RD: Tiger Force.
CB: Tiger Force.
RD: But of course that fell through, didn’t it? I think, I think it was a good thing too because the Lincoln wasn’t, wasn’t sorted for that sort of thing. You know, um, what the [unclear] forces were doing — they were doing — what two or three thousand miles, fifteen hundred miles, you know? And the old Lanc — well, it, it was alright. And of course what the fuel you put on then it lessened the bomb load and that’s why they did away with this under-turret and why didn’t fit one. They knew what was going on. I know for a fact. I‘ve seen photos of the Lanc wing with bullet holes in it and they put rods through and it shows you that the, the cannon shells were going in at an angle underneath the aircraft.
CB: Did they, um, tell you about that?
RD: No.
CB: What do you understand about scarecrow?
RD: Yes, well that didn’t take place. I’m sorry, it didn’t take place, in my [emphasis] opinion. I’ve spoken to many people and seen different things [clock chimes] and, er, no they were flames, explosives. They’d been hit in the bomb bay and, er, just — but they thought they were scarecrows, big, big, big guns firing scary things up them and big explosions, you know. But that’s in my opinion. I mean, I’m just saying.
CB: There was, there were lots of different situations in, obviously, in the war but how did you get on with the people who joined up with you and did you keep in touch with them for a period?
RD: Yeah, I kept in touch. I’ve got a photo there, see. Yeah, I had great friends. Fred Davies, he was a Welshman, he was a nice guy. Yeah, there was no, no animosity, nothing, right? None whatsoever, in, in my lot, put it that way. [clock chimes]
CB: The crew went together well?
RD: No animosity or anything. Really lovely. [clock chimes]
CB: And as far as mates were concerned, how many of those did you lose on the way?
RD: Well, I lost two, that’s right, yeah, two gunners, well two crews and that was the course at OTU.
CB: What happened to them?
RD: [clears throat] Well one of them was coming into land on the runway and at night. [clock striking] This was the thing, at night, and, er, it landed short and went in the forest. I’ve got some pictures of that somewhere and, er, smashed a tree [?] and that was it. And the other one was a friend of mine and Sandy and I go to Botley because that’s where they’re buried. And this crew — they were nice. There was Robin, Robbie I called him. He was rear gunner and there was the navigator. The pilot was called Ferdinando and they also had on board instructors so I should think there was probably on board five —eight people. And what it was, we, we, were on the way back to the aerodrome at Morton and a big weather front came in and we were told — it said by radio, you know, watch it there’s a bit dodgy weather and we managed, believe it or not, got in fine. We landed, perhaps because we’d got a good pilot, Pete, you know, he’d done it before. And while we were standing there waiting for the truck to come along and load our stuff in, in the distance on the hill — it was only six hundred foot high, apparently, they found out afterwards — there was a big red glow come up and died down quickly and we all thought, ‘What the hell’s that?’ And, er, I thought no more of it. And then in the morning of course when, when we went for breakfast there was, um, pictures of this and there was the Lincoln [?] and they were all killed and Robbie was too. He was a great character. Yeah.
CB: So next you went to the HCU and the HCU you went to 97 Squadron but the war finished. So how did everybody feel about that?
RD: Well we stopped [laugh] sorry. That’s the reason why I left anyway [cough]. Not only that they’re demoting you and bringing in these new grades and chucking you in — you hadn’t got a mess then I suppose. I don’t know where you went. They didn’t have a gunners’ mess, whatever, I don’t know. You just felt let down. You know what I mean?
CB: Let down because —
RD: Well I was —
CB: Because you hadn’t seen the action, is that what you meant?
RD: There was that to it but it was the way you were treated after the war — it was, it was just falling to bits, you know, I mean, as you say, the aircraft — the economy [?] of it was time-expired bloody Lancs and squadrons. The Wellingtons were well on their way out really. And also the morale was there. I mean, when you’ve got a group of guys together and they’re doing something, you know, dodgy [laugh] flying and — you don’t know what’s going to happen, put it that way. Then you become very close but then, as I say, look at myself. I was told to fly with them and fly with them and fly with them. I didn’t even know the crew. Then when Pete left so there was nothing, as far as I was concerned, and the war, that had ended, and I thought, ‘Well, what is there?’ And they started coming out with these aircraft that could — jets, you know. Oh yes, that’s right, sorry. There’s a little thing I must tell you as the fact that when we was there on the Lincolns we were told that there would be an exercise with Canberra’s, you know, so we got in the aircraft, I got in the aircraft and that was it. Then these Canberras were going to do a diving attack on our aircraft. So I’d got this gyro-sight, so the Canberra was way up there, carrying on the same course, and I’m looking at that and thinking, ‘Right, when you come down I’ll get you.’ And, er, he came down. I went like that and the gyro-sight toppled, get what I mean?
CB: Absolutely.
RD: It was, it was too quick. So that’s another thing, I mean [laugh]. Useless, isn’t it. What can you do?
CB: Sure.
RD: You know, you get the 262s, you know, and had you got plenty more of them they could have done a lot of damage.
CB: What sort of experiences were fed back when you were in the HCU? Because a lot of the crews had been on operations. So what did you get from that?
RD: Well they were quite happy, you know, really, I suppose but, um, I never doubted that, they’d done their tour or whatever, um, yeah, we were alright. But of course the thing is, with the older people in the RAF — I’m not talking about peacetime, wartime as well — the older people in the RAF. I mean, we were, we were at a dance, er, I forget where it was. Anyway, I was — I’d got my buddy [?] and things. It might have been Morton or somewhere and [cough] the guys were having a few beers like everybody else and enjoying it, lovely, and then in the morning we were told to go to the cinema, all sergeant aircrew to go to the cinema. So we went to the cinema and there was the CO and he said, ‘Right.’ He said, ‘I’ve never seen such a disgusting display of behaviour by all you people at this dance.’ He said, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’ And I heard it at school as well. They used to tell me, ‘You’re nothing like your fathers and your people before you.’ ‘You’re a disgusting young people and to pee in the middle of a bloody dance floor.’ He said, ‘It’s just the top of the thing. That’s disgusting.’ So we thought, ‘Yeah, that’s nice isn’t it? That’s typical of what’s going to go on.’ So we left there and it turned out it was a ground crew sergeant that pissed on the floor. So there you go. Not that I’m saying anything about the ground crew. They were lovely. We all had our moments, I must admit.
CB: How did the air — the crew of your aircraft get on with the ground crew?
RD: Lovely, yeah, but then again you didn’t see a lot of them unless you walked around and spoke to them. Yeah, they were fine, um, but you read reports of course that they were not fine, you know. They were — you know there’s a bloke, his statement I got upstairs [cough] written by some — in my opinion — brain has gone — about ground crew, he said they — a whole list of it, they hated us, they did this, they did that [cough]. It’s all rubbish. That’s how it, um, came about, you know, by their state of mind. Obviously they must have had a bad time or something like that and that was it. I don’t know whether that’s —
CB: Did you keep in touch with your crew after the war?
RD: Yes. Yeah. I’ve got some photos there —
CB: I’m going to stop this now. [background noise]
RD: All the pictures that you see of the Lincoln now. They’ve taken the gun turret out, mid-upper, I don’t know why.
CB: Just on this topic. We are talking now about gunnery again about equipment. How did you feel about using point 303s instead of .5s? Because the Lincoln had .5s.
RD: I used to think at that time that was, that was OK because, um, if I remember rightly, I think at six hundred yards, no four hundred yards, you get an area of a twenty two foot six square.
CB: A cone.
RD: So, you know, you’ve got a chance of hitting but a little 303 like that [cough] on the under plate on the front of these aircraft would just bounce off unless you got a lucky hit, which they did, they did at times, I must admit they did. But the 20 mill that was alright, my God that was — phew, bloody hell, that was a thing that was. And to load them you had to get in the turret and, and drop a, an arming tool down a hook and you had to drop it down to the breach, hook on the 20 mil cannon shell, and then pull it up, um, into the breach.
CB: This was the belt, the belt of shells.
RD: But the thing was you had to be very careful because some of the shells were impact used and if you got hold of it and pulled it like that you could blow yourself up. [cough] I think they discontinued those anyway. But they did with the turret. It was too much. I was as deaf as a post anyway.
CB: Ok. Thank you. I’m going to stop it now. [interview paused at 1:23:14:01 and restarted 1:23:16:2]
RD: Now we’ve glossed over [background noise] what you did after leaving school before joining the RAF. So you left school at fourteen Ron, what did you do before you joined the RAF and where did you live?
RD: At fourteen I went to Rootes and they were building, at that time, the stern frame and the centre section, wing centre section, of the Blenheim and, um, my first job there was to put behind a guillotine, which I had visions of one of these French guillotines coming down and chopping my head off, but it was a machine obviously and it cut metal, and I was the holder-upper on the guillotine, and my job was to go behind the guillotine. The guy operating it was there and I used to hold it and, er, it would cut and then I would put it down and cut, put it down and —
CB: This is aluminium sheet is it? Sheet aluminium?
RD: Alclad.
CB: Alclad.
RD: Alclad. Yeah, I used to do that and then there was guys going round with rivets and the rivets had to be normalised and, um, they were put in salt baths for a certain amount of time and all us guys had trays and at certain times of the day, and when I was free from this guillotine, you were given these rivet, rivet boxes and you had to go round to each guy, take his old rivet box and give him new a rivet box and that would go all the way through the cycle so that the rivets were always soft, yeah? And would harden with age. And then I was offered a job, sheet metal work, right, and I was taken on by the union as a, as an apprentice for sheet metal work and I used to do a bit of riveting and a bit of this and a bit of that, and shaping things and that, and, um, I think that was — that went on for — oh how long? Three years, that’s right, three years. By that time I could do a pretty good job at, um, panel beating. I was knocking out dents or whatever in the aluminium stuff and that. And then of course the end of the time came and, er, I got my calling up papers. I went to — what’s the name of the place? The house in London?
CB: What, to Lords?
RD: No. It’s a building. Oh God, Air Ministry RAF place — it’s got a name. Anyway, I went to there and that’s where all the things, medicals were done, and I went to that and then in my log book you’ll see A3B, A3B, NL what it was I got to do this thing, the length of leg, and I think it had to be thirty, thirty inches, yeah, and when they shoved me up — it was very crude in a way. They shoved me up against a, a back wall and then they would measure your leg length and mine was twenty-nine. So I got one guy pushing me back like this and the other guy pulling my legs to try and get the extra inch but it didn’t work out. So I could, according to that, I could never be a pilot because I didn’t have the leg length [cough]. [unclear] Of course, er, there was a little guy who used to fly, um, Kittyhawks and stuff and I used to take him to the Air Crew Association and, um, his job was to liaison with people, with these aircraft, and I always remember a little tale he said was, er, when he was in the Far East, he was told to fly from — I don’t know where it was, Libya to Malta, and he was told in — where the headquarters were — but this was a special message for the admiral in Malta, so he said, ‘ I’ve just come from a trip.’ And they said, ‘No you cannot worry about that, get in the aircraft and do this job because it’s very, very important.’ OK, gets in his Spitfire, flies off and lands in Malta and he said, ‘I’ve got a very special secret message for the admiral.’ So he had — was escorted to the — I don’t know where it was, the naval base, and went in front and saluted and gave the admiral this, er, this envelope [cough] and, um, the admiral went over there near the window and sort of opened the thing, ‘Oh, jolly good, jolly good, yeah. I bet the odds on that will be really great.’ He said, ‘OK, you can go and get yourself a meal now.’ And it was a tip. [laugh]
CB: For racing.
RD: For horse racing in Malta.
CB: [background noise] Ron was, um, in London during the war before he joined the RAF so what was it like Ron when you were in London and experiencing the air raids?
RD: I was only fourteen at the time [clears throat] and the war started. The sirens went and everybody panicked and run around, and got under tables and things, but then it was the all clear. And then nothing happened at all for quite some time, until one day above, in the sky above us, and over London itself there were vapour trails, loads and loads of vapour trails, and aircraft way up high, and then a smudge of smoke from where we were on the horizon. If you got upstairs and looked out you could see a smudge of smoke and that was when they first started bombing the docks and they caught fire, several of the granaries and other places along there, which really made a blaze, and all this was going on in a relatively small area of London called the East End [cough]. Unfortunately, that is where the real English people were, the cockneys, the, the miners, the coal — you know, the dockers, all sorts of things, and, er, living a very frugal life. But these bombs came down and wiped out a lot of the East End and then the fire got even worse and you could see the red on the horizon. I thought it was a good idea but — it’s silly again — but me and my mate said, ‘Let’s have a bike ride up there and see if we can see what’s going on somewhere.’ But we, we rode up there through London itself, near the East End, and then we were turned back because the police were there and God knows what, um, and then at night, they started to bomb at night, and this went on for, oh dear, four or five months maybe, maybe more. But every night, without doubt, without any problem, the siren would sound and then the bombers would come over. Then in the morning when it got light the all-clear would go. There was no guns, nothing. They just came over and did what they did. Then one night, one particular night, we were all there and waiting for the sirens to go and the sirens went, and we had an Anderson shelter in the garden and we went down there, sort of thing, and then the guns started. You never heard [cough] anything like it [chime] and all the guns down south were created in London, you know, mobile guns and everything and, um, they just fired hundreds of shells up in the air but they didn’t, they didn’t, they couldn’t target anything. They didn’t know anything about where they were or anything. They just fired everything and the idea was, apparently, I found out, was to raise morale of people — ‘cause every night they sat there and the bombs were coming on top of them and nothing was happening. So this, er, lot went up and — but they still carried on bombing and, er, we had a few two roads up that, um, dropped and killed some people and then they hit the gas, a big gasometer there, which was quite something that. That went up in a big flare [chimes]. It was a good mark but quite frankly I didn’t see, where I was in the west of London, I didn’t see a great deal. The one thing they did drop was an oil bomb which was a barrel full of crude oil with a detonator on it and that come down in Shepherds Bush Green. It didn’t do any damage but it made a mess, black muck everywhere. I can’t — that’s it as far as I was concerned, er, and then I joined the ATC and through that I used to cycle to the ATC and come back. And then I joined the fire watchers [slight laugh]. They brought out a thing, dousing the incendiaries, because this is what, what caused so much problem in London and everywhere, thousands of incendiaries came down, burned the roof and burned the place out. So they brought out voluntary fire parties and what you did you got together as a neighbourhood and you were issued with a stirrup pump and a bucket and, er, told how to put these fires out by laying on the floor and pressing the thing and one thing or another but if you pressed — put water directly on it it would just explode so you had to be very careful [cough]. So I did that for a while and then, as I say, I joined the ATC and used to go there and then the bombing receded then because that was the time, I believe, that the Germans were going into Russia. They wanted all their aircraft over there, most of them, and that was it. Then I joined the ATC. The V1s that caused — I’ve spoken to you about, at Clapham, when we were on the preliminary air crew training course, er, that was another sort of thing. Oh and by the way, um, when I was home, home in London I had a five-day leave — Chiswick was quite near us — but there one tremendous great explosion and, er, it blew some houses down and things and, er, people didn’t hear any aircraft or anything. And that was the actual first V1 rocket that hit the, hit the ground in London.
CB: First V2.
RD: V2, sorry, V2, yeah.
CB: Were there many refugees from the east of London coming your way. What happened with them?
RD: They all went in hotels and things along what they call Bayswater Road, which runs along Hyde Park, and they were all put in there, loads and loads of them, quite a lot from Malta to help them out, um, very good actually. They really looked after them I must admit, um, what was I going to say? Oh, the other thing is, what surprised me was after the war, er, Malta had, had been saturated with bombs and so many killed and this place was just wrecked. But they began to build it up and there was a guy apparently, I think called Mintoff, which was the president of all of them, the boss, and he asked our government for a million pound to help with the job and it was refused. Typical politics I suppose I’m afraid. But that’s life. Thank you very much.
CB: Thank you Ron. [recording device stops at 1:39:12:6 and restarts 1:39:17:01] This is just a summary of Ron’s situation. Even though he joined the RAF on 31st of January 1944 at Lords and Grove Court he never became operational during the hostilities. He’d chosen to be an air gunner and, er, was sent on a wireless operator course, with a view to then going to air gunner. However he ended up being shunted from pillar to post instead of actually going to, er, straight squadron operations. So various training he undertook included RAF regiment and educational training. He eventually left the RAF in 1947.
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 Ronald George Doble
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-11-17
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ADobleRG151117
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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
Ron Doble grew up in London and joined the Air Training Corps and the fire watchers when war was declared. He volunteered for the Air Force when he was 18 and trained as an air gunner. He talks about the conditions in his turret and the mishaps he had with his crew. Ron was never operational and left the RAF in 1947. He then returned to his former job as a panel beater were he stayed until he retired. When he retired be became involved in the Air Crew Association.
Contributor
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Christine Kavanagh
Cathie Hewitt
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--London
England--Shropshire
England--Wiltshire
England--Yorkshire
Temporal Coverage
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1944
1945
1947
Language
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eng
Format
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01:40:15 audio recording
1653 HCU
21 OTU
97 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
bombing
civil defence
displaced person
Heavy Conversion Unit
Initial Training Wing
Lancaster
Lincoln
military service conditions
Operational Training Unit
RAF Bridgnorth
RAF Dalcross
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Yatesbury
Scarecrow
training
V-1
V-weapon
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/324/3480/ARodgersR170220.2.mp3
67c5ef52bd3e8e546995b948eeec9b4c
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
Rodgers, Ronald
R Rodgers
Description
An account of the resource
Two items, An oral history interview and some photographs concerning Ronald Rodgers (432573 Royal Australian Air Force). He served as a mid upper gunner with 460 Squadron.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Ronald Rodgers and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-02-20
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. 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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Rodgers, R
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JM: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Jean MacCartney, the interviewee is Ron Rodgers. The interview is taking place at Mr Rodgers home in Southport, Queensland on the 20th of February 2017. Ron lets –
RR: And the spelling of it is R,O,D.
JM: R,O,D. Yes, we’ve got that yes, yes. Now we’ll start at the beginning Ron.
RR: OK.
JM: Back in 1924, and you were born in Cowra?
RR: Yep.
JM: And did that mean that you spent some time in Cowra or your early years?
RR: I grew, I went to school in Cowra. And then I joined the, it was in those days the Union Bank, which became the ANZ afterwards.
JM: Um.
RR: And then I was seventeen by this stage and I was transferred to Caloundra, which was a town twenty miles away. And I worked there until I went into the air force. Well actually I got called up for the military first and I reported to the military area zone at [unclear]. And as soon as I told them that I had an application in for the air force and I was just sort of waiting on the reply, they discharged me in two days, and I went back.
JM: Right. Well just before we go a little bit further there, let’s just go back a little bit. So, your time in Cowra. You did primary school and high school? Did you finish at the Intermediate Certificate or did you go through to the Leaving Certificate?
RR: Yes, finished at the Leaving Certificate.
JM: Leaving Certificate, you did your Leaving Certificate?
RR: Did the leaving certificate, yes.
JM: Right, OK. And your parents, were both, were they in town or?
RR: Yes. my Father was a local builder.
JM: Right.
RR: And he was, he’d been building there for, since the early 1900’s.
JM: Um.
RR: Had built a lot of homes in Cowra over the years. And he died a couple of years after this period. When I, by this stage the bank had appointed me to – oh that’s right, no I was going into the air force.
JM: Right.
RR: So, I went straight into the air force.
JM: Um.
RR: And I was in the air force until I came back.
JM: Um.
RR: After the war.
JM: Yeah, but in terms of the, you finished your Leaving Certificate and then from having done that you went into the bank at the local branch of the bank there and then?
RR: Yes.
JM: You did?
RR: Had a few months there.
JM: Had a few there and then they put you off to Coonamble?
RR: Yep. Caloundra.
JM: Caloundra, sorry my apologies. And then you had the call up but you had, you’d sent off your application for the air force. Why did you choose the air force, why did you want to go into the air force?
RR: Well I’d been involved in the ATC.
JM: Right. The Air Training Corps, what from?
RR: From about when I was about fourteen.
JM: Right.
RR: And I had my heart set on being a flyer.
JM: Um.
RR: I finished up I didn’t fly much. I started Tiger Moths.
JM: Um.
RR: But each instructor had about five pupils and so they were looking to get you out very quickly. And I can always remember I’d had one flight out to the satellite drome and they came and said ‘The chief scrub inspector wants you to fly him back to Malanda’. And I said ‘OK’ and I can always remember this, as I was coming into land there wasn’t a Tiger Moth in the sky. And suddenly I looked at this area, part of the landing area, and there were nine Tiger Moth’s all coming in at once. And the instructor said to me, he said ‘If you land in a white pegged area you’re scrubbed’. And sure enough, there was ‘planes coming in, I moved over and I landed in a white pegged area. That was the last time until Margaret took me on my birthday a few years ago on a Tiger Moth flight. That was the last time I’d flown a Tiger Moth.
JM: Um. And this is when then you were in the Air Training Corps?
RR: Yes, I’d signed up.
JM: Yeah, for the air force yeah.
RR: For the air force yeah. And it was only a matter of a couple of weeks and I went to Lindfield in Sydney, in Bradfield Park.
JM: Um.
RR: Which was the induction area for aircrew.
JM: Um.
RR: I did training there and then I was sent out as a prospective pilot.
JM: Um.
RR: Because this one error that fixed me. And then I said ‘What happens now?’ They said ‘You’re being transferred to No2 Wireless School at, what was the name?
JM: Parks?
RR: Yeah, Parks.
JM: Um.
RR: Yeah. To do a wireless course. I’d studied Morse ‘cause my bank manager had been a first World War guy. And they did Morse and he sort of got me going on Morse and I’d obviously topped the course in Bradfield Park. And so, out of seventeen who were scrubbed out of, there were about fifty in the course, we all volunteered for straight gunners. And everyone except me was posted. I was down posted, you know I had to do a wireless air gunners course at the Parks. And I was the only one. I went to Parks, and the other seventeen I think there were of them. And I did the gunnery course with them and then went back to Parks, and I did the course, which took six months. And amazingly enough, my closest friend there, he’d been in the next bunk to me at Bradfield Park, and I got to know him well. And we became close friends and he was my closest friend and today I’ve just read an article, he got killed in a crash and he’d written – and he’d done twenty ops and every op that he did he wrote a full story. And Bomber Command have been printing his story for the last flight he did and the one today in that flight magazine, it’s his sixth trip. So he’s, there’s still fourteen –
JM: To go.
RR: To go. And they’re putting in one a month.
JM: Um.
RR: But it was amazing the pilot, how, we got split up once we got to England. And I picked up the paper one day, and there’s a photo of this pilot who escaped without a parachute. And it turns out he was the skipper of the crew that Mac was flying in.
JM: Um.
RR: And suddenly the, I forget what the aircraft was, an Anson or something, it exploded and blew this guy, the pilot, out into the air without a parachute.
MM: Parachute.
RR: At twenty thousand feet and amazingly enough as he was falling through the air he hit something in the air. ‘Cause some of the them had got out. And grabbed onto it and it was the mid upper gunner who was coming down in a parachute. So, he came down with him in his parachute. And it’s amazing, my doctor treated him after he came back, after the war for the injury to his legs.
JM: Legs.
RR: And he died only about a year ago. And of course, Mac came down and his parachute was on fire.
JM: Oh dear.
RR: And it, he was killed when he hit the ground.
JM: When he hit the ground, on impact?
RR: But that’s just a side issue.
JM: A side yeah. Well I mean the point is you were just saying about how you had been doing your training with him. Yeah, so having done your training at Parks, you then more or less went to preparation for departure and went up to Brisbane?
RR: Yeah. I went to No2 wireless air gunners course at Parks.
JM: Yes, but after that.
RR: For six months. After that I know they just moved us out of a tent.
JM: Um.
RR: And I can always remember the mud and stuff. Onto a liberty ship which was [telephone ringing], had brought some American troops to Australia on its first, its maiden voyage.
JM: Um.
RR: And we were loaded onto that ship. And there were about eighty of us I think we were. And we went, we got let off at Alcatraz.
JM: Um. And –
RR: I didn’t go in the prison.
JM: No.
RR: We were in a, there was a camp right opposite on the other side of the bay.
JM: Um.
RR: And I’d volunteered to fly as a straight air gunner, although I’d done my wireless course and had got my wags, wings and all that sort of thing. But I still decided to carry on as a straight air gunner. And I finished up, I’d been to 460 the Australian squadron.
JM: Um.
RR: I did a Morse, Reuters Morse course at Yatesbury and then I went, volunteered, went to Yatesbury in Wiltshire and volunteered again to fly as a straight air gunner.
JM: Um.
RR: And I’d been at Binbrook for three months or something, that’s with the Australian squadron.
JM: Yeah, that’s when you in the 460, so when you got to Binbrook was when you were posted to 460 Squadron? Yes?
RR: Yes. That was 460.
JM: Um.
RR: And then I got wings, I went to Yatesbury, which is Reuters wireless school.
JM: Yep, yep.
RR: And I did fairly well in that. And I still volunteered to fly as a straight air gunner ‘cause we wanted to get it over and done with and get home.
JM: Home, that’s right yeah. So that’s OK, so you got to, you did all your, you did –
RR: Conversion.
JM: You got to Binbrook as 460?
RR: I went from Binbrook to Winthorpe where we converted onto Lancasters.
JM: Yep, um. So, you didn’t do any operational work at Binbrook? Didn’t run any, didn’t do any operational flights?
RR: No.
JM: Ok, so.
RR: Only, I was flying one flight from Binbrook. One morning the call woke me up at seven o’clock in the morning, and said ‘Get straight up to the Adjutant’s office, there’s a Lancaster waiting outside to take you to….’ And I’ve forgotten the name of the squadron which up was up at, which was up near Newcastle.
JM: Um.
RR: And, Newcastle upon Tyne, and they flew me up. ‘Cause they’d picked me because of my Morse knowledge.
JM: Yep.
RR: And I was going to be. I was interviewed and I looked at all the equipment in the Halifax. There was sort of special equipment, and the last thing that the guy said to me, he said ‘Right, there’s a Lancaster waiting to take you back to Binbrook, and we’ll contact you within seven days. ‘Cause you qualify for this job handling the electronics on the –
JM: The Halifax?
RR: On the Lancaster, no Halifax, Halifax.
JM: Yep.
RR: It was ‘cause I think there were only three Halifax’s with this equipment in them. But in that week they had a couple of crashes and lost the whole crew. And so the next thing I heard, I’m posted to Morton in the Marsh.
JM: Um.
RR: Which was Wellington.
JM: Right. So you had to do –
RR: OTU Squadron.
JM: Right, yeah.
RR: So I was [unclear] Morton in the Marsh. And we, and from there, we moved to, at the end of the course, we were moved to –
JM: To Winthorpe?
RR: To Winthorpe.
JM: For Lancaster conversion is that right?
RR: To Lancaster conversion yeah.
JM: Yep, so that’s in –
RR: And we did the Lancaster conversion, and we got a report that we were a real good crew and they were going to recommend us for Pathfinders.
JM: Um.
RR: Anyhow suddenly the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
JM: Um.
RR: And we’d moved only a few weeks before to Skellingthorpe.
JM: Um.
RR: And to, oh what were they called? I keep forgetting the name of it.
JM: Tiger Force?
RR: Tiger Force.
JM. Yeah.
RR: Yeah we were moved to Tiger Force.
JM: Um.
RR: In fact there’s a photo out in the office there of our course. ‘Cause there were, there were, sixty squadrons of Lancasters going to bomb Tokyo. And we were due to leave in two days time to fly to Tokyo up by the Arctic Circle, and the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, and that’s –
JM: And that was the end of that?
RR: And that stopped it all. But we’d done about five months flying in Tiger Force.
JM: Right, yeah.
RR: And within six weeks we were on our way home.
JM: Home. So basically you just – it was all training as such. You didn’t actually then do any operational missions –
RR: Oh, when we were doing at the conversion unit, which put us onto Lancasters –
JM: Yep.
RR: We did our, I’ve got the logbook down here.
JM: Um.
RR: And between Morton in the Marsh and Skellingthorpe –
JM: Yeah.
RR: We’d done about eight hundred hours flying. And we were flying every day.
JM: Um. Flying every day.
RR: And we were doing diversions.
JM: Um.
RR: And it’s amazing, just been looking into it. [unclear] getting the letter from Bomber Command. And there was one operation that we did, which was a, it was a bogus operation on Tokyo.
JM: Um.
RR: It was the diversion, and we were mainly flying diversions all over the Atlantic but no bombing.
JM: No.
RR: It was all this sort of flying. And so that’s my history really.
JM: Yeah, no. And of course you didn’t, with the way that all turned out you didn’t then have to do any of the pick ups and returns of the servicemen from Europe back to the UK? That, others did that?
RR: Oh, we did that.
JM: You did do that?
RR: We did that. We were put on a ship, and there was about a hundred of us. Australians, all Australians, about a hundred or so. They put us onto a ship, and the Chief of the Air Force in England was on the wharf. And all these blokes were coming off the ship and shouting and performing and. Anyhow they rounded us up and got us all back on the ship. You wouldn’t believe it and down this [unclear] of Spain it broke down completely. And we had to come back and they sent another ship down to pick us up to take us back and we were another six weeks in England. And then we came via Suez Canal and Taranto, Italy. We went around Italy and ‘cause they were picking up a few New Zealanders there. But yes well it was a very interesting exercise. And actually within two days of the Americans dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki the Japanese surrendered. And so suddenly everything had stopped and we were still flying for another month or so. We were just, we were flying over Europe, doing reconnaissance because they were worried that the Germans were going to start again.
JM: Um. Was there also a concern about the Russians at all at that point, or?
RR: Yeah, the Russians. The Russians came in, in fact the Russians released quite a lot of Australians that were, or Jews I think they were, that were in jail there. But that’s all the Russians. The Russians soon got out of the action there they wiped the Germans out. But that finished up being a very interesting period. And of the crew there’s only –
JM: When did you, because you’d had a lot of changes, once you were crewed up, when did you?
RR: Crewed up.
JM: Crewed up. Was it when you were at the Wellington OTU, was that when you were crewed up?
RR: Yes, yes.
JM: Right. And so who did you have in your crew? All Australians in your [unclear] yeah?
RR: All Australians.
JM: A mix of sort of west and east or?
RR: No, they were all Australians and we had a excellent pilot and the only Englishman in the crew was the engineer.
JM: Right.
RR: You’ll see in those photos, only seven of them in photo. Although I think there was one with only six. But yes so, we did a tremendous amount of flying.
JM: Flying um.
RR: Amazing.
JM: You said eight hundred hours I think didn’t you?
RR: The two together. I’ve got a copy of the logbook, pilot’s logbook.
JM: Right, yeah.
RR: And there’s about eight hundred. We did about eight hundred hours flying between OTU and the conversion. CSF.
JM: Going into the Lancasters?
RR: Yeah, Lancasters. But we did, I think we did, about three hundred hours I think in Wellingtons. There’s a note on the, in the logbook there, that the total was round about eight hundred flying hours.
JM: Um, gosh. And so, this pilot, well your crew, the whole crew that you were on. Did you stay together as a crew and then return home as a crew?
RR: Yes, yes.
JM: Yes, OK. And did –
RR: Out of that crew there’s only the pilot and myself left alive.
JM: And who’s the, is the pilot, was the pilot?
RR: The pilot was Wal Goodwin.
JM: Goodwin, yeah right.
RR: And we think there’s only the two of us out of the crew, others have died.
JM: Yes.
RR: ‘Cause the navigator and the bomb aimer were both, I think ten years at least older.
JM: Yep.
RR: The rest of the crew. And the pilot he’s just turned forty, sorry, ninety-four.
JM: Yep.
RR: And I’ll be ninety-three in August.
JM: August, yeah. And how, what, even though you were doing all this flying as training, were there any particular events, or sequence of events, that sort of perhaps stood out for you? That stay with you more than others? Couple of things, anything to mention?
RR: One of our flights over the North Sea we lost an engine and went into a dive and the pilot was getting ready to bail out. And we were out in the middle of the North Sea and there was no way of getting the dinghy out or anything. That was probably the worst experience.
JM: So, what did the pilot manage to recover at the last minute or?
RR: Yes. It got into a steep dive and the pressure on the jets, or the propellers, started the engine up again. And we were OK. We had one other –
JM: In the Wellington or the Lancaster?
RR: No, in the Lancaster.
JM: In the Lancaster, um.
RR: ‘Cause they used us in training for patrolling the North Sea, we did everything except drop bombs really.
JM: Um. ‘Cause I presume you were monitoring ship movements and that sort of thing were you?
RR: Yeah, yeah. In fact, I’m just reading a book about the, what’s it called, [unclear] I just bought it home. Guy that lent it to me, is our gardener lent it to me. It’s about eight hundred pages but it’s all about Bomber Command and their attacks on the Turbots. And thinking of the Turbots I went back a second time and found that it had a great hole in the side and the Turbot was sunk. Was sunk there and that was the end of it.
JM: So that was one when you lost that engine. Anything else that stays with you more than any other?
RR: No. We had a couple of tricky landings you know? They lost power and we came in round on the strip a couple of times. Only a couple of times, but in fact he was such a good pilot that one of the flights we came back, and it was in the daytime. We landed and we went into the briefing room and suddenly a person run in the briefing room and said ‘Is the pilot called Goodwin here?’ and we said ‘Oh yeah, Wal.’ And Wal stood up and he said ‘You’re wanted in the tower, some top-ranking officer wants to talk to you.’ And what it was, this guy was the top, one of the top half dozen in the air force. And he called him into the tower and said ‘Right’ he said ‘I just want to congratulate you,’ he said ‘That is the best landing I’ve ever seen made by a Lancaster.’
JM: Goodness.
RR: And from that we were recommended for Pathfinders. We were lucky we were a top crew and if the Tiger Force hadn’t suddenly happened we would have been posted to, to do, I’ve forgotten, I’ve lost track of what I was talking about now.
JM: You would have gone off to Pathfinders.
RR: Pathfinders.
JM: Yeah.
RR: Yeah. As a crew we would have been –
JM: Moved on.
RR: To Pathfinders.
JM: Yeah. And what about your leave times? You probably had various, quite often you would have had patches of leave, what sort of things did you do while you were on leave? Did you go anywhere? Did you end up with a particular place that you enjoyed going to or did you go to many different places, or?
RR: Well mainly we went on short breaks, somewhere the – there was one when we first got to England. We’d been there about three weeks I think it was and they said ‘ You’ve got five days leave.’ And a group of us, four or five of us, went off and stayed in a hotel in London, and that night was the most V1’s and V2’s they had over London in the whole time, London was very bombed.
JM: Bombed.
RR: And it was quite amazing. And we were there for two nights watching them.
JM: Um, um. And presumably the hotel you were staying in didn’t get any damage?
RR: No, no, no. ‘Cause they were going for certain targets and it was all round central London. But the other thing which happened to myself and I think three or four of us, the first night we were in Brighton, we were in two old hotels. Something and the ‘The Grand’ was the name of them. And that’s where we were living and this first night, and there was an air raid on London. And we all went down and got in the air raid shelter and when it was over we came back and went to bed. And next thing there’s a guy shouting at us. And he said ‘Get your uniform on, I’ve got a job for you.’ And there were four or five of us and I don’t know whether you know Brighton but the cemetery’s in very close. And he said ‘I want you to pick up a German who’s in the cemetery’ and we walked round, about eleven o’clock at night. And when we got into the cemetery there was this German in a parachute stuck in way up in the tree –
JM: Was he alive still?
RR: He was dead.
JM: He was dead.
RR: Obviously his ‘chute hadn’t opened properly and we had to get him down and have him taken away, yeah.
JM: Gosh, that’s a bit of an introduction to –
RR: Yeah, well we’d only been there –
JM: What two days in Brighton? Gosh –
RR: The other thing that I haven’t told you about, which is, and I’ve talked on this at luncheons and this sort of thing. Oh yes, yeah the Queen Elizabeth, when we came to get on the Queen Elizabeth, there were about eighty Australians and there was a band with about sixty or eighty in it and they played. And we marched down the side of this ship, and all we could see was a great hole in the side. And when we got in we found out it was the Queen Elizabeth. And the Queen Elizabeth, I’ve got all the records there somewhere. There were twenty thousand American troops on it. And they’d all loaded before us. And we came in and went into the area that was the, had been the middle stage, never been finished properly. And we were in a double cabin, and there were seventeen of us in the cabin. We slept on the floor with palisses, OK? So that night suddenly all the doors close, this sort of thing and we sailed off. And we’re out at sea two days and suddenly there was a great clanging of bells and this sort of thing. And they said ‘Everyone wherever you are on the ship.’ ‘Cause it was all colours, say if they wanted to use yellow that line down there would be yellow.
JM: Um.
RR: And that one over there would be red something. And we’d been picked out because we were all in gunnery and we were given a badge with a big ‘G’ on it. And so they said ‘Everyone stay where you are on the ship don’t move.’ And next thing all the guns on the grilles have opened up firing and unbeknown to us at the time ‘cause the gunnery on the Queen Elizabeth, there were three or four fat guns. And there was the gunnery crew, who were military, was over eight hundred. And all these opened up and there was a German Condor aircraft which had been tracking us since we’d pulled out from the wharf, and he was working in with a submarine group of eight or ten subs. And they were out in the North Sea, and we were only two days out, waiting for us. ‘Cause they were on the attack straight away out of the Condor aircraft. Took off because there was that much firing of flak and this sort of thing. It disappeared and they put a warning over the loudspeaker ‘Everyone, where you are stay there and hang on.’ And the boat did a ninety degree turn. Found out, I’ve since, met up with a guy who was pulled into the bridge whilst this was going on, and he said they’d got up to thirty-five knots and did this right angle turn and we went to Greenland. And we had a day aboard in Greenland. Then we went to Greenock in Scotland [unclear] day or couple of days. But Queen Elizabeth could have been sunk, it was quite amazing.
JM: It would have been an incredible number of lives lost.
RR: Oh God.
JM: You said there were twenty thousand Yanks on board, and then.
RR: Yeah, yeah.
JM: All the Australians and everyone else, and then all the gunnery guys.
RR: Yeah. I can always remember, another guy and myself were in the corridor kinda the mall, and this giant black guy pulled us up and for some reason or another, I don’t know why. And it was the bloke who was world heavyweight boxing champion. Trying to think of his name, I can’t think of his name. I knew it well, but he was on the ship for the whole trip. Can’t think of his name, memory is going a bit. But he was patrolling.
JM: Right.
RR: He said to us ‘Stay there, don’t move’.
JM: And you wouldn’t be arguing with him. [laughs]
RR: No. And they hunted off this Condor.
JM: Condor yeah.
RR: Which is a big aircraft. But we were just lucky. And what happened after we got to England. The Americans had sent several destroyers out after the subs, and they broke up the sub pack. And they captured a hundred I think. A couple of crews and it’s amazing that it could quite easily happen to someone like him, he was the world heavyweight boxing champion.
JM: Um, yeah.
RR: Oh, I know his name as well as anything.
JM: Oh well it’ll come back. So, when you were flying were you aware of anyone in the crew that carried a particular good luck charm or had any particular suspicions that they sort of?
RR: No, funny none of ‘em.
JM: None of them?
RR: No.
JM: So, they’re all pretty laid back and –
RR: Yeah they were all –
JM: Happy, confident in each other abilities all the time so didn’t have any need for?
RR: Yes it’s amazing. Of course out of the lot of them. Lot of German aircraft in the area but I think once they saw what ship it was and they would know they had flak guns they just backed off.
JM: Yeah. But as I say when you were flying, in all the hours of flying that you did you didn’t have any of your crew members had any good luck charms with them?
RR: No.
JM: No. And we were talking about when you did your leave and you talked about the time that you went to London and there was that heavy bombing.
RR: Yes.
JM: Any other times that you were on leave that stand out for any reason? Where you did something special or something funny happened to you?
RR: We got a group of us, about thirty of us I suppose, all Australians out of this intake. We got sent to Whitley Bay.
JM: Um.
RR: To a, like a, it was a military course.
JM: This was in June 1944?
RR: That would have been June ’44.
JM: Yeah.
RR: And, oh, can’t think about it.
JM: You went to Whitley, a group of you went to Whitley Bay?
RR: Oh yes. Whitley Bay and did this course. It was a, it had a name for it, I’ve forgotten the name. And the last day in it, I can always remember I had conjunctivitis in one of my eyes and so I went sick. And of course in the group of six or eight that we were in was a fella named Lenny Richards. Always remember his name. And we knew it was grenade throwing today and I said ‘I thnk I’ll be sick’ this conjunctivitis so I didn’t go. So, of course they were all having a joke that Lenny would drop a grenade or something, but he didn’t kill anyone. Anyhow I run into him one day years later, just off Martin Place, he was working for one of the typewriter companies –
JM: Um. That was a coincidence. And so when you were sent, eventually got going and got back to –
RR: Australia.
JM: Australia, you were discharged then?
RR: Yeah, and –
JM: In March 19 –
RR: Posted to Newcastle in the ANZ Bank.
JM: Yeah. So you discharged in the March of ’46?
RR: Yeah, that’d be right.
JM: Yeah, so then you what, went straight back into the bank?
RR: I went back into the bank at Newcastle.
JM: Um.
RR: In fact, I finished up marrying, my wife was a Newcastle girl.
JM: Um, so you met at Newcastle?
RR: Yeah, yeah. And then I was transferred to Oxford Street in Sydney in ANZ Bank. And then I got moved back from there to Head Office in Martin Place and I was Personnel Officer for New South Wales. Then after I’d done that for twelve months or so I became Methods Officer and was just driving round all the branches checking up on their equipment and this sort of thing, did that for [unclear]. Ran into several years, yes.
JM: So then did you retire from the bank or did you?
RR: I retired from the bank.
JM: Um.
RR: I retired from the bank in um, hard to think, around nineteen, about 1970 I think it was. I’d been to Newcastle staying with people that we’d known for years. I didn’t know that he was an alcoholic and he had a real estate business at Burley Heads. I finished up buying a half interest in it, and I did that for a couple of years. And Hookers had one office in Surfers’ Paradise and they wanted to get rid of the manager and they approached me from Hookers in Sydney. They flew me down and talked to various top guys and by the time I got back they’d offered me the job of managing the Hooker office in Surfers’ which had about ten or twelve staff. And I did that for several years and then resigned and came to the Gold Coast. I had this half interest business with this other guy, I found that he did all the drinking I did all the work.
JM: Work.
RR: But oh yes, pretty good life really.
JM: Um.
RR: And when I eventually sold out of here I had a job offer running Hookers. I’m trying, I’ve forgotten, years get away, so had a pretty good life really.
JM: Um, well that’s good. And it means that you’ve been able to do quite a lot. You mentioned that your pilot’s still alive. So, have you maintained, when you first came back did you maintain contact with the crew?
RR: Yes.
JM: All of the crew sort of?
RR: Yes. In fact, actually the rear gunner, his son had a job in the war memorial.
JM: Oh right.
RR: And he’d been there quite a few years.
JM: Um.
RR: So, he said ‘Well G-George is going to be refurbished, reconditioned and they’ll be taking it out. Why don’t you as a crew organise a couple of days? Come down to Canberra,’ he says ‘I’ll organise you an inspection on G-George and getting in,’ we finished up having two or three hours early in the morning, climbing all over G-George. Quite amazing.
JM: Would have brought back some memories to see George?
RR: Yeah.
JM: Not that it was in your unit, your squadron I should say. But that’s, well George was in 460.
RR: Yes. 460.
JM: So, there’s a relation. Like when, so you were in 460 briefly but so was George flying, being flown then when you were in 460?
RR: Yeah, when I was at 460 G-George was in that period. Was a period, three or four months I think it was I was there as specialist operator studying, it was to study the equipment that they were using then. But G-George had flown out to Australia by then it was just on display.
JM: Yeah, that’s right. And so as you say all the rest of the chaps have now passed away?
RR: Oh yes.
JM: But you still, where’s Wal Goodwin, is he?
RR: He’s in Melbourne.
JM: He’s in Melbourne is he?
RR: Yes, he’s two years older than I am. He’ll be ninety-four, he’s probably turned ninety-four now. And he’s fit and well. And it’s –
JM: Do you know if he’s been a member of Bomber Command or Odd Bods or anything?
RR: Him?
JM: Yeah.
RR: I would think he would, he seems to have a close contact in the veterans’ affairs. He occasionally used to get things that veterans’ affairs were sort of handing out, that sort of thing. But I talk to him at least every two or three months.
JM: Right.
RR: Particularly on birthdays and that sort of thing.
JM: Um.
RR: But the bomb aimer and the navigator were both at least ten years older than us. And the rear gunner just died he was the same age as myself, and he died only three or four months ago. And the, we had an Australian guy, brought into the crew as the engineer and he came from Adelaide and we’ve never heard a word from him or, he only sort of came in at the last bit.
JM: Last bit um.
RR: Last few months. So, I don’t know what’s happened to him.
JM: And he didn’t, did he travel home with you at the same time? In the same group?
RR: Came home in the same group.
JM: Yeah. But he didn’t sort of maintain any contact?
RR: Maintain any contact, no, it’s amazing really that we’ve lost track. Well we know that the navigator’s dead, the bomb aimer’s dead, the pilot’s alive and so that leaves us three gunners and one other the engineer who was an Australian, an Australian pilot, who they gave him an engineers course and he flew with us a couple of months or so.
JM: Months yeah.
RR: Yeah.
JM: So, you mentioned you do talks, have done talks in the past? Is there anything else that you would perhaps mention in those talks we haven’t covered now?
RR: No, I don’t think so. I think I’ve pretty well covered everything.
JM: Yeah, and maybe a bit more?
RR: Um?
JM: And maybe a bit more?
RR: Yeah, yeah. I got those couple of forms here.
JM: Of yes, well we’ll do those in a minute but –
Unknown: Coming down the stairs, I heard that you forgot Shorty.
RR: Huh?
Unknown: You forgot Shorty. Your wireless operator.
RR: Oh, Shorty died.
Unknown: Didn’t mention him.
RR: Yeah, Shorty died. [garbled mixture of voices] that was the other one I couldn’t think of.
JM: Yeah, right. So that’s all good.
RR: Yeah.
JM: Alright well if there’s nothing else that you –
Unknown: Would you like a cup of tea or cup of coffee?
JM: Well we’ll just finish the record. We’ll sort out the paperwork and that.
Unknown: You haven’t finished recording? I thought you might have done.
JM: That’s OK, no, no it’s alright we’re just wrapping up now. So, I’ll just formally thank you Ron very much for sharing all those memories with us. It’s very much appreciated and it’s just wonderful that you could give us the time and make the effort to do so.
RR: Good, no problem.
JM: Thank you.
Dublin Core
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ARodgersR170220
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Interview with Ronald Rodgers
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
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eng
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01:07:56 audio recording
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Pending review
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Jean Macartney
Date
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2017-02-20
Description
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Ronald Rodgers joined the Royal Australian Air Force aged seventeen, having previously been in the Air Training Corps. He trained as an air gunner and was posted to 460 Squadron at RAF Binbrook but did not fly operationally. On discharge in 1946 Roy worked in banking, retiring in 1970.
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--Lincolnshire
Temporal Coverage
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1944
1945
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Dawn Studd
460 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
Halifax
Lancaster
RAF Binbrook
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF Winthorpe
RAF Yatesbury
Tiger force
training
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/821/10805/PFisherT1701.2.jpg
ab966b75919cc81ba9cf72d7ae808da1
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/821/10805/AFisherT170726.1.mp3
14a8d63f6e971f8062c9b1885ae60417
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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Fisher, Thomas
T Fisher
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Thomas Fisher (1922 - 2020, 1097527 Royal Air Force). He trained as a bomb aimer / navigator.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-07-26
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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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Fisher, T
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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GT: Ok. This is a official interview of Mr Thomas Fisher and we are just outside of Dumfries in Scotland and it is the 26th of July 2017. Your interviewer is Glen Turner from the 75 Squadron Association and accredited IBCC interviewer, and also present is Thomas Fisher’s daughter Julia McLennan and a traveling friend here of Glen’s, Diana Harrington from Middlesborough. So, Thomas, can you give us, your opening piece of information would be where you were born, your date of birth and where you grew up, please.
TF: Yes. I was, I was born on December the 7th 1922 in Sunderland and I grew up in that, in that town.
GT: And where did you go to school?
TF: In Sunderland.
GT: And did you complete High School or —
TF: I, well, I [laughs] I passed the 11 Plus to go to Grammar School which I did do but unfortunately, I, my parents said I had to leave school when I was fourteen which was rather a bit of a blow because, and a surprise because my father had already signed a form to say I would stay until I was at least sixteen. But they sort of said they needed the money and so I left school and got a, got a job. I worked in an office for a while and then I became an apprentice painter and decorator. I worked at that until I was, until I was eighteen and that was when I decided that I would join the Air Force.
GT: Had the war been going long at that time or did you join before the war?
TF: No. The war had been on since the end of ’39. End of ’40. It would have been going on for a bit over a year during which time we’d have been, it had just been a series of disasters. You know, the Dunkirk evacuation and lots of bombing. I must admit I was getting a bit fed up with hearing the siren going at 3 o’clock or so in the morning and expected to get up and go to an air raid shelter. But, but fortunately that was the only time that I was subjected to bombing was before I joined the Air Force. I was much safer when I was in the Air Force [laughs] I was never at an airfield that was attacked at all and, and well to be quite frank I had one horrible time when I picked up the local newspaper and the corner was folded over of the heading and I could just see the letters “tain” said, “We must surrender.” And I took that as Britain says we must surrender. I was absolutely horrified at the thought. I just stood and stared at that for a bit and then I bent down and picked it up and the corner flipped over back. And it wasn’t Britain. It was Pétain, the French Prime Minister. And that was, I think that was one of the times that I sort of definitely thought the Air Force seems to be the only thing that’s doing anything at the moment so, and also I’m getting a bit fed up with them coming over and dropping bombs on us so we might as well go and do the same to them.
GT: So, you were seventeen years old at that time.
TF: At that time. Ah huh.
GT: And you mentioned that yourself and was it your family that were involved with German raids over Sunderland?
TF: Yes.
GT: And were you attacked, did the Germans manage to bomb your area? Your street, or house?
TF: They actually did later, at a later date when I was in the Air Force they did actually bomb the house.
GT: Did you lose any family from that?
TF: I, I got, I was stationed in the Air Force at Inverness and I got a message to go and see the adjutant and when I did he said, ‘I’ve got some bad news. Your house has been bombed. But there’s no, no one’s been hurt.’ So that was alright and they were very good. They immediately gave me a railway warrant and sent me on leave to see if I could do anything to help.
GT: Ok. So, let’s then just go back slightly to your reasons for joining the Royal Air Force and and how you managed to achieve that for me please.
TF: Well, the reason. Yes.
[telephone ringing]
TF: I would say the reason was —
GT: Ok. Hang on. I’ll tell you what. We’ll just pause that.
[recording paused]
[clock chiming]
GT: Ok, Thomas. Can, can you please tell me why you joined the Royal Air Force and when and how?
TF: Yes. Well, I joined in nineteen, at the beginning of 1941. And the reason why was I got a bit fed up with getting bombed by German planes coming over in horrible times. Middle of the night getting it Not that I expected I was going to make any difference but I just felt I would like to do something to make up for all the bombing that was going on and so I visited a recruiting office and said, ‘I’ve joined the Air Force.’
GT: So you were saying that you lived or grew up in Sunderland but there was no recruiting office there. You had to go somewhere else.
TF: No. No recruiting office.
GT: Where was the recruiting office that you went to then?
TF: It was at Newcastle on Tyne which was about twelve mile away. But, and so I went through there and joined the Air Force and, and I think I was put on what they called deferred service for about two months and then eventually went down to Blackpool where we got kitted out. Well, it was rather pleasant in a way because it wasn’t an Air Force station as such. We just lived in hotels. There’s hundreds of small hotels in Blackpool and there would probably be about six of us because they were nearly all geared up with double beds you see and of course we all had one each. So if they had six rooms it normally meant there would be twelve people staying but there was only six of us sort of like. We got good meals and then went out and got our uniforms and got kitted up with a whole pile of stuff. We were all given a kit bag and moved along a line and someone would say, What size shoes do you take?’ ‘What size shirt do you, what’s your collar size?’ And such like and you’d just keep dropping things in and we took, with laden kit bags went back to our hotel and were told to pay after, after lunch with our uniform on. And, and someone came and checked over to see if everybody fitted reasonably well and then we started doing basic training with a lot of PT and marching along the promenade, running around the sands like a lot of lunatics with rifles and bayonets. And, and then in the fullness of time we, I was there about a month and then went down to Number 4 School of Technical Training.
GT: Now, Thomas, now Thomas earlier you were telling me when you initially went to the Recruiting Office what they recruiter did to give you your future job. Can you, can you tell me that again please? What happened when you went to the Recruiting Office.
TF: Well, when I offered to be a flight mechanic he said, ‘Not so fast. We’ll have to see if you’re suitable for training.’ And, and then started to give me what I’d say with good grace here was a bit of mental arithmetic. Just wanted to know whether I could add up and I wasn’t completely illiterate and, and then and said I was quite suitable for training. So that’s why I ended up at Number 4 School of Technical Training at St Athan in South Wales.
GT: And how long were you there for and what did, what did they train you on?
TF: They trained [laughs] they trained us on all sorts of old pieces of aircraft. I don’t think there was a complete plane. Actually, when I was [unclear] was when I went to start the training someone came in to [laughs] in to my classroom one day and said, ‘Would there be any chance that there’s a sign writer here?’ So I said, ‘Yes.’ So he said, ‘Well, could you come through so that I’ll show you what we’d like you to do?’ And they wanted me to do some small lettering on a sort of board you see and said, ‘Well, the problem is I don’t know when you’re going to be able to do it. You can’t miss any of your course and you certainly can’t be expected to give your spare time because you’ll not have enough. You’ll be spending more of your spare time studying anyhow so would you mind missing PT? So I said, ‘Well, if it’s for the good of the Air Force I’ll miss PT.’ And so, when everyone else went to do PT in the middle of the morning I used to just go and spend a bit of time in there and in reality waited ‘til the tea van came around and had a cup of tea and a bun or something while everybody else was doing PT. But most of the things were very old pieces of aircraft. Just an engine here and there and we, I don’t ever recollect seeing an aircraft with an engine in to do anything. But however, we had our tests and we passed out as a flight mechanic engine. You had the choice of being either engine or air frame. If you were air frame you were usually referred to as a rigger and if you were an engine you were usually referred to as a fitter.
GT: So that was your choice. You were given a choice to be a rigger or an engines.
TF: Yes. A rigger or a fitter. One looked after the airframe and one looked after the engine.
GT: So how many was on your course when you went through there?
TF: I would think possibly about twenty or twenty four. Maybe two dozen.
GT: Did, did you lose anybody? Did they drop out or move on?
TF: I honestly couldn’t remember but I don’t think so.
GT: And the tests you did at the end there was it written or did you have to prove yourself on the machinery?
TF: Well, I think it was mainly written but it was also taken into consideration your work that you’d done during that time. One of the things I remember which seemed a complete waste of time was trying to find a piece of metal as a cube to fit into a square hole. And I could never for the life of me, never could think what that was going to have to do with an aircraft was spending hours and hours filing away to get a perfect fit.
GT: So during that time at St Athan then your barracks you were in were you twenty men to a room? Did you have bed packs? Did you have spit and polish shoes? Did you have marching?
TF: No. We didn’t have marching but we were expected to spend one evening cleaning the room and leaving everything neat and tidy for the COs inspection the following day. That was once a week.
GT: No stand by your beds inspection?
TF: I don’t recollect that. No.
GT: Interesting.
TF: On the whole, yeah it was reasonably comfortable and beds, we did have, we did all have a sort of a little fitted wardrobe each to put clothing and things in and, and then at the end of that time we were given two weeks leave.
GT: So how long was a course for, Tom?
TF: Well, I think it would be about sixteen weeks. I went in, I think it would probably be the 1st of May when I went in and it would be October when I passed out and that would have been a week at, a month at Blackpool and the rest of the time at St Athan. And I was given two weeks leave and, with instructions to report to Number 92 Squadron at Gravesend. So, I thought from Gravesend being at the, on the Thames Estuary I thought it was going to be a very busy station with getting fighters and bombers going. But however [laughs] when I got down to Gravesend, they said, ‘Oh, 92 Squadron. They’re not here.’ So, I went, ‘I’ve trailed all the way. Come all the way from one end of the country to the other.’ ‘No.’ He said, ‘They’re not here. I don’t know where they are.’ And I thought surely you must know. But then when I thought about it later I thought, well no. You didn’t give information like that away. They were just, suddenly the squadron would just go and they wouldn’t say where they were going. So, I was told to, I was shown where I could have a bed for the night, where to go and get a meal, ‘And after breakfast in the morning if you come back here I’ll have found out where 92 Squadron are and give you a railway warrant again and you can go join them.’ So when I went back he said, ‘Well, they’re in Lincoln at an airfield called Digby. So, I then took all my kit, got a bus in to London and then the train up to Lincoln and then on to, to Digby.
GT: So you were still eighteen years old at this time.
TF: At that time. Yes.
GT: And you got to Digby ok and what aircraft did they have when you first arrived?
TF: Spitfires. And, and it was actually in a way a little bit of an exciting time because obviously there was no television but we did see news regularly. News came on the radio. Everybody was glued to the radio for the 9 o’clock news and you kept hearing about, particularly during the Battle of Britain how they’d shot such a lot of German planes down and such like which later we discovered was great exaggeration. There were never anywhere near that number shot down. However, you saw the, the squadrons taking off and looked across and you saw, I saw great big bell outside the crew room and the notice up, chalked on a blackboard. “When you hear this bell you will run like hell.” And so when you, when somebody pokes their head out of the door and shouts, ‘92 Squadron, five minutes readiness.’ And the pilots then all knew that whatever they were doing would have to be dropped in five and be off in the plane and away. And then we would come out, possibly come out when it was time to go and ring this great big bell and we would dash down and unplug the, well wait ‘til the pilots got the planes started, unplug the starter batteries out and wave them out because a Spitfire a pilot can’t see where he’s going if he’s looking ahead because of the little wheel at the back on the ground. And if that lifts up the propeller’s going to hit the ground and twists so you sort of slowly guide them out and then they’re away and you see the whole squadrons flying off to somewhere and you know, you feel, well I’ve had some little part in this. And then when they come back they were immediately refuelled and every morning they were checked over completely to be ready for the next time.
GT: So, what Mark of Spitfire was flying on that squadron at that time?
TF: I don’t honestly remember. I just do know that they weren’t fitting with cannon. They were definitely just the eight gun and, but they were three bladed propellers. I gather some of the early ones were only two but later they were four. But I’m not sure what the number was.
GT: That’s fine. So, so when you got to Digby did they have everybody put into barracks again? Or did you have single billets or —
TF: No. It was a pre-war station and they were, it were quite good because there were a block. A big block of building and A Flight would have one side and B Flight another and the downstairs would be, we were all split into two watches because you had to cover every, complete daylight so sometimes it could be from what? 5 o’clock in the morning until 11 o’clock at night. And so obviously we were split in to two. Two watches. And one watch would have one room and there would probably be about twelve or twenty people in the room. But they were brick built and pre-war, centrally heated and incorporated on the landings. There were bathrooms and things. They were reasonably comfortable.
GT: So, you chose rigger as your trade.
TF: No. Fitter.
GT: You went fitter. So, from the engines that you had to work on at St Athan you arrived on the squadron and you were given Merlins to look after.
TF: Merlins, ah huh.
GT: So, did you learn your skill on how to maintain a Merlin directly there on the squadron? Was that a quick learning session for you?
TF: Well, what we trained on at St Athan were Kestrels which were really very similar to a Merlin but only very, nowhere near the power. But I suppose we must have just picked a lot up as we went along really. And I was there for a relatively short time and then for some reason or other I got posted to 417 Squadron.
GT: And what time, what date was that then, Tom? How long did you spend at Digby?
TF: That would be [pause] October. Just before Christmas. It was probably end of November.
GT: So barely two months. Barely two months or so on 92.
TF: Ah huh.
GT: Right. So you went up to 417.
TF: 417.
GT: And where were they based?
TF: Charmy Down in Somerset. Near, very near Bath.
GT: And aircraft type?
TF: Spitfires.
GT: And how long were you there for?
TF: I was there quite a while and I was very surprised to find I was now in the Canadian Air Force. It was all four. All the Canadian squadrons were fours.
GT: And how did they, work out? The very —
TF: Well, it was, it was just being formed. It was a new squadron just being formed so the pilots were, had a lot of, a long way to go to get operational and they were all Canadian. And the ground staff, the fitters and riggers were mostly Canadian but I think they must have been a bit short and there was about a half dozen or so of British boys made their numbers up.
GT: Was the Battle of Britain still going at that time or had it finished?
TF: No. The Battle of Britain was over then.
GT: Ok. Just going back then. So, you were on 92 Squadron during the Battle of Britain.
TF: No. I was still after the Battle of Britain.
GT: That was still just after. Ok.
TF: The Battle of Britain was 1940.
GT: Alright.
TF: And that was 1941 when I went in.
GT: Was there still much German aircraft activity that the Spitfires were going up to meet at that time?
TF: Not a great lot. I think what had happened was the squadron had originally been at Gravesend and they were very busy. They were. And when they went up to Lincoln there was a little bit of a rest. They weren’t going to be quite so, so busy and while I was there we had a visit from the King who came up to inspect the squadron.
GT: What’s your recollections of meeting the King? Did you shake hands? Did he talk to you?
TF: No. My recollection is of being rather appalled at the idea of, we had to parade in front of the hangar in our best uniforms and shoes polished and such like and the announcement came over, ‘All personnel not on essential duties will line the roadway and cheer his majesty when he goes past.’ And I thought I’ve seen this on the newsreels and you used to think it was spontaneous but you were actually ordered to go out and cheer the King. [laughs] And the other recollection I have for him was that his face was absolutely plastered with makeup. He looked, almost looked as if he was trying to smile or do anything. Well, he had a little permanent half smile. If he tried not to it looked as if it would all crack or something. It was really thick. It may have looked fine on camera but it looked ridiculous when you were close to him. And so things weren’t all that busy at Digby when I was there but now as I say there were, there were just this Canadian squadron was just being formed. It was bitterly cold weather then but obviously got in thick and one of the things that surprised me was we used to have to put heaters in the planes to stop them freezing. I don’t know why because they always had ethylene glycol in the tank. Anti-freeze. But however, they had these heaters to go under the engine and another one under the cockpit and the fitters always looked after the heater. And one day I noticed on the notice board, it said, “In future the flight mechanics will not do any servicing to the catalytic heaters.” They will — “This will be carried out by a specialist.” And then a bit further down, “The specialist will be AC Fisher.” And I I don’t know one end of them from the other [laughs] I have no reason why I would know anything more about them but the following day someone came and collared me after I’d finished my breakfast and said, ‘I’m taking you to —’ I think it was to Colerne. Another Air Force station, ‘Where you are going to get a day’s instruction on catalytic heaters.’ So, I went there for a day and on the strength of that I, I was then inspecting them. But it was quite a good job because it was bitterly cold weather and when all the mechanics were bringing the heaters off the planes they were still quite warm so I had my little part quite, quite heated. So —
GT: Fascinating. Well, those Canadians should have been used to the cold weather, wouldn’t they?
TF: Well, yes. So, and then I was supposed to have them all ready for early evening to go back in having been checked over and refuelled and such like.
GT: So you became a bit of a specialist on the base then. Very good. So how long did you stay with 417 and where did you go from there?
TF: I stayed with 417, not very long. I stayed with them for I suppose getting [pause] we moved about, about the Easter of the following year up to a place in Scotland called Tain. But I always remember that because I’d been out and when I came in he sort of said, ‘Oh. We’re moving and you’re on the advanced party. You’ve got to leave tomorrow.’ And I said, ‘Well, where are we going?’ ‘I’ve never heard of it.’ But it was quite a journey up from, from Somerset up to the north of Scotland.
GT: So that was about Easter 1942.
TF: Ah huh.
GT: Be about there. And how long did it take to move the squadron up there?
TF: Well, quite a while in a way. We went up and funnily enough the weather was beautiful. We were sitting out most of the time waiting for the planes arriving and of course they were being flown up. And it was probably two or three days and then things just, were just continued there and then things started to change. We got issued with tropical uniforms and it was, the Canadian boys went on embarkation leave and one half at a time and then there’s the other half and it never occurred to me to query why we didn’t get any embarkation leave. But however, I just thought we were going. I had all the gear. The kit. And somebody came in one day and rattled a few names out and said, ‘You’ll not be going with the squadron. You’ll remain here and look after the planes and they are always to be available at about half an hour’s readiness.’ And so the squadron moved off to the Middle East and about half a dozen of us stayed behind and gave the planes a check over every day and ran the engines up to full boost and and there was nothing else to do. It was absolutely very boring. But luckily for me I came in to our hut one day and there were one of the boys looking really miserable and I thought he’d had bad news from home, and I said, ‘What’s wrong.’ He said, ‘I’ve been posted.’ I thought, oh, lucky you. ‘Where are, where are you going?’ He said, ‘I’m going to Inverness but I’m all by myself. I’ve got to go all by myself to Inverness.’ I thought, ‘What a dreadful thing to happen. Would you like me to go instead?’ He said, ‘Ahum.’ I said, ‘Well, look, let’s go to the orderly room and see if we can get it changed.’ So I went down. I said, ‘Was the posting by name or just for a flight mechanic?’ And he said, ‘Just for a flight mechanic.’ I said, ‘Can you change that name to T Fisher?’ And he said, ‘Yes, but mind you you’ve got to go in the morning.’ Everything in the Air Force was wanted to be done yesterday but then you do nothing for about six weeks and then again its a rush. And so I went down to Inverness and that was the best thing I ever did in the Air Force actually. I’d only been there a week or two when the, it was a tiny little station and it was 14 Group Headquarters Communication Flight and they called the station Longman. And I [pause] and then while I was there there was a notice came out and the CO called a little parade of flight mechanics. There would have been about possibly twelve of us altogether of riggers and fitters and he said, ‘I’ve got a communication from the Air Ministry and they would like flight mechanics to volunteer to become flight mechanic air gunners. So, ‘And if you would volunteer will you take a pace forward.’ So I duly took a pace forward and if I hadn’t the others took a pace back which would have left me standing at the front. And he said, ‘You’d better come and see me this afternoon.’ So I went to see him and he said, ‘What on earth made you want to be a flight mechanic air gunner? Is it because you wanted to fly?’ And to be quite frank I felt like saying if the Air Force hadn’t have such silly names for people calling people a pilot officer and he might never have, never a pilot at all and a flight mechanic that doesn’t fly.’ So, but however you don’t talk to COs like that so I said, ‘Yes. Because —’ He said, ‘Well, why on earth didn’t you join as a pilot?’ I said, ‘Well, the main reason is that the recruiting officer said flight mechanics were wanted more.’ I said, ‘But I also knew that pilots have to have a flying, had to have a school leaving certificate and I don’t have one.’ He said, ‘Well, that is true. You have to have a school leaving certificate but no one will ever ask to see it.’ So I thought oh, this is [pause] ‘So, in that case I’m recommending you for training as a pilot.’ So, in the fullness of time I, we got sent for to go down for a selection board which was held in Edinburgh. So I went down to Edinburgh. I was told to book myself in somewhere for a few days and I went down to Edinburgh and had this. And the first thing I noticed was we went in to a big room and there was a blackboard and somebody came in and whipped a cover off the blackboard and says, ‘You’ve got one hour to write an essay on the —’ And there was a choice of two or three subjects. So, I got that over and then there was a few tests like Morse aptitude test, another eyesight test, then a night vision test and then the next day had another paper handed out and it was a maths. An hour of maths. And at the end of all that there was an interview. Oh, no, after that there was a medical. And I thought that was when I was going to fail. We had to blow up a tube of mercury and I thought my lungs were going to burst and I just shut my eyes and blew and blew and blew and blew. And then I heard a voice say, ‘Alright, you’ve done it.’ And, ‘You’ve passed the aircrew medical and now you go for the Board.’ And we knew some of the questions you would automatically be asked about, ‘Why do you want to fly?’ And I was always amused because in the sort of Aircrew Association magazine that I used to get later people used to say what they’d always said to things but you knew full well they would never have said it. ‘Well, because if I’m got to go to war I’d like to do it sitting down.’ And so, another one, ‘Because you get more money.’ And so on. Anyhow, I knew neither of those would really have been what they said. So, I I said, ‘Why didn’t you join then?’ Well, I couldn’t very well say, ‘Because I don’t have a school leaving certificate.’ So I said, ‘Because I was told the flight mechanics were urgently needed.’ And so a few things and then the other thing that always puzzled me they set such a store on, ‘What sport did you play?’ So and for some reason we all knew that what they wanted to hear was that you played rugby. They didn’t want to hear you played Association Football. But as it happened I was never any good at any sports so I couldn’t. Netball, I would go the opposite way to what I wanted to go and I had never managed to bowl anybody out at cricket so I was absolutely no good. But however, I thought well, there’s no good saying that so I sort of said that, [pause] ‘Did you not play for your school?’ And I said [laughs] ‘No. The school I went to was in the middle of a large town. It had no playing fields.’ However, we did used to go to the swimming baths regularly and I said that I was also a very keen member of the Scouts Association Swimming Club which meant you could get in the baths for tuppence instead of three pence or something on certain nights. So that seemed to satisfy them. And, and then a few more questions and then I was told they would, I would be recommended but they explained that you no longer could you be a pilot. You had to agree to be a PNB which meant you would be a pilot, navigator or a bomb aimer but you all got the same pay and you all had exactly the same and you were all equally important. That was always stressed. And so I went back and just waited to be sent for again. And this was about three months must have elapsed before they sent for me so there was no urgency. And I went to Aircrew Reception Centre at London which I didn’t like at all. I never did care for, I never cared for London and that was the only thing I really remember about it was going for a long run through some of the London parks and to then, I thought that was the PT part. But no, you then started to stop in certain places and do exercises. And that night I was on fire watching which meant I was sleeping on the top bunk of a two decked bunk and only had to get up if there was, if the sirens had gone. Had to watch for where bombs had fallen. And when I leapt out of bed for my turn my legs just buckled up. I think with the unaccustomed exercise I couldn’t even stand [laughs] never mind run. It took me ages before I was able to walk again. And anyhow, I finished there and most people went up to Scarborough to do their ITW training but instead of going there I was sent to Cambridge and went to Pembroke College which was rather nice. I was quite pleased about that. And when we finished there we did an awful lot of law. Military. It’s Air Force law and administration. Civil law. And we did meteorology which is understandable and, but and then there was the exams at the end and, and then if you, you never knew who had passed and who hadn’t because if people hadn’t passed something they just were whisked away. You never saw them. You couldn’t see anything. Speak to them even. Anyhow, I then moved down to a little airfield called Sywell, near Nottingham and learned to fly on Tiger Moths which was quite, I thought that was great. To sit in a little plane and push the throttle forward to get more power and pull the stick back a bit and I’m actually flying now, you know. And that was fine for two or three days but then they started to have to do spins and loops and oh dear and I was just felt absolutely ill with that. Oh, I felt horrible. And anyhow, I stuck it out for the training and then the chief instructor gave us all test flight and he told me that he didn’t think I was going to be suitable for pilot training which I think I already knew [laughs] And so I I was then put down to be a bomb aimer. And from [pause] from there I went to Manchester but we didn’t do anything. It was just a question of waiting until we went out to Canada. And in the fullness of time I got on the Andes and it was quite a nice pleasant run and landed at, I think it was St Johns in Canada and went up to Nova Scotia. Not Nova Scotia. New Brunswick. And then eventually down to Ontario for a bombing and gunnery course. And I always remember the first time we flew. The pilot said, ‘It’s just a wind finding exercise, isn’t it?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Well, how about if we do it over Niagara Falls?’ Oh, I thought. That’s great. And, you know, that sort of thing. Gosh. I never ever thought I would be sitting here flying over Niagara Falls. And so, I finished there and then went on to Number 1 Air Observer’s School which was mainly for navigation and flew quite, trips out across the Great Lakes and navigated about Canada and quite, quite pleasant really. And it was much easier than doing it over here because there was no blackouts so if you saw a train going along with lights on you think well there should be a railway line near here. Well, yes that must be it. Where here there are so many trains you don’t know where you were going. And towns were all lit up so again that was good, everything was easy, quite pleasant and a plentiful supply of everything. And, and we used to spend most weekends going down to America. And so I was quite, quite happy time to be there. And eventually we finished training and the great day arrived when we could get our flying badge and it was quite a do. They assembled the whole, the whole of the station and the courses passing out which in this case was us would be in the middle and you would hear your name read out and we were all forever being told you put, you have your white flash very loose in your hat so it can be easily plucked out and you hear your name which in my case was Sergeant Fisher, Sunderland, England. And the next might be Sergeant Jones of Winnipeg, Canada. So we went and stepped forward and some air marshall picks out, plucks out the white flash and someone hands him a flying badge and pinned it in and then you give him a salute and walk away. And there was the band playing, and a marquees with a buffet meal laid out and they made quite a do of it.
GT: Was the course you were on, Tom was it a mixture of of English, Canadian, New Zealand, Australian? The people —
TF: Mostly when I was there they were about fifty fifty English and Canadian. I don’t think there was, I don’t know if there was any Australian although we did see, there were quite a few Australians waiting to go on courses when we were waiting at Manchester to go over to Canada. So, there were obviously some Australians would go.
GT: That was the Commonwealth Training Scheme.
TF: Yes.
GT: Because the majority of New Zealand and Australian aircrew went through that scheme before they headed off through to England. So it’s interesting to hear you actually went the other way to so this training scheme to go back to England. So, when you finished that training and you were given the half brevet of observer or bomb aimer.
TF: Ah huh.
GT: Which one?
TF: Well, it was really what we used to be called observer and that went out of fashion and bomb aimer, but bomb aimer had also become much more of a navigating. And when I went on to bombers they used to work in conjunction with the, we had a navigator and one of us would operate one radar set. I think I used to do the Gee and he used to do H2S and —
GT: So, for your time then in Canada how long did you spend overall and then what was the dates and year that you got back to England?
TF: I would say slightly less than a year overall there. A lot of that time was hanging about mind. When I was at Moncton we weren’t doing, we weren’t, it wasn’t, they were just waiting to go somewhere else. Then there was two weeks leave when I went to New York and then back to Moncton to wait for a ship to bring us back home again. So, the actual time was getting on for a year altogether.
GT: When you were in the USA what was the feeling like about the war and obviously they recognised you guys because you were all in our English RAF uniforms or did you change in to civilians and try to keep yourself —
TF: No. No. We always wore our uniforms and we didn’t have passports. It was quite sufficient to have your identity card in your pocket when they came around at the front of you. They would just look at that and went across. There was no bother. It was really quite pleasant actually because the Americans were really really good. It was not unusual to go in to a restaurant for a meal when you asked for the bill or as they would always call it the check, you would always get oh its been paid for. Or someone to come in the bar and produce a tray of drinks on your table and say, with the gentleman, ‘With the compliments of that gentleman in the corner.’ And yes. They thought we were marvellous you see. But —
GT: What were the American ladies like? Did you get to go out to the nightclubs or the —
TF: Yes.
GT: Dances. Dine and dances.
TF: Yes. No problem at all like. I always remember going to one and as soon as I got in this girl came up and said, ‘Are you with or without?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m without.’ She said, ‘With now.’[laughs]. But, oh yes, there was never any problem on that score.
GT: Because you know the Americans were over in England [laughs]
TF: Yes, I know, and I think we to a large extent were treated the same as the way they were. Only of course they had lots of goodies to give away and such like but there was no need for that anyhow in America. There was plenty of things. But yes they were. They were very very interested to know what we were doing. Oh, it was a sort of a wonderful time. I used to, it was only a Friday evening we used to get a train from Toronto down over the border to Detroit. And, and what really happened was a terrific contrast because in Canada you cannot get drinks other than coke. There was no, no bars you can’t get a drink in restaurants and its quite, quite strict on that score but you could just cross over the border. And even in Niagara in the American part there’s nightclubs and business going on all night. In the Canadian half it shuts down quite, no where to go drinking and things like that.
GT: So you were about twenty years old by this time.
TF: Ah huh.
GT: You had yet to have your twenty first to come. Right. And so, when you finished in Canada you were all put on another ship back to Britain.
TF: Yes.
GT: Was it part of a convoy or was the ship fast enough to avoid the U-boats?
TF: The ship, it wasn’t a convoy. None of them were in convoy. It was reckoned it would be fast enough but if by any chance it got torpedoed it would have been terrible because it was so crowded. It was a very big ship. The Mauretania and it was, oh, I was absolutely appalled when we went on and they gave us a hammock. I says, ‘Go to sleep in a hammock?’ And it’s and I realised afterwards we were lucky to have hammocks to sleep in. At least we were in the top half as well where there was a bit more air and such like. It was so crowded they could only give, there was plenty of food but they could only give us two meals a day because they just, you know there wasn’t the space. They couldn’t fit any more in to the dining rooms.
GT: So how long was that journey? Two weeks?
TF: No. About a week each way.
GT: Brilliant. So, when you got back to England what happened to you then?
TF: Well, they sent us up to Harrogate for, for a very short while and then we came home on leave for two weeks. I went back to Harrogate and we stayed there for a few, a few weeks again and then for some strange reason I went up to Whitley Bay to do what they called a survival course and it always puzzled me why I was picked. Nobody else on the course went with me. I just went up to Whitley Bay and I was a bit appalled actually because when I got there I was issued with khaki battledress and great thick heavy army boots and we spent a lot of time running about on, on the beach and the purpose really was to try and show us how we could survive on stuff you could find on beaches. Sort of, you know I think I’d rather just die than eat some of this stuff to be quite frank. But, and I always thought it was funny to think that we were marching around like a lot of little soldiers during the, during the day and in the evening we went back to our billets. We were in sort of houses in, not, they weren’t people living in them but the houses had been sort of commandeered and they were empty and they just put beds and a few tables and things in for us and we changed to our Air Force uniform and go down to a dance. And I often thought I wonder if people realised we were, and also of course we were very proud of our new flying badges but then again in the morning we were back again in to this khaki uniform. But I flatly refused to wear Army boots. But on the other hand it was a bit awkward because we still wore those funny little gators and there was a gap between the top of my shoes and the [laughs] and the gator. So if you ran through a stream your feet were absolutely soaking wet. But anyhow, it was only a short course and when that was finished of all places I came up here to Heathhall.
GT: And that was a posting that that you asked for or was it just something you were told to go to?
TF: It was just something we went to. It was called Number 10 Advanced Flying Unit. And it was flying Avro Ansons and it wasn’t bad. It was quite pleasant really. We used to fly over the Irish Sea and over to Ireland and the Isle of Man and such like and a lot of, a lot of little cross countries and such like and [laughs] I never thought at the time that I would be living so near to, to Heathhall.
GT: So, what year was this? What month and year? Can you remember?
TF: Oh, we’re getting on for ’44 now I would think.
GT: And what was your role to be doing at this with the Ansons? You were still training? Or did you teach others?
TF: Navigating. Navigating and [pause] mostly navigating but we did, did drop practice bombs and actually it was part of the targets, one of the targets we used was, is still visible through the, through the, you can see the base of it and usually I had a cross country flight and then come back and we’d go, go and drop bombs. Six bombs from different directions over. It was either there or Luce Bay and and I think that was mainly what we did here at Heathhall. And then from there I got posted up to Lossiemouth and that’s where we were told we would have to find, sort yourself out in to crews.
GT: Oh, what, what base was that at? Sorry you went to the Lossiemouth base.
TF: Lossiemouth.
GT: Ok.
TF: Ah huh. It was an Operational Training Unit.
GT: Ok.
TF: I think we were number 20 OTU and, and we were in a way sort of lucky there because we were told we would have to form crews and from what I’d understood with most people the whole collection of aircrew was put in to a hangar and told to, ‘Sort yourselves in to crews and if you haven’t formed yourselves in to crews in an hour we’ll just come and put you in.’ But we were told to sort yourselves out in to crews and you’ve got a week to get that done. So just get to know each other in the bar, in the mess and get, get to know each other and and see what happens. And the second day over there I was [unclear] I was going to have a drink before the lunch break and there was a flying officer and a flight sergeant came in and they came straight across to me and one said, ‘Oh, I’m John and this is Eric. Eric’s my navigator and we would like you to join us as bomb aimer.’ And I thought well he’s a flying officer. That’s not bad. He must have some experience. So I readily agreed and I discovered afterwards that why he had had experience they’d kept him on as an instructor. So I felt quite confident we’d got a good pilot.
GT: Yeah.
TF: And then during that time we collected a rear gunner and a wireless operator and that meant five of us in the crew and we were now on Wellingtons and but [pause] And then after a little while the, for some strange reason again we were posted down to Moreton in Marsh and we were now told we were going to join Tiger Force.
GT: Now, you earlier mentioned it was 1944. So, by this time when did you get posted to 20 OTU in Lossiemouth?
TF: I was posted to 20 OTU in Lossiemouth and then from Lossiemouth posted to 21 OTU at Moreton in Marsh.
GT: But what year was that please, Tom?
TF: Oh, we were getting on for ’45 then, I guess.
GT: So you spent quite a bit of time training within the UK once you got back from Canada.
TF: Ah huh.
GT: On the Ansons, wasn’t it? I was just thinking back to the time you spent down here training on the Ansons. So how long did you spend on bomb aimer training with the Anson aircraft?
TF: The Bomb aimer training at?
GT: With the Ansons you were, you were bombing off of here somewhere. So —
TF: At here they were Ansons, ah huh.
GT: There’s quite a few months for you doing that.
TF: Probably, I don’t think it was a long time, probably about four months.
GT: And that took you in to early 1945. Wow.
TF: It would be getting on for that. Around that time. Ah huh.
GT: So, you, you were aware at the time with your crew that the war was closing. It was coming to an end.
TF: I don’t think we were actually. I don’t think we were. I don’t think. I don’t think we knew very much beyond our own immediate little —
GT: Right.
TF: No. I don’t think. We’d heard obviously you heard on the radios, news reels and you saw newsreels in cinema but I don’t think we were actually aware that it was getting so near finishing.
GT: Because it’s a long time to be spending doing your training when —
TF: It is an awful long time. Yes. But of course. there was such an awful long time of waiting in between. Sort of from Pembroke College, Cambridge to Flying School was straight off but then Flying School to going out to Canada to do really the next part of your training there was about three four maybe six weeks in Manchester. A week on the ship and two or three weeks at Moncton in Canada. All we always kept doing something but there was nothing to do with our, with training. It wasn’t until we got down to the Bombing and Gunnery School that you started to realise it and you also realised these were the only places they were giving us any tests at the end to make sure you’d, you got through. The others were just filling time in.
GT: So, when you crewed up at 20 OTU Lossiemouth did you do any flying there or did you go straight down south?
TF: I don’t recollect doing much in the way of flying Lossiemouth. I think we went down to, to Moreton in Marsh.
GT: That was 21 OTU.
TF: 21 OTU. Yes.
GT: Ok. So, and you did flying time there then.
TF: Yes. We did quite, oh we did a lot of flying time there and it made you wonder what we’d all been trained for first because now all the methods that we’d been doing were hardly used because there there was radar and you had a new type of bombsight. The Mark 14. The old one you used to have to watch for your target coming up between two wires and it looked like a really primitive thing. It was, it looked a bit like a compass and then an arm sticking out and you had to just search for the, find the target. Yes. I think. Give the pilot instructions. ‘Left. Left.’ Which incidentally if you wanted him to go to the left it was always, ‘Left. Left.’ And if it was right it was always just, ‘Right.’ So if he heard two he would know it was left. And gave him instructions and always one that, don’t do any last minute corrections because a bomb will always go in the direction the plane’s going. So if he’s moving to the left the bomb will just go over to the left and not to where you wanted it to go. And so yes it was [pause] but now we had a thing, which just shone across on the ground. And you just had to direct the pilot to get so that that cross went, the long arm went up over the target and when he reached the cross piece that was when you pressed the button and it released a bomb.
GT: So was it, ‘Bombs gone.’ ‘Bombs away.’
TF: Oh, ‘Bombs gone, yes.’
GT: ‘Bombs gone, skipper’
TF: But yes, it was usually something like we do sort of working out in your settings and wind speeds and all that and then said, ‘Bomb doors open.’ Because the pilot would open the bomb doors and then you would then say, ‘Number one and two selected and fused, nose and tail. Because if you dropped a bomb before it’s fused it doesn’t explode. Or so they say [laughs] I wouldn’t know.
GT: So, with the arming of your weapons you had a selection panel to choose and you already knew what bomb load you had. Is that correct?
TF: Well, you would. Yes. Because it’s got to be, it’s better if it goes out evenly and not all at one side first when it’s fused and you always had to select and fuse and then you —
GT: So those fuse setting that you, you then set the bombs before you released them was that given to you as part of your briefing before. Before you were to leave for an operation or was that something you chose when you were there for the, during the flight. The fuse settings for the bombs where did they come from?
TF: They were put on by the armourer.
GT: Yeah.
TF: And —
GT: So you knew the fuse settings before you took off.
TF: Well, it was just a switch.
GT: Good. Ok.
TF: And, and apparently we would [give them away] was because they would be left hanging on the thing. If there were little things left hanging on the bomb rack they would drop them without the fuses being set.
GT: Right. So that, that’s your arming wire which is selected to the, to the micro switch on the aircraft. So, you set the micro switches to hold the arming wire. As the bomb fell away wire came out of, out of the nose fuse and allowed the spinning propeller to arm the fuse of the bomb. Yeah. Good stuff. Ok. So, so Tom then once you moved down to 21 OTU that must have been pretty much near the end of the war.
TF: It would be because it was when you say 21 OTU. When we finished, we finished our training on 21 OTU and then we moved up to I think it was 16 I can recall 1630 or 1830 Heavy Conversion Unit.
GT: And what aircraft did you convert from the Wellington to that?
TF: From the Wellington to the Lancaster.
GT: Lancaster Mark 4 or Mark 3s generally. The Merlin engine.
TF: Merlin engines. Yes. Four Merlin engines which lots of people blame for having hearing aids in later life but —
GT: That’s a point to ask you, Tom. For your hearing protection. You didn’t have any hearing protection.
TF: Didn’t have any at all. And it wasn’t just in the, in the, in with four Merlins in the Lancaster but running the Spitfires up on the ground to maximum boost. There were no other. It can’t have done the ears any good at all. But to go back to Lancasters we’d now collected two more in the crew making it up to seven. A flight engineer and a mid-upper gunner.
GT: And, and that was and at what base were you at, Tom?
TF: North Luffenham.
GT: North Luffenham. So, now, now the war had finished you mentioned Tiger Force early on.
TF: Yeah.
GT: So, can, I know what Tiger Force was. Can you describe to me what you knew of Tiger Force at that time?
TF: Well, I just knew that we were going to go to Japan and I also know, quite vividly remember being to keep, we were going to have a little capsule of some sort of poison sewn in our, in the collar of our battle dress. We were told that if you get shot down the choice is yours. You can either be taken prisoner or you can bite the end of your battle dress off and take that.
GT: Cyanide probably.
TF: It was poison. Yes.
GT: Ok. So you were training on, on the Lancasters at this time. Had the atomic bombs been dropped?
TF: No.
GT: No. Ok, so you were, with this training in Tiger Force did they mention the Lincoln bombers to come?
TF: I’d heard of them. I didn’t know what they were but, particularly what they were though but I did read afterwards that the British government and the American government had come to an agreement that we would send out Tiger Force which would consist of twenty squadrons of Lancasters plus 1830 Heavy Conversion Unit. Why that I don’t know but that was what we were on so we knew full well we were going to, to go out.
GT: There was quite a numerous amount of squadrons of Mosquitoes to go as well I understand from the Tiger Force —
TF: I would think. I would think so because the Mosquito was a fantastic aeroplane.
GT: Certainly. So, they actually stated to you you were going to be going to Japan or bombing Japan.
TF: Well, I suppose we’d be bombing Japan first, isn’t it? No. There were, one or two places were mentioned but I don’t think it was officially. Officially mentioned.
GT: So how many flights did you do then in preparation for that? Because VE Day had happened.
TF: VE day had happened. Yes. And it sort of quite regular really. I might also mention earlier on when we were on OTU on Wellingtons that one night there was somebody extra seemed to get in. Come on wearing a flying suit so you couldn’t see what he was or what his rank was but he was an extra person came along that night. And the following morning we found we were no longer had a radio operator in the crew. [pause] He’d, he’d been taken out and that was the Air Force way of doing things. You know, no chance to say cheerio or anything. It was just [pause] I’m assuming that he wasn’t up to scratch and he just disappeared and later in the day we just got a new one.
GT: Did you have any, any idea that some of your crew members were unhappy or couldn’t take the strain? Or —
TF: No. No idea at all.
GT: And at this time you had done no overseas operational bombing —
TF: No.
GT: Sorties at that time.
TF: No.
GT: Because —
TF: No, it was very shortly, we’d only been crewed up and flying for two or three times. That apparently is the RAF way of doing it. I think they thought it might be bad for morale. They just —
GT: Were you made aware at the time of LMF? Lack of moral fibre.
TF: Of any —
GT: Lack of moral fibre. Were you aware of that term?
TF: Not an awful lot. I think I heard more of it afterwards. I think it was a disgusting thing. We knew of its existence but I suppose you always adopted the attitude of well it wouldn’t happen to me, would it?
GT: But you were a volunteer. All of you blokes were volunteers. Right?
TF: Yes.
GT: And they still treated you quite badly at that.
TF: It was, it was dreadful.
GT: Someone couldn’t keep it going. Ok. I’m assuming then that your navigator was, was removed from flying status because of his supposed lack of moral fibre and the way you described it. Would that be fair?
TF: Well, I think it possibly, could be that he was. Just wasn’t efficient enough with his, it was the radio operator. I think it could be just that he wasn’t in it. But I don’t know whether [unclear] would have anything to do with it but I did know that he was only member I knew in the aircrew that was married.
GT: Ok. Maybe he was removed so the war was finishing and they only wanted single, single men.
TF: It could be.
GT: Yeah.
TF: But there was no reason given. It’s just he flew with us one night and then we never saw him again.
GT: Right. So, when you did your training through on OTU and then on the HCU did you do any practice bomb dropping from the Wellingtons and then the Lancasters?
TF: Just practice.
GT: Just practice. Yeah. And how many hours have you accrued then for daylight and night time. Can you remember the flying hours you had done?
TF: It wasn’t a great lot.
GT: Now, Wellington. The Heavy Conversion Unit at that time is that pretty much where you much finished because you didn’t go to Lancaster Finishing School at all?
TF: No. That was one of the things that always puzzled me. Why didn’t we go to a Lancaster Finishing School like other people? But I realised afterwards it was because we did all of it on Lancasters. The others that went to Lancaster Finishing School went on to Stirlings and Halifaxes and then just did a short time on Lancasters but we did the whole of Heavy Conversion on Lancasters.
GT: Intriguing because most of the LFS Schools, Number 3 at Feltwell, for instance most of the 75 Squadron aircrew that I’ve talked with and seen their logbooks they only did four flights. Four to five flights in one week from a Stirling and then straight on to Lancaster. So, so you did, you did the full, that’s huge. Ok. So then, then came VJ day for you guys.
TF: Ah huh.
GT: And did flying pretty much cease because you were preparing for Tiger Force to get going to the Japan region.
TF: Well, that was to say rather strange. What happened in my case was just before VJ Day I was told I had to go and see the CO. And I went to see him and he said, ‘Your demob’s going to be coming up shortly.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m not surprised,’ I said. I said, ‘But,’ he said, ‘My job actually is to persuade you to sign on.’ He says, ‘Now, you could. If you were, the best thing you could do you know would be to sign on for twenty one years. You’ve done five years. Twenty one years you’ll be thirty nine. Eighteen when you joined. Twenty one years. Thirty nine. You’ll retire on a pension at thirty nine.’ Which sounds very nice but it was going to be only a very small pension anyhow. But anyway, I thought well I don’t think the peacetime Air Force is for me. I think, I always think of the words of a PT or drill instructor and he had a gathering of us to take for a PT session early one morning. Our names appeared on the notice board to attend for PT and we all knew it was because we’d done some minor infringement of rules and regulations and we, I went down and I had my PT kit on and I had a sweater or something on top. It was a bit chilly. And a lot of the Canadians, well they were mostly Canadians actually and most of them were commissioned and they came down in overcoats for the PT, so he said, well of course as you realise he had to be reasonably polite. He couldn’t speak as if they were just, ‘Hey you,’ do this or do that. He said, ‘Could you take your overcoats off?’ ‘Oh, no.’ ‘No? Why not?’ ‘It’ll be cold.’ He said, ‘Well, you can’t do PT in overcoats.’ ‘Well, we could try.’ [laughs] And he got really exasperated and said, ‘It’ll be a good job when this war’s over and we can have a proper Air Force without all this flying.’ And I thought my goodness an Air Force without flying. Does he think the Air Force’s main purpose is to do PT and march about and things like that? No. The peacetime Air Force wouldn’t be for me.
GT: So, he swayed your decision to sign on further. Yeah. So, so you that chap was asking you to carry on as a bomb aimer.
TF: Yes.
GT: After the war.
TF: And, after the war and he says or you could just sign on for six months. And I thought well what’s the point.? I’ve, you know I’ve got to adjust now to going back to Civvy Street. I’m not staying in the Air Force. I’m quite sure of that. I could not possibly put up with the peacetime. I could imagine it. Marching here and marching there. Life was so free and easy and things and also it was, they would probably be a little bit more strict on the visions of class. You know. I mean, in the aircrew when we’d done a, whether your crew were officers or sergeants you all went in for a meal the same, in the mess at the same time having, and we all used to use the same mess. It was all, you know nobody did any different but I should think that changed in peacetime. And so I said, ‘No. I don’t think I will.’ And then he said, ‘Well, if you won’t sign on you won’t do any more flying.’ And I thought is this man crazy? They’ve spent thousands of pounds training me in two years or so. Training me for this and now because I won’t sign on [pause] and I just cannot stand sort of being threatened like that. It just, that was just enough. So, I said, ‘Well, in that case I don’t do any more flying. So, later that day we were down for night flying and I went along to the, the briefing room and there was the board for tonight’s crews. And there was a sort of list down the side of the pilot’s names and the list along of the crew and I looked down. Flying Officer Jorgenson. Navigator Flight Sergeant Stobes, bomb aimer — it should have said Flight Sergeant Fisher. It had been rubbed out. And I was absolutely appalled. I didn’t think he really would have done it that quickly. I was really really annoyed and so, oh well that’s it. I don’t. So I did nothing for two or three days and then I thought well, I think I might as well go home for all the good I’m doing here. So I did. And then I started to worry about it a bit. You know, you’re being rather stupid if you get, if they discover you. You’d probably lose your stripes and crown and your demob pay would go way down. Way down. So you’d better go back. So I went back and at the same time I was relieved but at the same time it was not good for your ego to know that nobody had ever missed you. And anyhow, I went and saw the adjutant and said, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ He said, ‘What do you mean what do you do?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m not flying now.’ He said, ‘Well, whose crew were you in?’ And I told him. He looked up some records, he says, ‘That was a few weeks ago.’ ‘Oh yes. Yes.’ He said, ‘What have you done since then?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m waiting for a job.’ He says, ‘You mean you’ve sat on your behind and done nothing.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t put it like that.’ He said, ‘I don’t see how else you can put it.’ Anyhow, he said, ‘Come in the office next to me and you can sort of help me. You can be a sort of assistant adjutant.’ So that’s what I did. But I didn’t like it at all.
GT: So, there was no other aircrew. Had the same thing happened to them? Did he just single you out or was it common across —
TF: Well, no. There was no more but as it happened after I had [unclear] him up for about forty years later and I got a telephone call and he mind, sort of said, ‘Am I speaking to Mr Fisher?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Thomas Fisher?’ ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Were you in the RAF?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘You used to like to spend your weekends at Cheltenham.’ And I said, ‘As it happens I did but how do you know all this?’
GT: Yeah. And what happened?
TF: And he said, ‘Well,’ he says, ‘One final. One final question. Were you in Yorgeys crew?’ We always called him, he was always, his name was Jorgenson. He was always known as Yorgey. And I said, ‘Well, yes. Yes, but who are you?’ He said, ‘Well, I’m Frank, the wireless operator,’ he says, ‘And I’ve set myself a task of when I retired I was going to trace all the crew so that we could have, and see if we could have a reunion.’ And he said, I said, ‘How have you traced me? I live in Scotland now. I’ve moved from the North of England.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m with Scotland Yard and you must remember I’m used to tracing people and most of them don’t want to be traced.’ So, he, he said, ‘Can you think of any of the other names?’ I said, ‘Well, how far have you got?’ He says, ‘Well, I’ve discovered that Johnny is, only lived about forty miles from me. So we’ve been together and you’re the next one.’ And eventually went through with the aid of a newspaper ad, an advertisement and eventually traced all the crew and we met up. All met up again at Woodhall Spa. It was amazing to see each other after an absence of [pause] this would be about 1990. An absence of about forty five years.
GT: So when you finished with, with the aircrew because as then flight sergeant you became deputy adjutant you didn’t keep in contact with your crew even though you were still the same?
TF: No. With actually, this was the first, I gather that VJ Day the crew, I mean I just couldn’t understand it. We’d worked together all this time and then we only did two more practice flights and then that was, that was it. They’d actually gone on a train to go down to an RAF station. I think it was in Cornwall and the RAF police boarded the train and singled them out and said, ‘Will you get off at the next station and return back to your base. You’re not wanted anymore.’ So that was only a matter of days before VJ Day was announced.
GT: Fascinating. That must have been really disappointing to spend all that time —
TF: It just struck me as so ridiculous to think all this training that I’d had and why split a crew up?
GT: And you were the only crew that you know of that this happened to.
TF: Ah huh.
GT: That recruiter, eh. He’s got a lot to answer for.
TF: And then in many ways I was certainly glad I didn’t sign on because it wasn’t very long before bomb aimers were redundant [pause] The aircrews, most aircrews were now restricted to two. Pilot and a navigator. Bomb aimers were not wanted. Air gunners were no longer wanted. Radio operators were no longer, were no longer needed after a while because the pilot doesn’t need, you don’t need to use Morse Code anymore. You can speak plain language over hundreds of miles.
GT: Mind you, you’d been given a lot of navigator training so most navigators later received bomb aiming training.
TF: Could possibly. Possibly I had about that. But there was hundreds of us. Thousands in fact, I suppose.
GT: The UK was awash with airmen wanting to do something.
TF: And then just finally I got a bit fed up working in, just in the office and I asked the adjutant if I could, I thought well, perhaps I could go and learn to drive. That would be more sense. And —
GT: So up to this point you’d never driven a vehicle.
TF: Never driven at all. No.
GT: Aged twenty one. Going on twenty two.
TF: Ah huh.
GT: Yeah.
TF: No. I mean there must have been hundreds of us learned to fly a plane before we learned to drive a car. And he says, ‘Well, I could send you to Catterick and they’ll give you some tests and see what your suitable for.’ So I went to Catterick [laughs] and I had, I don’t know what these tests were. How they were worked out but and then in the central, he said, ‘I’ve got the result of your test and it appears you would be ideal for training as a butcher and cook.’ I said, ‘You are joking surely.’ And I can’t really, don’t believe what I was hearing. I had been, I was told I was suitable to train as a flight mechanic which is a higher grading. And then I was training as a bomb aimer navigator and now I’m just suitable to be a butcher. And that’s the one thing I could not stand was the sight of raw meat. And I said, ‘Well, that is out of the question. I just will not do that.’ He says, ‘Well, what would you do?’ I said, ‘Well, learn driving. He said, ‘Well, there’s no vacancies.’ He did try I must admit. ‘No vacancies in any driving school but I could send you to a transport company and you could do local training.’ So I did get transferred to this but I never did any training out there at all. What I was used for was to fill in gaps where people were away. If they were short of. Although I wasn’t an officer I would often do a parade and I would take part as orderly officer or something. Whenever they were a bit short I filled in for that. And then eventually I just got demobbed. But I was just so, to think I’d had blooming tests and now it turned out I would have been better off as a butcher.
GT: That’s crazy. So did you follow up and look at the medals that you were entitled for your war service?
TF: Just, I was just entitled to the, what everybody was. The Defence Medal and the, the war —
GT: The ‘39/45 Star.
TF: Star. Ah huh.
GT: And, and did you send in to have them? Received them?
TF: I did take them.
GT: And you’ve got them now.
TF: Ah huh.
GT: You’ve still got them.
TF: Ah huh. Incidentally I’ve got a photo here of the crew.
GT: Oh ok.
[pause]
GT: Perhaps you can, I’ll tell you what we’ll finish the interview first there.
TF: Ok.
GT: And let’s have a look at those soon. But so from, from your time of being demobbed, Tom you obviously didn’t go the butcher route. So, what did you end up doing in your new civilian life?
TF: Well, I had two things in mind. I was, one of the things that I thought I might have, might have had some help on instead of doing this silly business saying I could be a butcher or something I thought if they might have told us what grants were available for what training purposes. So, I had, when I was, before I joined I worked for my father as a, as a painter and decorator. So, I just went back to, to doing that and the Air Force and the government paid part of my wage because I’d left as an apprentice and there I was twenty two twenty three and I would not, I would expect better pay than [laughs] so they made up the difference. I can’t remember how long it was but they did it for so long and I sort of settled again and that. And then eventually I, I expect my father was getting a bit past it so I took over and I had quite a reasonable business. I got some quite some, quite good customers such as Lloyds Bank and I did quite a lot of decorating on hospitals and schools and things and, and then I also had a wallpaper and paint shop. And that, that was the rest of my, my life.
GT: That was here in Dumfries?
TF: No. It was in Sunderland.
GT: Oh, ok.
TF: But I [laughs] must say that the shop itself became a bit of a nuisance because the supermarkets, the Do it Yourself supermarkets were coming out. The price maintenance came off paint and wallpapers and so there was sort of cut price wars. And then to make things worse the shop got broken into twice. I got a bit fed up with hearing the telephone go in the middle of the night. ‘Something about your place. Can you get around?’ So this was including one practical joker who rang me up about 3 o’clock in the morning and said, ‘This is Sunderland Fire Brigade. ‘There’s a fire at your wallpaper shop. Can you get around?’ And I thought, oh no. ‘Yes.’ So I went back up to the bedroom and started to get dressed and my wife said, ‘What was that about?’ I said, ‘It’s just some fire. She said, ‘Well, ring the Fire Brigade.’ I said, ‘Well, that was the Fire Brigade that rang me.’ She said, ‘Well, how do you know?’ So, ‘I Don’t.’ So, I rang the Fire Brigade and they hadn’t phoned at all. It was just a hoax call trying to get me around in the middle of the night.
GT: They were going to wait for you huh? So you met a lady and you married and had children I guess.
TF: Yes.
GT: Can you give us a little bit of your, your fond memories of that time? Who is your wife and your children?
TF: Yes. Well, I I was sort of quite fond of going dancing and that seemed to be the way of meeting most people but and I met my wife at a, at a dance and I sort of had a few dances with her. One or two. And then they played, which was the custom in those days of the last dance was always a waltz and they usually sort of announces that, ‘Will you take your partners for the last waltz?’ Which, when that finished I said, ‘Well, I’ll sort of see you home.’ And she said, ‘Well, I live up at Grindon.’ And I thought that’s a bit far isn’t it? But she said, ‘I get a bus.’ I said, ‘Where do you get the bus from?’ Park Lane was the bus station. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I’ll go around that way.’ So, I went around that way and saw her on to the bus and arranged to see her again and then saw her two or three times and then it became quite a regular, a regular thing and and then that’s, we got married in 1950. And the problem was at that time was it was so difficult to get houses because with being so much bombing done at the places were instead of being streets of houses there were just streets of bomb sites and they were building new houses but the council where I lived in Sunderland would not allow any new houses to be built privately. Only council houses. And that was, created a problem. Well, firstly I didn’t want a council house and secondly you couldn’t get a council house until you’d had two children. So, so that’s how you fit that in was never explained. But eventually we, we looked at a few places and found somewhere we could live quite happily. I went, went in for it and I remember putting an offer in and the agents saying, ‘Well, mind I’m not having an auction, a Dutch Auction going on in my office, you know. If that’s your offer it has to be stick to that. If somebody comes along with better I’m not coming to see if you want to go any more.’ And then he added, ‘But I will place that offer before my client and I’ll advise her to accept it. And in a very short time I heard word that she had accepted and so we got well, the house if nothing else. And I got married in 1950. And, and I was sort of, you know having my own little business by then and, and then Julia and my other daughter came along and I think that was about it really, wasn’t it? I’d always wanted a wallpaper and paint shop and I just ran the business from my house you see and then someone sort of said he had one and he was retiring. He wanted to give it up, you know. He said would I like to take it and I said, ‘Yes. I think I’ll take it over. And and then we moved from where we were living until I was, just carried in until it was time to retire and my wife wanted to move somewhere else. She didn’t want to stay in Sunderland and I was quite happy there excepting I did get a bit fed up with having the shop broken into a couple of times but then I sold the shop anyhow. Then my house was broken into a couple of times and, and then I think I had my car broken into two or three times. So I thought well yes, I think I’ll agree. We’ll move. And my wife wanted to go down to Devon and, and I thought it’s nice. I like Devon. But I didn’t think I wanted to go that far the other end of the country you see. Anyhow, someone she knew suggested there was someone was building these houses just up this road and so we came through and had a look and decided to have one and I asked how much it would be. He said, ‘I’ll work you a price out.’ And this was in the middle of the summer and I always remember we got the price just as we were coming up to see you at Christmas. And so, after the Christmas we went, but unfortunately we couldn’t sell our other house it was just, so we had to let it go. So I had to ring the solicitor up and say we can’t go ahead with this and then the estate agents kept sending me a brochure and I looked at it one night when one came and I said, we’d sold our house in the meanwhile and I said [unclear] does this sound familiar to you, “In the village of Lonchinver, a three bedroom bungalow newly built. Just requires the purchaser to choose the bathroom and kitchen fittings.” That sounds like our house or what would have been our house and so I rang up and sure enough it was. So we came through to see it and it wasn’t quite like that. There was no walls up. It had a roof on but however we decided then we’d sort of decided we would move so we moved up over here. And that would be in nineteen, in 1991. So I’ve been here twenty six year now.
GT: Grandchildren?
TF: Two. One in Edinburgh and one in Aberdeen.
GT: Wow. Very good. And and in your retirement did you settle and golf, tennis, bowls?
TF: No. I I was never, never very keen on golf. No. I got, I bought a touring, a small touring caravan and we, we always went, we went once a year or two to a reunion and then went went away in the caravan about a month each year and a few weekends. And then I joined the Aircrew Association and they used to have some quite nice little breaks. About four day breaks. They were often connected with flying but not necessarily. Went down to Duxford for a few days. Up to the Scottish Memorial at East Fortune and Mildenhall.
GT: Was the Air Force Association something that was important to you after serving in the RAF?
TF: Not the Air Force Association itself but the Aircrew Association was. I suppose there were so many people in the Air Force Association and I did join actually. I more or less had to because they [laughs] they asked me to decorate their premises out and when they discovered that I’d been in the Air Force I really didn’t have any alternative but to join. But it wasn’t what I expected. It was merely a place to go and drink and a lot of the people they weren’t, hadn’t been in the Air Force anyhow. It was just, just a club to go drinking. But that wasn’t what I was looking for. But when I heard of the Aircrew Association I, it was a lady that my wife knew mentioned it and she said, ‘We have some really nice outings and get togethers. Why don’t you ask your husband if he wants to join?’’ So she mentioned it to me and then a few weeks later she said, ‘I’ll be seeing —' so and so, ‘This afternoon. What do I tell her? She’s sure to ask us if you would like to join.’ I said, ‘Tell her yes I would like to join. So, the following day a telephone call from the secretary and he said, ‘I understand you’re interested.’ I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ He said, ‘Yes, well. You were in the RAF.’ I said, ‘Oh yes, I definitely was.’ He said, ‘Do you know your number?’ I said, ‘Yes, I still know my number.’ And he said, ‘Were you aircrew? By that I mean not just did you fly but were you qualified?’ And I said, ‘Oh, yes.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ll make enquiries and we’ll be in touch.’ And obviously went to find out whether or not I’d actually, the bloke finally came back and he said, [unclear] so, ‘Would you like to come to our Christmas lunch?’ Which I did do. And well, regular quite regular lunches. Often here or down at the Valley and in the, in Dumfries. And then there was a monthly meeting so that was a regular thing then. But no, I never went in for golf or tennis or anything like that.
GT: What about air shows? Do you still, do you still look at the different aircraft that the aircraft are flying today? Of any interest?
TF: Not really. Not the ones today. I’ve always been more interested in in the old ones. In fact, there’s the Heathhall Airfield still have an aircraft museum and we are going there on Sunday, aren’t we? But yeah.
GT: And have you been to East Kirkby or Hendon or Coningsby where the Lancaster is?
TF: Yes. I went over to Coningsby and I saw the Lancaster in the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight.
GT: Fabulous. And —
TF: And that’s it. We were standing underneath it.
GT: Very good. So, your crew you mentioned that one of your crew members managed to get hold of you. So are your crew still about?
TF: No. I’m the only one left.
GT: You’re the last one surviving, eh?
TF: I’m the last one surviving. Ironically I was the oldest.
GT: Gosh. Yeah.
TF: I think at twenty two I was the old man of the crew.
GT: Do you think bomb aimer was was the job for you in the end? Did it work for you?
TF: It worked quite well yes. I mean. I quite, I would have been quite happy as a pilot but I realised that I was not in the position to be able if, if a plane got in to difficulties to get it out. Flying straight and level I could cope with quite well but if something happened you know I wouldn’t have been any use at all. And navigator? Well, bomb aimer and navigator were the same thing really. I think the only difference was the navigator did, went deeper into it and they did a thing called a square search which we never never did. But I mean we were expected to be able to navigate a plane. I mean, as an example we were flying in a Lancaster once and the radio operator says there, ‘Skip, the wireless if off. The radio. I can’t get anything on it at all.’ So, Johnny called and said, ‘Well, really you know we’re not supposed to fly over the sea without radio. What do you think, Eric?’ That was to the navigator. ‘Oh, press on.’ ‘What do you think Thomas?’ ‘Oh, press on regardless. Not a little thing like a radio going to stop us.’ So, we did and that was alright. And then suddenly there was a shout from Len, ‘Hey skip, port engine’s gone. Oil pressure’s right gone. There’s no pressure there at all.’ Oh, feather the port inner.’ And then it wasn’t very long before, The starboard engine’s now gone.’ So [laughs] so things looked to be getting bad. So we had two, just two engines and at the same time I heard the navigator, I think the navigator swearing away to himself you see and he said, ‘Oh skipper, the H2S is not working.’ And Dennis says, ‘Oh, well Tom will take over the navigating now.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry but Gee’s not working either.’ So, he says, well we had to get back to the old method of, of getting a bearing where you could and a course and came back to North Luffenham and called up on the radio. That was the one where you sent Morse messages out but plain talk on the other one was ok. And Johnny calls up and requests permission to land and they said, ‘We’re sorry. You can’t land here. There’s too thick fog so you can go to —’ It was somewhere near Oxford, and they gave us a course to fly if we went down there and we got there and then it was quite exciting in a way because you heard the flying control say to, ‘Clear all aircraft off. Emergency landing.’ And Johnny had called up and said, ‘Well, we’ve only got two engines. So yes. Emergency.’ And you saw the crash tent and ambulance coming up to meet us at the end of the runway and then race to be alongside us and you thought ee gosh, you know, in a couple of minutes time I could be in the back of that ambulance. Or I might just be walking away. So I think I’d better get down in to a crash position and go down with my back to the main spar and then thankfully you felt a bump bump bump. We’re down now. We’re alright.
GT: Because your bomb aimer’s position is lying prone in the nose, isn’t it?
TF: With your back on to the main spar.
GT: Yeah.
TF: In the event of an emergency the bomb aimer gets the, lifts the first aid kit off the hook and takes a chopping axe off it’s thing. Stuffs them down in the front of his battledress and gets your back of the main spar and then that’s it.
GT: I can’t think of anything worse that’s going to kill you it’s an axe stuffed in your pocket. Yeah. Well, well Tom is it, you’ve given us such an amazing amount of your recollections and your time obviously the war finished before you got a chance —
TF: Finished. Yes.
GT: To do any operations per se but do you remember any of your friends that that got on operations? Did anybody talk to you about what they saw? What happened.
TF: Well, one thing I do remember is that after that I volunteered to be a flight mechanic air gunner and then the CO’d recommended for pilot training. I’d been down, had a selection board, came back there was a thing came out, “Would flight mechanic volunteer to change to flight engineer?’ And my friend did that. Changed to flight engineer and he was away, oh I had only just started my training when he was away and trained and we kept in touch. We always wrote and, and then he got, he brought the plane back from Germany and got a Distinguished Flying Medal when the pilot was killed. And I looked a bit surprised to see when he put it on his letterhead. He was still [unclear] DFM and then, I was just starting really. Just starting probably two or three years past Cambridge when I’d kept in touch as I say and I wrote to him and I got the letter back and it was just marked, “Return to Sender.” And it had been opened, got my address out and sent back and he, obviously the reason for that was that he hadn’t come back. And when we were at Lincoln I looked at the [pause] at the Memorial numbers and sure enough his name was on. So he, he’d actually gone on ops, it would only be a few weeks training at St Athans and he’d gone on ops and I hadn’t even finished, hadn’t even got down to flying training.
GT: So as a flight engineer he got on to ops pretty much straight away.
TF: Straightaway.
GT: He was.
TF: He didn’t do, didn’t do any flying training. Didn’t do any OTU or anything like that. Just go straight to a squadron.
GT: Do you think that saved your life then?
TF: Or possibly might have been to Heavy Conversion Unit.
GT: Do you, you consider then that because that would have been say perhaps a year and a half’s worth of the war if you didn’t choose flight engineer. Could that have saved your life too, do you think?
TF: It could have done. Yes. If I hadn’t, if I hadn’t picked the flight mechanic engineer and got recommended for pilot training if I hadn’t done that I would have automatically probably have gone with him and just been a flight engineer. Actually, I did wonder about changing when he went. And then I thought well look you’ve had this altered in your paybook from now I would say trade or category FME UT PNB and you’d also a bomb aimer and a pilot navigator were a higher category than a flight engineer and you got a better pay so I thought well, I’d better just let things go. But yes, it was a very lucky, lucky thing to happen.
GT: Yeah. Tom, you still have your logbook.
TF: Ah huh.
GT: It’s ok. So have you given a copy of this to the IBCC?
TF: No.
GT: Because I can arrange if that’s the case. If you have not then we can arrange for that.
TF: I, the, the museum up at Heathhall took a photostat copy of it.
GT: They might have that in their local files but the IBCC are very keen to, to be able to copy yours in a high resolution file and as a point of note for the recording Tom is showing me photographs of his crew both at the time of training and also later on in nineteen ninety, nineteen ninety something there.
TF: 1991.
GT: Yeah. In front of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight aircraft which looks like Coningsby.
TF: It is, yeah.
GT: Yeah. Coningsby. So, so Tom would you, would you like to also approve that copies of these photographs can also go to the IBCC?
TF: Yes. Yeah.
GT: Fabulous. Right.
TF: Went to, went to the first reunion we had was at Woodhall Spa which is just a few miles from Coningsby and had arranged that we would see the Battle of Britain of Britain Memorial Flight Lancaster and they’d also arranged that we would go in it. And we all went in and took up our respective positions. One in the rear turret, mid-upper turret. Me down in the bomb, in the bomb section and there was it seemed to me, I don’t know where they came from but there was an awful lot of people snapping photos of us in there and they said, ‘That’s the first time ever that we’ve ever had a complete crew come.’ They said, ‘Plenty of people come but never as a complete crew.’ So that was at, at Coningsby at our first reunion.
GT: So, when you left your crew how long did they stay together after that?
TF: Oh, it was a matter of days.
GT: Oh, it was. Ok. So, it wasn’t —
TF: Well, one, one went as a airfield control. Another one went in charge of a group of German prisoners to close an airfield down and transfer all, all the goods up to, to somewhere else. And apparently I gather, that he had only problem tracing two. And one was the mid-upper gunner. A Welsh boy. And he knew he was Welsh so he put something in the Cardiff, in the Cardiff newspaper and, but the boy himself didn’t see it but his ex-wife saw it and thought that sounds as if it could be Terry and told him. And he was very cagey about it. He was wondering [laughs] what the reason why he was ringing him up about.
GT: Fascinating. Well, Tom, I I think you have duly covered your career, your life your service very well and it’s been an honour and a pleasure to come and interview you today and I’m going to make sure that this copy gets to the IBCC by next week and I’m sure that you’ll receive some form of communication from them. So —
TF: Ah huh.
GT: But it’s, it’s been a great afternoon so thank you very much. We’re also going to get some photographs and —
TF: I might also add that we did get a little bit of a bit of a reward in as much that in nineteen, in 2005 was it the Lottery granted money for people to visit when they’d served anywhere abroad and at, I went to Canada. And then again in 2010.
GT: And you visited your, the previous Training Schools where you were.
TF: Yes, because it turned out that the Navigation School was now Toronto Airport.
GT: So that was pretty easy to go back and see the Commonwealth Training Scheme areas.
TF: And then we did another one in 2010. About seven years ago now, wasn’t it? Oh, we did another one and in this case they said you can take the, they would pay the cost for a carer to go as well. [unclear] asked if she would be a carer for us.
GT: So, have you been to the Bomber Command Memorial in London yet?
TF: Not in London.
GT: Ok.
TF: Just the one in Lincoln.
GT: So, you’ve been to Lincoln and you’ve seen the Spire. What do you think of the Spire?
TF: Well, it makes you realise the Lancaster’s wingspan is very, it’s quite wide. Yes its, its quite good. Actually, I thought the whole set up that they had at this opening ceremony had been very well thought out and was quite well, really well organised.
GT: And you are prepared and getting ready to go to the opening of the archives building, Chadwick Hall. And that will be early in 2018. Just coming up.
TF: I don’t, I wouldn’t know. I doubt if I’ll be at that time but I —
GT: Oh well, I can promise you Tom that your record that you’ve just been telling me today will be in the IBCC Archives and they’ll be, they’ll be honoured and thanking you very much for that. So, I think we can, we can safely say that I can now complete the interview with you, Tom.
TF: Ah huh.
GT: And thank you very much.
TF: Not at all.
GT: For your time. So, this was Thomas Fisher and I have been in the company of Diana Harrington and Julian McLennan and this is Glen Turner who has come to interview Tom today. My service was Royal New Zealand Air Force for thirty years as an armaments technician, so now secretary of 75 Squadron Association I am honoured and pleased to help out the IBCC with interviews of the Bomber Command crews from World War Two. Signing off. 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 Thomas Fisher
Creator
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Glen Turner
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-07-26
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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AFisherT170726, PFisherT1701
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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02:04:40 audio recording
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
Wales--Glamorgan
Description
An account of the resource
Thomas Fisher trained initially as a fitter in the RAF. When the Air Ministry announced that flight engineers were needed from the ranks of the ground mechanics he volunteered for training. The CO was surprised that he volunteered and asked him if it was only because he wanted to fly. If so he should apply to train as a pilot. Thomas didn’t have a school certificate but the CO encouraged his application anyway and Thomas began training. He enjoyed the flying but not having to do emergency manoeuvres. Initially, Thomas was working as a fitter for 92 Squadron at RAF Digby on Spitfires. He then was posted to 417 Squadron at RAF Charmy Down. He then was posted to 14 Group Headquarters at Inverness. He joined Bomber Command as a bomb aimer and was prepared to join Tiger Force.
Temporal Coverage
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1942
1944-07-04
1945
Contributor
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Julie Williams
20 OTU
21 OTU
aircrew
Anson
bomb aimer
bombing
flight engineer
flight mechanic
ground crew
ground personnel
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Operational Training Unit
RAF Digby
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF St Athan
Spitfire
Sunderland
Tiger force
training
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1170/11739/PGoodwinWJ1701.1.jpg
8b4ec729b85f1c3409510581a2237ccf
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1170/11739/AGoodwinWJ170607.2.mp3
e3c8203b31a0ff85ab7d6725b4be77a1
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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Goodwin, Wal
Walter James Goodwin
W J Goodwin
Description
An account of the resource
Seven items. An oral history interview with Walter Goodwin (b. 1921, 419914 Royal Australian Air Force) as well as his log book, a story about visit to Cape Town, certificates, flying operation guide for Haverfordwest and photographs. He flew as a pilot with 463 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Walter Goodwin 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
2017-06-07
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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Goodwin, WJ
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AP: This interview for the International Bomber Command Centre is with Wal Goodwin who was a pilot with 463 Squadron on Lancasters. The interview is taking place at Wal’s place at the Basin in Melbourne, in Victoria. My name’s Adam Purcell and it is the 7th June 2017. Wal, we might start at the beginning if you don’t mind. Tell me something about you early life. How you grew up and what you were doing before the war.
WG: Oh. Well, my father was a farmer and we had conscription and I put in, in the Army for quite a while and then they decided because I was a Reserved Occupation they kicked me out, which I didn’t complain about. Not that I had any complaints out there either because they knew I had a driver’s licence so I had the, quite often had the job of seeing, driving the CO around in a beautiful new [unclear] [laughs] which was much better than doing route marches. But after I got back, about three months later I enlisted in the Air Force. But I had to wait to be called up and there were a lot of things that we had to learn because there was so many subjects we had to know which were way above whatever I had done. There was maths. And I was very lucky in one respect. There was a Post Office fellow, a guy that worked in the Post Office down in Boronia and he taught me Morse Code which was a great thing because a lot of the fellas were scrubbed because they couldn’t handle Morse Code. You had to be able to take and send twenty six words a minute and there was no way of faking it. You had to get it accurate and if you weren’t accurate you were out. And I was a bit lucky with the maths side of it. I did a correspondence course for, for the three months I was waiting and so that got me back on track but it was way above what I had done, learned at state schools. So that was a help. And then when you went to Bradfield Park, the initial training course at Bradfield Park was really nothing to do with flying. Although there was a lot of ground work and all the subjects we had to learn as well and there were, which were only be about a hundred guys on the intake I was on and they all wanted to be pilots but there would only be fifteen I think that qualified to go on to elementary flying. So I was posted to Narrandera to do elementary flying and I was a bit lucky there because if you couldn’t go solo in in six hours you were scrubbed. Anyone could learn to fly but there’s a time limit on it and if you couldn’t do it in six months, six hours you were out. Well, I was a bit lucky really because one of my mates [Salle Colewall] for some reason he couldn’t fly and he was filling in his time at that stage in the office. And when I was younger I used to get quinsies which were an abscess on the tonsil which are pretty painful things and I was home on leave from Narrandera one night and going back and I felt this quinsy coming on. So I went straight to this doctor and they put me into the hospital in Wagga Wagga and took my tonsils out which took me off course for about six or eight weeks I suppose. Quite a while. And part of the recuperation we were sent to a farm at a place out of Wagga at a place called Mangoplah where Charlie Harper had a farm. And it was quite an experience because there again because I had a driving licence. Mangoplah was quite a few miles out of Wagga but they used to go in to Wagga Wagga for their shopping and they got me to drive their Ford truck and the roads were all corrugated and I’d never met corrugated roads before and I, going, driving slowly. And a lady said, ‘The only way to handle these roads is go like hell.’ [laughs] So I tried and it worked. But I was there for probably five or six weeks recuperating and when I got back to Narrandera because I hadn’t had any flying experience in that time and according to my records I wasn’t there. But that’s when [Salle?] came in handy because he was in the office and said, ‘He couldn’t be because he was in, in hospital.’ So I was back on course again with a different instructor and I can remember he told me to do a slow roll and I told him I’d never been taught how to do it and he told me I was a bit of an [embarrassment ] But I proved to him I hadn’t because I went in that way and came out [unclear] [laughs] So I finally finished my course in Narrandera and then we were posted to Point Cook to Airspeed Oxfords and that was quite an experience flying a twin-engined Oxford after a Tiger Moth. Tiger Moths, you could, you could do anything in a Tiger Moth so a very very safe plane. But there was a couple of guys who were scrubbed from there as well. One guy was about to take off and the CO was taking me out for a test and suddenly he said, ‘Taking over.’ And he taught me so much in that five minutes that I never forgot. He turned the thing around, right around. So actually down and put the plane down right alongside the chap who was about to take off. He was taking off with, they had a little luggage compartment in there, just behind the cockpit and that was open. He was flying, taking off without opening and he never flew again. And another one he was a bit unlucky in a way, he landed downwind which another thing you recommend because Tiger Moths didn’t have any brakes and he got, before he went in to the drain at the end of the runway he managed to stop. He got out and turned this thing around and took off the other way. But the CO happened to see that so he never flew again either. There were all sorts of reasons why they were scrubbed. Anyhow, flying Airspeed Oxfords was quite an experience. The, my instructor was, he used to fly air ambulances in Sydney in peacetime and everything he’d tell you was just like taking candy from a baby which it was eventually. We, we learned an awful lot on the Airspeed Oxfords. They were, I was lucky really when you had, you didn’t have a choice but we got either posted to Ansons or the Oxfords and I’m glad I had the Oxford because they had hydraulics whereas the Ansons you had to wind everything up and down. And they were very safe plane but the Oxford had a few quirks about them. If you had a dent in the cowling that would put up the stalling rate by quite a few kilometres an hour but I managed to get through it all alright. And then we had to do a cross country flight up to, oh it was around almost to Ballarat and then back down again but you had to find your own way. It was common knowledge. Everyone that had done the course before would tell you when you did that all you do was follow the line. There’s a [unclear] plantation with a ring fence. You follow that down and you go straight [laughs] on to Point Cook. That was a big help but one fella did low flying down Geelong Road and he got a bit low down and took the tips off the propellers. He didn’t fly again either [laughs] But from there I was posted to embarkation depot in Melbourne. We started out at the Melbourne Showground and while I was there I got the mumps so, I missed the [unclear] By the time I was cleared of the mumps all the guys that I’d trained with they’d already been posted. I don’t know where they went. A lot of them went to England but not all of them. I never kept track of it after that. And then we moved from the Showground to the Exhibition Buildings for a few months and from there we went to the Cricket Ground which was quite an experience staying at the Cricket Ground. And eventually we went. We were posted. We went on a Dutch ship, the Niew Amsterdam which was a pretty big ship and we went from there and then we stopped off at South Africa and Durban for about four weeks because they took on about five hundred Italian prisoners of war and about the same number of Polish women. Girl refugees which were going to England so they had to change the ship over so everyone was segregated and of course it was quite an experience. Pretty well uneventful until we got up to Freetown and they took on supplies and one silly guy decided to buy a monkey. I don’t know what he was going to do with it but fortunately they found out before we sailed that he had a monkey so they, that was the end of his monkey. We went unescorted all the way because it was a pretty fast ship and it did a zigzag course which took a bit of getting used to but they reckoned that way you to go so submarines wouldn’t be able to get it. So we finished up in Scotland and went by train from there down to Brighton on the, right on the English Channel. And the first night we were there they had, there was an Englishman who had just defected to the Germans. His name was Lord Haw Haw and he used to do a radio broadcast every night in English to the English people and that the intelligence was pretty accurate because he heard that there was a group of Australians had arrived in Brighton that night and they were going to give them a warm welcome. So we had a quite a lot, a lot of planes going over and they dropped bombs where we were in Brighton and one of them was shot down and it crashed just a couple of streets away from the hotel we were staying at. And for me we, there were so many pilots around. There was. They didn’t know what to do with them so they sent us back to a private airfield flying Tiger Moths again. And from Tiger Moths we had one guy [Danny Maddox] was his, he was a civilian who ran this, this Tiger Moth station and they were all civilians and one of the guys [Danny Maddox] decided, he had a girlfriend and he decided he was going to go and see her in the daytime when he was flying. The only trouble was he tried to land at an airfield, in a wheatfield and he tipped it up. So, he rang the CO, told him he'd crashed a plane and the CO said, ‘Is it flyable?’ He said, ‘Oh, if you send a couple of guys out to stand it on its wheels it’ll be alright.’ [laughs] From there we did a, what they called a BAT course. That’s where you, a beam approach. You did everything by radio. You couldn’t see the instruments. You had to do everything on your instruments of course. It was quite, quite an experience. I really enjoyed it but it taught me a lot about instruments though. At Narrandera we used to do what they called a link trainer which was just, they all called them the horror box because if you could do it they were like a simulator you could do anything in the things but you never crashed. And quite often at night time I’d go back and do another course on on the link trainer because it was, I think that helped me a lot but this instrument flying one was really something. But we found flying in England was a lot easier, especially at night time than it was in Australia because in Australia at night time all you had were flares down the side of the runway and you had to come in until you virtually lined the flares up all in one line. I mean, you, that was it. You landed. But over there they had the control lights. If you were too low it’d be red. If you were on course it’d be green. If you got too high it’d be yellow. So, you come in on this its green and they had a, you had to come in at a separated speed and you had to lose height at certain times otherwise they had what they called the outer marker beacon and then an inner marker beacon and then a cone of silence and you had to be about fifty feet when you came over the cone of silence and you had to pull everything back and you’re on the runway. Which was really good. But from there I got sent on a [pause] down to a place called Haverfordwest in South Wales on flying control duty in the, in the control tower where it was getting, and it was quite funny really too. They had a radio channel that was monitored twenty four hours a day. It was called Darkie and if anyone got in to trouble they’d press Darkie and they, they would be directed to the nearest airfield. Well, this night there was a fella calling up for Darkie and we couldn’t get him. He’d got the, had the transmitter down all the time because we couldn’t get him. But it’s a funny thing I’ve often wondered about that. I reckoned he just must have just gone off into the night and crashed. But in reading a report from a, in a book that I got a bit after the war this guy he was doing his OTU at, in Scotland and the navigator should have been able to tell him where they went, where they were but the navigator had no idea. It was night time and it was cloud and the navigator didn’t know where they were, the pilot didn’t know where they were and they just kept on flying and eventually he was very lucky because the clouds broke up and underneath him was the Isle of Man and he was able to land on the Isle of Man. But in report he was, he was afraid he was going to be scrubbed because of that but in the report it said the navigator was the one who really got the blast. But he said to him as a navigator he wasn’t very good but as a pilot he was proficient. Well, I was there for another couple of weeks and this was after the D-Day landings and there were planes flying backwards and forwards across the Channel and the Navy was shooting at everything that came in sight. So they put me on a destroyer at Milford Haven as aircraft identification and they were taking a convoy of ships up the Channel to Cherbourg or what was known as a Mulberry Harbour. That was a harbour that was built up in Scotland [coughs] Built up in Scotland and it was, it was a huge thing. It was about a mile long. How they did it. We got there without any problems and we were on the way back to Milford Haven when the admiral was on board the destroyer I was on and he got a call to go to Portsmouth and I was, I’ll never forget it, I was on the catwalk on this destroyer when it turned around and I was up to my knees in water. Anyhow, we got to Portsmouth. Portsmouth, and from there got posted back to Haverfordwest and then the next day I was sent to Moreton in Marsh for OTU. That’s where I first met my crew. They put a whole load of us pilots and all the guys in a big room and we had to pick a crew. We’d nothing. We knew nothing about them at all except that they’d done their course and must have been proficient in whatever it was they were. I was very lucky. I managed to get a crew which we all got on very well with. Yeah. And the only one that I didn’t get was the flight engineer. He, they sent me a flight engineer and he came from Newcastle but he was quite a nice guy too. But we never had any problems. We just, we all got along very well with and we finished our OTU. The only thing was there’s something that I’d forgotten about until a couple of years ago when my rear gunner and mid-upper gunner reminded me that I’d, we were flying at seventeen thousand feet and suddenly started coming down, losing height and I can never, couldn’t get it back and we were coming down down down, getting lower all the time and everything was working as it should have been. I’d forgotten about it because, but when we got down to about six thousand feet I told them to prepare to jump out and when we got to about six thousand feet I was able to hold it at six thousand feet. So we finished the flight at six thousand feet but I reported it as an unserviceable plane, told them what the problem was but the next day we were posted to Winthorpe to the Lancaster. So I never really found out what the problem was. The only thing I can think of is that you had a constant speed propellers but [pause] you took off in fine pitch and then you put in a course pitch and from then on they took over and the only thing I can think of is that for some reason they changed over to fine pitch which would give you, you wouldn’t be able to climb very far on fine pitch. But that’s the only thing I can think of. I’d forgotten about it until just a few years ago when my rear gunner told me he always wanted to do a parachute jump. And he did two parachute jumps down at Wollongong but he said he was never so glad as the night I cancelled the order to jump ship. Now, I never, to this day I really don’t know what caused that. But then we went to Winthorpe. That’s where I met a guy that took me on a conversion course or an initiation course on Lancasters told me that he was very glad I was flying Lancasters and I never had any trouble. But the funny thing was there was an Englishman on the same course and he’d had no problem landing the Wellingtons and yet he reckoned he couldn’t land a Lancaster which doesn’t make any sense. I think he just didn’t want to go any further but I don’t know what happened to him. They took him out one day to an airfield that wasn’t used very much and they had him doing landings all day but I don’t know what happened after that. So from Winthorpe we were posted to 463 Squadron and [pause] I was, we were still on training at that stage and I can only remember they used to have a spoof raid which they called them, where the main course, main flight, the bombers would take off but this other lot would, one or two planes would take off a few minutes earlier and go on a different course and they’d throw out these strips of aluminium which they reflected on the German radar as planes that they didn’t know. And the idea was to get their planes up in the air somewhere away from where they, the main force was going. But the night war ended over in Europe we were flying on and all of a sudden all the lights came up all over the ground so I asked the wireless operator what was going on and he’d been listening to music so he didn’t know. Then he rang back and told me that the war was over and we had been recalled an hour earlier [laughs]. So we went back to base and I called up for permission to land which you have to do and of course and no one answered me. So I flew down over the control tower and never got any result from anyone. So I took a chance on what the wind was doing, what direction it was coming because we couldn’t see very much and when we landed we called up for transport to get us to go from dispersal back to the control tower and nothing happened. No one answered so we had to load all our gear for quite a long walk back to the control tower. And when we got back there all the guys were very much inebriated or had [laughs] had a little bit too much to drink. But it was quite a relief really to know that the war was over down there. And then we did several they called them Cook’s Tours. We took mostly WAAFs who had been in the offices around the place on these Cook’s Tours over Europe and showed them the bomb damage and all that sort of stuff and then that’s where instrument flying came in very handy because we were flying in cloud for oh, probably an hour. And it sounds silly but you, you swear blind your bum was six foot, six inches off your seat. You could really reckon you were upside down but you, that’s where I, you had to be convinced that the instruments are working. One of them might get out but not all them. And I finally got out of the cloud and when we came back I landed and the CO happened to be in the control tower and he, he said, ‘The pilot of that plane report to control tower immediately.’ I thought what the heck have I done? And he said, ‘That’s the best, best landing that I’ve ever seen.’ From there we did, we were supposed to go down to Italy to bring the prisoners of war home but it turned out that they had, in Italy they were all grass runways. So they didn’t have any concrete runways and they’d had a lot of rain there and the Lancasters that had gone down were all bogged. So we never went down there but the war was still going in, in the Pacific and the whole squadron were posted to, to go to Coningsby to do a conversion on to Lincolns. But the war ended over in Europe before, in the Pacific before we started on that so the next things happened pretty quickly from there on. That’s a photograph taken there of our squadron after the war. But we, we never actually got to Coningsby. I was posted back to Brighton and within three weeks we were on our way home. So that’s about it.
AP: There’s your quick story. Can we go back and fill in some gaps?
WG: Yeah.
AP: How old were you when you actually enlisted?
WG: Pardon?
AP: How old were you when you, when you actually joined the Air Force?
WG: 1942, I joined.
AP: So, how, how old were you at that point?
WG: Twenty one.
AP: Twenty one. Oh, of course because you had been a farmer.
WG: Yeah.
AP: The farm wasn’t a Reserved Occupation. That’s what —
WG: Yeah.
AP: Yeah. Ok. That makes sense. Where were you when, when war was declared? What can you remember of that time? What were you doing? What were your thoughts?
WG: Well, that was [pause] well the Japs came in to the war when I was out at Seymour in the Army. So that would be, well ’41/42. ’41 I think it was. So, I would have been in the Army up there at that stage and as I said I enlisted in the Air Force in about six, would have been when I was called up would have been about three months later.
AP: What can you remember of 1939?
WG: Well, that would be, in those days I was just a farmer.
AP: Did you suspect when, when you became aware that war was on did you suspect that you would be involved at some point? What were your thoughts about that?
WG: No. To this day I don’t know why I enlisted in the Air Force [laughs] It was just something. I’ve no idea why I did that. Anyway, I decided I had to do something and I wasn’t really crash hot on being in the Army so I decided the Air Force would be better. You know. I had no idea. It’s funny because my younger brother enlisted in the Air Force just before I did. It’s funny how people, what their ideas are because she told him he could enlist in the Air Force as long as he was a rear gunner which was the most unrealistic thing [laughs] I mean, that’s the last job you’d want. But —
AP: So your brother did serve with Bomber Command as well? But did he —
WG: No. He was a fighter pilot.
AP: Fighter pilot. Ok.
WG: Yeah.
AP: Can you tell me much about the process of enlistment? What did you have to do? Did you have to do interviews and any extra training or anything? Any medical exams before you enlisted?
WG: We all had a medical exam and that was about it. And then we were called up and were put on a train and we turned up to Sydney and, where we did as I’ve said I didn’t do anything, learn anything really about flying except the theory of flight. That was about the only thing. But we had to pass in meteorology and so many [pause] There was about fifteen or twenty subjects we had to study. Law and administration and, as I said before Morse Code. That included aldis lamps and semaphore which was all part of it. I can’t remember the rest of the things. We had to be able to take a Bren gun apart and put it back together with your eyes closed which is quite a thing to do. But I don’t think there was anything. We did a lot marches in, in Sydney while we were there. Never did any marches in Melbourne.
AP: So, you mean like a march down the city street.
WG: Yeah.
AP: As a recruiting thing or just to get from A to B or —
WG: Oh no. It was just something they just decided to do. I don’t know why they did it but we did two or three. Three I think in Sydney. Marching down the street in Sydney.
AP: What did the local population think of that? Do you know?
WG: Oh, there was always a crowd of people out to watch it. But I don’t really know what they thought about it because we weren’t privy to that.
AP: Was it, was it a serious thing or was it like a joyful thing or, what was the mood on a march like that?
WG: Well, no one complained about it. It was just something we did. At one stage after we, when we were in England we were posted up at [pause] north of England and they had a lot of what they called six weeks wonders. There was a guy trained in administration but they didn’t know how to handle anyone. And I can remember at one stage that we were all marching, we still had to do marches and we were marching past a, I can’t remember [pause] it was, if it was for some reason the guys just kept dropping off. This fellow was in front leading the marching and by the time he got back to base there was only half a dozen guys behind him. And the day we were passing out up there unbeknownst to the, the officer in charge they all decided they would silent hop. Normally when you stopped you banged your foot down like that. It was something that always happened and this day when he called out, ‘Halt,’ there wasn’t a sound behind him. He spun around. Everyone was there, which rather surprised him. He thought he’d lost them all [laughs] While we was there this chap came in in a Lancaster and it was probably one of the worst landings I think you’d ever see. He touched down and up and down and up and, and when he finally got it down there a big roar went up. And I remember the last flight I did in England was at a [pause] I don’t know why I had to, I don’t know why I was there but there was a chap, Johnnie Blair. He was senior to me. I was only a flying officer and he was a flight lieutenant and I had to go along as his second pilot for some reason. This is what they called a gaggle where everyone just flew in a heap at night time and it was the worst flying I’d ever seen. I was tempted to take over many times but I thought well, he’s, he’s my senior, it wouldn’t go down too well. But we got back alright and I never saw him again. That was just a few days before we were posted to Brighton and the funny thing is he joined, he was a pilot with TAA in those days and this was quite a few years after the war and I was up at Mildura and I was there having a meal and this guy come in and he looked. He came over straight away to apologise. He recognised me even though he was a civilian pilot and this was quite a few years after. He reckoned he didn’t know he was going to fly that night and he had too much to drink [laughs] But he remembered that years afterwards.
AP: Oh dear. That’s great. Ok. Well, we’re talking about flying. Tell me about your first solo.
WG: Oh, it was uneventful. I did everything. No drama at all. That was on Tiger Moths. We had a lot of funny experiences because the airfield at Narrandera, they had a satellite field a few miles away where we flew. And I can remember one day these, the pilots used to get really cheesed off with it because they didn’t want to be instructors on Tiger Moths and this guy undid his straps on his parachute and walked out on the wing and sat there on the wing. The Tiger Moths, you could fly them with your hands out at the side really. They were, I don’t think any Tiger Moths crashed while I was up there. I think if you crashed you’d have to have done something silly. They were, they were a reliable plane. Yeah. I don’t think I had any dramas. When we were at Point Cook we had what they called a crash mate. There were, there were two of you and one guy would do his hour or whatever flying or whatever he had to do and then they’d change over. Well, my crash mate, his first solo flight was from Werribee and they’d, and he was coming in to land at the same time as another plane and they were both killed. So that wasn’t a very good experience. We didn’t know what happened to him. We only found out afterwards. So that taught me to make sure you knew everything that was going on around about you. Which reminds me, when you were coming in to land you always had to call up for permission to join a circuit and you always had to go downwind, crosswind and then put it, come back downwind and this guy he was supposed to meet his girlfriend that night and he decided to come straight in. I could see him coming and I thought well I’m not getting off the runway for him and he had to land on the grass alongside, just behind me. And unfortunately for him the CO happened to be in flying control and saw that. He didn’t go out that night. He was a bit of a rat bag but he was still flying a couple of years ago. He was flying, delivering newspapers down to, well down as far as Eden. Dropping them off. So, he was still flying so he must have been able to fly all right.
AP: Didn’t set him back too much. What can you tell me about Narrandera? The airfield. How did you live there? What sort of things did you do on a typical day?
WG: Well, I was lucky in one way. My cousin had trained at Narrandera and my brother had as well and they got to know a Mrs Andrews who was the wife of the doctor and we could go and spend a weekend when you couldn’t go and come home and get back in time for anything. So we, quite often we’d spend a weekend with the Andrews family which was quite good. Otherwise, we just stayed on the station.
AP: What was a day like? When you were learning to fly on a Tiger Moth what sort of things did you do on a typical day? How, how did it run?
WG: Well, as I said earlier quite often I’d spend time on the link trainer. Apart from that there wasn’t much else to do. I didn’t have any social habits. Really, really nothing in Narrandera itself. The town was very very small.
AP: Ok. Can you describe a link trainer?
WG: Pardon?
AP: Can you describe a link trainer? What did it —
WG: Well, it was like a big box and had all the instruments the same as a plane would have. You were completely enclosed in this thing and you could do anything. You could put it in a spin and whatever and, but you couldn’t hurt yourself. So the one thing we had if you did anything wrong you’re not going to hurt yourself.
AP: Very good. What about Point Cook? What was that like as an airfield to fly from?
WG: Oh, it was quite good actually. It was wintertime when I was down there and at that stage I was importing Vultee Vengeance planes which they came boxed and they were assembled down there and the pilots had taken [unclear] do a circuit to make sure they were flying alright. And I can remember one day I was walking behind one when he decided to rev it up and I was blown over and down the runway on my backside. But it was, it was only the bare necessities at an airfield. Nothing special about it. But they didn’t, they didn’t have concrete runways. They were all grass which meant you could fly in any direction but there was nothing special about it.
AP: You said you stayed at the MCG for a little while. That would have been something of an experience I imagine.
WG: Well, it was. A lot of things in the Air Force disappear and they did a stock take of things while we were there and it’s amazing how people would get off with things from the store room which, you’re not supposed to go to the storeroom only if you need another uniform or shoes or something. And it was amazing the amount of stuff that was missing. Which reminds me of another time we were between sometimes it must have been after [pause] no, it would have been before we started OTU. We were at a place called Burton and it had a coal dump at the back and they had a whole lot of fire buckets and things like that and one of the guys used to take the fire bucket into the town and sell them. And he sold buckets full of coal as well. They never caught him [laughs] And I remember he had a verey pistols and a cartridge you would fire if you were in distress or something land or something and there was a big flare at the end of it and one day I had one and I was trying to light it with a cigarette lighter and I was keeping well away from it because I knew that it was going to if it, if it lit it was going to go off. Well, two of my mates [unclear] and Bob Hines decided to take over and they were crouching over the top of it when it went off and they lost all their eyebrows and half their hair and everything else. They weren’t going to go to the doctor. They went to the chemist down the street.
AP: Yeah. Ok. So, when you get to England you said there was something like the first night there was a a Germans attacked.
WG: Yeah.
AP: What were your general thoughts about wartime England? What were your general impressions?
WG: Well, we had been through London in daylight and they had big barrage balloons up in the air and all the damage that had been done so you didn’t feel any sorrow for anything that happened over in Germany because London was pretty badly bombed. But we didn’t know that at the time it just it wasn’t until the next day we knew that the plane had been shot down. We, we knew the Bofors guns. They had Bofors guns all along the, the promenade so we, when we heard them going off but that’s about all there was to it. They didn’t last very long.
AP: What did you think of the civilian population and how they were handling things? Did you —
WG: Oh, it was amazing how they handled it really. A lot of them used to sleep at night under the railway stations in the Underground. London got a, it had done a lot of damage to the buildings and the houses but there were so many people who were spending their nights in, in the underground railway stations. Hundreds of them. They did that week after week. And it was funny when the what they called the buzz bombs they were just a little two stroke engine and a bomb and wings and they’d fly over until they ran out of fuel and then they’d crash. Well, the Hurricanes used to fly alongside them and tip their wing up and turn them out to sea so they crashed out to sea. So they didn’t do that much damage after they realised what they were. But then when the V-2s came along that was a different story because you couldn’t do anything about them. You didn’t know they were there until [pause] and I reckoned we were pretty lucky because we were at the Victoria Station and were about to get into a taxi when this woman for some reason wanted a taxi in a hurry so we said, ‘Take ours. Take it.’ And a V bomb came over just a few seconds later and I reckon we would have been just about where it was. So, as I said lucky we didn’t get that. But there was nothing they could do about them. They were just going too fast.
AP: You said something about a beam approach course.
WG: Eh?
AP: You mentioned something about a beam approach course [coughs] Excuse me, that you did earlier.
WG: Yes.
AP: Flying the beam. How did you do that? Can you remember the process of it?
WG: Well, it was set up for landing when there was a fog on for some reason. Before that they had what they called, well they still had what they called FIDO where they had pipes of oil down the side of the runway and they’d light them. Well, this took over from that and you’d have to find where the runway was for a start but they had different signals for, one side would be dit dit dit and the other side would be da da da but when you, you got on the where it was quiet you knew that’s where the runway was. So you did your circuit around, and you had to have everything accurate. Your rate of descent had to be right any you had to be at a certain distance there. The marker beacon, you had to be seven hundred and fifty feet and your rate of descent had to be accurate or you had a gauge telling you what that was and then had an inner marker which was a different sound again and then, and then a cone of silence which everything went off and you just pulled back on this control tower and you were there which made it very simple.
AP: How often were they used in anger so to speak? I know you trained on them. Did you ever —
WG: No.
AP: Do you know of anyone who —
WG: No. I never knew of anyone that used them.
AP: You have to wonder the point don’t you?
WG: Well, London used to get fogs and —
AP: Yeah.
WG: Their Meteorology was very very good except for one night I remember we were supposed to do a cross country flight and we had to take off north and then we had to come back over the airfield and then and we had to be at about twenty thousand feet. And it, the Met told us that it would be a windspeed of about fifteen or twenty knots but they got it completely wrong because it was over two hundred knots and I can remember it took us over half an hour to fly across the airfield and, and it went on and on and on. I could still see that there was one plane up there and one down just below me and one was just going veering away so I had to make sure I stayed in the middle and hoped to hell they didn’t change. Well, after about an hour I decided that we were never going to be able to finish. We didn’t have fuel enough to get back again so I aborted and went back and the CO told me off ‘til the next morning when the planes were all over the country and they’d all ran out of fuel so he decided I did the right thing which I think I did anyhow.
AP: Was what aircraft were you flying at that point?
WG: Lancaster.
AP: That was a Lancaster [unclear] Cool. Alright, turning to thoughts of leave. You would have got leave in England fairly often. What did you do?
WG: Well, there was [pause] quite often I wouldn’t go on leave. But when I was, before I got a commission there was a what was known as a Victoria Leagues Club where other ranks could go in Vauxhall Bridge Road. It was the Duchess, the Duchess of Devonshire was a patron and you’d pay about two shillings for a bed and your breakfast. But it was only for other ranks and there was, the person who really ran it was an Australian Red Cross girl, Virginia [Herman] and I got to know her very well and quite often I just spent half a day helping her in the office because there was a lot of office work that I could do to help her. But then I got, we got an invitation to, for an evening at the Duchess of Devonshire’s residence in Knightsbridge and so I think that was the Red Cross girl organised it for me and I went out there and that’s, and the present Queen Elizabeth happened to be there. She was in the Land Army. Just an ordinary girl in those days and we had a dance with her and Princess Margaret. Quite a nice night. Something I can remember which not everyone’s had.
AP: That’s quite a good claim to fame actually. I like that one.
WG: But once I became commissioned I wasn’t supposed to go to the Victoria League Club but I kept my old uniform and if I was going on leave I’d go down there because you get sick of London. There’s not a lot you could do there. I wasn’t a great one for going and getting drunk or anything like that. But it’s funny because my wireless operator was a funny little guy. He was only very very little but he was walking down the street in London and there was a couple of New Zealand guys trying to break in to a car. They reckoned they’d lost their keys so Shorty said, ‘Oh, I can get in there for you.’ Just then the police came along and grabbed him [laughs] So he was arrested, spent the night in jail. There was an American guy in there as well and as he was going before the judge he put something in Shorty’s pocket. He didn’t know what it was but when he, he finally, the judge believed what he said and when he put his hand in his pocket there was a brand new watch. So he sold that and got his uniform cleaned.
AP: Ok. Characters. What was your first impression of the Lancaster when you first saw one? What did you think?
WG: I think. Well, I thought it was a marvellous plane. I didn’t realise how good they were but one night we were supposed to go, take off early in the day and went in flying and like the day before, it was summertime and for some reason when we were coming in to try to land everything was just a blur of lights. I’ll never forget it. It was just a blur of lights and the instructor said, he he aborted it, the whole lot and said, ‘The student is showing signs of fatigue.’ But the next night no problem. I don’t know what it was. There was something about it because we had never any trouble flying at night with landing. But with the Wellingtons they were a different story. They were a sleeve valve engine on them and if you throttled back quickly the, it would backfire and the carburettor catch alight. Well, in the daytime you didn’t see it but in the night time you did see it and the only thing to do when that happened you opened the throttles and it sucked it all out. And this guy, I was supposed to take off after him on his first solo flight at night and he’d throttled back and see this sheet of flame they reckoned [he was surrounded going in]. The poor old instructor said, ‘I think we’ll have to shoot him down.’ [laughs] But after four attempts he did come down and landed all right. He took a chance on it but you don’t really see the flame in the day time but at the night time it’s very very visible. It’s something you just have to watch out for.
AP: So the Wellington was a challenging aeroplane then in some ways.
WG: Not really. A lot of people didn’t like them. One of my mates he had to have a certain length leg to be able to put on the full rudder when one engine gave out and he was too short. He started off flying Wirraways in Australia but he, his legs were too short and he couldn’t. He couldn’t handle them. He tried to join Oxfords at Point Cook and did all the things that I did, the beam approach and all that until he got to OTU where he couldn’t, couldn’t handle the Wellington. But they were a very good plane really and they were the first plane that bombed Berlin so, but the only thing I, trouble I had was when I lost height with them. But I never had any trouble landing them ever.
AP: There’s one thing I’m really interested in as well. You said you were at Haverfordwest, I think.
WG: Yeah.
AP: At Haverfordwest. Flying control.
WG: Yeah.
AP: Declaration. I’m an air traffic controller. I’m very interested in your experiences there.
WG: Oh. Well, they were really flying looking for U-boats and that sort of thing and I can remember one day when a Halifax came in. Yeah. A Halifax. And it had been shot up and they’d landed. The undercarriage was blown away. I never, I didn’t think anyone could get out a plane that fast. The whole crew were out. They landed on the grass and the whole crew were out but the plane was still going off down the runway. You can do it if you wanted to. But otherwise it was pretty uneventful. One of the things that I will never forget though was I had to do a couple of nights on pundit duty. Every airfield had a call sign and this pundit duty was an alternator. It had a big diesel engine and it was roaring all night and this thing was going. It was clacking out the three figures for the, to identify the airfield. So, I never got much sleep that time.
AP: So —
WG: There wasn’t much to do though. It was just to make sure that it was alright. Everything didn’t stop. Another time I was on the [pause] controlling on the runway and the guys were supposed to end up being flying, shooting bullets and they had to clear them again before they came in but he didn’t. He was clearing his guns on the runway. Everyone was diving for cover.
AP: So what did the runway control duty involve? What did you actually have to do there?
WG: Well, the control duty was only really if anyone was taking off you had to give them a green light or not. Whichever way. It depended if something was, an obstruction on the runway which could well be they had to stop anyone landing. So you either gave them a green light or a red light.
AP: That was like an aldis.
WG: Yeah.
AP: Yeah. Ok.
WG: And the only thing wrong with the Lancasters if you had to stop before taking off they’d overheat because they depended on the air flowing through to keep them cool. If that happened you had to turn around the other way and rev them up until they cooled down again otherwise they’d blow all their oil out, coolant out which wouldn’t be a good thing.
AP: No. No. Not at all. And did you do much in the watch tower there as well? The control tower.
WG: I was in the control tower for about three weeks. That was before I went on the Navy excursion and after that I was posted to OTU.
AP: So, what can you remember about that control tower? What did it look like?
WG: Oh, it was just up in the air. It was a view windows all the way around and you could see everything that was going on all the way around you.
AP: Who else was in there?
WG: Pardon?
AP: Who else was in the tower?
WG: Oh, who was qualified. Yeah. We were, we were only doing what we were told to do because we didn’t know anything really about it.
AP: What, so what sort of things were you actually doing?
WG: I don’t remember doing anything very special. That night when the chap was calling up Darkie I was on the radio trying to get him but couldn’t do it. That’s the sort of thing we did.
AP: So just an extra pair of hands to fill in.
WG: Yeah.
AP: Get the coffee or whatever [laughs]
WG: Yeah.
AP: Alright. Cool. What did you think as the only Air Force officer on a Navy vessel? That would have been a bit odd.
WG: Pardon?
AP: When, when you were with the Navy what was the —
WG: Oh, I was the most popular guy in the Navy because they gave them a tot, a tot of rum every night and I didn’t drink the stuff. So I was the most popular fella. They all wanted my tot of rum.
AP: And were you, you were just sort of on the bridge there or —
WG: No. No. We, we was just there and if we were needed they’d call up. We didn’t have anything.
AP: Any duties as such.
WG: We didn’t have to do anything.
AP: Yeah. Ok. Alright. We might move on to Waddington. You weren’t there for very long I gather.
WG: Waddington?
AP: At Waddington. Yeah.
WG: No. I wasn’t at Waddington at all.
AP: Ah. Ok.
WG: 463 had been at Waddington but then they turned, they moved to oh what’s the name of the place there? Skellingthorpe.
AP: Skellingthorpe. Alright.
WG: Yeah.
AP: Tell me about Skellingthorpe.
WG: Very basic. Everything was very basic. Waddington was more of a permanent airfield whereas Skellingthorpe was just one that he been built during, just as for the war.
AP: How did you live there?
WG: Oh, we had all the amenities we needed. Had a mess hut. For a long time they used to have what they called high tea. I thought that was a main meal but I found out after that wasn’t a main meal. Once you became a commissioned officer you lived in a different world. You had a, I had a room to myself with a batwoman that came in to do all, all your necessary. Take your laundry or whatever. And they paid her a little bit extra for their meals but their meals were one hundred percent better than the ordinary troops got and one night a week we had a, what was called a dining in night. We had to be there in dress uniform and the CO shouted everyone a glass of port. I missed that for quite a while because I didn’t realise that the high tea wasn’t a main meal although it could well have been.
AP: So —
WG: The meals were much much better than the troops had.
AP: What was a high tea? What was the high tea?
WG: Pardon?
AP: What was the high tea? What did it involve?
WG: Oh, well it was a meal really. You could, could exist on that without any problems. But it was just called high tea. You had a normal meal. Your normal meal.
AP: What was, what other things happened in the mess? Did you get up to any high jinks there or —
WG: Not really. They had a bar but I wasn’t one that did a lot of drinking anyhow. Otherwise, it was just, one experience I’ll never forget was when I was orderly officer you had to go around the camp with the military police. They’d go around with you and they set me up because I was new on the station and there was, you had to check all the lights were all out by 10 o’clock and everyone was supposed to be in bed by 10 o’clock. But we came to this hut where there was a fair bit of noise going on so I opened the door and looked in. There was, this was the WAAFs quarters and this WAAF standing there with nothing on. Just the standard equipment [laughs] I couldn’t get out of there fast enough but the MPs knew what it was. They just set me up.
AP: Very good. Very good. Alright, so the war ended you said when you were on your first essential operation wasn’t it? Was that, did I understand that correctly?
WG: It wasn’t. That was a training flight.
AP: Yeah. Ok.
WG: [unclear] the training flight when Johnnie was listening to music. That was when it ended in Europe. That ended, was the night after when I was with Johnnie Blair and I was his second pilot.
AP: Yeah. And so then at that stage you, so you didn’t actually fly in any operations. Is that, that correct?
WG: No. We were still listed as learning.
AP: Ok.
WG: Yeah.
AP: At that point. Yeah. Alright. Alright. So, someone I, well you’re the first person I’ve spoken to who’s told me about a Cook’s Tour. Can you tell me more about it?
WG: Oh, Cook’s Tour. Yeah. There were a lot of ground staff on every station you were on, and they, they could be radio operators and all sorts of things but they were all WAAFs and we took them. There were two different routes. You flew over a fair bit of Germany, Munich and you crossed to Holland. And I could still remember something that I’ll, I thought I wish I hadn’t done it but we flew down low over the train on the [unclear] line and we flew down low. There was a train and it stopped and everyone [laughs] everyone piled out. Then we waved our wings at them and they all waved back [laughs] That’s something. I shouldn’t have done that.
AP: Wow. So, when you got back to Australia did you have a bit of time or a bit of trouble adjusting back to civilian life again when you got there?
WG: Oh, a lot of trouble. Yeah. Yeah.
AP: What sorts of things happened?
WG: I can still remember the day I was demobbed. I went in there as a flying officer and they made a point of telling me, ‘You’re mister from now on.’ I’d have liked to have stayed in the Air Force really but the way things were at home it just wasn’t practicable. But it took a lot of adjusting to civvy life again.
AP: What did you do after the war?
WG: Oh, my father still had a market garden. We planted an orchard with my brother, an older brother and we had an orchard and grew flowers and I used to do the marketing. Go to Victoria Market in the middle of the night about three, three times a week selling the produce. Couldn’t do it now. It’s a different world. But the old Victoria Market was quite an experience. I remember there was one chap down there he used to have flowers and his name was Eden and he sort of lost his marbles. He went around one day how long you’d be coming in to the market and telling him oh you’ve been here too long, writing me out a cheque. I don’t think anyone ever cashed his cheque. But that, I did a lot of the marketing before during the war before I joined up and it was pretty difficult driving with your headlights blacked out. Headlights were just a slit across and it was pretty hard on a dark night or wet night to see where you were going. I managed to make it all right. Didn’t have any crashes. But I’m glad I’m not doing it now.
AP: We might just jump back a few years again then as well. Most people that I’ve interviewed before the war if they joined up a little bit later they were still at school or something like that but you were actually working.
WG: Yeah.
AP: So as a civilian in Australia how did the war have an effect on your life in the first few years?
WG: Oh, it was just hard settling down to having to make your own decisions about everything because you had to earn a living which in the Air Force it was all [unclear] out. Yesh. Apart from that it was just something you had to get used to.
AP: So, my final question when you look back on your Air Force service what does it mean to you and what does Bomber Command mean and how should it be remembered?
WG: Oh, you’re talking about something I’m glad I did. I’m really, I was pretty proud of what I managed to achieve in the Air Force. I think someone had a guardian angel on my shoulder because if we’d been three months earlier I probably wouldn’t be here now because three months earlier Bomber Command were, their attrition rate was almost one hundred percent. And so we were very lucky. Ron, my mid-upper gunner I didn’t know until after the war that he started off trying to fly Tiger Moths and he couldn’t make it. I don’t know what it was but if he was doing anything he’d always turn to the left. If he was driving a car and he didn’t know where he was he would always turn to the left. And it must have been something to do with that because I never knew anything about that but he finished up a mid-upper gunner. He’s still going too. Shorty was a bit of a troublemaker. We, quite often, we had the living quarters and the mess hut were a long way away from the flight things and we used to all have push bikes and Shorty didn’t have a push bike so he would just take the first one he could find around the place. I can remember when first we got to Winthorpe we didn’t know where, we went into the town, Newark. It was only a few miles down the road. Then there was an, the Air Force had their buses take people into town and bring them back at night and we got back pretty late at night and we thought we knew where we were going and we were, it turned out we were walking through the CO’s tulip patch and the adjutant came out and the CO it was and I could see the moonlight shining on the brass around his hat and I saluted him and did everything right. And he said, ‘Do you know who you’re talking to?’ I said, ‘The commanding officer.’ And Alan Short said ‘Oh, what of it. Have a cigarette.’ And he said to report to the adjutant next morning at 10 o’clock. We thought we know [unclear] he doesn’t know who the hell we are. He knew who we were alright and we went in front of the adjutant the next morning and they called us. We were having lectures and they told us to go and report to the adjutant. They told us off a treat and they reckoned Alan Short was going to be sent home straight away and I said, ‘Well, if he’s going I’m going too.’ After giving us a good dressing down he said ‘Jolly good show.’ [unclear] So that was the end of that and the next day I got my commission.
AP: Oh really. Everything changed.
WG: There was lots of little things happened. Shorty used to, I had an electric iron when I, before I got a commission we all lived in the same hut and he, he’d break in to the butcher’s shop on the way at night time and bring out a steak out or something and cook it on my electric iron [laughs] Do that time and time again. One night the MPs were after him and he was a bit of a ratbag in lots of ways because they’d be looking for him and he’d sing out, ‘Hey, over here.’ And by the time they got there was somewhere else [laughs]. They never caught him. And he, I remember one night he went to the kitchen and he brought back, a lot of the kitchen staff they wore clogs, wooden clogs and he brought these clogs in. So I grabbed him by the curly hair and told him to take them back straight away. Well, he did take them back because they’d be wanting them the next morning because the kitchen, the floors would get wet and normal shoes would slip whereas the clogs they wouldn’t. One Christmas I remember they had a big Christmas dinner and out on this side of the runway they had a big kegs of beer. So, there were a couple of the guys went around to the field, found one that was pretty full so they took it back to the hut and they were drinking beer out of anything at all until Kenneth, the navigator got sick of it and he threw a slipper to the light and put the light out.
[pause]
AP: Any final thoughts?
[pause]
AP: No. Right. Thank you very much, Wal. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
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Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Wal Goodwin
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Adam Purcell
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
2017-06-07
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
AGoodwinWJ170607, PGoodwinWJ1701
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:31:39 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Australian Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Wal Goodwin grew up near Melbourne, was conscripted in the Australian Army but was discharged due to his father’s reserved farming occupation. He later volunteered for the Australian Air Force and received his initial training of meteorology, Morse code and semaphore in Sydney, plus basic combat training – including dismantling and reassembling a Bren gun blindfolded. He recalls a march through crowded streets of Sydney. Wal took flying training at Narrandera by Link Trainer and then Tiger Moth but stopped due to tonsillitis. Further training was undertaken at Point Cook on Oxfords. Next, he awaited embarkation to England at the Showground and Melbourne Cricket Ground. Delays ensued, contracting mumps and then, after departing Australia, Italian prisoners of war and Polish female refugees were added to the sailing vessel at Durban, South Africa. In London, Wal saw barrage balloons and the destruction of the Blitz. In Brighton, Wal listened to an accurate broadcast by Lord Haw Haw and undertook an instrument flying course. He assisted in the control tower at Haverfordwest, then transferred to Milford Haven for aircraft identification. Wal’s destroyer accompanied a convoy to Cherbourg following D-Day. Wal crewed up at RAF Moreton in Marsh and converted to Lancasters at RAF Winthorpe before being posted to 463 Squadron. He completed a decoy operation when the war ended. Unable to contact RAF Skellingthorpe, they landed unassisted and returned to a party at the control tower. Wal was invited to a function at the Duchess of Devonshire’s residence in Knightsbridge where he danced with Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. He remembers flying Cooks Tours. On return to Australia, Wal missed comradeship and struggled to adjust to civilian life; working on the family farm despite hoping to remain in the Air Force.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
Victoria
Victoria--Melbourne
New South Wales
New South Wales--Narrandera
New South Wales--Sydney
Great Britain
England--Brighton
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Sussex
Wales--Haverfordwest
Wales--Milford Haven
Wales--Pembrokeshire
France
France--Cherbourg
South Africa
South Africa--Durban
Victoria--Point Cook
Victoria
England--Gloucestershire
New South Wales--Wagga Wagga
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Ian Whapplington
Julie Williams
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
463 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
Cook’s tour
displaced person
Elizabeth II, Queen of Great Britain (1926 - 2022)
Lancaster
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
prisoner of war
propaganda
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF Waddington
RAF Winthorpe
Tiger Moth
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2093/34640/SWeirG19660703v090005.1.pdf
74ac85235abe6fb895ef94b26b3c25ea
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
Weir, Greg. Flannigan, J and McManus, JB
Description
An account of the resource
Seventeen items. Collection concerns Flt Sgt James Flannigan who flew as a wireless operator/air gunner on 77 and 76 Squadrons in 1941, he failed to return from operations 31 October 1941 and J B McManus (RAAF), a Halifax pilot who flew operations on 466 Squadron in 1944-45. Collection contains their log books, mementos, parade notes, medals, documents and photographs.
Collection catalogued by Nigel Huckins
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-04-26
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Weir, G
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
J B McManus - pilot's flying log 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
Royal Australian Air Force
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SWeirG19660703v090005
Description
An account of the resource
Flying Log Book for J B McManus, pilot. Covers the period from 22 December 1942 to 29 April 1948 and his training, operations and post-war flying in Australia and Japan. He was based at RAF Clyffe Pypard, RAF Wymeswold, RAF Weston on the Green, RAF Moreton in Marsh, RAF Rufforth, RAF Driffield, RAF Edzell and RAF Hawarden. Aircraft flown were Tiger Moth, Wirraway, Oxford, Wellington, Halifax, Albemarle, Anson, Beaufort, Proctor, Mosquito, Martinet, Master, Lancaster, Lincoln, Avenger, Dominie, Warwick and P-51 Mustang. With 466 Squadron he flew on 33 operations (including one recall); 17 daylight and 16 daylight. Targets were Hamburg, La Pourchinte, Soesterberg, Le Havre, Gelsenkirchen, Kiel, Neuss, Calais, Bottrop, Wilhemshaven, Hannover, Essen, Walcheren, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Bochum, Julich, Munster, Sterkrade, Bingen, Mulheim, St Vith, Opladen, and Koblenz. His pilots on his first ‘second dickie’ operations were Flying Officer Herman and Flight Lieutenant Hutchison.<br /><br /><span class="NormalTextRun SCXW135383485 BCX0">This item was sent to the IBCC Digital Archive already in digital form. No </span><span class="ContextualSpellingAndGrammarError SCXW135383485 BCX0">better quality</span><span class="NormalTextRun SCXW135383485 BCX0"> copies are available.</span>
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-08-27
1944-09-01
1944-09-03
1944-09-09
1944-09-11
1944-09-12
1944-09-15
1944-09-16
1944-09-22
1944-09-23
1944-09-25
1944-09-27
1944-09-30
1944-10-15
1944-10-16
1944-10-22
1944-10-25
1944-10-29
1944-10-30
1944-10-31
1944-11-02
1944-11-03
1944-11-04
1944-11-05
1944-11-06
1944-11-16
1944-11-18
1944-11-21
1944-11-22
1944-11-29
1944-11-30
1944-12-12
1944-12-13
1944-12-18
1944-12-19
1944-12-22
1944-12-23
1944-12-24
1944-12-26
1944-12-27
1944-12-28
1944-12-29
1945-01-05
1945-01-06
1945-01-07
1945-01-12
1945-01-13
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.
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
1663 HCU
21 OTU
466 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Albemarle
Anson
Dominie
Flying Training School
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
Halifax Mk 5
Harvard
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lincoln
Martinet
Mosquito
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
P-51
pilot
Proctor
RAF Clyffe Pypard
RAF Driffield
RAF Hawarden
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Rufforth
RAF Wymeswold
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1321/26954/LLatimerJF1551478v1.1.pdf
63e5be776c4ee948864e178c5d15224f
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
Latimer, James Ferguson
J F Latimer
Description
An account of the resource
Four items. An oral history interview with Warrant Officer Jim Latimer (1923 - 2020, 1551478 Royal Air Force) his log book, and photographs. He flew operations as a bomb aimer with 102 and 462 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-09-28
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Latimer, JF
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/.
Description
An account of the resource
J F Latimer’s air bomber’s flying log book covering the period from 9 March 1943 to 8 March 1945. Detailing his flying training and operations flown as air bomber. He was stationed at RCAF Fingal (4 B&GS), RCAF Port Albert (31 ANS), RCAF Jarvis (1 B&GS), RAF Skaebrae (1476 Advanced Ship Recognition Course), RAF Mona (8 OAFU), RAF Moreton-in-Marsh (21 OTU), RAF Marston Moor (1652 HCU), RAF Pocklington (102 Squadron), RAF Driffield and RAF Foulsham (462 RAAF Squadron), Aircraft flown in were Anson, Bolingbroke, Wellington and Halifax. He flew four daylight and four night-time operations with 102 Squadron and five daylight and twenty two night-time operations with 462 RAAF Squadron, a total of 35. Targets were Foret de Nieppe, Villers Bocage, De Bruyere, Somain, Brunswick, Eindhoven, Sterkrade, Wemars Capelle, Soesterberg, Le Havre, Gelsenkirchen, Nordstein, Kiel, Boulogne, Duisburg, Wilhelmshaven, Hanover, Essen, Ostkapelle, Domberg, Soest, Hamburg, Sylt, Koblentz, Bonn, Mainz, Rheine, Heilbronn, Neuss, Kaiserlautern, Mannheim and Dortmund. <span>His pilots on operations were </span>Flight Sergeant Mitchell, Flying Officer Sanderson, Squadron Leader Jackson, Flying officer Wther [?], Flying Officer Boyd, Flying Officer Anderson, Flying Officer McIndle and Flight Lieutenant James. This item was sent to the IBCC Digital Archive already in digital form. No better quality copies are available.
Title
A name given to the resource
J F Latimer’s Royal Canadian Air Force Flying Log Book for Aircrew other than Pilot
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LLatimerJF1551478v1
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Terry Hancock
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
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
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1944-07-28
1944-07-30
1944-08-03
1944-08-07
1944-08-08
1944-08-11
1944-08-12
1944-08-13
1944-08-15
1944-08-18
1944-08-19
1944-08-25
1944-09-03
1944-09-09
1944-09-11
1944-09-12
1944-09-13
1944-09-15
1944-09-16
1944-10-15
1944-10-18
1944-10-21
1944-10-23
1944-10-25
1944-10-28
1944-10-29
1944-12-08
1944-12-09
1945-01-01
1945-01-16
1945-01-17
1945-01-21
1945-01-22
1945-01-28
1945-02-18
1945-02-22
1945-02-23
1945-03-01
1945-03-02
1945-03-03
1945-03-05
1945-03-06
1945-03-08
1945-03-09
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
France
Germany
Great Britain
Netherlands
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
England--Gloucestershire
England--Yorkshire
France--Boulogne-sur-Mer
France--Dieppe
France--Le Havre
France--Somain
France--Villers-Bocage (Calvados)
Germany--Bonn
Germany--Braunschweig
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Essen
Germany--Freising
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Heilbronn
Germany--Kaiserslautern
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Koblenz
Germany--Mainz (Rhineland-Palatinate)
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Neuss
Germany--Oberhausen (Düsseldorf)
Germany--Rheine
Germany--Soest
Germany--Sylt
Netherlands--Eindhoven
Netherlands--Oostkapelle
Netherlands--Soesterberg
Netherlands--Vlissingen
Ontario
Wales--Anglesey
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Germany--Freising
100 Group
102 Squadron
1652 HCU
21 OTU
462 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
Air Observers School
aircrew
Anson
Bolingbroke
bomb aimer
bombing
Bombing and Gunnery School
bombing of Luftwaffe night-fighter airfields (15 August 1944)
Halifax
Halifax Mk 3
Heavy Conversion Unit
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operational Training Unit
RAF Driffield
RAF Foulsham
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Mona
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Pocklington
RCAF Fingal
tactical support for Normandy troops
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1497/28755/LLeadbetterJ163970v1.2.pdf
8b54fa7306a0c184800b59be488a49fa
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
Leadbetter, John
J Leadbetter
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-04-21
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Leadbetter, J
Description
An account of the resource
166 items. The collection concerns John Leadbetter (1549105, 163970 Royal Air Force) and contains his log books, photographs and documents. <br /><br />There are four sub-collections:<br /><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/1725">Leadbetter, John. Aerial Photographs</a><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/1721">Leadbetter, John. Aircraft Recognition</a><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/1723">Leadbetter, John. Canada</a><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/1718">Leadbetter, John. Maps and Charts</a> <br /><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Keith Henry Leadbetter and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
J Leadbetter’s flying log book aircrew other than pilot
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LLeadbetterJ163970v1
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.
Description
An account of the resource
Bomb Aimers flying log book for J Leadbetter covering the period from 25 October 1943 to 14 May 1945. Detailing his flying training and operations flown. Also details of targets and bomb loads. He was stationed at RCAF Picton (31 B&GS), RCAF Portage La Prairie (7 AOS), RAF Halfpenny Green (3 (O)AFU), RAF Moreton-in-Marsh (21 OTU), RAF Sandtoft (1667 HCU), RAF Hemswell (LFS), RAF Ludford Magna (101 Squadron), RAF Warboys (PNTU) and (AGLT), RAF Little Staughton (582 Squadron). Aircraft flown in were, Anson, Bolingbroke, Wellington, Halifax, Lancaster. He flew 14 operations (9 night time and 5 daylight) with 101 squadron. Targets were Mannheim, Bottrop, Chemnitz, Pforzheim, Hanau, Bruchestrasse, Bremen, Hannover, Paderborn, Nordhausen, Lutzkendorf, Keil, Plauen. His pilot on operations was Flying Officer Ridler.
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 French
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
Germany
Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Gloucestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Staffordshire
Germany--Bottrop
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Chemnitz
Germany--Hanau
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Paderborn
Germany--Pforzheim
Germany--Plauen
Germany--Nordhausen (Thuringia)
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
1945-02-01
1945-02-02
1945-02-03
1945-02-14
1945-02-15
1945-02-23
1945-02-24
1945-02-28
1945-03-01
1945-03-19
1945-03-22
1945-03-23
1945-03-25
1945-03-27
1945-04-03
1945-04-05
1945-04-06
1945-04-09
1945-04-10
1945-04-11
101 Squadron
1667 HCU
21 OTU
582 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
Air Observers School
aircrew
Anson
Bolingbroke
bomb aimer
bombing
Bombing and Gunnery School
Gee
H2S
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
incendiary device
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 3
Operational Training Unit
Pathfinders
RAF Halfpenny Green
RAF Hemswell
RAF Little Staughton
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Sandtoft
RAF Warboys
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1497/29053/MLeadbetterJ163970-160421-27.1.jpg
8e6c73c9d754a837875f34cb0ab6e8a6
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
Leadbetter, John
J Leadbetter
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-04-21
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Leadbetter, J
Description
An account of the resource
166 items. The collection concerns John Leadbetter (1549105, 163970 Royal Air Force) and contains his log books, photographs and documents. <br /><br />There are four sub-collections:<br /><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/1725">Leadbetter, John. Aerial Photographs</a><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/1721">Leadbetter, John. Aircraft Recognition</a><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/1723">Leadbetter, John. Canada</a><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/1718">Leadbetter, John. Maps and Charts</a> <br /><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Keith Henry Leadbetter and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Jack Leadbetter's Mess Bill
Description
An account of the resource
A mess bill for August 1944.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-09-04
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One printed sheet with handwritten annotations
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Service material
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MLeadbetterJ163970-160421-27
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
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-08
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Gloucestershire
mess
military living conditions
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1343/22177/LTyrieJSB87636v1.1.pdf
2593c27faef4f15089ccae84e95bc4f2
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
Tyrie, Jim
Tyrie, JSB
Description
An account of the resource
34 items. The collection concerns Flight Lieutenant Jim Tyrie (1919 - 1993, 87636 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, photographs, correspondence and prisoner of war log as well as a photograph album. He flew operations as a pilot with 77 Squadron before being shot down in April 1941.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Brian Taylor 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
2019-06-01
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
Tyrie, JSB
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
Jim Tyrie's flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
Flying log book for J S B Tyrie covering the period from 1 July 1939 to 9 August 1959. Detailing his flying training and operations flown Following which he was shot down 9 April 1941 and became a prisoner of war. Returning to flying duties 25 May 1945 to 27 October 1964 detailing his duties as instructor and with 90 squadron. Also included his flying in various aircraft including his airline flying. He was stationed at RAF Perth, RAF Hatfield, RAF Cranwell, RAF Abingdon, RAF Stanton Harcourt, RAF Topcliffe, RAF Wheaton Aston, RAF Seighford, RAF Perton, RAF Moreton, RAF Finningly, RAF Lindholme, RAF Wyton, RAF Shallufa, RAF Khormakser, RAF Hendon, RAF Gatow, RAF Shawbury, RAF Worksop, RAF Wunstorf, RAF Bruugen, RAF Chivenor, RAF Akrotiri, RAF Nicosia, RAF Sopley, RAF Watton and RAF Bishops Court. Aircraft flown in were, Tiger Moth, Oxford, Whitley, Wellington, Dakota, Lancaster, Vengeance, Anson, Lincoln, Proctor, York, Viking, Valetta, Auster, Meteor, Varsity, Prentice, Canberra, Vampire, Whirlwind, Hunter, Shackleton, Viscount, Brittania and Hastings. He flew 7 operations with 77 squadron. Targets were St Nazaire, Hamburg, Berlin, Brest and Kiel. His first or second pilots on operations were Pilot Officer Bagnall and Sergeant Lee.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LTyrieJSB87636v1
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Atlantic Ocean--Bay of Biscay
Cyprus
Cyprus--Nicosia
Egypt
Egypt--Suez Canal
France
France--Brest
France--Saint-Nazaire
Germany
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Niederkrüchten
Germany--Wunstorf
Great Britain
England--Berkshire
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Devon
England--Gloucestershire
England--Hampshire
England--Hertfordshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--London
England--Norfolk
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Oxfordshire
England--Shropshire
England--Staffordshire
England--West Midlands
England--Yorkshire
Northern Ireland--Down (County)
Scotland--Perth
Yemen (Republic)
Yemen (Republic)--Aden
North Africa
Great Britain
Cyprus--Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939
1940
1941
1945
1946
1947
1948
1949
1950
1951
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958
1959
1960
1961
1962
1963
1964
1941-03-10
1941-03-11
1941-03-12
1941-03-13
1941-03-14
1941-03-23
1941-03-24
1941-04-03
1941-04-04
1941-04-07
1941-04-08
1941-04-09
10 OTU
21 OTU
77 Squadron
90 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
bombing
C-47
Flying Training School
Initial Training Wing
Lancaster
Lincoln
Meteor
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
prisoner of war
Proctor
RAF Abingdon
RAF Bishops Court
RAF Chivenor
RAF Cranwell
RAF Finningley
RAF Hatfield
RAF Hendon
RAF Khormakser
RAF Lindholme
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Seighford
RAF Shallufa
RAF Shawbury
RAF Stanton Harcourt
RAF Topcliffe
RAF Watton
RAF Worksop
RAF Wyton
Shackleton
shot down
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
Whitley
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/201/9631/LBaileyJD1583184v1.1.pdf
2e9c51cb48a073b0119651195b7a083c
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
Bailey, John Derek
John Derek Bailey
Bill Bailey
John D Bailey
John Bailey
J D Bailey
J Bailey
Description
An account of the resource
17 items. Two oral history interviews with John Derek "Bill" Bailey (b. 1924, 1583184 and 198592 Royal Air Force) service material, nine photographs, a memoir and his log book. He flew a tour of operations as a bomb aimer with 103 and 166 Squadrons from RAF Elsham Wolds and RAF Kirmington.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by John Bailey and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-12-07
2017-01-13
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. 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
Bailey, JD
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
John Derek Bailey’s Royal Canadian Air Force flying log book for aircrew other than pilot
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LBaileyJD1583184v1
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
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
1946
1944-05-24
1944-05-25
1944-08-29
1944-08-30
1944-08-31
1944-09-03
1944-09-05
1944-09-10
1944-09-12
1944-09-13
1944-09-17
1944-09-24
1944-09-26
1944-09-27
1944-10-19
1944-10-20
1944-10-23
1944-10-25
1944-10-28
1944-10-29
1944-10-30
1944-10-31
1944-11-02
1944-11-04
1944-11-11
1944-11-21
1944-11-27
1944-11-28
1944-11-29
1944-12-04
1944-12-06
1944-12-07
1944-12-12
1944-12-13
1944-12-21
1944-12-26
1945-01-05
1945-01-06
1945-01-07
1945-01-14
1945-01-15
1945-01-16
1945-01-17
Description
An account of the resource
Flying log book for aircrew other than pilot for John Derek Bailey, bomb aimer, covering the period from 6 July 1943 to 5 September 1945, detailing his flying training, operations flown and instructor duties. He was stationed at RAF Regents Park, RAF Ludlow, RAF Paignton, RAF Brighton, RAF Heaton Park, RCAF Moncton, RCAF Carberry, RCAF Picton, RCAF Mount Hope, RAF Harrogate, RAF Kirkham, RAF Penrhos, RAF Llandwrog, RAF Peplow, RAF Lindholme, RAF Sandtoft, RAF Hemswell, RAF Elsham Wolds, RAF Kirmington, RAF Lossiemouth, RAF Moreton-in-Marsh, RAF Worksop, RAF Wigsley, RAF Swinderby, RAF Acaster Malbis, RAF Blyton, RAF Catterick, RAF Wickenby, RAF Bicester and RAF Scampton. Aircraft flown in were, Anson, Bolingbroke, Wellington, Halifax and Lancaster. He completed a total of 31 operations, one night operation with 83 operational training unit, 2 night and 8 daylight operations with 103 Squadron and 16 night and 5 daylight with 166 Squadron. Targets in France, Germany and the Netherlands were Criel, Stettin, Agenville, Eindhoven, Le Havre, Frankfurt, The Hague, Calais, Cap Griz Nez, Stuttgart, Essen, Cologne, Walcheren, Dusseldorf, Bochum, Dortmund, Frieburg, Karlsruhe, Merseburg, Kattegat, St Vith, Hannover and Zeitz. His pilot on operations was Flying Officer Knott.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
France
Germany
Great Britain
Netherlands
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
Atlantic Ocean--Kattegat (Baltic Sea)
Belgium--Saint-Vith
England--Gloucestershire
England--Lancashire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Oxfordshire
England--Shropshire
England--Yorkshire
France--Calais
France--Criel-sur-Mer
France--Le Havre
France--Pas-de-Calais
France--Somme
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Essen
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Freiburg im Breisgau
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Merseburg
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Zeitz
Manitoba--Carberry
Netherlands--Eindhoven
Netherlands--Hague
Netherlands--Walcheren
New Brunswick--Moncton
Ontario--Hamilton
Ontario--Picton
Scotland--Moray
Wales--Gwynedd
Poland--Szczecin
Poland
Ontario
New Brunswick
Belgium
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Manitoba
103 Squadron
1654 HCU
166 Squadron
1660 HCU
1667 HCU
20 OTU
83 OTU
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
Bolingbroke
bomb aimer
bombing
Bombing and Gunnery School
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 5
Heavy Conversion Unit
Initial Training Wing
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lancaster Mk 3
mine laying
Operational Training Unit
RAF Acaster Malbis
RAF Bicester
RAF Blyton
RAF Catterick
RAF Elsham Wolds
RAF Heaton Park
RAF Hemswell
RAF Kirkham
RAF Kirmington
RAF Lindholme
RAF Llandwrog
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Paignton
RAF Penrhos
RAF Peplow
RAF Sandtoft
RAF Scampton
RAF Swinderby
RAF Wickenby
RAF Wigsley
RAF Worksop
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/837/34465/BMarshCGoldbyJLv10001.2.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/837/34465/BMarshCGoldbyJLv10002.2.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/837/34465/BMarshCGoldbyJLv10003.2.jpg
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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
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
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
2017-10-25
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Goldby, JL
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JOHN LOUIS GOLDBY SERVICE NO. 1387511 and 139407 Version dated 21 July 2020
[inserted] Corrected August 2020 [/inserted]
John joined up on 31 May 1941 at Babbacombe in Devon. He completed ground training at the Initial Training Wing at RAF Kenley. He then went to Air Observer School at Jurby in the Isle of Man from October 1941 – May 1942. For some of his fellow volunteers it was the first time they had been in an aircraft. He completed navigation and gunnery training on Blenheim aircraft and bomb aimer training on Hampdens whilst at Jurby, using air-to-air towed targets. He gained 3 stripes as a Sergeant Observer. He then went to Stanton Harcourt (near Abingdon) to 10 Operational Training Unit in June 1942.
He became part of a crew under pilot Captain Watson RE, seconded onto Whitley aircraft in the role bomb aimer. Captain Watson was a 2nd pilot on the first 1,000 bomber raid on Cologne on 30 May 1942. The second 1,000 bomber raid targeted Essen and John flew on the third 1,000 bomber raid in a Whitley bomber to Bremen on 25 June 1942. This was a 5-hour round trip.
Bomber Command then extended the number of crew needed on 4 engined aircraft from 5 to 7 crew members, adding a bomb aimer and flight engineer.
No. 10 Operational Training Unit Detachment at St Eval was led by Wing Commander Pickard who was portrayed in the film 'F for Freddie' which detailed the raid on Amiens prison, in which Wg. Cmdr. Pickard was killed.
Twin-engined Whitley aircraft of Bomber Command were being used on anti-submarine duties because of the U-boat threat.
The unit was based at St Eval in Cornwall using black-painted Whitleys (Coastal Command aircraft were painted white). Flights involved a 10-hour flight dropping depth charges over the Bay of Biscay. It was a deafening experience as the crew had no hearing protection. The unit completed 6-8 operations.
John then moved in September 1942 to Marston Moor (Yorkshire) and completed a conversion course on to 4 engined aircraft – the Halifax 2. These were notoriously difficult to handle, with original tail fins and Rolls Royce engines.
John took part in a number of mine-laying operations off Heligoland, which counted as a 1/2 operation. These were called 'gardening' trips – planting mines at low level. On 11 December 1943 John was a crew member in a Halifax 2 aircraft of No. 78 Squadron which took off from Linton-on-Ouse with a heavy load of fuel on board, bound for Turin. An engine caught fire on take-off and the aircraft had to ditch in Filey Bay. The crew were rescued by local fishermen. By February 1943 he had completed 8 operations which was very stressful. He received news of his commission and went to London to get his uniform, but he developed a very bad throat infection and ended up in an Army hospital in York with an abscess on the carotid artery, and then had his tonsils removed. He spent his 21st. birthday in June 1943 in hospital at RAF Northallerton.
His commissioned service number was 139407. His mother came up from Sidcup for the commissioning ceremony – a very difficult journey in wartime.
John was posted as a Bombing Instructor to Moreton-in-March (Gloucester) from winter 1943 until late Spring 1944 (???) on Wellington aircraft. He then moved back to Bomber Command Operations and completed a Bombing Leader course at the Armaments School at RAF Manby in January 1944 at the beginning of July 1944 at RAF Riccal (York). He was posted to No. 640 Squadron at RAF Leconfield In Yorkshire on Halifax 3 aircraft as a bomb aimer with the rank of Flight Lieutenant.
In his position as a Bomb Aimer leader, John was supposed to complete only 2 operations per month, but if a crew lacked a bomb aimer then John would go on the operation to complete the crew. For his actions when his aircraft was damaged during a raid over Germany in September 1944 John was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (although he did not receive the actual decoration until June 1945 (see separate piece).
[page break]
On 6 December 1944 John's aircraft – a Halifax III with radial engines – was hit whilst returning from a bombing raid over Osnabruck in Germany. John thinks his aircraft collided with a German night fighter. He was fortunate to escape from the falling aircraft – he still does not know how he got out of the fuselage), and landed by parachute in a field full of water. He sustained various injuries, and recovered in a hospital run by nuns at Neemkirchen in northern Germany until 20th January 1945. He was then sent to the interrogation centre at Dulagluft at Frankfurt-an-der-Oder near Barth near Stettin in Pomerania. The camp had an airfield alongside it. The camp was divided into 2 parts – an American section for USAF personnel and a British RAF Group Captain commanded the British prisoners. You were placed into the appropriate section according to which air force you had flown with. The camp was liberated by Russian forces on May 1st. 1945. Shortly afterwards members of the American Army appeared and took over the camp.
2 Group Captains from the camp managed to get through to the Allied lines at Lubeck and arranged for the camp prisoners (all RAF men?) to be flown back to the UK on B17 Flying Fortresses, 25 men to each aircraft on 13 May 1945. John's aircraft landed at Ford, and he then caught a train to (RAF) Cosford.
He underwent a rehabilitation course in Air Traffic Control at RAF Henlow.
He was demobbed in late 1946.
POST-WAR CAREER
John re-joined the RAF in 1949, and completed a 9 month Navigator and Bombing refresher course at No. 1 Air Navigation School at Topcliffe and RAF Middleton-St-George respectively between 1 June and 15 August 1949 on Anson and Wellington aircraft. This was followed by training at No. 201 Advanced Flying School at RAF Swinderby, flying Wellingtons with pilot Wing Commander Oxley, between 29 September and 30 November.
Wing Commander Oxley (known as Beetle), was quite dangerous as he did not like to use his instruments. On one operation John's aircraft was diverted to Anglesey and Beetle overshot the runway.
John then posted to No 236 Operational Conversion Unit at RAF Kinloss in Scotland, flying Lancaster aircraft, until 5 April 1950. It was a very cold experience as they lived in unheated tin (Nissen) huts. John then was posted to 38 Squadron at RAF Luqa, Malta, flying Lancasters on Maritime Reconnaissance Operations, including exercises with various Navies and Air Sea Rescue duties), until 19 July 1952. During this period he was seconded to RAF Masirah located on the island of Masirah in the Indian Ocean as Commanding Officer of the staging post between Aden and India.
There were frequent visitors, to the RAF base, especially the top people from the Defence College. Back in Malta, on 12th May 1952 John flew with 6 Lancaster aircraft from No. 38 Squadron which set of [sic] on a goodwill visit to Ceylon (Sri Lanka.) They flew via Luqa (Malta), Habbaniya (Iraq), Mauripur (India) to Negombo. They returned leaving Negombo on 31st May via Mauripur, Aden and Khartoum (Sudan) reaching Luqa on 4 June 1952.
On leaving Malta in September 1952 John was posted to No. 1 Maritime Reconnaissance School at St Mawgan in Cornwall as a Navigational Instructor, flying Lancasters until the end of September 1954. During this period John had two breaks, one being in the procession at the Queen's Coronation in 1953, and the second at the Queen's Review at RAF Odiham. In October 1954 until September 1956 John was posted to HQ 64 Group Home Command, at Rufforth in Yorkshire, as PA to the Air Officer Commanding (this was a non-flying role, apart from accompanying the Air Commodore on internal visits).
[page break]
From September 1956 until 23 January 1957 John attended Bomber Command Bombing School at RAF Lindholme, Yorkshire, for navigation training for the V-Bomber Force. In summer of that year he was posted instead to the Air Ministry, London Intelligence Branch. During his term at the Air Ministry he had a spell of 2 weeks at St Mawgan, flying as Navigator on Shackleton aircraft with the Air Sea Warfare Development Unit. This was to qualify him to receive flying pay. From October 1960 until May 1962 he served as Assistant Air Attache at the British Embassy in Paris. John was promoted to the rank of Wing Commander and liaised with the French Air Force for participation in air shows.
John retired from the RAF in May 1962, as there was only a 1 in 4 chance that he would be posted to a flying role, and by then he had 2 small children at home.
In September 1962 he joined Shell-Mex and BP Ltd, soon to become separate companies. He stayed with Shell until his retirement in June 1982.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
John Louis Goldby Biography
Description
An account of the resource
A biography covering John's training and service in the RAF.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-07-21
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Devon
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Essen
Germany--Bremen
Atlantic Ocean--Bay of Biscay
Germany--Helgoland
Italy--Turin
England--Filey
England--Northallerton
Germany--Osnabrück
Germany--Barth
Malta
Oman--Masirah Island
India
Yemen (Republic)--Aden
Sri Lanka
Iraq--Ḥabbānīyah
Pakistan--Karachi
Sri Lanka--Negombo
Sudan--Khartoum
Germany--Lübeck
Italy
Sudan
North Africa
Germany
Iraq
Pakistan
Yemen (Republic)
Oman
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Kent
England--Lancashire
England--Yorkshire
England--London
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
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Personal research
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Three printed sheets
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
BMarshCGoldbyJLv10001, BMarshCGoldbyJLv10002, BMarshCGoldbyJLv10003
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
Sue Smith
10 OTU
38 Squadron
78 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
Anson
B-17
bale out
Blenheim
bomb aimer
bombing of Cologne (30/31 May 1942)
Distinguished Flying Cross
Dulag Luft
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
Hampden
Lancaster
mine laying
navigator
Nissen hut
Operational Training Unit
prisoner of war
RAF Cosford
RAF Ford
RAF Henlow
RAF Jurby
RAF Kenley
RAF Kinloss
RAF Leconfield
RAF Lindholme
RAF Linton on Ouse
RAF Manby
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Middleton St George
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Odiham
RAF Riccall
RAF Rufforth
RAF St Eval
RAF St Mawgan
RAF Stanton Harcourt
RAF Swinderby
RAF Topcliffe
Shackleton
Stalag Luft 1
training
Wellington
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2086/34534/SWeirG19660703v070001.2.pdf
5210abcb0a501aaeee7869deed8d6c2e
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
Weir, Greg. Britt, Leo
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. Collection concerns Flt Lt Leo Britt (Royal Australian Air Force). A Halifax pilot, he flew operations on 462 Squadron between November 1944 and April 1945. Collection contains his log book and a list of aircraft lost on 192 and 462 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-04-26
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Weir, G
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
L Britt’s flying log book for pilots
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
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SWeirG19660703v070001
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
Flying log book for L Britt covering the period from 27 May 1943 to 11 February 1953. Detailing his flying training and operations flown. He was stationed at RAAF Benalla (11 EFTS), RAAF Deniliquin (7 SFTS), RAF Babdown Farm (15 P AFU), RAF Moreton in Marsh (21 OTU), RAF Marston Moor (1652 HCU), RAF Driffield and RAF Foulsham (462 Squadron). Aircraft flown in were DH 82, Wirraway, Anson, Oxford, Wellington, Halifax, Mustang, Dakota, Vampire, Lincoln. He flew 21 night-time operations with 462 Squadron. Targets were Sterkrade, Soest, Essen, Duisberg, Kiel, Mannheim, Weisbaden, Ruhr area, Bonn, Kaiserlauten, Munich, Frankfurt, Munster, Kassel, Stade, Bremerhaven, Boizenberg, Neuruffin, Augsberg, Flensberg. He also flew on seven Cook's Tours. His pilot for his first 'second dickie' operation was Flying Officer Rate. This item was sent to the IBCC Digital Archive already in digital form. No better quality copies are available.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944-11-21
1944-11-22
1944-12-05
1944-12-06
1944-12-12
1944-12-13
1944-12-17
1944-12-18
1945-01-16
1945-01-17
1945-02-01
1945-02-02
1945-02-03
1945-02-04
1945-02-05
1945-02-13
1945-02-14
1945-02-28
1945-03-01
1945-03-13
1945-03-14
1945-03-15
1945-03-16
1945-03-19
1945-03-20
1945-03-27
1945-03-28
1945-03-29
1945-03-30
1945-04-13
1945-04-14
1945-04-15
1945-04-16
1945-04-18
1945-04-19
1945-05-02
1946
1947
1948
1949
1950
1951
1952
1953
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
Great Britain
Germany
England--Gloucestershire
England--Norfolk
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Augsburg
Germany--Bonn
Germany--Bremerhaven
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Essen
Germany--Flensburg
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Kaiserslautern
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Munich
Germany--Neuruppin
Germany--Soest
Germany--Stade (Lower Saxony)
Germany--Wiesbaden
Germany--Münster in Westfalen
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Germany--Oberhausen (Düsseldorf)
Germany--Boizenburg
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike French
1652 HCU
21 OTU
462 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
bombing
C-47
Cook’s tour
Flying Training School
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
Halifax Mk 5
Harvard
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lincoln
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
P-51
pilot
RAF Acaster Malbis
RAF Driffield
RAF Foulsham
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Watchfield
RAF Worksop
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1213/11951/EAshworthCWDonaldsonDW450819-0001.2.jpg
c5b9df99261c8c178c9a8bd58e828b60
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1213/11951/EAshworthCWDonaldsonDW450819-0002.2.jpg
b764dc0c8ea0fe122d0eff56011148a5
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
[RAF Crest]
8188547
F/O Ashworth C. W.
OFFICERS'S MESS,
R.A.F. STATION,
MORETON-IN-MARSH,
GLOUCESTERSHIRE.
TEL. MORETON-IN-MARSH 34 AND 64
Dear Wing Commdr Donaldson,
I would like to thank you & S/Ldr Kendrick for your good wishes on my award, which came as a complete surprise to me, in fact until I received your letter I has no idea of it, I feel very happy and pleased on getting it.
I am on the last few days of a 2 week Instructors course at Little Horwood, & last week we were fortunate enough to be at home on our day off, when Japan gave in, so I was able to celebrate the end of the war at home. How this will affect the O.T.U. courses I can't say, but obviously we can't keep taking new courses in.
Since leaving the squadron I found it hard to settle down, & I am sorry to hear that 192 is now close to dissolution, I shall always remember my stay there with you.
I would like to offer you my congratulations on your Bar to the D.S.O. I was very glad to [sic] it announced in the Aeroplane last week.
Please remember me to
[page break]
[circled 2]
S/Ldr Kendrick & the Adjutant & the other friends I left at Foulsham, I do hope everyone is going on alright & I wish you the best of luck for the future, & thank you for your kind letter.
Yours sincerely
[underlined] C.W. Ashworth [/underlined]
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to David Donaldson from Flying Officer C. W. Ashworth
Description
An account of the resource
Thanks David for sending good wished on his award. Describes current activities at Little Horwood. Congratulates David on the award of bar to Distinguished Service Order. Comments that he is sorry that 192 Squadron is close to dissolution.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
C W Ashworth
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1945-08-19
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Frances Grundy
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two 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
EAshworthCWDonaldsonDW450819
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--Gloucestershire
England--Norfolk
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-08-19
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
192 Squadron
Distinguished Service Order
RAF Foulsham
RAF Little Horwood
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/300/32120/EWrigleyDMMcDonaldDA441114.1.jpg
37cc6762579242d706927f6e37f583d7
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
McDonald, Donald
Donald Alexander McDonald
Donald A McDonald
Donald McDonald
D A McDonald
D McDonald
Description
An account of the resource
Five items. One oral history interview with Donald Alexander McDonald (1920 - 2021, 410364 Royal Australian Air Force) as well as two letters, a concert programme and notes on his interview. He flew operations as a pilot with 466 and 578 Squadrons.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Donald McDonald and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
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
2015-10-13
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
McDonald, D
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[underlined]COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA[/underlined]
ROYAL AUSTRALIAN AIR FORCE.
OVERSEAS HEADQUARTERS,
KODAK HOUSE,
63, KINGSWAY,
LONDON. W.C.2.
REF. NO. 1213/6306/P2.
14th November, 1944.
Pilot Officer D. A. McDonald, D. F. C.,
Aus.410364,
No. 21 O. T. U.,
R. A. F. Station,
London Road,
Moreton-in-Marsh. Glos.
Dear McDonald,
I have just received the good news from Air Ministry that you have been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
2. Please accept my heartiest congratulations on this award,
3. With this note I am forwarding a small piece of D. F. C. ribbon in case you are unable to obtain this locally.
Kindest personal regards,
Yours sincerely,
[signature]
Air Vice Marshall,
Air Officer Commanding.
Encl.
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 Donald McDonald from from the Commonwealth of Australia
Description
An account of the resource
Congratulates him on his DFC and enclosing a DFC ribbon “in case you are unable to obtain this locally".
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
D M Wrigley
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-11-14
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Gloucestershire
England--London
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-11-14
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
David Bloomfield
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
EWrigleyDMMcDonaldDA441114
Distinguished Flying Cross
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1525/27380/SNewtonJL742570v10051-0003.1.jpg
f69c6f257642e986010dd32a84a40177
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1525/27380/SNewtonJL742570v10051-0004.1.jpg
265c0f85dff57a7a8270bfabb21831ec
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
Newton, Jack Lamport
J L Newton
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-07-15
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Newton, JL
Description
An account of the resource
83 items. Collection concerns Flight Lieutenant Jack Newton (742570 Royal Air Force) who was a Sergeant air gunner on Wellington of 12 Squadron. His aircraft was landed on fire at a German occupied airfield in Antwerp in August 1941. He was the first airman to escape back to England via the Comète escape line. The rest of his crew were captured and made prisoners of war. The collection contains accounts of his escape, letters of research from Belgium helper, other official correspondence from the Red Cross and the Royal Air Force, photographs of places and people, newspaper cuttings propaganda leaflets and maps of airfield and escape route. In addition there is an interview with Jack Newton about his experiences in the wartime RAF.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Jackie Bradford and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
BOK/VH
WAR ORGANISATION
of the
BRITISH RED CROSS SOCIETY and ORDER OF ST. JOHN OF JERUSALEM
[Red Cross crest] PRISONERS OF WAR DEPARTMENT. [St. John of Jerusalem crest]
Chairman:
MAJOR-GENERAL SIR RICHARD HOWARD-VYSE. K.C.M.G., D.S.O.
General Manager of Packing Centres: THE LORD REVELSTOKE
Deputy Chairman: J. M. EDDY. C.B.E.
Directors: LT.-COL. M. W. BROWN, O.B.E.
MISS E. M. THORNTON, O.B.E.
TELEPHONE NO:
ABBEY 5841
When replying please quote reference:
RAF/0 684
RAF/M 1740
RAF/M 1629
RAF/M 1743
RAF/M 1579
ST. JAMES’S PALACE,
LONDON, S.W.1.
9th August, 1943.
Flying Officer J. L. Newton, R.A.F.V.R.
Officers’ Mess,
R.A.F. Station,
Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire.
Dear Sir,
re:
37938 Flight Lieut. R. B. Langlois D.F.C.
748217 Flight Sergeant R. A. Copley
962985 Sergeant H. J. E. Burrell
961321 Sergeant J. W. McLarnon
402134 Sergeant R. D. Porteous
Thank you for your letter of August 4th. The addresses that you require are as follows:-
Flight Lieutenant Langlois is interned at Stalag Luft 111, Germany. Prisoner of War No. 653.
Flight Sergeant Copley is at the same camp. Prisoner of War No. 24364.
P.T.O.
[page break]
- 2 –
Sergeants Burrell and McLarnon are at p.g. 73, P.M. 3200, Italy.
Sergeant Porteous is at p.g. 57, P.M. 3200, Italy.
Yours faithfully,
p.p. E. M. THORNTON [signature]
Director.
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 Jack Newton from the Red Cross
Description
An account of the resource
References the other five members of his crew and gives information on the prisoner of war locations of Roy Langlois and Flt Sgt Copely who are both at Stalag Luft 3. Sergeants Burrell, McLarnon and Porteous were at camps in Italy
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
E M Thornton
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1943-08-09
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two sided typewritten 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
SNewtonJL742570v10051-0003, SNewtonJL742570v10051-0004
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--London
England--Gloucestershire
Poland
Poland--Żagań
Italy
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-08-09
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
prisoner of war
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
Stalag Luft 3
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1345/22216/PTyrieJSB19010024.2.jpg
64fc57d663a3e666e5a32f8250bce130
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
Tyrie, Jim. Photo album
Description
An account of the resource
An album of photographs from Jim Tyrie's service and time as a prisoner of war.
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
2019-06-01
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
Tyrie, JSB
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
Liberator, Wellington and Lancaster
Description
An account of the resource
Photo 1 is a side view of a RAF B-24, captioned 'Liberator, Moreton, August 1946'.
Photo 2 is the nose of a Wellington with an airman leaning on the propeller.
Photo 3 is a side view of a Lancaster, captioned 'Lancaster Lindholme O.C.U. 1947'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Three b/w photographs on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PTyrieJSB19010024
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Yorkshire
England--Gloucestershire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1946-08
1946-09
1947
aircrew
B-24
Lancaster
RAF Lindholme
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/193/30990/BYeomanHTYeomanHTv1-01.1.pdf
8262794404d2ef0dfee19a3f5bd97a8e
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/193/30990/BYeomanHTYeomanHTv1-02.2.pdf
7e6e96679a1915a0c9b98fb636e9cf11
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Yeoman, Harold
Harold Yeoman
Harold T Yeoman
H T Yeoman
Description
An account of the resource
31 items. Collection concerns Harold Yeoman (b. 1921 1059846 and 104405 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a pilot with 12 Squadron. Collection contains an oral history interview, a memoir, pilot's flying log book, 26 poems, a photograph and details of trail of Malayan collaborator.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Christopher E. Potts 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
2016-10-28
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Yeoman, HT
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Start of transcription
[underlined] LOOSE ON THE WIND [/underlined]
Harold Yeoman
[page break]
To those who never came back.
[page break]
Their voices, dying as they fly,
Loose on the wind are sown;
The names of men blow soundless by,
My fellows’ and my own.
A.E. Houseman,
“A Shropshire Lad”, XXXVIII.
“And how can a life be loved that hath so may embitterments, [sic] and is subject to so many calamities and miseries? How too can it be called a life, that begetteth [sic] so many deaths and plagues?”
Thomas a Kempis,
“The Imitation of Christ”.
[page break]
[underlined] LOOSE ON THE WIND [/underlined]
Author’s foreword
Never no more
We would never fly like that
Lennie
It makes you think
‘Yes, my darling daughter’
Crewing-up
Images of mortality
Tony
Mind you don’t scratch the paint
Rabbie
Letter home
Low-level
A boxful of broken china
The end of Harry
Silver spoon boy
Intermezzo
Overshoot
First solo
The pepper pot
Approach and landing
Knight’s move
A different kind of love
Sun on a chequered tea-cosy
Photograph in a book
Glossary
[page break]
[underlined] AUTHOR’S FOREWORD [/underlined]
During the years of the Second World War, some 90,000 men, from the British Isles, from the great Dominions overseas and from the countries of Europe overrun by the German enemy, volunteered as aircrew in Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force. Of these men, over 55,000 were to lose their lives and, to this day, more than 20,000 of that total have no known graves. In one particular operation there were more Bomber Command aircrew killed than there were casualties during the entire Battle of Britain.
There were many men whose names will bear for ever an aura of unfading brilliance, men such as Leonard Cheshire, (whom for a brief time I was privileged to know) such as Guy Gibson, or John Searby. There were also the thousands who could not aspire to the greatness of those remarkable men, to their almost unbelievable heights of courage and achievement. To attempt to assess what we in Bomber Command did achieve is no part of my aim. Much greater minds and more highly skilled pens than mine have already done this. This small piece of writing is solely an attempt, through the window of personal recollection, to tell of a few of the incidents which affected me and of a few of the splendid young men whom I was fortunate enough to know and to call my friends. Many, all too many of them, alas, gave their lives as part of the price of our freedom, the freedom from an unspeakable tyranny, that freedom which we now so casually enjoy and take so easily for granted. If, in this small book, I have planted their names like seeds in the garden of future years for even a few eyes other than my own to read, for a few other minds to remember, then I shall have done what I set out to do.
An eminent air historian has recently quoted some words which I wrote to him, words which I now venture to repeat. I said, “We simply had our jobs to do and we tried to do them as best we could.” I believe that sums it up.
Harold Yeoman
November 1994
[page break]
[inserted] [underlined] Never no more [/underlined] [/inserted]
“….. And through the glasse [sic] wyndow [sic]
Shines the sone. [sic]
How should I love, and I so young? …..”
(Anon.)
[page break]
[underlined] NEVER NO MORE [/underlined]
There was something icy cold running down my face and a brilliant light was shining into my eyes.
“What on earth?” I heard myself mutter.
I came to rapidly out of a deep sleep and tried to wriggle away from the cold wetness which was finding its way down my pyjama collar, but I could not escape it, nor the blinding glare.
“What’s going on?” I half-shouted, then I saw her hand holding the dripping sponge. Bright sunshine was pouring through my window that winter morning.
A pale, laughing face framed in jet-black hair behind the hand. She was sitting on the side of my bed.
“Betty!” I shouted, “Stop it! What the heck are you doing?”
“Saturday,” she answered brightly, twisting the sponge away from my hand, “Saturday, and it’s your day off. We were going for a walk, do you remember?”
Her dark, lustrous eyes shone with mischief. I wiped my face on the sleeve of my pyjama jacket and shuddered with the cold. I tried to pull the blankets back around me, but she pulled them firmly down again to chest level. What on earth would my parents think, I wondered, a young girl coming into my bedroom – they’d have a fit. It was almost too much for them when I’d insisted on volunteering for aircrew when I was nineteen, but this - !
“I’ve brought you a cup of tea; now hurry up and drink it, ‘cos it’s breakfast time.”
Betty got off the bed, handed me the cup and made for the door.
“Don’t be long now, and if you don’t take me for that walk, I’ll never speak to you again, never no more.”
“What, never, never no more?” I mimicked.
“No, never no more.”
She grinned, but pretended to be in a huff and flounced out, tossing her shiny black hair which gleamed like coal in the morning sunlight. It became a silly, affectionate catch-phrase between us.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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We had arrived at the Knight’s home at almost the same time; Betty from Coventry, after the air-raid, I from Initial Training Wing, to start my flying training at Sywell, a few miles from the centre of Northampton. We had seen the bombing from a safe distance, out of the train windows, on the way up from our I.T.W. at Torquay overnight. We had stopped, miles from anywhere, for hours, it seemed, while the raid progressed. We could hear the Jerries droning overhead and saw the fire on the horizon.
“Someone’s getting a hell of a pasting,” we had said.
Betty, then, was a refugee. Near misses from H.E.s had decided her parents to evacuate her from the shattered and blazing city to the safer home of her aunt and uncle; the R.A.F. billeting authorities had decided to send me to the Knights at the same time. So we quickly became friends; we were both of an age and of similar dispositions, light-hearted, fun-loving, undemanding and contented by nature. Two of a kind, I thought.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
We walked in Abington Park. It was brilliantly sunny but bitterly cold, a wonderful December day. There was snow on the ground, the bare trees were black and stark against the clear winter sky. With my white u/t pilot’s flash in the front of my forage cap I swaggered a little. Why not? I was very proud of it. My buttons gleamed, my boots shone like glass.
“Bags of swank!” our drill Corporal used to shout at us as we marched through Torquay, and we obeyed that command, always. I was proud of myself and I was proud to be walking out with Betty. She was a lovely girl, her face in repose calm and radiant as some Italian Renaissance Madonna in a painting.
“No, I haven’t gone solo yet,” I was saying as we walked, “but I’ve only done nine hours up to now, you know”
“How long will it take you, do you think?”
“Oh, any minute now, but my instructor puts me off a bit, he is rather bad-tempered.”
(‘Can you see that other aircraft?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Well then, are you going to fly round it or through it?’)
“That’s not very nice, is it?”
“No, not very, but I try not to let him put me off.”
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“Will you be getting any leave at Christmas?”
“Don’t suppose so, Betty; I mean to say, I’ve only been in three months altogether and we did get a 48 hour pass from Torquay, you know.”
. . . . . . . . . . . .
The Knights had a radiogram in the lounge of their comfortable semi-detached house.
“Look what I got for Christmas,” Betty exclaimed, holding out a blue-labelled record in its cardboard envelop, “would you like to hear it?”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Hutch.”
I had little or no idea who or what Hutch was, then.
“Yes, please,” I said.
She put the record on and straightened up, standing before me in her simple, grey dress. The creamy, brown voice came out of the loudspeaker and I was immediately seized by some emotion which I had never before experienced.
“That certain night, the night we met,
There was magic abroad in the air,” sang Hutch, and Betty was humming the tune along with him.
“There were angels dining at the Ritz
And a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.”
To this day, when I play that on my hi-fi and hear Hutch’s lovely velvet voice and perfect diction, I am back with Betty at Mrs. Knight’s, falling beautifully and adolescently in love with her from the exact moment that she played me that song. I find it, still, an unbearably moving experience, one which brings a lump into my throat and tears to my eyes.
“Did you like that? Do you want to hear the other side?”
“Oh, yes, please, I’d like to.”
On the other side was “All the things you are,” and it couldn’t have fitted my mood better, either. She was all the things which Hutch was singing about.
“That’s a wizard record, Betty,” I said. She smiled happily.
. . . . . . . . . . .
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“Gosh, I’ve never had champagne before, Mr. Knight,” I said.
“Well, you went solo on Christmas Eve, when we were away and now you’ve done your first solo cross-country today, so you can try some, to celebrate, apart from the fact that it’s New Year’s Day, of course.”
“Well, thanks very much, and – cheers!”
“Cheers,” from Mr. Knight, “and happy landings.”
“Chocks away,” Betty said. Now where had she learned that?
“Would you like to hear another new record?”
“Oh, yes, I would, very much. What is it?”
“’You’d be so nice to come home to’, it’s called,” she said, “do you know it?”
“No, I’ve never heard that one.”
She put the record on and I listened as I sipped the unfamiliar but strangely disappointing wine. I thought, “Yes, you would be so nice to come home to, Betty darling.” Maybe it was the wine after all.
But I really didn’t know how to say that sort of thing to her. How did one start? Besides, my mind was still full of the voice of Flying Officer Lines from earlier that wonderful day.
“You don’t need me, do you? I am going to have a sleep. Wake me up if anything goes wrong.”
And pulling out his speaking tube he had wriggled down into the front cockpit, out of the slipstream, that New Year’s morning, as I set course, droning over snowy Sywell in the bitterly cold sunshine. He was a Battle of Britain Hurricane pilot, instructing for a so-called rest, and trusting me, with only thirty hours in my log-book, to fly from Sywell to unknown Cambridge, land, and come back again. If you did the trip without assistance from your instructor it counted as solo time, and I had done that. My cup of happiness was full, that day.
“You’d be paradise to come home to and love”, went the song as the record ended.
I sighed.
“Yes, she would be,” I thought, “but how on earth do you go about actually saying things like that to Betty?”
There were all manner of things I undoubtedly wanted to say to
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her. But I hadn’t even kissed her yet, and you couldn’t say some things without kissing somebody first, could you? Besides, she might not want me to. So how, and when, did, or could, one start? It was very difficult, rather like trying to do a perfect three-point landing.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Every other Friday we were paid. I was rich beyond my wildest imaginings. From the two shillings a day at Torquay I had progressed to no less than five pounds four shillings each fortnight. That was as a mere Leading Aircraftman. What I would be paid if ever I became a Sergeant pilot the imagination simply couldn’t tell me. I used to split the money carefully into equal parts and with one half burning a hole in my pocket and the Friday evening feeling joyously pervading my system my little world was at my feet until Monday morning. I would go into Northampton, to the “Black Boy” in the main square, for a mixed grill and a pint of black-and-tan, sometimes with Len or Eric, sometimes alone. It became the high point of my week.
We would sit and talk flying to our hearts’ content, comparing notes on our experiences. In retrospect how limited they were and how naive we were, and yet how miraculous and other-worldly it seemed to me to know the unutterable thrill of open-cockpit flying in the freezing winter air, strapped tightly into the fragile machine whose engine purred bravely in front of me; the wonder of the view of the blue-green and white hazy landscape spread out below, the icy slipstream on my numbed face, the thrill of the response, under my hands and feet, of the aircraft to small, smooth movements of the controls. There was the magic of the rising, tilting and falling of the snow-covered, mottled, dim countryside, blotched with the smoke of towns, the dazzling red disc of the sun as it set in the haze, the ecstasy of sideslipping [sic] in over the hedge and of smoothly straightening out the glide to set her down for a perfect three-pointer on to the frosty grass near the other Tigers, while a few fellow-pupils watched critically, and while over at the Vickers shed the engines of a great black Wellington rumbled ominously.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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“Are you coming down to the Y.M. tonight, Harold?”
My head was down over my books, in the dining room. I wasn’t finding the theory of flight too easy.
“Oh. Yes, I’ll be along; are you going to be there?”
“Well, I work there there [sic] three nights a week now, you know. Auntie thought I should do something to help the war effort until I’m called up.”
(Called up? I hadn’t thought of that; somehow I couldn’t imagine Betty in uniform.)
“O.K., I’ll see you down there later, then, I’ve got just about an hour’s work to do. Keep a chocolate biscuit for me, will you?”
She waggled her fingers, crinkled her nose smilingly, and went out.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
I landed for the last time at Sywell in a Tiger Moth, sideslipping [sic] off the height and greasing her down on to the grass. I let the aircraft rumble to a halt, then I taxied carefully to the dispersal tents, faced her into wind and switched off. The prop juddered to a stop. An erk ducked down to chock the wheels. Dusk was beginning to fall; I could see Alex Henshaw, Vickers’ Chief Test Pilot, on the circuit in his Spitfire. Everyone always stopped whatever they were doing to watch him fly, it was part of our education. But my eyes always returned to the huge black bulk of the Wellington by their hangar. I pulled out my harness pin and released the straps carefully, so as not to damage the aircraft’s fabric. I sighed and reluctantly, as one would part from a girl, I climbed out of the cockpit. A chapter had ended.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
“I don’t know exactly where, Betty, except that it’s overseas. The lads are all saying Canada, but no-one ever tells us much. I suppose we’ll not know until we get there. There’s a few posted to S.F.T.S.s in England, Hullavington, Cranfield, places like that, but ten of us are definitely on the boat.”
She looked down at her cup of tea. We were sitting together in
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the Y.M.C.A.; she had an hour off duty. The place was full of uniforms, but I scarcely notice them, I only had eyes for her.
“Will it be soon?”
“Next week, they think.”
“Harold - ?”
“Yes, what?”
“Oh, well, nothing. You will write, won’t you?”
“Of course I will, Betty, yes, I’ll write to you as often as I can.”
“What will you be flying?”
“Harvards or Oxfords, I suppose, I’m not really sure.”
“What do you want to go on to, fighters or bombers?”
(Strange, how civilians thought there were only those two categories of pilot, but I suppose the news the press and radio gave concerned mainly those two. After all, they were the types mostly at the sharp end of things. But I thought of Betty, huddled fearfully in the shelter, that night of the Coventry raid and I felt a sudden and great anger that she should have had to endure that. And I thought of the Wellington over at the Vickers hangar at the aerodrome, sinister, powerful, black, and from then on I was never in any doubt.)
“Bombers,” I said firmly, “definitely bombers.”
. . . . . . . . . . .
It is strange that I don’t remember saying goodbye to Betty, nor to the Knights, if it comes to that. I must have done so, of course, but sadly, I cannot bring the occasions to mind.
I did go to Canada. Once we got out west we worked hard and we flew hard, by day and by night. We got no leave, very little time off. We didn’t particularly want any. Things were getting rather urgent back home. Besides, I wanted to hurry back to Betty, and to my parents, too, of course.
I wrote to her as often as I could. She sent me her photograph, smiling and lovely in that grey dress, but I’m afraid I haven’t got it now. I got my wings a few days before my twentieth birthday. In the late summer, after a stopover in Iceland, I was back in England, and with a couple of Canadian chaps, splendid fellows whom I had
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met on the boat, I was posted to a Wellington Operational Training Unit at Bassingbourne, not too far from Northampton. Most of my buddies went on to fighters. As it happened, they had a little more future than us bomber boys. Not much, but a little. Of course, I was longing to see Betty again.
As soon as I had settled in I phoned the Knights one evening. It was an interminable business, repeating their number to different operators, waiting while the line buzzed and crackled, while disembodied and unreal voices spoke unintelligibly to one another in hasty, clipped syllables. In the end, a man’s voice spoke up.
“Is that Mr. Knight?”
“Yes, who is that?”
“It’s Harold.”
“Harold! How are you? Where are you speaking from?”
I told him Bassingbourn. We were allowed to do that so long as we didn’t give the name of our unit.
“How’s Mrs. Knight?”
“Oh, she’s fine, she’s down at the Y.M. this evening, on duty.”
“I see. And Betty, is she still with you?”
There was a slight pause. I thought we must have been cut off. Then he said, “No, she went back home a little while ago. Things are a bit quieter now, you know.”
“Yes, I understand. But how is she? I’d love to see her again.”
“Well, actually, Harold, she’s fine. But look, did you know – did she mention that she’s getting engaged?”
I felt as though I’d flown slap into a mountainside in the dark. I swallowed with difficulty, the perspiration had broken out on my forehead and my hand holding the receiver was trembling.
“No,” I said, “I didn’t know that.”
“Sorry, I didn’t hear what you said.”
“No, I hadn’t heard that.”
“Yes; he’s quite a nice chap, a bit older than she is, works in a car factory, I believe.”
We didn’t talk long after that; I was too stunned to think very straight. I’m afraid I never saw the Knights again, and I am truly sorry, for they were good, nice people and they were extremely kind to me. I made a mess of my flying during the next few days.
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I still think about Betty. I have quite a substantial record collection and after years of fruitless searching I finally got the record of Hutch singing what has become for me a poignant song, that song about the nightingale. And when I play it I can see Betty’s lovely face, pale and calm, like the Madonna, and I can visualise the gleam of the firelight on her jet-black hair, that winter afternoon in Northampton.
I wonder, often I wonder, what became of her. Dear Betty, I shall never forget you for you were my first love. What happened? Where did I go wrong? I don’t know why I should feel so very sad when I think of those days, for they were truly among the happiest of my life.
Sometimes, too, I think of the way she used to laugh, and of her words; I can almost hear her voice speaking to me, as though she were in the room here. But I know I shall never see her again and now, the touching little phrase sounds only like a cry of despair in the night – “Never no more, never no more.”
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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[inserted] [underlined] We would never fly like that. [/underlined] [/inserted]
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[underlined] WE WOULD NEVER FLY LIKE THAT [/underlined]
After I had described the incident to him, with inevitable, automatic use of a pilot’s illustrative gestures of the hands, he thought briefly about it, then looking directly at me, “You ought to write about it,” he said, “Why don’t you put it on paper?”
The following day I awoke early in the morning, earlier than usual, even for me, with his words still sounding in my ears. And remembering the words with which I had described the events of almost sixty years previously still fresh and vivid in my mind, I took up pencil and paper.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Now, in the dying days of the twentieth century, almost every summer week-end, all over the land, you may buy your ticket for some air display. You may sit in your car with the doors open to admit the pleasant breeze, the warm air, the chatter of the crowd, the over-emphatic loudspeaker announcements, or you may lounge upon your hired camp-chair, your sunglasses shading your eyes as you look upwards into the limitless blue clarity of the sky, and watch, to the accompaniment of the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ of the hundreds of spectators, the improbable antics of the ugly, purpose-built, monstrously-powered aircraft, meretriciously decorated with advertisements, performing their violent and ugly aerial manoeuvres. To me, the vicious use by their pilots of stick and rudder palls after only a few seconds, and I think, perhaps nostalgically, that I would much rather watch fewer and simpler aerobatics performed by pilots in standard military aircraft. And as I ponder this my thoughts are led back to a day on a Northamptonshire aerodrome when I was beginning my elementary pilot training in the R.A.F.
The time was the sever winter of 1940-41. The Battle of Britain had just been won; Coventry had only very recently been devastated by the Luftwaffe in one catastrophic night raid. I was one of twenty or so young men on our course. Most of us had never seen an aircraft at close quarters until we arrived at No. 6 Elementary Flying Training School. Here, there
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were Tiger Moths – biplanes, gentlemen’s aeroplanes, as I heard them many times described. They were docile, forgiving, vice-less, sensitive to both hands and feet, a sheer joy to handle once the initial strangeness of the sensation of controlling an aircraft in three dimensions had worn off. Most of us, I fancy, could see ahead no further than going solo on them, then completing the course with the required fifty or so flying hours before we went on to the next stage in our training, a Service Flying Training School. But we did not look far into the future; we did not know nor could we imagine what was coming to us. Perhaps, in many cases, this was just as well. All we knew was that we were, each one of us, filled with an unquenchable desire and zeal to qualify eventually as pilots in the finest Air Force in the world, to become – and we thought this and spoke of it without embarrassment or apology to any man – the elite of all the armed forces, an opinion which I will hold with pride today.
So we flew and we studied flying and talked of little else but the theory and practice of flying. We questioned one another. We pored [sic] over pilots’ notes and airmanship notes and navigation books and the Morse Code. We questioned our instructors and our peers on the senior course. And we kept our eyes and ears open, sensitive and receptive to anything, however small, which would assist us in any way to obtain those wings which we longed to be able to wear on our uniforms.
Here at Sywell, the Tiger Moths were, during the day, dispersed around the perimeter of the grass aerodrome, standing in their training yellow and earth-camouflage paint, their R.A.F. roundels standing out bravely, awaiting their next pupils to take them up on whichever exercise they would carry out. We were divided into three Flights, six or seven of the boys on my course in each, with six or seven of the senior course. Each Flight had its ‘office’ in a camouflage-painted bell tent near the hedge. But what drew my eye almost hypnotically when I was standing there, not flying, perhaps watching other pupils performing their ‘circuits and bumps’ until it was my own turn, was the occasional sight of a Wellington, a twin-engined bomber, at that time the biggest we had, standing outside a hangar on the far side of the aerodrome – the Vickers shed, as it was called. It fascinated me constantly and unfailingly, massive in its matt-black dope with its very tall single rudder, standing squat, silent and menacing outside its hangar, contrasting against the snow-covered ground,
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never approached by anyone except the Vickers personnel. What was taking place there I have never known, but all of us well knew who flew it.
He would arrive in his Spitfire, considerately keeping a respectable distance outside the circuit while we pupils took off or landed in our tiger Moths. Then he would slip into a vacant place in the circuit and make his approach and landing, his aircraft, pencil-slim, perfect and graceful in its flight, the focus of all eyes from the ground, its appearance possessed of something of the beauty and poetry of a Bach fugue or a Mozart andante, a Shakespearian sonnet of flowing aerial beauty. The pilot, we learned from some of the senior course who were comparatively old hands on the aerodrome, was Alex Henshaw, Vickers’ Chief Test Pilot, a fact which reduced us tyros, with probably less than thirty flying hours in any of our logbooks, to awestricken silence.
He it would be who would take the Wellington from its place at the Vickers shed, taxi it, ponderously, it seemed to us, into take-off position when all Tiger Moths were well clear, and without fuss send it charging with engines howling at full boost over the bumpy grass field and into the air, leaving traces of oily smoke in its wake from the two Pegasus engines as he eased it over the trees fringing the aerodrome and climbed away. Later, he would return to land, once again showing meticulous consideration of us pupils, and would taxy the bomber to its position by the Vickers shed. I would have not believed them had someone told me that less than a year later I would land and take off here in a more powerful Mark of Wellington on the strength of having seen Alex Henshaw’s performances; I am sure that my audience, if indeed I had one, would have been quite unimpressed by the sight. I know that my own crew, in the tense silence as I scraped over the trees on take-off, were wishing themselves anywhere but with me in my inexperienced disregard for their safety. But it was watching Alex Henshaw that first sowed the seed of an idea in my head that, whereas almost all of the chaps on my course wanted to fly fighters, I thought that I would try my utmost to get on to a bomber Squadron, if only to hit back at those who had so terrified Betty, the niece of the couple on whom
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I was billeted in Northampton, and whom I was beginning to regard as someone more than a friend. A year later I would be wearing my pilot’s wings, having been half way across the world and back to earn them, having joined a Wellington Squadron in Lincolnshire and having survived a fire in the air followed by a barely controllable night descent in the darkness and the final crash-landing on my first operation against the enemy. I would also have gained, then lost, a love.
One afternoon, at Sywell, I was not flying, standing outside the dispersal tent with two or three others of my course, no doubt talking flying, and watching critically the take-offs and landings of a few pupils on circuits and bumps. (How readily I could point out their faults – a slight swing on take-off, a ropey turn, a bumpy landing, or a too-high hold-off; how slow I was to recognise my own failings and correct them, except on the sometimes caustic promptings of Flying Officer J - -, my instructor).
At this stage in our training we could detect instantly any appearance or movement of an aircraft in the sky, no matter how far distant it was – an attribute I have never lost – and we could also quickly and correctly identify it, an ability which, for obvious reasons, was essential by day or by night. But on that bright, very cold afternoon, first there was the distinctive note of the Merlin engine. Our heads turned. Here was the Spitfire with Alex Henshaw, assessing the position of the Tigers on the circuit. He would have been at about 800 feet; I had a splendid view as he cruised gently along, well outside the aerodrome boundary. Then there was a flash of sunlight off the wing as, quite unexpectedly, he rolled the aircraft on to its back and flew, straight and level, but inverted, into wind. We turned our heads and grinned at one another. This was good. This was very good. Exciting stuff. Soon he would roll back and finish his circuit normally. We were wrong. He turned crosswind, still inverted, his rudder pointing grotesquely earthwards. This was becoming quite amazing, an incredible sight. Then, still inverted, he turned again, on to the downwind leg and put his wheels down – or rather, put them up, as we saw them, rising like a snail’s antennae from the duck-egg blue under surface of the Spitfire. Then he turned
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on to the final crosswind leg, still inverted, undercarriage held high, flaps now out, and finally into wind, on to his landing approach.
Spellbound and speechless we watched as he lost height smoothly in the inverted position. What was he going to do? Open her up and roll her out, then go round again on a normal circuit? But no, he continued on his inverted final approach. I hardly dared breathe; the tension in our small group could be felt. Down and down he slipped until we were prepared to see simply anything – but surely not a crash? I could not truly estimate at what height he was, but finally, effortlessly and smoothly, he rolled her out, the engine popping characteristically as he held off at a few feet and set the Spitfire down for a perfect landing on the grass. We exhaled in unison, the tension gone, wonderment taking over.
I have never seen any piece of flying anywhere to approach the silken, wonderful skill of this, and I would be astonished if anyone else has; it was sheer unadulterated Henshaw genius, a sight that I have always remembered with awe, one I shall never forget.
There is a very fine novel, long since out of print, written by an R.A.F. Flight Lieutenant pilot who was killed in 1940. The action takes place at a civilian flying school; in one particular chapter some pupils are watching an instructor putting an aircraft through its paces on a rigorous test flight and one of them speaks some words which precisely matched my thoughts as I watched that incredible inverted circuit – “We’ll none of us ever fly like that.”
I am sure that none of us standing there on that wartime winter day ever did and I would be astounded if anyone else did, or could. It was flying by a genius; even the gods must have smiled to see it.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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[inserted] [underlined] Lennie [/underlined] [/inserted]
[page break]
[underlined] LENNIE [/underlined]
In those days, full-backs wore number 1, right wing threequarters threw into lineouts and wore number 2, and so on, down to number 15 at wing forward. Lennie wore number 2 in my local rugby club’s first team, and also in the County side. As an aspiring wing threequarter [sic] myself, although just into my teens, Lennie, when I watched the team’s every home game, wide-eyed on the open side of the exposed pitch, in whatever weather, Lennie became one of my boyhood heroes.
He was not by any means one of your greyhound-type hard-running winger, for he carried, in retrospect, perhaps a pound or two too much weight to be numbered with them. But he was as elusive as a well-greased eel. Although in defence, and in particular, his rather feeble kicking, he was slightly suspect, with ball in hand every spectator, whether at club or County match, unconsciously sat up or stood straighter, in anticipation of his jinking, sidestepping runs up the touchline, soldier-erect, dark head thrown back, mouth slightly open. I wonder how often in his career he heard the encouraging shouts of the crowd, “Come on, Lennie!”
The recollection of a particular incident in one particular match, against the strongest club side in the county still remains vividly with me. In all but the highest grade of rugby, receiving the ball as a wing threequarter [sic] within ten or fifteen yards of one’s own corner flag meant that there was no choice. One kicked for touch, hoping to gain at least twenty or so yards. Especially so when one was pitted against the most efficient and successful team for miles around, and even more so when one was faced by the opposing winger, who in this case was an English international. But on this occasion Lennie eschewed the safe option. Perhaps it was that he himself knew that his kicking was rather weak.
About a hundred yards from his opponent’s line and faced by a rapidly advancing and grimly competent opponent, he set off to run, up the appreciable slope of his home ground. With a jink and a sidestep he evaded the oncoming International, who skidded and was left floundering. Urged on by the home crowd, myself included, he ran, sidestepped, swerved and tricked his way through the opponents’ entire team, his lately evaded marker in breathless and fruitless pursuit. He finally rounded the fullback and scored wide out to the left, after a solo effort of more than 120 yards. It brought the house down, especially as the England ‘cap’
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was finally left prone and exhausted in his wake. I have watched and played rugby for very many years and I honestly believe that I have rarely seen a finer individual try scored.
Came the war. Players and spectators alike of the necessary ages were scattered all over the world, many never again to see or handle a rugby ball. Very early in 1941, my elementary flying training – and Betty – left behind, the latter with some heartache, I and several other LACs from Sywell found ourselves en route for we knew not where to continue our training, gathered like so many shepherdless sheep in midwinter in a large and bleak Nissen hut at RAF Wilmslow, an overseas embarkation depot. There must have been fifty or so of us in the hut, sitting upon our respective beds, while a Corporal at one end lectured us on some topic relevant to our impending departure, then called us forward, alphabetically, of course – I was used to being the last in any roll-call – to hand us some sheet of instructions. Awaiting my turn I watched idly while others hurried forward to the Corporal’s desk, then about-turned and went back to their places. Watched idly, that is, until a name I only half-heard was called, and a well-built dark man trotted, on his toes, up the aisle to the Corporal. I started up with a stifled exclamation, recognising the way he ran. It was Lennie, Lennie C - - of W - - R.F.C. I could scarcely believe my eyes. For a second or two the forage cap with the white flash of u/t aircrew almost deceived me.
As soon as we were left to our own devices I walked along the hut and across to his bed-space.
“Excuse me, but you are Lennie C - -, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.”
He looked curiously at me.
“I thought so, I’ve often watched you play, at W - -.”
He looked surprised and pleased. I mentioned my cousin, who played in the same team. To meet someone from one’s own home town in the Service was a reasonably infrequent happening, and because of that, all the more welcome. He told me he was under training as a Navigator. We stuck together, despite the disparity in our ages – he was about ten years my senior – through our dismal stay at Wilmslow, then via Gourock and a ridiculously small ship to Iceland where we trans-shipped
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to an armed Merchant Cruiser. This was more of a morale-boosting title than anything else; the ship was a medium-sized passenger cruise vessel with two quite small guns which, at a guess, might have just about managed to sink an empty wooden barrel, but not much else. The news finally filtered down to us that we were heading for Canada. On setting out from Reykjavik we looked around for our convoy. There was none. We were to cross the Atlantic alone, with two paltry guns to defend ourselves against whatever there might be in the way of U-boats, pocket battleships or a combination of both. This was a very real threat. The ‘Bismarck’ was later to sink ‘Hood’ and itself to be sunk in the North Atlantic. We slept and lived, about 150 of us, I suppose, on the floor of what had been the Recreation Room with about twelve inches of so-called bed-space between mattresses. Half way across the Atlantic, in a February storm, the engines packed up and we tossed, helpless, for twenty four hours, a sitting target for the Kriegsmarine. Then at last we heard the welcome rumbling from the bowels of the ship.
An LAC whose bed-space was near to Lennie’s and mine then reported that he felt unwell. Chickenpox was diagnosed, and the M.O., looking for all the world like an S.S. man selecting victims for the concentration camp, ordered that several of us, including Lennie, Brian S - , who had been on my course at Sywell, and myself, were to be sent into quarantine when we arrived in Canada. Brian, as it happened, was also a rugby man, having played for Broughton Park.
We duly and thankfully docked in Halifax, Nova Scotia and after, I’m afraid, gorging ourselves on steaks and chocolate, which we had never seen since before September 1939, about twenty of us, including two or three Fleet Air Arm airmen, to our eyes bizarre in their bell-bottomed trousers and flapping collars, were put on the train for Cape Breton Island, in particular for the small R.C.A.F. Station of North Sydney.
Our quarantine turned out to be farcical. After twenty four hours on the camp we were informed, amazingly, that we could please ourselves where we went and whom we met, until further notice. We looked at one another in astonishment – then proceeded to enjoy ourselves while we could. Our duties, such as they were, consisted of one night duty in six when three of us were left in charge of the kitchen and served meals to the RCAF airmen
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who were on guard duty and fire picquet. The civilian cooks, who had never met anyone from the U.K., ensure that we were fed like fighting cocks, providing us with quantities of steaks, eggs and milk. Out of camp, the streets, cafes and cinemas of North Sydney and of Sydney itself were open to us. Lifts in cars belonging to the local people were there for the asking, and the friendly Nova Scotians, learning of our arrival, took us to their hearts and into their homes. They were astonished that despite the deep snow on the ground, we seldom, if ever, wore our great coats. The cold was so dry compared with that in England, and we were physically in such prime condition that we felt no discomfort, whereas our Canadian hosts went about muffled up in greatcoats and fur hats with ear-flaps. Our stay there was as good as an extended leave.
Off the pitch, most rugby players are determined to do their utmost to ensure that breweries never go out of business. Lennie was no exception. When a group of us were out together he drank his beer slowly but steadily, became more and more relaxed and laughed a good deal, sometimes uncontrollably. He never became objectionable or aggressive, never used bad language and was always amenable to our advice that perhaps he had had sufficient and it was time to return to camp. Being a mere tyro, at the age on [sic] nineteen I drank sparingly and with considerable discretion, my mental sights being fixed over the horizon, on the next stage of my flying training and the eventual gaining of my wings. So I took it upon myself, on several occasions, to steer Lennie, muscular but curiously boneless, laughing at only he knew what, safely into our barrack hut and on to his bed, where I covered him, still in uniform, with his blankets, where he would fall peacefully asleep. Lennie, even with several beers inside him, never did the slightest harm to anyone.
Of course, the idyll had to come to an end. After several very pleasant weeks, our posting came through. Brian and I and some others were destined for Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, No. 32 S.F.T.S., while Lennie was posted to Goodrich, Ontario, a Navigational Training School. I remember how we shook hands when we said ‘cheerio’. His smile was as broad as ever, and his hand, I recall vividly, was large and surprisingly soft.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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It must have been on one of my leaves from Moreton-in-the-Marsh towards the end of 1942 when my father, who was on the committee of the local rugby club, gave me the news. Lennie had been shot down and was missing. He believed that it had happened off the Norwegian coast. It was yet another blow to me following the loss of my own crew. I had recently had a reply from the Commanding Officer of my Squadron in response to a letter I had written him, that my crew must now all be presumed dead. I felt that the bottom had dropped out of my life and I was nearing the end of my tether. I was suffering deeply, as was my flying, and I sensed that my forthcoming Medical Board would be the end of a chapter. I went about cocooned in silent grief so intense that it amounted to permanent depression, which was only temporarily assuaged by drinking far more than I ever saw Lennie drink. From what little my father had gleaned from his informant at the clubhouse I surmised that Lennie must have been on some squadron in Coastal Command. For some reason I visualised him on Whitleys.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Years passed. I will not say that I had forgotten Lennie; occasionally some memory of those days would float unbidden into my mind and I would visualise him as I had last known him on Cape Breton Island, always smiling, playfully light-hearted, completely harmless. Then a friend gave me a cutting from a local newspaper with a photograph of the successful rugby team of the immediate pre-war years. Lennie smiled up at me from the middle of the front row of players, next to another young man who had been shot down into the sea off the Dutch coast as a wireless operator in a Blenheim on a daylight shipping strike. I was impelled to ask the friend whether any information could be obtained from the Internet as to what had happened to Lennie, and when it was he had died. Within days I knew enough to be able to consult a series of volumes of casualties of Bomber Command. For Lennie had not been on a Coastal Command Squadron as I had surmised, and he had not been shot down off Norway.
He was the Navigator of one of six Wellingtons from a Bomber Squadron at Mildenhall, (where much later, J – ended her career in the W.A.A.F. as a Base Watchkeeper), detailed to attack shipping, in daylight, on the Dortmund-Ems Canal in North-west Germany on a September afternoon in 1942.
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On reading this, I could hardly believe that Wellingtons were being used on daylight operations at that time; I had thought that the crippling loses [sic] that they suffered on such attacks in the early days of the war had meant their transfer solely to night bombing. (On my telling M – about these circumstances, she said ‘Suicide raid’. That was about the size of it.) Mr. Chorley’s painstakingly collated and amazingly detailed book gives the bare bones of the tragic story. Four and a half hours after taking off, presumably on their way back to Mildenhall, and within sight of the Dutch coast and the comparative safety of the North Sea, his aircraft was attacked by a Luftwaffe Focke-Wulfe 190, a formidable fighter aircraft. The wireless operator was killed in the attack and the aircraft was set on fire. The two gunners managed to bale out and became prisoners of war. The account says that Lennie was last seen using a fire extinguisher, bravely trying to put out the fire which was raging inside the fuselage of the Wellington.
The blazing aircraft crashed into what was then the Zuider Zee; the bodies of the wireless operator and the pilot were recovered and subsequently interred in a cemetery in Amsterdam, but Lennie’s body was never found and, having no known grave, his name is recorded on the Runnymede Memorial along with twenty thousand others whose remains were never recovered.
So died a hero who for a brief time was my friend.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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[inserted] [underlined] It makes you think [/underlined] [/inserted]
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[underlined] IT MAKES YOU THINK [/underlined]
“Mail up!”
We jumped off our beds and hurried towards the door at the end of the barrack hut. At least, some of us did. The majority stayed where they were, on their beds, pretending to read, cleaning buttons, pottering about. There could be almost no chance of mail for them, for they were Norwegian, and their homeland was under German occupation. They accepted this lack of mail, as they did much else, with considerable stoicism.
We who were the fortunate ones gathered around the R.C.A.F. airman who called out the names on the envelopes, and who, while looking down at the handful of letters he held, handed us our mail without a glance. There was one for me. I looked at the postmark. Coventry. My heart bounded when I saw that. There was two-thirds of the width of Canada and all the Atlantic Ocean between us; she was back in devastated Coventry, I in smaller and completely peaceful Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, under training as a fighter pilot.
I walked slowly back to my bed, savouring the sight of her handwriting, feeling the texture of the envelope smooth under my fingers. I sat down quietly, as far as one could be quiet in a hut with twenty-nine other blokes. In deference to us, the Norwegian lads did keep quiet as we read our mail. I held the unopened letter a long time in my hand, gazing at her rounded, shapely writing. I wanted this moment of pleasure to last as long as possible.
At the time I was with her, under the same roof, being so caught up in the novelty and the thrill of flying, I didn’t realise what was happening to me, or to her, and it was all too foolishly late that I had become slowly aware of it. After we had parted, when I was at the Embarkation Depot en route for Canada, and when I had time to take stock of myself, it was only then that it dawned slowly upon me that I had fallen in love with her, and that I wouldn’t see her again for the best, or the worst part of six months at least. Oh, Betty, I thought, the time I so stupidly wasted. Would I ever have the chance again?
I sighed, and looked at her photograph on my locker. She was
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smiling at me enigmatically, her mouth curving slightly up at the corners, her dark eyes holding more than a hint of mischief, the gleaming mass of her ebony hair framing the soft pallor of her calm face. Slowly and carefully I opened the envelope. I turned to the last sheet, looked at the end of the letter first, fearful that it might say only “yours sincerely” or some such. It did not. The words were there that I wanted to read. I lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and luxuriously, and started from the beginning.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Tim spoke up from across the gangway between the beds, his English idiomatic and only very faintly accented.
“I hope she still loves you, but come on, we have flying to do.”
“O.K., Tim, I’ll be right with you.”
I tucked the letter into my top left-hand tunic pocket, carefully buttoning the flap. Soren and Aage, next to Tim, both stood up. What opposites they were, I thought, Soren cheerful, muscular, blond, extrovert, while Aage was gaunt and rather silent, and toothy, with melancholy eyes which flickered nervously around him. We made our way up to the flights; it was going to be another hot day. Already the air was filled with the tearing rasp of the Harvards’ Wasp engines as the fitters ran them up in preparation for a long day’s flying.
We turned into ‘F’ Flight crewroom at the front of one of the hangars and looked at the flying detail pinned up on the board, next to the Coke machine. Aage was due off on a cross-country to Swift Current and back at 0900, while Tim, Soren and I had an hour’s formation flying at 1000. Lower down the list I saw that I was due on the Link Trainer at 1500 for blind-flying simulation, and to round off the day, or rather, the night, one and a half solo night-flying hours at 2100. It was going to be a long day, as well as a hot one. Aage, now bent over a map, pencilling careful lines, was to take over my aircraft, I saw, when I landed after night-flying.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
After the snowy, tree-fringed grass field at Sywell it was a novelty to have these sun-baked runways, even more so when there were two parallel ones with a narrow grass strip in between, the whole field being patterned by this double triangle of concrete strips.
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We took it in turns to lead our formation of three. Station-changing, as we had no R/T, was indicated by hand-signals from the leader. Soren was to lead first with me as his number two and Tim, three. Then I would take over the lead, and finally, Tim. I followed Soren’s bright yellow Harvard out as he taxied on to the perimeter and turned towards the end of the runways in use. He took the right-hand runway of the pair and edged across to the left of it, braked and stopped. I gave him ten yards clearance and took the right-hand edge of the same runway. Tim stopped level with me, alone on the left-hand runway. I saw Soren slide the canopy shut and start rolling, and I followed, pushing the throttle firmly up to the stop. I never got used to the tremendous feeling of exhilaration as the power surged on. I lifted the tail and kept straight with small pushes of my feet on the rudder-bar. As I chased after Soren I could see Tim out of the corner of my eye, keeping abreast of me.
Suddenly Soren was airborne, then I followed, climbing into the summer sky. To maintain station, the rules of tidy and correct flying were suspended. You used no bank on your small turns to get into position, but skidded gently across on rudder only. It felt all wrong, it was like being told deliberately to mis-spell a word one had known and used for years. When I had first practised formation with F/O Sparks in the front cockpit I had been frightened out of my wits to see two other aircraft each within ten yards of me. But one was soon conditioned to accept this, and very quickly one learned the gentle art of close formation flying, when your own wing was actually tucked in to the space between the leader’s wing and his tailplane, so that any forward or backward relative movement meant a collision. But provided you watched him like a hawk, and kept station by means of constant throttle and rudder juggling, you got by. It became great fun, and the early thoughts of comprehensive and devastating collisions were soon forgotten.
So I tucked myself right in on Soren’s starboard side and stayed there while he climbed, turned or glided. We flew four basic formations, vic, echelon starboard, echelon port and line astern. The echelons looked great and the line astern gave you a bit of relaxation, for numbers two and three were slightly lower than the aircraft in front,
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to keep out of the turbulence of his slipstream. Where we were heading was not my worry, nor Tim’s. Soren was in charge of that side of things while he was leading. He gave the signal to change leaders. I skidded away from him and opened the throttle to draw ahead. He skated in to my left and Tim crossed to my right, as number two. Back to cruising revs as they snuggled themselves in tightly against me. I looked down at the baked prairie landscape and saw that Soren had headed us back towards Moose Jaw to make it easy for me. I grinned and mentally thanked him. I started to sing loudly to myself as we flew, running through the repertoire of the popular songs we were always playing on the juke box at Smoky Joe’s cafe, just outside the camp gates, I felt on top of the world – a letter from Betty, a great day for flying and the formation going like a dream. I led them around until my time was up and signalled Tim to take it from there, over Regina Beach on Last Mountain Lake, at four thousand feet.
I slid into number three position in the vic and tucked myself in tightly into Tim’s port side. He led us around in a turn to port, back towards base. We never did steepish turns in vic formation, it was too difficult for the man low down on the inside to keep station as he had to cut his airspeed back so much. Tim tightened the turn and climbed a bit as he did so. Watch it, Tim, I thought. Still tighter; I dared not look at my airspeed. Still tighter, and my controls were starting to feel sloppy, approaching the stall; I dared not throttle back any further or I would stall off the turn and go into a spin, and a Harvard lost nine hundred feet per turn once they did spin. Out of it! I shoved throttle on as I winged over and dived out of the formation, swearing to myself as I did so. The wretch! Playing silly buggers like that!
All on my own in the bright morning sky I screamed round in a steep turn to port, with plenty of power on, nearly blacking myself out in the process. I yanked the seat tighter against the straps to bind my stomach firmly in and keep the blood in my head, stopping the grey-out. I eased out of the turn. Five thousand feet. Now, where the hell were they? Then I saw them, now about six miles away, orbiting innocently. I flew over to them and sat just off
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Tim’s port wingtip, shaking my fist at him, which only made him throw back his head and laugh as he made come-in motions with his hand. I went in, tight. We formed up again into a sedate vic and finished the detail, as usual, in echelon port, about two miles from the field, when we did our line-shoot party piece – a swift wing-over to port in rapid succession and a dive on each other’s tails into the circuit, making sure we were well clear of the more sedate pupils going about their quiet business.
When we had landed, taxied in and switched off, I collared Tim.
“Damn you!” I said, pretending to be about to sling a punch at him, “What the hell do you think you were playing at? Trying to make me spin in, were you?”
“No danger,” he replied, laughing, “you had bags of height – can’t take it, eh?”
Soren chimed in, smiling broadly.
“We thought you’d just decided to go home.”
“Wait till I’m leader, next time, you two mad so-and-so’s,” I said threateningly, “I’ll turn you both inside out!”
All the same, I threw Tim a Sweet Cap; Soren didn’t smoke. We strolled back to ‘F’ Flight crew-room where I’m glad to say that Tim bought the cold Cokes. It was a hot morning.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
The Link Trainer Sergeant was a stocky little R.C.A.F. man who looked like a middleweight boxer.
“Don’t forget to reset your gyro-compass every ten minutes or so or you’ll be way to hell out at the end. Got your flight card? Do all your turns at Rate two and let’s have a nice neat pattern on my chart at the finish. Give me the O.K. when you’re ready and I’ll tell you when I’m switching on so you can punch the clock.”
“Right oh, Sergeant,” I said.
I climbed into the little dummy aeroplane on its concertina-like base. I pulled over the hood, plugged in the intercom in the darkness and propped up the flight card near the small lamp on the instrument panel. I felt the lurch as he energised the system; the instruments
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came to life with a sigh.
“I’ve put you at a thousand feet,” he said, “do you read that?”
“Check,” I replied, “turning on to 045 Magnetic, now.”
“Got you. Just watch your height as well as your timings, won’t you, bud?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
I was flying the awkward Maltese Cross pattern, the idea being to finish exactly where you started, after the completion of the twelve legs. The instructor had a wheeled “crab” which inked in the line of your track on his chart. At the end, you should have drawn a perfect Maltese Cross, but it took forty minutes, approximately, of solid, grinding concentration on your instruments alone.
“Switching on – now!” came his voice, and I hit the stop-watch.
After what seemed like hours I did my final Rate 2 turn on to my original course. I straightened it up, timed a careful one minute, then called out, “Finish – now!”
He acknowledged and switched me off. The needles sagged to their stops. I took off my headphones and opened the hood and side door.
“O.K.,” the Sergeant said, “come right over here and have a look-see. Not bad at all.”
I went over to his glass-topped table. My pattern was about ten inches across and I had finished about an eighth of an inch from where I had started. It looked pretty damn good to me, and for an instant I thought about Tink’s brother in his Hampden.
“Yes,” I said, feeling rather pleased, “just a bit out, Sergeant.”
He grinned.
“You’re doing O.K., buddy,” he said agreeably, “now how’s about seeing if L.A.C. Briggs is outside, eh?”
“O.K., Sergeant,” I said.
He had just made my day.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
I lay back on my bed after the evening meal and read the letter once again. The hut was quiet. Those who weren’t night flying had gone to Smoky Joe’s or into town for an evening meal. The few of
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us on the night flying detail were reading, writing letters or dozing on our beds, waiting for the darkness. There was no sign of either Tim or Soren, while Aage was actually sound asleep.
She wrote, “I miss you here, I miss our walks in the park. I wonder if you will be posted somewhere near when you come back, where we can meet? Do you still want to go on to bombers, like you told me? Will it be very dangerous? Whatever happens, I shall pray for you, as I do now, that God will keep you. I have always said what has to be, will be, but I feel he will keep you safe…..” She went on to say she would be spending some time with her Aunt and Uncle in Northampton, as her parents still felt happier with her over there.
I folded the letter slowly and thought about Betty and the simple, almost idyllic happiness of life in those days six months ago. Tink, on the bed next to me, motioned to me and across at Aage, grinning, imitating his open mouth and his posture, his ungainly sprawl. Tink, the single-minded, I thought, hero-worshipping his brother flying his Hampden over Germany, and who could hardly wait to get on to the same Squadron. A faraway look would come into his eyes when he spoke about it; “When I get on Hampdens,” he would always be saying, and his broad, boyish face would be raised to the sky, “When I get on Hampdens with my brother –“
But looking at Aage had made me feel tired, too. I yawned, then lit a cigarette and grinned at him. Tink was from Coalville in Leicestershire; I wonder often what became of him.
An hour later I was taxying my Harvard out in the darkness, the flarepath away to my right looking very long and very far away. Night flying without a navigator and entirely without radio consisted, at Moose Jaw, of circuits and bumps – and of not getting lost. There was no blackout and you could see the town for miles, no bother at all. But if the visibility went, you got down out of it, quick. So far, it never had; the prairie nights were wonderfully clear.
I got my green from the A.C.P. and, nicely central between the flares, opened her up. We charged down the runway and floated off
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easily. I had done quite a few of these night flying stints before, and found I had taken to it naturally, much more so than I did to aerobatics, for example. Undercart up, throttle back to climbing power, keep the gyro on 0, shut the canopy, and up to 1000 feet. Level off, throttle back to cruising, turn port to 270. There’s the flarepath down over my left shoulder. Keep the wings level, watch the artificial horizon. Rate one turn downwind, heading 180, throttle back a bit, then wheels down when we’re opposite the middle of the flarepath. Greens on the panel as the wheels lock. There’s the A.C.P. giving me a green on the Alldis lamp. Crosswind on to 090. Bit of flap. Drop the nose and turn in. Watch the airspeed, open the canopy. Engine noise surges in. Switch on the landing light and hold her there. Nice approach, I think. Now, hold off and let her sink the last four feet. The flares merge into a line. Hold it there. A bump and a rumble. We’re down.
Keep her straight, flaps up, headlamp off. Touch of brake, not too much. Fine, now turn off the runway along the glim-lit perimeter track and back to the take-off position again. There’s someone else up, I can see his nav. lights. Wonder who it is? I rumble along the peri. track to head back for the end of the runway. Must say, I can see Tink’s point, I’d rather like a bash on Hampdens myself. After all, they’re what I wanted when I first thought about joining up, except that my ambitions were no higher than to be a gunner.
“Will it be very dangerous?”
God knows, Betty, but as you say, what has to be will be, and there is no turning back, one must simply live for and through the minute, even the second, and do what has to be done, enduring what has to be endured with fortitude.
Something’s irritating me, and I can’t think what, except there’s something here which shouldn’t be. My God! Yes! The cockpit is full of red light, now it’s flashing off and on, urgently. Stop. Tread on the brakes. She creaks and jerks to an abrupt halt. The red light stops flashing at me and someone taxies past me in the opposite direction. Wow! So that’s what the red was all about?
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Must stop this day-dreaming. Only two more circuits and I can pack it in, hand over to Aage and hit the sack. I’ll be about ready for it, too.
There’s my green. Hope he doesn’t report me for taxying through a red. It was only a dozen yards – I think. Oh, well, can’t do a thing about it now. No harm done, so here goes, back to my take-off point. Turn on to the runway, uncage the gyro on 0, open her up. We’re off again.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Turn on to 180, see the stars sliding around. Between the field and the town, now. Nice and easy, purring along, last landing coming up, then into the pit.
“I miss you here, I miss our walks in the park.”
I wish I were meeting you after this, Betty, ‘you’d be so nice to come home to’ – I wonder if you still play that record? ‘To come home to and love.’
Coming home – the lights of home – lights – lights – lights! What the hell’s going on? All those lights, ahead, and coming straight for me? Hell! Get the stick back, you’re in a dive, heading straight for the town! You’ve been asleep, you bloody fool. Come on, come on, ease out. The lights slide below me. Thank God for that. I risk a look at the altimeter – 500 feet. God. Another few seconds, and that would have been it, smack into the town centre, curtains. I reach up and slam the canopy open, letting the cold night air flood in, taking deep breaths to wake myself up. I climb cautiously back to circuit height, select wheels down and duly get my green from the A.C.P., as though nothing at all had happened. I turn across wind, edging towards the flarepath. Shove the nose down, turn port, full flap, headlamp on, heading straight in. I land, thankfully, and exhale with relief. Aage is ready and waiting to take over the kite as I dump my ‘chute, blinking in the bright light of the crewroom, and fill in the Authorisation Book.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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The murmur of voices nearby awoke me. I pulled the bedclothes around my ears, but it was no good. I was awake, back to life again. I sat up, yawned, looked at my watch – 0820. Still in time for breakfast, if I hurried. Brian, Tim, Tink and Soren were in a huddle across the other side of the hut, talking in hushed voices, looking solemn. Two strange erks were standing near Aage’s bed. I was puzzled.
“Hey, Tink!” I called, sitting on the edge of my bed and yawning again, “Tink!”
He looked over his shoulder and came across to me. I nodded towards the strangers.
“What’s cooking?” I asked.
“It’s Aage.”
“Aage? What about him?”
“He’s dead. He crashed, night flying, last night.”
“He what?” I gasped, fully awake in an instant, “He crashed? How the hell did it happen?”
Tink shrugged.
“No-one knows, he just went in, about four miles away, that’s all we know.”
“Christ,” I whispered, “poor old Aage. He’s definitely - ?”
“Oh, yes,” Tink said, “no doubt about it, I’m afraid.”
I said, quietly, “He took over my kite, last night, you know.”
Tink said, “Was it O.K. when you had it?”
“Of course, no trouble at all.”
I didn’t want to mention my falling asleep, not even to Tink. He sighed.
“Makes you think, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” I answered, remembering the lights rushing towards me, “it certainly makes you think.”
(‘What has to be, will be.’)
“Mail up!” someone shouted, and there was a clatter of feet hurrying down the hut. There would be no mail for Aage. Another day had begun.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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[inserted] [underlined] “Yes, my darling daughter” [/underlined] [/inserted]
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[underlined] “YES, MY DARLING DAUGHTER” [/underlined]
“What was it you did yesterday?” Flying Officer Sparks asked, “advanced formation, am I right?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied, wondering what was in store for me that morning. He pinched his lower lip between thumb and finger and frowned with silent concentration, his black moustache looking more luxuriant than ever.
“Well now, I think you’d better do some steep turns, climbing turns and a forced landing. An hour, solo. Take 2614. Don’t do all your turns to port, you don’t want to give yourself a left-handed bias, and watch you don’t black yourself out in your steep turns. Now. Forced landings. Don’t touch down anywhere, you only do that with an instructor. Don’t go below a hundred feet, and thirdly, don’t cheat and have a field picked ready, close your throttle at random when you’re doing something else. If you do ever have an engine failure you won’t be able to pick and choose the time or the place. All right? Any questions?”
“I take it I keep my undercarriage up, sir?”
“Yes, better a belly landing and a bent prop than a somersault if you try a wheels down landing on an unknown surface. Anything else?”
“No, sir.”
“Right, off you go, then.”
“Thank you, sir.”
I came to attention, about-turned smartly and went out of the Instructors’ Office into the pupils’ crewroom of ‘F’ Flight, No. 32 Service Flying Training School, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, on the Canadian prairies.
I felt buoyant that morning; I was feeling very fit and happy and I knew I was flying well. It was a beautiful early summer day with a few puffs of fair-weather cumulus at about five thousand feet, with a light breeze to temper the already growing heat. The constant drone of Harvards filled the air, punctuated by the fierce, ear-splitting howl and crackle of the high-speed propeller tips as one fled down the runway like a scalded cat, tail up, and took off, flashing yellow in the sunlight and tucking its wheels neatly up as it left
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the runway.
Tim and Soren, two of the twenty or so Norwegians on our course – in fact, the R.A.F. were in the minority on Course 32 – were sitting in the crewroom. They completed my formation of three when we flew, and we were great buddies. Tim looked up and grinned.
“No formation for us this morning, eh?”
“No, not this morning, Tim. I hear that you’re grounded, anyhow, for trying to make me spin in off a turn!”
I was joking, of course, and Tim knew it; on’s [sic] loyalty to one’s formation was absolute. Tim laughed hugely, his lean, brown face, normally rather grave, was transformed.
“Anyhow,” I said, “he’s not fit to fly with a face like that,” and I pointed to Soren, who was feeding a nickel into the juke box. There was a thud, and out came the seductive voice of Dinah Shore.
“Mother, may I go out dancing?
Yes, my darling daughter.
Mother, may I try romancing?
Yes, my darling daughter – “
It was practically our course signature tune at Moose Jaw, everybody sang, whistled or hummed it and selected it on whatever juke box was handiest, whether here in the crewroom or out at Smoky Joe’s, the cafe at the camp gates, on the dust road which led to town. Soren looked up. He had a bottle of coke in one hand, a split lip and a discoloured right eye. He grinned at me.
“Ah, but it was just a friendly little fight with a couple of Canadians, nothing serious at all.”
Soren’s favourite occupation on his evenings out was to have several drinks then find someone to fight. Strangely enough, he never fought with any R.A.F. bloke.
“See you later, then,” I said to them. Tim gave a vague wave, Sorne’s eyes were already shut as he lay full length on a convenient bench, arms crossed on his chest, his mop of incredibly blond hair gleaming in the sun which poured in through the window.
“What if there’s a moon, mother darling, and it’s shining on the water?” I sang to myself as I crossed the expanse of concrete
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in front of the hangars, under the blazing sun, my parachute bumping against the backs of my knees, the morning breeze finding its way pleasantly inside my unbuckled helmet. It was so hot that we were able to fly in shirtsleeves. Up at eight or ten thousand feet it was delightfully cool, but at ground level the temperature could climb to the 120’s in the sun by afternoon.
I found 2614 among the half dozen kites parked in line facing the hangar. Someone had thoughtfully left the canopy open to minimise the heat in the cockpit. I checked that the pitot-head cover was off, I didn’t want to get airborne and find that the airspeed indicator was out of action. Then I climbed in off the port wing-root, clicking the leg-straps of my ‘chute into the quick-release box as I did so. An erk was standing by with the starter trolley. I did up my safety harness while I was busy with the pre-start cockpit check. I operated the priming pump and shouted “Contact!”, switching on the ignition, and with the stick held firmly back into my stomach I pressed the starter switch. The propeller staggered, jumped, staggered again, then caught as the engine roared into life. the prop-tips became a yellow semi-circular blur in front of my eyes. The erk wheeled away the trolley, parking it to one side where I could see it.
I tested the controls for the full movement and ran up the engine, buckled my helmet securely and pulled the seat up hard against the straps, waving away the chocks. The erk gave me the thumbs-up. I toed the brakes off, opened the throttle a little, and we rolled. I taxied with exaggerated care, knowing that F/O Sparks was probably watching me. I had been told off by him once or twice for taxying carelessly. So I ruddered the nose meticulously, each way in turn, at 45 degrees to my direction of travel, which enabled me to see ahead, to the sides of the big 450 horse-power radial engine. A taxying accident was a very serious matter indeed, and a Court Martial was the automatic sequel.
I arrived at the end of the twin runways in use and squinted up into the flare; no-one was on his approach. A final check on the windsock and on the cockpit settings, then I turned on to the runway, pushing on a little rudder to ensure I was absolutely in
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line and central. I set the gyro to ‘0’ and uncaged it, then glanced up to make doubly certain that the canopy was fully back, just in case anything went wrong on take-off and I had to get out in a hurry. Then a final deep breath and we were off. I eased open the throttle to its fullest extent. We rolled, rumbling over the runway, keeping straight with small pushes on the rudder. The engine note rose to a deafening howl and the pressure on the stick increased as we gathered speed and as I eased the stick central. We were in a flying attitude, tail up and charging down the runway which was vanishing with amazing rapidity under the nose of the aircraft. At 65, a slight backward pressure on the stick – not quite ready. At 70, a bump or two, then the incredibly smoothness of being airborne.
I whipped up the wheels, holding the nose just above the horizon to pick up speed, then I throttled back to climbing boost and revs, and reaching up, slid the canopy shut. It was a bit quieter then, and I could relax a little. I adjusted the climbing angle to give me 100 m.p.h., saw with satisfaction that the gyro was still on ‘0’, and did a quick check on all the instrument readings, going swiftly round the cockpit in a clockwise direction. The altimeter slowly wound around its way towards the cotton-wool cumulus.
“Mother, may I go out dancing?
Yes, my darling daughter,” I sang loudly to myself.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
“How right he was,” I thought as I brought her smoothly out of a steep turn, “you can black yourself out in one of these.”
I had tightened the turn gradually, to the left, which I could do without conscious effort, toeing on top rudder to keep the nose pushing around the horizon, the stick fairly tightly into my stomach to tighten the turn in on itself. As the rate-of-turn indicator hovered around the 3 1/2 mark I could feel myself being crushed down into the seat, my cheeks were being pulled downwards, and the instruments had become rather fuzzy as the ‘g’ took hold of the blood in my brain, sucking it down out of my head. Then, as I came out of the turn and the ‘g’ decreased, I stretched myself against the straps as the pressure slackened, and bared my teeth in a mirthless grin
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to restore my features to their correct shape.
“Forced landing next,” I said to myself as I slowly but firmly closed the throttle, stopping it just before the place where the undercarriage warning horn would sound. I was at about six thousand feet, to the west of Moose Jaw. Several miles away, to the north-east, I could see another Harvard stooging along, probably on a cross-country, and away to the north a civil DC3 was flying the beam from Regina to Swift Current. I gently pushed the nose down into the quietness, selected flaps down and hand-pumped on 15 degrees. In a real engine failure you would have to do it this way, the hard way. I slid the canopy open and was all set to pick what would laughingly be called my ‘field’; in this part of the world what passed for a field was rather rare.
The prairie lay below in its muted colours, the occasional yellow dust road straight as a string, the sun flashing briefly on some watercourse. About thirty miles to starboard there seemed to be some line-squalls building up already above the low hills which marked the border of Canada with the neutral U.S.A. I put the kite into a shallow glide. Then I saw my field, a green, squarish paddock with two white buildings in one corner, a dirt road leading up to them. I settled the airspeed on 80 and turned towards the paddock, losing height slowly but steadily in a succession of well-banked turns like the descending hairpins of a mountain road. The green postage stamp of the paddock grew larger. From the smoke of a small fire somewhere on the prairie I saw I would be roughly into wind on my final approach. The white buildings grew into the size of matchboxes.
“What a God-forsaken place,” I thought, “imagine being stuck out here, miles from anywhere, no town, no trees, lots of damn-all connected by roads.”
Then I notice a movement near the house. One figure was standing just outside it, then it was joined by another. Still I glided down, mentally noting airspeed and altimeter readings with quick glances, checking and assessing my position in relation to the paddock. I used to sideslip Tigers with contemptuous ease to get them into the
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field at Sywell, it became my trademark before I left there, but I’d never tried to sideslip a Harvard. Come to think, perhaps this wasn’t the time to start. The horizon had lifted quite a lot. I was going to make it all right, I thought. The prop windmilled ahead of me and I had the urge to open the throttle to make sure that the engine was still functioning; it seemed an age since I had cut the power off. I dropped the nose and did a final turn to port. Airspeed back to 80, pump down full flap, line up, into wind, on to the paddock.
It was a man and a girl standing there watching me, the sun gleaming on their upturned faces. The man was pointing upwards, towards me, he had put his arm protectively around the girl’s shoulders. His daughter, I thought. I imagined them speaking to one another in their slightly harsh Canadian voices, anxious as to what was going to happen next to the aircraft, to me – and to them and their home. I saw the girl give a small wave of the hand, nervously, encouragingly, almost as though she were trying to placate some force, to stave off a possible disaster, and I felt a pang of guilt, knowing that they would be thinking that I was in trouble. Two ordinary people, the tenor of their lonely lives disturbed as never before, by my so casual and uncaring intrusion.
Altitude 150 feet. Airspeed 80. It was, if I said it myself, a honey of an approach, I could have put her down with no trouble at all. They were both waving now and I could distinguish their features. I had them firmly fixed in my mind as father and daughter. Perhaps he was a widower, living out his hard life on the land which his ancestors had farmed since the Indians had left, perhaps his pretty daughter had sacrificed her youth, her prospects and hopes of marriage, to look after her father and help on their farm, burying herself in their lonely world. They were remote there from everything of violence, receiving news of the war over the radio from professionally cheerful and brash newsreaders, couched in terms that they could merely imperfectly comprehend: Europe was far away, dominated by some tyrant of whom they knew little, opposed only by distant and defiant English cousins whom they had never seen, and whose ways were as strange and unknown to them as those of the biblical characters of whom perhaps they read daily at the end of their quiet evenings together.
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I saw him clasp her to himself protectively, and I saw also that I was now below 100 feet. Firmly, I opened the throttle fully. The engine surged with power, its roar doubly deafening after the long glide down. I eased the nose up and gently started to milk off the flap. The house slid beneath my port wing. I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the two figures. He was greying, slightly stooped, in brown bib-and-brace overalls, she a slim girl in a vivid blue frock, her dark hair like a halo round her face. I suddenly thought of Betty. They stood, their arms around each other, as I flew over them.
Then I had the strange and unaccountably peaceful feeling that in those few minutes I had known them all my life. It was as though time itself had become distorted, elongated, to envelop the three of us in some temporal vacuum in a cul-de-sac off the normal path of consciousness, where the clock of the world stood still and where we had, in some mysterious way, experienced a fragment chipped off the endless expanse of eternity, wherein the three of us had been united as one.
The horizon sank away below the Harvard’s nose. I was back again in my element after those eerie few seconds. I looked down at them for the last time. She was standing with both hands pressed to her face. Then her father slowly raised his right hand, as though in benediction. I climbed away into the summer sunshine. And I sang, to no-one but myself, but thinking of the girl down there –
“Mother, must I keep on dancing?
“Yes, my darling daughter!”
I turned the Harvard’s nose for home.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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[inserted] [underlined] Crewing-up [/underlined] [/inserted]
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[underlined] CREWING-UP [/underlined]
Although there are many things which happened at that time when we looked directly into “the bright face of danger”, there are some, and regrettably, some of the most important, the recollection of which steadfastly eludes me. This of course pains me greatly, as the men I was about to meet were destined in those six all too short months to leave an indelible and now poignant impression upon my memory.
My recurring faint recollection is somehow associated with being in a group of other pilots, pupils at 11 O.T.U., Bassingbourne, not far from Cambridge, quite near to the place of execution of Dick Turpin at Caxton Gibbet, and later to become an American Flying Fortress base. We were gathered at the end of one of the hangars in the morning sunshine, practising what little skills we had acquired on the use of the sextant, taking sun-sights and from them plotting the latitude of our position, which was, of course, easily checked by our, at that stage in our training, benign instructors. Perhaps their thoughts were couched in similar terms to those which Connie was to use in conversation with me a year or more later, and in totally different circumstances and surroundings – “They don’t know what’s coming to them, poor sods, do they, Yoicks?”
None of us knew what was coming, for better or for worse, to us, and I was certainly not to know that within the hour I was to meet, and for the next six months – (was it really as little as that?) – become associated with and know intimately five of the finest men, in my opinion, who ever walked the earth. Men who became closer to me, closer to each other, than brothers, than my and their own flesh and blood, men who were mutually supportive in the intangible but unyielding bond which perhaps only aircrew or ex-aircrew can comprehend, men, four of whom had already entered the last six months of their short lives.
We put away our sextants, thankfully, in most cases. There were about twenty of us pilots on the course, both from the United
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Kingdom and the Dominions. My own particular friends were Charlie from Newcastle, Hi-lo, a rugged, rangy Canadian and the man who was to become his Observer, a cheerful Australian named Laurie, and also Roddy, another Canadian, smiling and lively, whom I often addressed, attempting, not unkindly, to imitate his accent, as Raddy. He, Hi-lo and Laurie were soon to be posted with me to 12 Squadron. All three were also soon to die.
We had completed our introduction to the Wellington under the tutelage of ‘screened’ ex-operational pilots, on somewhat battle-weary ex-Squadron aircraft. The inevitable ‘circuits and bumps’ – a few of the bumps quite heavy – had been the order of the day, and of the night, a fortnight of them. I astonished myself by going solo on what were in my eyes monstrously large twin-engined aircraft, having gained my wings on single engined Harvards, in less than three hours. Perhaps it was due not so much to skill and ability as to confidence, or perhaps over-confidence. Looking back on it now it never ceases to astound me and I have to consult my log book to verify the figure of a mere two hours and forty five minutes instruction.
One interesting feature of this fortnight was that before we flew at night we practised what were known as ‘day-night’ landings. Flying in broad daylight with an instructor as safety pilot, we wore specially tinted goggles which gave the impression of surrounding darkness, while the runway was marked by sodium lights which showed up brightly and gave us the line of approach and landing. It was a novel and rather weird experience, but a very useful one, preparing us for the real thing, flying at night in much-reduced visibility, our eyes fixed almost exclusively on the blind-flying panel of A.S.I., altimeter, turn and bank indicator, gyro compass, artificial horizon, and rate of climb and dive indicator.
And so, to one degree or another proficient enough pilots of the Wellington, we were ready to be crewed up.
‘George’, as automatic pilots were universally known, were rare pieces of equipment in late 1941, so every Wellington was crewed by
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two pilots who shared the manual flying (of anything up to 7 1/2 hours on some operations) and one of whom was designated as captain of the aircraft, almost invariably addressed as ‘skipper’ or more usually ‘skip’. Once in the air, however, the pilot was virtually under the orders of his Observer, a misnomer if ever there was one, as he was in no position, huddled in his tiny compartment with his plotting chart and maps, his parallel ruler and sharpened pencils, constantly reading his super-accurate navigation watch, his ‘slave’ altimeter and airspeed indicator, to observe anything outside the aircraft. No pilot, however privately doubtful he might be of the Observer’s statement of the aircraft’s position relative to the earth, or of his instructions to alter course on to a given heading at a certain time, ever had the temerity to question him as to these matters except in the mildest and most oblique of terms. To do otherwise was to risk a most sarcastic reply, usually culminating in the curt riposte, “You just do the flying and let me do the navigating.” Later, on the Squadron I was to learn that Observers as a clan – and a Freemasonlike clan they were, dabbling in the impenetrable mysteries of running fixes, square searches, back-bearings, drifts and suchlike – were sometimes irreverently known as the Two-Seventy Boys, after their alleged persistent habit of, having bombed some German target and being urgently asked by the pilot for a course “to get the Hell out of here”, would airily answer, “Just steer two-seventy,” that being West. The Observer was also the crew member who released the bombs, his bomb selector panel down in the starboard side of the aircraft’s nose being somewhat inappropriately known as the Mickey Mouse, for a reason I never discovered, directing the pilot from his prone position between the front turret and the pilot’s feet on the rudder pedals with what was usually a breathless series of instructions, “Left, left”, “Right” or “Steady”, the word “left” always being repeated so as not to be confused with “right” against the various external and internal noises of a bomber aircraft. Current at the time was a somewhat school-boyish joke that one Observer had so far forgotten himself in the excitement of the bombing run to call urgently to the pilot, “Back a bit!”
The remaining three crew members each wore the air gunner’s ‘AG’ half-wing on his chest. But one, in addition, had the cluster of
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lightning flashes of a wireless operator on his sleeve and was invariably referred to, not by the official designation of wireless operator/air gunner but with the racy and succinct abbreviation ‘WopAG’. His was the task of obtaining as many bearings on radio stations, both R.A.F. and, if he was able, B.B.C. and German civilian stations such as Hamburg or Deutschlandsender and pass the information to the Observer in the next compartment. He must also, at designated times, listen out to messages from his base aerodrome and also his Group Headquarters. In addition, in emergency, he could attempt to obtain a course to steer to any given bomber station by requesting from them a QDM, the code for that information. But this was regarded as being rather infra dig.
The two ‘straight AGs’, as the other gunners were known, occupied their respective gun turrets with a few inches to spare, one at the front and one at the rear of the aircraft, the coldest positions, despite their electrically heated leather Irvin suits. In the ‘tail-end Charlie’s’ case it was the loneliest position in the aircraft and the most hazardous if attacked by a Luftwaffe night-fighter, but the safest if a sudden crash-landing became necessary, or if the order to bale out was given in some dire emergency, when he simply rotated his turret through ninety degrees, clipped on his parachute, jettisoned the turret doors and fell out backwards. Each turret was equipped with two .303 inch Browning guns, lovingly maintained and cared for by their users, pitifully inadequate when compared to the cannon of the German night-fighters.
To be in the firing line of these Luftwaffe cannon was not at all pleasant. Although never, fortunately, experiencing it in the air, Charlie, my room-mate, and I, billeted in Kneesworth Hall close to the aerodrome, on the old Roman road of Ermine Street, were quietly writing letters one evening in our first-floor room when we heard, and ignored, the noise of the air-raid siren from the village. Bassingbourn was one of the nearest training aerodromes, and certainly the nearest bomber O.T.U., to the east coast, although a fair distance from it. But this fact must have been well known to the enemy, who paid us periodic visits. One aircraft, in fact – I believe it was a Junkers 88 – either by design or mischance actually landed at
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Steeple Morden, our satellite aerodrome and became the property of H.M. Government and the Air Ministry, subsequently appearing as part of the circus of captured German aircraft in flying condition which we once saw flying out of Duxford, a nearby fighter station, where they were based, and heavily escorted by a squadron of Spitfires indulging in some plain and fancy flying around them to discourage curious onlookers such as we, who might have gone so far as to try to shoot them down, if in sufficiently rash a mood. However, to return to Kneesworth Hall and the air raid warning. Charlie and I carried on with our respective writing until we were suddenly aware of a strange aircraft engine noise becoming rapidly louder, accompanied by the loud and staccato banging of cannon-fire as the German intruder shot-up the road, the village and approaches to the aerodrome. Our letters were swiftly thrown aside as we, with violent expletives, flung ourselves under our respective beds. My future rear gunner also had a tale to tell concerning an attack by an intruder.
The taking of sun-sights over, we were instructed to gather in one of the hangars to be crewed up. There was, as I recall, no formal procedure attached to this important and far-reaching event. One of two instructors acted somewhat like shepherds directing straggling sheep to make up a group of six which was to be a crew. There must have been a hundred or more aircrew of all categories milling around rather haphazardly until, perhaps, a beckoning hand, a lifted eyebrow or a resigned grin bonded one man to another or to a group as yet incomplete. The whole procedure, if indeed it could be graced by that term, seemed to be quite without organisation, the complete antithesis of all previous group activities I had experienced since putting on my uniform eleven months before. Here, there was no falling-in in threes, or lining up alphabetically. (And how I used to long for anyone named Young who would replace me, the invariable and forlorn last man in any line for whatever was to be received or done.)
“You lookin’ f’r ‘n Observer?”
He was tallish, rather sallow and thin-faced, in Australian dark blue uniform with its black buttons, Sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeves, the winged ‘0’ above his breast pocket.
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“Sure. Glad to have you,” I said.
This was Colin, more often than not simply ‘Col’. He was to guide us unfailingly through the skies, friendly skies by day and night, then through the hostile moonlit spaces over Germany and Occupied Europe. Col, from Randwick, near Sydney, with his baritone voice which quite often suddenly creaked, almost breaking as he spoke, with his wry sense of humour, his sudden, almost apologetic half-stifled laughter, his strange, colourful vocabulary – “Take five!” His term, sometimes sarcastically uttered, of approval. And when he suspected that I or some other member of the crew was trying to kid him – “Aw, don’t come the raw prawn!” A single man, his father working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Later, one night on ops with the Squadron to Kiel where the Gneisenau was skulking after its dash up the Channel from Brest with the Scharnhorst and Prinz Eugen, Col performed a wonderfully accurate piece of navigation. It was on an occasion, of which there were several, when the Met. forecast was completely inaccurate, which we feared when we entered cloud at 600 feet after take-off. We climbed slowly until we could climb no more in the thin air and reached 20,500 feet, still in cloud, a faint blur of moonlight showing above us. We bombed the centre of the flak concentration in the target area, completely blind, but saw several large explosions which we duly reported on our interrogation back at base. Losing height slowly on the way back and with an unwelcome passenger in the shape of the 1000 pound bomb which had hung-up, I broke cloud at something around 1000 feet on return, a mere four miles south of our intended position, to see the welcome finger of Spurn Head down to starboard and the four red obstruction lights of a radar station near Cleethorpes gleaming ahead. Over seven hours in cloud and an error of only four miles, thanks to Col’s abilities. It was on this raid, by Wellingtons, 68 in total, of our No. 1 Group, that the Gneisenau was so badly damaged that she never sailed again from her berth. Many of her crew were killed. Perhaps it was our bombs that had done the damage, who knows.
I once found Col, on an op, being quietly sick into a tin at the side of his plotting-table, his face ashen, but carrying on despite that.
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Such was his dauntless spirit. He had my unspoken sympathy as a fellow-sufferer.
A pale, poker-faced and very quiet Royal Canadian Air Force sergeant pilot attached himself to us. Elmer, as the rest of the crew came to christen him, was silent to a degree, but despite that somehow exuded a quiet if somewhat forlorn determination. When we reached the Squadron in October he joined Mike Duder’s crew. Five of the six of them were killed when, damaged by flak over Essen on Mike’s 29th trip, his last but one of his tour had he completed it, they were finished off by a night-fighter and crashed in Holland. It was not until many years later that I learned a little more about Elmer. Although in the R.C.A.F., he was not, in fact, a Canadian, but a citizen of the United States of American, from St. Paul, Minnesota. Before Pearl Harbor [sic] he had an urge to fly against the Germans, possibly because of his Central European forbears. He volunteered for the U.S. Air Force as a pilot and underwent his initial training. Unfortunately, like many others, he had trouble with his landings and was failed. He returned home undeterred, with his desire to become a pilot undimmed. To raise money for the course of action upon which he had decided, he took a job in a sweet factory and augmented his wages by working as a petrol pump attendant. He then travelled to Canada and enlisted in the R.C.A.F. This time he successfully completed his training and got his long-desired wings. All this I learned years later when I was able to trace his sister-in-law and with a residual sense of guilt over my at times impatient, if not downright snappy instructions to him in the air, I have attempted to salve my conscience by having several times visited his grave, and those of his crew, in a war cemetery in a small, neat town in the Netherlands.
The ‘father’ of our crew was Mick, our Wop/AG, the only married man amongst us. In peacetime – or ‘civvy street’ as it was invariably known – he had worked at Lucas’ in Birmingham and was knowledgeable on most things electrical and mechanical, owning a small Ford car as well as a motor cycle. The former was later well used on stand-down nights on the Squadron for trips into G.Y. (as Grimsby was known) and I once had the doubtful pleasure of a hair-raising pillion ride
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over snow-covered skating rink minor roads, on his motor cycle, also into Grimsby, which was almost as nerve-wracking to me as a trip to Essen. Mick (this was not his given name) was tallish, fairly well-built, with a high forehead, a studious manner, a slight ‘Brummy’ accent and an unconsciously querulous voice. It was he, I think, who christened me ‘Harry’, by which name I became known by the rest of the crew, and the use of which, after their loss, I have strongly discouraged. Mick had done part of his training somewhere in Lincolnshire and had frequented, and knew the landlady, Edna, of the Market Hotel on Yarborough Road in G.Y., which became a home from home for us on stand-down nights. He had a habit concerning which Col and I wryly complained on several occasions, of, on being asked over the intercom. for some information, would testily reply, “Hey, shut up, I’m listening out to Group.” We met his wife once, in the ‘Market’, Mick proudly introducing her to us all, a shy, rather self-effacing girl, soon to become a widow.
Our gunners were a wonderfully contrasted pair. Johnnie, from a small Suffolk town – and again, not his given name – in the front turret, was slim, neat in appearance, quiet of speech and demeanour, moderate in his choice of words and apparently completely without fear. No matter what the circumstances, his voice over the intercom. was as calm and measured as though he were indulging in casual conversation over a glass of beer. On the way to Essen one night we were suddenly coned in a dozen or more searchlights and the German flak gunners got to work on us. Cookie was hurling the aircraft all over the sky in his attempts to get us out of the mess, and I was being hurled all over the interior of the aircraft, which was lit up as bright as day. In a steep dive, attempting to escape from the combined attack of searchlights and flak bursts, Johnnie, without being told, opened fire with several short bursts from his twin Brownings on the searchlight batteries, and immediately we were freed from them as they snapped out as though all controlled by a single switch. Johnnie bought himself no beer the next time we went to the ‘Market’.
In contrast to Johnnie’s urbanity there was Tommy, our cockney rear gunner. I am still looking for Tommy, still seeking to discover what became of him after he was admitted to hospital after a few ops with us, whether even today, somewhere, he is alive. J – would have
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described him, had she, like me, had the good fortune to know him, as being like Tigger, a very bouncy animal. Although not tall, he was built like a boxer or a rugby prop forward, solid, chunky – even more so when kitted up in his Irvin suit – with a gleaming broad red face, scarred in one place, topped by rather long and slightly untidy Brylcreemed hair, his face almost always split in a broad grin. He was cheerful, cocky, good-humoured, never short of a quip, lively and effervescent, and he was a tonic to us all when things were going against us.
He laughingly described to us one incident in which he was involved while in his training Flight in the weeks before coming into the crew. He had been on a night cross-country involving an air-to-sea firing exercise, aiming, presumably, at a flame float which they dropped in the English Channel. Several other gunners were taken along on the trip and after Tommy had fired his allotted number of rounds he retired to the rest bed half way down the Wellington’s fuselage, unplugged his intercom., closed his eyes and fell asleep, the padded earpieces of his helmet dulling the noise of the engines and of the rattle of the Brownings fired by his fellow-pupils. He awoke with a start, someone shaking him violently and yelling in his ear, “Bale out! Bale out!” The aircraft was being jinked around the sky in evasive action from the attack of a German fighter. By the time Tommy had collected his wits, found and clipped on his parachute and jumped through the open escape hatch, the aircraft was down to approximately 600 feet, the lowest safe altitude to allow a parachute to open. No sooner had it done so than he was down to earth, to the softest of all possible landings – in a haystack.
He had no idea where he was, nor what had happened to the aircraft or to the others in it, and certainly no idea of the planned route of the cross-country flight.
“I hadn’t a bloody clue where the hell I was,” he told us, “could’ve been in France, Germany England, any bloody where.”
So he collected his deployed parachute into his arms and in the darkness plodded away from the scene of his sudden and fortuitous landing upon the earth. The unfamiliar countryside was silent and
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dark. He came upon a ditch under a hedge and rightly decided to spend the night there. In the morning he would take stock of his position. In the ditch, he rolled himself into his parachute, comfortably warm inside his leather Irvin suit and once more slept.
In the morning, at daylight, he cautiously emerged to size up the situation. On the other side of the hedge was a narrow road. Keeping well hidden, he awaited developments. Presently, the distant sound of voices alerted him and two men dressed in farm-workers’ clothes came walking along the lane. Tommy strained his ears to catch their conversation, to determine what language they were speaking. To his relief he heard familiar English words. Tommy emerged and, perhaps too quickly, confronted them. But startled as they were by his sudden appearance and flying clothing, they were soon convinced of his nationality when he employed his colourful vocabulary to some effect. They directed him to the nearest house where he received some much-needed refreshment and telephoned his flight Commander at Bassingbourn.
On our evenings out at the ‘Market’ in G.Y. he always made a point of collecting small empty ginger ale bottles after one or other of us – often it was I – had added the contents to our gin. These he would take along on our next op., storing them handily in his already cramped rear turret ready for use. We had heard it said that if caught in searchlights, a couple of empty bottles thrown out would, during their descent, scream like falling bombs and cause the searchlight crew to douse their light, and one night on the approach to the Happy Valley, as the Ruhr, with the somewhat black humour of bomber crews, was known, when we were trapped in searchlights he proved, by throwing out a few bottles, that this was no old wives’ tale. It worked like a charm and we slipped through the defences and on to Essen.
(Soon afterwards, on leave, I was relating this to an elderly and very unworldly female relation, who, to my amazement and vast amusement was alarmed and scandalised, wide-eyed and open mouthed. “Oh! But you might have killed somebody!” she exclaimed.)
I have made several attempts to find out whether Tommy survived the war. In correspondence with a contemporary Squadron member, he
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wrote to say that he had a copy of a Squadron Battle Order in which Tommy’s name appeared in relation to an operation, as rear gunner in some crew whose names were unfamiliar to me, but that Tommy’s name had been crossed out in pencil and another substituted. Whatever the significance of that, neither he nor I could tell after the lapse of time. A message on the Internet, placed by my Dutch friends, has produced no result.
Are you out there somewhere, Tommy? If so, you and I are the only two survivors of the six who came together on that sunny August day in the echoing hangar at Bassingbourn those years ago. I miss you all, more than words can express; I think of you every day that passes, and I never cease to grieve for you, nor ever shall.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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[underlined] Enemy coast [/underlined]
Through cockpit window now,
The lemon-slice of moon,
Some random stars
Pricked in a hemisphere of indigo.
Ahead, the coastline waits –
Pale, wavering beams
As innocent as death
Rehearse the adagio ballet
Which will transfix us
On pinnacles of light
For ravening guns.
But for a space
In this brief, breathless safety,
Poised high above the metal
Of the neutral sea,
We hang in vacuum,
Scattered like moths,
Mute castaways in sky.
Until, inevitable, we penetrate
The charnel-house of dreams,
That swift unveiling of Apocalypse
Familiar to us
As the routine holocaust
Which other men call night.
H.Y.
June 1991
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[inserted] [underlined] Images of mortality [/underlined] [/inserted]
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[underlined] IMAGES OF MORTALITY [/underlined]
Someone, once, to whom I had been talking – perhaps, it must be admitted, at rather too great length – of my time at Binbrook, cut across my words impatiently with, “Ah, yes, but you were at an impressionable age then.”
Not being by nature argumentative I let the comment pass, and the subject was rapidly changed. But the memory of that remark has remained with me. Broadly, I would not dispute its accuracy, for surely, at whatever age one is, one should be, and should remain, impressionable. But here, the implication seemed to be that the events I had been speaking of were not of such importance to have remained so strongly in my memory as they had done. I was then, and still find myself now, a little annoyed by that viewpoint. The happenings of that period of time were of considerable importance to us participants, and the young men, or youths, as some of us were who were involved, were all, in their own individual ways remarkable to one extent or another, by any standards of unbiased judgement. But perhaps my bias is showing.
Be that as it may, when I think of Binbrook now, there comes into my mind a cascade of kaleidoscopic impressions of scenes, small scenes maybe, and of faces and voices, images of places and of people fixed into my memory like the black and white snapshots secured in an album of photographs.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
It was a shock to me when I saw it for the first time, walking up the road from the Mess towards the hangars. Being a peacetime Station – only just – Binbrook was equipped with the standard pattern of permanent buildings, including a row of what had been married quarters – a few semi-detached, two-storied houses. For some seconds I couldn’t think what had happened over there when I saw that most of the top storey of one of the houses had been shattered and was broken off. I halted in my stride, quite appalled at the unexpected and shocking sight. My first thought, an almost instinctive reaction in those days, was “enemy action”, then it slowly dawned on me that
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this was not so, that the building had, horrifyingly, been struck by one of our own aircraft, either on taking off or on landing, using the short runway. Who it had been, and what casualties had resulted, I never knew. I was too shaken to ask and no-one, certainly, ever volunteered the information. It was not a topic of conversation one indulged in or dwelled upon. But similar incidents were to involve my room-mate, Johnny Stickings, and I was to escape the same fate by only a few scant feet, and by the grace of God.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Johnny had been somewhat longer on the Squadron than I, an Observer in Sergeant O’Connell’s crew. He was short, rather chunky and pale, with straight hair the colour of dark sand. I think we were both much of a type, for while we never went around together, we were perfectly pleasant towards one another and quite happy to be sharing a room, never getting in each other’s way or on each other’s nerves.
One winter’s morning I woke to find his bed still neatly made up and unslept in. At breakfast I heard that his aircraft had crashed the previous night, coming back from an op., on Wilhelmshaven, I believe. As far as anyone could tell me there had been both casualties and survivors. It was later that day when I returned to the room, and found Johnny in bed.
As I recall, he seemed rather dazed and quiet, as well he might have been. He went into few details of the incident; possibly his conscious mind was shying away from the harrowing experience, or perhaps he had been given a sedative. What he did tell me was that when the aircraft crashed he remembered being thrown clear. He had been flung bodily into a small wooden hut on some farmland in Lincolnshire. The hut had collapsed around him and he was only discovered lying in its wreckage by chance, when one of the rescue party noticed the demolished building.
For several years, on the anniversary of the crash, there was an entry in the memorials in the “Daily Telegraph”, to Sergeants O’Connell, Parsons, Laing and Delaney, signed “Johnny”. Then one year the entry no longer appeared.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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Life on the Squadron produced, naturally, shocks to one’s nervous system. Shocks which one could reasonably expect as part and parcel of the normal run of operational flying, and which to one extent or another were predictable. It was the unexpected ones which shook one more violently than the rest; the dazzling blue of a searchlight out of nowhere which flicked unerringly and tenaciously on to one’s aircraft, the long uneventful silence of flying through a black winter’s night being suddenly shattered by a flakburst just off the wingtip. These were things which could set the pulse, in an instant, racing to twice its normal speed.
But there was an incident which occurred in, of all places, the ablutions of the Officers’ Mess, an incident which was so completely unexpected and, at the time, heaven forgive me, so utterly shocking, that it froze me into complete immobility, open-mouthed, horrified, and, for an instant, uncomprehending.
Apart from, as they are termed, the usual offices, in the dimly-lit stone-floored rooms, there were, naturally, a row of washbasins. I was washing my hands at one end of this row one evening when I heard a soft footstep nearby and I distinguished a figure in the feeble blue light which served to illuminate the place. What was so shocking was the face, a random patchwork of different shades of vivid red, white and pink, two long vertical cuts from the ends of the mouth to the chin, the eyelids unnaturally lifeless and mis-shapen, the hair of the head in isolated tufts falling at random on the skull over the brow.
As he moved, I recovered myself and muttered some vague greeting as I went hurriedly out, back to the normality of the well-lit, noisy anteroom. It was a while before I recovered from this un-nerving encounter. Someone subsequently told me about Eddie. He was a burn case, one of McIndoe’s ‘guinea pigs’. A pilot, he had crashed, taking off in a Hampden. The aircraft had burst into flames. The Hampden’s cockpit was notoriously difficult to get out of in a hurry and he had fried in his own greases until he was rescued. Richard Hillary, in his well-known book ‘The Last Enemy’, described Eddie as the worst-burned man in the R.A.F. He was now a pilot in the Target Towing
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Flight, flying drogue-towing Lysanders on gunnery practices.
Possibly because we both frequented the games room a fair amount, he and I slowly drifted together. No-one made any sympathetic noises towards Eddie, that was definitely not done, and no-one made the slightest concession towards him either. He played against me often at table-tennis, with a controlled ferocity which could have only have been born of the desire to live his spared life completely to the full. Frequently, a clump of his dark auburn hair would flop uncontrollably down over his eyes, to expose an area of shiny red scalp, upon which hair would never again grow, one of the numerous grafts on his head and face, the skin having been taken, he told me, mostly from his thighs. He would damn it cheerfully and push it roughly back again with his sudden slash of a broad grin, which never reached his lashless and expressionless eyes.
I had detected some accent which I could not place. One day while we were sitting together in the anteroom, chatting, he mentioned that he was a South African.
“Oh?” I said, “Where from? I’ve got relations out there.”
“Where do they live?”
I named the town.
“Well I’ll be damned,” he said, “that’s where I’m from; what’s their name?”
I told him.
“Have you a cousin called Edna?”
“Why, yes,” I said, astonishment growing every second.
“I used to go around with her,” he laughed, “it’s a small world, isn’t it?”
Eddie, I am glad to say, survived the war. There is a photograph of him, among others of McIndoe’s ‘Army’, in a book named ‘Churchill’s Few.’
. . . . . . . . . . . .
What can one say of Teddy Bairstow? Only that, had he lived fifty years before his time he would have been described, I am sure, as ‘A Card’ or as ‘A Character’.
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Unlike Tony Payne or Jim Heyworth, for example, he was physically unimpressive; very thin-faced and pale, sparse hair brushed sideways across his head, but with eyes as bright as those of the fox’s head of our mascot. It was his voice, however, which one remembers best, grating, strident and penetrative in its broad Yorkshire accents. When he was in the room, everyone knew it, and the place seemed filled with his jovial, but somehow, rueful, almost apprehensive presence.
Teddy had a stock phrase which he used whenever anyone asked him, for example, what sort of a trip he had had. He would lift his voice in both pitch and volume and exclaim to the world at large, “Ee! ‘twere a shaky do!” He had, to everyone’s knowledge, at least one very shaky do. Coming back from some op, he found, for one reason or another, that he wasn’t going to make it back to Binbrook. But he was reasonably close, he had crossed the Lincolnshire coast, and decided he would force-land his aircraft. But no wheels-up-belly-landing, as he should have done, for Teddy. Incredibly, he did a normal landing, if it could be described in those terms, undercarriage down, in the darkness, into a field near Louth, and got away with it without nosing over into a disastrous cartwheel. Few would have survived to tell the tale – Sergeant O’Connell certainly had not done so – but everyone agreed with Teddy’s usual comment. ‘Twere indeed a shaky do.
Towards the end of February Teddy’s luck ran out. We went after the German pocket-battleship Gneisenau in Kiel Docks, where it was holed up after escaping up the Channel. Teddy did not come back.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Somehow, it happened that Eric and I tended to gravitate together to play billiards or table tennis in the Mess games room, and for the odd glass of beer. It was, I think, possibly because like me, he was the only one of commissioned rank in his crew, apart from Abey, that is, who was his pilot and our Flight Commander, a Squadron Leader, very much senior in rank to both of us. Eric was Abey’s Observer, tall, well built, unfailingly polite, his manner polished and urbane, yet by no means superior. We got along very well; I enjoyed his company, and I like to think he enjoyed mine.
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It was one afternoon when we had a stand-down. Frequently, my crew and I would go in to Grimsby, to the cinema, then to the “Market” for a meal with Edna, the landlady, possibly stay the night, and come back in time to report to the Flights next morning. We usually managed to cram ourselves into Mick’s, our wireless operator’s, Ford. However, on this particular afternoon, possibly because we were broke, there were no such arrangements. I happened to bump into Eric in a corridor, in the Mess. We said “hello”, then he stopped suddenly and said, “I say, are you interested in music?”
“Yes, I am, rather,” I said, not knowing what to expect.
“Well, look, I’m just going along to old Doug’s room, he’s going to play some records – would you like to come along? I’m sure he won’t mind.”
So I went. Doug was pleased to see us both. He wound up his portable gramophone and put on Tchaikovsky’s ‘Valse des Fleurs’. I can never hear that lovely, lilting piece without thinking of that afternoon in Doug Langley’s room, lost in the beauty of discovery of orchestral music, and remembering Doug himself, with his light-ginger hair and luxuriant moustache, sitting, eyes closed, head thrown back, as Eric and I listened attentively. From there, on a subsequent stand-down night we went to a real symphony concert, my first ever, in Grimsby, and a whole new and wonderful world had opened up for me, thanks to Eric and Doug.
Abey’s crew went missing on Kiel, the same night as Teddy Bairstow. It was years later that I knew that Eric, and indeed, the rest of the crew, had survived. Desperate for contacts after J – ‘s death, I hunted through telephone directories until I found his name, and contacted him. After a few phone calls, and the exchange of several long letters, I met him in London. Being the men we are, it was an affectionate but undemonstrative greeting, a handshake and smiles rather than arms around shoulders and tears.
His was a simple story. With quite typical frankness he told me, and M – who was with me, that it was all his fault that they had got shot down. There had, he said, been some fault in his navigation, a very common thing in those days when navigational aids were almost nil, when such things as Gee and H2S had never been heard of. On the way to Kiel they had strayed over Sylt, a notorious hot spot of an island off the Danish-German coast.
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They were hit be flak in their starboard engine, which put it out of action. After a discussion as to the alternatives open to them, Abey had turned for home, in the fond hope that one good engine would be sufficient to carry them to the English coast. It was not to be; they were losing too much height to be able to make it back across the wide and inhospitable North Sea. The next option was to turn round again, fly across enemy-occupied Denmark and try to get to Sweden, where they would bale out and be interned for the duration. Again, their loss of height eventually ruled this out, they would never have a hope of reaching any Swedish territory. The third and final option was to bale out over Denmark. This they did, one after the other, successfully, over the island of Funen. They were all immediately taken prisoner. Eric and Abey finished up in the notorious prison campo Stalag Luft III, Sagan, the scene of the “Wooden Horse” tunnel – and of the murder of fifty aircrew officer prisoners by the Germans.
Eric, to my and to M – ‘s fascination, produced an album of pencil sketches he had made on odd scraps of paper, of prison-camp life. I asked him how he had been treated as a P.o.W., those three and more years that he spent behind the wire. Typically, again, he said, “Oh, I didn’t have too bad a time, really, you know.”
What could one say in reply to that? I simply shook my head in wonder. Of course, among others, we mentioned Teddy Bairstow. He and his crew had not been so fortunate. Nor had Doug Langley, whose grave I found, quite by accident, in a quiet cemetery in norther Holland a short time afterwards.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
I returned to Binbrook after many years. But only to the village. I had already found the Market Hotel in Grimsby where I went so often with my crew. I had stood for several minutes, looking up at the windows of the rooms we used to have, and remembering kindly Edna, who treated us like sons. Remembering Col, and Mick, and Johnnie, of my original crew. Remembering Cookie, our skipper, and Mac, our rear gunner, the Canadians among us. Thinking of the man I never knew, Rae, the man who had taken my place, the man who had died instead of me.
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When I arrived at Binbrook, I found I could barely contain my emotion. I recovered myself to some extent while I drank a cup of coffee in the Marquis of Granby, the well-remembered pub in the village. I stood for a long time at the top of the hill, on the road which led down into the valley and up again to the now deserted and silent aerodrome. I stood, remembering again, seeing, across the distance, visions of the Wellingtons I and my friends had flown, parked in their dispersals, the movement of men around them, and their faces, hearing their long-stilled voices. But I could go no closer to them than that. There were too many memories, too many ghosts.
On that fine morning the images of mortality were too real to be borne.
. . . . . . . . . . .
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[inserted] [underlined] Tony [/underlined] [/inserted]
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[underlined] TONY [/underlined]
At the time when I subscribed to ‘Readers’ Digest’ there would appear in each issue a short article entitled ‘The Most Unforgettable Character I Have Ever Met’. I find that this description could fittingly apply to Tony Payne.
When I had the privilege of knowing him, Tony, at the age of 21, was already a veteran in terms of ability and experience, looked up to almost in reverence as one of the elite pilots on the Squadron.
And whenever I recall the Officers’ Mess at Binbrook with its high-ceilinged anteroom just across the main corridor from the dining room, with the eternal, homely smell of coffee from the big urn near to the door, I can visualise Tony as he was so often, standing slightly to one side of the fire, pewter tankard in hand, holding court, as it were, the focal point of all eyes and conversation, eternally smiling and cheerful, his crisp, clear voice sounding above the music from the worn record on the radiogram which would be softly playing a catchy little tune, a favourite of his, called ‘The Cuckoo’. I have never heard it, or heard of it, even, since that time, but I could never forget it, as it was almost Tony’s signature tune. But Tony was entering the last six months of his life.
He had the gift of holding everyone’s attention by his witty observations on most things operational – and non-operational, his words rolling brightly and optimistically off his tongue, his eyes shining with the pleasure of living for the moment, and that moment alone, of good company and comradeship.
Once we were discussing a particular trip. (They were always ‘trips’, occasionally ‘ops’ but never ‘sorties’ or ‘missions’). Someone was describing our attempts to locate some target in Germany one night recently. There had been only sporadic gunfire aimed at us whn [sic] we arrived at about 20,000 feet, and that gunfire, we knew, was not necessarily from the immediate area of the target.
“What did you think about it, Tony?” someone asked. Tony beamed at the question, leaned slightly forward and declaimed with mock solemnity and a judicial air, “Ah! Then I knew that something was afoot!” he said.
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Among his many friends, or ‘familiars’ as they might have once been known, (a description singularly appropriate), was the Senior Flying Control Officer (or ‘Regional Control Officer’ in the terminology then in force) Flight Lieutenant Bradshaw, “Bradders” to everyone. He was old enough to be Tony’s and our father, a World War I pilot beribboned with the ‘Pip, Squeak and Wilfred’ campaign ribbons of that conflict, slightly portly, fairly short in stature, of equable temperament and genial in manner, his iron-grey to white hair meticulously trimmed. A great deal of repartee was invariably exchanged by the two, doubtless born of their mutual affection despite the disparity in their ages.
To our delight one day, Tony hurried into the anteroom in a state of high glee, carrying a small, brown-paper wrapped parcel the size of a large book.
“Wait till you see this, you types!” he crowed to his audience, which included Bradders, who was as intrigued as the rest of us. Tony slowly, tantalisingly slowly, unwrapped his mysterious parcel then dramatically held up its contents for all to see. It was a gilt-framed oil painting of a side-whiskered old man in a country churchyard, his foot upon the shoulder of a spade, a battered old felt hat on his head. The frame bore the title – ‘Old Bradshaw, the village sexton’. It brought the house down and it was ceremoniously hung on the anteroom wall near to the portrait of Flying Officer Donald Garland, one of the Squadron’s two posthumous Victoria Cross recipients, and near also to the mounted fox’s head, our Squadron badge, which had been presented to ‘Abey’, Squadron Leader Abraham, our Flight Commander, on his posting from a Polish O.T.U. where he had been instructing, to 12 Squadron.
At about this time the Air Ministry commissioned Eric Kennington, a noted war artist, to make portraits of outstanding aircrew members, many in Bomber Command, and Tony was one of those selected to sit for him. He sat in his usual place at one end of the anteroom fireplace while Kennington went about his work. The Mess kept a respectful silence while this was proceeding, conversing only in whispers and never attempting to peer over the artist’s shoulder. Some time later, the finished portrait was hung in a place of honour on the wall, to Tony’s laughing embarrassment.
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It was only within these last few years that during a telephone conversation with Eric, my friend, fellow-survivor and table tennis and billiards opponent of those days, who had been Squadron Leader Abraham’s Observer when they were shot down over Denmark, that he asked me if I remembered Tony’s portrait, and whether I knew what happened to it. I confessed that I had almost forgotten about it and did not have any idea what had become of it. But his question touched off in me a desire to find out. It seemed logical that in the first instance I should consult my local Library to see whether they might possibly have any book of the Kennington portraits. It did have such a book, and they brought it out to me. Unfortunately, Tony’s likeness was not among the hundred or so reproduced, but he was mentioned in the index of all the portraits which the artist had undertaken. Where next? I decided that the obvious next step was to contact the R.A.F. Museum at Hendon. There I struck gold. They had the original portrait in storage and swiftly sent me a photo-copy. I obtained two copies, one of which I sent to Eric. Today, a sizeable and well-produced copy of Tony’s portrait hang on my wall where I can look on it with a mixture of affection, pleasure and great sadness, as well as a sense of honour that such a fine man and such a fine pilot could have wanted me to join his crew. I was more than a little surprised when he did so and have often wondered what prompted him to approach me. It was prior to his finishing his first tour, and I have described the incident and its calamitous sequel in the next chapter.
His crew, on his first tour with us, must truly have been quite exceptional. To have completed their tour made them exceptional enough. The chances of that were a considerable way short of evens. There was an example of their ‘press on regardless’ spirit and of the brilliant navigation of Tony’s Observer, Sergeant Dooley, a dapper, smiling little Englishman, on one of our trips to Kiel to bomb the pocket-battleship Gneisenau.
We rarely had an accurate Met. forecast on the trips we did in that winter of 1941-42, and on this night the conditions turned out to be worse than even the Met. Officer had forecast. We took off in the darkness and gloom and entered heavy cloud at 600 feet We climbed
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steadily out over the North Sea but at 20,500 feet we had still not reached clear air. With our bomb load we could climb no higher. We were somewhere in the top of the cloud mass, the moon a faint blur of light on our starboard bow. Below and around us were numerous gun-flashes from the flak defences of Kiel, and as obtaining a visual pinpoint was obviously impossible we bombed the centre of the flak concentration. We turned for home, still in cloud. After over three hours of manual flying, concentrating solely on the instrument panel in front of me, and losing height slowly down to 1,000 feet, I became aware that we had finally reached the cloudbase. Then to my relief and delight I pinpointed Spurn Head, our crossing-in point, about four miles to starboard, and saw the four red obstruction lights of the radar station near Cleethorpes dead ahead. We heartily congratulated Col on his navigation – seven hours plus in cloud and only four miles off track at the end of it.
But Sergeant Dooley and Tony had outshone us. Like us, finding the target in Kiel docks completely cloud-covered he had refused the opportunity to bomb blind as most of us had done. They set course for the Baltic Sea, topped the cloud and found moonlight – and stars. Flying straight and level, which one had to do to take astro-shots of the various stars on the astrograph chart, and which one could safely do over the sea, but which was a most unhealthy undertaking over hostile territory, Sergeant Dooley obtained an astro fix of their exact position. He then plotted a dead-reckoning track and course to the target, some distance away, and when their E.T.A. was up, bombed on that. The Squadron Navigation Officer subsequently re-plotted his whole log and found that they had been ‘spot-on’ the target. Such was the ability and experience of Tony and his crew.
When his tour was finally over and he had a well-deserved D.F.C. to his credit he was posted away to some hush-hush job at an aerodrome on Salisbury Plain, and both the Mess and B Flight Office were the poorer and less colourful for his going.
My final meeting with him before my posting and his shockingly unexpected and untimely death was a few weeks after he had left the Squadron at the end of his tour. He appeared one day, cheerful and unchanged as ever, in the anteroom one lunchtime. He had flown up,
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unofficially, one guessed, in a small, twin-engined trainer. He was, he told us, flying all sorts of kites, at all sorts of heights, mostly over the Channel. He alleged that ‘they’, whoever they might be, and he did nothing to enlighten us on that, even wanted him to fly inverted on occasions. Beyond that he said nothing, and we did not ask him too many questions. He mentioned that although he had flown up to see us in the Oxford, one of the several aircraft at the secret establishment, he would have preferred something else – “I wanted to come in the Walrus”, he chuckled, naming an antiquated and noisy single-pusher-engined flying boat, usually operated by the Fleet Air Arm.
“I’d love to have taxied up to the Watch Office and chucked the anchor out!”
He left us after a cheerful lunch and went for ever out of my life, for which I am greatly the poorer.
It seems that he came back to 12, without a crew, for a second tour and was insistent on taking part in the first 1,000 bomber raid, that on Cologne, with a completely new crew. His was the first aircraft to be shot down that night. It happened over the outskirts of Amsterdam. How he came to be there will always remain a mystery to me, as the route planned for that night to Cologne lay over the estuary of the Scheldt, mush [sic] further south, its numerous islands providing invaluable pinpoints.
He and all his crew are buried in beautifully tended graves in a shady part of Amsterdam’s New Eastern Cemetery, which I have several times visited.
On one visit to Amsterdam I had contacted a Dutchman who had formed part of the team of volunteers who had excavated the remains of C-Charlie, Tony’s aircraft on that fatal night in May 1942. I was able to visit the crash site in the suburb of Badhoevedorp. A small museum of remembrance had been created in some old underground fortifications on the outskirts of the city where were reverently displayed several small identifiable components of the aircraft, as well as one or two pathetic personal belongings of the crew. I was offered, and accepted, a small section of the geodetic construction of the Wellington and this now has a place of honour in my living room, where Tony, from his portrait, appears to be looking down upon it.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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[inserted] [underlined] Mind you don’t scratch the paint [/underlined] [/inserted]
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[underlined] MIND YOU DON’T SCRATCH THE PAINT [/underlined]
After what happened that night to his beloved Z-Zebra when we, for the first and only time, were being allowed to fly it on ops, I could have quite understood if Tony had never wanted to have anything to do with me, or with any of the crew, again.
But instead, after it was all over, for some time afterwards, whenever he happened to see me in the anteroom there would come into his eyes a gleam of what I could only interpret as amusement, but something more besides; this was a look of amusement mingled with a knowledge and appreciation of our good fortune, the look which perhaps a proud parent gives to his offspring as he sees him emerge from the last obstacle of a tricky course in the school sports and run triumphantly towards the finishing line, a “by-God-you’ve-done-it” look. A fanciful idea maybe, but the more I look back on it, the more I am sure that was what it was.
It was when we had already done a handful of ops, I remember, and when he himself must have been well on towards finishing his tour – remarkable enough in itself – and quite some while after the events which led to his, and our, final trip in ‘Z’ that he caught my eye and beckoned me over, one day when there was no flying, in the mess at Binbrook. He and I were both standing among the small crowd of aircrew officers near the fireplace, tankards in our hands, nearly all of us smoking, under the gaze of the portrait of Donald Garland, V.C., and of the fox’s mask mounted on its wooden shield.
And when I had made my way towards him he paid me a great and surprising compliment, he who was without doubt one of the finest of the many fine pilots on the Squadron.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
But the story, of course, starts some time before that, when we were very much the new boys, before I and the rest of the crew had been blooded on ops. When we had arrived on the Squadron from our Operational Training Unit at Bassingbourn, Elmer, my co-pilot,
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had been allocated to Mike Duder’s crew, while the rest of us had been taken over, as it were, by Ralph, a pilot who had a few ops already to his credit. We settled down comfortably enough with him and went through the final stages of our familiarisation and training on the Mark II Wellington in preparation for our first operation together. This landmark in one’s flying career was something which I, at any rate, had looked forward to – if that is the correct form of words – with a mixture of curiosity, awe and a certain degree of apprehension tinged with excitement; I regarded it as a large step into a completely unknown world. Just how hazardous a step it would turn out to be I was soon to discover.
At that time, my logbook tells me, we had no aircraft which we could really regard as our own, perhaps because we were a fresher crew, I don’t know. However, we had flown seven different aircraft since joining ‘B’ Flight. One morning we reported as usual, to the Flights. I had the privilege of using, along with others, Abey’s, our Flight Commander’s, office as a sort of mini-crewroom. It was late November and we sat around talking, shop mostly, until about ten o’clock, when Abey’s phone rang. All conversation stopped. We knew what it would be – either another stand-down, or a target. It was a target, for freshers only. It would not be named until briefing that afternoon, of course, but I was fairly certain it would be one of the French Channel ports.
Abey nodded to me pleasantly and said, “Let the rest of your crew know, will you?” Then he looked quickly at the blackboard fixed to the wall facing him and said, “Look, I think you’d better take Z-Zebra, Tony’s aircraft – he’s off to Buck House tomorrow to collect his gong from the King.”
Tony Payne wasn’t in the Flight Office at the time, I suppose he had been told by Abey that he wouldn’t be required in any case; an appointment with His Majesty would naturally take priority over anything. So it was lunchtime when we’d done our quite uneventful night flying test on ‘Z’, that I saw him in the Mess. Or rather, that he saw me, and made a bee-line for me.
“What’s this I hear, then?” he asked.
I grinned at him.
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“You mean about Z-Zebra?”
“Yes, I mean about Z-Zebra. My Z-Zebra. You’re not actually going to fly my kite, are you? On ops? God!”
There was a look of mock-horror on his face.
“Well, that’s what Abey said, so that’s what we’re doing. Don’t worry, Tony, we won’t bend it, or anything.”
“Bend it? You’d better not! If you so much as scratch the paint I shall deal with you all personally, one at a time, when you come back, you mark my words!”
We both knew he was kidding, but I knew, too, that ‘Z’ was the apple of Tony’s eye and that it had served him well. I hoped that it would serve as [sic] well, too.
Briefing was in the early afternoon. I cannot recall that there were many of us there, three crews at most is my recollection. The target was Cherbourg docks, time on target 2100 to 2130, bomb-load seven five hundred pounders, high explosive, route Base – Reading – Bognor Regis – target and return the same way. I felt nothing other than curious anticipation, once the time of take-off drew nearer. I think the thought that we were in ‘Z’ boosted my morale. Tony’s aircraft must be good, for he was good, the best. That followed; ‘Z’ wouldn’t let us down. The trip was going to be, if not the proverbial piece of cake, then quite O.K., quite straightforward, a nice one to start us off, of that I was confident.
It was a Saturday evening and dusk was falling as I went up to the Flights and opened my locker in Abey’s office. He was there, of course, looking quietly on at the small handful of us putting on our kit for the op. I started to struggle into my flying kit. Roll-necked sweater under my tunic, brown padded inner suit from neck to ankle, like a tightly fitting eiderdown, old school scarf, which, while I would never have admitted it, was my good-luck talisman. Pale green, slightly faded canvas outer flying suit with fur collar, wool-lined leather flying boots, parachute harness, Mae West and, lastly, ‘chute and helmet, which I carried. I checked that I had the issued silk handkerchief, printed very finely with a map of France, just in case, and I touched the reassuring small miniature compass,
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sewn into my brevet, another aid to evasion if forced to bale out.
I joined Ralph and the lads in the hangar. There was a continuous buzz of conversation, the odd burst of laughter. Ralph was smiling with rather forced cheerfulness, no doubt wondering how his new crew would cope. Col, our Aussie Observer, looked more sallow than usual and was chewing gum rapidly. His Australian twang, when he spoke, was more pronounced, it seemed to me. Mick, the wireless op., looked worried, as usual, and said nothing, while Tommy, our rear gunner, was completely unconcerned and grinning from ear to ear. Johnnie, who would occupy the front turret, was his calm and quite imperturbable self, almost, I realised, the complete antithesis of Tommy.
Ralph said quickly, “Let’s go, then,” and we strolled out of the chilly, pale blue lighting of the hangar into the darkness. We climbed awkwardly into the waiting crew-bus parked on the perimeter track. A half moon was beginning to show, flitting in and out of the scattered clouds which were drifting out to sea from off the Lincolnshire Wolds. It was cold, and despite my flying kit, I shivered a little. Col was still chewing stolidly, his face expressionless. There was a little desultory conversation as the bus rolled towards the dispersals, but the night’s op was not mentioned.
“Z-Zebra,” called the W.A.A.F. driver through the little window at the front of the bus. We started to clamber stiffly down the back steps, reluctant to leave the companionable shelter of the vehicle.
“Have a good trip!”
Someone from another crew shouted the conventional but oddly reassuring words, which were invariably used to send a crew on their way.
“You too,” one of us replied.
Z-Zebra loomed over us in the semi-darkness. The crew bus rumbled away. The silence was intense, almost tangible. The ground-crew stood around, blowing on their hands and beating their arms around their bodies against the cold. There were muted greetings. Col and I walked several yards away from the kite, lit cigarettes from my case and took a dozen or so quick draws before stamping them out.
“Come on, let’s get started,” I muttered, and we clambered up the red ladder which jutted down from Z’s nose. Johnnie was handing
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the pigeon in its ventilated box carefully up to Mick.
We struggled in, heavily and clumsily, each to his position. I hoisted myself over the main spar and stood in the astrodome, reaching down to plug in my intercom lead, and I found the hot-air hose, aiming it to blow on to my body once the engines had been started. The port engine suddenly stammered and roared into life, then the starboard. We heard Ralph blow twice into his mike to test the intercom, then he spoke.
“Everyone O.K? Harry?”
“O.K., skip,” I said.
“Col?”
“Yeah, skip.”
“Mick?”
O.K.”
“Johnnie?”
“O.K., skipper.” Johnnie was always punctilious and correct.
“Tommy? All right at the back there?”
“Yes, fine, skip.”
“Right, I’ll take it there and do the bombing run, Harry, you can bring us back.”
“O.K., skip,” I said.
Ralph’s mike clicked off. There was an increased roar from the port enging, [sic] shaking the whole kite, then from the starboard, as Ralph ran them up, checking the power, the magnetos, the oil pressure and the engine temperatures. The kite was shivering like a nervous racehorse at the starting gate, waiting for the off. A lull, then I felt a lurch as we moved slowly out of dispersal. The hangars, topped by their red obstruction lights, slid by, then we were at the end of the runway in use. Behind us I could see the nav. lights of the other aircraft which were to share the night sky with us over Cherbourg. A green Alldis light flashed directly on to us – dah, dah, di-di, - Z.
“You’ve got your green, skipper,” I said. We were on our way.
“O.K., here we go, hold on to your hats.”
Johnnie appeared alongside me and grinned rather wolfishly; the front
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gunner went into his turret only when we were safely airborne. Ralph opened up the throttles against the brakes to lift the tail a little. Z-Zebra jerked and strained, then suddenly we surged forward, the engines howling. The Drem lighting of the flarepath smudged past, faster and faster as we charged down the runway. The bar of lights with the two goose-neck flares at the far end slid towards us, then suddenly all vibration ceased; we were airborne, we were on our way.
Johnnie gave me the thumbs-up and vanished up front to go into his turret. In a few seconds he called up to say he was in position. I felt and heard Ralph throttling back to settle into the long climb to operational height; we would aim to be at 20,000 feet over the target. He began a turn to port to bring us back over the centre of the aerodrome to set course accurately for Reading.
The night was clear, some cloud showing vaguely out to sea, a blaze of stars everywhere, with the half moon as yet low on the port beam. There were several flashing red beacons to be seen, scattered over the dim landscape like lurid and sinister fireflies, but no-one bothered to read their Morse letters on the way out; coming home, it would be another matter, they would be looked for and read as eagerly as one used to read the familiar names on railway stations on the way back from a holiday. From the astrodome the mainplanes were pale in the faint moonlight, the exhaust stubs glowed redly. The rudder was a tall finger behind us, under which sat Tommy in his turret, a lonely place. I could see the guns rotating from side to side as he kept watch. There was little sensation of height or speed as the engines roared steadily under climbing power, the passage of time seemed suspended and there was a sense of complete detachment from the earth and from all things on it. Conversation was limited to the essential minimum.
Ralph came up, eventually, on the intercom.
“Oxygen on, please, Harry, ten thousand feet.”
I acknowledged, unplugged my intercom and left my position, going forward over the main spar to where just behind the Observer’s compartment the oxygen bottles were in racks up on the port side of the
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fuselage. I screwed open the valves on each one and returned to the astrodome.
“Oxygen on, skipper.”
I plugged in the bayonet fitting of my oxygen tube to the nearest socket and clipped the mask on my helmet securely to cover my nose and mouth. After a while, “Glow on the deck, dead ahead, skipper,” Johnnie said. I went forward quickly to stand beside Ralph.
“Looks like Reading,” I said, “they always did have a lousy blackout. See those two lines of lights? The railway station. Wouldn’t that slay you? I don’t know how they don’t get bombed to hell.”
“Useful for us, anyhow,” Ralph replied, “we’re dead on track and two minutes to E.T.A., too. Good for you, Col,” he called.
The faint glow of Reading vanished under the nose. The moon was a bit higher now. Col gave the new course for Bognor. I took a deep breath of oxygen and holding it in my lungs as long as I could, went back to the astrodome. Tommy spoke up, rather fractiously.
“Bloody cold back here.”
“Shut up a minute, Tommy,” I heard Mick say, “I’m listening out to Group.”
No-one spoke for a while. Then I caught a glimpse of a white flashing beacon to starboard. These were very useful; Observers kept a list of them coded with their actual Latitude and Longitude positions. I switched on my mike.
“Occult flashing R Robert about five miles to starboard, Col,” I said.
Then, “That’s peculiar,” I thought, “I didn’t hear my own voice saying that.”
I checked my intercom switch and repeated what I’d said. Still nothing. I moved over to the intercom point at the flarechute and plugged in. I blew into my mike – dead as mutton. Taking a gulp of oxygen I went forward to Col’s desk and banged him on the shoulder. He looked up in surprise. I undid his helmet and shouted in his ear.
“Is your intercom working?”
He thumbed the switch and I saw his lips moving. Then he shrugged his shoulders expressively.
“Bloody thing’s crook,” he shouted.
After another gulp of oxygen I went forward to yell in Ralph’s ear.
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“Intercom’s u/s!”
I saw Ralph check his mike, then he nodded, the corners of his mouth turned down ruefully.
“Not a sausage,” he shouted, “see if Mick can fix it.”
I pushed through the door into Mick’s compartment. He beat me to it.
“Intercom’s u/s, R/T, too.”
“See if you can fix it!”
Mick nodded.
I went forward again to Ralph, who had scribbled a note on a message pad.
‘If no joy in 15 min. we jettison and abort.’
Without the intercom we would be completely cut off from one another, an impossible situation. I settled into the second pilot’s position alongside Ralph, thinking that I might as well stay up front for a while. Ralph was writing something again, letting the trimmers fly the aircraft while he did so.
‘Tell the gunners,’ I read, and gave him the thumbs-up. More oxygen, then I ducked under the instrument panel, past the bomb-sight, treading gingerly on the bottom escape hatch, and quickly opened the front turret doors.
My God, I thought, it’s freezing cold in here.
Johnnie twisted himself round and looked at me questioningly.
“Intercom’s gone for a Burton,” I shouted, “we may have to scrub it.”
He raised his eyebrows and nodded.
Half way back down the fuselage I saw the rear turret doors opening and Tommy emerged, slightly red in the face.
“My bloody intercom’s u/s,” he shouted, looking aggrieved.
I told him the situation quickly and he went back into his turret. I bent over Mick, who was fiddling with the intricacies of the radio equipment.
“Any joy?” I shouted.
Mick grimaced and shook his head.
“Keep trying, Mick.”
When I went back to Ralph he leaned over and shouted, “If Mick can’t fix it by Bognor, we’ll jettison ten miles out to sea and go home.”
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I wrote a note for Col and passed it to him. I was already hoarse with shouting and tired from moving around the aircraft on scanty oxygen.
Still we climbed. Bognor was now below us, I could distinguish the shape of the south coast, the Isle of Wight. Col came forward and made book-opening movements of his hands to Ralph who nodded and selected the bomb-door switch to ‘open’. Col ducked down to the bombsight. I wondered idly whether there were any convoys below; even though the bombs would be dropped ‘safe’ they wouldn’t like five hundred pounds of solid metal from this height. There was a slight shudder as the bombs went. Col came back.
“Bloody waste,” he shouted.
Ralph nodded as he closed the bomb-doors.
He shouted to me, “We might as well get down lower where we can come off oxygen. Get a course from Col, will you?”
I did so and set it on the compass for Ralph, who did a wide turn to port, losing height steadily. The altimeter slowly unwound.
When we passed through ten thousand feet I turned off the bottles and went the rounds of the crew, telling each one we were on the way home. Their reactions were muted, impassive. Soon we were down to two thousand feet, droning over the dim November landscape. There were no beacons to be seen anywhere in this area. I stood alongside Ralph, wondering if I would get a chance to fly ‘Z’ soon, but perhaps he didn’t like the thought of passing messages himself; the journey from front turret to rear, for example, was a bit of an obstacle race.
Quite suddenly, I noticed that the starboard engine temperature was up. I tapped Ralph on the arm and pointed to it. He nodded slowly, we droned onwards. I looked out of my side window, through the arc of the propeller, mere inches away, at the starboard engine. Was it my imagination, or was there a whitish mist streaming back from it? Ralph had levelled off at a thousand feet. Col came in and handed him a note of E.TA. Reading. The starboard engine temperature was higher, and now the oil pressure was decidedly down, too.
We’ve got trouble, damn it, I thought, and I saw there was now
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no doubt at all about the trail of vapour from the engine.
“Looks like a glycol leak,” I told Ralph, who stared grimly ahead and nodded. Then he turned to me.
“Get Mick on the W/T to base, returning early, intercom and R/T u/s, glycol leak starboard engine.”
I gave him the thumbs-up, seized a message pad and wrote it down, then went aft and handed it to Mick, who was sitting glumly at his table. He looked at the note, raised his eyebrows and frowned, then started to tap out the message on the Morse key.
Up front again I saw that the vapour leak from the engine was now streaked with red, and angry looking sparks were flying back over the engine nacelle and the trailing edge of the mainplane. I nudged Ralph, who leaned over to look, then grimaced. Now, the engine temperature was very high and the oil pressure had slumped even further. Z-Zebra was in real trouble. As is the way in flying, events thereafter moved in a downward spiral from bad to desperate with sickening rapidity. A lick of flame spat out of the engine, over the starboard mainplane, then horrifyingly, like the tail of a rocket, the flame shot back towards the rear turret.
“Fire!” I yelled in Ralph’s ear.
I pressed the extinguisher button on the instrument panel. Ralph chopped the starboard throttle back and hauled the wheel over to counteract the lurch and swing. I looked at the flames which were now pouring out of the duff engine, over the cowling and the trailing edge of the mainplane. Suddenly Tommy appeared at my side.
“Hey! There’s a hell of a lot of sparks flying past my turret!”
“Yes, we’re on fire, but we’re trying to get it out,” I shouted back at him.
Tommy’s eyes opened wide when he saw the blazing engine.
“Jesus bloody Christ,” he said, in awe.
We were now below 1000 feet. Ralph had opened up the port engine to try to maintain height, but we were turning slowly to starboard the whole time. I thought about the best part of 375 gallons of petrol in the starboard wing-tank, then about the western edge of London and its balloon barrage, somewhere very close to us. We
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were in one hell of a mess, I thought, and it began to dawn on me that the situation could well kill us all. I tried not to think too hard about that. Ralph was wrestling with Z-Zebra, trying to keep it on some sort of a course, but it appeared to be useless.
“Poop off some reds,” he yelled, “and look out for a flarepath!”
I hurried aft.
“Put the I.F.F. on Stud 3,” I shouted to Mick, above the howl of the good engine, and nodding glumly, Mick switched to this distress frequency which would show up as a distinctively shaped trace on all ground radar sets. I quickly found some double-red Verey cartridges and got the signal pistol down from its fixture in the roof of the fuselage. I loaded the cartridges and shot them off one at a time.
“Can’t do much more now,” I said to myself, and hoped for the sight of a flarepath, a directing searchlight, or anything that would help us. I went forward again. We were still losing height and I realised that we were too low to bale out. But the fire had died down and I sighed with relief at that. The prop windmilled slowly and uselessly. I wished that Z-Zebra had been fitted with propeller feathering devices, but it was useless wishing thoughts like that. I peered intently at the starboard wing; there didn’t seem to be any fire there, thank God, otherwise we would simply blow up in mid-air and that would be that. Now, the immediate problem was how we were going to get back on to the ground in approximately one piece; there wasn’t a flarepath or a beacon to be seen anywhere.
I felt completely helpless and at the mercy of a capricious and malignant fate which I could do nothing to influence. It was like being in a paper bag going down a waterfall. Ralph’s face was grim as he struggled to keep straight and to maintain altitude. I heaved a length of wrapped elastic from my parachute stowage and tied the wheel fully over to the left, to take the load off Ralph a little. He nodded his thanks. Another length of elastic; I tied the rudder bar over to the geodetics. That was all I could do.
I looked out again. Still no sign of friendly lights and the treetops were looking damned close now. The port engine exhaust stubs were bright red due to the punishment the engine was taking and I knew it was just a matter of minutes before we hit something. I thought, “This is a hell of a shaky do.” Then, ahead, I saw an interruption in the dark skyline and I was puzzled as to what it
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could be. I took a glance as [sic] the A.S.I., just under 100 m.p.h., much too near stalling speed for comfort. I hardly dared look at the altimeter, it showed a mere 200 feet now. The curious, dim outlines on the skyline grew slowly larger as we staggered on. That was about it, Z-Zebra was simply staggering along and sinking through the air, almost on the point of stalling, when we would drop like a stone. I was holding the wheel over to port, helping Ralph all I could. Keep height and we lost speed; keep speed and we lost height. That was the quite hopeless situation.
The jagged skyline, which was now beginning to fill the windscreen, resolved itself horrifyingly, in the dim moonlight, into buildings. A town, and worst of all, a town with a tall, thick chimney, dead ahead.
“Jesus Christ,” I thought, “we’ve bloody well had it now, we’re going to hit that bloody chimney.”
100 feet on the altimeter. Now we were over the town, churning over the roofs at 90 miles an hour. The streets looked so close that I could have put out a hand to touch them. The chimney loomed nearer, the black roofs skated away behind us, apparently just below the floor of the fuselage. I thought of the people in those houses, cringing as they heard the hideous noise just above their heads, praying that the aircraft wouldn’t hit them in a cataclysm of bricks, rubble and blazing petrol. I was sweating as I frantically heaved at the wheel to try to help Ralph. His eyes were staring as though he were hypnotised by the sight of the chimney. With agonising slowness it slid towards us, slightly to starboard now, it seemed, then just beyond the starboard wingtip, a handful of yards away. I shut my eyes for a second, hardly daring to believe that we had missed it.
“Thank Christ for that!” I yelled at Ralph. We were over open fields again. Ralph shouted desperately, “I’ll have to put it down soon, get them into crash positions!”
I hurried to the front turret, collected Johnnie, who was as pleasant and imperturbable as though he was sitting in an armchair in the Mess. he would have had a grandstand view of the whole thing, up to now. Together, we grabbed Mick and Col. The three of them lay on the floor of the fuselage, hands clasped behind their necks.
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I hurried, stumbling, to the rear turret and wrenched open the doors.
“Crash landing, any minute now!” I yelled at Tommy. He would sit tight, his was the safest place in the kite in this situation. I almost envied him. I rushed forward again and took a final glance out of the windscreen. We were at treetop level. Then I went back to join Mick, Col and Johnnie. There was not enough room for me to lie down, so I stood sideways on, taking a firm grip on the geodetics, and hoped for the best.
Suddenly the port engine was throttled right back. This was it, I thought. A few seconds’ silence, which seemed like a month, then a tremendous impact. A cool smell of newly-torn earth filled the aircraft. I hear, unbelievably, a long burst of machine gun fire and could see red tracer flying ahead of us. I couldn’t think what was going on; surely we weren’t being shot at? The kite bucketed along, everything twisting and grinding, the deceleration fantastic. I could hardly stay upright. The smell of ploughed earth was beautiful, almost intoxicating. I hung on grimly, and after what seemed an age, we finally lurched to a halt. For an instant there was total, blissful silence.
“Everyone out, quick!” I shouted.
The three of them hurried forward where I could see Ralph’s legs vanishing through the escape hatch above the pilot’s seat. Tommy came staggering from the rear of the fuselage, clutching his forehead.
“You O.K.?” I asked him.
“Hit me bloody head on some broken sodding geodetics,” he said angrily.
“Hurry up and get out in case the bloody kite goes up,” I said urgently, and I pushed him forward, ahead of me. He climbed out of the top hatch via the pilot’s seat; I was hard on his heels. I could hear Johnnie telling someone, in his clear, modulated voice, that he had forgotten to put the safety-catch of his guns on to ‘safe’, the impact of the crash had set them firing. I hoped vaguely that no-one had been hurt. It was years later that I learned that one bullet had gone through a child’s bedroom window as her mother was putting her to bed; the bullet had embedded itself in the mattress without harming the little girl.
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I followed Tommy up and out. I was swinging my legs over the edge of the escape hatch, on to the top of Z-Zebra, when I saw a spurt of flame from the port engine. The strain had been too much for it.
“Port engine’s on fire!” I shouted to them, “get to hell out of it!”
I jumped back inside the cockpit, quickly found the port fire-extinguisher button and jabbed my thumb hard on it, swearing softly under my breath. Then I clambered out again, found the port mainplane under my feet and walked down it on to the field.
The aircraft looked like a landed whale, its props bent grotesquely backwards, its back dismally broken, with the rudder towering up at an odd angle, its wings now spread uselessly across the stubble and the broad rut which we had gouged out of the field trailing back towards the hedge, between some tall trees. The crew were grouped together twenty yards away.
“Come on, Harry!” someone shouted.
A man was running over the field towards us, I could see the steam of his panting breaths in the moonlight as he got nearer and heard him excitedly saying something about ‘the biggest field in the district’. The moon shone palely through the trees which we had missed and the air was sweet as wine. I lit a cigarette and joined the others.
“Are you O.K.?” Col asked. I nodded.
“Bloody fine landing, Ralph,” I said, “damn good show.”
We followed the man over the stubble, towards the broken hedge, then to an Auxiliary Fire Station on the outskirts of St. Albans, where we had come down.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
“Look,” Tony said confidentially, “you know I’ve got …… as my co-pilot?”
“Yes,” I said, wondering what was coming next.
“Well, between you and me, I’m really not all that happy with him. Would you like to come into my crew? I can fix it with Abey, if you would.”
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When I recovered from my astonishment it didn’t take me long to decide. I shook my head.
“No, thanks, Tony, no, really, I wouldn’t want to leave my own crew, you know.”
“Oh, well, I can quite understand that. I just thought - . But if you do change your mind, there’s a place for you with me, any time.”
I thanked him. I have never forgotten the honour he did me.
As I have said, Tony took the wrecking of Z-Zebra quite well, all things being considered. Shortly afterwards, he finished his tour. His crew were posted away, while he himself went on to some hush-hush flying, somewhere on Salisbury Plain, we heard, involving several different types of aircraft. It was something, we guessed, in connection with the development of radar and its applications. He paid us a visit once, in an Anson.
“I wanted to come up in a Walrus,” he said, naming a slow, noisy and out-of-date small flying-boat, “and throw out the anchor in front of the Watch Office!”
We had a jocular half hour with him in front of the ante-room fire.
Tony Payne came back to the Squadron for his second tour of ops. He took a new crew, on their first trip, on the Thousand Bomber raid on Cologne. His was the first aircraft to be shot down that night. He was hit by flak over Ijmuiden, on the Dutch Coast and the aircraft blew up over Badhoevedorp, on the outskirts of Amsterdam, killing him and the whole crew. They are buried together in a beautiful shady spot in Amsterdam East Cemetery, their graves lovingly kept and cared for. I have visited the place where they fell; I have seen the place where they now lie at peace. Most of the aircraft was salvaged recently by some caring Dutch people, and I have a fragment of it on my bookshelf, to remind me of the man that was Tony. Not that I need much reminding.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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[inserted] [underlined] Rabbie [/underlined] [/inserted]
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[underlined] RABBIE [/underlined]
He was the sort of bloke one took to automatically if one was of a fairly quiet disposition, for he himself was quiet almost to the point of being self-effacing. On the ground, that is. But in the air – well, that was another matter. On the evidence that I had, at least, it seemed that another side of his nature took over.
In build, he was perhaps an inch or so taller than me, well made, with rather thick, limp, fairish hair, quite piercingly blue eyes and a mobile mouth which always carried the trace of a smile, as though he were laughing inwardly at some secret joke. His manner of speaking was strange until you got used to it; he would start a sentence then lower his eyes almost apologetically, as though he were afraid you were becoming bored with what he was saying. His voice was quite deep, very quiet, and his utterances were staccato, like short bursts of machine-gun fire, punctuated by little nervous laughs, almost sniggers. Now and again he would stammer slightly, and now and again a trace of his native soft Scots accent would ripple the surface of his halting, quietly spoken sentences.
It was I who first called him Rabbie, on account of this inflexion of voice, which, when he became animated, would show more prominently. I think he secretly rather liked the name; there weren’t many Scotsmen on the Squadron as far as I knew, and certainly, there weren’t many in ‘B’ Flight. We became friendly, and although on stand-down trips to G.Y., as we invariably called Grimsby, crews usually went as crews, on nights when we stayed in the Mess he and I, more often than not, would gravitate together, along with Eric. Possible because the three of us where a shade quieter types than, say, Tony or Teddy Bairstow.
I don’t know how it came about that I flew to Pershore with him – he had done his O.T.U. there, it seemed, and on a stand-down day he got permission from Abey to do a cross-country there. He must have asked me if I would like a ride; anyhow, I went along with him. He had his own co-pilot, Sandy, with him, and his crew. It was then I discovered the other side of Rabbie. I had only been on the Squadron a fortnight and everything was new and a bit strange.
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Rabbie and most of the others were comparatively old hands, and whereas I was a strictly-by-the-book pilot, I soon found that there were others who weren’t. Like that day, when I flew with Rabbie. One normally did cross-countries at a sober and sedate height, say between two and six thousand feet. Perhaps for a few minutes, now and again, one might have a crazy fit and beat up a train or something or other, but unauthorised low flying was a Court Martial offence, and all pilots had been repeatedly warned of that fact ever since they started flying at E.F.T.S.
We went off in Barred C, Abey’s own aircraft, and once we’d cleared the circuit, quite simply, it was a hundred feet maximum all the way. To begin with, I was shaken rigid, I’d never known anything quite like it; such sustained, hair-raising excitement, spiced with the occasional bad fright. Trees, villages, hills, hedges, they all streamed by; very little was said among the crew. When I’d collected my scattered wits and realised that this was second nature to all of them, I began to enjoy it a little more. We landed at Pershore, Rabbie said hello to one or two old friends, we lunched, took off again and came back at the same height, all the way. I was getting used to it by this time, but I still swallowed hard once or twice.
When we had landed and taxied in I came down the ladder after most of them. Rabbie and the crew were doing what we usually did then, taking off helmets, sorting out the navigation stuff, looking for some transport back to the Flights. As we lit cigarettes, and with his little secret smile, Rabbie said to me, “Enjoy it?”
“Rabbie,” I said to him, “excuse me for asking, but do you always do your cross-countries at nought feet?”
He gave his little sniggering laugh and looked down.
“Well, no,” he said softly, “but you have to let your hair down now and again.”
Some of it must have rubbed off on Sandy, too, except that he gave himself a bad fright. It really could have been quite a shaky do. Several of us were in ‘B’ Flight office one afternoon, doing nothing in particular. We had a couple of kites on, that night,
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but most of us had been stood down too late to go into G.Y. The phone rang and Abey answered it, his face, as usual, giving nothing away. He looked across at the blackboard as he listened and our eyes followed his, wondering.
“That’s right, E-Edward,” he said, and rang off.
The board said, ‘E’ – Sgt. Sanders – Local flying – airborne 1420.’
“We’d better go and see this,” Abey said calmly, straightening a few things on his desk, “Sandy may be in a bit of bother, it appears that he’s hit something south of here. He’s coming in now.”
We piled into the Flight van and hared out to dispersal. Just then, we saw ‘E’ land, quite a reasonable one, too. We breathed again. Then, as we waited, he taxied in and we could see that where the port half of his windscreen had been there was just a jagged hole. The air-intake on his port engine looked peculiar, too, it was half bunged up with something greyish. Sandy stopped in his dispersal and cut the engines. The ladder came down and he climbed down it a bit tentatively, looking decidedly sheepish when he saw the reception committee.
He and Abey talked rather quietly together while the crew climbed down and stood around, fiddling with their ‘chutes and navigation stuff, surreptitiously brushing what looked very like feathers from off themselves and trying to look unconcerned. Someone who had overheard the conversation muttered, “Been low-flying over the Wash and hit a bunch of seagulls.” We grinned at [sic] bit at that, once we knew they were all O.K. Abey’s poker face said nothing as he turned away from Sandy. Then someone nearby said, “Hey, Sandy, what’s wrong with your face?” and when we looked closely we could see a piece of pink seagull flesh sticking to his cheek. Sandy put a hand up to his face, then had a look at what he had collected. Slowly, his eyes rolled up, his knees buckled and he fell at our feet in a dead faint. Abey, good type that he was, hushed it all up.
Not long afterwards, a handful of our kites went as part of a smallish force to attack one of the north German ports. It might have been Emden. Rabbie was on it; I wasn’t. Next morning, after breakfast, Teddy put his head around the door of the ante-room, his eyes starting out of his thin, pale face.
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“Hey!” he exclaimed, “You want to have a look at Rabbie’s kite, he’s had a right shaky do!”
He tore off out, to tell someone else. Quickly, we made our way up to the Flights. ‘E’ was parked right outside ‘B’ Flight hangar, and most of the starboard mainplane out board of the engine just wasn’t there. The wing finished in a ragged, twisted jumble of geodetics. Obviously, they had had a very narrow escape indeed from a burst of flak. I climbed aboard. The wheel was tied over to port with a chunk of rope. I found Rabbie, poking idly about at this and that.
“Dodging the photographic bod,” he said with an apologetic grin. There was one of the photographic section erks outside now, fussing about with a camera, taking pictures of ‘E’. Rabbie looked paler than usual, thoughtful.
“How the hell did you manage to get it back like this?” I asked.
“Oh,” he said, with his nervous little snigger, “it wasn’t too b-bad, Sandy and I tied the wheel over a bit,” and nodded towards it.
The photo erk had gone and the sightseers had thinned out to two or three. I climbed out, chatting to Rabbie, but as we talked, I could see something different. There was something in his eyes that I’d never seen there before, a distant, almost other-worldly expression.
When I left the Squadron I lost touch with everyone, including, at times, myself. It was a long time afterwards, and I was talking to Eric on the telephone. We had reached the “Do you remember” and “What happened to” stage.
“By the way,” I asked him, “what ever happened to Rabbie?”
“Rabbie?” Eric replied, “Oh, I’m afraid he was shot down, you know.”
It had happened near the Dutch town of Beverwijk. Rabbie had finished up as a P.o.W with Eric and Abey, then had been repatriated on account of injuries to his hands, Eric said. Some of his crew had been killed.
In June 1989 a Dutch air-war historian took me to a beautifully-kept cemetery in the small town of Bergen, near Alkmaar, to visit the graves of a contemporary crew of ‘B’ Flight whom I had known.
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As I was turning to leave, my eye, quite by chance, noticed another name on a nearby tombstone, one which I immediately recognised, that of our Commanding Officer, who had gone missing while I was with the Squadron. Very near to him and to the others was yet another familiar name, that of Sandy.
Each name of all the aircrew, some 200 of them, who are buried there, is inscribed upon the bells of the local church, just across the way. One of the bells is perpetually silent, representing those who could not be identified. And one bell bears the inscription – “I sound for those who fell for freedom.”
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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[inserted] [underlined] Letter home [/underlined] [/inserted]
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[underlined] LETTER HOME [/underlined]
I wonder how many premonitions the average person has during his or her lifetime. It’s not the sort of topic which crops up very much in normal conversation, so I don’t think it can happen all that often. But when it does, and you believe you are being given a glimpse of the future, it can be quite weird and rather frightening. So far, I can recall three instances personally. One was at a very long interval of time, one was just the opposite, while the third - . That is what the letter home was about.
A week or two ago I was watching a debate from the House of Commons on television. There was a fairly sparse attendance, the subject became rather mundane and my attention, frankly, was beginning to wander. I looked along the green leather seats where the numerous absentees would normally have sat. Surely, I thought, surely seats like those had played some part in my life at some time?
Then I had it – they were the colour of the wooden-framed armchairs in the anteroom of the Mess at Binbrook. And I was immediately reminded of the first, and very strong, premonition I had had there, and was coping with, as I sat in one of those chairs, almost alone in the quiet room on that winter’s night, waiting to take off on a raid over Germany – and not expecting to come back.
Looking into my logbook now, I can narrow it down to one of four dates, but the actual date is of no importance. The premonition I had, though, was important, very important to me, very gradual, but extremely strong.
Abey, our Flight Commander in ‘B’ Flight was, in every sense of the word, a gentleman. He was then in charge of eight or ten crews of six men each which comprised ‘B’ Flight, and he had, among many other things, the responsibility of selecting crews under his command for any operations on any particular night, or day. Fortunately, the latter were scarce enough. Sometimes the choice was simple, if a maximum effort was called for by Command or Group, he simple sent everyone whose aircraft was serviceable. But sometimes
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he had to choose, and no-one envied him that, nor ever queried his choice. Querying things like that is something that happens in films, usually bad ones. If a “fresher” target was specified for the night’s operations then novice crews, who had done up to four of five ops were selected to go. If he had any choice at all, any crew due for leave went on leave, that same morning. He did his job well and fairly; he was a very considerate man.
On the day of which I write, our crew had done three trips, one of which had had an abrupt and near-catastrophic ending. A “fresher” was called for that night, so we were “on”, in S for Sugar. I have been wondering, recounting this, trying to remember what my reactions were during the time of an op, from the first knowledge that I was going, that night, to some unknown target, whose location and identity would not be known until briefing that afternoon, until the moment after one’s return, sitting down thankfully, tired and strained, into a chair, with a mug of coffee and rum in one hand and a cigarette in the other, for interrogation after the trip. When we would look around the room to see who was seated at the other tables with the Intelligence Officers, recounting their stories of the night’s experiences. However, although I readily confess that not a single trip went by when I was not to some extent frightened, quite often very frightened indeed, my first reaction on being told that I was among those who were on that night’s operations was one of intense excitement, of being immediately strung up to a very high pitch, reactions accelerated beyond their normal speed, like those of a sprinter on his starting blocks, alert for the sound of the pistol which will launch him on his rapid way.
We did our night flying test in S for Sugar as soon as we knew we were operating that night. It was winter, but not too bad a winter until then. This particular morning was cold and cloudy with a breeze from the south-west, the odd spot of rain in the wind, a typical winter’s morning in Lincolnshire, in fact. We flew around for a while to test that everything in the aircraft was working properly, except for the bomb-release mechanism and the guns. We weren’t bombed up yet, of course, and we would test the guns over the sea once we were on our way that night. I was still quite strung up with excitement
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and anticipation. None of us thought or said very much about the target, it was bound to be one of the French Channel ports, the docks, or course, and they were reckoned to be a piece of cake – straight in from the sea, open the bomb doors, press the tit and then home, James.
Briefing was at 1430 hours. By that time the weather wasn’t so good. The cloudbase was down, the wind was getting up and it was colder. At briefing there was ourselves and a handful of others. The target wasn’t one of the Channel ports, it was Wilhelmshaven, on the north German coast, not what we had expected, and quite a tough target. Weather prospects were moderate to fairly poor, with a front coming across which we would have to contend with, a risk of icing. It didn’t sound all that funny. But there it was.
The excitement of the morning had worn off and I was beginning to feel a bit deflated when I went back to the Mess after briefing. There was nothing to be done until teatime, and takeoff was fairly late, to catch the late moon. About five hours to kill. As I thought about it like that I realised that the expression could be taken more than one way, and I didn’t like one way very much. I went back to my room with the sense of deflation sliding quickly downwards towards a feeling of depressive foreboding. It was not as though the target was the toughest one in the book, tough enough by any standards, but no long stretch of enemy territory to be crossed there and back. Not exactly, as we had thought, the reasonably easy one we had expected, but not as bad as it might have been. Or so I tried to tell myself.
The foreboding grew inside me the longer I sat in my room. I was alone; Frank Coles, my room-mate, was Squadron Signals Leader and usually had things to do even when the rest of us were free. Out of the window I could see that the weather was steadily worsening, which added to my unease. I sat there, smoking, and trying to read. It was useless. I became more and more certain that this trip was the one I wasn’t coming back from, that we were going to be shot down. Once I had arrived at that realisation I found I was almost able to visualise it happening; I had already seen it happen to others nearby. But tonight it was going to happen to us, and that would be the end of me.
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There was nothing I could do about it; I had to go through with it, it had to be faced. The only practical thing I should now see to was to write a letter home, to my parents. The trouble was that I had very little idea what I wanted to say to them. For several reasons, I felt they hadn’t had the time to get to know very much about me, as an individual. But still, I felt I owed them this letter.
So I wrote to them. It was a very short letter, I remember, but its exact contents I cannot recall. I know I started in the conventional way – “by the time you read this you will know I have been reported missing,” and so on, and I know that after I had addressed the envelope I added, “To be forwarded only in the event of my failing to return from an operation.”
By the time I had stewed over this wretched little piece of writing it was teatime. There was still no sign of Frank. I was glad of some company in the Mess, although there weren’t all that many in, with only the freshers operating. So I had tea. It was usually a high tea if there were ops on. On this evening, as on many others, there were kippers, toast and tea. Surprisingly, I found I was very hungry. I think I was determined to enjoy what was going to be my last meal. So I savoured every morsel. As dusk fell I stretched myself out in front of the roaring fire in an armchair in the anteroom to await the time to go up to the Flights to get dressed for the trip. The armchair had wooden arms and sides with a green leather padded seat and back.
Every time the tannoy went with some commonplace announcement that someone was wanted at his Flight or Section I would jump a little and stiffen when the W.A.A.F. said, “Attention, please, attention, please,” and then slump down again when I heard that it wasn’t ops being scrubbed. There weren’t many people in the anteroom, and as the fireplace was at one end and I was very close to it, I couldn’t really see who was in the room with me. I was concentrating on absorbing, I think, every scrap of physical comfort I could from the heat of the fire, in what I now firmly believed to be the last few dwindling hours of my life. I could hear sleet or snow spitting as it dropped down the chimney on to the fire.
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I was seeing all sorts of strange pictures in the glowing coals. What they were I didn’t know, faces mostly, it seemed, but whose, I couldn’t distinguish. I started as one of the Mess waiters drew the big curtains across the blacked-out windows. Seeing me in battledress and roll-necked sweater and knowing that I was “on”, he gave me a half-smile as he piled some more coal on to the fire. The heat on my legs died as he did so.
“Is it still sleeting?” I asked him.
“Yes, sir,” he answered quietly, “still sleeting.”
Tactfully, he didn’t add “It’s a rotten night to be on ops,” or anything like that, but I knew that was what he was thinking. I nodded. He walked quietly away about his business and we left it at that. The wind was starting to get up quite a lot now. I could hear the slap of the sleet hitting the window like a wet cloth in the gusts. Surely they would scrub it? In an hour or so we were due to take off for Wilhelmshaven. I wondered what the weather was like over there, whether they were thinking that it was such a bad night that they were safe from R.A.F. raids. Then I thought about the letter. Was I being stupid? Was this all a lot of childish, hysterical nonsense, over-dramatising oneself? I still thought not; I was still convinced in my own mind.
Why did one write such things? I mused. It made no difference, really, to the outcome, someone would die, someone would be bereaved, that was all there was to it. I wondered how many people I knew actually wrote them, too. I suppose one reason for writing a last letter was to say a final goodbye to someone who was dear to one, but I think also it was to prove to oneself that one was ready and spiritually prepared to leave this life, to give up all those things regarded hitherto as important and to enter a new existence, to meet again one’s friends who were already there, like going from one room of a house to another via the dark passage which we call death. There was a Sergeant pilot in ‘B’ Flight, whom I knew quite well, Norman Spray. He left a letter for his mother. He went missing on a raid the following spring and his words of parting from his mother were so memorable that they found their way on to the page of a national newspaper which I happened to read. I am sure he was an exceptional person to have written in the way he did.
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The minutes ticked slowly by. Hypnotised by the heat from the fire and, I suppose, subconsciously withdrawing from what I believed were my final hours, I think I must have dozed for a few minutes. The tannoy announcement jerked me back to complete wakefulness. The W.A.A.F. said, “All night flying is cancelled, repeat, all night flying is cancelled.”
I immediately started to shiver uncontrollably, despite the fire’s heat. I moved my body around in the chair to try to stop the shakes, to try to hide them in case someone should see. I fidgeted around, stretched, blew my nose, then looked around the ante-room to see whether anyone was watching me. There were one or two ground staff Officers, and Teddy, Eric and Doug, the first two talking quietly over their beer, Doug reading a book, absently stroking his luxuriant ginger moustache with the back of his hand, an unconscious gesture which we all knew well. Outside, the wind moaned, the sleet was still tapping on the window, as though someone were asking quietly to be let in, perhaps like the messenger of Death itself. For not long afterwards, He would claim two of those three.
I took something of a grip on myself and pressed the bell at the side of the fireplace. When the steward came I ordered a beer. I could hardly believe this was happening. He was the man who had drawn the curtains earlier. He took my order, then hesitated and said, not looking directly at me, “You’ll not be sorry, sir, about the scrub, not on a night like this?”
“No, I’m not,” I said, “not on a night like this.”
The shakes had just about stopped by then. I went across to Eric and had a chat and another beer. Neither of us said much about the scrub, he hadn’t been on, anyhow, being in Abey’s crew. I certainly didn’t complain about it. Eventually I went up to my room and furtively tore up the letter into small pieces. I don’t think Frank noticed anything, if he guessed what I was doing he was too tactful to mention it. Then I undressed and got into bed. I was probably going to live for another twenty-four hours.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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[inserted] [underlined] Low-level [/underlined] [/inserted]
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[underlined] LOW-LEVEL [/underlined]
By the third day, those of us who were in the know were getting a little twitchy.
When you are briefed no less than three days in a row for the same target, when you are told it is to be a low-level night attack, when you learn that the whole thing is so hush-hush that only pilots and Observers are to know what the target is until after you are airborne, you only need one scrub to make you jump a bit at loud noises.
After the second briefing, when there was another scrub, and the following day, when there was a third identical briefing, you could have almost cut slices of the tension out of the air with a knife. To begin with, nothing in that city had ever been bombed before. When we knew where it was to be, we looked at each other with eyebrows raised. For very good reasons, we had to go in low and make one hundred per cent certain that we were going to hit the target when the Observer pressed the bomb-release. If we were not certain, then, ‘dummy run’ and round again. No trouble in that, we were told, there were no defences worth speaking of, only a couple of light flak guns at the airport some distance away. Just avoid that, and we shouldn’t have any bother.
So we were told at the briefings, all three of them. Did we believe it could possibly be true? We made ourselves believe it, I think, but it took some doing. Weren’t we used to the Channel Ports, to Kiel, to Essen and the Ruhr, where, in all conscience it was deadly enough at twenty thousand feet at night, let alone at – what was to be our bombing height? – two thousand five hundred feet, straight and level down a corridor of flares?
We would have liked to believe it, certainly. It sounded so – different, so well organised. 235 aircraft, which to us was one hell of a lot, including some Manchesters and four-engined Stirlings and Halifaxes. The first wave was going to drop flares, and keep dropping them so that the whole place would be well lit up, and once
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they'd done that and let go some incendiaries and cookies to start the ball rolling, then the second wave, which was us, would come in and stoke the place up with high explosive, as low as the safety height, 1,000 feet per 1,000 pounds of the heaviest bomb, permitted. If there hadn’t been some Manchesters carrying 2,000 pounders, in our wave, we would have been down around 1,000 feet, I suppose.
What was going through the minds of Mick, our wireless op. in S-Sugar, and Johnnie and Bill, the gunners, being completely in the dark as to what it was all about, I could only guess. But they accepted the situation stoically, and never asked one question. Except when we were clambering out of the transport at dispersal, really on our way, on the third evening, then Mick, who was a married man, said quietly to Cookie, “Is this a suicide effort, skip?” I believe he was recalling those two posthumous V.C.s our Squadron had won less then [sic] two years before, when we had lost five out of five Fairey Battles trying to stop the German advance through the Low Countries. Anyhow, Cookie shook his head.
“No, Mick, it’s not a suicide effort, at least not if I can help it!”
I’m afraid I couldn’t resist mischievously chipping in then, just as we were sorting ourselves out in the dusk of that early March evening under the shadow of S-Sugar’s nose in the quietness of our dispersal.
“You won’t be needing your oxygen mask, though,” I said.
Mick’s eyes widened. It was a bit cruel of me.
“You’re kidding, Harry, aren’t you?”
“No, pukka gen,” I laughed.
“Oh, bloody hell,” Mick said, his Brummy accent very pronounced.
Col, our Aussie Observer, came to the rescue.
“Don’t let it worry yer, Mick,” he said, “it’s going to be a piece of cake. Or so they say, anyhow.”
I was hoping this didn’t fall into the category of famous last words, as we climbed aboard. I found I was yawning quite a lot, while a muscle in my back was trying to do something all on its own.
We took up our positions in the kite. As co-pilot, mine was in the Wimpy’s astrodome until Cookie wanted me to fly it, or needed
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a hand with something up front. I checked the intercom point, saw we had a flare handy in case we had to do a bit of target-finding ourselves, and I groaned inwardly when I saw the stack of nickels, as our propaganda leaflets were known, which I was going to have to shove out over northern France. I took one out of the nearest bundle and saw a cartoon of a depraved and vicious-looking S.S. man, headed, ‘Personalité de l’ordre nouveau.’ I hoped I didn’t meet him later that night in some French gaol.
Faintly through my helmet I heard someone shout “Contact port!” and the engine shuddered into life with a roar, bluish flames spitting out of the exhausts. Then that tune, which remained obsessively with me throughout that night, and which, ever since, has evoked such vivid memories of it, started going through my head – ‘The last time I saw Paris’. Now we were rumbling around the perimeter track. The black shapes of the hangars, topped by their red obstruction lights, came and went. A little group of four or five W.A.A.F.s near the end of the runway waved to us as we passed them. A dazzling green light flashed three dots, our aircraft letter, at us, Cookie opened the throttles and the tail lifted. Then we were charging down the runway, the Drem lighting whipping past the wingtips as the Merlins’ roar rose to a howl at full throttle.
When we had turned on to the course for Reading, our first pinpoint, Cookie checked that everyone was O.K. Then he said, calmly over the intercom, “Now I can tell you where we’re going. It’s the Renault factory in Paris and it’s a low-level do, two to three thousand feet, and there’ll be bags of flares so we can bomb spot on.” There was stunned silence, then Johnnie said coolly, “Paris? That sounds like fun.”
The tension was released and we all laughed immoderately. Cookie told them about the lack of defences, how the crossing-in point had been carefully chosen at the mouth of the Somme, near Abbeville, and how we had to be very sure not to drop anything outside the target area, in case of casualties to the French population.
“I’ve always wanted to see the Eiffel Tower,” Mick said.
From the rear turret Bill, our Canadian gunner, drawled, “Don’t worry, at our height you’ll be able to count the bloody rivets!”
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The evening was clear as our home beacon slowly fell away behind us. It seemed strange to be cruising easily along at about five thousand feet; usually we climbed steadily all the way to whichever target we were bound for. There wasn’t much talk over the intercom, I think the boys were busy digesting the news about the target – and the bombing height. Then the moon came up, huge, brilliant and impersonal, a beautiful sight, away to port. Reading was, as always, easy to find, the railway station was like a dimly-lit flarepath, but it gave us a good pinpoint, however much it might have helped the Luftwaffe. We crossed the south coast dead on track and E.T.A. and headed out over the Channel. Cookie switched off the navigation lights. Shortly afterwards, Mick reported that he had switched off the I.F.F. We were on our own now.
In only a few minutes it seemed, Johnnie said, “Enemy coast ahead, skipper.” I peered forward from the astrodome. The pewter colour of the Channel showed a faint line of dirty white a few miles ahead of us. A few degrees to starboard some light flak was going up, and I reported it for Col to log.
“Probably Le Tréport”, I said, “they always put on a firework display for us.”
Johnnie said, “I can see a big estuary dead ahead.”
“O.K., Johnnie,” Col replied, “let’s know when we cross the coast. Next course one seven two magnetic, skip.”
Then Johnnie said calmly, “Anyone see an exhaust almost dead ahead, same height?”
I hurried forward to stand beside Cookie, and we both saw it at once, a point of orange light, straight ahead of us, and nastily at our own height.
“We’ll keep an eye on him,” Cookie said, “I don’t want to be formating [sic] on a goddam 109.”
“Nickels due out in five minutes, Harry,” Col told me.
“O.K., Col, thanks,”
I went aft again, to the flare chute. I heard Cookie say, “That fighter’s still going our way, we must be bloody close to him. I’m going to alter course a bit to try to lose him, then fly parallel to our proper track. Turning ten degrees starboard now, Col.”
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In the darkness of the fuselage I unlocked and extended the flare chute and started pushing the bundles of leaflets out. Once free of the aircraft the slipstream would release each bundle from its elastic band and spread them all over the countryside below. In a little while I heard Cookie say, “That bloody fighter’s still there, damn him to hell.”
Johnnie said, “We’re catching him up a bit, too, skipper.”
“That’s bloody impossible,” Cookie exclaimed angrily. He sounded rather exasperated.
I finished the nickelling, stuffed a couple into my pockets for souvenirs, brought the flare chute in and went forward again, past Mick, who gave me a thumbs-up, and Col. Johnnie had been quite right, that glowing point of red light was definitely larger now. The countryside under the rising moon was a leaden blur, now and again shot with a vein of silver as the moonlight reflected off a river.
“How long to the target, Col?” Cookie asked.
“E.T.A. eighteen minutes.”
The light was really getting quite a bit bigger now and we were still heading straight towards it. Suddenly, it all became clear to me.
“Hey, Cookie!” I exclaimed, “that’s no fighter exhaust, it’s the bloody target!”
There was a moment’s silence, then, “Jesus!” Cookie said in awe, “You could be right, Harry, you could just be right, at that. Check our course, Col, one seven two magnetic, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, that’s it skip, one seven two.”
Now we could see it. It was a fire on the ground, like a huge, glowing ember alone in the darkness. I went back to the astrodome. A pinpoint of white light hung above the glow, like a star, then a second, a third, a fourth. The flares were going down, dropped by the markers, for us. Cookie called out, “O.K., fellers, this looks like it, but we want to be good and sure where we bomb.” As we flew towards the blaze Johnnie said, “I can see the Seine, the fire’s right on it.”
Col said, “Part of the works is on a sort of banana-shaped island
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in the river, we’ve got to fly slap over it.”
We could see almost a dozen flares now, brilliant, whitish-yellow, and trailing rope-like white smoke as they slowly sank towards the ground, suspended from their parachutes. I could dimly see buildings below us. Cookie was turning S-Sugar gently to come in from the south-west; all the action was now on our port beam, then on our port bow.
Suddenly, away to starboard, two light flak guns pumped a few rounds of coloured tracer upwards, but there could have been no aircraft anywhere near them.
“Light flak away to starboard, skip,” I said, “only a few rounds, I think they’ve gone down to the stores to get some more ammo.”
“Just keep an eye on it, Harry.”
I was humming the words of that song to myself,
“The last time I saw Paris,
I saw her in the Spring….”
We were heading straight in now, flares on either side of our nose. The ground was almost invisible against the glare ahead from the fire and the lines of flares hanging in the sky. Col said, “Coming forward, skip.”
A few more rounds of tracer hosed up, away to starboard, but I didn’t even bother to report it. The lack of opposition near at hand was quite uncanny; we certainly weren’t used to this sort of thing. I was searching the sky for fighters, tracer, heavy flak-bursts, but there was nothing. Just the flares, dozens of them now. We were right among them, flying straight and level down a well-lit avenue.
I saw a dim shape loom up, dead ahead, growing rapidly and menacingly larger every second.
“Turn port, skip, quick!” I shouted.
Cookie yanked her nose round. A Hampden, bomb-doors open, hurtled past us on a reciprocal course, obviously completely disobeying briefing instructions as to the direction of the bombing run. He was almost close enough to read his identification letters.
“The stupid bastard,” said Cookie, “what the hell’s he doing?”
“Bomb doors open, skip,” Col said tightly.
“Bomb doors open, Col!”
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The inferno had vanished under our nose. There was a long silence while Col directed our track up to the target. I peered down, but I could only see a jumble of city buildings; I was trying to find the Arc de Triomphe.
“I’ve got that island coming up,” Col said, his excitement showing in his voice, “left, left, steady, right a bit, steady, steady – bombs gone!”
I felt the rumbling jolt as we dropped our load on the Renault factory.
“Bomb doors closed,” Cookie called.
“Oh, bloody marvellous!” Bill almost shouted from the rear turret, “spot on, Col, you got the first one bang on the island and the rest of the stick went right across the factory, I saw them bursting!”
Some distance ahead there was a sudden flash from the ground, a yellowish fire which turned redder and spread out, in a bend of the Seine.
“Some poor sod’s bought it, about one o’clock, five miles,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Cookie, I can see it. Don’t know what the hell he was doing up there.”
I looked back at the target, now a sea of flame beneath the brilliance of the unearthly light of the flares and the moon. A sudden eruption of flame shot up from the factory as I watched.
“Christ! Did you see that?” Bill called, “someone’s hit a goddam petrol tank or something.” We learned later that one of our Flight Commanders, Squadron Leader Jackson, had scored a direct hit on a large gas holder; it was that we had seen.
But the other fire, the burning kite on the ground in the bend of the river, drew our eyes to it as I took over the controls from Cookie.
“Poor sods,” Johnnie said quietly, “I hope they got out of it.”
We droned on over northern France, heading for Abbeville and home. But the excitements of the evening were not over yet. Half way to the French coast Johnnie reported a light flashing from the ground, to starboard of our track. I looked across between the nose and the mainplane and saw it, a square of yellow light, bravely flashing
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di-di-di-dah, “V for Victory”. Col came up to look.
“Good on yer, mate,” he said laconically. Those people down there in Beauvais were risking their lives by signalling to us their appreciation and encouragement, and I felt a strong bond had been forged between them, whoever they were, and us, in S-Sugar.
We flew on towards the mouth of the Somme. Bill said he could still see the target burning, many miles behind us now, and we were riding on the crest of a wave at the obvious success of the attack. We’d never known anything like it before and we hoped we would know many like it again. And as the Renault factory burned in Paris and the V’s flashed out from Beauvais I became aware that perhaps, after many disappointments, we were now beginning to win.
There was much elation as we flew homewards in “S”. We were a cheerful and buoyant crew, that night of all nights. I never dreamed that five short weeks hence I alone, of the six of us in the crew, would be the only one left alive.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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[inserted] [underlined] A boxful of broken china [/underlined] [/inserted]
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[underlined] A BOXFUL OF BROKEN CHINA [/underlined]
It had happened to Abey’s crew already (although I was not to know this until some years later), and no doubt it had happened to others whom I had known.
It was a common enough occurrence in those days, when we had simply to rely upon dead reckoning navigation with a bit of astro thrown in – there was nothing else to rely on, then – that at one time or another you would stray off track, fly unwittingly over a defended area, and get thoroughly well shot at. I use the words ‘thoroughly well’ advisedly, in the full knowledge that I shall be treading on many corns when I say that the German flak and searchlights left our own standing at the post when it came to accuracy and effectiveness. On several nights while at Binbrook, after our own air-raid sirens had sounded, we would troop out of the Mess to watch the progress of a raid on Hull and, so to speak, compare notes on the Luftwaffe’s reception with what we received, over Germany. We were all left in no doubt as to which target we would have chosen to be over, and would retire to the anteroom when the all-clear sounded, shaking our heads sadly and making rueful and derisive comments concerning the lack of effectiveness of our ack-ack gunners and searchlight crews compared to their German counterparts.
There were well-known hot spots over the other side, places whose names sent a slight chill up one’s spine when they were mentioned. Places such as Essen, or anywhere in the Ruhr, if it came to that, Hamburg, Heligoland, Sylt or Kiel. The list was a long one and the toll taken by those guns of unwitting tresspassers [sic] over their territory was heavy.
But no such reputation attached itself to a town called Lübeck, which we, among 2345 aircraft, were to attack one night late in March 1942.
“Lübeck?” we whispered to one another at briefing that day, “Lübeck? Never heard of it.”
We had it pointed out to us by our Intelligence Officer at the briefing, a bit beyond Kiel, a bit beyond Hamburg and between the two, almost on the Baltic coast. The defences, we were told, were
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believed to be negligible. Oh, yes? Well, we’d heard that about the Renault factory in Paris and that turned out to be true, so why shouldn’t this one be the same? Our confidence was very high after that Renault attack and this one was beginning to sound quite good. It was going to be largely a fire-raising raid. There were a lot of wooden buildings in the town, apparently. This really was beginning to sound very interesting, the chance to do to a German city what they had done on fifty-odd nights in succession to London. However, we were to carry an all-high explosive load in S for Sugar. We were warned, of course, of the proximity to our route of the defences, which we all knew about, of Kiel and Hamburg, but no-one really needed telling about those. We had experienced the Kiel defences twice before recently, once when 64 of us Wellingtons of 1 Group had put the battle-cruiser Gneisenau out of action for the rest of the war. I often wonder which of us it was that hit it, for I remember seeing some quite big explosions that night.
So, as far as the trip to Lübeck was concerned our crew, at least, were in a fairly happy mood. Looking back, I am sure that on that night, while not one of the six of us would have admitted it for fear of tempting whatever fates might be looking down upon us, we were each secretly thinking that this trip, this particular, and possibly only trip we would do, was going to go some way towards approaching the proverbial ‘piece of cake’. One could describe a trip in those terms while drinking, in a post-operational flood of euphoria, one’s mug of rum-laced coffee, waiting for interrogation, bacon and egg, and then bed, but no-one ever had the temerity to voice those words about any target before take-off. Not at any price. Fate was not there to be tempted in such a careless and impertinent manner.
The buoyant mood of the crew of S for Sugar was not in any way diminished when we gathered in B Flight hangar, all kitted up and ready – almost eager – to go. Mick, Johnnie and Col were standing near the crewroom door, looking amused about something, and with a fairly large cardboard carton half-hidden by their flying-booted legs. They had obviously said something to Cookie, now commissioned and doing his first op. as a P/O, for he was showing a lot of very white teeth in his amusement.
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“What’s going on?” I asked, puzzled. Such levity was very unusual before an op., we were invariably rather silent and very tense. Mick nodded towards the box.
“Present for the Jerries, from the Sergeants’ Mess,” he said in his Brummy accent, a broad grin splitting his face.
“What the hell have you got there?” I asked.
“Boxful of broken china,” Col said, “we’re going to chuck it out over the target. It’s all got the R.A.F. crest on, too.”
“Christ, you’re a mad lot of so-and-so’s,” I said through my laughter. Had I known it, I wasn’t going to laugh again for some time after that.
Recalling it now, although I cannot obviously tell where or how the navigation went wrong, it must have done so, somewhere along the line. Perhaps the reason was simply plain fatigue which led to our being off track and flying into trouble. Fatigue which, even as young, fit men, was inevitable when one realises that while the Lübeck raid took place on 28th March, this was our third operation in four nights. It almost alarms me now, to think of it as I write. We had taken off late on the evening of the 25th, the target being Essen, never any picnic. We had bombed what we believed to be Essen, but we had seen, remarked upon among ourselves at the time, and reported at our interrogation, that many aircraft seemed to be bombing much too far west, at Duisburg, we believed. But there were those among the Squadron aircrews who laughingly insisted that we had bombed too far east, perhaps Bochum, or even Dortmund. We still didn’t think so; we believed we had been in the right place and that the main force of the attack had hit Duisburg.
Apparently ‘Butch’ Harris thought so too, for after a few hours’ sleep we were awakened, fully awakened, with the news that ops were on again that night, the 26th. At briefing we learned the target. Essen again, time on target before midnight. It was a sticky trip, and we lost two of our crews, making three lost in the two nights. I have often wondered how many ex-aircrew are alive today who can say, “I was twice over Essen within twenty-four hours, and live to tell the tale.”
So, after the double attack on Essen, twenty-four hours’ rest
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and we were off to Lübeck, the piece-of-cake target compared to Essen, the wooden town which would burn like Hell itself. Provided we got there to see it, which, in the event, we didn’t.
It seemed that no sooner had we crossed the enemy coast, somewhere in Schleswig-Holstein, that a huge, bluish searchlight suddenly snapped on, and pinned us as surely as a dart hitting the bullseye. And not only one, but about a dozen followed. Then the flak started. Cookie was flying S for Sugar, I was in the astrodome. What use I was I don’t really know, except to try to see if there were any fighters about to attack us. Which was ridiculous, with all the flak they were throwing up at us. In any case, I couldn’t see a thing for the dazzling and horrifying glare of all those lights.
Cookie threw the Wellington about as though it were a Spitfire. The sensation was like that of being on a high-speed roller-coaster which had gone mad. And all the time, the intense, bluish flood of light which lit up the interior of the fuselage like day and the thumping of the flak-bursts around us. We had the sky all to ourselves, and, it seemed, all the defences of northern Germany were telling us that this time we weren’t going to make it back home. I was hanging on to whatever I could to stay standing upright in the astrodome, striving to see beyond the lights, to see whether there was a gap anywhere which Cookie could aim for. One second I would be pressed down on to the floor as he pulled out of a steep dive, the next, I would be hanging in mid-air, fighting against the negative ‘g’ and clutching wildly at the geodetics as he topped a climbing turn then put S for Sugar into another screaming dive. We carried one flare, heavy and cylindrical, four of five feet long. This suddenly left its stowage with the violent manoeuvres and hit me flush in the chest, almost knocking me to the floor. I managed to grab it before it damaged the aircraft and somehow secured it again.
I was, of course, frightened, but not uncontrollably so. As the shellbursts thudded around us my fear was climbing steadily, like the mercury in a thermometer on a hot day. I felt I was useless in the astrodome and longed to be doing something active. Quickly I unplugged my intercom and oxygen and clawed my way forward, to see if I could do anything to help Cookie, perhaps to take over
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if he was hit. Col was sitting with both hands clutching at the navigation table, looking rather sick and staring straight ahead of him, while Mick was fiddling with his radio, doing goodness knows what, I thought. I reached the cockpit, where Cookie was wrestling with the controls, his face shiny with sweat, his jaw tightly clamped. He glanced down at me as I plugged in my intercom. Dive, turn, climb, turn, dive – we were corkscrewing all over the sky, losing height all the time. Then Cookie snapped on his intercom switch.
“Col, get rid of the bloody bombs.”
Col came forward, his face looking ashen in the awesome light. A few seconds later I felt the bombs go with a thud. I thought, “I hope they kill somebody, destroy something down there, after what they’re doing to us.”
My fear had now risen to such a pitch it amounted almost to ecstasy.
“Get your chutes on everybody,” Cookie half-shouted over the intercom, “stand by to bale out.”
I obeyed, gladly, and wrenched open the escape hatch near to where I was standing. As I did so, a hole appeared in the aircraft’s fabric skin at my side and I wondered how much damage we had taken. It seemed it was merely a question of a second or two before we were hit and blown to pieces or set on fire, before I and the rest of the lads were torn apart by an exploding shell. They could not go on missing us for ever. I was impatient for the order to bale out; I felt I had had enough of this experience. At the same time I felt a deep sadness that I might be going to die without having led a complete life, a life in which I had not experienced many things. I had never known the love of a woman; I had never even had a steady girl friend.
Through the open escape hatch I could see the earth, a huge forest, stretching away under the moonlight. Still the lights and the flakbursts hammering at us, the smell of cordite. At that moment I came to accept that I was going to die, and at the same time, I now realise that I lost altogether, and for ever, the fear of death. Not the fear of pain, of great pain, which I still possess, but the fear of dying, of the flight into the unknown world of
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the hereafter. I am convinced that in those seconds, a corner of the veil was lifted and I was granted a glimpse of the boundless quietude of eternity. A great and mysterious calm flooded over me, enfolded me in a sensation of complete and deep peace. I now understand what the prayer means when it speaks of ‘the peace which passeth all understanding’. I could not then and cannot now understand it, but I am certain that at that moment, when I felt I was standing poised on the brink of death, the Almighty reached out His hand to me and I responded and touched it with mine. The memory of the incredible sensation of smoothly passing, as it were, through the fear barrier to another dimension, one of all-embracing calm, is one which has remained with me all my life.
Then suddenly it was quiet. Utter quiet – and darkness. We were through it, we had got away. There was the forest below us, and a stretch of water. The Baltic? It could only be. Cookie was almost drooping over the controls now, physically spent, nearly, I knew, at the point of exhaustion. He had saved all our lives.
“Take over, Harry, for Christ’s sake,” he said, and almost dropped out of the left-hand seat. I climbed quickly up into it and took the controls. Someone slammed shut the escape hatch and I inhaled deeply, very, very deeply, hardly able to believe we were still alive, still flying.
We were at a mere 2,0000 feet. Cautiously but quickly I tested the controls for movement and response. Satisfactory. Almost incredible, I thought.
“Col, where d’you reckon we are?” I asked.
“I know where we’ve been, right enough, Harry,” he said, “slap over Kiel.”
“Look, then, I think we’re a bit east or south-east of it now,” I told him, “I’ll steer three-one-five for the time being if you’ll give me a course to take us to that big point of land on the Danish North Sea Coast – you know the one I mean? Near Esbjerg?”
He knew it. He gave me the course and I started to climb; the more height we had, the better for us, in case of further trouble. We had lost thirteen thousand feet in all that evasive action but we needed to get at least some of it back. I had everyone make a check around the aircraft, but apart from a few minor holes we were intact, and there were no injuries of any sort. It seemed
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unbelievable that we could have survived the pounding we had taken with such negligible damage.
In the brilliant moonlight I saw the Danish coast creeping towards us, with the glint of the welcoming North Sea beyond. Esbjerg harbour was sliding beneath our nose; about eight ships were anchored there – and we hadn’t one single bomb left for them. I cursed aloud; they would have been sitting ducks for us. Not a shot was fired at us as I dived S for Sugar gently out to sea.
On the way back I discussed with Col where he thought we had been caught at first; he reckoned we had been trapped over Flensburg and then handed on, from cone to cone of searchlights until we were firmly into the Kiel defences, like a fly in a spider’s web. I was sure his assessment was correct as we had arrived over Esbjerg exactly as we had planned. I settled down to the long, thoughtful flight home. As usual, there was almost complete silence all the way. I am certain that there was not one among us who was not offering up a silent prayer of thanks.
After we had landed, switched off the engines and climbed stiffly down the ladder, we gathered in a group to congratulate Cookie. He was quite matter-of-fact about his marvellous effort. Then Mick said, in that edgy voice of his, “But listen here, Cookie, we used to have decent trips when you were a Sergeant, I hope all your trips as a P/O aren’t going to be like this one.”
He little knew that two short weeks and three trips later, he, Cookie and the rest of them, apart from me, would be dead, in unknown graves.
Then, inconsequentially, I remembered something.
“Hey! What happened to that boxful of china?” I asked.
The tension was easing.
“Oh, that?” Col said, “don’t worry, Harry, we’ll drop it on the blighters on our next trip, get our own back for tonight. Anyhow,” he added, “I’ll bet it’s the first time Kiel’s been dive-bombed by a single kite!”
I recall, with crystal clarity, waling down to interrogation. Col and I were together, he on my right, the others a few paces behind
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us. The moonlight was intensely bright and the hangars and the buildings of the Station stood out sharp and grey under its flood of cold light. There was not another soul to be seen and there was only the sound of our footsteps on the roads which led down from the hangars to the Headquarters buildings. I felt that I did not want to speak now, I did not want to break the spell of the feeling of that great “peace, from the wild heart of clamour” which was pervading my whole being, enfolding me in the purity of its white light, like that of the moon, shining down from God’s heaven on those whom he had spared that night, the night of the Lübeck raid.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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[inserted] [underlined] The end of Harry [/underlined] [/inserted]
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[underlined] THE END OF HARRY [/underlined]
“And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”
II Samuel 18, v.33.
“Crews were given a forecast of clear weather over Essen but cloud was met instead. The bombing force became scattered and suffered heavily from the Ruhr Flak defences….. 7 Wellingtons, 5 Hampdens, 1 Halifax, 1 Manchester lost ….”
Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt,
The Bomber Command War Diaries.
I open my log-book to refresh my memory of that trip. The entry lies there in red ink, under my fingers, as clear as the day on which it was written, as is now my recollection of the night, which comes flooding back to me.
The date. We were in M for Mother. “Operations, Cologne. Diesel engine factory attacked with 4000 lb. bomb. Moderate heavy flak and searchlights in area, mostly on west side of town. Good weather.” A pencilled note, “263 aircraft in attack; 179 Wellingtons, 44 Hampdens, 11 Manchesters, 29 Stirlings. A new record for a force to a single target. 4 Wellingtons and 1 Hampden lost.” We got off lightly that night. Sometimes, like one we did to Essen, it was ten per cent. It was the last night I ever flew as one of Cookie’s crew.
We approached Bonn from the north-west at about twenty thousand feet, into the brilliant light of the moon, dead ahead. The sight was fantastic, beyond all imagining. We were just off the edge of a solid sheet of strato-cumulus at about ten thousand feet, stretching as far south and east as the eye could see, lit brilliantly white by the moon, and with its north edge, nearest us, as well-defined as the edge of an immense shelf. Out of this layer there towered
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a huge cumulo-nimbus, rearing up, its north side jet black, like a gigantic tombstone, to about 15 or 16 thousand feet and casting a tremendous shadow over the Rhineland. To the north of this cloud-shelf it was crystal-clear, hundreds of stars shone brightly and the Rhine writhed and gleamed like a thread of silver below us. We turned north, to track along it, the fifteen or so miles to Cologne.
We could see it ahead. There were six or eight searchlight cones, with a dozen to twenty lights in each, probing, leaning, searching the sky for a victim to pin like a sliver moth in the beams. Every now and again the cones would re-form to close the inviting gaps between them. Each cone would split in half, the lights from one half leaning one way, and the other half the other way, to join the neighbouring cones, which performed the same manoeuvre, to form new cones. It was hideously fascinating, almost hypnotic, to watch. There would seem to be no way through. The dozens of red flashes of the flakbursts, seen distantly, grew larger and more menacing as we approached. Light flak was hosing up, strings of red, green, orange and white, and below everything, the fires, three or four smallish ones, growing larger all the time. Big, bright, slow flashes as cookies exploded among the flames. We were tensed up as we carried ours in. M-Mother had been specially modified to carry the two-ton bomb which protruded some way below the belly of the kite, the bomb-doors of which had been removed. A single hit from a piece of shrapnel on the cookie’s thin, exposed casing and – the mind shied away from it.
So we felt naked with this inches beneath us as we edged through the searchlights, to the right of the Rhine, weaving constantly through the flak, which we could hear, thumping around us over the roar of the engines. We could see it flashing close to us on all sides. In our imaginations the cookie was growing in size; they could hardly miss it, I thought. More fires started below, a stick of bombs rippled redly across the darkened city, then another. Some incendiaries went down in a yellow splash. Or was it an aircraft going in? Still, the slow, bright flashes of the cookies going down on to Cologne. Col went forward. We could hear his harsh breathing over the intercom as he directed us into the bombing run, guiding M-Mother so that the target slid down between the wires of the bomb-sight.
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“Bomb gone!”
The kite thumped upwards as the cookie left us on its journey of destruction. A tight turn to starboard and we were heading back the way we had come, towards the surrealist cloudscape, the enormous, abrupt shelf with the grotesque tower looming up out of it.
On the way back Cookie called me up on the intercom.
“Will you take over, Harry?”
Someone else said, “come on, Harry, get us home.”
It sounded like Mick, the wireless op. Up to now I had always got them home. I had never in my life been called “Harry” by anyone until we were crewed up at O.T.U. But from them I would have happily accepted any nickname they cared to bestow on me. So we flew on through the night, and I got them home.
When we landed I found the M.O. waiting. He was usually to be seen somewhere in the background. This time, he singled me out and detached me from the weary crews who were standing around, clutching their helmets, drinking their rum-laced coffee, rubbing their faces and eyes to clear their fatigue before they were interrogated.
“How did it go?”
“O.K., Doc.”
“Any trouble?”
“The trip, or me?”
“You.”
“No more than usual.”
“Take your pill?”
“Yes.”
“No effect?”
“No.”
“Take this one, now. Get some sleep and see me in the morning after breakfast.”
“O.K., Doc.”
He slapped my shoulder and trudged off. I went into interrogation with the crew, lighting another cigarette as I did so. Ewart Davies was the Int. Officer at our table. We liked him. He didn’t push us too hard for answers, he was quick, quiet, and had some idea what it was like. He knew we wanted our egg and bacon – and bed. As we walked towards the table, Johnnie, our front gunner, gave me a
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quizzical look. Mac, now our rear gunner since Tommy had gone into hospital, was telling him how he’d chucked some empty bottles out over the target to fox the searchlights; it had worked, too. Gunners were a special breed, and had a special bond.
Next morning, I saw the Doc. He made no bones about it and came straight to the point.
“Come in, sit down. Now then, your grounded until you can have a Medical Board, and as soon as you can pack you’re going on six days’ sick leave.”
I felt as though someone had slammed a brick on to the back of my head. I had flown and lived with my crew for eight months. We had shared much together; more than that perhaps. We had shared everything from hilarious evenings in the “Market” to staring into the face of imminent death, where our expectation of life seemed to be measured in seconds. They had become indispensable to me, we were part of one another, our relationship uniquely deep. We knew one another’s strengths, and weaknesses. Where there was a weakness, and there were few, strength was drawn from the others. Where there was strength, we each drew from it fortitude and endurance. We were closer to each other than brothers and there was an unspoken-of bond of the deepest affection between us all which was greater in its way than anything else in the world of human experience. I was stunned to think I was being parted from them; it was something I had never imagined could possibly happen. Our lives were so much intermingled and we were so completely unified and interdependent that I couldn’t imagine life without Cookie, Col, Mick, Johnnie and Mac.
In a daze, I collected some kit together, saw the Adj. about my travel warrant and found Johnnie. He, of all the crew, was closest to me. We would always sit next to one another on our sessions in the “Market”; he was very quiet, absolutely imperturbable, the personification of steadfastness and quiet courage. Somehow I got to Grimsby, then to Doncaster. On Doncaster station I was surprised to meet Ewart, who had so many times gently interrogated us. Normally so ebullient, he too was now subdued.
“Posted to Northern Ireland,” he said ruefully, in his harsh Welsh
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voice, “Hell’s bells, I never wanted to leave 1 Group, but you’ll be back, don’t you worry.”
Nearly three years later I was to meet him in Malaya. We had much to tell each other then. But now, we were both thoroughly depressed. He saw me on to my train, we shook hands, wished each other “Happy landings” and I looked back at him as the train pulled out, a slight figure, smoking the inevitable cigarette in its long holder, hunched miserably on the end of the platform.
The sick leave was anything but cheerful. I was tired, moody and tense. I developed some new and unpleasant symptoms which I kept to myself. I slept fitfully, ate little, snapped at my parents and listened avidly to every news bulleting on the radio for word of bomber operations. There was a raid on Hamburg, five missing. I drank in the local pub, alone, more than I was accustomed to, lay in bed late, walked alone on the cliffs where I used to go with Ivor on his leaves from the R.A.F. Three of my friends were on the verge of call-up for aircrew and Ivor and another school friend, Connie, had already gone to Stirling squadrons which were being formed and expanded. Of these five, four were soon to die, but there was no knowing that at the time. I looked out the first three and let them eagerly pick my brains, it gave me some relief to be able to talk flying and it filled some of the dreadful blanks in the leave.
I was working it all out. I would apply to go on to night fighters, to get some of my own back, or on to Coastal Command Whitleys. The morning before I was due back off leave I heard the B.B.C. news bulletin.
“Last night, strong forces of Bomber Command attacked the Krupp’s works in Essen and other targets in Western Germany and Occupied France. Much damage was done and large fires were caused. From all these operations sixteen of our aircraft failed to return.”
I found my hands were clenched tightly. Essen. That was an old enemy; we had been twice in and out of its massive and savage defences inside twenty-four hours not so long ago, and it had cost us three of our crews, including our Commanding Officer, in the process. To this day I cannot say or hear that evil name, Essen, without a shiver going down my spine.
My parents saw me off at the station. I was glad to go back;
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I felt like a fish out of water away from a bomber station, it was my life. I was anxious to hear the latest gen., and to get my medical board over and done with, to know what was to become of me. The local train crawled from Doncaster to Grimsby; I found transport there to take me to Binbrook.
My room-mate Johnny Stickings had crashed in January when one engine had failed on the way back from Wilhelmshaven, and he and the only other survivor had been taken to hospital. A little later, another Observer and a good friend, Eric, had gone missing with Abey, our Flight Commander, on Kiel, along with Teddy Bairstow and his crew. I had been moved in with Eric’s room-mate Frank, to keep up our morale, I supposed.
I walked along the empty corridor in the Mess. Someone came out of the ante-room and passed me, a pilot whom I didn’t know. I wondered about him, who he was, who he was replacing. We said “hello”. I went up the stairs and turned left to my room. I opened the door and there was Frank, with his fresh complexion and almost Grecian good looks, putting away his laundry.
“Hiya, Frank,” I said, “what’s the gen?”
“Oh, hello, Harry,” he replied, looking up, “how do you feel? Did you have a good leave?”
“So-so,” I said, “but what’s the gen?”
He cleared his throat.
“Look, Harry,” he said, “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you. Cookie, your crew, they went missing on Essen two nights ago.”
“Oh, Christ, Frank, no,” I said, dropping on to my bed, “Oh, God, they didn’t. Is there any news of them?”
He shook his head slowly.
“No, I’m afraid not. They went to Hamburg the other night and got back O.K. with everybody else, then they were on Essen and they didn’t come back, I’m afraid. They were in H-Harry, there was nothing heard from them after they took off. I’m terribly sorry.”
I put my head down into my hands; I was beyond speech. I heard Frank go out of the room very quietly. I thought, “I’ve let them down. I’ve failed them completely. I wasn’t with them to get them back home this one time when they needed me more than ever. I wish
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to God I had gone with them.”
And I wondered who had taken my place. Whoever you were, I thought, I would have you heavy on my conscience for the rest of my life, I would forever walk with your ghost at my side. I knew it was the end of something unique and very wonderful in my life, as though a great light had suddenly failed. It was the end of being called “Harry”. To this day I have never permitted anyone else to call me by that name, their name for me. H-Harry was gone for ever, taking them all with it to their eternity, and their own Harry had died with it, and with them.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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[inserted] [underlined] Silver spoon boy [/underlined] [/inserted]
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[underlined] SILVER SPOON BOY [/underlined]
It’s not a part of the city I’m in very often, but a short while ago, after a lunch engagement, I found myself passing the narrow-fronted shop in the busy street which once was the cafe where I had met him for the last time.
I stopped for a minute or so, oblivious to the intense, grim-faced pedestrians brushing past me, and to the traffic as it roared by. And I remembered that day more clearly, it seemed to me, for in that area, while the occupants of the shops and offices have obviously changed many times, the upper facades of the Victorian buildings have remained virtually unaltered – as have my recollections of Jack.
So indeed has the mystery surrounding him, how he came to be in the R.A.F., what happened to him then, and why the man who might have answered my questions would not do so.
There seems to have been no actual beginning to our friendship, it was simply one of those things which developed out of nothing. Since we were merely children at the time I suppose we must have seen each other in the road, probably each of us with a parent, perhaps eventually spoken a few casual words, but looking back now I cannot put any sort of a date upon it. I suppose friendships are like that. My memories of the house we lived in then are intermingled, woven like the coloured threads of a tapestry, with the recollections of the lads I knew at that time – of Alan, of Norman and Peter, and of Jack himself, who lived nearest to me of them all.
He was an only child of quite well-to-do parents. His father was a tall, big-boned, genial man, fond of country pursuits. Jack’s mother was a pleasantly relaxed, comfortably built lady with shrewd eyes, a good amateur pianist who also had rather a fine contralto voice. Jack was very much the son of his parents, cheerful, almost jaunty in manner, generous to a degree and quite undemanding – this last perhaps because he had most things that an only child of fairly well-off parents could wish for. But although he was a boy whom I had heard described, somewhat jealously perhaps, as having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he was not by any means a spoiled child.
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Like most other boys of my age I lived an intensely active life, physically in top gear from morning till night. But there appeared to be a shadow across Jack’s life. He was frequently absent from school, and on those occasions when I called at his house I would be told by his mother that he was in bed, unwell. These vague illnesses were, more often than not, described as ‘overgrowing his strength’, but eventually there were hints of a weak heart. He began to be excused games at school and their doctor’s car appeared fairly regularly at their front door. Yet he was never anything else but buoyant and cheerful and I never remember seeing him look or behave very differently from a normal, healthy lad. My own parents, at those times when I told them that Jack was poorly, would give each other meaning looks and would now and again make veiled and half-audible remarks about some doctors who knew when they were on to a good thing. These bouts of malaise never seemed to alter in their frequency, and it became accepted, gradually but inevitably, in the small coterie of friends I had as a young teenager, that Jack was perhaps a little less fit than the rest of us.
Jack’s father, as I have mentioned,. Was interested in country life, and in particular, in shooting; he owned a beautiful and gentle-natured black Labrador, by name Prince. Jack’s uncle was a farmer near to the small country town of B - , some sixty miles away, and close to some good shooting. It was only natural that Jack’s family should spend most of their holidays there. One summer it happened that my parents were going through a period of considerable financial stringency; there had never been any luxuries in my life, but now, even the necessities were scarce.
Then Jack’s father, perhaps being aware of our circumstances, and being the generous man he was, casually asked me if I would like to spend two weeks of the summer holidays with them on the farm. My parents readily and gratefully agreed; I was in the seventh heaven of delight. It was an idyllic fortnight, the car drive there and back were memorable adventures enough, to me, at any rate, without anything further. We had the run of the marginal land on which Jack’s uncle grazed his stock, the scenery was very agreeable, there was impromptu cricket to be played, drives in the country and to
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wonderful, deserted beaches nearby. The discordant note, as far as I was concerned at any rate, was sounded by the early-morning shoot which I attended, crouched unhappily in the butts near the sea’s edge in the half-light of a chilly dawn, while Jack’s father blazed away at the beautiful and harmless ducks and we regaled ourselves with bottles of cold tea, which were regarded by the others, at least, as something of both ritual and delicacy. A little while ago I found, at the bottom of a drawer, a photograph, startlingly clear, of Jack and me standing against a haystack during that holiday, two gawky youths grinning into the camera, with me holding Jack’s cricket bat. I was to visit the farm once again.
When the war came, the little crowd of my friends and I, apart from Jack, went our various ways. It is difficult now to place the events of that time in their correct sequence, the constantly recurring pain of many recollections has tended to blur the outlines, but never to soften the impacts of those tragic times. The two events connected with Jack, I am now astonished to realise, were separated by almost three years of war – in my mind they seemed to be telescoped together, their perspective foreshortened by the passage of time.
Strangely enough, my own family’s ancestors had some connections with B - , and my father, who was always much more interested in the family tree than I ever was, had paid one or two visits to the place over the years to search the parish register for reference to our name and to contemplate the inscriptions on our forebears’ tombstones in the shady churchyard on the side of the hill.
My father was quite obviously under considerable stress during the war; the office where he worked was constantly understaffed as more and more men were called up into the Forces. There were also frequent Air Raid Precautions duties which he could not neglect, nor would ever have dreamed of doing so. In addition, my mother’s health was beginning to fail, and they had two sons in the forces, one of whom was engaged in duties where the chances of eventual survival were rated as about two in five.
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Early in 1942 my own crew, in my absence on sick leave, were reported missing on a raid over the Ruhr. I think my parents must have noticed the effect this had upon me, for they decided that on my next leave we could go to B – for a few days, staying at the hotel in the small market place, if I was agreeable. I thanked them, and thought it might be a good idea. It was late spring when we went, with blue and white quiet skies and sunlight pleasantly shining on the grey stone buildings. The hotel was almost empty; B - , while on the main road, was also between two county-towns which drew the local people like the twin poles of a magnet.
Released from operational flying I embarked upon what was to be several months of drinking far more than was good for me, in an attempt to dull the agony of mind and self-recrimination I was undergoing. This must have been painfully apparent to my parents, and must have caused them considerable heartache, but – and I shall always be grateful to their memories for this – they uttered no word of reproach.
How we spent our time there I cannot remember, perhaps I was in a constant alcoholic haze. The only event I can recall with any clarity was the afternoon we visited Jack’s uncle’s farm and I introduced my parents to Mr. Brown, his wife and his two daughters. I remember it as having the appearance and atmosphere of a scene in a stage play. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion, gestures seemed limp and exaggerated and we sat like figures in a tableau against the backdrop of the scarcely-remembered living room of the farmhouse, small-windowed, lit by an oil-lamp, a heavy, dark red tasselled tablecloth draped over the massive dining table. Outside, I could see the shelter-belt of firs waving lazily in the breeze, hypnotic in their motion. My parents and the Brown family sat stiffly in their best clothes. What they talked about, I have no recollection; I said not more than perhaps a dozen words. I remember that one of Jack’s cousins kept looking curiously in my direction from time to time. Jack, now working in a branch of the same bank as his father, was, naturally, mentioned. I hadn’t seen him for quite some time, but someone said he would like to meet me when we went back home, before I returned to my unit.
The arrangements were made. My parents and I got off the bus at its city terminus in the Haymarket. They would make their way to the railway station and so home, I would join them later, to pack my kit at the end of my leave, as that day was my last.
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I remember feeling released and lighter in spirit when I left them, and guilty because I did so, but the sense of freedom was pleasant after a week when it had been necessary to cork down my feelings tightly and be on my best behaviour. Yet I almost dreaded going back to my unit, a Bomber Group Headquarters, where I had been given a sinecure of a job while I waited for a medical board, for the news that I might receive of the fate of the crew of H-Harry. As I walked through the grey city streets it seemed as though I were treading the razor-edged ridge of a mountain in a high wind.
We had arranged to meet at a little cafe on one of the main streets. Jack was standing outside, smartly dressed, tall, looking well and, as usual, cheerful. We shook hands.
“Hello,” he said, “nice to see you again. How are you?”
I lit a cigarette as we walked into the quiet cafe.
“So-so,” I replied, “a lot has happened since I saw you last.”
We sat at a small table, ordered coffee and biscuits. I looked at him and said, “You’ll have heard about my crew, have you?”
He looked down at his cup and nodded. I thought he appeared more adult than I’d ever noticed before.
“Yes,” he replied, “I had heard. How do I tell you how sorry I am?”
“Don’t try,” I said, “it’s O.K., I know.”
He asked, uncomfortably, “Do you think they could be prisoners?”
“I don’t know; it’s nearly two months now, no-one’s heard anything?”
We sat silently for a few minutes, traffic noise falling on our ears. Then he said tentatively, looking at the wings on my chest, “Are you finished flying, for good, I mean?”
I shrugged.
“Not as far as I know. I’ve got six months off then I’ll be having another medical board and we’ll see what they say then. I’ll probably go back on ops, I should think; after all, I’ve only done half a tour, I think I owe somebody something.”
“Do you think they’ll send you back again?” he asked, surprised.
“Oh, yes, they can do anything, you know,” I said, “there’s a bloke on the Squadron who’s completely flak-happy and he’s still operating.”
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He looked at me.
“What do you mean, ‘flak-happy’?”
“He’s round the bend,” I said shortly, “got the twitch, call it what you like.”
Jack shook his head wonderingly.
“But they let him go on flying?”
“Sure they do; he’s a damn good gunner and an experienced one, too. He’s not afraid of man or beast. Of course,“ I said, “there is another side to it – he could be dead by now. It’s a while since I saw him, and anything could have happened in that time. It depends on the targets you get. It depends on a hell of a lot of things.”
Jack swallowed hard.
I asked him if he’d seen anything of Alan or Peter.
“They’ve both volunteered for aircrew,” he said. I thought he sounded a bit wistful and I could tell what he was thinking.
“Listen,” I said firmly, “when I went and stuck my neck out I didn’t do it as a dare to the rest of you, you know, there are other ways of getting yourselves into trouble. And don’t you go losing any sleep about not being fit, it’s not your fault, and when the time comes you’ll be shoved into something which will be useful to the war effort, I’ve no doubt at all.”
He looked at my wings again.
“I hope so,” he replied, “it’s not a great deal of fun feeling left out of things.”
We finished our coffee. He insisted on paying for them, saying that he was a rich war-profiteer. He was probably getting a lot less than me, but it was no use arguing, I didn’t have a lot of time, and neither did he. I suddenly thought of that and said to him, “Anyhow, what are you doing here, skiving off during working hours? Shouldn’t you be drawing up balance sheets or something?”
He looked at me a bit sheepishly, squinting into the sunshine as we stood on the pavement with the pedestrians hurrying by around us.
“Oh, I asked the Manager for an hour off,” he said airily, “told him I was meeting a pilot on leave from the R.A.F. He said to tell you to drop one for him.”
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We shook hands.
“Take care of yourself,” he said, “and I hope you’ll have some good news soon.”
“Thanks, so do I.” I could hear the pessimism in my own voice. I looked at my watch. “Well, it’s been great seeing you; until next time, then, so long, Jack.”
It was some time later when I learned, with feelings of complete astonishment, almost disbelief, that not only was Jack now in the R.A.F., but that he had been accepted for aircrew training. I had to read my parents’ letter several times before I could begin to grasp what they were telling me.
Many months went by. I had been stationed at Tuddenham, in Suffolk, for a year, watching the almost nightly operations of, originally, the Squadron’s Stirlings, then their Lancasters; by day seeing the vast fleets of American Fortresses and Liberators forming up overhead to carry on the round-the-clock bombing of German cities. Late on a February afternoon I stepped out of the Tuddenham mail van, on which I had hitched a lift, at the aerodrome gates of Mildenhall, our parent station. The daylight was already fading and there was comparative silence; the Fortresses were back at their East Anglian bases and our Lancasters were waiting, poised to go that night.
I stood watching the roadway which led up to the barrier at the guardroom, chatting to the Service Policeman on duty. I recognised J – ‘s walk when she was far away. The S.P., who knew her, wished us a good leave, saluted and turned away. J – and I had met and worked together in the Operations Room of a bomber station in east Yorkshire, around the time of the Battle of Hamburg. But after a blissful few months I had been posted to Tuddenham, then, quite amazingly, following a bleak interval without her, she had been posted to the Base Operations Room at Mildenhall, a small handful of miles away. Everyone who knew us thought that one or other of us had somehow wangled things; in point of fact it was simply unbelievably good luck. In addition, it was a considerable feather in her cap as Mildenhall was one of the key stations in Bomber Command.
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Consequently, we saw one another several times a week when she, of course, should have been catching up on her sleep after long and hectic hours of night duty when operations were on. Now we were going on leave together; three days at my home then three at hers.
A lorry, known to all as the Liberty Wagon, took us to the nearest railway station at Shippea Hill, along with a dozen or so others, then we caught a local train to Ely. We had a meal there and took the overnight train home. We arrived before breakfast the following morning. When we had freshened up and had breakfast, my mother, who looked paler and more drawn than when I had last seen her three months before, looked at me across the table and said quietly, “I hardly know how to tell you this; it’s so awful, when you and J – have just started your leave.”
I couldn’t guess what was coming, but I steeled myself for whatever it might be.
“What is it, mother?”
She bit her lip then said, eyes averted, “I’m afraid it’s bad news, it’s Jack, he was killed two days ago.”
I felt my mouth open and close, then I reached slowly for a cigarette.
“But – was he on ops? I didn’t know he’d got as far as that, I thought he was still training.”
Mother nodded.
“As far as I know, he was killed training, night flying.”
She paused.
“You will go and see his parents, won’t you? They’re terribly upset, naturally.”
“Of course I’ll go,” I said, “of course I will.”
I went to see them that afternoon, after I had screwed up my courage to the limit for what I knew would be an ordeal for all of us. The tension in their house was almost tangible, their grief hung on the air like a cloud. They knew little about it except that Jack was dead; he had been a Navigator on Wellingtons at an Operational Training Unit in the Midlands whose name, Husband’s Bosworth, rang a bell with me when they told me. His pilot was also from our area;
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they had flown into a hill near a village in Northamptonshire. His funeral was here, tomorrow, would I come? It was unthinkable, of course, that I would not. His father paced the room incessantly, never meeting my eyes, Jack’s mother, her face bloated with weeping, tore at a handkerchief in her deep armchair in the corner. Their beautiful piano, black and shining, would remain unplayed for a long time, I knew, and her voice, which I had so often heard in Schumann lieder, would be silent now. The dog lay across the hearthrug, his eyes following first one speaker, then the other; I felt he knew what had happened to his beloved young master.
I met the cortege at the massive stone and iron gateway of the cemetery the following afternoon. The late winter sun was sinking and it was bitterly cold under the fading colour of an almost cloudless sky. I was the only non-relation there; as the hearse came slowly up to the gates through an avenue of trees I gave it the finest salute I had ever given to any senior officer. When I went home in the deepening dusk J – was alone in the living room, sitting in the firelight. I kissed her gently, holding her to me.
That evening, as I felt I must, I went to see Jack’s parents again. They were sitting alone, quieter than before, and with the calm of resignation beginning to possess them. Prince’s tail thumped the hearthrug twice as I walked into the room, his eyebrows lifted and fell as he looked at me, his chin across his folded paws. Jack’s photograph smiled cheerfully down from the mantelpiece. I told them I had come to say au revoir. His father thanked me for being there that afternoon, then, “Do you think you could possibly do something for us?”
“If I can, of course,” I said, glad to be moving on to practicalities.
“You know Jack was stationed at Husband’s Bosworth when – it happened, don’t you?”
“I didn’t know at the time,” I said, a bit uncomfortably, thinking that I should have done. We had seldom written to one another; one didn’t have much time nor the mental quietude in Bomber Command to do very much in the way of letter-writing, except to one’s girlfriend.
He went on.
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“Do you know anyone there? In your job I thought perhaps you might know someone who could tell us just what happened. We know so little, just what his C.O.’s letter told us, not very much at all. But if you could, perhaps, speak to someone?”
Jack’s mother dabbed at her eyes.
“Actually, I do know someone there, as it happens,” I said, “a chap I worked with at Tuddenham until recently was posted there as Adjutant; I’m sure he’ll be able to tell me something.”
He brightened slightly.
“That’s good,” he said, “really quite a coincidence. What sort of chap is he? You really think he would be able to help?”
I described George, avuncular, knowledgeable, but on occasions fiery and quite outspoken.
“I’ll phone him as soon as I can after I get back to Tuddenham, and get in touch with you.”
“I’ll be glad to pay any expense involved, if there is any,” he said, “and don’t get yourself into trouble on our account, will you? But – we would like to know something, of course.”
“Don’t worry about that,” I told him, “there’ll be no expense, and no trouble at all.”
I said goodbye to them. I was not to know that I would never see them again.
The first day back from leave I rang George quite confidently. He sounded his usual self, brisk, affable as ever, but perhaps slightly fussed. Had he trodden on a few toes already, I wondered? After the conventional greetings were over, I came to the point.
“George, I’ll tell you why I’m ringing you – it’s about a crash you had a week or so ago, the pilot was Sergeant - - . Well, I was a friend of the Navigator. I’ve just come back from his funeral at home and his parents were wondering If you could give them, through me, any further details of how it happened.”
There was an abrupt and surprising change in his manner.
“Is that why you rang me? To ask me that? I can’t tell them any more than was in the letter to them. I’m surprised at them asking you to do this.”
“O.K., then, George,” I said calmly, “if that’s how it is then I’m very sorry to have bothered you.”
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I rang off. I was extremely puzzled and quite troubled by his unexpected reaction; we had always been, and still are, good friends and our working relationship was never anything less than co-operative and mutually accommodating. That evening I wrote to Jack’s father, telling him briefly that I had been unable to obtain any further facts about the crash. He did not reply.
For various reasons, and to my lasting shame, I did not visit the graves of Jack, and of Peter, Connie and Roly, another classmate, all Bomber Command aircrew casualties, for several years. But after having stood in that busy street, gazing at what had been the cafe, and remembering Jack and I as we had been then, both of us in the prime of youth, an inner compulsion drove me to do so. I could find the graves of all of those who were buried there except one – Jack. I visited and revisited the place where I thought I had stood at his funeral, searching the tombstones round about for his name, but to no avail. I had heard that his parents had moved to B – on Mr. Henderson’s retirement and I was almost on the point of becoming convinced that they had had Jack re-interred there.
Eventually, after several fruitless searches, and as a last resort, I decided to go to the cemetery office to make enquiries. In a few minutes I had found it, about a hundred yards away from the place where I had been looking. There was a solid, low grey headstone with a substantial curb. There was the name, Flying Officer John Henderson, ‘killed in a flying accident 3rd February 1945.’ So very near to the end of the war, I thought sadly. The lettering was now so faded as to be almost illegible. Underneath his name were those of both his parents. The grave itself was completely bare, not a flower, not a blade of grass, not even a weed, only the cold, wet earth under the leaden sky.
I stood for several minutes in the silence, remembering them, but especially remembering Jack, incidents from our friendship returning vividly to mind. And I wondered about many things, the questions now long unanswered. Was he really the semi-invalid he had always been made out to be? How then had he passed his aircrew medical? Why did they crash that night? Had he – God forbid – made a navigational
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error? Why had George been so brusque and annoyed at my question?
There were no answers to be found in the rustling of the cold breeze among the fallen, russet leaves, and I thought that there never would be, that I would never know. But worse, I wondered would there be anyone left to remember Jack when I was no longer able to remember, or would his name disappear completely, both from his gravestone and from the memories of everyone who might have known him on earth?
I took the Remembrance Day poppy out of my lapel and pressed it into the sodden, bare earth below his name. Then on that grey afternoon I spoke a few words to him, very quietly, but knowing that somewhere, he would hear. And as the winter dusk was falling I turned away.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
I did not expect that I should be writing a sequel to this, but a sequel there is, one long-delayed…
Obviously, I have thought very many times about Jack since his fatal crash and I have visited his grave very many times also. But rarely, if ever, have I dreamed about him. Until a few nights ago, that is, more than fifty-one years since he was killed. It was a dream which was so vivid and so poignant – that realisation was with me even as I was dreaming it – that it has stayed with me, haunted me and disturbed me ever since the early morning when, in this heartbreaking dream, I recognised Jack, from a great distance, walking towards me on a riverside path. There were iron railings on my right, a river was nearby, at my left hand, the path curving slightly from my left to the right. For some reason I was quite sure I was on the riverside at Stratford-upon-Avon. I have been there twice, once during the war, with Connie and Shep, when we were at Moreton-in-the-Marsh together, and once on a brief visit when I was on holiday at Malvern. Yes, this was Stratford, I was positive. And I knew it was Jack approaching, I could distinguish his
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features, his walk, his tall, upright figure. He was as I never saw him in life, in uniform, his peaked cap at a slight angle on his head, the Navigator’s half-wing above his breast pocket. There he was, coming briskly towards me, smiling, the Jack I knew of old. And he was with a girl. Her features I could not distinguish as she approached me with him; they were walking close together, arm in arm. Even in my dream I could feel a lump in my throat as I watched them. They stopped in front of me. I heard Jack say, “This is Janet”, and I could see now that she was smiling, a radiant, pure smile, full of utter delight and joy.
They turned together and walked slowly in the direction that I was going. It had turned slightly misty. I was fascinated by Jack’s girl Janet, wondering what sort of person she was; I could not take my eyes off her. She wore a small, round hat of the pillbox type, and a brownish, quite long, heavy coat. Her lips were full, I saw, and pink; here eyes shone with a wonderful radiance, such as I have rarely seen. I had the overwhelming sensation of their happiness with one another. Then the girl, Janet, looked at me directly, her arm still through Jack’s, and gave me her wonderful smile, so full of bliss.
“We are going to be married,” she said, “next year.”
At that moment she looked as lovely as anyone I have ever seen. But immediately, as though I had been submerged by a wave from the sea, I felt an immense sorrow engulf me, because, as I awoke slowly, with the vision of that lovely, loving couple in my brain, even in my dream I knew that their marriage could never, never be. For Jack was to die; Jack was dead.
It is a dream I shall have in my mind until the day of my own death, until Jack and I meet once more and – God alone knows whether there ever was a girl named Janet – perhaps I might meet that girl who I dreamed was going to marry my oldest and closest friend, The Silver Spoon Boy, the boy who gave everything he ever possessed. ‘Too full already is the grave, Of fellows who were young and brave, And died because they were.’
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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[inserted] [underlined] Intermezzo [/underlined] [/inserted]
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[underlined] INTERMEZZO [/underlined]
“Sign here? And here? That it? O.K., Sergeant. Now, what have I signed for? Oh, I see, one brand-new Wimpy in mint condition with full certificate of airworthiness and rarin’ to go. HD 966, isn’t it? Where do I find her? That it, over there by the dispersal hut? O.K., thanks. Probably be back tomorrow for another. Cheerio.”
“Here we are, on this beautiful morning. HD 966. Plenty of juice, Corporal? Well, I’m not going as far as John o’ Groats, thanks, just to Moreton-in-the-Marsh. Pitot head cover off? Fine.”
“There’s only me. Up the ladder. God, it’s hot in here. Haul the ladder up, stow it next to the bomb-sight. Slam the escape-hatch door. Stamp it down firmly, to be sure. Hell, the heat. Slide open the windows, that’s better. Shove my chute into the stowage. Into the driver’s seat, check brakes on. Push and pull the controls about to test for full movement. Shove the rudder to and fro with my feet. All free. Fine. Check the petrol gauges. Enough.”
“Undercart lever down and locked. Flaps neutral. Bomb doors closed. Switch on the undercart lights. There we are, three greens. Undercart warning horn? God, that’s loud. Never mind. Main petrol cock on, balance cock down.”
“Now. Throttles closed, boost override normal, mixture rich, pitch levers fully fine, superchargers medium. O.K. So – ignition on, open throttle an inch. There we are. Now, yell out of the window. Contact port! Press the starter button. That’s it, got her! Hell! What a row, wish I’d brought my helmet after all. Shut the window. No, damn, not yet. Contact starboard! Press the button. There she goes. Come on, come on. Now shut the window. It’s a bit cooler now, anyhow.”
“Oil pressure O.K., all temperatures O.K. So, what’re you waiting for? Run them up. Port engine first. What a bloody noise. Pitch controls O.K., revs down and up again. Give her plus four boost. This is going to be damn noisy. Here goes. Throttle back, boost override in. Now for it. Open right up. Hell, it’s awful. Plus
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nine and threequarters. Fair enough. Throttle back smoothly. Not too quick. Override out. Now the starboard engine. Stick my fingers in that ear. Pitch control O.K. Plus four boost. Mag drop? ……”
“All O.K., then. Brake pressure? Right up. Try each wheel. O.K. So it should be, too, brand new kite. There goes the Anson with those A.T.A. girls. God, shook me when that blonde brought the Halifax in. Cool as you please, all five foot nothing of her. Damn good landing, too. Smashing blonde, like to see her again. Like to – hey, steady on! Back to business. Test the flaps. Right down. Now up again. Fine. Where’s he taken the starter trolley? Oh. Over there, well away from me. See they haven’t got that bloody Whitley moved yet. Bit off-putting, that, finding a pranged Whitley over a hump in the runway, just after you’ve landed. Plenty of room, though, at least it’s on the grass. Well, come on, let’s get back to Moreton, might have half a can if there’s no more flying today.”
“Chocks away. Wave hands across each other where the erk can see. There he goes with the port chock. Now the starboard. Thumbs up from him. And from me. Little bit of throttle, hold the yoke well back. Here we go. Taxy out over the grass. Bumpy. Wish they’d get another runway put in, too. The one they have got isn’t even into the prevailing wind. Using it today, though, I see. Not much wind at all, but the Anson used it. Lovely sunny day. Swing the nose about a bit, never know what’s ahead. Would hate to prang a Spit or something. What’s that Oxford doing? Coming in. Trundle up to the end of the runway, opposite the line of trees. Bit off-putting they are, too, when you’re approaching to land. Park, crosswind. Brakes on. Relax and watch him come in. Wheels down, crosswind, losing height. Bit bumpy over the trees, of course. Flaps down, now he’s turning in. Nice steady approach. Oh, Christ, here’s a Spit coming in next, what a bind. I’ll have to wait a bit. Yes, he’s put his undercart down. Damn!”
”Float her down, boy, float her down. Now, watch it. Not bad, not bad at all. Over-correcting a bit on his rudder on the runway. Never mind, nice landing, though. Open up my throttles to clear the plugs of oil. Yoke hard back. What a row. There we are, sounds
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O.K. Now throttle back and wait for the Spit. Quick check round the dials again. Set the altimeter to zero. Gyro to zero and leave it caged. Where is he? Oh, here he comes, hellish fast. God! That was a split-arse turn and no mistake. Full flap. Well, he is heading in approximately the right direction. Whoof! He’s down. A bit wheel-y, but never mind, he’s in one piece and still rolling. Now beat it, chum, and let a real kite take off. No-one else in the circuit? Thank bloody goodness. Wait a tick, where’s my friend in that Spit? Oh, there he goes, taxying to the Watch Office. Fighter boys – I don’t know!”
Here we go then. Flap fifteen degrees. Brakes off. Port throttle to turn on to the runway. Hope the far end’s clear. Suppose they would poop off a red if it wasn’t. Nice and central Brakes on. Uncage gyro on 0. Now hold your hat. Open both throttles steadily against the brakes. What a bloody row. Yoke back, now let it go to central. Not too far, not too far. More throttle. Hold the brakes on. She’s shuddering like hell, wants to jump off the runway. Lift the tail just a bit more. Now. Full throttle and brakes off. Here we go – and how! We’re really rolling. Shove those throttles forward against the stops. Touch of rudder against the swing. Fine. Hold it there.”
“Feels great. Love take-offs, tremendous sense of power. Hellish noise, too. Airspeed? 50. Nice and straight, shove the tail well up, a real 3 Group takeoff. Touch of rudder again. 65. Over the hump. Gi-doying! Nearly airborne then! Plus nine and threequarters on both, 3000 revs. Wizard. 75. Runway clear and pouring back underneath. There’s that Whitley. Plenty of room. 80. Almost ready. Still bags of room. Come on, come on. Ease back a bit. Trying hard to go, almost a bounce then. Now? Now she’s off. Airborne. Keep her straight, wheels up. Pick your field in case an engine cuts. Right, got one. Lights out as the wheels come up. Then red, red, red. All up and locked. Throttle back to climbing boost. Revs back to 2600. Airspeed 120. Overrides out. 200 feet. Gyro still on 0. Take half the flap off. Watch it, now. 300 feet. All flap off. Slight sink there, feels horrible. Keep climbing. Everything sounds good. Quick look around the panel. All O.K.
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“1000 feet. Level off. Cruising boost and revs. Select weak mixture on both. Rate 2 turn to port. There’s the Oxford just taking off. Spit’s parked at the Watch Office, next to the Hali. The Hali – God! That girl was a smasher. Cirencester just below the port wing. Now the railway. And there’s the Fosse Way. Follow it home, no bother. The Romans knew how to build roads. Excuse me, Centurion, but there’s an enemy chariot on your tail! Weave left, Lucius Quintus – now! Weather’s wizard, just a few puffs of cloud at 1500 feet. No hurry. Throttle back to economical cruising boost and revs. Try the trimmers. Feet off the rudder. Nice, keeps straight. Feet on again. Hands off. Bit nose heavy. Just a touch on the trimmer. Try again. There we are, perfect, no wing-drop, no pitching, no yawing. Flies herself and purrs like a sewing machine, she’s a beaut. Check the magnetic compass. Heading 037. Cage the gyro, set to 037, uncage. Check around the panel. Zero boost, 1850 revs, airspeed 150, altimeter 1000 feet, temps. and pressures O.K. and steady. Fosse Way sliding along under the port wing. Vis thirty to forty miles, 2/10 cumulus at 1500 feet. God’s in his heaven and all that.”
“What a view, all greens and hazy blues. Fields, trees, hedges, pale little villages. Lovely country. Must really explore it soon. Good as being on leave. I’m lucky. Bit lonely in these kites all on your own, though. Used to five other bods nattering. Nearly four months now. I wonder if there’s any news yet. Write to the Squadron tonight, see if there’s anything come through from the Red Cross.”
“Kite at 10 o’clock, slightly higher. Twin. Oxford, heading for Little Rissington, I’ll bet. Wonder who’ll take this Wimpy over. Couple of weeks and it could be bombing Tobruk or somewhere. Long stooge out there. Portreath – Gib – Malta – Canal Zone. Blow their luck. Wonder what the chop rate is out there. Better than we had, I’ll bet. Spit. at nine o’clock, high, heading East. Going like a bat out of hell. Clipped-wing job. Boy! Is he pouring on the coal. Wonder if he’s a P.R.U. type. Climbing hard, too. There he goes. Berlin by lunchtime at 40 thousand plus, I’ll bet. Nothing to touch him. Take his pictures, stuff the nose down and come home with 450 on the clock. Not a thing near him. That’s the life.”
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“Stow-on-the-Wold coming up below. Must go back to that pub some time. Wonder if I’ll hear anything from the police. No rear light. Jam had no front light. Both tight as newts. Tried to tell the flattie we were a tandem which had just come apart, wouldn’t believe us. Hell, couldn’t even pronounce it, I called it a damned ‘un, could hardly talk for laughing. We’d had a few that night! Blasted nuisance, though, expect we’ll be fined ten bob each. Shan’t go to court, though, write them a pitiful letter. Got no ident letters yet, how about doing a beat-up at nought feet? Oh, hell, can’t be bothered. Too hot, anyhow, slide the window open a bit more. Wouldn’t want to drop off to sleep like I did that night at Moose Jaw. Shaky do, that. Never mind, still alive and kicking.”
“Should write home tonight, really. Can’t be bothered to do that, either. Write to Betty? Oh, Christ, what’s the use? She’s hooked up to that other bloke, whoever he is. Don’t even know his name. Hell and damnation, why didn’t I - ? What’s the bloody use of moaning about it? But, God, she was nice. Wizard girl. There were angels dining at the Ritz - . Oh, for God’s sake, stop it. She’s gone, she’s gone, you’ve bloody had it, you missed your chance. Just stop thinking about her. Forget it. Oh, hell, why didn’t - ? Christ! Forget it, can’t you? Think of something else. Yes. Yes. What? I know. Let’s have a song.”
“Ops in a Wimpy, ops in a Wimpy,
Who’ll come on ops in a Wimpy with me?
And the rear gunner laughed as they pranged it on the hangar roof,
Who’ll come on ops in a Wimpy with me?”
“There we are, Moreton dead ahead. Long runway end on to me. Two kites on the circuit. God, I’m ready for a bite of lunch. Wonder what it is? I’ll do this right, otherwise the Boss will chew me off.”
“Into wind over the runway in use. Good look-see at the Signals Area, then a copybook circuit. Here we go. Signal for transport by pushing the revs up and down again. Makes a nice howl, hear it for miles. Oh, hell, I expect I’ll get chewed off for that, though.”
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Blast him, why does he hate my guts? Those other two Wimpies have gone, must have landed. Yes, can see one taxying. Reduce airspeed to 140. No signals out except the landing-T and that’s O.K. Crosswind leg. There’s the van leaving the Flight Office, good-oh, he’s heard it. Turn port, downwind. Throttle back to 120. 120 it is. Lock off, select wheels down. Red lights out. Green, green, green. Down and locked. Ready for crosswind.”
“Rate 1 1/2 turn to port, now. Nice. Select flap 15 degrees. Stop. Lever to neutral. Push a bit to compensate for the flap. Now the approach. Full flap. Shove the nose down. Rate 1 1/2 turn to port again. Watch the airspeed. Back to 95. Pitch fully fine. The van’s heading for dispersal down there. Keep the speed at 95. Dead in line with the runway, height just nice. Carry on, carry on. Losing height nicely, speed dead on 95. Trees rushing by. Lower and lower. Throttle right back. Push the nose down a bit more. Ten feet, now level off. Lovely, sinking down beautifully. Airspeed falling off as the runway comes up. Clunk! We’re down, what a beaut. Have we landed, my good man? I didn’t feel a bloody thing. Keep straight with the rudder. No brake, plenty of room. Slowing down now. Flaps up. Turn right at the peri. track. There we are.”
“Van’s waiting for me. Good-oh. Follow it round to whichever dispersal. Go on, then, after you, I’m waiting. That’s better. Get well ahead, where I can see you. That’s it. Weave the nose a bit. Not too rough with the throttles. Bit of brake now. O.K., I see which dispersal. Bit more brake. Slow right down. Turn into dispersal and swing round into wind in one go, with the starboard throttle. Flashy! Throttle back, straighten her up. There’s an erk with the chocks. Roll to a stop. Brakes on and locked. Pull up the cut-outs to stop the engines. That’s it, piece of cake.”
“Ain’t it gone quiet? Out of the seat. Where’s my chute? Yank open the escape hatch and shove the ladder down. Just nice time for lunch. Wotcher, Loopy, thanks for the lift. Did you witness my absolutely superb landing? No? Well, you missed a treat. How’s the Boss? What was that? Do what to him? Not me, old boy, it’s
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a Court Martial offence, and besides, it’s immoral. Come on, let’s go for lunch. What about the White Hart tonight? By the way, you missed a treat at Kemble this morning. I was just standing there, waiting until this kite was ready, when a Hali. comes into the circuit. Lovely approach and landing, taxies in, stops, and what do you think, out steps this A.T.A. pilot. Wait a minute, wait a minute, this one was a dame, and a wizard blonde at that. Now just let me describe her to you in some detail, you lascivious, drooling Australian, while I permit you to drive me to the Mess. Well, now, she was about five foot six, and her figure…..”
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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[inserted] [underlined] Overshoot [/underlined] [/inserted]
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[underlined] OVERSHOOT [/underlined]
In that glorious summer they had decided that I could do some non-operational flying, so they posted me away from Group Headquarters at Bawtry Hall, where I’d been playing about with a bit of admin. work, a lot of cricket, and, between drinking sessions, flirting with a couple of W.A.A.F.s.
Bawtry had been very pleasant but it was distinctly stuffy after the Squadron. I was the only recently operational aircrew there and I always had the feeling that they were waiting uneasily and suspiciously for me to start swinging from the chandelier, or to come rushing up to someone very senior and snip his tie off at the knot. What really made it for me was the brief moment when I happened to look across the anteroom one day – where Group Captains and other wingless wonders were two a penny, with bags of fruit salad to be seen on their chests, though – I looked across and saw him standing there, quite quietly. It was “Babe” Learoyd, and he had only one medal ribbon, that of the Victoria Cross.
It was a bit strange when I found myself back on a Wellington Station again, even more so because this one, an O.T.U. at Moreton-in-the-Marsh, was set in lovely pastoral countryside, a complete contrast to my Squadron’s base on top of the Lincolnshire Wolds. As I was back on flying, I decided that instead of getting drunk every night I’d better cut it down a bit, to every other night, if I wanted to survive, of course, which was debatable. I suppose that was oversimplifying it, because if I misjudged something and pranged, I would possibly write myself off, but I might take a few quite innocent people with me, which wasn’t by any means O.K.
However, I needed something to knock me senseless at night, because I was still getting nightmares. In the end, I would usually fight myself awake, distressed and sweating, and lie wide-eyed, until the summer dawn at last came palely to my window and I heard the distant whistle of the first train as it wound its way through the trees and by the little brooks down to Adlestrop and Oxford.
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That train and the railway station in the small market town gradually became to me symbols of ordinary, carefree life, of freedom and safety from sudden death, symbols I was desperate to hang on to. Eventually, the station became so central and vital a part of these imaginings that I lived in considerable and constant anxiety lest one of our aircraft while using the short runway which pointed directly towards it, should crash on to it and destroy my only link with the sanity of the outside world.
I wasn’t posted to the actual O.T.U. in Moreton, but to No. 1446 Ferry Flight. Basically, the idea was that we picked up brand-new Wimpies from Kemble, about half an hour’s flying time away, flew them solo, following the Fosse Way, back to Moreton, then handed them over to pupil crews from the O.T.U. who would do one or two cross-countries in them and then fly them out to the Middle East, in hops, of course, to reinforce the Squadrons in the Western Desert. Sometimes they were straight bombers, nevertheless looking strange in their sand-coloured camouflage, sometimes “T.B.s”, torpedo-bombers, with the front turret area faired in by fabric and the torpedo firing-button on the control yoke, and sometimes they were pure white Mark VIII “sticklebacks”, bristling with A.S.V. radar aerials, low-level radar altimeters and the like.
One morning I had collected a T.B. from Kemble and was bringing it in to Moreton. No bother at all. Except on my approach to land I seemed to be coming in a bit steeply, I thought. I checked the airspeed, 95, correct. I checked the flap-setting – yes, I had full flap on, and wheels down. Looked at the A.S.I. again. Still 95. But, hell, I thought suddenly, it’s graduated in knots. Frantic mental calculations to convert knots to m.p.h. Ease back on the control column a bit. Multiply by five, divide by six, I concluded. Say, 80. So, bring the speed back to 80 indicated. I should have checked before take-off, of course. After all, this was a T.B., a nautical job. Looks right now, I thought, except that I’m floating a bit while the airspeed drops off, using a bit more runway to get her in. No panic, though. I got her down quite nicely and didn’t go anywhere near the far hedge. Quite a good landing, too, though I says it as shouldn’t.
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But, just my luck, Squadron Leader --- had noticed it.
“That’s not a bloody Spit you just brought in, you know, Junior,” was his greeting as I walked into the Flight Office. I sighed inwardly. Here we go again, I thought.
“No, sir.”
What the hell were you doing? Trying to land at Little Rissington?”
“Just came in a bit fast, sir, that’s all.”
“You should’ve gone round again, done an overshoot.”
“Well, sir, I don’t much like overshoots on Wimpies.”
He grunted.
“Don’t like overshoots,” he said acidly, “Are you a competent pilot, or not?”
“Yes, sir, I am, but I don’t like taking unnecessary risks.”
To tell the truth, I hated overshoots completely. You had to shove on full throttle when you decided you weren’t going to make it, and with the full flap you already had on, the nose tried to come up and stall you at fifty feet. So you pushed the nose down with all your strength and some frantic adjustment of the elevator trimmer – three hands would have been useful about then – to pick up some speed before you even thought of climbing away to have another shot at a landing. Then, while keeping straight you had to milk off seventy degrees of flap a little at a time – and she wasn’t at all fond of that process. She wanted to give up the whole idea and just sit down hard into a field, to sink wearily on to the deck and spread herself, and you, around the county. You had to be damn careful not to take off too much flap in too much of a hurry when those big trees came nearer, or when those hills started to look rather adjacent. At night, of course, you couldn’t see them at all, but you knew they were lurking somewhere handy. If you were in a hurry about taking the flap off, then, you went down like a grand piano from a fourth-storey window, and you’d had it. No, overshoots were definitely not for me, thank you very much, not unless they were absolutely essential, and I knew that I knew, to the foot, when they were. I’d never been wrong yet.
“Well, watch it in future, Junior, and don’t set the pupils a bad example.”
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I could quite understand why Loopy had been within an ace of punching him in the face, a few days previously. It wasn’t only the things he said, it was the way in which he said them. Before I could reply he went on, “You might be interested to know that we’ve got the S.I.O.’s son taking a kite out to Gib. soon, he’s done his circuits and bumps and he’s crewed up. His father had a word with me at lunchtime yesterday.”
As I only knew the Senior Intelligence Officer vaguely by sight I merely murmured something non-commital [sic] and asked if there was anything else. I was told, reluctantly, no, there wasn’t, so I saluted and drifted out to have a word or two with Dim and Loopy.
A few days later there was a gap in the flow of kites from Kemble, and as Loopy and I had done all the compass and loop-swinging on those we’d recently collected I took myself off to the Intelligence Library. I was standing at one of the high, sloping library desks, reading one of the magazines, when out of the corner of my eye I saw someone come in and stand at a desk about six feet to my left. I took no notice of him but carried on reading Tee Emm or whatever it was. When I had finished, I turned to go – and recognised him.
“Christ! It’s Connie, isn’t it?” I exclaimed.
I had last seen him in the Sixth Form at school, five years ago. Five thousand years ago.
“Yoicks!” he said, greeting me by the nickname I’d almost forgotten. Connie wasn’t his real name, either, but he’d always been called that at school because, it was said, he had a sister of that name who was more beautiful than the moon and all the stars. A shame I never met her. We shook hands vigorously.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked.
“Been posted to something called a Ferry Flight,” he replied.
“Bloody marvellous! I’m in that, too; come into the madhouse!”
“Well, blow me,” Connie said, “it’s a small world, isn’t it?”
We celebrated that night, in traditional fashion, with several pints apiece. It was great to have him with me, he was jaunty, carefree, entertaining and likeable. I had noticed, of course, that he had the ribbon of the D.F.M. One day, as we walked through some nearby town on a half-day off, I noticed too that his battledress was ripped,
[page break]
just below his ribs, on one side.
“By the way,” I said, “do you know you’ve torn your battledress?”
I pointed to the damage. He laughed heartily.
“That’s my line-shoot, I’m not repairing that, Yoicks – got that over Turin from a cannon-shell. Never felt a thing!”
It was about this time that I discovered the poems of A.E. Housman and, on free afternoons, I would lie on the unkempt lawn of the little cottage where I had my room, out beyond the Four Shires Stone, and would read his poems long into the drowsy, high-summer afternoons, their words tinged with the sadness that I had learned. And as I lay there, the supple, vivid wasps would tunnel and plunder the ripe plums I had picked off the little tree under whose shade I rested. There was constantly to be heard, with the persistence of a Purcell ground, the noise of the Wellingtons on the circuit, two miles away, over the lush green Gloucestershire landscape, hazy with heat, the sound rising and falling on the consciousness like the breathing of some sleeping giant.
At length I would pick myself up, stiffly, feeling the skin of my face taut with the sun, and put the poetry away. Then in the incipient twilight I would stroll down the road towards the sinking sun to meet Connie, to have dinner in the Mess and to slip easily into the comfortable routine of an evening’s drinking with him, and perhaps with Dim, Loopy, Pants or Mervyn, in the anteroom, or down at the White Hart in the village. I would see Connie’s dark hair fall across his forehead, his heavy black brows lift and lower expressively over his mischievous eyes as he told some humorous story of his days and nights on his Squadron at Downham Market. Sometimes, when we were flush, he and I would catch a train to one of the neighbouring market towns, to embark on an evening’s pub crawl, laughing at each other and at ourselves as the beer took effect, and as the darkness slowly fell, un-noticed; each of us drowning our private memories.
Once, a bunch of O.T.U. pupil crews came into a pub where we were sitting – was it in Evesham? – obviously on an end-of-course party before they went their various ways to join their bomber Squadrons. They joked a lot, sang a bit and indulged in some mild, laughing horseplay. Connie, who like me had been watching them, suddenly
[page break]
grew solemn.
“Poor sods,” he said gravely, “they don’t know what’s coming to them, do they, Yoicks?”
Poor Connie, too. He himself had not long to go. Just over a year later he was killed, at the controls of his Stirling, where, had he known that he must die, he would have wished to be, I think.
Eventually, wherever I had been, I would fall into bed, my brain dulled by the alcohol, but neverthless [sic] conscious enough to dread what the night might hold for me, waiting for the nightmares to come again.
There was one kite in the circuit, wheels down, as I strolled towards the Mess for dinner as twilight was beginning to fall. It was yet another lovely evening, and what with the idyllic existence and Connie’s new-found friendship, I was feeling that as far as I was concerned, I could stay here until further notice, despite Squadron Leader --- and his unpleasant little ways.
I was quite near to the Four Shires Stone when I heard the sudden howl as the kite’s engines were opened up to full throttle. Should we go to the White Hart with Loopy and Dim tonight, I wondered, or have a bit of a session in the Mess? Just then there was a loud thump and a silence, another thump, and I saw a telltale column of black smoke erupting over the hedges and treetops ahead and slightly to my left, a mile or so away, I guessed. The kite had overshot and gone in.
“Jesus!” I said, and broke into a run down the road. I was panting and sweating along when suddenly the Flight van screeched to a halt beside me, going the same way. Squadron Leader --- was driving.
“Get in, Junior,” he yelled, “We’ve got to get them out!”
He let in the clutch and drove fiercely down the empty road. The pillar of smoke grew bigger as we got nearer. Then I saw the gap in the hedge and the smashed tree where it had hit. At the far edge of the field the shattered Wimpy burned savagely. We skidded to a stop and flung our doors open. As I ran through the gap in the hedge and across the field, --- raced around the front of the van to join me. I could feel the heat on the surface of my eyes from
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the wall of leaping flame. The kite’s geodetics were like smashed and twisted bones stripped of their flesh. I ran on, over the cratered and churned earth. There was a reek of petrol, of ploughed earth, and of something else, sweetish, sickly, burned. An engine lay to one side, the prop grotesquely curled back.
Suddenly there was a ‘whumph!’ and I found myself on the ground. A petrol tank had exploded. I got up again and went towards the inferno that was raging under the smoke-pall. I splashed through a pool of something. I could hear Squadron Leader --- cursing somewhere nearby; I was gasping and sobbing for breath.. [sic] Then the oxygen bottles started to explode and bits of metal went screaming viciously past me. I tripped and fell heavily. And I saw I had fallen over something smoothly cylindrical, like an oversize sausage, bright brown, and with a smouldering flying boot at the end of it. A few feet away lay an untidy, horribly incomplete bundle of something in what looked like Air Force blue, lying terribly still under the stinking glare. I was retching, on all fours, unable to move further. I dimly heard another explosion nearby, sounding curiously soft, there was a blast of hot air on my face, and then there were the bells of the approaching fire-tender and ambulance.
I was being dragged by my shoulder. It was ---.
“Come on,” he panted, “we’ll never get near it. They’ve had it, poor bastards.”
We must have made our way back to the van as the rescue vehicles arrived; I don’t remember much about that part. I was leaning up against the side of the van and wiping my face with a shaking hand when I heard --- say, “Now I’ve got to go and tell the S.I.O. that his son was flying – that.”
“Oh, Christ,” I groaned.
“Let’s go,” he said, “Let’s get to hell out of here.”
He switched on the engine of the Utility as the black funeral pall of smoke spread over the sky, and thinning, smudged the sunset dirtily.
I read an article in a magazine recently. The writer had been visiting some place which had impressed her. She concluded with
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the words, “But you never lose an experience like that. You carry it around with you.”
Yes. And sometimes you feel you need just a little help to carry it just a little further.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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[inserted] [underlined] First Solo [/underlined] [/inserted]
[page break]
[underlined] FIRST SOLO [/underlined]
I drank some more beer and said to Connie, “The trouble with Shep is that he’s far too damned opinionated, and what’s much worse, he’s far too often right. You just can’t knock him down, can you?”
Afetr [sic] several pints in the White Hart I was feeling less in control than I might have been, but having given vent to that penetrating observation I felt quite foolishly and inordinately pleased with myself. Connie, who had also had several, perhaps for different reasons, looked at me a trifle owlishly.
“I say, Yoicks,” he said, slurring just a little, “that’s rather good. You’re dead right.”
“If you don’t mind, Connie,” I said, “I’d rather you didn’t use that word.”
“What word? What have I said?”
“Dead,” I replied.
At the time, Connie and I were busy settling into our new routine in ‘X’ Flight of the O.T.U. at Moreton-in-the-Marsh. The powers-that-be had decided that there were too many pilots in Ferry Flight just across the way, and not enough utility pilots in ‘X’ Flight. Squadron Leader ---, with barely disguised joy, had promptly nominated me for transfer. And perhaps because he knew Connie and I were close friends, he had selected him to accompany me.
“Utility” was the word for it. We flew Wellingtons on fighter affiliation exercises and on air-to-air gunnery, one pilot and a kite full of A.G.s who took it in turns to man the turrets. Fighter affiliation was by common accord reckoned to be gen stuff, that is, approximating to the real thing – mock attacks by the ‘X’ Flight Defiant, convincingly hurled around the sky by Cliff, at which the gunners “fired” their camera-guns. But the air-to-air lark, I always thought, was of very doubtful value. Our Lysander flew straight and level, towing on a cautiously long cable, a canvas drogue, at which the gunners fired live ammo. with prodigal enthusiasm. Doubtful value? I might have said “pointless” instead. How many Me109s or 110s obligingly flew alongside you at a convenient distance and invited
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you to have a shot at them? It was damn noisy, too, with both your turrets blazing away, and the smell of cordite lingered on your battledress for days.
Most of the time the Defiant or the Lysander, whichever was in action, was flown by Cliff. He was tallish, lean, dark-haired and casual, a Canadian Flight Sergeant, but a man who might have stepped straight out of a Western film. Like Connie, he too was entering the last few months of his life. Cliff, the casual, was soon to be killed over Hamburg in his Pathfinder Lancaster.
The other occasional pilot on the two single-engined kites was Hank, an American, a Flying Officer in the R.A.F., also casual and easy-going, but suave, where Cliff was slightly flinty. The two were inseparable, if only as inveterate gamblers. I learned a lot about the gentle art of shooting craps from Cliff and Hank. On days when there was no flying, when Bill, Connie and I would be lecturing the O.T.U. pupils on Flying Control systems, emergency procedures, dinghy drill and airfield lighting and also, in my case, on the layout of the multifarious internal fittings of the Wellington, Cliff and Hank would retire to a quiet corner of the hangar. Gambling was strictly prohibited by the R.A.F., of course, but the rattle of dice would faintly be heard, punctuated by urgent cries of “Box cars!” “Baby needs new shoes!” or “Two little rows of rabbit-shit!” Money was never seen to change hands, but now and again it was apparent, from the obvious tension which was building up between them, that the stakes were high.
Our happy little Flight was genially run by an Irish Flight Lieutenant named Bill. Bill was the very antithises [sic] of Squadron Leader --- whom I’d just left behind. He was a tall, gangling, rather awkward-looking pilot who affected a slightly vague nonchalance about life in general. One of his endearing little foibles was that he seldom, if ever, referred to an aircraft by its proper name. It was commonplace that all Wellingtons were Wimpies, and fairly common that Lysanders were Lizzies, but he extended these nicknames by referring to our Defiant as a Deefy.
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I sat in on his introductory lecture to a new Course, a dummy run for me before I took over the conducting of the wedding ceremony of sprog crews to the Wimpy. They had all come off Oxfords and it was a bit awe-inspiring at first to be confronted by the size and complexity of the Wellington at close quarters. Bill’s opening remarks were memorable. He lurched up on to the dais, which was, in our hangar, alongside a complete Wellington fuselage, stripped of its fabric, and also near a separate cockpit taken from another kite. He looked slowly around the faces in front of him, as though surprised to find himself there at all, then lit a cigarette, exhaled, beamed happily at our new charges, coughed softly, and in an unbelievably broad Ulster accent uttered the following pearl of wisdom and deep scientific truth.
“Well, now. This here – this here is a Wimpy, and –“ patting a mainplane as one would a favourite dog, and lowering his voice confidentially as he leaned forward earnestly towards them – “these are the wings. Now you’ll be wondering what keeps them on. But don’t you be worrying yourselves about that, ‘cos it’s ahll [sic] ahrganised.” [sic]
After that, he had our pupils in the hollow of his hand; they adored him, as we all did. Dear old Bill. Old? He was about twenty three.
Bill, Hank, Cliff, Connie and me. A nice mixture; one Northern Irishman, one American, a Canadian and two Englishmen. Then into our happy little world stepped a newcomer. Shep. Correction – he did not step, he never stepped. He would barge, blunder, or he would push, but step? No. However, he arrived, all right. That was the system all over. ‘X’ Flight had needed two pilots, so it got three. Shep was a stocky, powerful little Yorkshireman, darkish hair thinning a bit, snub-nosed, built like a prop forward and always with a challenging look shining from his eyes, as though to tell the world, “I’m only five foot six but don’t let that fool you, I’m little and good and I’m worth two of you.” In his manner of speaking he was blunt and earthy to the point of rudeness, but almost everything he said was accompanied by that challenging look and a grin, which took the edge off most of his outrageous remarks. While none of us, except perhaps Bill, were saints as regards our language, which was, when circumstances demanded it, bespattered with words we wouldn’t normally use in mixed
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company, not to mention the odd spot of blasphemy, Shep’s outpourings were liberally garnished with a single oath, namely, “bloody”, which, at times, he rather over-used, I’m afraid.
Like Connie, he had been on Stirlings in 3 Group, or rather, “them bloody Stirlin’s” and, of course, when he realised that he and Connie had that in common he attached himself firmly to the two of us. So our placid little duo became a slightly turbulent trio. Express an opinion which didn’t match Shep’s and, “Ah’m tellin’ you, you’re bloody wrong. Now listen ‘ere – “ and one would be corrected in no uncertain way.
On an occasion when flying was scrubbed for a couple of days due to bad weather, we found ourselves in the city of Oxford. We had a meal, and we also had several beers. When it came to the time to go for the train back to Moreton it was growing dusk and it became necessary to find our slightly alcoholic way from an unfamiliar side street to the railway station. There developed a slight divergence of opinion as to the correct course to steer; Connie and I were all for heading in a certain direction, but not so Shep. Oh, no.
“It’s not that bloody way, Ah’m tellin’ you, Ah’m bloody sure we passed that big buildin’ over there when we came in.”
Meekly, we followed him. And arrived at the railway station in a few minutes. That was Shep all over. A trip to Stratford-on-Avon followed, one Sunday, and we were regaled with a lecture on bloody Shakespeare, and also bloody Ann Hathaway. The trouble was that Connie and I were both reasonably ignorant about Shakespeare and all his works and couldn’t contradict, or even argue with Shep. It was a trifle frustrating, to say the least, at times.
I seem to recall that it was my idea in the first instance, to have a bash at the single-engined kites which we owned. I had been up with a crowd of gunners on fighter affil., no evasive action, of course, to give them practice in getting the Defiant in their sights long enough to get a picture of it. It was simply a question of flying a straight-line track along the line of the range for about forty miles and back again, while all the gunners had a shot. To be honest, it was pretty damn boring, except when one of the pupils,
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despite all my previous entreaties and warnings, would clumsily heave himself in or out of the rear turret and give the undoubtedly adjacent and awkwardly placed main elevator control shaft a hearty push or shove, whereupon we were all hurled up to the roof or on to the floor amid a torrent of curses, depending on whether the kite was forced suddenly into a climb or a dive. It broke the grinding monotony of straight and level flight, though, and once back into the correct attitude everyone had a good laugh about it, including me. Needless to say, the exercise was conducted at a very respectable altitude to allow for such eventualities, and also to give Cliff free rein to throw the Deefy around with considerable abandon.
I was stooging along at about six thousand feet on a day of pleasant sunshine while all this was going on around me, watching Cliff out of the corner of my eye as he screamed across and down beyond my starboard wingtip in a near-vertical bank which he would then convert into a steep turn and a rocket-like climb, before coming in at me again from some new angle. I was thinking that it was pretty to watch, and that he should have been a fighter boy. I thought also that I might well have been one, too, had I not had two early love-affairs, a distant one with the Wellington across the field at Sywell, the other with Betty who had suffered under the German bombing of her home town. But the germ of an idea was growing as the morning progressed and as I day-dreamed, holding the Wimpy on course over the placid Gloucestershire landscape while the white puffs of cumulus drifted lazily by on their summer way.
When I’d finally finished the detail and landed back at Moreton I disgorged my crew of gunners and wandered into Bill’s office. He was sitting there doing his best to look like Lon Chaney on one of his off-days.
“Hello, Bill,” I said, “have you got a minute?”
“Sure, Junior, me boy,” he replied, “and what would be on your mind, now?”
“Well, it’s like this,” I said thoughtfully, “I’ve been watching Hank and Cliff having all the fun chucking the Deefy and the Lizzie about –“ he had me doing it by this time – “ – and I was thinking I’d like to have a bash on them, too. I did my S.F.T.S. on Harvards,
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you know.”
“Did you now?” he answered thoughtfully, “well, well, let’s see.”
He lowered his voice confidentially and looked around conspiratorially. He pretended to be watching a Wimpy on the circuit.
“As a matter of fact,” he said quietly, “a little bird tells me that Hank might be leaving us soon.”
“Oh?” I said, not wanting to appear to be too inquisitive, and waited for him to go on.
“Yes,” he said, “apparently the Chief Instructor came across him and Cliffy rolling the bones in a quiet corner, and poor old Hank, him being the senior and an Officer and all, is going to be sent to the place where they send naughty boys.”
“But what a bloody stupid waste,” I exclaimed, “Hank’s a damn fine pilot. He goes and sticks his neck right out, volunteers for the R.A.F. when he had no need to, being a Yank, and just because he rolls a couple of dice they’re going to kick him up the backside. It seems damned childish to me.”
“Oh, he won’t be grounded for good, or anything like that, he’ll just do drill and P.T. and parades and so forth for a couple of weeks, then they’ll send him back on flying, somewhere. Anyhow, the point is, I could use another pilot or two for the Deefy and the Lizzie, so you and Connie and Shep might as well have a go. It wouldn’t be fair on them if I said O.K. to you and not to the other two.”
“No, of course not,” I said.
“There’s no dual controls, you realise that, don’t you, Junior? You’ll have to pick it up from a ride or two in the back seat and read up the Pilot’s Notes a bit.”
“I’ve already been genning up on them,” I grinned, “I think I know where all the taps are, it’s just a question of getting the feel of the things.”
“You crafty so-and-so,” Bill said, smiling. “O.K., then, you fix it all up with Cliffy and I’ll have a word with the other two. H’m. Is that the time? Neither of us are flying this afternoon, so how about a quick noggin before lunch?”
“Sound suggestion, Bill,” I said.
We walked up to the Mess together; I was feeling slightly excited at the thought of getting a couple of new types in my log-book. I suppose I liked the challenge.
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It was strange to be sitting jammed into the four-gun turret of the Defiant while Cliff flew it around the circuit and gave me the gen.
“She’s a bit of a heavy sonofabitch,” he drawled, “but she’s got no vices if you treat her right.”
To be honest, I couldn’t see anything of what went on in the cockpit in front of me, all I could do was to form some idea of the distances on the circuit, where to start reducing speed and where to put the wheels and flaps down, and to watch the landing attitude, of course. He did a couple of circuits and bumps for me and that was all we had time for on that session.
Soon afterwards, he gave me a ride in the Lysander. That was quite an entertaining experience. It was an ugly-looking parasol-wing kite with a big, chattery radial engine, wonderful visibility due to the high wing, a fixed undercart and ultra-short take-off and landing runs. It was fitted with God knows what in the way of trick slots and flaps. Take-off was incredible, it made me want to laugh out loud.
“The important thing,” said Cliff as we stood ticking over, ready to roll, “is to make sure you’ve got your elevator trim central for take-off – this wheel right here.”
I leaned over his shoulder and looked at the aluminium wheel down below his left elbow. It was the size of a small, thick dinner-plate, with a bright red mark painted across the rim as a datum.
“If you don’t have that centralised, like it is now, you’ll try to loop as soon as she gets airborne, then we’ll be having a whip-round for a goddam wreath for you. So watch it, bud.”
“O.K., Cliff,” I said, “I’ve got you.”
“Let’s go, then, eh?” he said, and opened the throttle. We seemed to be airborne in about fifty yards and climbed like a lift in a hurry. The runway simply dropped away below us. Compared to the Wellington’s take-off it was simply unbelievable.
“Hell’s teeth!” I said, “She really wants to go, doesn’t she?”
“Sure does,” he replied happily.
Landing was equally impressive. It seemed you just closed the throttle and the Lizzie did the rest. She was designed for Army
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co-operation duties, to land in any small, flat field. And, of course, they were used extensively for the cloak-and-dagger stuff, putting in our agents to western Europe by night and picking up others, all by the light of the moon and a couple of hand torches: that must have been quite something.
Cliff turned into wind.
“No undercart to worry about,” he called.
Suddenly there was an almighty ‘clonk’ and I almost snapped the safety harness as I jumped involuntarily.
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
“No danger, just the slots popping out at low speed. Now see, I’ve got the elevator trim wound right back. Get it?”
“O.K.,” I said, “Got it.”
We lowered ourselves down on to the runway and rumbled to a halt in a few yards.
“Bloody marvellous!” I exclaimed, “some kite, isn’t it?”
“Sure is,” said Cliff as we taxied in, “I wouldn’t mind one of these babies for myself, to take back home.”
“No trouble at all,” I replied, “they’ll be two a penny after the war, and with all the cash you’ve won at craps you’ll be able to afford a fleet of them.”
He laughed.
“Aw, well, we’ll have to see, when the time comes,” he said.
The time never came, of course.
You can guess who organised himself the first solo. You’re right, it was Shep.
“Ah’m flyin’ the bloody Lizzie in ten minutes,” he announced loudly, one day soon after, bustling into the hangar and crashing open his locker door.
“How’d you fix that?” Connie asked.
“Ah, well, Ah’m the best bloody pilot around here so Bill said it was only right Ah should have first bloody crack before either of you clumsy buggers bent it.”
“Get the Line-Book out!” I shouted, “Just listen to that – best pilot? You’re just a ham-fisted bus driver, you four-engined types are all alike!”
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“Steady on, Yoicks,” Connie said, “don’t include us all in that.”
“Well, some of you are ham-fisted,” I said. “Anyhow, let’s go and witness this demonstration of immaculate, text-book flying by our modest friend here.”
Shep grinned and slung his chute over his shoulder, then the three of us wandered down to the peri. track where our Lizzie was standing on the grass, looking quite docile and waiting for her pilot. Shep buckled his chute straps into the harness quick-release box, pulled on his helmet and heaved himself into the cockpit. Connie and I lit cigarettes while he started her up, ran up the engine and taxied out for take-off.
“When are you going to have a shot?” Connie asked.
“Tomorrow, in the Lizzie,” I replied, “I’m quite looking forward to it.”
Shep was ready for take-off. He opened her up and the bright yellow Lysander quivered and tolled, then she was airborne, climbing steeply and joyously. He took her nicely around the circuit, a much smaller one than the Wellington’s, of course. Connie and I watched critically, smoking and chatting. As he was on his landing approach Bill drifted along.
“How’s he doing?” he asked.
“Bang on,” I said, “just coming in now.”
Shep landed and taxied round to the start of the runway again. He had done all right, we agreed. No reason why I shouldn’t, too, I thought. Hurry up, tomorrow.
He stopped to let a Wimpy take off. The contrast was grotesque, the bomber using most of the runway and climbing very shallowly away over the trees as it tucked its wheels up, leaving behind it a blur of oily, brownish-black smoke.
Shep moved on to the runway into position for takeoff. It was a lovely afternoon, hardly any wind, a few puffs of cumulus at about four thousand feet. There was a slight haze over the low hills beyond the railway station. We heard him open her up and she rolled. He’d hardly got the tail up before he was airborne, nose-high. Then he was climbing steeply, the engine howling, the kite hanging on its prop.
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“Oh, sweet Jesus!” Bill said, very distinctly, next to me. I simply stopped breathing and watched. We were going to see Shep die in front of our eyes and were completely unable to do a thing to help him. Then, at the moment when it seemed he would inevitably stall and crash into the middle of the aerodrome from less than a hundred feet, he somehow got the nose down, and as he did so, painfully raised the starboard wing. The crazy, fatal climb changed slowly, so terribly slowly, into a steep turn to port. Shep was in a series of tight turns, at full throttle, right over the centre of the runway at about fifty feet. Gradually, the turns slackened, the note of the screaming engine eased. He flew over us, very low, still turning to port, but now more or less in control, obviously winding the trimmer frantically forward.
“Bloody hell!” Connie gasped, “I thought he’d had it that time.” I could only gulp and nod. I felt for a cigarette with hands which were shaking so much I could hardly open the case. My knees felt like water. Bill sighed and said quietly, “I’m afraid he didn’t do his cockpit drill. He forgot the elevator trim.”
We said nothing, but watched as Shep came in to land.
“Let’s go,” Bill said.
We went back to the Flight Office. Five minutes later Shep bustled in, a bit red in the face. He dumped his chute and helmet on to a chair.
“Bloody Lizzies!” he exploded wrathfully, “that bloody trimmer wants modifying, it’s a bloody menace!”
We could only look at one another in silence and amazement. Surely he would admit to being in the wrong, just this once?
Next day, Bill called for Connie and I and silently handed us a memo from the Chief Instructor.
“With immediate effect,” it said, “Lysander and Defiant aircraft of ‘X’ Flight will be flown only by the following personnel.
F/L W. McCaughan,
F/O H. Ross,
F/Sgt C. Shnier.”
Bill, Hank and Cliff. I handed the memo back to Bill.
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“Yes, Bill,” I said, “O.K., fair enough.”
So we flew Wimpies up and down the range and liked it, and we watched Cliff hurling the Defiant into gloriously abandoned manoeuvres in the late summer sky while we flew straight and level. And we gritted our teeth, and we liked it. But now and again I had a sneaking little thought – I wondered what would have happened if that had been me up there instead of Shep. Would I still be bouncing around, like he still was, or …..?
I know, of course, what became of poor Connie, and every year on the anniversary of the day it happened, I visit him where he lies. What happened to Shep, I don’t know, but I’m prepared to bet that whatever it was, he would have had the last word, or, as he would put it, the last bloody word. But really, he wasn’t such a bad bloke. As I said to Connie, you just couldn’t knock him down, that was all.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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[inserted] [underlined] The pepper pot [/underlined] [/inserted]
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[underlined] THE PEPPER POT [/underlined]
It must have been a surprise to Connie as, just when we were about to climb up the ladder into the Wimpy one fine morning, he saw me fold into a heap at his feet. I can’t say it was much of a surprise to me, I hadn’t been feeling too brilliant for some time before that.
Things then moved very quickly. The M.O. saw me and whipped me off to London for a medical board, where I was told quite pleasantly that my flying days were over as far as the Royal Air Force was concerned, and I was asked what I would like to do. No promises, of course. I said, “Intelligence, in Bomber Command.” That seemed to them a reasonable idea, as far as I could make out.
Then followed several completely idle weeks in Brighton in mid-winter, waiting to see what was going to happen to me. My days’ work consisted of reporting to the Adjutant in the Metropole at nine a.m., asking, “Anything for me?” being told, “No”, and that was it until next morning, when the routine was repeated. I was billeted in a little hotel on King’s Road, facing the sea, with three or four other R.A.F. types and one or two R.A.A.F types. There were a few civilians there, too, among them the comedian Max Miller, who, off-stage seemed to me to be distinctly un-funny, if not downright anti-social.
I made friends with a couple of other pilots, Aussies, John Alexander and Don Benn, who were on their way home. Don had crashed in a Beaufighter and injured his legs – his M.O. had said he should play some golf to strengthen them. As he had been a stockman in outback Queensland, the idea of his playing golf was rather amusing both to him and to me. But, as an utter tyro myself, I agreed to go around the lovely course, up on the Downs near Rottingdean, with him. At night, John and I would paint the town red in a mild sort of way, sometimes exercising the legs of the local police force. I caught a glimpse, one day, of Hank Ross, doing penance, marching in a squad of aircrew types along the front. It depressed me greatly. Hank looked desperately unhappy. I waved to him and he acknowledged
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me with only a sad little smile. I thought that if he had waved back, he would probably have been sent to the Tower. It still seemed desperately unjust. I never saw Hank again.
Eventually my course came through, to an Intelligence training centre in a big old house in Highgate. Some fairly hush-hush stuff went on there and we were forbidden to talk to anyone who wasn’t on our own course of about twenty. But one evening, in the anteroom, I was delighted and amazed to see dear old Tim, and made a bee-line for him, rules or no rules. We chatted for a few minutes until someone intervened. Next day I was kept behind after a lecture and given a severe reprimand, and although I saw Tim several times after that, I never spoke to him again while we were there. Not until we met, at Niagara Falls, almost fifty years later – two survivors.
During this time, Alan was called up for training amd [sic] I discovered he had reported to an Aircrew Reception Centre at St. John’s Wood. We met for half a day, had a long talk, a visit to the flicks and a meal at a strange and deserted Greek restaurant somewhere near Covent Garden.
The end of March found me posted as an Intelligence Officer to Linton-on-Ouse, where there were two Halifax Squadrons, one commanded, as I discovered when I arrived, by Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire. Soon afterwards, the Canadians were about to take over Linton and I accompanied one of the Squadrons to Holme-on-Spalding-Moor, in east Yorkshire. After a couple of weeks there, the S.I.O. decided that they were rather short-handed at the satellite Station, Breighton, where the other Squadron from Linton had settled in. So there, among the farm buildings of the nondescript but not unpleasant hamlet of Breighton, I put down roots for a few months. And there I met J - .
. . . . . . . . . . . .
I was pinning up the bombing photos of the previous night’s raid when I noticed he was there again. the Intelligence Library, no matter how we tried to dress it up, was never all that well-populated, and that morning was no exception. The photos usually drew a few
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interested crew members, Tee Emm was invariably popular, but the other stuff was really a bit on the dull side. There wasn’t, for example, a tremendous rush for the Bomber Command Intelligence Digest. Most of the crews, anyhow, were sleeping off last night’s trip, or last night’s session in the local, whichever was applicable.
This little gunner, though, I had seen him in there several times before, always at the same table near the door. It made me wonder. I suppose it was rather obtuse of me not to have cottoned, especially in view of my own feelings about J - . Anyhow, when I had put up the photos I went over to him, more out of curiosity than anything.
“Hello,” I said to him, “did you want something?”
He hesitated, then said, “I suppose – “
“Yes?”
“I suppose Sergeant S – isn’t on duty, is she?
I saw it all, then. One of our W.A.A.F. Watchkeepers, Billie S – was very much sought after for dates, and, it must be admitted, slightly blasé about the whole business. Rumour had it she was the daughter of a fairly high-ranking Army Officer in the Middle East. She was an extremely pleasant girl, blue-eyed, blonde and very nicely shaped, with a calm, almost angelic manner and a vibrant, husky voice which could send the odd shiver up your spine when she used it in conjunction with those big blue eyes of hers. But not my type. Now J - , one of the other two Watchkeepers, she was a different matter entirely. I had the feeling I was going to like Breighton very much indeed, even though I’d only been there just over a week.
“Sergeant S - ?” I said to him, “do you want to see her?”
(Bloody silly question, I thought, of course he did.)
“Well, if I could, just for a minute, if it’s no trouble.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
I went back into the Ops. Room. Billie was purring at someone on the telephone and even then, unconsciously using her china-blue eyes expressively. Apart from her, there was only Margaret, one of the Int. Clerks, writing industriously. Billie hung up finally. I said, “Billie, there’s a gunner in the Int. Library would like
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a word with you.”
She wrinkled her nose just a little and said, “who is it, sir? Not that Sergeant P - ?”
“Don’t know his name,” I replied, “smallish chap, though, in Sergeant – ‘s crew, if I remember rightly.”
“Yes, that sounds like him, Johnny P - ,” she answered, with a faint sigh. She shrugged her shoulders and with a lift of her immaculately plucked eyebrows she said, “Would you mind, very much, sir?”
She sounded resigned.
“No, you go right ahead,” I said with a grin, “mind he doesn’t chew your ears off, though.”
She laughed quietly and went out, smoothing down her skirt over her hips as she went. Margaret was smiling quietly to herself and I cleared my throat rather noisily and started to sort out a pile of new target maps, mostly of Hamburg, I noticed. My tea had gone cold and I cursed it. Margaret looked up and laughed.
“Shall I get you some more, sir?”
“If you wouldn’t mind, Margaret, there’s a dear.”
She went out into the little store-room-cum-kitchen between the Ops. Room and the Int. Library, which we had been told recently to empty as far as possible. This had intrigued us greatly, but we asked no questions.
Billie came back, patting her blonde hair and looking a little flushed.
“Well,” I said, “have you been fighting like a tigress for your honour?”
“Oh, nothing like that, sir,” she replied with a smile, and left it at that, which was fair enough. Nothing at all to do with me, really. Margaret came back with teas all round. The war could continue. Billie got behind her switchboard, handed me a cigarette and did her usual pocket-emptying routine in search of a comb or a lipstick or something, as I lit her cigarette. The stuff that girl carried around with her.
The moon period came around and there weren’t any ops for a few days. Funny to think that when I had been operating a full moon was popularly known as a “bombers’ moon”. Now it was shunned as
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being too helpful to the German night-fighters. We more or less caught up with the outstanding stuff; the Watchkeepers got the S.D. 300 slap up to date and Pam spent a bit of time in the Library putting up some new stuff on the notice boards and going over some bomb-plots with the crews from the photos they had come back with. She mentioned casually that one of the gunners seemed to be spending a lot of time in there. I merely said “Oh, yes?” and looked blankly at her.
I got to know J – a little better during this time, and I knew that this was it. I was very pleased to see that she didn’t have an engagement ring on her finger. Our conversations progressed imperceptibly from one hundred per cent “shop” to a slightly more personal level. I found I was looking forward more and more to the times when she would be on duty, and I tried to fiddle it so that I was on at the same times. I also found that I was looking forward less than usual to my next leave, which would take me away from her for a week.
One afternoon, when things were quiet, I asked J – how Billie was coping with Johnny.
“Well, he’s very persistent,” she said, “he wants a date with her, but she’s doing her best to stall him off. Poor kid, what he really wants is his mother, you know.”
I nodded thoughtfully; I hadn’t seen it quite like that.
“So is Billie going to date him?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t know what she’ll decide,” J – said, “she’s tried her best to head him off, and all that, but he just shakes his head and keeps asking her to go out with him just once; what can she do?”
“Knowing Billie, I’m sure she’ll think of something,” I said, and we smiled at one another. I little suspected what in fact she was thinking of. Had I known, I would have slept less at nights than I was already doing, for various reasons.
Of course, I was thinking along the lines of asking J – for a date, too, but I was worried about rushing things. I had to pick my moment and I wasn’t sure just how to recognise when it had come. I would lie awake thinking it over, and thinking about J - , which just shows you what sort of state I was in.
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Two or three nights later I was on duty with Freda, the third of the Watchkeepers. Our aircraft had just gone off and we were relaxing a bit and wondering if we’d get any early returns. Freda had just finished phoning the captains’ names and take-off times through to Base at Holme-on-Spalding-Moor, along the road about eight miles, when the phone rang.
“It’s Billie, for you, sir,” Freda said.
“For me, Freda?”
“Yes, sir, she asked for you.”
I thought Billie must have forgotten to finish something on her last shift and wanted to square it with me, or get Freda to do it while she was on duty.
“Hello, Billie,” I said into the phone, “what’s the gen?”
“Oh, hello, sir,” came her creamy, purring voice, “can I ask you a favour?”
I still thought it was going to be something to do with work.
“Of course,” I answered blithely, little knowing that my whole life was in the process of being changed from that very second.
“Well, sir, I’ve got a date with someone tomorrow night, and to be perfectly honest about it, I’d rather make it into a foursome. So would you be willing to come along?”
“Hell’s teeth, Billie,” I said, “this is a bit of a surprise, isn’t it? But never mind, yes, O.K., you can count me in on it.”
“Oh, thank you very much, I knew you wouldn’t let me down, it’s such a load off my mind. You’re sure you’ve no objections?”
“No, of course I don’t mind, I’m game for anything,” I said brightly. “It isn’t Johnny, by any chance, is it?”
“Well, sir, as a matter of fact, it is,” she said confidentially. “I couldn’t very well get out of it and I thought it would be best if I tried to organise a foursome – the Londesborough Arms in Selby, if that’s all right with you. By the way, I’ve got some transport laid on from the W.A.A.F. guardroom to get us there, seven o’clock, assuming there’s a stand-down, of course, but we’ll have to make our own way back, so it’s bikes all round. We can push them on to the lorry to go to Selby.”
“Sounds bang-on,” I said.
Billie started to make end-of-conversation noises and was obviously about to hang up on me.
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“Just hold on a sec., Billie,” I chipped in quickly, “there’s just one small detail I’d like to get clear – who am I taking along?”
“Oh, don’t you worry about that, sir,” she said airily, “I’m sure I can find someone nice for you. Thank you very much indeed.”
She put the phone down.
I lit a cigarette and drank a mug of tea thoughtfully, letting my imagination give me a pleasant few minutes until we got a call from Flying Control that we had an early return coming back. So, for the time being, at any rate, I put the thought of my blind date aside. When the main body of our aircraft came back, one of the crews I interrogated happened to be that of Johnny P - . His pilot was a chunky bloke with a staccato manner. Johnny just sat there quietly smoking and saying nothing, but looking silently into infinity, as though he’d never seen me, or his crew, before. It was a bit weird. Finally, Pam, Derek and I got the Raid Report completed and bunged it off to Holme by D.R. I got to bed about 0400.
I was awake again with just about enough time to cycle down to breakfast. It was a miserable morning, ten-tenths low cloud and raining like the clappers. But J – was on duty and the day seemed to brighten when I saw here. Pam was photo-plotting as hard as she could and I got my head down, alongside her, over the mosaic photograph, about four feet by three, of last night’s target. No-one said very much. The blackboard had been cleaned off, in readiness for the next one. The photo-plotting took a long time, there was so little ground detail on the crews’ pictures due to cloud-cover over the target. About ten-thirty we got a stand-down through; J – phoned it around to those who were concerned. Buy lunch time we’d only plotted about half a dozen photos. One thing about the Ruhr – if you missed the aiming-point you usually hit something or other in the way of a built-up area. It was a consolation.
At lunchtime the rain had eased and there were even a few breaks in the cloud to the west. Derek took over from me about two-thirty and promptly plotted one of the photos to within a couple of hundred yards of the A.P., from a sliver of ground detail you could hardly see.
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“Beginner’s luck,” I said laughingly, and went off for a sleep. I hit the mattress and knew no more for a couple of hours. When I awoke, it took me a few seconds to remember that I was going on a blind date that evening, but suddenly I felt unreasonably, unaccountably happy, swept along by a wave of well-being which had me whistling “Tuxedo Junction” and singing snatches of “Sally Brown” as I got myself spruced up and into my best blue. I don’t know why I should have felt like that; possibly as someone once said, the mood of flying men changes with the weather, and outside, I saw that the sky had cleared to a beautiful evening.
“Sally Brown is a bright mulatto,” I sang,
“Way, hey, we roll and go –
“She drinks rum and chews tobacco,
“Spend my money on Sally Brown!”
Which started me wondering, again, who my date would be. I honestly hadn’t a clue, Billie had given me no inkling whatsoever, but I trusted her implicitly not to saddle me with some worthy but plain girl who would spend the evening painfully tongue-tied and twisting her fingers together. Never mind, I thought, it’s quite a change for me and at least we might all have one or two laughs together and try to forget about ops and casualties for a couple of hours. At five to seven I was trying to look as inconspicuous as possible, twenty yards or so from the W.A.A.F. guardroom, and trying also to think up a convincing story to tell the W.A.A.F. (G) Officer if she should appear and want to know what I was doing. As I was looking at my watch for the third or fourth time I heard a soft, musical voice say, “Hello, are we each other’s date?” and there she was, there was J - , looking quite wonderful.
My heart skipped a couple of beats, I could feel myself blushing scarlet and I found I was grinning foolishly. I managed to stammer something trite, or perhaps merely stupid. Anyhow, J – laughed, and I laughed with her, more or less in relief. I felt a bridge had been crossed, or at least, built.
Everything happened pretty swiftly after that. Billie and Johnny P – cycled breathlessly up, a fifteen-hundredweight lorry with several
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assorted aircrew on board screeched to a halt, and accompanied by a chorus of piercing wolf-whistles, Johnny and I loaded the four cycles on to the lorry, helped the girls up and scrambled aboard ourselves. Loud cries of “Let’s get airborne!” and “Chocks away!” and we were off, racing over the wet roads under the trees, through the village, being thrown companionably and tightly against one another as the driver took corners at some speed, and away to Selby, the nearest town of any size.
It turned out to be rather a dingy little place, I thought, but the pub itself was clean and surprisingly quiet, no Breighton types, or indeed no uniforms at all, apart from ours, to be seen. The evening went by in a blur which was only partly due to the intake of alcohol. Billie was her usual polished and poised self and Johnny never took his eyes off her. He looked like a thirsty man approaching an oasis. Such an unremarkable little chap to look at, a mere five feet six or seven, mousy, rather untidy brown hair, slim built like we all were on wartime rations and high levels of stress, but with an infectious grin which would suddenly light up his plain features.
What J – and I talked about I cannot for the life of me remember; I was completely bowled over by the simple fact of listening to her cool, musical voice. I think we talked about books and cricket, but had we simply sat in silence, that would have ensured my complete happiness, merely to be at her side, in her charming company. Considering the rationing position, we had a very good meal in the small, half-empty dining room. I remember how spotlessly white the tablecloth was. Johnny demonstrated his talents as an amateur conjuror, palming small objects and plucking them out of our ears, and so on. We had all had two or three drinks by then and our laughter came fairly freely. He did one small, silly trick with the chromium pepper pot, holding it between his fingers and rushing it down towards the table in the representation of a bomb’s rushing it down towards the table in the representation of a bomb’s trajectory, with the accompanying piercing whistle. We all duly made “boom” noises when it hit the cloth – except that it didn’t, it was no longer to be seen.
Eventually it was time to go. We undid the locks on our cycles in the twilight of the summer evening, and by tacit agreement, split
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up into two couples. J – and I didn’t hurry, tomorrow could take care of itself and we never saw Billie and Johnny again that evening. On the way back we stopped at a field-gate by the edge of a copse and leaned our elbows on the top bar, side by side, to watch the sickle moon slowly rise. One or two aircraft droned distantly in the starry vault of the darkening sky and we followed the nav. lights of one of them until they vanished into the haze and all was silent again, except for some small animal rustling his nocturnal way through the undergrowth. We didn’t talk much, I think we were both content with the magic of the still night and with each other’s presence and new-found companionship.
As we stood there, I tentatively put my arm around her shoulders and that small overture was not repulsed. We talked about Johnny.
“Do you know any of his crew?” I asked J - .
“Some of them,” she answered, “they seem nice lads. Johnny’s lucky to have a crew like that.”
“Yes,” I said, “he is. It’s a very special sort of relationship, there’s nothing quite like it.”
She turned to look at me.
“Your own crew, do you keep in touch with them?”
So I told her. She put a hand on my arm.
“I’m dreadfully sorry, I really had no idea that had happened.”
We cycled back to Breighton. I felt a great peace stealing over me. We stopped at the now deserted road by the W.A.A.F. guardroom.
“It’s been a lovely evening,” J – said, “thank you so much for it.”
“I’m the one who should thank you,” I said, “for putting up with me.”
She shook her head.
“Don’t say that, please. Anyhow, I must go now.”
She hesitated. Her lips, when I kissed her, were cool and sweet, like dew on a rosebud.
The next morning Base Ops., in the shape of Flight Lieutenant Smith, came on the phone.
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“Is that you, Breighton?” he asked in his dried-up schoolmaster’s voice. He would seldom, if ever, call you by your own name, you were only “Breighton” to him. I sometimes wondered what he called his pupils and more especially, whether he called his wife by her surname. So I was always deliberately and exaggeratedly casual in reply to him, just to irritate him.
“Yeah, Smithy, this is the Acting Unpaid Senior Int./Ops Officer, at your service. What can I do you for?”
Smithy was not amused. He sniffed loudly.
“We’re sending you some parcels. Store them in your little kitchen place, or whatever you call it. Don’t open them. That’s important, but keep them under lock and key until you’re told what to do with them, and keep the key on your person at all times. Is that understood?”
“Cloak and dagger stuff, eh, Smithy?”
He sniffed again and went on.
“Expect them in about half an hour. They go under the name “Window.” Is that quite clear, Breighton?”
“Yeah, I’ve got it.”
He rang off and I mused a little, wondering what on earth it could be that was so secret and new.
A sheeted-over lorry arrived from Holme and we started to unload the innocent-looking brown-paper parcels, the size of shoe boxes, and quite heavy, too. We all pitched in and got the lorry emptied eventually. By this time you could just about squeeze up to the sink in there to make the tea. Which one of the girls did, as we needed some by then. I dutifully locked the door on the bundles but I could see this was going to be a real bind, so we laid on tea-making facilities with the W.A.A.F.s in the telephone exchange, next to the Ops Room, and moved our few mugs and kettle and so on in with them.
When things had quietened down and I thought no-one would notice particularly, I slipped quietly in to the Window Store, as I was now mentally calling it, locked the door carefully behind me and took down one of the parcels. Very carefully I made a small slit in one corner of the wrapping paper so that it would look like accidental damage. I looked inside. There were hundreds, or perhaps thousands,
[page break]
of what seemed to be paper strips, about an inch wide and a foot or so long, matt black on one side, silvered on the other. My first thought was that they were some new form of incendiary device. I sniffed them – no smell. What on earth could they be? Was it something to dazzle the searchlights, then? In that case, why weren’t both sides shiny? I could get no further with my theorising, but as it happened I was somewhere on approximately the right lines. I carefully replaced the bundle and went back into the Ops Room, not forgetting to lock the door behind me as I left the thousands of bundles of Window. I put on an innocent expression and started to whistle “Sally Brown”.
“Quite a nice day out there,” I said. I wonder if I fooled them.
The mysterious Window wasn’t a mystery for much longer. A couple of days later we got a target through, quite early on, which was a sign that the weather was going to be settled. Hamburg. Hence all those new target maps. And when the operational gen came through, bomb load, route and timings and so on, right at the end was the magic word Window. It was to be carried by all aircraft. The number of bundles per aircraft was stated, as were the points on the route where dropping was to start and finish. The dropping height and the rate of dropping was stated, everything was laid down. Then we guessed it. It was a radar-foxing thing.
“Let’s hope it works,” we said to one another.
Derek did the briefing and I went along to listen, sensing that this might be an historic occasion. The Station Commander stood up on the platform first, and conversation stopped abruptly. He looked slowly around the blacked out briefing room in the Nissen hut. You could have heard a pin drop.
“Gentlemen,” he said, very slowly and quietly, “the intention of tonight’s operation is to destroy the city of Hamburg.”
The silence was so intense you could almost feel it. He went on to say that they would be carrying a new device which would save us many casualties if it was used strictly in accordance with instructions, and he told them about Window, which was designed to swamp the enemy radar screens with hundreds of false echoes, each one looking like a four-engined bomber.
Well, as far as Breighton was concerned, it worked like a charm that night. When the crews came back, and the Squadron’s all did,
[page break]
they were highly elated about the results of the attack and the lack of opposition. Few fighters had been sighted, flak was wildly inaccurate and spasmodic and the searchlights were completely disorganised and erratic. The photographs proved their elation was well-founded.
Three days later it was Hamburg again, and my turn to brief them. I caught a glimpse of Johnny, sitting about three rows back, still with that distant look on his face, as though this had nothing to do with him. I mentioned this to J – when we met on night duty, the first time I had seen her since the night we had gone to Selby.
“I’ve noticed it, too,” she said, “I don’t know what it is with him. Maybe it’s because of Billie, of course, he’s absolutely overboard for her. She’s changed too, she’s gone much quieter than she was.”
“Yes, I’d noticed that,” I said, “funny what love does to you, isn’t it?”
I gave J – a sideways look. She had coloured just a little, but smiled and said nothing. We were in the lull before take-off time. We talked about the possible effects of Window on this second raid on Hamburg. We did not know it at the time, of course, but this night was to be known as the night of the fire-storm, when hurricane-force winds, caused by the immense uprush of air from the fires, were to sweep their flame-saturated way through the city, even uprooting trees which had stood in their path. And there were still two further raids to come in the next week, plus an American daylight attack thrown in for good measure.
“Did you notice the bomb-load was almost all incendiaries?” I asked J - .
“Yes, I did,” she replied, “I wouldn’t be in Hamburg tonight for all the tea in China; imagine, almost eight hundred aircraft with full loads of incendiaries.”
“Make them think a bit,” I said. “You know, J - , what I can’t understand is why they just don’t give in now, surrender while they’ve still got some towns which are fit to live in; it’s quite obvious that we’re just going to work our way through the list one by one and flatten all his cities – I can’t think why he will just allow this to happen.”
We talked, smoked and drank tea far into the night. When they came back, the crews’ elation was now tinged with awe. No-one had
[page break]
ever seen such tremendous fires, “a sea of flame” was a common description by the crews, with a smoke pall towering to above twenty thousand feet; you could smell it in the aircraft, some said.
It was either on one of the big Hamburg raids or very soon afterwards that Johnny P – ‘s crew did not come back. I have to admit, in shame, that they were, as far as my feelings were concerned, just one of the many that we lost – all good, brave lads, but now almost anonymous in their terrible numbers, like the headstones in a war-graves cemetery seen from a distance. I knew only few of them personally; when it happened, I felt the pang of the loss, but the impact was not so great, God forgive me, as that of the loss of a crew on my own Squadron, of men whom I had been flying alongside, or with. Perhaps there is a limit to the sorrow one can truly absorb and bear, perhaps a saturation point is reached when the loss of men becomes a ghastly normality, where the mind begins to accept it as part of the natural order of things. But later – then it will suddenly all strike home in some unguarded moment, with full savage impact, as it has done, many times since.
When the last crew had been interrogated the night that Johnny went missing I saw Billie standing to one side, pale as chalk, gazing wordlessly at the faces around her, waiting for Johnny, who would never bother her again. I went over to her and touched her shoulder.
“Try to get some sleep, Billie,” I said, “he may have landed away, you know.”
It was all I could say. She nodded miserably.
She was on duty next morning, when we started the photo-plotting, tense, deadly pale, her eyes haunted by heaven knows what dreadful visions. I had given her a cigarette and taken one myself when the clerk handed me something or other and distracted my efforts to produce my lighter. Billie said quietly, “I’ll get mine,” and, typically, dumped a load of stuff from her pocket on to the desk. It wasn’t a lighter which she’d got out, though, it was a chromium pepper pot. I froze. She clapped a handkerchief to her mouth and rushed blindly out of the Ops Room as we sat silent and motionless.
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Later that day I met J – outside the village church.
“Shall we go inside?” she said.
We stepped into the dimness of the nave. My mind was still on Johnny.
“The way he looked,” I said softly to J - , “do you think perhaps he knew?”
“Perhaps,” she said, “perhaps he did.”
It was cool and quiet in there. J – knelt in a pew and bowed her head; I knelt alongside her so that our sleeves touched. Somehow, I felt I needed that nearness of her. A Prayer Book was at each place; there was just enough light left to read. I opened the book and came upon Psalm 91.
“Thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night: nor for the arrow that flieth by day. A thousand shall fall beside thee, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.”
J – ‘s face was calm, next to me, as I thought of Johnny, and of all the others. After a while I closed the book and slowly stood up. I took J – gently by the hand and we walked out, shutting the heavy oak door behind us, into the dim, evening green-ness of the churchyard and the faraway sound of engines in the summer twilight, as the first stars were beginning to appear.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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[inserted] [underlined] Approach and Landing. [/underlined] [/inserted]
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[underlined] APPROACH AND LANDING [/underlined]
With the inevitablity [sic] of an experience of déja vu, it unrolled itself with preordained certainty in my dream, as completely familiar as the action of a film one has seen often before, slowly remembering it in all its detail, and on waking and thinking afresh about it, I realised with some surprise that I had never written about, or even spoken to anyone about this particular event – since the time that J – and I talked about it, that is – one which both at the time it happened and since that time, I had always privately marvelled – and shuddered at what might have been.
At night in the Ops. Room at Breighton, once 78 Squadron’s Halifaxes had taken off there was little to do for whoever was on duty. Normally there was one Int./Ops. Officer – that is, Pam, Derek or myself – one duty Watchkeeper, a W.A.A.F. Sergeant, Billie, Freda or J - , and an Ops. Clerk. There was time to catch up on all sorts of things which of necessity had to be shelved during the process of assisting perhaps twenty or so aircraft to take off, adequately prepared and correctly informed, to bomb some target in the Third Reich. There was, naturally, time to chat, time to drink tea and to smoke endless cigarettes while the hours crawled by until the tension of the time of the first aircraft due into the circuit approached. And when J – and I were on duty together (and I took some pains to ensure that we often were) the conversations were naturally more relaxed, more personal.
It was on one such occasion, when the names of people one had known in the Service were casually dropped into the talk like snowflakes on to a pond, to exist for an instant and then to vanish and to be almost forgotten, that one name struck a chord between us.
I mentioned F – ‘s name quite casually, as that of someone I had known well by sight but not personally, a pilot on our sister Squadron at Binbrook eighteen months before, and who was the central character in a very highly skilled but very high-risk piece of flying which I had witnessed from, literally, a grandstand seat, and which, these many years later, was the subject of my dream.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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At Binbrook, when operations were on, it was necessary to have what was termed a Despatching Officer, one who was not flying on that operation. He was provided with a light van and a driver, and was to ensure that in this van there was contained every conceivable piece of necessary equipment which any member of any crew flying on the operation was likely to find to be unserviceable or to have forgotten prior to takeoff – articles such as flying helmet, goggles, oxygen mask, intercom. leads, the various essential maps and charts, and so on. In the event of a sudden radio call from an aircraft to the Flying Control Officer on duty in the Watch Office that some such was required. The Despatching Officer would be driven rapidly to the relevant aircraft’s dispersal to deliver the required piece of equipment.
On one particular late winter’s afternoon, although both Squadrons were operating, my own crew was not among those detailed. And I was designated on the Battle Order as Despatching Officer. There was, as it happened, no call for my services and the Wellingtons started to take off, using one of the shorter runs, roughly north-west to south-east and passing within two or three hundred yards of the Watch Office. Once that I was certain that nothing was required, I went into the Watch Office and up on to the balcony to watch the aircraft taking off, bound for some target – I cannot recall which – across the North Sea.. All had left the ground and were on their way, vanishing into the evening sky to the east, when there was a call over the R/T from one of them which had just crossed the English coast. It was that piloted by F - .
One of his main undercarriage wheels, the port wheel, could not be retracted. He was climbing away with one wheel locked into the ‘up’ position and one which would not join it. Apparently he could neither retract the wheel which was locked down nor lower again the wheel that was retracted. He was carrying a 4000 lb. High Capacity blast bomb, irreverently and casually known to us as a ‘Cookie’. His Commanding Officer, watching take-off from the Watch Office, called him up on the R/T and ordered him to jettison the Cookie into the North Sea, then to return to the aerodrome to attempt what would have been, in any case, a fairly hazardous
[page break]
landing with a full petrol load. But it was the only possible and sensible procedure in these unfortunate and unhappy circumstances.
But F – was very much his own man. I knew him, from a distance, almost as the reincarnation of a cavalier of King Charles’ day, dark, good looking, dashing, individualistic, the complete extrovert. He might well have served as the model for Frans Hals’ “The Laughing Cavalier”. He replied – to his C.O., mark you – that he intended to bring his bomb back with him. Then, apparently, Wing Commander K - , his C.O. and he exchanged words and observations of some sort. But F - , literally in the driving seat, was adamant and persuasive enough to have his way. We waited rather breathlessly for what might transpire, as well as what his C.O. might say to him, should he, in fact manage to return safely.
After a short while, all the aircraft operating having cleared the area, we heard the note of F – ‘s Twin Wasp engines, as noisy as four Harvards, which is saying something. He appeared on the circuit, a grotesque and unsettling sight. To those of us who have flown aircraft, especially Wellingtons, it is an almost unconscious reaction on seeing any aircraft in the air, to project oneself, as it were, into the cockpit, holding the controls, glancing at the blind-flying panel’s telltale instruments, and in this case, in F – ‘s case, seeing the wretched sight of one green light and two reds in the trio of small undercarriage warning light on the dashboard.
There were now five or six of us on the Watch Office balcony and we watched tensely as F – steadily made his circuit and, throttling back, commenced his final approach. His particular aircraft, in common with a few on both Squadrons’ strengths, had been modified to carry a ‘cookie’, which was essentially a railway locomotive boiler, thin-skinned and packed with high explosive. The bomb was too deep to be accommodated in the normal Wellington bomb-bay, so the modification consisted in suspending it in a rectangular hole like an upturned, lidless coffin without bomb-doors, in the underside of the aircraft. And the bomb was by no means flush with the aircraft’s belly, it protruded, throughout its entire length, by several inches, horrifyingly open to flak, machine gun bullets, cannon-shells – or a belly landing. The sensitivity of the weapon was legendary, the name “blockbuster” applied
[page break]
to it by the press was completely apposite.
So F – made his approach, one wheel up, one down, a grotesque and unpleasant sight, the cookie protruding ominously. Why we stood there watching, goodness only knows. Perhaps we were simply too fascinated to move or perhaps we were quite unthinking as to what the outcome might be, should there be an accident, a bad landing, and the cookie were to explode. If that had been the case, I would not be writing this. Or perhaps we were just plain stupid or reckless not to have sought cover.
The aircraft slowly slid down its final approach in the quickly-fading daylight. We watched and waited, almost holding our breath. I remember lighting a cigarette with a hand which was not altogether steady. Then, holding the starboard wing over the ‘missing’ wheel well up, F – touched down, it must have been lightly, on the port wheel only, the engines throttled back to a tick-over. Miraculously, he kept the aircraft straight. We hardly dared look at the protruding cookie. As the Wellington slowed the starboard wing slowly drooped, and finally, at the end of the aircraft’s run, the wing finally scraped the runway, the Wellington slewed around through ninety degrees to starboard and came to a lopsided rest. The fire tender and ‘blood wagon’ raced up, but neither, thankfully, were needed.
It would be trite to say that we breathed again but I am sure that there were some of us who in the final seconds of the touch-down and landing run were actually holding our breath. We stood there, the small group of us, on the balcony, potentially exposed to what would have been a blast-wave of killing proportions not only for us, but for many quite far distant from the runway. Perhaps the fact that we stayed to watch was even due a degree of professional interest in the expertise of one of our peers. But the visual memory of F – ‘s landing that evening has remained with me as something at which to marvel.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
“Oh! Did you know F - , then?” J – asked, that night in the quiet Ops. Room at Breighton.
[page break]
“Only by sight” I replied, then I told her about the landing.
“I will never forget that, I assure you. You knew him, too, then?” I added. J – nodded.
“Oh yes, who didn’t? He was quite a character, wasn’t he?”
“’Was’?”
“Yes. Perhaps you didn’t know he had been killed at --- .” She named an aerodrome not too far distant.
Apparently F – had taken off on a non-operational flight. On board was also an A.T.A. girl pilot and the aircraft had, for some unknown reason, crashed, killing everyone on board. J – mentioned that there was a certain theory concerning something which might have been a contributory factor to the tragedy. I will not set down here what that theory was. But I shall continue to remember F – as I knew him at Binbrook, debonair, dashing, cavalier-like and above all, just that bit larger than life, and possessed of flying skills to which few of us could ever hope to aspire.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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[inserted] [underlined] Knight’s move [/underlined] [/inserted]
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[underlined] KNIGHT’S MOVE [/underlined]
“One sang in the evening
Before the light was gone:
And the earth was lush with plenty
Where the sun shone.
The sound in the twilight
Went: and the earth all thin
Leans to a wind of winter,
The sun gone in.
One song the less to sing
And a singer less
Who sleeps all in the lush of plenty
And summer dress.”
“Casualty”
from “Selected Poems” by
Squadron Leader John Pudney.
Once I had seen the hangar, intact, black and huge, just over the hedge as I rounded the bend of the lane, everything seemed to fall into place, even after so many years.
Everything, except, of course, that J – was gone. I shut my eyes for a moment and forced my thoughts away from her. God knew what became of Pam, and as for Derek, I never heard of him for years after I left Breighton. But now I had, for the first time, come back. Seeking what? I could find no answer to that in my mind, except that I had obeyed some inner compulsion to revisit the place and that somehow it seemed to bring me some peace and calm of spirit to be back there amid the quiet hedges, the ruined buildings, the memories, and the silent, empty sky, where among so many losses I had, with deep feelings of the unique guilt of the survivor, found
[page break]
my personal happiness when so many had lost everything, for ever.
I walked down the empty road in the warm October sunshine, past what remained of the East-West runway, and marvelled at the utter silence. The little river at the edge of the road slipped silently over its green weeds and I remembered Gerry, how he had aborted a takeoff one night, smashed through the hedge and across the road and had finished up with the aircraft’s nose almost in that river. Amazingly, they had missed everything solid and had all walked away from it. I smiled to myself as I recalled how everyone in the Mess had kidded him about it the following morning.
The Mess itself was till there, pretty well intact. One or two broken panes in the windows, the buff-coloured walls reflecting the warmth of the sun, the porch by now overgrown with tall weeds around which a bee idly buzzed. Now, no bicycles leaned against its walls, there was no C.O.’s car parked, no battledressed figures walked in and out, calling to one another – there was just the brilliant sunshine and the utter silence. And then, as I visualised the inside of the Mess, its layout, its half-remembered faces; I thought of the events of such another day of sunshine all that time ago. I saw the interior of the anteroom, the small table with the chessmen on their board, the young bomb-aimer sitting opposite me, frowning with concentration as we played, then looking at his watch and standing up reluctantly, the cracked record, “I’ve gotta gal, in Kalamazoo”. “Shall we finish it tomorrow?” I had said to him.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
My part of the briefing came second, as usual, after the Wingco had told them the target and shown them over the route on the wall-map. Most of the crews weren’t really interested in the industries, population or the other standard Intelligence gen which I served up to them, and I didn’t blame them; their main concern was what the defences were like – and, privately, whether they would get back. They were silent when I pointed out the flak and searchlight belt around the target, and a few night-fighter aerodromes near to their route. There were one or two whistles when I told them
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how many aircraft were on that night; it was quite a big effort and craftily organised so that there were two targets, the stream of kites splitting up abreast of and between the two towns, then turning away from each other to attack their respective targets some sixty miles apart. There were also elaborate Mosquito spoof attacks to draw off the enemy fighters from the main force.
“We hope that will fox the defences,” I concluded.
When briefing was over I left the hubbub and snatches of nervous laughter from the crews and cycled down to the Ops Room in the summer afternoon to try to finish plotting last night’s bombing photos. One of our Halifaxes was on his landing approach, another was on the downwind leg with his undercart lowered. One of their engines was slightly desynchronised and it made a throbbing note above the steady roar. The sun was very bright, the trees were a deep green above the huts and the houses of the village and it was warm.
One of the bombing photos was holding us up. There was only a small fragment of ground detail, more or less one block of houses, visible in the usual mess of smoke, cloud, bomb bursts, flak and fires. Pam was having a go at it when I arrived.
“Any luck?” I asked, throwing my cap on the table.
“Not yet,” she said, “but it must be somewhere near the aiming point because there’s so much going on in the photograph.”
We stewed over the mosaic for a time, trying to fit the photo in, which would enable us to discover where the aircraft had dropped his load of bombs. Pam looked along the approach side to the A.P., I took the exit side. Finally, I had it placed.
“Oh, good,” Pam said rather wearily, and stretched.
I measured the distance carefully.
“Can you give him a ring in the Mess, Freda?” I asked the duty Watchkeeper, “he’ll be wanting to know. Tell whoever you speak to that they were about a thousand yards from the A.P., would you?”
After that, we generally tidied up from last night’s effort, and as far as we could, from tonight’s preparations. I did a last minute check that the Pundit was in the right place and set to flash the correct letters, and that the resin lights on the aircraft were the correct colour combination. About six o’clock I went down to the Mess, put my feet up and relaxed. There were several battledressed and white sweatered chaps clumping about in their heavy, soft-soled flying boots, trying not to smoke too much, mostly a bit pale and rather quiet.
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Dinner was much as usual, no-one had very much to say to anyone else, at least among the crews who were on. Derek came in and said he was going up to relieve Pam on duty.
“See you before take-off,” I told him.
“What the heck for?” Derek asked, “there’s no need – why don’t you get some sleeping hours in till they come back?”
“Oh, I don’t know; I might as well be up there,” I said, not wanting him to know that J – and I had a sort of thing starting. I hoped so, anyhow. She would be taking over from Freda about now. I’d taken her out a couple of times and I thought she was pretty wizard; we seemed to speak the same language. Had to be a bit careful, though, the R.A.F. was touchy about male Officer – W.A.A.F. N.C.O. relationships. You could easily find that one of you was suddenly posted to Sullom Voe or somewhere like that, and the other to Portreath, or worse still, overseas.
I went into the anteroom. Someone had the radiogram going. It was Glenn Miller and the Chattanooga choo-choo on Track 29. I settled down with Tee Emm at a table where someone had left the chess board and pieces, and was chuckling over P/O Prune’s latest effort when a voice said, “Do you play?”
I looked up. He was a P/O Bomb-aimer, rather stocky, darkish, with his name on the small brown leather patch sewn above the top right-hand pocket of his battledress, his white, roll-necked sweater and half-wing looked rather new, I thought.
“Sure,” I said, “but not very well, I’m afraid. I’ll give you a game, though, if you like.”
“I’m not very good myself,” he said.
As we were setting out the pieces, “Who are you with?” I asked. He named his skipper.
“He’s good; flies these Hallies like Spits!” he said, laughing. For an instant, the lines of stress on his face were smoothed out in the snatched and fleeting relaxation of the moment, so that instead of looking like a young man, he looked like a very young one.
“Yes, I know the name,” I said, “I think I’ve plotted one or two of your photos recently. How many have you done?”
“Six”, he answered.
There was nothing I could say to that. Thirty trips was a hell
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of a way off when you’d done six.
He chose white from the two pawns I held in my closed fists.
“Off you go, then,” I said.
He opened conventionally enough, pawn to king’s fourth, pawn to queen’s third, and so on, and as we played I could tell we were both about the same calibre, on the poor side of indifferent. After a while, he started looking at his watch a lot and I could see his concentration was beginning to fade, but his knight was going to have my bishop and rook neatly forked, so I knew I was in for a bit of trouble. He sighed and said, “That’s about it for now, I’m afraid, I’ll have to get weaving up to the Flights.”
I said, “O.K., then, shall we finish it tomorrow? I’ll make a note of the positions, if you like.”
“Yes,” he said, “fine,” and got to his feet. “Thanks for the game.”
“Enjoyed it,” I said, and gave him the usual and universal Bomber Command envoi, “Have a good trip.”
“Sure, thanks,” he said, gave a half-wave and went out.
I watched him go. He looked rather like a schoolboy who had been sent for by the Head. A slightly cracked record on the radiogram was now telling us that someone liked her looks when he carried her books in Kalamazoo. I wondered idly where that was. I made a copy of the position on the chessboard and went out of the Mess. It was a beautiful summer evening, the sun was starting to dip now and there were some streaks of altostratus in the north-west. A faint breeze brought the twittering of sparrows; a blackbird nearer at hand was giving a few clarinet notes, intent on practising the first bar of his eventual good-night song. A Halifax droned over, to the east, high, probably setting off on a night cross-country or a Bullseye. His engines made a hollow, booming roar in the clear evening air. Then the Tannoy came to life with a hum and with a leap of the heart I heard J – ‘s voice come over, telling someone he was wanted at his Flight Office.
I cycled up the quiet road through the hamlet, which was companionably and inextricably mixed up with the Station’s huts, and turned right at the tall gable-end of a house on to the narrow concrete road which, in a few hundred yards beyond the W.A.A.F. site, came to the Ops Room.
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The sentry gave me a cheery “Good evening, sir,” and I went inside to the strip-lighting, the huge wall-blackboard, the central plotting table and the long desk with the telephones. Derek, J – and little Edith, one of the Int. Clerks, were on duty. I saluted and said, “Hiya, folks, everything under control?” It was. Edith was finishing writing up the captains and aircraft letters on the big blackboard and it looked impressive. You started to imagine the bomb-load from that lot going down on to a built-up area, and what it would do. Then you stopped imagining. I got busy with some paper-work, tying up loose ends and amending some S.D.s, then the clerk made some tea. J – ‘s phone was pretty quiet – it usually was a couple of hours or so before take-off – she was writing a letter, I think, and Derek was sorting out the mosaics alphabetically and sliding them back into the big drawer below the table.
“Time we had a new one for Hamburg,” he said, “this one’s about had it.”
“So’s Hamburg,” I said, “if it come to that,” and we grinned.
We drank tea, smoked and chatted a bit, mostly about our next leave. Derek was whistling “Room 504” off and on, and rather badly. There wasn’t a lot to do now except wait for a scrub, which we knew wouldn’t happen when there was a big summer high over western Europe. Odd calls came in to J – requesting Tannoy messages; she put them out and logged them all.
I went outside for a while to look at the sky. The Ops Room was windowless and the lighting and general fug got you down rather after a time, especially as we all smoked like chimneys. It was about nine o’clock. I looked over the cornfield which was just outside the Ops Room door. The corn was ripe, grown high, ready for harvest; the sky was very beautiful, pale green almost in one place, some stars showing, complete stillness.
“Calm before the storm,” I thought, rather tritely. I breathed the cooling air gratefully. Somewhere in the distance the blackbird was firing his short bursts of evening song. It was all very peaceful and the war seemed a hell of a long way off.
The sentry seemed fidgety, he was probably wishing I would hurry up and go in again so that he could have a quiet smoke himself.
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“Nice night,” I said to him.
Back in the Ops Room I felt we were completely insulated from the outside world. Until the phone rang.
“Ops, Breighton,” J – said. She listened, then put the phone down.
“Flying Control,” she said to me, “they’re taxying out. First off should be any minute now.”
“O.K.,” I said, “I might as well chalk them up.”
I was feeling a little strung-up; it would give me something to do. In a little while the phone rang again.
“Ops, Breighton….. right, sir, thank you.”
J – turned to me.
“B – Baker airborne 2149.”
I chalked up the time opposite ‘B’. After that, the phone went at very short intervals, until they had all gone. In the Ops Room we never heard a thing, only the hum of the air-conditioning and the buzz of the strip-lighting.
I imagined them doing their gentle climbing turns to port and setting course over the centre of the aerodrome, the Navigators carefully logging the time, the gunners in their turrets watchful for other aircraft, then climbing steadily away towards Southwold where they crossed out for the North Sea, the enemy coast and whatever lay in wait for them beyond, on the other side.
When they’d all gone, the Wingco came in for a chat. He was a good type and we all liked him. He and Derek shared an interest in painting, and after a while he took Derek off to the Mess for a drink. There wouldn’t have been much for Derek to do behind his desk, anyhow.
“Can you cope?” Derek asked, as he went.
“Of course,” I said, hiding my elation that J – and I would be able to have a talk. The clerk slipped off into the Int. Library, I think she sensed that three was a crowd. After a while, the phone rang again.
“Ops, Breighton….. yes, thank you, I’ve got that.”
She turned to me again.
“Flying Control. Early return, F – Fox, starboard inner u/s. I’ll phone the Wingco in the Mess.”
While she was doing so, I went outside again. It was quite dark now, and countless stars were showing. They had put the Sandra Lights on for
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F – Fox. In a little while I heard him coming from the south, then he came into the circuit with his nav. lights on, flashed ‘F’ on his downward ident. light and slid down on to the runway behind the H.Q. huts, his three engines popping as he throttled back. In the stillness I heard the screech of his tyres as they bit the runway, then his engine-note faded into silence. In a minute or two I heard his bursts of throttle as he taxied into dispersal. He would have jettisoned his load, and most of his petrol, into the sea. J – had logged his time of landing on the board.
“I’ve told the Wingco,” she said.
We swopped childhoods, parents and early Service days for a while, then I decided to go and have a sleep in the Window Store, on the bench. I must have been tired and slept very soundly, because I was awakened by knocking on the door and Edith’s timid voice calling, “First aircraft overhead, sir.”
I shivered as I swung my legs down off the bench and on to the stone floor; I always shivered when I heard those words, wondering how it had gone. Had they had much opposition? That was always my first thought. Had there been much fighter activity? What had the flak been like, and the searchlights? I never thought much about the target; what seemed to matter to me was whether they were all back.
I went into the Ops Room and lit a cigarette, passing my case around. Derek was back.
“Here’s Rip van Winkle,” he said, “come to muck things up for us.”
“Get knotted,” I grinned, “and let’s have my fags back.”
He threw my case back at me and I disappointed him by catching it. The phone rang; J – answered it. The first one had landed safely. Derek said, “I’ll get along and start the interrogations, Pam’s on, too.”
“O.K., Derek,” I told him, “I’ll be down later,” and he left.
He still had “Room 504” on his mind and it still sounded no better. The phone rang again, it was another one landed. They kept coming in steadily and whoever was nearest the blackboard chalked them up. By quarter to six we had them all back but two. I took a quick
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look around. The clerk was in the far corner collecting empty cups. I said to J - , quietly, “Can you meet me tonight? Seven o’clock? We’ll go to the Plough, if you like.”
She nodded.
“Yes,” she breathed, and smiled briefly. She still looked wizard, I thought, even at six o’clock in the morning after a long night duty. For a while we let our thoughts take possession of us. Then the phone broke the silence again. One of the two had landed away, in 3 Group. That left just one outstanding.
The minutes ticked by. Then I said the usual thing, one of us always said it at times like this.
“He could have landed away, too, and they haven’t told us yet.”
But there was actually only fifteen minutes left before his endurance, on the night’s petrol load, ran out. I went outside, restlessly. The Sandra Lights looked desolate in a vivid and rigid cone above the aerodrome, waiting in the silence which had now enveloped everything. Dawn was starting to break. It looked like being another perfect summer morning. Far away, a door slammed and someone whistled, loudly and jauntily. Probably one of the returned crews, just off to bed. The sky, lightening, seemed immense, the stars had faded and the trees were motionless. In a little while I went back inside.
“Anything, J - ?”
She shook her head. I looked at my watch. Time was up, and more. We were quite quiet for a long while. Then I said, “I was playing chess with his bomb-aimer just before they went. Let’s hope to God they are P.o.W.s”. We still sat, waiting. When I knew it was quite hopeless I said to J – “You’d better phone the Wingco and the Padre. I’m going to see about the photographs. See you this evening, then, goodnight, J - .”
“Goodnight, or rather, good morning,” she said.
I walked out of the Ops Room into the early morning with a feeling of weariness and desolation. What was it all about? I thought. It was quite cool outside; I reached for a cigarette and my hand found a piece of paper in my pocket. It was the sketch of the chess board. I looked at if for a minute or so, then I said,
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“Good luck, wherever you are.”
I screwed the paper into a ball and dropped it into the waist-high corn, and I thought of the seven men who might be lying amidst the wreckage of their aircraft somewhere across the sea. It was growing light now and a faint breeze stirred the ripened heads of the wheat. Somewhere, the blackbird was starting to sing. The Sandra lights had been put out. There was nothing left for me to do. I shivered, and turned away.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
With an effort I dragged my thoughts back to the reality of the present, and I realised it was already time to go. The sun was dazzlingly low, but its warmth still lingered and there was a faint scent of late roses as I walked up through the hamlet, towards the gable-end and the road to the Ops Room. An old man was stiffly tending his patch of front garden, and looked up as I said “Good evening.”
“Been a fine day,” he said. He saw my rucksack. “Have you come far?” he added.
“Yes,” I said, “I’ve come a very long way,” and I walked on, into the silence and the shadows of the gathering twilight.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
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[inserted] [underlined] A different kind of love. [/underlined] [/inserted]
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[underlined] A DIFFERENT KIND OF LOVE [/underlined
“’Tis sure small matter for wonder
If sorrow is with one still”
(A.E. Housman)
Temporization, delaying tactics, putting-off. Call it what you will. I try to justify it be telling myself that whatever one calls it – and I am fairly certain we have all of us been guilty of it at some time – it is a human failing, and the guilt one feels, if one should feel guilt at some action or lack of action if it affects only oneself, has been felt by many another person. And should one indeed experience feelings of guilt if whatever the reason for the “putting-off” it affects only oneself? But I am afraid that in the circumstances which I have finally decided and brought myself to the point of describing, at least one other person must have felt some hurt, almost certainly deep hurt, and this is what has concerned me for a very long time. The thought and the concern I have felt is something which comes into my mind for no apparent reason at intervals of time, like the aching of a doubtful tooth which one knows will prove difficult and extremely painful of extraction. The moral points having been made, it is time for me to elaborate, sparing, I hope, no detail, least of all sparing nothing of the sad story of my own actions which undoubtedly started the whole business. These events, I know, will be re-lived in my mind, as they have been over the years, for days on end, producing invariably feelings of deep sadness and of ineradicable guilt.
I think it is worthy of mention that in the closing months of my career in the R.A.F. I was successively Adjutant of two units. The first of these was the unhappiest unit I had encountered, and the second, which followed immediately afterwards was without doubt the happiest one; one where I felt that those around me were like-minded. I went, at the behest of the powers-that-were in South East Asia Command, from one to the other on receipt of the appropriate signal, teleprinted on to paper, simply by walking from one tent to
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another on a crowded-to-capacity aerodrome near Rangoon, the Japanese surrender having thankfully taken place a few hours before. I met some of my new fellow-Officers and took to them immediately. First impressions were confirmed over the next days, weeks and months. On the final posting of my R.A.F. career I had arrived on a unit which was the most agreeable I had experienced in six years. I think that was understandable when one considers that I would wake in the mornings knowing that there was no war being fought, that no-one was going to be killed among those around me, no-one was going to go missing on operations and that one would not find an empty bed across one’s room in the morning, no empty chair in the Mess, no letters to be written to next-of-kin.
From the tented camp, where conditions were, to put it mildly, primitive, we were, after a few days, put on board a small paddle-steamer and left Rangoon for where we knew not. On this small ship I was to meet people with whom I was to work and play very happily for almost the last year of my service in the R.A.F. and with a few of whom I was to form enduring friendships, now alas, terminated by the inevitable and merciless passage of time.
It was on this ship too, where I first became acquainted with the music of Elgar. One morning as we were steaming southwards – we knew that much! – I was coming down a short flight of stairs leading to what, in terms of a house in England, would be described as a hallway or lobby. Some music was being played on a gramophone there and I was so struck by its grave beauty that I stood stock still on the stairway until it had ended. Then, moved by it and marvelling at its beauty I went up to the Equipment Officer who was playing it on his wind-up gramophone. This was at the time of 78 r.p.m. shellac records, of course. I asked him what he had just been playing and he was more than pleased to tell me that it was a movement from Elgar’s Enigma Variations, called Nimrod and explained the significance of that title. Little did I know that I was to hear the same music, in vastly different circumstances very soon, the recollection of which would have the power to move me deeply for years afterwards, not only because of the music itself, but because of the player of it and what the player meant – and still means – to me.
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We soon learned that we were heading for the island of Penang, of which most of us had heard, but that was all, as part of Operation Zipper, the British occupation, or rather re-occupation, of what was then Malaya, after the Japanese surrender and withdrawal. We were to be, in fact, the first R.A.F. unit to land in Malaya. And so it was. We arrived at the quayside of Georgetown, the principal town, under the massive shadow of the battleship H.M.S. Nelson, anchored next to us. Over the next few days we found our quarters in an old army cantonment on a wooded hillside, at Sungei Glugor, and took possession of the small aerodrome at Bayan Lepas in readiness for the arrival of a Spitfire squadron and a detachment of two Beaufighters from Burma. We hunted for furniture for the empty and deserted cantonment and found ample in the abandoned dwelling houses on the island. We readily imagined what must have happened to the original occupants during the Japanese occupation.
Within days we had the Station operating and thanks to the Royal Signals, in contact with our parent formations at Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. The Spitfires and Beaufighters duly arrived. We were an operational formation.
Now that I was settled into a permanent location I had the time and facilities to write a letter to J – every day, as she did to me. We had been engaged to be married for just under two years and there was a clear agreement between us that we would not be married until after we were both settled into civilian life again. Never did either of us doubt the promises made to one another and despite the time and distance which separated us, neither of us doubted the fidelity or behaviour of the other. J – was a W.A.A.F. Sergeant on an operational bomber station, now thankfully converted to peaceful purposes, and she was surrounded by some hundreds of both W.A.A.F. and R.A.F. personnel. As for me, my surroundings were peopled exclusively by men. The relationship between J – and I was firmly founded on mutual trust.
It had been decided that we should participate in a Service of Thanksgiving in one of the churches in Georgetown, and the arrangements were soon made, as were the arrangements for a victory march-past of all the armed services in Georgetown’s Victoria Park.
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I suppose there were over 100 of us to attend the service, which was held in the Chinese Methodist Church on a pleasant evening. A sizeable Chinese contingent were also present, men and women, all beautifully dressed in white. I was near to the right hand end of a pew fairly near to the front of the church, and as I took my place the organ was being played. To my amazement and delight I immediately recognised the tune as none other but ‘Nimrod’, which I had only recently come to know and which had made such an impression on me on the boat coming down from Rangoon. Smiling to myself, I looked up and to my right to see if it was one of our number who was the organist. My further surprise was that it was not anyone that I knew, but someone I took to be a Chinese youth in a white surplice. And then I saw that I was again mistaken; the organist was a Chinese girl in a long white dress. As she finished ‘Nimrod’ she moved almost seamlessly into a Chopin E Minor Prelude whose tune, full of yearning, almost brought tears into my eyes.
The service itself was jointly conducted by a Chinese clergyman about 50 years old and of almost ascetic appearance, and our own Methodist Padre. During the service an announcement was made that light refreshments would be served in the church hall afterwards and I determined to be there, partly from personal preference and partly because as Wing Adjutant it would obviously be my duty not to return immediately to the cantonment at Glugor but to show a degree of sociability towards the local people who were our hosts.
It dawned on me that since I had left England more than six months previously I had never seen a member of the opposite sex in that time, nor even heard a female voice. My mother, on my embarkation leave and J – immediately prior to my going on leave, had been the last two women to whom I had spoken.
I wondered, as, the service over, I went into the fairly crowded church hall, whether the girl organist would be there so that I could tell her how I had enjoyed and been moved by her choice of music. She was indeed there, one of those serving refreshments at a line of tables at one side of the hall. I was extremely pleased, went straight across to her, and smiling, spoke to her, complimenting
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her on her playing.
She smiled depracatingly [sic] and brushed away with her hand one side of the curtain of her collar-length black hair from her face, a gesture which, so characteristic of her, I have recalled very many times since. Her voice was soft, musical and charmingly accented, reminding me forcibly of J – ‘s own voice. She apologised for not having played well; she said she was out of practice. These few seconds were the start of an utterly delightful, all-too-brief, but quite unforgettable friendship. It became a friendship, and only that. Nothing more. During the time that I knew her I never once touched her, not even to shake hands when eventually I left Malaya for good. (‘For good’? I was in two minds about that. I felt I was being torn apart). My promises to J – were unbreakable and at no time did I think even of the possibility of breaking them. We were engaged to be married; we would be married as soon as it could be managed when I returned to the U.K. Strangely, I have only just discovered some poignantly applicable words in a chanson by the 14th century Guillaume de Machaut –
‘…. in a foreign land,
You who bear sweetness and beauty
White and red like a rose or lily ….
The radiance of your virtue
Shines brighter than the Pole Star ….
Fair one, elegant, frank and comely,
Imbued with all modesty of demeanour.’
I was not alone in making a friend in the local community; there were at least two other Officers to my knowledge who formed attachments of one sort or the other while we were on the island.
And at home? J - , in her daily letters to me occasionally mentioned going to dances on the aerodrome where she was stationed and I presumed that obviously she danced in the arms of men. But I trusted her as implicitly as I hope she trusted me. She mentioned two men, both Australian pilots, by their nicknames. One of them was killed, with all his crew, when they crashed within sight of the aerodrome on returning from an op. No reason for the crash was ever
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established. But to my discredit I could not help feeling a twinge - - perhaps more than that – of jealousy whenever I read their names in her letters. And some time after J – and I were married, while we were once talking about wartime days and nights, quite out of the blue she said, only half-jokingly, “If I hadn’t married you I would have married an Australian”. I remember that I smiled but said nothing. What could I say?
I find it difficult now to describe Chiau Yong adequately as I saw her then and as I think of her now, without using trite phrases or words which in this age of cynicism would be sneered at or greeted with unbelieving or sarcastic laughter. But then, and over the weeks which followed I was charmed by her placid nature, her smiling, childlike innocence, her undoubted beauty and her impish sense of humour.
That evening in the church hall, as I chatted to her, standing as we were at opposite sides of the table of refreshments, I felt a growing happiness which I had not known for a long time stealing over me and calming me, as though the war, with all the tragedies which I had seen and experienced, had never taken place.
When, regretfully, it was time for me to go I had learned her name and that she was the daughter of the clergyman whose church this was. I had also, hesitantly and tentatively, expecting nothing except possibly a polite rebuff, asked if I might see her again by coming to hear her organ practice, whenever that might be. She shyly consented and I felt, as I left the hall, that my feet were hardly touching the ground. I think I must have been smiling foolishly, but fortunately no-one commented as we boarded the gharries to return to Glugor.
As often as I possibly could I went to the church and sat in a pew near to the front, where I could see her sitting at the organ console, while she practised, content to listen to the music she made and to watch her as she played, quite unperturbed that I was there, a few feet away from her, listening and watching. Sometimes I went with her into her home, where she played the piano for me. And often we talked. Her English was truly excellent, somewhat reminiscent in her use of words and phrases of the Victorian era, but none the less lucid and charming to hear spoken
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in her soft, lilting voice. We talked about the music she played; she asked what sort of music I liked. We talked a little about our respective backgrounds. She was keen to learn anything about England. I mentioned one or two of my wartime experiences but asked for no details of hers or of her family’s under the Japanese occupation. I developed an interest to scratch the surface of knowledge of the Chinese language. Her own dialect, and that of her mother, who spoke no English, unlike her father and her sister, was Hokkien. She and her sister, who joined us on one occasion when we sat talking, amused themselves and entertained me by translating my name into written Chinese ideographs, which they pronounced as ‘Yo-min’. Whenever Chiau Yong wished to draw my attention to something or ask me a question, it was always prefaced by her saying ‘Mister Yo-min….’ . I suppose in her strict upbringing, which I assumed she had had, the use of my Christian name would have been seen as unduly familiar.
She taught me the numerals from one to ten and chuckled delightfully behind her small hand at my unavailing efforts to pronounce the words for ‘one’ and ‘seven’ correctly. To my ears they sounded identical; I am afraid that I was an obtuse pupil. I asked her about her own name; she told me that it meant ‘shining countenance’ which, I thought, could not have been more appropriate. As to her age, I never enquired. I would have put her as being slightly younger than I. I was 24 at the time, she would be possibly around 20, I thought.
I met her parents on at least one occasion. They very kindly invited me to come to their home for an evening meal, which I was glad and honoured to do. Two things stand out clearly in my mind about that occasion: the number of different languages spoken around the table and the sense of peacefulness which surrounded us. Her mother, a quiet middle-aged lady, simply dressed in black, spoke only Hokkien which, if she addressed me, was translated by Chiau Yong, as was my reply to her mother. Her father, the minister, spoke excellent English in a calm and measured manner. Her sister, Chiau Gian and her rather quiet younger brother spoke English too, for my benefit. Chiau Yong, who had told me that she was learning Mandarin, the classical Chinese tongue, spoke in English, of course, to me, in Hokkien to her mother and in Malay to the houseboy who appeared from time to time on his domestic errands.
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After I had visited their home on several occasions to see Chiau Yong and to hear her play, I was slightly surprised when one afternoon, as we were talking together, a pilot from the Spitfire squadron which had arrived came into the room. I knew D – P – well enough to talk to, but I thought, in my limited understanding of such things, he did not fit into my preconceived idea of what a fighter pilot should be like. He was, from what I had seen of him in the Mess, not only slightly older-looking than the other pilots, with somewhat thinning hair, but also of a quieter disposition than most of the others. However, a Spitfire pilot he was, whatever ideas I had formed about the differences between them and bomber pilots such as I had been. I gathered he had come to see Chiau Yong’s father, and not being interested in the reason for his visit I promptly forgot about him after we had exchanged polite enough greetings on this and on one or two further occasions when he came to the house to see Mr. Ng.
I knew that my time on the island and indeed in the R.A.F. must shortly come to an end. Being an administrative officer, as Adjutant, I could almost forecast when my time would come to ‘get on the boat’ and while others around me were obviously in a fever of impatience to get back to ‘civvy street’, as it was always called, I found my own state of mind to be more in the nature of calm acceptance, knowing that while I would be returning to J - , whom I loved and to whom I would be married, somehow, somewhere and at some time, I had spent a quarter of my life and almost all my adult life in R.A.F. uniform and would find things difficult or indeed incomprehensible.
At about this time our unit, 185 Wing, received orders to move across to the mainland, into Province Wellesley, to become R.A.F. Station Butterworth, leaving very good and well-appointed accommodation for something not quite so commodious. But there was a very good ferry service between Butterworth (which local people knew as Mata Kuching) and Georgetown, so I was still within easy reach of the town, its cafes, good sports facilities which were well used by us all, and above all, still within easy reach of Chiau Yong.
Towards the end of my service at Butterworth, on one visit to her, she suggested that we take a cycle ride to see some nearby parts
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of the island which were strange to me, and this we did for a couple of hours, along deserted roads, up hillsides, almost always under the cover of trees with their blossoms, so exotic to my eyes, with their birdsong, and the chattering and calling of monkeys and chipmunks.
The idyll had to end. I think my unconscious mind has, as a defence mechanism, obliterated the recollection of our goodbyes, for I can remember not one single thing about it. It is as though it had never happened. But it must have done, of course. I returned to England, a stranger to a strange land. Standards had changed, attitudes had changed, there was no longer the feeling of one-ness, of co-operation and togetherness which the war had engendered. It seemed now as though it were ‘every man for himself and damn the others’. I let a decent interval of two or three days pass as I settled in at home with my parents then I travelled south to be with J - . It was a happy but strange reunion. Strange to see her in civilian clothes, strange to see her leave to catch an early train to Brighton to work for the South Eastern Gas Board. All our talk was of when, where and how we were going to be married and where we would live. In the end, with the willing help of my parents, I found very basic accommodation in my home town, as I had agreed with J – that I needed to return to my old occupation and to obtain a necessary qualification as soon as possible.
J – and I were married in the autumn from her aunt’s home in Surrey and after our honeymoon in Edinburgh we were thrust into the realities of married life in cramped surroundings, comprehensive rationing, with a shared kitchen, and where even the basics of living necessitated stringent saving on my salary, with all of which J – coped amazingly well. I had to study hard in the evenings in the same small living room where J – was usually reading or knitting, deprived of the radio so as not to disturb me. Settling down at work was none too easy. My superiors were a man who had somehow missed the first World War and who was too old for the Second, his deputy, who had tried hard to dissuade me from volunteering for aircrew on the grounds that I would be probably be instrumental in killing people and who himself, had he not been reserved from military service as a key employee would have been compelled to describe himself as a conscientious objector. There were also two ex-R.A.F. men, who in six years of service had attained the respective ranks of Corporal
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and of Leading Aircraftman. Perhaps because I had outranked them it became apparent that any particularly physically dirty or awkward job was allocated to me. I accepted the situation as a continuation of military discipline, as I did when the office clerk, a lady of mature years, when I politely declined to do part of her far less than arduous work for her (so that she would have more time for gossiping, I suspected), told me rather angrily and unimaginatively that since “I’d been away” I had changed, which I thought was something of an understatement. I never talked of my wartime experiences and no-one asked me a single question. All they knew was that I had flown aeroplanes, been over Germany and finished my career in the Far East. The rest was silence.
Having neither a telephone nor a car I kept in touch with friends I had made in the R.A.F. by letter and rarely did a week go by without news from someone, either in the U.K. or some other part of the globe. My correspondents, of course, included Chiau Yong, whom I had told in a letter that I was finally married, and had given her my address. I certainly had not forgotten her and whenever I thought of her I smiled mentally at the remembrance of her charming company and her music-making.
At this time, although of course there was no means of knowing it, J – was sickening for a serious, potentially fatal illness, which within months was to take her into sanatoria for more than a year of her young life. Whether this slow decline in her health, coupled with the novelty of her surroundings and circumstances contributed to the short and low-key breakfast table conversation which took place between us I do not know, but I suspect it might have done so.
I remember vividly that it was a Saturday morning. There were two letters for us, one for J – and one for me, which, to my delight I saw was from Chiau Yong. We opened our respective mail at the breakfast table. The letter was typical of Chiau Yong’s nature – pleasant, equable, written in beautiful English and containing some mildly jocular reference to something I must have once said to her about settling down into civilian life. It contained no word of love; it ended without those conventional little crosses which were the well-known signs for kisses. I would have been astonished beyond measure if it had done so. J – had finished reading her own letter. I smiled across the table and said “From Chiau Yong. Read it, darling”.
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She took it without a word and read it expressionlessly. I had no inkling of what was to come as she handed the letter unsmilingly back to me. Looking directly at me, she said “I don’t think it’s right that she should be writing to a married man like that and I think you should tell her so”.
I could hardly believe what I was hearing. I was completely taken aback with shock and surprise. I had known J – for more than three years during which time we had seen eye-to-eye on almost everything and no word of disagreement had ever passed between us. But I recovered my composure quickly and knowing that one’s wife must come first in everything, I said “All right”.
I immediately left the table, got the writing pad and sitting down again in front of J – I wrote the cruellest words that I have ever in my whole life composed. My opening words are to this day burned into my memory.
“Dear Chiau Yong”, I wrote, “In England, a married man does not write letters to another girl”. And I continued briefly that the correspondence between us must now stop. It took about three minutes. I handed the letter wordlessly to J – who read it and gave it back to me with a nod. “Yes,” she said.
Chiau Yong’s name was never again mentioned during our married life, but I cannot and would not pretend that, happily married as we were for almost 40 years, I never thought of Chiau Yong. For I have thought of her often and I have been deeply and bitterly troubled that I must have been the cause of her suffering so much shock and pain so unexpectedly and, in my eyes, without any reason, and certainly not by any misdeed of hers, intentional or otherwise. I have prayed again and again over the years, and still do, that she might have eventually forgiven me. I never saw her again; I never heard from her again. Whether she is alive or dead, was or is happy or unhappy, I do not know, but I do know that she brought light and sweetness in unbelievable measure into my life and that our short and beautiful friendship was as innocent in every respect as any relationship could be.
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There is a curious and disturbingly bitter postscript to this unhappy episode in my life. J –‘s parents lived in Worthing and naturally she wanted to see them and her unmarried younger sister whenever she could. We had not much money, but by dint of hard saving we were able to spend two or three weeks every summer, usually during the Worthing Cricket Week, with her parents. One summer’s day, not all that many years before she died, J – and I were walking through the park near to the Worthing sea front. We left the park and crossed the road, going towards Lancing, still near to the sea. On the corner stood a church whose denomination I did not know – until I read on a notice board erected near to the church door, “Minister – D. P. –“ I looked away quickly before my shock and astonishment became too obvious. It could only have been the Spitfire pilot from Penang who used to visit Chiau Yong’s father, presumably for some sort of guidance or instruction as to his post war vocation. If things had been other than they were I would have gone immediately with J – to seek him out, to talk over the times when we first met, but of course Chiau Yong’s name would have come into our conversation. I walked on in silence, as though nothing untoward had happened, but with my mind in a turmoil. So J – never knew about D – P – , about his nearness and of the memories I still had of sunlit afternoons in the church hall in Georgetown where I would sit talking with that beautiful young girl in her long white dress.
Was I in love with Chiau Yong? Can one be in love with two people at once? Was that possible when I never stopped loving J - ? These are questions I have many times asked myself. The only self-convincing conclusion to which I can reasonably arrive is while there was no element whatsoever of the physical aspect of love in my relationship with her, yet I feel that the affection which I held and hold for her, whatever her feelings might have been for me, was more than mere friendship, that this was a different kind of love. Christ exhorted us to love one another. We were both Christians and I think that this is what He meant us to feel for one another.
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And so now, very often, while I have been writing this belated account of something which has haunted me for a very long time, and very often since I wrote that terrible, wounding letter, I remember with a sort of poignant gratitude and happiness, bitter-sweet happiness, the beauty of her nature and her innocent sweetness and I thank God for the gift of happiness which she gave me. But at the same time I feel a profound and bitter guilt and sadness, knowing that the dreadful hurt which she must have suffered and perhaps for years remembered was due to no fault of hers but was entirely due to me.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Mi querer tanto vos quiere,
muy graciosa donzella,
que por vos mi vida muere
y de vos no tiene querella.
Tanto sois de mi querida
con amor i lealtad,
que de vos non se que diga
viendo vestra onestad.
Si mi querer tanto vos quiere,
causalo que sois tan bella,
que por vos mi vida muere
y de vos no tiene querella.
(Enrique, d. 1488)
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[inserted] [underlined] Sun on a chequered tea-cosy [/underlined] [/inserted]
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O where are you going, Sir Rollo and Sir Tabarie,
Sir Duffy and Sir Dinadan, you four proud men,
With your battlecries [sic] and banners,
Your high and haughty manners,
O tell me, tell me, tell me,
Will you ride this way again?
(School Speech Day song, 1936.)
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[underlined] SUN ON A CHEQUERED TEA-COSY [/undelrined]
It was Zhejian green tea. I poured the water on, placed the lid carefully on the pot and took the tea-cosy in my left hand. The sun through the kitchen window shone brightly across its red and green checks. And stirred some memory, deep down in the recesses of my mind. Those checks had some significance, somewhere from a long way back. I stood there, looking down at the covered teapot and let myself relax until the realisation slowly dawned. I was looking again at the band around Ivor’s R.A.F. peaked cap when he was an apprentice at Halton, before the war, and I found myself thinking back to the times I had walked with him along the cliffs, hearing the gulls screaming overhead and wheeling in the sunlight, laughing with him as he sang “Shaibah Blues”, with the waves crashing on to the rocks below.
I never thought I would find myself in the position of trying to do a small thing to defend Ivor, after all this time, but, of course, there’s no one else left to do it now. Looking back over it, although so many years have passed since H – wrote what he did, it still seems to me that they were very cruel words to use, especially as Ivor had no means of defending himself, no right of reply nor of appeal. It was something so barbed that it eventually acquired, through its re-telling, the significance and nature of a legend, and in the perverse way of things it elevated Ivor to the status of a minor hero. But all the same, at the time it took place I could see it had made a deep and lasting impression on him, young and resilient as he was. And now, to me, at any rate, H – ‘s words about Ivor have acquired a poignancy which can never to expunged.
Ivor need not, of course, have let anyone into the secret; one didn’t do that sort of thing, very often, at school, in case it was thought that one was being sissy or trying to attract attention and sympathy, but it was sufficient to indicate to me, and to John, I believe, who was there at the time, how deeply it had struck home, when Ivor approached us one day on the Second Field, before school went in.
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It was the beginning of the Autumn term. The field behind the woodwork room looked bare and open without the cricket nets; the marks of the bowlers’ run-ups and of the batting block-holes could still be seen. The rugby pitch, away down the slight slope, looked very green and inviting with its newly painted posts and flawlessly straight white lines. During the winter months I lived for rugby and thought of little else; scholastic subjects took a poor second place.
As was the custom, about half the school were engaged in punting a single rugger ball around, more or less at random, before lessons started, competing with one another to catch it then punt it as far as one could again. It sounds, and looked, I suppose, pointless. But it was rare that anyone in any match missed catching a kick by the opposition, and no-one at all would dream of letting the ball bounce before he attempted to take it. I was squinting up into the sun at the flight of the ball when I heard someone call, “Hey! Yoicks!”
I turned to see Ivor. John, who was nearby, grinned when he saw him and came over, with his rather stiff-legged, rocking walk. Ivor and I exchanged the usual new-term greetings and repartee – where had we been, had we seen the latest laurel and Hardy picture, and so on. Then, surprisingly, for the old term was now but a hazy memory, Ivor said, “What was your report like?”
“My report?” I repeated in astonishment.
“Yeah, what was it like?” Ivor repeated, attempting a casual nonchalance.
I was surprised at his interest in that, because Ivor, more so than I, perhaps, was not particularly scholastically minded. He had the build of an athlete, taller than me by four or five inches, heavier by almost a stone, with dark, short-cropped hair, a freckled face and a pugnacious jaw. He moved with the natural athlete’s springy lope. He was a more than adequate boxer, a hard-working and aggressive lock forward and, during the summer, a forthright, attacking middle order batsman, as well as being a bowler of fearsome pace and hostility, if rather lacking in accuracy.
“What was it like, then, your report?” he repeated insistently.
To be truthful, I could hardly remember much about it; I took little interest in it, apart from my French result and the comments opposite “Games”. My parents rarely commented on it either, except to tell me, with some regularity, that I would have to pull my socks up.
“Oh, all right, I suppose,“ I said off-handedly to Ivor. “I was top in French,” I added rather smugly. He ignored that.
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“What did H – have to say – about your Speech Training?”
I looked at him in amazement. Speech Training? It just didn’t count; there was no exam., no placings, just remarks on the term’s progress, or lack of it.
For a short while around this period of time, the powers-that-were quite rightly decided that we should be put on the path towards becoming at least partly comprehensible in our speech to someone who might live more than half-a-dozen miles away. And Mr. H - , as a recent graduate from Oxbridge, was deputed to perform this function. It must be said that he did so with rather bitter sarcasm, delivered under a thin veil of feigned jocularity, which did little to impart in us either the ability, or indeed the desire to speak our mother tongue in a widely acceptable form. In fact, it had, in some cases, where the pupil concerned was either of a rebellious or strongly independent nature, quite the reverse effect, as toes were, metaphorically speaking, firmly dug in.
Into this category Ivor fell; he took very personally and very much to heart the barbed remarks directed at him during the rather tedious classes in Speech Training, and in the end, it was obvious to everyone that he was adopting an attitude verging on passive resistance to H – ‘s instruction. It seemed that Ivor’s was the proverbial duck’s back off which the pure water of H – ‘s tuition flowed unheeded.
Ivor seized me, in mock anger, by the lapels of my blazer.
“C’mon, c’mon!” he exclaimed in his best Humphrey Bogart accents, “Come clean, y’rat!”
“Well,” I said, rather tired of the subject by now, “if you must know, I think he said something like ‘fairly good’. I didn’t get myself told off by my parents, anyhow, so it can’t have been too bad. But why, anyhow? What’s all the fuss about?”
Ivor’s eyes narrowed and he looked around him before, dropping his voice, he said to John and me, “Do you know what the rotter put on mine?”
“No,” I said, somewhat obviously.
“Well, on mine, he said, ‘Seems incapable of sustained effort’, the so-and-so. My Dad played merry hell about it, threatened to
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stop my pocket-money and goodness knows what.”
“I say, it is a bit thick, though, isn’t it, H – saying a rotten thing like that? I mean to say – “
I left the sentence unfinished; I felt that H – ‘s remark was a bit much. Surely he could have simply said ‘fairly good’ or ‘could do better’? They were the customary form of words. But this, well, it was rather damning. Both John and I made sympathetic noises, then John passed around his wine gums. I let Ivor have the black one and we chewed them in thoughtful silence, each of us meditating on the rat-ishness of H - . The next time I caught the ball I passed it hard to Ivor and he gave vent to his feelings with a tremendous punt which almost cleared the fence by the Art School.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
At that age, memories are short, and mine was no exception. I cannot speak for Ivor, of course; I suppose that somewhere inside that stubborn, defiant head of his a resentment still burned, and as far as H – was concerned, while it would be quite unfair to say that he had it in for Ivor, it was apparent that he singled him out with some slight relish as the object of any cutting remarks he felt inclined to make concerning our defective pronunciation. But it was something which, to be honest about it, did not loom very large in my life. Perhaps twice a week, during the Speech Training lessons I would look covertly, with mingled anticipation and apprehension, at the scornfully sarcastic H – and at a reddening Ivor, his lower lip jutting stubbornly, as the temperature of the atmosphere rose between them. But my Autumn term was dominated by the fact that I was picked to play for the Junior House fifteen.
I knew, of course, that Ivor’s eldest brother was in the Royal Air Force; from time to time he mentioned him, proudly, and looking back, I realise that I never knew his first name, he was to Ivor, simply ‘my brother’. Somehow, it lent them both a great deal of dignity, I think. Ivor would also tell us the latest Station his brother was on, their romantic-sounding names supplying, as it were, a coloured backdrop to the anonymity of ‘my brother’ in his coarse, high-necked airman’s tunic and peaked cap pulled down on his brow,
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as I saw him in my imagination, marching in a squad of men – I did not yet know they were called ‘flights’ – across a vast parade ground.
“He’s on a course at St. Athan, just now,” Ivor would tell us, or, “My brother’s been posted to Drem,” or again, “He’s at Scampton.”
What his brother did, exactly, we never knew, nor thought to ask, it was sufficient that he inhabited and was part of a picturesque, far-off and dashing world, greatly removed in every way from our monotonous and rather dreary provincial town.
One day, Ivor came up to John and me and said, proudly, “My brother’s been posted overseas, he’s gone to Aden.”
John said, mischievously, “Will he be wearing a fez?” and had to dodge the powerful left swing which Ivor pretended to aim with serious intent at him. On the strength of that news, John and I took to calling Ivor “Ali”, but we could tell he didn’t much like it, and as he was still the target of H – ‘s jibes we thought he had sufficient to contend with, so we eventually dropped it.
It was during the Christmas holidays when I was, for want of something better to do, in our sitting room playing the piano rather loudly and very inaccurately, that my mother put her head around the door.
“You’re not concentrating,” she said, “I can tell, you know. But there’s someone here for you, do you want me to bring him in?”
“Who is it?” I asked, glad of the interruption.
“I think he said his name was Bradley,” she replied.
“Oh, it must be Ivor, then,” I said, feeling much less bored and getting up from the piano. I went to the front door. Ivor was standing there with an expression of elaborate unconcern on his face.
“Hello, Yoicks,” he greeted me.
“Hiya,” I said, “what are you doing here?”
I thought perhaps he might want to borrow a book, or something.
“I was just going for a walk along the cliffs – want to come?”
This surprised me slightly as he wasn’t by any means a regular friend of mine away from school; there were a group of five or six of us who lived near to one another and who tended to congregate
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on our bikes in our immediate neighbourhood; Ivor lived all of three-quarters of a mile away in quite another part of the town, separated from our district by a railway line.
“Sure,” I said, glad of the distraction, “just hang on, I’ll shove my coat on.”
As I was doing so, “Mother!” I called, “I’m just going along the cliffs with Ivor.”
“Mind you don’t get cold,” she said, “Have you got your coat on?”
I rolled my eyes at Ivor, who grinned understandingly.
“Yes, Mam,” I said, in a long-suffering voice, and shut the door quickly behind me. We strode away.
When we arrived at the cliff-tops, the cold easterly wind was smashing the rollers against the rocks below and tugged at our overcoats as we walked. Until then we had talked of the usual things, what we had had for Christmas presents, the “flicks”, as Ivor always called them – a word learned from his brother, perhaps? – and how we had been passing the time during the holidays.
“My brother’s in Aden,” Ivor said, “did I tell you?”
I said yes, he had told us, how was he getting along?
“Great,” he said, “but it’s bloody hot out there. They’re all wondering what this bloke Mussolini’s going to do, he keeps talking about – what’s its name? – Abyssinia, or some place?”
I wasn’t greatly interested in the comical figure of the Italian dictator, comical, that is, as he appeared to us, or as he was portrayed to us. So I merely grunted something non-committal.
Ivor said abruptly, “I’m leaving. I thought I’d tell you.”
“You’re what?” I shouted above the noise of the sea, “You’re leaving? Leaving school? But you can’t!”
“Oh, yes I can, though,” he replied with a grin of triumph, “my Dad’s been to the Town Hall to check up.”
“But what are you going to do?” I asked, now all agog. He used an expression I heard then for the first time, on that cold and windswept cliff path, one which, when I hear it, inevitably brings to mind Ivor, his freckled face pink with the cold, as he proudly said, “I’m going to join the Raf.”
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The penny didn’t drop. It must have been the cold.
“The what?” I said, “What’s the Raf?”
He punched my shoulder playfully. Fortunately he was nearer the cliff-edge than I.
“C’mon, yer mug, it’s the R.A.F., of course. What else did you think?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” I replied, recovering my balance. “When’re you going, then?”
“Soon as I can. End of next term, prob’ly. I’m going to be a Boy Apprentice at Halton!”
He squared his broad shoulders. A vision of Oliver Twist with his empty porridge bowl held out in front of him floated into my head. ‘Boy Apprentice’ sounded rather like someone who was being exploited, ill-treated. I am sure I was wrong, but the picture remained. But I grinned and said, “You might get out to Aden with your brother.”
“Hope so,” he said wistfully, “but he’ll prob’ly be posted again before that. Anyhow, that’s what I’m doing. I’m leaving as soon as I can. No more speech training for me!”
We laughed. Two gulls wheeled noisily overhead, their screaming cut across the noise of the sea and of the wind. Ivor aimed his fingers, pointed like a pistol, at them and clicked his tongue very loudly, twice. He was good at that.
“Gotcher!” he exclaimed.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
The Spring term came and went. Ivor, as they would put it nowadays, kept a low profile as far as H – was concerned, and worked assiduously at every subject, even Speech Training. At the end of term he quietly left us. I don’t even remember saying ‘cheerio’ to him. We were young, you see, and quite without sentiment. Then it was summer, and the nets went up again. To my surprise I was elected Junior House cricket captain and became rather insufferably swollen-headed about it. It was on a Saturday afternoon that summer when I saw him again. I was sitting at home, reading, when a shadow passed the window, there was the sound of heavy footsteps and someone knocked at the door. I heard the door-knocker flap loosely as my mother answered it, then the sound of conversation.
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“It’s your friend,” mother said, “the one in the Air Force.”
I hurried to the door. Ivor stood there, smiling broadly, resplendent in his uniform, heavy boots shining brilliantly, his cap carrying the chequered band of the Halton Cadet.
“Hiya, Ivor!” I said. (I almost called him ‘Ali’ and only just corrected myself in time.)
“Hiya, Yoicks! How about comin’ for a walk? I’m on a forty-eight.”
I had no idea what that was but I went to tell my mother where I was going.
“Isn’t he smart?” she smiled quietly, “he looks well in his uniform.”
We set off for the cliffs, in the sunshine. I noticed he did not lope along now, he marched. He seemed taller than I remembered him, bronzed and deep-chested, harder. We exchanged news. In one way he seemed to be very grown-up but in another, he was still my form-mate, furrowing his brow at some problem of Algebra.
“What’s a forty-eight, by the way?” I asked.
“Just a forty-eight hour pass.”
“You haven’t got much time at home, then, have you? All that way from Halton and you’ll have to be back again inside two days?”
“Sure,” he said, airily and confidently, “it’s a piece of cake.”
That was another new expression; I stored it for future use.
“Where’s your brother just now? Still in Aden?”
“No, he’s been posted to Shaibah; bet you don’t know where that is.”
I shook my head.
“never heard of it before,” I said.
“Middle East,” Ivor said proudly, “Iraq – getting his knees brown good and proper.”
He started to sing joyfully what I later knew to be the anthem of all overseas R.A.F. men, “Shaibah Blues”. Then he ripped into several verses of “Charlotte the Harlot”, and while, having been very strictly brought up, I didn’t know the meaning of some of the expressions, I gathered from their anatomical connections that it was not the sort of thing one would sing at home. At least not at my home. But I smiled rather sheepishly when he’d finished.
I said, “Do you like it, in the Raf?”
(I hadn’t forgotten.)
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“It’s great,” he said decisively, “bloody great.”
He slapped me hard on the shoulder.
“It’s a great life if you don’t weaken, Yoicks!”
“What do you do?”
“Oh, square-bashing, P.T., lectures – I’m going to be a Flight Mechanic.”
I could see he was as happy as a sandboy, it shone out of him. He was alert, confident, buoyant, a complete contrast to the rebellious and scowling youth who had reluctantly forced himself to stand and, red-faced, chant, “the rain in Spain.”
“that’s fine, then,” I said, “but we don’t half miss you in the scrum.”
He never mentioned H – ‘s name.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Then, of course, the fuse which had been smouldering in Europe for six years finally detonated the bomb, and everything blew up in our faces. Not many of us were at all surprised. Although I and nearly all our little crowd who lived nearby had left school and were settling into our various jobs, as soon as Munich had come along I pushed my studying to one side. I knew there was no point in it now. It was going to be, at the very least, somewhat interrupted. So I, and my friends, played a lot of games, went to a lot of flicks, cycled a lot, and, out of working hours, lived our lives to the full, as far as we could. I started to take a girl out. Her name was Lilian, and she was extremely beautiful.
When the Battle of Britain was on I went into the R.A.F. One of my leaves, much later, coincided with one of Ivor’s, and he called at hour house, out of the blue. This time, as we were men, we shook hands firmly. He looked me up and down.
“I’m bloody well not going to call you ‘sir’,” he said.
“You’d bloody well better not try,, either,” I replied, “or I’ll stick you on a fizzer!”
He swung a playful punch at me, which, knowing Ivor, I was half-expecting. I dodged it and clouted him in the midriff, hard enough to make him wince.
“You rotten sod!” he gasped, “come on, let’s have a walk on the
[page break]
cliffs!”
I handed him a Players’, we lit up and strode away. The cliffs were partly wired off as an anti-invasion measure but we managed to get near enough to hear the same waves crashing on to the same rocks, and to smell the salt air as we walked. Until I looked at us, I felt nothing had changed; then I knew it had, really, and that you could never, ever, put the clock back to what had been.
It was about this time that the inevitable, impersonal and cruelly clinical process of the dissection of our little crowd began.
Norman was unfit for military service because of his deplorable eyesight. He was working for one of the Government Departments in London when a German bomb killed him. Peter, who lived in the next house down the street, and whose father had been drowned at sea a couple of years before, went into the R.A.F., became a Navigator, and was killed when his Wellington, from Finningley, crashed one night. I visited his mother on my first leave after it happened.
She was in a state of near-hysteria at mention of his name, and bitter, it must be said, that everything seemed to be going well for me. She did not know, of course, about my crew. I left her staring into the small fire, locked in her private world of abject misery. Then there was Jack, who was also an only son, strangely enough, also a Navigator on Wellingtons, also killed in a night crash.
By the time Alan, whom I had met in London while I was on my Intelligence course, had qualified as a Radar Operator on Beaufighters, the Germans had ceased flying over England at nights and he was transferred to non-operational flying. George also went into the R.A.F.., qualified as a pilot, then, almost immediately, the war ended. He emigrated to the U.S.A., where he had been trained.
Connie and I had a few months together at Moreton-in-the-Marsh, until I was grounded for good. I left him there, bumped into him once more, on leave, then learned of his death. He had crashed his Stirling, towing a glider, over England.
When it was all over, I asked Alan to be my best man. I would have done so anyhow, but in practical terms I had no choice – there was no-one left in our crowd now but he and I.
[page break]
So much had happened since I had last seen Ivor that he rarely had entered my thoughts. There was little reason for him to have done so, as he was a Fitter, in a pretty safe ground job in the R.A.F. Like thousands of other friends, we had been separated by the war and we would either bump into each other on some R.A.F. station, or in some outlandish place in the Far East, or eventually, we’d see each other back in the U.K. When he did enter my head occasionally, I thought perhaps he might have met and married a girl from some other part of the country, or, like George, had seen service in foreign parts and emigrated. I visualised him in a fez, thought about John’s remark about his brother, and smiled to myself at the happy recollection. But gradually, Ivor faded out of my mind.
Until I bumped into a chap who owned a shop, and who had been in our form at school. He had lived within a few hundred yards of Ivor. He, also, had served in the wartime R.A.F., as an armourer, and strangely enough, he told me he had been on the nearest Station to Breighton, at the same time as I had met J – there. I don’t know how he managed it, but he was a mine of information as to what happened to the chaps in our form. Ivor’s name did not come up immediately, as, of course, he had left school before we had done so. But in a pause during his cataloguing of old friends and acquaintances I asked him, “Where’s Ivor got himself these days? I haven’t seen him for years.”
P – was solemn, bespectacled and deliberate in manner and speech. He looked earnestly at me through his thick lenses for a moment or two, as though sorting through some mental card-index and trying to decide whether I could be trusted to hear the information which he had in store there.
“Ivor,” he said slowly, “Ivor Bradley. Yes. he went into the Raf, of course – you knew that?”
“yes,” I said, “He was a Boy Entrant, a Halton Brat, as they were known.”
A smile flicked on to and off his face, like the headlights of a car signalling ‘come on’.
“That’s right,” he continued, then paused. “Yes, well he went missing, you know.”
[page break]
For a moment I could not think what he meant. Rather obtusely I said, “You mean he left town? Went off somewhere suddenly?”
“No, no, he was aircrew, he went missing on a raid over Germany,” P – said, looking more owlish than ever.
“But – he was a fitter, surely?” I exclaimed, with an awful feeling, which I had hoped never again to experience, beginning to overtake me. Then, as the light dawned, I said, “Did he remuster to aircrew?”
P – nodded.
“Yes, that’s what happened. I saw him just after he volunteered for aircrew – you remember we lived near to one another? – and he said he wanted to do something a bit more active. So he became a Flight Engineer.”
“Good God,” I said softly, I’d no idea at all. I never dreamed that Ivor would go – like that.”
He nodded again, solemnly.
“Well, he did, I’m afraid,” he said.
He shuffled through a few more cards.
“How long were you at Breighton, by the way? I saw your name in the Visitors’ Book in the Church there, on the day after you’d been in.”
“That’s remarkable,” I said, “what a small world, isn’t it?”
I remembered very vividly going into the church with J - , the day after Johnny P – went missing.
P – said, “You must call in again sometime. I’ll shut the shop and we’ll have a cup of tea and a proper chat.”
I said yes, I would do that, and I felt I should really have made more of an effort to do so. But I was a bit of a coward about the rest of his card index, I’m afraid.
It was several more years before I learned what had happened to Ivor. Searching through a volume of aircrew losses I finally found his name. He was lost without trace, with his crew, during a raid in a Pathfinder Lancaster in the summer of 1943.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
I poured myself a cup of the green tea and took a sip as I looked out of the window. But it was terribly tepid, so I threw it all away
[page break]
and found I wasn’t really thirsty after all. The sun had long since moved off the chequered tea-cosy, and it was starting to get dusk. I shivered suddenly and found I was feeling extremely lonely and extremely depressed. I looked across at the white telephone and wished to hell that someone would ring, anyone at all, even a wrong number would have done, just so that I could have heard a voice. I sat for a while, waiting, but I knew it was a stupid thing to do. Nobody did ring, so I put on my anorak and went out quickly.
I walked around for a bit. I passed a lighted pub which looked very inviting and cheerful with people smiling at one another and chatting while they drank their beer. I wished I could go in and have a few beers, with Connie, like I used to. I stopped and thought about it, but I knew it would be no good, and as M – had said, it wouldn’t solve anything. So I kept on walking and feeling bloody miserable when I thought about Ivor and Connie, and about Jack and Peter and Norman, and all my crew. And about J - . Her especially. Then I had a strong craving for a cigarette, but I knew that would be a stupid thing to do, too.
It started to rain, so finally, I made my way back to the flat. It felt empty and cold, like somewhere someone had once lived, but didn’t any more. If no-one rings before nine o’clock, I told myself, I will ring M - , just so that I can talk to someone, for Christ’s sake. I sat and looked at the telephone again for a bit and thought about it. But nine o’clock came and I didn’t do anything about it in the end, because I knew it wouldn’t be very cheerful or very much fun for her, and as I was tired and cold I swallowed a couple of aspirin and got into bed.
While I was taking them it occurred to me that there was a stack left in the bottle which could be put to very effective use, but then I thought that wasn’t exactly any part of a pressing-on-regardless effort, so I shoved the bottle firmly to one side.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to go off to sleep after all this business, and I was damned right. I kept thinking about Ivor, then I started thinking about the crowed and how much I realised I was missing them. And about J - ; her, most of all. Then I thought,
[page break]
“My God, there’s only me left now, and I’m not much damn good to anyone like this, even if there were anyone,” which made things worse. I would have given a great deal if I could have turned the clock back, to have gone back to Breighton, to that lovely summer, to have started all over again, to be meeting J – for the first time, that wonderful morning when I saw her walk into the Ops Room, when she came to attention smartly and saluted and said, “Good morning, sir.” Little did I know, little did we both know what was to happen to us.
But this was getting me nowhere, so in the end I said aloud, “Oh, Christ, I just don’t want to wake up in the morning.” Then I said goodnight to J – ‘s photograph, in our own very special way, like I always had done, to her, once upon a time, when we were together, when we were happy.
And then I put out the light.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
[page break]
[inserted] [underlined] Photograph in a book. [/underlined] [/inserted]
[page break]
[underlined] PHOTOGRAPH IN A BOOK [/underlined]
“Frankie, do you remember me?”
(Late 20th century pop song.)
I realise it is very trite to say that the unexpected is always happening. Nevertheless I have to say that something completely unexpected happened recently to me, which produced, out of the blue, a violent cocktail-shaking of emotions which I thought were firmly and peacefully laid to rest.
I flatter myself that usually I am among the first to obtain, or at least to see, newly-published books on the subject of Bomber Command in the second world war, but for one reason or another, this was not the case in relation to a recently-published history of No. 4 Bomber Group.
4 Group included the aerodromes at Linton-on-Ouse, (my initial posting as an Int/Ops Officer), Holme-on-Spalding-Moor, to which I was moved when the Canadians were about to take over the northernmost aerodromes of 4 Group to form their own 6 Group, and Breighton, the satellite of Holme, where I was to meet, fall in love with and become engaged to J - , who, when the war was over became my wife.
I should have, to have been true to form, snapped up the book on its first appearing, but for various reasons, I did not. Instead, I heard reports – all good – of it from D - , an Ex-W.A.A.F., who features on a whole page of it, complete with her charming photograph, and with whom I had been corresponding. And I heard of it from Alan, a friend who was instrumental in having a memorial installed on the village green close to the place where Pilot Officer Cyril Barton, V.C., of 578 Squadron in 4 Group, sacrificed his life in bringing back his crippled and half-crewed Halifax after the disastrous Nuremberg raid. Alan was a schoolboy at the time and was among the first on the scene of Cyril Barton’s crash. He has, most worthily, devoted a considerable amount of his time and energy to ensuring
[page break]
that Cyril’s sacrifice will never be forgotten. It was as a result of this that, just before J – died, I met Alan, a very caring man, a man who has become a true friend to me. He was given the book as a birthday present.
He and I live in neighbouring towns. We speak on the telephone quite often; we meet whenever we are able and always find much to talk about, as Alan was also in the Royal Air Force. He was thrilled to receive the book, which, naturally, contains material concerning Cyril Barton. I had been searching bookshops for it, but without success; I had been waiting for the local Library to obtain it for me.
Early one evening there was a ring at my doorbell. Alan was standing there, cheerful as ever, a welcome sight indeed. He was carrying something flat in a Sainsbury’s carrier bag. With typical generosity he said that as he and his wife were shortly going on holiday, I might as well have the benefit of the book while he was away. I was grateful to him, and leafed through it while we chatted for a while before he had to leave to go to work. He showed me a picture in the book of Cyril’s wrecked aircraft and of Alan himself, as a schoolboy, standing near to it, very soon after the crash occurred.
When Alan had gone, impressed by the high quality of the book and by the photographs in particular, many of them amateur pictures taken by wartime aircrew members, I leafed through its pages, then worked through them systematically.
There were many poignant, familiar scenes. Of aircraft and their crews, of aerodromes and their buildings, targets in Germany and the occupied countries, pictures of people I had known of by reputation, people I had known personally, many I had never known. I found myself wondering how many of those young faces smiling at me from the pages were now, like myself, turning these same pages thinking, as I was thinking, “Oh, yes, I remember a scene like that”, or how many if them were no longer able to do this. A lump was gathering in my throat as I turned to a particular page and saw, among a group of captions, one which read ‘Interrogation for 78 Squadron crews as others await their turn, following the raid
[page break]
on Berlin on 31st August/1st September 1943.’
Reading it, I thought, “Well – I was an Intelligence Officer to 78n Squadron at that time.” Then I looked at the photograph and saw myself pictured there, in the far corner of the room, writing down the replies to my questions to the crew – heaven only knows who they were – at my table.
“My God,” I exclaimed.
I could not help it and I am not ashamed to admit that my eyes flooded with tears. I had no idea that the photograph had been taken; the author’s credit was to Gerry C - , who was a pilot on the Squadron at that time, whom I knew, and with whom I am still in contact.
I felt as though I had been wrenched back in time to that night, almost fifty years ago, as though the intervening years had never been, as though I were still at Breighton, working those long and irregular hours in the windowless Operations Room alongside Derek and Pam, with one or other of the W.A.A.F. Watchkeepers – Freda, or the attractive and much sought after Billie, or with J - . I felt, strangely, that all I needed to do was to walk out of the door of this cottage and I would find myself, miraculously, back on the narrow concrete road leading from that house in the hamlet of Breighton with its tall gable-end, along past the W.A.A.F. site to the Nissen huts of the Intelligence Library, the Window Store and the Ops. Room, where the armed sentry would be on duty, where the cornfield would be stretching away to my left, up towards the perimeter track and the runways of the aerodrome. I would return the sentry’s salute and his greeting and I would open the heavy door of the Ops. Room to see, on my left, the huge blackboard with the captains’ names and their aircraft letters already entered for the night’s operation. At the top, the target for tonight, perhaps Duisburg or Mannheim or Essen – or Berlin. The route written underneath that – Base – Southwold – Point A, with Lat. and Long. positions for the route-marking flares to guide the bomber stream to the target. The time of briefing, of the operational meals, of transport out to the aircraft, of starting engines, and of take-off. Of ‘H-Hour’, the time on target. On the wall facing me I would see the huge map of the British Isles, the S.D. 300, blotched in red with gun-defended areas, stuck with broad-headed pins and coloured threads carrying information
[page break]
about navigational hazards.
In the middle of the room the big map table where, after the raid, we spread the mosaic photograph of the German town which had been the target and would plot the crews’ bombing photos. And, to the right, the place where I shall sit, near to the telephones and next to J – who is there behind her switchboard and Tannoy microphone, ready for the night’s operation. If she had been born a man she would, I know, have been a member of a bomber crew, for she thought and talked of little else but bombing operations.
Except on stand-down evenings, in the twilight, when we met secretly in the village at a quiet angle of buildings on the main road, near to the bus stop, then cycled to the ‘Plough’ at Spaldington, the nearest village to the bombing range, where, amazingly, there were no other uniforms to be seen in its homely bar. Where we would spend the long, warm evenings over two or three beers, sitting in the high-backed, high-sided wooden seats made for two, made for people like we were then, people who were young and who had met and who loved each other deeply and desperately. And sitting there, talking gently together, we would hear, above the murmur of the farm workers’ talk, the drone of some aircraft, perhaps on a night cross-country flight, perhaps heading for the other side on a raid. Then we would both sit silently, listening, not saying anything, but I know we were both praying for its safe return to base.
Sometimes, when our own aircraft had gone on a raid and we were not due on duty until they returned, we would steal a precious hour together, sitting with our arms around one another in the darkness, on a low grassy bank under some trees, not far from the unmanned railway level crossing at Gunby, the Sandra lights from the aerodrome shining distantly through the trees, heavy with their summer foliage. For some reason, whenever I hear Delius’ ‘The Walk to the Paradise Garden’ I invariably and inevitable think of J – and I at that place and those wonderful, warm summer nights we shared in the countryside of East Yorkshire, around Breighton.
The tears which came to my eyes when I saw my photograph, and the sadness which overwhelmed me, were because now, that Interrogation Room, whose walls, had they been possessed of ears, would have heard
[page break]
small, unemotionally told tales, couched in the understated phrases of flying men, of achievement, of failure, of heroism, of desperation, triumph and tragedy, that Interrogation Room is now an unoccupied ruin, and the Ops. Room is no more, now part of an isolated dwelling house. I know, for I have been back there, where among so much tragedy, I was so happy.
And J - , now, is no more, except in my memory. I sat with her, taking her cold and unfeeling hand in mine, one beautiful summer morning, such as we used to have at Breighton, and I watched her life slip away from the loveliness that had been her. But we shall meet again, I know, she and I, and all the many crew members who came into our lives and went again, and were forgotten by us, like the many dawns and the many sunsets which we shared.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
[page break]
[underlined] GLOSSARY [/underlined]
Abort – to abandon an operation and return to base.
A.C.P. – Aerodrome Control Pilot, a ‘traffic policeman’ for those aircraft within visual distance.
A.G. – Air Gunner.
Alldis lamp – high-powered lamp capable of flashing Morse letters.
A.P. – Air Publication, usually a book; Aiming Point.
A.S.I. – Airspeed indicator.
Astrodome – transparent blister half way back along the fuselage of the Wellington.
A.S.V. – Anti-surface vessel.
A.T.A. – Air Transport Auxiliary, civilian aircraft delivery service.
Base – parent Station of one or more satellite aerodromes. Three, four, or even five Bases and their satellites constituted a Group.
base – one’s home aerodrome.
Best blue – best uniform.
Bind – (noun) nuisance, annoyance. (verb) to complain, tiresomely.
Bomb plot – plan of the target area annotated with the positions of each of the Squadron aircraft’s bombing photos.
Bombing Leader – senior Bomb-Aimer on a Squadron, responsible for instruction and training of other Bomb-Aimers.
Bombing photo – vertical photo taken automatically on release of an aircraft’s bombs, thus showing the point of impact.
Boost – petrol/air mixture pressure at the engine inlet manifold.
Buck House – Buckingham Palace.
Bullseye – bomber exercise in conjunction with friendly searchlights.
Circuits and bumps – take offs, circuits and landing, the staple diet of training pilots.
C.O. – Commanding Officer.
Cookie – 4000 pound High Capacity blast bomb, nicknamed by the press and B.B.C. ‘blockbuster’.
DC3 – Douglas Dakota twin-engined transport aircraft. Also known as a C-47.
Defiant – Boulton Paul single-engined fighter/night fighter. Two-seater, the rear seat being in a rotatable 4-gun turret.
[page break]
D.R. – Dispatch rider.
Drem lighting – aerodrome runway and perimeter track lighting, protected by metal dish-shaped hoods so as to be invisible from above. First used at R.A.F. Drem, Scotland.
Early return – (later knows as ‘boomerang’) aircraft returning from an abortive sortie.
E.F.T.S. – Elementary Flying Training School.
Erk – Aircraftman.
E.T.A. – Estimated time of arrival.
Feathering – device which enabled the pilot to turn the blades of a propeller edge-on to the direction of flight, thus minimising the drag on the aircraft in the event of an engine failure.
Flak – German anti-aircraft fire.
Flights – Flight Offices and crewroom.
Flying the beam – flying from A to B by means of an aural signal transmitted by B.
Fresher – a new crew; such a crew’s early operational flights; the target for such a crew.
Fizzer, stick (or put) on a – charge with an offence.
Gee – radar navigational aid which enabled an aircraft to fix its position. Had a limited range which just covered the Ruhr and was susceptible to jamming.
Gen – information, news, divided into ‘pukka’ (true) and ‘duff’ (false). (Meteorological Officers were invariably known as Duff Gen Men.)
Geodetics – aluminium girders formed into spiral basket-work construction which made up the fuselage and mainplanes of the Wellington.
Get weaving – get going, get started.
Glim lamps/lights – low-powered lights which formed the flarepath of an aerodrome.
Glycol – Ethylene glycol, liquid coolant.
Gong – medal.
Goose-necks – paraffin flares housed in watering-can-shaped containers. Supplemented Drem lighting.
G.Y. – Grimsby.
Gyro – gyroscopic compass.
[page break]
1 Group – Bomber Group in north Lincolnshire consisting of, originally, 4 R.A.F., 3 Polish and 2 Australian Wellington Squadrons, latterly, of Lancaster Squadrons.
3 Group – Bomber Group in East Anglia consisting of, originally, Wellington Squadrons. Converted to Stirlings, latterly to Lancasters.
Halifax – Four-engined Handley Page bombers with crew of seven. Nicknamed Hali or Halibag.
Hampden – Twin-engined Handley Page medium bombers, crew of three.
Harvard – single-engined North American Aviation Co. advanced fighter trainers. Also know as Texan or AT – 6.
“Have a good trip” – Between close friends on a Squadron this parting remark was occasionally varied by the addition of “Can I have your egg if you don’t come back?” This was part of the grim humour current among bomber aircrew.
H.E. – High explosive.
High – anticyclone, high-pressure weather system.
H2S – Radar device which showed a ground plan of the earth below an aircraft.
Ident. light – identification light, a small nose-light used for flashing Morse.
I.F.F. – Identification friend or foe. Radar set carried on an aircraft to identify it as friendly to British ground defences. Set to ‘Stud 3’ it gave a specially-shaped distress trace on ground radar screens.
Int. – Intelligence.
Intercom – internal ‘telephone system’ in an aircraft.
Interrogation – now known, in view of the current overtones of ill-treatment which have become implicit in the term, as ‘de-briefing’.
I.T.W. – Initial Training Wing.
Juice – petrol
Kite – aircraft.
[page break]
L.A.C. – Leading Aircraftman.
L.A.C.W. – Leading Aircraftwoman.
Line-shoot – boast.
Link Trainer – a simulator which gave practice in instrument flying.
Lysander – Single-engined Westland Aviation Army co-operation (originally) aircraft.
Mag drop – the reduction in r.p.m. of an engine when one of its two magnetos was switched out.
Mae West – Inflatable life-jacket which gave to its wearer the contours of the famous film actress.
Mosaic – collage of aerial photographs, taken probably at different times, but from the same height, making up a complete picture of a German town, and used to plot bombing photos.
Nav. – navigator, navigation.
N.F.T. – night-flying test.
Nickels – British propaganda leaflets dropped over enemy territory. To drop the leaflets was known as nickelling.
Observer – Navigator/Bomb-aimer in twin-engined bombers prior to the establishment of these as separate categories.
Occult – white flashing beacon showing one Morse letter whose latitude and longitude was carried by Observers or Navigators (in code).
On the boat – posted overseas, or, when overseas, posted to the U.K.
One o’clock – slightly to the right of dead ahead (twelve o’clock). Dead astern was six o’clock.
Ops – operations.
O.T.U. – Operational Training Unit.
Oxford – twin-engined advanced bomber-trainer, made by Airspeed Ltd.
Peri. track – perimeter track, a taxying track connecting the ends of the runways on an aerodrome, and having aircraft dispersal points leading off it.
Pigeon – homing pigeon carried in bomber aircraft to carry a message back to base giving the aircraft’s position in the event of ‘ditching’ (landing in the sea), when the aircraft would be too low for its radio transmissions to be heard.
[page break]
Pit – bed.
Pitch controls – varied the angle of the propeller blades and consequently controlled the r.p.m. of the engine.
Pitot head – (pronounced pea-toe) fine-bore tube facing forward which supplied air pressure from the movement of the aircraft through the air and showed this pressure as airspeed on a ‘clock’ in the cockpit.
P/O – Pilot Officer (not necessarily a pilot!)
Poop off – shoot off.
P/O Prune – a cartoon character in Tee Emm (q.v.), an inept pilot forever involved in accidents of his own making.
Portreath – R.A.F. Station in Cornwall
Prang – crash, wreck, break.
Press the tit – press the button.
Prop – propeller, more properly, airscrew.
P.R.U. – Photographic Reconnaissance Unit.
Pundit – aerodrome beacon, flashing two red Morse letters which were changed at irregular intervals. The beacons were always within two miles of the parent aerodrome, although their position was changed nightly.
R.A.A.F. – Royal Australian Air Force.
R.C.A.F. – Royal Canadian Air Force.
Resin lights – low-powered lights at the rear of an aircraft’s wingtips, illuminated over this country as a warning to friendly night-fighters. Colours were changed at irregular intervals.
Revs – revolutions.
Rolling the bones – gambling with dice.
R/T – radio telephone (speech).
Sandra lights – cone of three searchlights stationary over an aerodrome, to assist returning aircraft.
Scrub – cancel.
Second dickey – second pilot.
S.D. – secret document.
S.D.300 – wall-map of the U.K., kept in the Ops Room and maintained by the Watchkeepers, showing positions of all gun-defended areas, navigational hazards and convoys.
[page break]
S.F.T.S. – Service Flying Training School. (Stage following E.F.T.S.)
Spit – Spitfire.
Spoof. – feint.
Sprog – newly arrived, newly joined, raw, inexperienced.
Square-bashing – drill.
Stall – lose flying speed.
Stirling – four-engined bomber manufactured by Short Bros.
Stooge – boring, casual or haphazard flying.
Stud 3 – Distress frequency setting on I.F.F. (q.v.)
Sullom Voe – R.A.F. Station in the Shetlands.
Sweet Caps – Sweet Caporal cigarettes, a popular Canadian brand.
Tee Emm – Air Ministry Training Magazine. Humorously written and comically illustrated aid to safe flying and good navigation and gunnery. It was extremely popular with all aircrew.
Trailing edge – rear edge of mainplane or elevators.
Trimmers – (or ‘trimming tabs’). Small adjustable sections of the aircraft’s control surfaces, enabling it to be flown, when they were carefully adjusted, without undue pressure on the controls by the hands and feet.
Undercart – undercarriage.
u/s – unserviceable.
u/t – under training.
Vic – V.
W.A.A.F. – Women’s Auxiliary Air Force; a member of same.
W.A.A.F. (G) – Officer responsible for the discipline and well-being of all W.A.A.F. on a Station.
Watchkeeper – W.A.A.F. Sergeant who acted as a clearing house for all telephoned outgoing and incoming secret operational and other information, and who was responsible for its prompt and correct transmission to the appropriate person(s).
Wellington – twin-engined Vickers bomber with a crew of six.
Wimpy – Nickname for the above. Derived from the character in a ‘Daily Mirror’ cartoon – J. Wellington Wimpy, a friend of Popeye.
[page break]
Wingco – Wing Commander. (C.O. of a bomber Squadron).
W/T – wireless telegraphy (Morse code).
Y.M. – Y.M.C.A.
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Title
A name given to the resource
Loose on the wind
Description
An account of the resource
Starts with a poem and then a series of stories which together form the memoirs of Harold Yeoman, an officer who served in Bomber Command during the war, initially as a pilot on Wellingtons and then as an Intelligence Officer. He relates his activities both professionally and personally during this time and recounts the many friends and colleagues he lost whilst on operations. He recalls his flying training on the Tiger Moths at Sywell, then on to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada for further training. He was then posted to Bassingbourne O.T.U. to train to fly Wellingtons, before going to Binbrook on operational flying duties. Harold flew a number of operations before being grounded due to medical reasons. It was whilst he was grounded that his crew were reported as missing and subsequently recorded as killed in action. While waiting for his Medical Board, Harold was stationed at the Operational Training Unit at Moreton-in-the-Marsh ferrying brand new Wellingtons from Kemble and flying them to Moreton to hand over to pupil crews. He was then moved to ‘X’ Flight of the O.T.U and trained new pilots before being grounded again for medical reasons when he transferred into Intelligence for Bomber Command. He completed his R.A.F. career in Penang as an Adjutant.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
H Yeoman
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1994-11
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Multipage printed document
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
Text. Poetry
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Canadian Air Force
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Northamptonshire
England--Northampton
England--Devon
England--Torquay
England--Cheshire
England--Wilmslow
Iceland
Iceland--Reykjavík
Canada
Nova Scotia--Halifax
Nova Scotia--Cape Breton Island
Saskatchewan--Moose Jaw
England--Suffolk
Germany
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Netherlands
Netherlands--IJssel Lake
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Essen
England--Lincolnshire
England--Grimsby
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
Germany--Cologne
England--Berkshire
England--Reading
Netherlands
Netherlands--IJmuiden
Germany--Essen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Sylt
Germany
Germany--Helgoland
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Germany--Lübeck
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Bochum
England--Gloucestershire
England--Yorkshire
Burma
Burma--Rangoon
Malaysia
Malaysia--Kampong Sungai Gelugor (Pinang)
Malaysia--George Town (Pulau Pinang)
Malaysia--Butterworth (Pulau Pinang)
England--Buckinghamshire
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Germany--Nuremberg
Saskatchewan
Nova Scotia
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942-09
1942-05
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
BYeomanHTYeomanHTv1
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
1 Group
12 Squadron
4 Group
578 Squadron
78 Squadron
air gunner
Air Transport Auxiliary
aircrew
animal
Anson
anti-aircraft fire
arts and crafts
B-17
B-24
bale out
bombing
bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943)
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
control tower
crash
crewing up
Defiant
faith
fear
final resting place
flight engineer
flight mechanic
forced landing
Fw 190
Gee
Gneisenau
grief
ground crew
ground personnel
Guinea Pig Club
H2S
Halifax
Hampden
Harvard
In the event of my death letter
Ju 88
killed in action
Lancaster
love and romance
Lysander
Manchester
McIndoe, Archibald (1900-1960)
medical officer
mess
military ethos
military living conditions
military service conditions
navigator
observer
operations room
Oxford
pilot
prisoner of war
RAF Bassingbourn
RAF Bawtry
RAF Binbrook
RAF Breighton
RAF Finningley
RAF Halton
RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor
RAF Kemble
RAF Linton on Ouse
RAF Little Rissington
RAF Mildenhall
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF St Athan
RAF Sywell
RAF Torquay
RAF Tuddenham
Scharnhorst
searchlight
shot down
Spitfire
sport
Stalag Luft 3
Stirling
Tiger Moth
training
Victoria Cross
Wellington
Window
wireless operator
wireless operator / air gunner
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/977/20854/LMarriottMW1627148v1.1.pdf
604f5c0575cf7bea583e18d4eff516e1
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
Marriott, Maurice William
M W Marriott
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Sergeant Maurice Marriott (b. 1924, 1627148 Royal Air Force). He flew as a navigator with 194, 96 and 110 Squadrons.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Maurice Marriott 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
2017-08-24
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. 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
Marriott, MW
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
Maurice Marriott's flying log book for aircrew other than pilot
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.
Description
An account of the resource
Flying log book for aircrew other than pilot for M W Marriott, navigator, covering the period from 6 May 1944 to 12 June 1947. Detailing his flying training and post war flying duties with 194, 96 and 110 squadrons. He was stationed at RCAF Rivers, RAF Llandwrog, RAF Moreton-in-Marsh, RAF Wigsley, RAF Leicester East, RAF Ibsley, RAF Mingaladon and RAF Hmawbi. Aircraft flown in were Anson, Wellington, Lancaster, Oxford and C-47.
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
LMarriottMW1627148v1
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Burma
Canada
Great Britain
Burma--Moʻ pī
Burma--Yangon (Division)
England--Hampshire
England--Leicestershire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Worcestershire
Manitoba--Brandon Region
Wales--Gwynedd
Manitoba
Manitoba--Rivers
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
1946
1947
110 Squadron
1654 HCU
21 OTU
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
C-47
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
navigator
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
RAF Leicester East
RAF Llandwrog
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Wigsley
training
Wellington