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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/142/1358/AYoungF160720.2.mp3
f72baecf6c3b846bc283a66409b06707
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Young, Fred
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Two items. An oral history interview and a photograph of Fred Young DFM (1583354 Royal Air Force).
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Fred Young and catalogued by by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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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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Young, F
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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AS: Okay, we’ll start. This is Andrew Sadler interviewing Fred Young in his home in Offenham in Worcestershire on Wednesday, July 20th, 2016. Fred thank you very much for allowing me to interview on behalf of the Lincolnshire Bomber Command Archive this morning.
FY: Right.
AS: Can I start by asking you about your early life where you were born and when?
FY: Yes, I was born in Birmingham, I spent most of my life down in London, and I’ve been all round the place, continent, everywhere.
AS: Did you have, did you have any of your family involved in World War One, was your father for example?
FY: No my father wasn’t but his brothers were.
AS: And did have any bearing on you becoming going into the RAF in the Second World War.
FY: No, when the, when the war started in ’39 my Uncle Ern who I’ve got a photograph of in there was on The Somme. Anyway he lived in London he rushed over to my father and said, ‘Don’t ever let Freddie get in the army’. [laughs] So I went in the Air Force.
AS: So you volunteered for the Air Force?
FY: Oh yes, yeah VER yeah.
AS: And can you tell me about how you enlisted in the Air Force?
FY: Well I, I [sneezes] I was in a protected job at the time so the only thing I could get into to get into the services was air aircrew.
AS: What job were you in?
FY: I was an accountant in, in the railway up in Somers it’s in Birmingham anyway.
AS: And how old were you then?
FY: I was seventeen, I went in at seventeen put my age on a year and called up in ’41, up to Warrington. I, I was a frail person I couldn’t carry a kit bag to save my life and we had to march from Padigate Recruiting Centre in, in Warrington to the railway station I had a job carrying it so did many others because we weren’t used to manual work like that. And then, then after that was pure training I was posted to Blackpool to do foot slogging and that was I think it was eight weeks there and I stayed in Blackpool ‘cos I went down to Padgate the engineering side of the business and that’s where I learnt my trade in engineering. You can’t better the RAF for training you up, wonderful. We were there quite a long time and then suddenly they cleared Blackpool, because um they sealed Blackpool off because the army were going, had a free town, and they were going out to the Middle East to Al Conlek [?] So we had to get out and we went down to Melksham. We went to a camp in Melksham where the everyone had turned it down the Americans, the Army, the Navy ‘cos it was a Navy area, but the RAF accepted it. We were up to our ankles in water most of the time in the huts. And then we came back again to Blackpool and I remember it well because we were all on parade in the Blackpool football pitch in their stadium, and they were calling out the names of those who were going to go on, ‘cos we were all mixed up, and those who were going to the Far East, and there was quite a lot going to the Far East, but all those in aircrew training carried on down on to the engineering side and they moved down to South Wales to, to finish off aircraft. I, I was down there tuning in the engineering side ‘cos it was not only engines it was air frames, electrics and everything else, it was very good training area. And then we came, we had exams every week and I failed the electrics, I could never get my head round electrics, everything else I was perfect on so I had to drop out and have another week, and all my friends then all went on. I passed the next week now all my friends went on to Halifaxes and instinctually they were all shot down. I went on the Lancasters, so I carried on, on my training on the Lancasters there. That was quite a thing we were pretty well exhausted mentally after all that period of training, ‘cos we never had leave you were constant all the while and eventually they sent us to a training centre keep fit area and they put us through keep fit to get us back to normal if you like, yes. And that was good ‘cos it did got rid of all the fuzziness and then I was a flight engineer. So then we went to stations in 5 Group, am, am trying to remember where it was now, but we went to the, oh Winthorpe, we went to Winthorpe that’s right and there we picked up a crew now the crew had been together on Wellingtons most of the time and I joined them there. So it was getting to know each other and I was the youngest and obviously called “Youngster” it was my nickname right the way through service. So from there we, we did training on Stirlings, and then we did training on Lancasters. I found out that was the worst period of the time really, well I don’t know if you know Newark there’s a church there got a red light on the top because it’s quite near the main runway and we are doing a night final exam flying and we are going up to Hel, Heligoland, and we took off but we didn’t take off, we were going down the runway we had a flight lieutenant who’d just come from America he was an instructor in America, Pilot, and we were two thirds of the way down the runway and we were just going to lift off and he cut all the, all the switches so we crashed to the other end of the runway. We went in the nose, the nose went in the whole distance up to the cockpit. I don’t know what happened to him he was reported obviously, we got away with that one, which was a good sign. Now we had our problems with the navigator, on the next trip we found ourselves over Hull in an air raid at night when we should have been down in Devon, he’d taken reciprocal courses so he was dumped straight away and we got a new one, Hugh. Now Hugh was a British BOAC, Overseas Airways yeah on the Pacific Airline, and he was a navigator there, so he was a good navigator, because they didn’t have radar or anything and he navigated across the Pacific, and he was brilliant, anyway that was Hugh and he joined us. Off we went to 57 Squadron and East Kirkby, they just moved from Scampton where 617 were and they moved there. We then went to, we were there about a week, and then we were called up with as battle stations is on battle and they just put a notice up and there was all the names of the people who were going. And went to the briefing and it was Berlin, which is quite shaky for the first op but we did eleven of them so we got away with it. [laughs] But we were a good crew, we were all rehearsed we did practice an awful lot, we never used Christian names in the air we were always referred to navigator or bomb aimer or so on. And after, we did quite a few initially of the Berlin raids and then we went to Magdeburg. From Magdeburg we went to Hanover and we were working our way round Northern Europe I suppose. ‘Cos you know, I mean they probably told you, we did, you never went straight to a target you went all round the Baltic or down over Switzerland and up, and then we went down to Leipzig and we were held at Leipzig because the pathfinders hadn’t arrived they were shot down and the back-up hadn’t arrived so we were there twenty minutes going round and round Leipzig, and of course people were getting shot down by their fighters. [interference on recording] And then anyway we went through that okay and carried on, we were it was quite a flat tour really. And then we went to oh, trying to think, it was on the Baltic coast, and that was where we had a near mid-air collision. Normally you come out of the target area and you turn to port this chap turned to starboard and came straight at us, because of the angles he obviously climbed out of the way, we went the other way but we got his slipstream and he blew us down into a spin. We spun round going down from twenty three thousand feet and we finally pulled out at three thousand feet we were fighting it. The bomb aimer was complaining ‘cos he was, he was wedged onto the roof of his cabin at the font [laughs] with gravity holding him in there. But we were spinning down we got it straight, ‘cos engineers sat in the Lancaster were always sat next to him, and I, he always let me fly over the seas you know so obviously I’d get a feel of the aircraft, so we were fighting it together, I was on one side of the control column and he was pulling it back and I was pushing it forward like, and so eventually it came up. I asked the navigator what speed we were doing, he said, ‘You went off the clock I couldn’t tell’ [laughs] so we don’t know what it was.’ Anyway Hugh was navigator leader and when we got back to East Kirkby he went to navigation centre, checked all the logs and he found that it was one of our aircraft squadron that nearly hit us, and he of course the language was quite out of this world apparently, I don’t know but they didn’t speak to each other again much. [laughs] Because he, I mean he came out and you know could have caused two fatals, our own and his, and he could have gone down as well. But that was um, there we got, then we had the of course Nuremburg, this is where our navigator was brilliant he, he navigated there and he, there were two targets they’d built a dummy town, did you know that?
AS: No.
FY: They built another town on the other side and people were bombing that because it was the first one they were coming to, and Hugh said, ‘No you’re wrong’, there was a bit of a thing going backwards and forwards and in the end we, we accepted Hugh ‘cos he was unbelievable. We bombed the other one which was the target that was why we lost so many people, they were being shot down on the way across the coast going in and on the way back they were shooting them down over the aerodromes they didn’t count those. The, the JU88’s were coming at the back following the crew that the teams in and shooting them down on the approach. That was something that was kept quiet. But anyway we had that, we had, going, going back again to the, to Berlins they introduced the new flying boot, it was a boot that you could, you could cut the top off it had a knife inside, you cut the top off so you could walk if you got shot down, and the rear gunner always wanted to keep up to date with things and he had them you see, but when you got in your, well I call them his huge outfit, looks like the Pirelli man you know, all balled up. He forced his feet into the boot forgetting he hadn’t got the electrics in his boots because they were ordinary boots for other, other members. He got on the way to Berlin, he got frostbite in his feet and he was, he was crying out, but we said to the nav you know, ‘Where are we?’ and he said ‘We were two thirds from the target there’s no point in turning round and going back there.’ So we continued to the target and all the way back [coughs] and when we landed the medical team were waiting for us and they took him and I think he lost both feet all because he wanted those boots on. Then we got another rear gunner who, who was, his crew was shot down, he was ill and he and somebody else went in his place and they got shot down, so he was spare as they say so we had him, a bit disjointed this but I say as I am remembering it. We went through I say after Nuremburg we got back and we thought you know ninety-six aircraft that’s quite a lot of men and we well thought it’ll be an easy one next then and Mr. Butcher we called him and he sent us to Essen of all places which is in the middle of the Ruhr which is highly defended, so we thought that’s a good one you know you’ve sent us into the slaughterhouse and then back again into another one. So we had that and we went through that all right obviously ‘cos I’m here. We went down to Munich and the route took us down south and Hugh said, ‘Shall we go across Switzerland on the way in?’ ‘cos we aim there and come up and yeah so we did that unfortunately we were so, what’s the word, taken aback by the snow and the twinkling lights of the, of the chalets in the mountains in there a J88 came up and took a piece out of us [laughs] ‘cos we weren’t concentrating and then we found out that it happens to be the J88 training pupils there it was just lucky we had a pupil and not a, not a professional [laughs] otherwise he would have taken us out completely no doubt about it, but they came right across the top and opened the canon [?] and that woke us up again so then we went straight up to Munich. The other one is the Frankfurt we, we, we did Frankfurt run that wasn’t too bad really it’s just a long haul. And then we had the Navy in one day they came and they wanted the RAF to drop mines in the Baltic, and when they told us where it was it was up in Konigsberg right up on the Russian side. Apparently there was a lot of German transport and things in the bay in Konigsberg Bay, Dancing Bay, and they wanted us to mine across the whole lot to stop them getting out until the Navy got there, that was a twelve hour flight so we had overload tanks on in the fuselage and that was quite a long haul that, we did it we dropped all the mines on the drop there was only two squadrons on that there was 57 and 630 the rest of 5 Group weren’t in on it. Then finished the first tour on Maligny Camp, I don’t know if you’ve read anything about Maligny Camp, it’s where it was a big French camp, tank and the Germans took it over obviously and this is where they serviced all the tanks coming back from Russia. And they were building up a division there hundreds of tanks, and repairing them, preparing them for the second front, repel the second front. And we were called in to bomb, we had to bomb at five thousand feet because it was moonlight, we had to, it was, it was quite complicated action really. We were the first to bomb we bombed two minutes past midnight and we got through, unfortunately because 57 squadron went first the Yorkshire squadrons who followed us got caught with all the fighters and the Ack Ack so they took quite a hammering, crashing, but after the war when I went to Maligny the people there had no resentment to us because not one bomb fell outside of the camp. There was a lot of French people killed but they were killed through falling aircraft, and if those tanks, Panzers, had been released on the second front there wouldn’t have been one because it was an absolute division, hundreds, and we did wipe them out completely so, that was the last one of my first tour. And then I went on to training command instructor [coughs] which I found very worrying [coughs] [laughs] you’ve got to have a lot of nerve, a lot of nerve.
AS: So you did one tour and then went into training?
FY: Yeah, I went in as an instructor. And then I got, I said look, I was on Stirlings and Lancasters instructing, which was the pilots used to you know like circuits and bumps, the pilot, the instructor pilot he’d leave the aircraft and leave me with the other pilot so I was in charge sort of thing we did all sorts of funny things. We got I had a Stirling and I was in the second pilot’s seat [coughs] and we were coming in to land at night and he was way off and I kept kicking the rudder to get him back on to get the lights, the green lights, but what I was getting amber and red [coughing] which meant we were all over the place. When we landed and we were told to report because they obviously saw it from the control tower just switching back like this, and, and I had to report and tell them what I saw, made and they sent this pilot for a medical and he was colour blind, can you believe it? Colour blind he was from America, he’d been instructing in America, well being all lit up in America they didn’t have any problems with lights with colours, but anyway I don’t know what happened to him he disappeared. And it was getting, it was getting a bit dicey and then we had at Winthorpe this was, the two main runways at Winthorpe and the other aerodrome were parallel, on to each other, there were two aircraft two Stirlings on night fighter exercise and about twenty odd air gunners in each one, and the one aircraft was taking off and the other one got into trouble and landed on top of the other one so it was absolute mess. It’s in my book all this, and he said I rushed up to the station and the WAFS there, I just don’t understand the WAFS, the medical WAFS, they were going to each one and they’re all charred you know getting their documents off them, but I don’t know how they did it, I still don’t understand it because the smell was terrible, I mean it was like pork, horrible smell all these poor lads they were all young gunners, air gunners. So anyway just after that I was posted back on to ops, ‘cos I asked for it, and they put me on to 8 Group Pathfinders down at Oakington in Cambridgeshire. Now they, that was good I enjoyed that, second tour. I can’t, I was, first op on pathfinders you’re, you’re, you’re supporters you go in first and drop flares and then the master bomber would follow you in and pick the spots. Now we don’t carry a bomb aimer on that op, and the engineer does it I had to go down and I did that dropping on the target area so that it lit up then we went round we came round again and went through again, always went through the target twice, and then we came back. And then the next one we were visual markers VM, now that new bomb by visual on a bomb site, and you did so many of those if you were any good then they moved you up to primary visual, primary er you, you bombed by radar anyway, the navigator did the bombing, he, he pressed the buttons and everything and he had the target on his screen and that’s when we marked that, used to go through right the way round and then go through again and keep doing that until the target finished. Then we had nothing really happened after that of any consequence, I was at, I finished I was a warrant officer, I turned a commission, all commissioned crew except me I was a warrant officer, and I refused a commission, but when I went back to squadron when the war ended, well just a couple of days before the war ended, a station commander asked me to, would I fly with him and we were going down to Africa, so I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll go down with you.’ So as an engineer to go down to Castel Benito like Tripoli so he was away two days I don’t know where he went and then we flew back. After that I was his engineer I always flew with the station commander, and he had put me in for a commission and I said, ‘No, I’m nearly demobbed, I shall, I shall be going out.’ I mean I’ve got to sign on you know, I mean I’d done five years I think it was like everything else you think oh I’ve got to get out of this now I’ve had enough, which I did. And I was demobbed, I went to Birmingham, back to Birmingham, incidentally I don’t like Birmingham [laughs] and I got an engineering job obviously ‘cos I’m an engineer, and they opened sales and I went into the sales side. The, one of the directors called me in, in Aston it was, called me in and he said, ‘We’re opening an office in London on sales, would you like to go back?’ I said, ‘Yes please.’ So I went back to London and while I was down there that’s when I got married to my wife and she was Birmingham so she had to make a change. She came down and I was mishmashing around, I hadn’t, mentally I didn’t know what I wanted really, I kept getting letters from the Air Ministry, I’ve still got them somewhere, asking me to go back in with the, with the rank I had left, and I, I, I said, I wrote back in the end saying no I don’t want to go back now I’m just getting used to being out. However, they sent me three letters from the Air Ministry wanting me back but on a short term you know, I wish I’d have taken it now obviously but I didn’t. The other one was I had applied to British Airways, British European Airways, yeah the European side [coughs] and they sent me forms which I filled in, they said, ‘Yes you’re what we want, you’ll have to come down and have an exam.’ Now you’ve got to bear in mind this is 1945 so I sent in the requisition and then they sent back and they said, ‘Well send us the cheque for seventy-six pound to pay for your exam’, I hadn’t got seven let along seventy-six pounds in those days so I had to turn it down because you know I mean there was no guarantee I was going to pass, ‘cos don’t know what the exams going to be like. So that was a game, ‘cos years later out with Hugh, the navigator, he was a British Airways navigator, a pilot, captain, and he said he always looked for me, he said ‘I was sure you were going to come in, sure’ he said, ‘But we never saw you.’ He emigrated to Nova Scotia, and I used to go over there ooh about two or three times a year and stay with him, my wife and I did, and we used to talk it out, we used to go into his den and go into all the various charts he’d got and yeah it was quite interesting. But anyway from there I was in engineering I didn’t know what I was any good at really apart from flying, and then I got a job with a sales company who got a contract to sell spring pressing, I hadn’t a clue on me, I went straight away to night school and checked it all out, it was a Yorkshire firm [coughs] and I found out that they were for some reason, they were halfway to bankruptcy. I used to go up there and it was a small factory and it clicked that was it I, I, I found my knew everything about spring pressing I could sell it and this, that, and the other and I stayed there, stayed there for forty odd years. Then I semi-retired, I did, I was in London based in London, I, I wouldn’t go to Yorkshire but I was based in London, and er, I used to go up there once a month for about a week or two days but then I was usually on the Continent flying out to the Continent, to the, to the French office, the German office and don’t forget there was East Germany then in those days, we had the Communists. I used to go down to Leipzig regularly a Communist area, Warsaw, I used to go all over the Eastern Bloc, it’s you get to know people, different types, I met a woman in a Keller in Berlin, East Berlin and on the, ‘cos you know they opened like a door, and we went in sitting down at the table and anyway she, she said in her English [unclear] and she said, ‘Oh I was from Berlin, I came from Berlin, West Berlin, I got stuck over here we should have never gone to war’, she said. [laughs] Which I thought was yeah, she said, ‘I said we’re all Saxons’, she said, ‘We’re Saxons.’ [laughs] So there wasn’t any animosity there at all. The same with Holland, we did food dropping in Holland, we had to mark the fields out where they were going to drop the food, so we were in first, we was on Pathfinders. The German Army Station there were all in the square all on parade, I can’t remember which one, which place it was now. Anyway we flew across there and our rear gunner said, ‘Can I have one burst?’ [laughs] ‘’Cos they were all lined up for me’, he said. [laughs] I said, ‘No we are on a peace, they’ve given us peace.’ So we followed on and then the light, the thing came on, [interference on recording] there was a chap on a bike and he was waving to us madly as we were coming towards him and of course the bomb doors opened with the marker which is like a bomb and he just fell off his bike you see he thought it was a bomb. Anyway we did all that properly and then we went down to the canals and there was a Dutch boat, you know sail boat and we went right down in front of him and slipstreamed and trailed all the way back [laughs] and they were shaking their fist at us, yeah that’s a bit of humour in it. That was, that was, that one it’s strange on the Second Front they left Holland they didn’t you know free Holland till later, because they flooded all the dykes had been opened, but they were starving [coughs], eating, they were eating rats and all sorts. So it was a mishmash really. So I say when I came out I went into engineering and from there when I semi-retired I moved to Ledbury. So I got a phone call from a competitor I, I used to deal with and he was a, he was the managing director of Solfis [?] and he’d retired and he said ‘I’ve got a company down in Sussex, now I’m gonna retire properly’ he said, ‘But my son’s going to take over, I want you to come down and look after him.’ I said, ‘No you know I’ve had enough.’ And he said, ‘I’ll give you “x” thousand pounds in cash’, and I did the main contract, he said, ‘Come down for six months.’ So I did I went down, I drove down from Ledbury every week and I, they made me a director there I finished up Solfis [?] as managing director and then I was there twenty years nearly. I was seventy when I retired from there, yeah. So you know, jolly good, I was I tell you I had a good life, you see I had my big arguments see with my wife it’s always money, the jobs you do but you don’t get paid for them, because I liked work I didn’t like money came secondary when a load of contracts came up I wasn’t bothered as long as we got the contracts and I signed it. And but that backfired on me when I was seventy you did sign a contract when you retire at seventy so I had to that was in April I remember that. So we, we’d already moved to Sussex from Ledbury so my wife wanted to go back to the Midlands and so we got up here. Now I’m not a gardener, I don’t like gardening, the only reason we had gardeners down in Sussex [background noise] and my wife loves sitting in the garden so I thought as long as we’ve got a green patch to sit in we’d be all right, so I got the stamp type of garden here, which is, even now I can’t look after it ‘cos I’m not interested in gardening doesn’t interest me one bit. [coughs] And from there I went in to Trevor, I met Trevor down the road, the British Legion, he was the chairman of the branch here and he got me involved in the British Legion. I did quite a lot in the British Legion here and then I went into County, I was County Treasurer, I was County Treasurer for about seven or eight years, and then my wife was very ill I just couldn’t spend the time going round to all the different branches and that. And so I retired from there but I kept up the branch here, but then again Trevor and I, he’s ninety on Thursday, we’re going to lunch on Thursday, he’s ninety, I’m ninety-two, he’s a youngster to me so we’re going to dinner. [laughs]
AS: So when you were offered a commission and you refused it that was because you’d have had to sign in to stay for a longer period?
FY: Yeah, yeah, oh yes. I mean you gotta sign in for a period, because then of course you got to remember people were being demobbed left, right and centre, you know particularly the officers side and they, they wanted a stopgap they wanted people in between for ten years just until they got the new people coming through.
AS: So when you did, you did one tour, am I right in thinking that if you did one tour you were then like exempt from doing any further combat?
FY: Oh yes, yes that was the end but I carried on.
AS: So why did you want to go back?
FY: Because I was nervous of being an instructor. [laughs]
AS: You thought that was more dangerous than being shot down by the Germans?
FY: Yes, yes definitely. [laughs] And, I, I thoroughly enjoyed it, I mean I wasn’t, I never, you know on Dresden people, I was talking about Dresden, they want to read the book on Dresden. It was the, it was the centre of the Nazi in Southern Germany, they had two concentration camps on the outskirts of Dresden, they had prisoner of war camps, they were manufacturing Messerschmitt parts for canopies in one instance. So there was quite a lot in Dresden, and though it was the near the end of the war but the Russians were knocking on the door and they wanted you know an easy way in which is what we had to do for them. But it’s, it’s I went to Chemnitz that night which is about oh a hundred miles north of Dresden and we bombed Chemnitz, no nobody said a word about that we were unopposed all the way [laughs] so not a word about that. There’s one or two like that we went to Beirut in Germany that was the only time I felt not sad. I had a South African captain pilot he was South African Army and he wanted to go do an op, so my, my pilot said, ‘Here take my place then you’ve got a team here you’re all right.’ So we were master bomber that night ‘cos the bomb aimer goes, er, there was six hundred aircraft, he called the first three hundred in, it was undefended we almost wiped it off the map, then he called the other three hundred, which he needn’t have done ‘cos we’d already done it, then you know I thought that was wrong, that was the only time I thought it was wrong, the rest of it I’d, I’d no pity. I mean on the first tour [coughs], I’m gonna use some bad language now, [laughs] on the first tour Smithy the pilot the moment I locked the wheels up he said, ‘Right you bastards here we come.’ And he always said that except for once and that was time we nearly crashed. [laughs] So he kept on saying it [laughs], the crew said, ‘You didn’t say it, you didn’t say it’ you see so we did, ‘cos we were only young [laughs], I mean I was twenty when I came out.
AS: So when you were flight engineer on the Lancaster what was your duties when the plane was up?
FY: Oh well I, responsible for everything really up front, the bomb sight, all the fuel make sure the fuel was being used correctly, the throttles right, you know rev counter, the whole bag of tricks really, the I mean the pilot was only a chauffeur [laughs] all he did was point it in the right direction and that’s it, that’s what the navigator used to say. [laughs] [coughs] And the bomb aimer usually was asleep I used to have to kick Alf and wake him up at the target he always used to nod off on the front nothing for him to see in the dark is there [laughs] till we got to the target. Yeah he was good the bomb aimer. But we, I thought I’d go in Transport Command and so I applied at the end of the war and I was sent up to York training but I wasn’t there long because the station commander sent for me to go back he wouldn’t, wouldn’t let me finish that course, laughs] ‘cos he wanted me to stay with him down down at Oakington but we’d moved upward by then. I think the only reason he liked me was because I used to run the football team and he always wanted to play football [laughs], yeah he was, I liked him he was nice.
AS: Did you say you trained on Halifaxes as well?
FY: No, I on Holtons [?], that was when I went to go on Transport Command, it was a Holton [?] they were a converted Halifax, but apart from that I was on Stirlings and Lancasters. I did a small tour on at the time rather on Manchesters which is a deathmell they was, twin engine Lancaster, that had terrible engines kept failing on people all sorts that’s when they dropped them and brought in the Lancaster with four engines yeah. Then it went on to Lincolns, never flew a Lincoln but I went on a course for Lincolns I never, I never flew one [coughs] it’s only a blown up Lancaster.
AS: And what was the chief advantage of the Lancaster?
FY: Oh its, its bomb bay, I mean the amount, we, we take to Berlin twenty thousand, twenty-three thousand pounds, a Mosquito would take four thousand pound bomber, the Americans would take three and a half thousand on a, on a Fortress, they didn’t carry much, they looked rather good on the films when you see all these but they were only five hundred pounders coming out. We had four thousand pound cookie, thousand pounders, we had banks of incendiaries, and sometimes we had two thousand pounders although one stuck it wouldn’t go we had to try and shake it off. It, it, to me it was, it was using the word it was a darling, it, it you were in love with it. It’s the only place if you go up to East Kirkby on their, their anniversary day when they have dinners, I’ve given those up now, but they, the Battle of Britain Lanc always came over and everybody there was taking photos and the men were crying, I was so moved it, it, it’s an aircraft you can’t explain. I mean it would fly on one engine you lose eight hundred feet a minute on one engine, it definitely fly on two I mean ‘cos we, we demonstrated that to America when the Americans came over the hierarchy wanted to go into a Lanc we took them up and he said this American whoever he was I don’t know who he was, and he said, ‘Will it fly on three?’, so we feathered one, ‘Fly on two’, so we feathered one, he said, ‘You can’t fly without an engine?’ I said, ‘No we’re losing eight hundred feet a minute so we better make up our minds about what you want to do next?’ [laughs] So we upped air and got them, got them all working again. But er yeah it was, there was always an amusing part was we used to have a lot of American aircraft land at East Kirkby and Oakington, mainly Oakington, and they were lost they wouldn’t know where the aerodrome was they got lost, there was Whirlwinds, Fortresses, all sorts really used to land there. We used to oh here we go again, but they used to always ask us to go to their aerodrome you see for a, for a drink yeah. So coming back from a daylight trip once and this Mustang pulled up alongside us and he flashed ‘Can I join you?’ And then we Morse Coded back to him ‘Yes’ and he followed us all the way to the UK, then he waggled his wings and he went away. And then we got a phone call to the mess asked us over to his place for a drink [laughs], he said he was completely lost [laughs] but it I mean they’d no navigation you know, it was a fighter with overload tanks. Are you all right?
Other: Yes I’m fine.
AS: So did you find it easy or difficult when you actually were demobbed, when you came back to civilian life?
FY: Yes.
AS: ‘Cos you said you were only twenty at that point.
FY: Yes difficult because you haven’t got a youth, my book is “Where Did My Youth Go?” it’s, it’s finished now it’s on sale. But it was the gap you came out, your suits were up here right, you’d grown so much, you couldn’t believe you’d grown so much. We were allowed after the second front we could have civilian clothes if we wanted so I sent for my suit I couldn’t get in to it, you don’t realise the difference between you know a seventeen year old and a twenty year old. But apart from that yes, it’s, it’s a muddled, muddled world, ‘cos the, quite an upheaval of course because of the you know Atlee was in power in those days, and then I’ve forgotten who followed him oh Churchill, and then somebody else followed him. But I know I’ve still got my passport when I used to go over to East Germany and all I could take was twenty-five pound, I always had to arrange with the German customer to pay for my hotel out there then I’d pay his hotel at this side when he came over. So like the Poles, just the same for the Poles from Warsaw, they used to come over every six months sign the contracts and I’d fly out to Warsaw and sign the contracts that side for the next six months, [coughs], we did an awful lot of business with them. The beauty of that was like East Germany and Poland in particular factories don’t order through people like us they go to a central purchasing bureau and they order the stuff from us, so the orders were absolutely huge without having to go round to the factories you see, we we, we spent two or three million pound each time we go over and we’d have to do that we’d have to go all round the different factories to get it but in Poland they did it themselves for you, it’s different now they’re all split up again now you see. The same in Berlin, East Berlin it was the same there, that was on the it was in a broken down old house on the second floor and the bottom part was derelict didn’t looked like it was going to stand, but on the next floor was the whole of purchasing for East, East Berlin, for East Germany. Amazing things that went on over the, you all thought we had a wonderful time travelling here, there and everywhere, but we didn’t. [laughs]
AS: What’s your feeling of the way the Bomber Command were treated and after the war?
FY: Terrible. Churchill put us on one side, I mean I was decorated, I got a DFM in that time, which was whitewashed you know, nobody, nobody bothered. That is why I think you see Bomber Command is so connected now and joined together because we were so badly abused, everybody else got, Churchill never mentioned Bomber Command once in his speeches, he mentioned the Army, the Navy, everybody except Bomber Command. ‘Cos he, he, he’s the one that sent us there, he got Harris, Air Marshall Harris to do these jobs, and then the moment we did the Dresden job [interference on recording] he pulled out, and yet he was the one who sent us to Dresden, Harris didn’t want to do it. If you read Harris’ book he said it was the worst decision he ever made.
AS: Yeah I have read it actually. Well thank you very much Fred, is there anything else that you want to add?
FY: Ah, memory now isn’t it [laughs] it’s thinking.
AS: Can you tell me about your book?
FY: Yeah, I mean it’s called “Where Did My Youth Go?” And it starts off before the war, not before the war when the war started, I think I was fourteen year old, I left school at fourteen. I was a messenger on ARP and I was a messenger all the way through during the Blitz in ’40 in 1940, we were bombed out there in London, we were told we had to find accommodation with relatives, of course all my father’s brothers and sisters they all lived in Birmingham so we got on to them and they found accommodation for my mother. We couldn’t go because we had to get, in those days you couldn’t change your job just like that you had to get permission from the Government, so we were waiting for that to come through so we couldn’t go up to Birmingham, and we were transferred to a company in the same situation as you. Well like I was on the railways at the time at St. Pancras in the accounts so naturally I was sent back to Moore Street Station [coughs] in Birmingham. So anyway we were, while we were waiting all this the air raids were still going off and my mother sent a telegram, ‘I’ve got a house, I’m trying to get furniture together’ ‘cos we lost all the furniture when we were bombed. Then we got, two days later we got another telegram saying, ‘Don’t come it’s been bombed.’ [laughs] So my mother was an absolute [unclear] she was, she made me go in the Air Force really, I mean I got my revenge there, but she, I, she was in a terrible state when we got there, her nerves, she was pale, oh terrible. Anyway then we got the Birmingham Blitz started when we got back, when we got there. And so I joined the the First Aid and Rescue Squad down in Walsall Heath. Went to the BSA and they were flooded you know all those people were killed in the floods with the bomb. We had the cinema where everybody was sitting there looking at the screen and they were all dead from the blast, all sorts of things that we dealt with on that. Birmingham took quite a hammering it did really, you know. I was, some of the lads there they rescue people, I mean they’d go into you know all sorts of situations and not think about the danger of it they’d do it. So that was, then obviously when the Blitz stopped, things didn’t get back to normal but you got back a bit more of your life you know. It’s you know that’s when it develops from there Moore Street, but I had carbuncles on my neck through no sleep because I was on rescue all night and in the day I was at work, never slept. That’s a lie I did sleep for you know about quarter of an hour or so but during the day I nod off but then you get called out yes, but that’s what kept you going. But it’s, it’s you know terrible and that was because I was run down, I mean the doctor obviously said that, he said, ‘You were absolutely wrung out there was nothing left, and that’s what your body’s doing it’s getting its own back on you’, I said, ‘Thanks very much.’ [laughs] But apart from that, as I say you can’t actually answer that, the question about the reaction after, now I can’t tell you that’s a difficult one really. I used to like dancing, I used to do a lot of dancing, ballroom dancing of course. I used to see all my relatives I’d never seen in Birmingham, meet them all. I had, oh yeah, I was at a wedding. Yeah my cousin down in London, Margaret, she married a Canadian airman, and I never got on with my aunt she always, always talked me down because her daughter was brilliant, and she was good, but I had it stuffed down my throat for about twenty years, I should think how good she was. Anyway it came to the situation where the wedding, and the chap who she married, the Canadian, brought his best man another Canadian and he kept calling me sir you see, and my aunt said, ‘No, no that’s Fred, Freddie, call him Freddie.’ So he said, ‘Oh can’t do that he’s an officer.’ So I got my own back on her, ’cos it took the wind out of her sails. [laughs].
AS: Right well we’ll switch the machine off then and then get you to sign the form if that’s all right.
FY: That’s okay yes. Was it two hours? Oh my.
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 Fred Young
Creator
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Andrew Sadler
Date
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2016-07-20
Format
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01:07:42 audio recording
Language
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eng
Identifier
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AYoungF160720
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
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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
Conforms To
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Pending review
Description
An account of the resource
Fred Young volunteered for the Royal Air Force at seventeen and flew operations as a flight engineer with 57 Squadron from RAF East Kirkby. He recounts his experiences on several operations including Berlin, Magdeburg, Leipzig, Essen, Munich, Dresden, and Mailly le Camp. After his first tour he became an instructor before returning to operations, with 8 Group Pathfinders at RAF Oakington. After the war he returned to Birmingham and took up an engineering position before moving into sales and settling in London. He retired at 70 and returned to the Midlands taking up an active role in the British Legion, and writing a book “Where Did My Youth Go?” recounting his experiences during the war years.
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Lincolnshire
France--Mailly-le-Camp
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Essen
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Magdeburg
Germany--Munich
France
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Contributor
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Jackie Simpson
5 Group
57 Squadron
8 Group
aircrew
Bombing of Mailly-le-Camp (3/4 May 1944)
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
demobilisation
Distinguished Flying Medal
flight engineer
Lancaster
Pathfinders
perception of bombing war
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Melksham
RAF Oakington
RAF Padgate
RAF Winthorpe
Stirling
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/274/3426/PHicktonH1701.2.jpg
1fe9ff0f6c1dc2e0bfca85c6277a2195
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/274/3426/AHicktonH170113.1.mp3
7a4236850c3a0519684326915b9d00f6
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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Hickton, Henry
Henry Hickton
Pat Hickton
H Hickton
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Henry "Pat" Hickton (b. 1921, 403004 Royal New Zealand Air Force).
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-01-13
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Hickton, H
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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MS: This is Miriam Sharland and I’m interviewing Henry Hickton today. Also known as Pat Hickton. This is for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. We are at Henry’s — Pat’s home in Palmerston North and it’s Friday the 13th of January 2017.
HH: It’s my daughter’s birthday today.
MS: Oh happy birthday to her. Thank you very much Pat for agreeing to talk to us.
HH: Yeah.
MS: Also present is Glenn Turner from the 75 Squadron Association. Pat can you tell us a little bit about your early life? Did you grow up in Palmerston North?
HH: No. I was born in Taumarunui in the 26th of January 1921. And we were, lived at Owhango. That’s this side of Taumarunui and that. Yeah. We used to have a hotel and east of that hotel on a little dairy that was there was the Owhango School, butcher’s shop etcetera. And that, and that’s where we were for five years with our father and mother. They worked. And my father worked with all the butchers around there at that time of the year. And my mother died from a haemorrhage in 1925. So I was taken from there to an uncle of mine who looked after me at Mercer, up north by Hamilton, until I could go into a home. Then I moved from there into the home in Palmerston North on the corner of Ada Street and Ferguson Street. And there was about, boys and girls and everything were in there. And then in 1928, that was in the Anglican Boy’s Home they called it then we moved to the one that has just been pulled down in Pascal Street in 1929/30. We went there and from there we went to Central School. And we had the earthquake boys and that that came from Napier. And in ’31 I was moved to Foxton Beach by the, by the, what would I say it was? The seaside resort. And from there I went to Anglican Boy’s Home, Lower Hutt. And I was there right up until nineteen thirty — late 1931. And from there I went to the boys home in Marston at Sedgley. And from there that same year I went back to the Anglican Boy’s Home in Masterton. And from there, when I was thirteen I went out to work northeast on a farm. Out from Masterton. From there I worked for a little while and then there was no jobs. I came back to one or two jobs around Palmerston and then I got my last job down at Cape Rivers down by White Rock. Down below Martinborough. And then I had already applied when I was here to join the railways as an engine driver. Or it was a cleaner, fireman and engineer. And then I got a reply from them in 1938 and I joined the railways. And I went in there as a cleaner. Then the war broke out and then in 1940, with the war going a whole lot of railwaymen — drivers and firemen and everything like that all joined what they called at that time the Railway Operating Unit, New Zealand. One that went to Egypt. And then they stopped anyone from the railway from going overseas because it was an essential industry. So the only way I could get away was write to the general manager. The general manager at that time was Mr Macklink. And he wrote back to me and saw me when I told him why I wanted to go and he says, ‘Yes. You can go with my recommendation. We’ll pay your union fee. And we’ll have a job here when you come back. So whatever you want to do and here’s a pass for going around on the New Zealand railways while you’re in New Zealand.’ And I did that. I went to, as I said down to Kimberley below Levin. Done twenty seven days there on health and done a lot about armoury and everything like that and how, or supposed to be how to shoot and how to get on to your target and everything like that. And from, I had to go to the high school to learn a little more about trigonometry. And I went there for three months and then I, and then I went in to sort of Kimberley then. But from Kimberley we were all, seventy two of us that were in there all went up to Auckland. And we went on the RMS Aorangi on the red route. Sailing boat. Boat. Seventy two Australians and seventy two new Zealanders. We went to Canada, and we, from Canada we went to Vancouver and then by the Canadian Pacific Railway to Calgary and there we went in to the camp. Number Two Wireless Camp there. And twelve of us that were left they went to Montreal. From there we did all our, in New Zealand we had to, before we left here we had to do at least Morse Code twelve words a minute. By the time we finished we had to do about twenty. And then we went to Saskatchewan to Macdonald to do our air, our air training on guns. Lewis guns, Browning guns and Vickers guns. From there, when we passed that and we came out we were given our sergeant’s stripes and we went to Halifax. And from Halifax we went on board a ship called the HMS California. It had a big gun on the back but I don’t know whether it could fire or not but it looked alright. This was just after The Hood was sunk. So away we went from Halifax to Liverpool. Had no trouble. From Liverpool we went down to Uxbridge just west of London. From there after a week or two we went up to Lossiemouth on the Lossiemouth side, in Scotland to do our Operational Training Unit. We did that for three weeks and from there we were posted to squadrons. I was posted, Jack Menzies Smith who was the other joker up there at Lossiemouth with me from New Zealand, well he went somewhere else but I went to 101 Squadron. An RAF squadron down just at Oakington. Just out of Cambridge. And there was where I stopped ‘til I could be put into a crew. From there we’d done our special training etcetera while we were in the squadron. Wing Commander Biggs was our CO. One of the best [unclear] I’ve ever met. And in the end he said to me, ‘You haven’t been on a trip yet Pat, have you?’ And I says, ‘No.’ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’ll tell you what. You’re going on, you’ll be on one shortly he says and you’ll be with Pilot Officer Allen.’ Oh, I didn’t know who Pilot Officer Allen was, ‘And you’re on these Wellington bombers.’ With the Peggy motor. And those motors on the Wimpies you couldn’t feather them to cool them down. Not like you do today. When they got to the red mark well that was the finish. The propellers just fell off. No matter what height you were at. So at the first I went into the briefing, ‘All those not on briefing out you go.’ I went to go out and Wing Commander Biggs said, ‘Not you Sergeant Hickton. Sit down. You are with pilot officer Allen.’ And just as I went to sit down he said, ‘Well boys, we’ve all been waiting for this. It’s Berlin tonight.’ Well I froze. I just stood with my arms on the back of the chair. And the joker next to me held me and he gradually started to pull me down. I think I just about turned to ice. And then he said, ‘It’s the big city tonight. We’ve been waiting for this one. So when you come in, we’ll let you know at 5 o’clock.’ We went in for the last briefing at 5 and when we went in there he said, ‘I’m sorry boys. You’re not going to Berlin tonight. There’s ten tenths cloud. You’re going to the Kiel Canal.’ Where the warships are. So we did that trip. That was my first trip. And then I done trips to around Germany. Bremner and Karlsruhe and down in to the Ruhr. All the searchlights you get in these places — some of them went up to about thirty thousand feet or twenty five thousand feet and they all kept at that. And when one picked you up all the searchlights would come on you. But we were lucky and the pilot used to say to me, ‘Can you see anything?’ And I said, ‘Yes, there is.’ And when we were going around Berlin. He said, ‘Can you see anything Hickie?’ And I says, ‘Yeah. There’s a big searchlight following us and it’s gradually getting a bit close.’ ‘Well, he says, ‘We’ll go in and drop our bombs and we’ll get out of it.’ And that’s what we did and we got back to England. The next ones I did down the Ruhr and everything and then in the end the crew itself had just done twenty eight trips over Germany. And this was in early September. Then they decided that they were going to do a trip to Turin in Italy. To the Royal Armouries up there in Turin and the CO said to Mickey Allen, ‘You are on twenty eight trips,’ and you had a briefing. After that you had a holiday. But he said, going to Turin, Mickey said, ‘Where are you going?’ He said, ‘To Turin.’ So he says, ‘Oh that’s a piece of cake. Straight down France. No. We’re going to go on that too.’ So he says, ‘Righto.’ So that’s where we went. Down to Turin. Six hundred miles. Berlin was six hundred miles also. But when we went down there we went down — everything was alright. We went all the way down. One or two Stirlings also went because they came on to our squadron in late August. So when we went on this trip on the 10th of September 1941 and we got down there. Did the good run. We could see all the fires and everything was burning. And then we turned around to come out and one, the only shell in the whole of the war from Italy that hit anything hit our right propeller. We got back over Mont Blanc on the one motor at twenty thousand feet and when we came down the valley we headed on and then Mickey Allen said, ‘This right hand motor is not too good. It’s getting around to the red mark.’ So he said, ‘We might make England. We might not,’ because a Wellington bomber can float a long, long way. So he said, ‘Right,’ and we went on. We crossed over Vichy France into occupied France. We were still going along and then the next minute the propeller fell off. And when it fell off we went down ten to twelve thousand feet. By the time we pulled out and we were going in occupied France there we, Mickey Allen says, ‘We’re not going to make it because the left hand motor is starting to get near the red mark also.’ The old Peggy motor you could put about sixty bullets in it and it would still turn over but you put one bullet in to a Rolls Royce engine it would stop. So we went on and Mickey Allen says, ‘Well we’ve got to crash land somewhere. We won’t be making,’ he said all the crew in to throw the oxygen bottles and all that out and everything and they did that. And then all of a sudden we were turning around and Mickey Allen said, ‘Look for a big area where we can crash land.’ And he’s looking around and one of them said looking through the astrodome, he said, ‘There’s a big area over there to the north. Hundreds of acres look like.’ And he said, ‘It looks like it’s just been a big paddocks that had been cut.’ Of hay or rice or something like that. Because in August, in September, that is autumn in France. So we were going along there and just as we was going along there — a JU88. I spotted him while I was still in the turret and looking around the back and I spotted the exhaust as he was turning. Someone must have seen us or noticed us or something like that. Or noticed our one motor from the back. Anything it could have been but he started to turn and when he turned I fired a few shots at him. He still continued to turn. Then I lost him. And then Mickey Allen said to me, said to all of us, ‘Righto boys. We’re going to go in to land. I’m going to put down the undercarriage.’ So, just as he said that the JU88 came back again. I fired at him again but I never saw him again. Never came back. Never saw him. And Mickey Allen then at that moment we must have been down to about three thousand feet or less. He says, ‘Here we go boys.’ We went down and the last words I heard him say, I couldn’t get out of the turret, I was not supposed to be in the turret so the only thing I could do, he said, ‘We’re going in to land,’ and I heard him say, ‘Oh shit.’ And we didn’t know what that was but we knew in a minute. In where we went where all these trees had all autumn leaves on them. And it looked like a big area where they cut hay. And when we went in there was these big trunks of the trees that were all on an angle. And our undercarriage hit it. That’s the only thing that saved all of us. I had already turned my turret around and lowered the guns and I was just ready when we hit. I don’t know any more after that until I heard someone say, ‘Oh, look what we’ve found.’ And behind the nuclear of the right motor, where they have a blow up boat and fallen out of that was a bottle of brandy. So one of the jokers that got it says, ‘Gee we’ll have a drink out of this.’ And I sort of woke up and I put my hand up and I sort of had my head cut open. All right around here etcetera and everything. And they all took a drink out of this bottle and then one of them says, ‘Where’s Hickie? Pat’s not around, there’s only five of us here.’ And just then I sort of realised when I heard the voices. So I just pulled the pins on the back of the turret. They fell off and I fell out and I was eight feet off the ground. I fell to the ground. I never got hurt any more and the joker says, ‘Look at all the blood and everything.’ They got a big bandage that was there and put it on and the joker says, ‘Are you alright?’ I says, ‘Yeah. Yeah. I think so,’ and everything. So he said, ‘We’ve all had a drink of this brandy.’ It was still over half full. So he says, ‘Have a drink.’ So I took it. I gave them back the bottle empty. And they says, ‘You’ve emptied it.’ And I said, ‘Well, why did you give it to me?’ And from then on we had to, that was at that time when we crashed was 1:30am in the morning. The moon was up and you could see everything quite nicely. So we decided to chew up all our secret papers etcetera. Smash the, on the guns where they had these sights, the electrified ones. Smashed them up and one or two other things. And then we had to get out of it. So we left about 2 o’clock. I don’t know what time. It would be about 2, I expect. And we headed south to go down to Vichy France. The first night we went, as soon as it became daylight we got into an area where we covered ourselves in slap during the day. All of us. Six of us. Then that night we went off again. And the next night we got in to a little bit of a gravel pit and we slept there. But between the first night and the second night when we were up on the top of the hills where our plane crashed at the La Riche and when you looked down you could see all the German troops looking for us. The third day when we came down there after the second night in the gravel pit we walked around. And all your flying boots were not meant to walk in and we all had blisters and parts of them were falling off. So we decided to go into a little place down there. And we had eaten all the chocolate and everything that we had had on the plane so we decided, we tried one or two places but they shooed us out of it. And then we came to this little place and at the back of the place there was a garden. A big two storey building and there was a garden at the back and there was tomatoes in it. So we went in and had a feed of tomatoes. And then a little girl came along, six years old and was looking at us. She had gone out to get the cows for milking. So then she went and then her father arrived. And when the father arrived he came around and he took us in. There was about eighty people in this little village of village Les Moines. So he took us around there, around all the people and that and all the children and that were there. And then while he was talking to us and everything they heard a motorbike. And he says to one of the jokers in a bit of broken French and he said to them, ‘Around behind the two storey building and get out of it. They’re Germans.’ So we went behind there and the German came in and he was a captain of the SS. German army. And he had a sergeant in the pavilion and they had a machine gun. And he said to them, spoke perfect English, and he said to them all around there about it. Then he spoke perfect German and French to them and he said, ‘Anybody seen six airmen?’ And they all said, ‘No.’ This little girl, the Germans got her, the little girl and one or two others and said to them in French, ‘Have you seen six British airmen? Or six people in uniform?’ And they all shook their head. And he says, ‘Right. If ever I come back and I find out that you had helped them or seen them and hadn’t told us we’re going to shoot the lot of you.’ And away they went. He took us in and he gave us a meal and then we went over to a little place just about two miles over further to Chenaud. And the farmer there, he decided to, we stopped there for a couple of nights. He used to take us into his house and give us breakfast, dinner and tea and we had, also had wine for breakfast. And then we went out and we go up into a hayloft. His house was there. And along side he had the driveway and there was this big two storey building that went back. In the top was the hayloft. And there was the steps you went up the hayloft to get into the top. But alongside of it, that high off it was a tap that was leaning out there and it was dripping. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. And we went up there. Never thought anything of it at the time. So we went up there and as we were in there Mickey Allen our captain said, ‘Well. What are we going to do?’ and I says, ‘Well, you ought to know Mickey.’ He says, ‘Why?’ ‘Do you remember the other day, about three days ago, we were in Cambridge and you said, ‘That barmaid that I know there. She wants to know where I’ve been lately.’ And he says, ‘I can’t tell her because I was going out with another girlfriend.’ So he says, ‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll tell her that I have just come back from France.’ So he told her that and oh she was all over him and everything. ‘Oh, I’m sorry that happened Mickey’ and everything like that. And then we came up eventually, this trip and we get, I said to Mickey when we were in the hayloft I said, ‘It won’t be bad Mickey.’ And he said, ‘What?’ I says, ‘Well you’ve just come back from France, you told that girl in Cambridge. So you’ll know the way back.’ Before you go on to a trip they always tell you that before you crash or wherever you go look where you are. You’ve got a compass. You’ve got a bit of a torch. You’ve got one or two other things that are all secret and everything. You take them all with you and you use them. Well, in this case we were getting around down here with this, these different issues and they says, ‘And when you in to there, if you get down to Marseille go down and see the joker that’s the major that’s in charge of the Resistance movement in the south of France.’ He was an officer that was at Dunkirk and he never got back to England. MI9 took over with him and he worked with them. Then we, after two or three weeks with these people they moved us in to the bush ‘cause the Germans were getting a bit near and there was hundreds of them getting near and in this heavy bush there was a two storey building that wouldn’t be much bigger than what that, and a bit on the top and a chimney that went up. It was an old, a bit of an old house. It must have been hundreds of years ago. Well, that’s where they took us. They’d take us in for tea at night and instead of taking us straight back out they said, ‘No. You wait here. We’ve kept our cows here. Now, when we take you back we’ll run the cows back over where you walked. They won’t know where you are.’ So that’s what they did. And then we met a young joker. He was twelve years old. [Pointson?] was his name and he was learning English in Paris and these people at village Les Moines and at [unclear] Chenaud they were relations of his. So he came out and he could speak English. So he says, ‘Well, we’ll work something out here. Well, I’m going back to Paris and I know a joker up there that was in the French army. He’s now with the Resistance movement with the new joker that’s in charge. Patrick O’Leary.’ The Belgian joker. Major General Guerisse he was and he worked for MI9 as well. So he said, ‘I’ll go back to Paris and I’ll come back.’ So he went back and he came back and he says, ‘Right. We’re taking two at a time,’ and they’re going there. And the young lad that was twelve, he took two of them. Mickey Allen and Saxon the navigator. He took them up to Paris. Then when this joker and other people came in and they took the other two. That was the second pilot and the front gunner. And that left the second pilot and me. That left only two to go. This young lad [Pointson?] came back and he had with him a joker. His name was [pause] it’ll come to me in a minute, and he turned around and he said, ‘I’m in the French army. I’ve brought you some clothes.’ Now, we didn’t know any name of any of these people at that time. We only found out these about twenty or thirty years later. But when he came down he said, ‘I’ve got some clothes here for you. Now, put them on.’ We said, ‘Yeah. Righto.’ We put them on and he said, ‘You look alright.’ And the shoes were half a size too small for me. He said, ‘We’re going to bike to the first station, get the train and go to, and we are going up to Paris. Have any of you jokers been to Paris?’ We said, ‘No. We’ve flown over it.’ So he said, ‘Right. Anybody that’s been in France has got to see Paris on the ground so we are taking you to Paris.’ So that was a surprise for us because we were still in occupied France which was halfway, you may as well say between Paris and Dijon and La Riche is just there. We were down there at village Les Moines. So he said to me, ‘Are you ready?’ I said, ‘Well these trousers are not much good.’ Oh listen all the fly and everything was all shredded and everything like that. I said, ‘Well they’re not much good.’ And everything. He said, ‘Don’t worry about it. You look a true Frenchman,’ [laughs] so there was a lot of humour that comes out at serious times. And he took us on the train. Took us up to Paris and he took us around the corner and then we went to a duke’s place. The duke had been caught by the Germans in the First World War and he had been badly injured with his hand. It was in a sling. And when we were there he said you’re all, gave us dinner. We sat down at 12 o’clock and we didn’t get up until 3 o’clock. And then he said, ‘You’re all going to go to someone else’s place.’ So he said — in twos, ‘There will be some people walk in. You won’t know who they are. And when they come in that door, that door or that door whichever one comes in and you’re near it you go with those people.’ So Mickey Allen went with the first one and the front gunner he went with the other and of course the Aussie who was our second pilot and I, we were over here. And that was the White Mouse we learned later on. That was her that took us to a joker who was in the government Henri Rolet and I’ve got his number 69 Rue [unclear] in Paris. Just over from what they called the painter’s area. So I went. We were there two days and after we left, after two days they said you’ve got to get out of it because Henri Rolet has a young son that’s two years old. And with people around and anybody come in then the lad would most likely say, ‘Yes. They did have someone here,’ and everything. So they decided to move us. The same joker that took us, the same joker that brought us up from village Les Moines. He took us across the Champs Elyse and there was the Arc de Triomphe standing up right in front of us. There was this big hotel and the Aussie said to me in a quiet voice, ‘Take short steps. You look like a Frenchman then.’ And I didn’t take any notice of him and just when we got there Andre Postel-Vinay is the joker that brought us up from village Les Moines. He was the joker in the army working in the Resistance movement of Patrick O’Leary. So André was across the road, about thirty yards in front of us and just then a big Limousine pulled up. All the soldiers came out both sides with all their guns. And the soldiers, I was standing right next door to them and the Aussie joker was here. And they all came out and out came that Kesselring. Major General. He came out, got into the limousine and off he went. And then all the soldiers went back in. Andre was waiting over there. We walked over with him and he says, ‘Right.’ We went around, over to an elderly lady’s place. She was about seventy. Couldn’t speak English. So she said, and she said to André, ‘I’ll give them these.’ One each. A package of cotton wool. And a great big bottle each of eau de cologne. Gave them that and she said to Andre she has no bath, she has no shower and she has never had one in her whole life. This was all she has washed with all her life. Now you’ve got to do the same. So for two days we stopped there. Then he came in, Andre, and says, ‘We’re going on the electric train from Paris down to Vierzon on the border of Vichy.’ We had our passports. And when we went out I says to André, ‘I don’t think we should go today.’ ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Well we can leave it for a couple of days because I smell like one of the Geordie boys with all this eau de cologne.’ So he said, ‘You’re going.’ So we went on the train that came in. He took our passports. Everything like that. Got down to Vierzon. Came off. Met a Mr Clerique who worked for the Resistance movement of Patrick O’Leary and he also took us out to watch the bridge. The river that ran right through the bottom of Vierzon. The south of Vierzon. All the German boats were on it. It was, had the German soldiers marking it and when they came down there they got one lad that came up, only about eight or nine and he took the Aussie joker first. Took him across at a quarter to 4. Took him over and that lad came back. Then the guards changed. When the guards changed he brought the Aussie joker’s passport back, ripped his photo off and put our other one on it. Now, all those photos that they had they had worked out it didn’t matter whether you ripped them off and put another one on. Where the bottom part of the stamp came into ordinary paper they had worked everything out that they fitted perfectly. And my photo went on and the Aussie’s photo. Went over to an elderly couple and we sat in there, went in with them. Went in the back door and the whole house was door to door and all the rooms went straight across it. They were people in their seventies and they fed us and said if anybody comes — that front window. Use them and go down the back. Well, there was one other thing that we did. We wanted to go to the toilet so they took us down the back and it was about, say about twenty feet down the back. And it was painted red. When we opened the door they closed the door and shut it. No light. And there was no toilet bowl. There was only a hole in the ground. Now, they told us later that that had been done right over the area. They started when Napoleon was around. And they just moved it over over the years. And so we did that and went in and then the next day or two days later they came back for a charabanc that was, went on charcoal and we went east. Right over towards Dijon. And from there this André Postel-Vinay took us on the train. All Germans in it and everything. And we were, on our passport, deaf and dumb commercial travellers and we only could speak sign language. I only know that, that’s schnell. So we had to be careful what we did. Andre took us in to get a meal. We were on our way to Marseille and while we were in there we never spoke. We just did a bit of sign language. I don’t even know any of it now. And we had German captains and colonels sitting at the same table with us with André Postel- Vinay. He was talking to them. And he told them who we were etcetera and everything you know. We were those people that are unlucky in life. So we went down to Paris. Down to Marseilles. And when we got to Marseilles we were taken from there over to a place that was run by a doctor, a Greek doctor and his name was Dr Rodocanachi. He had married an English woman and he was one of the best surgeons and doctors in the whole of France. You must remember that France was, had about sixty or seventy different states all through it. Not like it is today. And they all run their own little areas and provinces. That’s why they were fighting all those years with different other countries. And of course all those little areas that they ran was run by the cardinals. They were the big chiefs. So, and there was about thirty or forty different languages in France at that time. Not like it is today. That’s why I always say they’re a bit of an enigma. France. Even today at times, when you hear things about them. So when we went there we went to his place. We stopped in there and then they said, ‘Right you’ve got to go down now. Where we went to this Dr Rodocanachi,’ he says, ‘You’ve got to go over to North West of Marseilles. There’s a place called Nimes. Just out of Nimes there’s a prison camp called St Hippolyte du Fort. We didn’t know that at the time but we went there and this Negre, he was a Frenchman and he was a multi millionaire grocery joker and the Germans thought he was one of them but he worked for Patrick O’Leary. And he looked after us for about three days and he took us to their circus where all the Frenchmen were and everything and told them who we were. And we were drinking sweet and dry vermouth. Then we went from his place. They took us down to Perpignan. And from Perpignan we went down to the beach like going from Palmerston down to Foxton Beach. There, in the house we were in there was no, nothing or anything in it that anybody was using it. When we wanted to have a wash or something like that we used to have to go down to the sea and have a swim. And that’s what we did. Did our business and everything. That’s the only thing we could do at that time. Then we did that. We were there for about seven days. A lot of the people from between Canet Plage and Perpignan they’d would come in a roundabout way and bring us down tucker. And from there they decided that Patrick O’Leary had told them that we are going to go by train from Canet Plage, Perpignan and down to Andorra. The little principality at the Pyrenees. And when we got on the train we had to stand and seat ourselves outside the carriages because there was no room and they stopped at every station. And when we got down so far, three quarters of the way, we got some seats on these three cars and we were in the back car. And when they came into there. Right. They stopped and in came the Germans. In came the gendarmes. And they said, ‘Passports.’ And we all had our passport. Handed them over and as they came up the other four of them were back a bit further in this carriage than us. Saxon was the other joker that was sitting next to me. And they looked at the photos. And they looked at Sax and then they looked at me. And then they had another look. And they says, ‘Come with us.’ So rather than argue or anything like that because you still had four jokers in there we decided we’d go with them. And we’d already been told that if ever we got caught before we went on a trip to bomb we would have to be especially near the Pyrenees. We would have to try and keep the gendarmes from finding out too much. So they said, ‘See if you can keep them occupied for three or four hours.’ So we said, ‘Righto.’ We did. Any rate we were taken out. Went to the outside, to the gendarmerie and they kept us there. They gave us what I thought was lamb but I learned later on it wasn’t. It was goat. But it was nice and we were still deaf and dumb and then after three and three quarter hours these two gendarmes decided, the captain of one of them says, ‘You take that joker in that room and write something down and give it to him. I’ll take this joker in this room and I’ll write something down and get him to answer it.’ So they took it in to Sax. They wrote it down and Sax said, ‘Oh that’ll be easy. That’ll be no.’ He just wrote “No.” They wrote it down for me in the other room and they wrote it down and I looked at it and I said, ‘Oh, that’ll be easy. That’ll be oui oui.’ So I said, do you know what I wrote? “W E E. W E E,” [laughs] ‘Ahh English,’ they said. So from then we were prisoners of war and went up to Nimes by train with three guards. And went into St Hippolyte du Fort. We were in there for a while and then my friend who had escaped from Stalag 13 in West Poland came right across Germany, Holland, Belgium, and you had to have two red passes to get out of Belgium into France. And he got through that with a friend and got down to the demarcation line and he thought right, I’ll be right now. And he, the fog came down and he followed the track. And as he followed the track it winded all over the place. Next minute there was a rifle poked into his stomach. It was a German. The German says, and Derry [Naburrow?] he could speak good French. And the German could speak good French. So they got talking and he says, ‘You’re trying to get in to occupied France. Now, I’m taking you back and putting you in unoccupied France.’ So they put him in Vichy France where he was trying to get. And when he got down so far he got caught. I don’t know why. It would surprise you the number people came into Vichy France because in there even though there was plenty of Germans there was commissions. And there was a lot of people that were all around there that were divided but a lot of them were for the Germans. So that’s where we were and when we went we were in there for a while and we were looking for a place to escape. Inner courtyard and an outer courtyard. Went into the outer courtyard there was a young lad there and he was about six foot six. Well dressed. He was about eighteen or nineteen or sixteen or something. So we were looking him over while we were looking around for some place that could help us. And Derry said to this, ‘By Jove, he’s a fine looking soldier isn’t he?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, he is,’ I said, ‘I wish I was his build,’ I said. And we were looking up and then this soldier called out. And the next minute the guards arrived and we were arrested. And we went in to the room upstairs and a German general arrived from the commission in Vichy France. Our joker, who was in charge of the camp, he was at the, he was at our hearing and this German general could speak perfect English and he said to us, he listened to the soldier. We didn’t know what he was saying. Derry did but any rate I, we just got there and then the Germans said to him, ‘What did you say to him?’ We told him what we said, ‘What a fine joker he was and we wished we were the same build and everything and then he yelled out and we were arrested.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘That’s not what he was saying. And normally what we do when people do that to our friends we shoot them.’ So Derry looked at me and I looked at Derry. So we got up and we walked over to the door. Got hold of the handle, it was opening and this German general says, ‘Where do you jokers think you’re going?’ And we both said at the same time, ‘Well, if you’re going to shoot us get it over with.’ He says, ‘Get back.’ We got back over there and we got twenty five days in the cooler. But before we finished that time they decided at this time in, by the time we got to January, early January of ’42 that we were going to be moved to a new fort right up on the Italian French border. And they said they’d done it up, spent a few million and you’d like it. So they put us on a train and Derry and I we didn’t do anything. We weren’t going to escape off the train because there was that many gendarmes and special gendarmes all the way ‘til we got to Nice. And when we got to Nice there was the buses there for all the army and everything. They put us on it and away we went. And when you go up from Nice you go up what they call a high corniche road. There’s a bottom corniche road, there’s a middle corniche road, and there’s a top corniche road that’s up by this new fort they had on the border. When we got up there all the lights were on. We were on the road right outside and as we looked out the window there was a big broad bridge that went across and when we looked over and down there there was a moat. Eighteen feet by eighteen feet deep. No water in it. And this was the only bridge from the road into the camp. We didn’t know until they got us in and fed us that everything else is all underground. Except in the centre. That was the big parade ground where you had your meetings in the morning with the CO. That’s where we went for timey and we were in there and they said to us, ‘Well, nobody escapes from here,’ and the new CO they’d put in for us was a joker that was in charge of the French Foreign Legion from Africa. And he had a walking stick and every time he used to twirl he’d say vous and he’d be about that couple of inches off your nose and he says, ‘Nobody ever escapes from here. You’re like flies in a Chianti bottle with the cork hard on. So that’s what it is. Now then, I know you’ve got to escape. That’s your job and everything but you won’t get out of this camp.’ So as soon as we got up of our first morning there we had our breakfast and soon as they opened it up and we went out. And then over the other side there was a big concrete wall that went up over the parade ground and at the end of it there would be about from there to there wide where it went into a sort of a tunnel. You could drive a car into it. And then it went down. Right down the bottom and then it went along and then it came back out on to the parade ground the other side. So Derry and I, we said, ‘We’ll go down and have a look.’ Went down. Had a look. Right down the bottom. Got right down the bottom and then we turned the corner. Derry said, ‘I wonder what that is over there.’ Then I had a look this side and there was three steps. One, two, three. And there was a door. I says, ‘Derry, I wonder what’s there. There’s a door there.’ So when we got up it had a key in the lock. Turned it and opened it and I can show you a photo. That — in those places and all those underground things they have ventilator shafts to let the air in and they’re about, I can tell you, from there to there wide. So we got the key, went in, had a look and then we all came out and we got the other jokers, airmen that we were there and we all had a bit of a talk. Made sure there was no one else around. So we decided that we’d make a ladder and we would also get the Red Cross box things. Red Cross string and then tie the knots right and make it so as it would go up sixteen feet at least. Someone had to go up there to do it so we didn’t know what. So we had a look at it. I was one of the lightest. And we went along there and Derry, Gary, I mean Derry, my cobber, he says, ‘Someone will have to go up there.’ So I said, ‘Well, I’ve got a bit of rubber on my shoe and everything. I shall go.’ So we got a big board and put it there and they all helped me up and I put my backside there and my feet there and I went up these sixteen feet like this. When we got to the top there was the bars. So I hung the ladder but I hung it right in the corner of the bars so no one could see it because that side the guard went on. This side was too sloped down so we didn’t want him to see it. So the next day after we’d done all that and got it we went back in and with the wind blowing badly — better for us. We could cut the bar that was there and we cut the, and also with doing that we also had some chewing gum and we used the chewing gum and made it the same colour as what the bars were. The bars wouldn’t be much thicker than that. So we had two of them and we just put the chewing gum in it and it just looked ok. We were there practically, that was on, as I say we were there on the Monday and on the Thursday Derry says, ‘Well there’s seven of us. What are we going to do?’ I says, ‘Well I know,’ I says, ‘We’ll draw lots. Someone has to stop behind and pick this up and take the key again and use it again later on.’ So he says, ‘Oh well we know whose –’ ‘No. We put it all in. Whoever gets the shortest straw stops behind.’ So we all agreed with that. Went around and went around. I was the second to last one to take. I got the shortest straw. So Derry says, ‘Oh crikey.’ I said, ‘No. It’s alright. I know everything and what’s required.’ So I said, ‘No. It’ll be alright. We’ll come out later on. After another week or two.’ So he said, ‘Righto then.’ So I says, ‘Right.’ We fixed it all up for the lads and when they, we had to be in at 7 o’clock at night, we got the lads all dressed and ready and we took them over. Put them in there and locked them in and left them there. They had the chocolate and everything we’d got from the Red Cross parcels and everything. So the six of them were in there and then I went to bed and we duffled up their beds for them and everything. And the guards came around and had a look and everything like that and everything was alright and away they went. Then the next day we got up, I had breakfast and I had to get into the room and I had to get this ladder and everything because on top of this big ventilation shaft there was a big piece of glass that covered the top. And that had to be shifted by the jokers escaping. Well they did that. Never made a noise. And yet about twenty feet away was a guard but he was facing the other way. So the jokers were there and when they went over the top, went over the other side and down in to the moat the other side. It was all covered by the barbed wire. Porteous was a New Zealander. He was the six that got out and he hurt his ankle and he couldn’t walk. So he said to the other five, ‘Away you go. I’ll be alright. I’m not going to hold you up. Off you go. Get out of it. I’ll get back up.’ Well he got back up. He got back in to that little room that we found. Got down the ladder and he lay there and I had breakfast and I went over. I took the key out and opened the door and I got in. And I said, ‘What are you doing here Doug?’ And he said, ‘My ankle is crook.’ So I says, ‘Crikey, I’d better get that ladder and everything.’ So I got that. Rolled it up and I had a coat on because the weather wasn’t too good. The coat on and I stuffed it under. And I said, ‘Come on. I’ll take you.’ He was limping a bit and when we went to go over the courtyard where we had our meetings there was one joker there who was a corporal and he had an Alsatian dog. And he was a joker that was turning everybody in. And I saw him there and he looked at me as I was going across the courtyard. And I thought I’d better get rid of this as quick as I can because this joker looked interested. So I went in to my dormitory, the big dormitory we had. I went out onto it and I opened the doors and on the parapet outside and then into the, into the moat. I took the ladders out and I threw it right up on the right hand side. Went back and lay down on the bed. I lay down and he came in. And he says, ‘What have you got on?’ ‘Nothing,’ I said. I’m keeping warm.’ I’d stuffed a pillow up here. And Porteous was just laying on the bed as though nothing had happened. So he went out and he never said any more. And we didn’t do any more. We never heard any more. And Derry and them others must have got away. Then on the second day we had always been told that you’re in France. You can go to the nunneries or you can go to where the prostitutes work and they’ll all help you. So these jokers had got down and got into Monte Carlo. And when they got around there they couldn’t find anybody to find them. They couldn’t find this British cafe that was in there and they were walking around and they run into one or two prostitutes and they took them in to their place. But while they were asleep the prostitutes came out and told the police. So three days later they were back in prison. And we, and they knew they had gone because when we went the day after they escaped we had to fill in when we had the numbers were all set in eight, six and someone in charge of you. That’s how they did it. But we couldn’t cover six and of course the guard up there saw it and he would point down and tell the joker that was in charge doing the counting — six missing. And that’s how they knew that six jokers had escaped. After four days. So everything was cut down. Left there. When they came back they got thirty days solitary confinement and they all did that and we still stopped there and then we were always told to cause as much trouble as we could because they would have to keep the majority of guards with you and everything. So when Derry and I went around one of us would go one way and one would go the other and they would turn around and they’d say, ‘There’s Naburrow. Where’s Hickton?’ And they’d go looking for me. And the next time they would look around, they’d see me and they’d say, ‘Where’s Naburrow?’ And some one always came and looked. Then this little corporal after a bit we got down to about and we had to go somewhere. We had to do something. We tried other places to escape but no. It was solid concrete etcetera etcetera etcetera. So we decided one day they wanted us to give them a hand to cart a lot of stuff over the bridge and put it in the kitchen. The kitchen was below our dormitories so we took it in there and we had a look around and looking out the big window over there, a huge window like that with concrete and it had these big steel vertical and horizontal bars on it but at the top they only had [pause] went up that far. That part was clear. But down to the horizontal bar there was quite a gap. So Derry and I had been reading a book about Winston Churchill and how he did the BBC news when he was in South Africa. And when he got caught and the way he got out — these bars in South Africa were the same. So what he did he got a magnet and on that magnet you could put it over the top because it was dirt metal. That stuff they put there. And you’ve only got to put it over the top if you got it set right in a bit of wood and everything. You’ve only got to move it back two or three times and they come off right at that horizontal. So we thought, right, we’ve got to get a magnet. And we had a guard that was fairly good. He had some children that were sick and we were giving him some Red Cross stuff. And we asked him and he said, ‘What do you want the magnet for?’ ‘Oh we want to go around and see if we can pick up any nails and everything.’ So he says, ‘Yeah. I’ve got one up there about that long. Yeah. Yeah.’ So he brought it hidden under his jacket and he gave it to us and we just had a look at it and said oh yeah and we tried it on one or two other bars and one or two others the same size. So we made the string from the Red Cross box. Thin string so we had to put two or three of them together and tie knots so that you didn’t slip down. You had to go from this room, we’d have to go down about fifteen or sixteen feet into the moat. And right up by the moat and this window that was down here that was the bridge. The only entrance into the camp. And it had a railing along the top. And there was always three or four guards. Always on there. So Derry and I we says, ‘Well, what are we going to do?’ Well, he says, ‘Let’s have a go on Monday eh?’ And I said, ‘Yeah. Righto.’ So we told the jokers, and where our dormitory was, the passageway that went right up by the dormitories and over the wall from the kitchen, apparently, at some time they must have made meals down in the kitchen and they used to send them up this. It was about that wide and it had a grille on it and of course the key that we had from the other door we managed to make that to open this grille door. So we thought, right. Had a bit of barbed wire in it but we weren’t worried about that so we said, ‘Right. Monday we go.’ He said, ‘ Yeah. Right.’ That was on the Thursday. On Friday the officers that were in there they were all gone under army names like captain etcetera etcetera when they were wing commanders and squadron leaders and nobody knew any different. So as one of them was missing, the top one, Higginson who was a squadron leader. He was in charge at the time and he called us in to see him. And he agreed with us that we were going to do this escape. Then he says, ‘Read this.’ They’d given him a notice that on Monday or Tuesday they’ll all, the officers all, they’ll all be moved to Germany. They were taking them all out of there and taking them to Germany. Because they’d practically, the Germans had practically taken over Vichy France. Even from the beginning. So he said, ‘We’ve got to go. What about can we come with you?’ And Derry said, ‘Just you?’ He said, ‘No. Two others.’ So Derry looked at me and I looked at Derry. We thought it was tough enough just for two. And over from this only entrance with the guards on it. And Derry said, ‘Oh gee. Well if they’re going to Germany well ok.’ So he said to him, ‘Ok Taffy. Who are the other three?’ And one was a Pilot Officer Pyggott and there was a New Zealander that was a flight lieutenant and there was Higginson and he was a squadron leader. So we says, ‘Well, we’ll have a go.’ But we said to them, ‘Whatever you do you must do exactly what we tell you. Nothing else. Because it’s pretty dangerous,’ and we told them where the bridge went across where we were going to go out at the road where the bridge went into it. There was a big steel thin there and about two feet off the ground. So we said, ‘We’re going to try through there and see what’s what.’ We don’t know what’s what there because we weren’t allowed out to work. So we got there and we got it. We said, ‘Now, put another jersey on top. Put socks on your boots.’ They put that on and everything and something on their hands. When we went down through the ’chute the first jersey came off with the barbed wire there. It wasn’t much but we all got down there and with the concrete floors and that there that’s why we wore the socks on our boots. When we got over there we saw the guards but prior to this, the day before, we decided that it would be a lot better if we could get — all the army was on the south end of the fort. All the air force was on the north end of the fort and that is one was south of the bridge and we were north of the bridge. ‘What say we get the army jokers — Sergeant Hargraves and one or two others from Scottish Highlanders.’ They were good. ‘Put a concert on and come out on the parapet and put it on and these guards would go on and watch them. It would give us a chance.’ So we saw them and they says yes. So they went out there and they said to one of the guards that were up there. They said, ‘We’re going to have a concert. Do you mind?’ They said, ‘No. We don’t mind or anything,’ So we said, ‘Right.’ We got in there and they were all over there while the concert was going on and they were all over that side of the bridge and if I walked from here to that building that’s where the bridge went across. And that’s where all the army jokers were. So we said, ‘Right.’ We got, got the three off. Didn’t make any noise and put them down. Derry went first. And I went down. Then Higginson came down and then Bennett came err what do you call it came down. And the other joker, the pilot officer he came. We all got down there and they were still all watching the concert. We got over. Went under this big steel frame. We didn’t know what was behind it. And we went underneath it and we went up a bit. And when we went up a bit we went over and we were in a sewer above our shins. And there was rats in it and everything. But that didn’t bother us. We went there and we walked and we walked and walked along there to the other side of the road and then it turned around that way. And when we got there there was another lot of concrete and bars. So Derry says, ‘Oh crikey, what are we going to do?’ Well we went in there at 7 o’clock. 7pm. And when we got around there we had to get out of it. We were already told that if we got out we had to go so far below the fort on the road and there’s a little side road there. Go in there and the joker that’ll pick you up will be the Australian that’s in charge of the Monaco police. And he’ll take you to Monaco and give them to Patrick O’Leary. So we said, right. We got all that sorted out and everything. And we had everything all ready and we worked and worked and in the end the bottom part gave. Why I don’t know but all of a sudden it gave and that went out and the top one just fell off. We walked out. That was quarter to 12 at night. All the lights came on. And we looked at all the lights. We could see the guards and the sirens were going. There’s been an escape. So, the only thing we could do was go straight down the hill to the Mediterranean. And that’s what we did. Must be about ten or twelve miles. While on the way down there we got down and we could see the soldiers, see the cars all going up the long road up to the fort. But we still kept on and we went down and we got down at the bottom and when we got to the bottom there was a tunnel on the road. And we were going to go across and I was going to go across. I said, ‘Wait a minute,’ and I had a look right up at the other end. There was a joker smoking a cigarette. I can still see it today, you know. Smoking a cigarette. I said, ‘No. We can’t go. There’s a guard down there.’ Then a car arrived. The guard got in it and he went right past us and went up to the fort. So we went across the tunnel, in to the little stream and then up a little bit of a hill there and there was a railway station and there was this big tunnel. And on top of the tunnel there was a cave. So we got into the cave and we slept there during the night. We stunk to high heaven. The next morning we had a look at it. We said, ‘Well who’s the best looking one of the lot?’ So we said, ‘The pilot officer there. That RAF man.’ And we said, Derry said, ‘Yeah. Well you’ve got a good job to do.’ And this joker says, ‘What?’ ‘You’ve got to walk from this station along the railway line into Monaco and go to the cafe in the town that is run by the English couple. They work for the Resistance movement.’ So that’s what he did. He got them and they got around. The next day Patrick O’Leary was in Monaco. He came back with all clothes and everything like that and he came up into the tunnel. We changed. Left all the clothes, our old clothes that were in there, in the tunnel. And then he got tickets and we got tickets and got on the train from Nice into Monte Carlo. And in Monte Carlo we went to the cafe run by the British people and they, we had a meal etcetera and everything. Then I went very very crook. I got the flu bad. I had sores all around here and everything and I could hardly stand up. So next day the other four went with Patrick O’Leary with passports to Marseilles on the train. He came back three days later and I was a lot better by that time. So he picked me up, gave me my passport. We got on the train and as we were going down to Nice and Marseilles they had a lot of these cattle trucks and everything around. And they had men one side. Women and children the other side and they were loading them into these trucks to take them to Buchenwald. And yet the guards would come on and come around, look at our pass and hand them back and on they would go. When we got down to Marseilles Patrick says, ‘Come with me,’ and a joker came up to me and said, ‘Hello Pat. How are you?’ I looked. I didn’t even know him from a bar of soap. I thought I didn’t. Then we went up about fifty yards and Patrick went in the back where the Resistance movement had a special room. That was the day that Patrick O’Leary, we listened to the English news and he was presented with the DSO. I’ll always remember that part and then from the next day we stopped there. The next day we went up to the doctor’s — Dr Rodocanachi’s place. And from there we stopped for three or four days and we were just watching everything that’s going. Had to be a bit careful when you went out and when you come in. Nobody in Dr Rodocanachi’s house wore shoes. As soon as you went in you took your shoes off and put slippers on. You weren’t allowed to look out the window because the Germans were all over across from his building. And the Germans used to come in because he was their doctor. They wouldn’t, they didn’t think that he was a Resistance man. So all that went on and then they said, ‘Righto.’ He came up and after we were there, and his wife, she was very good. Fanny. She was an excellent woman. And then Patrick arrived and he says, ‘Tomorrow night. Tomorrow we’re all going down at different times and we’re going down to the Pepignan to Canet Plage.’ And I thought we must be going down to the Pyrenees. Any rate that’s what we did. We went down there. And when I was, when we were down there and it was still a bit light I see a lot of people coming in and I saw a joker with crutches. And I got hold of him. I got hold of Derry and I said, ‘I know that joker.’ And he was bent over and everything and I thought, well I’m pretty certain that’s André Postel-Vinay. The joker that helped me right up to Paris and everything. So I said, ‘Right.’ Patrick O’Leary went out. Shone a torch and got nothing. So we stopped the night. The next night he went out and a trawler came in. And on this trawler we all were taken on that trawler. I’ve never been so sick in all my life. You’re only about that high of the water and we went for two days and then I saw it was Patrick O’Leary. When he left me in Marseilles when I was going down to Canet Plage the first time he went back up north and when he got back up north he got caught and they put him in a two storey building on the top with about seven or eight acres of grass all around except below the window where they, he was, he couldn’t walk. He was just about done for and he said, ‘Well, I’m not going to give any names of anyone. I’ll jump out that window.’ They hadn’t tied him up or anything. I’ll go out the window because there’s concrete down below and I’ll kill myself.’ Well, he fell out of it but two days previously they’d cut the grass and then that’s where they piled the grass. Anyway they got him back in and they left him in that room and then there was a big disturbance in Paris and a German doctor from the First World War came in and he said to Andre, ‘See those white coats there? Put one on and go out. They’re all out. There’s a big disturbance in town. Put it on and go.’ That’s what he did and he went around to André Rolet’s place where we first went. And Henri said to him, ‘Come in my man.’ He said, ‘No. Give me some money. I’ve got to get out. My feet are crook,’ and everything like that. And Henri said, and Henri said, ‘No, I’ve only got one bottle of champagne left and we’re going to have it.’ So from there we went for two days on a British destroyer and then to Gibraltar. And when we went to Gibraltar we waited two or three days there and then HMS Malaya, the battleship was there. And those jokers were there and they said, ‘Where are you jokers going?’ And we said, ‘Oh we’re going to England.’ ‘Oh well we haven’t been home for two years,’ they said. The next day we were told that we were going aboard HMS Malaya and we’re going to Greenock. Up by Glasgow. And that’s what we did. We went on there and they said, ‘If we go up there you can have our rum.’ Well, that’s the worst thing they ever said. That rum was strong too. And when we got off the boat at Greenock the squadron leader taking us says you or Patrick O’Leary when we left Canet Plage. He gave Derry and I a whole lot of information to take with us. He wouldn’t give it to the officers. He gave it to us. ‘And give that, when you get to London, give them those papers and give them to no one else.’ So when we got up there and everything was alright. We got off the boat and we were going along Greenock and going along and I said to the squadron leader, ‘That’s a pub there. Gee I’d like a drink.’ And he said, ‘No one’s allowed to talk to you.’ No one’s allowed to do this and no one’s allowed to do that. ‘You’re going in and you’re going to be imprisoned in here.’ ‘Oh.’ So, Derry and I went along. We got past the guard. Went inside. Walked about ten paces and there was another wall that went along. A solid wall that went along but it didn’t go up to the roof. And when we went around that there was two guards standing there and they said, ‘That’s where you’re going in. You’ll be in there for at least one or two days. Then you go by train to London.’ Derry said, ‘Oh righto then.’ So we went in. The door opened that way and we were in there and here was the squadron leader. He was talking to the two guards telling them this, that, that and that. The bottom of the door didn’t have glass in it. It was solid. So Derry and I looked at one another and we got on our hands and knees and we crawled along the floor and we crawled around here and they couldn’t see us. Crawled around there and then we got up. Walked around this wall. Went to the first guard we had passed when we came in and said, ‘Where’s the nearest pub?’ He said, That’s it over there.’ So we went over there and what we did was I asked for two handles of scotch ale. We drank them and Derry said, ‘Two more handles of scotch ale.’ We had just about finished them when a hand fell on each of our shoulders and said, ‘You’re under arrest.’ [laughs] and that was and that’s when I sort of came under Air Commodore [Issot] when I should have come under, actually my CO that was on 101. But 101 had moved south. And the Stirling squadron that was 101 — they had taken it over. So I didn’t know where the 101 Squadron was but he took over and he said, ‘Right. You’re going to do this and do that. Now then, you go over to Sutton Bridge in Anglia and you do a gunnery leader’s course.’ So I did that. Done it. And we came out and after I came out he says, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I want to go on those Fiat where they’ve got those electric guns and everything on. I’d like to go on to them and night fighters and everything.’ He says, ‘You’ll do what I tell you. I’m running the show.’ And I said, ‘Oh well, ok if you’re running the show that’s ok.’ He said, ‘You’re going back to New,’ he says, ‘You’re going back to New Zealand.’ I said, ‘No I’m not. I’m not going back.’ He said, ‘You’ll do as you’re told.’ And I said, ‘Am I?’ ‘Cause we were always told no matter who the officers were always in the prison you always cause trouble.’ Well I caused trouble with him because he said to me, ‘We were going to give you a medal but we’re not going to give it to you now. ’So I said, ‘Shove it up your backside.’ And that’s what happened there. Derry, he got for his escape all of that and from Germany, he got the Distinguished Conduct Medal. One of the highest medals you could get. He died in 1993 in [unclear] a car accident. He took a heart attack. Even when I got back to England I went with him. We went to see his father and mother and everything and it’s the only time in my life I was playing cards with them and I got a royal flush of hearts and I wouldn’t bet with them because I said, ‘You can’t beat me.’ But no, all the different things that happened in Britain and everywhere you went. Even in New Zealand House or Australia House and yet when you go in there and want to go to the toilet at Australia House they used to be up at the top and when you wanted to go to the toilet you used to go out there in to the passage and the toilets, there were the stairs that led right to the toilet down there. And sitting on the top of the stairs was a notice, “Is your journey really necessary?” So when you look at a lot of the issues that come up there’s a lot of humour come around with it. And I saw one joker who I saw before the war and this joker was talking about — he was a squadron leader and he was talking. Doing a lot of jokes and telling them all the bomb raids he’d been on and everything like that. And Angus said to us, ‘We don’t want to listen to that.’ He was an instructor for all gunners and everything that came in to New Zealand. He was over there right at the beginning of the war. He was only a sergeant then but any rate him and I got on well together. When I got back to England he came and looked me up and he said, ‘Yeah, I heard that you were here so I’ve come to see you.’ He said, ‘I want to tell you this.’ I said, ‘Yeah. What’s that?’ ‘You know that squadron leader that was over there telling us all about all the bomb trips and everything he went in. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I went back to my squadron and I was in charge of instructing everybody on gunnery and everything like that. And sitting in the front seat was this squadron leader.’ He says, ‘After morning tea he sat at the back of the crowd,’ [laughs] he said, ‘He had never been on a trip.’ So when you look at a lot of them, I had another joker that I was brought up in the home with in Palmerston here and he had curly hair and everything like that. He came over in the second lot and I saw him later on and he says, ‘Yes.’ And the other couple with him, he came in a bit later and I said, ‘Where’s Curly?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Haven’t you heard?’ I said, ‘No.’ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘He went over there as a wireless operator gunner and a cannon shell came through and blew his head off on his first trip.’ So you never know what’s coming. Even on a raid you don’t worry about what you can see. It’s what you can’t see. Because they just look like, you know how you dry onions and you lift it up and you’ve got the bulb up there and you got all this. That’s exactly what they look like, all around. When you don’t hear anything you know you’re not going to live very long. But yes in many cases, yes you’re frightened. You worry. You’ve got a job to do and that’s all it is at that juncture. You’re there to save the crew and the other members of the crew are there to save you. And that’s how you work together. It’s a, it’s a sort of scheme that when you go into it then you all stick together. You’ve got to. Even if a sergeant is in charge of the plane and you have flight lieutenants and squadron leaders in the other part of it they’re still got to abide by the sergeant pilot because he’s the man that knows everything. And as one thing we had, one joker that was there he had to go and when we were going on this Berlin raid on our fourth trip we had this Aussie joker, second pilot and Mickey Allen said to me one day, ‘Pat.’ ‘What Mickey?’ ‘Can you see that bloody Aussie?’ And I turned my turret. I said, ‘Yes I can see him.’ ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘Can you?’ I say, ‘Yes I can see.’ ‘Where is he?’ I said, ‘He’s below the stretcher.’ In the Wellington bomber there and where the astrodome is, and there’s a galvanised pipe that goes down there and there’s your toilet. The toilet is chemical and the seat’s on the top but inside it there’s also when you sit on it the two wooden pieces are there. When you press down on there those two open up. So Mickey said, ‘What’s he doing?’ I said, ‘He’s just undoing his belt.’ ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘Right. You know don’t you?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ Anyhow, I waited there and he got down there and he took his trousers down and he got on there and he hung on to this galvanised bar that was there and he just, when he just started to smile I said, ‘Now Mickey,’ and Mickey threw the plane three hundred feet, four hundred feet and of course the Aussie grabbed this near enough. One part was below and the other part was above and Mickey says, ‘How’s he doing?’ And I said, ‘Oh he’s not enjoying it. Oh it’s alright now,’ I said, ‘He’s getting up,’ [laughs] So when you look at a lot of the things it doesn’t make any difference. It’s the war. They’re terrible things and what happens in them but in this case there is always one thing that you do. If you’re in an aircraft, if you’re in there to do that you work in with the crew because any minute you could be shot down. And you had to work together to be a crew. You also, in a lot of cases all went drinking together. It didn’t make any difference where you went to drink etcetera. Everything like that. But yes I enjoyed, if I had to do it again, yes I would do it again. It was one of those things that at that time all things were totally different. Even in France when the Germans walked into Paris to take over, the number of Frenchmen that came out in their SS uniforms. Andre Postel-Vinay told me that. But I didn’t know his name until about 1965/70 when Jack Warboys, our operator/gunner, when he went over and visited him. That’s when we started to find out. And then a lot of people used to write to us and want to know, ‘Do you know these people that helped us? Can you find out?’ This and that and that’s what we did. Quite a few other jokers that I had there. They all, that’s what they did to find out there to help those people do it. Then on top of it as soon as the war finished [pause] they decided that the RAF would do something for all the Belgians, Dutch, Norwegians, Greek, French, some Germans, Italians etcetera who all got injured and badly injured etcetera and everything. That they would do something to help them in their new life. So in 1948 we formed the Royal Air Force Escaping Society. And what we did we all paid a day’s wages a year. The RAF went around all the stations in England and Scotland and Wales and everywhere and they charged an extra shilling for the dances on the Friday and the Saturday and all that money went into the RAFES to pay for all these people. And they used to write to us and let us know. They got a Christmas parcel hamper. They also got birthday presents etcetera etcetera. They also were sent to hospital and fixed up as well as they can. What they could. And then about 1970/75. They had that much money in there that they turned around and they told the people of these that were injured and everything with their family they’ll pay for their sons and daughters to go to university. And that never finished until 1995. Now then to top the other part off with what you said I went over and I saw Michel [unclear] in Village Les Moines. And he told me that if ever he had time he would cut the throat of the Aussie joker because when he went over to Paris as a trip to see him he called monsieur [unclear] there was only five in the Wellington bomber that crashed here. He was the pilot. And they gave him a big write up, and everything. So Mr [ ] said that and when I got back this joker Christianson he rung me up and wanted to find out what was what and he said, ‘I’m going over to see him.’ Well, I says, ‘You go over to see him.’
[recording paused for a visitor]
MS: Pat, can you tell us about your, the Bomber Command clasp and your medals?
HH: I had — about medals. Rather strange for a lot of people who came back from the war because all those of ‘39/45 never had their name or number printed on them because Peter Fraser the prime minister said in 1945 he was not going to print all them on all their medals because it was going to cost too much money. All the 1914/18 war, yes. And if anybody like that joker we had here, you heard about him didn’t you? He was the president of the Otaki RSA and he had medals and everything and he hadn’t been away to the war. And he had those medals and they had no numbers on them. So if you lose your medals, I’ve had a lot of medals given to me by different people that have a number and that on them and I send them to the RSA etcetera etcetera and they find out who are the people that own them. And some of them that they have they’re living in England now. And that’s what happened. A lot of our people that came back from the Second World War would not apply for their medals. And a lot of them still haven’t applied for their medals. And when the Minister of Defence here, Mr Coleman at the time he put something in the house and he said about it and everything. I wrote him a letter and I said, Mr Coleman you don’t go back far enough. 1914/18 medals were presented to each man that came off the ship by the minister of defence and it had their name and number on them. When all the people came back from overseas in the ‘39/45 war Peter Fraser says they apply for them. And I’m not going to put their numbers and names on them because it’ll cost too much money. And that’s what happens today with a lot of them. So, I see a lot of people around who have got medals and they’re sort of getting them put on themselves. So with a lot of them that I applied for I was sort of turned down. I just mentioned something, even down at Wellington when I was sent to Upper Hutt somewhere and when I sent down they said, no. That’s your medals. That’s all there is. So, I’ve never sort of applied. I go to the high school here. I do the Anzac parade here. Every May we do it. And a lot of them over there always say, ‘You haven’t got your Bomber Command medal. You haven’t got your other medals. You’re supposed to have them.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, but I’ve applied for them and that’s been it. No. I’ve heard nothing.’ And I wrote when I was given a Wellington bomber photo of the old days I gave it to a joker who was going to do it up and photo it up and it was going to go into the RSA here. Well he lost it. And I wrote to England to the Royal Air Force in command to see if I could get a photo. And I had the letter returned. It’s still back in there somewhere. So, there’s a, there’s a lot of things you know around that sort of happened that you just say, ‘Right. I’m not going to muck around with that.’ etcetera etcetera etcetera. So I just let it go. But other than that, yes. There is certain ones that you get and like I say, like this plate that they give and they did that through the Royal Air Force Escaping Society. And Elizabeth Harrison, you’ve heard of her? She used to be in charge of this for years. She just died recently and she was ninety three, I believe. And she always used to write to me and say this person wants you to cover them etcetera etcetera etcetera and they write to me and I write to them and they let them know. And they, all of them, and one of them from Belgium wrote to me and said — you know a joker who’s a New Zealander. I was in the SAS with him. Do you know where he is? And I said well the only thing that I know his parents are in Church Street here. So I went and saw them and they said no. He’s in Vienna. So I wrote to the University in Vienna and they wrote to me and said no he is now in Wellington. So I wrote to Wellington and Wellington wrote to me and told me he is now at Massey University. So I saw him and we had a talk etcetera etcetera. And that was about what they were talking because this New Zealander was in the SAS. And they always knew that there was something crook abut Three Gun Patton and Eisenhower and he wanted to know, with the accident that Patton had that it was jacked up. At a certain place where they were supposed to stop with these special trucks and let his car go through and they didn’t stop and they smashed it and killed him. Because Three Gun ‘Patton had a lot of arguments with Eisenhower. He was a man that when he went out he did it. I know he used to push everybody into it who was going to go ahead. He always beat everybody wherever he wanted to go and everything but there was one thing about him. When he went to do anything he’d even be there with his men, and that’s how. A bit like Montgomery to a certain degree. But yes, it’s when you look at a lot of the issues and everything that happened I always look at the one thing that I think is the most loyal to me, and I think to a hell of a lot of people who don’t know anything about it, is the Resistance movement who are the unsung heroes. And there’s hundreds of them that were shot. And that joker that said to me in Paris, in Marseilles when we escaped from Fort de la Revere and he says, ‘Hello Pat,’ and when I went around and went in there he was a joker, Davidson. And he was an Australian. Later on I learned that he was helping a priest and a, two nuns etcetera and everything and they got caught. And when they got caught they got the orders from Hitler that there was too much of this had been going on and they sent them to Buchenwald and put them over a chair and chopped their heads off. And that’s that’s jokers name was Davidson. So when you look at a lot, and those men no matter where you go or what you do they’re there every minute when they’re with you and they make sure that you do exactly what they, is it, you take that, “’Allo. ‘Allo.” You know that French that went on. A lot of that stuff that you look in there and it looks like a lot of its tripe. A lot of its true. And a lot of it is done by a lot of our people. You take the legless pilot. Now he done a lot of harm to a lot of people and when he got caught and he went in and then he escaped with his boots didn’t he? And they got him right through the German lines in occupied France, through the Germans and got him through and got him right around there and put him in to a little village and said to him, ‘Stop here. Don’t go out for a week.’ After a couple of days he decided to go for a walk and he got caught. All those people in that village were shot. And that’s when he went back into the camp again they took his legs away. So when you look at it it doesn’t matter who you are or what you are when those jokers are doing it they are working twenty four hours a day, every second of the day and everything to help you. And when you, they tell you to do something you do it because they know what is what. And they know, and in many cases we were in Vierzon. We went in to Vierzon. One part of it. And when we went into Vierzon they had a toilet. That toilet was there and it had six in. Nothing at the back. And it was only from here up to here and there was a Frenchman in there with his girlfriend and she was leaning on the top talking to him. When we went in André Postal-Vinay, went there, I went here and the Aussie joker he was here. And the Aussie joker turned around and said this French girl instead of being this way she turned around and went this way you see. And when she went around the Aussie said to me, he said, ‘She’s not going to see what I’ve got,’ and instead of going like that he went like that [laughs] So, when you think a lot of things that happened etcetera its quite humorous and when you think of it, but it could be serious. But that’s what I was saying. Even in Marseilles. Even when they pulled the curtains back when we were at Dr Rodocanachi there was young girls going to school and when they were going down there opposite where the Germans were living she stopped and we could see out this window view it over there. And she opened her bag that she had and she took a brown paper bag out of it and she split it right open. I can still see her doing it. And then she got into the gutter, lifted her dress, took her pants down and done a poo. And when she got up she got the brown paper bag, put it over the top and pressed down the edges. So when you, and I’ve seen others even in Marseilles where a girlfriend’s with her boyfriend and they go around the corner. He wants to go to the toilet he just swings around the corner, takes it out and just wees on the wall. So in a lot of cases it’s surprising what really happens when you don’t know much about it. So when you’re in that position then you’ve, whoever’s taking you it’s their life at stake not yours. Because if they get caught and you get caught you only go as a prisoner of war. They get shot, or. And some of them with some of the books they had. The lady in America. She wrote to me and did it and some of those jokers that were caught they tortured them with chains. Those small chains like that and that’s what they lashed them with. And not with whips. So when you look at a lot of the things. Even their fingernails and everything like that you know, eh. It’s, you can’t really understand. The only thing I really understand from my time, previous times until the present and with human beings. The human begins have done nothing but kill one another. Even when you get back to Alexander the Great. So, yes that’s the sort of issues that I look at and I cover but I always look at those people that helped me. They couldn’t have done a better job and yet they lost their lives. And a lot of them even if they got caught even their wives and children were taken and shot. So, yes — and Cole he was one joker that was there with the Patrick O’Leary Line well he was of them that turned jokers in. And Roger Legionaire. He was another. He turned them in. He turned Patrick O’Leary in in 1943 and that’s when the Resistance Line started to fold up. And the little old lady that used to live in Toulouse who used to be his helper the Germans wouldn’t have anything to do with her because they reckoned she was a cranky old lady but she took over running the line after Patrick O’Leary was caught and the Germans didn’t even know. So when you look at it it’s all that help that you get from all those. Even the joker, the Tartan Pimpernel from Scotland. He had a church outside Paris and when the Germans came in he locked the church up, took the key out and gave the key to the people next door to him. And he says, ‘I’ll be back after the war to open the church again.’ And that’s what, you know when you see those jokers and what — he used to come in with us and he’d bring, he used to be our minister for the faith and he used to bring different things in for us. That’s how we used to got a lot of the issues. And he’d bring something special in for one or two of the guards that he would know and I would see him give him that and the guard would let him in. So it all works on faith and what you know. And you still end up the best of friends. Yes. And yes I’ve — no I’ve only been back once to France by them. And when I got back to Monsieur [unclear] that time I was in in 1995 I went back there for the government because they said there was no Resistance movement in France during the war. And when I got to, in there he came over and he said to me, ‘You know that German that came in and spoke perfect English with machine guns and that if he finds out he’s only going to shoot us all. Well,’ he said another joker came back three months later. He was an older German and he had a machine gun and a sergeant with him and he said to these people in village Les Moines and Monsieur [unclear] ‘Have you see those six airmen or anything?’ And he says, ‘No.’ And then he was looking down at their shoes and the other bits that were around. And what they had in their shoes was the laces off our parachutes. So it just shows you what can happen which could get you into a lot of trouble if you don’t know much about, etcetera or anything. But this joker said, ‘You won’t be hearing from me again. That’s the finish of it. We won’t be coming back.’ So it just depends who it comes back and who it is. A lot of Germans that were in there in the First World War quite a few of them were very, very good with a lot of people that they were. Doctors and everything like that. They helped a lot of people get away and it’s those jokers when they look at what was going on. Even when you look at the White Mouse, even when they married and her husband and when they married in Marseilles etcetera and everything and they were in Czechoslovakia. And they were having, I believe it was their honeymoon. I’m not quite certain but they turned around and when the Germans went into Czechoslovakia they had pregnant women there and were taking the foetuses out. That’s what made her as tough as what anybody could be and yet you couldn’t meet a better lady. She did everything that went around and everything you know. Nothing was too much trouble. She was caught a couple of times but got out of it. Patrick O’Leary helped her once when she was in Vichy France and the gendarmes had her. And Patrick O’Leary went in and said that’s his wife. Prove it. Showed, you know what he had so they gave him to her and she got out. And she’d been in there two days and they were going to send her away. He took her out as his wife and she went back to doing the job she’d originally done. And all the other things that she did when her husband was caught in 1942. He was only a vegetable in the end when they tried to find out where she was. And lived but he never let on. And on the 18th of October 1943 they shot him. So they sent her, Patrick O’Leary sent her back to England urgently in case she did something silly after hearing he’d been killed. So they sent her back to England and she went on a special course and then they sent her back in charge of the Maquis — south east of France. And when they went down there there’s one thing about the Frenchmen they don’t like a woman to be in charge. So when she went down there and they met her. They’d done anything, yes. And they said alright, and she said, ‘Oh yes,’ and she said, you have a joker around here that has been turning some of our men in from the Maquis and we don’t like them.’ They said, ‘Yes he’s married and he’s got a young son.’ He’s quite a nice joker. And they said, well. And she said, you, you and you are going out to see him. And they went out where they were holding him and when she went in she said are you Mr so and so and so and so and he says yes and she pulled out the gun and went bang bang bang bang. Shot him dead. The Maquis then said they would follow her wherever she went and that’s exactly what they’d done. They did. She would go in and do them from Grenoble and all down through that area. Down to Nice and down that area. She would take two or three hundred men or might be four hundred men but she would go against a German garrison of four or five thousand and they’d go in, just about shoot them all up and then they’d vanish. They’d be gone. Thirty, forty, fifty mile away, or a hundred mile away. And then they’d go into another. And that’s what the Germans didn’t like because she was killing more of them and she was hardly, and they were hardly killing any of her men. But she was a woman that didn’t like anyone to be cruel. And yet when you look at her and what she did to some of them it was either him or her and as a lot of people say, when you go to war, a joker would say to you, ‘I couldn’t shoot that German.’ And I would say to them, ‘Well if you didn’t shoot him he’d shoot you. So what’s the difference? It’s war.’ There’s a difference between war and peace. You can get away sometimes with murder in war but you won’t get away with it in peace. So when you look at all these things and war, even now, even in war with everything that happens look at all that comes out eventually from war that’s present day. Look at all those people that got burned and that New Zealander turned around where they could do those skin grafts and everything like that. Because some of those people right at the beginning, you know and you saw it and everything it was it was just scarred. They looked terrible you know, when you. Especially when you get some of that excess fuel burning. Yes. So, other than that no. I’ve, well —
[pause]
MS: What do you think about the way Bomber Command got treated after the war, Pat?
HH: Got?
MS: The way Bomber Command was treated after the war. Do you have —
HH: Terrible. Especially what Bomber Harris and what he had done and then even king George the VI’s was one of them that was against when they bombed Bremner, well not, yeah and they blew that city to pieces. And it had more objects of the past etcetera than anywhere in Germany. But it didn’t make any difference when you look at it. Because look what Germany did to Britain. Look what the Germans would have done to us if, if Hitler hadn’t had changed his methods of the war with his different planes with the different bombs and everything that he had. Or that he didn’t completely try to control everyone. It’s something I don’t think we’ll ever know but I will say this. If it hadn’t have been for Bomber Harris then yes he should have, after the war he should have been recognised for it. Yeah. I’ve always done that and when they did that one in 2012 I was going to go see if could get over to that service for him even though he came after me. Why? I was crook [laughs] Yes. But I thought if ever anything else sort of came up and I could and it was possible then I would apply because all my crew are dead now. All the people that I knew in the camp are all passed on. All the people, the majority of them that I knew in the Resistance movements and that, of Patrick O’Leary and all those others. They’ve all passed on to this day and when you look, you know, at what, and then Patrick O’Leary he went over to Korea afterward. Yet looking at the joker he doesn’t look like he would be able to do anything. The way he just walks along, etcetera etcetera etcetera. Yeah. No, I’ve looked back at it and I look at a lot of issues. I see a lot of people that even I’d had some time in camps that you couldn’t even trust. You’d have to be careful or otherwise you’d be shot yourself. It’s one of those things that it doesn’t matter what country you belong to or what country you’re in, or If there’s a war on or anything then there’s going to be a lot of people who are going to save their own necks if they can get away with it. So I’m just pleased that I’ve been through what I have been through and I’m still sort of going on. Although this Christmas hasn’t been the best was it? You didn’t hear about Christmas did you? I have a pacemaker. And I had to get it checked on the 30th of December this year. I’d had it since the 13th of June 2013. My daughter said, ‘Take this stuff up to George for Christmas,’ the next day. And I said, ‘Oh yeah I’ll do that, and then I went in. So I picked up my doctor’s prescription for pills. Put it in my pocket and I went here, went up, went in [unclear] Street. I went up Victoria Avenue and there was Newton Street over on the right. I went over there and I completely blacked out and I went across the left hand lane. I was lucky. No cars, no people, no lorries, no buses or anything were there. I hit the fence. I don’t know that. I had blacked out. Went along that and stopped in a little alleyway and then I woke up and this was right up here. That’s the only injury I got. My car is a complete write off. You wouldn’t believe it. And I’ve been down to Wellington here. They flew me down there. I got a new pacemaker so, and they found my old pacemaker had packed up. Just went wrong and I didn’t know it and that just shows you that if you’re completely blacked out and got your belt on you won’t get hurt.
MS: Pat, can I just ask you do you still have your logbook?
HH: No. I haven’t got my, no, I never got my logbook. No. Well, I haven’t got it because I never got it back from England. I got all other things. Flying boots and suits and that, but, and personal things and photos and a lot of photos were not even mine. So [pause] What about the —
MS: Do you still have all those things, Pat?
HH: Hmmn?
MS: Do you still have all those items? Have you still got them, your boots?
HH: No. They’ve all gone but I had my uniforms and everything and they eventually went. I gave them to the joker that was a squadron leader here and he was in charge of the museum out at Ohakea. And he had a plumbing business in [unclear] Street. And he was in charge of the brevet. Oh I just can’t think of his name at the present, yes.
Other: Tony [Pirod]
HH: Oh that’s it. Tony [Pirod]
MS: Ok.
HH: Yes. And he said to me why haven’t you joined it? When I went in one day ’48. I had some letters given me by Nancy Wake, she was an Australian in Newcastle, and she’d asked me to give them to the special New Zealander coming out in the air force from England. To give them to the Brevet Club to give to him because they were having a meeting. So I went up and I gave them to him and he said to me, ‘Ah yes. Oh that’s alright.’ He says, ‘Ok I’ll do that. I’ll give them to him.’ Now then, he says when [unclear] was in an insurance company now he says, ‘When you come in here and talk to me again you call me sir.’ I said, ‘I beg your pardon?’ He says, ‘You call me sir,’ he said, ‘I was an officer in the air force.’ I said, ‘I beg your pardon?’ I says, ‘The war’s over.’ And he said, ‘That’s what I’m telling you. Oh by the way,’ he said, ‘You haven’t joined the Brevet Club. The Air Force Club.’ I said, ‘No.’ ‘When are you going to join it?’ And I put my hand in my pocket. I took it out. I said, ‘Have a read of that.’ And that was the one for the Royal Air Force Escaping Society, to join it in 1948. I said, I’m going to join that because it’s something to do for people that have helped us and we can help them. And for you at the present you can stick it. I’ve been to Christchurch and down there quite a few others already. I’m not a member of the Brevet. But I’m a voluntary member down there. They joined us up. And they had one joker that came in when we were down there. I always remembered he was a squadron leader and he came in. I was talking to the president and everything down there and he said, yes, and the president of the club says, ‘No ranks or anything down here. We don’t have any of them.’ The joker said, ‘Well I was a squadron leader and I like to be called sir.’ And he had a handle in front of him and we all had a handle and outside this office which was on the south east corner of the Christchurch Aerodrome they says, ‘Do you? You like that?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Yeah I do and I want to keep it too.’ They said, ‘Have you finished?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ They said, ‘Come with us will you. Bring your beer.’ And we went out and around the back they had a round thing around and there was a big pond that was about that deep. They went out there etcetera and everything and while we were all out there the president said to the joker, you and you and you. ‘You know what to do don’t you?’ One grabbed one leg, one the other, one the other arm and one the other and they chucked him in to the centre of this pond. And when the joker came out he said, ‘I see what you mean,’ [laughs] But that’s what I say in many cases when you get a lot of them in that it’s, it’s friendship really that you’re going about. I don’t care if I care if I go in to a place and etcetera etcetera something like that and someone comes along and says this or that or something else. I say oh yes that’s alright. But I go out to Ohakea now and again and when I go out there I have a talk to them and everything. But what surprised me at Ohakea when I did go out there when they had the air force nationals on and we went into the sergeant’s mess, the number of women and the number of men who were warrant officers and flight sergeants. In our day when we were there we had only to say, ‘bloody,’ and we were out for a week. They were using every swear word going. Even the women that were serving the beer. And I just looked at it and the other joker with me, he said, ‘Well, I’ve just about heard everything. Things have changed.’ So I expect we have to put up with the change. Sergeant. Flight sergeant. Yes, I was a sergeant all my trips until I got back to England and I was made a flight sergeant from then on. And I was a flight sergeant when I came back here and when I got back here the Venturas arrived and Squadron Leader Hogg wanted me to be his gunner because we were going up to the islands. And the warrant officer was going to be his navigator so he says we’re going up there Pat and when we used to go in he wouldn’t let me salute him and we would sit and have a cup of tea and everything with him, you know. And we were getting on. And then he said well, then it came through. Everybody going to the islands in 1943 had to have a medical examination to see if they were fit. So many were coming back and hadn’t done anything. So he said to me, ‘You’ve been for your medical yet Pat?’ I said, ‘No. I’ll go later on.’ He said, ‘Righto then.’ So I said, I went out and saw him one day and when I came in all of a sudden this pilot officer that come in that was going to be the navigator he, he came out and he said, and the doctor said, ‘I’m sorry to tell you sir he won’t be going with you. He’s not allowed to fly.’ So he says, ‘Oh Pat’s here,’ he says, ‘Give him, take him in and check him will you because he’s going with me to the islands.’ I went in. I wasn’t in there very long and he came out and said, ‘You’re grade ten. You’re not allowed to fly.’ And I was flying around with drogues and everything going when I was out here and in the armoury. And that finished that so when that happened then there was a whole lot of people then coming back from England that had been over there for a while as instructors etcetera and everything. And so I went to Wellington and they said right, I was essential industry and I went back on to the railways. So yes when you look at all the different things that went on at different things like that it’s, it takes you a while to get used to war years. It takes you a hell of a lot longer to get used to peace time because in wartime even and more particularly if you’ve been a prisoner of war you’ve got to be a trouble maker all the time. You’ve got to do something even if you go into solitary confinement. It upsets them. They think their job, guards are not doing their job right and everything. Yes, it’s a — I had one joker who was, when I was in Fort de la Revere, he came in and he said to me you and you, and Derry was lying on his bed and he said to me, ‘And you. You’re the biggest trouble makers around,’ and this was this corporal. The joker with the Alsatian dog. And he said, ‘I’ve had enough of you and I’ve got into a lot of trouble through you two and everything,’ and he spat at me. So I gave him a good New Zealand spat and he went and told his commanding officer and the commanding officer came in and I went under arrest. And he said he never spat at me and Derry went into the hearing and Derry says, ‘Yes he did spit at Pat.’ And the CO says, ‘Well if he says he didn’t spit at you he didn’t.’ Sixty days solitary confinement I got. I went in at eleven stone six and I came out at six stone eight. But the only thing that keeps you going from going mad I’d look back on my life when I was a kid. And the jokers used to work around. They used to get big books like that, about that thick and they’d to cut the inside out of it and they’d put tucker in it. And where the guard was above the prison outside they would run up the stairs run around and come around and everything. They’d do that three or four times. When they came up the third time and do it they’d open the book and chuck some tucker in. And that’s how you worked in with each other. And yes I’d look at a lot of those jokers and what they did. And we all, we still had a laugh even right to the end. Yes.
MS: Can we just confirm Pat so you were in 101 Squadron?
HH: Hmmn?
MS: You were in 101 Squadron?
HH: 101 yeah.
MS: 101 and you were a flight sergeant?
HH: Yes.
MS: And you did nine ops?
HH: Nine ops. Yeah.
MS: Nine ops. Where did you go on those operations?
HH: Well at Kiel Canal, at Kiel Canal, Karlsruhe, Bremner was one. It was only a short one we had for there. And then we went down through the Ruhr and when you went down through the Ruhr it was as bright as going down the Ruhr in the middle of the night than it is here. And they had all the searchlights and everything for miles and miles and miles, you know. So, yes and all those other ones down south and around there that I went to. The nearest ones I went when we went was down the Ruhr. And then all the others were down towards the south east or the south west of Germany itself there. I got all the names up somewhere in there but other than that — no. I, and the last one of course I wouldn’t have forgotten that one [laughs] and yes and the crew you couldn’t have got a better crew. With the English jokers I was with they were exceptional. The only one that I had the bit of trouble with was the Aussie second pilot. He wanted to be the boss of everything. And he died the year before last over in Aussie. Yes. He’s [pause] so when you look at it and Mickey Allen. The other four after we went to St Hippolyte as a prisoner of war the others went and that four hours that we were deaf and dumb and they were trying to find out this and that that gave them the four hours to get with their joker over the Pyrenees and then into Barcelona. And those four got right over to there. But the unusual part about it is I tried to get Mickey Allen. Saxon that came back with me I tried to get him later on and he lived at Stoke on Trent. But never heard of him again and all the others that were in it that were in our crew they never heard of Mickey Allen and that again. So whether it was just too much in the end or whatever happened or whether he went on night fighters and was killed I don’t know. And now I’m, when I look I think of that time. The way the world was going. That’s why we, a lot of people joined up. Being in New Zealand we, freedom to us, freedom of speech and everything is a big issue. We like to do a lot. I know today that a lot of the issues that we did years ago they pass laws today to stop it. But in those days when you got it and the populations weren’t that big everybody sort of worked in to help one another. There wasn’t a lot of money around and when I went back on to the railways, when I first went on to the railways before I went overseas my wages at that time was one and a penny farthing an hour. So that’s only about fifteen pennies. So yes it was big money to us at that time because everything was quite reasonable. It’s only since we’ve seemed to have got into dollars and cents that we seem to sort of, and I should add to it the little card. The fantastic — that you can book everything to. That has a big bearing on life today. Because you’ve only got to look at your TV and see how many sales all the big companies have practically every week. So when you look at it you’ve got to change with the times. You’ve got to go with the times because a lot of the issues that you did in your day are irrelevant today. And with the issue that changes a lot to me was when I asked a young lad a while back, ‘Isn’t it marvellous that they can send something into space and they can land it on Jupiter or they can land it on a rock in space. Don’t you reckon that’s marvellous?’ And this nine year old kiddie said, ‘What’s marvellous about that?’ So things have changed appreciably. Yes. So as it is I just go along and I do what I did in the air and what we did for those people who were injured during the war for us. That’s why I do a lot for a lot of people around here and they gave me a citation through the mayor here for helping people etcetera etcetera. And he gave me a big copy of it. I’ve got it hanging in the room there and I was one of six that got it. And that’s what it’s all about. It doesn’t matter who it is or what it is you’ve got to help. You might not get anything back but you’re not looking for anything. You never had anything much when you first started. And when you wanted to get anything for yourself years ago you used to save up and then get it. Today you don’t have to if you don’t want to because then they’ll turn around and they’ll take the twelve and a half percent off. So, yes it’s one thing I think and something that you’ve got to do. You’ve got to go along with the times and it’s also working that way that we got a lot of people in the governments that are a lot younger than in our day. So I just believe what they say goes in one ear and out the other.
MS: We’re about to run out of recording time so we’re going to wrap the interview up now.
HH: Ok.
MS: I just want to say thank you very much indeed.
HH: That’s ok. Yeah.
MS: It’s been a real pleasure talking to you today.
HH: Yeah.
MS: And the interview concludes here.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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AHicktonH170113
PHicktonH1701
Title
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Interview with Pat Hickton
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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02:10:38 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending OH summary
Creator
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Miriam Sharland
Date
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2017-01-13
Description
An account of the resource
Pat Hickton was born in New Zealand. His mother passed away when he was young and he spent his childhood in a number of foster and children’s homes until he started working on the railway. He volunteered for the RAF and began training as a rear gunner. His aircraft was shot down and he and his crew evaded for a time with the help of the resistance until they were captured and became a prisoner of war. He managed to escape and make a home run withe the help of the Pat O’Leary Line.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal New Zealand Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Germany
Great Britain
New Zealand
Andorra
France--Perpignan
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1942
1943
101 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
escaping
evading
Ju 88
Operational Training Unit
prisoner of war
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Oakington
Resistance
sanitation
searchlight
shot down
training
Wellington
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/283/3439/AJonesPWA171207.2.mp3
b1161008fdc7ccbc2058d73a7d2e684d
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
Jones, Thomas John
Tom Jones
T Jones
Description
An account of the resource
62 items. An oral history interview with Peter William Arthur Jones (b. 1954) about his father Thomas John Jones DFC (b. 1921, 1640434 and 184141 Royal Air Force), his log book, photographs, correspondence, service documents, aircraft recognition manuals, medals and a memoir. He flew operations as a flight engineer on 622 Squadron Stirling and 7 Squadron on Lancaster. <br /><br />The collection also contains an <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2566">Album</a> of 129 types of aircraft. <br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Peter Jones and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2014-12-04
2017-12-07
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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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Jones, PW
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 7th of December 2017 and we’re in Lincoln talking with Peter Jones about the career and life of his father Thomas John Jones DFC. I think just first of all it’s interesting to reflect that in this case Peter didn’t elicit much information from his father, which is exactly the same with my father, and also Jan’s, in that they might have touched on trivialities, but they didn’t talk about what actually happened.
PJ: That’s very true.
CB: So Peter, how does that fit with your feeling of the background?
PJ: [Sigh] I feel very sad, that he, that he didn’t talk to me about it, about what he actually did and had to put up with, and when I did find out, I was immensely proud.
CB: I can imagine.
PJ: But also, as I only found out twenty four hours after he had died, it was an absolute maelstrom of emotions, of reading the memoir that he’d written fifty years after the war, secretly late at night, when my mother had gone to bed - I wasn’t living there at the time - and he’d put all his memories in a WH Smith notebook.
CB: Had he, really.
PJ: And when he’d finished them, he just hid them with all his personal papers I guess knowing I would eventually find it, after his death.
CB: What do you think prompted him to write it? What age was he when he wrote it?
PJ: He was in his eighties when he wrote that; he died in 2004. I don’t know, was he trying to exorcise his demons? Was he conscious that he hadn’t been able to tell me what he’d done and how he actually felt about what he’d done? I really don’t know.
CB: He was awarded the DFC.
PJ: He was.
CB: So clearly he’d had some really horrendous experiences which were rewarded. Do you think that it, to some extent, he felt he didn’t want to look as though he was in any way building on the background?
PJ: Yes, I think he did. He was a very modest man; he was a very modest, self-effacing gentleman. He was a lovely dad.
CB: But never got on to anything to do with wartime.
PJ: Only the very light-hearted stuff. [Microphone noise] He would talk about that, I mean he relates various stories of some of the capers the crew got up to, but when it went to operational, no. No details.
CB: What were the most dramatic capers they got up to would you say?
PJ: Um, I’ve got a lovely photograph taken at Mildenhall when he was flying with 622 Squadron and it shows my dad and three or four of the other crewmen dangling one of their colleagues out of a first floor window. By his legs. [Much laughter] I think that would probably be one of many stunts like that in the day, you know, it, obviously it would be quite a safety valve, and they would thrive on the black humour, but it was a lovely photograph.
CB: This is out of context in the sequence, but I think it’s worth just talking about – how do you think they dealt with the stress?
PJ: Certainly black humour. I think everyone deals with stress differently. So, I don’t know. My father was a smoker. When you, I’ve noticed that a lot, so many photographs of airmen back in the day, and airwomen, of course, they’re nearly all smoking. I think they enjoyed going down the pub as well.
CB: I mean we’ll get on to your father in a minute, but you, as the archivist here, are covering a huge range of different situations and they, there are two things that come out of that in a way, one is the release from the stress, and the other is, we’ll touch on later, is the LMF, the lacking moral fibre bit, which comes up but is largely buried, but the release of the stress is a broad one and in practical terms, what was the main safety valve would you say?
PJ: High jinks. I think that it was the high jinks. We at the archive have got so many photographs of, wonderful photographs of crew, both aircrew, ground crew, WAAFs, having a really good time, it was an adventure. They were young people. And when you look at the photographs of them having a good time, and then just look at the, look at the face, and then look at the rank, they really don’t go together. You’ve got a very, very young man or woman, with a very senior rank and again that must have, must have really weighed heavy on their shoulders.
CB: There was a notion, there is still I suppose a notion, that what the war did to people in the RAF, but particularly Bomber Command, was make them grow up really quickly. Do you reckon you see that in some of the pictures that have been submitted?
PJ: Definitely. Yeah. Certainly some of the more senior officers, you can see it in their faces: they’ve aged. They’ve aged. I mean my father when he, in 1944, he was twenty three. He looks older. And I think they did go through the mill, and I think it did age them, certainly mentally and probably physically as well with some, particularly the rear gunners who had to endure such cold. It must have been pretty dreadful.
CB: And constant flight, fright.
PJ: Yes. Of which they never spoke.
CB: No. I mean my CO in the Reserve had a mental breakdown after being chased by a Ju88 and then shot down, and so the stress there was huge. But what would you put down to the fact that almost, very largely, people in all of the Forces failed to talk about their experiences in the war? What do you think was the background of that?
PJ: We’re looking at a different decade, aren’t we. It was the stiff upper lip decade. It was the decade where men feared to shed tears, other than in private. I think that’s got a lot to do with it. I don’t, would they share it with the rest of the crew? I don’t know whether they would. In fact I don’t think they would, share their fears with the rest of the crew.
CB: No. I just get a feeling, having talked to people, that the LMF bit actually destabilised the crew so there was a very good reason for getting rid of them quickly, but if, and if they spoke about it, the crew was destabilised.
PJ: Yup. I think it was a fear of letting the crew down.
CB: That’s it.
PJ: Definitely.
CB: And that’s bombers, so we’ve got wider scopes than that, which is difficult to fathom.
PJ: [Pause] Mm. One of the things that my dad talks about, is a particular incident where, I can’t quite remember the details of it now, the nearest he actually came to being killed, and he actually quotes - this is in a, in his notes that he wrote fifty years after the event - he actually writes in there and describes this event and he describes himself saying, saying aloud, ‘don’t cry when you get the letter, mum’, and then he suddenly realises that he may be on an open mike, and thinks oh, maybe I shouldn’t have said that, but he wasn’t. You know, so I think that’s an example of again, fear of letting the crew down.
CB: Well I think we know, don’t we, that it’s clear from the four engined bombers but also from the, [throat clear] excuse me, two engined bombers, that the crew was the family.
PJ: They were. My dad describes them as being like brothers, rank didn’t matter.
CB: And they superseded all other relationships.
PJ: Indeed. Yeah, yeah. And because of the nature of the role that they were dealing with, they never made friends with other crews. They felt unable to, because they didn’t know how long they would know them for, and no thought was given to who had been in your bunk before you got in it. That must have been quite difficult to deal with.
CB: So in the Nissen huts there were two or three crews, and when one was lost then everything was picked up quickly, for replacement with another crew. Who they didn’t know either.
PJ: No. It must have been a terrible time for the ground crew, who saw so many come and go.
CB: Yes, and on ground crew, there are two aspects to that. One is losing their crew and their aeroplane, the other one is when the aeroplanes come back bent, or with horrors in. So what’s your perception of the ground crew reaction to that?
PJ: Well of course the ground crew always thought that the aircraft was theirs [emphasis], and they loaned it nightly to the aircrew and lo, you know, god help anyone that bent it, you know. But there was a lovely relationship between the flight crew and the ground crew, and I would imagine there was great banter. I know that my father thought the world of the ground crew. I mean they worked on his aircraft in the most appalling [emphasis] conditions sometimes, to keep it in tiptop condition and to keep the aircrew as safe as possible, or as safe as they could possibly be. But the ground crew must have gone through such terrible times, when their aircraft didn’t come back, you know. And it must have been there in the back of their mind that was it something that we missed? It’s terrible times.
CB: And the link between the aircrew and the ground crew would be the pilot and the engineer would it? Or what would be the main link – just the engineer?
PJ: I think pilot and engineer, yeah, but there would be camaraderie with the whole crew. I don’t know whether the ground crew actually were involved with trying to install the rear gunner in his turret because of course they struggled to get in there on their own.
CB: Yes, ‘cause moving on from there is the aftermath of an attack and removing crew who were injured, or dead. What was your perception of that?
PJ: Pretty grisly business. Very often it, I mean the rear gunners’ odds of survival were so few, so low, and it was quite common that the rear turret just had to be hosed out. Pretty unpleasant job.
CB: And the bits taken out as well.
PJ: Yes. One of the early things that my father talks about in his notes was when they first went to Mildenhall and they saw their first operational aircraft, and it was a, if I remember rightly, it was a Stirling, outside the Flying Control and it was absolutely riddled with holes. And as they walked round, round this aircraft, they got to the rear gunner’s turret and it was just a shattered mess of just shattered Perspex and bent metal, with lots of blood in it, and uniform, bits of uniform and hair, it was at this point my father actually quotes in his notes, ‘it was this point we realised we’d got to pay back the cost of our training,’ and it all became very real.
CB: Yes. Let’s just. That’s a good phrase, I think, that’s appeared in many cases, probably, which is the payback, so how did you perceive the crews’ attitude to that?
PJ: They were professionals: they were dedicated. They were airmen, trained. They were young men, it was an adventure, it was a job and they were young men under orders and they would obey those orders.
CB: Hm. And in a way they were completely detached, if they were at twenty thousand feet, that’s four miles above [throat clearing] where the effect of their ammunition, their bombs, is felt.
PJ: Yes, they’re kind of divorced from it.
CB: Detached.
PJ: Yes, all they see is fires, and explosions and then of course the flak, the searchlights, et cetera and the ever-present fear of fighters.
CB: On a slightly lighter note then, there’s if they make a mess inside the aeroplane, there’s a fine attached to this.
PJ: There was. My father actually flew three hundred hours, three hundred flying hours, before he got rid of his air sickness and squadron lore had it, that if you threw up in the aircraft you had to pay a fine to the ground crew and clear it up yourself. He actually, he mentions that his bank account was saved by a member of the ground crew who gave him any empty biscuit tin. [Chortle] I think that’s another reason why he liked ground crew!
CB: Then there’s the other aspect which is the filling of the Elsan, [clears throat] or not. [Laughter]
PJ: Exactly, or not! Yes, I would think so, or not. A filthy piece of kit, back of the aircraft, just near the rear turret which must have been pretty unpleasant for the gunner. They’d use anything rather than have to use the Elsan, including milk bottles or peeing down the flare chute or even into the bomb bay. But you know, it was desperate measures to have to go and use the Elsan.
CB: See how long it was before it froze!
PJ: Not long, at eighteen thousand feet! [Laughter]
CB: Now [throat clear] what about the interpersonal relationships of the crew? How did that work?
PJ: They were, as I’ve said, they were like brothers; rank didn’t matter. However, once they were operational, on an operational flight, it came into play. The rank did matter then and the skipper’s order was to be acted on, there was no messing about, when they were on ops, there was no, there was no overuse of the communications at all. Everything was spot on. They were professionals.
CB: I think one of the interesting things, looking at the log book and your details of the crew, is that they, the pilot was Royal Australian Air Force.
PJ: He was.
CB: And you also had a wireless operator who was the same, but you had two, he had two Royal New Zealand Air Force and two RAF, three RAF Reserve, RAF Volunteer Reserve. So how did that interaction go?
PJ: It seemed, looking at my dad’s notes, it seemed to work really well. There was no, they were a crew and it didn’t matter where they were from or what their backgrounds were. They were a crew.
CB: I’m going to stop just a mo. Now your father did a lot of ops, but we’ve talked about the aircrew, what about the hierarchy? So, there was a Flight Commander and a Squadron Commander, did you get much out of the notes on that, the relationships?
PJ: No, he does, it’s humour, in some of it. He doesn’t talk much about the squadron commanders although he does talk about when he joined 7 Squadron, that they’d just lost their CO on operational flying. He was replaced and within a fortnight the replacement had gone; had been killed as well.
CB: This is a Pathfinder Squadron.
PJ: This is 7 Squadron at RAF Oakington, yeah. Thinking that, looking back you think was the policy of the squadron CO flying ops a good one? You have to question it really, don’t you. It can’t have done the morale any good, when the boss cops it.
CB: Well presumably the Flight Commanders were Squadron Leaders and the Squadron Commander, ‘cause there’d be thirty aircraft, would be a Wing Commander, would that be right?
PJ: Yes. The quote that my father gives it was three Wing Commanders that were lost.
CB: Oh was it? Oh, I see. In sequence.
PJ: In sequence, yes.
CB: Any indication of whether the Station Commander flew with them occasionally, because Group Captains did sometimes.
PJ: Um, in his logbook there is one: Lockhart. He was, he flew, my father was Lockhart’s flight engineer for one op, other than that it was Fred Philips, DFC and Bar, who was my father’s pilot.
CB: I mentioned earlier the topic of LMF – the lacking moral fibre - did he, in his notes in any way refer to that, either by experience or hearsay?
PJ: He did. And he speaks, and he speaks with warmth about those that just had reached the end of their tether and couldn’t do it any more, and he says he felt sorry for them, but they were still airmen; they weren’t to be ridiculed.
CB: Any indication of their fate, fates?
PJ: Nope. No.
CB: Just stop a mo. I think, in restarting, it’s worth just exploring a couple of things and putting it into context. A lot of these things are written up and in this case there’s a lot from Thomas’ recollections, but the key is the being able to listen to the narrative that you’re delivering. And there are two topics: one’s LMF and the other is the Guinea Pigs. So on LMF, what’s he say there in his report? Notes.
PJ: In his notes he writes a paragraph about LMF in it and he writes: ‘some unfortunates, through no fault of their own, reach the point where they can no longer carry on. Irrespective of how many ops they’d completed, they were deemed lacking in moral fibre. I never knew or heard of any member of aircrew that had anything but sympathy for them.’ And I think, I would like to hope that was a general feeling amongst the airmen, they had reached a point where they couldn’t go on.
CB: Yeah. For whatever reason.
PJ: For whatever reason, yeah.
CB: What do you know about their fate, after they were removed?
PJ: He doesn’t mention a fate at all, he doesn’t mention it.
CB: Okay. And then the people who were badly injured, burned or amputees, what’s he got on that?
PJ: He says, ‘I remember some of the lads who had a tough time: the empty sleeves and trouser legs of the amputees, there were lads with no faces, noses and ears no more than shrivelled buttons, and heavy, newly grafted eyelids, their mouths were little more than slits in a face rebuilt with shining tightly stretched skin grafts, some had hands shrivelled and clawed like eagles talons. They sought no sympathy or favours, but carried on doing a job they could manage. When they went drinking with us, their laughter was as hearty as ever, their spirits unbroken,’ I’m sorry.
CB: It’s all right, we’ll stop. They carried on doing the job they were trained to do.
PJ: Yeah. And he goes on to say when they went drinking with us, their laughter was as hearty as ever, their spirits unbroken and no sign of bitterness. I do find it very difficult to read some of my father’s notes. Even though it’s now, what, thirteen years since he died.
CB: But it’s intensely personal for you.
PJ: Very.
CB: Which it was for all these individuals.
PJ: The notes that he wrote, he wrote in the first person, so it is as though he’s actually speaking to me from the page. Which he is.
CB: Of course, yes.
PJ: That was his idea.
CB: Well the Guinea Pigs, we’re talking about partly there, of course, we’ve interviewed as a group of people, I’m sure we’ve interviewed a number of those, and seen the effects of them and even these years later, some of them brilliantly mended shall we say, but always obvious that they’ve been injured in one way or the other, and McIndoe did an amazing job.
PJ: Fabulous man. And his team.
CB: And of course, there is now, indeed, not just him. There is actually a museum, isn’t there, down in East Grinstead now.
PJ: Yes, I really must go.
CB: In the County Museum, in the Town Museum, and there’s a memorial as well of course. There aren’t many left, but there were six hundred and fifty, in total.
PJ: Yes, it’s sad that we are losing so many of our ladies and gents now.
CB: Shall we now go specifically on to your father’s situation. Here, if we start with earliest information about him. So, he was born in 1921.
PJ: He was.
CB: In Birmingham, is that right?
PJ: Yeah. He was born on the 19th of April, 1921, at 35 Wrentham Street in Birmingham 1, right in the very city centre of Birmingham. The house that he was born in was a back-to-back property on three floors, and a cellar. I think now we would class these properties as slums; they were dreadful places. On the ground floor was a living room and a small scullery, the bedroom above was where his parents slept and then the bedroom above that was where the children were. My dad was one of three. They were, Edna was his, his older sister, and she had a bed of her own, whereas Dad and Ron, his brother, shared a bed. He would talk to me about these sort of things, and he always said that it was cold, bitterly cold, in winter, and they would snuggle up together and there were times when they actually had to sleep under coats. Another thing he would talk about was the fact that it was shared facilities for houses and I think it was six families shared two toilets, which would have made mornings rather interesting, I think.
CB: Out in the garden this is.
PJ: Out in the yard. Yes.
CB: In the yard.
PJ: My father’s parents were William Jones, and Amy Jones, neé Roberts. His father had served with, in the trenches in the First World War, but after the war he became a metal presser. His mother, obviously my grandmother, was a housewife. The family before my dad was of school age, thankfully moved south to Hall Green, which is quite a nice, leafy suburb, and certainly things got better for them down there and he went to, I think it was Pitmaston Road School, and he actually says in his notes that he rather liked school and, but I don’t know what age he was when he left school. I know certainly that he, when he left school he started an apprenticeship with the BSA, in Small Heath, in Birmingham.
CB: Well school leaving age in those days was fourteen wasn’t it, so apprenticeships tended to pick up from there.
PJ: Yeah. When war broke out he was too young to enlist, really. He joined the Home Guard, but I don’t know a lot about that, and I think he was determined to serve, because he was just fed up with sitting at night in the air raid shelter and watching his city burn. He describes in his notes how Edna would sob in, at the very back end of the shelter, frightened as, frightened stiff, as the bombs whistled down. But he was always the boy in the doorway, watching what was going on. Eventually he applied for service, and he applied for service in the Royal Air Force. Why he chose the Royal Air Force I don’t know. Was it the nice uniform? Was it the chance of flying? Why didn’t he choose the army? I think possibly why he didn’t fancy the army was because his father and his grandfather had both served in the army. His dad had served in the trenches and Walter, his, my father’s grandfather, had been out in the Boer War so maybe he’d heard grisly stories about life in the army, on the front line. One memory that I have of my dad when I was growing up, was that he wasn’t a good sailor. In the 1950s and 60s we would go on holiday to the East Yorkshire coast, or the East Riding coast as it was then, and we’d go to Bridlington, and during the holiday it would always, there would always be a cruise on the Yorkshire Bell or whatever the other ones were called, in Flamborough Bay, and I remember my father was always very quiet and rather green around the gills, [chuckle] so I think that was probably the reason he didn’t volunteer for naval duties. Um, I think, I need to go through his log book, but I’m pretty sure he went to Cardington first, in September ‘42 for aircrew selection. And interestingly, when I got hold of his service record, he was turned down - for aircrew - and I think he must have been pretty, pretty brassed off about that. What changed their mind, I really don’t know, because he ended up as aircrew and successfully carried out sixty four ops with main force and Pathfinder Force, so something must have impressed them. I think I have a very vague memory of my dad talking about the flight engineer’s position on Stirlings, which is the aircraft that he started on, as being very poky. My dad was five foot one, so maybe they changed their mind because they wanted small flight engineers! I’d rather think that they saw his potential rather than his size [laughter]. But I guess, like all of the trades, they needed engineers and here was an enthusiastic young feller who wanted to fly. Anyway, from Cardington he was posted to Padgate for his induction and that’s where he was issued with his service number, and like all servicemen it was a number he would never, ever forget. From Padgate he went to the Initial Training Wing, 42 ITW, at Redcar up on Teesside, and there he was billeted with Mrs Thatcher on Richmond Road, Redcar for six weeks and he talks about the capers he got up to with Ken Battersby and Chaz Curle, but most of all he remembers how icy cold it was doing drill on the sea front with the howling north, north wind and the spray from the North Sea. Must be pretty unpleasant. But anyway, he got through that. In December ’42 he then went to RAF Cosford, and there he, a quote from RAF Cosford, he actually said, ‘everything involved muck and mud down there.’ He says that in the first week of every entry it was spent on fatigues, peeling four foot high piles of vegetables and after every meal the floors and tables of the huge dining hall had to be cleared and polished. There was also guard duty but they didn’t mind it because everybody else had to do it. I suppose they’d all gripe but it had to be done, it’s just how it was. From there he went to start his engineering course at St Athan, by this time he was what, twenty two. I’ve got a lovely photograph of him at the age of twenty two, taken at St Athan, where he looks like a very, very young sergeant. He was a natural engineer. It never left him, he was a perfectionist in everything he did in later life. He drove my mother batty because he was plan, plan and then do, whereas my mother wanted plan – do, or just do. [Laughter] But he was a great planner. He was a perfectionist in everything he did. I think that comes from his RAF training and it was instilled in him how important it was. A lot of the people that he’d been at Redcar with were also at St Athan and he writes, most of the lads that had been on the ITW were at St Athan. He records in his memoir lots of names, Tommy Meehan, MacMeehan, John Mullins, Jimmy Cruickshank, Albert Stocker, Arnold Hurn, Jack Walker and John Gartland. And that they would be killed. Taffy Lightfoot and Roy Eames would go down over Bremen and that Billy Currie was shot down whilst still training. It was pretty terrible, and it was a relatively small group to start with, at the ITW, that so many would be killed, and so quickly. From there he went to 1657 Heavy Conversion Unit at Stradishall, and it was here that he experienced his first flight in a Stirling. He’d never been higher than a first floor window in his life and he really didn’t know how he was going to cope with it. And his description, I think, of his first flight is fabulous. It’s just something that you don’t think about unless you’ve done it yourself, in an aircraft of that generation, which sadly I haven’t but would love to. And he describes taxying to the runway and, ‘hesitating for a few seconds before beginning the mad dash to the other end and how the aircraft’s thirty tons lifted off the runway and it promptly began to sway from side to side and up and down. Looking back down the fuse, the wings actually flapped, the huge engine appeared to be nodding in unison, looking back down the fuselage the whole structure was twisting back and forth,’ and he says that the height didn’t bother him but after ten minutes the motion caused him to be sick and here he says it took three hundred flying hours before the airsickness settled down. Quite remarkable. I can’t imagine flying in an aircraft that’s doing that, but. It was at Stradishall that he was crewed up, and it was the same process that they all went through: all met up bumbling around in a hangar and sort of someone would come up and say fancy being my flight engineer or I need a rear gunner, and it’s a kind of odd way of doing things; but it worked! You know. I think it’s quite remarkable that a skipper could have, I don’t know, almost a special sense of who he’s choosing and certainly with Fred Philips’ crew, they gelled straight away. I mean the crew was Fred Philips who would become, was awarded DFC before he was twenty one and was awarded Bar before he was twenty two. He was an insurance clerk from Punchbowl, Sydney. Dave Goodwin was a New Zealander, he was the navigator, another Kiwi was Clive Thurstan who was initially bomb aimer, and he had an interesting nickname: he was known as Thirsty Thurston - I wonder why! The wireless operator was an Australian, called Stan Williamson. Ron Wynn who was RAFVR was the mid upper gunner, he was from Stockport. Joe Naylor, again RAFVR was the rear gunner, and interesting he was known by everyone, sorry, it was John Naylor, and he was known by everyone as Joe, or maybe I’ve got that the wrong way round and they did their first flight together on the 29th of September 1943. I can’t imagine what it was, what it would feel like, I really can’t. But having read the memoir, they became instantly, a crew, and gelled as a crew, immediately. And it was after thirty four flying hours at Stradishall that they were declared fit for operations and as I said earlier, that was when it suddenly became very real. On the 2nd of September ’43 they joined 622 Squadron at Mildenhall. They were flying Stirlings. The squadron converted to Lancasters in November ‘43. That’s where his log book starts to get very interesting. Whereas he’d logged his operations in quite detail with additional information added after the op, I think later on. He’s quite detailed, he notes targets and also notes the, sometimes notes, tonnage of bombs and the aircraft that took place and the losses. Having looked through a lot of log books they are all very different. They’re all of the same format, but every airman had his own way of putting things in. I love the fact that you rarely, rarely see a scrappy log book: the writing is almost identical in them all. Whether it was something that was taught at school, or whether it was something that was taught during their training, that they all seemed to have the same handwriting. They’re beautifully readable and they are fascinating books to look through. His first op was a gardening op, a minelaying op, on Skaggerat and he mentions that they had an extra man, for gardening ops, they had a naval, a member of the Royal Navy that would arm the mines before they were dropped and then it just goes on with I think, next we’ve got two ops to Hanover, the first of which they had to turn back due to engine failure, and then it was gardening again, but this time at Kattegat. And just, it’s not intense, the flying, really, right, having said that, I’ve just turned the page, [paper shuffling] and I’ve gone the wrong way round. Er, yup. He’s going to Ludwigshafen, Berlin, Berlin, Stuttgart, Schweinfurt, Stuttgart again. His last op with 622 was on the 1st of March, the Stuttgart. And it was there that they, went, after that they went to Warboys and this is where they each learned a little bit of each other’s role so that should anything happen someone else would be able to carry out your role and not let the crew down and hopefully get home.
CB: Now Warboys was the night flying unit, so what were they there to do?
PJ: A lot of it was circuits and landings, obviously like the initial training but they were learning night navigation I believe as well, using a bubble sextant and things like that and that was the second sort of hat that my father wore. That he, he learned to do the, now what is it called, the navigating via the stars?
CB: The star shots.
PJ: Star shots, thank you. Yes. It was after that, that on the 4th of April 1944 they transferred to 7 Squadron, Pathfinder Force, at RAF Oakington in Cambridgeshire. Their ops started on the 9th of April with an attack on the railway yards in Lisle. This was ’44, so a lot of the ops here are French. This was running up to D-Day, and interspersed with German ops as well, but there’s an awful lot of operational flying on Normandy. [Paper shuffling]. Get these the right way round. On the 1st of July they start doing day ops, or daylight operations again it’s all French and they’re hitting communications, flying bomb sites, railway yards, oil plants and then he goes night flying again, over Germany, and then it’s back to France. Interestingly some of these ops they were flying two ops a day. On the 18th of July ’44 they did a French op, a flying bomb site, flying three hours fifteen minutes in the morning, then at night they were up again for three hours thirty five minutes attacking an oil plant in France. A lot of these French ops now in July, Fred Philips had been promoted to Master Bomber with 7 Squadron, so I guess it would have been even more intense with the crew than it had been in the past because I guess they weren’t dropping bombs and markers then scarpering: they had to hang around. Must have been pretty stressful. Going on to again, July. On the 30th of July, my dad’s log book shows that they were bombing the Normandy battle area. That’s followed by more flying bomb sites. On the 6th of August they were observing the artillery firing, 7th of August it was the Normandy battle area again, and it was the enemy strong points were being bombed, back to oil depots and then fuel dumps. The 12th of August 1944 there were two ops: in the day it was a fuel dump, four hours five minutes, and then in the evening they were stemming the enemy retreat. Then it’s back to flying bomb sites on a daytime raid. 29th of August 1944 was the longest flight that they ever did, and that was to Stettin in Poland, a total of nine hours and ten minutes, and my dad refers to this op in his notes by saying that it was the coldest he had ever been on an op and he felt so sorry for the rear gunner, because my father was in a heated cockpit and of course there was little heating for the rear gunner and of course many of them had a clear vision panel although they punched the panel out to see, so he must have been incredibly [emphasis] cold on that raid.
CB: Just before you go on from there, in his notes, what does he say about the bombing of the V1 and V2 sites, because they were difficult a to find and b to actually hit?
PJ: He doesn’t actually mention them, he doesn’t say much about them. It’s all in his log book with just a little note, he doesn’t actually describe physically attacking the V1 and V2 sites, and most of his descriptions are of Berlin and the Ruhr, which were of course the bread and butter targets, and nasty targets as well.
CB: Yes, so how did he feel, in his notes, about Berlin?
PJ: Like them all, he hated it. It was the big city. It was the place that Hitler did not [emphasis] want hit, but.
CB: So what was the significance of them being an unpleasant place to go? Was it more flak, was it fighters or combination of both?
PJ: It was a combination of both. I mean Berlin had massive, massive flak towers didn’t they, and the flak was intense. Um, he describes the noise when the curtain went back, in the briefing, when they followed the red line and at the end of the red line was Berlin and he just describes it was a loud groan. Really, no one wanted to go to the big city.
CB: So as the Pathfinder, now on 7 Squadron, the most accomplished ones would drop the reds, the newer ones would drop the greens, if Fred Phillips became the Master Bomber did that mean they ended up dropping reds?
PJ: Er, I don’t know, he doesn’t describe that. He does remember graphically being extremely uncomfortable circling the target for so long, on an open radio, you know, and he was very aware that they were the sitting duck, the aircraft that had to be shot down.
CB: And what height would they be flying then? Does he give any indication of that?
PJ: He talks about eighteen thousand feet. Whether they dropped for the target, I don’t know. He does describe flying over enemy territory at ten thousand feet, when they were, they’d been severely shot up over the target and they experienced severe [emphasis] airframe icing and the only way that they could gain height was to make the, was to jettison anything and they ended up throwing out all of the ammunition and the guns and they flew back to the UK at ten thousand feet, over enemy territory. Eventually, there was no way they were going to get back to Cambridgeshire, so they diverted to the first airfield available which was West Malling in Kent, fighter station, and ran out of fuel and piled into the runway. They wrote the aircraft off completely. And he describes having to get back to Oakington, from Kent to Cambridgeshire, on the train, in flying gear. [Laughter] There was no taxi in those days. No, but that was just one of the dodgy moments he had.
CB: Did the aircraft become unserviceable or a write off because he landed without undercarriage, or what happened exactly?
PJ: He doesn’t go into great detail, but it was written off, completely written off. I don’t know at the time whether West Malling had a concrete runway or whether it was still grass, I don’t know. But I can’t imagine the CO of West Malling being impressed as a Lancaster drops in very heavily. But they got away with it. They were, at Oakington, Fred Philips’ crew were known as the lucky crew. They’d been flying on a lot of ops by then and they were probably seen as one of the more senior crews on station and they were invariably late back, and usually peppered with holes and my dad describes in his notes, once, the fact that they were so late back that he later discovered they’d been written off and marked up as missing and he describes how they eventually landed and they were debriefed and then they went into the dining hall for their post-operational bacon and eggs and he said there was one of the, there was a WAAF in there and soon as they walked there in she burst into tears.
CB: And the relationship with the WAAFs, was that regular or how did it pan out?
PJ: I think it was, yeah, again, they had great respect for the WAAFs and many a young amorous airman could be put down by just one stare from them [chuckle].
CB: Does he make any comment, it’s an interesting point though I think, about the experience of the WAAFS who had relationships with the aircrew and constantly losing that person?
PJ: He doesn’t mention it, but I’m aware that it must have been very difficult. And I mean some of the poor girls got the reputation as being the chop girl because they’d lost so many boyfriends, or well, airmen who they’d had relationships with, and they got this dreadful reputation and that must have been really hard to live with.
CB: Absolutely.
PJ: And yet there are so many lovely stories about the relationship between the aircrew and the WAAFs. Stevie Stevens’ story is absolutely fantastic, in that, I can’t remember where he was flying from, he, he really enjoyed, loved the sound of the WAAF controller’s voice and then she suddenly just disappeared off the radio and she was never heard of again at that station. I think it was Scampton that he moved to and lo and behold, there it was, the same voice as he was requesting permission to land and he was so intrigued by this WAAF’s voice that he actually went to the Control Tower to see who she was and of course the upshot of that was that they married!
CB: Never looked back.
PJ: Never looked back and are still happily married to this day. Yeah. Some lovely stories.
CB: I think one of the interesting ones that emerged from interviews is the occasions where the WAAFs lined up at the end of the runway to wave off. Does he refer to that in any way?
PJ: He does. Yeah, he does, he said there would be a row of them, or a row of people on the Control Tower balcony and there would be, and he said invariably there would be, I think he calls it a gaggle of WAAFs, that would wave their handkerchiefs to them, but another person that he talks about was a little girl and he talks about this, a family that lived next to the perimeter track in a farm cottage, and he describes how the squadron would taxi round the perimeter tracks from their various dispersals, describing, and he described the aircraft as being like a row of ducks and he said just this roar and spit and hiss of brakes and he said there was this little blonde girl would appear at the back, at the garden gate, every time there was an aircraft on the perimeter track and she would wave to them, every evening. And he said without fail each aircraft that passed this little girl, the crew would wave back and the gunners would dip their guns at this little girl and he said he would love to know who she was, and after my father died I was researching his notes and I found out who she was.
CB: Did you?
PJ: Her name was Clara Doggert, if my memory serves me right, but sadly she died, but it would have been so nice to have met this lady.
CB: Yes. On a lighter note, looking at the log book, [bump on microphone] I think it’s quite interesting to see the entry that says NFT – Night Flying Test - and the timing. What do you know about the choice of timing?
PJ: Um, I hadn’t spotted that one.
CB: So the idea is that you take off at twenty three hundred hours, and you do your night flying test which takes an hour and ten minutes and why is that?
PJ: I think it would be because they would get their breakfast?
CB: They would get their fry up! [Laughter]
PJ: Good for them!
CB: After midnight! And I think this is one of the intriguing things there. I mean on ops obviously they were coming back because they were flying at night, but to do the night flying test.
PJ: They had a cunning plan!
CB: Yeah! Some of them had to be in the day so that didn’t work. Same title, but different time.
PJ: Yes. I think they’d become a pretty savvy crew by then, knew how things worked.
CB: So how many ops had they done when the crew left 7 Squadron?
PJ: Sixty four.
CB: Oh, right.
PJ: They had, by then they had an extra crew member because Fred was Master Bomber so they had a specialist map reader, of course H2S had come along by then so they were an eight man crew. The eighth man was a guy called Steve Harper who hadn’t done as many ops as the rest of them, so when the crew split up he wasn’t tour expired, and Steve kept on flying with 7 Squadron for a bit longer and he was very, very seriously injured by flak on an op. He survived, but he was seriously injured. Their favourite aircraft was PA964 and in less than a month after them, the crew splitting up, the aircraft was shot down and the entire crew were held then, as POWs. So the name ‘Lucky Crew’ was pretty apt. They got away with it. They never saw each other again.
CB: Didn’t they?
PJ: A couple of the Australians and the New Zealanders did, but the RAFVR chaps didn’t. And in my dad’s notes he does actually mention that and he asks the question, would I want to meet them again, and he actually makes the point of saying no. And the reason he wouldn’t want to meet them again, because he wants to remember them as being young men. He doesn’t want to see a load of old men, he wants to remember them as, how they were.
CB: I think that’s a really telling sentiment, as to why some people don’t want to open up about what they’ve done: it’s a memory that’s hurtful, in some ways, it’s pleasurable in others. But there’s a mixture of emotions, isn’t there.
PJ: But there is, and again in his notes, he hints [emphasis] at the, the difficulty he had with the number of civilians and children that were killed. I think he took comfort from being, with his role as a Pathfinder, that he was marking targets as accurately as possible to cut down on the losses, but he was, I think one of the reasons he couldn’t talk about it, were the civilian losses.
CB: Any reflection on the British civilian losses being on the opposite, receiving end?
PJ: No. The only thing he mentions in his notes is the, when he was a teenager in the air raid shelter and he also mentions walking from Hall Green to Small Heath one morning after an op the night before, after a raid the night before on Birmingham, and he actually mentions being fascinated by the effect of the bombing: that one house was a shell and yet the house next door was perfectly okay. One had no windows, the other one was intact, with an alarm clock still ticking in the window, and he describes a double decker bus, sitting on its nose, in the middle of the road. And he just describes this as being absolutely fascinating in an horrific way, and he couldn’t, just couldn’t work out why it wasn’t all flat and yet why would one building remain intact, as though it’d not been touched at all and yet the one next door was completely devastated.
CB: Just on that tack, what do we know about the composition of the German bomb load, in dropping bombs on Britain.
PJ: Well they were using twin-engined aircraft and certainly the bomb load that was dropped on this country was far less than was delivered to Germany.
CB: I was thinking of the composition of the load itself. So they’ve got high explosive and they’ve got incendiary. Because the RAF learned from that.
PJ: Yes, um, it was the incendiary that would cause the, the devastating fires, then you had also, certainly from an RAF perspective, specialist bombs for, that were used on specific targets. Like the Grand Slams, et cetera.
CB: Had father got to the stage of dropping those as well?
PJ: No. No, by the end, by the time he was on Pathfinders he was mostly dropping markers with a basic payload as well.
CB: ‘Cause his job was to make a mark, marking.
PJ: Yes. Primary job was to mark, mark turning points and targets for main force.
CB: So at the end of the tour, tours, two tours, effectively.
PJ: Two tours.
CB: What did he do then?
PJ: When he left, when he left Oakington, I think, I’m sure he went to Northern Ireland to, er, looking at.
CB: To Nutts Corner.
PJ: To Nutts Corner, 1332 Heavy Conversion Unit, and he was there from the 28th of December ’44 to April ’45. One of the things that he talks about is the warmth of the people of Northern Ireland. And he describes that when he arrived in Belfast he was kind of adopted by a family and given a late Christmas lunch by this family because he was a young lad; you know, sort of, he wasn’t that young by then, but he was so far from home, from his, from Birmingham. 1332 Heavy Conversion Unit moved to Riccall in the East Riding of Yorkshire. It was an airfield to the south of York and just sort of north of Selby, and as a teenager I used to cycle out there and it was all still there, which was wonderful, knowing that my dad had served there, but that’s, I digress, and it was whilst he was serving at Riccall – he was the adjutant of the Engineering School there - he went to a dance in Selby, which was a little market town, and the dance was at Christy’s Ballroom, above a shirt factory, of all things, which I think was how they were in the day, and he met the girl who would become my mother. And she was a farm worker’s daughter, who was at the time working in service, as a maid for a quite a wealthy timber family that ran a wealthy timber business and actually where she was living at the time, working, was on the perimeter track of RAF Burn and later my mother would tell me how, as a young working maid, she would also go to the bottom of the garden, in the evenings. But anyway, my dad would cycle to Burn or to Hamilton, where my mother’s home was, and that’s four miles south of Selby, on his service bicycle. That wasn’t too bad, but then 1332 HCU moved to Dishforth and his weekly trips then were a hundred and twelve miles, on a service bicycle, in all weathers. I guess he was in love! [Laugh] Mad fool!
CB: Amazing what motivation there can be in that! What were they flying, 1332, that was a Heavy Conversion Unit, but.
PJ: Initially, they were on, at the time they had a mixture, I think, of Lancasters B24s, certainly the last aircraft my father flew in was B24.
CB: But what was their role? It wasn’t bombing.
PJ: I think, I think they’d gone over to transport by then, or certainly they were heading that way. But when his time was up at Riccall he went to Bramcoats, and there he was the Station Armaments Officer, and this is where his RAF career is kind of taking a spiral because he’s not flying, he hates it. He really [emphasis] wanted to stay in the RAF and pursue a flying career but my mother wasn’t having any of it, so that was the end of his dream of serving round the world and spending his days flying. From Bramcoats he ended up going to Uxbridge and after a medical and signing lots of papers he was given a cardboard box with a suit and hat in it. And he was demobbed.
CB: When was that?
PJ: Oh, I think ’46, I think. I’d need to look at the log book. But my parents married in February ‘46.
CB: And he was still in the RAF then.
PJ: Yes. His wedding photograph is in uniform.
CB: How did he feel about moving from operations, which were very intense and specific, in terms of being a Pathfinder Force, to an OC, to an HCU? What did he feel about that in his notes?
PJ: Um, I wouldn’t say he was bored. But -
CB: Frustrated?
PJ: Yes, frustrated probably. He did have the odd bit of excitement. I mean he talks about [bumps on microphone] one particular incident at Nutts Corner where he was a flight engineer for a young Canadian pilot. He said that this young Canadian was a flying boat pilot and he said lovely chap, really eager, and loved it, he said they were on final approach to Nutts Corner and my father kept looking at this pilot and the pilot kept nodding excitedly much as ‘I’m doing all right aren’t I’, and my father looked at him again and then looked down at the switch gear and looked at him again, and my father just gently leaned over and pushed the full throttles wide open to force an overshoot because he’d forgotten to put the undercarriage down! So the eager Canadian airman was having too much of a good time. Apparently his expression was one of hang dog!
CB: This was on a Stirling?
PJ: Yes, er no, it was a Lancaster actually. Because of course he wouldn’t have been on flight deck for a, with a Stirling. Yes, I can imagine the poor Canadian’s face. He thought he was doing really, really well.
CB: Amazing!
PJ: But I think he was disillusioned, my father was disillusioned: he didn’t want to be on the ground, he wanted to be in the air.
CB: So when he left the RAF, what did he do?
PJ: I really don’t know. As I say, my parents married in February ‘46 and initially they moved to Birmingham and also to Bath because my grandparents, my maternal grandparents lived in Bath for a very short time and then moved back to Birmingham, and then my parents ended up settling down in Selby and my father started working for John Roster and Son which was a paper mill. They were a Manchester based paper company and they had a satellite factory in Selby, and he worked there for years [emphasis]. I came along in 1954 and as I was growing up I remember that my dad was hardly ever at home. He, for years and years and years he worked six and a half days a week and he would always cycle to work and he cycled to work in all weathers, and I can still see him in winter with his RAF greatcoat with plastic buttons on it, he’d taken the brass buttons off, and he used his old gas mask, service gas mask bag, for his backup and there’s a really endearing image I have of him, cycling off in his greatcoat. Um, having said that he was never there, when he was there, he was a great dad. He always had time to read stories to me, and we would read things like the usual 1960s classics that every little boy read: Moby Dick and Treasure Island et cetera, and I have lovely memories of him reading those. Again, going back to his practicality, he used to build me all sorts. He made stations and tunnels. He made the tunnels out of paper pulp, from the paper factory, from the paper mill. So I always had a really good train set.
CB: A type of papier maché.
PJ: An early type of papier maché. Yes. It was very smelly as well!
CB: He worked as an engineer, presumably, at the paper mill.
PJ: He did, he did. Yeah, and he was there until I was in my teens and of course I changed from junior school. He was brilliantly supportive with my homework and he would spend hours helping me with homework and I remember one for some reason I was struggling with the coffee trade in Kenya and I now can’t forget it and he just sat down and we just went over it. He was an incredibly skilled artist - self taught - and sadly I never inherited those genes, although my daughter has. He produced some fabulous sketches.
CB: Amazing!
PJ: And watercolour paintings. [Paper shuffling]
CB: [Indecipherable] in 1979. Amazing, yes.
PJ: He started from nothing with his art, you know. He just used to doodle and then he just got better and better and better. An example I’ve got here today is the, this, his lionesses head and it’s incredibly [emphasis] detailed isn’t it, you can almost see every hair.
CB: Yes. As an engineer did he go into design engineering as well do you think?
PJ: I don’t think so, I don’t think so. I think he was possibly a bit of an innovator, when problems arose, which of course he would have had to have been back in the war, he would have had to have been very self reliant and that carried on with him. He became a model maker as well, and he produced a model that I still have at home that sits in my sitting room and it’s a twin engined compound engine. Stationary steam engine.
CB: Oh really!
PJ: And it works. It probably, well it worked. It probably doesn’t any more because I haven’t kept it serviced. But it has pride of place.
CB: Brilliant.
PJ: Yeah, it’s a lovely thing.
CB: So, you were a teenager when he left the paper mill. What did he do then?
PJ: He got a job as a maintenance fitter at Danepak Bacon, in Selby, and it was then that he actually started to only work five days a week, which you know, I suppose was luxury, really, but sadly he didn’t work there for a very long time because he was, the company got into difficulties and he was eventually made redundant. I think that [emphasis] had a big effect on him [pause] and after his redundancy he never had a job again, and he was made redundant before [emphasis] retirement age.
CB: So what messages did you get from his [emphasis] experiences and advice as to what career you would follow?
PJ: He wanted me to go in the RAF, and follow his footsteps, but I didn’t. [Laugh] My mother didn’t want me to. So I headed off in a different direction altogether.
CB: What did you do?
PJ: I went into acute healthcare. Well after a while, I went into acute healthcare. I had numerous, numerous sort of jobs first. Nothing too serious.
CB: Did you have some kind of vision of what your career was to be?
PJ: Initially no, not at all and then I met up with a few people who were working in healthcare and I thought yeah, that sounds interesting.
CB: So what did that involve?
PJ: It involved a thirty four year career working with anaesthetics and airway management.
CB: Tell us more.
PJ: I trained as an operating department practitioner and specialised in anaesthetic support and ended up working mostly with emergency patients. I specialised in emergency work in the end.
CB: Doing what exactly?
PJ: It was airway management. I used to work in, I was based in operating theatres but I worked in Intensive Care Units and then the resus rooms in A and E departments. It was the A and E work that I really did love. I worked all over the country. I started in Kettering and from Kettering I went to, um, where did I go from Kettering? To East Surrey Hospital in Redhill, then I went up to London and worked at Moorfields Eye Hospital, the Western Ophthalmic Hospital, Great Ormond Street. Then I worked in the St Mary’s Group, which was St Mary’s in Paddington, Mary’s West 2, St Giles West 10, Samaritan Hospital for Women, and then I got a little bit disillusioned with living in London, or maybe it was my then girlfriend who got disillusioned and wanted to move. So I got a job in Lincoln and a month later my then girlfriend who would be my wife and now my ex-wife [laugh] followed and I moved up here to Lincoln in 1987 and I’ve been here ever since. I took early retirement in June, July 2012 because I was just so disillusioned with how the NHS management worked, messing things up, and I really didn’t want to be part of it any more. I had two years where I didn’t do anything, really, and I saw a post, I think it was on the internet or something like that, about the International Bomber Command Centre and I read this post and thought that sounds really interesting. And lo and behold it was based in Lincolnshire, and so they were looking out for volunteers. So I thought well, I spent two years sitting on my bottom doing next to nothing, or once a week walking up the pub and I could be doing something a little bit more worthwhile and something that would reflect what my late father had been doing and I started on the project as a data checker. I was working with the, with Dave Gilbert who was doing a fabulous job recording at the losses and it was one of my jobs to check the accuracy of the information against the data and make sure that what was going to be put on the IBCC records was accurate. And it was fascinating but shocking, as well, going through the losses and looking at the ages of those that had been lost and also looking at the fact that an awful lot of those aircrew that had been lost were lost in training before they’d even got on the squadrons, and I was really shocked because I was, at the time, I’d been given a whole load of Canadian names, I’d been given about a hundred and fifty Canadian names, and the losses in training were higher that the loss, operational losses, for this particular group of airmen, and I thought, and I’m thinking where are these poor sods remembered. They’re not. Not really. There’s the odd little memorial in a hedge bottom, somewhere, which I think are wonderful, but there were so many lost in training that aren’t recorded. They’re not in Chorley. Mind you, Chorley was the record of the aircraft not the crew, wasn’t it.
CB: Absolutely.
PJ: And this is one of the reasons why I got so hooked on the project, and I think it was in January 2015 I had a phone call from the Bourne office asking me if I’d like to come on board as a paid member of staff, to work on the archive, and I bit their hand off. We were based initially at Witham House on the University of Lincoln’s campus. We were in a portacabin which I think my colleague describes as the nearest thing the university had to a Nissen hut, at the time.
CB: We remember.
PJ: You remember it well, [laugh] with the flexi floor, but in August 2015 we moved off the main university campus out to University of Lincoln’s Riseholme Campus, which is where we are today, and we work in the most beautiful country house and I think it just lends itself so, so nicely to the project. It looks, I [emphasis] think it looks like a Group Headquarters and when I first saw it I thought, yeah, I want to work there. But there are two things missing on that house: it doesn’t have a flagpole and it doesn’t have an RAF Ensign fluttering from the top of it. But um, beautiful house. Beautiful grounds and I am very fortunate that I’m now working with a fabulous group of people. Working with some amazing [emphasis] facts, figures, and dealing with amazing stories and artefacts and literally every day is like Christmas Day, when I open the post I have no idea what’s going to come through the door. But it’s also every day is an emotional rollercoaster, you go from the Christmas Day of opening a parcel and seeing these amazing artefacts and these wonderful memories that are sent in, or I’m listening to other recordings of fabulous stories, or heartbreaking stories that come through and it’s those stories and reading the letters, that a young airman wrote, hoping that no one would ever have to read it and of course I’m reading it because his parents did. And I remember reading one of those, it was from a young Canadian airman from Vancouver who had just started operational flying and he’d written the [emphasis] most beautiful letter. I found it remarkable that a nineteen year old could write such a mature letter. I was, I read this letter late on a Friday afternoon and I couldn’t get rid of it, and it haunted me all weekend. I mean, those letters were wonderful. But also we deal with the other side of it, in that I got into the archive about two hundred letters from a young airman who, before he joined up, had worked at Park Royal, in a printing works, and the letters that he was writing weren’t to his family, they were to his workmates, and so they weren’t sanitised and they were laugh out loud funny. My colleagues here will tell you that I was laughing, out loud, at some of these letters, and this particular airman was the Eric Morecombe of his day and I got inside his head and I got to know this man and reading these letters and he’s describing one where there’d been an influx of two hundred WAAFs on station and he actually says ‘the chaps are getting choosy’, with the WAAFs [chuckles] and you know, these were lovely letters and then I got to the last letter in this pile and I rang this chap up and the donor, the owner of this collection was from Bridgewater in Somerset, and I rang him up and said ‘I’ve just read the last of Peter’s letters’ [banging] and I said ‘what happened to him? Have you got any more letters?’ [Steps] And he just says, ‘well you’ve read his last letter.’ He didn’t come back. And that really hurt, because having read all his letters I thought you know, I’d got to know this man, he was a very funny man, and he must have been fabulous to serve with. But the project’s going really well. I’m in receipt of some amazing [emphasis] stuff and I do it in my dad’s honour.
[Other]: Yes.
PJ: Well, I hope he’s smiling down on me.
[Other]: I’m sure he is. You’ve given us a fantastic insight into your father’s experiences. Absolutely.
PJ: He was a remarkable man. He was a lovely man.
[Other]: Yes.
PJ: As I say, it’s been thirteen years since he died and, [pause] I still miss him.
[Other]: Course you do. I’m going to the loo. [Whisper] [Laughter] I’ll turn this off.
CB: It’s running. So Peter, thank you for what you’ve done so far. I think, in summing up we could cover a few other things, but what was your parents’ reactions to your career choices after the experiences of their parents, and your father in particular, in the war?
PJ: As I said, my father, I think, rather fancied the idea of me joining the RAF, as I did, but my mother put me off that. I don’t think my father was disappointed at all, in fact he was quite proud of the career path I chose, but interestingly, another career path that my mother put me off: I gained a Deck Officer Scholarship with Shell and my mother put the kybosh on that as well. [Laughter] She was quite, quite, um, she tended to get her own way.,
CB: What worried her about going to sea?
PJ: It was being away from home I think. Actually she was probably right because of course the British Merchant Fleet has gone. So I’d probably be redundant.
CB: As a Captain! [Laugh]
PJ: I doubt it! [Laughter] More like Pugwash! But no, my dad was proud of where I ended up.
CB: Of course. Well I mean it’s a very good thing to do.
PJ: And I really think he would be very proud of what I’m doing now.
CB: I bet, yes.
PJ: It’s a great project. I think that we are trying to turn back history, because Bomber Command and particularly those that flew were demonised and we want to tell the story of the whole of the bombing war, not just from British perspective, but we were an umbrella over the whole of the war. We want to hear the experiences of people on all sides and we are getting remarkable stories: we’ve got fabulous inroads into Italy with amazing stories from there. And, you know, going back to Bomber Command, I can’t, I really can’t imagine what it was like in 1945 when everyone was huddled around the wireless, waiting for Churchill’s victory speech and everybody was mentioned. Except Bomber Command. And I think that must have been a terrible blow to everyone that served with Bomber Command; a body blow. So many had been killed and what recognition had the government given them? None. What is a life worth? What was a life worth to them? You know, I think it was a terrible thing to miss them out.
CB: Did your father ever mention this matter?
PJ: I think he did once. I can’t, I wasn’t that old, and I’m pretty sure it was a conversation he was having with someone else, but he was pretty hacked off about it, he’s, I think his opinion of Churchill had gone from being very high to being very low. He was hurt by it, very hurt. Because he’d lost so many, many friends.
CB: Yes, you mentioned them.
PJ: Well that was just a few I think.
CB: Yes, that was just from his early days.
PJ: Exactly, it wasn’t from the later days.
CB: What was do you think his overriding memory was, of his service during the war?
PJ: I can tell you – it’s in his memoir, if you -
CB: I’ll pause while you look it up. Right, we’re re-starting now.
PJ: I can quote from my father, I remember him saying that all in all he felt he’d had a good war, he’d had a relatively easy war, he’d come out unscathed and that in a way I think he felt guilty because he had survived and so many hadn’t, but he then, in his notes, he reflects and he reflects asking what made them do it? What made them go on ops, over and over and over again, and he says was it the patriotism, was it the pride of volunteering being greater than the butterflies in the stomach, was it the fear of letting down the crew, or of the lifelong stigma of lack of moral fibre? And he says perhaps it was one or all of them, who knows? And then he follows that with what I think a lovely sentence.: ‘And what do I have to show for it? My discharge papers and identity discs, my flying log book and a few medal ribbons – and a thousand memories.’
CB: I think that’s extremely touching, it, it in a way, glosses over an important point which is not unusual for him, people like him to miss, which is: he got a DFC and nobody crowed about that but why did he get a DFC, what was the origin of the award?
PJ: I’ve never found the citation. I think possibly, of course, he was on a crew that carried out a lot of ops. I’ve found Fred Philips’ citations for both of his DFCs, for his DFC and his Bar.
CB: Which were earlier.
PJ: Which were earlier. Of course by 1945 they were dishing out quite a lot by then, weren’t they.
CB: What was the date of your father’s DFC?
PJ: I can’t remember.
CB: But it, was it a similar time to his pilot, his second one?
PJ: No, it was later.
CB: Later, exactly.
PJ: Which makes me think possibly the number of ops, or -
CB: Nothing specific. Could have been the end of the tour, the second tour.
PJ: Yes. That’s what I think.
CB: Would be nice to be able to get the citation though.
PJ: It would. I would like to see that.
CB: Right, we’ll pause there for a mo. Now we’ve already talked about the DFC and also the crew gelling together, but what sort of conversations did they have, in these circumstances?
PJ: One of the conversations that my dad did tell me about, and that was a conversation he would have with the mid upper gunner, Ron Wynn, when they were coming back, leaving the target on every op as flight engineer it was my dad’s role to walk the length of the fuselage doing a damage control walk, to see how badly damaged, or if [emphasis] they were damaged. And my dad would always use a shielded torch and Ron Wynn would always say, ‘Oi, you’re lighting me up like a bloody lightbulb up here, turn that torch out!’ And my dad would always reply, ‘If there’s a hole in this bloody fuselage I’m not falling out of it for you!’ [Laughter] And it would be the same conversation, every op, but there must have been more, there must have been more. Even in the, even in the sort of, the terrible times of the operations the humour was still there. Like in the breakfast before the op there was always somebody who’d say if you don’t come back, can I have your breakfast, wasn’t there, you know. There was always that, that lovely, lovely dark humour.
CB: Yes, it’s a trait where you deal with the danger, at the threat, and the horror of it, with humour.
PJ: Yes, but since my father’s death, I’ve spent over eleven years researching his notes and of researching his crew, or the crew that he served with, and I was fortunate enough to have made contact with Fred Philips in, who was living, still living in Sydney, and interestingly, when his flying career with the Royal Australian Aircraft, Air Force came to an end he joined Qantas and he eventually became the Chief, the Senior Training Captain, with Qantas and he was the first Qantas pilot to fly a 747 to Heathrow. Now sadly Fred died in October last year. The other one I managed to get in touch with was the mid upper gunner, Ron Wynn, still living in Stockport. After the war he’d been an instructor at Cranwell and I managed to speak to him on the phone and it was quite an emotional encounter I think, for him, talking to the son of someone he hadn’t seen for so long, but after the initial emotion he was very chatty. And after the conversation I had an email from one of his sons, saying how much his dad had enjoyed talking to me and hearing what my father had gone on to do, but then he said that the conversation had brought back a lot of memories and he wouldn’t want to talk again. I do hope that wasn’t too upsetting for him. But you know, I’ve gone through the crew and I now know what all but two of them did, after the war.
CB: One of the reasons was it, the link between the mid upper and the flight engineer was both were acting as lookouts, during this, but what was father actually doing as a flight engineer in his role?
PJ: In his role?
CB: So, start with take off.
PJ: At take off he would take over throttles so that the pilot could use both hands on the stick, for take off. During flight he would be constantly making fuel calculations et cetera, trimming the engines, shifting fuel between tanks et cetera, just to keep the stability and also keeping records, and as I say doing calculations because they didn’t rely on instrumentation for fuel, it was the engineer’s calculations, and woe betide if he got them wrong. My father could, could fly, he, it was again, going back to the Warboys experience where they did a bit of each other but I think it would have been straight and level flying, it wouldn’t have been landing, take off and landing, that sort of thing. Looking back at his, reading his memoirs, I think he did have a good time. I once went to the 7 Squadron reunion in Longstanton and when my, when his tour was up and they were going their separate ways they took their ground crew out, to the pub, The Hoops, in Longstanton, where they wouldn’t let the ground crew spend a penny. In his notes, my dad said it was worth the twenty four hours of hangover. And I dearly wanted to go and have a pint in The Hoops but it’s been knocked down.
CB: Oh dear.
PJ: But I did walk the streets of Longstanton, in the rain. One of the things that he talks about as well, is once on an aborted op they were returning to Oakington in a really vicious side wind and they had a sudden gust of wind and bounced badly on touchdown and went round again, and as they were roaring off, off the runway, the wind had sent them across the village at very low height and he can vividly remember seeing people staring up and people running away and he can clearly remember a lady running out of a house and grabbing a little girl, or her child, and pulling her into the house, out of the way. My father describes how they, they very narrowly missed All Saints Church in Longstanton and that when they touched down, got out of the aircraft, the rear gunner came, wandered around, and said to Fred Phillips, ‘if you’d have told me you were going to pull that stunt I could have taken that weather vane off as a souvenir!’ [laughter] But thinking as I was driving into Longstanton, it’s a long straight road into the village, the hair almost stood up on the back of my neck when I saw that, the spire of the church and realised that’s it! That’s it.
CB: In conclusion, because this is fascinating and it’s covered so many aspects of your experiences, and your father’s experiences. But thinking of father’s experiences with the research that you’ve been doing, and what he had written, what’s your overriding feeling about the story?
PJ: My father’s story or the story of Bomber Command.
CB: Your father’s story.
PJ: My father’s story. [Sigh] The little lad from, [pause] from the slums of Birmingham did all right.
CB: Can I translate that into a feeling of great pride?
PJ: Indeed.
CB: Thank you, Peter Jones.
PJ: You’re welcome
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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AJonesPWA171207
Title
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Interview with Peter Jones
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:49:58 audio recording
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-12-07
Description
An account of the resource
Peter William Arthur Jones (b. 1954) speaks about his father Thomas John Jones DFC (b. 1921, 1640434 and 184141 Royal Air Force). Peter Jones discovered a memoir written by his father, Thomas Jones, a flight engineer, just after he passed away. Peter talks about his father’s life and service during and post-war, some of the details in the memoir and memories of their time as a family after the war. There is much discussion about operations and post-flight details, how emotions, injuries and fears are dealt with, including non-flying personnel as well as those who flew. Peter’s own life and work, particularly on the IBCC Digital Archive is also talked about, and the way the stories of others are so emotive.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-09-23
1944-04-04
1944-08-12
1944-08-29
1945
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
England--Birmingham
England--Cambridgeshire
Germany--Berlin
Northern Ireland--Antrim (County)
Wales--Glamorgan
England--Warwickshire
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
Civilian
Second generation
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Anne-Marie Watson
Carolyn Emery
1657 HCU
622 Squadron
7 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
flight engineer
ground crew
ground personnel
Heavy Conversion Unit
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
McIndoe, Archibald (1900-1960)
Pathfinders
RAF Mildenhall
RAF Nutts Corner
RAF Oakington
RAF St Athan
RAF Warboys
Stirling
training
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/337/3501/PTaylorEC1701.1.jpg
acbcb633c679d09f01c94a0f7e54d530
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/337/3501/ATaylorEC170928.2.mp3
9a15f4d3f4e54369b0747cf28be0b8eb
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
Taylor, Eric
Eric Charles Taylor
Eric C Taylor
E C Taylor
E Taylor
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Squadron Leader Eric Charles Taylor.
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
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Taylor, EC
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DK: So this is David Kavanagh for the International Bomber Command Centre, interviewing Squadron Leader Eric Taylor at his home on the –
BT: Where are we?
DK: 28th of September 2017. So if I just put that there, put that that there –
ET: Yeah.
DK: Put that there. I’ll keep looking down, I’m just making sure that it’s working.
ET: Yes.
DK: That looks okay. So if we leave that, yeah that looks okay. Well, what I wanted to ask you first was what, what were you doing immediately before the war?
ET: School.
DK: Right, so you went straight from school to –
ET: I left school in the June forty-three –
DK: Mhm.
ET: Sorry, [pause] –
DK: It would be 1943 wouldn’t it?
ET: Yeah it is forty-three.
DK: Yeah, yeah. So you went straight from school, straight from school to the RAF?
ET: Yes.
DK: So what made you want to join the RAF then?
ET: Because I, I joined the, the LDV I think they called it –
DK: The Home Guard.
ET: The Local Defence Force.
DK: Mhm [BT laughs].
ET: And they put me through hours of drill [laughs], and I didn’t like that very much. I thought I’ll probably better join the Air Force, and you used to get all these magazines of course, you know, with all the things about the –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Battle of Britain and that type of thing. That’s what encouraged me to, to join. I went to Edinburgh for a testation [?] which was delayed for six months, so I actually went in, in the February –
DK: Is that on? Yeah, okay.
ET: Forty-three.
DK: Right. So –
ET: That was wrong, I told you –
DK: You’re right, it says forty-two in here.
ET: Must have been forty-two [emphasis].
DK: Right.
ET: Twenty, 1923 and something.
DK: That’s 1940 isn’t it? Okay, don’t worry, don’t worry.
ET: 1940.
DK: Yeah.
BT: 1940, you’d be seventeen.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Must have been forty-one then.
BT: Forty-one was it, okay.
ET: Left school.
BT: Yeah.
DK: So forty-one.
ET: Yeah, because it was forty-two –
DK: That you joined the Air Force.
ET: That I joined the Air Force.
DK: Yeah, yeah, okay.
ET: That’s right.
DK: You left school in 1941 and then joined the Air Force –
ET: Yeah.
DK: In 1942. So what, what was your first posting in the Air Force then? Where, where, can you remember where you went to?
ET: Well the first , well I went to London, and the – ooh we attended several lectures, you know, mainly about venereal disease [all laugh] and all the rest of the things.
DK: Yeah.
ET: And the, from then on I went up to, I trained at Staverton, Gloucestershire, Number Six AUS [?].
DK: Right.
ET: And that took about a year.
DK: So at this point you were already training as a navigator?
ET: Yeah, oh initially I did a small six hours course. I went in as a PNB.
DK: Right.
ET: Pilot, navigator or –
DK: Bomber aimer.
ET: Bomber aimer. Didn’t quite make the pilot stakes [?] so I became a navigator.
DK: Right.
ET: And then I went to the CUS [?]. That was the first straight navigator course, because before that they had the air observers, they called them.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Yeah, so we didn’t do any bombing aiming at that time. Course I went through them very quickly [emphasis], it only took about a year.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Then from there I went to Stratford-on-Avon to the OTU.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Operational training unit.
DK: Yeah. Just going, winding back a bit. What, what was the training as a, as a navigator? Were you actually flying [emphasis] at the time then?
ET: Yes, yes.
DK: So what sort of aircraft were you –
ET: Anson
DK: Ansons, right.
ET: Anson mainly. And then we came onto the Wellington when we came onto the OTU.
DK: The operational training unit.
ET: Yeah.
DK: Yeah, so that was Number 16 Operational Training Unit?
ET: That’s right.
DK: Yeah, and that was at RAF Upper Heyford?
ET: No.
DK: Oop, sorry.
ET: It’s at, it was at, it, just past Stratford-on-Avon.
DK: Stratford-on-Avon, right, okay.
ET: Yeah.
DK: So that’s 16 OTU at Stratford-on-Avon. And, and what aircraft were you training on there?
ET: Wellingtons.
DK: And is that where you met your, your crew then?
ET: Yeah. Well we all met [emphasis] –
DK: Mm.
ET: And just somebody would say, ‘would you like to fly with me?’ It was very, it wasn’t a rigid [?] thing at all, you know.
DK: No. So how did that work then? Were you all pushed into a hangar and you all had to work –
ET: Well we’re in a big hall, yeah, and the pilots were there and [laughs] –
DK: Right. How did you think that worked, ‘cause it’s quite unusual for the military. Normally you’re ordered to go somewhere.
ET: Well that’s right.
DK: This was quite an unusual way of where you –
ET: Yes.
DK: Picked your crew.
ET: Anyway, that’s how they did it and it seemed to work out there pretty well.
DK: And you found your, your pilot there then did you?
ET: Yes.
DK: And can you remember your pilot’s name?
ET: Yes, Cyril Pearce.
DK: Right.
ET: I think he’s no longer with us –
DK: Yeah.
ET: I don’t think any of the crew are with us now, you know.
DK: So you would have met your pilot?
ET: Yes.
DK: And –
ET: I met them all, the bomb aimer –
DK: Bomb aimer.
ET: And the wireless operator.
DK: Yeah.
ET: And the gunner.
DK: Mhm. And, and did you all get on well together when you –
ET: Yes, we seemed to, yeah.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Yeah. And I – the navigator didn’t do a lot of the pilot training on the aircraft, you know, the local flying circuits and mops and that.
DK: Yeah.
ET: But on the cross countries of course, we, we all went on those.
DK: Mm.
ET: Some had a dual instructor and others smaller [?].
DK: Yeah. What did you think of the Wellington as an aircraft?
ET: Actually quite good after the [laughs] – it was a bit bigger. The big thing I remember is – I think the model’s a 1-C that we trained on.
DK: Right.
ET: At the OTU, but then we got a mark three I think. ‘Cause we took an aeroplane out with us when we went to Tunisia.
DK: Right.
ET: And that was a long flight.
DK: Mm.
ET: We had to go miles out to sea to avoid the Bay of Biscay, you know, ‘cause all the Germans –
DK: Yeah, yeah.
ET: Were there, and we flew from Portreath to a place called Ras el Ma –
DK: Right.
ET: On the west coast of Africa. The big thing I remember there was there was always an enormous amount of flies [DK and ET laugh]. You had a plate of soup, had a quick swipe [DK laughs], put your spoon in quickly [laughs]. And from there we just, we went on through Blida and then ended up at the Kairouan.
DK: Right.
ET: With aircraft – 142 Squadron and 150 had both just gone there. There was nothing, there were no facilities at all. There wasn’t even a latrine initially [laughs].
DK: So, so out your training then, you’ve done the operational training unit and really cross country flights around England.
ET: That’s it.
DK: And then your posted to your squadron and you’re posted out to Africa.
ET: Yes [emphasis].
DK: Oh right.
ET: Actually we just cleared [?] Africa, North Africa. Well we arrived there –
DK: Right.
ET: And when I was, we were there, we had the invasion of Sicily of course.
DK: Mm.
ET: And Italy. And most of our bombing were, they were to, you know, targets in Sicily.
DK: Right.
ET: And several, going up the coast to Italy.
DK: Right, and this was with 142 Squadron?
ET: 142 Squadron.
DK: Yeah. So can you remember how many operations you did in the Middle East and Italy?
ET: Yes I, thirty.
DK: Thirty [emphasis]? Oh right.
ET: That was a tour then.
DK: Yeah.
ET: And I came back to UK. Oh I went with a journey from Tunis to Algiers –
DK: Mm.
ET: By train, and on the carriage I’ll always remember it said, ‘forty orm [?] or five [laughs], what were they, sivar [?] horses’ [ET and DK laugh]. Took five days, the journey, and then you got on a boat, came back to Liverpool.
DK: Right.
ET: This was at the end of forty-three –
DK: Uh-huh.
ET: And the – I thought I’d move to Scotland so I went all the way up to a place called Edsoff [?] where I used to live and the last bit I had to do by bus, you know, train then bus.
DK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ET: Then I met this girl on the bus and she said, ‘what are you doing?’ And I said, I said ‘I’m going home [emphasis], what did you think?’ She says ‘I think they’ve moved’ [laughs]. Ah, I had then to go and search where they’d gone to.
DK: And this was your family?
ET: That’s my family –
DK: They’d moved while you were away [laughs].
ET: My parents – well I didn’t get the letter of course to say they were moving.
DK: Oh of course.
ET: And they’d moved to Woodhall Spa would you believe.
DK: Oh right.
ET: In Lincolnshire.
DK: Yeah, yeah, know it well [DK and ET laugh]. So when you were in Africa then, your parents moved from Scotland –
ET: Yes.
DK: To Woodhall Spa.
ET: Yeah.
DK: And you didn’t, you didn’t know [laughs].
ET: Didn’t know.
DK: No. If I could just go back a bit, your operations in the Middle East. Did you find navigating something that came to you easily or –
ET: Quite difficult.
DK: Difficult? Right, because –
ET: Actually, we did have one, one navigation error which a very lucky to get away with it in many respects because coming back from Italy, we hit this land [emphasis] and I thought it was the north coast of Africa –
DK: Right.
ET: It turned out to be the north coast of Sicily [emphasis], going along.
DK: Yeah.
ET: And, course there’s some very high mountains there. Our signaller, our wireless operator finally got a , what we’d call a QDM –
DK: Mm.
ET: You know, a course to steer.
DK: Yeah.
ET: So we turned on that. Of course we’re getting short of fuel and all sorts of things, and we threw out the guns onto the turret to make the aircraft lighter, and coasted at quite a low altitude –
DK: Mm.
ET: Thinking of the mountains there –
DK: Yeah.
ET: And landed , there was an emergency airfield right on the tip of, which we landed at.
DK: On Sicily?
ET: No, no, in North Africa.
DK: Oh North Africa was it, right.
ET: Right at the top there.
DK: Right, oh right.
ET: So that was a real bit of luck there.
DK: Did you, did you get into any trouble for navigating?
ET: Not really.
DK: No, good [DK and ET laugh].
ET: What I remember is my pilot got in trouble because there was a taxi accident.
DK: Right.
ET: That’s the worst thing that can be done, you know. I think the wing hit it [unclear] on one and knocked [?] it up and twice, and I remember the station [?] commander at briefing for an operational trip. He’d see [?] pilots in front of him and say, ‘look at these men, traitors to the cause.’ I always remember that.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Terrible thing to say really.
DK: Bit harsh isn’t it?
ET: They felt bad enough as it is.
DK: Yeah. And one of those, one of those was your pilot was it?
ET: Yes [emphasis].
DK: Stood up – so he had to stand in front of everybody and get told off?
ET: Well there was three of them.
DK: Three of them, right.
ET: Yes, two’s [?] being blamed for the trip, you know –
DK: Yeah.
ET: That night. And this came out.
DK: Oh dear. It’s not very good is it? [Laughs].
ET: Very unsympathetic.
DK: No. Were commanding officers like that then? Were they a bit tough?
ET: This is a copy, what’s it? [Papers shuffle]. Is there something in there called “Blida’s Bombers?” A book. Oh yeah, it’s about him.
DK: Oh right.
ET: There’s something in [papers shuffle, pause]. All this mail, that’s Kairouan [laughs].
DK: Right. Just for the recording, it’s a magazine or a pamphlet called “Blida’s Bombers.” B-L-I-D-A, Blida. That’s, that’s in Algiers isn’t it?
ET: That’s right.
DK: [Unclear].
ET: That was a big base, as the Army. We started going in with the first army –
DK: Right.
ET: [Unclear].
DK: I actually went there many years ago, to Blida in Algiers. And just for the recording, this is “Blida’s Bombers” by Eric M. Summers. Did you know Eric M. Summers?
ET: No.
DK: No, no.
ET: But there was a Group Captain Powel, his photograph was in there which I was trying to, to find.
DK: Right.
ET: He was a man that –
DK: Oh, Group Captain Powel –
ET: Yeah.
DK: Here he is.
ET: Yeah, but there’s a picture of him with his –
DK: That’s in there.
ET: Fly [?]. He always used to fly [laughs].
DK: So he was your commanding officer was he?
ET: He was the station commander actually –
DK: Station commander, right.
ET: Group captain, yeah.
DK: And was it him who told your –
ET: Yes.
DK: The three pilot off?
ET: Yeah.
DK: Well that’s for the recording then, Group Captain Powell [laughs]. Ah there he is, there is he is.
ET: That’s him.
DK: Yeah.
ET: That’s exactly with his – yeah.
DK: Oh, so just for the recording here. It’s Group Captain Powell, briefing for Radan Recina [?]. And it looks like he’s got a fly swat there.
ET: That’s right. He always used that as a pointer [DK and ET laugh].
DK: He looks like he must have been a bit of a character. Oh wow.
ET: Quite a forceful –
DK: Forceful, I can imagine [?].
ET: Yeah.
DK: So there’s the Wellingtons –
ET: Probably [unclear], that’s him, yeah.
DK: You were flying.
ET: Yes, yeah.
DK: So this is all – the book itself is about the Tunis campaign then?
ET: What I can remember is when we got later [?], the power, the whole, the whole instruments used to shake and [laughs].
DK: [Unclear] my phone’s on. Sorry about that. So you got Noel Coward’s poem [?] there, ‘lie in the dark and listen.’
ET: Yes.
DK: Yeah, ah. So while you were in North Africa then and you’re bombing targets in Italy, were you, was your aircraft ever hit at all or, can you recall?
ET: Er, not really. Should they call it sometimes [?], few peppered.
DK: Right.
ET: But nothing direct.
DK: Nothing serious.
ET: Direct hit.
DK: So you never got attacked by German aircraft –
ET: No.
DK: At all?
ET: No.
DK: Right. So what did you, what sort of targets were you hitting there in –
ET: Mostly airfields.
DK: Mostly airfields.
ET: There, [papers shuffle] here you are –
DK: Right.
ET: I don’t have the – oh [unclear]. That’s how we got there.
DK: Right okay, so that’s, for the recording here, that’s your logbook.
ET: That’s my logbook, yeah.
DK: So –
ET: Number one.
DK: Your pilot then is Pearce.
ET: Yes.
DK: Sergeant Pearce, and you’re the navigator down on here.
ET: We’re all sergeants –
DK: You’re all sergeants, right.
ET: At the time. There was very few, very few commissioned there on the squadron.
DK: Right, so the whole crew was sergeants then?
ET: Yeah.
DK: Yeah, so from the logbook then, so you’ve gone from Portreath to Ra –
ET: Ras el Ma.
DK: El Ma. Ras el Ma to Blida.
ET: That’s right.
DK: Then Blida to Kairouan.
ET: Kairouan.
DK: And I’ll spell that for the recording. It’s K-A-I-R-O-U-A-N. And so your base was Maison Blanche?
ET: No the base was Kairouan.
DK: Kairouan was it?
ET: Yeah.
DK: Right okay.
ET: It looks as though someone must have taken an aeroplane or something up there.
DK: Oh right [something pings in background].
ET: And I don’t know how we came back but it –
DK: Right. So you’ve done operations then to Nissena [?] –
ET: Yeah.
DK: And that’s in a Wellington, 19th of June 1943. So Nissena [?] seems to be a regular target, hmm. So Nissena [?], Italian airfield, Syracuse.
ET: Syracuse, yeah.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Masala [?].
DK: So quite a number of – so you said you did thirty operations there in North Africa?
ET: Yeah.
DK: Hmm, the Nissena beaches I noticed [page turns]. So what were the, what were the briefings like in North Africa? Were you sort of in a tent and – what were the facilities like?
ET: Yes, was all under canvas, the whole thing. The food was corned beef –
DK: Yeah.
ET: For everything. In fact, I got an attack of jaundice –
DK: Oh right.
ET: Through that. I went into hospital and they gave me tinned fruit –
DK: Rivht.
ET: And I thought this was a most wonderful thing to, to get. In fact, there was a big American camp near us and they – we used to trade whiskey [DK laughs] for tinned fruit –
DK: Yeah, yeah.
ET: You know, that they had.
DK: [Tape moved] I’m not sure that that’s such a good spot now [laughs].
BT: No.
ET: Not now [laughs].
DK: Not now, no. Oh right.
ET: I suppose thank goodness for corned beef otherwise the [laughs] –
DK: So at, at the briefings then, presumably you’re sort of sat down and told what the target – were you told what the targets were?
ET: Told what the target is, yes.
DK: Right. So in North Africa, were they mostly military targets, airfields and –
ET: Yes.
DK: I noticed here you’ve got here [reading from logbook]: ‘30th of September 1943, ops. Port engine caught fire on takeoff [emphasis].’ Do you remember that?
ET: Not really [both laugh].
DK: Well it says you landed okay after twenty-five minutes.
ET: Yeah we always – obviously we’d have just gone –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Round and there –
DK: And landed again.
ET: And landed again.
DK: So then you’ve had, got several places in Italy then. I noticed you’ve got Pisa is one, ops to Pisa.
ET: Yes.
DK: Yeah [paper turns].
ET: I remember the vehicles [?], I remember we were on that night, bobbing and the beaches, you know, before the army got in.
DK: So that’s 142 Squadron then, and you’ve done two hundred and forty-two hours, fifteen minutes operations then.
ET: Is that the end?
DK: Yeah that’s the end there, yeah.
ET: Yeah [page turns].
DK: So you’ve, you’ve come back to the UK then, you’ve come back to England. What, where –
ET: I was an instructor then.
DK: Right [laughs].
ET: Or so – we didn’t have half the instrumentation that the UK aircraft had.
DK: Right.
ET: So it was like an idiot teaching an idiot really [laughing], until we got used to –
DK: Right. So you, you went onto training then did you? You were –
ET: Yes.
DK: Right.
ET: It, I did a year –
DK: Right.
ET: Mainly at a place called Barford St. John –
DK: Right.
ET: Which is not far from Oxfordshire. Oh it’s about three miles away from, what’s the name of the town [pause], starts with a B I think.
DK: Bedford?
BT: Bicester?
DK: Bicester?
BT: Bicester, yeah?
ET: B – well down that way, yeah.
DK: Right. And that was in Oxfordshire was it?
ET: Yeah.
DK: Right.
ET: And then the –
DK: So what, what aircraft were you flying doing the training there?
ET: Wellingtons.
DK: Wellingtons again, and that, you said they were better equipped than the ones you were flying in the Middle East?
ET: Yes [DK laughs]. There’s a thing in navigation called G [emphasis] –
DK: Yes.
ET: Which we didn’t have out there, you know. It was a wonderful aid, very accurate –
DK: Mm.
ET: But I had to learn [laughs], I had to learn that, you see, when I came back .
DK: So although you were training people, you yourself didn’t know –
ET: Well [laughs].
DK: Oh right.
ET: You know radio, you know, out there, about thirty-five miles was the range of our radio. You know –
DK: Mm.
ET: If you did want to call our base [laughs] –
DK: Yeah.
ET: You had to be within thirty-five miles of it.
DK: So not very far then?
ET: Not very far at all, no.
BT: Banbury, it was.
DK: Banbury.
ET: Banbury [emphasis] was the place –
BT: I just looked it up.
ET: Yeah sorry, Banbury, Banbury’s where – it was just outside Banbury. And anyway, at the end of the year they changed from Wellingtons to Mosquitos.
DK: Right, okay.
ET: So I just stayed there and did the course, met the pilot. He was a very good pilot. He, when he finished training in Canada they kept him on as an instructor.
DK: Right. So you’ve come – I slightly misread this earlier and I want – for the benefit of the tape, your initial training was at Number Six Air Observation School at Staverton.
ET: That’s right.
DK: And then you went to 21 OTU, Morteon-in-the-Marsh.
ET: That’s correct.
DK: Then [emphasis] to North Africa.
ET: For operational training –
DK: Then to North Africa –
ET: North Africa.
DK: Sorry I misread this, with 142 Squadron.
ET: Yes.
DK: Which we’ve just covered.
ET: That’s correct.
DK: So you’ve come back then and you did a year’s training –
ET: Yes.
DK: Instructing, and that was at 16 OTU, Upper Heyford [?].
ET: Yes, that was the main base –
DK: Main base.
ET: But as I say, I spent it all at Barford –
DK: Right okay.
ET: St. John.
DK: Right. So then in early 1945 then, you’re now converted onto the Mosquito?
ET: That’s right.
DK: Can you remember your pilot’s name on the Mosquito?
ET: Yeah, Green, Dave Green.
DK: Dave Green.
ET: We didn’t have a – he was married, the chap in the, well obviously [unclear] he met a girl out there and married her, and so we didn’t spend a lot of social time together at all.
DK: Right.
ET: He didn’t drink at al so l [laughs].
DK: Was that quite unusual in the Air Force then? [Laughs].
ET: Well a bit. But yeah he was a good chap.
DK: Right. And would he have been a pilot officer or –
ET: He was a flight lieutenant.
DK: Flight lieutenant, right. So that’s Flight Lieutenant –
ET: I expect –
DK: Dave Green
ET: If you, if you finished top of your course –
DK: Yeah.
ET: You were normally commissioned, the top. So as he did well, kept him on as an instructor, I suspect he was –
DK: And you say he was an Australian?
ET: No, no, he was English.
DK: English, right okay. So, and you’re in the Mosquitos then. What did you think of the Mosquito as a aircraft?
ET: Oh it was great [laughs], with so much speed.
DK: Mm.
ET: Amazing aircraft because to carry that load, to carry one four thousand pound bomb, was like a big oil tank, you know.
DK: Mm, yeah.
ET: Oil drum, for the business. And course we’d overload tanks on the wings as well, so she was pretty heavy.
DK: Yeah.
ET: But it was wonderful. We used to bomb at twenty-five thousand feet.
DK: Right.
ET: And when the bomb went of course you shot up about three [DK and ET laugh], three hundred feet.
DK: And this was at 571 Squadron?
ET: 571, yeah.
DK: And –
ET: It was very short lived – each squadron, they were created [emphasis], you know, and of course the war, the war finished –
DK: Right.
ET: And they disappeared again.
DK: Can you remember, can you remember where you were based with 571?
ET: Yes, Oakington.
DK: Oakington, right okay.
ET: Which is a big –
DK: Housing estate now [BT laughs].
ET: Oh is it?
DK: Yeah, afraid so. It’s all been knocked down.
ET: But did it, did have all these refugee, I don’t know what they were, refugee centres?
DK: It was for while, yes.
ET: Yeah.
DK: It was a refugee centre –
ET: Yeah.
DK: After the war.
ET: Oh but, but I haven’t mentioned that I – when the war finished, they asked for volunteers to ferry the aircraft back from Canada.
DK: Oh right.
ET: SO I volunteered for that. I got out to Canada, went out by boat, and they said ‘oh you’re not wireless trained’ [laughs].
DK: Mm.
ET: ‘So you can’t do that.’ So I ended up doing about thirty hours in Dakotas.
DK: Oh right [DK and ET laugh].
ET: And I was there for about three months, and came back in a BUAC [?] Liberator.
DK: Right.
ET: [Laughs] to Prestwick, I remember that.
DK: Just, just going back a little bit to your time in the Mosquitos.
ET: Yes.
DK: Can you remember how many operations you did on Mosquitos?
ET: Yes, I did twenty.
DK: Right, so that was thirty operations, Wellingtons in North Africa –
ET: Yes.
DK: And another twenty –
ET: When we were operating on the Mosquito, we had sort of two nights on and one night off.
DK: So what was your role with the Mosquito, because you weren’t really flying with the main Bomber force were you? Were you separate to them?
ET: Well, it was diversionary [emphasis] normally. We went to targets to make them think that the –
DK: Right.
ET: Main force was going there. You had your sneaky little – I went to Berlin thirteen times [laughs].
DK: Right. What was it like flying over Berlin?
ET: Well it’s quite, quite intense. The flak was, you know, they had these predictions, the marshal [?] –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Predicting –
DK: Predicting flak –
ET: You’re very happy if you saw it bursting a bit beneath you, you know, thinking ‘oh they haven’t got it right.’
DK: Mm.
ET: And they had these incredible searchlights, and a marshal would come on you, and then all the sleeves [?] [unclear]. It’s a really lovely feeling [laughs] being all lit up at night.
DK: So when that happened, what did your pilot do? Did he –
ET: He couldn’t do much at all really –
DK: Right.
ET: For that. Because with that height, you know, it would take a long way to –
DK: To get out the searchlight. So you’re, you’re being fired on all the time while you’re in the searchlights?
ET: Well, you might be or you might not, you know. It didn’t – we had a little indicator on the aircraft, a light it was, which was supposed to switch on if you were being attacked.
DK: Yeah. So you, did you fly out with a number of other Mosquitos?
ET: Yes.
DK: And could you see them at night, or –
ET: Well that’s the amazing thing is, there’s all these aircraft together –
DK: Yeah.
ET: You suddenly see, if another one gets lit up by the searchlights you think, ‘I didn’t realise he was there,’ you know.
DK: Mm.
ET: You were like a loose formation I think, you weren’t in flying formation.
DK: Right, so you never saw other aircraft then?
ET: Not very often.
DK: So your role was then, the main force would go off to one target and you’d attack somewhere else to, to draw –
ET: Yes.
DK: Their defences there –
ET: Yes.
DK: Presumably.
ET: Of course, we had the Pathfinders.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Who would – now this, well a secret as it was at the time, called Oboe.
DK: Mhm.
ET: And they used to drop on that, and this thing was amazing. Two different aircraft flares go down, you go down one on top of the other. You’d think it was out of one aircraft, you know.
DK: Right.
ET: This was getting towards the end and –
DK: So when you saw these two flares go down, what was your, what did you have to do then?
ET: Well, I’d, it would tell you, or, if it was some apart [?] it would tell you which one to go for. Well, I had to get down into the bomb bay, and, well about ten, you had a ten minute run in when you had to stay rock steady, you know, and I had to get down into the front and set up the bomb, bomb site.
DK: Right.
ET: ‘Cause one night, an incident was that I got down there and I wasn’t making sense about it to my pilot, and he was very quick at knocking my oxygen off [laughs].
DK: Oh.
ET: And he quickly catched on what was wrong and put the switch –
DK: Right.
ET: Back on.
DK: So he switched the oxygen off then, right.
ET: Yeah just getting, getting down into the – I had a harness [?] on, you know –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Just to –
DK: So, so although you were navigating then, on the Mosquitos you actually acted as a bomb aimer as well then did you?
ET: Yes, I did both jobs.
DK: Right.
ET: Yes, I did a small bombing course with a Mosquito conversion. We did a course on –
DK: Right.
ET: With Oxfords [emphasis] it was this time, which was a training aircraft.
DK: Mm.
ET: Used to bomb in the Wash.
DK: Mm.
ET: You know, the target.
DK: Yeah.
ET: The Wash.
DK: Yeah, so, so you said you went to Berlin thirteen –
ET: I think it was about thirteen –
DK: Thirteen times.
ET: Times if you –
DK: So for the recording, I’m looking at the logbook again so, so 1st of March 1945, Mosquito. You’ve gone from ops to Erfurt, E-R-F-U-R-T.
ET: Erfurt, yeah.
DK: So you’ve got one four thousand pound bomb.
ET: That’s a bomb we carried, just one.
DK: And then 3rd of March forty-five, Wurzburg, one four thousand pound bomb again.
ET: Yeah.
DK: And then it says here Berlin on the 5th of March, the 7th of March, 9th of March, 11th of March, 13th of March. So every other day there for about a week, you were going to Berlin.
ET: Yeah.
DK: So each time it’s one four thousand pound bomb. So those trips to Berlin, can you recall, were those diversional then, or part of a, a main attack on Berlin?
ET: I, I don’t think it was a main attack because we didn’t see other aeroplanes there really.
DK: Right, so the main force has gone off somewhere else?
ET: It’s more a nuisance, you know, morale type thing I think –
DK: Right.
ET: On that.
DK: So you’re also going out there then to, not as diversions as such but to just keep the defences alert?
ET: Keep it going, yeah.
DK: So then 15th of March, Erfurt again [page turns]. [Laughs], and then here 21st of March, Berlin, 23rd of March, Berlin and the 24th of March, Berlin [page turns]. Think the people in Berlin must have got a bit fed up of you turning up [all laugh]. So your, and it says here, so the same pilot, Flight Lieutenant –
ET: Yes.
DK: Is it, was it Dave Green? Dave, Dave Green, was it? Green?
ET: Dave Green, yeah.
DK: Dave Green. And just reading for the recording here –
ET: Yes.
DK: So 4th of April, Magdeburg, and then 8th of April, Berlin, 10th of April, Berlin, 12th of April, Berlin [BT laughs], 13th of April, I’ll spell this out for the recording. It’s S-T-R-A-L-S-U-N-I, or S-U-N-D, Stralsund I think it is. 17th of April, Berlin, 20th of April, Berlin again, 23rd of April, Flensburg [page turns]. So the end must be coming to an end here then. And finally, 25th of April, a power station at Munich.
ET: That’s right, that was the last one.
DK: Mm.
ET: It, I had a son out there [laughs].
DK: Right.
ET: He worked with the, what’s it called, you know, the –
BT: Eurofighter.
ET: Eurofighter.
DK: Oh right, oh okay.
BT: After the war you want to add [DK and BT laugh].
ET: After the war, oh yes.
DK: Yes.
ET: But I said, ‘I probably passed this part,’ I said, ‘I probably bombed [emphasis] that part’ [all laugh].
BT: Yeah.
DK: So years later, your son was working on the Eurofighter in Europe?
ET: He was in the Eurofighter, yeah.
DK: So can I, if I just add those up [page turns]. Where are we, that’s Berlin. One, two, three, four, five [page turns], six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. Yes as you say, thirteen.
ET: That was –
DK: So out of those twenty operations in Mosquitos, thirteen of them were to Berlin.
ET: Yeah.
DK: And your trips to Berlin, it’s obviously quite a long way. I mean, are you fired on all the way or is it mostly quite dark and quiet?
ET: Bits and pieces.
DK: Mm.
ET: Sometimes flak would come up, you know, you could see it at – you just hoped they hadn’t predicted you, your height.
DK: Hmm. But in a Mosquito you’re a lot higher than another aircraft.
ET: Twenty-five.
DK: Mm, twenty-five thousand feet.
ET: We were, and sometimes we used to get to thirty coming back, you know.
DK: And can you recall, were you ever attacked by German aircraft at all?
ET: Not that I know of.
DK: No.
ET: No.
DK: So as you’re, as you’re approaching the target then, you’ve got down into the –
ET: I get down into the, the bomb bay –
DK: So –
ET: And set up the wind and that –
DK: Yeah.
ET: On the – in fact, so that we could keep together more of the navigation, you’re trying to navigation –
DK: Yeah, yeah.
ET: The leading aircraft might pass back the wind, so as we’re all using the same wind to, to part [?] with our drift and that –
DK: Right.
ET: So as we’d keep –
DK: ‘Cause presumably wind change can really affect your navigation?
ET: Oh yeah, well effects your drift and everything you see, so if you get different winds you could be offsetting differently.
DK: Right, what was it like, if I can ask – you’d obviously have a briefing beforehand –
ET: Yes.
DK: And, and this is in the building at Oakham. What were your feelings like when you saw what your target was going to be?
ET: Well you think –
DK: Presumably they have curtains and they put it back and –
ET: Well they tell you where it is. Oh, the routine was, you take the aircraft up for an air test –
DK: Right.
ET: Up there about fifteen minutes, see it’s alright in the morning, and then, this being the morning, then the afternoon you would go to briefing. Told you where it was, you had to make charts up, you know –
DK: What was your thoughts when you saw Berlin again? Were you –
ET: [Laughs] yeah, ‘can’t you find somewhere else to’ –
DK: So you now know the target, so you’re now doing your charts presumably as the navigator?
ET: Yeah.
DK: So you’re, you’re told the winds and –
ET: Got to put a tracking of where we’re going and that, all these sort of things. Oh yeah, you get briefed by the MET officer of the winds and the weather.
DK: Mhm.
ET: And after that, you had a meal, and then you went back. The worst thing I found was you went back to your billet and then you’d devour [?] away these hours –
DK: Right.
ET: Until, ‘cause it’s always at night of course, you know, until you’re ready for takeoff.
DK: So it came as a bit of a relief then, when you got to the aircraft to takeoff?
ET: Oh yeah, once you get going, you’re too busy really to think about anything else, provided you didn’t swing. It was quite a nasty aircraft to swing in on takeoff –
DK: Mm.
ET: Mosquito, you know, the propellers going the same direction –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Until they got the tail up for a bit of –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Control.
DK: And your pilot then, Dave Green, was he a good pilot?
ET: Yes [emphasis]. But just as I say, he was a quiet chap so I didn’t really see much of him –
DK: Right.
ET: Apart from work which, which was fine [laughs].
DK: But did you – I’m presuming you’d have to work well [emphasis] together then.
ET: Oh yes.
DK: So you worked well together?
ET: Yeah.
DK: We’ve covered what you did over the targets, so you’ve come back after the operation and your landing. How did you feel then as you got back?
ET: Relieved once you got down but of course you’re coming back, you’re all coming back together aren’t you? In these airfield, the seconds [?] they overlapped.
DK: Yeah.
ET: So it was a bit dodgy at times. We landed once at the wrong airport [laughs].
DK: Really?
ET: You know, the wrong way, direction was the same.
DK: Yeah.
ET: We ended up at Wyton [laughs].
DK: Right.
ET: Anyway, they just briefed us and, and that was it. I think we took off in the morning to get back to base [DK and ET laugh].
DK: So you, once you’ve landed then, what’s the procedures then?
ET: Oh you go for a briefing.
DK: Right, a debriefing [emphasis].
ET: De –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Debriefing.
DK: And, and who would take that?
ET: Intelligence.
DK: Mm.
ET: Officers.
DK: Mm, and what sort of questions did they ask?
ET: Did you hit the target, did you think you hit the target?
DK: Right.
ET: We used to take a, a film [emphasis]. Some were better than others, you know –
DK: Mm.
ET: Of the target area and when it happened.
DK: So a photo would be taken when you –
ET: A photo when you pressed the plunger for, to release the bomb a photograph would be taken –
DK: Oh right.
ET: A little later.
DK: Right. So you’ve got back then and you’ve got feelings of relief. What happened then, you just went to bed?
ET: No.
DK: Ah.
ET: Went for a meal.
DK: Right, okay [DK and ET laugh].
ET: And a beer.
DK: Mm.
ET: And a few beers [DK laughs], otherwise I never slept really, you know.
DK: Right.
ET: It’s all night [?], but oh, it was a relief [emphasis] –
DK: Mm.
ET: Really. I mean we were very lucky in the Mosquito, we didn’t have near the number of losses –
DK: Mm.
ET: That the – the loss that I saw, well, the loss that I saw was at – one aircraft completed [?], he was up on his air test and of course he came and tried to beat up the, what we called the flight hock [?] [emphasis], you know, where our ground crew were.
DK: Yep.
ET: And these, these overload tanks in the wing. He hit a tree and knocked one tank off, and the aircraft just [unclear].
DK: Cartwheeled.
ET: I watched this –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Just rolling [emphasis].
DK: Yeah.
ET: And it went straight in the front of the, the sick quarters.
DK: Mm.
ET: That was a complete waste of lives. Another accident we had was at the – one chap lost an engine and he came roaring in far too fast. Oh no sorry, he spun [emphasis] in and of course, they were killed. It happened a second time to another person, and he thought ‘I’m not going to stall’ [laughs], so he came rolling in too fast and [taps four times] wasn’t able to stop at the far end. And then the disciplinary thing at Sheffield, so they sent them to Sheffield. [Unclear] fly –
DK: Right.
ET: But just for discipline [laughs].
DK: But at least he survived that one.
ET: He survived that one, yeah.
DK: But got into trouble for it, yeah. Okay that’s, that’s great. Just ask you, after all these years how do you look back at your time in, in Bomber Command? How do you look back on that?
ET: I don’t really look back on it all that much nowadays.
DK: Mm.
ET: I think – well I was occupied, of course seeing an Air Force and getting in transport we had the Berlin Airlift –
DK: Right.
ET: For a year.
DK: So you got involved with the Berlin Airlift then did you?
ET: Yeah.
DK: Yeah, so –
ET: I did three hundred lifts on that.
DK: Oh right. So you’ve, let, you’ve – so just reading here, that’s three hundred and two lifts –
ET: Yeah.
DK: To Berlin.
ET: That took a year.
DK: And, and what aircraft were you flying?
ET: York.
DK: Right, the Avro York. So what, what was Berlin like when you, you went there after the war?
ET: Oh they were very, very grateful that we’re keeping away from the Russians I think was a big thing, you know, there.
DK: Mm. ‘Cause it’s, it’s kind of strange ‘cause one moment you’re dropping bombs [BT laughs] and then the next –
ET: Three years later, yeah.
DK: You’re giving them food.
ET: That’s right. It’s amazing when people have nothing, you know. If anybody had a bar of soap or something like that –
DK: Mm.
ET: It was like a gold [emphasis] to them, you know.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Things like that.
DK: So what kind of stuff were you carrying in the Avro Yorks then?
ET: Oh you name it, everything.
DK: Food and –
ET: There was coal.
DK: Right.
ET: Actually the aircraft – I forget they were a lot heavier when they finished, it was all this coal dust.
DK: Mm.
ET: They erm, hay for horses, all the natural stuff that people eat.
DK: Right.
ET: Anything like that.
DK: So flying into Berlin then, did you have to stick to certain routes or –
ET: Yes –
DK: ‘Cause you’re flying over –
ET: The Northern – we used to go up north and then go down from a northern corridor, and come back at a centre corridor.
DK: Right.
ET: ‘Cause basically, Onsturfrun [?]
DK: So you went to Onsturfrun Gateaux [?].
ET: Onsturfrun [?] to Gateaux [?] yeah, yeah that’s right.
DK: Right.
ET: And –
DK: So they’re just continuous flights then, going –
ET: Yeah.
DK: In the northern route and coming out the southern route.
ET: Oh it was a shambles in this case. We had lots of different speed aircraft, you know. There was, there was Yorks, there was the Dakotas –
DK: Mm.
ET: Valettas, and what was happening, supposed to go off on waves but one wave was [laughs] overtaking the other wave, you know –
DK: Right.
ET: And things like that. It’s amazing there weren’t more accidents than there were, but after they got it settled it worked very well. You just went along, you got in. If you missed, if you couldn’t get in you came straight back, you didn’t, you couldn’t go round again, you know –
DK: Right.
ET: To Gateaux [?]I mean.
DK: So you, you had to land first time?
ET: You had to land, that’s right.
DK: Yeah.
ET: But it worked very well. And we went down to two lifts. Initially we had to do three lifts. It was a tremendously long day ‘cause you had to wait for the aircraft to get ready and complete your three lifts.
DK: Mm.
ET: That was it, but they put it down to two [emphasis] so we did a night shift or a day –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Day shift. It was well organised towards the end.
DK: Was it easier for you as a navigator, doing that then, because they –
ET: Oh I didn’t do very – there wasn’t very much navigation at all.
DK: Right.
ET: For – you just, it was a corridor, you know –
DK: Right.
ET: And took me an hour coming back ‘cause you flew over quite a bit of Russian territory coming in.
DK: Mm.
ET: The only, the odd fighter used to come and have a look at you [laughs]. Think ‘I hope you go away again,’ you know.
DK: Oh right [ET laughs]. So after that then, you’ve remained with transport and –
ET: Yes.
DK: Yeah. Just looking, so you were in Valettas, Varsitys, the Beverlys?
ET: Yes.
DK: So that was, you went out to Aden then, and –
ET: Yes.
DK: And Iran? Yes.
ET: Yeah, did two years in Aden.
DK: Was that during the conflict out there or –
ET: There, there was a bit of conflict –
DK: Yeah.
ET: But [coughs] there was a lot of trouble in – what do you call that country?
DK: Yemen?
ET: Yemen.
DK: Yemen, yeah and Aden, Aden is Yemen I think, isn’t it? Oman?
ET: There’s another one I think, further east.
DK: Right. So, so what were you doing there? Was it supplying –
ET: Oh just loads of [?] – it was wonderful, a place called Macierz [?] –
DK: Mm.
ET: Which was about eight thousand feet high, and from Aden was very steamy, you know [laughs], and you get up there, your stockings fall down because it’s so dry up there.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Byt they’ve got stuff in there you didn’t know if you could get before, you know.
DK: No.
ET: Like quite big trucks and that type of thing.
DK: So what was, what was the Beverley [emphasis] like as an aircraft then? They’re quite big, quite bulky things aren’t they?
ET: Oh dear [DK laughs]. It was slow [emphasis], it was noisy [emphasis]. In fact the navigator’s table used to be on an angle, you had to, you had to [tapping] flatten it and you had to [tapping], they tried to [?] bounce on it, you know [DK laughs]. And that had a fixed undercarriage, and if you got into icy conditions, these legs used to ice up which meant you even go slower [emphasis] than [DK and ET laugh]. But it had this great capability of short landing in –
DK: Yeah.
ET: In getting into these airfields, you know.
DK: So then you’ve gone onto the Britannia.
ET: That’s right.
DK: So what, what was the Britannia like?
ET: Oh it was lovely.
DK: Yeah
ET: Yeah, I did five years on.
DK: And what was that, mostly trooping flights was it? So whereabouts did you use to go to?
ET: All over the place [coughs]. Did a lot to Norway because the commander was a not [?] – always went there from January to March –
DK: Mm.
ET: They go for their winter training –
DK: Right.
ET: So we’d lots of flights there and back. That was an adventure [?]. We had a lot of flights out to Woomera –
DK: Right.
ET: You know, the atomic –
DK: Oh right, the atomic bomb tests.
ET: It was a little box.
DK: Oh.
ET: Didn’t know what it was [DK and ET laugh]. But we used to go down to Adelaide.
DK: Probably best not to ask [all laugh].
ET: Well, quite a lot.
DK: Yeah.
ET: When all these tests were going on.
DK: Yeah.
ET: And just [coughs] –
DK: You, you didn’t witness any of the tests then did you?
ET: Oh no.
DK: No, no.
ET: We used to use an Edinburgh field recorder, it was a RAAF base. That went on quite a lot. We did trips to Singapore and back –
DK: Mhm.
ET: But when it first started, you know, there was no slipping [emphasis] crews –
DK: Yeah.
ET: You just had a – everyday it took five [emphasis] days to get to Singapore, you had two days off there and five days to come back. And I think what a waste of aircraft it was really [DK laughs]. I suppose we had so many we didn’t bother. That was on the Yorks [emphasis] then.
DK: Yeah [ET laughs]. So finally you’ve become ATS navigator instructor.
ET: That was on Belfasts.
DK: So you’re, you’ve – and then 53 Squadron on the Belfasts?
ET: That’s right.
DK: So, so what was the Belfast like as an aircraft?
ET: Oh it was nice, nice. Well lovely, very palatial for the crew.
DK: Mm.
ET: Just the pilots could get in from the outside of the aircraft into the seat, you know, being a big aircraft –
DK: Right.
ET: It was very palatial for the crew.
DK: So what sort of loads would you have on the Belfasts?
ET: All sorts, helicopters.
DK: Yeah?
ET: Tanks, just stuff like that.
BT: You took the Concord engines didn’t you as well? Concord engines.
ET: Oh I had a big, yeah. Oh my big flight was I went – we carried an engine for Concord once. It went on a world tour.
DK: Oh right.
ET: Well, went to Far East sales pitch. It never needed the engine [laughs].
DK: Right, so it was just a spare –
ET: But it was a few pictures somewhere of that. Is it in there [shuffling].
BT: Yeah that’s the one, that’s the Concord.
DK: Ah.
ET: There’s one with the tours [?] on.
BT: I’ll have a look [ET laughs].
DK: That’s the original prototype isn’t it?
ET: Yeah.
DK: DBSST.
ET: That’s right.
BT: Oh wow.
DK: Okay, so I’ll just finish this off. So you retired in 1978 as a squadron leader.
ET: That’s right.
DK: Ah.
ET: They eventually decided to promote me after [laughs] –
DK: So they promoted you just before you retired?
ET: Yes.
DK: Ah [laughs]. Okay, well I’ll stop that there because I’m conscious of you talking for a whole hour there, but thanks very much for that. I’ll switch that off now.
ET: Well –
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ATaylorEC170928
PTaylorEC1701
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Eric Taylor
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Format
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00:54:10 audio recording
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
David Kavanagh
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-09-28
Description
An account of the resource
Squadron Leader Eric Taylor joined the Royal Air Force in 1942 and served as a navigator. He served in North Africa and completed a tour of operations against targets in Italy before becoming an instructor in England. He describes the differences in instrumentation between the North African and English aircraft, such as the Gee navigational aid. He flew nuisance and diversion operations in Mosquitos over places such as Wurzburg, Erfurt and Berlin thirteen times. He was involved in the Berlin Airlift and then spent a couple of years serving in Aden and the Middle East, and remained in the Air Force until 1978 when he retired as a squadron leader.
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
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Algeria
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Tunisia
England--Cambridgeshire
Algeria--Blida
Algeria--Râs el Ma
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Erfurt
Germany--Würzburg
Tunisia--Qayrawān
North Africa
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Katie Gilbert
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1943
1945
142 Squadron
16 OTU
571 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
civil defence
crewing up
Gee
Home Guard
Mosquito
navigator
Operational Training Unit
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Oakington
RAF Upper Heyford
training
Wellington
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/283/6692/PJonesPW1606.1.jpg
2c6796117404e6f8a2b57367b5876a71
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/283/6692/PJonesPW1607.2.jpg
e905f613134873d98cadcb062ccca7c5
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
Jones, Thomas John
Tom Jones
T Jones
Description
An account of the resource
62 items. An oral history interview with Peter William Arthur Jones (b. 1954) about his father Thomas John Jones DFC (b. 1921, 1640434 and 184141 Royal Air Force), his log book, photographs, correspondence, service documents, aircraft recognition manuals, medals and a memoir. He flew operations as a flight engineer on 622 Squadron Stirling and 7 Squadron on Lancaster. <br /><br />The collection also contains an <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2566">Album</a> of 129 types of aircraft. <br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Peter Jones 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
2014-12-04
2017-12-07
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Jones, PW
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
No 7 SQUADRON P.F.F. 8 GRP
RAF OAKINGTON
CAMBS
SEPT 1944
AVRO LANCSTER BIII
PA964 MG-G
L – R
J NAYLOR REAR GUNNER RAF
S HARPER BOMB AIMER RAF
D GOODWIN NAVIGATOR RNZAF
F PHILLIPS PILOT RAAF
T JONES FLT ENGINEER RAF
S WILLIAMSON W/OP AG RAAF
C THURSTON H2S OPERATOR RNZAF
R WYNNE M/U GUNNER RAF
[red dot] GARDENING SKAGGERAK
[red dot] HANNOVER
[red dot] HANNOVER
[red dot] GARDENING KATTEGAT
[red dot] KASSEL
[red dot] LUDWIGSHAFEN
[red dot] BERLIN
[red dot] BERLIN
[red dot] STUTTGART
[red dot] SCHWEINFURT
[red dot] STUTTGART
[red dot] LILLE
[red dot] AACHEN
[red dot] TERGNIER
[red dot] KARLSRUNE
[red dot] ESSEN
[red dot] CHAMBLEY
[red dot] MANTES
[red dot] DUISBURG
[red dot] DORTMUND
[red dot] AACHEN
[red dot] RENNES
[red dot] Mt COUPLE
[red dot] FRAUGEVILLE
[red dot] FORET DE CERISY
[red dot] FOUGERES
[red dot] RENNES
[red dot] TOURS
[red dot] AMIENS
[red dot] VALENCIENNES
[red dot] RENESCURE
[red dot] OISEMONT
[green dot] BIENNAIS
[green dot] ST MARTIN D’ORTIERS
[green dot] FORET DE CACC
[green dot] LIUZEUX
[green dot] THIVERNY
[red dot] CHALONS SUR MARENE
[green dot] CAGHEY
[red dot] AULNOYE
[red dot] HAMBURG
[red dot] KIEL
[red dot] STUTTGART
[red dot] FERFAY
[red dot] STUTTGART
[green dot]NORMANDY BATTLE AREA
[green dot]NOYELLE EN CHAUSSE
[green dot]FORET DE NIEPPE
[green dot]FORET D’ADAM
[red dot] CABOURG
[red dot] NORMANDY BATTLE AREA
[green dot] FORET DE MORMAL
[red dot] LA PALLICE
[green dot] MONTRICHARD
[red dot] FALAISE
[green dot] OUF EN TERNOIS
[red dot] STETTIN
[green dot] LUMBRES
[green dot] VENLO
[green dot] LE HARVE
[green dot] EMDEN
[green dot] LE HAVRE
[green dot] LE HAVRE
[green dot] LE HAVRE
OPERATIONS
[red dot] NIGHT
[green dot] DAY
2 TOURS EXPIRED
10 SEPT. 1944.
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
Lancaster and Fred Phillips' crew
Description
An account of the resource
A starboard side view of a Lancaster, PA964, on the ground. There are eight aircrew standing at the nose. On the reverse is a list of the aircrew including Tom Jones and a list of his operations.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Royal New Zealand Air Force
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PJonesPW1606, PJonesPW1607
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Atlantic Ocean--Skagerrak
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Stuttgart
France--Lille
Germany--Aachen
France--Tergnier (Canton)
Germany--Karlsruhe
France--Chambley Air Base
France--Mantes-la-Jolie
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Dortmund
France--Rennes
France--Cerisy-la-Salle
France--Fougères (Ille-et-Vilaine)
France--Tours
France--Amiens
France--Valenciennes
France--Oisemont (Canton)
France--Creil
France--Châlons-en-Champagne
France--Maubeuge
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Kiel
France--Béthune
France--Normandy
France--Abbeville Region
France--Pas-de-Calais
France--L'Isle-Adam
France--Cabourg
France--La Pallice
France--Montrichard
France--Falaise
France--Hesdin
Poland--Szczecin
France--Lumbres
Netherlands--Venlo
France--Le Havre
Germany--Emden (Lower Saxony)
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
France--Saint-Omer (Pas-de-Calais)
Poland
France
Germany
Netherlands
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Atlantic Ocean--Kattegat (Baltic Sea)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Claire Monk
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-09
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-09
7 Squadron
8 Group
air gunner
aircrew
bomb aimer
bombing
dispersal
flight engineer
H2S
Lancaster
Lancaster Mk 3
mine laying
navigator
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Pathfinders
pilot
RAF Oakington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/283/6693/LJonesTJ184141v1.2.pdf
5748d2448d5ea2cadc0c3e9a2aadc8de
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
Jones, Thomas John
Tom Jones
T Jones
Description
An account of the resource
62 items. An oral history interview with Peter William Arthur Jones (b. 1954) about his father Thomas John Jones DFC (b. 1921, 1640434 and 184141 Royal Air Force), his log book, photographs, correspondence, service documents, aircraft recognition manuals, medals and a memoir. He flew operations as a flight engineer on 622 Squadron Stirling and 7 Squadron on Lancaster. <br /><br />The collection also contains an <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2566">Album</a> of 129 types of aircraft. <br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Peter Jones 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
2014-12-04
2017-12-07
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Jones, PW
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Tom Jones’ navigator’s, air bomber’s and air gunner’s flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
Navigator’s, air bomber’s and air gunner’s flying log book for Sergeant Tom Jones from 17 August 1943 to 27 August 1945. Detailing training schedule, instructional duties and operations flown. Served at RAF Mildenhall, RAF Warboys, RAF Oakington, RAF Nutts Corner, RAF Riccall and RAF Dishforth. Aircraft flown were. Stirling, Lancaster, Oxford, C-47 and York. He flew a total of 11-night operations with 622 squadron and 51 operations with 7 squadron pathfinder force. 18 daylight and 33-night operations on the following targets in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Poland: Aachen, Amiens, Aulnoye, Berlin, Biennias [sic], Cabourg, Cagney [sic], Chalons sur Marne, Chambley, Dortmund, Duisburg, Emden, Essen, Falaise, Fougeres, Foret de l'Isle-Adam, Franceville, Hannover, Homburg, Karlsruhe, Kassel, Kattegat, Kiel, Le Havre, Lille, Liuzeux [sic], Ludwigshafen, Lumbres, Montrichard, Mt Couple [sic], Mantes, Normandy battle area, Oisemont, <span>Œuf-en-Ternois</span> [sic], Renescure, Rennes, Schweinfurt, Skagerrak, St Martin d’Hortiers, Stettin, Stuttgart, Tergnier, Thiverny, Tours, Valenciennes, Venlo aerodrome and V-1 sites. His pilots on operations were Flight Lieutenant Phillips DFC, Wing Commander Lockhart and Wing Commander Cox. The log book is well annotated with comments about events during operations.
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
LJonesTJ184141v1
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.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Germany
Great Britain
Netherlands
Poland
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Atlantic Ocean--Bay of Biscay
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
Atlantic Ocean--Kattegat (Baltic Sea)
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
Atlantic Ocean--Skagerrak
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Suffolk
England--Yorkshire
France--Amiens
France--Cabourg
France--Chambley Air Base
France--Falaise
France--La Pallice
France--Le Havre
France--Lille
France--L'Isle-Adam
France--Lumbres
France--Mantes-la-Jolie
France--Montrichard
France--Nord (Department)
France--Normandy
France--Nieppe Forest
France--Oise
France--Oisemont (Canton)
France--Pas-de-Calais
France--Rennes
France--Somme
France--Tergnier (Canton)
France--Tours
France--Valenciennes
Germany--Aachen
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Emden (Lower Saxony)
Germany--Essen
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Homberg (Kassel)
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Germany--Schweinfurt
Germany--Stuttgart
Netherlands--Venlo
Northern Ireland--Antrim (County)
Poland--Szczecin
France--Neufchâtel-en-Bray
France--Châlons-en-Champagne
Great Britain
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
France--Œuf-en-Ternois
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
1943-09-21
1943-09-22
1943-09-27
1943-09-28
1943-10-02
1943-10-03
1943-10-04
1943-11-18
1943-11-22
1943-11-23
1944-01-30
1944-01-31
1944-02-20
1944-02-21
1944-02-24
1944-02-25
1944-03-01
1944-03-02
1944-04-09
1944-04-10
1944-04-11
1944-04-12
1944-04-18
1944-04-19
1944-04-24
1944-04-25
1944-04-26
1944-04-27
1944-05-01
1944-05-02
1944-05-06
1944-05-07
1944-05-21
1944-05-22
1944-05-23
1944-05-24
1944-05-25
1944-05-27
1944-05-28
1944-05-31
1944-06-01
1944-06-06
1944-06-07
1944-06-08
1944-06-09
1944-06-11
1944-06-12
1944-06-13
1944-06-15
1944-06-16
1944-06-17
1944-06-27
1944-06-28
1944-07-01
1944-07-04
1944-07-06
1944-07-08
1944-07-12
1944-07-15
1944-07-16
1944-07-18
1944-07-19
1944-07-20
1944-07-21
1944-07-23
1944-07-24
1944-07-25
1944-07-26
1944-07-28
1944-07-29
1944-07-30
1944-08-01
1944-08-04
1944-08-06
1944-08-07
1944-08-08
1944-08-09
1944-08-10
1944-08-11
1944-08-12
1944-08-13
1944-08-28
1944-08-29
1944-08-30
1944-09-01
1944-09-03
1944-09-05
1944-09-06
1944-09-09
1944-09-10
1944-06-05
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
1657 HCU
622 Squadron
7 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
B-24
bombing
bombing of the Normandy coastal batteries (5/6 June 1944)
C-47
flight engineer
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 3
mine laying
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Oxford
Pathfinders
RAF Dishforth
RAF Mildenhall
RAF Nutts Corner
RAF Oakington
RAF Riccall
RAF Stradishall
RAF Warboys
Stirling
tactical support for Normandy troops
target indicator
training
V-1
V-weapon
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/283/6694/PJonesPW16010001.1.jpg
c8ae6ce1c743a6d7892de00f4921f16b
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/283/6694/PJonesPW16010002.1.jpg
114b8f1f15478216af7f1dc518cd642d
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
Jones, Thomas John
Tom Jones
T Jones
Description
An account of the resource
62 items. An oral history interview with Peter William Arthur Jones (b. 1954) about his father Thomas John Jones DFC (b. 1921, 1640434 and 184141 Royal Air Force), his log book, photographs, correspondence, service documents, aircraft recognition manuals, medals and a memoir. He flew operations as a flight engineer on 622 Squadron Stirling and 7 Squadron on Lancaster. <br /><br />The collection also contains an <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2566">Album</a> of 129 types of aircraft. <br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Peter Jones 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
2014-12-04
2017-12-07
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Jones, PW
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Front Row L-R
Stan Williamson RAAP W/OP
Tom Jones RAFVR F/E
Ron Wynne RAFVR A/G-HWP
Joe “Jonny” Naylor RAFVR A/G rear
Back L-R
Fred Phillips RAAF Pilot
Dave Goodwin RNZAF Nav 1
Clive Thurston RNZAF Radar + Nav 2
Steve Harper RNZVR B/A
Sept 1944
7 SQUADRON. BOMBER COMMAND
R.A.F OAKINGTON 8 GROUP P.F.F
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
Fred Phillips' crew and Lancaster
Description
An account of the resource
A group of eight airmen standing at the nose of a Lancaster. On the reverse are the names of the aircrew.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-09
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PJonesPW16010001, PJonesPW16010002
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
Royal New Zealand Air Force
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-09
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Claire Monk
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
7 Squadron
8 Group
air gunner
aircrew
bomb aimer
flight engineer
Lancaster
navigator
Pathfinders
pilot
RAF Oakington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/283/6695/PJonesPW16010003.1.jpg
f4ecc1f9637d94d972dfba79baf5b483
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/283/6695/PJonesPW16010004.1.jpg
47cd0743e2b5456546c5525cb4ef4c5d
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
Jones, Thomas John
Tom Jones
T Jones
Description
An account of the resource
62 items. An oral history interview with Peter William Arthur Jones (b. 1954) about his father Thomas John Jones DFC (b. 1921, 1640434 and 184141 Royal Air Force), his log book, photographs, correspondence, service documents, aircraft recognition manuals, medals and a memoir. He flew operations as a flight engineer on 622 Squadron Stirling and 7 Squadron on Lancaster. <br /><br />The collection also contains an <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2566">Album</a> of 129 types of aircraft. <br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Peter Jones 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
2014-12-04
2017-12-07
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Jones, PW
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
L-R
Steve Harper
Fred Phillips
Dave Goodwin
Clive Thurston
Joe Naylor
Ron Wynne
Indoor L-R
Stan Williamson
Tom Jones
SEPT 1944
7 SQUADRON BOMBER COMMAND.
R.A.F. OAKINGTON. 8 GROUP P.F.F.
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
Lancaster and Fred Phillips' crew
Description
An account of the resource
Eight airmen at the port door of a Lancaster, PA964. Two men are sitting in the door and the other six are standing or leaning on the fuselage. On the reverse are the aircrew names.'
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-09
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph
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
PJonesPW16010003, PJonesPW16010004
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
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Claire Monk
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--Cambridgeshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-09
7 Squadron
8 Group
air gunner
aircrew
bomb aimer
flight engineer
Lancaster
navigator
Pathfinders
pilot
RAF Oakington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/283/6696/PJonesPW16010005.1.jpg
57adcb1c3cec8fe14b6ec1c25aec1e38
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/283/6696/PJonesPW16010006.1.jpg
c61ee102560f27581e9ec0aa180fb011
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
Jones, Thomas John
Tom Jones
T Jones
Description
An account of the resource
62 items. An oral history interview with Peter William Arthur Jones (b. 1954) about his father Thomas John Jones DFC (b. 1921, 1640434 and 184141 Royal Air Force), his log book, photographs, correspondence, service documents, aircraft recognition manuals, medals and a memoir. He flew operations as a flight engineer on 622 Squadron Stirling and 7 Squadron on Lancaster. <br /><br />The collection also contains an <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2566">Album</a> of 129 types of aircraft. <br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Peter Jones 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
2014-12-04
2017-12-07
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Jones, PW
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
PA 964 MG-K
L-R
Fred Phillips
Dave Goodwin
Stan Williamson
Clive Thurston
Ron Wynne
Joe Naylor
Tom Jones
Steve Harper
SEPT 1944
7 SQUADRON BOMBER COMMAND
RAF OAKINGTON 8 GROUP P.F.F.
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
Fred Phillips' crew and Lancaster
Description
An account of the resource
Eight aircrew, including Tom Jones, standing in front of Lancaster, PA964, 'MG-K'. On the reverse the individual members are identified.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-09
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph
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
PJonesPW16010005, PJonesPW16010006
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
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Claire Monk
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--Cambridgeshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-09
7 Squadron
8 Group
air gunner
aircrew
bomb aimer
flight engineer
Lancaster
navigator
Pathfinders
pilot
RAF Oakington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/283/6697/PJonesPW16010007.2.jpg
6c634b66d9ba7e0de1571ec3ba4bd63b
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/283/6697/PJonesPW16010008.2.jpg
5a355c1d0b2961cfd1a7ed30dbdffea6
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
Jones, Thomas John
Tom Jones
T Jones
Description
An account of the resource
62 items. An oral history interview with Peter William Arthur Jones (b. 1954) about his father Thomas John Jones DFC (b. 1921, 1640434 and 184141 Royal Air Force), his log book, photographs, correspondence, service documents, aircraft recognition manuals, medals and a memoir. He flew operations as a flight engineer on 622 Squadron Stirling and 7 Squadron on Lancaster. <br /><br />The collection also contains an <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2566">Album</a> of 129 types of aircraft. <br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Peter Jones 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
2014-12-04
2017-12-07
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Jones, PW
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
PA 964 MG-K
L-R
Joe Naylor
Steve Harper
Dave Goodwin
Fred Phillips
Tom Jones
Stan Williamson
Clive Thurston
Ron Wynne
SEPT. 1944
7 SQUADRON BOMBER COMMAND
R.A.F. OAKINGTON 8 GROUP P.F.F
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
Lancaster and Fred Phillips' crew
Description
An account of the resource
Eight aircrew, including Tom Jones, standing at the starboard side front of a Lancaster, PA964. On the reverse the aircrew are identified.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-09
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph
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
PJonesPW16010007, PJonesPW16010008
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
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Claire Monk
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--Cambridgeshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-09
7 Squadron
8 Group
air gunner
aircrew
bomb aimer
dispersal
flight engineer
Lancaster
navigator
Pathfinders
pilot
RAF Oakington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/283/6698/PJonesPW16010009.1.jpg
367ed23ddc50f594305bfddac0e18c73
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/283/6698/PJonesPW16010010.1.jpg
0e67095cb2ada9e91d7f877b7edf4964
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
Jones, Thomas John
Tom Jones
T Jones
Description
An account of the resource
62 items. An oral history interview with Peter William Arthur Jones (b. 1954) about his father Thomas John Jones DFC (b. 1921, 1640434 and 184141 Royal Air Force), his log book, photographs, correspondence, service documents, aircraft recognition manuals, medals and a memoir. He flew operations as a flight engineer on 622 Squadron Stirling and 7 Squadron on Lancaster. <br /><br />The collection also contains an <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2566">Album</a> of 129 types of aircraft. <br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Peter Jones 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
2014-12-04
2017-12-07
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Jones, PW
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
PA 964 MG-K
L-R
Tom Jones
Steve Harper
Clive Thurston
Dave Goodwin
Joe Naylor
Fred Phillips – in cockpit
Ron Wynne
Stan Williamson
SEPT. 1944
7 SQUADRON BOMBER COMMAND
R.A.F. OAKINGTON 8 GROUP P.F.F.
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
Fred Phillips' crew and Lancaster
Description
An account of the resource
Five aircrew sitting on the starboard inner engine of Lancaster PA964, MG-K, one sitting in the cockpit and two including Tom Jones are sitting at the back of the cockpit. The individuals are named on the reverse.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-09
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph
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
PJonesPW16010009, PJonesPW16010010
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
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Claire Monk
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--Cambridgeshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-09
7 Squadron
8 Group
air gunner
aircrew
bomb aimer
flight engineer
Lancaster
navigator
Pathfinders
pilot
RAF Oakington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/283/6707/PJonesPW16010027.1.jpg
901c7828467979e117cd82b5d7517cc1
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/283/6707/PJonesPW16010028.1.jpg
c938cbce78c84d57c53bcb043c471421
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
Jones, Thomas John
Tom Jones
T Jones
Description
An account of the resource
62 items. An oral history interview with Peter William Arthur Jones (b. 1954) about his father Thomas John Jones DFC (b. 1921, 1640434 and 184141 Royal Air Force), his log book, photographs, correspondence, service documents, aircraft recognition manuals, medals and a memoir. He flew operations as a flight engineer on 622 Squadron Stirling and 7 Squadron on Lancaster. <br /><br />The collection also contains an <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2566">Album</a> of 129 types of aircraft. <br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Peter Jones 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
2014-12-04
2017-12-07
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Jones, PW
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
On tail L-R
Ron Wynne
Tom Jones
Stan Williamson
L-R
Fred Phillips
Frank Shaw – ground crew
Steve Harper
Dave Goodwin
Clive Thurston
Joe Naylor
Sept 1944
7 SQUADRON BOMBER COMMAND
R.A.F. OAKINGTON 8 GROUP P.F.F.
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
Fred Phillip's crew and Lancaster
Description
An account of the resource
A group of aircrew and one ground crew member arranged at the rear starboard side of Lancaster PA964. Six are standing and three are sitting on the tail plane. One the reverse it is captioned with the names of the aircrew.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-09
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph
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
PJonesPW16010027, PJonesPW16010028
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
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Claire Monk
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--Cambridgeshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-09
7 Squadron
8 Group
air gunner
aircrew
bomb aimer
flight engineer
ground crew
ground personnel
Lancaster
navigator
Pathfinders
pilot
RAF Oakington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/380/6891/MHattersleyCR40699-160506-030001.2.pdf
285015105f751b1a073cff037b679249
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
Hattersley, Peter
Peter Hattersley
C R Hattersley
Charles Raymond Hattersley
Description
An account of the resource
77 items. The collection concerns Wing Commander Charles Raymond Hattersley DFC (1914-1948, 800429, 40699 Royal Air Force). Peter Hattersley served in the Royal Engineers between 1930 and 1935 but enlisted in the RAF in 1936. He trained as a pilot and flew with 106, 44 and 199 Squadrons. He completed 32 operations with 44 Squadron but had to force land his Wellington in France on his first operation with 199 Squadron in December 1942. He became a prisoner of war. He married Miss Kathleen Hattersley nee Croft after the war. The collection contains his logbook, notebooks, service material, his decorations and items of memorabilia in a tin box and 39 photographs.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Charles William Hattersley and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-05-06
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Hattersley, CR
Access Rights
Information about who can access the resource or an indication of its security status. Access Rights may include information regarding access or restrictions based on privacy, security, or other policies.
Permission granted for commercial projects
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HATTERSLEY
SERVICE DIARY
ROYAL AIR FORCE
LARGE NOTE BOOK
[page break]
[blank page]
[page break]
[underlined] 27TH. LONDON BTN R.E. (TA)
(London Elec. Engineers)
Nov 1930 – Dec 1935
[bracketed] Sapper L/Cpl Cpl [/bracketed] 306 Coy.
Lewis Sun. Sound Locator. Driver M.T.
[page break]
[underlined] 600 (CITY OF LONDON) B. SQDN AAF [/underlined]
Feb 1936 – Mch 1937
[inserted] ACH [/inserted]
AC.2 W/OP T.21 & TF. T.R.9.D.
Hant (passenger) 6 hrs
[page break]
[underlined] R.A.F.V.R. [/underlined]
Mch 30th 1937 – 3rd Apl 1938
Sgt.
[bracketed] Blackburn B.2 Hant (T) Audax [/bracketed] Flying Training Flt Hanworth Aerodrome
Assessment – above average pilot.
[page break]
[underlined] RA.F.
READING CIVIL SCHOOL
4th April 1938 – 7/5/38
MilesHawk Trainer & Magister
UXBRIDGE
7/5/38 – 21/5/38
NO 6 F.T.S.
Netheravon 21/5/38 – 4/9/38
L. Rissington 4/9/38 – 17/12/38
Audax & Hart (T)
Attachments.
NO.1 A.T.C. CATFOSS
31/10/38 – 4/12/38
Assessment – above average pilot
[page break]
S. of AN. MANSTON
2/1/39 – 11/3/39
Anson (1st & 2nd Navigator)
Obtained 2nd cl. Nav ticker (R.A.F.)
106 (B) SQDN. THORNABY (“B” flt)
11/3/39 –
Regarded as P.O. 7/3/39
Fairy [underlined] Battles [/underlined]
Dual .35 mins to solo
Avro [underlined] Ansons [/underlined]
Dual 1 1/2 hrs to solo
Handley Page [underlined] Hampdens [/underlined]
Dual 1 1/2 hrs to solo
July assessment – Pilot – average Navigator – above average
[page break]
[duplicated bookmark]
[page break]
[underlined] 106 Sqdn (contd) [/underlined]
Made Sqdn Signals Officer abt 10/7/39 (Blackpool)
19/8/39. Squadron moved to Armament Training Camp Evanton
4/9/39 Squadron moved to Cottesmore
6/10/39 Squadron moved to Finningley.
10-11-39 Made Regional Control Officer [deleted] 10-11-39 [/deleted]
(& Sigs. Officer)
[bracketed] 1/1/40 26/1/40 [/bracketed] Astro Course at St Athan
28/1/40 Finningley made Sqdn. Navigation Officer.
[photograph of a Handley Page Hampden aircraft]
[page break]
[underlined] 44 Sqdn. Waddington [/underlined]
15/6/40
Posted to 44 Sqdn ‘B’ flt.
17/5/40 1st Operational flight [underlined] over Germany [/underlined]
Hamburg 4 x 500 lb G.P. bombs
Won D.F.C. (& navigator DFM). Crew [bracketed] Windle Atkinson Edmunds [/bracketed]
L.4154 (Q)
14/9/40 Posted to SHQ. & act. Flight Lieutenant
[inserted two newspaper cuttings]
[indecipherable text]
[underlined] 31 ANS [/underlined] (cont)
19/12/41 No 17 Co. ends. [underlined] Passed![/underlined]
19-26/12 Leave
[deleted] 26/12 [/deleted] 26-29/12 Lectures to SFTSs in Ontario
29-31/12 Party in Royal York – Toronto.
[boxed note 1/1/42 Mention in Dispatches {sic] (Ron. Gayette)]
31-6/1/42 Party in [indecipherable] Royal – Montreal.
6/1 – 27/1 Bermuda
27/1 – 28/1 Elizabeth City. N.C.
28/1 – 8/2 Bermuda
[collective explanatory note for period 8-9/2 to 12/2 – Posted 1 Group HQ.]
8-9/2 – Flying Atlantic
9/2 [deleted] [indecipherable] [/deleted] Stranraer
10/2 [two indecipherable words]
12/2 Leave
18/2 Reporting 1 Gp
[underlined] 1 Gp HQ Bawtry [/underlined]
8/2/42 Posted [inserted] (supernumary pending posting to S/L post G.N.O.). [/inserted]
18/2/42 Reported for Nav duties
1/3/42 Granted acting rank of Squadron Leader. – G.N.O. 1 group
7/11/42. Posted to BLYTON to form and command No. 199 Sqdn Granted acting rank of WING COMMANDER.
9/12/42 Missing. France.
12/12/42 Captured P.O.W until 2/5/45.
1/1/43 Mentioned in Despatches (Jan. honours list.)
2/5/45 Released near Lübeck
7/5/45 Arrived England (Wing)
8/5/45 Cosford
9/5/45 Leave until 22/6/45
1/6/45 Applied for P.C.
[page break]
22/6/45 Cosford
23/6/45 Medical = A1B.
23/6/45 – 9/7/45 Leave
10/7/45 Reported 7. F.I.S. Upavon for refresher fly course.
[inserted] 24/7/45 Applied for 18 months postponement of release. [/inserted]
7/8/45 Posted to HQ 43 Group for S.P.S.O. duties. [inserted] as CO Unit. [/inserted] w.ef. 17/8/46 [/inserted]
26/3/46 A.M. P’gram advising will be offered E.S. Comm.
28/3/46 Signalled AM from 43 Gp provisionally accepts.
1/4/46 Posted to AM [inserted] D of Nav [/inserted] as NAV. P.I. retaining acting rank.
Aug ’46 Gazetted Permanent Commission
20/3/47 Posted to HQTC for disposal (Sfy) [indecipherable word]
8/4/47 Posted to 1382 T.C.U. on no35 Course. Passed
15/8/47 Posted Syerston further T.C. course passed
17/9/47 Trip to India flying Dakotas until Oct. 2 [underlined]nd[/underlined]
10/10/47 Posted Abingdon Deputy o/c Flying Wing
2/12/47 Posted Oakington Senior Nav officer & Dep. o/C F.W.
29/6/48 Jun & July 48 Berlin Airlift
24/9/48 Died at RAF Oakington.
[page break]
[blank page]
[page break]
Ode to the skies [underlined] – Up There. [/underlined]
Up there we speed amongst the clouds, Whose billowing shrouds absorb the sounds Emitted with the smoke & flame, From our steed – the aeroplane.
Up there we travel in between Great towering banks of pure white screen. Truly – Castles in the Air, Whose beauty takes your breath, - up there.
Up there we sit and let our gaze Wander in a cloudy maze, And think ’tis shame that Beauty reigns – But seen by us, in aeroplanes
Up there we roam in sunlit sky, A world apart for those who fly. Whilst men upon the surface lurk In cold November’s fog and murk.
Up there unfolds the beauteous night, The moon in all her glorious might, The stars undimmed by Autumns mist, The distant hills by sunset kissed.
[page break]
Up there and now the early dawn Begins to herald in the morn. Long ‘ere earthly man’s aware The rays are lighting us, - up there
[underlined] Finningley Nov 1939 [/underlined]
[page break]
[underlined] To my beloved Sally [/underlined]
Sweet Sally how I miss your loving charm, The feel of you, your hand upon my arm; Your sweet warm breath upon my eager lips; The lovely imperfection of your hips.
Dear Sally how I love your flaxen hair; The breath of Spring about you everywhere. The soft light melting on your smooth white skin, The gentle perfume of your lovely skin.
Hey Sally I can’t say how much I miss The exquisite trembling of your tender kiss; The thrill of sensing your dear lips on mine, My body pressed into the warmth of thine.
Fair Sally how I love your eyes to show That feeling of such tenderness I know; That lovliness [sic] those perfect lids conceal, But opened such a wealth of charm reveal.
Sweet Sally within those slender arms entwined Is our love’s great [indecipherable word] defined. Such moments in their sweet embrace exist, I could not, - if I wanted to, resist.
[page break]
Oh Sally that we two should ever part Not always hand in hand and heart to heart, That this should happen darling, never fear, I’ll fight the very Gods to keep you near.
- Finningley Dec. 1939.
[page break]
[underlined] To – a Love, - a requeim [sic] [/underlined]
We met, we saw, we noticed, In times of strain, of strife. Our paths ran close together, Sweet moment in a life. Tis not for me to wonder Why paths should so converge, And enter realms of beauty Then suddenly emerge.
Nor ‘tis for me to question The fancies of the Fates, Who play their human playthings Behind their golden gates. But rather should I show my thanks For moments far too rare, For seconds in this passing hour Too lovely to compare.
‘Tis better for to love and lose, Than never know that bliss, That height to which you raised me In the heaven of your kiss. And so I thank thee Sally, For moments we embraced, And look towards the future Which can better now be faced.
[page break]
For though our paths diverge again, That fleeting instant showed, A world of such complexity, - Of magic yet untold; A world if I’d not known thee Would still be dull and bare, But having met thee dearest I’ll so much better fare.
And so into a memory So sweet, your presence parts, But say not that we wasted Those hours near our hearts. For memories we have Dear, That I’d not give away, For all the worlds sweet treasures Could never mine repay.
Finningley. March. 1940.
[page break]
[underlined] To Ann. [/underlined]
I saw you vaguely one vague day Not thinking that again we’d meet, But I felt your impression stay, - Oh Ann, - I found you very sweet.
I found beneath your face of calm, Shown with bold trust and openly, - A world of gay and subtle charm, Oh Ann, - how much I’d give for thee.
I write and see your face appear – You’re in my thoughts so constantly, Your voice in every sound I hear, Oh Ann, - I pray thee smile on me. –
Cottesmore, June 1941
[page break]
[underlined] Ode to an invitation [/underlined]
Come, give me your lips fair Pamela, give me your lips, Let their ripeness be mine fair Pamela, - so sweetly mine. Keep not their fair sweet freshness yourself Keep not their joy and fragrant wealth, - Give me your lips fair Pamela, - so sweetly thine.
Come, give me your hand sweet Pamela, give me your hand, Place its’ smallness in mine fair Pamela, sweetly in mine. Hold not its’ sweetness in solitude Hold not its’ fairness and beautytude [sic], - Give me your hand sweet Pamela, give me your hand.
Come, give me your self fair Pamela, give me your self, To love and to hold sweet Pamela, to hold and to love. Keep not your purity obscure, Keep [deleted] [indecipherable] [/deleted] your goddesslike [sic] allure – But give me your Self fair Pamela, give me your Self
Bawtry [underlined] June 1942 [/underlined]
[page break]
[underlined] To Kay, as Love appeared. [/underlined]
In all Her bountiful and queenly grace arrayed Views from high Olympus Earthwards strayed, And gave Her blessing. Thus enchanted she Did bid me kneel and pledge my faith to thee.
Uncalled unthought [sic] of, unexpected came That sweet sensation; with a name So often lipped unmeaningly [sic], yet far above All other words, - sweet Love.
Undream’d [sic] of, unexpected happiness Encompassed me, as I perceived that this Ungiven [sic] heart could err no more, Now given to my Katherine’s tender care.
Sagan, August 1943
[page break]
[underlined] To Kay. [/underlined]
Calm moments give to golden thoughts, from thoughts to reverie On untold things in days to come, With Thou and me in harmony.
Such thoughts make life seem beautiful, And seeming, therefore is. What need of other wishes, What more achieve than this?
Sweet Kay, what need to pen these words When all to this succumbs, - Dear when I shall have won thee Life itself a poem becomes.
Sagan, February 1944
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Peter Hattersley's Service Diary
Description
An account of the resource
A service diary written by Peter Hattersley covering the period from November 1930 to 24 September 1948.Initially he served in the Royal Engineers but in February 1936 he joined the RAF. It covers his training and operations including a newspaper cutting of the award of a Distinguished Flying Cross in 1940. There are poems written before and during his time as a POW.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Peter Hattersley
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One diary
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text. Diary
Text. Poetry
Text
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MHattersleyCR40699-160506-03
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
British Army
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
Poland
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Gloucestershire
England--Kent
England--Lincolnshire
England--London
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Oxfordshire
England--Rutland
England--Shropshire
England--Wiltshire
England--Yorkshire
Poland--Żagań
Scotland--Ross and Cromarty
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1938
1939
1940
1941
1942
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
Steve Christian
David Bloomfield
1 Group
106 Squadron
44 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
arts and crafts
Battle
C-47
Distinguished Flying Cross
Hampden
pilot
prisoner of war
RAF Abingdon
RAF Bawtry
RAF Blyton
RAF Catfoss
RAF Cosford
RAF Cottesmore
RAF Evanton
RAF Finningley
RAF Little Rissington
RAF Manston
RAF Netheravon
RAF Oakington
RAF St Athan
RAF Syerston
RAF Thornaby
RAF Uxbridge
RAF Waddington
Stalag Luft 3
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/380/7012/LHattersleyCR40699v1.1.pdf
099f001bc26b394fc0440d57cacdb995
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
Hattersley, Peter
Peter Hattersley
C R Hattersley
Charles Raymond Hattersley
Description
An account of the resource
77 items. The collection concerns Wing Commander Charles Raymond Hattersley DFC (1914-1948, 800429, 40699 Royal Air Force). Peter Hattersley served in the Royal Engineers between 1930 and 1935 but enlisted in the RAF in 1936. He trained as a pilot and flew with 106, 44 and 199 Squadrons. He completed 32 operations with 44 Squadron but had to force land his Wellington in France on his first operation with 199 Squadron in December 1942. He became a prisoner of war. He married Miss Kathleen Hattersley nee Croft after the war. The collection contains his logbook, notebooks, service material, his decorations and items of memorabilia in a tin box and 39 photographs.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Charles William Hattersley and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-05-06
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Hattersley, CR
Access Rights
Information about who can access the resource or an indication of its security status. Access Rights may include information regarding access or restrictions based on privacy, security, or other policies.
Permission granted for commercial projects
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Belgium
Bermuda Islands
Canada
France
Germany
Great Britain
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
England--Berkshire
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Kent
England--Gloucestershire
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Middlesex
England--Norfolk
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Oxfordshire
England--Rutland
England--Shropshire
England--Wiltshire
England--Yorkshire
Ontario
Scotland--Ross and Cromarty
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Belgium--Liège
France--Soissons
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Dessau (Dessau)
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Leuna
Germany--Lingen (Lower Saxony)
Germany--Magdeburg
Germany--Sylt
Germany--Münster in Westfalen
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
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
Title
A name given to the resource
Peter Hattersley's pilot's flying log book
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LHattersleyCR40699v1
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1937
1938
1939
1940
1941
1942
1945
1946
1947
1948
1940-05-17
1940-05-18
1940-05-19
1940-05-20
1940-05-23
1940-05-24
1940-05-25
1940-05-26
1940-05-27
1940-05-28
1940-06-01
1940-06-02
1940-06-03
1940-06-04
1940-06-07
1940-06-08
1940-06-09
1940-06-10
1940-06-11
1940-06-12
1940-06-20
1940-06-21
1940-06-25
1940-06-26
1940-07-01
1940-07-02
1940-07-05
1940-07-06
1940-07-09
1940-07-10
1940-07-20
1940-07-21
1940-07-22
1940-07-23
1940-07-25
1940-07-26
1940-07-28
1940-07-29
1940-07-31
1940-08-01
1940-08-03
1940-08-04
1940-08-07
1940-08-08
1940-08-11
1940-08-12
1940-08-13
1940-08-14
1940-08-16
1940-08-17
1940-08-21
1940-08-22
1940-08-25
1940-08-26
1940-08-28
1940-08-29
1940-08-31
1940-09-01
1940-09-03
1940-09-04
1940-09-06
1940-09-07
1940-09-08
1940-09-09
1942-12-09
1942-12-10
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
Pilot's log book for Wing Commander Peter Hattersley, covering the period 10 April 1937 to 24 September 1948. It details his flying training, operations flown and other flying duties. He was stationed at Hanworth Park, RAF Reading, RAF Netheravon, RAF Little Rissington, RAF Catfoss, RAF Manston, RAF Thornaby, RAF Evanton, RAF Cottesmore, RAF Finningley, RAF St. Athan, RAF Waddington, RCAF Port Albert, Darrels Island-Bermuda, RAF Bawtry, RAF Blyton, RAF Upavon, RAF Shawbury, RAF Bircham Newton, RAF Wymeswold, RAF Syerston, RAF Oakington, RAF Cosford, RAF Stanmore and RAF Abingdon. Aircraft Flown in were, Blackburn B2, Hart, Audax, Mile Hawk, Magister, Battle I, Anson, Hampden, Tiger Moth, Lysander, Catalina, Wellington, Oxford II, Hudson, Harvard IIb, Proctor and Dakota. He flew a total of 32 night operations in Hampdens with 44 Squadron from RAF Waddington, and one operation with 199 Squadron. Took part in Berlin Airlift (Operation Plainfare).Targets in Belgium, France, and Germany were Hannover, Hamburg, Lingan, Rhine, Leige, Keil, Frankfurt, Duisberg, Soisson, Rhur, Sylt, Dessau, Leuna, Magdeburg, Berlin and Munster. Some navigation logs and correspondence concerning the award of his Distinguished Flying Cross are included in his log book. He became a POW in late 1942.
106 Squadron
14 OTU
199 Squadron
44 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
Battle
bombing
C-47
Catalina
Distinguished Flying Cross
Flying Training School
George VI, King of Great Britain (1895-1952)
Hampden
Harvard
Hudson
Lysander
Magister
navigator
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
prisoner of war
Proctor
RAF Abingdon
RAF Bawtry
RAF Bircham Newton
RAF Blyton
RAF Catfoss
RAF Cosford
RAF Cottesmore
RAF Evanton
RAF Finningley
RAF Little Rissington
RAF Manston
RAF Netheravon
RAF Oakington
RAF Shawbury
RAF St Athan
RAF Syerston
RAF Thornaby
RAF Upavon
RAF Waddington
RAF Wymeswold
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/380/7022/MHattersleyCR40699-160506-110001.2.pdf
995fdff83e81e5cb178570d0eabd60e5
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
Hattersley, Peter
Peter Hattersley
C R Hattersley
Charles Raymond Hattersley
Description
An account of the resource
77 items. The collection concerns Wing Commander Charles Raymond Hattersley DFC (1914-1948, 800429, 40699 Royal Air Force). Peter Hattersley served in the Royal Engineers between 1930 and 1935 but enlisted in the RAF in 1936. He trained as a pilot and flew with 106, 44 and 199 Squadrons. He completed 32 operations with 44 Squadron but had to force land his Wellington in France on his first operation with 199 Squadron in December 1942. He became a prisoner of war. He married Miss Kathleen Hattersley nee Croft after the war. The collection contains his logbook, notebooks, service material, his decorations and items of memorabilia in a tin box and 39 photographs.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Charles William Hattersley and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-05-06
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Hattersley, CR
Access Rights
Information about who can access the resource or an indication of its security status. Access Rights may include information regarding access or restrictions based on privacy, security, or other policies.
Permission granted for commercial projects
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Peter Hattersley's note book
Description
An account of the resource
A duplicate book with letters handwritten by Peter Hattersley to various people and organisations.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Peter Hattersley
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
23 pages of a duplicate book
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text. Correspondence
Text
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MHattersleyCR40699-160506-11
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1947
1948
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Cambridge
England--Cambridgeshire
RAF Oakington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/380/7025/MHattersleyCR40699-160506-110017.2.jpg
9210754c8b4c08a86e85920d4c26cde6
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
Hattersley, Peter
Peter Hattersley
C R Hattersley
Charles Raymond Hattersley
Description
An account of the resource
77 items. The collection concerns Wing Commander Charles Raymond Hattersley DFC (1914-1948, 800429, 40699 Royal Air Force). Peter Hattersley served in the Royal Engineers between 1930 and 1935 but enlisted in the RAF in 1936. He trained as a pilot and flew with 106, 44 and 199 Squadrons. He completed 32 operations with 44 Squadron but had to force land his Wellington in France on his first operation with 199 Squadron in December 1942. He became a prisoner of war. He married Miss Kathleen Hattersley nee Croft after the war. The collection contains his logbook, notebooks, service material, his decorations and items of memorabilia in a tin box and 39 photographs.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Charles William Hattersley and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-05-06
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Hattersley, CR
Access Rights
Information about who can access the resource or an indication of its security status. Access Rights may include information regarding access or restrictions based on privacy, security, or other policies.
Permission granted for commercial projects
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter from Group Captain R E Bain to The Telephone Manager
Description
An account of the resource
The letter is in support of Peter Hattersley's request for a telephone line to be installed at his house.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1948-05-20
Format
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One typewritten sheet
Language
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eng
Type
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Text. Correspondence
Text
Identifier
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MHattersleyCR40699-160506-110017
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1948-05-20
Creator
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Great Britain. Royal Air Force
RAF Oakington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/380/7035/MHattersleyCR40699-160506-19.1.jpg
1bb562897e66d39dbd5a35604db914b8
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
Hattersley, Peter
Peter Hattersley
C R Hattersley
Charles Raymond Hattersley
Description
An account of the resource
77 items. The collection concerns Wing Commander Charles Raymond Hattersley DFC (1914-1948, 800429, 40699 Royal Air Force). Peter Hattersley served in the Royal Engineers between 1930 and 1935 but enlisted in the RAF in 1936. He trained as a pilot and flew with 106, 44 and 199 Squadrons. He completed 32 operations with 44 Squadron but had to force land his Wellington in France on his first operation with 199 Squadron in December 1942. He became a prisoner of war. He married Miss Kathleen Hattersley nee Croft after the war. The collection contains his logbook, notebooks, service material, his decorations and items of memorabilia in a tin box and 39 photographs.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Charles William Hattersley and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Date
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2016-05-06
Identifier
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Hattersley, CR
Access Rights
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Permission granted for commercial projects
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[underlined]FLYING WING, ROYAL AIR FORCE, OAKINGTON
WING INSTRUCTION NO.7.
PILOT’S FLYING LOG BOOKS – METHOD OF RECORDING FLYING TIMES.[/underlined]
The following instructions are to be complied with when recording flying time :-
(a) Qualified first pilots while flying as Captain or aircraft or designated First Pilot – Log Book Columns 6. or. 9.
(b) Qualified First Pilot while flying as Second Pilot – Log Book Columns 7. or 10.
(c) Second Pilots and other pilots not qualified as First Pilot – Log Book Column 7.or 10.
(d) Instructors giving dual instruction [Log Book Columns] 6. or. 9
(e) Pilots receiving dual instruction [Log Book Columns] 5. or 8.
2. Pilots taking passage in aircraft of which they are not designated in the authorisation book as “First Pilot”, “Second Pilot” nor as “Pilot under instruction” are to record the time as [underlined]“passenger”[/underlined].
3. Acceptance Checks and Categorisation Tests are to be recoded as “First Pilot” time by the testing pilot, who will be designated “Captain” of the aircraft, and as First Pilot the the [SIC] pilot being checked or tested.
4. “Route Checks” are designated to assess the general behaviour and ability of crews while operating on the routes. Under these circumstances the Captain of the crew being checked will normally record the time as “First Pilot” time, unless the checking officer actually takes over the controls and the Captain being checked acts as “Second Pilot”.
5. The following amendments are to be made to the Pilot Flying Log Book:-
(a) Column 12 – Delete the heading [undecipherable] and insert “Simulated”
(b) Column 13 – Delete the heading “Pilot” and insert “Actual”.
6. “Actual Instrument Flying” will be that flying time, day or night, when the aircraft cannot be controlled by reference to extend visual aids and all manoeuvres are carried out solely by reference to instruments. Time above the overcast is not to be counted. The practice of allowing a certain of percentage of night flying to be counted as instrument flying is to be dis-continued.
7. “Simulated Night Flying” will be that instrument flying time when conditions such as demand that all manoeuvres be carried out solely by reference to instrument are created artificially.
8. Air Ministry Orders A.884/1945 and A. 878/1946 refer.
A. Foord-Kelcey
Wing Commander,
Commanding Flying
R.A.F. OAKINGTON.
DISTRIBUTION
Station Commander
S.L Training (2)
O.C. No.27 Squadron (2)
O.C. No. 30 Squadron (2)
O.C. No. 46 Squadron (2)
O.C. No 238 Squadron (2)
O.C. “D” Squadron 2)
Wing Control Room
File 1)
Spare 3)
OAK/FW/109C/TRG
4th February, 1948.
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
Method of recording flying times
Description
An account of the resource
Instructions on filling in a Log Book
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1948-02-04
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One typewritten sheet
Language
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eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Training material
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MHattersleyCR40699-160506-19
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Publisher
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
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Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1948-02-04
Contributor
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Claire Monk
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
RAF Oakington
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/467/8350/ABantingP160315.2.mp3
b7b96bfe67cf2c1ebbc167ca5bd83878
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
Banting, Peter
P Banting
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Banting, P
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with Peter Banting (b. 1923, 1399810 Royal Air Force) his log book and a a piece of material containing signatures.
He flew operations as a bomb aimer with 75 and 7 Squadrons.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-03-15
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. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is David Meanwell. The interviewee is Peter Banting. The interview is taking place at Mr Banting’s home in East Molesey on the 14th, 15th of March 2016.
DM : Ok if we start off with when you were born and where you were brought up.
PB : Well I was born in 1923 and I was brought up in Brixton. I was born in Brixton too.
DM : Right ok, and tell me, tell me a little about what lead you to join the Air Force and when you actually joined up.
PB : Well I was a founder member of the Cadet Corps and that was started, I believe, in about 1940, I believe, and I was one of the first to join it in Brixton. It was number 50F ATC and I remember it well going there and many people, many people of my age were there as well, and ‘Will I get in?’ I said.’ Will I get in?’ And they did accept me and that’s how it all started.
DM : Did you actually do any flying in the ATC?
PB : No, no, no, but there was one really wonderful experience we had. We attended Biggin Hill Aerodrome, that would be 1941, and okay the Battle of Britain was over but they were doing, they were going over to France low level, very, very dangerous and that’s when I had my first trip actually. I was very fortunate to go up in a Blenheim. They, they allowed us to go up in a Blenheim. It was wonderful. Yes, and we saw, there was a Spitfire squadron, and we saw it coming in and land. Marvellous, marvellous experience. We were there for two weeks.
DM : Ok -
PB : Hmm.
DM : So then you joined up? When did you actually join up?
PB : July 1942.
DM : Right.
PB : Yes.
DM : And what was the-?
PB : No, Sorry, actually, I joined up in December 41 and I wasn’t called up until July 42.
DM : Right
PB : Yes. St John’s Wood. We all went to St John’s Wood.
DM : Right. Did you have a sort of ambition when you joined up what you thought you’d like to do?
PB : Erm, I just wanted to fly with the RAF. I, it was day-to-day. You know? One took one day as it came and that was it, and enjoyed it and from that day on, I had a wonderful experience. I love the RAF [laugh] still do. [laugh] and I’m a member of the RAF Club at that.
DM : So, when you were actually called up, which was, you said, July-
PB : Yes, yes.
DM : What actually happened then?
PB : Well, we went to St John’s Wood, where the cricket field was, and were stationed there and after that we went to Ludlow, I remember. We camped at Ludlow it was summer and we were all in tents and that decided where we would go for ITW (Initial Training Wing), and there was a corporal in our tent, and he asked me where I wanted to go. And I said ‘I’d like to go to Cambridge.’ He said ‘Right and I did.’ [laugh] And he fixed it and I went to Cambridge and had a lovely time in Cambridge, wonderful, with the Initial Training Wing. I think we were about three months there, yeah three months. And after that, after the three months initial training where you had certain exams, you were taught to dismantle a Browning gun and put it all altogether again, Morse code, navigation, and elementary stuff you know that sort of thing and after that we were sent to an Elementary Flying Training School for selection as to whether you’d be a pilot, navigator or a bomb aimer and that’s when, that was in Oxford. I got there in December, erm that would have been December 1942 and we were tested, we had I suppose I don’t know how many hours, I suppose, about thirty hours on Tiger Moths and I was tested and very fortunately I made a perfect circuit and bump and I was selected to be a pilot. I didn’t know that for a long time we were sent to Manchester, the training centre in Manchester and that decided - and we were all lined up one day and we all carefully listened to what he was going to say, he said and he called out all these names and my name came out, ‘Banting. Pilot.’ I was delighted [laugh] of course. And then I think there were after Manchester we were sent to up to Scotland and there when we got to Scotland by train, we saw outside in the sea the ‘Queen Elizabeth’ and I mean, there was a cheer when we saw it. We saw this ship and thought ‘My God. Is this going to take us to Canada? And it did.’ And it was a four-and a-half hour trip, a four-and-a-half day trip and all the way through we were a bit concerned ‘cause some in ’43 that’s when the U-boats really, were really active, but - we the ship zig-zagged all the way through and I suppose a normal journey would have taken three days and we took four-and-a-half days and we landed at Halifax and from Halifax after a few days I was sent out to, erm, to DeWinten Flying School. And then I got chicken pox and I had, I think it was, two weeks leave in Vancouver. What a trip that was. They made such a fuss of us. Absolutely wonderful. And came back and I got scarlet fever and I couldn’t fly a bloody thing. I was absolutely hopeless. So unfortunately, or fortunately I think, it probably saved my life, but fortunately I was regraded to be bomb aimer and I went on a bomb aimers course. And sent to Lethbridge for the bombing course. And what year would that have been? I’m trying to think now, that would be, er, ’43 March ’43. That would be the summer of ’43 so until that took most of the summer. And from then, having completed that course went to Edmonton in Canada for navigation course and bomb aiming course and the rest of it. So I finished in December 1943 in Canada. Came back and to Monkton, which is the centre for air crew to be despatched back to Britain. And we were told under no circumstances, we had two weeks leave, under no circumstances will you be allowed to go past the barrier to get to America. Don’t try it. Well that was a challenge [laugh] and I knew you had to have it was called a short H form, and I got this short H form and I filled in everything with everyone’s agreement that we should go and a great friend of mine Pat Russell was with me and I had armed with this form we went to the barrier and there was an American there. And he said ‘Right. I’ll just phone your base and see if it’s ok.’ Left me on my own and when back to the phone completely out of sight and I thought God this is it we’re going to be despatched back. That was a nice try. He came back and said ‘Ok, you’re ok.’ In other words he was trying, to see, to see if we’d escaped. So we got on the train and we had a most wonderful time in New York where we were entertained by a family and stayed with them and that was an experience to be in New York in 1944 it was then. Wonderful. And that was an experience in itself, and we came back, when we came back to Monkton, we, erm, we went, went to the port and there was a ship waiting and it was The Andes. It was called The Andes. Nothing like the QE, nothing at all [laugh]. I mean it really was. It was a hell ship. We were in hammocks and they were crowded into a tiny area and that took a bit longer. That took six days ‘cause it was slower and we got back to Liverpool I think it was. Came back to a centre. Now after this it gets a bit blurred and my memory fades on this but, erm, I remember we went to somewhere up north near Northumbria near there for the centre. Came back and I might refer to my logbook now It might give a little indication of what happened after that [turning of pages] Lethbridge AFU [turning of pages] [whistling] Sorry to keep you waiting. But it’s -
DM : No no.
PB : It’s all here somewhere. Oh yes, I remember now we went to Harrogate. We went to Harrogate as a centre which decided where we’d crew up. And we were all there together, pilots, navigators, bomb-aimers and I was crewed up with somebody called Rothwell. My pilot an Australian, and a very tall man. A blonde man, and he, I found out later he was three years younger than me. Now had I known then he should have treated me with greater respect , he was three years younger than me. He didn’t at all. Anyways he was a great chap and you know I still see him. He’s in America. [pause]
DM : And off we go,
PB : And I still see him. He comes over regularly. He’s a great chap and he brought his son once and I remember when his son was there, we went to a little pub, and had a look in the river. A very lovely day and it brought it all back and I remember describing one of the episodes to, to his son and he was very pleased with that. Anyway the other members of the crew, if I remember, we had Paddy Key at rear gunner. He was a Northern Ireland guy. Erm, John Turner mid upper gunner, erm Wellard was the wireless operator. Bob Wellard he was much older than us and he was called Pop ‘cause he was twenty-eight. And a nice guy, twenty-eight, well he was twenty-eight then, so if he was twenty-eight then, five years older than me. So I’m ninety-two he’d be- he’d be over a hundred so I doubt very much if he is still with us. Navigator he got scarlet fever and he only did five ops with us and he disappeared from the scene. I can’t remember his name. And, of course, Jack Pond was the engineer and Ken Rothwell was our skipper. And that was the crew. [coughs] So we crewed up and I think we went very shortly after that to Operational Training Units on Ansons. The only thing about Ansons that I detested I had to wind down the undercarriage, you know. That was a rotten job. And that was, I don’t know how long, probably about two months there at Operational Training and then we went to Chedburgh for the heavy conversion unit from Ansons to heavies. They were Stirlings. And I don’t, can’t remember how long we were there but to cut a long story short we ended up at 75 New Zealand Squadron, Mepal, that would be December 1944. But our first ops weren’t until January 1945 and I going out of my log book really ‘cause that picks it up [turning of pages] 75 New Zealand Squadron [turning of pages]. Here we go. My first operation was on the 22nd of January 1945 and the skipper was the commander. His name was Wing Commander Baygent [?]. He was a New Zealander. Now I discovered later I didn’t realise this, this is quite amazing. I looked at this guy and I’m like oh god he’s a very old guy, well-experienced and I’m ok. I learnt later he was the same age as me. We had a Wing Commander Baygent Commanding Officer of the 75 New Zealand Squadron and he was twenty-one. I was absolutely amazed at that. I didn’t discover that until much later. But that first operation, I mean when I went up and I saw a wall of flak in front of me at the target, the target was Duisburg on the Rhine. And when I saw this wall of flak I thought ‘My God. How the bloody hell we going to get out of that?’ And it was really quite, you know, that wasn’t a nice experience. But he was a good pilot but there’s one thing that he did do, that was very naughty actually. We got over, I dropped the bombs on the target and then he put the aircraft down in nosedive to get out of the flak. Now you’re not supposed to that, you’re supposed to fly straight and level. So when you’re over the target you take a photograph of where the bombs had gone. Now according to the records, when it was later, all my bombs dropped in the river because he the angle of the aircraft, you see, was such that it photographed what was behind and not in front so I never really forgave him for that but he got us out of it anyway. That’s the main thing. So that was my first op 22nd of January. Next one was on the 28th and we did them quite regularly, 28th, 29th and going all the way though about two or three a week. Now I’ve all the ones listed here, which we won’t do. On the 28th of January went to Cologne. All our targets were military targets. We didn’t carpet bomb and I’m very glad to say that. And all our targets because of the landings and the military operations going on behind the Rhine and it was decided that we’d bomb things like railway junctions mainly railway junctions, most of our targets were railway junctions and very rarely factories or anything like that. So that’s what we did mainly. Now 28th of January Cologne. Then 29th of January Krefeld and I notice it took to get there five, five-and-a-half hours to get there and back from Krefeld. [Turning of pages] I won’t list them all, but included are Monchengladbach, Wiesbaden, Dortmund, and then very sadly I notice on the 16th of February 1945 the New Zealand squadron, my best mate Pilkington was shot down and I got a note here when it happened. It was on the 16th of February on a trip to Dortmund. Now after that Wessel, we went to Wesel, now Wesel was very much in the papers at the time because that it was a key centre for troops to, apparently it was a centre for troops to rest before they went back to the front. Wessel, Dortmund, Gelsenkirchen, Kamen, Karmen, Wanne Eickel and then I, please forgive lack of German accent, my German accent is appalling, I don’t know any German at all. Not like my grandson. Salzbergen, Dessau, Gelsenkirchen, Essen. Now Essen I got a note here, this is, this is fascinating. This was an amazing, what an experience that was. It was biggest daylight raid in the history of the RAF. I don’t know how many, it doesn’t say how many aircraft. I did note that. It was the 11th of March 1945 and what an amazing sight that was. Over the clouds, bright, bright sun of course, and to see these aircraft. It did seem, I don’t know how many there were but it seemed like a million to me. It was absolutely incredible. You know tail to tail and wing to wing. That was an amazing experience. And unfortunately during that we saw quite a few of them shot down when we got over Germany ‘cause it was daylight. [Turning of pages] Now after that the skipper came and had a little talk to us. He said : ‘Now look you’re doing quite well, how do you feel about going over to Pathfinders?’ So we had a little chat and I said ’That’s great, you know. Let’s go to Pathfinders.’ So we were then sent to Pathfinder Night Training Unit at Warboys.
[Door bell].
PB : We were at the Pathfinders Unit Warboys from the 17th of March ’45 until the 31st of March when we were posted the 7 Squadron at Oakington. Now coming back to Pathfinding Night Training, the skipper there was Group Captain Mahaddie D.S.O., D.F.C, A.F.C, S.C.F.C., and etc etc etc. Now we really got very friendly with him after the war with 7 Squadron with the Pathfinder Association and at one of the, that’s a bit out of sequence but never mind, he did give us the book and inscribe it. I’ll read out the inscription. He said: Signed for Peter Banting and the child bride Hazel [cough] with my warmest regards the Pathfinder battle cry – Press on Regardless. Hamish, RAF Wyton. That was written on the 15th of August 1992. So that was that. So coming back to reality, we were posted to 7 Squadron and our first operation there was on the 2nd of April to Nordhausen, and Pathfinders are so different. If I can briefly describe our operations on Pathfinders. We went in, the first Pathfinders went in and dropped illuminating flares over the target, there was a general illumination, then there was back-up where they dropped coloured flares on the target so that was really pinpointed. The master bomber up above was usually in a Mosquito and he was directing incoming aircraft onto the target. So the first ones that came in dropped it accurately on the target, now if it drifted away backers up drifted different coloured flares onto the target. So there’s a new target which was seen by the master bomber up above and he redirected the aircraft onto the correct coloured target. That’s how it worked, but the thing is with Pathfinders was we dropped. We dropped these illuminating flares and you know whatever but we have to go round again and drop the bombs. So every trip that we did was counted two ops really and that’s why after thirty ops, normally everyone got a D.F.C. or a D.F.M. and who did that on Pathfinders. Now coming to what we actually did again, it’s coming near to the end of the war isn’t it? North of Hamburg, I won’t describe them all, Hamburg, Kiel now, we did go to Kiel. Now the interesting thing about Kiel. At Kiel there was a German battleship. It was a cross between a cruiser and a battleship called the Deutschland. Now I am convinced that I sunk it like everybody else who on that trip but it was sunk at that trip and I’m sure I did it you never know do you? So, that was Kiel and we went to Kiel again on the 13th of April but by then the battleship was sunk so we weren’t so worried about that. We were told when we went to Potsdam that Hitler was probably there, that was on the 14th of April and we were told that he was likely to be there, so we dropped our bombs very accurately on where he was. Bremen, and then on 24th of April that was it. I was awarded the Pathfinder badge on the 26th of May 1945 after the war. But the most memorable trips to me were after the war. The Dutch were starving in May 1945 and it was decided that they would receive an airdrop of food. And on the 4th of May 1945 we went to Rotterdam and dropped food for them, and that was quite amazing and it was an enormous target area and they had in white stone around the target area. Thank you, after that we went to Lubeck and Juvencourt, landed in Germany picked up prisoners of war and brought them back. That was quite amazing. That was a wonderful experience, and when I was at Lubeck I raided the German store brought back a perfect German uniform and a helmet. Now I, later I very carefully packed this German uniform away in a brown bag and put it in the loft to keep it safe, and then a couple of months later I thougt: I’ll have a look at it, and a shower of moths came out, totally ruined. That was that, so unfortunately no more German uniform and I gave the German helmet away, but I’ve still got an armband somewhere or other, a German armband. [Turning of pages] And so that was really the end of my flying experiences during the war. We, then of course, after the war, after the European war that is, we were training as the Tiger Force to go out to India to fight the Japanese. We were trained at low level bombing but nevertheless August came and the end of the war. That was it. But I was in the RAF until discharged, and really I wasn’t really doing very much after that. I was very fortunate to be maintained on to 7 Squadron and funny enough 7 Squadron as a whole after the war went back to Mepal where 75 New Zealand, 75 New Zealand, Squadron was. So I had a few girlfriends there and met up with them again too [laugh]. So that’s really the war experience, my total war experiences.
DM : So we came to the end of the war came to, August Victory in Japan, did ever think about staying in the Air Force? Did you ever consider that?
PB : Well, funnily enough at the end of the war I ended up as a Warrant Officer, I had an interview with the Commanding Officer. He said ‘Look, maybe you’d like a commission but it’d mean signing on for a couple of years. Would you like to do that?’ I thought it over and said ; ‘No, but very, very I’m glad you’ve done that I was very honoured, but I do feel that I’ve got to get back to what I want to do which is architecture and being an architect and that was that. And that’s what I did, an architect after six years training. And I met my wife, my wife of long years standing lived next door to me in Brixton and we got engaged, but I said to her: ‘Look, do you mind? You’ve got a long wait.’ She didn’t mind. So it was a long course, it was, how long was it? It was seven-year course really, well really, five years really on studying and part of it was when I was working, and we got married in 1951. Yes, but the other part of all this after the war was ‘The Pathfinder Association’. I was on a train going into London once when I saw a guy opposite me had a Pathfinder tie, very distinctive blue with, we used to call it, a shite hawk, a yellow eagle on his tie. And I said: ‘Are you a Pathfinder?’ And he said: ‘Yes.’ I said: ‘So was I.’ He said: ‘What squadron?’ So I told him. He said : ‘Well come and see us.’ And he was the secretary of the Pathfinders Association Jimmy Hughes, and we became great buddies and we used to go out regularly and I used to go up to the RAF Club at- I wasn’t a member then, and my wife came with me to the RAF club and we became great buddies, and his wife also was also heavily involved.
DM : So when you, when you when became a member of 7 Squadron Pathfinders-
PB : Yes, Yes.
DM : What, what did the missions entail for you? Was there something specific you did on each mission? Was it all a mish-mash?
PB : Oh no, it was all very carefully controlled. Each member of the team had his own particular job but coming to my job. Erm I had to, when I went through France I was responsible for the radar navigation. At that time had a very, very, very excellent radar system which consisted of H2S which was a circular screen which showed exactly where we were on a map and Gee where we were accurately pinpointed. But when we got to the target we were all briefed on what we had to do, and it varied enormously, we were either marking targets either, er, either giving (sorry) yes, we either had to mark targets or illuminate the targets. Each crew was given their specific job at the time, you either had to mark the targets back up with flares, illuminate the target and we were all given a different job at a different time. We all had our own specific job at that particular time and it varied. Each trip we had, we had different things to do. Either illumination or marking targets or backing up flares. It was always different. It was always specific, but every time once we’d down it, we have to back round again and drop the bombs. And that, that was a bit painful, but nevertheless we did it. And, of course, the flak was really concentrated on those specific areas we were at. That’s briefly what we did. It was a wonderful crew. Bob Wellard what he used to do, always used to do was put on AFM, all the way, all the way through, over France, even over Germany sometimes – The American Forces Network. And there was always the same disc jockey pushing out the same old things, you know, the same old things we always used to listen to. I [unclear] Glenn Miller, of course, and that, that was a good experience. We liked that. But coming back to what we actually did, mid-upper gunner was wonderful really, he, we saw Focke-Wulf coming at us once, and I can’t remember where the target was at that time but the Focke-Wulf came at us and made a burst and disappeared from view. We don’t know if he was frightened or lost his way, I don’t know. And that was pretty awful but the worst experience I think we ever had was, I don’t know the target, but the Germans had a radar system. It was a big blue light that illuminated a very great area and picked up most aircraft. We were on our own and this blue light picked us up, once it picked us up all the searchlights in bloody Germany came in on us, and once they came in on you, they no matter where you flew another battery of searchlights picked you up. So we had these searchlights, we must have been, I think, I think it must have at least ten minutes. We had these detailed searchlights on us and the, I could hardly see I was blinded by them. And we came back that night like a bloody colander. And the rear-gunner at the back, I don’t know how he survived, ‘cause the tail plane was virtually shot to pieces. I think that was the worse thing we ever had. But Ken Rothwell what a pilot. He, what we called, corkscrewed and when you corkscrew a Lancaster, and we had a full bomb load at the time, that made it worse. You go down to the left, to the port, and then you turn-around and climb up to the starboard, to the right, up again to the port and then you climb up again to the port and then down and he evaded them. I don’t know how he did it, but he evaded them.
DM : Were all the crew N.C.O.’s? Or were..
PB : Actually the skipper he got a commission.
DM : Right.
PB : Yes.
DM : Did that change the dynamics at all.
PB : Not at all. No, he was a buddy. I mean, I think it was quite wrong in a way. The Americans didn’t see it that way, who nearly all got commissions. But we were all as one, you know really. It didn’t matter what rank you were. He was the pilot, you were the bomb aimer and there was a navigator there. The rest were N.C.O.’s, yes, yes.
DM : Did you, when you, see, from what you said earlier on, you kept the same crew apart from the navigator, who got scarlet fever?
PB : Yes. Yes that’s right.
DM : But other than that the same crew all the way through.
PB : All the way through.
DM : 75 Squadron and 7 Squadron.
PB : Yes, yes.
DM : So did you use to socialise off base as well as on base?
PB : Oh yes.
DM : Did you go to the pub?
PB : Oh, we went to the pub. Oh yes, we all went to the pub together. We had a great time. It was a lovely war. It was wonderful really when I think of those guys on the ground who were, you know, there battling away constantly in danger. We were in danger some of the time. The rest of the time we had a good life, came back to our bunks, and you know, and well fed when we came back. We had an aircrews’ breakfast which er, which consisted of bacon and eggs, and a tot of brandy. That was great, yeah.
DM : Will you, when you, I don’t know if you can remember particularly, but were there perhaps any missions early on when you were filled with trepidation?
PB : Oh, yes. Well there were trips when you lost an engine and came back on three engines. We had a hang-up once, we came back and the skipper said : ‘Don’t drop it on land, go over, drop in the Channel.’ And fortunately, it went off. It landed in the Channel. And I went back to the [unclear] officer and said : ‘There’s something wrong with that bomb release system.’ And he said : ‘Well, I will check it out.’ And he checked it out, and came back and said : ‘No. It’s perfect. There’s nothing wrong with it.’ Went on leave and the aircraft blew up in mid-air. The whole crew were killed. So, so that was terrible. So there was something wrong with it, but never found out what caused it.
DM : Did you ever have problems with fog when you came back?
PB : No. No. No, we always came back, luckily, when the weather forecast was excellent. We usually came back at night, of course. We were told though that the Germans at night were waiting above when we landed to see if they could knock out any Lancasters when we landed. We didn’t see any though.
DM : I was going to ask if you any trouble with intruders, but you never saw any?
PB : No.
DM : Or knew of anything?
PB : No. None at all. No. I think they were all busy fighting Russia. [laugh] Anyway we didn’t see that.
DM : So was it ’46 that you actually came out of the air force? When was that?
PB : September ’46.
DM : ’46. That’s when you resumed your training?
PB : Well, I started my training.
DM : Started your training.
PB : I wanted to be and I was going to be, and I started my training, as an, as an architect. I went to the Brixton School of Building, which was just around the corner funnily enough - So I had to walk there.
DM : So was that something you’d wanted to do before you joined the air force?
PB : No, not really. No, no. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Before I joined the air-force I very fortunate I got a job at the Ministry of Aircraft Production on Millbank. I must have been, I was seventeen. Yes, I was seventeen. And I joined the air force then when I was the Ministry of Aircraft Production. Wonderful job, counting the aircraft as they came out of the factory, literally. And I had access to all these figures, and they had accurate estimates of what should be produced and the factory ones that were produced. And I could see how many Hurricanes, Halifaxes, Spitfires, not Lancasters, were produced every, every week. And I was in the direct, in the fort, the very direction of aircraft production, which was the first floor of Millbank. I often go back, but it’s all changed now. They’ve taken it all away. It’s all gone They’ve gutted it and done again. They’ve really, really started the whole thing all over again.
DM : So, I imagine from what you’re saying it was while you were in the air force you, sort of, firmed up the idea that you would like to train to be an architect.
PB : I think, I think oh yes, yes.
DM : Any particular reason for that?
PB : Well I like to say I knocked them all down so I’m building them all back up again, but it wasn’t that at all. [laugh]. No, it wasn’t that. I just felt that I could draw and I felt I’d like to do it. And luckily I found the right niche.
PB : So after the war, you get a career, you get a wife and then a family, I imagine. Did you keep in touch with the crew or any other colleagues from the air force.
PB : Only Ken. And I’ll tell you how this happened. I knew Ken was an Australian. So I phoned up the Australian Pathfinder Association, and they said: ‘Oh Ken, yes we know who he is. Yes, he’s living in America now.’ So I said: ‘Whereabouts?’ He said: ‘New England.’ So I phoned up every Rothwell there was in New England and I got all sorts of funny replies. Mostly American. And then one day I said: ‘This is a voice from the past. You probably don’t know me.’ He said: ‘Hello Peter.’ He knew my voice. Huh. That’s how it started. And we’re friends now, we still see him. He came over, he used to come over here regularly to march at the Cenotaph. I still march every year at the Cenotaph. And he used to come over, but he’s my age, of course, and he finds it difficult to get around, like I do. So he doesn’t do that anymore. Great family. Got to know them. He’s been in this room.
DM : What career path did he follow?
PB : He was, he was the head of a college, in, I don’t know exactly what. But he was the head of a college in New England. He went into teaching. He met his wife in Sweden when he went on holiday once, I believe. And she’s American. Hmm, yeah.
DM : So, after the, after the war was there a period in your life when, obviously you would never forget what had happened in the air force and your time in Bomber Command, but did you, sort of, move away from it, and then perhaps come back to it and then join associations later?
PB : I put it right out of my mind. It was another world. Disappeared. And right up until fairly recently been totally out of my mind, except when Ken comes over. That brings it back a bit. But, no, it’s another world. Every life has its cycles and that was a cycle that disappeared. And this is my own particular cycle now, it’s been like that since the end of the war. No, I don’t think of it. I very rarely think of it. It’s another world. Another person. In fact, I often think of that person who did those things as my own son you know, and you know, nothing to do with me. Strange, but no another episode totally forgotten, and this brings it all back.
DM : Hmm.
PB : And I get a bit emotional about it now I’m afraid but that’s the way it was. Hmm.
DM : Did you go to the dedication of the memorial in London?
PB : Yes, we did. We did do that. My wife and I went to the dedication. And because I was, was signing books. I, because, was signing books for an organisation that was raising money for the maintenance of it. Because I was signing books I was invited with my wife. And when we were there, suddenly it was quite silent and suddenly there was, some of us heard a noise and we looked around and it was a Lancaster coming over. It was only those who looked around that were aircrew that recognised that sound. This Lancaster came over and dropped all these poppies. Wonderful.
DM : So, you didn’t know that was going to happen?
PB : No, no, no. It was out of the blue. Yeah great experience. Yeah, I like the memorial very much, but I find one fault with the sculptures. They all look about thirty-five or forty. We weren’t that age. All of us were kids. Twenty-one.
DM : Yeah, I think -
PB : Twenty-two.
DM: - like when you see your representation in the films. Most of the actors are far too old.
PB : Yeah. It’s a lovely memorial. I think, ‘Thank God it’s there,’ but the figures there I didn’t recognise.
DM : Do you have any opinions on how Bomber Command were treated after the war? As opposed to other people who had fought in it on other fronts and other-
PB : We were disappointed because we were in the same dangers as any other members of the forces, and we did feel a little bit let down that we weren’t recognised. And I think it was political football in a way, and I think it was all to do with the bombing of areas which were civilian occupied and I doubt it ever involved in that, anyway. Nevertheless it was a bit of let-down, yeah I felt that.
DM : So perhaps, whilst there’s recognition now, it’s very late because a lot of the people who survived the war are no longer with us.
PB : Yes, it is. Yes. The wonderful people who did make a great thing of thing of this, I’m very glad they did. I’m very grateful to them. But much later, of course, it was recognised and we were awarded a clasp and I was very honoured to be invited to Number 10 Downing Street by the Prime Minister with many others to receive the clasp. And that was an amazing experience. Going up the staircase with all the former Prime Ministers going up to the top floor and the Prime Minster. Gave a wonderful speech and he, he summarised the losses which was roughly a hundred-and-fifty thousand took part and fifty thousand died, fifty-five thousand died, and he knew all these facts and he knew all the statistics. And after the little presentation he came up to us and gave us the clasp. We didn’t go up to him, he came up to us. That was magnificent and then we were ushered into another room where there were tables set out and there were about five to each table, and there was a vacant seat at each table. I sat down at one with my wife, and shortly after he came and sat next to me and I was delighted with chatting away. And I said to him: ‘When the coach came in they searched for bombs and underneath the coach, you know, it’s very flat and there could have been bombs there so they searched for them.’ And I said to him later at the table, I said: ‘They looked for bombs under here. You need have bothered as we’re used to having bombs underneath us.’ And he thought that was quite funny. And had lovely meal there and that was wonderful. That was tremendous. That was a long living experience with me. Yeah. Yes my wife has been stalwart with me since my training days in the RAF, she lived next door to me, and I had wonderful letters and we kept this correspondence, she was only a child then you see. She was only twelve. When I was seventeen she was five years younger than me, and I’d always thought of her as a child and then much later she grew up and I grew up a bit more and we did get married in 1951 and very happily too. She’s till upstairs [laugh]. And very happily married. We’ve had three children. Unfortunately my son died, he went to America and he got a job in America and he was an accountant with Airbus, and he contracted cancer, unfortunately. But the other two girls are doing well, one of them is an architect like myself and the other is a very senior, very senior officer in the National Health Service. Yes.
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Title
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Interview with Peter Banting
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David Meanwell
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2016-03-15
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00:43:28 audio recording
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ABantingP160315
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Pending review
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Sound
Description
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Peter Banting grew up in London and was a member of the Air Training Corps before he volunteered for the Royal Air Force. After training he flew operations with 75 Squadron from RAF Mepal and 7 Squadron RAF Oakington. After the war he trained to be an architect.
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Gemma Clapton
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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Canada
Germany
Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Suffolk
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
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1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
7 Squadron
75 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
bomb aimer
bombing
crewing up
fear
Gee
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Master Bomber
memorial
Mosquito
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
Pathfinders
perception of bombing war
RAF Chedburgh
RAF Mepal
RAF Oakington
target indicator
Tiger force
Tiger Moth
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/597/8866/ALeatherdaleF151018.1.mp3
0656231076eab0f126437dd54aae5a5b
Dublin Core
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Title
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Leatherdale, Frank
F Leatherdale
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Leatherdale, F
Description
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An oral history interview with Squadron Leader Frank Leatherdale DFC (b. 1922, 151162 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a navigator with 7 and 115 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Date
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2015-10-18
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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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Transcription
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GR: It’s Squadron Leader Frank Leatherdale.
AM: OK. [laugh] So, my name’s Annie Moodie. I’m working as a volunteer for the International Bomber Command Centre in Lincoln and we’re recording memories of Bomber Command veterans for the learning centre in Lincoln so that there’ll be there as a record for future generations. And, I am in Norwich today and with Squad— Squadron Leader Frank Leatherdale and it’s the 18th of October 2015. So, thank you for agreeing to this. And, maybe can — if you can just tell me a little bit about your early days. Where you were born and what did your parents do?
FL: I was born in Thornton Heath, which is part of Croydon these days, almost London, but — and educated at the City of London Freemen’s School at Ashtead, um, not that my father was a Freeman. He — we were day pupils there, my brother and I, um, and I was born on 3rd of November 1922. We’d better start there and [clears throat] when I finished school war had just started. July, I finished and, um, I was still too young to join the RAF. They wouldn’t have me until I was eighteen so I joined the local Defence Volunteers, which was before the Home Guard, and I was a bit of a nob [?] on aircraft recognition because I used to make Skybird models. These were 1:72nd wooden scale models of various aircraft and if you’d been filing away at a piece of wood you know that shape when you see it in the sky very well. And this was known in our DV and so they made me a fulltime aircraft spotter and, um, whenever the air raid alarm went I had to leap in my bike, cycle up the road about three or four hundred yards, to where a house had a very good vantage point all round. This was in Leatherhead in the North Downs and the people at this house on the corner left a window open downstairs so I could reach in and grab their telephone. So, this was known as Point L21. Whenever I got there I had to put two numbers, one was the Leatherhead Police Station, the other was a number in the Brooklands Defence. I never did find out quite where it was but it was an Army number. Anyway, and then I reported what I saw and I never saw great droppings of parachutes or anything like that but I did see aircraft and, on one occasion, I was watching the sky and saw this flash out of the corner of my eye, to the south east, and I thought, ‘That’s funny, what was that?’ And the only equipment I had was what we had in the family. I didn’t get any government equipment. So, I just got some little binoculars and I looked through this thing. There was a group of some twenty-odd aircraft coming across and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s unusual,’ and wondered what the flash was I saw and I reckoned then they were Messerschmitt Jaguars which I’d just read about it. The Messerschmitt Jaguar was a version of the 110 fighter but the bomber version with the glass nose. In fact, later on we learnt that they only built about three of these things but it was reported as a new type in our journals. And, um, anyway, I thought they were going to try and get down to London through the back door’ sort of thing, coming over our way. And —
GR: In fact, this would have been, this was 1940 while the Battle of Britain was —
FL: Sorry?
GR: Was this 1940 [unclear] during the Battle of Britain?
FL: October 1940 yes. And so I reported these aircraft through, to the numbers that I had to ring and I found that, whilst we had air raid warning at Leatherhead, um, it hadn’t reached Brooklands. Their sirens hadn’t gone, which was a bit odd, someone slipped up there but, nevertheless, I didn’t think these things were going to Brooklands. I thought they were going to try to get round, as I say, to London from the north, from the north to west through the back door but they got over at Esher and then they then just peeled off. It was like watching something at the Hendon air display in the peacetime. But they just came down one after the other and bombed the Vickers works at Brooklands. They didn’t touch Hawker’s on the other side of the airfield, thank God, but the trouble was, that as the sirens hadn’t gone, they didn’t respond to my warning, which was, would have given them about five minutes. They would have to be pretty quick off the mark. But one of the bombs hit their canteen and it was lunchtime and two hundred workers were killed there with that bomb. Luckily for us, a Polish Squadron based at Croydon, with Hurricanes, had seen these aircraft approaching Brooklands and the chappie in charge of them said, ‘We’d better go and investigate this.’ And they just managed to get there and attack them as, as they were breaking away from their dives and they shot one down, and the Bofors guns got another one and, um, that was it. Well, when the raid was over I jumped on my bicycle and cycled up to where I’d seen this smoke coming up from the one that had been shot down by the Hurricanes in fact, but it didn’t matter. But being an excited schoolboy (I was only seventeen) I didn’t write down how many there were or what it was. I could so easily have looked at this wreck on, burning on the ground and identified it. I, in fact, took a piece of wreckage of it, which is in the museum at Brooklands now. It’s only a little piece of metal. So, as I said, we weren’t very sure what these aircraft were but we eventually found out that they were a fighter bomber. The Germans only built three Jaguars [slight laugh]. These were just their normal fighter bomber Messerschmitt 110. Anyway, I eventually joined the RAF after that and wanted to be a pilot, like we all did, and was sent out to Canada, to the Empire Air Training Scheme, and I went out right across to Calgary and we were flying Tiger Moths at the Elementary Flying Training School and, very quickly, I didn’t have many hours, I got my log book. I had only twelve hours altogether, um, learning to fly this thing but I crashed one on take-off. A lot of people had trouble landing. I had no trouble guessing my height off the ground. I could land them beautifully. It was take-off that got me and when you open up the engine on a, any aeroplane but particularly a thing like a Tiger Moth there’s a vertex, vortex of air going back onto the tail plane and if you don’t do something about it that’s going to push that tail round so the pilot has to take off some of the rudder to keep the thing straight. I was told all this and I thought, ‘Well, that was easy.’ And then I was given a flight commander’s check and this was when I did a ground loop on take-off, spun round, and, you know, well what happened there? Well, of course the undercarriage collapsed. Not a lot of damage done but worrying. Anyway, I was given another check by a more senior instructor and the same thing happened. I did another ground loop. Years later I realised what I think what was happening was that my first instructor was only quite soon, only just been appointed, a pilot himself and, um, and when he said I’d got control he was still on the controls, quite unwittingly I should think. And so, as we were starting to take off he was working the rudder but didn’t know he was. And so I thought, ‘Oh this is fine.’ Off we went but when the flight commander gave me the check he didn’t have his feet on the rudder bar and I had [emphasis] control when he said I had and, um, and of course I didn’t do anything about correcting this swing until I saw the nose starting to move on the horizon and so then I started to over-correct in the opposite direction and that caused the ground loop. So, I was re-mustered, um, and sent down to a training unit right across the other side of Canada to be re-mustered as an air observer. And well, I was all very upset by that but still, I did what I was told, and became an air observer and qualified as such in February ‘43. Oh, I had been sick in hospital in the meanwhile, in Canada, with glandular fever but anyway, so that put me back a bit. And I eventually, afterwards, realised that how lucky I’d been because the most of the pilots on my first course had a very rough time of it. Many of them were killed when they eventually got across Europe and I always thought, ‘Well, I’d rather be a live navigator than a dead pilot.’ Until I was a sergeant na— navigator with the flying Os, we had in those days, I won’t tell you what we used to call them but you know what [laugh]
GR: I know what [laugh].
FL: And, um, came back to England and joined 115 Squadron up at Witchford, just outside Ely, and when we formed up as a crew an Australian pilot said would I be his navigator and I said, ‘Yes.’ And I’m glad I did. He was a very nice chap and a very good officer and he selected the rest of our crew as he was going round in this big hangar meeting people as we did in those days. It was all very voluntary. And so, we got to 115 Squadron flying the Lancaster Mark 2s. Now, the Lanc 2 had Hercules engines so many people thought they were Halifaxes, looking at them quickly. Of course they’d got these Hercules engines but it was a Lancaster Mark 2 and a damn good aircraft because the Hercules engines had got more power than a Merlin so it was rather like having four — a Hercules was an equivalent four Merlins so we could lift a heavier bomb load. Our difficulty was, we also gobbled up more fuel, especially at high altitude. Anyway, quite shortly our pilot was — went into Ely Hospital with pneumonia and they wouldn’t let us wait for him to come out. They sent another pilot up to take over the crew and he was a Canadian and probably a far better pilot than our Australian chap but nothing like the officer that the Australian was. The Australian really was a good officer, had us all trained and — right, this Canadian, he’d come back from a raid and said, ‘Where have we been?’ [laugh] If we’d been shot down, you know, he wouldn’t have a clue where he was. And that was Mack all the time. He was sitting up late at night playing cards with his oppos in the billets and, um, there was one occasion when, in the following morning — oh, I by this time I was a flying officer and so was the pilot, um, anyway, we were down for flying that night and I looked at Mack and I thought, ‘I’m not flying with you tonight.’ His eyes were little slits and red. He’d been up half the night playing these cards with his — and smoking away there. And after, well years after the war I — oh, the raid was cancelled, thank goodness, so nothing happened, but I went to the flight commander, who was George Mackie, a very famous — also a, a navigator, well a flying O [laugh] and I said, you know, ‘Had I gone to you and told you this at the time what would you have done?’ He said, ‘Well, I’d have had to court martial him.’ And I thought it’s a good thing I didn’t. He was a good pilot as I say. But anyway, we got through our thirty trips on that first tour and I, myself, had only done twenty-nine. Because of the change of pilots we were, most of the crew, were one short. However, I was awarded an assessment of above average and so I thought if we went to Pathfinders we’d get more money. And this is a little tale that needs to be told, that when the Pathfinder Force was formed — and, of course, the shot rate was pretty high. Clearly, you were out in front of the main force, they were coming along, and just these few aircraft out in front to mark the targets and our air officer commanding number 8 Group wanted to get us more money and Air Ministry said, ‘No, we’re not paying you danger money. That’s not how we work.’ So he went tick, tick, tick, tick. He promoted everybody one rank and got his money for us. So everybody was happy and, um, there we were and the rest of the crew were mostly made up to officers. They were sergeants or one was a flight sergeant. And so we went to 7 Squadron. After training at the Pathfinder Training Unit you went to Oakington just outside Ely —
GR: Did you have a break in between? Sorry Frank in between finishing your first tour and then going did you have a break, did you have —
FL: No, no. We, we carried straight on.
GR: Oh you went straight through.
FL: And, um, and I think well, I’m going to volunteer for Pathfinders, are the chaps are coming with me? Well the pilot didn’t want to, being Canadian he was going to go back to Canada and do more training, um, and the flight engineer didn’t want to because he’d just got married on one of the deep leaves that we had at the end of our ops. The rest of them came with me and joined, we joined Pathfinders and we picked up a new pilot there. And, in fact, we didn’t have, we had several different pilots in Pathfinders. It wasn’t a sort of regular crew. The rest of us were but the pilots seemed to come and go. And so, we staggered through a tour on Pathfinders, and we had — twice we were master bombers on the raids so that was good and when I finished there, I was assessed as above average and I thought, ‘Well, that was pretty good.’ But assessed as above average in a Force which was itself was above average. Anyway, I was then I posted to the Radar Research Establishment down at Defford which did all the flying for all the boffins at the Intelligence Communication Radar Establishment at Malvern and, um, I was the station navigation officer at Defford and they had all sorts of aircraft there so this was great fun for me. I liked flying in different planes and, um, anyway I did a lot of flying with the CO of the bomber flight. There was a bomber fight, a coastal flight and things like that at Defford, a naval flight as well, and this pilot, the CO of A Flight, was a chap called Ken Letchford [?] DSO and bar, DFC, from his Pathfinder days. Anyway, I did quite a lot of flying with him and got on very well with him and I flew with a lot of other pilots as well and, um, one of the jobs we were working on was Doppler navigation and the boffins were sitting at the back of a, another Mark 2 Lancaster actually and I had to align the nose, looking at the road or ground ahead, and the boffins would say, ‘We’ve got a return coming up at two miles.’ And I’d say, ‘Yes there’s a motorcycle there,’ or whatever it might be so, eventually, over time they would learn what these returns were on their Doppler. A car would give them this sort of picture and something else would give something different and so on. Well, this meant very low, a lot of it was very low level flying, and Ken Letchford would get right down on the deck, which is what the boffins wanted, so that their Doppler radar looked along the ground. This was just after the Germans had broken through in the Ardennes and, um, so there was a bit of a hurry on to get this equipment working because, at the time of the German breakthrough, which was a bit foggy, the air wasn’t able to give much support to the American sector where the Germans had attacked. Anyway, I would be lying there in the nose and all down the Bristol Channel you’d get these little blocks with a pole and a little light on it for, to warn the shipping, a little — fishing smacks and things, and Ken would go over [slight laugh] and down the other side. Well, when you switch the microphone on in an aeroplane you get a swooshing noise and as soon as I switched on Ken would say, ‘It’s alright Frank. I know where it is.’ And he always did, while most pilots would lose have lost it under the nose, they’d no longer see it, but his skill was he always knew right where it was, and sure enough, as I say, up and down the other side and so there it was. Anyway, one of the pilots I was flying with was — it was the first time I’d flown in a Beaufighter and he’d done his ops on Beaufighters, this chap, and, um, we had a, or the boffins had, a radar station on the Welsh coast, at a place called Brawdy, so that they could work out over Fishguard Bay and so we’d gone down there for, to take some equipment to them. On the way back this pilot decided to beat up Porthcawl and he dived down on the beach at Porthcawl as we were flying back home and to get in the Beaufighter the navigator had to go up through the bottom of the back compartment. The main spar separated you from the pilot’s cabin, no way through physically, and it was the general practice and I did the same as I’d been shown to leave my parachute pack on the airborne interception equipment and, anyway, as the pilot had dived down on Porthcawl, pulled up afterwards, he pulled a lot of G and I was crushed down in my seat and hanging on the sides of the plane and I could feel myself slipping down. And the floor of my compartment was the door which I had climbed in through and it had put the extra load and the extra negative G had snapped the lock on it and that meant I’d slid out a bit so my intercom plug pulled out of the socket and I couldn’t talk to the pilot at all. Thank God he was the man he was because, not only was he an experienced Beaufighter pilot, he’d also done the test flying on Beaufighters at Bristols and as soon as this door started to open he felt the change of trim. So, he thought, ‘Crickey.’ You know, he could guess what was happening and so he quickly put the plane into a bump, and a bump is a reverse loop, and you can — and coming down like that and again had he continued he would have done up and done the loop but he just, just pulled up. So, anyway he stuck the nose down quickly and that got me [unclear] back into my seat with positive G instead of negative G and, um, I was able to plug in and say I was still there and he said, ‘Yes right. We’ll carry on.’ And we got home alright. Just after he’d left Defford, which he was wing CO there at this time, a chap Peter Gibb, he set the world record for a jet aircraft altitude climb. He was — had gone to, back to Bristol’s as a test pilot and, um, he set this thing at about sixty thousand feet or something [clears throat] and about a fortnight later he thought, ‘Well, I can better this.’ Bristols had different engines so he got them to fit more powerful Bristol engines to this Canberra and he went up, and he left the navigator out so it would reduce his weight, and set another world record, which might be even still there to this day. Certainly all the time war was on it was still the record, of about sixty-five thousand feet. Anyway, as I say, I flew with several interesting people, many of them much medal-ridden. One, a chap called Trousdale, he was a New Zealander really, um, but he got the DFC and an AFC and he was also awarded a Dutch [emphasis] DFC because he’d done intruder work in his Beaufighter and he bombed bridges and barges and things like that. Anyway, the Dutch DFC is like ours but is — where the DFC’s got blue and white stripes and the Air Force Cross has got red and white stripes, the Dutch one has got orange [emphasis] and white stripes so, until such time we was issued our campaign medals, these three medals were together. Later on, of course, the Dutch one, being Dutch, would become at the end of his row of medals with the — so you would have the DFC, the AFC, then the campaign medals and then this Dutch one but until that time they were these things and then he was an outstanding chap to look at, he’d got all these strips of different colours. Anyway, he was a very good pilot and, um, one of the flights I did with him, he decided to go in a B17. We had one Flying Fortress, an American Boeing B17. We also had a Liberator there. Anyway, we had to go down to Geschborn, Eschborn [emphasis] in Germany to pick up some equipment which the boffins had left there. As the Army advanced across Germany they got parcelled this stuff up to bring it back to examine it more carefully in this country. And we went over to pick this up and we had to land at Croydon airport coming back, both to clear Customs and to dump off this package of radar equipment, which was going to go Air Ministry to get it in their hands quickly. And so, as we came into land I had wonderful seat right in the nose of this B17. I was navigating on a thing called a Bigsworth board, which was a mobile chart table really. How I came by it? I don’t know. I must have found it somewhere in some odd corner of a RAF station I’d been on. It was from the First World War really. But anyway, it was a very good mobile chart table, and as we flew up the Thames and then turned south to go into Croydon, over the houses, which I hadn’t seen before because they didn’t go that way, bombers obliviously at night but even in daylight we wouldn’t fly over London. Anyway there we were having to fly over London, all these houses, incredible, and we came in and Croydon was a grass aerodrome, didn’t have built-in runways at that time, and I’d been there as a boy, before to war, to see airliners go in and out and, um, I thought, never thought I’d come and land here so it was quite an experience for me to land there. Anyway, um, when I’d finished my two years as a station navigation officer at Defford I was sent to the Pathfinder Training Unit as an instructor and I hadn’t been there very long when the CO said, ‘Oh Frank, go and get your kit. The AOC wants to take a Lanc up.’ The AOC, this was Bennett, Air Vice Marshall Bennett, the most famous navigator in the world, you couldn’t get a — you know, what he hadn’t done, a tremendous man. Anyway, the reason he wanted to go on this flight whilst we had target indicator bombs, which were red and green and one or two yellows but we, our boffins couldn’t get blue and the Germans would make up false target indicators, which they would fire up with their anti-aircraft guns, and try and make people bomb the wrong place so, if they could get a blue marker then the Germans would have — apparently one Dave Brocks [?] said, ‘We’ve got the thing for you. We’ve got a blue marker.’ And so Bennett, being the man he was, said, ‘Right, I want to see it.’ And so, this is why he took a crew made up of other instructors at the Pathfinder Training Unit and, um, I must admit I wasn’t unworried. I was right on my toes because I was ready, knowing that Bennett was an efficiency man, and we took off from Warboys where we were. You could see the Wash and the ranges on it but of course coming the other way I knew very well — but he would knew where he because he knew the place was like the back of his hand. Anyway, I kept the thing right up to date on my G Box. If he asked for a course I could give it to him immediately. And anyway, these marker things, what Brocks had done was to fill marker bomb case with chopped up blue paper and so, when it was burst in daylight, this showered down and make quite a little blue cloud of — in the sky but quite hopeless for a crew to see it and in daylight not at all. So he wasn’t very pleased with that but it was interesting. Well when we landed — By the way Bennett wrote a book on air navigation, I think it might be still the book on it and I had it in my RAF bag and so we landed and I said, ‘Would you mind Sir autographing my book.’ ‘No lad!’ [laugh] I thought he’d be happy to do it. And he turned round to the wireless operator, sorry the flight engineer, and said, ‘And get your microphone checked.’ And this chap had been stuttering and stammering all the way through the flight and I didn’t know him from Adam, of course, it was just other instructors pulled together to make this crew up for the CO, AOC, and he turned round to this flight engineer and said, ‘Get your microphone checked, lad.’ And the chap looked a bit red faced but still. There wasn’t anything wrong with his microphone at all. He was just scared of Bennett. Couldn’t say two words together but you didn’t need to be scared of Bennett. If you were doing your job he would back you to the hilt but if you weren’t doing your job that was another matter. He would soon see you were going to — and he was a great one for training and even when we were on the Squadron we never wasted time. If you weren’t on ops for some reason you’d be sent off on a training exercise. Now, I didn’t worry about this because I could see the benefit of it. It speeds up your work, certainly as a navigator, if you keep in practice every day but some of the boys didn’t like this. They thought it — they would rather go into town [slight laugh] and relax and so on. But anyway, there we were that was Bennett’s method and I think it saved a lot of lives and improved a lot efficiency. So —
GR: So where are we in war time now?
AM: 45? Or 44?
FL: Well, the war came to an end.
AM: 45?
FL: Well, I was eventually demobbed and, um, oh, whilst I was at Defford at the radar establishment I was working on equipment called Airfield Controlled Radar, 3X, X stands for ten centimetre waveband and I said to the wing commander of flight and I said, ‘Look if I’m here to use this equipment and help the boffins I need to get trained as an air traffic control officer.’ He said, ‘Yes I can understand that.’ So I was sent off just on — as duty from Defford to the Air Traffic Control School at, er, Edgeware. I became a — qualified an air traffic control officer so, when I came to be demobbed, I got myself a job with the Ministry of Civil Aviation and, um they were all ex-RAF chaps of course. I was posted to the area control at Uxbridge and one Saturday the boys were going off to lunch and they said, ‘Frank, you’d be alright looking after things.’ I said, ‘Yes, no trouble.’ And a little Airspeed Oxford came in up in, er, distress having flying from the Channel Islands to Southampton lost an engine and this was November, which was not the sort of time to come down in the Channel, cold water and so on. Anyway, as soon as the emergency arose and did what we would have done the RAF always and I picked up the telephone, got through to Mountbatten in Plymouth and said, ‘We’ve got a problem here. Can you have a launch standing by?’ So they said, ‘Yes.’ And alerted a launch somewhere up, probably in Southampton, to get ready to fish someone out of the water. Well, the aircraft landed in Southampton so didn’t leave anyone on tenterhooks waiting for this emergency that no longer existed. I made another telephone call to Mountbatten to say, ‘Thank you very much, stand down, all is OK.’ Come Monday morning, the senior air traffic controller at this centre, who had been at Croydon before the war and how he dodged the war I don’t know but he was in air traffic —, and he, the plane was so antiquated, it wasn’t true. I mean, the RAF had been using radio telephony for ages but not these boys. They were sending turns to land at their simple air fields by WT, on the Morse code, so it meant carrying a wireless operator in the aircraft to trans— for the messages between the air and the ground. Anyway, this chap came in Monday morning and said, ‘What are these two telephone calls to Mountbatten?’ And I explained what it was and he said, ‘Oh no, no, no. You mustn’t do that. Only the Minister can ask the RAF to help. You should have sent a telegram (or a signal he put it but that turned out to be a telegram) to the Minister asking if he would give permission to help these poor blokes.’ Well, by that time they’d had been dead if they had landed in the deep and so I was so infuriated and instead of taking humble pie I said, ‘That is ridiculous, the cost of two telephone calls.’ And all the correct procedures, a far as I was concerned, and the bad thing would have been if I’d left them standing by and hadn’t told them the chap had landed safely. So anyway, instead of eating humble pie, that very morning I had a letter from the Air Ministry in my pocket offering me a permanent commission in the RAF. At this time I was still a volunteer, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. And I thought I don’t know what to do about this but that made up my mind, and I said, ‘I’m going back to the RAF.’ And that was the start of my proper RAF career in post-war days. I did a tour on Lincolns at Waddington and, um, and then I had been doing quite a lot of work on evasion and escape. There was an organisation, the Air Ministry Air Intelligence 9 it was called, and it taught people how to evade and so on and they used to lay on exercises to train people and each station might have one operation perhaps only once a year perhaps, but it laid on that the air crew go off as if they were invading, evading and told they would be dropped off of coaches and they didn’t know where they were, they wouldn’t be told where they were, they had to find out where they were just as if they’d bailed out and, um, and the local police and some army units usually provided opposition for them, trying to catch them. Almost the first exercise that I did, actually organising it, I thought well it’s — when these chaps are caught and brought in to the Police Headquarters, the Police Headquarters were regions around the country, they were being interrogated and I realised that this was not teaching them very much at all because there was no fear at all so they wouldn’t, wouldn’t know quite what, how to react to it. So I had myself, hired myself from Mos Bros an army officer’s uniform as a captain in the artillery with some war medals — oh, and I should say I’d been awarded the DFC in Pathfinders, so I had an MC on this uniform, and the exercise started and I was at the Police Headquarters where these chaps who were caught brought in and I had two big labels put on doors of two different rooms, one saying ‘RAF Interviewer’ and one saying RA— ‘Army Liaison Officer’. So, they would come in and they had been told, of course, to say nothing until the exercise ended on the Monday, the course was over a weekend, and various chaps were brought in and, much to my surprise, one of them was the station commander of RAF Coltishore and he’d decided to go on the run with the boys and he got caught. So anyway, he came in and to me as an Army Liaison Officer and he started to tell me all about the exercise, where they were going, where the [unclear] were and I was taking all this down and when he’d gone I went round to the wing commander policemen who was in charge of the opposition and said, ‘Look if we let this information out it’s the end of the exercise because there’s no point in it so we’ll keep this quiet until Monday morning.’ But then I had to put my report into Air Ministry, which I did, group captain so and so said this, that and the other. He was livid [emphasis]. He was going to have me court martialled wearing a uniform to which I wasn’t entitled, a medal to which I wasn’t entitled and, of course, it had all been laid on by Air Ministry, quite legitimately as far as I was concerned before-hand, and this station commander was none other than a chap called Bing Cross who was always a bit of a firing one. So anyway, that was that. Oh, and then the Suez operation came up and at this time I was at Upwood which was a Canberra station. I was in charge of the ground support system there and, when it as over, it was decided that proper, um, honour should we say, should be given to those who took part and Prince Michael, I think it was, came round and I had to lay out a graphic, get all these photographs that had been taken during the operation in Suez and, of course, you could speak to all the air crew of the squadrons that had gone from Upwood. Well, of course, naturally with such a high ranking visitor the air officer commanding Upwood, which was 1 Group, was Gus Walker, a little man who’d lost an arm during the war when he was rescuing a team, a crew of a bomber that crashed on his airfield at Flintham [?], a wonderful man, and anyway he was there and Cross turned up to represent his squadrons that had taken part in Suez and so Gus Walker, this 1 Group Air Vice Marshal, started to tell Bing Cross, the Air Vice Marshal of 3 Group, about me and I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ And Cross turned round to Gus Walker and said, ‘I know him.’ [laugh] And, much to my surprise, told this tale about himself. I didn’t think he was like that. He’d forgotten over the years perhaps but, um, anyway, he told Gus Walker all about me so that was that.
AM: Gosh, where, where did you —
FL: And then I went out to Korea with the Army still on this evasion and escape drop. I was an Air Ministry liaison officer, the only one north of — well only one in Korea really, certainly —
GR: That’s while the Korean War was on?
FL: Korean Headquarters where I had a little tent and each new lot of soldiers coming in I had to brief them on evading and so on. Well, of course, evading in Korea was very different from evading in this country. I mean, you couldn’t walk around and pretend you were anything other than what you were, with your white face and so on. But, um, so really it was a question of teaching them how to live off the land rather than how to evade but, anyway, that’s what we did and so for two years I was doing that, not only with the Army, I was, I went out onto the boats, HMS Ocean and HMS, oh, the other one. Anyway, there were two aircraft carriers [sneeze] and also I used to work with the Americans, 5th Air Force. I went out on the other coast to one of their big aircraft carriers and spoke to their air crew and so on.
GR: And that would be the early ‘50s, wouldn’t it? 1952, ’53?
AM: No later than that. It’s later than that isn’t it —
GR: The Korean War was ’53.
FL: Anyway, I went back to — well, Air Force Technical Training Command, working in research branch, that was interesting, no flying really, and then from that back — well to 115 here at Marham then, and flying Washingtons, B59s, as the Americans called and I was flight commander on B Flight.
GR: When did you finish in the RAF, Frank?
FL: Sorry?
GR: When did you finish in the RAF the second time around?
FL: Yes —
Frank’s wife: We always forget don’t we?
AM: ‘80s?
FL: Well, oh, from that I was given command of 220 Squadron with Thors, ballistic missiles, so for that I had to go to America to be trained as a launch control officer and ,um, then came back and was stationed up the road at Swaffham, north Ickenham, and when I my tour of duty was finished with that, the only job open for a squadron leader of my seniority, was to run the officers’ mess at one of the three bomber stations and I thought, ‘My God, going from missiles to messes, you know, what is the RAF coming to?’ [laugh] I had long realised that it was a pilot’s Air Force and didn’t have the same promotion chances as navigators. It’s changed now. You’ve got quite a few navigators right up the top but not in those days. If you weren’t a pilot you got nowhere so I thought, ‘Well, I’ll come out.’ And, um, sorry, I can’t think of the year. It doesn’t really matter.
AM: No, it desn’t matter.
FL: So that was the end of my RAF career, running this officers’ mess. In fact, it got me a job in civil life but that’s another story and you won’t want to know about that [laugh]. It’s probably about some of the things in Bomber Command and there’s one flight that I would like to record —
AM: It’s on.
FL: And that’s with 115, from when I was at Witchford. 115 was a big squadron and A and B Flights had used up all the letters of the alphabet because our code letters were KO for 115 Squadron so you had KO, then the roundel and then the aircraft identification A, B, C, whatever it might be. Well, when they got round to C Flight, as I said, they’d used up all the letters of the alphabet so, instead of having KO as the number we had A4. Well, it was a big A and little 4 like a Q and this particular night we’d been down to bomb Friedrichschafen on the —
GR: Maltese [?] coast.
FL: There’s a big lake there now.
Frank’s wife: Lake Constance?
FL: The Messerschmitt factory was in — it was a terrible night, stormy, thunder clouds, bouncing around and I was feeling quite sick. I did suffer from air sickness a great deal in rough aircraft. Anyway, we got down there, markers went down, we bombed the target and turned to come back when we did I didn’t get much help on the way down fixing our positon. And so I knew we obviously — Friedrichschafen that was the name of the place. I knew we’d been at Friedrichschafen when we bombed so from that I could work out what the average speed wind had been since we took off and I thought I’d use this average wind to get home. And the wireless operator couldn’t get me any bearings. Because of these thunderstorms the radio waves had been bounced off the thunderclouds and so the DF direction systems couldn’t help us. It was us on them or them on us. But we got back to where it was over Witchford to Ely and, in those days, all the aircraft had a radio transmission in the aircraft to speak to the ground but it had a limited range of nine miles, deliberately, because there was so many airfields that if it was any wider the ether would be absolutely cluttered with talking so, anyway, we got to where we should have been over Witchford, over Ely, and calling up for a turn to land, deathly quiet, nobody about, no other aircraft, nobody answering. So I thought, ‘Well that’s odd.’ Well, if the wind has changed well we would have been blown this way so I’d go north for ten minutes but then the wind may have gone the other way so I’d go west for ten minutes, still trying to find Witchford, and we had a system, if you were lost you called out ‘Darky’. That was the call sign to get help and any ground station hearing somebody calling ‘Darky’ would answer it with the name of their station. As I said, we were limited to nine miles so you knew you would be within nine miles of that airfield, um, but anyway, nobody answered our Darky call and we went north ten minutes, west ten minutes, north ten minutes, west ten minutes and all the time the bright lights on the fuel tanks were glowing red and I thought, ‘Oh my God, you know, we’re going to be in trouble here.’ And then, just as I was going to tell the crew to — I think I did tell them actually, yes, we sat on the Mae West dinghy, individual pack, and but you didn’t have it clipped to your parachute harness. Normally we just sat on it, that was it, but when you wanted to use it you had to clip it on to the side of your parachute harness otherwise you wouldn’t have a dinghy. So, I warned the crew to hook on their dinghy’s and just at that point we were going north and the rear gunner spotted a searchlight to the rear, to, in other words, to the south and just shining a single searchlight on the cloud. Well, that was, er, quite a normal procedure for showing where an airfield was, a Sandra light it was called, a single searchlight, so we turned to go towards that and I thought, ‘Hang on. We’re going south and we might have been blown a long way south to start with and we could be going to France.’ And we knew the Germans had set up airfields in northern France, along the coast, to make them look like RAF airfields to try and say, ‘Come on in boys. This is where you are.’ Just to capture you, capture the aeroplane, so we carried a little bomb in the aircraft and coming down on hostile country this was to be put in the wing over the fuel tank and then you ignited it, it was an incendiary bomb, and it would burn the aircraft up. And that was the job of the wireless operator was to get out through the hatch on top and go and do this once we’d landed. Anyway, we did quite agree and what I told them to do was for the gunners to protect the aircraft while he was going to do that. Of course, he couldn’t get out until the aircraft had landed, obviously. Anyway, as we got down into the circuit, once we’d broke through this layer of cloud, we could see where the searchlight was shining on the cloud, reflecting all around like daylight underneath, and one of the gunners said, ‘Cor, this is a Messerschmitt over there and a Dornier over there.’ Oh yes, this is one of those German places so I said, ‘Look, gunners stay in their turrets and fight off anyone who comes while we get out and get this bomb burning.’ Well, I used to carry a Mouser pistol because I didn’t like the idea of the RAF only giving you a Bentley 38 with six rounds of ammunition. It wasn’t going to last you very far on the continent but a friend of my fathers had captured this Mouser nine millimetre in the fighting in Russia after, as the First World War ended, and he’d had given it to me so I had this thing. Well, I was going to go to the door and help fight off any Germans coming to try and capture the aircraft and as the tail hit the runway, as we landed, the engines cut, we were right out of fuel. I thought, ‘Goodness me we couldn’t ever get any closer than that.’ Well, we knew it was really low because we’d had red lights on the fuel tanks for some while but, of course, as the engines cut the lights went out because it was the dynamos in the engines that kept the lights going. So, I went on back down to — in the darkness to fiddle with the outside door. Well, it was opened from the outside and a good old English voice said, ‘Oh, 115 Squadron.’ Oh no, there’s something funny about this because, as I said, we didn’t carry 115 letters. We weren’t marked up as KO we were marked as A4 so I thought I’ll put my pistol behind me [laugh] you know, and we found we had landed — oh, sorry as we were approaching it through the static we did pick up the words, ‘Something Ford Bridge standing by.’ I thought Stamford Bridge. Can’t be Yorkshire but it might have been. But anyway where are we? And it turned out what we’d now call Blackbushe, down near Woking . And, um, so it transpired our gunners were quite right, what was happening was that this was just before — well, D -Day hadn’t happened but they were getting ready for it and they got such German aircraft as they caught and assembled there, so that pilots could learn to fly them, so that when the invasion took place they could get over and bring German aircraft back to us. But I was so shattered after that I said, ‘I’m so sorry I can’t stand any more after this. I’m going to resign.’ Of course, it wasn’t just me. It was six other aircraft and they were relying upon me and I failed them. So anyway, when we eventually got back to our base at Witchford the following day, um, the station navigation officer went through my work and said, ‘I couldn’t find any mistakes here. It’s just you didn’t have the information that you needed.’ Well, I said, ‘That’s true. I couldn’t get any information on the way back.’ So, we were just lucky and I said, ‘Well, as a navigator or as an old flying O, I was trained as a gunner. I could go and fly with somebody else in the turret. It didn’t worry me. I’d be quite happy to fly in the turret.’ But the crew said, ‘No, we want you as our navigator.’ I said, ‘Well, you know, we went all through the business of laying mines and mines and so on.’ But we stayed together and carried on with Pathfinders.
AM: Crikey.
GR: Wonderful.
FL: That was a very dodgy, that was the most frightening flight I had.
AM: The dodgiest one of the lot.
FL: Sorry?
AM: The dodgiest one of the lot. You just can’t imagine actually that moment of landing and no fuel. Two more minutes, three more minutes and — gosh. I’ll switch back off again then.
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Interview with Frank Leatherdale
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Annie Moody
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2015-10-18
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ALeatherdaleF151018
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Pending revision of OH transcription
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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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00:59:36 audio recording
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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Frank was an aircraft spotter for the Local Defence Volunteers and volunteered to join the Royal Air Force as a pilot. He went to Calgary in Canada on the Empire Air Training Scheme, where he few Tiger Moths at the Elementary Training School. He was, however, re-mustered as an air observer and qualified in February 1943.
Frank joined 115 Squadron at RAF Witchford, where his crew was formed and flew in Lancaster Mk 2. His first tour consisted of 30 trips, although they only completed 29 because of a change of pilots. He then joined 7 Squadron, part of the Pathfinder Force. He trained at the Pathfinder Training Unit and went to RAF Oakington where they were twice Master Bombers. After his tour, Frank was posted to the Radar Research Establishment at RAF Defford as station navigation officer. It involved several different aircraft and flights (bomber, coastal, naval). He describes several of the interesting people he flew with and the work on Doppler navigation. Frank was subsequently sent to the Pathfinder Training Unit as an instructor and recounts a flight with Air Vice Marshal Bennett, investigating blue target indicator bombs.
After Frank was demobilised, he worked initially as an air traffic control officer before accepting a permanent commission into the RAF. Frank goes on to describe his post-war RAF activities.
Squadron Leader Frank Leatherdale was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his work in Pathfinders.
Contributor
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Sally Coulter
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Worcestershire
Canada
Alberta
Alberta--Calgary
115 Squadron
220 Squadron
7 Squadron
aircrew
B-17
B-29
Beaufighter
Bennett, Donald Clifford Tyndall (1910-1986)
bombing
crewing up
Distinguished Flying Cross
Lancaster
Lancaster Mk 2
Lincoln
Master Bomber
navigator
observer
Pathfinders
radar
RAF Defford
RAF Marham
RAF Oakington
RAF Waddington
RAF Witchford
searchlight
training
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/620/8889/PPaineGH1616.2.jpg
c7fb40cc6f0bfbe3e8dfa9843065b6cb
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/620/8889/APaineGH160726.1.mp3
924472391843693055dda8d9ecb5466d
Dublin Core
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Title
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Paine, Geoff
Geoffrey Hugh Paine
G H Paine
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Paine, GH
Description
An account of the resource
14 items. An oral history interview with Sergeant Geoffrey Paine (1925 - 2019, 1894345, Royal Air Force) documents and photographs. He flew as a pilot with 100 Squadron.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Geoffrey Paine and catalogued by Trevor Hardcastle.
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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.
Date
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2016-07-20
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and it’s the 26th July 2012 and I’m speaking with Mr & Mrs Paine, Geoffrey Paine the pilot and we’re in Croxley Green and we’re going to talk about the life and times of Geoff in the RAF and other activities. So, what are your earliest recollections of life Geoff?
GP: My earliest recollections of life? Oh, when I was a small boy do you mean? [Laughs] I lived at Gerrards Cross which is just down the road from here so I’m a, almost lived here all my life, yes always have, telephone [telephone ringing] always have done to be frank. [Telephone ringing]
CB: I’ll stop it just for a moment.
PP: I’ll go and get it.
CB: It gets.
PP: That was timed wasn’t it?
CB: I was going to say, yeah.
GP: That’s better, yes.
CB: Yes.
GP: So in Gerrards Cross I went to school first of all at —
PP: Not leaving a message, so can’t be important.
GP: I went to school first at High Wycombe Royal Grammar School and then I went down to Cornwall and went to Falmouth Grammar School, and of course when I was there the war was on and I volunteered for the RAF, I was in the ATC, Air Training Corps, down there I was one, actually joined the Air Training Corps when it was probably first formed quite early on and I volunteered for royal air force and as soon as I was eighteen I was whipped into it. [Laughs] No trouble at all. And then now where did I go first? Oh my goodness me I went to London first and then I was sent down, we had about, when I signed up in London, we had about three or four days in London and then I went to Aberystwyth, and we were billeted on, in hotels on the sea front at Aberystwyth and we used to have our lessons in the University Aber, Aberystwyth and our drill on the sea front of course, there was a great lovely big sea front there you could drill on, hard standing and then I volunteered of course for the RAF and my first recollections really I went to grading school, didn’t I, I think, I think perhaps it was grading school, No 6, yes, of course I went to an ITW first an initial training wing and then I, was on 20th September, at Aberystwyth, it was a nice place to be, billeted in the Belle Vue hotel, little hotel we were all in hotels there, we did all our drill on the sea front and we used their swimming pool, we had to go up to the swimming pool on a very cold morning, and the first time we went there we were all non-swimmers, we had to climb to the top diving board and jump in, and we were fished out with long poles, and there was one chap couldn’t do it, ground staff, [laughs] he wasn’t allowed to join aircrew, amazing. I felt sorry for him because he was very, completely gobsmacked he was. It took a bit to jump in because they’re quite high the top boards, and they had this great big long pole, and you grabbed hold of it and they pulled you in and you soon learnt to swim, I mean within a couple of days you were swimming the length of the pool so it was a good way to start, I think.
CB: Yes.
GP: A good way to start that. That was Aberystwyth, gosh, what did I do then?
PP: Well you’ve got it all written down old man, use your notes, use your notes!
CB: I’m just going to stop it a moment.
PP: Yes, go on.
GP: Elementary Flying Training School, Ansty, I went first, I did my first solo at six and a quarter hours, which was quite early I think ‘cause me instructor was leaping about, he’d beaten everybody else getting me in the air [Laughs]. Then I went to ITW at Cambridge just for a short time this was, they moved you about just to fill up time. Then I went to 100 Sqn, RAF Waltham, and there I packed thousands of blooming incendiary bombs. They were going on big raids then from Waltham and it was a continuous packing of incendiary bombs, thousands they, the whole place, must have put Germany on fire I think. Then what happened then? Bomb damage repairs Hornchurch, [?] where did I get to? Heaton Park, 18th of July ’44 and then Hornchurch, bomb damage repairs, and then Kew, bomb damage repairs, and then Hendon, again bomb damage repairs, and then I was put on a boat, the ‘Andes’ to go to Cape Town and from Cape Town you go on that beautiful train all the way up to Bulewao, I think it took three days, two days and a night I think and we went to RAF Guinea Fowl to start our elementary flying training on Cornells and then from there I went to RAF Ternhill to fly on Harlands, and then I think it was getting a bit near the end of the war. Twenty-five, five, forty-five, oh my giddy aunt yes.
CB: OK, we’ll stop again a mo’. Could you just explain the bomb damage repair you were doing, so what was the scene?
GP: Well we, there were about I think twenty, twenty-five of us, and we had a chiefie, you know an RAF sergeant.
CB: Flight sergeant, um.
GP: Nice old chap, and a lorry and when a bomb had dropped and blew all the tiles of roofs, blew the windows in we were piled off, given a place to go and there we had all the necessary stuff to, yellow calico stuff, to nail to the window to keep the wind out because all the glass had gone, we put stuff on the roofs, if there were tiles we put tiles, if not we put tarpaulins on the roofs just to make the place habitable, habitable after the bombing, that’s what happened then.
CB: So some of this was in East London?
GP: Yes it was, it was in East and West, and West London too, yes.
CB: And what about Hendon, that’s an airfield, so?
GP: Yes.
CB: What happened there?
GP: I went to Hendon just for a few days. They’d had a, a doodlebug had landed in the evening when they were all having showers and things right onto an accommodation block.
CB: An RAF billet block?
GP: And we had to clear the site which meant clearing human remains as well, it wasn’t very nice at all. It meant shovelling bricks, shovelling it on a lorry and off it all went, that was it. A complete barrack block got a direct hit, unbelievable really they picked that one building out on the station.
CB: Amazing. And what with the human remains this was a sensitive thing but what did you do with them?
GP: Well, you find yourself a hand with a bit of the, bit of the —
CB: The bone, yes.
GP: A bit of bone sticking out, you didn’t know whose it was.
CB: No.
GP: You just put it in a pile, no way of finding out at all.
CB: So what did they then do with those?
GP: I think they were buried somewhere ‘cause they didn’t know whose they were. They knew who’d died in the blocks obviously but the remains you couldn’t really match them up, impossible. Didn’t find any heads or anything, mostly arms and legs and bits and pieces like that. Not very pleasant but it was as if you were in another place, it didn’t mean much because there was no body with it, just an arm or a leg, wasn’t very nice at all. Oh gosh what did I do after that?
CB: So going on from there you were on the ‘Andes’ yes?
GP: Yes.
CB: Which route did that take and how long?
GP: Oh, it was lovely we called in on the way, it was a posh boat the ‘Andes’, a cruise ship and we called into, what’s it called half way down?
CB: You didn’t go via Canada?
GP: No, we didn’t, no. [unclear]
CB: You went in the west coast of Africa did you?
GP: Of Africa, I’m trying to think.
CB: OK, and who were the people being transported, were they only air force or?
GP: Only air force yeah, I’m trying to pick it up on here. All here, near Gwelo. Yes, that’s right. It was back a bit, arrived at Cape Town.
CB: Yeah.
GP: We went on this nice boat to Cape Town on 1st March.
CB: 1945?
GP: Then we were heading for Southern Rhodesia.
CB: Yes.
GP: I think it took two and a half days to get to Rhodesia.
CB: OK.
GP: Two days and a night. Each carriage had bunks to sleep six so we arrived in Bulewao on 4th March and spent twelve days there to become acclimatised, being so high up above sea level I think it was, I think it was about six or seven thousand feet above sea level.
CB: How did they acclimatise you?
GP: Well just a matter of —
CB: Exercise or?
GP: Matter of doing a few marches, they used to take us out and drop us out on the bush and we had to find our way back and you had to be very careful because if you didn’t pull your socks up or your trousers down you got ticks sticking in your knees all over the place because they used to be on the undergrowth and they’d burrow into your skin.
CB: Yes.
GP: And —.
CB: How did you get them out?
GP: With a cigarette if you had a cigarette, you’d put a bit of heat behind them and they reversed their way out, that was better than doing it any other way otherwise they left the beak in there didn’t they you see? So you got a cigarette behind them and they soon came in reverse [laughs]. Yeah, oh gosh.
CB: And how did the flying go when you were there, you were flying Cornells?
GP: Cornells, well the weather of course, every day was like this, beautiful weather, beautiful weather, lovely flying, and it was, the airfield was out, well out in the countryside and we did a lot of low level flying. We used to beat up the native villages, I can see them all now cowering underneath their little shelters. They lived in thatched roof, you know rough little places, we were pretty horrible to them really. [Laughs]. We used them as a target, we didn’t hit anybody but we used to go in very low and —
CB: Yeah.
GP: And then what else, I think, the war finished and we were shuffled off down to Cape Town and we were there for several weeks, we had a wild time because we climbed all the, well I climbed all the mountains. As you know Cape Town goes all the way round, I climbed all the mountains there, I used to live on the mountain. We’d go to Muizenberg and we’d learned to surf, lovely surf at Muizenberg and the people there were ex-pats who’d moved out there before the war and they were very nice, if they saw you coming down the mountainside they’d call you in and you’d have coffee and cakes and goodness knows what, they looked after you which was jolly nice. We were there for some time before they shipped us home again you see, it was really like a nice holiday really.
CB: What was the ship like that you returned on?
GP: A bit rougher than the one we went out on, we went on the ‘Andes’, came back on the ‘Reina del Pacifico’, which was a bit of, I think the ball had blew up in Belfast when we came back, it was a real old tramp steamer, [chuckles] packed with RAF people coming home.
CB: So we’re talking about May 1945?
GP: May ’45 yes.
CB: And you then went where?
GP: I went to, can you find it below, yes this is it here, yes. I went to RAF Ternhill, on the 25th May we went to Ternhill.
CB: What did you do there?
GP: I’m trying to think, um.
CB: That would be where you the advanced training. [Dialogue confused with interviewer].
GP: Flying Harvards. Yes I was flying Harvards there. I went solo in three hours forty minutes which was quite good and received my pilot wings and along came VJ day, got my pilot wings there and then a victory in Japan day and the second world war —
CB: Yeah.
GP: All flying training ceased.
CB: OK.
GP: We all returned to Cape Town to await our boat home to England, four wonderful weeks in Cape Town climbing the mountains.
CB: So that’s what you did earlier?
GP: Yeah.
CB: So if I just interrupt you again?
GP: Yes.
CB: We come to the end of the war but in the war you were in the Air Training Corps but you were also in the Observer Corps were you?
GP: Yes, no.
CB: That was later?
GP: That was later.
CB: OK, so we’ll come to that in a minute.
GP: Yes.
CB: OK I’m just going to stop for a moment. We’re just doing a correction here, because it’s not Ternhill in England, it’s RAF Thornhill, before coming back. Let me just.
GP: Yes, we went down to —
CB: So after Guinea Fowl then where did you go?
GP: We went down to Thornhill.
CB: Right.
GP: Another RAF training school, No22 Flying training School at Thornhill, and on, along came VJ Day, that was on Harvards, but along came VJ Day and all flying ceased and we were just enjoying ourselves, put on a train and sent back to Cape Town. And when we got to Cape Town there was no boat. We saw the boat going out, we missed the boat, and so we had about four or five weeks in Cape Town to do what we wanted so we climbed the mountains, I did, I climbed up the mountains went all along the back behind Cape Town [Colossal?] and then down over, it was interesting, coming down Oloch[?] you had to get down on to the main road if you wanted to get back to where camp was and there were all these people who, ex-pats who’d built lovely houses there, obviously moneyed people, and they used to welcome us with open arms, ‘Do come in’, used to open a little gate and they’d give you cakes and tea, coffee and drinks if you wanted it. We had rather a nice time, four or five weeks there, before we came back on the boat to come home. And we got on this tramp steamer I called it, ‘Reina del Pacifico’ it was a rough old boat, a lot of people on it, very much overloaded, I’ve got pictures of it here we have, we kept. We stopped at Mafeking going down through, that was interesting coming down to South Africa and —
CB: On the train?
GP: Yes, I got off the train there ‘cause the train was there for a while. They were changing engines so I said to the driver ‘How long are they going to be?’ he said ‘Half hour, three quarters of an hour’ so I went down to have a look at Mafeking and there, there’s Rhodes.
CB: Statue?
GP: Cecil Rhodes statue. Which was quite interesting.
CB: Yes, yes.
GP: And this was when we spent time down to Cape Town and I spent my time climbing mountains there.
CB: So on this boat then, ‘cause you’re going back on the boat.
GP: Yes, back on the boat.
CB: What was that like?
GP: Yeah.
CB: What was that like?
GP: A bit overcrowded.
CB: Um.
GP: But we came out of Cape Town and then we came up the coast and we called in at St Helena which was interesting because Napoleon had been banished there.
CB: Yes.
GP: And the people came out, and I remember buying my mother a tea cosy made out of local raffia or something. [Laughs]. Had quite a good time really. Now what else happened, what happened after that, oh gosh?
CB: So then where did you dock when you got back?
GP: Liverpool.
CB: Um. And where did they send you when you returned?
GP: Trying to think, Liverpool.
CB: I’ll just stop for a mo’ hang on.
PP: Dad.
CB: Right so you’ve landed at Liverpool then what?
GP: Yes, we went to, went down to West Kirby in October ’45. I don’t think we did very much there at all, we were just swanning around, didn’t know what to do with us and then they sent us to Stansted. Stansted was an airfield that had closed and we were put in the hangars and lorry loads of equipment from closing airfields came in and what we did we built little bivouac’s underneath some of this equipment and hid there, nobody knew we were there, otherwise we were given a job. So, we were there for about four or five weeks, hiding away [laughter] otherwise you would, they just gave you something to keep you out of mischief I suppose really. And then 28th November ‘45 I went to number, Bircham Newton, No27 FSTS Bircham Newton, and then I went to Little Rissington, 6FS, solo flying training school at Little Rissington on the 18th January ’46, then I went to Ternhill where I got my wings on 3rd September ’46, quite a long process wasn’t it?.
CB: What were you flying then?
GP: Harvards. That was in Harvards.
CB: So all three of those you were flying Harvards were you?
GP: Harvards yeah.
CB: Right.
GP: [Indistinct]. Kirton-in-Lindsay, oh I flew everything then, doesn’t go on there. I flew Oxfords, Hansons.
CB: So how did you convert to twin engine?
GP: No problem at all.
CB: Yeah, but where?
GP: Gosh, where’s my logbook, where’s my logbook?
CB: OK, we’ll look at it in a moment.
GP: I can see in my logbook —
CB: But you had a good time with these other ones, flying single?
GP: Oh yes, excellent time.
CB: Yeah OK, we’ll stop there for a moment. So, from Kirton-in-Lindsay which is in Lincolnshire you went down to Oakington?
GP: Oakington yes.
CB: And what did you do there?
GP: Oakington? I think I did a little bit of local flying.
CB: On what?
GP: What was that in? Gosh, um, has it got it there Pete?
CB: But what was happening at Oakington which is in Cambridgeshire?
GP: Yes it was a flying training school and um —
CB: For? ‘Cause you went on to Yorks there?
GP: Yes, I went onto Yorks there. Gosh it’s difficult to think of it all now.
CB: OK.
GP: How it all pieced together now.
CB: OK, well never mind. So you went onto Yorks?
GP: Yeah.
CB: And what position were you flying there?
GP: Second pilot on Yorks.
CB: But you’d never been converted to twin-engine or four-engine?
GP: No, no, I just sat in the right-hand seat and enjoyed myself.
CB: Yes. And what did the captain get you to do as the second pilot?
GP: Well, keep an eye open, [laughs], I used to go back, I used to leave my seat and go back in the back and fill in the logs ‘cause you always had this great big log to fill in. I used to keep the logs in the aircraft and then when I finished that I’d sit back next to the pilot again.
CB: Yeah.
GP: But it was a bit of a swansong really.
CB: And the pilot what was his experience before being on Yorks?
GP: Well, he’d had been on Lancasters.
CB: Had he?
GP: Yeah.
CB: And a Lancaster only had one pilot so he was quite happy?
GP: Flt Lt Horry, ‘Horrible Horry’ they called him.
CB: Did they?
GP: And he flew the last York into the museum.
CB: At Hendon?
GP: At Hendon, yes. Horry, I got on well with him, they used to call him ‘Horrible Horry’ but he wasn’t, quite a nice chap, I had a very easy time.
CB: And where did you go in the Yorks?
GP: Oh, we went route flying. You flew across alongside the Andes, the um, —
CB: So you went down through France?
GP: Yeah, through France, and then you turned left along the Mediterranean and you called in at various places.
CB: Would you stop at Orange?
GP: I stopped at several places there.
CB: In France?
GP: And what amused me at the RAF stations there in North Africa, we still had German prisoners of war, and the German prisoners of war would be given a big stick to keep the natives from coming in and robbing the things on the station, that was his job, yes, he had a big pole and that would keep the natives out, and he used it too [laughs]. ‘Cause they’d come, they’d pinch anything, they’d pinch anything. Oh dear, yeah.
CB: So your re-fuelling stops would be how long?
GP: Oh, sometimes we’d have a night, sometimes we wouldn’t have a re-fuelling on the gain, and we’d get as far as India, go up to Karachi and we used to land at Suez down the bottom there, and I used to love it there ‘cause you could hire a boat there and go sailing on the big lakes down the bottom there, and I used to go up to Karachi, we used to fly up to Karachi.
CB: Did you fly via Aiden?
GP: No, I don’t think I went to.
CB: So you went to Iraq did you, through Habbanya?
GP: Yeah, yeah Habbanya. Cor, it’s all a bit of mist at the moment.
CB: That’s OK and this was doing what?
GP: I was second pilot.
CB: Yeah, but what was the ‘plane doing?
GP: Yorks. Carrying freight.
CB: Freight.
GP: Freight, yeah we didn’t carry, well we carried a few, odd people who wanted to fly back, in fact we brought my brother back from, on one occasion, from Cairo, he came back in the aircraft with us.
CB: And what, what, you delivered freight to Karachi?
GP: Yes.
CB: What did you bring back?
GP: Freight came back as well. I can’t tell you what came back I suppose they were packing up the stations, and the important stuff we would fly back home. Then they moved us from, God where we flying from then?
CB: ‘Cause we’re talking now about the time of partition aren’t we?
GP: Yeah.
CB: Between Pakistan and India?
GP: It’s all in the distant past now for me.
CB: We’ll stop there a mo’. So, this delivery system you were operating was from RAF Lyneham?
GP: Yes.
CB: In Wiltshire.
GP: That’s right.
CB: In the aircraft could you just describe what was the crew? This is a transport version of the Lancaster so what did it carry in crew terms?
GP: We had a first pilot, we had me second pilot, and I was sitting in the right hand seat really as a lookout in a way, and we had a wireless operator and a navigator, that’s all we had and we’d fly down, call in at various places in North Africa.
CB: But you had an engineer?
GP: Flight engineer.
CB: Yes, flight engineer.
GP: We’d stop at various places in North Africa and unload freight, or load freight, a lot of freight came home because they were closing the stations when we came back, they were loaded with all sorts of stuff, stations, getting rid of it, getting it home.
CB: What sort of accommodation did you get on the route? So your first stop is Castel Benito?
GP: Well I’m thinking about Malta, ‘cause we went into Malta, I went into Malta.
CB: Yeah.
GP: I had nice accommodation there, very, very hot and humid in Malta, I didn’t like it at all when I was there, very humid, terrible. In fact one day I spent the whole day sitting on the edge of the shower it was so blimin’ humid, it was awful. On other occasions Malta was very nice, we just happened to get the weather that’s all. I did nothing but act as second pilot really.
CB: In North Africa, were you in tents or were they proper buildings?
GP: Oh I’m trying to think, trying to think. No, we were in proper buildings, we were in proper buildings, hard to place it now.
CB: Um.
GP: Yes, we were in proper buildings there, I don’t remember being in tents at all, I don’t remember being in tents.
CB: And how busy was the route? And you’re the lookout how often did you see?
GP: Well it was pretty busy because really because there was a lot of freight coming back. Some, little bit going out, but a lot of freight coming back from closing stations and so forth, so we used to have a lot of freight on-board. I would be up with the pilot and then once we got airborne I’d go down the back and fill in the log, we had a great big log to fill in, what we’d got on board and everything else, I used to do, keep the log. Then come back home, it’s all misty parts [laughs] —
CB: Yeah, yeah. So after flying in Yorks without training on twin or multi-engine.
GP: Yeah.
CB: Where did you go after that?
GP: Oh crikey.
CB: Did you go for twin-engine training?
GP: Where’s my logbook?
CB: So you went to Valley?
GP: RAF Valley.
CB: In North Wales?
GP: Yeah North Wales, that’s right it was very nice there.
CB: So what did you do there?
GP: [Laughs] Skive most of the time on the beach. [Laughter] because we had um —
CB: This was September ’46?
GP: The airfield was quite near the beach.
CB: ’47?
GP: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
GP: Yeah, was nice there. Cor gosh, it’s a job to remember it was a long way back.
CB: But the flying training was twin-engine training was it?
GP: Twin-engine training.
CB: In Oxfords?
GP: In Oxfords and Ansons yeah.
CB: So how did that go?
GP: And Ansons yeah.
CB: How did that go?
GP: It went very well really ‘cause there were a bunch of us, there’s a photograph of us in there I think, all pilots and navigators. Or is it in this one?
CB: Well, we’ll have a look in a minute. And the point of the question is you’d had experience on multi-engine?
GP: Yes.
CB: So I wonder how well that prepared you for twin-engine training?
GP: Fine, ‘cause I went onto Wellingtons.
CB: From?
GP: Middleton St George.
CB: Oh right.
GP: And flying UT navigators, they were all UT navs, I used to end up with sometimes one, sometimes two or three navigators in the back, and a wireless operator. Used to fly every day or every night.
CB: And then you went to Swinderby?
GP: RAF Swinderby.
CB: 201 AFS?
GP: Yes.
CB: So were you instructing there or what were you doing?
GP: What was I doing in Swinderby?
CB: ‘Cause you were on Wellingtons?
GP: Yes.
CB: And you were on familiarisation for a while, but what was the purpose of that?
GP: I did a bit of flying there. Can I have a look at —
CB: Yes, we’ll stop there for a minute. So, you went to Swinderby to the advanced flying school for Wellingtons?
GP: Yes.
CB: Then you went to RAF Topcliffe, which is clearly a nav school and you’re flying on Ansons?
GP: Yes.
CB: So.
GP: I was learning to be a staff pilot then.
CB: Right.
GP: So I could fly anything, Ansons, Oxfords, Wellingtons.
CB: Yes. OK.
GP: Used to mix it up.
CB: Right. So, um, at Topcliffe you were doing what?
GP: Topcliffe?
CB: So this is the No1 Air Navigation School and you’re flying on Ansons so.
GP: I think I was a staff pilot.
CB: You were a staff pilot OK.
GP: Yes.
CB: So you’re flying in an Anson, who else is in the Anson?
GP: Um, wireless operator.
CB: Um.
GP: And probably a training navigator to train, [unclear].
CB: Yeah.
GP: They were UT navigators.
CB: Right.
GP: So they used a couple, they used UT navigators, sometimes two UT navigators and one staff navigator.
CB: OK, who was the instructor?
GP: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, and were you being trained at the same time?
GP: No, I was just flying.
CB: Right, OK, right. So from there you then went onto Wellingtons again?
GP: Wellingtons.
CB: And this time you were at Middleton St George.
GP: Middleton St George, yeah I spent most of my time there then.
CB: So talk us through that, what was that, what were you doing there?
GP: Flying UT navigators all over the place, every day, every night.
CB: Right.
GP: I was a staff pilot there so.
CB: OK.
GP: I had my own wireless operator.
CB: Um.
GP: Forget what he was called now. He’s there somewhere.
CB: But the practicality of it is that that kept you busy for quite some time?
GP: Oh yes it did, until I finished I think.
CB: OK. So, when you, you were the captain of the aircraft, except when you had to be checked out occasionally?
GP: Yes that’s right.
CB: So that takes you to the end of your flying training by which time you’d done eleven hundred hours?
GP: Yes.
CB: So your biggest, where was your biggest hour accumulation, flying hours?
GP: Probably flying out to India.
CB: And on these Wellingtons you put in a few hours?
GP: No that was on, not Lancasters, on —
CB: On the Anson, on the Wellington?
PP: Yorks?
GP: No, Yorks.
CB: Yorks to India. Yeah, no, no, but this.
GP: Second pilot of Yorks.
CB: But at the end you were doing the training of navigators?
GP: I was training, UT navigators, in the back. Usually a staff navigator and UT navigator.
CB: Yeah, at Middleton, OK. ‘Cause you started there at six hundred and eighty four hours, and you finished up with eleven hundred hours.
GP: Yeah.
CB: That was pretty good going.
GP: There was a lot of flying see.
CB: And how did you feel about flying like that?
GP: No problem I loved it, I did, I enjoyed it, I really enjoyed it.
CB: And the navigators were telling you where to go so sometimes it wasn’t right.
GP: Which course to go on. I dozed off one night, I’d been on nights, I dozed off and got a tap on the shoulder, ‘Excuse me sir’.
CB: And to what extent could you fly on auto-pilot, or was it just trimmed for stability?
GP: Oh you could, almost entirely, almost entirely you could fix it.
CB: But you did have auto-pilot?
GP: We had auto-pilot, yeah.
CB: Yeah. How reliable was that?
GP: Very reliable, yeah, very reliable.
CB: So this is how you could catch up on your sleep?
GP: We kept an eye on things, you just sat there, you were just a passenger on the aircraft. Aircraft flew itself really.
CB: Yes. And where were the sorties, because Middleton St George is on the north east, close to the coast, did you fly?
GP: Well we used to come right down over the country, down to the, down to Cornwall and the Isle of Wight and up, up again up the east side, yeah we did all sorts of trips.
CB: By then we’re talking about peace time, so everything’s illuminated so to what extent could you check where you were without the navigator helping you?
GP: Well you could ‘cause you, as a pilot, you kept a check on where you were. You knew what course you were flying, or you knew the main places you could identify on the route and it was normally anti-clockwise, you’d go down across Wales and then across to the east coast then up, nearly always that way round.
CB: Right.
GP: For some reason or another, I don’t know why.
CB: So that was No2 Air Navigation School at Middleton St George?
GP: No2 Air Nav yes.
CB: So you come to the end of your time?
GP: Yes.
CB: What rank are you then?
GP: Pilot three.
CB: Right. As what rank?
GP: Well it’s equivalent to a sergeant pilot really.
CB: Right.
GP: But um.
CB: What had they done to the ranks?
GP: I was a pilot four, that was equivalent to a corporal ‘cause they changed it all you see.
CB: Right.
GP: And when the SWO found out I was still in the sergeants, I’d been in the sergeants mess, but because they changed the ranks he said ‘You can’t come in here now, you’re only a corporal’ but I went to the airmans mess and had a far better time in there I can tell you.
CB: At what stage was that?
GP: God only knows.
CB: Was that close to your leaving the RAF or many years?
GP: Yes a couple of years I think.
CB: Yeah.
GP: Yes, you can see from my logbook.
CB: OK. So, you’ve come to the end of your RAF term, how many years had you signed on for?
GP: Three years and four years reserve I think it was.
CB: Right. So, you came out of the RAF in ’49.
GP: Yes.
CB: What did you then do?
GP: Farming, [laughs], took a farm. Then what did I do then? I went in the Observer Corps didn’t I?
EP: ’61 you went in the Observers.
GP: Royal Observer Corps.
CB: OK, what prompted that?
GP: I became a commander in the Royal Observer Corps and —
EP: You went full time ’66.
GP: What was that darling?
EP: You went full time in ’66.
GP: Yes I went full time in ’66 yes.
CB: Fine. And how long did that last?
Unknown: [Indistinct]
GP: Three years was it?
EP: No until you retired.
GP: Until I retired yeah, yeah.
CB: Aged what?
EP: Sixty.
GP: Sixty, when I was sixty.
CB: And while you were in the Observer Corps what was your task?
GP: What was?
CB: What was your task? What were you doing?
GP: Pilot.
CB: No excuse me, I’ll stop it.
GP: Oh sorry, Observer.
CB: So as part of the history here —
GP: Yes.
CB: How did you come to meet your wife Evelyn?
GP: Well —
CB: And when did you marry?
GP: I met Phillip, her brother, first and we had motorbikes, and he took me home.
CB: What was he doing?
GP: He was um, he was in the RAF still, and I was in the RAF, but he took me home, and I met Evelyn then, and oh gosh, it’s a long story isn’t it?
CB: Go on.
EP: That was in ’45.
GP: ’45. 1945.
EP: When you came back from Rhodesia.
GP: I’d come back all sunburnt from Rhodesia, yeah. [Laughter]. Yeah that right, and we got, we just clicked didn’t we, we just got on so well. I think, never had any arguments.
CB: Well there you are.
GP: And her family were very nice to me, your father was very nice to me. He was a funny old chap her father but he was very nice to me indeed, in fact he gave you away, came up the aisle with you to me.
CB: Lovely. And he was a farmer was he?
GP: Oh no.
CB: Oh no, what did he do?
GP: Well I don’t know, [laughs], practically nothing I think. He’d um —
CB: So when did you marry?
EP: ’48.
GP: 1948. Twenty sixth of August, was it? 26th? 1948. Yeah, and he gave her away.
CB: OK.
GP: Doesn’t sound right somehow does it, how can he give you away?
CB: Well I’ve just done it twice.
GP: Yes.
CB: It relieves the financial pressure you might think.
GP: That’s right, that’s right.
CB: Doesn’t work that way at all.
GP: We’ve always got on, never had any upsets as far as I can remember.
EP: Show you the letter.
CB: I’m just stopping a moment. Now here we have a letter from the Queen which ‘gives her great pleasure to send you her best wishes on your sixty-fifth wedding anniversary on twenty-sixty August 2013’.
GP: We’ve got, we’ve got two haven’t we from the Queen? The other one’s hanging up there behind the lamp.
CB: Yes. That’s really nice.
GP: We’ve met the Queen.
CB: Yes.
GP: She’s very nice.
CB: You went down to Buckingham Palace did you?
GP: Yeah.
CB: Was there a garden party?
GP: Garden party.
CB: How did that go?
GP: We went to the garden party. At one occasion my nephew drove us there and the car conked out going down Whitehall [laughs] and we walked into Buckingham Palace. [Laughter].
EP: But we met her at Bentley Priory, that’s where you met her ‘cause we went to [?]
GP: Oh yes, I was in charge at Bentley Priory so I had to meet her didn’t I?
CB: Right. So now what we need to do if we may is talk if we may about your time in the Observer Corps.
GP: Yeah.
CB: So how did you come to join the Observer Corps and where?
EP: Because we were farming.
GP: Yeah, we were farming —
CB: Where?
GP: In Cornwall.
CB: Down in Cornwall, yeah.
GP: Who did I meet?
EP: You met, you went haymaking at next door neighbour.
GP: Next what?
EP: You went next door neighbour, helping with the harvest.
GP: Yes.
EP: And a ‘plane flew over and you went over to have a look didn’t you?
GP: That’s right yeah, ‘Are you interested in aircraft?’, I said ‘Yes, I was a pilot’.
CB: Yeah, and how did the conversation go after that.
EP: He said he had a post on his farm didn’t he?
GP: Yes that’s right he did. Who was that? That was um —
EP: Stevens.
GP: Stevens yes. Yes, he said ‘I’ve got a post on my farm’ that’s right. Um, he had these underground posts every, every four and a half, or five miles.
CB: Right. OK.
GP: They’re still there most of them.
CB: Yeah, hang on. So, this chap’s farm was where you started was it?
GP: That’s right down in —
CB: Where was that?
GP: Down in Cornwall, Pelynt in Cornwall.
CB: OK.
GP: And there was an underground post there. Um a bunker.
CB: Right.
GP: And we had a crew of ten.
CB: Right.
GP: So we’d man it with three at a time so you had a succession of people manning the post.
CB: So what did this compromise, the underground?
GP: The underground, you had a bomb power indicator, you had a battle assembly pipe outside which would record the over pressure of a bomb if it dropped and you would record it on a dial, BPI. BPI - bomb power indicator.
CB: Right.
GP: And then outside you had a pin hole camera, 360 degree camera with a cover on it and you had to load up sensitive papers in that, take it up, put it on its stand outside. If a bomb went off then it would record the height, the size of the weapon and the angle from the post, so you knew exactly, you know you could pass all this information onto your headquarters which were down Truro and they could plot it all on a big map and knew exactly what was going on. It was quite clever really.
CB: So this was with a landline reporting?
GP: Yeah. Landline.
CB: On a landline?
GP: We had radio back up but mostly landline, but um —
CB: So this is Observer Corps, so people were out observing how did that work?
GP: Royal Observer Corps, and they’re from down underground. You had a bomb power indicator underground so if a bomb went off immediately you had, the bomb power indicator would show you how many pounds pressure there was.
CB: Yes, right.
GP: How big a bomb was, and then you waited about three minutes and you went up the ladder, got outside, lifted the lid of the ground zero indicator which was a pinhole camera.
CB: Right.
GP: With four pin holes.
CB: OK.
GP: And you’d lift the lid off, took out the papers to come downstairs and then sent the readings through to headquarters and they could plot that bomb and you had several posts call the same bomb and you’d get several angles they knew exactly where the bomb was, if it went, if you had one.
CB: So what sort of bomb was this supposed to be?
GP: Well a —
CB: A nuclear weapon or an ordinary bomb?
GP: A nuclear weapon probably yeah.
CB: But the Observer Corps itself during the war.
GP: Yeah. The eyes and ears of the RAF.
CB: Were doing something different was it? Was that doing something different?
GP: Eyes and ears of the RAF.
CB: Yes. They would be working above ground during the war.
CB: Right.
GP: Spotting aircraft, saying where they were going and what they were doing, and then we went to the nuclear phase where they built all these bunkers, they’re still there ‘cause they’re solid concrete underground, most of them are still there.
CB: Right.
GP: One or two of them have been excavated but most of the are still there, if anybody’s got the keys they can go down them.
CB: So what distance are they apart?
GP: It’ll be eight miles.
CB: Right, and where are they in the country?
GP: Eight to ten miles. [?]all over the country.
CB: Right.
GP: Everywhere. There was one at Pelynt, where was the nearest one to Pelynt?
EP: I’ve no idea.
GP: Oh, um, trying to think now. They were about every eight, between eight and ten miles apart.
CB: So you were doing this part-time to begin with were you?
GP: Um.
EP: Yes.
GP: Yes I was to begin with.
CB: At what point did you change to full-time?
GP: God.
EP: ’66.
GP: ’66 was it?
EP: Yes.
GP: Yeah, she would know [laughs]. 1966 – full time. Yes I became an observer commander so I had quite a responsibility, then I got posted to Preston, Lancashire but I still kept my home here.
CB: Yeah.
GP: Came home on Friday nights, and went back on the two minutes past seven in the morning to get into the office before anything started happening, yeah.
CB: So at Preston you’re now a senior man, what were you doing there?
GP: Preston, well we had, I had a headquarters there, quite a big headquarters, longer than this garden with offices all the way up with staff, ‘cause you had a local area, had a whole area. There was an area Commandant who was a spare time who didn’t really do very much except have a rank but he didn’t do anything, I was the, I was the one that did the work at Preston.
CB: How long did that last?
GP: ‘Til I retired didn’t it?
EP: Five years.
GP: Five years.
CB: Yes. And from Preston where did you go?
GP: Home.
CB: No.
GP: I was sixty then.
CB: Oh you were sixty. So how does the Bentley Priory part fit into this?
GP: Oh, Bentley Priory.
CB: I’m just going to stop a moment. So, from Preston you came to Bentley Priory?
GP: Yes, I did.
CB: Before you retired, what did you do there?
GP: Well I was in, oh what was I, I was in an office there, and I’m trying to think what I did there, cor dear.
CB: The Queen?
GP: Queen’s visit, we had a Queen’s visit to Bentley Priory.
CB: What did you do about that?
GP: We have observers from the whole of the country down there, bought them all down by train and we had a big garden party at Bentley Priory and I remember I went round one way with the Duke and somebody else went round the other way with the Queen, ‘cause we criss-crossed just to introduce to one or two extra people, special people on the way round, that sort of thing, Bentley Priory.
CB: And what was the significance of the event.
GP: [Exhalation of breath].
EP: Wasn’t it the closing down of ROC was it?
GP: I think it was.
PP: Anniversary?
GP: I don’t know, yes I think it probably was that we were anticipating being closed down, the ROC, and we had just this royal garden party and we invited the Queen.
CB: Yes.
GP: And the Duke.
CB: Right.
GP: The Queen, the garden party was split in two places with the, if you know Bentley Priory out the back is a fountain. One half was that side and we were the other side. So the Queen went round one side and we took the Duke round the other and he was hilarious [laughter], he really was the old Duke of Edinburgh, but we got a lot of fun, a lot of fun with him [laughs].
CB: Well he had a lot of background with the military.
GP: Yeah, yeah, he did.
CB: OK. Thank you. Now in the Observer Corps the people needed to be trained?
GP: Yes.
CB: And what did you do on an annual basis?
GP: On an annual basis we would have a big camp at an RAF station that was being closed.
CB: Right.
GP: And um we’d have a week, I think it was a week there, and observers come from all over England to do training there, which was quite good, but I used to go as a full-time staff and help do the training. It was quite good fun really.
CB: What was the training that they had?
GP: Aircraft recognition, mostly aircraft recognition, God, it’s hard to think.
CB: ‘Cause we’re talking about the Cold War time aren’t we?
GP: Yeah, we are.
CB: And um, so aircraft flying very high that’s no good, but so what were they looking for?
GP: They were still looking for aircraft, I’m trying to think.
CB: No more.
GP: Trying to think. There was still low level flying as well, you know it wasn’t all high level. Um, gosh.
CB: Because as well as recording the data.
GP: Yeah.
CB: About nuclear blasts they had to have training for that presumably?
GP: Yeah, we, trying to think about it now. Yes, we used to have exercises which were all planned, co-ordinated so that a post which was perhaps ten miles away would have a reading and a time, and a post which was ten miles away would have details of the same blast but different timing and different angles, you know the whole thing was co-ordinated as if the real attack had come, nuclear attack had come. Massive, massive, awful, awful to contemplate really, but the whole thing was planned nationally so that all the posts, all the stuff fed in would have co-ordinated properly you know? Quite a big job really. Quite a job, a lot of planning went into it.
CB: And where was this information fed to?
GP: Fighter Command, Fighter Command mostly I ‘spose, yeah, and local defence. Surprising we had scientific officers at each group headquarters, they would work out the fall-out, the radioactivity levels and so forth as if a bomb had really dropped and so we had scientific officers there, they weren’t in the Corps but they were scientists recruited to do that job. Great big screens, two big screens. Long range board and another big screen, and you’d plot on the back and the scientific officers would read the front but you’d plot on the back.
CB: Like fighter screens, and where were these regional headquarters located?
GP: God, all over the place. Oxford, big one at Oxford.
CB: On airfields or separate?
GP: No, separate from airfields.
CB: Right.
GP: One at Oxford, there was one here at.
EP: Watford had one.
GP: Here at Watford, the bunker is still there at Watford, and it belongs now to the vets doesn’t it? They use it down below ‘cause I went down it one night, I used to, when I was down at Horsham I used to come home and I used to go and check on the headquarters here at um —
CB: At Watford?
GP: Yeah. And I went in one night, a bit on leave, I came and couldn’t understand a light was on. So, I went in to put the light out and I could hear noises, der, der, der, der and I thought hello, I said ‘Somebody’s here’ so I walked on and there was a bloke there and what he was doing, he was preparing training material for his crew using all the tape and everything you see. So, I crept down there and I didn’t let him hear me coming and I walked up to him and tapped him on the shoulder. I’ve never seen a bloke jump so high in my life [laughter]. He didn’t think anybody could get in you see, because he had the key. He was using it, he shouldn’t have been using it really, using it to prepare all his training stuff for his crew. That was very funny and I was able to creep right up to him and tap him on the shoulder, I’ve never seen a bloke jump so high in my life. Frightened him to death [laughs], yeah, and that’s still there, that building. If you went to see the vet she’d probably let you in, if you said you’d — gosh when you think the money that was spent on it all.
CB: Yeah. Well this also linked in with the RSG’s didn’t it, the Regional Seats of Government?
GP: Yes, yes it did, that’s right the RSG’s. Yes, it was an interesting time really, in another few years it will all be forgotten nobody will know what it was all about will they?
CB: We’ll have to do research into that as well.
GP: [Laughs].
CB: Thank you.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Geoff Paine
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-07-26
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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APaineGH160726
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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
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Geoff Paine attended High Wycombe Royal Grammar School and Falmouth Grammar School, joined Air Training Corps and volunteered for the Royal Air Force at eighteen. Upon competition of initial training he was posted at RAF Waltham (100 Squadron) then at RAF Hornchurch, RAF Heaton Park and RAF Hendon. He served in a bomb damage repair unit, and reminisces a V-1 weapon exploding onto an accommodation block at RAF Hendon. Geoff continued his training in Africa (Cape Town, Bulawayo, Thornhill) flying Cornells and Harvards. He qualified as a pilot near the end of the war but after august 1945 flying activities ceased. Back in Great Britain he was stationed at RAF West Kirby, Stansted, RAF Bircham Newton, RAF Little Rissington, RAF Ternhill, RAF Oakington, RAF Lyneham, RAF Valley, RAF Swinderby, RAF Topcliffe where he flew Yorks, Oxfords, Ansons and Wellingtons until he was demobilised in 1949. He subsequently went into farming and joined the Royal Observer Corps first part-time, and eventually progressing into full time role of observer commander retiring at sixty in 1966. Discusses Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh’s visit, Cold war bomb testing and observation roles.
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Wales--Anglesey
Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe--Gweru
Zimbabwe--Bulawayo
South Africa--Cape Town
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Cheshire
England--Essex
England--Gloucestershire
England--Gloucestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Manchester
England--Norfolk
England--Shropshire
England--Wiltshire
England--Yorkshire
South Africa--Mahikeng
South Africa
England--Lancashire
England--Bishop's Stortford
Format
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00:54:12 audio recording
Temporal Coverage
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1945
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
100 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
Cornell
demobilisation
Elizabeth II, Queen of Great Britain (1926 - 2022)
Flying Training School
Harvard
incendiary device
Initial Training Wing
Oxford
pilot
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921-2021)
RAF Ansty
RAF Bentley Priory
RAF Bircham Newton
RAF Grimsby
RAF Heaton Park
RAF Hendon
RAF Hornchurch
RAF Little Rissington
RAF Lyneham
RAF Oakington
RAF Swinderby
RAF Ternhill
RAF Topcliffe
RAF Valley
recruitment
training
V-1
V-weapon
Wellington
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/830/10718/E[Author]WilsonJH440408-0001.jpg
7595b1eb8acfe185b63780dc4645dd2a
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/830/10718/E[Author]WilsonJH440408-0002.jpg
429bae6810c9565332e01777fdda8888
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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Fuller, Frank Tilden
F T Fuller
Description
An account of the resource
19 items. Sergeant Frank Fuller was the rear gunner on a 7 Squadron Lancaster captained by Squadron Leader C H Wilson, Distinguished Flying Cross, which was shot down during operations to Nuremberg on 3/31 March 1944. Collection consists of letters to Mrs Wilson, the captain's wife, from the parents of other crew members and official sources after crew reported missing. <br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Maurice Burl and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.<br /><br /><span>Additional information on Frank Fuller is available via the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/209870">IBCC Losses Database.</a></span>
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-10-01
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
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Fuller, FT
Transcribed document
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Transcription
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[crest]
No. 7 Squadron,
R.A.F. Station,
Oakington,
Cambridge.
8th April, 1944.
Dear Mrs. Wilson,
Thank you for your letter of 4th April. I am enclosing a list of your husband’s crew and their next of Kin.
You will be informed immediately any news is received which I sincerely hope will be in the near future.
I should be pleased if you would confirm that correspondence addressed to 2, Kensington Grove, Denton, will find you or whether you have permanently moved to Chapel-en-le-Frith.
Yours sincerely
[signature]
Mrs J. H.Wilson,
Greyfriars,
Chapel-en-le-Frith.
[page break]
NAVIGATOR:- Sgt. J.Stevens 1456987 R.C
Next of Kin:- Father
Mr. D.W.Stevens
Carlton Grange,
Hope Nr.Wrexham- N.W.
AIR BOMBER:- F/O J.S.Ferrier J.23366
Next of Kin:- Father
Doctor Gordon Ferrier
167,Church Street
Mimico- Ontario – Canada
WIRELESS OP. Sgt. K.G.Francis 1387022 C/E
Next of Kin:- Father
Mr. J.Francis
65, Winchelsea Road,
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 Mrs J. H. Wilson from 7 Squadron
Description
An account of the resource
Letter to Mrs J. H. Wilson from 7 Squadron enclosing a list of next of kin for her husband’s crew and requesting confirmation of her address.
Creator
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7 Squadron
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-04-08
Format
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Two photocopied sheets, two page typewritten letter
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
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E[Author]WilsonJH440408
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Civilian
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Lancashire
England--Manchester
England--Chapel-en-le-Frith
England--Derbyshire
Temporal Coverage
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1944-04-08
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
David Bloomfield
7 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bomb aimer
flight engineer
missing in action
navigator
RAF Oakington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/767/10768/PDavenportE1801.1.jpg
9b1f946586e85bffeada770ed7a27552
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/767/10768/ADavenportE180523.2.mp3
14123a7c068a69fe6a614786d465e1f9
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
Davenport, Ernest
E Davenport
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Ernest Davenport (b. 1923, 1237998 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a bomb aimer with 7 Squadron before being shot down and becoming a prisoner of war.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-05-23
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
Davenport, E
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JB: This interview is being carried out for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Jennifer Barraclough and the interviewee is Mr Ernest Davenport. The interview is at his home in Manly near Auckland and the date is the 23rd of May 2018. So, thank you very much Mr Davenport for taking part. Perhaps you could start by telling me a little bit about your early life and then how you came to join up.
ED: Very well. Yes.
JB: Thank you.
ED: Well, I’ll start by introducing myself. Ernest Davenport is my name. I was born on the 4th of January 1923 in Tattenhall, Newton, Chester, Cheshire England. Soon a place in my life. The family moved to Wallasey, Cheshire in the 1930s. I was sixteen at the outbreak of war. I joined the Home Defence Volunteers in 1940 when invasion was imminent. Later the Local Defence Volunteers name was changed to Home Guard. My experience of the German blitz on Merseyside which was quite severe made me decide to join the RAF as a pilot and I hoped to become a night fighter pilot. How I came to Bomber Command is after being accepted in to the RAF Volunteer Reserve in January 1941 when I was eighteen and I commenced flying training in July 1941 and completed a course at RAF Elementary Flying Training school at Watchfield, Wiltshire. In November 1941 the weather being very bad and not much flying going on a group was formed. A group of pilots, pupil pilots was formed to go to the United States who had volunteered to train RAF personnel in the US Army Air Corps in Florida and Alabama. At that time the Americans were not in the war. Eventually we arrived in the USA in January 1942, and by that time the Americans were in the war and the situation was slightly different. Prior to that we were supposed to be going in civilian clothes but of course we now went in uniform and the Americans issued us with American uniforms which was a bit peculiar but this was the way it was to be. The course wasn’t altogether a success. The, the Americans were still on a peacetime footing and with ample manpower they were quite selective and more than half of our class was eliminated. Many for trivial reasons. The RAF reinstated many of these pupils to pilot training in Canada. By July 1942 I’d completed the US Army Air Corps primary and basic course and had about two hundred flying hours as a pilot. I was then posted to their Advanced Flying Training School in Dothan Alabama. After my second flight in a new type of aircraft with my flying instructor I was taxiing back to park when a strong gust of wind caused the aircraft to swerve and one wing touched the ground scratching the paint. That was the end of my pilot training in the USA. I was told to make my way to the Royal Canadian Air Force station at Trenton, Ontario, Canada and report to the RAF senior officer. The reselection board at Trenton interviewed me when I arrived. I was hoping to be admitted to pilot training in Canada but I was informed that there was a need for navigators and that I could resume my pilot training after completion of a tour of operations with Bomber Command. I was returned to the UK after qualifying in the observer role which included navigation, bombing and gunnery. The usual procedure was to post newly qualified personnel to Operational Training Units where they were formed into crews and did further training before being posted to operational squadrons. I was posted directly to 7 Squadron, Oakington, Cambridge. An operational squadron in the Pathfinder Force equipped with Short Stirling aircraft. The Pathfinder Force was used to mark targets for the main force to bomb. On my arrival at Oakington I reported to the squadron adjutant who took me to see the squadron commander, Wing Commander Mahaddie, who far from welcoming me demanded to know what I thought I was doing there. He went on to tell me that the, that he could have the pick of the finest crews in Bomber Command and that the minimum qualification he required was a commendable tour of operations over Germany. After I let him know the facts of my experience in the RAF he relented and told me that I could stay on his squadron for one operation and that if I was satisfactory I would be accepted. He further said that he would arrange that I could join a crew who needed a replacement for ops that night. As he was conferring a huge favour I was then introduced to my skipper to be, flying officer Ince DFC, and crew members Flying Officer Winfield, Pilot Officer Collins, Flight Sergeant Fray, Flight Sergeant Stokes and Flight Sergeant MacDonald. All of whom had completed a tour of operations before joining 7 Squadron. We went to briefing as a crew and learned that we were to attack Turin that night, the 4th of February 1943. The crew were very good. Very good. Very good natured about having such a raw recruit foisted on them and gave me a lot of help. I’d never flown in a Stirling. Didn’t know where anything was. For example, when we reached twelve thousand feet altitude climbing on course I didn’t know where, where to find an oxygen point. When we crossed the enemy coast and were fired on I had no idea how much danger we were in until I heard one of the gunners call the skipper on the intercom and say rather disinterestedly, ‘A bit of flak about ten miles on the port beam, skipper.’ The Stirling was fitted with four Bristol Hercules engines which had the handicap of not functioning well above about twelve thousand feet, so navigating the Alps was a bit tricky. It was a beautiful night but one engine, but one engine failed over the target with the result we could not maintain altitude on the way home so it was necessary to keep more than usually a keen lookout if we were to avoid the alpine peaks. There was a huge explosion in the middle of the night in Turin during which, during the raid which we heard later was due to a direct hit on the main armoury. But otherwise nothing of note. My second operation was to Cologne on the 14th of February. A much shorter trip but much more hazardous I was told by the old timer crew. How right they were. A few miles before reaching the target we were, we were to drop a navigation marker flare at a turning point for the main force. After dropping the flare we turned right on to the new course. At that moment a German night fighter who must have been following us coincidentally opened fire. Fortunately, most of the cannon shells missed except for some which damaged the petrol tanks in the port wing. Again, most fortunately the petrol did not catch fire. Being so close to the full intensity of the burst of tracer shells was a sight not to be forgotten. The gunners were highly embarrassed at not having seen the enemy fighter but their task was extremely difficult. We assessed the damage. Mostly we thought petrol leakage. It was trickling down from the main spar and puddling on the floor of the fuselage. The skipper decided to continue to the target where we had to drop markers for the main force. After successfully marking the target we turned for home. The flight engineer then announced that with the petrol loss we might not have enough fuel. We altered course for RAF Manston which is in Kent and was nominated as an emergency airfield. Arriving at Manston we found that the electrics for the undercarriage had been damaged and so it had to be manually lowered with a hand crank. Eventually the skipper landed and the slight jolt caused the port wing to sag. We travelled back to Cambridge by truck. The skipper was awarded a bar to his DFC and the flight engineer a DFM. So it went on until the 21st of June when having completed twenty operations we were forced to abandon our aircraft. Sadly, our skipper Flight Lieutenant Ince did not survive.
[recording paused]
JB: Ok. Would you like to start?
ED: Right. On the night of the 21st of June the target was Krefeld in the Ruhr Valley. After we had marked the target and were on, on course for home the mid-upper gunner reported a fire in, in the port wing. The flight engineer had a look from the astrodome and he thought that it was the petrol tanks between the, between the engines. The skipper thought possibly he’d try diving the aircraft to see if the fire would go out. So he had a try at that and the fire was, became more intense because of the velocity of the air going past, and so we levelled out again. One of the gunners came on the intercom and said, ‘Perhaps we should put our parachute on.’ So the skipper thought that might be a good idea and then he said, ‘Well, you’d better bale out boys.’ And so I went down and opened the escape hatch in the nose and somebody came down the steps and went out and I thought perhaps I’d better go too. So I sat on the edge of the, of the escape hatch and dangled my legs out and pushed off and fell out of the aircraft and then pulled the rip cord of course. And my next impression was of complete silence because the aircraft had vanished in the night and I couldn’t see anything but blackness. And so little by little I could hear noises and realised that they were distant guns going. And I found this going down in the night a bit boring so I, my ears were creaking a bit so I tried to get some chewing gum out of my trouser pocket but I couldn’t because the, the parachute harness was too tight across my body so I [pause] suddenly hit the ground and that was the, that was my introduction to Germany. So I was in some sort of a, the middle of some sort of a crop of either wheat or oats or something and I, I had a big knife which I had in my, in my waist belt for protection so I dug a hole and buried my parachute and tried to make myself look like a civilian by pulling my trouser legs over my flying boots and started walking thinking I might reach the Dutch border which wasn’t I thought too far away. But I, then I realised that the, there was a big river to cross in that direction so I just carried on walking and it was about 2 o’clock in the morning I think, and of course being mid-summer’s night it started to get light quite early. So, I came to a main road and decided perhaps I’d better not cross it in case I was seen, so I doubled back in to the field and by this time it was, it was fairly light. Pushed my way back through the hedge and suddenly I realised there was a farmer with a big scythe about to start cutting his crop. So he started shouting, and the next thing I knew some troops were running towards me with rifles, and there was an anti-aircraft gun in the corner of the field so that was it. I capitulated, and was taken into the farmer’s house and he got on the telephone and, and a vehicle arrived and some German troops took me to a German barracks nearby and I was asked for the usual things — name, rank and number and so forth and then locked in a room. And I was pretty tired by this time so I, I went to sleep. Of course I was awakened about 11 o’clock in the morning and given some food which was the last thing I felt like really, but then I was taken to a [pause] I was interrogated by a German officer who then locked me back in the room again and a little later an Air Force officer came and took charge me, and he was quite a pleasant fellow. I think he was probably aircrew and he, he [pause] no I’ve missed a bit out. I was marched by the German Army people down the road and they had six of them, three in front and three behind and I thought it was all rather amusing. I realised afterwards that the troops were really protecting me from the populace not the other way around. But quite a lot of our people had been murdered by civilians and of course the Germans didn’t want to appear in a bad light relative to the Geneva Convection so they were protecting us.
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 Ernest Davenport
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jennifer Barraclough
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-05-23
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
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Sound
Identifier
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ADavenportE180523, PDavenportE1801
Conforms To
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Pending review
Format
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00:20:34 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Description
An account of the resource
Ernest Davenport was born in Tattenhall, Cheshire in 1923. He joined the Local Defence Volunteers in 1940 and after witnessing the bombing of Merseyside he decided to join the RAF as a pilot. He was accepted into the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve and commenced flying training in July 1941 at EFTS at RAF Watchfield. He continued his training in the USA in 1942 and after a slight mishap on landing during a training flight he was sent to Canada for reselection as a navigator. He returned to the UK as a qualified observer which included navigation, bombing and gunnery. He was posted directly to 7 Squadron at RAF Oakington equipped with Stirling bombers, and was told on arrival by his CO, Wing Commander Mahaddie that he would be accepted providing he completed one satisfactory operation. On an operation to Krefeld his aeroplane suffered a fire and the crew were forced to bale out. After burying his parachute in enemy territory he eventually became a prisoner of war.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Wiltshire
Germany--Krefeld
Italy--Turin
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942
1943-02-04
1943-06-21
7 Squadron
aircrew
bale out
bomb aimer
bombing
civil defence
Home Guard
observer
Pathfinders
prisoner of war
RAF Oakington
RAF Watchfield
Stirling
training
-
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/830/10792/EChaplinWilsonJH440331-0002.1.jpg
3dbb1d1ebd0e2eb2a0e7e0113c3fe650
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
Fuller, Frank Tilden
F T Fuller
Description
An account of the resource
19 items. Sergeant Frank Fuller was the rear gunner on a 7 Squadron Lancaster captained by Squadron Leader C H Wilson, Distinguished Flying Cross, which was shot down during operations to Nuremberg on 3/31 March 1944. Collection consists of letters to Mrs Wilson, the captain's wife, from the parents of other crew members and official sources after crew reported missing. <br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Maurice Burl and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.<br /><br /><span>Additional information on Frank Fuller is available via the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/209870">IBCC Losses Database.</a></span>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-01
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
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Fuller, FT
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CHAPLAIN’S OFFICE,
R.A.F. OAKINGTON,
[underlined] CAMB’S. [/underlined]
[underlined] March 31st [/underlined]
Dear Mrs Wilson,
I am writing personally to express my sincere sympathy with you in the deep anxiety which you must be feeling in regard to your husband who, with the rest of his crew, did not return from the raid on Nüremberg last night. We shall hope with you however that all may yet be well & any further news will of course be sent to you at once. You may well be proud of your husband – his devotion to duty & true courage
[page break]
have placed him among those to whom we all owe so great a debt.
God grant you & the children deep comfort & strength in these anxious days of waiting for news. Please let me know if there is any thing that I can do to help you,
Yours very sincerely,
G. H. Martin
Chaplain
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter from chaplain to Mrs Wilson
Description
An account of the resource
Letter from the Chaplain at Royal Air Force Oakington to Mrs Wilson expressing his sympathy that her husband and his crew did not return from an operation to Nuremberg the previous evening.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
G H Martin
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-03-31
Format
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Two photocopied sheets, two page handwritten letter
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
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EChaplinWilsonJH440331
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--Cambridgeshire
Germany
Germany--Nuremberg
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-03-31
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
David Bloomfield
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
faith
ground personnel
missing in action
RAF Oakington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/829/10817/AFrostEH171110.1.mp3
4ecbc32e765af74a605294daa00675e9
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
Frost, Ted
Edward Howard Frost
E H Frost
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Edward Frost (b. 1920, 146644 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a pilot with 61 and 83 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-11-10
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
Frost, EH
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
RP: This interview is being conducted on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Rod Pickles. The interviewee is Edward Frost. The interview is taking place at Mr Frost’s home in Somerset on the 10th of November 2017. Also present is Ian Frost. Good morning, Ted and thank you for inviting me to your lovely home. Can we start off by telling us, if you could tell us when and where you were born and what led you to joining the RAF?
EF: Well, I was born in Ealing on 18 3 20. I’ve always been interested in aircraft. In fact, I first flew in an Avro 4K when I was six. And this was my father knew the pilot and I’ve always been interested in aircraft models and that. And I know when I got into this Avro the pilot said to me, ‘Now, you see those wires going down there. On no account touch them.’ I said, ‘Oh, I know. Those go to the elevator and the rudder. And he sort of looked. I said, ‘Yes.’ And I gave him one or two other details about the aircraft. And he said, ‘Oh, you’re interested.’ I said, ‘I’ve always been interested.’ So when I left school at eighteen I joined, I joined the VR and started my training. And then when the war started because I was in the VR I was virtually straight into the Air Force proper and finished my training. And I was posted to Hendon. And I thought great. Fighters, you know. But when I got there it was Lysanders. They had Lysanders at Hendon and I thought they would be fighters. Anyway, the idea of the Lysanders was to train Bofors gunners and other gunners. And what we used to do was to fly various heights and various headings so they could train their guns on it. And I did that for quite a while. I’ve got to think again here. Oh, that’s right. We had also got involved slightly in the Dunkirk excavation, picking up downed aircrew and taking agents in and out to occupied France. And the agents were always known as Joes. We never knew who they were. And what we used to do was to go, we used to work on a principal of a backward L if you can imagine it. L backwards. We’d come in and we’d land, obviously, down the upward L part. Turn around at the top, come around to the short L bit and we’d be then facing ready to go off again. And I’ve lost my thread again. Just a minute. [pause] Oh yeah. No. It’s gone again. Anyway, I got fed up with this flying because you’d often hear the old bullets coming along and hitting your tail plane. You know, the Jerries were not all that far away so you used to land in odd spots. And I got my transfer to Bomber Command. You know, it’s a hell of a job to remember this.
RP: Don’t worry. Don’t worry. If you remember the aircraft you were flying. The Squadron.
EF: Oh yeah. The Squadron was 61 Squadron.
RP: Right. Ok.
EF: We were flying the Lancaster Mark 3. But prior to that I was at Swinderby which was, what was that? OTU was it?
RP: Yeah. Might be. Yeah.
EF: Anyway —
RP: Because they would, they would have that for you if you were just joining them. Yeah. Yeah.
EF: We had the Manchester there which wasn’t terribly good. No. It’s all going.
RP: What year? What year was this, Mr Frost? What year are we talking about?
EF: I’ve even lost the thread I was on. This was —
RP: You were joining 61 Squadron.
EF: Oh. 61 Squadron. That would be, must have been about ’43, I think. ’42. ‘43 and also funnily enough on the other squadron because there were two on the station, this was at Syerston was Guy Gibson on 106.
RP: Yeah.
EF: Anyway, we got to about twenty four trips you know and we were one of the few that were still flying and they were forming new Squadrons. We didn’t know what they were. But it was the Dambusters as it turned out. And we said, well another sort of thirty or twenty trips I think they said we’d have to do. We’d had enough quite honestly. So I said, ‘Well, we’re not keen,’ you know. We only want to do six more trips and we could have a rest. Well, the bomb aimer was very keen. A keen type. He went and he was killed on the, one of the Dam raid.
RP: Oh right. But you were flying sorties from Syerston in the Lancasters.
EF: Yeah. 61 Squadron.
RP: So what was, what was the, what was your memories of the sorties you did? Was there anywhere particular?
EF: Oh yeah. Well, one, one in fact can you get that picture down there? I brought it down. The little one. Yeah. 61 Squadron at Syerston. Lancasters Mark 3. It was a jolly good Squadron, you know. It was very, very friendly. It was a super Squadron and we did our tour on there. I told you towards the end they wanted us to go on this special Squadron that was being prepared. Or being developed. Well, we didn’t want to go but the bomb aimer went and he went in on the Dam raid. After the tour there I did a tour on Wellingtons at Bruntingthorpe as an instructor.
RP: Was that an OTU?
EF: That was an O —
RP: OTU.
EF: OTU. Yeah.
RP: Yeah.
EF: Yeah. OTU.
RP: How did the Wellington compare to the Lancaster?
EF: Well, it didn’t really. It was a different thing but it was a jolly good old aeroplane. It was good, you know, Very, very good. It had a fabric covering on the fuselage. I quite enjoyed that one. The only trouble with the Wellington is if you put your hand out of the window of the Wellington you lost your fingers because the prop tips used to come just there.
RP: Oh right. Just outside.
EF: It was outside. That was so close.
RP: I never thought of that. Oh right. So you wouldn’t wave the ground crew goodbye in a Wellington.
EF: No. No. No. That reminds me of something. Gibson. His wife. I can’t think of the name of her. She was very good. She always used to come to the end of the runway when you took off for a bombing mission to wave you goodbye.
RP: Really.
EF: She was very good. I think she was an actress or something. I know she was a blonde. But I thought that was very good of her because you always used to see a crowd at the end.
RP: Yeah.
EF: You know, where the caravan was.
RP: Yeah. Sending you their best of luck. Yeah.
EF: Cheerio. Yeah. But —
RP: So, you were at Bruntingthorpe on the Wellington. So how long were you at the OTU for? At Bruntingthorpe.
EF: Quite a long time. Quite a long time. It’s on there. It must have been two. Two years I would think. Oh, I know. We were coming back then on to Tiger Force which was then being introduced to go to Japan. And of course shortly afterwards they dropped the bomb and of course that fell flat. And so my next thing was at Oakington on Liberators bringing the troops back from all over the world. As a number. You had a number come up. A demob number. And that was quite interesting.
RP: So what Squadron was the Liberator on?
EF: That was Oakington?
RP: Was that 83?
EF: No. 83 was the Pathfinder Squadron.
RP: Ok.
EF: Oh, I don’t know.
RP: No. Ok. But so where were you flying in the Liberator then? Where were you —
EF: Oakington.
RP: Where to though? Where were you repatriating them?
EF: All over the world.
RP: Right.
EF: Anywhere.
RP: Anywhere.
EF: Yeah.
RP: Gosh. So basically they were being used as transports.
EF: It was Transport Command.
RP: Yeah.
EF: And what you used to do was probably take an aeroplane out to North Africa or something. Drop it and someone would pick it up and then carry on. And you’d stay there and they’d, you’d pick up another aircraft that was coming back.
RP: But, but were you on 83 Squadron at all? Were you ever on —
EF: Yeah.
RP: What did you fly?
EF: Lancasters.
RP: You flew Lancasters on 83 —
EF: Yes.
RP: As well. That was from —
EF: I only did a few trips there.
RP: What year was that? Was that before 61?
EF: That would have been — no. That was after 61.
RP: After 61. Yeah.
EF: Yeah. When I’d, we’d done our main tour.
RP: Right.
EF: But I fell out with Don Bennett who was, you know the —
RP: Oh. The Pathfinder.
EF: The Pathfinder chief.
RP: Yeah.
EF: And he always seemed to be picking on me. I know one day I’d had a particularly bad day and he was picking, nit picking again and I said to him, I said, ‘Excuse me, sir,’ I said, ‘But you’re obviously a highly qualified airman,’ I said, ‘I’m a highly [laughs] recently qualified civilian and the better I get back to that position the better.’ Of course, that didn’t go down very well and I was booted off very quickly.
RP: Removed from the Squadron.
EF: Yeah. Well, yes.
RP: Oh dear.
EF: That was 83 Squadron.
RP: So that, that was Lancasters. So you’re making all, were all your sorties done on a Lancaster then?
EF: Yes.
RP: All of them.
EF: Yes.
RP: Ok. Because I think 83 also they, they flew Hampdens early on. Didn’t they? But –
EF: Oh yes. Guy Gibson flew Hampdens on 61.
RP: Yeah. Did you ever fly a Hampden though?
EF: No.
RP: No.
EF: In fact, I remember one night we were walking back to the, well debriefing really and suddenly there was a terrific bang and a Hampden went right through, in front of us, the barrack blocks had taken the wings off.
RP: Oh, my goodness.
EF: It shot straight through the front doors. But the crew were alright I believe. It’s a bit disjointed, isn’t it? I thought I’d —
RP: Oh, don’t worry. Don’t worry. I mean, we’re getting the, I’m just interested that you sort of pass over your sorties as though they were just sort of everyday occurrences but did you have any near misses when you were out over Germany at all?
EF: Oh yes.
RP: Could you, could you remember a couple of those?
EF: One of the bad, one of the dodgy ones was the Skoda works at Pilsen. We’d lost an engine on the way in. You know, it had been hit by flak and stopped. And so of course I had, this was the starboard inner and I had to rev up the outer a little bit to try and make up for it and that was getting rather warm. But the reason, the result of that which I didn’t know about it had damaged the undercarriage. So, of course when we came in to land it folded up and we did what they called a circuit on the —
RP: Oh, my goodness.
EF: Yeah.
RP: Where were you landing at? You were going back to Syerston. Syerston.
EF: Syerston again.
RP: Oh dear.
EF: But we always landed. In those instances you always landed on the grass so there was no, not really a lot flame or, you know sparks coming off. And —
RP: Did you all get out ok?
EF: Oh yes.
RP: You put it down.
EF: Nothing serious.
RP: No.
EF: It’s just that we didn’t know about it. I knew that the engine wasn’t [pause] you know, we’d feathered that. But it was a bit of a surprise. Where else did we go?
RP: So that was one sortie.
EF: Oh, another thing that we did were the mine laying.
RP: Oh right. Yeah.
EF: But that only counted as half a trip and you had to fly at about sixty or eighty feet.
RP: Yeah. So very low, isn’t it?
EF: For a mine otherwise they’d, you know it smashes itself up if you were too high.
RP: Yeah.
EF: And I know we were going along at this, this was all at night. We were going along quite low and flak started coming up and I swear it came up between the engines.
RP: Gosh.
EF: It probably didn’t. But of course there were some flak ships around.
RP: Yeah. Yeah.
EF: And we, you could see them and suddenly they’d obviously got you in their range and as soon as you got near of course they opened up with the flak.
RP: So you mentioned earlier that your nickname was Flak Happy then.
EF: Yeah.
RP: How did you get that then? Why did they christen you with that name?
EF: I was always coming back with holes. And what they used to do was do you remember the old metal kettles. I think there’s one out there, but they used to repair these with the washers and that, that they used to repair the underneath of these metal [unclear]
RP: Oh right.
EF: If you imagine they used to screw this thing in and then file off the head of it.
RP: Right. I see. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s why. You always brought a Lancaster back for repair then.
EF: Oh, yeah. Well, always.
RP: I imagine most of them must have had flak. Or did you attract, seem to attract more?
EF: It was just a name I had. I think I caught more than most.
RP: Yeah. But you were never, you never obviously caught yourself. Injured at all by flak yourself. You didn’t suffered any injuries.
EF: Oh well, no. Not really. I just had a flak splinter which oddly enough they didn’t take out at the time and it was an August about, what two years ago they took this piece of flak out.
RP: Really.
EF: Yeah [laughs] the scar’s here.
RP: Two years ago.
EF: Yeah.
IF: It had moved through his body apparently.
EF: Yeah. It had been moving around and —
IF: Yeah.
RP: How amazing.
EF: And suddenly it irritated me.
RP: Oh, I see. It suddenly started itching.
EF: Yeah.
RP: But before you hadn’t felt it.
EF: No.
RP: How odd.
EF: And I knew I’d been hit.
RP: Yeah.
EF: Because there was obviously broken skin.
RP: This might seem a silly question but did they give you the piece of flak?
EF: No. They didn’t. I realised that afterwards. And it was Doctor [Coldrick] that took it out.
RP: Gosh.
EF: And he kept it.
RP: Oh right. But he might have kept it. You never know.
EF: Yeah.
RP: Gosh. That is, that is strange.
EF: I’ve got a piece of flak upstairs haven’t we?
IF: Yeah.
EF: That came in and hit me. Well, hit the metal plate at the back of me. Well, it was quite a big piece.
RP: Obviously the plate did its job though.
EF: Oh yes.
RP: Yeah. That’s why it’s there.
EF: Hit the metal plate and then slid down to the floor.
RP: That’s what it’s there for.
EF: And the ground crew gave it back to me afterwards.
RP: That was very nice of them.
EF: Yeah.
RP: So, can we, if you can recall it you were awarded the DFC and we’ve seen the newspaper cutting from 1944. Was there a particular reason you were given the DFC or was it because of your, the way you behaved?
EF: It was the way basically I behaved.
RP: Because of your —
EF: And I think —
RP: All the sorties you’d done. Yeah.
EF: The Skoda works finished it. You know that was the, quite a, it was a hell of a long way.
RP: Yes.
EF: In Czechoslovakia.
RP: It is. When you said Skoda works I thought that’s not in Germany.
EF: No. No. No. It’s not.
RP: Mind you some of the cars they produce they did deserve to be bombed.
EF: Yeah.
RP: Don’t quote me. But so that, at that point in 1944 then about how many sorties would you have done then?
EF: I’d done thirty [pause] About thirty four or thirty six. Something like that.
RP: That’s extraordinary because a lot of your colleagues of course you were expected maybe five or ten was good, wasn’t it?
EF: Well, yeah. The fact you never really got to know anybody.
RP: Yeah.
EF: Because there were two or three of you that always seemed to, you know, get, get through but another crew would come in. Two days and they just weren’t there.
RP: Yeah.
EF: You know. But you got used to it. It didn’t do you any good but —
RP: No.
EF: Most of the crews just didn’t come back. In fact, I think the losses on Bomber Command were fifty five and a half thousand.
RP: Yes. Yeah.
EF: And about, there was about twelve thousand training.
RP: Yes.
EF: And you wouldn’t —
RP: Because you forget about the training crashes. Yeah.
EF: When you think about it very few people had seen a real aircraft to touch when the war started.
RP: That’s right.
EF: It was only the aircrew that were training. Even though when I got there I had only been in Avro 4. Ok. But to see these other ruddy great aircraft you thought I’m never going to fly one of those. So —
RP: So when you were in the Lancaster doing your sorties was it the same crew you took every time?
EF: Yeah.
RP: So you got to know your own crew.
EF: Oh, we got our crew. Yeah. They got on very well.
RP: That’s good. So —
EF: In fact, the navigator. I was with Quaker Oats and was in sales force. I was away in [pause] anyway, it doesn’t matter. Anyway, I had to spend a fair bit of time away and the, my wife rang me up and said, ‘Oh, the police have been on the phone. Would you call in on Saturday?’ So I, you know, I thought, what on earth had I been doing? But what it was, it was my navigator who was then the chief of police of Harrogate.
RP: Oh right.
EF: And he wanted to see me.
RP: How nice.
EF: But that’s odd, isn’t it? He was a good navigator. Very good.
RP: Yeah. Did you maintain any other correspondence with other members of the crew? Or not.
EF: No. Funnily enough I didn’t. I was, it was one of those things. Just after the war I went to Quaker Oats and we, well what they did I was training to be an accountant. I came back after the war, they said, ‘Ah, Mr Frost. It’s nice to be back. There’s a desk over there. There’s an office there.’ So, I said, ‘Well, quite honestly I don’t really want to sit with my knees under a desk any more. Anything else I can do?’ ‘Oh yes,’ they said, ‘We’ve got a few vacant territories. Sales territories.’ So they gave me one of these. And of course that meant I could get out and I was, you know —
RP: You weren’t hamstrung in an office. No.
EF: I didn’t have an office. No.
RP: You were out and about.
EF: I used to try and work from home. Well, at home. But it meant I had to spend an awful lot of time away. I was in hotels and back home on Thursday for the Friday, you know sales meeting. But I’ve lost myself again.
RP: Oh, don’t worry. When the war ended then what were you flying? Were you on Liberators at the end of the war?
EF: I was on Liberators. Yeah.
RP: Did you sort of consider staying in the RAF?
EF: I did think about it but my wife wasn’t keen. And what finally decided me which may surprise you we used to have VRs. Brass VRs in our tunics.
RP: Yeah.
EF: Well, the order had come through to remove these. I don’t know why.
RP: Ok.
EF: Which of course obviously left two holes. And I was at a dining in night where everyone gets together in their best blue and that and I was told to see the adj in the morning. Which of course I did. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘There’s been a complaint you’re improperly dressed. You’ve got holes in your — ’ I said, ‘Well, that’s not a surprise. You told me to take the VRs out.’ ‘Well, you’re improperly dressed, you know. You can’t wear a shirt with holes in it.’ So I said, ‘Well, I don’t know what else I’m going to do,’ because in those days it was all on coupons as you probably remember.
RP: Yeah.
EF: Yeah. And that was really what decided me not to stay in. I thought, well. —
RP: Do I need this?
EF: Things aren’t what they used to be.
RP: I don’t blame you.
EF: Who can blame me?
RP: Yes. What was the purpose of removing that then? Because they —
EF: Well, I never found out.
RP: No. So they did away with the Volunteer Reserve.
EF: You see, we were the volunteers with VRs.
RP: Yeah.
EF: Whereas the majority of people I suppose were still in the regular Air Force.
RP: Oh right.
EF: But why? I don’t know. I never found that out. But that’s what decided me. Things aint what they used to be.
RP: No. No. But how did the Liberator compare to the Lancaster in terms of flying?
EF: Oh. No. It was a nice old aeroplane because the big difference was it was a tricycle undercarriage. The Lancs was two —
RP: Oh yes. Yeah.
EF: And it was quite a different approach to bring a Liberator in. Or even take off because you had to virtually fly it in to the deck whereas with the Lanc you come in and you just drop it in.
RP: Yeah.
EF: With a big bang.
RP: But in the air though was it much the same? Once you were airborne was it easier?
EF: Well, really yes. Yeah. Because it was never under, I never flew it under wartime conditions, you know. Other than just bringing people back.
RP: So how many people could you carry then if you were going to repatriate?
EF: We could get about eighteen, twenty.
RP: Oh gosh.
EF: It depends. And we used to sit them alongside the fuselage. And I had a funny experience. I was a flight lieui then and we had a captain turn up but he didn’t want to sit with the troops down the right side there. He wanted to be up in the cockpit. I said, ‘Well, nobody comes up in the cockpit unless I specifically ask for them.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Well, I’m not flying on that.’ So he got out of the aircraft and we were the same rank so it didn’t make any difference to me. So I said, ‘Well, you’ve got a choice old boy,’ I said, ‘You can either get in there or stay here,’ I said, ‘But don’t forget your luggage is somewhere in that Liberator and I shall be taking off in about five minutes and your luggage will be coming with me if you don’t come.’ And no. He decided to stay. So we ended up back at Oakington with his luggage on board. How he got out I don’t know.
RP: You never saw him again.
EF: No. No, his —
RP: Or his luggage for that matter.
EF: I’ll tell you another thing he was one of these officers who smoked a pipe. It was a Dunhill. I always could see that, you know. Puffing away at this pipe. I said, ‘You really shouldn’t be smoking. You’re right next to an aircraft with several hundreds of gallons of fuel on board.’ Oh well,’ you know, ‘That’s alright. I’m quite safe with a pipe.’ But no.
RP: Yeah. Not now you wouldn’t be, would you?
EF: No.
RP: You’d be, you’d be in trouble.
EF: Well, of course there’s always a certain smell of petrol around.
RP: There is. Yeah.
EF: I suppose many of the tanks did leak a bit. You know. They were bound to. So there was always that atmosphere around and the vapour smell. It was a dodgy business. But yet [laughs] on the other hand, the crew. I always knew when we were coming to the, well what was called the Enemy Coast, which of course the coast coming back I’d suddenly go [sniff] and some of crew had lit up. You couldn’t do much about that. But I always knew. I suppose the navigator obviously had told them that we were approaching the English Coast as it was. But —
RP: So, how many, how many sorties did you do on Liberators then? Repatriation.
EF: Oh, I couldn’t tell you.
RP: Quite a lot.
EF: Quite a lot. Yeah.
RP: Right. It was a long time. Was that —
EF: Yeah. Well, again we were just flying a leg.
RP: Right.
EF: We’d fly say to Algiers or something drop the aircraft. Someone would pick it up. Take it. Already there. On they’d go. We’d wait there for another aircraft to come in and then pick that one up.
RP: Oh. So it wasn’t the same aircraft. You were flying different.
EF: Oh no.
RP: Oh right.
EF: Only go in stages.
RP: Right. So you didn’t actually have your own Liberator.
EF: No.
RP: You were just a crew for a Liberator.
EF: Whatever came in. Yeah. Oh yes. Mind you, the crew, the recipients of the journey were very, very pleased. They got home in, you know in a couple of days rather than a week or a couple of weeks on the water.
RP: Yeah. Well, yeah I suppose it would take a while.
EF: When their number came up.
RP: Yeah. Were there prisoners of war among them? Did you —
EF: No.
RP: It was just —
EF: No. Never had.
RP: Just the troops that had been —
EF: They had a special, you know, return.
RP: Yeah. Yeah. So what’s, looking back across the sort of aircraft you flew what’s your abiding memory then of World War Two?
EF: The Lancaster obviously because I flew those a tremendous amount. Although, Wellingtons of course. I spent a long time on the OTU at Bruntingthorpe and I spent a long time on Wellingtons.
RP: But you think obviously the Lancaster is the, was your favourite then.
EF: My favourite. It was, it was a magnificent aircraft. And yet the Manchester was just the opposite.
RP: Yeah. Because they decided to do away with that, didn’t they? Was that a twin-engined?
EF: Had to. They had, the engines were no good.
RP: Yeah.
EF: I forget what they were but if you lost an engine you went like a brick.
RP: Yeah.
EF: With a Lanc you could fly on three and you could exist on two. On two for a while but —
RP: But you, you’ve flown, have you flown the Lanc, you’ve flown the Lancaster on three though. Yeah.
EF: Oh yes.
RP: So you know.
EF: Well, it was a normal thing really. Because engines, I don’t know if they were Rolls Royce, were not all that reliable or you’d get hit by flak or something, or there were so many things that could go wrong with an engine after we’d been banging away there for eight, nine, ten hours. Things do go wrong. So it was, it was nothing unusual to fly on three engines. You could do it no bother. You had a job climbing but you could maintain height and airspeed alright. Which —
RP: So, looking, looking back then Ted if you had to do it all again would you do it?
EF: Oh, I think I would. Well, yeah because I’d volunteered and I’d been told to do it you know. I think so. But it was certainly an experience and you never forget it and I do get flashbacks even now at times. And I’ve got some pills that are supposed to give me relief from them but the trouble is they make me even worse the next day.
RP: Right.
EF: Do you remember those?
IF: Oh yeah.
EF: Right —
RP: But these are, these are sort of memories of the war you’re talking about.
EF: Yeah. Yeah. Because you’d get something come and I used to take these pills. But the next day. God it was awful. So I’ve still got them in a drawer somewhere.
RP: But you’re not taking them now then. You’re not taking them anymore. No.
EF: I don’t take them but I still get the flashbacks.
RP: Yeah. Are they, is it the sense that they’re a bit disturbing? Or it’s just —
EF: Yeah. You know, I’m doing something and the funny thing is, in a flashback if you’re firing at something and you’ve been, say you’ve been shot down and firing a revolver at a German you never seem to hit them. A funny thing. No. It’s something that always intrigues me. And if you’re firing at another aircraft you could see your bullets going you know. This is in the flashback. And never seem to hit [laughs] I don’t know.
RP: But in the reality if you were ever hit by a night fighter did you ever shoot any down? Did your gunners get them?
EF: The gunners hadn’t actually seen the one go down but they had hits.
RP: Yeah.
EF: When we went to the Skoda works at Pilsen we had, we were attacked by a Junkers 88 and the gunners certainly hit it because it, you know disappeared and didn’t sort of affect us anymore. But we had some good, I had good gunners. I had a good crew.
RP: I assume all your Lancaster sorties were night time sorties.
EF: Oh yes.
RP: But the Liberator trips were in daylight. So that that made a pleasant change.
EF: Well, yeah they were. Sometimes you needed to fly at night.
RP: Yes.
EF: You know. To get to a certain place.
RP: Yeah. But daylight flying was something new then.
EF: I didn’t do an awful lot of daylight flying. In fact, now I still get up at 3 o’clock in the morning. I still do. It’s funny.
RP: Really.
EF: The night is quite friendly to me somehow.
RP: Oh ok. Anyway, it’s been lovely talking to you Ted and I appreciate you recording all that. It’s been absolutely superb.
EF: Well, it’s, it’s been difficult.
RP: No. I do appreciate. We’re grateful for your time and thank you very much. It’s been lovely listening to you. Thank you.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Ted Frost
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Rod Pickles
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
2017-11-10
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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AFrostEH171110
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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00:31:33 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
Edward ‘Ted’ Frost volunteered for the RAF and began training to be a pilot. Initially he was posted to RAF Hendon where he flew agents in Lysanders to the occupied territories. He was then posted to 61 Squadron at Syerston. He was offered the opportunity to join 617 Squadron but he and most of the crew felt they didn’t want to immediately start another operational posting. His bomb aimer did take the opportunity and died during the Dams operation. Ted’s nickname on the squadron was ‘Flak Happy,’ because he was always bringing his aircraft back with holes. On the squadron there were so many crews that did not return that they didn’t really get to know other crews. As on many operations Ted was injured by anti-aircraft fire but thought little of it until he had to have an operation to remove a piece only two years before the interview. Ted continued to have flashbacks of the war throughout his life.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
61 Squadron
83 Squadron
aircrew
B-24
Bennett, Donald Clifford Tyndall (1910-1986)
Distinguished Flying Cross
Lancaster
Lysander
Manchester
Operational Training Unit
Pathfinders
pilot
RAF Bruntingthorpe
RAF Hendon
RAF Oakington
RAF Syerston
Special Operations Executive
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/830/10821/EMeredithFWWilsonJH440403-0001.1.jpg
d8aacebcd1f72b0ef32626f647f59d64
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/830/10821/EMeredithFWWilsonJH440403-0002.1.jpg
fe9711be269fbae74c11b6286e9f8a24
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
Fuller, Frank Tilden
F T Fuller
Description
An account of the resource
19 items. Sergeant Frank Fuller was the rear gunner on a 7 Squadron Lancaster captained by Squadron Leader C H Wilson, Distinguished Flying Cross, which was shot down during operations to Nuremberg on 3/31 March 1944. Collection consists of letters to Mrs Wilson, the captain's wife, from the parents of other crew members and official sources after crew reported missing. <br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Maurice Burl and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.<br /><br /><span>Additional information on Frank Fuller is available via the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/209870">IBCC Losses Database.</a></span>
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-10-01
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
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Fuller, FT
Transcribed document
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
1169645 Cpl Meredith F.W
c/o Officers’ Mess,
Royal Air Force,
Oakington,
Longstanton,
Cambs.
April 3rd/44.
Dear Mrs Wilson
Ma I just express my deepest sympathy.
As S/Ldr Wilsons[sic] batman I have had handed to me a number of articles to be forwarded to you, these I am forwarding under separate cover & trust the parcel reaches you safely.
It has been stated that over 90% from here have been taken prisoner so I hope that will be some small consolation to you. Finally may I say that after four years in the R.A.F. S/Ldr Wilson was my idea of an Officer & a Gentleman
Yours faithfully
F. W. Meredith. Cpl.
[page break]
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 Mrs Wilson from her husband's batman
Description
An account of the resource
Letter from Corporal F W Meredith, Squadron Leader Wilson's batman, expressing sympathy and stating that he had been ask to forward a number of articles and he would do this under separate cover. Offers hope that her husband was taken prisoner.
Creator
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F W Meredith
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-04-03
Format
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Two photocopied sheets, one page handwritten letter and printed transcript
Language
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eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EMeredithFWWilsonJH440403
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. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-04-03
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
Sue Smith
David Bloomfield
aircrew
ground personnel
missing in action
RAF Oakington