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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/8/16/PPfeiferKW1601.2.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/8/16/APfeiferKW160627.1.mp3
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Pfeifer, Charly
Charly Pfeifer
C Pfeifer
Karl W Pfeifer
Description
An account of the resource
One interview with Karl Wilhelm Pfeifer (b. 1941), a schoolboy in Betzdorf an der Sieg during the war. The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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
Pfeifer, KW
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-06-27
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
PS: Lieber Charly,
CP: We can talk English, if you like to.
PS: Nein, es ist besser auf Deutsch. Können Sie mir erstmal ganz einfach ein bisschen von Ihrer Jugend erzählen. Die ersten Erinnerungen die Sie haben.
CP: Ja, die hängen natürlich zusammen mit den Zweiten Weltkrieg, weil, das ja außergewöhnlich, Krieg ist immer außergewöhnliche Situation, und da ich in der Nähe einer Stadt wohnte, in der zum Beispeil, sehr viel militärischer Nachschub über die Eisenbahn verschoben wurde, gleichzeitig gab es dort eine Fabrik für Lokomotiven und Industrie für Reparatur von Lokomotiven undsoweiter. Weil alles was in der Nähe im Krieg zerschossen wurde, wurde dort repariert. Also waren die Alliierten daran interessiert, diese Werke und die Eisenbahn, den Eisenbahnknotenpunkt stillzulegen durch air raids, was sie dann auch gemacht haben. Und ich kann mich dann als Kind in soweit daran erinnern, denn Bombenabwürfe sind ja nun nicht uberhörbar. Dann war es so, das abends und nachts, wenn die Alarmsirenen gingen, wir natürlich aus dem Bett mussten. Meine Mutter, mein Vater hatten schon immer einen gepackten Koffer da stehen. Und dann sind wir los in, entweder einen Bunker, das war aber kein Bunker der extra errichtet wurde, sondern das war ein Stollen von einer ehemaligen Mangangrube, oder aber wir sind, war auch wir bei also in einen Eisenbahntunnel dann nachts. Und… [dog barking] Dann ist klar das nach Bombenangriffen die Stadt dann brannte und ich kann mich erinnern dass meine Mutter mich auf den Arm nahm, weil ich alleine nicht so aus dem Fenster gucken konnte, schauen konnte, und ich dann gedacht habe das die Sonne rot scheint weil der Himmel rot war, aber in Wirklichkeit war das ja nur der Wiederschein des Feuers aus der Stadt.
Speziel kann ich mich erinnern an den Winter 1944-45, wenn wir Kinder spät nachmittags draußen gespielt haben, und es war blauer Himmel, dann konnten wir die Abschüsse der V2 Raketen sehen, weil in unserer Nähe, war nur ein Paar Kilometer weg von uns, war eine Abschussstation für V2 Raketen und im abendblauen Himmel konnte man schön sehen den Kondenstreifen der Rakete und wenn Brennschluss war, sah man nur noch in der Abendsonne den hellen Punkt weiterfliegen. Die wurden damals aber schon nicht mehr in Richtung England geschossen, sondern Richtung Belgien und Holland, weil sich in dem Bereich die Alliierten schon befanden, nach der Normandie. Und das war natürlich für uns Kinder interessant, weil logischerweise wir das ja nicht so als Krieg empfunden haben, weil wir ja nicht direkt da involved, also beteiligt waren, sondern mehr als, ja eine Art von besonderer Ablenkung aus dem Tagesgeschehen heraus. Und wir sind dann, dass weiss ich noch, 1945, sind wir dann von Zuhause weg, weil so viel gebombt wurde, und sind das, aber nicht allzu weit weg, sind wir in so‘n Dorf gezogen, was für Bombardements kein Interesse war, wo also nichts war, keine Industrien und nichts. Da wo ich zum Anfang wohnte war natürlich viel Industrie und dran war man ja interessiert. Und das direkte Ruhrgebiet, das war ja auch nur 80-90 km weg von mir, damals, so dass wir das alles also mitgekriegt haben. Wo ich mich noch dran erinnern kann war dass, sehr oft, abends, wenn‘s dunkel wurde, dunkel war, wir, ein einzelnes Flugzeug kam, wir nannten ihn den eisernen Gustaf und der machte aber nichts anderes, das war der Pfadfinder, der vor wegflog, und dann die sogenannten, wir sagten Christbaüme, Weinachtsbaüme, gesetzt hat, das war also, sah aus wie ein Riesending mit Leuchtkugeln, das also die ganze Gegend erhelte, und das war wie wir, wie ich dann später erfuhr, als ich älter war, dass das kein Schauspiel war, sondern dass das die Zielmarkierung für die Bomber war. Und auch als Kind haben wir natürlich nicht gewusst, sind das nun Englische Bomber, sind das Amerikanische Bomber oder, für uns waren das einfach nur Bomber.
Nachwirkungen von all diesen Dingen, nach den Krieg, als ich dann selber einigermaßen unterwegs war, also selbststandig war. Wir haben sehr viel aus der Natur gelebt damals, das hieß, wir gingen im Herbst, auch Pilze sammeln undsoweiter, und da haben wir zum Beispiel massenhaft nicht explodierte Brandbomben gefunden, Stabbrandbomben, das waren Fehlwürfe, die also die Stadt nicht erreicht haben, sondern in einem Waldgebiet runtergegangen sind. Das könnte ich Ihnen hier auch, ich habe extra deshalb hier Google Earth angeschmissen. Ich kann Ihnen das mal zeigen wo das war. Ok?
PS: Ach ja, können Sie mir sagen wo Sie eben gelebt haben?
CP: Betzdorf an der Sieg, das ist 90 km nordöstlich von Köln. Köln ist für jeden ‚n Begriff. Da bin ich geboren, aufgewachsen und ich bin 1961 erst nach Jever gekommen hier, durch die Luftwaffe. Sonst habe ich da unten gelebt, in dieser Gegend, dicht, dicht zum Ruhrgebiet. Das ist, was ich Ihnen jetzt erzählt hab, ist alles nichts von Jever hier. Jever war nichts los hier. Die Bomben, das weiß ich von Bekannten, die Bomben die hier gefallen sind, waren alles Notwürfe, dass heißt die sie in Bremen nicht so wie Wellington, die sie in Bremen nicht losgeworden sind wegen Wetter, oder Wilhelmshafen vorbeigeworfen haben die hier, aber meistens im Land hier und wo nichts passiert ist. Aber wie gesagt, zu meiner Zeit, da unten ist sehr viel bombardiert worden, weil ja auch alle Flugzeuge, die Bomber, auch in der Nacht, wenn die zum Ruhrgebiet flogen, flogen die immer über uns weg. Weil wir, halt, aus der Luft betrachtet waren wir direkt vor der Haustür, wenn man so will. Denn aus der Luft betrachtet sind ja 80-100 km keine Entfernung. So, und [pauses] ich weiß allerdings, also eben nicht mein Erleben, das weiß ich auch aus der Erzählung meiner Tante, die dort nach wie vor, als wir mal kurzfristig weggezogen waren wegen der Bombenwürfe, die ist dort geblieben und die hat auch erlebt, wie dann die Amerikaner eingerückt sind dort und wo also gegenüber auf den anderen Hügel noch Deutsche lagen und die sich dann gegenseitig da beschossen haben. Hat’s auch noch ein Paar Tote gegeben, liegen noch drei und auch ein Amerikanischer Leutnant liegt noch bei uns in meiner Heimat noch auf den Friedhof heutzutage. Und das ist aber alles relativ schnell gegangen da denn das waren die letzten Kriegstage wo also, die Alliierten rückten vor und die Deutschen rückten nur immer weiter weg. Das war also nicht mehr weiter viel, wiegesagt. Nach dem Kriege dann [waren] wir als Kinder natürlich sehr interessiert an allem. Wir sind also überall hingelaufen, wo abgeschossene Panzer lagen, wo abgeschossene Flugzeuge lagen, weil das für uns Kinder interessant war sowas. Da sind natürlich überall hinmarschiert. In der vicinity, also in der Nähe da wo wir hinlaufen konnten. Und da gab es für uns natürlich einiges zu sehen, für uns Kinder, wir waren ja neugierig, wie, wo, was ist da. Ja, ich bin auch in dieser Gegend zur Schule gegangen. Bin dann nach der Schule, wie in Deutschland üblich, habe ich ‚ne Lehre gemacht und am Ende dieser Lehrzeit von dreienhalb Jahren bin ich dann zur Luftwaffe gegangen. Und hab dann so die Standardausbildung gemacht bei der Luftwaffe, Flugzeugführerschein, Fluglehrerlehrgang, irgendwann Offiziersschule und also was hier, und hab auch sehr viel Ausbildung in America gemacht, war also sehr oft in Amerika drüben, und bin dann 1993 hier in Jever Airbase auch pensioniert worden. Habe mich aber trotzdem immer weiter mit der Luftwaffe beschäftigt. Der Fliegerhorst Jever hier ist so mein zweites Zuhause. Und so ist das auch gekommen, nachdem ich die ersten Verbindungen mit Jack Waterfall hatte, das ich dann diese Geschichten wieder intensiviert hatte. Ich wusste zwar sehr lange schon, ich wusste, seit Anfang der Sechziger Jahre wusste ich, wo die Wellington abgestürtzt war, weil ich kannte den Förster, den Vor-Vorgänger von Carsten Streufert, den kannte ich auch gut, der hat mir das mal eines Tages gezeigt und damals, 1960, war das ja gerade zehn jahre, zwanzig Jahre her und die Baüme waren dann noch nicht so wie sie dann heute sind, das war alles noch gut sichtbar. Und wir haben dann damals auch schon Einzelteile gesammelt die man so noch oberflächlich fand weil wir in den Neunzehnhundertsechziger Jahren noch nicht die, oder überhaupt, wir hatten überhaupt keinen Metalldetector, oder wie wir sagen Minensuchgerät. Heute haben wir natürlich, ich auch, das modernste Gerät. Wenn ich heute da langgehe, piept es an allen Ecken und Kanten, weil immer noch Blechstücke, Munitionen und allesmögliche im Boden leigt. Denn die damalige Luftwaffe im Dritten Reich hat ja nur oberflächlich abgeraümt, die Grossteile die da rumlagen. Alles andere da hat keiner gesucht, was da an Kleinzeug rumliegt. Und deshalb findet da man das heute noch. Und Ich bin mir sicher, da will ich zunächst auch mal hin, dass man an anderen Stellen auch noch genügend findet. Denn südlich vom Flugplatz, die Wellington die ist ja runtergegangen im Upjeeverschen Forst. Noch weiter südlich sind auch welche abgeschossen worden und um die Stellen denke ich hat sich heute noch gar niemand gekümmert. Es ist auch in Deutschland ein bisschen kompliziert weil man, weil offiziell brauche ich ja jedesmal die Genehmiegung vom Landeigentümer, das ich da überhaupt hin gehen darf und normalerwiese müsste ich noch eine Polizeiliche Genemiegung haben, weil ja immer die Gefahr besteht, Munition zu finden und ähnliches. Die brauche ich aber nicht, weil ich Gottseidank Munitionsfachmann bin durch die Luftwaffe und Sprenglizenzen habe und Feuerwehrlizenz, so das ich das eigen verantwortlich machen kann. Aber am sonsten ist das immer mit Schwierigkeiten verbunden, weil viele Landeigentümer sagen nein sie wollen das nicht, das man auf ihrem Land keine Löcher gräbt zum Beispiel. Ja, [pauses] zum Krieg fallt mir natürlich jetzt im Moment so gar nichts mehr ein.
PS: Sie deuteten vorher… Sie haben mir vorher die Bilder gezeigt von der Gegend um Betzdorf und den anderen Ort. Können sie mir das moment noch einmal wieder ein bisschen erzählen, der Ort wo Sie Pilze…
CP: Ich bin aufgewachsen in einem Ort, der heißt Scheuerfeld. Da haben wir letztens erst 1100 Jahre Bestehen gefeiert. Das ist eigentlich ein ganz besonderer Ort. Das war zu der Zeit da unten als ich geboren wurde noch Gebiet der Freien Männer, so nannte man das, änhlich wie hier in Ostfriesland, deshalb heißen die Ostfriesen ja auch die freien Ostfriesen. Und dieser Ort liegt ungefähr zwei Km von der Stadt Betzdorf weg. So dass das letztendlich, wenn ich das aus der Luft betrachte, eine Einheit ist das ganze. [pauses] Ja wie gesagt, da bin ich halt geboren, aufgewachsen und habe das halt erlebt was ich vorhin nun berichtet habe, aus der Kriegszeit, genau in dieser Gegend da.
PS: Sie hatten mir da auch erzählt warum….. Sie hatten da eben etwas von Scheuerfeld und Betzdorf erzählt in Verbindung mit den Bombardierungen.
CP: Ja, genau. Weil in Betzdorf diese Werke waren, Eismann Ausbesserungswerk, Lokomotivenfabrik, also wo Lokomotiven gebaut wurden, und viele, viel Gerät der Bahn, der Eisenbahn war ja zum Teil nach Bombenangriffen nicht mehr zu reparieren also musste man ja auch noch neue Lokomotiven bauen. Und in Betzdorf war ein grosser Rangierbahnhof, wo also Waren, Kriegsmaterial zu Zügen zusammengestellt wurde, die dann halt irgendwohinn an die Front fuhren, und auch mit Kanonen drauf, Panzer, Munitionen, was weiss ich, und deshalb war Betzdorf für die Alliierten vom Interesse, logischerweise Nachschub abschneiden und halt verhindern das noch, durch Bombardierungen, das noch Lokomotiven gebaut or repariert wurden, undsoweiter. Das war ein Hauptgrund warum dort viel bombardiert wurde.
PS: Sind Sie noch in… haben Sie noch Familie in Betzdorf? Und Scheuerfeld?
CP: Nein, nur Bekannte. Schulfreunde. Meine Familie, meine Eltern sind tot und meine Geschwister wohnen überall nur nicht mehr da. Da wohnen nur noch Freunde, Bekannte, keine, keine Verwandtschaft von mir mehr. Wobei ich, wobei muss ich sagen, ich komme ein Mal im Jahr komme ich dorthin. Ich besuch also, einmal im Jahr besuche ich mein Schulfreund da unten. Ich bin ja auch, wie Sie sehen, Jägersman und mein Schulfreund hat auch ein Jagdgebiet da unten und da fahre ich einmal im Jahr zur Jagd da runter und frische die Jugenderinnerungen auf.
Zum Beispiel, habe ich, ich erzählte ja vorhin das wir im Winter da gesehen haben wenn die V2 flog. Da bin ich inzwischen mal gewesen, wo die abgeschossen wurde und das waren ja zum Teil ganz einfache Abschussgebiete. Da hat man einfach mitten im Wald irgendwo ‚ne Betonplatte gegossen, mehr war das nicht, und der Rest war ja alles in LKWs, die dann drumrum im Wald gut getarnt standen und da bin ich zum Beispiel hin gewesen, ein Ort der heißt Bad Marienberg und dort habe ich dann im Wald auch noch so eine Platte, so ne Abschussrampe, so ‚ne Platte gefunden. Das war Bad Marienberg und eine andere Abschusstellung, die war nicht weit davon, die hieß Hachenburg.
PS: Und das waren die V2.
CP: Ja, das war V2. Das wird auch gut beschrieben in einem Buch, das da heißt “Kriegsschauplatz Westerwald”. Da kommt das drin vor und dann gibt‘s aus dieser Gegend noch ein Buch, das hieß, ich erklär das gleich, “Gefrorene Blitze”. Das stammt aus den Volksmund, das heißt, das haben die Leute so gesagt, wenn die V2 ab einer bestimmten Höhe zog die auch Kondensstreifen und genauso wie bei jetzt von den Jets wenn der Kondenstreifen anfangt zu zerfallen, irgendwann zerfiel der natürlich auch und weil der eine Zeitlang da war und sah aus wie ein Blitz, haben die Leute auf den Land das “Gefrorene Blitze” genannt. Und so heißt auch das Buch. “Gefrorene Blitze” behandelt die V2 Stationen im Westerwald. Und das ist ja direkt an meiner Heimat. Ich bin zwar Rheinland-Pfälzer aber der Westerwald grenzte direkt an meiner Heimat dran.
PS: Hat der Freund den Sie hin und wieder besuchen noch Erinnerungen? Haben Sie je noch darüber gesprochen?
CP: Ja, wir haben vorwiegend nur über Nachkriegsdinge gesprochen. Zum Beispiel, wenn wir im Wald waren und Brandbomben eingesammelt haben und sowas. Aber ob er direkt noch aus den letzten Kriegsjahr oder so noch was weiß, oder das letzte Halbjahr, sagen wir mal 1945 Januar bis Mai, das weiß ich nicht, da musste ich ihn ja fragen, weil wir uns weniger darüber unterhalten haben.
PS: Ich weiss jetzt nicht ob ich das aufgenommen haben. Können Sie mir vielleicht noch Moment von dieser Erfahrung mit den Brandbomben erzählen?
CP: Ja, Wie gesagt, Die Brandbomben steckten, das waren die Sechskantstabe, so lang, die stachen einfach den Waldboden, weil sie nicht explodiert waren. Und wenn wir Kinder im Wald waren zu Pilze suchen oder sonst, haben wir die natürlich gefunden. Und neugierig wie wir waren haben wir natürlich auch welche mitgenommen. Weil das war so. Wir haben in diesen Dingern gar keine Gefahr gesehen, weil diese Sachen alle bei uns in der Schule sehr genau beschrieben waren. In der Schule auf den Fluren überall hingen Plakate, „Hände weg von Fundmunition“, und da waren die einzelnen Sachen, die man finden konnte, waren da alle beschrieben und da waren zum Beispeil die Brandbomben auch beschrieben. Und da ich mich zu der Zeit auch schon, was ich heute noch tue, für alle diese Dinge, Waffen und Kriegsmaterial und Sprengstoff und alles interessiere, habe ich also.. Also die Brandbomben da habe ich natürlich nicht mit vier Jahren gesucht, sonder das war in der Zeit wenn wir schon alleine in den Wald gingen um Pilze zu suchen, da war ich zehn, elf, zwölf Jahre alt. Und da hab ich mich also schon sehr für Munition und Sprengstoff und all sowas interessiert. Und das habe ich natürlich später beim Militär alles ausgebaut das ganze.
PS: Und wenn Sie jetzt zurückdenken an die Kriegszeit, gesehen von heute, welche Eindrücke haben Sie?
CP: Sagen wir mal so. Was störend war, war nachts aufzustehen und in den Bunker zu rennen. Am sonsten, für uns Kinder, war das eine interessante Zeit, weil immer was los war. Und dann, man sah Flugzeuge am Himmel und wusste natürlich als Kind noch nicht genau überhaupt nicht wer ist wer, man wusste nur “die mögen sich nicht” weil da geschossen wurde oben, das hörte man ja unten. Von daher war es seine erlebnisreiche, interessante Zeit. Wie gesagt, mal abgesehen vom Bunkerlaufen nachts und änhlichen. Und was natürlich gestört hat, uns Kinder, gegen Ende des Krieges, Kinder haben ja immer Hunger, und Essen war immer weniger gegen Ende des Krieges. Das hat also eine bischen gestört, dass man vom eigenen Magenknurren, nicht nur von der Sirene wach wurde nachts, sondern auch vom eigenen Magenknurren. Aber am sonsten was tagsüber war und was so geschah um uns drum rum, weil ja außer Bombardements direkt am Boden bei uns zu der Zeit keine Kriegshandlungen waren. War ja nix, das war ja alles in der Luft. Und deshalb war es für uns Kinder immer interessant. [pauses] Meine Schwester, das ist ein Phänomen, das müssten aber Psychologen klaren. Meine Schwester ist im März 1945 geboren, das heißt die war bei Kriegsende drei Monate alt. Und das war die Zeit wo also sehr viel Bombardement war, und sehr viel geschossen wurde in der Luft und und und. Was ich später erlebt habe war, da habe ich mich immer gefragt, wie kann das sein. Wenn wir beim Essen sassen, und es kam in der Küche nur eine Fliege angeflogen, da ist meine Schwester vom Stuhl gesprungen und hat sich unterm Tisch versteckt. Obwohl sie das ja eigentlich gar nicht, sie war drei monate alt als das alles passierte. In wieweit man das ganze Getöse im Mutterleib schon mitkriegt weiss ich nicht. Ich sag dass ist ein Fall für irgendein Psychologen, rausszufinden wie sowas kam. Aber meine Schwester brauchte nur eine Fliege sehen die ankommt, irgendwas was in der Luft fliegt, war die verschwunden, weg.
PS: Jetzt wo Sie seit einigen Jahren die Beziehungen, gute Beziehungen zu den Briten haben, wie sehen Sie das ein bisschen alles, ich meine die Bombenkampagne und, ja?
CP: Ja sagen wir mal so. Nicht nur die Engländer und Amerikaner haben gebombt, wir haben auch gebombt. Also beruhte auf Gegenseitigkeit. Deshalb bin ich auf niemandem gram. Und dann, habe ich auch heute den Standtpunkt dass die Welt noch wesentlich besser sein könnte, wenn wir keine Politiker hatten. Denn sehr viele Politiker sind ja Schuld an manch einem Desaster. Und wie man ja jetzt auch sieht in unseren Beziehungen mit den Verwandten der ehemaligen Besatzung und und und, Leute unter sich vertragen sich in der Regel immer gut. Das ist überhaupt kein Thema und ich hätte auch keinen Groll gegen irgendjemandem, was weil das ist halt Krieg. Da fürt nicht nur einer Krieg, sondern da führt auch der andere Krieg. Und da muss man halt rechnen, damit rechnen dass es da Tote und Verletzte gibt, und und und. Nur also ich stehe dem ganzen, und das war auch in der Zeit wo ich in Amerika war, eigentlich positiv gegenüber, weil ich mir sage, die Leute unter sich vertragen sich in der Regel immer gut. Irgendwelche die dann, da gibt es ja ein spezieles Wort für in Deutschland, Scharfmacher, Leute die also solange hetzen, aufhetzen bis der nächste meint er muss mal zum Gewehr greifen. Also ich will das was wir hier machen und deshalb wollen wir das auch für die Zukunft weiter aufrechterhalten. Da bin ich auch mit Jack einig, wir können uns naturlich, alleine schon aus Kostengründen, nicht jedes Jahr treffen hier. Aber wir werden das ganze am Leben erhalten und vielleicht haben ich ja noch die Gelegenheit, wenn meine Gesundheit mir keinen Strich durch die Rechnung macht, noch irgenwelche anderen Absturtzstellen zu erkunden hier und vielleicht noch Kontakt zu anderen Leuten bekommen in England. Denn die Zeit drängt ja. Wir als Zeitzeugen sterben aus und die Englischen Zeitzeugen sterben genauso aus, so dass man irgendwann keinen mehr hat mit dem man über diese Dinge reden kann, den man, weil halt niemand mehr da ist. [pauses] Und Ich habe leider, leider auch in meiner Heimat da unten, wie gesagt, ausser mein Schulkameraden, auch niemanden mehr der so alt ist, dass er mir berichten könnte, den der müsste ja so wie Heino, 94 sein. Und, Ja und ich selber bin auch 75 und viele von meinen Bekannten da unten leben schon gar nicht mehr. Mein Schulfreund, auch 75, Paar noch drum rum, aber es gibt natürlich auch welche die sich im ganzen Leben für sowas gar nicht interessiert haben, die wissen auch nix zu erzählen weil sie das nicht interessiert hat. Und wir wie gesagt, wir haben früher, als Kinder, alles was mit Militär zu tun hatte, was wir gefunden haben im Wald, haben wir mitgenommen, haben wir gesammelt, zum Leidwesen meiner Eltern, den die mochten ja auch keinen Sprengstoff und keine Bomben im Haus haben. Aber ich hatte, wie das früher auch im Land so war, wir hatten neben dem Haus ein Hühnerstall, und änhliches, da immer alles versteckt. Aber wie gesagt, kenne ich leider niemandem da unten der also älter ist und der sagen könnte “Ja, ich habe noch das und das erlebt”.
PS: Wissen Sie von mehreren anderen Absturtzstellen hier in der Gegend?
CP: Ja es müssen noch zwei in der Nähe vom Ems-Jade-Kanal liegen und im Bereich Wilhelmshaven müssen noch welche sein, wo ich aber nicht auf‘m Meter genau kenne, wäre aber herauszufinden.
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 Charly Pfeifer
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Peter Schulze
Subject
The topic of the resource
World War (1939-1945)
Bombing, Aerial
Description
An account of the resource
Charly Pfeifer recounts his experiences of the bombing of Betzdorf an der Sieg, a small town not far from the Ruhr. He explains the strategic importance of the city, due to the presence of locomotive works. He recounts taking shelter from the bombs in a former manganese mine. He remembers the time as a child, when he used to go into the forest looking for mushrooms and finding incendiary devices. He tells that he wasn’t afraid of these objects because at school there were posters with detailed descriptions of the ordnance. He happened to find V-2 ramps hidden in the forest. He explains how it was a very interesting time for children because there was always something happening. The most annoying aspect, he remarks, was being woken up, not only by the air alarm, but also by the rumbling of his own tummy. He recounts seeing Pathfinder aircraft, which they as children used to call 'The Iron Gustav' and when it dropped the target indicators, which they called 'Christmas trees'. He tells about his sister’s weird and unexplainable behaviour. Although she was only three months old at the time of end of the war, later on whenever there was a fly coming into the kitchen, she jumped down from her chair and quickly hid under the table.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-06-27
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Peter Schulze
Language
A language of the resource
deu
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany--Betzdorf
Germany
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:35:31 audio recording
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
APfeiferKW160627
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
bombing
childhood in wartime
civil defence
home front
incendiary device
Pathfinders
target indicator
V-2
V-weapon
Window
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Title
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Auton, Jim
J Auton
Description
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26 items. The collection relates to Sergeant Jim Auton MBE (1924 - 2020). He was badly injured when his 178 Squadron B-24 was hit by anti-aircraft fire during an operation from Italy. The collection contains an oral history interview and ten photographs.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Jim Auton and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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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.
Date
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2015-07-30
Identifier
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Auton, J
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: Well Jim, perhaps we could start with your date and place of birth please?
JA: Yes I was born at Henlow, my father was an officer in the RAF and he happened to be stationed at Henlow when I happened to be born.
CB: And what date was that?
JA: That was the 13th of April, 1924
CB: And what do you remember about your childhood?
JA: I remember when he was transferred to Cranwell, I started infant school at Cranwell and we had to walk across the aerodrome to school, and there were about twenty of us and we were told to walk in groups together and if you see an aeroplane coming in, stand still [emphasis] so he can avoid you and we used to see aeroplanes coming in to land on the grass field, they were bi-planes of course and we’d wave to the pilot and if he waved back to us that made our day because pilots were our heroes and we all wanted to be like daddy and join the RAF when we were old enough and next to the school playground there was an aircraft dump, old fuselages, they’d taken the engines out and the instruments but we’d climb into the cockpits and stand there and go ‘dud dud du du’, we were shooting down Germans when we were five years old, we knew the Germans were the enemy, I don’t think our government knew at the time.
CB: So you have happy memories of your childhood in Cranwell?
JA: Yes, and then of course we, he was stationed at Manston and we could go in the workshop and see the fitters working on the planes, they never told us to shove off, and we liked the smell of dope on the aircraft on the canvas and, but when they took an aircraft to the butts to synchronise the guns, they’d jack up the tails to get the plane horizontal and we’d stand around with our fingers in their ears while they were shooting into the pile of sand in the butts, and then when an aircraft broke down we used to rush out across the aerodrome to help the man, help the men push it and for kids it was marvellous, we loved aeroplanes.
CB: So do you think that’s what started your desire to join the air force later on?
JA: Well you see I was brought up on RAF stations, RAF camps and I didn’t know any other life, we were isolated from the outside community, we had free medical treatment, free dental treatment, we were in married quarters most of the time where even the crockery was provided, all the linen and everything, so our whole life was in the air force until we were adults, so naturally we all wanted to be pilots when we grew up, and when the war was announced I thought ‘oh good they’ll need more pilots now’ [slight laugh]
CB: So off you went to volunteer.
JA: Well when I was seventeen I couldn’t wait, I went to join up, and I registered as a pilot but I found later they put me down pilot navigator or rather pilot observer as it was in those days so they could change me any time they wanted, and I started flying training as a pilot and then when they introduced the four engine bombers they didn’t need two pilots, so they would have a pilot and a bomb airman who had done some flying training and he in an emergency would be able to take over from the first pilot so the bomber was a second pilot, but and [slight pause] I started flying in England but the German intruders flying over us, over England were shooting us down in our training planes, so the Government opened the Empire Air Training scheme.
CB: Where did you do your initial training?
JA: At Ansty near Coventry and then after much delay because flying schools were all full and there was a waiting time, I was sent to South Africa as a navigator and I trained there as a navigator, but I wasn’t very keen on being a navigator so I also trained as an air bomber, because I knew air bombers would be allowed to pilot the plane, in an emergency, and even during training the staff pilots would allow me to take out over and fly the Oxfords and Ansons because that’s all I wanted to do really and so I trained as a navigator and a bomb airman.
CB: What about your journey down to South Africa?
JA: That was marvellous, hundreds and hundreds of them on a small Liberty ship. We were told you mustn’t be below decks during daylight, so we had to stay on the top deck in all weathers and there wasn’t room for everybody to sit down, so if somebody stood up you immediately sat in that place and some of the troops perched on the ship’s rails until they broadcast anybody falling over will drown because the ship will not stop to pick anybody up, so we couldn’t sit on the rails so we had to stand up sometimes for ten, nine or ten hours, during the day, we were fed twice a day, seven in the morning and seven in the evening and the food was like an airways meal on a tray and it wasn’t enough to keep us alive and I asked the crew, it was an American Liberty ship and the crew were Filipinos and Negroes and I asked them ‘do you have this terrible food that we have?’ and they said ‘no we’ve got plenty of food’, they said ‘if you come and work in the kitchen for us, we’ll let you have our food’, so I spent couple of weeks washing up dirty dishes until the heat got too bad and I went back on the troop deck again, but during my time in the kitchen I was allowed to sneak some food out for my friends [slight laugh] who didn’t work in the kitchen, that was all unofficial of course.
CB: Was it better food in the kitchen or just more of it?
JA: More of it and better.
CB: So they were keeping you on starving rations basically?
JA: Yes, yes, eventually the doctor said I was suffering from severe physical debility but that was much later, we were on this ship for six weeks and they warned us we were in shark infested waters and the ship wouldn’t stop for anybody falling over board, but it was quite an interesting voyage except the sun was dreadful in the tropics and there was no shade, and the officer in charge of troops thought that we were cadet officers because we wore a white flash in our caps but we weren’t and when we got to Sierra Leone Freetown somebody must have told him we were not potential officers and he said ‘right, you’ll have to do all the duties’, fire picket, fatigues, peeling potatoes and all sort of things like that and guard duty for the rest of the voyage, another three weeks and my name beginning with an A, I was one of the first to be chosen for guard duty and it was a stinking hot day and we were anchored off Freetown to re-fuel and I found a hatchway and a collapsible chair and I sat in that hatchway and dozed off because I’d had no sleep, we couldn’t sleep on the deck as it was too hot and the smell of the engine oil, and I dozed off and suddenly I was awoken when the ship’s officer came round on his inspection with the ships warrant officer and they bellowed at me ‘what are you on? sleeping duty?’ and I said ‘yes, sir’ because I didn’t like to say no to anybody in authority and they said ‘you’re under arrest in five minutes’, ‘oh dear’ I thought ‘I’ll be all on my own in prison’, the brig, the ship’s prison was below the water line, it was nice and cool and I wasn’t on my own, there were eleven other air crew cadets in there with me and the police who looked after us took us round for dinner wearing their caps and then they said ‘you keep your mouths shut and we’ll go round again’ and they took their caps off and we had a second dinner, so being in the brig wasn’t so bad, except we were locked in and we were below the water line and there were submarines about, so we thought if, if a submarine hit we’ll certainly drown like rats in a trap but it didn’t happen of course.
CB: It must have been quite a relief to get to South Africa after all that?
JA: We anchored off in Table Bay about quarter of a mile from land and the dock workers had a big lump of rusty steel plate and they wrote on it in chalk: ‘plenty of food, plenty of women, plenty of booze’ [laughs] and the next day we docked in the harbour and we were told you will be discharged tomorrow, and there was nearly a riot because we’d been cooped up for six weeks and eventually they said ‘Ok, you can go into town but you must be back at midnight so we all went into town, it was paradise, things we hadn’t seen for years like pineapples and peaches and plenty of food and so we goaded a kind of a restaurant run by volunteers for service men and some old ladies served dinner, so we had a three course dinner and when we finished they said ‘would you like anything else’, and we said ‘could we have it again please?’, so we had another three course dinner, then we had half a dozen bananas on the way back to the ship [laughs] and we brought a coconut, it was paradise, but at flying school wasn’t so funny, the day we arrived we were told that five aircraft had crashed and twenty five air crew had been killed, that’s five pilots and two navigators in each plane and two bomber men in each plane, five men in each plane and the reason was the staff pilots had been low flying round a hospital where somebody’s wife was working and all five crashed (these would be Ansons?) they were Ansons and they, we were told report those pilots for low flying in future but we didn’t do that because we liked low flying because stooging about high up isn’t much fun, but low flying is exciting [clears throat].
So after training in South Africa [coughs] for nearly a year we went up by stages through central Africa, Rhodesia, Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, the Sudan to Egypt where we found we were going to live in the Heliopolis Palace Hotel, marvellous [emphasis] but when we entered we found there were no beds, no furniture of any description and we had to sleep on the marble floors and our kit had been left behind in South Africa so we only had the clothes we were standing up in, so I wrapped my shoes in a towel to use as a pillow and lay my uniform down on the marble floor and slept on that, I found that I had to sleep on my back otherwise my hip stuck into the marble and it hurt [slight laugh] and then, I was then sent to Palestine where there was a war, the Jews and the Arabs were fighting each other and both sides were fighting the British Palestine police and while I was there they blew up the radio station and they blew up hotels, and people were fighting in the streets and I thought ‘I haven’t got into the war yet but I’m going to get shot by our own police’, and they had said to us, because we each had a revolver, ‘hand in the revolvers in the armoury, so I went down to the armoury which was in the cellar of the hotel and I handed my revolver in, and I saw the men there were mounting twin machine guns on a platform to be carried on a lorry, so it was a war, but then we were then transferred to Lidder, after going back to Egypt and wasting some more time sleeping in the western dessert on the sand, we had to empty our shoes thoroughly because there was scorpions in the dessert and the sand was almost too hot to walk on and the authorities had laid a tarmac path but it never hardens and it was like sticky toffee so we couldn’t walk on that [slight laugh]
CB: And this was part of your flying training or were they just moving you from place to place?
JA: Moving us around, and then we went to Lidder for a conversion course, onto Liberators, about a five week course.
CB: Were you expecting Liberators?
JA: No, when we saw that we were going to fly Liberators, we thought ‘they are American planes, why haven’t we got Lancasters?’, ‘cause we knew about Lancasters we thought they were marvellous, Liberators were unknown and didn’t even know that the RAF had Liberators and we thought they’re gonna send us to Japan because the Americans had Liberators so we were a little bit frightened of that, because we thought we should be helping defend Britain, we thought the war in Japan is an American affair and we shouldn’t be anything to do with that, but after we’d been shuttled around in Egypt to Palestine for a bit we went to Algiers by air, nine hours, and we thought we were on our way to Italy, when we got off the plane we saw a French flag and we said ‘what’s this place?’ and a French airman said ‘it’s Algeria’ or at least he said ‘it’s Maison Blanche’, we said ‘where’s that?’ he said ‘it’s Algeria, it’s North Africa’ and we said we’re supposed to be in Italy but there was nobody to ask, we could ask any questions and he said ‘you can go to a hotel here and sleep in huts in the grounds’, and then you should go to Algiers’s downtown about twenty miles and report to the RTO, transport officer, we went to see him the next day and he said ‘oh bomber crews, you’ll be here for ages, you’re low priority’, he said ‘only fighter pilots are priority one’ and our navigator said to me ‘we are priority one, I’ve read the documents’ but I said ‘shut up, it’s nice here’ so I said to him ‘the French people don’t seem very friendly’ and one of the gunners said ‘no wonder, we’ve just sunk the French fleet in Iran, so [slight laugh] after three weeks we said to the corporal in the RTO’s office, ‘I think you ought to have another look at our documents’ and he stood and talked on the telephone for a few minutes, kept us waiting because we were so insignificant, a low priority, then he looked at the documents and nearly had a fit, he said ‘you’re priority one, you should have left the same day’ he said, ‘you’ll be on a plane this afternoon’, so we fly to Italy in a freight plane with a load of boxes and an aircraft wheel that wasn’t properly strapped down, it kept shuffling around and nearly run us over, we were sitting on the floor and when we got to Italy, no customs, no immigration, nothing at all, nobody to tell us where to go or what to do, so we, first thing a service man does when he goes somewhere new is look for a tea and a bun [laughing] or what’s called a ‘shy and a wad’ and there was a little sort of canteen with Italian girls serving and they were laughing and joking, I expected Italians to be hostile like the French but they were so friendly, I thought we’re gonna like it in Italy and they kept saying ‘capiche, capiche’, and I said ‘no, no cabbage thank you, just tea and a bun’ and they said they were saying ‘do you understand?, capiche’ but we didn’t know that, but we thought they seemed nice [laughs] hope there are going to be some women where we’re going.
CB: Is this around about Naples was it?
JA: It was in Naples, and then we were transferred to Portici to a, to a holding centre, and there were people there who’d done a tour of operations and they were going on a rest period, and they were so dejected, haggard and ill looking, and they wouldn’t talk to anybody and we thought it must be terrible on a squadron, that it was demoralising to see them, anyway we stayed there a few weeks and then we were sent to Foggia by train, and you understood that Foggia is a big aircraft base, there were thousands and thousands of Americans there, with Liberators and Flying Fortresses, B24s and B17s, and we had liberators but other squadrons, some of them had clapped out wellingtons obsolete or obsolesce wellingtons so the liberators were a bit better except they weren’t new machines, they were machines that had been damaged and done a tour in the American Air Force and were now in a sort of scrap yard called a maintenance unit, and the pilots would go and ferry them to our squadron and if we were lucky we’d get the one in reasonable condition but most of them had got terrible faults, some of them had even got twisted airframes, and engine troubles common, and our fitters worked in the open air, there were no hangars, and sometimes they worked through the night in all weathers, and we were reliant on them to keep us alive.
CB: Now your crew, there was the seven of you as in a Lancaster but in this Liberator is that right?
JA: Yes, when I talk about how when I won the war I always say ‘I didn’t do it alone, there was seven of us’, and three of them were Scotsmen, one was from the Shetlands, and it took me a few, few days to learn to understand them on the intercom, because the intercom system is not very clear, it’s like a poor telephone system, and their Scottish accents were very guttural and I knew my life depends on these fellas, so I had to learn [slight laugh] to understand them and the skipper was very pleased when I joined the crew because up till then he was the youngest member, he was twenty-one and I was twenty and of course as I trained as a navigator and as an pupil pilot I was a useful member of the crew, and I’d done a gunnery course so I could do anything if anybody was killed or injured, I could take over from them, I couldn’t land a Liberator of course but I could keep it in the air long enough for the others to jump out and I said, I think I was bombing I think it was Budapest and the flak was so thick I thought we couldn’t get through it without being hit, and I looked over the side and it was like black velvet, the sky was so dark and I thought I’d jump out if I dared but I had no faith in my parachute and as I said to a Polish pilot I knew, he had parachuted safely and I said ‘ I think I’d jump out if I dared, but I’d be scared’ and he said ‘you wouldn’t hesitate if your arse was on fire’ and he was speaking from personal experience.
CB; So, you were with this very close-knit group, you were a good team, a good cohesive team?
JA: Yes, yes, you see when we arrived on the squadron nobody would talk to us because they couldn’t be bothered with new boys and when we became senior crew, we couldn’t be bothered to talk to new crews because on average they were only doing seven trips before they got shot down, and it was bad enough if our friends got shot down, but we didn’t care much about strangers being shot down so we didn’t really want to make any friends, because it would be traumatic when they died.
CB: And what were the conditions like at Foggia?
JA: The conditions were absolutely terrible, we were in a field, there were no gates, no fence, we were in a field with one solitary brick building, and that was the orderly room, the medical offices office and something the commanding officer used, he lived in a caravan, we lived in little four man tents, bivouac tents, you couldn’t stand up in them and we had no beds, we had to make our own beds out of bits of packing cases, and I had the side of a packing case with a strut across the middle, in the middle of my back, most uncomfortable, covered in cardboard, the mid-upper gunner, had a sheet of corrugated iron, I said ‘that’s why, that’s why he walks so funny’ [laugh]
CB: But you’d have the heat, you’d have the rain, it must have been terrible.
JA: It was, we’d have the side of the tents rolled up and the end flaps were open because the heat was so intense and we’d get a couple of hours sleep at night, but we couldn’t sleep more than a couple of hours so we’d get up and walk around, and when the sun came up it was unbearable and there was no shade anywhere, there was a place that we called the dining room and it was a roof on six poles with no sides and we sat on forms at trestle tables, and the cook, had an outside kitchen arrangement made out of oil drums, and the first thing I noticed was his black arms and white hands, he was twenty-one, he never wanted to be a cook, we called him Gladys because he was a nice boy.
CB: And was the food any better?
JA: The food was terrible, you see sometimes the food didn’t arrive, the food was brought to us by a lorry from somewhere distant each day, only enough for one day and after everybody had had a bit of it on the way there wasn’t much left for us, and there was hardly enough to keep us alive and sometimes the food didn’t arrive at all and we’d have nothing to eat for twenty-four hours and one day we said to Gladys our cook ‘ God for Christ’s sake Gladys, find something, there must be something left over’ and he scratched around and he found an onion, a raw onion each and a mug of tea, and that’s what we had and we had to do a nine hour flight, on an empty stomach and of course I smoked twenty cigarettes on every trip because it took away the hunger pangs, and then the medical officer discovered that the cook was using some sort of cans of meat and vegetable stew that had blown, and most of us got severe enteritis and people couldn’t control their bowels and there were no toilet facilities in the air, so people were doing it in their trousers, and sitting there on it for the rest of the trip, and some of the crews were yellow with jaundice, we didn’t know if it’s contagious or what caused it but we were living in what they called a malarias area, there were boards around the perimeter of the field we lived in, saying ‘caution, malarias area, malarias area, area’ and everyday a bowser arrived, a tanker of water but we couldn’t drink the water, it tasted of chlorine it was terribly strong, so we could only use it for washing ourselves and trying to wash clothes but we had no washing powder, we’d save little scraps of soap and put a shirt in a tub and leave it for three weeks to soak [slight laugh] and then rub it, and then rinse it and lie it in the sun, and in the hot sun it was dry in about an hour and we had nothing to eat except a mug of tea twice a day, and when we came back from operations we went to the debriefing tent, and there was a billy can full of lukewarm tea there and half a dozen mugs, they were never washed they were just recycled, we dipped them in the lukewarm tea, but if we were gone for more than five hours on a trip, we were given five boiled sweets which we promptly ate on the ground before we took off, and we were given a gallon of tea between seven of us, in a thermos jug, but that got cold, we’d saved it for the return trip and Jock the wireless operator used to bring the tea round for us cold, cold as ice, and about once a month we got what we called a tuppenny bar of chocolate but it was tropical chocolate and it never melted and in the air, I would put a piece of chocolate in my mouth and chew it and it became like gravel and then it became like dust and then I swallowed it but it never did melt, and one day some, some things arrived at the cook house, we thought they were bails of straw but they were dehydrated cabbage and that’s the worst thing you can have when you’re flying because our stomachs swelled up and we had to loosen our belts and our flying clothes because our stomachs were expanded enormously and we farted furiously throughout the trip.
CB: Did you have proper flying clothes in all this?
JA: We had flying clothing, we just recycled, the only ordinary clothing we had were ones left behind by casualties and of course lots of it was very old and our kit bags were still somewhere in Egypt or South Africa, following on about three months later and when I was in South Africa, I brought thirty oranges for a shilling, no for three pence, you couldn’t buy less because they were in a net, thirty for a ticky it was called, a threepnee bit [sic], and my kit bag wasn’t quite full so I put thirty oranges in there thinking the kit bag would come with me but it followed on three months later and the oranges were well ripe by that time [laughs] they were putrid, and we were allowed to wear civilian clothes in South Africa, provided we wore our service cap, we could buy bush shirts and nice clothing in the gents’ outfitters, so if we took our caps off we looked like civilians, and that was good quality stuff and when that eventually arrived in Italy we were very pleased because we’d been dressed like scarecrows up until then with all sorts, I had a brown battle dress, it wasn’t khaki it was brown, a sort of teddy bear material, I don’t know what air force or army that was from, maybe Greek or something, and it was a bit big for me so I could wear two battle dress blouses, two pairs of trousers, two shirts, two vests and three pullovers, because sometimes it was twenty below in the air and then I’d wear my flying suit, going to the toilet to urinate was a bit difficult because I had so many clothes on, I couldn’t stretch my penis long enough in the cold air to have a pee in the pee tube, which was on the side of the fuselage with a tube leading out of the aircraft but usually they were blocked up with cigarette ends [laughs]. The Americans had had ashtrays in their Liberators, they smoked in the air, smoked cigars in fact but the RAF took the ash trays out so of course we smoked in the air, nobody knew and I would smoke twenty cigarettes during a trip and now and again I’d feel like another cigarette but I’d already got one alight and then I’d think, ‘what did I do with the last cigarette end, did I stamp on it? did I drop it?’ and I’d switch a torch on which had a bit of brown paper over the glass, inside the glass because that was regulation and try and find the cigarette end on the floor somewhere and, once we took a fitter with us to another airfield and he nearly had a fit when he saw me light a cigarette because you are not allowed to smoke within so many yards of an aircraft but it was alright, it was, smoking was less of a hazard than the flak, we were carrying a ten thousand pounds of bombs and thousands of gallons of fuel, petrol and oil and pyrotechnics, photo flashes, incendiary bombs so –
CB: A cigarette was the least of your problems –
JA: A cigarette was minor.
CB: What did you make of the Liberator as a plane?
JA: Well when I flew it, because I could fly it when the automatic pilot backed and the skipper said to me ‘you can take over if you like’, it was like, it was like steering the Queen Mary, if you wanted to change course you had a wheel instead of a joystick and you’d turn the wheel and wait and nothing happens for a few seconds and then suddenly it moves, and if you don’t turn the wheel back quick enough its gone too far, so it’s too sluggish and, of course my instrument flying, I only took over at night, my instrument flying wasn’t good enough, most of my instrument flying was in the link trainer under the hood, and instrument flying was tedious and I could only stand about half an hour at a time, then I was glad when the skipper came back and took over, we were all sergeants, we liked that, because it was awkward sometimes when there was officers in the crew, in one crew the tail gunner was an officer well that seemed silly because a sergeant in that crew was a skipper and he was in charge in the air but he had to salute the tail gunner on the ground, well he should have done if they hadn’t abandoned saluting, but there was so many American officers because all of their bomb aimers or bombardiers were commissioned and the navigators and the pilots, so they always, when they talked to me they always addressed me as lieutenant because they thought I must be an officer being a bomb aimer, bombardier, and I would say ‘no we’re not one, we’re sergeants’, but you see we didn’t wear rank badges because we hadn’t got any, when we qualified at flying school, they didn’t give us any sergeant strips and when we got to the squadron nobody was wearing any rank and the commanding officer said ‘you should wear rank badges’, we said ‘we haven’t got any’ he said ‘chalk them on’, chalk them on, well that seemed so silly we didn’t bother, we said ‘we can get some from the Americans’ he said ‘you’re not allowed to wear those’, so we didn’t wear anything.
CB: Did you get on well with the Americans?
JA: Yes, oh yeah they were lovely fellows, we went to a, about twenty miles away to Foggia, was a ruined town, it had been bombed by the Germans, the Italians, the British and the Americans so there wasn’t much left of it, but there was a bath house where they had shower baths, and when we had a day off we’d hitch a ride on a lorry, lorries were conveying chalk from the quarries and we’d hitch a ride on the back of a lorry carrying limestone, and then we’d get very dusty on there, the drivers were all American Negroes and they’d say ‘where you going, down town Foggia?’ and we’d say ‘yes’, ‘get aboard’, so we’d climb up on the limestone and go to the bathhouse which was a small with half a dozen cubicles which were meant for one or two people but there were always four or six people pushing in trying to get wet, under the water, and we’d be sitting there waiting to go in with our towels and our soap, all naked, and soon as someone came out we’d push our way in and try and get some water, and after the war I was invited by the Hungarian government to go, go to a meeting in Budapest, they’d invited all available flyers of every air force that was active over Hungary during the war, well Hungary was allied with Germany and I’d bombed Hungary but the Hungarian air force was very kind to us, they took us flying, you know in their aeroplanes and there were five Americans standing there, there were only two of us they could find from England, but I said to one of the Americans ‘do you remember the shower baths in Foggia?’ he said ‘yeah I must have seen you there’ but he said ‘I didn’t recognise you there with your clothes on’[laughing].
CB: So let’s turn to your missions, your operations, what were you involved in while you were there on your long range bomber?
JA: Well we could put most eighty aircraft in the air, RAF, Liberators and Wellingtons but the Americans could put up six hundred, or nearly a thousand, they flew during the day, we flew to the same time at night and of course we had the same opposition say for sixty planes as they had when they flew six hundred so our casualties were much higher than Americans but I liked the Americans, we got on well with them, they had a camp in a field not far from us and we went to visit them once, to compare their facilities with ours and they had tents with wooden floors and wooden walls and they had stoves, we had nothing like that, we didn’t have running water, they did, they had electric light, we didn’t, they had decent food, we didn’t, they had flak jackets to protect them when they were flying, we didn’t, they had an ice cream plant for making ice cream and when the weather was very hot, they used to take the ice cream up to about fifteen thousand feet to freeze it and they had a cinema on their site, we didn’t, so we felt really rather ashamed of our conditions compared with theirs ‘cause they didn’t know how bad ours were –
CB: I’m surprised there wasn’t mutiny but I suppose –
JA: Well we had some desertions, we didn’t, we felt mutinous but we didn’t actually mutiny, and our attitude was we want to get this bloody war over and beat the Germans, and get home, but after forty operations we should have six months instructing or some other job and then come back and do another forty so not many people getting through the first forty and by the time we’d done twenty we knew we wouldn’t survive, we were the most senior crew on the squadron, we lost the flight commander and all the senior people off the squadron and when people much more experienced than us were failing to come back, we thought ‘we haven’t got much chance’, and so we reconciled ourselves to the fact that we will die but everybody’s got to die sooner or later and we thought ‘we are gonna die now instead of when we are ninety-nine’ so that cheered us up the fact that everybody has got to go sooner or later anyway but what did worry us, is the thought that we’d be severely wounded and blinded and badly burned, that sort of thing and having to live with that from the age of twenty for the rest of our lives, we didn’t like that, we had been stationed in Torquey as raw recruits, and there was a hospital there for burned air crews, air crews that had had their faces burned off and they were disgusting to look at, and horrifying, and we didn’t want that to happen to us, it was very demoralising and it was happening to other men, it never happened to us, you know, we couldn’t understand how we keep getting away with it, the plane was hit, engines were knocked out, we were landing on one wheel and two engines and all sorts of things like that, but none of us were hit yet and we went on to, the skipper had done one air experience trip, before we started operating, so he was one ahead of us he’d flown with another crew for experience, we didn’t like that ‘cause we thought ‘if he gets bumped off we’ll have a strange pilot’, and anyway we went on, watching other people dropping like flies until our, until my, my thirty-seventh trip, and I was bombing German troops in Serbia, they were evacuating from Greece and the Greek islands, back through Yugoslavia, back to the home land, to defend Germany, and we were stopping them, and no matter how much we bombed them they never really took to it and they hit me, filled me full of shrapnel.
CB: Before we get to that Jim, your first operation I believe were against oil plants in Bucharest, is that right?
JA: The first one was an oil refinery in Fiume, that was an Italian port which is now Rijeka which Fiume and Rijeka mean river, and it’s now Yugoslav, Croatia now, and I know that oil refinery well, and I know a woman who used to go to school across the bay when I was bombing that oil refinery and I thought what a terrible thing it was she lived nearby and when I went past on the bus sometimes after the war and I thought I could’ve killed her and I would’ve hated to kill her she was such a nice person and, after the war I knew a lot of Germans, the German airmen, pilots, ‘cause I speak fluent German and they always thought I was German, they used to say ‘but your father’s German?’, and ‘no, no he’s English’, well your mother is German ‘no no’, ‘well where did you learn English?’, I was the head of the German department of import export firm for years and I had to learn German at school anyway, and I had a private tutors for languages after the war and, I even spoke Italian during the war, fifteen years after the war I opened an office in Milan, and I put a man there who was a Venetian, rather posh Italian, superior you know, and I said ‘hey Franco, have you changed the language?’ and he said ‘why?’ I said ‘well during the war we used to speak differently’ and he said ‘no we haven’t changed anything’ well he said ‘after Mussolini, we didn’t call people voy we said lay’ and I said ‘no it’s not that’ I said, I only speak these days when I’m on my monthly trip to Italy, to supervise the office, I only speak to bus conductors and waiters and people like that but they speak differently to the way I spoke, so I started talking to him in Italian and he said ‘for God’s sake don’t talk to the directors of Fiat, what you speak is Neapolitan dialect’, well I didn’t know that and I thought well if it was good enough for the girls in Sorrento, it’ll have to be good enough for the rest of the Italians, he said ‘you speak like those little black fellas down in the south’, ‘cause you know there was snobbishness between the north and the south but I liked the southern Italians, they were all nice jolly people you know, I’ve even got some distant relatives that are Italian, my, my grandmother’s sister married an Italian during the first war when the Italians were on our side, and they settled in England and had a multitude of children and I knew them all.
CB: So the operations, some of which were in Ploiesti in Romania, and they had a fearful reputation.
JA: It was the most heavily defended target in the world.
CB: You were bombing these oil plants, especially the one at Ploiesti at night obviously?
JA: Yes, yes it had tremendous defences you know, because it was the oil that was vital, what really finished the war was lack of petrol, they got, they’d run out of fuel for the tanks and the aircraft so all the war we should have only really been concentrating on oil refineries, oil fields.
CB: So the operation in October to do gardening or mine laying as it was properly known, mine laying in the Danube of which you reported was the most frightening episode that you’d ever been.
JA: Well the first time that we dropped mines in the Danube, we’d been told they are secret and you must make sure you drop them in the main stream, the Germans must not get the secret of the mines, they lie dormant for three weeks and they don’t go off until the second ship passes over them, so they are virtually un-sweep able, the Germans used to fly over them with special aircraft with a big magnetic ring on it to try and explode them, they’d gun barges adrift to go over them and nothing, they couldn’t sweep them and, within a few months we’d stopped a hundred percent shipping on the Danube, which was conveying oil from Ploiesti back to the German forces, so it was a very important thing and the fighter defences were enormous, we’d seen planes shot down every few minutes and that was a bit frightening, I used to think ‘I hope there’s not somebody I know in it’, because a plane would fly along beside us for seconds, it seemed like ages, on fire, and slowly descend in a curve and explode on the ground, and we were told, ‘don’t be distracted by crashes’ but you can’t stop looking at them, wondering ‘whose that?’ and thinking ‘why don’t they get out, don’t see any parachutes’, what we didn’t know was that the Germans had upward firing guns, and they’d creep underneath the plane in the dark and fire into the belly of the plane and nobody would see them, so the gunners didn’t open fire and wondered ‘why didn’t the gunners open fire on that?’, nobody told us about it, this was the secret.
CB: No, they were doing this to Liberators? They were certainly doing it to Lancasters weren’t they, they were doing this to Liberators as well?
JA: Yeah and you see we had no ball turret underneath, the RAF took out that bull turret, we hadn’t got a gunner for it anyway and then we had a gun turret in the nose but they took all the guts out of that, to decrease the weight, so we had no guns in the front turret, we had no gun underneath that could’ve seen these upward firing guns and we didn’t carry a lot of ammunition, mining the Danube we would use all our ammunition, immediately I’d drop the bombs, I would rush back to the beam position where I’d got two machine guns, one on either side, there was no gunner for those so in the event of an attack I would use those or when we were mining the Danube, I’d drop the mines, rush back there and use those guns to strafe the shipping on the water or any insulations on the banks, the banks were two hundred feet high, and the Germans used to stretch cables from bank to bank so we had to fly below two hundred feet so we normally went to a hundred feet in the dark above the water, and then we thought we’d be safe, except there was flak barges with barrow balloons and we couldn’t see the cables from those because the barrage ruins were too high up above us and you can’t see a cable in the dark, we were going too fast anyway and, I remember one time there was a man on a barge firing at me with an automatic rifle and I gave him a quick skirt, squirt from the machine gun as I went by, I would’ve like to have met him after the war if you lived to discuss that, you know I didn’t mean it really you know, I’d say ‘I’ve got nothing against you personally’.
CB: But if you’re going to fire at me, I’m firing at you, what was your bomb load on something like this?
JA: Ten thousand pounds, you see we couldn’t carry a big bomb like the Lancaster because we’d got the cat walk going down the centre of the plane, so the bombs had to be hung in rows one above the other on either side of the cat walk, so the biggest bomb we could carry was a thousand pounds, so we carried ten of those, ten thousand pounds, which is plenty anyway and we’d carry pyrotechnics, lots of incendiaries as well.
CB: And what was your job if there was a hang up, and the bomb hadn’t been released?
JA: I had to go along the cat walk, in the dark, with no parachute, and no oxygen, and holding onto the railings in the roof and skidding about on the ten inch wide cat walk, with the, the slipstream would take away my weight so I had a job to keep on my feet and when I got to the bomb which was usually the one right to the back, I would stand on the cat walk with one leg and kick it and it would never fall off, so I had to swing then holding onto the hydraulic pipes, which were not meant to be swung from they are only about an inch diameter, I’d hold them with two hands, my wrists would go like jelly, you know, I’d swing and kick with both feet and when the bomb eventually fell off it was like my stomach went off with it, ‘cause there was always lights twinkling on the ground and thousands of feet below, and one slip and I’m off to the ground you know, seconds to live, that was terrifying. The only other terrifying thing was throwing grenades when I went on an infantry tactics course during training and, swinging propellers, on tiger moths, on a wet windy and muddy day, I thought I’ll swing in to the propeller and get my head cut off, but when I was in South Africa a chap did walk into a propeller, a navigator, and it threw his head over the hangar, so propellers were a danger, you couldn’t see them rotating, they were invisible.
CB: So now you were also involved in what was known as the Warsaw uprising or the support of that, that’s right isn’t it Jim?
JA: Yes but to go back to the mining of the Danube, the first time we mined the Danube, I said to the skipper ‘we’re too low, we’re much too low’ and he said ‘we’re at a hundred feet’ and I thought ‘we’re bloody not’, I could tell by the droplets of water we’re not at a hundred feet, when we got back to base the compass was, the radio compass was checked and we’d been at thirty feet in the dark, if we’d touched the water we’d have been gone, so that, it was terrifying yet there was no, there was no pay off, if you dropped the bombs you’d see the explosions and things, you’ve done something but you dropped mines that are not going to go off for three weeks or more then there’s no, the stress is there, there’s no release from the stress except machine gunning like mad, and then of course on the way back you would get attacked by fighters so then I was stay by the beam guns or as the Americans call them the waist guns, and that was quite exciting really firing those, but the reflector sides illuminated, were too bright, they were meant to be used during the day and I couldn’t see through them at night so I switched them off and I fired watching where the trace goes ‘cause every fifth bullet it was a tracer, so I fired a gun like squirting a hose, and they’d burn out about I don’t know whether it was six hundred yards but up to that time I could see where they were going, firing like watering the garden it was, with a hose pipe [laughing] anyway you were asking me about?
CB: Supporting the Warsaw uprising, dropping the supplies?
JA: Yeah, I’d bombed a place in Hungary, we were pretty tired, it was the second of two nights we’d been in the air, and we eventually got back in the tent to go to bed and within three hours a runner, a runner arrived from the orderly room and he said ‘you’ve got to report for briefing’, we’ve only been in the tent for three hours and we were told you’re going on a secret operation, fly down to Brindisi, we didn’t know what it was all about, and in Brindisi we went into a hut and there was a big map on the end wall and it showed a tape going from Brindisi to Warsaw, we thought well it’s nothing to do with us, the Poles are on our side we’re not going to bomb Warsaw, but then we were briefed and told we’re not going to bomb, we’re going to drop supplies of explosives and ammunition and guns for the underground resistance fighters who were fighting in the city against the Germans and, they were expecting the Russians to arrive any minute so on the 1st of August they’d started to fight, and they were doing well for a few days, and the Russians stopped their advance so the Poles were on their own so they appealed for help, apparently Winston Churchill was in Italy checking the arrangements for the south of France invasion which was imminent and he said, ‘we must help the Poles, we went to join the war on their account, we can’t stand idly by’, our air officer commander told us this later and, so he said we should go with the special duty squadrons, there was an Polish squadron and an RAF squadron dropping supplies but they’d lost so many men so they couldn’t continue so three liberator bomber squadrons were called in to do the supply dropping, they said ‘you must, you must drop from below six hundred feet and the poles said ‘two hundred, otherwise the parachute containers will drift away’ and they said ‘we’ve been there, it’s safer at a hundred feet because then the Germans can’t bring the guns to there because at a hundred feet you’ve come and gone quickly’, but they said ‘there’s one building still standing and that’s sixty meters high, so don’t fly into that in the middle of the night’, when we got to Warsaw, the whole city was on fire, gun fire and everything was burning and we’d been told a particular street and squares where we were to drop the supplies but nothing was recognisable so I remembered them saying, Zoliborz, a district of Warsaw is still in the hands of the insurgents, well that was a few days ago and I thought there doesn’t seem to be any fires, or no fighting going on as far as I could see, we fly around for fifty minutes and planes were getting shot down all around us and I’d eventually counting the bridges, I knew where Zoliborz was, I dropped the supplies there and I said to the wireless operator, ‘we must be bloody mad you know flying around fifty minutes’ and he said ‘well we’re not going all that way to drop them in the wrong bloody place’, I thought we’re all crazy, the psychiatrist reported that we were crazy, in their official reports, which I read after the war, ‘they must be crazy and they all think it won’t happen to them’, it’s insulting, we knew it was going to happen to us sooner or later, why shouldn’t it happen to us, it did happen to me in the end, fortunately it wasn’t quite fatal [laughing] .
CB: Glad to hear it, so that was your philosophy really to imagine that you had been killed already basically?
JA: Well we knew that we would die eventually anyway, so it’s like people ask you ‘when did you have your holidays?’, when you’ve had it, doesn’t matter if it was June or September, its gone, so doesn’t matter when you die really, if you’ve got to die anyway what’s the date matter, we had to tell ourselves that sort of thing, but we had superstitions, we had lots of superstitions, my friend Deakey (?) the navigator, he had a lucky shirt and he couldn’t fly without his lucky shirt and if it was dirty he had to wash and dry it quickly ready for flying that night, we only fly once without his lucky shirt and we got lost, and that was on the way back from Warsaw, we went twice to Warsaw and each night we lost thirty percent and by the third night we’d lost ninety percent, ninety, the air force pretended it was seventeen percent but everybody knows it was ninety percent and there are plenty of documents saying it was ninety percent and our air officer commanding Sir John Slessor wrote a book in which he [said] the time of the Warsaw uprising was the worst time of his career and he mentioned it was ninety percent but after the war, Stalin had to be appeased so we didn’t want to tell, didn’t want to emphasize anything we did that he didn’t agree with, ‘cause Stalin was anti-Poles and he’d stopped his army to allow the Germans to polish off Warsaw, and Hitler said eradicate Warsaw, it was to be razed to the ground and he gave an order ‘all inhabitants to be killed’ and the new German commander who wrote a book after the war, he said ‘you don’t mean women and children?’ and he was told ‘yes’ [emphasis], the whole population is to be killed, that’s what was going on when we were flying over there, and we were told ‘if you get shot down near the Russian lines, they will shoot you, especially if you are dressed in blue’, well of course we were dressed in blue we were in the Air Force, so it was a bit late to tell us that now and, while we were flying to Warsaw we were being shot at by the Russians and the Germans because they didn’t agree with us helping the Poles, the Poles got a medal, the Germans got a special badge, the Russians got a medal, I’ve got one of them as a souvenir, and we got nothing, we got no recognition.
CB: Andy your pilot comes over as very calm.
JA: Yes, he was very determined, he was very stubborn and of course he was the skipper, he was in charge but I always felt that I was in charge you see and when we were lost on the way back from Warsaw, Deakey the navigator called me up and said ‘Jimmy can I have a word with you’, well I thought there’s something wrong and I just asked him a little while ago, ‘do you want a pinpoint?’ ‘cause I would navigate by map reading all the way there and back you see, but I hadn’t bothered because he, I said ‘do you want a pinpoint?’ and he said ‘no, no I’m alright’ now he says ‘can I have a word with you?’, so I scrambled up the front to the nose compartment and the tears were dripping off his chin and he said ‘I don’t know what country we’re over’, I said ‘give me the typographical maps, I’m shit hot at map reading, I could tell you in a few seconds where you are’ and I said ‘we’ve got no maps for this place whatever it is’, when we should be over the sea, we’re over land and when we should be over land we were over the sea of course we were over the Greek islands, they’re all messy you know, the little bits and we’ve got no map for that place and I didn’t know until after the way why we hadn’t got a map, the reason was he’d got diarrhoea and he’d used the map because there wasn’t any toilet in plane, and he wrapped it up and chucked it out down the flare shoot, that’s where the map was the Germans had got it, bit messy, and the plane had been on fire, the wireless operator had the wireless set in pieces and he was in his element putting it together, you know mending it, he was busy and I, went up the front to have a chat to the skipper with Andy, and I said to the flight engineer, he pushed past me to look at the fuel gauges, they were like a gauge on an oil tank, like a domestic oil tank, visual gauge with a bubble in tubes, I said ‘how we’re doing?’ he said ‘empty’, I said ‘we can’t be empty we’re still flying’ he said ‘yeah but I don’t know how long for’, we’re flying over aerodromes with German planes with black crosses on, they’re freight planes but we daren’t try and land there otherwise the you know the ground defences open up on us, so I said to Andy ‘we’re heading to the mountains’ and I said to him ‘land on this road’ I said ‘these strong, straight roads’ I said ‘we’re just flying over one now, look you can land here, that’s what I would do if I were you’ and he said ‘I think we’ll press on’, I thought ‘you’re mad, press on, [emphasis] we’re flying into the mountains and we’re out of fuel, and in any minute all the engines are going to cut out’, anyway he was right and we did press on and we got eventually over the sea and the radio operator had got the wireless together again and he always used to stand up and point when he was listening on the radio and he started waving his arms about and pointing and he said its Brindisi and we were facing the runway, we running up to Brindisi and we went straight in, if there had been anybody in the way we couldn’t have done round the circuit because when we got to the end of the runway the, all engines cut out, out of fuel, so we told the duty pilot where we were and that we were out of fuel, so they put some fuel in and flew back to Amendola near Foggia, of course we’d been gone so long we couldn’t still be in the air, our trip was eleven hours and forty minutes plus over an hour going to Brindisi over an hour coming back so we were so tired, I’d already dropped off to sleep for the last half an hour and when the plane landed I was still asleep and the ground crew got in and stirred me with a foot to wake me up, I was just dead tired, I’d been in the air longer than I’d been on the ground for about three days and no sleep at all you know (tired, hungry?) yeah but we were always hungry.
CB: And then you’d have to have the debriefing?
JA: Yes, that didn’t take long because we were always a bit impatient at debriefing, we’d answer questions, we didn’t volunteer any information and always something had gone wrong with the plane, like the guns didn’t fire, the oxygen cylinders were empty, all sorts of things, one engine cut out, two engines cut out and the ground crew would run out to us soon as we landed and they’d shout ‘any snags, any snags?’ and we’d swear and shout and say ‘this went wrong and that went wrong’ using lots of ‘f’ words but then we’d never report the snags, because we relied on those lads and it wasn’t their fault, the planes were clapped out anyway and they’d work through the night perhaps maintenance and they couldn’t get spares and some of the things they did were, were fatal, and they couldn’t help it, one of them said to me, ‘I don’t get very close to the air crews, I don’t make friends with them because’ he said ‘if a plane goes missing I’d wonder if I did something wrong or whether I’d forgot to do something’ and he said ‘I’ve been on a squadron a long time and lots of planes have gone missing and I always feel it might be my fault’ so he said ‘I don’t like to get friendly with air crews’, I can understand that, when I used to go to the, we weren’t allowed to take anything with us like a bus ticket or money or anything like that, and so I had a little wallet and I used to hand it to the sergeant fitter, ground crew fitter and I’d say ‘take that Jake and if I don’t come back you can keep it’, and he’d take it but he didn’t like touching it really and when I got back he’d shove it at me as soon as he could ‘cause he didn’t want anything to do with dead men’s property and I can understand that you know, he was squeamish and when I got wounded he was the chap who lifted me up and carried me out of the plane.
CB: So what happened on that your final operation obviously, what was it the thirty-seventh out of forty?
JA: Yes
CB: And what happened Jim?
JA: When we were told the target would be undefended, and for the first time ever you can bomb anywhere in the town, it’s just full of Germans, so I dropped a stick of bombs at predetermined intervals, and I hit about two or three blocks of flats right in the middle, the next one between two blocks of flats, the next one a road and rail junction, and then I said to the skipper, ‘hold this course for half a minute because we’re going into mountains now’, and we were low you see because the visibility you had to come down very low, ‘cause of the cloud, and just as I said that the tail gunner said ‘it’s flak, it’s stern’ and WOOF [emphasis to express being hit], and it’s a sensation like if you’re playing football and the football is wet and heavy and somebody kicks it and it hits you straight in the face, it’s a numb sensation at first and then comes the pain, well this was like a puff of wind, like being hit with something but no pain what so ever and then floods of blood, I seemed to be bleeding to death, and I felt for my parachute pack because I thought we were getting shot down but I was the only one hit actually, we were hit in one engine and me and the navigator wrote in his diary; ‘Jim’s eyeball is hanging out on his cheek’ [laughs] actually it wasn’t, I’d got a lump of Perspex because all the Perspex had become shrapnel, and there was a piece about four inches long stuck in my eyeball and of course all the blood was running down my face because I was hit in the head and the face and everywhere and the blood running down this Perspex made it look as though my eye was hanging out you see so he couldn’t look at me, so he tapped me on the head and I could see he was talking, we had throat microphones, American throat microphones, it were very efficient and he was telling the crew I’d been hit, I crawled under the flight deck and when I stood up in the well, the back of the flight deck, the wireless operator had got all the first aid kits open and he wanted to put one on my face but he was hesitant to do it and I thought ‘do it, do it’, but of course there was this four inch long piece of shrapnel stuck in my eye, and it wasn’t until it fell out that he could put bandages on and then he bandaged everything that was bloody including my right arm which was badly damaged and my left arm which I’d used to investigate my other wounds and that wasn’t damaged but it was very bloody so he bandaged that as well, he bandaged everything and then he said ‘I’ll give you a shot of morphine’, I said ‘I’m not in pain’, I had no pain what so ever and that frightened me because I thought, if you get your legs chopped off you don’t feel any pain, because the body reacts as though you get shock but you don’t feel pain and I thought I’m dying, I must be dying and I said ‘I’m not in any pain I don’t need morphine’ and he got some out the first aid thing and I’d got my eyes shut and he stuck the thing in my arm and the morphine came like a marble, raised up, it didn’t disperse and when we landed he said to the ground crew ‘I’ve tied a label on him saying I gave him morphine at twelve o’clock, but I know now that I shouldn’t do that because he’s got a head wound’ and ‘oh Christ he’s killed me instead of the Germans’ [laughing].
But anyway, all we did all the time was sing and tell jokes, and it was like a rugby club –
CB: In the military hospital?
JA: No on the squadron, we weren’t morose and we weren’t miserable, in fact everything was hilarious and because we had to keep flying it didn’t matter what we did, hooliganism didn’t matter, drunkenness, it didn’t matter, because we were either up in the air or we had a group stand down when we’d have two of three days off due to so many casualties, waiting for new crews and new aeroplanes, and we’d get drunk and forget everything you see, and if, if unexpectedly we had to fly after a night a free night in the mess and drunkenness, we’d have a headache like you’ve never experienced and I went to the medical officers little cubby hole and there was a youth leaning up the doorpost and I pushed past him and I was opening boxes and things looking for an aspirin and I said to this fella, ‘do you know where they keep the aspirins?’ and he said ‘yeah’ and he told me and I said ‘you know your way around?’ and he said ‘yeah I’m the medical officer’ [laughs]
CB: So you found yourself in this hospital?
JA: Yeah when, after we landed, I was put on a stretcher, propped up in a sitting position on some blankets, some blankets behind me and it seemed to take ages and the flight engineer said ‘what’s the bloody delay? Get him to hospital’ and they said ‘we’re checking the first aid kits’ which all had been opened and used and they said ‘there’s a pair of scissors missing’ and that’s why they were delaying and he said ‘if you don’t get him to hospital right away I’m gonna bloody do the lot of ya’, and he was a tough Shetlander and that made them pull their socks up, and they put me in the ambulance to go seven miles, no twenty miles into Foggia to the general hospital, military hospital, and the skipper said ‘I’ll come with you’, well he shouldn’t have, he should’ve gone back to be debriefed but I was glad he came with me, ‘cause I didn’t know what I looked like, I didn’t know if my ear had been chopped off or whether I’d got a complete nose ‘cause I knew a piece of shrapnel had creased the top of my nose and the bottom, I didn’t know how bad things were and he said I can show you and he and he got a little stainless steel or chrome mirror in his pocket and he showed me but that’s very distorting and I thought ‘bloody hell look at that’, and I heard the nurses talking and they were talking as though I was already dead and one of them said ‘he must have been a good looking boy’, he must have been? [emphasis] I’m still here, you know, and they stripped me, cut all me clothes off and I felt a bit embarrassed because I’d borrowed a pair of long johns from the tail gunner and I was stripped down to my long johns and I felt that was a bit embarrassing because long johns were a bit silly aren’t they, and then the skipper went back then but he had to hitch hike back and he was in his flying kit you know, and when he got back he got a bollock-ing ‘cause he should have gone straight back not gone to the hospital with me, and anyway he got over that and they decided as he’d done one more trip than me anyway and they couldn’t manage without me and they hadn’t got anyone to replace me, the crew could stop now and go for a rest period, and after a few days they did go, and so there I was in hospital four and a half hours, and a chap from the squadron had sprained his wrist or something and he called at the hospital, to see the medical officer at the hospital and he said, the medical officer said ‘we’ve got a chap from your squadron in here’ and he said ‘oh I’d like to go and see him’ and he said ‘no you better not he’s just recovering from four and a half hours on the operating table so you won’t be able to talk to him yet’, and I came round and it was evening but I couldn’t see and I was bound up like an invisible man, just all bandages and I could see a white apparition by the bed and I thought ‘I’m alive’, surprisingly and I muttered, [clears throat] ‘could you tell me if they’ve taken my ear off?’ and this thing said ‘what are you here for?’, and I said ‘I’ve been wounded’, and she said ‘well you’re have to wait until the day staff comes on, I don’t know anything about you’ so I had to wait the rest of the night to find out whether I’d got a nose and whether I had only got one ear and that worried my because in the day of short haircuts I thought I’d look a fool with only one ear [slight laugh] isn’t that silly and, of course I was blind in one eye and the, every hour they dropped penicillin in my eye, it was icy cold, they said ‘you’re lucky, you’re being treated with this new penicillin, new’, I’d never even heard of it and I said ‘can you warm it up, it’s cold’ they said ‘we keep it in the refrigerator’ [slight laugh], anyway, after a few days I was totally blind because my left, my left eye had been alright, well reasonable but then I was totally blind in both eyes and I heard them muttering about cross infection in the ward and I had to lie flat on my back for a month, thirty days I wasn’t allowed to sit up or move due to the eye treatment, they said ‘we’ve healed eyes before but usually they get an infection in the end and we have to remove them’ and I thought well if I can’t see with it it doesn’t matter, I might look alright with an eye patch, a talking point and they transferred me to another ward, they lifted me up flat, put me on a stretcher, wheeled me away, and all the others in the ward had thought I’d died and I said well nobody talked to me anyway, they said, ‘well when your eyes were bound up we didn’t know whether you were awake or asleep’, well I didn’t know what time it was or what date it was or anything and I used to doze off and come back to consciousness again all the time and I never knew whether it was morning or afternoon or evening and I used to listen to what was going on, are these night time sounds or day time sounds, very difficult to tell. Anyway I then after a while when I’d recovered a bit I had more operations on my eye under local anaesthetic, terribly painful, they picked out bits of steel, bits of Perspex and a piece of wood and the chap said to me, ‘what wood was there in the air craft?’ I said ‘well it was made of aluminium’ he said ‘well you’ve got a piece of wood in your eye, a tiny piece’, then I remembered, there was an air blower near the bomb airmen’s position and it would blow in my face so I used to put map over it and stand the astro compass box up against it and it was made of wood and of course that had been shattered and a piece of wood obviously went in my eye, and when they cut my clothes off in the hospital I’d got three pullovers on, lots of clothes you know, multiples of everything and two of the pullovers were air force issue but one I’d brought at Marks and Spencer’s before I joined up and I thought ‘steady on that’s my pullover they cut in half’ you know and that watch that got took off I brought that you know, got no compensation, but anyway it was terrible in the hospital because nobody had any time for me, I don’t know whether they were opposed to the bomber offensive or what it was.
CB: So what nationality were they, the nursing staff?
JA: British, in that hospital they were British, in a second hospital they had Italian nurses that was a bit better but the British nurses were quite cruel really and, except for one, she used to be on night duty and she’d come and sit on the bed and talk to me at night and bring me a cup of tea, I think she fancied me [laughing] and anyway when I could stand up, because I felt very dizzy, it was very difficult to stand up after being about six weeks in bed and I’d only got blood stained clothes on, ‘cause one battle dress was though the rats had eaten it, it just fell open, as I’d got more than one battle dress on, one of them weren’t too bad and, but it was all blood stained and my flying boots were all caped with blood and I felt stupid you know I wanted to have proper clothes, and I felt very truculent and resentful, and the nurse came round and she said ‘lie to attention’ [emphasis] and I said ‘what does that mean?’, she said ‘both arms above the sheets down by your sides, feet together, head straight’, [coughs] I said ‘I can’t do it’, can we wait a minute [pauses] and then got it up gradually from twenty to eighty percent.
CB: So you’re still in the hospital, how long were you in the hospital?
JA: Three months and I was transferred then to a place called Torre del Greco to another hospital, and we’d got Italian nurses there, very pretty, black hair and uniforms, white dresses with a red cross on their chest and their English was a bit faulty and they’d come round every day and ask me ‘lavatory?’ [puts on an accent] and I’d say ‘what’s that?’, ‘lavatory?’ [in accent again], that’s all they could say and I’d say ‘I don’t understand’, and then they’d write something down and go away and I was there for a month and then I was discharged and told you’re on twenty four hour stand by to go back to England wounded, never happened, after a few weeks, they put red crosses on my kit bags and loaded them on board a ship, I had a two week visit, sorry a two week voyage back to England through the, past Gibraltar, through the Bay of Biscay, submarine alert all the time, no beds no chairs and I sat on a form leaning on a table for two weeks.
CB: Still of course not a hundred percent?
JA: No I was ill, very ill and every now and then submarine alert and I’d got to scramble up on deck in a life vest and over coat and have to stand there in the drizzle and rain until the submarine alert was over, and I wasn’t treated as an invalid at all, I was just with the other troops, nobody had a bed, nobody had a chair, if some of them if they were lucky they could climb on the table and sleep on the table but I couldn’t get on the table so I had to sit on the form and lean forward on the table all night, and we put into Liverpool and we spent twenty four hours in the docks while the customs went thoroughly through the ship examining everything, I thought some people have been abroad for several years, what the hell are they looking for? and we’re all British anyway, and then I got off the boat and I had to carry two kit bags with the red crosses on, all to the station put them on the train unaided, I thought ‘what they hell are the red crosses for?’, and I reported to the Air Ministry with me two kit bags and they said ‘you’ve been sent back because they haven’t got the right facilities for treating you in Italy’, so I expected to go back into hospital again but they gave me five weeks leave, didn’t give me any money, they didn’t ask me where will you go on your five weeks leave but they said ‘every week report here again’, well my, fortunately my father was at an Air Ministry unit at Harrow and my parents lived in Hillingdon on the outskirts of London, so I could live with them, the morning after I arrived there, in my funny garb of odds and sods and I hadn’t got a proper uniform, I heard the first time of Doodlebug what we called pilotless planes (B1) I had heard about them, didn’t realise they were so noisy, I knew when the motor cut out they’d come down and one came over and the motor stopped and I said to my mother ‘what do you do?’ she said ‘don’t do anything’ and she went outside to peg some washing on the line and it just dropped at Greenford, which was not very far away from [pauses] not very far away from where we were living and then the rockets came and they were terrifying, the V2s, the rockets, because you’d hear terrible explosion and then hear them coming and in the newspapers and on the radio it was saying ‘gas mains exploding all over London’, well that was a lie, my father knew what they were and he was told ‘don’t evacuate your family as it will cause panic’ so he had to stay there, couldn’t tell his family the danger, it was quite silly during the war because when the Germans bombed a town we weren’t allowed to know which town it was, on the radio it would say ‘bombs were dropped at random’ and we thought ‘Random must be totally destroyed by now because its bombed every night’ [laughs], anyway my father said ‘haven’t you got a proper uniform’, I’d got this brown battle dress which I wore with a blue shirt and a black tie and a hat that had collapsed with a badge I had brought in a bazaar in Egypt which wasn’t a regulation badge, an air force badge it was sort of a souvenir thing bought in a bazaar ‘cause someone had stolen my badge and, he sized me up and brought me a tunic anyway but I was wearing a flying badge and strips on this brown thing and I was hoping people would ask me ‘what the hell are you?’ but nobody ever asked and I was passing military policemen, they should have said ‘excuse me, what air force are you in?’, nobody ever asked because there was so many foreigners in London of different armies and air forces that everybody looked different, anyway I realised I wasn’t, on my weekly visits to the Air Ministry, I wasn’t seen by what I would call proper doctors, I was seeing men in white coats, now psychiatry was in this infantry or psycho analysis and we were prime subjects for it because we were all bloody crackers, you see, so they asked me all sorts of questions, not about my injuries, no medical treatment but things like ‘do you like girls? What sort of girls do you like? Do you dream? What do you dream about?’ so I made things up, course the chap was writing things all down in long hand, ‘what sort of girls do you like?’ I said ‘girls with red hair’, well I had only known one girl with red hair, I nearly said to him girls who do or girls who say yes [laughing] but ‘what do you dream about’ so I made it up a dream and told him and it would amuse me to see him scribbling it all down, no medical treatment what so ever then I got a telegram, report to Innsworth, and I said to my father who’d worked his way up you see from being a corporal in the first world war to being a squadron leader, acting wing commander and he knew all the ropes, I said to him ‘god I could do with a few more days leave’ and he said ‘well send them a telegram’, I said what will I say?’ he said ‘wedding’, so I thought telegram style is quite ambiguous you see, and instead of saying ‘I request extension of leave for my wedding’ I just said ‘for wedding’, so it could be anybody’s wedding, they said forty eight hours granted and report to Manby in Lincolnshire, well I still hadn’t got proper uniform and everything, just one tunic my father had given me, this funny cap and other odd things you know, and I had to buy everything I needed to make it up, you should have three of everything, three pairs of trousers, three tunics etc. I had to buy it from the stores and a 664B which it the payment on clothing on repayment form, I can remember even the name of the form, form 664B, and I had it stopped out of my pay, so I was looking for a job, nobody knew what I was there for, there were people on a course, officers training courses and I said, they said ‘are you an instructor’ I said ‘I don’t know, can I look at your books?’ they showed me the books and I said ‘no I don’t know any of this stuff, it’s all up to date, you know I don’t know it so I can’t be an instructor’, ‘are you a pupil?’ I said ‘no I’m off flying so I can’t be a pupil’, I got pally with the armourist officer and I said ‘I’m sick of just hanging about, three weeks and nothing to do and have you got anything I can do?’ and he said ‘well we need someone to take charge of the low level bombing range but it’s night work’, I said ‘well I’ve got nothing to do during the day or during the night so I might as well be working at night, sleeping in the day’, so he gave me a squad of blokes and WAAFs and I was in charge of bombing range so after another three or four weeks he said ‘guess what, your documents have come through and you are attached to my section anyway, what would you like to do?’, I said ‘well what is there?’, he gave me two or three options and said ‘there’s a detachment on the coast with three bombing ranges, have a ride out there on the ration lorry, see if you like it, you can take charge of one of the ranges’, so I thought well anything to get away from the real air force, get away on a detachment.
CB: Your eyes were alright now were they?
JA: No, no I still couldn’t see out of my right eye, but they said, they introduced peace time regulations and things you see after the war had ended, and they said annual musketry, everybody must attend so I went to the rifle range and I fired off so many rounds and I didn’t get any bullets on the target at all, so they said ‘something must be wrong there, will you do it again?’, well I couldn’t see the target never mind hit it, and I was trying to use my left eye with the rifle on the right side you see and that’s impossible, anyway I was in charge of the bombing range for a year or two and I was sent for by the commanding officer, he was an air commodore and he said ‘air crews are allowed to take trade training’, and I said ‘well I don’t need any because I’ll be demobbed in about six months, demobilised, don’t need any trade training’, I said ‘what is there anyway?’, he said you’re only allowed to take group one or group two trades and I said ‘what are the group one’s and group two’s?’ he said ‘there aren’t any’, I said ‘well what is there then?’ he said ‘well if don’t volunteer for one of these I’ll damn well send you on one’ he said ‘there’s plenty of openings for cooks’, I said ‘oh I’d like to be a cook’, I thought you’re in the warm and you can get plenty to eat if you’re in the cook house, I said ‘I’d like to train as a cook’ and he was furious, he said ‘that’s a group five trade, you’re not allowed to take a low trade’ well I thought well it’d be nice you know in the winter in the cook house [laughing] so he said ‘I’m sending you on a photographic course’, so all the other people, I was in charge of the course of twenty five men because I was a senior man, and the others were people who had joined up to fly but before they could start training the war had finished so they got to go onto ground jobs, and the ones on the course were amateur photographers and they knew everything, well all I knew was you point a camera and press the thing and you send it off to Boots, and when it comes back it’s prints and how they do it I don’t care, but now I had to learn all about it, take photographs of things moving and you know all sorts, people walking, cycling, aeroplanes taking off and all that, I learned quite a bit actually and then I was transferred to Benson, near Oxford and I was put in charge of the photographic section, well I was the most naive photographer in the world because I wasn’t even interested, but I was put in charge and they were doing an air survey of the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, and doing hundreds of feet of film and it was all going through machines and it was all automatic, well I’d never seen such machinery and the photographic officer was always sliding off somewhere and he’d put me in charge and disappear and when he came back he’d say ‘hundreds of yards of film have been ruined’ and ‘how did that happen?’ and he said ‘you didn’t make them clean the film’ well I didn’t know they had to clean the film [slight laugh], so it wasn’t too bad because there was a lot of women there, WAAFs, they were quite jolly and I used to open the section at nine o’clock in the morning and they’d say ‘right we’re go off to breakfast now’ and we’d go down by the river, the Thames and have bacon and eggs and stroll back when we felt like it, and I hadn’t got the faintest idea, some of the people knew what they were doing and some didn’t you see, I didn’t know at all [laughs], so eventually I was demobilised from there and it took place at Uxbridge and I was given a chalk striped suit, like Max Miller I felt, and a hat, I’d never worn a trilby hat and we looked in mirrors in our civilian clothes and laughed like hell because we’d never worn anything like that before and when we come out the demobilisation centre there were chaps hanging around offering you two quid for the box of clothing, I offered them the hat, they didn’t want that, they wanted coats and trousers, ‘cause clothing was rationed you see, and the thing I would have really like to keep was an over coat because they had good overcoats in the air force and I hadn’t worn an overcoat you see, so I went to a market and they were selling second hand clothes which weren’t rationed and I brought a sailor’s overcoat [laughs].
CB: Did you keep in touch with your crew after the war?
JA: Up until the time they died, yes, except the one from the Shetlands who emigrated to New Zealand so we lost touch with him, but the rest of us stayed in touch until they all died, one at a time, not all together but they got heart attacks and cancer and things and I think that was through the stress they had during the war.
CB: You became a very successful international businessman after the war.
JA: I did, yes, I devoted all my time to educating myself, I attended a technical school, it was a commercial and technical school, they had commercial boys who did short hand typing and book keeping and technical boys, I was one, we did metal work and wood work and higher mathematics’ and science, advance subjects you know, we didn’t do the nice subjects like art anymore and scripture and things you know, easy subjects, we didn’t do that.
CB: There is one point I wanted to ask you, you were awarded the DFM, the Distinguished Flying Medal –
JA: Yes.
CB: Did you accept it?
JA: No I didn’t, I got a message, chaps used to come into town, my old friends who’d trained with me and were still on the squadron and they’d come in they said, one of them said, ‘see you got a gong then?’ and I said ‘I don’t know anything about it’, he said it was on DROs, daily routine orders, I did know about it because an officer appeared one day in the hospital and he sat on the bed next to me and I couldn’t see him, I couldn’t recognise him properly, because my eyes were badly affected and he said, in a very pompous way he said, ‘I have honour to inform you, that you have been awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal’ and it was as though I could hear a radio on in the background, it didn’t sound like me at all, and I heard myself saying ‘tell them to stick it up their arse, I don’t want a bloody medal, I want some clothes, I want a shirt and a tunic, and some trousers, I want some shoes’, because they hadn’t provided me with anything and another thing that upset me was a bitch had had puppies on the squadron, in the tent lines, and I’d got one of these puppies and that was the only thing I’d got in the world, I’d got the rest of the crew but I didn’t own them and the only thing I owned was this little Italian dog, he was a kind of Labrador and I used to save a bit on my plate from dinner or breakfast and bring it back for him, put it on the ground and he’d lick the plate clean, and the next morning I’d go to breakfast, forget to wash the plate and I’d remember later ‘oh god I forgot to wash the plate’, because it was always so clean, you see he’d licked it clean, and the lads came to the hospital and they said ‘the CO’s had all the dogs shot’, ‘what, why’d he do that, shot all the dogs?’, ‘cause they were good for morale those dogs and I used to look forward to my little dog you know when I came back from my trips, it might be the last day of my life, and he shot it, and that’s why I didn’t take the DFM, why I told them to stick it up their arse, now years after the war when I moved to Lincolnshire from London, where I live now, I was in Lincoln when I met somebody who turned out to be a flight commander from the squadron, and he was not the same flight I was in, we had A flight and B flight, he was the other flight and he said, I didn’t know him on the squadron ‘cause he came after I’d you know done most of my trips, he was the new boy, and he said ‘do you know the CO is still alive, he lives in Norfolk’ I said ‘no, I didn’t know that’ he said ‘I’ll give you his details, his telephone number and address’, so I phoned him and I said ‘I’d like to come and check a few things with you ‘cause I’m writing a manuscript for a book and the sort of things I’ve heard, I heard that you were a group captain dropped down to wing commander because you wanted what the Americans called some combat time, we thought you must be bloody potty,’ because he was non-compassionate at that time you see, I said ‘there’s certain things I’d like to check with you whether it’s true or not’, I went to see him, I said you never talked to us on the squadron because we were sergeants, he said ‘well I couldn’t because you were so much more experienced than me’ he said ‘I kept a low profile’ and I said ‘well you won’t remember me but I’ll tell you something now and it’ll remind you who I am’ and I told him about the DFM and where it should be stuck and he was flabbergasted, I had come back from dead you know to haunt him and he’d got a couple of dogs there you know, young two dogs, and how would he feel now if I shot his dogs –
CB: Did you mention that to him?
JA: I didn’t no, I just told him I was so embittered and outraged that I didn’t want the bloody medal but of course it was a mistake, looking at the Antiques Roadshow one day, I saw a few ordinary medals being auctioned and a DFM, and the DFM made about six thousand pounds or something put together with the other medals and I said to my wife what a fool I was I should’ve taken it, but it was involuntary you know when I said it, it was as though I wasn’t speaking, I was listening to somebody saying it, and I was in a bad way of course, I’d got no short term memory, for many months, I didn’t dare tell anybody because I wanted to get back on to flying you see, I thought you can fly with one eye, I’m not interested in anything else only flying, they wouldn’t have it, and [pauses] I was eventually, I was on this photographic course and coming out of a darkroom into the sunlight I couldn’t see I was blinded, my eyes are streaming, so I was sent to an army doctor in Aldershot, and he said to me ‘you’re up to British army standards’ and I said ‘maybe I am because you’re calling up people with one eye now’, they were towards the end of the war they called up people to serve with one eye. And I went back to my unit, one day I was called for by the medical officer and he said ‘you should have had a medical board last year’, I said ‘I did have one’ and he said ‘why do you say that? Nothing in your records about it’, I said ‘I went to Watchfield and I had a railway warrant for myself and a party of airmen and I was in charge, ‘and what do alleged happened?’, I said ‘well the medical officer who gave me a board he said ‘what’s your condition?’ and I said ‘about the same’ and he said ‘right we’ll leave it at that then, same’ and he said ‘I can’t understand you saying that’, and I said, he was flicking over pages in a file, I said, the pages are numbered, I said to him ‘there’s one page missing’ he said ‘it’s nothing to do with you’, I said ‘well it’s my records it’s something to do with me, that’s the page that gives you know, details of my last medical board’, he said ‘I’m a squadron leader, I’m competent to conduct medical boards, you are A1’, and I thought I can’t be A1, what’s their game, I thought, well they don’t want to pay me a pension for not being A1, so nothing I can do about it, I left the Air Force and I signed on with a panel doctor just before the National Health Service came into being, and he said I’ll just check you over while you’re here and he said ‘good God man you’re in a terrible state, what the hell has happened to you?’ I said ‘I was wounded when I was flying in the Air Force’, he said ‘well you should get a pension’ and I said ‘I can’t get a pension, I’m A1’ [laughs] he said ‘the bastards’ he said, ‘they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it’, he said ‘I’ll get some British Legion forms and fill them in for you, you sign it and send them off’, so that happened, I took a day off, I thought this is a waste of time and they said ‘yes you are due for compensation’, gave me nine shillings a week, nine shillings, I didn’t need nine shillings anyway within two years I was an armour men’s designer working for the Ministry of Defence and from there I progressed upwards until I was managing director or chairman of three companies at the same time and I was making an awful lot of money.
CB: How do you look back at your time in the RAF? is it with –
JA: With disgust, you see when I was a child, daddy was in the Air Force, all his friends were in the Air Force, they were my heroes, we were, Douglas Bader was stationed on there and he used to come to my father’s house and I saw Lord Trenchard, he was going by in his car on the aerodrome and people who became very famous later and I admired them, they were all my heroes, Amy Johnson and Jim Mollison, all those people you know, civilian pilots, I didn’t know any other life so naturally I joined the Royal Air Force and when we were living at Cranwell, that time 1929 and then again just before the war, the Royal Air Force was known as the world’s finest flying club, it wasn’t very big, only about thirty thousand men in the RAF, they would join with no rank and they’d go out in seven years with no rank, there was no promotion, you see there’s no expansion until late 1930’s and everybody seemed to know everybody, my father knew every commanding officer throughout the world, and he was well known, when I was in the RAF people remembered him you know and they’d look at my name and they’d say ‘have you got any relations in the service?’, and my brother was in the RAF and he said ‘I always say no, ‘cause we don’t want to let the old man down’, ‘cause he was a bit of a scallywag, and anyway, I used to forget to draw my pension of nine shillings a week, forty five pence nowadays and it would go on for about three months and I had to write away for it, and I let things slide ‘cause I was making an awful lot of money, I was eating in the best restaurants in the West End and hotels all over the world, staying in the best hotels.
CB: What do you think you would’ve done if you hadn’t gone in the RAF?
JA: God knows
CB; Do you think you would have just brought your success as a businessman you just have brought that forward as it were and you would’ve started it straight away?
JA: I don’t know.
CB: Or did you need your time in the RAF to form and develop?
JA: I think the RAF made me very aggressive and when I went for a job after ready for coming out of the RAF, I was in uniform and I had an interview with the personnel manager of an engineering firm and he said ‘what were you doing in the Air Force?’ no ‘what were you doing in the war?’, well I was dressed in uniform, I’d got a flying badge and medal ribbons, I thought it was pretty obvious what I was doing, I said ‘I was flying in the Royal Air Force’ ‘oh’ he said ‘not much use to us is it?’, I was very aggressive at that time, the war had made me a bit loopy, and I felt like I wanted to knock his head off but I thought just a minute he’s right, I’ve learnt how to fly an aeroplane, how to drop bombs, how to blow people up, how to shoot people, I’ve learnt nothing that’s of any use to a civilian employer, he’s right I’ve completely wasted my time, if I been a cook or a lorry driver I would have something to contribute, but that made me determined to overtake all the people who hadn’t served in the war so I started at the bottom in a factory, and I went to evening classes and I had private tutors, I spent all my money on tuition, I got language teachers, I leaned Latin, I learned Russian, and I perfected my German and within two years I was head of the German department in import export firm with only Germans working for me, because I was an engineer and a German speaking Englishman, so I’d got an advantage there, and the cold war had started, and I thought either there’s going to be a war with Russia or eventually the Soviet empire is so big there will be a demand for things –
CB: that’s where you did most of your trade –
JA: So I learnt Russian so I could negotiate contracts in Moscow in Russian –
CB: Tenacious, determined.
JA: Well I was determined to do better than everybody, I went for an interview ,when I first came out of the Air Force, because I understand the government were giving grants to ex-service men, and I went for an interview and they said ‘what were you doing before you joined the Royal Air Force?’ and I said ‘well I was in school until just before’, they said ‘were you not studying for a profession?’, I said ‘I was only seventeen when I joined the air force, I was studying higher mathematics and subjects that would get me through the selection board to be a pilot’, I said ‘the town was being bombed and I thought by joining the Air Force I could help to stop that’, they looked at me, they were thinking you simpleton, they said ‘we only give grants to professional people’, so few weeks later I made another application and the attitude to me was humiliating or intended to be humiliating, so I got, I was fed up with being humiliated so I told the interviewee off, I really told him off, in words, you’ve never heard before and the second man who was sitting with him, when I left, rushed out with me and jumped in the lift and he said ‘thank you for doing that’, he said ‘that was wonderful the way you told him off, I’ve had to sit there for weeks listening to his rudeness’ he said ‘you really fixed him’. When I got a job as an armours designer, because I’d been in the Air Force and been shot, not because I knew anything about designing [slight pause], all the other people in the department had gone straight from school, into the ministry and they’d all got a free education and got a higher national certificate which is what I wanted to do you see, so I thought they’ve never been in the service and they’re the same age as me and they’re well ahead of me, got their qualifications, I’ll beat them, I’ve got to be better than them, so that’s what drove me on, I was inferior and I became superior ‘cause I had to, I had to do it, I spent all my money on studying, spent all my time on studying.
CB: Well that’s been a fantastic story Jim, thank you very much indeed.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Jim Auton
Subject
The topic of the resource
World War (1939-1945)
Great Britain. Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Jim Auton grew up on Royal Air Force stations and joined the Royal Air Force at seventeen. He trained as a pilot navigator and bomber at RAF Ansty near Coventry, then in South Africa under the Empire Air Training Scheme. He trained on B-24s at Lidder and after travelling up through Africa was stationed at Foggia in Italy, where he started his operations. He describes the tough conditions there, as well as the operations in which he participated, such as targeting an oil refinery in Fiume, now known as Rijeka in Croatia and Ploiesti in Romania. He took part in mining operations in the Danube as well as secret operations to drop supplies in Warsaw to support the uprising. Whilst on his thirty-seventh operation, he was injured and describes his time in hospital, the journey home and his ground jobs in the Royal Air Force after the war. He also relates why he turned down a Distinguished Flying Medal, and recounts his post-war career as a businessman.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Clare Bennett
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-06-08
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Emma Bonson
Heather Hughes
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AAutonJF150608
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
02:13:37 audio recording
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Warwickshire
Croatia--Rijeka
Danube River
Egypt
Italy--Foggia
Poland--Warsaw
Italy
Poland
Romania--Ploiești
Croatia
Romania
Danube River
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
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
animal
B-24
bombing
coping mechanism
demobilisation
Distinguished Flying Medal
fear
military living conditions
military service conditions
mine laying
RAF Ansty
RAF Benson
sanitation
superstition
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
Warsaw airlift (4 August - 28 September 1944)
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/89/876/LCalvertRA1488619v1.1.pdf
a4d74b59eb8d89a89607ee6b934e1006
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Calvert, Roger
R A Calvert
Description
An account of the resource
Seven items. The collection consists of an oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Roger Alfred Calvert (b. 1923, 1488619; 152814), his logbook, navigators training course class book and 3 photographs. Roger Calvert was a navigator with 141 Squadron at RAF West Raynham flying Mosquitos on night intruder operations. For most of his operational career his pilot was Flight Lieutenant John Thatcher.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Roger Calvert and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-04-24
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Calvert, R
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Roger Calvert's Royal Canadian Air Force flying log book for aircrew other than pilot
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LCalvertRA1488619v1
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Canadian Air Force
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
France
Germany
Great Britain
Netherlands
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Ontario--London
England--Bedfordshire
England--Herefordshire
England--Norfolk
England--Northumberland
France--Dieppe
France--Paris
France--Pas-de-Calais
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Darmstadt
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Emden (Lower Saxony)
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Mainz (Rhineland-Palatinate)
Germany--Merseburg
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Oberhausen (Düsseldorf)
Germany--Osnabrück
Germany--Rüsselsheim
Germany--Schleswig-Holstein
Poland--Szczecin
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Wiesbaden
Netherlands--IJssel Lake
Netherlands--Zeist
Poland--Police (Województwo Zachodniopomorskie)
Poland
Ontario
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Description
An account of the resource
Royal Canadian Air Force flying log book for aircrew other than pilot of Flight Lieutenant Roger Calvert from 25 March 1943 to 6 July 1945. Detailing training and operations flown. Served at RAF Cranfield, RAF Great Massingham, RAF Ouston, RAF Twinwood Farm and RAF West Raynham. Aircraft flown were Anson, Beaufighter, Mosquito, Oxford, Tiger Moth and Wellington. He carried out a total of 32 intruder operations as a navigator with 141 Squadron from RAF West Raynham on the following targets in France, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands: Bochum, Bremen, Darmstadt, Dieppe, Dortmund, Dresden, Emden, Frankfurt, Gelsenkirchen, Hamburg, Kiel, Mainz, Merseberg (Leipzig), Nuremberg, Oberhausen, Osnabruck, Pante-Lunne airfield, Paris, Pas de Calais, Politz, the Ruhr, Russelhelm, Schlesvig, Steenwjik aerodrome, Stettin, Stuttgart, Wiesbaden, Zeist and Zuider Zee. His pilots on operations were Squadron Leader Thatcher and Flying Officer Rimer. The log book is well annotated and contains a green endorsement and several photographs of aircraft flown and attacked. Notes include an air sea rescue sortie, the sighting of a V-2 and one Me-110 claimed.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944-07-18
1944-07-19
1944-07-20
1944-07-21
1944-08-07
1944-08-08
1944-08-09
1944-08-10
1944-08-11
1944-08-12
1944-08-12
1944-08-13
1944-08-16
1944-08-17
1944-08-18
1944-08-19
1944-08-25
1944-08-26
1944-08-26
1944-08-27
1944-08-30
1944-09-11
1944-09-12
1944-09-12
1944-09-13
1944-09-15
1944-09-16
1944-09-17
1944-10-04
1944-10-06
1944-10-09
1944-10-19
1944-10-26
1944-10-29
1944-11-01
1944-11-04
1944-11-06
1944-11-10
1945-01-13
1945-01-14
1945-01-15
1945-01-16
1945-01-17
1945-01-28
1945-01-29
1945-02-01
1945-02-02
1945-02-03
1945-02-04
1945-02-08
1945-02-09
1945-02-13
1945-02-14
1945-04-22
1945-04-23
1945
141 Squadron
21 Squadron
Air Gunnery School
Air Observers School
air sea rescue
aircrew
Anson
Beaufighter
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
Initial Training Wing
Me 110
Mosquito
navigator
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
RAF Cranfield
RAF Great Massingham
RAF Ouston
RAF Padgate
RAF Torquay
RAF Twinwood Farm
RAF West Raynham
Tiger Moth
training
V-2
V-weapon
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/147/1501/PColeC1630.2.jpg
0962e933319341a7a981256df2768920
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/147/1501/PColeC1628.2.jpg
3c186ef0bd75ce242ced8672d1e8cd3d
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/147/1501/PColeC1629.2.jpg
f1d76f975f565d6401a27f4776d388a5
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/147/1501/PColeC1631.2.jpg
b3beed90f501db20bf7af5169e31d66c
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
Cole, Colin
C Cole
Colin Cole
Description
An account of the resource
31 items. The collection relates to Warrant Officer Colin Cole (1924 – 2015 RAF Volunteer Reserve 1605385) who served with 617 Squadron. The collection contains two oral history interviews his, logbook, service documents, medals, memorabilia from the Tirpitz and six photographs.
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. Six items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties or to comply with intellectual property regulations. 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
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-01-27
2015-07-27
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Cole, C
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
V-2 fuel pipe connector
Description
An account of the resource
V- 2 part labelled 'V2 fuel pipe connector'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One pipe connector in a wooden presentation box
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PColeC1628, PColeC1629, PColeC1630, PColeC1631
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
Physical object
heirloom
V-2
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/194/3326/PAdamsHG1704.1.jpg
980d8be504d2da9355ce447405cd8c1f
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/194/3326/AAdamsHG170215.1.mp3
041f97f2eedf07da91f07fc45cf06065
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
Adams, Herbert
Herbert Adams
H Adams
Herbert G Adams
Description
An account of the resource
88 items. Collection concerns Herbert George Adams DFC, Legion d'Honour (b. 1924, 424509 Royal Australian Air Force). He flew operations as a navigator with 467 Squadron. Collection contains an oral history interview, photographs of people and places, several memoirs about his training and bombing operations, letters to his family, his flying logbook and notes on navigation.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Herbert Adams and catalogued by Nigel Huckins and Trevor Hardcastle.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-02-15
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Adams, HG
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
RG: This is an interview with Herbert Adams for the International Bomber Command Centre on Wednesday the 15th of February 2017 at his home in Kooringal, Wagga, New South Wales, Australia.
LD: The name of the interviewers.
RG: Interviewers are Rob Gray and Lucie Davison.
LD: Alright. All good. Ok.
RG: Off you go.
LD: So, you were born near Gulgong.
HA: That’s right.
LD: New South Wales.
HA: Yeah.
LD: Were you born in town or on a farm? Or where?
HA: No.
LD: What kind of area did you grow up in?
HA: My father had a stock and station agency and carrying business in Birriwa.
LD: Yeah.
HA: Very small. You wouldn’t see it now if you went through it [laughs] but it was a prosperous little district. I went to primary school there. One teacher school.
LD: And did you work there or did you leave?
HA: No.
LD: Leave home to go to work before you signed up?
HA: When I was old enough I went to high school at Mudgee for five years — where I boarded. And in 1938 dad sold the agency and bought a farm at Mendooran.
LD: Oh yes.
HA: And that’s where I reckoned I lived for a while because after I came back from the war they were still on the farm. And in fact, they sold the farm at the end of the 1946 drought and moved into town. And my brother and I took up share farming at Mendooran.
LD: Right.
RG: That town being Mudgee or —? That town being Mudgee or —?
HA: Not Mudgee. It was Mendooran, sort of east of Dubbo. South of Coonabarabran.
RG: Right. Ok. Yeah.
HA: We did that for three years and then I took on carrying for about a year and a half. Carting cement from Kandos to Sydney.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And then I bought a sports store in Mudgee.
LD: Oh right.
RG: Ok.
HA: Where I strung tennis rackets and fixed cricket bats, sold toys and stuff like that for seven or eight years. Got married and had three kids there. Didn’t know what to do with myself when I sold the sports store so I went to teacher’s college in Sydney for a year.
LD: Oh. Wow.
RG: Ok.
HA: Boarded with me sister. Left my family at Mudgee and got appointed to Mudgee to teach.
LD: Well that was handy wasn’t it?
HA: Well [laughs] we were asked to give preferences of where we wanted to teach and I said ‘Mudgee. Mudgee. Mudgee.’ And they said, ‘Well you’re married and an ex-serviceman and you live there. If necessary we’ll move someone.’ Which they did.
LD: Oh.
RG: Oh. yeah. Very good.
HA: They moved a first year out. A young fella.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Our From Mudgee to Muswellbrook or Maitland or somewhere over there.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And I taught junior maths and, senior and junior biology for five years.
RG: Right. Ok.
HA: At the same time, I did a degree from Armidale by correspondence.
RG: A degree in —?
HA: Just a BA degree with a major in maths and education. Tried to get a science degree out of them but they wouldn’t agree to an external student.
RG: Oh for science.
HA: Getting a science degree even though I could have had more science units.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Than what they could provide from Armidale.
RG: It’s odd isn’t it? Perhaps it required laboratory work or something at Armidale or something like that.
HA: I don’t know, just one of those regulations.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Regulations you can’t undo.
RG: Yeah. I was going to say with your service background to put down Mudgee, Mudgee Mudgee you were liable to be sent to Coonabarabran or somewhere. Anyway.
HA: Yeah. So, I taught at Mudgee there for five years and then I resigned and joined the air force a second time. Came to Wagga.
RG: Oh. Ok.
LD: Oh right.
HA: As an education officer out here at Forest Hill.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Oh excellent.
HA: Which I did for just on three years.
RG: What were you teaching in the air force?
HA: First two years — adult trainees.
RG: Yeah.
HA: It was basic maths, physics and [Electrical] tech.
RG: Yeah.
HA: In the second year I was teaching fellas who didn’t want to be instructors to be instructors [laughs]
RG: Yeah. I was one of those. Yeah.
HA: It was an experience.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And I learnt more about teaching in that year than I did at teacher college. For sure.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Yeah.
HA: And then —
LD: That must have been most interesting. Going back into the air force again after all that time.
HA: It was, yeah, because I was straight away a flight lieutenant.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And I did Anzac Day addresses and things like that.
RG: When was that? When did you go back into the air force?
HA: ’65 ‘66. ’67.
RG: Right. So, twenty years after you left.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
LD: That would have been fascinating.
RG: Have we got — sorry. Have we got Bert’s date of birth? Anywhere?
LD: Oh. No. What’s your date of birth, Bert?
HA: 23rd of the 2nd ’24.
LD: Ok.
HA: So, I’ll be ninety three next week.
LD: Wow. So, did you work before joining the air force the first time?
HA: Yes. I worked in Sydney for a year and a half. The local government department in Bridge Street.
LD: Oh yes. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Didn’t like it much. Didn’t get much money.
RG: This was as a clerk or —
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Junior clerk. And when they brought in compulsory service for the army I was very keen to get in because six shillings a day was big money.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Like, I was paying board in Sydney and train fares and had nothing left. I couldn’t even play hockey because I didn’t have enough money to go and play hockey every weekend.
RG: Right. Yeah. So that, what year was that that you —?
HA: 1941 and 1942.
RG: So, so you were called up in —
HA: ’42.
RG: ’42.
HA: Yeah.
LD: So, you were called up in to the army initially.
HA: Yeah. Yeah.
RG: Where did you go to?
HA: Went to Dubbo and did the infantry training for a month and then was invited, if you could drive a truck, to go to Moorebank near Liverpool and do a motor-school for a month.
RG: Right.
HA: A lot of stuff with Bren gun carriers.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And internal, whatever you call it. A written exam at the end of it. We had lectures at night and that sort of thing. Some of the fellas could barely read and write and they were in the army. I’d finished High School with good passes.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yes.
HA: I came top of the course.
LD: Yeah.
HA: I was invited to go to Sydney Tech College for six months and come out as a warrant officer instructor.
RG: Right.
HA: At aged eighteen.
RG: Ok. That was advanced promotion.
HA: I thought about it very seriously.
RG: You would have done. We’re talking about six shillings being good money.
HA: Anyway, I was already on the reserve for aircrew so when that came up I got out of the army.
LD: Oh right.
RG: So, did you volunteer for the reserve for the aircrew? Did you do that before you joined up? Or —
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
HA: As a matter of fact, when Air Training Corps first formed, late in 1941 I think it was.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I was one of the first in.
RG: Right.
HA: And that was supposed to get you a month or two precedence on the, on the waiting list. There was a big waiting list for aircrew.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Eight months. Something like that.
RG: So did you do — we’ve read Andy, sorry, Adrian Child, sorry Ray child — Charlwood sorry.
HA: I’ve read two of his books.
RG: Yeah. And his way, he did it he came in through the ATS got assessed, got accepted, sent home and then came back later and did some training and then got sent home again and then went and did his specialist — his navigator’s training was it? Did something similar happen to you? Did you like get accepted and sent home again?
HA: No. Air Training Corps was only part time stuff up at Ashfield. Never got any uniform.
RG: Oh. This is not the ATS —this is Air Training Corps. Yeah. Ok. Sorry. Yeah. Different.
HA: Sorry. Wrong thing.
RG: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking of the ATS. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Yeah. Where we were up to?
RG: So, Ashfield.
HA: Ashfield.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah.
LD: So, which ITS did you end up going to?
HA: Bradfield.
LD: Oh right.
HA: Number 2.
LD: Oh my God. That’s where Ken was.
RG: That’s where Ken was. Yeah.
LD: I have a relative who was there.
HA: Yeah.
LD: Ken Glover.
HA: I’ve got an idea as I can remember that name. I was in 32 course for a start.
LD: I’m not sure what course he was in.
RG: No. He —
LD: I haven’t been able to find that out.
RG: He became a rear gunner. He was in 463. And he was killed on Christmas Eve ‘43 over Berlin.
LD: He started out in 207 Squadron.
RG: Yeah. He started out in 207 RAF.
HA: Yeah. He was a bit earlier at Bradfield than me if he was on Berlin raids.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yeah. He left [pause] he left Australia like January ’42.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah.
RG: ‘43. He was killed at the end of ’43.
LD: Oh, I’m getting mixed up.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Anyway.
HA: Yeah. There may have been another Glover that I met somewhere along the way.
RG: I’m sure there were scads of them really. Yeah.
LD: Yeah.
HA: I actually had a time. I got the mumps while I was there and went out to Prince Henry Hospital. Came back and I found myself in 33 course. And then they said, ‘They need more fellas at the training places. We’re going to do a rushed course so that you can go out with 32 course again.’
RG: Yeah.
HA: ‘Providing you’re quick enough at Morse.’
RG: Yeah.
HA: And because I’d been in the Air Training Corps I was fast enough at Morse.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yeah.
HA: So, I ended up with 32 course at Bradfield. And then came to Cootamundra.
LD: Yes.
HA: 1 AOS. I didn’t even get inside the gate. We were throwing kit bags up on to a truck and I collapsed and found myself in hospital.
RG: As a result of the mumps?
HA: Woke up the next day with terrible trouble with appendicitis.
RG: Oh, ok. Yeah.
HA: I was delirious for a few days and a bit lucky to survive I think because penicillin was, luckily, available.
LD: Yeah.
HA: In those days.
RG: Yeah. And only just available too. Yeah.
LD: Yes.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And so, I was in the hospital for a month with a hole with a rubber tube gushing out rubbish. Finally sent home, I think for Christmas, still with a hole in my belly. And —
RG: So, this is Christmas ‘41
HA: ‘42
RG: ‘42.
HA: ‘42. Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And they said, ‘By the way you will have to come back to hospital next year and have your appendix out.’
LD: What?
RG: They hadn’t done it.
HA: They didn’t take it out. All they’d done was drain all the muck out of it to treat it.
LD: Oh of course. They needed to drain everything ‘cause if they tried to operate with —
RG: The poison would have got into the bloodstream. Yeah.
LD: Yes. Yes.
RG: Lucie is an ex-nurse so.
HA: Yeah.
HA: My wife’s an ex-nurse too.
LD: We’re good people [laughs]
HA: So, I came out of hospital and did some time with 35 course and helped in the sick quarters for a while.
RG: This is filling in time before the next observers course.
HA: Yeah. Then I came down to Wagga.
RG: So, you didn’t actually get to Cootamundra at all. You were posted there but didn’t get there.
HA: Oh yes. When I come out of hospital I was put on to 35 course.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And I went to lectures and did one flight with them. And then they said but you’ve got to go and get your appendix out so I came to the RAAF hospital out here at Forest Hill which hadn’t long been opened and had my appendix out. And went back and fooled around until 38 course started.
LD: [laughs] They must have been wondering if they were ever going to get rid of you.
RG: Yeah. So instead of three months it was nine months.
LD: Oh right.
HA: At Cootamundra.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Mind you that kept you out of the worst of it.
HA: It may have kept me out of going to the islands or somewhere like that, you know.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Yes. Yeah.
RG: Or the Battle of Berlin as well. Yeah.
LD: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Anyway —
LD: Did you end up doing any of your training overseas or was it all done in Australia?
HA: Up to the wing stage — in Australia.
LD: Right.
HA: I did bomb aiming and gunnery at Evans Head for two months and then astro nav at Parkes for a month. And then after a bit of leave we got on a boat and went to San Francisco.
LD: Do you remember the name of the ship?
HA: The Mount Vernon. I think.
LD: Ok. Yeah. Did you go via New Zealand?
HA: No. Non-stop.
LD: Oh. Ok.
HA: And we got our sea legs I think because it was calm for the first week or so and then there was a big storm.
LD: Yeah.
HA: There were logs floating around in San Francisco harbour.
LD: Right.
RG: Did you leave from Sydney or Melbourne?
HA: From Sydney.
RG: Sydney. Yeah. By the way when you said you did one flight with 38 course.
HA: 35.
RG: 35. What sort of aircraft?
HA: Ansons.
RG: Ansons. Yeah. Ok.
HA: It was Fairey Battles at Evans Head and it was Ansons again at Parkes.
RG: Right. Yeah.
HA: Astro.
RG: Yeah.
LD: So were you happy to be a navigator or would you have preferred some other role? Because you said you did the gunnery course as well. Did you have any choice in this or —
HA: While we were at Bradfield park they asked us towards the end of the business which you’d like to be and nearly everybody wanted to be a pilot of course. The day that they did the coordination test I was at the dentist and so I missed that.
RG: [laughs] You had bad medical trouble there didn’t you [laughs]
HA: I had a lot of trouble with my teeth.
RG: Oh dear.
HA: And the test was to sit in a seat with rudder pedals and a joystick with a screen where somebody made a dot move around the screen at random and you had to chase it with your feet.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I knew I’d made a terrible mess of it. Partly because when I was a kid I had a flivver which you steered with your feet. If you wanted to go to the right you did that which is just the opposite.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: To what you want to do in an aeroplane.
RG: Sorry a flivver.
HA: A flivver.
RG: What’s a flivver? What —
HA: Well it had a handle on it like the trikes that they had on the railway.
RG: The ones that you cranked. Yes.
HA: Yes.
RG: Oh ok. I didn’t know they were called flivvers.
HA: Yeah. Anyway, so, I knew I made a mess of it so when they came to ask me what I wanted to do I said navigator. They said, ‘Why don’t you want to be a pilot?’ And I said, ‘Well I made a mess of the coordination test and I’m pretty good at maths and stuff.’ I didn’t tell them that a lot of fellas say, ‘I want to be a pilot,’ and they say, ‘Oh well. You can be a rear gunner.’
RG: Yeah. [laughs] Ok.
LD: Yes.
HA: So, I got in first.
RG: That was a smart move.
LD: Yes. Yeah. They were getting to be short of rear gunners, weren’t they? Very sadly.
HA: So, we got on a, oh there was only six hundred of us on the ship. Most of the people were American servicemen who were either ill or wounded. Coming back from the Pacific.
LD: Yeah.
HA: And so, when we got to San Francisco they said, ‘There’s sixty of you navigators,’ or observers as we were then. We had an O wing, ‘Who thought you were going to Canada to do a six months reconnaissance course. That’s been scrubbed. You are now going across to Britain for Bomber Command.’ So, we had to —
RG: Oh. So you might have ended up doing reconnaissance flights in Mosquitos, I presume. Or something of that nature.
HA: Probably in Liberators across the Atlantic I would think.
RG: Oh ok. Ok.
LD: Right.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Anyhow.
RG: Yeah.
HA: That was scrubbed and we got on a troop train and went across America to New York and got on a ship called the Isle de France.
RG: Ah yes. Famous vessel.
HA: On Christmas Eve.
RG: That’s Christmas Eve forty.
HA: ’43.
RG: ‘43 yeah.
LD: Oh right. Yeah.
RG: That was the night Ken was killed.
LD: Yes. Yeah.
HA: It got as far as the Statue of Liberty and broke down.
RG: [laughs] That was the French.
HA: And we thought thank goodness because we were right down below the waterline at the stern with the sides coming down like that.
RG: Oh yes. Yeah.
HA: And had to climb through round portholes all around.
RG: Hatches. Yeah.
HA: Vertical ladders to get up to the next deck.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Anyhow, they kept us there overnight. They gave us some sandwiches I think and then the next morning they said, ‘You can wait until we give you some more sandwiches and some pay. Or you can do without that. Go straight into New York where there’s likely to be people taking you home for Christmas dinner.’
LD: Well there’s an option isn’t there?
HA: So, three of us went out to a very nice double decker house in Mount Vernon for lunch. We thought Christmas lunch, you know. Christmas lunch came time and there were plenty of little nibbles and plenty of drinks. This went on all the whole afternoon until about 7 o’clock at night and they brought out the turkey. Us three all said, ‘Well yes, we wouldn’t mind a second helping,’ [laughs]. He took us to his factory the next day. He had a factory that made, amongst other things, handkerchiefs. He gave us some handkerchiefs each.
RG: You don’t happen to remember the family name by any chance, do you? A big ask I know but —
HA: Richie, I think. Richie.
RG: Richie. Ok.
HA: And took us to his club. We offered to buy a drink after he’d bought us one. Everything’s done with chips.
RG: So, you can’t possibly. That’s a polite way to do it isn’t it?
HA: Took us back to our camp at Fort McDowell or Fort Slocum or something. I’ve forgotten the name and we had a few more days in New York. Went to Madison Square Garden and saw an ice hockey match for the first time.
LD: Oh wow.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Went to Jack Dempsey’s Spaghetti Bar.
RG: Ok. Yes. Sorry. Sorry Bert, I was just going to say, I know you said it was a camp. Fort Slocum or wherever it was. Was that like a transit camp for Commonwealth personnel or was it a US army camp or —?
HA: I can’t remember.
RG: Ok.
HA: I can’t remember. It seemed to be a useful sort of a camp.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Could have been [unclear] or that sort of thing.
RG: Yeah.
LD: I have read that Australian servicemen in the States, because there were a lot of people like you who were, you know, kind of in between places who ended up staying there for a couple of weeks or something were very welcome and, you know, never had to buy a drink and so on. Is that — is that your experience?
HA: They were very generous. The Americans.
LD: Yeah.
HA: Yeah. We didn’t buy a drink the time that we were with him of course. I can’t remember other Americans shouting us drinks while we were in New York but in Denver one day, we had a couple of hours in Denver and a fellow came up to us and said, ‘You’ve strange uniforms.’ We had Australia across here. ‘I didn’t know Austria was on our side.’ [laughs]
RG: [laughs] Did you point out that Hitler was an Austrian [laughs] Anyway, yeah.
HA: So, we talked to him a bit about Australia then and [pause]
LD: I have, I’ve also read about the Australians being mistaken for German POWs. Did you, did you have that experience?
HA: I think that could happen. I got mistaken for a policeman a couple of times in London. In the blue uniform.
RG: The blue uniform, yeah. Of course.
LD: Oh of course. The darker blue.
HA: Yeah.
LD: Yes.
HA: And because we’d been to London a few times and used the Underground I knew my way around London fairly well as far as the Underground was concerned. So if somebody said, ‘How do I get to —,’ such and such. I was able to say, ‘That way.’ [laughs] Didn’t let on I wasn’t a policeman.
LD: Fair enough.
HA: Yeah.
LD: So, did you have a safe trip across to Britain after all that. Did you have any problems?
HA: No. No. On New Year’s Eve we boarded the Queen Elizabeth.
LD: Oh. Right.
HA: And it had, it had been partly furnished for passengers before the war but it hadn’t been finished.
RG: No.
HA: There were parts of it were still open hold.
RG: Yeah.
HA: With stacks of —
RG: She came straight from the shipyard. Straight in as a troopship. Yeah.
HA: We got a cabin and there was —
LD: Lucky you.
HA: Eighteen of us, I think, in a cabin, with a little toilet corner in it. Most everywhere there was six feet on a wall with three bunks.
RG: Three bunks. Yeah.
LD: Ah yes.
HA: There were six walls altogether including the corner of it.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yeah.
HA: We had a great time there. Used to sit on the floor and play cards.
LD: Did you have to — did you have to act as lookouts on the Queen Elizabeth?
HA: No.
LD: Right.
HA: No. We did boat drill which was a bit of a hassle because there was over twenty thousand troops on it. Two or three of the top decks that were open to the weather had three bunks up the wall. Bolted on.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Americans took twelve hours on, twelve hours off on those bunks.
RG: Wow.
HA: So they could fit more people in.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Oh my goodness. Yeah. I’ve read about the hot-bunking. I didn’t realise it was to that extent.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Two meals a day because it took four hours to feed them all.
LD: Yes. Yeah.
HA: Four hours to clean up and then another one.
LD: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
LD: I also read that the meals were more than a bit basic.
HA: They were, they were alright.
RG: This was a British, this was a British ship. Not an American one. Different. Yeah.
HA: Yeah. We had good meals on the boat. On the trains across America too. It was a bit strange. They’d ask for volunteers to go and count the stuff through the corridor sort of thing. I never had to do that. But they’d arrive with a stainless streel tray, plate, with five compartments on it. You’d put meat there and vegetables there, vegetables there, vegetables there, fruit salad there. And then they’d get a ladle and put what we reckoned was plum jam and put it all over the plate [laughs]
LD: Oh.
HA: It may have been chutney I don’t know.
LD: It sounds awful.
RG: You’re right to separate everything and then join it up with — yeah.
LD: So, did you have the Pullman carriages?
HA: Yes.
LD: Yeah.
HA: Yes. A little compartment with enough people for four. And yet they only put three in it because at night time they had a negro porter came in and made up a double bed at the bottom.
LD: Yeah.
HA: And pulled down —
LD: Yeah.
HA: One at the top which I got in. Being wintertime, each morning I’d find icicles hanging down from the ceiling where the fellas underneath would be warm because they were steam heated.
RG: Yeah. Oh right. Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Yeah. So did you get to see snow on that trip as well?
HA: Yes. For the first time. We pulled up in marshalling yards at Chicago for about an hour and a half, I suppose. Nowhere near the platform but there was railway lines forever.
RG: Yeah.
HA: We saw it was snow on the ground so, ‘Oh, we’ll get out and have a snow fight.’ So, we got out and had the snow fight for about five minutes and it was minus thirty.
RG: Yeah. Chicago in the winter.
HA: We got back in again pretty quick.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yeah. No. That’s, that’s my relative’s experience as well. Was seeing the snow for the first time.
HA: Yeah. It was the first time I’d seen snow.
LD: Yeah.
HA: Going across the Atlantic in the Queen Elizabeth after about three days they said, ‘There’s reputed to be a U-boat pack waiting out there somewhere so we’re going to go up near Iceland somewhere and we’re going to go flat out.
RG: Yeah.
HA: So, put your warm clothes on.’ We’re not going to — we’re going to turn the heating off and go as fast as we can.’
RG: Yeah.
HA: We met some of the crew in Glasgow. Greenock. They took us for a tour of the ship later and said that they got over forty knots.
RG: Wow.
HA: That night going up.
RG: She was fast. I didn’t realise she was that fast though.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Wow.
LD: So, did you, did you land in Greenock?
HA: Yeah.
LD: Yeah. Ok. Yeah.
RG: Yes, I suppose if you’ve got the threat of U-boats you’ll find the, you’ll find the extra knots.
HA: Yeah, they put all the steam they could get in to it.
LD: So, once you arrived in the UK where did you go to then?
HA: By train to Brighton.
LD: Brighton. Ok. And were you there for long?
HA: I think about three weeks.
LD: Right. Yeah.
HA: We did a little bit of training. I think the main thing we did was learn the stars of the northern hemisphere.
RG: Oh course. Yeah.
LD: Of course. Absolutely. Yeah.
RG: They didn’t teach you that while you were here?
HA: No. No.
RG: I mean even theoretically. That’s funny. I suppose a lot of you would have ended up in the Pacific theatre so, yeah.
HA: There’s enough to learn one lot at a time.
RG: Yeah. True enough. Yeah.
LD: Yeah. No. I remember the first time I went to Europe, you know, looking up at the sky and going —
RG: It’s all different.
LD: All the bases of my life were gone. It’s quite strange and it would have been even more so for you because that’s —
RG: Your trade.
LD: Yeah . That would have been really interesting for you.
HA: At Brighton there was two big hotels. The Metropole and The Grand that were taken over by the RAAF as a holding centre. And again, when we left to come home. Same place.
LD: Oh right.
RG: They’re both on the seafront aren’t they?
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah. I can remember the Metropole.
HA: When I went back to Europe in ‘94 and took a trip down to Brighton and had a look at them and they’ve dolled them up. They’re both nice looking hotels.
RG: Yeah. They’re both there though. Yeah.
HA: They were very basic then.
RG: Yeah.
LD: And was Brighton all — ‘cause I know Bournemouth had all the razor wire on the beaches and things like that. Was the same sort of protections there in Brighton?
HA: Yes. One of the, I think both of the piers had a hole cut in the middle of them so that they couldn’t —
RG: Couldn’t land on the end.
HA: Get on to one end and come ashore sort of thing.
LD: Were there any air raids or anything while you were there?
HA: Yes. There were air raids while we were there.
LD: Yeah.
HA: For a start we used to go down to the basement and they didn’t seem to do much harm so after that we didn’t bother. We just stayed in our bedroom.
RG: That would have been also around the time of the V1s and V2s.
HA: Yes.
RG: Did you have any experience of those? Or —
HA: Once or twice when I was in London on leave we heard one or two come over and we actually heard one stop one night and thought oh, this is going to be a bang.
RG: Oh dear.
HA: And sure, enough there was a bang not far away.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve heard people, Londoner’s I’ve met, who said that they were far more frightened of the V1s than the V2s because of that. You’d hear. In the buildings you couldn’t see them. You could hear them and when they stopped it was, ‘Where is it going to fall?’
HA: Yeah.
RG: Whereas the V2 was the crash and if you heard the crash — well you were still alive. So that was —
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I don’t think there was any V2s ever landed when I was in London. They were frightening.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Yeah.
HA: And I don’t think there was any of the London guns landed in London when I was there either. You’ve heard about the London guns. The V3.
RG: That’s the V3. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I have heard about it. I didn’t know they actually fired on —
HA: Yeah. They fired a few.
RG: Oh ok.
HA: But nowhere near what they wanted to.
RG: No.
HA: They were going to finish Britain off with the V2s and V3s.
RG: Well by that point they were disappearing back away from the French coast weren’t they?
HA: Yeah. That’s right.
RG: Yeah. You’re talking January ‘45.
HA: Yeah. So the London gun got bypassed.
RG: Shuffled back. Yeah. Became a Calais gun or something [laughs] as far as you could reach.
LD: So which OTU did you end up being sent to?
HA: Lichfield.
LD: Yeah.
HA: Before that we went to an AFU At Llandwrog. In North Wales.
RG: Wales.
LD: What was an AFU?
HA: They called it an Advanced Flying Unit.
LD: Oh right. Yeah.
HA: Avro Ansons again. That was mainly to familiarise navigators and bomb aimers I think with map reading in Britain.
LD: Oh right.
HA: Which was altogether different to the Riverina
LD: Just a little [laughs]
RG: [unclear]
LD: Not to mention the stars.
RG: Yeah. And at Lichfield — that was an OTU.
HA: Lichfield it was a fairly popular OTU where we crewed up and —
LD: Yeah.
HA: Flew Wellingtons.
LD: Right.
RG: For training.
HA: For training.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah.
LD: So how did they crew you guys up? It seems to have been a little different in different places.
HA: They gave us two days to hang around in the hangar and hang around in the mess drinking beer and find ourselves a crew.
LD: Right.
RG: Right. But that was a five man crew wasn’t it?
HA: Six.
RG: Six. In a Wellington.
HA: Six I think.
RG: Six. Yeah. Ok.
HA: Yeah. Even though Wellingtons only had five in the crew.
RG: Yeah.
HA: You crewed up with six and the rear gunner and the mid-upper gunner took turns in the rear turret to practice.
RG: Oh ok.
LD: Oh right. Ok. Yeah.
RG: But you’re still one down from a Lancaster though ‘cause that was seven.
HA: Yeah. No engineer.
RG: No engineer. Right.
HA: So, Syd Payne and I who’d done our training in Australia together as observers and he had been a — started off as a pilot. Did Tiger Moths at Narromine and got scrubbed on Wirraways at Uranquinty I think. So, he looked like a valuable bloke to have in a crew. Somebody who could fly.
RG: Fly. Yes. Of course.
HA: And we were both navigator — bomb aimer, sort of thing and he trained.
RG: Tossed a coin to see who did what.
HA: He trained as a bomb aimer just across Anglesey from where Llandwrog was. So, we’re looking around for a pilot.
RG: Sorry. Did you two decide between yourselves who was going to be the bomb aimer and who was going to be the navigator?
HA: Before we’d even got there because he trained as a bomb aimer AFU.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I trained as a navigator AFU.
RG: Yes. Oh of course. That was before Lichfield yes. Of course. Yeah.
HA: Before Lichfield.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: So we got together and we found a pilot with a wireless op attached. And they were both Queenslanders. Both same age as us. All twenty years old. And after looking at a few others, sort of thing, I think the pilot decided that, yes, we would do him sort of thing and so we were thinking about a rear gunner. And a pair of gunners. Looking around and then a pair of gunners came and found us [emphasis] They turned out to be fellas who came first and second in their gunnery course.
RG: Nice.
HA: So, they, they had the pick of the mob sort of thing. So they picked us luckily. We got on well with them so —
RG: Both Australians. So —
HA: Yes. All Australians.
RG: Yeah.
HA: The rear gunner was from Sydney. In fact, we had a connection. I don’t know whether he’d married already a girl that I knew in Mudgee.
RG: Oh. Ok.
HA: Or married her after.
RG: After the war.
HA: One or the other. And the other fella was a farm worker from Western Australia who was elderly. He was twenty five.
RG: Oh gosh.
LD: Oh. Poor old man. You’d have to help him on with a stick.
HA: And they were both teetotallers.
RG: Oh. Ok. Ok. Maybe that’s why they came first and second in their gunnery course.
HA: And they were good shots. The bloke from Western Australia had done a bit of clay pigeon shooting, well live pigeon shooting against kangaroos and stuff.
RG: Yeah.
HA: You know. So, he knew about leading.
RG: Yeah. And they used clay pigeons to the train the gunners. Yeah.
HA: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. So, they were good shots by the time we got together and of course we did a lot more training. One of the things we did at Lichfield in our training was do a bullseye.
RG: Yes.
HA: Several reckoned it counted as an operation. Others reckoned it counted as half an operation. Yeah. They got all the training planes together. Not only from Lichfield but a heap of them and flew up as if you were going to Wilhelmshaven or something like that. Up in the Baltic. When you got nearly there you turned around and came back while the rest of Bomber Command went to Munich or somewhere.
RG: Oh, you were the decoy force.
HA: Diversion decoy. Yeah.
RG: Diversion. Of course. Yeah.
LD: This is the first time I’ve actually been able to confirm what a command bullseye was.
RG: Yeah. Lucie’s relative, Ken mentions in his logbook about a command bullseye but they did these over London.
LD: But they did these over London. Yes.
RG: But and he just says command bullseye and we’ve asked the other veterans and none of them have known what it was. They didn’t do it. So —
LD: I’ve only found one reference to it in the research.
RG: Yeah.
LD: That’s really good. I’m really pleased [laughs]
HA: We did another one when we were on Stirlings. We did another bullseye.
RG: Oh that was still on Wellingtons wasn’t it?
HA: This was still on Wellingtons. Yeah.
RG: Yeah. And then you went over to Stirlings did you?
HA: Yes. Our next move after Lichfield was Swinderby.
RG: Oh yes.
HA: Near Lincoln. And I was on Stirlings.
RG: Yeah. Where you found an engineer at that point.
HA: Yeah. That’s where we got our engineer.
RG: Was he appointed or did you find him?
HA: He was just appointed to us and he was a man of forty four.
RG: Wow.
LD: Really.
HA: He’d been a policeman for years.
RG: Yeah.
HA: In Birmingham and Coventry.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And those sorts of places.
RG: So he was RAF.
HA: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: I didn’t realise.
HA: He was born in Scotland. His parents lived in Ireland. When we went on leave he had to change in to civvies to go over to Ireland.
RG: To go to Ireland [laughs]
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yes.
LD: So, did you do anything other than kind of like a spoof raid on the bullseye. Did you drop leaflets?
HA: No.
LD: Or anything like that?
HA: No. We just stayed over the sea all the time.
LD: Right. Ok.
RG: Ok.
HA: And the other one we did in the Stirlings I think we only went about as far as the Dutch coast. It was quite a short trip compared with the one that went nearly to Wilhelmshaven.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yeah.
RG: So how long were you on Stirlings for? And again, this is just training isn’t it? On the Stirlings.
HA: Training. Yeah. We trained there for about a month I think.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: It was mainly circuits and bumps and that sort of thing for the pilot more than —
RG: Get used to the four engines.
HA: Probably did about a couple of cross country’s and that sort of thing.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Some bombing. Fighter affiliation for the gunners.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: So, the bullseyes. Were they both at night?
HA: Yes.
LD: Yeah. So that would have been training for you as a navigator as well wouldn’t it?
HA: Oh yeah.
LD: Sort of doing the real thing. Yeah.
HA: Oh yeah. Had to find our way there and back. But when we got to Lichfield I think, on OTU, on the Wellingtons we first had Gee.
LD: Yes.
HA: Which was a tremendous help for navigators. You could get accurate fixes whenever you wanted them.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Up as far as the enemy frontier sort of thing. They jammed it after that. If we could get an hour or two when we were on an operations of good fixes before Gee gave up. And they also had APIs which you don’t seem to be in the literature much. Air Position Indicators.
RG: No.
HA: They were the best thing going for —
RG: How did that work?
HA: When we were at Cootamundra or AFU we were expected to keep a manual air plot. Every change of direction or speed or height made a difference to the air plot each time.
LD: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Then if you found a fix you could find a wind.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And that depended on the pilot sticking to the course that he was told to be on.
RG: Yeah.
HA: The speed he was told to be on and the height he was supposed —
RG: So pilot’s actually —
LD: Pilots don’t always do that.
HA: Navigation was very much a — perhaps. But with API they had a distance reading compass down the back that was half gyro and half magnetic.
RG: Yeah. Gyro magnetic compass. I know those. Yeah.
HA: And that came via the nav table through a control called a Variation Setting Control so you could set the variation on that.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And change it as you went across Europe.
RG: Yeah.
HA: From 11 around Lincoln to about 3 at Berlin or something like that.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: And deviations.
RG: Yeah.
HA: They’d swing the compass every now and again on the ground. Give you a deviation card.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Generally only one or two degrees.
RG: Yeah.
HA: So the true directions would come out on the repeater compasses for the navigator and the pilot.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And the bomb aimer.
LD: Right.
HA: And the API had true directions going to it and then from the air speed indicator which didn’t give true airspeed by any means when you, as you went higher. The indicated air speed might be a hundred and sixty mile an hour and the true air speed be two hundred miles an hour.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Thinner air. That’s going to —
HA: Thinner air. So that was accounted for as well.
RG: Wow. That’s —
HA: So the API had got true directions and true speed.
RG: Yeah. And altitude to make that variation. Yeah.
HA: Just had two knobs on it.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Two little windows.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And the normal thing we did for a start was to set the latitude and longitude of the airfield and as you flew along any time you wanted to find out where your air position was it was there. You just wrote it down. Latitude and longitude. Popped it down on your chart.
RG: And that was quite accurate.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Wow. Ok. So that were, that were in Lancs and Stirlings obviously. And Wellingtons.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Ok. So was this must have been, was this something that sort of came along later in the war? Do you know?
HA: I think it probably came in in late ’43.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I would imagine.
RG: Ok. Yeah. You’re right. I haven’t come across that either, but, yeah.
LD: Did you get — because from what I’ve read there was a lot of technology happening there around all sorts of things but, you know, including navigation.
HA: Yeah.
LD: Did you find there was a lot of changes in the equipment that you used and were you actually trained in those changes?
HA: Yes.
LD: Or did you just kind of wake up one morning and get on the aircraft and find it was new.
HA: We had — Lancasters were fitted with H2S when we got to Waddington.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And we used them in training on [pause] between — between the Stirlings and going in to the squadron we did a Lanc Finishing School. I think that’s where we first saw H2S on the planes.
RG: Yeah.
HA: All the planes had H2S at Waddington. And we used them for training exercises but we were forbidden to use them on operations because the Germans could home in on them with their fighters.
RG: Yes. Yes. Yeah.
HA: And so the only time we ever used H2S over Germany was on a daylight trip to Wilhelmshaven when they expected to have a lot of cloud over the target and so for the first time we ever got directions like this — ‘If you can’t see the target you can use H2S or you can drop your bombs when you see another one drop their bombs.’ [laughs]
RG: [laughs] Gosh.
LD: That’s precision bombing.
RG: Yeah.
LD: So you’re all sitting there going can any of us see the target? Who’s going to drop a bomb first?
HA: In our training with H2S the bomb aimer used to come and sit alongside the navigator. Both fiddled with H2S and so he came up and we were deliberating about where we were going to aim at sort of thing and we finally said, ‘Oh well, that’ll do.’ When we pressed the bombing tit two other Lancs dropped theirs.
RG: [laughs] Not sort of what you’d expect is it?
HA: We don’t know what harm we did.
LD: Might have killed a couple of sheep.
HA: Anyway, that was H2S. Gee didn’t change except as, as the allies crept up through France and so forth.
RG: Went further out.
HA: They opened up two more Gee chains besides the ones that were based in England.
RG: Yeah.
HA: One was called the Reims. One was called the Ruhr. And the other thing was after about two months, I think, Loran was fitted to the Lancs.
LD: Sorry. What was that?
RG: Loran.
HA: L O R A N long range air navigation.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Which related to Gee in that it measured time differences between the emitter and the plane. And that chart with curved lines in different colours. Same as Gee. But apparently it was only effective at night time because instead of getting direct radio signals they were bounced off the ionosphere at night time.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: It had an extremely long range. Covered all of Europe. And when they came out to the Pacific it covered all the Pacific area.
RG: Really important in the Pacific. Yeah.
HA: So we trained with Loran while we were on the squadron and actually used it about halfway through our tour. Used Loran when Gee ran out.
RG: But was it as accurate as Gee?
HA: Not as accurate.
RG: No.
HA: And a bit more cumbersome to use because you tuned into one station and got one partition line at a time and then you had to tune into a second one.
RG: Get the second position line.
HA: Get the different and then transfer further along.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Parallel ruler and muck around. So it was a bit slower. I think it was accurate enough. Good enough to find the target anyway.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Were you mostly on, at 467, on daylight operations at that point or still mostly night time? Night operations?
HA: We got back to mostly back to night time by that time. This was September when we started and D-day was back in June.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Sorry that was September. What year?
HA: ‘44.
LD: Thank you. Just to –
HA: We finished in January ’45.
LD: Right. Yeah.
HA: So we did a few daylight trips. The first and third ones were fairly big raids on le Havre and Boulogne in daylight. Big armies.
RG: Army support. Yeah.
HA: In both those places and they had side-tracked or bypassed them with the Canadians and British armies.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And finally, they decided it was about time they cleaned them out, sort of thing. So dropped a lot of bombs on various parts.
RG: Yeah.
HA: It wasn’t area bombing like there was on towns in Britain, in Germany. It was specific things.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Like oil dumps, E-boat pens. Stuff like this.
RG: Transport links and stuff like that. Yeah. Tactical. More tactical.
HA: Tactical stuff.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: They didn’t want to kill too many Frenchmen.
RG: No. No. Exactly.
LD: No. One doesn’t.
HA: So, we did that in daylight.
LD: That’s right.
RG: So that was on your first and third trip.
HA: First and third trips. Yeah.
LD: How many ops did you complete?
HA: Twenty nine.
LD: That’s a good number.
HA: Pardon?
LD: That’s a very good number.
HA: Yeah. Well I think the bullseyes might have counted to make it thirty.
RG: I was going to say, Bert, it varied over time we noticed that the number of ops you had to do to do a, you know, to do a tour.
HA: A tour varied.
RG: Yeah. In your period it was how many?
HA: Thirty to finish.
RG: It was thirty still. Yeah. Ok.
HA: When we started it was thirty six because it had been made thirty six around D-day.
RG: Ok.
HA: With so many short trips.
RG: Of course. Yeah. Yes.
HA: And then a month or two after D-day they broke it back to thirty three.
RG: ‘Cause you were going back on the raids on Germany then.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And then after we’d done about fifteen or twenty trips or something like that they said you only have to do thirty from now on.
RG: That was a bit of a relief.
HA: Yeah. But there was some longer trips coming up.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: We did one long trip to Trondheim in Norway.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Wow.
HA: Almost eleven hours.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And they put a smokescreen over the target and so the master bomber said, ‘Well, you can take your bombs home.’ So we did almost eleven hours with a full bomb load.
RG: Wow.
LD: Did that count as an op for you?
HA: That counted as an op. Yeah.
LD: Because you didn’t drop any bombs.
HA: You’d only to go to the target and be on the op. Yeah. We did a couple of —
RG: You said you brought the bombs home.
LD: Yeah.
RG: You didn’t land with them did you?
LD: Yes. That’s what I was thinking.
HA: Yeah.
RG: You did.
LD: Wow.
RG: I thought the standard practice was to ditch them in the sea if you were —
HA: Only if you had too much weight.
RG: So —
HA: I think earlier in the war they might have ditched them but we brought our bombs back three times I think.
RG: Ok.
LD: Oh my goodness.
RG: So when you say too much weight you had too much fuel still in and there was like a maximum weight that a Lanc could land with.
HA: Yeah. Yeah.
RG: Oh. I see.
LD: Well, you wouldn’t have had much fuel left after a trip to Norway. Would you?
RG: No. That’s right. It would have been light enough I suppose.
HA: I wrote a bit about this later one time. We were the only one to get back to Waddington with our bombs on. The others either landed in Scotland or ditched their bombs in the Atlantic.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And then got back to Waddington. But we didn’t bother. We came all the way back and had eighty gallons left.
RG: Eighty gallons. Don’t go around the circuit once or twice [laughs]
HA: It’s not really enough to go around again.
RG: No.
LD: Yeah.
RG: Wow. Ok.
LD: It doesn’t kind of sound very safe landing with the bombs but —
RG: No. No.
LD: But obviously you managed it.
HA: Yes. I believe —
LD: And the big one would have only been a cookie in that case wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t have had —
HA: Yeah. I don’t think we had a cookie even then. I think we only had about eight or ten one thousand pounders. I could find out in the logbook.
RG: Yeah for that range you would have only had a small one. You’d need more fuel and less bombs for that range.
HA: They actually, like, we were two squadrons taking off from Waddington. So there would have been about forty planes. As you turned at the end of the runway, on the perimeter track to get on to the runway they had a petrol tanker there to top up the tanks.
RG: [laughs] Fair dinkum.
LD: Oh my goodness.
HA: They knew it was going to be touch and go you see.
RG: Wow.
LD: Wow.
RG: That must have been close to one of the longest return — one of the longest return raids of the war surely.
HA: For ordinary squadrons.
RG: Yeah.
HA: But the fellas who did the Tirpitz raids —
RG: Yeah.
HA: They did thirteen, fourteen hour trips.
RG: Yeah. They had modified aircraft though too didn’t they? Yeah.
HA: They threw out the turrets.
RG: Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
LD: Because that’s what I was going to ask with these raids was the crew or the aircraft modified in any way for those, for that long trip.
HA: No. No.
RG: The standard. Still must have come close. I mean there were some squadrons, some raids I believe where they flew across, dropped their bombs in east bloc Poland and then went on and landed at Russian airfields, refuelled and came back out.
HA: Yeah. They did the same with some of the Italians targets early in the war I think.
RG: Yeah. Flew down to North Africa. Yeah. Yeah.
LD: So did you guys know, well no, you didn’t know in advance did you? About where you were going? But how did you feel when you realised you were going to Norway?
HA: We feel pretty happy about it because we thought that’s going to be a safe target.
RG: Yeah.
HA: There’s not going to be anybody shooting at you all the way.
LD: Fair enough.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Actually it was a nasty trip for navigation. There was what they called an occlusion up in the North Sea where a cold front and a warm front got together.
RG: Yeah.
HA: It was raining. And the wind was variable and we were supposed to find our way up there after Gee ran out. For about another two or three hours flying after that. The bomb aimer gave what we thought was a pinpoint crossing the coast of Norway that turned out to be wrong. And he gave another one later on and he thinks it was right. But anyway we finally found the target. Then we had to fly for two or three hours without any aids coming back because it was ten tenths cloud. Still raining.
RG: And you were over the sea the whole way.
HA: When I finally got the first Gee fix we were fifty miles north west of where we should have been.
RG: That’s not bad.
HA: The wind had changed that much.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: In four or five hours.
RG: Yeah. But you’re over the sea almost the whole way too.
HA: Over the sea most of the time.
RG: So if you ditched —
LD: You’ve got no points of reference have you?
RG: No. And if you ditched, you had to ditch you were in deep trouble.
HA: Yeah. Anyhow. We were heading, had a slight headwind at that stage which had been pushing us up that way. We increased the speed a bit because of the headwind and then after about an hour of finding Gee fixes I found the wind had changed to almost the opposite. Anyway, we said, ‘Skipper you can slow the plane down a bit now. We’ve got a bit of a tailwind.’ And so he and I and the engineer did some calculations. We’d already decided we’d land at Lossiemouth or Leuchars or somewhere. In Scotland. But after we did the calculations the skipper said, ‘I think we can give it a go to get back to base because of the tailwind.’ Maybe the other fellas didn’t do that workings. But anyhow we cut it fine.
RG: Yeah. So you started ops with 467 in September.
HA: Yeah.
RG: First and third raid. On your second raid. Where was that to?
HA: Stuttgart. Night raid. In between the skipper did a second dickie to Pforzheim. I forgotten where he went. Somewhere like Stuttgart I think.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And then the next night he went.
RG: Went out on a —
HA: Stuttgart on his own with us.
RG: What was your, how did you, what was your experience of the first raid? You know. The first German raid really. First. Stuttgart. How did you —?
HA: No problem much. The navigator stayed in his blackout curtained room with the light on and I seldom went out and looked at the target.
RG: Ok.
HA: So I left it to the rest of them to do all the looking out and so forth. Our gunners, bomb aimer and engineer all were very good at keeping a lookout.
RG: Good lookout. Yeah. I suppose the resistance from fighters and so forth was slowing down a bit by then wasn’t it? It was still there but —
HA: You’ve heard about Schrage musik.
RG: Schrage musik. Yes. Yes.
HA: That was something that took a great toll of bombers.
RG: Bombers. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Right up to the end of the war I think. When we finished our tour. In the next two months Waddington lost both their COs and one of their flight commanders. All experienced fellas on second tours.
RG: Ok.
HA: Sort of thing and, we think, all to night fighters with their upward firing guns.
RG: The guns. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Some of the some of the German aces were reputed to have shot down over a hundred, sort of thing.
RG: There were a few who got — yeah. Yeah.
HA: It was pretty dangerous.
RG: Yes. Yeah.
LD: I have seen — I think it was a Lanc with, there were modifications, not official ones but just ones that were done in particular squadrons with like, an observation point underneath. I remember seeing the ones with like the little round dome underneath.
RG: Yeah. Like an astrodome.
LD: Yes.
RG: But on the bottom of the fuselage.
LD: Yes, but underneath. So, I have read about you know some aircraft that had these unofficial modifications to watch out for Schrage musik. Did you have anything like that in your — ?
HA: No. We weren’t even told about it.
LD: Ah. That’s what I was wondering as well.
HA: You know, I’m sure the authorities knew about it. Probably months, maybe more, before we flew. They didn’t tell us about it. I think it was probably to keep the morale up.
RG: Morale. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: What they did tell us to do was to do banking searches and —
LD: Banking searches?
HA: Banking searches.
LD: Yes.
HA: Like earlier in the war, before Window, the searchlights and ack-ack were mostly radar controlled and so if you flew straight they would drop onto you and so the technique was to —
RG: Swerve.
HA: Just weave. Go a few — half a minute this way.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Half a minute that way. Sort of thing.
RG: So, predictors couldn’t predict in curves.
HA: Window came in and their radar wasn’t able to lock onto planes. The technique was to put up a barrage of flak and in daytime it looked pretty horrible with all these black puffs in the air. They’d hang in the air for a long time so it looked —
RG: Looked worse than it probably was. Yeah.
HA: So anyway, the technique was to straight, go straight. Don’t weave. Get through it as quick as you can. And all the time we were over enemy territory our pilot was quite religious about the banking searches. They could make the plane do that. Without it changing direction.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yes.
HA: He’d say, ‘Down port.’ The gunners would have a good look underneath and say, ‘All clear port.’ Roll it over.
LD: Right. Yeah.
HA: ‘All clear starboard.’
RG: Ah ok.
HA: We would do that for hours.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: And we never got shot at by a fighter.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: A couple or three times a gunner saw a fighter and we started corkscrewing and we weren’t chased on any of those occasions.
RG: Yeah.
HA: The general opinion was that if a German fighter saw you doing a corkscrew they’d give up and look for somebody else.
RG: Someone easier. So, you never actually got attacked by a fighter.
HA: Never. No.
LD: Were you ever hit by flak?
HA: Oh yeah. Lots and lots of times. Sometimes a lot of holes. A couple of daylight lowish level ones we got holes from machine guns from the ground.
RG: Wow. Ok.
HA: Walcheren Island. We bombed Walcheren Island three times. Short daylight raids.
RG: Sorry? Whereabout?
HA: Walcheren Island.
RG: Oh sorry. Yeah.
HA: Scheldt Estuary. The first time this was what I was going to tell you about. 617 Squadron landing with their bombs on. I think they did there. We went. 5 Group sent about a hundred planes to Walcheren Island and the aim was to break the sea wall and flood the island and we did a run at about, I think about six thousand feet or something like that and drop seven bombs in a close stick and come around again and did another seven. In the same place. Hopefully.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And a hundred planes did that and they opened it up, the front of the island. Got a picture in The Sun and the next day, sort of thing, “The RAF floods an island.” Apparently 617 Squadron was standing by with tallboy bombs.
RG: Yeah.
HA: In case.
RG: Just in case you didn’t manage it.
HA: And they brought them home.
RG: Wow.
LD: They brought home Tallboys.
HA: Twelve thousand pounds.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Wow.
RG: I’d be terrified landing with a bloody Tallboy underneath.
HA: Yeah. Well, I don’t know if they brought them home and landed with them or whether they junked them somewhere else, you know but they didn’t need to use them on Walcheren Island.
RG: Actually sorry, one of the first chaps we interviewed — Arthur. He was, he did, he finished his tour in ‘45 and then was posted to an experimental unit experimenting with a blind landing aid which he told us a bit about and he said it was very very effective. He was there when the war ended.
HA: Yeah.
RG: But he, before he left his squadron he went down to the intelligence officer’s hut and nicked some of the photographs that he had taken himself on one of those raids and he gave us the photos and you could see the bombs striking the seawall. That was in Holland though. There was another one trying to break a dyke in Holland but at low level and — yeah. Arthur’s photos. Yeah. I forget what squadron he was with now but —
HA: The next two raids we did on Walcheren Island, they were both daylight, were on the big guns that were stopping the Canadians from going along the bank.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And stopping the navy probably from coming in as well although the estuary was mined and the navy had one go at it before and said, ‘No. It’s too dangerous.’
RG: Yeah.
HA: So, we were trying to bomb these big guns and they were pretty impervious to bombs I think but it ended up being a fairly hairy sort of a thing because we would go over and they’d say, ‘Oh yes, well the weather’s not too good. You might have to fly at six thousand,’ and you’d get there and have to fly at four thousand or something like that. And so, there was a lot of anti-aircraft fire.
RG: A lot of flak. Yeah.
HA: Small arms stuff even.
RG: Yeah. Four thousand feet. You’re not very high are you?
LD: I’ve read about bomb aimers keeping some of the Window and putting the Window on the bottom of their aircraft and lying on the Window to stop —
RG: A bit of armour.
LD: Yeah.
RG: Using the Window.
LD: To protect them from the flak.
HA: I’ve never heard of that.
LD: I I guess these were kind of individual things that people —
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah
LD: Systems that people developed themselves.
RG: Did you have a mascot or a, you know, a token or anything.
HA: On the side of the plane.
RG: No. A personal one. A personal one.
HA: That one of us carried? No. None of us seem to have been too superstitious.
RG: Ok.
HA: A lot of them were but —
RG: Do you know of all the chaps we’ve spoken to most of them have said that? That they didn’t do it.
HA: No.
RG: Yeah.
LD: And yet you read such a lot about it don’t you?
RG: Yeah.
HA: About the only superstitious thing we did was we’d all pee on the tail wheel before we took off.
RG: [laughs] Yeah. I believe that was a common one.
LD: Was that very easy? In those flying suits.
HA: It was not. No. I can’t, I can’t ever remember using the toilet down the back of the plane during any of our trips.
RG: The Elsan.
HA: The pilot did it once.
LD: From the sound of things, you wouldn’t have wanted to use it if you could avoid it.
HA: Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you were above ten thousand feet you’d have your oxygen on for a start. So, you’d have to disconnect that. Get a hold of a portable oxygen bottle, go down, climb over the main spar which was about this high.
RG: Yeah.
HA: The pilot went down once on a daylight trip. I forget where it was to. So, I got to fly the plane for half an hour.
RG: Oh right.
HA: Straight and level.
RG: Yeah.
LD: And what kind of, we’ve heard about the — that the meal you’d had before an op. Was that still happening for you?
HA: Yes. Yes. But one of the early things you find out about being on an op on a night somebody would have said 2154 and that would be the number of gallons that a plane would hold and you’d say, ‘Oh well, it’s a long trip.’ And then the next thing they’d announce that the flying meal would be on at 3 o’clock. Something like that. And then a briefing at about 5 o’clock. That sort of thing. It would all lead up to actually take off time.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. It was quite a long period.
LD: So how far ahead would they kind of lock down the station? You know, set the security measures in place.
HA: I’m not too sure. I think it would probably be twelve, fifteen hours. Something like that.
LD: Right.
HA: Maybe a bit longer.
LD: Yeah. Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
LD: And did you guys get the wakey wakey pills too?
HA: Yeah. They gave them to us and I never used them once I don’t think. I don’t know if anybody else in the crew ever used them. Maybe the gunners did because they’d be tested on some of the long trips for staying awake.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: In the dark.
RG: Yeah.
LD: How did they do that? Test them,
HA: They’d be stressed.
RG: And tested as in stressed.
LD: Oh right. Ok. Not examined.
HA: I used the wrong word.
LD: No. No. That’s fine. I just took it the wrong way. Yeah. Yeah. Examined. Yeah. That’s what I meant.
RG: So, your crew. You had the same crew throughout all twenty nine?
HA: Throughout. Yeah. No replacements. No.
RG: Yeah. Have you got their names and so forth?
HA: Yeah.
RG: I mean you probably almost certainly remember them.
LD: Yeah. But it’s got all this. Maybe it’s written in there.
HA: Our pilot was Peter Gray-Buchannan. With a hyphen. His elder brother had done two tours as a rear gunner earlier.
RG: Wow.
HA: Over there.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Gosh. He was a lucky man wasn’t he?
HA: Have you heard of Doubleday and Brill?
RG: No.
HA: From Ganmain. They’re both fairly famous men. They both enlisted from Ganmain early in the war. Both went over there and did at least two tours. Maybe three. Both were wing commanders with the DSO and a couple of DFCs. That sort of thing. Billy Brill was CO of our squadron when we arrived. And I’ll tell you about the DFC now.
RG: Yes. I was just about to come to that eventually.
LD: Yes, it’s on my list.
HA: When we got to the squadron Bill called all eight of the new crews that had arrived from training into his office and amongst other things said, because we were all, nearly all flight sergeants, ‘All you flight sergeants who were thinking of applying for a commission don’t bother until you’ve done twenty trips. And then if you keep your nose clean you get recommended.’ He didn’t say, ‘Most of you won’t make twenty.’ [laughs] But anyway, that was his — so when I had done twenty trips I applied for a commission and Bill — Bill had been moved on and we had a new younger CO called Douglas. And he took it upon himself to sort of decide who was officer material and who wasn’t, sort of thing. One of the questions he asked me was, ‘Are you going to be any more use to the air force with a commission?’ And I said, ‘No. I can’t say that I will.’ I didn’t give him the right answers anyway and he didn’t recommend me.
RG: Yeah.
HA: So —
RG: That’s a fair answer though Bert. I’ve got to say. I have to say.
HA: When we got towards the end of our tour. I think probably only with one trip to go. It may have been two. The group captain called me in one day and said, ‘I’ve a bit of a problem. I’ve got one CO who recommends you fellas when you’ve done twenty trips and you’ve looked after yourself. And the other fella says yes or no to some of them.’ And he said, ‘The RAAF hierarchy requires that even if the CO says no it has to come to me. It’s not final.’
RG: Yeah.
HA: ‘So that’s my problem. Are you a good navigator?’ ‘Oh, I think so. I’ve lasted this long.’
LD: You’d done at least twenty trips.
RG: Yeah.
LD: You must be good.
HA: That was the end of the interview. So apparently on that day he approved me for a commission and so sometime later I got, in the mail, a letter saying that I’d got a DFC and I was a pilot officer.
LD: Oh.
RG: So, you didn’t make pilot officer or —
HA: Yeah.
RG: Oh. Ok
HA: Yeah. So I was a pilot officer dated from the day that I saw the group captain.
RG: Because as an airman you would have got the DFM wouldn’t you?
HA: Yeah.
RG: So, maybe they were going to give you the DFM and they went, ‘Oh God, he’s a pilot officer, we have to — [laughs] Did you get the DFM DFC for any particular —
HA: No.
RG: Just —
HA: I could show you the citation but it’s just a standard one that they gave to most people. The pilot got one with the same wording apparently.
RG: Right.
[pause]
HA: That’s fairly standard I think. There’d be hundreds of those. Came in a nice little case.
LD: Oh, it’s not there anymore though.
HA: It’s there.
RG: It’s on there.
LD: Oh, it’s a beautiful box isn’t it? It’s lovely.
HA: Yeah.
RG: You’ve got the Bomber Command clasp.
HA: Yes. I only got that one last year.
RG: It’s recent isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah.
HA: It was a bit of a hassle because I filled in all the forms and so forth. Sent it to England. And they sent it back, they sent back word, ‘No. You don’t apply there. You apply at Canberra.’ So, I had to go through it all again. Copies of stuff from the logbook and all that.
LD: So how, how was it presented to you?
HA: It was just sent in the mail. It wasn’t. There was no, no ceremony at all.
LD: Right.
RG: There’s an interesting thing on the back of it I’ve just noticed. It’s got on it that it was obviously first issued in 1918 and it’s got George Rex on it and then 1945 is just stamped in at the bottom.
HA: Yeah.
RG: That’s you know, that’s interesting that they keep — yeah.
HA: Yeah.
RG: I suppose originally when they did they first design they didn’t think they’d need it again.
HA: Yeah.
[pause]
HA: A local federal MP gave out those sort of things at one stage.
RG: Oh, the sixtieth. Yeah.
HA: Yeah. Just a medal .
RG: Yeah. World War Two. Yeah.
HA: And I was sitting with some other fellas that day and they had a Bomber Command medal on their chest. And I said, I asked them, I said, ‘Where did you get that?’ And they said, ‘We bought it.’ You can’t get a Bomber Command medal. They haggled with the government over there for years about getting one and they were never approved. The best they could do was a clasp. But apparently —
RG: Did Fighter Command get one? They got one, didn’t they? Fighter Command.
HA: I don’t know. Battle of Britain got one I think.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Yeah. The Bomber Command one. That sort of — there were problems with that with the political ramifications of Bomber Command. After the war.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: That became quite unpleasant.
HA: Yeah.
LD: To say the least.
HA: Yeah.
LD: I just checked out the squadron before we came.
HA: Yeah.
LD: And — yeah. So, you talked about the support of ground operations during the D-day landings at that time and so on. It said that 467 participated in the raids on Peenemunde.
HA: Yeah.
LD: Were you there then?
HA: No.
LD: Ok.
HA: It was a research station for the V2s and V1s.
RG: And V1s. Yeah.
LD: Yes. It was a fascinating raid. I’ve read a book about it. it’s pretty amazing. And were you involved in Operation Manna and bringing the POWs back from Europe?
HA: No.
LD: And dropping supplies and so on.
RG: No. You’d finished by then, hadn’t you? You finished in January.
HA: I’ll tell you why I wasn’t. As soon as I finished my tour our pilot got transferred to Transport Command and I got transferred to Training Command. And I was an instructor at a Con Unit.
RG: Whereabouts?
HA: At Wigsley. Near Waddington.
RG: Yeah. Ok.
HA: And we were getting crews ready to go to squadrons that were going to be in Tiger Force.
RG: Tiger Force. Yeah.
LD: Right. That’s what else I was going to ask about because it said 467 was involved in that.
RG: Yeah.
HA: So, I was an instructor right up until they dropped the atom bomb.
LD: Right. Right. Fair enough.
HA: Yeah.
RG: And were you still at Wigsley right to the end?
HA: Still at Wigsley.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And I stayed on at Wigsley for another couple of months after that and did a bit of ferrying. We ferried some Stirlings over to Northern Ireland and some Lancasters down to Southern Britain. Did a Cook’s Tour over some of the targets we’d been in Germany. But generally sort of loafed around.
RG: Cook’s tour.
HA: Alex talked about that. Yeah.
RG: Yeah. With a Cook’s Tour? Was that. Ok. Yeah. Well Alex was going over, he was a pilot. He’s living up at Orange. He was going over specifically to photograph the damage. Is that the same thing? Yeah.
HA: No. No. They just put a heap — a heap of interested fellas.
RG: It was literally a sightseeing tour.
HA: Like a real Cook’s Tour. I don’t know how many. A dozen or something like that in a Lancaster. I took my box brownie and took a few photographs.
RG: But did you land anywhere on the continent or just went out and came back or —?
HA: Somewhere I’ve got where we went. I think it’s probably in the logbook where we went.
RG: Oh. Bound to be. Yeah. Yeah. No. Alex said they were photographing the damage for analysis purposes. Cook’s tour. Base — Brentwood. [unclear] [ Cape Gris Nez, [ unclear] Aachen. Turin. Cologne. Krefeld, Duisberg — it was a tour wasn’t it? Ham. Munster. Wesel. Eindhoven.
LD: Ray, can you read them out loudly for the tape?
RG: Oh yes. Ok.
HA: Start at the with the ones inside Europe.
RG: Yeah. Well, Cape Gris Nez, [unclear] Maastricht. Aachen. Turin. Cologne. Krefeld. Duisburg. Essen. Ham. Munster. Wesel. Eindhoven. Turnhout. Ostende. [unclear] Calais. Cap Gris Nez,
LD: Wow.
RG: Yeah.
LD: That’s comprehensive.
HA: Yeah. It was good. Yeah.
RG: It must have been an odd feeling flying over and knowing that no one was going to shoot at you.
HA: Yeah. Oh yeah. We had a look at the Dortmund Ems Canal. I don’t know if that’s even mentioned there but —
RG: Dortmund. Not the canal itself is mentioned but no.
HA: The Dortmund Ems Canal was a place where Bomber Command did a lot of damage. I think we might have been one of the first raids where they actually breached the canal walls and let the water out and stranded the barges but there was ten attempts at it I think. Altogether. Some of them didn’t work. We did two on the Dortmund Ems Canal itself and another one the Ems Wesel Canal which was nearby. Both night-time raids. And because of its importance it was a very dangerous target to go to. The ack-ack was fierce. Had plenty of searchlights and usually we seemed to have to, for one reason or another, do orbits when we got to the target. Either because cloud was too — we had to come down through cloud to find it or one time they had trouble with the marking and so, they said, ‘Do an orbit until we can get it properly marked.’ ‘Do another orbit.’ ‘Now you can come and do it,’ sort of thing. That sort of business happened.
RG: Yeah.
HA: So, and we did, finally did a daylight one on New Year’s Day to the Dortmund Ems Canal. And I met a fella after the war, playing golf, who’d been in our same squadron and was on the same raid and they got one engine on fire for a start and I wrote in my logbook, log and chart of the day, not the logbook, I’ve got a lot of logs and charts.
RG: Oh ok.
LD: Wow.
HA: “Aircraft on the starboard beam going down on fire. “ Dot dot dot. “Gone.” That was them.
RG: Oh right. Ok.
HA: They didn’t go down. They got down to about four thousand feet and got control of the plane and started off staggering back. Then it got another engine on the same side on fire and kept going. This fella was the bomb aimer and he said he put a piece of rope around the rudder pedal to help the pilot try and keep it straight. They staggered along and got fired at repeatedly because they were on fire but they got as far as the front line. To where the Americans were. And all bailed out successfully.
RG: Wow. Ok.
HA: The pilot was last out and he managed to get out apparently and got a DSO for it. Straightaway.
RG: Well, it sounds like he deserved it too. Yeah. You also did a raid here on the Lützow the battleship?
HA: Oh yes that was probably something special.
RG: Yeah [unclear] special target.
[LD excuses herself]
RG: Well there’s a daytime raid. Bergen as well.
HA: Yeah. Bergen was an interesting one. That was one of the ones where they said, ‘Bert, you ought to come out and have a look at it.’ This target. Most targets I didn’t want to come out of my blackout curtains. But Bergen there was four thousand feet mountains.
RG: On either side.
HA: And in between there was a valley where I, as navigator, was able to get on a Gee position line and keep between the two mountains and come down because we were supposed to bomb at twelve thousand or something but they said come down to the cloud base. Four thousand. We came down to three thousand eight hundred I think before we got out of the clouds. And then we snuck up a little bit. Just skimming under the clouds to the target and they’re shooting from downstairs. They’re shooting —
RG: From above. Yeah. Wow.
HA: He said, ‘You ought to come and see this. We’re being shot at from above as well as below.’
RG: God. Return from Marston Moor. So yeah, I was going to ask that. On any of your trips did you come down somewhere else?
HA: Yeah.
RG: Come back
HA: Quite a few times. I don’t know how many. Two or three perhaps. You come back from Europe and Waddington and all the inland bases would be covered with fog.
RG: Ah ok.
HA: So, they send you somewhere on the coast to land there.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I remember one time we got in a tender then and they drove us back and got lost. And so, we wondered around. It was a really cold night. Looking for, looking for Waddington.
LD: That’s just what you need I imagine.
HA: No signs up anywhere, you know.
RG: I can just imagine some of the conversations you guys would have with the drivers of the tenders, you know. We got all the way back from Germany and you can’t find bloody [laughs] Waddington.
HA: I think one of the navigators finally got in the front with him [laughs] I remember there was a town with a five way intersection where he didn’t know which one to take and he went backwards and bumped into a lamppost and about two hours later he bumped into the same lamp post [laughs] So, we were lost.
LD: Oh dear. Might have been easier to leave it ‘til daytime.
HA: Other times you’d stay. We stayed the night at one of those places too and then just flew back the next day.
RG: Yeah. I had a friend in Canberra. He’s dead now. He was a pilot in Stirlings and then — he was a flight sergeant and his navigator was a sergeant and he said there was a notice up one day saying volunteers for special operations. Instant promotion. Up one rank and he thought, ‘This is a good idea. What do you reckon?’ It was Pathfinder force.
HA: Yeah.
RG: So he converted over to Lancs for that. But he said when he was on Stirlings they were doing a navigation exercise. And it was a daytime one and they flew over another field and one of the, one of the crew was an RAF guy. He lived in the village nearby and he said, ‘Skipper can you put us down there?’ He said. So, they did. They put him down at the airfield. Went and had lunch in the mess and went back out. Ducked off home to see his mum, you know. Came back. And he said it would have been all perfect. He said, ‘I was taxiing up the runway, got to the end to turn on to the runway and clipped his wingtip and broke the navigational knob at the end on a post at the end of the runway. So, when he got back he had to explain how he managed to break it in the air.
HA: Yeah. He was in big trouble.
RG: Did you ever do anything like that? Your —
HA: No.
RG: No.
HA: We came back from a trip one time. I forget which one it was but when we got back to Waddington you couldn’t see the circuit lights. You could see the runway. It was very bad visibility and so the pilot said, ‘I’ve got to land this like a Tiger Moth. We’ll just get around the runway and then come in like that.’
RG: Side.
HA: And the fella that was in the caravan with the green and red light, sort of thing, at the end of the runway. He said afterwards, he said, ‘You fellas almost took my caravan off. Coming down like that.’ And then they closed the, they closed the place down. After that everybody else had to go over to the coast.
RG: Bert could you explain, sorry. The circuit lights. Can you explain how that, that worked?
HA: Yeah. They would have the runway with the runway lights and then they’d have circuit lights going. I don’t know. Half a mile. A mile around or something like that.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Almost touching somebody else’s.
LD: Right.
HA: ‘Cause there were so many of them.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And when you came back wanting to land you’d come in on the right hand side, sort of thing. And you’d call up the girl on the microphone. Tell them who you were. “Mozart dog to slagwort.” They’d say, ‘Go to channel two,’ or something like that. She’d tell you to stay at four thousand. So you’d go around again. Then she’d say, ‘Prepare to land.’ You’d go around. You’d have to say, ‘Wheels,’ at a certain place and come around and then lining up with the runway. You’d say, ‘Funnel.’
RG: Funnel.
HA: Yeah. And if you got the green light from the bloke in the caravan you could land.
RG: Right. Ok. Ok. So with the circuit it was the same diameter with the aircraft stacked in the altitude?
HA: Yeah. Yeah.
RG: So, you had a whole bunch of aircraft circling.
HA: She used to stack you up at four thousand or three thousand. Something like that.
RG: Ok.
HA: So, you wouldn’t run into one other.
RG: And you were all going anti clockwise, I guess.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Well it’s a very responsible position isn’t it?
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah. All done by WAAFs.
RG: Yeah. ‘Cause you would have had aircraft coming back and straggling back really wouldn’t you? All over the place.
HA: Yeah. Sometimes.
LD: And she would potentially be triaging to see who’s going to land before others because of problems.
HA: If somebody had damage they would get priority and they’d leave you stacked up there.
RG: Yeah. I heard, I heard, sorry, it was earlier in the war. I think it was about ‘42 that the Germans were using intruders raids. They tried to get in to the circuits. Get an intruder in to the circuit. A night fighter. Was that happening later in the —?
HA: Yes. When I was at Wigsley. I was duty navigator up in the tower one night and some ME110s came in with the bomber stream coming back and got across the coast without —
RG: Without being detected because they were in the stream. Yeah.
HA: And they came to Wigsley and a couple of the other Con Units. They shot down two training planes at Wigsley.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I don’t know how many they shot down altogether. Five or six I think. They went to Waddington and machine gunned the mess. Had a go at the bomb dump without [laughs] without any damage. Bomb dumps are hard to —
RG: Yeah. They’re well protected.
HA: That was some experience.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Because the people in the control tower — it was probably a duty pilot and a duty wireless op as well as a duty navigator and somebody in charge of it. A bit of a flap on. You know, what do you do with planes being shot down?
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Turn the runway lights off for a start.
RG: Yeah. And then what do you do with the stacked aircraft in the air. Redirect them?
HA: Tell them to look out.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah. That was, that was a strange one.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. ‘Cause I thought later in the war I wondered whether that still happened because the Germans had lost so many aircraft.
HA: Yeah. That would have been, that would have been probably March or something like that. 1945.
RG: Yeah. It was between January and May so, yeah. Wow. So still that late.
LD: So were they using FIDO for you to land with at night?
HA: Only on certain ‘dromes. We didn’t have it on every drome.
LD: Oh right.
HA: There was only a few FIDO ‘dromes.
LD: Yeah.
HA: It was terribly expensive.
LD: Oh, that’s, that’s what I thought. Looking at it it must have been just in terms of fuel.
RG: Did Waddington? Did Waddington have it?
HA: Used up hundreds of gallons of petrol.
RG: Waddington didn’t have it?
HA: No.
RG: No.
LD: No. I sort of wondered how effective it was too. With all that petrol burning there’d be smoke and everything as well as well as, as well as the lights.
HA: Probably turbulence. I should think it’s probably very difficult for pilots to land in.
LD: Yeah.
RG: Hence what, hence what Arthur was doing. Yeah. [unclear] he said it was very accurate by the way.
LD: Yeah.
RG: He said you could land a Lancaster almost hands off at night without any trouble whatsoever.
HA: Oh well.
RG: Then the war ended.
HA: Good planes to fly apparently.
RG: I’ve heard that. Yes. The pilot. A couple of pilots we’ve spoken to have said that. Yeah. They really liked them. Arthur all this stuff. This is obviously very precious. Have they got copies in Evans Head or anywhere else? Or are there any copies of it?
LD: I think there’s a book here too Rob.
RG: Oh. Ok.
LD: Yeah.
RG: Because what I was going to say was if we can manage to get copies of all this stuff — if you’re happy to do that. Put them in the archive as well.
HA: I’ve got the other logbook here somewhere I think. Yeah. I might have it down here. I have another logbook that you could take perhaps. It’s got all the stuff in it for the operations. I copied them out. I’ll find it for you. Probably downstairs somewhere.
RG: If we could copy them. I mean we could copy them here before we go and bring them back to you today.
HA: Well you’re welcome. Yeah.
RG: Yeah. Thank you. I guess we could go to the library or somewhere.
LD: Office Works. If they’re open.
HA: That book right there.
LD: This would be fabulous.
HA: I was telling you about the crew that got shot, well they caught on fire.
RG: Yes.
HA: Their navigator produced this book afterwards about their experiences.
LD: Oh. It’s not yours. I just saw it was from a navigator. I didn’t realise it wasn’t yours.
HA: No. It’s not mine. It’s about their crew’s experience and so forth.
RG: [unclear]
LD: Oh, is this is what you were talking about?
HA: It’s got little bits. See. That’s some of —
LD: A copy of the logbook.
HA: Some stuff out of my log and charts of the day. I lent it to him and he got it put it into the book.
LD: Is that what you were talking about with the copy of the logbook?
HA: No.
LD: Ok.
HA: No. That was just to emphasise that our tour — I think twenty four out of our twenty nine trips were just with 5 Group. We only did about five trips with, big trips with seven or eight hundred of Bomber Command.
LD: Oh yes. Oh you weren’t part of those really huge bomber streams then.
HA: Not as, not as a rule. Mostly we were just 5 Group.
LD: Yeah.
HA: And on some of those little daylight trips only half of 5 Group, you know, about a hundred planes.
LD: Right. That’s a big change from earlier in the war, isn’t it?
HA: Yeah. Yes.
LD: Yeah. Arthur. Sorry Bert. That’s Rob getting the names mixed up when we arrived.
RG: Yeah. Sorry. And I just called you Arthur a minute ago. Sorry about that.
LD: Very bad of me. What sort of experience did you have with the Committee of Adjustment. Did you, within —
HA: Were they the fellas that decided on LMF and that sort of thing?
LD: Yes. Yeah.
HA: Never had any experience of it. No. I heard about it.
RG: Oh, Committee of Adjustment were the guys who cleared the crews who were missing. Cleared their possessions and stuff out.
HA: Oh yes. Yeah. We had another crew in the same room as us. Sixty on one side and sixty on the other side. Both about the same time. And the navigator of the other crew was a good friend of mine because he came from Tooraweenah and he said I’m the only fella that’s ever, he’d ever met in the air force that had ever heard of Tooraweenah let alone been there and had a drink in his father’s pub. And they got shot down on their twentieth trip. So, we got woken up a couple of hours after we went to bed by the service police coming in and asking us if we would just mind looking on when they were sorting out their belongings.
RG: Witnessing that. Yeah.
HA: If there was anything that we particularly wanted to do something with to send to their parents or something like that. But we didn’t find anything that we wanted to. They just took the lot.
RG: Ok. So they just bundled everything together and took it.
HA: In the middle of the night sort of thing. It would have been 4 o’clock in the morning or something it was.
RG: Right. Ok. ‘Cause we’ve heard different — different stations seemed to do it very differently.
HA: Yeah. They were Air Force Military Police.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. ‘Cause other stations they used just airmen and —
LD: Sometimes the chaplain.
RG: Sometimes the chaplain. Yeah. Alex Jenkins, the pilot from Orange. He got shot down and he was the sole survivor. He was in a German military hospital, a Luftwaffe military hospital. Only for a few weeks actually before the British army overran the place in Holland and so he was sent back and he said when he got back all his kit was gone and he had to go down to London.
LD: At the dead meat factory, he described it as.
RG: Yeah. The dead meat factory with all these steel boxes with all the kit in it. He said there were just thousands of them in this warehouse. He had to go in and say, ‘That’s mine. Get it out.’ Yeah.
HA: There’s a few things that I’ve put aside that might be worth your while copying if you want to.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Because you could maybe photograph.
RG: Photograph these but — yeah.
LD: Those. Yeah.
RG: [what I could do with it] actually, we will take copies of those. Thanks. Bert, this chap because this is his book not yours is he still around or is he —
HA: No. He was four or five years older than me. I played golf with him for a few years here at Wagga.
RG: Right.
HA: But he’s gone now. He’d be a hundred, I think, nearly, now. Sam Nelson.
RG: Is there family around or anybody because what would be good is if we could get a copy of the book for the archive but the other thing too for books like this and we did it for another chap at Orange who was a navigator. An RAF guy. He’d written a book about his time in a prison camp and we’re trying to get these things into the National Library because they’ll take them just like that.
HA: You can take that as long as you like.
RG: Would it be alright though ‘cause it’s not you know.
HA: I’ve read it.
RG: No. I was thinking like, if the family might object. I don’t know. Should we notify the family that it’s? Is there any way to contact?
HA: The navigator himself. I think he’s probably gone.
RG: Yeah. He’s gone but — the family —
HA: I could tell you one little snippet about them. His crew were part RAF and part Australian.
RG: Yeah.
HA: At one time they had a reunion in Australia. Went over to Canberra. At the time that the G for George had just been refurbished.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Put back in to the museum and was all roped off. And they went up and I think Sam himself said to one of the attendants, ‘This is our crew that flew in Lancasters and we’ve just had a reunion. How about letting us get in?’ And they held it up and let them get in.
RG: Yeah. Actually, this chap from, Alex from Orange. He did the same thing. It was only – we spoke to him last year and only a month or so before he’d been down to the war memorial. It was the last time he could go down because he was getting a bit frail and he got down there and they put on a lift thing to get him up to the door. He got into the fuselage and he got up to the main spar and the two young guys were in attendance, and they said, ‘Do you want to go any further?’ And he said, ‘Yeah. I want to get over that main spar just one more time.’ And he said, ‘It took quite a while,’ he said, ‘But I got over the damned thing and he got up to the cockpit.’ [And he got the gun ] in the cockpit and he stood on it but on his way out he was coming down. He looked through one of the windows on the side and there’s an ME262 over in the corner. And that was the aircraft that shot him down. Not the same aircraft obviously but yeah and he said that was a bit of an odd feeling. But he said that anybody who had ever flown in Lancasters would understand that. That he just wanted to get over the main spar just once more. They had to help him back across but if he could only get over one way. You know. Yeah.
HA: I can remember — one thing I didn’t mention before. You asked me about damage to the plane. Quite a lot of holes sometimes. If they weren’t too big they just patched them over, you know, But down where the rear gunner slid in to his turret there was a piece of, probably a piece of plywood or something like that that he sat on and then slid in to his turret. One time we came back there was a hole the size of your fist through that. It would have missed the rear gunner by that much. And another time the pilot put his ‘chute in and they inspected it. I don’t know if they always inspected it. Probably they did but anyway there was a lump of shrapnel.
RG: Wedged in the parachute.
HA: In his seat parachute.
RG: And he was sitting on that.
HA: He was sitting on it. It didn’t get through the parachute [laughs]
RG: So none of your crew was ever wounded?
HA: No.
RG: No.
HA: No.
RG: Lucky.
HA: We were lucky.
RG: Yeah. So, with your time at Training Command — because the training losses were really high weren’t they? Guys killed in training. But in, was that with, was there a squadron that you were with at Wigsley or was it a training squadron that was, or just an ATU?
HA: I don’t think they called them a squadron. It was just a unit.
RG: Yeah. Ok. But did you lose any aircraft or any people under training? Apart from the ones shot down by the ME110s?
HA: I don’t think so. When we were on Stirlings we had a hairy experience. There had been a lot of rain and dirt alongsides of the runway was soft and there was a Stirling came in trying to land in a crosswind. Put one wheel off the runway, skidded out into the mud and we went out and helped to dig the bomb aimer out of his turret which he shouldn’t have been in because the mud had pushed him up over the guns.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Like a bulldozer.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Not much space in there at the best of times is there?
HA: No. So the next day we’re doing a three engine practice landing in a Stirling with, obviously no bombs and not much petrol sort of thing. So you can understand what happened. You’re not supposed to come, once you get below a thousand feet for a three engine landing you should land. So our skipper’s coming in. Same cross wind. Knows about what happened the day before. Got down almost to the deck and said, ‘I’m going around again.’ Pushed the three throttles forward. Told the engineer to start the other engine. The navigator’s doing his usual job calling out the airspeed so he doesn’t have to worry about that.
RG: Yeah.
HA: The stalling speed is about eighty apparently and I’m calling out, ‘Sixty five.’ [laughs] ‘Sixty five.’ ‘Sixty five.’ The pilot’s hanging on.
RG: [laughs] Jesus.
HA: By the time I got to the end of the runway the other engine had started up and because we had flaps down too it took a while to get up in to the air again.
RG: To get the speed up. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: That was touch and go.
RG: Yes. I should say so. So, what about when you were — the other time in the UK between ops. On leave. Did you have any leave as such while you were there?
HA: Oh yes.
RG: On your squadron
HA: Yes. You normally got six days leave every six weeks while you were on ops.
RG: Oh ok. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: A bit less if a few others got killed because they had a waiting list, you know. It was your turn.
RG: Oh yes. I heard about that. Yes. Yes.
HA: So it might be only five weeks.
RG: Yeah. I’ve heard about that. So where did you do on your leaves? You went in to London obviously a few times.
HA: Oh I’ve been to London. Yeah. I went up to Edinburgh one time. Took a girl to the pictures one time in the middle of summer. I was thinking I might have a kiss afterwards. It was still bloody sunny. The sun was up at 9 o’clock 10 o’clock at night. They had double summer time on.
RG: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, you’re not trying to photograph that logbook are you?
LD: Yeah.
RG: Oh it’ll take forever.
LD: No. It wouldn’t take that long but I can’t, the shadow of the camera keeps, the shadow of the phone keeps going over it.
RG: Bert, if we could borrow this stuff.
HA: Yeah sure.
RG: We’ll photograph it and or copy it and then bring it all back to you today.
HA: Ok. That’s fine. Yeah.
RG: We can do that. That’s cool.
HA: I was going to say about leave.
RG: Leave. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah.
HA: I think after about our twenty trips we had leave and by that time I had a car and the skipper had a car. His was twenty pounds. Mine, I think, was thirty or something like that.
RG: What was yours?
HA: A Morris. Morris Minor. No. A bit bigger than a Morris Minor. It was a little narrow thing but a sedan with high windows.
RG: Oh yeah. Yeah.
HA: Morris something or other.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: A Morris Ten I think it was called. He had a Ford. And we decided we would do some touring down towards Devon and that sort of thing. Together. So we found somebody. I think the engineer might have put us on to an aunt or a niece or something like that and an address we could give down there. Where you couldn’t get to it by train.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And so you could petrol coupons to go.
RG: Oh ok. I was wondering. I was going to ask you about that. Yeah.
HA: Yeah. So we took off and we stayed at places like Stow in the Wold.
LD: They have such funny names some of them don’t they?
HA: Yeah. So we had a nice tour down that way.
LD: Did you have any family in the UK or anything? That you were able to visit?
HA: No. No. Some people did. Like Charlwood.
RG: Charlwood. Yeah. He went to the town of Charlwood to look up his ancestors. Yeah.
HA: When we first got to Brighton the first lot of leave we had there from there they had a scheme called the Lady Ryder Scheme.
LD: Oh yes. I’ve heard of that.
HA: Where they would send you for a week to somebody just to let you settle in to Britain, sort of thing and so I was sent up to a place not far from Windsor to a lady’s who was Mrs Adams.
RG: There you go.
HA: That’s probably why they picked her.
RG: Yeah.
HA: When I got there she’s got this lovely two storey house and she said, ‘I’ll just show you around the house and you can look after yourself. I’ll give you the key because my daughter’s having a daughter or a son or something and I won’t be here. Just help yourself.’ I never saw her again sort of thing.
RG: A bit pointless wasn’t it really. Not helping you to settle you in but still.
HA: But she said, ‘If you go to this little village. I think it was Taplow or somewhere there’s a woman here who likes seeing Australians. Margaret Vyner. Was that the name of the, yeah that’s right. Margaret Vyner was this Australian actress who liked seeing Australians.
RG: Ah ok.
HA: So she gave me her address and I went around there and was made welcome and she was married to an English actor called Hugh Marlowe who was a big handsome fella who’d played The Saint in one of the movies.
RG: Oh ok. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: I hadn’t been there very long and in comes an army captain with a case of brandy that they knew. I can’t just pick his name out from memory now but he was a very famous English actor.
RG: Not David Niven.
HA: David Niven.
RG: You’re kidding.
LD: Oh really.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Right.
HA: Back from North Africa.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Handsomest man in the universe I think.
HA: Yeah. A big name. So they got stuck in to the brandy and started talking about acting and all this sort of stuff and I said, you know, like, you don’t want me in the way. I snuck off back to Mrs Adam’s place.
RG: Oh well. You could say you met David Niven anyway.
HA: Yeah. And then the next day I decided to go to London. Got into a carriage. David Niven and a heap of others were in the same carriage. And he was there — [laughs] I said, ‘G’day,’ and he said, ‘G’day.’ And that was it [laughs}
LD: He’d had a big night had he?
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah.
RG: What about demob? What happened with demob? So you were there for a couple of months. You were there right up to VJ Day you said. In Training Command.
HA: Yeah. Finally we, we got sent to Brighton to spend some time waiting for a ship to come home. Got in a game of hockey at one stage which was the first time I had a game of hockey over there. I was very keen on hockey at high school. We played at Bournemouth in snow. Sago snow or something. They used a red ball instead of a white one [laughs] But yeah we put in some time at Brighton and then finally got on the Aquitania.
RG: Oh yes. Ok.
HA: Came home around South Africa.
RG: So that was what September or something? Or October. In 1945 still though.
HA: Late 1945.
RG: Yeah.
HA: About November or December ’45 or something like that I think.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Fair bit of waiting around for a ship.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. They were pretty busy. A lot of people to move.
HA: I went home to Mendooran and somewhere on the demob business in Sydney they did aptitude tests and that sort of thing. IQ tests I suppose and said — [pause] It’s lunchtime.
Other: Yes.
HA: In a bit I suppose. Well these people are going to leave very shortly.
RG: We’ll finish this off very quickly and you can have your lunch. We’ll just finish it off very quickly now.
Other: Ok.
RG: We’ve got to the end now.
Other: That’s alright.
RG: Five — ten minutes.
RG: Yeah.
Other: He can talk.
HA: I’ve got a pretty good memory.
RG: You do actually. Yeah.
HA: Where were we up to?
RG: Aptitude tests and IQ tests.
HA: ‘Oh yes,’ they said, ‘You can go to university and do virtually what you want to. Whatever you like.’ I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to go back to the public service. That’s one thing. So I elected to do Ag Science. Which I did. And I think only forty of the one hundred or so people who lined up for it passed because half of them were ex-servicemen and the place was overcrowded and they weren’t — didn’t have the facilities for big numbers that they should have had.
RG: Whereabouts was that? Sorry. That was at —?
HA: Sydney Uni.
RG: Sydney Uni. You said you only did a year of that.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I thought to myself it’s a four year course. I’d used up nearly all the money I’d kept from the end of the war. What am I going to do for the next three years? Talked to a couple of fellas who had just finished fourth year Ag Science. They said, ‘The best we seem to be able to do is get a job with the Agricultural Department at about eight pounds a week.’ I said, ‘No.’ Dad had just sold the farm because of the drought and he had a bit of spare money. He said, ‘I could stake you some the money to start share farming.’
RG: That’s you and your brother did that.
HA: So we went share farming and made some money.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. And that was it.
HA: That was it. I did a bit of truck driving and had a sports store and then went back to, oh, went back to uni by correspondence while I was teaching at Mudgee.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Is there anything else you’d like to add or any questions for us?
HA: If you’d like to read through those you’ll find some interesting stuff. I’ve written some three pages in the last couple of days of things that I’ve sort of —
RG: Ok.
HA: Thought were important.
RG: Yeah. Well we’ll definitely, we’ll take copies of those definitely. But we’ll let you have your lunch now.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Thank you very much for that.
LD: Can you just sign this here. This is just to say that —
Dublin Core
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AAdamsHG170215
PAdamsHG1704
Title
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Interview with Herbert Adams
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
Language
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eng
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01:53:42 audio recording
Creator
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Rob Gray
Date
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2017-02-15
Description
An account of the resource
Herbert Adams grew up in New South Wales Australia and joined the Air Training Corps as soon as it was established. He later joined the Royal Australian Air Force and after training, he completed a tour of operations as a navigator with 467 Squadron. He describes crewing up, flying operations in Lancasters and his experience of avoiding aerial attack. He recalls the use of navigational aids including Gee, API and H2S. He then became an instructor at RAF Wigsley. He discusses an occasion when Me 110s attacked the airfield. He talks of a Cook's Tour over Germany when others photographed the after effects of the war. He was demobilised back to New South Wales and later taught for the RAAF.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Australia
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
California--San Francisco
United States
California
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Carolyn Emery
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
467 Squadron
5 Group
aircrew
Anson
bombing
control caravan
Cook’s tour
crewing up
demobilisation
Distinguished Flying Cross
fuelling
Gee
ground personnel
H2S
Lancaster
Me 110
military living conditions
navigator
Operational Training Unit
promotion
RAF Lichfield
RAF Llandwrog
RAF Swinderby
RAF Waddington
RAF Wigsley
sanitation
service vehicle
Stirling
superstition
Tiger force
training
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
Wellington
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/209/3348/ABellJR150727.2.mp3
9d02f41eac38212c78457bf9772c6f97
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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Bell, John Richard
John Richard Bell
John R Bell
John Bell
J R Bell
J Bell
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Wing Commander John Richard Bell DFC (-2024). He was a bomb aimer with 619 and 617 Squadrons in Flying Officer Bob Knights’ crew.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-07-27
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Bell, JR-UK
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
The interview is taking place at Mr Bell’s home in Storrington on 27th July 2015. During this interview Mr Bell recounts his experiences as a bomb aimer in 617 Squadron.
JB: I and my crew begged Wing Commander Cheshire when we asked if we could join his squadron and he was sat in his office, very nice man to talk to, we were an experienced crew and he still wanted to know why we wanted to join his squadron, so we told him that we would like to be flying a little lower, nearer the ground, but he said ‘oh, but we’re not going to be doing that any more, we’re operating normally’ which of course they were but they were operating mainly over targets in northern France, practically to the build up to the invasion obviously and one installation that I remember on operation was against the [unclear] works at Limoges which was the first time that Leonard Cheshire had marked the target with his own flares and, er, having found that marking was essential he came over the factory at about two to three hundred feet and dropped twice, to drop flares on the target and to ensure that the French workers in the factory could get out and get into the shelter, the word being that we should try to avoid killing French workers during our bombing campaign. He was a very compassionate man and very easy to talk to and very good, very easy to get on with, he didn’t stand on ceremony and he didn’t order you to do things, he just asked you to follow him, whatever he was prepared to do, he was an exceptional man, an exceptional leader. Early in 1944 the Allies became aware of [unclear] reconnaissance of some large structures, concrete structures being built in the Pas de Calais area of France. They did not know what they were at that time although they suspected they were something to do with the V weapons programme which had been discovered after the attacks on Peenemunde. Following the attack on Peenemunde it was known that the Germans were developing two weapons, a rocket programme and also a pilot’s - aeroplane programme carrying, each carrying one tonne of explosive warheads. The V1 launch site was discovered in the Pas de Calais area early in 1944 and also at that time the two large concrete structures which the Allies were not sure of their purpose but felt they were probably connected to the rocket – V2 Rocket programme. The V1 sites were attacked by Bomber Command throughout the next three months of 1944 and the construction of the - what became known as the V2 programme, the two sites, one in the Eperlecques Forest and one near Saint-Omer at [unclear] were watched as the building progressed but they were large concrete structures and could not be attacked, although they were attacked with conventional weapons but not put out of action until the 617 Squadron was equipped with the Tallboy in June 1944. The site at [unclear] near Saint-Omer consisted of a chalk quarry with a cliff at the far end of the quarry and on the top of the cliff we saw the construction of a concrete dome, obviously built there to protect the workings within the cliff. 617 Squadron were assigned to attack it on – several times in June and July, I think about four times altogether, mainly because of cloud interfering on two occasions and Tallboys were used to destroy all the facilities of the site and in fact one landed close to this concrete dome which obviously destroyed the foundations of the structure. One of the operations I was on was the 17th July 1944 and it was a clear day and we approached the site from the north-west and from a long way away I could see quite clearly, from the bomb aimer’s position, the dome covering the installation in the quarry. We approached at the normal speed of close on one hundred and eighty to two hundred miles an hour and at a height of around eighteen thousand feet. I signed up er [pause]
AP: It’s OK John, just keep -
JB: I switched on the bomb sight and carried out all of the normal procedures for the bombing run and directed the pilot to - on the bombing run. This took some time, we were on the run for at least five minutes and the - I had the dome in my bomb sight for all of that time and at the appropriate moment the bomb was automatically released. It was a clear day and I saw the bomb – the Tallboy going down and I followed it all the way down to the target and it exploded just beside the dome, there was an enormous explosion, so that was recorded as an almost - a direct hit and in fact I did shout out ‘Bullseye’ to the crew to let them know that we’d had a pretty good hit.
AP: And the consequence of what happened, about what it did, can you talk a little bit about what – later on you discovered that -
JB: Later, much later, we discovered that the foundations of the dome - the supports of the dome had been severely disrupted and it had tilted to one side. Obviously the site was then unusable, other Tallboys had bombed the whole of the site and the whole facility was useless by then. On the 25th of July 1944 the squadron continued its attacks on the V weapons sites in the Pas de Calais, we bombed the first V2 site that we’d seen at the Eperlecques Forest and this was a large concrete structure which would have taken a great deal of destruction by Tallboys to put it out of action. It - there were several direct hits on the target on that particular day and eventually the installation was put out of action by our attacks and only the oxygen-producing facility was maintained there. Both sites were never able to launch V2s as they were programmed to do. A third construction site was discovered at a village called Mimoyecques, also in the Pas de Calais area, and it was noted that there were a number of concrete underground installations with a pattern of openings in the tops of the structures. The purpose was not known although it was thought that they were – it was going to be used for the launch of some sort of rocket projectile. The whole site was bombed by the main force of Bomber Command and also by 617 Squadron and their Tallboys were able to penetrate deep into the earth and destroy the foundations of these concrete structures, thereby putting it out of action. It was only discovered - the true purpose of the site was discovered after the Armies – the Allied Armies moved through following D-Day and found that it was a site designed to launch projectiles with a warhead of several kilograms towards London and the number of missiles that would have been launched could have been as high as three thousand a day. The intention of the site was to bombard London with projectiles from these - from this supergun, each carrying a warhead of around thirty kilos of explosive and the intention was from the number of projectiles that they could launch would result in some three thousand shells, so-called shells landing in London every hour and the destruction of the site obviously saved London from an enormous barrage of artillery from long range. This site at Mimoyecques was extremely difficult to bomb because it was all buried underground and there was very little to see on the surface except two concrete structures but er – and of course the whole of the site had been bombed pretty heavily by the normal weapons by aircraft from Bomber Command and the United States Airforce so the 617 crews had difficulty in seeing the site but nevertheless were accurate enough with their Tallboys. On July 6th 1944 617 Squadron aircraft, led by the CO, Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire, attacked the site at Mimoyecques with Tallboys and completely destroyed the site. This operation on the V3 site at Mimoyecques was Wing Commander Cheshire’s one hundredth bombing operation throughout his bombing career from 1941 onwards and he was stood down from bombing following that day, he was then awarded the Victoria Cross for completing all the operations and for his valour in doing so and his leadership and he was followed in command of the squadron by Wing Commander [unclear] Tate, Wing Commander Tate. In 1941 Barnes Wallis who had given great thought to the bombing of various targets in Germany, particularly those underground or buried installations, and he saw the need for a bomb other than a blast bomb, which was currently in use, a bomb to penetrate the earth and explode below causing some sort of an earthquake. His thought at that time was for a very large bomber flying at forty thousand feet and carrying a ten tonne bomb which of course was quite impractical at that time, but in 1943 the launch of the Air Ministry brought out his project again and asked him to design something that could be carried by perhaps the aircraft of the day, the Lancaster, and so he designed what became known as the Tallboy and he designed it in three sizes – four thousand pounds, twelve thousand pounds and twenty-two thousand pounds, all at that time called Tallboys. The four thousand pound was tested and was found not to be as stable as they thought it should be so the fins on the tail were turned to five degrees from the vertical and this helped to - the bomb to spin as it was dropped thereby giving it great stability and the twelve thousand pounder then became known as the Tallboy and the twenty-two thousand pounder was called the Grand Slam, the twelve thousand pounder was issued to 617 Squadron immediately after D-Day and the first operation was against the Saumur tunnel on I think the 9th of June 1944 and the – it was a complete success in destroying the tunnel and from then on the squadron operated almost solely with Tallboys and later with the Grand Slam, the weapons being central in the destruction of the V weapon sites and any other installation that had been buried below the ground. It had also of course - was later found very – found to be the ideal weapon for destroying bridges and canals so a great weapon by Barnes Wallis again used by the squadron. On the 5th August 1944 we carried out a daylight attack on the U-Boat pens at Brest. This was in bright daylight, sunny day, and I can remember dropping my Tallboy onto the area of the pens and I think it hit fairly close by. My memory of the day is that there was an enormous amount of flak, very heavy flak over the target area but we were, we were not hit, we escaped. My job in the crew in the Lancaster was as a bomb aimer and also as front gunner if need be and my job was to guide the pilot towards the target and then to concentrate on dropping the bombs on whatever the target was and dropping them as accurate as possible and my abiding picture of the whole of all the operations I did, particularly those over Germany at night, was of approaching the target area - the city that was under attack or was about to be attacked and to be met with a wall of anti-aircraft fire. The German gunners would fire their shells into a box at around twenty thousand feet, which was the height we were aiming at, aiming to be at, and we just had to fly through that. It was a pretty awesome sight to behold some miles before we reached the target but by concentrating on what we had to do we just had to ignore it, there was no way you could ig – you could dodge anti-aircraft shells, you just have to fly through them and hope that you’re not going to be hit even by a small amount of shrapnel which of course could damage a vital part of the aeroplane but we were very fortunate that all our operations – that we got through all of them unscathed. Following the raid on the German dams 617 Squadron later became, became used to operate on many other targets for which it was equipped with a bomb sight, a new bomb sight, the stabilising automatic bomb site, also known as SABS. This was a precision-built bomb sight and it was not, it was not used in any other – by any other squadron, mainly because it was difficult to build and very few were actually made. The invention and design of the Tallboy weapon by Barnes Wallis was the – a most important weapon that arrived at the right time in 1944. It was the only weapon that could have destroyed the targets against which it was used, conventional weapons at that time were blast weapons and would have had little or no effect on the structures that the Tallboy attacked and it was, it was essential of course to use it against targets which were buried underground and also, er, heavily armoured targets like battleships, the [targets ?] could never have been bombed by anything else other than a Tallboy so the Tallboy was really the crux of the whole bombing campaign from 1944 onwards to, to hasten the end of the war by destroying those targets which the Germans hoped to use to counter the invasion forces, it just was the [emphasis] weapon that was needed at the right time. The Tallboy was carried in the bomb bay and supported in there by a strap which had – the connection of the strap was electrically operated by the bomb sight at the critical moment. The top of the bomb had a hole drilled in it and in the roof of the bomb bay was a metal plug and the plug was – so when the bomb was hoisted into the bomb bay it married up with the plug and the strap was fitted underneath it and that secured it into the bomb bay. At a critical moment the bomb sight automatically triggered the release mechanism for the bomb, the strap separated and the bomb dropped out. The wireless operator’s job was to go back and wind in the two straps – two parts of the strap. The one thing about the Tallboy was that it was expensive to produce and they could not be produced very quickly so they were in limited supply and we were told that if you can’t drop the bomb, if you can’t see the target, don’t drop it, just don’t drop them all over France said Leonard Cheshire and we were instructed to bring them back which we did on several occasions when cloud obscured the target and – or smoke and if we couldn’t see it clearly then we would bring the Tallboy back and landing with a twelve thousand pounder was not funny and one had to be very careful – the pilot land very carefully which he did of course and there were never any accidents with them as there were never any accidents with the crews that brought back the twenty-two thousand pound Grand Slam when they couldn’t drop it so the aircraft was built to carry it and we never had any problem with it. Following the raid on Brest on the 5th August I completed – that completed my 50 missions constituting two tours of operations that I could retire from operating now and attend to further duties in training other crews in the training, training line. The squadron went on to other targets on U-Boat pens and military and, and naval targets throughout the rest of the war.
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Identifier
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ABellJR150727
Title
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Interview with John Richard Bell
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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00:21:47 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending OH summary. Allocated T Holmes
Creator
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Andrew Panton
Date
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2015-07-27
Description
An account of the resource
John Bell completed 50 operations as a bomb aimer with 617 Squadron before becoming an instructor.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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France
Germany
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
France--Mimoyecques
France--Saint-Omer (Pas-de-Calais)
France--Saumur
Germany--Peenemünde
France--Watten
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
Contributor
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Gill Kavanagh
617 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bomb aimer
bombing
bombing of the Mimoyecques V-3 site (6 July 1944)
Bombing of the Saumur tunnel (8/9 June 1944)
bombing of the Watten V-2 site (19 June 1944)
bombing of the Wizernes V-2 site (20, 22, 24 June 1944)
Cheshire, Geoffrey Leonard (1917-1992)
Grand Slam
Lancaster
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Tallboy
V-1
V-2
V-3
V-weapon
Wallis, Barnes Neville (1887-1979)
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/211/3350/ABirchM150811.1.mp3
822228d299830315ec5ea07056aa17ac
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
Birch, Marjorie
Marjorie Birch
M Birch
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Marjorie Birch (b.1924).
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-08-11
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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Birch, M
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
TJ: This is Tina James I am here in *** Waddington with retired GP Dr Marjorie Birch and she is going to tell us a bit about here experiences in wartime London. So Marjorie can you tell what year you were born.
MB: Yes I was born on the outskirts of London on, in the 29th of June 1924 so I am ninety one now so I can’t complain I haven’t had a good run.
TJ: So your father was he involved in the First World War?
MB: Yes he was in the Royal Flying Corps and a lot of my uncles were in the Army and one or two of them were injured but very lucky no one was killed so you know a fairly big family (interrupted)
TJ: Did they used to talk about their experiences?
MB: No.
TJ: Not even your Father.
MB: No not much at all no. I don’t know why we didn’t question them at the time, I mean looking back I ask why didn’t I question them, you know. No I think in the First World War a lot of them were you know, pretty well upset about everything they say and were not very keen to talk about it were they. No they didn’t, no.
TJ: So where did you grow up?
MB: Well we moved when I was quite small to a place called Bexley Heath which is in Kent and they built eh a lot of new houses. You know we had a spell in Lincoln where a lot of the villages you know building,a lot of building going on. It was a semi detached house with a garage sounds although it was small but the rooms were quite large and we had quite a big garden. Mind you the soil was awful, my Father had a lot of trouble to grow anything much at all. Em anyway we moved there in the thirties I think I would be about, oh I had a Sister who was em, eh how many, emmm, eighteen months younger than me, I have to think. We were pretty close but that’s all we were.
TJ: Just the two of you.
MB: Yes, and my Father was in the Civil Service and he worked in County Hall on Westminster Bridge. Its still there in various departments and ended up by being in charge of the whole of the Fire Force during the War. So when the Fire Fighters were having a terrible time, he was in charge. Anyway em, so we moved to Bexley Heath and we went to em, first of all eh Eirwith Grammar School which I don’t think I don’t know if it is still there,it is probably a Comprehensive now. Because our rent paying area, that was where you went to Grammar School and so em, but it was a mixed Grammar School and after a couple of years they decided to make it just boys only. We were transferred to Dartford Grammar School which was a girls Grammar School. The boys, there was a boys Grammar School incidentally [unreadable] just in passing, not at the time I was there. So then we were there after the war started and because we were in an area where they bombed, the bombers used to come up the, up the Thames to bomb London and we could see them and hear them. Em because they thought we were in a dangerous area we were offered evacuation and em so my Father said yes you can go but you must have a billet together, he wouldn’t have us separated. So I remember, it would have been in 1940, in the summer I think it was June, going to Waterloo Station and I have never seen anything like it, there was just children. The whole station was full of children, varying from little ones with their Mothers eh to, I was then eh sixteen, yes I was doing my [unreadable], The little ones had labels round their necks as you probably know, and trains coming in and filling up and going out. We didn’t know where we were going, we had two teachers with us.There would be about thirty of us to start with and a couple of teachers, we had to take something to eat and drink. Anyway we’d pack on the train and nobody knew where we were going, sounds absolutely amazing, but somewhere to the south. We ended up in Exeter which is a very nice town of course. When you go all day in the train, it was very slow, it took us all day, I think we left about seven O’clock in the morning. Everybody was absolutely fed up, you know, tired and hot, it was a hot day. So the next thing you, you know, we were met by a couple of people who were in charge of finding billets and they got the numbers that were coming, presumably. And we were herded onto the platform and we had to go round with these people and the teachers, going round Exeter dropping off children. You were more or less lined up and they came, and the people who said they would have evacuees came along and chose. Needless to say my Sister and I were the last because most of them expected young children, I think they were a bit taken aback because we were as old as we were. Anyway eh finally we ended up with a Welsh couple in their middle age I would say, who hadn’t any children. They were very nice eh and in Countess Weir which is outside Exeter a very pleasant place to live. Well as I say they were very nice, we, we have always been shown to do a bit of cooking and stuff so we helped out when we could. She had her own ways, they were Welsh and she was lovely really. Anyway em there was er there was going to be, it would be at the cricket ground in Exeter, the Ashes you know were going on at that time and there was a match being played in Exeter. So the husband said to us “do you like cricket?” I was very keen on cricket, we didn’t play it as school, but, you know I liked, I liked it because some friends always took me to the cricket when we lived in Bexley Heath. Anyway so off we go and we walked down the new bi pass to wherever the ground was and at that time there was a large convoy of Americans coming. I thought I don’t know about the dates but they were definitely Americans. And em they were non stop, there were lorries there were cars, jeeps, everything. And you know what they are like, they were all whistling and so what, I was sixteen. This upset the host of house because he weren’t used to having any children or anybody like that. So they approached the teacher and said we were much older that expected and he was embarrassed and so we had to be found another, another billet. This time it was with eh, eh a young woman who was married to a chap in the Army, he must have been very young, she had a two year old child so she was very nice as well, so we used to help her as much as possible. But the child I am afraid, well you can understand it because the husband had been posted missing and she didn’t know if he was dead or alive or whatever. And she slept in her mother’s bed and I say she was about two and half and her Mother was still breast feeding her plus an ordinary diet, in other words the child did as she liked. Well we had a nice bedroom during the day, we had our books and stuff in the bedroom, during the day she allow, she couldn’t lock the door. She was in our bedroom pulling all the books, some of text books were school books tearing out some of the pages, I mean. We would say “well look we will try and put everything out of her reach.” But it was absolutely hopeless, but were there, I think we were there a year or two, a year and a half perhaps, oh now we couldn’t have been because, no I meant months, we were there about three or four months and in the end it got so difficult that we said to the Teacher, we said to her you know “we would like to help you,” because she needed the money, “but we really, we can’t do this these books aren’t ours” Anyway what ever we did it didn’t work. So we were found another billet and this was a couple who lived in Countess Weir in an old monastery, it was absolutely fantastic, divided into two houses and it was right by the river and eh, the husband worked for the gas board and the wife was quite a bit older than him and her Sister and she owned a local paper, you know eh, I don’t know what it was called I can’t remember. Anyway she was a fantastic cook. So we were there for the rest of the time we were evacuated and eh and she eh taught me quite a lot of cooking things which was very nice. And eh, we came back in 1941 because we went down in 1940, came back in ’41. By which time my eh, we’d moved from Bexley Heath down to a small village outside Maidstone. Well it was a small holding, very nice, lots of fruit growing. We had ducks and geese and everything down there, it was really lovely. My Father obviously had to travel up to London everyday. Anyway we moved there so we had to go to Maidstone Grammar School, so I was going there for my higher schools as it was called, in other words A levels because of course I was em applying for University. So we had, so when I got my A levels I applied to all the Medical, I wanted to do Medicine at Top Woman. In those days there were three which were all Women and didn’t take any men. There were Guys, not Guys, Kings and UCH which took half a dozen, so I applied for them all.
MB: What did you parents think about you going into Medicine?
TJ: Well my Father, who was quite strict, he said “girls want to do Careers that are paid the same as men not less.” So he said “you’ve got a choice of Medicine, Dentistry, Accountancy and Law so you had better choose.” In those days it was strange, you know we used to accept things like that. Anyway I had always been quite interested in medicine and had my appendix out when I was thirteen at eh, eh oh dear, one of the London hospitals, it will come to me. I was very impressed and I liked, I liked this and I thought yes I like this, this is good. Eh and my Sister was absolutely bonkers about animals so she wanted to be a Vet. So we both had to take our A levels obviously to get into University. When I was talking about applying for Medical School I heard afterwards that UCH and Kings who were mostly men and half a dozen women. Oh with our application form, when we submitted our application form we had to send in a photograph. Apparently the Consultants looked at the photograph, chose the prettiest girls and that was that.[laugh] Anyway that was the story that went round and naturally I didn’t get in, but I got a place at Royal Free. In my days it was known as the Royal Free for freaks and frumps. I can tell you it wasn’t freaks and frumps in my year there were some goers I can tell you. I mean in London apart from all the other things there was a very ongoing social life, because they had all the Foreign Embassies with all the Troops around and we used to get invitations to all sorts of things, it was quite interesting. Anyway eh so there we were, I went up to the Royal Free, must get this right. I went up in nineteen forty, forty one, forty two, I went up in forty three. I went up in forty three that’s right and em, so em and when you went you had a list of University Properties in London where you could get digs, you know. So I got a room, you only got a room, I mean there was nothing specific like the modern Universities, it was a case of going in where you could get anywhere. Anyway I was in a house with three stories in a place called Argyle Square in a place opposite Kings Cross Station. Well one side of the Square was in the Square, one side was the local red light area, [laugh] they got several houses there. I remember looking out of the window one day, oh I was right on the top floor and I, and I am, the other girl [unreadable] was in the other room and we became great friends. We were friends all the time we were at University. Anyway I remember looking out of the window one day and I could see the prostitutes talking to the American soldiers. I mean you really saw life in the raw. Anyway that was just in passing so, we were in these digs, it was run by a very old New Zealand lady who apparently had been in the New Zealand Hockey Team and she had come over on a tour, this was before the war and eh, met her husband who was in the Navy and em,em he was killed and she was old so it must have been em just before the war and em, she was in charge of the rooms.She had a room right down on the bottom, there were two rooms on the top and three, then another three and another three and the old ladies room right at the bottom. For all these people we had one toilet, we had a bath which was actually in the conservatory at the back of the house, so from my window I could see in [laugh] you see. The whole setup was frightful really but we did have a bathroom em in the premises in, at the Medical School. Now I must explain, the Medical School attached to the Royal Free was called the London School of Medicine and it was in Hunter Street.That is where you had to do your second MB, which is the second lot of exams you took before you before you went into the, into the Hospital and into the Wards. Its quite different now we did Anatomy and Physiology, we had a really thorough grounding. And by what I, I have spoken to the Medical Students at the modern day, you know at the moment and frankly I am not impressed with their training at all, its entirely different. I don’t think they are getting the grounding we had. Anyway, so this took two years, you really had to get down to it, you didn’t have time to have a social life at all, it was really hard slog. Anyway we knew we were there to work, anyway this particular friend of mine lived at Orpington and she used to go home at the weekends, you know it was nice of here to get out of the digs really. I know every Saturday morning eh I used to go down to the local, they called it eh the British restaurant, they had these British restaurants in London where for a shilling, I think it was a shilling, you could have a jolly good lunch. You know rationing was so tight and we had to, you did get a lunch and at the Medical School and em, we had no facility, we just had a gas ring you know to heat up water, so know things were pretty primitive. Anyway I used to go down and get a good lunch at the British restaurant. Anyway one day I was sitting there and a piece of pudding came flying through the air and hit me in the face and there was this old boy saying “bloody rubbish, bloody rubbish,” he was saying because it was the pudding and the food was pretty awful. He was so upset with his pudding he just threw it across the room, unfortunately I was sitting in the wrong place. Anyway that happened.
Anyway you want to hear about the bombing. As soon as we got there the worst of the Blitz was more or less over because we were there in, what did I say, forty three we went didn’t we, yes. Well they had a Blitz, the Blitz was the year before really. But they were still bombing and everytime the siren went, wherever we were, if we were in our digs this old lady used to shout up the stairs “Come down” she was, she wanted us all to come down and go down in the cellar, there wasn’t anywhere else.We got so fed up every night going up and down, when it, the siren went, we just didn’t bother, ‘cause really. I mean we could hear the bombs dropping, we were very lucky, we didn’t actually all that near. But in the morning when we walked round to the Medical School, you could see houses that had been bombed. I mean this is, and the strange thing is people were going to work in their normal way with their cases and so on. After that nights bombing, stepping over the rubbish and just going to work as you would on any other day. People would say why? Well that was all they knew, they got their jobs and they just wanted life to be as normal as possible. And if you happened to have a hit and you were in the house, well hard luck. A lot of people used to go down to the Tube Station which was just down the road from our digs, I, I only went there once, well I didn’t, I went in the Tube early and all these people were lying on the platform rolled in blankets and so forth, it was absolutely crowd. I mean the underground trains were running as normal and all these people on the platforms, it was very difficult to get on the train without treading on someone. Anyway they went in every night and stayed in there, it was so stuffy, so smelly you can understand what I mean. Anyway that’s what used to happen, other people had their shelters, but in London you see there were only yards at the back of the houses. We didn’t have any eh kind of shelter at all. I mean in the suburbs and that they had their Anderson Shelter and their all, you know, but we just didn’t have anything like that. At the Medical School there was nothing there, if there was a raid on we just used to carry on, I mean it sounds ridiculous but we did and we were very lucky. Until, I am going to think if I, there was one little incident em, after one raid eh, some young girl was found in the street, you know, dead. They collected people after a bombing raid to see if people were there, needed attention, if they were dead. So they were taken to the mortuary and they were all free, those that were near and this young girl attracted the attention of the man in the mortuary who’s job it was to take the clothes of all you know eh the dead bodies. He thought, why has she got her knickers on inside out because girls don’t put their knickers on inside out. They were very careful when the PM came and they found that someone had been trying to abort her, you see, she was pregnant and they found that she was damaged. That is obviously why she had died, not from the bombing. Anyway the Police had been trying to find a professional abortionist who they knew had been working in the area. Because they had the address of where this young girl’s body was found,they actually caught this chap because obviously she had died when when he tried to abort her and put her, put her out on the street after the bombing raid. And they caught him, that was just a passing, you know.
TJ: That was very interesting.
MB: Yes these sort of things happened.
TJ: I bet he never thought that he would get caught, if her knickers had been on the right way out.
MB: They did PMs on, but after a bombing raid, the standards I don’t know or comment on that. They didn’t expect to have a gynaecological examination. That attracted a do, so little things like that. Anyway I was just trying to think if there was anymore em. But what I was saying, the ordinary bombs were dropping and what I was going to, I have forgotten to say when my Sister and I were in Exeter, my own house, before we moved to Bexley Heath had an incendiary bomb on it, and my Mother picked it up, well she tried to wrap it in a rug, it was in one of the bedrooms and throw it out the window. She burned her hands and arms really quite badly. That was a brave but rather a silly thing to do I suppose. But some of those incendiary bombs, I don’t know what dates it was, if you approached them, I mean they were burning, they would blow up. She was lucky it wasn’t one of those. Anyway that was in passing, you know well. Oh I forgot to say, I’m sorry about this, while we were er, in Exeter well er one night there was a tremendous bang and er, a landmine had dropped, they had tried to hit the barracks in Exeter. It had landed very near to where we were in digs, that was what, that was when they young[unreadable] what it was. So that was very unpleasant and also one night we saw this glow in the distance and that was the night that they bombed Plymouth. Plymouth had a terrible night and day when they were bombed. We did see the light from Plymouth and that’s I don’t know how many miles from Exeter but anyway we could see it. We knew something was going on, but that was in passing. So where have we got to.
TJ: You were doing your anatomy and physiology.
MB: That’s right, so there we were in the middle of a … can’t say it, anatomy and physiology, we were having a physiology lecture. We had a lecturer in physiology, nobody liked her she really was a rather unpleasant woman and she used to swear at us. I mean in those days it was terrible having someone swear at you. We were young ladies we weren’t used to, well you know what I mean. Then see everybody disliked her. Anyway in the middle of her lecture there was a God Almighty bang. A rocket had landed on a Presbyterian, I think it was Presbyterian church right next to the Medical School. Our anatomy department was demolished, we were very lucky there was only one student in there, of course she was killed, the rest of the College we were ok. Well the ceiling didn’t come down but the rest of the ceiling on us, well we were standing there and my first thought was, well my Father at County Hall probably had heard that it had got pretty near the Medical School, or on the Medical School because of the Anatomy part. So I thought I had better go, dash down to Kings Cross to get a taxi to let him know. In those days we didn’t have phones or anything like that, so I had better go and see him to tell I were alright. Anyway as I went up to the [pause] oh, well to get my coat, into the cloakroom there was this unpleasant Lecturer, quite a bit of plaster had come down on her head and she was bleeding quite profusely from the scalp. She said to me “oh Miss Hurst, Miss Hurst” oh I had forgotten to say eh, my pre marriage name, my name was Hurst, so when I married I became Birch. We haven’t got there yet, sorry. Anyway “oh help me help me” so I thought poor old girl. So ran the tap in basin and put her head down to clear all the blood to see what was going on, she got a lot of little cuts and abrasion but nothing serious, so I rather enjoyed putting her head under the tap and clearing it all of. Anyway then I found a towel somewhere and wrapped it in the towel. I said “I must go you must see, you know check if everything is all right” presumably she did. Anyway I did go down to Kings Cross and got a taxi. It sounds ridiculous, I mean life went on whatever and you know people can’t understand that, but it did. Anyway I get a taxi to County Hall and go into my em Fathers Office and his Secretary was sitting and she said “Oh my dear whatever is the matter?” I hadn’t looked in the mirror but I had got plaster in my hair, I had got a bigger, one or two, nothing much, I was absolutely filthy. [laugh] Oh I said we had a V2 on the Anatomy Department. “Oh my dear” she said, I said “I’d better see my Father” “Oh yes go in.” Do you know what my Father said “you are in a mess why did you come like that?” I thought so much for caring what had happened to his Daughter, obviously he hadn’t heard. Anyway his Secretary was lovely, she took me into the cloakroom and cleaned me up as well as she could do, So that was that, so anyway,so we, we lost our Anatomy Department so we couldn’t function anymore so we were sent down to Guys. Now Guys was male only you see, no women and what a fuss. We thoroughly enjoyed it and so did the male students but the Consultants were saying, one old boy I can’t remember if he was a Surgeon or what he was “we have never had women walking out ward bababababa.” We always thought it was a great joke. Anyway you never had, these ah, anyway this Lecturer who we all disliked, because we all came down to Guys. She stayed at Guys for the rest of her, and apparently she mellowed, everybody said she was a different women when she went down, stayed in Guys and did,lectured at Guys.
TJ: Perhaps it was the plaster falling on her head.
MB: Eh It was the male surroundings, that was what I heard in passing, so there we were at Guys and eh we were very, very lucky when you think about it. If they hadn’t stopped the Rockets London would have really suffered, I mean they were dreadful, there was no warning it was just this terrible bang. Oh I forgot to tell you I did an edited course in Anatomy because I hated it and I wasn’t doing very well. So in the first two years we had a holiday, we had a holiday in the summer, before we started Clinical because when you started Clinical you did three months of ENT, three months of skins, three months of every department of Medicine you did three months because that’s when you were learning about it. Anyway well, before I started that, where did I get to. I know, I was doing this extra course in Anatomy because I had not been doing very well in our Anatomy exams. So what I did, we were living in a, I used to catch the train from where we lived to London Bridge and then catch the bus to the Royal Free [possibly means Guys] in Gravesend Road. One day we were sitting there and we were coming into London Bridge, there were two other people in the Compartment on the other side. I looked out of the window and there was this Buzz Bomb you know the V1 travelling exactly parallel to the train. I knew as we approached London Bridge the track curved round. I thought my God that is going to cross straight over the line, you know as we come into London Bridge. And I never knew, I knew what people knew by paralysed with fright I couldn’t speak. I was trying to tell the people “look, look” and you couldn’t hear it because of the noise of the train, the trains, the trains made a lot of noise. It was about as far, I am not very good a measuring, as my fence.” can you see my fence?” about as close as that.
TJ: That’s about twenty feet.
MB: That’s where it was, it was very close and I thought “Oh my God” and I just sat there paralysed with fright and these two completely unaware. Suddenly if I had, had a camera, we didn’t have anything like that in the War. It turned on its side, went down, blew up a couple of houses. The train swayed really badly and I thought it was going to come off the rails, swayed from side to side because of the blast and stayed on the rails and carried on. And when I got to London Bridge I couldn’t get out. My knees were going clickty, clicky, I couldn’t tell the other people what they’d missed,they’d no idea, completely oblivious of all this drama. So when I got to Guys a friend said “God you look awful are you all right?” Well I said “Oh deary Oh me” If fait hadn’t have turned the damn thing there it could easily have done it on the line and blown us all to bits. Sorry about that I am a bit out of. So where have we got to, oh yes the V2 and going to Guys. Well it was ok down at Guys we had quite a good time and then eh. From there eh doing the Clinical it didn’t have enough things going on in the Hospital, we had Emergency Hospitals in those days. We had to go, my friend and I down to Letchworth, because we had to do three months ENT at an Emergency Hospital and three months skins and three months something else. So we went down there and we had digs in Letworth and em so we got away from the bombing. And eh that was ok and we were alright and we had nice digs with a local shopkeeper. So we were a alright and we always had plenty of butter and stuff like that and we were always short of food and we did alright. When we were there we eh, we used to get invites from the local RAF stations and eh we had an invitation, for the dances I mean. And I went to one dance, oh eh we went to one at the Emergency Hospital and the RAF Crew would come you see. Snobs we only sent invitations to the Officers Mess. Anyway em and that is how I met my Husband, he was one of the Aircrew, he was a Navigator in Bomber Command at that time and eh and that’s how I met him. And eh, so this would have been about nineteen forty five I would think. I must tell you, on D Day I happened to be in Kent at home for some reason and I saw the planes pulling all these gliders on their way to France. I have never seen such a sight in all my life and I thought to myself “these poor men, sitting there in those gliders, waiting for them to crash” They are supposed to land gently but you know what I mean, that is absolutely terrific. I mean how brave were they, I am not saying anybody else wasn’t but that was really [interrupted]
TJ: And there was a lot of them?
MB: There were a lot, the whole sky was absolutely full of them, so that, that was interesting, I, I never forget that, but I felt so, it really struck me then, I mean. Oh and the other thing, I forgot to tell you in the thirties, this is going back a bit. The Zeppelin the R101 was being built at I think it was Bovington or Cardington one of the places in, in Hertfordshire where they were experimenting with Zeppelins, this was in the thirties. This R101 was going over to France, so we had a, it came right over our house. What amazed me it travel it travelled really low, you could see the little, I think its called the basket and the people in it. And you know and it and you know it was going so slow and the old propeller was going like mad. I thought we if they are shooting at it, they couldn’t miss it. Anyway they weren’t , the War hadn’t started. Apparently that night, I don’t know how long after that it crashed in France and they were all killed. I don’t know how many people were in. I always remember that as a child, that would have been about nineteen thirty six, not quite sure. You know sorry I ought to put things in no I.
TJ: No it doesn’t matter, so lets go back to D Day did you get news on what was going on day to day?
MB: Well, it was very difficult ‘cause we were at, what forty four em, no I must have been at home so we didn’t. Well you got the news, the Radio news and they said they announced I can’t eh, I can’t tell you how it was, how it was put because obviously they have got recordings of what they em of what they were saying on the Radio. But they did tell you that em, didn’t give you any details I don’t suppose they knew very much at first.
TJ: But you did know there had been an Invasion.
MB: Yes, we knew it was on. I knew when I saw the gliders I knew you see. I think the Government were trying to keep it very secret when they were preparing all these thing. But I mean, I don’t know how many of these gliders landed successfully without them being killed. It was a sight as I say I shall never forget. Yes eh I am just trying to put things into chronicological order, it’s a bit difficult. Sorry where did we get to? Oh yes we were in digs in Letchworth and then we came back to the Free to continue our Clinical, because you had to do every part of Medicine and then you took your Finals and that was that. Then you took your house jobs and everything else. So came back to Guys and I was feeling really rotten, you couldn’t put your finger on it but anyway in the end they found I had a Pleural Effusion. Eh I hadn’t had a cough or anything like that. Anyway in those days anything in the lungs like that must be Tubercular because there was a lot of tuberculosis around at that time and after the War and eh, all my X rays were clear but no “you must take a year they did in these days, they’d take a specimen of the pleural effusion of you lung and inject it into a guinea pig because guinea pigs were very sensitive to the, to the tubical bug and I knew a lass in the path lab and she let, said to me “your guinea pigs very healthy” so I didn’t have TB but they wouldn’t accept they said “you must take a year off” so I went down and stayed in my Parents house at, near Maidstone for a year. So I lost all that, all the friends because you are together for about five years and you become like a club, you know. Everybody knows everybody else and its really nice because you feel part of a group, we stayed together. Well,of course when I had to take it out, I missed everybody especially my particular friend. ‘Cause they were a year ahead, so they qualified a year before me. I qualified in 1949 finally and, but I was married in 1946 which as a Student was very unusual in those days, because when my Husband came out of the, when he was demobbed we managed to get or find a flat in London in Balm. Well finding a flat in London after the war was like gold dust. Anyway we decided we would get married because we got a flat. In those days you didn’t live together, so we got married in a[laugh] in eh eh Wandsworth Registry Office. We queued up at quarter to nine in the morning and there were marriages going on twenty minutes each. Next one please, next one please, next one please[ laugh]. My Father had strongly disapproved of my Husband to be because he didn’t have enough money according to him. He didn’t come to the wedding my Mother came and my Aunt and Uncle from Orpington were wonderful, they really helped me because my Mother would have to come up by train because she was, were living near Maidstone then. Anyway she brought some of the things she managed to get from the country as far as food and everyone,well there was Bills particular friend my Husbands particular, my particular friend from Guys, my Aunt and Uncle, my Sister and my Mother. Oh no of course not I’d forgotten, my Husbands Parents she didn’t approve either so they weren’t going to come either. I was a sickly girl from the south because they lived in. Oh I must tell you this, when we were engaged, we were engaged in the year before, nineteen forty five my husband to be said eh “you must come up and meet my parents” they lived outside, in a village outside Halifax in Yorkshire. So I brought some photographs of my Family so they could see. So there was one of my Sister and myself, gave it to my Mother in Law to be and she said “is that your Sister” and I said “yes” “she’s very pretty isn’t she” I said “yes” then there was a long pause and she said “you are not a bit alike are you?” [laughs] So that was how we started a glorious friendship. Anyway because they were Yorkshire they were both overweight both eh his Father and Mother. But my Husband was tall, quite different, I mean there were some tall people apparently in his Fathers family but his parents were rather dumpy and overweight. Eh when they saw me they did not approve, I was a sickly girl from the south, I was rather slim, in fact I have always been a bit thin. So anyway that started and over the years, oh I won’t tell you about when we got married, you wouldn’t want to hear all that. ‘cause we went up and lived in Yorkshire. My Husband did some of his house jobs in Bradford Royal Infirmary and I did a Casualty job there and Philippa our first child was born. You don’t want to hear all that but eh I just remembered about my Mother in Law.
TJ: So was your Husband had he started his Medical Training before the War.
MB: No when he came out he said eh Aircrew could get grants for University ‘cause he didn’t really want to go back into the Civil Service he only done a year anyway. They offered him his old job which actually was in London but he said “no I am going to do Medicine” I said “are you sure?” because by then I was half, I was doing my Clinical by then. When we were married I was still doing my Clinical but we got this flat in London and he got eh what? I got a small grant from the Grammar School, they did have grants for going to University. So I got a small grant given the condition that my Father paid the same amount. I don’t think it was very much, anyway he agreed to it. So anyway that was how I got, how we got the money and then he said “I am going to apply for a grant, I tell you because I am going to do Medicine” I said “are you sure.” So he applied on the grounds of outstanding em oh eh outstanding bravery or something like that because he was given the DF eh DFC no DFM because when they were awarded they were still not eh em that hadn’t been given their Commission, that was it, when the appoint. But the Canadians, Australians and all the others who were in his Crew, they were all given Commissions straight away so they were all given the DFC. But because the English, there was Bill and the Rear Gunner who was English, because they were English they weren’t give their Commissions, till six months after, so they lost out on that, which is typical really isn’t it? Anyway er where did we get to?
TJ: He started to do Medicine.
MB: Yes so eh he applied for a grant, they said no he didn’t , he didn’t qualify. So my Father said to him because we were living with my Parents then em em, “well go and see your MP” So we went up to Halifax to see the MP there and he said I, “I’ll see what I can do, because you were decorated you are entitled to a grant” Anyway he did and he was given a grant, we were fine then. So we had a small grant, I think we paid eighteen shillings a week for our flat and we had an income of three pounds a week which we thought was really jolly good. So then he applied for Medical Schools and because he had been in the RAF he was accepted for all, for all the the you know London Hospitals. When he went for an interview to Guys there was a Surgeon there called Tony Bear who has written a book, very ancient now and he said to Bill “ do you play rugby boy” he said “yes I played rugby at school and I played rugby for the RAF” “right he said your in” [laughs] So I am not saying he got in at the others that was Guys because . he went to Barts, St Marys and all others and I tell you he was accepted for them all so he had a choice. He decided to go to Guys and eh he did play rugby all the time he was there. But I got fed up when Phillipa was born in nineteen fifty and eh I got fed up with him coming home every Saturday night in an Ambulance because he was always injuring himself. [laugh] I said “now you’ve got a family you have jolly well got to stop playing rugby, you know” He loved his rugby so that was it. Anyway he, he was in Bomber Command as a Navigator and he was offered a place in the Pathfinder Force as he always said “the em, the em Navigators in the Pathfinder Force were the crème de la crème” We were, I was offered this you know, offered this place in the Pathfinders so he took it. He was in Mosquitoes, he was in 109 Squadron which was one of the Pathfinder Force, eh Squadrons. Em and eh they had the very modern radar called Oboe which actually, what they did was lead the whole Bomber Group in, into the Target and drop flares at right on the Target. Because this Oboe absolutely pin pointed the absolute, say you were bombing a factory, and pin pointed that factory. The idea was to stop killing eh civilians if they could. So they would drop flares and the main Bomber Force would come behind them and drop the Bombs hopefully on the factory or whatever, whatever the Target was. So that was quite interesting and eh in the Mosquito they had a Pilot and a Navigator, not like the Lancaster which he was in which I think they had eight in the Crew. Anyway so eh I only saw the Mosquito once when they were celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Pathfinder Force and they, there was a little seat, two little seats and I said to my Husband, how did you fit in, because he is tall with long legs. He said, I had a small Pilot [laugh]. He was a New Zealander. Anyway so that the War, when he demobbed, he was still on Mosquitoes. Oh and he was on the raids that took part to, to Holland Manna it was called.
TJ: Operation Manna.
MB: That’s right he was on that quite a long time, well for the whole time it was going. That was his last presumably, Operational time. So that was, that was interesting yeah em yeah em I don’t, I do think of odd things I can tell you about, but its.
TJ: I am wondering what did your Sister do, did she become a vet?
MB: Oh well first of all she didn’t manage her A Levels, she was a practical girl. I mean she wasn’t so good on the academic so that disappointed her. So what she did, she got a place at em, eh, oh it’s a College off Nottingham University, Agricultural College, its got a name, anyway she got accepted for that and done a degree in Dairying instead. ’cause she hadn’t got the appropriate A levels to be a vet. She would have been a jolly good vet but there you are. She didn’t have the academic you know. Anyway that’s what she did and when she was at Nottingham University she met her Husband who got a degree in agriculture. And they went out to Tasmania eventually with their six children and I always remember when they emigrated. We were all in a hotel the night before they sailed, because in those days you went by ship. And someone said “I see you are going to Tasmania, are you going to populate it then?”[laugh] and actually she’s go she has Grand Children and Great Grandchildren out in Tasmania so you can say they put their share in populating Tasmania yeah. So that was right and she is still there and she rings me up and we are both staggering on She is only a year, eighteen months younger than me.
TJ: What is she now eighty nine.
MB: Yeah she had her ninetieth this Christmas and she wanted me to go out, she was having a jolly big party out there, so, I couldn’t face the flying there, its such a long way.
TJ: And what about your special friend from Guys, did you keep in touch with her?
MB: She married when she was on an anaesthetic course she met a Rhodesian who had been in the War and and married and she went out to Rhodesia. And then when all the trouble started they moved to South Africa. And then from South Africa they moved back here, so I, and they live near Malvern so Bill and I went to see them when they first moved in and they came to stay with us. So it was lovely to see, to see her again. And she is still living, her Husbands died and eh Bill died in nineteen, no in two thousand and two and her husband died about the same time. And we keep saying we are going to get together and we don’t, she said to meet her in London. I don’t think in my present state, I am gradually loosing my sight, that I would be able to manage London, not on my own, you know I would have to go with somebody. And eh so I don’t know wither I shall see her again or not, we keep in touch. And I was going to ring her up and verify some of the [unreadable] [laughs]
TJ: You did some, obviously you did your House Jobs.When did you decide to go into GP work?
MB: Well when were, when we were married we, we were in London first and then we moved to, Bill decided to go into Public Health instead of going into General Practice. In those days they had a Medical Officer of Health, well he, he got a job as a deputy in Watford and soon got another job in Lindsey. And he was going for interviews all the time we were living in London then. And em he came home one day and said “I’ve got job in” he’d been for interview because I lost count where he’d been. He’d been to Devon and Cornwall and various these things. I said “yes I’d quite like to live in [unreadable]. Anyway he said “I’ve got a job in Lindsey” I said “where the devil is Lindsey I’ve never heard of it” [laugh]. And he was a, Medical, Medical Officer of Health in Lindsey and then the Medical Officer at Kesteven was going, so he got and that’s what, that was his job and eh.
TJ: And that’s when you went into GP work?
MB: Oh yes, and then we moved up to Lincoln, that’s what I was thinking. We moved up to Lincoln, we moved up to Lincoln in nineteen sixty and we lived in Heighington for thirteen years and then we moved to Waddington, and then em what was I going to say. As soon as I came to Lincoln I had been casualtying for a while from eh just daily, not a, not a resident in the eh eh.
TJ: Lincoln County.
MB: Yes, Lincoln County, so eh I did that a couple of times a week that was all. Because the children were still, oh we had four children and, and we had, you know trying to do, to do everything was difficult. But I did do some General Practice and in the end I went into a Practise with three other men down at St Catherine’s and em, but I was only part time there. And em so em what, no I hope to get this right, yes and then em no I was working full time for about eleven years and then, then I argh when I left there after I worked for eleven years and I worked part time, doing surgeries basically for other practices. So I didn’t do a lot of General Practice because it was a bit difficult with four children. We got them going to school and going to University and all that, you know.
TJ: Did you ever, going back to the War years again, did you ever do any casualty work in London?
MB: No not in London no.
TJ: You didn’t have to deal with Bomb Victims?
MB: Not people who had been damaged in bombs, well you, it would be routine when you were on, wouldn’t it? You were on in the morning and you would get the aftermath of what had happened in the night. No I didn’t not in London.
TJ: It was a good job then really.
MB: Mm well I qualified in, what did I say forty.
TJ: Forty nine Mm.
MB: So em, and then we moved up here you see, no we moved to Hemel Hemstead first then we moved up here in nineteen sixty. So when you think I, I haven’t done a great deal of work really but em I say it wasn’t very easy with the four children. So anyway.
TJ: So you are going to be invited to the official opening of the Spire in October.
MB: Yeah that will be nice and Phillipa my daughter, the oldest one is coming with me so yes that will be very nice. But I mean we belong to the 109 Squadron Association and we used to go to Bedford. They had a weekend in Bedford every year where everybody used to get together. That was very nice but it is still around a bit it’s a, they don’t go, well I think they do go to Bedford. It is very difficult because everybody is gradually dying off you see. Em, I don’t go anymore but yes they were very nice weekends. Oh and the other thing we used to do was go to the Pathfinder Ball, they had it near Christmas every year in London. Be either the Dorchester or somewhere with the RAF Dance Band and we would have a weekend in the RAF Club and that was really enjoyable, we really liked that. You know because we used to enjoy ballroom dancing. Bill was a good ballroom dancer because he had had lessons, when he went to London in the Civil Service he went to Madam So and Sos Dance School to learn how to ballroom dance properly. He was a good dancer I just had to follow him really. So eh, no they were lovely weekends those Pathfinder Balls and em as I say you had everything, the RAF Band. And eh we used to know a lot of eh the Squadron people in the Association. I’ve lost touch now, they still send me the little magazine they have, because they, they have a meeting at the ex, oh he has died now. The CO of the Squadron in his home, you know in eh, its Hertfordshire or somewhere like that, I don’t know, I’ve never been. They try and get together you know, some of them.
TJ: Well thank you very much for sharing your thoughts with us.
MB: Well I don’t think it was that interesting really.
TJ It is was fascinating.
MB: Do you think?
TJ: Yes absolutely fascinating. I’ll just add, I don’t think I put it at the beginning it’s the 11th of August 2015. Well thank you Marjorie very much.
Dublin Core
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ABirchM150811
Title
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Interview with Dr Marjorie Birch
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:07:26 audio recording
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Pending review
Pending OH summary. Allocated T Holmes
Creator
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Tina James
Date
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2015-08-11
Description
An account of the resource
Dr Marjorie Birch was born and grew up in London. She was evacuated with her younger sister when war was declared. She later trained as a medical student in London. She describes her accommodation opposite Kings Cross Station and the bombing. She married a navigator with the Pathfinders in 1946, before moving to Lincolnshire.
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Kent
England--Lincolnshire
England--London
Temporal Coverage
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1940
1941
Coverage
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Civilian
Contributor
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Hugh Donnelly
109 Squadron
bombing
evacuation
fear
home front
incendiary device
love and romance
Mosquito
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Oboe
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Pathfinders
shelter
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/257/3404/PFraserC1501.2.jpg
1b37fb0db87bcc24ea45c3ca9410d737
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/257/3404/AFraserC151113.1.mp3
c25ed2496f5e21b68df313bc38956864
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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Fraser, Colin
Colin Fraser
C Fraser
Description
An account of the resource
Four items. An oral history interview with Colin Fraser (Royal Australian Air Force) an account of his being shot down, a crew photograph and a piece of parachute memento. He served as a Lancaster navigator on 460 Squadron. His aircraft was shot down in April 1945 and he was a prisoner of war.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by XXX and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-11-13
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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Fraser, C
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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AP: This interview for the International Bomber Command Centre is with Col Fraser. A 460 Squadron navigator. The interview is taking place at Camberwell in Melbourne. My name’s Adam Purcell. The date is the 13th of November 2015. Col. I believe you have got something prepared. Let’s go.
CF: Yeah. I was born in Melbourne on 5th of November 1922. My air force number was 435111. And when the Japanese came into the war I decided to join the air force but they had many volunteers and the army wanted me so I went into the army on the 31st of December ‘41 and it took me ‘til March ‘43 to get back into the air force at Number 2 ITS Bradfield Park in Sydney. Where I was then classified as a navigator which is what I wanted. By changing Australia where the system was to have a observer, which means you could be a navigator, a bomb aimer or both depending on the size of the crew. I graduated in February forty — oh sorry. It was ‘43. ’44 sorry. Yeah. I graduated, sorry, in February ’44 as a navigator and had leave and then lived in the Melbourne Cricket Ground grandstand for seven days before I sailed off to England. I arrived in Brighton where the Australians were — had a reception centre, in February, sorry in March ’44. And we were told then immediately that there would be a delay because the fact is that the Bomber Command was not losing the people and aircrew were surplus for the moment there. I took leave courtesy of the Lady Ryder Scheme at a farm in, outside York. And I then returned to the new area of the instruction things at Warrington in Lancashire. And I and my mates spent a lot of time from there looking around various parts of England while we were waiting and we had some leave. At that time the RAF stopped the number of pilots being trained and there were empty airstrips and aeroplanes. So they said the pilots had been waiting a long time, for three weeks down to these airstrips and an empty backseat. They sent the navigators and bomb aimers to learn about map reading in English conditions. I finished up at Fairoaks which is in the Windsor Castle area. And we arrived there in early June ‘44 and we could see with flying at only a few thousand feet around the area that the invasion was well and truly on. And a couple of nights later we were not surprised at the amount of aircraft flying around for the invasion date. The — and then about ten days later we woke up to the sound of the V2. The flying bomb. We were not on the direct route from France to London, but the stray ones often were within our sight and two at least came over our area. We went back to Padgate and there we were split up into navigators and bomb aimers and I, being a navigator went up to West Frew in Scotland. And there we were joined by a section from New Zealand boys and I did my first DR navigation for six months while there. Then we were sent to 27 OUT at Lichfield which was the Australian OTU. And there we met up with our bomb aimer mates who we’d trained with, and I crewed up with Dan Lynch for the following day. We discussed having a pilot and decided we wanted one who was big and strong and had to be mature. About twenty three or twenty four [laughs] so we mixed with the pilots and picked out two pilots who seemed to fit the bill a bit. And we were at the same meal table as them that evening and the following morning when we decided that we wanted as a pilot Harry Payne. Known as Lofty because he was six foot three. So later that morning when we all got in the big hall we sat behind Lofty and were chatting to some gunners who’d also paired up. And when the chief flying instructor said, ‘Righto boys. Crew up,’ we tapped Lofty on the shoulder and said would he like a navigator and a bomb aimer and he said, ‘Yes. Do you know any others?’ and we said, ‘There’s two nice gunners over there. So we had them. They in turn knew a wireless operator from the night before so we finished up with a crew which was Harry ‘Lofty’ Payne from West Australia. Dan Lynch, the bomb aimer from Tasmania and myself, Colin Fraser from Melbourne. Our wireless operator was Bill Stanley from Melbourne. And then we had two Sydney boys as gunners. Jack Bennett, upper, mid-upper and Hugh Connochie known as Shorty, as the rear gunner. We then did ground subjects for a couple of weeks. Everybody. And I was then introduced into the mysteries of Gee. The radar navigation aid. We were taken out to the Wellington aircraft with a instructor pilot and he showed Harry how things were done and then said to him, ‘Now you can take off for three landings and take offs and then call it a day.’ Well, we took off and landed twice and the third time as we reached height the port engine failed and we went into emergency drill which for my position was in the middle of the aircraft where I couldn’t see anything. As we went around I pulled a nacelle cock to get rid of some petrol from the plane. And when Lofty turned in to make the landing he instructed me to pull the air bottle which I did and down came the undercart. The original Wellingtons that would also blow all hydraulics. But the pilots had all been advised that all planes on the station had been adjusted. That this would not happen. However, as Harry went to put down the flaps nothing happened. And he finished up banging the aircraft down halfway down the strip and he ran through the fence, across a road, a fence the other side, a bush or two, and finished up in a ditch with the back broken and up in the air. We all managed to get out of the escape hatches with any trouble, no injuries except a few minor cuts. And we took on, went back to flying the following day. And the only one there the one night the heating failed just after take-off and I had to navigate around with frozen hands. Putting them in gloves and out again. Navigation was a bit sketchy. And when I handed the log in, the instructor said to me it wasn’t too good. I maintained that in the circumstances it was quite ok. His comment back was, ‘In Bomber Command there are no excuses,’ which stayed with me for the rest of the tour. We finished there on the 11th of December and then we went in to Poole which meant sitting around for nothing for a couple of months because it was winter and there wasn’t any flying going on anyway. And we took leave to several places such as Edinburgh and there. Then on the 2nd of February we then went to Heavy Conversion Unit at Lindholme and met up with the mighty Lancaster bomber. As the navigator I met up with the H2S which allowed you to look through cloud and pick up the signals from the ground. It was good on the coast but not too good with towns. And one night when we were flying on a decoy raid which meant you flew within a few miles of the enemy coast and then turned back to make them think you were going to attack them. And that night it turned out that my oxygen tube got twisted and I was only getting half the amount of oxygen, and as such I got — cut out a dog leg we should have done and got back earlier to be noted that they were bandits in the area which was code for German fighters. Anyway, we got down. The last crew in to land while a mate of ours at 460 Squadron, Binbrook was shot down on a training flight and two of his crew were killed.
AP: Col.
CF: There were about a hundred JU88s came back with the bombers.
AP: Col. I’ll stop you there for a minute.
Other: I’ve heard this story.
AP: I haven’t yet.
[recording paused]
CF: Ah yes.
AP: Now where weren’t we?
CF: That’s how it goes. Now, where was I in this?
AP: We were talking about bandits returning from your decoy trip I think. Bandits. You were returning from your decoy trip.
CF: Oh yeah.
AP: And there were bandits.
CF: Yeah. Which meant that therefore we landed. I think we said we landed. And got, Binbrook. That’s right. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. So we’re as we said before any former on there. We finished on that at Poole, there we’ve got the — ah that’s right we’re at Lindholme. Ok. So Ok. Now where do I start from now when.
AP: Say again. Alright. Have you finished.
CF: Yeah.
AP: Your prepared statement shall we say. Ok. You said you were picked as a navigator and you said you wanted to be a navigator. Why?
CF: Because I’m good at figures. I’m not very good with my hands. I never wanted to really drive a car like all the other kids were fighting to get the steering wheel and I’d say, ‘Give me the map.’ So [laughs] yeah. I haven’t got the co-ordination with my hands. Well the obvious thing is my wife very nicely said to me, ‘You know dear if we lived on what you made with your hands we’d be below the poverty line.’ [laughs]
AP: Fair enough.
CF: No. I’m good at maths and I enjoy doing the figures. And secondly to stare, to sit with your steering column in front of me for five, six, eight, nine hours. That’s deadly. I like, I’ve got figures in front of me. I’m working on this time . Doing it there. So all in all the idea of being a pilot, although I had all the things. In those days my eyes were good for landing and everything. I was pilot/navigator category only because I was six feet one and they would not make you a gunner if you were over six feet.
AP: That’s why you’re —
CF: When I went in for my interview as to what I could be and they said, ‘What do you want to be?’ I said, ‘A navigator.’ And they probably looked at each other and said well that’s a change because ninety percent or more say a pilot. And they had a look at my figures that I had done pretty well in the exams. The mathematics and so forth. So yeah. So I was happy with being a navigator, yes. I wouldn’t have liked to have been a bomb aimer. Again, you would be steering there on a bombing trip for hour after hour whereas, you’re working on it. Mind you, at the same time you have a lot of pressure on you because if you’re not there and where you should be the crew look upon you. I always remember reading memoirs of some fella that when he said they got there and he said, ‘But we’re there,’ and the pilot and the rest of the crew said, ‘There’s no markers down. No, nothing. Are you sure you’re right Bill?’ You know. And then all of a sudden some markers went down and the pilot said, ‘Oh well done. The markers are down.’ He said, nobody apologised for all the queries and suggestions that I’d stuffed up really [laughs] yeah. No I enjoyed being a navigator. Yep. Yes.
AP: Very good. Can we — we might backtrack a little bit actually. Your early life when you were growing up. What, what did you do before the war?
CF: What?
AP: Yeah.
CF: Well I grew up at, in Hawthorn you might say. Down near the Quay on tennis courts on Scotch College where we had the Gardiner Creek winding around and like all the little kids along the Gardiner Creek we played down there when we shouldn’t have probably. We even had a bit of naked swimming there when we were six or seven or eight sort of business there in the creek. And somebody asked me once what was the, your memory of childhood? And I said, I thought for a while and I said, ‘Freedom.’ We were free. There was never any worries about anything sort of business there. Admittedly in the Depression I never gave my parents enough credit for the way they looked after us four kids during the Depression sort of business then. But the point was that as I said at my elder brother’s funeral my first memory of him was mother calling out, ‘Take you little brother with you and look after him.’ And that was the way that it acted in those days. Big sisters and big brothers looked after little brothers and I had what you might — and of course there was no TV. And we played games within the family and with our mates, sort of business, there. I had a great mate who died only a few months ago with a sudden heart attack and I went out my back gate and up a couple of houses in his back gate and vice versa and he was just as much — had two sisters he didn’t [pause] but he was just as much an elder brother as I was for the girls. They just treated me like a brother. He was over so often, he was always with us. Yeah. But the freedom was that was it. I could do what I sort of liked. Mother never said ‘Where are you going?’ Or something or other. I would just say, ‘Oh I’m going down to see Bill Jones or something like that.’ There was no worries that there were going to be any strange men or odd people around about. I had the — and there weren’t that many cars on the road either sort of business. That was it. It was freedom type of business that I had on there. And I was in the, one of the higher ones up in class. Again fortunately I had brains. I had nothing with the hands but the brains. I had the brains. And I can remember at state school you had two, what you’d call, very smart bastards, and I was one of the next three or four after that to get fired over two or three or four of us. But those two were outstanding and then we three or four or so were varied from time to time as to who was the smartest bastard shall we say. But that was it. We had freedom type of business of it there. And what was more. To do it there, more we had security ahead of us. It was obvious that if we’d ever thought about it we would grow up and get married and have kids and have a house. And that was, you know, the feeling was there was life ordained and certainly anybody who took a job in the public service would be, assume that they would see their life out in the public service. Again, if you joined a big company like BHP or something like that you would again, would assume that you’re there. So that was also better. But on the other hand of course as you were growing up you didn’t think too much about security. You just assumed I suppose that there was a instruction. And living in Hawthorn black was black and white was white. It was only when I went into the army I found there was a lot of shades of grey, depending on circumstances and the viewpoints of people etcetera. But in Hawthorn where I was, as I said we had all those. We had all that creek and the open land to run and play and fished and so forth etcetera there and I can remember the actual Quay on tennis courts there being built shall we say on it there. But that was it. It was the freedom of doing things. We might, as I say, Depression we might have had a second hand football or cricket bat or something or other. You had something. That was it, sort of business there. You weren’t looking for much sort of business there, and as I say you had a lot of, a lot of kids in that area I suppose moved at the same time and there was always. You walked out the house and walked around to the next over or you’d run into a couple of kids and you sort of business there. Yeah. Yes.
AP: Yeah. [unclear]
CF: A good childhood really. As I say not a very, not a rich one in any way or form sort of business there but a good childhood of freedom. Yeah.
AP: What— was the army your first job. Was the army your first job?
CF: What?
AP: Sorry. Sorry. Your first job. Was, was that — did you come straight out of school and straight into the military or did you do something?
CF: At that stage, Year 10, the intermediate was where everybody except the, the title used recently — only the swots went past Year 10 and they would be the future doctors and so forth there. The only the very, very smart ones you might say, the top ten percent or something went past Year 10. The rest of but again, looking, you went to work in a big company and when you started out they had — shall we say half a dozen new boys started at the end of January or something and you worked in the mail room. And for twelve months you delivered papers and picked up papers all around and you got to know what happened in the company. And then after that or sometime during it perhaps you then got a job of doing — writing something up or doing something and you stepped up your attitude. And you also went to work — you went to night school to learn book keeping accountancy. Or whatever was the thing of it there. So for two nights a week and maybe a bit of time to do a bit of study you were occupied shall we say. You didn’t have much money so you couldn’t go out much sort of business there. You did the things. Yeah.
AP: So why did you want to join the air force? Why? Why did you want to join the air force?
CF: Well I’d never had much to do with the water so the navy was out for a start. The idea of being on a ship sailing around on water had no appeal. The army — well I had read a few books about World War One. In the trenches and such and again the idea of face to face, shall we say, bayonet and so forth didn’t appeal much to me and so I couldn’t see a place in the army for my clerical skills shall we say. That type of business. So the air force and being a navigator appealed to me. Yeah. Yeah.
AP: Fair enough. You were, I think you said ITS was at Bradfield Park. Your Initial Training School was at Bradfield Park?
CF: Yes. Don’t ask me why they sent a Melbourne boy, like a fella said to me when he went to do his initial training as a pilot, he lived in Adelaide and thought he’d go to Padfield or something.
AP: Parafield.
CF: And no. No. No. They sent him over to Wagga.
AP: Ask not. Just do.
CF: The mysteries of postings. Yes.
AP: What happened at ITS? What, what sorts of things did you — were you taught. What sort of things did you do?
CF: Well you learned the theory of flight was the main thing there. Why did a plane stay up shall we say. You did mathematics for your because later on your skill. You did plenty of PT to keep yourself in good fit there. Incidentally, the fittest I ever was after the army induction because we did marching, drill there. PT. And then we’d finish up at four in the afternoon with a swim in the [Goulburn River?] And at the end of six weeks of that or something like that we, at nineteen years of age you were very fit when you’d been doing all this exercise every day for six weeks sort of business there. Yeah. The [pause], I can’t really think what else you did in there as I say the theory of flight. The theory of there and as I say mathematics. And PT. Yeah. I can’t think of really much else you did in that sort of days. I didn’t ever keep any records of what we did but certainly when you were on the reserve they would send you homework to do on mathematics. Do that there. So we had a reasonable amount of mathematics in there. Teaching up at there. But now I can’t remember really much other than the fact that we did the mathematics and the theory of flight etcetera up at there. Yeah. They might have had something else up at there. I don’t think if that was the question when you know they would ask you how you got up there. Yeah.
AP: So the first time that you ever went in an aeroplane what aircraft was it? Where was it? And what did think?
CF: It was an Anson aircraft at Mount Gambier which was Number 2 Air Observer’s School. So that was where I go on from ITS to Mount Gambier. And we went on [pause] I think it was an initial flying thing. We flew over the land and we flew over the ocean. And I think that was, you might say, showing us what flying was about. I don’t think we did anything other than fly around and see what was there. Yeah. And the Anson. Yeah.
AP: Did you —
CF: And what was more you had to wind it up a hundred and six turns because you were the, you were there. The pilots wouldn’t wind it up. You were part of the crew who had to wind it up. Yeah.
AP: That’s the undercarriage. That’s the wheels.
CF: That was the navigation. Yes. And you flew two to a crew. Two to a crew. One was the navigator and the other was the secondary one who had to take some notes about the countryside. Yeah.
AP: Did you, did you encounter any accidents or incidents in that early training? Did you, did you see any or —
CF: No accidents in the early training.
AP: No.
CF: Australia had none of the training actually till I was a sergeant and I didn’t actually get involved in any accident that time at all. Sort of business there. No.
AP: Alright. Once you got your wings you passed out as a qualified navigator. You then went to the UK somehow. How did you get there?
CF: We actually went to Brisbane and we caught a American twelve thousand dollar victory ship. They were the ships that they were welding for the first time. They had the, what was the seven thousand tonnes was called the something or other. And I was on a twelve thousand tonne called the Sea Corporal. And we went from Brisbane to San Francisco. And the two things I remember was A) I could see a rain storm and I could see a rainstorm had length and it had width but living where I was in the sort of valley a bit really of Gardiner Creek you only ever saw the rain coming at you sort of business there. You could never see the width or the depth of it but then all of a sudden there you had the ocean. Look across there and there is a rain going across and it’s got width and it’s got length. And the other thing. One day we went into the doldrums when the sea is perfectly smooth. There was no waves crashing. Smooth. There’s no, not a ripple on the water. This was what the old time sailors with the sail used to dread getting. I can imagine. That’s it there. I saw that one day. Yeah. It was eerie to watch this, shall we say, waves — not raising high obviously but, you know, up in the air, yeah.
AP: Very nice. You got to the States. Did you spend any particular time in the USA or was it straight across?
CF: Oh we had six hours. We went to a place called Angel Island in San Francisco Bay which was an American camp and we were given six hours from 6 o’clock in the evening till midnight to see San Francisco. That was our time in San Francisco. Then the next day we caught a train. A train across America. And the great thing about that — on the Pullman carriages they had sleepers. Great thing. Yes. We had to sleep sitting up in Victoria. Well in Australia and in England and then we got to outside New York and we got three days leave in New York. And then we went down to the harbour to there and on one side was the Queen Elizabeth of eighty four thousand tonnes and on the other side was a boat, I’ve forgotten the name, fifty five thousand tonnes. And we had never seen a ship bigger than twenty thousand tons. So eyes opened up big and wide. We didn’t know actually we were going to go on, you see. We actually slept in the Queen Elizabeth. In the third class cinema with bunks three high. And they had something like twelve to fifteen thousand troops on. I understand the American soldiers had eight hours each to sleep. That was it. There was only one bed for three American soldiers when they were taking them across. Six were there. So that was — you had two meals a day. And you had about, I think about half an hour you were allowed up for fresh air once a — once a day you got half an hour on the deck to get a breath of fresh air or something. Because the Queen Elizabeth had done that trip, you know, how many times they had the work down to a fine art. You had to wear a colour patch on your uniform and you weren’t allowed to move outside that colour patch except to go down and have your meal. It was a highly organised thing of it sort of business there. Yes it was. Yeah.
AP: How long ago — sorry, how long did that take. That voyage.
CF: Five or six days it took us to get across. Yeah. Yeah.
AP: Not much fun. Not much fun.
CF: Yeah.
AP: Alright. You get to England. This is the first time —
CF: Actually you finish up in the Gourock in the Clyde. Firth of the Clyde.
AP: Ok.
CF: Yeah.
AP: You get to the UK though.
CF: You take the train down and in actual fact you get in the train and you go to Glasgow and then you come to a city that’s got a big castle. And it’s got Waverley. That’s when we asked where we were. ‘You’re at Waverley.’ We couldn’t find Waverley on the map. And of course later on, some a month or two or so later somebody went up to and said, ‘Hey that was Edinburgh.’ Waverley is the station like Flinders Street.
AP: Certainly is. This was the first time you were overseas.
CF: Yes. First time. No. Sorry the army was the first time I was outside Victoria.
AP: Really.
CF: Yeah.
AP: Ok. So as a young Australian, the first time you were overseas wartime England would have been fairly confronting I suppose. What did you think of wartime England when you first got there? What was it like?
CF: Well, wartime. We got there in April which was spring you might say. And we had seen many pictures of England. Of the green land and so forth there. And coming down from Scotland the land was open shall we say and pleasant and the main memory I got down there seeing, for instance all the poles to stop planes landing from the invasion and other matters that indicated there was a war on around the place and England, I read a book. The same thing. It seemed to fit in pretty clearly of what you’d seen in the papers shall we say because you weren’t looking at the slums of London or anything of that nature. We were at Brighton which was the big as you probably know was the big holiday resort with the pubs all along the front. Like something, you might say, like the Gold Coast or something or other like that. And plenty of, actually in peacetime B&Bs behind that, also around places etcetera there. But no England was comforting I would say. There was no problem in there and of course they spoke the language [laughs]
AP: What did you think of the people?
CF: Incidentally, going across to America we had one naive nineteen year old saying to some American officers talking about America and he said, ‘Won’t they think it funny we haven’t got an accent?’ Took the Americans about five minutes to calm down with their laughter.
AP: Fair enough. What did you think of the people in England? Did you, did you have much to do with the civilian population?
CF: Well as they said in the book of, “No Moon Tonight” the author said if there was ever a Commonwealth spirit it was in England during the war. There were no — the Canadian, the English and such and one of the great things about being an Australian was that there were no Australian army troops to stuff it up in England. The air force by and large were ground crew admittedly as well. But by and large the Australians over there were, shall we say middle class and educated and were very popular with the locals and with the girls. That’s it. Yeah. And we were pretty well paid shall we say. Not as well paid as the Americans but we had — yeah.
AP: What — what sort of things, when on leave and these could be at any point when you’re in England. When you’re on a squadron or when you’re in training. What sort of things did you get up to when you were on leave or when you were off duty?
CF: Well, I went on leave with Dan Lynch who — he’d been doing the first year of a medicine course so you might say that we, on leave looked at seeing what we could of England, Scotland and Wales sort of business of it there. So we were always looking for the views and what was there and the old castle and all those types of things of it there. We had a few drinks but basically we didn’t hang around the pubs etcetera there. We, we wanted to see the actual country and as a tourist shall we say there. Yeah. That was my particular little group of, shall we say half a dozen mates and so forth you mixed. In other words you soon found out who wants to, you know, we were friendly with a couple of older blokes who, you know. They were shall we say twenty five or twenty seven or something like that. They’d like to, and they were married they liked to just go down to the pub and just have a drink and a talk. That was fair enough. Whereas we would possibly pop into the pub for one or two drinks and then on to the dance or something of that nature of it there. Yeah. So, like, how things go, when we were at OTU we got a week’s leave and Dan Lynch and I went out and went to hitchhike a ride with the Americans trucks to Brum. Birmingham. And we –they pulled up and, ‘Where do you want to go.’ I said, ‘Birmingham,’ and, ‘That’s ok we’re going to Oxford.’ ‘Could we come to Oxford?’ ‘Oh yes. Hop in the back.’ So we finished up at Oxford. And the following night we went and saw a George Bernard Shaw play which I had never seen one before. But that’s, as I say, a mate of mine. Dan Lynch. He was, that was his culture more so than mine, shall we say, etcetera. Yeah there. Again it was mixed up with you that for instance out of hours, 7 that was what we had to go to get back by the way that we picked up with the English. Bill Stanley and Dan and I would often make a three and go to the dance shall we say. Whereas the navigator Jack Bennett would then be he was a bit of a, he had a couple of other blokes or something. He was chasing the girls and so forth there. And he would, he’d go there and go sometimes with Shorty and the pilot. They tended to do other things shall we say. Yeah. But that was it. You, you soon found the people that wanted to do things that you wanted to do. Yeah.
AP: Did you spend much time in London? Did you spend much time in London?
CF: No.
AP: Not at all.
CF: No. We thought, having had a good look around London on a couple of occasions when we were there. No we didn’t spend, we spent some time there but no we wanted to, when we went on leave we would head down to either Cornwall and Devon or John O’Groats up in Scotland. We never made either place, or land. We didn’t make Lands End. We didn’t make John O’Groats but we would head off with a pass and went off with a thing and we’d stay one day, two days, three days and then all of a sudden realise that we’ve only got two days left. Perhaps we had better in that case make a firm plan where we’d go but that was it. Yeah. We went we made the opportunity. The one little group I sort of mixed around in was to see as much of England, Scotland and Wales as possible in the time. Yeah. In fact, Ireland as well. When the war was over, over there I actually went over to Ireland. Yeah. Where my Irish grandfather came from.
AP: Excellent. What did, what were your thoughts when you finally got out of that Wellington? Or the Wellingtons that kept having engine failures.
CF: Yeah.
AP: And you’re now on four engine aeroplanes. You’re looking at a Lancaster for the first time.
CF: Well, wait a second. When I, when after the Wellington crashed or when we moved in to the Lancaster.
AP: Sorry. In general. When you moved on. So you’ve left the Wellingtons behind.
CF: Left it behind you. Yeah.
AP: Yeah. Thank goodness for that.
CF: The old story was that the following day we went flying and that crash was they rolled the Wellington. That’s what happened. We didn’t suffer any and our main thought then was we’d got a bloody good pilot who didn’t panic. He did everything he could to keep the aircraft going and so forth. Safety sort of business of it there. Because as I said they found out that aircraft somehow had not been modified. I never found out why and so forth. Anyway, no, you, we were young. You got on with it and when you got to a Lancaster well let’s face it, let’s say the Lancaster at the Heavy Conversion Unit might have been a little battered but it was better than the Wellington. At the OTU sort of business there. Yeah. And you had four engines too. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. No. You didn’t worry too much about that.
AP: Can you, can you describe for me what the navigator’s position on the Lancaster is like? What? What’s there when you’re sitting at your desk. What’s around you and what’s it like?
CF: Well a Lancaster you had first of all you were the pilot and the flight engineer stood alongside of each other with the great things in front of them. You, then there was a big black curtain could be pulled across there where [unclear] and you actually faced sideways with a desk in front of you and therefore in front of you you had a compass which theoretically agreed with the compass in the — [paused]. You had to check that there because sometimes it didn’t. And you then had a set for the Gee which you used frequently. You read the thing and you got two, and two things on that and then you plotted on a special sheet which curved and let there. And then you had a, then a thing for the, on the side, for the H2S when you had that equipped on it there. And the rest of the thing of course your tables had your log and most of all you had your flight plan which you drew on as you went along and filled the detail in it there. So you had a couple of pencils and a compass and you had then a, the calculator. I’m trying to think of the name that is that you put your thing on and drew a couple of things on. It was a calculator for navigators to use. I’m trying to think of the name of it now. Yeah. That was it. At that stage you hadn’t, the navigator didn’t have a drift recorder and the ones we had which you had in the Anson and so forth to get there but when you had the Gee in the aircraft you didn’t need that. You had your map on there. Yeah. So as I say you sat on the side and then as I say you had a curtain between you and the, really, flight engineer and then you had a curtain on the other side to keep the light going out that way type of business of it there. So you were in your little cocoon with the light going on. As they said one navigator came out of the second or third raid and had a look at it, and said, ‘Bloody hell,’ and he said he never looked, he never would come out of his cocoon again. He didn’t want to see it.
AP: Did you ever have a look at a target? Did you ever come out and have a look?
CF: No. I went out and had a look. As one navigator said if you’re coming this far let’s have a look. But as they say in my thing that I had down there that on my first trip we were down for a place near Cologne which is in the Ruhr. Where the ack ack is pretty severe and the point was that we got there. We — ok there. Everything was going nice and easily and you’re thinking it’s a nice and easy sort of business there and then you see what’s there. But the bomb aimer’s there and he says everything and then all of a sudden he says, you know, ‘Bomb doors. Bomb doors closed.’ That’s the thing and then he called down a rather, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’ I must admit that the rest of the crew including me were feeling much the same way as he was feeling. This is no, no place to be for us nice blokes. That was straight out of there and say, as we were flying across occupied France and Germans had —half an hour later something after we’d dropped the bomb or something, maybe there, a shot come up and went through our wing and kept on going thank God. And it was dark. You couldn’t see outside and our pilot, having already done one trip as a second pilot said, ‘Oh it’s alright boys. A near miss.’ And about twenty minutes later when daylight appeared the mid-upper gunner said, You’ve got a bloody big hole in the wing,’ [laughs]. But that’s it. We got back home and we felt a bit guilty that, bringing back an aircraft another crew normally flew with a hole in the wing. As if we had been a bit careless about the whole thing. Yeah.
AP: That sort of leads on to the next question. The ground crew. What sort of relationship did you have with your ground crew?
CF: I didn’t have much of a relationship because as the navigator I was working up to the last minute finishing the plan we’d been told and so forth. And I was taken out to the aircraft just before it was time to — I never, never really saw the ground crew at all. And of course when we got back there was a no talk for the crew. So I had no relationship with the ground crew for the simple reason, as I say, that I didn’t — I was not there like the rest of the crew had been out doing a check and so forth etcetera there. But I was a late comer because I was there and sometimes you got you had to then finish your flight plan because you hadn’t had time to finish it beforehand. Yeah. So our pilot had a good relationship with the ground staff. I don’t know about the other crew members that were there as to whether they did or didn’t. I have a feeling that we only did seven trips so we weren’t there a long time and I don’t think, I think basically our flight engineer and our pilot had a good relationship with the ground crew but the other members I don’t think they really had much relationship with them type of thing.
AP: Alright. I’ve done that. Were there any superstitions or rituals that you, either that your crew took part in or that you saw in the squadron? Hoodoos or anything like that?
CF: No. No. I heard of various rituals and odds and sods but as far as I know there was no rituals about you always wore a blue tie or a certain hankie or something or other. As far as I know, in our particular crew, there was never any particular ritual, as you said. Some crews there was a ritual something or other but with our crew as far as I know there wasn’t any.
AP: Did you have any nose art painted on your aeroplane or were you not there long enough? Did you have anything painted on the front of your, on the nose of your aeroplane.
CF: No.
AP: You weren’t there long enough.
CF: No. No.
AP: That’s alright. Just thought I’d ask the question. So oh that was what I was going to ask you. As the navigator you’re working pretty hard when you’re flying. I believe it was fixing a position every six minutes or something along those lines. Can you remember much of the process of the actual physical what you were doing?
CF: Well when you were in England and you had the Gee which gave you your position, as you, I think you mentioned, every six minutes. You had to get a reading where you were and from that you had to work out the wind that had blown in the last six minutes and then readjust your flight plan as to whether to tell the pilot to change course if so what to change to. And you also had to check your estimated time of arrival likewise. Every six minutes. Which meant that you were working steadily shall we say? Yes. Yeah. As I say that was the great thing as I was good at mathematics I could, I could meet those six minutes all right shall we say. Yeah. Yes.
AP: And when, when you were no longer —
CF: And then once you, once you got over Germany and your Gee was jammed or you had difficulty getting a good reading because Gee lines were curved and over a certain distance they tended to merge into each so you could you know could be a half an inch deciding where they actually crossed sort of business there. But when you, after that you were dependant on if the bomb aimer can tell you something and sometimes the Pathfinders would drop a light to say this is the turning point to something of that nature there which I don’t remember ever having that myself. And basically we were flying on what information we’d had and anything we’d had in the first half hour or so or an hour or so of flying. And that’s one thing. When we started operations the [pause] see this was the — we started in March ‘45 the actual operations and the, that stage they were getting into the German border which meant that you possibly had a couple of hours of what the actual wind was that you could do yourself, sort of business a bit there. Other than that you flew on your flight plan and if you were over cloud, well, there and there were at times a wind direction might be come over from the Pathfinders. They might send it back if the wind was so and so and you might get a thing from them. Very rarely we did that but I heard it happened at times. We basically flew on DR. Dead reckoning. Once you got past the, into the German jamming and so forth there. Yeah. And of course it was always nice to see the Pathfinders drop the markers and you got off the course. Or you could see them ahead of yourself. Yes.
AP: The [pause] alright, what was the drill if one of your gunners spotted a night fighter and said, ‘Corkscrew. Port. Go.’ From your perspective as a navigator what happened next?
CF: Never happened to us fortunately there but as a navigator you mean when they said, ‘Go.’ Well, as a navigator you just sit there and grind your teeth or something or other. Or say, that there is nothing you could do and the only great thing what you had to do was to make sure that the, your gear on your desk when they flew into a steep curve didn’t go flying anywhere. And particularly because I remember the first time when we’d been practicing doing it for the first time when the pilot flew it down and the bomb aimer for some reason was having a rest on the bed, the rest bed which went along the aircraft. And my compasses flew up in the air and was flying towards him. And he was trying to push away this compass coming at him. At that — so I learned from that that if there was at any time the first thing I would do would be yes to put my hand on my gear and hold it there.
AP: Hold on for dear life.
CF: But fortunately I didn’t have to do that. Yeah.
AP: Ok. You mentioned something when we were at the RSL at Caulfield the other day. At the EATS lunch. You came up and you said something happened on Anzac Day 1945.
CF: Happened on —
AP: Anzac Day 1945. You haven’t told me that story yet.
CF: Well that’s what I’m getting on to later on. That was the, in actual fact that’s the day we got shot down.
AP: That’s what I was hoping you’d say.
CF: Yeah. Yeah.
AP: Please tell me about that experience.
CF: Yeah. Well I’ll tell you about the whole story. That’s part of my story.
AP: That’s part of your story.
CF: Yeah.
AP: Well ok.
CF: In actual fact I did that for this group, did one and I got for what turned out to be would I have my photograph taken and I said yes and I turned up like this and the, I found out that there was a team of five or six people. Not just one from the publicity. And one wanted the story and one wanted a photograph and so forth there. And I finished up getting my medals out and having a photograph taken and then they said, ‘Would you say a few words?’ I said, ‘Well a couple.’ A few words turned into, ‘Will you make a ten minute speech?’ So I finished up making a ten minute speech which described what happened from the day before when we were on the battle order which was the, picked like lead teams. That was the team that picked for the following day which was Anzac day. And my story lasted from there till the time that [pause] where does that go? Till the time we got to the Stalag. That’s right. Yeah. Ten minute speech. Yeah.
AP: Well I’ve got to the point in my questions now where we’ve been talking about operations so this is probably an appropriate time to carry on with your story if you —
CF: Yeah.
AP: If you’re happy to do so.
CF: Yeah. Yes. Well as I say. Right. Ok. Well now. Where were we? We’d got [pause] oh we got to Heavy Conversion Unit. I got introduced there, that I forgot to mention the fact that we picked up a flight engineer there. English flight engineer at the, when we got to Lindholme we picked up a English engineer. He had been, he was one of those fellows who’d been trained as a pilot and been sitting around for eight or ten weeks doing nothing and therefore he volunteered to go to go to a six weeks to be flight engineer and therefore get into operations. So we finished up, as I say a bit there that he was happy to fly with an Australian crew and we were happy to have him as a second pilot shall we say because he was a qualified pilot on it there. And he did a little bit of flying of the Lancaster while we were there and while we were at 460 so that he could take over if anything happened to our pilot. It was reassuring to have him. Yeah. Yeah. So then we get to, let me see, then we get to the 460 in March. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Ok. We start on that now?
AP: Yeah. Go for it.
CF: While at the start of our Heavy Conversion Unit we met up with our new flight engineer required for a Lancaster. He — name of Rick Thorpe and he came from Sheffield in Yorkshire. He was happy to join an Australian crew and we were happy to have him as a flight engineer and second pilot if necessary. We finished our training at HCU in March ‘45 and was transferred to Australian squadron number 460 at, near the village of Binbrook in the Lincolnshire. We did a training trip and the [pause] our skipper then did a second dickey trip with an experienced crew over Germany and after he came back about three days later we were on the battle order for that night. And we had the briefing. Found out we were going to bomb [Bruckstrasse?] which was a town close to [pause] what was it? Cologne. Everything went well. We took off at about 1.45 in the morning. Flew to [Bruckstrasse?] Started our bomb run. Everything was going nicely along. Nobody was saying anything. There was radio silence except for the navigator. The bomb aimer giving directions. And then the bomb aimer said, ‘Bombs gone. Bomb doors closed. Let’s get the bloody hell out of this,’ in a rather excited voice. And the rest of the crew felt that they had the same feelings. It was time to go. And on the way back across occupied France the plane got a shudder and the pilot told us that it was a near miss but it was dark at the time. Twenty minutes later when daylight came they found out that they had a hole in the wing that the shell had gone right through. We went back somewhat shamefaced that we’d injured the plane that was usually flown by one of the more experienced pilots. We then did several more trips and went ok. And then we went to Potsdam which was our longest trip to that date and as we dropped our bombs on Potsdam we were grabbed by the searchlights circuit and that’s very dangerous because the guns keep following those searchlights. And we dived very, very smartly and very steeply and heaven knows what speed we got to but we got out of the searchlights and flew back home. We did a trip to Bremen and as we were starting our bomb run the word came over, the code word, ‘Marmalade,’ which means cancelled. No bombs. So we had to dodge over Bremen to miss the flak and come home and land with a five or ten tons of bombs. Then on the 24th of April we were on the bomb order for the following day which would be our seventh flight. And wake up time was 2.15 am. So an early night. Up next morning, breakfast, flight plan, briefing and we were going to Berchtesgaden area. Not the town. In two waves. The first wave of a hundred and eighty planes was to bomb the houses of Hitler and all the Nazi leaders who’d also built their holidays home there and the communication centre and administration buildings. The second wave, of which we were one were to bomb the barracks of the Gestapo and the army that were looking after the Nazi leaders and their communication centre and administration quarters. That was one hour later. We took off just after 5 o’clock in the morning and flew down to the meeting point, joined the gaggle and were flying over The Channel and along over the French countryside. It was a lovely day. Beautiful blue sky. No clouds. Green fields, lakes and rivers down below and on the right was the majestic Alps and with the snow shining on the snow tops. Absolute picture book. We got near the target area and I left my table and moved behind. Ten inches behind the seat of the engineer because on the floor was a parcel of metal strips for [pause] we looked ahead, the flak looked light-medium so no worries. And the bomb aimer took over and he said, ‘Left. Left.’ And then, ‘Bombs gone. Bomb doors closed.’ And as he finished that word we were hit and something flew up past my face and out over the roof. And I looked down and in the centre of the parcel there was a jagged hole. In the meantime the pilot and the engineer were closing down the starboard engine which was a mess and the two inner motors which had also gone. So we were flying on one engine and an empty Lancaster will fly on one engine. The pilot checked the crew and found that everybody was ok. And he then said that the port outer engine, the remaining one was not giving full power and perhaps it would be best if we jumped while he had full control. Nobody wanted to jump. And the flight engineer said, ‘But we can’t do that Lofty. We’re over the Germany.’ At the time I thought that was a very sensible remark. Then we decided that we would try to reach the line of the allied army but very quickly the port, the remaining engine stopped and we were gliding and we had to go. And the drill was to all escape underneath the plane so you wouldn’t get hit by the tail plane. And the bomb aimer was the first to go and the four others all followed in due rate. And then the rear gunner appeared with the parachute in his arms. It had caught on the way up and opened. The pilot told him to get the spare parachute. He came back to say it wasn’t there. Later we found that they had taken it out to repack it and not — failed to replace it. The pilot then made a very very brave decision that rather than leave the rear gunner to his fate he would try and make a crash landing. At this time there was petrol floating around on the floor of the cockpit. His chances weren’t too good but he found that with the five men gone, the petrol also gone and such the plane would glide much better. And he saw a field down below of what looked like wheat and he glided the plane down. Dodged some wires close and put it down on a cornfield. They then both got out of the plane. Ran forty or fifty yards. Threw themselves down on the ground, looked back waiting for the explosion but nothing happened. The earth they’d driven into had apparently put out the flames. But appeared four Hitler youth boys aged about fourteen or so carrying a couple of machine guns which they pointed at the two Australians who were pretty worried. The boys were very excited. Talking to each other. And then along came the Volkssturm. The German Home Guard who took over and took the two Australians back to the regular army. Harry, the pilot, Harry was interrogated by a very high German officer there who said to him, ‘Why are you Australians here? We haven’t got any argument with Australia.’ Harry didn’t attempt to explain it but — meanwhile I had parachuted down to the ground and landed near a couple of houses in which the housewives were standing. Presumably looking at me coming down. And I hastily unbuckled my harness and parachute and left it there and went, walked quickly over to where there was a large clump of trees. The Volkssturm didn’t take long to turn up and no doubt the ladies pointed out where I was. And they were — I thought they said, ‘Pistol? Pistol?’ and patted me. I said, ‘No, and shook my head very vigorously. They said, ‘Parachute.’ and I just raised my eyebrows there and I assume that the couple of German ladies would be wearing silk underwear in the future. They took me to an army camp where there were my, the [unclear] were, was there and in the next couple of hours along came the mid-upper gunner and the flight engineer. And two or three hours after that again the pilot and the rear gunner appeared. The remaining member of the crew, the bomb aimer dropped first. He landed in the snow in the foothills and was captured by the mountain troops who took him deeper into the mountains and he actually didn’t get out of there till two days after the war ended. On May the 10th. The Americans turned up there. We were taken from the camp into the town where they had taken over the hotel as a headquarters and we were put in a room and finally given a piece of dry bread and it was covered in honey and ersatz cup of coffee. There was no hostility there. They were, but they were treating us as prisoners but not close guard. And came the evening light was there and we were put in the back of a covered wagon with the parachute of the, we think, the flight engineer. And we left there with a couple of guards. You might say nominal. Nobody was taking it too seriously. And we drove into the mountains and through the night. There was lots of traffic both ways on the roads. The Germans were using the darkness to avoid the allied fighters who were everywhere. And we then changed over half way across. We changed over to an open truck and we got under the parachute to open the parachute. Yeah. And at 6 o’clock we arrived at the Stalag 7a. Moosburg. Where they opened, a couple of the allied troops actually opened a couple of Red Cross parcels and fed us some breakfast which was very welcome. They then drove us further on to a communication centre at [Mainwaring?] about twenty kilometres away. And that afternoon the interrogating officer had Lofty, our pilot, in and asked him the questions and they got the usual answers there. And they said where, ‘Where do you come from?’ Lofty said, ‘West Australia.’ And the interrogating officer said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I know that quite well. I was an agent out there on several occasions for German firms buying wheat and wool.’ And Lofty said we then had a chat about the west Australian back countryside of which he knew more than I did. And then he said, ‘Well you’d better get back to your crew.’ So he said that was the interrogation. The Germans had given up. And the next morning, we stayed the night there and the next morning we were taken back to the Stalag on a tray, a horse tray with two horses to carry us back to the thing and we did a mixture of walking and sitting on the truck. And we talked to various Australians along the way who had been working on the farms. Where was the question? And we got back to the Stalag and the chief Australian officer said, ‘Do you know what’s going to happen to us prisoners when the allies arrive?’ And our pilot said, ‘Oh yes. We’re going to be taken back to England in the back of bombers.’ ‘Oh,’ said the group captain, ‘How would you know?’ Our pilot said, ‘Well the day before we got shot down they marked twenty five places on our plane where people could sit.’ ‘Oh.’ That was the end of that. The, on the 29th of April the American 14th Division came in and we were free. But it was some time before we got back to England.
AP: And you did go back to England in the back of a bomber. Did you go back to England in the back of a bomber?
CF: Yes. I think that’s about enough there but in actual fact what happened was that was the 29th of May. On May the 1st, yeah the 29th of April, May the 1st two days later General Patton arrived sitting on the front of a truck and at least a hundred correspondents and photographers if not a thousand were there and he announced that we would all be home in two or three days. Back in England in two or three days. And the, some of the Americans would be back in America in two to three weeks. At which the old timers such as me and such were a little bit cynical because of the amount of numbers. And we, yeah, so we sat in the Stalag with the — somehow or other the food was still coming in and the Red Cross parcels were being tapped and so forth. There wasn’t much difference under the Americans than there was under the Germans shall we say because I wasn’t going to go out into the town that I couldn’t speak the language and there were some wild people around. And, yes, I stayed in camp. But the long term prisoners who could speak German went into the town and in actual fact slept in some of the houses because the German, the German civilians liked to have you sleeping in their house if you were well behaved. There was no, any wild men turned up in the middle of the night sort of business, there. On the 7th of May. The night of the 6th of May we were told the following morning at 5 o’clock we would be taken by semi-trailer to air strips where we would be loaded on DC3s. A Dakota who would take us to the main ports, airports where we would then get into either American or British bombers. On the 7th of May we got up at 5 o’clock and duly got on the back of semi-trailers there and we were driven, I reckon forty odd kilometres if not more to an airstrip, a grass airstrip and quite a few. A big crowd. Only a few planes turned up. And therefore that night we were taken back to the German, at Ingolstadt the German. And we did some souveniring of some German wear and tear. And they took us back to the airstrip again the following day. And that was May 8th. Everybody was celebrating. One plane turned up, don’t ask me how they got to one plane there. So at lunchtime, by then the fella in charge of the shipment out said, ‘Go away and have a swim in the river or whatever you do. There’s nothing. Nobody is going to come in today and get it there.’ So an, sorry English long term prisoner who slept just near where I was in the hut said, ‘Oh come into town.’ I said, ‘ Oh ok.’ He said, ‘We’ll go and get, go in to the house and get some hot water for which we’ll give them American cigarettes,’ which were a very strong bartering tool and we’ll take some coffee in. He said, ‘I’ve got some of the stuff that the Americans who got taken out yesterday left on the ground. And let’s put it this way. A long term prisoner never threw anything away. You could, if you didn’t want it you could barter it for something else. And, ‘Yeah. Ok,’ and we went in and I don’t know whether he’d sized it up before we went in this house and we saw them and said you know could we get some water for a wash and a shave and we got some American cigarettes. And yes that’s ok. So we had a wash and a shave and then we said we’d got some coffee and they said yeah. So we were there and two daughters appeared aged, well they might have been nineteen, twenty, twenty one. Some like that age. And we found out that they had married some local boys who had then been grabbed by the army where ever it was. They were taken into Stalingrad. Do you know? Have you heard of Stalingrad?
AP: Yes.
CF: And as such they wondered whether they’d ever see their husbands again, sort of business, there. So that was their message. That we were celebrating the end of the war and they of course weren’t celebrating. And the two daughters were wondering you know just what the bloody hell was going to be the future of them. Anyway we had some nice cup of coffee with them. We having produced the coffee grains there to do it. Yeah. And we went back to the camp and we were taken to a jail that night and there was a bit of a fire about four in the morning or something or other. Some screaming. We got out of that and went and spent the rest of the night back at the airfield and using the overcoats that had all been abandoned by the, because they wouldn’t let you take overcoats on planes. It would make the load too heavy. And that was the 8th. The 9th and the 10th a few planes came in and the English bloke with the German language and so forth managed to wangle himself on one of the planes. So we didn’t go back to the house again and we just filled in the day just walking around. It was nice warm weather and such. So on the 11th there we were having breakfast. Oh we slept out those two nights using the overcoats and so what shelter there was and such so the following morning we’re there and the whole bloody plane, DC3s turned up. So we have to grab what breakfast we could and go and get ready, ready to go and you know make up plans. You had to go and list. Before you got on a plane you had to list everybody who was getting on the plane so if anything happened you knew what was happening . So we got taken to Rheims. To the small aerodrome and then we were taken by semi-trailer across to the major airport which of, was Juvencourt which was, you know, had about, probably had about five runways. Whatever it is. Anyway, we got there and I was allocated to a New Zealand Lancaster crewed by new Zealanders. And the pilot — I’d been in advanced flying unit with him six months before. He looked at me a bit surprised. ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘What the bloody hell do you think I’m doing?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Come and sit alongside me.’ So I, I didn’t sit in my designated spot but sat alongside him and got quite a nice view as we flew back. So anyway I was back on the 11th but the rear gunner, the bloke in there, he got back late on the 7th. He was the only one that came through on the one day where we were at the whole five thousand were supposed to do or something or other. Don’t ask me who was doing the statistics and everything around the place. Anyway, he got through on the night of the 7th and he was tired and they slept at some English ‘drome near London. Were there when fighter ones probably saw it and in the morning he and the other blokes hopped in a bus or something or other. He said, ‘What’s all the people wandering around shouting and jumping and everything else.’ ‘Oh the war’s finished. They’re celebrating.’ They said, ‘Oh is it?’ Oh. So he said he got down to Brighton on the 8th. The mid-upper gunner and the wireless operator had got as far as Holland no the 7th in other words but there was no plane to take them back to England that night. And so they got back on the 8th. That’s three. We don’t know what happened to the English engineer, he, after that he didn’t reply to any mail or anything etcetera. That was four. That’s right. So I got back on the 11th when, as I say, I got back to England on the 11th and the pilot actually stayed another four days after this. He didn’t leave the Stalag until about the 11th. Then he got flown to Nancy and then he took the train to the [pause] somewhere near the English Channel. And then flew across The Channel. He got back about the 15th. So if you get the idea that all your POWs are going to be flown back home in two days [laughs] — but I will say this much. We got very well treated when we got back to Brighton. In England. There, we got special treatment from there and when I went on leave I got, I think quadruple rations, I think, to take to the people I stayed with etcetera. Yeah. I got very well looked after. So that was the story of there. That as I say and that’s one thing on the DC3s you get quite a nice view of the Maginot and the what’s the name, the Siegfried Line. And all the debris of war was still spread out across the countryside shall we say. Nobody had had time to clear it up. It was, it’s out of the way, just leave it there and we’ll do it next week or something or other like that. The debris was and the bridges had been blown up and you could see what war had done to the countryside. You know. Yes. Oh yes. So that’s the story.
AP: Well I have three more questions.
CF: Yeah.
AP: Alright. So after that experience you came home to Australia. What did you do? How did you adjust back to normal life again?
CF: I had very little time adjusting back shall we say. And for instance my mate, Dan Lynch, who I, he was Tasmanian but he’d come over to Melbourne and he stayed in Melbourne and did the, went to the Melbourne University and got a degree in biology and then joined the fisheries and game department as their first biologist actually. And I formed a lifelong friendship and so I for the next few years while we were batchelors we saw a lot of each other. As we did with another couple of fellas who we trained with — Frank Kelly and John Hodson etcetera there. Yes. Four bachelors played around and one went up to The Northern Territory and then three bachelors played around. Yeah. So we all, as far, we all seemed, we all seemed to get pretty much, Frank actually I know started to do a course on something. I forget now. But he gave that away and then he got a job with a international there. The motors and so forth with them and from there he moved on to the South Melbourne City Council. I got a job back with a small building firm that I’d worked with and went back there. And went and did my accounting studies and then moved to a job with what was then Vacuum Oil which is now Mobil oil there. And Dan, as I say, got this thing and then he got a job. Those three of us, none of us had any, well as I say Frank had got shot down. And Dan and I had got shot down. And in actual fact the other fellow, John Hodson, he was sick one night. Didn’t fly. His crew didn’t return. So he had to get another crew etcetera. He, he, he sort of felt the war, shall we say, more than he did because he’d been pretty friendly with that crew and did a lot with them whereas we didn’t lose over there the same feeling as he got. And we also adjusted quite well to doing it there and I don’t quite know. By and large aircrew seemed to adjust pretty well back to there. Maybe the fact that we did it at remote distances as distinct to fellas that were there but on the other hand there were like the other day one fellow who didn’t do too well. And I know another fellow who didn’t, for thirty years did nothing because his best mate had got killed on 460 Squadron. I don’t know much about it. His third of fourth trip the plane crashed and killed the whole lot. Now why the plane crashed about twenty miles from base I don’t know. It could have been that something had been frayed and wear and tear over those next hundred miles might have caused something and all of a sudden some control might have snapped and the plane went in before the pilot could do anything about it. If he was flying at only a couple of thousand feet ready to land you don’t know. But that fella wouldn’t just come, for thirty years he wouldn’t come back to the air force. So there were people who were affected by the things but in my immediate knowledge of the people I trained with and saw a lot of in the next few years, none of them suffered from any kind of mental stress that showed in any way at all, sort of business there. So it did appear that being possibly a little bit away from it and so forth there but that’s how it goes on it there. In actual fact my biggest loss was a friend I grew up with who joined the air force before I did and went up to New Guinea. And on his first flight was shot down and he was injured and captured by the Japanese and the bloody Japanese sergeant then bloody murdered him. Which was a nasty one at the time but you know that one of your boys had not only not killed in action but bloody murdered sort of business there and we were told like, and the family afterwards said that they were told that they, that sergeant had been killed and they couldn’t do anything about it as a result sort of business. But that was the only, really he was the only one that was, really hurt me shall we say. My brother was in the army in the anti-aircraft in New Guinea but he was ok. And the other as I said this mate of mine. This is the odds of course. In Berkeley Street which is the next street to where I was in Kooyongkoot Road, Hawthorn. My mate did the thirty trips. The one that was there. Next door to him was a fella called Bob Benber who later became a big dealer in the insurance industry. He did a trip and got his DFC. And exactly opposite them was where Alec Wilde who did two trips — two tours. A tour and then another tour with 460. They all survived. And Kooyongkoot Road where I lived there was this lad I was telling you about got killed by the Japanese. I was a prisoner of war and a little further up the street was a fellow who was captured in the army at Crete. So two streets, three blokes all had tough luck. Next street three blokes who lived as close as you could possibly get all survived Bomber Command which was a dangerous place. Don’t ask me about the statistics. Yeah.
AP: Someone. One of my interview people said, ‘That’s the important thing in war. To have good fortune,’ he said.
CF: Yeah. Yeah.
AP: That, yeah. That’s exactly what you just explained.
CF: Yeah.
AP: I’m getting closer. I have two more questions. You mentioned when, I think it was your pilot, Harry, was being interrogated or when he was captured the German asked him, ‘You’re Australian. Why are you fighting us?’ I’m just curious. If he had attempted to explain why Australia was there what might he have said? What I’m interested in is why was Australia there?
CF: Well Lofty was not shall we say a well-educated man. He was a country boy. Grew up in the wheat fields and then moved into Perth. As such his, I don’t quite know what he might have said actually with his background of it there. It’s a little hard to say what you would say on it there. And whether he might have said, you know, we were fighting for the king or something. I can’t quite, can’t quite imagine him saying kind of thing that er. We were fighting. The best thing I could say he’d say we’re fighting because you Germans are threatening the rest of the whole of the world. Something of that nature is about all I think he might have said at that stage. But as I said he was not well educated in the sense of the word. He was a doer rather than a thinker type of business there. But as for a man in an emergency he comes out much higher than anybody else I know.
AP: I guess he was tested there.
CF: In other words, we said on his eightieth, so much so that both Dan and I worked it out that we would be in Perth around his eightieth birthday and we then took him up to Frasers restaurant, by name. Which is the big restaurant in Perth overlooking the township from what’s its name there? Have you been there at all? Anyway, we went there and we said, I said, ‘Except for picking our wives — Dan’s wife was there so she said, Thank you Colin.’ Picking Harry as a pilot was the best personnel decision we ever made. And he said, ‘Yes. I agree entirely. It was the best personnel decision that we made.’ And as you heard before we just about picked his crew for him. But as I said he was, we were right he was a solid citizen and that was it type of business of it there. He’s the type of bloke thank you want in your back line I suppose, at football. Sturdy. Dependable. And always be there. Yes. Yes a real bloke. A pity of it that they only had one daughter who was a smart lady. In actual fact she didn’t get married. Yeah. You could pass some of his genes down shall we say but there it is. Yes. Yes. He died some years ago and I flew over for his wedding [laughs] for his wedding — for his funeral and made a speech on there. Yes.
AP: The final question and probably the most important one. In your opinion what is Bomber Command’s legacy? What is the legacy of Bomber Command and how do you want it to be remembered?
CF: Well I’m not too sure where Bomber Command stands at the moment as you said. The thing is that hurt most of all that Churchill deserted Bomber Command. In fact he did it there and the — Harris, the one said he was sitting with on May 8th listening to, with the head of the American bombers and they listened and he mentioned Fighter Command and Transport Command and Coastal Command. Not one word one way or the other was Bomber Command in the Churchill’s speech of the victory over Germany mentioned. And in actual fact a couple of there before that after he was the man who agreed with Stalin that Bomber Command would bomb Dresden and he then sent the message back to the head of the air force — Portal. Who then passed the message down to Harris. And as Harris said all he said was the decision was made by somebody much more powerful than me and he was quite aware that no doubt he had a good relationship with Portal. He was probably mentioned of it there and he [pause] that, that hurt most of all. That later on there but that was it. When the war was close to finishing and all of a sudden shall we say the bishops and the [unclear] were saying oh we shouldn’t have bombed. Oh no. Look. Bombings nothing supposed to be like that. It’s just supposed to be drop a little bit in their garden or something. Look. Look at all the houses you’ve knocked down. Look at all the [pause] No. So in England there was great horror that those nice German people they used to see on holidays had been. Yeah. Anyway. The point is that it should always be remembered that the amount that Bomber Command did for the — well they sunk more capital ships then the navy and as Harris said didn’t even get a thank you [laughs] The army in the war in Europe would go back, instead of calling up the artillery they would call up Harris and say would you drop a few bombs on something or other on the business of it there. And while the, for instance the Americans got — grabbed a lot of praise for stopping the advance the Germans made in December, January sort of business there. Nobody ever mentioned that Bomber Command went and, in the, where there were the roads, two very important roads crossed. That Bomber Command just blasted that crossing out of action and nothing could move through there for another twenty four to forty eight hours. Reinforcements and so forth etcetera. That sort of thing never got talked about. Yeah. Well the thing is that in more recent times they have come around to realising that Bomber Command did a lot of things there. And one of the things that they did was that they bombed the artificial petrol factories there and the German fighters basically from the invasion on, or before the invasion were short of their hundred degree err hundred octane petrol because of the artificial petrol being made from coal — I think it was about eighty seven where they wanted a hundred. So they had to add things to it to make it a hundred and the, from before that the German fighters were not sent up anywhere near as often because they were trying to save petrol and of course the funny thing was that [pause] what is really never said and that is both against the Japanese and the Germans that the code breakers were able to get the messages that had been tracked on the wireless and they could then tell you what was going to, they could then tell you what was going to happen, sort of business of it there, and they never got the accolades. It did sort of business of it there. Because anyway they got the message and Churchill and the head of the army, the head of the navy and the head of the air force and I think about two other leading politicians etcetera there. I’m not too sure. They were the only ones that were allowed to be given the information that was coming through and they knew how it got there. So Portal, as the head of the air force knew that the Germans were short of petrol. Not only for their planes but for their tanks and so forth etcetera there. And he’s wanting Harris to really bomb the artificial factories more, more, more, and Harris who’s been told over the years it’s ball bearings, its gear boxes, there’s something else that was going to win the war was getting this message about it, about this. And in fact that it got to the point when Harris said to Portal, ‘Well if you don’t like my bombing programme I’ll hand my resignation in and you can get somebody who will do it.’ Portal couldn’t say, ‘I’ve got this information.’ You could understand why Harris was irate. So it was a bit tricky for some months there as to a bit of a chill between them because one knew all the information he was right but on the other hand he could understand why the other one was arguing against it there. But oh well it’s like there and I think in the last few years that the Bomber Command has been done there but it will never get the credit because it certainly did the damage and I must admit when you see the damage that Bomber Command did they did it, sort of business. And probably this is the old story of course people say oh they should have stopped it much earlier and you ask people in January ‘45 how long would the war last? You know. January February. Could go on for twelve months or so. And they say well why didn’t they stop doing it etcetera there. They probably could have stopped it a little earlier but it’s very difficult to say. Nobody knew that Hitler was going to commit suicide. If they knew that Hitler would commit suicide. Ok. Sort of business there. But as I say our raid that we got shot down on was completely unnecessary because Hitler was never going to come back to Berchtesgaden but a lot of people thought he was and he did sort of the business of it there. Ah yes I was quite glad as several leading people have said there, said the main character is that, I’m trying to this of his name. He said — he was a farmer in the Wagga area and he and another fella in Wagga further on he said, the war as he saw it was it’s like how you are at home. If there’s a fire or a flood on a neighbours territory you down tools and go over and help him. And he said, that’s what we were doing. Australia. England was in trouble and we were going over to help it sort of business of it there.’ And he [pause] Bill Brill and Arthur.
AP: Doubleday. Doubleday.
CF: Yeah. Yes. They had amazing bloody careers on there and I read somewhere that neither ever had to bring back an injured crew member. Absolutely amazing the fact that they had flown. Each of them had done sixty trips or something or other. Or more. Just one of those things. Yeah.
AP: Well that’s all the questions I have so unless you have anything, anything else to add to the discussion just before we wrap up.
CF: I don’t think so. The business of it there. The great trouble was of course after the war here as you probably knew that the fellas who came back from Europe were blackballed a bit. In fact some of them were accused of running away and actually anyway when the war was over the people who were out here were very annoyed when the people who’d been in Europe came back and told them what a real war was about. And as the fella who later became chief of the air force and the actual Governor General — sorry, the Governor of New South Wales he said he was in the mess and he said and somebody was saying, ‘There must have been forty planes, forty guns firing at me. It was terrible.’ And as this fella said, ‘I didn’t say something but I had had four hundred guns shooting at me sort of business of it there. And that was the thing. The reason there and they appointed the wrong bloke as chief of the air force during the war. They got the wrong diagram or something or other. I forget what it was. Anyway. Yeah. So that was a pity that it took ten years after the war I think to sort of get that nexus between those who had been in the war there. The fella I was telling you about Eric Wilde did two tours now he’s a bit of a character but he went to having got the DFC and the DFM and a flight lieutenant and all the rest of it. He was, went to an OUT, up I think to Mildura or somewhere like that and he was classified as not suitable for flying in The Pacific. And he promptly got a discharge and went and got a very nice job with A&A flying planes and he was made for life and that sort of business there. But some other fella came back, he’d been a wing commander over there and the best they could offer him was a flight lieutenant’s job or something or other. Those sorts of thing. Yeah. There was a bit of a nastiness as well as difficulty that fellas who had handled miles of stuff — when they came back here they would say the people who had the bit of power they’d fought in The Pacific and that was, ‘oh we had to do it. We didn’t have brick buildings to go back to at night time.’ And we had to do that and so forth there. One of the interesting periods of that incidentally was the fact that the fella came over as a wing commander at Binbrook and in that period in December, January when the big war was on. The Battle of the Bulge. And the air was there he said Binbrook when the snow came down he looked at the amount of equipment they had and he thought well in The Pacific we had one ‘drome and that was it. One big strip. That’s all we could make. So he told the bloke in charge of the ‘drome that he was to put his all equipment pick out the main one that was used and keep that one strip open. The other two strips don’t worry about them. Keep that main strip open and keep your, all the equipment on that and as he said at one time, or something or other we had seventy planes come and landed there and he said, ‘Where did you put them?’ And he said, ‘We put the one on strips we weren’t using.’ That was it. In other words where the one fella who had only ever been in England always had three strips tried to keep three strips open. Whereas he had been in The Pacific where, you know that was it. A few little things like that appeared here and there. On their, on the business side of it there. Yes. Yes. Of course there were a lot of politics on it. On the business of it there. But it’s there and the point is that’s true about Lofty Payne on there. That was in various magazines over the time and even in The Sun and it’s in the bomber what’s the name there, Bomber Boys. Lancaster man. Yeah. And I asked Lofty. He said, ‘I have never talked to anybody.’ I think he did talk to the fella who wrote the history of 460 Squadron during the war. He was Australian. I think he might have talked to him. But he said all the others — no. I’ve never talked anybody about that. Where they’ve got the information from I don’t know. But none of them ever come or ring me up or talk to me about it sort of business there. Yeah. It’s irritating slightly shall we say. Sort of business. Yeah.
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AFraserC151113, PFraserC1501
Title
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Interview with Colin Fraser
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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02:10:16 audio recording
Creator
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Adam Purcell
Date
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2015-11-13
Description
An account of the resource
Colin joined the British Army in December 1941, and eventually moved to his preferred Royal Air Force in March 1943. He went to Number 2 Initial Training School at RAAF Bradfield Park in Sydney as a navigator, graduating in February 1944. His first flight was in an Anson at Number 2 Air Observers’ School at Mount Gambier. Colin then sailed to Britain.
There were some delays as Bomber Command had surplus aircrew. He spent some leave through the Lady Ryder Scheme and went to RAF Padgate. He was sent to RAF Fairoaks and witnessed V2 flying bombs before returning to RAF Padgate. Colin was sent to RAF West Freugh and did dead reckoning navigation. His next destination was 27 Operational Training Unit in Lichfield. Colin describes how they crewed up. He was introduced to the Gee radio navigation system and Wellingtons. He went to a Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Lindholme and encountered Lancasters and H2S.
Colin discusses his impressions of England and his activities. He also outlines how he carried out his role as a navigator.
They transferred to 460 Squadron at RAF Binbrook and started operations in March 1945. Colin describes some of their seven operations, which involved damage to the aircraft on a trip to Saarbrücken; being caught in the searchlights at Potsdam; cancellation mid-route of their trip to Bremen. On 25 April 1945, they flew in the second wave to Berchtesgaden and were hit, losing all but one engine. Some of the crew baled out but the pilot crash-landed the aircraft with the rear gunner because of a missing parachute. Colin was taken to Stalag Luft 7 at Moosburg. They were freed on 29 April 1945 by the American 14th Division, although it took some time to return to England and ultimately Australia.
Colin gives his views on the treatment of Bomber Command and the politics involved.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Staffordshire
England--Surrey
England--Yorkshire
Scotland--Wigtownshire
Germany
Germany--Saarbrücken
Germany--Potsdam
Germany--Berchtesgaden
Germany--Moosburg an der Isar
Germany--Ingolstadt
Poland
Poland--Opole (Voivodeship)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1943-03
1944
1944-02
1945-04-25
1945-04-29
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Sally Coulter
27 OTU
460 Squadron
aircrew
bale out
bombing
C-47
crash
crewing up
Gee
H2S
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
military service conditions
navigator
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
Portal, Charles (1893-1971)
prisoner of war
RAF Binbrook
RAF Fairoaks
RAF Lichfield
RAF Lindholme
RAF West Freugh
searchlight
shot down
superstition
training
V-2
V-weapon
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/271/3424/PHenwoodP1701.2.jpg
5bd36850f41a574b0a6cb559380241aa
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/271/3424/AHenwoodP171125.1.mp3
7d85bbdcc9253696b663f18de3fe16fd
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
Henwood, Priscilla
Priscilla Henwood
P Henwood
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Priscilla Henwood (b. 1921, 21397/2618 Royal Air Force).
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-11-25
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Henwood, P
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
MC: Right. This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Margaret Carr. The interviewee is Priscilla Henwood. The interview is taking place at Priscilla’s home in Helderberg Village, Somerset West, South Africa on Saturday the 25th of November 2017. Priscilla, thank you so much for seeing me today. I really appreciate it. Would you like to tell me just a little bit maybe about your early life, where you went to school and your family.
PH: Thank you, Margaret. Thank you very much for taking time on your two day visit to come and visit me. I feel very very honoured. Truly honoured. And it’s lovely to meet you and your family. My early life. Well, my early life. My brother and I were twins. Our parents lived in, were stationed. Well, my father was stationed in the Royal Air Force, or Royal Flying Corps in Palestine in the 1916/17 I suppose. And then my mother was stationed in Salonika in Greece — working with the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service Reserve. And they all wore grey and scarlet and they were very, very elite nursing sisters. Anyway, she was there until the end of the war and then she went. She somehow managed to go from Salonika to Palestine to meet my father whom she’d known before in her early life in — down in the New Forest. And so they were married in 1919 in Cairo. In the riots. Always riots in Cairo. And I see today two hundred, six hundred people have been killed in Cairo. This is today. Saturday. In November 2017. It’s a tragic country. Anyway, they were married there and went back. Eventually they went back to England. And my brother and I were born at Farnborough. One of the first RAF stations in, in Hampshire. Royal Flying Corps. We were born in October 1921. And my father was stationed near. Then, it all changed then and people were re-routed and reconnected. He left the air force and eventually we lived in London. All sorts of post war problems that we recognise today. They were the same problems back in 1920s and ‘21s. In fact they call the 1918 to 1939 “The Long Armistice.” And so anyway there we were living in Sussex for a while and then my brother and I grew up in London. In Maida Vale and St John’s Wood. And we had a happy time visiting, with going to museums. The Science Museum or the, always Westminster Abbey, the unknown warrior. And so we, we went and we grew up there. I went to school in Maida Vale and then to secretarial College. My brother went to school at Monmouth. And then just before the war in about 1938 I had a great friend whose father was in the War Office and he recognised this war was coming. He recognised that women were going to be recruited in to munitions or farmer’s labourers and all sorts of things. So he arranged for my friend Joan Morgan and myself to join the 600, City of London Squadron. That was a fighter squadron in London obviously. And they wore, they wore red and scarlet cloaks. Or their cloaks were lined with scarlet. They were an elite but they were stationed at Hendon. And this is a bit, this is an interesting part. We used to, I used to go about once a week. I never actually went down to Hendon but they had meetings in the HAC headquarters and at Finsbury Barracks in London. And the idea was that we were to be as a group. We weren’t really the WAAF yet. We were going to be the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and we were going to do exactly what everybody had done in the first war. We would go with the squadron, 600 City of London Squadron. We would go and be typists or telephonists or cooks or drivers, or whatever. Medical assistants. And so then we went to various lectures. Very interesting people from the first war. And learning about how it would be in trenches and stations in Europe when we were conquering Europe. But it was not to be. The training went on. My brother was in the Royal Fusiliers in that time. So we were pretty well prepared for the war when it came. In fact, I was called up before the war. And we went. We were then based at Finsbury Barracks in London and did recruiting. The great thing was we used to recruit young women for the air force and then they’d say, ‘Yes I want to be, I want to be in the air force. I want to be in the secret service. That’s what I want to be.’ So we said, ‘Well that would be nice.’ I said, well we must have, one of the first things we had to do is to go for a medical. And there at Finsbury Barracks we used to take, one of those places to be — ‘No. I can’t go for a medical today. I was out at a party at the nightclub all last night. So can I come back and have a medical later?’ [laughs] In fact one particular person did come back and had a medical and she passed. And the big passing was that I remember my [unclear] — fit, brave one, mentality alert. And so we were launched. And so I did various tasks in Finsbury Barracks. Including working on the telephone exchange at Clerkenwell. And then in October 1940 I was posted. And I went off with a rug in a rug bag and ready to go to the trenches really. That’s what we thought would happen. But anyhow off we went to Royal Air Force Station Bassingbourn. B A S S I N G B O U R N. Which is near Royston in Hertfordshire and Cambridge. And that was an Operational Training Unit for Wellington bombers and we, I was in the equipment section and typing on a Royal machine. And you see, I mean, they said, ‘You’re setting that machine on fire.’ There was a lot of nonsense going on. We were all very young. And one of the people who was stationed there was Hope Embry and her husband Basil Embry became a most highly honoured and significant member of Bomber Command. And he survived the war. I think you can read more about Basil Embry. But he was a lovely person. Obviously, I was all of seventeen and thought I was, I’d conquered the world, you know. I had arrived. But he was, I suppose much older. Probably twenty five you know. And there was Corporal Bates who was in charge of equipment in this Operational Training Unit and he used to tell us a story of how he was in charge of, of parachutes. And his parachute, what it did, what happened was they decided to change where the parachute, they had the rip cord here but then they decided it was awkward, and fear. And he used to tell us this gruesome story of a pilot who used his parachute, forgot it was on this side and they said he’d scratched himself to nothing on the way. We always used to be horrified by that story. And so it was very, very interesting and we saw the Wellington bombers. We met a lot of sergeant pilots. There was one man called Wally Walsh who was from Toronto. And I remember another, Len Day from London. There was several of them. And what we used to do as we became a little more used to Royal Air Force life we’d walk up to the pub at Royston. It was probably not as far as Royston — Bassingbourn. A local pub. Well I always remember before I left to join the air force or to go to Bassingbourn my mother said, ‘Now, Priscilla, you may, you must be very careful what you drink.’ She said, ‘You may have a shandy. Ginger beer shandy. You may have a little sherry, but no cocktails. Don’t you ever have cocktails,’ and since then I never had a cocktail. Now I never drink cocktails [laughs] but it was all very innocent. Two or three of us used to go with these dear men. They were just that much older than us. They never took advantage of us. We all went up to the pub and had a shandy and played shove ha’penny and had a lot of laughter. And those were those early days of the war, before Christmas in 1939. And then I went, I remember I went home for Christmas. Some of the, some of these pilots had had a car and one of them drove a lot of us up to London where my mother was now living in a flat. And so that was the first Christmas of the war. And my brother came down, still in the army, from wherever he was stationed. Bushey I think. And so life was very interesting and we learned a lot. Bassingbourn. And it was very, especially good for me because my, my cousin was still at University in Cambridge. And so I could cycle to Cambridge. In fact one day I walked from Bassingbourn to Cambridge. This was lovely. It was fun. So we did that. And there was talking about photographic interpretation. There was a Photographic Interpretation Unit at Benson just near, and I had never went to Benson but I met people who were there. And it was wonderful work they did interpreting a little dot in the sky. In those days with no, no modern facilities. And they did wonderful work those photographic people. And then we used to go into Royston. So then, in May 1940 a message came, or a signal came. My name was Welsh then. W E L S H. That was my maiden name. I meant to tell you that going to Cambridge I met, I’d already met him but I met Paul who I was eventually to marry or who would marry me. But he was a great friend of my cousin. They were having their last year at Cambridge and then they both went off. He into the army and Paul was, who I married, into the navy. But that’s another story. Anyway, that was so, I didn’t waste much time when I was at Bassingbourn. But I enjoyed every minute. It was all an education. Like a university education I suppose. And so then I was stationed, sent to London to the Air Ministry War Room. W A R room. In, in Whitehall. Near the [pause] I think it’s a, not the Home Office [pause] I can’t remember but it was that end building at the end [unclear] at Whitehall. And the Spanish, the St James’ Steps, King Charles Steps below, in to Green Park. Anyway, I went there as a rookie little WAAF and was put in to a correspondence. What do you call it? Just give me a minute.
MC: Secretarial. Typing and —
PH: Just put this thing off a minute.
[recording paused]
PH: Well, I was in the room where all the correspondence came. And in those days in The Air Ministry in 1940 it all came through on tubes. Like you have at the grocer’s shop or the haberdashers. You know ,they all had these tubes coming in, down and these messages would come in. So really it was a very responsible job because extraordinary messages came. One actually I remember was Amy Johnson. Amy. She was the wonderful pilot. And she had been, some said she’d been shot down into the Thames but she, she had crashed in to the Thames in London at that time. That would be about probably June 1940. So this, then I was to be there in the Air Ministry War Room for the next year and actually it was May 1941. We used to go up to, walk up to Westminster to Trafalgar Square for lunch. And Myra Hess played and it was quite peaceful. Then of course the Blitz started. And so then I had very interesting work then but we seemed to just take it in our stride because we did twelve hours on, twelve hours off in the War Room. And we’d have just a, right down in the bowels of the, of the War Rooms. The War Office I’m sure. And we used to have time off and we’d go up and amongst the ramparts of the building. Churchill and Clemmie would be walking about too because he had his secret place down below. Quite close to where we were. And the whole idea, object of the War Room, Air Ministry War Room was to supply the Cabinet War Room with up to date information. So all the correspondence came in and then we distributed to the, to the necessary parts. One of the very important parts was stats. Statisticians. How many tons of bombs had been dropped. Tons of bombs and then piles of bombs I think they called them in America. So stats was very important. And somebody was working at the back at the war room on them and it was very interesting because they were also working in the Battle of Britain. So messages were coming in and they’d, rather like the cricket scores. Twenty four for two. Six for eight. You know. They were counting it all. So that was a very interesting time for me. But then suddenly when I could go into all sorts of details but there was a great feeling of, of confidence and hope. You know, we never thought of any other way but we did realise that by then, by 1940, the end of 1940 just before the Blitz ended, the big Blitz ended there were no more planes. No more pilots. Just one more and suddenly Hitler had a brainstorm and decided he was going to attack Russia. Do something extraordinary. So my part as a WAAF, I was still a WAAF, they suddenly said I must go on a corporal’s course. I said, ‘Oh that’s lovely.’ I can’t remember where I went to that course. It may have been to Alnwick for that. I know I went to Alnwick in South Shields later but, so I did a corporal’s course and came back with these two stripes and was sent. I can’t, I can’t remember. Oh yes. I was sent to Tangmere but to be down in a little GCI station, Durrington near Tangmere. Anyway, I wasn’t long on that course and somebody said I must go on an officer’s course. Oh I know. Sorry. I did go from that corporal’s course. I went up to Chester. To Cheshire. To Honington. RAF. That’s it. From the corporal’s course that other bit. I never went, I didn’t go back to the War Room. I was sent to RAF Honington in, in Cheshire. Near Liverpool. So there I was with a, with a very nice sergeant. Woman sergeant. And she and I became great friends. And we had a big challenge at, as you were, it was not Honington. Honington was where my bomber friends went. It was Hooton Park in Cheshire. And that’s where I was stationed for, from April 1941 ‘til about July I think. And my promotion to sergeant came through and then in the same correspondence I was told I must go to an officer’s course at Loughborough. I remember saying, ‘Can’t I be a sergeant first and then go to Loughborough?’ They said, ‘No. You must stay as a corporal then you go to Loughborough.’ So I went to do the officer’s course at Loughborough and I was there for six weeks I suppose, whatever. And somehow or other I passed and I went to, I was posted to Tangmere. But going back a while I haven’t said enough about that time that I was in Bassingbourn. Can I go back to that? Because these, I told you about these, these chaps who were, they were all sergeant pilots and very fine men. Then they went off to — one went to Honington in Bomber Command and the other one went to Marham. I think he was 215 Squadron in Honington and 9 Squadron in Marham. Also up near Bury St Edmunds and there they flew and then I lost touch with them really but I know that Len Day went to Malta with Bomber Command. And while he stayed in London and then as war went on one lost touch. But I knew they did wonderful work. But I never really found out what happened to them but these people were the salt of the earth and so steady. And so that that time in in Bassingbourn which I just spoke about earlier made a very strong impression on me. It was a short time really but it was, it gave me inspiration and confidence and as I said earlier one always felt secure. They weren’t, there weren’t problems. At least I never found them. Probably there were too. So now I go back to my arrival at Tangmere. The day I arrived at Tangmere everybody was in mourning because Bader, the famous legless pilot, had been shot down that day. That was in August 1941. And there’s this famous story about his legs. They wanted to, the Germans said they’d give safe passage for his legs. And Fighter Command said not on your life. We’ll bring them over, as it was [laughs] if you catch us you catch us. We don’t want any special courtesies. We’ll just bring his legs. And they did. They flew them over. I think they parachuted them down. And Bader went on to have an extraordinary career too as a prisoner of war. But it was very interesting for me to be at Tangmere. There were Hurricanes and Spitfires and they’d had a tremendous bashing in the Blitz and a lot of people were killed and a lot of WAAF were also injured. And some of them were, were honoured with medals for bravery in that Blitz. But this was in 1940 when I was in London. So I, I went after that so all was so called peaceful then. There was no more bombing there. And then they, they had, this was what I was saying earlier. It was a little station near Ford, near Arundel, also in Sussex. Down from Tangmere. And I was put in charge, only having been on a course as an adjutant. And I was put in charge of this little station which was GCI and doing, working in radar. This favourite vital work. So we had this little office down below then, up at the top of the hill where these people were working on the radar. And wonderful things that came from, from that radar time. Interception and all that and I knew the [pause] when I was at Durrington it was probably early in 1941. There was a, it would be probably September ‘41 there was a warning that the Germans were coming to Durrington. They’d be parachuted in to, to get the people who were doing the radar work up at the top of the hill and kidnap them and take them back. And so they said, ‘Now, you people here below who are looking after them, you are going to be getting issued with Tommy guns so that you can protect your people.’ And along came a Home Guard. A Home Guard chap with a Tommy gun and he said to me, ‘I want you to learn to fire a Tommy gun. When the Germans come you’ve just got to pick this thing up and go boom, boom, boom and he’ll be dead and then you,’ [laughs] and then I put it on my shoulder and tried and I couldn’t do a thing with it [laughs]. I said, ‘I’m very sorry but you’ll have to have a bigger chap than me to protect these people.’ So there was a lot of laughter about that and of course the, again Hitler changed his mind and they didn’t come. So then, when I was there in Durrington and got married in the middle but that’s another story. A lovely time. It really was. My brother was, by that time, in the air force and he’d been shot down in the North Sea but rescued after two days and my husband Paul had been in the Malta convoy. He’d been in a Russian convoy but at this time he was in a Malta convoy relieving with The Ohio which was a ship with supplies for Malta. And anyway while he was in this convoy in Italy somewhere they were very upset. They were bombed by an Italian plane which was very interesting, and they said the plane was badly hurt, the ship was destroyed. They’d lost a whole keg of sherry they’d been given somewhere. That upset them. Anyway, he, he survived and we were married in 1942. In the war. Again near Cambridge, near Bassingbourn. So I was stationed. I went on to be stationed at Durrington and then went on another course and my, my husband left South Shields in his destroyer, a new destroyer to go to the Far East and he was away for three years. And I was on another course at Alnwick and enjoyed that. And I was stationed. Then I was sent to Biggin Hill. Stationed at Biggin. Again as adjutant. Sailor Malan was a famous South African pilot. And a lot of the Free French Air Force were there. And they were famous because they had at Biggin Hill, the squadrons there had shot down a thousand bombers. There was a tremendous publicity stunt with the papers. There was a big ball at the Dorchester to which we all went. All the, all the Windmill Girls were given open invitations to come to Biggin Hill for that weekend so there were high jinks with the Windmill and the other, I suppose night club characters would come. And Biggin Hill was the talk of every Sunday newspaper and everywhere in the world. They shot down a thousand planes and all the wonderful men which of course they were wonderful men. There was no doubt about it. And then they were to have a reception at [pause] in, at Biggin and Lord Trenchard was to come. Lord Trenchard, one of the founders of the Royal Air Force. Royal Flying Corps. And he came and the pilots told me that he, he came very much in his military Royal Flying Corps sort of uniform I think. Very impressive. He came and he said, ‘Good day gentleman,’ he said, ‘I come here to give you one message. It’s the bomber’s boys who is going to win this war. Good day gentlemen.’ And he turned and left. All the deflated people who were not really. That was, that was the big thing was the bomber boys who were going to win this war which of course we remember very well happened. And that, the tragedy of that was that the bombers did the job they had to do as we well know with, and I had many friends there and people to do with it and the casualties I knew. But after the war they were treated like [pause] like rats had left the ship. It was disgraceful. And people said, ‘They bombed Dresden. Dresden. With all that china. Look what they did,’ and I’d say, ‘Well Dresden was a route for those bouncing bombers to go thorough.’ They were, they were transporting all these bombs to go through to wherever they did. So those bombs were based before they bombed. These wonderful men who of course I can’t even think of the names as I’m talking but everybody knows them and they, well they saved, saved England really. Saved the world. And we all said if it had not been done, if the bombing had not been done successfully we would all be speaking German today in England. Nobody really saw that. People still don’t realise the precarious critical situation we were in because Churchill would always talk and buoy us up and life went on. And those bombers and the fighters. We all needed each other. And the Coastal Command and Transport Command, and balloons we all needed but it was the bombers who were the vital factor in any war. And their bombing saved Britain and to me it is, one feels ashamed that they’re only now being recognised and still people say, ‘But they bombed Dresden. How could they dare to bomb Dresden?’ Never mind they bombed London and would have absolutely finished us if they’d had their way. So, so where did we go from there? Let’s have a rest.
MC: Do you want me to turn this off for a short while?
[recording paused]
PH: I’m talking with Margaret about Bomber Command and at Hucknall and Scampton and others that I can’t remember, some of those. I was never actually stationed again on a Bomber Command station but we knew about them and recognised them and honoured them and a lot of the, it was an extraordinary life they lived because they lived in a nice cosy little English town where they’d be in tea rooms and life would go on and the station, people stationed nearby and some of the pilots —
[doorbell rings. Recording paused]
MC: Ok.
PH: Can you go back to what I said?
[recording paused]
PH: I was probably talking about, have you been to the War Room in in —? Cabinet War Room in —
MC: In London.
PH: King Charles’ Steps there. And you know how they said there’s nothing more. There’s nothing we can do. And then Hitler, you know, we believe in prayer. I don’t know, we’d had, we’d had a World Day of Prayer and suddenly Hitler changed his mind, we don’t know. I don’t know. I’m not telling anybody what they should or should not do or how they should be but there is something more than we know. It’s not just, it’s not just the computer and wireless and all these wonderful new ways of [pause] somebody said I’m watching a good film. Somebody gave me a stick. You get a stick and you put it in your television and then you watch a film. So we’ve got all these wonderful contraptions and things but we still can’t regulate the weather. We can’t regulate the tides and we can’t regulate the eclipses of the moon and the sun. And what happened two thousand years ago at such a time suddenly happens again two thousand years later, whatever, at such a time. There’s something more than even our brains can do. But so there we are. So I was talking about the faith and they had the, there was faith. We couldn’t have managed without faith in those days of war and I think maybe we might have done better in these last ten years if we hadn’t been prohibiting people from praying at the school. And you mustn’t mention Jesus and you mustn’t talk about Christmas. You talk about the holiday. Anyway, somehow and then other people come and say what’s what about this God? He doesn’t do anything for us. Well poor chap he doesn’t get much chance. He’s not allowed. So I’m not into religious talk but I do believe in faith and I do believe that it was the faith and prayer that brought us through that war. Maybe without, it would have happened, but we haven’t come through very well this lot. So where are we back to? Can you just stop a minute?
[recording paused]
PH: And then the pilots would get married and their wives would come down and stay in the local hotel or boarding house or get a house and next to the RAF station so they’d live a normal sort of life. But then at night time they’d hear boom boom. The bombers going off. Counted them and when they came back five, six, sixth where’s the sixth? And they’d be off to the station to see if their husband had come home. So there was an extraordinary artificial but normal life living right in a war. Yet going as I say, you would go to the flicks. Everybody went to the flicks in those days, and going to the pub. So that I think the wives and the mothers really suffered. Even if they were in a town where they didn’t have a husband or son or somebody they heard the bombers going off and they would listen for them to come back and there would be one short or none would come back or something. And they would be very much aware of these people. So there was a strong [pause] a feeling of rationing, of letters to the Far East. Air letters we did, air letter cards we wrote. And they would be they would be minimised and sent off. And I think that people like myself who were privileged to be in the air force it was a full interesting life. We were all in it together. But for the mothers with the children and the one egg and a couple of potatoes a week and maybe some, a bit of meat — it was, it must have been terrible. And those cold, cold winters. One, one good thing that came in the war at that time was Lord Woolton and his feeding. All those children. They were very bonny — the wartime children. He had a special orange juice sort of proceeded so that all every child had on their ration card — orange juice. No bananas. They didn’t know about bananas in those days. So that the children were well cared for but the mothers had a terrible time. And other people who came into the war at that time and did a lot of, a lot, a great job, were the land girls. And the Land Girls were often employed on, on farms and learned to milk the cows and to make up the hay and all the rest of it. But some of them of course were misused and used as maids. They would milk the cows and then come on in and make the breakfast for the farmer and his wife and his children. And they’d wash up afterwards and then go back to the fields. So the Land Girls were magnificent and did a great job. And the other people I always feel we’d never, they’d never been, to my knowledge, been recognised as they should have been were the mechanics. When those fighter planes landed the mechanics were there. They bashed, probably had some shooting, and the pilot would go off and have a shower and had some breakfast. Meantime this chap would be working on his plane so it was ready and he could take off again. Take off. And it’s the same with the bombers. Those chaps who looked after the — the engineers and the, all the people who worked on the planes. One has never really heard enough recognition of them, or for them. I think that is something that is missing. Maybe you could mention that to your people in Bomber Command. And Fighter Command too. Because they were, they were on the job and of course suffered terribly when their pilot was killed. And they, you know became, you know mates. Worked together. Worked on the plane. And so that was that. So then I told you I was, I did the officer’s course at Loughborough and I went to Tangmere and then did where I’d been. I’d put Hooton Park as well. But then I went to Biggin Hill. I told you this and as I said Sailor Malan was there. And Churchill lived nearby at Chartwell. And Sailor Malan’s wife was there too and she had a baby and Churchill was the baby’s godfather. He was there. It was a wonderful station Biggin. In spite of it being rather choked off by Lord Trenchard telling them that it would be the bombers who would win the war. Separate from Biggin Hill I went, I was sent on another course. Of course they loved to send us on courses. So it was very like being at university but you’re not. And a lot of legal work too. Not that I can remember any of it now, as you can hear. I can’t always remember the names of the stations but from, from Biggin Hill I went on this course and it was and I went to Shrewsbury, Shropshire. To Montford Bridge. And that was another training station. Rather like Bassingbourn had been originally. And I was stationed there as adjutant near another big RAF station — Oswestry. All near Shrewsbury. And the, and at Montford Bridge there were Czechoslovakian and Polish pilots all waiting. Doing circuits and bumps waiting to go. To go off, to fight. They were waiting to go off but the weather was dull all the time. and they were frustrated. And the Poles and the Czechs were not good friends so there wasn’t always a very good atmosphere there. But they were lovely. They used to call me — the Poles used to call me mamushka [gihana?] — little mother. And I, because I had to sort of tell them what to do. ‘Oh Adjie, can’t we do —?’ They wanted to fly but they couldn’t. They nearly went mad because the weather was so bad. And that was in, I’m talking now about 1943. October. That sort of time. And while I was stationed, while I was stationed there I had a phone call to say that my brother had been — it was an accident I think in a Mosquito night bomber and his plane had crashed. And he was alright but his observer wasn’t, and he went to try to rescue him and he was also burned. That was my twin brother. November 1943. Seventy something years ago now, just this week. So then somehow or other I didn’t apply so I left Montford Bridge and I went back to the Air Ministry of War Room in 1943, November. And I was in the Far East operations and was there ‘til the end of the war. ‘Till ’45. But my job there was to monitor signals that came in. And they came in then for one and we had to read them and work out the tonnage of bombs that had been dropped. This was all in the Solomons, in the New Guinea. All near Australia. All the fighting of the Japs which were impossible really. We’d never beat them as it seemed. Anyhow, we had to have this report ready by four in the morning to go through to Churchill to go to the Cabinet War Room where Churchill would be with, of course, all his people. And it had to be accurate. And I remember I made a mistake of saying Zagreb was [pause] and they were dropping bombs, dropping bombs on Zagreb which was west of, of the ocean. Of course it was east. Whatever it was I got it wrong and Churchill in amongst all the other things he picked up this mistake and it came back. He didn’t miss a trick. But it was very interesting time in the War Room with the Far East and the war going on in Italy. That was a new one. Remember we were fighting in Italy. That was an unnecessary tragedy too. And that was the time when I was in London of the bomb. What did they call them? Dropped bombs. I can’t remember. They came through silently and they dropped.
MC: Oh I know.
[pause]
MC: I know what you mean. Yes.
PH: I had a few adventures with that. And we were stationed in London again and it was a very exciting time in a way waiting. Waiting for D-day. Buzz bombs they were called buzz bombs. And they were the ones that were boom boom boom and then you heard them when it stopped that’s where they dropped. And then they had an even worse bomb that just came silently and it just, you didn’t know and the next thing was chaos. I experienced a bit of that when I was living by then at, when a whole group of us WAAF worked for officers all together in Chelsea. We had, there was a flat and somebody else had a room and we all used to get together. And there was quite a bit of bombing then in the night again. And I remember one of our, one of our friends had a flat in Chelsea. She had a lovely flat upstairs which she’d had for some years, it was her home. We were down, we were down below. A couple of us were down below in more the basement. So we would all come down to the basement for the night when the bombing was on. And then next day we’d go up onto the, into her flat when the sun was shining. And a big fruit to have in those days was rhubarb. We’d always have rhubarb. And I remember we had rhubarb at the top of the nook for pudding and he used to call them — we always heard, none of us had had babies but we always heard that the, after your baby you have a wonderful sort of party. You forget all the pain, all the problems, and just sit down and enjoy it. We used to call them our post baby, post bombing breakfast. Then I can remember going back again. Way back to when I was in the War Room in 1940. Again, we were caught one night going somewhere. A friend had had a flat in Ebury Street in, near Victoria Station. So the bombing was pretty hard that night but she had one of these records playing the Warsaw Concerto which had just come out and some Beethoven and boom, boom, boom you know, the sign from France when the code Beethoven’s fifth. So I can remember those days. We were really in trouble but it was alright. We were all in it together. And that’s, as I said earlier was how I felt sorry for the mothers who were left behind with the children and rationing and clothing. Maybe their own sick mother with them. Their diets were not easy. Neither, as I’ve said earlier, were the lives of the people that maintained the aircraft and the ships and the guns in the air force. We have a very fine young woman. Well, she’s not young any more, she’s my sort of age. She was on searchlights in London, and in the park and they used these lights all the time. And that must have been a big, big strain because they were right out on Hyde Park and I suppose Regent’s Park with these lights going, so they were a certain target for the bombers but she survived it all. She’s written her book about it. Then came, going back again now to the War Room and there was D-Day which we were all involved in in the War Room of course. And still the Japanese war going on I was very much involved in that. There were reports coming in. And we, the [unclear] then there was that sudden war. Somebody decided to fight in Holland between Holland and Germany and a lot of casualties there. I can’t, I’m trying to think of the name. We can probably think of it afterwards. But where the army obviously were involved. I’ll think of it, and tell you later but it was in, it was in Christmas 1944 because the, it was D-day was June ’44. 6th of June. But this was another little war that somebody seemed to start and it was on the Holland/German border, and we had a lot of casualties. And then after that came, came May and the end of the war. And I remember we were all, we were, I was on duty in the War Room that night and so we phoned Buckingham palace and asked, ‘Would the king and queen be out?’ And they said, ‘Yes.’ So we all went down to Buckingham Palace.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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AHenwoodP171125
PHenwoodP1701
Title
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Interview with Priscilla Henwood
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:00:01 audio recording
Creator
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Margaret Carr
Date
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2017-11-25
Description
An account of the resource
Priscilla was encouraged by a friend’s father to join the 600 Squadron in anticipation of the war. She was called up and was based at Finsbury Barracks, involved in recruitment. Priscilla also worked on the telephone exchange at Clerkenwell.
In October 1940, she was posted to RAF Bassingbourn, an Operational Training Unit for Wellingtons. Hope Embry, wife of Basil Embry was stationed there.
Priscilla was sent to the Air Ministry War Room in Whitehall and received correspondence in pneumatic tube system. She recalls an extraordinary message about Amy Johnson crashing into the Thames. She would see Churchill and his wife. They provided the Cabinet War Office with information, including statistics.
Priscilla went on a corporal’s course and was stationed briefly at RAF Hooton Park. After promotion to sergeant, she was sent on an officers’ course at Loughborough and then posted to RAF Tangmere and the ground-controlled interception (GCI) radar station at RAF Durrington. Priscilla was put in charge of the GCI station near RAF Ford. She did another course at Alnwick and was then made adjutant at RAF Biggin Hill.
Priscilla expresses her disappointment with how Bomber Command was treated after the war. She praises the land girls and mechanics, who were often overlooked.
Priscilla went to RAF Montford Bridge and was an adjutant at RAF Rednal. She returned to the Air Ministry War Room in 1943 and was involved in the Far East operations until the end of the war, monitoring signals. On D-Day they all went down to Buckingham Palace.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Cheshire
England--Sussex
England--London
Temporal Coverage
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1939
1940
1941
1943
1944
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Sally Coulter
600 Squadron
bombing
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
faith
ground personnel
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
promotion
RAF Bassingbourn
RAF Biggin Hill
RAF Hooton Park
RAF Tangmere
training
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/280/3433/PJamesPAE1701.1.jpg
187ab57f99d88437aa4d1126eb42ab2d
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/280/3433/AJamesPAE170705.2.mp3
17c083df420e2e35a0f032f60c0c65b3
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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James, Philip Albert Evan
Philip Albert Evan James
Philip A E James
Philip James
P A E James
P James
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Philip Albert Evan James MBE (b. 1924, 1807170 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a flight engineer with 192 Squadron.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-07-05
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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James, PAE
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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LD: Ok. This is an interview for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Laura Dixon and the interviewee is Philip James. The interview is taking place in Port Talbot on the 5th of July 2017.
PJ: Right.
LD: Hello Philip. Thank you for having me. So, my first question. Can you tell me more about your life before you joined the Bomber Command? Before the Second World War.
PJ: I was working in a place called Margam Castle.
LD: Oh really?
PJ: I was a valet there to a gentleman called Captain Andrew Fletcher. I worked there for some time before I went to the Air Force. They did want me to go to Scotland with them because they were moving to Scotland but I said, ‘No. I want to go to the Air Force.’ So, that was my time just before going to the Air Force.
LD: So, how did you join the Bomber Command and why did you join the Bomber Command but not the navy or the army? Why did you choose the Bomber Command?
PJ: Because my two idols were Captain Scott of Antarctica and Douglas Bader, the fighter pilot with no legs. And I wanted to just go to the Air Force.
LD: Ok.
PJ: And I ended up at St Athans forty minutes away from where I lived and I trained as a flight engineer. I trained to be, to fly Halifaxes. So —
LD: So —
PJ: That’s it.
LD: So you were a flight engineer. So what does a flight engineer do? What’s the, what was your job?
PJ: My main job was to help the pilot, take off and landings. Monitor the fuel consumption. All the specifications for the engines like oil pressure, oil temperature. The temperature of the engines and make sure that I did the correct procedure with the petrol consumption and the correct procedure of using the different tanks. There were fourteen tanks on the aircraft all together and they had to be done in a proper sequence not to put any stress on the wings. Right.
LD: Yeah. Ok. So, what kind of places did you go to? Did you go to Europe or did you go further than Europe?
PJ: Yes. I did. I went to France, I went to Germany and I also flew up right to Northern Norway.
LD: Ok.
PJ: Ok.
LD: Ok. So how long would a mission take? Did you go there and then come back? Was it overnight?
PJ: The one at Norway took us about four days because the weather stopped us from flying back to Norfolk. Yeah.
LD: Ok. So what was your relationship like with your colleagues? With your crew members.
PJ: I think I’ll start the talk about my crew a little bit later on.
LD: Ok.
PJ: Because that’s, that’s how I will start my story then if you’d like to call it that.
LD: Yeah. Ok. Yeah. I’ll come back to that.
PJ: Right.
LD: That’ll be interesting. So, were there any problems with the plane or any injuries that you experienced at any point?
PJ: No. We were very lucky. We did have some slight damage but we’ll come to that later on.
LD: Ok.
PJ: Yeah.
LD: So, what did you do in your spare time when you weren’t flying? When you were on the ground with your colleagues. Would you go out in the evening?
PJ: Dependant on how much time I had spare like. I could have like forty eight hours and I would go in to Norwich and stay in the Salvation Army Hostel for about a half a crown a night. Two and sixpence.
LD: Yeah.
PJ: Two shillings and sixpence. I would also go to the flight engineer’s section and learn a bit more about the aircraft and what goes on in the, in the plane during the trips that we did.
LD: Ok. So, what would happen on a typical mission? What would the procedure be?
PJ: The procedure from where?
LD: Well, from the start and then to the end. From take-off and then to the finish.
PJ: Well, first of all you would have to go to the main briefing where you’d be shown a target and the weather conditions. The red spots on the map would be where the heavy defences were in Germany, particularly in Germany and you were routed usually bypassing them. But that wasn’t always the case. Ok.
LD: So, were you excited to start flying? Because you must have been very young when you started. So, what kind of feelings did you have? Were you excited or was it just something that you felt that you had to do?
PJ: I wouldn’t say that I was excited but you were sort of learning things every minute of the day. How can I say? We’d, the crew would probably get together and have a chat and discuss what we’d done or what we were going to do. It depended a lot on whatever time we were given. Like you could have a day off and you would go in to Norwich then. If you had like forty eight hours pass then you would go into Norwich and stay in the Salvation Army Hostel. Yeah. The crew used to go to Sheffield. They used to stay in a Temperance hotel called the Albany Hotel which is still in Sheffield today and they used to eat in a place called the Athol Bar. That’s where they used to eat. They were also treated very kindly by the master brewer of a brewery in Sheffield called Richdale’s Brewery. Yeah. And they organised them to visit a coal mine. The brewery of course [laughs] So, that’s that. That’s that little bit.
LD: Ok. So would you like to tell more about your little story about the friendship with your colleagues.
PJ: Right. I was at a place called Dishforth in Yorkshire. On this particular day about twenty flight engineers were told get into a hangar and there was about twenty Wellington crews which was, a two engine bomber, a crew of six and now they had to team up with a flight engineer. And the wireless operator of that crew was a Canadian Red Indian called John Yakimchuk. He came over to me and he said would I like to join his crew? I said, ‘I’ll come and have a chat with the crew and make up my mind.’ I went and had a chat with the crew and I decided that I would stick with them. They were all Canadians. So I became part of their crew ready to go flying in Halifaxes which was four engine bombers. So, as we were a crew now it was down the pub in the night to have a drink and sort of celebrate being made up into a full seven crew. So they asked me now what would I like to drink? And I said, ‘Orange juice.’ I was only nineteen at the time. So later on, later on I noticed that the crew were all chatting amongst themselves and not including me so I called John over, John Yakimchuk and I said, ‘What’s all this chatting going on and I’m not involved in it?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you what happened,’ he said, ‘We were looking around at the engineers and we decided that that bloke over there with ginger hair,’ me, ‘And a fresh complexion, he’s a drinking man. So we’ll have him for our flight engineer.’ So of course, that’s how I came to be crewed up with the Canadians. And they were a great bunch. A great bunch of chaps they were. The pilot, George Ward, he was a first class pilot and we had a first class navigator, Bert Taylor. I think the reason we were posted to 192 Squadron was because of the quality of the pilot and the navigator. So that’s as far as I go now. Right.
LD: Ok. So, when the war ended were you relieved? What was the, what was the feeling about leaving the Bomber Command?
PJ: Well, I was lost for a little while. I was given a job after I’d finished flying. I was given a job of clearing RAF stations of vehicles and I had about twenty German drivers and about half a dozen RAF drivers and we used to go around clearing all these RAF stations of vehicles. And we used to take the majority of them to a place called Grafton Underwood which used to be an American base. And I think that change of work style sort of made you sort of forget what you’d been doing for thirty three trips. That’s about it.
LD: Ok.
PJ: Yeah.
LD: So, have you kept in touch with your colleagues after the Bomber Command?
PJ: It was some years. It was about 1982. I was going to London and before I went I had a telephone call and it was my navigator, Bert Taylor. He was in London and I was going to a reunion in London that same weekend. So I told Bert, ‘Just get a taxi and go to an hotel called the Ritz,’ because we were all going to go for a tea at the Ritz. So I met up with Bert and his wife and between the two of us we came up with the idea of having a reunion out in Canada. So Bert got on the phone and we arranged to all meet up at my tail gunner’s farm. They called it a farm. I would call it a ranch more than that. He had five, no seven oil wells on his land. And we had a great reunion there. Aye. Ah yes. We had. I’d been down to Canada eight times. Western Canada because most of the crew came from Western Canada. I did two trips to Eastern Canada as well because I knew another pilot and a radio mechanic Hugh Home And they were two very good trips they were as well. There we are.
LD: Very nice. Ok. So, I know you have an MBE. Can you tell me a bit more about that and how you got it?
PJ: The MBE. I was a welfare officer looking after ex-RAF and I did that for about forty, fifty years and it was decided that I should have an MBE for doing that work.
LD: Oh, ok.
PJ: So we were all getting geared up to go to the palace and the Queen had an operation on her knee. I don’t know if you remember that.
LD: No. I don’t think so.
PJ: Anyway, she had an operation on her knee so we were transferred to Cardiff University and Prince Charles did the presentation instead of the Queen.
LD: Ok. So, when did you get that MBE? When was it? How long ago was it?
PJ: How many years ago, Pete?
[pause]
LD: So, how do you think the Bomber Command is being perceived now?
PJ: What love?
LD: How do you think the Bomber Command is being perceived? Do you think it’s being, do you think it gets the recognition it deserves or do you think it’s not recognised enough?
PJ: Well, I flew with 192 Squadron which was part of 100 Group which was all secret in World War Two. Our mail was censored and no cameras were allowed on the squadron. So, that was —
[recording paused]
PJ: Fifteen years ago, Pete. Goodness me alive. Goodness me.
Other: Time marches on.
PJ: Fifteen years ago.
LD: Ok. Is there anything else you can think of that you’d like to tell me? Anything else?
PJ: When I was at Dishforth we were being converted from a twin engine. The crew, I hadn’t flown with them in Wellingtons so we were being trained there then. It was called an Heavy Conversion Unit and we were flying clapped out Mark 1s and 2s. Halifaxes with Rolls Royce engines. But they say that if you could get through Heavy Conversion Unit you was very lucky but we got through then ok. And it came to the day when the notice board would have then where all the crews that had passed would be posted to. So we had a look and it said George Ward’s crew posted to 192 Squadron. And everybody said, ‘192 Squadron? Never heard of it. Never heard of Foulsham.’ That’s where we were based in Norfolk. So, we thought, ‘Oh well we’ll just have to go.’ So we arrived at Foulsham. Everything was all hush hush. And the first thing that we had to do then when we got to Foulsham was to learn to fly the latest Halifaxes. A brand new Mark 3 with Bristol Hercules engines. Radial engines. In your car your engine is inline. You know like the cylinders are inline. But with a Bristol Hercules engines they’re in a circle and they’re air cooled. Rolls Royce engines are liquid cooled. Hercules are air cooled. That was another job that I had to watch was the temperature of the engines. There was cowls which you could open and decide where the setting would be to keep the engine at the right temperature. So the first thing we had to do we had an Australian pilot and his flight engineer who came with us to an aircraft. A brand new Halifax. And the Australian pilot did two or three [pause] the Australian pilot and his engineer did three or four circuits and bumps. That means taking off, fly around and come back down and land and take off and go around again. And then he said to my pilot, ‘Are you ok now?’ My pilot said, ‘Yes. I think I’m ok now.’ [overhead plane noise] So he did a take-off and coming in to land one of the tyres burst and we slewed off, off the runway on to the grass and then the undercarriage at one side collapsed and the plane tilted and finally stopped on the grass. Anyway, that was sorted out and then we were allocated a brand new Mark 3 Halifax called DT-O. DT was the squadron and O was the aircraft. All the aircraft were numbered DT-O or A B C D. That’s how they numbered the aircraft. With letters. So we were allocated DT-O. So now do you want me to go and talk about a couple of trips or something like that?
LD: Oh yes. That would be great. Ok.
[pause]
PJ: The first trip that I’ll talk to you about we were sent somewhere near Saarbrucken. Just us. Just one aircraft and we had to do a patrol there. In other words fly back and forth. So when we got back you were interviewed by the intelligence officer and we told him we had seen vertical vapour trails and he said, ‘What you saw was the new German fighter. The jet engined ME262,’ I think it was called. And he said, ‘Yes. That was the ME 262 that you saw.’ But they found out later that what we were doing, we were monitoring the V-2s. Do you know what a V-2 is?
LD: No.
PJ: It was a rocket. The first few were radio controlled. All the rest were just fuelled up, pointed in the direction of London or where ever they wanted to send it and they were shot up and they would go up into the atmosphere. I forget how high they used to go. Then they would come down, usually on London faster than the speed of sound. They would explode on the ground and then you would hear it come in after it had blown up because it was travelling faster than sound. That was one trip we did. Another trip although we didn’t do it we found out about it. We used to use the two engine aircraft that we had on the station. They used to go down to the Bay of Biscay and monitor a wavelength that the Germans used to send out into the Atlantic so that the U-boats could home in on it and go to the French ports that had the U-boat pens with twelve foot thick concrete roofs. The only bombs that could get through that were the twelve thousand pounders. Anyway, I said, ‘Why have we got to keep monitoring this wavelength?’ ‘Because we use it as well.’ Our submarines and our ships would use it as well. But of course instead of going into the French ports they were quite near home now and they would come up the English Channel or the Bristol Channel whatever. And we had to keep monitoring it because the Germans used to change the wavelength and we had to keep tabs on it to make sure we had the right wavelength all the time. And that’s what the Wellingtons used to do. Some of the Halifaxes used to do it as well. The most important trip I think that we did we were based as I said in Foulsham in Norfolk, up in the corner of Norfolk and we were sent to an Air Force base called Lossiemouth which was right at the very top of Scotland. I don’t know if you know that. It’s right at the top of Scotland and we flew from there under a thousand feet to avoid being picked up by the German radar. We flew over the Arctic Circle and we came to a certain spot. The navigator and the pilot would probably know where this spot was. And at that spot we went up to five thousand feet and by doing that the German battleship the Tirpitz, Germany’s finest battleship, its sister ship called the Bismarck they’d already sunk that but this Tirpitz would put on its radar. But unknown to them we carried a special operator and special equipment that was recording the gaps and the weaknesses in the Tirpitz radar stream. And the reason why there was gaps and weaknesses? It was the lie of the land up in Norway. Steep sided fjords etcetera. And that information then was sent to planning and they sent the Lancasters in to Swedish air space, they rendezvoused at a Swedish lake and flew out and sunk the Tirpitz with twelve thousand pound bombs. That trip took us nine hours five minutes, hence two bloody hearing aids [laughs] excuse that [laughs] and about two and a half thousand gallons of petrol each plane with four planes doing this. And that’s the longest flight I ever did. And I did thirty three trips altogether. End of my story.
LD: Ok.
PJ: Life. Life style.
LD: Thank you very much. That’s very interesting. Thank you. I’ll end it there.
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Identifier
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AJamesPAE170705, PJamesPAE1701
Title
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Interview with Philip James MBE
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
Language
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eng
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00:31:23 audio recording
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Laura Dixon
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2017-07-05
Description
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Philip James was a valet to Captain Fletcher at Margham Castle before joining the Royal Air Force. At the age of 19 he trained as a flight engineer at RAF St Athan, working on the Halifax. At RAF Dishforth in Yorkshire crews were formed and Philip joined a crew of Canadians. At the Heavy Conversion Unit they were flying Mk1 and Mk2 Halifaxes before being posted to 192 Squadron based in RAF Foulsham, Norfolk, to fly Halifax Mk 3. During his service Philip flew to France, Germany and Norway. When he had a 48 hour leave he would sometimes stay in the Salvation Army Hostel in Norwich or go to the flight engineers section to learn more about the aircraft. The crew also occasionally went to Sheffield, staying in the Albany Hotel and visiting a coal mine and a brewery. Philip recalled a trip near Saarbrücken when they were monitoring the V-2 rocket. He also mentioned a posting to RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland. He had done 33 operations with the squadron. When the war ended Philip worked clearing stations of vehicles to be taken to RAF Grafton Underwood. In 1982 Philip and the navigator, Bert, arranged a reunion in Canada. Philip received the MBE for his work as a welfare officer working with ex RAF personnel for over 40 years.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Canadian Air Force
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Great Britain
England--Norfolk
England--Northamptonshire
England--Yorkshire
Scotland--Moray
Wales--Neath Port Talbot
Wales--Port Talbot
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
England--Norwich
England--Sheffield
France
Germany
Germany--Saarbrücken
Norway
Contributor
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Sue Smith
Julie Williams
Carolyn Emery
100 Group
192 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
crewing up
First nation
flight engineer
Halifax
Halifax Mk 1
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
Heavy Conversion Unit
RAF Dishforth
RAF Foulsham
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF St Athan
Tirpitz
training
V-2
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/294/3449/AMarshallAH161012.1.mp3
97bb1339dd8d17f832ee3984a665229f
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Title
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Marshall, Alfred
Alfred Higgins Marshall
Alfred H Marshall
Alfred Marshall
A H Marshall
A Marshall
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Alfred Higgins Marshall (1861844 Royal Air Force).
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-10-12
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Marshall, AH
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Hello. My name is Pam Locker and I’m in the home of Mr Alfred Higgins Marshall of [redacted] on Wednesday the 12th of October 2016. And Fred, can I just say first of all thank you very much indeed on behalf of everybody for agreeing to share your memories with us.
AM: You’re welcome.
PL: So, if we start by just maybe perhaps you’d like to just talk a little bit about your, your young life and how you got to be in Bomber Command.
AM: Well, initially I’ve no idea. I mean, I took the what they called the school leaving certificates in those days and the schools didn’t open and I went to see the headmaster and he said, ‘You will be coming back to school won’t you?’ I said, ‘No. I’ve got, it’s about time I contributed something to the family because in two years’ time I’ll be in the forces.’ So that was how it started. And as I say, you know war broke out. My Dad and I joined the LDV et cetera and we stayed in that. After that I went to, it was an air force training place, thing which was about navigation. And I think that was the first inkling that I had. But also in 1938 seven of us went on, went camping at Middleton in Teesdale. And four of us went into the RAF, two went into the navy and one became a doctor, he went to university. And that had a bearing on me as well. And out of those four I was the only survivor. And the two lads that went in the navy one was shipwrecked. Well, he was, his boat was sunk in the Mediterranean. He was a prisoner of war until he was liberated in 1942 when the, you know, in the North African campaign. And I had lots of other friends who went into the Bomber Command or went into the air force as it was then and unfortunately most of those died. I mean, I left and I went to, when I joined up that was in, my dad took me to Newcastle. Of course initially what I wanted to do I wanted to go into the Merchant Navy. My parents wouldn’t agree. So I stayed on and I went to Newcastle with my dad and he said, ‘Do you want to volunteer for the air force?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ So I went and volunteered for the air force, told my mother and she went berserk. And I mean really he was thinking of the war being the same as the First World War. Because he went right through from 1915 to 1918. And he, I mean the conditions that they had were horrendous. So he didn’t want me to have that so he took me to volunteer for the air, for the air force. And I was, that was on December the 13th [laughs] On January the 1st I was enlisted in to the air force. And then I was on, they sent me home for about a few months and then I was called up. And as I say I went away with from Birtley with two lads. Two other lads. Neither of them survived. I was the only one. And from there on it just took off and I drifted into Bomber Command. That’s how I got there. In Bomber Command we had, well actually I did part of the first tour on Wellingtons. And then we tried, we converted on to Halifaxes and picked up a mid-upper gunner and an engineer and then continued. Finished the first tour. Then continued, because we’d picked two boys up, five of us were entitled to nine months rest period which we didn’t do. We discussed it over a few pints of beer and we agreed that we would carry on for the sake of the other two lads. So we carried on with the second tour consecutively. And that’s it really. I mean I can give you the details of what we did et cetera. I mean on the first tour, as I say the first part of the first tour was on Wellingtons. And what we, 100 Group were on Special Duties and 192 Squadron were investigating enemy radar. And B Flight was Wellingtons — A flight was Wellingtons, B Flight was Halifaxes and C Flight was Mosquitoes. And we also had on our squadron an American reconnaissance unit. So it was all, it was all very hush hush. All our correspondence was vetted before it went off so what the family got at home I don’t know because you weren’t allowed to tell anybody anything about what we were doing. It was so secret. And the logbook shows SD Operations. Full stop. And as I said the first part of the tour on Wellingtons was immediately off the Dutch coast and maybe about five ten mile off the Dutch coast and the idea, the rear of the aircraft was packed with special equipment and we had a special operator interpreting whatever we found. If he found a signal we phoned it inland and I mean it was, it was seemed to be quite easy to us because that area was where the German night fighters were based and it’s strangely enough we went through it completely. Never saw a night fighter. But there were two of us flying from each end and the other crew always were attacked by night fighters. So, well the book that was issued at Lincoln, you know when we went down to the erection of this there was a chap called Donaldson there. Wing Commander Donaldson. Well, he was our wing commander so he flew on the opposite leg to us. And this was all night flying. And they were attacked by night fighters. We weren’t. So they put us on daylight and we flew daylight with a Spitfire cover. And then after that we converted on to Halifaxes and because of their longer range we were then involved in most of Germany. I mean actually we were supposed to be the last Bomber Command Wellington to operate. And I’ve got a photograph to prove that. But we weren’t because the crew, the last crew to operate on our flight the skipper was cashiered because he came back, couldn’t get his undercart down and pancaked on the runway which was forbidden. So he was cashiered and they were the last crew that flew on Wellingtons. So that’s it. It’s a long story that.
PL: Can we just clarify this because it’s a fascinating, it’s a fascinating story. The role of your crew. So you would navigate in —
AM: Yes.
PL: And the, all this kit, this electronic kit that was at the back of the plane.
AM: Yes.
PL: Were they finding out where radar was operating from?
AM: It was mainly radar but it was, it was mainly the V-1s that, which were starting at that time and we wanted to locate where they were being fired from. We were also, when we were flying in daylight there was a V-2 went up from The Hague and we, we witnessed that and it was, it was unbelievable. I don’t know whether we were the first crew to see a V-2 or not. But when we were on the, on the station there was a terrific bang and it was one of these V-2s which had exploded at a place called Dereham in Norfolk, and then we heard it coming because it was travelling faster than the speed of sound. So you heard the bang and then you heard the thing coming. It was weird. You couldn’t understand it at the time but that’s, that’s what it was.
PL: So then you would take that information back or —
AM: We took the information back.
PL: And that was your role.
AM: Every trip we went back. Every crew was interviewed or interrogated by the intelligence people.
PL: And so presumably you could be sent anywhere where they thought —
AM: Well, I mean we were mainly on the, on the Dutch coast. The northern, off the Frisian Islands. Down. Up to Denmark and places like that. But you were limited in the time you could fly in a Wellington, you know. I mean I’ve got to say a strange story but the nearest thing that we took that we had, we took a WAAF officer on leave to Cambridge. And we landed at this ‘drome at Cambridge and immediately the engines cut out because the bomb aimer was supposed to check that the nacelle tanks were full and we were switched on to the nacelle tanks for landing and he didn’t do it because the ground crew always did it. And we landed, just landed and both engines cut out because there was no petrol. [laughs] So that was the nearest escape we had.
PL: So that was just, so you were already landed and stopped.
AM: We, the wheels just touched down and both engines cut. Which could have been disastrous if it [pause] but we laughed about it.
PL: Was there a bit of an exchange in the aircraft with that?
AM: Yeah. So —
PL: A little bit of an exchange in the aircraft over that incident.
AM: Well, we had a good laugh about it. I mean of course you didn’t really criticise each other. I mean you were flying as a team. I mean there was never any animosity or anything like that.
PL: So, so what year was this that you started?
AM: Well, it was 1941 that I volunteered. That was, and that was, and this is January the 1st 1942. And then from there I went to ITW. Elementary Flying School. Then we were transferred to Canada to do our training. Came back and did the, we went on to, from there you went on Advanced Training Wing which was in Llandwrog in North Wales. And then we went from there to Wing which is an Operational Training Unit. And from there you would normally go and convert on to either Lancasters but we were transferred straight from the squadron, from the ITW straight to the squadron. So we missed that course out and we eventually had to go and convert later on that year on to the Halifaxes. Which we did at Marston Moor.
PL: So how old were you when you first joined Bomber Command?
AM: Twenty, well I was eighteen when I first joined up. And then when you went into Bomber Command it was maybe nineteen forty — end of ’42.
PL: And this, this particular squadron, were you, did you volunteer for that squadron?
AM: No.
PL: Or were you chosen in a particular way? Was it just random?
AM: You were selected mainly on the, on the operations that you did at the Operational Training Unit. And they selected the best crews there because it was all Special Duties and it had to be so accurate. Because on one of the operations if you had to, well, we dropped you heard about dropping silver paper. You know. And we used to carry out spoof raids because you might be, you might be going to a target down here and so the main force would go there but they’d send a spoof raid which was mainly 192 Squadron, well 100 Group and you used to throw silver paper out which when they picked it up they thought it was a pukka raid because these strips of silver paper were half the wavelength of the [pause] It was all clever stuff. And if you were a minute early or two minutes late on your datum point you had to write an explanation. I don’t know how that happens so it was really, you know you had to be we were chosen to go to that squadron because of our ability at OTU. I mean, my skipper I mean he used to volunteer to fly with the main force and go just as a passenger. He was an Australian and he did that just for experience.
PL: So did you stay with that squadron for the whole of the war?
AM: Yes. Until, until the war against Germany finished and then we were transferred to — actually what we, what we had to do then, I mean we could, I could have volunteered for Transport Command or something like that. But we’d done our tour. We were entitled to a rest period. And so we took the rest period and then eventually we ended up as, in Canada. No. I beg your pardon. I’m ahead of myself now. We were — they sent, they sort of give you a ground trade. So although I was a warrant officer navigator I was an AC 2 equipment accounts. And all I did was write my name on the top of the paper and passed out [laughs] I didn’t answer any of the questions. Just passed. And from there I was sent to India. Of course they, they couldn’t get, they couldn’t find employment for all the people who were being demobbed so they sent them to India. And I was out there for eleven months and I did nothing except draw my pay.
PL: So quite an experience.
AM: So it was. It was quite it was quite interesting out there. I mean it was an experience which I would never had otherwise but, otherwise. But in general, I mean you know I’ve attended lectures about, from historians about what Bomber Command did and how ineffective they were and how barbaric it was. Well, I accept that in the early days it was like tally-ho. And they used to go off. They were given the target. Many of them didn’t find it because they didn’t have the electronic equipment or radar equipment to navigate properly. It was all on DR and maybe didn’t find the targets. With their resources they got shot down and their losses were tremendous in the early days. They were flying Blenheims and Wellingtons and things like that. But, and Arthur Harris, I mean, I mean I think really he did an awful lot towards the war. I mean a lot of people said it was barbaric. Well, not once were we, when we were briefed when we were going was it said, ‘You’re going to bomb civilians.’ It was always a strategic target and the one, the thing that comes to mind is Dresden. I mean at that time Dresden was already twenty miles from the Russian border. And we bombed Dresden during the night. The Americans did it too. But after Stalingrad, the Battle of Stalingrad the Germans retreated and were regrouping in that area. And as I said this New Zealand crew went to Dresden and it was a fire attack. But what we, our brief was that we were to disrupt the reorganisation. That was the brief. It wasn’t that we had to destroy Dresden. And it was really these fire bombs there. You see Harris’s idea was instead of just haphazardly one aircraft followed by another aircraft flying in a stream the ground forces ARP could cope with it. He said you’ve got to fly in a stream and you’ve got to be through that target in ten minutes so that the concentration was too much for the ground forces. And the only thing that comes to my mind in, I mean they changed the method of bombing. And that was if you had a conventional bomb it went into the ground and it dug a hole and that was it. I mean there was a terrific explosion. But they then developed these four thousand pound bombs which were tin cans really, strapped together. One thousand pounds each strapped together to make up and I mean and they hit the ground, blasted and demolished the property so therefore civilians must have been killed. Also, I mean I listened to a lecture in Newcastle by a chap from Exeter University and he’s written several books on this and he castigated Bomber Command for being inaccurate et cetera. Well, when you were bombing you didn’t bomb the target you bombed the flares which the Pathfinders put down. And there was one raid at Essen where Germans put dummy path, dummy flares down and all the bombs of our thousand bomber raid went in to that field. So after that they developed what they called the master bomber technique. And the master bomber used to fly lower than the main force and identify the target. So when the Pathfinders came along he could tell them where they’d gone wrong. So where you had red, green and yellow so if the red ones were the wrong ones you’d tell them where to put the green. And so you then really bombed the target. And I think that was more precise then what the Americans did because the Americans flew in daylight and they flew in formation. And I did go on to, when I was at Marston Moor went on to the B12s and the equipment that they had for navigation was abysmal. I mean it couldn’t be compared with what we had. But the armament that they had was terrific. And they, when I was working actually I worked with a chap who was a colonel in the American Air Force and he said ‘we carpet bombed.’ And they went through the target and dropped their bombs to make sure that they hit something. Whereas we were bombing specific things. And that’s the, that’s the thing which never came through from any of these historians. So —
PL: So, talking, talking about the way Bomber Command has been treated since the war do you think that that was a political decision?
AM: Well, it was political as far as Churchill was concerned in so much that he was all in favour. I mean the thing that you’ve got to remember that German civilians did not know there was a war on. I mean because Hitler controlled the whole of Europe and the people in Germany, there was no blackout or anything. And it was only the air force who let them know that there was a war on. And we flew all those years, long before the D-Day landings without any back up from anybody. And it was just to keep the war, keep the people, in the German’s minds that there was a war. And they got the biggest shock of their life when Berlin was bombed. And they started it and we finished it. And that’s my view of the of the air force because they were really, what was written about them was so far from the truth it was unbelievable really. Otherwise you wouldn’t have done it.
PL: It’s taken a long time to get recognition.
AM: A long time to — ?
PL: Get recognition.
AM: Oh it has, I mean, I don’t know how it came about but for years I mean you used to read the papers and they used to say it was a waste of time, the German people were as strong as ever but they weren’t. They couldn’t have been once the bombing came because we were doing it at night time and the Americans were doing it during the daylight because all they were doing was map reading. And it took, an example is that in 100 Group the main force was stood down because of some leakage of information. So they had an operation just to keep them on their toes and the American Air Force, 8th Air Force acted as Pathfinders. And as I said before they had no navigational equipment and they marked the whole of Northern Germany [laughs] And we just bombed, because with, there was a system called Gee which was, you had two stations — one in North Africa and one somewhere up in Iceland. And they sent out beams and where they intersected you could navigate. You could set them up and you could navigate within four hundred yards which was amazing really. And a lot of people did drop their bombs on Gee. And that was amazingly put on our aircraft on 192 Squadron. We had Gee. We had H2S which is your own transmitter which sends out transmissions and you can really see and it shows you rivers, coastlines, towns et cetera. But the German night fighters could home in on this and shoot you down so there was generally H2S silence, you know from four degrees east. So you couldn’t do that. But H2S was great. You could, because it was just like map reading like the American’s did. And then we also had another system called Loran which was like the, it was for Transport Command really. And it took, you took two position lines. In DR navigation you’re flying along a path and to find out where you are you take a reading or a compass reading on a certain point, wait a few minutes and take another reading and then you transfer this line and where those two lines crossed that’s where you are. But that was only accurate within, you know, because the aircraft flies like that and it was accurate within about twelve miles or something like that. But as I say Gee you could navigate within, well say four hundred metres. Which, I developed a system with my bomb aimer and we could get further west, further east than the majority of crews because the Gee system, it sent up signals and when you, what they called strobed them it became like a, like a hillock and the others on the other side so if you kept those two together you could navigate further. Because Germany were no idiots. They were clever as well. I mean they used to jam the radar and the Gee by putting up what they called Grass or Railings. And if you lost that signal you couldn’t find it again. So, I mean but we were too clever for our own good and we went to Potsdam. And the winds were two seventy five mile an hour. And that’s, and then the Met men said, ‘When you pass through this point you’ll pass through a front and the winds will veer to three forty at forty.’ But I got to the point and I was getting readings of two seventy. So I had to alter my flight plan and waste eight minutes. So we wasted eight minutes. As a result we ended up ten minutes late on the target. And strangely enough the chap that I worked with when I was at BOC he lived in Low Fell, he was over the target at the same time. There were two, two of us over the target. We got coned by the blue searchlights and we put the nose down and the speed went off the clock and the gyro compass toppled. So we just flew on the P6 compass and ended up, well I thought it was Lisle but the wireless operator read what they called a pundit, which is a flashing light and he gave me that and I said, ‘Well that’s near Paris.’ So we didn’t know what to do so we just flew on until I thought well we’ve got to get rid of H2S. I’ll switch it on and I’d altered course north because we were about to hit the coastline. And the skipper said, ‘Oh. That’s the Thames Estuary.’ ‘That’s — sorry but you’re wrong. It’s le Havre.’ It’s going the other way. So we map read back there, back from there on Gee. But they were the sort of —
PL: So did you have a gunner with you? Were you, were you able to defend yourselves? Did you have a gunner with you?
AM: I had two gunners. I had a mid-upper gunner and a rear gunner. And, in that sort of thing [laughs] I mean they could be looking at a Perspex screen and you could see a dot on it, the odd dirt. Is that an enemy aircraft? And there was only once that we ever had to take evasive action from night fighters. But another thing not known is that a lot of, I mean you’re supposed to fly at a certain height within a stream five miles wide but a lot of people flew just above that to avoid the flak. We never did that. We always went through the flak because if you flew above the flak you were liable to be attacked by night fighters who could home on to you. And we lost more aircraft through night fighters than what we did through flak. So we took the option. And I can remember we, there was a chap flew with us. We went to Dortmund and we went through the flak. We got hit, turned on our backs and we came back and although you thought the aircraft had been blown apart there were three tiny holes in the aircraft. One took the top off the skipper’s knuckle. One came in beside the wireless operator’s leg. Another just missed the rear gunner. But they were only three tiny holes and you’d thought the plane had been blown apart. And I mean that was the sort of, that was one of the few times that we had any, that we got involved in anything like that. We were more than fortunate but I think it was a lot of good management as well because we never had any speech on the aircraft other than commands. Others they used to have Joe Loss playing the music. I flew with one, one crew as a passenger and they were, they had Joe Loss on and it was like, it was terrible. I couldn’t, I couldn’t bear it really. But we only spoke, you know, on commands. When we had to. So that’s the story.
PL: So you were obviously a very tight crew. Did you fly with the same crew throughout?
AM: We flew with the same crew throughout. And you lived as a crew. I mean we had, both the Canadians got promoted. They got commissions. I was recommended for a commission twice. And on the first time I refused to go forward because there was a superstition that you don’t accept a commission while you’re on operational duty. So I was, when we finished the tour I was recommended to go forward again. And I got turned down which, what they was said was that it was because they were over staffed on officers in the navigation section. A lad that was flying with us who refused to fly with us again because we went through the flak got a commission. But that was just the luck of the draw.
PL: So, tell me about your last, your last flight.
AM: The last flight was on —
PL: You knew that was going to be your last flight did you?
AM: Not really. It was in April. I think it was April the 24th and the war finished on May the 8th. I can tell you where I went to [pause] April the 24th to Dortmund. That was the last flight that we did. I’ve got Donald’s signature so many times in there. He was quite a good bloke actually. I mean he’d gone right through from the Battle of Britain. Right through the war and survived. Lovely bloke though.
PL: So tell me a little bit about what happened next.
AM: Well, we were sent on an indefinite leave after the war. And then as I said you know we were regraded to a ground force then on equipment accounts. I ended up in a place called Kankinara which is in India. Which was like an old jute station. Oh the pong was terrible. I mean we were living in absolute luxury. But outside, I mean there were just hovels. There were people living in, about forty people living in a room this size and I mean they had meat hanging up, you know. It was covered in flies. And bowls of currants — you went like that [clap] and it was flour. And that was the sort of conditions that they Indians were living under yet we were living in these palatial places which obviously the people of the East India Company had lived in. But I mean it’s strange in Calcutta. I mean the temperature used to get up to about eighty but in the morning there would be a white frost. So we were wearing blues, you know and then you’d change in to khaki.
PL: So, did you experience any of the, any of partition of India?
AM: Yes. I was in Bombay at the time when they were fighting for independence. And as I say I was in fact I was trained as, in. I worked in the services thing. But I went to, I went to Bombay I was in pay accounts. And all, all I did was go through a list of things which had thumbprints on it and stamp them and say yes. But we were then, because we had been in aircrew we knew because of all the riots in Bombay et cetera of course they used to throw stones from vehicles et cetera. And we were, used to go, what they called garrey guards and we used to have sten guns and we’d go back and we were going along this road and we got through. And when we couldn’t get through because the streets were absolutely jammed full of people we turned to come back and there was a tree being felled across the road. So we jumped out and all of about forty of them were trying to get through a door about this size [laughs] and they were saying, ‘Sahib,’ but I mean so we did that. We sort of transported the civilians back to their place where they were living and that’s the, that’s the only involvement we’d got in that. But it was definitely there and I mean they had to bring tanks in eventually. But eventually they did get their independence.
PL: So then you went home. So then you went home.
AM: I did.
PL: And what happened then?
AM: When I came home, well I got married in 1945 and while I was out there could have gone on to British Overseas Airways but I promised not to fly again [laughs] And I came home and it would, it’s a pity because I enjoyed flying. But I came home and they were bound to give you your job back. Well, I went back to BOC and I worked there. Eventually went in to the purchasing side. Became purchase, I was there for, including your war service, thirty years. Got my watch to prove it [laughs] And then, but our eldest son who was taking his what they call O levels now, and it meant that I was going to have to transfer down to the London area. Nobody was very happy so stayed in this area. And eventually I went to Hartlepool and my daughter wouldn’t move down to Hartlepool because she said, ‘You didn’t move for our Neil.’ [laughs] So that’s right I was going to move to Shotton Village, a nice estate, and you wouldn’t. You said, ‘I’m not moving.’ [laughs] So, and that was it. So I stayed with BOC and then eventually they moved me to London which wasn’t a particularly good move. And from there I went from BOC to Foster Wheeler. I then transferred. I got into the off shore industry. Then I went to Charlton-Leslie which was, it was a part of the BT Group and they were in to the offshore and that was just about collapsing. So I transferred and went to NEI and I was working in the nuclear industry. And then I retired at sixty five. So I’ve been retired now twenty eight years.
PL: So did you keep in touch with the rest of your crew?
AM: We used to meet. Well, actually rather strange. I mean when we picked up an engineer he was Geordie. He came from Newcastle. I thought great another Geordie in the crew. But he was the strangest lad. I mean I can remember him, we were at the, we used to report to the flights and the NAAFI wagon used to come around. And he said to me, he said, ‘Can you buy me a cup of tea and a wad.’ I said, ‘Oh that’s ok. I have some.’ So I bought him a cup of tea and then at lunchtime he says, ‘Can you lend me a half a crown to get a packet of cigarettes?’ I said, ‘But you’ve got a pound note in your wallet.’ He said, ‘I don’t want to break into it.’ [laughs] And we used to go out for a drink and there were eight of us with pints of beer. And Taff, Welshman he used to drink rough cider and after he’d had two he was legless [laughs] And, but Green who was the engineer, we got wise to him and said, ‘Right. You’re first shout.’ So he stopped coming out with us. So we lived as a, not as a seven man crew but as a six man crew. It’s unfortunate because he missed an awful lot. And unfortunately I think they’re all dead now. I’m the only survivor. But you asked about meeting. Well, the two Australians went back to Australia obviously. But the bomb aimer, the mid-upper gunner and the rear gunner and myself used to meet down in Tring because my eldest son lived in Tring and the, Taff was a Welshman. Came from Newport. Chas the bomb aimer came from Cheltenham. And Pete from Leicester. And that so that’s it. When we went down to visit Neil we always got together. And we did that for years didn’t we? We used to meet every year and it was good to meet up again. And we used to have a meal together and then just disburse. And then after that well Chas died. Lung cancer actually. And then we were, we had another meeting and Taff, he bought, he always had a desire to buy one of these luxurious cars. He bought it and within ten minutes of where we were meeting he had an accident. And he damaged his chest et cetera. Well, he died subsequently and then there was only Pete and I and as I say we used to meet and we went to Elvington to see this Halifax. And then after that it just died but as far as I’m concerned I think the, well Laurie Mottler was about ten years older than what we were. So he would be a hundred and something if he was here. And Gibby was older than us so I think they all must be dead now. And that brings us up to date really.
PL: Well, Fred, that’s an amazing story. Thank you very much indeed.
AM: I don’t think you’ll print all that.
PL: Is there, is there anything else that you’d like to talk about?
AM: I don’t know. Not really. Except that I was appalled by some of the stuff that was put in the newspapers about Bomber Command. I mean we were portrayed as being sadists, didn’t care but it wasn’t like that at all.
PL: Well thank you very much indeed for your interview.
AM: That’s the first time I’ve told that story for a long, long time.
PL: It’s a wonderful story. Thank you very much indeed.
[recording paused]
PL: So we’re recommencing the tape and Fred you were just telling me about —
AM: Well the raids on Dresden and Chemnitz, in that area they were tactical because the German army was regrouping after the defeat at Stalingrad. And to avoid them regrouping we bombed them and it was for that reason that we were briefed. It was nothing to do with scaring the population or killing civilians or anything. And because it was so near, it was only twenty miles from the Russian Front they gave us a Union Jack.
PL: But this was, where was it you bombed? It wasn’t Dresden.
AM: We went to Chemnitz.
PL: Yeah.
AM: And I mean we only carried a token bomb just for the cover up to show that we were in Bomber Command. They didn’t want people to know that we were on Special Duties. And that was one of the things that we did. I mean we only carried maybe five hundred pounds or a thousand pounds of conventional bombs or these aluminium fire bombs. But —
PL: But you wore —
AM: But that was interesting that.
PL: A Union Jack badge.
AM: Yes. Well you hung it around your neck.
PL: And you hung it around your neck.
AM: Yeah. And that was it.
PL: And that was in case —
AM: Well, it was sufficient to show that you were British. To get through the Russian lines. So —
PL: And you were telling me about the New Zealand crew. Some New Zealanders.
AM: The New Zealand. Well, they were only in our billet for a short while. I mean, for example I mean there was seventeen. Was there fifteen or seventeen in our billet? And there was, the only people who survived were the C Flight crew. There was a navigator and a special operator in our billet. There was a lad called Tommy Campbell which was sad really. He was a Canadian and he flew as a spare bod as we called them and he used to throw Window out. And he’d done twenty nine operations and they put the number up to thirty three for a tour. And he did thirty two and they put it up to thirty six. And on his thirty fourth operation, well they got hit by flak. And the chap who was one of the special operators asked him to jump and he wouldn’t and he had to push him out of the road and jump. And Tommy stayed and he was killed. But he was afraid to jump. And that was at a place called Rheinau. So there was those were missing and this New Zealand crew, so and out of the fifty or something there were only five of us left. So that was the odds that were, you know. They said there was fifty percent loss in aircrew in Bomber Command. And it comes always back to that figure. I mean I went, we had three lads from Birtley. I was the only one that survived. The lads that I went camping with I was the only one. But it always came back to this tremendous figure of the loss of people who actually operated. Because I think there was only a hundred and ten thousand operated but there were about three hundred thousand trained and they didn’t operate at all. These are facts which don’t come to light really.
PL: Thank you Fred. Thank you for that additional piece of information.
AM: What?
PL: Thank you very much for that additional information.
AM: Oh, you’re welcome.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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AMarshallAH161012
Title
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Interview with Alfred Marshall
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
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eng
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00:51:47 audio recording
Creator
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Pam Locker
Date
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2016-10-12
Description
An account of the resource
Alfred Marshall volunteered for the Royal Air Force and was called up to serve with two others from his home town of Birtley, neither of whom survived the war. He flew operations as a navigator with 192 Squadron from RAF Foulsham including Special Operations. He discusses the use of navigational aids including Gee, H2S and Loran and describes flying through and being hit by anti aircraft fire. He also speaks of the strategic aims of the bombing of areas including Dresden and how this has been perceived. He finished his service in India and later worked in the off shore and nuclear energy industries.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
India
England--Norfolk
England--Yorkshire
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Carolyn Emery
Temporal Coverage
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1941
1942-01-01
1945
100 Group
192 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
fear
Gee
H2S
Halifax
navigator
perception of bombing war
RAF Foulsham
RAF Marston Moor
superstition
training
V-2
V-weapon
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/324/3480/ARodgersR170220.2.mp3
67c5ef52bd3e8e546995b948eeec9b4c
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Rodgers, Ronald
R Rodgers
Description
An account of the resource
Two items, An oral history interview and some photographs concerning Ronald Rodgers (432573 Royal Australian Air Force). He served as a mid upper gunner with 460 Squadron.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Ronald Rodgers and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-02-20
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Rodgers, R
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JM: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Jean MacCartney, the interviewee is Ron Rodgers. The interview is taking place at Mr Rodgers home in Southport, Queensland on the 20th of February 2017. Ron lets –
RR: And the spelling of it is R,O,D.
JM: R,O,D. Yes, we’ve got that yes, yes. Now we’ll start at the beginning Ron.
RR: OK.
JM: Back in 1924, and you were born in Cowra?
RR: Yep.
JM: And did that mean that you spent some time in Cowra or your early years?
RR: I grew, I went to school in Cowra. And then I joined the, it was in those days the Union Bank, which became the ANZ afterwards.
JM: Um.
RR: And then I was seventeen by this stage and I was transferred to Caloundra, which was a town twenty miles away. And I worked there until I went into the air force. Well actually I got called up for the military first and I reported to the military area zone at [unclear]. And as soon as I told them that I had an application in for the air force and I was just sort of waiting on the reply, they discharged me in two days, and I went back.
JM: Right. Well just before we go a little bit further there, let’s just go back a little bit. So, your time in Cowra. You did primary school and high school? Did you finish at the Intermediate Certificate or did you go through to the Leaving Certificate?
RR: Yes, finished at the Leaving Certificate.
JM: Leaving Certificate, you did your Leaving Certificate?
RR: Did the leaving certificate, yes.
JM: Right, OK. And your parents, were both, were they in town or?
RR: Yes. my Father was a local builder.
JM: Right.
RR: And he was, he’d been building there for, since the early 1900’s.
JM: Um.
RR: Had built a lot of homes in Cowra over the years. And he died a couple of years after this period. When I, by this stage the bank had appointed me to – oh that’s right, no I was going into the air force.
JM: Right.
RR: So, I went straight into the air force.
JM: Um.
RR: And I was in the air force until I came back.
JM: Um.
RR: After the war.
JM: Yeah, but in terms of the, you finished your Leaving Certificate and then from having done that you went into the bank at the local branch of the bank there and then?
RR: Yes.
JM: You did?
RR: Had a few months there.
JM: Had a few there and then they put you off to Coonamble?
RR: Yep. Caloundra.
JM: Caloundra, sorry my apologies. And then you had the call up but you had, you’d sent off your application for the air force. Why did you choose the air force, why did you want to go into the air force?
RR: Well I’d been involved in the ATC.
JM: Right. The Air Training Corps, what from?
RR: From about when I was about fourteen.
JM: Right.
RR: And I had my heart set on being a flyer.
JM: Um.
RR: I finished up I didn’t fly much. I started Tiger Moths.
JM: Um.
RR: But each instructor had about five pupils and so they were looking to get you out very quickly. And I can always remember I’d had one flight out to the satellite drome and they came and said ‘The chief scrub inspector wants you to fly him back to Malanda’. And I said ‘OK’ and I can always remember this, as I was coming into land there wasn’t a Tiger Moth in the sky. And suddenly I looked at this area, part of the landing area, and there were nine Tiger Moth’s all coming in at once. And the instructor said to me, he said ‘If you land in a white pegged area you’re scrubbed’. And sure enough, there was ‘planes coming in, I moved over and I landed in a white pegged area. That was the last time until Margaret took me on my birthday a few years ago on a Tiger Moth flight. That was the last time I’d flown a Tiger Moth.
JM: Um. And this is when then you were in the Air Training Corps?
RR: Yes, I’d signed up.
JM: Yeah, for the air force yeah.
RR: For the air force yeah. And it was only a matter of a couple of weeks and I went to Lindfield in Sydney, in Bradfield Park.
JM: Um.
RR: Which was the induction area for aircrew.
JM: Um.
RR: I did training there and then I was sent out as a prospective pilot.
JM: Um.
RR: Because this one error that fixed me. And then I said ‘What happens now?’ They said ‘You’re being transferred to No2 Wireless School at, what was the name?
JM: Parks?
RR: Yeah, Parks.
JM: Um.
RR: Yeah. To do a wireless course. I’d studied Morse ‘cause my bank manager had been a first World War guy. And they did Morse and he sort of got me going on Morse and I’d obviously topped the course in Bradfield Park. And so, out of seventeen who were scrubbed out of, there were about fifty in the course, we all volunteered for straight gunners. And everyone except me was posted. I was down posted, you know I had to do a wireless air gunners course at the Parks. And I was the only one. I went to Parks, and the other seventeen I think there were of them. And I did the gunnery course with them and then went back to Parks, and I did the course, which took six months. And amazingly enough, my closest friend there, he’d been in the next bunk to me at Bradfield Park, and I got to know him well. And we became close friends and he was my closest friend and today I’ve just read an article, he got killed in a crash and he’d written – and he’d done twenty ops and every op that he did he wrote a full story. And Bomber Command have been printing his story for the last flight he did and the one today in that flight magazine, it’s his sixth trip. So he’s, there’s still fourteen –
JM: To go.
RR: To go. And they’re putting in one a month.
JM: Um.
RR: But it was amazing the pilot, how, we got split up once we got to England. And I picked up the paper one day, and there’s a photo of this pilot who escaped without a parachute. And it turns out he was the skipper of the crew that Mac was flying in.
JM: Um.
RR: And suddenly the, I forget what the aircraft was, an Anson or something, it exploded and blew this guy, the pilot, out into the air without a parachute.
MM: Parachute.
RR: At twenty thousand feet and amazingly enough as he was falling through the air he hit something in the air. ‘Cause some of the them had got out. And grabbed onto it and it was the mid upper gunner who was coming down in a parachute. So, he came down with him in his parachute. And it’s amazing, my doctor treated him after he came back, after the war for the injury to his legs.
JM: Legs.
RR: And he died only about a year ago. And of course, Mac came down and his parachute was on fire.
JM: Oh dear.
RR: And it, he was killed when he hit the ground.
JM: When he hit the ground, on impact?
RR: But that’s just a side issue.
JM: A side yeah. Well I mean the point is you were just saying about how you had been doing your training with him. Yeah, so having done your training at Parks, you then more or less went to preparation for departure and went up to Brisbane?
RR: Yeah. I went to No2 wireless air gunners course at Parks.
JM: Yes, but after that.
RR: For six months. After that I know they just moved us out of a tent.
JM: Um.
RR: And I can always remember the mud and stuff. Onto a liberty ship which was [telephone ringing], had brought some American troops to Australia on its first, its maiden voyage.
JM: Um.
RR: And we were loaded onto that ship. And there were about eighty of us I think we were. And we went, we got let off at Alcatraz.
JM: Um. And –
RR: I didn’t go in the prison.
JM: No.
RR: We were in a, there was a camp right opposite on the other side of the bay.
JM: Um.
RR: And I’d volunteered to fly as a straight air gunner, although I’d done my wireless course and had got my wags, wings and all that sort of thing. But I still decided to carry on as a straight air gunner. And I finished up, I’d been to 460 the Australian squadron.
JM: Um.
RR: I did a Morse, Reuters Morse course at Yatesbury and then I went, volunteered, went to Yatesbury in Wiltshire and volunteered again to fly as a straight air gunner.
JM: Um.
RR: And I’d been at Binbrook for three months or something, that’s with the Australian squadron.
JM: Yeah, that’s when you in the 460, so when you got to Binbrook was when you were posted to 460 Squadron? Yes?
RR: Yes. That was 460.
JM: Um.
RR: And then I got wings, I went to Yatesbury, which is Reuters wireless school.
JM: Yep, yep.
RR: And I did fairly well in that. And I still volunteered to fly as a straight air gunner ‘cause we wanted to get it over and done with and get home.
JM: Home, that’s right yeah. So that’s OK, so you got to, you did all your, you did –
RR: Conversion.
JM: You got to Binbrook as 460?
RR: I went from Binbrook to Winthorpe where we converted onto Lancasters.
JM: Yep, um. So, you didn’t do any operational work at Binbrook? Didn’t run any, didn’t do any operational flights?
RR: No.
JM: Ok, so.
RR: Only, I was flying one flight from Binbrook. One morning the call woke me up at seven o’clock in the morning, and said ‘Get straight up to the Adjutant’s office, there’s a Lancaster waiting outside to take you to….’ And I’ve forgotten the name of the squadron which up was up at, which was up near Newcastle.
JM: Um.
RR: And, Newcastle upon Tyne, and they flew me up. ‘Cause they’d picked me because of my Morse knowledge.
JM: Yep.
RR: And I was going to be. I was interviewed and I looked at all the equipment in the Halifax. There was sort of special equipment, and the last thing that the guy said to me, he said ‘Right, there’s a Lancaster waiting to take you back to Binbrook, and we’ll contact you within seven days. ‘Cause you qualify for this job handling the electronics on the –
JM: The Halifax?
RR: On the Lancaster, no Halifax, Halifax.
JM: Yep.
RR: It was ‘cause I think there were only three Halifax’s with this equipment in them. But in that week they had a couple of crashes and lost the whole crew. And so the next thing I heard, I’m posted to Morton in the Marsh.
JM: Um.
RR: Which was Wellington.
JM: Right. So you had to do –
RR: OTU Squadron.
JM: Right, yeah.
RR: So I was [unclear] Morton in the Marsh. And we, and from there, we moved to, at the end of the course, we were moved to –
JM: To Winthorpe?
RR: To Winthorpe.
JM: For Lancaster conversion is that right?
RR: To Lancaster conversion yeah.
JM: Yep, so that’s in –
RR: And we did the Lancaster conversion, and we got a report that we were a real good crew and they were going to recommend us for Pathfinders.
JM: Um.
RR: Anyhow suddenly the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
JM: Um.
RR: And we’d moved only a few weeks before to Skellingthorpe.
JM: Um.
RR: And to, oh what were they called? I keep forgetting the name of it.
JM: Tiger Force?
RR: Tiger Force.
JM. Yeah.
RR: Yeah we were moved to Tiger Force.
JM: Um.
RR: In fact there’s a photo out in the office there of our course. ‘Cause there were, there were, sixty squadrons of Lancasters going to bomb Tokyo. And we were due to leave in two days time to fly to Tokyo up by the Arctic Circle, and the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, and that’s –
JM: And that was the end of that?
RR: And that stopped it all. But we’d done about five months flying in Tiger Force.
JM: Right, yeah.
RR: And within six weeks we were on our way home.
JM: Home. So basically you just – it was all training as such. You didn’t actually then do any operational missions –
RR: Oh, when we were doing at the conversion unit, which put us onto Lancasters –
JM: Yep.
RR: We did our, I’ve got the logbook down here.
JM: Um.
RR: And between Morton in the Marsh and Skellingthorpe –
JM: Yeah.
RR: We’d done about eight hundred hours flying. And we were flying every day.
JM: Um. Flying every day.
RR: And we were doing diversions.
JM: Um.
RR: And it’s amazing, just been looking into it. [unclear] getting the letter from Bomber Command. And there was one operation that we did, which was a, it was a bogus operation on Tokyo.
JM: Um.
RR: It was the diversion, and we were mainly flying diversions all over the Atlantic but no bombing.
JM: No.
RR: It was all this sort of flying. And so that’s my history really.
JM: Yeah, no. And of course you didn’t, with the way that all turned out you didn’t then have to do any of the pick ups and returns of the servicemen from Europe back to the UK? That, others did that?
RR: Oh, we did that.
JM: You did do that?
RR: We did that. We were put on a ship, and there was about a hundred of us. Australians, all Australians, about a hundred or so. They put us onto a ship, and the Chief of the Air Force in England was on the wharf. And all these blokes were coming off the ship and shouting and performing and. Anyhow they rounded us up and got us all back on the ship. You wouldn’t believe it and down this [unclear] of Spain it broke down completely. And we had to come back and they sent another ship down to pick us up to take us back and we were another six weeks in England. And then we came via Suez Canal and Taranto, Italy. We went around Italy and ‘cause they were picking up a few New Zealanders there. But yes well it was a very interesting exercise. And actually within two days of the Americans dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki the Japanese surrendered. And so suddenly everything had stopped and we were still flying for another month or so. We were just, we were flying over Europe, doing reconnaissance because they were worried that the Germans were going to start again.
JM: Um. Was there also a concern about the Russians at all at that point, or?
RR: Yeah, the Russians. The Russians came in, in fact the Russians released quite a lot of Australians that were, or Jews I think they were, that were in jail there. But that’s all the Russians. The Russians soon got out of the action there they wiped the Germans out. But that finished up being a very interesting period. And of the crew there’s only –
JM: When did you, because you’d had a lot of changes, once you were crewed up, when did you?
RR: Crewed up.
JM: Crewed up. Was it when you were at the Wellington OTU, was that when you were crewed up?
RR: Yes, yes.
JM: Right. And so who did you have in your crew? All Australians in your [unclear] yeah?
RR: All Australians.
JM: A mix of sort of west and east or?
RR: No, they were all Australians and we had a excellent pilot and the only Englishman in the crew was the engineer.
JM: Right.
RR: You’ll see in those photos, only seven of them in photo. Although I think there was one with only six. But yes so, we did a tremendous amount of flying.
JM: Flying um.
RR: Amazing.
JM: You said eight hundred hours I think didn’t you?
RR: The two together. I’ve got a copy of the logbook, pilot’s logbook.
JM: Right, yeah.
RR: And there’s about eight hundred. We did about eight hundred hours flying between OTU and the conversion. CSF.
JM: Going into the Lancasters?
RR: Yeah, Lancasters. But we did, I think we did, about three hundred hours I think in Wellingtons. There’s a note on the, in the logbook there, that the total was round about eight hundred flying hours.
JM: Um, gosh. And so, this pilot, well your crew, the whole crew that you were on. Did you stay together as a crew and then return home as a crew?
RR: Yes, yes.
JM: Yes, OK. And did –
RR: Out of that crew there’s only the pilot and myself left alive.
JM: And who’s the, is the pilot, was the pilot?
RR: The pilot was Wal Goodwin.
JM: Goodwin, yeah right.
RR: And we think there’s only the two of us out of the crew, others have died.
JM: Yes.
RR: ‘Cause the navigator and the bomb aimer were both, I think ten years at least older.
JM: Yep.
RR: The rest of the crew. And the pilot he’s just turned forty, sorry, ninety-four.
JM: Yep.
RR: And I’ll be ninety-three in August.
JM: August, yeah. And how, what, even though you were doing all this flying as training, were there any particular events, or sequence of events, that sort of perhaps stood out for you? That stay with you more than others? Couple of things, anything to mention?
RR: One of our flights over the North Sea we lost an engine and went into a dive and the pilot was getting ready to bail out. And we were out in the middle of the North Sea and there was no way of getting the dinghy out or anything. That was probably the worst experience.
JM: So, what did the pilot manage to recover at the last minute or?
RR: Yes. It got into a steep dive and the pressure on the jets, or the propellers, started the engine up again. And we were OK. We had one other –
JM: In the Wellington or the Lancaster?
RR: No, in the Lancaster.
JM: In the Lancaster, um.
RR: ‘Cause they used us in training for patrolling the North Sea, we did everything except drop bombs really.
JM: Um. ‘Cause I presume you were monitoring ship movements and that sort of thing were you?
RR: Yeah, yeah. In fact, I’m just reading a book about the, what’s it called, [unclear] I just bought it home. Guy that lent it to me, is our gardener lent it to me. It’s about eight hundred pages but it’s all about Bomber Command and their attacks on the Turbots. And thinking of the Turbots I went back a second time and found that it had a great hole in the side and the Turbot was sunk. Was sunk there and that was the end of it.
JM: So that was one when you lost that engine. Anything else that stays with you more than any other?
RR: No. We had a couple of tricky landings you know? They lost power and we came in round on the strip a couple of times. Only a couple of times, but in fact he was such a good pilot that one of the flights we came back, and it was in the daytime. We landed and we went into the briefing room and suddenly a person run in the briefing room and said ‘Is the pilot called Goodwin here?’ and we said ‘Oh yeah, Wal.’ And Wal stood up and he said ‘You’re wanted in the tower, some top-ranking officer wants to talk to you.’ And what it was, this guy was the top, one of the top half dozen in the air force. And he called him into the tower and said ‘Right’ he said ‘I just want to congratulate you,’ he said ‘That is the best landing I’ve ever seen made by a Lancaster.’
JM: Goodness.
RR: And from that we were recommended for Pathfinders. We were lucky we were a top crew and if the Tiger Force hadn’t suddenly happened we would have been posted to, to do, I’ve forgotten, I’ve lost track of what I was talking about now.
JM: You would have gone off to Pathfinders.
RR: Pathfinders.
JM: Yeah.
RR: Yeah. As a crew we would have been –
JM: Moved on.
RR: To Pathfinders.
JM: Yeah. And what about your leave times? You probably had various, quite often you would have had patches of leave, what sort of things did you do while you were on leave? Did you go anywhere? Did you end up with a particular place that you enjoyed going to or did you go to many different places, or?
RR: Well mainly we went on short breaks, somewhere the – there was one when we first got to England. We’d been there about three weeks I think it was and they said ‘ You’ve got five days leave.’ And a group of us, four or five of us, went off and stayed in a hotel in London, and that night was the most V1’s and V2’s they had over London in the whole time, London was very bombed.
JM: Bombed.
RR: And it was quite amazing. And we were there for two nights watching them.
JM: Um, um. And presumably the hotel you were staying in didn’t get any damage?
RR: No, no, no. ‘Cause they were going for certain targets and it was all round central London. But the other thing which happened to myself and I think three or four of us, the first night we were in Brighton, we were in two old hotels. Something and the ‘The Grand’ was the name of them. And that’s where we were living and this first night, and there was an air raid on London. And we all went down and got in the air raid shelter and when it was over we came back and went to bed. And next thing there’s a guy shouting at us. And he said ‘Get your uniform on, I’ve got a job for you.’ And there were four or five of us and I don’t know whether you know Brighton but the cemetery’s in very close. And he said ‘I want you to pick up a German who’s in the cemetery’ and we walked round, about eleven o’clock at night. And when we got into the cemetery there was this German in a parachute stuck in way up in the tree –
JM: Was he alive still?
RR: He was dead.
JM: He was dead.
RR: Obviously his ‘chute hadn’t opened properly and we had to get him down and have him taken away, yeah.
JM: Gosh, that’s a bit of an introduction to –
RR: Yeah, well we’d only been there –
JM: What two days in Brighton? Gosh –
RR: The other thing that I haven’t told you about, which is, and I’ve talked on this at luncheons and this sort of thing. Oh yes, yeah the Queen Elizabeth, when we came to get on the Queen Elizabeth, there were about eighty Australians and there was a band with about sixty or eighty in it and they played. And we marched down the side of this ship, and all we could see was a great hole in the side. And when we got in we found out it was the Queen Elizabeth. And the Queen Elizabeth, I’ve got all the records there somewhere. There were twenty thousand American troops on it. And they’d all loaded before us. And we came in and went into the area that was the, had been the middle stage, never been finished properly. And we were in a double cabin, and there were seventeen of us in the cabin. We slept on the floor with palisses, OK? So that night suddenly all the doors close, this sort of thing and we sailed off. And we’re out at sea two days and suddenly there was a great clanging of bells and this sort of thing. And they said ‘Everyone wherever you are on the ship.’ ‘Cause it was all colours, say if they wanted to use yellow that line down there would be yellow.
JM: Um.
RR: And that one over there would be red something. And we’d been picked out because we were all in gunnery and we were given a badge with a big ‘G’ on it. And so they said ‘Everyone stay where you are on the ship don’t move.’ And next thing all the guns on the grilles have opened up firing and unbeknown to us at the time ‘cause the gunnery on the Queen Elizabeth, there were three or four fat guns. And there was the gunnery crew, who were military, was over eight hundred. And all these opened up and there was a German Condor aircraft which had been tracking us since we’d pulled out from the wharf, and he was working in with a submarine group of eight or ten subs. And they were out in the North Sea, and we were only two days out, waiting for us. ‘Cause they were on the attack straight away out of the Condor aircraft. Took off because there was that much firing of flak and this sort of thing. It disappeared and they put a warning over the loudspeaker ‘Everyone, where you are stay there and hang on.’ And the boat did a ninety degree turn. Found out, I’ve since, met up with a guy who was pulled into the bridge whilst this was going on, and he said they’d got up to thirty-five knots and did this right angle turn and we went to Greenland. And we had a day aboard in Greenland. Then we went to Greenock in Scotland [unclear] day or couple of days. But Queen Elizabeth could have been sunk, it was quite amazing.
JM: It would have been an incredible number of lives lost.
RR: Oh God.
JM: You said there were twenty thousand Yanks on board, and then.
RR: Yeah, yeah.
JM: All the Australians and everyone else, and then all the gunnery guys.
RR: Yeah. I can always remember, another guy and myself were in the corridor kinda the mall, and this giant black guy pulled us up and for some reason or another, I don’t know why. And it was the bloke who was world heavyweight boxing champion. Trying to think of his name, I can’t think of his name. I knew it well, but he was on the ship for the whole trip. Can’t think of his name, memory is going a bit. But he was patrolling.
JM: Right.
RR: He said to us ‘Stay there, don’t move’.
JM: And you wouldn’t be arguing with him. [laughs]
RR: No. And they hunted off this Condor.
JM: Condor yeah.
RR: Which is a big aircraft. But we were just lucky. And what happened after we got to England. The Americans had sent several destroyers out after the subs, and they broke up the sub pack. And they captured a hundred I think. A couple of crews and it’s amazing that it could quite easily happen to someone like him, he was the world heavyweight boxing champion.
JM: Um, yeah.
RR: Oh, I know his name as well as anything.
JM: Oh well it’ll come back. So, when you were flying were you aware of anyone in the crew that carried a particular good luck charm or had any particular suspicions that they sort of?
RR: No, funny none of ‘em.
JM: None of them?
RR: No.
JM: So, they’re all pretty laid back and –
RR: Yeah they were all –
JM: Happy, confident in each other abilities all the time so didn’t have any need for?
RR: Yes it’s amazing. Of course out of the lot of them. Lot of German aircraft in the area but I think once they saw what ship it was and they would know they had flak guns they just backed off.
JM: Yeah. But as I say when you were flying, in all the hours of flying that you did you didn’t have any of your crew members had any good luck charms with them?
RR: No.
JM: No. And we were talking about when you did your leave and you talked about the time that you went to London and there was that heavy bombing.
RR: Yes.
JM: Any other times that you were on leave that stand out for any reason? Where you did something special or something funny happened to you?
RR: We got a group of us, about thirty of us I suppose, all Australians out of this intake. We got sent to Whitley Bay.
JM: Um.
RR: To a, like a, it was a military course.
JM: This was in June 1944?
RR: That would have been June ’44.
JM: Yeah.
RR: And, oh, can’t think about it.
JM: You went to Whitley, a group of you went to Whitley Bay?
RR: Oh yes. Whitley Bay and did this course. It was a, it had a name for it, I’ve forgotten the name. And the last day in it, I can always remember I had conjunctivitis in one of my eyes and so I went sick. And of course in the group of six or eight that we were in was a fella named Lenny Richards. Always remember his name. And we knew it was grenade throwing today and I said ‘I thnk I’ll be sick’ this conjunctivitis so I didn’t go. So, of course they were all having a joke that Lenny would drop a grenade or something, but he didn’t kill anyone. Anyhow I run into him one day years later, just off Martin Place, he was working for one of the typewriter companies –
JM: Um. That was a coincidence. And so when you were sent, eventually got going and got back to –
RR: Australia.
JM: Australia, you were discharged then?
RR: Yeah, and –
JM: In March 19 –
RR: Posted to Newcastle in the ANZ Bank.
JM: Yeah. So you discharged in the March of ’46?
RR: Yeah, that’d be right.
JM: Yeah, so then you what, went straight back into the bank?
RR: I went back into the bank at Newcastle.
JM: Um.
RR: In fact, I finished up marrying, my wife was a Newcastle girl.
JM: Um, so you met at Newcastle?
RR: Yeah, yeah. And then I was transferred to Oxford Street in Sydney in ANZ Bank. And then I got moved back from there to Head Office in Martin Place and I was Personnel Officer for New South Wales. Then after I’d done that for twelve months or so I became Methods Officer and was just driving round all the branches checking up on their equipment and this sort of thing, did that for [unclear]. Ran into several years, yes.
JM: So then did you retire from the bank or did you?
RR: I retired from the bank.
JM: Um.
RR: I retired from the bank in um, hard to think, around nineteen, about 1970 I think it was. I’d been to Newcastle staying with people that we’d known for years. I didn’t know that he was an alcoholic and he had a real estate business at Burley Heads. I finished up buying a half interest in it, and I did that for a couple of years. And Hookers had one office in Surfers’ Paradise and they wanted to get rid of the manager and they approached me from Hookers in Sydney. They flew me down and talked to various top guys and by the time I got back they’d offered me the job of managing the Hooker office in Surfers’ which had about ten or twelve staff. And I did that for several years and then resigned and came to the Gold Coast. I had this half interest business with this other guy, I found that he did all the drinking I did all the work.
JM: Work.
RR: But oh yes, pretty good life really.
JM: Um.
RR: And when I eventually sold out of here I had a job offer running Hookers. I’m trying, I’ve forgotten, years get away, so had a pretty good life really.
JM: Um, well that’s good. And it means that you’ve been able to do quite a lot. You mentioned that your pilot’s still alive. So, have you maintained, when you first came back did you maintain contact with the crew?
RR: Yes.
JM: All of the crew sort of?
RR: Yes. In fact, actually the rear gunner, his son had a job in the war memorial.
JM: Oh right.
RR: And he’d been there quite a few years.
JM: Um.
RR: So, he said ‘Well G-George is going to be refurbished, reconditioned and they’ll be taking it out. Why don’t you as a crew organise a couple of days? Come down to Canberra,’ he says ‘I’ll organise you an inspection on G-George and getting in,’ we finished up having two or three hours early in the morning, climbing all over G-George. Quite amazing.
JM: Would have brought back some memories to see George?
RR: Yeah.
JM: Not that it was in your unit, your squadron I should say. But that’s, well George was in 460.
RR: Yes. 460.
JM: So, there’s a relation. Like when, so you were in 460 briefly but so was George flying, being flown then when you were in 460?
RR: Yeah, when I was at 460 G-George was in that period. Was a period, three or four months I think it was I was there as specialist operator studying, it was to study the equipment that they were using then. But G-George had flown out to Australia by then it was just on display.
JM: Yeah, that’s right. And so as you say all the rest of the chaps have now passed away?
RR: Oh yes.
JM: But you still, where’s Wal Goodwin, is he?
RR: He’s in Melbourne.
JM: He’s in Melbourne is he?
RR: Yes, he’s two years older than I am. He’ll be ninety-four, he’s probably turned ninety-four now. And he’s fit and well. And it’s –
JM: Do you know if he’s been a member of Bomber Command or Odd Bods or anything?
RR: Him?
JM: Yeah.
RR: I would think he would, he seems to have a close contact in the veterans’ affairs. He occasionally used to get things that veterans’ affairs were sort of handing out, that sort of thing. But I talk to him at least every two or three months.
JM: Right.
RR: Particularly on birthdays and that sort of thing.
JM: Um.
RR: But the bomb aimer and the navigator were both at least ten years older than us. And the rear gunner just died he was the same age as myself, and he died only three or four months ago. And the, we had an Australian guy, brought into the crew as the engineer and he came from Adelaide and we’ve never heard a word from him or, he only sort of came in at the last bit.
JM: Last bit um.
RR: Last few months. So, I don’t know what’s happened to him.
JM: And he didn’t, did he travel home with you at the same time? In the same group?
RR: Came home in the same group.
JM: Yeah. But he didn’t sort of maintain any contact?
RR: Maintain any contact, no, it’s amazing really that we’ve lost track. Well we know that the navigator’s dead, the bomb aimer’s dead, the pilot’s alive and so that leaves us three gunners and one other the engineer who was an Australian, an Australian pilot, who they gave him an engineers course and he flew with us a couple of months or so.
JM: Months yeah.
RR: Yeah.
JM: So, you mentioned you do talks, have done talks in the past? Is there anything else that you would perhaps mention in those talks we haven’t covered now?
RR: No, I don’t think so. I think I’ve pretty well covered everything.
JM: Yeah, and maybe a bit more?
RR: Um?
JM: And maybe a bit more?
RR: Yeah, yeah. I got those couple of forms here.
JM: Of yes, well we’ll do those in a minute but –
Unknown: Coming down the stairs, I heard that you forgot Shorty.
RR: Huh?
Unknown: You forgot Shorty. Your wireless operator.
RR: Oh, Shorty died.
Unknown: Didn’t mention him.
RR: Yeah, Shorty died. [garbled mixture of voices] that was the other one I couldn’t think of.
JM: Yeah, right. So that’s all good.
RR: Yeah.
JM: Alright well if there’s nothing else that you –
Unknown: Would you like a cup of tea or cup of coffee?
JM: Well we’ll just finish the record. We’ll sort out the paperwork and that.
Unknown: You haven’t finished recording? I thought you might have done.
JM: That’s OK, no, no it’s alright we’re just wrapping up now. So, I’ll just formally thank you Ron very much for sharing all those memories with us. It’s very much appreciated and it’s just wonderful that you could give us the time and make the effort to do so.
RR: Good, no problem.
JM: Thank you.
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ARodgersR170220
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Interview with Ronald Rodgers
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
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eng
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01:07:56 audio recording
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Pending review
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Jean Macartney
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2017-02-20
Description
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Ronald Rodgers joined the Royal Australian Air Force aged seventeen, having previously been in the Air Training Corps. He trained as an air gunner and was posted to 460 Squadron at RAF Binbrook but did not fly operationally. On discharge in 1946 Roy worked in banking, retiring in 1970.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
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Australia
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Temporal Coverage
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1944
1945
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Dawn Studd
460 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
Halifax
Lancaster
RAF Binbrook
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF Winthorpe
RAF Yatesbury
Tiger force
training
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/346/3514/AWarwickT170322.1.mp3
66e6c6203dd7a036ea9519f720f4f66c
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Title
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Warwick, Thea
T Warwick
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Thea Warwick.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-03-21
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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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Warwick, T
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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RP: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Rod Pickles. The interviewee is Thea Warwick. The interview is taking place in Mrs Warwick’s home in Portesham, Dorset on the 22nd of March 2017. Max Warwick is also present. Good morning Thea. Could you start by telling us where you were born and your early childhood experiences please?
TW: I was born in Rotterdam on the 13th of August 1937 and the war didn’t start until 1940 as we all know. My father was called up in 1939 to help with the, with the army although he didn’t have any experience. He was stationed at a small airfield in [unclear] and because I was only more or less a baby my mother wanted to see my father so we went over there and stayed in a farmhouse. While we were staying there I got the measles so that meant we couldn’t go home. During that week when, when we were stuck there they bombed Rotterdam. And we didn’t know whether our house was still standing so luckily it was OK when we came back. So that was my earliest memory of the war. My father came back, I don’t know exactly when, but when he came back out of the blue he was very thin and he had dysentery so quite an ill man. And after that, after the bombing there, there wasn’t much going on to be, to be honest. The war or the hardship started before the Hongerwinter that is where I remember most and also there were things going on. There was a lot that year on the 10th of November 1944 all men were called up in Rotterdam and, and you had to be between seventeen and fourteen, forty. You had a days notice, so my father packed his little suitcase and went with our neighbour to the park behind our house where they were supposed to go. When they were inspected they told my father, even though he was forty, you’re too old you can go home. The neighbour was thirty-eight years old but he, he had a visible goitre so the Germans said “you can go home”. So luckily he came home after hours and I remember the joy we had. Thank goodness my father came home because my mother would’ve never coped with what was going to happen next. While, while this was going on with regard to [unclear] there was a little Jewish chap who lived in our street and he hid but the Germans found him because after the time — after the [unclear] that particular afternoon when all the men were supposed to be in the park the Germans came to every house to see if there were any men hiding. Luckily they got so fed up with going up and down the stairs they didn’t go up stairs they just went to the front door and asked my mother if there were any men, of course there wasn’t. Now, later on in the war when some — most, most of the men came back who were picked up in our street except for two who found another lady while they were in Germany and that was very sad and caused a bit of a scandal [laughs] I remember that all because it — then, then of course things got really bad. My father, there was no more food and we moved into the smallest room in our house. He had bought a dustbin lined with concrete which was put up in the corner of the room with a pipe going through the window outside we had a table and four chairs in there and that’s where we lived. I used to go to the park and try to find wood and also had a sieve with me and some tools because the path in park were made with a sort of coal like an anthracite and I used to scrape it off in bits and put them in the sieve, you know and then take them off home.
RP: This was for fuel obviously?
TW: Yeah, yeah because — well we had to burn whatever we could find in the dustbin, you know. We had no electricity, no gas. Luckily we had water. That was all we had left. Then one day I found a great big branch, branch of a tree and it was very heavy and walking home, carrying this tree and there was a man that lived there who I happened to know. He came up to me he said “I’ll have that”. He took it off me, I ran home crying and my father said he would — I will get it back and he called his neighbour up and the two men went up to his house and he gave it back without any problem. I mean, you know, we were all so desperate [laughs] it’s all become basics hasn’t it. In the morning my mother had to look through all the blankets for fleas because when you have no proper food the bugs come and there were a lot of fleas in the blankets every morning. Not only that we had lice on our heads. We were taken somewhere to some sort of hospital and I remember they cut my hair very very short. I was almost bald because of the lice and was given some sort of stuff, you know. These are all the things I remember and of course we had to walk everywhere, you know. Then my father went to, to the harbour to see if he could find anything to eat and then there was— in the winter and there was snow and ice and he had a bicycle and he fell, fell over on the ice and broke his arm. Anyway he managed to get home, had his arm in a sling and he rigged up some sort of contraption in that little room we were in in the corner to exercise his arm. Anyway that got better. Then he decided to go away for a few days at a time to go to the farmers to try and see if he could get food from them, but you see money was not worth a penny, you know. It was worth nothing, so all we had of value was then used to buy food in exchange and I tell you some of the farms got very rich during the war. We also had an allotment and that was fine and helped us out in the years before 1940 to the Hongerwinter. Of course when people got very hungry they went to the allotment and stole all the food and even the little summer house that was on there was completely gone. People took it home for burning, you know. And also every tree in the park went it was bare, it was totally bare.
RP: Goodness.
TW: Then the government tried to grow some food in open public places like corn and potatoes to try and feed the population, you know. Well that helped a little bit but it wasn’t really good err I will have to stop for a minute [pause] err yes and also we had to learn soup kitchen and I always had to get [unclear] and we found the biggest saucepan we could find, it was about that big, and I had to walk for about two miles with the pan to the soup kitchen and I was about six then. I think my mother let me — the things I did when I was six in those — she didn’t care anymore because after the war she was extremely strict with me, I couldn’t do this that and the other but in the war I think mentally she had, she had given up, you know. So I went to this [laughs] soup kitchen and one day we had a soup so called, it was a grey mass, you know and of course then I had to carry that all home and another day I went with my little neighbour who was the same age as me and we heard there was another — we could get a meal in a church somewhere we walked for miles to that church and on the way we found a great big bundle of money laying in the street so we started to count it and then because we were so young and naive we asked a passer by what we should do with it [laughs] and he said don’t worry I will bring it to the police station, yes, you know. Never to be seen again [laughs]. Oh we were so innocent.
RP: Did you not keep one note?
TW: No, nothing I mean we — [laughs]. Then of course, I didn’t have shoes anymore that was a thing so my father repaired the shoes as much as he could. Instead of soles he put rubber underneath from tyres, you know.
RP: Oh yes.
TW: And in the end he couldn’t repair them anymore so he bought me a pair of wooden clogs, you know, the Dutch clogs so that was in the Hongerwinter and there was a lot of snow and we still had to go to school. Yes [laughs] and I remember and they didn’t fit very well so he put some straw in them, you know and every fifteen yards or so I had to stop because snow used to pile up underneath because it was wood you see so I would struggle to school.
RP: They would become heavier?
TW: Yes, yeah you could walk and I had to take the snow off. And then of course when we went to school in the end there was no coal because each classroom had a huge burner in the corner and it was enormous and there was nothing. So we used to sit there with our coats on and every time when the sirens went we had to rush out of the school straight into the — what’s it called, the — underground what’s it called?
RP: The subway?
TW: No, no.
RP: Cellar?
TW: A cellar, no, no they were specially built for everybody to hide in. You had them in this country. Anyway.
RP: So while all this all this was going on obviously you were only six so you would not be aware of why you were cut off. Were you aware of the fact that the allies had advanced past, past Holland?
TW: No I wasn’t [unclear] to that. This was my — what I personally — my experience my memory, you know.
RP: So I wonder all this time that obviously the population looking for food what were the Germans doing were they starving or were they —
TW: No they were well fed. And of course, you know, in the street where we lived we had a Jewish family living who was a Rabi and one day he disappeared and the following day he had [unclear] that went in there which were called christenings[?] and we had another two sisters living further in the road who were fraternising with the German Officers they were collected by cars every time but I tell you a bit more about them later. Then my next door, we had four, eight families living in my — where I lived and my other neighbour he was in the resistance and also the one that lived on top and one day the Germans had a tip off that he was home I don’t know which one they were after the first neighbour or the one that lived on the top. The one that lived below luckily wasn’t home the other one that lived at the top was able to escape over the roofs and those Germans came in our house and stood on the balcony for hours on end pointing a gun down the gardens because they thought he would escape through the gardens but no he escaped over the roof. Anyway my first neighbour who lived below he — they did find him and they killed him. You know, with all these — although it was only a little street a lot happened there so can you imagine, you know.
RP: It must’ve been terrifying.
TW: Yeah. Right I’ll stop. [rustling of papers] That was in the summer it was before the Hongerwinter and we had quite a nice warm summer and my father somehow had secured a load of potatoes but we had to collect them ourselves. So from where he worked he got up a hand cart with a lid on it so my mother who was pregnant, so that must have been in the summer of forty-three, we, we left very early and walked for five hours to get to the river where this boat was supposed to be. So we had to wait a long time there and in the end we were able to fill the hand cart with potatoes and then we had to get home because there was curfew. We had to be home before dark. We just made it in time and of course I got very tired and I was able to sit in the cart, you know, because my mother didn’t want me, to leave me at home in case there was a bombardment [coughs] back so it was almost dark when we got home and we unloaded the potatoes. We threw them in the hallway until it was all finished and then locked the door and lights out and then we went two flights up. We had another room at the top of the house which wasn’t used and had a wooden floor and all the potatoes were spread out over the floor so they would keep you see, didn’t go rotten and then my father said “Make sure you don’t tell anybody we’ve got those potatoes.” I remember my mother boiling a big pan full of potatoes that night that’s all we had to eat [laughs]
RP: Do you still like potatoes?
TW: oh yes, yes [laughs] yeah, yeah.
RP: [laughs] it’s just that I thought with eating so many you might have decided that you were never going to eat them again.
TW: No. I have to stop here a minute [rustling of paper]
RP: OK.
TW: We, we woke up about seven o’clock with an almighty explosion and my mother had a sort of very large bed called an Alisa Bowl, French word for it, it is so four people could sleep in it and for safety we all slept in that room, anyway there was this explosion and my father went straight out of the house to find out [coughs] excuse me, what happened and a V-1 had gone wrong in about maybe half a mile away from us and it landed on block of houses, you know. So he came back and he collected us and we all went to have a look and it was so sad. I remember it so well because people did have nothing left, they just sat in a field nearby with nothing, you know and apparently according to this book here this
V-1 was fired from [unclear] and was supposed to go to Antwerp. We thought it was going to England because most of them were, you know. We had V-1s and V-2s and we could tell the difference because of the sound they make. So that was all very sad. I’ll stop here a minute. My father during the war worked for the electricity supplier in Rotterdam near our house a huge building and it was the highest building at the time apart from a church about sixteen stories high and of course it was near the harbour. So the Germans took charge of that so there was [unclear] as well and my father was a night porter there during the war and they used to give it [unclear] with string and annoy him just for their own pleasure ,you know, ‘cause there was nothing else to do and when he was at the end of his shift they’d give him a huge plate of food to take home but he had to go on his bicycle but how he got home every time I really don’t know. We’ve still got the plates. My sisters still got the iron plates. They’re about that round and that high [coughs] Let’s stop for a minute. [long pause] Yeah, on the 9th of April 1945 somehow we knew about a food drop. My parents knew I don’t know how they got to know this but we went to the top of our house which had a flat roof and we waited for the planes to come and when they did come they flew very low and we saw the parcels being thrown out of the planes and we had a sheet there and we used to wave, we waved, at the pilots it was extremely emotional. Unfortunately whatever we got from the food drop wasn’t very much in the end because the distribution was very difficult. There was no petrol everything had to be delivered by horse and cart to the shops and we didn’t — and on the 13th of May that was after the war we actually got some tins of corned beef, corned beef and some biscuits. That’s all we got from the drop I suppose the rest had already disappeared, you know, somewhere.
RP: I suppose the Germans helped themselves as well did they?
TW: Of course, of course.
RP: So what — do you know what they were dropping beside the corned beef and biscuits? Do you know what they were dropping?
TW: We don’t know what was in it but according to the book here there were chocolates in it and everything but we never got it.
RP: You never saw any chocolate?
TW: No all the good things had gone. So only biscuits and tins were left but the Swedish Government sent us white bread. That was one loaf for every family and it tasted like cake.
RP: So how did they supply that the Swedes?
TW: Well we were told — it comes in the local shops the food shops we had they always sell food. The problem was we had to queue for hours on end. The way we used to queue I used to queue an hour then my mother and then my father because it was only a bag and we went home.
RP: So on shifts then? That’s something new, shift queuing but I suppose because Sweden was neutral they could sail in couldn’t they?
TW: Of course.
RP: They could sail in to Rotterdam?
TW: Well I think, well I don’t know how they actually managed to —
RP: Well whatever way they —
TW: Well it was after the war so they could have come by ship.
RP: They could have come by ship.
TW: Or by plane even, yeah.
RP: But, but you actually saw the aircraft come in when you were on the roofs then?
TW: Oh yes, oh yes never forget it. Makes me cry every time.
RP: So I mean — I suppose somebody somewhere got the food I guess so —
TW: Yes I think.
RP: What about your neighbours were they, were they able to get some?
TW: Well we, we all went to the same shops so I suppose, you know, they got the same as we did. I’ve got some more about food talk. The distribution was very slow and between the 1st of May and the 13th of May four hundred and eighteen people died from starvation and we were liberated from the 5th of May so can you imagine so they didn’t just — nearly at the end of the war lots of people were dying of starvation. You saw people drop in the streets it was awful. [coughs] Do you want to know about the liberation?
RP: Yes, yes please. So at what point did the Germans surrender in Holland then? Was it the same day as —
TW: Well it’s all a little bit vague but the official day actually they say was the 6th of May when they did it, liberated, not the fifth. I don’t know why they are saying this and then the Canadians, the Canadians came in. I’ll never forget that day. They came in their tanks row after rows, rows all afternoon rolling in with tanks then went to the centre of the town and of course everybody went out to celebrate and of course the Germans just disappeared. Then when the liberation came well the people had street parties everywhere, flags were hung out, bunting everywhere I don’t know where they got the flags from. My neighbour who was a pianist his piano was carried out of the house in the street and we learnt to dance the hokey pokey and this went on for days on end.
RP: I can imagine.
TW: And every now — after that everybody must have been too exhausted to party anymore. And then came the revenge. The two sisters that lived in our street and were friendly with the German Officers were dragged out of their house, their head shaven, tarred and feathered then put on a horse and cart and driven through the neighbourhood collecting others on the way. The Quizlings[?] living opposite us disappeared overnight. Then after that I can’t remember very much. I think it came back to normal.
RP: So at what point did the food supply return to normal do you think? Did it take a couple of years or —
TW: Oh well, we, it was the same of everybody else we had rations.
RP: So you had ration books same as this country?
TW: And err [coughs] I believe the rations in England lasted longer than ours.
RP: Yeah, I think it was about 1953 in England the rations stopped.
TW: Yes because coffee was always rationed wasn’t it?
RP: Yes and strangely enough bananas.
TW: Bananas ,God, I remember seeing a banana and an orange I’d never seen one before.
RP: I think I saw one about 1953 but yeah, yeah. So do you know how many drops were made in Holland then because —
TW: I think it was a one off. It was a very dangerous exercise. They couldn’t have done —
RP: Because the Americans also came by as well didn’t they? They had an operation to supply as well. Probably two different parts I think. They called theirs, they called theirs Chowhound , Operation Chowhound but I think that might have been to different cities not to Rotterdam.
TW: Well Rotterdam was the worse and then next came the Hague and then [unclear]
RP: Yeah, so they might have been dropping elsewhere. I know the one I showed you he did one drop on the Hague I know that.
TW: Yeah, Yeah.
RP: But the Americans also came in afterwards and I think they may —
TW: Well I was too young to actually know the ins and outs, you know. If I’d been older I probably would’ve known.
RP: So did you — so ten years later after the war did your parents talk about it or was it forgotten?
TW: Never
RP: No.
TW: Obviously, I mean we never asked somehow. We should’ve done because, you know, they could’ve answered a lot of questions. No we never talked about it. It’s only my sister two years ago wanted to know because she didn’t know anything [coughs]
RP: Is your sister still in Holland?
TW: No.
RP: No. So is there anything I should need to tell them because that’s been fascinating but — I mean when you said about the four hundred that wasn’t the total [unclear] was there more over time than the four hundred do you think?
TW: Well it was the highest in one week.
RP: In one week? So it was a weekly thing so —
TW: Oh yes.
RP: So it could’ve been thousands?
TW: Oh. If it hadn’t been for my father I don’t see we would’ve made it. My mother was useless. She was suffering a [unclear] which is very — your legs swell up and —
RP: Oh yes.
TW: You know, and she just mentally was out of it completely.
RP: Well that’s been fascinating and really, thank you for telling us all that. It’s been a pleasure listening.
TW: I think that’s it.
RP: It’s been fascinating and thank you very much indeed because it’s a little known story and I think it will be valuable information. So thank you very much for that. You did twenty-eight minutes. There you go.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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AWarwickT170322
Title
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Interview with Thea Warwick
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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00:28:56 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Creator
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Rod Pickles
Date
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2017-03-22
Description
An account of the resource
Thea Warwick was seven years old and living in Rotterdam during the war. She recounts what is was like during the Hongerwinter. Walking for miles to soup kitchens and talks about other examples of how they obtained food. They moved into the smallest room of their house to try and keep warm and had to go out searching for wood to burn. She recalls waiting on their roof for planes to drop food parcels and remembers being woken up by an explosion which was a V-1 landing on a block of houses about half a mile away from them. She remembers the Germans searching for their neighbour and standing on the balcony of their house pointing guns down the gardens for hours on end. She recalls the day of liberation and when the Canadian tanks rolled into her town. An explanation is given how everyone in the street celebrated.
Coverage
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Civilian
Spatial Coverage
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Netherlands
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-04
1945-05
Contributor
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Tracy Johnson
anti-Semitism
bombing
childhood in wartime
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
round-up
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/442/7861/PTwellsE15070064.1.jpg
1fc40d09963c4091b813ff79f1a2d33a
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/442/7861/PTwellsE15070065.1.jpg
90ef4a6756bdc840900c78de970685d6
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/442/7861/PTwellsE15070066.1.jpg
0ec30fea4a141ce6ca9313cfec47b159
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
Twells, Ernie. Album
Description
An account of the resource
A scrapbook containing photographs and documents of Ernie Twells' wartime and post-war service including squadron reunions. The photographs and documents are contained in wallets in a scrapbook. The wallet page has been scanned and then the individual items rescanned. The scans have been grouped together.
Date
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2015-10-26
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Twells, E
Transcribed document
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Transcription
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15
Wartime pilot is praised
Dambusters’ pilot Bob Knight has paid tribute to the war service of Mr. Ernest Twells of 2 Abbott Street, Long Eaton, who died recently.
Mr. Twells, who served in the Royal Air Force as a Flight Engineer during the 1939 to 1945 conflict, joined the famous 617 Squadron just after the daring, bouncing bomb raid. But he flew with Mr. Knight on precision raids of pinpoint German factories, U-boat pens, V1 and V2 rocket sites and other special targets.
OWED LIVES
Aged about 34 at the time, Mr. Twells was affectionately referred to as ‘Dad’ by the rest of his crew – the average age of the Dambusters being between 21 and 23.
Speaking of him at a funeral service, Mr. Knight said the crew of his Lancaster bomber ‘Thumper’ knew they owed their lives to Ernest Twells.
“It was,” he stated, “due to his thorough and immaculate knowledge of the flight engineering that we never run short of fuel, even on our longest diversions.”
Originally from Wilford, Mr. Twells, who leaves a widow, Mrs. Doris Twells, a son, Ernest and a daughter, Margaret, first came to Long Eaton in 1937 to work as a race twist-hand at Byard’s.
Rising to management level in his work, which he returned to after the war, Mr. Twells joined the RAF auxiliary in 1938 and was called-up for active service at the outbreak of war.
AWARDED DFC
Serving first as an engine fitter, Mr. Twells was promoted to sergeant and then to flight engineer.
His training in Lancasters began early in 1943 when he served with 619 Squadron at Swinderby and later at Woodhall Spa, from where he took part in 30 raids over Hamburg and Berlin.
While in the Dambusters’ team, Mr. Twells served under the command of Group Captain Len Cheshire and, together with the rest of the team, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for taking part in 70 operations over Germany and other enemy territory.
He was among the crew which sunk the German battle cruiser Tirpitz, sister ship of the Bismark, in the Norwegian Fjiords.
A keen member of the international Dambusters’ Associations, Mr. Twells had attended reunions in many parts of the world, including Canada and Australia.
[page break]
[Crest of Buckingham Palace]
BUCKINGHAM PALACE.
I greatly regret that I am unable to give you personally the award which you have so well earned.
I now send it to you with my congratulations and my best wishes for your future happiness.
[signature] George R.I. [/signature]
Flight Lieutenant Ernest Twells, D.F.C.
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
Ernie Twells' Obituary and letter from the King
Description
An account of the resource
Ernie Twells' obituary detailing his life before, during and after the war.
A letter from the King awarding Ernie Twells his Distinguished Flying Cross.
Format
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A newspaper cutting and printed sheet on a scrapbook page
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
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PTwellsE15070064, PTwellsE15070065, PTwellsE15070066
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Laura Morgan
617 Squadron
619 Squadron
aircrew
Cheshire, Geoffrey Leonard (1917-1992)
Distinguished Flying Cross
fitter engine
flight engineer
George VI, King of Great Britain (1895-1952)
ground crew
Lancaster
Operation Catechism (12 November 1944)
RAF Swinderby
RAF Woodhall Spa
Tirpitz
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/478/8360/PBrookM1702.1.jpg
2a32cca0ab606686d2c94b2637f9bf3f
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/478/8360/ABrookM170109.1.mp3
00850afc35764d56bc92548f6dbdcad0
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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Brook, Maurice
Dr Maurice Brook
M Brook
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Brook, M
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Maurice Brook (1640523 Royal Air Force), his memoir and a squadron photograph. He flew operations as a navigator with 625 Squadron.
The collection has been licenced to the IBCC Digital Archive by Maurice Brook and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DM. This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The Interviewer is David Meanwell, the Interviewee is Mr Maurice Brook and interview is taking place at Mr Brooks’ home in Dorking, Surrey, and today is Monday the 9th of January 2017. If you could start off perhaps by saying a bit about where you were born, grew up and educated, and a bit about your family perhaps.
MB. If you want to be strictly accurate, I suppose it is Doctor Brook, but that’s -
DM. I beg your pardon.
MB. Well I grew up in Yorkshire, went to school in Rothwell, er Rothwell Grammar School and er, to use Rob Wiltons phrase, the day, the day war broke out I was still at school, and I remember our neighbour saying to my mother, ‘well at least your boys too young to be affected’, and how wrong she proved to be because that was 1939, the first year of the war, we were soon into 1940. We had an Air Training Corps formed at school, there was no summer holiday. School stayed open, the boys were spending time with the headmaster at his house learning to shoot, with a view to providing defence as it were. But um, and then we started getting rifles from America on the lease lend I suppose, and we were emptying rifles that were all in grease and degreasing them and making them work. That was a sort of school boy activity for the summer. Er, the eh, then of course we had Dunkirk, and we had wounded, we had a hospital nearby and so wounded soldiers were there, and they used to bring them over to school in the afternoons and the girls used to give them tea and so on. It was a mixed school by the way. And then um, the RAF started a bursary scheme. I got to be a sergeant in the Air Training Corps by then and the scheme was, you could apply for a bursary when you were seventeen, and I managed to persuade my father to sign the forms to sign up for this, and I managed to win a bursary to Christ College Cambridge. Went there when I was under eighteen actually, the condition was that er, you attended the university course for a year. It was a war time year which was of course not the full twelve months, because there was no vacations and you had to be a member of the University Air Squadron, and in effect we did initial flying training during the University Air Squadron period. So I was there and er, we had the Commanding Officer of the Cambridge University Air Squadron was the headmaster of the Lease School at Cambridge, so he had sort of two hats. I suppose we were being taught to be gentlemen or something. Quite amusingly, after the war when I got my, some of my RAF records, I found what the Commanding Officer of the Air Squadron had said about me when I moved on, and er, he said I was rough diamond but I responded well to training [laugh] and I suppose what he meant was, I got quite a strong Yorkshire accent and that sort of, and that menial was not on. Anyway, from the University Air Squadron, I went to the RAF proper and we were moved to Canada for the next stage of training, went to London, Ontario, in the winter, really cold weather and the airfield, the pilots were all civilian pilots. The Instructors were Royal Canadian Air Force instructors, the er, pilots were amazingly good, they would just do what they were told even though it was wrong, even to the extent of running danger. Sometimes people would overfly the Great Lakes because they got the navigation wrong and the pilots would do it and not turn a hair, and of course would have to land in America and come back. Er, I was very impressed actually by the training, it was very thorough, and er, um, in subsequent years the fact that we had a good training in astronavigation, which seemed to be useless at the time, proved to be very valuable as you learn. The er, eventually we graduated, navigators, and I was commissioned in the Royal Canadian Air Force, then had a months leave when I could explore the United States. Back to England, landing at Liverpool and being met by a military band and in both directions, both going out and coming back, we went on big liners like the Aquitania and the Andes, not in convoy but just singly, just zig zagging at high speed across the ocean and er, we had to do drill on board. You know, a cannon, a loose so that you could do some fighting back if a U-boat surfaced, but we made it both ways successfully. Er, Liverpool to Harrogate which was the aircrew reception centre, where most of the hotels had been taken over by aircrew, and I had a temporary job in the post office for a time sorting out missing mail. I can’t remember how long I was, I wasn’t there very long, then up to the advanced flying training unit in Millholme in Cumberland. Because of course, in Canada, although you were taught the rudiments of navigation, there were no black outs, so you could look out and see the illuminated towns. Although you might misinterpret what you were seeing, at least you, you could see towns, but in Millholme and so on, you were working in black out conditions, and also there was the Isle of Man and the Lake District with high mountains which put people on their metal, and ‘cause more than once aircraft crashed into them through not having enough height. That was the initial experience of black out flying and er, in the daytime it was really wonderful, the experience of climbing up through the clouds into the sunshine was one of the exhilarating moments, er, in a young mans life. What I was, what I was only nineteen then and er, where did we go from Millholme, Millholme to operational training units in Husbands Bosworth and there we were brought together, all different aircrew. The first day after we all got settled in, you were in a big mess hall and you just left together and the instructions were to sort yourselves out into crews. There was no sort of detailed selection process and that. I was one of those people that liked to watch what was happening rather than take the initiative, but it wasn’t very long before a rather dapper looking young man, well not young man, he was a middle aged man actually came. He was a commissioned bomb aimer, and said ‘had I got any crew yet?’ and I said ‘no’, he said well he’d tied up with a pilot and would I join them as a navigator? All right, you look all right. And then I met the pilot, Peter, and he seemed all right. He was a young man like me, very young actually, and er, what else did we have in the crew, oh a wireless operator and two gunners. The gunners were survivors of a previous crash and all the rest of the crew had been killed except them and of course it wasn’t uncommon, the, the accident rate in training was quite high. So having formed a crew, we were put onto Wellingtons for quite a long period of training on Wellingtons. And we, and we had the first of the electronic equipment I had as a navigator, a thing called Gee, where you had blip, blips on a screen and transmission stations in the Country sending out signals and you were given special maps, and where the lines intersected you should be able to plot your position exactly. If you were in this country you could, but as you moved further away from Britain of course, the lines, angles became more and more distorted and then the Germans began to jam it so it became very difficult. We completed our operational training reasonably well but we weren’t happy with the pilot, Peter, who was, he was, how can I put it? He was over anxious, he was over stressed, he wasn’t in charge of himself let alone a crew and an example, at take off, we were all wearing oxygen masks but you didn’t have oxygen on at ground level, but he would leave his mask dangling and the microphone was in the oxygen mask and he didn’t switch it off. So when we took off down the runway, the noise of the engines was amplified through his loud speaker and everybody had this noise. And of course, if there had been an emergency, none of us could have communicated. And er, we kept telling him about this and he kept saying he would put it right and he never did. But we got to the last flight of the training and we were given a long detour. During the flying, during the operational training, by the way, we kept having various routes which took us near the Dutch coast or German coast, so you got in touch with searchlights and anti-aircraft guns, but you weren’t carrying any bombs. Erm, only occasionally did anybody get shot down but it gave you a, just a taste of what might be to come. On this last flight it was an absolutely filthy night, it really was dreadful and when we took off from Husbands Bosworth and we had a long route around part of the British Isles, and then we were going North, crossing the Isle of Anglesey and I thought I must be getting something wrong because we seemed to be stationary over the Isle of Anglesey for ages and ages, we weren’t moving. And I kept getting the position from Gee and we were hardly moving but we had a head wind of something like a hundred miles and hour, erm, then we got a call to divert because the weather had obviously closed in at Husbands Bosworth. We diverted to an airfield near Bristol and I worked out the course and got us back to the airfield and Peter the pilot was clearly very stressed by all this, erm, and er, we got to the airfield and he wanted us to bale out, he didn’t think it was safe to land [laugh], that caused some consternation, I couldn’t see why we needed to bale out. Fortunately we had sitting with us, an instructor who had been there from the beginning, hadn’t said a word the whole flight, and at that point he said ‘I’ll take over’. So he took over and landed perfectly well and then the next day we flew back to Husbands Bosworth. We were sent on leave for ten days and when we came back from leave, I talked to Jim, the bomb aimer, who was a commissioned officer and I said, ‘I wasn’t happy about Peter as a pilot’. He said no he wasn’t, and then the two gunners came and they were really twitchy having, you know, already had one crash and they said they couldn’t, they couldn’t fly with Peter. Erm, and the wireless operator who had been a ground operator in er Africa, so he wasn’t immature, he was in his late twenties, he said the same thing and they more or less said, ‘well you are the officers, you have to do something about it’. And er, we went to see the adjutant, somewhat apprehensive because refusing to fly, even although we were volunteers, was quite a serious matter, you were, you know, lack of moral fibre. We weren’t lacking any moral fibre, but we didn’t feel that we had much of a future with Peter, and fortunately when we talked to the adjutant, he said ‘that’s alright, I had a report from the instructor and we think Peter should be held back for some more instruction, and so he will go to the conversion unit and there will be a pilot waiting for you there’. So off we went to Sturgate, which was four engined conversion unit, Halifaxes, where we picked up a flight engineer who was also a pilot, and we were introduced to Dave Lennox, Flight Lieutenant Lennox. Scotsman, such a contrast, he was, he’d been one of the first er, call ups of the [unclear] pre-war conscription and he had gone into a Scottish Regiment. Served in a Scottish Regiment, been in France, been in Dunkirk, risen to the rank of Regimental Sergeant Major very rapidly, and then when he had got back to England, he wanted to remuster as aircrew, and in those days, if you were in a reserved occupation or in any of the other forces, if you wanted to volunteer for aircrew, you had to be released. So he was released and he had gone and trained as a pilot and then he had been kept in er, Canada as an instructor for some time. So he got a lot of flying experience by the time he came to us, and he was, he was so level headed and sort of refreshing. As we did our conversion unit training and very early on, we had reason to be thankful we got him as a pilot because we took off and er, just as we left the ground, he said ‘we’ve burst a tyre’. [Interrupted by telephone call]. We had just left the ground with the burst tyre. We completed the exercise, which I think was a bombing exercise off the Lincolnshire coast, and then came back to land and of course, the problem was landing with a burst tyre was very dangerous. So Dave quite calmly said, ‘take up your crash positions and I am going to come down with the burst tyre on the grass and the other wheel on the runway and we might tip over, but with luck we should make it’. And he did, we made a perfect landing and we came to a halt, no problem. So that reinforced our confidence in Dave. We completed the full er, conversion, these were Halifaxes by the way, which were rather like airliners inside. They were so spacious with the black and white tiled lino on the floor, amazing. Er, we had also more ground instruction, we had dinghy drill, we were taken to the local baths. You had to get up on the top diving board with a pair of dark glasses on and the dinghy was in the pool upside down and you had to jump off the top of the thing and make you way around in the pool and find this dinghy, turn it over, climb into it and then blow your whistle to attract the other crew. Which was valuable training I suppose, but very unpleasant, and various other things like that. Then at some stage, a very curious thing happened, we were taken, some of us, me included, were sent to Hereford, to RAF Regiment place at Hereford. Aircrew Officers Numbr 1, yes, Number One Aircrew Officers School, and we were given a sort of infantry training, er assault course stuff and er, creeping up on enemies and slitting their throats without them making a noise. Being taken out into the Welsh hills and made to jump off the back of moving lorries and find your way back to base. The point of it all was, you know, it wasn’t good for morale, we were told, ‘oh, well, this was so that we could help to defend airfields against invdaders’, you know, we would take charge of the troops but the danger of that had passed, subsequently this became the SAS, so that is what it was all about, they were just trying it out. Anyway er, fortunately, I, I, I got put into hospital [laugh] and became paralyzed with fibrositis through exposure, and I was in hospital for two weeks having physiotherapy and radiotherapy. The only disadvantage of that was the local vicar used to come visiting, and he wouldn’t be persuaded that I was suffering from exposure through something stupid the Air Force had done, you know. I suppose he thought I had come down in the sea or something. Anyway, we got over all that, go back join the team and were posted to 625 Squadron at Kelstern. Er, now when we moved house some years ago, my log book was stolen and for that reason I don’t have an accurate record of what happened, and false memory can be quite intense and yet be false, you know, after seventy years interval, You realise things are not quite what you thought they were. I went to the records office at Kew and looked at the squadron records. Most of them were undecipherable, I just couldn’t make head nor tail of them, so then I employed a couple of er, military experts who were spending a lot of time there, and asked them if they could research the records. They had some difficulty but they did get quite a bit and I could have sworn that we joined the squadron in late ’45, late ’44 rather, certainly before Christmas, but the records show we didn’t, it was early 1945, so that was just one example. They got details of most of the operations which had taken place and I recognised some, not others. There are some that I could have sworn we’d done like Stettin and Frieberg, but again that could be false memory, it’s very curious. The very first operation you would think you’d remember, I don’t remember a thing about it and so it must have gone very smoothly. The second one I certainly do, and that was Nuremburg. Now in 1944 there was a disastrous raid on Nuremburg, March 1944, in which nearly a hundred aircraft were lost, and at one stage they were being shot down at a rate of one a minute, and very few aircraft ever reached Nuremburg. On this occasion we got to the target erm, and [unclear] I was in a little cabin, I didn’t see much unless I got up to look out, but the gunners and the bomber aimer commented that there seemed to be fires lit on the route. So the Germans must have known the route and certainly there was quite a lot of opposition. Anyway, when we got back, we reported this and the briefing officer said ‘oh no, they weren’t fires, those were aircraft burning on the ground’. And in fact that raid, nearly a year after the disastrous one in ’44, had over eight per cent loss, erm ,which was a very sobering introduction for us, for our operational career, made us look at things differently. Erm, well, life on an operational squadron was sleep, briefing, flying again and then intervals of leave inbetween. The way it tended to work was, there would be a tannoy message in the morning that operational aircrew were to remain on base, which meant you might be on operations that night, and then in the Officers Mess, there is a little blackboard called “battleorder”, and it would have the names of the captains and navigators of the aircraft that were likely to be wanted that day, and then if there was a, a raid on, you would be called for briefing about four or five o’clock. Go to the briefing room and er, all sit together, and the station commander and squadron commanders came in and er, there would be a curtain over the wall. The curtain would be pulled aside and the target and the route to the target would be marked, and there would be an intake of breath according to where the target was. Each of the operators would give a, meteorological officers would tell you about the weather, the bomb aimer would give instructions to the bomb aimers, the navigation leader would tell us the things to watch out for and of course, you never went straight to a target, it was always varying turning points, and getting the timing right at the turning points was absolutely vital. Because if you are in the Bomber Stream, and you are thirty seconds late on your turn, when you’ve turned you might be outside the stream and you can be picked off. Er, after the briefing, the rest of the crews used to go out to the aircraft. The navigators would remain behind copying the details of the turning points and the codes for the erm, beacons on the ground. In this country there would be beacons and sometimes the Underground would be going to be have flashing beacons, which weren’t reliable, but if you knew and you knew a code, they might be useful to you. Then we picked up our stuff and were taken out to the plane, by which time the engines had started, and you taxied out onto the runway one after the other and took off and then you would climb and probably have half an hour or more to kill, and you would tootal up and down England or go look at your home area or something like that and usually we collected around Reading, that was a very common meeting point and then the stream would begin to assemble over Reading and then go out very often, go out to Beachy Head, would be our next turning point, then you cross across to the Enemy coast. Er, from that point on, I would navigating and I would give the pilot er, the compass course which he would follow. We had in the aircraft, and it was Lancasters by then, an air position indicator, which showed the exact position you were in the air, or at least in the exact position you would be on the ground, if in the air, there was no wind [laugh]. But of course, the vital part about navigation is to work out the wind and the extent to which it moved you and we also had an erm, a thing called Gee for operators, which was a mobile transmitter which sent beams down to the ground and then they rebounded and er, you got a picture on the screen, an illuminated screen, reflecting objects on the ground like lakes, towns, small hamlets erm, on a very good set, railway lines. Actually, a photographic interpretation officer on the squadron showed me how to spot the railway lines. I didn’t believe you could do it but she said you could and showed me how to do it and we had special maps, which were coloured to match what you would see on the screen. We also had the Gee but it was heavily jammed and it was very difficult to be precise, so I had to rely most of the time on the radar things and when we came up to turning points, I would give the captain a new course but count down to the turning point, so we got it, you know, absolutely precise to the second, and we managed to stay in the stream most of the time. When you were in the dark in the Bomber Stream, the crew used to be happy if the plane felt as though it was running over tarmac, you know, because that meant you were in the slipstream of the aircraft in front and the first time we realised how close we were, was when we did our first daylight raid. I mean, very often in the dark, the wireless operator used to have a trailing aerial, a long copper aerial, but it was frequently cut off by the propellers of an aircraft behind us, er, and then, as we approached target, it would usually be marked by Pathfinders, the bomb aimer would take over and er, he would then, there would be those tense moments as you approach the target when he was totally in charge. He was flying, supposed to fly a steady, left, left, right, right and steady and that seemed to go on interminably. There was searchlights around and you were hoping they’d miss you, and then you felt the bombs go, ‘cause the plane would jump and after the bombs gone, it was still steady for another thirty seconds or so while they took photographs. Then I would have given the captain the course away from the target, he could turn and get on the way. Now of course, it didn’t always go as smoothly as that, there was searchlights and anti-aircraft. If you got caught in searchlights, then they used to do a manoeuvre, steep dive and corkscrew, and your guts used to come up into your mouth and then pull out of it again, or if the gunners thought they had spotted a night fighter, they again would call out corkscrew left or right, according to which way they thought you should go, the same thing would happen, we managed that all right. On one occasion, we had a major from an anti-aircraft unit in this country who was flying with us, ‘cause he was supposed to be studying the German anti-aircraft defences, and he was beside me but with his head out of the astrodome, watching. And it so happens we got caught in searchlights, and the Germans had a system in some areas where they had a blue searchlight, which was presumably radar operated and if the blue searchlight got you, then five or six others came on immediately, you were absolutely coned and that happened to us, and Dave again did a steep dive, he got us out of it, back again and then wee tackled the target and there was quite heavy ant-aircraft fire. Anyway when we got back, this major [laughs], major had gone very quiet [laugh], he said he didn’t know how we could do that night after night. I think he got the information he wanted. I don’t know precisely how many trips we did because these records even when the experts were confusing. We didn’t, we didn’t do a tour but I seem to remember us being pleased, we done half a tour, so er, er, and there is records show something approaching that number anyway.
DM. How many would that have been?
MB. The full tour would have been thirty, half the tour would have been fifteen. One memorable, well there were several memorable ones, but one was Kiel. We were detailed to lay mines in Kiel harbour and so we flew with the main force which was attacking some other place, Bremen or Hamburg I don’t know which, and then we broke away to Kiel, and I had to navigate to a land mark in Kiel harbour so the bomb aimer could take over at that point, and then he had to fly a straight and steady course for a certain time and then drop the mines. And of course a lone plane in Kiel harbour, with all the ships there, was just a sitting target, searchlights and anti-aircraft, everything being shot at us. Erm, but we did, we dropped the mines and we got away from Kiel, but soon afterwards one of the engines had obviously been hit and had to be feathered as they say, it stopped working and soon after that, another engine went. That meant I had no electricity for the radar operations, the problem was, you know, well how do we get back home [laugh] navigation wise? And er, it was at that point I was thankful for the astronavigation training in Canada. Er, it was a cloudy night but I got in the astrodome and looked and occasionally you could see stars, and I always took a sextant with me, so I got my sextant out and I could identify, eventually identify what I was pretty sure was the pole star. And the wireless operator, his cabin, his bit was next door to me, I got him to do the precise timing on the watch and I took the shots on the pole star and then I always carried books of tables, and you could look up in the tables and an angle and a time, and it would tell you roughly, well tell you precisely what latitude you should be at. That gave us at least a latitude and I reckoned if you keep North, keep North of Heligoland, which was heavily defended and er, keep on the right latitude, hit England eventually. So we proceeded that way, as far as the rest of crew were concerned everything was ok, I didn’t tell them I got problems. Erm, and er, we were slowly descending so I was also trying to work out by dead reckoning, applying the last wind that I knew was reliable, points where we might come down in the sea, so that the wireless operator could send the message if need be. Anyway we proceeded and eventually we hit the East Anglian coast and the bomb aimer recognised where we were, and we tootaled off and landed successfully back at base, relief all round. And then another occasion I remember, we had a long flight into Romania I think it was, no, Czechoslovakia, a place called Plowen, and oil refiners in Plowen, and er, we must have been running short of fuel coming back. We got back, we just got to the end of the runway and the engines stopped, we were completely out of fuel [laugh], so that was another lucky escape. Er, on the whole we did all right, the er, two memorable ones when we were put onto daylight raids, a couple of when, of when we had a big fighter escort. That was quite impressive, American and RAF fighters in the daylight alongside erm, and er, I think Hamburg. The fighters left us after we had gone some distance but nevertheless it was nice to see them there. But there was heavy anti-aircraft fire and er, the gunners said something about the next plane had been hit and I got up in the astrodome and looked, and there was a Lancaster at the side of us and it was just flying normally, and erm, black smoke came out of one of the engines and then it slowly tilted on its side, and you could see flames developing and nobody came out of it. And then it started slowly descending and after a while, you saw the three people came out but they were on fire, and I didn’t see the parachutes open, so that was a bit of a shake up and went back to navigating [sad laugh]. Sunday morning, I think Hamburg, not Hamburg, Hanover, and I remember as we approached the target thinking, well, Sunday morning, well they will be going to church or coming back from church, at least they will get plenty of warning and they can get into shelters. And we left Hanover after bombing it, with a big cloud and black smoke going up in the sky. Ah, so you did think about the people as well. Then we had a curious, not curious in a way, but an unusual one in daylight, to a place called Nordhausen, which has come back to haunt me actually. It was in Eastern Germany and we were given the job of attacking the barracks, when we got there, it was ten tenths cloud. Not quite ten tenths cloud but as we approached the target erm, this cloud came over and the bomb aimer couldn’t see to drop the bombs. So we went round again and I could see on my Gee, my H2S screen, the radar screen, I could see the ground and I could see the barracks, and I had a bomb release on my cabin, so I took over at that point and guided Dave and made a few calculations about wind and so on, and then dropped the bombs on what I thought would be the right spot visually on the radar screen. And afterwards photographic reconnaissance showed that the barracks had been hit and destroyed, or heavily destroyed. Erm, some years afterwards, there was a letter in the Bomber Command Magazine from a film producer in Germany, saying that he would like to make contact with any aircrew who had taken part in this raid, so I made contact. And eventually he came to the house and did a recording, and he was making a film called “The Last Survivors”, and er, the story of Nordhausen was that it was an ordinary medieval town, untouched by war [telephone rings], medieval town in Germany, untouched by war, not particularly Nazified. And you remember after the raids on Peenemunde, when the rocket sights were destroyed, well within six weeks, I think the Nazis had moved rocket production into caves outside Nordhausen, and they were using slave labour and they were producing eventually, very quickly producing eighty V2 rockets a day, apparently with this labour force which was worked to death and of course, London was being threatened at that time. We were not told at briefing about any rocket production in Nordhausen, and I notice the record, the Bomber Command records about Nordhausen say it was raided because it had become, it was, they were moving ministries from Berlin to Nordhausen, but rockets certainly were being produced. When the film producer from Germany came and did an interview with me, and I found out he was a Nordhausen resident, or his family was, and he was making a film called “The Last Survivors”, and he said they had been producing these rockets with slave labour after Peenemunde for some time, and the day after the raid, production stopped. But it probably stopped because the workers were demolished and they were housed in the barracks which I had been responsible for bombing, and apparently there had been eighteen hundred of them killed. Er, I expressed some concern about this, and he said, ‘You shouldn’t, the Nazis had killed far more than that already’. That’s this war. Since then, he has produced, German television produced a film called “Hitler’s Rocket Factory” and that went out last year, and the interview that he did with me and some other aircrew is in that film. Curiously there’s a twist in the film, the film as produced in Germany says that when the raid took place, rocket production had ceased because of the damage to the communications that had been taking place, so was there a gloss that the Germans had put on it or was the chap who did the film who came from Nordhausen accurate, you know, er, and the Nordhausen film is in German. I think it ought to be in the Bomber Command records at er, Lincoln, I didn’t tell them about it and it could be copied. Do you know any German? That was Nordhausen erm, and then er, I can’t remember, oh of course, yes, as we got towards the end of the war, the Germans, the Dutch people were starving and they, they er, the Germans were approached and asked if they would allow Army lorries that were in the British zone to go through with food, and they refused. So then it was decided that an air drop would be attempted, and the Germans again were told, ‘We are going to do an air drop with Lancasters’, and would they give them safe passage, and they refused to give them safe passage, and so we were told at briefing. But when the Royal Army Service Corps came and the bomb bays of the Lancasters were filled with food supplies [laugh], and then we were given a briefing where we were to drop the food, and we were told that the Germans had refused safe passage, but we were not to take any offensive action unless we were fired on. And then er, the food had to be dropped at very low level, and we were told, I am sure we were told [emphasis] at briefing, fifty feet. The official records of the Operation Manna as it was called, says the food was dropped at four hundred feet but I have seen other people who say that it was fifty feet. And I distinctly remember as we flew along very low, looking up out of the astrodome and seeing the church spire, so it was fifty feet. But er, the people were out in the streets, we were so low you could identify anyone in the streets, the children were out waving, it was very touching, and we used to get chocolate as an aircrew ration and we made little parachutes with handkerchiefs and the rear gunner used to throw them out of the back and the kids used to pick them up. We flew over some German machine gun posts and we could see them swinging their guns round but they didn’t fire and then on the airfield, I think it was the racecourse initially at Gouda, we dropped and the underground people were waiting on the, and they then ran across and picked up the supplies and took them away. Then er, we came away, very low of course, and there was one of these sea frets developing so it was misty and er, we were climbing away but there was a huge flash in front of us. When we got back to base we reported this, we were told that the aircraft in front of us had flown into the sea. Presumably they didn’t, hadn’t got a good horizon or the altimeter was faulty, and then I did a, I think I did a second food drop er, with an Australian crew whose navigator was ill, and I volunteered to go with them. Similar experience except that they were, they seemed to delight in flying even lower [laugh] all the way there and all the way back, they were quite frightening. That was Operation Manna, since then I met Dutch people when we had been on holiday who were children at the time and they are so grateful. And we there was a commemoration of the operation at Lincoln two years ago and the Dutch had planted a lot of bulbs in commemoration of it and we were there. Any surviving aircrew were there and there were some ladies there from Holland came round, insisted on kissing us all. One of them was a little girl at the time you know, she said, ‘you saved my life’. Her uncle had already died of starvation, she was a little girl and she was close to it so we did something useful. And then of course the war had come to an end and er, we had a trip to Brussels airport to pick up released prisoners, our prisoners who had been released from prisoner of war camps and we packed them in the back of a Lancaster and had to give them a lecture, you know, ‘don’t move, mustn’t move because you upset the trim of the aircraft, you could crash’, and er, we were all right, we came back to, I think it was Dunsfeld, and unloaded. But obviously one aircraft, the people had moved and it crashed, and all the prisoners and crew were killed. I mean so dreadful at the end of the war, yeah, so [pause]. [unclear]. When the war ended the RAF were very good at introducing education and training courses and er, I eventually was put in charge of the work at Scampton. We were running all kinds of educational courses using people in the force who had been, you know, teachers and things like that, and we were running dress making classes for the WAAF and we could get aircraft, you know, parachute silk from stores and there were quite a few wedding dresses were being made [laugh] there. We had workshops, carpentry workshops using some of the old tables, people were making themselves coffee tables and so keeping people occupied and that was quite fun. We had an education centre which eventually I was in charge of, taking daily newspapers and of course, the ‘forty five election was coming up, and er, I was called into the Station Commanders Office, the group captain, who was very concerned because we got the Daily Mirror in the education centre [laugh]. So I really had to point out to him that it was a perfectly legitimate newspaper, you know, it wouldn’t look good, it wasn’t the Daily Worker it was a respectable newspaper and it was valued by the troops. So I got away with that one [laugh] so he left me alone I think, um, yes.
DM. Did you fly any more after that?
MB. The squadron was on stand by for Tiger Force, which would mean going to Japan, or going to the Far East, but of course the Japanese war brought that to an end, so I didn’t fly any more after we brought the prisoners back. I was doing this education job really, running er, quite a big unit actually. Then I was offered promotion to er, squadron leader if I would do it for the group, but that would mean signing on for staying longer and I had no particular interest in doing that. I wanted to get out and get on with my own education which had been disturbed severely. But er, it was interesting.
DM. When were you demobbed?
MB. Mm?
DM. When were you demobbed?
MB. 1947, yes, we got married in ’46 and I was still in the Air Force then, I was kept. Because they had a points system and of course, if you were very young, which I was erm, in a sense, it counted against you. So I got out in ’47 and I was er, I went to, I got a place at Nottingham University in October, started in October ’47. So I came out in early ’47 I think and I had a temporary teaching job in Nottingham er, for several months before I went to university.
DM. What did you read at university?
MB. I did biological sciences and er, there was the food and agricultural organisation, [unclear] and so on, and that was the area that interested me. I had been doing engineering at Cambridge, I didn’t want to go back and do that and I er, so I did biological sciences which was quite worthwhile actually. Eventually got a job with the Boots company, which is in Nottingham, doing agricultural and horticultural research for some years. Then I joined Beecham group down South when we were about to move, we got a family by then, and spent the rest of my career with the Beecham group. Eventually became Director of Research of the consumer products group. It’s surprising how many times the little things you learn en route were put to use. Er, certainly, I think the RAF and the RAF training taught me that you can train people to do jobs with which they are totally unfamiliar, if you organise the training properly. Brilliant er, the training that was organised in wartime, yes.
DM. Did you maintain any contact with the crew?
MB. No, we had little contact but not much after the war, we all went our separate ways, we’d enough, er, yes, no real contact, and Dave the pilot, he eventually went to Glasgow University, and in fact he did study engineering and er, the bomb aimer, who was the oldest in the crew, he was in his thirties, he had work, he had been with Unilever before the war. He went back to Unilever and then we lost touch with one another. Er, I have never been one for “old boys” units really and that was the phase of life, it was over, you have got to get on with the next phase and I got married in ’46, my wife had been in the Army, Signals, and then we had children. We got other things to occupy our time with, it took all our time and energy catching up on a career and on life and so on.
DM. Have you found as you have retired that your thoughts have gone back more to those days?
MB. In, well in two ways, you hear a lot about post traumatic stress and I went, I have been to a number of lectures with a psychiatrist because we have a mentally handicapped son. So I got involved on that side of it and got fairly heavily involved with the Royal College of Psychiatrists and so on and I remember going to one lecture, and the psychiatrist who was talking about post traumatic stress, and he put on the black board all the symptoms and the treatments you should adopt. So I said to him, ‘well, you have got one or two symptoms there which I have every day, but I don’t think they interfere with my life. I suggest it is biological adaptation that enables you to cope’. you know, things like flash backs and so on that you are not looking for, and they just come. And er, he was flummoxed he, he didn’t quite know how to deal with it, I hope he has thought about it since. But it’s true and I have talked to other ex-aircrew who have said the same thing. Then my children, not so much but certainly my grandchildren began agitating, you know? We, both of us, both my wife and I, ‘what did you do during the war? You never talk about it. We like to know, we ought to know, we ought to know what you were doing when you were our age’. So eventually, under pressure from my brother-in-law as well, I did write a sort of retrospective for them. So they all know what I wrote five years ago anyway, my thoughts at the time and recollections and experiences, which in fact, I think they found useful er, [pause] but otherwise until they started, tried to establish the Bomber Command Centre at Lincoln, because I had always regretted there wasn’t a proper recognition in the work of Bomber Command. I mean, after Dresden and so on er, and politicians had become a dirty word and they didn’t use it, didn’t refer to it. Churchill talked about Fighter Command saving the country, and Bomber Command bringing victory was forgotten about, but we got the memorial in Green Park, we did go to the opening of that. That is more of what I call a State Memorial, but it’s suitable, it’s appropriate and it is visited a lot. But the one at Lincoln is more important, Tony Wright, who was, his name the [unclear] representative in Lincoln, anyway he was the one who had the idea, because there was so many airfields in Lincoln, and it was responded to very vigorously by most aircrew who helped to raise funds for it, and I think it is the ideal memorial. Because there is the memorial spire which is the wing span of a Lancaster, but more important around it are the metal columns, on which are engraved the names of all the aircrew who didn’t come back, over fifty thousand of them, which does make people appreciate the extent and the sacrifice. And then the memorial garden with soil in it from each of the airfields, and most important of all, the educational centre with the sort of thing you are doing and er, other records will be valuable for the future. Particularly as it is going to include input from German sources, which is what’s required. Yeah.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Dr Maurice Brook Interview
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David Meanwell
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-01-09
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Sound
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ABrookM170109, PBrookM1702
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Contributor
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Vivienne Tincombe
Description
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Maurice grew up Rothwell in Yorkshire, joining the Air Training Corp, and going into the Royal Air Force after spending time with Cambridge University Air Squadron at the age of 18. He completed his pilot training in Canada before going to the Advance Flying Training unit in RAF Millom, Cumberland. Maurice then tells of meeting up with his crew in RAF Husbands Bosworth, of several incidents with his Pilot and his training on Handley Page Halifaxes. He was then posted to RAF Sturgate, flying in Halifaxes and collecting a new pilot, who managed to land the aircraft after a tyre burst. Maurice was then posted to 625 Squadron at RAF Kelstern, flying Lancasters, and he tells of some of his operations and his memories of the losses of other aircraft. He tells of an operation to Nordhausen where they were to bomb a V2 rocket site, and his encounter with a German film maker who was making a documentary about the attack called “The Last Survivors”. Maurice completed 15 operations including a mine laying operation to Kiel Harbour and the oil refineries at Plowen, and he tells how he used his astronavigation training after power had gone to his radar. He also took part in Operation Manna, dropping food supplies to the people of Holland. After the war, Maurice went to University to do Biological Studies and then he got a job with Boots company in Nottingham doing Agricultural and Horticultural research before joining the Beecham Group, where he help the position of Director of Research of the Consumer Products Group.
Format
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01:03:20 audio recording
625 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
Bombing of Peenemünde (17/18 August 1943)
coping mechanism
crewing up
Gee
H2S
Halifax
memorial
military service conditions
mine laying
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
RAF Kelstern
RAF Millom
RAF Scampton
RAF Sturgate
searchlight
training
V-2
V-weapon
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/510/8412/PDunnG1501.2.BMP
505c4b2651ad5389c9a6458077b498ac
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/510/8412/ADunnG150405.1.mp3
d86cd9b1133884331255b8b76f63465f
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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Dunn, George
George Charles Dunn
G C Dunn
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Dunn, GC
Description
An account of the resource
Six items. Two oral history interviews with George Dunn DFC (1922 1333537, 149315 Royal Air Force), a photograph a document and two log books. He flew operations as a pilot with 10, 76, and 608 Squadrons then transferred to 1409 Meteorological Flight.
There is a sub collection of his photographs from Egypt.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-03-08
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AP: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre, the interviewer is Andrew Panton, the interviewee is George Dunn, Mr Dunn was a RAF Pilot who flew various types of aircraft during the Second World War, the interview is taking place at Princess Marina House in Rustington West Sussex, on the 5th April 2015.
GD: My name is George Dunn, I was seventeen years of age when the war broke out and I was born at Whitstable on the North Kent coast, so I saw quite a lot of the Battle of Britain and being facing the Thames Estuary all the hoards of German bombers that were coming in to bomb London, when the London Blitz started, at, I joined the local defence volunteers, and then that became the Home Guard, and when I reached the age of eighteen I volunteered for aircrew. I was interviewed up at Chatham and I originally registered for wireless operator/air gunner, but they said to me would I consider pilot training, which I agreed, and after a written exam and a selection board, I was advised that I could take up pilot training. First aircraft I flew was a Tiger Moth because I did all my training in Canada, the first place was at Saskatchewan, a little place called Caron west of Moose Jaw and from there I went on to A V Roe Anson’s at a place called Weyburn again in Saskatchewan. When I came back to the UK in September 1942 I was then posted to Chipping Norton which was a satellite of Little Risington on airspeed Oxford’s this was to acclimatise us to the flying conditions in this country, we had been used to flying with full town lights and city lights, but this was of course flying in blackout conditions. From there I was posted to Lossiemouth which was number 20 OTU, and formed my crew, and we did my OTU on Wellington’s.
AP: So can you say a little bit about the Wellington Bomber, how you found it to fly and what you did [inaudible word]
GD: Well the Wellington Bomber I found was a nice aircraft it wasn’t difficult to fly and we had quite an easy course on it.
AP: What about op’s with the Wellington? Can you remember any?
GD: No I didn’t do any operations on Wellington’s
AP: So from the Wellington, where did you go next?
GD: From Wellington’s I was sent to Heavy Conversion Unit which was at Rufforth just outside York, on Halifax aircraft.
AP: And was that your first op aircraft?
GD: No, surprisingly enough, normally if you went to a Heavy Conversion Unit, you had, you flew a certain number of hours and then you were seconded to a squadron where you had to do two operations with an experienced crew, but in my case I was sent to number 10 squadron at Melbourne to do my two second dickey trips as they were called and believe it or not I had not set foot in a Halifax aircraft until that first raid. First raid was Essen, which was rather a heavy place to go to, to start with but we got through that alright and the following night I did my second, second dickey trip to Kiel, so I got two fairly good targets under my belt to start with.
AP: And could you talk a bit about the experiences you had on those trips, I mean did you engage fighters, flak, ack ack searchlights?
GD: What when I was on my own crew?
AP: yes.
GD: Yes, our first trip as a crew was to Dortmund, and right throughout our tour we were fairly lucky we were never attacked by a fighter but we were coned at one stage.
AP: So can you talk about what that means?
GD: Yes, coning is when you initially get trapped by a blue searchlight, a radar searchlight and once that’s on to you the white searchlights form a cone so you could be, you might call it sitting like a fairy on a Christmas Tree, and the only suitable manoeuvre to get out of a coning, is by a corkscrew method, if you can do that then you’re ok, but on this occasion we managed to get away from the cone.
AP: And
GD: Yes if you are coned the thing is, is to keep your eyes on your instruments, don’t look outside because you will get blinded by the light. On the 17th, 18th August 1943 I was based at Holme on Spalding Moor south east of York and on this particular afternoon the first thing we noticed when we got to the briefing room were there were extra service police on the door which we thought was rather unusual, and when we got into the briefing room and they drew the curtains across we saw this red ribbon going all the way up to Denmark up the North sea, across Denmark, missing the North German coast because of the heavy flak and then we saw this tiny little place on the Baltic coast, and we thought what, what’s going on there, what’s this all about, never heard of it. When we were briefed we were only told that it was a secret research station connected with radar, at no time were we given any indication of the real work that was going on there. The chilling remark that was made at the end of the briefing was that the target was so important that it should be destroyed that night, otherwise we were told quite firmly that we would go back the following night, the night after that until it was destroyed, and you can imagine the feeling we had knowing what reception we would get if we had to go back on the night after. After the briefing of course we went back to our usual pre-op dinner or meal, bacon and eggs usually, and eventually to the parachute room picked our parachutes up, and into the crew room, dispose of all our wallets and anything that might identify us, and took off, reached our climbing height, and proceeded through the Yorkshire coast up towards Denmark. Included in the main force was a low number of Mosquito’s which were used as a spoof raid on Berlin, this was to make sure that the German authorities were thinking that the main force was going to Berlin, and of course as we got nearer the main force veered off to Peenemunde, and the Mosquito’s carried on to Berlin. This caused quite a lot of consternation amongst the German aircrew controllers because they weren’t sure where the main force were, and when the German night fighters were alerted they had no idea what was going on, the German ground controllers were in a bit of a state and one German pilot realising what was going on proceeded to Peenemunde without being told, so of course by the time the German fighters had got there the raid was virtually half over. We were fortunate we did our run in from the Island of Roden which was about a five minute run in from the North, and we went in on the first wave, the target was well marked we went in at about seven thousand feet it was a brilliant moonlight night and my bomb aimer got quite excited because this was the first time that he had actually been able to identify the target because normally we were bombing from eighteen or nineteen thousand feet, so this was quite an occasion, and I can remember telling him don’t get too excited just concentrate on what you are doing. So we moved in no trouble at all the flak was very very light we were able to, despite the pathfinder markers we were able to identify our aiming point visually, dropped our bombs and came out without any problem. We were very lucky that we were in the first wave because we were able to bomb and get away from the target before the fighters arrived, in the original plan, four group which I was a member of, was scheduled to go in on the last wave, but because they were frightened of smoke from the ground generators obscuring our aiming point we were reverted to the first wave which was very fortunate but not so fortunate for those who were transferred back from the first wave to the last. There were three aiming points on Peenemunde itself and our aiming point was the living quarters of the scientists and the technicians, and one wag on our squadron said there would be a prize given to the first aircraft back with a scientists spectacles hanging from its undercarriage. Once you begin your final run in you are really under the control of the bomb aimer because he, he’s the one that can only see the actual line of path to the target so he will be giving you instructions, such as, right, left left, right right, steady, until you actually came to the point where he’d say bombs gone. We were only told that it was a, as I said before, a secret RADAR station, and it was some time afterwards before that it was revealed that it was for rocket research. So, of course the best thing was that the day after, it was only after a Spitfire reconnaissance which evaluated the amount of damage that we knew with some relief that we were not going to have to go back that night. The aftermath of course was what was the overall result and it was generally recognised that the rocket programme was put back by at least two months, and in his book Crusade to Europe, General Eisenhower said that the second front would have been seriously compromised had the Peenemunde raid not taken place when it did. It is possible that the raid on Peenemunde could have taken place a lot earlier, because in May 1940 a note was pushed through the door of the British Naval attaché in Oslo, from the writer claiming to have very important information connected with German activities, and if the intelligence people were interested would they put a coded letter or word in the broadcasts that were made usually to the resistance, this was done and another letter was pushed through the door and the sort of information the writer indicated that they had, was to the intelligence people so ludicrous that they thought it must be a hoax, and it was ignored, and it was many many, well this was 1940, it was some years later when snippets of information came through and two German Generals who were in a , they were prisoners of war, were in a bugged room and amongst the things that they discussed was that they couldn’t understand why Peenemunde had never been bombed, this of course brought it to the notice of the authorities and from then on every endeavour was made to secure other bits and pieces of information, to ascertain whether this was true. The final answer to the problem I think was when a WRAF intelligence officer very keenly spotted a launching ramp on one of the reconnaissance photographs, and this really was the, was the result of good reconnaissance, and it really gave the answer that there really was something going on at Peenemunde, and from then on of course a committee was formed Mr Churchill appointed Duncan Sands to chair this committee and eventually after a few meetings it was then that they decided that this would, Peenemunde would have to be bombed. Of course one of the things was how were they going to do it, Air Vice Marshal Cochrane of five group who’s group had been used to some time and distance bombing wanted to go in with about, I think about 150 Lancaster’s, it was also discussed that a small force of Mosquito’s would go in, but Sir Arthur Harris the chief of Bomber Command, he felt that if a raid was going to take place it would have to be successful one hundred percent at the first go, and he made the decision that it was going to be a maximum effort, so all groups of the Bomber Command were going to take part. Consequently almost six hundred aircraft were sent, probably the decision was right because the place was destroyed, virtually destroyed on the first raid. Four days after the raid on Peenemunde, the place was visited by Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and Albert Speer the armaments manager and they, after a survey Hitler himself decided that the place would not continue to operate, at least on the scale that it had done, and it was then that the whole project was moved to various places particularly the Harz Mountains. Of course the success of the raid was not achieved without some loss and unfortunately the total aircraft loss was forty and two hundred and twenty aircrew were killed, mostly occurred in the last two waves of the, of the raid so as I said before we were very very lucky that we had been moved from the last wave to the first wave, because we were virtually in and out without any problem. Of course the success in some ways of flying on operations is the team work, the crew have got to work together and I was very fortunate I had a very good crew, we originally formed up at OTU at Lossiemouth, it was a question of one person getting to know another. I well remember my bomb aimer coming up to me and saying “have you crewed up yet?” and I said “no” “how about crewing up with me” “yeah sure do you know any navigators?” “Yes I know a navigator” and that’s how it went on, so we finished up with five, and later on we acquired a Mid-upper gunner and a Flight Engineer who was actually allocated to us. We were lucky in this respect because my Flight Engineer’s Wife and Mother ran a pub just outside Horsforth in Leeds so on our nights off all seven of us used to pile into a Morris Eight, and go off to a night out and as you can imagine the customers made a great fuss of us, and we were never short of free drinks. [laughter] I can well remember the only time when my navigator did suffer from, I don’t know what it was, but he suddenly came up on the intercom and said “ Skipper were about ten miles off course” and my reply was “well look we can’t be, I’ve been steering this course that you gave me without any deviation, so get your finger out and get us back on course, otherwise I’ll get the bomb aimer to take over the navigation” this really put the wind up him and he, he got us back on course, don’t ask me why but whether he’d made a mistake with his GEE box fixing it turned out ok at the end. Of course most of our navigation was dead reckoning but the saviour that we had, but it was only I think to about five degrees east that the GEE box from where we could get a fix on our position enabled us to keep to a reasonable course. Of course whilst the aircrew got most of the glory, it was the auxiliary staff that really supported us people like the parachute packers, the ground crew, as far as we were concerned we had an excellent ground crew on our aircraft, everything was tickety boo, the windscreen was all polished they went completely out of their way to make sure that the aircraft we were flying was in one hundred percent condition, and the only way we could reward them was taking them down to the pub on the occasional evening and buying them a few beers, it was our way of saying thank you to them. I well remember that on our last night our very last raid which was a castle, outside the control tower there was a whole host of personnel waving to us a lot of air cadets and when we got to the runway for our final take off the crowd round the caravan way, the crowd outside the caravan the controller which gave you a green light when it was ready for you to take off, and then finally opening the throttles for what you knew was going to be your final operation, and wondering how it was going to go, but of course at that time you were really concentrating on getting the aircraft safely off the ground. I well remember, I don’t know which raid it was but probably my fault we had not secured the front escape hatch properly, and on take off it blew open, my oxygen mask, tube rather was ripped off and I had to borrow the mid-upper gunners oxygen tube, he had rather an uncomfortable flight trying to breathe his oxygen having given up his tube to me, but we did get over it, and we did manage to close the escape hatch with some difficulty, I must take full responsibility for that error. Yes on that final flight when you got the green light knowing that this was going to be your final operation, you had that feeling of great support from those people that were standing there, they knew that it was your final op, and they were willing you to go on and come back safely and that was, that was really comforting, but of course you were more or less concentrating on the take off at that time because that was a very dangerous time for a fully laden, fully fuelled, fully bombed aircraft, until what you reach was known as safety speed, where it was, you were then able to climb to your normal altitude.
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 George Dunn
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Andrew Panton
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-04-05
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ADunnG150405, PDunnG1501
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Format
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00:25:12 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
George was born at Whitstable and was 17 when war was declared. He joined the local Defence Volunteers which became the Home Guard. When he reached 18 he volunteered for air crew. He was interviewed at Chatham and sat an exam and selection board to train as a pilot. All of his training was in Canada and his first aircraft was a Tiger Moth. When he returned to England, he was posted to RAF Chipping Norton on Oxfords flying in black-out conditions. From there he was posted to RAF Lossiemouth, operational training unit on Wellingtons. He was then sent to a Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Rufforth on Halifaxes. George was posted to 10 Squadron at RAF Melbourne. He flew operations to Essen, Kiel and Dortmund. On 17/18 August 1943, while based at RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor, he took part on the bombing operation to Peenemünde rocket research station.
Contributor
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Sue Smith
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Canada
Germany
England--Chatham (Kent)
England--Kent
England--Oxfordshire
England--Yorkshire
Scotland--Moray
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Essen
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Peenemünde
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
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1943-08-17
1943-08-18
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
10 Squadron
20 OTU
aircrew
bombing
Bombing of Peenemünde (17/18 August 1943)
civil defence
crewing up
Gee
ground crew
ground personnel
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Home Guard
military ethos
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
RAF Chipping Norton
RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Melbourne
RAF Rufforth
searchlight
Tiger Moth
training
V-2
V-weapon
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/515/8747/AGreenKS150713.1.mp3
c8ff4633227b104e9027ea6a3b4661cb
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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Green, Kenneth Shelton
K S Green
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Green, KS
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Leading Aircraftsman Kenneth Green.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
MC: This interview is being conducted for, on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Mike Connock, the interviewee is Kenneth Shelton Green and the interview is taking place at Skellingthorpe Community Centre on the 13th of July 2015.
KG: As I say -
MC: OK, Kenneth, what we’ll do is, I’ll just ask you to tell me a bit about when and where you were born.
KG: Yes
MC: and err, your early days, school and the, the area you lived in
KG: Yes, right. I was born at Pleasley near Mansfield, on the 17th of January 1922, I lived variously, as a small person with my parents and partially with my grandparents, at a place called Pleasley, and it doesn’t matter what the name of the street is, it was Burghley House, B-U-R-G-H-L-E-Y House, Pleasley, near Mansfield, that’s where my parents lived and my [pause] lived with my mother’s parents when they were first married and where I was born. That’s [unclear], then moved to a small agricultural setup, called Dales Torth D-A-L-E-S T-O-R-T-H, two separate words, Danish background origin, and then we moved to a place called Skegby, S-K-E-G-B-Y, where I started school as a five year old, [pause] err, [pause]. We later moved to Nottingham where my father took up a post with the Nottinghamshire County Council in 1920, [pause] something, six, eight, thereabouts
MC: When were, when were you born?
KG: Oh, I was born 17th January 1922
MC: ‘22
KG: Err, I ‘ve gotten down out as 17, [unclear] move into Nottingham, where we had a house whilst a new house was built for my parents where we occup, which we entered into occupation in 1930 I think, at Mapperley, Gedling, Nottingham, Westdale Lane, that’s it, err, [pause]. I was then transferred to a school at Mapperley, Nottingham and was there until I, from there obtained a scholarship at Nottingham High school where I went in 1933, I think, yeh, [pause]. I had a scholarship for the same year also to Henry Mellish modern school, which I didn’t take up because I went to the high school, err, we lived at Nottingham, well Gedling it was called the address, until I was err, err, I went into business and then into the RAF, and then the Navy, and then came out.
MC: How old were you when you left school?
KG: I left school at the age of 18, 17, 17.
MC: So, did you have any employment from then?
KG: Yes, I worked for a, an insurance company at the office in Nottingham until, I went in the Air Force and I came out of the Navy, er, out of the Air Force
MC: Before you joined the Air Force, did you do anything else?
KG: I was in, oh yes, I was in the, air, auxiliary fire service, the local Carlton AFS where I was part of the team, and ultimately was an engineer with the fire engines and so forth, that’s where I first drove a Rolls Royce, which had a fire pump trailer behind it. That would be 1930, correction, 1941, two.
MC: So, what age were you when you joined the Air Force?
KG: I went into the Air Force, er, in 1942, at the age of - [pause]
MC: Yes, you would be about 19, 20 if you were born in ’22.
KG: I wouldn’t, yes, I get, I’m sorry about this.
MC: That’s ok
KG: I’m so, er, [pause] 1939 was the beginning of the war, 1940, ‘41, ah ‘42 [emphasis], I joined the Air Force, that’s it.
MC: What made you choose the Air Force?
KG: Because I wanted to fly, er, I became an engineer in the Air Force
MC: So, what was the reaction when you asked to fly, what was the action, reaction, from the Air Force when you asked to fly, said you wanted to fly?
KG: Well, I wanted to fly but unknown to me, I had astigmatism, an eye condition which prevented me being accepted for aircrew, yes,
MC: So -
KG: So, I joined the Air Force and then went to my first technical school in South Wales.
MC: Did you do any basic training?
KG: Oh, oh yes, I did my paddy, Padgate, Blackpool, square bashing, then I went into the technical college, technical, er, section of the Air Force in South Wales, erm, name. St Athan
MC: RAF St Athans
KG: Yes, I went and did my first technical course there, and became I, I, merged head of course as a flight mechanic and joined, 61 Squadron RAF, Bomber Command, 5 Group, Lancasters, as an erk, SAC, as LAC, give or take, yes LAC, 1942, yes that’s it, ’42. I stayed with squadron, until, moved to, oh, oh, wait a minute, I didn’t, I went off on a conversion course to, number 1 school of technical training, Halton, RAF, in 1943.
MC: That was conversion too?
KG: I was, I was, then became a fitter to E, engines, LAC, I joined the servicing flight of 61 Squadron, which was a new type of arrangement for dealing with [pause] periodic inspections, a separate team
MC: [unclear]
KG: A separate team, a separate team, we were an upstage from the, from the squadron, but we were still on the squadron, but we were the servicing flight, er
MC: Where was that, that was at?
KG: That was at RAF Syerston, first of all, 61 Squadron,
MC: Not far from here
KG: The squadron then moved to Skellingthorpe
MC: So, what was the -
KG: And then from Skellingthorpe to [pause] bom, bom, bom, [pause] er, Coningsby, then back to Skellingthorpe, where they have been doing some runway work in the meantime, still on 61 Squadron, er, I was then posted to a new par unit, production unit, at RAF Bottesford
MC: Can I go back to Syerston, when you -
KG: Yes
MC: First went back to Syerston, what, err, you worked, what mark of Lancaster did you work on?
KG: I worked on both Mk 2’s and Mk 1’s and Mk 3’s, the Mk 2’s then left the squadron, down to, went down to Cambridge where they shifted the whole lot, but we were the, we were a rare beast there were very few Mk 2’s made, they were, [pause] Bristol Hercules engines in a Lancaster, so I am one of the relatively small number of people who worked on those.
MC: That was all part of your training?
KG: Well no, it was part of service, I was at the squadron with them
MC: Yes, but I mean you, your training on the engines
KG: Oh well, you did, you did all engines
MC: Oh, you did?
KG: And expected, I, I took a, a works course at Rolls Royce, Derby on Rolls Royce engines in 1943 [pause], yes
MC: So, then you went on to Skellingthorpe from Syerston?
KG: But, but well I, no, whilst I was at Skellingthorpe, I went off to Derby and did a course then came back, then, I left Skellingthorpe to this, to Bottesford
MC: Can I ask you what’s, what were your reactions to the accommodation and stuff at Skellingthorpe, what was it like?
KG: At Skellingthorpe you were, you were, a Nissan hut in a field [pause] oh, over the hedge and so forth, away from the main er, sites at er, Skellingthorpe. We had a proper civilised brick establishment at er, Syerston of course, [laugh] it was not, it was not highly regarded the basic sort of Nissan huts that we ended up with at Skellingthorpe [laugh] but anyway, I use, I used not to go preferably to, well the guard room was too far away, I lived over fields so it was nearer to go over the next field over across the farm and down to erm, the station at Hykeham, where it was very convenient to catch a train to Nottingham where I lived and I er, it saved time and other things. Not to go as far as Nottingham but to get off at Carlton, which is the station before Nottingham so you didn’t meet people like SP’s who wanted to know how, why, when and where.
MC: I’d like to cover some of the experiences at Skellingthorpe if I can, erm, you know
KG: Yeah
MC: Mishaps or whatever
KG: Well, life was what it was, one worked hard, I was proud to be there, we, we went off to do all sorts of things occasionally. I went down to, I went down to [unclear] erm, Silverstone [emphasis] I went down to Peterborough, servicing was to pick up a Lancaster, it had landed down there after ops and it wasn’t working properly but in actual fact, it was that the pilot was friendly with a WAAF in the stores there [laughs]. When he was doing his OTU training [laughs], however, Chiefy and I went down by Hillman Minx sort of garry, and, er, sorted the aeroplane out which was not in dire straits, there were a few sparks out of the exhaust pipe that was it, that was the argument, err, yes
MC: So, you, you say you went down to Peterborough and it was er, -
KG: Well, yeah, I went to Peterborough to swap an engine on Mickey the Moocher as it was at er, later, 61 Squadron’s M, Mike, and the flight mechanic who was on the flights with it, he painted the first Mickey the Moocher and the Mickey, and then the trolley and the bomb and all the rest of it er, yeah and I spoke to him after the war, he lived in South Wales then er, [pause]
MC: So, you got quite friendly with the crew of Mickey the Moocher then?
KG: Oh, oh we went down to her because the third crew on Mickey the Moocher, yes, I think they were the third crew, they’d had an engine blow, starboard outer, blew up on an op and they landed at Peterborough, so, er, a colleague of mine from the squadron went down with an engine and swapped it and managed to get it all put together and back again the next day
MC: How long would it take you to change an engine?
KG: Well, it, [laughs] not long because we wanted to catch the train from Nottingham [laughs], at five thirty [laughs] from Hykeham, so we flew back by Lancaster [laughs] yeah, up to the Nissan hut in the field and then out of the back door to the Hykeham station [laughs]
MC: I gather you experienced quite a bit of an explosion at Skellingthorpe?
KG: Oh, Skellingthorpe, yes in the course of ordinary work, we did our periodic, periodic inspections which were a stage up from what, what the squadron could do and I, I was stuck on a B flight aircraft, I can’t remember which one it was now, erm, with err, another chap. I’d finished my port outer, I’d done no snags and engine ready, and it was four o’clock thereabouts and my colleague John, was in the record for the getting killed, he was doing the port inner
MC: Who with?
KG: He said, ‘look, I’ll do the run up with Chiefy, you, you scarper,’ he knew where I was going, so off I went with my bike, he stayed and shortly after I left, before I got, be, beyond sort of two hundred yards from the back over the fence on my bike going down to the station, there was a hell of a bang, and err, something had gone up. I didn’t know what it was, but of course couldn’t do anything about it, preceded on my way, get back at midnight at Hykeham and people said, ‘Oh we’ve been sweeping the deck looking for your fingernails,’ and so forth and it was er, my friend who’d kindly stayed to do the run up and this whole tractor and trailer, train of thousand pound, yellows, yankee, DA, delayed actions for daylight were tur, turning round to bomb up and servicing aircraft when you are doing bombing up was not [emphasis] a good thing to do. Anyway, my friend was blown, blown apart because the back spring on the trailer, row of trailers which was being driven by a chap, I think he was an electrician, anyway he’d broken his collar bone and he was fed up with doing nothing and he accepted the job as driving the tractor for armourers with a whole string of bombs and he was with his arm in, in plaster, he was driving one handed and the, the back spring on the back trailer which you can, you know was far off and you couldn’t see it and it broke and the back bomb [three loud taps] kept hitting the ground and it pulled the safety pin out and so forth, and, er, as he got to the aircraft where my friend was still doing his port inner engine, it went bang and the lot went from here to there and back again, so he’s, he was killed and is in the er, killed list that would be I think, October, September, October ’40, ’44.
MC: Squadron [unclear]
KG: Hmm
MC: Any other, any other -
KG: It was, it was a B Flight aircraft
MC: Any other issues like that?
KG: Well, no, I mean, whilst going, whilst, for, for a time we were going all the way down at Bottesford, a mate and I we used to go by train, from erm, from Carlton to Newark, in the mornings, and cycle, down the A1 to Bottesford, over the, over the hedge and so forth, because we had got a permanent living out chit, both of us, and both of us came from Nottingham, and we cycled, used to cycle down. I can remember this Sunday morning, winter, it would be ‘44, seeing these, these, contrails going vertically up from the ground down to the south east, and they were the German V2’s being fired from Holland into England, we didn’t know at the time but er, that’s exactly what it was, that was an interesting, you know when, when you it was sort of 5am, 6am, that sort of thing but in the early light of dawn, to see these things going up and not knowing what they were
MC: So, when did you leave 61 Squadron?
KG: Came then, on, and er, I left 61 to go down to Bottesford, for doing, doing these, we used to make, make up brand new engines for
MC: Oh, engine assembly
KG: Into power plants, we were, we were instead of a factory somewhere doing it, we were RAF people doing it, we could do it alright, we knew what we were about, we were all qualified people and, er, yes, it, it was interesting
MC: Had you got any promotions from then?
KG: No, no, it was no such thing then, out of the blue, we were slung in the, slung in the Navy
MC: So, there’s no [unclear]
KG: Which was not, [emphasis] not to our liking
MC: So, you finished up in the [unclear]
KG: So, I went off back to Padgate, Warrington, to go into the Navy, from the Air Force and there we were issued with all our naval gear. I was dressed as a taxi driver, because I was a fitter, other people were dressed as sailors, of course that suited them with the young ladies around, that suited them very much for a time, but they soon got fed up with it, all the year, and, err, we were not best pleased, we were definitely dis-chuffed, and the excuse, and they put us under armed guard, with the old barbed wire, and so forth, and that, that, really did knock people who were, you know, we didn’t like that and the politicians from London running around like scared rabbits, didn’t know what, what they were doing and they didn’t [laughs] but then they claimed they, they were propaganda game was who. The Army guard were pleased because we had got cheap cigarettes [laughs] anyways, it, it was a, talk about a hairs breath from really blowing up out there and really, we were dis-chuffed, we were very fed up indeed, [laughs]
KG: Yes, that was a, a not a very unhappy experience, then in the Navy. I was sent off to a squadron in Northern Ireland, with a, oh, [laughs] a, a low grade of training aircraft and we, one didn’t have, and I had very little regard for them and then
MC: [unclear] Can you remember what aircraft it was?
KG: Err, [pause] I could have done when I walked in [laughs], what was it
MC: [unclear]
KG: It was a single engined, target towing aircraft, and they used to tow a glider, tin, little tin gliders, fifteen-foot span, for, to be shot at by, RAF fighters in training, or Navy fighters in training. Then we left, they were building a ship at Belfast, which was, instead, they said you are going to be on our ship, for going out to Russia or Timbukthree, oh yes, before, by then, we had got Tiger force, who were going to have Lancasters to Siberia, would bomb, outbound, bomb Japan, land in the islands, re bomb and back into Russia. We were, we were quite, we could put up with that, we were, we thought that was quite interesting, and that’s where we were going to go you see, in the RAF, and then they bunged us in the Navy [laughs], all part of the story.
MC: What about flying yourself when you was, when you was
KG: I, I,
MC: When you was doing the servicing
KG: Right
MC: Did you do any test flights?
KG: In flying, I once went to the trouble, first time, a new boy, to get a parachute from stores, to go on a test flight, after doing an ordinary inspection, that’s an L plate, number one, new boy. By the time I got back, they were nearly fed up with waiting for me ‘cos I’d taken so long, to cycle across the airfield, find the stores, argue the toss with the store masters. Anyway, got back, and that’s the only time I ever got a parachute [laughs] and flew, from that time onwards, if I, if I mended it, I’ll fly it, I don’t want to know about parachutes [laughs], never again did I wear a parachute, [laughs] flying in the Air Force, that’s, that’s true [laughs]
MC: So, what was your role on the test flight, what did you do?
KG: Well I, sat on the, I looked around, sat in, lay on the rash bed or [laughs] what have you, err, you just hung around, just another, just another jolly [laughs]. I remember, from, Skellingthorpe, a young chap was a pilot, we’d done all the inspections and I, I as usual, I would always grab a flight if I could, after we’d done the inspection, and we, I can remember, I was standing in the astrodome, which was near the mid upper, and we were doing fighter affiliation as a, argy bargy with a Spitfire or Hurricane, or something and I remember looking up in the astrodome, and there was Newark [laughs] church spire looking up at me [laughs], I thought how come that, I’m upside down in a Lancaster [laughs] looking down [laughs] at the church tower [laughs]. Interesting experience
MC: How did that happen?
KG: Well, it was, we were [laughs] doing aerobatics in a Lancaster to avoid the fighter, and, and they went on ops that night, this would be late afternoon, they went on ops, that night and got the chop, never came back [laughs] probably the wings fell off [laughs] overstrained or something. Oh dear.
MC: What about socialising within the Air Force when you was off duty and -
KG: Well, we, we never had much socialising, curiously enough, as least I, I would nip off home if I could, you see, it was, that was the easiest way, and I could er, use my time personally, privately, rather better than, and RAF events, we had all the usual, booze up sort of parties and so on, but I, I didn’t drink then, [laughs] when you are younger you don’t, anyway, I used to go off home when I could, and, err, that was a case of bike, Skellingthorpe, took it in and away, err
MC: So, you had experience of the Packard Merlin?
KG: Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, I -
MC: Was there much difference?
KG: Packard, oh, very different, but Stromberg carburettors, are, a, a, it’s a whole chapter on its own, SU’s, yes, I know, I know about SU’s, but Stromberg’s, they were a challenge, they were a very involved pieces of machinery, but jolly good, first class, Merlin 24’s, they were fitted to, yeh, anyway, I went into the Navy, after all, all that
MC: So, what aircraft did you work on in the Navy?
KG: Oh, these useless single engine, target towing things, and, er, and that [unclear] in Northern Ireland, oh dear, Northern Ireland, far side, you were there -
Other: Dublin?
KG: No, far side
Other: Far side of Ireland?
KG: Northern Ireland
Other: Northern Ireland? Why you come to er-
MC: Ballykelly
Other: Strabane
KG: No, no, bigger city
Other: A city?
KG: Yes, ah, [emphasis] the capital of Northern Ireland
Other: Belfast?
KG: No, opposite side, opposite side, far, far side
Other: Well, the capital is at this side
KG: Yes, yes, I know
Other: Belfast
KG: It’s the next, er, no, it’s, er, big city, beyond side of Ireland
Other: Well, there’s Limavady
KG: Northern Ireland, no, next to Limavady, and it’s quite a small place, next door to Limavady, further over, the big city, where all the, the, erm -
Other: Cork?
KG: No, no, north
Other: Yeah
MC: So, you were at Derry
KG: Yeah
MC: With the Navy?
KG: Yes, yeah
MC: So, what, where did you go from there?
KG: Then we were moved to, Cornwall, which was er, [laughs] not the brightest idea, especially as they got off the train somewhere at Crewe, then the train went, and then we found that we shouldn’t have got off, that was a genius [emphasis] naval officer, [laughs]
MC: Oh, was that still with the Navy to Cornwall?
KG: Yes, [laughs] and then I was at there, down there at Cornwall, Padstow was the end of the line, the buffers, and you couldn’t go any further, and that was then, you got off there, and you got on a garry and went to the airfield, an RAF airfield, modern built, big runways, and they served us in the Fleet Air Arm, not just in the Navy, but what was it called, north shore of Cornwall [pause] oh, dear oh dear, big airfield
MC: St Mawgan
KG: No, it’s next to there,
Other: You’ve got Wellington down there haven’t you
KG: No but, we had, in fact, they, 61 Squadron put some Lancasters to fly down to Spain from there, we lost them, Mk 2’s, from 61 Squadron, you know where I mean, I, I, it just goes blank on me, you haven’t got an atlas with you? No, [pause]
MC: So, this was a holiday estate on the north shore of Cornwall, was it?
KG: Yeh, and that was where, where, near Padstow, and then you go inland and there was the airfield, but, and on the coast, going the opposite way, there was this er, holiday resort
MC: So, were you there until you finished in the Air, in the Navy, or finished it during the end of the war
KG: No, no, they, they explained that I wouldn’t usually get out, and I would say when, when do I get my ticket, oh no you can’t, with the Navy you have to wait until your replacements come, it’ll take two or three years, and so I said words to the effect of stuff that, and so I had a word with higher up, I didn’t tell my theoretical seniors, I went over their head and said there’s a way of me getting a broken educational continuity course, civilianisation, and so forth, where, where, do I get the course for that, and suddenly out of the blue, I was posted to this naval college, which was, oh yeah, Salisbury part of the world, I mean, it’s just gone blank on me
MC: When was that?
KG:’45, I, I went then and my lot who were saying you can’t go, they couldn’t do anything about it, I said, ‘you can’t argue with head office, I’ve gone,’ so off I went, and I spent, er, er, five or six weeks becoming a civilian, we were all ranks, commissioned and non-commissioned, it was very, [laughs] and we went round visiting companies to see how companies run in civvy street, and so forth, [laughs] it was a good five or six weeks, and then when I got back, they’d, they’d found a replacement for me, and I, very shortly, I went down to Plymouth, and, and got my civilian establishment, papers, and so forth, and left them.
MC: So, post war what was your reaction to the job you did and the work you did?
KG: Well, I went back into the office and then, picked up where I’d been
MC: I’m thinking about your thoughts, on, you know, on the war itself
KG: Well
MC: And what you did and -
KG: I just worked in an office, that’s all I could -
MC: As a flight engineer
KG: No, as a clerk
MC: No, I meant during the war, what did you think of the work you’d done during the war
KG: Well, I thought I was not doing a bad job, I’d, I’d done technically, I’d learnt everything I could, I was interested, [emphasis] I learnt everything I could about Rolls Royce, I considered myself a cut, er, you know, I knew what I was doing, the other lot, not necessarily, and when we were building up power plants, you felt that you were part of the, it is, it’s a strange thing because to find yourself in effect being rather like Rolls Royce works and building their power plants which is what we were doing and we were turning out a lot of power plants, and er, they were going out on ops and being broken [laughs] etc. and we were turning out
MC: So, obviously post war then, you said you went in an office
KG: I went back into the office, and er, ultimately, I became an outside rep, and then I came up to Scunthorpe and opened a new office, the first, first North Lincolnshire office, I was running the whole caboodle
MC: I gather you ultimately achieved your ambition to fly
KG: Well, no, that went on, I then left the insurance company and went as, I joined the chairman of my commercial group, as his PA, and, and, ultimately, became the director of all the companies at Scunthorpe, and we, and anyway, there was a lot of business things I was running new lines in business in Cornwall, and Chester etc. etc., we were, we were, tied up with the sewer works, I went to, I did a tour of America and so forth, with the, with the, tying up with business people as, as I say I became a director of eight or nine companies and in the meantime -
MC: So, where did the flying come in?
KG: Oh, oh, then, but I started, I stayed in [unclear] in motor sport, car rallying, and so forth, navigating and so forth, I was in things like, all the Daily Express rallies. I was driving and co-driving and navigating on those etc. it was a pretty busy sort of existence er, I forget, one forgets about and then I, heard about flying and I thought oh I’ll try this, and started with the local Lincoln flying club, and went on and on and on ultimately flying, involved with more exotic sort of flying, and through twin engines, and night flying and airways and all sorts of things, and, er, in business I was using it of course as well because it was convenient sometimes to fly here, there and everywhere and I was a qualified, qualified pilot in night airways etc. and radio etc. etc. etc., oh well, and so it went on
MC: Er, do you, do you keep in touch with many of your colleagues from the RAF days?
KG: Er, I’m afraid there aren’t many of us left [laughs]. I’ve gone to the squadron association, and that’s, I’ve regarded that as my main link and people who I used to know have passed away or gone on, I, don’t know, these links decay and fall but Skellingthorpes the only one really that is, is my active one
MC: Well, thank you very much Kenneth
KG: Not very natural, but, er, I’m sorry, I’m, iffing and butting, but
MC: No
KG: Er, one forgets and time goes on you see, and then I retired in my sixties, but, er, I, I, then, I was the founder, and Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, new Chamber of Commerce, North Lincolnshire and so forth, North Lindsey as we call it, erm, etc., it, it just happens, and suddenly you realise, you’re eighty not sixty, [laughs]
MC: And how old are you now?
KG: Ninety-three
MC: But, it’s been lovely talking to you Kenneth
KG: Anyway, I’m sorry I’m, I’ve, been -
MC: No, it’s
KG: Wandering and I can’t remember, and anyway, you’ve helped to remind me of -
MC: Thank you
KG: And names and -
MC: Tell me about this trip up to er, Yorkshire then, what, what -
KG: What was the name of the airfield inland from -
Other: From where?
KG: From Bridlington
Other: From Bridlington, it would be Driffield
KG: Driffield
MC: Yes, so you finished
KG: I had this aircraft, 61 Squadron aircraft, and landed at Driffield, been shot up, MU crowd had rebuilt it there, we went up to spent 2 or 3 days sorting it out, weather went clampers, so we were stuck with no gear, no nothing [laughs] I know we went down to, Bridlington, and, and, shall I say extracted some free money out of the penny in the slot machines, by devious means [laughs] oh dear, anyway, then the weather improved, and that’s when we separated, everybody went off but I was left with the aircraft and the incoming CO from 61 Squadron, and the signals leader, so it was a three man crew for a Lancaster [laughs]
MC: You flew as flight engineer, did you?
KG: I flew as flight engineer, I was, I was the crew [emphasis] flight engineer, everything [laughs] you don’t argue with a CO, I mean, I had probably been in as many Lancasters as him, running up and one thing and another, but it was all part of fun and games, that would be ‘44, can’t remember when, it was before, oh, before I went to Bottesford, so it would be ‘44, summer, yeah, [laughs] you forget these things, I do.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Kenneth Shelton Green
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Mike Connock
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-07-13
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Sound
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AGreenKS150713
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Pending review
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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eng
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Royal Air Force
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00:41:21 audio recording
Description
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Kenneth Green was born on the 17th January 1922 at Pleasley, near Mansfield and worked with the Carlton Auxillary Fire Service before joining the Royal Air Force at the age of 20.
He trained as an engineer after he was unable to fly due to eye problems, and worked on a variety of engines, including the Bristol Hercules, Packard Merlin and the Rolls Royce Merlin engines.
He tells of his time on base, the explosion that took the life of his friend, and the work he completed on the Avro Lancasters and worked on the Mark 1, 2 and 3’s.
Kenneth joined 61 Squadron, and served at Skellingthorpe and Bottesford, before working with the Royal Navy where he worked on single engine aircraft.
Contributor
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Vivienne Tincombe
61 Squadron
bombing up
fitter engine
ground crew
Lancaster
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 2
Lancaster Mk 3
military living conditions
Nissen hut
RAF Bottesford
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF St Athan
RAF Syerston
service vehicle
tractor
V-2
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/603/8872/PMarchantT1501.1.jpg
7633a576a05d3d628f8ab4f5aab3c311
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/603/8872/AMarchantT150715.2.mp3
a088003f0ff9542450c26653477e41c9
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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Marchant, Thomas
Thomas Chas Marchant
T C Marchant
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Marchant
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Thomas Marchant (1604589 Royal Air Force). He flew operations in Transport Command and Bomber Command as a flight engineer with 101, 7, and 582 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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My name is Tom Marchant I was a Flight Engineer on Transport Command as well as Bomber Command. (slight pause) You may wonder why and how I got to be a Flight Engineer. I was only a young lad eighteen or nineteen , nineteen when I was actually operating, eighteen when I actually joined up. I couldn’t wait to get to fly. Now if I go back, I saw the Zeppelins fly over and I saw other aircraft flying around and I always wanted to be up there. I knew that as a working class lad from a working class family I could never afford to fly. I used to make my own aircraft, model aircraft, that flew from plans and with balsa wood and tissue paper and I used to fly my own aircraft and used to wish I could go up with them. I am just dying to fly, I wanted to fly. So actually when the war came along I was, em, I was er, what? fifteen or sixteen when it started and I couldn’t wait till my eighteenth birthday so I could volunteer for the RAF.
I hadn’t much education, just a basic education and I left school at fourteen without any qualifications, because I used to play about and play Jack the Lad and all the rest of it. So I thought I wouldn’t have a chance to get in the RAF but I thought I would have a go. I went, I was about seventeen and a half. I went and thought I could get away with saying I was eighteen. They started by asking me questions , how many degrees in a circle and things like that and of course I didn’t even know how many degrees there were in a circle. So I thought I had to do something about it. Suddenly I woke up, I went and got books from the library, I bought books, which you could do in these days for aircrew instruction and I got my head in these books and really started to educate myself and by the time I went, em, when I was just gone eighteen I volunteered again. I knew a lot more than when I first went and to my utter joy I was actually accepted to be aircrew. You can’t believe, to me it was almost like saying you can go to heaven and I just couldn’t believe it. Anyway em, I was eventually called up after about three to four months and em, (pause) I was sent to em, er, a camp under canvass, somewhere outside Warrington. From there we went to er, Blackpool. We went into digs at Blackpool which of course there were plenty going on in these days no em, holidaymakers, so that was the place and I went to Squires Gate airfield where I was trained, say training, er.
I ought to go back really because I did not have any formal education it was a problem getting a job. My parents weren’t very, they weren’t very helpful to me. I had a stepmother because my real mother died of consumption as it was called in these days, eighteen months after I was born. So I had a stepmother who never had any other children so I was a loner in effect, which in a way was a good thing because, em, I learnt to stand on my own feet so that helped in one way. When I went into the RAF I was quite happy to be amongst em, other lads which I didn’t have very much in my younger days em.
Any way well get back to, we went to Squires Gate and I was enlisted first was accepted as a em, Wireless Operator Gunner em, but before I was actually called up and joined the RAF I was re delegated to be a Flight Engineer because em, the four engined aircraft, bombers, were taking two Pilots and they were loosing two Pilots in one go, so they introduced the idea of Flight Engineer and I just had a basic training at Squires Gate airfield. While I was there I had to be on guard duties and I was out on the airfield on guard duty em, with a rifle and all the rest of it and I saw these ATC kids getting in an a a Anson aircraft and being flown off. So I said to the Sergeant who was on charge of us when I came off duty “can I get in there and get a flight, I have never been up in an aeroplane and I am supposed to be a trainee aircrew?” and he said “yeah you go over and join them.” So I did and I had my first er, en, flight in an Anson which are normally used for training Wireless Operators and people like that. Anyway we took off from Squires Gate and we flew round Preston Cathedral, I’ll never forget it and it was the first, I was on cloud nine. Anyway so I had more impetus in my er, my studies and I eventually, after I did my square bashing at Blackpool and er, em, the introduction to well what you call engineering. I think we filed a few bits of metal and whatnot and were shown bits of engines.
Anyway I went to St Athan where all Flight Engineers went to I understand. I er, em we learnt a bit more there I suppose and then I was passed out as a Flight Engineer.I couldn’t believe it, it was incredible really from being a hall boy in private service, scrubbing floors and then, then eventually footman in private service serving meals to people I’m suddenly in the RAF, I’m flying. I can’t put over, I can’t even think how it affected me, I just couldn’t believe it. I didn’t care if I was going to get shot at. I was only nineteen and em, I just couldn’t wait em, and eventually I passed all the Flight Engineer training and I was posted to an operational squadron. Oh no, sorry, go back. Was posted to an OTU Operational Training Unit at Dishforth where we flew in Halifaxes at first and then we flew in Lancasters, em. I think I’m missing something else out here. Of course we had to join up with a crew who had been flying Wellingtons,er, which is just a five crew aircraft and,er, this crew before they could go onto four engine aircraft had to pick up their,er, mid upper gunner and Flight Engineer and I don’t know how it was sorted out. We all got together and we got together and formed our crew and I had,em, I had an Australian pilot,(slight pause) no we had a Canadian navigator later on. So we had an Australian pilot and all the rest of us were British, English er, em, then we went onto Dishforth where we did our training on Halifaxes and then Lancasters. I just fell in love with the Lancaster, I was loving every minute of it, absolutely loving it. We went on cross country and I, it, I can’t describe. I’ve always loved flying, always will do eh, to get into the air and got through the clouds and then at night time you go above the clouds and you see the brilliant stars. . I never forget the stars that are in sky, you never see them now. Although he was an Australian he wasn’t your archetypical Australian, he was a sober sort of lad he didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke, all the rest of us did em, but that was his strength in a way, he was very level headed and he was very and he was strong as an ox. We was very lucky. I think it helped a lot, you have got to have a lot of luck but you have to have a certain amount of skill and he as we started flying with him, we got to know him and put our trust in him and he was a very good pilot.
Anyway comes our first op, all slightly nervous and apprehensive. I remember it well it was to the Happy Valley as they called the Ruhr in those days, far from happy for some and em Gelsenkirchen we went to, industrial town in the heart of the Ruhr. We did get shot up a bit, we got a little bit of flack holes and em, er, one of the pipe lines got broken but it was nothing much, no problems, all the engines working properly and we got back ok. That was a start of a series of raids on Germany, they were all on Germany I didn’t get sent abroad at all. So we went on, from 101 squadron this time from Ludford Magna we used to call it Mudford Magna because it was carved out of the Lincolnshire Wolds and made into an aerodrome not long before we got there and it was mud. I always remember the hut we were given, we were given hut number something or other and when we got there, there was a big painting of a chop, chopper there and we all knew what chop meant well you can imagine that did not inspire us very much. Anyway it turned out not to be true for us anyway. We quickly learned that a few people had been in there and not come back again, it all helped to make you cheerful when you went on you first op I suppose. Em, we survived the first op which was Gelsenkirchen that I have said and we went on. The next really impressive one was Hamburg, now Hamburg was the one where there was a fire storm. The first fire storm that was created and that was done I think on the first raid. There were three raids on Hamburg and we went on all of them and I always remember the one because the met said there was a front and it would clear Hamburg before we got there but we all knew what met was in those days they did not have satellites in the sky em, it was just by guess and by God to a certain extent. Anyway when we were approaching Hamburg on the second night er, we couldn’t get above the clouds and er, we could see sheet lightning and all sorts of lightning, anyway Bob decided to press on er, and we started getting lightning flashes right across from one engine to another, big flashes it was absolutely frightening, much more frightening than flack, em, electric lights going all around the canopy. It really was frightening and we still pressed on but we and we got into this culo, cumulous nimbus we started getting thrown all over the place.Bob decided to jettison the bombs and turn for home, but when he opened the bomb doors and we dropped we were thrown sideways and the bombs dented up the bomb bay doors and so we got quite a bit of draft in the aircraft going back. Anyway we survived and we got back home again (slight laugh) and that was another experience with something different that the sky can throw at you, probably more frightening than flak actually.
Eh, anyway the next one, the next sort of notable one we went to was Peenemunde, which was er, its up on the Baltic, on the side of the Baltic where the Germans were developing a rocket, eh, rockets which were eventually going to hit us later on. As opposed to the, eh, and the V1s which were the buzz bombs that went brrrrrrrr, you could hear them coming, I was in London when they first started using them. Anyway they were developing rockets there which were going to be the first rockets that anyone had used er, in warfare and this Peenemunde place was the place where they were er, developing them. We didn’t know this, we, it was highly top secret we weren’t told that this was a rocket place, we were told that it, that they were developing new types of radar which could home onto us. A story which eh, we all swallowed but it made us very determined to get of this place em, because it would make it easier for them to shoot us down, that was the sort of story we were given. We were attacking it in moonlight, it was the first trip we’d been in moonlight, we didn’t normally fly in moonlight and em, er , we were going to bomb it around six or seven thousand feet which was a long way lower than we normally bomb, from normally twenty one thousand feet and em, a full moon but the Germans didn’t really know that we knew about this place I don’t think and it wasn’t very heavily defended, there was just one or two searchlights. Er, I did a picture of this which shows one searchlight which is pretty well accurate. Anyway that was a reasonable success, it wasn’t as big a success as they thought, it did get rid of a few people and and it did slow up their production of these weapons for about five or six months. They eventually moved it all to a place in Germany, underground. Er, em, anyway then we started to what has been called the Battle of Brit, Berlin and we went to Berlin and er Nuremberg. I’m just going to read you from my Log quickly. We went to Berlin, Berlin, Manheim, Munich, Hanover, Munich again and then, and then after that we volunteered to go onto Pathfinders because I hadn’t really mentioned it, but our Navigator at that time wasn’t really up to the job. He took us back over London once from one of the raids and we got, we saw balloons going past us. The Mid Upper Gunner said “Hi skip I have just seen a big balloon” and we were amongst the London barrage balloons and ah, anyway I just remembered, that was frightening that was, anyway, full boost, full throttle ‘cause we were starting to come down for base. Anyway we thought if we volunteered for Pathfinders the Navigator wouldn’t be up to it and we were right. We landed up with a Cambridge educated whizz kid, little, we used to call him Brem. He was a little fellow but he was a fantastic navigator and I think that is another reason that we perhaps survived when we did. So we were lucky to have this navigator and eventually we went to Berlin, we actually went there fifteen times but we set off times but em, on two occasions we had engine problems or we had some sort of problem which made it not really feasible to carry on, so, so.
When we joined Pathfinders of course we had to do extra navigation, we had to do a lot of cross countries at night time and I used to love these cross countries jomits because we could see all the stars and on odd occasions we would see the Northern Lights. Oh, and going back when we went to Peenemunde we went right up north and we could see the lights of Sweden, Stockholm or is it Oslo, my geography. Anyway we could see the lights in Swindon(think he meant Sweden), I had forgotten that. Talking about the Northern Lights of course they are fantastic thing em, so I was still enjoying my flying. I was scared wittless actually over the Target but the target areas themselves were fascinating, there’s flares, there’s searchlights there’s puffs of black smoke all over the sky from flak, it’s, I’ve done paintings of, of raids but you can’t capture it, you really can’t capture it. The sight is incredible and em, er as far as firework shows they leave me cold, I’ve seen the biggest firework show on earth and I don’t know what else I have to say. You see, other than the fact that being aircrew I didn’t have to work on aircraft. The ground crew had a horrible job they had to patch up the aircraft when they came back and when they were at the, on the eh (pause) the perim, eh “what’s off the perimeter?” (someone suggests dispersal) dispersal, they had to work on dispersal points in all weathers. Freezing cold in the winter and we were tucked up in bed then. I mean providing you didn’t get shot down or you didn’t get injured and you came home safely, it was a dawdle. You just em, got scared to death on the op but when you were nineteen, (laugh) “that was a long time ago” it’s all an adventure er, em, it’s exciting in a way. It’s hard to describe unless you’ve been em, but can you imagine as a nineteen year old lad who has had a very boring life before and dying for something different, that I got it in mega bucks and it was a great. Em, and I am sorry to say this, to me, ok there were things that you tend to overlook. The odd nasty things that happen and discomfort in nissen huts and er, that sort of thing but to me I, I, just loved it. I’m sorry but that is the way I say it, I can understand how lots of other aircrew didn’t and they had a terrible time and when I see and read about other peoples’ experiences er, I had a walk in the park really in comparison.
Anyway on the last trip we had was what we thought was going to be a dawdle, which was marshalling yards just outside Paris. This was on the day, the night, the night, of D day and we were bombing marshalling yards and lots of other people were bombing gun emplacements on the south, the north French coast and that sort of thing, but our job was to blow up this marshalling yard just outside Paris called Juvisy . We were Master em, going to be acting Master Bomber which meant we did Master Bomber em er, a few times once you got well into Pathfinder. Being a Master Bomber you direct the bombing and you stay over the target till it all, till it’s all over and telling people not to bomb certain TI’s or certain markers. There wasn’t much doubt about this, it was well lit up and we again. It was one of those low level attacks I think we went in at six or eight thousand feet and I can remember seeing em,er, trucks going up in the air and whatnot and I did feel for any French railway workers down there which I’m sure there were, but that’s war. Anyway we thought that’s great we’re on our way home and we just about left the target when suddenly this ME110 appeared right up beside us, incredible, and before the Mid Upper Gunner could peel round on him he just peeled of. Of course after that we were waiting for the coup de gras. We thought and Bob really started throwing it about like the Spitfire he always wanted to fly. He was a real beefy bloke and he started throwing it about and em, we started doing this for about twenty minutes or so and we thought we hadn’t seen him again and we settled down again and he was just doing a bit of a weave and suddenly, pow! We got hit, feel everything juddering and em, we suddenly went into a dive. He’d hit the, he’d hit the elevators, the Rear Gunner, very lucky chap, he survived. He said “all the elevators have been hit” well we didn’t have to be told that(slight laugh)we felt that. The plane went into a bloody dive and I thought “bloody hell we’ve had it now.” Anyway old Bob being a beefy bloke he really held it back and we tried em, what did we try. Anyway we used the trimmer but it didn’t make any difference em, er, I was helping him pull it back and I remember I had my tool, all Flight Engineers had a tool bag with them, don’t know what they were supposed to do with them half the time. We weren’t going to crawl out onto the engine and start doing things. Anyway eh, I got a piece of thin nylon rope in my tool bag, I don’t know how it be or was there. I don’t know why I should carry this but I had it and we tied er, we tied, or tied a piece of it round one of the circles in the formers of the aircraft. There a lots of holes of course and we put it in there and put it round the yolk, round the upright part of the control column and that gave us quite a good purchase. Then just as we sorted that out we noticed the outboard starboard engine had started to smoke and flames started to come out of it so we eh, feathered that, pressed the fire extinguisher and fortunately the fire extinguisher worked, which it apparently didn’t on Paul that Just Jane from East Kirby. Anyway our fire extinguisher worked so everything was, but of course when all this was going on we were expecting to get the coup de grass, we though he would be back to finish us of. Somehow or other our luck as a crew held and we got back to Manston which is right on the edge of the Kent coast. Em and the landing of course, we weren’t sure if the wheels would go down em but em, he tried the flaps and the flaps worked and he tried then just before, he said “we could do a belly landing if necessary” with the wheels up and everything. We tried the undercarriage and incredibly the undercarriage worked, then the other tricky bit was the pressure required to flare out and hold it on a proper approach er angle and flare out. It wasn’t one of Bobs best landings but it was, you walked, they say if you walk away from a landing that it, your lucky if you walk away from a landing that’s a good landing, and it was. After that we should have done another couple of trips to make up for the two that were aborted but they stood us down and we all went our different ways.
I eventually went up to Lossiemouth and I em er I did instruction on dinghy drill which fortunately I never had to do myself but I had to learn how to do dinghy, I had to learn dinghy drill and then I showed it to operational people, OTU people who were going to have to go on ops. Well we never had that when I went to OTU. But em.and that was at Lossiemouth swimming pool, I always remember that, I enjoyed that. I got to fly, I still wanted to fly they had Wellingtons up there I think and they had other aircraft and I used to get flights er, when they were doing test flights, on any aircraft I would go up in it, I still loved flying, always have done and em er. After that I had to revert to what I was supposed to be which was an Engineer, but all they gave me was changing all the plugs on a Napier Sabre which was about forty eight plugs and that kept you busy for a bit. They didn’t let me loose on anything that was em very important. Em but and I always wanted to and I kept applying to go flying again and I got a job on transport, I got posted to Transport Command and it was a period when we thought we might have to, oh no sorry, the Far Eastern war was still going on. The Japanese war the er the Yanks hadn’t er yet bombed with the Atom Bomb and the Japs was still fighting and we was going to have to send Big Wigs out to the Far East and they were going to be flown over by a civilised version of the Lancaster, called the Lancastrian and for that you had to learn how to load certain loads. It was like civil aircraft, you had to load the aircraft properly with certain loads and whatnot, so we had to do a course on that. Then we eventually flew a Lancastrian and only a month or so after that after we got into this the Japanese war just stopped. The er the Yanks dropped there second Atom Bomb and they surrendered and so there was no more use for these Lancastrians to go out to the Far East.
So then I got, then was trouble flaring, possible trouble with Russia because they had overtaken Berlin and all the rest of it and everybody knows about the Berlin Airlift which I wasn’t on. I would like to have been on that. I was em then put onto Halifaxes and we were towing we were towing gliders and dropping parachutists over the Salisbury Plain we also had to drop ten pound guns and a jeep and they were all strapped under this Halifax, they took the bomb doors off and they strapped these thing on, and you had to drop them on the Plain. Those were the dodgiest piece of flying I think I ever did I think I would liked to have gone back on ops actually. Because they struggled off, off I think it was ridiculous really, they struggled off the end of the runway and if you had anything like a cross wind with all that underneath you sticking out. I can remember being really frightened on take off with that stuff but I must have been a very lucky bloke. I had another good skipper he was a Scot er. Anyway that was Transport Command, you are only interested in Bomber Command aren’t you?
Question by interviewer. “So when you were on Pathfinders?”
Yes of course before we were on Pathfinders, before we actually operated as a Pathfinder we had to do a lot more cross countries and night time cross countries which I used to like. It’s so lovely looking at that starry sky and em everything and very often it was semi moonlight because we did not operated on moonlight towards the end of the war. We did not operate on moonlight because you would get shot down so easily which we demonstrated when we went to Paris but em (pause)oh I get er, and when were on those cross countries that was when I used to get into the driving seat, the skip he’d put it in, you could put the Lanc into automatic you know it could fly itself but of course that is not quite the thing to do when you are operational. He’d put it in automatic I’d get he’d swap seats and I would fly it and I would turn, I knew how to control and aircraft anyway because I was so keen when I was a lad I learnt all about airplanes and em at first the crew said “hey you are not letting him in the seat are you?” (laugh). I took to it quite well and the Navigator would give a course to turn onto and I would turn onto the course and everybody was happy. I was happy, I was happy as Larry because I was flying the airplane, you know, hands on. Not many people have had hands on, on a Lancaster so it has always been one of my things.
From that when I came out I wanted to carry on flying but I had got married and em we were paying a mortgage on a house and you can’t afford to fly. I got a job, not a very not a well paid job, I had a job with Lucas actually in the press shop, not in the press shop actually, doing, getting materials up for them and everything. Then I went in the gas board, kids came along, eventually grew up and once I got, I started getting promotions and a bit more money I still got this feeling I wanted to fly and I wanted to fly the aircraft myself. The next thing the cheapest way of doing that is join a gliding club and er, I joined a gliding club near Grantham at er, Saltby where Flying Fortresses had taken off if you remember, didn’t they, from Saltby and there was a gliding club there which I knew from a friend. I went there and I started gliding. In no time at all I was sent off solo. I done quite a bit of gliding I got the Silver C which is staying up for five hours and er doing fifty K , it was all the fives. It was making a height of five thousand feet and fifty kilometres and five hours up and fifty kilometres and making five thousand feet, that’s right. I went beyond that but got my Silver C in gliding but there are days when you can’t fly anyway, you can be launched and you can take a launch up to fifteen hundred two thousand feet but if there are no thermal or anything at Salby anyway you just came down again. Anyway some friends of mine said “why don’t we get a motor glider?” he heard about a motor glider that was going, a Faulke motor glider he said “you can fly anytime then” and they do thermal as well. I have stayed up for three or four hours in a Faulke you know. We em went to so, and from there this was over a period of a few years, five six years and em you had to pass a test to fly the motor glider which was half way on to getting your private pilots license, but to do that you have got to have a proper single engined aircraft like a 150, Cessna 150 and em, of course that costs, that costs money. Then I was flogging my pictures and whatnot and got a better job. I got a company car that was another thing, I got a job with a company car in advertising driving all over the place and em, I got a company car and they were very easy about, they paid for all the petrol whither it was for me or not. I mean you would not get a job like that these days. (laugh) I was very lucky and from, from then you may not know Burnaston it’s where they make the Toyotas now and that’s just outside of Derby on the A38. That was an aerodrome during the war. They had all sorts there, it was a primary trainer, it’s only a grass strip, it’s a good sized grass strip and they eventually flew em what it’s names off there, didn’t they Pete? “Argonauts” yeah and Dakotas and things and it was sort of Derby, it turned into Derby Airport of course. Then it closed down for a while and Jack, what’s his name, Jones he opened it up, didn’t he? I helped, I just retired then when they started opening up Burnaston as an aerodrome again and I went and helped mark out the runways with a concrete,no it was a white, white chippings to line the runway to mark out the runway to make it commercially acceptable again for flying. They got em (pause) “terrible loose my words.” Em Cessna 150s which are a two seater private aircraft which are a very popular aircraft who want fairly cheap flying. Of course to fly one of those, to hire one out and fly it you have got to have a proper pilots license. That is the first step on flying really a PPL as it called and em er, I started flying these Cessna’s but I couldn’t afford to fly them very much as it was quite expensive to hire out an aircraft and I had got my share in this motor glider anyway. I wanted to add to my flying experience in effect I would like to have gone and done instrument flying so you could fly at night but it all costs money and time. When you are a family man you have to consider your wife and what not so. You are restrict, restricted to a certain extent. I did what I wanted to do to a, you know and I have been very lucky really, very lucky.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Thomas Marchant
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Mick Jeffery
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-07-15
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Sound
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AMarchantT150715
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Pending review
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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00:51:12 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Tom Marchant had always wanted to fly and at eighteen joined the RAF as a Wireless Operator Air Gunner but was remustered as Flight Engineer after his initial postings to Warrington and Squires Gate Airfield, Blackpool. He describes his very first flight in an Anson aircraft from Blackpool. His next posting was to St Athan where he passed out as a Flight Engineer and was posted to an Operational Training Unit at Dishforth in Yorkshire where he flew in Halifax and Lancaster aircraft and met the crew he would fly with. On completion of the OTU he and his crew were posted to 101 Squadron based at RAF Ludford Magna where they completed a number of bombing operations over Germany. The crew successfully volunteered for Pathfinder duties and had to complete further training in navigation and cross country flying. On these training sorties he actually flew a Lancaster.
On completion of operations Tom went onto instruct dinghy drill at RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland and from there went on to join Transport Command flying Halifax aircraft. After the war he left the RAF but continued to fly gliders and motor gliders from Salby (ex USAF bomber station) near Grantham. He eventually went on to gain his Private Pilots License.
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Hugh Donnelly
Language
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
101 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
bombing
bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943)
Bombing of Peenemünde (17/18 August 1943)
fear
flight engineer
ground crew
Halifax
Lancaster
Lancastrian
Master Bomber
Me 110
military living conditions
military service conditions
Operational Training Unit
Pathfinders
RAF Dishforth
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF St Athan
training
V-2
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/606/8875/PMayBJ1601.2.jpg
67eb022aee54727f792c196613e31254
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/606/8875/AMayBJ161123.1.mp3
bca779d86d0b95dbcb09fc34a07901c7
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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May, Ben John
B J May
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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May, BJ
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with Ben May (1925 -2018, 1894955 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a flight engineer with 420 Squadron. Also includes a short memoir and a photograph.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Ben May and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CJ: This is Chris Johnson, and I am interviewing Ben May today for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. We’re at Ben’s home near Canterbury and it is Wednesday the 23rd of November 2016. Thank you very much Ben for agreeing to talk to me today. So, we’ll move onto the first er question Ben if we may. Perhaps you could tell us where and when you were born, please, and what your family background is?
BM: Well, it’s my birthday today, and I’m ninety-one today. So, I was born in 1925 at Birchington in Kent. Now the family lived in East Kent, because my father worked for the local gas company, and er, as I grew up I tended to go that way and my first job was in the forge in the gas works, blowing the bellows, for fifteen bob a week. [laughs] I sort of grew up in the gas works atmosphere and I worked there until I was called up. I was a fitter’s mate there and we did all sorts of things. All sorts of maintenance, on all the equipment in the gas works, which is not terribly interesting but, er, very dusty and dirty. However, I was called up in, er, when was it. [turning over papers] Can you stop for a minute?
CJ: So Ben you were, we got as far as you telling me when it was you were called up. What happened then?
BM: I was a member of the ATC for many years.
CJ: So you were called up when was it?
BM: I was called up in 1944 as a flight engineer under training. I volunteered as a flight engineer and er, the first posting was to Locking, in Cornwall. Sorry Locking in Somerset after ITW in Cornwall. That was very interesting, standing on the cliffs doing signalling [laugh] in the wind. And then my next posting was to St Athan, number 4 School of Technical Training, where I started on the one-year long flight engineer course. Um. At the end of that I passed out on my nineteenth birthday and, er, I can’t read that [?] I’ll do it from, and, er, went down to— I am sorry I got stuck.
CJ: So Ben you were telling me about your training period?
BM: Yes after a couple of years in the ATC in Margate I found myself, I had volunteered for aircrew by then of course. All aircrew were volunteers and, er, I was called up in 1944 and went up to the Recruiting Office in Chatham. [laugh] Where they gave you a cup of tea and a biscuit and said ‘Well done, we’ll call you when we’re ready.’ So they called me up in 1944 and I was sent down to Locking in – down to Cornwall, for initial training, and then onto Locking in Somerset for the first part of the course, and then eventually onto St Athan in South Wales for the 4 Flight Engineer Course, which lasted about a year. There we were taught not only the fundamentals of flying, but also about engines and all the other equipment. You would be amazed the amount of different pieces equipment that are on a bomber. Learned about compressors and filters, and all sorts of bits of gear you wouldn’t even think about. One little joke I play on people. I ask them if they’ve ever heard of changing gear in an aeroplane, and they laugh at you, they say ‘You can’t change gear in an aeroplane.’ But the fact is you can, because there is the two-speed gearbox on the, on the supercharger of the Hercules engine which we flew with, and as you climb the air pressure outside drops away and then you have to change gear on the supercharger. So it always raises a smile when you say you’re changing gear on an aeroplane. Anyway, we learned all about the different systems. Can I stop a minute and start again?
CJ: So Ben you were posted to St Athan for more training. Would you like to tell us what happened from then on?
BJ: That was No. 4 School of Technical Training. It’s a one–year course for flight engineers, and you go through just about every part of the aero – by then you were what they called type cast, type trained. You were selected for one of the four aircraft. There was the Halifax, the Lancaster, the Stirling and the Sunderland which we were being trained for. So you were selected for one of those and in my case it was the Halifax. So, everything on the Halifax was of interest to you and we went on this one–year course, which took just about every part of the Halifax aeroplane and explained it to you. Not only explained it to you, drilled it into you, you had to learn every part of it. What every bit was for and how to maintain them and so on when you were away from base and what to do, you know. There was an awful lot to learn and, er, that took about a whole year to learn that, and, er, and, er, after which I was posted away to a squadron which was Number 420 Squadron which was one of the Royal Canadian Air Force squadrons. It would come over here, they’d brought over a lot of aircrews which were, which were short of a flight engineer, because the Canadians didn’t train any flight engineers, and so as, when the crews came through they selected some of us. They literally dumped us in it, they said, about twelve of us and this bunch of Canadians came along and started crewing up with somebody you know. Very embarrassing that was sitting around waiting for somebody to pick you. But this tall guy came along, asked for me. He’d been reading the notes I think, [laughs] the examination notes and saw something he liked. And so he came and asked for me. I said ‘Well I don’t know any of you, it’s all the same to me so I might as well join your crew.’ And I’m glad I did because they were marvellous, absolutely wonderful guys. And so, we were crewed up and went to further training then. Eh, [pause] I’m sorry I’m getting lost. When we got our crew we embarked on a load of long flights, long training flights. Like a flight from Yorkshire up to Edinburgh and then back down to Cornwall then back home again. So we got some really good experience on long flights, which entail an awful lot of different things to a short flight, where you have to manage the fuel because on the Halifax there were fourteen fuel tanks, and fuel had to be used in a certain order and then some overload tanks pumped from one tank into another and so as to make it go as far as possible. So it was, it was a busy, flight engineer was a busy job, you were always on the go doing something. You had to read all your instruments every twenty minutes, record them or every half an hour. All the oil pressures and the fuel pressures and the cylinder head temperatures and so on, keep a good eye out on your engines. And er, you know, we gelled together as a crew, and we became very good friends. In fact they’ve all been to my house here, all my Canadian friends and I’ve been to all their houses in Canada. So we were really good friends and I suppose that helped us get through the war really. Anyway we were, after a bit more training we were posted to a squadron which was the same as the Canadian squadron, and we went on operations from there. Our first operation was a little town in the Ruhr. We got through that alright and we felt a lot better then, after the first one. But we carried on flying to the end of the war, managed to get – must have been eleven or twelve flights in over Germany, and, er, you know, well we got, looked forward to life out of the flying. I’m sorry I’m not doing very well. [Appears to be a little upset]
CJ: It’s alright.
BM: Life on a squadron is quite different from anything else in the service because there’s a different atmosphere about it. And eh you all know that you’re doing a dangerous job and you might not be here tomorrow was the general feeling, but eh, we settled in quite well, because the Canadians were very hospitable people. They never left me behind when they went out for a drink at night, I was always there with them and they were good mates. We em, [pause] we, we spent a lot of time [pause] talking about, about home. Because home for them was Canada, it was quite different from anything else I’ve seen at that time and er. [pause] And I will tell you something about a typical day on the squadron, eh? Life on the squadron was ruled by daily routine orders and you had to go down to the notice board every day and have a look because woe betide you if you missed something. If ops were on there was an almost palpable atmosphere around the Station because everybody knew that we would be flying that night, so we’d go to the briefing and er, depending whether it was a day or night operation could be late in the day or at mid-day sometimes, and you’d go back to the hut and have a, write your last letters home. [laugh] Write a letter home to your mother always and er, and then you go up to the, to the mess and have a flying breakfast. We were very privileged actually aircrew, whenever we were flying or on an operation we got egg and bacon for breakfast. That was unheard of during the war; we were very, very lucky. [laugh] But er, I suppose we earned it. So you’d go to, you’d go to the mess and have your break, have your flying breakfast, and then you’d go and wait in your huts until we knew what briefing time was and er, then you’d all go into the hut. In the briefing hut there was a very distinct atmosphere about, because the CO would, or the intelligence officer, would pull back the curtains on the target over the, on the stage. There was a pink ribbon stretching from your flight all, following your flight plan it would show you where the target was. And er it was a bit er, you know but you knew it was serious so you got on with it. But we, we flew operationally until just before the end of the war. One particular flight was notable because there was a –, it was a long, long flight to the island of Heligoland which is off the German coast, and, er, [pause] while we were flying over the sea there was a collision between –. Well we don’t know what happened really. Some people say that this particular Halifax pulled the jettison lever, dropped all his bombs together and they – some of them banged together and it went, the bombs went off underneath his aeroplane, but I’m not quite sure that’s true. However the aeroplane blew up in front of us and we flew through the pieces, but we, we only got one crack in the Perspex so it wasn’t too bad. And, er, [pause] Another thing was that we noticed when we were coming back one day early in the morning. We watched a V2 rocket being fired from somewhere in Belgium. So we weren’t the only ones in danger because, that, that rocket landed in England somewhere. Killed a lot of people I imagine. Anyway, the um, the operations were pretty straightforward, because you’d been trained how to use the, all the equipment on the aeroplane. Lots, lots of different systems, lots of things to look at. My job of course was to monitor the fuel system because the Halifax had fourteen fuel tanks, and er some had to be used in a certain order so that they balanced and then the overload tanks had to be pumped into the normal tanks and what with that and doing all the other things. Like the other bits of equipment. Dropping flares and, and all sorts of little jobs that you wouldn’t even think about the flight engineer’s job was quite busy, um, [pause].
CJ: I think you mentioned on the Heligoland raid you saw a Lancaster dropping a Tall Boy bomb?
BM: Oh yeah, yeah I did, yeah, one thing, one notable flight was when we were going in over , over em ‒ . Now let me think where it was. We were going in over one target and there was a Lancaster, a Pathfinder Lancaster, Number 19 Group I imagine. Came, flew alongside us but below us about, about a thousand feet below us. He was carrying one of the first Tall Boy bombs, one of the very big bombs. A twelve thousand pounder I think, wasn’t it? Yeah it was a twelve thousand pounder and we watched, we watched that bomb go, we watched that bomb go down. It was absolutely amazing, it went right smack in between the runway. It was on the –, the raid was on the airfield in Helgoland and the bomb dropped right on the, the er, intersection of the two runways. There wasn’t much runway left when that, after that had gone off. That was quite spectacular. And er, we had to [pause/ a little confused] hold on. So one way and another we, we totalled up a, a total of eleven operations over Germany while the war was still on, because I mean I was only thirteen when the war started so I’m surprised I got into it at all. [laugh] Anyway the war finished and the flying finished and I was made, made redundant and so had to retrain, and, and er, the, the trade, I chose was, was um, [pause] oh God – . I retrained as a, as a fitter marine on the rescue boats. So it was, it was much the same job as the flight engineer’s looking after the fuel and all the equipment but on a rescue boat. So, but we were supposed to be going out to, to join the air sea rescue people but the war finished before we could go out, before we could get there. So, anyway I carried on in the Air Force until I was demobbed in 19 – , when was I demobbed? 1944 was it,
CJ: ‘47 was it, you said?
BM: hang on a mo. [Looking through papers] Yeah I remustered and retrained as fitter marine, with the intention of joining the Air Sea Rescue Services in the Pacific with the expected invasion of Japan, but that didn’t come off, because the atom bomb put an end to that, and so I finished my service in 1947 on marine craft. I, I retrained as a fitter marine and they sent me out to Singapore so I had a year in Singapore which was quite interesting. And er, so I came back home and got my demob suit [laugh] and er, re-joined civilian life. Which wasn’t easy because I hadn’t got a job and er, oh dear – .Anyway [pause], I’d always been interested in photography so, after the war, I got a job with one of those companies on the seafront taking walking pictures and er, I did, I did a year of that. Just kept the, kept the rent coming in and er, found it very interesting actually, especially when you get down on the beach chasing all the girls, you know it’s quite good fun and, anyway I packed that up. I got interested in photography and because the company I worked for said ‘what else can you do?’ So I said I’m, I’m quite handy with a tool kit, so they put me in the workshop repairing cameras of all things. But these cameras weren’t, weren’t like, like your little snapshot cameras. They were great big postcard size, negative reflex cameras, and they were quite complicated and er, the chap in the workshop there was very clever. He got me, got me making spindles on the lathe. I used to make the little roller spindles for him on the lathe and er, that was quite interesting. But then the workshop was next door to the commercial department where they did what we call proper photography. Real commercial photography, not the beach stuff, and I used to go into there and I got interested in that and in the end I decided to take my exams as a, as a, as a photographer. So I genned up and went to night school, went to, and I learned about photography proper, and er, then I joined [little confused] joined a company doing, doing all sorts of commercial photography, and er, managed to get some aerial photography in too, which was quite good. And er, I got really interested in it so in the end I went to night school, took my exams in photography and started my own business. So [pause] I kept, I kept the family, I was married by then and kept the family in groceries. [Slightly confused] I’m sorry I am not very good. Since the war my life has been in photography, professional photography and er, [pause] I, I tried to do as much aviation work as I could, but um, apart from the SR53 which was – I’ll go back ‒ . I went to work for a [pause/looking through papers] I’m sorry.
CJ: You said you were doing some aviation work and you were on this SR53 project, I think, which is a prototype aircraft?
BM: Yeah I went to work for er, I went to work for Saunders Roe, who had, who had launched the SR53 which was a rocket. Which was a, a twin jet with a rocket engine and a jet engine, and I did the air to air pictures of that flying in a Meteor. [laugh] And eh ‒ .
CJ: I think you mentioned some Concorde shots as well?
BM: Yes, I managed; I managed to get some air to air shots of Concorde one day. I dunno how I got that job but I did, I got some nice shots of Concorde in mid-air, and er, sold a nice lot of those. [laugh] But other than that my work’s all been in commercial photography. But of course, any time, any chance we get near an aeroplane. I go to air days, I go to air shows and so on and er, it has all been very interesting.
CJ: You mentioned that you have been over to Canada to see the crew and they have been here. Did you have regular reunions?
BM: Yeah, well my Canadian crew of course all went back home and they were glad to get back to Canada, but it wasn’t long before they invited me over there. And er, so I took a trip over there one day, and er, [pause] [unclear] I went two or three times to Canada. And my, my crew all came here, they all, they all visited me here. And we had some, had some, jolly good booze ups I can tell you, [laugh] as one does. But um, I am still in touch with one of them, all the (others), they have all passed away I am afraid. [pause] I am the last one of the crew left. [laugh] There’s one or two people that I know in Canada, but er.
CJ: And how do you feel about the way Bomber Command was treated after the war?
BM: You ask any one of the thousands of Bomber Command people, they will all tell you the same thing. It was treated rather shoddily. But er, I went up to the, to the big day when the Queen came and um, unveiled the Memorial. I spent a happy day in London doing that – and er, [pause] oh well. It is all part of life isn’t it, these things. [pause]
CJ: So were there any big squadron reunions that you went to or were the reunions just with your crew?
BM: No the only, only RAF reunions I went to were with my crew but, as I say, they have all been here to visit me here, and er – .[pause] As I say, I, I wrote to them for years and years and years but as I say I am the only one left now. Our skipper was in the timber business. He went back to running two big timber camps in Canada, chopping down trees. [laugh] [pause] er, [looking through papers] Yeah, we got through the war. We were quite surprised really, we, we got through without any real damage to the aeroplane. Our rear gunner got a piece of shrapnel in his, in his forearm. That was about the only thing that happened to our aeroplane, we were very lucky and er ‒ . Flying out of a little field in Yorkshire a place called Tholthorpe in North Yorkshire. The local people there were very kind to us. There was always someone to mend your socks for you. You know have a little word when you got a bit upset sometimes, and er, of course the village pub in that village, pub did a roaring trade with the, with the aircrew blokes. But er, I have been back to the airfield since actually, it’s still there, and the runways are still there and the perimeter track’s still there. Somewhat overgrown of course but er. [pause] Funnily enough my hobby by then was flying radio-controlled models, and I, I took one up to the runway and flew it off the runway. [laugh] That is how sentimental I am. [laugh] Yeah.
CJ: I think you mentioned one operation where you got, the aircraft was damaged by ack, em, anti-aircraft fire.
BM: Oh yeah we got some, we got a few holes in the aeroplane yeah. We got – on operations we got quite badly shot up one night with, with anti-aircraft. In fact when we got down there was, there was, seven large holes in the aeroplane. And er, I went, I went down to change, change fuel tanks. At that time when you have been out, and almost back home again, you, you, you use every bit of fuel that’s in the tanks so, I was draining this tank and you, to drain the tank, you, you switch the engine to that tank, and you, you leave it until the little warning light comes on. The little red warning light flickers and then it stays on steadily. You nip up quickly and change, change the tanks over then. But I was waiting for this to happen and er, all of a sudden one of the engines started to splutter a bit, so I changed tanks quickly and went forward to see what was wrong. Only, only found out later that the, the fuel pipes for that tank had been shot away, so I would have waited all night and it wouldn’t have come on again. Anyway, that is the sort of thing that happened, that’s why they put you on there.
CJ: Well, thank you very much for talking to us today Ben, that was really interesting and we’ll end the interview there.
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 Ben John May
Creator
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Chris Johnson
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-11-23
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AMayBJ161123
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
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00:32:39 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Canada
Great Britain
England--Yorkshire
Wales--Glamorgan
England--Cornwall (County)
Germany
Germany--Helgoland
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Singapore
Temporal Coverage
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1944
Contributor
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Chris Johnson
Terry Holmes
Description
An account of the resource
Ben was born in 1925 in Kent and his first job was in the gas works. A member of the Air Transport Command, he was called up in 1944 and after initial training at RAF Locking he joined No.4 flight engineers course at RAF St Athan for one year. He relates about the number of items of equipment in a bomber that he received training on. He then specialised on the Halifax and was sent to 420 Squadron where he crewed up and flew long flights as part of his training. Ben explains in detail the duties of the flight engineer and how much work it entailed. Posted to RAF Tholthorpe, he relates on life in bomber command on a typical day.
The first of his eleven operations was to the Ruhr valley which was uneventful, unlike the one to Helgoland where the aircraft in front of them exploded and they flew through the debris virtually unscathed. On another op, Ben had a grandstand view of the release of a Tallboy bomb and its devastating effect.
At the end of the war Ben retrained as a marine fitter and spent a year in Singapore before being demobbed. After a year as a photographer, he spent time in the camera workshop repairing commercial cameras and became a qualified photographer. Moving to a commercial photographic firm and then Saunders Roe, he specialised in air to air photography, including the SR53 experimental aircraft and Concorde and still retains his interest by visiting air displays.
Ben has had exchange visits with his Canadian former crew and feels, like most bomber command veterans, that they were treated shabbily.
420 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
bombing of Helgoland (18 April 1945)
crewing up
flight engineer
Halifax
military living conditions
military service conditions
RAF Locking
RAF St Athan
RAF Tholthorpe
Tallboy
training
V-2
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/651/8922/PTweenR1501.1.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/651/8922/ATweenRC150909.2.mp3
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Tween, Reginald
R Tween
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Tween, R
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Flight Sergeant Reginald Tween (b. 1925, 3005992 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a flight engineer with 514 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-09-09
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
GC: Right. This is an interview being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. My name’s Gemma Clapton. The interviewee here today is Reginald Tween who was flight sergeant.
RT: Sergeant.
GC: 514 Squadron. The interview is taking place at his home in Heybridge Basin on the 9th of September 2015. Right, how did you get started in the war? How did you join up?
RT: Well when we were youngsters, we were always interested in models, especially model aeroplanes, and we carried on from there. I joined the ATC, and that was my ambition, to join the Royal Air Force to fly. Being in the ATC as a top cadet, blowing my trumpet a bit, I had two flights at Hornchurch Aerodrome while I was in the ATC, so I knew what flying was like.
GC: So you wanted to fly. Not Army or Navy.
RT: No. No. No. No. No. Flying was the one interest, yeah [unclear]. Do you stop it?
GC: Yeah.
[recording paused]
GC: So you did the acc. Now, you’ve just —
RT: ATC.
GC: Act.
RT: ATC.
GC: ATC. You’ve got me at it now.
RT: Auxiliary training.
GC: Tell me a bit about before you joined up.
RT: Well we was always in to making models, making model aeroplanes and flying them. There was a group of us, a brother included.
GC: Did your brother serve? Did you —
RT: Yes. On — he failed the medical for flying so he had to serve in the Meteorological branch.
GC: Was he jealous?
RT: A bit, yes, because we’d both looked forward to flying so much.
GC: So, as a member of the ATC, what did you see of the war before you joined Bomber Command?
RT: Well, all the fighting going on overhead, and the oil works being set ablaze and all that sort of thing. The whole war was going on overhead, bombs dropping at the end of the garden where we lived and that sort of thing.
GC: Where did you live at this time?
RT: Chadwell, which was two miles from Tilbury, and we stood out at the back door, watching what was going — did like to see what was going on, even with the shrapnel pinging down. And an anti- aircraft shell landed in the back garden on the point of the house, blew half the garden into the front road. Another, another time, there was a land mine dropped a couple of miles away and blew the back door off of the house.
GC: So did these things make you want to serve more?
RT: Not particularly, no. We were, we were so keen to start with. I do remember one time, this is later, when I was on leave, I saw the V2s rocket being launched from Holland, saw the vapour trail of the rocket come up and over and then it landed in London. Because we had the report a couple of days later, that the rocket had landed so and so.
GC: So obviously where you were, which is Tilbury, which is not far from East London.
RT: It’s a direct line from Germany to London.
GC: Yeah.
RT: They used to fly right overhead. And the diesel engines — you could tell them a mile away, with a certain hum, hmmmmm, all the time, couldn’t mistake them. Then, when I was at work at Purfleet, West Thurrock, I’m cycling into the works entrance, and a Junkers 88 came over and dropped a bomb right over my head [laughs] which landed at the Van den Burg and Jurgens, where they were making all the margarine. Killed a couple of people.
GC: So did all the young men just want to serve? Did they believe it was their duty to serve?
RT: In the ATC?
GC: Yeah.
RT: Oh yes, all the youngsters. Yes. Yeah. And we said they started it, we’ll finish it.
GC: So, once you decided that you was going in to the Air Force, how did, how did your training start and where was you based?
RT: Oh, I joined up in London, St John’s Wood.
GC: Whenabouts? When?
RT: Oh I can’t remember. Forty, must have been ’43, and then we went from there to Torquay. Did lots of training there.
GC: When —
RT: Then —
GC: Sorry.
RT: Yeah, then to a station near — just south of Cambridge, Wratting Common. W R A T T - Wratting Common. Then from there we went to Feltwell, further training, near Cambridge, and Lakenheath. No, not Lakenheath, Methwold. Methwold.
GC: My granddad lived there. At Feltwell.
RT: Yeah. And then from there, we went to the squadron at Waterbeach and started operational flying from there. In August, August, I was looking at it, August the 3rd was my first flight. Operation.
GC: So, during your training, did you want to be a flight engineer or did your training just to lead you that way?
RT: I was also mechanically minded. Everybody wanted to be a pilot obviously, but my education let me down, so as soon as they knew, they asked me questions about engines and various things. They said, ‘Right. Flight engineer’, so that was that. I accepted it, no qualms. I wasn’t good enough for a pilot and that was it. Yeah. Everybody can’t be a pilot, obviously, and I had a — well, I won’t say a wonderful time but it was, something. Well it’s one of those things, I mean, a lot of lives were lost. But I never — the furthest I’d been from home was a week’s holiday in Clacton before I joined up. In those days, a Sunday School outing was to Maldon once a year.
GC: So we’ve gone as a flight engineer. Tell me about your first op then, if you can remember it. Can you remember?
RT: Yeah. The flying bomb sights, in — near the Pas de Calais, near, near Calais, just across the channel. Actually, I’ll go and get my logbook [pause]. Every, all the cricket matches. We flew from Cambridge, all the way to Cornwall at, say, four hundred foot, and everybody lay flat on their face. Three hundred Lancasters in one mass. And the cows were jumping the hedges, the farmers must have gone berserk after. Then the tail gunner saw everybody getting up again. We flew at a hundred foot over the Atlantic and it took us nine hours, there and back, and we bombed coming in from the south, to catch them unawares, they were only sweeping from the north. And on that trip, the skipper said, ‘Swap seats’, and I flew the plane for twenty minutes, down off the Channel Islands, coming back, and I had another flight at the controls on this second trip which was a day later, for twenty minutes. And the rear gunner, he’s saying, ‘Get him off there. I’m getting sick here’. because I was going up and down [laughs], oh dear. On one of those trips, I had to shut one engine down. We had trouble with the hydraulics and oxygen U/S, but we weren’t climbing very high, so that was ok [pause]. Our sixth operation was to Stettin, in the Baltic. We come back flying over Sweden, that was a nine hour flight also, and seven, eight and nine trips were bombing barges and troops in Le Havre. We were down to two thousand feet due to the weather. Two were shot, two of our aircraft were shot down. All baled out. That was daytime. Now, the tenth trip saw two Lancasters collide and blow up over France.
[pause]
RT: On the fourteenth trip, to Duisburg, we had two Lancasters following us which were to drop their bombs when we dropped ours, as we were the senior crew. As we approached the target, there was a stick of bombs coming down on the starboard side, so I nudged the skipper, he looked out and saw the same thing on the port side. So with that, he put the nose down slightly to get away from the bombs which were dropping just past our wingtips. With that, the radar picked us up. The next thing, there was a terrific thump and the aircraft stood on its nose, we were heading straight down. When I picked myself up and I looked back and the two behind had just blown up, completely disappeared. All I could see, was red flame, black smoke, nothing, just one huge bang. When I looked at the speedometer, we were doing four hundred miles an hour, more or less straight down, so the skipper yelled, ‘Give us a hand’, and we managed to pull it out of the dive and regain our height again. Then a couple of minutes later, the bomb aimer comes staggering up from the nose with his helmet off, torn off, his mask, and a huge strip of skin off his, I could see bare skull right across his head. Blood everywhere. Oh, a terrible sight. So I managed to bandage him up, took him back, laid him on the bed and then he said, ‘You’d better have a look to see if the bombs are gone’. So I had to lay down on the floor, amongst all the blood, looked in the bomb bay and half the bombs hadn’t dropped, so that was another shock. So the skipper then said, ‘Well you’d better, better drop them soon as you can’, so I went back with a special lever we had and I dropped the bombs as we flew back across Germany. That was, that was the most unnerving trip we had out of the whole lot. On that same trip, Richard Dimbleby flew with one of the other planes from our squadron, which was a very unusual thing, for a civilian to be allowed on to a plane to fly, but he did anyway. So that was that.
[pause]
RT: Oh, and the twenty fifth operation was to Dortmund. I’ve got here, ‘Jolly good trip. First kite to bomb. Tons of flack. Twenty five holes’, so that was that. On the twenty eighth operation, ‘Very good show. Tons of flak. Very accurate. A few holes. Two Lancasters shot down that we saw. Two five hundred pound bombs loose in the bomb bay’. When the undercarriage was selected down, there was two bangs and the two bombs were laid on the bomb doors, so we had to fly all the way out to the North Sea, open the bomb doors and just let them fall into the water. It didn’t explode and that was that. [pause] That’s it. Right. So my last, my last trip was on the 16th of the 12th ’44, Siegen. Distance, nine hundred and fifty miles. ‘Fairly good attack. Tons of flak en-route. None over the target. Ten tenths cloud all the way. Roads and rail. Hedge hopping on the way back as a last trip, with toilet rolls thrown out over the aerodrome as we celebrated our last operation’ [laughs].
GC: So how many ops in all did you do?
RT: Twenty-eight. I was, I was sick for one, had a cold, so you can’t fly with your ears blocked up. Yeah, so that was that. Then we went on indefinite leave after our operations finished [pause]. All told, I flew a hundred and forty-five hours in daylight, sixty six hours at night, so we had more daytime flights than we had night time flights actually.
GC: Was it safer day or night do you think? Was there a difference?
RT: I used to like to be able to see where we were going in daylight. It was, it was, because our navigator, he only saw one target, he was cooped up behind his curtain. We said, ‘Come and have a look at this, Les’, and he came out, took one look and dived back in [laughs], he wasn’t interested. But I used to fold, fold my seat up and be ready, looking out, around, up and down. On one trip, we were coned with searchlights. We had an awful job getting away from that because once you were in searchlights, usually that was curtains, because they could zone in onto you then, but we put it into a steep dive, or the skipper did, and we managed to escape, which was very lucky. I do remember it was so bright that I could fill out my log sheet with the petrol, without using a lamp. It was like daylight. Oh it was unnerving. Oh dear. Terrible.
GC: Someone told me that they were happier with the guns going, because the guns meant that the night fighters weren’t up. If the guns weren’t firing.
RT: Oh yes. Yeah. We only had two, bags of fighters, two MEs after us. That was at night. There was only one more when we were with, had fighters to contend with, but it was the flak. We was going into briefing and they would mention there might be six hundred light guns and maybe eight hundred heavy guns in the target area, so everybody started biting their nails, and [laughs] oh dear, yeah. See the black puffs, there was so many shells bursting, it was like flying into clouds at times, even though it was a clear sky. In the daylight, all these puffs filled the sky with smoke. Quite unnerving, yeah. Right, so that was it.
GC: I’ll turn that off for a second.
[recording paused]
RT: A Nissen hut down by the River Cam, away from the airfield for safety. We used to go swimming in the river when we weren’t flying. Oh, one special occasion, we were told not to leave the camp under any circumstances as there was a possibility of operations that night, so the pilot decided he wanted to go and see his girlfriend in Cambridge, and he went. Lo and behold, we had the call to operations, so we went to briefing, had our meal, had everything. In the meantime, we had to tell the squadron leader in charge of the flight that we were short of a pilot. So he gets in his car and goes off to Cambridge, one of the gunners showed him the address, and brought him back. He came back just in time to get in the aircraft and take off, otherwise he would have been court martialled. Oh dear. So we’re telling him where we’re going, what we’re going to do and everything else, as we’re flying there. Oh dear.
GC: So it was a close unit.
RT: Oh, he nearly had the chop there. Oh dear, he would have been thrown out, dereliction of duty and all the rest of it. Disobeying an order. Oh dear, yeah, but it all turned out right in the end. Good job they had a car handy.
GC: So did you [pause], can you describe what it was like to fly in a Lancaster?
RT: Absolutely exhilarating to me. That’s, that’s what I spent my youth dreaming about, flying, and I’d been up twice in the ATC, so didn’t have any trouble, sickness or anything. Lovely. Terrible thing you have to have a war to get flying in. But I was, I enjoyed every moment of it.
GC: And what was the Lancaster like?
RT: Cramped. Our parachutes were stowed under the navigator’s table, so you hadn’t a hope in hell of getting it if there was any damage to the aircraft, because once you turn over or something like that, you just can’t move. Because when we were training over the Thames Estuary, we had a Spitfire doing fighter affiliation with us, in other words, mock attacks, and I’m standing up alongside the pilot, and all of a sudden as we dived and pulled up, I went blind, with G forces, and it was a very strange feeling. Quite a few seconds and then my vision suddenly came back. And I wondered, I couldn’t move my hands or my feet, I was glued in place with the G forces. Oh, it was amazing. The only time I ever had that effect. It might have been better if I’d have been sitting down. It wouldn’t have happened because they have G suits now to stop that, stops the blood draining out of your head, yeah. But it was very peculiar, yes.
GC: Can you remember the sensations of, for example, a bombing sortie over a city? Can you remember the noise? The smell, those kind of things.
RT: Well you didn’t get anything outside because it was so noisy in the aircraft, but at night, I looked up on one trip and I could see a row of red-hot exhausts, just above our head. If I’d have stuck my arm out of the top, I swear I could have touched the plane. It was a big shock because there was no good in dropping down, we might have done the same to the one underneath. Oh, it was very, very dodgy, very dodgy, especially when we were flying in solid cloud. You didn’t know who was next door or above or below you or anything, and then when we flew through cumulus cloud, the bumping and the disturbance, oh terrible. It would shake your teeth out nearly, it used to [laughs].
GC: I suppose it must be a different kind of flying, because these days, we have a lot of technology and equipment. You literally did it on —
RT: Well on — instrumentation in those days was very basic, very basic, yeah. Nowadays they’ve got an instrument that tells them how many miles they’ve flown, because when I’ve been up in the cockpits, on foreign holidays, I’ve asked to see if I could go up in to the, on the flight deck, and I told them who I, what I’d done and that, and I said, ‘Well what’s that then?’ ‘Oh that’s how many miles we’ve flown’. Oh. Dead easy, yeah. GPS, global positioning these days, you can’t get lost, but we had to find our own way. Well when you were in a mass, you just follow the leader, but at night, it was different. Everybody had to navigate then because there was no lights at all. No, no.
GC: So, is there one operation that sticks out in your memory?
RT: Well, that one where the two blew up behind us. That was a sight, oh dear, terrible. Just there one second, gone the next, yes. But at least they didn’t suffer, they never knew anything about it. Just one big bang and they were gone. But that aircraft we were flying, that never flew again because it was so bad, it damaged our tail plane. They seemed to think that if we’d have flown much longer, it would have fallen off of ours, so we were lucky there, very lucky, yes.
GC: So the ground crew were as protective of the planes as we hear.
RT: Oh yes. Yes. Yes, the same crew for the whole period of flying. Actually, we flew three different aircraft. One was time expired, it had reached its maximum flying hours, and the next one was written off, didn’t fly again, and then we finished up with the third one, so we were quite lucky actually.
GC: Can you tell me a bit about life after the war? How did you hear that the war had ended? What was your emotion to that?
RT: Well everybody was very pleased because we were on six months leave, ready to go to the Far East, so that meant that we were finished flying for good, while I was on five weeks leave, and that was it.
GC: Would you do it again?
RT: If — if need be, yes. We were doing it for a cause, a good cause. He had to be stopped. And as Bomber Harris said they started it, we’ll finish it. I never had any qualms about dropping bombs on cities. They started it, I mean I used to see them flying up. Well they dropped bombs where I lived anyway, houses up the street, so we were only giving them back what they started. Oh yes.
[recording paused]
RT: It was like sitting in a bus, they just go up and your ears pop, but when we did our two low flying trips, that was flying. Two hundred and twenty miles an hour at four or five hundred foot, everything flashing by underneath you. That was when, when you had to be careful and watch what was coming up ahead, but when you’re up at thirty thousand feet, people go from A and B, they don’t know what’s on the way. I used to like to be looking out the window when we flew abroad, but other people would be either asleep, reading books. I had my head glued at the window to see what was passing underneath, night or day. Oh yes.
GC: So, you were a bit of an adrenalin junkie then.
RT: Oh, for flying. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We used to have a huge kite. We built a huge six-foot wingspan model and it used to run up the wire on a gadget we made. Hit stop at where the kite was and then drop and glide all the way back, because we had huge fields where I used to live, and we’d have to run like hell to retrieve the glider before someone else found it. I used to go cycle to Hornchurch Aerodrome, which was six miles from home, and we used to watch them testing the Spitfire’s cannons, firing at the railway sleepers. Wood, pieces of wood flying everywhere. They left the tail up so it was horizontal. Oh dear. Now it’s a housing estate where the aerodrome used to be. Hornchurch. Yes.
GC: So why, that brings the question, why Bomber Command and not Fighter Command. Why the bombers?
RT: Well I wasn’t clever enough as a pilot, so the only thing left was crew, and the fact that I was mechanically minded, obvious to us, was a flight engineer, which I quite enjoyed. Sitting there filling my petrol log out. Every time I altered the engine speed, I had to work out how much petrol we used from each tank, in case the instruments were damaged. Every quarter of an hour I think that was, yeah.
GC: So, it’s like we said. It’s not technical, it’s mathematical and instrument based.
RT: A lot of it, yeah. Actually, sitting alongside the pilot, he only flew it. I used to do the revs. Same as when we took off, he’d start it off, then he used to say, ‘Through the gate’, I’d put the throttles — the last bit, three thousand revs maximum, then you’d say, ‘Throttle back’. Once we were airborne, flaps, speed, all the controls I operated, which was like a second pilot on an airliner actually, yeah. And we were supposed to be able to fly it straight and level in case the pilot was injured. I think I could have flown it, but I don’t know about getting down. I’d have flown back, got them to bale out and then ditched it, I think, oh dear.
GC: They would have taken that off your weekend rations, would they?
RT: Yes. Oh dear. Yeah. Yes, but out of twenty-eight trips, I only ever saw three parachutes. Of all the planes that either blew up, a wing blown off, just spiraling down, nobody, nobody could get out, so having a parachute wasn’t much good a lot of the time. No. You had to find it, then clip it on and then try and bale out. It wasn’t on. Too difficult, no. And those that were spiraling down, they knew what they were heading for obviously. It wasn’t quick, they could see it coming. Yes, it must have been terrible.
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 Reginald Tween
Creator
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Gemma Clapton
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-09-09
Format
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00:36:27 audio recording
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ATweenRC150909, PTweenR1501
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Reginald joined the Royal Air Force in 1943, becoming a flight engineer with 415 Squadron, Bomber Command. He tells of his love of making and flying model airplanes, and that although he wanted to be a pilot, his love of anything mechanical, made him an easy choice for a flight engineer. Reginald tells of joining the Air Training Corps, watching the V-2 rockets coming over his home in Tilbury and their effects. His first operation was on 3rd August and it was to target the V-1 sites near the Pas de Calais, and he had operations to Stettin and Duisburg. He tells of two Lancasters that were shot down. Reginald flew 28 operations with Bomber Command (145 hours in daylight operations and 66 hours during night operations).
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Germany
Poland
France
England--Essex
England--Tilbury (Thurrock)
Poland--Szczecin
Germany--Duisburg
France--Pas-de-Calais
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
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1943-08-03
Contributor
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Vivienne Tincombe
514 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
flight engineer
Lancaster
mid-air collision
RAF Waterbeach
shot down
training
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/667/9220/PAlgarH1701.1.jpg
fc6613bb2e0382203476e2c25fd2b6dd
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/667/9220/AAlgarH170520.1.mp3
971b79860cc48492ea1f6c034d96276b
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
Algar, Harry
Harold Keith Mael Algar
H K M Algar
Description
An account of the resource
Thirteen items. An oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Harry Algar (1924 - 2022, 1801102 Royal Air Force) and his log books and documents.
He flew a tour of operations as a bomb aimer with 463 Squadron.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Greg Algar and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-05-20
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Algar, H
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DK: [unclear] So, this is David Kavanagh for the International Bomber Command Centre interviewing Harry Algar at the Dambuster’s Inn on the 20th of May, is it the 20th today?
HA: [unclear] we’ve been discussing that this morning, what the date is [laughs]
US: I think it is, yes.
DK: Ok, [unclear], I can always amend it later. If I keep looking down at this, I’m just making sure that it’s still working cause I sometimes get beaten by the technology and the battery runs out or something
HA: Yeah
DK: So if I look down that’s all I’m doing. So, just leave that there. So, what I wanted to ask you Harry was first of all, what were you doing immediately before the war?
HA: Well, at that time I was working in London right next to London Bridge, working for Hay’s Wharf and I used to go up there every day, because in those days I went there on Saturdays as well as the other days of the week and I was what they called an office boy in those days, I don’t suppose they have them these days, but I worked in the engineer’s department of Hay’s Wharf [unclear] on the river front right from London Bridge down to Tower Bridge and part of my job was to walk from there to there and put in the time cards for the various [unclear] cranes and all the equipment they had on the wharf and then we’d take them out at the end of the week, work out their wages, that was my job then
DK: Right, so, what made you then want to join the Air Force, is there anything in particular?
HA: Well, yeah, in those days, it’s any different now but I did realise that there was gonna be trouble with Germany again and so I thought if I joined the RAF now at least I’m in the Air Force, not in the navy or the army
DK: So, the navy and army didn’t appeal to you?
HA: Not really, no, and so I joined the, what was it called? The
DK: ATC
HA: ATC, yes, I was one of the first to join the ATC, I joined the Woolwich Squadron, cause I lived comparatively near to Woolwich
DK: So how old would you have been about then?
HA: Sixteen,
DK: Sixteen
HA: Sixteen, seventeen
DK: Yeah
HA: Yes, I actually joined the Air Force when I was seventeen and I got called up when I was eighteen
DK: Yeah, right. So what did you feel when you were called up into the Air Force, what were you?
HA: I was expecting it, you know, it’s no great surprise
DK: No. And what were you hoping to do once you joined?
HA: Well, when I was in the ATC, I took the [unclear] leave for navigators, pilots and bomb aimers and that was sufficient actually to get me into aircrew
DK: Right. So you were tested then to see what your best sort of role
HA: Yes, well, when I actually joined the RAF the first thing I did was to go to the Elementary Flying Training School on, what the heck they called them?
DK: Is it the biplanes, the Tiger Moths?
HA: Yeah, Tiger Moths, on Tiger Moths, yeah. So, I was on Tiger Moths but I wasn’t specially able to, I didn’t progress quickly enough and so I came out of that particular scheme and got sent to Canada to do an air bomber scheme.
DK: So, when you were trying to fly the Tiger Moths, did they tell you quite early on, no, this isn’t
HA: I did about ten or twelve hours flying on Tiger Moths and after that they said, we think you’re more likely to kill us than kill Germans [laughs] so I was taken off the scheme.
DK: So, you then went off to Canada.
HA: Yeah.
DK: Can you remember much about the trip to Canada?
HA: Well yes, at the time, Roosevelt was in charge of the scheme and Churchill was going out to Canada to meet him and to discuss the state of the war and so Churchill was on the Queen Mary and I was on the Queen Mary as well.
DK: Oh right, Churchill was on the ship at the same time.
HA: Yes.
DK: Oh, right.
HA: Cause in those days, but most people don’t realise it that you couldn’t fly to Canada, not directly, you could only go by in small hops you know, so he went on the Queen Mary and I went on the Queen Mary
DK: Did you see him?
HA: Yes, I was outside his suite supposed to be guarding him, unfortunately I was rather sick [laughs] I could only go out and say [unclear]
DK: Were you a bit seasick then?
HA: Oh yes.
DK: So you were supposed to be actually guarding Churchill.
HA: Yeah.
DK: Oh right. Did he speak to you?
HA: No, I never saw him.
DK: You never saw him, oh, right.
HA: No. And of course when we went because we had him on board we had a squadron of Spitfires with us going down the Irish Sea and then we got down to the Irish, through the Irish Sea into the Channel, then it would be full steam ahead and then go down south into the South Pacific, South Atlantic so that you would avoid the submarines and then come up the coast of
DK: So, you weren’t actually in a convoy then, you [unclear]
HA: No, just a single ship
DK: Just the Queen Mary
HA: Yeah. It could outrun submarines
DK: Alright, so [unclear]
HA: And of course the submarine could, if it was very lucky, happen to be [unclear] our position to torpedo it but [unclear]
DK: Yeah, so are going at quite a speed then on the
HA: Yes, it could do thirty knots, twenty eight to thirty knots something like that but they were quite a quick [unclear] away but because of the length of the trip going down into the South Atlantic it took us best part of a week, I think
DK: And whereabouts in Canada did you dock, you remember?
HA: Well, we docked at New York
DK: Alright.
HA: We docked at New York and
DK: Was this, would this have been the first time you’d been over to another country in overseas?
HA: No, in, before I left school, I went on a school trip to Holland and Belgium and France
DK: Alright. Obviously the first time to America then
HA: First time to America, yeah, and then from New York we went up to Moncton in Canada which was via Boston and Providence and then we waited in Halifax until there was this place in a school for me to go to and then I was sent to Picton in
DK: In Picton
HA: Picton, yeah, in Ontario and did a bomb aimers course there and then after that I did a short navigation course
DK: So, what did the bomb aiming course involve then? What did you have to do?
HA: Well, it involved a whole of the theory of bombing, also all the things to do with the bombs and the components, so that you knew exactly what the bombs would do and what sort of fusing they had on them and pyrotechnics as well, so a lot of it was more or less, more armament than anything else and I’d be responsible for the bombload on the, on whatever aircraft I was flying at the time
DK: Can you remember what type of aircraft were training there?
HA: Yeah, yeah, Ansons
DK: Ansons, yeah
HA: And then we had Blenheim IVs,
DK: Right.
HA: Blenheim IVs we used as towing targets and also we were going to the turret of another one and fire at a drove that
DK: [unclear] being towed, yeah
HA: Yeah
DK: So, what did
HA: They were towed by Lysanders
DK: Lysanders. So, what did you think of Canada then, was it?
HA: Oh, it was fine, I mean, it was [unclear] really I suppose because when we went there it was still more or less summertime I think, I can’t quite remember when I went but
Dk: [unclear] people were training in winter [unclear] it was very cold
HA: Well we, when I’d finished training I went back to Halifax to wait for a boat, to take a ship to bring me back to England and that was in the winter and we had several feet of snow and I took the opportunity to go to Montreal and Quebec and also I took a couple of trips down to New York because we had a fair amount of time spare you know, it wasn’t something you [unclear] [mimics a bombing sound] that’s how you’re going to work, it was done over a period of time cause you never knew exactly when you were going anywhere
DK: No. So, what did the training actually involve? What are you also dropping dummy bombs as well or?
HA: Yes, yes, that’s in
DK: Is in one of the logbooks
HA: One of them, yeah, first of them
DK: That one, that’s, is that the first one?
HA: Right at the beginning
DK: So, I’ll read this out just for the benefit of the recording here, so you were with 31 Bombing and Gunnery School
HA: Yeah, that’s right, yeah, so, Picton
DK: Picton, Ontario, Canada,
HA: Yeah
DK: So, you’re going, you’re flying on Lysanders, no, you’re not flying, sorry, you’re flying on Ansons
HA: Yeah. Doing the bombing
DK: Yeah, flying on Ansons and the [unclear] which is the Blenheim.
HA: Yeah
DK: Yeah. So it’s got example here is six bombs, there’s quite a number of flights on the Ansons then
HA: Yeah
DK: And the [unclear], yeah, and the Anson again
HA: And I went to the navigation school
DK: Alright, that’s
HA: At Mount, Mount Hope, Mount Hope is still in use in Canada as a major
DK: Funny enough I’m going there next month
HA: Oh yeah?
DK: Hamilton and Mount Hope, so this is, so then you went onto number 33 ANS
HA: Yes
DK: So that’s the Air Navigation
HA: Air Navigation
DK: Air Navigation School, yeah. And that was at Mount Hope,
HA: Yeah
DK: Hamilton, Ontario.
HA: Yeah
DK: So then you’re back on Ansons again
HA: Yeah
DK: And that was purely navigation training
HA: Yeah
DK: Yeah. So it’s got where you had to fly from and to then
HA: Yeah, various cross-country trips
DK: Yeah. And then, so you’ve come back to the UK then
Ha: Yeah, then we went to Penrhos
DK: Penrhos, so that was number 9 AFU
HA: Yes, Advanced Flying School
DK: Number 9 Advanced Flying School
HA: And that was really to get you into, you know, into with the sort of weather that you would have in England which was obviously quite different to Canada, so that was an introduction to English weather
DK: So that was all air bombing training again
HA: Yeah
DK: Rather than navigation and that’s all on Ansons. What did you think of the Anson as an aircraft?
HA: [laughs] Well of course it was, well the first Anson I flew in you didn’t, you, to get the undercarriage up you had to
DK: Wind it up
HA: Wind it up [laughs], so you had the pilot sitting there, I was sitting here and I’d be winding up the undercarriage [laughs]
DK: So, how many of you would go on, roughly on one of these training? Was it you and a couple of other
HA: Yeah, just, yeah, yeah.
DK: So you also used the gun turret as well.
HA: Yes, yeah
DK: So you’re trained in air bombing, gunnery and navigation
HA: Yes
DK: Yeah. [unclear] the training there so then you’ve gone to number 29 Operational Training Unit at Bruntingthorpe
HA: Yeah, yeah, yeah
DK: That’s 29 OTU Bruntingthorpe
HA: Bruntingthorpe
DK: There you’re on the Wellingtons
HA: Yeah, this was crewing up with the idea of eventually going onto a squadron.
DK: So, how did you meet your crew then, was it at the OTU?
HA: Yeah, yeah. All that happened was that they would have enough people from the various trades to make up about eight or ten crews, something like that and you’d all be put into one room and told to mingle and sort yourself out in your crews.
DK: And through that you found your pilot and
HA: Yeah
DK: Navigator. How did you think that worked, cause it’s a bit unusual. Because normally
HA: It worked very well actually because I never knew anybody who was dissatisfied with the people that I picked up to fly with.
DK: Because it’s quite unusual really, it’s not normally how the military worked
HA: Yes
DK: You’re [unclear]
HA: That’s right, yeah.
DK: But you think that worked well then
HA: It did, yeah, I was crewed up with, where I found my pilot, he was an Australian, that’s how I got on the Australian squadron
DK: Can you remember his name?
HA: Yes, Hyland, Frank Hyland, H-Y-L-A-N-D
DK: Frank Hyland.
HA: Yeah. His name’s in there
DK: Yes, his name’s in there, yes, so he’s Flight Sergeant Hyland
HA: Yeah
DK: H-Y-L-A-N-D
HA: Yeah. Then later on when we were going, I’m not sure whether it was when we were there but he got commissioned
DK: Right, ok.
HA: And we weren’t very keen on that because in those days the, well, do you know the, if you were commissioned, you were a bit [unclear] from the people who weren’t commissioned and it tend to break up the crew so we weren’t keen on that
DK: Would he have been the only officer on the crew then?
HA: Yeah, he was
DK: So, once he was commissioned then, did that mean you didn’t socialise at all?
HA: That’s right. Well, that’s not true because we did, it was against the law, but you know, you’re not supposed to socialise with your lower ranks but we used to meet up in pubs, we already did you know, because at that time was when things were beginning to break down when it came to the, you know, the iron fist in the services, you know, became easier to meet with
DK: But on the station itself you’d be living separate
HA: That’s right, yeah
DK: You’d be in the officer’s mess
HA: That’s it, that was why we didn’t like very much, I mean you couldn’t talk as much as you would like to about what you’d done or what you expected to do
DK: Which I would imagine would’ve been good for you, your job if you got to know each other better
HA: Well, it is, yes, it is, yes
DK: So, at 29 OTU then you were flying Wellingtons?
HA: Yes.
DK: And what did you think of the Wellington?
HA: They were marvellous aircraft really, they were geodetic construction which means they were as you probably know, teaching the conversion [laughs] but you know it’s like [unclear] with the canvas outside but they were remarkably strong and no, I thought they were great aircraft
DK: Right, so, so after 29 OTU then, gone on
HA: Then we started getting onto the Heavies
DK: Right, so
HA: And you didn’t go onto Lancasters straight away because all the Lancasters at that time were being used by frontline squadrons
DK: Alright. Ok, so then, just read your logbook again, you went to 1660
HA: Heavy Conversion Unit
DK: Heavy Conversion Unit and that was
HA: That was on Stirlings
DK: Right, so that’s at Swinderby
HA: Yeah
DK: [unclear] 1660 Heavy Conversion Unit, Swinderby and you’re flying Stirlings
HA: Stirlings, yeah
DK: What did you think of the Stirling?
HA: Not a lot [laughs], they were heavy, cumbersome things and they were all like, I think they got their design and that from people who worked on ships
DK: Right.
HA: I mean they were, they came from Ireland, Belfast and they’d been more used to work on ships than on aircraft
DK: And what was it like as an air bomber then? Because you’re at the front, are they quite high up?
HA: Oh yes,
DK: [unclear]
HA: Oh well, you don’t sit on the front for take-off
DK: Right, ok
HA: You come back and then you go down the front when you’re airborne
DK: I noticed you’re not having your coffee. [unclear]
US: [unclear] forgot it. He hasn’t brought it, has he?
DK: Right, ok, so, you’re
HA: I just done
DK: 1660 Heavy Conversion Unit
HA: That’s right, yes. And now next thing is the Lanc Finishing School which means that you go on to Lancasters and get tuned up on what’s happening before you go on the squadron.
DK: So that was, just for the benefit of the recording, making sure it’s working, is number 5 Lancaster Finishing School at Syerston
HA: Mhm.
DK: So you, so the idea is then you’ve gone from the Heavy Conversion Unit to then [unclear]
HA: To the aircraft you’re gonna fly on Bomber Command. And you know, you get used to it before you actually get sent to a squadron cause obviously when you get to the squadron you’re expected to be [unclear] with what’s going on
Dk: Alright. So what did you think of the Lancaster then when you?
HA: A marvellous aircraft [unclear], very strong and quite fast and a good altitude, the defence wasn’t so hot, it was on any aircraft
DK: No. You say the defence, was that a problem with the machine guns or?
HA: Well, they were too light, you know, they were 303s and people were firing at you with rockets and whatever, well not rockets but heavier, heavier
DK: Calibres
HA: Calibre
DK: Yeah. So, as the air bomber then, on Lancaster, was not too short [unclear], were you responsible for both dropping the bombs and the front gun turret?
HA: Yeah, I was responsible for all the armament really on the aircraft and we would go up before a raid and we used to harmonise the guns on the turrets, they would be harmonised the four guns in the rear turret, harmonised at about four hundred yards, in other when I say harmonised all four came to
DK: Came together
HA: Yeah, at that point and in the front you just had two guns and you harmonise those for probably about a hundred yards something like that
DK: And also, so did you have any other roles as the air bomber besides that, so you’re looking after the guns, dropping the bombs and
HA: Well, as soon as you went out to the aircraft, I was in charge of the bombs and so I would have to go round and inspect all the bombs and remove every safety devices that weren’t used once we were airborne so the rest of the armament would be made live once you got airborne and once the aircraft got to target and started to drop the bombs as the bombs came out of their holding and the last safety devices would be removed and the bomb would be live
DK: So how could you remove the last safety device when you’re in the air?
HA: Well, they would [unclear] electrically
DK: Ah, right
HA: You had the, how can I put it? You had something that was locked in and when you switched on the electrics the [unclear] would work and clamp onto that thing and hold it in position till the bomb had gone
DK: Right, and you could control that from
HA: Yeah
DK: Something in the, the bomb aimers area
HA: Yeah
DK: So you had a control panel who did that
HA: That’s right, yeah
DK: Alright.
HA: And you could, if you got into trouble, you could drop all the bombs at once [unclear] panel showed that you could drop a salvo of bombs all at once so if you put it on that you could get rid of the whole immediately so if you were in trouble, you could lighten the aircraft by several thousand pounds you know
DK: Very quickly
HA: Yeah [phone rings]
DK: Ok. So, after the Lancaster Finishing School then, you’ve gone to number 463 Squadron Royal Australian Air Force
HA: Yeah
DK: Based at Waddington
HA: Yeah
DK: So we [unclear] that for the benefit of that and that was in first, so, November 1944 [unclear]
HA: That’s right, yeah
DK: What did you think of Waddington when you got there?
HA: Well, we were very lucky really cause it’s a pre-war aerodrome with buildings, got accommodation as I said in my book there, some people were in Nissen huts you know in winter it was terribly cold and in summer they were really hot so they were quite uncomfortable, but we had permanent buildings to live in, we had a decent mess, we were really lucky
DK: And you mentioned you went to this particular squadron because your pilot was Australian?
HA: Yeah, we had an Australian wireless operator as well
DK: Right
HA: So we had two Australians on our, on our crew
DK: Can you still name the crew?
HA: Yes, Frank Hyland was the captain and the skipper
DK: Yeah
HA: I was the bomb aimer
DK: Yeah
HA: Navigator was Keith, what was his name?
DK: Listed in here?
HA: Yes, it is. Cause I was his best man
DK: Right.
US: [unclear]
DK: Frank Hyland, wasn’t that?
HA: Frank Hyland, yeah
DK: So, that’s your crew there
HA: Yeah
DK: So, you got Bob Stewart
HA: Yeah
DK: Eric
US: No.
HA: No, Eric is the only one that I, we couldn’t keep in contact with
DK: Alright
HA: After the war he just sort of disappeared and I found unfortunately, I’ve also forgotten his name as well
DK: Yeah, right. And then Ken Richardson?
HA: Yeah. He was the rear gunner
DK: Rear gunner. Keith Jenkins?
HA: Yeah, he was the navigator.
DK: Navigator.
HA: Yeah
DK: Frank Hyland
HA: He was the pilot
DK: Pilot. And then you got Max ?
HA: Yeah [unclear] I don’t remember his name, he was the other Aussie.
DK: So, he was the wireless operator [unclear]
HA: Wireless operator
DK: Yeah
HA: He was a great sportsman actually, he played for Australia after the war, rugby
DK: Alright. So I’ll, just for the benefit of the recording again, I’ll read this out again, so, from left to right you got, [unclear], Bob Stewart, he was the
HA: He was engineer
DK: Flight engineer
HA: Yeah
DK: Eric somebody, who was
HA: The mid upper gunner
DK: Mid upper gunner, Ken Richardson
HA: He was the rear gunner
DK: Rear gunner, Keith Jenkins,
HA: He was the navigator
DK: Navigator. Frank Hyland, pilot
HA: Was the pilot
DK: And the Max somebody
HA: Wireless operator
DK: Wireless operator and he was the Australian
HA: Yeah
DK: So, was 463 a good squadron, do you think?
HA: Yes, well, the thing was that you were only on the squadron for about six months really, in general you know, you don’t, you’re not gonna be on it for years and at that time you don’t get to know people all that well but because you’re, not really with the other squadron, the other crews, your, it’s your crew you were interested in
DK: Yes, yeah. So, you didn’t mix too much?
HA: Not all that much, no, we, as a crew we always stuck together and when went out socializing we always stuck together, we all had bikes you know, we just cycled down the pub, the Horse and Jockey at
US: Coningsby?
HA: No, The Horse and Jockey at, quite close to Waddington, Bracebridge Heath
DK: Bracebridge Heath. Yeah.
HA: Yeah
DK: Is it still there?
HA: Yeah
DK: Oh, right, I’ll have to go along to it at some point
HA: Yeah [laughs]
DK: See if they remember you [laughs]. So, looking at your logbook again then you got your first operation to Heilbronn?
HA: Heilbronn, yes
DK: Heilbronn, just for the benefit of the recording, H-E-I-L-B-R-O-N-N
HA: Yeah
DK: So, your bombs then are thirteen thousand pounds
HA: Yeah
DK: So, one
HA: One four thousand pounder
DK: Six
HA: Six one thousand pounders
DK: And six five hundred pounders
HA: Yeah
DK: So how did you feel after you’re done, after all this training and done your first operation?
HA: Oh, relieved I suppose, I managed to do one without getting shot down [laughs]. I mean the thing is lots of people joined the Air Force, they never managed to do very much because they got shot down on the first trip, you know, but to survive one tour [unclear] was very fortunate but Dinah’s father, he also was a navigator
DK: Alright.
HA: And he did eighty-three operations, oh, eighty-eight operations, he got, he was ordered a DFC and bar.
DK: What was his name?
US: Mayson
DK: Mayson, alright.
HA: M-A-Y-S-O-N.
DK: M-A-Y-S-O-N, I’ll make a note of that. Alright, so and he flew how many operations?
HA: Eighty-eight, I think it was.
US: I think it’s eighty-six, for all he said.
HA: Oh yeah, it’ll be eighty-six. Yeah, eighty-six.
DK: Can you recall which squadron he was in?
HA: Yes, [unclear] somewhere
US: I am not as old as Harry, so
HA: Not many are [laughs]
US: During the war, we stayed at home, he went and I didn’t really know an awful lot about it
HA: So, he was on Pathfinders as well, he flew on Lancasters, he flew on Mosquitoes,
DK: And so he was a pilot or?
HA: No, a navigator
DK: Navigator, sorry, navigator, yeah
HA: Actually I think he had the same sort of introduction to the RAF as I did, I think he used to wear an O badge, observer, observer was the same sort of thing as bomb and navigation which I did so I think we both did the same sort of course initially and then he went back onto navigation before I did
DK: Alright, and did eighty-three ops
HA: Yes, eighty-three ops. I think he did about thirty on Berlin
DK: Wow!
HA: [laughs]
DK: Ok, just for the benefit of the tape again, just going back to your logbook, so your second operation then, 6th of
HA: Giessen
DK: February 1944 to Giessen
HA: Yeah
DK: And there you got elven thousand pounds of bombs
HA: Yeah
DK: And that was twelve one thousand pounders
HA: Yeah
DK: An interesting one next so, the 8th of December, operations to the Urft Dam
HA: Yes
DK: U-R-F-T Dam
HA: Well, that’s in green, it’s daylight
DK: Daylight
HA: But it was clouded over, we didn’t
DK: Cause you got, it says here, eight thousand five hundred pounds, no bombs dropped
HA: Yeah
DK: And that was because it was
HA: Weather,
DK: Weather
HA: Couldn’t see the target
DK: No. Would that be normal then, if you couldn’t see the target you’d bring the bombs back?
HA: I don’t know if it would be normal, but we probably got recalled and it was probably said in the brief [unclear] did not jettison or something like that
DK: Oh, ok. And what was it like flying at night compared to day? Did you prefer one to the other?
HA: Oh yes, night flying was always a bit hairy because we went, you take off say from Waddington and it’s probably dark when you take off, you may well have seen the odd aircraft crash you know and you knew that it could be a bit dodgy taking off at night time with all that load of armament on board
DK: Yeah, and the petrol as well
HA: Yeah. Yeah
DK: Ok, so just going through this again then so you had another operation recalled here, so that’s the 10th of December 1944, operation recalled and then,
HA: Where was that to?
DK: It doesn’t actually, it just says, operation recalled
HA: How many hours did it do?
DK: Two hours forty-five
HA: They got started
DK: And then on the 11th of December 1944 it’s the Urft Dam again
HA: Yeah
DK: U-R-F-T,
HA: Again
DK: Ten thousand pounds, no bombs dropped
HA: Again [unclear]
DK: Ten tenth cloud. Ah, and then 18th of December 1944, operations to Gdynia. That was
DK: It’s in Poland, isn’t it?
HA: Yeah, bombing the German fleet which had taken position in Gdynia and we’re bombing them
DF: And that says thirteen thousand seven hundred and fifty pounds of bombs
HA: Yeah
DF: And it does actually say in pencil here, Poland bombing German fleet
HA: Yes, right.
DF: And it says landing FIDO
HA: Oh yeah, FIDO, that was, yeah, when we came back it was
DG: Fog
HA: Fog everywhere and we didn’t really know where we were too well and we were told to fly on dead reckoning and wondering whether we would be able to find anywhere to land because you couldn’t get in contact with people without the aerodromes like you could today, there was no VHF or UHF, it was HF, HF was short range communication and so, you know, it was sometimes very difficult to get in touch with people that could help you, so we were just flying along wondering what was going to happen whether we’d have to bail out or [unclear] because we couldn’t find anywhere to land when in the distance we saw a glow in the sky and we flew towards it and then when we got there we realized it was FIDO which is a method of dispersing the fog and we were able to get down and land
DK: That was petrol set like each side of the runway
HA: Yes, petrol, clean burning petrol which dispersed the fog
DK: I bet that was an impressive sight
HA: Oh, it was
DK: [unclear] [laughs]
HA: This was at Carnaby
DK: Carnaby, right, ok.
HA: And the
DK: Was it a bit of a relief to see that then?
HA: Oh, it was, yeah, and there were lots of other aircraft already managed to land on it, the whole aerodrome was covered in aircraft that had managed to get in
DK: So then, next operation then, 12th of December 1944, operations to Politz
HA: Politz, that’s an oil refinery, a big oil refinery
DK: And that was twenty thousand two hundred and fifty pounds of bombs
HA: Yeah
DF: So, one four thousand pounds and six one thousand pound bombs. So, then we’re into 1945 here, so 13th, I think that’s just 13th of January ‘45
HA: Yeah
DK: So, Politz again
HA: Yeah
DK: One four thousand pound bomb and fourteen five hundred pounds of bombs. And then 14th of January 1945, Wurzburg
HA: There’s an oil refinery
DK: Oil refinery again and then 1st of February ’45, Siegen
HA: Siegen, yeah
DK: S-I-E-G-E-N
HA: I don’t remember much about that
DK: And then 2nd of February ’45 operations to Karlsruhe
HA: Where? Karlsruhe? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah
DK: And then 13th of February 1945 operations to Dresden.
HA: Yeah
DK: So that was, it says here supporters,
HA: It means that we went around twice
DK: Right
HA: Because what it means is that you go in, drop your bombs and then to give support to those who were still coming in after you go round again, so that [unclear] far ahead [laughs]
DK: Alright. So that’s saying thirteen thousand seven hundred bombs, one four thousand pounder and elven, can’t quite read what that says,
HA: I’ll have a look
DK: Yeah. Is that incendiaries?
HA: Eleven cans, be eleven cans of incendiaries
DK: Eleven cans of incendiaries, right. Do you remember much about the Dresden raid?
HA: Well, yes, I suppose, I remember more than the rest because I suppose I probably brought it to mind because people keep talking about it [laughs]. As far as I was concerned, Dresden was just another town. I mean, I left school when I was fourteen, so I wasn’t all that well educated and Dresden, you know, was just another town
DK: Yeah, just another operation
HA: Yeah, another operation. I remember it because it did burn, I mean without a doubt it was a hell of a burn but
DK: So then 3rd of March 1945 operations to the Dortmund-Ems Canal
HA: Yeah
DK: So then, 5th of March ’45, operations to Bohlen
HA: Bohlen?
DK: B-O-H-L-E-N.
HA: Bohlen.
DK: Bohlen. And then 7th of March Harburg, 12th of March Dortmund, 14th of March Lutzkendorf
HA: Lutzkendorf, that’s another oil refinery
DK: And then it’s got, I notice you landed back at Alconbury
HA: Oh yes, yes
DK: Which was
HA: Oh, is an American base again was being in the fog or something like that we were being diverted there. I remember that because we were eating in the, I remember the soup in there was full of pepper [laughs] couldn’t possibly eat it and I said to this chap, why did you put that much pepper in this? He said, because I like it [laughs].
DK: Making taste, isn’t it?
HA: Yeah
DK: And then 20th of March ’45 Bohlen again, B-O-H-L-E-N. Then 22nd of March Bremen and then 27th of March Farge, F-A-R-G-E.
HA: Farge
DK: Farge, F-A-R-G-E. The war’s ended, are we? So, 4th of April Nordhausen.
HA: Nordhausen.
DK: Yes, 7th of
HA: Nordhausen was where they were firing the rockets from on London
DK: Oh, right. Would you, would you tell, can you recall if you were actually told about that, at the briefing
HA: Oh yes.
DK: What the target was?
HA: Oh yes. We were told what we were looking for, because these rockets that they were firing at London, they were coming out of woods and that sort of thing so they were extremely difficult to find, what we were looking for but they weren’t anywhere else you know and London was really getting a pasting with bombs and rockets
DK: The V2s
HA: Yeah
DK: Yeah
HA: Yeah.
DK: So, 7th of April, the operation seems to be recalled and then I can’t quite, it’s something 8th of April I think it is, operations to Lutzkendorf again
HA: Yeah
DK: And that’s a supporters as well
HA: Yeah
DK: So would that mean you’ve gone round
HA: Yeah
DK: Twice again
HA: Yeah
DK: Then there was fifteen thousand two hundred and fifty pounds bombs, one four thousand pounder and fourteen five hundred pounds. And then 23rd of April Flensburg, and it says no bombs dropped
HA: Yeah, well, the war was very nearly closed then, very near to close and I think that was probably the last, one of the last targets that were nominated for
DK: And then I see the next few flights then was Operation Exodus
HA: Yeah, that was
DK: After that
HA: Yeah, that was picking up prisoners of war, British prisoners of war and bringing them back to England.
DK: That must have been quite [unclear]
HA: Oh yes, yeah
DK: Yeah. What sort of shape were the POWs in?
HA: Oh, very poor shape, yeah. And then of course, I didn’t actually do any, but they were also dropping food to Holland at that time.
DK: So, you didn’t do any Operation Manna flights?
HA: No, no.
DK: And then you’ve got Cook’s Tour.
HA: Well, that was just a sort of swan around Germany to see what damage [unclear] you caused [laughs].
DK: And presumably that would’ve been the first time you’d seen the damage then, was that
HA: Well, you could see it in daylight, if you did the odd daylight trip, as we did, you would see [unclear]
DK: And did the Cook’s Tour event involve taking the people on the aircraft?
HA: Yeah
DK: The ground staff
HA: Yeah, yeah
DK: So you had a circular flight there
HA: Yeah
DK: Munster, Dusseldorf, Essen, Cologne, Munich, Glad, sorry, Monchen Gladbach, then back to base. So the war has come to an end then
HA: Yeah
DK: What did you do at that point then?
HA: I went to India
DK: Oh, right [laughs]
HA: In India they were going to demilitarize the Air Force there and most of the aircrew were [unclear] obviously they were the war [unclear] at a close but on the other hand there was, the fight was still going on with the Japanese so to some extent they wanted to have aircrew out in the Far East to take over bombing of Japan if
DK: Right
HA: If it became necessary. And we went to India with that intention but in fact what we did was to demilitarize the Air Force and we had to, the way we did it was to get the [unclear] in groups and take their uniforms and that sort of thing from them, pay them and organize transport for them to get back to home
DK: Alright. So it’s quite a different
HA: Oh, quite different altogether, yeah
DF: So, you weren’t considered to be flying out operations against Japan then?
HA: No
DF: No
HA: No. The only aircraft that we had that could possibly have done that was a Lincoln at that time
DF: Right
HA: But the Lincoln hasn’t actually been put on the squadrons at the end of the war, they never flew during the war on operations in England or in Europe rather.
DF: So, the war is ended, so it’s 1948 now and you’re
HA: I’m back from India
DF: India and then you’re going to number 2 ANS
HA: Yeah
DF: At Middleton Ste George. Was it, did you make a decision then to stay in the Air Force?
HA: Oh yes, yes, I applied to join before, I forget what years it was but eventually I was signed on till I was fifty-five. I didn’t serve until I was fifty-five because there was a Labor government in and they decided that they wanted to reduce the number of people into services and so there was a redundancy scheme offered and because we had three boys, we didn’t really want the family split up which would’ve been if I had carried on the Air Force, they’d had to go to school, [unclear] live in the school somewhere and I’d have to [unclear] somewhere
DK: And can you remember what year it was you left then?
HA: Yeah, I left in, what year was that?
DF: [unclear], ’49, ‘53,
HA: What year I left the Air Force? Oh, ‘69.
DK: ’69, right, yeah.
HA: Yeah, ’69.
DK: So, you’ve now trained as a navigator then
HA: Yeah, at Middleton St George
DK: Yeah. Let’s go through this, so, number 201 AFS
HA: And I was back then on Lancasters
DK: And Wellingtons by the looks of it
HA: Yeah was, yeah that was to crew up again
DK: Yeah
HA: Cause I’d been on a different crew
DK: And then 1949 Lancasters again with 149 Squadron
HA: Yeah
DK: At Mildenhall. And by this time, you are a fully-fledged navigator
HA: Yeah
DK: Yeah. So these, some of the last Lancasters built, aren’t they?
HA: [unclear] what?
DK: Some of the Lancaster here, they’d be quite old by this time
HA: Oh yes, they would, yeah
DK: [unclear] crew here now, 1949 so Lancasters
HA: And
DK: So you’re with 149 Squadron for quite a while then.
HA: Yeah
DK: ’49. Then to the Central Gunnery School
HA: Yeah
DK: Lancasters again
HA: That was to get a qualification as an instructor on [unclear]
DK: So 1950 then you’re now on the Avro Lincoln
HA: Yeah
DK: What did you think of the Lincoln compared to the Lancaster, was it?
HA: It was bigger, better armed, cannons on the front, machine guns, but I don’t think, they were just a bigger version, that’s all [unclear] Lancaster I suppose
DK: So, then it was number 44 Rhodesia squadron at Whitten
HA: Yeah
DK: That’s Lincolns again
HA: Yeah [unclear]
DK: And then the 149 Squadron, the Washington conversion unit
HA: Yeah
DK: And that’s August 1950
HA: Yeah
DK: And that’s at Marham
HA: Yeah
DK: So, what did you think of the Washington then?
HA: Oh, they were marvelous really cause they were, you fly unpressurised in them and they had a tube which ran from the front down to the back and you could actually bomb using radar equipment that was at the rear and you could actually guide the aircraft from the back
DK: Alright
HA: Using the radar target that you could see
DK: And that controlled the aircraft
HA: Yeah
DK: Is it true that B-29s had ashtrays?
HA: We didn’t [laughs]
DK: The Americans put ashtrays in the [unclear]
HA: I remember, we did use to smoke in there
DK: They had ashtrays. Were you impressed by the Washington then?
HA: Yes, yes, it was a big aircraft and carried a big load
DK: So, 149 Squadron again with Washingtons, right into 1951, so it’s mostly all training then
HA: Yeah, you could do the sort of flight you could do in a B-29 would last about sixteen hours
DK: Alright.
HA: When, there’s one in there, I think, sixteen hours we went there onto Africa and back non-stop
DK: You flew on the Washingtons for quite some time, didn’t you?
HA: Yeah.
DK: And this was all from the UK
HA: Yeah
DK: And then I see, so it’s 203 Squadron Coastal Command, then 236 OCU at Kinloss on the Neptunes
HA: Yeah
DK: So, what was the Neptunes like?
HA: It was good aircraft too, it was only two engines but it had [unclear] endurance, it did one time hold the record for endurance flying, the aircraft was called the reluctant turtle [laughs]
DK: That’s up to 1954 then when you
HA: Ah yes, I got commissioned in ‘54
DK: Ok, that’s, just one final question, just looking back at your time specifically with RAF Bomber Command in the war, how do you look back on that period now?
HA: I don’t think it ever, I mean, never, I don’t know, it never bothered me, you know, I read of some people getting bothered [unclear] about what you did and that sort of thing, it never bothered me, I mean, I was, I went through the Blitz in London, I was in the, we used to do fire watching and I remember London burning and when I was at, as a boy, you know, doing this office job as it were, we used to do at least one night a week fire watching and I can remember bomb was falling and terrific fires and we were putting these fires out, you know, and I remember one particular incident where sticker bombs fell into the water about a hundred yards away from us I think, but because they fell in the water there was no damage was done, you know, we didn’t get hurt but I mean, I had to [unclear] quite a lot from the Germans so I didn’t feel I was doing anything I shouldn’t do as far as I was concerned, I was defending my life and the life of my family.
DK: Ok, that’s great, we’ll stop there
HA: Ok.
DK: You’re absolutely marvelous. No, thank you very much for your time. It’s been wonderful, I think we covered everything.
HA: Ok [laughs].
DK: Just for the benefit, thanks very much for that.
HA: Do you
DK: There’s a notice here in the book. I thought you left the service at the time of the Neptunes but you went on, did you go onto the Shackletons after that?
HA: Yes.
DK: So you went to Guyana?
HA: Went to Guyana, yeah.
DK: And that’s cause it burnt down.
HA: Sorry?
DK: You said it was burnt down.
HA: Well the [unclear] Georgetown in Guyana was set on fire, yeah but the government decided, the British government decided they’d have to send troops out there
DK: Alright
HA: And so we carried the troops out there that meant these chaps we were taken out, had a very horrible journey because they had been taken from Ireland where we were based to [unclear], [unclear] down to Bermuda, Bermuda then out to Jamaica
DK: Right
HA: And then Jamaica to Guyana, all they had was a hard floor to lie on
DK: And that was on the Shackletons
HA: Yeah, you know, they didn’t have anything decent to lie on
DK: So what was the Shackletons like as aircraft [unclear]
HA: Well, they were really good aircraft, they did the job
DK: Yeah
HA: But I mean this was, they weren’t made for that sort of thing
DK: Yeah
HA: Carrying troops
DK: So, what was your normal role in Shackletons then?
HA: Again, I was first navigator on most of these trips.
DK: Alright. And that’s through the Cold War, isn’t it?
HA: Yeah
DK: You’re keeping an eye on the Russians.
HA: That’s right, yeah. And our sort of flying was, flying training was locating submarines and practice bombing them, that sort of thing
DK: Oh, right. Did you actually identify Russian submarines?
HA: Oh yes. Yes, you’d pick up a contact on radar and then you’d home into the contact and if you were lucky you’d probably find the submarine at the end, probably just diving, you know, realisng that it’d been found
DK: And would you make a dummy attack on it?
HA: Yeah
DK: Trying to go down
HA: There’s one trip we did in southern UK we came across about, well, I think there must have been about twenty Russian ships, a whole fleet in the Atlantic
DK: They didn’t ever fire on you then, did they?
HA: No, but they always turned their guns on us
DK: Alright.
HA: They were always pointing their guns at us.
DK: And you could see that [unclear]
HA: Yeah. We would never actually overfly them knowingly, just, we would just [unclear] round them
DK: So you went out to Rhodesia, was it Rhodesia then, wasn’t it?
HA: Yeah, we went down to South Africa
DK: Yeah
HA: And then I did quite a lot of flying from the Middle East when the [unclear] on
DK: Oman
HA: No, I’m sorry, my mind isn’t quite as quick as it should be. Cyprus
DK: Cyprus, yes, yeah.
HA: And then, there was some other in, where was that? Anyway, if you, it’s in that book
DK: Yes, it mentioned Oman here, yeah
HA: Yeah
DK: Yeah. And then later the government came along and [unclear] the redundancy
HA: Yeah, I joined Barclay’s bank then [laughs]
DK: So, you did almost twenty-seven years in the Royal Air Force
HA: Yeah
DK: And then ten years in Barclay’s?
HA: Twenty years
DK: Twenty years in Barclay’s. Oh right, ok. Good bank Barclay’s. [unclear] Ok, that’s great, I’ll [unclear], but thanks again for that.
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 Harry Algar
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
David Kavanagh
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
2017-05-20
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AAlgarH170520, PAlgarH1701
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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00:55:27 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
Harry Algar worked as an office boy at Hay’s Wharf in London before the war. He entered the Air Training Corps before joining the RAF when he was seventeen. Started his training on Tiger Moths but was then sent to Canada to remuster as a bomb aimer. Remembers travelling on the Queen Mary, where he was assigned to escort Winston Churchill, and his training in Canada on Ansons and Blenheims IV. After completing his training, he was posted to 463 Squadron (RAAF) at RAF Waddington. Describes his role and his duties as a bomb aimer. Remembers some of his operations: coming back from an operation to Poland targeting the German fleet, they encountered heavy fog and managed to land safely at Carnaby airfield thanks to the fog dispersal system; taking part at the Dresden operation on the 13th of February 1945; operation to Nordhausen on the 4th of April 1945 to disrupt V2 rocket launches on London. He took part in Operation Exodus. At the end of the war, was posted to India. After the war, he trained as a navigator and flew on Neptunes, B-29s and Shackletons. Remembers fire-watching as a little boy during the Blitz in London and tells of a bomb dropping a few hundred yards away from him, leaving him unscathed.
Contributor
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Peter Schulze
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Canada
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Dresden
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
149 Squadron
1660 HCU
29 OTU
463 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
Air Observers School
aircrew
Anson
B-29
Blenheim
bomb aimer
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
Cook’s tour
FIDO
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lincoln
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operational Training Unit
RAF Bruntingthorpe
RAF Carnaby
RAF Swinderby
RAF Syerston
RAF Waddington
Shackleton
Stirling
Tiger Moth
training
V-2
V-weapon
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/84/9858/MCluettAV120946-150515-15.1.pdf
45257601be1228d48e7ba6965f8d72ad
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
Cluett, Albert Victor
Albert Victor Cluett
A V Cluett
Subject
The topic of the resource
World War (1939-1945)
Great Britain. Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
68 items. The collection concerns Leading Aircraftman Albert Victor Cluett (1209046, Royal Air Force). After training in 1941/42 as an armourer, he was posted to 50 Squadron at RAF Swinderby and then RAF Skellingthorpe. The collections consists his official Royal Air Force documents, armourer training notebooks, photographs of colleagues, aircraft and locations as well as propaganda items, books in German and Dutch and items of memorabilia.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Albert Victor Cluett's daughter Pat Brown and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-05-15
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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Cluett, AV
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Access Rights
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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
Cartoon notebook
Description
An account of the resource
Royal Air Force notebook for workshop and laboratory records containing a large number of hand drawn wartime cartoons including aircraft caricatures. On the cover '547557 AC2 Johnson' and '1209046 LAC Cluett 1940'.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1940
Format
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One notebook
Language
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eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Artwork
Text
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MCluettAV120946-150515-15
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.
animal
Anson
arts and crafts
Beaufighter
Defiant
Do 18
Fw 190
ground personnel
Horsa
Hudson
Hurricane
Ju 88
Lancaster
Lincoln
Lysander
Martinet
Me 163
medical officer
Meteor
military living conditions
military service conditions
Oxford
P-47
Spitfire
Stirling
Typhoon
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/688/10096/ABaptisteDMM170504.2.mp3
1dc27df23af9a2bfa31f201bae8fd069
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
Baptiste, Daphne
D M M Baptiste
D Baptiste
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. An oral history interview with Daphne Baptiste (b. 1921) and a wedding album. She worked as a civil servant in the air Ministry.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Daphne Baptiste and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-05-04
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Baptiste, DMM
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is Thursday the 4th of May 2017 and I’m in Epsom with Daphne Baptiste who experienced the war as a civilian and married an Army officer later on in the war. But Daphne, what are your earliest recollections of life?
DB: My earliest recollections are, date from when I was four years old and I can remember I hadn’t started school, my mother was on her knees in our little house in Becontree. She was washing the kitchen floor. She had the bucket and a mop there and was on her knees at the time and suddenly we heard two loud bangs and I rushed to her side, a four year old frightened of these two loud bangs. And I said to her, ‘What’s that? What’s that?’ And she said, ‘Shhh. Just be quiet and I will tell you in a moment.’ And that’s when I had my first history lesson and she told me about the First World War and how we now respected people who had given their lives in the First World War and remembered them on November the 11th each year to give them the respect that they deserved. That’s my earliest memory. My other earliest memory is being taken to hospital with diphtheria. Again, I was four years old and my mother had lost her own brother when he was two and a half years old with diphtheria. It was a serious illness and you can imagine how distraught the family were at the thought that I also might die from this children’s serious illness. I didn’t fortunately. Obviously. And, but I came out after seven weeks in hospital not having had any visitors other than my father standing outside the large ward window looking at me as he cycled from Becontree up to the City of London to join his fire station where he was on duty at that time. That would be 1925 I suppose and [pause] but I came out of hospital unable to walk. My parents had to hire a little old pushchair and took me away on holiday with the rest of the family and, and I soon regained the ability to walk but just for a while that was the result of diphtheria.
CB: So, what did your father do as a job?
DB: My father was a fireman. He had been in the Navy for two years at the start of the First World War. He’d been invalided out with an injury. He’d been crushed by some machinery I think in the engine room and invalided out. He wanted to marry my mother. They had met and he wanted to marry her and she wouldn’t marry him until he had a job so he joined the London Fire Brigade. She wouldn’t marry him still until her brother could come home from the Army. This was First World War. Her brother was on the Somme, fighting in the Somme and she used to tell us when we were children that she prayed every night of her life that her brother would get a blighty one which meant a slight wound. A small wound. Enough to bring him home. And he did. He was wounded in the arm and he came home and he was able to be, he was able to give her away at her wedding to my father. So, and my father stayed in the London Fire Brigade all through the war. The First World War. Rescued children from a burning building. We think probably set on fire by German Zeppelins. We’re not sure about that but they were certainly active at that time and he rescued six children one by one from this burning building. The adults and children on the ground floor were killed in that fire but he managed to get six children out from the first floor and was given the medal of the OBE after the First World War in recognition of bravery, gallantry which was a cause of pride in the family at the time.
CB: So then in the interwar years while you and your siblings were young what was happening then?
DB: With my father and his career? He stayed in the Fire Service and I can’t think which particular year that would be, nineteen, late 1920s possibly he was promoted to be in charge of a fire station. And because he had had even two years experience in the Navy they gave him the Fire Boat Station at Battersea Bridge. On the corner of Battersea Bridge, and so we the family all moved to Battersea. Lived on the bridge, on the corner of the bridge there and had opportunities to go on the fire boats and see what went on there. And then seven years after that he, a new Fire Brigade Headquarters was built just by Lambeth Bridge opposite Millbank and the Houses of Parliament and he was given command of the fire boats there and remained there until his retirement. Right through the war he was in charge of the fire boats from Westminster to Chiswick. Had a very lively war. They were not only trying to deal with fires along by the riverside, the docks and, and the oil fires but also they were often called out to relay water from the Thames even up to two miles because the engines couldn’t always get through the roads. The roads were too heavily bombed. And so that certainly happened when there were fires at Piccadilly. I think that was possibly one that a couple of miles of hose laying. I suppose a man could get through guiding the hoses through. I’m not sure how it happened but [pause] but it did happen. And he was allowed to retire, 1944 when the worst of the raids were over although we were still having V-1 and V-2 raids but not so frequently as during the war we had raids every night. And when we came up out of the shelters of the Fire Brigade Headquarters the shelters were simply bunk beds that were provided for us in the basement and we would see the firemen running through the basement to where ever their appliance was. Their, their engines or whatever. We thought that was quite exciting when we were teenagers I suppose, one has to admit. But, but it was, it was a very lively time. We understood that because the Fire Brigade Headquarters had been built on a raft, I think that’s a building term, right by the river every time bombs fell in the river and they did, they were dropped in the river. That was a guiding light for German bombers very often especially if there was a moon and bombs would be dropped in the river and the building, the whole building, nine floors would shake but we didn’t ever have one broken window because it just moved. The vibration.
CB: So, he was looking after the river between Westminster and Chiswick.
DB: Yes.
CB: A lot of the bombing was further east.
DB: Oh yes.
CB: To what extent was he drawn in to that?
DB: Oh yes. In fact, he, no this is going back through the war. He almost went to Dunkirk but the Fire Brigade Headquarters people decided that they would send over to Dunkirk the fire boats as far as Blackfriars or Cherry Garden. I’m not sure which was the final one. But that they must retain some fire boats in London in case bombing started there. It hadn’t started there then and so my father wasn’t sent there but, but certainly he was at the docks, he was at the oil fires and, and where ever they were called upon to go and they very often drew all the fire engines and fire boats to all over different parts of London. I can remember there was Raphael Tuck’s Christmas Greetings Cards building next to us. Next to the Fire Brigade Headquarters. That was burned to the ground and people could be quite rude about that and say it was next to the Fire Brigade Headquarters what were they doing when that building was on fire? But every engine was out, every fire boat was out dealing with fires at different places. They certainly were called upon to travel quite widely in, in and around London.
CB: So which floor were you on? Living.
DB: We lived on the sixth floor. Sixth floor. There were nine floors all together and the night of the very big City fire my sister and I went up on to the roof, that’s above the ninth floor and looked across to the city and we could see the whole of St Paul’s Cathedral surrounded by flames there. The city had suffered very much in that. In that raid. And the only firemen left in the headquarters were a few, no engines again but they were up on the roof with stirrup pumps and buckets and as incendiary bombs fell on the roof they would go and put them out from their stirrup pumps and buckets. Put the fires out before they could get a hold on the building.
CB: And as children what did you, how did you feel about this huge perspective of fire?
DB: This was before the war, you mean?
CB: No. In the war.
DB: In the war.
CB: So, you’re watching. You’re watching the fires burning.
DB: Well, children. You see I was seventeen, eighteen, upwards then.
CB: Yeah.
DB: My sister was two years younger. A year and eight months —
CB: Yeah.
DB: Younger than I was. And you didn’t enjoy it. I used to think to myself if we survive all this I’ll never grumble about anything ever again. Well, of course I did. I have [laughs] But, but that was how you felt at the time. You didn’t know whether you would survive the night. You didn’t know whether you might be surrounded by fire even where you lived. Certainly, when I worked in the Air Ministry in London and I did first aid duty for the Air Ministry and was called out to raids. We took shelter probably once every two weeks. Slept in the basement again with these huge pipes that supplied water I think to the whole building and I used to wonder and was frightened at the thought of it. What would happen if the building was bombed and those pipes burst and we would be down there? What would happen to us? Yes. You were quite frightened but nevertheless you just had to get on with whatever was needed. I can remember coming up in the mornings and walking across rubble from some of the bombed buildings. It wasn’t, it was a difficult time to live but somehow you were given the strength to get on and do what you had to do. And we were very relieved when the time came that the bombing started, when it stopped every night even if you had one night’s rest you were thankful. And then after a break of course when the V-1s started and that was another different experience.
CB: 1944. Yeah.
DB: And they were still coming over to our country even when my husband had taken part in the Normandy landings and was wounded and came home. That was still going on. And then later on I was working when the first rocket, the first V-2 fell. I think that was in Chancery Lane. I was working in High Holborn in another Air Ministry building and I think that fell in Chancery Lane not that far away. It didn’t do us any, it didn’t do our building any damage but we were quietly working and suddenly heard this tremendous bang. It was a loud bang when the first rockets came over and, because we didn’t know what it was. And then you gradually began to, the news percolated through that it was the Germans latest weapon of war and, and we had many of them after that. That was 1944/45, I suppose. Going towards the end of the war.
CB: Going back to your father and the early stages of the war Dunkirk was the end of May, early June 1940. Then the bombing started seriously in London in the autumn.
DB: Yes. September.
CB: So, to what extent did your father describe what he was doing fighting the fires?
DB: He didn’t really talk a lot about of it at home. He was very very tired because it was constant. It was every night. At the beginning of the bombing he was out for three days and nights without sleep and because he was the officer in charge all his men came and went, did their day duty or their night duty and then went home and had a break. But for those first three days and nights he was on the fire boat the whole time and I think he was going to be going out again and my mother was absolutely distraught about that and went to see the chief officer [laughs] and said, ‘You can’t send him out again.’ And he didn’t. He gave him a night’s leave to come home and sleep and I suppose a subordinate officer took over. But then it happened again. Every, every night but at least a break in between and I mean we did hear over the years different things that might happen but, but he didn’t ever go in to any detail. Whether he thought it would be distressing for us. We would hear the buildings that he’d been to like Piccadilly and relaying hoses. We would hear that sort of information but nothing, nothing of the suffering. We would hear if any of his men had been killed. One or two I think were sent overboard from the boat in to the river and were not always able to be rescued although they could all swim. But, but no. We didn’t hear a lot about the suffering from my father.
CB: But the loss rate of civilians and of fire crews was quite considerable.
DB: Certainly, all the land crews I think maybe the land crews did have a greater number of casualties than the Fire Boat crews because some who might have been knocked in to the river would have been able to swim to the shore and be rescued. However, that was. But land crews, yes my own brother was a fireman stationed in the East End of London and the East End suffered very heavily. And one night there was bombs were dropped and I think it was a laundry fire and he, I think all the generator boxes were blown up all down the street that he was in, helping to put out the fires and he was blown in to the middle of the road and he, every bone in his foot, in one foot was broken and he spent the next year in hospital. The Fire Brigade or the Ministry of Defence, whatever it was then were trying out a new type of treatment that they had discovered through the Spanish Civil War where they had discovered people injured by the roadside who not been able to be rescued for a long time and their wounds had healed in their own gangrene. And my brother’s foot went gangrenous and he was taken in to hospital at Ripley in Surrey and they tried this, this treatment on him putting plasters on, I think once a month. However long it was. Leaving it on. And those wounds were left in their own gangrene and he had to be moved in to his own ward because his wounds and what came from his wounds was affecting the throats of other patients and so he was put in a ward on his own. And, and those plasters were put on for a year and then at the end of the year the doctors said to my parents because he wasn’t married, my brother, he was still at home and they said, ‘Now, your son’s wounds have healed but if we leave things as they are he’s going to be more of a cripple with that foot than without it. So we want you to make the decision, you and your son whether he should have that foot removed.’ And my brother was engaged to be married at the time so the fiancé was brought in to that too and my brother did decide to have the foot just below the knee. His leg was taken off and, which was very sad. It left him disabled of course for the rest of his life but —
CB: So, just putting that in to context the Spanish Civil War was 1936 to ’39.
DB: Yes.
CB: Were there people from the civil war who were part of the medical staff?
DB: I wouldn’t know. I don’t know that. No. I’ve no idea. We just heard that it was a discovery that they were trying out for raid conditions in our own country.
CB: Yes.
DB: But instead of them just being left by the roadside these people who were injured he was in hospital and being supervised.
CB: Yeah.
DB: Looked at all the time. But it was a strange, well, it was a very strange experience. And my sister and I used to cycle from Lambeth Bridge to Ripley to go and visit him. And at one stage there were lads who had been injured as part of aircrew in the same hospital. I don’t know quite how that happened but they were put out in the open air in the summer weather. I think they had injuries where they felt fresh air was beneficial to them. But, but for my brother that was the end of his war.
CB: Yes. This is before McIndoe really got going.
DB: Yes. Yes. Well, that was later. That was penicillin, wasn’t it?
CB: Well —
DB: Yeah. Fleming and McIndoe.
CB: No. But this is to do with the burns really.
DB: Yes. Yes.
CB: So, going back to your father with the boats.
DB: Yeah.
CB: You talked about the sorts of fires including oil.
DB: Yes.
CB: So, what was the real problem with boats? Was oil the real danger that caused a lot of concern. Burning on the surface of the water.
DB: I think. Well, I think it was because they, possibly it was more relaying of hoses. I mean there were obviously fire engines around because this was Shell Haven. Thames Haven and Shell Haven.
CB: Right.
DB: But certainly, I don’t know how near they got to those. But it might have been in a hose laying capacity. I really don’t know all that.
CB: Okay. So, you were born in 1921.
DB: Yes.
CB: At the end of the year. You decided, at what age did you leave school?
DB: I left school when I was just seventeen.
CB: Right.
DB: I’d gone in to the sixth form. I’d done one term in the sixth form but decided it was an unsettled world. We hadn’t, hadn’t started the war but, but I didn’t want to carry on with education. I wanted to go out to work but and so I took the Civil Service exam. But I also started at St George’s College, Red Lion Square to get more qualifications and hoped to get in to the executive grade of the Civil Service and perhaps from then to the administrative. But I would have settled for the executive I think then. But of course, the war started and they closed all of those institutions for a while. They opened them later but at that time I was looking ahead to marriage and family and didn’t really, and wouldn’t have continued with education.
CB: But you said you joined in January ’39.
DB: Yes.
CB: The Civil Service.
DB: Yes.
CB: What made you choose A) the Civil Service and, B) the Air Ministry particularly?
DB: Well, you know in those days it wasn’t the affluent society that it became later and you always felt that security was the big thing and the Civil Service had a very good reputation. You reckoned that the Civil Service had slightly higher wages than other types of work. That it was interesting work. Administration. All of those things appealed to me. My parents were not affluent. We had security and the Civil Service was another, it was a secure future. You felt you were paving the way to a secure future for yourself and I liked administration. I wanted to do that. I had to put down if I had a preference for any department what would it be and I put down the Civil Service. I put down one other, I can’t think what that one was now because I thought the Civil Service Air Ministry would be a particularly interesting job. The, the Air Force was only really just growing at that time. And, and that I felt would be good and that I might have time, might have the opportunity of going abroad with the, with the Air Ministry. What I didn’t know was that in those days they didn’t send young women abroad with the, with the Air Ministry. So I wouldn’t have had those opportunities. But the war started anyway and that, that put an end to that. But yes, I felt that would be an interesting life.
CB: And how did they train you to begin with?
DB: Oh, you were put in to a department and under your superior officer. He gave you a sort of training but you, you started work. I mean it was quite a modest job. It was a clerical officer and as I say I hoped to get to be an executive officer quite soon because you could take the exams quite quickly. The internal exams. But, but everything changed with the onset of war. But, but you were working straightaway on, on your own work. I think as I stayed with them for a year or two I think my particular responsibility was examining negotiations and agreements for providing water supplies and sewerage disposal facilities for Air Force stations all over the country. That could be big airfields, it could be small premises and so you were dealing with, corresponding with supply authorities for those facilities and also for councils if the councils were involved. Borough councils, county councils, whatever. So, you were dealing with those authorities all the time. So, I got to know a lot about the different airfields. All the names of them. And even to this day when I hear the name of an Air Force station that still exists I immediately think of the size of the file. It might be like that. Bovingdon. All sorts of them all over the country or down to small premises like that.
CB: And the airfields themselves were, they were building them brand new.
DB: Some of them. But some of them were old Air Force stations from before the war. Yes. But a lot of them were new. The thick ones tended to be the older ones. And certainly, all of East Anglia was like one big airfield.
CB: Where was this run from?
DB: Where was —
CB: Where was this office of yours?
DB: The first year of the war I was in Harrogate. We were evacuated to Harrogate. To the Ladies’ College. We worked in Ladies’ College at Harrogate. They evacuated the Ladies’ College pupils to a safer place in the country they thought but they gave it to us, the Air Ministry. And really Harrogate was filled with civil servants and Air Force personnel and we had a social life up there. I was billeted with a railway family up there. And when I, when the raids started and we weren’t getting any news of how our families were faring back in London and I put in for the transfer back home the man of the house where I was billeted, who was a senior engine driver on the LNER railway, he said, ‘Would you like a ride on the footplate?’ I said, ‘Yes please.’ So he gave me a ride on the footplate from Harrogate to Knaresborough, a little local village up there which was exciting for me. And then I came back to London but, and in Harrogate they were very kind, the people we were billeted with. And one day the air raid sirens went. Well, so that must have been just at the start of the raids, I think. Well, nobody ever expected Harrogate to suffer any air raids but the lady of the house, well it must have been a weekend because the lady of the house grabbed hold of the three of us girls, seventeen year olds, and said, ‘Come under the stairs. Come under the stairs.’ And she dragged us under the stairs because she said that was the strongest part of the house. A very modest little house. And dragged us under there and I think there were three bombs dropped from one aircraft in the grounds of a hotel I think up in Harrogate. And I think that was, they were the only bombs that I think Harrogate had during the war but it certainly created excitement at the time.
CB: So, you got back to London but how? How did you convince them to send you back to London?
DB: Well, I just said my family were here and where they lived right by Lambeth Bridge and the centre of all the bombing. That it took five days for us to get letters or to be able to make a phone call. We couldn’t make a phone call home and I said that, you know I wanted to be back with the family. Hopefully to work in the Air Ministry in London. Of course, there was some of the Air Ministry in London you see. It was that the I went to [pause] now was it Ajax House? Victory House? One of the big houses in the Kingsway I went to first of all and travelled to work daily. Bus or tram or whatever it was. They didn’t question it.
CB: You were billeted with your parents when you were in London then. You lived at home.
DB: Living at home. They didn’t call that billeted [laughs]. But yes, and that was when we had all of the bunk beds in the basement of the Headquarters and [pause] and didn’t know what we would find when we got up in the morning. Whether it would be rubble as I say. We often did walk over rubble in different parts of London. We got to work. I mean I think probably the hours were a bit intermittent. It depended how long it took us to get to, to work. I think there was still a tramway that went underground up to the Kingsway. Near Bush House.
CB: Yeah.
DB: And —
CB: It’s still used. The tunnel.
DB: It’s still used.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. The roadway.
DB: Yes. Yes.
CB: So you didn’t use the tube because of the —
DB: No.
CB: The roadway and the bus was more convenient.
DB: Well, there wasn’t, the nearest tube to us was Westminster tube station which would have meant walking over the bridge and to the station which was right by the Houses of Parliament.
CB: Yeah.
DB: Big Ben. And that would have taken longer I suppose. We could get buses outside the Headquarters. Buses ran from Albert Embankment there right through to, to the West End. To the City.
CB: There’s a classic picture of the Blitz with a bus in a big crater. Did you see that sort of damage?
DB: I don’t know that I saw that. I remember hearing about it. We had friends. Now, this man was in the police force and he was, you know he had a reasonably responsible job in the police force and I think he lived in Balham and he was out overnight with the raids happening and got back home in the morning off duty to find that his wife and three daughters had been killed. Their house had been bombed and I think that was when Balham had quite a lot of bombing. That part of London. And I think the tube station at Balham, I think a bomb went down the shaft to it. I have a feeling.
CB: A ventilation shaft. Yes.
DB: Was that right?
CB: Yes.
DB: Yeah. And [pause] Yes. There were some horrific incidents. That must have been awful for him.
CB: When you were in Harrogate you were doing your airfield work but what did you do when you returned to London?
DB: Well, I was trying to work out [pause] yes, because it must have been a different branch. It might, it might even be that that part came because I’d been in the Air Ministry for a year before I came back when the raids started. And it may even be that I started with something smaller in Harrogate and took on the airfield work when I came back. I’m not, really not too sure about that now. No. I can’t think.
CB: What sort of people were working with you?
DB: What —?
CB: Sort of people were working with you?
DB: Oh, well, they were mainly young women and middle-aged women and men. But we also had, I remember there was one young man who was about twenty eight and he was a conscientious objector. So he was given leave to not be part of the armed services but I think he had to do nine months in prison for that. But I know there was quite strong feeling because people used to feel is this fair because he is showing what he can do in the civilian job and therefore he will have an advantage when the men in the services come back home. There were all sorts of feelings about conscientious objection, that sort of thing during the war. If there were people in reserved occupations. They would call them reserved occupations. He was a nice enough chap and if he was, if he was sincere in what he believed you know you couldn’t blame him but but the people there who had loved ones fighting in the active services did feel strongly about it.
CB: So, did this effectively be expressed as abuse?
DB: Oh, they would talk. I don’t know how much they expressed it to him but certainly they would talk about it to one another and say how they felt about their own loved ones being away, in danger, losing perhaps seniority for when they came back and that would affect their promotion. Yes. There were prejudices.
CB: Did he describe any experiences of his own of people?
DB: I think he was a bit of a loner.
CB: Criticising him.
DB: He was a bit of a loner, I think. For those reasons really.
CB: And did he do extra tasks like fire watching?
DB: Did he or did I?
CB: Did he?
DB: Did he? Not that I’m aware of. I did. I did fire watching in Harrogate and I did first aid of course in London. I did fire watching on the roof of the Air Ministry. The Ladies’ College when we were in Harrogate. I thought that was the thing to do because my father and my brother were in the Fire Service. But when we came back to London I wanted to do first aid and I did British Red Cross and St John’s Ambulance courses in order to help me to do that.
CB: And then to what extent did you put that into action?
DB: Well, I, I didn’t have to do any serious dressing of wounds or anything. I think bandaging and as I say I saw this one really nasty incident. But they drew more than one first aid party to them in case people couldn’t get through obstruction in the roads. And we were the second party to get there on this occasion and there were people just ahead of me already dealing with the wounded but that was where I was standing behind ready to take over. For instance, if those people had fainted or anything in their, you know treatment of the injured. And that was where I did see the open head wound. Very dark wounds of this one particular lady and I did hear afterwards that she had died and I wasn’t surprised. She looked, she was unconscious but I didn’t actually have to deal with it myself.
CB: What sort of wound was it?
DB: Open. The whole of the head was open.
CB: Blown the back of the head had it? Yeah. And how did you feel about that?
DB: How did I feel about it? I just felt at the time I wasn’t capable of thinking. I was waiting to see if I was going to be needed. But afterwards even during those days I thought how awful that young women like me or anybody had got to see that because it, it was pretty awful.
CB: The secondary shock caught up with you. We’ll pause just for a mo.
[recording paused]
DB: I was thinking just now when you said, you know, you’re doing alright I thought if I had been the age or near the age that I am now when those, some of those things happened I would have probably taken more in. Be able to interpret them in a different way. It very much relates to the age that you are at the time and the experiences you’ve had previously. So that you don’t quite know what to expect I should think when you are, you are doing all these interviews. But, and, and I don’t know whether I am, whether I am interpreting everything correctly. I’m, I’m trying to be totally honest.
CB: Well, it’s the recall that is important.
DB: Yes.
Other: Yes. Yeah.
DB: Yes.
CB: We want to know.
DB: Yes.
CB: How you felt about it.
DB: Yes, well that —
CB: As you remember feeling about it.
DB: That’s what I’m trying —
CB: Yeah.
DB: To do as I go.
CB: In today’s perspective.
DB: And it’s a long time.
CB: Yes.
DB: It’s a long time ago.
Other: It is a long time.
DB: But —
Other: I think it’s fantastic that you remember.
DB: Well —
Other: Absolutely fantastic. I can’t always remember last week.
DB: Well, no but that’s true. They say that don’t they? The short term memory.
Other: Yeah. Goes.
DB: I find now that I can lose a name. The name of a person, name of a place.
Other: Yes.
DB: I can’t just grab hold of it straightaway.
Other: Would you like another cup of tea now?
DB: No.
[recording paused]
CB: We’ve covered a lot of things but what I’d like to do is just to step back in a way because —
DB: Yes.
CB: I mentioned early on I’d like to know what your education was and how that worked and then how that impinged on your career so, what, what did you do when you got in to the more senior part of education?
DB: Well, I was never very senior because I went in as quite a lowly level of clerical officer intending to take the examinations.
CB: No, but at school.
DB: Yes. This was at school. But when I was at, it depends really where you want me to start.
CB: Okay.
DB: I went to a London Elementary School. From there I took the Junior County Examination. I passed at a high level but elected not to take up those top grammar Schools. Went to the normal London Grammar School. It was a grammar school in Clapham and and worked for matriculation examinations at sixteen, the equivalent of GCSEs now, I suppose and passed those. And went in to the sixth form intending to do what was called Higher Schools Examinations then but had decided whether it was anything to do with the world being very unsettled, it was the time of Munich and all of those things. I don’t really know. But I decided I didn’t want the lengthy education. That I would go out to work. Chose the Civil Service and, and would work my way up within the Civil Service. Now, when I was at school I was quite able at the academic studies and at sport so I could have gone either way at school. It was a good education. It was a good grammar school. Also, when I was at school I did have the opportunity of sitting for a scholarship. Just for a Saturday morning scholarship to Trinity College of Music and I passed that and I used to travel as a ten year old actually on the bus from Battersea Bridge to Hyde Park Corner, change the bus at Hyde Park Corner. Everybody worked Saturday mornings in those days so with all of the working population I would then get the bus and go up to Selfridges, walk down beside Selfridges to Trinity College of Music and did three years of music education there. It was mainly piano and theory. I didn’t do the singing there. I did that later on when I was older when I wanted to do singing tuition and did that and in my life have done quite a bit of singing. That was my interest. Coming back from Trinity College of Music, Saturday about 1 o’clock all of the crowds coming home from work in the morning it was a real scrum at Hyde Park Corner where I had to change buses. No queuing for buses in those days. That didn’t happen until the war. So, everybody was rushing for their bus at Hyde Park Corner. There was quite a lot of elbowing as I remember but, and do you know you’d hesitate these days to let your ten year old do that sort of journey in London on her own. There was one other little girl that, we were often together. But that’s the way it was. We did that journey on our own and got back for the rest of Saturday to my home by the bridge. My mother who had thought when my father got his own fire station command was going to have a nice country station like Streatham, she thought. That’s not so countrified now I believe, because we had Phillips Paper Mills one side of the road and Morgan Crucible Chemical Company the other side of the road. Down a side road. So we were really right in the heart of London and it was actually at, when I lived at Battersea Fire Station there that I met my husband in the church youth group. I was fourteen, he was fifteen and we weren’t boy and girlfriend then. In fact, I think we both had other eyes for other boys and girls but it was a good healthy start to to growing up and, and we kept in touch. We kept in touch when I was at Harrogate. He was at his OTC, Officer’s Training Corps at his school. He went to Sir Walter St John School in Battersea and and did his training for OTC and therefore he went into the Army when he finally left school and we got to the wartime years. And first of all they sent him to the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry. Then they picked him up for, for Sandhurst and he did his training at Sandhurst. Wasn’t the lengthy training they do now at Sandhurst but that’s where he met and it was while he was there that he came home on leave, asked if he could stay with my parents. His mother had already moved to the West Country with her husband. And my parents didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t in love with him at the time [laughs] And, but anyway they said, ‘Oh, yes. We can’t refuse him.’ And so he came and stayed with us for his leave and that was where our life story began. Our love story began if you like. My father sent one of his men to Victoria Station with me to pick up my husband. We went back to the Fire Brigade Headquarters and he stayed there with us and, and that was it. That was the future assured.
CB: So, then he, in his Army experiences he then landed at D-Day.
DB: Yes.
CB: What happened there?
DB: He was, he was drafted to the Lincolnshire Regiment. Really, he chose that because he was at Sandhurst with a Lincolnshire boy, man and they talked about what they would put down as their first choice when they left Sandhurst and my husband didn’t know. My husband was born in Canada of an American father and, and met the mother in the First World War. That, and that was how Don came, they went back to Canada and Don was born in Canada. But this young man that he trained at Sandhurst with said, ‘Well, why, if you don’t know what to choose why don’t you put down for Lincoln’s Regiment? He said, ‘I’m going to put that down because it’s my home county and we could stay together, you know, the rest of the war.’ So, Don said, ‘Yes. Alright. I’ll do that. That’s as good as any regiment.’ So, he put down for the Lincolnshire Regiment and they were drafted to different battalions and never met again the rest of the war. He didn’t even know if he survived the war. But of course, my husband made many friends in the Lincolnshire Regiment during the war. And in fact we went to most of the Lincolnshire Regiment reunions after the war which was why when we were talking I said to you we went to most of the reunions every September after and through the war and went to a number of reunions in Normandy. When he was drafted to the battalion, second battalion the Lincolnshire Regiment he did normal infantry training with his company and then he said to me that they wanted to send him on this intelligence course at the School of Military Intelligence at Matlock, I think it was. And so he went to Matlock. I was on holiday with my parents and my sister in Devonshire in 1943 and we had become engaged by then, Don and I and expected to be engaged for possibly three or four years. Wait for the war to finish. We didn’t even have the Second Front established then but we waited. We would wait for the war to finish. He would get established in civilian life and so we would have to be engaged a long time. Well, he started at the School of Military Intelligence and I received this letter when we were on holiday in Woolacombe and the letter said, ‘If I pass this course I will get my third pip, be a captain. And I’d like us to be married before I go abroad.’ And I thought what on earth am I going to say to my parents? They think we’re going to be engaged for four years. So, I spoke to my mother first. I thought she would be the easier one and she said, ‘I don’t know what your father will say.’ [laughs] Spoke to my father and he said, ‘Ridiculous.’ But they all rallied around, you saw the picture of the wedding and gave me coupons for my trousseau. And we had a wedding and a wedding reception and photographs. Everything as I say except for wedding bells which we couldn’t have. Then of course, within nine months of that marriage he had landed in Norway, err in Normandy. I’ve got to gather my thoughts. And so, and many experiences stem from that. But we survived. We survived the war. We were the lucky ones.
CB: How did he get wounded?
DB: Sorry?
CB: How did he get wounded?
DB: They were about half a mile inland, if that. A quiet road. That was where they established their Brigade Headquarters. As I say he was brigade intelligence officer and he was, he’d had to go with the brigadier inland to the village of Herouville [?] This was where they landed. Herouville.[?] But the village itself was about a mile inland and they’d established that, the regiment had got that far and they established a Divisional Headquarters in a big office there next to the church and Don had gone with the brigadier to sort out the next move because I think German Panzer divisions were moving up to where they were and they were going to have to change all their moves. Make a different strategy. He came, he went up in the scout car, they came back in the scout car. Don stayed with his little band of brigade IO people telling them the next plans. What they’d got to do next. And it was while they were sitting there in a little dip in the roadway that this either mortar fire or artillery fire there’s some question now about which it was. They, we, we always understood it was mortar fire three hundred and fifty yards away but now there’s some suggestion that it may have been artillery fire. Whichever it was it landed in the midst of them, this little band of I think a dozen of them, this brigade IO headquarters and half a dozen of them were killed and half a dozen were wounded. The brigadier was one of those who was wounded too. And we kept in touch with him after the war. We saw them every time we went to Scotland. He was in the Scottish part of the Third Division. This was the Third Infantry Division and [pause] but of course it meant Don was put in the assembly area for bringing back to England. Did I tell you that story about the medical officer? The medical officer came round, dressed his wounds which were all leg including the femur, fractured femur and he put him back with others who were also wounded and said to the medical orderly, ‘I want you to take this officer down to the beach tonight for embarkation in the morning back to England.’ And the medical orderly got it wrong and took the man next to my husband down to the beach that night. The medical officer came back and said, ‘You’ve taken the wrong man down. Never mind. Leave it now but get him down first thing in the morning. I want him on that.’ On the, on the ships. So in the night, that night the German bombers came over, strafed the beach and all of those including the man next to Don, all of those who were down on the beach were killed. But Don wasn’t killed so, but taken down the next morning. So, the next morning the small ships came in and took these officers and people who, including German prisoners who were there on to the small ships and the small ships were going out in to the bay, the bigger part of the bay to the big ships to get them back to England. While they were on the small ships German bombers came over, Stuka bombers this was, came over and started dive bombing the small ships to stop them getting out to the big ships. The big ships who already had their, you know thingummies to get them on board that was already down but they had to put up these big gates. And in the meantime, the small ships which were being piloted by men of the, of the Third Division, and it was a little corporal and Don said he was absolutely wonderful because he would watch these Stuka, Stuka bombers coming and getting to the top and when they got to the top they started dive bombing. And as soon as the little corporal saw that he put the tiller hard over and the bomb would fall one side of them. They would come around again, go up again and as soon as they got to the top they would start dive bombing and the little corporal put the wheel hard over the other side. It fell the other side of the ship. He said, ‘If he did that once he did it twenty times and saved our lives.’ Including the lives of the German prisoners. But then they went away. The dive bombers went away and they were able to get the little ships out to the big ships and get them back to England. But, so he had about three escapes all together. Once with the Canadian officer. Once with the assembly area.
CB: How long was his convalescence?
DB: Well, he was in hospital six months but he was given, his leg, it was on traction and subject to dive bombing by wasps he always said. Wasps which kept coming round and dive bombing. Picking up the scent of all that was going on with his leg. But anyway, after two months and he was having physiotherapy and the doctors came up and said, ‘Sir, you are not exercising your leg enough. It’s not healing quickly enough.’ And my husband said, ‘I’m doing as far as I can. I cannot bend it further.’ ‘Well, you’ll have to try it.’ And my husband finally convinced them that he was doing as much as he could. So they decided to give him x-rays again. They took him out to x-ray him and found that the spike of his broken femur was sticking in a muscle. That’s why he couldn’t move it.
CB: Jeez.
DB: So, convinced they took him to the operating theatre again and cut off that spike and of course he had to start healing all over again and that took another three to four months. That’s why he was in hospital so long. But that was the only, well sort of, I suppose it was a sort of a convalescence. And I can’t remember when he was actually posted to Nottingham but from there he was posted to Nottingham and, and we were living there. That was when I left work and went up to join him. He, he rented a house that was opposite one that his uncle and aunt lived in. They happened to live in Nottingham and they said, ‘People opposite us are moving. They want to let their house. Why don’t you get Daphne up here?’ Which we did. So that was the end of my career and I was what? Twenty three then. Whatever it was. He was twenty four. And we were up there when the atom bombs were dropped and that brought a very quick end to the war of course. And then in that October he was posted to Cairo to do this advisory job really. And, and it was the, that next year that our son was born.
CB: How long were you in Cairo?
DB: He was in Cairo.
CB: Oh, he was.
DB: Yes. Not I. No.
CB: Right.
DB: There was no normality yet.
CB: No.
DB: That wasn’t really civilian life. He was there from October. I think it was eleven, thirteen months, I think. He went in the October and I think he came back the following month and I think he was demobbed the following November. So a year and a month.
CB: Okay.
DB: And then we were up in Blackpool. Or just north of Blackpool. He in the Civil Service. Me with our small son. He managed to get two rooms up there for us so we lived there. We were making all sorts of plans about the next summer going to the Isle of Man to see the TT races. He was very keen on the TT races on the Isle of Man so [laughs] But it didn’t happen because he took the next exam and passed that and was moved back to London. And then we stayed with my parents until we got a little house in Epsom ourselves and where we lived for seven years and then moved here and have been here ever since.
CB: That’s very good. How did you parents come to Epsom anyway?
DB: That was through this officer of, of the Lincolnshire Regiment whose parents lived in Epsom and managed the building firm. Managed. Owned the building firm that built many streets in Epsom. And that officer, John Roll was killed in Normandy in the July. He survived the first month or so but he died in the fighting in, I think it was Chateau Beauregard Wood. The woods around there. And Don wanted to see the parents to give his condolences. Talk about him. He always said John Roll was the best Christian young man he ever knew. A lovely young man, and he was engaged and he died. So Don went to see him. And I think my parents were probably looking at estate agents then to see if they could find a house that they could move to when my father did finally leave the Headquarters which he was due to leave then. And that was when Mr Roll said, ‘I have a house in Epsom that has been leased to the Epsom Fire Service and if they will let, let it, release it back to me your parents can have it to rent.’ And that’s exactly what happened. They did release it to him. Mr Roll let my parents have it, next to the park in Epsom. We lived with them until we got our own house. And that established the pattern for the future. I’m still here.
CB: Very good. Right. We’ll stop there. Thank you very much indeed.
[recording paused]
CB: Yes.
Other: You mentioned something —
CB: So, you, a couple of things to pick up on. Your first child was your son.
DB: Yes.
CB: His name is —
DB: Anthony.
CB: And then you had a daughter.
DB: Avril.
CB: Avril who’s ably —
DB: We stopped there.
CB: Avril is —
DB: We thought we’d have four.
CB: Right.
DB: And we decided to stop.
CB: Ably assisted today by David.
DB: Absolutely. He’s a treasure.
CB: Yes.
DB: He’s a treasure.
Other 2: Is it worth, I don’t know whether it’s worth mentioning or not but, but mum’s father you know I think because of what went on in the war actually got a sort of creeping paralysis disease didn’t he? I mean, I don’t know whether that’s worth mentioning or not.
CB: Right. So, what were, what —
DB: No. I don’t think so David.
CB: No.
DB: Because we did discover an earlier, his father seemed to have something like that.
Other 2: Oh, right. Right. Okay.
Other 3: It’s probably genetic.
DB: I guess it was something genetic.
Other 2: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So, so, in summary what you’re saying is that your husband was finding it more difficult to get around in later years.
DB: Not my husband. No. My father.
CB: Your father, I meant to say. I meant to say your father.
Other 2: Yes. Yes.
DB: My father did find it —
Other 2: Yes.
DB: Very difficult to get around.
CB: Yes. Yes.
Other 3: From his early fifties.
DB: He was very badly disabled.
Other 3: Not later. From his early fifties.
CB: Early 50s.
Other 3: From about 1963.
DB: Not the 50s. It would be ‘60 Avril. ‘60s.
CB: 60s.
DB: Yeah.
CB: And then a story about what your husband was doing in the —
DB: Well, it was —
CB: With the D-Day plans.
DB: They did a lot of training in Normandy. A lot of the invasion training. He always said he got his feet wetter off the coast of Northern Scotland than he did when he landed on D-Day.
CB: Right.
DB: Because he jumped on the back of a Sherman tank to land on the beaches at Normandy. But anyway, from Scotland getting ready for the trip across the Channel they moved down to the south of England. Hambledon. Near Hambledon Somewhere near. That part of, of the south coast and because he knew he was within reach of Epsom he thought it would be a good idea to take the, if he, if he got the weekend off duty to come up to see me. So, he borrowed a motorbike from the unit down there and rang me. Asked me if I could meet him at the Anchor Hotel. Anchor Hotel. Royal Anchor Hotel, something like that, at Liphook, Hampshire. I took the train down there, met him there and he booked a room for us. First time I’d ever slept between coloured sheets [laughs] and I promised myself when we got our own home after the war I would have coloured sheets. Silly things you do really. Anyway, we spent the weekend there and then of course he had to go back south. He told his, and I had to come back home, I was working still with the Air Ministry he told his fellow officers about this lovely weekend and he’d achieved it. Hadn’t told any of them before he came away and so a number of them tried to do the same the next weekend and the military police got to hear about it and came up and arrested them all and took them back before they’d had the weekend there [laughs] And it wasn’t Don. It wasn’t dad that had told them. That was just the way it was. I think, yes so I think there were too many of them. And within, I think it was within a couple of weeks of that time he had a motorbike again down there. This time officially. Legally. And he came up to London. He was being sent with revised plans of the Normandy invasion in an old laundry box and he’d got to get them across to Tilbury to see the generals there about the revised plans there. And so he brought these plans up in this old laundry box and we slept in my mother’s spare bedroom up there of course with this revised plans of the Normandy invasion under the bed. I mean, I wasn’t allowed to see them of course. I mean he was totally honourable in that way but I don’t know that anybody else knew that and I don’t know that you ought to put that in really [coughs] sorry.
CB: I don’t think it will be too sensitive.
DB: Sorry?
CB: I don’t think it will be too sensitive.
DB: You don’t think it would.
CB: No.
DB: No. Probably wouldn’t.
CB: No.
DB: Well, there we are. I’ll have to leave that to you.
CB: What was the most memorable thing about your experiences in the war?
DB: Oh, well, I I think I would have to say [pause] because they went over on the Tuesday for the landings and I didn’t hear another word until the Saturday. I didn’t know whether he was alive or dead. And on the Saturday, because it took a couple of days to get him back to England, on the Saturday I, I was at work. Again, we still worked on Saturday mornings. My sister phoned me from the Headquarters and said, ‘You’ve got a telegram, Daph.’ And straightaway she said, ‘But it’s alright.’ Because you see being a wife I had the first telegram. ‘But it’s alright,’ she said and she was choked and I was choked hearing this. She said, ‘I’ll read it to you.’ And of course, I’ve never forgotten he just said, ‘Wounded. Now in hospital. Writing. Love Don.’ But it wasn’t the official telegram. That came later. The War Office telegram. He had got the sister of the hospital, Botleys Park, he had got her to send that telegram to me as a personal telegram from him. And of course, my boss at the office packed me off home straight away. ‘Go on. You go home. You’re going home.’ And so I went home because I would obviously want to go down and visit him. I knew it was in Botleys Park. Must have. I don’t know how that news got through but anyway I went down to see him Saturday and Sunday and —
CB: Finally —
DB: That was the most memorable news because I knew he was alive.
CB: Yes.
DB: I knew I’d got a future. And he never saw active service again you see. He was —
CB: No.
DB: That was the end of his active war. Other than that as far as my own experiences perhaps in some ways seeing the horrors of the war and feeling that I would never want to do that again.
CB: During the Blitz.
DB: Yes. Yeah. And, and this lady whose head was open. And I think all of these things influence your thinking for after the war.
CB: Yes.
DB: How you feel about war itself. Now, I’ve got a young grandson who quite thinks about going in to one of the services and I think I don’t know whether I want him to. But —
CB: You mentioned the V weapons earlier. V —
DB: Yes.
CB: What was people’s reaction, first of all to the V-1s?
DB: Well, we were puzzled. We were totally puzzled. We didn’t know what it could be. What is this thing? It’s something different. Then of course very quickly they did get news out. We didn’t know. And the barrage balloons were up of course and we were hoping that they would catch these sort of aeroplanes in them and bring them down and there was more a widespread dispersal of where these things were falling. It’s where a lot of them fell around Epsom you see. It was horrible. And my own experience of being caught in that locked air raid shelter opposite St Thomas’ Hospital. I didn’t know, you never knew where they were going to fall. They were just making this noise and, until it stopped and then you didn’t know whether it was going to fall on you when it stopped. You didn’t know that it would go on a bit further over the river like it did with me. It went over the river. Or you didn’t know whether it would fall before then. There were so many question marks with all of this which left a great insecurity about life generally. You didn’t [pause] you didn’t know whether any moment might be your last moment. Your last conscious moment. Despite all that somehow you had an optimism that you would survive like I did when I saw the people lined up on the railway station saying good bye to their loved ones. I amongst them. Dispersed all along the railway station platforms. As the as the chaps went off to wherever they were stationed and you didn’t know whether that was the last time you would see them. So there was so, there was so much insecurity and yet you hoped. You carried on hoping. You believed. I believed we would come through. I believed we would win the war. Even in Harrogate where Harry Schofield the chap I was billeted with he got very depressed and I would go around singing, “It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow.” [laughs] and I’d say ‘It’ll be alright. It’ll be alright. You’ll find out. It’ll be alright.’ But you got, you did get depressed at times when it went on, dragged on so much and you knew that the war could not finish until we had gone in to Europe. So we knew that was still ahead of us. Nothing could happen. We couldn’t plan the future until that happened and we’d retaken Europe.
CB: The V-1 you got some warning because the engine stopped. It wasn’t supposed to but that’s another matter.
DB: Yes.
CB: But the V-2 you couldn’t hear it arrive.
DB: No.
CB: Until after it had arrived.
DB: That’s right. Until the bang happened.
CB: What was the reaction to that?
DB: Well, that first one happened, as I say I was in High Holborn and it fell in Chancery Lane. And again, to begin with because it was the first you didn’t know what it was. This terrible explosion. You didn’t know whether it was an unexploded bomb suddenly going off. One that had been dropped a year before perhaps because this happened too. Bombs would suddenly explode. And so you waited for news and, and I think we again they got the news through quite quickly that it was another V weapon that the Germans had, had invented. And, and we didn’t know what, whether there would be many. Whether it was a one-off thing. We guessed there would be more. Of course, if they’d been successful in getting it that far then it must be possible for them to get more that far. They came from certain fields in, on the continent and we were told that the RAF were bombing those places and of course but they were well fortified. I think some were at, no. it was the submarines that were at la Rochelle. They were more Northern Europe —
CB: Yeah.
DB: These V weapons. You probably know but certainly we were doing our best to bomb where they were being made and, and fired from. A lot of time you spent waiting to know more. And then when you knew more waiting to hear the next development or to feel or to suffer the next development yourselves. Hoping that it wouldn’t be your loved ones. You knew it could happen where they lived or where they worked. There was, there was so much uncertainty all the time.
CB: The V-1 by nature of its arrival created more blast at surface level. The V-2 descending vertically had high penetration and had less blast. From a public point of view which one was more terrifying?
[pause]
DB: That’s difficult to answer because there seemed to be more of the V-1s. There probably were.
CB: There were.
DB: The V-2s I think were over more quickly. Therefore, they haven’t left as big an impression on me as the V-1s did. But on the other hand you shook probably with belated fear when the V-2s happened. But then you said to yourself it happened, it’s done. For that one it’s done. There may be more. But with the V-1s you went through a longer process of hearing it. Not knowing how near it was or where it would stop or where it would fall when it did stop. So, in that way I would think the V-1s were more frightening for me. It wouldn’t be the same perhaps for others.
CB: Okay. Good. I think we must stop there. Thank you very much indeed. Absolutely fascinating.
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 Daphne Baptiste
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-05-04
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ABaptisteDMM170504
Format
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01:22:45 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Civilian
Description
An account of the resource
Daphne joined the Air Ministry at 17. She initially joined the Civil Service as she believed it would be a safe job with high wages. Throughout the war, she was stationed at Ladies College in Harrogate and was in charge of supplying water to many RAF stations. Daphne recalls her experience of the war as a civilian, as her father was a firefighter in London, she recalls a large amount of the Blitz. She mentions working with a young man who was a conscientious objector and describes how he was viewed at the time. During the Blitz, she was both a fire watcher and a first-aider. She also gives information regarding her family's experience during the First World War, including Zeppelin bombing. She recounts her memories of seeing St. Paul’s cathedral is surrounded by fire, seeing firefighters running to put out fires and the anxiety of not knowing if she would wake up in the morning. She recounts one or two deaths and many injuries in the fire service, including her brother, another fire-fighter, who was injured one night, and left disabled. She ends the interview by remembering marrying her husband, a Canadian born army officer, just before the D-Day landings, in which he was injured. She went a long-time without any communication, wondering if he would return.
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Yorkshire
England--Harrogate
England--London
Contributor
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Sam Harper-Coulson
Julie Williams
Carolyn Emery
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939
1940
1943
1944
1945
bombing
fear
firefighting
home front
love and romance
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/379/10126/PToombsSE15100008.1.jpg
3c55dfdb490ddfc1edb8835ee86b3926
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
Toombs, George
G Toombs
Description
An account of the resource
61 items. The collection concerns Sergeant George Toombs (1590211 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, decorations, memorabilia and 56 photographs. George Toombs completed 30 operations as a flight engineer with 460 Squadron from RAF Binbrook and served in Germany after the war.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Stephen E Toombs and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
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2015-08-06
2015-11-04
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. 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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Toombs, G
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Access Rights
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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
Raimbert
Description
An account of the resource
Vertical aerial photograph of Raimbert V-2 storage site. The bottom right of the image is obscured by cloud.
Captioned '6051 Bin. 31-8-44//8" 8,800' <--245° 1447 Raimbert Ki. 13x1000. 4x500 c28 secs. F/O Lester. T. 460'.
Date
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1944-08-31
Format
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One b/w photograph
Language
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eng
Type
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Photograph
Identifier
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PToombsSE15100008
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Conforms To
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Geolocated
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-08-31
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.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
460 Squadron
aerial photograph
bombing
RAF Binbrook
target photograph
V-2
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/725/10725/ABrandonJP180302.2.mp3
03e83eb935f3c68e6ca7bede2207ffe2
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
Brandon, June Pauline
J P Brandon
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with June Pauline Brandon (b. 1923, 8382 Royal Air Force). She served in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force.
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
2018-03-02
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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Brandon, JP
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JeB: This is an interview, is being carried out for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Jennifer Barraclough, the interviewee is Mrs June Brandon. The interview is taking place at Mrs Brandon’s home near Warkworth, Auckland. The date is the 2nd of March 2018. Okay, Mrs Brandon could you tell us, thank you very much for taking part. Could you tell us a little about your early life and how you came to join the Air Force, please.
JuB: As my father was with the Ghurkhas I was born in India, in the Himalayas and we had a wonderful life out there, riding twice a day and father had to go up the North West Frontier at regular intervals, we just wanted to keep the Afghans north of the North West Frontier so they didn’t come down into India, and they took tours of duty. We got leave in England every three years and when I was nine, my, the Gurkhas themselves are only about five foot three. Wonderful, loyal, great fighters, but the Afghans pick off the big ones cause they know they’re the officers. Father was brought back from the Frontier wounded, unfortunately got another bout of malaria and died, so we had to pack up. I was nine, at the ten, time, my brother was seven. And so we packed up, came back to England with mother who was widowed at twenty nine. And I can remember coming up the Suez Canal, I hated the topees, which were cork hats, and mother said to us, “come on you can throw your topee into the sea, you won’t need it again.” And I stood at the rail, threw the topee over and burst into tears and mother said what’s the matter. I had a pet donkey in India, I adored her and we just had a lovely relationship and I said, “I’ll never see my father or my little donkey again.” We came back to England and I was sent to boarding school. It was a school for all permanent officers’ daughters in Bath. I loved it there, they were great people and when the war started, the Navy, because we were on a hill above Bath, took over the school because they wanted to signal ships in the Atlantic. So we were moved to a beautiful country house where they built classrooms. We used to sit on the stairs and have lectures with ancestral portraits peering down at us. We had science lessons in the stables and art lessons in the Orangery. And I was, took school certificate there and I left school at seventeen. I looked around for what I should do and thought of nursing, but it looked like too many bedpans, [chuckle] so we weren’t allowed to join the Air Force till we were eighteen, so I put my age up a year, went up to London with mother who had some business to do, and whilst she went, I went along to Kingsway House and enlisted. They asked me for my birth certificate and I said, “oh I was born in India.” She didn’t seem to know. Father would obviously have registered me at Somerset House, so I got away with it. [Laughter] Well the next thing I know I’m on the train with a crowd of girls and the Germans didn’t bomb, this was after Dunkirk. They didn’t bomb Morecombe or Blackpool cause they thought they’d be there themselves in a few weeks. So first of all it was Morecombe and this endless marching up and down for drill. I found the shoes awful, I think they had slabs of concrete on the bottom, and I got chilblains. It was very, very cold. Well one morning the sergeant said to us tomorrow morning put on your overshoes. These were a kind of a galosh thing that came up to your ankles and did up with two buttons. So that morning I was doing great, I was marker cause I was the tallest, and at the end of the parade the sergeant said now take off your shoe, your moccasins, for inspection. I took them off, and everybody burst out laughing! I was standing in the middle of the Morecombe parade with a pair of red moccasins on. The officer looked at me, she couldn’t charge me with not being dressed on parade cause I had been. She just shook her head and walked away. [Laughter] The next thing I knew, I was posted to the Photographic School because I told them I had played with photography at home. And it was a six month course, and we started, it was lovely because you suddenly realised the class system had gone. In the desk next to me was Rachael Tennyson, Lord Tennyson’s granddaughter. Next, the other side was little girl that had worked in a chemists shop. We were all in it together, didn’t matter what our background was. We started off with the properties of light, then we went on to different lenses on cameras. We had an exam every two weeks, if you failed an exam [whistle sound] you were off. They couldn’t waste time on you. There were eighteen of us, our only trouble was we were billeted in Blackpool and there were bed bugs in our. Some people were moved three times, luckily I was only moved once. Some of the landladies were lovely, others were awful. Well, we got through the course, and they decided we must have a passing out parade. Well there was wide driveway with a wall down one side and suddenly the officers decided they had to be elevated to take the salute so they got on top of the wall. I was glad I was marker and they couldn’t see me grinning cause we did eyes right to five pairs of black polished shoes, [interference] we couldn’t see anything else. Well after two weeks leave I was put on camera guns [/interference] and these would, guns, synchronised with the real guns and they took a photograph of anything the Spitfires would shoot at. I was sent up to Newcastle to a fighter station. And there was only one other photographer, a corporal, he was a lazy thing. So my job was, I was given a bicycle with yellow and black stripes, given a satchel with the magazines and I had to cycle round all the operative Spitfires and test the cameras every morning. Well, I was always very careful going across the end of the runway if they were using that runway cause the Spitfires used to come in very low and very fast and I realised they weren’t going to stop for me! So I got up to the squadron and a sergeant came out and said, “what are you here for?” and I said I have come to test the cameras. And the whole lot of them burst into laughter. They’ve sent a girl! They were slapping their knees and dancing about and I thought what a greeting! So I grabbed a wheel chock; they were big triangular shapes of wood, with a rope through them and they put them in front of the Spitfire wheels so they didn’t move. Now the Spitfire wing is quite high and I had to look down. So I gathered the chock, took it to the port wing between the canon and the fuselage, took a screwdriver out of my pocket, undid a little panel in the wing, checked that there was, and then I said to one of them, the mechanic, could you jump into the cockpit and just give a quick burst to the camera only button. So, being a bit surprised, he did that. Then I took the magazine out to make sure there was enough film, put it all back together [interference] again and went to the next aeroplane. Then I had to sign a Form 700 [/interference] which was everything was checked, every morning and I had to sign for the camera gun. Well, there was a bit of fighting up there and several times the Spitfires went out and I got a call one day: “One of the pilots is sure he hit something, come out and get the magazine.” I cycled out there, I couldn’t believe it. There they were, with the film like this, looking at it and I said you’ve just ruined the film, you’ve put it to the light. They wouldn’t believe me! So I said come with me back to the dark room and I’ll show you. And I wound it on a big frame and developed the film for them. And they saw it was black, cover to cover. I was surprised pilots didn’t know about that. Anyway, a little later on I got a terrible pain in my stomach and the sergeant was roaring at me to get out of bed and get going. And I said I just can’t move. A friend of mine came over, realised I had a temperature and went and got one of the medical staff: acute appendicitis. So I was put on a stretcher, loaded into an ambulance. They couldn’t find mother because she was driving an ambulance in London. And I was taken down to the hospital, bumping over the tram lines, which was extremely [emphasis] painful. We get to the hospital and the nurse that came with me was carsick, so in the middle of an air raid with all ack acks going off, she was taken in as the casualty leaving me lying outside. They at last realised they’d got the wrong people, came with a stretcher on a trolley, put me on it. As we were going in to the hospital I said to the orderlies, don’t hurry the pain’s gone. They immediately started to run, my appendix had burst. No penicillin in those days, I didn’t realise how sick I was till I came to and found mother sitting beside my bed, she’d come all the way up from London. Well, I recovered and got, all told, four weeks sick leave. It was beautiful. I went to some friends of ours in the country. They were so kind to me, and this beautiful countryside, and you could forget the war. Well, when I was told I was fit enough, I was sent to RAF station Benson. Now we only [emphasis] took photographs, that was the sole purpose of the place. There were two cameras loaded behind the Spitfire cockpits and we had some um, Mustangs, not Mustangs, it’ll come to me. They were all painted blue and, making it hard to see against the sky. And the cameras were placed so that there was always an overlap this way, cause they didn’t turn over fast enough and this camera overlapped that way so if there was a damaged negative you could make it up with the other two. They were lovely girls there and we had a common room and the men had a common room. We used to have to change the chemicals at regular intervals so they gave us - because the hypo rotted our shoes - they gave us clogs. They are the most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever worn. And we used to clatter about sounding like horses on a hollow bridge. Because you had to change the chemicals by buckets. You had to fill the bucket and go up the thing and change the, in these big machines we had. And I was always the one in the dark room. I don’t know why. You went through double doors into the dark room and there was a red pan light. You had a spool here with the film on it to be developed and it was threaded through the machine as just a spare piece of film, so you’d cut the film like this with a razor, pull out a piece of red tape, which always amused me, press it down and fold it over and cut it again with a razor blade, then you’d turn the machine on. And there were these rods that went down into the chemicals, and you slowly lowered them, there were two for water to get the film really wet, then it went into the developer. There were six, this was all in the dark, then there were two of water and two of neutraliser and then the film went through a little rubber letterbox, and was finished in the open. There were three of us in a crew working these machines. The one in the middle saw that everything was developing correctly and washing correctly. There was a viewing chamber as it went up onto the dryer, which was long fluorescent lighting with warm air being blown through it and it would go round this and someone at the end would see that it spooled up properly. Then it went through to the printers which had similar machines, but just printing, only. When that was finished all the films were bundled up and sent over to Intelligence for a quick look at what we’d got. It was nearly awaysl of bombing raids to see the damage we’d done or not done. Then it was sent to Medmenham, which was the Central Intelligence Unit, for final analysis. We used to have in the hall a huge what we called the Sortie Board, which listed the sortie number and its ETA so that we had an idea and when it arrived it was put down as arrived, when it went into the developing, when it went into the printing and when it was finished was all noted down. The sadness comes if someone came down and drew a line right through it. Plane was missing. Sometimes they landed at another airfield, sometimes: the inevitable. I always admired those pilots because they had to fly with no guns because the cameras were so heavy. They had to get to the target, fly up and down, taking photos, then scoot for home, and they knew that the Germans gave their pilots a bonus if they shot down a reconnaissance plane. We used to get a lot of requests for shipping movements, troop movements, where things were. We found in one stage the Tirpitz in a Norwegian Fjord and they got her when she came out. We also found the Bismark, took photographs of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau that were bombed. And all together it was an extremely interesting but stressful job because you couldn’t make mistakes. The girls were lovely, I never had any argument, none of us did, and when there was no flying we’d all sit in the common room and do beautiful needlework or knitting or something. We were in a separate hut, the photographers. Well, one night the sirens went and it was freezing, I was a corporal then, and I said to the girls, do you want to go down the shelter, which was what we were meant to do. No. So I said stay here, these shelters were very nice concrete but there’s steps going down and water run down and when you got to the shelter you were sitting ankle deep in ice cold water! So we stayed where we were, suddenly after a lot of running round in the thing, the door burst open and a sergeant covered in mud started to curse us. “Who’s in charge here?” And I said me. “You’re on a charge for disobeying an order!” Cause they’d opened up the shelter and found nothing. So next morning I was in front of the CO, so he said to me – after the usual charging - why didn’t you go down there, and I said I had a feeling. So he caught on and put it down to women’s intuition. Actually, my only feeling was it was too damn cold” So I got off. [Laugh] So, well I was there for about four years I think it was, and then I was sent to Medmenham. That was all enlargement work and specialised work, but there were no aeroplanes, I really didn’t enjoy it. So I got a commission and I was sent to the usual training. By this time the Americans were in the thing and you know what we thought of them. You’ve heard the saying [chuckles] and I was disgusted when were sent on a talk to learn how to public speak, and the Americans just took us as, for popsies that they could pick up! Me and my friend were asked were we staying the night? We said certainly not, we’re going back to camp. They turned their back on us and went and talked to the others because we weren’t going to sleep with the devils! So that was fine. And then, I can’t remember why, I was on Windermere station and a train came in, doors flew open, this was near the end of the war, and a troop of soldiers jumped out carrying rifles and they lined up all the way down to outside the gate where there was a staff car. Two more carriages opened and two officers jumped out with their hand guns in their hand. Next thing you know the middle door opens, Rundstedt walked out. We’d captured him. He looked magnificent [emphasis] with that red general stripe down his trousers. I noticed that her wore the Iron Cross, but no [emphasis] swastikas. They put him on an island in the middle of Windermere Lake, as a prisoner. I can’t remember what happened to him in the trials afterwards. Well. Can we stop this? During the bombing, when I was in London, you think it was never, ever going to stop, just noise, noise, noise and you didn’t know what was going to happen. I used, if possible, to curl myself into a ball and recite poetry which I loved. I was always terrified of getting an arm or leg blown off and they’d feel sorry for me. Usually the bombers went home about three o’clock in the morning. And then we had the start of the doodlebugs. I was at home one day on forty eight hour leave in mother’s flat in London and the sirens had gone nine times. You forgot whether it was all clear or what, and mother always used to go into the hall of the flat cause there were no glass. I had a very interesting radio programme on – National Velvet about a horse. And she was shouting at me to come and a doodlebug went past the window. We were only on the fourth floor. There was a bit of a silence and then a great big explosion and mother said come on, we’d better go and see if we can help. We went round to a little square that was near us, all built by people that had escaped the French Revolution and it was all built in that lovely French style. The doodlebug had gone straight through one block house right down into the cellar. The house was completely gone, but standing on a landing on the top, with absolutely nothing underneath her, was a woman screaming her head off. Luckily the firemen came along with a long ladder and rescued her. And then we had the V2s coming and it was very, very difficult to find where they were coming from. And we kept taking photographs round Holland and round the coast and finally one of the intelligence girls found it at Peenemunde and she got the MBE for that, and we bombed that, which stopped quite a lot of the V2s. And then the war did end.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with June Pauline Brandon
Creator
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Jennifer Barraclough
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2018-03-02
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
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
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ABrandonJP180302
Format
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00:30:18 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
June Brandon was born in India, returning to England when her father died. She joined the WAAF and went into the Photographic Section, loading cameras on Spitfires then carrying out development of the films. She served at several RAF stations, telling stories of conditions in various places as well as experiences she had in service and on leave.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Pakistan
England--Bath
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Lancashire
England--London
England--Oxfordshire
Pakistan--Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
England--Somerset
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Anne-Marie Watson
Bismarck
bombing
ground personnel
RAF Benson
RAF Medmenham
Spitfire
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force