1
25
1845
-
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7c4c564398d73694dc49b1d39e3d2b6e
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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
Evans, Ernest Darwin
D Evans
Description
An account of the resource
71 items. An oral history interview with Darwin Evans (1921 - 2017, 1049547 Royal Air Force) and photographs, including several of Lancaster nose art, Lancaster W4783 AR-G George, and crashed or damaged aircraft. Darwin Evans served as an assistant to the Navigation Officer in 1 Group.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Darwin Evans and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-11-01
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Evans, D
Access Rights
Information about who can access the resource or an indication of its security status. Access Rights may include information regarding access or restrictions based on privacy, security, or other policies.
Permission granted for commercial projects
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
460 Squadron photograph
Airmen on a Lancaster
Description
An account of the resource
A squadron photograph of many airmen arranged in six rows at the front of a Lancaster with an seventh row on top of the wing. On the reverse '460 Sqn. RAAF March 1943 Aircraft 'R Robert' Lost on Skoda Raid April 17th 1943 24 Operations'.
Two further photographs are enlargement of the starboard and port sides.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
460 Squadron
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1943-03
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Three b/w photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PEvansD17020001,
PEvansD17020002,
PEvansD17020003,
PEvansD17020004
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 Australian Air Force
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-03
460 Squadron
aircrew
ground crew
ground personnel
Lancaster
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1706/38572/PWebsterE1801.2.jpg
bd871568ed63aa89f924af62bd970368
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Webster, Edward
Webster, E
Description
An account of the resource
18 items. The collection concerns Edward Webster (2210797 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, objects, documents and photographs. He flew operations as a flight engineer with 61 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Margaret Diane Butler and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-01-21
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Webster, E
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Squadron Group Photograph
Description
An account of the resource
A large group of airmen and ground crew arranged under a Lancaster. Information supplied with the collection states '61 Squadron 1945'.
This item was sent to the IBCC Digital Archive already in digital form: no better quality copies are available.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
61 Squadron
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1945
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
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
Photograph
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PWebsterE1801
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.
aircrew
ground crew
ground personnel
Lancaster
RAF Skellingthorpe
-
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b5cd378bd9603cf29b4d8cb442c845eb
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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
Bell, Oliver
O Bell
Description
An account of the resource
47 items. The collection concerns Flying Officer Oliver Herbert Bell (1915 - 1997) and consists of photographs and documents. He served as ground personnel at RAF Cranwell and was then posted to Aden and the Middle East with 12(B) and 8(B) Squadrons before the war. He later served at establishments in Canada and at RAF Blyton and married <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/208">Joyce Bell</a>.<br /><br />The collection was loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by G Sadler and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Achive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-02
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Bell, O
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[crest]
USQUAM ET PASSIM.
[underlined] CHRISTMAS DINNER 1933. [/underlined]
No 8 (B) SQUADRON
[underlined] KHORMAKSAR. ADEN. [/underlined]
[sketch]
[underlined] Menu. [/underlined]
Soup á lá "Slaney"
Haggar Shark Cutlets.
Turkey Mk1. (Mod:)
Boiled Ham.
Potatoes á lá "Trooper" – "Peirpoint" Sauce.
Flowers – Cauli – & – Sprouts – Brussels.
Puddings – Xmas – G.S. Pattern. – Brandy Sauce.
Mince Pies
Coffee by Dholn Wallah –
Cigarrettes [sic] by Abdul-ben-Naafi –
Crackers by "Butch" Ackerman & Co
No. 9's by M.O.
[sketch]
[page break]
[signature]
H J Melville
[signature]
N Butcher
J Kenney
[face drawing]
[signature]
[signature]
[signature]
Sapper
[face drawing]
H.L. [signature]
C J Adkinson
John Laurie [indecipherable name]
J H Page
Carrotts
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
No 8 (B) Christmas Dinner Menu 1933
Description
An account of the resource
The menu for dinner at Aden in 1933. On the reverse are some signatures.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
8(B) Squadron
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1933-12-25
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Yemen (Republic)--Aden
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
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Service material
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One double sided printed sheet with handwritten annotations
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MBellOH565848-210421-010001, MBellOH565848-210421-010002
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1933-12-25
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sue Smith
8 Squadron
aircrew
entertainment
ground crew
ground personnel
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1252/16973/SCheshireGL72021v10051.1.jpg
dc381b9b135f13e9dee57265a3189679
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
Cheshire, Leonard
Cheshire, Geoffrey Leonard
Baron Cheshire
Description
An account of the resource
374 items concerning Group Captain Leonard Cheshire VC, OM, DSO & Two Bars, DFC. Collection consists of photographs of people, vehicles, places, aircraft, weapons and targets; documents including, private and service letters, signals, telegrams, intelligence reports, crew lists and official documents. Cheshire served on 102 and 35 Squadrons and commanded 76 and 617 Squadrons. The collection includes details of 617 Squadron's precision bombing operations. Also included are two sub-collections: one containing 21 photographs of Tinian and Saipan, the other consisting of 37 audio tapes of speeches given by Cheshire after the war.
The collection has been licenced to the IBCC Digital Archive by The Leonard Cheshire Archive and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is property of the Leonard Cheshire Archive which has kindly granted the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive a royalty-free permission to publish it. Please note that it was digitised by a third-party which used technical specifications that may differ from those used by International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive. It has been published here ‘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.
Access Rights
Information about who can access the resource or an indication of its security status. Access Rights may include information regarding access or restrictions based on privacy, security, or other policies.
Permission granted for commercial projects
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
P/O A.J. Ward
RAF. MRU.
Hazelrigg Hall
Ashby Road
LOUGHBOROUGH, Leics.
March 3rd’ 44
Wing Commander Cheshire DSO.DFC.
Dear Sir
I just wished to let you know that I am making excellent progress with both arm and leg and that the Doc thinks I shall probably be fit in 4 or 5 weeks time.
Very best wishes to the Squadron.
Yours sincerely
Arthur J Ward
P/O
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to Leonard Cheshire from Pilot Officer A J Ward
Description
An account of the resource
Writes that he is making excellent progress with both arm and leg and should be fit in five weeks.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
A J Ward
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-03-03
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One page handwritten letter
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text. Correspondence
Text
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SCheshireGL72021v10051
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Leicestershire
England--Loughborough
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-03-03
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
Cheshire, Leonard. Correspondence
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
License
A legal document giving official permission to do something with the resource.
Royalty-free permission to publish
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is property of the Leonard Cheshire Archive which has kindly granted the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive a royalty-free permission to publish it. Please note that it was digitised by a third-party which used technical specifications that may differ from those used by International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive. It has been published here ‘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.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Claire Monk
Cheshire, Geoffrey Leonard (1917-1992)
ground personnel
medical officer
-
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/548/18509/BLeedhamALeedhamAv10002.1.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/548/18509/BLeedhamALeedhamAv10003.1.jpg
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Leedham, Alma
Alma Lucy Muriel Leedham
A L M Leedham
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Leedham, A
Description
An account of the resource
Four items. An oral history interview with Alma Lucy Muriel Leedham (1922 - 2020, 455833 Royal Air Force), memoirs of herself and her husband Warrant Officer Terence Leedham an armourer who also served on a number of bomber command stations. She served as a driver in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force stationed at RAF Scampton and East Kirkby.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Alma Leedham and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-05-14
2017-05-26
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Alma Leedham
I was born in Fulham, London on 26th June 1922. I am now 91 years old and trying to put into words some of the things that have happened during the years so far. I had no sisters and just one brother. Graham was two years younger than me and from the age of 6ys I was made responsible for his safety. London was a wonderful place in those days. We were allowed to wander off and visit Museums and anything that was ‘Free of charge’.
.We [sic] learnt to swim in the Thames and were constantly going over the bridge into Putney for the start of the Oxford & Cambridge boat race each year. When I was 11 years old the family moved to Kingston-on-Thames. Because I had been run over by a car when I was 9yrs old I did not go to school for several weeks (in those days it was not considered important for a girl to do well at school – she would grow up and get married). I was just 14yrs and 1 month when I left school and got a job as an apprentice dressmaker. I made tea, washed up and went out to buy buns for the ladies tea break during which time, I also had to take material to another shop where buttons and belt buckles were made to order. I was there for about 6 weeks, earning 5 shillings per week and I got the sack for sliding down the banisters.of [sic] the 3 storey workshop. Apart from getting another job on the way home, not a lot happened until War was declared in September 1939. By then I was 17yrs of age and working as a Progress Chaser at Hawker Aircraft where the Hurricanes were being built. I stayed with them until near the end of 1941 when I decided to join the RAF
Learning to drive at Blackpool was not easy. There were 3 girls to each car and, when 4 of our ”Teachers” were picked up on a smash-and-grab raid by the Police, we had to start from “scratch” in North Wales which, at that time of year, was really beautiful with all the many rhodedendrons [sic] in full bloom. Three weeks on cars followed by another 3 weeks on lorries found most of us having passed all tests. Our half days were spent on classroom work where we learnt all about what went on under the bonnet
Early in June 1942 I was posted to RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire where as WAAFs we were billeted in what had been originally, the married quarters. There were 3 of us to a room. Kath Williams (known as Bill), Vivian Winsome and myself. I think there were at least two more girls in the upstairs bedroom. (I little knew then that my second daughter would be born in the same house, No 18,. Some years later) Of course we only used the house for sleeping and our meals were served in the main cookhouse which also served as a cinema in the evenings. Driving all types of vehicles and meeting all sorts of people was soon part of the daily round. At that time Squadrons using the 4 hangers were 83 Sqdn who were in the process of changing from Wellingtons to Lancasters and 49 Sqdn who were flying Manchesters. Manchesters only had 2 engines and so, apparently, were not able to travel the required distances to Germany and were taken out of use. 83 Sqdn had been posted down south where I think they became part of the Pathfinders and, 57 Sqdn from Feltwell in Norfolk arrived as their replacement. It was then that I was transferred from a general driver in the MT Service area to 57 Sqdn as a tractor driver; taking the bombs from the Bomb Dump to the kites (as the planes were called in those days).. My house mate, Vivian, worked in the Bomb Dump and each morning she would have 6 bombed up trolleys (2 bomb loads) ready for me to take to the aircraft that would
[page break]
Be flying that night and I would leave for the dispersal points where the armourers would be waiting to take one 4,000 bomb and 2 loads of incendiaries for each aircraft. I soon got to know quite a few of the Ground Crews and to cut a long story short, among them was the man who was destined to become my future husband. Lofty Leedham (he was 6’2”) as he was known then was a Flight Sergeant in charge of the guns and turrets and the men who worked on them. Our boss was Warrant Officer Cook but, to tell you about him would make my story a great deal longer. It was quite a while before I discovered that Lofty’s Christian name was Terry. Our first date was on 6/06/43 and early in July Terry came down to Kingston-on-Thames to meet my Mum & Dad. In the August, only a month later 57 Sqdn was moved to East Kirkby where A Flight of 57 became part of the newly formed 630 Sqdn. We got married on 12th September from my parents home in Kingston-upon-Thames. Due to “rationing” and a shortage of everything, our wedding took place with me wearing a borrowed wedding dress but, we did manage with the help of neighbours, who gave us their food coupons, to have a small Wedding cake. Because the arrangements we had made for our honeymoon collapsed, we spent the next week living with my parents and going to London most evenings to see some of the shows. We did manage to see the Beverly Sisters and Danny Kaye before going back to East Kirkby where arrangements had been made for us to live “Off Camp”. the farm/pub where we slept was homely and was also very handy, as the bottom end of the farm was the boundary of the RAF perimeter and it was just a case of lifting our bikes over the railing and cycling round the Airfield to where we worked. It was then that I was put on night duty, so we were almost just passing each other, either to go to work or to come home each morning and evening. But that didn’t last for long when the discovery that I was !expecting! got me sent home to Mum & Dad. So I was no longer a member of the RAF. When in August of the following year our first daughter, Lesley, was born, we managed to find ‘Living Out’ accommodation in Lincoln which was some way from being ideal. Being back at RAF Scampton was like going home for us. We eventually were given the opportunity to taking over one of the Married Quarters with the provision that we clean it up and make it liveable. That was when we moved into No 18. and where our second daughter, Valerie was born, almost exactly 2 years after Lesley. (just 4 days difference). This was quite soon after we had found a nine month flatcoat (like a golden retriever only black). We called him “N*****” after Guy Gibson’s dog. He was a birthday present for Lesley. In those days we didn’t have much money so we were very pleased when the local butcher gave him to us. His history was that he had been bought by a couple for their son who had unfortunately been killed in Germany and they were unwilling to keep the dog. N***** spent many years with us but there were times when we had to leave him with my parents. For instance, when Terry was posted to the middle East and Singapore. I often had to wait a long time for a married quarter to become available but when I was able to take the girls to where ever Terry was serving I had to leave N***** with my family and go. . . N***** was always so pleased to see us each time we came home. The years passed and when we were living near Salisbury and the girls were starting to go to school there were no married quarters available, so we bought a caravan and got permission to live in the grounds of the nearby School of Chemical Warfare where Terry was in charge of “Working with Chemicals” . . Soon after we moved into the married quarter. I discovered that I was expecting another baby who arrived in the January and was our son, Richard. We now had three Children. . The next posting was Singapore and
[page break]
I waited 15months [sic] before getting a trip on the Asturius, (troopship) with the girls to join him. . The Suez Canal was not available for us in those years so, a trip round the bottom end of Africa lengthened our journey to Singapore. Terry met the ship on the harbour and took us to our new home in Serangoon Valley. (All this was written some time ago and I am now trying to make some sort of finish. (Terry died 25years [sic] ago and my memory is not quite what it was . . . . I am now 93 years old. .
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
Alma Leedham's memoir
Description
An account of the resource
Tells of early life in London, joining the Woman's Auxiliary Air Force in 1941 and training as a driver. Relates experiences at RAF Scampton and then with 57 Squadron as a tractor driver pulling bomb trolleys. Subsequently went to East Kirkby. Married Terence Leedham who was an armourer on 57 Squadron in late 1943. Left the Woman's Auxiliary Air Force on expecting her first child. Continues with family history at RAF Scampton and postings to the middle east and Singapore.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
A Leedham
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Three page printed document
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
BLeedhamALeedhamAv1
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--London
England--Lincolnshire
England--Kingston upon Thames
England--Surrey
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942-06
1942-09-12
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Steve Baldwin
49 Squadron
57 Squadron
630 Squadron
83 Squadron
animal
bomb dump
bomb trolley
ground personnel
Lancaster
love and romance
Manchester
military living conditions
military service conditions
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Scampton
service vehicle
tractor
Wellington
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1519/30375/BGambleATGambleATv1.2.pdf
2657924e2f12afbc9e2eaea6afe49c54
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
620 Squadron
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
2016-06-23
Rights
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620 Squadron
Description
An account of the resource
Twenty-three items. The collection concerns 620 Squadron and contains photographic slides or aircraft and places, an autobiography of Alan T Gamble, wireless operator training school documents, a memoir of operations on D-Day by Noel Chaffey and a short biography of him as well as noted of crews lost on 620 Squadron during Arnhem operation.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Darren Sladden and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[underlined] WATER UNDER THE BRIDGE [/underlined]
By
ALAN T. GAMBLE
[line of stars]
[underlined] PART ONE [/underlined]
[underlined] “BY THE SEAT OF HIS PANTS” [/underlined]
[line of stars]
[underlined] PART TWO [/underlined]
[underlined] “NO PROBLEM SPORT” [/underlined]
[line of stars]
[page break]
TO THE MEMORY OF THE AIRCREW
OF
BOMBER COMMAND
WHO WERE KILLED OR MISSING
IN
OPERATIONS OVER EUROPE
1939—1945
[line of O’s]
[page break]
THERE ARE OLD PILOTS AND BOLD PILOTS
BUT
VERY FEW
OLD….BOLD PILOTS
Anon.
[page break]
[underlined] FORWARD [/underlined]
Like most impressionable youngsters I had ambitions; notwithstanding the fact that ambition is one thing and the chance of achieving it is something quite different.
In those early days I was not aware that there were so many factors involved. The only one that seemed obvious to me then was opportunity, or the lack of it, but on reflection it is obvious that both ability and motivation were most certainly lacking.
With the most important ingredients that one needed to guide one's path in life missing. I was stuck in a rut which seemed to be the normal lot of an average child from an average working family, although there may well have been a spark of a Walter Mitty trying to get out.
I had developed an interest in all things mechanical from bicycles to motor bikes then cars and aeroplanes. As far as aeroplanes were concerned I could not get enough of them. I read everything I could lay my hands on. I made models. I went to air shows to be thrilled by Alan Cobhams Flying Circus at Shoreham and to Tangmere for Air Days. On one occasion my hand built bicycle took me as far as Hendon for the Air Pageant and more thrills.
I once watched one of the giant German airships, the Hindenburg, cruise in from the Channel between Worthing and Lancing on it's way to Cardington, never suspecting that in a few years time there would be more lethal visitors following the same path.
Those early days were full of the exploits of aviators. Scott and Black and the original Comet. Amy Johnstone and Jim Mollison. The Schneider Trophy attempts and new records being made all the time by intrepid aviators on transatlantic and round the world flights from places like Hendon and other mysterious outposts of civilisation such as Mildenhall!.
For me to ever come into close contact with aeroplanes looked like remaining a schoolboy dream forever.
My schooling was not spectacular. I reached no academic heights. I could not even qualify for High School. I don't think I ever
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had a school leaving certificate but if there was one perhaps the kindest comment that could ever have been made on it would have been "goodbye"!.
On leaving school I had taken up an apprenticeship as a cabinet maker/polisher and the years passed by as the world lurched from one crisis to another until the prospect of another war loomed on the horizon.
Eventually the day came when ultimatums were given and promises were broken which resulted in the Prime Minister broadcasting the declaration of war against the German Nazi State over the radio on 3rd September 1939.
I had already made tentative enquiries about joining the RAF which attracted me like a magnet. Perhaps that is when I should have joined but I didn't; and the story that unfolds is the result.
[line of stars]
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It is difficult to describe one's feelings at the time of a declaration of full scale war in the knowledge that is was likely to be a very messy business.
For myself I could only recall all the stories that my father and my uncles had related of all the horrors that they had experienced or that they knew of and it was only 21 years since the last terrible conflict had ended with all of the human debris and suffering still evident in everyday life.
Even the Sunday walks along the prom. at Worthing were not without their reminders, with the war wounded from a nearby base being taken out in their basket chairs. They were the blinded and the limbless and those with such disfiguring injuries that they had so be covered with netting to avoid upsetting the kids or the sensibilities of some people whose war had only meant a few shortages and would rather that such unfortunates were kept out of sight.
There seemed hardly a family that had not lost a loved one, some having disappeared from the face of the earth with no resting place, and it looked as if we were going to have to go through it all again.
I had a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach as I made my way to the front garden gate with my friends after we had heard the broadcast by the Prime Minister; “....we are at war with Germany .....”. We were very quiet for a while as we contemplated what it was going to mean to us all and were each busy with our own thoughts when the wailing of the air raid siren jolted us back to reality.
As is turned out it was a false alarm but it certainly go things moving. Almost before the siren whined down an Air Raid Warden dashed by on his bike frantically ringing his hand bell and shouting to us to take cover which made very little impression on us except to shout back and tell him what to do with his bell. After that initial jolt the conversation turned to what we were going to do about it as there was little doubt to our minds, at our age, we were bound to be involved and would be likely to join a lot of our other friends who had already joined the services.
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I had made up my mind that it was going to be the Air Force for me but it was a long time before it was possible to get anything near what I wanted.
Every time I went to the recruiting office I found that their priorities did not coincide with mine and in the end I left it in the lap of the Gods.
Shortly before my 20th birthday I was called up!.
A great deal had already happened. Norway and Denmark had been lost to German domination and most of the continent of Europe was under the NAZI jackboot.
We had suffered serious setbacks all over the world and our resources were stretched to the limit. We had fought the Battle of Britian [sic] and only won it by the skin of our teeth. The threat of invasion of our shores still hung over us, which I and a good many others, as civilians, had been prepared to defend in the uniform of the LDV. (Local Defence Volunteers), later to be renamed 'The Home Guard' or more affectionately known later as 'Dads Army'.
I still wanted to change my kharki [sic] uniform for a blue one so when the time came it was 'in for a penny-in for a pound', I volunteered for aircrew; and much to my surprise, was accepted. There were still hurdles to be overcome like the medical examination and that was a tough one but when it case to deciding the aircrew category that I wanted the selection board and I had a little problem.
With so many young men joining, mostly with ambitions to become a pilot like myself, there was little chance for me with my educational qualifications; or lack of them!
They said No to pilot, No to Navigator, and No to Flight Engineer, which was actually my second choice, but they finally agreed that I might make the grade as a Wireless Operator/Air Gunner. That was good enough for me, especially as there were a lot of other things that I did not want to be!.
That was it, and I still had a chance of getting into the air but it took a long time. Nearly two years; and not without a few ups and downs along the way and a lot of hard work to make up for my mis-spent youth.
[page break]
With a great deal of excitement I followed the instructions that I had been given and found my way to Cardington in February 1941 for 'induction', which seemed to me to be a new word for a monstrous machine that devoured humans but had none of the glamour that I had expected of the place that I had previously known from news reels and books. The home of the airship.
Anyone that went through that routine will recall that as soon as the gates were behind you and you got a number that is all you were.
Most areas were out of bounds and we were confined to camp. No longer was our life our own so I suppose it is not surprising that I only saw the airship sheds close up on one occasion whilst I was there.
I saw more of a highly polished floor under my nose, and of the plumbing of the latrines, and the mess kitchens on fatigue detail and of uniform beds and uniform lockers and contents until I was utterly sick of the sight and smell of boot polish, floor polish, metal polish, stained porcelain and disinfectant and stacks of greasy tins.
It did not take long to learn that everything was best done by numbers if I was going to survive without getting into too much trouble.
There was the one time that I made the mistake of allowing myself some original thought when I forget that airman were not supposed to think and that the order of the day was still "yours is not to reason why, yours is but to do and die". The very backbone of blind discipline, in that terrible place.
One wet day the hut sprung a leak allowing a steady drip of water to splash onto our brightly polished stove in it's immaculately whitened surround next to a highly burnished coal bin which contained a load of rubbish under a carefully placed top layer of dusted and polished coal.
I would go as far as to suggest that the coal was kept just for inspection time and was otherwise locked away, whilst we did our best to burn the rubbish and the dust. With very little success of course.
The net result was that the leak was threatening to destroy all of our hard work just before an inspection by an officer was due.
[page break]
It seemed that the easiest thing to do was just to place a fire bucket on the stove until the last moment but the Sergeant in charge had different ideas when he came in for his final look around.
I was left speechless after a good dressing down for mis-use of fire fighting equipment when the offending bucket had been removed from the hot stove and the guilty person identified.
He roared; as only Sergeants can, "you, can't put out a fire with 'ot water you stupid airman: what are you?". By that time I had also learned in a very short space of time that the safest thing to do was agree with anyone with stripes on his arm, and admit sheepishly,to the accusation.
After that it was just a case of keeping the head down and only doing what I was told to do in that soul destroying place and hope that my turn would come later.
Most of my off duty time; and there was not such of that, was spent resting or sleeping. I was too damn tired to do such else after being on the go for about 14 hours a day.
It was obviously more than some people could take and it was not unusual at night to hear a little weeping going on in the darkness by someone who was finding it particularly hard going. Our civilian clothes and most of our personal posessions [sic] were sent home in a cardboard box at the RAF's expense and then we belonged to the Air Force body and soul. After that it was just a matter of settling down and running around like headless chickens.
We learned all the basic things that were expected of us. Who and who not to salute and how. Great chunks of Air Force Law and the Air Force Act were thrust down our throats, including the riot act; to leave us in no doubt what-so-ever as to the very meaning of the word 'discipline' as applied to the forces of the Crown.
It was definitely "yours is not to reason why" etc,...and after three weeks of agony, having been confined to camp all of that time, we were considered fit to go out in public with our bright new uniforms and partially shaven heads.
[line of stars]
[page break]
Going out in public did not mean that we were free. We went in a large party by train, more or less under escort of several NCO's and were delivered to a unit at Skegness for more 'square bashing'.
After being herded and marched about we eventually finished up being allocated billets in what had previously been holiday boarding houses, but there was a difference. Air Force beds and the three 'biscuit' sections of mattress had taken the place of the more comfortable Slumberlands that pre-war paying guests had enjoyed, and as many as possible had been packed into each room.
We were rounded up every morning and marched about and drilled first without rifles and than with, and drilled some more, and then some more until at times I wondered if my feet still belonged to me. They finished up a mass of blisters on top of blisters until a visit to the MO determined that synthetic soled boots did not agree with me and the inflamation [sic] subsided after changing to leather. How glad I was that I had not gone into the Army. I wondered if they would have been as sympathetic?.
At last we were moulded by our drill instructors into regimented lumps of humanity and with the passing out parade in sight there was considerable competition to be the best flight on parade.
Well; among the instructors anyway.
My efforts made sure that we were not!.
It was still common practice in those days to wear such things as sock suspenders as socks were not made to stay up on their own any more than trousers were, so it was not unusual for me to be wearing them.
Unfortunately one of mine came adrift on the march as we pounded our way towards the saluting base with rifles and fixed bayonets. It was causing a bit of a problem as the chap behind me kept crashing his No.9's down on the trailing bit and although it was a bit of a lurching job as it twanged it's way back I am sure we could have got away with it.
Nevertheless, a young officer on the flank worked his way across and came alongside me as I was in the outside file, and hissed out of the corner of his mouth, "step out of line and fix that quickly", so I did.
I stepped smartly out of line by half a pace and bent down to
[page break]
rip off the offending article but half a pace was not enough. Four others tumbled over the top of me in a tangle of arms legs and rifles.
We managed to recover sufficiently, minus a sock suspender, to get back in line before we marched past the saluting base but it goes without saying that there were some very red faces. I was of course carpeted by the flight commander and threatened with all sorts of punishments and it was the first time that I had been on a charge of any sort. I'm not sure what the charge was though but I was beginning to get the hang of things by that time. I do remember that with tongue in cheek I stated in my defence that I had only done what I had been told to do like a good airman and the fact that it went wrong was hardly my fault……there were a lot more red faces and a great deal of spluttering. The case was dismissed and I was told that I should go a long way in the Air Force. The further the better…..like TIMBUKTOO!.
As far as postings were concerned I kept my fingers crossed for a few days and was agreeably suprised [sic] to find that I was going to Mildenhall in Suffolk, instead of some isolated outpost, to continue the process of turning me into aircrew.
Sometimes I have thought that Mildenhall might have been better off without me!.
[line of stars]
[page break]
At Mildenhall my 'on the job training' started off in 'A flight office of 149 Squadron and there I started, to familiarise myself with the workings of a flying unit and aeroplanes.
I sort of bumbled along quite happily as the work of the unit grew on me.
It was one big thrill to be soaking up the atmosphere of this very famous RAF station that had been the scene of numerous departures of record breaking flights before the war and had at one time even been inspected by representatives of the German Air Force High Command.
Currently it was flying almost nightly operations against targets in Germany and German occupied territory, particularly ports and invasion barge concentrations.
I was moved out to the flights after a certain incident which was the result of been asked for assistance by the flight commander. It seemed that he had mis-laid his safe key and as he was 'ops' that night "could I help by getting his pistol out of the safe”?.
It was yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir. That request was as good as an order from such an exalted person and it certainly never occurred to me to refer the matter to the Flight Sergeant in charge.
Many years later I was to find out the correct procedure to achieve access to a safe when the key had been mislaid, but then; if the officer did not seem to know what to do why should a 'bloggs' with only a few months in the service be any better informed!.
'Sir' was quite happy to find his pistol, all oiled and cleaned, with ammunition, laying on his desk when be returned from briefing and with many other things on his mind he did not have time to ask questions.
It was two days later when the subject came up again as he still could not get into his safe so I was obliged to show him how. All I had to do was pull it away from the wall diclosing [sic] the hole in the back created by a circle of holes done with the aid of a Wolf electric drill. He seemed very upset and reckoned with a bit of luck that he would become a casualty before anyone found out. I must confess that…………………
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in my ignorance I could not understand his concern.
People and aircraft were being lost and damaged right left and centre but 'slight' damage to a safe seemed to be a much more serious problem.
I am not too sure of it but I do believe, that he was the great P.C.Pickard and that somehow he overcome the case of his damaged safe.
As for me, I was dispatched to the flight line and actually let loose with a tractor and refuellers. I don’t remember anyone asking me if I could drive but as it happened the only thing that I had been behind the wheel of before had been a Bren gun carrier,(in the Home Guard-days), when training with local regular units; but no-one seemed unduly concerned and I was soon charging about happily with petrol and oil refuellers as well as towing aircraft about.
It did not take long for the administration to find out that I did not hold a driving licence for my various sorties onto the public highway when I thought it was about time I tried to qualify for a full service licence. Not only was no-one interested but I found myself restricted to camp boundries [sic] only. No harm in trying anyway!.
In due course I found myself having to undertake a different sort of training.
Everyone was required to do a short local course of field training to ensure that they were proficient in the use of certain basic weapons, and as a relatively new arrival I was detailed to report.
I had handled enough weaponry in the Home Guard to know my way around most of what the RAF could produce and I had been awarded a marksmans proficiency in basic training apart from handling all sorts of non-standard stuff.
We had been issued with Canadian Ross .300 rifles of 1916 vintage that had never seen the light of day since they had been manufactured. They had hastily been taken out of storage as the result of an appeal made by Churchill for assistance after Dunkirk,and had been shipped to us urgently with millions of rounds of ammunition in a special convoy. Along the other items were more hand grenades, some Browning automatic .303 rifles and perhaps the most potent of all; the Boys .5ins anti-tank
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rifle which looked like a king sized rifle which fired armour piercing shot.
This latter item was looked at very suspiciously by the 1914/1918 veterans who were 90% of our ranks and when it had arrived and been degreased along with everything else there had been a lot of dicussion [sic] as to who was going to do the test firing of the thing. The net result was that they; and that included my father, encouraged me to do it, so off we trooped to the range up in the Downs to try and prove something.
Having given the Brownings a satifactory [sic] work-out the time case for the Big-one!
Despite the fact that it was on a bipod and it's heavily padded butt was pulled tightly into my shoulder, and I was in the classical prone position; when it went off I thought the heavens had fallen in. I was forced back several inches but despite the painful process the shot went where it was intended and everyone was satisfied. I promtly [sic] became No.1. on the gun.
The idea was to have a crew of four but it was questionable whether I would have the rest of the crew with me to spot and load when we were confronted by an enemy vehicle, despite the fact that in those desperate days we were expected to stand and fight to the last.
What we lacked in experience then we made up for by our determination to defend our homeland. The order of the day when things were at their worst was 'take one with you' which spelled out some very nasty goings on both for our unit and any Germans that got further than the units manning the beach defences.
Among the assortment of weapons were the 'Molotov Cocktails';bottles of mixed petrol, oil, and parafin [sic] to back up the lavish use of hand grenades.
Part of our defensive plan was to throw then all out of the upper windows to saturate the road junctions with splinters and flame; so my attitude towards that course was one of mild amusement. And a certain amount of smuggness [sic] .
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It therefore presented no problem when, at a certain part of the course we were in the weapons pit and the Flight Sergeant was calling us in one at a time and going through the procedure of throwing a hand grenade. After a series of bangs I was next in line, so it was "next one, step forward" etc and it was my turn to turn the corner into the active part of the pit.
I think that the Flight Sergeant had probably had one or two nasty experiences with the highly sensitive and nervous types as he seemed very tense when I arrived on the scene.
We had all done a dry run in practice so the rest was done in time honoured fashion as I was handed the grenade.
It was "by numbers-one, pull the grenade off of the safety pin, holding down the lever" ...."Two, throw the grenade overarm...and get down". The lever would fly off as it was thrown and then it would go off in either four or seven seconds from the time of throwing according to the fuse that had been inserted, and I doubt if many people hung about after the pin was out.
In the Home Guard we had practiced a short count after releasing the lever so that an air burst would result but what we were doing was not quite as sophisticated so I thought I would show off a bit. After pulling the pin and holding down the lever I enquired of the F/Sgt "now?".
He went a strange puce colour and kept shouting "now, now, now" as I continued to hold down the lever in the throwing position. Then he changed his cry to "everyone out" which was followed by a mad scramble as the trench was cleared in record time.
I contemplated putting the pin back in and handing it back to him but figured that was pushing my luck so I lobbed it down range where it went off with a satisfying bang.
I soon found myself facing a very irate 'chiefy' who suprisingly [sic] enough just sent me back to my place of work instead of escorting me to the Guard Room on a charge of some sort. But not without my ears burning.
He hurled several unkind remarks after me as I departed about "clever s...." and expressed the hope that the nest time I tried anything like that I would blow my f…… head off!!. Charming!.
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I soon found that there were plenty of other explosive articles about the place that one had to be very suspicious of in the absence of adequate instruction.
On my introduction to the innards of a Wellington I was told that the 'magic box' with a loose red cover on it in the navigators compartment had a demolition charge inside it and could make a nasty mess of things if interfered with. The same applied to the red cover over the firing switch on the table.
Other nasty devices were the explosive cable cutters set in the leading edges of the wings. It was good bye fingers if they were accidentally triggered and a short 12 bore type cartridge fired a chisel head into a plate.
A job that I did not particularly care for was towing a fully fuelled and armed Wellington about when repositioning was necessary.
It was a very rare job which I did very gently in case anything fell off despite being assured by many people that it was perfectly safe. After all; it was argued, the pilots had to taxy then around and fly them in that condition.
So they might have done but that did not make me feel any happier about the task.
Too many things just seemed to be taken for granted such as the incident out near 'A' Flight dispersals, no more than 100 yards from the 'Bird in Hand' and less than that from a fuel dump.
I came across an armourer sitting astride one of the new 4000lb. 'cookie' bombs on a bomb trolley. He was carefully chipping away a groove around it's middle with a hammer and a cold chisel as they had a tendency to slip out of the bomb hoist sling when arming up!.
The expression on my face must have been one of absolute horror if it reflected what was in my heart but once again I was assured that it was perfectly safe. Nevertheless, I took off at a high rate of knots to the other side of the airfield until he had finished.
I was to learn later that activities such as that really were quite safe. It was just a question of learning about what made things tick but I always remained a little suspicious ever since the occasion when a Cpl fitter had climbed into a Wellington
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undercarriage wheel wall to investigate the malfunction of an indicator micro switch. I had been shown such things when the safety locks had been in but on this occasion he had said "perfectly safe"…….but it wasn't. The undercarriage collapsed and he was crushed into a very small space and that, unfortunately was the end of his waiting for a pilots course to come through. It was a very unpleasant and messy business for everyone involved.
I generally tried to steer clear of trouble but it was not easy. I once got a loaded petrol bowser stuck in the sand on the way out to 'B' Flight. The Flight Sergeant was called to sort everything out, and me!.
Everyone stood around making various suggestions and I foolishly put in my pennyworth but got told to "belt up” for my suggestion so I just stood back and watched the fun. But I had a feeling that attaching a tow [underlined] above [/underlined] the tractor axle was not a good idea. There were lots of strong words when the tractor and the F/Sgt finished up on their backs but it eventually came out, I finished refuelling. and the aircraft went on ops. despite my efforts.
I still remained on towing and refuelling, even after I was left to refuel a Wellington on my own but I did not secure the filler caps correctly; mainly because as far as I can recall no-one had ever shown us how they should have been done.
It was a very alarmed pilot who landed immediately after take-off with petrol pouring from his wings, and the aircraft was unserviceable for some time whilst drying out. Even then I only had a dressing down and some belated instruction but perhaps the final effort was when I tried to put 'F' Freddie into dispersal on my own.
I had marshalled it in onto the taxyway opposite the dispersal pan and the Sgt. pilot airily told me to put it away; so I tried, but not very successfully.
Although I was fairly adept at hitching up the tow bar and operating the air brakes from the cockpit and I got nicely lined up going into the dispersal I had overlooked the fact that it was a bit of a down hill gradient and the brakes of a Fordson agricultural were not designed to hold a ten ton aircraft in such circumstances....and neither did it!.
Not only did the brakes not hold but the aircraft pushed the
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tractor, and me, through the hedge sideways resulting in a bent tractor and bent rear guns as well.
Eventually someone realised that perhaps a lot of responsibility was being placed upon 'Bloggs' from time to time, inexperienced as he was, and however willing he might be. From then on, although I still towed things about the fitters and mechanics, who were after all the responsible tradesmen, did the jobs that they were qualified and paid for....and more importantly, signed the Form.700 accordingly.
There were still some dirty and unpleasant jobs to be done from time to time; such as cleaning out the remains of a rear gunner from a battle damaged Wellington. A very unpleasant memory to carry with me when I subsequently set off for aircrew training. Despite the banishment to the more mundane jobs I did some-how get dragged in as an 'extra' in the film 'Target for Tonight', by being allowed on the mainplane and going through the motions of refuelling.
It was a great dissapointment [sic] when I saw the film after the editors had been at it. I appeared in a two second flash out of what I recall was at least a two minute take.
There is always the possibility that when they saw the proofs and noticed this leering airman on the wing trying to look like Errol Flynn they were obliged to do more drastic cutting rather than re-take it. We will never know as the film was also darkened by filters to give a night effect although it was taken in daylight!
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Piece by piece the vast programme of aircrew training which involved thousands of people was inexorably sucking me, and others, into it's system as it churned out the crews to man the thousands of aircraft that were pouring off of the production lines. My name came up to the top of the list and I was off on my travels again.
This time it was to Blackpool for the beginning of Wireless Operator training; which turned out to be just another production line although it was not nuts and bolts coming off of the end. Blackpool by that time was a sea of blue. Even Reginald Dixon the well known organist at the Tower Ballroom was in uniform as a Corporal drill instructor and his duties seemed to leave him a lot of time to continue to play the organ.
It was a welcome break to go along to the ballroom to enjoy his recitals. 'Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside' always seemed to be booming out some time of the day, but it was no holiday for us.
The boarding houses had been taken over in the same way as they had been at Skegness and they had crammed even more double bunks in so that there were about ten times the number of "guests" that would have normally have been accommodated in peace time.
It was a new experience to eat in our billets which was a change from the mass catering that I had been getting used to but although the landladies did their best with the ration allowances they did seem to dish up some strange things at times. Nevertheless, my taste buds had already undergone a change and I recall that I was eating a lot of dishes that I would have previously turned up my nose at. It was either that or go hungry!.
Our days were divided between morse training and drill with weekly visits to the swimming pool for our bath. The bath arrangement killed two birds with one stone as all the boarding house bathrooms were either locked up or otherwise out of bounds to us. We used the bedroom washbasins. The alternative to a [underlined] real [/underlined] bath was to partially heat a swimming pool.
The tram-car sheds had been converted for signals training and had been fitted with long tables equipped with headsets and morse keys, and stony faced civilian instructors seated at the
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end of each table.
Half the day was taken up in this environment getting used to the incessant dit,dit,dit,dah,dah,dah, at increasing speeds until the bell went to give us a break or when someone cracked up under the pressure and had to be carried away screaming or crying. It was not only the WAAFS that were affected that way!. No-one who ever went out that way ever came back but there were other ways of being withdrawn from training. It very nearly happened to me when I got 'stuck' at one speed and it was only after pleading with the chief instructor that I finally made the breakthrough.
Then one reached the stage where there was a progress test undertaken in the most nerve racking place. It was in the upper floor cutting rooms of Burtons, 'The Fifty Shilling Tailors', which had also been requisitioned.
The room was set out in a semi circle of tables facing a raised dais upon which there was one table with an elaborate brass morse sending key and a headset. All of the other tables just had headsets.
As we progressed through the course we were tested at an appropriate speed with no re-test if we could not meet the requirements, until the final test came up.
If anyone failed at that point they were washed out, finished, ceased training, call it what you like; and were sent off somewhere else to be something else.
The tension started to mount when the Warrant Officer who was conducting the test, appeared in his white dust coat and issued a dire warning about cheating. After that he set a metronome going to monitor the speed, and by the time he made his first signals check to ensure that everyone was hearing satisfactorily every nerve in the body was jangling.
By the time the opening dit,dit,dit,dah,dit, had come across some people had already gone to pieces but the remainder squared up their papers, checked that their half a dozen pencils were at the ready in case of breakages, and with one more deep breath just ploughed on hoping to get the test piece down with no more than the permitted number of mistakes.
It was inevitable that a good many people 'went for a Burton' in that place. 'Going for a Burton' was a phrase among aircrew
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when referring to those who for obvious reasons had disappeared from active service. That was the signals side of Blackpool apart from the fact that we even tried to read everything in dots and dashes. The paper, the hoardings, even our letters from home. The locals must have thought we were all daft but as in most skills it was a case of practice making things perfect or at least proficient, but I recall that we used to get some strange looks.
A lot of our time was spent in Stanley Park, the Tower Ballroom, and the public baths where we had our weekly bath; (unless one was rich enough to bribe a landlady). and that weekly bath in our case was combined with dinghy drill.
It is indellibly [sic] imprinted on my mind.
Stanley Park was bad enough with incessant marching up and down doing rifle and bayonet drill with a crazy old F/Sgt who worked us up to a pitch where we could have quite cheerfully put one through him. I'm sure old Freddie Fox knew that too.
The baths were something quite different.
Few people had swimwear and in fact it was considered 'cissy' to wear it anyway so several hundred blokes in their birthday suit's were quite a sight and there was a great deal of speculation as to the sight when they were replaced by WAAFS in the same state of undress. The mind boggled!.
To my knowledge no-one ever found out although there were a few bets taken. but security was very strict and WAAF Police replaced RAF Police when the switch was made and a roll call confirmed before the actual change over was made.
Despite the fact that I had been brought up by the seaside I was not a good swimmer, probably due to the fact that I had been pushed in at the deep end at an early learning stage. Being a slow learner I had swallowed a lot of water before being dragged out and pumped dry. It is hardly surprising that thereafter I was not attracted to deep water. Especially the cold variety.
Nevertheless, I did manage to swim the required width across the deep end to qualify as proficient but it was only the preliminary to the so called 'dinghy drill'.
I always seemed to go straight into a state of shock when it came to donning an icy cold, wet and heavy Sidcot
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flying suit, plus parachute harness and 'Mae West' life jacket which was inflated by the mouth after being thrown in. In practice the inflation was done by operating a pressure cylinder toggle but we had to do it the hard way.
There was an awful lot of floundering around after entering the water without swallowing too much especially with all the weight one was carrying, and suffering from the others making waves and generally simulating heavy seas before getting into the dinghy. It made things very difficult and I did not even enjoy doing the aggravation bit to others either.
There were times I could have cheerfully packed it in and remustered to a less demanding ground job but somehow I stuck it out.
[line of stars]
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The day finally dawned when the agony was over and with others I was off to Yatesbury in Wiltshire to learn all about procedures and equipment.
At last I was doing something tangible and I sailed through the course to be awarded the 'sparks' badge at the end plus a few more pennies in my pocket.
I certainly needed the latter as at Mildenhall I had for some reason been overpaid to the extent of being some £5 in the red at one time so deductions had been savagely made until the debt had been paid off. I could have settled it in cash at the time but I was told that the accounts section did not have a procedure for it so for a long time I had only been receiving 5/- five shillings, (25p) every two weeks and in a place like Blackpool my cash balance did not last long. It was no fun at all.
I was very glad when it had been finally settled and I no longer had to rely on the kindness of others for the odd cigarette, cups of tea and buns as well as the odd postal order from home. I'm sure a lot of others were pleased about it too.
I did manage to make up for the lack of certain 'home comforts', namely food, on one occasion though.
On a physical training run at Yatesbury one afternoon I decided that I had had enough and dodged the column by peeling off between some huts followed by a shout from a Cpl. who had seen me go. With that I put on a spurt with the intention of rejoining the party further down the route but did not reckon on the ability of the PTI.(Physical Training Instructor). He caught up with me first and that was me on a charge.
Later, when asked by the officer why I had not stopped when told to do so I simply told the truth and said that I thought that I could run faster than the PTI and that I had hoped to beat him back to the group. My award for failing to do so was three days C.C. (confined to camp), full marching kit parades twice a day at the guard room and kitchen fatigues to go with it. I didn't mind one bit!. I had nowhere to go anyway and I finished up being one of the few people in that place who was getting [underlined] four [/underlined] meals a day for a while.
It was worth peeling buckets of spuds and cleaning a mountain of dirty dishes and pans. The cooks were sympathetic and served up generous helpings as they would for themselves. I do not
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ever recall seeing a skinny cook!.
Someone had got hold of the idea that if you were particularly good at morse beyond the basic standard required then there would be a chance of being earmarked for Coastal Command so with others I put in the extra effort and time and achieved the extra speed almost up to Navy Telegraphist standard.
In principal it seemed a good idea when Bomber Command losses were reaching somewhat frightening proportions but it did not do me or anyone else any good at all as far as I can recall.
As soon as the course was over we were dispersed all over the place; mainly in Bomber Command, to consolidate the training doing all the things that Wireless Operators did and still wondering if it was all worth while.
I went to Marham in Norfolk.
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Photo
YATESBURY 1941
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I covered a lot of ground whilst I was at Marham but I still had to get airborne and there was a long way to go.
I suppose that being aircrew under training had a lot to do with the fact that I was given a wide experience of different jobs in a very short space of time. That is what I thought at the time anyway!.
I started out on the flight line doing daily inspections and ground tests on Wellington and Stirling radio equipments and was later transferred to what was then called Flying Control; as the R/T (Radio Telephone) operator.
Theoretically my job was to relay the controllers instructions to aircraft but everything seemed so incredibly slap-happy during daylight hours that I often found myself doing the actual control whilst the controller kept an ear open in the background.
I found myself particularly attracted to the two Thompson machine guns that were kept in boxes in the control tower. So much so that I was permitted to clean and polish then regularly; provided that I did not put the magazines on!. One particular controller seemed pleased to have someone around that was familiar with then as he certainly was not. My Hone Guard experience again. We only had one in the platoon but everyone knew how to use it!.
On one occasion during a quiet lunchtime with no movements notified I was on my own in the control tower when a Stirling arrived in the circuit and the pilot asked for landing instructions, but the pilot would not circle whilst I got in touch with the controller so I finally gave landing permission. Having given taxying and parking instructions I dashed out of the tower to marshall [sic] it in next to the tower. I was amazed to find that the pilot was a very small lady of the ATA. (Air Transport Auxillary [sic] ) and her only crew was a flight engineer.
I did not have such choice after that but to sign for the aircraft and then had another surprise when an Anson landed and taxied in without any warning at all. The pilot was non other than Jim Mollison who was doing the taxi driving to take the Stirling crew out.
The controller who had seen the activity from the Mess soon came dashing along after he had seen the aircraft in the.......
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circuit and were very surprised to find a brand new Stirling neatly parked but I got a hell of a rollicking for my efforts.
Things got tightened up eventually when another aircraft arrived that no-one seemed to know about. As R/T operator I also performed the duties of 'airmen of the watch' and although I had registered the notification signal in the log and written the details on the movements board it would appear that the controller had not placed a great deal of importance on the movement. As a result he was unaware of the visit of a VIP, (Very Important Person). None other than the Under secretary of State for Air!. Phew!, that caused a stir when he did realise what the score was. The Station Commander was not too pleased either!.
I suppose someone's head had to roll and it was possibly mine as I started a series of detachments to widen my scope of knowledge; unless it was to keep me out of the way!.
I did the rounds of Honington and East Wretham and numerous jobs and being of an inquisitive nature soon found out how things ticked.
At one time I was surprised to find that elements of the Czeck [sic] . Air Force were making a great deal of fuss over what they considered to be their low pay (they were paid RAF rates, Sgt's about £4.50 a week) then the unit moved and things went quiet.
Although I was expecting to be recalled to Marham it was still a shock when it happened. Even more so when I was required to draw flying clothing and prepare to go back to Yatesbury for the air training course. After that everything happened so fast that I wondered what had hit me. It was already mid 1942 and as our activities increased so were our aircraft losses increasing. It was with some apprehension that I embarked on this part of my training. My feelings were not improved when on the morning of departure; waiting for transport at the Guard Room. I was detailed off by the SWO (Station Warrant Officer), to help collect a coffin from the morgue and load it on the transport where it was draped with the Union flag.
I don't know if the SWO had remembered me from another incident which surely should have stuck in his mind, but whether he did or not I have reason to remember it as I was taught another lesson.
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It so happened that I snored; even in those days, which was not a good thing in amongst a crowd of people. In the barracks where we were jammed in with hardly room to move between the beds it was a considerable source of annoyance to my neighbours; if not the whole room although I was not the only one with the problem. It was just worse when I had put a few pints under the belt.
It was not unusual to wake up in the morning to find myself surrounded by a selection of footwear that had been hurled in my direction during the night. Whether any found it's target I would not know. I was usually too far gone.
There was one night that the others in the room could no longer put up with it even when well aimed No. 9's did not do the job and suffice to say that when the SWO marched onto the parade ground is the morning for the colour hoisting parade there I was, still fast asleep in my bed at the foot of the flag pole.
It was a hell of a situation as I struggled back to the billet with my bed and bedding with the SWO hurling dire threats after me. Good job I wore singlet and PT shorts in bed!.
However. it had not resulted in direct punishment. I was still on the mat of course but in my defence I stated that as I had known absolutely nothing about it by virtue of being asleep throughout the whole episode I could not be held responsible.
You can't tell SWO's things like that and get away with it even if the case was dismissed. It was not surprising that after the incident I found myself on guard duty every other night for two weeks, and that included the evening parade as well as the morning colour hoisting parade that the duty people did. It was very uncomfortable being under the eagle eye of the SWO all the time so my turnout and drill had to be impeccable to avoid further punishment. Somehow I got away with it. When detailed off for the loading up I was foolish enough to ask what had happened to the poor chap in the box; only to be told by the man, with a glint in his eye, that it was a Sgt. Air Gunner who had 'copped a packet' a few night [sic] previously. After that I was only too glad to see the coffin subsequently placed in the guards van and draped with the union flag in the care.....
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of the escorts whilst I took off to another part of the train and tried to forget about it.
Back at Yatesbury there were some familiar faces among the entry and we were in a different part of the camp; more or less segregated from the 'sprog' wireless operators, but otherwise there was little difference.
It was not long before many of us were sporting Leading Aircraftsman 'props', and a few more pennies came in useful as well. There was no such thing as a flying pay supplement in those days.
As usual the day was split between job training and other activities, and I was looking forward to the air experience part of it. At last I was going to get airborne and I was all set to enjoy it. It was the beginning of many occasions when I was to feel somewhat disillusioned about taking to the air.
Our initial flying was done in the De.Haviland Dominie as the RAF called them. Many were in fact ex. civilian Rapide's that had been requisitioned and as a result had had a name change and were flown by a mixture of civilian and service pilots.
They were fitted out with several radio positions at which we carried out exercises under the supervision of a Cpl. Instructor with a similar set-up on the ground where we also worked in rotation.
There was of course no toilet compartment, and not even the paper bag that is standard in today's aircraft. There was just an open square biscuit tin of the type that the ancient 'hard tack' biscuit came in, (circa 1917), and there were plenty of those.
That type of biscuit was being substituted for bread several times a week in most units as a great deal of our flour was being sent to the bottom of the Atlantic by the U.Boats, and the civilian population had preference when what limited flour supplies were being distributed. Hence the endless supply of tins. We were obliged to use them instead of paper bags but it was all very crude. It was loose on the floor for anyone to use as necessary. Ugh!!!.
It was a most nauseating experience as most of us were getting airborne for the first time so we were a bit queasy, and more!. It was all part of the elimination process. Anyone who spent
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more time at the 'throw-up' tin was threatened with withdrawal from training and remustered to ground wireless operator.
It was very difficult to force one's self to overcome the discomfort sufficiently to get back to work but the process was motivated by the fact that the rule was that the last one to use the tin was the one that had to dispose of it after landing. Yuk!. I made sure that it was not me.
I was not sorry to progress from that stage to the single engined Proctor for solo exercises. Then I only had myself to worry about…….and the pilot!.
By that time I was getting increasingly aware of the varying abilities of pilots. Not that I had had any alarming experiences, but the seat of my pants was always a very sensitive indicator of how a machine was handled.
It is difficult to explain but I had always had the same sensitivity either in a car or on the back of a motor-bike and that feeling was beginning to develops in respect of pilots. I had come to the conclusion that there were pilots and 'drivers airframe' to use a stores nomenclature description of an item, and it was always to be the same. I knew whether I was comfortable or not.
THEN I MET A PILOT WITH A REPUTATION…………..!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Photo
YATESBURY 1942
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On completion of the course the next move was to an Advanced Flying Unit at Penrhos, North Wales, on the Lleyn peninsular.
I fell in love with that area right from the start and still have a soft spot for it. The years have changed it very little. It was only a small airfield operating Ansons in which Wireless Operators and Navigators carried out more advanced exercises which covered a lot more countryside and took us almost up to the level where oxygen was needed. Just one more thing to contend with.
The pilots were all service types doing a stint as taxy driver to get more hours and experience as they progressed in their training but I had hardly settled in when I picked up a 'buzz' that was going around concerning a certain pilot who apparently was putting the wind up a lot of people.
He had gained a reputation for doing some crazy things and until quite recently had made a habit of flying under the Menai bridge which is the magnificent old bridge built by Thomas Telford across the straits between the mainland and Anglesey.
The practice had just been strictly forbidden under threat of the most severe punishment because someone else had tried it but had killed himself and a few others in the process.
Most people seemed to be keeping their fingers crossed hoping that they could avoid flying with him so I faced the future with some apprehension when I found myself on a flight detail with him as pilot.
My first impression of Sergeant. Francis, Cadell, Macdonald was that he did not look the sort that could put the wind up anyone. I had expected a 'jolly hockey stick' type such as the Pilot Officer Prune, (the accident prone cartoon twit), who featured in an Air Force Magazine, but as he did not fit that category I was forced to the conclusion that he must be downright ham-fisted.
It was a surprise to find that he was a little older than the average pilot, certainly on the wrong side of thirty, and it was many, many years before I was to find out exactly how old he was.
First impressions were of a strangely rugged character with rusty fuze wire type of hair with a heavy drooping moustache to match who seemed strangely out of proportion.
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It took a second look to find the real reason for that impression. His torso was that of a six footer, with well developed chest, arms like the branches of a tree but he had short stocky legs giving him an overall height of no more than 5ft 7ins.
In standard battledress which was designed to be purely functional he looked as if he was suffering from a severe case of 'ducks disease'.
We climbed aboard the aircraft after a briefing that was brief and to the point. "If we get into trouble I will tell you what to do, whether you jump or not, and you only jump when I tell you to. Got that?”. Then he started up, taxied out and took off and although I had my eyes shut during the first part of the routine I opened when there were no unusual sensations and wondered what all the fuss had been about. My sensitive parts had given out no alert signals and it all seemed pretty normal to me.
As the exercise progressed I virtually forgot that I was in an aeroplane despite what he was doing with the machine although it was impossible not to notice that he seemed to be trying to turn it inside out in the gentlest possible way.
The main issue was that I did feel any discomfort at all although a few hill sheep might have done so as we steamed up one side of Snowdon and down the other and we seemed to balanced on one wingtip as we went around the Great Orme on Anglesey with Puffins and other sea birds getting somewhat agitated by the disturbance. My insides took no longer to settle down after that flight than they normally did so I decided that I could cope with that sort of treatment at any time and it certainly made life interesting. My companions still had different ideas though as the stories of his various escapades became more and more exagerated [sic].
Before I left Penrhos I learned a little more about him whilst he was still scaring the daylights out of others.
He was reputed to have previously been Chief Engineer to Gar Wood the racing driver of pre-war years and although I have never found the need to verify the story I have never had reason
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to doubt it either.
As far as I was concerned he certainly knew what he was doing and that was good enough for me.
The operator training became more and more demanding as time went on and I had reached a point where there was a great deal of satisfaction in being able to transmit and receive messages in morse, juggle with frequencies and identify my control station through a cacophany [sic] of background noise. It was gratifying to be able to code and encode messages efficiently but as usual it was not all work and no play. I think we would have gone daft under the pressure if it had been. The pattern was the same as before with the days split between training and exercising.
There were invariably some high jinks in Pwllheli where the Royal Navy had taken over the nearby Butlins as a training establishment and in the traditional Navy way had named it HMS something or other.
There were all sorts of derisive remarks about Nary terminoligy [sic] as they called the bus the 'liberty boat' and they had to salute the 'quarter deck' on leaving and boarding their 'ship'. We called it the main gate!.
Of course we countered with suitable remarks about our 'wizard prangs', 'bombs away' and 'chocks away', but some they resented their 'ship' being called HMS Bullshit, all of which resulted in some good nattered rowdy exchanges in the local pubs.
There was a lot of ale sloshed around. and a great many fried eggs consumed in the basement kitchen of a sea front hotel after chuckout time at 6d, (2 1/2 new pence) each.
The 'end of course' party was a great success and I recall putting in a great deal of effort into assisting one member of the course with some conjuring tricks. He was a member of the Magic Circle and why he picked me I haven't the slightest idea. Little did he know what that did for my confidence which was being somewhat undermined by the realisation that I seemed to be accident prone. As it happened, the, programme went without a hitch and that little exercise did me a great deal of good.
I only vaguely remember the return to camp after that party. It was somewhat hilarious as we came back via the beach where several of us had to be rescued from the sand dunes where we
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had capsised [sic] and ploughed up a lot of sand.
I finally collected my flying log book that recorded the entry of the flight with one Sgt.F.C.Macdonald and normally it would have been just one more entry without much significance as I continued on my travels once more.
[underlined] Fate decreed that we would meet up again!!. [/underlined]
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Photo
PENRHOS 1942
Page 30 And there’s more!
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I continued the process of going up and down the countryside like a yo-yo which was quite an experience for someone like me who had never ventured very far from the home town before the war and I was certainly getting to know my way around.
My next journey was to a gunnery school on Walney Island just off Barrow-in-Furness, flying old hacks such as Blackburn Botha's and Bolton Paul Defiants which seemed to be a very chancy business.
Most of the time the direction of take-off was straight towards a hill and if that was not bad enough the Botha was a death trap on one engine. If there was an engine failure it could not maintain height on one and the emergency exit was straight into the propellor. Turning or not it was dicey.
The Defiant was not so bad although it had a nasty habit of flopping onto it's side in the air if the gunner failed to inform the pilot that he was rotating and firing on the beam. The pilot needed that information so that he could counteract his controls and it was not all that easy to get out of either if in trouble. I have the greatest admiration for the chaps that went into battle in those things.
Somehow I struggled through that period in the depths of winter and at one stage I was very close to being put back in training when I went down with a severe cold and only just avoided going sick, especially as we had strict orders about flying whilst suffering from a cold which resulted in bunged up nose and ears. I felt so bad one evening that I doped myself with whisky and asprin and retired to bed early after a hot shower even though it meant going to and from the ablutions through several inches of snow.
By the time the others came back to the hut later in the evening my condition had them so worried that they woke me up.
There was a considerable cloud of steam rising from me but once they were assured that I was not on fire the threw more blankets on me to continue sweating it out.
Despite the fact that I was a bit wobbly in the morning I still managed to fly my last detail and in fact even get a good score but the rest of the time there is a blurr [sic] .
I have vague recollections of Northen [sic] ale which appeared to be a lot stronger than average and of an hilarious evening at
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a vaudeville in Borrow where most of the course occupied the front row of the stalls, booing and cheering the acts as seemed appropriate.
There were often rowdy exchanges with the conciencious [sic] objectors who were formed into non-combatant pioneer units to man things like smoke generators to mask the docks from air raids, and some energetic clashes with strong minded and well muscled WAAFS who manned a lot of the searchlights and barrage balloons. All good clean fun!.
Eventually, in the end came the passing out parade and the award of the cherished Air Gunners brevet with promotion to Sergeant, and although that was only the outward sign of qualified aircrew it did at least take the place of what had by that time a very grubby white cap flash.
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There was still a lot of training to do, and more travelling as well.
The travelling was not so easy by that time as most of us had gathered more flying kit so everywhere we went it meant struggling with two kit bags.
The next port of call was a Wellington Operational Training Unit at Turweston, which was a satelight [sic] unit of No.12 OUT Chipping Warden, both near Banbury. Oxford. 'A' and 'B' Flights were at Chipping Warden and 'C' and 'D' Flights were at Turweston.
It was there that crews were put together more or less by mutual agreement.
In the first 24 hours everyone just browsed around gathering more paperwork, dealing with arrival procedures and generally making one's self known.
I had hardly settled in when the 'jungle telegraph' was sending out the news that a certain Scotsmen had also turned up. The notorious F.C. Macdonald!.
There were frantic efforts being made by people to find themselves another pilot of their choice. Anyone but him!.
I was not fussy, or for that matter as quick off the mark as some. I had met a Navigator who had also been at Penrhos and had not yet found himself a pilot and although he could not remember Macdonald he found him and introduced himself.
By the next day Macdonald had made up his mind and the crew lists went up on the notice board.
I was looking them over when he came up with a group and announced rather ungraciously, “so we have got you have we?".
A remark that was not designed to inspire confidence although I must confess that I felt a lot happier with someone of known qualities so I was not unduly concerned.
That was the way that the crew came together. I don't think any of us were very special.
Macdonalds background was still vague and was always remain so although I gathered that he was married but separated.
Peter Hobbs, the navigator, was an ex Cpl. accounts clerk who
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had been in the Voluntary Reserve. Both he and Macdonald were a little older than the average and were newly commissioned Pilot Officers.
We actually started with a commissioned Observer/Bomb Aimer but he did not last long.
It transpired that he had already flunked a pilots course, and a navigators coarse so they made him a Bomb/Aimer before they found out that he was too tall for the front turret so off he went to retrain once more.
He might well have been doing courses later on in the war to qualify for some-thing although it is just as likely that he may well have distinguished himself somehow.
He had certainly been been [sic] determined to be aircrew anyway but I must admit that his case was the result of a policy that I was never able to come to terms with.
To commission someone first and then go to considerable lengths to see if he was any good at anything was odd to say the least. However, that is another story!.
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In the place of 'mastermind' we got 'Hoppy’ Hill, so named because he bounced and rolled on the balls of his feet when he walked around invariably with a novel of some sort tucked under his arm. I never did find out what he had been doing before he joined the RAF.
Then we had another Mac. McIlroy, a Canadian Rear Gunner who had been at Walney Island at the same time as myself although I could not recall him. He had been with the Canadian Pacific Railway in some capacity although in his own words he had spent most of his time doing trying to do nothing.
Then there was me. A cabinet maker/polisher who had finished up doing almost anything to remain employed; and I mean anything. My last civilian employment had bees as a milk roundsman!.
Nevertheless, whatever we had been doing we were all in the same boat (or aeroplane) and we all had one thing to common. That was to get on with it and hope to come out of it is one piece.
We were a fairly wild bunch in our off duty periods but I would not think that we were any worse than any other crew.
It was from that point onward that living, working and playing as a crew started. It was for me anyway. Almost to the exclusion of everything else.
Suddenly it seemed that my youthful ambitions had been fullfilled [sic] although it was a pity it had come about under such circumstances.
The most important thing was that we got on well together and we concentrated on getting moulded into a crew which involved an airborne discipline that few people could understand considering our peculiar life style.
Although our crew seemed to be the ideal balance of officers and NCO's with commissioned Pilot and Navigator some crews had formed up with some very odd mixtures with Sgt. pilots and commissioned gunners but which ever way they were mixed the pilot was always the captain is the air.
This arrangement was incomprehensible to some Army and Navy types and even the USAAF. It did not seem compatable [sic] with the normal chain of command yet it worked satisfactorily within the RAF.
Mac, as he was always to be knows, still looked as lumpy in
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his new uniform as he did when we had first met despite a change of rank insignia and a fancy cap but there were more important things to concern ourselves with than how people looked.
We had far more serious things on our minds.
Flying had become a very serious business and if we were going to be together for any length of time we would be relying on each other a great deal for survival and it was to that end that Mac went about his part of the programme as if he had been born with wings.
As far as I was concerned he was an absolute natural and on more than one occasion I was asked by wireless operators in other crews how I got on with him.
I think some of then may well have been regretting their choice of pilot and were looking for a way out but I usually pointed out that I was in no way considering a change. Particularly as no-one saw us overshooting from missed approaches to the runway or had seen us swinging about all over the place on landing or take-off as I had often seen others doing, so what more could I ask?.
On more then one occasion I was told that I would be sorry, (as if I had made the choice): But I never was....Not once!.
I got the distinct impression that for some reason Mac was not very impressed with wireless operators, although from his occasional remark he seemed more interested in having a spare gunner aboard, and I was beginning to feel very spare until one night I had the opportunity to exercise some of my training. We were flying is the local area of Chipping Warden one night when the voltage regulator down by my left foot went haywire and burst into flames.
The voltage shot up and batteries started to cook immediately so I had to work very fast to tell Mac what I was going to do before switching the Ground/Flight switch to ground which cut us off of the engine driven generators, then go rapidly through the fire drill whilst Mac called control for an emergency landing on what little internal battery power we had left.
He did happen to mention afterwards that perhaps a wireless op. might have some use in a crew after all. Only perhaps!.
As time went on we did get to know him a little better although he was one of those chaps you could never get really close to.
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He was not actually unsociable but uncommunicative. More often then not when asked a question on a subject which was not directly related to what we were currently doing his answer would be a knowing wink, a tap on the side of his nose with his forfinger [sic] which could be taken to mean anything; like, "I don't know", or, " leave it to me” or," mind your own bloody business!".
No doubt some people would call it the attitude of a dour, canny Scot but I did get a satisfactory answer on one occasion when I asked him about flying under the Menie [sic] Bridge. His words for once were encouraging.
"Only a bloody fool would attempt that without the wind on the nose, at low tide and through the widest span'", and then I knew that he was not as crazy as some people would like to think.
That in my book added up to a calculated risk, and there were some more to come.
As we ploughed on through the course a great deal of time was spent in the 'Harwell Box' which was a compartmented type of simulator in which we practiced all of the airborne procedures for a bombing sortie, [underlined] only at twice normal speed!. [/underlined]
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All the clock faces had been altered to achieve the time factor and we had to work frantically to keep up with all of the information that was being fed to us from umpteen different sources: It certainly kept us on the ball, particularly the navigator.
That was not the only simulation. For the first time our operating heights were soon to be up in the rarified [sic] air above 10,000ft for lengthy periods. Above that height the use of oxygen was essential and mandatory, and just to wake sure that no-one treated the matter lightly we were introduced to the decompression chamber.
Eight at a time with a medical orderly, we entered the tank which was fitted with inter-comm and after it was sealed the pumps started to reduce the pressure as one would experience in flight.
When 10,000ft was reached on the internal altimeter we fitted our oxygen masks and then the pressure was progressivly [sic] reduced until the altimeter read first 15,000ft, then 20,000 and finally 25,000ft by which time various parts of our internal plumbing were beginning to respond to the pressure change.
We had been provided with note pads and pencils and were than told to start writing our names on the pads as the oxygen supply was turned off.
I was no different from the others when the voice on the inter comm said that the oxygen was back on and we were called by our names and asked to describe any sensations that we had experienced and the answer was unanimous. Nothing!. But the shock came when we were told to look at our pads.
Our signatures had tailed off into an unintellible [sic] scribble and then re-appeared at the bottom of the page.
The realisation hit us all. Although most of us had experienced some light headedness as the pressure lowered we had not been aware that that was the warning that could lead to oblivion and possible death. It was frightening to think that the process was so insidious that it was possible to be unaware of it.
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After that little demonstration no-one needed any further warning on how to recognise the early effects of the lack of oxygen and I was later to find that my tolerance was quite low and I usually needed oxygen at 8,000ft, and that if I needed to move about I had to be fairly quick when going from a main point to a portable bottle especially later on when I was often sitting next to a damned great hole at the back end of the aircraft where there was no main outlet.
The training got more and more realistic both in the air and on the ground. We had got used to the parachute harness and packs by that time and the short briefing on it's use such as "after you have jumped, count ten and pull that", but suddenly it got serious now that we were going to have to face all sorts of unknown difficulties whilst we were defying the laws of gravity.
We started more intensive training off a rig. First without 'chutes just jumping off of a 12ft platform onto coco mats and then right up in the eaves of a hanger with harness and weighted cable system.
The landings were the same spine jarring thump either way as we made contact with the ground with feet together, knees slightly bent, slight angle to the direction of landing to roll over shoulder and hip on contact.
That was the classical way of doing it if you had the opportunity!. A very good friend was not so lucky when his turn came. He had already received a smashed arm when the aircraft was hit but although some of the crew put his 'chute on and threw him out he lost consciousness on the way down and busted a leg is several places on landing. But he fared better than the others. They all went down with the aeroplane!
Perhaps I was fortunate in my approach to the training and found no great difficulty but others were not so lucky and were required to do it again and again until they had improved their technique but not without a few sprains and bruises as one ploughed on through the course.
We finally completed it with a better than average crew assessment and then we were all on our travels again, but for the first time as a crew.
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Our next destination was to a Stirling Conversion Unit at Stradishall, near Bury St Edmunds. Back in-Bomber country again!. We had known that we were destined for "heavies' long before we left OTU. In fact, I had known before I left gunnery school as I had only done the short course for wireless operators and bomb-aimers, and my log book had been annotated accordingly.
Nevertheless, I had hoped that I would finish up on Lancasters or Halifax's as I already knew enough about Stirlings to be very wary of them.
When I had marshalled in a new one on delivery to Mareham [sic] I had been amazed that the pilot of the monster had been a very small lady of the ATA.
The Stirling was impressive. Although it looked very big it’s dimensions were not much more than the other 'heavies'. It was just that it looked so incredibly bulky.
It stood high on an undercarriage that looked more like some scaffolding around a building, placing the pilot's eye some 22 1/2 ft above the ground which was very high for those days and did not make the assessment of the distance between the wheels and the runway any easier whom landing the thing.
I was also well aware that they had been causing all sorts of problems when the Marham Squadrons were converting to them resulting in all sorts of hair raising incidents and bent aeroplanes.
At least I was familiar with it, and the radio compartment but the fact that I was going to finish up as a crew member on one was a thought that I had not entertained.
Soon after arrival the crew was made up to seven by the addition of a Flight Engineer and a Mid-Upper Gunner.
'Paddy', the flight engineer was of course from the emerald isle and was no stranger to the Stirling having been a ground engineer on them at Waterbeach until he had remustered. He was several weeks into his conversion training and it was a long time afterwards that I learned that he had never flown before he got airborne with us. He must have wondered what he had let himself in for.
Certainly he had a nasty shock when instead of finding his pilot to be another fresh faced youngster he got this 'gnarled old man' as someone described his.
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It was suggested that his main task would be to help the poor old bloke in and out of the driving seat!.
It did not take him long to find out that Mac was something different.
The mid-upper was at the other end of the age scale. Ralph was a fresh faced youngster who had just about changed his Air Cadets uniform for RAF uniform although of course he had done the gunners course since joining and had been at Stradishall for a few weeks on a familaristion [sic] course. But he had not long been out of school.
The crew was now complete. although for a while there was a little doubt about us staying together as Mac found out that he was not exactly built for the Stirling; or visa versa.
The lady ATA pilot had been small but she had seemed to cope but I suppose it was a matter of proportion, and Mac's proportions were somewhat different.
With the controls and the seat adjusted to their limits he still needed some special padding made up to improve things. and the seat of his pants took a terrific beating as he wrestled, wriggled and sqirmed [sic] to handle the thing.
The take-off and landing characteristics of the machine did not help such either. An uncontrollable swing to starboard could develop very easily and the tall undercarriage would be incapable of standing the strain and 'crunch', another one would bite the dust adding to the numbers that ended up damaged by that sort of accident which was already in excess of the numbers lost by enemy action.
It usually depended on how fast you were going at the time whether you walked away or were carried away from the wreckage. Not a pleasant prospect!.
In theory the idea was that the engines were opened up on a staggered basis having due regard to any cross wind. until a speed was reached when the rudder would give effective control, then all engines could be taken to full power.
The snag was that with a full load there was never a lot of runway to spare so it was usually a choice of two evils. You either took a chance of running out of runway if you did not get the power on soon enough or you slammed it on at the beginning of the take off run and took your chance with a
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swinger'.
Mac seemed to have it down to a fine art.
Whatever the length of the runway. Whatever the load, the strength and direction of the wind. Whether the runway was uphill, downhill, or both, with bump or a hollow in the middle, his computer brain had it worked out. Whatever the circumstances and however tired he was we always seemed to make a perfect take-off and landing. So far I had not experienced a bad one with his at the controls.
Nevertheless, he was wearing out his pants at an alarming rate in the process.
So much so that the instructors were having serious doubts as to whether Mac and the Stirling were quite right for each other.
Then something happened that removed all the doubts.
On the night of 13th June 1943 we were doing night circuits and bumps in preparation for his first night solo.
After several circuits the check pilot gave Mac the thumbs up after another satisfactory landing and vacated the aircraft the aircraft in the vicinity of the control tower before we taxied around again for the next take-off.
After the usual pause for the routine cockpit check we entered the runway and were soon thundering along gathering speed; when it happened.
At the most critical point, almost half way down the runway, with about 90mph. on the clock, the port outer seized with a crunch that could be felt throughout the aircraft despite all the other sensations, and 30 tons of Stirling started to swing to port.
It was a wonder that the prop did not sheer off which would have been normal but the reflex action that went on in the cockpit was fast and furious. It had to be to prevent us from becoming another statistic.
Paddy closed down the dead engine by stabbing buttons and switches that cut the ignition to the engine, cut off the fuel, operated the bulkhead fire extinguishers and 'feathered' the propellor as Mac called for maximum power on the inboard engines as obviously his hands were very busy with the controls.
As Paddy took over the throttles and the propeller pitch controls the power came on with a bellow as he shoved the inboard
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We were just at the 'unstick' point and almost at take-off speed as the swing to port became more pronounced with Mac struggling desperately.
At least we were almost airborne which was better than being splattered all over the airfield and his efforts were being rewarded as we then started to go slowly into a starboard turn with only just enough speed on to keep us flying.
Standard procedures dictated that we had to go into a right hand circuit as it was invariably neccessary [sic] to turn away from the dead engine. There was so little margin of control if you went the other way that a nasty mess was the likely result.
Still close to the ground with wheels and flaps still down Mac was straining every muscle to maintain control but slowly and surely we increased our speed still swinging to starboard.
From my position in the astro dome I could see the hangars and the control tower dead ahead!.
If that wasn't out of the frying pan and into the fire!.
It looked as if it was going to be decidedly messy and certainly it was going to do me no good at all if I dived for my crash position…...and then we started to climb and bank as the speed had built up sufficiently.
With wings almost vertical we went between No's. 1 and 2 hangers, taking a telephone line with us. I had a very unusual view of the water tower as we went around it straight into a very low level emergency right hand circuit for a landing that was just like all the others. As smooth as silk. Even under those circumstances.
It was shortly after we had landed that I became aware of the fact that I seemed to have been holding my breath for a very long time and I had been very close to ceasing to breath altogether.
We taxied around to the control tower to pick up the instuctor [sic] pilot and when he came aboard he was still very much out of breath as like most of the staff in the tower, he had abandoned it rapidly as we headed straight for it.
He just managed to gasp "you'll' do" before we taxied back to dispersal.
There was so doubt in our minds anyway. He had tamed the beast and there congratulations all round.
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Mac's reaction was normal. A wink and a tap on the side of his nose. No comment!.
After that there was very little let up as the training including flying intensified. Mac continued to wear out his trousers in his efforts to maintain control and that’s what it was all about as far as he was concerned. Total perfection, and he never, ever, let the machine take over. We had absolute confidence in him.
The only other incident of any note throughout the course occurred shortly after we had landed one night and had got back to the billet. A Ju.88 intruder who had followed someone in tried to shoot him up on the runway without success. He sprayed lead all over the place and I think the most damage was done to a window above my bed in the barrack block. I was under it!. There was no one hurt although my bed was showered with glass.
That sort of effort did not impress us very much if that was the best they could do. It all seemed a bit panic stricken and I had seen plenty of similar activity on the South Coast where air raids on Worthing had been mainly of the hit and run type.
I had been close to several attacks as they came blasting along the railway line and the shunting yards but they never hit the gas works which was opposite the hospital; which was just as well as my father was invariably fire watching on top during a raid.
Not one bomb fell on the railway line or the signal boxes in the local area but there was a fair amount of damage to civilian property and loss of life. The flat in which I had spent the first few years of my life was one that collected a direct hit although mostly the bombs fell in open ground.
There is still evidence to this day of the occasion when an Me.110 straffed [sic] along the line. The metal footbridge between East Worthing and Worthing Central still has the canon shell holes in it and my wife remembers it well.
She was walking along the road parallel to the railway when this chap came blasting in firing both front and rear guns and she was obliged to make a hasty dive over a low wall into someone's garden for safety.
Even then I thought it was a bit panic stricken and not very effective.
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It was whilst I was at Stradishall that I saw the half scale Stirling in one of the hangars. A very interesting little machine. It was about the size of a Wellington with a cockpit just big enough for two in tandem, and four little two blade props on Pobjoy engines. It had been built for test purposes early on, whilst the full size machine was still in the design stage. Even then it was-fall of snags but they pressed on.
No-one sees to know what happened to it eventually. It had been pranged and was not airworthy but it just seems to have dissapeared [sic] . Perhaps it will turn up at the back of a barn one days!.
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[underlined] THE SHORT BROS. S.29."STIRLING" [/underlined]
Built by Short Brothers, Rochester & Belfast and Austins, Longbridge.
First flight (Mk.I) 14th May 1939. Followed by Mk's II, III, IV & V.
Began with daylight operations in 1941 before switching to night operations until the end of 1943. Later used as glider tugs. paratroop and supply dropping and finally transports.
2,374 of all types manufactured but none remained in flying service after the early 1950's.
[line of stars]
[underlined] Model B.Mklll [/underlined]
Span...................99ft 1in.
Length………………87ft 3in.
Max. all-up weight…………70,000lb.
Max. speed…………270 mph. (Economical cruising 180mph. fully loaded)
Range……………….Max. 2010mls. (According to load).
Service ceiling………17,000ft.(14-15,000ft with max. load)
Engines………Four 1,650bhp. Bristol Hercules Mk.XVl
2 stage, supercharged, sleeve valve, 14 cylinder radials.
Defensive armament…….8 .303in. Browning m/g. 2 in dorsal and front turrets. 4 in rear turret. All power operated.
Max. bomb load………..14,000lb. (Max. bomb size 2000lb.
[line of stars]
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[deleted] 44 [/deleted]
[underlined] FOR NORMAL BOMBER OPERATIONS THE CREW CONSISTED OF:- [/underlined]
Pilot………………………..………..who was always the captain.
Navigator……………………..…..who was also trained as a bomb aimer.
Observer/bomb aimer…..….who was also trained in navigation and was front gunner.
Flight Engineer………..………...was responsible for monitoring the engines and other systems. Often acted as co-pilot.
Wireless operator/gunner….communications, radio direction finding and trained reserve gunner.
Mid-upper gunner……………..)were interchangable [sic] between positions
Rear Gunner……………….…….)but generally preferred one position.
Note:- On occasions another pilot was allocated to the basic crew for operational familiarisation and became the co-pilot.
[line of stars]
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[deleted] 45 [/deleted]
It was the middle of June when we left Stradishall and it was a pleasant change not to have to travel too far to our new unit. We moved by truck just a few miles up the road to Chedburgh, a satelite [sic] station of Stradishall.
Most Stirling units were concentrated in East Anglia and we were to join a new Squadron being formed on the day we arrived. The Squadron had been numbered 620 and we would be the partner to 214 Squadron which had been in residence for some time. It had been formed by the standard procedure of hiving off 'C' flights from established Squadrons. In this case 'C' flights from both 214 Squadron and 149 from Mildenhall; by coincidence the same Squadron that I had been with at Mildenhall previously. To assist the rapid build-up new crews direct from training were being added so with virtually a snap of the fingers the new Squadron was born on the 17th June 1943.
Chedburgh was just another war-time airfield that like so many had just mushroomed all over the countryside by the hundred. A tremendous achievement both in planning and engineering considering the enormous amount of material and man-power each one absorbed. It was not surprising that Britian [sic] was often referred to as an unsinkable aircraft carrier. There were over 100 airfields in East Anglia alone!.
They were all built to the same basic pattern with Nissen huts all over the place with dispersed accomodation [sic] tucked away in woods and down country lanes that ensured that everyone had plenty of exercise in the process of getting to and from their place of work.
The airfield was situated alongside the A143 Bury St Edmunds to Haverhill road and the set up was much the same as any other unit.
The Station support services comprised an Administrative Wing, a Technical Wing and a Flying Wing and within the latter were the flying units, the Squadrons, which were independant [sic] units.
Altogether the station was manned by between 1800 and 2000 people including Squadron personnel, with an establishment of 16 air-craft per Squadron. plus 4 reserves. Theorhetically [sic] that should have given the station a total of 40 aircraft but we were rarely up to even the basic strength and then not for very
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All the arrival formalities that we had done so often were soon completed with introductions to the Squadron and Flight Commander as well as the specialist leaders, in my case the Signals Leader, who was an operational Wireless Operator filling the position by virtue of his previous experience and seniority.
With all that attended to Mac had received his instructions from 'B' Flight Commander and we boarded the bus that continually circled the outer edge of the airfield where the aircraft were dispersed.
On the way we passed many Stirlings poised like great vultures, except for the odd one that looked as if the vultures had been at them and had gangs of men working on them.
When we stopped at one dispersal pan Mac said "this is it". 'This' was a pleasant surprise. We had become so used to flying old hacks that had seen better days that to be looking at what appeared to be a new one was unique. Even more of a surprise was to be told that this one was 'ours'.
This particular Stirling was serial No.EF433, built by Shorts at Belfast, and was still new enough to have a new smell about it.
The Squadron identification letters of QS and aircraft letter 'W' had been freshly painted on it's sides over some other lettering that turned out to have been 214 Squadron's identification, with whom it had apparently done three operations before being transferred on the formation of the Squadron.
We were concerned with getting to know that piece of machinery more intimately than anything else we had had dealings with in the past.
We spent hours going over it with the ground crew; testing and adjusting until we had it ticking over like a well oiled sewing machine. We air tested it and put it through it's paces again and again. The gunners tested their guns over the sea. Pete checked his box of tricks. Hoppy put the bomb release mechanism through it's sequences and tested the front guns. I tuned my radio and made contact with the control stations as well as testing the radio direction finding system. Mac and Paddy did everything they could to ensure that the engines and controls gave the right responses by throwing it around at height including a landing procedure with first one then two engines
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feathered and everything throttled back just to see how she stalled as well as a maximum height climb until they were at last satisfied that if anything went wrong with it it [sic] would not be our fault.
When all that was done we were ready for anything and both crew and aeroplane were in a partnership which we hoped would be for some time. As it turned out it was longer than than [sic] the average!.
We were soon to find out what we had let ourselves in for on a series of night operations that were not without a little excitement.
[line of stars]
Four days after leaving Stradishall we found ourselves on the Battle Order for the night of the 22nd June and from the moment the order went on the board everything started clicking into place as we started a procedure that hundreds of other crews were doing up and down the country in order to deliver thousands of tons of bombs and incendiaries to the enemy.
Mac had already been through it the night before, flying as second pilot with a crew to Krefeld, but the only thing he would say about it was that we would find out soon enough, accompanied of course by that tap on the nose.
I was naturally apprehensive at the prospect of flying over enemy territory now that we were finally committed and not unaware of the losses that had already occurred in 214 Squadron in the short time we had been on the base. Fortunately there was plenty to do to take our minds off of the inevitable as the procedure had become standard for major exercises and operations and we knew precicely [sic] what to do.
The first thing was to ground test and then air test the aeroplane and with [deleted] that [/deleted] over to try and get some sleep before the briefing and all the other business whilst the ground crew prepared it for the flight with bombs, fuel, flares, ammunition, oxygen, first aid packs and safety equipment such as the dinghy, inclusive of the distress radio and a multitude of other individual items to be checked over or stowed.
Our next step was to change into clean underwear of the aircrew type. The pure wool and silk mixture. Not only for warmth in the sub zero conditions we were likely to
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encounter at altitude but just as important to reduce the risk of infection if injured. That was the general idea anyway, but at the rate we were soon to be flying we very often had to wear underclothes a week or more before the laundry caught up with us.
'Night Flying supper' was always something to look forward to at whatever time it was scheduled. The rare operational egg and bacon special. That meal was not just a 'perk' but possibly the last one that one would get for some time depending on the circumstances, and then we were off to the operations block.
Once we got there we were cut off from the outside world. All the outside telephone lines had either been disconnected or were at least monitored and even the local telephone boxes had been disconnected or secured as soon as the teleprinters had started clacking away earlier to advise that the operations order was following.
Within that environment there was a lot of activity and the amount of stuff we had to get together was quite extraordinary.
There was basic stuff such as parachute harness and pack. Life jacket, (the Mae West), helmet complete with earphones, microphone and oxygen mask, all to be tested on the rig in the safety equipment section. Then to change into sea boot socks and flying boots. Then to empty pockets into the locker and don the heavy fishermans roll neck sweater. The next step was to draw rations and escape and evasion packs that all had to be stowed into the numerous pockets of the life jacket and as if that was not enough we then gathered up our specialist equipment.
The navigator and wireless operator carried the most and it was quite a pile of stuff. Maps, charts, rulers, pencils, computer, (of the Dalton circlar type for wind calculations etc) , sextant, star tables, code books, lists of call-signs, frequencies, identification beacons. colours of the day information etc. Some of the secret stuff was typed on rice paper for the purpose of disposing of it by eating it if if [sic] the need arose.
It was hardly surprising that we needed large canvas flight bags for all of the odds and ends apart from having to carry all of the other gear.
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After assembling all that there was a short briefing by the specialist leaders before the main briefing took place, and it was at this point that the pilot, navigator and bomb-aimer were given advance knowledge of the target so that they could make their special studies of route, and target photographs before everyone else trooped into the main briefing room where the whole thing was put together so that everyone knew what was going on.
The teleprinters had been spewing out stuff for a long time after the planners at Command and Group HQ had held their planning meetings and sometimes the Operations Order was yards long. The operations order contained details of take-off times, route, turning points, target data, ack-ack defences, possible fighter activities, heights to fly and speeds, winds and weather en-route and return, fuel and bomb loads, pathfinder marking, alternative and emergency airfields, radio procedures, radio beacons, frequencies and callsigns, etc, etc. and even details of any POW camps if they were near the target.
The complex mass of stuff had been sorted out and the whole station was in top gear as we at last struggled into the main hall to assemble around our own table where there was a great deal of chat with clouds of tobacco smoke floating about by the time the whole assembly was called to order by the senior briefing officer. That was always a dramatic moment and the climax of all the activity that invariably seemed to be a race against the clock. Heaven help a crew that was late!.
The windows had been shuttered as soon as preparations had commenced and the 'fug' must have been murder for non-smokers.
As soon as everyone was in and accounted for the main doors were closed and two RAF Policemen took up position outside. Everyone settled down within the chaos of equipment all strewn around the floor and on the tables as the briefing got under way as soon as the big wall map was uncovered.
The briefing officers included the Flying Control and Met.Officers. The Armament and Engineering Officers, The Wing and the Squadron and Flight Commanders, and very often the Station Commander
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who took no part in the proceedings although he occasional took part in the operation with a 'scratch' crew but he invariably had a few words of encouragement at the end of the briefing.
When the curtains were drawn back from the wall map there was a bit of a gasp as eyes followed the coloured tapes across to the target..Mulheim, and then with such waving about of an old billiard cue that had been 'liberated' from one of the messes the show got under way.
It was a source of relief to find that we were not part of the main force. Our detail was 'Gardening'. The code name for mining, which we would be doing by flying part of the route with the main force and then dropping out to sow our 'veg' as we approached the Frisian Islands. I was glad of that and would not have cared for a trip to Mulheim first time out.
Mac would still say nothing about his trip to Krefeld. In fact very few people would. When asked, the usual answer was, "you will find out soon enough", and as far as Mulheim was concerned Mac would only say that we should think ourselves lucky that we were not going there. No-one argued with that!.
As soon as briefing was over there was a mad scramble for the crew bus to take us out to dispersal and to load all the gear into the aeroplane.
Having stowed everything where it should be there was time for a tour around the outside to make sure that all protective covers and control locks had been removed.
When all was ready it was just a matter of waiting for start up time with a few minutes quiet contemplation, a pee on a wheel, and a cigarette.
Any chatter there was at that stage was about anything other then the operation ahead of us.
Although the start up and taxy times had been given at briefing there was usually a signal from the control tower as back up bearing in mind that radio silence was strictly imposed from the time that the operation had been notified.
The signals were yellow/green verey flare for start up or a double red for cancellation so when the yellow/green went up the game was on. Some game!. Suddenly it was all deadly serious.
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My only consolation was that it was my own choice. I could have been blown to bits in the infantry, or roasted in a tank, or faced several different ways of drowning in the navy so it seemed as good a way as any of taking my chance.
With the start up everything in the aircraft seemed accentuated. The smell of paint, leather and fuel brat was all mixed up to create the odour that was peculiar to an aeroplane.
There was the additional smell of the rubber oxygen mask that was attached to the now sticky leather helmet and would be stuck to my head for the next few hours.
There was no way around that as the earphones and microphone were an integral part of the helmet.
Then there were the atmospherics on the otherwise silent radio receivers that mingled with all the other muffled noises as the aeroplane case to life in the hands of Mac and Paddy.
Starter motors whined. Engines coughed and spluttered and the airframe vibrated from end to end with the initial rough running in rich mixture. Flaps were operated, bomb doors were closed and brakes released with hissing air and sighing hydraulic systems after the wheel chocks were waived away, followed by the rolling motion of the heavily laden aircraft as we taxied to the marshalling point near the runway threshold. Depending where the dispersal was in relation to the runway in use determined the length of time taxying, and the order of take off, but normally by the time we reached the threshold the oil temperatures and pressures, and cylinder head temperatures had risen sufficiently for the engines to be run at near full power against the brakes to test the magnetoes [sic] .
As was usual in aero engines there were two magneto's to each engine, each serving one of the two sets of plugs per cylinder. That added up to 112 spark plugs altogether and it was neccessary [sic] that every one was doing it's bit when full power was called for. Then the superchargers were tested, and the variable pitch propellors, with the aircraft shaking and rattling until all four engines had been tested after which they were throttled back to a nice healthy tick over.
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That was the decision point of 'go,no-go'. The engines had to give power within certain tolerances before a full load take-off could be attempted, and a decision that we would have to 'abort' if all was not well would here been an anti climax at that stage.
It would have meant entering the runway at the allotted time, rolling down and turning off at the intersection or the end, and then justifying it to the engineering officer and the flight commander. It was not a decision to be taken lightly.
That first time, with a live load and everything checked out satisfactorily, a green aldis lamp signal flashed from the caravan in acknowledgement of the aircraft's letter signalled on the downward identification light and we were ready to go.
We entered the runway with the one hundred and one checks complete and the adrenelin [sic] started to flow as we went through the familiar procedure.
Line up, brakes on, one third flap, engine cooling gills set, superchargers in low gear, props in fine pitch, mixture rich, engines wound up, a momentary pause for a final check of revs and boost with the aircraft straining against the brakes....brakes off; and a surge of acceleration as we started down the runway. Then the continuing acceleration and the tail coming up followed by a final bellow from the engines as the throttles were shoved to the stops.
The runway lights flashed by at ever increasing speed. The aircraft gave a little sideways fidget as the line was corrected and we were soon approaching the critical speed.
Very mindful of several tons of high explosive and a great deal of high octane fuel surrounding us we continued to thunder down the runway until those of us not in the cockpit knew by all the familiar sounds and sensations that all was well up front. The flight engineer who had followed the pilots hand on the throttles up to the stops had now taken them over and applied the friction locks as Mac devoted all his attention to controlling the aircraft as at the same time the engineer was calling out the increasing air speed.
The rumbling stopped; the attitude changed and we knew we were airborne. The next call was "undercarriage up" and as soon as they were showing up the next call was "flaps in" and another
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change of attitude as the aircraft was 'cleaned up' before there was a final change of engine note as they were throttled back after reaching a safe height and speed.
At that point we all started to breath [sic] a little easier.
All the time the intercom between the pilot and enginneer [sic] was lively as the action and subsequent indicator response was called out and acknowledged.
With so such to do and so such depending on it being done correctly it was a rigid discipline, and very soon we were climbing on the first heading to the rendezvous position before climbing further to our operating height.
On that first occasion we set off at medium level under cover of the main force and once more we were on our way. This time with a difference……it was for real!..
[line of stars]
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As soon as we got clear of the coast the gunners tested their guns with a couple of bursts and the smell of cordite drifted around for a while, after which they settled down to their long spell of sky searching.
It was a lonely and demanding job but very neccessary [sic] as they methodically scanned up and down and left and right with the turrets following their search.
You could not see them out there but there were a lot of aircraft milling about with between 600 and 700 hundred converging on the main rendezvous position from East Anglia, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire to make up a solid stream. Even in good night conditions you were lucky to be able to see further than 700 yards so that if anything did show up there was not a lot of time to take action.
Some separation was provided by the various waves being at predetermined heights, and by time separation between the waves going through a check point or turning position, but nevertheless there were still a large number of aircraft packed into a relatively small area of sky at any one time.
When I was not in the radio compartment my position was in the Astro dome. That was the clear vision dome on top where the navigator took his star shots from and where I could assist in the search.
From there I could still remain plugged into the communication system and listen for routine broadcasts from the Group control station every half hour. These included up-dated forcasts [sic] of the weather in the target area and a common barometric pressure setting for the altimeter to ensure that we were all flying on the same datum.
Any message received was rapidly de-coded and passed to the navigator or the pilot although it was more common that only the station identification would be transmitted, (no message). It did not do to miss anything like a recall though, and to find that you were the only one over the target and getting a great deal of attention.
On occasions I would be required to release a flare over the sea for assessment of the wind drift. It was released down the flare chute and ignited after entering the water and then the rear gunner kept his sights on it to read off the drift angle.
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whilst the navigator did the timing and his sums which was very crude by modern standards but the results were a very useful check against the Met. forecast which with the best will in the world was often well out and navigators needed everything they could get to keep us on track. Pete was forever beavering away with his rulers, dividers and computer to cross check everything and did not rely on any one specific facility. The best I could do for his were radio bearings from the UK using the direction finder equipment.
Unfortunately that became suspect as we got deeper and deeper into enemy airspace. The Germans sent out false signals on the same frequency to confuse things and the continental broadcasting stations were suspect as well due to them being made on linked geographically located transmitters. [underlined] The same as we did for UK broadcasts. [/underlined] It was impossible to get bearings on that network. One equipment that they found difficult to interfere with was 'GEE', which was our most important navigational aid up to a certain distance imposed by range and height. That was the 'Magic Box' which used Information from a number of special high frequency transmissions which were received and displayed on an oscillascope [sic] . When the information had been transcribed to some special lattice charts positions could be fixed with considerable accuracy, and from running fixes it was possible to assess wind speed and direction for the purpose of correcting headings. It did not do to stray far off track.
The flight engineer continually monitored the engines, and all the vital functions that kept us going including fuel flow and fuel remaining as well as transferring fuel from the smaller tanks to keep the main one's topped up. There was very close co-operation between Mac and Paddy as Mac was meticulous in his handling of the engines.
The bomb-aimer/observer whose main function occupied very little time often spent time as co-pilot or assisted in map reading when conditions were favourable, so everyone had their job to do and a little bit more. It was team work all the way.
Positioning for mine dropping was meticulous. The Navy provided the charts and told us where they wanted them dropped, and the charts went back to the Navy.
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The mines went down in their specified area on their parachutes which softened the blow of them entering the water after which they submerged to do their evil business at a later date.
I was glad to see those go. Their explosive content of Torpex was far more devastating than that in our bombs; not that the outcome would be any different if we had a direct hit in the bomb bay!.
It all seemed too easy. We saw a little sparkling flak in the distance that someone had stirred up, possibly a flak ship.
Those were the blighters that could crop up anywhere so every sighted had to be logged so that some might be done about them later; if only to give instructions to avoid the area. The trouble was that it was easy for them to more from one anchorage to another before the next day!.
As we droned back to base I found it difficult to reconcile the fact that it really was me going through it all. It all seemed so unreal like a dream.
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I had moved on.
Someone else now had the refuelling job.
If ever I needed to call the W/T (morse) fixer service I knew what was at the other end of the facility and how they could help us.
I had worked in one of Bomber Command's transmitting stations at Honington, (mainly polishing the wretched floor), but as a qualified wireless operator I had often been allowed to plug into the transmitter side-tone as it squawked away and take down the transmission for practice.
Mostly of course at that time it was incomprehensible as it was in code, but now I had found out what it was all about being one of the recipients within a collective call sign.
There were facilities available on the shorter range R/T (radio telephone) service usually need directly by the pilot and although I had means of using it from my compartment it was very rarely necessary [sic] .
Apart from air to air and normal air to ground control there were some very useful services to be obtained such as the D/F (direction finder) cabins which I had also spent time in.
These were the strange tepee like wooden cabins stuck out in some field near the airfield with their double walls filled with fine shingle for protection against shot and shell and an aerial array sticking out of the top. I [sic] was from there that a highly experienced operator was able to give pilots a course to steer for base, or a bearing, and in dire emergency, assistance with a descent through cloud procedure.
I had spent more time in the teleprinter communication cabins and had done duty as the R/T operator in what was then called Flying Control as well as doing daily inspections on aircraft radio equipments.
I had time to reflect on what it all added up to as we droned steadily towards base. There was little else to do except listen out on the control frequency, load the colours of the day into the verey pistol and switch an the IFF (radar identification signal), make up the log etc as we approached the coast, descended and identified the flashing beacons that pin-pointed airfields and other geographical locations by their code. (I had even
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been part of the operating team on one of those at one time); until we identified Chedburgh's among the dozens that were winking through the night.
With navigation lights on and gunners still keeping a good look out for intruders we called the tower and got our joining instructions; joined the circuit, landed and taxied around to our dispersal.
The ground crew were waiting and marshalled us into position and finally when the chocks were in place everything was shut off and at last the dull roar that had been going on in our ears for hours finally subsided.
It took some time to adjust and we found that we still shouting at each other for a long time afterwards.
Apart from that and to get the tacky helmet off perhaps the most relief was gained by being able to slacken the lower straps of the parachute harness that if properly adjusted made life very uncomfortable, and then to have a good pee on a wheel and light a cigarette. What a blessed relief that was!. It became almost a ceremony!.
There were a few minutes to wait whilst the skipper had a few words with the crew chief to pass on any information relative to defects or malfunctions and then finally the crew bus arrived and we boarded on route to operations still drawing hungrily on our cigarettes, that as I recall, tasted pretty horrible at the time.
On arrival at the ops. room for debriefing there were excited exchanges with other crews all milling about after we checked in our parachutes. The room was still thick with tobacco smoke as the windows had remained closed since the briefing and would remain so until until [sic] the end of the de-briefing or to the time when all was quiet. The time when all aircraft had landed back at base or had been notified as landing elsewhere or endurance times had been reached. After that time aircraft that had failed to turn up were chalked up on the state board as FTR. (Failed to return).
We then spent a little more time answering questions put by the Intelligence Officers and their assistants as they probed for information, and completed combat reports as appropriate as they pushed more cigarette across the table.
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Finally came the specialist debrief when we handed in our logs and code books. Returning all equipment. Changing out of our flying clothing and at last making our way to the mess hall for our eggs and bacon, and to top it all off, a nice long walk back to our tin hut where others were already asleep or just tumbling into bed.
That is when it hit. When you were winding down. When it was all over and you felt completely drained. I know I did. Apart from anything else I was never very good at being up half of the night.
It might have been a routine trip for us but later as we found that [underlined] Eleven [/underlined] out [sic] 96 Stirlings had failed to return from the Mulheim raid and one of them had been from our Squadron. The casualty procedure was already under way and we had not even been there long enough to know the unfortunates concerned!.
That was the pattern of our lives. We usually reported to the flight office at 1400 hours the next afternoon whatever time we had landed, to see what was in store for us and a special effort was made for more than one reason.
If we had slept late and had to make a dash for it it [sic] was easy to miss lunch and we would have to go through to tea time before eating again. There was no other way of finding something edible unless one happened to find a mobile NAAFI wagon doing it's rounds. Even the so called 'sausage rolls' or the inevitable currant bun was welcome then. We very soon got around to keeping a tuck box of some sort to tide us over by hoarding some of our flying rations.
If there was no flying there was a serious attempt to be the first in the queue for supper. We always seemed to be hungry in those days. Or perhaps it was just me!
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On the 25th we were detailed for another mining job. This time in the Bay of Biscay, off the estuary the Geronde [sic] and in the approaches to the Atlantic U.boat bases.
Again it was hours of concentrated low flying over moonlit waters that could be so very, very deceptive. It placed a great deal of strain on Mac but that is where he seemed to be in his element and we were glad to get home again after a flight of 5 hours 45 minutes.
The mines had been placed with the same meticulous care as before and everyone seemed of the opinion that mining was 'a piece of cake' although not everyone was happy about spending so much time near the wave tops, especially as on one occasion Mac was close enough to cause the rear gunner to complain about the spray drenching his turret!.
There was some speculation about whether Mac was volunteering for mining but we never found out. What went on in the confines of the Flight Commanders office only ever translated itself into what went on the Battle Order and the Flight Authorisation Book.
That night others were not so lucky and another aircraft and crew from the Squadron failed to return.
We were all beginning to feel a little jaded by that time and we were hoping for some free time, if only to catch up on some sleep; but we had to wait for that.
[line of stars]
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We dragged ourselves down to the flight office in the afternoon hoping to hear the magic words "stand down", only to find that we were on the Battle Order again for another operation that night, and later on, in the briefing room, I was to experience a very strange feeling in my innards, somewhere between my heart and my stomach when the target was announced as Gelsenkirchen, in the Ruhr, or 'Happy Valley' as it was commonly dubbed by aircrew. It had to happen sometime!.
For Mac, it was already his fourth operation in five nights so it was not surprising that he was tight lipped about it. He knew what we were in for!.
For the rest of us it was to be our first time over the enemy coast to face all the perils that went with it. Since no-one would talk about it it [sic] had to be imagined although it not do to dwell on it.
I do know that as we approached the target that I was glad that I was not a pilot after all. How I would have reacted in those circumstances I am really not sure. Perhaps I would have coped but since my responsibilities towards the crew at that moment in time were limited I decided that on looking at that scene as we approached I would rather not know. I promptly retired to the protection of my armour plated seat. As if that made any difference!.
It did not seem possible that anything could fly through that unscathed. There were a lot of explosions and steel splinters out there but it soon occurred to me that the armour plating was only psychological protection. The others had a lot less protection so I went back to keeping a look-out and to hell with it.
As we started the bombing run the sight of the destruction being wrought upon a town by hundreds of tons of high explosive and incendiaries was bad enough but there was also evidence of life or death struggles going on around us as there had been on the run in. The searchlights probed and flak peppered the sky and through it all, flying more or less straight and level, Hoppy guided Mac to the aiming point chanting his left's, steadie's . and right a bit as the target slid up the sight wires.
In the initial stages of the approach the flak had been scattered as the guns went for individual aircraft but as the 'stream'
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Mac had laid down his own ground rules about what was expected of us when we were away from home shores.
In any case he strictly limited the use of the IFF. This was the device that sent out an identification signal to our radar stations, but which some people were known to use over enemy territory in an attempt to confuse the enemy radar. We most certainly did not!, and On/Off entries were made in both the signals and the nav. logs accordingly.
He would not permit the use of the infra-red rear facing fighter warning system which was just as well as we were to find out later that their fighter A.I. (airborne intercept) radar could home on it.
He was insistant [sic] that there should be the absolute minimum use of any radio equipment, and if it was not needed it was to be switched off. (He even used to switch off his R/T set unless there was a very good reason for having it on!.)
The ban even included navigational equipment if there was any chance of an emmission [sic] from it.
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Perhaps he knew something that we didn't but he was never one for explanations and since he was the boss what he said was never questioned. Not openly anyway!.
Like most pilots he carried a mini route map to help him keep orientated and the navigator was kept hard at it to keep us on track and on time as well as keeping in the middle of the stream rather than being a sitting duck waffling around on the fringe where we could be picked off by a roaming night fighter.
My duties had become very restricted by the limitations imposed by Mac. I could not even use the main transmitter without his permission and he was even reluctant to have it switched into the stand-by position which kept it warm and ready for use.
Only the main receiver plus it's associated direction finding equipment were available to me so I was not able to do much to assist in the navigation although there were plenty of other jobs to keep me occupied.
The results of people straying off track had already been obvious when sparkling exchanges of fire between aircraft were seen, or a sudden concentration of ack-ack and the probing fingers of a cone of searchlights and occasionally an orange ball of fire in the sky that would fall to earth and disintregate [sic] . Having no wish to be part of that scene it was 'softly softly catchee monkey'.
One job I often did was chucking leaflets out of the lower rear escape hatch but generally in the final stages of the bombing run I had another job that was another of Mac's specific requirements.
In order to take a photograph of the bomb strike a photo flash was released automatically down the flare chute and a barometric capsule activated it's 'chute and ignited it. Some photo flash!. It contained about 25lbs of magnesium mixture that produced a 3,000,000 candle power flash but the release mechanism of this thing had been known to fail with disastrous results. If it went off inside the chute or failed to clear the aircraft if it malfunctioned the results were as spectacular as getting a direct hit with an ack-ack shell.
It was usually assisted on it's way by a shove from me when I was not otherwise engaged. Just another safety measure that Mac had very quickly picked up from somewhere,
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and I imagine that the rest of the crew were somewhat relieved to hear the call "flash away---chute clear" call on the intercom before I went back to my other duties.
Once more we had run the gauntlet without problems and although the homeward journey was tedious we were eventually back over base and once more flopping into our beds an hour later when it was all over. Even then sleep did not come easily.
There were some more mines to be dropped in the Bay of Biscay on the 25th; again in the approaches to the Atlantic ports and U.boat bases and once more they went down bang on the button.
There was a special technique for accurate positioning but as usual Mac had his own variation. The brief was to transit at medium height and then down to the dropping height after a 'GEE' fix. Our way was to go down to the wave tops after the fix and then climb to dropping height after which we went down to the wave tops again to avoid being picked up by the Coastal radar stations.
It was not only the position in which they were dropped that was important but [underlined] how [/underlined] they were dropped. Too high and they could be out of position and possibly break up on impact. Too low and they were still likely to go up on impact by hitting the water before the 'chute deployed. Either of those results made the effort a waste of time....and there is no fun being blown up by your own mines!.
As soon as they were gone we were racing home again with the taps wide open to avoid the attentions of any prowling Ju.88's in the area….and then we climbed back up to above 2000ft. On that occasion our flight time was 5hrs 35mins.
By that time I was finding it difficult to reconcile our efforts with all the experiences that I had had on operational stations and of other lurid stories told by others of combats, fires, crashes, injuries and deaths. I knew it was not a myth and that it could and did happen so perhaps some people were just unlucky as the BBC news bulletins were regularly giving out that "XXXXX of our aircraft are missing". Just a cold statement of fact but often they were crewed by people we knew. The figure was frighteningly high on occasions, especially among the Stirling force, and there were not only operational losses. On the 2nd July two of the Squadron's aircraft collided in the Chedburgh
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circuit and crashed nearby with the loss of 15 lives. There was only one survivor from that tragic accident which included some ground crew getting some air experience.
We had a few days break before the next operation and like the I others I managed to catch up on some sleep and letter writing as well as sinking a few jars in the Mess but it was not all fun and games.
Hoppy and I took time off to go to Ely for a look around the Cathedral which we had so often seen from the air or the train and of course there were other activities laid on if there was no flying.
There was the often repeated talk about our conduct should we be unfortunate enough to become POW's and it was sometimes made all the more interesting when the talks were from people who had already escaped or evaded to make a home run. There talks on first aid and sea survival and how to make the most of all the equipment that was available to us if we got into trouble. There were not many idle moments but on those days we achieved some sort of normality. One could not be in the front line all the time, and it was too good to last. On the 3rd July we were on the Battle Order again to find that at briefing targets at Cologne were detailed so off we went again.
The defences were even more lively than I had ever seen before. There was evidence of a lot of fighter activity around the City and some very nasty sights as aircraft were hit in their vitals. There must have been some desperate situations as people fought for their lives if they had not already been blasted into eternity. How we went through that inferno I will never know and we were very relieved when we came out into the clear again and were heading for home, still keeping a good look-out for a long time.
It took time after slipping between the sheets before that scene finally faded from the mind. The brain needed time to wind down allowing the need for sleep to take over.
There were [underlined] seven [/underlined] Stirlings lost that time, again about 10% of the Stirling force among the total losses for the operation. It did not bear thinking about for too long and it was rarely the subject of conversation. At that rate according to the law of averages it would not be long before our number came up but
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people normally kept such thoughts to themselves, or shared their fears with their Chaplains.
For me, I soon gave up the struggle of concience [sic] . If people were getting killed or maimed on both side fighting for God and country then any rational person was bound to have doubts at some time. Possibly most people, like me, tried to push such thoughts to the back of the mind and just concentrated on eliminating the enemy, trusting that a forgiving God would understand.
I suppose it was a sort of psychological con. trick that one played on one's self.
It couldn't happen to us!!!!!
[line of stars]
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On one break between operations and sleeping there was flying practice of the kind that I found the most-enjoyable.
Fighter affiliation was the one exercise that involved us all except the navigator. He could get his head out of the 'office' and enjoy the fun. It allowed Mac to demonstrate his skill by causing more than a few Thunderbolt, Hurricane and Spitfire pilots to have to work very hard to get a bead on us, with a very good chance of getting them in our sights first, which Mac insisted was the object of the exercise.
It required complete team work between gunners and pilot and they had a fine old time giving their running commentaries and instructions which were interpreted by Mac into evasive action. The inter-comm was alive. A team of acrobats could not have put a routine together any better as we skidded and banked and slithered this way and that way to the frustration of the fighter pilots.
My place was in the Astro-dome as usual looking for any attacks that the gunners were not concentrating on....just in case!. I never had the opportunity to get into the turrets. The only way that I was ever going to do that was if one of the gunners became a casualty and although I was not over anxious for that experience I still had to keep in practice.
It was inevitable that Mac would get the opportunity to show off to our American friends one day.
We had recently had a liaison visit from USAAF crews and we had shown off our aeroplane only to be left smarting from some tactless remarks about our 'pop-guns' and the lack of them in certain parts, and "where did we stow the pool table", etc, etc. Certainly the fusulage [sic] of the Stirling was big enough for one, but they were more subdued when we told them that we could carry some three times the weight of bombs that they could!. We kept quiet about the fact that they could fly more than twice as high as we could, and very often did.
On one particular occasion we had just completed our exercise and the fighter was orbitting [sic] out of range somewhere when a B.17. (Flying Fortress), came stooging in looking for all the world like a porcupine with guns sticking out of everywhere.
We were a little above him so Mac shoved the nose down, piled on the power to build up the speed quickly, then stopped and
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'feathered'; (turned the propellor blades edge on to the slip stream) both outboard engines before coming up alongside him. After a little hand waving came the big surprise. We then slid up, over the top of him, came down the other side, then underneath and back into the original position before waiving [sic] goodbye to the astonished, and possibly alarmed B.17. pilot and then peeling off like a fighter. All that on two engines!!!!. Very good for morale!.
It has to be said that although the Stirling could not get to a decent altitude it could be thrown about in a very lively fashion and Mac's handling of it had to be experienced to be believed. We might have done some strange things at times and he threatened on several occasions that he would loop it but one thing I do not ever remember him doing was a heavy landing of the sort that some people seemed to make a habit of.
One measure of the quality of successive landings could always be taken from what was known as 'creep' marks on the tyres and wheels.
When a tyre was fitted on one of those enormous wheels a line was painted across wheel rim and tyre so that after a number of landings with the wheel being jerked into motion by the impact with the runway it was possible to see how far the tyre was creeping around the rim. It was only allowed to go so far otherwise the inner tube could distort and fail.
In most cases tyres needed re-fitting about every seven landings but I do know that our aircraft did not have a refitting as often as that.
As for looping, we never did, although we were never very far from it on the occasion when he did attempt it. He had several tries but the result was the same every time. We started running out of air-speed long before we got up to the top and he was obliged to roll out of it with dust, fluff and debris of all sorts floating about loosely in a brief spell of weightlessness. He gave it up after a while having calculated that he needed at least 300mph on the clock before the pull up to make sure of getting over the top but one thing he would not do was to push 'Willie' to that extent,
Someone else's aircraft maybe, but not ours!.
It goes without saying that such fun and games were never
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attempted without a lot of airspace under us. At least 7000ft. of it to make sure that to make sure of recovery if anything did go wrong, and I loved every minute of it.
On the 9th we were back to mining in the Frisian [sic] Islands this time, in the approaches to Wilhelmshaven and Bremerhaven. There was a lot of flak going up from the islands or ships but we had gone in on track fairly low and as soon as the mines had gone down we went again, skimming the wave tops and once more we skirted all the defences finally arriving back at base with no more problems other than just feeling tired even if it was one of the shorter trips.
Someone did mention to Mac that he was likely to slam into the side of a flak ship one night but he reckoned he would always jink around it before they could bring any guns to bear.
[line of stars]
Among the odd jobs that cropped up between operations were trips to pick up a crew or part of one that had diverted or pranged somewhere, or taking a crew to pick up an aeroplane after it had been repaired. Every day it was something different, and some nights as well with a mass exercise to test some procedure or just to keep the enemy guessing. Spoof exercises were boring but very worthwhile as it put the German defences on the alert only to find that the force had turned away half way across the North Sea.
Mac still went out of his way to practice low flying and I recall with shame the number of sailing boats all over the Broads that we capsized with our slipstream as we steamed along with about 200mph on the clock.
It seemed funny at the time anyway. Especially the poor bloke on a bike who was wobbling all over the place as he was looking over his shoulder at a massive Stirling at about 30ft bearing down on him, to be finally flung, bike and all, into the dyke.
None of it was authorised of course but Mac always used to say that if the flight authorisation book was annotated 'local flying' it looked suprisingly [sic] like 'low flying' and that is what he would be doing for as long as he could get away with it.
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On the 24th we were briefed for a raid on the docks and the U.Boat construction plants at Hamburg with a maximum effort being called for.
Every available aircraft was put on; many with 'scratch' crews drawn from the operations staff. This was one with a difference!. The briefing was long and detailed as we were going to drop 'Window' for the first time.
'Window' was the code name for the bundles of foil strips that were to be discharged from aircraft at a steady rate from a given position en route and as every aircraft in the force was contributing it was expected to cause such a smother of signals on the enemy radar that it would be quite impossible to track individual aircraft. It sounded like a good idea to me and I was quite content to spend a lot of time shoving that stuff down the flare chute if it was going to keep us out of trouble.
It did work and losses were cut considerably despite the fact that three of the Stirling force failed to return out of a total of 791 aircraft dispatched. Nine others were also missing.
It was a fairly long flight of 6 hours 55 mins. but was without incident until we were over base on return. Someone ahead of us had done a 'swinger' and blocked the runway so we were diverted to Mildenhall and it was a strange bed for the night for us. The arrangements for diverted crews were a bit rough and ready. After debriefing we were given bedding and then had to hump it, with all of our other gear, around the camp, through the main gate to the pre-war airmens married quarters which were being used as barracks, and we finally flopped into hastily made beds in the kitchen of one of them, dead beat. I'm sure we could have slept the clock around but it was not to be.
We were hauled out of our beds at mid-day by the RAF Police as there was a panic to get back to base. We had no time to have a drink or a meal or clean our teeth or wash or shave. It was a mad scramble to get out to the aircraft as quickly as possible after returning the bedding. That basically is what caused my problem. It was not until we had got airborne that I realised that in the 'flap' I had left my flight bag in the billet and that was
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serious. Among the contents of that bag were secret code books but Mac was adament [sic] when I asked for a turn round. His comment was simply "hard luck". so when I reported the loss on return to base the cat really was among the pigeons.
It was a long time before the enquiry was concluded.
I could have shortened the period, and certainly Mac was soon wishing he had turned-back but he would not take me over later in his car, or lend it to me (not that I had a driving licence), so we had to put up with a Squadron Leader chasing us all around for statements. It must have been time consuming and frustrating for him when we kept disappearing into the protection of the briefing room which were 'off-limits' to him.
The bag was eventually recovered from where I said it was. It was in one of the cupboards in the kitchen where we spent the night. (I had put it there for safety!), and later I got a formal reprimand for my sins. It did not make a lot of difference in the long run.
[line of stars]
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Nevertheless, I was feeling very apprehensive about the outcome of the oversight as we set course for base, air testing the aircraft on the way, and once the loss was reported I was issued with a new kit before we dashed off to try and get a few hours more sleep and a clean up. There was not much time to spare as we were on the Battle Order again. Hence the panic to get us back!.
Even then none of us felt particularly wide awake as we dragged ourselves into the briefing room once more. This time to be briefed for a raid on the Krupps complex at Essen.
Essen was considered to be one of the hottest targets in the Ruhr, being right in the middle with some fairly formidable defences to work our way through.
It was a case of running the gauntlet for a long time with a big of a wiggle here and there to dodge the ack-ack and the searchlights that someone else had stirred up but nevertheless, around Essen itself it was pretty fearsome.
Somehow we got through it and were homeward bound just wanting our beds but it was not to be. Routine W/T (Wireless Telegraphy-morse) broadcasts from Group HQ confirmed that the weather had indeed taken a turn for the worse, as we had been warned about at briefing.
Fog was forming all over East Anglia and we did not have a lot of reserve fuel. We had carried a maximum bomb load instead so someone at Group HQ planning must have been keeping his fingers crossed. The problem was that there were a lot of pilots wanting to get on the ground quickly as the low swirling fog was thickening up rapidly.
The countryside was covered in almost 100% cotton wool with church spires and masts sticking up through it and it did not make it easy to find a runway underneath it.
Our diversion was to Waterbeach and by the time we arrived on the scene it was going full blast. Aircraft were milling around over the top burning up precious fuel and others who had been called in had made missed approaches and rejoined those circling so when we were called in without too much delay Mac pulled out all the stops and made it first time on the BABS (Blind Approach Beam System), much to the relief of all concerned.
There was a lot of nail biting and it did not improve matters
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when we actually passed over one flaming wreck on the final approach. We had made it but some others holding off near the coast ran out of fuel and had to abandon with the inevitable loss of life due to parachute failures, crash landings and drownings.
At least we were home and dry once more even if it was going to be another cold and somewhat damp bed for the night, which was more than could be said for some poor blokes. Nothing at all was heard from another six Stirlings, Three of then from our Squadron. There was another large gap in the ranks that would need filling!.
The weather had cleared up by mid-morning and we were hauled out of our beds again feeling more dead than alive, with another panic to get back to base as we were on the Battle Order yet again!.
I must confess that at the time I felt that we were really pushing our luck.
"Willie' did not come up to scratch as we airtested it on the way back. We had actually taken off with what would normally have been an unacceptable 'mag' drop being unladen but it really did not make a lot of difference so we handed it over to the ground crew to sort out and once again we went through the same procedure as before. Grabbing some sleep, cleaning ourselves up etc. but when it came to briefing time 'W' still had not become serviceable despite Mac's rantings and ravings. He and Paddy had spent quite a lot of time out at the dispersal with their sleeves rolled up. We were allocated EF492 which someone else had air tested.
It finally resolved itself as the operation was cancelled almost immediately after the briefing. That was one time I was very relieved when the 'op. scrubbed' message came through considering the diabolical weather that had been forecast.
Despite the extra time that was available 'W' still failed to give satisfactory engine responses even after they changed all the plugs, ignition leads and magneto's on the troublesome engine so we were still down for EF492 when we were briefed on the following day for Hamburg yet again.
'Windowing' was the routine once more starting long before we entered the flak and fighter belt.
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The only break in that routine was when the flare was loaded as we once again approached the target in the midst of the docklands complex.
There was a lot of chatter and excitement from those up front as we got nearer. I went forward to join Pete who had virtually abandoned his charts about fifty miles from the city. There was absolutely no doubt where the target was. No spoof target fire could have possibly looked like that.
There was a damn great fire up ahead that, obliterated any aiming point so we jostled ourselves into the stream and Hoppy aimed for the middle.
The scene was almost beyond description, with a carpet of fires delineated by the waterways and streets with bursting bombs and other erupting areas of fire with photo flashes and flak tracers climbing lazily into the sky. Probing fingers of searchlights and cascading chandeliers of red and green Pyrotechnic markers.
It was an obsolutely [sic] apalling [sic] inferno down below us. It was sea of flame with smoke reaching up almost to our height to even penetrate the aircraft which bounced and bucked in the updraft.
I had never seen anything like it before and it was a long time before the flames faded into the distance as we left it all behind us. The rear gunner reckoned that he could still see them nearly 100 miles away and everyone was wondering what could have caused such a conflagration. We were to find out later that a combination of freak conditions had caused what was to be known as the 'firestorm’ but it was with some relief that we eventually arrived back at Chedburgh, into a hut now full of new people and to flop into our own untidy beds ready to sleep for a week.
[line of stars]
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We had another free day before the next operation was scheduled.
A day of rest and an opportunity to write to my parents, who, although they never showed their feelings in their letters about the family must have dreaded each day for what news it might bring them, knowing what I was doing. But the following day we were on the Battle Order once again.
We had a shock when we found that the target was Hamburg once more, and there seemed something sinister in going for the place so soon after the last attack that surely must have torn the heart out of the place.
EF433 was back in business as they had sorted it out at last and we had a rough time weaving in and out of a multi searchlight cone and concentrations of flak as we approached the target area. Once again it was a combination of Mac's skill in weaving about and a fair slice of luck. It was not surprising that our gunners were getting a bit 'twitchy' by this time, and so would I have been in their situation. One moment of slackening concentration on their part and we could easily be one of the 'flamers' we saw all too often so when Ralph blasted away at a shadow that swept across the top of us without warning the very fact that he identified it as a Halifax almost immediately was taken for granted. We learned later that Ralph's fire had been accurate enough to have wounded the Halifax engineer in the foot!. It was unfortunate but it really was a case of shoot first and ask questions afterwards. A split second hesitation and there was no second chance if it had been a roaming night fighter trying to drop something nasty on us. We had been warned about that possibility.
Worst things could happen in the 'stream' with hundreds of aircraft converging on one spot with a night visibility of 500 to 600 yds. at best. Collisions were always a possibilty [sic] despite the attempts to achieve separation in the planning, but if someone was out is his timing, and at the wrong height that was it. What the Halifax was doing at our height and mixed up with the Stirlings is anyone's guess. Pete was adament [sic] that we were on time but a total of six Stirlings were lost that night despite the protection of 'Window' and other methods that were being used to give us some cover.
The Special Duties Force had all sorts of tricks up their sleeve
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to confuse and jamb the German fighter control system including German speaking operators on board to imitate their controllers and transmit spurious instructions.
They played merry hell with the system causing Luftwaffe pilots to continuously change channels and in the general confusion they were soon forced to make some drastic changes and then the main force joined in as soon as they entered the fighter belt. Every aircraft transmitted noise on a selection of frequencies which overlapped and were manipulated in such a way as to produce a solid spread of noise across their operating band.
It caused a buzz of excitement when this was detailed at briefing but was Mac was still reluctant to have our main transmitter in use. It produced a typical comment, "It's all very well these clever sods deciding that we will do this and that and the other, but I'm not having a fighter home on our transmissions right up our chuff".
Nevertheless, I had my orders and I could appreciate the value of it. He was finally convinced when I asked him try to listen into the din that was going out on the airways. There was a solid spread of noise from hundreds of aircraft using a microphone in an engine housing feeding to the transmitter. It blotted out everything else so I was allowed to add my bit. Operation 'Tinsel' was good value as far as I was concerned.
Once more the journey was made over the North Sea which always looked so angry and inhospitable when there was sight of it. The very thought of finishing up in the 'oggin' filled me with dread but that was the way so many went following an emergency signal going out at frantic speed to the fixer service. If the sender was lucky it would be followed by a long transmission when the key was clamped down before he dived for his crash position and the transmission ceased when the inevitable occurred.
Everyone who heard those transmissions logged whatever they heard and a D/F bearing if they managed to get one although the transmission would be acknowledged smartly by the base operator for the benefit of all those that might be listening.
The sender would no longer be listening. He would have far more important things to occupy his mind; if he had been lucky!.
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It was not always easy to ditch copy-book style, with the tail down, along the bottom of the swell, exactly at the right speed, at night, and with the aircraft flying like a brick lavatory. Maybe without even a qualified pilot at the controls. But some made it just the same and the rescue services did the rest.
For us once more there were the dulcet tones of the WRAF in the control tower when Mac called for landing instructions, and eventually after all the paraphinalia [sic] had been attended to; to climb into a cold and untidy bed, for most of us, in the same state as we had got out of it!.
The next night we were off to Remchiede [sic] in the Ruhr and marking was carried out to the ultimate. Something different was being tried. There were route markers, turning point markers, target markers, back up markers and shifters, but it was not to Mac's liking. It might have helped to place more bombs in the right place but it also seemed to be an invitation to the night fighters to concentrate their efforts in a nicely defined corridor.
That was the night I did something that I only ever did the once. We were carrying a second pilot on his first operational trip. Paddy spent most of his time in the astro dome, the flare was loaded and there was no window to throw out so I was virtually 'spare'. I retired to my armour plated seat, receiver volume turned right up so that I would be alerted at the first signs of a transmission; and then I dozed off!. At that point in time I decided that if I was going to get killed I did not want to know about it.
It is not possible to go right off in such circumstances so I was still conscious of thumps, bounces and weaving sensations but we still sailed right through it all although eight other Stirling were not so lucky. Two of them from our Squadron!.
[line of stars]
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There was hardly time to get our breath back before we were at it again. We went through the old familiar routine and there were a few gasps when we found that the target was Hamburg once more.
In the meantime a story had gone around in respect of an NCO crew who had turned up for a briefing in their best uniforms, having told their commissioned captain in advance that they were refusing to go, but when they announced that fact to all and sundry that they really had had enough after their last rough trip there was one hell of a commotion. They had all been placed under close arrest and were stripped of their rank and aircrew insignia after which they finished up in the ‘glasshouse'. Subsequently, when they had completed their term they were employed in the Sgt's Mess of another operational station with the glaring signs of removed badges for all to see………and lesson to everyone!.
How much truth there was in that story is anyone's guess but it did show up the anomaly in the aircrew set up that everyone was well aware of.
Despite the fact that all aircrew were volunteers once you were in that was it. There was no going back and staying that you did not like it or you did not want to do it, on moral or any other grounds. You were stuck with it.
Failure or refusal to carry out your duty in the air was classified as LMF. (Lack of Moral Fibre) and led immediately to a Courts Martial. The action was swift although there was a subtle difference between that charge and 'cowardice in the face of the enemy'.
I am sure that a lot of people who were justifiably scared out of their wits still pressed on rather than give way and be labelled with that stigma. In many cases the condition was recognised by other crew members and the individual often 'rested' on medical. grounds which eventually sorted the chap out one way or the other.
In this particular case where there was more than one person involved it was much more serious and no doubt could have been construed as mutiny rather than LMF. It begs the question of how a similar problem would have been dealt with in either of the other services. I have a fairly good idea...but this was
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the Air Force way!!!!!!!.
The briefing was well under way and everyone did their little bit until it finally came to the Met. man's turn.
He commenced to put up a chart such as I had never seen before; or since.
It was smothered in the usual blue and-red symbols of high and low pressure systems. Warm fronts. Cold fronts. Occluded fronts, and the craziest pattern of isobars that looked as if they had been put on by a demented spider.
There was a buzz of anticipation as he finished pinning up his chart, then he turned around, coughed nervously and confessed that he had not got a clue.
What a brave chap!.
The announcement was greeted with good natured hoots, howls, and whistles accompanied by the stamping of feet until, he had an opportunity to explain that the situation was very complex and that it was impossible to draw up really accurate forecast. This was the best that he could do.
His forecast was absolutely grim. We were to expect anything and everything. There were no soft options.
He probably did not realise at the time that all the noise we had made was little more than a cover for the twinges we nearly all had in our guts.
His chart may have been a joke but the weather was not. There were umpteen layers of cloud with heaped up cumulous and dirty great Cumulo [sic] Nimbus embedded in the layers with the most incredible wind sheers in them that was a navigators nightmare quite apart from the fact that if you did happen to be unfortunate enough to blunder into the worst of that it was enough to tear your wings off with updrafts and downdrafts of around 100mph adjacent to each other!.
We encountered ice, snow, hail, rain, thunder and lightning and even that rare phenomenae [sic] 'St Elmo's fire' that lit up the aircraft with a silvery blue glow of discharged static electricity around all of it's extremeties [sic] including the propellors that were turned into enormous catherine wheels.
Mac fought the elements and that aeroplane for hours as it bucked, bounced, and groaned with every lurch. We couldn't get above it so there was only one way....onward!
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Hail about the size of marbles hammered us until we thought that every piece of perspex must give way under the onslaught but somehow we got through although we had to bomb under the parachute sky markers that the Pathfinders had been forced to drop above the diffused glow of the doomed city below us.
It must have been too much for some. It was a shocking night all round. For us as well as Hamburg. We lost thirty aircraft altogether and another 50 were badly damaged, without a doubt as much by the elements than by enemy action and on the whole it is not suprising [sic] that the bombing was scattered all over the place.
We were all utterly exhausted after that. None more so than Mac, and were very relieved to get back to base and flop into our beds again. We were very lucky. A lot of good blokes went to a more permanent resting place that night without achieving a lot on that ill fated mission.
There were some angry mutterings directed at the commanders who had made the decision to go out an such a night.
There is a story told of one Aussie pilot who was so incensed at the debriefing he insisted on phoning Group HQ and when he was connected fired a real Aussie broadside down the line. The story goes that when he had finished the person at the other end said "do you know who you are talking to?", "No" said our Aussie. "This is the C in C, Air Chief Marshall Harris" (short pause), the next question was from our Aussie friend, "do you knew who this is?" to which the C in C said "No". "Thank Christ far that" was the answer to that before the phone was promptly replaced!.
[underlined] Noel [/underlined]
Happy reading
[line]
and there are another 70 pages to ‘Water under the Bridge’ Part 1
[underlined] Alan [/underlined]
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On the lighter side there were a few evenings out together in Bury St Edmunds where someone had found a pub that was just right for us.
It was a back street 'spit and sawdust' place with the very apt name of 'The King William', and give us a common meeting place that we were otherwise denied as we were split between two Messes.
Mac used to get a small recreational petrol allowance for his car but it didn't go far. One or two sorties had proved fruitless as everywhere we went we seemed to be up to our armpits in aircrew and allied troops of all nations, and despite various reports about a certain pub having some beer we would be lucky to get in the door before they sold out. In others it was not unusual to get a watered pint. With war-time beer being limited to 2 1/2% alcohol to start with who wanted a watered pint! We most certainly didn't so once we found the 'King Willie' we kept very quiet about it.
The landlord and his wife had recently heard of a service bereavement in the family and when we turned up they virtually adopted us. We were treated like family and we could not have asked for more. In those days such a place that never ran out of beer, eggs and bacon, or time was the nearest thing to home. We probably spent more time in the private rooms than in the bar.
After 50 years that old `pub` no longer dispenses jars of ale. It has been converted into a private dwelling but the old pub sign boarding across the front that used to bear the name has been painted over, but it will always be the 'King Willie' as far as I am concerned.
I will always have a soft spot for that place and 'mine hosts'. There must have been times when Mac's elderly but mechanically perfect Triumph Dolomite was on auto pilot when we were on our way back from Bury after an excursion but it always did it without fuss even if it was grossly overloaded. Anyway, Mac was quite used to nursing a grossly overloaded machine and under the circumstances I never had any worries.
There was the consolation that of course if anything did go wrong; and one day it did when I was not with then, we would not have far to fall, and on occasions we were past caring.
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After a short break we were on the Battle Order again on the 10th August and that night we had a very close shave.
The targets were at Nuremburg, and everything was as normal as it could have been under such circumstances until we were in the final stages of the bombing run when Ralph suddenly snapped out "go port--go-go-go", and Mac threw the aircraft over without hesitation.
I searched around frantically to see what it was all about because I was as usual looking in the opposite direction to where Ralphs turret was pointing.
My heart nearly stopped when I saw a Lancaster no move than 100 feet above us, sliding diagonaly [sic] across, with a 'cookie'. 4000lb blast bomb just leaving it's bomb bay!.
That instant `jink' undoubtedly saved us as we actually felt the displacement of air buffet us as it passed within a few feet of us between the mainplane and tailplane....and then it was gone. So was the Lanc!
Whether we were late on target or the Lanc. was early, or why the Lanc. was at our height, or why the bomb aimer had not seen us goodness only knows. There were lots of theories put forward and Mac had a lot to say about it for a change.
Our own theory was that a new Lanc. crew had done a panic stricken dive to the target and were more intent on getting rid of their load and out of it, and we were well aware that such things did happen from the whispers that did the rounds.
Hoppy was more concerned that the manoeuvre had spoiled his bombing run and he had lost his initial aiming paint so all he could do was to dump the bombs into the inferno that was Nuremberg below us but we were still sweating over that incident for some time afterwards.
It certainly had the affect of increasing our vigilance in the future and we were not going to be caught out like that again if we could avoid it. Things were dangerous enough as it was without being 'bombed' by our own aircraft.
Sixteen aircraft failed to return that night and three of them were Stirlings out of the 119 Stirlings sent out!.
Despite the savage losses within the Stirling force we were
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off again on the 12th but from all around the briefing room there were sharp intakes of breath when we saw just how far the tapes stretched across the wall map, right down to Turin, Italy, and everyone knew immediately that it was going to be a 'hairy' one. Mainly because every Stirling crew member was only too well aware of just how high a Stirling would go. Even the Wellington and some of the 'oldies' could do better than us so we knew that there was no way we would be flying over the Alps...it had to be through them!. As the plan unfolded we soon learned that that was exactly what we were going to do. The bolt hole if in trouble was North Africa!. Our Stirlings were a standing joke in Bomber Command. Even WWI aircraft could get to greater altitudes. We were lucky in normal circumstances to get above 15,000ft fully loaded despite the fact that the Operations Order often called for heights that were unobtainable. There were occasions when we managed to 'claw' a bit more at the expense of high fuel consumption by using more revs and boost and with a bit of luck, climbing at a ridiculous 200 feet per minute with 5deg. of flap when it was possible to gain another 1000 to 1500ft before starting the run in to the target but it was not always a good idea as it reduced the airspeed at the most vulnerable time. It did of course produce an increase in airspeed in a nose down approach to the target but it was a 'swings and roundabout' situation. It was certainly a waste of time gaining height that way for any other reason as having achieved it it [sic] could not be held in level flight and would slowly sink back to it's own level like a waterlogged hippo. The net result was that we got the full treatment from both the medium and the heavy flak as well as being bombed by our own aircraft!. The die was cast and we were stuck with it and it seems appropriate to relate an incident as I recall it.
A New Zealand pilot of 214 Squadron received a replacement rebuilt machine and to his delight he found that it out-performed any other Stirling that he had ever flown and kept singing it's praises until the news got around and an investigation was started to try and find out all about this 'Super' Stirling.
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All sorts of people flew it and sure enough it went up to around 20,000ft feet just like a Lanc. and there was much scratching of heads. Then they brought the jigs in from the repair depot, (SEBRO), at Cambridge and the matter was solved. They found out that the tailplane was out of incidence, so they promptly put it back to the 'correct' specification and 'presto', it was back to what a Stirling should be.
It might have solved the technical problem but it did not help the pilot much. He was so peeved about that he refused to fly it until it was changed back and he was threatened with disciplinary action but it was overcome by allocating him another 'normal' aircraft so he had to fly that or face the consequences. My recollection of the final verdict is that the powers that be decided that an incorrectly rigged tailplane could cause a structural failure in flight and that was the last word as far as I am aware. Stirlings continued to be produced to the same specification and displayed the same problem right to the end of it's days, even when many were converted or built as Mk.lV and Mk.V transports that were subsequently to be found littered around airfields all over the world.
I think most of us at that time would have been prepared to have taken a chance if there had been a choice of the two evils and Mac summed it up in his own inimitable way. "Bloody stupid sods", but since there was no choice through the Alps it was.
At the other end of the spectrum there was another `rogue' aircraft that arrived on the Squadron after a rebuild but it must have had a very limited test flight prior to delivery. Rogue is hardly the word that it's crew called it after air testing It. It creaked and groaned. The wing tips fluttered and it could not be trimmed from a lop-sided attitude in flight. Despite the most careful handling it showed great reluctance to exceed 9,000ft and was finally landed very delicately as it seemed that it was about to fall apart. It still took another independent short air test to confirm it's condition before it was promptly grounded and handed back to engineering!.
Despite the problems with the aircraft and the conditions encountered in flying right down to the South of France, skirting around Switzerland and heading through the mountains the Fiat factory......
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in Turin received our calling card but Mac was not at all happy with the return journey.
We had used a lot of fuel as a result of the engine settings that he had insisted on as we had weaved in and out of the mountain tops and to make matters worse it seemed to be getting light much earlier than anticipated.
The planned route was given up in favour of a straight line course for home shores and in the improving light Mac went down to deck level to get under radar cover and to make sure that no-one could get underneath us.
There was little I could do. Radio communication was out of the question even if it had been needed. We were far to low for reeling out the trailing aerial without loosing it so I went into the front turret as all of the others up front concentrated on map reading and safety look-out.
We were scudding along and were about 30 to 40 miles South of Paris when Mac let out a yell, "all gunners stand-by.....open bomb doors". He had spotted something that looked like a good place to jettison the incendiary containers. That 'something' appeared to be a German troops early morning parade forming up in a barrack square and we blasted into the parade ground leaving a very nasty mess behind us from front and rear guns as well as the containers.
That got rid of a bit of weight and we continued to steam along until we came to the shores of the Normandy coast where we spotted what looked like another troop assembly for morning bathing which we blasted into as well leaving that area rather messed up as well.
It did seem as if Mac's apptitude [sic] for low level flying was paying off as we had no-one chasing us so we stayed down low until half way across the Channel by which time I had vacated the front turret then it was back up to height, IFF on for radar identification, and on to base.
Mac had his own reasons for imposing a discreet silence about that episode despite what might have been a considerable contribution to the war effort. As far as anyone else was concerned we had dumped the containers and fired off the ammunition in the Channel to lose weight but having run for home more or less in in a straight line we got it........
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in the neck for arriving home early, a little earlier than others. There was even an accusation that we might not have even been to Turin and Pete's charts were impounded, but the target photo proved that we had. What they thought we had been doing for 7hrs 25mins. I really do not know but it was not very pleasant until we were proved to be in the clear but our unauthorised activities were [underlined] never [/underlined] reported.
The relief of crossing home shores again on the return journey was always an anti-climax as there were many hidden dangers on the home run with most of the crew drained by the physical and mental concentration of picking a safe pasage [sic] through enemy defences.
It was too easy to relax too soon with the gunners fighting the overwhelming desire to close their eyes, and even up front it was just as easy to be lulled by the steady throb of carefully synchronised engines with the aircraft flying itself on auto-pilot, particularly during the dark hours.
It was not unknown for the occasional Luftwaffe fighter bomber to infiltrate the home going bomber screen [sic] with a chance of shooting one down or following it through the radar screen to his base to shoot him down when he was most vulnerable during the landing and to give the base a plastering as well.
There was one occasion that I thought Mac had gone barmy when we were homeward bound over the sea and he called me up to take over his seat whilst he went down the rear. The night was as black as a coal cellar otherwise I am quite sure that I would never have had that opportunity but I dread to think of what might have happened if we had been bounced.
Of course, Paddy, in the right hand seat was quite capable of flying the aircraft within certain limits should an emergency arise, that was part of the job. So could Hoppy and although I had done several hours in the Link trainer (Flight simulator) my own efforts were very limited. My best effort was when I had an outside horizon but I was not very good on instruments alone and with the hood down. Under those circumstances I invariably 'pranged' it by losing control so when on that occasion I sat there gingerly making adjustments to the controls; as I thought, Paddy said after a few minutes "easy isn't it?", and when I nodded he added, "especially on auto-pilot"!. Rotten
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swine, and I thought that I had been doing so well to keep it straight and level.
After that I just sat there until it was time to return to my radio compartment to take a routine broadcast. Then I knew why I had been afforded the privilege of a front seat.
There was Mac, comfortably seated on the Elsan toilet down the back end, smoking a cigar, seemingly without a care in the world. Skippers privilege; no-one else was allowed to smoke!.
After the last operation we learned that three Stirlings had failed to return and one of them was from our Squadron.
The briefing on the 16th was for the long haul down to Turin again but we had an engine pack up 1 1/2 hours out and we were forced to return. With obstacles like the Alps to contend with it was no time to invite trouble but it seemed a terrible thing to do to jettison about 1000 gallons of precious fuel over the bombing range at Thetford followed by the bombs. It all had to go to get the aircraft down to landing weight but not all of the bombs went down safe. They never did. If the arming links did not release from their clips the pins were pulled and they went down live.
I remember only too well the occasions when as an airman on the very range, looking after the flashing beacon that there were some hair raising incidents. I have always maintained that the safest place was the target area. Being 2000 yards from it was no guarantee that you would not get earth thrown in your face,.....even when the Lufwaffe [sic] had a go at knocking out the light. At least on those occasions it gave me a bit of fun then with the Bren gun!.
We were certainly more rested than those who had done the full round trip when we found out that there was another operation planned for the 17th.
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Excitement mounted when the Battle Order was posted calling for a maximum effort and every available aircraft and crew was on the board to start with although it was whittled down for various reasons as time went on. We were allocated a 2nd pilot as EF433 was still undergoing an engine change so we were down for EE945 but it seemed a struggle to get many serviceable.
There were gasps and whistles as the wall map was uncovered. The tapes went right out across Demark and jinked about all over the place before they ultimately took up a course for Berlin from a turning point on the German Baltic coast very close to the Polish border. That was the crafty bit. We had been going on that route with variations for some time but that time we were not going to Berlin but to some place by the name of PEENEMUNDE.
The briefing was lengthy and very detailed. We were going in at medium height in bright moonlight to attack an experimental radar establishment (so we were told) and there was an order of the day from the man himself, 'Bomber Harris' to the effect that we were expected to press home the attack with the utmost vigour, and that if we did not knock the place out the first time we would be going back again the next night to finish it off.
Apparently Peenemunde was very special and I did not like the sound of that any more than the rest of our brief.
The aiming point for our wave was the quarters of the technical staff with the intention of killing as many as possible and the other waves would deal with the research and manufacturing plant. There was a lot of quiet whistling through clenched teeth at that announcement. It had a particularly dirty feeling about it to set out to deliberately kill people although we were not so naive not to be aware that the type of bombing that we were engaged in invariably took it's toll of innocent civilians including women and children. Somehow this felt different.
The Pathfinder technique was something new too. We had a 'Master of Ceremony's', who would be flying around the target broadcasting target and marker information to keep the bombing concentrated in the right place. A very dodgy process at low level and under a lot of falling bombs so Mac had to keep his R/T set on whether he liked the idea or not.
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Despite the maximum effort called for all the Squadron could muster was four serviceable aircraft and in fact only a total of 54 Stirlings were committed so we were not the only unit having difficulty in keeping aircraft flying but we got off and were under way without any trouble.
It was a long trip taking a Northerly route across the North Sea with many feint turns to keep the enemy guessing until we eventually turned South to cross the Island of Rugen with the head of the stream pointing to Berlin but in that case using the island as a final navigational check point to line us up with Peenemunde.
In such a bright moonlight night dozens of aircraft could be seen lining up but the rear gunner spotted one that seemed to be lining Itself up on us and it was not one of ours!. He kept an eye on it until he was sure of it's intentions and then there was a sharp warning, "fighter low, corscrew [sic] starboard, go" and opened fire as he spoke.
There was a lot of firing from both gunners as banked and dived followed by a yell from the rear gunner "got him" as the would be attacker went diving earthwards with smoke and flame pouring from him.
We soon levelled out again with the target area now clearly lit up ahead by markers, exploding bombs and fires. The Flak was very light and the target stuck out like a 'sore thumb' although there was a little confusion about the precise aiming point. The MC had been a bit late in giving corrections to bomb upwind and to one side of the markers but Hoppy had already locked on to his target and it was too late to do anything about it once the button was pressed, He always maintained that he went for the correct target anyway as it was obvious that the markers were out of place but there was a lot happening around us and there was more excitement to come.
The bomb bay doors had just closed when Mac suddenly ordered "guns stand-by-fighter dead ahead" and I swung around in the astro-dome to see an Me.110 about 200 yds ahead going from left to right with the crew plainly silhouetted in the cockpit by the light of the moon.
In the time that it had taken me to turn around Mac had already
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rammed on full power, banking right and Hoppy was scrambling into his turret. Ralph was rapidly rotating forward but it was a forlorn hope that we might do something effective. There was no way a thirty tonner was going to produce the sort of urge [sic] that was necessary and we soon lost him as he went into the dark side. I don't suppose the German crew even saw us.
The intercom was a bit lively after that as we cleared the target area and finally headed for home. The fighters were showing signs of getting very busy and there was evidence of combats all around us so it was not surprising that Mac did his usual and to hell with orders to climb away from the target. I heard him explaining to our co-pilot that he did not think it was a good idea to reduce his airspeed to about 150mph in those conditions and our co-pilot was learning a few things too. It must have paid off for him anyway. He stayed with the Squadron to the end advancing from Sgt to Sqdn.Ldr. and with a DFC.!.
Mac did the very opposite to the briefed instructions by shoving the throttles right forward with the nose down and 'high-tailed' it out of there like a scalded cat and kept it going until we were down to about 2000ft which we maintained over Denmark before climbing again.
We got home without any more trouble. The rear gunner had his claim of a `kill' of a Do.217 confirmed by other sightings although it was never acknowledged in the record books and fortunately we didn't have to go there again. We had well and truly put the place out of business and the Yanks made sure that it was unlikely to recover.
It was long afterwards that we learned that the so called 'radar delelopements [sic] ' at Peenemunde were in fact the V1 and V2 rocket research and developement [sic] that had received top priority, but at a terrible cost.
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The raid had cost us 41 aircraft including one Mosquito over Berlin where a diversionary attack was-going in. Of the two Stirlings lost one was from our Squadron and we lost not only the 'A' Flight Commander and another 'freshman' pilot who was down as second pilot.
Altogether there were nearly 300 casualties of which 131 had a been consigned to watery graves; never to be found!.
Later on some more interesting facts emerged. Apparently the Luftwaffe had dispatched their night fighters to Berlin at first due to the Mosquito's stirring things up and in the excitement they had a fine old time shooting each other up; and down, before it became obvious that the main raid was-somewhere else. Then the fighters were diverted to the Peenemunde area and other units were alerted.
The net result was that when the whole flock descended to land, very short of fuel, on diversionary airfields it was every man for himself and quite a number were lost in mid-air collisions and taxying accidents.
One significant loss that could be attributed to that episode was that the senior General of the Peenemunde production staff was among the many casualties and production was put back sufficiently to gain time for the introduction of countermeasures when they did finally launch them.
[line of stars]
I was not sorry when we found ourselves free for a few days as we waited for the nights to get darker and for nearly 300 air-crew and 40 aircraft to be replaced; but it was only a few days.
On the 23rd August EF433 was back in business again and we were off once more. The target was Berlin; the 'Big City' as it was known to aircrew. It no longer gave us any cause for concern when the target was announced....we had been well and truly blooded, so off we went again although it was not without a spot of bother.
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It seemed that there were battles going on all around us with intense activity for a long time. There were 'flamers' going down in all directions and we were all keeping a very sharp look-out whilst Mac weaved about so that at times we could see below us but we were lucky again even when Mac had to take some very lively action to duck out of a searchlight cone that definitely had our number.
The pale blue high intensity radar controlled master light locked onto us first and then a number of others joined in and chased us around all around the sky.
We had seen that situation often enough to know that once you were trapped in that lot there would be a fighter not far away waiting to finish us off if the concentration of flak did not get us first; and the flak got [underlined] very [/underlined] concentrated.
That was no time to just 'corkscrew'. Throttles forward, fine pitch, nose down to increase speed and then Mac more or less played tag with them as they chased us but he used some very rapid changes of direction before they could reverse.
That night was perhaps the most desperate searchlight situation we had ever been in. On occasions the whole interior of the aircraft was illuminated as plain as day and it was like being a fly caught in a spiders web but eventually Mac's tactics paid off as we broke free. We were very glad to get home again after that.
It was becoming increasingly obvious that the relatively quiet earlier missions were a stroke of luck as we were now having to fight our way through almost every time. The odds in favour of us completing a tour were shortening considerably, and to make matters worse the flying time was getting longer. The last three ops. had all been over seven hours and Berlin was nearer eight, and 56 aircraft had been lost on that raid, 16 of them Stirlings!. The beds in our hut were getting new occupants before we even got to know the previous one's!.
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No-one seemed to be getting posted away or 'tour expired'. There was always someone from the 'committee of adjustment' gathering up the possessions of those who would have no further use for them unless they had been particularly lucky.
As far as we were concerned it was still not a subject of conversation although we were a little superstitious about the situation. Despite the fact that our beds were scattered about the hut none of us ever moved from the beds that we first flopped into so that we could be grouped together, although it would have got some of us away from draughty doors and windows.
We just stayed put as the occupants of the others changed regularly and I learned later that Mac and Pete had adopted exactly the same procedure!. Among the most recent casualties that brought things rather sharply into focus was the loss of another McDonald, (slightly different spelling), ex 214 Squadron, on the last operation. We had got to know him and his crew quite well as they were the most experienced, and we had wished them 'Good Luck' as they left the briefing room.
It was his 30th and final operation before being rested and it was a long time later that I learned that only his W/Op. had survived as a POW. Apparently, at the last moment, on leaving the briefing room, he had been offered the chance to stand down and finish his tour there and then but the crew voted to turn it down!. It did not help to reflect on the fact that when the Squadron had been formed there was a McDonald, a MacDonald and a Macdonald. One, Sgt MacDonald had already goes missing on the 25th July, so we were the only one left!.
As usual, despite the long trip the night before, we reported to the flight office in the early afternoon where we learned of the Squadron's loss, hoping as usual, that we would be 'stood down'. Some were but for Mac and I it was a different story.
For us there was a flight detail with some S/Ldr Staff Officer from Group HQ who for some reason wanted to demonstrate the 'corkscrew'.
I don't know why it was us. Perhaps Mac had volunteered again
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as we suspected he did an occasions, but as it only required a minimum crew of three for such details the others were sent off. There was no Battle Order on the board so they did not need a second telling. They were off like scalded cats!.
It was no real problem with two pilots up front so I was down as 'gunner' for the flight and there was a chance that we might learn something new although we had certainly done our share of 'corkscrewing'; and a bit more the previous night when Mac had got into an energetic but still smooth manoeuvre in such a way that it did not communicate the extent of the motion to the back-side. The evidence of that was that Pete, sitting in his darkened 'office' doing his sums, was only half aware of what was going on apart from the occasional interior illumination, came on the intercomm [sic] and nervously suggested to Mac that he "chuck it about a bit"!. That was a bit of a surprise to the rest of the crew. I knew that we were being 'chucked about,' quite a lot. How else was it that I was in my seat and often getting glimpses of the ground through the the [sic] Astro dome on [inserted] the [/inserted] [underlined] top [/inserted] of the aircraft.
When we got out to EF433 I was more concerned with the pre-flight checks of both mid-upper and rear gun turrets in case I had to make a dive for one of them in the event of an intruder chancing his luck, and then basically I was a passenger.
I was a little surprised to see Mac in the right hand seat as I took up my position on the flight deck between the two pilots as we started up and taxied out…..even then I was getting alarm signals in my sensitive parts as I was subjected to an G experience that was rare since flying with Mac.
The brakes squeeled [sic] and shrieked and the aircraft rocked and a lurched about until finally it was heaved off of the runway in about the clumsiest take-off I could ever remember and into a climbing turn that seemed to strain every rivet. And that was before we corkscrewed!.
After climbing to about 5000ft with the engines bellowing I was listening to this chap explaining to Mac how it should be done but it still caught me by suprise [sic] when he went into the most violent, wildest manoeuvre that I had ever thought possible. The wing tips must have flexed by about 6ft although I did not know for sure as I was brought to my knees by the 'G' forces
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one minute and was floating to the roof the next desperately trying to hang onto something to avoid being thrown around the cockpit and possibly finishing up in someone's laps. Even so I could not avoid noticing a purple tinge developing around Mac's neck that had nothing to do with 'G' forces. As it went on he was obviously getting very angry and not learning a lot!.
Eventually he got very emotional as he turned to the other pilot and the intercom [deleted] n [/deleted] fairly sizzled with an outburst that contained phrases like, "how dare you treat my aeroplane like this" and "what the bloody hell do you think we were doing over Berlin last night" and "what the bloody hell do you think the gunners are supposed to be doing whilst all this is going on" and a lot more besides which is unprintable. An argument ensued, the outcome of which was that Mac finished by telling the other pilot to relinquish control by his "I have control....now sit back and you might bloody well learn something". I crept away somewhat embarrassed and took up my position in the mid-upper turret reporting in when I was established and I soon knew how Ralph felt as Mac put us through the same manoeuvres as we had done the night before, (and he was driving from the right hand seat), with no further comment from the visitor.
At least, being in a gunner situation for a change I learned the value of keeping my eyeballs in their sockets which is more than I would have done if the other chap had been driving!.
Having got that off of his chest we headed straight back to base and landed with the Squadron Leader still fuming at the indignity of being lambasted by a Flying Officer, so he stamped away from the aircraft with a flea in his ear!.
Mac left him to his own arrangements to get back to the flight office whilst we spent a long time looking around the aircraft for signs of sprung rivets and other signs of over stressing like wrinkled skin.
Mac was muttering darkly all the time about "ham fisted buggers" and other uncomplementary [sic] remarks that are unprintable.
He was more vocal than I had ever heard him and definitely not impressed that 'Sir' had not done as many ops as we had!.
No doubt the demonstration was well intentioned even if it was a case of 'teaching grandma to suck eggs'.
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On the 27th we were in the briefing room again to find that targets in Nurnburg [sic] were to receive our attention so off we went in the company of another 673 aircraft.
My recollections are that the flak was the worst I had ever seen so far. There seemed to be a solid wall of shell bursts in front of us as we closed in on the city, and 'flamers' were going down right left and centre.
At briefing it had been mentioned that the night fighters were likely to be repeating some new tactics that had already had some success; as far as they were concerned anyway.
It confirmed our suspicions that something different was going on.
Previously the fighters had kept clear of the ack-ack and waited until they saw someone in trouble before going in for the kill but they had started getting in among us and having a go at anything they saw regardless of the possibility of being hit by their own stuff. Between those operating those tactics and others using AI (Airborne Interception Radar) they were beginning to knock us down like clay pigeons.
The searchlight/flak/fighter combination was lethal under those conditions and between them accounted for the loss of 33 aircraft, 11 of them Stirlings from a force of 104. [underlined] Three [/underlined] of them were from our Squadron detail of seven that had ultimately got under way. The loss of nearly 50% really knocked the stuffing out of us. None of them had been with us for more than a few weeks and one of the pilots had flown with us as co-pilot recently.
At this point I was hoping that a spot of leave would help to prolong things but it was not be.
After a brief rest the next place to receive our attention was Munchen-Gladbach [sic] on the 30th and this one started off on the wrong foot.
All was well until start-up when the starboard outer starter motor stripped when engaged.
It was not unnatural that most of the crew immediately started planning the evenings entertainment to occupy a bonus night off as we knew that there was no spare aircraft. I must confess that I had no knowledge of the starting handle!.
There was no reason why a wireless operator should I suppose
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although it was in our own interests of survival that we should know quite a lot about everyone else's [inserted] job [/inserted] . But that was some starting handle!.
Nearly 20 feet long, shoved through a hole in the engine casing to engage it, and with a large double. crank at the bottom designed for two people to turn it.
With Paddy in the cockpit juggling with throttles and mixture controls, and Mac jumping up and down shouting unprintable words of encouragement to the owners of [underlined] four [/underlined] pairs of arms, mine included, we cranked that engine until at last it spluttered into life and then we all piled aboard and got under way.
We soon made up for lost time by taking a few short cuts to catch up the force as there was no way that we were going to be a loner over enemy territory but I doubt it very much if many aircraft had been started that way to go on ops.
We had a bit of a skirmish later as we approached the target. The rear end Mac hollered and fired as we jinked away from an Me.109 which spun away pouring smoke and flame although we did not see what finally happened to him. We were far to busy searching for others as it was obvious that the fighters were very active all around us. McIlroy was only credited with a possible for that engagement.
There was no doubt that our two gunners were really on the ball as once again they had fired first but others were not so lucky and for one reason or another six Stirlings failed to return.
[line of stars]
We were briefed for Berlin on the 31st although there was some doubt about W becoming serviceable although they were half way through the starter motor change. In the event it was not rectified in time and at the last minute we were allocated EF117, but Mac was very peeved about it. It had not even been air tested!.
We did not get very far in it before we found that the rear guns would not fire and then the intercom went dead on us.
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Mac was fuming and we pressed on for a while desperately trying to rectify the faults without any success but he decided that we would not waste the trip or the bombs as we turned away from the enemy coast and diverted to overfly a place that most people tried to keep clear of; Texel, in the Frisian Islands. They started firing as we approached so it was taps open, speed up with a bit of a weave on and Hoppy planted the bombs as close as he could to the batteries and the searchlights. Their effort was certainly reduced as we turned away so perhaps we had done a bit of damage in the process. It was counted as an operation as we had been over enemy territory but there was one a hell of a row as the brief was to dump the bombs in the sea or jettison them on the Thetford range.
In addition there were even accusations of possible sabotage and collusion from higher up until the faults were proven to have been electrical malfunctions that could not have been fixed in the air. Mac was furious about the whole business but it did not help. One can only speculate on what the outcome might have been if we had not been forced to 'abort' the mission. There were 16 Stirlings lost that night out of the 57 dispatched. One of them from our Squadron!.
The gaps around the mess tables were getting noticeable again and if the absence of any entries in my log book is anything to go by we were sent on leave whilst the Stirling Force was being put together again.
I do vaguely remember one leave that started with a fair old session at the King Willie and I must have forgotten where I was as we pulled out of Bury. St. Edmunds station. Apparently I had to be restrained from dispensing leaflets out of the window!. Despite my indiscretion I still managed to retain some of them.
There were a few mining operations undertaken by new crews whilst we were away and on our return we were to find that one new crew had arrived and had already been lost in that short period. It was not long before we were back in the briefing room again to find that the target was the Dunlop factory at Montlucon, Italy, but it was another washout. We never even left home shores.
An engine seized shortly after getting airborne and we were
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obliged to jettison bombs and fuel on the range before landing. We were in 'W' and it had only done a few hours local flying whilst we had been away but sleeve valve Hercules engines really made a thorough job of it when they seized, so of course Mac was hopping mad.
We ail got blamed for the various things that had gone wrong and a lot of accusations were flung around in the heat of the moment. The frustration was understandable as we all knew that he was driving himself, and us, as hard as he could to get the tour over as quickly as possible but eventually he calmed down and we renewed our efforts.
[line of stars]
It was during our last leave that Mcllroy spent a few days with me and the family as we had a welcome break from the East Anglian scene.
We walked miles over the Downs at the back of Worthing where I had spent all my earlier days, and past the spot where in 1940 I had gazed in awe at a shot down Heinkel 111. although it was an area now that was not so regularly visited by the German Air Force.
It had been different then, when the invasion was imminent although they had been forced by their losses and other commitments to limit their efforts in our direction.
I can still recall vividly the occasion when I found myself right under a scrap over Worthing, between three Spitfires and a Heinkel 111. that had dared to venture in the direction of London.
The Air raid siren had sounded and I had seen him going over very high, leaving vapour trails but he had obviously been forced to turn tail and he was in a shallow glide going very fast as he came over the hospital and the gas works. Then those Spits gave him a real hammering.
With hot empty cartridge cases and links cascading down all around me I had watched mesmerised as the top gunner had winged two of them, one going off East towards Shoreham staggering a bit and the other in the direction of Ford and Tangmere trailing smoke. Then the third one went in for the kill if the
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way that the guns suddenly went askew was anything to go by. That was it. He continued out to sea and plunged in about a mile off of the pier. He had put up a good fight but it had not done him much good.
Now the skies were relatively clear but that did not mean that the area was safe. There were elements of the Canadian Army en-camped in the area and they often imposed a threat to life and limb.
I was glad of McIlroy's company in a bar one evening when some of his countrymen who were somewhat 'tanked' up started making derisive remarks about Brylcream boys and a scrap was imminent.
It all looked very ugly for a while and of course those chaps had been trained to the peak of fighting efficiency and no doubt still had a bee in their bonnet about the Dieppe affair.
Just in time Mac defused the situation. He pushed me out of the way, took of his raincoat to reveal his Canada shoulder flashes, gunners brevet and stripes, and drawing himself up to his full height of 6ft plus asked who was going to be first. There were no takers and we moved to another bar to continue drinking in peace.
No doubt that lot had more than their share of fighting later on, on 'D' Day and after.
[line of stars]
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That was all behind us as we finished our leave and got back to the task of taking the fight to the enemy.
On the 16th we found ourselves on the Battle Order for an operation that turned out to be a very dodgy one.
There were the usual mutterings, quiet whistling through clenched teeth plus a few caustic comments from the assembly when we found that we were off to do some damage to a railway station and tunnel at Modane, a mountain pass between France and Italy. What caused most of the comment was the unusual method of attack. Modane was at the Northen [sic] end of the Tunnel-de-frejus, deep in the Alps!.
As it was in a valley, the floor of which was 3,467ft above sea level, with the tops of the valley at about 11.000ft and only three miles across the tops it was impossible (so they said), to approach the tunnel mouth direct due to the sheer rock face above it.
The plan was to approach from a valley at 90° to the tunnel mouth, plant the bombs in the valley wall to bring down a large amount of debris before doing a smart left hand turn into the main valley.
The task was a risky one, bearing in mind that it was at night. Anyone who failed to get it in one was to initiate the left turn and take the station and yards at Modane as the secondary target.
One way or the other it would make it difficult for the German military traffic that was plying between France and Italy through the remote pass.
Fortunately the Met got it right that time. The weather was perfect. It was beautiful moonlit night and we entered the mountain region between the peaks bang on track and worked our way through until the target area loomed up ahead. We rushed towards the rock face at around 200mph and Hoppy did his lefts and rights and steadies and then he goofed it!. !
What happened next caused my heart to miss a beat. Calm as you like as if he was on the bombing range Hoppy said "missed it-round again"!.
I think that is what upset Mac more than anything else as we banked over into the valley expecting him to give Hoppy some verbal about the secondary target but what came next caused
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my heart to miss a few more beats.
We were all alarmed to hear Mac say, 'that is just what we will do too, and get it right this time or you go out next, we are going back to the tunnel"!.
By now we had got to know Mac well enough to know that when he had set his mind on something there was very little that we could do about it. I got the distinct impression that I was riding a runaway roller-coaster as I braced myself in the isle [sic] between the pilots positions.
The horizon went haywire as we banked over into the initial turn and started to descend. We had not quite got to the station yards when we went into a tight 180deg. turn to head back underneath the rest of the force that was still hurling bombs all the way down the railway line.
I don't know how serious Mac was about chucking Hoppy out but he gave it to him straight, "no more messing about" as we charged at the tunnel mouth and when the "bombs away" call came we did not hang around to see the results although I don't see how we could have avoided hitting something. Our greatest concern was getting out of the situation.
All I could see was a kalidascope [sic] of nasty looking rocks as there was only seconds to make the turn, no room to turn back, no chance to climb with aircraft still coming in over the top of us. All we could do was wriggle and twist along the valley floor hoping to God we would not go the wrong way and find ourselves in a cul-de-sac.
It was very uncomfortable for a while as Pete and Hoppy had consulted their maps and assured Mac that all was well. And so it was as suddenly we came out into a wider valley and were able to climb.
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Obviously we had not done the exact reciprocal of our inbound route and it did not matter a lot as we all breathed a little easier until Mac let out a whoop with an "all gunners stand by" and we were all on the alert again. Then he told us what it was all about as the gunners reported "ready".
He throttled back and in rich mixture we were soon whispering along without even a flicker of flame from the exhausts, and then we all saw clearly what he had seen as we went into a turn. We were able to pick out dim convoy lights on a road halfway up the mountainside, so it seemed likely that it was the Southern end of the tunnel that we had just bombed. Mac said "if that is not a military convoy I will eat my socks" and followed it up almost immediately with a gentle turn onto a Northerly heading to within a few hundred yards of the mountainside. All gunners blazed away in turn and there was all hell let loose before we turned away.
The results were spectacular and certainly not quite what we had expected.
There were explosions, scattering lights, and liquid fire pouring down the mountainside with more explosions in the waterfall of fire and after about 20secs. we turned about and repeated the performance.
It was an appalling sight as obviously vehicles including fuel and ammunition trucks had been hit but turning away with most of our ammunition gone and somewhat shocked, we made our way home, low down across the tip of Switzerland and across France just as fast as we could.
Mac's orders were specific. Not a word about it, and he swore each one of us to absolute secrecy as we had not been ordered to do it, or whether we had done the right thing even though we might have contributed considerably to the war effort.
It was never reported and has remained under wraps until Mac can no longer answer for whatever damage was done. With more operations still to do if we were lucky it was best to forget the episode although some explanations were called for as our target photo showed a very messy tunnel mouth and the expenditure of several thousand rounds of ammunition was explained as an attempt to supress some ground fire in the valley. [underlined] And a ticking off for attacking in the wrong direction [/underlined] !!.
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I did not do another operation until the 3rd October as I went on the sick list for a few days.
I received an injury not from enemy action but from one of my own crew, although the outcome showed the sort of crew spirit that there was even if I had to be the 'dogs-body' to prove the point in respect of my own particular crew.
Macdonald and I had been into Bury St Edmunds to the King Willie for a couple of quiet drinks and on return we went to the Sgt's Mess where there was a dance in progress.
As soon as we entered the Mess we found ourselves in the middle of a group of people, Station Commander included, who were being treated to a drunken comedy act by Paddy who seemed to be doing his damndest [sic] to climb a wall by making repeated runs at it.
He must have been in the bar as soon as it had opened and obviously had had far more than his share.
The affair had just reached the stage where the Group Captain had already ordered the RAF Police to be brought in so Mac stepped in to sort things out his way. Exercising his right as 'Skipper' he ordered me to get Paddy out of the Mess and out of trouble. I wish he hadn't!.
With the assistance of another Flight Engineer from the Squadron Paddy was talked out of the building but we had not got very far when the other chap slipped and went down and a very confused Paddy decided that I was responsible.
I was still trying to hold him up but he turned on me and belted me one!, and I tumbled into an open trench.
I could have coped with that but grabbing a large paint drum half filled with solidified paint he heaved it at me and I remember nothing after it bounced off of my head.
I woke up in the sick bay the next morning with the great grandaddy of all headaches and adorned by large pieces of sticky plaster.
In the meantime wheels had been in motion as it had been decided that disciplinary action would be taken against Paddy for the rumpus that he had caused in the Mess. As far as my condition was concerned it was a different case so it looked as if Mac was going to have to do without his favourite engineer for a while if that reached it's logical conclusion…..until Mac did a deal with someone. That is, in addition to me!.
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He came to see me in the sick bay with a proposal that he said would satisfy all concerned.
The deal was that I would be charged with being responsible for the whole affair and as I was hardly in a state to argue I went along with it. The net result was-that Paddy was in the clear, I was fined five shillings (25p) for being 'drunk and disorderly', a scar on my forehead, and an entry on my documents as well as a few days off; but I had an opportunity to even the score sometime later.
Whilst I was on the sick list and grounded the crew did another two operations with a relief W/Op, going to Hanover on the 22nd and Mannheim on the 24th without incident. and each of those two nights I spent in the control tower biting my nails until they were back. One of our Squadron failed to return from the Hannover raid…..and it was nearly a turning point for me.
There was a limit on how long you could remain out of a crew without being, permanently replaced and the relief W/Op was sufficiently impressed with the rest of the crew to ask if he could stay with them. Mac must have pulled a few more strings and the MO signed me off despite the sticky plaster so I was back in the crew instead of becoming spare man.
The other chap had previous been spare because his crew had gone missing whilst he was sick so he went back to being spare.
Unfortunately, when he did get crewed up again the following month he was killed in a flying accident. That's fate! and it was being tempted far too often for my liking.
Eventually Mac did get around to thanking me in an embarrassed sort of way for my involvement but I think that when I weighed up the final outcome I was the one that was most thankful, so despite a sore head and some red ink remarks in the records, we just pressed on as if nothing had ever happened.
[line of stars]
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The operation we were briefed for on the 3rd October was for aircraft factory targets at Kassel and as 'W' had been unserviceable on air test we were allocated EE971. After air-testing that one Mac and Paddy agreed that 'it would do'. Not quite like our 'W' but they could accept it.
A few things had changed by that time. The Luftwaffe hit and run raids were almost a thing of the past as they were well and truly on the defensive and East Anglia now bristled with AA sites which very rarely permitted a raider to get very far.
We had got bold enough to assemble all the aircraft for the night's operation on the runway in front of the main camp area and in sight of the main road, and on this occasion there must have been as many as 28, possibly 30 aircraft lined up, and very impressive it looked too.
I have always thought that one lone raider bold enough (and lucky enough) to have got through the defences to shoot up that line would have done an awful lot of damage, but fortunately no-one ever did. The resultant mess would have wiped out half the camp and the Marquis of Cornwallis pub at the same time.
Nevertheless it was a great morale booster for the locals who were crowding up to the other side of the fence to watch procedings [sic] , many with pints of ale held aloft in salute. It did restrict activities a bit when many crew members were saying goodnight to their favourite WRAF under the mainplane, but the less said about that the better.
Off went both Squadrons in grand style and we were just approaching the coast outbound when the port outer packed up with a great deal of spluttering and backfiring so it didn't look as if we were going to get very far.
Mac and Paddy juggled with the engine controls but the engine steadfastly refused to do much more than 1000revs without protesting so they shut it down and feathered the prop.
By that time Mac was keen to get another op. under the belt and apart from calling me a 'jinx' he decided to 'press on'. We were not keen but he didn't ask us so we went all the way on three engines, bombed the target and headed home with Paddy biting his nails with concern at the high fuel consumption and the strain of the extra power being extracted from the other
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three engines. I do not think he would have put 'W' under so much strain but this one was not ours and that was that.
As soon as we cleared the enemy coast wee started to economise on fuel with a change of engine settings, firing off ammunition into the sea. Flares, incendiary containers and all sorts of stuff being dumped to lighten the load with Paddy getting more and more agitated as he endeavoured to work out our fuel state which was not made any easier by Mac's persistent nagging.
My request to make an emergency call was refused as was a further request to call the emergency services for the state of Tangmere, although we did change course in that direction. I was further refused permission to switch the IFF to the emergency code, in fact he was downright bloody minded.
Nevertheless, I was all ready to go straight into all my emergency procedures with IFF, radio and verey [sic] signals if the need arose, without permission, as we approached home shores.
We were just about overflying Tangmere when Paddy and Pete come up with the results of their combined calculations.
When I heard that on the intercomm [sic] I thought immediately, 'Tangmere, here we come', with one hour to base and one hour five minutes fuel, so we were not amused when Mac said, "what the hell are you worrying about then. Navigator, a direct course to base please".
A direct course for Chedburgh was made in defiance of standing orders that forbade us to overfly London and hoped to God that we would not lose too much height and find ourselves tangled up in the London balloon barrage.
It was bad enough when the banshee wailing of the balloon barrage warning came in on the radio. That in itself was a bit unnerving but we were all in Mac's hands and I was hoping that he would be prudent enough to settle for any airfield whilst we still had a limited reserve of fuel. And it was limited. Paddy had made it quite clear that he had calculated to the last drop of [underlined] usable [/underlined] fuel on the evidence of gauges that he was doubtful of. He could not do more other than protest further to Mac as we cleared the London area, in fact everyone protested that what we were doing was unnecessary, although perhaps not in such mild terms.
His only answer was to request that I open all of the fuel tank
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cocks on the bulkhead behind me and he started to rack the aircraft from side to side to drain every last drop into the main tanks.
That was enough for me. On went my 'chute and it would not have taken much more for me to be heading for the rear hatch which I had left open after jettisoning equipment over the sea earlier. It was just at that time that Paddy decided that he had definitely had enough. As far as he was concerned Mac had gone 'bonkers' and he was getting out whilst he still had a chance. He struggled out of his seat, clipped on his 'chute and had just got by Pete, and I was seriously. contemplating joining him when I received an order from Mac to "restrain him".
That upset any plans, so he was 'restrained', if that is what you would call tripping him up and sitting on him, although it was not for long as Mac had decided that we were serious and he agreed to go for the nearest airfield if Paddy would go back to his seat.
No sooner had he done so the port outer spluttered and died so they started up the port inner for the first time in hours and although it would not run at any speed without backfiring it was kept going as we desperately searched around for an airfield.
Mac was very busy struggling with the controls when one was sighted and we immediately headed for it. I fired off the colours of the day as fast as I could load and fire and when they were gone I fired off all the reds and then everything else in the rack, greens, yellows, star shells and even smoke puffs in the hope that the control staff would be suitably alerted to an emergency. Mac was far too busy to even use his radio and it was all very tense in the cockpit. I was half hoping that Mac would still give the order to abandon, and I was still ready, but instead he instructed Paddy to select wheels and flaps only when he asked for them and that's when the starboard outer spluttered and died. It was in those desperate moments that Paddy 'goofed' and we lost about five thousand feet rapidly after he feathered the starboard inner by mistake, and although he promptly rectified the error we were by that time descending like the proverbial brick lavatory. Not surprising as we were for a time flying; if you could call it that, on between one
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and one and a half engines.
I was back in the astro dome by that time as we aimed at the threshold of the runway at an alarming angle to keep the speed up. My legs and fingers were crossed as I looked hypnotically at where I was quite sure that we were going to make a large sized hole and then the nose came up …….."full flap" was Mac's breathless request over the intercomm [sic] and we were flaring out above the runway with the speed falling off as all power was taken off with another almost whispered request ...."wheels down" and then we floated whilst Mac held her off, to kiss the runway within seconds of the undercarriage 'green lights' coming on with warning horns blasting our ears.
Another perfect landing!!!! even if the approach had been a bit abnormal.
Mac established contact with the control tower to find that we were at Wratting Common, another Stirling base and we managed to stagger to the end of the runway and turn off before everything stopped with a splutter as we ran completely out of fuel!. We subsequently had to be towed away but not before we had managed to compose ourselves.
It was really an amazing piece of flying that had made the best out of a very bad decision that so easily could have ended in disaster…..and we all knew it.
Why else would Paddy come rushing past me towards the rear door, ashen faced, then jump out and spend a lot of time throwing up and kissing mother earth!
As for me. I stayed in the semi-darkness of the doorway until my colour came back and my knees stopped knocking before I ventured out...and I needed the ladder!. I don't think the others were much better.
After a few hours sleep we were back out to the aircraft which had been repaired and refuelled. The problem had only been burned out ignition leads which was something that Hercules engines quite often suffered from and we were soon on our way back to base still feeling as if we had experienced a very dream [sic] but we were still better off than some. Another five Stirlings failed to return that night.
Not another word was said about the incident. No apologies....nothing! Perhaps it was best left that way if we
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expected to continue as a crew…..and we did, although Mac was somewhat subdued afterwards -and was suffering from strained back and shoulder muscles for several days.
[line of stars]
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We had a few days break before we were detailed for another operation on the 8th. It was my birthday on the 9th so I planned a celebration if all went well but that night, as the 8th turned into the 9th we got the sort of party I could have done without. The main target was Hannover although-we were part of the secondary force within the main force with everyone heading for Bremen and at a certain position the main force turned towards Hannover leaving us virtually as decoys.
The fighters had been scrambled to intercept the track to Bremen and I was half way through a large bale of leaflets that I was dispensing out of the rear escape hatch when the rear gunner suddenly yelled "fighter--port quarter--corkscrew port--go" and over we went straight into evasive action as the fighter opened up. The rear gunner opened up at the same time and the interior of the aircraft was lit up by flashes as we were hit and bits and pieces were flying around in all directions. There was not a lot that I could do although I instinctively started to throw out leaflets as fast as I could without bothering to cut the string on some as I came up to the standing position to kick some bundles out. As I was to find out later, a good move. Mac was throwing the aircraft around all over the sky and the firing seemed to go on for a long time with smoke, flashes and a great deal of noise as something stung me in the face, and then it stopped as quickly as it had started. Immediately the rear gunner was back on intercom to report that his rear turret was damaged and had jammed solid when he had resorted to turning it manually.
He also reported a hell of a lot of debris from us had smothered the attacker before he had broken away suggesting that we had lost a few bits of aeroplane.
It was later on when we were piecing together details of the attack that we figured that it must have been my leaflets in the slip-stream, and he also reported that the fighter appeared to have two glowing tails; which is what I had also seen in a brief moment through the hatch.
There was a hell of a lot to do. We were in no doubt that we had collected a considerable amount of damage yet everyone checked in OK and unharmed which was a relief.
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I made my way back to the radio compartment to find Paddy curled up behind the armour plating of my seat which he had dived for after seeing me hopping about in the illumination of tracer that was flying about.
I asked him to check me over as there was a lot of wet and warm stuff running down my face and producing his torch very soon re-assured me that "it's hydraulic oil you bloody twit" before he was off down the back end to make some repairs.
Everyone was checking around thoroughly at that time but there were no fires or fuel leaks and all engines were turning without fuss. All other indications were normal….and we were still flying, complete with bomb load so we pressed on somewhat gingerly at that point in time.
There was another very good reason why I had dashed up front so rapidly after the action. Despite the fact that I had been standing on the edge of quite a large hole to dispense the leaflets, my 'chute had still been in it's stowage a long way from me; and I never ever did that again that's for sure!.
Everyone eased their parachutes in the stowages. Paddy put his on as he had to negotiate the open hatch which we had decided to leave open under the circumstances and as we continued to Bremen we checked and re-checked all our vital functions.
Paddy used a fire axe to clear the rear bulkhead and turret doors before the turret became operational again with a healthy short burst. But Mcllroy was in a very draughty situation as most of his perspex had gone and there were holes all around him, after which he made some first aid repairs to the hydraulic piping in the area of the position where the ventral turret would have been; if it had been fitted. First aid was the operative word; he used the medical first aid kit!. More to stop slippery oil sloshing about than anything else.
The intercomm [sic] was lively and as we had a freshman second pilot with us he was learning very fast. For a change Mac was not telling anyone to quit the chatter as he usually did so bit by bit everything was satisfactorily cross checked and it was reassuring to find that all the essentials were working despite the fact that there was a lot of internal damage: There were holes in the main bulkhead up front near my position and
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even some of the instruments in the cockpit had lost their glass. With everything giving the right responses it was no time to pull out of the stream and becoming a sitting duck for another enterprising night fighter so we stayed with it, bombed and stuck to the route for the return journey still regularly checking and cross checking.
I really thought that that was the one time Mac was going to have to use his "angle of dangle" equipment as he called it; to help him fly the aeroplane. It was in fact a weighted Scots doll suspended by a cord in line with his nose that he always set up for use. He always said that he could fly on that if all else failed but fortunately it was not needed and stayed up on the scuttle.
Eventually Paddy and I replaced the rear hatch and things returned to near normal but I could not help reflecting that I could have been a lot more effective with a pair of .303's sticking out of the bottom instead of dispensing a pile of paper which no doubt the German population used for the same purpose as we would have done in those days of paper shortage.
As it was, we had nothing protecting the underside and the Luftwaffe knew it well enough. After all, they had a fair sized scrap business going in recovering crashed Allied aircraft and re-cycling them into fighters for the defence of the Fatherland, and it was costing us dearly.
Although the attack on us had been from the rear so many losses of the period were being caused by something that for some reason or other our intelligence people did not know about, or if they did it was not made common knowledge.
It could have been that the Luftwaffe system was so effective that few, if any, aircrews ever got back to tell the tail [sic] .
They had developed a weapon along the lines of a British invention of WW1, the COW (Coventry Ordinance Works) gun, originally intended for shooting down airships.
They had put together a pair of 20mm cannon with periscope sights on an upward firing mounting in several types of aircraft, including the Me.110. and codenamed it 'Schrage Music' as part of their 'Battle Opera' control system.
With or without radar they were getting into the bomber stream, picking a target and positioning themselves underneath in the
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blind spot out of sight of the gunners, even to the point of following through a 'corkscrew' so that the gunners never got contact, or the Wireless Operator through his infra-red 'Fishpond' equipment, (if he had got it on) for that matter.
All they had to do was to keep up the shadowing until they got their aiming point 'spot on' then hit the button.
The aiming point was usually the starboard wing root where there was a concentration of fuel lines, fuel tanks, control lines and crew. It was very adjacent to the bombs, one engine, flares, oxygen bottles and other things that go bang in the night.
One short burst in that vital area was usually enough and the aircraft invariably exploded within seconds of the strike giving the occupants very little chance to escape. No wonder that we had seen-so many aircraft just explode and dissapear [sic] in a fireball.
It is on record that one of their night fighters fitted with the system was credited with [underlined] Five [/underlined] Lancasters in a 30 minute sortie so it was hardly suprising [sic] that there was very little feed back of intelligence information.
As we got nearer home we were very careful how we prepared the aircraft for landing. Fortunately the bomb doors had operated satisfactorily and Hoppy had made sure that there were no hangups. That was the last thing we wanted as a primed hang-up was a very sensitive beast.
Finally there was more to do before joining the circuit. Air pressures, hydraulic pressures and electrics were all normal. Mac did a mock landing procedure at height to test the responses at landing speed. There was no way that he was going to have the aircraft fall out of his hands at same vital stage of our final approach, but flaps, undercarriage and control services all gave the right reaction so it was on to base for a landing. Even then he was not entirely satisfied. Our first touchdown as a bumper to see if the green lights stayed an indicating that the undercarriage has locked down and to check that the tyres were not perforated.
Only then did we make an approach for a normal landing which was, as ever, as smooth as silk.
We gave ourselves a bit more time that morning to look around the aircraft after we had parked in dispersal and what we saw
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in the morning half-light made us gasp.
It did not seem possible that nothing had been seriously damaged yet there was hardly a square foot without a hole in it.
There were holes in the undercarriage doors, the flaps, bomb doors, control surfaces, engine cowlings and nicks out of the propellor blades. The rear turret had suffered most of all with 80% of the perspex gone and there were dozens of holes around the foot well.
A count showed that there were 96 groups of damage altogether but what brought me out in a cold sweat was to find a nice group of five holes through the rear step of the bomb bay where I had been sitting when the attack started. It was just as well that I had jumped up when I did or I would never have subsequently raised a family!.
I would not have been surprised if McIlroy had not been in a similar sweat. Not only was his turret a mess but his flying suit was nicked all over and ruined. There were tufts of fur sticking out under his arms and around his waist and even his flying boots had been chipped.
His turret doors had been ripped open like a tin can and the bulkhead doors had been badly holed as well. His parachute in it's stowage between the doors was later found to have quite a lot of lead embedded in it. When they opened it up it was like a colander and it is doubtful if it would have been much use if he had been forced to use its but he had not got a scratch on him!. I will never understand it.
As far as EF433 was concerned, although she had served us well she was done for. She just sort of sat there drooping and creaking so it was just as well that Mac had treated her gently. She was taken apart and sent to Cambridge for repair.
We learned later that when they stripped her down further and further they were still uncovering signs of damage including a cracked main spar, so she was very close to falling apart.
I have often wandered whether all that internal damage was battle damage or the result of the terrible handling she got on the corkscrew demonstration. I am incline [inserted] d [/inserted] to think the latter and it would not surprise me if that particular pilot had not ultimately torn the wings off of something.
However, the repair depot did their remarkable jig-saw puzzle
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repair job with so big an aircraft and there must here been sufficient of EF433 left for it to retain it's identity as it later went back to the Squadron after it had moved to Fairford. Eventually it was transferred to 1665 CU as OG-N until the following February when a mishap with a 'swinger' wrote her off at the end of the month.
In the meantime EF189 had been produced and painted up as the new 'W' so within the period of quiet that seemed to have descended on us that also received the attention that we had previous lavished on EF433. Stirling operations were slowing down a bit and few operations were undertaken. Rumours regarding our future were rife and Mac was very busy checking out new pilots as they came in to bring us up to strength. Several operations were scheduled but cancelled although there was still a bit of mining to do from time to time.
We did not mind a bit. The Bremen affair was not easy to forget and although our last flight in EF433 may not have been all that significant we had get quite attached to her. Some poor chaps had never got any further than their first trip and we had always considered ourselves very lucky that the attack on us had been made with small calibre ammunition. If we had been hit by cannon fire it would have been an entirely different matter.
[underlined] Thirteen years later I found out why there had been no cannon. [/underlined]
As an Air Traffic Controller at Amman in Jordan I was swapping yarns with an ex Luftwaffe pilot, then senior captain of the resident airline, Air Jordan, and an honourary [sic] member of our Mess, when the incident was recalled.
We had got so far with reconstructing the episode that we both went for our log books as the whole thing had reached the proportions of a gigantic 'line-shoot', Nevertheless, there were the details of date, time. and place to match those in my log book.
Apparently he had been a test pilot on jets and had been called in to try out the aircraft in operational conditions.
I don't know who was the most surprised but he had claimed us so badly damaged that we most likely finished up in the sea, and even if we hadn't then we must have had casualties on board. The burning question was "why only small calibre ammunition?",
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It transpired that he had used up all of his cannon ammunition in knocking down two other Stirlings already, so he would have been responsible for two of the three Stirlings lost an that raid. His name is not important in this narrative but it is significant that our combat report of the episode (which has never come to light) had put special emphasis an the aircraft with the fiery tails and it may well have been one of the first reports that identified jet night fighters to the intelligence people. Nothing: was ever mentioned about it so it may well have been kept quiet for good reasons.
Nevertheless, the Messerschmitt aircraft factories continued to be pounded regularly.
[line of stars]
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It was the 3rd of November before we had the opportunity to take our new 'W' on ops. We were briefed for mining in the Kattegat between occupied Denmark and neutral Sweden.
It should have been a 'doddle'. It was a lovely moonlit night and we had to overfly Denmark at medium height before going low level to the dropping area.
All went smoothly until just after the drop when we were engaged by a flak ship with a stream of sparkling tracers squirting at us which started Mac wriggling around all over the place with the taps wide open and down to the wave tops until we put him behind us. We were just beginning to breath easy again when there was a yell from the rear gunner as he spotted an Me.109 on our tail. We must have come in for some very special treatment as a loner crossing Denmark and it was as well that Mac had kept us as low as possible until the drop. Once we got back down there again that's just where we stayed as the intercom between the gunners and pilot got very lively.
It was the fighter affiliation stuff all over again as we slithered and twisted and turned, only this chap was not using a camera.
He sent several bursts after us but they all went wide as the gunners assessed the point at which he was coming into the right position for a deflection shot and then we side slipped and banked out of his sights once more.
We never fired a single shot as Mac had said only to let him have it when the gunners were absolutely sure of a hit so we played tag for a long time.
In the later stages we came to a rugged shore line and still the 109 could not get at us.
In and out and round and round we went across country where the landscape showed up in great detail. We could see people in gardens and lights blinked from friendly windows and open doors. We went around chimney stacks, over power lines and we must have given that enemy pilot a real run for his money until eventually he broke off and disappeared. He either did not care for the low level stuff or he was getting low on fuel but we were glad to see him go after a very hectic 30 minutes. We continued to stay low just in case he had a partner somewhere
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and we were still skudding along weaving about for some time before it was considered safe to gain some height and sort out the navigation.
It was hardly surprising that Pete had lost track of where we were. The number of tight 360° turns had been sufficient to upset both the magnetic and gyro compass's. We were too low for 'Gee' to be effective and I was still refused permission to break radio silence for a D/F fix so we staggered around somewhat blindly for a while trying to sort ourselves out.
At one time we saw an illuminated coastline some miles ahead which puzzled us a bit until the penny dropped...whoops..Sweden!. That gave us a clue as to which way we were going...the wrong way, so it was a smart about turn and back to low level again trying to stabilise the compasses as we picked up the Danish coastline again and crossed the country as quickly as possible before finding some higher cloud to hide in and set a rough course for home.
Pete still could not make a lot of his plot. 'G' was not helping a lot. D/F bearings that I was able to obtain from UK beacons only seemed to confuse the issue and when I looked over his shoulder at his chart it was a mass of hastily pencilled in headings and speeds until it looked like one of those kids dot puzzles that produced a picture when the dots were joined up. Only his picture looked like a bundle of loose knitting wool!.
All we could do was press on in a rough direction, picking our way in and out of convenient clouds whilst Pete gathered as much information as he could. It did not help much that Mac would not fly a steady course but even when he had satisfied himself that we were just off the Dutch coast Mac still had his doubts until Hoppy reckoned he had got a good visual pin-point. He estimated that we were over the Zuider Zee and would be able to confirm it when the Western side came into sight. Sure enough it did, but it was not the sort of confirmation he had been looking for!.
Just as we crossed the coastline, in and out of cloud at about 7,000ft, a number of searchlights switched on as one, in a perfect cone, smack on us, and it seemed several dozen ack-ack guns let loose at the same time.
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The salvo must have gone off about 50ft below us with the sound of gravel being sprayed all over us and we bounced up with Mac piling on the power, banking and balling [sic] "that's Dover you bloody fools".
There was all hell let loose as we wound into a corkscrew followed by the lights and a lot more flak. Mac was hollering "Darkie-Darkie" on the R/T to identify ourselves. I slammed on the IFF (radar identification) switch and fired off the colours of the day as fast as I could fire and reload the pistol and then as if by magic it all fizzled out.
The guns stopped firing, the lights wavered and flickered out and the violent evasive action slowed as Mac asked if everyone was OK. By the grace of God we were and then we immediately started checking around the aircraft which seemed to have taken a bit of a battering.
Despite the presence of several shrapnel holes everything seemed to be working satisfactorily so we set course for base with a lot of discussion as to how we had found ourselves over Dover.
The general opinion was that we must have done a zig-zag course right down the Danish, Dutch, Belgium and French coasts without interception. Perhaps our course had been so erratic that the German fighter controllers had just held back waiting for us to make a navigational error that would have put us within their grasp, or some other problem we had on board manifested itself and did the job for them.
As it was the Dover defences had done us far more damage and we were very thankful for either a slight error in the guns predictor or perhaps a little aiming off just in case we were a friendly aircraft with a spot of bother.
We would not have been the first RAF aircraft that the Dover guns had put on their score board though. They had to be very wary of unidentified aircraft. The Luftwaffe's equivilent [sic] of Farnborough; Rechlin, was known to have quite a comprehensive selection of airworthy Allied aircraft that they played all sorts of tricks with. In such circumstances it was more often a case of shooting first and asking questions afterwards and a risk we had to take if there was any doubt about the position at which the IFF was switched on.
During the final part of the flight back to base we had to go
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over the aircraft with a fine tooth comb to test everything before attempting a landing in the same way as we had done for our previous operation and it was a relief to find that everything worked and ended with a perfect final landing.
I have often wondered how many of the others felt as I did as we prepared for that final landing. Legs, fingers and toes crossed as we took up our crash positions, until we were safely on terra firma again.
I was beginning to wonder how much longer we could keep up that sort of escapade without coming unstuck somewhere.
After we had taxied into dispersal and shut down, the ground crew seemed somewhat concerned as we clambered out. I distinctly remember one of them saying "oh no, not again. You chaps must have a guardian angel somewhere". I could appreciate the sentiment when we looked around the aircraft with them.
The underside was like a pepperpot with slivers of metal hanging loosely from everywhere yet nothing vital had been hit.
We did not fly it again as it was withdrawn for repair and subsequently relegated to the training role' as yet another 'W' was prepared for service.
We were very lucky that night. [underlined] Four other mine laying Stirlings failed to return. [/underlined] Mining was no milk run!.
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[underlined] Picture page. [/underlined]
Macdonalds crew
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We were reprieved after a decision was finally made to withdraw Stirlings from the main Bomber Force and start preparing them for another task.
620 was once of the first to go and crews that were close to the end of their tour were not being retained. That meant us...and it was a great relief when we were told. There was only one other crew made 'tour expired' with fewer operations than ourselves although they had originaly [sic] come from 214 Squadron when the Squadron had been formed.
Certainly it was a relief not to have to fly the two ops that I was short of for the full tour. I had already seen what happened to 'spare' people but it placed our crew in a unique position. We were the [underlined] only [/underlined] crew to have actually started and finished a 'tour' on the Squadron since it had come into being.
The credit really belongs to Mac of course but in that short time we had lost 17 aircraft on ops and 9 in accidents. [underlined] More than the whole Squadron establishment strength, plus six!. [/underlined]
Our gunners had accounted for two enemy fighters. We had carried seven 'freshmen' pilots to introduce them to ops and two of them had not survived Chedburgh.
We had lost 147 aircrew killed or missing of which 47 were known to have become POW's. It was a sad tally.
In the same period of time the Command had lost nearly 1000 bombers with their crews in an air war that showed little sign of abating.
The Squadron distinquished [sic] itself later by towing gliders and dropping parachute troops and supplies into the invasion of Europe, Arnham [sic] and the Rhine crossing, as well as numerous SAS and SOE operations into enemy occupied territory with some very severe casualties.
[line of stars]
We were more concerned with the present at that time. We celebrated with a wild night at the King Willie and a few more nights in the Mess as the strain began to fall away with the added bonus of some special leave.
On our return there were, a lot of new faces but we were more concerned with clearing the station and preparing for our next posting. There was trouble of a different sort on the horizon!.
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As soon as we had returned from leave, refreshed, we found ourselves; that is, the five NCO's lined up outside the flight office with Mac demanding an answer to a very delicate question. It was not very delicately put.
Apparently a certain WAAF who had been fairly liberal with her favours; to say the least, was beginning to show signs of motherhood, and since [underlined] some [/underlined] of us were known to have been in her company at times we were all suspect. Of course, it did not help her case a lot when she was only able to claim that it was one of the Macdonald crew!, and why that did not include Mac and Pete the two commissioned officers I do not know, but Mac's question was blunt and straight to the point. "Which one of you buggers was it", which rather stunned us and for a moment we just shuffled our feet as we studied each other.
I forget who stepped out first followed by another until all five of us had stepped forward. I know for certain that we had not all sampled those favours but a crew is a crew through thick and thin. 'All for one and one for all' and all that stuff. There was not much that could be done under those circumstances so whilst they were trying to pin it on someone else (and there were plenty of others), we were only too pleased to pack our bags and sneak off quietly to our new unit.
[line of stars]
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We had been posted to No.3. Lancaster Finishing School at Feltwell as a complete crew, for instructional duties as strange as it may seem. The unit was just setting up to convert the Stirling Squadrons that were not moving out of the Command and Mac and Paddy went off to a Lancaster OTU in Yorkshire for a couple of weeks whilst the rest of us just familiarised ourselves with the Lancaster. The ground school was just getting going so we soon learned our way around. Apart from the Pilot and Engineer's speciality it was not difficult as most of the equipment was the same or similar and a nice little challenge to convert to a different type.
As soon as Mac and Paddy returned we flew intensively as a crew and within a matter of weeks we were into the training programme and open for business.
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Actually the unit was a bit of a hybrid. Part Operational Training Unit, part Conversion Unit and part Holding Unit for despite the savage losses the Command was still building up it's strength as fewer demands were being made in other theatres of the war, and the station was soon packed to the gills.
Crews started to come in from all over. The Stirling Conversion Units were still in the business of converting people from Wellingtons and then they came to us for changing to the Lancaster until the Stirling CU's were run down. After that they came direct from the Wellington OTU's as well as those Stirling Squadrons that sent detachments for conversion as their aircraft were being replaced by Lancasters.
We became very busy with the flow of people through the unit. Some of them knew the Lancaster better than we did as they were refreshing for their second tour, and very rarely for their a third. They had come off all manner of aircraft and had been 'resting' as we were now doing. There was a great deal of experience to draw on which I was only too willing to put to practical use. There did not appear to be any 'instructors' courses as such. You just threw yourself into it and you just turned out to be good, bad or indifferent at it. In all modesty, I seemed to cope satisfactorily.
After a few months Paddy got fed up with it and eventually got himself crewed up with a pilot of 115 Squadron that was converting and went back on ops. with him. Pete found himself in a spot of bother as a reult [sic] of a little over exuberance at a party and was given an option that he could not refuse....so he went off to a Mosquito Squadron at Downham Market, but not until most of the old crew, with the exception of Hoppy and Mac, attended my wedding in the March.
The bells of St.Mary's Broadwater, Worthing, were rung for the first time since the threat of invasion had silenced them in 1940. That was a traffic stopper if ever there was one and in the ensueing [sic] celebrations the rest of Macdonald's crew left it's mark on the local area. [underlined] I think the marks are still there!!. [/underlined]
I don't mind admitting that for the first time in my life I was smitten with the uncontrollable shakes when standing before the alter [sic] . Call it what you like, fear……………..
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apprehension, whatever, it got hold of me and I shook. My eldest brother, in navy uniform, survivor of numerous sea actions and two lost ships and my best man, came in close and propped me up. All that happened was that I transmitted my shakes to him and we both stood there like jellies and did not settle down until the ceremony was nearly over. Not a pretty sight!. Nevertheless, I married my childhood sweetheart despite the circumstances; something I never thought I would ever have the opportunity to do, and the marriage has stood the test of time.
Eventually Feltwell became so busy that we opened a non-flying ground school at Methwold a few miles away and having already been promoted to Flight Sergeant I got the job of setting up that part of the school for Wireless Operators.
Rather than lose my comfortable room in the pre-war Mess at Feltwell I cycled to and fro' daily and I am sure that it did me a lot of good as far as keeping fit was concerned. I enjoyed cycling anyway having been a founder member of the 'Worthing Wheelers' cycling club and a regular cyclist...even in my job.
To have to peddle a loaded tricycle from one end of Worthing to the other twice a day was quite an accomplishment which I had done for nearly two years and prior to that I had had a job with a builder and cycled 16 miles each way daily; so what was 5 miles.
Getting my bike out from the shed in Worthing where it had been tied up in the roof was no easy task. I have vague recollections of peddling half the distance from Worthing to Feltwell, including across London to save a few pence when some station staffs insisted on there being a ticket for the bike when it was placed in the guards van..to finally arrive in the rain.
The time passed and I only flew occasionaly [sic] to keep my hand in as momentous events occurred on the battle fronts that we, or at least I, felt at times that we were missing out on. I didn't push things though....I wasn't that daft!. There was enough going on at Feltwell and Methwold to keep me busy.
Even the odd operation turned up and that is how we lost a crew and our Chief Flying Instructor. He had opted for a mining job, got together a crew and it did not present any problem in arming up and self briefing. I'm glad he didn't pick me as his Wireless Operator. He took off at the appointed time and was seen clearing
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the immediate area, climbing, and shortly after he disappeared from view there was an almighty explosion as his load blew up and the aircraft disintregrated [sic] , scattering the landscape with a thousand pieces of man and machine. What a hell of a useless way to go for another seven young people. It was a sobering thought that it could have been any one of us that might have drawn the short straw for the privilege of making up the crew.
Life was anything but dull. When the Tannoy started blaring out one evening calling all sorts of people to report here there and everywhere a few of us went up to the airfield to see what it was all about.
It was quite a circus when three B.24's, (Liberators) charged in one after the other.
Apparently these three had not only lost their formation but had also lost their way to such an extent that they had been as much as 100 miles off track and an hour late in getting back to their base arriving at the time it was getting dark.
Just as they were getting into the circuit in a bit of a panic as they were not very experienced at night flying Flying Control yelled 'bandits' as there were Luftwaffe intruders suspected to be in the area, and promptly snuffed out the airfield lights.
[underlined] Panic stations!! [/underlined]
They had been given a course and distance to fly to Feltwell but bandits or no bandits they set off with all their navigation and anti-collision and formation lights on. The bandit scare was obviously false as they arrived in the Feltwell circuit looking like Christmas trees and firing verey signals all over the place. No self respecting Luftwaffe intruder would have passed up that invitation to do a bit of damage. As it happened, they did it to themselves.
The Feltwell controller told them to spread themselves out a bit for landing but they were not having any of that as it was dark by that time. There was no way they were going to lose each other having get that far so in they came, landing lights on. No. 1 got down and was told to go to the end of the runway and follow the 'follow me' illuminated van but got disorientated so slammed on the brakes to come to a juddering halt on the runway. No.2 piled right up the back of him, his props chewing at the……………………
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fusulage [sic] , and No.3, seeing what had happened flung his aircraft into a turn and belly flopped when the undercarriage collapsed. What a mess!, but they were lucky. There was not a single casualty although it took a lot of cleaning up.
We entertained the NCO's in our Mess afterwards and it was a source of amazement at the attitude those blokes had to the whole business. They were not in the least concerned that they had written off three aircraft but it was the manner in which they entertained us to a show that was straight off a Hollywood film set.
They were mostly unshaven, cigar chewing, gum chewing, with side arms and knives slung all around them who seemed hell bent on emulating the six gun cowboys of the wild west films and on the whole it was a lot of fun listening, to their wildly exagerated [sic] stories of 'combat over Germany' totally ignoring the fact that many of us had already done complete tours of night operations over enemy territory. They were not interested but it was better than going to the cinema. Most of them had been in the UK long enough to have sampled 'Limey' beer and were not slow in telling us what rubbish it was so we plied them with it until it was running out of their ears. In the end they weren't so tough. Most of than had to be put to bed!.
As time went by and crews continued to pour through the unit it was obvious to me that my time for moving on could be getting close so I started making the appropriate noises to ensure that I would get something different next time and would not have been surprised at anything that turned up. Nevertheless, there was one big surprise; my appointment to a commission which I had been quite convinced would have been turned down somewhere along the line.
When the appointment was promulgated I did not tell Dorothy but took a few days off having arranged to meet her in Oxted in Surrey, and on the way stopped off at Moss.Bros. in Covent Garden to get fitted out. It felt good. I went in as a Flt.Sgt. and came out an hour later as sprog Pilot Officer, no doubt looking like a tailors dummy, all bright and shining, including my cap, hot foot for Oxted.
Dorothy was not at the station so I set off across the field to meet her half way.
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When we did meet there were expressions of surprise and elation and in the excitement I threw my new, expensive cap into the air. That's how it became 'operational'. It landed in a cow cake and took a hell of a lot of cleaning; in between the laughter.
Later on we continued our journey to Worthing and I was suitably 'shown off' by my proud parents but it was a very odd situation when I met one of my old school pals who was a ground wireless operator.
He was one of those who I had always kept in touch with and had been one of the group at the garden gate on the day war had been declared. He had been totally brainwashed!. The poor bloke kept calling me 'Sir' and the only way I could break him of the habit was to get out of uniform to have a drink together without embarrassment on both sides.
Shortly after leave I found myself detailed for a short course at Fighter Command HQ, Bentley Priory, Stanmore.
There was about a dozen of us and we were told that the course was to train Wireless Operators in the use of R/T broadcasts and relay work of the type that the Pathfinder Force was developing. There was also a suggestion that after the training which was part of the Fighter Controllers course we would be assessed for our suitability for broadcasting airborne fighter control as well.
The first day was spent being shown all the fighter control systems as well as seeing them in practice in the famous fighter control/plotting operations rooms and then we were in business.
The next three days were highly amusing as we worked 'aircraft' from a mock control room with the plotters moving radar plots around the table to set up interceptions as the information from the filter room created the picture. It was the 'aircraft' that caused most of the fun. They were in fact Wall's ice cream tricycles with radar reflectors stuck to a pole on the side with low power battery operated transmitter/receivers in the body of the thing. The 'pilots' of the ice cream carts provided the motive power of course and wore the usual headset plus the restrictive..................
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headgear that pilots wore when they were practicing instrument flying.
As a result we could only see a compass and our feet whilst we were in a world of our own either peddling like the 'clappers' and making turns, or in the control room.
It was a highly amusing sight to see a couple of dozen demented ice cream carts cavorting blindly about a strangely marked out rugby pitch, and the occasional crunch as hunter and hunted came together in a perfect interception. Such crude simulation did not have the advantage of vertical seperation!!!!!. It was enlightening, interesting; and amusing but nothing ever came of it.
[line of stars]
It was getting increasingly difficult to get down to the South coast at that time. It was only by virtue of wearing uniform that I got through the security screen whether it was to Worthing or Oxted. There were troops jam-packed in every nook and cranny and there was hardly a bed to spare in any house or hotel. The streets and wooded areas were gigantic vehicle parks with acres of camouflage netting in some open areas disguising the enormous build up. Both my parents and my in-laws were billeting Commando's and the nights were filled with the rumbling of tanks, guns and other vehicles.
Once or twice whilst I was down that way the Luftwaffe had a go at night reconnaissance of the area but got a hot reception every time. During the day there were standing patrols of fighters that discouraged their attentions and I remember one that tried it one night that found himself facing a daunting barrage of fire that I would not like to have faced. Everything and the kitchen sink was thrown at him as he came through East to West at about 2000ft. Every piece of ack-ack, light and heavy, and hundreds of machine guns let loose from the hills, street corners and vehicle parks with a tremendous racket. It was just too dangerous to stay out in with shrapnel and spent rounds falling like rain. If that intruder got his picture and got back home that night then I reckon he was a very lucky chap.
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As we got towards the end of May it was impossible to meet my wife or get in touch with her. She was in the depths of Montgomer's [sic] HQ scheduling convoys down from the North into the Southern assembly areas although I did not know precicely [sic] what she was doing at the time. It was not until after the HQ had been disbanded that I learned about the restrictions that had been imposed. It was little wonder that I had not been able to get in touch when 'Q' Movements staff were under guard for days and were ever escorted to the toilet!.
[line of stars]
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Back at Feltwell the training programme slowed down and everyone was crewed up into a reserve Squadron. Orders of the day were published imposing all sorts of restrictions.
Crew members were on a two hour stand-by and not allowed off of the station. I was crewed with the remainder of the old crew as Pete and Paddy had already moved on and two others joined us. We regularly ground tested and air tested aircraft to operational standard although our efforts were not always successful. There were always problems with the wicked little 'Gremlins' that attached themselves to aeroplanes. 'Gremlins' were the imaginary demons that were blamed for the many problems that aircraft suffered from.
One of them had a real go at us one night before Paddy had left us. We had landed from a night flying detail and had hardly settled on the flare-path when Mac started giving Paddy a verbal broadside for not having fixed the slow running on the starboard outer engine as it had just cut out when he throttled back. With some surprise Paddy looked at his instrument panel, borrowed my signal lamp to light up the wing and calmly announced that there was no need to worry, it would not need fixing as it had just fallen off!.
That caused a bit of a stir in Flying Control when they were told on the R/T and then something else went wrong and we could no longer communicate with them. There was a lot of choice language from the whole crew and muttering from Mac about "cheap bloody meccano sets" and "it couldn't happen to a Stirling" and other appropriate caustic things as we taxied in.
Before we got to dispersal we were met by one of the controllers on a motor bike who signalled us to stop and then he climbed aboard to tell us to switch the blasted R/T set off. Then we knew why we could not hear the tower. We were stuck on transmit...and in the meantime they had evacuated all the female staff from the control room!!!. Nevertheless, it was quite a programme to get the maximum number of aircraft fully serviceable and operationally ready.
When the big day dawned....'D' Day, 6th June, I found out at breakfast as the majority of us did. The two hour stand-by was
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changed to a one hour and we waited with our ears glued to the radio for the minute by minute news of the events of that day. There was no doubt in our minds that this was the 'big one' that we had been waiting for.
It was incredible that nothing had leaked out although the aircraft had all been tested the previous day, and had been painted with white bands around the wings and the fusulage [sic] . In addition they had all been fuelled and bombed up the night before plus there were two more bomb loads stock piled in each dispersal. All we had to do was to sit around and wait for the signal to report for briefing and we would be off, so we sat around and waited and waited, with nothing to do except go out to dispersal from time to time to move aircraft a few feet as it was not good for them to be in one position for too long with a full load on.
As it happened we were not required. The Luftwaffe were caught napping and by the time they got themselves organised they were very much on the defence. The Allies committed so many aircraft that thousands and thousands of sorties were flown. Even the Bomber Command effort had to be flown on a race-track pattern in and out of the target area for safety and there was no room for us; fortunately!. After three days we were stood down and we went back to the training programme. The rest is now history.
Bomber losses were still heavy at times as the Command reverted to strategic bombing to disrupt enemy communications, supply and fuel resources and there was always the dread thought of the possibility of a repetition of the losses that we had suffered in the attack on Nuremburg the previous March. That had been an absolute disaster when [underlined] 95 [/underlined] of our aircraft were lost. Many of them were crews that had passed through our hands a short while before. It had been a reminder that we were not out of the woods yet and from time to time the Luftwaffe were still a force to be reckoned with.
With the invasion well under way my wife was posted to Newmarket as a result of her Surrey HQ being run down. That was a very convenient arrangement when a sympathetic C.O. arranged for me to be detached to Newmarket airfield as detachment commander for a couple of weeks. Very cosy…..our messes virtually backed
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on to one another!.
It was about that time that Macdonald got himself Courts Marshalled for unauthorised low flying….it had to happen some time. He was returning from an investiture at another airfield, including I believe for his own DFC, but landed on three engines and one bent propellor as a result of low flying over Thetford Forest, and it had taken a bit of explaining.
I was not with him at the time but I remember enough of the case to know the prosecution was badly prepared and could not produce the prop. or bits of tree or photographic evidence and the case was dismissed. I also recall that although Mac was in the left hand seat it was in fact in the hands of Mcllroy in the right hand seat. A piece of evidence that got overlooked, but he was still sailing close to the wind. It was probably similar doubtfull [sic] factors that caused him to prang his car with some of the others on board somewhere out in the Fens when the road did something unexpected. Only Mac was damaged and wore a patch over one eye for a time making him look like a pirate. What hurt him most of all was that in those days before the National Health Service, even in war-time, his accident was treated as self inflicted and he had to pay hospital fees. Even in the RAF hospital at Ely.
By the end of the year the work of the unit was almost complete. Reserves were being built up and replacements could be made by other conversion units so No.3. LFS. started running down with Methwold being cleared first. That kept me busy for a while dismantling all the systems that I had put in and returning stuff to stores, and in the meantime I was pulling strings to get the sort of posting that I wanted.
By the end of January 1945 nearly everything was cleared up and to my delight my posting came in for No.9 (Special Duties) Squadron, sister Squadron of the famous 617 (Dam Busters) Squadron which was more than I had dared to hope for.
Unfortunately a change in circumstances caused the postings staff at No.3. Group HQ. to have a re-think within 24hours of issuing the posting notice.
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My posting to No.9.Squadron was cancelled before I finished packing!.
Instead, after more days of delay I was crewed with some of the remaining chaps at Feltwell and posted to XV Squadron, Mildenhall so it was back on ops. again to fill the gaps that were still decimating units.
'Gaps' was the operative word as in my period of 'rest' at Feltwell the Command had lost a mind boggling figure of around 2000 aircraft.
It would have been nice if the old crew had managed to get back together again but things did not normally work out that way. Pete was already half way through his tour on Mosquito's at Downham Market. Paddy was getting on with his second tour with 115 Squadron. The others had been crewed up and departed. Squadron Leader. F.C.Macdonald.DFC. had been appointed as Flight Commander of 622 Squadron; also at Mildenhall, and it was a whole new ball game.
I only had the opportunity of socialising with Mac once in the very short period that I was there. The hand of fate caught up with me at last.
Our first operation was the last that XV Squadron's new, all officer, all second tour, all ex instructor crew was to do and it was late June before I got back to Mildenhall again, mainly to thank the parachute section for packing my parachute correctly!.
By the most amazing coincidence when the WAAF in the parachute section went through the books to find the serial number of my 'chute it turned out that she had also been the packer!
The poor girl got a sloppy impulsive kiss and a donation to their social fund but when I went to look for Mac I could not find him. There was very little interest; no-one wanted to know as he was away somewhere and although I tried several different ways of communicating with him later I had no direct contact again until 1954.
My search eventually led me to a scruffy motor engineers workshop on the outskirts of Wisbech where he seemed to be both the proprietor and chief mechanic; there was no-one else!.
He was the same old Mac. Uncommicative [sic] and shabby, like the shabby old Triumph Dolomite that stood next to a shabby old
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caravan that appeared to be both his office and his home.
There was not much left of the old sparkle and fire in his eyes although at the time it might have had something to do with the fact that the mid afternoon refreshment served in a dirty cracked cup came from a whisky bottle rather than the tea pot, but he was just as dammed uncommunicative as ever. Never a word when a nod and a wink would do. About the only thing I can remember him saying was "I thought you had got the chop and I was going to write to your wife" but of course, he never had. He did confess to being a bit surprised that I was by that time a Flight Lieutenant and the Operations Wing Adjutant at Mareham but his comment was typical. "I never thought you had it in you". He never was complementary....just a dour Scot.
He really looked as if he could here done with some assistance but there was no way that I could do anything without offending him although I did find out that he had done another 15 ops. and had ditched a damaged Lanc. before his wings had been well and truly clipped.
Shortly after that meeting I was off to foreign parts and on my return to the area about three years later nothing had changed although shortly afterwards he did another disappearing act and it took many years to track him down again. The trail eventually led to Troon and then to Dunoon before it fizzled out once more and it was many more years before he surfaced again with the assistance of the RAF Association and the Mildenhall Register. He was in very poor circumstances in Glasgow where Paddy found him and there was every indication that he would rather not have been found. He was content to be a survivor and the past was over and done with; what he could remember of it at the ripe old age of 82!.
We had not been far out in our estimates in 1943. He must have been one of the oldest Squadron pilots in the Air Force at the time at the age of 38!.
He disappeared again for a short time but following the trail left by Paddy I made a visit to Glasgow and finally tracked him down in a home for the elderly but he was no longer the Macdonald we had known. I don't think he knew who I was. He died six years later!.
I have never regretted my 'choice' of the pilot in which I placed
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my trust and my life and those sentiments are shared by the surviving members of the crew. We look back on those days and wonder how we ever came out of it unscathed considering that in our subsequent flying after the war we nearly all had the experience of climbing out of 'bent' aeroplanes.
Pete flew in a civilian capacity with Freddie Laker as both Navigator and Flight Engineer. They were lucky to walk away from a wrecked aircraft on the Berlin Air Lift. Paddy walked away from a wrecked passenger Mk.V. Stirling in the Middle East and I climbed out of a Proctor upside down on Oakington's runway.
For the record, Mac, Pete, Paddy and Ralph were all awarded DFC's for their efforts, Mac and Pete with bars, but sadly we are no longer a complete crew.
For me, those years were the most traumatic of any life and I will never forget those occasions when we were so close to each other in that short period that seemed like a lifetime.
TO
"THE SKIPPER"
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THERE ARE OLD PILOTS AND BOLD PILOTS
BUT
VERY FEW
[underlined] OLD….BOLD PILOTS [/underlined]
Anon.
[page break]
IN MEMORY OF THE AIRCREW
OF
BOMBER COMMAND
WHO WERE KILLED OR MISSING
IN
OPERATIONS OVER EUROPE
1939—1945
[row of circles]
[page break]
[underlined] ACKNOWLEDGMENTS [/underlined]
To Michael.J.F.Boyer……. whose research and detail in his excellent books:- [underlined] Action Stations--Part-One [/underlined]
[underlined] and [/underlined]
[underlined] The [/underlined] [underlined] Stirling [/underlined] [underlined] Bomber [/underlined]
were valuable sources of information.
To Martin Middlebrook & Chris Everitt for research details made available in the [underlined] Bomber Command War Diaries [/underlined] .
To Jock Whitehouse & Spencer Adams whose energy and enthusiasm helped to correct the many inacuracies [sic] in my early drafts.
and
TO MY DEAR WIFE DOROTHY who was obliged to tolerate the many years of typing and interuption [sic] of more important matters.
not forgetting
THOSE CREW MEMBERS WHO ARE LONG GONE:
WITHOUT WHOSE SKILLS THIS STORY
[underlined] COULD NEVER HAVE BEEN TOLD!!. [/underlined]
[line of stars]
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[underlined] PREFACE [/underlined]
On the 3rd February 1945 seven aircrew were posted to XV Squadron, Mildenhall, to form the crew of a Lancaster.
The pilot was Australian, the rear gunner was an American in the RAF. The navigator and mid-upper gunner were Scots and the remainder of the crew were from the counties of Sussex, Nottingham and Warwickshire.
They had all completed a previous tour of operations and had been resting for varying periods as instructors at No.3. Lancaster Finishing School at Feltwell in Norfolk.
The school was closing down and as the staff were being dispersed one pilot had been given the option of forming his own crew prior to posting back to an operational Squadron. That is how we all came together.
Some of the new crew had flown together whilst at the school and the pilot and flight engineer had previously flown together on Manchesters and Lancasters in operational Squadrons.
The time had come for them to get back into the fray as the bombing campaign was being stepped up to an awesome number of aircraft being employed to deliver thousands of tons of bombs to the enemy as the war was rapidly drawing to a close.
The Third Reich was reeling from savage attacks from both East and West. Their Navy was just about bottled up and had lost most of their capital ships. Her Army was being lost in great chunks and the German Air Force was being severely restricted by fuel shortages and although they fought on desperately the final blows were not far off. Anyone with half an eye could see that; except Hitler. If he had not been so crazy he would have given in a long time before we had reached the critical stage, but since he would not, and the Allies would accept nothing but unconditional surrender, Germany and it's long suffering population had to bludgeoned into submission.
I was the Wireless operator/air gunner of the crew and we were part of that final effort although there was an awful lot of killing still going on in all theatres of the war.
At the time it seemed that we had a good chance of being in at the finish so on arrival at Mildenhall we got stuck into refresher training and emergency drills against the stop watch
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until it did not seem possible to trim any more time off of the procedures and the 'Skipper' was satisfied that we were now moulded into a crew and ready for anything.
For me it was quite an experience being back at Mildenhall again having been there as an 'erk' in 1941, and now I was back again as a commissioned officer and experienced crew member although I did not have a lot of time to dwell on the fact.
A lot of water had passed under the bridge and we were perhaps somewhat unique in that we were an all commissioned crew starting a second tour of operations.
That was a very rare combination and as I thought at the time we might make a name for ourselves.
HOW WRONG I WAS !!!!!!
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On the 7th of February we found ourselves on the Battle Order for an operation and subsequently the old familiar pattern of activity fell into place as we trooped into the briefing room.
The target was detailed as the oil refinery at Wanne Eikel, at the eastern end of the Ruhr industrial complex, which, suprisingly [sic] was still trying to produce something despite the hundreds of tons of bombs that had been dumped on and around it over the years.
Our job, within a force of 100 Lancasters of No.3.Bomber Group, was to try and put it out of business and further disrupt the already desperate fuel situation that was severely limiting the activities of the German War Machine.
As far as I was concerned it was going to be a change to be on a daylight raid. I figured that at last I would be able to see what was going on and that I might even get a chance to assist in doing something really useful from the astro dome. Even the prospect of flying higher and faster than I had done on my previous tour in Stirlings was something I was certainly looking forward to.
I had polished up my gunnery in the various turrets on the firing range including stoppage clearance although inwardly hoping that the occasion would never arise when I would have to put the practice into use as it would mean taking over from one of the other gunners who had become a casualty.
Even so, there was no way that I was going to be caught out in such an emergency----not when the end of my war was in sight!. After briefing and collection of all the usual paraphernalia we all trooped out to the airfield in the crew bus to get on with the pre-flight checks until the time came for us to start up and taxy out for take-off.
With the usual heart stopping lurch Lancaster ME434...coded LS(XV Squadron) D for 'Dog'; the 12th that had carried that identification, (not all Lancasters); took to the air as the end of the runway came into sight with everything straining to get up to a safe height with it's heavy load of bombs and fuel.
The load was around 2000 gallons of petrol with 1 x 4000lb blast bomb and 12 x 500 pounders. Not the maximum that a Lanc. could take but enough to require some delicacy-in handling.
4
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Everything was normal as we gained height and climbed on course following a route that took us over Newmarket where my wife was.
I was wondering what she was thinking as the thunder of up to 100 aircraft filled the air. I had only seen her the night before and had told her that I was going to be busy so she knew that something was going on.
We were soon changing course for a point on the South Coast near Beachy Head and as it came up on track my home town of Worthing was in sight, to the West as we crossed the coast with the sky clear and bright as we continued to climb to our operating height.
The rest of the force closed around us as we formed up into the usual 'gaggle' as we approached another turning point on time.
Unlike the USAAF, we did not fly in a tight defensive formation as the RAF preferred to present any attackers with a loose, weaving, inconsistent mass of aircraft with a less restrictive field of fire. The exception was underneath, which is why some of XV Squadron's aircraft that took up position at the bottom of the pack had been locally fitted with a pair of ventral guns to cover what would normally be a blind spot.
We were not one of those but a 'Gee-H' leader, carrying some special homing and bombing equipment with which to pin-point the target through cloud. The yellow bars on the tail fins identified us as such.
We crossed the French coast which was no longer as hostile as I had last encountered it and in fact it was an inspiring sight to look down from over 20,000ft in such brilliant conditions on an area that only a few months before had been wrested from German domination.
It all looked very peaceful down there but there was always that false impression of things outside the aircraft and one could easily be lulled into a false sense of security by it.
Despite the impression of a bright summers day out there and the warmth of the sun falling on my shoulders in the astro dome it was, nevertheless minus 12° out there.
It was uncomfortably hot for me so I discarded my 'Mae West' life jacket as we changed course once more to head across Belgium
5
[page break]
towards the Ruhr.
It soon became obvious that the bad weather that we had been warned about at briefing was not far ahead. In the distance a huge wall of angry black cloud appeared; from just about deck level right up to the heavens, stretching from North to South as far as-we could see.
It was a typical squall line associated with frontal conditions and the nearer we got to it the more obvious it was that the Met. people had underestimated it's severity.
The formatiom [sic] leaders still did not break radio silence with instructions and as it was obvious there was no way around it we were soon doing what everyone else was doing as the force started spreading out with maximum climbing power until we plunged into it, in an attempt to get out of the top.
At 23,000ft we were still in it and ploughing on yet there were still no instructions to change our plans but with the first of the Ruhr defences ahead of us, and the aircraft icing up to the extent that she was getting very sluggish, Geoff Hammond, the pilot, was getting concerned that we could not possibly go much higher without the risk of losing control plus the chance of carburettor icing as well.
With the sun obscured it had turned very cold inside the aircraft as the heating system was fighting a losing battle and I thought that perhaps it was time that I put my life jacket back on. I thought better of it for the very reason that I would have to take my parachute harness off to do it but with the aircraft waffling around like a drunken duck it perhaps not the best time to do it.
We were all somewhat relieved when Geoff announced that we were turning back and descending to try and find better conditions although it was some time before there was even the slightest improvement.
We could not get out of cloud completely and the ice was still not clearing although it was no longer building up so we set course for our secondary target; Duisburg, from where we could have made a dash for clearer areas. However, Dave Howell, the navigator, although he was able to place us over the target area on radar, was not satisfied that he could pin point a target so we just kept on going and descending as the cloud started
6
[page break]
to thin into layers. As the conditions improved ice started to strip off and clatter about with a great deal of noise although it was no problem and certainly better than being loaded with half a ton of ice in the wrong places.
Even-the Lancaster had very limited de-icing equipment. It was only installed on the leading edges of the wings inboard of the inner engines, and therefore not all that effective. It was policy to increase the-bomb carrying capacity by reducing such [underlined] unneccessary [/underlined] [sic] frills.!!!!!.
It seemed that it was going to be an abortive sortie and that we would be taking our bombs back home and dumping them on the range but after a short conference on the intercomm [sic] Geoff decided that our best bet would be to go back to Krefeld in a final attempt to plant the bombs on the enemy side of the 'bomb line' so we turned around again and headed East for Krefeld.
We were still in and out of cloud at about 8,500ft by the time our new target came up by which time Dave and Jim Murphy the bomb-aimer had decided on a target reference and between them the bombs were dropped in one salvo.
As soon as they had gone we started into a port turn to make for home when Jim reported that the bomb doors would not close, probably due to icing…..; [underlined] when it happened!!!! [/underlined]
The aircraft gave a violent lurch and being in the astro dome I was horrified to see the starboard wing just rear up as if it was going to wrap itself around us.
With my heart in my mouth I went scrambling towards my parachute stowage but before I got there I was brought to my knees alongside the radio compartment as the aircraft rolled right over and the next few moments were rather desperate.
We went into a spin; which way up I shall never know, but to the accompaniment of the sound track from some old aviation film we, were descending at an alarming rate as Geoff yelled "prepare to abandon" on the intercomm [sic] although no-one really needed telling. The trouble was that there was little that we could do about it.
Geoff and Des Cook the flight engineer were fighting the controls together with linked arms as the altimeter unwound rapidly but the spin had locked everyone into their respective positions.
Dave and I were both desperately trying to get to our side by
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side parachute stowages without much success and although our heads were probably only a couple of feet apart I swear that our eyeballs; out on stalks-must have nearly touched.
It has often been said that when one is faced with death one's whole life flashes before you but I do not recall any such images.
The only thing that flashed into my brain-box was "Dear God; this is it-I hope it doesn't hurt too much", and then suddenly the aircraft righted, or at least stopped spinning and we were released from the centrifugal forces that had kept us locked allowing us to get the 'chutes out of the racks as at the same time the order came from Geoff to "abandon...abandon...abandon”. Reaction to that order was automatic after the amount of time that we had spent practising the procedure in the previous three days.
Helmets with oxygen and intercomm [sic] connections were torn off. Dave and I grabbed our parachute packs on the run and slammed them onto our chest clips by the time Jim Murphy had jettisoned the front hatch and had virtually gone out with. Dave went next, feet first and I followed so closely behind, head first, that there could not have been a foot between us.
Archie Macintosh, the mid-upper gunner, was hot on my heels even though he had had to negotiate the main spar to get up front and then the way was clear for Des.
Des had already released Geoff's sutton harness and removed his helmet and connections as well as his own whilst Geoff was still struggling with the controls and he was ready to go the same way as the rest of us.
We had all thumped Geoff's arm as we passed so he got another thump from Des prior to his departure after which Geoff was able to make a dash for the exit before the aircraft went out of control again. As usual, the rear gunner had made his own arrangements by rotating on the beam and jettisoning the turret doors then throwing himself out backwards.
From the word 'go' there was a lot to be done and it says a great deal for a well practiced drill because we figured out afterwards that we were all out in 12 secs. flat, and not suprisingly [sic] , even faster than we had achieved in practice only the day before when Geoff had insisted that we do it again and
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again until he was satisfied.
It was with the same mechanical process that I counted to ten before I pulled the rip cord although I have to confess that I cheated a bit. It was more like 2,4,6,8,10 and after I had done it my heart was in my mouth as nothing seemed to happen.
I had felt some urgency to get the 'chute open as quickly as possible as we had been in cloud all the time and I had no idea of our height at the time of going out. I was just hoping that it would open before I dived into something solid; like the side of a house before it did.
I had made sure that I had put the 'chute pack on with the 'D' ring under my right hand which had been on it from the time I had clipped up. I had heard too many stories of people who had gone out in a panic only to be found later at the bottom of a hole with the right hand side of the pack half torn away by bleeding fingers; yet as sure as I was that I had done everything correctly it seemed like a lifetime before anything happened.
There was a violent jolt and I was swinging under a rustling canopy, still in cloud and preparing rapidly for a heavy landing. For a brief moment there was a tremendous sense of relief as I found myself looking down at the 'D' ring clutched in my right hand. Then the thought struck me that I had better hang onto it as there was a five shilling fine for opening a parachute; but only by mistake. What a bloody silly thought!...so I tossed it away smartly just before I broke cloud.
I estimated that I was about 1500ft and on looking around I found that I was much too close to a turbulent river for my liking, especially as I was a poor swimmer and I had no life jacket on, so I started hauling on the shroud lines to do something about it. With not a lot of time to spare I concentrated on the landing.
I was agreeably suprised [sic] that crossing hands on the lines and pulling them in opposite directions worked like the instructors said it would and with a little more heaving and hauling I soon got a fair idea of where I was going to land in an open field!.
I need not have worried about going into the river as a strong wind was carrying me away from it but if it was not bad enough that landing by parachute was the equivilent [sic] to the rate of
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descent of jumping off of a 12ft wall I seemed to be doing about 30mph on the level so I was not keen to get a busted leg at that stage.
When I was just a few feet above the ground I turned the release buckle to unlock the harness and a fraction of a second before touching terra firma I banged the release buckle and Presto!. I came out of the harness, into a forward roll over the shoulder and hip and immediately up on my feet to grab the lower lines of the canopy and collapse it. It was a classic landing-I was down safely and I could only hope at the time that the others had been as successful.
I had seen no sign of them during the descent but I was to find out all about that later. The most important thing was-where the blazes was I?. The time was 3.30pm and as we had crossed and re-crossed the 'bomb line' there was every chance that I might be on the Allied side.
The terrain gave no indication of where I was and there was not the activity that one would expect of a battlefield area but with those thoughts running around inside my head I gathered up my parachute and shoved it under the base of a tree among some roots as I decided to get away from the immediate area.
[line of stars]
10
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Continuation of “Water under the Bridge – Part II. by A.T.GAMBLE.
I could faintly hear shouts and whistles coming from one area so I scrambled off on my hands and knees in the opposite direction into an area of 4ft nursury [sic] pines towards a road that I had seen on the way down. By the time I got there the shouts and whistles had become considerably louder.
Within a few seconds of reaching the edge of plantation the road was in sight but I stayed under cover until I spotted a Jeep coming along displaying the American white circle with a star in so with great relief I broke cover, stood up and waived [sic] . I immediately regretted it.
The chap standing up front next to the driver let loose with a sub-machine gun so I promptly went to ground again.
I just had time to notice that his uniform, although a sort of blue, was not quite the familiar RAF colour and pattern, Then I knew which side of the line I was on; the wrong side. !!
I was only half aware of the sounds of ZZZtz’s as lead cut into the area around me as I did a reasonable imitation of a rabbit on my hands and knees heading for the middle of the trees wondering how the blazes I was going to get out of this situation, until l was finally forced to stop, exhusted.
I buried my identity card which I should not have been carrying anyway, plus two £1 notes, and drew my pistol which had been tucked in my tunic, cocked it and laid down trying to be very, very small.
A siren was wailing in the distance and the shouts and whistles got even louder with sounds of more local movement that was just audible above the hammering of my heart.
I did not know what to expect but what happened was very sudden. A heavy boot came down on my gun hand. The pistol went off and I was hauled to my feet facing the business end of a nasty looking machine pistol and about half a dozen grinning chaps of my own age; in Luftwaffe blue!.
There were some others behind me and one of them relieved me of my Smith & Wesson .38 and with my hands now free it seemed the most logical thing to do was to put them well above my head. With as cheerful a grin as I could muster I said "good afternoon", to which the bloke behind the pistol said, "gooten abend, fur sie das krieg ist fertig". (good afternoon, for you the war is finished) and although my German was not good enough
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to interpret, the inference in the manner in which it was said was sufficient. I was without any doubt a Prisoner of War!.
In the middle of the group, with a prod and a push I was ushered to a large house, past a battery of heavy looking anti-aircraft guns and the thought struck me that they might have been responsible for my present predicament as there was no doubt in my mind that it was ack-ack that had got us, but I didn't ask. I was not going to give them the satisfaction of an affirmative reply as they already seemed pretty smug about the whole business.
I was led into the house, and up the stairs from the baronial hall of heavy oak panelling and flying staircase and into a room being used as an office.
An officer behind a huge antique desk greeted me with a broad grin, so with very little to lose I gave him a parade ground salute which he smartly returned. So far so good….but what was running around inside my head at the time was the irony that it was just my luck to have come down in the middle of the Luftwaffe flak unit that had shot us down!.
The proceedings that followed were all conducted in German and a lot of sign language apart from one question directed to the single ribbon on my tunic. It was only the 1939/43 star as it was then, but the officer pointed to it and enquired "DFC”?. Well, a DFC was about the equivalent of their Iron Cross, whatever class, and I thought it might influence the treatment so "ja” it was. As it happened it might as well have been a VC for all the difference it made.
Everything was turned out of my pockets. Collar studs were taken from out of my shirt. (They obviously knew that we often had special one's with compasses in them). Then the cufflinks, (they often had the same use). Then all of the buttons from my jacket and trousers. (Again some buttons could be used as a matching pair with one balanced on the other to produce a crude compass). Then the stitching that secured the tops of my flying boots was cut to deprive me of the tops as they were obviously aware that often money and maps were built into the layers of fleece and silk.
A polished metal mirror that I always kept in my left breast pocket was also removed before I was handed a piece of paper
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and pencil, and it was not difficult to understand the next request. Number, Rank, Name, although it was difficult to comply right away until I had secured my trousers with my tie.
Among my possessions now laying on the table was a nearly new pack of 20 cigarettes, so I indicated a request for one but the crafty blighters handed them round first leaving just one in the pack for me. Even then they did not light theirs. They probably pulled them to pieces later to see if there was anything other than tobacco in them. I knew there was not. I had only got them from the Mess bar the night before.
Now those in the escape and evasion pack that had gone down with my life jacket were an entirely different matter but it was no good bemoaning the loss of that stuff.
It seemed that the initial procedures were finished when the officer made a few calls on a field telephone after which I was ushered outside to take my place between two armed escorts on bicycles and with a boot up the backside and "Schnell" off we went with me at the trot.
I found out later that I had come down between Veirson and Alderkirk, about 10mls West of Krefeld but we were soon away from there as was persistently prodded and booted to keep me on the run which was no easy task in sloppy shoes which used to be flying boots, and trousers without adequate support but they seemed in a great hurry and obviously 'I was of no consequence.
There were regular encouraging shouts of "rouse" and "schnell" accompanied by more kicks in the rear so there was no alternative to keeping on the move.
What surprised me was the fact chat the area we went through was devoid of all civilian population. Villages, shops, farms and houses were deserted. There was no sign of life at all. Derelict filling stations had rusty 'Shell' signs hanging lop-sided. Shops with tatty Coca-Cola signs were all boarded up. It was more like a no-man's land that I jogged through with little evidence of all the troops that I expected to see considering how close to the front line that I was. It was even more surprising since in the early hours of the next morning one of the biggest offensive's of the war was launched by the Allies
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on the Northen [sic] battle front in an attempt to break through and reach the Rhine. They must have been known that something big was about to break.
The very fact that we did not achieve immediate success is a matter of history but with great armies lined up and about to be locked in battle less than 30mls to the West I can only assume that if there was any strength of German troops in the rear they were very well hidden. The only traffic that I saw was the occasional military vehicle travelling very slowly hugging the edge of the tracks through wooded areas.
I was just about done in when we finally arrived at the Luftwaffe airfield at Krefeld around dusk.
I was duly handed over and signed for at the guard room with my two escorts still showing signs of being in a hurry to get back to their relatively isolated unit before the RAF or the USAAF started chucking stuff at what was a prime target.
Perhaps they figured they would have more chance against our ground forces but whatever; they were off as fast as they could go with their hand generating flashlights whirring away.
My first impression of the place was the similarity between their buildings and our pre-war bases at home. It all looked so familiar that they might have been built to the same plans….perhaps they were!. Even the cell block behind the guard room was identical as was the exercise yard behind it, but I was not impressed when I was shown to my room.
In the cell was the same sort of wooden dais that served as a bed, (no comfort for the wrong doers), and of course no pillow or mattress. Just a single thin blanket.
It was not long after I had been locked in and I had taken stock of the situation that I realised that it was some time since I had eaten or had a drink, about eight hours actually, so I started making a fuss to attract the attention of a guard and demanding to be fed.
The sign language conveyed the message alright but the only reaction was a great deal of laughter and sign language from them which simply meant "you have had it mate"!.
I have no doubt it was due to a typical military process which ensured
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that there would be no issue of food to a prisoner until he came on ration strength in the morning!.
Everything that I had been provided with for such emergencies (had I been allowed to keep it) had gone down in my life jacket.
I finally went into an uncomfortable and restless sleep with visions of that egg and bacon that would have been waiting for me back at Mildenhall, and grumblings in the tummy. I was also very concerned at the sort of reaction that there would-be when the inevitable telegrams arrived. There was no way, that anyone back home would know what had happened to us. We would just be 'missing' until something was sorted out.
In the morning the routine was simple. An early visit to the ablutions under guard with no means or opportunity of washing, other than splashing a little water on the face and return to the cell to find that 'breakfast' had been served.
It had been placed on the floor outside the cell door. I could have eaten a horse, harness and all but all that 'breakfast' consisted of was one slice of sticky black bread with a smear of bright yellow grease on it and a mug of some brown stuff that they called coffee.
I did not dare laugh at their reference to "cafe' and brot und butter" as there was no was of knowing when I would get anything else particularly as my insides were already protesting at not being fed for nearly 24 hours. Nevertheless, I nibbled and sipped any way through it having never ever tasted anything quite like it before.
Had I gulped it down I have no doubt that I would not have kept it down for long. It was absolutely ghastly.
There was no activity at all until mid-day and after a visit to the ablutions a meal was provided on a small folding table in the passageway and I had company.
My companion was a young Luftwaffe airman of about 17 who spoke quite good English and although he could have been a plant I very much doubt it.
Over the meal which was about a handful of turnip stew. a tablespoon of sourcraut [sic] and a thin slice of black bread without any scrape, plus a mug of the brown stuff we managed to communicate sufficiently for him to tell me his story.
Apparently he had wanted to be a pilot but his eyes were not
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up to the standard required so he had become ground crew of some sort which he had been a bit peeved about. He was in the cooler for striking an officer and what's more he did not seem too worried.
I found it embarrassing when after he had made enquiries about the various insigna [sic] on my uniform and found that I was an officer. It was he who suggested that the scar on my forehead was a duelling scar so I want along with it. After that disclosure he jumped to his feet, clicking his heels and bobbing up and down in typical German fashion until I suggested that we had better get on with our food, what there was of it, before it got cold. Especially as we were using the same utensils...his!. Then we were locked up again and for my part still hungry.
I have often wondered how that lad got on. After all, striking an officer was, and still is a serious offence, especially on active service. He was probably sent to the Russian front in a penal battalion to fight for his beloved Furher [sic] . They might as well have shot him outright. Whilst I was having visions of egg and bacon I was disappointed when supper turned up. It was a mug of a different shade of brown stuff of indefinable flavour and so to bed. It was the same routine the next day and my insides were still trying to come to terms with the 'snacks' that arrived three times a day and even the Luftwaffe airman had disappeared but things livened up the next day.
There was a terrific rattle of light ack-ack when the airfield was straffed [sic] by USAF P.51's, (Mustangs). They did a hell of a good job from what I could see through a small peep-hole in the top corner of the window, only just accessible .by climbing on the bed stood on it's end.
There were quite a few fires and explosions and a hell of a racket from the defences but I was forced to abandon my grandstand view very quickly when lead started splattering all over the outside of the building. It was too close for comfort and the window finished up with a larger hole in it that it had had before causing a bit of a draught.
Archie Macintosh had been brought in the night before but apart from one brief meeting we had been unable to communicate as
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he had been put in a cell at the other end of the block and we were fed at different times.
I was beginning to get a bit fed up with my own company when on the afternoon of the 10th I had plenty of company.
The entire crew of a B.17. (Flying Fortress) were brought in and distributed among the cells so two of them joined me.
They were a bit suspicious at first but were soon convinced that I was genuine as I was sharing their discomfort. Despite the increase in numbers we were not provided with any more blankets and only a small increase in total food, although we were being fed in the cells at that stage. Fortunately my new cell mates had only recently been well fed back at their UK base and were quite willing to forego the "Kraut junk food" so I had my fill. I am sure they changed their minds about it later on.
At least there was someone to talk to relieve the utter boredom of my four walls and I must confess that I was astonished when I heard their story.
Apparently they had lost an engine and could not keep up with their formation so before the fighters could get at them they had just force landed, fired the aircraft and that was that.
I found it difficult to reconcile such an action with what we might have done in similar circumstances but their orders were not to risk lives at that stage for the sake of an aeroplane. There were plenty of them!. Even so I thought that it would not have been difficult to have done some hedgehopping to our own lines rather than finish up in the situation they now found themselves in.
The next day we were all mustered outside the Guardroom after our morning drink and with one guard per prisoner we set off to Dusseldorf by the process of alternatively walking or hitchhiking on military transport. Archie and I were at last able to compare notes.
He had gone out just behind me but had not been able to execute as neat a landing.
He had landed in some fairly tall pine trees and after he had finished crashing through branches he finished up swinging about 20 feet from the ground somewhat winded.
He had a lot to think about once he had recovered and certainly
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did not fancy getting a busted leg by releasing himself from that height, although that is what the Luftwaffe wanted him to do as soon as they arrived on the scene.
There was a lot of shouting and a few shots to give him encouragement so he eventually got a good swing going until he was able to grab the branch of another tree, release himself and clamber down. The rest was routine so that was two of us that were OK anyway.
As we plodded along we took in all that was revealed by the countryside and the signs of the desperate shortages in Germany were even more obvious.
All the things that made up the daily life back home that we took for granted; the butcher, the baker, people, transport and tradesmen were just not there. The area was desolate apart from the odd military vehicle that picked us up and saved our legs for a few miles.
It took a long time to cover the 16 miles by those means and there was no refreshment at all-not for us prisoners anyway!, but we duly arrived at the Luftwaffe airfield at Dusseldorf to be handed over and signed for as usual at the guard room.
Then our escorts came up with an extraordinary gesture that took us completely by surprise They came down the line and shook us all very politely by the hand, with of course the inevitable heel clicking, and then we were led away to our cells. There was four in mine, including Archie.
We were not fed or watered. Only water was available when it was possible to visit the toilets although the guards were very reluctant to let us use the wash basins--but we managed.
By that time I was used to being hungry and our American friends were getting aclimatized [sic] --but getting very vocal about it. It was a total waste of time, even when we were ushered outside at 4.30 the next morning.
Naturally we were hoping that we were going to be fed but all we got was a pack of three dry sandwiches, containing some garlic smelling sausage and being told that they had to last several days. Some only lasted a few minutes as about 20 of us were packed into a bus which took us to what was left of Dusseldorf station and whilst we were waiting around for something to happen we found that Jim was among us. That made three of us accounted
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for.
Jim's descent had been perfectly normal. There had been a reception committee waiting for him and he had gone straight to Dusseldorf where he had waited several days for something to happen. At last it had.
We spent all day on that train, and the next as it clanked and groaned it's way across country. It was a painfully slow journey, and sometimes we were shunted into sidings for long periods, and on others we were just held up by the signals.
The guards were touchy and there was one outside each of the compartments all the time. The only time we were allowed out into the corridor was for the occasional visit to the toilet, still under escort, and the facilities were a bit primitive to say the least.
Drinking water was limited and was only made available twice a day from a bucket with a ladle which we all had to use, so it was not surprising that we were getting thirsty, dirty and hungry. Three sandwiches do not go far---mine went on the first day and nothing else had turned up.
Sleeping was another big problem although we dozed quite a lot as there was-nothing else to do, but ten in a compartment brought it's own problems, especially at night. We took turns for a few hours at a time up on the luggage racks but without any heating on the train it did not take long for the body to get chilled right through so it was necessary to get back into the sweaty and rather smelly huddle of bodies to warm up again.
We had to disembark several times as the train went forward slowly on it's own over either weak or hurriedly laid sections of track or where unexploded or delayed action bombs were suspected and it was all very tedious.
The next night we stopped at one station to change the train crew, I think it was Siegen, and it was another of those rare occasions to get out of the compartment.
The German equivalent of the WVS were on the platform and the ladies of the tea urn were approached by our guards with a proposal to dispense some in our direction and with a great show of reluctance they eventually obliged.
Of course, we had to take it in turn to use the tin cups provided as we had nothing and the news was relayed that the hot drink
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was 'chocolate'. I saw some strange expressions from the others that were ahead of me in the queue when they got theirs and I don't suppose mine was any different when I got my measure.
As chocolate it was more like dirty washing up water and that the average German had long forgotten what chocolate really tasted like.
It was more like the sort of brew that you would get if you dissolved a Horlicks tablet in five gallons of hot water!.
It was welcome just the same and we dare not make any disparaging remarks about for fear of being deprived of it.
I was just wondering if I should finish my ration by washing in it when the air raid sirens started wailing and there was immediate panic everywhere as we set off for the shelters.
We were herded down some steps into caves which had been hewn out of the natural rock alongside the station and some of us helped the guards with their packs. Someone else 'accidentally' knocked over the abandoned drinks trolley in the general rush and we eventually finished up in a dimly lit shelter where we were pushed well to the back as bombs started crashing down outside causing the lights to flicker and dust to start filtering from the roof onto everyone. [The raid was short but the bombs were heavy one's and are thought to have been Mosquito's on a 'siren tour'].
The rest of the occupants of the shelter, mostly civilians including children were terrified and apart from one old bloke, stayed huddled up in the corners. He shuffled across to our group and peered at us through the shield of guards for a while until it dawned on him who we were and then he went frantic.
He lunged and spat, yelling "terror fleiger" doing his damnedest to get through to us but the guards closed ranks into a solid wall in front of us and he shoved off when the all clear sounded. The guard commander was taking no chances that any further demonstration might get out of hand and we left last!.
I doubt if they would have been so protective If they had known what we had been up to. It was some time later after we had re-embarked and were clanking along once more when they found out. First one went to his pack and then another, to find the cupboard bare. Even the: wine bottles were empty!.
They got very upset about it and there were all sorts of threats
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of punishment for stealing but we just laughed it off and it came to nothing.
Their rations were not all that good anyway but by that time we were past caring. I do not remember anyone saying that they did not like garlic sausage or black bread but in that situation you soon forget about any fads and fancies you might have had.
We finally arrived at Frankfurt on the morning of the 15th and I was surprised to see so such of the station still standing. It was not until I took a second look that I realised that the broken framework of the roof had no glass and the only solid thing seemed to be the platforms, and there was a lot of those missing.
It was even worse outside!.
The roads were just avenues between piles of rubble that had once been houses, shops and businesses. What a mess. I had seen some of Coventry after they had done some clearing up in the areas that had been devastated, and a great deal of London's East End but this lot was not in any way isolated. It spread as far as the eye could see. We had seen signs of it from the train as we were pulling in but when we were actually in it was obvious that anything still standing was little more than a blackened shell.
It was not surprising that the population were showing signs of hostility as we were herded out of the station and we were surrounded by the guards almost shoulder to shoulder. It was with some relief that we were all shoved into the relative safety of an old electric tram which eventually rattled and whined it's way up the hill in the direction of the infamous interrogation camp; Dulag Luft, at Ober-Orsal, the place that most of us knew about from the talks that we had from either repatriates or escapees. We had a pretty good idea of what to expect, and were prepared for it.
The tram ran out of line after about two miles and then we were on foot again until we reached the camp at about 2pm.
This time the guards did not shake hands when we were handed over. They were probably still sore about their stolen rations and were as anxious as we were to get a meal. Nevertheless, I was glad that it was policy for the Luftwaffe to look after Air Force prisoners. They seemed reasonable enough under the
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circumstances.
Perhaps they were being particularly nice now that the stuffing was being knocked out of them and although they would not have admitted it many of them must have known that the end was near.
We queued for a long time as forms were filled in and cross checked with other papers and then finally it was time to have our photographs taken.
Most of the staff seemed to be Luftwaffe aircrew who were either grounded by the shortage of fuel or were convalescing but either way they were not very good with a camera. They had been clicking away merrily for some time with the lens cap still on and a buzz passed down the line not to tell them until they got near the end. I was only a couple from the end and it gave me great satisfaction to point it out to them. Much to their embarrassment Everyone fell about hooting with laughter and there were a few derisory remarks made in German about the efficiency of the Luftwaffe. It did mean of course that we had to do it all over again which involved getting colder and hungrier but it was all part of the scheme of things that almost everyone was engaged in. Crudely put, it was 'goon baiting', and something that they failed to see the point of.
After hours of standing around and being herded to and fro' I was eventually ushered into a room that might easily have been one of our own flight offices. It was a cleverly laid out stage set that was a perfect replica using RAF furniture, carpets and fittings that had been captured and put to use. In addition there was even one of our own Marconi TR1154/55 radio equipments sitting on top of one of our filing cabinets with an RAF flying helmet, goggles and oxygen mask draped casually over an open drawer, plus a gunners Irvin fur flying jacket on the door hook to create the right effect. In addition there was a wall map with pins and tapes showing routes and other areas exactly the same as the one in our briefing room.
I could not help wondering how many of these stage sets they had got for the various aircrew categories both RAF and USAF but it was so obvious I was immediately on my guard.
When the officer, or the chap that was dressed as one spoke from behind the desk it was in perfect English, without any accent, that it might easily have been an interview by a flight
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commander on posting; except that he was in the wrong sort of uniform!.
He asked all sorts of questions relative to target and route, the call signs, equipment, and frequencies as well as the codes, all of which I refused to answer. I stuck to number, rank, and name.
After a while he pushed over a packet of Players cigarettes and then launched into some searching questions about the Bomber Codes that we used and even showed me some copies that they had obviously recovered from pranged aircraft. Naturally he wanted to know about the sequence of use and although I told him that it was a random sequence and just issued for an operation he really did not believe it, but it was true and so simple that it was unbelievable. As a result he was not convinced and suggested that as an officer I must know more than that (which I did of course), but it seemed that the best way was to act ignorant, and I doubt if they were ever able to decode anything from any one transmission. It was that simple yet very discreet.
He started off again about the target and why we had been around Krefeld but eventually got fed up asking the same questions over and over again, and getting a blank stare for an answer.
All the time he had been questioning me he had been referring to a folder on the desk in front of him and eventually with a sigh he held it up and showed me the front cover. As plain as the nose on your face the wording was '15 Squadron, Mildenhall'.
It had obviously been put together over the years from snippets of information plus a good deal of intelligence gathering through spies and the like and they may have managed to find sufficient evidence from the wreckage of 'D' Dog to tell them where we had come from. After all, 4ft lettering on each side of the fusulage [sic] would be enough. Nevertheless, he displayed a certain amount of smugness at the disclosure and when I said "well, if you know all that why do you persist in asking damn silly questions" he went one better. He said he knew Mildenhall quite well, and that included 'The Bird in Hand', which was a local favoured pub. Then he trotted out some more local knowledge and rounded it all off with the fact that I would be pleased
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to know that all the crew had been captured uninjured which was a great relief, although it was a sprat to catch a mackerel. He started off right away again about Bomber Codes. No way. Two could play that-game so it was back to number, rank, name again.
All the time the interrogation was going on, in addition to the guard by the door there were two electricians in white overalls working on a side wall putting in electrical conduit and I was doing my damndest to show more interest in what they were doing than my interrogator and especially the materials that they were working with.
The conduit seemed to be rolled up paper' tubing with a foil coating and a crimping tool rather like a large pair of pliers was being used to shape the curves and the corners.
The electricians looked at me with puzzled interest and I grinned back at them much to the consternation of the interrogator. It all seemed a bit daft to me. With Allied ground forces approaching the Rhine for the final big blow and their country being blasted to bits and their armies in the East and the West retreating from overwhelming forces. With death and destruction everywhere wasn't it typically German to be putting in electrical modifications?. I suppose they could have been wiring demolition charges just in case but surely they would not have bothered with conduit---or would they?.
I was dragged back from my meditations when asked to complete a small white card with personal details and when he saw my home address he asked how I managed to get across London with the mess that it was in with the VI's and V2's still a pouring down the question took me by surprise The damage from those weapons had been very isolated however devastating it might have been in the precise spot of impact. At the worst we had learned to live with the things even when one had taken the end off of the London hotel in which my wife and I had been staying and another had blown up a cow in a field just across the road from where we had been staying in Surrey but life went on just the same so I told him. "No trouble".
That was not good enough and he still persisted that London was in a terrible mess so I let his have it straight. I told his that I could still cross London any way I wanted. By taxi,
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bus, underground or on foot as I had done only three weeks previously...or stay in the city if it suited, and certainly a lot easier than he could get across Frankfurt from what I had seen of the place. That was it. End of interview! Could it have been that he had heard all that before and he was soon going to have to believe it?.
I was promptly dismissed and escorted to my 'private' room. It was three paces by one and a half most of which was taken up by a bed, and of course, the radiator!.
The window was shuttered and this type of room was commonly known as the sweat-box and considered by many to be the means of extracting information from people.
Although we had been told about this I am still more inclined to think that since the Germans were generally more advanced in their use of central heating systems than we were they were also inclined to overdo it a bit; even in those days.
I had been locked up for about an hour when the rattling of keys alerted me to the possibility of food arriving but no such luck.
When the door opened it was to admit a tubby, faded civilian, in a faded shapeless suit. He looked like something out of 'Scrooge'` in his cock-eyed steel rimmed glasses, and announced himself as a representative of the German Red Cross as he produced a foolscap sized questionnaire. We had been warned about this one too!.
Red Cross he might have been but the requirements of the questionnaire seemed to be bending the rules a bit and he seemed somewhat upset when I only entered the same basic details that had gone on the white card.
We had been warned that anyone who had been careless in their disclosures would be dealt with later and I was taking no chances.
It would not be the first time that 'Lord Haw-Haw' (William Joyce) had made use of such information and mentioned the names of people that had recently become guests of the Third Reich in his propaganda broadcasts.
Another significant factor was that William Joyce knew Worthing well enough to have made the most of it having been in lodgings just around the corner from home before the war. I was very
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careful.
The little grey man got quite angry and made dire threats about not getting any food if I did not co-operate. Big deal...that was nothing new. No food had past my lips for at least 36hours!. Not long after his departure clatterings at the door suggested food again but instead an elderly guard brought in a dirty metal bowl with some lukewarm water in it and a razor with a blade that had definitely seen better days. One thing was for sure, there was no way a desperate POW was likely to cut his throat with it!.
The rest of the equipment was a dirty damp towel and a piece of 'soap' more like pumice stone which had no intention of producing a lather. It made very little impression on my seven days growth of beard or the 'tide marks' on various parts of my anatomy that had not been exposed for the same amount of time.
I felt better for it anyway even though I still had no opportunity to clean my teeth and it was probably just as well that I had not got my steel mirror to assist in those ablutions. I would probably had a fit.
Some time after that the clatter at the door was followed by the same guard with my meal. Not very much and not very nice but even a dollop of turnip stew in a tin bowl was welcome at that time which was probably nearer 48hrs since my last bite of anything.
It did not take long to figure out the routine. There was a lever by the door which when turned allowed a piece of red painted angle iron to drop on the outside indicating that a visit to the toilet was required.
On my first visit I was going down the corridor and was horrified to see an ashen faced Flight Lieutenant, his arm in blood soaked bandages, just painfully stumbling along, using the wall for support, and I instinctively went to give assistance although he feebly protested that I would get into trouble. I did!.
I got a rifle butt smack between the shoulder blades and down I went. When I struggled to my feet the guard was screeching his head off about "sprachen verbotten" and "schnell" as I was prodded along to the ablutions where another chap was able to tell me about the set-up.
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Apparently the Flt.Lt. was the pilot of a Tempest which was a type fairly near to the battle scene and as they wanted information from him they were withholding medical treatment until they did. His arm was already gangrenous and he smelt awful but there was nothing I could do for him when came back out of the toilets. He had just managed to make a little more painful progress down the corridor and that episode most certainly put all of my problems to the background. I was definitely not amused at the procedings [sic] .
I spent the rest of the night doing what everyone else seemed to be doing. Making sure there was a signal bar going down every few minutes of the night just to annoy the guard. It did!.
On one occasion when he got around to me he was very angry and protested to some considerable length in his pigeon English that "alles ist pissen unt shitzen" so it seemed worth while going without sleep. It was too hot for sleeping anyway with the radiators pinging away.
At 5 o'clock they next morning, after a drink, an untidy collection of prisoners were assembled outside with the usual shouting and shoving and then we were marched the five miles down to Frankfurt station to await a train. The weather was cold and miserable, we were cold and hungry as we staggered along in no particular order and then I was thumped on the back by Des which cheered things up a bit. He had already found some of the others are although I did not feel much like walking it certainly helped to swap experiences and pass the time.
Des had a very good story try tell.
Despite the fact that in his haste he had only secured his 'chute by one side clip and had made a very dodgy descent with every chance of the canopy 'candleing' [sic] and dropping him like a stone he still made a reasonable landing without injury. What was more important, his landing was undetected so he made some very positive arrangements to evade capture.
For two days and nights he worked his way Westward and had made considerable progress towards the front line to the point of having to dodge German patrols and guards.
In the early hours of the second morning there was gunfire all around him and he even heard American voices in the distance when he got a bit too bold.
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He had already fooled a guard earlier by grunting "gooten morgan" after the guard had shown his presence by lighting a cigarette, then strolled by him whistling Lillie Marlene but shortly afterwards made a lot of noise by falling in a ditch and was challenged. There was no way that he could bluff his way out of that and he was promptly bundled off to the rear to spend the night in a village hall before being handed over to the Luftwaffe, so here he was after all that.
It was after mid-day before a train was finally shunted in by which time most of us were just about asleep on our feet but were eventually embarked with more pushing, shoving and shouting accompanied by the liberal use of rifle butts.
The guards must have thought we were all daft by the way we kept bursting into song from time to time. We did our best with that fine old marching song 'Colonel Bogey' which cheered us up considerably. The Air Force had it's own words to that particular piece so we managed to tell them just what we thought of them without them knowing it!.
We finally arrived at Wetzlar later in the day having recovered from our earlier exertions but we were very, very hungry.
When we disembarked we were once more jostled about until the whole party, about a hundred, were ready to move off.
Then Dave turned up, although why we had not bumped into him before was a bit puzzling. Des had already met him and lost him again but it appeared that he had been at the other end of the column and this was our first chance to mingle since we had left Frankfurt.
There was a great deal of chat and it seemed that Dave had been picked up even quicker than me. He had come down in the open and the German Air Force was there to welcome him with open arms. He had been a bit concerned that the reception committee gathering below him were going to use him for target practice and was relieved when he finally touched down and rapidly divested himself of his 'chute and harness before doing basically what I had done. There was no other choice!.
We were chatting away as we trugged up the hill away from the station and eventually the boundary wire of a camp came into view looking somewhat ominous on the skyline but before the front of the column got to the main gate there was a flurry
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of activity.
Suddenly there were a couple of shots and the sounds of whistles as half a dozen guards with dogs came rushing out of the gate and we all came to a halt as they broke though our ranks and raced around the perimeter wire.
They raced out of sight and there was a lot of shouting and dogs barking for a few minutes before another shot was heard and shortly afterwards the party came back dragging a body unceremoniously by the legs along the whole length of the column. The body was that of a young American Air Force Sergeant who had a leg and a body wound in addition to a neat hole in his forehead!.
We soon found out what it had all been about when we got into camp but not until we were fed; this time with a difference.
For a start it was a well run POW transit camp run by the Americans and it seemed to have everything. It was a long time since any of us had been in a dining hall like that one. As traumatic as our arrival had been food was still uppermost in the minds of most people.
Surrounded as we had been by drab ugliness for so long to find ourselves in a clean cheery place with larger than life Disney cartoons and other such characters painted everywhere I half expected to see a Coca-Cola dispenser in the corner but what was on the tables was mind boggling.
There was Spam, beans, sausages, potato, bacon, bread, biscuits, butter, cheese, tinned fruit, dried fruit, chocolate, you name it, it was all there. All the things that came in Red Cross parcels. There was real coffee with reconstituted milk with real sugar on tap, or tea, and we hardly needed a second telling to "get stuck in". It was magnificent.
I can't remember how long we sat there just stuffing ourselves like kids at a Christmas party but eventually when we had had enough we were off to the showers, to be told that an issue of clothing would be made when we had cleaned up and for a start there was a new towel and real soap.
We all needed a good scrubbing before we were all pink and glowing once more and all the gear we had been wearing had been well and truly soaped and trampled on before we went on to the clothing store where most of us needed a complete change to
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bring us up to a acceptable standard.
Like most aircrew I had gone into the bag with just the flying gear that was being worn at the time but like any clothing it was bound to suffer from being worn day and night in all conditions for ten days. Gunners were probably better off than most if they had managed to hang on to their furs, but being military equipment most of them had had it taken from them.
There were other things that came out of the Alladins [sic] cave.
In addition to new underclothes, socks, boots, shirt, a greatcoat and a blanket there were cigaretts [sic] , pipe and tobacco, razor, shaving brush and soap. Toothbrush and paste. A comb and what military folk called a ‘hussif’, (housewife or sewing kit) which was very useful for keeping things in repair and of course for putting buttons back on things.
It was nearly all American Red Cross clothing and the like, mostly olive drab kharki [sic] but that did not make it any less welcome.
The camp seemed to have lavish supplies of everything and the fact that there were no guards patrolling the perimeter suggested that the administration had been bribed with goods to keep it that way with only the towers manned. It was certainly not beyond the realms of possibility knowing the capacity of our American friends to organise such things.
We were soon off to the barrack blocks with arms full of 'goodies' and to finish drying off those items of clothing that we wanted to keep and it was there that I finally heard the full story of the lad that had just got himself killed.
Apparently the poor chap had become very depressed since his capture mainly because as a waist gunner in a B.17. (Flying Fortress) when his aircraft had been damaged, he had panicked and failed to help the ball turret gunner out of his position. (Gunners in this very cramped turret needed assistance to both get in and out) but he himself had baled out and his buddy had gone to his death in the crippled aircraft.
It was hardly surprising that it had affected him very badly and he had been threatening to do something drastic which he had eventually done by going over the wire.
He had had the usual shouted warning when he went over the trip wire but kept going and started to climb the fence. On the way
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over he was hit by the first shot but still struggled on until the next shot brought him down outside but still crawling. There was very little doubt about the third shot that we had heard. That had been a pistol.
Whether he had begged the guards or whether they had needed no encouragement no one seemed to know although he must have been in view from the opposite side of the compound. Either way he was very dead and it was very sad to think that another young life had been needlessly thrown away.
We were not all that happy about our introduction to the POW cage but however much we had been shaken by the episode creature comforts were still uppermost in our minds and I spent the rest of the day sorting myself out and puffing away on my new pipe.
It was just as well that we had got away from Wetzlar station when we had.
I had no sooner made up my bed and was contemplating the luxury of spending the night in it when a racket started in the town as it got a pasting from USAF Thunderbolts and we had a grandstand seat as bits of the town and the station went flying in all directions accompanied by shouts and cheers from the 'grandstand'.
Nevertheless, I did get that night's exhausted, dreamless sleep in a real bed and not troubled by hunger pains. It was sheer ecstacy [sic] and I must confess that I was no longer so worried about how my wife and my family must have been feeling about my disappearance. The way things were going I was confident of getting home in the not too distant future so it was just a case of surviving until that day.
After a leisurely and handsome meal the following morning, the 18th, the whole camp apart from the permanent staff assembled with all their personal possessions and with a Red Crass parcel between two prisoners we were herded; (we refused to march), down the hill.
The station was in a bit of a mess but we were packed into a train on a side line and then left there waiting for something to happen.
What we did not want to happen was for a return of the Thunderbolts to finish off the job that they had started the day before. We had noticed that the carriages had got large
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lettering--P O W in white along the top but there was a lot of muttering about the potential dangers from roving Allied train and tank busters.
An impromptu committee was soon formed from some of the more senior prisoners and it was decided to 'encourage' someone to move the train to a relatively safer place. A collection of cigarettes was quickly organised and for the sum of several hundred cigarettes the guards, station staff and train crew were bribed accordingly. We only moved a few hundred yards into another siding, but It was certainly safer than being in the station notwithstanding the fact that we had an anti aircraft flak car at the front and the rear of the train!
Once again we were packed into compartments, twelve at a time and once more we were obliged to adopt the same procedure as before. Up on the luggage racks for a period. Limited visits to the toilet. Limited drinking water and no distribution of food at all. Fortunately we had all fed well and with the contents of our Red Cross parcels we could last several days.
W were still clanking along on the 19th and perhaps it was just as well that the POW had been plastered along the top after all.
We were buzzed several times by Allied aircraft including one cheeky chap in a Thunderbolt who braved the fire from the flak cars to fly parallel to us waggling his wings and waving from his open cockpit. It was very encouraging even if a little foolhardy but it provided for some more light entertainment.
Although we could not open the windows or the doors we crowded as many as we could into the them [sic] all waving as hard as we could go which caused immediate reaction from the guard in the corridor.
In he came and pulled down the blinds and then the game started.
As soon as he left to pull down those in the next compartment up went ours with a clatter and back he came again. It did not last long---he gave up first!.
At one time we passed through some absolutely devastated areas including some marshalling yards that looked as if a giant had trampled through them.
On one occasion we were on one of the few complete through lines, and everywhere else was a mass of bomb craters, smashed rolling
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stock and rails that were twisted into the most fantastic shapes like so much spagetti [sic] .
Repairs of sorts were being carried out by what looked like Russian or Polish women in headscarves, quilted jackets, sacking and string boots and who were wielding long handled shovels. They looked such a sorry dejected bunch that we put up a cheer but the only response were vacant stares.
One of the most incredible sights among all the mess was that of a huge circle of locomotive sheds surrounding a turntable locomotive roundhouse like the spokes of a wheel which had copped a real packet.
There were several 100 ton loco's reared up on their ends and wrapped around each other like so many discarded Hornby model trains. I don't know where it was. It could have been Frankfurt as it was not far away and we could have come back in that direction, or Wurzburg, but the effectiveness of that yard had been reduced to zero, making it even more difficult to move things about, including us. It did not seem logical to take all that trouble with POW's who were a definite liability.
We found out later what it was all about!.
Apparently Hitler had ordered that all POW's were to be brought down into the area surrounding Birchtegarten [sic] to be used as hostages and I would not have given much for our chances with Hitler in residence backed up by his SS fanatics.
Fortunately Hitler did not get out of Berlin anyway and a lot of his Generals were only going through the motions of obeying orders.
It was a dodgy situation all round and several of his Generals had already come to a sticky end in the hands of the SS.
Meanwhile we were being transported with great difficulty and at one time we passed through a hilly wooded area, still deep in snow which made it all look like a Christmas card scene. It was probably in the Steigerwald area; but at the top of one climb, with the locomotive chuffing and clanking we noticed that there were numerous little sidings among the trees with tanker wagons by the dozen stowed in them. We were to remember those later!.
It was about that time when the young guard positioned in the corridor by our compartment got himself into serious trouble
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with his Oberfeldwebel.
He was armed with an old French rifle of 1914/1918 vintage and we had been working on him for some time about his chances of defending himself when our troops caught up with him considering the numerous automatic weapons that our front line troops were armed with.
He eventually took the bait after some disparaging remarks about his antique rifle and proceeded to show us what a good weapon g it was; by taking it to pieces!.
We had got to the point where one of us had the magazine, another had the rounds and the bolt, another the bayonet until his rifle parts had been well distributed among us and with the train going slow enough to make jumping possible, he was within seconds of being clouted when the NCO on his rounds could not see him in the corridor and burst in on us.
He was blue in the face, waiving his pistol about and of course, shouting.
The guard got a great grand-daddy of a dressing down as he stood stiff as a ramrod and then, sheepishly re-assembled his rifle as the bits were handed back.
After some shouting, with the assembled rifle at the high port the NCO, having said his piece stomped away to a fair bit of tittering from us which turned to laughter as the guard had the last word.
As soon as the NCO was out of earshot, he said, out of the corner of his mouth, "oxen scheissen", which needed no interpretation so we finished up having a damn good laugh with him. For him it probably ended alright but little did he know how close he had been to getting his head bashed in.
In the early hours of the 20th we arrived at a suburban station on the outskirts of Nuremberg. ‘Lagerwasser’ was a dreary little wooden platformed affair and immediately the old routine started. Shouting, shoving and pushing to keep us all grouped together in the darkness we eventually walked about three miles to the camp. Then we walked back again as they were not ready for us!. That episode caused a bit of an argument as we did not know how long we were going to have to wait and it was damn cold. In fact it was actually freezing and eventually we were allowed back into the relative warmth of the train but those negotiations
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cost us almost all the remainder of our precious cigarettes.
Eventually detrained again when it was light enough and we moved down the road in small parties, strung out, until we were well away from the station and with a lot more slow, slow, quick, quick, slow stuff we were all inside the camp at full light.
In the dark and confusion I had lost Archie but had picked up Jim again but the most important thing was that we were more or less in the same group, and that was the only satisfaction that we got out of entering a grim looking place that did not get any better as we took stock of our surroundings.
The board over the main gate said Stalag X111d, and what a dump it was after our experience at Wetzlar.
Apparently it had been recently cleared and was filling up again although at that time we had no idea where the previous inmates had gone. Wherever it was they appeared to have stripped the
place before leaving.
We were counted off, 150 to a barrack room which was actually a very largo hut. Barrack Nr.69 was no different from the others. The bunks were triple stacked and by the state of them most of the wooden slats; (no spring beds or mattresses in those places), had been used for fuel which was the only type of fuel available for the two empty stoves.
We found ourselves places to sleep; and that included the floor as very few of the top bunks could be used after the available slats had been re-distributed to make up as many of the lower bunks as possible. There was not much point in having more gaps than slats up top and doing a balancing act all night with good chance of crashing down on the chap below so everyone co-operated without any fuss.
It goes without saying that the floor was favourite at that time although later on the rats made a bit of a nuisance of themselves. We were obliged to secure our rations very carefully in something they had difficulty getting into.
Shortly after 'settling in' we were called to a room at the end of the hut for a check to be made on our identities by some of the permanent POW camp staff and I was amazed at being interrogated by our own people but these boys knew what it was all about.
They had been in the 'bag' a lot longer than us and knew all
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about 'ferrets' and 'moles'.
Some had come from Stalag Luft.3. in Upper Selesia [sic] and had had the most awful experiences marching through the countryside in the depths of the Winter leaving many of their comrades frozen solid on the road-sides where they had dropped through sickness, starvation and fatigue, many of them having been shot as stragglers.
As 'sproggs' we were very fortunate to have the benefit of their experience but I was suprised [sic] to see a map of Europe spread out on the table and to be asked if there was anything we had seen en route' that might be of any use to our advancing armies.
I got Archie called in and we gave them enough information on the fuel tanker wagons that we had seen up in the mountains for a plot to be put on the map. I still do not recall exactly where it was though.
It was heartening to think that somehow we were actually able to pass on that information and the tankers might go up in smoke. It was not beyond the realms of possibility.
There was a radio somewhere among us. There had to be as we got regular BBC news bulletins after we got settled in. But to imagine that there was a transmitter as well was mind boggling. It must have been a remarkable piece of equipment with it's numerous components concealed in all manner of things with wiring connections and aerial secreted in belts, braces and tin cans. It is worth bearing in mind that a lot of earlier Air Force prisoners were highly trained technicians who could build such equipment out of basics.
I was never privileged to see anything of it. That was the province of the veteran POW brigade and the fewer people that knew about it the better.
It was still freezing and we did not dare use any more bed slats to get fires going as there was always the chance that some might be needed to line a tunnel.
That was only a thought at the time but I found out later that there really was a tunnel linking us with the next compound.
Of course, the toilets were frozen although still in use, and other parts of the ablutions were also locked in deep freeze.
The only running water available was in the compound kitchen where it was used sparingly for producing hot drinks and later
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on some sort of food.
It is understandable that creature comforts were still our primary consideration in such primitive conditions so the first cup of 'hot stuff' that was dished up was very welcome even if many of us had to go to the end of the line and wait until the owner of a drinking utensil was prepared to lend it.
We had been in the camp several hours, when an air raid hit the city, starting with the wailing of sirens in the distance and then the camp sirens.
Then the roar of hundreds of B.24's, (Liberators) reverberated and shook everything as they came in from the South with mass formations glittering in the weak sunshine but they were surrounded by enemy fighters like a swarm of bees around a jam pot.
The fighters must just about have met them head on and they wheeled in and out of the formation. Flak peppered the sky and they still droned on as one fell out of the sky with flames pouring from it. Then the smoke markers and streams of bombs from the lead aircraft was followed by clouds of bombs from the rest of the formation with the most spine chilling whistling rushing sound as they descended followed by the steady roar of explosions they plastered the city in great swathes.
Some went wide, perhaps jettisoned as aircraft got into trouble, and the station that we had only recently vacated collected one or two!.
What was most vividly imprinted on my mind were the numbers of crippled aircraft falling out of the sky at one time. There must have been at least a dozen. Some breaking up, others on fire or exploding with bits and pieces raining down and all the time the continuous roar of the battle with the crackle of machine guns, the thud-thud of cannon mingling with the heavy crack of anti-aircraft guns. It was a savage battle.
There was an awful lot of killing going on up there as well as down below and there were a lot of parachutes too.
The luckier one's fell clear of the city, and I would not have given much for their chances if they had come down in it.
We added to our numbers by one that day and he did not go on the ration strength. He came right down in camp and was promptly hidden before the guards came out of their 'funk' holes where
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they invariably dived with their tin hats over their back-sides.
We learned later that the B.24's had come from Italy and were going though to UK bases, hence they had run into the defences instead of having to fight an extended battle right across the country.
The fires in the city burned all of the rest of the day with the occasional explosion of delayed action bombs which made it very difficult for the fire fighters as well as the inhabitants.
When that bit of excitement was over the rest of my day was spent sorting myself out. I was lucky enough to salvage an old tin can from a rubbish dump and as soon as it was cleaned and polished with sandy soil I was able to join the drinks queue a bit nearer the front.
I had also found a piece of barrel hoop that looked as if it might be turned into something useful so I started working on it. It took two days of hammering and grinding with stones and lumps of concrete before it eventually finished up as a combined cutting tool and shallow spoon to make me more independent.
Ever the optimist, there was never any need for a knife for a long time as most of the food we were getting was easily dealt with a spoon; or the fingers!.
The first night was cold and rough, but we managed to get through it, as usual, fully dressed, rolled up in a blanket and anything else that was available. Even wrapping paper and cardboard was useful; either as cover or to provide some sort of insulation underneath. It was a noisy night too as a few Mossie's turned up and stoked up the city with cookie's.
It did not take long to finish off the Red Cross parcels that we had left Wetzlar with and the food provided during the next few days was very basic.
The day usually started with the ersatz 'coffee', without milk or sugar of course. There was a slice of black bread at midday and the thickness varied according to the number of people sharing a loaf. Sometimes there was a pat of ersatz margarine about the size of a ten pence piece, or a bowl of vegetable stew was a luxurious alternative; if you had a bowl to put it in, otherwise it was handful. In the evening there was a mug of ersatz 'chocolate'. No milk or sugar of course, and that
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was the basic ration when there was no supplement from the Red Cross parcel.
The mid-day 'meal' was quite a performance as there was no mess hall. When the rations came in there was a whole crowd of 'observers' who followed it's progress to the cookhouse and the division and supply to the huts to ensure that there was no pilfering along the way. Considering that we were a mixed bunch of RAF and USAAF, Officers and NCO's it was all done quite amicably. The final division of the bread was usually done by the chap with the sharpest knife under the eagle eye of more 'observers'. He had to be very careful when it had to divided between nine or nineteen people!.
The next day brought another devastating attack on the city. Again they were B.24’s but this time coming from UK bases on their way back to Italy but the concentration was not the same.
They would have spent a lot longer running the gauntlet as attack after attack had been met and probably many losses had been incurred. This time we went for cover as a lot more bombs went very wide of the target and in our direction. They were not quite in the camp but when one or two holes erupted within a few hundred yards of the wire in open ground only the foolhardy would have stayed to watch.
The next day was just another cold and miserable day. The city banged and burned but there was no heat for us. Not that we expected it after what had happened just a few miles away.
It was well below freezing at night and Jim and I found it warmer to do what others were doing by just wrapping ourselves up together to utilise a bit of animal warmth. It was either that or freeze.
I shall never understand what rats found to scavenge for in that place but they were always busy at night and could often be heard in the vicinity. Perhaps they were cold and hungry too and were looking for a warm place but we very soon learned that it was not a good idea to take one's footwear off at night unless you wanted something gnawing at the toenails!.
On the 25th the city was still burning and another batch of prisoners came in. Some more huts were opened up and as we stood there looking for familiar faces among the new arrivals we found one. Lynn Clark, the rear gunner. We soon had him billeted in
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our hut and it was not long before his story came out. After the order to abandon came he had already managed to put his 'chute on and rotated his turret on the beam so all he had to do was jettison the doors and chuck himself out backwards. The snag was that his bulky flying boots got stuck between his seat and the guns as he had not depressed them sufficiently so he found himself hanging out of the back watching us go one by one underneath him and disappear into the cloud.
It was no time to mess about so he pulled the 'rip'; the 'chute deployed and yanked him straight out of his boots. It's a wonder that he didn't break his legs considering that it was all happening at speeds somewhere between 150 and 250 mph but he was lucky and made a good landing, albeit without any footwear!. Unfortunately he too was soon picked up after he had spent some time improvising some foot covering out of his parachute that had served him so well. Later on he was provided with some well worn second-hand boots but certainly better than lashings of parachute silk/nylon. Nevertheless, he had not seen Geoff either and we were beginning to wonder if he had been able to get away somehow and that what we had been told at Ober-Orsal was all 'bull'.
The city still continued to burn all the next day with the occasional crump of a delayed action bomb going off but the highlight of the day was the mid-day meal when real potatoes were dished up.
We knew they were real as there was still a great deal of earth attached to them that had not come off in the boiling. At least it showed that none of the goodness had been lost in the cooking!.
There was even a smear of evil smelling semi-liquid French cheese in lieu of the coal based margarine that in better days would have been condemned for human consumption....and possibly animal consumption!. But we eat it just the same!.
The RAF stoked up the city again that night with a few more 'cookies': Those 4000 pounders certainly did go off with a crump that shook the dust off of everything and that was from three to four miles away!.
Another day dawned and with it good news. A large consignment of Red Cross parcels had come in with more people and lots more
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rumours. Even the rumours were a heartening charge from the daily dose of 'bull' that we were getting from the OKW (German High Command) news bulletin which was always good for a laugh when it was read out by an English speaking guard. I wonder if he ever listened to the BBC London news broadcast.
Every evening now we were getting a summary of that compiled by our own sources, inclusive of information from new arrivals that were not being processed by Dulag Luft. There was a great deal of difference between the two bulletins.
We even got another blanket issued on the 28th so that at last we could manage to keep warm without going into a huddle at night but the most important issue was the distribution of four Red Cross parcels between [underlined] five [/underlined] people. There was a lot of good stuff in those....including cigarettes!. I don't think I was the only one going around puffing happily and blowing smoke all over the guards as if to say "that's real tobacco".
I got real satisfaction out of that as a couple of days before I had traded some soap for a couple of their's and an enamel spoon; but only once.
Theirs tasted like a mixture of dried oak leaves. old tea leaves and pulverised straw-perhaps they were, but like a lot of other things in Germany at the time it was ersatz, (substitute), and tasted like it.
The pattern of each day did not vary much. A bit of a thaw during the day allowed a little more water to come through although it all froze up solid again at night.
The food issue was still the same old rubbish but it was safest to eat it first and then top up with something from the parcel. It would have been so easy to have gone for one big blow out and be done with it and it exercised one's self control to the utmost. It did not always work!. Scrounging and bartering with the contents of the parcel was an occupation undertaken by some with the mental agility of the street trader but it was not for me. Some went around trading in such a way that they doubled their stock but I confess that I was one of those who helped them do it as my stock diminished. It takes all sorts and I soon packed it in when I found that I was being outsmarted. If we all had that sort of ability for success we would probably all be in the stock exchange.
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We did get a little light entertainment on the Ist March that also gave an insight into the plight of the Luftwaffe.
We had often noticed activity at an airfield a few miles away to the North East and on this particular day we observed a couple of FW.190's tail chasing which was the standard procedure for a fledgling to learn new tricks but it was obvious that it was a very inexperienced pilot that was doing the chasing by the way he teetered around every turn at about 3000ft not far from the camp.
We watched them for a while as they went through some very basic manoeuvres. The trainee wobbled around every turn very gingerly and after a short break they had another go. They went on to some more advanced stuff and at one point when the turns got tighter and tighter I think we must have all been willing the outcome when he wobbled and side slipped, wobbled some more and then lost it.
He stalled, flipped, and dived earthwards out of control and wallop, in he went with a plume of smoke to mark his grave.
A great cheer went up from the camp but the guards were most upset about it and we were confined to barracks for two hours. As far as we were concerned that was one FW.190 that would not have to be shot down so we indulged in a little community singing, bawling at the top of our voices everything from 'Abide with me'. 'Colonel Bogey' and 'Lillie Marlene' liberally sprinkled with RAF words, much to the bewilderment of the guards who had been stationed in the doorways of the huts.
On the 2nd March the day dawned much the same as any other until some more prisoners came in and as our compound had filled up the next one became active. We were soon at the wire making shouted enquiries about this that and the other when Geoff appeared; looking a bit pale but otherwise fit and well.
It transpired that he had made a reasonable descent but he also had landed slap into the arms of a reception committee although that did not explain his late arrival at Nuremberg, but that was soon explained.
He really was at Dulag Luft at the same time as us but he had been out of circulation for seven days after his interrogation.
It seemed that towards the end of the interrogation, when presented with the little white card and pencil he told the
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interrogator precisely what he could do with it...in Aussie terms,....sideways; so he got seven days solitary confinement for insulting a German Officer!.
According to Geoff, "Ve haff vays of delink vis you" is not so funny when you are the one being dealt with. But now we were all accounted for. Years later, as a solicitor, practising in Australia, I am sure that he was more careful in his selection of words in difficult circumstances.
As a matter of interest it was the small white card that triggered off the Red Cross reporting procedure that notified all and sundry that so and so was a POW so he could have saved himself a lot of trouble.
Between the 3rd and 7th there was not a lot going on. It did start to get a little warmer during daylight hours on occasions and it soon became neccessary [sic] to find ways and means of filling in the time.
There were a few scruffy packs of playing cards about but unless one was good at poker there was no point in taking a hand unless you were prepared to lose your shirt. The stakes were usually items in short supply and our American friends seemed to have the manopoly [sic] of the schools.
I was of the opinion that I had lived rough enough already to risk my meager [sic] stocks which had already suffered from my attempts at wheeling and dealing especially as I saw a few who got the bug and were going down the drain fast for promissory dollars or pounds in the form of I0U's to be redeamed [sic] later.
Draughts,(or checkers) was favourite with most people, using home made boards and pieces made from cardboard and soot from the still empty stoves to distinguish black from white and it did not take long for regular afternoon and evening classes to get going on all manner of subjects in one hour sessions. It certainly filled in the time with subjects as diverse as music, fishing, maths and agriculture.
I found considerable interest in the German classes which were given by a Flt.Lt. who I suspect was one of the Luft.3. boys and he was as interesting as he was fluent. It is highly probable that he had been partly educated in Germany before the war and apart from the introduction to the language he told us a great deal about their history, the people and their culture.
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There were rumours that he was a 'mole' or a 'stooge' but if he had been I am sure that we would have known about it and not tolerated him for long, but then we thrived on rumour at that time.
Later events were to prove his credibility but there was always a little suspicion about who was who so we generally stuck to people that we did know and bit by bit accepted others on recommendation and found oneself accepted. I even found a Flt.Lt. who came from my home town and who's home was no further to the West of my local pub than mine was to the East. He had been in Wg/Cdr. 'Willie' Tait's crew on 617 Squadron at one time and had helped to make a mess of the battleship Tirpitz before he too had run out of luck.
The days just went by with very little to mark one from another and although I had started keeping a diary using cigarette packs there is a long gap without note after the eighth as things became rather desperate.
The Red Cross supplies were running out. The bread allowance became less and less. At one time twenty two people shared a loaf and sometimes we only got one ancient hard tack biscuit instead.
The days and nights just blurred into each other and there was a general feeling of helplesness [sic] as we became weaker and weaker. People had got into the state where they were falling all over the place especially when going from the horizontal to the vertical. One had to be very careful to let the world stop spinning before attempting too much.
On the night of the 11th RAF Mosquito's made another noisy attack on the city but most of us were too far gone to get very excited. More than half the hut had gone down with the flu' and the limited supply of Asprin did very little in the way of relief. They were only dispensed to the most seriously ill who had complications and the only way was to try and keep warm relying on friends to bring a little nourishment as it became available.
Certain things happened during the period that I cannot put a date to but I know they happened.
Some Red Cross officials toured the camp and the Camp Commandant lost his dog.
The Commandant, in elderly silver grey haired Hauptman, always
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smartly dressed, used to walk around with his staff and his Dacshund [sic] until one day it disappeared around the corner of a hut on his own personal inspection for something to cock his leg up against; [underlined] and did not come back!. [/underlined]
He was very upset over the loss of his little 'Fritz' but he had underestimated the skill and determination of our cooks so our stew that day had a little more 'body' in it. I’m glad I did not know at the time!.
In the same period the civilian contractor who used to bring the rations in by horse and cart was distracted long enough for his horse to disappear in the same way as little Fritz and he made a terrible fuss. Not so much about the horse but the harness and the blanket!.
He eventually stopped hollering when the items were returned plus an additional blanket but there was a lot more fuss when the cart was towed back to the gate by hand and then a search party was sent in to find the horse. All they found were a few nasty bits and pieces down the toilet pit. Everything edible had gone into the pot and was stewed and diluted for several days before it ran out.
As a result of this latest escapade all starts of reprisals were threatened with Courts Martial for theft and with shooting; the lot....but it all fizzled out. It might have come to that if things had been normal but they were anything but normal.
Towards the end of the period I was getting over the worst of my ills and I eased myself from my bed in stages into the vertical position for my daily constitutional and tottered out of the hut.
I had not gone far when I started a nose bleed so I was staggering along, head back, my one and only handkerchief in use to stem the flow when there was a blinding flash, a searing pain in the back of the neck and the next thing that I remember was that I was face down In the dirt.
When I climbed to my feet blinking in pain with a few angry words welling up inside me I was facing a full blown inspecting party comprising of an SS General and his staff which included two giant sized troopers, one of whom had bopped me with his rifle butt.
I think it was astonishment that stopped what might have been
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some ungentlemanly language but was halted in my tracks when the Generals Adjutant or his ADC stepped forward and barked "you must salute a superior German officer".
I was in no condition to argue so he got his salute. It wasn't the parade ground sort though. It was a very sloppy afair [sic] in which two fingers were more prominent than the others and I was shoved out of the way whilst they continued their inspection. After that I staggered back to my bed feeling worse than when I had got up.
The days and nights continued to blurr [sic] into one another and then ran the 13th came the devastating news that President Roosevelt had died the day before and an impromptu memorial service was laid on.
It was difficult to take it in and the guards crowed a bit as if they had somehow been responsible and suggested that it could mean the end of the war without appreciating that that was not the way a democracy worked. It seemed such a tragedy that the great man had not survived long enough to see the end of the war than was obviously not far away.
The following day we were still feeling a bit numb but there were some rumours of parcels coming in that cheered us up a bit but it was very difficult to show a bold front when we were all so cold and hungry....but we tried.
It was not until the 15th that things showed real signs of improvement. The toilets at last came out of deep freeze and then some fuel came in so the boilers were stoked up for the first time in a long while. We had hot showers and made full use of the water that was available and washed some clothes.
Drying them was the problem so there were a lot of people just wearing a blanket for a while, not that anyone cared about that when Red Cross parcels were distributed. One between two!.
Apparently they had come in by truck the night before and during the day some more arrived. Thank God for the Red Cross. What sort of a shape we would have been in without them I dread to think and at the time few people, including myself had any idea of the vast operation that the International Red Cross had going.
The RAF had another go at the city on the night of the 16th yet despite it all some more fuel came in and there was more hot water for a while to continue the cleaning up process. The
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place was turned into a laundry, and like most laundries things got 'lost' but no-one cared much. The most important thing was that we could clean up and that there had been no sign of lice. On the 17th there was another surprise. I suppose it had something to do with the recent inspections that some of our deficiencies were being made up. We were issued with new enamelled spoons and bowls and by way of payment the city got another pounding during the night.
It was followed by some excitement the following day when long columns of prisoners arrived at the main gate. They had all come from Wetzlar...new POW's and the old permanent staff as they evacuated the place and brought all of their accumulated stores that they could manage.
It seemed as if Nuremberg was becoming an assembly point for POW's but it was getting very difficult to absorb the numbers. It did not seem possible that any more could be crammed into the place, but somehow they were.
There were over 200 in our hut by that time and all of the top bunks had to be brought into use by re-distributing the bed boards plus the clever use of all sorts of materials such as string, strips of fabric, and cardboard plaited and replaited and finally criss-crossed to serve as webbing. It was suprisingly [sic] strong especially as some of it had a centre core of fine wire that had been stripped after some of the lighting had been re-routed!.
The new arrivals had brought a large quantity of food parcels so there was a generous issue which led to a bit of a party later in the evening which was rounded off with some community singing. It was all going quite noisely [sic] until the sirens started to wail and the lights went out as another raid fell on the city.
The days started flying by as things improved; especially the weather. There was no longer that bite in the air that seemed to cut right through you, made worse by the fact that you were not getting adequate food.
The showers were no longer permanently frozen so when there was water it was at least possible to have a drink or to have a wash.
Rumours were rife but usually the jungle telegraph managed to
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pick up something from the outside and one rumour of even more food parcels coming in raised our spirits some more. So did the sound of heavy gunfire in the distance on the 25th. That really was a good sign.
There were some French parcels distributed on the 25th but most of us thought that the contents were very inferior although welcome. It was hardly likely that they could have been anything else considering the conditions that the French had been living in for years. They were the bulk version similar to the British ones we got sometimes and were divided between 13 men or went straight to the cookhouse.
The American pack was the most favoured as it was based on the 'K' rations that were liberally distributed to their troops, and were made up of several packs about the size of a 200 cigarette pack. They came in three variations. Breakfast, dinner and supper, and were complete with cigaretts [sic] , matches, can opener and that most civilised item; toilet paper!. Nevertheless, the Americans were not all that keen on them. Too much Spam and coffee powder!. They should be so lucky!.
I got to wondering if the German POW's in our hands got Red Cross parcels and what they would to like. Not that they would need them as desperately as we did, but at that stage of the war with transportation in Germany at breaking point food supplies were probably worse than they had been for years and everyone suffered accordingly.
We were more keen to get out of the wretched place but with the end so near there was no point in trying all the normal escape methods. We had in fact been told by our own administration not to do anything risky. It was only a matter of time.
There was a lot more speculation when definite news reached us that 30,000 food parcels had somehow arrived by train which was possibly just as well as not even basic rations had come in for days. Supplies had been very spasmodic since the dog and the horse had disappeared.
Even more important was the news that Allied forces were less than 100 miles from Nuremberg but what put a slight damper on that was that we received instructions to prepare for a long march so with an issue of parcels was advice on how we should
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turn the contents into 'marching rations'. There being a limit on how much we could carry.
The veterans soon passed the ward around and everyone was soon busy, and trying to avoid the temptation to have what POW's referred to as a 'bash'. A real feast. It was not practicable. The idea was to process as much as we could into convenient and lightweight food. Everything other than the tinned goods had to be considered. Tinned food was to be consumed first but the biscuit, fruit, (raisins and prunes), peanut butter. powdered milk, flaked chocolate, coffee and sugar was all to be pounded together with as little moisture as possible so that when it dried out it could be cut into bars about the size of Mars bars and then wrapped in anything suitable. It made good sense and on the basis of one bar per meal, three times a day there was more nourishment in that than we had been coping with for same time.
Then there was the problem of carrying it all along with blankets and other personal bits and pieces. Trying to carry a parcel as some people seemed prepared to do would have been back breaking so I set myself the task of making a rucksack from the lining of my US. army greatcoat with the aid of my 'hussif'. I put a lot of time in on that and as far as I was concerned it was a masterpiece and copies were being made by others.
It had padded shoulder straps, waist straps, draw string, blanket roll straps on top and other ties on the bottom. I washed and darned my socks ready for the off but I was not in all that much of a hurry. My mind was concentrated on other things.
Every night I dreamed of a shoot out down the road so that we could all get out and go home. But it was not to be.
The 28th came and even more prisoners arrived and were squeezed in. Tents were put up on the spare ground between the huts and the latest news was that armoured forces were only 70 miles from us. So near, and yet so far!.
The longer we hang about the nearer our forces got to us and in the meantime it was just a case of hanging on to our marching rations and eating up any surpluses from regular issues of parcels which everyone was getting. No other food was coming in.
On the 29th more prisoners were squeezed it somehow The place
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was bulging at the seams.
Some of them had come from an Army camp at Hammelburg, 170km. North West of Nuremberg and same very interesting stories came out of that lot.
Apparently an American armoured column had blasted through the German lines with the express intention of releasing the prisoners of Hammelburg but it had all gone disastrously wrong. Although some had been released the Germans reacted very quickly to block their escape route to a safe area and there was all hell let loose. A lot of casualties had occurred and some of the escapees found safety back in their barracks but the Germans took more prisoners and only remnants of the raiding force got back to our lines. So the story went although it seemed too far fetched to be credible.
Each time the story was told it became more and more lurid until we treated it as what the Americans would call "scuttlebuck' or we would call 'bull' despite the protestations of "on my Mother's life' etc.
Eventually it turned out that basically the story was true although officially not a lot was said about it but it did tie up with an OKW news bulletin that a couple of days previous had reported an American armoured column approaching Wursburg was counter attacked and had suffered very badly. Certainly some of the new prisoners had been taken on that raid so it was not all 'bull'.
April 1st brought more parcels and as by that time most of us had our marching rations set aside so we really did have a 'bash'.
With parcels had come another suprise [sic] in the form of even more prisoners. Thirty two members of the Serbian General Staff, also from Hammelburg!, although the normal compounds were by that time so chock-a-block that a temporary compound was set up with tents alongside ours. Then things changed dramatically.
The guards no longer patrolled the compound from the inside but only the outside of the perimeter fence which had been extended, so down came the trip wire and the inner fence which normally we were forbidden to approach at the risk of being shot. Even a stand-pipe was set up to provide then with running water so it was a free for all as ours was still limited. Of
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course there were protests from the guards as it seemed that just about everything was 'verboten'. They just could not understand why we would not obey the rules and it made them very angry.
The very fact that the internal fence on one side had come down saved us from the daily ‘apel' (role call) which had become an obsolute [sic] farce. The guards never got it right anyway.
If a head count did not produce the right answer they tried all sorts of methods but we had all sorts of ways of adding and subtracting people. What gave them most trouble we found was having more people than they should have done so then they would try an identity check which was a bit daft anyway. It always worked out simply because our own administration drew up the nominal rolls anyway. As long as it tallied they had been happy. Now they had given up the whole charade, and left it to us.
A strange phenomena occurred whilst I was attending an open air Easter Sunday religious service. Just at the end of the closing hymn and with many people kneeling in private prayer, there appeared, it seemed, just to the North and very high, an enormous V shaped cloud in an otherwise clear blue sky. I have no idea what caused it but many theories were put forward.
The most popular one was that it was a very high flying aircraft doing a photo recce' of the battlefield but we could see no sign of the aircraft itself. The cloud hung there a long time before dissipating like a cigarette smoke ring. To me. and others no doubt, it was another sign of hope, and so unusual that I just hoped that a little miracle would happen and that somehow we could just walk out of the main gate and go home, but no such luck. Such thoughts were becoming an obsession it seemed.
The next day we were warned to be ready to move out at 7am the following day so there was feverish activity to get everything prepared.
One of the veterans who had already had experience of one of these marches tipped me off that cigarettes, soap, and chocolate were the most useful currency for bartering with the guards and the German population and I had already observed that soap was being thrown away wholesale down the toilet pit.
There was so much of it, still packaged, under the twenty seater
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'thunderbox' that It was not difficult to recover several dozen unspoiled packages of soap. As much as I wanted to carry anyway. The following morning we were up bright and early and the dream came true as we started to evacuate on time.
It was just after eight o'clock when our compound started to file out of the gate and it was a wonderful feeling. Even the air smelt different.
In all there was about 9000 of us with several hundred guards, many with bicycles, and in a long snake column about four abreast we were on our way. Naturally there was a lot of speculation as to the prospects of getting away if and when the opportunity presented itself; it would not have been difficult but our own administration had thought of it first and issued orders that we were not to attempt any chancy breakaways as the escape committees had everything under control.
That order absolved the officers at any rate from their duty to resist and/or escape so there was nothing more to do but to go along with it however frustrating it was.
I knew what it was all about as we had filed through the gate when I saw the Flight Lieutenant who used to give the German lessons, in civilian clothes, and carrying a small suitcase tucked up very tightly in the middle of a group so I tried to keep my eye on him as it was very suspicious.
In the melee I never saw him go and I never saw him again but I'll bet he was home long before I was, with a great deal of information which would help the advancing Allies.
y
TO BE CONTINUED..........................
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One or more pages is missing.
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party went for cover.
There was no cover so everyone scattered as the parties started laying out the markings after the first burst of firing and by the time the Thunderbolts came back for a second pass we had been identified. It was too late for some though. Our casualties were one killed and two injured and for a long time after that everyone spent a lot of time looking over their shoulder. The casualties were sorted out by a small party that was left behind with a guard and the rest of us just ploughed on, and on, and on, and although most people had made some attempt to get fitter by walking around the compound for an hour or so a day we had not reckoned on doing mile after mile without a break.
It was not surprising that by mid afternoon there were lots of complaints about blisters and aching bodies but we were just prodded on by the equally disgruntled guards.
By late evening we were still going; albeit slower than when we had started and finally after it had got dark it started to rain. Nevertheless it was about 10pm before a break was finally called.
I was absolutely shattered as were most people and I took shelter under a railway wagon on the temporary railroad that had been laid at the side of the road and then gorged myself on a large can of stewed steak from my ‘heavy’ rations.
We were not allowed to rest for long. Before there was time for a nap and with the rain still coming down in buckets we were the move again but not before I had investigated the wagons with a view to hiding in one for a few days but found that they were all full of coal and had no covers so that was
that. Nevertheless, a liberal handful of fine ballast from the track into the axle grease boxes made sure that they would not move it very far without finding the odd problem.
Finally, soon after midnight the word came down the line to stop for the night and most of us just flopped where we were. We had done some 22mls, it was still pouring down and as there was very little cover not many had the energy to go any further to look for any.
All I did was to dispose of another can of something, curled up in my already wet blankets at the foot off a tree and went
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out like a light.
It was dawn then I woke, to a clear steamy morning and like most people I was soaked through. I had been sleeping in a puddle several inches deep which had accumulated from the steady downpour, and the prospects were not good until we saw signs of a cheery blaze a bit further up the line.
The whole column had virtually collapsed where they were when the halt had come and some more fortunate characters had been near a saw mill where there was a mountain of off-cuts which they used for shelter. That was until someone set fire to them!
It had of going nicely and it did not take long for us to take full advantage of the situation. The sight of hundreds of naked bodies dancing around getting warm and drying out their clothes whooping away like a tribe of Red Indians was more than the guards could cope with.
They tried very hard to put out the fire and get us to assist but it seemed that we were pulling in opposite directions, and they were losing the battle. We were stoking it up!.
They had not a hope in hell, not even after threatening to start shooting someone after loosing off a few into the air. Right from the start every one was marked by half-a-dozen prisoners and they would have been flat on their backs immediately they had pointed a rifle at anyone:
We kept the fire going as long as we could and most people got dried out and comfortable again as the enormous pile of glowing embers was reduced to little more than charcoal; then we were ready to leave!.
We understood that the mill owner was still going on about compensation as we left and how the poor old Hauptman dealt with it we would never know but he was looking very grim about it having wined and dined at the mill owners home for the night. Once we got ourselves sorted out and got going again we plodded on through the day for another 16mls before a halt was called for the night.
That time, to avoid a repetition of the previous night we were all to be billeted in large enclosed buildings such as churches, church halls, village halls, barns, etc. I was in a party of about 300 who were packed into a small village church around
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which they placed a guard. No doubt they had noticed a thinning of our ranks since the previous night but they would not let anyone out for any reason whatsoever.
It was not surprising that the place was defiled. I was not proud of the fact that someone had used the pulpit as toilet but it was the one place that no-one could sleep and they were lucky that the altar was respected.
The guards made a terrible fuss naturally and I was glad that I was not among the cleaning up party that was left behind, but that was the last time they bothered to confine us at night.
The main party had started to move out at about 9.30 and the pace was steady although slow before we got to Birching about mid-day to find a great deal of activity.
There were dumps of Red Cross parcels along the main street in front of the Town Hall and they were being distributed as we passed through...one each!. Even the guards were getting them but I suppose there was a good deal of sense in that, if only to keep them off our backs.
There were Red Cross trucks, (American and British Army types) and a couple of ambulances going up and down the column, and beyond, picking up stragglers and bringing them back to the fold. Some of them should have been to hospital and were really in poor shape but they had cleared all the hospitals of the walking wounded as well and everyone that could stand on two feet was having to hike it. The Red Cross took some of the worse cases further along the line of march so that they could rest up before we caught up with them.
Nothing else was provided and water had to be scavenged from where it was available in order to have a drink of something. I even got used to instant coffee being made up cold...it was wet!.
We moved off later in the afternoon and stopped for the night at Belingries where Jim and I found a warm corner in a stable where we spent all the next day and night before we were on the move again. I suppose we could not really complain about our conditions as there were two guards in the next stall sharing the same facilities and making the most of the contents of their food parcel.
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It must have been like a Christmas present for them the way they were going on and like us the only thing they had on their minds was survival, food and shelter. They were only Grade 3 troops and were looking for an end to all the discomfort and misery just as much as we were That's what made it all so damn silly!.
Things got better and better as we plodded into Bavaria. The countryside looked lush and green with well tended fields and the early signs of crops was heartening The weather was fine and most of the civilian population treated our progress kindly. We treated it like a Sunday School outing, waiving, smiling and cheering the population. No doubt they thought we were daft but we were not downhearted.
On rare occasions Allied aircraft flew along our line of march waggling their wings so it seemed that they were monitoring our progress.
Some of us eased out of the column from time to time to do a little trading and on one occasion I was able to add some fresh bread and garlic sausage to the stores of our little group comprising most of the crew and I occupied myself happily after being elected cook.
We picked another barn for the night and found a good supply of mauve dyed potatoes of the sort we had at home for animal feed. The farmer was a bit concerned when he found us with them. He made it quite clear that they were for 'swine' only and that it was a criminal offence to use them for human consumption. It was a continual source of amazement to me that whilst their country was being torn apart with the utmost disregard for human life and property there was still so much regard for common law but I suppose that they had been conditioned by years of shortages and regulations.
I had first noticed the tendency at Nuremberg when we did have fuel for the stove and we were toasting the black pumpernikal [sic] by sticking slices on the side of the store and in came a guard who became very angry when he saw what we were doing.
Toasting bread was ‘verboten’ by law as it destroyed the nutritional value of the bread and we were breaking the law!
As prisoners we were well aware that they could impose civil
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as well as military law if necessary. They had made the same threats for the same reason when we had our bonfire but as there was no time for that sort of nonsense there was precious little that they could do about it. In any case, a few gifts of cigaretts [sic], soon overcame the problem.
We finally got on the more again the next day about mid-day but by now we were doing little more than just strolling along enjoying the freedom and the weather. I had the opportunity of selling a spare blanket to a Polish farm worker for 6 eggs but he could not understand that we were mixed British, American and Commonwealth POW's. Nevertheless, there were a few more exchanges after a lot of sign language and I was better off by 30 Reichmarks which caused a spot of bother as the transactions had been witnessed by a straggling guard who wanted to confiscate the goods. Again it was 'verboten' to sell German military equipment. It was easily resolved. He got 10 marks and was told to "getten ze stuffed" so he wandered off somewhat bewildered.
There was a distribution of Belgian Red Cross parcels, and a large wedge from a round Bavarian loaf at one point and eventually we caught up with the main column again to find a comfy spot in another barn and a good night's sleep with a handsome meal tucked under the belt.
I suppose that now we had put a fair distance between us and the battle front there was no longer the urgency to force us along so we continued to stroll through open farm lands and cross a lot of main roads and the Danube; which was not blue. In fact it was quite mucky.
At one point shortly after crossing the river we crossed a bridge over a closed off section of either dual carriageway or autobahn and there was some interesting activity in the road through a deep cutting which had been closed off to traffic near Seiganburg.
To our amazement the road had been turned into a temporary airstrip with Focke-Wolf 190's lined up and being serviced under a great deal of cables and camouflage netting. I wondered how long it would be before our chaps identified it as camouflage and gave it a good pasting even though we did not see so much of them quite so often as we had previously.
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There was plenty of evidence that they were still busy not too far away though.
We continued to plod on past decorative Bavarian farm houses which, with their high pitched roofs and fancy gables looked very attractive. We were close enough to some of them to see into their fine big kitchens in pine and stainless steel where women in crisp pinafores seemed to be up to their arms in tubs and flour. We did not get more than a passing glance though. The guards were catered for with steaming hot canteens of soup and hunks of home made bread cut from big flat round loaves, supplemented by thick slices of farmhouse cheese. It is understandable that all we got were dirty looks!.
We found accomodation [sic] that night in a barn at Swienbach and once again contemplated the possibility of doing a runner but when we made enquiries we also found out why the column was thinning out!.
It appeared that our administration had been organising parties of 25, each with two guards, to do an about turn during the hours of darkness to find a route to our own lines.
How the selection was made I do not know but it was understandable that those who had been in the bag the longest had first choice and if anyone deserved priority it was them. It was also interesting to learn that the guards were being provided with safe conduct passes which would ensure that they would get preferential treatment when they were finally picked up.
We were still told not to go it alone as there would still be many pockets of fanatical resistance and it was just not worth the risk. Geoff had already tried it once and he had a close shave. He had only got a little way beyond the fringe on a daylight attempt when he was apprehended by a couple of trigger happy SS field police. He had been sent back with a warning, but there was a very good chance that those blokes did not send any of their own back to the line if there was any chance of them being deserters. A little on the spot summary punishment was likely to be meted out without having to justify the action. With our guards it was different. Things were so slack that on one occasion one of them sat on the roof and placed his rifle between us. I just could not
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resist the temptation when a hare appeared in the field and I grabbed his rifle that I had been eyeing anyway, quickly worked the bolt to 'put one up the spout', aimed and fired, but missed, so I hurriedly handed the gun back to it 's owner as the Oberfeldwebel came running up to see what the shooting was about. That turned out to be another big laugh. What else was he to think when he found the guard with a smoking rifle in his hands?. The guard must have figured that he would be in less trouble if he admitted to the use of his rifle for sporting purposes than to admit to allowing a POW to get the better of him so he got a good dressing down for wasting ammunition and I got a dirty look. It all helped to pass the time and keep up morale.
The next day we received the news that we were heading for a camp at Mooseburg but although we started off fairly early we soon got the message that Mooseburg was not ready for us. That immediately started the 'go-slow' process again.
At one time we were lounging around at the side of a track that led across the fields when we heard the skirl of pipes and from over a rise to one side of the main column came a small formation of Scots troops in full marching order with a piper in the lead. What a glorious sight they were with kilts swinging, brasses glittering. It looked damned silly to see half a dozen guards marching with them!.
The sight was enough to inspire some of us to drag ourselves to our feet as they converged on us. Some of us even saluted but they just ploughed on ignoring the Air Force rabble. Good luck to them. They were still going strong as they disappeared from view over another rise. Good luck to them. It looked good and it no doubt made them feel good but there was no doubt that they would be back behind barbed wire long before we were.
We just flopped a bit farther along the track and found ourselves a comfortable billet for another night of relative freedom.
The next day I got organised with another group for scavenging and the like.
Things had been going so well that like others I had already got through my marching rations and generally had lightened my load. No-one was hungry any more but I was approached with an offer that I could not refuse.
The offer was made by a Captain of the US. Infantry who wanted
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fourth to complete his team. The others were two American Air Force Sergeants so I left the crew to join his outfit. It was hard luck on the crew though-they lost their cook!.
The Captain was very interesting and enterprising character. It was his third time as POW, having escaped on two previous occasions, but this time he was no longer going to stick his neck out as there was a state-side ticket waiting for him as soon as he was out of his present situation. He was a very shrewd and tough bloke and it did not take us long to decide just how we were going to operate.
At the first opportunity we scavenged some bits and pieces from some farmyard pumping machinery and rebuilt a broken down 'dog-cart' on which we dumped all our kit and went into action immediately.
Two did the pulling whilst the other two went off scavenging. Within the first half day we had done so well at the butchers, bakers and farms a few km. each side of the column that to were soon re-trading among the others at a 'profit'. My carefully hoarded stock of soap was proving to be most useful currency although coffee and cigaretts [sic] were sill the most valuable.
It was too good to be true. We had not gone far with our cart getting piled higher and higher when the owner of the bit’s and pieces that the cart had been built from discovered they were missing. He rapidly caught up with us on a broken down horse and demanded the return of it.
There were more dire threats of punishment for stealing which of course never came to anything but it left us with having to carry, eat or trade the fruits of our transactions, and the two with the column just had to carry that much more. It was worth it though.
Part of the plan was that it was this pair that staked out a comfy site for four when we made camp and generally the scheme worked well.
The Red Cross trucks were still going to and fro’ but with a difference. They were coming from the South East, loaded, and discharging their loads at various places, loading up the sick and lame and actually [underlined] backtracking our route to the Allied lines [/underlined] to deliver them to safety before loading up again and refuelling for the return journey to us, mainly with ‘K’
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rations.
It still was a source of amazement that the Red Cross trucks were nearly all British or American types that had been re-painted accordingly, loaded, and transported from Italy through Switzerland with neutral drivers under the International Red Cross Organisation.
We were told that some 2000 of them had set out and split up near Munich, one column going in our direction and the other North Westerly to meet other POW's converging on us from the North.
If that produced a farcical situation then it was no more farcical than the latest method of communication that had been adopted between our administration and the rest of the Germans to keep us informed of what was going on.
A sort of HQ. unit had been set up by the more senior officers and their selected staffs who were up front and they never missed a chance to harass the guards....and that included their CO!.
Right from the outset the guards bicycles had come in for a lot of attention.
With monotonous regularity they had lost tyre valves, and chains. Tyres had been slashed until constant canabalisation [sic] of what was left had reduced the original number to only a couple of serviceable bikes, and we had reached the ideal solution where they no longer had a pump between them. We had!.
It was not suprising [sic] therefore, that the last bikes were allocated to the Commandant and his Adjutant....but on conditions imposed by us!.
It was agreed that if we had equal share of them there was a good chance that they would no longer be vandalized but the daftest thing of all was when our own Adjutant went up and down the line on one to pass information it still had a machine pistol on the handlebar clips!.
On the 6th we only moved a few km. and there were more food parcels distributed The awful French one's again but anything was welcome in the food line, if only for bartering.
One of the team and I slipped away one one occasion and crossed a railway line to a group of cottages where we made enquiries for eggs.
At one cottage we called at we were received by an obvious
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1914/18 veteran who was minus one leg but who was quite philosophical as we discussed the terms of the deal in a mixture of broken English and German and he seemed friendly enough. When the terms were agreed he shrugged his shoulders and indicated in the direction of the chicken house and then left us alone with two teen-age girls, possibly his grand-daughters, to collect the eggs.
He was either very trusting, or taking no chances and possibly very relieved to find the eggs were all we had helped ourselves to even offered to give them a four minute boil before we departed. Again, after the difficulties of conversation it was the shrugg [sic] of the shoulders and the well worn phrase, “you soldat-me soldat”.
These eggs went down very well with Spam, beans and fresh bread that someone else had aquired [sic] .
Every day brought the sound of gunfire and battle closer well as Allied aircraft sweeping over us on occasions as they plotted the movement of the long snake of people. There was no doubt that that is what they were doing as our identification process had not been needed for a long time.
That evening we were quite close to Mooseberg and we made camp in a sheltered part of a farm with beds of hay and camp fire was set up with bricks and ironmongery that we had accumulated.
As usual as soon we were all together I planned the menu around the spoils of the day, particularly as our team leader, Capt. Dunkleburg, (a good old American name), had just knocked over a plump farmyard hen.
I don't know if he had been a horseshoe throwing champion back home but he was adept at throwing a short length of wood up to twenty feet with deadly accuracy and he had brought the chicken down by catching it across the neck and it was ready for the pot in a few minutes.
After that it was my responsibility as I had been the team cook on joining, and had been able to make all sorts of dishes from anything that became available including nettles and turnip greens, wild berries and even watercress from the streams where most of our water was drawn from.
Everyone seemed to be happy with this arrangement and our chicken supper was simplicity itself. I must admit that I felt a little
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guilty when others drifted around our site sniffing the aroma like Bisto kids but it was a matter of survival, although I did feel a little sorry for those who could not cope with looking after themselves.
Lashings of coffee was consumed and dispensed to others who wanted to make use of our fire and we were off to sleep like babies.
The morning of the 17th started with a leisurly [sic] breakfast which was still in progress long after the time we had been told to be ready. Then the farmer and a guard arrived making a lot of fuss and accusing us of stealing again. I suspect that more than one chicken was missing but nevertheless we pleaded innocence. They threatened us with all sorts of consequences for our actions as we started to clear up bones, feathers and damp down our fire so they eventually called in the Hauptman.
When he arrived on the scene he let rip with a very good immitation [sic] of Hitler and as we took very little notice he worked himself up into a fine old state until he was just about purple with rage. We didn't understand much of it, but Dunkleburg did, and he knew what he was getting at before he got a little calmer and reverted to English. Then he gave us an ultimatum. He was going to count ten and then he was going to shoot someone if we did not get moving.
By that time the situation had got decidedly dodgy but we took our cue from Capt.D, and started to spread ourselves out as the count started.
Ien...drie...swie...by which time he was spluttering again and by the time he had got to ten he was clawing at his pistol holster which was a beautifully polished leather affair with a fancy-lanyard disapearing [sic] into it.
Capt.D. had gathered himself into a crouch like some old gun fighter from a Western, poised as if to try and beat him to the draw..although of course totally unarmed. The guards looked alarmed and backed off as the pistol was withdrawn seemingly in slow motion as Capt.D. prepared to charge.
On the other end of the lanyard appeared a fancy pearl handled ladies handbag model of a .22 which was pointed skywards and fired.
Putt, putt, putt, and everyone relaxed immediately and rolled
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about laughing as we carried on clearing up. The old boy's face was contorted in anger and embarrassment as he stomped away. I think that was the last I ever saw of him.
I imagine that as he was just about to hand us over he was getting the wind up and was going to have to do a lot of explaining about how he lost 2000 prisoners and half of his guards on the way from Nuremberg!. That is always presuming that anyone else was still worried about such things.
We finally reached the camp, Stalag V11a, Mooseburg, by mid-day and then began the process of sorting ourselves out. Eventually we had a hot shower and a meal of sorts and then sat around most of the afternoon whilst the administration figured out what to do with the 1700 strong RAF contingent now that we all been segregated. It was goodbye to all the friends we had made outside RAF circles so I was back with the crew again.
The time spent lounging around was not boring anyway. There were Yanks all over the sky around us, knocking hell out of anything anything [sic] that moved now that we were within the safety of the camp.
We had news that Prauge [sic] had fallen. The Yanks were reported to be only 20 mls from Berlin and the Russians virtually had the city surrounded, so what was there to worry about.
All we had to do was sit tight and survive and eventually we were given an area of huts for the night although they provided little more than just a roof over our heads.
The 19th started with a roll call, with promises of hot water and food which did not materialise. All that happened was that we got moved to another compound with huts in the same condition as those we had just vacated, lacking everything except the bed frames.
I got very fed up with the whole deal. My shaving gear was just about used up. Like others I had over two months growth of hair falling all over the place. My boots were falling off of my feet....they had not worn at all well. There was a long queue at a single tap and no ablutions. There was no heating and precious little fuel for cooking fires. The remaining bed boards were carefully guarded by those who had managed to get a few together. Issued rations were a couple of potatoes, a hunk of
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bread and some mouldy cheese. I went into a nasty fit of depression so I turned in to sleep it off.
The floor was the best place with the shortage of bed boards so it was a matter of just curling up in a corner wrapped up in anything to keep warm.
Over twelve hours sleep cleared the air a bit and the next day I felt a lot better. All the crew except Jim had got together again for parcels and food share out as for some reason Jim had gone in with another group but the waiting game was not improved by a change in the weather so any cooking or brewing up had to be done in the hut. At times it was like 'smokey Joe's'.
The change in the weather did not stop the air activity all around us but fortunately it was mostly ours. The Luftwaffe was rarely seen.
The next day was the same but supplies were improving a little and carefully hoarded stores were opened up. I got a replacement pair of boots; not new but at least the soles were not flapping and I was able to replenish the shaving gear.
The following day looked like being a repetition until an order came through to prepare to march again. The burning question was "where the hell can we go from here?.
The Russians were already through Poland into Czechoslovakia to the East and the North of us, and were coming up through Austria to the South and not all that far away. Even Italy was suggested although the only obvious way was back and perhaps that was not a bad idea as I was not partial to the idea of the Russians over-running us.
There had been lots of stories already concerning the Russian way of life and from what I had seen and heard of the Ruskie POW's on the far side of the camp there was no doubt that they were a strange lot.
Of course they had had it very rough and had no protection under the Geneva Convention as non-signatories which had a lot to do with it. They were very badly treated and their food rations were even worse than ours….and they had to work for it, officers and all.
As a result they had become a desperate band of brigands with little more than survival in their minds and they were up to
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all kinds of mischief.
Only the day before they had been bearing a coffin out of the camp for burial and the German gate guards made sure it was a corpse that went out. They plunged a bayonet through the flimsy coffin and the corpse screamed!. They had buried the original in the compound and although it might have been interesting to have got mixed up with them I don't think it would have been exactly pleasant.
We got back to using the bunks again after a load of rough boards had been dumped in the compound for the purpose of making them up although a number got sidetracked for fuel, mainly for brewing up.
Brewing up was something of a ritual and when fuel was short it was foolish to be extravagant with resources. The most economic were the tin can arrangements that had come down from Luft.3, although some copies had been made.
Usually mounted on a small board they consisted of hand wheel driving a metal fan in a perforated lower chamber with a fuel chamber on top. All driven with a string or bootlace drive. It sounds very crude but the gearing was such that it worked like the bellows of a forge furness [sic] . They were very economical and would burn anything from a handfull [sic] of twiggs [sic] to lumps of tar off of the road. There was always a great deal of whirring going on at brewing time. i
The owners of these masterpieces would usually brew up a can of water for others if a handfull [sic] of fuel was produced and it was amazing how bits of fire was transferred from one to the other rather than use a seperate [sic]match for each start up.
The 25th April dawned a beautiful day and there was considerable relief when we were told that we would not be marching after all as it could only be a few days before we would be free.
The sky was getting thick with aircraft at times, mostly ours, but the odd German Air Force fighter was seen invariably high tailing it for safety to their temporary landing strips, often trailing smoke, with a swarm of stars and stripes after them.
These were exciting times and the guns seemed even nearer as the excitement increased when we had a news flash that Augsburg, about 45mls to the West of us had fallen into our hands.
It seemed to us, and it proved to be the case, that it was a
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race between the Americans and the Russians as to where the gap would be closed, whatever may have been previously agreed. The thrust between us and Munich, and onward to where they finally did join forces did solve one very important point.
It prevented what might have been the fulfilment of Hitler's original plans to surround Birtchesgarten [sic] with his SS fanatics and at least 40,000 POW hostages for a fight to the finish.
Everything was going so well that we were no longer bothered about keeping a reserve of food or conserving fuel supplies. Part of Geoff's bed went into preparing lunch and some of mine went at supper time.
The 26th was another beautiful day. We had a bit of a surprise when a large party of guards marched through the camp to the boundary wire at the edge of the compound, then downed arms, cut the wire and rapidly filed through leaving their rifles behind. It is quite possible that they just went off to somewhere quiet and then sat down waiting to be picked up.
They got out of sight rapidly after I dashed out and picked up one of their rifles to send a couple of shots after them but I only fired over their heads.
That's all there was time for as our administration collected all of the rifles and took them back to camp HQ.
It was not long after that news came through that we were taking over the running of the camp and we were one more step nearer home.
A bread ration came up. The interior fences were torn down. Where the guards had cut the wire we strolled out into the open as if it was a Sunday afternoon along the prom. Along the river bank, chatting to a couple of pig-tailed giggling teenage fraulines and even picked up some firewood which had been our main purpose for going outside.
It was not long after our return that the PA system instructed us not to stray too far if we were outside and although there was a tremendous sense of freedom in doing so it really was not neccessary [sic] for obtaining fuel.
Warning notices, air raid shelters, fence posts and the like were all available to us by that time. It was a change not to hear the PA blasting out 'Achtung' and OKW rubbish but we were being kept informed almost hourly by
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relaying BBC and AFN programms [sic] .
There was an announcement that our documents and personal possesions [sic] were available for collection from the admin office if we wanted them.
After all that had gone on since 7th February I actually got back my mirror and cuff-links that had been confiscated but it would seem that someone had aquired [sic] a very nice white silk scarf that I had been wearing at the time. Perhaps it had been considered service property, which was fair game. I was just surprised that anything was returned under the circumstances.
News came later that Regensburg had fallen and our forces were encircling Munich, and although the weather turned very nasty in the night and the hut leaked like a seive [sic] no-one was concerned about such minor discomforts.
Even the, following day when there was no let up in the downpour we did not worry about it. Even the natural water supply was a luxury!, and a visit to the clothing store gave us the opportunity to change some more of our tatty clothes.
On the 29th P47 Thunderbolts buzzed the camp and then did a bit of straffing [sic] in the local area. Perhaps it was just as well that the cut wire had been repaired and we had been confined to camp until further notice!.
By 11 o'clock there were all the signs of a battle starting to the North so there was another good reason for staying under cover.
Geoff and I had taken cover under our hut and in fact I was brewing up whilst the battle was going on and one or two people who were foolish enough to still be wandering around were hit by stray bullets but fortunately not seriously.
By 11 o'clock the sounds of battle had gone right round the camp to the South of us, giving us a chance to venture outside.
There was still a lot going on almost on our doorstep. Some big guns were firing over the camp from the hills and shells could be heard rushing overhead followed by a 'crump' as they landed between us and the town.
Then one found it's mark when the church steeple and a sniper with it disappeared in a cloud of dust and debris.
News in those conditions travelled as fast as a bush fire and
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we next heard that the senior Allied POW officer and the local German Commander had been out the previous evening under a white flag to confer with the American Commander, but the German was adamant in his response to the ultimatum. He refused to surrender the area without some sort of fight so that was why it had all started up again but it did not last long.
There seemed to be a bit of a lull and then on the top of the hill, along the ridge, dozens of tanks appeared and just took up position menacingly. About mid-day another party went up the hill under a white flag to parley once more and I can only assume that enough people had died to satisfy honour and to find terms on which to end the slaughter especially when faced with that threat.
By 1 o'clock all firing in and around the area ceased. The Stars and Stripes flew in the town and in the various compounds national flags of all kinds were flying.
Those flags had been hidden for a long time at great risk and at last they could be proudly displayed. As far as we were concerned it was all over, and we could look forward to going home.
We were nearly all bursting with excitement wondering what to expect when later on in the afternoon a convoy that was a sight to behold came in through the main gate.
The lead Jeep had a General saluting all over the place. Some said it was Patton as it was the US. 7th Army that had relieved us but there was so much going on with the bustle and the noise it was difficult to take everything in.
Behind the Jeep came a Sherman tank and a whole convoy of armed troops who toured the camp as we shouted and cheered, and cheered some more, and cried a bit too until we were just about drained of emotion.
The PA system belted out cheerful music and then the circus was in town.
Another convoy came in and news reel camera crews set themselves up as Red Cross trucks, ambulances, mobile hospital, mobile bakery, mobile laundry and trucks with mountains of goodies followed.
There was everything from chewing gum to fruit juices and even fresh fruit that some of us had not seen for months and in some,
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cases, years.
Everything was eventually set up in the central compound and we marvelled at quantity of the goods and the generosity with which it was all being dispensed. There was even a Padre' tossing packets of chewing gum into the crowd.
It was announced over the PA system that we could go outside again but only through the main gate, and then only after we had been processed by the general office and provided with a repatriated POW document. It was worth it, although at that particular time I found plenty to occupy myself in camp and did not venture out.
Although we thought that the fighting was over it started up again not far from our compound as dusk fell. No doubt some brave German still trying to defend his Fatherland but it did not last long.
We had already been warned not to try and make for home on our own as some had attempted. There were still some fanatical pockets of resistance in areas that had been encircled and had yet to be secured.
The most noise that night came from the Russian compound. Although they had had their share of all that was coming into camp they had been conditioned [deleted] but [/deleted] [inserted] to [/inserted] such hardships that they were still out for anything they could get and went on the rampage. They raided the camp bakery and having carted off all the bread and the flour that they could carry they finished up by smashing all of the equipment. It took some time to round them up and try to convince them that there was no need for it. It didn't work.
It all flared up again the following morning. They had their freedom, as we all did and got into town but it was not long before they were smashing the place up, pillaging and looting and generally being a damned nuisance until something happened that I though I would never see.
The limited number of Military Police in the area had to be backed up by deputies drawn from the POW ranks and included Officers and NCO's They were armed with the rifles that had been left behind by the departing guards and were needed to guard German shops, homes and the population against rape and downright vandalism.
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As one Welshman who was involved said to me at the time, "There's daft for you. Yesterday the Germans were our enemies and today we are protecting them from certain elements of our Allies". There's no answer to that but I think the Ruskies eventually got the message.
Some of the excitement had died down by the next day until the circus got going again.
The camp had another visit from some top brass and there were more news reel camera crews shooting just about everything in sight.
American Forces Air Mail blanks were distributed and collected again but that is one area where the Yanks did not get top marks. Mine never got home. Probably they were shipped to the States first and then they were dumped on the assumption that we would have got home first.
The mobile bakery was going full blast now that the camp bakery had been ruined but some of the veteran POW's were having problems with the fluffy white American bread. One chap was stuffing great lumps of the stuff into his mouth and complaining that the 'cake' did not fill him up like pumpernikal [sic] . There was plenty of everything else anyway and no doubt by the end of the day he would have tried everything that was on offer and like me, the pains in his tummy would be from eating too much!.
The camp PA system continued to broadcast AFN and BBC relays. The BBC gave news of 32,000 liberated POW's in the drive for Munich and that had to include us. That would be good news for the folks back home who would be getting the same news and were no doubt feeling very relieved that they would soon be hearing from their loved one's.
It was not all good news though. What the army found in places like Dachau, between us and Munich was a very different story, and the world was soon reeling in shock and horror at the scenes of the almost indescribable conditions that were found there.
By comparison our situation was a picnic.
Those that did venture into town could not be stopped entirely from a little 'souvenir' hunting.
They came back with bicycles, radios, weapons, motor bikes, and all manner of household goods but although it was a free
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for all I do not remember that it got too far out of control as it did at the time of the Ruskie's excursion.
One group near us came back from a hunting expedition with a deer that was soon given the treatment. It was barbicued [sic] on a spit over a pit that used to be an air raid shelter and there was everything that one could wish for.
It was open house and became a communal feast. People just contributed anything that they had. There were chickens, eggs, rabbits, ducks, fish, you name it. It was the biggest, most hilarious barbicue [sic] that I have ever been to or ever likely to go to, and of course some alcoholic beverage found it's way into the camp as well.
During the proceedings one American came back from visiting a nearby tank unit and he was absolutely plastered.
He was teetering all-over the place, hanging on to half a case of Champagne on his shoulder and every time he looked like capsizing and people went to help he he [sic] , fought them off. He was very protective of that 'champers'. Even when he fell into an old air raid shelter it could not be prized from him so we left him with a happy smile on his face. There was plenty more.
Although we were getting a little restless at the delay in moving us it was understandable....there was still a war going on!. But on May 3rd. parties started moving out and leaving their surplus goods behind and we spent a lot of time walking around the area inspecting the staggering amount of transport, troops and armour that we came across. We only had to show our identity slips and everywhere we went we got first class treatment with the utmost generosity, but there was the inevitable sad story to remind us that for some people the war was not yet over.
One of the tank crews was suffering from a traumatic experience, the memory of which was still fresh in their minds.
Apparently, when they had been confronted, not far from the camp, by armed school kids in cadet uniform they had tried to discourage them by firing over their heads but it had not been successful. The youngsters still showed defiance and continued firing. The tank crew had no choice but to fire on them for the benefit of their own infantry who were just behind them, and of course some of them had been injured before they gave up.
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In it's way it was very sad but it just showed that it was no picnic out there.
When the next piece of news came it was difficult to take it it [sic] in.
Berlin had fallen to the Russians and Hitler had killed himself in his Berlin bunker. The German High Command had collapsed and a cease fire was imminent.
The excitement reached a new high when that news had sunk in.
The call forward of people for evacuation was speeded up and those called were taking messages for us as well so I was looking forward to being home for my wife's birthday on the 8th, but the days were slipping by rapidly.
We were bathed and de-loused, (the first of many de-lousings) on the 6th for moving out on the 7th only to be frustrated by another deferment.
We were interviewed by an American female War Correspondent and were photographed charging around on bicyles [sic] and yet another frustrating day went by. Some people had got totally fed up by that time and were having a go on their own despite the regular warning being given. I played it safe and was rewarded on the 8th when our party was called forward.
All of the parties were of 28 people and Geoff was in charge of ours when we finally moved out at 5.30am. when we boarded a convoy of trucks, that set off for an ex Luftwaffe base at Straubing to the North of us.
It was a rough and dusty journey, but eventually we rolled into the place and again I was struck by the resemblance to our own pre-war airfields. I could have found my way around there as easily as Marham, Mildenhall or Stradishall but we did not have chance to go far. It was not worth it anyway as we were likely to be called forward at any time.
We were off-loaded on the road leading through the camp with the hangars dead ahead and told to stay put.
There was very little sign of damage so either the Luftwaffe had evacuated smartly or surrendered, but there we were, at the side of a tree lined avenue waiting….and …waiting!
Des and Lynn had been left behind at Mooseburg but they turned up in a later convoy and were not far from us as evening came. Still stuck on the road!.
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Fortunately the weather remained fine and although there was a NAAFI type building on the opposite side of the road none of us wanted to be confined. We had had enough of that.
We relieved the NAAFI place of a small stage about 8ft by 8ft and about a foot high which we set up between some trees. Several parachutes from the stores were used for bedding and a canopy and we had a neat little camp site that was the envy of many.
A metal grid was set up on some bricks to serve as a fireplace and we were able to dispense hot water and coffee to all and sundry as well as being a meeting point. I
We were just about to settle down for the night when the bomb shell came. Germany had capitulated…the war was over at last! As if there had not been enough excitement for one day.
There was still a little light left when there was a flurry of activity up at the airfield and troops were charging in that direction from all over. Curiosity got the better of us and no sooner had we got to edge of the airfield than a half dozen Ju.52's approached from the North East firing red verey signals
as they went into line astern for landing.
As soon as they had landed they were surrounded by armed troops and then the doors opened.
The occupants were mainly women and children, obviously families of Luftwaffe personnel being evacuated from Chechoslovakia [sic] out of the path of the advancing Russian forces. They looked very frightened as they were hustled away but I am sure that they would have been taken care of by the local population even if the military got different treatment.
We were not allowed to get too close but the airfield attracted us like a magnet and we soon found it to be a very busy place. No wonder they did not want us in the way.
There were mountains of stores dumped all around the perimeter.
There were dozens of Mustangs and Thunderbolts in another area and the remnants of dozens of German aircraft of all types piled up in another area.
Then came the next surprise when about twenty Me.109's and Fw.190's appeared in the circuit...all flying white streamers from their wingtips in the act of surrender. The sight of those brought just about everyone up to the airfield as they circled and landed, finally taxying into a neat line in front of the
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hangars.
The pilots hardly had time to switch off before the 'reception commitee' was up on the wing and the elegantly turned out pilots in their No.1. uniforms were unceremoniously whipped out of their cockpits, frisked and relieved of any Iron Crosses around their necks, and watches, binoculars, pistols and holsters were removed before they were lined up and marched away.
I suppose they did try to surrender with some dignity but they were not allowed to do so and neither was the next group that came in.
We had had the families, then the Staffel, and the next arrival was a Ju.52. carrying the unit commander and his staff. It included his female secretary, filing cabinets and all....plus...the pig!.
The latter was no doubt the product of the unit pig farm and an insurance against going hungry at a later date. So here was an almost complete unit apart from the poor old ground staff who were probably having to hike their way back from somewhere just inside the Chech [sic] border about 60 miles away.
The volume of gold braid on the senior officer did not save him from going the same way as the others, so he was bundled off one way, no doubt protesting about his rough handling....and the pig went the other. To the cookhouse!.
One of the last to land in the fading light was a Feisler Storch light communications and spotting plane and the pilot demonstrated it's capability by virtually stalling it into a very short landing run and …..plonk, stopped.
The pilot got out, like an entertainer in the circus, grinning, as if to say "who's a clever boy then", until a huge coloured American airman grabbed him by the collar and he was put through the mincer like the others.
We loved every minute of it and wandered back to our camp site very happily not expecting anything to climax that but the finale came shortly after daylight went completely.
The day was finished off with a giant pyrotechnic display that must have used up everything that could be mustered from all of the combined stores plus stuff from wrecked or surrendered aircraft.
The way some of the stuff had been put together to blast off
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some 200ft into the air must have made the excercise [sic] near lethal but I am sure that there was no shortage of the necessary explosive and technical skills to put on such a show at such short notice.
The night sky was filled with star shells and flares of all colours and enormous explosions for well over an hour before we retired to our communal bed with stars in our eyes, and hope for what the next day would bring.
When May 9th dawned we were up early, washed, shaved, breakfasted and the site tidied up in case anyone else wanted to make use of it after we had gone, all ready standing by long before 7.30 as we had been told to be.
About 8.30 a flock of DC3's (Dakota's to the RAF) started pouring in, landing and taxying into the park directly ahead of the road we were on.
We had seen these depart on the previous day and it was a well drilled procedure by which they took up position in five ranks of ten nose to tail so all we had to do was to was [sic] for the call forward. It did not come!. Instead, truckloads of GI's came rumbling into camp straight past us and out to the aircraft which taxied out as soon as loading was complete and away they went…..all 50 of them!
We did not know whether they were front line troops who were in need of a rest or even walking wounded but it got us a bit steamed up to think that someone seemed to be jumping the queue but we knew that they would be in again in the afternoon so we continued to wait impatiently.
By mid afternoon the flock were back again and after landing formed up with the same precision and then another convoy of Americans arrived, again going straight out to the airfield. Fortunately it was a smaller party and some of our groups ahead of us were called forward but leaving us still sweating it out.
There was nothing more to but to open up our site again and brouse [sic] around the rest of the camp to occupy the time.
There was another firework display but we could not work up much enthusiasm for it. All of our thoughts were concentrated on what might happen the next day.
Again we were on call to be with some of the first away so once more we prepared ourselves and then watched in dismay as another
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convoy came sweeping in and went straight out to the airfield. When the aircraft came in they were promptly loaded and were away again leaving us still stuck on the side of the road. There were some angry mutterings.
Eventually the group leaders had a conference to elect a spokesman who went forward to speak to the load masters and whether it was that that did the trick or whether it was the luck of the draw I would not know but all of the RAF roadside gipsies were moved up to the airfield for the afternoon shuttle.
In came the aircraft as before and as soon as they were parked each party was allocated a specific aeroplane from which they unloaded jerrycans of petrol and other stores which included 'K' rations from which we got an issue and then we boarded....at last.
Like a well oiled machine the 50 aircraft started up, rolled out in sections of ten, took off and in loose formation headed West at about 4000ft.
The precision of that operation made a lasting impression on me as it was shifting about 300 tons of fuel and suplies [sic] in and about 2800 people out each day. With over 40,000 repatriates to get out of the area it was understandable that it was going to take time however frustrated we might have felt at times.
We landed at an airfield near Rheims, France, and were trucked to a huge tented encampment in the grounds of some Chateaux. We got de-loused again, had a label tied on and were then provided with vouchers to exchange for cash, shown the accomodation [sic] and told to be ready by daylight next day..
To someone like myself who, had only been in the 'bag' a short time it was a short step back to reality but for those who had been behind the wire for years it was the start of a long period of adjustment.
The bright lights, the incessant broadcasting of AFN (American Forces Network) and the delights of the tented city with it's cafateria [sic] tents, beer tents, cinema, magazine stalls and one-arm bandits was a different world. Obviously American servicemen (and women) did not expect to be cut off from their home comforts just because they were fighting a war in foriegn [sic] parts, whether they were in our [sic] out of the line. i
Whilst I was having difficulty in deciding what to spend my
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money on…and a beer was one of the first things, others were very reluctant to spend at all. I found that those who had hoarded for years in order to survive could not easily break the habit but we all mucked in together until eventually we had had our share of everything that was going and then it was early to bed, a real one, in preparation for an early start on the next lap.
We were up at 5 o'clock the next morning, piled onto trucks and commenced another bumpy, noisy and tiring drive, seemingly in the wrong direction, to an airfield at Juvencourt, which I found out later was between Troyes and Chaumont. I did not hear any complaints. If everyone was like me they were too pre-occupied with their own thoughts at the prospect of getting home soon to be concerned about a such a journey. Even if it was about 100 miles!.
We expected to be going into another camp but there was great excitement when, on arrival, we found a flock of waiting Lancasters on the airfield and we loaded 25 to each aircraft ready for the off.
The Lancaster was not built for passengers so we were distributed all along the fusulage [sic] and my diary records that I was in one of 514 Squadron's aircraft, from Waterbeach, Pilot, Flying Officer Tasker. His W/Op turned out to be one of my old mates from training days, Tommy Gookie.
There was no opportunity for chat though. Anyone who who [sic] has ever flown in a Lanc. without a helmet will know just how noisy they were but it was a terrible racket when those four beautiful Merlins started up and we taxied out and took off, setting course in a bit of a gaggle, heading West. I did have the opportunity of a few minutes in the top turret but there was quite a queue for it.
I lapped it up but it was a bit nerve racking for some of those who's flying had been cut short when they had been flying 1939 vintage fighters and bombers. Those chaps were going to need quite a lot of rehabilitation that was for sure.
After about an hour's flying all the changes in engine note and attitude suggested that we were preparing for landing and after touching down and taxying in we scrambled out of the door to find ourselves on the tarmac at, of all places, Tangmere.
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Just 18 miles from my home town!. Then the inevitable occurred. First we had to go through a very rudimentary customs check and then we were deloused again. There was no way that anything illegal or catching was going to be allowed into the country but I was beginning to get a bit fed up with having a hose stuffed up trouser legs, sleeves, down the trouser front and back and in the hair dispensing clouds of strange smelling itchy powder. Then it was tea and sandwiches in the hanger served by WAAF's who for some reason seemed to treat us as if we were something from outer space. I did not realise it at the time but that is probably what we looked like.
For the next part of the programme we were bussed to Barnham railway station to board a train that was sitting in a siding, but not before I had attended to one most important matter.
I was sorely tempted to slip away but thought better of it. Instead, I dived into a phone box, called the operator, but before I could tell her that I wanted a reverse charge call she asked if I was a returning POW, so obviously I was not the first she had had on the line.
Having been assured that I was she said that there was no charge and got a number for me in Worthing. In a flash I was talking to a local Chemist who I had been in the Home Guard with. He took a message to my parents, just up the road and on the way met my father-in-law so the whole jungle telegraph got going to spread the news.
Quite a few used that phone but eventually the locomotive whistle brought them back on board and we were off.
The trip was a long one and at times very slow as we wound our way all round London making occasional stops at stations for the ladies of the WVS and the 'Sally Ann' to dispense tea and sandwiches, whatever the hour, until eventually, somewhere around midnight we arrived at the reception centre at RAF Cosford, near Wolverhampton.
The train ran right into the camp which had it's own internal railway system being a storage area and maintenance unit and we dissembarked [sic] almost directly into a well lit hangar.
There were lines and lines of tables creating avenues which were alphabetically indexed; and from then on it was every man for himself for a while.
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The first part of the process was an identification check. There were boxes of Records Office duplicate I.D. cards with photograph after which there were a few questions and once past that check we were back in the Air Force. Some who had not worn too well in the 'bag' took a bit longer but all were eventually filtered through perhaps after calling an officer to verify or a Doctor to advise on suitability for immediate clearance or a spot of R & R. (Rest .and Recuperation) first. Cosford also had a very large hospital so it was ideally suited.
After that we were provided with a temporary I.D. card and authorisation chits for this, that and the other. Leave warrant, ration card, advance of pay, clothes coupons, petrol coupons, cigarette and confectionary coupons…..all taking time as we worked our way down the line of tables until we were further directed towards another hangar which was a monster clothing store for an issue that would at least allow us to change out of the odds and ends that we had been wearing for so long. Half of mine by that time was American drab olive so it was back to blue.
The clothing issue was very basic. Airmans battle-dress and cap. Underclothes, socks and boots. Shirt, collar and tie.......separate of course, and nothing to hold them together, and finally a. piece of braid or a set of stripes appropriate to rank and..........the sewing kit!, plus a new kit bag to put surplus stuff into. Goodness knows what time it was before the process was complete and then we were off to a barrack block, a steaming hot bath and to bed.
We had been told that the Mess dining room was providing a 24 hour service and very few people overslept. We were up and about gathering everything together and I forget how many peices [sic] of braid and collars I sewed on for others before the need for breakfast was calling.
I felt a bit like a fish in a bowl wandering around the Officers Mess again among others dressed much the same as myself. The permanent staff were very helpful and the stewards could not do enough but there had to be a limit to how much one could eat in one go. There was only one thing on the minds of most people, and that was to get home as soon as possible. One of us had already gone. Jim only lived at Coventry and I was told
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that he had ordered a taxi and was off…..and to hell with the expense!.
Buses had been scheduled to run to Wolverhamptan [sic] for main line connections for those who were cleared to go and other nationalities, including Commonwealth personnel were being assembled to go to clearing depots that had been set up in various parts of the country to prepare them for repatriation. For me it was a quick call to Newmarket and I was on my way.
I must have got quite used to the scruffy character reflected in the shaving mirror without realising that there was a lot more of me that I had just taken for granted. When I first looked in a full length mirror it took some time to realise that the wild man from outer space was in fact me. If clothes maketh the man then I really looked like a rag-bag…..but a clean one!.
Clean I might have been but I had over three months head of unruly hair which was almost white from the liberal use of de-lousing powder that would not wash out. My ill fitting serge battle-dress had come straight from the stores and looked like it and although I could have delayed my departure to make myself more presentable I didn't. And I do not know anyone who did!, but as soon as I was back in the public eye it not surprising that I was getting some funny looks.
There were a few more to come before I finished my journey but one incident imprinted itself on my mind.
I have no idea where it was exactly but after changing trains and we got under way, I was lost in thought and the other person in the compartment; a member of the bowler hat and brolly brigade, went to some length to point out that it was a First Class compartment and that I appeared to have made a mistake.
Normally I would have treated it lightly but as his expression suggested that he had a nasty smell under his nose I'm afraid I was in no mood for that sort of nonsense. I cannot recall exactly what I said, but it certainly was not complimentary, I do remember that it was he that moved out and not me....after all, I did have a First Class ticket!
I finally arrived at Newmarket where it seemed that half my wife's HQ had turned out to greet me but why they were on the down-line platform when I arrived on the up-line platform I
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don't know and there was an awful lot of running about before we fell into each others arms. Then it was back to her office for a whirlwind of activity and excitement as a leave pass was arranged.
There was of course a very lively party in the evening before we finally retired to our room with some people that we had often stayed with on previous occasions. It was ironic that the lady of the house was the German wife of an old jockey of some repute.
Old "Willie" Warne had been the Kaisers jockey prior to the 1914/18 war and had been too late to get out of the country when that war started. The result was that he had been interned in Germany throughout the conflict. We had a lot to talk about!.
The following morning we were off to Worthing for a reunion with my parents and the rest of the family with the exception of two of my brothers who were still away in the forces.
My uniform and other clothes were waiting for me, all cleaned and pressed; although a little on the loose side and eventually, after lots more soaking in the bath most of the signs of the de-lousing powder disappeared. Nevertheless, a haircut was necessary, before I could get my cap on. The old barber that I had used for years nearly had a fit when he saw the state of my hair until I told him how it had got that way. That was the only free hair-cut I ever had out of him!. After that it more or less resumed it's natural colour and I was reconciled to a more civilised routine even though a touch of jaundice limited activities for a while. Something was bound to happen when the diet was undergoing that sort of change.
It was another twenty six years before I left the Air Force. I will never know why I was one of the lucky one's and it never ceases to amaze me. Sometimes I have thought that I have lived on borrowed time since those days.
If I had been a cat I would have run out of my nine lives a long time ago and I have always considered myself very fortunate to have enjoyed a longer period of relative peace than the older generation had experienced between two dreadful wars.
My youthful ambition to fly had been fullfilled [sic] ; even if it had been the hard and dangerous way. The war had finished and our country and our society seemed safe and secure at last.
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It had been achieved at the most dreadful cost in human lives and suffering. There were a lot of my old school friends and others that I would never see again.
Historians have since put forward many academic arguments on the conduct of the war as they have done throughout the years over long and bloody conflicts to try and prove points and discredit theories as well as personalities which is easy enough to do in hindsight.
The fact remains. Hitlers evil Third Reich was destroyed, and only just in time before the introduction of a new generation of weapons might have prolonged the war or even given Germany the chance of recovery. Then the pages of history would have been written somewhat differently and I doubt if todays armchair strategists would be in a position to express themselves quite so freely.
The overall number of casualties was appalling and the Royal Air Force had it's share as it wielded one of the most powerful and flexible weapons ever forged.
Bomber Command alone lost 47,293 aircrew killed or missing on operations over Europe, and another 8000 were killed in training and non-operational flights between 1939 and 1945.
A staggering 9000 bombers of all types were lost in the same period and at the peak of the air war 40% of Britains [sic] war production was concentrated in the manufacture of aircraft and supporting services.
Between them the Allied Air Forces devestated [sic] 70 cities and manufacturing centres severely curtailing production.
The Hamburg raids of 1943 disrupted U-boat building and caused the terrible fire-storm that resulted in more than 40,000 deaths. Altogether 3,600,000 homes were destroyed. 7,500,000,people were made homeless and there were 1,000,000 casualties caused by the bombing on the European front alone.
The costly raid on Peenemunde in the Baltic gave us breathing time to develope [sic] a defence against what could have been devestating [sic] damage from the V1's and V2's.
Sea and Air co-operation effectively swung the balance of the U.Boat war and a steady flow of war materials and food was assured from the vast resources of the USA.
The German Navy got bottled up and was no longer an effective
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force. The Luftwaffe was being depleted as their bomber force declined in favour of fighter production. Although in 1943 their production of fighters actually increased they were faced with the fact that experienced pilots cannot be produced, at the same rate as machines and the bombing was starving them of fuel.
Once Germany was forced onto the defensive as was Japan the writing was on the wall.
Towards the end of the war Germany had committed enormous quantities of some 20,000 anti-aircraft guns and vast quantities of ammunition to the defence of the Third Reich, tying up 1,000,000 troops and another 1,500,000 people in fire fighting, clearing up bomb damage and re-housing.
The destruction caused by Allied air raids affected German war production to such an extent that it was estimated by German sources that in 1943 alone, it cost, in terms of production, the [underlined] equivalent [/underlined] of 10,000 heavy guns and approximately 6000 heavy tanks. If the resources that those figures represent had reached the battle fronts the outcome of many a campaign might well have different.
Those figures are just some of the grim statistics on the balance sheet of a war that need not have happened if Hitler could have been prevented from embarking on his plans of world domination.
The overwhelming Allied air power was a major contribution which helped to reduce the casualty figures of the ground forces who eventually squeezed the discredited leaders of the German nation into surrender, giving Europe a chance to sort itself out and lay plans for a more peaceful future.
History will show that the transition into an uneasy 'peace' and the rebuilding of shattered countries and communities was not easily achieved but I am proud to have been part of it.
Alan.T.Gamble.
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"NIL DESPERANDUM”
[underlined] PREFACE [/underlined]
My war came to an end with Victory in Europe, when, after returning from German POW camp I was sent on leave to await further instructions.
For some time I expected to be called for duty in one of the areas of either Europe, the Middle East, India or the Far East where there was still a great deal of conflict going on, but it seemed that there were still plenty of people around to cope and it was many weeks before something was found for me to do.
I was content as long as my pay and allowances were being credited to my account, so I sat back waiting for something to happen and enjoyed being with the family again. My wife Dorothy was still in the Army and soon used up her leave entitlement to be home with me at Worthing although I managed several periods up at Newmarket where she was still stationed which was not too far away so I had a comfortable time rehabilitating myself until a telegram from the Air Ministry requested my presence at Whitehall to determine my future.
Meanwhile I had had plenty of time to contemplate both the past, present and the future. At least I still had a future of sorts which was a lot more than some of my old school friends whose short lives were about to be recorded on the memorial tablets.
My youthful past had been humdrum until joining the Royal Air Force and I could not see it getting any better by doing what so many were doing by getting `demobbed' and back into `civvy street' as soon as possible to pick up the threads of their previous occupation. Apart from anything else I was not even sure that I wanted to resume my previous occupation.
I had made the grade from the ranks to commissioned officer more by luck than anything else and despite some bad moments I had been introduced to a different sort of life; and it attracted me.
I had asked myself time and time again; should I throw it all away or capitalize on it? The answer always came out the same, whichever way I looked at the situation. I really had nothing to lose as I had very little to start with, so I approached the postings department at Air Ministry with an open mind and tongue in cheek.
I was kept waiting for a long time after I had presented myself, and bit by bit I progressed from the main reception to the clerks office then to an outer office until finally being called into the inner sanctum to be asked by a chap who simply asked what I would like to do.
It was such a surprise that I was barely able to splutter out "anything you like" and no doubt if I had not already given some thought to my future I could easily have blurted out "civvy street" and that would have been the road that I would have gone down. Nevertheless, my remark produced a contemplative "hm" and a lot of paper shuffling. I just looked at the ceiling and shuffled my feet!
The next question was "what about administrative work?" and I recall that my reply was something to the effect that "if that is what you would like me to do I will have a go" although my insides were churning. Me! administrative work! What the hell did I know about that, but the die was cast and I was sent off for a few more days leave to await further instructions, which took the form of a telegram instructing me to report to No. 47 Group. HQ, Hendon, for disposal.
I duly reported to the HQ which was in a group of huts, which is still there behind barbed wire in front of the Restaurant of the RAF Museum and by adopting the philosophy of leaving my destiny in someone else's hands the cards were shuffled once more. I was earmarked for administrative duties and sent home, once more to await further instructions.
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It was not long before, they arrived and then I was en route to Lyneham, in Wiltshire, all shiny, new and refreshed for the beginning of a new era.
[line of stars]
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[underlined] CHAPTER ONE [/underlined]
Lynham [sic] was a flying station of No. 47 Group, Transport Command so it made a change for me to be outside Bomber Command but I did not have a lot of time to contemplate the Yorks and Stirlings that were being flogged to and from many parts of the world. The arrival preliminaries were soon over and I found myself being employed as assistant to the Adjutant of 511 Squadron and was soon up to my ears in routine paper work, a lot of which was processing claims for campaign medals but it seemed an easy way to earn a crust for the ten days that I did the job and I learned a lot more about the running of, a unit like a flying Squadron which had not changed a lot since I had been a 'sprog' airman at Mildenhall in 1941 where I had started my first stint of admin in the orderly room. There was something else that had not changed. Stirlings being Stirlings, whatever the mark, could still get into an uncontrollable swing on take off and landing as I found out from the signals that were coming in reporting aircraft all the way down the route to India having swung and busted the undercarriage in some God forsaken place and I had not been flying a desk very long before one did the same thing at Lyneham which finished up careering into the operations block causing a number of casualties among ground staff.
It had previously entered my mind that if I could keep away from flying for a while it would not do me any harm but after that episode it did not seem to make any difference. I think that I would have been most upset at being pranged by a runaway Stirling whilst sitting at a desk; especially after successfully completing a tour in Bomber Command on them without damage to myself.
However, I was whisked out of that job overnight and flung straight into a properly established job in Station HQ. That of Station Assistant Adjutant although the job title of the appointment was a mis-nomer as far as I was concerned. It really was personnel administration and I inherited a staff of twenty headed by a Flight Sergeant Chief Clerk. All of a sudden I was an Admin Officer!
The reason for the sudden move requires a little explanation as I did not physically take over from the previous encumbant [sic] , a WAAF officer who apparently had got herself and the job into one hell of a mess and had been moved out smartly before things could get any worse. My brief from the Senior Admin Officer was to get stuck in and sort things out as quickly and as quietly as possible so I took over everything completely blind. Office, staff, ledgers, account books, cash and inventories. It was difficult to know just where to start so I familiarised myself first with the orderly room procedures and the staff who handled the details of some 2000 airmen and airwomen and then came the process of sorting my own office. It did not take long to find out that things were far worse than they appeared on the surface.
I started checking the inventories as I had signed for them subject to check and although some small one's were fairly easy but when it came to the bedding store, oh dear, oh dear. My heart missed a beat. It showed up a flaw in the system that been exploited for a long time by people quite prepared to make a few bob out of surplus blankets, only they were not surplus! Even in the stock room half blankets suitably folded had been counted as complete blankets to deceive the checkers for a long time. I had to have a long think about that one. There seemed no point in enquiries and chucking charges about. I had a feeling that it would bounce right back into my court. Quickly and quietly the boss had said, so I did it my way and worked at it steadily over a period of several weeks whilst dealing with other day to day matters.
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I had the station scoured for blankets that were being misused as curtains, table covers etc. and a few billet inspections with the aid of the Station Warrant Officer produced a considerable number that were in excess of entitlement and more than a few exchanges were made at the main stores until I was satisfied that the deficiencies had been reduced to a modest number that I could subsequently declare for write-off. War time methods of writing off losses were no longer in force so I was aiming for the minimum possible before asking for an independent check to be made with me in attendance. Such matters absorb a great deal of time and at the same time I introduced a completely new system of accounting for the issue, receipt„ storage and stock control of bedding without adding extra staff although there was a change of staff. The Corporal in charge of the bedding store! who I am sure was very pleased to go without a fuss. I found a place for him in the sanitary squad! In the long run quicker and quieter than the more formal way of doing things. I followed it up with a multi page paper on the subject, with recommendations for the changes that I had already made and submitted it through channels to Air Ministry, as I was sure that there were considerable savings to be made if my scheme was implemented officially. I can only assume that someone, somewhere along the line put his own name to it and nearly two years later an Air Ministry Order appeared almost word for word so it must have had some merit. It was still in force 40 years later!
I did get something out of though!. Nearly six months later after I had moved on and after an enquiry into the deficiencies that had been disclosed, a Board of Enquiry found me responsible for the losses and invited me to pay £5 toward the value of the losses. One learns the hard way and so it seemed that everyone was covering their backs, and they had to have their pound of flesh. £5 was a lot of money in 1945. About 25% of a weeks pay for a Flying Officer!
Had that backhander arrived whilst I had still been at Lyneham I might well have decided that Air Force Admin. was not for me but by then I was engaged in numerous other problems and learning to cope with them without compromising myself. It did not always work but I was getting better at it. In the meanwhile Dorothy had left the Army and was back with her parents in Worthing awaiting the arrival of an addition to the family.
Among other things that were under my jurisdiction were the issue of clothing coupons, tobacco and confectionery and petrol coupons and it did not take long to find out that the system of accounting for those items were far from satisfactory. Of course, they were all issued, or were supposed to have been issued according to entitlement as laid down in the relevant orders but I found it impossible to reconcile the stocks and book balances. I burned the midnight oil balancing, (or to be truthful, cooking them) until I had resolved the petrol and clothing coupons sufficiently to satisfy a snap audit which was always a possibility although obviously no such audit had been done for a long time.
In hindsight it would probably have been to my advantage to have asked for an independent audit when taking over, if it had occurred to me, but I was new to the business and without formal training it could still have gone against me in the same way as the blankets episode. I doubt that it would have gone against the departed WAAF officer who no doubt had left the service very smartly which was the normal practice for someone in her condition. There did not seem any point in making waves so in my ignorance I just pressed on.
The tobacco and confectionery coupons were a bit of a headache although I had not placed any priority on them but the first time I attended a Station Commanders conference the subject came up as the local and area NAAFI managers had apparently been tearing their hair out for some time as their monthly stocks were all being taken up in the first few days of the month and supplementary stocks were having to be put up to supply the demand for the rest of the month. I came directly into the firing line although my predecessor had previously been
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instructed to do something about it and of course the inevitable occurred. The finger was pointed at me with an instruction to "fix it ....and quickly". It did not take long to find an answer.
The blank coupons were initially issued by the NAAFI to units for distribution and generally coupons issued by one unit were valid at another and therein lay the problem. At Lyneham everyone other than the Officers and Sgt's messes seemed have about four times as many coupons as they should have but the work involved was not easy and I burned a lot of midnight oil personally setting up a system to get it right first time. I made all old coupons invalid as new coupons became valid from a certain date. They were all serial numbered and distributed to internal units and departments against nominal rolls There was no leeway or overlap. Any cases that would have previously been arbitrated by the Naafi staff were referred to me and only coupons bearing the Lyneham stamp were valid. All new arrivals got a new issue on surrender of their old one's with a limitation of only two weeks back issue. I did get it right first time!. The rot was stopped dead in it's tracks within the first few days of it's introduction. The Naafi managers were happy and despite the success of the operation that was the only area from which any compliment came and I was presented with an enormous box of chocolates for my wife with their compliments. At least I had the satisfaction of knowing that I had some aptitude for the work that I had been thrown into and had so far I seemed to have done it a bit better than someone with formal training.
There were other matters that needed a nudge in the right direction from time to time to bring them into line but eventually all the serious problems had been attended to and I was able to relax slightly as the job ticked over as it should have done in the first place. I even managed a few more week-ends at home instead of working right through but at that time people were still revelling in the euphoria of the cessation of the war and there was a lot of partying going on, and that of course meant too much drinking as an outlet for pent up emotions. There was one rip-roaring party to which I invited my Petty Officer Naval brother, (with temporary promotion to Lieutenant. RN. For the occasion) and it was the great granddaddy of all binges. We were in a very sorry state the next morning when we went down to the flight office as I had arranged a trip in a York for him. He had never flown before, and it had been no trouble to lay it on although it was in a freighter on air test that we found ourselves in. No seats. Just a load of loose covers on the floor with a few straps to hang onto.
I suppose it's something you are trained for and you grow up with so it was second nature to me. My poor brother felt differently about it with the thunder of the engines, the unfamiliar smells and a skyline that would not stay in place, and neither would his stomach as he was obliged to make use of the paper bag supplied!
His final thoughts on the matter were that he would sooner take his chance in the bowels of a ship than fly or have to chuck himself out of an aeroplane if it got into trouble although I am sure that when he was later obliged to fly back to the UK on compassionate leave on the death of his daughter he had more things on his mind than his own personal discomfort.
Bit by bit I attacked all of the accumulated problems and new one's as they arose and life began to jogg [sic] along quite nicely. I was able to spend time studying the activities and the rules and regulations of the personnel department for which I was responsible, although it was run very efficiently by a Flight Sergeant Waaf. Even so, I began to take more notice of what I was invariably signing for. At that point in time I seemed to have been launched in a career in Admin so it seemed logical that I should learn all that I could about it.
It was too much to expect that I would be left to settle for long. In early Spring of 1946 I received the reward for my efforts when I was notified that I was posted to Holmsley South in the New Forest, Hampshire, for Admin duties, so a quick hand over followed a handshake from the C.O. and to my surprise a "well done" and I was ready to go. One of my
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first thoughts was that I would be a lot nearer Worthing and things seemed to be working in my favour especially as Holmsley was another Transport command station with a Stirling squadron. The prospects were good and I had no reason to make any preliminary enquiries so off I went and waved goodbye to Lyneham.
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[underlined] Chapter Two [/underlined]
I completed the arrival formalities by eventually arriving at the C.O's office and that's when I received a nasty shock to be told that he was very pleased to see me as a very special job had been reserved for me. I was to take charge of 50 German POW's who would be arriving by train [underlined] the following day [/underlined] and the Senior Admin Officer would tell me all about it!
He did. A dispersed Nissen hutted site had been allocated. Beds and bedding had been set aside at the stores and an inventory opened ready for my signature. Cooking facilities had also been arranged on site "so off you go and the best of luck and keep them out of my hair" was the brief.
[underlined] Dispersed [/underlined] was the operative word. Typical of war time airfields it was well spread out and I was to find that the site that I had been allocated was nearly two miles from the main camp area but I was thinking very hard about the prospects and wondering if my reputation had preceeded [sic] me as they must have decided at the last moment to appoint an officer in charge. I must confess too that I rather liked the idea of being a POW Camp Commandant which was the title that I gave myself. After my recent experiences as a POW in Germany it would be interesting to have the role's reversed.
Most of my first day was spent checking out the site and supplies. The electricity was on, the plumbing was working and coal had already been dumped on site but it was the `cooking facilities' that intrigued me. It was no more than an old soya boiler and a Spitfire packing case but I was not going to worry too much about that. One thing was for sure. At the very worst the conditions could never be described as rough by comparison with the way we had been treated as prisoners so after reading up the limited amount of information that been handed over to me and making a few arrangements for the reception of the POW's I settled in the Mess and turned in that night with a clear conscience. The next day could take care of itself!
I duly met the motley crowd at Brockenhurst railway station the following day without too much ceremony having mustered a couple of hefty, armed Service policemen to make an impression and there I was handed a package of `bumph' by one of the two RAF (aircrew) Warrant Officers who were going to be my total staff for the indefinite period that they were going to be with us. As soon as we got back to the main camp I was able to dispense with the policemen and the POW's did a lot of waiting about whilst I poured over the documents with the Senior Admin Officer (who really didn't want to know), but I was determined to keep him in the picture before being told once more "get on with it". By that time I had got the impression that as far as I was concerned I was on my own!.
The POW's were all ex Africa Corp and had been incarcerated in working camps in Canada. They had been well fed and documented and were in the pipeline for repatriation, and they knew it and the best part was that they were to be reminded regularly with the added threat that if any one of them absconded, or even attempted to, then the whole lot would be put back to the end of a very long list.
That solved a lot of my fears and it was with a much lighter heart that I paraded the lot, read the riot act through their senior NCO `interpreter' although most of them knew enough English to understand and then we were off to the site where I paraded them again and explained that it was to be their home until further notice. I also explained that any comforts that they might enjoy would be achieved mainly by their own efforts which soon put a stop to any complaints that they might have thought of voicing. There was the inevitable roll call and familiarisation of faces having formally introduced myself and then we got down to work setting things up.
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The next few days were hectic as I scrounged, scavenged and borrowed all the necessary equipment to make life tolerable and there was a lot of earth moving, hammering, sawing and considerable industry as the days went by. The kitchen and mess room layout was built from the Spitfire packing case and sited in a partitioned end of a hut adjacent to the ablutions block to make use of the plumbing, and the remainder of the hut was turned into sleeping quarters for the duty officer and the site office.
There were few restrictions. By the very nature of our staffing arrangements it was an open camp apart from morning and night roll calls with one of the Warrant Officers or myself on camp throughout each 24 hour period. The daily routine was soon established. I was allowed a small cash ration allowance to supplement the daily ration issue and the prisoners were allowed a small basic pay in script as they were not allowed real money. They spent their script in the small canteen that we set up and it's value was converted into real money under my control (more book-keeping), for purchases from the Naafi main distribution centre in Southampton.
I was also allowed to employ them on the station in a variety of trades that they were suitable for and give small pay increments accordingly, so it was not long before some of them were being employed as drivers, fitters, cooks and butchers, cleaners and baggage handlers with a pool of refuse collectors. My message to them was very simple. "Screw up a good job and you go straight to the garbage detail". (There was no extra pay for that job!)
A bout of very wet weather made life very difficult as the entrance to the site was uphill and impossible for motor transport so that supplies had to be man-handled in but in my travels I had spotted a considerable supply of used and new PSP, (Perforated Steel Planking) of the type that many war time hard standings and even temporary runways were built with which had been more or less abandoned by the Americans, who had used Holmsley for the invasion of Normandy so several tons were transported to the site in the next spell of good weather and we got cracking. There was a lot more earth moving as the surface was prepared and we worked it out as we went along. I got my shirt off too which raised a few eyebrows among the troops.
Like any other body of men there will always be those who will hang about on the fringe of activity trying to look as if they are busy. Germans are no different! But I felt that if I could demonstrate that I could work as well as any of them then I would be justified in putting my boot behind anyone who seemed reluctant to flex his muscles so we toiled like an army of ants the whole of one week-end when I was the duty officer. At the end of the day we straightened our backs with the satisfaction of having done a good job in record time with a firm driveway leading up to a level turning area at the top.
I had a few crates of beer brought in later on and had the additional satisfaction of being told by one of them that it was most unlikely that a German officer would have applied himself in the same way. By that time I had bathed and was back in uniform and once more and `The Commandant' was feeling rather pleased with himself, so the reply that came from me, almost without thinking was....."possibly, and you lost"! Touche!.
After that things began to tick along quite nicely which was just as well as I was beginning to be drawn more and more into the routine work of the station. Nevertheless, the POW's took up most of my time and I had to argue my way out of doing station duties like Orderly Officer on the grounds that I was spending every third night and every, third week-end in the POW compound. I was excused station duties...but not for long!
I had to take fairly swifty [sic] action on one occasion when I had a report from the civilian accountant officer who came to work on his scooter that he just passed one of our two tonner's being driven by one of my POW's on the Southampton road, and he did not appear to have a load! I was off like a shot on my recently aquired [sic] motor cycle and chased after him.
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I was flat out for several miles before I caught him up and flagged him down. The driver was the one that I thought he might be. He was reputed to have been a pre-war racing driver mechanic and it appeared that he had been doing some unauthorised tuning of the truck's V8 engine as well. His argument that he was road testing the vehicle cut no ice as he had no authorisation to do either that or his journey so it was about turn and back to camp with me tailing him. I think he knew what to expect when I had him on the mat. Like everyone else he knew that Southampton was not many miles down the road and my own view was that he was making a dash for freedom although there was no way I could prove it. For him it was the loss of his trade pay and on the back of the refuse lorry instead of driving it! They had been warned!.
My motor cycle was a great help to me and allowed me to get between camp and Worthing in less than two hours giving me much more time with my family especially as I would normally have caught an early Sunday evening train to get back. With the bike I was usually driving into the compound on the dot of eight o'clock on the Monday morning to be received by one of the Warrant Officers and the Feldweibel. The bike was then taken to be cleaned up as I changed and had breakfast before going through the reports and morning inspection. The bike was then taken to be cleaned as I changed and had breakfast, before going through the reports and my morning inspection. [sic]
I had learned enough about Germans to know that they understood and respected that sort of routine so there was some satisfaction in having the bike cleaned and polished, very often by the chap who I had suspended from driving after his misdemeanour but I was too trusting. I should have remembered that once you give a "creegie", (an abbreviation of the German word for POW); an inch, he would take a mile. We used to!
On one fine day I decided to take run to Bournemouth and on the spur of the moment took the head man with me on the pillion but we had barely done a couple of miles when the bike went into a violent, almost uncontrollable wriggle on a bend which resulted in us being thrown onto the verge, on the wrong side of the road, somewhat shaken, when the back wheel locked up!
When had got our breath back it did not take long to find the cause of the trouble. A loose back wheel which had caused the wheel to go out of alignment and the chain to jump the sprocket! That had also upset the brake control but it was soon put right and the outing was abandoned. There was some more sorting out to do. I was quite adament [sic] that wheel nuts do not loosen themselves and I had already decided that the bike would no longer be cleaned by a particular prisoner and the same person found that he never did get back driving, or for that matter on any other job that might have restored his trade pay. There were no direct accusations but I think everyone was aware just how close `Sir' had been to a very nasty prang. It was just one of the many problems to be sorted out where my charges were concerned and it was not unusual for the local village policeman to be hauling one of my `boys' back into the compound in the early hours of the morning having found him sneaking around the village. It was an open camp after all and my staff was not large enough for anything else. Neither would the administration consider giving me a guard patrol at night so all sorts of things were known to be going on after roll call and lights out and I was obliged to turn a blind eye to such goings on provided that nothing desperate occurred. It was impossible to stop the forces of nature and if some of the local lasses preferred the company of German prisoners then that was their affair.
Another problem concerning the motor-bike nearly deprived me of it when I received a letter from an H.P. company advising me that the machine was the subject of an H.P. agreement between them and a third party and as Dorothy had opened the letter at home it really caused a storm in a tea cup!. The bike was costing me about four months pay on an
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H.P. agreement with another company! In the end it was not difficult to sort out. I threatened to sue the dealer that I had got the bike from and told the first H.P. company that the bike theoretically belonged to another HP company and then let them sort it out so in the end the bike remained in my possession.
It very nearly got bent on another occasion when a group of about five of us who had motor-bikes, (including the medical officer), went out for an evening's tour of the local area which included a few stops for [underlined] light [/underlined] refreshment. Perhaps that was what caused a little excess speed as we swept into a bend, line astern, with the Doc. in the lead, but he couldn't quite make it round the bend. Off the road he went whilst the rest of us made our own arrangements to keep control and come to a stop as the Doc. disappeared up someone's garden path. When we had turned around and investigated there was the Doc. bike and all, extracting himself from a flower bed. There was no real damage done except for the loss of an area of skin from his knee and a hole in his best trousers.
The lady of the house had just come out to see what all the commotion was about and seeing a pranged person discharging a quantity of blood on her path asked if she should get a doctor and with great solemnity the Doc. said, “thank you madam, I am a Doctor but I would very much like a cup of tea", so we all got tea and patched him up althoughfor [sic] some reason we did not indulge in that sort of escapade again.
Our little camp matured and blossomed and I thought that it was enterprising of the inmates to have achieved some colour in the place when flower borders appeared. I put it down to the generosity of the locals until I had a telephone call from a retired Colonel living in a pleasant old Victorian house next to the compound. It didn't take long to find out from a visit and a couple of sherry's that as our our flower beds blossomed his had thinned out. Actually he was very reasonable about it for a man with a name like his. It was BASTARD, so I naturally pronounced it Bas-tard, to be put well and truly in my place when he insisted that it was BASTARD by name and BASTARD by nature; but his bark was worse than his bite.
It was all simply resolved by the return and replanting of most of his plants and by the allocation of a regular POW gardener to him for two half days a week. Couldn't be fairer than that! We benefited from the deal as there was no further need to raid his garden. We apparently just appropriated surplus plants from his greenhouse!
I had a few days leave after our first daughter was born only to find on return that there had been a near mutiny among the prisoners when someone had upset their comfortable routine.
I had made arrangements that whilst I was away the Duty Officer would include certain daily checks that would normally have been done only at week-ends when I was not there. It had all been resolved by the time I got back but it had resulted from the actions of one officer, himself an ex POW, deciding that they should have a taste of what he had been subjected to resulting in numerous restrictions, parades and roll calls. Nothing too drastic but quite unnecessary in the circumstances when they were safe in the knowledge that all they had to do was behave themselves and repatriation was certain. The net result was that they had refused to go to work until the status quo had been restored. Just to show them that they were not going to get it all their own way I imposed a fine of one week's pay for everyone although it really need not have happened. It subsequently turned out that the officer concerned had been in Stalag X111b and V11a with me and we continually bumped into each other at various units over the following years but that's another story.
One highlight was our camp concert. News had been filtering through of the closing down of the whole station so I thought we should do something special without thinking too much about what the implications were for me, like what, when, where? so after a tentative enquiry the repatriation authorities suggested that if it did happen then my lot might well be
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moved up the repatriation schedule rather than re-locate them. I thought it wise to leek [sic] this information to them to act as an incentive to good behaviour and it did not take long to get things going. I did very little except to beg, borrow and scrounge stuff for them, including instruments and did not even vet scripts or attend rehearsals. I left that to my two Warrant Officers. It would have been a useless exercise anyway.
When the show was finally presented, the CO. and other Senior officers who had been invited seemed to enjoy themselves anyway although I suspect that many of the jokes were at our expense. Nevertheless, they all laughed in the right places; as I did, even if we did not fully understand what was being said. It was an interesting experience and there were no repercussions although their [sic] was an air of excitement creeping into our daily lives as this particular element of the vanquished Africa Corp. considered the pending return to their homes, or what was left of them, and as for me. What next?
About that period I was in the Mess one lunch-time when a noisy visiting aircrew were attracting a great deal of attention in the foyer and my eyes lighted on one of them. None other than Macdonalds Flight Engineer of my Stirling days, 'Paddy' Martin, now in the rank of Fg.Off, but we only managed a few minutes chat before they were all boarding a crew coach with I suspect, a little more than just their lunch on board, going out to their aircraft which was a Mk.V. Stirling no less.
When we met up again umpteen years later he swore that we had never met on such an occasion; but then he also swore that he had never attended my wedding in 1944 until I produced a photograph to prove that he did. The last information that he could recall of me was that `Tommy' Gamble had got the "chop" early in 1945. Close--very close, but not quite.
One very interesting event took place just about that time. A Courts Martial came up. That of a case of alleged rape of a WAAF by an aircrew Warrant Officer, and I found myself sitting with the court as one of the officers under instruction. All part of the training scheme.
The WO had engaged the services of a K.C. barrister whilst the prosecution had produced a relatively inexperienced officer, not of the legal profession, who had just been detailed for the job and the case lasted two days during which time I studied the form very carefully as it customary for anyone to be detailed for such jobs; either for defence or prosecution and my only experience of court procedure was in my youth when I had appeared before the magistrates for some minor cycling offence and this was very different.
We were in fact treated to some of the finest court arguments that it has ever been my privilege to witness as the barrister ripped the evidence of the prosecution to shreds in the most expert fashion and the case was not proven. It made me feel very uncomfortable to think that one day I might be detailed for such a job and find myself in the same invidious position as that unfortunate prosecuting officer so at that point I made two resolutions. One, to keep my head down when they were looking for someone to make a fool of himself in a court room, and Two, to dissuade anyone from accepting my services should I be so detailed. Needless to say, after it was all wrapped up I think we were all rather pleased to put our medals back into storage.
I then became heavily involved in the arrangements for the Squadron's move to Lyneham and followed the normal procedure of working with the RTO (Military Rail Transport Office) to move the remainder of the personnel that were not flying or going by road but when I submitted my part of the planned move of the movement order to the Station Commander he was not impressed and instructed me to cancel them and arrange for a fleet of coaches so that the move could be accomplished, taking a third of the time and with the bonus that the Squadrons would be non-operational for only a very short period. It made sense and having cancelled the RTO arrangements they were no longer concerned so I duly hired the coaches through a Christchurch firm and all went well. Shortly after the aircraft departed the
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transport baggage train convoy followed and a silence descended as the airfield was closed to active flying.
In due course the bill arrived for several hundred pounds and I passed it through accounts for payment thinking no more about it until an irate Group Accountant Officer came on the phone demanding to know why we had not used the RTO for transport and who had arranged it all. My insides went into a turmoil of panic as I thought of the consequences and the effect that it would have on my already overstrained finances particularly after he said that it was all very irregular and that he would send the bill personally to me for payment. That's when I dug my heels in and pointed out in no uncertain terms that it was the Group Captain's (who was no longer in command); decision and I had only carried out his instructions then the line cooled a little when he said he ought to send it to him instead.
In hindsight I suspect that he felt that he had to make a fuss under the circumstances but I think I chewed my fingernails down to nothing whilst I waited for the outcome. Thankfully I never did hear any more.
Meanwhile there was the problem of the shrinking station. I had been absorbed into the station HQ for all manner of duties and then in a twinkling of an eye I was unit Adjutant with a Squadron Leader CO. With all that on my shoulders it was time to place the full responsibility for the POW's onto the WO's. The senior was placed in charge and as the camp medical centre had already been closed I re-opened it and transferred the prisoners to it from the dispersed site which was closed. As far as their conditions were concerned they were now positively luxurious with all that a complete medical centre had to offer including constant hot water and a superb kitchen. That got them off of my back whilst I tackled the deluge of responsibilities that came my way.
We soon compressed the unit administration into one HQ building as bit by bit activities closed down and brought their own problems and although certain posts were disestablished there were some that had to remain and most of them fell into my lap. Almost every day another crop of posting notices arrived and more people were on there way leaving behind various duties for which they had been responsible and the one quick way was to concentrate that responsibility into the hands of some-one who would discharge the final act to terminate the job. With only a few officers left and with myself being one of the nominated seven to stay I would go so far as to suggest that I got more than my share being the junior officer.
All non-public accounts were concentrated under one control; mine, and although the monies were at the bank by the time I had collected seven accounts to the value of several thousand pounds I was beginning to feel somewhat uneasy particularly as I was delving into the mysteries of double entry book-keeping. There was more burning the midnight oil to study to try and work it all out and I tried desperately to take it in my stride without admitting that I knew very little about it in the first place. Now what would a Secondary schoolboy trained as a carpenter and subsequently a Wireless Operator/Gunner know about such things? Fortunately there was only one active account and although they all had to be audited by the accountant officer monthly who certified the balances I must have done it correctly as there were never any problems.
It was inevitable that among the various hats I was wearing I became the M.T. officer but only as the nominal head of the section which was as usual ably run by an experienced senior NCO. But the Air Force had this thing that only a commissioned officer could take the can back for anything that went wrong and I barely had time to sign for everything that I had become responsible for as it was so most of it was done tounge [sic] in cheek and fingers crossed. I had already crossed that bridge when I was at Lyneham so it was nothing new.
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One of the jobs for early elimination was that of Entertainments Officer as it was not an on-going thing but then it occurred to me that one of the accounts that I was managing was the PSI fund which was particularly healthy. The PSI fund is the equivalent of a Regimental Fund which when all was finally wound up would have any balance transferred to Group accounts. But it could be used for financing other projects-provided that it was not drained and I could not think of anything better than the concentration of the best of our remaining local talents into a final farewell party. It didn't take long to find someone to mastermind the production side and I developed it into a two hour music hall programme with some very accomplished and enthusiastic people. The hall was laid out along the lines of a German beer cellar with barrels of free beer being dispensed by real German waiters (my POW's) in white aprons in the time honoured fashion with free food laid on as well.
Maybe I pushed my luck a little but as I was also in charge of the few remaining service policemen I issued instructions to keep it cool with further orders to the POW's to the effect that none of them were to fall down until they had completed their jobs as barmen, cleaners and general handymen. As far as I know none of them did but no doubt because I was so heavily involved I could not have seen to everything and towards the end I was not far from falling down myself. I do know that when I did my rounds in the morning everything was back in place and cleaned up. If there had been any bad behaviour or punch-ups there was no evidence of it and the cells were empty. All I had to do after that was pay the bills but that was one hell of a party'
As the unit continued to thin out even more business came my way including the dreaded inventories and by that time I had already received the outcome of the Lyneham enquiry so although I was a bit peeved about it I felt safe in the knowledge that having started up my POW inventory from scratch it was a model of correctness from the time I opened it up. Nevertheless I was more than peeved when I found that I was required to take over dozens of depleted inventories from departing people and transfer the stocks to one holding inventory.
A job like that can only be done with a mountain of vouchers and although I tried to get the hard pressed storemen to do it internally I found myself stuck with it but it involved a lot of work including stock taking before taking some of them over. I had learned my lesson!
Numerous problems arose of course. Like the occasion when a bicycle found in the village pond was brought in by the local policeman. Identified by it's [sic] serial number the books showed that it had already been written off so no more paperwork was required. It was consigned to the scrap dump which was yet another of my responsibilities.
Naturally there was a lot of useful scrap in the yard as well as the rubbish and it was my job to see that a contract was let to a local merchant whose outgoing loads had to be inspected and approved by me at the Guard room and the price agreed on a signed invoice which went to the accountant officer who subsequently collected the money. It was all done according to the regulations so it was with some surprise that on one of my tours of the airfield I investigated the contents of a large packing case in the area of the old bomb dump. I found that it contained a brand new, still sealed, Wright Cyclone aero engine with American markings that had obviously been left behind by the USAAF prior to `D' Day.
Perhaps it was too innocent but at that time it seemed that my biggest problem was how to get rid of it as it was definitely not on charge. It was a completely surplus item until enquiries through the supply people resolved it. You simply took such an item on charge by filling in the appropriate vouchers and once it's on the books that's it. You can then transfer it so Engine, Aero, Wright Cyclone, Mk. ?, serial no. ? Port, One, was dealt with and I thought that was the end of it. Within an hour of having it picked up and conveyed to stores the scrap contractor was knocking at my door. He claimed that he had `discovered' same, but had not said anything to me whilst he was looking for a home for it, which he had only just done.
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I have often wondered if [sic] would really have known-anything about it's departure as according to him he had found someone running a one man airline with a Dakota who could have done with a spare engine and £500 was the price he was going to put to me but it was too late. (and hard luck Freddie Laker!). I certainly could have made use of that sort of money at that time and I might have been tempted but as the RAF was still using Dakota's it no doubt found it's way into one of them at a later date. There was never such another lucrative opportunity but there was no time to cry over spilt milk either. I was up to my ears in stores vouchers and posting notices as I had become the Personnel Officer again as the unit got smaller by the day and we got nearer our dead-line date. Then the time came when the POW's were warned to be ready.
When the day finally came there was no ceremony. All the hand shaking had been done before they were paraded. There was just a quick salute and "goodbye and good luck". That was that. Some of them had been receiving mail via the Red Cross and they had had access to UK newspapers so they knew what to expect. Those who had lost touch with family for various reasons did not have a lot to celebrate knowing that they were going back to a land that had been ravaged by a war that had destroyed so much. I knew what it was like; I had seen it, so there was no cheering and I was glad to see the back of them. As they marched off there was one thought that struck me that the WO's had not mentioned; the radio that I had been permitted to purchase on their behalf had not been handed back and I had to account for it. It was "Halt, about turn" and it didn't take long to find it when I told them that it had to be returned, even if they missed their train. One of them had it under his greatcoat!!!
It didn't take long to clear up the paper work after they had left then it was nose to the grindstone again as the next major job had to be attended to. That was the disposal of all non-public assets, mainly PSI funded, that had already been collected and an inventory drawn up which I then had to dispose of by public auction for which I engaged a firm of auctioneers. In all the book value was just over a thousand pounds and shortly before the sale which had been advertised I had a visit from a retired Air Commodore representing the Bournmouth [sic] Branch of the Royal Air Force Association who was prepared to make a cash offer for the whole lot at half the book value. I managed to negotiate the addition of the auctioneers fee if it was acceptable. It seemed a good deal to me but when I put the idea to the Group Accountant he was horrified. Oh dear no! It was most irregular and the regulations stated quite plainly that it had to go to auction so despite considerable pleading and argument he had the final word. Whilst my sympathies were with the Air Commodore and the RAFA there was nothing I could do about except apologise to him and let the sale go ahead.
I did not attend the auction and was quite happy to leave it in the capable hands of the experts but subsequently when I got the proceeds, less commission and handling fees it did not amount to much more than £100 for the lot! I was hot foot down to their offices for explanation but it was all above board although the receipts showed that most items had been knocked down at quite ridiculously low prices but I did find out that a certain Air Commodore had been in attendance and he and his cronies had done most of the bidding. As far as I was concerned the RAFA had got the stuff much cheaper than they would have done by private sale although I had a sneaking feeling that a certain Group Accountant was not going to be very happy so I obtained a complete breakdown of the sale prices and the purchasers before I left their office. Just as well. When the Group Accountant did spot it it really did 'hit the fan'. The line was red hot as we discussed the pro's and cons and it was perhaps my suggestion that in hindsight we should have accepted the cash offer in the first place. That brought forth accusations of collusion and conspiracy. That did it. I was on a short fuse anyway flogging my guts out and with more than my fair share of responsibility and there he was, up in his ivory tower counting paper money so I let him have facts and figures, not forgetting to point out that I was after all a lowly GD(General Duties) Flying Officer doing my best in a job that
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I had received absolutely no training for. Then he simmered down, huffing and puffing, "it's still all very irregular". I began to get somewhat fed up with Admin duties that was for sure but had no option but to "press on".
Fortunately the unit accountant had been the Accountant Officer at Chedburgh when I was there in 1943 and only dealt with the day to day financial matters at Holmsley but knew enough of our experiences there at the time was very sympathetic and supportive and assured me that the Group A.O. was only making waves in case anything went seriously wrong and he got the blame for it so I learned a few more lessons about human nature. He was very helpful in many ways.
On one occasion he arrived at the office from Lyndhurst on his scooter and related the story of how he had just seen a pig clouted by a car down the road and how it had finished up head first in a ditch looking very dead. The driver had not stopped and obviously would not be reporting it as the bye-laws of the New Forest gave right of way to animals. But `headfirst' sounded good to me. I don't know if it was the 'creegie' still in me or just the thought of all that good meat going to waste but in no time at all I had a two ton truck and two kitchen hands with carving knives on board scorching down the road where we spotted the animal, still headfirst and no longer bleeding. Many people must have passed it and there no doubt in my mind that if it was left a great deal of fresh meat would go to waste even if the owner of the animal were to be found within the next few hours so we cruised pat [sic] the corpse and cruised back again keeping a good look-out in both directions. As we came up to it there was nothing in sight arid within a matter of seconds it was on board and we were off. It certainly supplemented our rations for a few days and I had no qualms about my action which were quite illegal and would have caused a few embarrassing headlines if the law had been tested.
Fortunately for me it never was.
The unit finally dwindled to three officers and a handful of airmen and we all finished up in a large house that had been the CO's official residence. I claimed an enormous room, en-suite, as I was the only one living in so I had a little luxury that compensated to a degree for the enormous amount of paperwork that was involved. Even moving has it's problems like decommissioning this that and the other, re-arranging the staff, and getting phones transferred as we no longer needed a switchboard. I was still doing about 16 hours a day to keep on top of the work so that I could have my week-ends free to get through to Worthing when a bombshell arrived in the form of a posting notice detaching me to Hereford, on an [underlined] Admin course!!!! [/underlined]
At the time I thought that perhaps my career was being advanced by that development so I didn't make a fuss although the duration of the course was three weeks. I [sic] would mean nearly a month without visiting home as it was too far on the bike and too expensive by train. My fellow officers thought it would do me good to take the course so I was off.
Perhaps I would have benefited from it if it had not been a course specifically designed for young aircrew officers to teach them the inner workings of the Air Force although at first I decided to go along with it. Within a few days I came to the conclusion that it was not for the likes of me who was actually doing such work. It seemed more of a disciplinary course to occupy idle hands and mine had been far from idle for a long time. I became more and more resentful as the days went by as I was shown how to use a rifle and a pistol and a Sten gun and engage in all manner of field craft including escape and evasion techniques which involved crawling around in long wet grass which at one point I strongly objected to only to be told that I might find the experience useful one day! What does one say to that? Matey, I've done it, and a fat lot of good it was when in the end I was surrounded and had a Schmeisser stuck up my nose. It didn't cut any ice. Then there was all the drill and parade procedures which were not entirely new to me either although I can understand the needs of some who for some reason didn't know one end of a rifle from the other and were
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somewhat unwilling to pull triggers and throw grenades. I wondered what they had been doing in their very limited careers!
The classroom work was mainly forms, forms and more forms and their use therof [sic] as well as stores procedures and of other things like how to write letters, command structure and a lot of other stuff that was old hat. By the end of the first week I was fuming I was not learning anything new and there was a lot of work piling up at Holmsley just waiting for me to deal with. Only the most essential would be dealt with by the others and I could visualise many hours of binding graft before I was likely to have broken the back of it.
I must confess that my attitude toward the course as we started the second week was not going unnoticed by the course commander who quite naturally took me aside to point out the error of my ways. That is when the real reason for the course was confirmed. Not only was it intended for surplus aircrew officers to find something for them to do but it definitely was a disciplinary course as well so I was being assessed accordingly--------and I was not doing very well! It seemed that we had gone back in time to "Yours is not to reason why etc" and I had had enough of that as an airman. For a start I wondered why I had been sent on such a course anyway so I promptly made a request to phone my parent Group HQ `P' Staff which brought forth howls of indignant protest. Despite the fact that I was normally in touch with the chap on an almost daily basis I was told in no uncertain terms that such lowly types as myself were not allowed to communicate direct with the higher echelons. It was only the prerogative of senior officers to the `top brass' and that is what I was on the course to learn about. As far as I was concerned it was utter nonsense and I had serious doubts regarding the background experience of this Flight Lieutenant of the A & SD (Admin & Special Duties) Branch who seemed unaware that the `top brass' were only people like ourselves holding staff appointments. Not only that, a lot of them were like myself of the GD (General Duties-Flying) Branch. Expected to do anything that was thrown at them------including flying!
Suitably chastised I was dismissed with threats of extra orderly officer duties and the inclusion of some appropriate remarks on my course and confidential report so I simmered down a bit as I waited for an opportunity to use his phone whilst he was out of his office a few days later. There all hell let loose when he suddenly burst in, very angry and rightfully indignant at the audacity etc, etc, at performing, in his eyes, an almost criminal act. Not that I was unduly worried as by that time I had already done what I set out to do and the threats went over my head.
Within four hours a signal arrived from Transport Command HQ. recalling me to my unit urgently and naturally I was called to his office immediately to have the signal waived under my nose. "Explain this!!!! So I did, in detail that he had not been prepared to listen to previously and I think he understood my action even if he could not approve of the manner in which I had dealt with it. As far as I was concerned I was off the damn silly course and I was on my way.
As soon as I returned to base I plunged into a mountain of paper work and after two days and nights of frenzied activity I came out on top ready for a long week-end at home.
During that burst of activity there was an unannounced staff visit from Group HQ and all the visitors could find was one junior officer slaving away, whilst the others were out hunting, shooting and fishing around the area and that put the cat among the pigeons. That and my absence for nearly two weeks seemed to solve the problem of the numerous delays that occurred in the closing down procedure. Hence a snap visit! And although I could only explain the absence of the others by saying they were on tours of inspection, when they did turn up there was a lot of muttering behind closed doors and I was only too happy to bury myself in paper again.
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A few more weeks went by until at last we were run right down to a C & M (Care & Maintenance) party. At last I had got my head above water and I could relax a little-----but not for long.
A telephone call from Group, followed by a posting notice gave me advance warning of my posting to Oakington in Cambridgeshire for --------Admin duties, to report in a few days time, but as far as I was concerned, not before I had another long week-end at home. After just thirty months I was a bit of a stranger at home, especially to the baby but I felt that something had to be sacrificed if there was any chance that I could make a career out of the Air Force. At least, I thought, Oakington is a well established station so I should slip into the same sort of job that I had done at Lyneham without any hassle. I had had enough challenges for a while-------but I had overlooked the fact that so had Lyneham been well established and what a mess that had been in. There was more to come.
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[underlined] CHAPTER THREE [/underlined]
The journey up to Oakington was nearly a disaster. After a few days at home I set off on the motor bike on a cold and frosty morning, Loaded to the hilt, wearing full flying kit over my uniform and greatcoat which included a bright yellow immersion suit and flying boots, helmet, goggles and gloves, looking like something from outer space but warm and well protected I had just cleared the London area when the front of a blizzard caught up with me and my speed was drastically reduced to a few miles an hour with my feet stuck out like out-riggers to prevent me sliding all over the place and in those conditions I pressed on until I got to Baldock.
By that time there was between three and four inches of virgin snow covering everything and every sensible traveller had got off of the road. There was very little other traffic so I ventured down the hill very slowly with my aching legs still propping up the bike and found myself gaining on the only other vehicle in sight which was a fairly high standing two ton truck, and I was desperately trying to slow down when suddenly the truck driver braked and slithered along fishtailing to a stop. I knew that my brakes were not going to stop me as I slid gently towards the back-end of the truck and when it quite obvious that the tailboard hinges were going to spread my face I took the only option open to me. I flipped the bike on it's side and went underneath. It was just as well the truck had a good ground clearance as I went right underneath the back axle and came out between the front and rear wheels with my tail in the gutter. The driver had obviously been completely unaware of the incident as within seconds of my coming to rest he started to move off, with my front wheel right underneath his rear wheel so I reached out and pushed on the truck wheel and the bike and I slid out just enough to avoid serious damage to the bike. The truck wheel just squashed over the front number plate and mudguard and then he was gone before I could get my breath back. There was not another vehicle in sight and the only other person around was an elderly lady, who might well have been the cause of the drivers urgent braking; who, observing the situation, was concerned enough to ask if I had had an accident!! What she thought I was doing there, laying in the gutter with a motor-bike I don't know but I think that I said something suitably facetious as she tottered off and I started to sort myself out.
I was very glad that I was wearing so much gear rather than having tried to pack it. I was not even bruised and apart from a slightly bent number plate and tip of the mudguard there was no other damage to the bike but it took a while before I recovered sufficiently to get going again getting more than a little concerned as it had started to snow quite heavily. However, with traffic clear roads I was able to make progress and eventually outran the weather front, coming out completely in the clear and completing the last ten miles completely free of snow. Oh, blessed relief…..until I ran out of petrol just in sight of the camp!! I had overlooked the fact that I had been using it up at a much higher rate than normal doing so many miles in low gears. Fortunately an Air Ministry Works Dept truck came along and with the aid of a length of rope I was gently towed the rest of the way. After an eight hour journey I had at made it to Oakington and I was only too glad to book into the Mess and leave the arrival formalities until the following day. A bath, a change of clothes and a meal and early to bed made all the difference.
I soon found that the job was to be the same as Lyneham and I was looking forward to free-wheeling for a while until I met the C.O. I could hardly believe my ears after the introduction. "Ah" he said, "you are the very man I have been waiting far. My Central Registry and internal communications are in a bit of a mess and I'm told that you the man to fix things. The last chap couldn't sort things out and I've got rid of him so off you go and get stuck in". Oh no........not again!
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The only consolation was that my previous efforts seem to have been recognised and that maybe, just maybe, I might be able to find a career in the Secretarial Branch ultimately as I always seemed to be sorting out jobs that Secretarial types had made a cock-up of; so off I went and "got stuck in". There was no-one to take over from so once again I started from scratch: At least there was not the panic to get things squared up and the routine work went smoothly enough whilst I conducted a searching enquiry into the main problem that I had been instructed to sort out.
At that time my own personal problems needed sorting out as well. Now that I was a family man the household at Worthing was getting a bit crowded particularly since Dorothy's brother-in-law had at last been de-mobbed after being abroad with the 8th Army for four years and there was family expected in that direction. I was frantically looking around for suitable accommodation and although official quarters for married personnel was beginning to come back on the scene the points system that determined one's entitlement suggested that it was going to be a long time before I qualified for one. I was just one of millions of people who were desperately trying to re-settle and in need of accommodation. The story was invariably the same when one enquired. "Sorry, no children" and it all added to the frustration.
Eventually I did find a place just to the North of Cambridge on the Huntingdon road and plans were made although I must confess that I did not tell Dorothy the exact arrangement of the accommodation. The kitchen was in the basement. The living room was on the ground floor. The bathroom was on the second floor and the bedroom on the third floor! I didn't dare, but I hired a car and drove down to Worthing in a clear gap in the weather pattern that the Met. Man assured me would last a couple of days.
Apart from the occasional sortie in the Flight pick-up van when I had been at Newmarket two years previously I had never taken a car on the public highway before but I don't think that I gave it a second thought. The family needed something picked up from near Leighton Buzzard `on the way' which created a fair sized `dog-leg' but did give me a few more miles to come to terms with my lack of experience, and it avoided London so somehow I made it to Worthing.
Travelling by car those days was generally a fairly slow business as there were few major roads that allowed high speed cruising and one just plodded on but there was no time to mess about as we loaded up the car the following morning and off we went, having arranged that the pram, fully loaded, was to follow by rail. There were tears on our departure and I think that perhaps the most ironic thing was the remark from my sister-in-law that there was no need to worry as "Alan was a good driver" and that we would be OK. I don't know what gave her that impression. Little did they know, but I had managed 200 miles without any problem......so what was another 140! The journey was not uneventful! That would have been too much to ask for.
The hire car had been a reluctant starter at the very outset but we had got as far as Kingston when in the dip under the railway by the station the engine packed up and so did the battery. Not the best place to fizzle out but eventually we were pulled clear and towed to a garage a little further up where I purchased a new battery and we were an our way again. The fact that the cost of the battery had to come off the hire fee did not please the hire firm when the car was returned but a compromise was eventually reached. The main thing was that we had taken up residence in a place of our own for the very first time and much to my surprise Dorothy accepted the arrangement of the flat although we soon made alternative plans to avoid going right to the top of the house to a cold bedroom as I had already installed a convertible settee in the living room. That was soon put to use.
The met. Man's forecast was absolutely spot on. The day after we arrived the weather that had been expected hit us with a vengeance when about a foot of snow fell. The basement back door was unusable with a drift of snow filling the door well right to the top and massive
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drifts along the road due to cross winds were up to six feet-high. Cars were already stuck. It was impossible to get the bike out from the bottom of the garden and a colleague who lived in the same building joined me in walking to camp across country. It was a long way and our situation was not improved when we came to the edge of the airfield and in making a direct approach to a gate he disappeared through the snow cover up to his neck in a ditch but we made it in the end. I'm glad it was him in the lead as he was nearly a foot taller than me. I would have completely disappeared!
We struggled back home in the late afternoon as life on the station virtually came to a standstill. There was no flying and with more snow forecast the whole airfield was blanketed although an energetic but useless snow clearing operation was initiated which at least kept us warm. There was a slight spell of thawing when some areas of the road went a bit slushy but then a `deep freeze' hit the whole area and everything was locked up solid. People got to and from work the best way they could. The main Cambridge to Huntingdon road was impassable due to buried frozen in vehicles. The C.O. issued an order of the day allowing any type of clothing to be worn to cope with the extreme weather and we just battled on from day to day. At home of course there was no central heating but fires just had to be kept going on the fuel supplies I had stocked up although it was difficult to get at and it was supplemented with anything else that was to hand but it thawed and froze alternatively for weeks before a general thaw finally set in and vehicles could be released from their icy cocoons, many totally ruined. The A604 (now the A14) was still difficult to negotiate through ridges and ruts of ice well into March.
Meanwhile I had had all the time I needed to complete my survey and draw up my plans accordingly. I placed a brief outline of my proposals before the C.O. and although he gave me cart-blanche to get on with an added word of warning such as "cock it up and you will follow the last chap" so I worked my way right through the plan once more to look for problems before drafting the final order. Meanwhile, I had collected two more responsibilities. The Post Office as Postmaster and that of Mess Secretary which meant that more of my precious time would be used up but the day came when the plan that I had circulated to all users was put into effect and on that day there was absolutely no problem with it's introduction. I had expected some hick-ups but it all worked like a charm.
I decentralised the Registry to cut down the appalling wasteful duplication of just about everything that was going in and out. That in itself was causing delays and was a self generated work load. New index cards and registers were brought into use and the system updated to ensure that files were booked back in as well as out! As daft as it may seem that had not been the case so files could wander around between people and departments and the Registry had no knowledge of the whereabouts of a file if it was not in it's cabinet. I have often wondered what 'mastermind' had set all that up in the first place as it certainly did not conform to the Manual of Office Administration. However, new index cards and registers were brought into use and when it got under way the staff had no difficulty in handling the new system so within days a few sub-registry's became redundant and number of active filing cabinets was reduced from twenty to four, all cross referenced to the old registry. The bumbling circulation of paper was at last reduced to manageable proportions. The C.O. spent less time than he had done previously handling his daily correspondence and when I found that too many people were now sitting around doing little more than making tea a quick establishment review reduced the number of Registry clerks from ten to four. It made my life a little easier too as long as I didn't collect too many other jobs on the strength of my success.
I was certain by this time that it could only do me good as far as my confidential report was concerned. I had already applied for and been granted two extentions [sic] of service that had taken me beyond my normal discharge date and that's, as far as I was concerned, was what it was all about if I was going to be noticed. Any ambitions that I had at that time were
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mainly concerned with holding on to a relatively well paid job as a lot of my school chums were not finding 'civvy street' all that easy. I had no other qualifications other that of cabinet maker/polisher, [underlined] lapsed, [/underlined] and wireless operator, almost lapsed, so I just hung on to what I had got.
Like a good many of my age group and background, politics were not my strong point but it was not long before there was an awareness. Some very odd things were happening. The first post-war elections had shaken a lot of people when our remarkable war-time leader's party had been rejected for a different administration with an overwhelming majority. It did not make sense to me but the daily routine had to go just the same although some very subtle changes were taking place. Naturally I was shielded from a lot of it by being in the Armed Forces but it was difficult not to notice what was going an as the main effort was being channelled into `Nationalisation'! That meant roads, rail, steel coal, electricity, road transport, health care and a lot more that was in the pipeline. It was one of the great bloodless revolutions of the age. It was of course jobs for the `boys', the party members, who were often elevated to manage their previous employers businesses for the benefit of the state. History will show whether it worked or not but a lot of new ideas were filtering into the Forces.
One of those was the formation of a Station Committee made up representatives of all ranks from all departments, elected by ballot and not by appointment, which was to sit weekly to air grievances, discuss working arrangements and conditions and in fact anything other than pay, appointments and promotion. The unit Commander chaired the committee but thank God he had the power of veto and most commanders voiced their indignation at having their time wasted with such nonsense. Like mine did when he was on his way to such a meeting at which I was to take the minutes. "Come on Gamble; lets get along to this bloody silly union meeting". What a funny way to run a military establishment. It was a complete turnaround from the normal well established command structure and had all the ingredients to undermine discipline. It did little more than waste time but I had the distinct feeling that the tail was beginning to wag the dog!
I ran into a union problem sooner than I expected when we had two steward posts in the Mess disestablished. The disestablishment notice came straight out of the blue and the Mess Manager and I agreed that we would could [sic] do without the two least useful members of the staff who were duly served notice. Immediately there was a great deal of protest about being contrary to trades union practice etc, and that their representatives would be taking up the policy of disestablishing jobs without union consultation as well as giving notice to people to terminate their employment without the same consultation.
I turned a blind eye to it all but within a few hours I had a trade union rep. From Cambridge breathing heavily in my ear and telling me that I couldn't do it. That was red rag to a bull so I dismissed him with a flea in his ear but it was not over. A few hours later a chap from an Air Ministry department for civil relations or something was on the phone telling me that I couldn't do it, and quoted chapter and verse from the newly drawn up trade union rule book so I had no choice but to bow to that although I insisted that I had it in writing. Meanwhile the two men were re-instated as we were forced to apply the last in first out rule. As far as I was concerned it still was not over. Two could play that game.
I got hold of a copy of the union rule book and studied it at great length with the Mess Manager before we took our next step. Within a few days two people got their cards by reason of incompetence. (They had had plenty of verbal warnings over a period of time, and a written one as soon as they had been re-employed)......and immediately afterwards the two men that we wanted to keep were re-instated. Of course, there were immediate screams of protest from the union officials so I invited them to a face to face confrontation with both the Mess Manager and myself where they used every argument they could accusing us of `collusion',
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`unfair treatment' and `victimisation', but what they couldn't say was that it was illegal. It was right out of their own rule book but I was never entirely comfortable about the incident but I was damned if I was going to be told who and who not I could employ in certain circumstances. I quickly briefed the C.O. in case of repercussions but nothing further came of it.
It was about that time another incredibly wasteful practice came to light more or less by accident.
We were continually being exhorted to use less stationary and in particular duplicating paper and I had already done quite a lot to reduce the consumption by the registry arrangements. I had followed it up by reducing the supply to sub units and at the same time allocating more to the central registry for printing on behalf of the sub units although every job had to be vetted by my chief clerk. That had helped but we were still going through our allocation rather quickly and as H.M. Stationary Office were not always prepared to meet supplementary demands WE had to do something about it. WE equals ME in those circumstances as it fell into my lap once more as unit commanders complained to the Senior Admin Officer that they were being starved of certain stationary items. It was just about that time that Bourne, on the Cambridge to St.Neots road, for-which we were the parent unit, was in the late stages of closing down so I went over to see if they had anything in the stationary line that would be of any use to us. What I found was an Alladins cave as the stationary store was opened for me!.
There was an assortment of exotic stuff like the pale blue embossed pre-war paper for the exclusive use of unit commanders. Beautifully bound ledgers, some indexed. Note books, log books and all kinds of stuff that must have accumulated over a long period. It was stuff that if you were to order any of it in the present conditions you would be very lucky to have got any of it without putting up a special case. I was bugg eyed and it did not take long to transfer that lot to a three tonner and convey it to Oakington. Our stationary cupboard had to be re-arranged with the assistance of most of my staff and re-stocked until it was virtually bulging at the seams... ...and I held the key and a newly drawn up stock book!!
I think that I know how it was all accumulated. The same half yearly demand must have gone in as regular as clockwork irrespective of stocks but times were changing and so were the figures that showed that the Air Force was using even more paper per flying hour than ever before but no-one could say Oakington was not doing it's bit although there were still some items that we were short of so I phoned H.M. Stationary Office and did a deal. I don't think such a thing had ever happened before. There was a lot of huffing and puffing and expressions of "highly irregular" but they went along with it. We sent them a large packing case of what I considered was surplus to our requirements in exchange for a supplementary issue of items we were in urgent need of and everyone was happy but I just wondered how often that sort of wastefulness had been repeated by the hundreds of other units up and down the country during the war when every commodity was so precious to us and had often cost lives to import the raw materials. It was mind boggling.
Bit by bit life became a little more regulated although it was never without it's share of excitement and on occasions I even managed to tour around various other parts of the station including the airfield and the aircraft; Dakota's no less! It was not long after the snow and ice cleared and things started to warm up that the unsettled conditions usually associated with the end of April brought some savage weather including the most violent thunderstorms that I have only ever seen on one other occasion since.
In the late morning the sky darkened by degrees until it became as black as night and the wind increased by the minute to the point where it started to howl with the most savage gusts.....and then the rain came! It slashed and swirled and in no time all the roads were like rivers as the drains overloaded and I stood in my office window at the front of the HQ
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building thinking how lucky I was that I was not out in it. Anyone with any sense had taken cover and as I contemplated the violence of the storm I was astonished to see the striped pole barrier in front of the Guard Room suddenly whip into the vertical, snap off like a matchstick and disappear over the building. It occurred to me that that would be a job I would have to see to when the storm abated when the little Austin Seven which was parked outside and had been rocking about as each gust hit it; suddenly flipped on it's side. Oh well, I thought that can wait too.......then the phone rang.
Above a great deal of noise on the line an almost hysterical WAAF in the Post Office blurted out "please come at once sir, the roof has blown off”. My first reaction was "S..." but I had no choice so out I went, splashing my way through about four inches of water and was soaked in a matter of seconds. The Post Office looked a sorry sight minus it's roof which lay, completely wrecked, not far away but the poor girls were more concerned with the fact that as they had just set up the counter for business the contents of their trays had been sucked up, following the roof, and had been deposited far and wide. I don't remember having any lunch that day.
The clerks gathered up all the rest of their Post Office stocks and set up a temporary post room in the WAAF quarters and then I locked the place up! That was a laugh. I felt that I had to do that as only a week before I had had new mortice locks fitted and the safe securely embedded in brickwork. All that and now the place was roofless!
Although the clerks had set up the post room just inside the WAAF quarters they initially used the laundry room for sorting out their stock. A few telephone calls got some search parties organised as well as a broadcast on the PA system and before long some very soggy money and postal orders started coming in. It was rinsed, dried and ironed much to the amusement of all concerned but the amazing thing was that when I called off the search there was only one ten shilling (50p) postal order missing. When the inspectors arrived from Cambridge GPO (General Post Office) towards the end of the day they were agreeably surprised that that was all they had to write off after seeing the state of the Post Office. We were all somewhat relieved at that. I made may report to the C.O. later and followed up with a load of repair work including the barrier pole in front of the Guard Room.
I thought that was enough for one day until I got home. Dorothy had had her share as well. The downpour had filled up a balcony outside a full length window of one of the other flats and she had spent a lot of time baling out the balcony to stop the flow into the room whilst the storm was raging. We were both very relieved when that day was over.
Eventually things settled down as the year wore on and we experienced a most beautiful summer. Life in Cambridge with it's wonderful buildings and activities made life very interesting. Even the baby indulged us by winning first prize in a baby competition but as far as the job was concerned with most of the problems ironed out it was almost boring, but a great opportunity to develope [sic] family life to the full. Again it was too good to last!
I was asked to report to Transport Command HQ at Teddington, Middlesex for a job I [sic] interview and I was sure that the business was opening up for me. Out of the four candidates for the job I was offered it and I accepted. It was in the "P" Staff (Personnel) dept of the HQ so before long I was wrapping up and making the necessary arrangements to move the family. Although Teddington was not too far away Dorothy felt that she did not want to be on her own and preferred to go back to Worthing with her parents; [underlined] particularly as we had just found out that there was another addition to the family on the way! [/underlined] In hindsight it was a pity that we gave up the flat. I'm sure that we could have coped but Teddington was also convenient for Worthing but we settled for that.
The C.O. gave me the opportunity of nominating a suitable relief so a friend who was the Operation Wing Adjutant was acceptable and so it was goodbye Oakington. Here we go again!
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One or more pages is missing, apparently pages 24 – 86
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EXTRACT FROM
[underlined] NIL DESPERANUM…… [/underlined] OR
IF YOU CAN’T TAKE A JOKE ………
[underlined] BY [/underlined]
[underlined] A. GAMBLE [/underlined]
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knock. Pay awards had for some time been based on a flat rate rather than a percentage increase and the differential between ranks had closed up considerably. I now found that a Warrant Officer aircrew was in fact was in fact better off than a Flight Lieutenant!, which did not make a lot of sense. My situation was not improved by the Wolsley's rather extravagant use of oil and petrol and it eventually ran a big-end on the A5 just North of Birmingham on the way home one week-end so I didn't make it. Fortunately I had relatives at West Bromwich so I was able to stay with them until I could pick the car up in sufficient time to get back Sunday evening. That made another nasty hole in the accounts!.
That little episode put paid to a few week-ends at home. There was no-one at that time living anywhere around or on route that I could share with so I was obliged to stay in the mess with others in a similar state, although we often filled up a car and toured into Wales for a day to fill in the time.
A friend kindly offered me the use of his motor bike to go home one week-end and although it was only a clapped out 250cc side valve BSA I thought it was worth a try. That was a laugh and a half.
I dressed up in a selection of flying gear that I had with me and I was off into the wide blue yonder. I mounted the thing and kicked it into life and the first thing that was obviously wrong was the throttle which had a mind of it's own. I was not the sort of chap who could tolerate sloppy machinery so a quick investigation soon found that the top of the carburettor needed screwing back on and with a few other adjustments I set off. Before I had got to the main gate I was obliged to totter down to the MT yard to have the tyres inflated by as much as 20lbs both front and rear and then I was under way. Even then I was not feeling too happy about the machine. There were unpleasant noises from the engine and the first few bends caused the most peculiar sensations so another pit stop to tighten the head and forks dampers was taken. They had been very very loose and being forks with dampers gives some indication of it's great age. I was still feeling my way with it when I had to put the brakes on rather briskly when the lights went against me in Wellington and the back wheel locked up throwing me into
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gutter. Another pit stop to adjust primary and main chains and brake linkage was necessary before I could head East again. I very nearly threw my hand in then but surprisingly I found myself jogging along quite comfortably at between 45 and 50 but with still an ear tuned to the knocking from the engine until a convenient garage came in sight and it seemed an appropriate time to stop as there were signs of overheating. This is a bit of an understatement as she was almost red hot 'pinging' with excess heat. Whilst it was cooling down I dipped the oil tank and couldn't find a level so it took nearly two pints to top it up, then it was cool enough to change the spark plug and reset the points before the final test. I had so far done about 60 miles in three hours and it was decision time as I gingerly started up and carefully took off once more.
After a few more miles all was well so I decided to go for broke and head for home at speeds between 50 and 60 and finally arrived at Marham some 7 hours after departure much to the surprise of the rest of the family.
The return journey on Sunday took less than 4 hours so at breakfast on Monday morning I was able to tell the owner of the bike that all was well and I hope he didn’t mind that I had found it necessary to make a few adjustments which he was quite happy about.
He did not seem quite so happy later on that evening when he came into the bar with plasters on his face and a bandage on his hand. Before I could [inserted] say [/inserted] anything he hurled at me "you and your bloody adjustments", but laughed as he said it before telling that me what it was all about. Apparently, being so used to the machine that he had allowed to get so sloppy and gutless he had attempted to drive off in his usual way but it reared up, tore across a rose bed and threw him in another one!. Nevertheless, he was very impressed with the way it performed when he had got used to it so when the word got around I finished up with a few more machines to tinker with to keep me occupied.
The fastest I ever did that journey one way was 30 minutes. In a Canberra!. I was being 'dined out' at Marham and the aircraft was laid on for me one Friday afternoon. The pilot was the co-pilot of my last 90 Squadron crew and he showed Shawbury a few thing…and me. It was the: first time I had
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ever done a 'rotation' take-off although I had seen one or two demonstrated....I think I left my stomach on the runway when shortly after the kick up the backside by the tremendous acceleration he pulled it up almost vertical like a rocket and kept going until we got to around 10,000ft before levelling out and setting course for Marham. I was very impressed with that for an old bomber man who was more used to 500ft a minute climb hanging on the props with everything shaking and thundering. The return journey was done on the Monday morning a little more gently in an Oxford.
By that time a second course was running and another friend who had been an instructor on the Marham training Squadron had joined the course on transfer. He lived at Feltwell and was prepared to divert through Marham for a share of the running costs so until the end of the course that eased the burden a bit but as the course was nearing it's end like everyone else I was concerned to know about my posting. There was nothing notified so I was still hoping for a return to Marham but when the course results were made known after the final exams I was not pleased. Never mind about Marham...what what about Egypt?.
There was no point in making a fuss, one just had to accept those things so most of my embarkation leave was taken up settling the family back in Worthing as there was no way that I would be getting quarters out there in the 61 days after my effective posting to the Middle East and they would be obliged to move after that anyway.
I sailed on the RAF troopship Empire Ken out of Southampton in the Summer of 1954 and there were times that I wished I had taken up one of the jobs that I had been offered in Shell distribution.
I was the only one that had got an overseas posting and apparently it was almost unheard of. Overseas units usually wanted controllers with a bit of experience behind them but there I was, posted to the main terminal for the Canal Zone; Fayed. The only consolation was that it would be more or less in the centre of things and not stuck half way up a Wadi.
I soon found my sea legs and how to cope with bar prices which in today's money was less than 5p a double but it was the heat that took a lot of handling. The ship had canvas ducting to
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direct air down to the lower troop decks but it was ghastly even then and the troops, including Waafs used to have to come up on deck in shifts for a breather but it was one of those situations that could only be enjoyed for that period of time. With temperatures well over 100deg. the minute you went down below you started oozing again and just had to wait for the next turn on deck. The ship had never been built for that sort of climate anyway otherwise it might have had a more sophisticated ventilation system. The Empire Ken was a German ship built in the Blomm and Voss yards at Hamburg which we had taken as part of the war reparations and was more suited to the Baltic or the North Sea. I had had enough of it by the time the journey was finished anyway. We stopped at Algiers and subsequently arrived at Port Said to exchange sweaty discomfort for smelly and sweaty discomfort. It took a bit of getting used to. After disembarkation and sorting out of paperwork I was on my way by bus down the canal road wondering if I would ever get used to it with persperation [sic] pouring off me from top to bottom and to experience the further delights of the dust, flies, heat and smells of the Land of the Pharoes [sic] . Two minutes of that and I was quite willing to let them have it back!. At last I understood why my father used to get so incenced [sic] about flies. He had done it all both in India and Egypt many years before. My main concern was that I was entering a new phase of my career with a difference; as a Branch Officer, ie, Air Traffic Control, and no longer General Duties(Aircrew) and a dogsbody for a multitude of other jobs. It had been my experience that it had always been very difficult to detail such Branch Officers for extra duties, especially when they were so often shift workers and there were many units that maintained a 24 hour Air Traffic Control service. Fayed was one of them!.
Some of the most serious of local troubles in the Canal Zone had simmered down a bit and it was a lot safer than it had been a year earlier with the political unrest, mainly caused by the fact that there were elements in Egypt that wanted us out and Egypt for the Egyptions [sic] . They were talking, we were talking with an eye on the security of our oil supplies and trade routes through the Suez Canal. It was obvious that we were not going to give that up without favourable agreements after what it
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had cost us during the war in terms of blood sweat and tears.
So there I was. Arrival one day and to work the next although it was three weeks before I went on a solo watch after 'on the job training'; testing and certification. It was relatively simple and so was the set up. It was all very crude and temporary and had not changed a lot since the war but surprisingly enough it all worked efficiently albeit with the need for considerable local knowledge which was to be expected.
Fayed was the terminal for the Canal Zone with fighter airfields and other units to the North and the South and operated 24 hours a day with four short range Transport Squadrons that went out on scheduled flights in all directions, calling at Khartoum, Aden, Habbanyia (Iraq), Cyprus, Malta etc, with staging posts in between. It was a busy place. Fayed even supplied the neccesary [sic] control for the Great Bitter Lake for any flying boat that happened to be coming through although those services were nominal. In addition it was a staging post for the long haul types on the routes to and from the Far East. Our facilities were limited to VHF (Very High Frequency) and HF (High Frequency) direction finders and radio beacons and the airfield lighting was all lashed up stuff that had been modified to signal an alarm if any part became disconnected which had become necessary to discourage the natives from stealing the wire for it's copper content. Another discouragement was an anti-aircraft searchlight and a Bren gun on the roof of the control tower!.
The domestic and technical sites were separated from the airfield by being totally ringed in barbed wire and the access tracks leading from the airfield had wheeled barbed wire fences drawn across from sunset to sunrise as aircraft went in and out. It needed a small army to man the wire as well as an armed, mobile lighting repair squad standing by.
Air Traffic Control staff manned our searchlight and the gun and the searchlight generator was run at all times during the hours of darkness and I recall the night we used them with a vengeance.
The look-out reported movement on the airfield but I could not see much more than moving shadows through the glasses so it was "searchlight on" and on it came with a sizzling crackle as the switch was thrown. I could still see only vague shapes
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about 300 yards out from the tower in the reflection of the intense reflecting blaze of light, the man on the gun had already cocked it so I gave the order to fire. He loosed off a complete clip [inserted] s [/inserted] after which things seemed to have changed a bit so everything was put back to stand-by as the mobile patrol was ready to go out through the wire.
They very soon reported that we now had a dead camel on the airfield although it was clear of the runway and the question was; what to do next?. The Air Traffic Control course had not covered situations like that!. A quick call to the duty Engineering Officer produced a bulldozer and a working party to bury the thing but the problem did not go away for a long time. Every night for the next week the wild dogs uncovered it, and every day we covered it up again until eventually nature took it's normal course and there was no longer a meal to be had for the scavengers.
Although Married Quarters were available I went on to a very long list so I just settled down to sweating it out. In more ways than one. The Control Tower did not have the luxury of air conditioning and at the height of the day it was stifling with a shade temperature well over 100deg. One of the great delights of the night shift was to be able to sit outside on the roof of the Met. Office at about 3 o'clock in the morning when the temperature was down to about 70deg!, but that only lasted for about an hour before the sun zoomed up over the horizon.
Just as I thought that I could concentrate on being an Air Traffic Controller I was appointed Station Fire Officer and no sooner than I had mastered that I got loaded with another job but it all helped to pass the time anyway. Somehow I found time to qualify as a Desert Rescue Land Rover driver and then I figured that was enough as I devoted any other spare time to photography and accumulated my own processing equipment and soon found that my services were in great demand as the local processing was ghastly.
The photo processing did not start until I moved out of tented accommodation which was three months of absolute misery. Trying to sleep in a tent during the heat of the day after a night shift was virtually impossible.
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The permanent accommodation was limited so it was into a tent first and then wait your turn but sand seemed to get into everything despite the cat-walks laid on the sand. The bed feet stood in the usual pools of paraffin in boot polish tins to stop the creepy crawlies from invading the bed and mosquito nets, were hung from the ridge. I don't think I ever slept more than three hours at a time in those conditions before waking up absolutely soaked in persperation [sic] . The only thing to do then was to get up and shower; not that that did much good.
The water tanks were on the roof of the ablution block so they heated up well during the course of the day and never really cooled down but the best time to get a cold shower was normally between 4 & 5 in the morning!.
At least it was a happy unit. The rest of the controllers and staff made the best of it. Some of the controllers I already knew as well as some of the aircrew who I had met previously either at Marham or other units. One delightful character was a Czech who had been war-time RAF and had returned to his homeland to reach the rank of Air Commodore in the Czech Air Force until the political climate of the country had forced him to leave it. As a result he had rejoined the RAF as an Air Traffic Controller and was back to Flying Officer!. Nevertheless we all got on well and I found that copying his routine provided some limited relief from the heat.
Having completed the first few hours of sleep it was off to the Officers Club on the edge of Lake Timsa by bus equipped among other things with a sheet. At least it was possible to emerse [sic] one's-self in water even if it was in the eighties, wrap up in a wet sheet in the shade of a rush 'basha' and achieve a few more hours sleep until the evaporation process was complete and the 'cooking' process started again. Then it was back to camp to get ready for the night shift again. That was just part of the routine. It was all that happened within the routine that made life interesting.
I had been there a few months when I had two aircraft inbound from the UK. One a Hastings, the other a Canberra and just before their arrival a violent dust storm blew up. These could happen at any time given certain conditions and rising sand can make flying very dodgy. I just managed to get the Canberra in before
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visibility dropped to near zero and then the VHF direction finder went on the blink so I had to pull out a few stops after suggesting an indefinite holding or a diversion to Cyprus. The pilot was not keen on either and finally opted for a non-standard let-down using the H/F direction finder co-operating with his Wireless Op. and pilot together. It worked and he got down just about the time that the pilot of the Canberra had worked his way though Ops. and came up to the control room to find out what had happened to his baggage aircraft!
There were very few people that could have fixed up that sort of thing and it was of course the one and only 'Black Mac-The China Bull', on his way to take over command of Habbanyia, (Iraq). When we came face to face in the control room he was his usual bad mannered self. His comment of "I might have bloody well known it" was no more than one would have expected from him. As if it was my fault that a sand storm had blown up!. Had it occurred to me from the details on the flight plan that it was him I would definitely diverted him to Cyprus!. As it happened he only refuelled and fed and was off again after I had gone off duty. I thought that would be the last I would see of him but I was wrong.
Then we had a very interesting fire. Some damn fool army signals bloke exploded a primus stove by using the wrong fuel when brewing up so off went the fire party supplimented [sic] by the Army fire service and between them threw enough water at the signals hut to put out the fire but a lot of it drained away down the conduits in which the whole of the zone's land lines were trunked and out went the lot.
I could not get to the scene as I was duty controller and as all our mains facilities had failed all the stops had to be pulled out again to keep things moving. Going on to standby battery operated equipment I handled Approach control as best I could with no D/F facilities and the Senior Controller handled local traffic from the cockpit of a Valetta aircraft sitting on the tarmac not far from the control tower. Fortunately the weather was fine and all worked well with co-operation of the pilots who were able to carry out visual procedures.
The outcome of the enquiry was typical. The Fire Service, and that meant me; got half of the blame for the failure of all
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the radio, teleprinter, telephone and land lines!.
I got all the blame as the result of another enquiry that had taken place at Marham after I had left and I was kindly sent a copy of the findings. Shortly after leaving they could not find a Secret file although I know of no reason why it had not been in the cabinet if it had not been booked out. After my experience with registries I had been punctilious with the Secret Registry that had been under my direct control as well as the handling of the Top Secret files that always went in and out of the Wingco's office under sealed cover, and as far I recall everything had been handed over according to the laid down procedures. Nevertheless they could not find the handing over certificate, (I wish I had kept a copy), and I had to take responsibilty [sic] for the loss. I was a bit peeved at that. I had not been asked to give evidence even though the certificate would have been in the files now under the control of the bloke I had handed over to it seemed that the only avenue left was to appeal. After some thought I decided just to acknowledge receipt of the findings but with a very strong protest. After all, they couldn't shoot me for it!.
By this time the political infiltration into service life had almost died out and most things had returned to near normal as far as there is any normality in the forces. One just pressed on but at times one's shoulders had to be very broad to carry the load and it helped to have a thick skin as well!. At least there was the satisfaction that it would not last for ever. A lot of control was being passed back to the Egyptians and customs officials were getting very busy at Port Said placing import and export duty on almost all personal goods plus insistance [sic] on area Air Traffic Control by their services with a suggestion of imposing the same controls at Fayed. So far they had not been given access to Fayed but when they were we were very likely to have been deprived of one of our most advantages 'perks'.
We had a weekly 'training flight' to Malta locally known as the Whisky run which picked up supplies from a bonded warehouse and Fayed then acted as distribution agent for other units. The net result of that was that, as an example, a bottle of Whisky was 8s. 6d. in old money in the Mess. 42 pencel and
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cheaper than the Naafi who were obliged to make some declaration and payment to the Egyptian Government.
As a result of my involvement with the fire service I requested a Fire Officers course in the UK which I thought would kill two birds with one stone. It did not work so I took my accumulated [underlined] local [/underlined] leave with an itinerary of a round robin tour of the Middle East and hopped on the Whisky run to Malta and thence BEA to the UK. returning by the same process. At least I had 10 days at home with the family and then the misery started all over again.
There was still little hope of Married quarters but I kept a very close eye on the comings and goings.
Among the names that appeared on the list was that of the chap who had been the Station Adjutant at Marham, just one position below me, stationed somewhere in the zone at a Maintenance Unit. We met up on one occasion at Ismalia as I did with a number of people who had been at Marham with me. At one time there seven of us at Fayed. I had even met up with a long lost cousin who was in the Army at another unit so in one way and another occupied myself as time went by. What it must have been for my army cousin before the war I dread to think. He was in the ranks then when a tour of overseas duty was five years without family or home leave. I don't think I could have even contemplated it, but then perhaps neither did he when he signed on. After pre-war service in the Middle East and also a survivor of the Dunkirk withdrawal he was certainly earning his pension the hard way.
Being a shift worker gave me the opportunity to get away from the place on numerous 'flying' visits. Trips to Khartoum and Cyprus were fairly easy to arrange and I planned to go further East sometime when the opportunity arose.
Another advantage of Fayed was that it was the centre of all entertainment schedules. All visiting shows started off in our open air theatre/cinema and they could be sure of a critical audience too. It was usually packed to capacity and I enjoyed some of the very best shows on the circuit and had the priviledge [sic] of meeting many of the stars of those days when they were entertained in the Mess. Many are still around today. There was Harry Secombe, Lena Horne, Arthur English, Tommy Trinder
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(who got himself lost out on Lake Timsa in a small sailing boat), Ted Ray, Terry Thomas, to name but a few and it was there that Tesse O'Shea got one of her biggest laughs ever. The stage really did collapse and Two Ton Tesse had to be dragged out from underneath, still laughing. On the other hand there were turns that were not received so well. If Fayed didn't like them they knew it but it would be unkind to mention names. They tried and some of them are no longer with us.
In due course the Egyptian Air Force took over some of the zone fighter bases having been trained by British instructors at other airfields near Cairo and I began to wonder what sort of fun and games those instructors must have had in the process if the sort of flying that they were doing was anything to go by.
They seemed to put a great deal of effort into their flying but there never seemed to be such practical value in it if the commotion that went on at their nearest airfield was anything to go by.
I was on duty on one occasion when it became obvious that they were expecting an aircraft when all the ground radio checks started and in due course we heard the pilot calling Almaza (near Cairo), for back bearings every two or three minutes until he was obviously about half way when he started calling his destination.
The result was dead silence as the pilot called again and again with mounting urgency in his voice. He seemed so desperate that I chipped in and offered assistance as my D/F operator had been passing me his bearings anyway. The offer was accepted although it took some time before he was able to identify who was calling him and the rest was simple. He was homed to overhead us, descended to a lower height with instructions to steer a given heading for a number of minutes and he would find his destination which he did and despite his frantic calls to his destination we never did hear their control. Not even when he asked for landing clearance or when he reported landed!.
What all the fuss was about I do not know. It was only a 70 mile flight and a few minutes in what we identified as a Meteor when he came overhead. The sky was 100% blue with the Suez canal right under his nose a few miles from his destination so I can
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only think that he was a bit worried at missing it and getting lost in the Sinai desert. Later on we had a liaison visit from some of their controllers who had in fact been trained by International Air Radio and they were not backward in boasting about all the sophisticated equipment that they had. It was met with a diplomatic h'm, no comment. It was a pity that they did not know how to use it!. A lot of their questions were directed to where our radar unit was, suggesting that we had hidden it prior to their visit. That was time for some discreet tapping on the side of the nose. Radar!, we should be so lucky. I found out later that before I had arrived there had been a small final approach radar for evaluation but it had moved on somewhere. Despite the fact that there was liaison it was only one way and we could not get a visit to their unit. They were very mysterious and conspirital [sic] . They said that their bases were secret and it was very difficult to keep a straight face at that. We had even built them!.
Eventually they worked up their fighter units to the North and South of us and one day they decided to do a mass formation flight of about 30 aircaft [sic] up and down the canal. I wish I had recorded that R/T pantomime somehow although I suppose they were ding [sic] their best with limited training and experience.
The two formations never did get together as one. There was total confusion about heights, and everyone tried to talk at the same time when at one time they found that the two sub formations were on a collision course at the same height and then it was "break, break, break", and every man for himself. It was absolute pandemonium. All that in bright blue skies without a cloud in sight and the line of the canal and the lakes to navigate by. It was something to think about!.
No doubt they improved later on with practice and experience but I have often wondered how the Russians got on with them when they decided to re-arm with Russian equipment and of course, Russian instructors as well. They could not have found it easy by any standards.
Another serious Air Traffic matter came to light purely by chance shortly after had [sic] been appointed as Deputy Senior Controller. A lot of our inbound flights from the UK were chartered company aircraft, although at Malta the company livery was painted out
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and the crew changed uniforms and aircraft call-signs to become RAF. All very clever!. So we had a selection of those, RAF Yorks, Beverly's, Viscounts etc, both inbound and outbound. They were normally cleared by Cairo Delta control from Alexandria, descending and transferred to us but I was a bit concerned when more than one pilot reckoned they should report a confliction after they had been transferred, and even more so when I asked what traffic information they had been given. The answer was always nil so for about a week I asked all pilots to complete a questionaire [sic] relative to the hand over procedure and when it was complete the results of my investigation went through the Senior Controller and Operations. It resulted in some discreet enquiries with the Egyptian Ministry of aviation and a liaison visit by the Senior Controller and some rapid changes in prcedure [sic] . Many a pilot complained subsequently about the extra Easterly drag from Alex. to Port Said under airways control before being cleared to descend on the final leg to us. Little did they know that previously they had been descending blindly across three air routes out of Cairo. Phew.!.
There was an interesting situation early one evening when dust storms blew up unexpectedly around Cairo. I was only aware of it by listening to the one-sided R/T conversation but it was obvious that Cairo's controllers were getting in a bit of a 'tizzy' and some BOAC pilots were getting angry. They did not seem to be able to get an accurate weather report or saisfactory [sic] holding instructions and there was mention of diverting to Nicosia until one ex RAF BOAC pilot remembered us and gave us a call. Having checked our weather he then requested diversion facilities which Operations approved he was on his way, followed by another and another until we had accepted six until Ops. said "enough" before we were swamped.
It was a lovely collection. Constellations. Super Connie's, DC4's and Argonauts of BOAC, Air India, Air Italia, and SAA came swooping in and discharged about 300 passengers into the passenger lounge. They were not too happy about being limited to the reception area with an obvious presence of Service Police but the pilots were pleased enough when they came up to the control later to file their flight plans when Cairo had cleared.
It was just as well that I had had time to look up the
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regulations for charging landing fees, a subject that had not received much attention on the ATC course. Nevertheless, we got it sorted out and charged the grand total of £300. I could not repeat what some of the pilots said about Cairo control but it seemed to be about the same standard as Niarobi [sic] was at that time from what I was told.
In similar circumstances about that time a BOAC pilot had stood off at Nairobi and had taken control from the air to let down five others and himself when the controllers had actually lost control of the situation. I thought our training had been a bit rough and ready but I suppose that the fact that most of our controllers were ex aircrew was in our favour. We had grown up with it whilst other emerging nations were just finding their feet.
I had been in Egypt about nine months before I was allocated Married Quarters. It was a hiring on the canal road close to the officers club, and then the process of calling forward the family started.
The day after it was allocated it was reallocated to the chap who was just below me on the list on the strength of two extra points he had claimed by virtue of detachments overseas from Marham. (Returning B.29's to America he claimed). No way; I knew those regulations inside out and it didn't count so the 'phone lines were red hot before that got sorted out. There was no way that I was going to lose the [underlined] last [/underlined] allocation in the zone by default, not to that chap. (He was the one that knocked me off the greasy pole at Marham). He was not amused.
Everything was eventually worked out for the transportation of my family except for the date and then there was a dock strike at home which put thing back for several more agonising weeks. Meanwhile the quarter was being officially sub-let to another officer who in fact spent the best part of three months in it before my family eventually arrived at Port Said on an Army troopship, the S.S. Lancashire from Liverpool. There was only one snag. When they were half way across the Med. I got posted!. I think someone was using his influence-and putting the boot in.
I was stunned as I was required go to Amman in Jordan as soon as possible. When I protested pointing out that my family were
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half way across the Med. the answer was that they could easily wait in transit in the zone until I was-settled or they could take the next troopship back to the UK!. I really was getting the treatment!. I did eventually get a few days deferment by virtue of going sick, to hold me over until they arrived.
That put paid to any idea I had of taking them all on a visit to Cairo and the Pyramids. I had waited a year for the opportunity and it had slipped through my fingers.
There was great excitement when I met my wife and two daughters at Port Said and after the arrival formalities were completed we boarded the bus for Fayid via Ismalia down the canal road to be dropped off at the bungalow which was complete with a native servant who understood practically no English but understood the requirement and had been recommended. He was a glossy black Sudanese resplendent in galabere and tarboosh and displayed a permanent broad smile. He was a treasure. The girls did not quite know what to make of him at first but he was efficient as was unobtrusive. He made it plain the kitchen was his domain and Madam was not allowed in it. That suited us alright as there was not a lot time to get used to paraffin cooker, lamps and even paraffin fridge.
Of course my wife did not know just how much time she had until we had all settled in and I asked her if she knew where Amman was. Of course she did; in Jordan, but it wiped the smile off of everyone's face, including Abdul when they were told that we were off there in less than a week. Abdul cheered up a bit when I gave him a full month's pay and a reference and he looked after us well whilst I was busy about arranging passage to Amman. Of couse [sic] , it was too much to ask that it would be straightforward.. First of all my wife said she didn't want to fly but since the only alternative was camel she did not have much choice. Then all the deep sea baggage had to be chased up with some urgency from Port Said and then Air Movements insisted that it all be repacked as the size of the boxes were in excess of Air Freight dimensions. It was a good thing that I knew a few people in the right places and a compromise was reached where it could stay as it was. We finally went on a mixed freighter passenger flight in a Valetta. The Gamble special only had one other airman passenger on board and had to go via
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Aquaba and in fact overflew Amman to another of our bases at Mafraq.
Prior to our departure signals had been going to and fro' asking when I would arrive and in answer to one inquiry one confirmed that suitable accommodation was available and eventually when all of our baggage and boxes were unloaded we were bussed to Amman, about 35 mls away to make another new home. On arrival and after refreshments I reported to the Adjutant.
I was optimistic about what had been provided for us but knowing my luck I was not really surprised either when contrary to my expectations I found there was absolutely nothing. True they knew I was coming, but not with a family. There were no quarters available or accomodation [sic] other than by private arrangement plus the fact that as it was Friday and it was a Bank Holiday week-end nothing could be done until Tuesday. I nearly went spare. What had all the rush been about, etc, so I went to see the Accountant Officer, changed some money, drew some more and decided that I would have the Bank Holiday off as well since I could claim three days in transit at the expense of the Air Force so off we went to a hotel in the city and we had a good weekend familiarising ourselves with the area and a new currency. All I had done on the day of arrival was sign in so on the first working day I reported in and started the arrival procedure. All went well until I reported to the Senior Controller who actually accused me of being absent without leave when he found out that I had arrived on Friday. He was under the impression that I should have reported to him in the first place as he could have put me to work. It is not the best way to start a new job with a flaming great row with the boss but a flaming great row there was.
Obviously they had coped despite the alledged [sic] shortage of staff because he had not even known when I was due to arrive and I could not have just slipped into the routine without some preliminary training and certification. No allowance was made for my domestic circumstances and then whilst I started to absorb the local set-up another bombshell arrived. Air Headquarters Middle East at Habbanyia having received confirmation of my arrival signalled to the effect that I should have reported to that HQ for posting as required as they wanted me down in
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the Persian Gulf, and I was instructed to proceed accordingly. Then I really did blow my top!.
I had already found alternative accomodation [sic] ; more or less in the native quarter on Jebel Hashiem as the hotel was straining the finances somewhat, but at least it-was convenient for the base and the girls were about to start school. In [sic] was still scouting around for something better. I was not in a very good mood by the time I had worked my way through the Adjutant, Senior Admin. Officer and Wing Cdr. Admin. to the Station Commander for a showdown. At least he was sympathetic enough to listen to my greivance [sic] which I followed up with threats of resigning my commission there and then. Pretty strong stuff but a lengthy signal to AHQ produced the desired answer and I was at last allowed to get down to work with a bit more security than I had had for a long time. I don't think I was ever forgiven though for stirring things up for a change instead of accepting what was thrown in my direction. I was beginning to wish that I had transferred to the Secretarial Branch after all if that was a fore-taste of what could be expected in the future. Little did I know.
I found Amman very interesting. It was a joint Military and Civil International Airport with control exercised by the RAF. That included a locally based RAF fighter Squadron with Venoms, communication aircraft and Search and Rescue helicopter. The Royal Jordanian Air Force with Vampires. RAF transit traffic, two resident civil airlines and scheduled BOAC Argonaughts from London to Barhrein [sic] via Beruit [sic] on Monday's returning later in the week. Somehow that seemed more civilised as the crew always brought UK Sunday newspapers in for us when they brought their flight plans in. We had three parking aprons. One civil, one Jordanian Air Force and one RAF. Our facilities were the basics that I had been used to at Fayed plus; the Radar!. The very one that had been at Fayed, had gone to Cyprus and thence to Amman. It was a non standard equipment for the RAF which had received little more than a mention on the ATC course and on which in due course all Amman controllers were to be locally trained. And before you could say 'Bingo' I was appointed the Station Fire Officer as well!.
Within a matter of weeks I had found a more desirable residence
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on Jebel Taj nearer the city and things started to settle down. We soon got used to the amplified sounds from the mezzine calling the faithful to prayer....at 6 am!. it was better than an alarm clock. One could not possibly have slept through it. Not even on a day off and as I was still shift working it was inconvenient at times. However, we were comfortable and happy in our new accomodation [sic] and there were English families living around us so we did not feel as cut off as we had been before.
The new landlord was a Palestinian originally from Haifa and he and his family were very kind. They all spoke very good English and helped us with learning enough Arabic to get by on the buses and in the shops. In fact it was too easy to get lazy in learning Arabic as most people could speak English. It was the second language in all the schools.
The camp swimming pool was one of our main attractions and it was situated near the control tower. In fact when on duty I could look down on it which made it a little frustrating on those steaming days when the temperature in the 'glasshouse' was well over 100deg. and the family had come in by bus to make the most of those cooling waters.
A lot of people had written home to the tourist departments of their town halls to get posters of their favourite sea-side resort so it was not long before Worthing was also advertised on the fence. A little bit of home and of course that usually designated one's favourite spot in the area around the pool.
It was quite a small pool so sessions had to be allocated to prevent overcrowding and it was not unusual for members of the Jordanian Royal family to be mixed up with the officers families. When King Hussein flew as he did often being a pilot in his own right he insisted on going through the motions like any other pilot. He climbed the steps and presented his own flight plan for approval. and he was of course very pro-British. His army was to a great extent British financed and controlled through General Glub. His air force was similarly controlled and they were very good too having had their basic training in the UK and then finished off locally on Harvards before jet training. His senior Air Force Officer was a seconded Wing Commander and in fact there were quite a lot of secondments
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both Army and Air Force. His stable of racing cars was looked after by an ex Flight Sergeant and several- of his ponies were stabled in our pony club and looked after by us. It all seemed an innocent and comfortable arrangement. It was not always quite so comfortable on occasions when certain factions in his own country and those of neighbouring states would rather that the strongly pro-British monarch was deposed. After all, Jordan was in a peculiar geographical position. The Hashimite [sic] Kingdom of Jordan had been carved out of what used to be Palestine and some of the old Palestine was now Isreal [sic] which had produced something like a million refugees who were virtually stateless persons. The mandate that the British had had for many years had been repealed by the United Nations due to pressure to create the new state of Isreal [sic] after the war. The Arab/Jew conflict had not neccesarily [sic] been made any less of a problem and it was all tied up with the American owned IPC (Iraqi Petroleum Company) oil pipeline between Haifa and the Persian Cuff that dominated military and political thinking. Not that the pipe-line had delivered oil for a long time, but we still had an interest in it.
The King had a very close shave on one occasion when he was returning from Damascus whilst I was on duty. The Wing Cdr. was with him in the Royal De Haviland Dove and they found that they had a couple of Syrian jets on their tail. They produced some very spectacular low flying by all accounts until they were able to make contact with us for back up from anything we had flying in Jordanian air space before they were safe. It was the sort of chance he had to take in those days, even when he only used to fly half-way down the pipe-line towards Bagdad to meet his cousin King Feisal of Iraq at an air-strip on the border. Neither used to file flight plans for that. Both of them used to keep in touch through their own private shortwave radio link.
It was obvious that the senior captain of one of the resident airlines was ex-Luftwaffe by the cut of his coat and the set of his cap. Only the insignia had changed and he was an honourary [sic] member of our Mess!. We swapped a few yarns which ultimately led to the production of our respective log books which confirmed that he was the bloke that had shot up our Stirling very badly
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in October 1943 when we were on our way into Bremen. Our conversation after that provided answers to questions that we both had. Yes, he was flying a jet. An early prototype Me262, and had been scrambled for evaluation, but why had we only received small calibre shots?. The answer to that was sobering. He had used up all his cannon shooting down two other Stirlings...and the records show that three Stirlings of the force had indeed been lost that night, two of them to his guns. I can only thank my lucky stars that he had not been using cannon on us that night!. It did explain the tails of fire we had seen from his back end too. He was somewhat surprised that we had not incurred casualties and that we had in fact returned to base after all the stuff that had flowed back from us after the engagement which had obviously been the leaflets I had thrown out in a great hurry, especially as he had claimed us so badly damaged that we must have finished up in the North Sea as there had been no other crash report.
I was still negotiating for other accommodation as official quarters were still a long way off but before either came up Dorothy had to be hospitalised. She could have gone to Habbanyia or Cyprus to either of the military hospitals but she opted for an operation to be done locally at the RAF's expense in the Italian Hospital in Amman so in she went.
It was all very different from one's normal concept of hospitalisation. It was a private hospital and she did have a private ward. The head surgeon was Italian and the staff were mainly Italian nuns with some Arab cleaning staff. Catering was not normally provided but on this occasion two meals a day were provided under the terms of the contract, mainly rice and eggs. There was only one nun who spoke very limited English and with her very limited Arabic it was a bit of a pantomime. Altogether it was hardly conducive to rapid recovery.
The occupant of another adjacent private ward, a Sheik, spent most of the daylight hours out on the flat roof outside her window with all the accompaniment of a scene from the Arabian Nights. I don't know what was wrong with him but he seemed to end a lot of time trying to cough his lungs up, not that it stopped him smoking his hooka [sic] pipe.
he was well looked after by several retainers who brought him
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various kinds of food, including great bunches of grapes with which he was fed and when this circus was added to by his personal musician with his one string fiddle it was enough to drive anyone mad. That and visiting times in the afternoon for those in the dormitory wards where the sounds and smells of on the spot cooking on primus stoves wafted up were enough to have her out of there as soon as the M.O. would allow, to continue her convalescence at home.
When she was fit enough we moved house again and the process of the final negotiations for the tenancy was yet another pantomime; never to be forgotten.
Some of the locals, particularly the Sheiks, had made a packet out of the British a few years earlier when room was needed for the expansion of the airfield and other areas that were needed for the building of the Married Quarters. I suppose it was just another way of putting money into the country really but it seemed. that the criteria for receiving payment of £1000 for any sort of building on the land purchased was that it should have a door. As a result there had been a brisk trade with carpenters fitting a door to just about anything, and those that could not afford it naturally borrowed the money from the Sheiks at a premium or were forced to sell their property to the Sheiks. One way or another they were the blokes that finished up getting most of the 'ackers' which they had reinvested in properties that they let to the military. It was the process of bargaining and negotiating with these chaps that created another scene out of Arabian Nights. One must understand that bargaining is a way of life out in those parts and that to do business it was common courtesy to respect the fact that when in Rome you do as the Romans do.
One did not do business through agents as such. The only agents were the multitude of small boys who were always wandering about looking for opportunities of exercising their light fingered efforts to pick up something for nothing. A word in the ear of one of those suggesting that you were interested and an appointment would be very quickly fixed up and he would get his reward of a few fils for his trouble from both parties.
It was not the first time that I had gone through the procedure but that particular occasion sticks in my mind. At the appointed
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time we presented ourselves at the flats and were escorted to a plain unfurnished room with just cushions and a low table and then the 'person' arrived resplendent in robes of gold on black over white, with jewelled belt and sash and jewelled knife scabbard plus the butt of a pistol showing from an equally elaborate holster, and greetings were exchanged. With that over he clapped his hands and the glasses of tea appeared and the performance was on. I had been asked to bring my wife with me by one of the boys who turned out to be one of the Sheiks sons who was also acting as interpreter but it was obvious that the request had come from the Sheik. I had already been warned about him. Now the scene was set and his number one wife squatted in the dirt on the other side of the road from the flat. Women did [inserted] not [/inserted] pay [sic] a particularly important part in the routine except to keep an eye on things. No.1 wife's responsibility was managing the household and the other junior wives. So she had taken up her position.
I don't know that Dorothy was particularly happy with the situation as she sat opposite that imposing figure with the classical hooked nose and piercing eyes of the Bedouin. Pleasantries were exchanged with the first glass of tea; revolting stuff to our standards, then the second glass came up and by this time Dorothy was squirming a bit as the Sheik was not slow in examining what he seemed to be part of the deal. He played a bit of footy footy and proceeded to pinch the fleshy parts of her arm that were exposed under her shawl which she was obliged to wear in such circumstances. Their own women were covered in black from head to toe as well as wearing a yashmak. Nevertheless he examined her as if she was a chicken in the market and she winced a bit but stuck it out until the third glass of tea arrived. That was the one you did not finish and it was time to talk business. It was the way things were done and we were obliged to go along with it for about half an hour until we gave him our promise of a decision before the sun had set. We had made the decision before we made our escape from him with the eagle eye. Dorothy did not care to become part of a Hareem as part of the deal or having him inspecting his property too often with an eye to another 'wife' so the message was passed. "No thank you" and we looked elsewhere.
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We eventually rented a flat not far from the camp main gate and I suppose it could be said that it good views. It looked down on the Hadj railway station on the famous line from Damascus through Amman to a point where it fizzled out way down South towards Aquaba. A line that Lawrence of Arabia had played havoc with many years before when the Turks had control of the area. It also looked down on the main Damascus/Amman road and the prison but at least it was convenient. The landlord was the local butcher an [sic] he eventually brought along a young married chap who we were only to willing to take on as 'bearer'. He had never worked anywhere by virtue of being caught up in the net of the homeless refugees in the North but he was willing and learned fast and took no liberties. He found local accomodation [sic] and moved his family for the first ever now that he had a job which allowed him to face the world with a little more dignity instead of being dependent upon United Nations hand-outs.
He was an Abdul and replaced another Abdul who was reputed to have worked for the British Army but we were glad to see the back of him and his dirty habits plus the fact that I had found him drying out his tobacco in the gas oven on one occasion with only one side burner lit to save gas!. His English was also punctuated by a great deal of barrack room language and his final efforts in the kitchen seemed to be designed to feed his family on our left overs made sure that there was plenty for all!. Now the catering was firmly back in Dorothy's hands and Abdul looked after the rest. He needed a bit of training but it was well worth it.
My cousin that had been in Egypt was now down in Aquaba and an arrangement with the Jordanian Air Force brought him up to to [sic] spend a Christmas with us and some time later we flew down to Aquaba in the Kings personal aircraft for a couple of weeks holiday and that was a very interesting period.
Our accommodation was a holiday bungalow on the sea shore that had belonged to General Peake who had given it to the RAF for recreational purposes. It gave me an opportunity of spending more time with my cousin who I had not seen all that often in the past and to visit our limited Air Traffic Control staff and the firemen who manned the landing strip on rotational basis
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from Amman resources. The landing area was just a rolled strip in the wadi that led down almost to the waters edge and even the control cabin was only the cockpit of a Dakota that had crashed there many years before. It was no more than just another link in the chain of landing grounds that served the Army garrison tasked with keeping the peace in the area which they had been trying to do for years.
The geography was historical and had become even-more important since the creation of the State of Isreal[sic] . The Gulf of Aquaba was only three miles wide at the head and the town of Eilat in Isreal [sic] sat on one corner and the border with Egypt only a little further down. Three miles down the other side was the border with Saudi Arabia so it was quite a crossroads.
I suppose it was just my misfortune that a couple of my firemen went on a sight seeing tour whilst I was there and were absent two days as a result of straying into Isreal [sic] . No big diplomatic incident really but the Army did have to exert a little diplomacy to get them back and they were both charged for contravening standing orders. Still, one could laugh off seven days C.C. (confined to camp) in that place; there were few places to go. Anyway, the army dealt with it and I got on with my holiday. I wanted no part of. The weather was supurb [sic] , the bunglalow [sic] was on the waters edge and there was no tide to speak of. Unfortunately the glass bottomed boat that usually provided interesting views of the coral reefs had been damaged and was awaiting repair so we were not able to enjoy that experience.
Some people relate to being on holiday with being able to sleep in late but it was very rare that we were able to do that with the fishermen out in the early morning. Their fishing was accompanied by a succession of bangs resounding across the water. Lazy fishing that; with sticks of dynamite!. Then they netted the stunned fish afterwards. The girls were warned to keep well out of the way when they were close to the shore as obviously they were not all that clever. The dynamite thrower in one boat only had one arm and the girls had learned earlier on in Amman that when told to do things like that it was for a very good reason and they had to react without question. On that previous occasion in Amman we had gone into town on a little shopping expedition and had just reached the main shopping area where
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there seemed to be a lot of people and suddenly the whole crowd erupted as shots rang out, followed by a lot of panic stricken people running in our direction. When I grabbed them and said "run" they did. Hot foot down the road, into the Hotel Continental where we stayed until things had gone quiet before taking a taxi back home. I understood later that day that an order had been issued on camp putting the city out of bounds but then I had not been into camp and knew nothing about the possibility of trouble.
We managed to enjoy ourselves though, just lazing about, swimming, playing board games, reading, listening to London on the short wave overseas service but generally resting up wondering what was going to happen next. Something always did!. One morning we were having coffee out in front of the bungalow when we noticed that a Royal Navy destroyer had dropped anchor about half a mile out and it was not long before a boat with four ratings and a Petty Officer was rowed ashore. They tied up just few yards from us and were loaded with some metal trunking that they started to chip paint from so I figured that they were defaulters given a dirty job to do. Hard luck on the Petty Officer!.
I would have left them to it but there was a geat [sic] deal of lower deck language that was enough to blister the paint off without the use of elbow grease so two little girls had to be hauled out of earshot whilst I ambled across and asked them if they would like some refreshment. They nearly fell over with shock but the P.O. jumped at the opportunity. Beer for him please, anything but beer for the others and what the blue blazes were we doing in such a God forsaken hole and where the hell was he anyway?. He was quite happy to sit in the shade and chat for some time whilst the others chipped away until a winking light from the ship signalled that it was time to return. It had made his day and in the time we had spent chatting I had found out that he knew my brother from his days at HMS Vernon, the torpedo establishment at Portsmouth. It's a small world.
Later on as darkness fell the ship was dressed overall with lights and was an imposing sight out in the Gulf as small craft pIied to and fro' with the garrison Commander and his party to a social function on board. I think they may have stayed
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most of the night if what happened to us is anything to go by.
We had been invited by some Arab neighbours to coffee, cakes and social chat and there had been no mention of conditions outside when darkness fell. We found out as soon as we got outside. Everything was blacked out by rising sand. Not the sort of sand storm with horizontal wind but the sort in which sand is just lifted straight up and deposited somewhere else. We could hardly see our hand in front of our face. If it had not been for our hosts being more familiar with the area I doubt if we could have negotiated the fifty yards between the houses.
We put the shutters up as soon as we got back but it was too late and it took ages to clear the heavy layer of sand that had been deposited over and inside everything which included the beds and the pantry. Just something else to put down to experience. We were well rested by the time we flew back to Amman in an RAF Valetta and as I knew the pilot from Fayed days he kindly circled the ancient and amazing city of Petra virtually hidden in the desert which we would otherwise never have seen, and then it was back to the old routine. Not a dull one by any means. Among my activities I had a taste of some limited radar control on which I was locally trained. I found the process fairly easy to pick up as this was a 'one man band' and the initial pick up was assisted by a built in direction finder system. To an ex aircrew wireless op. it was no problem. It did not take long to become proficient and as the only other qualified controller was leaving I finished up being in charge of the thing and training others, not without some dissapointments [sic] . The Senior Controller, an ex navigator, couldn't cope with it and neither could another, an ex pilot, but enough did become proficient to ensure that there were sufficient people to rotate. It was not all that comfortable stuck out in a metal box at the end of the runway.
That particular radar unit was the one that had done the rounds. At one time it had been at Nicosia before it had been transferred to Fayed and then Amman and the original operator had travelled with it but it could only provide a very limited service and as far as the RAF was concerned it was a 'one-off'. It gave me some useful experience anyway that I made use of later on.
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By that time we had given up the idea of getting back to Egypt for a holiday. Fayed was just about handed over to the Egyptians so we could not get a passage that way and since holidays had to be planned well ahead it didn't seem worth the effort to go the long way around via Cyprus so that was ruled out. Haifa or some similar place was considered before we found that it was again impossible to go direct particularly as we would need a second passport to visit Arab countries and Israel. The tension was very real out there at the time. Even the Naafi could not import any goods that may have been a product of Israel and postings to a place like Amman ruled out anyone of Jewish name or origin.
It was the only place that I had come across where a parade commander was to say "Roman Catholics may fall out" before prayers. That order was usually "Roman Catholics and Jews....". In the end we figured that we would do better just to make the most of our immediate surroundings but we never got to Beruit [sic] or Damascus. Every time we made plans for a long break between shifts or a week-end those places were declared out of bounds.
It did seem as if we were hemmed in although we were in regular contact with neighbouring countries. Even our daily radio checks gave us two way communication with Nicosia and strangely enough Lod in Israel. We thought nothing of it, or of giving bearings to any Israeli aircraft that called us but the Jordanian Air Ministry were very sensitive and suspicious about it so we had to discontinue any contact with Israel.
We had a very interesting experience one afternoon when we were having tea in the flat when there was a shivering shaking sensation. The tea in my cup rippled an [sic] I immediately recalled something that my father had mentioned about his time in India. If in doubt look at the ceiling light, and there it was swinging gently to and fro' and then I knew that what I had felt was an earthquake tremor Dorothy looked at me and asked "why did you kick my chair?" and then nearly fell out of hers when I told her to look at the swinging lamp and the significance of it. It was a very light tremour [sic] really and we understood later that the centre had been around Damascus but there had been no damage.
One real highlight of Amman was my flight in a Venom jet trainer.
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Since my first jet experience in a Canberra I had been itching to have another go. It was not difficult to arrange and away we went into the wide blue yonder. It was the most exhilarating experience. The sky was bright blue well laced with towering cumulus cloud and at 25,000ft I was in my element when control was handed to me in the side by side trainer as I went cloud hopping. I was in my element and I always knew that I had an aptitude for it. I performed all the standard manoeuvres successfully which rather surprised the pilot. Wireless Ops. don't do things like that!, but he changed his mind when I attempted a roll. Then my old problem of disorientation reared it's head again and he had to take control to prevent us hurtling earthwards out of control. He reckoned that with formal training I would have had no real difficulty in becoming a pilot but it was too late for me to change direction at that time.
Our flat overlooked the prison just beyond the main road and an incident there created a lasting impression on Dorothy. I could understand that if conditions in the prison were as crude as those in the hospital then a lot of people went hungry most of the time if family and friends did not bring in food regularly or the inmates had not got the money to pay for it but that's the way it worked. Prison out there was real punishment and the ultimate was to be publicly hung in the city's amptheatre [sic] which were other occasions when the city was out of bounds.
The incident really upset her when some noisy activity started as protests were voiced and then the whole thing escalated rapidly.
There were hundreds of prisoners milling around the courtyard and the guards manning the walls were reinforced by the army. What sparked it off I could not say but there was a sudden crackle of rifle fire and prisoners went down like nine-pins for several minutes. When it stopped the army entered the courtyard and hearded [sic] the frantic mob to one side as dozens of bodies were dragged away and she could no longer watch the scene of such callus [sic] slaughter. She had some very bad dreams for a long while after that.
At last a married quarter became available after some ten months of waiting and moving around and we moved into a very large
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converted hut which many years before had been the Education Section. The original lettering on the doors was still visable [sic] under fresh paintwork. A friend of mind remembers the building from when he was out there in 1937!. However, it was spacious, convenient and comfortable. Just a stone's throw from the Mess and almost overlooking the flat that we had just left. In addition to our own servant who successfully passed his medical we were allocated an official one, shared with another family, so life took on a whole new style.
Typical of course was the fact that very British fire places had been installed but the cooker was still the parafin [sic] job so took our rented gas one with us. The water heater was the most diabolical hazard that I had ever come across. It was oil fired; with a difference!. We had got used to parafin [sic] fridges and cookers so one took such things in one's stride. To fire up the boiler you turned on the fuel to drip onto a metal plate, then set light to it. By turning the fuel tap on and off the plate eventually got hot enough to explode the drips as they fell on the plate and then it could be adjusted to give a series of continuous explosions and presto!, hot water!. A damn dangerous device though and as fire officer I made sure that everyone was reminded regularly of it's dangers. At least it was more civilised than what we had been recently used to. In our first place on Jebel Hasheem we had a bath that had to be filled with buckets of water that had to be heated by other means and the drain hole was positioned above nothing more than a hole in the floor. It was alright until the bath slipped off of the supporting bricks and flooded the floor. Perhaps it was better that way as it slowed down the activities of the toads, whacking great spiders and scorpians [sic] that tended to investigate the invasion of what they considered to be their territory. In the last flat, although new, we had always had trouble with the drains. The worst part being that when there was a blockage in the system. When we flushed everything came up in the next door neighbours bath!. Small problem….well, to us anyway. When the sanitory [sic] people were called in they pin-pointed the problem of blockages right away. Apparently toilet paper should not be flushed into 2" drains!. The alternative was most unhygenic [sic] to European standards.
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Now it seemed that we were home and dry. There was a bit of a garden which was overgrown so after I set my photo dark-room up I got to work terracing the garden so that we were able to grow tomatoes and sweet corn within a matter of months. The trouble was that it disturbed the habitat of several dangerous species of snakes and other creepy crawlies of which there were plenty. One had to be forever on the alert for them, checking footwear and clothing, and particularly bedding.
One of the strangest creatures was the sand beetle. This chap was about 1/2 ins. long and lived in the sand with the entrance to it's complex protected by a trap door. It had the most incredible technique of building a hinged trap door which was a perfect watertight fit. To see this thing nip down it's hole and pull the trap door down after him was quite amazing.
Another insect that surprised us one evening when we were having drinks on the veranda were the fireflies. For a moment I thought that I had made the drinks a little too strong when little bright lights started jumping around the table but then a little more light was produced they turned out to be little flying insects with little light bulbs in their tails.
Lizards of between four and five inches were common and quite harmless. We had one or two resident one's that had been given names and at one time we had a Chameleon that I had found in the garden but it died on us. Probably due to the rapid changes of colour that was expected of it when we put it on a multi coloured carpet. The poor thing probably got into a state of utter confusion and died of a heart attack.
Tortoises were common and I have never seen so many in a natural habitat as there were around the old Roman city of Jarash, and Jarash it'self [sic] was another incredible place that was right out of biblical times. It had been uncovered in the preceeding [sic] 20 years and I swear that if you just stood there and listened you could hear the ghosts of the past all around and the sounds of chariot wheels on the old Roman roads that still bore the marks of those wheels.
We paid a visit to the Dead Sea and it was well worth the frightening drive. The native taxy driver seemed quite oblivious to his surroundings as we swept along high mountain unmade roads that twisted and turned with sometimes as much as a sheer 1500ft
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drop on one side into a moonscape like valley. Mix that up with the dust, the heat and five fractous [sic] kids as we were sharing the journey with another family, the driver with only one hand on the wheel and the radio blasting native music at 99 decibals [sic] and you have all the ingredients for a very exciting time. It was. Our route took us through Jericoh [sic] and close to the old courthouse, where according to the scriptures Christ was tried and sentenced, until we eventually got to the banks of the Dead Sea, over 500ft [underlined] below [/underlined] sea level and where I subsequently was flown down to in a Jordanian Air Force aircraft. A most interesting experience.
After the journey the sight of so much water was a great temptation and in we all went but within minutes we were in trouble. The adults knew that it was impossible to sink in that sea due to it's high salt content but no-one had told us that it was just like acid if you got it in the eyes. The kids thrashed around screaming in pain and it was just as well that we had a plentiful supply of water in bottles that we were able to pour over their faces until all was well again. After the initial discomfort we were all very careful as we experimented in the very dense water. It was quite incredible. Even just walking into it, before one was waist deep it was impossible to keep your feet on the bottom. You couldn't swim in it either. There was just not enough of the body in water to be able to go through the normal motions. Arms and legs just thrashed around in the air and it really was possible just to float in the sitting position with head and shoulders out of the water.
That was alright until we came out and there was no-where we could rinse off as most of our precious bottles of water had been used up. Within minutes we dried off and were covered in a layer of salt crystals and that was the way we set off back via a different route.
On the way we came across a place by the name of Salt. Just a nameplace where the road crossed a small tumbling stream so we made a stop there to wash off the salt and freshen up. There was an old rusted cannon and a lot of other ironmongery in the stream left from battles of long ago but we did not have a lot time to investigate further. A Jordanian soldier appeared and warned us off by the process of pointing his rifle at us
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so one does not argue in a situation like that. We did a bit more splashing about after I had put my camera way [sic] whilst the driver and the soldier communicated. Some folding money changed hands and we were on our way. The driver told us that the small wooden bridge was guarded because of it's strategic importance and I suspect that it had been guarded ever since General Allenby had passed that way during the first World War. Rather like the Allenby bridge across the River Jordan that we also visited on another occasion. That was still guarded so we did not think it worth while trying to obtain a bottle of water that we had planned to do. I suppose that if we had approached the soldiers with a fistful of notes we could have done it as that is what seemed to smooth the way generally if you wanted to get things done as a friend of mine found out when he imported a car from the UK!.
God knows how long the preliminaries had taken to even order it but in due course it arrived at Beruit [sic] after months of waiting.
Then came the business of getting it into Jordan. First of all he could not do it himself and pay the fees. That was much too easy. It had to be imported by a recognised import/export firm and then negotiations were started with the appropriate Government department although he was entitled to it's import without tax, under current diplomatic arrangements. So it laid at Beruit [sic] for many months as palms were greased until it duly arrived in Amman. Having accumulated more fees by that time there were even more to pay. Several more months of negotiations had followed as the documentation kept getting held up until fistfull [sic] of Dinars smothed [sic] the way and it was finally HIS car. Not that he was able to tax and insure it and drive it away. Despite the fact that it was new it had to go through all the mechanical checks that all vehicles were required to go through before being given a registration. It was a sort of MOT test but set annually, and annually got a different registration number which also meant a new set of plates. More Dinars changed hands at each of the four stages of testing, shuffling and mis-laying of papers, passing the papers to the department that made the plates, (right next door to the registration office), more mis-laid papers, and at last, when
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the plates were ready, the production of the insurance documents before those plates could be fixed and sealed by the department. Plus of course the final bakshees before he could actually take the car on the road. In all it took just over a year. He never took it for a second test. Things happened that forced him to subsequently drive it across the desert nearly 500 miles to Habbanyia where it was eventually taken to Basra under service arrangements and it came back to the UK on the Ark Royal minus wing mirrors, screen wipers, wheel trims, slightly dented and rusted. Fortunately there was enough documentation with it to ensure that it was not subject to import duty....provided that he kept it for a year!. At that point in time he would rather have got rid of it when he eventually got back to the UK himself but despite all the hassle he made full use of it. That was a car with a history.
I eventually got my opportunity to go further East. Just far enough. I was detailed to go to Habbanyia in Iraq for Courts Martial duties as a member of the Court. Anything except defence or prosecution, but it was not quite the 'perk' that I thought it was going to be.
After flying in I reported to the Adjutant who I knew and had a been the Signals Leader of 138 Squadron at Wyton and subsequently 90 Squadron at Marham, (at the same time as the chap who had fun with the car had been there); only to find that the President of the Court was none other than 'Black Mac' himself.
Being the junior member I was the 'scribe' and Mac was his same old self. His Adjutant was having as rough a time with him as I had had at Coningsby. Anyway, the case was over in a day and sentance [sic] was pronounced so I immediately set about putting some distance between Black Mac and myself.
It took three days with the flight priority that I had and more than one argument with the Senior Air Traffic Controller at Habbanyia who wanted to put me to work there. No way!. I wasn't there for that and it was a good thing that I knew a few people, not the least the Adjutant, who kept me on a four hour stand-by for a seat on an aircraft back to Amman. Apart from anything else I wanted to see Habbanyia, the RAF's jewel in the desert.
There was plenty of it with the old plateau airfield and the new one that had been laid out on the plain; the former being
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used for the training of the Iraqi Air Force. The relatively new base on the plain was surrounded by masses of buildings, three swimming pools, a profusion of lawns and gardens that turned the place into a glittering oasis. I walked miles and miles around that place and marvelled at the engineering that had made full use of the waters of the Euphrates and numerous artisan wells. There was even a large lodgement compound for the hundreds of native workers and their families who seemed to enjoy quite reasonable amenities, and eventually a seat became available and I was on my way back to Amman. I was to go back there again in due course.
Meanwhile it was back to work. I was duty controller and the airfield had been shut for a couple of hours one evening as no traffic had been notified when one of the ATC assistants phoned from the duty but to tell me that there was an aircraft overhead flashing it's lights. There was a rapid call out for duty crews and I was off to the control tower. The aircraft was still circling when I went on the air and asked the pilot to identify himself. It turned out to be an Eagle Airlines York freighter on his way to India which had been routed to us but the signals office still had nothing so he had to circle until we lit the place up, inspected the runway and alerted all the other services before we let him in. Then there were a few more surprises as the pilot and the navigator turned out to be ex 207 Squadron, Marham, who I had known there.
It did not take long to find out why they had arrived before the notification. They had actually been routed via Cyprus and Beruit [sic] but had done a short cut across the Med. and smack across Isreal [sic] . It might have seemed logical at the time but with no diplomatic clearance such an unauthorised route could have had unpleasant results from a trigger happy Ack-Ack gunner.
There was never a dull moment although some of the things that happened were quite serious.
Our helicopter with the Station Commander and Station Warrant Officer on board went down the line of the old Hadj railway of Lawrence of Arabia fame; to a point where it petered out about half way to Aquaba. For some reason or other the SWO, contrary to standing orders relative to the safe areas around a helicopter made the mistake of backing into the tail rotor,
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and a military funeral was the order of the day and a few months afterwards the helicopter pilot's wife who had shared our taxi to Gerash died of natural causes and there was more sadness in our tightly knit community.
There was a snippet of information from Habbanyia that did me the world of good when I heard of it and had a little 'chortle' at Black Mac's expense. He had given orders for an enormous banquet to be laid on. Typical, it had to be big!, but to lay that on for around a thousand people was no mean task. I definitely would not have cared to be in his Adjutants shoes about that time. As usual he had a hand in everything, including the menu and I can imagine the raised eyebrows when he decided that among the many courses served to two Kings, Ambassadors and dignatories [sic] from all over the Middle East was; maise!,(corn on the cob). That's what they feed the chickens on out there! but that was not the end of his indiscretions.
There was King Feisal of Iraq and his cousin King Husein [sic] of Jordan so it didn't help matters when he proposed a toast to King Feisal of Jordan!. I could just imagine the diplomatic huffing and puffing that went on. I had been on the mat in front of him often enough. I would like to have been a fly on the wall when he was on the mat in front of the C in C later.
In the political turmoil of the area we still managed to carry on with a small degree of normallity [sic] .
We managed a sports day with inter service competition between the RAF, the Army and the Jordanian services finishing up with a flying display from both Air Forces and on more than one occasion we closed the airfield to suit the Kings convenience by turning it into a motor racing circuit. That was a bit of fun on one occasion when he wanted to try out his latest Mercedes sports car. I can't remember the model but I do remember that it had gull wing doors. I even had the privilege of belting it around in company with the rest of his fleet.
It was a dreadful shock when we heard later that there had been a political uprising in Iraq, something that seemed to be spreading right through the Middle East, and as a result of that particular incident King Feisal of Iraq and most of the Royal family has been massacred, and a republic had been declared.
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There was definitely a rot setting in and there was no doubt that there was a lot of outside influence behind it all. You didn't have to be a genious [sic] to work out the fact that oil and a power politics was still the key to the whole business in Egypt, the Suez Canal, Jordan, Iraq and as it was to turn out later, Aden, the Persian Gulf and Iran and all points East. It seemed that that area of the British Empire's influence was crumbling around us.
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Nevertheless, Air Traffic Control was the job and there were few occasions when a shift did not produce something out of the ordinary.
It was all quiet one sultry afternoon when I heard a very faint 'May-Day' call on the common frequency and immediately responded but found it difficult to achieve satisfactory contact. The direction finder bearing showed the aircraft to be to the North of us and although it was possible to pick out a call-sign the rest of the message seemed to be in German. After giving courses to steer to reach us the aircraft's transmissions were getting louder and the pilot was calming down although it was obvious that his English was very limited, as was our German and then one of the assistants came to the rescue. I was not aware that he was a Channel Islander but he asked me to find out if the pilot 'parlies vous francious [sic] '?. That brought forth a stream of French so I put the assistant on the radio and it did not take long to find out what it was all about. At least he was steering the headings he had been given and was getting louder which was the most important thing but he turned out be a Swiss. in a light aircraft en. route from Cyprus to Bagdad but had encountered head winds, was lost and getting low on fuel. Certainly he had done the right thing by declaring an emergency over that inhospitable terrain that looked like the surface of the moon and getting into a bit of a panic that caused him to lapse into non-standard procedure. The rest was easy. He followed our instructions until he found us after which he was directed to the civilian reception area for the rest of the
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formalities. By the time he came over later to file a flight plan he had calmed down and able to communicate in good English and certainly happy enough that he had finished up with the RAF in Jordan instead of being lost in the mountains. Another satisfied customer even if we did extract a small landing fee from him.
I had to respond very rapidly to another emergency situation one evening shortly before our normal shut-down time. One of the Venoms was still airborne and the C.O. was on his way back from Aquaba in a Pembroke. The helicoptor [sic] pilot had just put his chopper away in the hangar almost opposite the control tower and had given me a wave as he started to walk off when the Venom pilot came on the air reporting his position and the fact that he had just flamed out and would be ejecting in five seconds ...4..3...2...1 and he was gone. There was a quick shout to the chopper pilot and hand signals to wind it up, another quick call on the radio to the C.O. who was on a different frequency almost overhead, to tell him that we had 'one down about 25 mls to the North East of us, please investigate...chopper on the way' and everything swung into action from there. Suffice to say that the downed pilot was back on the airfield within 30 minutes of his first call. Not bad going. The same 'downed' pilot was the one that subsequently took the first Harrier on a non-stop transatlantic flight to New York.
There was another occurance [sic] one late afternoon when a Valetta had a burst tyre and ran off of the runway to get well and truly bogged down but things like that were only slight hic-ups in a day's routine and I must admit that I was getting a lot more out of life than if I had continued to push paper around in the Secretarial Branch. Not that there wasn't any paperwork but it was different.
I had not been in Quarters on camp for very long and I had an off-duty morning closeted in my dark room when I heard the fire alarm faintly in the distance but with all the stuff I had in the trays I decided to ignore it. There was a highly qualified
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Flight/Sergeant RAF Regiment fireman on duty and quite capable of handling any situation without me. I found out what it had all been about when I went on duty for the afternoon shift and in hind-sight figured that it might have been better if I had turned out.
The fire had been in a ventilation canopy over the airmens mess kitchen right next to the school, so the firemen and police had cleared the school and were tackling the fire quite successfully until the Wg/Cdr. Admin turned up and instructed then to lay foam on the roof. They did as they were told and the resultant mess took days to clear up as the foam slid off into the school. My daughters were delighted at the fun and a few days off but the kitchens and the mess and the school were in a hell of a state. Ox blood based foam is very sticky stuff but I found a bit of a problem in writing up the fire report. First of all I was in trouble for not being there and then because foam had been used. I think it took three drafts of the report before the Wg/Cdr found it acceptable to pass on without laying the blame for the mess at anyone's door.
Following the report were his own recommendation that I, as fire officer should be on the phone so a phone was installed,(not that it would be any good if I was in the control tower or off camp as anyone else was entitled to be when off duty, but that caused another storm in a tea cup.
Some time later I got the bill for the telephone installation and was hot foot down to see the Wg/Cdr. As far as he was concerned I had the facility and I should pay for it but there was one quick way out of that. I insisted that as it was a strictly a service requirement on his own recommendation it should be restricted for incoming calls only and the Air Force could pay for it...and that was that. As far as I was concerned it was a matter of principle but I was beginning to wonder if other people had the same sort of hassle over almost everything. I certainly seemed to be getting more than my share anyway.
We had another unfortunate incident one night when an aircraft of the local air line inbound from Jedda lost an engine on final approach and piled in about three miles out. There were no other aircraft scheduled so with all the alarms going we were straight
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into the crash procedure and I jumped aboard one of the back up water tenders to get to the scene. It was a very rough ride but all we had to do was to head straight for the fire and by the time we got there the aircraft was well alight. The first rescue crews on the scene had put water spray on the exits where the passengers had been scrambling out virtually being pushed along by the crew and the last of them had just got out a few minutes before I got there and the fire finally beat the water and the foam and was rapidly consuming the aircraft.
Nevertheless, the crew were uninjured and there were no serious injuries among the passengers no doubt due to the fact that the the [sic] pilot had whipped the undercarriage up smartly and had done a successful belly flop in the lights of his landing lights. I found the rather shaken Captain who told me that at least everyone was out until there was some hysterical screaming from one of the native passengers who had been assembled in a group to one side and ultimately some-one conveyed the message that she had left her baby an the luggage rack…..too late!. The aircraft was melting down and there was nothing that could be done until things cooled off. Meanwhile we started loading the passengers into an RAF bus and ambulance as well as some of the back-up fire vehicles that were no longer needed and they set off back to the medical centre. My problem was that due to the terrain our radio to the tower was virtually useless and produced little more than buzzes and crackles so no-one on the airfield knew what was going on. I did something that was a bit hit and miss but it worked. I got the Rescue Landrover up to the highest point I could looking down on the airfield and broadcast the information and in addition I used the headlights to morse a message to the tower. They got both and the medical centre was ready to receive them and attend to the injured. Typical of the way they did things out there was one of the final acts. The pilot was promptly placed under arrest by the civil authority even though he was still in a state of shock. Out there you were often guilty until you could prove your innocence. It was the way things were done and one got used to things that would have been outrageous at home. It was very similar to the manner in which I saw the public treat a taxi driver in Amman city after he had knocked over
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a small boy in the main street. The taxi had come to a screeching stop after the lad had nipped in front of him and got clipped. A howling mob descended upon the taxi driver and hauled him out of the vehicle and pulled, punched and kicked him in the direction of the nearest police post whilst in the meantime the small boy, who had only been bumped and had rolled into the gutter, got up, dusted himself off and scurried down a side ally. No doubt the taxi driver got thumped for his part in the incident and it seemed that no-ne [sic] was particularly interested in a slightly grazed little boy!.
The unit library was a place that most people used and contributed to quite regularly but most books had become dog-eared and certain types, mainly 'whodunits' very often had their story line ruined by the attentions of a certain elderly lady.
The lady was an ex school mistress who had taught in the local missionary schools since the days of Queen Victoria if her appearance was anything to go by. She wore Victorian type clothing that elderly ladies of that era would have worn. Voluminous skirt and blouse with tweed jacket, the whole ensemble, half moon steel rimmed glasses and all, topped off by a white brolly. She lived locally although retired, and had stayed on, greatly respected by the local population and permitted the privilege of an honourary [sic]membership of our mess. That was how she came to use the library but the margins of nearly every book contained some comment, like an Agatha Christie Miss Marples, in her unmistakable shaky scrawl such as, 'now I know who it is', or 'so and so did it', or 'it cannot be……' or 'I knew it was' etc, etc. but she was a great character and after a spot of bother on one occasion with some of the locals when she needed rescuing from an excitable crowd she was heard giving them some suitable comment in arabic about their behaviour whilst still retaining her dignity.
At one point in the late summer we got the first rains of the season and a most wonderful sight met our eyes when we looked p down the hill from the bungalow. The whole hillside was covered in a solid carpet of crocus in all shades of mauve. They had
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just popped up, and by the end of the day they had all gone again. Surprising what a bit of moisture will do in that part of the world where it did not usually rain between March and September.
As the weather became cooler we decided to have a fire lit in the lounge one evening. Coal was available in the outside storage bin supplied on payment through the stores and very expensive. As it was a most unlikely commodity in that part of the world I asked the storeman how the devil we got it to find that apparently it was supplied under a local contract and came from South Africa by boat to Aquaba and then was brought up by camel train. Very precious stuff that!. However, Abdul was instructed to light a fire. I suppose I should have shown him how to do it the first time but it never occurred to me that he would never have seen coal before so when he queried the method he was told, paper and wood with the coal on top and the black rock will burn. So he did as he was told but he had experimented somewhat. He mixed the lot up with about a pint of parafin [sic] , set light to it outside and then brought it all in in a bucket. There was certainly some pandemonium when he came staggering in with a bucket of fire on the end of a pole!. The Station Fire Officer had visions of his quarters going up in smoke but we did eventually manage to transfer it to the fireplace where he sat watching it for a long time before being convinced that the black rock really did burn.
Their usual method of producing heat was by some parafin [sic] appliance or charcoal or even scrub wood which further diminished what timber there was on the sparse hillsides.
There was always plenty of social activity with dances, parties, horse riding, tennis, swimming gala's, motor racing etc, etc but I will always remember one particular function that we attended. A reception at the British Embassy was about the dullest affair that I have ever been to. The drinks were so watered that even if you asked for a straight Whisky you still couldn't taste it, or the Gin or the Brandy for that matter. One thing was for sure, no-one was likely to have more than was good for him and let the side down. What other foreign
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nationals from other Embassies thought about I wouldn't know but I imagine that giving a Russian a Vodka similarly diluted would have raised an eyebrow, and precious little else!. However, as is so often said, it was all part of life's rich tapestry.
As a part time untrained fire officer I was certainly getting my share of 'on the job training' from the experiences of attending some quite spectacular fires.
Shortly after having the phone put in I had a call-out and had no option but to turn out since the call came direct from the C.O. The first one was in the Souk (market), in the city, and I mustered the maximum that was available, leaving the bare minimum for the airfield so we set off with four vehicles and when we arrived the area was an inferno. The source of the fire was right in the centre where there was a great deal of timber used by a small factory producing boxes for fruit and vegetable packing and although the native population were very agitated not a lot seemed to be happening. The municipal fire services were no-where to be seen and as my F/Sgt was on leave the two corporals soon assessed the situation and started to deploy the vehicles whilst I went in search of a person of some authority and to find a source of water replenishment. I was unfortunate in both respects and when I returned to the scene it was obvious that we were in trouble. A hord [sic] of uncontrollable natives were helping out in their own way by manhandling one hose and had pulled the pump off of the jacks and the suction hose out of the water bowser to such an extent that there was water everywhere except where we wanted it. It was a fine old mess until I managed to find a policeman with stripes on his arm and asked him to muster sufficient troops to protect the operation whilst my firemen were instructed to recover everything, stop pumping and to stand-by until we had control. Not easy as some people were absolutely frantic as it appeared that at least four people had been caught in the blaze. As I saw it they would have been well and truly roasted by that time and my main concern was to stop the fire from spreading and we started to pump water again as far as our tankerage would allow although we had found a supply source of our own at an ice factory back along the road and started
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a shuttle and that kept things going.
In due course the municipal fire brigade arrived and positioned themselves on the downwind side of the fire…..and the best of luck, then the Jordanian Air Force arrived with their pump but no water tender but very soon packed up as their hoses were perished and leaking but it didn't matter much as they then ran out of petrol!. At least we were putting on water..until the King arrived!.
The police lost control of the crowd again, everyone was bowing and scraping. We lost control of the pump for a while and stopped pumping which upset the King a little when he came to watch progress but was satisfied that we had a water problem and as the fire was almost under control we might as well allow the centre to burn out unless the city fire services still required us. That being established we wrapped it up and set off home in convoy with a salute to the King and clapping from the locals....but we were minus one brass hose nozzle; which had been stolen!.
The next fire I attended some time later was to a cinema up on Jebel Ammman overlooking the city. That time we took the big fire tender with back-up pump and tanker. I went with the big Mk.V. and half a dozen firemen and air traffic control assistants but we did not have the best of drivers for a job like that. There were some very steep hills to negotiate and that particular model as fas [sic] I was concerned had some built in design faults. Not the least of which was it's hill climbing capability with a full load of water and foam compound plus a few people. In the excitement the driver did not react properly to the possibility of an extended hill climb when he should have selected auxiliary low gear at the bottom of the hill, but instead he stuffed it at the hill until he ran out of steam and then muffed a gear change. That was a recipe for disaster.
We started to roll back. Neither footbrake or handbrake would hold it and with the prospect of a nasty situation arising I hollered to all the men on the back to bale out, crashed the gear lever into a forward gear and wrenched the wheel out of the drivers grasp so that our downhill run was stopped by our back end ramming a low wall. I got some stick for it of course but I am convinced that it saved the day. It saved the troops
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but it bent the tender and the wall but at least we did take off again and got to the scene of the fire. Unfortunately the pump outlets had been damaged and we could only use it as a back-up water tender to our trailer pump that got to work immediately on arrival. The cinema was nearly gutted anyway and the shell of the building itself had prevented any spread of fire to surrounding buildings so there was little that we could do. The city fire services were spraying water on the side wall, aiming for one small window quite high up, with very little success until one local fireman climbed an extending ladder with his 1 1/2 inch hose to put water directly into the window. I didn't think it was good idea as it was all very close to overhead power lines and the like so I went inside through the foyer with the city fire chief to asses the possibility of taking our hoses in through that way and promptly retreated. The fire had got a good hold so I immediately withdrew all of our appliances out of the roadway from below the wall of the building to the space under the inside balcony. The main wall was as hot as the side of a brick kiln and all that cooling water in my estimation was likely to cause a blow-out and collapse the wall. Despite putting this suggestion to the fire chief that his man up the ladder was in considerable danger he left him up there whilst we concentrated on the fire at the base of the inside wall.
Of course, in retrospect there is always another way of dealing with a situation although my report emphasised the need to keep my firemen out of the danger of a collapsing wall so as usual I got 'stick' for it. That is what officers in charge were for!!.
That's what the recently appointed C.O. thought anyway as for some reason he did not have a lot of time for Air Traffic Controllers, even though we were all ex aircrew. To him we were 'rock-apes', a term of endearment usually reserved for the RAF Regiment. There was very little that any of us could do right according to him, so there was the usual enquiry and a lot more caustic comment thrown around. I was used to it by that time so it was all water off of a ducks back.
I was paying a number of liaison visits to the civil airport
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by that time as parts of the civil terminal building were being up-dated with an Air Traffic Control facility although it was very basic. Almost every time I went there the man in charge was comfortably dressed in pyjamas and rather like the Egyptians had very limited knowledge and even less experience but most of their questions were answered. We never saw them in our Air Traffic Control tower though. They always declined the invitation as apparently they monitored all of our radio channels anyway!.
I have very good reason to remember the occasion that the terminal was officially opened by King Hussien [sic] . I had an official invitation to attend with a place on the viewing balcony so of course I had my camera at the ready when the King advanced along the red carpet towards the entrance just below and a perfect shot was presented....then my lens hood fell off and landed at the feet of P.M. with a gentle tinkle. There was instant reaction. H.M. stepped back smartly, surrounded by his escort whilst about ten weapons were aimed straight at me. Phew!. Fortunately I was immediately recognised by the King as the chap he saw quite regularly in the control tower when he presented his flight plan and with a wave the procession carried on. One thing I did not expect was a soldier clattering up the steps to hand me back my lens hood with the compliments of the King. Alright to laugh at later but a bit tense at the time.
The political situation in Jordan seemed to changing in a way that was very similar to that which had caused Britain to give up their protective role in Egypt under the mandate given to us by the United Nations. We had been obliged to get out of Egypt and our troops had been withdrawn from the Canal Zone. Now the power struggle had centred on Jordan and King Hussien [sic] being pro. British was having a spot of bother keeping control of the situation and on one occasion when I paid a liaison visit to the civil 'Air Traffic Control Centre' I had an extraordinary proposal put to me. Although one had to be very careful not to discuss sensitive political matters a mention was made of Colonel Nasser who was the current 'fly in the ointment' in Egypt. It was suggested that if I could arrange for the British Government to put up £1,000,000 in gold Nasser could easily
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be put out of business!.
Having done my best to confirm that it was not a joke I lost no time in passing the message along a discreet channel which dealt with such things and naturally heard no more about it.
It was not long after that incident that I was on duty in the control tower and soon after we had opened up in the morning a great deal of activity was observed over at the civil terminal building as well as in the Jordanian Air Force dispersals. Through the binoculars I was able to determine the figure of General Glub, C in C of the Jordanian Forces, (and controller of the purse strings for the British money that kept that force going), in amongst a large crowd of military people.
It all looked very excitable and not the usual situation that one expected to see the General in so I immediately opened the line to our intelligence officer to give him a running commentary on the activities as far as I could see. One of the Jordanian Air Force's De Haviland Dove's was run up and then started taxying as the pilot called for take-off clearance whilst on the move. He would not give his destination although he advised that his flight was diplomatically cleared and he duly took off heading North. So was the General and his Lady as we found out later!. There had been a coup. Out went the General and the Jordanians controlled their own purse military purse strings. The results of that were soon very obvious as the supply of British money was cut off.
The British seconded personnel were OK for their pay as they were seconded from their respective forces but pay for Jordanian Forces soon became unreliable. So did the supply and re-supply of military stores. Their uniforms became tatty. Their boots were wearing out and we were to find out later that the troops were selling their equipment to make both ends meet although the shortage of one commodity did not come to light for some time.
It was after attending another fire that we were able to put two and two together. The fire was in one of the typical concrete blockhouse native dwellings out in the scrub and there was a hell of a bang one night when it erupted in smoke and flame. When we got there it was obvious that there was little need
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for our services. For myself I had long given up trying to put out fires. The priority was to save lives, stop the spread of fire and last of all saving of property. What we were faced with was a blackened ruptured mess that had been a home but with very little combustable [sic] material left but the worst part of, it was that there were half a dozen pink, bloated, naked bodies spread around it, plus one on what was left of the roof. We dowsed the place well and truly with water and the locals recovered the body but it was even more terrible to find that most of the casualties were women. They all had to be very carefully handled so we left the clearing up job to the Jordanians.
The subsequent Investigations showed that the explosion was caused by the careless handling of some high grade cordite, from some .303ins. cartridge cases complete with percussion caps, all in the same area. A recipe for disaster.
Apparently cartridges were being emptied and the bullets replaced making a nice little earner for someone. But it did mean that most soldiers probably had only one in five usable rounds for his rifle!. It was just part of the corruption that was beginning to undermine the once proud and efficient Jordan Arab Army. It was going into decline rapidly after it's finance had been cut off.
From that point on we found ourselves facing more and more restrictions in our daily life. NAAFI supplies became limited as certain items which were produced by firms having any connection with Isreal [sic] were banned imports. That included of course Jaffa orange juice that had gone all the way to the UK and back again to their next door neighbours but we coped. The NAAFI bottling plant stepped up production of orange and lemon drinks from essence that came from Cyprus. Well, so the management said!.
Nothing that happened surprised me any more. We had some very unusual flight plans signalled in one day which immediately aroused suspicion so Intelligence was advised. I decided to go out to the radar truck situated at the edge of the runway to get the closest possible view of these four 'Egyptian Air
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Lines DC.3's when they came in. They came charging into the circuit totally ignoring all Air Traffic instructions, did a low level circuit in a 'gaggle' and then crunched onto the runway. I was watching carefully from a small ventilator in the van as they slowed down at my end of the runway and they were quite a sight. In the first place they were not DC.3's. They were Russian Ilushan [sic] 14's and not in very good condition either. They were very tatty with lop-sided undercarriage suspensions and their general appearance was not improved by the rough flaking paintwork only partially covered Egyptian Air Force markings by crudely painted civilian registration letters.
I kept in touch with the control tower and all of our observations were passed to Intelligence and of course as they were ostensibly civil aircraft they went to the civilian terminal.
There was a great deal of activity on their arrival and there was a fleet of lorries awaiting them but the unloading process was difficult to follow even from the control tower, although I have no doubt there were many pairs of eyes on these from various vantage points as there must have been from the moment they touched down.
As soon as the unloading was complete they were requesting taxy clearance, destination not notified and no flight plans filed. All very suspicious.
All the information that we had been passing back had filtered through to the right people, possibly through the Embassy to the King but someone was very quick off the mark. Jordanian military police forces intercepted the convoy of trucks on the main road out of the airfield and the cargoes were found to be arms and ammunition looted from the huge depots in Egypt that we had left in the care of the Egyptians. It was obvious that something really dodgy was going on and subsequently some very rough justice was meted out. There were more public hangings in the city which was becoming quite a regular event.
The daily routine still went on but there was an air of apprehension creeping in. It was not unfounded. The next thing that happened was that families were warned to get ready for
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repatriation to the UK, and not very much time was given. There were lots of tears and frenzied packing until eventually the airlift by Hastings aircraft out of Cyprus began. Every day there were more goodbye's. Some people had to go by 'casevac' aircraft as the medical centre was emptied. Mothers and one day old babies were included until eventually it was the turn of the Gamble family. Abdul cried and beat his chest in anguish and when they had gone and the married quarter had to be prepared for handing back as I took up residence in single quarters. What an end that was to what had been initially descibed [sic] as an accompanied posting!. [inserted] I [/inserted] was not amused, but work had to go on just the same.
Living out privileges were withdrawn and everyone moved into camp as our activities became more and more restricted by local events. We were confined to camp for days at a time and mess life became a very hectic round with little else to do. Even the cinema only opened two or three nights a week with the difficulty of getting new films in. I managed to get Abdul taken on by the mess as a steward and he was only too glad to have a reasonably well paid job having moved his family into the area to work for me he had considerable overheads.
On one of the numerous occasions that the city had erupted once again in political termoil [sic] the C.O. sent for me to do a nice little job for him. I was to be a courier to take a message to the British Embassy, which was virtually under siege, and our communications were no longer as discreet as they might have been. I was to go in civilian clothes by taxi. My answer to that was "thanks a lot, do I have any options" to which the answer was "no". Thanks again, although I did wring one concession from him, I was allowed to draw a pistol, with a full chamber, which I kept in my hand, in my brief case, all the way there and back. There was no way I was going to be at the mercy of a howling frenzied mob without being able to do a bit of damage first. Right or wrong, that's the way I felt about the situation at the time. After all the tight spots I had been in in my life I reckoned I was owed a chance but it went off without any fuss and I breathed easy again.
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One evening about six weeks after the families had gone there was a strange atmosphere permeating the normal activities. The cinema was closed. The Sgt's mess bar, and ours, as well as the Naafi canteen were ordered to close early and everyone was warned to be ready for an early start the following day.
Few of us thought that it would be as early as it was though At 5am the sirens started wailing. The PA system was busy giving orders for everyone to report to their normal places of work by 6am, phones were ringing madly and the whole station got into gear very quickly. At 6am roll-calls were made and instructions were passed for everyone to get back to quarters, pack personal belongings and back to the messes for breakfast. Breakfast was tea coffee, toast and boiled eggs...taken on the run as it would finish at 7pm precicely [sic] after which we were to report back to our sections. At 7pm the PA system was announcing the almost unbelievable news that we were evacuating the station. Today!...just like that!. We were going to Mafraq which was a few miles to the North and we had 12 hours to do it in, and the PA system was going almost non-stop. There was no written distributed plan to work to. It was all done on the PA from Ops. and on the telephone. Motor transport was allocated to all sections who provided their own drivers. Those sections that had no drivers had them allocated with the vehicles and every qualified driver was pressed into service. Workshops were emptied. Vehicles were put together, and those that could not be put on the road were loaded on the backs of others or prepared for towing.
The direction finder vehicle that had been up on the hill without wheels for years was fitted with wheels and brought down. Fuel tankers were filled from the storage tanks and vehicles were filled to the brim. Aircraft tanks were topped up to maximum. A Meteor that had been under repair in the hangar was hastily prepared and in fact took off later with almost flat tyres and was wheels down all the way with the locks in just to be safe.
The messes, offices, stores, the Naafi, the library and armoury were emptied. The armoury in particular was cleared by the simple expedient of issueing [sic] arms to everyone to save transport space so we all finished up with a selection of rifles, pistols, Sten guns, Bren guns, you name it, and as much ammunition as we could
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carry. Work pressed on at an incredible rate. The only refreshment was what one managed to cobble up in the departments and sections…..lunch was not even mentioned, although we were told that meals would be available at Mafraq where a skeleton crew had always provided minimum facilities there as a relief landing ground; even before a new runway had been built on a new site.
Everything that was not bolted down was packed…and some things were unbolted, and as each section was ready to move it was off to the Guard Room where convoys of a minimum of ten vehicles were put together and dispatched by the Service Police. The Squadron Venoms were being flown out followed by the chopper as soon as the Squadron was gone. The fighter control unit that had always operated from a remote site was wrapped up and that was on it's way independantly [sic] as were the British Military personnel on secondment to the Jordanian Government. The RAF Regiment airfield defence units just packed up and went, Bofors guns and all, everyone armed to the teeth and in many cases parties left a certain amount of damage and disruption behind them. Handsfull [sic] of salt and sand did guns and engines considerable damage. The Jordanian Air Force Vampires had all their guns de-harmonised so that they were likely to spray lead all over the place instead of in a concentrated pattern and the Kings personal Tiger Moth was tipped up on it's nose busting it's prop.
The Station thinned out fast. Air Traffic Control, the fire services and the signals cabin were the last to wrap up but the dead-line was met although aircraft were still going in and out with very limited services which pilots were advised of and as we approached the dead-line we lost control of the airfield.
The last civilian aircraft was the BOAC Argonaught from U.K. to Bahrain and although the captain accepted the limitation he had to be sent around again as half a dozen vehicles of the Jordan Arab Army appeared on the airfield weaving about all over the runway and he was obliged to circle whilst we tried to keep them off. The pilot landed eventually under his own responsibility, disembarked and embarked his passengers in double quick time and was off again without a flight plan.
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Our last action was to signal the airfield's closure and change of operating authority before the signals cabin was dismantled and the Pembroke flew out with as many as could be piled in leaving the remaining Air Traffic staff (including me) and the fire services to go by road as soon as the keys were deposited in the Guard Room, so off we set with RAF Police Landrover in the rear. Amman was no longer an RAF base!!!.
Our new home was the new Mafraq airfield being built as part of the NATO plan. It was on the North side of the old oil pipeline on the main route from Damascus to Bagdad opposite the old Mafraq (Dawsons Field), but it was in no way complete.
At least it had a long new runway, some new buildings which had in fact been built as married quarters although there were no barracks as such. Needless to say, they were allocated as barracks even though they lacked lighting, running water or toilet facilities. In fact, water was a very scarce commodity as there was no bore hole, and no water tower so water had to be brought in by a dubious civilian source which could not even be used for cooking until a filtration system was devised. But all these problems were only part of the getting sorted out plan. Later on we found that as we were not far from the foothills of the mountains of southern Syria a water diviner was expected from the UK to pin-point a source. That was put on hold although it should not have been difficult considering that 20 miles to the East there was a large area of marshland and vegetation which was fed by the flood waters from the mountains and some of that found it's way through the middle of the airfield. They had built a large conduit under the runway to take it away in the rainy season!.
However, limited water there was and that was a start. At least once a day we could draw a ration for washing and shaving. Drainage was a different matter. There were no drains so we resorted to the desert encampment method of doing things and the shovels had been at work allready [sic] . Everyone got 'stuck in' and were working like beavers.
The Officers Mess had been set up in an area of bungalows. The Sgts Mess was similarly set up in a clutch of houses and the airmen spread around the incomplete estate. A large wooden building with a kitchen, which had originally been provided
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for the contractors workers was turned into the main mess hall.
As with our departure from Amman there were very few questions asked. Then we had been told to pack up and go. At Mafraq we were just allocated space and it was up to us to set it up. It says a lot for the character of the British serviceman in the way it was done. There was no lack of initiative.
Air Traffic Control had already been set up in a suitable place about half way down the runway in a desert mobile office and our old runway control van. Emergency short range radios took very little time to fit and aerials were promtly [sic] rigged by the signals section as was the direction finder and radar truck although it was only as a radio back-up and even the homing beacon was tied to the side of it on with a lash-up of a mast. As the ATC services were outside the main camp area and main power supply we had our own mobile generator.
The Royal Signals Corp who were [deleted] a [/deleted] our telephone people out there were frantically running lines between departments in the main compound, linking everything through a small PBX in the hub of the whole system, the Ops. room but had saved a lot of cable by actually using the runway lighting cables as phone lines to the ATC centre. There were no lighting units installed anyway just the cables. It would be back to the old parafin [sic] goose-neck flares for a flare-path.
The RAF Regiment were whacking in stakes and spreading coils of barbed wire by the ton to surround the main area of activity which did not include ATC. It was an isolated outpost, but armed to the teeth as was everyone else. Representations had already been made to the CO to turn us in a defensive compound surrounded by wire as we were going to have to maintain a 24 hour watch but we had been given a low priority on that.
Within the stores area was another fleet of vehicles including workshops which had [deleted] previously [/deleted] been part of the Egyptian stores depot that I had previously known nothing about and that played it's part later. Then there was a complete [inserted] mobile [/inserted] fighter control unit but it was not sited or deployed so there were a lot of people without jobs that ops deployed as manpower to wherever it was needed.
Work had been going on at a furious pace and a lot had been done before we arrived in the late evening. To uproot about
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1400 people with all their goods and chatels [sic] , equipment of all kinds, transport, arms andammunition [sic] , fuel, food and cooking facilities plus communications equipment, and set it all up again was quite an achievement and must have given the CO and his senior officers more than a few headaches in planning it in secret the night before.
Work that first day did not stop at five o'clock. It just continued until most things were in place and reported operational before the troops staggered back to the mess hall for soup and sandwiches before drawing bedding and making up beds to finally flop into them; exhausted. What a day it had been although it should be pointed out that it did not all happen on the first day. It was an on going thing and a matter of priorities.
There were two items of private transport parked in the officers mess area. One, the car that had caused a colleague so much trouble to get into the country, and the other, a neat little bright red MG.B. belonging to the Station Commander, or to be precise, his wife. Some months previously King Hussein had made a present of it to the CO. but no sooner that the Embassy heard of it they invoked Queens Rules and Regulations about the acceptance of gifts by serving officers and it was 'no can do'. I do not know who squared it all up, but the King took it back and then presented it to Mrs.C.O. There was no argument with that!.
After a few hours sleep the second day was a memorable one as far as some of us were concerned. There was no need to push anyone and after a quick breakfast the hustle and bustle started again. I had not even had time to go to the airfield for the day shift although we were down to six controllers by that time with postings out and no replacements and having left ATC problems to another controller I had hardly had time to check out the fire services deployment when a message direct from the CO was delivered. It required two controllers, six firemen, two radio mechanics and two other technical trades to muster with tool kits as appropriate, small kit, (essential personal belongings), plus one major fire tender, to return immediately to Amman to put the services back on the air again. It had not taken long for everything to fizzle out and the King had made
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a personal appeal to the Group Captain for assistance. I had no problem in nominating my No.2. A New Zealander, an ex POW like myself who would know how to take care of himself. I went with the fire tender and the others went by air arriving more or less at the same time. I had been delayed a few minutes before setting off as I transferred a couple of cases of Brandy from the Mess stocks to the fire tender…..just in case of emergencies!!!!.
My colleague had already taken stock of the situation and was waiting at the foot of Air Traffic Control when we arrived and we quickly sorted out a plan. A young Jordanian pilot was 'in control' in the tower and was doing his best with a verey pistol and a stock of cartridges which was about to run out as there had been a total breakdown of communications despite, as I had understood, that the civilian terminal facilities were all in place if needed. A bit of 'know how' would have helped, but civil aircraft were still scheduled and something had to be done so everyone went about their business. Within two hours everything was ticking over again. The main generators were started up. Power was back on, batteries were being charged, verey cartridge stocks were replaced by scavenging among the Jordanian Air Force aircraft, tuning had been carried out and crash and rescue services were operational, with limitations, although the Jordanian Air Force appliances would not join ours on the hard-standing but 'control' remained in the hands of the Jordanians. We flatly refused to have anything to do with it....it was their airfield and that was that.
By late afternoon our activities slowed down as intercomms [sic] and radio communications were all back on line so we waited around for something to happen.
Eventually we were rounded up and taken to a mess hail in the Jordanian Air force compound where we were fed. We certainly needed it. We had had nothing for ten hours other than perhaps a small share of a bar of chocolate that someone had thoughtfully put in his kit.
After that we were taken to our accommodation. I could hardly believe it was happening. The keys of two married quarters had been produced from the Guard Room. One was my old quarter and the other the Station Commander's.
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My colleague and I took rooms in my old quarter and we put the men in the CO's residence as it was the larger building but after a good look around we decided that there was plenty of room for all of us in the big house and that we would move in the following day. There was room for us at one end and for the men the other with the lounge designated as a common room. Our stock of drink was added to what we found in the main house. The CO had lived in it right up to the moment we had moved out and hence his wine stocks were still there in his store and side-board. It was an Alladins [sic] cave!. Exactly as he had left it. Nice of him. We promptly appointed one of the Corporals as barman with the responsibilty [sic] of keeping it all secure and out of bounds during the working day. That way we could make it last so after a couple of rounds on the CO we retired for the night.
I must confess that it did seem strange sleeping .in my old quarter again especially as there remained a memento of the previous occupants. A jig-saw puzzle that one of my girls had left was still on the top of a wardrobe!.
We had been warned to be ready for a pick-up at 7:30 the following morning for an 8 o'clock breakfast so we were all formed up in a mini parade when the transport arrived on the dot and were duly conveyed to the same mess hall, where we had had supper the night before.
Most of us were hanging on to the little bit of kit that we had taken with us and had added a few eating and drinking utensils along the way. The quarters were still as they had been left by the last occupant, as per inventory; down to the last pepper pot... but who cared!. There were two ex POW's who had been obliged to eat with the fingers before, and were not taking any more chances.
We had a good breakfast and at 8:30 we were asked to wait for instructions as there was a great deal of activity ouside [sic] and we did not have to wait long before we found out what we were going to do next.
The mess hall was totally encircled by armed troops standing shoulder to shoulder and an officer told us that we were to stay put until things were sorted out. We were under house arrest!.
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By mid-morning the sorting out had been done as we just sat around twiddling our thumbs until we were asked to assemble outside as we were going to the airfield...but not before being asked for the keys to the fire tender!. There was no point in arguing so I reluctantly handed them over and then we were escorted to the airfield where we waited a little longer before our Pembroke came in so we all piled in. The pilot, who happened to be the Group Captain did not bother to shut down the engines. It was certainly not built to carry that many so it was a bit of a squeeze and it was even more of a squeeze to get it off the runway too. We used every bit of it and every bit of power that was available. We used all of the runway and just lifted off with everything straining all the way to land at Mafraq a few minutes later with some very hot engines. So much for that little expedition!!.
The CO did not say a lot apart from suggesting that there would have to be an enquiry into the loss of my fire engine and I think [deleted] g [/deleted] my answer was something to the effect that it might as well be done by the same board that would do the enquiry into the loss of his airfield!, but it was only a formality really in order to get it struck off and replaced.
In the meantime things had really been going on apace at our new base. The barbed wire had been strengthened. Trenches and gun pits had been dug. Sand bags were piled up all over the place including the fuel dump, the aircraft dispersals and other vulnerable places....including Air Traffic Control. That was at least no longer stuck out on a limb but a whole new pattern of life had emerged.
The station was on Red Alert permanently which was a rare situation for peace-time. Everyone was still armed to the teeth and the Amman party had reclaimed their weapons from the armoury. On reflection it was as well that we had not been armed when we had gone back otherwise I am sure that it would have meant another enquiry into the loss of our weapons.
The old Mafraq desert airfield had been completely deserted and everyone was confined to the new camp area. Aircraft had been shuttling to and from Cyprus and Habbanyia. Essential supplies were coming in and non-essential personnel were being flown out as a lot of adjustment was taking place.
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Air Traffic Control was still being maintained on a 24 hour shift system so the few that had been doing the job were only too pleased to spread the job out a bit. We all had secondary duties to perform as well so we were kept busy.
The Army had opened the Post Office again and some mail was already beginning to filter through from the UK but we had been advised that outgoing mail was being censored at Nicosia so there would be delays in that direction.
I was desperate for news of my wife who had not been well prior to leaving Amman and had had a dreadful time going through Cyprus, Stansted and subsequently through Hendon before being able to catch the first train out of Victoria in the cold early dawn of an English winter. She had caught a chill. Her nerves were shot to pieces and it was just as well that she had opted to go back to her parents home in Worthing where she could be looked after much better than if she had gone to a transit camp at Blackpool which had been one of the options.
From her most recent letters it was obvious that she was still unwell and was not being helped by the disruption of the mail from our part of the world either.
All our goods and chatels [sic] which had been flown out of Amman was somewhere en-route so a lot of new clothing had to be purchased and it was not easy but somehow she was coping. For the girls it had all been quite an experience although even they were glad to settle down in the local school once more.
Our daily routine developed into something like normality once more. There was plenty of ammunition and we could spend as much time as we wanted on the range which had been quickly set up but in a very short space of time we set up our own on the airfield with aid of a borrowed bulldozer. I had qualified as a range safety officer at Mareham [sic] so we soon got clearance to do our own thing. The targets were of the tin and bottle kind and there is nothing like practice to improve marksmanship!.
One also learns considerable respect in the handling of firearms provided that the basic rules are observed, and they were. No fooling about. A gun should always be handled as if it was loaded so loading and unloading and cleaning, going on and off duty never produced one incident of mis-handling...fortunately!.
Aircraft continued to go in and out, and in most instances we
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had notification as soon as our communication with the outside world had been re-established. It was all radio and radio teleprinters of course so with all the coding and de-coding that was required the signals cabin was going flat out.
We were very surprised one morning we we [sic] went off-duty after a busy night with Hasting's coming and going to find that we had several heavy artillery peices [sic] already dug in, sandbagged and manned by the R. A. ready for use. The question was, against who?.
We were not left in doubt for very long. Within 24 hours of their arrival the news hit us that combined French and British forces had invaded Egypt and the Suez Canal Zone and then we were immediately on a war readyness [sic] state.
News was limited to the personal radios that many still had but the fresh restrictions under which we were then placed gave us more to worry about.
Diplomatic relations with other Arab countries were broken off and we could no longer use the air route across Syria to Cyprus and all traffic had to be routed via Habbanyia(Iraq) and Turkey. Isreal [sic] was at war with Egypt and Jordan. Iraq was making protests in respect of our presence and Cyprus was suffering some internal unrest from a regigious [sic] rebel. And we were sitting in the middle!.
That particular episode is but another chapter of history, so it might as well be left to the historians to write it down. All I was aware of at the time was that it was another fine mess I was in.
The daily routine went on but perhaps the biggest headache of all was the acute shortage of water. Tanks, water carriers and bowsers of every sort were pressed into service for storage. There were no laundry facilities and it soon became neccesary [sic] to institute bathing parades for about twenty people at a time to strip wash at a water bowser and then dunk clothes at the same time. It was not very well received by some of the more sensitive youngsters, many of them national servicemen but thank goodness the weather was still fairly warm with the odd shower from time to time. At least when it did rain Air Traffic Control had a plentiful supply with the benefit of the stream that ran under the runway. More than enough on one occasion after a really
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heavy downpour when a great deal of rubbish was carried along in the flood which blocked the grating and then diverted the stream over the runway!. A useful job for the fire services.
The rain did bring some other problem though as the airfield had been built right across an age old camel route from the North right down into Saudi Arabia. Camel trains naturally followed the water supply and took years to go each way with many young being born en-route.
The older animals knew the route instinctively and invariably travelled in the cool of the night with the herders fast asleep in the saddle but it played merry hell when they blundered into barbed wire and other things like an airfield across their path. There was a great deal of growling, bellowing and other noises that camels make as some of them got tangled up.
Some wire had been strung out earlier to divert them from their route but it was a waste of time. You only had to look at a camel to realise that going around it was very far from their minds. The easiest way was to remove it and thoroughly inspect the runway at night before it was. I think it save a lot in compensation too!.
I had one piece of good news anyway. The two cases of Brandy that I had diverted from the bar stocks were written off and did not get charged to my mess bill, the paperwork for which had all been brought from Amman. It would not have cost much anyway. At approximately 50p a bottle it would not have been more than £12 in total in those days!.
Since we had moved to Mafraq our rations had been fairly basic although with the air supply we had been topped up and were adequate for several weeks if we had been completely bottled up. Nevertheless. the NAAFI manager, who was a member of our mess and in fact shared a room with me, decided that he would do something really special for one week-end and set to work with some 'surplus' stocks to make an enormous pie. In a bath tub!.
In went four chickens, obtained locally, followed by several pounds of bacon. The contents of several tins of pork and sausage meat. Corned beef, spices, all suitably spiced and sloshed into the tub with several dozen halves of boiled eggs. The pastry took umpteen pounds of flour and fat to make the lining and
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the lid and when finally decorated was a near masterpiece as the 60lb. pie was hoisted into the oven.
After hours of cooking and cooling it was finally brought ceremoniously into the dining room with all the solemnity usually reserved for a royal haggis. It really did look good with it's pastry leaves and rosettes all glistening with the overall glazing. It cut beautifully and tasted gorgoeus [sic] . Certainly it seemed worth all the effort that had been put into it….until the following day!.
Some people said it was due to a richness that we had not been used to, others reckoned it was over indulgence but the medical officer decided that as the medical centre was inundated with officers going sick that perhaps the ingredients were not as fresh as they might have been. The local chickens were suspect even though they had been bought live. (You did not normally buy anything of that sort out there unless it was on the hoof or still clucking). So the MO had the last word and condemned it to be consigned to the fire. I thought it was a great shame. I had had a double portion and I was OK, and so was the NAAFI manager who took out a large chunk before disposal. And we still did not come to any harm. Need one say more!.
There was one weekly event that many people turned out to see. It was the 'train' that went through from Damascus to Bagdad a few miles from us, usually on the far side of the old Dawsons Field, only it was not on rails. It was a huge Mercedes locomotive/coach with a trailer coach like a gigantic silver caterpillar. It's wheels were between 7 and 8 feet in height with great balloon tyres that looked as if they had come off of a Stirling. With a crew of drivers, engineers, radio operators navigators and stewards it just bored majestically along like the proverbial ship of the desert in a plume of exhaust smoke and a cloud of sand. It really was an impressive sight as it went through. Unfortunately I was never in a position to photograph it as zoom and telephoto lenses were not so readily available as they are today.
After [sic] while the rigid restrictions were eased a little although we were required to wear uniform all the time. Everything to the West of us and that included the town of Zerqua was still out of bounds but we could go in small parties Eastwards to
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the marshes where there was some wildfowl and some remnants of an ancient civilisation.
Among them were the ruins of an old Bysantine [sic] town which still bore the marks of the progress of the Crusaders that had passed that way hundreds of years before. The most amazing thing was the size of the building blocks. Something like 4ft square and there was still a lot of it standing. Mostly it was being used as a shelter for camels which were being looked after by a motley collection of very ragged boys who surprised us by having a smattering of broken English. In fact they even looked a little European and I will say no more about that other than to note that the British had been in those parts for a long time!.
The method of construction was to remain a mystery as we could find no books on the subject in our limited library but generally it must have followed the same ancient techniques used by the Romans and the Pharoes [sic] , who seemed to be able to move huge quantities of stone with only crude equipment…..and a lot of expendable manpower. In one wall there was a door of solid stone 18ins. thick, some 4ft by 5ft hung by 3ins. pegs, hewn out of the solid, which was perfect fit and capable of being swung to and fro' in balance by a finger touch. Quite remarkable, and a welcome outing in a place like that provided some relief from our normal routine.
I took the opportunity to fly down to Aquaba on one accasion [sic] . The firemen down there were on detachment originally from Amman on a rotational basis and some of them had been there overlong. I had been badgering the CO. for a long time and eventually got clearance to go down and swap three of them over, as well as taking what mail there was. Mail had been very spasmodic as the lines of communication kept changing.
When we were in Egypt the run out of Fayid to Amman used to parachute the mail into Aquaba and aircraft landed infrequently. When Egypt packed up some went by sea and some went via Amman and then it all got held up until it went via Cyprus and Amman and then the routing was changed to Cyprus/Habbanyia/Mafraq with the inevitable delays. With only limited communications between Mafraq and Aquaba three firemen had a nice surprise when they found that they were being relieved. I tried to find my cousin but learned that he had already returned to the UK.
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At his age he was due to end his long service with the army and at last get the sand out of his shoes. I could understand how he felt after all the years he had spent in Mesopotamia [sic] before the war and he was no doubt relieved to get out of another of many tight spots including the evacuation from Dunkirk.
We had a very nice surprise one day when a couple of young English nurses in an old banger presented themselves at the main gate asking for shelter for the night.
They were en-route from the UK to India the hard way. Right across the continent, a hop from Turkey to Cyprus. Another to Beruit [sic] and Damascus, then following the route of the old Hadj railway to Zerkqa before setting off across the desert for Bagdad they found an out-post of the British Empire on their route so it changed their plans a little.
Room and board was found for them. They were fed and rested and their old banger, which was actually in better condition than it looked, was serviced by the MT. section who were only too pleased to have something different to do. After spending a couple of nights with us they were given a resounding send off and good luck to them. There was still some spirit of adventure left that was for sure. They were not the only women to undertake such a daunting journey.
When the families were being evacuated from Amman there was one lady who decided to drive the family car back to the UK. If they had had as much trouble in getting the car into the country as my colleague then there some logic in it, but she took two youngsters as well.
We heard that she had made it after many weeks on the road and her route had taken her out of Jordan into Syria. Then further on into Turkey, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany and Belgium before it became neccesary [sic] to cross the last ditch...the Channel!. Some journey. Nearly 3000 miles. Who said that women were the weaker sex.
We were still losing controllers without replacement. The next one to go was the same chap who had imported the car and the NAAFI manager was being posted back home as well so they went together. They filled up the car with their kit, fuel and supplies and they set off for the 500 mile plus journey to Habbanyia following the pipe-line towards Bagdad and Basra.
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The pipe-line was the best possible navigational feature for crossing the desert as there was no road then. Just the pipe-line and a string of desert air-strips that were generally American oil company manned with their own system of communication. All that for a pipe-line that had not pumped oil for years!.
My wife was continuing to have a rough time of it and for some reason was not getting all of my letters. Her nerves were still bad and she was having a lot of treatment whilst I was still stuck in that place. True, we had the facilities of mess life and the Squadron pilots who were not doing much flying had set themselves the task of starting up a cinema in a marquee. The RAF Film Service had fallen down on the job and nothing was coming in other than privately arranged 16mm films from Habbanyia and using the 16mm projectors that were supplied for training films we managed some form of entertainment. Our original 35mm equipment in our cinema had been left behind in Amman but we coped even though we had to stop the programme to change reels and it very often went out of synchronization...accompanied by hoots of laughter.
A games night in the mess on one occasion provided a little distraction but it was a night that I fear I became a little unpopular with the organisers, The Squadron pilots of course. It was a games night with a difference as it was turned into a gambling den despite the fact that normal mess rules forbad the playing of games for money. Anyway, our conditions were far from normal and I recall that the bank was holding it's own at most tables but the roulette wheel favoured me to the extent that I broke the bank. The first time was not so bad and after they had raised more funds I broke it again!. They said it was only for fun so I gave all my winning back and retired but I am sure that I would not have got my shirt back if I had lost it....but it was still a lot of fun despite the fact that the CO made some very disapproving remarks. He and I were not on very good terms by that time.
Our relationship had not been improved by another incident when I was Duty officer one night and one of the patrols called in to report that there were suspicious noises on one section of the perimeter according to the Guard Sgt, like tank track noises. I was just a link in the chain and passed the report on to OPs.
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centre. The CO decided to go out with the Guard Commander and found that it was only echoes from a generator exhaust and I got the stick for it. Still, I would have got a lot more if it had been a tank probing our defences and I had not reported it. As usual it was a 'no-win' situation for me.
We still did not know quite what to expect or from where. The Suez invasion was all but over. We had driven a wedge between the Egyptians and the Isrealies [sic] and they had agreed to pull back. Our troops were withdrawing and it was a very tricky situation not improved by the recriminations and world opinion on our role in the whole affair, and all was not quite what it seemed on the surface.
We had been warned that the odd Canberra might be making a dash for us from Cyprus but we had a bit of a shock to learn that on one occasion an RAF Canberra out on a high photographic recce' over Syria had something on his tail that he had not quite expected. A Syrian, (Russian made.), SAM 7 heat seeking missile!, and unfortunately it found him. As far as I recall one member of the crew was killed, the other was captured and was returned some time later when the situation had eased a bit. Not a lot was said about it.
Christmas 1956 came and a great time was had by all. The Officers and NCO's served the men in time honoured fashion. There was too much to drink and rationing was forgotten for that day. Unknown talents emerged with a station concert and a station song with many bawdy verses was produced along with one or two daft acts on stage. I am not sure what time lunch finished that afternoon but I reckoned we owed ourselves that.
My tour of duty, 2 1/2 years, was coming to an end and like most people I cherished the date which was bodly [sic] marked on my calender [sic] . In the old days it would have been "roll on that bloody boat" as the song goes although in the circumstances it was roll on any form of transport when I reported to the Adjutant for confirmation that the repatriation procedure would soon be be [sic] put in motion. I was devestated [sic] when I was told that I was being deferred as they could no longer afford to lose people without replacement. It did not take long to arrange for an appointment to see the CO only to be told that there was no appeal, the decision had been made although after we had been
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closeted for a while with some man to man talking and the production of some letters from my wife and her Doctors he accepted the fact that I might have a good case so he would see what he could do. He owed me that at least after one incident that ocurred [sic] between us that needs no airing so I was left sweating it out for a while.
Fortunately it did not take too long and I was soon involved in the paperwork to clear the unit, obtain an air priority and wait for another week before, I at last found myself on an aircraft for Habbanyia.
As soon as I got into the transit mess there was my colleague who had driven there in his car still trying to get it down to Basra but otherwise enjoying himself.
I found it very difficult to enjoy myself even when every day was virtually a holiday whilst I waited for a seat on an aircraft when I was so desperate to get home. My priority rating was still the basic, the bottom of the list!, so all I had to do was wait.
Fortunately I knew a lot of people at Habbanyia and was invited out quite a lot. I also saw a lot more of Habbanyia and on one occasion a party of us got together for a day trip to Bagdad.
That was a forty mile taxi journey each way across the desert as there did not appear to be a road and the return journey was of course done at night. I can only think that those drivers navigated by the various clumps of rocks that loomed up from time to time as there was nothing else to indicate which way to go except the stars.
In Bagdad we broused [sic] around, up the street of the goldsmiths, down the street of the silversmiths and up the street of the ivory carvers and in an about sampling the sights.
It was not possible to photograph all that I would have liked to as it seemed that the Iraqi army was guarding almost every street corner. Photographs had to be taken very discreetly after the first occasion that a threatening rifle was pointed in our direction, but it was a good day just the same.
I was still kicking my heels after a week without having been called forward so I buttonholed a Valetta captain that I had known at Fayid who was flying a freighter to Cyprus the following day and he agreed to take me as supernumarary [sic] crew. Air Movements
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staff agreed and I was out on the airfield, baggage, hangover and all by 7am, after very little sleep. I wish I had had the good sense to have abstained but it had all developed into another fairwell [sic] party and I don't think I have ever felt so bad before. I almost signed the pledge [underlined] again!. [/underlined]
The thunder of the take-off just about scrambled every nerve in the brain-box but that was only half of it. We were of course taking the roundabout route going North-West to cross the Turkish border then West over the mountains and the Valetta thundered it's way up to 16,000ft with the crew on oxygen, all except the supernumary [sic] crew member who did not have an oxygen mask so I cupped a spare outlet hose in my hands with it on full flow I gulped and and [sic] gulped until the hammering in my head became a little more bearable. I was very glad when we turned South and started letting down clear of the mountains on the last leg to Cyprus. What a blessed relief it was to touch down at Nicosia and sample that first cup of coffee in the transit lounge.
With thanks to the pilot for the completion of one more leg of the journey behind me I reported for documentation and when that was done found myself signing for a Smith & Wesson .38 with six rounds and a printed set of instructions before being transported to a hotel in a quiet area of Nicosia. Basically the istructions [sic] were to the effect that if I was out in public I had to be prepared to defend myself although the natives seemed friendly enough on the surface there was still an undercurrent of dissent. Most of the troops that had invaded Egypt who had used Cyprus as a jumping off point had been withdrawn and I certainly had no intention of going very far on my first day in Cyprus. I was in need of a lot of sleep.
The following day, fully refreshed, I was off to re-visit Nicosia city centre and I was dammed if I wanted to take a pistol stuck in my belt like some bandit as all my webbing had been packed away in my 'deep-sea' kit so I left it in my room.
I was wandering along quite happily taking in the sights down a main street when a car pulled up alonside [sic] with a screech of brakes and my immediate thought was...'whoops-here is trouble' and I turned quickly to asses [sic] the situation only to see a chap that I had known in Amman who said with some urgency "Tom Gamble,
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get in you bloody fool", so I did.
It turned out that I had been strolling down 'murder mile' where more than one bloke had bitten the dust in recent months. He was more concerned afterwards that I was not armed but who knows, perhaps it was because I was not that I did not become a target. He lived in a bungalow not far from the Hotel so that's where we finished up for tea, dinner and drinks on more than one occasion.
He was a useful chap to know being one of the Air Movements and despite the fact that I had been told that I would be called forward when a flight became available I didn't think a daily visit to Air Movements would do me any harm, if only to be sure that I-was not overlooked. Not that he could expedite my passage. That was determined by my priority and a long waiting list but we chatted about this that and the other and he told me there was a compound in the freight area with all the Amman baggage in it so we went to have a look. Under a large tarpaulin was a huge pile of boxes and on investigation we found all the Gamble's unmistakable boxes on the edge of the pile. I couldn't mistake those boxes. One of them had been my father-in-law's tool chest and another had belonged to an Uncle who I had never known, who had been killed in France during WW1. He had had it made in India so it was certainly well travelled. Anyway, they had already been there three months and whether he exercised his perogotive [sic] or not they were back in the UK two weeks later.
I had many a pleasant time with his family for odd meals and parties as well as a couple of runs out into the country and to the coastal resorts of Limosol [sic] and Lanarca as the days went by.
Despite the fact that I checked daily with Air Movements the answer was getting monotonous, "sorry, not today" was not what I wanted to hear and seriously thought of using the knowledge of my wife's condition to 'up' the priority although I had already sent a cable to her to let her know I was in Cyprus and still waiting when, at last, after a week I was told that I was allocated for the following day so all the paperwork was done. I sent another cable to say I would be on my way and duly reported with baggage, ready to go. I actually got as far as the steps to the aircraft when a Service Policeman came rushing
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up with an Air Movements Cpl and a harassed looking airman with a suitcase. Papers were waived and I was taken off of the manifest to go back into transit. The airman had compassionate grounds for getting home in a hurry and that's the way it worked. He had a higher priority than I did and unless you were very senior it was usually an officer who had to give way. It cost me another cable to say I was further delayed.
Air Movements confirmed that I would be away the following day and I think I went to bed that night with everything crossed but it all went according to plan. There was another emergency boarding but that time it did not effect me as my priority had gone up one as a result of the previous day's cancellation, so I was off at last in a chartered Eagle Air Lines Viking stopping; at Nice for refuelling and thence to Stansted and finally to Hendon for disposal. After that I was on my way to Worthing, home and family.
That was the end of my Middle East tour. All that packed into two years and seven months!. By that time it was the beginning of February 1957 and I was not thinking too much about my next appointment. I would know all about that when I reported to the Air Ministry within the customary 48 hours of my arrival in the UK. Family business was of the highest priority as it was obvious that Dorothy was far from well with a nervous disorder so before I reported to Air Ministry I got a letter from her doctor and was prepared for any problems that might arise.
I need not have worried. The Personnel Staff could not have been more sympathetic and sorted out a posting for one that was beyond any wildest dreams. Tangmere, just 18 miles from Worthing so off I went with two weeks dis-embarkation leave to sort things out.
It did not take long to get a small car and we visited Tangmere to take a look at what was to be our new home and to complete an application for Married Quarters which we were told, would be available soon and another visit to the Senior Controller soon put me in the picture. There was one small problem. It was another 24 hour shift working Air Traffic Control situation. Another of the many geographically placed units that provided an emergency service although that would not present much of
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a problem once I was in quarters. I was used to sleeping away from home....although that did not mean that I liked it.
The two weeks went very quickly but at least we made the most of it. We got out and about visiting family as part of the process of rehabilitating my wife until it was time to report for duty and once again after the arrival formalities I was up in the control tower ready to start local training to bring me up to the very high standard required on such a busy unit.
There were two resident Squadrons. One of Meteor night fighters and the other of Hunter day fighters and their activities ensured that Tangmere was not going to be dull. A controllers handling capability had to be brought up to being able to cope with up to eight aircraft at a time....and that was pushing it!. What took a little time to get used to was the fact that every time I was up in the tower I was looking down on an area of tarmac where only 12 years previously I had been de-loused on repatriation from a German POW camp, but it was the general atmosphere of the place that I found so fascinating. To me it was like being on hallowed ground and all rather pleasant after my recent experiences and somewhat comforting to find that I had served previously with three of the controllers.
Within a matter of weeks I was put to the final test required by the Senior Controller and was certificated for solo watchkeeping and bit by bit I was also creeping up the married quarters waiting list until one day I was allocated a quarter.
Unfortunately it all went sour the following day when I was told that it had been re-allocated to the Medical Officer!. It was not very well received at home although I was told that another would be allocated in a few days so I was reluctant to have made the protest that I could have done. My knowledge of the regulations told me that as a National Serviceman the M.O. did not qualify for quarters!, but it was politic to let it ride.
Within a matter of days I was allocated a quarter for the second time and there was considerable excitement in the family when they were told that we would be moving soon.
It was either the next day or the following one when I went on duty that I was told, yet again, that it was being re-allocated. I could not believe it. If I had done that sort
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of thing when I had been looking after quarters at Coningsby I think I would have been lynched but that time I did not take it laying down. It did not take long to find out that it had been allocated to the new O.C Flying Wing, (my boss, two steps up) on ex officio grounds, meaning that the quarter goes with the post irrespective of the waiting list. That was the regulation and as such it was acceptable, apart from the fact that the out going Wing Commander was still occupying a Quarter!. As far as I was concerned that was not on and if I was go home and tell Dorothy once more that we were further delayed the next thing that I would be doing was resigning my commission. I had just about had enough too but after more consideration than I would have given most problems I asked to see the Station Commander, Group Captain Hughie Edwards.VC, among many other decorations, and with tounge [sic] in cheek put my case as succinctly as I could. A change from my usual bull at a gate tactic. Out came the relevant order, in came the OC Admin, and the S/Ldr Admin and the Station Adjutant, the order was taken apart with a decision in my favour and apologies for the cock-up. After that it was my turn to apologise for having the temerity to make such a protest and it all ended up without anyone being upset and within a week we were in quarters. I can think of one or two CO's who would not have reached a similar decision whatever the regulations but enough said about that.
Before we moved our boxes had at last been delivered to Worthing and we didn't know whether to laugh or cry when they were opened up. Customs had already been through some of them and they had been badly repacked. Crockery, glass and ornaments had been broken. Clothes had gone mouldy and had to be thrown away. Linen that we thought was white when we packed it was a nice shade of brown as a result of a couple of pounds of Jordanian and Cypriot sand in each box a lot of which had filtered into the sewing machine box requiring a complete overhaul of that to avoid further damage. Nevertheless, most of it was usable. Just one of the snags of living out of a suitcase and boxes for years but we settled into our new home and a comfortable routine was soon established. The girls were soon back to school and there was continual family movement to and from Worthing as we picked up the threads of a more settled life and Dorothy's
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health began to improve. It really was turning out to be a very a happy unit too, and I had become the Station Fire Officer again!. It was suggested that I should go on the Fire Officers short course at one time but I cast that one aside. "No thanks, Iv'e[sic] had enough on the job experience" and left it at that. I didn't protest when the phone was put in though. Being out of my bed every fourth night I could cope with but I was trying to avoid being away from home any longer than that for a while.
It was shortly after we had settled into the routine that I heard the sequel to the Mafraq situation. Not a lot was mentioned by the media and I got most of the information from my correspondence with friends but apparently within a few weeks of my departure we abandoned the place. It was quite an operation. Again, everything was made mobile. Vehicles got armour plating and Bren gun mountings. Some 400 vehicles that had been in the Maintenance Unit were made ready and loaded with all the other stores, preparations for which were going on before I left as that many vehicles require a lot of batteries but the distilation [sic] plant did not have the capacity to produce the required amount of distilled water. Even at that point a decision had been made to use any sort of water and throw the batteries away after a short life. All had been put together in a very large convoy of 600 vehicles were fuelled and provisioned for the 500 mile journey, armed to the teeth still, the aircraft were flown out so off they set off with air cover and air supply all the way to Habbanyia.
Quite an experience for a 'peace-time' operation. There was no real problem and eventually it all finished up at Basra for shipment.
I eventually heard from the chap who had had all the problem with his car. It did eventually get to Basra and subsequently back to the UK, as deck cargo on the Ark Royal, very scratched and bent with a lot of bits missing. There was a car with a history!,.
One of the biggest surprises that I got one day was a bill from the accounts department; for1s & 7d, (7 1/2 pence in today's money) for 'barrack damages' on the occasion of leaving my quarter in Amman. It was for the deficiency of one wash basin plug!. Absolutlely [sic] incredible after all the millions of pounds that
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the evacuations had cost the Government. And I get a bill for 7 1/2 pence!. When I approached the Accountant Officer with a suggestion that it ought to have been written off he was adament [sic] . It had to be cleared from the books and although it cost me more than 7 1/2 p in stamp duty I paid it by cheque just to make a point. How bloody silly!.
Secondary duties were always coming the way of Air Traffic Controllers and one that fell in my lap was an audit of the bedding store inventory. I had a full briefing for that one and the appropriate Air Ministry Order thrust under my nose to reinforce the importance of checking thoroughly. It was the first time that I seen the order and it was almost word for word of the paper that I had put forward years previously so obviously it was an successful system. I wonder who got a pat on the back for that?. Certainly not me.
On one fine day up in the top tower doing airfield control with a few Hunters flashing around the circuit I knew by the clatter of footsteps on the stairs behind me that the party of .Air Cadets that I had was expecting were about to descent upon me and on turning to meet them was astonished to find that Peter Hobbs who had been the Navigator in the same crew as myself on Stirlings in 1943 was the officer in charge. I don't know who was the most surprised and for a while I was far too busy for any conversation although later on when it was quieter we really did get down to business. I picked him up later in the day to come home for tea and later for a drink in the Mess and we had a lot to chat about but the extraordinary thing was that when we met umpteen years later he had no recollections of the meeting at all, although at least he could remember coming to my wedding. That is more than Paddy Martin the Flight Engineer could!.
As we got into the Summer I had a feeling that all was going too well to last. In July I was dispatched to Shawbury for an eight week Radar course. Just as the kids school holidays were coming up. Nevertheless, I took some local accommodation at Wem and managed to live out for nearly a month. That gave everyone a change and a chance to tour new areas and a great deal of Wales as well. It actually made a very nice break for us all and although it was my second visit try Shawbury it was not to be my last.
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I passed out of that course with possibly the best mark that I had ever achieved despite it's intensity and in due course reported back to Tangmere for duty.
There was of course the usual period under instruction but I was certificated after ten days and back on watchkeeping duties with the ability to be rotated anywhere in the control system.
Ground Controlled Approach as the radar system was called was most satisfying and there were many occasions when I was required to pull out all the stops. It was very demanding but rewarding nevertheless. Some of the highlights of my experiences in GCA are firmly imprinted on my mind.
One occasion that I remember well, and I think my younger brother will as well, was when I was on stand-by on the end of the telephone at home and he was staying with us as he was also recovering from a nervous disorder following a matrimonial problem. I took him with me when I was called out.
The alerting system had already brought the equipment up from the stand-by mode to full power as we raced for the operations truck and I made contact with the tower as I slid into my seat. I put him on a spare headset and was pointing out the significant blobs on the radar screen and after that concentrated on the job in had [sic] , showing him the progress of the blob from time to time. The customer was a diverted Hastings from abroad and although our weather was bad elsewhere was even worse so with 600 yards visibility and a 200ft cloud base I got stuck into my very first operational talk-down. I had been on the other end often enough and knew that it was not easy to handle an aeroplane completely on instruments, boring into the murk, descending at around 130mph. That was probably why I always projected myself into the cockpit when doing talk-downs and felt as if I was virtually holding hands with the pilot and everything went smoothly. The pilot had a full instrument rating and the rest was up to me. When we came to the critical bit, just in the bottom of the cloud at half a mile from the runway threshold he was as steady as a rock, still doing around 120mph, in contact with the approach lights through the murk to the point of touch-down when I flicked the transmitter switch off to hear the pilot report "on the runway" as I turned to where my brother should have been to as I said "I'll open the door
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and you will see him go by"....he was not there. The strain had been too much. He was flat out on the floor and although he did not take long to recover he vowed that would never place himself in that siuation [sic] again and was very glad to get back to the house where a drop of the hard stuff restored him. I don't know if it was the shock treatment but he made good progress after that and got his feet firmly on the ground again.
Another visitor to the tower one day sent a few people into a panic as the sight of a policeman' uniform will often do. Even if you have done nothing wrong. Nothing you can remember anyway!. It was my wife's cousin, a local police patrol Sgt who was making a courtesy call, and in the course of our conversation he conveyed his Inspectors compliments. It had come out during a chat that he was none other than the chap who had been in the same hut as me in Stalag 11d, Nuremburg POW camp. It certainly was a small world!.
Our Senior Controller had a unique talent. He was in great demand to perform party tricks with cards and the like but his best performance was as a Hynotist [sic] .
Like most-people I was sceptical even when I saw people doing quite remarkable things, under the 'influence' I was still not convinced. Not until I was included in a group session. When the preliminary process of selection and conditioning had been done and I was told that my right arm was heavy and I could not lift it I said to myself "rubbish', I will show him. But I couln't [sic] , or my leg when we got round to that any more than I could stop the daft answers to questions coming out of any mouth when I tried not to say them. After that I was convinced and knew that people who were. getting drunk on a glass of, water, acting like chickens and other animals were not just part of the act. I submitted myself to several sessions and it was to be the same every time. He really did have control and was very good but the CO. put a stop to group sessions particularly if any of the pilots were involved. He reckoned that pilots were too vulnerable and did not want any talked into the ground!. Although it was most unlikely as one has to submit oneself to hypnosis it was perhaps a wise move.
We were getting into the Autumn of that year when I collected another secondary duty, that of taking charge of the Corporals
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Club, and on the face of it it seemed easy enough. Like a lot of other things that had come my way!. I soon found out that picking up the takings every morning, and checking the books and cash in hand and stock-taking once a week was a job that I could do without. The takings were very small. There seemed to be no more than half-a-dozen people making use of the place on any night and as far as I was concerned it hardly justified the services of two part time volunteer barmen and yours truly putting in two hours every week when over a hundred Corporals never even bothered to stick their noses in the place. That's the bit that peeved me most and I was 'piggy in the middle' again. For all that if anything that went wrong I was the fall guy.
A survey showed that for the year that it had been operating the takings had never reached what I would call reasonable proportions, albeit it was a non-profit making set-up, and the NAAFI manager confirmed that when the Cpl's bar had been run by them it had not needed any extra staff. That was enough for me and called a general meeting of the club with only two items on the agenda. One, "do you regularly make use of the club facilities;" and two, "would it make any difference to you if it was to revert to NAAFI management", The vote was a unanimous NO to each item and armed with the results of my survey and the minutes of the meeting I presented my case to the CO. When he realised that an officer was spending more time on Cpl's club business than most of the Cpls made of the facilities he agreed immediately to it's disbandment. He did make the observation though that as I had not appeared to be keen on taking the job anyway was my action the easy way out. A straight "yes" surficed [sic] !.
We were still making the most of Tangmere and the area, there was always something going on. On one occasion the Mess laid on a Battle of Britain garden party with invitations to all and sundry including of course many of the 'Few' who had fought from Tangmere. The invitation list was very impressive and I was awed by the prospect of being in such illustrious company. It was a schoolboy's dream come true.
Douglas Bader was there doing his usual stomping around and chatting with his old chums and gold braid seemed to be dripping
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everywhere. I spotted one of the 'Few', a Group Captain who had been my boss when I had been at Transport Command HQ. If ever I am asked about my most embarressing [sic] incident what happened next is certainly one of many.
I tried several times to catch his eye if only to make my presence known so when he eventually looked in my direction and approached I thought it would be an opportunity to make small talk for a while. He never seemed to notice although I had my hand stuck out to grasp his he went right by and gabbed the hand of an elderly steward who was behind me. As I looked in amazement at him pumping the arm of the steward he looked around at me and said "sorry Gamble, I couldn't let this bloke go, d 'you know, he was my batman in 1940". Then I understood and I knew that he had got his priorities right so I retired to the refreshment tent.
With the winter approaching the GCA became more and more important to our activities. On one occasion we had a flight of three Hunters of the Royal Netherlands Air Force notified but our weather deteriorated very quickly as they were on there way and when they did arrive they only had a very limited fit of frequencies which were already cluttered up by other traffic using Ford and Hayling Island. They were also quite low on fuel and on that day I think I created a precedence in Air Traffic Control by declaring an emergency 'Mayday' on the frequency requesting all other users to clear the channel. Needless to say it worked and with the GCA operator monitoring their progress they poured down from the overhead and landed without a hitch in what were still very poor conditions but a quite oblivious to the fact that the situation could have been much more serious. Another less successful incident was the talk-down of a diverted Valetta from overseas. His destination was below his limits and ours were marginal but three times I talked him down to the half mile decision point but he would not go that little bit further and overshot each time. After the third time he asked for a further diversion and was sent to Manston. I felt very sad about the end result of that. I know he was in the right place to make a touch-down but either he was sticking to the rules or he was lacking confidence in me. We will never know. The runway at Manston was icy, he braked and slid after
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landing, dipped a wing and pranged in a ball of fire and all of the crew were killed.
On another occasion I was on duty on a dirty Saturday morning in what was our published availability time for the Radar. We had not been warned of any traffic, the equipment was in the stand-by mode and I was in the crew van with my feet up sipping a cup of coffee when the tower controller came on the intercom. He only said two words, "urgent...in" and I was off to the operations vehicle with the mechanic at the double.
The mechanic started building up to full power as fast as was permissable [sic] as I contacted the tower to be told that we were taking on a Sea Vixen from Ford as there [sic] radar had just packed up as they were recovering aircraft from the Victorious in the Channel. The tower controller was positioning the aircraft into the pattern on time and bearings as my picture was filling in and I had already been told that he was short of fuel. Why the Fleet Air Arm had to fly to such tight limits I do not know but as soon as I had him in contact and he had changed to my frequency I asked him to confirm his fuel state and he quite calmly said "I can't overshoot if that's what you mean", so it was going to have to be a first timer.
I suppose my voice was calm enough, my directions accurate enough and his flying precise enough for him to ignore any limitations to make a perfect touch-down and then he promptly ran out of fuel on the runway as he was saying his 'thank you's'. I wonder though, if he was anything like me absolutely saturated in persperation [sic] !. All part of a day's work.
y
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Page 170 is missing
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Part of ‘Nil Desperandum’
Wyton 1962. Dot had become paralized [sic] from the waist down.
we were managing; just!.
After Dorothy had been in Addenbrooks for three weeks her condition had deteriorated further with almost no control over the lower part of her body as they carried out test after test whilst we continued our prayers in our own way. There was no time to spare to attend church for formal services. We were much too busy. Then the ultimate test came up on a new machine that Addenbrooks had just installed. Dorothy was the first person to have ever been strapped into it. Normal X-Rays had failed to show anything but that machine was the very latest. The patient was strapped to the bench which was set in double gymbals [sic] which rotated the body in every possible angle to a number of X-Ray cameras. The contraption looped, rolled and twisted and turned until she was dizzy but when they interpreted the results they did at least find the problem, which was all that they told me at the time apart from the fact that are operation was necessary and everything had been arranged for it to be done at The London Hospital in Whitechapel which specialised in neurosurgery so I managed some more time off to go with her in the ambulance to see her settled in. That is all I could do....and pray some more!.
The operation was scheduled for a week later and the surgeon wanted to see me first so I knew the time had come. I had to find out sometime but when I was told I was just about bowled over. When you are told that an operation has a fifty fifty chance of success you draw your own conclusions as I did but although Dorothy had been told the same I was given some more priviledged [sic] information. The 50/50 chance was that, one she would die, or two, she would be a cripple for the rest of her life.
I have made a few decisions in any life but to give approval for an operation that could have such consequences was perhaps the most difficult I have ever had to make. That was my Dorothy they were talking about. The little schoolgirl that I had known since I was seven and who had never subsequently questioned my career decisions and had always supported everything I had done. I hoped and prayed that I would not let her down.
As far as I was concerned at that time that the end of my service career. There was no way that I would be able to carry on, my
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work was suffering too much already; and I signed on the dotted line. Dorothy never knew about that 50/50 chance for years and neither did the family. I left everyone to draw their own conclusions and not everyone realised the seriousness of the situation, and never have. As for me I was back to work, looking after the kids and trusting in the Lord.
Eventually the operation took place, all eleven hours of it in the hands of a most celebrated surgeon and as it was a teaching hospital it was all recorded by colour cine' camera's under the eyes of dozens of students in the galleries. I found it very difficult to concentrate on work but eventually I phoned to find that she was out of surgery, confortable [sic] , stable and all the normal things that the nursing staff are trained to say but it was a couple of days before I could get down to see her.
To aovoid [sic] upsetting the system too much I could only visit between shifts without landing myself in more trouble by asking for more time off. She looked pale, she had had three blood transfusions during the operation which had been to the area of the inside and around the back of the spinal column between the shoulders to remove a tumor [sic] . A very delicate job, and touch and go.
It would be three weeks before we would know whether it had been successful and in the meantime she was told not to move a muscle or even think about it. Every movement she wanted to make had to be assisted. About the only thing she could more without assistance were her eyes and mouth. Not easy.
Whilst she was in that state she developed some side effects like a sort of bronchitis that had everone [sic] baffled although it eventually got sorted. That was one time that we were able to do something for the hospital, they had done so much for us and she was not the only one suffering from the same congestion in the bronchial tubes. They had tried everything and Dorothy suggested that one of Grandma's cures might help so they went along with it. Off they went to the fruit and veg. market on the opposite side of the road to the hospital to buy lemons and then produced Grandma's mixture. Hot pure lemon juice and honey!. Two doses and a cough and up came the offending obstruction with a great deal of relief. It went down to the
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path. lab immediately and funds were promptly allocated to buy more lemons and honey from the market and everone [sic] received the 'cure'. That made some considerable improvement in Dorothy's condition and she began to get stronger. Family visits were allowed, all except the baby and after two weeks, although she was not supposed to move, came the moment we had both been praying for. She reckoned she had been static long enough and had experimented a little. It may not seem a lot, but when I made my next visit she said to watch the foot end of the bed. The bed clothes rippled. She could wriggle the toes of both feet so that was a good sign but we could do no more than hold hands in our excitement. We coudn't [sic] even embrace due to all the dressing and padding around her but that was the beginning of her recovery.
Within a couple of days she had experimented a little more to find that she could move her legs and there was feeling in them, a fact that she was able to tell the surgeon on his rounds. He and his staff were excited too and she had the all-clear to try, very gently, other movements, in a closely controlled situation, and what she was able to do caused even more excitement. Of course, she was prodded, pricked and scraped to test all the reflexes that had previously packed up and all the right signs were there.
At the end of the third week she was allowed off of the bed into the vertical position and most people will know what that is like, even if they have only taken to their bed for a few days. After fighting the nausea and using a walking frame for a few days she decided to go solo. No walking frame crutches or sticks and she did the length of the ward from bed to bed with a lot of encouragement from everyone in the ward.
Day by day she improved, doing a little more each time and getting her sea legs. Her wound had healed well and she could do most things by herself including turning over in bed. Even her vericose [sic] veins had improved due to the bed rest and the end of another week she was transferred back to Addenbrooks Hospital on a stretcher by train with private compartment!.
After a further week the hospital authorities were making arrangements for her to be transferred to Huntingdon hospital which would make it easier to visit when, out of the blue they
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changed their mind. She could come home for convalescence!. The relief was indescribable. It was an emotional time for all of us, and I can barely recall what went on apart from the fact that I was totally overcame when the strain of the last few months manifested itself and I had to go and lie down in a darkened room for a while to wait for my brain to simmer down. Eventually I was able to get myself together and bit by bit we were able to tackle the daily routine once more and re-establish the family unit that had been so disrupted.
Every day brought improvement and by the time she had been home a month Dorothy had not only managed to walk comfortably with the pram and to a certain extent unaided, after another few weeks she even managed to ride a bicycle again. That was quite an achievement and when she went back to Whitechapel to see the surgeon he and his colleagues could hardly believe that it was possible and were justifiably highly delighted. Dorothy turned down an invitation to appear in person to back up the film for a presentation at a later date. It would have been very good for the moral of the team but we had more important things to attend to by then.
Fortunately the tumor [sic] had been non-malignant and was in a place of honour in a pickle jar and we were only too happy to say our 'thank you’s' to all the ward staff and doctors who had made it possible, including a letter to Peterborough hospital staff who had started it off. But who had really made it all possible!?.
By what stroke of fate was it that she went to Peterborough hospital on that day when a particular nurse was there. What caused the surgeon to express such surprise at the supple state of Dorothy's spine if it had not been the dedicated work of the Chiropractor, and what guided his hand in a most hazardous operation which they considered to be a near miracle?. Who knows. When we wrote to the faith healing organisation telling them of the outcome we received a most beautiful letter and so we went on from there.
Not everything was as it had been before. The bits that they had taken out of Dorothy's spinal column to get at the tumor [sic] had left her a little shorter than she had been. She had to walk fairly fast to maintain her balance and her ankles were
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turned over slightly inwards. Small things really and as time went on they became less and less of a problem.
For me it was back to the routine again to try and make up lost ground. No more time off, full shiftworking again including night shift although we had lost the emergency service requirement we manned for 24 hours to cover USAF traffic. All throughout those months of anquish [sic] there had been a lot going on that I had still been involved in. We had got rid of our museum piece of radar and taken the new equipment into service and were beginning to shake it down as we were developing new, safer and more sophisticated systems of traffic handling. In such an environment everything was ongoing as problems were confronted and solved almost daily. It all directly involved me one way or another as at the same time I was working my way through the system to refresh my proficiency certificates until it all finally settled down and was running efficiently. At least, during that period I had not collected any secondary duties like Fire Officer!. The only certification I lacked was that of supervisor and no doubt if I stayed there a little longer I would have made but before you could say "Christmas 1962" my next posting was notified. To Laarbruch, Germany, effective from the following February!. I was a bit peeved as I had regularly requested to be trained for area radar which would have widened my scope but at the same time limit the units at which I could serve but it didn't work out that way. I found it somewhat frustrating at times that whilst I was bouncing around like the proverbial yo-yo every 2 1/2 years (or less), there were people around me in different professions who had been in the area for ten years and more. They had done the rounds of Wyton, Upwood and Brampton, bought houses and raised families all in the one area. I should be so lucky!!!.
At least we had plenty of time to organise ourselves. I knew a few people out there so I set the wheels in motion for renting a some private accomodation [sic] to hold us for a while until quarters came up and finished with a place in the town of Goch, about eight miles from the airfield and where the RAF had some married quarters. The two eldest girls were going to have to go to boarding school at Hamm in the Ruhr which was not entirely to our liking but local military schools only went up to junior
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grades, after which it was off to boarding school, either in the UK or Germany. to. A very limited choice so Hamm it was.
After some careful planning we made the move as painlessly as possible. I went privately two weeks in advance with the car loaded up to the hilt almost 16 years to the day that I had baled out of a crippled Lancaster over that country.
The car really was loaded. I only had a little cockpit left that was not stuffed with something and it wallowed somewhat, but I was not rushing anywhere. A gentle jog would get me there if the suspension held out and I got perhaps the best advice that I could have had from A NAAFI manager who was returning to Gutersloh, on what to look out for when driving with UK number plates out there.
We were on the Harwich to Hook route so I had the advantage of following him for a while as I settled in to driving on the opposite side of the road. In the first large town that we came across the very thing happened that he warned me about.
The rule of the road is such that you give way to traffic on the right, therefore if you are on the left of any conflict between two vehicles you are in the wrong and penalised accordingly. Cut and dried in Dutch and German law. So if you are a Dutchman driving a beat up banger that needs a new engine, and replacement panels what do you do?. You bounce an English registered car that you know has got to have good insurance cover and that's what very nearly happened!.
A couple of youths in an old Merc. made a bee-line for me from my right hand side and I had to work very smartly on two occasions to brake and weave away from his obvious intentions. Then he must have got angry and tried it a third time but I got out it by jinking around the wrong side of a tram which he promptly collided with so I had no further problem with him. Trams in Holland have absolute right of way so he was the one to finish up having to do a lot of explaining and no doubt a hefty repair bill.
I was even more wary after that but there was no further trouble after waiving [sic] goodbye to my 'pathfinder' friend and in due course crossed into Germany at Nijmegen. The loaded car caused considerable amusement among the German customs officers. I don't think that they had seen a vehicle quite so well packed,
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roof rack and all. The only room for any cigarettes was on top of the blankets that covered everything up to the sill line, but they got the message when they realised that it was all mainly household goods and I was away again without any hassle.
I was relieved when I finally arrived at my destination and although I had planned the route very carefully I made sure that I stayed on track by calling at numerous bars on the way. That had resulted in an intake of several beers which caused the interval between stops to become shorter and shorter. At the last port of call, in a bar just off of the market square in Goch I tried out my well rehearsed little bit of German on the lady behind the bar "Bitte, vo ist drei unt vierzig Weeze Strasse"?. It must have sounded alright as I had already asked for an "eine kleiner beer, bitte", but she came out with a torrent of German and then was amazed to be told "langsam, ich sprechen kliene Deutsch" and that was almost the limit of my German. It didn't matter a lot. After a good laugh, another beer and a lot of arm waving I only had a few hundred yards to go and there was 53 Weeze Street, a tall terrace house that looked a little battered with other houses each side still shored up or boarded up with panels of wood and galvanised sheeting. It was no palace but it was going to have to do.
The landlady was a charming elderly lady, almost Victorian, who managed only a few words of English but magically produced a cup of tea and over that I found that her husband had been a merchant sea captain and had been lost at sea but all was quite friendly when I told her that I had been more fortunate after being shot down not so far from where we were sitting. After that I started to unload the car with the tool box being one of the first things and then places were found for everything with shelves, brackets, hooks and the like with her permission. I wanted it to be as homely as possible, and it certainly needed the personal touch. There was basically only two rooms and nothing that could be called a kitchen, only a long passage off of the living room. It had a wash basin and a cold tap and at the far end was the toilet....unscreened and frozen up anyway!.
I could have done a lot with emulsion paint but I did not have time for that. I worked on it with what I had in terms of covers,
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screens, tacks and nails, pictures and plaques and it soon looked considerably brighter which rather surprised Frau Van Cooke who had kept me supplied with tea and cakes throughout the unloading and conversion process. The last last [sic] thing to install were various electric and gas cooking appliances and it was all done. It would not be too much of a shock to the family on first sight at least and then I was off to Laarbruch to stay the night with friends who had been at Tangmere with us before going down to Wildenwrath for the homeward journey.
I had arranged to leave the car at Wildenwrath in the care of friends who had fixed me up with a flight to Northolt in a Pembroke and it all clicked into place. Later that day I trained to Huntingdon and home. So far so good and a couple of days later we gave up the quarter and travelled as a family to Manston via a night stop in London where several of the family had congregated from Worthing, and then by air direct to Wildenwrath. The air movements staff were somewhat surprised when; as a family we by-passed all the normal transportation facilities, but all I had to do was pick up the car and set off for our new home. It was not much but we were together and we made the best of it. Frau van Cooke was a little concerned as she had obviously mis-understood that we were five in family until the eldest girls were off to boarding school but after some adjustment to the rent she made another small room available and we were fairly comfortable. Fortunately the weather had turned a little warmer and the toilet had thawed but the thing that seemed to bother Frau van Cooke most was that as the rating system in Germany was based on a poll tax the appropriate authorities had to be informed of changes as they occurred. We overcame it as we did most things. The day after arrival I was reporting for duty. The girls were enrolled at the camp school temporarily before their places at Hamm had been confirmed and we were very soon into a routine. It was different though. It was a long time since we had lived in anything but an Air Force community and in it's way it was very interesting. We soon integrated into the local environment and we had no problems in adapting. Frau van Cooke and our neighbours were kind and helpful [sic] . The local garage housed the car overnight for a modest fee when I was not on duty rather than park it in the main road and we
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soon got used to the the [sic] German way of doing things. First and foremost, the cleanliness of the area in front of a building was the reponsibility [sic] of the occupant so it seemed that there was competition to be the smartest although they were very reluctant to allow grass to grow on the verges. They were all raked and scratched into patterns. Bicycles were ridden on the footpath but always according to the direction of the road traffic and the bicycle bell was mandatory. Cars could be parked in the roads but only in the direction of the traffic but not both sides of the road at the same time. It was a very practical arrangement. Parking was relative to the date and the house numbering. Odd dates on odd numbers and visa versa. Cars were not washed in the street on Sundays and neither was washing hung on the line. Sundays was a day for visiting the family in Sunday best clothes and for church. How much that routine has changed over the years I would not know but at that time it seemed to be a comfortable arrangement. Another practical method of designating where speed restrictions started and stopped was by applying the standard 50k limit at the signpost at the town limits on the way in and at the signpost on the way outwhich [sic] gave the name of the next town or village on route. Very simple, economical and effective.
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The town of Goch was a market town very close to the Dutch border and more or less on the line of what had been at one time the old Seigfried line. It had suffered badly from savage fighting when the big push was launched on the 8th February 1945, the day after I failed to return, when the Allies attempted to reach the Rhine all along the front. The Canadians had forced a passage by the most bloody hand to hand fighting along the very road in which we were living after they had taken Weeze and most of the houses still bore the marks of the battles as did many places in the town centre. The houses adjacent to us were not the only one's that were boarded up skeletons and the Town Hall was still pock-marked with scars from shell and morter [sic] splinters as well as anti-tank and canon fire but despite it all life went on as near normal as one would have expected at home.
The attic rooms above us were not part of our let but we investigated at one time and I immediately regretted it as it upset the girls. The flimsy doors at the bottom and the top of the narrow winding stairs were both splintered with bullet holes and the walls were well and truly peppered with holes and some very nasty stains which obviously would not wash off. The attic itself was no better and there were still remnents [sic] of uniform scattered about and it would appear that nothing had been done other than to clear the casualties of the battle. It was not difficult to imagine the desperate and bloody fighting that had gone on in that place and we only ever went up there that one time.
Despite it all, the Germans had built a memorial to a British officer who had been appointed as Town Major to manage the civilian administration which was standard procedure after the battle had passed through. It was neccessary [sic] to get public facilities running properly as soon as possible and tie up the minimum number of fighting personnel. His job was to help to get things going again as smoothly as possible and to that end he applied himself in such a way that he became highly respected by the locals for his ability to be hard working, fair and just. Unfortunately, it had to be a memorial plaque as, once the town was capable of running itself again he had rejoined his unit up at the front and had been killed in action. It was something to think about that their appreciation was so recorded which
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was more than could be said for some of the German military whose presence in the area still showed…but in a different way. In the town of Kevelaer, which was renowned for it's manufacture of religious artifacts, there was a tall wall alongside a church absolutely riddled with bullet holes where a large number of the population had been lined up and shot..by the SS!, as apparently the battle raged to and fro they had been evacuated several times for their own safety until finally they refused to be moved. They were prepared to stay and take their chance and after seeing that terrible sight I could understand that the population of some German towns were prepared to show their appreciation for their deliverance from the yoke of Nazizm [sic] .
Eventually the time came for the two eldest girls to start at Hamm when the new term started and they set off by train with others who they had met between terms. It seemed better that way and probably allowed them to settle a bit quicker...but they did not like it that was for sure. Boarding school discipline was not to their liking and the school buildings were a bit grim. They were converted SS barracks and most of the pupils were quite certain that the matron had been left behind by the SS when they evacuated all those years ago!, but they coped.
We went to Hamm whenever the opportunity arose. Week-ends when they were allowed out and half-term so we took them about as much as we could to places of interest but there was invariably tears when we were obliged to leave.
Fortunately the journey through to Hamm was only just over two hours but it was an interesting route whether by autobahn or the 'scenic' route. The autobahn route was right through the 'Happy Valley' Ruhr industrial complex that had received such a pounding from Bomber Command and still showed it and the scenic route to the North was through some very badly damaged towns, including Wanne Eikle when we diverted to have a look at the place. Nevertheless, it was surprising how quickly the economy was recovering. When we first arrived a great deal of our transport and services were provided from local resources under the reperations [sic] agreement but as industry recovered that was was coming to an end and British products were taking over.
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We had plenty of friends in and around Laarbruch and at other RAF units in the area. There were plenty of places to visit and Arnhem and Nigmegen [sic] were near enough for shopping expeditions
as well as paying our respects at the military cemetary's [sic] both at Arnhem and the Reichwald. Despite the fact that the camp had very comprehensive facilities we got out and about as much as we could. If we were going to be stationed in Germany we were going to see it, particularly when the eldest girls were home from Hamm or we visited then there. I remember once asking the technical F/Sgt in charge of the radar how he liked the place and was surprised to find that he did not think much of it but after a little more discussion found that he had not been outside the main gate since he had arrived!. Even by the end of his tour he had only been 'outside' twice and his wife not at all. It seemed a bit 'head in the sand' to me as most people we knew got about as much as possible.
There was one place we found, a little different from when I first encountered it, and that was the spot where I had landed safely in 1945 and nearly got shot by the side of the road. The house where I was first interrogated was as it was imprinted on my mind. Only 22 miles from Laarbruch. I even entertained the thought when I scouted around the area that I might recover two soggy one pound notes and my old I.D. card. Some hope!. The area of small nursery pines had grown to some 50 to 60 feet high and although I looked around the area I could find no sign of the whacking great hole that 'D' Dog would have made if that was where she came down. I never have found the crash site. It was years later that I made a serious attempt to find it but MOD Historical Records could not help other than to say that they had information that they could not disclose. Possibly a cover up for the fact that they knew nothing although they were interested to know where we baled out and why. 'D' Dog was the only aircraft Bomber Command lost that day and the crash site is still listed………………..
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as 'unknown'. That local tour was one of many that we made to places that were engraved on my memory and noted in my diary. At Krefeld I couldn't even find the airfield!. At Dusseldorf the old airfield had been swallowed up or otherwise expanded although the ghosts of the past were swirling around when I surveyed the area on more than one occasion from the terminal buildings.
At Frankfurt although I followed the road out towards Ober-Orsal I could find no sign of what had once been the infamous interrogation centre of Dulag-Luft. Throughout the next two and a half years there were not many areas that we did not visit as we ranged far and wide with the benefit duty free pre-paid petrol coupons that were more than enough for our requirements. Shortly after starting the daily routine of setting off for the airfield one morning I picked up a Warrant Officer who was heading the same way. He too had only just arrived and lived not far from us. He was the Technical Wing Adjutant and his son was destined for Hamm school the same as our girls. That was the start of a long and deep seated friendship of the sort that one rarely made in the service as most friendships were like the ripples made by a stone in a puddle. They tended to dissipate when one or the other moved on but we are still in touch after 35 years.
I was soon certificated and operational. The work at Laarbruch was slightly different although it was not a continuous 24 hour shift system that I had become used to but we kept a skeleton crew on standby outside normal working hours to fulfill [sic] the requirements of 2nd Tactical Air Force. The aircraft were Canberra bombers and the more modern delta wing Javelin night fighter. A touch of both Bomber Command and Fighter Command which made for some very interesting procedures. Other than that the rest of the set-up was fairly standard. The GCA radar was the same type that I had used at Tangmere and I was promptly placed in charge of it for it's operation proficiency which included checking out other controllers and to train to a high standard of re-positioning and setting up of the equipment when the runway in use was changed. The requirement was to do it within an hour which was a tall order considering that there was the operations trailer, the power supply trailer and rest
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caravan weighing in all about 40 tons to be moved with great care considering that it contained some quite delicate equipment and cost around £250,000!. Bend that little lot and someone's head would roll........mine!.
The route to Hamm took us down to the new bridge at Vesel, slightly up river from the remnants of the ends of the-old bridge that had been destroyed during the war in that hottest of all hotspots. It was from that very area that massive armies had gathered to force a crossing of the river and where Churchill had fired one of the first shots of the assault by pulling the lanyard of a very big gun and where the biggest Airborne landing of 22,000 men had been landed by glider and parachute on the East side of the town. A very historical place militarily and a slightly battered one having been given a terrible pounding by Bomber Command prior to the attack by ground forces. Nevertheless, a lot had been rebuilt and the new system had taken advantage of a lot of open space and vast quantities of rubble. We usually swept through and in a few miles had linked up with the autobahn.
I got my first taste of motorway driving out there when they were were [sic] still building the M1 in the UK although the southern end was usable I had not used it but it was like a battlefield. 90% of the autobahn traffic seemed to be VW Beetles and the like with a top speed of a little over 70mph, about the same as mine, but it was the way they were driven that put the wind up me.
There was no speed limit and drivers just hurled themselves along at maximum possible speed with foot flat on the floor all the time, come what may. Nose to tail, bit between the teeth, no leeway whatsoever and no margin for error, just going like the clappers all the time. I really felt as if I was back in the Battle of the Ruhr and found it decidedly uncomfortable. I don't think that there was ever one journey that we did that we didn't see the results of what appeared to be suicidal driving so I started to try and prove that the MT instructors at the base were not going to include me when they quoted the statistics of 90% of drivers [underlined] will [/underlined] have an accident whilst in Germany. [underlined] They were right though [/underlined] !. I came unstuck eventually. In the meantime I just battled on. On one occasion we had just cleared the Ruhr
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area on the autobahn heading for Hamm with particularly heavy traffic developing into two solid streams doing around 60 to 70mph and I felt concerned enough to do as I still do today under such circumstances....get into the 'slow' lane where there was at least room to duck onto the hard shoulder if there was trouble. I was suddenly aware that way ahead stop lights were coming on like strobing airfield approach lights and was immediately on the alert. I suppose other drivers concentrating on the vehicles directly in front were not aware that the stop lights were coming on were getting closer and closer and then as it was obvious to me what was going to happen I jinked out onto the hard shoulder. I must have done it with split second to spare as some 200 vehicles shunted each other with the screeching of brakes, bangs, thumps and the sound of tearing metal and breaking glass. It was followed immediately by the cries of the injured when all other noises had stopped.
No-one in our immediate area was badly hurt although there were numerous head injuries and the odd broken limb with a fair bit of blood splashed around so it was out with the first aid kit and to the rescue. Fortunately, in addition to the mandatory first aid kit I had for years kept a large package of war-time wound packs in the car and they came in very useful although I what some people thought when they found that they were British Military packs dated 1943 I couldn't say. They did the job despite the fact that in most cases the safety pin was rusted!. Small matter. I had found them in an abandoned store in a pill box at Oakington in 1947…..I was not the sort of a bloke to waste things!. They lasted many years. In that instance we were luckier than the majority and it took an hour and a half before the autobahn ahead was cleared sufficienty [sic] for us to proceed past piles of smashed up vehicles, and then we came to the root cause of the pile-up. Unbelievable!. There were [underlined] two [/underlined] white police cars mangled together more or less standing on end up against a bridge support. We subsequently learned that they had been heading the long snake of cars to keep the speed down but had been playing 'tag' and had obviously not-been very clever.
I felt at the time that 'someone' was definitely out to get me having so far escaped all other intentions of the Germans to eliminate me and it did not improve Dorothy's attitude to
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sitting in what was often classified as the suicide seat, ie, the passenger seat of a right hand drive vehicle being driven on the right hand side of the road. There was even more apprehension by the time that particular week-end was over. We had just got into Hamm and rounding a corner had to duck to miss the car ahead that had lurched around the corner, bounced off of one of the large concrete cylinder things that were liberaly [sic] sprinkled around their street corners and then finished up with the front wheels over a small garden wall. It was a British Forces registered vehicle also heading for Hamm school but no-one was hurt and the driver declared that he needed no assistance so we pressed on. Nevertheless it was a great weekend with the girls who enjoyed their visit to Munster zoo we thought no more about driving and it's associated problems until we were on the return journey.
I was gaining slightly on a VW Beetle but held back for a while as it was lurching about over both lanes in very light traffic. It was some time before I ventured alongside and was somewhat shocked to find that all of the windows were closed and steamed up and all four occupants were asleep, including the driver, hunched over the wheel. I gave the horn as much as I could for as long as I could to rouse everyone, making signs to wind down the windows until it was safe to pass and felt after that that I had done my good deed for the day as that bloke was very close to running off of the road. He would not have known much about it though as he was doing what most beetle drivers did. Foot still flat on the floor regardless.
As always there was continual movement of personnel, most people having settled into a 2 1/2 year tour. We had with us people that we had known at many units including Amman and Egypt as well as Mareham [sic] and Wyton so of course the usual thing was happening with the married quarter waiting list as we went up and down like a yo-yo. There was one movement that had occurred just before we arrived although would not have made any difference to our quarters list, that of the Station Commander whose Adjutant I had been at Marham but he had gone on with more promotion. After that apparently almost every move he made was with further promotion until he eventually retired as an Air Marshall with a Knighthood and a handsome string of awards and
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decorations including; GCB, KCB, CB, CBE, OBE, DSO, DFC, AFC, and I must confess that I am proud to have received a great deal of instruction from him in the three years that I was his Adjutant.
The eventual allocation of married quarters at Laabruch could not have come at a better time. 53 Weeze Strasse was not the most suitable of places but it had enabled us to recover our finances to the satisfaction of both the bank manager and our-selves, and I hope, Frau van Cooke, so we moved into our comfortable centrally heated house shortly before the winter set in and had a damn good house warming party to celebrate.
Everything sailed along quite happily despite the girls dislike of boarding school and our youngest was soon into her third year but we were outgrowing the little Ford Popular and it's three speed gear box was a bit tedious at times. It was time for a change and we considered all the options. In the end I ordered the new Ford Classic (tax free) from a firm in Chichester in Sussex with a part exchange deal and it was all done when we went back to the UK for a holiday covering the school term break.
That was going to be the car that would see me through for the maximum number of miles before another change became neccessary [sic] . I ran it in carefully and the engine was treated with all the right things to achieve longevity and when our leave was up it was fully prepared to do anything asked of it, nevertheless, no sooner than we were back into Holland on the way back one of the first things we came across was a car upside down in a ditch at the side of the road with arms and legs hanging out of broken windows. I only stopped for a quick look and decided that there was little I could do that would not involve and upset the family so I pressed on for about half a mile until I saw a house with the sign outside denoting that they had a phone, nipped in and asked them to telephone ambulance and police to get to the scene, and then continued my journey. I've sometimes thought that I might have been able to do more at the scene but the inside of the car was like a butchers shop with not a lot of hope for the occupants.
The Classic was soon re-registered with British Forces plates and as it was a new model it always attracted a great deal of interest wherever we went. There was usually a crowd around
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it wherever it was parked.
There was one place just over the border in Holland that we visited regularly. The village of Well was an interesting little place and one of it's most comfortable establishments was a little restaurant and bar on the side of the River Maas. 'Auntie' Nellie was mine host and she was a remarkable person. She was well known for her resistance work and had been responsible for numerous evaders to pass along another link in the chain back to the safety of their own lines. It had obviously needed someone like that who was handy to assist in the river crossing. The Maas was quite wide and fast flowing at that point and the nearby bridge was a war-time Bailey built especially to carry military traffic from Eindhoven; still carrying heavy traffic. Our free week-ends were often spent there for shopping and for refreshments in the restaurant, watching the barges chugging by with all manner of goods piled on them and the bargees washing, bicyles [sic] , dogs, or watching a UK football match on the tele. but there was a bit of a problem with that. The football commentary was usually in Dutch so a radio was set up alongside and we had a commentary in English for the same match that suited the Dutch, English and German patrons who all gravitated to that place. Great fun greatly assisted by good strong Dutch beer, or possibly something hotter and stronger on cold days.
We visited the area many years later and it had not changed much and one of the girls plus her own family visited many years after that and it was still pretty much the same. We had a lot of time for the Dutch people and found no difficulty in integrating. In fact, we could quite happily have taken up residence there.
Crossing the Dutch/German border just North of Goch a few months after getting the new car the windscreen disintegrated in my lap and of course being a new model not yet on sale on the continent it took a week before a Dutch Ford agent could fit another but that was nothing to what happened later. With a new car I thought that I had overcome the love/hate relationship that I had always had with motor vehicles, but I was always
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to be in trouble with them one way or another.
Something else cropped out that I was not overjoyed about. The 'cold war' that was the very reason that we were out there demanded emergency establishment manning in the event of going to 'Red Alert' and on that deployment I would have been immediately on my way to my war establishment post. To Gatow, Berlin!!!, right in the middle of the contested Russian Zone. Just my luck. I would much rather have been going in the opposite direction!, away from any conflict but due to it's security classification I had to keep that possibility under wraps.
Life was anything but dull. The job of Station Fire Officer landed in my lap again almost as soon as I moved into quarters although it was the usual arrangement. A senior fireman did the work and 'Sir' was the dogsbody who took the flak if anything went wrong but it still helped to know as much as possible about the job. I had learned the hard way but the crash/rescue element was always under the operational control of Air Traffic Control and I thought that having got that job it would be enough---wrong again!.
There was plenty to occupy my mind and my hands. There were liaison visits of all sorts on a two way basis. The local German and Dutch fire services were entertained and visa versa (but not both at the same time). At one time I had two Luftwaffe NCO's for several weeks to polish off their GCA training although their initial training had been with the Americans and we all used the same procedures. Even our GCA was of standard American design. All very interesting!. A very daft situation arose with them on one occasion as naturally they were billeted with us and it seemed natural for them to use their camera's. It is true that we did have one very secure area in the vicinity of the Canberra dispersals on the far side of the airfield but the Service Police were I think a little over security concious [sic] when they pounced on them in the domestic area and ripped the film out of the camera's. Typical. I did have a word with the senior policeman but it was a waste of time. He reckoned that he was not having Germans photographing our installations. Bloody daft!. They had built the station for us in the first place!
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My interest in photography had developed further to the extent that I joined the unit photographic club, a move that I was to regret later and although the facilities were a bit run down I was able to widen the scope of my activities in that field as I had sold all my processing gear back at Wyton when finances were taking a bit of a hammering. What happened next was just waiting to happen. The current Officer I/C (in-charge) was posted and they did not look very far for his replacement. There were no terms of reference so I was instructed to write my own for approval and then my brief was simple. "It's a mess, put it back on it's feet". I knew it was a mess, the trouble was that I had told too many people. In the main it was used by people for standard processing at a profit, and who were not very interested in cleaning up. It did not take long to find out that there was about twice the number of people booking out the keys as there was on the register so it was a matter of going back to 'square one' to lock the place up and out of bounds to all but a selected few who were formed into a committee until a new system was set up I had the place refurbished with all the enlargers overhauled by a local German photographic supplier, new black-outs and racking resulting in four good booths. Eventually we agreed the maximum number of people that we could have on the register, all old membership cards were invalidated and new cards issued against the subscription register which was to be renewed annually and 'bingo'. With new rules, a studio and lecture room we opened up and it flourished. One feature I introduced was processing on certain nights only and a weekly 'beginners night' series of talks for the benefit of those, schoolchildren, wives and all, who wanted to know the basics. I well remember my own first efforts when every other word the 'experts' said was 'double dutch' to me so I was determined that each of the four talks was pitched as low as possible and repeated every month. It worked well and it was popular.
As we went into the first Winter we were glad of the design of the married quarters. Airmen's and Officers were all built along the same lines albeit to a different standard. The typical concrete box built on top a cellar and around the plumbing. There was no piping showing inside or outside. The cellar was
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the utility area, with concrete wash tubs, floor drainage and other mod. cons. and a store room. It all looked rather like the inside of a submarine with huge pipes and turn cocks along the passage…..but there was no boiler!. Hot water was provided by a huge boiler system to the whole station along deep insulated piping on a communal basis, the only base in Germany to have such a system and it made everything very comfortable and convenient. Especially when an Officers wife went 'down below' to see how the plumber was getting on with a job only to find that he was sitting in one of the wash tubs, in the buff, happily blowing bubbles in oodles of hot water. Now that's what I call initiative and it caused a bit of a giggle when the story got around.
Later on our store room became the 'Den' where the girls and their friends congrgated [sic] to get away from the 'oldies' but at least they had their own space. Goodness knows how many there were down there at times after we got fed up answering the door and fixed up a string and a bell system through the outside grating.
Being a house of concrete the attic had a concrete floor as well and all the roof beams had built in hooks for what I assumed to be hammocks if ever they were needed as barracks providing a very useful sleeping area particularly if anyone was overwhelmed with visiting friends and relations from the UK.
As it happened we never were and although my father-in-law expressed an interest to visit us and take the opportunity do the tour of the WW1 battlefields he found it more than he could bring himself to do and could not set foot on German soil; and he never did. The memories of his brother being blasted into eternity at his side, and his own wounds were too strong for him ever to forget that episode in his life.
Before the winter was out we skated and tobogganed. Everyone enjoyed themselves in the light fluffy snow of the kind that one did not normally see back home until at last Spring broke through and work and play took over the scene again. The Winter was a bit hard although nowhere near as bad as the one to follow but a lot happened in between.
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One tour we put together for the early Summer holidays came unstuck. It was planned as a round robin right down through Central and Southern Germany, into Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland, France and back home over at-out ten days. It did not quite work out like that although we were making the most of it until it went wrong.
We went to Nuremburg and found the site of Stalag X111b but there were no huts left, only a police Guard Post and we were allowed to browse around. Then on to Stalag V11a Mooseburg and back to Munich for a night stop. The memory plays funny tricks though. Despite my notes I found it very difficult to locate some places and even when I did positively identify places from the notes they were sometimes unrecognisable. We had already found the same problem around the UK!. However, our navigation went a bit haywire down in Austria when we took a wrong road up in the mountains and instead of going into Switzerland we found ourselves back in Germany again. Not that it mattered much. All of the scenery was absolutely splendid and eventually we were into and out of France crossing the border into Germany again near Strasburg. We were ahead of our schedule so we decided that we would head for home rather than go for another night stop and were about ten miles South of Heidleburg when some idiot driver pulled a stunt that upset a few people; us included and so we finished up with a night stop anyway.
I was the tail ender of seven or eight vehicles in convoy doing near enough 70mph in the 'fast' lane with no traffic in the other lane when a light truck going like a bat out of hell came up behind making angry signals with his lights for us to get out of the way, which I did and then I resumed the tail end position. I did not stay behind him long as obviously no-one else was going to move over for him so he pulled out and went through on the wrong side. No doubt he had worked himself into a frenzy of agressive [sic] behaviour, (what is called road rage today is nothing new) and as soon as he got to the head of the column he did something quite unexpected. I could see the whole thing happening as if in slow motion as he literally hurled his vehicle across the bows of the leaders and them stood on the brakes. What happened next was anything but slow motion but long before
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anything happened directly I was on the brakes and everyone on board slid up against something solid before each and everyone of the cars shunted one another with a series of thuds until despite my heavy breaking we slammed into the one in front with such a wallop that it shot forward again into the one in front and our roof rack landed in the road between us. It was very fortunate that I was 'tall end charlie' as I am quite sure that we would have had one in the back of us as well.
After a quick check to see if we had any injuries, to be very relieved to find that only the eldest had had a scratch from a broken Coke bottle I dispatched her immediately to about fifty yards back along the centre section to start waving her white cardigan like mad, and got everyone else out onto the central reservation in case some damn fool back-ended us. It was not difficult to get out of as the impact had given us a 'droop snoot' and the doors had sprung with an overlap of some four inches. One could see at a glance that that we were not going anywhere in that car for a long time.
Checking on the vehicle in front and recovering the roof rack disclosed that the middle aged couple in the BMW that I had hit were badly shaken but otherwise unhurt although their car was quite badly damaged. The front end was bent, the back end was scrunched, the boot lid had sprung, and the exhaust had fallen off. They were both in tears though as the car was absolutely brand new, direct from the factory on delivery with only 22km on the clock but that was the least of my worries.
Between listening to their tales of woe, refixing the roof rack and repacking some of our spilled goods with a very watchfull [sic] eye on the traffic that was still hurtling by I still had time to take a few photographs before the police arrived and my daughter could retire from her rather exposed position to the relative safety of the central reservation where all the damaged cars had been pushed once the police were satisfied with explanations and that the exchanges of insurance details had been attended to. That's the way German traffic law worked; 'he who does the bumping does the paying', so you dealt with the one in front and the law is satisfied.
Breakdown vehicles appeared as if by magic but we had to wait a lot longer than most to get cleared as I, being a member of
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the military, had to be dealt with by the appropriate military authority, in that area, the U.S. Army, who could not have been more sympathetic and helpfull [sic] . The car was eventually winched onto a civilian break-down vehicle, (which I subsequently had to pay for) and off it went with us following up in a staff car to see it settled in a field full of other wrecks. Our surplus goods were left in the care of the driver of the breakdown-truck before we were finally deposited at the steps of a very nice Hotel in Heidelburg.
In normal circumstances we would have enjoyed that visit to the beautiful city of Heidelburg but not that time. We were just about broke. I had a Hotel bill to consider as well as the train fare back to base. I did not have a German bank account and there were limits that one could do then with a UK chequebook. Nevertheless, we dredged up every mark and phenig [sic] that we could, including the kid's pocket money but it didn't allow for a meal so we just had to picnic on the bits and pieces that we had recovered from the car and ultimately went to bed very tired if not a little hungry. It still took a long time before sleep came to me. Here I was again, virtually stranded in Germany wondering what was going to happen next. Every piece of the day’s action kept floating in frost of my eyes. Of all the damn silly things. All those occasions of war-time flying over enemy territory escaping injury by the skin of my teeth, to finish up in Germany with a pranged car and very nearly a damaged family as well.
I made myself a promise before I want to sleep, to never, ever again put myself or my family in such a situation again. There had to be a way to adjust one’s driving technique to reduce the risks, so I was going to have to swallow my pride. Meanwhile I had become one of 2nd TAF's motoring statistics having been told that nine out of ten drivers would have an accident I had scoffed at the idea...but they were not wrong.
The following day after paying our bill and buying tickets there was not much left in the kitty so it was rolls, butter, sausage and fizzy drinks bought locally for breakfast and for the journey, then we were off.
That part of the journey was a tour to remember for it's sheer
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beauty but I think that I was the only one to remember it in detail. The weather was perfect. The scenery along the Rhine was picture postcard stuff of vinyards [sic] and castles perched high up on hillsides especially the area around Koblenz was too good to miss particularly as I had run out of film and could not even afford to buy another. I kept waking the family up to look at, it but at that stage of the game they were not too impressed although I was out to make the most of it. To hell with the car, insurance would take care of that and the most important thing was that we were all together and all in one piece. That's all that mattered. We eventually arrived back at Goch, a colleague picked us up and that was the end of that holiday and touring for a while. There were letters to write and reports to make as we eventually settled down to life without a car. I tried to negotiate for the car to be transferred to Holland for repair as it was a new model not yet available in Germany although it was filtering onto the Dutch market but the agents for the UK insurers who were based in Hamburg would not entertain the idea and weeks went by as they deliberated. In the meantime my neighbour who had just bought a new car agreed to run it in by driving me down to Heidelburg to pick up all the stuff that we had been obliged to leave behind. It had all been prepared and packed and even lunch was provided for us. He and his Frau earned our gratitude and their remuneration for their thoughtfulness. It helped me overcome my dismay when I went to see the car sitting forlornly among the wrecks. It had already been vandalised, possibly on the assumtion [sic] that it would be a write-off. All the wheel trims and the front wheels had gone as well as the wing mirrors. The battery had gone and the petrol had been drained off all ten gallons of it as we had only just fuelled up for the home run. I had been relying on some of that to help us to do the 300 mile round trip but someone had beaten me to it. Of course no-one knew anything about it. The yard did not belong to the recovery chap and there were notices around in German disclaiming responsibility for any losses etc. It was to be expected!.
The months went by and were particularly frustrating. Having looked the car over carefully on that visit I figured that it ought to be classified as a write-off but the insurance company
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disagreed. I tried to get it taken to Cologne, the German manufacturing centre for Fords but eventually it was transferred to Mannheim for repair. I found out later that the front was completely cut off and replaced, something that would not be acceptable today but that was it and they had the last say. I was without it for six months and a lot of annoyance which did little for my blood pressure.
I busied myself in work of one sort and another. We did not go out of camp much and the girls had settled themselves into local employment so it was the photographic club that received most of my attention which was soon flourishing financially and with a lot of enthusiastic new members. So much so that Laarbruch was selected as the venue for the Command Photographic Competition. It all went well with the cooperation of the Education Flight and the fact that I won two awards had nothing to do with the fact that one of the judges had been my neighbour at Wyton. All entries were coded which was standard practice.
Air Traffic Control was more or less routine. By that time I was convinced that I had covered just about every aspect and I was still making it known annually, that I wanted area radar training for the future. Nevertheless, I had one experience which I thought might have influenced a decision but it didn't.
I was doing stand-by shift in the radar track after I had been informed of a large formation practice of aircraft from 2nd TAP units to the South-East of us and I had been monitoring their progress when I was asked to take control of an aircraft being flown by the C in C who wanted see how the formation was shaping up.
It was really difficult after taking him on. I found out from the formation Ieader the detail's of the altimeter setting and then working him on a different frequency did a perfect fighter interception placing him just above and 100yds behind the formation. He even asked if I was a Fighter Controller and was somewhat surprised to find that he was being controlled by an airfield radar. He did say "as good as any fighter control interception" but he didn't bother to find out who I was!.
Our GCA was not without it's troubles though. There was one
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expensive internal item absolutely vital to it's operation that was costing dollars to replace and contracts had-been let to produce them in the UK under licence but they didn't always last for the expected running time but at least we had replacements. Our headphones were a different matter. Some of then were the original issue with the radar unit and were always in need of repair which was common in almost every similar equipment in the RAF. I found that intolerable. Aircrew helmets and associated communications equipment cost hundreds of pounds to ensure absolute reliability and safety and I was sometimes sweating a bit when we were obliged to operate in marginal conditions with our own equipment that could fail at any time. I indented for new head-sets to be told that they were too expensive and were to be repaired locally. I made a fuss and some were taken away by Command signals workshops for repair but very few people knew that I had got something else up my sleeve.
My contacts with my opposite number in the Dutch Air Force at Vokel was very helpful in finding out that their Bell helicoptors [sic] used the same sort of headset and were replaceable under a NATO agreement. A liaison visit exchanged three of them but I kept that quiet. The only time they came out was when we were operating in marginal conditions; and I kept up the pressure for total replacement much to the annoyance of the technical staff particularly when the refurbished sets proved to be unreliable. Eventually, wondering how long it would take to get something done before the next winter set in I really put the cat among the pigeons. I did a 'Douglas Bader' and signalled 2nd TAF HQ that the radar was declared 'non operational-training in visual conditions only due to technical problems'. Phew!, that really did get things moving. I knew through the 'grapevine' that new UK produced headsets were becoming available and that the C in C of Coastal Command had authorised the local purchase of replacements for his radars...that was good enough for me and was part of my argument and I flatly refused to change the status of our radar until something similar was done. As with Douglas Bader the result was dramatic. Within a week all the stops had been pulled out and I received replacements direct from the manufacturers completely by passing the normal stores
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procedure. All I had to do was to pass the invoices back through stores to confirm that I had got them and turn in the old one's for write off. We were operational immediately but I got a hell of a lot of 'stick' for it. Bader might have got away with it but I didn't. I had upset too many people along the line by taking a short cut and there were no thanks for my achievment [sic] .
In the late summer I did another liaison visit that was most interesting; to our Fighter Control Centre at Udem....in the war-time bunker that the Luftwaffe had used to track our bomber streams and direct their fighters although of course it had been modified to our sytem [sic] . It was similar to our UK fighter Control Centres that I had been in although it just felt different but what was interesting was the fact that there were a lot of Luftwaffe personnel around as a new generation was being trained by us. It led to to [sic] another liaison visit later when a few of us went to a radar controlled Luftwaffe ack-ack unit somewhere towards Wesel. Now that was interesting; less than ten miles from where a similar unit had shot us down in 1945 and very enlightening.
The winter was nearly upon us when I eventually received notice that the car was ready for collection so off I went to Mannheim only to find that as far as I was concerned it was not. It was lacking all sorts of bits and some parts were still unpainted so I returned without it. There was an angry exchange of letters between myself and Hamburg and claims for costs until I was eventually told it was positively ready so off I went again. Then the s……hit the fan. Hardly anything more had been done and although I phoned the Hamburg office and got the OK to take it subject to a settlement the repairers would not release it until it was paid for. Oh boy oh boy!, what fun and games. More phoning, Hamburg making arrangements to transfer money via banks, a night stop for me and eventually it was released so off set for the 230 mile return journey, and not before time. It was a good job that I had fuelled to the brim as the weather did not look at all promising. I soon connected with the Autobahn and had not gone more than 30 miles when I ran into a snowstorm that turned into a blizzard, just what I wanted!, although it
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slowed things down considerably and the traffic thinned out as snow came down in about the heaviest fall I had ever encountered. It was very soon some two or three inches deep and going was getting difficult although mostly I was in virgin snow and still getting a grip. I pressed on nevertheless having in mind that it looked as if I was going to have to make another night stop somewhere but then found that in the confusion of the poor visibility in the ten lane junction near Frankfurt I had picked up the wrong lane and was on my way North-East, towards Wuppertal!. There was only one thing to do and that was backtrack. Although the snow had stopped leaving a depth of about 4ins. it would have been quite impossible to go across country so it was back 20 miles and then find my way through the network of the ten lane junction again until I was on track for Cologne once more. By that time it had got dark and I was somewhat relieved to be heading in the right direction at last and was working out my ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival) when there was a hold up. It took some time for the traffic to creep forward and over the brow of a hill before I could see what had caused it all. There was a large articulated lorry on it's side blocking most of the carriageway and the police were only allowing one vehicle at a time down the hill past it as by now the snow had become impacted and it was a bit like an ice rink. When my turn came to make the descent I was amazed to find that the firemen and the 'wreckers' were actually cutting the lorry to pieces with blow torches to remove it in sections and was very relieved when I was finally in the clear again and heading for home. It took a total of twelve hours to do the journey. I had left in daylight and arrived with the dawn feeling hungry and very very tired. It was just "Hello, don't ask qestions [sic] and Goodnight”.
I finally came too, refreshed, reported that I was back and started the negotiations with Hamburg to restore the car to it's new state which I estimated would cost another £300 and they paid up in full. That was not the end of it though....
Winter soon descended with a vengance [sic] . It got cold and then colder. The bottom fell out of the thermometer and one morning, in common with many others I found the car locks frozen. Possibly
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like others I poured almost boiling water on in an attempt to unlock it but it froze as it hit the car and it was several days before the temperature went up a little to allow everything to release. then a great deal of the new paintwork came away with the defrosting!. I was very cross to say the least but I had it all renewed within the allowance that had been made by the insurance company. That still was not the end of it………but then the winter really set in.
Even the underground pipes froze in places and the works department produced a device that had not been used for years. It was a mobile motor driven generator producing a low voltage high amperage current that was attached to the fire hydrants and when the power was switched on it virtually heated the pipes up and they thawed. I had never seen anything like it before but at least the Fire service was kept in business. Even in the readiness areas the immersion heaters in the fire vehicles were needed to avoid freezing up. I put the fire dept to work to flood and freeze a fairly large depression of grassed area which produced an ice rink for several weeks. The centre of it was nearly two feet of solid ice and it was so cold that even the moat around Well castle in Holland was frozen to a depth of over two feet. Nevertheless we were still in business until it snowed again. We had been waiting for it and all the snow clearing machinery had been brought out and made ready but when it did start it made what I had been through when I brought the car back look like a little flurry. It snowed and snowed continually until there was a good ten to twelve inches over the whole airfield; and not the sort that would go away!.
With no flying possible we started to tackle it with everything we could muster to get the airfield clear. One machine had flame heaters for melting an icy surface, a hopper with finely graded sand with a worm feed which distributed the sand on the melted surface before it froze again. Result; a sandpaper type surface that was ideal for braking on at the upwind end of the runway. That's the way I figured it but everyone had different ideas particularly among those who had taken charge of the operation. It was attempted on snow, it was overworked and eventually it had a major breakdown. The various teams pushed and shoved snow all over the place with the snow ploughs and one crew even
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managed to put a twelve foot bank right in the runway threshold!. The equipment was the best with four wheel drive MAM diesel trucks with chains, and the blades could be swung either way for a left or a right cut, two splendid 'Snow-go’s' with flail intakes and plume blowers but the whole lot was being used piecemeal. Some ploughs had been used as bulldozers and a lot of snow was just being shifted from one place to another without opening up areas. After 24 hours of quite useless effort I stuck my neck out and produced a sketch plan of my own and there was very little argument. Obviously I couldn't make a bigger cock-up than had already been made and it was accepted. I assembled six ploughs in echelon with a half blade overlap followed by the two Snow-go’s and working on a plan to shift the snow [underlined] away [/underlined] from the taxyways [sic] we were off. It worked like a charm and mountains of snow was being cleared without blocking up other access points. At the end of the first cut I took the whole lot into a dispersal to swing the blades for the next run in the opposite direction when the CO turned up and 'suggested' that I would be better employed clearing snow instead of messing about changing the angle of the blades. He was not amused when I 'suggested' that "I was doing it my way" but really, there was no basis for any argument. I had already cleared half of a mile long taxyway [sic] in one sweep which was more than anyone else had done in the last 24 hours so with his permission I would like to carry on and prove a point, and perhaps he should judge my efforts by the result, particularly as others had not achieved much. How to get on and influence people!!!!, but I was cold and tired and past caring.
However, it did work as I expected and we were the first 2nd TAF airfield to be declared 'open' despite the fact that after I had left a colleague in charge whilst I went for a meal on my return found that he had managed to put 200 tons of snow back where I had just cleared it from. At least I had justified my plan and we were invariably the first 2nd TAF airfield to be declared clear after subsequent falls of snow. There was only one way to do it and I spent hours out on the airfield in -15 to-20 degrees. I followed it up with a written 'Snow Clearing Plan' with sketches and techniques to show how the basic plan could be adapted for any airfield and it turned up
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in print later. There were no thanks, just hard work and chilblains although there was a certain amount of satisfaction in having done something practical and useful. It was a relief when the deep freeze gave way to the first signs of Spring though and thoughts turned to planning the last holiday we were likely to get in that area. Before that happened an urgent problem put Dorothy into the Military Hospital at Vegberg near Rhiendalen for about ten days and we very nearly did not get the holiday but the planning was well advanced so we decided to go for it.
We had been fortunate in purchasing a slightly used but almost complete camping outfit so the destination was the Costa Brava in Spain. There were several dummy run exercises in the garden for putting up the tent until everyone knew what they had to do and the day came when all was assembled, loaded on the car and off we went.
Up to that point in time we had done no long distance travelling since the car had been repaired although there had been no problems. They started when we reached the area around Frankfurt when we were on long hill climbs when there were signs of overheating in the clutch and the most terrible noises from the gear box. With a little experimentation I found that the heat and the noise could be reduced by holding the highest gear for as long as possible which was not easy as the car was so heavily loaded. Eventually the decision was made after our first night stop at Frieburg that we would press on to the half way point at Geneva and that if it did not improve we would turn about. Strangely enough it was only lower gear hill climbs that produced the problem and in fact when we tried the odd run unloaded it was OK. We pressed on although I still had no idea what was causing it. I just wanted to be on holiday.
Actually we nearly abandoned it for other reasons. Dorothy did not like camping!. Not after our first night stop anyway. It was the way we had pitched the tent on a very slight slope in the semi-darkness and the natural movement in our sleep that found us up against the sides of the tent. That and the noises of the frogs at the lakeside did not exactly induce sleep.
Somehow we managed to retain some sense of humour even when in the early hours of the morning Dorothy had twisted herself up in her sleeping bag and I was awoken by gurgling noises and
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"get this b……zip out of my mouth"!!!!. That and the fact that it had started to rain heavily did not improve matters. It did not stop us moving out though. With a wet tent on top that then weighed twice as much as when we started!.
The next stop was Geneva where we were aiming for a camp site on the banks of Lake Lemon and it rained nearly all the way. What fun!. We had to put up a wet tent and I very nearly turned about at that point. Nevertheless, there was a pleasant little restaurant not far from the site and we indulged ourselves to the point of feeling a lot more comfortable by the time we turned in.
It had at least stopped raining but everywhere was clinging cold mist and these were the conditions when we packed up and moved out again, heading for Orange in the south of France where we were planning to stay with friends. We just ploughed on and on and on in those conditions through the Swiss mountains not seeing much more than the road is front of us until we got into France and the weather cleared up at last. We had a comfortable night stop in real beds and managed to get the tent up to dry out. We had arrived just in time for the May Day celebrations and had a great time dancing and drinking in the square on the fringe of the ampthitheatre [sic] . I think somehow that managed to bring us back to some sort of normallity [sic] .
Rested, well fed and with a dry tent packed off we went the following day heading for Spain and for a long time the weather was fine until shortly after we stopped for a break in Perpignan. Then it started to rain again. That was just what I wanted through the Pyrenees! and there was still a long way to go.
By the time we got to the border we were enjoying a full blown thunderstorm with lightning, thunder and lashing rain but the French customs just waived us on and we only made a short stop at the Spanish customs. Just long enough for the customs officer to determine that we were a British family on a camping holiday. That brought forth peals of laughter and he brought all his mates out to join in the fun. What's the Spanish for "blood silly British"??!!!!. We just laughed with them and pressed on but I was getting very very tired by that time and we had another good laugh before we finally stopped for the night.
Some time after we had left the border post we were being........
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followed by a German registered mini-bus and the damn fool driver made several dangerous attempts to overtake. Why he could not have been satisfied in following someone who was doing the 'pathfinding' for him I do not know so when we came to the edge of a town I thought that I would give him the opportunity to pass as I groped my way through a left and a right turn and several inches of water which almost obscured the line of the road. The mini-bus driver thought his chance had come as he surged past on what he thought was the road straight ahead and finished up along a shopping boulevard and came to a grinding halt mixed up with cafe’ tables and chairs!. He certainly paid for his impatience but enough was enough. If we got to Tossa-de-Mar that night we would still have put the tent up so with about 60 mls to go we decided that a comfortable night stop in a Hotel in Gerona would be a good idea. It was!. A meal, a drink and I crashed out.
The weather had cleared up by the morning and it was only about 30 mls to our destination through the winding roads of the area lined with carbuncled cork oaks. We were on site, tent up, and prepared to stay for at least ten days.
I think it was worth the effort. With a family of five I don't think we could have done it any other way even though there had been a few problems on our 1062 mile journey. We were not the only people ever to have had problems. One of our neighbours in the previous year had undertaken a motoring holiday to the North through Hamburg and on to Denmark and Sweden but had lost most of their baggage when their roof rack had seperated [sic] from the car and was very nearly pulped. There is no guarantee that all will go according to plan even with the more modern form of air transport to exciting places; not when several days may be lost sitting around an airport lounge or the hotel has been double booked. We had ten supurb [sic] days bathing, taking in the sights, and cruising around. The strange thing was that the car behaved itself so it didn't seem worth doing anything about. Perhaps one of the most interesting roads that we took was the coastal mountainous route from Tossa de Mar to San Feli'u. Only about twelve miles as the crow fly's but with most spectacular scenery and [underlined] 365 [/underlined] hairpin bends which actually doubled the road miles but it was interesting to say the least. We cruised the
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Costa Brava taking in the sights, eating and relaxing where it took our fancy, had a day in Barcelona and the scenic route through the Sierra de Montseny area to return stopping at numerous unspoiled villages where we were welcomed with open arms. Today there is always the tendency to want to dash from place to place along the new coastal motorway system and miss a great deal of the real Spain but we lapped it up. We even got used to the Spanish style of driving!. especially in the wrigly [sic] mountain areas. The locals had a tendency to maintain the maximum speed come what may, with the result that they approached blind corners at high speed, on the wrong side of the road, blasting away on the horn. The theory was that if there was no answering blast from anyone approaching from the opposite direction then it was safe to continue fast; and on the wrong side!!!. A bit dodgy nevertheless.
We have many recollections of that holiday, like the first time one of the girls took to the water in her new bikini only to find that as soon as it got wet it went transparent. A bit embarrassing for a sixteen year old, and we found that there were quite a few British on holiday there including one RAF couple who actually lived in Gogh. We made the most of it anyway and the day finally came when we had to be homeward bound.
The weather had generally improved and after getting back into France we took a different and very scenic route through the foothills of the Cevennes to Lyon and on to Bescancon and Belfort to finally pick up the motorway system northbound and home only making two stops en route. I was glad to get home. Being the only driver on a journey like that does impose a certain amount of strain but I was soon back to work and an opportunity to find out what had caused the heat and the noise but everything seemed OK until I checked the gear box oil level. Absolutely empty!!. I cross checked the detailed worksheet that the workshop had provided (in German of course) which showed that they had for some reason stripped both the engine and the gearbox and meticulously recorded every nut and bolt removed and/or replaced.....except the replacement of the gearbox oil. I think that possibly the only reason the gear box survived some 6000 miles without lubricant was because I had treated all the original lubricant with a propriety molybdenum after it's running
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in but to say I was annoyed is an understatement. It resulted in an absolutely stinking letter to the insurance company, who typically, would not accept the complaint without comment from the workshop.....and the workshop made every excuse in the book to avoid the issue. I gave it up in the end as I had just been notified of my next posting with nearly six months notice. Unheard of for me. I was going to Valley in North Wales so there was not much more time to finish our touring. We did the area towards Berlin to visit friends at Gutersloh who had visited us previously. That was the chap that had also been a POW with me, and at Wyton, and Marham, who had visited the Reichwald War Cemetery with me and whilst walking around was telling me how he was the only survivor of his crew when they had been shot down a year earlier than myself in a Halifax, near Krefeld. Naturally he wondered where his crew had been buried as we viewed some of the 5000 aircrew graves when he stopped with a gasp. There they were, all six of them in one row!!. Talk about "There but for the Grace of God go I"!. I retired to a respectful distance to allow him to compose himself. Whilst we were that way we visited the Mohne Dam and the Sorp and back at Laarbruch we visited Amsterdam and did the tourist thing by canal bus. We visited the amazing scenic park of De Efteling and another place in Holland which was an inland sort of water park. Probably the for-runner of Centre Parks, Bad Boekelo. Inland but just like the sea-side with fine sand and lots and lots of safe water fun. The first time we had come across the wave making machine but it will always stick in my mind for one incident. Everyone was lolling about and Dorothy was returning with some ice-cream with her sandles [sic] producing spurts of sand as she walked. Just as she approached a young Dutchmen in a reclining position who was inspecting the inside of a sandwitch [sic] , one of the spurts of sand left the toe of her sandles [sic] and joined the mustard, splat!!!. He looked up in amazement and then burst into laughter as we all did. So much the easier way of dealing with it and he shared our sandwiches!. We finally found the area of the windmills. There is only one area where they are plentiful and that is in the canal area east of Rotterdam. Kinderdyke. One of the few areas where national dress is often worn and very photogenic. About the last interesting event that I recall
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in Air Traffic Control matters was at the commencement of a flying excerise [sic] when our Javelins were sitting on the Operational Readiness platforms at the end of the runway hooked up to the Fighter Control network as we were so that we were able to listen out on the net but I was not prepared for what came out of the box…….. “Achtung……. Achtung……. XXXXXX(callsigns) shcramble [sic] ……shcramble [sic] ."…followed by the interception instructions. It was the first time the Luftwaffe controllers had been placed in the 'hot seat' and I must confess that it raised a few eyebrows among among [sic] a few of Bomber Harris's 'old lags" who formed about 50% of our controllers. As ironic as it was we had no option but to move with the times.
We were coming to the end of our visits to our favourite cafe at Nijmegen. A delightful family run establishment where no order was too much trouble for the somewhat rotund proprietor. We invariably topped off our shopping expeditions there and it was one place where I saw muscles [sic] served up as a meal on their own....in a large enamelled washing up bowl!. I like muscles [sic] but enough to fill a kit-bag in one go would be bit too much for me but one of the national dishes I believe. I wouldn't like to cope with that if any of then was a bit 'off'.
With plenty of time to sort things out and having been told that quarters would not be immediately available I managed to arrange a rental at Amlwych [sic] on the North side of Anglesey and our friends who were also posted to Valley more or less at the same tine arranged a rental in Holyhead. Of course there was packing to arrange. Goods in store in St.Ives to be transported to Amlwych [sic] , travel arrangements to be made etc, etc. The process was no longer a daunting prospect, we had done it often enough!, and eventually we cleared the station and we were on our way.
Dorothy and the girls went under service arrangements and flew from Wildenwrath on their way to Worthing and I set off with the car loaded to the hilt via the Hook and Harwich. It was an absolutely dreadful crossing in a Force 9 gale. People were being sick all over the place, and it was virtually impossible to sleep. All the berths had been booked and a good good [sic] many others and myself were making the best of deck chairs lashed to the decks. The usual seats and benches offered very little comfort as people were being thrown off of them all over the
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place and the bar and kitchens shut early as it was so difficult to cope with the pitching and the tossing. There were some very unhappy looking passengers around when we docked in the morning and I must confess that at times during the night it would not have worried me if we had foundered....I think I just wanted to die!. Nevertheless we started to dissembark [sic] and I was not in a hurry but one Army Officer who had obviously been well ahead of me had allowed his discomfort and his haste to get the better of him. It does not pay to get 'stroppy' with Custom Officials!.
He was standing by his car, tearing his hair out as they were removing absolutely everything from it which had been as loaded as mine. And I mean everything!. They had removed the seats, emptied every compartment and opened every package. It was strewn all around the car. I felt bad enough as it was so I declared every cigarette, gram of tobacco, and drop of booze and when they had deducted my allowance only asked for a nominal payment on the excess!: There was a little fuss over the car which I had already re-registered and re-placed the UK plates. They reckoned that I had jumped the gun but the documentation was all in order although there was some other documentation that was not quite right that at least we had a laugh about. I was bringing back our Budgie and [inserted] I [/inserted] had pinned it's import licence to the cage. Trouble was there was only half a licence, the other half was in the Budgie!. There was enough of to get by with and I was off to Worthing.
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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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Water under the bridge
Description
An account of the resource
Part 1. "By the Seat of his Pants". Covers from Alan Gamble's years as a schoolboy in Worthing in the late 1930's, up to joining the RAF in 1943, where he trained as a wireless operator in Blackpool. He joined 620 Squadron, which was equipped mainly with Stirlings and based initially at Leicester East, then Chedburgh, before it moved to Fairford in 1944. He flew 29 bombing and mine laying sorties over Germany and elsewhere. At Fairford '620' also supported SOE and participated in the Horsa glider operation at Arnhem.
Part 2, "No Problem Sport".Covers Alan Gamble's short flying history over France in 1945 before being shot down, and his experiences as a POW in southern Germany and subsequent liberation. The manuscript of Part 2 appears to be complete except for one or more pages missing about two thirds of the way through. This is at the beginning or the end of a fragment bound by metal clips, and could easily have become detached as the outside pages of some fragments' in Part 3 were also lost. It is therefore possible that only one page is missing.
Part 3. "Nil Desperandum".Covers Alan Gamble's post war experiences up to about 1963. This has not been read.
The manuscript of Part 3 is missing pages 24-86, 120 and 170, the latter two being the outside pages of bound fragments. (Page numbering here has assisted in reconstruction).
Additional information about this item was kindly provided by the donor.
Creator
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A T Gamble
Format
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Multipage printed document
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Text. Memoir
Identifier
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BGambleATGambleATv1
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Wehrmacht
Wehrmacht. Luftwaffe
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Bedfordshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Skegness
England--Suffolk
England--Lancashire
England--Blackpool
England--Wiltshire
England--Norfolk
Wales--Gwynedd
Wales--Porthmadog
England--Cumbria
England--Barrow-in-Furness
England--Oxfordshire
Germany
Germany--Krefeld
Atlantic Ocean--Bay of Biscay
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Cologne
Germany--North Friesland Region
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
Germany--Hamburg
England--Cambridgeshire
Germany--Nuremberg
Italy
Italy--Turin
Germany--Peenemünde
Germany--Berlin
France
France--Modane
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Jordan
Jordan--Amman
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-06-13
1943-06-17
1943-06-22
1943-07-03
1943-07-24
1943-08-10
1943-08-12
1943-08-17
1943-08-27
1943-08-31
1943-10-03
1943-11-03
1945-01
1945-02-03
1945-02-07
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Peter Bradbury
115 Squadron
149 Squadron
15 Squadron
214 Squadron
3 Group
620 Squadron
622 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
Anson
B-17
B-24
bale out
bombing
bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943)
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
Botha
C-47
coping mechanism
crewing up
debriefing
Defiant
Do 217
Dominie
Dulag Luft
evading
fuelling
Fw 190
Gee
gremlin
ground personnel
Halifax
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Me 109
Me 110
meteorological officer
military discipline
military living conditions
military service conditions
mine laying
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operational Training Unit
P-51
Pathfinders
petrol bowser
prisoner of war
Proctor
promotion
RAF Barrow in Furness
RAF Cardington
RAF Chedburgh
RAF Feltwell
RAF Marham
RAF Mildenhall
RAF Stradishall
RAF Turweston
RAF Waterbeach
RAF Yatesbury
recruitment
Red Cross
searchlight
service vehicle
Stirling
strafing
tractor
training
Wellington
Window
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/328/3488/PSmithJ1601.2.jpg
0fe7e11ac29997643bdadaafb0ca7c4b
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/328/3488/ASmithJ160312.1.mp3
6c84a152556073ed657df032c82e6d84
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
Smith, Jean
J Smith
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. An oral history interview with Jean Smith (2105009 Royal Air Force) and a photograph. She worked as a clerk in the aircraft manufacturing industry before the war and later served as a secretary in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. She served at 27 Operational Training Unit at RAF Lichfield.
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
2016-03-12
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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Smith, J
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AP: This interview for the International Bomber Command Centre is with Jean Smith, who was a WAAF at Lichfield among other places during World War Two, she in fact I met her husband who was a Stirling flight engineer, so this is gonna be a good one. My name is Adam Purcell, the interview is taking place at Jean’s home in McCrae, south of Melbourne and it is the 12th of March 2016. So, Jean, I thought we might start from the beginning, it’s probably a good spot. Uhm, can you tell me something of your early life, what, where and how you grew up, uhm, education, first job, that sort of thing.
JS: Oh, well, I was born on the 1st of January 1922 and born in [unclear] 6, moved to, uhm, Welwyn Garden City and that’s where I spent my school life. I went not to the local primary school and I went to Hitchin Grammar School, was the nearest secondary school to Welwyn Garden City and then I went to Pitman’s College in London and at the same time the family moved to Amersham in Buckinghamshire. I was always very keen on horse riding and show jumping so that’ s where I spent most of my spare time in my youth. I did a secretarial course at Pitman’s College and also studied for my civil service exams, which I passed very well and went in, I chose the Air Ministry, my father told me I was very silly to do that. He was a civil servant, he knew better than me but I wanted to go into the Air Ministry. And then the Air Ministry split and was the Ministry of Aircraft Production which I went into. We spent our time typing out and preparing all these contracts for small firms to make Wellington bombers and Spitfires and Hurricanes a year at least before the war started. Then the war started and by that time I had met a very nice young man at Halton number 1 school of Aircraft Apprentices and he was passing out that year and he was sergeant apprentice and he, when the war occurred, he went straight over to France with the British Expeditionary Force, he was a fitter of course, and then managed to escape back from a French fishing village, on a French small fishing boat back to Folkestone and as soon as he got back to Britain, he, then we were, the Battle of Britain had started and we were very short of pilots for all our new aircraft, fighter aircraft and he trained as a Hurricane pilot and sadly he was shot down in the Battle of Britain. I wanted to go into the Air Force straight away, into the WAAF, but my father wouldn’t let me, he said, no, not until you are twenty one, why that magical number? I got in at twenty in the beginning of 1942 and I wanted to be a flight mechanic or a radio operator but of course they conned me and they said that you’re already trained and you’ll save your country such a lot of money [laughs] and so I went in as a secretary and all I did was my two months training at Innsworth Camp with thousands of other girls, usual routine, learning to march, to salute and hygiene and air force laundry, marches. And there were no mirrors on our training station so we had to learn to do our hair, put our make-up on and put our caps on and tie our ties without anything other than your little compact mirror and that was a bit of a thing. Anyway, I was posted to number 27 OTU Lichfield and I wanted to be in Fighter Command, now I was going to Bomber Command. Anyway, I arrived at 27 OTU and I found out what a lovely station it was, friendly and happy. And, [sighs] I became secretary to the Chief Flying Instructor Wing Commander Jackson, he was a South African and he’d done his first tour on Hampdens and I, my office was part of the orderly room, training wing orderly room down in flying control on the edge of the air field and I was stunned when I used to see all these young officers and flight sergeants and warrant officers coming in, all the instructors coming into our office, I was strapped dumb and they were all decorated and they’d all done their ops on Wellingtons and Hams, not Wellingtons, Hampdens and another aircraft, we used to call them coffin boxes, Hampdens, can’t think of the other one, uhm, and I was so naive and young, all these young heroes coming in, breezing in, and of course I quickly learned all the slang, you know, di digitate and you’re in the fertilizer business and [laughs] so on and so on, the prangs and they really did say jolly good show when they came in up to doing something [laughs], well, uhm, so, the Waafery was two miles down the road, uhm, I think it was a place, a little village called Streethay, it was on the main road and it was two miles away and it was surrounded by high barb wire fencing and sentries at the gate and I remember, some of the aircrew boys saying: ‘Why do they, why do they surround your place as if it’s like a prison?’ and I used to tell all the Aussies: ‘To keep you randy Aussies out’. We had a little pub called the Anchor, a tiny little pub that had been a coaching inn and it was just, all about a quarter of a mile down the road from our camp and, of course we were all armed [?], we were all given service bikes, we could all ride a bike because we had to ride to and fro to camp and coming down on summer evenings, especially when I was first there, lot of the girls used to stop and go in for half a pint of beer before they went in for their tea [laughs]. Oh, I was so pure and innocent, it took me six months before I set my first footstep, I’d never been in a pub in my life, [laughs]. Anyway we used to go into the Anchor a lot for a quick drink and also of course on the nights in the winter, when night flying was cancelled, when it was thick pea souper fog or rain streaming down, you couldn’t see an inch before you, we all used to wait around in our hut after we’d had our tea at night and suddenly over the tannoy the message would come: all night flying cancelled, all night flying scrubbed, over and out. And we’d all say whoopee and get the curlers out and put all the glamour on, those were the days of big pink rouge cheeks and thick horrible makeup called powder cream, we used to plaster all over our spotty faces and big cupids bow lips bright red and mascara [?], which came in little black blocks and you spat on it and rubbed it with a little brush, and thickly coated your eyelashes. The trouble was it wasn’t waterproof so if you went to the pictures and it was a sad film you, also all the girls came out with streaks of black down their cheeks [laughs], we’d all be trying to wipe of our black tears. Uh, we had a lot of fun in the Hut 2 and, as I say, we used to put all our makeup on and then best blue and dash down to the pub and then we’d wait there, we’d order our drinks, just half a pint of beer and you’d hear all the boys coming down and all the bikes going bang, bang, bang on the pub wall and they’d all come streaming in and in half an hour the whole place would be a thick fug, you could hardly see across the room, cigarette smoke and I always remember cigarette smoke and all the wet wall, there was always a big fire on in the lounge bar and the piano, oh, piano would be going like mad with all the songs getting naughtier and naughtier as the night went on [laughs]. And it was good because these boys were doing their, they were doing their operational training, they were, they’d come from all their various schools, pilots from their flying school, wireless school, gunnery and they’d come together and they’d been put in big room and told to make up a crew of five which would be pilot, navigator, wireless operator, he was also a gunner, uh, a gunner and a bomb-aimer and they would then convert onto Wellington, twin-engine bombers, the good old Wellingtons which were nicknamed Wimpies, they were, they were going up doing circuits and bumps all day and all night and it’s all very well, I was shattered actually when I got there, because the number of accidents in training was shocking during the war and I don’t think a lot of civilians, I didn’t think there were going to be all these terrible accidents and my first job, as soon as I settled into my, into my office, my first job was to type out a form 765C, I think five copies I had to do, you had to do five copies, one went to Bomber Command, one went to Group Headquarters, one went somewhere else and this particular form 765C, which was an accident report form for Bomber Command, it was a Cat E, and Cat E was total wreck all crew killed, it started with Cat E which was just nothing, you know, somebody knocked a, knocked a whole in a [unclear] or something like that, but the Cat Es were all full and of course when I’d done that and send that off and I was appalled cause I said to the sergeant in charge of the orderly room: ‘Does this happen often?’. ‘Oh, yes’ he said turning to me, he said, ‘Oh, we’ve had one accident, we should have another two in the next week’. Sure enough we did and next day I, and next morning I, after I’d done the general correspondence with the Chief Flying Instructor, the CFI, I had to go and sit down and we did letters of condolence to the various parents and wives and I know there were two Australian families and I thought how dreadful, all those miles away and I suppose no air mail, so I suppose in five weeks, will take five weeks for the letters to get to the parents somewhere in the outback of Australia and it just hit home, the war really came home to me in those first few days at my new station. And I was to see a lot of very nasty accidents and I think you know there’s always, it always makes me shudder now when I hear of a bad accident to a large airliner, you think of the horrible noise and the smell and that sort of vile cloud of black, black grey smoke and then the dark red flames going up and I’d seen dead bodies being carried out of planes and it’s so terrible and it did happen so often and of course we were very near the Peak District, Staffordshire, Derbyshire was the next door county and of course the Peak District and the boys did their night flying training in all weathers, terrible weather in full blackout and there they were flying around with all the peaks not very far distant and all the, all the Welsh mountains not very far away so, we had quite a lot of accidents hitting mountains. There used to be a comical character, in a magazine which was circulated to the air crew every so often and there was a little pilot called PO Prune and he was always saying: ‘Do not come down to sea!’ and he always held his finger in the air and that was called the irremovable digit [laughs] and he was always telling people all the things they, all the aircrew telling them what they must look out for and what they mustn’t do and constantly it was: ‘Do not come down to sea!’ Never come down lower than a certain height. And life went on very smoothly at 27 OTU. I remember, uhm, I turned twenty one of course at the end of that year, on New Year’s Day 1943 and there was, on Saint Valentine’s Eve there was a WAAF dance. Morale had been bad among the WAAF at that time because we’d had an awful lot of accidents, one girl had lost her young husband only a few months married, several girls had had bad news from their boyfriends in Africa because at that time our tanks, it was the first time when our tanks were being pushed back by Rommel and there was bad news from all our various fronts and the U-boats were having a feast downing our convoys, rations were being tightened for civilians, it was a very bad time, so, all the officers, and our WAAF officers decided, have a dance, I think it was the, our WAAF, the WAAF was formed in 1938 or ’39 just before the war and it was an anniversary for the WAAF and of course we couldn’t be allowed to wear civilian clothes, you weren’t allowed to wear civilian clothes, you had to be in uniform all the time. So, they got round that by saying, we’ll have a fancy dress dance for the WAAF, not for the airmen, the airmen have to come in uniform for the girls. So, we all rushed home, if we had a 36 hour or 48 hour leave, we all rushed home and said to our mothers, what have we got, got all the bits out, my mother dyed some spare cloth, she dyed one lot red and made me a very full skirt and then she found a bit of blackout curtain and made a little bodies and the boys in the dope shop painted a sickle and hammer on it, cause they were, the Russians were our gallant allies in those days and I’d also I got a little [unclear] in civilian life, a little, pretty little embroidered blouse, Hungarian blouse. So I went as a Russian peasant and my aunt had given me a beautiful silk Japanese kimono which she had before the war, it was a really beautiful thing. And my best friend, Hibbie, Brenda was her real name, Hibbie was dark-haired and very petite and I lent this kimono to Hibbie and she did her hair up with a comb in it and went as a Japanese girl, a horrible [unclear] [laughs] and so we all got it, we were told to get in the transport, we could go in our fancy dress and we were all glamourized that, we’d had all our hair set, we’ve had to get in the transport in order to go up to main camp but we had to take our uniforms with us to, to camp, so that we came home, back to camp in uniform. Anyway, we got up to the big NAAFI on the main camp and the station band which was very good started to play and the boys came in and we were dancing and a couple of young men came in and they, they were just in working gear, with scarves round their neck. They walked over to the bar, meanwhile ten of us had coloured a huge table near the bar, so, we were all there, sitting and chatting and these two young airmen came along and the older said; ‘Hello, girls, can we sit with you?’ And I said: ‘Oh, yes’. And they dragged out the young man along, she seemed very shy, blushing about being among with all us girls, anyway this was to be, this was my husband-to-be and he didn’t ask me to dance and I was getting up and dancing with all these other boys and then I said: ‘Don’t you like me or don’t you think I can dance very well?’ He said: ‘I can’t dance, he said, I’ve never danced in my life, he said, there’s a boy in our hut being trying to teach some of us to dance but, he said, I come from the isle of Lewis, and we are free Presbyterians, we are Calvinists, and we believe dancing is very sinful’. But he said: ‘I don’t’. And he said: ‘I’d like to learn to dance’. He said: ‘Will you dance with me now?’ So, he danced with me and trod all over my feet, he was such a, oh, he had lovely blue eyes and he was a very nice boy with that beautiful Highland accent, very soft and of course I really fell for him and he said, so after the last waltz we, he said to me: ‘May I see you at to transport?’ I said, ‘Oh yes’, I said, ‘You have to wait outside because we’ve all got to change back into our uniforms’. So we go into another room, change back and I found that I got all my uniform there except that I hadn’t got my, we didn’t have suspender belts in those days, we had corsets and [laughs] large, pink corsets with suspenders on the end and I found I left my back at camp. So, I put my stockings on, I went out to transport, I was holding my skirt with my stockings up and there is this nice boy waiting for me and eventually, you know, after we all chit chatting and talking, the driver said: ‘Get in girls!’. So, he said: ‘May I kiss you goodnight?’ and I said: ‘Oh, yes!’ and I put my arms up around his neck and my stockings fell down [laughs] and so obviously it must, it must have been ordained that this would be my future husband. Oh, we only had five dates before he went off, he was a fitter on our camp, and we had five dates and he went off for his aircrew training and the young man and the older man who’d introduced him to us girls was Norman Jackson, who went on, he went off on the flight engineers course too, he was a fitter. And he went on to win the VC, he climbed out on the wing of his burning plane, he stuck a fire extinguisher into his tunic and climbed out and the other men were sort of holding onto his parachute pack and then a flame [unclear], he managed to put most of the fire out but the flames blew back all across his face and hands and unfortunately in all the shemozzle, well the fire extinguisher of course went, fell off the plane and but his parachute started to open so he had to go off, they couldn’t drag him back and he was a POW. The Germans cared for him pretty well but years later, apparently he worked, somebody told us that he worked in a high class Rolls Royce showroom selling Rolls Royce, he probably would be helped after the war, but he was a prisoner of war for a long time. Uhm, no, from about 1943 to 5 and uh, unfortunately we tried to get in touch but it was very difficult after the war, everything was in such a muddle and we never got the chance to meet him again. And, so, Jock wanted me to be his steady girlfriend but most of us WAAF didn’t like, didn’t like to be, it was the boys who wanted to be serious but we didn’t like to be serious with any of them or getting, most of us didn’t want to get engaged or married because we all felt with aircrew that once they got married or they were engaged, they were, they became very serious and much more careful and it was, we all felt talking to aircrew boys that it was the worst thing to be very careful, it was far better to be gung-ho and able to take risks than, and not have to think about a wife or a serious girlfriend. But I wrote to him the whole time he was on ops, I didn’t see him for eighteen months, I wrote him the whole time he was on ops, and I’ve got most of his letters and unfortunately he hasn’t, he didn’t, he couldn’t keep many of mine because most of them threw letters away, personal letters were thrown away. Uhm, aircrew on ops, it wasn’t a wise thing to keep anything from love life or anything like because if you were killed or taken prisoner, the RAF police went in and put everything into, uhm, boxes and all that was sent to the parents and sometimes, or wives, and sometimes it was far better that certain things weren’t known. So, I mean, you know, even things like condoms, they were told not to keep in their lockers and things like that because of the attitude in those days. So, uhm, eventually in 1945, I was posted to 3 and 5 Group at Grantham, the top groups which commanded the operational squadrons and we were working in a large country house on the edge of Grantham and we were billeted in a lovely old Edwardian house right in the middle of Grantham, not far from the Great North Road which ran through Grantham at that time. And it turns out, when I was reading the biography of Bomber Harris, when he was a young air commodore at the beginning of the war, that was his living quarters, his house with his wife and young daughter and they, eventually it was withdrawn as living quarters for RAF officers and became the living quarters for mainly the clerical and secretarial staff and actually discipline was very easy in the house, this was the place where we were living, uhm, because we were all very trustworthy women who’d worked as personal secretaries all the war and so were trusted to go and come without having to book in or book out. So, I knew I’d been keeping in touch with Jock and I knew by then he’d finished his tour of ops and he was a fighter engineer instructor at Woolfox Lodge, just down the Main North Road and he’d got a motorbike and so I said, you know, I said, he said, you know, did I feel like taking up the friendship again, and I said if he was interested, yes, fine. So, he came up on his motorbike to Grantham and we renewed our friendship, which of course brought something to our romance and we married at the end of 1945, once all the, when the war was over. But, to go back to Lichfield, I would have gone on Lichfield, unfortunately my very nice Chief Flying Instructor boss went back to do a second tour of ops so I was getting some, I was going to work for someone else. But sadly he went back on ops and he lost his life, his plane crashed over Germany and he lost his life and it was very sad because he’d married an English girl and he had two lovely children because I used to, when there were officers mess dances, I used to go and babysit for him, cause I always felt, I always used to sit next to him in his car when I was taken out to his house. [unclear] for the night and I used to feel like a queen sitting next to a senior officer [laughs] going past the guards [laughs] and they were all saluting [laughs] and so I used to look after the children and then he, and I’d have breakfast with them and he’d go, we’d go back to camp next morning. But very sadly, we were moved from our nice wooden house, we were moved into new Nissen huts, this was when conscription came in for women at the end of 1942 or the beginning of 1943 and we really suddenly became inundated with all these conscripted women, they hated us, we hated them, we were volunteers, they were conscripts, and they didn’t want to be in the services and we made it clear that we wanted to win the war and we were going to win the war [laughs] and so on. Anyway, we were moved to new Nissen huts, which had been built in the winter and were still, the concrete floors were still very damp and it was terribly, terribly cold, I know, we discarded our sheets and used to sleep between blankets and we put on our pullovers and our slacks over our WAAF pyjamas, which were nice and warm and thick but still not thick enough and we heat bricks up and wrap them in newspaper or old bits of cloth to put in the bed and even so in the morning your breath used to be frozen, right down the blanket, a little icicle. Anyway it was so cold, and I got flu and I didn’t do any, I got a cold and then it went into flu and I didn’t do anything about it and didn’t go sick, that went into bronchitis and the bronchitis very quickly turned into pneumonia and I was at work and I went all funny and they had to get an ambulance to take me to sick quarters and I must have been very ill because they put me in a private room which was normally kept for officers and I was wrapped in the officers white blanket because if I’d been, other ranks blankets would have been grey [laughs] and they gave me the new miracle drug, MB363 or some, it was a new sulphanilamide drug and it worked wonders on pneumonia and I was sick for, very sick for a few days and then eventually I lost my voice and I was sent down to Waafsey quarters to convalesce and in Waafsey quarters they had a dreadful sergeant, a woman sergeant, a WAAF sergeant in charge and she used to have all us patients up every morning, we had to get on our hands and knees in our pyjamas and polish the floors [laughs]. I couldn’t speak [laughs]. We had a little wind-up gramophone in sick quarters and the only record we had was some well-known singer of the day singing, we’re having a heatwave, a tropical heatwave, it isn’t surprising, the temperature’s rising, she certainly can, can, can [singing] [laughs]. We played it and played it and played it. So then I went back to work but by then my boss had gone and the senior medical officer decided that I’d been so sick and I’d also had a lot of very nasty boils and said really you should have a series of injections for vitamin B but unfortunately vitamin B is kept for aircrew only so I can’t give it to you, and he said, I’m going to do the very next best thing, he said, I’m going to arrange a posting to group headquarters and he said you’ll have much better food, you’ll get fruit and he said you will be in much better quarters, but of course when I went to group headquarters it was all very nice but no aircrew, no any young men. The only thing was, we had a big Canadian Bomber Command station not far from us and a huge American camp so we used to go to the American camp and that was the first time we saw, for several years that we saw oranges and ice cream, they gave us ice cream [unclear]. But to go back to Lichfield, before I leave Lichfield to go to 93 Group Headquarters in Derbyshire, I must tell of the most exciting thing that happened to all of us and that was our station taking part in the first thousand bomber raid on Cologne, I think it was the 30th, 31st of May 1942 and that was very exciting, I mean, we didn’t know where, that the target would be Cologne but we all knew something big was on. Apparently, I’ve read all about the thousand plan but at first poor old Bomber Harris thought [unclear] make the bombers because the Coastal Command was going to be in it and their bombers were going to take part and the navy bombers, but at the last minute the navy and coastal or they say so, Coastal Command withdrew so we were left with less than a thousand bombers and Bomber Harris said they must: ‘Churchill had said it must be’, and Bomber Harris said it must be a thousand bombers so they racked in all the training stations and every screen was allotted a crew and so cause always at the end of OTU training the aircrews always went on things called bulls eyes [?] or light tight raids just over the coast of France either to straf, shipping or to drop leaflets and just over the coast and then back again, to give the young aircrew a taste of what it would be like but now we were going to have everything, uhm, every crew we could put, even if they were going with an instructor, the screen instructors and so, of course our poor old Wimpies, I mean, all those operational training units, all the heavy conversion units, the aircraft were already second hand, they’d all been used on operational flying, they’d all been used and abused I mean, you, when you talked to a flight engineer as my husband was, they were running those engines very often at revs never put down in the makers note and they came to the instructional units, and they were pretty knocked about a lot of them, a lot of them been hit and repaired and they weren’t very good and that’s probably what caused a lot of the training accidents. And so of course my husband, cause I didn’t know him in those days but than I knew, but I knew all the mechanics, all flight mechanics and fitters were working all around the clock to get service for aircraft and aircraft were taking up on their tests and then repaired again and again, the, don’t you want to stop [whispers]?
AP: No, no, you’re alright.
JS: And then they, then the uhm.
AP: But I will get you to move the microphone if you can, slip down [laughs] it was fine as long as you put your hands on [laughs]. There.
JS: Then, uhm, the uhm, so, they were very, very busy and we knew, because our, the control tower was next to K2 Hangar where my future husband worked and we knew where they were working cause we very often worked very late at night and you could hear all the noise and claying in the hangars and so we didn’t know the actual date until the actual date occurred the 30th of May and suddenly all, everybody was called on deck, everyone, you were just told to do all sorts of jobs, I know I was giving out sealed maps to the navigators and the pilots and we were getting all sorts of things together, all the Red Cross, the Australian Red Cross used to send wonderful parcels across, and the Aussie boys used to share, all the RAAF boys always shared their Red Cross parcels which were marvellous, full of all sorts of goodies and we were getting all those things ready and there were planes obviously being air tested and the whole station was busy with people, all with very definite looks in their eyes, all going about our business, sort of, with a lot of extra jobs to do and wherever you walked on the station normally when planes were bombed up, you wouldn’t see any bombs because they’d just be out of dispersals, but there were bomb trolleys everywhere, you were weaving your bikes all among all the different things, keeping a wary eye on the incendiary bomb boxes, which were painted red because if incendiaries fell off and the box broke open, the incendiaries could, they were very touchy and could often go off and you know, they were very dangerous. So, then of course the boys went for briefing and we were all hanging about, we had, I remember we had our tea and everyone, everyone was very quiet, very serious, the whole station. Of course, when there’s any big operations on the station is closed down and there is no leave and there’s no out coming or incoming personal phone calls or anything like that. So, we were all very busy, doing our various jobs and then I remember after briefing, they all came into the, into our big room in training wing and we were giving out the various, you know, chewing gum, barley sugars, cake, all sort of, parcels and things, cigarettes and off they went. We all had our quick tea and a whole host of us went down to wave them off, and I always remember that night, quite a mass of people were all standing underneath the balcony of flying control and all the top brass of the station, all the senior officers who weren’t flying men were above us, they were all out on the balcony and all the flying men, they were all in the planes, they were all been allotted to [unclear] crews and the three Padres all went, [unclear] and other denominations, Padres, they all went off choice and quite a few of our senior officers, who were ground staff chose to go with the crews, they said they backed them up and they wanted to go, you know, to give them heart as someone was there with them and we heard the first, to see a station, I’d never been on an operational station but my husband’s told me a lot about it but to see these planes or to hear them going, you know, we were standing there and of course always bombers during the war were around in dispersals, all dispersed around the airfield and you’d hear that coughing and choking sound of each engine starting up and revving up and then slowly, slowly. It was a rule that they mustn’t taxi fast because during the war all our rubber came from, well, what’s Malaysia and Indonesia now and of course rubber was very difficult to get and actually it hit the Germans more because of, you know, we were downing any German ships trying to get rubber, they couldn’t know they couldn’t get rubber because it was still British and but all aircraft, all aircrew were told to taxi slowly, because if you taxied fast it wore the rubber out more quickly. We were told that with our bikes, that we must only put our bikes into the bike racks with the rear wheel because if we put the front wheel in, it wobbled about and wore the rubber out [laughs]. All these silly things that happened during the war [laughs]. Uhm, so, then the, the first aircraft came weaving down past the control tower and I always remember the pilots window open and seeing the pilots face, each pilots face white in and his helmet faming [?] his face and he waved to all of us and, as they went slowly past, and we all gave thumbs up and he gave thumbs up and then slammed the window too and they went along to the runway, the end of the runway which wasn’t far away from us and of course they revved up each engine, one must be like a four-engine bomber station where they ramped each engine up to shrieking and you could see, you could see in the dusk, you could see all the dust and leaves and twigs flying and then of course they’d get a green from the airfield control and the caravan down at the end of the airfield and each one revved up and they took all the whole of the runway to get off to clear the hedge at the far end and almost before they were over the hedge, the next one was going down the runway, you know, heavily loaden with bombs and oxygen and high octane fuel, a living bomb themselves and we were all waving and we stood there long after the ground crew had put out the flarepath and long after the dim lights on the balcony had gone out off and all the officers had gone in, we all stood there, sort of not speaking, you know. And next morning of course lying in beds, you know, when the dawn was breaking, we were lying in bed, a lot of us hadn’t slept much that night, hearing the first faint roar of the aircraft coming back and counting back, we only lost one aircraft and they were actually, they had gone to another station, we were lucky but several of our aircraft had to turn back, cause that was the trouble on the training stations, Harris did get his, he got just over a thousand but actually before they got to the enemy coast some were turning back and I mean, once one engine goes in a Wimpey, you know you can’t go on. And of course, you know, we were lucky as I say, we, I and my friend who worked in training, when we dashed down on our bikes before breakfast to go and have a look, I think we run up to Flying Control, up the stairs to Flying Control to have a look at the big board to see who was back and that was quite an exciting night and so, and of course later on Jock told me all about, you know, his operational life and he had some exciting times. But, I went on to, Group Headquarters and of course you were working for senior officers, uhm, there were just one or two flight lieutenants, most of them were squadron leaders, ah, and of course you had air vice-marshals, all the people with the mess of scrambled egg on their caps and you were doing some, we were doing very secret stuff actually at that time and because of course, when I was at, yes, it was, 1945, yes, that was when I, that was when D-Day occurred and we all knew, because they cancelled long before D-Day, they cancelled all long leaves, all seven, fourteen day leaves and even forty eight hours weren’t very, weren’t given out very much. I was lucky, I wasn’t very far from my home and my home was by then in Buxton in Derbyshire because my father was in the civil service and he was in the customs & excise on the Board of Trade, and they were evacuated out to Buxton in Derbyshire. A lot of places, Ministry of Aircraft Production, were evacuated to Harrogate, all the non-military, there only be the Air Ministry, Admiralty, War Office, the Home Office, Colonial Office and, well, the Foreign Office, they were the only ones that stayed in London. All the other departments went out in case of being bombed, so, my dad’s office was in the big Palace Hotel, the biggest hotel in, uhm, in Buxton in Derbyshire and which is a beautiful place and so I wasn’t, when I was at Group Headquarters I wasn’t very far away. I could hitchhike to Derby and get a train to Buxton, so I was lucky I could get home for thirty six hours, but, I, uhm, for D-Day we all knew something was afoot but nobody, I don’t know why none of us put two and two together that it would be D-Day and we were doing all sorts of things so we used to, when you are on duty at night you know we’d be sitting the, only two or three of us on duty and we’d be having to take lots of coded messages and stick them onto paper and they’d go to various officers and the tele printers would be chattering all night with stuff from Bomber Command mainly and of course, then of course we, I came down to early lunch on, actually on D-Day and I went into the airmen’s mess and there was this little huddle around a tiny little radio that they got in the corner of the mess and I said: ‘What’s going on?’ and they said: [makes a shushing sound] ‘it’s on!’ So we all got our ears together listening. And I, cause I was very interested actually and had been interested for a long time because, of course I’d moved up with my parents, I’d left the Ministry of Aircraft Production and I moved up to Buxton when they moved to Buxton in 1940 and, I’d worked for the, I’d had a job as a secretary, as a town clerk in the town hall and the junior clerk who was a year younger than me, he had to wait till he was called up, he was in the home guard, he had to wait till he was called up because his mother was a widow and he was sort of contributing to the family so he waited until he was called up and the non, the local government offices were like the civil service and some big firms. When men were called up, their service pay was made up to their civilian pay, what they were earning in their civilian pay by the civil service and they were very, that was very good, so he had good money all the time. And we used to go out together, I was doing, everybody did voluntary work during the war, my mother rolled bandages and made up, she rolled bandages and made up, she old dressing kits for the army in her spare time, my dad used to fire watch and I used to go and work in the services canteen at the town hall in, about three evenings a week, pouring cups of tea or stirring backed beans for all the troops, cause we had troops everywhere, every town was full of troops, and, this, my boyfriend Morris, he was in the home guard, so he used to come and pick me up after his guard duties on reservoirs and oil damps and so on and, walk me home and I was, he was called up and went into the West Yorkshire Regiment and for years, I mean, Jock knew all about my romance with Morris, and the West Yorks were one of the first, they were one of the first to go on D-Day onto the beaches for the British crowd and I always wondered how he’d got on and my friend across the road, my neighbour across the road, she does genealogy and she’s looked up a lot of my family for me and she looked up Morris for me and if he’s alright and he got through obviously and he married two years after me and they had a daughter. And, so that was nice to know. So, that was our D-Day excitement and then of course I went, I was posted on to 3 and 5 Group Headquarters at Grantham, where of course I met Jock again. And our romance took off but nothing was, I mean, it was very easy living and very easy working conditions at Grantham compared to what I’d had and the war was almost winding down then so we had a very easy time of it and eventually of course once D-Day came, oh yes, D-Day, not D-Day, once VE-Day came, oh, we’ve all danced in the streets, there were civilian women dancing in their nighties in the streets and the street lamps were put on, and of course they’d obviously been preparing for VE-Day because all the street lamps went on and Jock and I, we used to go to a little park in Grantham and we had a special seat and that was our Snogging Seat and [laughs] we used to kiss and cuddle and on our Snogging Seat and we were very put out, after we’ve been down singing, drinking and you know, all the boys, he and all the boys climbed up, they put, they climbed up on the town, Grantham town hall roof and one of the boys tied a pair of WAAF blackouts, twilights, pair of WAAF knickers on the flag staff, certainly weren’t mine and Jock and I went round to our little park and our Snogging seat was no good anymore because there was a big lamp above it and it was lit up [laughs]. So, that was that but, he of course, he did his ops on Stirlings, so, I don’t know if whether you’ve heard, the losses on Stirlings were terrible and whenever we met people after the war and he said he was on a Stirling Squadron, they said; ‘Well, you are one of the few to get through!’ And half way through his ops, they took them off quite a lot of bombing ops and they put onto dropping, uhm, sea mines mainly in the Baltic, up the Gironde Estuary and so on, and then, that was quite tricky stuff, the only two or three would go out, it was quite tricky stuff because those sea mines going down on parachutes of course they were very touchy and they have to be, you have to fly at a certain level so that they would drop into the sea and then they come up to a certain level in the sea and lie there under the sea. And of course, while he was doing that, while he was dropping all these mines in the Baltic and so on, his father, who had been in the Royal Navy during World War I and then he went back into the Royal navy in World War Two and he was on minesweepers off our coast, off the western of [unclear] and the Minch, he was minesweeping for the British convoys coming and going. So, he was sweeping them up and his son was sowing them, they were called gardening operations and so he, they were doing well and also they were dropping a lot of stuff to the Maquis, the French Maquis in the Alps and he said, that was a very leery thing because he remembers, you know, cause Stirlings hadn’t go the height, they couldn’t get the ceiling like the Lancaster could so you often had to fly through gorges, these alpine gorges and he said, very often wingtip to wingtip you’d see this black icy glassy rock each sideof the wingtips and quite a lot of aircraft of course got smashed up in those gorges. And they also dropped to the Maquis, he had a quite an exciting experience, once they were quite high up in the Alps and they had just signalled and they received a torch signal back from the Maquis and they were coming to drop their, they had a lot of stuff including a Gee, of course it was always a flight engineer and a bomb aimer who were pushing it out in a big hatch, they had a special hatch who pushed all the stuff out and they were coming down in a steep curve and suddenly the floodlights, the searchlights went on and guns started, obviously the Germans were waiting for them and because they just went straight up, they took off and went off but he said he always wondered how the poor devils on the ground got on. And they did quite a lot of that sort of thing and they had, they were, they had a nasty time when they took off one night and the plane had been going, they’d been up all day, they’d headed up and down on air test and as they took off, one engine failed as they were taking off and they carried on, I mean three engines were, the Stirling was a tough plane, even though it couldn’t get the height, but second engine failed as they went over the end of the runway, and then the third engine started coughing and it was wintertime and there was a ploughed field next to the airfield, I mean they got a full bombload and the pilot said to Jock the engineer, he said; ‘I’ll have to go in’ and shouted out crash, you know, crash positions and they went in and he, Jock was up with the pilot, he was up in the cock pit and he said, all the earth, we went nose, he said, all the earth came over the cockpit but, he said, fortunately, he said, the little escape hatch so, he said, the pilot went out there and I went out the back and got out and we all got out and he’d expected the bombs to go off but nothing happened. So they were very fortunate and one [unclear] them was, see they’d had problems with this particular aircraft several other times and they had actually come back, they didn’t, I think they’d only returned twice with a bum aircraft and then this crash, and one the engineers, warrant officers came up to them and said: ‘Uh, yellow aye!’ and apparently he got roasted because they found out this aircraft was in a bad condition but it still went on flying and we were very interested because I think the Bomber Command War Diaries gives a detail of every aircraft that flew. And Jock was really through one day and he said, Jean, he said, this is so interesting, apparently it was sent off to a Heavy Conversion Unit and it only did two flights and then it disappeared somewhere over the coast of Ireland, the west coast of Ireland out to the Atlantic it disappeared with the crew, the [unclear] crew and never seen or heard of again, so obviously it was still playing out. He said there were always bum aircraft, lemons, like cars and but they were very lucky to get out of that. And then another time they were on their way to target and they were hit by cannon shell and an Me 109 went underneath them, obviously aiming for the engine, hit the starboard side, blew his flight engineer’s panel out and, cause all the lights, everything went out, and shrapnel flying around and this great big jagged hole and you could see the starboard engine and he was a bit stunned and he said: ‘I couldn’t breathe’ and he said: ‘I could feel this something warm dripping down my back’ and but he said, ‘it didn’t hurt, he said, my knee hurt’, he had got shrapnel, small shrapnel splinters in his knee and but he said, the navigator was groaning and he said, as soon as I sort of pulled myself together, the pilot was checking the crew round, fortunately the intercom was still working and he said, ‘engineer, are you ok?’ and Jock said; ‘I think so, I can’t breathe’. He said: ‘I’ll check’. Well, he found, he got a hydraulic pipe blown around his neck and that was what was dripping hot oil down his back, not blood [laughs] and his, a big lump of shrapnel had hit his parachute, bent his parachute buckle, harness buckle, perhaps bent it and set his Mae West off, that’s why he couldn’t breathe [laughs]. And it had wicker shade and gone, made a real mess, gone right into the groin of the navigator, I mean, the navigator sitting right behind the black curtain, you know, quite nice and all, nice and protected from anything nasty and he was the one who was the worst hit, well, he, Jock grabbed the first aid kit and he went straight up over and he, the navigator was in a really bad way and Jock gave him, cause they all had whole series of small morphines, he gave him morphine and cut and sliced his trousers and put a big shell dressing on his wound, he was and sort of dragged him to a lying down position and then he went to the wireless operator whose poor right hand was pouring blood and he said to him, he said to, don’t give me morphine, he said, cause he practiced Morse with his left hand, he said I’m carrying you on, he said, I don’t want to have morphine and go out to the wood, just shove a shell dressing on this and actually it was worse than it looked actually when they got back but they were still on their way to target so they were among a whole stream of bombers, it was very difficult turning round in a stream of bombers and the pilot said to Jock, he said, engineer, how is our fuel situation? Of course by that time Jock was checking with the torch what was left of his dials and switches and he said, can we get to target and back? As long as we have enough to get back home. And Jock said, that was the time I turned from a boy into a man [laughs] and he said, yes, so they went on and bombed and came back and they landed with very little fuel and the navigator of course went straight to hospital. The wireless op only had a week or two off, his wounds healed and, oh, Jock had only dressings put on his knee. But the others were ok, but, you know, see, they had no officer in their crew and actually that would have warranted in many crews that would have got a DFC or DFM for the [unclear] but DFM was not given out in great numbers and having no officer to sign it all because, yes, that’s it, the navigator was the only officer and of course he was in hospital so he wouldn’t be, he was unconscious by the time, so he wouldn’t have been able to write anything else, that sort of put the kibosh on any medal for the crew but I mean that was quite something I thought to go on to target and then come back. But that went on, as they all, oh you talked to a lot of the aircrew and I mean, that went on, there were so many crews that went west, that should have got medals, you know, for what they did. And, so he was very pleased and actually if he hadn’t died when he did, he would have, he did qualify for the French [unclear] again because he was flying, they did their last two ops just before, just on D-Day, they came, their last operation was on D-Day and that was another well-kept, that was a such a well-kept secret, I mean, the aircrew didn’t know, it went out that night, and they were given targets north of Normandy and they were dropping all these funny little sacking parachuters, which had firecrackers on them, so when they landed, it sounded as if they were firing shots and they dropped them, there a quite a lot of planes dropped them in various parts of Northern France and a lot of Germans did think that that was where the invasion was taking place and of course they went out, I think it was after midnight, cause it was only just into France, and they came back just as dawn was breaking and Jock was busy at his dials and only the pilot, the pilot must have looked down and he said: ‘Oh, boy, it is on!’ and he said, we all rushed and had a look and he said; ‘What a wall of ships!’ he said it the most amazing sight, he said, it send cold shivers down their backs and they’d also gone out and been minelaying a couple of nights before in the Gironde Estuary and he said, that was a terrible place for being armed, and he said, only three Stirlings went and he said their’s was the first to go in and of course they dropped these sea mines which are touchy even in the aircraft, you know, can go off and he said he looked round and his great friend was in the next aircraft, and was hit, went up and then the third bomb went up, so, they’d been given a route to come home across the South of France and then across the Channel, but the pilot had him put the nose down and went out in the [unclear], into the Atlantic and they came in through, came back through Cornwall [laughs], they didn’t want to know any more having lost their team mates [laughs].
AP: Ah yeah.
JS: But they often used to come, cause they laughed after they hit the target, they loved finding trains to shot up and any roadways and shot up any convoys and anything and they’ve would come back with bits of haystack and leaves of trees and [unclear] but the Stirling was, he used to say cause eventually he went on and became a flight engineer instructor on Lancasters and he said, yes, they were, they were wonderful aircraft cause they could do the distance, they could carry the arms but he said, he said, our Lancaster wouldn’t have survived that first crash with a full bombload, he said, they were beautifully built, he said, they were a lovely, comfortable aircraft and he said, they were so sturdy, and then they could fly very low, but how stupid of the Air Ministry to cut their wings of ten feet to get into the normal hangar, I mean why not build the odd hangar to conform to the wing? Say, were some funny things in the, there were some weird, weird things went on, you know, people with all sorts of suggestions and as I say, this front wheel of your bike, I was put on a charge cause I put the front wheel of my bike in, I was late on duty and I flung my front wheel of my bike in and the service police came round and of course you had a number on and tracked it to me and I was put on a charge! And I remember being marched in without my cap and of course was one of the officers I knew and worked for and he [unclear] said: ‘Now, what have you been up to?’ And the WAAF officer looked [unclear] [laughs]. There was a WAAF officer and someone along this sort of thing and he gave me three days jankers and I went down to the cookhouse cause normally you got all these filthy, big greasy ben maries [unclear], huge things, this big cooking greasy stuff, you’ve got them to clean out, but they said: ‘Oh, we’ve got nothing for you to do’ and they gave me some tea and cake [laughs]. It was a good laugh and it’s funny when we’re all, of course now I go into the Air Force Association and of course, we always go, my daughter and I always go to the Odd Bods November dinner and we meet up together and we, it’s, I mean, even for years all those old chaps and they were facing hell and you wondered how they had the nerve to do it and yet they all said: ‘Best years of our lives. Best years of our’, Jock said it, I said it, and I mean our living [unclear], I I’ve seen the ranks, living conditions and food was terrible and the living conditions were often awful and what you had to do. Cause we had, when we were at Lichfield we had to, at one period, probably be ’42, ’42 more than ’43, there was a lot of business, Germans were dropping odd parachutes, two or three parachuters and of course we had a fifth column of people who were Pro-Nazi, Fascists, some even before the war, Royal Family, you know, old Edward the 8th and his bird, you know, they were all quite Pro Hitler and, we, we were, that was when there had been attacks on planes, that was when they used to keep the planes all in a line or on tarmac and they started to put them down in dispersals, the ones that were in use, any spare ones would be dragged out and put on a farmers’, in farmers’ fields under the trees and we had a couple of Wellingtons near our Waafery, near the Waafery and we were asked, we were told to do guard duty and you’d, there’d be two or three of us and, I mean, it was so absurd, was at wintertime and we’d wear our gas capes which came neck to floor and airmen’s wellies so you had to ware about three pairs of socks, because you were in these great big wellies and our tin hats of course and gas mask respirators at the ready and we were armed because see, the WAAF, the Women’s Auxiliary Airforce, the auxiliary women, we couldn’t be forced to carry arms so we were armed with truncheons, there were three girls with truncheons and we’d be out in the rain and mud, parading round these Wimpeys, we opened the hatch, we used to open the hatch and get in and sit up in the pilot’s seat and, oh, I loved the smell of aircraft, so aircraft [laughs] and not long ago the RAF went to the museum at Moorabbin, you know it was so lovely to smell a real aircraft inside, those oils and petrol and everything and sometimes we’d have an airman with a rifle. And at the same time they also had, we had a mock invasion and all they, they didn’t know what to do with the WAAF because all the airmen had arms with, with blank, you know, ammunition, and they had thunder flashes and they were, there were two, there were the enemy and all the ones [unclear] and all the aircrew weren’t armed and they didn’t know what to do with the WAAF so they told us we had to go and sit in the toilets [laughs]. And I remember cause there were thunder flashes, being blasted out against the wall, just outside, cause they knew we were in the toilets and the others were chucking thunder flashes [laughs]. And we, we said, why can’t we be out among it all. Anyway, they, you know, we had all those sorts of funny things and at the same, around the same period, when there was a threat, a real threat of airfields being invaded and they said, if there’s a last minute stand [unclear] on parade one morning last minute stand, would any of you girls volunteer to learn to load Lee-Enfield rifles? And you would be at the back and the men would be throwing their rifles to you to reload, you’d be throwing back loaded rifles and so on and so on. Then we all stepped forward, everyone, we all wanted to carry arms, it was funny because some, quite a lot of men, especially the aircrew said, oh, they didn’t want women to carry arms, we were nice, gentle girls, women, we didn’t need to, what we wouldn’t have done to a German with a bayonet! We, I mean, my dad was in the army in World War I, and I always, you know, used to talk about bayonet charges and things. Anyway, we all learned, we learned to dismantle a Lee-Enfield rifle and to clean it and then we learned to arm it and so on, and then they said, the sergeant down the rifle range said: ‘Would any of you girls like to volunteer to fire a rifle?’ and we all stepped forward and he said: ‘Oh, there’s too many of you’, he said, ‘we only have five rounds each’ [laughs] at least we got to fire a Lee-Enfield rifle [laughs] and I came back with a big [unclear] [laughs]. But, I mean, we very always said that we couldn’t carry arms, it seemed ridiculous they had a whole army there of women who were dying to carry arms. The ATS, my sister in law, Jock’s young sister, she went into the ATS towards the end, she was called up and she went into the ATS and, but she was put in as a cook, they didn’t, as a conscript, they were just, you’ll be a cook, and they had a horrible time but a lot, some of the ATS girls they were our viewfinders on the keg guns but they didn’t fire the guns but they were, they were very good on the viewfinders and but we, we actually in WAAF actually had the best of the women services in the war, I think we worked alongside our main army, you known we were always there and among the aircrew and helping to do things and I mean, we had, you know, there were flying mechs and battery charges and girls they are all among working among the aircraft and we all ate together, we didn’t eat in separate messes, we ate in the airmen’s mess and, I mean, we did everything except sleep together. And some of the girls did [laughs] but, you know, I think we were much closer because the air forces is a nice service, you know, it's a sort of much more specialised and you get different type of person in the air force, I think. And I now belong to the Royal Naval Association, I’m only an associate member, a lot of us RAF people go to the Royal Naval Association which is only a [unclear], [unclear] or [unclear]. They were lucky, the naval people, cause like our RAF Squadrons and the RAAF were all on our squadrons so there was a great closeness between the RAF and the RAAF and the same with the navy, quite a lot our RNAF were in on British ships and there’s quite a closeness and cause they, they obviously got into, they got in with the ones down here, the naval people got down here, got in the British navy got in ex-services associations with the Cerberus crowd, and they bought a block of land and it’s a lovely big block and the Cerberus as a sort of war memorial put up this memorial building and it’s, it’s not huge but it’s got a large hall and big kitchen, toilets, and a bar and outside a big barbecue and it’s really nice and once a month they have a meal and they get together and of course there is always a Trafalgar Day in October, you go and we always have a big Nelson thing, and drink our toast and rum, tot of rum and apparently they British Navy send out every year, they send out this small keg of naval full strength rum which is, cause in the navy it was always, when everybody used to have rum everyday but it was always watered down, it’s very, very strong and they are still saying this Cerberus, this ex-service crowd, still send out, I don’t know how much longer they will do it, this rum and of course the air force crowd, we sit at one table and the navy crowd are so different to us, we are very prim and proper lot, we are behaved, cause they always make fun of us, sailors are very rough and the funny thing, their wives and so on, they all sit at tables on their own and the men all sit at tables whereas we’ve always air force have always been men and women together and they, they told us the first time on when we were invited first for Trafalgar Day and they said, you air force types, don’t stand when the royal toast and the toast to Nelson is said, because apparently in the old sailing ships not very much headroom, do you know, those sailing ships, tiny old sailing ships like Nelson was in and they had a complement of eight hundred, fourteen inches for a hammock, that’s where you slept, fourteen inches, you’ve [unclear] and I noticed that a lot of those ex-servicemen, the old chaps, they, there’s a lot of them missing fingers and arms and hands, quite and I mean, you don’t see this among air force crowd. Quite a lot of them have, you know, half an arm or several fingers off and obviously, you know, I suppose with their big guns and things, I suppose stuff and I don’t know anything much about the navy cause it’s only my, up in Lewis of course most of them go into the navy, there were only four men from the Isle of Lewis who went into the air force during the war, Jock had always wanted to fly since he was a little boy, he’d always wanted to fly, and I mean as a crafters son he got back his chance because there is not work up there and you know, money was small but most of the men went into the navy or the merchant navy and the only ones that went into the army would go into the Highland regiment, the Seaforth Highlanders in [unclear] cause he had two uncles who were pipers and his sister, one sister was called up into the ATS, his, other sister, his older sister, unfortunately she couldn’t pass the medical for the ATS cause she volunteered, and she went into the NAAFI, cause the NAAFI was a good backup, you know, they had those little vans and they had, ran the canteens and they were very, very good and you’d find each station would have its specialised, you know, cakes and things cause I knew at Lichfield they made beautiful [unclear] cakes and we always used to go out to the NAAFI event who did outside about 11, or 10, or 10.30, or 11, everyone used to go, everyone, officers and everyone used to go out with their mugs and you’d always say; ‘Tea and a wad!’ [?] [laughs] [unclear], pig lardy, heavy things, we were always hungry [laughs].
AP: Pretty good. Let’s have a look. You have spoken for an hour and twenty minutes without a break, that’s pretty impressive [laughs].
JS: [laughs] Well, I’ve got no one else to talk to!
AP:
JS: I’ve got the cat.
AP: You’ve got the cat.
JS: He’s lying on my bed in the bedroom.
AP: I’m more than happy to assist. You’re absolutely fascinating so far. Uhm,
JS: I talk too much.
AP: We love this sort of stuff, this is really, really good.
JS: But then, then my cousin, there was my cousin, now I’m talking about the Isle of Lewis and as I say, my husband he once he went to primary school and he won a scholarship which, living in the village where he lived, fifteen miles away from Stornoway, where the only secondary school on the island. He won a scholarship but there was no bus you had to board in town and his parents, this was during the Depression, his parents couldn’t afford the books because, sometimes scholarships had a living allowance for books, uniform and living out but there was nothing like that during that particular year, so he couldn’t go to secondary school and he, I mean, there was me, I had a grammar school education and I was a hopeless scholar, absolutely hopeless, the only thing I was ever good at was English and history, and I never got anywhere with anything until I went to Pitman’s College and then I come out here and I saw one of my daughters teachers, when she was at primary school, said to me, oh, you ought to study and become a teacher, because we were desperate for teachers, so I investigated and I did, I went through, did my GCSE and so on went up the exhibition building and did my HSC and did very well, it was totally different doing it as an adult. Well, I hadn’t got horses or boys, that’s a thing, the two loves of my, oh, I was a terrible flirt in the Air Force. I was a student, I’ve been a quiet, studious girl as I say horse mad and I got in the Air Force and I suddenly discovered men and I didn’t read a book, I had boyfriends galore, I found a little address book and all these addresses are Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders, cause they all wanted you to write to them and we wrote letters to all, we’d sit on our beds and write letters to all these different boys you never saw again. But, I mean, love affairs were no sex, I mean to start with, VD, we were shown all these film of VD when we [unclear] training stations and that would put you off sex forever and if you were pregnant you were chucked out of the WAAF and you were never allowed, you could go back into the ATS if you’d had an illegitimate baby but you weren’t ever allowed back into the WAAF. Oh, we were very pure and high [?] but, uhm, cause Jock was shocked when I said, Oh, I said, the only thing that kept me a virgin was VD, the thought of VD and getting pregnant. And he said, oh, he said, I’m very disappointed in you, because I thought you had higher morals [laughs]. Well, I said, I didn’t want to get pregnant and I didn’t want to get VD.
AP: Oh dear.
JS: And when you’ve done the VD report for the station, for all the Czechs and the Poles, they were the worst. They used to have to go to Cosford once in a week to have these horrible, I won’t, well, you probably know what they used to, used to inject them with mercury and where but it was very painful apparently and we used to see the bus going and they all used to have their heads down and we used to see the bus going to Cosford once a week and we all used to go [laughs ironically], they all used to have their heads down [laughs]. And, as I say, I used to do the VD report and Lichfield had two satellite stations, Tatenhill and Church Broughton and they of course used to, uhm, they had Czechs and Poles. Now I mean, the Czechs and the Poles they were, they were so brave, oh, they hated, they loathed the Germans, they absolutely, as long as they could kill a German their happiest time but they were dreadful and of course in this VD report they had to say when they went to the MO and it was discovered, they had to fill in a form, they had to, legally didn’t have to give the name of the woman but they had to give where they, whereabouts they thought they contacted it, usually under a tree or in a field [laughs]. Contracted it, I should say. Or, and roughly the age, and the age could be anything, of the woman, I mean, they wouldn’t know, but the ages could be anything from fifteen to about seventy [laughs]. And of course, all the girls used when I was typing the VD report, all the girls used to come and look through the papers, weren’t supposed to [unclear] and titter and make very [unclear] remarks and, but they were the worst cause I and after the war I met several Polish, ex Polish airmen and I always used to say to Jock, oh, I don’t think I’d better shake hands with him [laughs]. And they were very nice people [laughs] so you know but we had men of every nationality you could think of at the service, you know, of the Commonwealth and so on you. We had lots of South Africans, New Zealanders. Now, the New Zealanders, they never had the funny accent they have nowadays, it’s funny, they spoke much more like Australian men. They didn’t have that funny twisted accent. I don’t’ know where they got that from, cause it’s really weird. And of course New Zealand, when we were going to emigrate, I wanted to go to Australia because I wanted to, we were living in Scotland and I wanted sunshine and of course all the.
AP: So you went to Melbourne [unclear]
JS: Of course, all the Aussies had told me what a wonderful country it was. Jock wanted to go to New Zealand because full of Highland, Gaelic-speaking Highland people and of course their Scottish country dancing is impeccable, similarly if you couldn’t go and of course they were only taking building, tradesmen or farm workers. So he, cause he’d gone back to his basic trade by then, he was maintenance engineer with British overseas, no, British European Airways. And he came out here, the old Australian National Airlines brought him out here cause they were so short of maintenance engineers so he saw it advertised, applied, they took him, brought him out six months ahead of me, cause they had hostels for me and, uh, so, when New Zealand was no good, he went down to London and applied to Canada house [?], he phoned me up and he said, we can be in Canada within three months and it was winter and I’d got flu and I, you know, I get, my nose was streaming, my eyes were streaming, I said, you’ll kill me if you take me to a country with all that snow and so he didn’t and so that’s why we applied for Australia and of course we’d read all these books about Australia and we decided, oh, the best place would be West Australia, the climate there was beautiful, Albany, and you know, the climate was supposed to be absolutely wonderful and cause ANA brought him out to Essendon aerodrome, so, he was Melbourne [laughs]. I remember when the first time we took the caravan up to Darwin and I’d only been in Darwin a couple of hours, and I said to Jock, Gee, how [unclear] would cost to move house and the furniture up here? Oh, I’d loved to have lived in Darwin. Cause Darwin years ago was lovely but the last time we went to Darwin it was, it had grown in population, it was very commercial but the first few years, when we used to take the caravan up North, it was lovely. This, and, people, all the young people used to stop, you know, older people and say: ‘Oh, hope you are going to stay up here, cause we, it was too many young people, we need some grandparent type people’. Have you always been in Melbourne?
AP: No, I’m from Sydney.
JS: Oh, your [laughs]
AP: Yeah, I came down from Sydney about five years ago for work. So.
JS: I’ve, you know, I’ve been through Sydney on the bridge, to go on the car, wiht the caravan, we’d been there over the, on the bridge and we’ve also been underneath.
AP: Oh yeah?
JS: And I’ve been to Sydney to change planes. I’ve never been to Sydney as a town.
AP: A lovely spot sometimes. Anyway, uhm, you were telling me before we started the tape, uhm, about something that was going on, one day when you were doing the, I think it was the group VD report about a certain squadron.
JS: Oh yeas, about that, about the.
AP: Yeah, so, can you tell us that story again for the benefit of the tape?
JS: Yes. God, what was it called the,
AP: Fauld.
JS: Oh yes, the Fauld, the day the Dam went up, yes it was in 1944 and it was the Fauld explosion and uhm, oh yes and I’d gone upstairs and was typing away at this huge, great big long-carriage and those long-carriage typewriters you never see them now, great big thing, very, very heavy and so I was typing away and it was this funny rumble that went through my feet, I have felt this funny and heard, we all stopped because it sounded like air raids and, we, it was only, must have been seconds, barely minutes and suddenly this rumble got bigger and my typewriter really big jammed, it went [makes a repeated booming noise] and I sort of set back and I looked at the dirty, green wall in front of me and there was this little crack and it started to open and it came down in a big curve and I just, I just watched it, cause funny it’s like when you’re in an air raid when you bombs and you tend to watch them, you’re sort of rooted to the spot. I mean I remember once was a terribly bad crash on our airfield at Lichfield and we were all in our office, we heard this terrible thud, screech, metal, you knew it was a crash, that metal noise and we looked out of the window, the side window and there’s this flame and it was sliding across the airfield, right out on the airfield, on the runway and it was beginning to slide straight towards training wing and we just stood there, we were just stood rooted to the spot. That was the time when, it was horrible. The operators see the girls at the radio while the radio operators took the planes up, and now the girls, they rushed to the window when this thing happened and they left us with the intercom switched on and of course, see, those Wellingtons you know were geodetic and they had axes along the body but obviously the boys were burning, the thing was a degrees of heat and they were screaming and you could hear it from above, you‘d hear the screams, it was horrible and we were rooted to the, I, everybody, nobody said a word, I mean, I, nobody passed out or anything like that, but it was really horrible and of course then the fire, cause naturally the blood wagon, the ambulance and the fire engine were always right beside flying control, they went straight out cause they got foam and it had stopped but it was a fact that it could actually, I mean if nothing had been done, it could have banged into our building. We were so struck with that and it was like that in that Fauld thing, and we were sitting, as I say, immediately somebody said, oh, there must be a bad air raid somewhere, funny we haven’t heard the sirens because often we did have [unclear] and I mean once our airfield was very lightly attacked by one aircraft and I mean, you’d simply, you’d, over the tannoy they’d simply say even before the sirens died you’d hear: ‘red alert, red alert’ and we’d always have our respirators with tin hats on our chairs and all you do is [unclear] your respirator on your shoulder, put your tin hat on and all fire alert, slip trenches outside, you’d run like hell once you got outside because you were scared and you’d, the slit trenches were so nasty because they’ve been used as toilets [laughs] by people going to a frat night they were very smelly and I know, a friend of ours, poor men, they jumped, he was the first one to jump into the slit trench and someone had obviously been doing the other business in there and when he got out, all the others came on top of him and he noticed and he was sitting there a nasty smell and when he got out, he found his knee, he’d gone straight into someone’s poo and he said he got a knife and cut his, he said, he couldn’t bare it [laughs]. Like poor Jock, one time on an air test and he was moving about the aircraft and they hit an air pocket cause they were low and [unclear] went up and he and the mid upper gunner were both, and they couldn’t move because of the way you are rooted you know in the planes and he said, he saw in slow motion [unclear] came over. They’re supposed to be emptied every trip and it all come over the two of them, [unclear], he said, we, he said I took my flying without equipment on a stick [laughs]. Oh God, he said, I went straight up to the showers, he said, I just showered in my uniform and then he said, I took that off and he said I was in the shower spitting it [laughs]. But and the mid upper gunner was the same, but poor old Charlie [unclear] but there was, it was always very pooey, very smelly in the, in the trenches because you’d sit there with your tin hats and things do fall on you, you’d hope no bomb would fall on you but, I mean, we weren’t like the fighter stations, they had it regularly, they were bombed regularly, down more on the coast down south we were, we were lucky we were in the Midlands but I mean along it was all Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, cause Jock’s Squadron he was 90 Squadron and they were in Suffolk. Cause they always used to rendezvous at Cromer Pier when they were went off, the you know when the whole gaggle of paints [?] were going out, they’d fly from their station and go up round and round to get height and then go straight out and they’d have some to rendezvous, Cromer Pier was a great place for a lot of them and others would, they’d get into formation and then they’d pick the other formations up, all up from all up the coast and we went to Cromer when we, one trip we had overseas in the 1970s I think, we went to Cromer and it was beautiful day because I know he was swimming in the North Sea and I, he said: ‘Oh, I’m lying here, look at me up!’ Thinking about me circling around over here before we went out, we’d stay off and went in from their area, they went in to France over the Frisian Islands. Cause he always said, I always put, as soon as the pilot said enemy coast ahead, he said that’s when I always pull my, he was always scared of his eyes being burned, you know, injured, and he said, I always pull my googles down cause some of them didn’t and got their eyes burned. He said, I was always terrified of getting my eyes burned. But he never, he still, you know, they had three pairs of gloves, silk and wool and then leather, but he nearly always worked with his silk gloves cause he was using bars and things and [pauses] but as I say, I still think, you know, but we probably don’t remember the nasty parts, you only think of the fun parts. When you say it was, it was the best years of our lives. I tell you why, because after the war it was so horrible. After the war we went back into Civvy Street and you had this awful feeling you weren’t wanted. See, people had, who’d been in fact prison officers [?], they’d all got jobs and they were looking after, this is my job and we don’t want you people coming in and move, you know, with all, you’ve got medals and we haven’t and so on and so on. And then the idea was that we should all forget the war, get on with the peace and everything was so grey and actually we were then more severely rationed, that was when bread was rationed and onions and potatoes. I cued for hours for all those things, because we were feeding Europe and particularly because we had to feed poor old Holland, cause they were starving but we were feeding the bloody Germans, that’s what got up our noses and we should have done what Joe Stalin said, Joe Stalin said at one big conference, he wanted Germany totally disarmed and made into the food bowl of Europe, got rid of those bloody Germans. I still hate them and I’ve got German blood in me, I’ve got Prussian, great grandfather. I still hate them like mad, I can’t forgive but then I was going to tell you about my cousin. Can I tell you about my cousin?
AP: You certainly can. [unclear]
JS: My cousin, there was another boy like my husband, he, now, his was a very sad story. His father, like my father and my father’s two sisters both married men during the war that were in the trenches. My sister Nora married this soldier and he ended up the war, after the Great War, in a lunatic asylum, he’d, he was shell shocked, absolutely shell shocked. And Nora always told her little boy Bill, who was born, she was married I think in 1916 and had him in 1917 and she told Bill, growing up, that his father was dead. And because in those days to be in a lunatic asylum, you know, was like having a baby illegitimately, it was one of these, you didn’t talk about those sort of things, Gee, woman had a Hysterectomy, that was women’s [unclear] and you didn’t mention that, everything was so, [makes a shushing sound] proper, and anyway poor Bill, he grew up. Uhm, Nora went and when my grandfather was widowed, he went up to Lancashire or Derbyshire, where he’d come from and he opened a little corner shop and Nora went up and lived with him and worked in the shop and Bill grew up and went to the local primary school but then Grandad died during those years and the shop apparently wasn’t making much money so, Nora came down and stayed with us and Bill, they stayed in our house for a little while until, and aunt Nora’s a widow of a service man, was supposedly a widow of a service man, she got a council house, we were living in Welwyn Garden City at that time, I was going to the local Handside Primary School and Bill came along too. Now Bill would have been about three or four years older, three or four years older than me, and I’ve got his photo somewhere, and I couldn’t find it today and he was a nice looking boy and of course you know, I was only a little girl about eight or something like that and, eight or nine, and, oh, I was in love with Bill, I used to tell my parents and everybody I was going to marry Bill and I remember, cause Bill loved, he had a Meccano set and Bill loved his Meccano and cause with my little itchy [unclear] fingers, I remember, could I have put that, no! He hated me, I was always around his Mecco, trying to or reading his comics, and I remember at school, we were changing classes one day and the big boys came out of whatever they’ve been and he’s, and of course I’m saying to all my other friends, that’s my cousin, that’s my cousin Bill and you know, Bill’s looking everywhere except, we were twelve or thirteen. So, you know, that’s my cousin and so they went and lived in their house and eventually they moved to Luton in Beds, and Luton was the centre of the hat-making industry, of course in those days I mean everyone made more hats, felt hats, women wore hats all the time, straw hats and felt hats in the winter and my aunt was pretty good at her job and Bill got a job as a young, he had, when he left Handside Primary School, during Depression there were so few jobs he got a job as an errand boy. They would take boys as errand boys on delivery bicycles, like you used to see in that funny comic series Open All Times [sic], it how you would have seen it on TV, and always had errand boys. I mean, when my mother went shopping, she would carry a little shopping basket but she would only get the perishables like the meat or eggs, a bit of cheese or fish, she would carry that home, everything else was delivered either sometimes by delivery man, mainly by errand boys on funny big arm bikes with a huge thing. And errand boys were all everywhere, of course they got a pittens [?], I mean, there was no real big dole or anything in those days, so, they only got a little bit above of what the dole would be and as soon as they, all these errand boys turned eighteen, see, they had to go on to adult wages, so they were all sacked. So that was when Nora moved to Luton and Bill got a job in a factory, you know, he was just a general factotum sweeping up and so on and he could see, like a lot of boys of that era, that it was much better in the forces, so he joined the Royal Air Force in those days when they used to wear the breeches and the grey patties and tunics up to your neck and the peak caps and he was stationed at Cardington where the balloons were, all the big balloons. And RAF Cardington and of course he saved up and bought a motorbike and so on and my dad had had a motorbike and they were motorbike crazy, he used to come over and see us a lot. And then of course, uhm, he, that’s it, he went in, he hadn’t got the educational qualifications to go to Halton, to the School of Aircraft Apprentices to be a fitter because you had to have secondary education for that, with maths and so on. He went into the trade of, is not a trade now, machine tool oiler and setter, next, really, a machine, he would end up as a machine setter which was a very good trade. So, that was what he was doing when war started, and about the same time it was, it was beginning in 1943 when all the four-engine bombers were starting to come in and we were really doing something over Germany, we were the only service other than the navy, the only service really doing anything in the war. And Bill wanted to go as aircrew, I don’t know why he never said why, and he, he applied to be aircrew and they turned him down, saying, you know you are a school tradesman, someone will have to be trained in your place, stay as you are. So he said, right, I’ll go on strike. Well of course he was marched up to the commanding officer who said: ‘I could court martial you and that would be the end of your air force career’. But he said: ‘I’ll tell you what, boy, he said, you can go in as aircrew and can go in as a bloody bomb aimer’. So, he went in, he was trained as a bomb aimer, he was at Skellingthorpe. Now he was on Lancasters. Now, the Air Force in 19, 1943, ’44, I think it was October 1944, the Air Force had been trying to decimate Brunswick because it was full of factories, war factories and they’d been, they’d had raid after raid, there was going to be a really big raid, a huge raid on Brunswick and that night the huge [unclear] went out including Bill’s Lancaster and they were all so even other, this shows you how our Air Force had grown from 1942 when we were couldn’t make, could barely make a thousand, there were other small diversionary raids on that would draw fighters away and it was a highly successful raid. It was, the town was absolutely decimated. They only had three or four minor raids on it afterwards, just to clean up and only one of our aircraft was missing that night. That was my cousin’s aircraft. I managed to find this out. I found out from the Bomber Command War Diaries and then I was in the library only a month or two ago, and there’s was a wonderful book which I had written down somewhere which has all, it’s a big book about all our prisoners of war, it has all our prisoners of war and of course Bill’s name was in. And apparently they were badly hit and their navigator, funnily their navigator, navigators always seem to get hit, their navigator was badly injured and they, I mean, it must have been hell in the plane because apparently, you know, it was going round and how, how on earth you can move about in a plane that is going down like that I don’t know. They, he said, he told us afterwards, he said, two of them, he and another, the engineer apparently, had to drag the poor old navigator to the biggest exit and his parachute came open, started to open in the plane because they just had to bundle everything out but he seemed to go down alright but they, they never, then he jumped and the other man jumped, that must have been the gunner I think. When they got down, when they landed in Germany, cause it wasn’t far from the target, they, cause he’d forgotten all of the correct things to do, he didn’t take his helmet, and all the hoo-ha getting them out, didn’t take his helmet off, and he was nearly strangled, all the cords went round his neck, he was [mimics a strangling noise and laughs] and then his big flying boots he had they were unzipped, they came off, [laughs]. So there he was in his socked feet and they couldn’t find any of the other crew in the dark of the night and they started to down this long road and you know on the continent they very often they put all this plane trees along the sides of the road and there were all these sapling trees with thick sacking wrapped round them, so to keep them up to sporting post cause they were, so he and the other bloke they cut all this sacking off to wrap around Bill’s feet and they looked around and there were all these plane sacking across the road, all these [unclear]. And he said the next thing is a couple of nights, he said, it was very cold, he said, a couple of nights we just got water, rain water, where we could find it in the fields and he said, we got turnips from the fields and ate them turnips and carrots and he said, we got to this little township and he said, in the dark we could see this building with all these bikes outside. We thought if we can get a bike how much easier and cause they knew the direction they were going, you know, towards the west trying to get to our troops. Anyway, they both grabbed the bikes and cause they must have made a noise, next thing all these German troops come out and they take them prisoners and apparently it was outside the SS headquarters [laughs]. Then, the next thing, he was an officer, now, that what I always think about my cousin Bill, his bomber aimer training, he’d been send over on the ATS scheme to Canada and he’d obviously the smart lad, been commissioned, you know, I mean, drop us off a commissioned, who wouldn’t take it, but Bill took it, and he was, he came out as a flight Louie. So, he went to Stalag, the officers camp, Stalag Luft III, the great escape camp and cause he talked, I mean, he didn’t tell us an awful lot but they were all helping, you know, that were these, they made bags to wear inside their trousers to take the earth and they’d sort of sprinkled the earth if they were walking about or playing games and he said, oh, he said, I could have been in the last group, he said, to go, he said, all us tail enders, he said, of course by that time they’d been captured and but he told us quite a bit about that terrible march that the Germans did, not just from Stalag Luft III, but from several of the prisoner of war camps. They were going to massacre the prisoners but why they started, they started to march them to the east and it was the middle of winter and of course a lot of them had thin shoes and uniform thin and they didn’t have any, they had a bad couple of holes of thin potato, growl potatoey water and they were all being marched along with all these German guards and if any of them fell by the way and didn’t pick themselves up, they’d either shoot them or bash them with a rifle butt. And I mean, Bill didn’t say anything much, just told us about this and he said, fortunately, he said, I, and he wasn’t a very strong chap and he said, you know, he said, it was pretty sickening, he said, we were helping the ones that were really, couldn’t walk but, he said, it was pretty sickening and fortunately we ran into, oh, we were spending, we’d been put into an empty prisoner of war camp for overnight and he said, fortunately or unfortunately the Russians came along. But, he said, there was a lot of problems with the Russian soldiers. They were trigger-happy and he said, we were warned that if we tried to sort of get out of the camp to start going to the east again, to try and join up with the British who weren’t far away, that we would, you know, that these trigger-happy Russians and he said, they came into our prisoner of camp and they treated us as if we were the enemy. He said, they just took wrist watches and all the money, anything of any value. They took even cat badges and things like that. And he, so they were told to play it very cool, and be very quiet, and just, they stayed in this prisoner of war camp for a few days and behind the barbwire and the Russians were circling around outside and suddenly the Americans appeared full force, tanks and guns and things and they immediately, the Russians sort of, they ushered the Russians, there were only a few Russians by then, they ushered them off and took the aircrew to an American camp, to a British camp but he said it was a pretty nasty situation. He said, when you’ve been a prisoner of war and then suddenly your allies come and treat you almost as badly.
AP: Said one of my interview subjects a few weeks ago, he said: ‘Then we were liberated by the Russians’, he said.
JS: There.
AP: Actually, we were recaptured by the Russians [laughs]
JS: Yes, that’s what he said, that’s what it was like, and he said, you didn’t feel comfortable, you didn’t feel safe,
AP: Very, very similar.
JS: Weird.
AP: Strange stuff. So, Bill came home [unclear]?
JS: Bill came home but it was all very sad. Now, we came out here in 1952 and Bill had, he’d had a job and he’d got a very nice girlfriend, they were going to get engaged and then his mother, apparently, I mean, we weren’t near him at the time cause my father said, if only I’d known, you know, but his mother then said, you can’t get married Bill, there’s mental problems in our family, in your father’s family and he and I think Nora was very possessive and I think Nora wanted him to be there for her life. And she, I mean, had, we don’t know how she brought it to him but she more or less said, you know, if I, in the end she told him, you’re father’s a raving lunatic in a padded cell and Bill said, I want to go, I didn’t know I had a living father, he said, you should have told me years ago, I want to go and see him and of course there was a real breakup between them and in the end she gave him the address of this place. He went to this mental home and he saw his father, more or less a slobbering lunatic, you know, and in a padded cell. And he came back, broke his engagement, I think he had a complete breakdown and he was having a treatment, he went in as a sort of outpatient and apparently he was getting on very well and he got a job as a gardener and he was still having light treatment but of course he got to know a young nurse there and of course the authorities would never let the nursing staff make boyfriends of the patients. So she was immediately posted somewhere else and I suppose he saw another friendship gone. I mean, the poor boy was probably craving for love and I just, look, I go around, I’m sure these years since Jock died, if I were religious, I mean, I’m an atheist, if I were religious, and if I were a catholic, I’d say I’d be going through a sort of Purgatory because I’ve been looking at all the things I should have done, I should have been a better daughter, I should have done better at school, I should have been a nicer wife, I mean, I wasn’t nasty but I was, you know, things I shouldn’t. And I think of Bill, and torture myself, if only you had kept, you know, written to him more often, if only you’d asked him to come out, we were living in a caravan over on the north side of town on our block of land, building our house out of pocket more or less, building where [unclear} house our first home and I couldn’t sponsor him. And the next thing, he was living in digs and working as a gardener and I suppose he just had this complete, what’s the use, because I know the feeling myself. And I had a letter from his landlady, apparently he put his head, and when she was out one day he put his head in the gas oven and I mean, my lovely cousin Bill, and I, a year I was so fond of him and it broke my heart. And nobody else in the family took more. Jock didn’t know him well and dad and mum didn’t take much notice. And my dad was very hard, he was very hardened by World War I, and what he went through, and you know, I, it haunts me all the time, that nice boy and I mean, you know, flying and so on and then, every sort of romance, every bit of love broken up and I, blame my, well, look as I always think of mental hospitals, because that’s what happened when Jock fractured his skull, and, oh, he was, I mean, I could, it was a huge and I mean nowadays he probably would have had a brain operation, fortunately he had very strong bones but you could feel this huge jagged bone underneath his skin, huge scar and he said to me, he wasn’t going to ask me to marry him cause he said, he said, I in the end he did and he said, look, he said, I lay it on the line, he said, if you marry you are not going to get the man you would have got had I not had this accident, he said, and I know what it’s done to my brain, he said, I know you won’t get the man that you deserve. And, I mean, I was madly in love, I didn’t care and, but, I know he did, he wasn’t nasty or anything, but he had a nose operation, uhm, oh, in the 1980s, ‘70s, had a nose operation and when the, he had a, like me, he had a deviated sept, to my [unclear] had it done, my nose was twisted and his nose was badly twisted and he couldn’t breathe well and he had this [unclear] surgeon, she said his bones were all overgrown and pressing on nerves and he used to have these occasional days, a couple of days when he would have a terrible headache and he would wake up in the morning, he’d still go to work but he would, he wouldn’t talk to me, he’d just look at me, glassy-eyed, his eyes would just sort of glare at me and he wouldn’t say a word, he wouldn’t answer me and it would all clear over, I mean, I didn’t mind that, it didn’t worry me, he wasn’t cruel or anything to me. But, I mean, I put it down to what he had on his head. But, he was taken from the local hospital to the big service hospital at Rauceby out in Lincolnshire, very big hospital which had been a mental home, a mental hospital. And I used to go, I used to walk about five miles, my bosses used to let me off early, they were very good and I used to walk about five, used to walk down the old roman road, the old way and right out in the middle country this big, huge building and all these corridors and every so often they’d be huge, heavy doors with double locks on because they were all pushed back with great big long corridors and then every now and again there’d be a little passage and that led to the padded cells. And I heard groaning one day and I tiptoed, I was on my way to see Jock, I tiptoed down and there was this poor young aircrew boy, I mean, he didn’t see me, he was bandaged over his eyes, he obviously burned top to bottom and he was hung on straps and he just got holes for his nose and mouth and all bandaged up with his arms up like this and he was groaning away and he was and I actually saw all this sort of pale blue padding, all ceiling, walls, floor, everything, they put the very worst burns cases in there, I suppose peace and quiet and, cause a lot of them were screaming you know, would disturb the other patients. But I know Jock must have been very ill because when I first came to visit him, the RAF nursing sister, she said: ‘Are you his fiancé?’, I said: ‘Well, we’re not engaged but we are going to get married when the war ends or when the war’s over’ and she said, you know, you know your boyfriend is very seriously ill, she said, I want to warn you, he is very seriously ill. And I mean, all they did with him there, he had his head sort of wedged in a wooden frame and he lay there for a couple of weeks in a wooden frame and they fed him stuff like [sighs] you don’t see it now, it’s sort of made from bones and, bones and brain and stuff that we used to be called, it was called something in old-fashion, it was like a sort of jelly, carsford [?] jelly, that’s it, it was made by bones and I think brains and it was the most tasteless stuff, cause I had to taste if his, cause it was supposed to help remake bones [unclear].
AP: Ok.
JS: So, that was, he obviously was very ill but they never cleared, they never gave him an x-ray to after, he was x-rayed when he had the accident, never gave him an x-ray to clear him and he managed to get back onto flying because he went for his aircrew board to see if he was fit for flying. And there was, there were two doctors and the old chap more or less told the other bloke he could go, the other doctor he could go, he said, oh, I’ll deal with this case and he was an old doctor and he came from one of the Hebridean Islands and he spoke Gaelic and of course he saw from Jocks docs where he came from and they spoke for about an hour or so in Gaelic and the doctor apparently said: ‘Ah, you are fit for flying!’
AP: So this, I think we were talking about that before we turned the tape on. This was the motorbike accident for Jock.
JS: Mh, yes.
AP: Wasn’t it?
JS: That he, he had scars, I mean, you know, cause his googles were broken and his nose was damaged and the size of his mouth was split, his eyes were all split at the side, he had slight scars, but it didn’t damage his beauty, I think he was quite nice looking [laughs]. But he was the love of my life, he was a lovely man. We laughed our way through time and it was all giggle, giggle, giggle, all the time.
AP: Very good. Uhm, what else do I have. Can you, well, we might back up a little bit. Can you tell me where you were and what your thoughts were, obviously you’ve already told me that you expected war to come but when you actually heard that Britain is at war. What were your thoughts and feelings and what were you doing at that point?
JS: Well, that’s rather dreadful because I told you I was in the Ministry of Aircraft Production and obviously war was coming, well war was coming very close because that, you know, what’s his name, had been over, Chamberlain had been over and come back with a piece of paper and then of course Germany had walked into Czechoslovakia and in that interim period we were working twenty-four hours, they’d got camp beds in a big room and we were and it was a Sunday and I was on duty, I’d, cause I was living at Amersham at the time, I’d come up, I’d think I’d slept the night an hour in the bed there which was in the Ministry of Aircraft Production was, the offices were in Berkeley Square and we, in the West End of London just walked up and Piccadilly was just and the Green Park was just up the road and I, we were called, they said to, we were working and they said to us girls we are all going down to the big hall because there is going to be a speech by the Prime Minister, because we all knew Germany had [unclear] and everyone was cock-a-hoop, oh, we’re going to be at war, oh whack-o!, sort of thing and of course, see [unclear], I mean, in 1939 I was seventeen, young and silly. We all were, a big typing pool of girls, all silly girls and we sat in the hall and the speech came on and he said we are now at war and we all said whoopee! And the air raid siren went and we were told to go to the shelters, or go down the corridor and we all rushed to the big windows and there wasn’t a soul to be seen in Berkeley Square. The Queen Mothers, the Queen’s dressmaker William Hartnell [sic] had room, had his big shop and rooms just opposite, not a soul to be seen anywhere, only a big red big fat barrage balloon going slowly up. And we were all, where are the Germans? And we all thought it was wonderful, then we all sang, Pack Up Your Troubles and It’s a Long Way to Tipperary and we were all throwing paper around and thought it was wonderful. And then of course I went home and my father said: ‘Bloody little fool!’ [laughs] He said, you wait, you don’t know what war was like, he said, now, and I remember when Dunkirk happened because I had an aunt, my mother’s sister married my uncle and they lived on an island at Thames Ditton, which isn’t far from Surbiton in Surrey, an island in the river Thames, that’s where the Thames widens and Richmond Park, beautiful royal park, is on the other side. And my uncle had a little cabin cruiser I think and they were given orders, everyone was given orders to take, the navy came round to, all those people on the island had boats and they were given orders at Dunkirk time to take their boats, they had to take their boat down to some part in the Thames estuary and the navy would deal with them and they were all hitched up to a, I don’t know whether it be onto a torpedo boat or a destroyer, I don’t think a destroyer would be too big, they were hitched up on lines and they were taken over to pick men up and brought them back. He only went over the once, cause I think he had engine trouble coming home and you know, all this sort of thing was happening and I and dad said, after Dunkirk I mean it was only then the Battle of Britain started almost and I remember we, dad and mum and I went for a walk and dad, we were talking about the war and he said, I don’t know, he said, what have we got? He said, we’ve only got these young men and a few young men with planes and he said, they are going to be overwhelmed by the German Air Force, who’d been practicing in Spain in the Spanish war, he said, they are going to be just shot down and he said, I just wish I’d kept my World War I revolver with three [unclear], one for you, one for mum and one for me. And that was dad, he said, it’s going to be a bloodbath if they come over. But then again quite a lot of us in years later in the ex-service things, we were talking, there were all, I mean, there was the man in the street who could do what he’s told and he couldn’t care less, as long as he’s got a warm bed and three meals a day and I mean, Hitler had obviously impressed the German people, I mean, obviously, well, I mean, they had been in a bad, in a terrible way in the Depression and we were, and we’d come through that terrible Depression and I mean, if you had someone who started to tell you, oh, we are going to do this and we are going to do that and we, you know, we are all going to live in a united Europe and do very well, and a lot of the, a lot of the upper crust, a lot of the aristocracy were very Pro-Hitler and, but there was in recent years, there have been things discovered, there’s been an underground headquarters found which, they’ve got no records of anywhere in the War Office or, anyway and apparently it has come out that there was a big, like resistance movement already being organised by Churchill and the patriotic people, very patriotic leaders of the country. Now there would have been civil war I think, I think it would have turned into civil war. You know, lot of us ex-service people have been talking, cause I’ll tell you this. In recent years, with the way life is, with the permissive life and it’s all me, me, me now and the way things are going politically, I mean everywhere not just our [unclear], our politicians are bloody twits, all of them and everywhere seems to be the same and all these do-gooders and letting all these people into Europe and a lot of us ex-service people are saying, perhaps it would have been better, saying, was it worth it? Was it worth all those lives lost? Would we have been better under Hitler? If you’d kept your nose clean and done what you were told you’d probably be just as well off. Cause the German people were. The only thing is of course, you’ve got things like the, those concentration camps, I mean, you’d think of that. The concentration camps, I mean, would we want concentration camps? This is the thing. You’ve got. And I mean, I was only reading the other day about the Japanese, if we hadn’t atom bombed them, they had, form the Emperor down, they had been given orders that every prisoner of war, civilian as well as service, which would have been a hell of a lot of civilians cause they had a lot of Dutch people and so on were to be massacred, it didn’t matter how you do it, squashed them, hanged them up, knifed them, staked them, all the most horrible of things, that every non-Japanese was to be got rid of, so, I was just as well we get the atom bomb off, cause we saved a lot of innocent people’s lives. But I mean, you know, there’s quite a lot of us, especially you know like in the navy get-togethers and things, and everyone says, was it really worth it, when you think of all your mates. And I think more or less one of the reasons that we say it was the best time of our lives, it was a wonderful time in the majority of people, civilians and service, we were all pulling together, we all had one ideal, and it was a very legitimate war. We had one ideal and there was the mateship, the companionship. I mean, I never came across anything nasty, I never came across rape or anything in the services, in the women’s services and everyone was so, you know, working together and the great comradeship and friendship and helping each other, cause life was difficult and harsh at times and we all helped each other. And, you know, you would put your friends before anything else, you know, to help your friends and support them and perhaps I’d think it’s more that when we say it was the best years of our lives, that terrific comradeship. And it really to me and of course to me all the time and then it’s something we all say in the RAF association, you know, those young men who sacrificed their lives and the way they were treated after the war, the way the bomber boys were treated and they must never be forgotten. My daughter gets on my nerves cause she said, oh, one day will come and everyone will forget them, I said, no, they won’t after all they don’t forget Nelson and the sailors that fought at Trafalgar, they don’t forget the soldiers that fought at Waterloo, that saved Britain and there was, both of those were narrow squeaks, [laughs], I mean Waterloo was very near the knuckle, they were and so was Trafalgar, cause Nelson was, cause right from a little girl I always Nelson was my big one time hero and we’ve had a film of his life, we also, one year we had a film of a sort of mock-up thing that they did in Britain of these battleships and they had an actual broadside, cause Nelson, Nelson did it, instead of fighting each ship broadside on and opening the cannons, he got, he laid his flotilla, all the enemy battleships were like front and back, you know, all in lines and then he came along with his flotilla like that and they simply opened up, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, broadsides and split the ships right through and he brought that manoeuvre into being, I mean, he was a real, I read a lot about naval battles, I read, my reading, I read occasionally a biography or a travel book but my reading is all war books.
AP: [laughs]
JS: Oh yeah, I’m on the [unclear] and up there.
AP: I can see in the collection of books [unclear].
JS: I’m, I’ve been getting out of the library, I’ve been reading about [unclear], or I think submariners that’s even worse than bombers. I once met a submarine man and he was such a nice, gentle, little chap and I used to think, how can you go down under the sea, all those thousands of feet, oh, with depth charges?
AP: [unclear] a lot of fun.
JS: But I, I do, I read a lot and I’m reading a lot at the moment about World War I cause there have been a lot of programs, Tony, oh, he’s Sir Tony now, the man who does the walks through Britain, he’s done a very three or four weeks running on a Sat, Sunday afternoon about going through World War I. My dad in World War I, he was in the trenches and then they were sent to Mesopotamia and that’s of course Iraq and then they were sent to Salonica, but they were sent through Palestine cause I know he had a bathe in the Black, in the Dead Sea, and said, oh, you just float on the top of the salt water but he saw Lawrence of Arabia, Lawrence of Arabia, he and another man, they came on their camels and he said, we’d just come out of the lines, we were fighting the Turks and he said, we’re all filthy and dirty and he said, we were having our rest and he said, cause dad started as a private and went up to, he went right through the ranks and was commissioned in the field and went up to captain and he said, I was in the headquarters and he said, this man in all his silk, was only a short man, in all his silk Arab robes came in and they wanted maps to getting from somewhere to somewhere and they were going to take a place, they were going to take the surrender of a place and the Aussies got there first [laughs] and took the surrender, and all these [unclear], all these two [unclear] men [unclear] Arabs they got there after us but then before that dad had seen the Australian light horse going up not very far away cause I think it was Damascus and the Australian light horse came through going up to Beer Sheba and he said, again we were all filthy, our poor old infantry, cause he was in the rifle brigade, he said, oh, the poor dirty old infantry and he said, we were all lying around and he said, suddenly, he said, in the middle of all this filth and dust, he said, these, like a vison, he said, these tall, they all seemed to be tall according to them, these tall bronzed young men and he said, everything, he said, their horses were gleaming, their saddlery was glowing and he said they got these, whatever, they got, I don’t know what they’re called in their hands and just, and they were all laughing and the Aussies were all laughing and joking and you know, the rifle brigade gave them a cheer and saluted them and they were all happy and I mean that was a real fluke, that the Turks had their machineguns set for them there, they’d had mown the horses down if they’d been able to and they got them locked all in a mess and apparently, cause you, I mean, if you’re on a galloping horse you know what’s it’s like on a full gallop, it must be pretty deadly to see all these waving their swords and shouting and, you know, shrieking and shouting and horses neighing and the thud of hooves, just imagine it. And it was a complete triumph but that means at some poor devils [unclear] worst of course and horses. Yes.
AP: So, oh yes, I have, we’ve covered a fair bit. [unclear] We’re still going.
JS: I shouldn’t have kept you.
AP: No problem at all.
JS: Four hours.
AP: I’ve loved it, it was really good. However, uhm, I do have one last question. It may well be the most important one all my interviewees is this. Uhm, in your opinion, how is Bomber Command remembered and what legacy has it left?
JS: How is it remembered? Well, I suppose all of us who’ve had anything to do with them will remember them for the, they were the, they were our little white hope in all those long years when we were waiting and waiting to try and get into enemy, try and do an invasion, they were our only white hope and they were, I mean, if it hadn’t been for Bomber Command, bombing the factories, roads, every, keeping them on their toes, and keeping them short of things, it might have been terrible on D-Day if we hadn’t done something, I mean, why isn’t Bomber Command universally, why is it always this bloody Dresden thing comes up? All the time it comes up! And it seems to me, Canada and Britain seemed to have fostered this, I don’t know why and I would like to see Bomber Command remembered for the fact that they were our one big bastion against Germany for those interim years before D-Day and I would, well, I hope that, I would like to see them remembered more as a special thing, as we remember the Battle of Britain, I would love to see a sort of Bomber Command Day or something but the way they are still remembered I don’t like this attitude, it always comes up Dresden. And I mean why, you’ve got a German [unclear] who agrees that Dresden was hiding a lot of things and still there’s these people, so, well, I’m glad that there’s this big memorial in Britain because I think that it’ll be there and it’ll be like that wonderful memorial in Green Park, so at least you’ve got something always there in front of people, but I mean, you know, I still think there should have been a Bomber Command Day and a Bomber Command Medal, I mean, I mixed with these old chaps and it’s so sad, I don’t know, it’s so sad and remembering what they did, I remember you see the crews and their average age was between eighteen and twenty two, I mean, I think Jock’s crew they had their, I think their navigator was, he was grandad he was thirty, no, no, it was their, I’m sorry, it was their rear gunner, he was thirty, he was ex-metropolitan mounted police, cause the only way the police could get in the services was volunteer for aircrew, so he went in and yes, Ron, he was thirty two and married with children and they called him grandad but I mean, they were young men and I look at young men now and think my God, they were either in charge of a bomber and seven men’s lives or they were in a motor torpedo boat, interestingly, I never thought much of Jack, John Kennedy when he was president, I didn’t like the Kennedy family at all but I’ve read a very interesting book about him and he was a very brave young man too in that motor torpedo boat, a very brave young man but you when, and talking to them and of course you’d say how did you feel, what was, when you knew you could be going to your death? And a lot of them have said, well, you couldn’t let your mates down, you didn’t want to go but you couldn’t let your mates down, cause Jock said the first, oh, he said, I looked forward to my first op but he said, after that I didn’t look forward cause he said, oh, he said, when we went over the target and I looked down and he said it was a vision of hell and he said I still, he said, I still wasn’t that scared until I got back. But I remember, see some people, they were, you know they were terribly superstitious, I mean, Jock always, he had a [unclear] bit, those tiny [unclear] bits with a hole through it that one of his relatives gave him and he had a tiny little silver thimble which he got the leaves that he, when he went into the air force, he had a Christmas pudding at his aunt’s place and he got this silver thimble on a chain, teeny tiny little thing, the size of his little nail and he had one of my suspenders and he’d always have them pinned on his flying suit and, when he was cremated and I put, they were always kept in our bedside cabinet and I took them out and I tucked them under his pocket, you know, so that when he was dressed and being put in his coffin, they would go with him on his last flight but I mean, they had, the pilot had a teddy bear and he always had to rub its stomach when you got in so that was always stuck behind the pilots seat and some of them, he always told he’d get through he always said to me, don’t worry, he said, I might get injured but he said I have a feeling I’ll get through, now, other boys didn’t and I remember when I was giving out some of the Red Cross comforts one night when they were going on one of these small ops and from Lichfield, there was a lovely young navigator, he, blue eyed and very fair curly hair and always a lovely smile and you know, he’d been one of the boys, we’d all been in the pub together, singing, we all knew each other quite well and I remember him coming up and he leaned across the table and he was a big tall boy and he picked me up, just picked me up under the arms and gave me a big kiss and he said, bye bye Jean, he said, I won’t see you again, I mean, a great big smile, and I said, I can’t remember his name and I said, oh come off, he said, no, he said, I know, he said, I know I’m on it tonight and he didn’t come back and he was quite jovial about it but quite a lot of them and Jock had friends that he knew and he said some crews, he said, some crews, when you were on your operational station he said you knew as soon as they walked into the mess as a new crew, he said, they had the look and the smell of death on them, he said, you knew that they wouldn’t last long, cause on his squadron, 90 Squadron, theirs was the first crew for ten months to do, to get through full operational tour and actually they did thirty two and they were asked to go on a last one and his mechanics said to him oh, one of his mechanics said, oh god, I wish you weren’t going on this one, but he said, It’ll be alright and it was, thank God, that was the one where the two friends got blown up. But I don’t know ways remembering Bomber Command, how do you make people remember? I just hope that they’re never, well, I just hope they’re never forgotten for what they did because that was a horrible job. And I, you know, you, as I say, we used to see them and they were twitchy, you could see a lot of them were twitchy when they were going down to dispersals and they’d laugh, they’d be like little boys, ah, and they’d light a cigarette and then they’d take two puffs and then put it out and then light another one, I mean, and in transports the WAAF drivers taking them down, they liked the WAAF to take them down to their planes, they much preferred a WAAF than a man driver and it was the same with the wireless operators, the radio operators in flying control, they, oh, Jock used to say, oh, he said, when you are tired out and he said, you know you’re being told, a force comes on telling you, you’re going in a stack and he said, all you want to do is get your feet on the ground and he said to hear that quiet woman’s voice, he said, a man’s voice never did anything to me, he said, you hear that quiet woman’s voice talking you down, almost sympathising with you, and he said, you know, it did something for you and I think, you know I think, they were full of nerves. Jock said, you were, he said, you were always very quiet in the transport, he said, some would joke with the driver, the WAAF driver about her boyfriends or things like that but he said you’d, he said, the worst part was the waiting, he said, the waiting for the word off, cause sometimes when they were down by the aircraft all bombed up, it was cancelled and that was horrible cause he said, if it was cancelled you think oh god, I’ve got to go through all this again tomorrow night and every time they got back it’s one off towards the end of your tour and he said, once you got into your aircraft, he said, cause, engineers, the bomb aimer very often did the second pilot’s job during a trip but always take off and landing, the engineer was always with the pilot cause he helped the throttles and so on and switches and he said, you sat down, you did your cockpit check, you did your crew check, he said, you forgot everything, you had so much to do before take up, off and once you were up you had so much thing cause the engineers were checking labour entring every fifteen minutes, fuel thing and of course any lights going out or oxygen not coming through or things like that, they were always, he said, we are, he said, I was always busy, I didn’t have much time to sit down at all, but he said, you were always so busy, you never thought it was only, he said, we always used to be so glad, we always used to give a cheer when we saw the Channel coming back, he said, when you saw the sea [unclear] those usually be or everything going up from the coast, or defences, he said, you saw the sea, he said, you just prayed you got across the sea cause so many of them didn’t. And the awful thing was that of course some poor sods that landed on beaches and then the beaches were mined or the aircraft went into mined areas and blew up, just as they thought they were there. They did one time come, they were short of fuel and they had to use Woodbridge, you know, Woodbridge was a huge, right just over the coast, gigantic, but he said, they said, and the next one most wonderful thing was when he said you saw your beacon, cause that’s another thing that caused crashes coming home, the, all the, on the east coast all these huge airfields and their satellites all the circuits were intercepting so you got planes twiddling around everywhere, all the time during the war the sky was never free of aircraft, it seemed to be, always aircraft doing something cause they’d all the train, people training and then there were people going here and there to other stations and going off out. One of the most wonderful things was when I was down in London on leave, I was walking near Buckingham Palace I think, it was with my mother and aunt and walking near Buckingham Palace and a huge squadron, cause it was right near the end of the war and I mean they were just it wasn’t easy in those days, they were going over and it was, the war was almost into Germany and all these Flying Fortresses went out, hundreds of them went right over Buckingham Palace flying out, quarter of an hour later [makes a whooshing sound] along comes a little fighter squadron, cause they had to, they picked their fighter umbrella up cause the fighters were much faster, all these Hurricanes and Spitfires all riffing a long, making a lovely noise and it was quite inspiring because I’d only seen aircraft going out at night one by one and circling round and listening to the [unclear] in the clouds and that was, that was not as exciting as seeing a whole squadron, of cause they did a big box formation, they were quite classy, and once they, once their jolly old formations were broken they were really limping and we were better with our open formations and once they had, it was nearly, it wasn’t before the end of the European war but it was not far off, we had a conference at, oh no it must, no, no, this was at Lichfield so it must have been, no, must have been, I left, I left late 1943, I went to Group Headquarters so it must have been 1943, we had a Stirling bomber coming to this conference, a Lancaster bomber and a Flying Fortress, now you could see the three of them, a Stirling just towered, the Lancaster was fair and the Flying Fortress, which everyone said oh [unclear] big planes, it was so small and the Yanks took us, our boys took us over there [unclear] and the Yanks planes, I mean I wouldn’t like to be a gunner on an American fortress and you know with this wide open bitterly cold I mean they wore a lot of warm things must have been terribly cold and they were more or less each side gunner, they were more or less bashing buttons and there were all the machine guns, all strings of ammunition everywhere, you had to pick your way through these strings of ammunition and it wouldn’t have been very nice at all, wouldn’t have been nice at all, so and cause, you know, the Lancaster of course you’ve got the big bulkhead but you’ve got a bigger one in the Stirling cause Jock said there was always the trouble you know when you had to get down to the rear gunner and you got an awful long way to go and it was, and you’ve only got a catwalk, is bitterly cold [coughs] if you hadn’t got, even through your silk glove you could feel the cold if you put your hand on the side of the aircraft [coughs] then you get that bloody great bulkhead, climbing over there with all that flying kit [coughs] horrible.
AP: Quite, quite amazing. Well, I think you’ve covered all the questions I had.
JS: [coughs] [unclear]
AP: I only had to ask three of them. [laughs]
JS: I apologize.
AP: No, no problems at all, there is some fantastic stuff in there. [unclear] I love these sorts of interviews I love the best, cause I come in, I ask one question and I just sit back and listen.
JS: Oh, as long as you don’t mind, I do apologize.
AP: Ah, I loved it.
JS; [unclear]
AP: yeah, yeah.
JS: I’ll make another cup of tea.
AP: Thank you very much. I’ll turn this off.
Dublin Core
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ASmithJ160312, PSmithJ1601
Title
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Interview with Jean Smith
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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02:40:04 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending OH summary. Allocated S Coulter
Creator
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Adam Purcell
Date
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2016-03-12
Description
An account of the resource
Jean Smith worked as a clerk in the aircraft manufacturing industry before the war and later served as a secretary in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. She served at 27 Operational Training Unit at RAF Lichfield.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Staffordshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1945
Contributor
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Peter Schulze
27 OTU
aircrew
bombing of Cologne (30/31 May 1942)
control caravan
control tower
crash
flight engineer
ground personnel
love and romance
memorial
military living conditions
military service conditions
mine laying
Navy, Army and Air Force Institute
Nissen hut
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
RAF Lichfield
runway
service vehicle
Stirling
superstition
training
Wellington
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/341/3508/PTinningH1601.1.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/341/3508/ATinningHW160314.1.mp3
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Title
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Tinning, Herbert
Herbert William Tinning
Herbert W Tinning
H W Tinning
H Tinning
Description
An account of the resource
Four items. An oral history interview with Herbert William Tinning DFC, his log book and three photographs. He flew operations as a navigator with 51 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Herbert Tinning and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-03-14
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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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Tinning, HW
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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AP: So, this interview of the International Bomber Command Centre with a Mr. Herbert Tinning, who was a 51 Squadron Halifax navigator during World War Two. The interview is taking place, at Herbert’s place in Preston, in Northern Melbourne. My name is Adam Purcell, it is the 14th of March 2016. So, Herbert, we might start at the beginning, uhm.
HWT: [unclear]
AP: It is a very good place to start, isn’t it? Can you tell me something about your early life, growing up, the education and first job, perhaps?
HWT: Oh yeah, I grew up on the other side of the river, mainly around Prahran and Toorak and Carnegie, I, I went to the, the Fawkner Park State School up until the sixth grade. Then I went to Toorak Central, seventh and eighth grade and then I went to Melbourne High for, to leaving. And then I went, I managed to get, no, I went to work first in a, no, no, I got an apprenticeship with the Victorian Railways as a fitter and turner, which a highly competitive job thing in those days and in waiting to go there I went and worked for a gasket maker called Ferrer, a company, that would be for about six months, and then I spent nearly three years in doing my apprenticeship at Newport during which time the World War Two broke out and I wanted to get into it but I was in a protected industry so I had to [unclear] quite big struggle but I managed to get a release providing I went into a technical trade which I, which I did do, I trained as a, what’s that called, a fitted away, which rear [unclear], I did that, then I was posted to a communication flight as a fitter and I again kept trying to get to [unclear] into aircrew, which I eventually managed and, uhm, and then I trained in Australia at, uhm, at Sale and Nhill and Cootamundra and then I was posted overseas and went to UK and ended up in Bomber Command as, I was trained as a navigator, bomb aimer but I was chosen to be a navigator and I went through the usual initial training et cetera and whilst I was at, what they called pre airview, which is because of the difference in map reading between Europe and Australia we had to get used to the greater quantity of identifiable objects and so we did a pre airview in Tiger Moths, would I tell you the story about that?
AP: Go for it.
HWT: Uhm, whilst we’re training, we used to do three, three day cross countries in flying in groups of three, big formation and I led this formation into Northampton and, as we’re turning over Northampton to, for another aircraft in which my mate was the navigator and the pilot [unclear] slipped under us too closely and wiped it up the main plane off on our undercarriage and we were in about 800 feet and he, they had to get out because the plane just went straight in and fortunately to this shoot [unclear] this happened in time [unclear] could land or crash land this thing so seemed so low, I straightened it and crash-landed it and that was that. Now, I tell you that as a preamble to we went on through training, we did our OTU on Wellingtons and we went to squadron, I went to 51 and he went to a different squadron and anyway I’m about, sometime later I heard that he is missing believed killed and I learned that on their fourteenth trip, I’ll tell you the, he went to 467 Squadron instead and anyway on the 8th of July ’44 he was on a French target, Saint-Leu-d’Esserent and he was shot down, it was night of course and they were on fire the Halifax navigator set out the forward straight patch so he tended to jettison the straight patch and he grabbed his parachute in his hand and he shot the [unclear] up because of his previous experience to just fall out and try to keep it on the way down but he clipped it, apparently he clipped it on a one clip and it held but he was ok and the only, the only one that could help was the bomb aimer, that was that I didn’t know anything about that at the time but he was missing believed killed. So the years went by and I finished my tour and I was appointed radar officer for the squadron and I’d been on leave and I was on my way back to squadron when we stopped at a place called Peterborough and just as the train was pulling out, the back wing doors on the bar, which is on the station, swung open as a fellow went out and I had a quick glance inside and I saw this, sort of head in silhouette, with this peculiar nose cause, in the bailout he’d, of the Tiger Moth he’d hit his nose on the tireplane [?] and it broke and he had mended it in a peculiar way. So anyway I grabbed my bag and I jumped out of the train and went back into the bar and, sure enough, it was Jim Walsh. He’d been picked up by the Free French and he’d spent the remaining years of the war until they were, until that part of France was, ehm, was occupied by the Allies, uhm, and he’d only been repatriated two days and there he was, you see. So, it was quite a good reunion, uhm, you have to believe in these units, I did you know, anyway I went on my way then and he went on his way and I’ve never seen him again. He was a Queenslander and in those days, it was much more expensive and difficult to travel into [unclear] as it is now of course and you get tied up with marriage, family, all the rest of it. So, that was that but I just tell you because of the incident that we had in the Tiger Moth and that [unclear] mine, uhm, we, that sort of saved his life in a way because if we hadn’t had the previous [unclear] he would have hesitated and try and put his shoot on, straight out of the escape hatch, it would have been too late. So anyway, that was that and then, as I say, I went to Waddington on 51 Squadron and there I did a tour with a mixture of French and German targets.
AP: Pretty good. Uhm, so you were working for the railways when you heard that war was declared. How old were you at that time? What were your thoughts? And how did you [unclear]?
HWT: Well, I must have been, I must have been, uhm, eighteen, because it was the age you could enlist and I was only, I always wanted to fly and a fellow who I knew was a pilot in the Air Force, he told me that you gotta get a speciality to, you know up until that, normally in the Air Force is a five year commission and you’re out. But if you had some speciality they would give you a more permanent job, you see, well, this fellow specialised in Photography and he was kept on as a aerial photographer. And because I was interested in engineering mechanical things, I thought, oh well, I’ll get an engineering diploma and then I’ll try for the Air Force. Instead I was on my third, in my third year, or just started my third year. But, it must have been during, it must have been, nearly in towards the end of my first year as an apprentice as the war broke out and I spent, you know, a year or so trying to get out of it, which I ultimately did and that was it.
AP: You, uhm.
HWT: Is that enough?
AP: Yeah, no, no, that’s alright, we’ll, [laughs] we’ll got plenty to cover, uhm, so I guess you’ve already answered the question of why you picked the Air Force.
HWT: I suppose I better finish it off and then, before I got an apprenticeship, I missed out that bit, after I’d finished with leaving, I went to Melbourne High and I was there for three years now, I’ll say it again, after I finished State School which is the eighth grade, then I went to Melbourne High and I finished there in my leaving year and went to the railways.
AP: Ok. Uhm, can you tell me something of the enlistment process for the Air Force? Did you have to do any testing, any interviews, any medicals, things like that?
HWT: Oh yeah, there were [unclear] interviews, there were, uhm, medicals of course, which sight was the main, was one of the principal things and [unclear] fine [laughs]. When I was, I got the notification to go and had my medical for remustering to aircrew, a couple of mates and I went out and had a bit of a party you know and anyway the next morning I had to do this medical test you see and, which I did but my sight must have been caught up to it because one eye was a bit weaker than the other. So, they, uhm, so I didn’t get the choice of a pilot, I was navigator bomb aimer and I always put it down to the fact that I’d perhaps had a bit too much booze that night but the, uhm, cause the thing is, post war when I was sort of older, I passed certainly a less stringent test but the eyesight test was just as stringent I think. Uhm, and I got the ok for a pilot’s license. So I think I’ve had a bit too much to drink at the wrong time.
AP: [laughs] pretty good. Uhm, were you on the reserve at any stage?
HWT: No.
AP: Because you went straight in as the trade of course.
HWT: Went straight in as a, as a trainee 2 A and well actually you didn’t do that as [unclear] but now they, you went in as an AC 2 and that’s we had a little white flash in our forage caps [unclear] to sending into [unclear] trainees and you did a three, four weeks of square-bashing down at Laverton and then you, during which time you, the selections were made and then you went to, in my time, Ascot Vale for engineering training and so, uhm, so I think I must have been about, almost nineteen when the war broke out.
AP: So, the white flash you are telling me about, I always thought that denoted air crew training specifically but it was
HWT:
AP: It was aircrew training specifically. Ok, yeah, that’s what I thought. Uhm, alright, so, you did, once you transferred to air crew, presumably you had to go to initial training school and do all the square-bashing again.
HWT: Yes, that’s right.
AP: Where was that? What happened?
HWT: The square-bashing was down at, uhm, at, oh god I must [unclear],
AP: Somers, perhaps.
HWT: Mh?
AP: Somers?
HWT: Yeah, Somers, yeah, that’s right, [unclear] bad, we did square-bashing then and pre airview at Somers. Incidentally it was, there was a well-known champion bike rider called Hubert Opperman, I don’t know whether you’ve heard of him but anyway he was, I came across him at Laverton first, where he was, a sergeant, no, he wasn’t a sergeant, I think he was DO, and then, when I went to Somers there he was again as an officer and he was doing, taking the PI training, organising and so on, nice bloke, anyway you had to gotta do that to. Anyway that’s where I did my initial training for aircrew. Then I went to Cootamundra and had training as a navigator. And then to Sale, training as a bomb aimer and gunner and then to Nhill, to do astronavigation. And then back to Ascot Vale, yeah, Ascot Vale for posting.
AP: So, I’m particularly interested in Nhill, I’ll tell you why later on, but, uhm, the first time you went into an aeroplane, presumably that was Cootamundra?
HWT: No, I had a passenger flight, you know, in a Tiger Moth, or was that a Gypsy Moth in those days, pre-war and while I was, fitted away, I had two Hawker Demons and a Lockheed Hudson in my charge, you see, and, anyway I used to, uhm, hit the odd flight [?] in a Hawker Demon, which we flew down over [unclear], anyway we flew down over to [unclear] anti-aircraft shooting, training, you know, and we, in a dive bomber [unclear] and so I got a, but then I fit [unclear] to it and I got a little bit of dual time on it, you know unofficially. So, yeah, that was, so I found a bit [unclear].
AP: [laughs] excellent, very good. Did you, when you were doing your training but particularly in Australia, did you see any accidents or anything like that?
HWT: Accidents?
AP: Along the way? Yeah.
AP: Or did you know of any accidents?
HWT: Oh, I knew, when I was at, when I was, just after I had been to Sale, I’m not sure which now, there was a string of accidents of aircraft going in and have a best strike and there were, I think there three of them, before they discovered what it was and what they were doing was torpedo bomb training with a damaged torpedo, see, and they had made the torpedo run which could have been made almost underwater and released the torpedo and [unclear] away you see, but I have been doing dry rounds without torpedoes and then I fitted them with these damaged torpedoes, which is the same weight as number one. And of course the pilots were used to unlighten [?] pulled out but, and because with the heavy weight they squashed a bit to say and that’s what they were doing, they were squashing into the sea and but they lost I think three before they discovered what the problem was. So, there were those and, uhm, [pauses], you know, you’d hear of accidents but they weren’t close to me, you know.
AP: Uhm, so, Nhill, oh my God, was talking about before Nhill also went through Nhill, and I actually went through there just about a year ago, we were coming back from Kangaroo Island and we stopped at Nhill on the way back, and turns out that the airfield, they’re opening up this Nhill aviation heritage centre, and they’ve got an Ansett there restoring very very slowly, which is really good to see. Uhm, can you remember much about Nhill in particular and what you were doing there, I know it was, I believe it was astronavigation at Nhill, uhm, what did that actually involve?
HWT: Oh well, we, we did the theory of it you know and then we did star identification, we just stand out and pointed out [unclear] to learn where they were and then you had to learn the theory side of using them, using sights to develop a fixed position and then of course sometimes that was over your head, you see, because flying over Europe was all dead black, not a speck of light anywhere and until you’ve done that, you don’t know how black the night is, you know. Uhm, and occasionally you’d have some, uhm, some guidance with, you know with the water get the reflection of the river, or a lake, whether you like it or not, although I didn’t experience this with the Gee, five lights around Berlin and they were a wonderful sort of fix for the aircraft, so the Germans were a very cunning enemy, they actually boarded out [unclear] a couple of them so there were only three lights, then they altered the shape of the other lights by boarding round it [?] you know, so none of the people would be certain [unclear] Berlin. Very cunning. But, what was I saying?
AP: We were talking about Nhill.
HWT: Ah, Nhill, yeah, uhm, now what I remember then it was very hot and the meals were good, we had no trouble flying out of there, at night we were flying in Ansons and, uhm, we were only a month there, four weeks, so I haven’t got much of a memory, I know, I’d been married by then and I know I missed my wife because she’d come up to Cootamundra, but Nhill was such a short stay. No, she didn’t come up to Cootamundra, she came up to Sale, where I did two months for bombing and gunnery. But, uhm, I know I got, you know, quite positive memories of Nhill, as a matter of fact I called in there once when I was driving, no, I flew in there once, that’s right, [unclear] to analyse, yeah, I landed there, just [unclear], was the last experience I had.
AP: [laughs] So, yeah, it is really nice to see what they are doing there actually at the moment, but anyway. Alright, so, moving on a little bit, we go up to Ascot Vale and then you embarked and you went to the UK. How did you get there?
HWT: I embarked, we went by a ship called the New Amsterdam, which went via New Zealand, cause it was taking, uhm, some of the New Zealand members of [unclear] back from Africa and were called from Wellington and then from there we went on to San Francisco. And from San Francisco we went by [unclear] car across to Boston. [unclear] car, they are still in pretty [unclear] condition and we had a black porter, made up our beds for the night, put a [unclear] chocolate on our pillow every five nights and anyway then we got to Boston, and we were waiting embarkation for England and we were embarked on a French liner, [unclear] something, wasn’t [unclear] to France but they had, they had several of these [unclear] and they flew, normally in peace time fly between Marseille, France, yeah, to Rio de Janeiro and that was a regular [unclear], you know. Anyway, we went to from Halifax in Canada to Liverpool unescorted so, they took us way up into the Arctic Circle to avoid the subs, which was interesting, and cold, and, anyway, [unclear] arrived at Liverpool and then we went by train to [unclear] out of Bournemouth.
AP: What did you think of wartime England when you first got there, particularly an Australian?
HWT: I liked England, I’ve been there since, I liked it better since but then during wartime it was, everything was severely rationed, there were no lights anywhere, blackout was very, very strict, uhm, and, I went to, I went to several stations, Bournemouth and from there we went to a place called Desford and then to, went to Lichfield and to Marston Moor for conversion and then to Snaith for, uhm, for 51 squadron. [unclear] We were actually posted to an Australian squadron but the day before we left, Bomber Command had raided Nuremberg and they had the heaviest losses of war, they’ve had 96 lost on the one trip and I think another twenty flying into high wind [?] when they got back. Uhm, so they were very short of aircrew so we were, uhm, then diverted to reinforcements to various squadrons and our diversion was to 51 Squadron.
AP: So, what did you have getting to that point where, ok, we’re going to a squadron now and you hear about Nuremberg, what did you think of when you heard about that?
HWT: Oh, well, you really got pretty philosophical about it, you know. As a matter of fact, you didn’t expect to live, you know, that’s probably more [unclear] a bit more than I should. And whatever, but we didn’t think about after the war, really, we just did what we were doing and, and uhm, did as best we could, I guess.
AP: Alright, We’ll back up a bit. Lichfield. I was talking just on Saturday to a WAAF, who served at Lichfield.
HWT: Oh yeah?
AP: Amazing lady, I interviewed this, [unclear] Mary Mccray, we had a wonderful chat. Uhm, the important thing that happened at Lichfield I presume is where you met your crew.
HWT: Yes, uhm, we met part crew,
AP: [unclear] of course, except for your flight engineer.
HWT: Pardon?
AP: Except for the flight engineer, of course.
HWT: We didn’t pick up our gunners, we, it was the, we didn’t pick up an engineer either. It was just the navigator, bomb aimer, pilot and wireless op. And we did our, well, we converted from, what the pilot did, we did to a point [unclear] from the Tiger Moths [unclear] previously flying in Ansett [unclear], no, we hadn’t, no, we hadn’t, we, uhm, [pauses] we must have flown, no, [unclear] I do recall flying in Anson but I don’t think that was in training, anyway we went to Wellingtons and we did the, the, what do we call it? [pauses] The, there was a pre airview I think they call it, anyway we flew the Wellingtons and actually I liked [unclear], I had no complain about any of the stations except, no, none of them, at Lichfield we had [unclear] they sent me to cross countries day and night, [unclear] a bit of a, a bit of a [unclear] there, see where we were, here you go, I went to 27 OTU which was at Church Broughton.
AP: Ah, that was a satellite of Lichfield, I think.
HWT: I think you’re right.
AP: Yeah.
HWT: We were flying Wellingtons there and I was West Freugh in Scotland and that’s where we were flying Ansons. I got it a bit wrong then before.
AP: That’s alright.
HWT: Pre airview at West Freugh
AP: A bit cold up there I imagine?
HWT: It was a bit.
AP: [unclear] at what time of year?
HWT: [unclear] was a bit [unclear], Stranraer was 7 Squadron you know. Yeah.
AP: Very nice. Uhm, when you were in England, what did you do when you weren’t on duty? What did you to relax?
HWT: On the station?
AP: Yeah, any of the stations that you were there.
HWT:
AP: Anything.
HWT: I played a fair bit of squash, most of the men, I know the, stations [unclear], we did a bit, we started [unclear] when we got leave, you know we went and quite often we stayed with people you were good enough to, you know, to sort of entertain, [unclear] your troops and I saw a bit of England that way, quite a bit really, underground and by you know they just we were on leave, we went some place which [unclear] short leave like overnight or a couple of days, you know, you didn’t go far but life on the squadron wasn’t bad, it was, but I initially went as a flight sergeant and there we lived in Quonset huts and that’s a thing I remember about it, the Quonset huts, oh, I suppose it might have been twenty or so, slept in them, and down the set of the bedroom on the side [unclear] down the centre and there were two or three potbellied cast iron heating stoves [unclear] and anyway it was cold alright because we stacked these things up and when we went to bed, the [unclear] of the [unclear] was cast on was red hot and was beautiful, you see, but then by morning there were icicles off the roof, from our hot breath, you know, the heating had gone out and other things, and it was cold, very cold, I remember that, but then I got a commission and we moved into a two bedroom unit in a big, where I was, in a big building at [unclear] which was much better than, I got no sort of unpleasant thought really of any of the stations I was on [unclear] I know the time has [unclear], but.
AP: [laughs]
HWT: But I think I remember something.
AP: Very nice. Alright so, when you are on squadron and you’re not on duty, I presume that you spend a fair bit of time in the mess, at the sergeant’s mess or the officer’s mess.
HWT: Play snooker, billiards, squash, sometimes I put on a cross country run and if you [unclear] you might decide to do it. And I had picture shows, pretty regularly at night and of course there was always drinking, always high drinks [unclear] appreciate. Some of the men [unclear] there and they used to get into the, particularly into the police time quarters where there were long corridors with, they’d get in there, ride round their motorcycle up and down along the corridor, you know, which in confined space was pretty deafening and then another friend I used to get up to was, and I only saw this once though, was they, they’d been drinking, and they got this fellow and they walked him over some soot and then they uphended him and hurled him against ceiling, across the ceiling, made him walk across the ceiling, you see, which looked pretty funny, you see, these black footprints across the ceiling [laughs], I remember that, [unclear] prank I remember, but no there was not, no boredom really, you know, you had, and we had [unclear] and all that sort of stuff, you know, and that was quite good. I’ll tell you a funny thing though, when I, during ops I was doing mechanical engineering and I liked engineering and I still like it and I intended to finish up as, with a diploma and working in like a designer that, you know, but during the war for some reason I changed my mind quite unconsciously and became interested in building, so when I was demobbed, I did a rehab course in building and construction and spent my working days in building administration and some on a building design on a side but yes, so I don’t know whether, whether unconsciously knocking building down through the war, unconsciously directed me towards, rebuilding, [laughs] interesting question.
AP: [unclear] more questions, isn’t it? yeah. Pretty good. Uhm, that sort of leads into the next thing, presumably an operational tour was not the most relaxing thing that you would have ever experienced, how did you cope with the stress of the operations, the stress of flying and [unclear] what you were doing. How did you cope with that on a daily basis?
HWT: Oh I think we had probably a bit more drinks than we should have drunk you know we had regular, you know, organised parties in the mess and they were fairly cunning you know, not that you weren’t aware of it, but, you know, you might go out on a ride one night and you come back and go through debriefing and you go off, have breakfast and go to bed. And when you were up in the morning, you know, you might have lost one aircraft say, [unclear] and you come out and you want to go out and do a, you know [unclear], usually only if you are doing ops really you had to do an air test and any way could be sitting there but you knew it was missing and what they did overnight went to remind you night, they flew an aircraft in from a, you knew, factory area, [unclear] the number, it was on dispersal and the only thing that was missing was the crew, and they sort of tried to make losses less obvious then they really were but I know some people had a lot of trouble, I, I don’t know why but I wasn’t, you know, I was concerned but I didn’t have any sort of shakes or anything like that, the only thing I got really was at the end of the tour I developed an eye tick, you know, you’d feel your eyebrow move but you weren’t sort of, you weren’t doing it, yeah, so yeah, they called it a nervous tic.
AP: And how long did that hang around for?
HWT: I don’t know, a few months.
AP: Alright, we were talking about drinking before. The local pub at Snaith, what was it called? What did it look like?
HWT: The local pub at Snaith was George and the dragon. And we drank, and it was a typical English pub you know, a nice atmosphere and all the rest of it. And of course we had our mess which we patronized, you know, fairly well because they had, you know you had your billiards or your snooker, your darts and the bar, card tables you know to play cards and that, so you had enough to do around the place.
AP: Were there any [unclear]?
HWT: There were concert parties and there were film [unclear] all that sort of stuff you know and they looked after us pretty well.
AP: Were there any, [clears throat] excuse me, superstitions or hoodoos, things like that, within your crew?
HWT: Very much, very much. And I remember some of the crew’s superstition, they are not my words, we always had to sit at the same seat in the way of going out to dispersal [unclear] aircraft. I think that was my only one. Yeah, I had to have that seat [unclear] but I know some that got some, well, the other thing too I suppose was, my wife, when I went [unclear] she gave me a white silk scarf and she’d sown a little, a little, uhm, what do you call, dice, a little dice in one corner of it, see, and I wouldn’t fly without that, I still got it, it’s no longer white, it’s now yellow.
AP: [laughs] it’s done you well then, it’s done you well. I guess we’re getting to the nitty gritty now. Do any of your operations stand out for any particular reason?
HWT: I remember D-Day, it just, you know, just for the amount of traffic on the Channel and we had, you know, on D-Day they locked all the [unclear] down, you know, so nobody went anywhere and there were armed guards with instructions to shoot to kill if anyone wanted to get out. And then when we went into briefing, I noticed, they told us, this was D-Day and our target was on the coast, [unclear], not [unclear], [unclear], something like that and that’s the first we heard of it, oh, no, we knew it was pending because the place was crawling with troops and [unclear] whatever but we didn’t know when and so we, so off we went and I just remember the level of activity and there was no fighter activity on that D-Day target, not where I was, there was quite a bit of flak and that was it but the, there is, thing I remember mainly is a mid-air collision of three pre airview, that’s opened your eyes pretty quick and we got shot up a few times, you know, may have taken out a bit of flak damage one night, we had one fighter attack [unclear] air gunner, I remember that, [unclear], you know, normally they were looking for someone who was asleep, you know, and because they were easy in sight but by the way [unclear] was in the time when they developed a thing they called Music, Schrage Music I think they called it and they equipped the Me101os with an upward firing cannon and they’d come in underneath [unclear] you see and stand in blind spot and [mimics the sound of rapid gun fire] and it’s gone, they aimed for the wing tanks and that was very successful and they did in the end on some of the aircraft, on the Halis or the Lancasters, they did put up a turret, or not a turret, but a gun in the, no, I’m sorry, they didn’t, no, they never did that, the Yanks did that, the Yanks did that with their [unclear], they put a belly gun in and the poor gunner had to sort of crawl in and, you know, he’s in a very uncomfortable position and but that was the Yanks, not us. No, we were, we did, part day and part night trips and by the time we were doing them, they were, by the time D-Day arrived, the Yanks had cut into the [unclear] pretty heavily with attacking their aerodromes and in air fighting, you know, by then they had the Thunderbolts and the Mustangs. And they got [unclear] in the bomber stream a fair way the Yanks [unclear] not us and of course they got into the German fighters a bit. Which is very good.
AP: [laughs] yeah. Cool.
HWT: But, oh, now we had, a couple of times we lost motors [?] and you get one time bomb hanger, but now we, when you’re, [laughs] when you’re being, when there’s a lot of flak, when you’re hit by the flak, it’s, you don’t have to [unclear] quick you’re in it, you know, but the no reason that the shrapnel, sometimes the noise that’s close to you when you caught a bit of shrapnel, it sort of puts you on edge but the thing that I know was my job, I was busy all the time, see, cause the safest way to get over a, uhm, an operation was to stay in the stream, you see, the head streams had five, six, seven hundred aircraft, you know, in a short space of time and if this stayed within the stream band was about ten hundred miles, you mind an individual on the German radar, you’re part of the mess which they couldn’t distinguish you from, but if you were outside that, you appeared on their screens as a [unclear] and they could [unclear] a fighter onto you, you see. So, the thing to do was, stay behind and you had to stay in that channel, then be one of the pack, so you were supposed to take a fix every six minutes, but of course you couldn’t do that with, you know, where the, your radar range weren’t, what do you call it? Interfered with, you know, which I have forgotten the word.
AP: Jamming.
HWT: And [unclear] otherwise you took them as you could [unclear] something on the ground or, a river or something or [unclear] started with the star sight, but they, the best took you about fifteen minutes to work out, [unclear] to work out.
AP: And you, you
HWT: And so you had to stay on it, you know, and if you concentrated on that but you’re not thinking about the threat, instead I was fortunate in that position.
AP: What was the navigator’s compartment like in the Halifax?
HWT: Good,
AP: If you’re sitting at your desk, what are you looking at?
HWT: It was, I haven’t got a photo of it, but it was quite generous, it was, uhm, the pilot was up on a slightly raised area and there was a lower deck but not at full height, you know, and then I was [unclear] accommodate the navigator and the bomb aimer and when the bomb aimer wasn’t up acting as a second pilot, he would be down in his prone position, you know, and when he was there, I had to let him in because I had a collapsible seat that folded back [unclear] and but I had a pretty generous desk probably about that wide I suppose and it was, we had, you know, the usual red light or amber light to light, which wasn’t all that good. But then you had an API in front of you, which was a box about so big on the wall and, you had the, forgotten the name of the thing now. You had this device over the table which carried star maps and that projected star positions down onto this chart, you see. And, in fact, I’ve collected navigation instruments since the war, you see, and might even down in the workshop.
AP: Yeah.
HWT: And not since the war, only since I’ve retired yes and anyway I got an API, I got a GPI and I’ve never been able to get one of these, whatever they were, because I don’t think they were common out here, I think they were common to Bomber Command in England [unclear]. Anyway, this is one thing I forgot but I’ve known now, I’ll look it up.
AP: [laughs] Pretty good.
HWT: But now, my space was pretty generous and the only, I had a fold down seat [unclear] and that’s about it, and we had to wear silk gloves under our gauntlets to give us feel [?], that’s one of the computers we used to use, that was, that’s just, you know, one I bought since you know, but they were between that and doing your chart work and then doing your sextant work, quite busy.
AP: Where in a Halifax, I know in a Lancaster you got that astroline [?] thing behind the cockpit, where in a Halifax did you take star shots from?
HWT: Same thing.
AP: Same spot the Halifax.
HWT: [unclear] position to it.
AP: Oh yeah.
HWT: To [unclear] I’ll show you.
AP: Oh yeah, we have a model here so I prepared earlier.
HWT: It was just alongside, just behind the pilot and I’m beside [?] the radio operator.
AP: Ok. Pretty good. Uhm, you were talking about being attacked by a fighter once or twice, or being chased by a fighter once or twice. Did you encounter the corkscrew or did you have to use the corkscrew at some point?
HWT: Yeah.
AP: And how did that effect your navigation?
HWT: Badly [laughs] it, everything I had on my desk flew up the roof, you know, scattered all over the [unclear], then I had to recover them when I got out of it and but it didn’t affect, like, navigation as far as [unclear] is concerned, they usually corkscrewed around the [unclear] they’re on, it only pictured as a one off anyway, you didn’t [unclear] you know it was [unclear] corkscrew and so it didn’t affect my navigation to any extent because whatever in the [unclear] you were picking up with the continued fixes you were trying to get, you know, so it didn’t grow and I’m frustrated you know, I kept a log and part of the chart of the trip I did to Stuttgart, which I was going to show you but I can’t find the damn thing!
AP: Oh damn!
HWT: I looked everywhere and it gives you a fair idea then of how the, you know, why you kept the record the fixes [unclear] you know.
AP: You have to let me know if you do find it. I’d like to see that. Anyway.
HWT: I’ve gotta find it.
AP: Yeah.
HWT: I don’t know whether it’s down in my workshop, I got stuff down there but I wouldn’t have taken it down, there is no reason for me to take it down there. However.
AP: That’s alright, no worries. Uhm,
HWT: And I’ve got, this is a map, a map case this,
AP: Ah, cool!
HWT: Which I made, when I was collecting maps, well, I still have and I’ve got, you know what a [unclear] is?
AP: What?
HWT: [unclear]?
AP: No.
HWT: [unclear] you hang the file.
AP: Oh, ok, yeah.
HWT: And that’s how I got the maps in here.
AP: Oh, fantastic! Uhm, alright, so, how many trips did you do?
HWT: I did forty.
AP: That’s alright.
HWT: I started off on forty two, but two of them we were recalled on. Went through all the briefing took off, were on our way when we were recalled. Because they got [unclear] information that the targets were, you know, clouded out [or up?] and even then the decisions varied you know because we were recalled on those two occasions but on other occasions, you’d, not very often though, you’d bomb out of a cloud [unclear] and now I bombed once on my H2S,
AP: Ah!
HWT: And the bomb aimer couldn’t see the target and when we were committed to it, so handed over to me and I took it over on H2S which where they landed but [unclear] aircrew there’s a bomb site.
AP: So, Ok, tell me something about H2S. Presumably that’s in your navigator’s compartment as well, it’s around your desk somewhere. What were you looking at and how did it work?
HWT: Well, you had curtains along the side of your compartment. You could find the light [unclear], so most of your time that’s where you were, except when you want to take, you know, star shots and then you turn your light out and go for [unclear] you come back and if you got [unclear] on the chart, that’s why I’m frustrated I couldn’t show to you, you know, you had to get a fix straight at target shot if you could on three stars and that gave you, you reduced your position to a small triangle, and you just took the centre of that then you had to, had a symbol for that which was a circle with a dot in the middle on the chart and then your air position which made you maintain a, what do you call it? An air position chart all the time so because your air position was always the thing you had to apply the wind to, which gives you a [unclear] position and the air position was always the triangle with the dot in the middle, so by the time you’re keeping your chart up to date and you’re writing up your log and you’re having taken the fixes, you’ve taken the shots to make the fix and then on some occasions you’re bitterly cold, you know, your hands are cold, so you don’t work as flexibly as you would normally, I remember one time before we got the Mark III [unclear] my oxygen mask was dripping onto my chart and make a little ice cream, you know, but you had to navigate through but [unclear] you know, so, you couldn’t, you wouldn’t work as quickly as you would if you’re sitting down here [unclear], you know, you had certain discomforts here so you are
AP: Pretty good.
HWT: That’s how anyway, but the navigator was pretty busy all the time and he looked like [unclear] interesting, I was [unclear] target when we went up to it and if there was, if there was a ten [unclear] black in the sky, if it was a day like one, I just keep the curtain pulled [laughs] not that you use your curtain as you could but that’s what you felt like
AP: Yeah.
HWT: But now, I was, particularly on the night targets as always busy, day targets were better because you had, you could take visual fixes, [unclear] you could have a radar range, you know.
AP: You used Gee a fair bit?
HWT: Pardon?
AP: You would have used Gee a fair bit?
HWT: Yeah, Gee.
AP: How did that work?
HWT: [unclear] I think I got a, no, [unclear] but the [unclear] chart was an [unclear] chart with a number of lines drawn on it, you see, and these lines, they weren’t straight, they were sort of, you know, what they call it, I forget now, anyway they were lines demarking the radiations from three different radar stations and each station had a different colour on the chart and say you’d, when you took your readings of the, of the Gee, you could prop them on against in relation to the station you were working, you know, and that was very good and very simple and then you got the H2S which and of course the [unclear] was able to, oh God there is a word for I can’t think of it, a [unclear] scrambled anyway the Gee transmission over the [unclear] so the H2S then gave you a radar unit that you carry in the aircraft and the Germans couldn’t, uhm, scramble it, ain’t that terrible? Anyway but you had the danger the Gee transmitting and the Germans took out [unclear] they could pick up your transmission and home on you, you see, so you didn’t want to, until that happened, it was great, you know, you could, all the cities had distinctive shapes on H2S screens which were the same on your chart, so it was easy and to maintain where you were but when the Germans tend to home on your transmission, you didn’t transmit all the time, you see, so then it was much harder because you hadn’t been on the thing all the time yet, you had to be, identify where you were, you know, or guess where you were in relation to what you station you were working. Bu they all had their, you know, plus and minuses.
AP: It’s one of the fascinating things I think, if you follow through the whole bomber war, the measures and the countermeasures and then the counter countermeasures and then the way that, you had this brilliant new technology that gave you the advantage for about two weeks and then the other side came up with a counter tour and you had to put the counter to counter and it just kept swinging [unclear]
HWT: [unclear] scientific war
AP: That’s unbelievable, yeah, I [unclear] read a couple of books about that. Uhm, alright, so forty two trips happen, uhm, how did your tour end?
HWT: Oh, it just ended.
AP: Just ended? [laughs]
HWT: It was forty, I did forty two, was the number I was set out on but how did it end? [unclear]there was another operation on Essen, two days before I’d had a day operation on Essen and the one before that which was two days before that again we were recalled by radio. Oh, it ended quite officially peacefully, [unclear] five hour trip, five hours, five minutes.
AP: Were there any, any particular celebrations when you got back or?
HWT: Oh yeah, we [unclear] on celebration, yeah, course, of course it has but in [unclear] long, you see, we were posted [unclear] pretty straight away but [unclear] was our pilot, he went to [unclear], no to [unclear] to conversion, I was, stayed on the squadron, they made me the radar officer which, you know, I had to assess all the bombing performance of the aircraft, you know, as recorded by H2S and I did that some months and then I was posted to a transport squadron 96, which was just forming and I did three cross countries to them [unclear] we were preparing to go on a route I’d established by then was down to Middle East, Cairo across to Bombay, then across to Chongqing I think, some Chinese place to take [unclear] squadron to them. And we were just doing our run up to that, I didn’t know which [unclear] I was gonna be on because, you know, you do the England-Cairo, we did the Cairo-Bombay, Bombay-Chongqing, a trip, be stationed on those but I can get to that, they posted me back here and I went back here and then I had my normal leave and I was posted, I was going to be posted to a squadron in New Guinea when the war was over, so that was it.
AP: That was the end of it. So, how did you find then are you in the Air Force for about five years or something now?
HWT: Yeah.
AP: How did you find readjusting to civilian life?
HWT: No problem.
AP: No problem at all?
HWT: No. I went back to Newport for six or eight months and then my course started at Swinburne and I did that. I did that for three years and then, then I got a job at the council as a building inspector and I was that for a couple of years, then I got, caught as a building [unclear], so I got the building [unclear] job and then that gradually grew to encompass the town planning and won a council work so started as the city architect [unclear] town planner [unclear] regional department for about fifteen [unclear] and couple of secretaries, you know. So it developed and so I had no problem, I got back into a quiet work and then I wanted to fly but my wife didn’t want me to fly until the kids had grown up a bit so I didn’t care for my license until 1968, then I got that and then, well, I still got it but and then during those years I did a lot of flying around Australia. I belonged to a group called the [unclear] aviation group [unclear] and I was the secretary, director for secretary for quite a while and so we had three aircraft and we had a Cessna 182, a Cherokee Piper 180 and a Victor and before we got the 182 we had a Piper Comanche, beautiful aircraft, I was standing in front of the aircraft but one of the [unclear] aviation group crashed the [unclear] and killed the four of them and [unclear] for me, I had to go up there and dispose of the airframe, and [unclear] took the engine and the retractable undercarriage and I had to very carefully dispose of the [unclear] which was the airframe and [unclear] back and forth which, you know, [unclear] terrible end of a lovely aircraft. Anyway and then the last trip I did, I flew clockwise right round Australia, coastal, right round Australia,
AP: Beautiful.
HWT: You know, took us three weeks, a good trip.
AP: Oh boy! [unclear] A country that lends itself to things like that. Very much the easiest way to cover the distance I think. Very nice, so, oh, I guess we’ll come to what is my last question, I ask everyone this. Uhm, what do you think is the legacy of Bomber Command and how to you want to see it remembered?
HWT: Well, I was annoyed and hurt so that affected [unclear] job didn’t but the way that the Command was treated after the war upset me, [unclear] a good two years the Command has carried the war and at the time we started was the time Bomber Harris really started his campaign we didn’t have any [unclear] gear, you know, we had normal just recorded all this stuff but and sextants but then, as a Command I’m talking about and then we got Gee, which helped us through a while and then we got H2S which helped us and then in between the, [unclear] this, they developed pathfinders to find the target and illuminate it, which made the job more accurate so and it was the Bomber Command and the government’s, the English government’s decision that we use carpet bombing because at the time we started, we had no better means to getting to and so, but they always picked an appropriate target which was bombed too but then there was always, you know, the weering skilled and the bomb aimer, all that sort of stuff come to it, so you had a spring but, but anyway Bomber Command was much blamed and the politicians particularly didn’t want to know [unclear] because you see in the bombing civilians were killed but civilians were [unclear] during the war because most people were working in something to do with the war, ammunitions, looking out, people in leave, all this sort of stuff, you see, so there was no real completely neutral person but that’s perhaps a modest justification but the, but anyway the thing I heard most was the fact that the politicians would give Harris a list of targets, see, the scientists worked them out, you know, factories [unclear] whatever, so they had collected the intelligence, then they gave the list of appropriate targets to the Parliament and the politicians nominated [unclear] you see, they normally give him [unclear], you know, the five was his choice, which one of the five his choice, depending on [unclear] and so it was [unclear] because the politicians didn’t want to know it, didn’t want to know about it, you see, because thinking that it was not very good because of people had, you know, the [unclear] of civilians being killed they didn’t know [unclear] and I think members of Bomber Command as a whole felt that way. There is one little last thought, but I don’t know whether you know about it but it was something like so long after the war I [unclear] have forgotten about it, but last year the French government decided to give the survivors of D-Day and Battle of Normandy a Legion of Honour and they presented them to them and which I got one was a nice medal but I think there were twenty five from Victoria and I think six from South Australia and I think there about twenty five from [unclear] I’m not sure but they [unclear] until the numbers were way down, you know, and I just mentioned it because it’s a very frugal [unclear] to
AP: What are your thoughts on the clasp? I see there’s not one hanging on your medal up there. There’s a little Bomber Command clasp.
HWT: OH yeah, good idea, I’ll show you.
AP: One of those as well [laughs].
HWT: [unclear]
AP: Yep.
HWT: This.
AP: A DFC as well I see.
HWT: Yeah, and that’s the
AP: Yeah, lovely.
HWT: [unclear] a nice medal, isn’t it?
AP: That’s a very nice medal, yeah.
HWT: And when you look at it, it’s clipped by the sides.
AP: Ah, wow!
HWT: [unclear] any good one side.
AP: [laughs] Lovely, yeah, there’s the clasp there. Very good.
HWT: That’s our crew, that’s me, that’s the rear gunner, that’s the wireless op, that’s the bomb aimer, that’s the mid upper gunner and that’s our pilot.
AP: [unclear] ground crew and a couple of WAAFs as well.
HWT: And, yeah, that’s the ground crew, that the ones who drive [unclear]
AP: Yeah. Fantastic, fantastic.
HWT: And that’s, that’s the rear gunner [unclear], the pilot and the mid upper gunner [unclear], he was killed on his fifteenth trip.
AP: Wow [unclear] that’s brilliant. Brilliant [laughs]
HWT: [unclear]
AP: Ah, very nice! Well, that’s the interview thing, so I’m gonna turn that off in a minute. So, thank you very much.
HWT: That’s alright.
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ATinningHW160314, PTinningH1601
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Interview with Herbert Tinning
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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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01:19:54 audio recording
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Pending review
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Adam Purcell
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2016-03-14
Description
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Herbert Tinning trained as an aircraft fitter but later remustered and flew operations with 51 Squadron as a navigator. After the war, he build a career as a town planner and later as an architect.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Australia
Great Britain
51 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
coping mechanism
crewing up
fitter airframe
Gee
ground crew
ground personnel
H2S
Halifax
mess
military living conditions
military service conditions
navigator
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
perception of bombing war
RAF Church Broughton
RAF Lichfield
RAF Snaith
RAF West Freugh
superstition
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/504/8401/ADavisR150929.1.mp3
7d5803a12157733afcdf4a0477cfe4f4
Dublin Core
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Title
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Davis, Ronald
Ronald Samuel Davis
R S Davis
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Davis, R
Description
An account of the resource
Eight items. Collection concerns with Ronald Davis (1922 - 2017, 1231181 Royal Air Force). He served as ground crew with 49 and 617 Squadrons. Collection contains three oral history interviews as well as photographs of people and aircraft.
The collection was catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AS: Okay, I think we’re in business.
RD: Right.
AS: I think everything’s switched on. Yep. So, this is Andrew Sadler interviewing Ronald Davis on Tuesday the 29th of September 2015 for the Bomber Command Archive. Thank you for letting us interview you, Ronald. I’d like to start by asking you about your family and where you were born and when.
RD: Yeah. I was born in the city of London on the 2nd of March 1922 which makes me ninety-three years and six months, and almost seven months, and my family lived in the East, East End of London. After their marriage my parents first moved into a couple of rooms in New North Road, London, N1, but after my birth they moved into a flat in Bancroft Road, London, E1. I think it was number twenty-three, no, number thirty-one, and my grandmother, who was widowed at forty years of age with eight children, lived in number twenty-three. And they were very, very difficult times. Things progressed, and at 1940 because of conditions – before that in 1929, my parents moved from Bancroft Road to Clarkson Street which is in Bethnal Green. It was a bit downmarket to where we were, but it was a whole house and there were four children and my parents who lived there. My mother and father had been born in England. My father was a, he called himself a machiner [emphasis on ‘er’] but they call themselves machinists [emphasis on ‘ists’] these days, in the, in the ladies fashions. My mother, had been a secretary to the chairman manager of the Palladium Theatre in London, and saw every show that was ever on from 1918 to when I was born, and she knew most of the theatrical people, or entertainment people. But she was very well educated, these days she would have been good enough to go on to university, but her parents who were foreign didn’t, didn’t know of any such things. I left school age fourteen and went to work as a solicitors clark in the city, Great Winchester Street, where my pay was fifteen shillings per week. And after nine months I was told that I’d better start looking for another job, not because I wasn’t any good but because they would have to give me a rise in three months, but they could get another little boy in for fifteen shillings to do my job. So I transferred to a junior clark, by that time I knew [laughs] my way around the office about all, but I became a junior clark in a solicitors office in Chancery Lane, London WC2, which was the centre of the legal world, very close to the law courts. And there I learnt a lot in a very short time because at the beginning of war business was so bad my boss had to take a job in the high court as some sort of assistant – I never knew what he did because he never told me that he took the job, I just found out by chance. He, I think he was ashamed to tell me that he – so basically he left me running this office aged eighteen or seventeen to eighteen years and I learnt a lot in that time. In nineteen, the end of 1940 when I was eighteen, I told my dad that wanted to go into the Air Force, I had no wish to go into the army, I’d great interest in aeroplanes at that time, and whilst my dad told me I was an idiot for volunteering for anything, he understood exactly what I wanted to do and I had his blessing. And at eighteen I went up to Whitehall, and, recruiting office, and was eventually sent to Carding, Cardington for assessment.
AS: Can I ask, was your father involved in the first war?
RD: My father was [emphasis] involved in the first war. He, he was the son of immigrants and as a result there was a doubt about the loyalty at the time, so he wasn’t allowed to go into any of the services, but he volunteered to go in as a steward at an officers mess in RAF, sorry, RFC, Royal Flying Core Netheravon in Somerset, I think it’s Somerset, but down, that part of the world –
AS: And your father had come from Russia?
RD: No, no, my father was born in England.
AS: Sorry.
RD: My father was born in England, he might have been two when he came, but so he was obviously a foreign national –
AS: Oh, I see.
RD: And for that reason couldn’t, couldn’t join any of the services.
AS: It was his father that had –
RD: Emigrated –
AS: Emigrated from Russia?
RD: From Russia, yes.
AS: Yes, right.
RD: But I think my father might have been two years old when he came. But basically he was educated in England. He never had any accent whatsoever, he was as good as British born. But I think because of that, he couldn’t enrol in the services, so when he was twenty he went in as a steward at the officers mess at R, RFC Netheravon. And I have a photograph which you’ve seen of him at that time.
AS: Why did you choose to go for the RAF?
RD: When, when I was fifteen, or sixteen, working as a solicitors clark, I had two weeks holiday. Couldn’t afford to go away at that time, so my grandmother, who lived in Golders Green said I could go and stay with her for two weeks. So I got on my bike and rode from the East End to Golders Green where I stayed. And on my first day riding around from Golders Green I came across Hendon Airfield [emphasis], on the, what was called the Watford Way [?] at Hendon, which was just a couple of miles from Golders Green, and there I used to go in the morning with my sandwiches and drink and sit on a stile all day long watching these little tiny aeroplanes taking off and landing and, great excitement. And that interest, first interest, I got first interested in aeroplanes and after that I used to make models and things like that. So I was, I was always minded that this is great. And at eighteen I decided that I wanted to be sure to go into the Air Force, I didn’t want to wait for, erm, I forgotten what they call it now, when they call you up, erm – well I didn’t want to wait to be called [emphasis] up and possibly go into the army, was interest was the Air Force. So I decided to volunteer, I told my mum and dad, and they both thought I was crazy but in the end they agreed and understood that I would have to be enrolled and I would then be doing what I wanted and they agreed. So I went off to the RAF recruitment office in Whitehall, where a few weeks later I was called for assessment, and then sent off to RAF Cardington in Bedfordshire to be kitted out, and taught what the RAF was about. From there, where I only spent a couple of weeks, two weeks I think, we were transferred to training, sort of what we called square bashing, that’s drilling and firearm drills and things of that sort to Bournemouth. And at Bournemouth I was put into an old boarding house, Mrs Pepper, I will never forget, and for the first time in my life [laughs] aged eighteen I had a bedroom to myself [emphasis]. Previously I always had to share with my brothers, my brother and sisters. And there, in Bournemouth we did our square bashing on the front promenade near the pier, until one day German aeroplane came in and wiped out a complete troop just by, just because they were standing on the front basically. After that they changed things so that we did our training around the backstreets around Meyrick Park at Bournemouth. That took six weeks as far as I remember, and from there I was posted direct to a squadron at Scampton in Lincolnshire, which was 49 Squadron, flying Handley Page Hampdens, which was a twin boom, twin engine aircraft. As far as I know it was built in Quickwood High Road at the Handley Page factory there, and I’m not sure how they got it to an airfield from there [laughs] but they must have taken the parts and assembled them and then they flew off. And there were two squadrons at Scampton; 49 Squadrons which I joined, and also 83 Squadron, who shared the field. It was an airfield without runways, so that whenever it rained the aircraft coming back would very often sink their up to their axel, axels in mud, and then we used to have to go out with our equipment and lift them up and get them off on, on, in various ways. Work was not difficult because we were overmanned with men at that time; there were, the Air Force was growing but the equipment wasn’t growing and, so consequently you had about eight men per aeroplane to look after it when basically two could have done it very easily. But I learnt a lot there, about my job. Flights, bombing flights were always at night. We rarely bombed during the day. Later on in the war when the Americans came in, they did the daylight bombing, and they did their bombing in formation lead by one navigator, whereas every RAF plane had its own navigator and made its way to the target. The bombing raids used to leave, depending on where they were going, early evening and be back at, because flights were about eight hours [emphasis]to if they went to the far parts of Germany, about six hours if they went to the nearer parts of Germany. And we used to have to do a twenty-four hour duty every three nights. So you worked for three days, on the fourth day you worked twenty-four hours and the fifth day off, other than that there was no time off at all. It was a very strange feeling when you prepared your aeroplane to go off on a bombing raid, knowing the risks and just hoping in every way that they would come back safe and sound. And if they didn’t come back then you certainly felt a family loss. You know, we were all so close to one another, the aircrew and the ground crew knew each other, and it was like losing a member of one’s family, which was a horrible feeling. The worst raid I can remember was the night we – it was soon after Christmas, it might have been the day after Boxing Day or something. We stood down for two days over Christmas, there was no flying, and either forty-two or, it must have been forty-two, Christmas forty-two, when we went after the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau that was sailing through the British Channel to get to the Baltic, and we’d been expecting it for some time and we were bombed up with armour piercing bombs for days on end, and then on the day they actually moved to, during that Christmas period, we had the wrong bombs on and for a, we had to change the bombs and get them off which took some time, and on that day, as far as I can remember, the squadron was twelve aeroplanes, six of our aeroplanes didn’t come back, including my crew where the pilot was a guy called, I never knew his Christian name, he was just called Aussie Holt, he was an Australian pilot, Sergeant Aussie Holt, and he and his crew never came back, and that was a terrible loss for me, my P for Peter aeroplane. Although I was young I was very sensitive about this sort of thing. This went on until 1940, end of forty-two, beginning of forty-three, when the new four engine aeroplanes were coming in, and they could not land at Scampton because they didn’t have any runways. So we were transferred from Scampton to Coddington Hall Airdrome near Newark. One part was called Thrumpton Hall and the other one was called Winthorpe, which was just outside Newark, not very far, probably what eighteen miles from Lincoln. And there were equipped with initially Manchester aircraft which was a, the same body as a Lancaster but with two engines, two large radial engines that flew this thing but it was a bit slow, and eventually the Manchester was converted into the Lancaster with four Merlin engines which made it an absolute super aircraft which carried a very, very large bomb load and could go, fly a very long distance. And from there, the 49 Squadron, having been scrapped with the Hampdens, all the crews from 49 Squadron came with us to the conversion unit at Coddington Hall, and there they were, we were converted to maintaining the four engine aircraft and they were converted to flying the four. I would always when possible try and go up on tests. We had a thing where if you touched an aeroplane to service it, it was a good idea to let you fly in it to make sure that there was no shortcuts, and I used to fly quite a lot. We also used to have to tow [emphasis] the aircraft all over the shop for compass swinging and various maintenance things that went on in the hangers because we were out in the open around the airfield. How much more?
AS: How did you decide, how did you decide that you were going to be part of the ground crew?
RD: I, no, I didn’t. I was initially I was recruited for aircrew, but very soon after I joined I was told I was not fit for aircrew because of my eyes. I only functioned on one eye, as I still do, I got one good eye and one bad eye. My left eye is basically useless even today, so I was not fit to be aircrew because of my eyesight. And as a result I just remained in the Air Force as ground crew. I did my, you know, I admitted that didn’t I, I did my – when I left Bournemouth where I did my square bashing for six weeks, I was posted to RAF Cardington near Ailesbury in Buck, Buckinghamshire. No that was where [pause], I’ve forgotten. I was transferred near Buckinghamshire, near Ailesbury, a permanent RAF station which was number one school of technical training. I’ll think of it in a moment. Number one school of technical training. There I did a six month course as air fitter A-frame [?], and after six months I was passed out, qualified, and then sent to Scampton as an engineer, but I did six months training at erm, I can’t even remember now, Holton [emphasis], Holton in Bedfordshire, near Ailesbury, and that was a wonderful technical training school where we had excellent instructors who were RAF men. Some were [unclear] actually, but we got our training and – which included maintenance of the aircraft. An air frame, air frame fitter [emphasis] looked after the whole aeroplane except the engine. The engine was dealt with by an engine fitter, but other than that the air frame fitter did the rest of the air frame, except for electricians, electrical, which electricians did, and armourers who dealt with the bombing, bombing up and the equipment for dropping the bombs and things like that. But the rest of aircraft, and of course, a Lancaster was quite a big aeroplane so there was quite a lot of work to do, although thinking back, not a lot went wrong, it was just maintenance of checking this and checking that. [Pause] erm, what else?
AS: How, how long – I mean when an aircraft flew, how long did it take to prepare it?
RD: It would depend. First of all, depending on where it was going, whether its tanks were to be, its fuel tank were to be full or three-quarters or seven-eighths, it made a lot of difference to the weight of the aircraft as to how many bombs it could carry. And, so it would take most of the afternoon to get it ready to fly off in the evening. It would just stand there during the, during the rest of the day. Now, apart from refuelling, we had to do our daily routine checks, and then the bombs came along, and as far as I remember, the Hampden carried two one-thousand pound bombs in the bomb chamber and two or four two-hundred-and-fifty pound bombs under the wings, depending how far they were going. On one occasion we were going to bomb Milan [emphasis], which seemed to be a hell of a long way to go, and the nearest spot in England to Milan to my amazement, and I still can’t see how it is but that’s what was said, we had to – the ground crews – the aircrews flew their aeroplanes to Cornwall, an aeroplane, an airdrome in Cornwall, and we crew, ground crew, flew in a Handley Page Harrow, which was a very large aircraft with fabric sides and the sides would flap as you were [laughs], as you were flying, and it carried about twelve, fourteen people, perhaps more. And we flew down to Cornwall and they took off from Cornwall to fly to Milan. They were away ten hours for that trip. Very, very long trip, must have been so uncomfortable for the crew, particularly the lower rear gunner who sat in his capella [?] with his legs up in the air like this for ten, absolutely frozen stiff for ten hours. Then they got back to Cornwall, can’t remember any losses on that trip, got back to Cornwall, and they landed, and we put some fuel in and then we all flew back to Scampton. That was a particularly long trip, but generally trips to Cologne would take about six hours. But further western Germany would probably take eight or nine hours. They were away for an awfully long time. You have to remember these aeroplanes were very slow, they didn’t do more than about two hundred miles an hour downwind, you know, and when they were loaded up they were probably only at one-hundred-and-eighty miles an hour. So there was a long time, but later on with the Lancasters obviously they flew very much quicker. Erm, what else?
AS: How often do the, did the planes go out? Did they go out every night, or –
RD: Well, sometimes it would be every night. It would depend on the weather. It would depend on whether it was clear for takeoff, and weather forecasts, the weather forecasts in those days was pretty poor, but they did have weather forecasts to be sure they could get back in clear weather. But I would say on average I think the squadron did four, four or five bombing trips a week.
AS: So pretty busy.
RD: Oh yes, oh yes. Oh yes, when the weather was good it could be every night. But not all crews went every night. Ground crews were there all the time but the aircrews, there were more aircrews than aeroplanes.
AS: And the chaps in the aircrews, I mean you must have got to know them well?
RD: Of course.
AS: And what about, as the war went on, weren’t there a lot of losses?
RD: Tremendous losses. As I said before, it used to affect me emotionally, all these great guys, you know, this was the cream of Bristish youth basically, because they were all young, some under twenty. Oh yes, we knew them all. One funny story that I remember to this day was Aussie Holt’s crew, who were a mixture of Australian and English guys, might have been Canadian I don’t know, had a ritual before they took off on a bombing raid. They used to all pee up against the tail wheel just for, for luck, and within three days of this happening there was a note on the DROs, which is Daily Routine Orders, which is orders to everybody about what to do on the squadron. The Daily Routine Orders said ‘promiscuous urination against tail or other wheels is to cease forthwith’ [laughs]. ‘Promiscuous urination’ [laughs] I remember the words to this day. I thought that was very funny. Erm, that was that.
AS: So you had, so really you were, you were working sort of four days on and one day off.
RD: Three days on.
AS: Three days on.
RD: Three days on [emphasis] –
AS: Yes.
RD: And one day. No, no, the fourth day you worked twenty-four hours –
AS: Yes –
RD: And the fifth day you had off.
AS: Yes.
RD: Yep.
AS: So what did you do when you had your day off?
RD: When I had my day off, when I was at Lincoln, we used to get – bearing in mind our money at that time was two shillings per day, which is fourteen shillings per week, I used to send ten shillings home to my mother who by that time was widowed ‘cause my father died in 1943. And he, he died of tuberculosis, and if he’d lived another couple of years he would have survived because penicillin came in. But unfortunately he died in forty-three, so my mother was a widow with four children, one in the Air Force, one working and two still at school, and times were hard. So of my fourteen shillings, ten shillings used to go to my mother, and four shillings was my spending money for the week. So we didn’t live [laughs] the life of O’Reilly. So on our day off, we would obviously sleep [emphasis] until, we didn’t really go to bed about four, five in the morning, we slept ‘till about twelve, one, two, and then we got up and had our shower and went into Lincoln, where, which was the nearest town. We used to go in by bus and spend our time in Lincoln. I always had a problem with the food on camp which was not very good. It was wonderful food, spoiled by terrible cooks [laughs] and I was never very keen on food, but obviously I had to eat what I could. So when I went into town I always went into a café, whilst the boys always went to the pub I went into the café and had a meal and then, then, then I would go – the meal would probably consist of egg on toast [laughs], or Welsh rarebit with an egg on top or something, something of that sort, very, there was no question of having a proper meal. A, we couldn’t afford it and B, there was very strict rationing of food. So that, that was, and basically we played darts and tried to chat up the local girls and things of that sort, but there was very little to do anywhere.
AS: Was there any particular pubs you used to go to?
RD: There were but I can’t remember them. I remember we used to come off the bus, I remember we coming in from Scampton, so we coming in from the East, and the bus used to drop us near the high street where the bridge went over the water, and there was a pub round to the left but I can’t, I can’t remember the names.
AS: Yeah, it was near the Stonebow Arch I think –
RD: Yes.
AS: Wasn’t it?
RD: That’s right, that’s right.
AS: Yes. It was a, there was a pub, as I understand it as I wasn’t there, on, in the high street along there –
RD: No, no. We never, it wasn’t in the high street. It was round the back of Stonebow, you remember, I, you maybe recall now. Yes we used to go under the Stonebow, up towards the cathedral [emphasis] more, it was all really quiet near the cathedral but before the cathedral there was a pub there, but for the life of me I couldn’t, I couldn’t remember it now. And that basically was what we did. And then, because busses didn’t run very late, probably five or six o’clock, by the time we were ready to go home at eight, nine we used to have to walk the five miles from Lincoln to Scampton [laughs] which was the end of a fun day.
AS: So that was, so –
RD: So it was about five miles I think.
AS: So you were probably doing that for about, were you about three years in Lincoln?
RD: Yeah.
AS: Something like that.
RD: Yeah, yeah.
AS: And did you have any –
RD: No, no, two years.
AS: Two years.
RD: And then we went to Newark where the airdrome was much closer to town. I remember we used to walk down the hill from Coddington Hall, past the Ransome Marles factory there – does that still exist there?
AS: I don’t know –
RD: They were ball bearing manufacturers.
AS: No, I don’t think so.
RD: No, we used to go past the Ransome and Marles factory into Newark, and there we basically did the same thing. Had some fish and chips, couple of beers, and yeah. We also used to sometimes cycle into town, and from Newark we used to go to the smallest city in the UK, Southwell, which was, they used to call it Southwell [pronounced Suthull].
AS: Yes.
RD: But Southwell, there was a pub there, almost opposite the cathedral, where we used to hang out there, play darts there and there were some girls who lived nearby who used to come in and sometimes take us home for a cup of tea and things like that. And then on a special [emphasis] occasion we would get the train from Newark to Nottingham. Now Nottingham was a big city, I liked Nottingham very much. There I was in 1943, when my father died – in the Jewish religion for a year after the death of a parent, you have to say a special prayer and there, and there, and there in Nottingham was the nearest synagogue, so I used to go to Nottingham, I used to go on Friday night, stay in the YMCA in Nottingham overnight for very little, and then go to the synagogue which was just down the road from the YMCA, and, to say these special prayers, and there I would be invited by various families to lunch on Saturday, which is as you know the Jewish Sabbath. And after lunch I would have a walk round with them then I would go back to the station, back to camp, because I’d only have twenty-four hours off. But Nottingham was a very happy place to me, I met a lot of people there, civilians, girls, and – the prettiest girls in Britain come from Nottingham, you know that do you? [Laughs], they say.
AS: My wife did.
RD: Well there you are [laughs], you’ve proved it [laughs]. But Nottingham was a great place for me, and by a strange coincidence, one of my closest friends, post war, became manager of a very large factory there, and we were involved in business and what have you, and I used to travel up to Nottingham for a long time, so I became, I knew Nottingham well. And then in 1945 the war ended, and VE Day, it was rumoured that a large number of Bomber Command squadrons would be going out to the Far East, ‘cause prior to that there had been no heavy bombers outside of Britain because there was obviously nowhere for them to land [emphasis]. So we were going out to the Far East, but before one aeroplane took off to go, VJ Day came so that was hit on the head. And I, the squadron was disbanded and I went, was posted to Number One Signals Depot at West Drayton at West London, which was very handy for home, and by that time we were getting weekends off and things that, so I used to go home at weekends. But I was deferred demobilisation for a long time because, although I’d served five and a half years, you, your demobilisation depended on the length of service and your age [emphasis]. Well I started at eighteen whereas most of them started at twenty-one, which meant that I was way down the list for discharge when it came to numbers, even though I did, I’d served for five and a half years, and I wasn’t demobilised until July forty-six. So it was a year after the end of the war. And then I – I’d had this open air life for five and a half years and I hadn’t the faintest idea what I wanted to do. I certainly didn’t want to go back to the solicitors’ office, I didn’t want to go back anywhere indoors. I thought I must [emphasis] be outside and what could I do, I thought I would become a commercial traveller. What made me think of that I haven’t the faintest idea but it was soon quashed because when I came home on demobilisation leave my mother, God rest her soul, said ‘I’ve found you a job in the solicitors’ office’ [laughs] and when my mother said that you didn’t say no [laughs]. And so I went then to work for my uncle who had a practice in the city of London in Finsbury Square and started all over again training. I never qualified as a solicitor but did, I did become what they now call a chartered legal executive, which is basically – we ran all solicitors’ offices, [laughs] we did the work. And that I did until I retired at seventy-two. I did have quite a bit of success in the business and fixed myself up with investments and pensions and things of that sort and I retired very comfortably at seventy-two.
AS: Did you work in the city of London –
RD: Yes. From Finsbury Square – when my uncle died in 1980, I had problems as to whether I bring in another solicitor to help me run things or amalgamate it. And by an amazing coincidence I met somebody in the tube by chance who said, ‘Ron, we’ve got an advert going in the Times tomorrow for a senior executive that would suit you down to the ground.’ And I said ‘well, thank you very much but I’ve got this practice should keep me going seven days a week.’ And he said ‘I’ll come and see you tomorrow’ and from then they amalgamated, or took me in on an amalgamation and they were a large firm with fourteen, fourteen partners in Fleet Street, and very good commercial legal office. And I realised that by putting my practice into a much larger practice, A, it would cut out my rent, A, it would cut down all my administration costs, and whatever I earned was basically profit because they already had all the – that worked out very, very successfully for them and myself. During my time there, I’d lost my wife very tragically aged forty-seven, and my daughter – I had a son and a daughter, my daughter went off and bought her own flat, and my son and I were living in this four bedroom house just using it as a dormitory, and so I said ‘well I think we’ll move into town,’ and that’s when I bought a flat on, below Blackfriars Bridge, about four-hundred yards east of Festival Hall, and this flat looked over, every room looked over the, overlooked the river. It was a beautiful view from there, and I used to walk to work in Fleet Street in ten minutes –
AS: Very good.
RD: And for London that is unheard of [laughs]. And I lived there until I married Pat in 1990. She had no wish to live there – it was a lovely flat but she had no wish to live there because no community and everybody used to skip off for the weekend. There was just no community there, and that’s when we came to end up [?] –
AS: So you found it quite easy to settle back into civilian life?
RD: No, I didn’t.
AS: You didn’t.
RD: No. I more than once, more than once considered throwing myself under a train because I was so unhappy at the – but after a while it was probably, by the time I was going out with my first wife and my life taken on a bit of a change that I realised ‘don’t be an idiot, just get on with it,’ and I did. And that was all, but initially for the first few weeks I seriously –
AS: You, you missed your colleagues?
RD: I missed everything. I missed the excitement, I missed the tragedy, I missed my colleagues, and I missed the travelling, because in my last year I was travelling all over the country, that sort of thing. I mean, it was probably a bit stupid really, I went in at eighteen, and an eighteen year old in 1940 was not like an eighteen year old in 2015. I had never bought myself a pair of socks [emphasis] at eighteen, my mother did all the buying, I never had enough money to indulge in anything. And so I was very unsophisticated at eighteen, but being from the East End of London I was streetwise. That was my, in my opinion, that was my saving grace, that I was streetwise. Unsophisticated but streetwise. I knew my way around and I knew how to handle myself which was very important at times like that. And, but I have to say, for that short period afterwards I did have this problem of –
AS: And what about your comrades, I mean, have you, did you or have you kept in touch with them?
RD: I have, there is, there were two guys from London, Ron Cawte, C-A-W-T-E, and Ernie Creckendon, Creckendon, C-R-E-C-K-E-N-D-O-N, who were very close buddies of mine. We went on holiday during our demobilisation leave to Jersey and we used to meet up, we used to meet up, not regularly but probably three or four times a year. But then after I got married, when we married in forty-nine, I got tied up with work and marriage, there was no time and I lost touch with them. The other guy I kept in touch with for a long time was from Glasgow, his name was Alec Hall, and he used to come down for the England Scotland soccer games, well which took place at that time, and I always used to meet him, we used to go to Wembley together and I met him, in fact I used to stay with him in Glasgow when I was stationed up in Leuchars with Number One Signals unit at the beginning of forty-six. We used to stay – he was demobbed by then and working and he used to invite me down to Glasgow for weekends. I kept in touch with him for a long time but I’m not in touch with any of them now, unfortunately.
AS: When you, when you were in Lincolnshire, at Scampton and Newark, what was the, what sort of living conditions did you have? Where were you billeted?
RD: Ah. Now, at Scampton we were very well – Scampton was a permanent, what we called a permanent station, so they had brick built blocks where we lived in dormitories of about twenty-four or twenty-six with washing facilities. When we – and the cookhouse where we ate was a brick built buildings with proper kitchens and things of that sort when I, when I was, when I was at in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Holton. They also had brick built because that was a permanent station. They had brick built buildings, but when we were doing our training out on the airfield the cooking was done on campfires out on the airfield which was horrible, horrible food. Then when I went to Winthorpe, again they were Nissan Huts with twelve or fourteen airmen in them, no washing facilities – when you got up you had to walk across the field to the ablutions and showers to get a wash, and that was not very comfortable. You had to basically dress to get there [laughs] and dress to come back again. They were pretty primitive, but we got used [emphasis] to them. And occasionally we would have one of the guys who wasn’t keen on washing so we used to drag him down to the shower [laughs] and put the, put the shower on him just to clean him up because it was a disincentive to look after yourself with, you know, in those conditions.
AS: And were there separate facilities for the officers and other ranks?
RD: Oh yes. Oh yes, oh yes. Officers lived in a separate part of camp, I mean, and aircrew, they were non-commissioned in most of the, in the old days, most of the aircrew were non-commissioned, but they had separate quarters, and then officers had further separate quarters. At the time there were very few women, but they obviously had their quarters well away from where we were. Most of the women were mainly employed in the cookhouse or in control, you know, from the control tower, you know, radio, control, and things of that sort. But later on, when we got the Lancasters there were some women engineers, airframe engineers and engine, engine, flight engine engineers, and they also would be in separate, of course no men and women near each other. There were no problems as far as I can remember at that time [pause]. Girls, the women in the, women, WEFs [?] they were called, women in the Air Force, were not terribly interested in the men because it was much more exciting to be with the officers [emphasis], the flying crews, but it never affected us in that way, we just [pause] found our girls outside, it wasn’t difficult.
AS: And after the war, I mean the fact that the Bombers didn’t have their own medal or memorial, was that an issue?
RD: It was an issue, I’m not sure if it was an issue for everybody but it was certainly an issue for me, because I felt that they had, and this was common knowledge at the time, that Churchill let us down [emphasis]. You know, he was a wonderful war leader but he let us down. You see, when the war ended, particular after the bombing of that German university city in the south west –
AS: Dresden.
RD: Dresden. It is alleged that the RAF bombed Dresden, which only had a civilian occupation, only civilian people. We knew and we were told that there was a great deal of rocket research and manufacturing going on in the area, and Churchill told Bomber Harris, who was in charge of Bomber Command, to bomb Dresden, which he did and destroyed a very large part of it. And for some reason shortly after the war, Churchill didn’t acknowledge that it was his instructions that we bombed Dresden, and it was a big, big letdown. And it was because of that, that we didn’t get A, a medal for flying against the enemy, and B, there were no memorials for the fifty-thousand plus cream of British youth who were killed as aircrew until the RAF memorial at the Hyde Park corner there which was unveiled in 2010, no 2012, yeah 2012.
AS: I mean, presumably nobody knew when Dresden was bombed that it was the final weeks of the war.
RD: No, of course not.
AS: That couldn’t have been predicted at that time.
RD: I mean, we knew for nine months, you know, once we’d made the bridge head [?]at, in Northern France there, once we’d started moving and the Russians were coming in, we knew that the end of the war was in sight but we had no idea it was necessarily coming as quick as it was. Because the last couple of weeks was, was just unbelievable, you couldn’t keep up with the news of the progress they were making. You have to remember all these concentration camps were found long before the war, the war ended. You know, the Russians and the British and the American troops came across these concentration camps when the war was still on [emphasis], it hadn’t ended then, but it was shortly after that the end came. We [pause] as far as I remember, I don’t think we young men got involved much in the politics of the time.
AS: You just did as you were told.
RD: Yeah, yeah. And I’m not sure my CO [emphasis] would have known much about the politics of the time, and my CO was a group captain, I don’t think he would know much about the politics at that level.
AS: What about your reminiscences of Bomber Harris, and his legacy. What’s your opinion of that?
RD: To me, to me he was the greatest leader of the lot [emphasis]. Far more than Montgomery or Alexander or Eisenhower. You know, he was our boss [emphasis] and we knew what we were doing [emphasis]. We knew that we were destroying the enemies’ access to armaments [emphasis] and vehicles and things of that sort and that was the only way we were going to win. And I mean obviously men on the ground had to go through but we had to do our job to enable them to go through [emphasis]. That was my, my view – I mean I can’t remember talking about it to anybody at the time but that would have been my view. Oh no, no, Bomber Harris was the greatest of them all.
AS: And do you think he was let down by Churchill?
RD: Badly, very badly let down by Churchill. If Churchill had stood up for him about Dresden then it would have been another story entirely. You know, he was made the villain of the piece. P-I-E-C-E [laughs].
AS: And he should have been a hero.
RD: That’s right, yeah. And he, I think, felt it.
AS: Did you, as sort of a, did you ever see him or meet him?
RD: No.
AS: No.
RD: No, I can’t recall ever meeting him or seeing him. I can recall, I can recall King George coming to Scampton on a visit on one occasion. I can’t remember why he came but I can remember the King coming because we were on parade. There was another point that I didn’t bring up during what I was saying. The fact that, in the services there was very strict discipline, very strict discipline, but on squadron this was not possible, so the discipline was relaxed. There were certain limits but discipline was relaxed on an operational squadron, because, you know, the ground crews and the aircrews and the officers were very closely mixed up, I mean they would call me Ron and I would call them, you know, whatever their name was. I remember [laughs] the only time we had discipline was when we were walking around near the headquarters, which it was near the gate at Scampton, and on one occasion I was walking through there with my hand in my pocket. Well, servicemen don’t have hands in their pockets [emphasis], so the station warrant officer, ‘young man [?], get your hands out of your pockets immediately’ [laughs], ‘sorry sir.’ He said ‘you’ve got a funny smirk on your face, I think I’m going to put you on a charge, I’ll make up my mind later. Come back this afternoon with your pockets sewn up.’ ‘Yes sir, five o’clock.’ So I go back to my billet and I stitch up my pocket and I go back at five o’clock, and he said ‘have you obeyed my orders?’ ‘Yes sir.’ ‘Show me.’ I turned round then and he said ‘what about the other one?’ I said ‘I only had one hand in my pocket’ [laughs] so he said ‘that’s impertinent and you’ll have five days jankers,’ which is after, after you’re working in the cookhouse cleaning up all the dirty dishes and things of that sort, not a pleasant job. I mean, I had five days there, but fortunately, being streetwise, I chatted up the lady cook and she used to feed me [laughs] rather than me do the washing up, whilst we were chatting [laughs]. But as I say, the discipline out on the airfield itself was not like that at all. It was very, very informal. We were all in the same position, and that I think was very important at that point, to bring out that discipline, although we always knew our place [emphasis], discipline was not enforced as it was in the administration part of the airfield.
AS: Well thank you very much indeed –
RD: Well I don’t know, is that enough?
AS: Yeah, I think that’s excellent –
RD: More than enough.
AS: I’ll erm –
RD: But if you have any other questions, you know, that hasn’t occurred to me – I’ve probably given you much too much there. Particularly as some of it will be on the –
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Interview with Ronald Davis
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Adam Sadler
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2015-09-29
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Sound
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ADavisR150929
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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
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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01:01:29 audio recording
Description
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Ronald Davis grew up in the East End and worked in London as a solicitor’s office boy. He joined the RAF and served as a fitter airframe.
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
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IBCC Digital Archive
49 Squadron
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
demobilisation
faith
fitter airframe
ground crew
ground personnel
Hampden
Lancaster
military living conditions
RAF Scampton
superstition
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/601/8870/PLoosemoreLJ1501.2.jpg
711df538feec47125a25b5846c6510a0
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/601/8870/ALoosemoreLJ151116.1.mp3
8ef370350df4759aa45dc6ad864c2ddc
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Title
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Loosemore, Lesley Joseph
L J Loosemore
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Loosemore, LJ
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An oral history interview with Les Loosemore (3033406, Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a mid upper gunner with 61 Squadron.
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Transcription
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AS: My name is Adam Sutch and –
LL: Ah [emphasis], that’s a good idea.
AS: This is an interview with Mr. Les Loosemore, formally mid upper gunner in 61 Squadron, Bomber Command during the Second World War. My name is Adam Sutch, interviewer for the Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive, and the interview is being carried out at xxx Broughton Gifford on the 16th of November 2016. Les, thanks ever [emphasis] so much for agreeing for this interview.
LL: That’s alright.
AS: I’d like to set the scene by asking you to describe your life before joining the Air Force. Where you come from, your brothers and sisters, that sort of thing.
LL: Erm, well [emphasis]. I was born in Swansea, South Wales. Now, I can remember the address some. Left school, first job, first job I had was on a – well a scrap merchant, not [unclear]. This is all ship work [emphasis]. When the ships come in they’re bringing in shells and bombs and stuff, but they’d got to be packed in such a way that every one is above the other, and jammed on the side to stop them from swaying. And it was our job then to [unclear] all those ships and collect all that timber, then we used to store it in the dry [?] so the next ship that comes in, and takes its stuff over to [unclear] or over to Europe [?], you had all the stuff ready and you just put them all back [emphasis] in the same place. But you had to make sure that they stayed upright, so everything was right, a row of bombs, planks, but they had to touch the sides of the ships to stop them from going otherwise they’re all sinked [?] on the bottom. But by doing that, putting a layer of timber in between you kept them in the middle of the ship, yeah [coughs].
AS: How old were you when you started that job?
LL: [Coughs] that was the first job I had I think, yeah. I was only about fourteen, yeah, and – oh and I ended up in the, with the – oh hell, Old Barn Easton [?] was the old scrap yard. I got into somewhere, but I can’t remember where, but [coughs].
AS: Not to worry. But you left –
LL: Erm – I must have been fourteen when I left [inhales loudly]. I got a job [emphasis], sausage skin factory they called it. And you get all [emphasis] the sheep’s guts and get all the – it’s all frozen and it’s all dry and you got to rip all the fat off so you left with a skin which is used for sausages.
AS: Good lord.
LL: Yeah –
AS: That’s your first job.
LL: That’s the, the proper first job I ever had.
AS: Yeah. Were you living at home at that, at that time?
LL: Erm, I was, I was living at [emphasis] home then, yeah. And, where was that? Oh, that was at a place in Swansea, and, well, Treboeth they called it. It’s just on the edge [emphasis] of Swansea. And there was only about ten or fifteen minutes walk, so that want too bad there, yeah. That was an aunt, because I walked out of home, because too many arguments and all this and that. Conditions were better when I went and lived with an aunt.
AS: Oh okay.
LL: So, I haven’t had any, like a brother [?]. I did have that as my official address for many years, even when I was in the RAF, so you can say that was my second home really, yeah.
AS: Mm. Did you have, do you have many brothers and sisters?
LL: I got some, but they are too far away. I’ve only got some brothers. Oh [emphasis] sorry [coughs], I got a sister, she born 1936, that was about a, wrong again [?]. It must have been thirty-seven, mother died in 1937, how do I remember that? I used to play with two tins of World War One medals.
AS: Mm?
LL: Now, I usually, two tins laid right across the table. I never realised it until somebody mentioned it. ‘Why did you have two tins?’ One was is [?] some relative. I don’t think he had any brothers, he had sisters according to my sister. I lost my train of thought –
AS: The World War One medals.
LL: Yeah. I used to put all these medals across and – there were two tins. We discovered he had two tins. Why he had two I was asked by a certain person, and I said ‘I’ll find out.’ And it appears that he’d, he had a relative of some description, he didn’t have any brothers, but he [pause]. Yeah, he said that, well he asked if I had a brother who won a Victoria Cross, and ‘well sir I don’t know,’ and I said ‘next time I go down Swansea’ I said ‘I’ll ask about it.’ And apparently he had a relative as well that was staying with them. One tin was the old man’s and the other was the sister [?]. But he didn’t come back because I think he got wounded during the First World War and he passed away.
AS: Mm.
LL: So he left the old man with the two tins. In there was the square Victoria Cross.
AS: My gosh.
LL: I used to play with that all on the table, two tins of them.
AS: Good lord.
LL: ‘Cause when I asked the old man I said ‘what’s all this then,’ he said ‘well they were all different parts of World War One.’ He didn’t say what they actually were, but it was only later on that I discovered through somebody else that it was a Victoria Cross.
AS: Goodness.
LL: And that was a bloke Loosemore in the First World War.
AS: Good lord. When you were in Swansea during the war – when, what, what, what year were you born in? What year –
LL: 1925.
AS: 1925.
LL: 5th of the 8th 1925.
AS: So, so when the war started you were fourteen [emphasis].
LL: When the war started, erm – I’d left school. Oh [emphasis], that’s when I was working over with the scarp merchant, the one unloading the timber off the ships. That’s the first job I had –
AS: Do you –
LL: And I ended up – actually, oh, a yellow metal mill. It’s a bit like a steel works with all the rollers and a great big wheel and all that material used to come off all bent and we had a machine beside it that would flatten it dead straight. That would then go to the girls, what they called the stamping machine, and they’d stamp out bits of brass the size about, just a bit bigger than say a fifty p. piece. They turned that m, m, into money [emphasis].
AS: Wow, okay.
LL: It was an interesting job [coughs]. Peoples, peoples good, that’s the main thing.
AS: As the war started –
LL: Yeah.
AS: Did you see much of the war in Swansea? Was it –
LL: Did I –
AS: Was it bombed at all, Swansea? Did you see much of the war in Swansea?
LL: Well I joined the RAF in – it’s the book, 1940, 1940, February [emphasis] 1943.
AS: Mhm.
LL: That’s when I signed up with them. I had volunteered – you had to register I think a year before hand so that you could join the ATC and learn something about whatever service you going to go into, Territorials if you’re going in the army. And with the, for the RAF you had the ATC.
AS: Did, is that what you did?
LL: Yeah, and so, I didn’t require all that much because my old man being in the Home Guard, he had a rifle, a three-o-three, and that’s all we wanted to know when we got in the RAF. Who could handle a 303 rifle? But, I’ll tell you one thing, an incident there, I was lucky. I was sitting besides a table, just like that, hand was on [?] there, and I’d been up to the place where there these – oh they had an exercise on, the Home Guard, I had to go up to the barracks and get the rifle. I put it on the bloody table, and the old man started stripping it down to get a good clean overall. He put the blooming [emphasis] rifle down there [emphasis], with the end of it, and the bloody thing went off. It missed my ear by about an inch, yeah, pshh. And it cut a groove in the end of the table, and the old man, when he did go back up on duty, he give them a great big bollocking, ‘cause [coughs] I could have lost an arm easy enough.
AS: Mm.
LL: Yeah.
AS: What –
LL: You got to be, you got to be very careful [coughs]. I wish this cough would go away.
AS: Mhm.
LL: Yeah, yeah carry on.
AS: The – before you joined the Air Force, did you see much of the war in Swansea? Was there bombing, or anything like that?
LL: Well, they had a Blitz in there, I know that. Where were we living then? Most of the time I think we were in, what did they call it? District Road [?] Swansea, Plasmarl, it’s slightly north of the main town centre, and we had our own air raid shelter and that, and [coughs] a good – it was nice and warm [emphasis], it wasn’t cold like a lot of people you see shivering like mad in the middle. Ours was built against another big building, and you used that as one blanket [?], filled it up with earth and built all around it. And that was quite warm in there, yeah.
AS: Mhm.
LL: So we weren’t too bad really [coughs]. Oh bloody hell, I wish – they can’t find anything to get rid of this phlegm I got on my chest, they’re worried if I sit like this ain’t too bad, but I could be dead upright and I got to do it on that bloody bed there. But if I lay down flat it’s worse, but if I can sit upright, dead upright, then phlegm sinks to the bottom –
AS: Yeah.
LL: And then I’m clear for a while, yeah. Anyway carry on.
AS: When you were in Swansea under the bombing, what was it like? Was it night after night or?
LL: Well, we didn’t live there all the time, we were on the outskirts they call it, yeah. Yeah, we moved to an area called Plasmarl and that’s – I’d finished school I think, yeah. Because when I left home I was living with an aunt and I had to walk about two miles [unclear] but [unclear] the mills [emphasis]. Yellow metal mills.
AS: Mhm.
LL: You used to use them as the material brass to make bullet shells, and all that sort of thing. A good job, good pay, so I was alright like that.
AS: Mm. What made you decide to join the Air Force?
LL: Well I had erm, I had two brothers and a sister. The sister was in the WAFs. I think the eldest, no the eldest one was in the army [emphasis] but the second eldest was in the – I would say, erm, what do they call them now? [Pause] oh what do they call them, they were, they were classified as –
AS: Were they sort of soldier, or?
LL: Volunteers, yeah. I forget – they had a special name for them [coughs]. When did he [?] join the services anyway?
AS: Okay.
LL: So that was, one’s in the WAFs and one in the RAF, so I thought ‘I might as well make it a third.’ So I joined the Air Force. But I didn’t realise it when I – I went up to Penarth [emphasis] for an interview and they passed me as a fit for air crew duty. Well flying [emphasis], first of all, then I had to go somewhere else. Oh, we had to do some, go to a place, stay overnight I think, done some exercises to see if you’re fit [emphasis].
AS: Mhm.
LL: ‘Cause you had to be fit to be in the aircrew, if you’re going to fly anyway. And I passed alright. So from then on life carried on like normal, yeah.
AS: So you went up to Penarth, did they give you –
LL: Well, what they do there, they give you a lot of information, like about ranks and things like that, and all the usual ground, what I call the ground work for anybody any service, I mean Navy or Air Force. They still got to recognise you as a cornel or a captain or a corporal, and all the general information about the service you were joining. And that’s what the ground work was, but the flying [emphasis], you start going up for gunners, we went up to somewhere round [?] Scotland, Castle Kennedy, and that’s – we were flying on Anson aircraft then, the Avro Anson. And that only had a turret, a mid upper turret, but it was an Anson towing on the windbags, and you’d have about, what was it? About half a dozen chappies in there. Everybody had a different coloured bullet, so when that bullet went through the bag, the windbag, it would leave some paint. You could tell, tell how many hits you had. So, so when you got back –
AS: Were you any good at it?
LL: When you got back they counted how many little holes and the colour [coughs]. They got your score then, yeah.
AS: Were you any good?
LL: Yeah [emphasis] I thought I was very good. What did I do? Something special up there one day. We changed instructors, who was it? It was laughable really [pause]. It made me laugh at the time, it made me laugh. I was very good with the side-by-side shotgun.
AS: Mhm.
LL: I discovered I think, thanks to listening to the old man talking about in the Home Guard when he was on exercise, what they normally do. You get the gun side to you other [?] and you pass it through, and there’s a time when it stops [emphasis] and then it starts to fall. You fire when it’s on the top, on the apex and then you waited every time. But [coughs] I done this four times out of five, and the [unclear] said ‘oh, we’ll change instructor, instructors,’ and we had a good one in the first place. But, what was it this bloke said something? [Pause] ooh heck, it made me bloody laugh at the time I know that [AS laughs]. Oh Christ – I used to hit for some reason or another, you’d have five [emphasis] bullets to fire through this gun, the turbo [?].
AS: Mhm.
LL: And I hit the fourth one, and he said ‘I bet you a pound you can’t hit this one.’ I says ‘put the gun up [unclear].’ I turned round and it says ‘offices and NCOs should not gamble’ and [laughs] he said ‘you’re a bloody poacher mate’ [AS and LL laugh]. I never [coughs], I never handled a gun before.
AS: Wow.
LL: And yet I was able to do that, you know. Four times out of five, and he looked at him and he says ‘you’re a bloody poacher aren’t you?’ I said ‘I never handled a gun before in all my life.’ But I was watching the old man when he was in the Home Guard and listening to him talking, when they were on exercise and you learn quite a bit that way, yeah.
AS: Mm.
LL: Anyway, what else have you got to go onto? Checked – 20:43
AS: Let’s go back [emphasis] a little bit, before you went to air gunner training –
LL: Well, problem was, six months ground work, what I call ground work, that’s learning all the ranks and all the rules and regulations going into any service. And then six months there ground work, six months flying training. Start off with the Anson, then you went onto the Wellington, Avro Wellington, then up to Winthorpe, Stirlings [emphasis], then you go onto the, what they call the LFS, the Lanc Flying School. That’s where, the first time you sit in a Lancaster. You’re up at RAF Syerston, and you there for – well you’re supposed to be there for a given time, but somebody was, somebody took ill [emphasis] and then they remembered that one of them was the engineer. You didn’t fly – well, you’re not supposed to fly unless you had a full crew, but I, I can’t remember why we – oh, they didn’t need anybody on the Wellingtons, not a flight engineer, he came when we went onto the Stirlings, and then onto the Lancasters [coughs]. And we went into Syserston for that, from there onto the squadron.
AS: Okay.
LL: ‘Cause it was just up the road from Newham [?].
AS: Okay. How did you choose, how did you choose to be an air gunner? Did you do tests?
LL: Do what?
AS: Did you do – did they give you tests to decide if you would be an air gunner or a pilot or?
LL: Erm, no. I think what it was, it started, it started off where they decide [emphasis] you’re in brilliance, you’re intelligent, you’re general [emphasis] knowledge and stuff like that. And oh, you got to be fit. You had to be one hundred percent fit, and I suited everything and they, they said ‘well you qualify for flying duties.’ So that’s what I did. I said ‘oh,’ I didn’t know what aircraft you got to fly in, could have been a tiger moth or, I don’t know. But anyway, we were told we were going to fly Lancasters eventually, on a squadron.
AS: Okay.
LL: Yeah [coughs].
AS: So you were on forty-two course at Castle Kennedy.
LL: Pardon? Yeah [emphasis].
AS: To learn to be a gunner.
LL: Yeah –
AS: And –
LL: And they had – you do your training facing the side of this hangar and on there, there was, you had to chase the path [?] and you had to train the sites of the guns on that path without making the bell ring, because as soon as you hit the line – they had like a roadway, a pathway. These rung the bell as a fault [?] but if you go through straight through it, the two lines, without touching the lines, you got a clear run. I had many clear runs, because you kept on practicing all the time, yeah. But great big, behind the hangars, great big building started at one end, all the bloody way along there, yeah. Shake it mad hoping you didn’t touch the bloody line [AS laughs]. [Coughs] yeah, and that was up at the, now where was that? Oh that was up in Castle Kennedy, Scotland I think, yeah. Somewhere up there.
AS: Okay. And then you, you actually sat in an aeroplane for the first time in your life I guess.
LL: Yeah [emphasis], that was the first aircraft was an Anson, yeah. And that’s the first time I sat in the turret. Although they did have a turret during the training, the groundwork, so you could get used to where the bits and pieces are, how, which way the guns were going to be going, how you line them up and all that sort of thing. That sort of ground work consists of, learning all the basics, I think you could call them, yeah.
AS: And you have to strip the gun and clear stoppages and things?
LL: Oh yeah, you – and, and the thing was this. In case you were, had a failure at high altitude, you had all these flying clothes on, thick gloves like gauntlets [emphasis] and how had to fiddle about wearing them, and if you had a middle of winter now you’d have gloves on. And you just imagine trying to strip that thing down, it was a small parts inside the gun, the 303 [coughs] and you had to strip them down and put them back together again, wearing your gloves.
AS: Where do you put all the pieces when you’re in a turret [LL coughs] at twenty thousand feet?
LL: Oh, this is when you’re in the classroom.
AS: Oh.
LL: You do it all when you’re in the classroom. But [emphasis] you got to shout all the way around you in the turret so you’ve got bugs [?] everywhere. It’s like, it’s like drying, riding a motorbike. You don’t, don’t move your arms like that, you just run handle like that, up and down, that’s all, that’s all there is. It’s all under control, so you just, you don’t move [emphasis], you just move your hands like that. Course looking around all the time.
AS: Is the turret electric or hydraulic?
LL: I think oil [emphasis]. I think oil was the driving force behind it, yeah. It must have been, because they were very worried about any oil leaks when, if you’d been attacked, anything like that. Because you can easily slide on it and injure yourself, ‘cause it is a bit rough inside the aircraft because of all the ribs [?].
AS: Mhm.
LL: And you can easily break an arm, break a leg or something when you steady [?] yourself.
AS: Mm. Did you actually like [emphasis] the flying?
LL: Mm?
AS: When you got into the Anson did you actually like they flying and think ‘this is for me?’
LL: I liked the flying a lot, I really enjoyed that, and especially in the Lanc up there, it’s very comfortable, the seat itself was a strap of fabric, no wider than that but a bit longer, connected from one side to there. And you sat on that thing for anything, eight to nine hours.
AS: Good lord.
LL: Now you’d think, well your backside must have been sore but that strap forms the shape of your backside [unclear] end, and we used to be sitting there for eight or nine hours, longer. I forget what the – I supposed it’s somewhere in there, the longest one, eight and a half hours I think, over Germany, that’s the longest flight we had I think. But you don’t’ feel tired [emphasis] and it’s a lovely feeling, sitting in a lot of bloody clouds, yeah. ‘Cause you don’t know what’s coming the other bloody way.
AS: ‘Cause you faced nearly always the tail?
LL: Yeah.
AS: Yeah, mhm, yeah. When you’d finished on Ansons, was that when you –
LL: Oh –
AS: When you’d finished on Ansons, is that when you, when you were qualified and you got your wings?
LL: Oh, wait a minute [?]. No [coughs] you got your wings when you finished your ground training. The last lesson you get, I forget what it’s all about, but then the old chap says ‘right, you’re now classified as sergeants. You’re, you’ve jumped all those ranks just because you going into aircrew, and also your pay goes up as well.’ So it makes a vast difference when you – that’s going from Bridgnorth in Shropshire which is the last of the ground [emphasis] training. You then go up to Castle Kennedy in Scotland for the, to start your, no, to start your flying, proper gun training then, yeah [coughs].
AS: Mm. When you got your wings and your promotion –
LL: Yeah.
AS: Was there a big parade? Did any – did your relatives come or?
LL: Erm [pause] and where was it? We were in Bridgnorth, I know that [papers shuffle]. Oh, no I think we were in the classroom in Bridgnorth, that was RAF Bridgnorth, yeah. And when the, when the ground course finished, the instructor, he then informed you that you were then made sergeant, you jumped all the ranks and you were made a sergeant and your pay went up as well. [Papers shuffling] so that was a good thing, yeah.
AS: Yeah, [laughs] absolutely. So you went then I suppose on leave for a while, did you?
LL: Erm, I think we might have had a, a long weekend or something like that. Ah yeah [coughs] ‘cause I went home that weekend when we passed out. Now who did I meet? I met somebody – unimportant anyway.
AS: Mm.
LL: Walking through town, a pal a long time ago, a school kid, yeah. I’d gone – I had a bit of a long, a long weekend [emphasis] I think they called it when I went home. And then from there we went from, I went from Swansea all the way up by train to Scotland.
AS: To Castle Kennedy, yeah. Okay, and when you finished Castle Kennedy –
LL: Yeah.
AS: It was round about the time of D-Day. When –
LL: Well, I was never going to teach [?] [coughs] but if it’s in there, mm.
AS: Shall we have a pause for a minute?
[Tape paused and restarted.]
AS: Right Les, we pick up again. I’d like to talk about the OTU and the Wellingtons and –
LL: Yeah.
AS: And crewing up. When you got to the OTU how did you form a crew? How did the crew all [LL laughs] get together?
LL: It was brilliant [emphasis]. You never, you never seen such a process – you couldn’t invent such a thing. I [unclear] gunner, Bill Jenkinson. I suppose – oh, I was behind the door, that’s my favourite bit, behind the door. And Bill was on that side. I said to him, I said to Bill, I said ‘oh, have you got anybody else with you? Why not grab a wireless operator or something like that?’ ‘No,’ I said ‘let’s go and have a look, see what we can see,’ and walked into all these chaps of pilots and navigators, and when [unclear] barracks, and when they were in this long line I saw a pair of feet sticking right out. I said ‘let’s have a look and see what that is, he looks a big bloke.’ [AS laughs] and that was the skipper, a New Zealander.
AS: What’s his name?
LL: And we walked up to him and said ‘you got any crew members yet.’ ‘No.’ I said ‘well you got two gunners,’ ‘oh that’s a good start’ [AS laughs]. We picked up like that [emphasis]. It was long [?], if somebody fancied you, it was – if you didn’t like them then you just passed on. But ‘oh, he looks a friendly’ – ‘I know him, I had a couple of pints with him,’ like that. That’s how you picked up a crew.
AS: So when –
LL: You wouldn’t believe – it was so lackadaisical the way everybody come together as a crew, and yet it worked beautifully.
AS: So you chose your skipper because of the size of his feet?
LL: Yeah [AS laughs]. It’s rather strange how seven people like that, complete strangers, can come together and form a crew. And all more or less you work and play in, with one aircraft, it’s brilliant. And yet you just knitted together and formed a complete crew, yeah.
AS: And when you’d done this dating [?], did you go out and socialise to get to know each other?
LL: Oh, oh yeah. Oh, I’ll tell you a funny thing happened, it’ll make you laugh. When the course – now what was that called? Ah [pause] –
AS: At the OTU?
LL: Upper Heyford.
AS: At the OTU, yeah.
LL: Erm, OTU.
AS: Mhm.
LL: We’d finished the course and everybody passed and we had a party in the sergeants mess, and the – we had lots of drinking going on and all that. And old Bill the rear gunner, he said ‘that bird from the sergeants mess, the cook, she’s caught my eye. I’m going to chat her up’ he said ‘when we finish.’ Well, it was sometime later on I did catch a glimpse of him. Of course he had to see her the following night or something, so I said to him, I said ‘oh, how did you get on last night?’ He just lay on the bed fully clothed looking miserable as sin. I said ‘what did you do?’ I said ‘what did you get?’ [AS laughs]. And he fell silent for a while. I said ‘you must have had some – you must have done something’ or another, similar comment like that. I said ‘what did you get?’ ‘That’s it on the table’ he said, chunk of bread and a chunk of cheese [AS and LL laugh]. I said ‘all that fuss for nothing,’ he said ‘a chunk of cheese and’ – right in the middle of the table. We enjoyed it anyway, we had, I think we had a bottle of beer hidden away somewhere, but it was enjoyable, yeah.
AS: Mhm. Was the flying at the OTU, was it very intensive? Did you do a lot of flying?
LL: Operation – yeah [emphasis]. There is – you do all sorts of trips, daytime and at night time. Short ones, ops, what do you call them? Bumping and something or another –
AS: Circuits and bumps.
LL: Ah yeah that’s it, good, circuits and bumps. You do a lot of that, day and night so that the pilot can get used to flying the aircraft. That’s more than anything else, because there’s nothing you can do from the gunner’s point of view at night time, you can’t see nothing. Not a thing, it’s completely black. You can look down, you can see one light or anything. And the only lights you see is the runway lights, and you can see them quite a distance away. But that’s the only thing to guide [emphasis] you, and it’s up to the navigator to know exactly where you are, so you learn from them, and I should imagine they got some beacons [emphasis] dotted all over the country so, and each one is tuned differently, so you tune, the navigator tunes into them. That’s how they guide you down a narrow alleyway because you’ve got flying, aircraft flying in all directions during the war. You could have a collision anytime [emphasis], you never know it, but that’s it, that’s what it’s all about.
AS: Mm. When you were at the OTU you were – were you straight away confident straight away that you’d chosen a good pilot?
LL: Erm, I think we did. We had a couple of rough landings, bumps, but like everybody else the more you do your job, the more efficient you become. Like you learn – I kept on missing [emphasis] when I was flying over the target, and fair enough the pilot of the, I think it was the Anson, he was very patient because they tell you off in a, a personal way, not giving you a good bollocking but advising [emphasis] you is a proper phrase, what you’ve got to do so everything goes along smoothly like that, yeah. Good enjoyable, I enjoyed it, sitting in there.
AS: Mm, okay. When you moved onto the OTU as a crew, where there many accidents among the other crews at OTU?
LL: [Coughs] Well [pause]. We were at – nearly every [emphasis] station, RAF station we went, we went with an aircraft went missing. Up at [unclear] Castle Kennedy, an Anson went missing over the, not the North Sea, the West Coast.
AS: The Irish Sea?
LL: Yeah, ah that’s, Irish Sea, yeah.
AS: Mm.
LL: He went missing up there. Next station – oh, then we, there was a Wellington. Oh, the Wellington went and crashed somewhere in mid Wales and it must have gone somewhere into a bog [emphasis] because it, it sunk out of sight, nobody could find it. So wherever it is it’s down there rotting. And then we got to – nothing happened up at Newark, Winthorpe. Oh, the Lanc finishing school, that’s the first time you’re in a Lancaster. Joining the circuit I spotted a black shadow on the ground of an aircraft, and you could practically recognise it as a Lancaster. But the strange thing about it was, as if some yob [emphasis] had been there with a spray gun, blood red, and gone all the way around it, framed it just like that. This black shadow on the ground, in line with the perimeter track. And just a line of red all the way round it. They reckon that the black was a plane, the red was the remains of a crew, yeah, when it exploded. There’s nothing, there’s nothing left to show, it was a crew there, it’s just that red mark.
AS: Good lord. We’ll pause for a second.
[Tape paused and restarted.]
AS: Lesley, you were talking about lights, or not having any lights at night –
LL: Yeah.
AS: Could you see the exhausts from your own aircraft, from the Wellington or the Lancaster when you were flying?
LL: I don’t think – I wasn’t aware of it –
AS: Mhm.
LL: But I don’t think, I don’t think we, no I don’t think we did bother with it. We never saw anything because [coughs] I think that the flame from the engine would pass through the back end of it and disappear.
AS: Mhm.
LL: So you did – I don’t think, I can never remember seeing any light or flame or, coming from the engines.
AS: Okay.
LL: And I think they had an extended exhaust pipe [coughs] and it goes under the wing rather than over the top. So it’s out of sight [?] anyway, yeah [coughs].
AS: Yeah. There were two of you as gunners, there was you and Bill Jenkinson.
LL: Yeah.
AS: How did you decide who was gonna be the rear gunner and who was gonna be –
LL: Oh, well, well we were in a bedroom like this, a long hut. A peace [emphasis] time building, brickwork. Bill was on that side of the door, I was behind it.
AS: Mhm.
LL: And I had a look around and Bill was the nearest and I said ‘you got anybody to go up with you Bill?’
AS: Mm, mm.
LL: ‘No not yet’ he said, ‘but I want to be a rear gunner.’ ‘Oh that’s alright,’ I said, ‘I’ll take mid upper gunner position then’ –
AS: Oh so you decided between you?
LL: Yeah.
AS: Yeah, okay.
LL: He said ‘alright, that’s [coughs] that’s what I want to be, rear gunner.’ So that’s how we decided.
AS: Mm, okay. So you did a fair bit of flying at the OTU on Wellingtons.
LL: Yeah.
AS: Were they good, were they good aircraft, or were they pretty ropey at that time?
LL: No, oh [emphasis]. They must have been reliable because I think [emphasis] now you come to mention it, a lot of them were [coughs] exit [?] squadron.
AS: Mhm.
LL: And that had to be kept in a good condition, especially going on operations. The good maintenance on that aircraft was carried on I think through the training sessions. So you did have reliable aircraft – I can’t ever remember us having, if we ever – well you have a stimulated three engine landing for practice with a pilot [coughs], see how it handles landing and taking off.
AS: okay. So you were on forty-four course at –
LL: Sixty, sixty one.
AS: Okay. The, the course you were on at 16 OTU that was forty-four course. Did you, did you pass out from there, did you have a passing out parade when you finished at OTU?
LL: Erm [pause] Upper Heywood.
AS: Mm.
LL: OTU, operational training – no [emphasis] apart from having this, this party at the end of the course when Bill and all this cook from the sergeants mess catching his eye [AS laughs]. That’s the only incident I can remember [emphasis] in there.
AS: Okay.
LL: It was a very quiet sort of a station, yeah.
AS: Okay. And then you went on leave [emphasis], did you?
LL: I think we must have because I remember – I went on, possibly a long weekend because I went home to Swansea and I had to get on, what do you call the, they call the Coastal Train down there. It goes all the way round the outside of Wales until you get up into Scotland. You didn’t go across the midlands, I think they were kept clear for munitions [?] and all so you go on this track [coughs], going through small village all the way up to go up to Scotland.
AS: That must have taken forever [emphasis].
LL: Yeah, it does. But it’s surprising how quickly time goes when you’re moving, you know. And you tend to remember [emphasis] places like that. You, you seen it in your school days on a map where certain places are, so like ‘oh this is so and so,’ ‘that’s so and so.’ You go, time soon goes, yeah. Oh take my tea away, too much, too much of that.
AS: Mhm. Then after the OTU you went onto Stirlings at the Heavy Conversion Unit at Winthorpe.
LL: Er, yeah, Winthorpe, that’s where we were Stirlings.
AS: Mhm.
LL: Very, very quiet, not much happened on that station to my, to my knowledge anyway.
AS: Mhm.
LL: No I can’t think of any [coughs] –
AS: But at –
LL: Winthorpe –
AS: Mm.
LL: Stirlings, no I don’t think much happened on there. Very quiet station.
AS: Okay, mhm.
LL: At Winthorpe, yeah. Near Newark, yeah.
AS: Mhm.
LL: That’s it.
AS: But then, then did you start doing exercises with fighter aircraft in the sky, on the Stirlings?
LL: Erm –
AS: The fighter affiliation [?] –
LL: We didn’t do it on the Wellingtons because it’s got no mid upper turret, so the Stirling would have been the first aircraft. No hang on. The Wellington would have been a job for the rear gunner, there’s no mid upper gunner turret, so I used to stand at the astrodome and looking out possibly [unclear] one of the navigator might want it or somebody want some information. You can see everything but there’s nothing to see, it’s all black. So what they expect you to see in the darkness like that I don’t know. But I had a sometimes it was a longish journey and other times it was just bumps, bumps and whatever, yeah [coughs].
AS: Mhm. So that’s just over a month on Stirlings from mid October to mid November 1944. I suppose pulling you together as a crew still.
LL: Yeah, well you go from Wellingtons which has only got one active turret, you go onto a Stirling then which has got the two.
AS: Mm.
LL: It’s got three turrets actually – one in the doors, mid upper turret and a tail gunner, yeah.
AS: Mhm.
LL: But there’s only two gunners there anyway.
AS: And so does the bomb aimer use the front turret?
LL: Yeah, Well sometimes if necessary he can [emphasis] get up there if you got time [coughs].
AS: And then you went on, for a short time to the Lancaster Finishing School.
LL: Yeah.
AS: Right.
LL: Yeah, yeah we passed away [?] – yeah the Lanc Finishing School is the last time, oh the first time you sit in [emphasis] a Lancaster, ‘cause then that prepares you for your next station which for us was just up the road in Lincoln. That’s the only place, the first place you sit in a turret of a Lancaster, so the Lancaster Finishing School. That’s the whole idea of it, introduce you to the aircraft you’re going to fly, yeah, which is a good thing really, yeah.
AS: And how did that feel? Did that feel –
LL: I rather liked it myself, yeah, quite pleasant. It was a nice steady aircraft when you were flying, you know, it was rather stable, and often you see them bumping about but that one, it seems to hold itself dead level the whole time. It’s pretty well set up. I think that applies to a lot of them during the war.
AS: And that was a really modern aeroplane then.
LL: Yeah, yeah. And according to the book, it was a mark three I believe that we ended up with up on the squadron, ‘cause you had all the latest radar equipment and all that stuff in it.
AS: Mhm. But nothing special happened at Lanc Finishing School that you recall?
LL: Erm, apart from seeing that shadow with the red painted on, that was a very quiet station, yeah. You do, you do day and night flying in it. But you can’t see a blooming thing at night, anyway.
AS: Even though you’ve got the best view at the top of the aeroplane?
LL: Yeah you can’t see – well, people don’t realise what a blackout is. A blackout is every [emphasis] light [emphasis] is out [emphasis].
AS: Mhm.
LL: It’s complete darkness, and if you happen to show a light it’s so quiet that you can hear somebody shout out ‘put that bloody light out,’ or so ‘shut that doors, shut that window,’ something like that.
AS: Mhm.
LL: Because it’s so black [emphasis] that you spotted straight away – you go ‘well what the hell’s that then?’ Or ‘some buggar’s opened the window’ or something like that.
AS: But when you’re airborne with the stars and the moon, could you see horizontally or above you? [LL coughs] Could you see other aircraft in the sky, for instance?
LL: [Pause] You could see the horizon, the dark earth and if it’s a moonlit light you could see the curve of the earth and the difference – the horizon [emphasis], you could see the difference. Now, an interesting thing happened there. Talking about UFOs, now this is true this. There was a starlit night; you could see the horizon and the end of the darkness and all of the stars. And I thought ‘that’s funny, that star’s moving faster than the others.’ I kept on coming around to it [coughs]. That one star, that I believe could have been one of these foreign things, a UFO I believe. I tell you why, [talking in the background]. Yeah, it’s rather strange, nobody speaks [emphasis] when you’re in an aircraft, everybody’s concentrating on the job. You’re a navigator you’re concentrating, engineer, and all that you concentrate on – and I was looking and I thought ‘he’s moving.’ And I followed that. As it got overhead, I heard – nobody speaks [emphasis] when you’re flying, and this voice, I heard this voice as clear as you were talking. ‘We’re of no danger to you.’ So where did that voice come from? Nobody spoke, you never speak unless you’re telling the navigator tells the pilot ‘oh we’ve got to turn right here, and our starboard’ or something like that, or somebody passing a message, that’s the only time you speak. And you see somebody spoke just [emphasis] as clear as if it was in the aircraft with you. ‘We’re of no danger to you,’ so where did the voice come from?
AS: Wow. Did you discuss this with your crew later?
LL: No, well the thing is, you never mentioned – and this is strange. You never mentioned anything inusual [emphasis] because you then put everybody on nerves end –
AS: Mm.
LL: Thinking ‘now what’s he on about?’
AS: Yeah.
LL: But then the next thing you know, ‘what the hell’s he bloody on about, silly, he bloody drunk again,’ something like that. But, so you kept everything to yourself, and this is why it’s so quiet in the aircraft, the only time you’d speak if you’re passing instructions to anybody.
AS: It sounds like you were a very disciplined [emphasis] crew. Did your skipper keep tight discipline and make –
LL: Erm, well it seemed that we were completely at ease. I can’t remember the pilot or anybody for that sort of losing their temper. It’s rather strange, as if you’re entering another world. It’s very calm [emphasis] in there, when you’re flying, whether it’s the quietness, the only sound you can hear is the engines, but then you got your helmet on and you got your earphones, so you blocked out all the sound, the external sounds. So the only thing you can hear is when anybody speaks inside [emphasis] the aircraft. Otherwise it was dead quiet. It’s like this place now, yeah.
AS: Can you hear your own breathing?
LL: Hmm?
AS: Can you hear your own breathing on your mask? Checked – 59:41
LL: Ah now you come to mention, you did sometimes if you got excited, yeah. You’re bound to, yeah, and oh, another time was if your oxygen tube, pipe got disconnected, then you can hear all sorts of things then. Bad connection [?] from you to the turret, it’s complete, you can’t hear nothing else ‘cause it’s all coming through there, and what goes there comes from the person who’s either flying it or the crew, other members of the crew, yeah.
AS: So did you have this then, did your oxygen come disconnected?
LL: Yeah, it did. Now what happened there then? [Pause] oxygen lack at high altitude is very dangerous. A lot of things can go wrong, you’re maybe doing things that you would not normally do [coughs]. But, so you do take care of all your equipment at all times, to make sure everything is working right, and every switch is in the right position sort of thing.
AS: Mm.
LL: You got to be very careful when you’re flying.
AS: Did you check on each other to make sure you were all –
LL: Oh, oh, I’ll tell you what, I used to regular but you do it in a manner that you’re not scaring them, not upsetting them. ‘You alright down there Bill? You warm enough?’ Some remark like that.
AS: Yeah.
LL: You didn’t agitate any problem or anything like that, you kept quiet. Because anybody under tension could miss things. But when it’s all quiet like that and you’re concentrating you were quite safe I think, yeah.
AS: Mm. When you were on the ground as a crew, did you practice your drills? Your dingy drills, your evacuation drills?
LL: Well, Bridgnorth was some of the ground staff. Oh we did some dingy [emphasis] drill up at [unclear] at Castle Kennedy in Scotland. You cling onto an imitation, well a platform which represented the wing of the aircraft, and you want to jump [emphasis]. You’re in a pond, and then you had to get to the raft. Now, with all the flying clothes on, everything, you’re heavy, and you’ve got to get there as quickly as you can, otherwise – well it’s not all that deep anyway just sufficient to wet yourself or so, all your clothes. And you just go in and sort of change and put dry clothes on.
AS: Mhm, when you finished, or any time really, did you really think about ‘well, I’ll be going bombing soon?’ Did you think that you were about to go to war?
LL: No, not to my knowledge. I never – flying was just flying to me, and you look forward [emphasis] to it, it’s getting you off the ground. You join the Air Force to flying an air, to flying in aircraft, not to keep marching on the bloody square all the time.
AS: So even on operations you were keen to go flying?
LL: Oh, oh yeah. Never where you are – you wanted to get away from the, from the monotony of class, in the classes, because quite often you get different instructors but the subject is always the same. They drilling [emphasis] it into you, they, and they’ve got to succeed in getting that knowledge into you because it could save your life, and not only you but the aircraft and the rest of the crew.
AS: So going on operations was almost a relief [emphasis] to stop –
LL: It was in a way [pause]. There was a – I forget what happened, but we were on a very heavy raid. Loads of bloody shells everywhere, exploding all around you. I found that – now this is stupid [emphasis]. I was in an aircraft with five or six tonnes of high explosive bombs. I was trying to stand up in the mid upper turret, shaking like a leaf on a tree, shivering, frightened like hell, and it, well. It’s like the noise is like flying in a thunderstorm, a very heavy thunderstorm. And then the bumping [emphasis] about of bumps from the shells [?] is like when they go on these rapid waterfalls, you’re bumping all over the place – what was the other thing? Very calm sort of thing. I suddenly – I was shaking like mad, and then as quickly as it appeared, the condition disappeared completely. Instead of being frightened or scared stiff and god knows what, I just sat down there in amongst all this noise and what have you, I just sat and relaxed. And as if somebody had said ‘welcome to the club, you’re a survivor. You lost the fear of death.’ And there it was, in exactly the same conditions, shaking like mad and all that, I just sat down like we are now, and as if I was on a training flight. And all this going on outside, just outside the door [emphasis], and I just sat down there as if nothing was wrong. How your brain bloody works I don’t know, but I just sat down there, still the same conditions, but I wasn’t worried.
AS: Mm.
LL: It’s funny really, yeah, ‘cause – just normal training flight and I must be bloody mad or something [AS laughs].
AS: And you were fine from then on?
LL: Yeah.
AS: Yeah.
LL: We were going on a raid, I forget where it was, somewhere, somewhere heavy [emphasis] I know that. And I know one thing that – in the, oh, we got a 50, 61 Squadron newsletter that comes out once every three months I think. Somebody wrote an article about what happened over at Hamburg on this – it’s on there, the raid during the 61 Squadron I think [papers shuffling]. Oh, some bloke describing all the anti-aircraft shells everywhere. And these German [papers continue to shuffle] jets in amongst the aircraft. What did he – and someone else wrote it, that’s what drew my attention to it. It was completely wrong [emphasis]. He made it up, because the day in question, the 9th of the 4th, not one anti-aircraft shell was fired, and the only aircraft we saw was a German jet, the 262, and that flew head on, straight through the middle, plonk. Right through this group, turned round and knocked down three aircraft. We didn’t see the fourth go down but you’re in a group of six sevens, forty-two, six across and six behind them below, and that fighter knocked down three on one, on our side. You got the, I think the bombing leader on that end comes up to us and it’s a tail end Charlie sort of thing [coughs]. You there [?] to form the six in the front. That thing went down, but that thing [?] got shot on the following day with the Yanks. They damaged this aircraft, they had to find a place to land, and when they was looking and doing something with the controls of the aircraft, he didn’t see the crater in the middle of the runway. Straight in and up he went. That was the following day.
AS: That was the German pilot?
LL: Yeah.
AS: So, so with your six sevens of forty-two aircraft, that was both squadrons flying together, 50 and 61?
LL: Well, it was the son of the late rear gunner, he [pause] – did he phone or ring, write a letter? [Pause] I forget now.
AS: Okay, we’ll, we’ll come back to that later.
LL: [Unclear] no we’ll come back to it.
AS: Mm. So you were forty-two, in daylight, flying in formation.
LL: Yeah.
AS: Okay, so that must have been the two squadrons together.
LL: Ah, ah I know, I know. In that logbook, that’s all the operations and all the flying we did as a crew.
AS: Mhm.
LL: No other squadron is mentioned, but the son of the rear gunner, he must have something, telly or something, internet. He found that the Dambusters are not mentioned in there, but the Dambusters and us were on the same raids.
AS: Okay.
LL: And how I know that, we were on the one raid and I pointed out to the – it was Bill started it first. He said ‘look at that light down there’ he said ‘down on the port side.’ And he said something about ‘possibly turn back soon because it looks like the engines were not coping with the load.’ And we followed this progress, you didn’t focus on it you just casually glanced – it kept on coming nearer and nearer. But when that thing came near enough, we thought it was an extra fuel tank you know, to set fire to buildings, but that was the latest bomb that the RAF aircraft would, could carry. What was it, twenty-two thousand pounds?
AS: Is it the, the Tall Boy was it?
LL: Yeah.
AS: Yes.
LL: And that’s what they called it. But we followed that and gradually, so it came level with us, and you know when people bail out of an aircraft they travel at the same speed as the aircraft, and same applies to your bomb load, because when that plane gradually comes up dead level with us, wing tip to wing tip, the release of such a weight, that plane disappeared. I couldn’t see it, I couldn’t bend my head back to see if they were overhead, but it just disappeared. And I was left with a view of this great big bomb flying level with our [AS laughs] wingtip. If we had a camera, nobody would have believed it was a fake picture, but it was the – I’d heard of [?] the people travel the same speed as the aircraft when they bail out, so that bomb load does and gradually [emphasis] it sinks. But for what seemed like an eternity it just stood there level with the wing and then it dropped. The size of that thing there, my gosh [emphasis], long as this bloody room nearly.
AS: Well I think [emphasis] the biggest one was twenty-two thousand pounds was it?
LL: Yeah that’s it, that was, that was this Dambusters aircraft [coughs] because a raid is made up of possibly a dozen or more squadrons all different ones, all with different purposes and all with different buildings to go to, stores or oil depots or things like that.
AS: Yeah, could you remember, could you talk me through a typical raid, from getting up in the morning to going to briefing, what was it like? [LL coughs] say a daytime raid.
LL: Well you get up in the morning – well more often than not your day, your own [emphasis] day starts about dinner time, because you’d been out, say, the night before, so you’ve had your kip and you go down to the sergeants mess for lunch. And then you got your briefing [emphasis] in the afternoon, and then similar, if it’s a late takeoff it’s normally about tea time or something like that.
AS: What was the briefing like?
LL: Erm, well they give you all the details, the name of the target – well it’s more for navigation than anything else. Bu you’re also advised that there are certain airfields about with various fighters in there. And at that point of the war [?] it was mainly German jets, the 262. And that’s the only time we ever – I’ve actually been that close it’s practically this distance away from here to the other side of the passage. And I should imagine that pilot, he would have knocked down the three outside ours, and that was I think two 61 Squadron aircraft went down and a 50, and I could imagine now [emphasis], I didn’t think of it then, I could imagine the bloke swinging his aircraft around and lining it up, and he weren’t that far away, he couldn’t have bloody missed us, and I should imagine that as he was able to press the button, I told him, the pilot, to take aversive action, and the pilot caught up and eighty-one [?] straight through, yeah. Carried on, he knocked down that three besides us and that was it, yeah.
AS: Mm. The luck of the draw.
LL: Sometimes it gets exciting but otherwise it’s boring [emphasis].
AS: Mhm.
LL: You’re just sitting there doing nothing. Nothing you can do about it, no.
AS: When you were flying on daylights –
LL: Yeah.
AS: Did you have fighter escort?
LL: No, never saw any.
AS: Okay.
LL: They might have been out of range, some distance away not to distract your attention, but I could, could never ever, 1943, forty-four, no forty-five –
AS: Forty-five.
LL: February forty-five was the first raid we’d done. Never had I seen anything there to protect us, you had to protect yourselves.
AS: So you weren’t, you weren’t told at briefing that there’d be –
LL: Yeah.
AS: You weren’t told at the briefing that there would be fighter cover or anything?
LL: Yeah, that’s all you, that’s all you relied on, whatever the squadron leader tells you during your briefing.
AS: Mm.
LL: Nothing else, target and all this and that, and they tell you the airfields with various aircraft, but at that time of the war, it ended a couple of days later anyway [emphasis], and [coughs] I’ll tell you what, in the areas [?] sort of thing, give you some advice, but you never took too much notice of it, because you know in about two, three days the war’s gonna end.
AS: So when you, so when you went on ops you knew this was just about the finish did you?
LL: Yeah, for us it was a limited period of time from the beginning of February I think it was until what was it, May?
AS: May, yeah.
LL: Yeah, that’s my wartime experience, that, the last three months, yeah.
AS: So –
LL: It was bad enough then –
AS: Yeah.
LL: When you consider fifty-six, fifty-eight youngsters lost, thousand [emphasis] lost like that.
AS: Mhm.
LL: Great number of men, and all youngsters, yeah.
AS: And still being killed at the very end.
LL: Yeah, yeah.
AS: Like your three aircraft.
LL: Yeah.
AS: Yeah.
LL: Yeah, practically the last, last day but one, down they went. I did see one of those Lancs splitting off. Either the pilot, mid upper gunner was sound asleep or something, or the bomb aimer above wasn’t with it because that aircraft broke right in half [emphasis], with [unclear] where the mid upper turret, mid upper turret gunner must have been killed instantly because the aircraft broke in half and the tail end gone down there swinging like a pendulum.
AS: Mm.
LL: And the whole front of it just went straight down. I don’t think any of them, anybody got out of it alive, I think they lost. Another aircraft was shot down further down and out of that, what was that, twenty, twenty, only a few survived, all the rest gone. There aren’t any survivors – once they start going down you can’t get out of them, yeah. That’s a big problem.
AS: Hmm. So still really dangerous with the flak and the fighters.
LL: Yeah you, well you did worry about it I think internally, but I think it soon passes over once you get used to it I think. You get accustomed to all this noise and bumping that goes on, and you accept it as part of the job, simple as that, yeah.
AS: Okay. We were talking about a typical mission. After the briefing you’d have your meal and then what would happen?
LL: Well erm [pause] first thing out to the aircraft. What you do there from then on, you were double checking all what everybody else had done. You check all your equipment, navigator and wireless operator, everything, everyone checks everything is okay. And then you just hang about, have a chat with the ground crew, discuss something like that. You just spending time until a tank [?] would takeoff. Comes on usually has after a meal or sometime in the afternoon, yeah [zipping noise].
AS: How did you get out to the aircraft?
LL: Oh, well we had transport [zipping noise]. We had one of these little round Land Rover things, you never walked because moving about on foot you’re sweating, and that’s the last thing you want to get into an aircraft and you gonna fly high and you’re sweating, because then you really get cold [emphasis]. It’s like when you have a bath in the winter, it’s not so comfortable as having a bath in the summer. It’s still having a bath [coughs] and you’re still flying but if you’re sweating you’re much colder. [Coughs] it’s a bloody nuisance this is.
AS: Did your flying kit generally keep you warm?
LL: Yeah, yeah. It was electrically operated, like yeah – oh it was like a pair of overalls [emphasis] you put on completely. Under your – oh, it was outside your trousers but I think you had your jacket – oh you had all your flying clothes on, thick, thick like sheep’s wool uniform –
AS: Mhm.
LL: All over you to keep you warm. And you wore mittens or gloves, gauntlets, they were plugged in as well. It was like an electric seat and that kept you warm when you were flying.
AS: Okay.
LL: So it wasn’t too bad.
AS: And some of your trips were quite long weren’t they?
LL: Oh yeah. I done eight and a half hours I think, or was it nine? But they’re not as long as some of these people have done, they’ve gone further and flying for ten or twelve hours.
AS: Mhm. And Nuremburg, that’s a long one.
LL: Yeah. I think eight and a half or nine and a half was the longest I think we done. It’s recorded in there anyway, somewhere.
AS: Mm. A really basic question is how did you use the loo, or did you, in the aeroplane?
LL: How did you?
AS: Use the toilet in the aeroplane? With all this suit [emphasis] on.
LL: Ah, now that’s a big problem. I never can remember, I never did do anything. Because the last thing you do, usually after a meal, you dive into the toilet and you get rid of all your problems down there [AS laughs]. And then – you got to be relaxed before you get in the aircraft. Remember you don’t want any distractions of any description.
AS: Mhm.
LL: That’s the only way I can put that, yeah.
AS: Changing tack a little bit, your skipper was commissioned.
LL: Yeah.
AS: Did that make a difference to the way the crew operated?
LL: No, he was still a skipper to us.
AS: Mhm.
LL: Mm, number – I think – well no, don’t forget you’re flying together, you’re practically living together, you don’t necessarily use the same sergeants mess because you’re not supposed to fly, what was it? A four engine aircraft, say a Stirling, a pilot must have – I don’t think the pilot was allowed to fly one of them unless he was a pilot or flying officer [coughs]. And when you got onto the Lancasters as if there was an unwritten law. You can’t fly in these aircraft unless you’re a flight lieutenant.
AS: Really?
LL: Yeah. And straight away, you move from one station to another and you gain all those ranks, and it’s the same as when we passed out at a training centre. You go from the lowest rank in the RAF to a sergeant, with an increase in pay which is a good thing, yeah.
AS: Did you, did you – what did you feel about bombing at the time? Was it just a job or did you feel sympathy for the people underneath, or?
LL: Erm, bear in mind that at that time I was living in Swansea and we were going through a Blitz over there.
AS: Mm.
LL: And they say that you dump [?] the bomb that’s going to kill you, you don’t hear that coming down. But you can’t get any nearer than about a hundred yards and you can still hear it, because I think it was at, what I remember, this chap must have been a doctor, and his wife and a son, and they were in a bungalow and that disappeared, and that was only a hundred yards away. But you heard this noise like a whistling sound, and that was it on its way down, the bomb on its way down. There was nothing left, there was a great big hole there and that’s all that was left of that little bungalow.
AS: In Swansea?
LL: Yeah, and that was during the Blitz, yeah. A bit of a noisy place down there. And we weren’t even in the centre of the town, we were on the edge of it, only about a well, a mile, maybe a mile and half from the centre of the town. Otherwise it was just a distant banging that goes on [coughs].
AS: Mm. And then at the end of May, operations, well, operations stopped. You finished operational flying in May 1954.
LL: Yeah.
AS: What happened to you after that?
LL: Interesting. The squadron got rid of its Lancasters. It changed over to the Lincolns. Now you might know, the Lancaster had a mid upper turret, the Lincoln hadn’t. So all the mid upper gunners had to remuster, and you had a discussion ‘where you going to go to?’ Sometimes the officers required certain people at certain stations, but more often than not they remuster to go to Marsham [?] to learn to drive [coughs]. Because don’t forget we were only kids at the time, only eighteen, so the more you learnt the better, and this is how I come to end up in Marsham [?] learning to drive.
AS: Okay.
LL: And that was a – what was I then? I left the flying when I was well, eighteen, I was still eighteen then, yeah. Yeah that’s when I went over to Marsham [?] and I’ve been in the air ever since, yeah.
AS: When you remustered, you kept your rank –
LL: Yeah, yeah you kept your rank and your pay.
AS: And your badge?
LL: Yeah, and the badge [coughs]. I never know, never knew where my wing went, my air gunner’s wing, and the length of ribbons like I got on the photograph.
AS: Mhm.
LL: Somebody must have thrown them out, I don’t know where. I used to keep a lot of the stuff altogether like we did with this.
AS: Mhm.
LL: But where they’ve gone to – they’ve disappeared now, anyway.
AS: Mhm. So you remustered as a driver in the Air Force.
LL: Yeah.
AS: And then where did you get posted to after that?
LL: Ah, where, Marsham [?]. I remember being interviewed with a friendly officer. He said ‘right, now’ he said, ‘we got to get posted now. What about going down to St Athan’s? That’s in Wales.’ I said ‘no good going down there, pubs are closed on Sundays’ [AS laughs]. That’s all I could answer, then he looked through some books around. ‘Bristol’ he said.’ ‘Ooh that’s alright’ I said, ‘I got a niece or a relative still down there in Bristol,’ I said ‘we could go down there.’ ‘Pucklechurch’ he said, that was a transport maintenance station and we used to do a lot of this, taking the vehicle, RAF vehicles from Pucklechurch and I think it’s up to Quedgeley [emphasis], place near Gloucester?
AS: Mm.
LL: I used to do that run quite often, and this is funny. Now then, what was required by the mechanics, whatever was on that list, you had to bring that vehicle in. You take the vehicle out that had been repaired and restored, and you bring another back, so you didn’t have an idle journey. And I came back, all sorts of private cars, officers cars, and all. And you know what those Queen Mary’s are?
AS: Yes, mhm.
LL: The long aircraft carriers. I had to bring one of them back [coughs]. You had a building – on the station, Pucklechurch, you had a building, car park was this side, had this, I had this car, this Queen Mary, and I must have remembered what the driving instructor had said. ‘Pause briefly, have a look what sort of route you’re going to take, if you’re getting the vehicle out [emphasis] of the car park. And you’d get so far and close round [?] to the bend, and then you start turning,’ so you were lined up ready to go on. And I thought ‘well briefly I did that’ but in reverse, and I paused very slowly and I thought ‘I’ve gotta go there, there, there, there.’ I levelled [?] then lined myself up – I didn’t move the vehicle, just looked. ‘Right go on then, right God, I’ve worked the route out how to go out backwards with this Queen Mary,’ I went all the way around and went all the way in. Never touched the side [AS laughs] and all of a sudden I heard this voice. ‘Loosemore you’re a liar,’ well I thought ‘how’s that?’ I looked round, couldn’t see anybody, and I heard this voice again. And there was this, I think it was the transport officer and he said ‘you’re a bloody liar, you tell anybody who’s just done that they’ll call you a bloody liar mate.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I’d never driven a Queen Mary before, and I just didn’t want to shut him down [?], go so far and backed up and that was dead [emphasis] in line. I could see the pillars of the windscreen, between the windscreen and it was all in, dead in line. And that’s what that transport officer was shouting.
AS: Mm.
LL: ‘You tell anybody you just done that,’ and I was dead [emphasis] in line. And he wouldn’t believe me, wouldn’t believe me.
AS: Brilliant.
LL: I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d never driven one before [AS laughs], mm.
AS: When, just as you left the squadron –
LL: Yeah.
AS: What was it like leaving your crew? Did they go on without you?
LL: Ah, no. That was rather strange that. I don’t think, no. It was proper procedure, because you were guided towards an office and all this rubbish, what I call rubbish piled on the floor. The officer then said ‘dump all you want to get rid of, take what you want,’ just like that. And there was all sorts of stuff, but your uniform, you didn’t want that, a lot of stuff straight on the pile. But if there was anything you wanted you just grabbed. I grabbed a couple of towels, that’s about all I wanted. Nice brand new towels, and I forget [?] what I didn’t want, but I could have had anything off that pile, he just said ‘take all you want.’ But I couldn’t for the life of me, well there was nothing I wanted really.
AS: Mm.
LL: Everything. But I did grab a couple of towels.
AS: Mhm.
LL: And all the other, the wrong number on it but you could always cross that number off and put your own number next to it, and name, yeah.
AS: What about leaving your crew, what did that feel like?
LL: Well as I said, I didn’t know they’d gone [emphasis].
AS: Oh okay.
LL: No, because I was sent straight to the dumping ground, the office.
AS: Mhm.
LL: When they went, I hadn’t seen then since [coughs] ‘cause they went possibly to another, to get ready to go to another station.
AS: Mm.
LL: Because I think they left, they left Skellingthorpe and they might have gone somewhere onto another squadron [coughs].
AS: Okay, so you didn’t manage to keep in touch?
LL: Oh, the only – oh I did with, oh I make [pause], did I see him? I might have had a letter or a phone call to say that the rear gunner who travelled from Ormskirk in Lancashire [coughs].
AS: Mm.
LL: He was with a fellow officer. I think we were all warrant officers by then. Oh they were at Crewe Station, and he said, he had to answer a call of nature [coughs]. And he was with this other bloke, I think a warrant officer, with his two kitbags [coughs]. When he came out his mate was missing and his kitbag. All his kit was in there. His family didn’t know what he had done during the war. The bloke disappeared, so did his kitbag with all his stuff like that in there.
AS: All his logbook and –
LL: I thought, he was telling me about it [coughs]. And when I was – I had a letter from his son telling me, telling me what happened, I thought ‘well, it’s not fair really.’ He’d got all this – it wasn’t too long back. His family didn’t know anything about his service life, not a thing. So been in contact with him, I thought ‘well, it’s only fair.’ You can change my name to any member of the crew, it’s exactly the same. All the flying you do is as a crew [emphasis], and all, no stranger amongst them. So if I take my name off and put yours instead, nobody could be any wiser because you all fly together as a crew and not as an individual with somebody else. So the recording on there is exactly the same, right the way through.
AS: Mm.
LL: All seven of us got exactly the same written on there.
AS: So you made a copy and gave it to –
LL: Yeah –
AS: The son.
LL: I did, I copied it I think.
AS: Yeah.
LL: You can have that if you want it.
AS: Thank you.
LL: It’s entirely up to you.
AS: Thank you.
LL: I think – oh, when I did the copying for Bill I done an extra one, in case I came across somebody else who wanted one, so I’ve always had – it’s been spare so I’m alright that way [?].
AS: Thank you. That’s been absolutely [emphasis] – we’ve been talking for two hours. Shall we stop now, I think?
LL: What do you want to do now, anything?
AS: I think we’ve pretty well covered most [emphasis] of what I was going to say, maybe we could pause now.
LL: Well what we could do, we could open that door there and when – you can unlock it and have a bit of air come through, it’s getting a bit stale in here, yeah.
AS: That’s what we’ll do. Thank you very much.
LL: Yeah.
AS: Cheers.
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 Lesley Joseph Loosemoore
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Adam Sutch
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
2015-11-16
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ALoosemoreLJ151116
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
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01:41:32 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Les Loosemore describes his upbringing and employment history in Swansea before joining the war in 1945. He describes the Blitz in Swansea before training to be a mid upper gunner for 61 Squadron. He describes his rather intensive training, including his time at the Lancaster Finishing School, the crewing up process, the importance of maintaining equipment and the various aircraft he flew, including Ansons, Wellingtons and Lancasters. He articulates the atmosphere onboard an aircraft during an operation, recalling the silence as everyone concentrated on their own duties and the fear he felt on his first few operations. He recalls watching the aircraft next to him dropping a Tallboy (or Grand Slam) bomb, before likening the noise of a operation to that of heavy thunder. He flew operations for three months before the war ended, at which point the mid upper gunners were no longer needed. He retrained as a driver although missed saying goodbye to his crew.
Contributor
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Katie Gilbert
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
Wales--Swansea
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-02
1944
1945
61 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
Anson
bombing
crewing up
fear
Grand Slam
ground personnel
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Me 262
military service conditions
Operational Training Unit
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF Upper Heyford
RAF Winthorpe
sanitation
service vehicle
Stirling
Tallboy
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/669/10073/AAn00086-150722.1.mp3
b69da3885a99576f6754191029cb4a7c
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
An00086
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with a flight engineer who completed a full tour of operations on Lancasters. The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by a donor who wishes to be anonymous and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-06-22
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
An00086
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AS: My name is Adam Sutch and I’m conducting an oral interview for the International Bomber Command Centre Archive. It’s the 22nd of July 2015. The interviewee wishes to preserve his anonymity but I can record that he was a flight engineer on a Lancaster squadron from May 1944 carrying out a full tour of operations. Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. I’d like to set the scene by asking you to describe your life before joining the Air Force.
Anonymous: My life before joining the Air Force. Right. Well, I was one of three sons of a widowed mother and in 1939 I was fourteen years old, I think. Yes. Fourteen. Both my brothers, well one brother was already in the Royal Navy having joined when he was twenty one in 1936. So he was at sea when the war started and my second brother joined the Air Force a few months later. So I was left at home to comfort mother and because most of our school in Kent were disrupted by evacuation of children I left school and worked in Chatham Dockyard for a time in various jobs and took the apprentice’s exam there. And was about to sign indentures to become a bench carpenter or something similar but backed off that and my mother couldn’t persuade me from setting my sights on joining the Air Force when I was eighteen. But before that I attempted the aircrew selection board at seventeen and a quarter. I expect you know about that. When one went to London for a selection day and went home miserable because one had failed. But, and they told me to come back when I was eighteen. Ok. And so I went back to Chatham Dockyard and then I, as soon as I was approaching eighteen I volunteered for the Royal Air Force. For ground duties in fact because I’d failed the Aircrew Selection Board first time around. Then what happened? Yes. I was called up. Did the usual rooting through square bashing at Skegness for six weeks and did ability, multiple, multi-choice questionings to see what I was fit for. And they said, ‘Well, you would make a half decent flight mechanic.’ So I was then posted to Cosford for a six month flight mechanic’s course I sort of quite enjoyed. During the course the aircrew occupational flight engineer was introduced. And I think that was in ‘42/’43. Hang on a minute. Ok. Yes. So that was halfway through that flight mechanic’s course. They sent around recruiting sergeants to gather volunteers for aircrew you see. And, and I saw it as an opportunity to do what I’d wanted to do from the start. Aircrew selection board at Birmingham. And I passed that one. Some of the questions were the same ones as I’d answered earlier. But anyway, anyway I passed that one and then I had to complete the flight mechanic’s course before I could go down to St Athan. Anyway, I did that. I did quite well in the exam when I passed out. Then I had to wait for the, for the entries to be teamed up properly you know. In the right capacities and so on. So I did a period of maintenance work on Spitfires on 222 Squadron at Hornchurch. Then in [pause] when did I go? September ’43. Oh, that’s when, yes then I went to St Athan in ’43 as part of the entry of — oh we were all ex-flight mechanics in that particular entry because they based your training to be a flight engineer on your previous experience. So they had a good history of that you see. So that was that and that lasted until January ’44. Way into the spring of ’44. And the day of my final exam I was in hospital with the flu. But anyway, so I was delayed from my colleagues and that’s just a by the way. I lost track of them. But in due course, it was only about two or three months, two or three weeks later I went to Dishforth in Yorkshire to do something called a Heavy Conversion Unit. You’re familiar with those?
AS: Yes.
Anonymous: Yeah. Dishforth. And from there I joined, well I joined up with a crew of Canadians and an American pilot on 419 Squadron. They’d already done, they’d been up to, what do we call it? Operational Training Unit. You know, they were, they’d been through the first bit of being a crew. A six man crew. But they had no flight engineers. They didn’t train them in Canada apparently. So we were bolted on at the Heavy Conversion Unit stage using ancient Halifaxes to, to get familiar with four engines, you know. And for the pilots too because our pilots, you know they were astounded by the size of the four engine ones. And so it was, we were only there for about a fortnight. And then we went on to Middleton St George in, when was that? May, I think. May. Yeah. Just after. Yeah. Yeah. Just after that. May ’44. Went to Middleton St George. And I don’t know if you want any silly humorous things. Semi humorous things. The first thing we did when we got there all the flight engineers on our course concentrated on Halifaxes. This is a typical bit of service. So, I learned all about a Halifax. This will tell you all sorts of things about a Halifax in there. And when we got to Middleton they’d just converted to Lancs you know. Great. Great. Only two weeks previously. So we all had, I had to do a lot of re-learning and, and we did our customary getting used to flying the Lancaster thing. And we wrote off the first one we rode. There was a tyre creep that we weren’t familiar with and the bell blew off halfway down the runway on a very fine Sunday afternoon. So we spent two or three hours messing about over Stockton on Tees etcetera getting rid of petrol. And then we had to attempt a two wheel landing on one of the — I should have said that the, the portside tyre blew off or burst when we were half the way down the runway. We were empty fortunately. No bomb load. And so we stooged around and got rid of the petrol and then we were carrying on to the rear wheel and the good wheel and we were doing very well and holding it levelly until the speed diminished and the wing dropped. And the, where the tyre had burst it dug into the, into the edge of the runway and slewed the aircraft right around and broke its back. And by some quirk of fate it was the particular aircraft that the CO had selected to be his own [laughs] Such as [laughs] Yeah.
AS: Promising start.
Anonymous: So the next time he saw it it was at the end being towed away rather sadly to the end of the runway. The end of the airfield. And I don’t know what happened to it after that. Poor chap. But it was interesting being with Canadians and an American. You know, there was the cultural difference. I mean they eat like eating your first meat meal with jam on it which my pilot liked doing. American Joe this was. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Joe Hartshorn. He was, he was quite a distinguished American pilot and, well he did very well with us actually. But yeah he was a geologist by profession and a very interesting man. And I’ve got something here that he wrote. I don’t know if it, I wonder if it would be any help to you. He wrote his account of life in Bomber Command as an American and he called it, “Under Three Flags,” because he was an American. He went into the Canadian Air Force because he, before the war, before America was in the war and then he was flying under the Union Jack as well. So under three flags. Yeah. They were an immigrant family. His father was a miner in the North Country and they’d gone over there. Anyway, so where were we? On —
AS: You’d just written off the COs Lancaster.
Anonymous: Was it? We then embarked on our, on our operational tour. And I’ve got my logbook. It’s, it’s a very poor standard of paper in some of the logbooks. I suppose it didn’t get a lot of priority really at that time. Is this stuff I’m giving you any use to you?
AS: It is. If there is something beyond gold dust Ken this is it.
Anonymous: Oh right [laughs] Right. So where do we go first? We did our first one. Let’s have a look. That was number seven. [unclear] in, a French troop camp and rest centre. In Belgium it was. Four hours thirty minutes.
AS: Ken, this was just before D-Day you went on ops was it?
Anonymous: Yeah. Well, sadly, it was. Yeah. Because it wasn’t enough before D-Day for us to get the Aircrew Europe medal. Medal. We did, well I’ll tell you, you needn’t write this down early but we did, we completed a tour of thirty two sorties and collected three DFCs and a DFM but we didn’t get the Europe. Anyway —
AS: Because it stopped after the 6th of June didn’t it? it was the —
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: Yeah.
Anonymous: Something like that. Yeah. I’ve long since ceased crying myself to sleep to do that. You know. So that was that. Now that was about the time that the only Canadian VC was earned. You know, the Polish chap.
AS: Mynarski.
Anonymous: That’s him. Yeah. He was on 419. I think, yeah there were two air, there was two squadrons on 419 but I’m sure he was 419. We didn’t know him because we’d only been there about a couple of weeks, you know. But reading accounts of how he earned his VC that’s where it places him. Yeah. So that was interesting. That was a revelation to us all. And of course Joe, the pilot, had done two earlier ones as spare pilot for experience with, with an experienced crew. Just, just went as second pilot on those but that didn’t affect the rest of us. So then we started here. When the first, I mean after the initial shock of seeing, they saw this illumination and explosion ahead of you that you’d got to go flying through we — I don’t know if you want to read that little bit. It came out of the local paper. The paper the Canadians produced. Lorne Vince. That’s it.
AS: It’s staggering that. You know.
Other: It’s great isn’t it?
AS: Yeah.
Other: It’s amazing what’s on there.
Anonymous: I think I’m the only survivor of these you know.
Other: Amazing.
Anonymous: Yeah. Yeah.
Other: But did you kept in good touch after the war?
Anonymous: Yes. I’ve got some photographs of meeting the two gunners and their wives in Toronto when it was our golden wedding anniversary.
Other: Oh brilliant.
Anonymous: We did Canada that year. Yeah.
Other: That would have been rather touching wasn’t it? Catching up after all that time.
Anonymous: Yes. I’ve kept in touch with Joe the pilot by correspondence as well.
Other: Yeah.
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: That is amazing. Was this your first trip? When you went on to —
Anonymous: No. That was number — let’s see. It was up the Ruhr somewhere wasn’t it? Yeah. Let’s have a look.
AS: That sounds quite hairy. Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about that.
Anonymous: It was. It was rotten. Yeah. June the — what was it? Number six I thought it was. Bad luck when you can’t read your own logbook isn’t it? Fighter cover. Oh, Sterkrade. That’s the one.
AS: Ok.
Anonymous: That’s the one. Number six.
AS: Ok. So, so that was a daylight op.
Anonymous: No, it was night.
AS: Ok
Anonymous: Does it, does it give a departure time or —
AS: It does. Yeah. 20:14 you’re right
Anonymous: On there. It doesn’t say that?
AS: 20:14. Yeah. You’re right.
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: So obviously your gunners are heavily involved. What, what happened on that particular occasion? Can you tell us a little about that?
Anonymous: Well we were, there was a lot of, let me just refresh my memory on it. Then it was, “Shot up by a fighter.” Yeah. “Hammy injured.” Yeah. Ok. Yeah. What happened was the rear gunner shouted out. We were, we were within sight of the target in the Ruhr and Lorne Vince, the rear gunner, shouted, ‘Corkscrew.’ You know, ‘There’s a fighter coming in.’ Or whatever he said at the time. And he let off a burst and the chap came around again. He must have ducked under us and come up again and he raked us from the rear turret right up through the aircraft. The mid-upper turret had a hole, both sides of it, both sides of the globe, you know and poor old Jason was sat there with his head still on, you know. But he was alright. A bit shaken up. And then it came up through the, through the crew area. You know. Up at the front. And some of the flying shrapnel or whatever it was wounded the navigator in the arm and in the leg and he lost a good number of his instruments. And there was a certain amount of flapping going on up there as well. And anyway, Joe kept the aircraft under control and, and Lorne Vince, the gunner must have let off another burst because he got it credited to him as a probable you know. A bit stronger than a probable maybe. Anyway, they decorated him from it and, but we were like a colander by this time, you know, we’re — yeah. And it was very hairy alright but the bomb aimer was ok and we sort of pressed on and got rid of our bombs and got back home in a mess. As Joe, the pilot said, with less aircraft than we started with [laughs] Yes. And so that was our, that was our initiation into the real thing, you know. Yeah. So that was, but Hammy by the way, the navigator, he navigated us home by dead reckoning. You know. He’d lost so many of his instruments and, and so on. Anyway, so he was decorated as well for that account and repatriated so we didn’t see him again. He was the, he was older than the rest of us.
Other: Was he?
Anonymous: Yes. There he is. Hammy. The tall, the tall one second from the right. Left is it?
AS: Yeah.
Anonymous: Yeah. That’s it. That’s Hammy. Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, he died. He died quite a young man, I think. After the war. But, but he was two or three years older than us and it sort of showed when some of you were nineteen, you know and you’ve got a twenty six, a twenty six year old chap with you, you know.
AS: It’s taking your grandad along.
Anonymous: Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. He was great. He was a great chap actually. Anyway, so yeah, so that’s our, then it, I mean I can’t tell you about the variations of the various trips. These were all — if these are in green they’re daylight and if they’re in red they’re night ones. So we, you know, by number eleven we were up the Ruhr again and I mean the typical report would be, “Heavy flak. No fighters.” You know. That was a rail one actually. “Heavy barrage over target,” at Kiel and so on. Stuttgart — flak over target. And so we went on until August time and we were now getting to be a, a sort of an experienced crew you know. And regarded as having a certain amount of luck. Then we had to go, on our twenty third trip we had to go to Stettin which is a long way north isn’t it? And very heavy flak there. I mean the trip took eight hours. It was the longest one we’d done actually. Eight hours and fifty minutes. That’s virtually nine hours isn’t it? And, but we got back unscathed from that. Then we all went on leave and when we got back the first one we were booked for was Stettin [laughs] again. Now this time, I’m speaking from memory now, we were carted around to the dispersals to get in the aircraft, which we did. And we started up and we started taxi-ing around to the, to the hut you know and the breaking and the steering on the ground is all controlled by the rudders. The rudders isn’t it? It was. And there was some fault in that and so we had to stop on the, on the, not on the runway but on the track around. Perimeter track. And they fixed that. Cost us about a half an hour. Three quarters of an hour I suppose. But it’s like going to the pick your own at the supermarket. You know. You get the benefit and then you’ve got to pay for it. By the time we got over the, over to Stettin the main stream had gone through. We’d lost the benefit of Window. You know. The strips. So we were virtually doing a solo act. Not quite of course. There must have been others around. But anyway we were coned by searchlights on the bomb run and, and there wasn’t serious damage but we did [pause] it did start a fire in the starboard inner engine. And we lost, we lost height and we [pause] sufficiently to say in the logbook that we bombed at eleven thousand feet which was quite low, you know. So, and the, I mean it’s quite frightening really when you see these flames going back over the fuselage on the main plane. And the poor old rear gunner in all the noise and shouting and searchlights and so on he [laughs] he came on, ‘What the hell’s happening up there?’ He said, ‘I can’t see a thing.’ You know. So we had to put him in the picture and fortunately we had this cockpit controlled, control for fire extinguishing on each engine. You’d got four, four buttons and you pressed one for each relative engine. And the fire went out. Yeah. It was between fuel tanks. You know, the engine. The starboard inner. And then there was the fuel tank and then another engine but the fuel tank in the middle. It hadn’t got across there and there were no leaks sufficiently to get a big fire going. And what happens with the, when you press that button the engine feathers as well, you know. The blades come around. Do you fly by the way?
AS: A little bit.
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: A little bit. Yeah.
Anonymous: So you know what I’m talking about when I say feathering.
AS: Yeah.
Anonymous: Yeah. And, and the fire went out. So we all breathed a sigh of relief and set off home, you know. And the practice on our squadron was, half way home normally, if you were over the water you would open the bomb bay doors, give it a shake around a bit to make sure there were no hang-ups and then close the doors again and proceed. When we did that the aerodynamic effect was that it changed the setting of the damaged engine’s propeller and it started unfeathering. All the temperatures went up in there and the fire started again. We were, you know we were well over the North Sea now. Between Stettin and Darlington if you like. Yeah. And we pressed the button again and by some act of God the fire went out again. So we, well to cut the rest of it short we got back [laughs] but it was remarkable really. It was a dickens of a way to contemplate going. Yeah. I mean the Lanc was quite capable of flying on three engines with quite a load on but, yeah but that distance over water, very cold water. Yeah. Anyway, yes, whatever, which one I started. These are not here. But do you know it’s a funny frame of mind you’re in when you’re on these tours. There’s some sort of, oh I don’t know the word [pause] togetherness you know. And a lot of, a lot of genuine feeling is disguised by either bad language or drinking or, or too much bonhomie. You know. That sort of thing. But by and large there was very very few that you come across that were blighted with this wretched, what was it, LMF thing, wasn’t it? Yeah. Yes. That was dreadful. Yes. It’s the only service that punish people to that extent to make it so [pause] Yeah. Yes ok. So there we go. Then we got up to twenty and we began to get hopeful now. By this time, by the way we were going on a number of daylights. D-Day would pass and we were doing army support ones. And the only thing I mention that for is that here you might have seen this in oh that’s one little thing. That was, that was an unofficial photograph taken at the sergeant’s mess on the occasion of that.
AS: The Moose Men. 419 Squadron.
Anonymous: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s yours truly holding that end up.
[pause]
AS: No tie, Ken.
Anonymous: Hmmn?
AS: No tie.
Anonymous: [laughs] No. We were just come back. I don’t know. We used to say that the last thing the cook and butchers did in the kitchen when we were taking off, as soon as the sound died down they put our fried eggs on. They were like yellow rubber heels by the time we got back. So, no. No. This was, the reason I mentioned daylight ones was you might have seen this in, in journals of some sort.
AS: So this, taken from an another aircraft above.
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: The Lancaster almost directly underneath. That must have been quite a scary position to be in.
Anonymous: Oh yes. For them it was. The thing is, it was at, we took the photograph.
AS: Oh right.
Anonymous: Yeah. And I’ve got the original. The photographic department broke all the rules and gave us the photograph. Yeah. So, it was us that took the photograph. And what it, it wasn’t somebody aiming a camera at it. It was the, you know at the end of the bomb run, the last exposure on the camera which was photographing the target would be the result if they could. And so that was what, that’s what got caught in the, in the last flash. And you’ll find that in many, many journals on it. Yeah.
AS: That’s extraordinary.
Anonymous: Yeah.
Other: Good framing isn’t it? Great.
Anonymous: Yeah. So, the only other thing we did we — D-Day the Canadian army I think it was, was held up in the Falaise Gap. You know. And we were doing a daylight on the 14th of August in ’44. And it was the one occasion when we earned one of those. Have you seen one of those before?
AS: I have not seen an original. I’ve actually seen a copy of this one.
Anonymous: Have you?
AS: On the internet. On the Moose Men website.
Anonymous: Oh yes.
AS: I have never seen the target token original. That’s just fantastic.
Anonymous: Yeah. That’s one you can take away, I think. If you wish.
AS: Absolutely. Thank you. That will, that will go in the archive.
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: Absolutely go in the archive.
Anonymous: Yeah. Ok. And so that was, claimed to be a direct hit you see, on the target which did us all a lot of good, you know. And this — we’d, we got out of our aircraft coming back from a daylight. An early morning one, you know so about a 6 o’clock take-off when we were attacking the flying bomb sites. Ok. And I don’t know, one of the WAAFs I expect had a camera that she shouldn’t have had. And she was down at the dispersal and she took one of each of us as we got out. Apart from Joe. He stayed in.
AS: How did you feel about being photographed? A lot of crew have told me that, or some crew have told me that they felt it was, it was not good luck.
Anonymous: Oh really.
AS: I didn’t, obviously didn’t bother you.
Anonymous: No. No. I don’t think that. I don’t think we discussed that one. No. We were all too vain I expect. Yeah.
Other: How old was the oldest?
Anonymous: Hmmn?
Other: How old was the oldest crew member?
Anonymous: Hamilton. But he only did six with us so he was [pause] I suppose the next one might have been Joe but he was only two or three years older than us, you know.
Other: Yeah.
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: Shall we, shall we have a pause there Ken?
Anonymous: Yeah. Why not.
[recording paused]
AS: Here we are back from, from our break. Ken, I’d like to go into your memories of the crew as individuals and then perhaps some of the reunions and the way you kept in touch after that war. If that would suit.
Anonymous: Yes. Right. Well from the top then. We had this maverick chap with us. An American lieutenant of the American Army Air Force who had originally gone up across the relevant parallel to join the RCAF, the Canadian Air Force, before America came into the war. And he did this at the risk of losing his American citizenship in those early days. This was later changed when — after Pearl Harbour. So Joe was a man of great flying ability and saw us through many tight, out of many tight corners. And we were pleased to say that at the end of his time with the Canadian Air Force he went back to the Americans and had quite a distinguished career. A career with them. And became one of the few people in the Air Forces who had a DFC from both of them. Who earned a DFC from both of them. I don’t know why he got it in the American one but I know he stayed in the reserve after the war but we’re thinking about wartime relative. W/O Keelan, Keelan, Bill Keelan was, now where did he live? Somewhere near the Rockies. And he, we acquired Bill when we lost our original navigator over the Ruhr on our sixth trip. Bill was a very quiet chap and kept into, kept at his desk. Rarely came out to view the bomb run or anything of that sort. But he was surprised on one occasion and a bit startled I think when he did pop his head out and saw three or four flamers going down not too far away from us during the bomb run. So he was, it didn’t affect him fortunately. So, and then there’s Tony Delaney was the bomb aimer who often, people who wanted to be pilots but lacked some characteristic that was required and often became bomb aimers. Did you come across that before?
AS: Yes. I think so. Yeah.
Anonymous: You know a lot of people going over from this country had the same sort of selection process I think. And then W/O Lyall. He was quite experienced. The wireless operator. Always anxious to be in the middle of things and, and when he, when he was involved in the shoot up over the Ruhr he was, he was very active in trying to get around and see what else he could do apart from wireless operating at the time. Fred. Fred Grumbly and Lorne Vince both had the same characters really in the sense that they were quite at home being alone for some of these long trips with nobody around them or close to them. You know. And I don’t know what else I can say about them really. So, about the, what we were saying about, yes, seeing them again. Yeah. That’s right. Seeing them again. Yes. For our, for our personal golden wedding my wife and I went to Canada and by arrangement we met both Fred Grumbly and Lorne Vince together with their wives at Toronto and had a marvellous day around the, what is it? The CN Tower or something?
AS: The CNN I think it is. They’re broadcasting towers, I think. Broadcasting.
Anonymous: That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s — oh then in addition to that Joe Hartshorn and I kept in touch for most of the period. And he was coming over to Europe on one occasion and came and stayed in Modbury which is quite, that’s this little town here. And he’d expressed a wish to go to an old English pub and stay with his partner and we duly fitted him up with that. And he came over and we had some time together. Took him over on Dartmoor and showed him all the sites over there. And then when he saw me the day after they’d spent their first night in the pub I’d put them in. He said, ‘Marvellous, ‘he said, ‘Lovely flagstones floors.’ You know. He said, ‘It’s the first building I’ve seen in the whole world and I’ve been around a bit,’ he said, ‘That didn’t have a straight wall in it, [laughs] or a right angle in it.’ A right angle. The first building he’d found without a right angle. Yeah.
AS: As a crew. Not when you were operating. When you were down did you all live together?
Anonymous: Well, I mean we were, we were non-commissioned people. Joe, Joe and the navigator Bill, oh wait a minute. Joe was in the officer’s mess, Keelan wasn’t. Delaney was in the officer’s mess. So there were just two in the officer’s mess and the rest of us were in the sergeant’s mess, you know. NCO’s mess. Yeah. So, but socially some of us used to go to the dance hall in Stockton on Tees. The Maison de Dance I think it was called [laughs] with the pub right opposite the door. Yes. So that was our, that was our sort of, I don’t know, our respite I suppose. Swap one noise for another. Yes. But I shall forever remember the Glenn Miller record of “American Patrol,” because we used to think at times it was the only one the band knew. But it stayed with me you know. The American.
Other: The theme tune.
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: Your tour seemed to pass relatively quickly. You got thirty two ops in in what, four months which is, is quite — did you feel that you were, it was all happening under pressure? Bang bang bang or did you get lots of time off?
Anonymous: I don’t, I can’t recall. I don’t think we were ever concerned about the frequency. Only if we’d had four in one week we might have done but it was sufficiently phased, I think, to avoid that. I mean during the, this isn’t for, for the narrative by the way, my narrative. My personal view is that the area or the timing of the, all the bravery and so on of Bomber Command doesn’t give enough attention to the early ones who would take off, six or eight of them. Blenheims would take off from Detling and if a couple came back, you know, they’d had a good day. Their navigation wasn’t as good and the equipment wasn’t, was it? You know. But some of those chaps were doing very very long deep European ones and coastal ones. Heavily defended. You know, around the dockyards and so on. I sometimes think that they almost deserve a separate recognition but I know that’s, that’s a vain hope. I do feel, you know, it’s quite right. I mean, if you lose fifty four thousand people and you’re the only command that ever, that was still going at the end of the war that started off then there’s going to be a lots of bravery. I mean there must have been thousands of acts of bravery that nobody will ever know about. Mustn’t there? Yeah.
AS: Someone has to come back to tell. Yeah.
Anonymous: That’s right. Yes. I mean if our, if our engines hadn’t reignited or if the one hadn’t come to life again we could have been in the bottom of the North Sea couldn’t we? In August 1944. No trace. That’s what Runnymede is largely about you know. People who, well they don’t know whether there’s any grave for them. Yeah. Ok. So what was the question?
AS: We were, we had been through your recollections of your crew and keeping in touch after the war. Perhaps we could, we could move on a bit to a different aspect of being a crew. I mean it’s often said that the, the successful and surviving crews were in large part very very disciplined and very skilled. Was your captain? Were you, as a crew practicing your drills, emergency drills religiously? How did you become such an efficient and surviving crew?
Anonymous: Yeah. [pause] I can’t say there was ever any dedicated. You’d have to be selective about what you put here because I don’t want, the last thing I want to do is ruffle, ruffle any feathers. We rarely had team cooperation lectures or practices. We used to do it in practical ways by doing cross country’s at night, you know. And bombing Hull at night. That sort of thing. Yeah. It was practical. Hands on building really. But the most thing, the best thing to build the morale and so on was to get involved in to our Ruhr experience and see what comes out. You know. See where the deficiencies are. Because I mean, talking in modern, modern terms we have this thing called the annual review in big business now don’t we?
AS: Yeah.
Anonymous: And there was a lot of suspicion about it when it first came in wasn’t there? Because they thought it was a way of getting rid of me but in fact it was the positive was you got many good qualities which we want to further and exploit and tidy them up or you’ve got several bad habits that are not acceptable. You know. There was a [pause] but I mean none of that, the services have got the basis, or the big advantage of having discipline haven’t they? You know. Ranking. If you come, I was asked to come and work in Plymouth for a time. You can’t say to a man in Civvy Street, ‘You’ll do this because,’ you know, ‘I’ve got three pips and you’ve got three stripes,’ you know. Yeah. You can’t do that. But the military and all the, all those people that have the big weapon of discipline haven’t we? Disciplinary procedures and so on. Anyway, I don’t know why I’m telling you all that but that’s what came more when I was I was doing, well involved in personnel work before I retired you see. So.
AS: I think there’s an element of doing a post mortem really after action. And you linked it to the Ruhr. Your Ruhr operations. So was that, was that a feature of your crew interaction that you discussed previous operations? Hairy experiences or —
Anonymous: I didn’t, I wasn’t party to any discussion on that.
AS: Yeah.
Anonymous: No. No. I mean there’s a certain amount of, of relief really that the survivors if you like come back. I don’t, I can’t recall any where they said well we knew there was a bit of a weak link there, you know. Or he ought to be off to Eastchurch. To the LMF camp. You know. Yeah. Yeah. So —
AS: Could we go down a slightly different track and this would be very familiar to you but perhaps not to many people who’ll listen to this interview. Could you, could you take me through a raid from, from basically getting up, going through the briefing. I know a lot of them are different but if you —
Anonymous: You’re asking a lot.
AS: Ok.
Anonymous: I mean I’m ninety one next month, you know. You’re doing very well. You’re dredging all that [laughs]
AS: Would you like me to stop?
Anonymous: Yeah. Go on. Stop it for a minute. Yeah.
[recording paused]
Anonymous: That was not dealt with. No. No. That’s, that’s not right. There wasn’t any so it didn’t need to be dealt with. Joe was a very good, very good captain and, yeah, he really was. He was, he was quite an impressive bloke. He was, he didn’t go, he didn’t socialise a lot. He would, he would never go to hear the, “American Patrol” in the dance hall, you know. You wouldn’t find him there. But, yeah, he was, he was a good man and he held the team together very well. Yeah. So no. I can’t, I can’t deal with that question very, very much I’m afraid from personal experience.
AS: That’s absolutely, absolutely fine.
Anonymous: Ok. But I mean as far as the sequence goes each, each aircrew category had their own building somewhere on the, you know, their hut. The flight engineer’s hut was down near the dispersals. So you’d go down there in the morning and on the wall there was a list like a league table and and it would say, “Flying tonight,” Or whatever, you know, “Engaged tonight.” And there would be the captain’s name all the way down. And then the last figure on it would, I think from memory, fuel load. You know. Which caused speculation then because they said fuel load, or bomb load, whichever. If the, if it was a lot of petrol and not so much bomb load you knew you were going a long way. That’s right. So, so there’d just be the captain’s name and then briefing would be about, well it would depend on the take-off time really. And you’d all go down to the, to the central building and be briefed. All the crew. 419, everybody went. You know. The whole crew. And you were briefed by the various people. The Met people and the navigational people and one or two others and yes I remember the day of Arnhem. Arnhem was it? Yeah. Arnhem. Joe was, Joe was labelled with the name of ‘fearless Hartshorn’[laughs] Yeah. He carried that label for some time. But they had this tape going across Europe you know. The end of the tape would be the target. And, and then there was one that finished on the, right on the coastline. And I remember the, the briefer saying, ‘Don’t get fooled by that one that finishes at the coastline. It’s not Fearless off on his own again,’ you know, or something like that. And [laughs] but in fact it was, it was the Arnhem flight that was being carried out by the airborne people. And they were just telling us this would be about. You know, there would be a lot of activity down there. And we were doing, we did a diversionary raid further south. I can’t remember when it was but if you know the date of Arnhem I could probably tell you when it was from here. But anyway, yeah so that would and then we’d all troop off and go and have our yellow rubber heel at the, you know [laughs] Or was that when we came back wasn’t it? When we came back. Yeah. That maligns the cooks and butchers of course but it was one of those things that happened in the service isn’t it? Yeah. So we’d then go back to our huts or whatever and get ready in our own ways, you know. Personal ways. Prepare. One thing I don’t know. We were in Nissen huts until we could get a room in the sergeant’s mess which was usually overbooked and you’d get about eight or ten of us in a Nissen hut. And you know what they are don’t you? Nissen huts.
AS: Yes.
Anonymous: I’m sure you do. Yeah. And there was only one. Replacement crews would come in. You know, the NCOs of replacement crews would come in to make up the numbers in the crew. And one of the bravest acts I saw within the service culture was a Roman Catholic Canadian. It might have been a French Canadian who came in with some replacements and came about, I don’t know, late evening. We’d all started settling down. And he kept his light on and he actually knelt by his bed and did his prayers. You know. And it took courage of a great sort I think, you know. He was laying himself open to a lot of leg pulling and so on. Yes. But they didn’t make it back from their first trip. Yes. Sad little story but —
Other: In a group of young men it was a pretty brave act wasn’t it?
Anonymous: Well in that, at that company yeah I think it was so unusual. Nobody, nobody made anything of it you know. Mind you we were a good lot. A decent lot in our hut you know. Yeah. The best hut to be in. Yeah. Ok. Alright. So, there we go. So where are we now Alan?
AS: We were preparing ourselves for, or you were preparing yourselves for, for the op.
Anonymous: Oh yes. Well then you’d gather your stuff. Any lucky omens you’d got you stuck in your top pocket, you know and all that sort of thing. And you’d go down and go to the equipment room and pick up your parachute and, and any other gear you’d got in your locker that you needed to take. And then get carted out in the in the wagons, you know to the dispersals. And there you would wait until you got the word to get in. To load up, so of speak. And that one, that one, this one here — that would have been that stage there. Some of them have got their Mae Wests on haven’t they? Yeah that’s right. So we were ready to that stage, you see. Got their Mae Wests and their parachute harness on. Joe, the pilot was quite different because he had to have a parachute he sat on didn’t he? But the others had them clipped on there. But yeah, so you’d then get the word to get on, load up and then you’d get your signal to join the queue going around the perimeter track and you’d be four or five back from the, what was it? Black or white hut was it? Where the starter was. Anyway —
AS: Runway control van.
Anonymous: Yeah. Run control. That’s right. So then you’d, in due course roll around to the start you know, when you got the signals and do your run up. And get the engines going nicely and when you got the green off you went. And at Middleton St George the main runway ended with quite a valley across it. If that was the runway, that was the runway, there was a valley and on the other side of the valley there was a very nice farmhouse. And during the summer, it was double British summertime don’t forget, you could be quite late and the farmer and his wife and family would all come out and we used to think well that was decent of them to come and see us off, you know. What they were scared of was that we weren’t going to make it off the end [laughs] you know and they were the first in line. Yeah. That was the cynical view of it, you know, but, yes, so that was the sort of thing you know. Then the flight engineer and the pilot or the bomb aimer, sometimes the bomb aimer assisted. Sometimes the flight engineer assisted on following up with the — because you’ve got the throttle and you have the revs you know, haven’t you? You know, so the person assisting the pilot would be the follow up hand on the quadrant that increased the power. You know all about that. And hopefully two thirds of the way down you’d feel the big lift, you know. Yeah. Then you’d stooge around for an hour over the coast. And then when the stream was formed off you’d go, you know. Yeah. And —
AS: Could I just pause you there about, I’m interested in the, in the forming up process.
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: Some stations had an assembly point. It sounds like you did too. Over the coast where you climbed to height.
Anonymous: Yeah. I think it was often when there was more than one station. One more airfield you know, involved. Maybe four or five squadrons, you know. And I suppose it was a precautionary thing as much as anything. As strategic. Because what’s the position? You want, say five hundred aircraft bombing a target you know. That’s a lot of aircraft milling around isn’t it? So you’ve got to have some discipline about altitude and longitude and all positions, I think. Yeah. So that was I think functionally necessitated. A functional necessity. Yeah. Yes. And the Window cover as well. You know. The bomb aimer used to hate that job. They were like, you know these Christmas wrappers. Christmas crackers. No. Chains. Paper chains you used to make. Strips of paper about like that but about that size those Windows were and they were silver paper. A little more. And he had a little chute by the side of his position and he had bundles of these all the way up. But he thought it was a very menial job for him to be doing. He wanted me to do it. No [laughs] He never told me I should be doing it but I didn’t volunteer. So yeah. It’s all these little things that make life what it is you know.
AS: So on the way you’d be at least, you know a pair of eyes in the cockpit.
Anonymous: Oh yes.
AS: And also was it also fuel management? Was that your main responsibilities?
Anonymous: That was. Yes. Yes. Yes. I’ll show you a book. A dear friend of mine who died three or four weeks ago gave me and it’s the, it’s a book on the Lancaster and it’s got marvellous pictures of the panels of the — it’s got, it’s got the original requirement of contractors to build this. To build the Lancaster. Yeah. I don’t know where he got it from but he was, he was an enthusiast. A Lancaster enthusiast. And he used to ask me questions. He was a trained, a trained mechanical engineer and he used to ask me questions about the Lancaster that I couldn’t answer [laughs] Typical, you know. Yeah. Because he really examined them right down. Yeah. But I’ll show you that book.
AS: That would be great. And you must have been a Jack of all trades because it’s hydraulics, its pneumatics, it’s electrics. It’s —
Anonymous: Oh yes. What staggered me, I don’t want you to mark it for neatness or anything but that was the sort of thing. This was the, this was the pre — this was the learning about the internal combustion engine to start with. Which was a lesson to me. And then you moved on to a specific aircraft. Your last six or eight weeks of training and you learned everything about that aircraft. And this one was the Halifax Mark 3 with a radial engine with a sleeve valved engine. You know. A very, a very unusual engine and so this is, there’s the engineer’s panel look. Open.
AS: Was that standardised with the Lanc or is that too much to expect?
Anonymous: Oh no, they were. I should think they were in competition really but, for the work but I imagine the language was the same but the, the construction would have been you know the positioning and so on.
AS: So this is what you were saying earlier that suddenly when you go to 419 and you’re on Lancs you have to relearn.
Anonymous: Yes. Who’s that?
Other 2: It’s only me.
Anonymous: Oh is there —
[recording paused]
Anonymous: When the bandit was behind us, ‘Corkscrew. Corkscrew. Corkscrew left. Corkscrew left,’ you know. Get out of the way. You know. And this was to reduce the area that the fighter had to fire at but you all had an observation point for fighters anyway and mine was the [pause] where’s that, is there a — where’s that picture gone? Yeah. The, no, the flight engineer’s position was on the, that’s it on the starboard side. Level with the pilot. But well just a little bit behind that. Just there. And there was a sliding window there and that was with a, with a blip, an observation blip. You know. Bubble in the —
AS: A blister. Yeah.
Anonymous: In the window. Yeah. And that was my, so that I could see. So the flight engineer could see below.
Other 2: A small one for you.
AS: Ok.
Other 2: A slightly larger for you.
AS: Is mum home?
[recording paused]
Anonymous: Yeah. Well, my responsibility was to observe through this what would you call it? Bubble window I suppose, which just stuck out a bit from the fuselage and to see if any aircraft, any bandits as we called them were coming up that way. But why I was really telling you that was, when the, when the chap hit us with that spray from the rear turret up through and through the front the window, I was looking at, out of, disappeared. It disappeared [laughs] It just went. Now, I don’t know if there was a break in his bullet supply or whether it was afterwards. We thought it was the pressure really building up inside the fuselage that blew it out. But, you know, I might have come home without my head. But —
Other: So were you guys strapped in? I mean if the window disappears surely there was quite a high chance that you might too.
Anonymous: Yeah. Well it wasn’t that big a window. It was, well I suppose about that.
Other: Ok.
Anonymous: Like that. And it had this like a pregnant window. And it was to enable you to see under the aircraft. ‘Cause one of their wicked weapons afterwards was the upward firing cannon wasn’t it? Yeah. So there we are. So we lost that and Joe lost part of his window and so did the bomb aimer right down there. So that was a good rake from back to front. He must have thought he’d nailed us, you know. But I mustn’t concentrate just on that one but that was it but it’s the best one. I can’t remember many details. I’ve got so many of them. But, sorry Alan. You said you’d got me to where?
AS: You, you were airborne. That’s one of your hairiest moments. Was there any discussion about going on or going back or just the pilot decides off you go?
Anonymous: I think the [pause] I’ll tell you, I mean I can tell you something from memory which I wouldn’t want put in any, anything subsequently.
[recording paused]
Anonymous: Yeah. I suppose my most vivid recollection of flak and its potential was the raid — I might find it here. It’s towards the end of our lot. Calais. Duisburg. We, it was on the 29th 27th of September. Duisburg. It was a lovely day you know. Lovely autumn day I suppose. And we had, what was the target? Bombing results not observed. Let’s have a — right. There was this thing called the random, not the random flak but the flak they just put on with the searchlight on us, on it, you know. Using the same setting as the searchlights. But then they had, they’d put up, they would put up a thing that was radar controlled. They would produce this cone of [pause] not cone. I don’t mean a cone. A cube. A cube of flak. Bursting flak, you know. If you can imagine that and that was, once they’d sorted out your route and what the target might be then they put this rectangle but in fact it had another dimension and it was a cube of flak. And you knew you’d got to go through that. And the most striking time that personally I experienced was on this Duisburg raid. Predicted flak. That’s what it was called in those days. In target area. Obviously once they’d identified that they’re own explosions of their shells from the ack-ack batteries would be concentrated in the area above the target. Where the bombs were likely to be dropped. Yeah. But [pause] so what did we say? Ten ten I don’t know what that is. Not — results not observed. Ten stroke ten.
AS: Perhaps that’s ten tenths cloud was it?
Anonymous: Oh, you’ve got it actually. Yeah. There must have been a layer of cloud as we were coming out. I don’t remember the clouds. But that, I’m sure that’s what it is. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, that was the cloud so it was sort of, it wasn’t an option. There were no options other than go through it, you know. Yeah. And so you’d go through and get rocked about a bit and I mean goodness knows where all their shrapnel went but, you know but it got some of them. I think it was operation number [pause] one of the early ones we were. We were in a stream. I forget where we were going now but anyway suffice it to say we hadn’t a a clue what was around us in the way of friendly aircraft, you know until we saw some flames on our starboard side. Starboard side. Port side. Anyway. Starboard side. And suddenly the flames became all-consuming and we saw it was a Halifax and he just fell away behind us and down. You know. We never knew what had happened to that. What happened to that. But then you get all this illumination. You lose your night vision yourself. So you can’t see anything. So you just hoped that the gunner’s guns aren’t going trail you now. But yeah I sometimes find it difficult to recapture one’s feelings. I mean what was 1944? Fifty six. Sixty one years ago isn’t it? Sixty one years ago. A long time isn’t it? To remember things.
AS: It’s entirely, entirely understandable.
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: It is.
Anonymous: But I’m sure it’s all therapeutic. Yes.
Other: But I suspect if you knew you had another mission to do that you didn’t really indulge in too much thought about feelings did you? Because you knew you had to go back.
Anonymous: Well yes.
Other: So —
Anonymous: I think we used to put it on the back burner until we saw our name on the morning mist you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. But I [pause] it’s surprising really. You know, you hear stories about people not making it. Well, we’re all different, aren’t we? And there must have been thousands of reasons why people couldn’t cope with it. Yeah. Anyway, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t ever remember being actually frightened. Now, that’s, that’s in no way bragging at all. It doesn’t say anything about me that’s worthy you know. But it’s, I don’t know, I seemed to have some assurance that, well I didn’t think about it really. I mean that doesn’t just say I didn’t feel apprehension because I did. It would be difficult not to wouldn’t it? Yeah. And the actual operation six incident, you know it was all over so quickly. You suddenly come out of it you know. But then you’ve got to get back. I was reading the, some accounts of the dam busting the other day. I think it was Guy Gibson’s. Was it Gibson done that one?
AS: Yes.
Anonymous: It was wasn’t it? And some of the reports of his, of the aircraft that took on that you know. And you can see, well it sort of, it reawakens your sensations or speculations as you’re approaching it. But you try to keep occupied I suppose. Yeah. Yeah. I can’t say more than that Adam. I can’t say.
[recording paused]
Anonymous: Period.
AS: Ok.
Anonymous: And the first thing, I mean we had some army instructions there about map reading. You know, he had a dozen of us and we sat down on the grass. And he gave us a reference and he said, ‘Where’s this reference?’ You know. And of course obviously to the army mind it was where we had our backsides then. You know. ‘We’re sitting on it sergeant,’ you know. That sort of thing. We had to do the usual coupling up with another person and being carted away from the camp about, I don’t know, twenty miles. Something like that. Making your own way back to the camp. So we had that one. We had the good fortune to find a lorry with a friendly driver I think [laughs] Anyway, that was that. And then we had to do the underground bit where you had this, oh about that size had been dug to a depth. I don’t know how deep. I can’t remember now. And then a long, a long tunnel and then coming up the other end. We had to do that. There were no lights there. You just followed the smell in front of you, you know and looked for daylight. So that was about the sum of it. At the time things like going away in the lorry become a challenge of another sort don’t they? You had to outdo your own people [laughs] and do all the things they told you you weren’t allowed. So that was the, it didn’t take I mean the whole Heavy Conversion Unit didn’t take long. I don’t know how long. Maybe a fortnight at the most and we went from there to Middleton then. Yeah. So air to air firing, practice bombing. Yeah. Yeah.
AS: And did you see any escape training films or training films generally prepared for you?
Anonymous: We used to have talks on survival. Yeah. About cooking in the field and so on, you know. But if you, if you get an [unclear] if you catch a hedgehog and cover it with mud and get a good fire going. Bake it. You break the cake off it at the end and all the, all the needles will come out of the hedgehog and you can eat it then. You know. That’s desperation for you.
Other: Lighting a fire might be a bit dodgy.
Anonymous: I don’t think it would catch on here. No. So, yeah that sort of thing we had. Yeah. Quite a number of talks on that. Yeah. Because these are only I mean the logbook is is sort of a structure. That’s all isn’t it? You can’t [pause] flying, bombing an installation. Yeah. There were quite some interesting ones when you read through. It does me good to have to read through this again sometimes. Things we got up to. I’ll tell you one thing we saw when we were on a daylight doing air to air firing or something like that. We were up in the, up in Yorkshire somewhere. Flying over Yorkshire. It was lovely. Another lovely day. Hello dear.
[recording paused]
Anonymous: I can’t remember the purpose for our flight but this brand new looking Halifax suddenly appeared in our, our rear and he overtook us. You know. Overflew us. And I was saying the weather was beautiful. Lovely. And he got ahead of us and we could only assume that he was going to show this damned Lancaster pilot and his crew that the Halifax was just as good. And he flew on. And he started messing about and he stalled. And from about, it couldn’t have been more than two or three thousand pounds he, not pounds, feet, he just fell straight to the moors. No survivors at all. He just stalled, you know. He just tipped it up on its wing tip. Brand new. It looked brand new. So we had no more engagement other than to just mayday the event and fly on. Couldn’t do anything about it. But that, that was a bit of a dampener in our day. Yeah. See these little incidents that just, they’re still there but they’ve just got to be dug out. Yeah. So, so what was the next development now?
AS: Could we talk a little about the emergency landing grounds? What you knew of them. Whether you used them at all.
Anonymous: We knew of them. Yeah. I mean we were diverted twice I think but not for those reasons but because the weather had deteriorated or they’d got it wrong and the raid was off so we were diverted to places like Little Snoring in Lincolnshire. And another one somewhere over on the east coast. But I knew about — what’s the one on the east coast? That’s the big one. That’s the three miler.
AS: There’s Manston. And then Woodbridge in East Anglia.
Anonymous: Oh Woodbridge was the one we were most interested in to know where it was and what it was capable of because [pause] yeah. But we had it clear documented but not used. Yeah. And at Manston was, I’d forgotten about that one. The Battle of Britain must have been useful. I mean it must have been useful at that time, yeah because that’s pretty well on the coast isn’t it? Manston. It is. Yeah.
AS: Yeah. Yeah. I think —
Anonymous: Is Woodbridge still open?
AS: No. I grew up near Woodbridge actually. But it became an American fighter base after the war.
Anonymous: Oh, did it? Yeah.
AS: And it’s now open for the army engineers.
Anonymous: Oh, is it?
AS: It’s called Rock Barracks. The runway’s still there.
Anonymous: Oh is it?
AS: Yeah.
Anonymous: Yeah. Yeah. So I can’t, I can’t offer much comment on that other than we knew of them and were glad of them, you know. Glad of the resource being there but fortunately never having to use it. I suppose the only time was the second trip to Stettin that might have involved us going there. I can’t say now can I? Anyway, it was better to get back home. Yeah. I mean we did one, I can’t remember when where we were diverted. And then we did our next op to where we were diverted to. Yeah. You know. Little Snoring. You did that upside down [laughs]
[recording paused]
Anonymous: Look at that. “Cross country. Weather duff.” I don’t, I don’t know if we had to, we took three thousand and fifty minutes. I’m sure we did. “Very moonlight. Good bombing.” Oh dear. Sad isn’t it?
AS: But that was the task.
Anonymous: Middleton St George. “Very moonlit. Good bombing.” Oh dear. Six hours and fifteen minutes. What’s interesting, ops on daylight attack. Siracourt Oh that was a, what was the flying bomb site. Flying bomb sight. There was just a field. You just had a field to bomb and you know if you knocked that one out they moved to the next field. Yeah. Daylight attack on Cannes. Oh yeah. Just forward of Canadian. Oh, that’s the, that’s that one.
AS: Oh the one you got the aiming point photograph.
Anonymous: Yeah. Daylight attack. Was it this one? On Cannes. Just forward of Canadian beach head. “Light flak over target. Good result. Four thirty.” Well we would have. Yeah. They were quite rare you know those. So we were quite happy to get that. What else have we got here? Another one in. I didn’t realise we’d been to Ruhr as many times as this. “Great number of searchlights. Heavy flak. No fighters.” That was a big relief. Flying bomb. We did a number of these bomb installations here. Kiel. See this is supporting the army. And the heavy barrage. Flak over target. Kiel. You know these naval places. Hartshorn, engineer. Stuttgart. What was Stuttgart here? Crikey. Nine hours and ten. That was a long one. I’m grateful to you for making me read it. Read it again. You had your disappointments. Four hours and twenty minutes and we didn’t bomb because it was too cloudy. Yeah.
AS: That would still count as an op would it?
Anonymous: Well it was if you — yes it would. Yeah. The Canadians used the hundred and twenty point system. And they graded the targets as either three points or four points.
AS: I’ve not heard about that.
Anonymous: Yeah. Well that’s how we assumed it was. So if you did the daylight ones over the flying bomb sites would be three points, you know. And the Stettin would be four. I don’t think it ever went above four. And you had to accumulate a hundred and twenty. Or the pilot did if you were a crew. You know. Yeah. So, yeah, that’s what it was. If there was any doubt you used to write the number of points. Stettin. Very heavy flak. Yes. So there it is. I don’t like, I don’t ever, I don’t want to let this go out of my possession you know because I think the children wouldn’t forgive me for that.
AS: Indeed.
Anonymous: From what Gill was saying. Yeah. So, so what more can I answer? You’ve got a picture of him I expect?
AS: Yes. I’ve sat in his office.
Anonymous: Did you?
AS: Yeah.
Anonymous: So did the chap — that’s the chap who writes, who wrote books on the Lancaster and well Bomber Command generally I think. He isn’t.
AS: [unclear]
Anonymous: Yes. That one. And he wrote to me and wanted some information so I sent him copies of pretty well, I sent him everything that I’d got and he photocopied it all and he’s written books. I think he must have died because he suddenly stopped writing to me. The other interesting contact I made as a result of John — Joe. Joe Hartshorn was my pilot, you know. He was a great friend. Apparently he’d met him somewhere. One of the air artists. And he got to be very friendly with him and the artist got in touch with me to see if I’d got any photographs. And yes, he gave me a copy. An original copy of one of his big bombing ones. You know. Yeah.
AS: Yeah.
Anonymous: I think he’s now married a Polish girl and gone to Poland. So that was interesting.
[recording paused]
Anonymous: The attention that was paid to it until the monuments hit the headlines. You know. In Green Park. Yeah. And there’s been a sudden, the Bomber Command Association I think stirred it all up again. There must have been somebody who found the formula for getting it going. And I think that’s marvellous and I think it’s grown since then and they themselves have been largely responsible for the monument haven’t they? Which has been vandalised a few times I think but, yeah. So it was alright to complain, well not complain. I’m not complaining about what the government could do, or the Air Ministry could do in the early days of the war. They could only use what resources they had. What I’m saying is that the accounts we read of Bomber Command a lot in the war doesn’t always pay a lot of attention to them. It might say, you know eight Blenheims attacked Wilhelmshaven and, but but it doesn’t say a lot about them. But I mean you can’t. I was thinking of something else just now. I mean like the, I mean what about the clasp for Bomber Command on the — I’ve heard it called all sorts, you know. Like a Brownie knitting badge or something you know and that sort of thing. But does it really matter. What’s it for? I mean medals are. It’s alright isn’t it? I mean I think they’ve lost their impact actually because with all due respect to the people that have fought in Afghanistan and so on and Ireland and so on you see young soldiers of about twenty five to thirty and they’ve got about eight campaign medals, you know. But it depends what your take is on these things, you know. Yes. Yeah.
AS: So the, have you got your Bomber Command clasp?
Anonymous: Yes. I got it at Coningsby. The group captain there was a very delightful man and Gill, the one that, our daughter that you went to first she did all the paperwork for us there. Yeah. So I’ve been there and sorry what was the question?
AS: Had you got your clasp? Which you obviously have. Yeah.
Anonymous: Yeah. Well, he wrote and invited us up to come up for the lunch and hear the ladies choir sing and all that sort of thing, you know and I thought it was marvellous. So we, we went up, all five of us. Our two daughters and our son and Vera and me went up. And we had a couple of nights in Grantham. Yeah. And yeah. That was, that was very good. Yeah. And what else was I going to say about Coningsby? Yeah. He was, they were very good to us and I met two or three chaps from Middleton St George. Because it was a Canadian thing you know and there weren’t many of us there who had actually served in a Canadian squadron. So I didn’t notice [unclear] too much you because there were so many people there. I mean there were about eighty or ninety people who, who took the group captain’s offer of re-presenting them with their clasp if he wished them to. So I had already got mine and had it put on my — so I gave it to his person. His right hand. And then when the time came you know we were sitting in numbered rows and when my name was called I went and he pinned, he came around and pinned it on me, you know. That was a bit of service flannel really, you know. But it was rather nice. He was such a nice man the group captain. He made himself known all around the place to the seniors. Apparently the veterans have got quite a good reputation in service you know. Yeah. I mean we got our retired group captain in the village here. And another one who was a, he was a navigator I think so I think he must have come off navigating quite early to get into some other stream. Anyway, the other one was a, used to fly Canberras I think. He was a wingco. And yeah, you know, they always regard with respect anybody who was on Bomber Command. Because they’ve seen the other side haven’t they?
AS: Yeah.
Anonymous: They’ve seen. They’ve probably seen some pretty horrible sites. Crashing on to the home runway.
AS: I think that respect is universal and that underpins really some of what we’re doing at Lincoln really.
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: Hopefully. Hopefully so.
Anonymous: Yes. How did you become?
AS: Ken, how did you actually become the flight engineer on Hartshorn’s crew?
Anonymous: Now, well it happened because I was the last member of a seven man crew. The six man crew having been formed earlier into one stage of operational proficiency but without a flight engineer. And so when it got to the Heavy Conversion Unit stage the six man crew would select a flight engineer. And whilst I was waiting at a bus stop in Ripon one evening an American brown uniformed flyer came up to me and invited me to be their flight engineer. Apparently he was an American who’d joined the RCAF originally but was now having to do a tour with the RCAF as a recompense presumably. Yeah. Something like that. Is that enough?
AS: That’s great. And did you instantly accept or did you think?
Anonymous: Oh, I said yes. Of course. I think it was getting a bit short because I think some of them already knew each other you know. But I couldn’t have made a better choice.
AS: Excellent.
Anonymous: Pure luck. Yeah.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with an Anonymous Interviewee (An00086)
Creator
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Adam Sutch
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-07-22
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AAn00086-150722
Conforms To
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Pending review
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Format
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01:32:47 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Canadian Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
This interviewee was working at Chatham dockyard before he was accepted by the RAF as a mechanic. He then remustered as a flight engineer which fulfilled his hopes to be accepted as aircrew. While waiting for a place on the training course at St Athan he did maintenance work on Spitfires for 222 Squadron at RAF Hornchurch. At his Operational Training Unit the crew had the unfortunate of experience of crashing the command officer’s aircraft. The crew were posted to 419 Squadron at RAF Middleton St George. On one operation there was a fire in the engine which they managed to extinguish but while undertaking a manoeuvre on the flight home the engine again caught fire. Luckily they were again able to extinguish the fire. On another operation they were attacked by a night fighter and were raked from one end of the aircraft to the other but luckily were able to fly home despite the damage. However, the navigator was injured and was repatriated home. On a training flight over England a Halifax overtook them and apparently wanted to engage in a friendly way but tragically it stalled and the aircraft plunged to the earth with the loss of the lives of all on board.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
England--Durham (County)
Germany--Duisburg
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939
1944
222 Squadron
419 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
coping mechanism
crash
evacuation
faith
flight engineer
ground crew
ground personnel
Halifax
Halifax Mk 3
Lancaster
memorial
military service conditions
Operational Training Unit
RAF Hornchurch
RAF Middleton St George
RAF St Athan
searchlight
Spitfire
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/888/11127/AHughesWH151021.1.mp3
33613f53da69484a983e122f2ed1e463
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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Hughes, Harry
William Henry Hughes
W H Hughes
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Harry Hughes DFC DFM (- 2023, 159079 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a navigator with 102 Squadron and then with a Mosquito Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-09-21
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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Hughes, WH
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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HH: It’s all in the book, I think, mainly, isn’t it?
AS: Most of it is, but we need to get it on tape. I think. This is an interview with Harry Hughes, flight lieutenant Harry Hughes DFC DFM, a navigator in wartime Bomber Command on 102 Squadron and then later on Mosquitos. My name is Adam Sutch and the interview is being conducted at Harry’s home in St Ives. Harry, thank you ever so much for agreeing to this interview. Perhaps we can start by going over a little your early days. I believe, you were born in Dorset.
HH: Yeah.
AS: Okay. Did you have brothers and sisters?
HH: A sister, yeah. But I went to school in Sherborne, the Grammar School in Sherborne not the big school, not the public school. And, it was a good school but there we are, I think it was a good school anyway but they’ve, in their wisdom they’ve closed it down now and they amalgamated with the Lord Digby school, ‘cause the Lord Digby school is gonna cost too much to repair or something and I think some builder wanted to get hold of their building anyway and make flats out of it. You know, usual thing.
AS: Yeah. How did you get on at school? What were your subjects? What did you do well at in school?
HH: Mainly in maths. I got a distinction in Maths and a distinction in Physics and Chemistry. Otherwise I got all passes except English language in which I got, I didn’t fail, I got a pass, just got a pass so I didn’t get my ‘tric. Did so⸻
AS: Sorry.
HH: Anyway that’s beside the point. Anyway I left there in 1940 and my very first job was a night watchman for some lady at Lewisham Manor near Sherborne, who lost all her staff and she wanted somebody to be in the house at night and to patrol the grounds. While I went round the grounds once, no, never again, it was too bloody scary [laughs].
AS: Things that go bump in the night.
HH: Yeah, there was hooting and things [laughs]. Anyway that’s beside the point.
AS: But this was 1940. Was this, was the Battle of Britain going on over your head or had that finished?
HH: Yes, yeah.
AS: What, was that what pushed you towards the air force or?
HH: No. Well, I think. Well, what pushed me towards the air force was the fact that I went, my father wanted me to join the navy and I, I went down to Portsmouth to sit an exam to be a writer or a supply probationer [unclear] his own clerk, and I didn’t fancy that, but anyway they gave you twelve blocks of pounds, shillings and pence to add up that way and then you had to add up that way and then you had to add them all up across and then the figure you got down here and the figure you got down here should have been the same. Mine was nowhere near. Anyway.
AS: But your maths were good so, you threw it really, didn’t you?
HH: Pardon?
AS: Did you deliberately mess up, because your maths were good.
HH: Yeah. Yes, I know, but not the accountancy type [laughs]. Anyway, we then, coming back on the train, I was pretty certain I’d failed, so, coming back on the train, I had to change at Salisbury and I had about an hour to waste, wait at Salisbury so I went in the town and I saw an RAF recruiting office. So I went in there and saw a sergeant there and I signed on for aircrew.
AS: Just like that?
HH: Yeah. And they took me on as a pilot or navigator and then I had to go to Oxford for attestation and I went there and with all the gunners from South Wales and what have you became gunners rather, from the mines, you know, and so that’s how I came to be in the air force.
AS: Okay. Did you go through the aircrew recruiting centres in London at Lord’s and?
HH: Yes, I was the first one there.
AS: Really?
HH: Very first one to go there, I think. In July ‘41, I suppose, yeah.
AS: That’s pretty early. What, what happened then? They’ve taken you into the air force at that stage, I suppose, you didn’t know what you were going to do.
HH: Well, we went to ITW and⸻
AS: Where was that?
HH: Down Torquay, which is very nice and, I’ve got my bloody reading glasses on, no wonder I can’t see, and then I was sent down to America to train.
AS: Okay.
HH: In the United States Air Force.
AS: Straight from Initial Training Wing.
HH: Yes. Straight from ITW. We didn’t get a chance. Later on they used to, they did a little course on Tiger Moths up on somewhere in the world, somewhere up that way.
AS: So, you hadn’t actually flown in an aircraft when you went to.
HH: No.
AS: How did you, obviously they wouldn’t fly you over, but how did you get across the Atlantic, in a convoy or?
HH: Yeah.
AS: Okay. What was that called?
HH: I went out on a ship called the Highland Princess, which I ended up selling. I sold the Highland Princess, the Highland Brigade and the Highland Monarch.
AS: Presumably not during the war when you got there.
HH: No. Four of them, I sold them in about ’51, or ’52, something like that
AS: Okay. So, you’re going across the Atlantic in convoy. Was the ship crowded? What was the conditions like?
HH: Well, we were in hammocks, you know, on meat hooks in the, you hung your hammock on meat hooks in the lower hold, you know?
AS: Gosh.
HH: And we are right up on the stern of the ship because every time the, I think she was twin screwer if I remember rightly, because every time the ship rolled the prop shoot [mimics a sound] [laughs].
AS: Is that the prop coming out of the water?
HH: Yeah.
AS: Gosh! Gosh, and so, there must have been hundreds of men on the ship with you.
HH: Yeah.
AS: All [unclear]
HH: The one thing you found out, you had to hang on to your four and a half hat because one went missing, what did he do? Go and pinch another one. So, it went all round the ship [laughs]. [unclear]
AS: Like measles, isn’t it? Yes, yeah, absolutely.
HH: Yeah, I remember that so, I hid mine, anyway.
AS: So, you went across in uniform with
HH: Yeah.
AS: Hundreds of other people.
HH: No, when we got to, we were being issued with, at Wilmslow I think it was in Cheshire, we’d been issued with a grey flannel suit to wear in America, ‘cause we all had to go down grey worsted suits, you know.
AS: Ah, ‘cause America wasn’t in the war then.
HH: ‘Cause they weren’t in the war then, yeah.
AS: Right.
HH: So, and so we went down to Maxwell Field in Alabama first of all for acclimatization.
AS: Wait, where did the ship come in?
HH: Halifax.
AS: Oh, so you landed in Canada.
HH: Went to Canada first, yeah.
AS: Okay.
HH: And then, I think, yes I think we were there, we were trained down to Toronto, I think, and then we went from Toronto down to Alabama, to Maxwell Field, to Montgomery, Alabama.
AS: Okay. Was the whole journey really well organised⸻
HH: Oh yeah.
AS: Or was is the usual service mess up?
HH: No.
AS: No. It was good?
HH: It was good, yeah, everything seemed to go to plan I think, pretty well.
AS: How were you received at Montgomery, at Maxwell Air Force base?
HH: Oh, pretty well. In fact, the very first Sunday we were there, first weekend we were there, the American officer came round and, when we were having lunch, and he said, there’s a fair in town at the moment and they’ve heard that you boys are here, so we’d like you, they’d like you to come along and be their guest. So we thought we were going there but no, it was a scam, we were all scammed out of our money. Yeah, so we woke up in the morning, everybody had lost all their money, it was a real American type scam you know and I saw a coach loading up with American service people all in uniform. So I said, ‘Where is this coach going?’ ‘Oh’, he said, one of them said, ‘We are going to a little village called Prattville just outside of Montgomery and we’re going to church and if we’re lucky we will get invited out for lunch afterwards.’ So, I said, ‘Can we come along?’ Then the three of us got on board anyway. And we went in and sang all the hymns [laughs] and, real gospel stuff too it was, yeah.
AS: Deep South, isn’t it?
HH: You know, happy happy-clappy type of fellows, kind of stuff, you know, and anyway afterwards all the American were all invited out to lunch and we were there, standing there, wondering what the hell to do, because it was a long walk back to Maxwell from Prattville ‘bout twelve miles I should think and then suddenly this lovely blonde comes up, she says, ‘You all from Maxwell?’ I said, ‘Yeah, as a matter of fact, we are.’ ‘Oh’, she says, ‘Matter of fact what sort of language is that?’ she says. ‘Well’, I says, ‘Well, you probably wouldn’t understand but we are English’ [laughs]. ‘Oh’, she says, ‘English, you are English?’ And she rushed around and she got all the Americans to cancel so that we were all invited to and she was a daughter of a, she collared me anyway and the other two were taken off somewhere else, I don’t know where. And then, we had lunch and her father was the local judge and he said afterwards, after we had lunch, he said, ‘I guess you would like to take my daughter out for a drive, would you? We gotta a nice Buick in the back. Buick with a steering column for your change’ and I didn’t even have a licence [unclear] never mind [laughs]. Never mind, and I got in anyway and I drove her out, bit of snogging and came back. And that was that and I never saw her again, she, I heard later she married an American navy pilot, who got killed in the Pacific. Yeah. So I could have followed it up if I wanted to but I didn’t but by that time I was back in Canada anyway.
AS: So when did the serious business of learning to fly start and how did that go?
HH: Pardon?
AS: When did the serious business of learning to fly start and how did that go?
HH: Well, when I go to, we went down to, we were posted from Maxwell Field down to Albany in Georgia to an aerodrome called Darr Aero Tech, that was the owner of the aerodrome, I think, Darr Aero Tech. And it’s still there, I was there not long ago. And so, I suddenly had to do a flight commander’s check and he decided, he decided to wash me out so I went back up to Canada and trained as a navigator.
AS: On the flying piece, how much flying did you do? Do you think it was fair that you got washed out?
HH: No.
AS: How did that come about?
HH: Well, they wanted, they, the Air Ministry wanted as many people washed out as possible who could train as navigators, bomb aimers and gunners and what have you. They weren’t too short of gunners but they.
AS: I believe you had an instructor with a German sounding name.
HH: Oh yeah. Schmidt.
AS: Schmidt.
HH: Yeah, that was a joke really. That was in the book, wasn’t it? Yeah.
AS: So maybe he sabotaged your flying career, your piloting career. So, I presume that a lot of people were washed out at this stage.
HH: They were, but [unclear] was never washed out.
AS: Wow.
HH: Over eighty percent. I know it was a whole lot of us came back. And on Pearl Harbour, the day of Pearl Harbour we were giving an exhibition rugby match in the town. And suddenly over the tannoy came an announcement that Pearl Harbour had been attacked by the Japanese and so everybody went home, they all packed up and went home. So we went home as well. And that night, I had a place I used to get under the wire and go into town at night, you know [laughs] and when I came back to get under the wire there was a man there with a gun [laughs]. And he was trying to shoot me because he thought I was a Japanese. He said, look mate, I don’t like your look, you look like a bloody Japanese [laughs].
AS: Did you go out of through the gate after that?
HH: No. Well, I didn’t bother after that.
AS: So.
HH: I went back, well, the following day we were on the train to go back up to Canada.
AS: Is that quick?
HH: Yeah.
AS: Flight commander’s test and then pack your kit and off you go.
HH: About for, about a week later I suppose I was back, I was on the train going back up to Canada. And it’s quite an experience travelling by train out in America, isn’t it? In those days with the dining cars and everything, and the bars and but we had to change, we were on what was called the Chattanooga Choo Choo, but going the wrong way [laughs]. We were going there, were going north but the Chattanooga Choo Choo goes, comes south, doesn’t it? But we were on that line anyway. And I remember we stopped off in Boston and we had a bit of a wait there so we decided to go into town, we never did see Boston because we got on the way into town, we got attacked by these Irish Americans.
AS: For being British?
HH: We had taken them into the war.
AS: Okay.
HH: It’s our fault but [laughs]. And they were at war now. And they’d be getting called up and be killed. And then anyway we got away with that alright.
AS: You were physically attacked?
HH: Yeah, yeah. They had knives and God knows what. They weren’t very nice people. Anyway, I say Irish American but I imagine they were Irish Americans, being in Boston, wouldn’t you?
AS: Big population there, isn’t it?
HH: So, then I went to Trenton where I was interviewed by a group captain and he was Raymond Mass‘s brother.
AS: God lord, Raymond Mass of the Agfa?
HH: Yeah. It was his brother. He looked just like him too. Yeah. And.
AS: Was that a sympathetic interview?
HH: Yes, yeah.
AS: You wanted to be a pilot and then suddenly that stopped. Was the system generally sympathetic to you?
HH: Oh yes. So they were quite keen to take me on as a navigator. And so then I went from there to Quebec City, L’Ancienne-Lorette. And from there up to Rivers in Manitoba. Which was a dry town, that was, Prohibition there.
AS: Oh dear. Good lord.
HH: Yeah.
AS: Were you in uniform by this time? RAF uniform?
HH: Yeah. Wearing a Canadian uniform in fact [laughs]. They issued us with a Canadian uniform, which were quite smart actually. And they were very similar to ours but the cloth is a little kinder, shall we say?
AS: So, you’re in Prohibition and you went out, presumably looking for a drink, do you?
HH: Well, we knew that Mont-Joli was dry but there was a little, there was a port just down the river called Rimouski, which was a timber port mainly. I remember when I took my Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers exams, one of the questions was, could you explain what were the, how many and what sort of cargo was exported from Rimouski, well everybody else thought it was in Russia, didn’t’ they? [laughs]
AS: But you had a clear mental picture.
HH: Yeah, I’ve seen it. Anyway, we were trying to, we were drinking some, we went to a bar and we were drinking this clear liquid, we had asked for whiskey but they served us up with this clear whiskey, clear liquid and when we were coming back in a taxi we were, we’d had about two each of these, we were all very sick we had to stop the taxi we were really sick and we saw afterwards that [unclear] don’t drink anything that is given to you because there is a stuff called alcool which is made from wood alcohol and it’s can make you blind.
AS: It’s like drinking anti-freeze, isn’t it?
HH: Yeah.
AS: Gosh, lucky escape!
HH: And so that was that. So then from Mont-Joli we went to the staff end course at Rivers in Manitoba which was astronavigation, advanced navigations course it was.
AS: What was the basic navigation course? What was your basic navigation training like? Was it mostly classroom or?
HH: A lot of in the air.
AS: What were you flying in?
HH: Ansons. Yeah. Mark 1 Ansons you had to wind up the undercarriage, you remember?
AS: Yeah. Did you take to it easily, to the navigation, because of your maths proficiency or?
HH: Oh yes, yeah.
AS: And you found it easy to be an accurate navigator?
HH: Yes, I mean, you’re training all the time of course and right the way through when I came home from Rivers, came home over on the Union-Castle ship, called the Cape Town Castle, which I didn’t sell. And, what’s the time?
AS: Now.
HH: [alarm clock rings] The taxi, yeah.
AS: Okay. We’ll pause at there, shall we? [recording paused]
HH: Yeah. Astronavigation course A and it was mainly a flying by using star shots yeah. But when I got on the squadron, I mean you had to carry about three sets of books, you know, and a naval almanac as well. Had to work out your star shots. But when I got to the squadron they had a marvellous bit of equipment, a little projector over the navigator’s tail [unclear], which about that high off the table and you had to measure it up with a special stick to make certain it was in focus and on this astrograph there was three stars you could use and, two stars rather, two stars plus Polaris you use to get a three star fix, and you worked out a datum point for the time before you, before you got airborne and drew it on your chart and then you lay your chart down on the table and lined it up with the astrograph and then this projected the position lines of these stars onto your chart. So all, so, the bomb aimer, all the bomb aimer had to do was to take the star charts, he was, my bomb aimer was a trained navigator anyway and I think he’s still alive, I’m not sure, and.
AS: So it was very much team work.
HH: Yeah.
AS: Between you and the bomb aimer but actually on astros. So, you, we jumped straight on to being on the squadron. Did you know, as soon as you started navigator training, that you would be going to Bomber Command?
HH: Well, it’s pretty obvious I would be. Yeah.
AS; Okay. And, so, you finished your training in Canada, came back to the UK by ship, and what happened next before you got on to the squadron?
HH: I went to [unclear], is it Cumberland?
AS: I think Scotland.
HH: Up near Carlisle, north of Carlisle then, between Carlisle and Keswick I suppose. And a little aerodrome there and we learned to fly in wartime conditions, you know, where the balloon barrages were et cetera. Where to avoid them.
AS: And is this when you stepped up from Ansons to bombers?
HH: No, no, this is still on Ansons. And then from there we went down to Hampstead Norris still on Ansons and then we went to Harwell, Hampstead Norris was a satellite of Harwell at the time and then we crewed up with our pilot and wireless operator, I think we already had a wireless operator and we crewed up with bomb aimer and engineer, no, no, we didn’t have an engineer at that time, this is on Wellingtons and.
AS: What were they like the training Wellingtons, were they in good nick, were they ropey old kites or?
HH: No, no, pretty ropey, they were draughty as hell, oh God they were draughty. The wind used to whistle through that fabric, you know. [unclear] construction, wasn’t it?
AS: What was, was there a step up in gear going on to heavier airplanes and operational tactics?
HH: Oh yeah, yeah.
AS: You are moving much more quickly in your calculations and navigation than perhaps when you were training?
HH: We did quite a lot of cross countries and Bullseyes we did in OTU.
AS: What’s Bullseye?
HH: Bullseyes we did down, we’d go down to, say the Channel Islands and experience a little bit of flak there and then we’d come back up again and fly across to Portsmouth or somewhere and fly across the coast there or else we’d fly, out to the North Sea towards Denmark and come back into Hull.
AS: So this was almost a simulated bombing mission, was that?
HH: Yeah.
AS: Training, for training. Okay.
HH: They were called Bullseyes anyway in cooperation with the army, I suppose, with the the ack-ack.
AS: So, when you’re at OTU, you’re on Wellingtons.
HH: Yeah.
AS: Okay.
HH: Then we went up to a place called Riccall in Yorkshire, near Selby, and we had to, we trained, we converted onto Halifaxes.
AS: What, can you remember what year, what month this would be when you?
HH: Well, that would be about Christmas of, just around Christmas in ’42, I suppose.
AS: Wow, so what type of Halifax would this be? The Merlin one or the?
HH: The Merlin one, yeah.
AS: Okay.
HH: Yes, so the Hali, Hali 1, what’s his name? Not Gibson, what the hell was his name?
AS: Cheshire?
HH: No. Gus Walker.
AS: Gus, oh yeah, yeah.
HH: He was a lovely man, Gus was, and he’d taken out, all the mid upper turret and the front nose cone as well, there is a very big heavy turret in the front nose and like the Lanc was, you know. And then, it’s pretty useless that front turret was but anyway. Then, eventually we got the Hali II.1 A which had a four gun [unclear] turret on the top, yes, same as on the Hali 3.
AS: So your mid upper then got his job back.
HH: Yeah.
AS: So, Gus Walker he took these turrets out to save weight, to carry more bombs?
HH: To save weight, yeah. Just to save weight, to make it improve performance a bit. And get a better height. I better ring up my taxi.
AS: So, by taking the turrets off, Gus Water was giving his aircrews more of a chance really, wasn’t he?
HH: Yeah, but then later on they improved the, we still had the Merlin 22s, same as the Lanc had, you know. Merlin 22s, but the Mark II.1 A was a much better aircraft, you could get up to, you know, eighteen, twenty, twenty one, twenty two thousand.
AS: Loaded?
HH: Yeah.
AS: Which is, you were at the same height as the Lancs. And the Lancs had the habit of dropping their bombs on you. Which happened on our very first trip. We went to, we were waiting to have a nice easy trip but no, we got Essen. And then, when we were over the, when we were over the target on our bombing run but a whole lot of bombs dropped on us, a whole lot of incendiaries dropped on us and the engineer and myself had to go back and kick them out the door [laughs] and which is good practice actually, because it happened to us again over Wuppertal.
AS: Really?
HH: But that time there was a, I think it was a two thousand pounder or a thousand pounder, I don’t know, and it came and took our port rudder right off, and the port tail and the port tail blade yeah.
AS: And what sort of problems did that give the pilot?
HH: Mh?
AS: What sort of problems did that give the pilot?
HH: Well, we found, she was, it was still flying alright but I found that we were crabbing a bit. And I remember seeing a light below and I said, take a drift on that, would you? And anyway we found that we were crabbing quite about ten degrees to port, I think, yeah.
AS: So you do all your sums again and take that out by adjusting the.
HH: No, I just took ten degrees off every course [laughs]. Yeah.
AS: That must have been quite a hairy landing I would think.
HH: No, [unclear], yeah. I can’t remember it being anything but normal.
AS: Wow.
HH: And when we got back, the little corporal in charge of our ground crew, he came out, what the bloody hell have you done to my aircraft! [laughs] as if it was our fault, you know.
AS: Did you fly your own regular aircraft that you got attached to?
HH: Yes, yeah. D, we always flew in D, until one time we let, we were on leave and I think it was an Australian pilot took it and he was very conscious of saving fuel. So he throttled right back coming back and the result was that the, when we went to run the engine up the following day, the engine started to shake, port engine started to shake and suddenly the prop came off and went right through where I’d be normally sitting and sliced my table in half, but I was in the rest position now for take-off you know.
AS: Wow. So that was one of your nine lives gone?
HH: Yeah. I tell that story I say, as you can see I’m still here [laughs]. I wasn’t sitting there at the time.
AS: So, did they repair the aeroplane or was that the demise of D-Dog?
HH: But that was it finished, D-Dog was finished then and we got the Mark 2.1 A then.
AS: Still as D-Dog or was there a superstition about that?
HH: No. We were still with D, yeah. But, Jackie Miles, he was our mid upper gunner, he was really pleased to get that. We got four guns, he was really happy [laughs]. But it was much safer to have somebody in a blister looking down underneath.
AS: Is that what he used to do before he got the target?
HH: Yeah. Yes, and he used to put it in his log book, duty, rear gunner’s me [laughs].
AS: Yeah. On, when you were on ops, had the idea of the bomber stream come in by then?
HH: Oh yes. Yes, we were on the very first time they dropped, the Pathfinders used Oboe on the Essen raids. I think it was first used on the 5th of March, wasn’t it?
AS: I don’t know, 1943. This was.
HH: Yeah, ’43, ’43 by this time, yeah.
AS: So, it was quite early on in the idea of the Pathfinders.
HH: Yeah.
AS: So, you went on ops just as the stream and the concentration were starting to take place. I know you were deep in the bowels of the aeroplane at your navigation table. Did you, did the crew see other aircraft around them, feel the other aircraft around them?
HH: No, you are in the slipstream the whole time. Especially when you got near the target, when you’re on your final run, you sort of you feel the slipstream and you have got to remember that five percent of our losses were due to collisions, it has been estimated.
AS: That’s a high percentage.
HH: I think we were told that at the time to be extra vigiliant, you know.
AS: Against the dangers of collision. What about enemy aircraft on your first tour? Did you have any encounters with the German night fighters?
HH: Oh yeah. [unclear], he shot down two, he shot down a Ju 88 and an Me 110 I think it was, yeah.
AS: And this, this was your rear gunner.
HH: And he had a problem as well. A lot of Battle of Britain pilots would have given their eye tooth for a score like that. Probably would have gotten a DSO and a DFC.
AS: [laughs] there are a lot of unsung deeds in Bomber Command.
HH: Anyway then we finished up in October ’43 and I got sent up to 6 Group, it was a Canadian crew.
AS: With the Canadians. How did you?
HH: And they wanted everybody to be Canadians, you know. They didn’t want an English instructor so I got, I quickly got posted down to 3 Group. And
AS: Somewhere along the way you, you picked up the DFM. Was that during your first tour?
HH: Yes, was the first tour.
AS: And what was the story behind your DFM?
HH: I don’t know really. It’s not in the book even, not even in the, my citation is not there, there’s a book of DFMs in the RAF, book of DFCs and DFMs. And I think there was an Australian, called Cameron, he found this book of DFMs but I don’t know, I think Gus Walker probably. You see, I’d broken my left foot, I’d broken a bone in my left foot and what with having leave, we were due for leave I went on leave on with my foot in plaster, came back and had the plaster taken off and then I fell off my bicycle [laughs]. Didn’t help. So, the doc said, ‘Right, I’m going to keep you in hospital until your foot’s cured. I don’t want any arguments.’ And the following day Sam came in, he said, we are on tonight, [unclear] and they want me to take a spare navigator and I said, ‘No way, Sam, let’s go and see the doc.’ The doc was in a good mood ‘cause he was going on leave. So, have you read all this before?
AS: No.
HH: So, [pause] he said, ‘Alright you, you can go this time, but’, he says, ‘Provided you come back into hospital as soon as you get back. If you get back’, he said, ‘If you get back.’ So, he then went on leave. Anyway, I duly arrived at main briefing, done my navigation briefing, I think we came at main briefing and Gus Walker was on the door. And Gus said, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘I’m on crutches you see. I’m going on ops.’ And he said, ‘Why?’ ‘I don’t where my crew is going, I don’t want them to go without me.’ ‘Well, oh alright then.’ So I went in and we went to Berlin that night. And when I got back, Gus was still on the station. ‘Cause he was in charge of three squadrons, wasn’t he? Up there. And he said, ‘Right, young Hughes,’ he says, ‘I’ve been hearing all about you, he says, ‘It’s alright, I’ll take you back to the hospital myself.’ And then I got in his car and he tore me off a bit of a mild strip for being irresponsible and some of that and then as I got out, he said, ‘Bloody good show anyway, Hughes.’ And I think it was he who recommended me for a DFM, I don’t know, probably.
AS: Excellent. It’s a wonderful, wonderful story. What happened, you said, you tried the book in the RAF club to find your citation. Have you explored anywhere else, to try and find the DFM citation?
HH: I did write to some time ago, I don’t know, I think they did, you get from RAF records I think.
AS: Okay.
HH: Because I wrote to them the other day and asked them if, ‘cause I had a letter from them to say that I could retain the rank, substantive rank of flight lieutenant when I finished in the reserve and use the courtesy rank of squadron leader. But I’ve never used it. So I thought it would be a nice thing to have on my tombstone, so I wrote and asked them if that still pertained, shall we say.
AS: And you are still waiting for a reply.
HH: Well, they wrote back to me and said that I’d have to give them some more proof of who I was, you know, passports, et cetera so I sent them up a copy of my, one of my utility bills and my council tax demand.
AS: Well, hopefully that’s good enough.
HH: It only went off last week, so we will have to wait and see.
AS: You mentioned briefings. I know the targets were different and the weather was different, but could you give me some idea of an average preparation for a mission from waking up in the morning to taking off. Is that possible, that sort of things that?
HH: Yeah, because you went down to the, you went down to the flights and you stood in the apron outside the squadron offices and at ten to ten on the dot, if you were on that night, the phone would ring. You knew you were on that night then and then, but if you waited and waited until ten past ten the phone would ring again to say the squadron’s stood down by which time we had all disappeared ‘cause we’d all. Didn’t want to go to on a bloody route march or something [unclear].
AS: So it was all incredibly secret but the routine gave it away.
HH: Yeah [laughs].
AS: So if the phone call came at ten to ten, you knew you were on ops that night, what would happen then?
HH: Well I did, we’d go down to our aircraft and check all the equipment in it and then if necessary you take it up on an air test and then you were back on the ground again by, about eleven, eleven thirty, and then you’d either come back and go to lunch and or else you’d and then after you’d had lunch you’d go on for navigation briefing at about two o’clock.
AS: So the navigator was the first person in the crew to know where you were going, what timing was.
HH: Yes, we knew where we were going, yeah.
AS: Was that a very full briefing, with weather? Is this when you drew up your courses, you got your turning points and what not?
HH: Sorry?
AS: Was this a very full briefing?
HH: Oh yeah, well, the navigation briefing, yes, you got your various tracks you had to go on to and hopefully they’re taking you around the defended areas you know.
AS: The flak and the searchlights, yeah. Was there a lot of work involved for you to prepare your charts?
HH: Yes, it took quite a time. You were mainly with your bomb aimer to help you, you know. Harry Hoover, my bomb aimer was a trained navigator, he trained in South Africa I think.
AS: So, you two were the only ones that knew at the navigation briefing the target. Was it difficult to keep it secret from your skipper and your crew?
HH: Oh no, you didn’t have to keep it secret but you just told the rest of the crew where we’re going so all this business about being a gasp when they, when the curtains were pulled across from the map.
AS: Probably you already knew.
HH: We all knew where we were going by that time, at least my crew did.
AS: So, you’ve done your navigation briefing and what happened then? Just sit around waiting for the main crew briefing or did you have duties to do?
HH: No, we just, by the time you finished doing the nav, it’s about time for the main briefing and then having done the main briefing you then went for an ops breakfast. The ops breakfast, which was bacon and eggs, baked beans, all the things you shouldn’t eat.
AS: Baked beans?
HH: Yeah.
AS: And you’re flying at twenty thousand feet.
HH: Yeah.
AS: Oh, that could have been interesting. What was the atmosphere like? Was there a lot of tension? Was there a lot of horseplay? Was there a lot of fear? What was the atmosphere like?
HH: I don’t know, I can’t remember now, there was a feeling of are we gonna make it or not, you know.
AS: Was that a personal thing or something that you talked about with the crew?
HH: I would never, never, never, never, my mid upper gunner, he, one day, we were in our room, I shared a room with him and he packed up all his biscuits on his bed and folded up all the blankets and sheets. What are you doing that for? And he said, ‘I don’t think we are gonna come back. So I’m putting the things in order now.’ And he got all his paperwork out and everything, letters and everything to his wife and things.
AS: What did that do to your morale?
HH: Well, I wasn’t, I wasn’t very happy about it but it was a scrub that night anyway. Then he said, afterwards he said, ‘God, good job we didn’t go to [unclear] because we weren’t going to come back.’ He knew.
AS: But after that on future trips he was fine.
HH: Well, I said, ‘Don’t you ever do that again, Jackie, I said, ‘You never do a thing like that again.’
AS: Tempting fate. What about off duty, what sort of things did you, you guys get up to that you can talk about?
HH: Sorry?
AS: Off duty, did you get much time off to yourself? Or to yourselves as a crew?
HH: Yeah. We, I used to go out with, mainly with another crew ‘cause all our crew, our skipper was commissioned, so we were all and the rest of them, Jackie Miles he lived in Leeds so when he had an evening off, he went back to Leeds and the rear gunner was the same, he was somewhere just outside Leeds. Sam was from Leeds as well, the pilot, so it was only the engineer and myself.
AS: So you latched onto another crew for the,
HH: Yeah.
AS: The social element.
HH: Yes, [unclear] crew, yeah. I was pretty friendly with his navigator but he got killed.
AS: And did the rest of the crew come back?
HH: Yeah.
AS: And brought him back?
HH: They brought him back, yeah.
AS: Your, we were talking about your navigation training and astro, during your time, your first tour on ops, did you start to get Gee in the aeroplane or any other navigational aids that you used?
HH: We had Gee.
AS: You had Gee.
HH: Right from the start, yeah. We had the Mark 1 Gee which was, used to have to tune it, the narrow knobs on the side and you had to tune it to get a signal and it’s like tuning one of those. Televisions, you know.
AS: Keep wandering off. Did you, was it as a big revolution in navigation as people say?
HH: The Gee was, yeah.
AS: The Gee was, it really did make a difference.
HH: Yeah, well, it did make a difference because, but you didn’t get it beyond the Dutch coast, it wouldn’t work beyond the Dutch coast but you had we, well, you had LORAN later, in Mosquitos we had Gee and LORAN. In fact, it really annoys me now to hear the met men talking about the jet stream because we found the very first jet stream. I found a wind of a hundred and ninety five knots at thirty thousand feet.
AS: Tailwind.
HH: Hundred and ninety five knots and when we got back, I told the met man, I said, ‘I got a wind of a hundred and ninety five knots and you were forecasting forty five to fifty knots.’ He said, ‘I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it!’ So he went to Group headquarters and the Group headquarters said we don’t believe it. They went to Command headquarters and the met people up there said they didn’t believe it either. But then everybody else came back with these winds and they suddenly realised what was called jet streams but now they talk about jet streams all the time. And what they mean is where the warm front, the warm tropical front meets the polar maritime front and all the way along that you get depressions form and then, and with it you get this so-called jet stream would form as well. Ah, so which comes first? The frontal systems or the jet stream?
AS: Must be the fronts, must be the fronts. So, when you are doing your tour, you’d had the nasty experience of being bombed twice by your own people, probably 5 Group above you.
HH: Yeah.
AS: Was that the limit of the difficulties you had? Was the aeroplane mechanically reliable or did you suffer?
HH: Oh, we, came back on three engines more times than we came back on four.
AS: Really?
HH: Yeah. I think we came back on three engines eleven times out of our tour.
AS: And what did your ground crew chief say to that?
HH: Well, it wasn’t their fault, necessarily, well, he didn’t think it was anyway.
AS: It’s just overstraining them, is it, full fuel, full bombload climb to heights. Coming back from the raids, what was your pilot like? Was he one of those that, wanted to pour on the coal and get home early or did he stick to heights and courses as briefed or?
HH: Well, he couldn’t do much else with a Halifax. But when I was on Mosquitos, with our New Zealand pilot, we were always first back [laughs]. Yeah.
AS: Becomes a matter of pride. On your first tour still perhaps we can talk a bit more about that. As you got towards the end, did the, you knew presumably you were going to stop on, what, thirty trips?
HH: Well, I did twenty six in fact.
AS: Okay.
HH: Which we were screened two trips early. I would have done twenty eight for my first tour, ‘cause the pilot had already done two second Dickey trips to start with. [door bell rings] That’s my taxi now.
AS: Okay.
HH: So I’ll just pause this. [recording paused] We were just talking about your tour length. The question I was going to ask is did you feel a real rising tension as you got towards the end of your tour?
HH: But we didn’t know we were towards the end, we thought we had another two trips to do.
AS: Okay.
HH: But, I remember Sam coming in and he says, ‘I have some good news for you, we’re screens and you’re off on leave from tomorrow. You are all going on leave tomorrow.’
AS: What did that feel like?
HH: Mh?
AS: What did that feel like?
HH: Ah, it was good feeling but I forget what happened now. When I was on Mosquitos I think when I was doing my last trip on Mosquitos ‘cause you had to do fifty on Mosquitos you see for a tour.
AS: So, you finished on 102 Squadron and were there many crews that went all the way through like yours did?
HH: No, not a great deal, I wish I had the [unclear] I’ve got it somewhere, might be in that case there, book of all the losses, you know. 102 Squadron losses.
AS: Oh, perhaps we can look at that tomorrow or now if you like.
HH: Well I, it might be in that case, I’m not sure.
AS: Let’s pause this and we’ll go and have a look. [recording paused]
AS: Harry, good morning, it’s day two of our interview sessions. It’s very good of you to agree to this interview. Can we start by going back to your first tour of operations during the Battle of the Ruhr on Halifaxes. Were you conscious at the time that this was a major battle or was it just one job after another?
HH: We were trying to hit Germany where it hurt, ‘cause we didn’t only go to the Ruhr and we went to places like Pilsen, and then we did Nuremberg and Munich and.
AS: Were you briefed on specific targets in these cities and told what you were going after?
HH: Oh, we knew that Essen was the Krupp works, yeah, and we were given a good, pretty good briefing by the intelligence officer what we were gonna hit because one time we went, we were going to. There was almost a mutiny one day because they were sending to some place I forget, Gelsenkirchen or somewhere, I forget where it was now, and [pause]
AS: What happened then? What was the mutiny all about?
HH: Well, the intelligence officer said that he didn’t know why we were going there, there was nothing there, there was just a spa town that we were going to hit but what we didn’t know, of course, it was a leave centre for the Gestapo and the place was full of the Gestapo officers and but you know initially we said, no, why are we going there, you know? And there was almost not exactly a mutiny but it was a fear of you know, why are we bombing this place, we probably would just hit a lot of women and children.
AS: So, this was 1943. So even at that stage.
HH: This is ’45. ‘43 rather.
AS: So, even at that stage there were some concerns amongst the crews about what you were doing and where you were going.
HH: Yeah, we didn’t, the Hamburg raids for example. That’s the first time there was a real firestorm and we went on three or four of those raids, I forget now, it’s in the book, Hamburg in July ’43. That book is falling to bits, isn’t it?
AS: Well, it happens to all of us, doesn’t it? As we get older. Here we go, 24th of July ’43 and the 27th of July ‘43. Ops Hamburg, yeah. And then the 2nd of August.
HH: Yeah, the 2nd of August when we, we’d already realised that the firestorms, you know, in then, we were dropping our incendiaries first and setting fire to places and then dropping four thousand pounders, two and four thousand pounders on top of the fires which, that’s why it’s called the firestorm, the blast from the comparatively thin-cased two thousand pounders and what have you, would suck in the air and the oxygen, you know, and cause these firestorms.
AS: So, the thin-cased bombs would blow the roofs off and then the incendiaries would go inside and.
HH: Well, you know, in that, wish I could find that, you could sit and watch that, the CD I’ve got somewhere in there of.
AS: Is it of a Hamburg raid?
HH: Pardon?
AS: Is it of a Hamburg raid?
HH: Yes, the first or second of the Hamburg raids which caused the firestorm. And I remember watching this from over the bomb aimer’s shoulder and watching these fires spreading and I remember saying, I felt very sorry for the people down there.
AS: At that time.
HH: At that time, yeah. In fact I said a little prayer for them.
AS: Is this something you discussed with the crew or any of your friends?
HH: Not really, no. I just said a prayer to myself, yeah.
AS: And was that really specific to Hamburg or to?
HH: Just to Hamburg, yeah. ‘Cause that was where the firestorms first started. Well, it was worst then Dresden actually.
AS: I believe so in the numbers lost. So, your first tour was absolutely in the thick of what we call the Battle of the Ruhr and extremely, extremely difficult and dangerous missions.
HH: The people who came after me, they’d done Hamburg and the Battle of the Ruhr, and then they had to follow on doing the Battle of Berlin. You can find my very last trip was to Berlin I think, no, it was Hanover. It was one of my last trips was to Berlin, that’s when I went on crutches, yeah.
AS: Home on three engines, that one?
HH: Was that Berlin?
AS: Yes, 23rd of August. And then you did a Munich and a Hanover. What was Berlin like? Was it special, was it the
HH: Pardon?
AS: Was Berlin perhaps the best defended target? What was Berlin like?
HH: It was the length of the trip really. You know, on heavies, on Lancs and heavies it took us eight and a half hours there and back. What’s it say there? [paper rustling]
AS: Seven hours fifteen, that’s still an incredible time. People talk about eight hour days, and that was a full day’s work at night.
HH: Was a full day’s work was being shot at too.
AS: And, I mean, was Berlin the best defended target, do you think or was that the Ruhr, perhaps?
HH: No, I think, I don’t think it was as bad as the Ruhr but it was, there was plenty of activity there but mainly a lot of fighter activity there over the target, over Berlin.
AS: And you, you could see the enemy?
HH: Oh yeah. They were coned and searchlights one time I was on Mosquitos, there was two Mosquitos, an Fw 190, and an Me 109, all on the same cone.
AS: Wow!
HH: And there is a painting of that somewhere. I described it, you know. And there is a painting somewhere that is called Berlin Express. And [unclear] have got the original.
AS: Okay, I’ll look for that.
HH: [unclear] then.
AS: Okay. Some trips to France as well. Le Creusot. You weren’t after a saucepan factory there were you, what was, can you remember what that trip was about?
HH: Oh yes, that was, they were manufacturing parts for tanks and things, I think.
AS: Gosh, here, after Le Creusot, Muhlheim, home on two engines.
HH: Yeah [laughs]
AS: What’s the story behind that? Did they just pack up or was it flak or?
HH: Yeah, they just packed up on us yeah, these Merlins were you know they were way overstressed on the Halifax and we came back on two on that occasion, yeah.
AS: After a lot of, after the Hamburgs that we talked about and Berlin, Munich. Now, can you remember that trip? September ’43 to Munich.
HH: Yeah.
AS: First off, first back, in your log book, eight hours, fifty five minutes. Did the stream hold together, the bomber stream hold together over these long distances?
HH: Yeah, you we were all given certain times, you know, you had to be at certain times on all the way along the track, at the various turning points, you know. And I think it did help, you know, no doubt about it and then with the advent of Window of course, it just threw their ground tracking, we had a little device, did I tell you, a little device called Boozer in Mosquitos.
AS: No, you didn’t, no.
HH: We had a little device which, when they were tracking you from the ground, a little yellow light used to glow. But when they were tracking from the air, a red light used to glow. And one night, we were coming back, and somewhere around about the Hamburg, sorry the Bremen Hanover gap, and this red light came on very bright and we knew the red light meant we were being tracked from the air you see. And then suddenly over the top of us, about the height of this building, just came two, I think they were Me 263s,
AS: The jets?
HH: The jets, yeah. Right over the top of us. And they didn’t see us. I got a photograph of a Mosquito somewhere I don’t know what she’s done with it now. I meant to ask her that when she was in last night.
AS: No worries, maybe today. So, this, the 262s had the speed, they were the only ones with the speed to catch you, really.
HH: Yes. They were doing about a hundred knots faster than us. Fifty to a hundred knots faster than us. And they just sailed over the top of us and disappeared in the distance. There were four jets, two of them.
AS: So they had radar airborne in the jets.
HH: Yes.
AS: That is a pretty dangerous development, isn’t it? That was another one of your nine lives gone, really, wasn’t it?
HH: Yeah.
AS: Your slices of luck. Back to your first tour, you, when did you come off ops?
HH: I went to a conversion unit, at a place called Wombleton.
AS: Okay, was that Stirlings?
HH: No, it was Halifaxes actually but.
AS: Okay.
HH: Canadian group, they are mainly on Halifaxes.
AS: In 6 Group, how did you get on with the Canadians?
HH: Not very well.
AS: Really?
HH: No. They are very, they didn’t want to know us, you know, they just wanted to get rid of us as quickly as they could.
AS: I’ve heard this that they were running,
HH: They wanted to run their own show.
AS: [unclear] as part of the Canadian.
HH: I remember getting one crew and I said, I wanted to send them back for further training because the navigator was absolutely hopeless. He really was, he couldn’t, it was like putting, I don’t know, he was thick as two planks, he couldn’t. So, I said if you’re sending this crew with this navigator they don’t stand a chance of getting through, not a chance at all. They’ll be shot down on, within their first five operations, they’ll be shot down.
AS: And do you know whether that came to pass?
HH: No. They didn’t like this, you know, the fact that I’d criticised one of their Canadian crews and I was posted down to 3 Group and, which suited me, and the crew got to squadron, got to a squadron and they did one trip and got hopelessly lost and I heard it afterwards that the CO of the, I think it was Lane, what was his name? Lane. He said, what the hell are you doing sending us crews that are, they should have been send back for further training. And I had recommended that.
AS: Had you been commissioned by this point?
HH: Yes, yeah.
AS: Okay.
HH: I was commissioned at the end of my first tour, I think.
AS: What sort of process what that? How did that take place?
HH: Pardon?
AS: How did, what sort of process what that? How did that take place?
HH: I just had an interview, I don’t know, who I had an interview with now, I can’t remember. And I mean after the interview I was then a pilot officer but I was a flight sergeant before and my pay was sixteen shillings a day as a flight sergeant but as a pilot officer I was only going to get fourteen and four pence a day. So they said, oh, we can’t have that so they gave me a six pence rise, six pence a day rise so I was getting fourteen and six a day as a pilot officer. And then eventually when I was a flight lieutenant after a couple of years, I was out in India by that time, and I got, well I was on Indian rates of pay anyway so, it didn’t factor.
AS: Back to the instructing. You finished an operational tour, had some leave and presumably your crew dispersed.
HH: Yeah. Pilot went to Rufforth converting many French Canadians and to go to Elvington, French, I mean French crews rather, French crews to go to Elvington, to 77 Squadron.
AS: Did you keep in touch with any of your crew members after?
HH: I came up to York a couple of times and met Sam, Jackie Miles I used to see and my gunner and Harry [unclear] the, the last time I’ve heard from him, he was up at near Shrewsbury.
AS: You all went to instructors jobs, do you?
HH: Yeah.
AS: Did they teach how to be an instructor or did they just send you off?
HH: No, I just went in and just talked to them and told them where they were going wrong, you know, and how to waste time and things like that.
AS: In the air this is.
HH: Yeah.
AS: So, did you do any formal classroom training of these chaps or was it just, what, supervising in the air and on the ground?
HH: Yeah.
AS: Supervising?
HH: Yeah, just going through their logs and charts individually with them and showing them where they’d gone wrong.
AS: And I believe the same sort of thing used to happen on ops, that when you came back your nav leader would go through your charts, is that right?
HH: Yeah. Yeah.
AS: Okay.
HH: They’d assess your, that’s the assessment on each one there.
AS: That we saw before.
HH: The little design on his wall, Charlie had, he had sort of a little square beside each one of you and you had two dots for very good, one dot for reasonably good, no dots at all for
AS: Average.
HH: Just average. Yeah.
AS: That’s his way of keeping track. So, on 3 Group, is this when you went to Stirlings? When you were training?
HH: Pardon?
AS: When you left the Canadians and went to 3 Group, that was, what was that, Stirlings, was that the Conversion Unit there?
HH: Yeah.
AS: Okay.
HH: Yeah, it’s down at Chedburgh.
AS: Okay.
HH: And, yeah, Chedburgh, near Bury St Edmunds. There was a beer drought down at that time and we used to cycle miles to find a pub with beer [laughs]. Then we’d keep very quiet about it [laughs].
AS: It’s not too bad.
HH: Me and a Canadian called Connors and we wanted to, we’d heard about that 8 Group wanted Mosquito pilots and navigators, so, we both applied to go, we both applied to go back on ops together. So, our first application, we were turned down because, being in 3 Group on Stirlings, you know, they were rather short of crews, and so we were turned down anyway. So we waited a couple of weeks and we applied again and we got turned down again. So that night, I got a tin of black paint from the stores and I wrote a message, a letter on the ceiling of the mess to the group captain, quite a polite letter, would you kindly pull your finger out and get us posted back on ops. We’re fed up with this instructing so could we please get back in so and so and signed it Connor and Hughes. The following day we were up in front of the old man and he said, ‘Right, you’re both going back, no way you’re going on the same crew or on the same squadron. In fact, you go back first, Hughes. Connor will follow you in about two- or three-weeks’ time.’ And this is what happened.
AS: It’s amazing. So you weren’t actually instructing for very long, were you?
HH: No, from October until July, so I suppose six months.
AS: Okay.
HH: And you’re supposed to have six months, at least six months rest, you know? From operations. Between tours.
AS: Okay. And then, in July having arranged your own posting really, you arrive at 1655 MCU. What’s MCU?
HH: Mosquito conversion unit.
AS: Okay.
HH: At Warboys, yeah, and Weston [?].
AS: I imagine this must have been a completely different sort of navigating. Was it?
HH: Oh, just very quick, but you, you wouldn’t think it now but I was very, very neat and tidy in what I did. I knew exactly, I used to keep my pencils in my flying boots, my dividers as well, [unclear] my Douglas protractor I kept in my hat with my dividers, which was behind me and my Dalton and, and then we used to take as your [unclear] fix, as soon as you got airborne, you got to operational high I’d take fix, fix, fix, every three minutes, then work out a tracking ground speed wind velocity and then another three minutes later another fix, a nine minute tracking ground velocity plus the sixth, the latest sixth one and another one, further on, six, and I can tell you exactly which way the wind was going, how far out the met was on their winds.
AS: And these fixes would be visual fixes or Gee fixes or both?
HH: Gee fixes.
AS: Gee fixes.
HH: So I’d take fix, fix, fix, you worked really hard to get the timing, you know, of the.
AS: Whereabouts was the Gee screen in the aeroplane? You were sitting on the right in the [unclear]
HH: I was sitting on the right and the Gee was behind me and LORAN as well.
AS: Okay. So.
HH: Gee and LORAN which was behind me.
AS: So, could you operate the equipment with your harnesses done up?
HH: Oh yeah.
AS: ‘Cause you just turned your head and⸻
HH: I just turned my head. It was just like there, behind me, there, but I could turn easier then and it was there, you know, just behind about there, about that angle to me.
AS: And it is just, as you say, second nature, three minutes, three minutes.
HH: It didn’t take long to take the fix but it took a long time but we, we had charts with the letters, lines of the Gee chart superimposed on top of it. So, this really worked very well.
AS: So, what came up on the Gee screen? What allowed you to compare the screen to the map?
HH: Pardon?
AS: What was the presentation on the Gee screen? What actually came up? Was it numbers or?
HH: Yeah. Well, you just, you could, you worked out, you knew what, you strobed the whichever signal you wanted to take, you know, and then you, you strobed the two of them and then fix and then you just read it off.
AS: I guess it’s, so you gotta an alphanumerical printout did you virtually.
HH: Yeah.
AS: Wow. So that could be done quickly.
HH: It’s quite, it’s very quick to work it all out, yeah, to work it out to get, to actually calculate the winds on your Dalton.
AS: How did you operate at night, because I imagine you had no lights in the cockpit?
HH: Well, we had enough.
AS: Okay.
HH: We had a red light and then, what’s his name? Anderson, our group navigation officer, he found that red, you couldn’t see the red markings on your chart. So, that was all orange and green.
AS: Which was easier to see.
HH: Yeah.
AS: Okay. So, when you’d done your Mosquito conversion unit or at the Mosquito conversion unit, you must have crewed up with a pilot, how did that go?
HH: Well, I had already wanted to fly with this Australian so, when this New Zealander came along, I thought, he’ll do, I crewed up with him.
AS: As simple as that. And did you do, did the aeroplane Mosquito take some getting used to it, so different from a heavy bomber, with different performance and.
HH: Oh yeah.
AS: What was she like to fly in?
HH: It was nice and reasonably fast. And I don’t think you really noticed it until you were doing some low flying.
AS: Shall we take a pause there? Okay. [recording paused]
HH: The Mosquito was, it was terribly difficult for a navigator to get out of.
AS: Why was that?
HH: Well, you had to, first of all you had to get hold of your chute and you kept that on, then you had to jettison two hatches to get out,
AS: Underneath.
HH: Underneath, yeah. Slightly forward towards the nose, yeah. And but by which time your pilot probably gone out of the top and you were spiralling down and the chance of you getting out was pretty slim.
AS: This hatch underneath must have been very close to the starboard propeller.
HH: Yes, we, yeah. Yes, it was quite close, yeah.
AS: Did you practice this on the ground a lot?
HH: No. I don’t think they thought you were, it was worth the risk. But the, a friend of mine used to fly with a man called Gill and he went down, got killed, Ronnie Knaith went down with his aircraft, and Gill got out and came home and he went to see Ronnie’s parents and they just slammed the door in his face, they wouldn’t talk to him. ‘Cause they had thought that he’d should have stayed onto the controls until Ronnie got out. Which is really what one was supposed to do.
AS: I hadn’t realised that the drill for the pilot was to go out of the top.
HH: Yeah.
AS: Because there’s a tailfin behind.
HH: Yeah, you jettison, you jettison the hood I think, the whole hood went. And theoretically the navigator could’ve gone out after him, I suppose, but.
AS: I think overall the losses were less on the Mosquito.
HH: Oh yeah.
AS: I think you were safer flying in a Mozzie than in a Halifax.
HH: Yes, I mean, there’s somewhere I got the losses in Hamish’s book, in Hamish Mahaddie’s book, all the losses in 8 Group and you will see that 692 do feature quite regularly, you know.
AS: Yeah, so you were posted to 692 Squadron after the conversion unit. You’d had, I suppose, eight months away from ops by then, ten months, had things changed a lot in that time?
HH: I don’t think they’d changed all that much for the heavies, no. And we operated separately and we used to do Window opening for the heavies, we used to do, we used to fly out with the heavies and used to meet up with them at Reading, they’d all congregated there, what’s that? There is something squeaking, did you hear?
AS: I don’t know, let’s pause the tape.[recording paused] Well, Harry, we discovered what the squeak was, it was the smoke alarm. We were talking about Window opening and you meeting the heavies over Reading.
HH: Yeah. We used to fly down with the and meet up with the heavies and then we’d weave in and out of them, stream, you know, and you could see the strength of the stream then because, you know, there was just a whole block of them all over the horizon.
AS: And these are daylights.
HH: Yeah, in daylight, yeah, it would be. And then somebody in one of the heavies would be signalling to us, you lucky bastards or words to that effect. So I was sent back, been there, done that [laughs].
AS: Fair do’s. Because you could fly a lot faster and a lot higher than they could.
HH: Well, we used to be, weave in and out of them, you see. And then, then when you got to the coast, you climbed very rapidly above and you got to your operational height. If we were going to say, if we were Window opening say for Stuttgart, we’d probably do a, you go to Cologne first and drop a few bundles of Window there making them, making them think that was the target, you see. And then we’d go along to wherever, Stuttgart, and where the main force were going, and we’d, we’d do Window opening for the first wave of Pathfinders going in.
AS: Okay. This was the, was this the main role of 692 Squadron?
HH: Pardon?
AS: Was this the main role of 692 Squadron?
HH: Yeah, well, we were the light night striking force, yeah.
AS: Okay.
HH: But our main role was to bomb Berlin every night.
AS: Oh, you were involved in this Berlin shuttle?
HH: Yes. So, we used to drop our cookie, we used to drop Window for the heavies and then we’d go along to Berlin and drop our four thousand pounders, keep them awake.
AS: Ah, so, did you have those special Mosquitos then?
HH: Yeah.
AS: Those with the pregnant bomb bay?
HH: That one there, isn’t it?
AS: Yes. Yeah.
HH: Yeah.
AS: So, who got to drop the bomb? Was it you or the driver?
HH: Me.
AS: You.
HH: Yeah. Unless we were doing low level. And even then it was me up on the front, up in the nose.
AS: How did you, how did you drop Window from a tiny little aeroplane like Mosquito?
HH: We had a chute, little wooden chute which used to go through the two doors and we just dropped bundles of Window through that. Remember to grab the string as it went down, otherwise you’d just drop bundles [laughs].
AS: You don’t want them falling on someone’s head and hurting them, do you?
HH: No [laughs]. So, it’s a nice day now, isn’t it?
AS: It’s wonderful out there. It’s great. So, sometimes you were operating with the main bomber stream and sometimes as 8 Group by yourself or squadron by yourself?
HH: Individually, yeah.
AS: Individually too?
HH: We used to fly, we used to sing, I made up, there was a song going round at that time sung by Hildegard, I walk alone, to tell you the truth I’ll be lonely, I don’t mind being lonely, when my heart tells me you are lonely too. So, I made up the words for our squadron, we fly alone, when all the heavies are grounded and dining, 692 will be climbing, we still press on, it’s every night, though they never will give us a French route, for the honour of 8 Group, we’ll still press on.
AS: That’s fantastic.
HH: It’s always a [unclear] no matter how far, one bomb is slung beneath, it’s twelve degrees east, one engine at least [laughs]. It’s a pretty horrible little song.
AS: it’s brilliant. It sums up what you felt.
HH: Not as good as some of the songs, you see, erks used to make up in India and down in Burma, you know. One they used to sing, rotting in the jungle, on a [unclear] marshy shores, dysentery, malaria and bags of jungle sores, living around in a bloody great heap, our beds are damp, we cannot sleep, we’re going round the corner, we’re going round the bend, two trips to Meiktila, maybe three or four, AOL’s a keen type, he thinks we’re doing more. When we get back as you can guess, we’ll put this effing kite US [laughs] and we’re going round the, and there’s about two more verses to that, I can’t remember, that’s when the mail arrives, and there’s two for you and f.a. for me you know [laughs].
AS: I think we will have to try and get you a recording contract. This could be an excellent CD on the wireless.
HH: I don’t think they’d allow it to be broadcast.
AS: Probably not, probably not. But see, you, it sounds as you had very high morale on the squadron.
HH: Oh yeah. But, yes, this was when I was on ferrying.
AS: And on 692, as you say, opening with Window and then lots and lots of trips to
HH: Berlin.
AS: To Berlin. Did you ever get involved in a double trip, I believe some people, some crews did two trips to Berlin in one night.
HH: Yeah, we did, on one occasion we did. I think we did Duisburg in the morning and Berlin that night. Came back, and refuelled and bombed up again and we were away again.
AS: There must have been, I would expect, a cumulative tiredness at that level of operations. I’ve seen your ops on your second tour are very close together.
HH: Yeah.
AS: First of October, third, fourth, fifth, two on the fifth, very, very very close together and then Berlin followed the next night by Cologne. Did you, were you conscious of getting tired?
HH: Well, no, because when you’re off, you went into town and into Cambridge and I met up with my girlfriend and she was lovely, my girlfriend, I must have a picture of her, I did have a picture. She was beautiful, she was lovely red hair and creamy skin, you know, and green eyes, oh, she was beautiful. I used to walk down the street with her and everybody would stop and stare, at her, not at me [laughs].
AS: I was going to ask that. And you met her when you joined the squadron?
HH: When I joined 692, yeah. Yeah, we were walking, you remember, do you remember the Red Lion in Cambridge?
AS: I don’t know Cambridge well. I know where the airfield is.
HH: There used to be a passage where you could go through, you’d start off in the Baron of Beef, down by the river there and, and then you go from there to the Bun Shop and to get to the Bun Shop you have to walk through the Red Lion right, right the way through there, the foyer, there is a bar, two bars there and when I walked through there one night, there was Red sitting there with two of her friends and as I walked through, I said, ‘Cor’ to who I was with and I caught red hair and no drawers, and I said, ‘I’m in’ [laughs]. And she followed me through to the Bun Shop and that’s how I met up with her [laughs].
AS: Excellent. Probably best not pursue that story too much further, I think. So, you’ve got here on a trip to Berlin, landed Woodbridge. Now⸻
HH: Yeah.
AS: I know that Woodbridge is one of the emergency landing grounds.
HH: Yeah, well we, very often we had to land, when we took S-Sugar, which is a bloody awful aircraft with a terrible fuel consumption, if we took that to Berlin, we would end up, always end up landing short of fuel at Woodbridge. In fact, one night, when Harris was on this station, we were the only squadron operating that night, so he came to our briefing. [phone ringing]
AS: I’ll pause there. So, after the phone call, we were talking about S-Sugar and its ability to drink fuel.
HH: Yeah, on this night Harris was at the and [unclear] Northrop, our CO was reading out the battle order, you know, and he said, came to, flying officer Mormo, S-Sugar, ‘S-Sugar?’ said Roy, ‘What’s wrong with our Robert?’ ‘Well, that’s got a mark drop on the starboard engine, you’re going to have to take the spare.’ ‘But S f for Sugar, sir, that bloody kite flies like a brick shithouse!’ [laughs] and old Harris was standing there, and he was trying his best not to laugh, you know, his moustache had a twitch and [laughs] you could he’s gonna laugh every minute, you know. But he didn’t, he held it in [laughs]
AS: What was Woodbridge like? Is an emergency landing ground very different from a normal airfield?
HH: Oh yeah, you, huts with the roof off, you know, half off and snow would come in, on a snowy night, yeah.
AS: Not finished?
HH: No, they had just blown off. That’s a nuisance that thing, isn’t it?
AS: Your smoke alarm, yeah. As we got to this time or you got to this time in the war, this was late 1944.
HH: Yeah.
AS: Had the scene changed in terms of aids to navigation, things like Sandra lights and Darky and ground organisation, was there a lot to help you?
HH: [unclear] Much on the ground I think, mainly H2S, Oboe, things like that, you know. And G8, wasn’t it? G8.
AS: G-H, yeah. I didn’t, I don’t know how that worked, I never had that but we were quite content with LORAN. In fact, I got a wind over, going down to, I forget where I was going, Berlin I suppose, but yeah, we were going over to Berlin I think and I got a wind just north of the Ruhr, a hundred and ninety five knots.
AS: Wow!
HH: And what we’d done, we hit a jet stream, you see, and but when I came back, I said to the met man, I got a wind of a hundred, impossible, impossible, impossible, and it went to Group and Group said impossible as well, went to Command and Command said impossible well then when everybody started to get them, they suddenly realised there was something in this jet stream. Now they talk about nothing else but the bloody jet stream and it annoys me that because they ignored their existence during the war, the met people did and we kept telling them, look there is something up there and it didn’t last very long, you see, you were in it and then you were out of it, you know. So you couldn’t use it as a general wind to carry on to Berlin, shall we say for example, and nor could you use it when you were coming back. You might hit it again but it’d be in a different place slightly and.
AS: It must have meant that you had to be on your toes with your fixes all the time.
HH: Yeah. Anyway we,
AS: In your logbook, it suddenly goes from duty as nav to duty nav b. What was the significance of?
HH: Well, I stood in as bomb aimer as well.
AS: Ah, okay, that’s what it was. Tremendous number of operations over the winter of ’44-’45.
HH: Yeah.
AS: So I presume you must have flown in most weather with the nav aids that you had.
HH: Oh yeah, I remember one night, I don’t know if I should say this because it’s a bit derogatory to somebody who’s now dead, and that’s to Don Bennett. He was in the control tower on this particular night and we were getting hoarfrost all along the wings of our, as we taxied out we were getting hoarfrost develop all along the wings, so Roy got onto control and he says, ‘Could we have the de-icing bowsers out, please?’ And Bennett said, ‘Never mind about the de-icing bowser, just get off the deck.’ Well, we didn’t go, we said, ‘No, no. It’s too dangerous.’ Anyway, another aircraft came after us and they ploughed into the end of the runway and they were both killed of course when their bomb blew up. And Bennett never said a word to us afterwards, he was, we came back for briefing that night and he’d left the station. We came back and got the de-icing bowser and got cleared of the hoarfrost. He literally left, you see. And then we went to Berlin that night, I think.
AS: I should think, with fuel and a four thousand pounder you must have needed all the runway to get off.
HH: Yeah, well, there is another tale attached to that, the, you see, we started off with four thousand pounders, I think we were the first squadron to have four thousand pounders, and then they put fifty gallon drop tanks on each wing which were increased eventually to seventy five and then a hundred and then, and then we ran out of four thousand pounders and we had to borrow four thousand pounders from the Americans, which were four and a half thousand pounds. So another five hundred pounds to get off the deck. But the old Mozzie just used to take it all in its stride. No bother.
AS: You had no concerns.
HH: No, and I remember one day when I’d finished tour. I was sitting in the crew room minding my own business and the CO, a Canadian called Bob Grant came in and he said, ‘You doing anything Hughes?’ I said, no. He said, ‘Grab yourself a ‘chute would you and I’ll see you out at the aircraft.’ I said, ‘What do you⸻’ ‘Just bring a local Gee chart and local maps, would you?’ So when I got out to the bay, they were loading a four thousand pounder and I said, ‘Well, what fuel have we got?’ ‘You’ve a got full load of fuel and two hundred gallon drop tanks.’ And there’s a wind blowing right the way down the 330 runway which was fourteen hundred feet or something compared with two thousand feet on the main runway. I said, ‘What are we gonna do then?’ He said, ‘We’re gonna see if we can get off with this wind, the scale blowing, see if we can get off on this, on the fifteen hundred runway.’ So, we got to the end of the runway, and he waited until there was a gust of wind blowing, until the airspeed indicator was indicating about fifty or sixty knots. And we went. And I dropped the cookie on the live bomb target in the Wash and then we came back. And he got a report and said it wasn’t possible. I said, ‘Well, thanks for telling me.’ [laughs] it wasn’t possible. And he said, ‘No, no, no,’ he said, ‘I don’t think the crew, you could expect the whole crew to wait’, the whole squadron rather to wait until there was a lull, that’s turned till there was a gust of wind which would get them off the deck.
AS: It’s a good example of leading from the front though, isn’t it?
HH: Yeah.
AS: Doing the test himself.
HH: It was old Bob Grant, he’s dead now, he married a Yorkshire, he was CO of 105 Squadron, amongst other things and he was, when he got back to Canada, of course he was made up to brigadier, I think. He was a group captain here, so he was a brigadier. That was equivalent to air commodore, wasn’t it?
AS: I think so, yeah, yeah.
HH: I don’t know.
AS: And, ah, there it is Group Captain Grant, 19th of March 1945, bombload take off fourteen hundred yards. That was pretty much the end of your operational flying, I think, wasn’t it?
HH: Yeah.
AS: On the Mosquito. Last trip, February, February ’45.
HH: Hanover, wasn’t it? Or Hamburg, Hanover.
AS: Frankfurt, I think, Frankfurt in your log. And did you know that that would be your last trip or you’re just told you’re screened?
HH: Yeah. You knew you had to do fifty on Mosquitos. So.
AS: And what did happened after that? Did you go back instructing or?
HH: No, no, we were sent on leave and when we came back, we’d been posted, several crews had been posted down to Pershore to ferry Canadian built Mosquitos across the Atlantic. And I crewed up with a different, Lloyd had gone back to New Zealand and he used to fly with Air New Zealand after the war. And thanks to me, because someone had put a bottle through his hand and all the tendons had gone. And so he couldn’t, when we were taking off at Whiten once doing a cross country, we got airborne and suddenly the throttle went back and he grabbed hold of them and held it with his hand and because you had to keep the throttle up so loose ‘cause of this weakness in his left hand. So I said, ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Roy, from now on I’ll tighten the throttle knot for you when you’re ready. As soon as you want, you just say, throttle knob and I will reach through and grab the throttle knob and turn it and tighten it for you.’ And we did that every trip. And but I, ‘cause I had to reach over, I couldn’t strap in, so I did all my trips without strapping in [laughs]. I never strapped in again, not with Roy flying. So he’d of never, I mean, he was flying with Air New Zealand afterwards he’d never have passed their medical if he’d of disclosed it, you know.
AS: But eventually, not in a Mosquito, but he’d be flying with throttles on the other hand, wouldn’t he? So the problem,
HH: Yeah.
AS: The problem would go away. So you’d had some leave, you were posted to fly to Pershore to fly Mosquitos.
H: Yeah. And we were sent on indefinite leave, Pershore sent us on indefinite leave. And I thought, oh God, I’ll be grounded for sure. So, I got on a train and went up to Air Ministry and saw a wing commander there and I said, look, there is a war going in in the Far East [unclear] aircraft ferried out there, coming back for maintenance and what have you. And he said, what a good idea, you know, come back in the morning, will you? And I got the whole lot posted out to the Far East. Fifteen or eighteen, I think I told you this before, didn’t I?
AS: I think so but we didn’t get in on the tape, I don’t think, no.
HH: No.
AS: I bet you were popular.
HH: Fifteen, oh God, when I got down to Lyneham they were moaning, ‘I’m just due for demob for God’s sake, why the heck do I have to, due for demob any day now.’
AS: I bet you kept quiet.
HH: And here I am, so I kept very quiet. And so, I mean I wasn’t due for demob for some time.
AS: So here we are, Lyneham in July ’45. A huge trip as a passenger on a deck. Thirty two hours flying.
HH: Yeah, back to Karachi, yeah.
AS: So by going, going East, you, did you, before you went, did you see, did you go on any of these trips over, over Germany to see all the destruction?
HH: No, no.
AS: Okay.
HH: I missed all that.
AS: You’d said earlier that you said a prayer for the people of Hamburg. What, at the end of the war, did you reflect at all on the, or during that, on the bombing? And what were your feelings about being involved in it in the war?
HH: Well, I’ve spoken to our vicar about it, you know, and said, do you think Saint Peter’s gonna let me through the gates? Or not. So she sat and he said a prayer for me. Lady vicar of course. Anyway, but I was invited out to Hanover as a guest of the mayor and the local newspaper to commemorate the 60th anniversary of when we bombed them.
AS: And you went?
HH: So I went over, yeah, well, I was asked to volunteer and I remember, at the Bomber Command meeting they said, did anybody go to Hanover, I said, well, I did. When I got home, I found out I’d been to Hanover about eleven times and [laughs] so I was well qualified.
AS: And are you pleased you went, did it turn out well?
HH: Yes, they were very, very, very nice, I like German people.
AS: So do I.
HH: I got two of them coming over now. Here any day now. I think. They stay up at [unclear] castle, ‘cause he’s paraplegic, he can’t get down my steps.
AS: Yeah.
HH: He’s, he had polio when he was a youngster. But they come over by air this time so he couldn’t bring his invalid scooter with him so I don’t know whether he’s gonna hire one when they’re here or not, I don’t know what they’re gonna do to get around.
AS: That should be possible, I think.
HH: Yeah.
AS: And these are friends you made when you went to Hanover?
HH: Yeah. Well, they were both reporters with the Hamburger Allgemeine. And anyway I was, the last day I was there in Hanover I was there for about three or four days, I had to attend a meeting of all the survivors from the raids and all the students from university there and the colleges and what have you and a little girl gets up and question time you see and she gets up and says, can I please explain what was the duty of the navigator? Well if you ask me a stupid question like that, I’m gonna give you a stupid answer, for sure. So I said, ‘Well, the reason why we carried a navigator, because we had to have someone on board who could read and write’ [laughs] and their mouths fell open, he went like this, everybody, so I said to my interpreter, I said, ‘Tell them, it was a joke, will you?’ ‘Ah, a joke, yeah, we got no sense of humour, we Germans, we’ve got no sense of humour at all.’ [unclear] So then, later on somebody, one of the survivors said, ‘Why did you bomb the city?’ So I said, ‘To be perfectly honest, we couldn’t hit anything smaller but just remember this,’ I said, ‘Right in the centre, almost within half a mile from the centre of Hanover there was the biggest rubber factory in Germany, so it made Hanover a very legitimate target.’ ‘Yes’, this man says, ‘But you didn’t hit it, did you? ‘Cause it’s still there!’ [laughs]. I said, ‘Well, and you tried to tell me that the Germans got no sense of humour?’ [laughs] And then I was on their side from then on.
AS: I’ve lived there for eleven years. I’m with you. I’ve lived there for eleven years.
HH: Have you?
AS: Yeah. They’re great people, great people. I think.
HH: In which part were you?
AS: I was in Munich for five years.
HH: Yeah.
AS: And then in Bonn and Cologne, in the Rhineland for about six altogether. Some of the places you visited by air, in fact. That’s the feelings of the Germans. How, there’s been a lot of controversy about how Bomber Command were treated after the war. Have you got any views on that?
HH: Well, I think, first of all, we should never, never have bombed Dresden, I think that was the biggest mistake we made. And Portal should have stood up and said, no! But he didn’t have the guts to do it, he didn’t have the guts to stand up to Churchill and it was Churchill who, on his way to Yalta, he stopped off at Malta, And they’d agreed to bomb five cities within reach of the Russian lines, you know, and I think Dresden was one and what’s that? And Leipzig and one other I think. Anyway he sent back this signal to Portal saying, from Malta saying, where is my spectacular, get on with it. So, Portal looked at the charts and he consulted the Met people and the only target available that night was Dresden. I didn’t go to Dresden, I went to Magdeburg, Magdeburg that night, you can see it on there, in that book there.
AS: You believe it was, that Dresden was the turning point and that?
HH: Mh?
AS: You believe that Dresden was some sort of turning point?
HH: Yeah.
AS: How Bomber Command were treated?
HH: Yeah.
AS: Did you, do you feel now that it’s changed with the memorials and the clasp?
HH: Yeah, I think so. I think, there was a time just after the war, when the people who were against us were the people who were in the Air Force or in one of the forces and they felt that we were, they didn’t want us to have any publicity, you know.
AS: After the war.
HH: Yeah. And then, and then since then, they’ve suddenly realised that you know, we had the highest losses of any unit in the, our forces, fifty five thousand killed, which is quite a lot, wasn’t it?
AS: Yeah. Fifty five thousand, five hundred and seventy three.
HH: Yeah.
AS: And you’ve seen a, well, or you see a change in attitudes now.
HH: Yes, I think, younger people are much more inclined to want to hear about it and talk about it and understand why we did it and there is no good saying, well, we were under orders to do it, because that’s what the Germans excuses were, you know, for their treatment of the in the concentration camps. We were under orders.
AS: And you did it because it was right?
HH: Well, we did it because we thought we were, ‘cause we were shortening the war and therefore less people would be killed.
AS: Is it, I agree, you say, that now people want to hear about it, is it good for you and other veterans to be able to talk about it after all this time?
HH: It’s getting more and more difficult, there’s so many books have been written on there, now.
AS: And you are actually in one of the books.
HH: Yeah.
AS: Steve Darlow’s book. How did all that come about? Did you get involved with him?
HH: I don’t know. He wanted, I think I was recommended by probably Bomber Command, you know, Dougie Radcliffe.
AS: Oh, the Bomber Command Association.
HH: Yeah.
AS: Have you always played a big part in that?
HH: No, no, I was mainly in the Pathfinders Association.
AS: Oh, okay.
HH: We were separate from, we were separate from the Bomber Command Association, but I’d already joined the Bomber Command Association when we disbanded. I’d already been a member for several years.
AS: And do you belong to your squadron or 102 Squadron association as well?
HH: Yeah. Yes, it’s, I’ve written a letter to, when I went to the VJ-Day celebrations⸻
AS: Yes.
HH: We had to fill out a form travelling expenses and I got three hundred pounds from the Lottery Fund.
AS: Excellent.
HH: And my son Jeremy, who’d driven me up there and then he got three hundred pounds as well. And I don’t, I hope he hasn’t. So I wrote a letter to the Big Lottery and said, thanking them for their, I said, so, twice a year I’ve got to go to, up to Pocklington in Yorkshire, which is rather expensive for me now ‘cause you got to go up Virgin cross country you know, right the way up to York and it’s a long journey that. It’s an interesting journey but there’s no, there was a little old lady pushing the tray along, pushing the trolley along, you know, that’s all that you get to eat with some coffee and a fruitcake or something.
AS: It’s not the same as a full dining car.
HH: I like the dining cars on, I’m going up on the 22nd of October I think, coming back on the 23rd, I always travel back down on the dining car which, on a train with a dining car which leaves at seven o’clock in the evening.
AS: Do you still have wartime comrades that you’ll meet in Pocklington?
HH: Oh yes, yeah. Most of them are dead now but.
AS: So, a lot of reminiscing and’
HH: Yeah. There’s a friend of mine, who was a previous chairman, Tom Wingate, who, he wrote a book called Halifax Down, ‘cause he was shot down on his second tour, and I used to have a copy but I can’t find it now. I don’t know what I have done with it, I lose things all the time now.
AS: I have a copy at home, I can send you one.
HH: Pardon?
AS: I have a copy, I can send you one.
HH: You got a copy of that?
AS: Yeah, I have.
HH: Halifax Down, yes, it’s not a bad book, actually. Except that he joined the squadron the same time as I did, his crew did. And he’s quoted in his book, as if he was there three or four months before me. He’s quoted various trips and he’s got these out of those old war diaries, wish I could find that. I wonder where I put it?
AS: Well, you’ll have to take your logbook the next time you meet him.
HH: Oh no, he’s dead now.
AS: Okay.
HH: That’s why I’ve taken over as chairman.
AS: After you came off ops, you did this trip out to the Far East, did you then get involved in ferrying aeroplanes?
HH: In what?
AS: Did you then get involved in ferrying aeroplanes?
HH: Oh yes, yeah.
AS: Okay.
HH: It’s quite a lot really. My very first trip was down to Akyab, on the Arakan coast. I think I told you, didn’t I?
AS: Yes, but not into the tape. So, what happened on that trip?
HH: I don’t think that particular trip’s in there, actually, I looked for it the other day and I can’t find it. I must have left it out for some reason.
AS: This was the trip with the Japanese.
HH: Yes, all the way around us were Zeros, you know. We could hear them yacketing away and then this Indian crew comes on with their Hurricanes and the Japanese just disappeared.
AS: What was the radio conversation about with these Indian squadrons, red flight?
HH: Pardon?
AS: What was the radio conversation story about the?
HH: Oh, well, the Indian crews? ‘Yes, red leader to yellow leader, how do you read me, over? Yellow leader to green, you are not red, you are green, you know? Red leader to yellow leader, I am not green, I am red. And this Aussie voice comes up by the blue, you are black, you bastard’ [laughs].
AS: So, it’s still a combat area that you’re flying replacement aircraft I suppose in to the squadrons?
HH: Yeah.
AS: Did you get involved in flying damaged aircraft for repair?
HH: Oh, I used to fly back from say Kamila or with two Pratt & Whitney’s engines in the back and a load of ENSA girls as well amongst them [laughs], sitting where they could and trying not to get greasy, ‘cause these, and yeah.
AS: Yeah. Shall we, pause there I think?
HH: Yeah.
AS: And wind it up. Thank you that, It’s been absolutely wonderful to hear.
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 Hughes
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Adam Sutch
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
2015-10-21
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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AHughesWH151021
Format
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02:28:15 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Harry Hughes volunteered for the Royal Air Force in 1940 and trained in America, where he was washed out as a pilot and then retrained as a navigator in Canada, flying Ansons and Wellingtons. In 1942 he converted to Halifaxes and flew operations with 102 Squadron over Germany, being awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal for flying an operation to Berlin whilst on crutches. He recounts the routines of preparing to go on operations and his use of navigation aids including Gee, LORAN and later, Boozer in Mosquitos. He was bombstruck twice during operations. He completed 26 operations including the bombing of Hamburg which he describes as a firestorm and recalls saying a private prayer for the people of Hamburg below. After his tour finished, he then instructed before applying to go back on operations with 8 Group, flying Mosquitos with 692 Squadron and dropping Window for Pathfinder forces in 1944/45. In 2004 he visited Hanover and discussed the raids with survivors of the war. He was a member of a number of post war service associations and kept in contact with his crewmates.
Contributor
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Peter Schulze
Carolyn Emery
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
Germany
Great Britain
Southeast Asia
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Essen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
United States
Alabama--Montgomery
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1943
1944
1945
102 Squadron
3 Group
6 Group
692 Squadron
8 Group
aircrew
Anson
Bennett, Donald Clifford Tyndall (1910-1986)
bomb struck
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943)
briefing
Distinguished Flying Cross
Distinguished Flying Medal
faith
Fw 190
Gee
ground personnel
Halifax
Halifax Mk 1
Halifax Mk 2
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
incendiary device
Ju 88
Me 109
Me 110
Me 262
medical officer
meteorological officer
military service conditions
Mosquito
navigator
Operational Training Unit
Pathfinders
perception of bombing war
Portal, Charles (1893-1971)
promotion
RAF Chedburgh
RAF Harwell
RAF Riccall
RAF Wombleton
Stirling
training
Wellington
Window
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/914/11156/AKnottS151001.1.mp3
378d56e9297935f50b102ccca94f5736
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
Knott, Sidney
S Knott
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Warrant Officer Sidney Knott DFC (1268143 Royal Air Force). He flew 64 operations as an air gunner with 467 and 582 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-01
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Knott, S
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AS: My name is Adam Sutch. I’m conducting an interview for the International Bomber Command Centre. I’m interviewing Mr Sidney Knott. A Bomber Command aircrew member of 467 Squadron during the Second World War. Also present is his daughter Mrs Jean Mangan. Sidney, I’m really grateful to you for agreeing to this interview. Could we start by discussing your time before the war? Before you joined the Air Force. When you were growing up. Schooling and that sort of thing
SK: Yeah. Yeah. Well I was a, I was a youth of the 20s and 30s and I lived in Southend on Sea. I lived in Leigh on Sea which is in the borough of Southend on Sea, Essex. And [pause] things were quite, you know, you imagine what things were like between the wars. It wasn’t very [pause] My father was a joiner. He had his own business. He worked for his father and he, when grandfather died my father took his business over. Just a one man business. And my mother ran a fruit and greengrocery shop. And then when I came up, I left school at fourteen but I lost about fifteen months schooling when I was ten and eleven through an operation. And I worked in in the greengrocer’s shop. And then, of course in 1940, when invasion was imminent, where we lived notice was, I remember, I can see it now. It was on a Sunday and they put up notices on the shop’s windows and saying that we were to be prepared to leave within one hour and only allowed to take one suitcase with us. And as soon as people read this notice, well in twenty four hours from being a busy area full of people suddenly there was hardly, there was only the shopkeepers left. And the Battle of Britain was going on and my father came to me and said one day, well you know we had nothing to, had hardly any work to do because there was no people, many left there. And I used to do my paper round and that was how I got my pocket money. So my father came to me and he said one day, of course he was in the First World War and he was wounded twice and he was in the Essex Regiment. And when he got wounded the second time he was sent back to France in the Suffolks, and he come to me and he had a rough time in the army being wounded several times. And he, he come to me and he says, ‘You don’t want to go in the army.’ Because he was worrying about being called up. This was before I was eligible to be called up and he said, ‘You won’t get in the navy. You’d better see if you can get in the Air Force.’ So I said, ‘Alright.’ He said, because he said, my father was quite a proud man, he never went outdoors without a tie on and he used to say, ‘In the Air Force they wear a collar and tie all the time.’ So, [laughs] so he said, ‘See if you could get in the Air Force.’ So I found out they were, in Southend there was no recruiting for the for the Air Force in Southend so I had to get on a bus and go to Romford. And there was a, there was a recruiting office there, it recruited all sections and I, that’s how I joined the Air Force. And my education was very poor because I lost a lot of schooling and left at fourteen. I did do a little bit of after school work. You know, night classes when I was about sixteen to eighteen. And because I was, what was I when the war started? I was [pause] how old was I when the war started? Eighteen?
JM: Eighteen.
SK: Eighteen. That’s right. And so, you know, that was the background before then. That’s how I joined the Air Force. But they were recruiting for wireless ops at the time. This is ground wireless ops you see. And then I wasn’t good enough for that so he said, ‘We can have you for general duties.’ So I jumped at it and I joined the Air Force as a general duties wallah.
AS: In 1940.
SK: I got my number in 1940. I was sent home on deferred service and was actually called up on the, I think it was the 6th of January ’41. Went to Blackpool, you know, for to do my square bashing. And that was my early life. And then I was, after square bashing we were, a group of us were posted to Horsham St Faiths in Norfolk. And we were only there twenty four hours and they pushed us out to the satellite and we was on a, well we were sent to Blickling Hall. We was living in the cow sheds and things like that. In the outbuildings of Blickling Hall. But the airfield, the airfield was at Oulton. And it was just a grass airfield and we had two squadrons of Blenheims there that were really only just forming from being kicked out of France. And of course some of the crew, the ground crews were still wandering back after being got home from France and had a bit of leave and had been assessed as fit to go back to the squadron. And as I say the Blenheims were doing, that was 2 Group then and they were doing such things as Channel sweeps and things like that. And bombing the coastal ports like Brest and other French coastal docks and so on.
AS: Against the barges and things like that.
SK: Pardon?
AS: Against the barges and things like that.
SK: Oh yes. Yes. You see. That sort of thing. Yes. And then, while I was there doing all sorts of things I was put on, I was on the fire section while I was there and while I was on the fire section I had two duties. One was the fire section to look after Blickling Hall. And we had to eat at Blickling Hall. There was no, on this airfield, all there was on the airfield was two, about two Nissen huts where the fitters were and we had one little brick building where we had, there was no flying control. They had a duty pilot and he just used to have to log the aircraft as they took off and landed and that was his job. It was one of the aircrew that was grounded at the time and that was his duties. And I was put on a crash tender, and we used to stand alongside the duty pilot. There’d be the crash tender, the blood wagon side by side and we had to attend all, any crashes. We were, well I had to attend three crashes while I was there but that’s, that’s going to longer stories. But then, from there during the time, it came up on daily orders that we were to, they were recruiting for air gunners because in the pipeline four-engine bombers were — that was going to be the future. And so they thought, well I mean they had the Wellington bomber and they needed a gunner. And of course the Blenheim had three crew and they had a gunner on them. It was wireless op/gunner. And then the Wellingtons had, excuse me, Wellingtons had five crew with one gunner. But the wireless op was also a spare gunner. And they asked for volunteers so I volunteered and two of us went from this camp, were sent to Horsham St Faiths to see the station commander there.
AS: Who was that?
SK: I don’t know who it was at the time. I can’t tell you anyhow [laughs] I’ve got no record of that.
AS: No worries. Sorry. Go on.
SK: But we didn’t have to go, no test or anything like that and he said, ‘Oh you want to,’ he said, ‘Alright,’ he said, ‘Ok,’ and it was assigned to us and we awaited our call. And then we, that’s how we joined up. I didn’t have to pass any tests or anything there. And then from there we waited our call and it was the end of 1941. Somewhere about October I would have thought, may have been September, I was called to go to Regent’s Park in London because that was the recruiting centre. The initial centre for aircrew. And then from there we were sent to a, after a short course there we were issued with our white flashes. That means aircrew under training which we wore in our forage caps. And then we went down to St Leonards. Part of Hastings and we was in the big marina. Marine Hotel it was. It belonged to Southern Railway at the time but it was commandeered and we, we were posted there at the Initial Training Wing to do the ground work for an air gunner. And the initial gunners, we had quite an extensive course. We had to learn basic navigation. As regards to signals you had to learn the Morse code and read the lamp at, I think six words a minute and there was, you know, you had lots of extra duties. All to do with being a good crew member. And then when that came to the end of that course well of course I didn’t pass the maths you see. They said, ‘You failed on the maths.’ My maths. And of course I wasn’t very good at that sort of thing. So anyway our next posting to go on, they weren’t available to take us, that was to an air gunnery course, because the weather was bad and a sudden influx of people, there was nowhere to put them. So they said we are going to put you on an extended course to do — for several weeks we did just maths, drill and PT [laughs] And from there there was, I wasn’t the only one I must say, I was pleased about that, that didn’t pass on the first issue but they passed us on the second time. And they said, well, and then we were posted to a Gunnery School and I went to, to Manby up here in Lincolnshire to the 1 Air Armament School as it was called and I did my gunnery course there. And I passed my course at gunnery. This course. And I remember it because when we had to do, because Manby was very strict. A lot of bull at Manby. And on passing out parade we had to form on the parade ground where every Friday, every Friday we reported on the parade ground but this one was the passing out parade when you were awarded your brevet. And, and I remember I had to be marker because I was two thirds down the course. And so that’s my position. I passed two thirds down the course. But they were a grand lot of chaps. And then we passed out from there and then I was sent to, from there I was sent to an OTU and that was to Finningley in Yorkshire. I forget the number of the OTU but that’s where we went to. Finningley. And we had to do quite an extensive course there and that’s where I got crewed up. And our crewing up was quite funny really because there was quite a few of us sent to, there was about twelve gunners sent down there because most of these crews that were there we found out were Blenheim crews, which had three crews. They had a pilot, they had a navigator, called an observer and the wireless op/air gunner. And then they were posted to the OTU to take the conversion course on to Wellingtons. And then [pause] so they had to take on two more crew and that would be the rear gunner and a bomb aimer. Right. And the crewing-up procedure was, after about a fortnight because after the fortnight we were just doing section work where the gunners were in one place, pilots, engineers all in their own sections. Then we had to meet all together and the CO of the station said, ‘Well, now you’ve got to get crewed-up. So sort yourselves out.’ So we all just stood there and, you know one or two had got in mind who they wanted, you know to crew-up with and so on. But I remember one of the chaps, one of these gunner friends that I’d got to know said to me, ‘Well you’d better,’ you’d better, you know, ‘Get going.’ He said, ‘Otherwise you’ll be left with that young kid over there.’ You know, he was a pilot. ‘That young kid over there.’ Because he could see some of them getting crewed-up, ‘I’m crewed-up.’ But I’m not, I wasn’t one to push forward so I just waited. And then quite, at the end a chap come over to me and I see he was, he was a wireless op/air gunner and he said to me, he introduced himself like, and he said, ‘I’m Johnny Lloyd,’ and he said, ‘Would you like to join our crew as a gunner? And would you like to come and meet my pilot?’ So I said, ‘Oh yeah. Ok.’ You know. So that’s how I met my first pilot. That’s him there. And he was eighteen months younger than me. And that was the young kid [laughs] they said I’d be left with. And I’ve often thought afterwards of those twelve chaps that were there I wonder how many of us got through, you know. And, you know he was the young kid you’ve got to put up with so I was quite pleased about that. So that was our, so we did all our training there on the Wellington and then we had to go over to, now what was that place called? Near Bawtry it was. A satellite to Finningley, to do, to do cross country’s. Right. Where you, you’re left on your own to do the cross country’s, you know. That was big deals. And so we, that was about a three or four week course over there. Then you go back to Finningley afterwards and await a posting. Well, we waited at Finningley for quite, we were sent on leave then for a while and then when we got back to Finningley we were still hanging about. Finished our course, waiting for a posting and we was quite, there quite a long time and then suddenly it came through that we were posted to, to Scampton. Right. And so I thought oh yes, yes. This was, what’s the time now? It’s about, it’s about, I don’t know, May, June, July. Somewhere about July or August. Something like that. August perhaps, ’42. Yes. And he said, he said [pause] so we gets to, so we gets to Scampton and we find out that Scampton where we are forming a new crew, a new squadron, sorry. A new squadron. And there was already two squadrons already there fully operating. And we was the juniors coming in and as I say, and we found out our first part of forming up we had no aircraft. We had no ground crew. But our leaders were there. We had some leaders. We had to get to know our leaders and our section commanders and so on and we got to know people for the first couple of weeks and then, then we were sent — we’d got to join this Flight. 1661 I think it was. Conversion flight. That was at Scampton. And it was only a grass airfield at Scampton and there were two fully operational aircraft there err squadrons there. 49 Squadron and 83 Squadron were there. And then we found out we’ve got to do this course because we were posted to 467 Squadron. An Australian squadron. And so anyway we, we trained on Manchesters and then after, of course Manchesters were the forerunners of the Lancaster but it only had the two engines. Well when they put the four engines on it they called it the Lancaster and took off the third fin to make it look nice. And so that, that was, you know that was how we got crewed-up there and of course when we were there from a Wellington crew we had to take on two extra people again to make a seven crew. So we had to take on an extra gunner and, and a flight engineer. And then we flew in the Manchesters and there was quite a few on the course there. And then we had to do some bullseyes. Bullseyes are mock operations where we, like mock, they were raid diversions in a way because we used to fly within reach of the Dutch coast and then turn back and come home. But you did everything as if you was going on an op and you would divert. We were diverters to draw the fighters up to us so the main force could creep in and perhaps go in through southern France. So we had a good training there and we used to come over to, of course Scampton as I said was still grass. But unknown to us we were going to be posted to Bottesford, right. Which is just in Lincolnshire but it’s in three counties. The actual airfield I think was in three counties because Bottesford was a very dispersed sort of airfield. So it was Leicester, Nottingham and Lincolnshire. The postal address I think was Nottingham. But we were quite, we were quite close to [pause] what’s the town called? Grantham.
JM: Grantham.
SK: Grantham. And so, anyway we used to go over to Woodhall Spa to do our landing on, on the runways because the satellite stations, as Bottesford was called was built during the war and they built them as dispersed stations. They realised the stations that were built during the war period in the 30s were all quite cramped and in one section they found that was a dangerous thing so they built these dispersal stations. Well, when they built them of course, I mean aircraft were going to be bigger so they wanted more space so they had bigger airfields. And so that’s why we went over to Woodhall Spa which was, had runways to learn the different way of landing on runways as to, to grass. And then, anyway when we got to the, we were [pause] got to Bottesford, we left Scampton a few days before Christmas. That’s ’42. And we first flew at Bottesford about two or three days before Christmas. We had a lot of training to do when we got to Bottesford because unknown to us, the ground crew, they’d sent new aircraft into Bottesford, new Lancasters, into Bottesford and they sent ground crew there to, to learn their trade on Lancasters. And they had a month to do it. Like we was learning at 1661 conversion flight. We were learning from the aircrew side. They were learning it from the ground crew side. And because we thought that how can we be a squadron with hardly any, with no aircraft. No ground crew. Anyway, so we got there and we, I talked to one chap and he said, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’d only, I’d only been a mechanic on Magisters,’ which was a single engine aircraft. A little tiny thing, you see. And of course when he come to see the Lancaster, a great big thing, it frightened the life out of him [laughs] you see, and we had a lot to learn. Anyway, the squadron became operational and we operated from there. I finished my first tour and the squadron, the crew I was with we were the first crew to finish a full tour on 467. We, we, there was two other crews that we were quite friendly with. They finished one trip behind us so we beat them by three days. But we claimed that right to be the first then to finish a full tour. And that, that went on to the concluding the, my first tour there. And this was taking place between, shall we say the 1st of January and my last one, my last trip was on the 30th of May. And we were posted away on the 6th of June. And we were posted away. Do you want me to carry on? As screen gunners. As screen gunners. And we said, ‘Well what’s a screen gunner?’ We’d never heard of it before. They said, ‘Oh, you’ll find out.’ So we didn’t know. So five of the crew were posted to the same place. I think it was 17 OTU, I think that was the number, to, to Silverstone. And the navigator was posted to Wing. And he said that was the saddest moment of his life when he had to leave the crew. And we got posted by air and I remember when we got there we had dropped him off at Wing first and then our aircraft flew on and landed us at Silverstone. Well, Silverstone was only just, the OTU at Silverstone had only just moved there and it wasn’t really organised properly. And it took them a month to get organised and when they did get organised they found out they had a satellite as well which was called Turweston. So as all gunners were sent over to Turweston because the gunnery courses and I think the bombing courses were going to be sent from there. And we found out what a screen duty, what a screen gunner’s duty was. We were to be instructors without being taught by — not, not classroom instructors. Field instructors. To pass on our knowledge and, and to take new recruits, new crews coming through from their OTU because that’s what Turweston was. An OTU. And to take them on air firing and, and cine camera work. Well, we had a little training aircraft attacking us as a fighter and so on and so forth and we used to take them up in the air to do that sort of thing, you know. But that’s what a screen gunner was. And of course you were supposed, that was supposed to be a six month rest. Well, we had casualties while we was on there. But after that, so we were posted away in early June and I stayed there ‘til the middle of January and you were supposed to have a six months rest. And then a chap come to me who was one of the staff pilots there. Like us he was a screened pilot. He was an officer, and he said to me, ‘I’m forming a new squadron,’ He’d obviously been told he’s got to go back on ops and he said, ‘Would you be interested in joining my crew?’ So I said, oh you know it came quite out of the blue. And I thought, well I’d done about seven and a half months I think it was and I felt well I’ve gone over my six months. I could be called back at any time and, mind you we had a good bunch of lads, of air gunners there. We all lived in one hut as screen gunners. And it was, I thought well, you know what do I do? But I thought I’ve got to move on I think because if not [pause] So I liked this chap anyway. Although he was a flight lieutenant I liked him. Right.
AS: What was his name?
SK: Walker. Flight Lieutenant Walker. Clive Walker. He came from Bolton. He was the son of a known name in Bolton that had a big tannery works up there. And anyway, he, he approached me and I said [pause] and he said, he saw I was hesitating a bit. He said, ‘Well look, can you think it over? Can I give you twenty four hours to think it over?’ So I said, ‘Oh thank you. Good.’ And at that he approached me because he, I’d just been on, taking some air gunners on air firing and we used to take about four or five air gunners in one aeroplane and then change the gunners in the air and, you know they would be firing at a drogue, you know. Towed by a little light aircraft. And then we could, we were controlling the, the you know it was whilst we were in the air we was in control of these gunners. Well, so anyway when I got back to my billet I kept thinking about it. And I went to a friend I was quite pally with, one of the gunners and I said to him, ‘Clive, Clive Walker’s just approached me about going back on ops with him and I keep thinking, shall I go?’ And the chap said to me and that was Bill Harley, his name was and he said to me, ‘He’s asked me as well.’ So anyway we sat down on our beds and we had a chat and I said, ‘Well, if you go I’ll go.’ So he said, ‘Alright, we’ll both go.’ So the next day we told him yes, we’ll go with him. Alright. I think Bill err Clive Walker, he had a dog on the station. It was a corgi, you know. I didn’t like it. A yappy little thing. I didn’t think much of him as a dog but a nice looking dog but Bill loved this dog. He used to look after the dog a lot. He liked the dog anyway. And he, I think, I don’t know whether the dog swayed the argument [laughs] but we went, we went, and said the next day, ‘Yes. We’ll go.’ So he said he was very pleased about that and he said that and after a little while we were called. And then of course we were taken back to [pause] where did we go? Let’s see. We had to, mind you we had to leave Lincolnshire then. Do you want to go on because it’s not Lincolnshire?
AS: It’s great. Carry on.
SK: Anyway, we had to go to [pause] I think it come under Northampton. Let me see. What’s the name of the place? Turweston. Now was it Turweston? Wait a minute. No. No. No. No. No. Wait a minute. No. That’s where we were. Turweston. Then we had to, when we got the posting we had to go to Little Staughton in Bedfordshire. Little Staughton was 8 Group, Pathfinder Group. So there again when I joined 467 it was a new squadron and we found out that Pathfinders were forming a new squadron and of course as most of us had been off for over a year now from a squadron we had to do refresher courses. So we were sent to different places all around to do refresher courses. We went to Binbrook, up there and did a gunnery and the bomb aimers had to do a bombing course up there. And so we did various other stations around. And then we finished up at Little Staughton and that’s where we operated from.
AS: Which squadron were you?
SK: 582 Squadron. A new squadron. It was formed on April Fool’s Day 1944. And we operated from there, right. I did twenty nine trips on 467. But I did, and I did thirty five trips on 582. So that’s sixty four in total. And —
AS: Wow.
SK: And then of course that’s, we got through ok. You know. So that’s basically my, my flying life and then we didn’t know we was on our last trip and on our last trip was to Bremer in Northern Germany there. Bremer, Bremer. How you say it? And after I landed back somebody said, ‘This is your last trip.’ I don’t know whether perhaps our skipper knew. He hadn’t told me. So we just, you know thought — really? You know. It just came quite suddenly, you know. And that’s the last time I flew in the RAF. And then after sending on leave for a while, we were on leave for a little while, they sent us right up to Northern Scotland for, to be, for an attestation sort of course to reclassify you now to a different job. The only two jobs they we were offering at the moment was to be in the transport section or airfield controller. So I jumped for airfield controller and I did my, my course down at Watchfield in Oxford as an airfield controller. And then when I passed that course I was posted to West Raynham in Norfolk and [pause] as the airfield controller there. They were very pleased to see me because there were only two, two airfield controllers there and they were having to, it’s a twenty four hour station so — and you had to be relieved for your meals so they were never off duty. So when I got there I was welcomed. And so I was there then. That was the longest station I was on because otherwise we was, you know, we seemed to be always on the move. And that’s where I met my wife. At that station.
AS: Was she a WAAF?
SK: She was a WAAF. And then I got demobbed from that station when the war had all finished and so on. And then I went back to work, sort of thing and forgot all about the Air Force then. And I took, as I thought, having a green grocers shop I’ve always got a chance to know how to sell a cabbage. So my uncle was in wholesale greengrocery business and I fancied, I fancied to, to be more in the wholesale business than a retail business. I didn’t want to go and serve women coming in to the shop and arguing about the size of a cabbage so I went in the wholesale department, right. And we, because I was keen on getting back and playing a bit of football and we could have Saturday afternoons off then. And it was interesting, you know. When I was up West Raynham after the war finished suddenly it all came out, the orders came from the hierarchy everyone’s got to play sport. You’ve got to get playing sport again. Well I loved my football until I was called up and then, and then I found I hadn’t kicked a ball for six years. And of course I suppose I would have been in my prime then so I thought, I wonder if I can kick a football? So, anyway the sergeant’s mess got up a team and said we’ll have a try you know and we formed a sergeant’s mess team and we played different sections and goodness knows what else. And I got back playing football and then when I was started playing football that’s why I wanted my Saturday afternoons off. And then after a while it went on that I went to work in London in Spitalfields Market. And I worked as a salesman in Spitalsfield Market. That’s a wholesale fruit and vegetable market there. And I finished my working life there. It’s [pause] so you know that’s basically my life story. You know. In a nutshell [laughs] It’s quite interesting though that different things, you know little things creep up in your life doesn’t it? So if that’s any help to you there you are.
AS: That’s fabulous. Shall we pause there for a second?
SK: Yeah. Yeah.
[recording paused]
AS: Sidney, I’d like to pick up on a few questions that come to mind from, from your interview so far. Could you tell me a bit more about the air gunnery training? Did people ever hit anything firing at drogues? What was the standard like?
SK: I got a standard in my [pause] how did they put it in that? Stop the tape a minute.
[recording paused]
AS: Ok. So tell me a little bit more about the gunnery training and the assessment.
SK: Well the gunnery training was when you’re air firing at a drogue they, you had a little light aircraft come alongside you, flying with you on your beam. So you could turn your turret around onto the beam. As much as ninety degrees. And you’d fire at a drogue which was let out behind. Behind the little tug. And as we took up about four gunners, I think it was at a time we’d take one [pause] we’d take one and we’d, the first gunner would have his bullets. The rounds were dipped in a coloured paint. So the tips were red, yellow, green I think. Or whatever they were. There was about four different colours. And you had two hundred rounds each to fire. So you had little short bursts of two second bursts and then you’d undo your breach and you’d see what colour you are. Because once you lost your colour you had to stop. Right. And that’s how it was done. Right. So that when a drogue came down and it was assessed the bullet would leave a little hole in the drogue with the colour around like a little round circle. And that’s how you was assessed. Two hundred rounds — how many hits you got. And of course it was all done on a beam because that’s where deflection come in and deflection was allowing for the time for your bullet to get from the gun to the aircraft. If you fire direct at him you’ve missed him because it’s gone behind him. Although the speed of the bullet is fast it’s enough to miss the aircraft, you see. So anyway that’s how, that’s how gunnery was assessed. Right. And then also when you were doing cine camera work you had magazines. Two magazines. Each gunner was allowed two magazines. And he had these little aircraft and they did flat attacks you know. They’d be on the beam and they would come in just like this and then pass underneath you. And you had to see how good your manipulation was because gunnery training is a bit like [pause] it’s a bit like, think of yourself as a snooker player. A snooker player, if he wants to be really good like these professional snooker players they have to train for hours a day and keep training. And that’s what you had to do. For gunnery you’ve got to keep training to get your control of your turret because at the turret you’ve got to turn your turret and you’ve got to angle your guns at the same time. Right. And it’s manipulation and it’s, it’s a question of having really good manipulation. And it’s just a matter of continue working at it, you know. And, and it was a Fraser Nash 20 turret I was in with four machine guns. And I had them while I was on OTU flying the Welllingtons. And it was the same as that, exactly the same turrets when I got on the Lancasters. Later on because I’d finished flying by August. Finished operational flying by August. I don’t know what the, I haven’t got the date in my mind but I know it was August ’44 I’d finished flying. And oh where were we? I’m losing my track now.
AS: Did you have ground training turrets? Ground training aids as well or was it all airborne?
SK: Well, I’m talking, I’ve been talking about airborne. Ground training — no. We did, we did a bit of training. I mean you start off by, when you’re at even your initial training when you first join up we used to get, we was at Blackpool but we went up to Fleetwood and they had some rifle butts up there somewhere on the downs, on the seashore. Somewhere near there. And we used to, we were give five rounds to fire a rifle. Right. But then prior to that, I didn’t mention in the chat but prior to that when, when the forerunner of the Home Guard came out it was called the Local Defence Volunteers. And Anthony Eden came on the radio and said, ‘We’re calling for volunteers,’ because the invasion was imminent, ‘We’re calling for volunteers. Will you report to the police station.’ So me and my old mate said, ‘Yes. Let’s go.’ You know. So we went down and we signed on and we were, we was a Local Defence Volunteers. And of course we had nothing much to start with and gradually you got little bits and pieces and then just, it was just, renamed it after a little while because they had such wonderful support that they turned it in and renamed it the Home Guard. And then of course, as soon as it was made the Home Guard that was about the time I was called up. Right. But then we had other training firing machine guns. Not much done on the ground but when we was at, when we was at air gunnery school we used to fly at Mablethorpe, along the beach at Mablethorpe because from Manby to Mablethorpe wasn’t far. We used to fly along the beach and we’d turn the guns on to the beam and there was targets put in the water. You know, this deep of water like, you know because it’s tidal there and targets were put there for you to fire at, right. And that was just for one gunner because that’s when we had [pause] No. We weren’t crewed-up there so no we must have had several gunners then. That’s right. And we, so it was done at Mablethorpe beach. Right. And then to get your, to get your results of the targets from Mablethorpe beach there the people in charge of the sight down there used to go back out on horseback to pick up the targets, you know. I remember that. Don’t kill the horses, you know.
AS: It can’t have given you much time.
SK: Pardon?
AS: It can’t have given you much time because the target comes from the front of the aeroplane.
SK: Yeah. Yes.
AS: And you’ve got very very little time to —
SK: That’s right. Well, yeah. Yeah That’s what, that was some of the training we did. We did two or three. That was part of our air gunnery training when we was at Manby. And then, as I say OTU you did the training with the trailing of the drogue and so on. Basically that was the training, you know.
AS: How about the aeroplanes that you were flying in training?
SK: Well —
AS: Were they mechanically reliable or old and worn out? Or —
SK: Yes. Old and worn out mostly, you know. The longer the war it didn’t, if the thing was operational it wasn’t put on training exercises, you know. On the training stations. It wasn’t so bad. I didn’t notice any problems when we was at Manby when we had, we had Wellingtons there. So luckily I had a good training because I was on Wellingtons all the time and with the same turret and something but when we got to, to being screen gunners we had very poor aircraft there. They had a job to keep them, you know. They’d say, ‘Yes. Your aircraft’s ready.’ We’d go out there as a crew and you find out, oh no. You’d be sitting out there waiting for an hour and a half before it was finished. And I had a, had one crash flying at while I was a screen gunner because I was flying, flying with a sprog pilot. That is a pilot going through the course. And we burst a tyre just as we lifted off on exercise. And so I, I said, well I didn’t say nothing. I thought we’d burst a tyre there and the aircraft just screwed a little bit to the left and I thought well we might as well do the exercise whatever happens because we’d burn up a bit of fuel. So, so finished the exercise and I said to the pilot afterwards, I said, ‘I want you to throttle back a bit and when you throttle back to lower the wheels and we want to inspect the tyres,’ I said. ‘I think we burst the tyre as we lifted off.’ So he said, ‘I thought the thing screwed a bit to the left,’ you know, ‘To port.’ So we, we checked the, so he did, he lowered the aircraft — the wheels down. The undercarriage down. And the port, the port tyre was blown to smithereens. And so he put it up and I said ok. Well, he said, so he said, ‘I’ll let base know.’ So we flew back over base and then we called up and said we appeared to have burst a tyre on take-off, you know. So usual old thing come from that. Put flying control in a panic. So they said the usual thing of, ‘Stand by. Stand by.’ So we, we carried on circuit and we were watching down below and we saw, we know our flight commander in charge of the course. He was, he was a good man really but we used to think he was a hard nut. But he had a little van you know and we could see his van suddenly appeared and it was at the end of the runway, you know. And we were told to fly over. He wanted to inspect it. Yeah. So he, he flew it over and he said, ‘Yes. You have blown your tyre.’ That’s the message we got back. We knew that. We’d had a look at it. So anyway, he said, I thought perhaps he might let us land with wheels up on the grass but he didn’t. He was struggling to, he didn’t want to lose an aircraft so he said, ‘No. Land on the runway and try to keep the leg off as long as you can until last moment.’ So anyway, I went forward. I had a word with the pilot and I said, ‘I’ll assist you as I can,’ and I had to look after my gunners which I got them all sorted out in the, in the fuselage. And of course it wasn’t enough points for them to all know what was going on. So the one with the most sense, as I thought, I gave him the, so he could listen to the intercom and he was to tell the others what’s going on and we [pause] So I said, ‘I’ll come forward,’ and I remember when we were doing all our circuits and bumps when we were under instruction ourselves as a crew they always had, the instructor always called out the airspeed for him. For when he was perhaps doing his stuff and by calling out the airspeed it’s one less job he’s got to watch. So I said, ‘I’ll come forward and I’ll call out the airspeed for you and anything else I can do.’ Oh he thought that was a good idea so that’s what I went forward and sat alongside him. He brought it in but at the last minute he a bit over corrected trying to keep the leg up and instead of what you might expect you’d swing around on the broken leg he went the other way and the wing hit the ground and damaged the wing a bit but we kept upright. We didn’t tip over on our nose. We kept upright and because we were slow, we were lost enough speed to keep us flat and level and I said to the crews, ‘Don’t panic.’ I said, ‘We’ll get out nice and slowly,’ you know. I said, ‘We don’t want any broken limbs.’ There was no fire. I mean I was sitting up in the cockpit with him and I said to the skipper, checking everything’s switched off. I said, ‘All switches off.’ And he checked everything. All switches off so there’s no fuel running about and I could see there was no, it all looked, there was no imminent fire. So we got out quite slowly and by that time our officer commanding was standing outside with his, with his van you know. So I got out and got all my gunners together and with the pilot because he had, he was flying with his own crew, you see. That was their training as well. To learn how to be a captain controlling the crew because he was on the course. And he was, he was a flight lieutenant believe it or not so he must have been somewhere on a training station for years you know and then suddenly said, ‘It’s time you went on ops.’ And he, anyway I walked over to, to our commanding officer there and I said to him, no. ‘No injuries sir. We’re all ok.’ He said to me, he said, he said, ‘You took a long time to get out of that aircraft.’ I said, ‘Well, we’ve got no broken limbs. No casualties.’ So I I sort of went away with a flea in my ear sort of thing, you know. I thought I’d done quite well. So that was one I had like that. And then my other gunner that I got to know which I joined up on the second crew with, he had another trouble when we had an aircraft that caught fire after he’d been airborne a little while. And he of course, we used to control it all from the astrodome halfway down the turret. Halfway down the airframe. The fuselage. And we only just used to sit and we used to control it all by the thing and I used to control the, the screen gunner used to control the tug, the flying you know, the towing the target or if it’s a little fighter going to attack us. We did that by Aldis lamp you see. Using a green for go and red for stop. No. Red was, red was exercise complete. You know. Thank you very much. But we had the green for stand by and then flashing green for attack, you know. That sort of thing. And so there was always little accidents going on, on the OTU because the aircraft weren’t at their best. They weren’t at their best. And in fact a gunner I got very friendly with also, he was one of the three crews that were going through. He was, he was sent as a screen gunner afterwards. He come only two or three days after us. That’s why we had a good lot of gunners there. And he, his wireless op was sent on from, from Turweston. Turweston yeah. When we was doing this. They crashed on take-off and were killed instantly. And that was one. So we had casualties while we was, you know, screened so we thought well might as well go back on ops. So that’s how we volunteered for our second tour.
AS: When you passed out as an air gunner.
SK: Yeah.
AS: Did you know you were going to Bomber Command and how did you feel about it?
SK: No. No. When you passed out from where? From OTU?
AS: Yeah. Yeah.
SK: Oh from OTU we were told we were going to, as I said, up the road here.
JM: Scampton.
SK: Scampton. Yeah. Scampton. Good job I’ve got a prompter. To Scampton. And we was, we were told we were going on a conversion course. That’s what we were told. When we was on a conversion we were told we were actually posted to 467.
AS: In Bomber Command.
SK: Yeah. In Bomber Command, you see. Yeah.
AS: What was it like?
SK: Mind you the OTUs were like Bomber Command. They were OT, Bomber Command’s OTUs I believe. Yeah.
AS: So you knew fairly early on that you’d end up bombing Germany.
SK: Well yeah.
AS: Yeah.
SK: When we, when I joined the first crew, when I said they were a Blenheim crew they thought they were going to the Middle East as a Blenheim crew. Because at that time they were just phasing out the Blenheims and sending them to the Middle East. And they were so surprised when they come and they were going to be made into a Wellington crew you see. So it’s, that’s how the war, you know, evolved really, you know. You never knew.
AS: What was it like being an all English crew in an Australian squadron?
SK: Well the reason we were all English crew. One Irish.
AS: Sorry. I do apologise.
SK: British.
AS: British.
SK: We were British, weren’t we? But our crew we had one Irish. He come from Belfast. We had one from Bolton. One from [pause] where did Ted come from? Bradford.
JM: Bradford.
SK: Bradford. The pilot come from the Cotswolds. I come from Essex. Johnny Lloyd. I don’t know where Johnny Lloyd, I’m not quite sure. He was our wireless op. I’m never quite sure where he come from. So we British. A British crew there. Oh and then we had, we didn’t have the, the flight engineer we got on our, when we first crewed up on our first 467. Our flight engineer really didn’t fit in the crew. And I don’t know what happened to him afterwards. He never operated with us. We did all our training with him at Scampton but when we come to be posted to 467 he suddenly disappeared. So we had to make do with what they called odd bods. If there was an engineer that hadn’t got a crew on the squadron or whatever it was or if not they had to pinch one off another crew that wasn’t flying that night.
AS: All the way through your tour?
SK: Well we had, we didn’t have a lot. We had, I think four different engineers that I can remember. So they were split over twenty nine. Twenty nine ops. One was an Australian. He was pinched off another crew. And our crew, we never had any sickness in our crew at all apart from the engineer which I mentioned. But only once the Irish chap, coming back from Belfast. Coming back from Belfast the boat, the sea was so rough they couldn’t sail the boat and he got back twenty four hours late. Well, we was on that first night so we had to pinch, we had to be given another bomb aimer and they took one from another crew. And he was an observer with the O badge, you know. And he was a good chap. We liked him but he came, he didn’t get through his tour. He failed, failed to return on one occasion. Yeah. Does that answer that question? I don’t know.
AS: Absolutely.
SK: Yeah. Yeah.
AS: What was it like being surrounded Australians? Was it very different from — ?
SK: We weren’t surrounded by Australians. I didn’t really, I didn’t really say everything.
AS: No.
SK: A lot of our leaders when we were first formed up at Scampton we found most of our leaders were New Zealanders. Believe it or not. We had the two Flights. A and B Flight. And we was put into A Flight when we got to Bottesford. And that was Squadron Leader Pape and he was a New Zealander. And then when we formed a third Flight in March we, we had our flight commander was another new Zealander. Flight Lieutenant Field. Squadron Leader Field, sorry. And our, and our officer commander, he was actually RAF. He was, he formed, he made the squadron. There was no doubt about that. He was a wonderful leader and he joined the RAF in about 1936 if my memory’s right. But he was actually born in Brazil and, you know. I think he had, I’m not sure if he had British parents or what but he was actually in the RAF. So there was, we had quite a few new Zealanders there. Not many Canadians although there was a few odd Canadians there. And then to get the squadron going, being a new squadron how they, they sent in from different, other squadrons perhaps some experienced pilots because you can’t, you want, you want some experienced crews around you and with say six, six or eight trips to do, right. And so they were sent in to finish their tours with us. So we didn’t have a lot of Australians there. And when the Australians were coming you’d find a pilot would come with his navigator and then the rest we would make up with British. With Royal Air Force. Right. And then we had one or two gunners coming through on their own and they would join a crew. But also, we got through, we was pushed through our tour very quickly. The RAF crews were. We had no rest at all. You know. It was the hardest work I ever did. But they held back a little bit on the Australian chaps coming. Trying to build up the crew, the Australian crew. The Australian squadron. Right. But I don’t think I ever come across a whole, not in my time, a whole crew of all Australians. But they were, if an Australian pilot come through, looking through the book I can see they had a different colour uniform to us so you could always tell them that they had the darker blue one, you see, the Australians. And the New Zealanders as well. So you can see them when you look at old pictures. You could say oh look he’s got three. There’s three Aussies there. The rest were made up of RAF. That’s how it worked you see. So, but that’s why we were not, got through my first tour rather quickly, you know.
AS: Going through at such a rate.
SK: Yeah.
AS: Did, did you start to feel really worn down by it all or were you glad to be going through it so fast?
SK: You didn’t think about it. You were just, it was just what the order was. Whatever the order was you did, you know. It seemed that we was always on you know. Because I mean the weather’s, a lot of people forget what the weather was like. The weather we had in the war or the war winters were very hard. Very hard winters.
AS: That, that actually touches on something I’d like to talk about.
SK: Yeah. Yeah.
AS: Did you have any experience of FIDO or the emergency landing grounds?
SK: I didn’t have it myself. There was three places in the country wasn’t there had them? One was at Manston and another one was in Suffolk.
AS: Woodbridge.
SK: Woodbridge. Yes. The other one was further up country wasn’t it? Was it in Yorkshire? But there was three in the country there. No. I never had. Never had any experience of that. I’ve spoken to. I did speak to some chaps that landed in it, you know. It’s not — you know, a dicey thing to land in. Flames burning both sides of you, you know. Makes the runway look quite small, you know when you’re coming in, you know.
AS: On your, on your first tour as you say the weather could close in.
SK: Yeah. Yeah.
AS: Close down.
AS: What was it like coming back when the weather had closed in?
SK: Well Bottesford was in what did they called it? The Vale of Belvoir was it?
JM: Belvoir.
SK: Belvoir. In the Vale of Belvoir right. Right. And it was a frost hollow. So it wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t too bad in the middle of the winter because our take off times you had more darkness. Put it that way. We were controlled by the moon. We wanted darkness. Right. And, but sometimes the moon would be coming up before you got back or something like that you know. So we were controlled. What was the actual question you asked me?
AS: What was it like when you came back to find the fog had come in or — ?
SK: Oh yes. Well, yes. Well, it was a frost hollow there so, but most mists like we’ve had recently actually they’d come in in the late hours of the night, you know they form. And then you’ve got them at dawn break, you know. And it wasn’t until you got shorter night hours when you’re coming back at daybreak perhaps or, you know, just prior to then and then it was a bit difficult. But only once did we get diverted. And we got diverted, it’s a long story there [laughs] but we’d done a long trip. That was, I’m pretty sure that was the time we went to the Skoda works down in Czechoslovakia and we, we found that quite a hard trip. Very hard for the gunners. Because, you see, I used to, if you were in the flak belts and you got ack-ack flying around you. I used to think you were better off if you were in the pitch dark because it got so intense looking out for fighters. It was, you know. And you gained experience to know how to [pause] you could smell danger by what was going on around you, you know. And we always had a good understanding. We used to, especially in the first crew because we were all sergeants in the first group. Just sergeants. In the second crew we had four officers and three sergeants. It wasn’t quite so cosy if you know what I mean there. We couldn’t do our crew meetings sitting on our beds. We used to have crew meetings after. The next day and, and if anything we could have improved on, you know. We all had our say and all that. And you could, there was lots of little things you could do to save your skin, I suppose, you know. That sort of thing. Because, you know, you’re flying in a block. You’re not flying in formation. It’s a block. It’s, you can get statistics where you can get the actual measurements. It’s a wide block and it’s that deep and you’re flying as a gaggle anyhow, right. And the reason it was like that, deep like that was because you got at the time on that first tour the Wellingtons were still flying. They could only convert them to Lancasters as the Lancasters became available. And you had, shall we say over a target you’d have the Wellingtons at fourteen thousand feet. You’d have the Stirlings at sixteen. Halifax at eighteen. And we’d try to get to twenty if we could but we couldn’t always get there but you know it just depends on the weather. So that, that’s why you got the depths of it like that. So then they used to stagger it a bit so you weren’t dropping bombs on the ones underneath you and things like that. But when you’re flying at night and your night vision was most important to you for gunners. And there’s always a dark side to the sky. There’s always a dark side. However pitch dark it is one side is darker than the other. And it’s nearly always darker underneath for a start and then the south was nearly always the darker than the north. Right. Because if you got the stars you don’t realise how brilliant the stars can be. Right. So we always used to think if we’d got a long leg to fly on, flying in this gaggle, this stream which I’d say to the skipper, you know, we had a message to say creep over to the, if that was the stream going through there and the dark side was this side shall we say we’d creep over a little bit this way. Right. We’re still in the gaggle but we’d creep over a little bit this way. So the track would be down the middle. Right. But we’d go over to this side. Not that side. So you’ve less chance of being seen. Right. So there was all them little things you learned. You weren’t taught. You couldn’t be taught operational flying. You just had to grin and bear it and learn it yourself. And the only way you learned it was by discussions afterwards, you know and by little tiny things to say how you’d go about it.
AS: What was your attitude, or your skipper’s attitude to weaving? Did —
SK: Oh yeah. In, in those days you did weave. You weaved a lot and of course it was it was so, so a gunner couldn’t get his bearing on you. Because, you know it only takes two seconds to shoot you down. Two seconds. And you’ve got to be, if you’re on a eight or nine hour flight. Long flights in the winter. It’s a lot, a lot of time that’s going on there you know. So —
AS: Did, did you, did you ever have any exposure to wakey wakey pills?
SK: Yeah.
AS: To keep you awake.
SK: Oh yeah. I used to take them. If it was only, if it was up to the Ruhr or places like that according to your, you worked out you was given your briefing to, to know what routes because you didn’t go just straight there and back. You had different ways to, tactics to do. You had to fly on. And oh I’ve lost track now.
AS: Wakey wakey pills.
SK: Oh wakey wakey pills. Yes. So going to the Ruhr it could be four hours. It could be six hours. Right. So, and so possibly not then but if you were going further afield where you’ve got an eight hours, anything over a seven hour trip you needed something to keep awake. But you’ve got to realise you’ve been at work since 8 o’clock in the morning. Right. You’ve been up since 8 o’clock in the morning. You’ve been to a meal and from half past nine that morning you started work. You had your, you’d know by 11 o’clock whether you was on that night. Right. And then you had things to do like we always went out to the aircraft. You’d find what aircraft you’d got. We didn’t have regular aircraft. You had to fly on what was available. I think I worked it out, I think it was fourteen different aircraft we flew in in twenty nine trips. I think it was fourteen. So you didn’t have a regular aircraft so you always went out there to have a look but you got to know aircraft. You know. Perhaps you might do a training trip in one because training never stopped. So if you was on that night you’d have to go out there and you’d look at it and make sure the turret, had it been serviced? You know. Check on it. Make sure the armourers hadn’t missed anything because they were hard pressed and then also give, give, of course we had no Perspex in the front. We had a canopy over the top. Give it a clean. A bit of a sides we had so clean that up. And then you had to do a night flying test. So that had to take place between a bit before you went for briefing or then you would have your briefing. Mostly you would have a meal beforehand. You know, ,a flying meal beforehand. Then you got your briefing. Sometimes it was the other way around accordingly, you know, how it worked out. So there was no, there was never any spare time. And if you weren’t on that night you’re bound to have a flying exercise to do. We never, exercises never stopped. There was always new equipment coming out that some training had to be done on. You were, you’d be put on air firing. We used to, we used to go to, that’s Lincolnshire. Wainfleet. The Wainfleet.
AS: Wainfleet ranges. Yeah.
SK: That range there. And we used to drop our eleven pound smoke bombs from twenty thousand feet onto a target down below. You had to pre-book it, you know and arrange your time and then you were, you were given a slot to bomb at, you know. And then we had gunnery places I told you. Where did we used to go? We went, we had gunnery exercises. Perhaps we went to Mablethorpe then. I don’t think so. I don’t know where we went. I can’t think but there was always exercises right to even if you’ve only got one trip to have done you were still given exercises to do and you were kept busy because it took your mind off any casualties you’d had. That’s what it was done for.
AS: Yeah.
SK: You were never, you’d never get any time to rest at all but then occasionally a squadron would be given perhaps a forty eight hour stand down. And that’s when it was, well that’s right, you know. You got the message. It was good then. The squadron would be stood down. It gives the squadron time to recover, you know. So that’s that. So anything you want to ask me now?
AS: Yeah. On the wakey wakey pills still.
SK: Oh the wakey wakey. I didn’t say that. So I used to take them if it was a long trip but I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t take them until after we’d done the bombing. Then you’ve got to be, the way home is always worse than the way out, you know. That’s the more dangerous place, coming home. More dangerous is coming back because they could be waiting for you. Especially if it was a long trip because they’d had time to go down, refuel and come up again. So I used to take the wakey wakey pills and I found out they used to make you quite tired for a quarter of an hour after you took them. Whether it was the thought of it or not I don’t know but I thought they always made me tired first. But then they did help you to keep yourself awake because it’s no good falling asleep for a time because it was very unsociable hours we were working and we worked long hours you know. And you could only do it if you were young, you know. And of course we were all young lads, you see. So.
AS: What, what was, I knew they were all different but can you give me an idea of what the debriefing was like afterwards?
SK: Debriefing. Yeah. It varied, I think on squadrons because some said when they come back they used to have a tot of rum and things like that but I don’t think we ever had that. But a cup of tea was more, was better than anything else. Of course when you, when you’ve only done one or two trips you want to keep talking about it, you know. You think, you know, fancy I’ve done that, you know and so on, you’d talk about that. But we, certainly that was one of the first things we got out in our crew is we’ve got to get to bed and forget what’s happened because we might be on the next night. Because your entire, you’d be two nights on and one night off. That’s how it was going. You weren’t always given that. You couldn’t be. But you had to be prepared for that. So from touch down we aimed to get to bed within, into our bunks in two hours. And if we could do it in two hours we were lucky. You know, we’d done well. And the initial crews, the early crews, the ones in the earliest stages would be three or four hours getting to bed, you know. And then that affected them the next day. So you’ve got to, you’d get out your aircraft, you wait for transport. Transport was good. They were nearly always waiting for you. You’d get back to the locker room. You’ve got to stow your gear and it’s no good being excited about it. I know it did happen to some of them that they were so thankful they got back they took the gear off and just threw it in the locker. But the most important thing is, especially the gunners is you have to hang up your suit, your electric suit and see that it’s in your locker. You had long lockers. And it aired in your locker. See. Because any dampness you’d get a short in it you see.
AS: Yeah.
SK: So we always made sure that we got [pause] got into our, into the locker room and stowed all our kit away properly, you know. And then you go to debriefing and when you get to debriefing it depends who’s in front of you. You know. If you had a lot, a lot of bombers on that night there’s only perhaps two or three intelligence officers there to debrief you. Right. So you walk in and the first thing you look for — whose got the tea? You know. And then there would be some WAAFs there that would bring you a cup of tea. So you had a cup of tea and you might, I don’t know whether, there was nothing to eat. You just had this tea. Two mugs of tea would go down that quick. And then if you’re lucky you’d go straight in but if not you’ve got to wait till your, a table’s available for you to sit down. And then debriefing of course. They debrief the pilot and the navigator. The navigator’s the one they’re debriefing really, with the pilot as well because the navigator has got a complete log of everything that has gone on. What you’ve got to remember is the moment you took off every one of those aircraft flying was a separate unit. No one knew what, what he was doing or what’s happening in that aircraft until he came back over base. They didn’t know where he was or anything. So the navigator had a complete log of everything that went on in the aircraft. Right. Just like a ships log. And we were closer to the navy than we were to the army although we came out of the army originally. Right. So we used to get the debriefing done and then you go for your meal. Right. Yeah. Your meal. And you always had an egg when you came back. You always found an egg. It was wonderful just to have an egg you know and that. And then, and when we was at Bottesford after we’d come out the mess there we had at least a half mile to walk back to the billet because we were dispersed. We was right out in the sticks. It might, it seemed longer than that to me but there was only just a small road to go down. Just enough to carry a van down you know. There were no big lorries in them days much. And then that’s what we tried to do. To try to get back to our billet within two hours. So is that the answer? Is that alright?
AS: Brilliant.
SK: Ok.
AS: Wonderful.
SK: Any more questions?
AS: I have hundreds of questions, Sidney.
SK: Oh [laughs]
AS: A couple more perhaps. Did, did you, because you are a man who survived two tours of operations.
SK: Yeah.
AS: At different times of the war.
SK: Yeah.
AS: Did you notice a real difference in how you operated between the first tour and the second tour?
SK: Yeah. Oh yes. Of course. Yes, it did. That’s why we had, that’s why we had to go on to a refresher course. As I said when, we crewed up but as a crew we had to go on to a refreshing course. And we did all sorts of courses. We was, I don’t know how long they were for. I’d have to check my logbook really but I think, I think it might have been even two months before we operated you know because first, navigational aids were coming through. Different navigational aids and so on. And your, your tactics were different, you know. Your tactics were different. You had to keep altering them all the time, you know. So yes, there was a big difference. Yeah. Yeah. And of course then they made more, more officers were coming through in crews and that’s what split crews. When you was all sergeants you were one unit together but when you had officers, not that we didn’t mix together but you had to, you couldn’t, you had to live apart. You didn’t live together. You lived apart. You ate apart and so on. Whereas when we were sergeants everything was done together. You was just a little unit on your own, you know.
AS: Well it seems from, from what you’ve said about your first crew at least that you were a very tight knit, staying alive club. That’s what you wanted to do.
SK: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
AS: Put a lot of —
SK: We got good results and all. We had some very good results. I remember when we didn’t know we’d finished because you were supposed to do thirty trips. Right. But our pilot had done one second dickie trip. Right. He did it with our squadron leader and he did it to Essen. Because you know what they say? When we, when we was at OTU and people used to come, come to you and say to you at OTU and say, ‘What’s it like flying on ops?’ You haven’t got an answer. You’ve got to find out for yourself. We used to say, ‘When you’ve got Essen in your logbook you’ll know what it’s like.’ That was the answer, you know. So Essen was the most heavily defended target in the Ruhr. Where the Krupps works were. And getting in and out was, you know, it seemed almost impossible. It was amazing how you got through. So that’s what we, that was our answer when we were screen gunners to tell them. Not very helpful but you couldn’t, you can’t teach them. You can’t teach them operational flying. You can teach them everything else but, you know because it was a different feeling. It’s a fear factor comes into it you see. How do you react? You know. There’s somebody there is trying to blow you out of the sky. Another fighter coming up trying to set you alight and blow you to pieces you see. So it’s, it was a fear factor there you know and people act differently, you know. And one never knows, you know. I can tell you a little story when I was [pause] is it alright if I carry on? When I was at ITW down at St Leonards we’d finished our course. Wait a minute. Where was I going to get to, to tell you? We finished our course. Oh wait a minute. I’ve forgotten what I was going to say now. What was we talking about?
AS: We, we were talking about the fear factor. And you were going to tell me a story.
SK: Oh. A story. Yeah. Oh yes. Yes. The fear factor. Yeah. Right. Got it. Well we had to wait a long time down at ITW down at, down in Eastbourne. And they said it’s all, it’s been posted. ITV has been posted. And we was put on a train at 7 o’clock in the morning. We never knew where we were going. And we finished up in Bridlington, you see, that’s Yorkshire. And then we passed our course there and [pause] what was the question again?
AS: We were talking about the fear factor.
SK: Fear factor. Fear factor.
AS: And how people react. Yeah.
SK: Yeah. How people react. The fear factor. Yeah. And oh yes while we was there so they couldn’t, they couldn’t find anywhere to train. The air gunners couldn’t find anywhere else to go forward. We had to wait for our tour because the weather was so bad they couldn’t get through to flying. So we had several weeks there doing different things, sort of thing, you know. And so the fear factor. I keep wandering off don’t I? The fear factor is —
AS: We can come back to that if you like.
SK: No. Wait a minute. The fear factor was that I thought to myself when you, when you sign on as aircrew you haven’t got any knowledge or any idea of what it’s like to fly. None of us had ever been, had had our feet off the ground. We didn’t know what it was like to fly. So I thought to myself a lot of people coming in how are people going to cope with it? Would they be airsick? You see. Well airsickness is not like seasickness. But airsickness is only, you only get airsickness if you’re, you know, doing rough flying. But when it comes to flying over enemy territory you get this fear factor, you see. So they thought well these chaps have never been off the ground. We’d better give them a test to see how they cope with flying. So we was at Bridlington, on the seafront and they decided, ‘We’ll put them through an air sickness test.’ And they got some swings what they had in the fairgrounds right. Big swings. And they put some boards along the top of them and you had to like, you laid down on the board, on the board. And then some of the course there had to keep these thing going, you know. And you had to get the thing so it went perpendicular. Like that. And you had to, to go for twenty minutes. And I mean, a lot of boffins come down and the boffins were standing at the side of us and asking us questions. They were standing here. So as we went up and down they spoke to you as you went up past, you see, ‘How do you feel?’ ‘Do you feel ill?’ ‘Would you like fish and chips?’ ‘What did you have for lunch,’ you know. Trying to make you feel sick. Right. And so this was all done on Bridlington sea front and I often thought to myself if any of the locals had seen us, ‘With a war going on what are these chaps doing having fun down there?’ See. So that’s, they did bring out the airsickness ‘cause they couldn’t tell. Some chaps did get sick in the air and its just the fear factor, you know. The fear factor of what might be ahead of them. They didn’t know you see. So they wanted to find out if there was any way they could train them but I’m sure that the tests they put us through was far greater than they would have been in reality like, you see.
AS: It’s a marvellous, marvellous story.
SK: Yeah.
AS: The fear.
SK: I passed my test by the way on that screening.
AS: Of course. Of course. But the fears that one had on, on operations. What, what was the greatest enemy do you think? Was it the flak or the fighters or the weather?
SK: Well both. Well all. There was three things you mentioned there, they’re all. It just depends at the time doesn’t it? You know. It’s, they’re all, all. Which is the worst? Well, I always thought, as I mentioned before fighters I always thought were the worst for me as a gunner because with the shells bombing around you, you know there’s no fighters there. That’s the [laughs] that’s the way I looked at it right. And my job in the back there was to make sure a fighter didn’t creep up on us you know because the German tactics changed as well as ours. And their approach to, their approach to attacking us changed. Where in the, on the first tour they all attacked us from behind, underneath and just came up to us and fired from the back. Right. Aiming at the rear gunner and the aircraft. Right. Between my tours they did the Peenemunde raid. Right. And that’s the first time the Germans used a new system. They called it the sugar music. Sugar music. I think that’s what they called it. They, they used to have a gunner in the night fighter and he was like we were. Firing from a swivel. From a swivel or a turret, you know. At us. Then they thought, well why don’t we have a, rather like the Spitfires had, fixed guns. So they fixed a gun at a thirty degree angle. Firing at that angle upwards. Right. And the pilot could fire it. Right. That’s what they did. So they used a different tactic. They’d fly underneath you where it was always darkest and then when they got underneath they used to lift up. Lift themselves up. They were mostly JU88s they weren’t fast like Spitfires or anything like that but they were just a bit faster than the Lancaster so they could keep up with you, overtake you, but they used to the throttle back and then when they got their gun right they’re aiming for your petrol tanks between the two engines. Right. And that’s how we lost so many through firing. And that started between our tours so tactics had to alter. But Air Ministry never told us about that. We never knew that. Except that we were getting, we were seeing more flamers going down. Set alight by flame. Been set alight. When there’s no ack-ack around about it must be a fighter you see. So you sort of realise something was going on but they never told us and I never knew about these guns until after the war finished. Amazing really. What I, they had the idea what you don’t know about you don’t worry about I suppose. You see.
AS: [unclear ] what, as for both of your crews really was your tactic to just not open fire if you saw somebody?
SK: I I I believed in that. I felt, you see, according to how light it was how far could you see? Right. Guns were harmonised. The four guns. Usually about two hundred and fifty yards right. So they were all supposed to hit on another at two hundred and fifty yards. Right. But sometimes you wouldn’t see an aircraft at that, not [pause] because he’s what, three times smaller than you are. He’s flying in the dark. You’re flying, so he can see you and he can see you and he can see your exhaust pipes just glowing red, you know. If he got in a certain position he could see them. So, you know, it’s — yeah where was I again?
AS: Whether or not you opened fire if you saw one.
SK: Oh yes. Whether I opened fire. Yeah. So I would think, it might have been, you don’t want to make a fight with him. You want to keep away from him. And my idea was if you, you could sense something and if you had any, you’d say to the pilot something like, are we, ‘Get to the darkest side you can,’ you know in as few words as we can. It don’t, ‘It don’t look right.’ ‘Things don’t look right,’ you know. So that, and then if they were like that, they were looking for simple targets. If they could find a crew that didn’t respond to anything you know that’s the one they’d go for, you see. So it was just, just a knowledge at the time really. I suppose. You know.
AS: When you’re flying backwards over a target that’s, that’s been bombed could you, did you look away? Could you preserve your night vision?
SK: I tried, the most important, the thing you were trying to do is don’t look at the target. Because that’s the only time it’s lighter underneath. Right. But avoid looking at the target. Don’t spoil your night vision. We had night vision training and it takes full twenty minutes to get your full night vision, you know. Twenty minutes. I know you can improve it in ten or something like that but, but it’s a full, full twenty minutes to get your full night vision and one flash of light can spoil it you see. And that’s another thing you didn’t want to do. So it’s very tempting to look to see where your bombs are falling, you know but I used to look away. And that’s the only time you looked upwards instead of downwards you know. Or sideways, you know. But that’s something you had to learn to do.
AS: Did you test fire your guns?
SK: In, in the very early stages we were allowed to do it when you were over, over the sea. Right. And then it got stopped doing it because they said there was a danger that you might give your position away and there was a danger that other aircraft might be not too far away from you. And so on. And they said, ‘No. You’re not to do it anymore.’ But we used to do. Test them. Just a short burst and so on but that got stopped. That was an order that came through to stop. So —
AS: Could you, I mean it’s a bit of a silly question because it depends to a great extent on how dark the sky was. But could you often see many other aircraft?
SK: Yes. Oh yes.
AS: Over the target? Or —
SK: Oh over the target you wonder where they all come from. You thought you was all alone. But when you were over the target aircraft were everywhere, you know. Above you. Below you. A pilot was always looking. You don’t want to see somebody with the bomb doors open just above you, you know. But yes its — yes it’s [pause] Ok?
AS: Yeah. As a crew did you ever talk about what you were doing? About the fact that you were bombing the enemy or did you just treat it as a job and just get on with it.
SK: Well it was a job of work. A job you were trained to do. It’s [pause] it’s something that we were right to do. And we had, we had targets to, we had targets to officially aim for, you know. But when you’re fighting an enemy things can go wrong, you know. I mean they had the problem of creep back. Creep back was where you, if you had a target area there and it was marked by the Pathfinders and then the bombers coming in and then they’re getting knocked about a bit. They let the bombs go a bit quicker you know. That sort of thing you know. So they used to put tactics. You’d put your, go forward, mark the forward there to allow for the creep back. You see. There was all things like that. But we were given a job to do and we thought it was the right job to do, you see. Yeah.
AS: And you said towards the end of the first part of the interview that you were demobbed and didn’t really think about it.
SK: We switched off.
AS: Yeah.
SK: It’s what happened. It’s what happened with the government and everything. They wanted everybody to forget everything. It’s like they destroyed all the aircraft. You know. All these aircraft we had. They were just got rid of them and so on and made you forget. That’s why they said on the stations what I said, got to bring sport back. They had sport everything. You’ve got to do. Play cricket. You’ve got to play football. There’s badminton, you know. And there was running races. Everybody had to be in to sport you see because that’s what the, that’s what the Services were before the war you see. So that’s you had a, you forgot all about. In fact my daughters, I’ve got three daughters, I don’t think they know much about what I did until they read the book. So there we are.
AS: Well, hopefully we’ve got a tape as well. One, one final question if I may and it’s not about your aircrew duties. It’s when you did aerodrome control. And I have a reason for this because my mum used to do it as well.
SK: Oh yes.
AS: What was your —
SK: She’d be in flying control.
AS: She was in flying control.
SK: Yes. Yes. I was in the caravan at the end of the runway.
AS: Oh Ok.
SK: Yeah.
AS: So, what did your duties entail?
SK: Right. As flying control. First of all you logged every aircraft as they took off and when they landed and you brought them on to the runway with an Aldis lamp and gave them permission to take off and then when they were landing, with your binoculars you’ve checked that their wheels are down properly. That their tyres looked in good nick and so on and also to recognise the aircraft as its coming to land and so on, you know. So that’s what your duties were. Yeah.
AS: Brilliant. Thank you.
SK: I’ve got a little bit about [pause] I’ll show you this then because I suppose you’ll want to finish then I’ll have said enough. I’ll show you one other thing. I think you’ll be able to keep it if I can show you something. Are you alright for time?
AS: I I have years for this, Sidney.
SK: Oh alright. Now where is it?
[Pause. Shuffling papers]
SK: Now where is it? No. That’s not it [pause] This was a battle order when we went to the Skoda works. Right.
AS: At Pilsen, yeah.
SK: At Pilsen. And that’s when we got diverted to Boscombe Down. I told you the one occasion.
AS: Yeah.
SK: We got diverted to Boscombe Down and our squadron, which is 5 Group, right. And a squadron should only be two Flights. And a squadron should be six aircraft to a Flight. So you should have twelve aircraft. But you had extra aircraft so you got six serviceable. Right. Well, when the war was going on and Bomber Command was building they formed, our squadron formed a third flight. Right. C Flight.
AS: Yeah.
SK: And we was in A flight when we were at the start. And then when it got to [pause] when it got to, they wanted to start a third Flight it was C Flight and the idea of that was how you build a new squadron is you build it up to three Flights and then when you’re going and alright and you’ve got, that’s eighteen aircraft and you’ve got two or three spares. Then you can take that flight away and it starts a new squadron.
AS: Yeah.
SK: But then you go back to your two flights. Well this time we was up to three Flights because we found out the first, it was the 1st of March, I think, we started our C Flight on our squadron there. And this was the 16th 17th of April right. And this is when we, it’s —these are all the pilots. There’s us up there. The other two pilots with us — one was on leave and Bally was the other that came, just followed us off here. That’s our wing commander. He was on that night. Going down, Mackenzie [pause] No. Stuart was RAAF. You asked about that.
AS: Yeah.
SK: Tillerson. Desmond. All RAF. Wilson. All RAAF I should say.
AS: Yeah.
SK: Sinclair. Wilson again. There was two Wilsons on our squadron. And Parsons. And Manifold. So by that time the captains were getting more, more Australians but we were — but they had RAF in their crews. Right. And this is the number of ops that crew had done. There. That’s the time they took off. The time they bombed. The height they bombed at.
AS: Six thousand feet.
SK: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was, that was our height to bomb at because there was nobody there. We came down to that height to bomb because there were no defences there and yet we had the hardest trip coming back then ever. That’s the time we landed. We diverted, we got the diversion call come when we was crossing the sea. I know we were just crossing the French coast on our way back. I could go on forever. Because when we was at Bottesford you have to put me back on track in a minute, when we was at Bottesford we were, the station was confined to barracks because we had a Diphtheria scare on, on the squadron and they confined everyone to barracks. No one to leave. But we were able to fly on ops. And when we when we, when we landed at Boscombe Down they knew all about it so the MO had phoned through and said, ‘They’re aliens,' you know. That sort of thing. ‘You’ve got to be careful with them.’ So we were sent up to they wouldn’t allow us in the mess. They found us empty huts and we had to lay down and they found us some, what we called biscuits you know to lay on. Mattresses. And we laid down on them and they rustled up some — because Boscombe down was an experimental station for the RAF. Right. And it was only a grass airfield but that was in Hampshire. And they had to get — we lost two aircraft that night. Stuart. And where’s the other one? Failed to return. One there. Oh up here. “And diverted to Boscombe Down in Wiltshire on return as Bottesford was fog bound.” What I mentioned before. We lost thirty five aircraft. Bomber Command lost thirty eight aircraft from this raid and yet there was no defences at the target. A hundred and ninety nine were killed in action. Fifty two prisoners of war and thirteen, there were thirteen evaders. Right. How they — they must have come down in France somewhere and managed to get back through Spain I should think.
AS: So you could have dropped some aircrew with Diphtheria into the prisoner of war camp.
SK: Yes. We were, we were all the what, you know — what do you call it? They hadn’t got enough of the, would it be serum or something?
JM: Oh No. No. Inoculations.
SK: Inoculations. They hadn’t got enough of them, you see. But when you get a big outbreak like that and so they, they was able to test you to see whether you were positive or negative or something. Do they scratch you or something? I don’t know how they do it, put it like that. But our crew was alright but then we were poorly we were still allowed to fly. And the MO at briefing said to us that night, he said, ‘If any of you unfortunately crash and come down in German you must tell them that you are Diphtheria carriers.’ We said, ‘Blimey we wouldn’t tell them that,’ [laughs] You’re asking for a bullet in your head straight away, aren’t you? You know [laughs] So we didn’t agree with the MO one bit. I remember that. So you can keep this bit if you like.
AS: Thank you.
JM: Well, that’s not in the book is it? It’s not subject to copyright?
SK: I don’t know. Maybe. Yeah but —
JM: Oh.
SK: Yeah.
JM: In which case you can’t digitise that I’m afraid.
AS: Ok. We can —
SK: Well you can have a look at it anyway.
AS: We can sort that out.
SK: You must sort it out. I don’t know.
AS: What interests me on there as well.
SK: Yeah.
AS: Is two things. One — did you climb back to height after you’d bombed?
SK: What? In this? On this one. Yeah.
AS: On that one. Yeah.
SK: You would have done. Yes.
AS: And the “Froth Blower” on there. The code name. Is that the squadron or the target code name?
SK: That. No. That would be the target code name you see. “Froth Blower.” Yeah. Yes.
AS: Ok.
SK: I think that would be in the book there. But you see how many aircraft we put up there? And look. They can’t beat that now. We took off at minute intervals.
AS: Yeah.
SK: Minute intervals. And we got fourteen up there till this last one. And I remember Manifold. He was an Aussie but he went on and he did fifty trips. He finished his tour on fifty and he went on to Pathfinders afterwards and he [pause] he, when he went to start his aircraft one engine wouldn’t start. And they had to rush around and take the spare one standing by. So he lost fifteen minutes or whatever it was. But that’s, that was, that’s good flying control. That was a good bloke at the end of the runway did that one.
AS: Fast on the finger.
SK: Yeah. Yeah. Getting them all on there. To get heavy aircraft down at the end of the runway like that, you know.
AS: So at least on that squadron if you had one you’d have a standby aircraft fully fuelled and fully bombed.
SK: You would try to. It didn’t always happen. But there was at that time. At that time there was. Yeah. Yeah. I did a little thing here I wrote down. I think I’ve got it here somewhere. I’m sure I’ve got it here. Printed out. Perhaps I haven’t got it.
[Pause. Shuffling papers]
AS: Do you know how long we’ve been talking for?
SK: No.
JM: Two hours.
AS: Nearly two hours.
SK: Oh I’m sorry.
AS: No. Not at all. Don’t apologise. It’s wonderful.
SK: [unclear ]
AS: I was just saying shall we, shall we draw stumps there. At least for the tape.
SK: Yeah. Yeah.
AS: And maybe we can do another.
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 Sidney Knott
Creator
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Adam Sutch
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
2015-10-01
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. 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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AKnottS151001
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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01:51:57 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Sidney Knott was from Leigh on Sea and recalls the day, with invasion apparently imminent, that signs were put up on the local shops advising people that they had to be ready to move within an hour and taking only one suitcase with them. Sidney’s father had been injured several times during the First World War and advised his son to join the RAF rather than the army. Sidney had had an interrupted education so was advised he would be accepted for general duties. He was posted to Blickling Hall where he was on crash duty but later remustered as an air gunner. Initially he was posted with 467 Squadron based at RAF Bottesford. His was the first crew to complete a full tour on the squadron. After his tour he was posted to RAF Silverstone. He was then approached to join a new squadron and do a further tour of operations. His crew joined 582 Squadron, Pathfinders based at RAF Little Staughton. He completed sixty four operations in both tours. He talks about the fear factor of operations, the instinct over the target looking out for threats and coping with the tiredness.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
England--Bedfordshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1944
17 OTU
467 Squadron
582 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
animal
bombing
fear
ground personnel
Lancaster
Manchester
military service conditions
Operational Training Unit
Pathfinders
RAF Bottesford
RAF Finningley
RAF Little Staughton
RAF Manby
RAF Scampton
RAF Silverstone
RAF Turweston
RAF Wainfleet
RAF Woodhall Spa
training
Wellington
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2454/43713/PThompsonJ1807.2.jpg
09aac28f148aa51c51ec522bf6b7ffa9
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
Thompson, Jean
Howe, Jean
Description
An account of the resource
Eight items. The collection concerns Corporal Jean Thompson (b. 1920 Royal Air Force) and contains photographs. She served as a WAAF at Bawtry Hall, 1 Group RAF Bomber Command Headquarters.
The collection was loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Stephen Howe and catalogued by Benjamin Turner.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-03-27
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Thompson, J
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[symbol]
By the KING’S Order the name of
Corporal J. Thompson,
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force,
was published in the London Gazette on
14 June 1945,
as mentioned in a Despatch for distinguished service.
I am charged to record
His Majesty’s high appreciation.
Harold Macmillan
Secretary of Sate for Air
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
King's appreciation letter
Description
An account of the resource
A letter signed by the Secretary of State for Air, Harold Macmillan, on behalf of the King, addressed to Jean Thompson for distinguished service. Accompanying the letter is a portrait photograph of Jean Thompson in a WAAF uniform.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Air Ministry
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-06-14
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
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
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Photograph
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One letter an one b/w photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PThompsonJ1807
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1945-06-14
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.
ground personnel
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1375/23784/MEdgarAG172180-180704-01.1.pdf
36ae9e28a74e85f4be77156522931818
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
Edgar, Alfred George
Edgar, A G
Description
An account of the resource
83 items. The collection concerns Pilot Officer Alfred George 'Allan' Edgar DFC (b. 1922, 172180 Royal Air Force) He flew operations as a pilot with 49 Squadron.
The collection has been licenced to the IBCC Digital Archive by Pip Harrison and Sally Shawcross nee Edgar, 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
2018-07-04
2019-10-01
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. 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
Edgar, AG
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DADS TRANSCIPT MEMORIES OF CREW AND MISSIONS 1944 TO 1945
RECORDED BY MIKE GARBETT AND BRIAN GOULDING IN 1980 AT A REUNION ON THE CREW HELD AT SUDBROOKE LINCOLN, AUTHORS OF SEVERAL BOOKS LANCASTER AT WAR (UNFORUNATELY SOME OF THE TAPE IS MISSING AND BITS MISSED OUT)
PHOTOS OF FATHER FLYING HIS LANCASTER INTO FISKERTON IS SHOWN IN THEIR BOOK LASCASTER AT WAR NO3.
WE CREWED UP AT 17 OUT AT SILVERSTONE AND IF MY MEMORY SERVES ME CORRECTLY THE FIRST PERSON THAT I GRAVITATED TO WAS THE NAVIGATOR BOB BROOKS AND AUSTRAILIAN I THINK THE MAIN FACT WAS THAT I WAS LOOKING FOR WHAT I THOUGHT WAS A MATURE RELIABLE GOOD NAVIGATOR AND HE SOMEHOW GAVE ME THAT IMPRESSION, SO WE STARTED TALKING AND I REMEMBER OUT OF THIS THAT HE KNEW ALAN MILLARD THE BOMB AIMER SO WE THEN EVENTUALLY GRAVITATED TO HIM AND HE KNOWING BOB FELT IT WOULD BE BETTER TO JOIN US.
AND AFTERWARDS I DID FIND OUT FROM BOB IT WAS SORT OF FIRST HAND IMPRESSION HE RATHER LIKES THE LOOK OF ME, IT WAS ONE OF THOSE THINGS
I AM ALMOST CERTAIN THEN THAT THE NEXT PERSON THAT WE GRABBED, WAS THE WIRELESS OPERATOR AG ALF RIDPATH WHO WITH HIS FAIR SWEPT BACK LOOKED A LITTLE BIT OF A GAY LOTHARIO AND WE FELT IT WAS ANOTHER COMPLETE IDIOT THAT WOULD JOIN AN IDIOT TYPE MOB ANYWAY, AND WE SEEM TO GET ON QUITE WELL. THE NEXT ONE WAS DON HARWOOD THE REAR GUNNER WHO ALTHOUGH HE WAS YOUNG AS US SEEM TO HAVE AN OLD HEAD ON HIS SHOULDERS, A DEEP VOICE AND GAVE AN IMPRESSION OF RELIABILITY, I SOMETIMES WONDER IF THIS WAS EVER TRUE! AND THEN JOHN WATTERS WAS THE MID UPPER GUNNER A LAD FROM BELFAST WHO I AM ALMOST POSITIVE WAS MUCH YOUNGER THAN WHAT HE MAINTAINED HE REALLY WAS, TO THIS DAY I AM CONVINCED THAT HE WAS ONLY ABOUT 16/17 YRS AND HE CLAIMED TO BE MUCH OLDER 18/19 YRS, IT WAS A GREAT PITY REALLY THAT I SUBSEQUENTLY LEARNT AFTER THE WAR THAT HE HAD STEPPED UNDER A TUBE TRAIN ON NEWS YEARS EVE COMMITTING SUICIDE, I LEARNT THIS FROM DON HARWOOD THE REAR GUNNER.
ANYWAY AFTER COMPLETING OUT AT SILVERSTONE WE
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FINALLY ARRIVED AT 1661 CONVERSION UNIT AT WINTHORPE JUST OUTSIDE NEWARK AND TO BE HONEST I CAN’T REMEMBER MUCH ABOUT MY INSTRUCTOR AT ALL – ALL I CAN REMEMBER IS THE BLOODY STERLING!! NOW THE MOST INTERESTING THING WAS THAT ALAN MILLARD THE AUSTRALIAN BOMB AIMER WAS A FAILED PILOT WHO HAD GONE ONTO THE BOMB AIMERS COURSE. SO FROM THE VERY BEGINNING AS A CREW I DIRECTED IF ONE CAN ASSUME THE WORDS DIRECTED THAT EVERYBODY WOULD DOUBLE UP ON EVERYBODY ELSE IN CASE OF ANYTHING HAPPENING AND SO ALAN MILLARD WOULD TAKE OVER IF ANYTHING HAPPENED TO ME BECAUSE AS HE GOT AS NEAR TO GETTING HIS WINGS IT WAS QUITE POSSIBLE INFACT HIGHLY PROBABLE THAT HE COULD FLY THE AIRCRAFT BACK AND MAKE SOME REASONABLE ATTEMPT AT LANDING IT.
THE WIRELESS OPERATOR DOUBLED UP AS A GUNNER, THE NAVIGATOR BOB BROOKS DOUBLED UP AS A BOMB AIMER AS DID THE FLIGHT ENGINEER, AND IN MY MEMORY SERVES ME CORRECTLY AS WELL, ALAN MILLARD THE BOMB AIMER ALSO PARTIALLY DOUBLED UP FOR THE WIRELESS OPERATOR. WE LEFT JOHNNIE WATTERS THE MID UPPER GUNNER TWIT ON HIS OWN AS WE FELT IT BETTER LEAVE HIM UPSTAIRS THAN DOUBLING UP FOR ANYBODY.
I CAN ALSO REMEMBER THE FACT THAT BOB BROOKS THE NAVIGATOR WAS A JUDO EXPERT AND INFACT IT WAS COMMON PRACTISE WITH OUR CREW TO EGG YOUNG WATTERS JOHN TO ATTACK BOB BROOKS WOULD THROW HIM AROUND THE CREW HUT UNTIL FINALLY THE YOUNG IDIOT IRISHMAN LEANT TO PACK IT IN FOR THE NIGHT, WHEN WE WOULD RESUME AGAIN THE NEXT NIGHT.
COMING BACK TO THE STIRLING I THINK THE MOST VIVID IMPRESSION FOR ME INITIALLY WAS TAXING. NOW WITHOUT AS DOUBT WAS PROBABLY THE MOST BARBARIC BASTARDISE BLOODY AIRCRAFT I HAVE EVER MET IN MY LIFE FOR TAXING. IF MY MEMORY SERVES ME CORRECTLY THERE A HUGE YELLOW BRAKE AND YOU OPERATED THE FOUR THROTTLES AND PULLED THIS MASSIVE GREAT LORRY BRAKE BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS SWINGING THE RUDDERS AROUND WHILE THIS, I CAN ONLY DESCRIBE IT AS A TYRANNOSAURUS REX OF A DINOSAUR PROWLED RATHER THAN ROLLED ALL OVER THE PLACE, IN ADDITION THE FLIGHT ENGINEER SAT ON THE MIDDLE OF THE AIRCRAFT IN WHAT WAS LIKE A SUBMARINE WITH ALL HIS FOURTEEN AND IF MY MEMORY SERVES ME CORRECTLY ONCE AGAIN THE FUEL TANKS FOR CROSS FEEDING AND OTHER PURPOSES AND IN ADDITION IT DIDN’T MATTER WHAT ANYBODY DID THIS COW OF AN AIRCRAFT NEVER REACHED ITS CEILING EVER.
LANDING AT WINTHORPE WITH THE RUNWAY THAT RAN PARALLEL WITH THE MAIN NEWARK/LINCOLN ROAD ONCE AGAIN THIS BLOODY HANDBRAKE WAS A DISADVANTAGE RATHER THAN AN ADVANTAGE AS I CAN ONLY SAY FROM THINKING DEEPLY ABOUT IT WHOEVER
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3
DESIGNED THE BLOODY STERLING SHOULD HAVE BEEN MENTALLY EXAMINED.
ANOTHER THING ABOUT STERLINGS WAS CORRING THIS WAS WHERE, I AM ALMOST SURE ITS AS IF THE OIL TEMPERATURE WENT DOWN THAT YOU DROPPED THE UNDERCARRIAGE OPENED UP FULL THROTTLES WITH PART FLAP AND STAGGERED ALONG WITH WHAT CAN ONLY BE TERMED AS FOUR BLOODY GREAT BIG BULLSEYES FOR THE ENGINES WHICH OF COURSE MEANT FROM AN OPERATIONAL POINT OF VIEW THAT THEY WERE SITTING DUCKS FOR ANYBODY, AND IT WAS 460 OR 490 TOW TURNS ON THE WHEELS TO GET THE UNDERCARRIAGE DOWN IF YOU COULD NOT LOWER IT NORMALLY BECAUSE I REMEMBER THAT HAPPENING TO US ONCE.
IT WAS AT WINTHORPE AS WELL THAT WE HAD TO GET RID OF OUR FIRST ENGINEER BECAUSE UNFORTUNATELY IT WAS TAKE OFF WHEELS UP “BREAKFAST UP” AND THERE WAS JUST NO WAY HE WAS GOING TO MAKE IT.
WE THEN TOOK ON ANOTHER ENGINEER CALLED GEORGE BEDFORD ON WHO OF COURSE FLEW WITH ME DURING MY FIRST TOUR AND GEORGE BEDFORD THE 2ND FLIGHT ENGINEER AS A VERY PROSAIC LAD AND INDEED HE BELIEVED IMPLICITLY THAT HIS JOB AS A FLIGHT ENGINEER WAS TO MAKE CERTAIN THAT WHATEVER AIRCRAFT WE WERE FLYING WAS ABSOLUTELY IN TIP TOP CONDITION – BECAUSE I CAN REMEMBER COMING BACK FROM A TRIP AND I THOUGHT FOR ONCE I AM GOING TO LIGHT UP A CIGARETTE AND HAVE A SMOKE AS WE WERE FLYING BACK ACROSS THE NORTH SEA AND I DISTINCTLY REMEMBER HIM GOING BANANAS OVER ME SMOKING A CIGARETTE.
AFTER A SHORT PERIOD OF ABOUT 14 HRS OF WHICH 7 HRS DAYLIGHT AND 7HRS NIGHT AT LANC FINISHING SCHOOL AT SYSERTON I THEN ARRIVED AT 49 SQUADRON FISKERTON
WHERE FOR MY SINS I WAS GIVEN “A” APPLE TO FLY I CAN REMEMBER THE FIRST TRIP WHICH WAS A 2ND DICKIE TRIP WHICH WAS WITH RUSS EVANS AND THAT WAS TO DANZIG BAY GIDENER, KONISBERG AREA WHICH WAS A 9HRS 15MIN TRIP, I THINK THAT ALL I CAN REMEMBER ABOUT THIS WAS THE FACT THAT IT SEEMED COMPLETELY IDIOTIC TO ME THAT A PILOT SHOULD GO ON A TRIP RISK GETTING SHOT DOWN WITH ANOTHER PILOT AND CREW, WHEREUPON HIS CREW WOULD HAVE TO GO BACK ALL OVER IT AGAIN WITH ANOTHER PILOT! THE THING WAS TO STAND BEHIND THE PILOT AND FLIGHT ENGINEER AND OBSERVE “WHAT I DO NOT KNOW” I SUPPOSE THE IDEA WAS THAT YOU WENT WITH A RELATIVELY EXPERIENCED CREW AND AS IT WERE SHUCK DOWN WITH THEM AND GOT AN IDEA OR IMPRESSION OF WHAT THE WHOLE CAPER WAS ABOUT.
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BUT ALSO AS I SAY I TEND TO THINK THAT BECAUSE YOU AND YOUR CREW WERE DIFFERENT WHATEVER SHAPE OR FORM THERE WAS GOING TO BE A DIFFERENT REACTION ANYWAY BECAUSE YOU WOULD HAVE TO BE TEACHING YOUR CREW ON YOUR VERY FIRST TRIP WHEN YOU HAVE ONLY DONE ONE YOURSELF! WHICH HAD NOT GIVE YOU MUCH EXPERIENCE ANYWAY. AND INFACT RUSS EVANS IS STILL RUNNING AROUND
HE PROBABLY THINKS OF THIS IDIOT, WHO AFTERWARDS WE GREW VERY FRIENDLY TOGETHER.
MY NEXT TRIP WAS ONE WITH MY OWN CREW TO TORS MARSHALLING YARD AT 7,000 FEET AND I THINK THIS WILL ALWAYS LIVE IN MY MEMORY AS FRANKLY IT STARTED OUT AS A COMPLETE SHAMBLES BUT IT HELPED THE CREW INTO A FIGHTING UNIT.
WE STARTED UP AND TAXIED ROUND TOWARDS TAKEOFF AND I THINK I WAS ABOUT 3RD 4TH OR 5TH INLINE COMING UP THE RUNWAY AND ALAN MILLARD THE BOMB AIMER A TYPICALLY AUSTRALIAN IF I MY [SIC] USE THE WORD WAS IN THE BOMB AIMER COMPARTMENT AND PISSING ABOUT AS USUALLY WHEN SUDDENLY IN A TYPICALLY AUSTRALIAN TWANG OVER THE INTERCOM CAME “ I HAVE PULLED MY BLOODY CHUTE AND IT HAS BELLOWED OUT” I IMMEDIATELY SAID “ WELL THERE IS NO WAY WE CAN TURN OFF HERE AND I CAN’T SEE US TURNING ROUND HERE AND TAXING DOWN THE END TO GET ANOTHER CHUTE FOR YOU SO WE SHALL HAVE TO GO AS IS AND I WOULD SUGGEST TO YOU THAT IF WE HAVE TO BAIL OUT YOU HOLD YOUR CHUTE UP TO YOUR CHEST AND WHEN YOU GET CLEAR OF THE AIRCRAFT RELEASE IT BECAUSE ITS ALREADY OPENED ANYWAY” UPON WHICH IF MY MEMORY SERVES ME CORRECTLY HE REPLIED “THAT HE HADN’T COME 12,000 ------ -----!! FOR THIS SORT OF CAPER!! IT JUST SO HAPPENED THAT THE VERY FIRST TRIP I WAS USING A OBSERVE TYPE CHUTE SO IN A FLASH YOU WOULDN’T CALL IT INSPIRATION MORE DESPERATION I SAID ALRIGHT YOU BETTER TAKE MY CHUTE THEN, INCASE ANYTHING HAPPENS, UPON WHICH HE SAID THANKS VERY MUCH SKIP AND PULLED MY CHUTE DOWN INTO THE BOMB AIMERS COMPARTMENT, AND BY THAT TIME I WAS ON THE RUNWAY AND BEGINNING TO TAKE OFF AND IT WAS PROVABLY OR COLLOQUIAL ‘NOT UNTIL AIRBORNE THAT I SHIT A BRICK!! SO OF COURSE THE TRIP COMMENCED WITH ME WITHOUT A CHUTE AND HE THE GREAT ALAN MILLARD WITH TWO, ONE WHICH WAS OPENED WHICH HE HAD STUFFED INTO A CORNER OF THE BOMB AIMERS COMPARTMENT AND AFTERWARDS WHEN WE RETURNED HOME THE REST OF THE CREW SAID SOME HOW OR OTHER THEY ALL FELT THAT THEY MUST NOT LET ME DOWN BECAUSE THERE I WAS FLYING WITHOUT A CHUTE WHEN EVERYBODY ELSE WAS OK AND NO WAY WERE THEY GOING TO LET THE SKIPPER DOWN. SO HAVING SET OFF AS IT WERE AT A SLIGHT DISADVANTAGE AND THINGS OF WAFTING MY WAY GENERALLY DOWN THROUGH THE AIR SHOULD WE BE SHOT UP ON NOTHING.
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WE GET TOWARDS THE TARGET AND STARTED THE RUN IN, DURING OUR TRAINING IT HAD BEEN EMPHASISED WE WERE NOT GOING OVER THE OTHER SIDE TO CHUCK OR THROW BOMBS AROUND AND THAT BASICALLY YOU SHOULD PUT THEM DOWN IN THE RIGHT SPOT SO WHEN WE CAME UP TO THE TARGET AND ALAN WAS SAYING “ STEADY RIGHT, STEADY OH I HAVE MISSED IT GO ROUND AGAIN” I LIKE THE IDIOT I WAS WENT ROUND AGAIN. NOT THINKING GET RID OF THE BLOODY THINGS. SO OF COURSE I WENT ROUND AGAIN AND RAN IN AND THIS TIME WE PUT THEM DOWN AND IF MY MEMORY SERVES ME CORRECTLY IT WAS A AIMING POINT. IT WAS NOT TILL WE GOT BACK THAT WE REALISED THAT UNDER NORMAL CONDITIONS CREWS DIDN’T NORMALLY DO THIS SORT OF THING. SO REALLY OF WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN A DISASTER TURNED OUT TO BE A EXCELLENT THINKS FROM THE CREWS POINT OF VIEW BECAUSE WE BECAME WEILLED AS A FIGHTING UNIT. IT ALSO BECAME APPARENT ON THIS TRIP BECAUSE WE REALISED EARLIER ON THERE WERE THREE ALANS OR ALS IN THE CREW THAT WAS THE BOMB AIMER, WIRELESS OP AND MYSELF, SO THE REAR GUNNER AND MID UPPER GUNNER WOULD CALL ME SKIP AND THE REST OF THE CREW WOULD CALL ME PILOT, THE IDEA BEING THAT IF SOMEBODY CALLED ME SKIP I STARTED WEAVING STRAIGHT AWAY ON THE GROUNDS THAT A GUNNER WAS COMING UP ON THE INTERCOM.
I THINK THE MAIN THING ABOUT MAILLY LE COMP WAS THE ENORMOUS COCKUP OF THIS OPERATION IN WHICH 1 GROUP CAME WITH US ON THE TRIP BECAUSE OF THE SHAMBLES AT THE TARGET INCLUDING VIRTUALLY ALL THE BLINDED ILLUMINATORS BEING KNOCKED OFF THERE WERE “T.I.S” PUT DOWN IN TWO DIFFERENT PLACES ONE FOR 1 GROUP AND ONE FOR US AWAY FROM THE TARGET UPON WHICH EVERYBODY WAS TO CIRCLE THEIR RESPECTIVE “T.I” BY THIS TIME I HAD LEARNT ENOUGH NOT TO GO NEAR ANY “T.I”. WE WERE A LITTLE AWAY FROM OUR ONE QUIETLY CIRCLING IF YOU CAN POINT THAT OUT, WE KNOW THAT 1 GROUP IF MY MEMORY SERVES ME CORRECTLY WERE CIRCLING A YELLOW “T.I” AS IF THEY WERE ON A RACE TRACK WITH A RESULT THAT THE FIGHTER BOYS WERE HAVING A FIELD DAY WITH THAT LOT
COS WHEN THE TIME CAME FOR US TO COME IN I CAN REMEMBER TWO INCIDENTS, ONE WITH OUR RUN IN WITH THE BOMB DOORS OPEN A LANC WENT PAST US LIKE A BAT OUT HELL WITH HIS BOMB DOORS OPEN AND THEN A FOKWOLF 190 WENT OVER THE TOP OF OUR COCKPIT BECAUSE THE REAR GUNNER HAD CALLED UP “FIGHTER” AND OF COURSE I WAS ON THE BOMBING RUN AND HE COULDN’T HAVE BEEN MORE THAN 20 OR 30FT OFF THE TOP IF US WHERE HE WAS GOING FOR THE LANC THAT HAS JUST PASSED US AND HE FIRED HOT THIS LANC AND KNOCKED IT OFF “IT JUST BLEW UP” ITS RATHER IRONIC AS WELL BECAUSE DURING THIS TRIP WE HAD THREE COMBATS AS WELL IT WAS A PRETTY HAIRY DO. THERE WAS SO MANY FIGHTERS AROUND US IT WAS TO BE
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UNBELIEVABLE, THEIR DAY FIGHTERS WERE UP AS WELL AS IT WAS SUCH A BRIGHT MOONLIGHT NIGHT.
IF MY MEMORY SERVES ME CORRECTLY THAT THIS TRIP WAS ALSO WHERE WE SPOTTED A WHITEL HINEKELL111 AND MY REAR GUNNER SAID LETS GO DOWN AND KNOCK IT OFF AND I SAID WAIT A MINUTE WHEN SUDDENLY IT TURNED TOWARDS AND WE WERE ATTACKED BY TWO FIGHTERS THAT WERE WITH IT, THEY WERE WORKING I AM ALMOST CERTAIN IN CONJUNCTION WITH THIS HINEKELL, SO THAT AS ONE FIGHTER CAME IN AND YOU CORKSCREWED INTO HIM THE OTHER FIGHTER CAME IN AND YOU CORKSCREWED INTO HIM WITH OTHER FIGHTER WOULD THEN BE ON THE OUTSIDE TO NAIL YOU WHICH OF COURSE WOULD FORCE YOU TOWTRDS THE HINEKELL WHICH ALSO WOULD LET FLY AT YOU SO INFACT IN REALITY YOU WERE BEING ATTACKED BY ALL THREE. I DO’NT[SIC] KNOW PERHAPS HE WAS A TRAINEE AIRCRAFT OR WHATEVER IT WAS WE SEEM TO THINK IT WAS A BLOODY GOOD PLOY, BECAUSE WE MENTIONED IT WHEN WE GOT BACK FROM THE TRIP THAT IT SEEMED LIKE A NEW SYSTEM OPERATING BY THEM. ALL WE KNEW THAT WE WERE ATTACKED BY TWO FIGHTERS WHICH APPARENTLY WERE WORKING IN CONJUNCTON WITH IT.
THE ONLY THING I CAN REMEMBER ABOUT THE NEXT TRIP TO SALSBREE ARSENAL WAS THAT ONE WE WERE HIT BY LIGHT FLAK WHICH NECESSITATED US HAVING TO CRASH LAND AT WITTERING THE OTHER THING WAS WE SPOTTED A TRAIN WITH WHITE STEAM COMING UP FROM IT SO WE ATTACKED IT RACED UP AND DOWN IT WITH THE GUNNERS FIRING AT THE TRAIN. IT SEEMS IRONIC TO ME THAT ALL I CAN REMEMBER IS NOT SO MUCH LANDING AT WITTERING ALTHOUGH I DO KNOW NOT HAVING ANY BRAKES OR FLAPS JUST SHOOTING UP THIS TRAIN WHICH WE THOUGHT WAS HILARIOUS EPISODE NOT REALISING OF COURSE THAT WE COULD OF EASILY BEEN BROUGHT DOWN EITHER BY GUNS ON THE TRAIN OR BY A FIGTER FOR UST GOING DOWN AND LARKING ABOUT I MEAN AFTER ALL WHY SHOULD FIGHTERS JUST ATTACK TRAINS WHY CANT LANCASTERS!!
AFTER THE NEXT TRIP IN WHICH WE HAD THREE COMBATS AGAIN WITH NO CLAIMS, CAME THE ONE TO BELGIUM
BOURG LEOPOLD WHICH I WON THE D.F.C.
I REMEMBER ON THIS THAT WE WERE ATTACKED WITHOUT EITHER OF MY GUNNERS SPOTTING THIS BOY HE JUST CAME IN FROM BELOW IN THE DARK AND THE NEXT THINGS THAT WE KNEW THAT HE WAS KNOCKING SIX OUT OF US BECAUSE LET ME RECAP – ONE CANNON SHELL KNOCKED OUT THE WIRELESS SET – WE HAD A FIRE IN THE BOMB BAY FROM THE ATTACK AND WHATS MORE THE FLYING CONTROL SYSTEM WAS HEAVILY DAMAGED BECAUSE SHE REARED LIKE A STRICKEN HORSE AND WENT OVER ONTO HER BACK THEN WE DROPPED ABOUT 12,000 FEET BEFORE I PULLED HER OUT
THE MAIN THING WAS THAT HE HAD GOT VIRTUALLY ALL HIS ATTACK IN BEFORE WE RIPPED UP AND WENT – AS WE HAD NOT DROPPED OUR
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BOMBS WE WERE IN A DIVE AND THE FIRE I OPENED THE BOMB DOORS AND SAID JETTISON THE BOMBS AND SEE IF WE CAN BLOW THE FIRE OUT THE NEXT MINUTE WELL REALLY IT WASN’T THE NEXT MINUITE BECAUSE WE MUST HAVE LOST 10,000-12,000 FEET
IN THE DIVE BY HINT OF PULLING AND MANOEUVRING THE LANC CAME OUT AND SHOT STRAIGHT UP AGAIN WITH A VIOLENT TENDANCY TO GO OVER ONTO ITS BACK – TRYING TO CONTROL HER (IT SEEMS RATHER FUNNY TO CALL A LANC A HER) TRYING TO CONTROL HER I HAD TO CROSS MY RIGHT LEG OVER MY LEFT LEG AND HOLD THE CONTROL COLUMN FORWARD WITH MY RIGHT KNEECAP THEN I HAD TO HOLD FULL LEFT AILERON DOWN AND THIS BROUGHT HER STRAIGHT AND LEVEL AND KEPT HER STRIAGHT AND LEVEL FOR A MOMENT. I CALLED THE BOMB AIMER UP AND THE FLIGHT ENINGEER TO GET INTO THE BOMB AIMERS COMPARTMENT AND I HAD WITH MY LEFT LEG FULL LEFT RUDDER THE IDEA BEING THAT ALAN MILLARD WOULD COME UP AND CONTROL THE THROTTLE TO ASSIST ME BECAUSE WE HAD TO HAVE THE ENGINES OUT OF SYNCHRONISATION IN ORDER TO KEEP HER STRAIGHT AND LEVEL AND GEORGE THE FLIGHT ENGINEER TIED A PIECE OF ROPE ROUND THE LEFT RUDDER AND WAS HOLDING ON TO IT TO HELP – IT WAS DURING THIS PART AS WELL ONE THINKS OF THE HILARIOUS EPISODE OF THE NAVIGATOR SAYING “ I HAVE BEEN HIT AND I WILL GIVE YOU A COURSE FOR HOME” WHICH HE DID OF COURSE THIS TOOK ME AGES TO TURN ONTO THE COURSE WITH THE LANC CRIPPLED AS IT WAS THEN HE FELT INSIDE HIS SHIRT UNDER HIS MAE WEST AND SUBSEQUENTELY SAID “CHRIST ITS SWEAT”
WE AND I SAY WE BECAUSE THERE WAS THREE OF US DOING THE JOB FLEW BACK TO ENGLAND AND WAS DIVERTED TO WOODBRIDGE WHERE I WAS TOLD TO BRING IT IN - SO AS I CAME ACROSS THE AIRFIELD FOR THE FIRST TIME I TOLD ALL MY CREW TO GO FORWARD AND BAIL OUT BECAUSE I DID NOT THINK I COULD BRING IT IN SAFELY THERE WAS THE PROVERBIAL RHUBARDS WE STAYING WITH YOU RATHER THAN BAILING OUT – SO THEY WENT INTO THE CRASH POSITIONS EXCEPT FOR ALAN MILLARD AND MYSELF AND I BROUGHT IT IN AND CRASHED LANDED WHERE AFTERWARDS IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A MASTERLY LANDING ACCORDING TO THE CITATION
ALL I CAN REMEMBER WAS THAT TWO THINGS
ONE WHERE THE CREW SUBSEQUENTLY COUNTED 200 HOLES IN THE AIRCRAFT FROM THE FIGHTERS ATTACK AND THE QUESTION OF THE LITTLE RUM BOTTLES FROM WHICH WE ALL GOT STONED OUT OF MINDS AFTER HAVING SURVIVED
BECAUSE ALSO HALF THE PORT RUDDER WAS MISSING AS WELL. BUT MOST OF THE ATTACK WAS CANNON SHELL BECAUSE APPROXIMATELY 2 WEEKS AFTER THIS EPISODE I FOUND OUT THAT I HAD BEEN AWARDED THE D.F.C.
WELL IF YOU MEAN A CELEBRATION ALL I KNOW IS THAT AT WOODBRIDGE WE GOT STONED OUT OF OUR MINDS WIPING ALL THE
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RUM BOTTLES PRESUMABLY THEY WERE MEANT FOR THE OTHER CREWS WHO CRASH LANDED THERE AS WELL ALTHOUGH WE SAT OUTSIDE THE HUT AND THEY COLLOQUIAL PUT, PISSED OUT OF OUR MINDS - YES THERE WAS A DO IN THE OFFICERS MESS BUT AS THE REST OF MY CREW WERE N.C.OS. WE HAD A LITTLE ONE ON OUR OWN BUT THE OTHER THING WAS THAT OF COURSE MY WIFE SHE WAS NOT THEN SEWED MY D.F.C. ONTO MY TUNIC.
ANOTHER TRIP WAS TO A PLACE CALLED MAISY I STILL CANT PRONOUNCE THE NAME OF IT IN FRENCH AND WE HAD BEEN ATTACKED WE COULD NOT OPEN THE BOMB DOORS AND WE HAD 13,000 LBS BOMBS ABOARD INCIDENTALLY THE WHOLE OF THE HYDRAULIC SYSTEM HAD GONE AS WELL – AFTERWARDS ON THE WAY HOME WE WERE DIVERTED TO SILVERSTONE OUR OLD OTU WHERE WE HAD FIRST CREWED UP ON WELLINGTONS COMING INTO LAND I HAD TO USE THE EMERGENCY AIR SYSYTEM TO BRING DOWN THE UNDERCARRIAGE AND FLAPS WHEN ALOAD OF REDS WERE FIRED AT THE BEGINNING OF THE RUNWAY AND I WAS TOLD TO OVERSHOOT THIS MEANT THAT I INSTICITIVELY PUSHED THE THROTTLE OPEN APPARENTLY THERE WAS STILL ANOTHER AIRCRAFT ON THE RUNWAY SOMEWHERE SO WE STARTED TO STAGGER ALONG ON AT ABOUT 200 FEET WITH A FULL BOMB LOAD UNDERCARRIDGE AND FLAPS DOWN WITHOUT ANY CHANCE OF GETTING THE UNDERCARRIDGE AND FLAPS UP AND I WAS DIVERTED TO TURWESTON – I CAN REMEMBER LETTING A FLOOD OF LANGUAGE COME OUT OVER THE RT (RADIO TRANSMITTOR) TO THE CONTROL TOWER AND PUTTING ME IN THIS STUPID POSITION – SO WE STAGGERED TOWARDS TURWESTON IN THIS CONDITION WHERE I BROUGHT IT STRAIGHT IN AFTER USING THE INTERCOM VITROUILIC TO ALL AND SUNDRY WITRH SOME WORKDS I WOULD THINK ARE ANOT MENTIONED IN BOOKS ANYMORE – WE LANDED ONTO THE RUNWAY AND RAN OFF ONTO THE GRASS AND I REMEMBERED A TRUCK COMING OUT TO US AND SAYING THEY THOUGHT WE HAD SOME PRACTISE BOMBS ABOARD AND WHEN THEY WERE TOLD IT WAS A FULL BOMB LOADS THEY ALL LEPT BACK INTO THE TRUCK AND DISPPEARED OVER THE HORIZON AT HIGH SPEED
SO WE LEFT THE LANC WERE IT WAS AND STARTED TO TRUDGE ACROSS THE AIRFIELD AND BY DAYLIGHT I REMEMEBER DISTINCTIVELY SOME TWIT AS A WING COMMANDER GIVING ME A ROASTING OVER MY USE OF FOUL LANGUAGE OVER THE INTERCOM – IT DID NOT APPEAR TO HIM THAT THERE HAS BEEN ANYTHING WRONG WITH OVERSHOOTING ME WITH A FULL BOMB LOAD WITH UNDERCARRIDGE AND FLAPS DOWN AND ONCE AGAIN I AM CERTAIN THAT AT THE SAME TIME A HALIFAX HAD OVERSHOT AND GONE INTO THE CLOTHING STORE AND BLOWN UP
THE THING ABOUT THIS INCIDENT IS THAT I WILL NOT RELATE ANYMORE BECAUSE IT WAS FAR BETTER TO DRAW A CURTAIN ACROSS
[PAGE BREAK]
9
WHEN ONE CONSIDERS THAT AT THESE TWO AIRFIELDS WERE EX OPERATIONAL PEOPLE WHO WERE NOW INSTRUCTING WHO APPEARED TO HAVE LOST ALL SEMBLANCE OF REALITY.
I THINK IT WOULD BE OF INTEREST TO RELATE ONE SMALL HUMOROUS INCIDENT AND THAT WAS THAT THERE WAS A LEADER NAVIGATION CHAP “PATCHEET” WHO ALWAYS SWORE BLIND THAT HE WOULD NEVER FLY WITH ME BECAUSE I WAS THE HAIRIEST ARSE PILOT ON THE SQUARDON
COS I WAS NOTORIOUS FOR LOW FLYING AND FOR GETTING BACK FIRST
WELL WE HAD BEEN UP TO THE OPS ROOM TO PREPARE FOR THE NIGHTS TRIP AND BOB BROOKS THE NAVIGATOR HAD A BICYCLE AND ON THE REAR WHEEL ON ONE SIDE WAS FREEWHEEL AND THE OTHER SIDE WAS FIXED – HE ALWAYS USED THE FREEWHEEL SIDE AND RIDING BACK FROM THE OPS ROOM WOULD GO ROUND THIS BEND AND PUT HIS FOOT DOWN AND DIRT TRACK LIKE A SPEEDWAY RIDER WHILE HE WAS IN THE OPS ROOM PREPARING THE NAVIGATION ASPECT WE TURNED THE REAR WHEEL ROUND SO THAT HE WAS ON FIXED AND SO HE RODE ALONG PUT HIS RIGHT FOOT DOWN AND HIS LEFT ONE OUT TO DO A SPEEDWAY RIDERS BROADSIDE AND QUITE NATURALLY CAME OFF HIS BIKE HEADLONG INTO THE HEDGE AND DITCH!!
IMMEDIATELY THE DOC WAS INFORMED AND HE WAS CARRIED TO THE SICK BAY WHERE HE WAS TOLD HE COULD NOT GO THAT NIGHT SO PATCHETT WAS NOMINATED TO COME WITH ME AND MY CREW AND DID NOT LIKE THIS ONE AT ALL!
AND THE FUND THING ABOUT THIS TRIP WAS THAT WE WERE ATTACKED TWICE – WITH PATCHETT SITTING THERE AND ALL OF SUDDEN OVER THE INTERCOM AFTER THE SECOND ATTACK HE SAID “I THINK IN FUTURE ANYTIME YOU WANT ME I WILL COME WITH YOU BECAUSE I DID NOT REALISE THAT YOU AND YOUR CREW WERE SO EFFICIENT OVER THE ENEMY TERRITORY”
I KNOW THAT IT BECAME A BYE WORD THAT I WAS INVARIABLY FIRST BACK THERE WAS VARIOUS NAMES APPLIED TO ME INCLUDING CHAMPION JOCKEY AND IT BECAME ALMOST A MATTER OF PROUD WITH ME
A. TO BE FIRST BACK AND
B. B. FOR ANOTHER CREW ON THE SQUADRON TO BEAR ME BACK WHICH FROM MY MEMORY NEVER DID HAPPEN
THE MAIN ASPECT APPEARED TO BE HOW WAS IT I GOT FIRST BACK AND YET MY FUEL LOGS ALWAYS SHOWED THAT WE DID QUITE WELL REGARDS TO FUEL CONSUMPTION
THE ANSWER WAS SIMPLE AND IT WAS KEPT A CLOSELY REGARDED SECRET WITH MY CREW
THAT WHEN WE WERE TOLD TO START DESCENDING AT CERTAIN POINT I STILL KEPT ALTITUDE AND WOULD COME DOWN IN VERY
[PAGE BREAK]
10
SIMPLE SMALL STEPS STILL WITH THE SAME REVS THE RESULT WAS THAT THE TIME EVERYBODY WAS AT CIRCUIT HEIGHT AND FLYING STRAIGHT AND LEVEL TOWARDS BASE I WAS STILL SOME 1000S FEET ABOVE THEM AND VIRTUALLY AT A SIMILAR POINT RELATIVE TO THE EARTHS SURFACE IN RELATION TO THEM THEN THROTTLING BACK AND PUTTING MY NOSE DOWN I WOULD REACH WHAT ONE MIGHT CALL FANTASTIC SPEEDS FOR THE LANCASTER AND RACE PASS EVERYBODY REACHING BASE FIRST AND NOBODY COULD UNDERSTAND HOW THIS KEPT HAPPENING TIME AND TIME AGAIN
ITS INTERESTING BECAUSE AFTER THE WAR WHEN I WENT BACK TO 83 SQUADRON ON LINCOLN’S I APPLIED THE SAME TECHNIQUE AND WAS INVARIABLE FIRST BACK AGAIN AND NOBODY COULD UNDERSTAND EITHER HOW IT HAPPENED.
ANOTHER THING I WAS NOTORIOUS FOR I SAY NOTORIOUS IN APOSTROPHES AND ITALICS WAS COMING INTO THE AIRFIELD INLINE WITH THE RUNWAY AT NOUGHT FEET CLEAN AS A WHISTLE AND A THIRD OR HALFWAY DOWN THE RUNWAY PULLING UP VERY VERY STEEPLY AND GOING INTO A VERY VERY TIGHT LEFT TURN AND WHEN I WAS IN AN ALMOST UPSIDE DOWN POSITION UNDER CARRIAGE AND FLAPS DOWN AND THROTTLE BACK TEMPORARILY STICK WELL BACK IN MY STOMACH AND A SPLIT ARSE TURN ONTO THE RUNWAY LIKE A SPITFIRE OR HURRICANE. I HAD A FEW ROCKETS OVER THIS BUT NOBODY SEEMED REALLY TO OBJECT TO THIS ONE !!
I THINK INFACT THIS COULD REALLY BE MENTIONED IN THE BOOK IF HE GOT ROUND TO IT
THERE WAS A DRIVER A WAAFF ON 49 SQUADRON AND ALL WE KNEW HER WAS SWISS ROLL SAL AND SHE WAS EXTREMELY KEEN ON MY WIRELESS OP ALF WITH A RESULT WAS WHEN WE LANDED WHOEVER WAS CLOSE BEHIND US SHE WOULD INVARIABLY COME TO OUR DISPERSAL FIRST TO COLLECT US AND GET US BACK TO DE-BRIEFING IT WAS A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE WITH HER! AND I REMEMBER WE HAD BEEN TO LINCOLN THE CREW AND I AND WE HAD GOT BACK TO FISKERTON FIVE MILE HOLT AND YOU CROSSED THE RIVER BY A LITTLE FERRY BOAT IN THE DARK AND SWISS ROLL SAL WAS WITH MY WIRELESS OP AG WITH SOME OTHER WAAFS AND A COUPLE OF OTHER CREWS AND THERE WAS A HILARIOUS MIX UP IN THE BOAT WHEN HALF OF THEM WENT ONTO THE WATER! AND I THINK THAT’S ITS JUST THE FACT AS I SAY EVERYBODY KNEW SWISS ROLL SAL
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
Transcript of interview with Allan Edgar
Dad's Transcript Memories of Crew and Missions 1944 to 1945
Description
An account of the resource
The memoirs were recorded in 1980 at a reunion at Sudbrooke. He starts by describing crewing up at Silverstone. His opinion of the Stirling was that it was awful on the ground and in the air. His first operation was a second 'dickie' (an observer) to Konisberg. On his third trip his bomb aimer opened his chute on the ground so Alan gave him his. Fortunately the trip was uneventful. They took part on an operation to Mailly le Camp which turned into a disaster because the bombing points were obscured. On the next operation they machine gunned a train without appreciating how dangerous it was. Then an operation to Bour Leopold, Belgium led to their Lancaster being heavily damaged. They crash landed at Woodbridge and Alan was awarded the DFC. After the landing they drank all the rum they found in a hut. On the next trip to France they were attacked and the hydraulics were damaged resulting in not being able to open the bomb doors. They returned to the UK with the bombs and successfully landed at Turweston. He was always first back because he maintained height until close to the airfield then dived at top speed for the airfield. The other crews could not understand how he achieved this.
Creator
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Alan Edgar
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1980
Format
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10 typewritten sheets
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
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Text
Text. Memoir
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MEdgarAG172180-180704-01
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.
Belgium
France
Great Britain
Poland
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
France--Tours
France--Mailly-le-Camp
Belgium--Leopoldsburg
Poland--Gdańsk
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Claire Monk
1 Group
49 Squadron
83 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bomb aimer
bombing
Bombing of Mailly-le-Camp (3/4 May 1944)
crash
crewing up
Distinguished Flying Cross
flight engineer
Fw 190
ground personnel
He 111
Heavy Conversion Unit
Hurricane
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lincoln
mess
navigator
Operational Training Unit
pilot
RAF Fiskerton
RAF Silverstone
RAF Syerston
RAF Turweston
RAF Winthorpe
RAF Wittering
RAF Woodbridge
Spitfire
Stirling
target indicator
training
Wellington
wireless operator / air gunner
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2198/40172/BMcInnesAMcInnesAv1.2.pdf
039409582741300cd52a4251b3dd8e46
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
Royal Air Force ex-Prisoner of War Association
Description
An account of the resource
97 items. The collection concerns Royal Air Force ex-Prisoner of War Association and contains items including drawings by the artist Ley Kenyon.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Robert Ankerson and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-01-29
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RAF ex POW As Collection
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
Alan McInnes memoir
A German Holiday 1944-45
Description
An account of the resource
An autobiography by Alan of his time as a prisoner of war. He describes the night they were shot down over Germany. Also his training with his mainly Australian crew. Then he goes into more detail regarding the operation when he was shot down.
He describes their capture, mistreatment and interrogations at various locations. After interrogations at Dulag Luft they were sent to a transit camp in Frankfurt then on by train to Heydekrug, Stalag Luft VI. Although their camp section was new it was cramped and basic. He describes camp life in detail. As the Russians got closer they were sent by train to an Army camp at Thorn. He read a copy of NCO education in the camp. These courses were extremely popular and supported by text books sent from the UK. Exams were sat and papers sent to the UK for marking. At Thorn they marched to Stammlager 357 but not for long. They then marched back to the railway and were sent to Fallingbostel. He describes the rail journey in detail, then in greater detail he describes camp life.
Later he was moved to an officer's camp at Eichstadt. This turned out to be an Army camp which refused them and they were sent to Sagan. He stayed there for a short time then was moved to Stalag Luft 3, then 111A. As the Russians neared they moved again. After a couple of days waiting in trucks they returned to their camp. The railway system was breaking down as the end of the war neared.
After the Russians reached them they were allowed out of the camp but still remained billeted there. He writes about his impressions of the Russians.
His journey home was delayed by rain that did not allow aircraft to fly.
His story ends with his retelling of the night his aircraft was shot down, his night in Brussels and his return to England.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alan McInnes
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Magdeburg
Australia
Great Britain
England--Lichfield
Poland--Szczecin
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Stendal
Switzerland
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Lithuania--Šilutė
Poland
Italy
Canada
United States
Poland--Szczecin
Poland--Toruń
Greece
Greece--Crete
Poland--Vistula River
England--Staverton (Northamptonshire)
Germany--Bad Fallingbostel
Poland--Żagań
Poland--Bydgoszcz
Poland--Poznań
Germany--Pasewalk
Germany--Neubrandenburg
Germany--Stavenhagen
Germany--Malchin (Landkreis)
Germany--Güstrow
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Lübeck
Germany--Eichstätt
Germany--Munich
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Eisenach
Germany--Fürth (Bavaria)
Germany--Treuchtlingen
Germany--Ingolstadt
Germany--Regensburg
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Plauen
Poland--Wrocław
New South Wales--Sydney
Victoria--Melbourne
New South Wales
India--Jammu and Kashmir
China
England--London
Germany--Elbe
Germany--Potsdam
Germany--Jüterbog
Ukraine--Odesa
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Halle an der Saale
Belgium--Brussels
England--Brighton
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Hannover
Ukraine
Germany--Luckenwalde
Poland--Poznań
Germany
Germany--Hof (Hof)
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
Format
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85 printed sheets
Identifier
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BMcInnesAMcInnesAv1
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-01-21
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending text-based transcription
83 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bale out
bomb aimer
C-47
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
crewing up
Dulag Luft
entertainment
final resting place
flight engineer
Fw 190
Goering, Hermann (1893-1946)
ground personnel
H2S
Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945)
incendiary device
Lancaster
Mosquito
navigator
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operational Training Unit
Pathfinders
pilot
prisoner of war
radar
RAF Bicester
RAF Lichfield
RAF Wigsley
RAF Wyton
Red Cross
shot down
sport
Stalag 3A
Stalag Luft 3
Stalag Luft 6
target indicator
the long march
training
wireless operator
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/84/9673/MCluettAV120946-150515-11.1.pdf
c7a30c790abf30b50584dbe93107b383
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
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
Cluett, AV
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Access Rights
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Permission granted for commercial projects
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[Underlined] 1209046 A.G.2. CLUETT. A.V. [/underlined]
ROYAL AIR FORCE.
Rough Notebook for use in Laboratories and Workshops.
[Page break]
BOMBS + COMPONENTS.
G.P. BOMBS. G.P. Bombs are used for general purposes against personal and materials they are fuzed at the nose and tail.
10-2-41
[Underlined] Old Type of G.P. Bombs. [/underlined]
These are in 3 weights 120lb – 250lb. and 500lb. MKS. I. II. III have a central tube from nose to tail.
[Underlined] New Type G.P. Bombs [/underlined]
The new type of G.P. bombs are in 3 weights 250lb. 500lb MK IV and 1,000lb G.P. MK I, these bombs have pockets at each end instead of the central tube. The 250lb. and 500lb have clip-on tail units, the 1,000lb bomb has a tail unit which is fixed my means of 4 bolts.
[Diagram in margin]
40lb. G.P. and 20 “F” Bomb.
The 20 “F” bomb is used against personal because it has a great fragmentation effect, it is with T.N.T., and fuzed in the nose only.
The 40lb. G.P. is similar to the 20lb. “F” but is larger, and is used for general purposes, and it is filled with [underlined] Amatol. [/underlined]
[Page break]
[Diagrams of Bombs with colour schemes, descriptions of markings and filling ratios]
[Page break]
[Underlined] Parachute Bombs. [/underlined]
A number of 20lb. “F” and 40lb. G.P. bombs have a parachute fitted in they tail unit. This increases the fragmentation effect by preventing the bomb from penetrating; this one has a special pistol fitted.
[Underlined] 20lb. H.E Old Type MK.I. [/underlined]
This is a old type of bomb which has a No16 pistol fitted in the nose.
[Underlined] High Explosive. [/underlined]
10.2.41 P.M. [Underlined] An Explosive. [/underlined] is a substance which on being rendered chemically unstable by heat, light or shock rapidly evolves a large quantity of gas with or without heat. Explosives are divided into 2 groups A. HE. And B L.E. The main differince is the rate of becoming unstable.
Detonation takes place with H. Explosive. (H.E.)
Explostion takes place with Low Explosive. (L.E.)
[Underlined] Initiation. [/underlined]
Fulminate of Mercury. Lead Azide.
Lead Styphnate. A.S.A. Mixture.
[Underlined] Intermediaries [/underlined]
C.E. Pure T.N.T. Dry Gun Cotton.
Main Fillings
T.NT. BARATOL. AMATOL. SHELLITE. AMATEX.
[Table of percentages and ratios for fillings]
[Page break]
Essential Requirements of a High Explosive.
1. To have a maximum shattering effect.
2. To be insensitive to shock or friction.
3. To be obtainable at high density.
4. To have sufficient ease of detonation.
5. To be stable in storage, safe to handle and transport.
6. To be free from re-action with its container.
7. To be cheap, easy and safe to manufacture.
8. To be free from exudation.
[Page break]
[Underlined] Low Explosives. [/underlined]
11.2.41. [Underlined] Propellants. [/underlined]
.Gun Powder. .Nitro Cellulose. N.C.Z.
Cordite. 2 Types. M.D and S.C.
[Underlined] Hardening and Temporing Steel. [/underlined]
The object of temporing is to reduce Brittleness of hardened steel, in order to mak it suitable for the purpose for which it is required. Unfortunately Brittleness can only be removed from a straight Carbon Steel at the expence of hardness. Temporing is a heating of hardened Carbon steel sufficiently to remove known amount of hardness, and there-fore brittleness. The temporing range is from 200°/c to 320°/c for carbon steel.
[Underlined] The Colour Metal [/underlined]
If a piece of clean steel is slowly heated it will [deleted] by [/deleted] be seen that a series of colours will appear in the following oder
1 Very Pale Yellow. 200°/c
2 Straw Yellow 240°/c
3 Brown Yellow 260°/c
4 Light Purple 276°/c
5 Dark Purple 290°/c
6 Dark Blue 296°/c
7 Light Blue 320°/c
[Page break]
Each colour represents a definate temperature thus a dead hard job quenched, at the required colour will result in a degree of tempor definitely known.
[Underlined] Process cold Chisel [/underlined] :- heat the cutting edge about 1 1/2“ back from the point a medium red heat, dip the point quickly to about 3/4” in c.c water holding it upright and keep a straight up and down motion whilst cooling, when the point is cold with-draw and polish with an abrasive and the heat [deleted] will [/deleted] remaining in the body of the chisel will begin to heat the cold point causing tempor colours to appear, when the desired colour (in this case Brown changes to Purple) appears cool of in cold clean water to avoid further temporing.
[Underlined] Treatment to Carbon Steel to Anille or Soften [/underlined]
Heat to a medium red, allow to cool of slowly by burying it in sand or lime, to [underlined] harden [/underlined] heat to cherry red and plunge into cold water to unomalize heat to a medium allow to cool freely in the air.
[Page break]
11.2.41 P.M. [Underlined] Tools [/underlined]
[Underlined] Scribbing Block. [/underlined] conts. 3 Main parts. {Block.) Pillar. (Scriber.)
[Underlined] Combination Set 0. 180
Conts Rule. The Square The Protractor Centre Square
[Diagrams]
[Underlined] Files [/underlined] in 5 Shapes.(H.S.E.)
[Diagrams showing File Shapes, annotated]
FLAT [underlined] HAND SAFE EDGE. [/underlined]
ROUND.
3 SQUARE
SQUARE
HALF ROUND.
ROUCH. 10”
BASTARD 10”
SECOND CUT 8”
SMOOTH.
DEAD. SMOOTH.
SINGLE CUT. DOUBLE CUT.
[Underlined] HACK SAW [/underlined] 2 TYPES ADJUSTABLE & FIXED.
[Underlined] CHISELS [/underlined] FLAT. CROSS-CUT. + DIAMOND.
[Underlined] HAMMERS [/underlined] BALL-PANE. CROSS-PANE. SQUARE-PANE.
[Diagrams]
[Underlined] SOFT HAMMERS. [/underlined] WOODEN MELLET. .LEAD. .COPPER. .RUBBER.
[Underlined] GUAGES FEELERS [/underlined] 2,000 to 15,000
[Underlined] CALIPERS [/underlined] [Diagrams] INTERNAL. (EX.) DIVIDERS.
[Underlined] PUNCHES. [/underlined] CENTRE. PIN. + COPPER FACED. DRIFTS.
[Underlined] 12” RULE [/underlined] 1/64”.
[Underlined] RATCHET SCREW DRIVER. [/underlined] + SHEARS.
[Page break]
No 16 NOSE PISTOL
20lb H.E. Mk.I
[Diagrams]
[Underlined] Safety Devices [/underlined]
1 [Underlined] Vane securing Wire [/underlined]
2. [Underlined] Shearing Wire [/underlined]
3. [Underlined] Striker Pellet Wheel [/underlined].
[Page break]
[Underlined] BOMB PISTOLS [/underlined]
[Table showing Pistols, Bomb Used In and Safety Devices]
Differences in the MKs. Of 28 Pistol.
[Underlined] Pistol 28 MK. I. The coil spring and striker [underlined] cannot [/underlined] be removed. MK II This pistol has a screw on portion at the end which [underlined] can be [/underlined] removed to enable you to remove the coil-spring and striker.
MK. III This is similar to the MK. II but it has a stronger [underlined] safety Fork [/underlined] this increases the sinsitivity.
[Page break]
[Diagrams of Bombs and Bomb Sections including colours, markings, fillings, screws and caps.]
[Page break]
12.2.41 [Underlined] Stick Attachment [/underlined]
This is fitted to the No. 27 nose pistol to increase the Fragmentation effect when the G.P. bob is dropped on water.
[Diagram of No 27 Nose Pistol in margin]
[Underlined] S.A.P. Bomb. [/underlined]
250. 500. MKs. I II III or IV. these bombs are fitted with a tail Fuze. No. 30. (1/10 SEC Delay.)
[Underlined] S.A.P. [/underlined] 250. 500 MK. V is fitted with a No. 47 [deleted] delod [/deleted] delonator and a No. 28 pistol; it has a clip-on tail unit.
[Underlined] 2,000 A.P. Bomb. [/underlined] This bomb is fitted with Shellite, (Some of these bombs will be filled with Amatol.) it is fitted with a No. 37 Fuze in the tail.
[Underlined] A.S. (ANTI SUBMARINE) Bombs. [/underlined]
[Deleted] 100, [/deleted] [Symbol] 250. 500 MK. I II III These bombs are fitted with a No. 32 Fuze in the nose end. A Ballistic cap is fitted to the nose end of the bomb to produce a flat nose bomb, this prevents the bomb from deviating from its path through the water.
[Page break]
[Underlined] BOMB TOOLS. [/UNDERLINED]
[Diagrams Of bomb tools]
[Page break]
[Underlined] A.S. Bomb. [/underlined] [deleted] 100. [/deleted] [Symbol] 250. 500 MK. IV [underlined] (LATEST) [/underlined]
This bomb is fitted with a detonator and a No. 30 pistol in the tail. It has a clip-on tail unit. The nose is flat shaped. This bomb is filled with [underlined] Batatol [/underlined]
[Underlined] Scatter Piece. [underlined]
These Pieces are fitted to the 20lb, “F” and 40lb G.P. bombs between the pistol and bomb body. This is to seperate the bombs over a greater area.
3” Piece for the 20lb “F” only
4” Piece for the 20lb “F” or 40lb. G.P.
5” Piece for the 40lb G.P. only.
1 Bomb in each compartment will be fitted with a disc.
[Underlined] Collet Bar. [/underlined] This bar is used for examining bomb pockets.
[Page break]
DETONATORS. OLD TYPE.
COLOUR DELAY
WHITE INST.
YELLOW 1 SEC.
GREEN 2.5 SECS.
BLUE 11-15 SECS.
DETONATORS. OLD TYPE. ALL THESE DETONATORS USED IN THE OLD G.Ps.
[Table of Colour codes and detonator types]
[Table of Detonator Holders, Types of Bomb Used In and Schemes]
[Diagrams of Detonators, including New Type]
[Page break]
13.2.41. [Underlined] Detonators (New Type) [/underlined]
No 36 or No. 43 detonators will be fitted in the nose of the 20 “F” and 40 G.P. 250lb . 500lb G.P. MK IV and 1,000lb G.P. MK. I
No. 35. No 44. and No. 45 these detonators will be fitted in the tail of the 250lb 500lb [inserted] MK.IV [/inserted] and 1,000 MK I according to the required.
[Underlined] Exploders. [/underlined]
NOSE. No 16 EXPLODER 12.1” 250lb – 500lb. MKs I II II. SCHEMES. ‘A’. and ‘B’.
TAIL. No 19 EXPLODER 7.39” 250LB. – 500LB. MKs I II III.
[Diagrams of Exploders]
[Table of Exploders and Marks of Bomb]
No 20 and No 21 filled with T.N.T.
No 22 has a centrail tube because of the C.E. nose & tail ‘C’.
[Page break]
[Diagrams of Fuses with Detonators and Exploders]
[Underlined] FUZEING SCHEMES A.B.C. [/underlined]
[Underlined] Precautions when Fuzing the Bomb [/underlined]
1. Nose and tail adapter threads must be clean and undamaged.
2. Nose and tail Pistol must be tested before insertion into the bomb.
3. When the bomb is fuzed it should be marked so.
[Page break]
14.2.41. [Underlined] A.P. A.S. S.A.P [/underlined] 20lb ‘F’ and 40 G.P. all exploders are already built in as they leave the factory.
[Underlined] Taxying Seal [/underlined] this is fitted to the No. 32 MK III Fuze, between the flange and the body of fuze; this is to prevent any ingress of moisture, and a special safety clip is fitted to keep joints tight.
[Underlined] Fuzes [/underlined]
15.2.41 No 37 Tail Fuze almost the same as the No. 30. The difference is that the No. 30 has a longer [underlined] arming [/underlined] rod which is jointed, so that it will rotate freely.
This Fuze is used in the 2,000lb. A.P
No. 32 Fuze in the nose of the A.S bomb.
Nose Fuze for testing. Clock-wise 10 times and then back.
Tail Fuze for testing. Anti-clockwise 10 times and then back.
No 32 MK III 60-1.
No. 32 MKs. I II 30-1.
[Underlined] Site Fuzing Precautions. [/underlined]
1. 75 yds. From any A/C ect.
2. Bombs should be Fuzed over soft ground.
3. Fuze the right number of bombs, (no more, no less.)
4. Do not Fuze bombs in the slip-stream of any A/C.
5. Bombs must not be Fuzed on or near any bomb stores.
[Page break]
11 1/2 lb. FLASH BOMB. OR SMOKE BOMB.
[Diagram of Flash Bomb]
No. 28 DET. BUSTER.
[Diagrams of Bomb Markings]
TWO CHEMICALS USED IN SMOKE BOMBS
TITANIUM TETRACHLORIDE
STANNIC CHLORIDE.
FLASH AND SMOKE BOMBS HAVE ALL WHITE BODIES.
Treatment of Drums.
Stannic Chloride and Tetrachloride on receipt in Unit, the plug is to be removed and threads cleaned with Carbon Tetrachloride. The threads are to be cleaned, then coated with a mixture of graphite and M.T oil. This should be carried out as quickly as possible to prevent moist air from entering the drum. Empty Drums are not to be washed out, but the Plugs as on receipt and screwed in to exclude air.
[Page break]
11 1/2 lb Practice Bombs.
15.2.41. P.M. Smoke or Flash.
[Underlined] Smoke bomb. [/underlined] Body [underlined] White [/underlined] 2 x 2 1/2” Green Bands on tail end of body.
[Underlined] Flash bomb [/underlined] Body [underlined] White. [/underlined] 1/2” Red Nose Band. 2 x 2 1/2” Black band on tail end of body.
[Underlined] Smoke bomb. [/underlined] filled with Titanium Tetrachloride. or Stannic Chloride.
[Underlined] Flash bomb. [/underlined] filled with Gun Powder and Magnesium turnings.
[Underlined] Practice [/underlined] bombs are used in this service so that actual bombing can be carried out on our own bombing ranges. The [underlined] Smoke [/underlined] bomb is used in the day-time and the [underlined] Flash [/underlined] bomb my night-time.
[Underlined] Safety Devices. [/underlined] Safety Pin. Safety Plunger and Spring.
The Nose of the Practice is made of Cast Iron and filled with Lead [deleted] to [/deleted] according to the weight of filling in the tail. The tail is made of sheet Tin.
[Underlined] Action [/underlined] when the bomb is released the spring loaded plunger disengages, alowing striker rod to brake shearing wire and strike No 28 Detonator Buster on impact.
[Page break]
[Table of Old Types of Bombs]
[Page break]
[Underlined] NEW. DETONATORS. [/underlined]
[Table of New Detonators showing No., Delay, Colour and Where Fitted]
[Page break]
4lb. INCENDIARY BOMB.
[Diagram of Incendiary bomb showing colours and fillings]
[Page break]
17.2.41. 4lb INCENDIARY BOMB.
The bombs come to the station packed 20 in a box 4 rows of 5s. 4 of the top row of 5 are MK.IE. or MK II. The MK.IE. or MK.II has an extra bright red band on the body, also the end of the tail unit is painted br. Red. This bomb has an explosive in the nose , which goes of in the first 5 mins.
The MK. I burns for 10 to 15 mins.
The safety devices are
1. Spring loaded plunger.
2. Creep spring
3. Brass furrule.
20 in a box.
3 BOXES in a container.
4 in 20 bombs are H.E.
[Page break]
25lb INCENDIARY BOMB. MK.I/A
[Diagram of Bomb showing paint scheme and internal contents]
[Page break]
18.2.41. 25lb. INCENDIARY BOMB.
Conts. 3 main parts. Nose, Container and tail.
Nose made of steel.
Container containing 7 fire-pots.
Tail unit of Aluminium.
On release from the carrier the wind acting on the paper discs blows out the parachute. The inertia rod is pulled up and ball-bearings are allowed to move clear. The inertia rod is pulled up and ball-bearings are allowed to move clear. The inertia rod comes to rest on the striker which acts as an additional weight which enables the striker to brake the shearing-wire. On impact the shearing wire is broken and the striker goes onto the cap which ignitits the igniting composition which light the Tail Blowing off charge which blows of the tail and starts the bomb going.
There is a 3 to 4 mins. delay between each fire-part, each f-part can fly about 300 feet, also each one gets thrown in a different direction.
If this bomb has to be used on a carrier a No.6 expansion lug is fitted to the bomb.
To load these bombs they go 4 in a compartment and there are 2 compartments in a container.
[Page break]
[Underlined] FUZES. [/underlined]
[Underlined] INSTANTANEOUS AND DELAY. [/underlined]
[Underlined] Instantaneous [/underlined] fuze is coloured Orange or yellow.
[Underlined] Delay Fuze [/underlined] is coloured Black.
[Underlined] Fuze Instantaneous. [/underlined] MK.IV conts. Of 3 strands of quickmatch in a tube of waterproof tape surrounded by twisted cotton in a gutta-percha tube bound by worsted tape.
The rate of burning is 90FT per SEC.
[Underlined] Fuze Delay [/underlined] No 15A. A train of powder protected in a somewhat similar manner to the Instantaneous MK.IV.
The rate of burning is 90 SECS. Per yard.
[Underlined] Fuze. Delay [/underlined] No. 17 MK.I A train of [underlined] special [/underlined] powder similarly protected.
Rate of burning 50 to 70 SECS. per yard.
Colour. White. This fuze is used only in the No21 Detonators.
[Page break]
MICROMETER.
4 Kinds.
1 Internal [deleted] 1” 2” 3” [/deleted]
3 External 1” 2” 3”
[Diagram of Micrometer with scales]
[Underlined] VERNIER CALLIPERS. 4”. [/underlined]
[Diagram of Vernier Callipers]
For internal measuring add .25 to total measurement.
[Page break]
19.2.41. [Underlined] BOMB CARRIERS. [/UNDERLINED]
[Underlined] Universal [/underlined] No 1. For 250lb.
[Underlined] Universal [/underlined] No. 2. For 500lb. (15” longer.)
[Light Series [/underlined] EM/LS. ‘A’ Type.
[Underlined] 2,000lb [/underlined] bomb Carrier
Universal carrier No.1. is made of Duralilium. On the main channel are two plate to strengthen it where the central Release is fixed. There are nose and tail fuze boxes on the carrier which are operated from the cockpit. The fuze setting control link is held in place by ajustment, in the fuze box, when the switch is on a rod comes across the F.S.C.L. so, when bomb is released the Pressure Plate stop is drawn out; and bomb falls alive. The EM.C. Release slip is operated by another switch. No2. 15” longer for fuzing No.32 Fuze on A.S Bombs, and for taking 500lb bombs.
[Underlined] Light Series [/underlined] EM/LS. ‘A’ same metal as UN. No1. Top plate with 4 holes segrated for strength. 4 Release Slips. 8 Spring loaded crutches.
[Page break]
[Diagrams of Bomb Carriers]
NOTE. A/C SUPPLY IS FROM A 12 VOLT ACCUMULATOR.
[Page break]
21.2.41. [Underlined] E.M/L.S. STORES CARRIED. [/underlined] (L.S Light Series]
4. 20lb H.Es. R.L.
4. 20lb “F”.s.
4. 40lb G.Ps.
4. 11 1/2 lb. PRACTICE. (SMOKE OR FLASH.)
4. SMOKE FLOATS. NAVIGATION.
4. 4.5” RECONNAISSANCE FLARES.
4. ALUMINIUM SEA MARKERS. MK.III.
4. 4” TRAINING FLARES.
3. SMOKE GENERATORS. No. 11.
1. SMOKE PUFF APPARATUS.
1. PHOTO-FLASH CONTAINER.
[Underlined] No1. UNIVERSAL EM/EF. STORES CARRIED [/underlined]
1. H.E. BOMB ANY TYPE FROM 100lbs. TO 250lbs.
1. WATER BALLAST CONTAINER.
1. SMALL BOMB CONTAINER.
1. SMOKE PUFF APPARATUS.
1 11 1/2 lb. PRACTICE BOMB. (FLASH OR SMOKE)
1. SUPPLIES DROPPING APPARATUS.
1. 250lb. SMOKE CURTAIN INSTALLATION.
1. RECONNAISSANCE FLARE. (ANY SIZE.)
[Page break]
[Underlined] No2. UNIVERSAL EM/EF. [/underlined]
[Underlined] STORES CARRIED [/underlined]
1. H.E. ANY TYPE FROM 100lbS TO 550lbs.
1. 500lb SMOKE CURTAIN INSTALLATION.
1. OF ANY STORES CARRIED ON No1 UNIVERSAL EM/EF. CARRIER.
[Underlined] Differences in Type of Release Units [/underlined]
Type. ‘A’. I II III. Used for light stores. (L.S.Carrier)
Type ‘B’ [symbol]
Type ‘C’. I II III To operate single hook release clip. (Universal Carriers.)
Type ‘D’ MK IV To operate [underlined] Wellington [/underlined] release clip.
Type ‘E’ ‘A’ Type unit without front crutch. (No A.1 Attachment)
No 1 unit is the nearest unit on the right side. (Starboard.)
[Underlined] Light Series [/underlined] carries 3MKS in Types ‘A’. ‘C’. ‘E”.
[Underlined] Wiring Positive. [/underlined] Red. Circuit never broken.
Negative. Blue. Circuit is looped.
[Page break]
SINGLE HOOK [underlined] MK III. V.A.D. [/underlined] RELEASE SLIP.
[Diagram of Single Hook Release Slip with different MKs]
[Table]
[Page break]
[Underlined] Release Slips. [/underlined]
The difference between MKs. I. II and III is projecting side plate, between MK. II + III is that the Axis Pin through Bomb Hook is flush (MK.II) with the Side Plate and the MK.III Axis Pin is raised and sealed with split-pin.
No 1 Carrier Bomb Release Slip single Hook Type.
MK.I Side Plates with Projection side plates at top end.
MK. II Projection removed and covered.
MK. III Projection removed and cut short. Axis Pin is raised and locked.
[Underlined] V.A.D. [/underlined] Indicates only 2 Leap Springs. Action control by leap spring, operating lever, packing piece, (brass) bomb hook stop, (Brass.) Safety catch (Brass), Tortion spring, Roller bearing, Release arm, and bomb hook with tail piece or horn.
[Underlined] Action. [/underlined]
When the operating lever is rotated, the [underlined] bent [/underlined] is disengaged from the safety catch, the tortion spring is compressed and the spacing rivet bears upon the top of the release arm; further rotation of the operating lever raises the release arm, and compresses the leap spring and lifts the roller bearing clear of the bomb hook. The weight of the bomb moves the B. hook which comes to rest on the B. Hook Stop.
[Page break]
NEW ‘B’ TYPE CRUTCH.
[Diagrams of ‘B’ Type Clutch]
[Page break]
To Test Bomb Hook Release.
1. Ensure that when the operating lever is raised to the fullest extent, the roller bearing clears the tail of the bomb hook.
2 Ensure sufficient clearance between bomb hook and retaining lug.
3. Ensure that torsion spring keeps the bent of the operating lever engaged with the safety catch.
4 Ensure when release slip is on to the carrier frame that the bomb hook rotates freely.
[Symbol] 5 Ensure there is a clearance between tail of bomb hook and safety catch is over 15 thou. (using feelers).
[Underlined] Carriers. cont. [/underlined] UNIV. No.1 + 2.
22.2.41 Has. “B” Type strengthening crutch. ‘A’. ‘B’. ‘C’. positions, fixed only to the rear of the carrier, (‘C’ is to stow-away.)
‘A’ all bombs of 500lbs and all containers.
‘B’ all bombs below 500lbs.
‘C’ MK. I. S.B.C.
No 1. And 2 Universal Cs are fitted with 3 and 3A. adaptor for Practice bombs. Front one adjustable; rear one fixed, Suspension by Lug Chair holds the centre of bomb.
UN CARRIERS. MK 3 ALL STEEL. -250 – 500.
[Page break]
[Diagram of Universal Carrier]
[Page break]
[Underlined] L.S. TYPE ‘A’ UNIT [/underlined]
Oiled by felt washers to prevent oil dripping into unit. Type ‘A’ unit has bomb hook attached not seperate as on type ‘C’ Un.
[Table of Stores and Attachments]
[Page break]
[Diagrams of Bomb Carriers]
[Page break]
24.2.41 L.S./EM.
Fitting the LS/EM carrier to Universal attachments.
Stores required:- a L.S./EM. With auto [inserted] 2 Plug [/inserted] selector box; fitted and a L.S adaptor frame;
Procedure.
1. Remove bracing members from Carriers Eye Bolts.
2. Remove the five Pin Plug from aircraft supply.
3. and remove universal Carrier, then bolt into place L.S adaptor frame, attach bracing members form craft to eye bolts of frame then bolt into place L.S. Carrier and plug threw carrier into supply of the aircraft.
[Underlined] Type ‘A’ 3 Unit for L/S carrier [/underlined] (with auto selector) 2 Plug.
[Underlined] Action, [/underlined] when the pilot presses the firing switch the current flows to the E.M. unit and energises the magnet; the safety magnet Armature, disengaging the bent from the toe of release arm is drawn down by the release [deleted] arm [/deleted] magnet disengaging the bent from the nose of the release lever, the trigger spring rotates the trigger the nose of which being engaged with the bent of the release lever rotates the lever and breaks the [underlined] circuit [/underlined], the tail of the trigger moves away from the face of the bomb hook and the weight of the bomb rotates the hook, when the bomb is clear the hook is reposititioned by its own spring. Oder of firing auto switch 1ST. 1. 2ND. 4. 3RD 3. 4TH 2.
[Page break]
INSPECTIONS ON CARRIERS.
‘A’ (DAILY NO BOMBING) SECURITY – CORROSION – DAMAGE – FUITONING TEST EVERY 6 DAYS.
‘B’ BEFORE BOMBING, (NORMAL D1) FORM 700 SEE ELECTRICIAN HAS SIGNED – DAMAGE DISTORTION – SECURITY. [Underlined] TEST RELEASE SLIP [/underlined] FUNCTIONING TEST – LOAD BOMB – LIGHT TEST. REMOVE SAFETY DEVICES.
‘C’ (HANG UP) BOMB AIMES REPORT – ELECTRICANS – ARM – OFFICER.
‘D’ (BETWEEN FLIGHTS) C OR B INSP.
‘E’ (END OF DAYS BOMBING) (‘C’ INSP IF H.P) CLEAN OIL CARRIER – LOOK FOR DAMAGE – LEAVE UNIT UNCORKED
‘F’ MINOR INSPECTION 50 HR. TAKE RACK TO ARMOURY STRIP – CLEAN – ASSEMBLE. CARRY OUT TESTS.
‘G’ 120 HR MAJOR INSP
‘H’ CARRIER INTO STORIES LABLE ATTACHED – FUNCTION TEST EVERY 28 DAYS.
[Page break]
Small Bomb Container (S.B.C) MK.I. + IA.
25.2.41. MK. I. cannot be used on a catapulted A/C.
MK. I.A. can be used on a catapulted A/C. (much stronger than MK I).
The auto selector switch box tells the front of the carrier. Only 3 EM units on carrier, No. 1 is blank, so always set auto box at No. 2, the order of firing is No 2 Rear. No 3 Front. No 4 Centre.
[Table of Stores, Carried and Position on Rail]
P marked on EM. UNIT means all units fired at the same time.
[Page break]
4” TRAINING FLARE.
[Diagrams of 4” Training Flare Internal and External]
26.2.41. [Underlined] Pyrotechnics [/underlined]
[Underlined] Flare A/C Reconnaissance, 4” Training. [/underlined] This flare is so designed that the case remains suspended on the parachute instead of dropping to earth; and is therefor safe to release over any area.
Carrier Arrangements. L.S/E.M.
1. Engage suspension lug with release slip and ajust crutches tightly enough to steady it.
2. Remove free end of stantic cord from canvas pocket and tie to rear crutch, putting loose cord back in pocket.
Launching from Tube
1. The suspension band must be removed before stowing in A/C.
[Symbol] [Deleted] 2. Remove safety Pin. {Only when used in tube) [/deleted] [Symbol]
3. Place flare in tube upside-down. (Do not remove safety Pin)
4. Make fast loop, and free end of static cord to eye-bolt on A/C.
[Underlined] Action. [/underlined]
On release the cord is pulled out of pocket, after 5FT of fall flaps and parachute emerges, after another 20FT of fall the breaking cord snaps; parachute opens and flare falls free. Pull percussion unit operates and ignits flare. Fuzible alloy disc melts and candle burns. This flare burns for about 3 1/4 mins; also it should not be used or dropped below 2,500FT. Rate of fall 500FT PER.MIN.
[Page break]
SMOKE FLOAT A/C NAVIGATION GROUP XI
[Diagrams of Smoke Floats]
[Diagram of Aluminium Sea Markers and container]
ALUMINIUN SEA MARKERS.
[Page break]
[Underlined] Smoke Float A/C. Navigation MK. II. [/underlined]
Method of igniting is percussion. No. 23 Tail Pistol. White smoke for 6 MINS.
[Underlined] Fuzing [/underlined] remove tail plug and insert NO.23 tail Pistol. (5/16 SPANER.)
[[Underlined] Action [/underlined] on release from a/c the No £ [inserted] MK I [/inserted] attachment is pulled clear, the vanes rotate and fall of leaving the stricker pellet held by creep-spring, on impact with the water the stricker pellet over comes the spring and strikes the cartridge base (.410) this ignites a small flash charge; the flash from .410 goes down the copper tube and ignites the pellet, this ignites the quick match, unpressed and pressed priming compo. which ignites the candle; the smoke which is generated forces off the zinc disc at the top of the emission tube, and white smoke is emited for about 6 MINS.
MK II has a (delay) fuze instead of copper tube [symbol] ob.
[Underlined] No 3 MK I. (RED SMOKE 40 SECS.) IN DINGHIES – COLOUR GREEN + YELLOW. (8 SECS DELAY)
[Underlined] Aluminium Sea Markers.
MKs. [inserted] U/S [/inserted] [underlined] IV [/underlined] + V used; MKs. [deleted] II [/deleted] + III [deleted] job [/deleted] MK. I [symbol]
These markers are used on the sea; the contence floats on the water in a round patch and this is used for bombing and gunning practice. When a marker is dropped it hits the water nose first; the water pressure breaks the disc and thread, also forcing rubber bag onto cutters and through end of marker; the marker body sinks, leaving the powder on the water as target.
[Page break]
[Diagrams of Photoflash Apparatus]
[Diagrams of Smoke Puff Apparatus]
USED ON UN. CARRIERS.
WHEN ON CARRIER WIRE BOMB (SAFE)
[Diagram of Water Ballast Container]
[Page break]
28.2.41. [Underlined] Signalling Photo-flash Apparatus. [/underlined]
[Underlined] Photo-flash Apparatus [/underlined] :- for practice bombing; used on light B.C, wood base, surrounded by plate tin, 4 lamp sockets in 4 compartments bulbs used are filled with magnesium foil. White colour bulbs are used by day and red by night.
[Underlined] Smoke Puff Apparatus [/underlined] :- used for finding wind speed and direction, made up of mild steel, carried on L.S. Carrier and Universal Carriers. 4 brass cannisters for smoke compo. (4 No. 26 Electric fuzes) fitted with Stannic Chloride. [Underlined] Preparation of Apparatus [/underlined] unscrew the four cannisters and unions, remove collar, place big disc, then fill 9/10 full with Stannic Chloride, (1/10 for air and liquid expansion; ) replace small lead disc, screw on union, place in No.26 E. fuze pass leads through frame, and connect to spring terminals, screw on cannisters to beam, lock together with wire, and place lug ready for type of carrier being used.
[Page break]
[Diagram of 3” Signal Mortar MK.I]
3” SIGNAL MORTAR MK. I
1. Barrel.
2. Stand.
3. Bracket + Pully.
4 Firing Lanyard.
5 Vent bit.
6 Sponges + Rammers.
7 Wire Brush.
[Page break]
28.2.41. [Underlined] (Fired Mortar) [/underlined] [Underlined] 3” Signal Mortar [/underlined] MK.I. Barrel with Vent, stand and pulley, firing lanyard, rammers and sponges, wire brush, vent bit. The signal or projectile charge is orange or yellow to the hight of 1,000ft. when the mortar is fired at 80°/Des. the flame lights up shortly after leaving the muzzle, burns to it trajectory and part of the way down, (12 SECS in all). The charge is 1,700 grains in a muslin bag. [Underlined] Preparation [/underlined] go to stand and insert barrel securing it with pin, withdraw and refix pulley after passing lanyard through, then dry barrel with sponge, rinse out vent with vent bit; [underlined] Loading [/underlined] put Gun powder charge down barrel press carefully with rammer, lower projectile charge primed end down no forcing, insert friction tube, run-out lanyard, then attach C.hook in eye of friction tube, then ready for firing. [Underlined] Precautions [/underlined] the friction tube must not be inserted untill both charges are loaded, keep head and body well clear during loading, all personel keep well behind primer; full length of lanyard must be used; after fired used vent bit to clean vent; clean out barrel first with wet and then dry sponges holding thumb over vent hole. [Underlined] Misfire [/underlined] first time wait 1 MIN. second time 1MIN. third time 30 MINS, leaving mortar under guard. Make record of rounds fired, after 200 rounds apply for A.I.D. examination, never fire more than 250 rounds from one mortar untill A.I.Ds. consent.
[Page break]
[Diagram of Type ‘A’ Bomb Distributor]
[Underlined] AP 1095 [/underlined]
NEW DISTRIBUTOR MK IV AS ON ALL MODEAR A/C LANC. WIMP. ECT.
.5 - .04 SEC.
[Page break]
29.2.40. TWIN B. CARRIER [Underlined] Bomb Distributers [/underlined] TYPE A. MK. IV To test circuits, put tumbler switch to test, move comb arm down, lock mortar with locking nut, put release arm down, switch on each bomb in turn (8 switches)
[Underlined] 3.4.41. [/underlined] [Underlined] To release bombs singly or in Salvo. [/underlined] move comb arm down, lock mortar, put tumbler switch to release, switch on selected, bomb or bombs, release instantaneously by depressing release arm, ([underlined] Auto release [/underlined] put tumbler switch to test) X
[Underlined] Signal Cartridges [/underlined]
Types/ Single star 3. / Change star 2 / Double star 6 / Smoke Puff Illuminating. 2 /
[Underlined] Action [/underlined] when percussion cap is struck, the flash ignites powder charge, the gasses formed drives out star also igniting the quickmatch or priming compo, which in turn ingites the star. [Underlined] Single and Change stars [/underlined] are identified by colour bands, [underlined] double star [/underlined] by triangles, [underlined] smok puff [/underlined] by smoke mark, cartridge illuminating by larger size. All cartridges ignites 1 SECS. after firing, except [underlined] smoke puff [/underlined] which is 1 1/2 SECS. owing to delay fuze in [deleted] funnel [/deleted] bush. Single and Double burns for 10 SECS. Change star for 3 and 8 SECS. (11 in all)
[Underlined] Signal Rocket [/underlined] 1lb. MK. III remove wood plugs, attach stick and lock, then place in pipe or tube, light portfire and apply to end of rocket, stand clear and up-wind.
[Underlined] Action [/underlined] the flame from portfire ignites the powder in vent which ignites rocket compo, the gasses generated escapes at high velocity through vent, this action drives rocket up when compo. is burnt out the flame is carried on to the gun-powder which ignites and expells the 28 white stars (at 800 FT) burning for 5 secs. (ground to air.)
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
Albert Cluett's armourers training notes
Form 714
Description
An account of the resource
Note include diagrams on different types of bombs, explosives, fuses and pistols, detonators, tools, precautions, bomb carriage and release mechanisms and pyrotechnics.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Albert Victor Cluett
Format
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One illustrated notebook
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Text. Training material
Identifier
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MCluettAV120946-150515-11
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1941-02
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941-02
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Anne-Marie Watson
ground personnel
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/84/9676/MCluettAV120946-150515-12.1.pdf
3c759028e0b0aec2c678b831f2bb9512
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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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
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
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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
Transcribed document
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Start of transcription
The LAMBETH Exercise Book
DEC 3RD
Name 1209046. A.V. CLUETT.
Year [Indecipherable LY2903???] 15 [indecipherable] DEC 1943
School KIRKHAN
[Page break]
AP. 1242 SMLE No 1. MK III [symbol]
[Diagram Rifle, Bolt, Lever, Firing Pin, Extractor, Spring Remover]
1. REMOVE R.H. GUARD BEFORE PUTTING IN VICE.
A. NOSE CAP.
B. UPPER. SLING. SWIVEL.
C. OUTER
SPRINGS. WEIGHT
MAIN + EXTROR. 7-9
M COCKER 14-16
1ST TRIGGER PULL 3-4
2ND FIRING 5-6
BOLT HEAD 10-16
ERT??ING [Maybe Retaining]
BUT TRAP 2-3
WHEN UNLOCKING BOLT, GIVES 1/8” BACKWARD.
W/O P RAID 515 SQDN.
19.9.43 A/C P.
[Page break]
S.M.L.E.
STRIPPING SEQUENCE
1. SEE S.M.L.E. UNLOADED, THEN REMOVE R. HAND GUARD
[Underlined] POSITION I [/underlined] MUZZLE – RIGHT. UPSIDE-DOWN. OUTER BAND IN VICE.
1 NOSE CAP/ 2. OUTER BAND SCREW + SWIVEL./ 3 TAKE S.M.L.E. OUT VICE. REMOVE
[Underlined] OUTER BAND + FRONT H. GUARD. [/underlined]
POSTION. II MUZZLE – RIGHT. BUTT IN VICE.
1. MAG./ 2. TRIGGER + T. GUARD. / 3. UNDO INNER BAND. SCREW. LIFT OFF.
[Underlined] FORE END. (DON’T DROP F/END SPRING + SCREW.) [/underlined]
POSITION III 3 MUZZLE TO LEFT. UPSIDE DOWN. BUTT IN VICE.
1 SEAR SPRING / 2. SEAR + BOLT HEAD RETAINING SPRING. / 3 MAG. CATCH. 4 OPEN BUTT TRAP + REMOVE STOCK BOLT WAD. / 5 UNSCREW STOCK BOLT.
[Underlined] PART BARRLE FROM STOCK [/underlined]
POSITION IV MUZZLE TO LEFT. RIGHT SIDE UP.
1. LOCKING BOLT SPRING. – WASHER + LOCKING BOLT + SAFETY CATCH 2/ BOLTS.
([Underlined] ASSEMBLING. [/underlined] SCREW SAFETY CATCH BACK TO LOCKING BOLT AT 1/4 -12.
BOLT
1. EXTRACTOR SPRING. / 2 EXTRACTOR / 3 BOLT HEAD. / 4 STRIKER KEPPLER SCREW. /5 UNSCREW STRIKER. + REMOVE WITH MAIN SPRING.+ CORKING PEICE.
SPRINGS. WEIGHT. (2440FT PER SEC. M.V.)
[Page break]
[Underlined] S.M.L.E. [/underlined] MK III {symbol]
[Diagrams]
FIXED LIPS ON MAG.
[Underlined] REPAIRS + ADJUSTMENTS. [/underlined]
[Underlined] FORE SIGHT ADJUSTMENTS. [/underlined] BLADES 7 SIZES. 1.0 STANDARD.
1.03 = 03
1.015 = 015
1.0 = 1.0
.985 = -015
.970 = -03
.955 = -0.45
.940 = -0.5
ALL SIZES UP OR DOWN .15 / 2 UP 4 DOWN +SDN (7 IN ALL)
STANDARD RANGE 100YDS .15 = 2 1/2” UP OR DOWN.
100 YD RANGE MK I CRAMP WITHOUT GAUGE. 1 TURN ON SCREW GIVES 8” RIGHT OR L
100 YD RANGE MK II CRAMP WITH GAUGE. GAUGE 1” PER 25yd = 4” ON 100yds
1 MARK ON GAUGE = 1” PER 25 yds.
[Underlined] SAFTY [/underlined]
LOCKING BOLT
SAFTY CATCH
STUD ON THE BOLT.
WHEN USING CART. HEAD SPACING GUAGES [Underlined] ALWAYS TAKE OUT EXTRACTOR CLAW + SPRING [/underlined]
[Diagram of Cartridge]
WHEN FIXING NEW BOLT HEAD + TESTED FOR C. HEAD SPACE: NEXT TEST FOR STRIKER PROTUSION WITH SUPPLED GAUGE. GIVEING RADIUS AS WELL AS LENGTH.
[Diagrams]
BOLT
BODY
FORE END
NOSE CAP
BACK SIGHT
BARRLE.
[Deleted] CANNOT CHANGE [/deleted]
[Underlined] NOT INTERCHANGEABLE. [/underlined]
.002 2/1000TH RADIUS MUST BE PUT ON BOLT HEAD AFTER AJUSTING
DOWN FACE WITH OO
[Diagrams]
[Page break]
TOOLS. CLEARING PLUG
[Diagram]
[Page break]
[Underlined] (P.14) [/underlined]
[Diagrams of gun parts and firing mechanism]
LOCKING BOLT.
SAFETY CATCH.
SAFETY STUD.
[Underlined] 3 WAYS OF LOCKING [/underlined]
MILLS H.E. 36. DETS.
7 SECS. YELLOW. BY HAND.
4 SECS WHITE. RUBBER BAND FOR DARK.
FOR DISCHARGER. 80 – 200YDS.
MILLS CUP DISCHARGER
P.A.M. 2058A.
MILLS H.E.36
2 1/2 ozs H.E
ALL 1 1/4 lbs.
[Page break]
[Underlined] G.45 CINE CAMERA AP 1749. [/underlined]
[Deleted] RED [/deleted] 12 VOLTS SERIAL NoS. EVEN. 16MM. 25FT. PER SPOOL
[Deleted] GREEN [/deleted] 24 VOLTS SERIAL NoS. ODD. 40 PICTURS PER FT. 1,000 P.S
[Diagram of camera shutter]
AUXILORY SHUTTER WHEN ON CLOUDY GOES BEHIND MAIN SHUTTER.
CLOUDY 45° SHUTTER CONTROLED FROM
SUNNY 13 1/2° F.F.I. (FILM FOOTAGE INDICATOR)
CAMERA CONTROL SPEED SET @ 20 GIVES 1 PICTURE PER ROUND/
[Underlined] MOUNTINGS + ADAPTORS. [/underlined]
[Table of Mountings, Adaptor, Camera, F.F.I. and Where Used]
[Table of Turret Installations]
G.45 2 HEATERS 1 IN [underlined] LENS [/underlined]
OTHER [underlined] BODY. [/underlined] WORKING ON THERMASTATIC SWITCH GIVING HEATS @ 60 (START) -70F (STOP).
[Page break]
[Underlined] HARMONIZATION OF C. CAMERA WITH GUNS ECT. [/underlined]
[Diagram of Sighting Screen for 50 yds Method]
ST. ANDREWS CROSS (FIGHTER A/C)
ST GEORGE’S CROSS (BOBMER)
AFTER HARMONIZING CAMERA + GUNS, WHEN LOADING FILM FIRST NAME + DATE FILM IN + WITH [underlined] TITLING UNIT [/underlined].
[Underlined] TYPE OF LENS [/underlined] 3 IN ALL ([underlined] YELLOW RED GREEN [/underlined])
COLOURS DENOTE FOCAL LENGTH
[Diagram of Lens showing Plate, Focal Point, Focal Length and Light Rays]
[Page break]
[Underlined] GUNSIGHTS AP. 1730 B [/underlined]
[Diagram of Aircraft, Path of Bullets, angles and Path of Other Aircraft.]
[Underlined] RING + BEAD SIGHT [/underlined]
[Table with diagrams of sights and where used]
[Underlined] BULLET TRAIL [/underlined] ON BULLETT FIRED ONLY FROM BEAM @ 300 – 500 YDS IS ABOUT 11 FT; IF BOTH A/C ARE GOING FORWARD @ SAME SPEED, (300 M P.H).
[Diagram of Cone of Fire]
WHEN SHOOTING TO BEAM AIM 11TF IN FRONTOF SPOT WANTED. TRAIL COMES FROM AIR DRAG ON 2 SIDES OF BULLET.
[Diagram of Aircraft showing aiming point and Air Pressure on Bullet]
[Page break]
A.P. 1730. B.
[Underlined] REFLECTOR TYPE SIGHTS. [/underlined] G.J. III + (G.M. II)
G.J.III
MK IIIA 12 OR 24 CAN BE CHANGED} USED ON ALL MOVABLE GUNS. TURRETS ECT.
MK IIIA [symbol] 12 24 ON CHANGING.} ([underlined] NOT FIGHTER A/C [/underlined])
[Diagram of Reflector Sight]
(100 MPH) (FIGHTER A/C) [Underlined] G.M. II OR R. SIGHT MK. II [/underlined] (FIXED GUNS)
[Diagrams of Sights]
4 CHANGES IN G.M. II + G.M III
1 METAL BULB HOLDER
2 LEAVER TO MOVE DIMMING SCREEN
3 GRATICULE LINES
4 RANGE SETTING IN 50s (150-600)
ALL FOUND ON G.M. III.
[Page break]
[Underlined] REFLECTOR SIGHTS G.Js + GMs. + DIs. [/underlined]
[Table of Sights showing Marks, Type, Speed and Where Used]
[Underlined] D.Is R.S. [/underlined]
1 CONTINUITY OF CIRCUIT (NIGHT + DAY)
2 LENS (ECT). POLISH. SELVYT CLOTH.
3 ELECTRICAL LEADS NOT FRAYED OR U/S.
4 ATTACHED SECURELY (AFTER D.I ON PILOT’S R.SIGHT COVER UP WITH C.BAG.)
5 NEW LAMPS STOWED + O.K.
[Underlined] G.I PRISMATIC [/underlined]
[Diagrams of Lenses]
[Underlined] LEWIS ONLY [/underlined]
[Page break]
[Underlined] HARMONIZATION [/underlined] 1730(.B.) SECT 7. CH 2
[Underlined] FIGHTER A/C @ 50 YDS REDUCED DISTANCE. [/underlined]
[Diagram of Aircraft showing Master Guns]
INCLINOMETER
FIRST GET A/C 50 YDS FROM TARGET; ON TRESTLES, CLEAR OF THE DECK.
DROP 2 PLUMB LINES FROM A/C NOSE + TAIL. ALINEING WITH LINE ON WALL USE DATUM. LINES TO MAKE SURE A/C IS LEVEL, NEXT USE INCLINOMETER ON TOP PLATE OF MASTER GUN OR GUNS. {M. GUN MOST INBOARD). NEXT HARMONIZE ALL GUNS + CAMERA TO RIGHT MARKS ON WALL, USING [inserted] INSTMENT [/inserted] GUN-ALINNING UNIT. + PERICOPE GUN ALINNING.
[Page break]
[Underlined] AMMUNITION [/underlined] AP 2058(A) GROUP VI.
.303 [underlined] BALL PURPLE [/underlined] ANNULUS. MK. VII
.303 [underlined] ARMOUR PIERCING GREEN [/underlined] W.I.
.303 [underlined] TRACER RED [/underlined] G. IV G V G VI IV V GREY NOSE (NIGHT) VI GREY NOSE (DAY)
.303 [underlined] INCENDIARY BLUE [/underlined] B VII BLUE NOSE IV VI OBSOLESCENT.
Z AFTER LETTER + MK DENOTES FILLED WITH OTHER THAN CORDITE. [inserted] (NITRO CELLULOSE) [/inserted]
.303 [underlined] BLANK [/underlined] L) ON CLOUR ANNULUS. OLD CASES NOW USED. [Diagram]
.303 [underlined] BALLISTITE [/underlined] H (TOP HALF PAINTED BLACK) OLD CASES NOW USED [Diagram]
.303 [underlined] DUMMY [/underlined] D VI 3 FLUTES ON SIDE, PAINTED RED. OLD CASES NOW USED.
[Underlined] .300 [/underlined] BALL – NO TIP.
[In margin] .300 RIMLESS [/in margin]
A.P. MK I GREEN. MK II BLACK. [Underlined] STORAGE OF AMMO [/underlined]
INCENDIARY. BLUE TIP. [Underlined] ALL TYPES [/underlined] IN GROUP VI
TRACER RED TIP. INC. NO WITH PHROS. GROUP XI
[Underlined] GREEN LABLE FOR ALL SERVICES [/underlined] INC [underlined] CONTAINING [/underlined] PHROS. GROUP XII.
WHENUSED FOR SYNORONIZED GUNS [Inserted box] [Underlined] MAIN CHARGES [/underlined] CORDITE. NITRO-CELLULOUS. NEON-NITE. GUN POWDER [/inserted box]
1 MUST BE USED WITHIN 2 YEARS.
2 MUST BE USED WITHIN (DAYS) 14 OF OPENING BOX. (CAN BE 40 DAYS WITH A.O.P. SAY) AFTER THAT THE AMMO IS USED FOR GUNS OTHER THAN SY.
[Underlined] AMMO STORAGE [/underlined] INC. AMMO CAN BE STORED WITH REST IN GROUP VI BUT ONLY 20,000 ROUNDS. ([underlined] INSPECTION. [/underlined] B. ILES EVERY 14 DAYS SUMMER B. ILES EVERY 28 DAYS WINTER OVERSEAS EVERY 14 DAYS.
[Page break]
[Underlined] .5 BROWNING AMMO. [/underlined] (100 ROUNDS = 30 lbs.)
[In margin] RIMLESS [/in margin]
BALL. NO TIP
A.P. MK I BLACK MK II [[underlined] GREEN. [/underlined] MK II MORE POWER. (REINFORCED BARRLE.)
INC. BLUE TIP
TRACER. RED TIP.
[Underlined] REVOLVER ECT. AMMO [/underlined]
[Underlined] COLT. [/underlined] .455 MK I (LONGER)
[Underlined] COLT [/underlined] .45 [Underlined] AC. [/underlined]
[Underlined] THOMSON SUB G. AC. [/underlined]
.38 REVOLVER MK II (RIM)
.45 WEBLEY MK VI (RIM.)
.22 RIMFIRE
9M.M. RIMLESS
[Diagrams of 20mm Shells]
MK II A.P. SAME AS MK I ONLY [underlined] FLAT TIP [/underlined] BAKELITE NOSE CAP. FOR USE [underlined] BELT [/underlined] MECENIZEM. MK I MAGAZINE.
[Diagrams of Shells]
[Page break]
[Underlined] 20. MM SHELLS. [/underlined]
[Diagrams of Shells]
[Underlined] FUZES OF TWO TYPES [/underlined] (20MM.)
1) INCENDIARY CONTAINNIG PHOSPHORUS 252 [Underlined] INSENSITIVE. [/underlined]
2) INCENDIARY [underlined] NOT [/underlined] CONTAINNIG PHOSPHORUR 253 RED [underlined] VERY [/underlined] SENSITIVE. GREEN INSENSITIVE.
3) H.E. [Underlined] ALL FUZE BODY. BUFF [/underlined]
4) H.E + INC. CONTAINNING PHOSPHORUS [Underlined] TIPS RED OR GREEN [/underlined]
5). H.E. + INC. [underlined] NOT [/underlined] CONTAINNING PHOSPHORUS
GREEN = PHOSPHORUS.
[Page break]
[Underlined] A.P. 1242 [/underlined] VOL I CHAP 5
[Underlined] COLT AUTOMATIC PISTOL .455 [/underlined]
[Diagrams of Colt Pistol]
1 SAFTY LOCK
2 SAFTY GRIP
3 BARRLE LINK + LOCKING LANDS
4 HALF BENT
5 STRONG FIRING SPRING. SHORT PIN.
6 DISCONNECTOR. ALLOWS NOT MORE THAN 1 ROUND PER FINGER PRESURE. + PREVENTS YOU FIREING IF BREECH IS NOT LOCKED OR SLIP NOT RIGHT FORWARD.
2lbs. 7ozs (PISTOL) 8ozs FULL MAG.
[Page break]
[Underlined] MOUNTHLY [/underlined] INSPECTIONS CHECK ACTION. 1 MOUNTH IN STORE OR GOING +COMMING FROM LOAN.
[Underlined] 6 MOUNTH INSPECTION. STRIP. [/underlined] WHEN CLEANING IN A TYPE OIL ONLY DIP FOR 10 MINS.
WHEN CLEAN BARRLE USE FIRST A TYPE OIL. IF NO GOOD USE 112 STRANDS H BRASS WIRE 26 GAGE 3 INS LONG. FOR WIRE GET C/O CONSENT.
[Underlined] STRIPPING [/underlined]
REMOVE MAG SEE UNLOADED
REMOVE RECOIL SPRING + PLUG 16
BARRLE BUSHING 15
SLIDE STOP 14
SLIDE, BARRLE, RECOIL SPRING GUIDE 13
SAFTY LOCK (HAMMER COCKED) 12
HAMMER AXIS PIN (HAMMER FORWARD) 9
HAMMER + STRUT 8
MAIN SPRING HOUSING PIN 11
MAIN SPRING HOUSING 11
SAFTY CRIP 10
SEAR SPRING 6
SEAR AXIS PIN 5
SEAR + DISCONNECTOR 4
FIRING PIN STOP 3
FIRING PIN + SPRING 2
EXTRACTOR 1
(AXIS PINS IN FROM L – RIGHT.)
FIGS. THE WAY TO ASSEMBLE.
MAG. HOLDING 7/ (WILL HOLD 8)
[Diagrams of Safety Lock and Cocking Mechanism]
[Page break]
[Diagram of Cylinder]
MK I 7lbs. 14 ozs 8 1/2”
[Underlined] USING 4” CARTRIDGE. [/underlined]
MK II 9lbs. 5ozs. 10 1/2”
USING 4” + 6” CARTRIDGES.
[Diagrams of Revolving Mechanism]
1 INDEX CAM
2 INDEX PAWL
3 BOWDEN CABLE
4 PULLEY
5 INDEX PINION SHAFT
6} SAFTY DOOR + SHAFT
7}
8 HAMMER
9 HAMMER CAP-SPRING + PLUNGER
10 CAM LIFT
11 INDEX PINION
12 INDEX CROSS.
13 STOP PIN.
[Page break]
A.P. 1641 (H). VOL. I.
[Underlined] SIGNAL DISCHARGER 1 1/2” MKS I + II [/underlined]
[Underlined] STRIPPING [/underlined]
REMOVE 3 FLANG NUTS, TAKE OF MOUTING FLANGE, MUZZLE + COLLAR, NEXT BOTTON PLATE + SPACING WASHERS. REMOVE CHAMPER ASSMLY. FROM HEAD. NEXT REMOVE PULLY HEAD COVER + SPRING THEN INDEX CAM, INDEX PINION + LIFT-CAM; DUST COVER, REMOVE HAMMER CAP-PLUNGER + SPRING. HAMMER AXIS PIN THEN HAMMER IT-SELF. NEXT. SPRING + PLUNGER OF SAFTY DOOR, THEN REMOVE DOOR. (ASSEMBLING, REVERSE ACTIONS).
WHEN LOADING DISCHARGER ALWAYS KEEP DOOR OPEN; [Underlined] ORDER OF COLOURS; [/underlined] LAY OUT COLOURS IN LINE AS NEEDED [inserted] 1-6 [/inserted]. THEN LOAD IN [underlined] THIS [/underlined] ORDER 5-6-1-2-3-4 ONLY PULLING CABLE OR MOVING CHAMBES ROUND 5 TIMES. THE [UNDERLINED] 3RD [/underlined] CARTRIDGE LOADED IS THE [underlined] FIRST [/underlined] TO BE FIRED.
[Underlined] INSPECTIONS [/underlined] 4 IN ALL A.B.C.D.
A [Underlined] BEFORE FLIGHT. [/underlined] (OPEN DOOR) (LISEN FOR HAMMER. FEEL FOR PLUNGER. LOOK FOR DENTS ECT. SEE FIRM TO A/C ALWAYS DRY BARRLES.)
B [Underlined] BETWEEN FLIGHTS. [/underlined] (GIVE GOOD QUICK TEST)
C [Underlined] END OF DAYS FLIGHING [/underlined] (CLEAN BARRLE. + CHECK DISCHARGER. (50 PARFIN 50 G.S.OIL) ([Underlined] NOT A TYPE OIL[/underlined])
D [Underlined] END OF 180 FLIGHING. [/underlined] (REMOVE FROM A/C. CONTROL + DISCHARGER) STRIP + CHECK FOR BURRS, DENTS ECT. GIVE [underlined] FIRING [/underlined] TEST. PUT BACK IN A/C.)
[Page break]
[Diagram of Signal Pistol]
[Diagrams of Signal Pistol firing mechanism and parts]
WEIGHTS OF SPRINGS.
TRIGGER 14-18lbs.
MAIN SPRING} 3 1/2 – 4 1/2
LONG ARM ONLY}
(TRIGGER PRESSED, READING WHEN HAMMER IS HALF WAY BACK.)
MESURE OF MAIN SPRING IN WIDDEST PART. 1 1/8”
[Page break]
[Underlined] SIGNAL PISTOL No 4. MK I + I [symbol] AP. 1641(F) [/underlined]
[Underlined] STRIPPING [/underlined]
SEE UNLOADED.
JOINT PIN + SCREW.
EXTRACTOR.
MOUNTING CATCH + SPRING.
CARTRIDGE RETAINING SPRING.
STOCK PLATES.
STOCK CENTRE SCREWS + CENTRE.
MAINSPRING PIN.
MAINSPRING.
HAMMER.
BARRLE CATCH SPRING.
MAINSPRING LEAVER AVIS PIN.
MAINSPRING LEAVER.
TRIGGER.
[Underlined] ‘A’ INSPECTION [/underlined] BEFORE FLIGHING. CHECK PISTOL + MOUNTING + WORKING OF PISTOL.
[Underlined] ‘B’ [/underlined] BETWEEN FLIGHTS UNLOAD, CHECK + RELOAD.
[Underlined] ‘C’ [/underlined] SEE PISTOL IS UNLOAD, CLEAN WITH TYPE A OIL CHECK WORK, DRY, THEN THIN FILM OF A.F. OIL, CHECK MOUNTING; [underlined] REPLACE COVER. [/underlined]
[Underlined] ‘D’ [/underlined] END [underlined] 300 [/underlined] HRS FLYING. REMOVE PISTOL + MOUNTING FROM A/C STRIP + CLEAN BOTH. (TYPE A). CHECK SPRINGS WEAR ON PARTS ECT. REASSEMBLE; SMEAR OF OIL; PUT IN A/C FIRE.
[Underlined] REVERSE ACTION TO ASSEMBLE [/underlined]
[Page break]
[Diagram of a Pistol Revolver]
[Diagrams of Revolver firing mechanisms]
BULLET .38 – 1lb. 11 1/2ozs.
BARRLE CALIBRE .352 10 1/2” LONG OF PISTOL
RIFLING 7 GROVES RIGHT.
(1 TURN 15.) BARRLE 5” = 1/30.
1 EXTRACTION + REJECTION
2 COCKING BY HAND
3 ROTATION OF CYLINDER
4 FIRING FROM FULL COCK
5 RAPID FIRE.
6 REBOUND ACTION – FROM FACES OF HAMMER + M.S. LEAVER; M.SPRING FORCING BACK [underlined] HAMMER [/underlined] + TRIGGER, GIVING ((1/2 COCK) – STRIKER BACK FROM CART. CAP.)
No2 MK I [symbol] NO BENT OR COMB.
(ONLY No 2 MK I WITH SAFTY STOP) BENT IN NOSE OF HAMMER)
[Page break]
A.P. 1641 (P)
[Underlined] PISTOL REVOLVER .38 No 2 MK I . I [symbol] + I [symbols] [/underlined]
[Underlined] BARRLE GAUGES [/underlined] { .352 A.C.C. PASS FROM MAG. END
{ .358 REG NOT TO ENTER MAG. END.
[Underlined] CYLINDER GAUGES. [/underlined] .359 - .357 A.C.C. MUST ENTER
.364 - .392 REG NOT TO ENTER
[Underlined] CARTRIDGE. H. SPACE [/underlined] .067 REG NOT TO GO BETWEEN SHEILD + CYLINDER.
[Underlined] STRIKER PROTUSION [/underlined] .04 ROCKS. .05 PASSES OVER.
[Underlined] STRIKER RADIUS [/underlined] .038
[Underlined] HEIGHT OF CYLINDER STOP [/underlined] .05
[Underlined] CENCENTRICITY + HIGHT OF EXTRACTOR GAUGE [/underlined] (.73 MINIMUM.)
[Underlined] PULL OFF TRIGGER [/underlined] 13 – 15 lbs.
[Underlined] WEIGHT OF M. SPRING. [/underlined] 3-3 1/2 (TRIGGER PRESSED 1ST MOVEMENT OF HAMMER)
[Underlined] PULL OFF FROM FULL COCK. 5-6 [/underlined]
[Underlined] WEIGHT OF BARRLE CATCH SPRING [/underlined] (OPEN REVOLVER) 3-5
[Underlined] INSPECTION 1 MOUNTH = SAME AS COLT EXTRACTORS [/underlined]
[Underlined] 6 MOUNTHS SAME AS COLT. USE ALL GAUGES. [/underlined]
13 STRANDS 26 GAUGE M.D.W
TRIGGER. REBOUND FACES WORK (BACK) FORCING M.S. LEAVER – PAWL UP, PUSHING TRIGGER NOSE ON HAMMER CATCH
[Page break]
A.P. 1641 (P)
[Underlined] PISTOL REVOLVER .38 No 2 MK I . MK I [symbol] + I [symbols] [/underlined]
CAM LEAVER FIXING SCREW
REMOVE CHAMBERS OR CYLINDER. (6 CHAMBERS / CYLINDER RECESSES)
STOCK SIDES
BARRLE CATCH (USE CRAMP) SCREW + SPRING (+REAR SIGHT)
SCREWS FROM BODY PLATED + BODY PLATE
MAIN SPRING (LONG + SHORT ARM + CLAW)
PAWL. (NOSE + STEP.)
MAIN SPRING LEAVER + AXIS PIN (REBOUND FACE
HAMMER. (PEAK. CONE. SWIVLE. REBOUND FACE. FACE. HAMMER NOSE + W CATCH.
TRIGGER + SAFTY STOP {TRIGGER NOSE + CATCH + SPRING – GUAD LUG)
CAM LEAVER + SCREW.
JOINT PIN SCREW. + J. PIN [inserted] + LUG [/inserted] (PART PISTOL)
EXTRACTOR LEAVER (ARM – BENT. AUVLY + SPRING)
CAM.
[Underlined] STRIF CYLINDER [/underlined] REMOVE NUT + SPRING + EXTRACTOR.
[Underlined] SAFTY DEVICES [/underlined] SAFTY STOP (No 2 MK I) + LOCKING OF MECHANISM 2 ON BOTH PISTOLS.
SAFTY STOP No 2 MK I [symbol] + LOCKING OF MECHANISM 2 ON BOTH PISTOLS
SAFTY STOP No 2 MK I [symbols] LOCKING OF MECHANISM
SAFTY STOP No 2 MK I 2 STAR LOCKING OF MECHISM.
LOCKING OF MECHANISM BY HAMMER GOING FORWARD; HAMMER CATCH GOING DOWN ON TRIGGER. REBOUND FACES WORK (BACK) FORCING M.S. LEAVER - PAWL UP, PUSHING TRIGGER NOSE ON HAMMER CATCH
[Page break]
[Underlined] LEWIS GUN .303 [/underlined] A.P.1242. 1641. D.
[Underlined] MK I GROUND GUN [/underlined] RATE OF FIRE 500 R.P.M.
NO VOLUTE SPRING.
RETURN SPRING (IS MORE MK III) 11 – 14 lbs.
MK III RATE OF FIRE 700 R.P.M. [Underlined] AIR GUN [/underlined] (USED IN THE AIR.)
INCLINED PLATE IN GAS REGULATOR (REGULATOR ALWAY FULLY OPEN)
VOLUTE SPRING. RETURN SPRING 10 -12
[Underlined] RIFLING [/underlined] RIGHT HAND. 4 GROVES. BARRLE. 26 1/4”. (GUN 17 lbs.)
[Underlined] SIGHTS [/underlined] RING + BEAD OR G.J. I (PRISMATIC)
[Underlined] MAGAZINE FED [/underlined]
[Diagrams of Lewis Gun parts]
[Page break]
[Underlined] STRIPPING + ASSEMBLING [/underlined]
SEE GUN IS UNLOADED {TAKE OF MAG. TAKE ROUND FROM FEEDWAY.)
REMOVE SPADE.
TRIGGER GROUP.
PINION GROUP.
TOP PLATE.
FEED ARM.
PULL COKING TO REAR + REMOVE.
BOLT
PISTON ROD
BODY LOCKING PIN.
UNSCREW BODY FROM BARRLE.
GAS REGULATOR KEY, + REGULATOR
GAS CYLINDER SHEILD
REAR DISTANCE PEICE.
SWIVELLING BAND
GAS CYLINDER
GAS CHAMBER
MUZZLE NUT + FORE SIGHT BRACKET.
BARRLE BAND
FRONT DISTANCE PEICE
[Underlined] REASSEMBLE IN REVERSE ORDER. [/underlined]
[Underlined] SAFTY DEVICES [/underlined]
STRAIGHT PART OF CAM SLOT 1 1/8 “
CUT-AWAY PART ON BOLT FACE. F. PIN HOLE.
SAFTY SLIDE OR CATCH.
(LOCKING OF THE BOLT)
[Underlined] GAUGES. [/underlined]
.038 RADIUS [Diagram]
[Underlined] .045 - .037 STRIKER [/underlined] GAUGE.
[Underlined] 22.285 FROM STRIKER POST – PISTON HEAD. [/underlined] (MINIMUM 22.255”
[underlined] VOLUTE SPRING 1.072 IN LENGTH) OUT OF 5/16 – 7/16 END.
[Underlined] U. JOINT NOT [/underlined] EXCEED 3/8” IN PLAY [Diagram]
[Underlined] CART HEAD SPACE. [/underlined] .064 - .074 (SHOULD NOT LOCK ON .074)
[Underlined] RETURN SPRING [/underlined] 10 – 12 lbs. (SAME ON NEXT PAGE. P.T.O)
[Underlined] BODY COVER GAUGE [/underlined] SLID GAUGE UNDER TOUNGE. (REMOVE. FEED ARM + PART. GUIDE SPRING)
[Page break]
[Underlined] STOPPAGES LEWIS G.O. GUN MK III [/underlined] AP. 1242 – 1641.
1ST EMPTY MAGAZINE. – MISS.FIRE – GAS REGULATOR ([underlined] FAULTY [/underlined]) BROKEN STRIKER.
[Underlined] BROKEN FED PAWL OR SPRING. – DAMAGED MAGAZINE. [/underlined]
[In margin] 1ST [/In margin]
[Group] EMPTY MAG – CHANGE FOR FULL
MISS FIRE – RECOCK
GAS REGULATOR (DUF) – AJUST OR FIT NEW ONE.
BROKEN STRIKER – NEW PISTON
BROKEN FEED PAWL OR SPRING – REPLACE
DAMAGED MAG – REPLACE. [/group]
HARD EXTRACTION AID BY COCKING HANDLE
MIS SHAPEN ROUND. AID BY COCKING HANDLE
WEAK CHARGE, WITH 1/2 FEED. AID BY COCKING HANDLE
WEAK OR BROKEN CARTRIDGE GUIDE SPRING – RENEW.
TOO HEAVY RETURN SPRING OR GAS REG. TURNED – AJUST + REPLACE KEY.
BROKEN TIP EXTRACTOR – NEW BOLT
BROKEN EXTRACTORS 1 OR 2 – NEW BOLT
FULL DEFLECTOR BAG – EMPTY
BROKEN EJECTOR – NEW EJECTOR
BROKEN PISTON. NEW PISTON.
[Page break]
[Underlined] GAUGES LEWIS [/underlined] [Diagram]
[Underlined] STRIKER [/underlined] .043 TO .037 .043 SHOULD PASS OVER .038 RADIUS
[Underlined] PISTON [/underlined] MAX LENGTH 22.285 MIN 22.255. (FROM STRIKE POST.)
[Underlined] VOLUTE SPRING [/underlined] 1”.072 IN LENGTH. IN HOUSING 5/16 TO 7/16 OVER END.
[Underlined] UN. JOINT [/underlined] NOT TO EX 3/8” EITHER WAY.
[Underlined] CART. HEAD SPACE. [/underlined] .064 .074 BOLT SHOULD NOT LOCK ON .074.
[Underlined] RETURN SPRING [/underlined] 10-12 lbs (AIR) 11-14 (GROUND).
[Underlined] BODY COVER GAUGE [/underlined] UNDER TOUNGE. FIX GAUGE UNDER TOUNGE LINE UP HOLE.
[Underlined] INSPECTIONS LEWIS [/underlined] M.Gs.
‘A’ D.I. BEFORE DAYS FLYING + FIRING TAKES PLACE.
USE DRILL ROUNDS WORKING MECHANISM. DRY BARRLE. WIEGH MAIN SPRING. 10-12
‘B’ BETWEEN FLIGHTS (AFTER FIRING.) ASK FOR SNAGS – CHECK – REPLACE EMPTY MAG . IF TIME GIVE PULL THROUGH.
‘C’ AFTER FLYING + FIRING. TAKE OUT GUN + STRIP. ON GAS AFFTECTED PARTS USE TY. ‘A’ ASSEMBLE, LIGHT COAT OF OIL ON ALL PART.
‘D’ AFTER FLYING [underlined] BUT NO FIRING. [/underlined] CHECK.
‘E’ AFTER 120 HRS FLYING. NO FIRING. [symbol] N/A/NOW. CHECK.
[Boxed] ‘F’ [/boxed] EVERY INSPECTION ON KIT. {30X. 50X. 50XX. MAJ. ECT.) AFTER FIRING. REMOVE GUN. STRIP. [Underlined] USE GAUGES AFTER CLEANNING. [/underlined]
[Page break]
[Underlined] A.P. 1641. [/underlined] VOL. II
[Underlined] ALL TYPES CARE OF BARRLES RIFLE + M. GUN .303 [/underlined]
[Underlined] GAUGES [/underlined] .303 (acceptance) .307 (.307 MUST [underlined] NOT [/underlined] PASS RIGHT THROUGH (REJECT GAUGE)
[Underlined] .308 [/underlined] (TAKE NOTE OF MARK) [underlined] TEST [/underlined] FOR CORD WEAR; [inserted] (SHOULD NOT ENTER) [/inserted] (GAUGE IS ONLY ALLOW TO ENTER TO MARK.)
[Underlined] PLUG LEAD [/underlined] No 2. (M.G.s ONLY) MARK ON GAUGE = WEAR IN CHAMBER
[Diagram of Gauge]
WHEN BARRLE [underlined] TOUCHES MARK OR OVER [/underlined] ITS U/S FOR THAT JOB.
NO 2 PLUG LEAD WITH .310 (MUST BE BOTH) FOR [underlined] RIFLE ONLY [/underlined]
TO MAKE [underlined] RIFLE [/underlined] (ONLY) [underlined] BARRLE [/underlined] U/S GAUGE .310 + No 2 P.LEAD. MUST ENTER UNTIL [underlined] FLUSH [/underlined] OR [underlined] INSIDE [[/underlined] CHAMBER; IF ONLY 1 ENTERS + NOT THE OTHER, THE BARRLE IS O.K.
[Underlined] CLEANING RODS. [/underlined]
[Underlined] BRASS HANDLES [/underlined] PISTOL GRIP. MK IV
SPADE GRIP MK II
[Underlined] STEEL HANDLES [/underlined] LONG TYPE T HANDLE No 1.
SHORT TYPE T. HANDLE No 4.
[Underlined] NICKLE FOWLINGS. [/underlined]
20cc. DIST. WATER. 20cc AMONNA + 2 TABLES K.N.N.S. (KINGS NORTON NICKLE SOLVENT) FOR NICKLE COATED BARRLES. SOAK FOR 30 MINS. WASH OUT INTILL CLEAN. THEN TRY; CHECK WITH .037 (SEE IT CAN GO THROUGH.)
30-40 -/26 GAUGES /S.B.W.
[Grouped together] NOT
POWDER FOWLINGS
NICKLE FOWLINGS
CHEMICAL CORROSION
C. ROD. + [underlined] TYPE A. [/underlined]
20cc W. KM
20cc A 2 NS.
[Underlined] TYPE ‘A’ [/underlined]
+ GAUGE
[/Grouped together]
(MK .302) = [underlined] PLUG. [/underlined] FOR HAMMERING IN BROKEN PULL THROUGH. THEN USE BUSH + BIT.
[Page break]
[Underlined] A.P. 1641. [/underlined] (B) VOL I.
[Underlined] VICKERS GAS OPERATED M. GUN. [/underlined] .303 (CONTD)
[Underlined] 4 TYPES IN ALL. ALL MK I BUT Nos 1-4. [/underlined] ALL AIR COOLED.
No 1 MK I [Underlined] AIR [/underlined] FREE GUN.
No 2 MK I [underlined GROUND. [/underlined] (FIRED FROM HIP OR SHOULDER. (PISTOL GRIP) WOOD.
No 3 MK I USED IN [underlined] TURRETS. [/underlined]
No 4 MK I SAME TYPE AS GROUD. [Underlined] USED IN ARMOURER CARS [/underlined] (SHOULDER + PISTOL GRIPS ARE MAKE OF [underlined] RUBBER [/underlined]) (700 R.P.M.)
950 R.P.M. 2 TYPES MAGZS. 60 + 100. (5 LEFT. HAND BARRLE GROVES.
[Underlined] STRIPPING FOR CLEANNING. [/underlined]
1. SEE GUN IS UNLOADED.
2 REMOVE SIGHTS + DEFLECTOR BAG
3 BODY EXTENSION + SPADE GRIP.
4 RETURN SPRINGS + RODS.
5 BREECH BLOCK + PISTON
6 FLASH ELIMINATOR
7 BARRLE STRAP + YOKE
8 BARRLE + GAS CYLINDER – (PART FROM BODY.)
9 GAS PLUG.
[Underlined] SAFTY DEVICES [/underlined]
5/16” HORIZANTOL SURFACE.
GAS ESCAPE HOLE (WITH F. PIN HOLE)
UNLOCKING + LOCKING CAMS.
SAFTY CATCH.
[Page break]
[Underlined] V.G.O. [/underlined] (CONTD)
[Underlined] No I MK I. [/underlined]
[Diagrams of Vickers Gun identifying parts and different Marks]
[Page break]
[Underlined] GAUGES V.G.O. [/underlined] (CONTD)
.064 - .074 (REMOVE EXTRACTOR) CARTRIDGE HEAD SPACE.
IF TOO MUCH CART. HEAD SPACE CHANGE [underlined] BARRLE STRAP. [/underlined].
[Underlined] FIRING PIN PROTRUSION GAUGE [/underlined] [Diagram] FOR V.G.O.) (.038 RADIS)
TAKE OUT EXTRACTOR – REMOVE BARRLE + G. CYLINDER, PUT GAUGE IN REPLACE STRAP – DO UP LOCKING NUT – CLOSE B. BLOCK SLOWLEY. WHEN REPLACING NEW F. PIN MESURE 1ST WITH 2” MIC. TO 1.904 – 1.907.
.303 ENTERS. .307 (SHOULDN’T PASS RIGHT THROUGH) .308 (CORD WEAR)
No 2 PLUG LEAD. LINE ON GAUGE .6 – 1 1/2” – 2 1/2” – 4”.
[Underlined] MAGAZINES [/UNDERLINED] 2 TYPES.
No 1 MK I (60R) [inserted] 3 1/2 [underlined] TURNS [/underlined] [/inserted] No 2 MK I (100R)
[Diagram]
[Underlined] INSPECTIONS. [/underlined] SAME AS [underlined] LEWIS [/underlined]
‘A’ BEFORE FLYING – CLEAN OIL FROM ALL GAS AFFECTED PARTS.
‘B’ BETWEEN FLYING - ASK FOR SNAGS – REPLACE USED AMMO. CHECK GUN.
‘C’ AFTER FLYING + FIRING – STRIP GUN. CLEAN GAS A. PARTS IN TYPE A OIL. ASSEMBLE.
‘D’ AFTER FLYING NO FIRING. CHECK.
‘E’ AFTER 120 HRS FLYING. NO FIRING. CHECK.
[Boxed] ‘F’ [/boxed] EVERY INSPECTION ON KIT (30X. 50. 50X. 50XX. MAJ.) AFTER FIRING,
REMOVE GUN. – STRIP – USE. GAUGES ON BARRLE. CHECK TRIGGER MECHANISM.
[Page break]
[Underlined] STOPPAGES [/underlined] 1.2.3. [Underlined] V.G.O. [/underlined] (CONTD)
[In margin] No 1 STOPPAGE [/in margin]
MISSFIRE – RECOCK
SLUGGISH MAG. (WEAK SPRING.) – REPLACE.
EMPTY MAG. – REPLACE NEW ONE.
BROKEN FEED PEICE OR SPRING. – CHANGE BREACH BLOCK.
BROKEN FIRING PIN. – CHANGE BREACH BLOCK.
FAULTY GAS PLUG. – REPLACE FOR FRESH.
WEAK RETURN SPRING. – REPLACE FOR NEW.
[In margin] No 2 [/in margin]
SEPERATED CASE – REMOVE.
FULL DEFLECTOR BAG – EMPTY.
[In margin] No 3 [/in margin]
BROKEN EXTRACTOR OR SPRING. – REPLACE BREECH BLOCK
BROKEN EJECTOR – NEW ONE
MISS ALINED ROUND – CLEAR. TAKE OF MAG.
SEAR BUFFER SPRING SLEVE
SEAR BUFFER SPRING SLEVE PLUG
SEAR BUFFER SPRING
SEAR BUFFER PLUNGER.
SEAR AXIS IN (EARLONGATED SLOT)
SEAR (STEP + LUG.
SEAR STOP
AXIS PIN (FOR SEAR CATCH)
SEAR CATCH (FORKED)
TRIGGER AXIS PIN
TRIGGER + TRIGGER ROD.
(STRIP TRIGGER ROD)
TRIGGER ROD CAP
TRIGGER ROD SPRING.
TRIGGER ROD SPRING SLEVE
SEAR CATCH SPRING.
[Page break]
[Underlined] AP. 1641. (C) VOL 1-2. [/underlined]
[Underlined] .303 BROWNING. M.G. MK II [symbol] [/underlined]
[Underlined] GENERAL DISCRIPTION [/underlined]
RATE OF FIRE – 1150 R.P.M.
LENGTH OVERALL 3’ 7”
APPROX WEIGHT. 22 lbs.
BARRLE LENGTH 24”
GROVES 5
LEFT HAND TURN 1 IN 10”
TYPES OF MK II [symbol] WITH FLASH ELIMINATOR FOR OR AS TURRET GUNS.
WITH MUZZLE ATTACHMENTS FOR WING INSTALLATIONS
METHOD OF COOLING – BY AIR FLOW OVER BARRLE. THE GUN IS PURELY DESIGNED AS AN AIRCRAFT M/G. AND IS UNSUITABLE FOR GROUND USE.
METHODS OF FIRING, - HAND, - PNEUMATICALLY, - HYDROMATICALLY - + ELECTRICALLY.
[Underlined] AMMO [/underlined] OF ALL TYPES [underlined] .303 [/underlined] (S.A.A) CAN BE USED.
[Page break]
[Underlined] BROWNING .303 [/underlined] MK II [symbol]
THE SEAR – BENT – SEAR RETAINER – SEAR REATINER SPRING – SEAR SPRING RETAINER KEEPER + PIN.
STRIPPING.
1. FLASH ELIM.
2 BACK PLATE
3. RETURN SPRING + ROD
4. COCKING STUD.
5 BEECH BLOCK.
6 LOCK FRAME.
7 BARRLE EXT.
[Underlined] 8 BARRLE [/underlined]
[Underlined] BARRLE EXTENSION. [/underlined]
1. BARRLE LOCKING SPRING.
2. LOCKING PEICE.
B.BLOCK GUIDES.}
EXTRACTOR TOP + SIDE CLEARANCES} F.
T SHAPE PROJECTION}
[Underlined] BEECH BLOCK [/underlined]
1 TRANSPORTER.
-EJECTOR
- HORN + STEP
- CLAW
- PLUNGER + SPRING
2 SWITCH PLATE + STOP
3 COCKING LEAVER + PIN.
4 SEAR SPRING RETAINER KEEPER.
5 SEAR SPRING RETAINER
6 SEAR SPRING
7 SEAR RETAINER
8 SEAR
9. FIRING PIN.
- 2 BENTS
- STRIKER
- SLOT
- SPRING
FIXED
-CART. RIM GUIDES.
- TRANSPORTER STOP.
- BENT – (REAR SEAR)
- CAM GROVES.
- LOCKING RECESS. (LOCKING PEICE)
[Page break]
[Underlined] LOCK FRAME. BROWNING. 303. MK II [symbol] [/underlined]
1 ACCELERATOR.
2 BARRLE (RET.) SPRING + PLUNGER.
3 REAR SEAR LEAVER
4 REAR SEAR
5 BARRLE RET. SPRING SOCKET +
REAR SEAR BUFFER SPRING.
6 R.S BUFFER SP. WASHER
[Underlined] 7. R.S. CRADLE BREECHING UP [/underlined]
[Underlined] ADJUSTMENT OF CARTIDGE HEAD SPACE. [/underlined] (BREECHING UP.)
[Underlined] OVER BREECHED [/underlined] BARRLE SCREWED TOO TIGHTLY UP TO B.EXTENSION; RESULTING IN [underlined] NOT [/underlined] ENOUGH CART. H. SPACE. [Underlined] DETECTED [/underlined] BY BARRLE LOCKING NOTCHES BEING VISIBLE. [Underlined] RESULT [/underlined] GUN [underlined] WILL NOT FIRE. [/underlined]
[Underlined] UNDER BREECHER [/underlined] BARRLE [underlined] NOT SCREWED UP TIGHT ENOUGH [/underlined] TO BARRLE EXTENSION; GIVING TOO MUCH CART. H. SPACE.
[Underlined] DETECTED [/underlined] BY INDEPENDENT MOVEMENT OF BREECH BLOCK.
[Underlined] RESULT [/underlined] OF UNDER BREECHING. – SEPARATED CASE. ([underlined] STOPPAGE. [/underlined])
[Page break]
[Underlined] BROWNING. MK II [symbol] 303. [/underlined]
[Underlined] CHANGING FEED DIRECTION [/underlined]
[Underlined] BREECH BLOCK. [/underlined] CHANGE SWITCH PLATE TO L OR R
[Underlined] CHANGE EJECTOR [/underlined] LEFT OF TRANSPORTER FOR R.H. FEED
RIGHT OF TRANSPORTER FOR LEFT H FEED
[Underlined] BREECH COVER [/underlined]
CHANGE FEED LEAVER + P+S R.H. FEED BOTTOM HOLE
L.H. FEED TOP HOLE
CHANGE FEED PAWL + FEED PAWL LEG ON FEED SLIDE.
[Underlined] FEED WAY SIDE OF FEED [/underlined]
CHUTE LUGS (2)
BELT RETAINING PAWL + SPRING
[Underlined] OPPOSITE SIDE [/underlined] (FROM FEED)
CHUTE LUGS (2)
BULLET STOP.
CART. STOP.
FILLING PEICE.
[Underlined] BREECH COVER [/underlined] NAMES OF PARTS.
FEED LEAVER BUSH
FEED LEAVER S + PLUNGER
FEEDER SLIP
FEEDER PAWL + SPRING
FEEDER PAWL LEG
TRANSPORTER GUIDE SPRING
TRANSPORTER RAMP (F)
BREECH COVER CATCH + SPRING.
BARRLE CASING (F)
TRUNNION BLOCK (F)
BLAST TUBE ADAPTOR
BREECH CASING (F)
LOCKING PEICE CAM
LOCKING LEAVER BRACKET (F)
TRANSPORTER CAMS. REAR + FRONT (F)
[Page break]
[Underlined] FIRING MECHANISMS [/underlined]
[Underlined] R.S.R. [/underlined] – REAR SEAR RELEASE. 4 TYPES.
[Underlined] F + S. [/underlined] FIRE + SAFE UNIT. 2 TYPES (WORKS SEAR)
R.S.R. F+S UNIT WHERE USED. EXAMPLE.
1. MANUAL. MANUAL RANGE ONLY –
2. PNEUMATIC (120-) PNEUMATIC (80) ALL FIGHTER A/C. HURRICANE SPITFIRE.
3. HYDRAULIC (300) MANUAL ALL F/N TURRETS BOMBERS.
4 ELECTRIC MANUAL B.P. TURRETS. BOMBERS + FIGHTERS.
[Underlined] ALWAYS SET TO SAFE (LOADIING + UNLOADING.) [/underlined]
WHEN LOADING (BROWNING 303.) [Underlined] WITHOUT [/underlined] (PNEUMATIC ) OR WITH Nos 1 -3-4 OF ABOVE, FEED BELT OVER BELT RETAINING PAWL; (BREECH COVER CLOSED) COCK – FIRE – COCK – LEAVE COCKED FOR MANUAL F+S.
[Underlined] LOADING PNEUMATIC ONLY [/underlined] FEED BELT, COCK + FIRE [underlined] TWICE [/underlined] LEAVE [underlined] BREECH BLOCK FORWARD. [/underlined]
[Underlined] UNLOADING [/underlined] LIFT COVER REMOVE BELT, COCK + FIRE ONCE, [underlined] LOOK [/underlined] ON BREECH FACE FOR [underlined] LIVE ROUND. [/underlined].
[Page break]
[Underlined] MECHANISM BROWNING [/underlined] .303 MK IIx
[Underlined] BACKWARD MOVEMENT [/underlined]
1 ACTION OF RECOIL
2 ACTION OF THE GASSES IN THE MUZZLE CHOKE.
3 BACKWARD ROTATION OF THE ACCELERATOR
4 UNLOCKING OF THE BREECH BLOCK
5 BACKWARD MOVEMENT OF THE BREECH BLOCK (COMPRESSING RETURN SPRING).
(A) ACTION OF THE TRANSPORTER
(B) EXTRACTION + EJECTION
(C) THE COCKING ACTION
6 FIRST ACTION OF THE BELT FEED.
[Underlined] FORWARD MOVEMENT [/underlined]
ACTION OF THE RETURN SPRING + BARRLE RETURN SPRING.
LOCKING OF THE BREECH BLOCK
FORWARD ACTION + RAISING OF THE TRANSPORTER
RETURN OF THE COCKING LEVER.
SECOND ACTION OF THE BELT FEED
FIRING OF THE CARTRIDGE.
(ACTION OF THE REAR SEAR.)
[Page break]
[Underlined] SAFTY DEVICES BROWNING .303 [/underlined] MK II [symbol] A.P. 1641. (C)
1. LOCKING OF THE BREECH.
2 LOCKING OF BREECH 5/10” BEFORE COMPLETION OF FORWARD MOVEMENT (STRAIGHT FACE)
3 5/16 BREECH REMAINS LOCKED. ([underlined] BACKWARD MOVEMENT [/underlined].)
4 LOCKING LEVER BRACKET HOLDING COCKING LEVER FORWARD (SEAR WILL NOT WORK)
5 REAR SEAR (ALWAYS HOLDS B. BLOCK TO REAR WHEN FIRING IS FINNISHED. SAVES ([underlined] COCKED ROUND [/underlined]))
[Underlined] DUNLOP PNEUMATIC SYSTEMS [/underlined] A.P. 1641 (E)
[Underlined] HIGH PRESSURE SYSTEM [/underlined] 1800 LBS □” AIR CONTAINER - A OR B TYPE REDUCING [inserted] (1800 TO 150) [/inserted] VALVE (HUDSON A/C).
[Underlined] LOW OR 200LBS □” [/underlined] PRESSURE SYSTEM. E.D.C ON A/C ENGINE. GIVES CONTINUOUS AIR PRESSURE WHEN IN FLIGHT. NO AIR CONTAINER OR REDUCER VALVE NEEDED
[Underlined] 350lbs □” PRESSURE SYSTEM [/underlined] AS PER DIAGRAM. GENARLY USED FIGHTER A/C FOR .303 BROWNINGS. WHEN TESTING SYSTEM MORE THAN 5lbs□” DROP MEANS LEAK.
[Diagram of [underlined] 350lbs LOW PRESSURE SYSTEMS. [/underlined]]
350 TO 150 REDUCING VALVE WORKS WITH FLEXIBLE METALLIC BELLOWS.
[Page break]
[Underlined] COLT A/C M-G .5 (YANKY.) [/underlined]
[Underlined] .5 BROWNING GUN. A.P. 1641. (L) VOL I-II. [/underlined]
RATE OF FIRE – 800 R.P.M. (APPROX) ADJUSTABLE TO 400 R.P.M. THROUGH OIL BUFFERS AT REAR.
([Underlined] WEIGHT 64 lbs [/underlined])
AMMO .5 RIMLESS. MUZZLE VELOCITY 2530 F.P.S.
RIFLING R.H 8 GROVES 1-15”. No 1 FIXED No 2 FREE
[Underlined] DIFFERENCES BETWEEN .5 + .303. [/underlined]
RECOIL ACTION (NOT GAS ASSISTED) AS .303.
OIL BUFFER ASSEMBLY REPLACES REAR SEAR MECHANISAM
FIXED TRANSPORTER GUIDE DEPRESSES SPRING GRADED REAR TRANSPORTER CAM
EJECTOR IS NOT MOVED WHEN CHANGING FEED
TWO SPRINGS ON RETURN SPRING ROD.
[Underlined] BREECH BLOCK. [/underlined] FIXED TRANSPORTER GUIDE. (NOT PLUNGER + SPRING)
FIRING PIN SPRING + SEAR RETAINER
SEAR SLIDE [Diagram]
SEAR. BENT + CAM FOR SEAR SLIDE.
LUG – NOT ACCELERATOR FACE + BENT.
CUTAWAY PORTION TO BALANCE WEIGHT OF TRANSPORTER.
[Underlined] LOCK FRAME [/underlined] DETENT SPRING DEPRESSORS
LOCK FRAME RETAINING SPRING.
[Page break]
[Underlined] .5 BROWNING M.G. [/underlined] A.P. 1641(L)
[Underlined] BARRLE EXTEN. [/underlined] LOCKING PEICE HAS ON CLEARANCE FOR FIRING PIN
1 TOP + SIDE EJECTOR CLEARANCE. SHANK (NOT T SHAPE)
[Underlined] FEED WAY [/underlined] FRONT + REAR CART. STOPS. LINK RETAINER
FEED ADATOR WITH LEFT HAND FEED. ([Underlined] NOT USING R. CART. STOP)
[Underlined] TRIGGER MECHANISM .5 BROWNING M.G. [/underlined]
[Diagram]
No 1 – MK I GUNS ONLY (NO LEVERAGE)
No 2 - No 1 MK II GUNS SYNCHRONISED + WITHIN PILOTS REACH (CAM + ROLLER
No 3 ALL MK II GUNS OTHER THAN WHEN No 2 MECHANISM IS USED.
[Underlined] FEED. DOUBLE LINK IN ALWAYS. [/UNDERLINED]
[Underlined] LOCKING OF THE BREECH FIRE + SAFE UNIT. [/underlined]
[Underlined] COCKING LEVER 3/4“ BACKWARD MOVEMENT [/underlined] (DELAY FOR GASSES
[Page break]
.040 - .050 [Underlined] OIL BUFFER [/underlined] (.5 BROWNING M.G. AP
[Diagram]
[Underlined] BACKWARD MOVEMENT [/underlined] OF RECOILING PORTION
VALVE + PISTON ARE TOGETHER + OIL PASSES THROUGH PORTS ONLY
[Underlined] FORWARD MOVEMENT. [/underlined] PISTON + VALVE ARE APART + OIL PASSES THROUGH HOLES + PORTS OF PISTONS + PORTS + AXIS HOLE ON VALVE.
[Underlined] GAUGES [/underlined] [Diagram]
.498 THROUGH BARRLE. (USE GAUGE ON ROD)
CHAMBER END
.513 (CHAMBER REJECT GAUGE) IF ENTERS TO END NEAR HANDLE – BARRLE IS U/S.
.030 SHOULD NOT ENTER UNDER SWITCH PLATE.
.040 - .050 AJUST OIL BUFFER PISTON + VALVE (TO SAME)
[In Margin] ON COMBINATION TOOL [/in margin]
.074 + .082 STRIKE PROTRUSION
.090 DIAMETER OF STRIKER [Diagrams]
.868 + 7 [inserted] [Underlined] THOU [/underlined] [/inserted] FEELER = 875. (868 ENTERS ON FEEDWAY + WITH 7/1000 IS U/S)
.116 OF AN INCH} TIMIMG OF FIRE + SAFE.
.110 OF AN INCH + .080}
[Page break]
[Underlined] FIRING MECHANISMS .5 BROWNING M.G. [/underlined] A.P.1641. (L)
[Underlined] TWO TYPES G4 + G5 [/underlined] (G5 MOD TYPE WITH CLOSED TERMINALS) OTHER TYPES IN USE).
SCREW AJUSTING COLLAR [underlined] OUT [/underlined] TO INCREASE PROTRUSION OF PLUNGER
SCREW AJUSTING COLLAR [underlined] IN [/underlined] TO DECREASE PROTRUSION OF PLUNGER
[Underlined] TIMMING [/underlined] (USING .116) WITH GAUGE IN POSITION – PRESS PLUNGER GUN SHOULD NOT FIRE.
REMOVE GAUGE – PRESS PLUNGER – LET BREECH BLOCK FORWARD – GUN SHOULD FIRE.
[Underlined] TIMMING [/underlined] USING (110/.080)
WITH .110 GAUGE IN POSITION – PRESS PLUNGER – GUN SHOULD NOT FIRE.
WITH .080 GAUGE IN POSITION – PRESS PLUNGER – GUN SHOULD FIRE.
[Underlined] MK I [/underlined] M G 53.A. ON RIGHT SIDE OF PLATE. (UNDER FEEDWAY)
BREECH COVER CATCH ON TOP. BARRLE CASING CRIMPED TO RETAIN MUZZLE BEARING.
[Underlined] MK II [/underlined] MG. 53.2 OR M2 ON R.H. SIDE PLATE. TOP L H CORNER.
BREECH COVER PLATE CATCH ON SIDE. SAFTY CATCH FOR BACK PLATE CATCH.
SPECIAL TRUNNION BLOCK ADAPTOR.
[Underlined] INSPECTIONS. [/underlined] ‘A’ SAME AS .303 + 1. SEE OIL BURNERS FULL. 2. (A).
2A. TEST TIMMING OF FIRE + SAFE. 2(B) SYNCHONIZING MECHANISM TEST. (NOTE. WHEN GUNS ARE SYNED FEED ONLY 1 ROUND)
‘B’ SAME AS .303. ‘C’ SAME AS .303 CHECK OIL BUFFER FOR LEAKS
‘D’ + ‘F’ SAME AS .303.
[Page break]
MACHINE CARBINE STEN MK II + MK III [Underlined] P.A.P 35 [/underlined]
[Underlined] RANGE [/underlined] 10/100 YDS [Underlined] BARRLE [/underlined] 7.8” LONG
[Underlined] RATE OF FIRE. [/underlined] 550 R.P.M. (APROX) – SINGLE SHOTS. [Underlined] AMMO. [/underlined] 9MM. RIMLESS.
[Underlined] RIFLING. [/underlined] R.H 6 GROOVES. 1 TURN IN 260MM. [Underlined] MAGZ. [/underlined] BOX TYPE 32 ROUNDS.
[Underlined] STRIPPING SEQUENCE [/underlined] FIRST SEE GUN IS UNLOADED
1) BUTT
2) RETURN SPRING HOUSING [underlined] CAP. [/underlined] RETURN SPRING HOUSING. RETURN SPRING.
3) COCKING HANDLE.
4) BREECH BLOCK (FIRING PIN – EXTRACTOR - + SPRING – BENT – FEED RIBS – EJECTOR GROOVES – CLEARANCE
5) BARRLE GROUP (MK II.) BARRLE – BARRLE NUT – B. NUT CATCH RATCHET. – BARRLE SLEEVE.
6 TRIGGER MECHANISM COVER
7) TRIGGER SPRING.
8) TRIPPING LEVER PAWL.
9) SEAR + AXIS PIN.
10) CHANGE LEVER.
11) TRIGGER AXIS PIN
12) TRIGGER + TRIPPING LEVER.
13) MAG. HOUSING PLUNGER
14) MAG. HOUSING PLUNGER SPRING.
15) BARRLE NUT CATCH
16) MAG. CATCH RETAINER
17) MAG CATCH + SPRING.
[Underlined] REVEARSE TO REASSEMBLE. [/underlined]
MK III NO BARRLE GROUP OR STRIPPING OF MAG. HOUSING.
[Page break]
[Underlined] MACHINE CARBINE STEN [/underlined] MK II + MK III [Underlined] P.A.P 35. [/underlined]
1 TRIGGER
2 TRIPPING LEVER
3 CHANGE LEVER
4 SEAR
5 PAWL
6 TRIGGER SPRING
7 NOTCHES
[Diagram] [Underlined] STEN CARBIN TRIGGER MECHANISM. [/underlined]
[Underlined] STOPPAGES [/underlined] COCKING HANDLE [Underlined] FORWARD [/underlined] 1ST
[Underlined] IMMEDIATE ACTION [/underlined] COCK GUN
(1) MISS FIRE
(2) BROKEN OR DIRTY FIRING PIN
(3) EMPTY MAG
[Underlined] 2ND POSITION COCKING HANDLE NOT RIGHT FORWARD. [/underlined]
IMMEDIATE ACTION COCK + LEAVE COCKING HANDLE IN [underlined] SAFTY [/underlined] RESESS (EXAMINE EJECTION [underlined] OPENING. [/underlined]
(1) DAMAGED MAG OR MAG LIPS.
(2) FAULTY EXTRACTION
(3) FAULTY EJECTION
(4) SEPERATED CASE (NO TOOL MADE FOR SAME).
[Underlined] INSPECTIONS ‘A’ BEFORE FIRING
‘B’ AFTER FIRING
‘C’EVERY 6 MONTHS WHEN IN STORE
‘D’ AFTER 2,500 ROUNDS .
[Page break]
[Underlined] SHOT GUNS [/UNDERLINED]
[Underlined] VICKERS VANGUARD [/underlined] SINGLE BARRLE 12 bore – (1/12lb SHOT.)
3 PEICE TAKE DOWN – TO CLEAN BARRLE.
1) PRESS TOP LEVER TO R. + BREAK GUN TO SEE ITS UNLOADED.
2) TAKE OFF FORE END
3) PRESS TOP LEVER BRAKE GUN + REMOVE BARRLE FROM ACTION + BUTT GROUP.
[Underlined] ACTION OF TOP LEVER. [/underlined]
1) WITHDRAWS LOCKING BOLT
2) WITH LOCK BOLT WITHDRAWN, GUN CAN BE BROKEN + CART. INSERTED.
3) GUN IS AT SAFE IN HALF-COCKED POSITION.
[Underlined] SAFTY ARRANGEMENTS [/underlined]
IN THE HALF-COCK POSITION, TRIGGER BEING ENGAGED IN UNDERCUT HALF BENT OF HAMMER, CANNOT BE ROTATED.
[Diagram]
[Page break]
ACTION OF TOP LEVER [Underlined] WEBLY + SCOTT. [/underlined] DOUBLE BARRLE (12 bore) A.P. 1668 (B)
1) WITHDRAWS LOCKING BOLT.
2) WITH LOCKING LEVER WITHDRAWN GUN CAN BE BROKEN + 2 CART. CAN BE INSERTED.
3) [Underlined] GUN SET AT SAFE [/underlined] [Underlined] SAFTY ARRANGEMENT. [/underlined]
SAFTY ARM IS PUSH TO THE REAR BY THE LOCKING BOLT + STUD. SAFTY ARM IS POSITIONED OVER TRIGGER PREVENTING IT FROM ROTATING.
[Underlined] CLEANING FOR LEADENING [/underlined]
1) PHOSPHOR BROZNE BRUSH (USING YOUNGS CLEANER. (-NEAT).)
2 PLACE FLANNEL PATCH ON JAG. (USING 50% YOUNGS + 50% WATER)
3) DRY OUT WITH NEW FLANNEL.
4) POLISH WIGH LAMBS WOOL MOP.
5) IF GUN IS GOING TO BE STORED OR NOT USED FOR A TIME LEAVE THIN FILM OF YOUNGS CLEANING OIL (NEAT) ON INTERIOR OF BARRLE.
[Page break]
[Underlined] CLAY PIGEON TRAP [/underlined] AP. 1668 (B)
THROUGH A PIGEON 20/85 YDS.
[Underlined] BASE PLACE [/underlined] (BOSS) [Underlined] SWIVEL BLOCK [/underlined] (FORK + TRUNNONS + SWIVEL + FRAME)
[Underlined] ELEVATION CLAMP [/underlined] SCREW + WHEEL
[[Underlined] BODY /[underlined] COLLAR – QUADRANT.- QUADRANT STUD.- QUADRANT PAWL + SPRING. THOWER ARM + CARRIER.
RELEACE LEVER + SPRING.
[Underlined] INSIDE [/underlined] MAINSPRING – TENSIO ROD + WHEEL – FRONT + REAR BODY CAPS.
[Underlined] NOTE [/underlined] TO STRIP THE TRAP OR MAKE ANY AJUSTMENTS TO THE MAINSPRING IT IS NECESSARY TO PARTIALY COCK THE TRAP SO THAT THE REAR BODY CAP MAY BE REMOVED. RELAX THAT [inserted] SMALL [/inserted] TENSION BEFROE AJUSTING.
[Diagrams]
[Underlined] AFTER USE. [/underlined] 1) ENSURE TRAP IS UNCOCK
2) REMOVE THROWER ARM
3) WIPE TRAP WITH OILY RAG.
[Underlined] MAINTENANCE [/underlined]
[Underlined] BEFORE USING [/underlined] (1) INSPECT + TEST.
(2) REMOVE GREASE FROM HANDLES OF RELEASE ARM + THROWING ARM.
(3) OIL QUADRANT SHANK.
[Underlined] MONTHLY [/underlined]
1) INSPECT + TEST.
2) CLEAN WITH TYPE ‘A’ / RUST CAN BE REMOVED WITH SCRATCH CARD + EMMERY
3) LUBRICATE – GREESE.
4) TEST SECURITY ON FOUNDATION
[Page break]
(6 WEEK.)
[Underlined] 20 M/M HISPANO SUIZA GUN [/underlined] AP. 1641 (F).
20 M/M 0R .787” SHELL FIRING GUN (NOT A CANNON.) 650 R.P.M
WEIGHT 109lbs. – LENGTH 8”.2 1/2 – RIFLING 9 – R.H. GROOVES
M. VELOCITY. 2880 F.P.S – GAS ASSISTED WITH RECOIL.-
ONLY 2 FIXED PORTIONS FRONT MOUNTING UNIT + MAG. CARRIER
MK I GUN. WITH MK I BACK BLOCK. ROUND STUD; SQUARE GROVES [Diagram]
MK II GUN WITH RE ENFORCEMENTS, ON BODY; BACK BLOCK IS HELD ON IN AN INCLINE SLOT [Diagram] MK II BACK BLOCK HAS LONG FLAT CATCH + SLOT.
[Underlined] 20 M/M BARRLES [/underlined] 5PTS. AMMONIA .880 S.P.G (FOR REMOVING [underlined] COPPER [/underlined] FOULLINGS. 20 M/M ONLY
4 1/2 PTS DIST. WATER
MIX + ADD 1 1/4 lbs AMMONIA PURSULPHATE.
POUR INTO BARRLE FOR 3 HRS – DRY OUT – REGAUGE – REPEAT IF GAUGE WILL NOT PASS.
[Underlined] DIFFERANCE BETWEEN CANNON + MACHINE GUN. [/underlined]
M-GAS 20 M/M USES SHELLS – SHELL SMALLER THAN BORE, BEING DRIVEN BY [underlined] COPPER DRIIVING BAND. [/underlined] GIVING INGRAVING PROSESS AS .303 .300 .5
[Underlined] MACHINE [/underlined] GUN .303-.300-.5 BULLET SAME SIZE AS RIFLING; WHEN BULLET PASSES UP BARRLE INGRAVING PROSESS TAKES PLACE.
[Underlined} CANNON [/underlined] NO RIFLING, PROJECTILE ROUND + SMALLER THAN BARRLE.
[Page break]
[Underlined] HISPANO SUIZA [/underlined]
[Underlined] MAGS [/underlined] (3 TYPES) [Underlined] 20 M/M SHELL FIRING GUN. [/underlined] A.P 1641 (F).
(1) M.A.R.C.O (2) AUSTIN. (3) AUSTIN (WITH INPELLOR)
EACH MAG WILL HOLD 60 ROUNDS.
INPELLOR OR (BOOST) GIVES BOOST TO FIRST 40 ROUNDS.
TO LOAD MAG, OR TO PUT TENSION ON; WIND ANTI CLOCK WISE.
TO UNLOAD MAG, OR TO TAKE TENSION OFF; WIND CLOCK WISE.
TO [underlined] STORE [/underlined] MAGAZINES; PUT ON SIDE WITH MOUTH UP [Diagram]
[Underlined] TO STRIP [/underlined] TAKE TENSION OFF, SPRING (HOUSING) COVER [inserted] FRONT COVER [/inserted] (7 SCREWS)
REMOVE TENSIONING TUBE, CLOCK SPRING + HOUSING, GO TO THE REAR TAKE OF COLLAR HELD BY SCREW, NEXT COMES OUT FEED ARM AXIS TUBE, WITH FEED ARM, LINK + GUIDE.
[Underlined] INITIAL [/underlined} TENSION [underlined] 10-14 [underlined] lbs ON A [underlined} 12” [underlined} BAR. WITH 3/4 TURN WHEN LOADING TAKE SPRING CLIP OR PIN OUT OF INPELLOR SHAFT. THEN LOAD, WHEN FULL PUT 5-6 TURNS ON INPELLOR SPRING AND REPLACE PIN. (CLEAN MAG AFTER 6 FILLINGS (360 ROUNDS)
[Diagram] (A) [Underlined] BEFORE MAG IS LOADED [/underlined] CHECK INITIAL TENSION. CHECK MAG. 1 CHECK FOR DENTS. 2 EXAMINE TIE RODS. – ROLLERS.
‘B’ [Underlined] AFTER FIRING {/underlined] REMOVE + CHECK FOR DAMAGE REMOVE FOULING WITH TYPE ‘A’ 6TH FILLING WASH OUT 50/50 A.F. + PARPHINE ALLOW TO DRAIN.
IF STOPPAGES HAS ACORD PUT MAG ASIDE FOR INSPECTION
[Page break]
[Underlined] INSPECTIONS [/underlined] CONT.) 20 M/M [Underlined] HISPANO SUIZA SHELL FIRING M. GUN [/underlined]
‘C’ [Underlined] EACH MONTH WHEN MAG IS IN USE. [/underlined] REMOVE INITIAL TENSION, TO SRIP + CLEAN MAG (TYPE A OIL). INSPECT FOR DAMAGE. LUBRICATE MOVING PARTSWITH A.F OIL. ENSURE FEED ARM MOVES FREELY IN ITS BRACKET. EXAMINING HOLES IN SPRING FOR WEAR; + SPRING CATCH ON TUBE. PUT MAG TOGETHER + PUT ON INITIAL TENSION.
‘D’ EACH MONTH WHEN IN STORE. STRIP. CHECK FOR RUST - + REMOVE. OIL ALL MOVING PARTS WITH A.F OIL ASSEMBLE + TENSION.
INITIAL TENSION ON ALLWAYS. (IN USE + STORES)
NO [underlined] MAG [/underlined] MUST STAY LOADED FOR MORE THAN 48 HRS.
[Underlined] WORKING OF GUN [/underlined] (MECHANISM)
1. COCKING – FORWARD ACTOINS – A -D
(A) RELEASE OF THE SEAR
(B) FEEDING OF THE ROUND OR SHELL.
(C) LOCKING OF THE BREECH
(D) FIRING OF THE SHELL.
RECOIL. (A) RECOIL ASSEMBLY. –(B) FRONT MOUNTING UNIT.
BACKWARD ACTIONS A-D.
(A) UNLOCKING OF THE BREECH
(B) EXTRACTION + EJECTION
(C) RETURN + BUFFER SPRING.
(D) RE-ENGAGEMENT OF SEAR.
[Page break]
AP. 1641 (F).
[Underlined] 20 M/M HISPANO SUIZA SHELL FIRING M. GUN [/underlined]
[Underlined] MECHANISM [/underlined] (CONT) [Diagrams]
1 UNLOCKING PLATES
2 BREECH BLOCK
3 LOCKING PEICE
4 LOCKING SHOULDER
5 LOCKING RAMPS
6 STRIKER OR F PIN
1 LOCKING PEICE
2 SEAR
3 SEAR SLIDE
4 A FIBRE COUSHION
B PLATE
C STUDS
D SEAR STUD SPRING
5 SEAR SPRING + PLUNGER
6 RAMPS
7 F + SAFE PAWL
8 TRIGGER ROD + ROLLERS
9 SEAR CAM
10 BANJO CANNECTION + VALVE
[Underlined} SAFTY ARRANGEMENTS [/underlined]
1) LOCKING PEICE MUST DROP DOWN ONTO LOCKING SHOLDER . IF BREECH AS. IS NOT HOME ACTION WILL NOT HAPPEN
2) LOCKING PLATES CANNOT MOVE FORWARD ALONE [inserted] (FROM BREECH BLOCK) [/inserted] UNTILL LOCKING PEICE IS HOME ON [underlined] LOCKING SHOULDER [/underlined].
3) SURE ENGANGEMENT OF LOCK-PEICE WITH LOCK-SHOULDER IS MADE BY FLATS ON LOCKING PEICE + UN L. PLATES
4) FIRING PIN CANNOT GO FORWARD UNTILL [underlined] UNLOCK PLATES [/underlined] ARE RIGHT FORWARD.
IF GUN IS AT SAFE, IT CAN BE COCKED OWING TO THE CUT AWAY PORTION ON THE TRIGGER ROD. [Diagram]
[Page break]
[Underlined] AP. 1641. (F) [/underlined]
[Underlined] BELT FEED MECHANISM) 20 M/M HISPANO SUIZA SHELL FIRING MACHINE GUN [/underlined]
[Underlined] REQUIRED [/underlined] BEFORE BELT FEED MECHANISM CAN BE FITTED.
No 2 GAS PISTON GUIDE
MK II MOD. OR MK III MAGAZINE CARRIER
No 1 MK I MOD [underlined] RECOIL ASSEMBLIES [/underlined]
OR
No 2 MK II [underlined] RECOIL ASSEMBLIES [/underlined]
RACK OPERATING LEVER ([underlined] SHOULD BE PACKED WITH B.F.M) [inserted] FROM M/U [/inserted]
[Underlined] STRIPPING B.F.M. [/underlined]
1) ENSURE B.F.M. IS UNLOADED + NO TENSION ON SPRING.
2) REMOVE SPLIT PIN – PLUG – SPRING – PAWL
3) REMOVE RACK RETAINNING SCREW – RACK – SPRING – GUIDE.
4) REMOVE MOUTH SCREWS + TIE RODS
5) PLACE B.F.M ON REAR COVER + REMOVE FRONT COVER + MOUTH.
[Underlined]6) RELEASE 2 SPRINGS + REMOVE BODY ASSEMBLING [/underlined] (AFTER FINISHED – ALL TESTS)
1) PLACE SHAFT ON + SECURE (FEED LEVER FLATS ON CONTACT)
2) REPLACE REAR COVER. (WITH FEED LEVER ON TOP OF STOP.)
3) SET ON REAR COVER, REPLACE MOUTH, + SECURE LINK EJECTOR BRACKET ON SIDE OF MOUTH NEAREST BELT GUIDE.
4) REPLACE FRONT COVER – MOUTH SCREWS + TIERODS
5) REPLACE RACK – SPRING + GUIDE (3RD TOOTH JUST SHOWING.) [Diagram]
6) REPLACE PAWL – SPRING – PLUG + SPLIT PIN.
[Page break]
(CONT)
[Underlined] B.F.M MK I) 20 M/M HISPANO SUIZA SHELL FIRING MACHINE GUN. 1641.(F.) [/underlined]
[Underlined] MECHAICAL TEST [/underlined] B.F.M. MK I –(MK I MOD) EVERY TIME B.F.M IS USED.
1) TEST FREEDOM OF SHAFT; SHOULD HAVE FREE ROTATION IN DIRECTION OF FEED (NO COUNTER ROTATION)
2) DEPRESS RACK SEVERAL TIMES, FOR EACH DEPRESSION SPROCKETS SHOULD ROTATE ONE (1) TOOTH ONLY (NO COUNTER ROTATION)
[Underlined] FUNCTION TEST [/underlined]
MAKE UP BELT OF 16 DUMMY ROUNDS. ((USING 18; CHECK + GAUGE EACH ONE.
PICK UP BELT + SEE THAT EACH LINK + ROUND ROTATES – THEN TWIST AT 90%; TAKE 2 END ROUND, USING [underlined] CLOSED [/underlined] LINK AT END. FEED DOUBLE LINK IN, SMOOTH SIDE UP – (LINKS ON TOP))).
PUSH BELT IN B.F.M + FULLY TENSION, DRIVE OUT ROUNDS WITH WOOD, AT LEAST 10 ROUNDS SHOULD BE EJECTED BEFORE FURTHER TENSIONING
[Underlined] WEIGHTS. (B.F.M.) [/underlined]
WEIGHT OF DRIVING SPRING – NOT LESS THAN 14lbs @ 20 INCHES BAR.
SLIPPING LOAD OF SPRING BAND BRAKE - SHOULD SUPPORT 25lbs @ 20 BAR.
[Underlined] AJUST MAG. + CARRIER [/underlined] TO 10-16 THOU [inserted] .010 - .016 [/inserted] – FEELER GUAGE BETWEEN RACK OPERATING LEVER + RACK ROLLER.
[Page break]
[Underlined] 20 M/M B.F.M. [/underlined]
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MK I + MK II MOD – MK I MOD. 4 SPROCKETS. CHROME PLATED BULLET GUIDE.
(A) [Underlined] BEFORE LOADING. [/underlined] CHECK ALL PARTS FOR SECURITY.
MOUTH SHOULD BE CLEAN + FREE FROM BURRS.
CHECK B.F.M. FOR BURRS + DENTS
CHECK LINK SHOOT – RAMP + SPRING FOR DAMAGE
MECHANICAL TEST.
(B) [Underlined] BETWEEN FLIGHTS IF FIRED [/underlined]
UNLOAD + REMOVE, EXAMINE FOR DAMAGE.
WASH OUT WITH TYPE ‘A’ OIL
(‘C’) [Underlined] DAILY IF FIRED [/underlined] SAME AS GROUP ‘B’.
(D) [Underlined] MOUNTHLY [/underlined] SAME AS ‘B’ + CHECK FOR RUST.
(‘F’) [Underlined] AFTER FIRING 500 ROUNDS. [/underlined] STRIP + CLEAN WITH TYPE ‘A’
DRY + OIL ALL PARTS (A.F. OIL) EXAMINE ALL PARTS FOR DAMAGE. ASSEMBLE + APPLY ALL TESTS. – MECHANICAL - FUNCTION – WEIGH SPRINGS – GAUGE RACK OPERATING LEVER. [Underlined] 10-16 THOU [/underlined]
[Page break]
[Underlined] 20 M/M HISPANO SUIZA S.F.M.G. [/underlined] A.P. 1641. (F)
[Underlined] FRONT MOUNTING + ASSEMBLYS. [/underlined]
[Underlined] No 1 MK I [/underlined] FRONT MOUNTING ASSEMBLY: MAG. F.G. (2 [underlined] COIL REDUCERS [/underlined])
SHORT TUBE – No 1 – SPRING – LONG SLEEVE – RECOIL REDUCER 1 NEEDED TO WORK DFM)
[Underlined] No 1 MK I MOD [/underlined] FRONT M.A. [Underlined] BELT FEED GUNS. [/underlined]
SHORT TUBE – MK I SPRING – LONG SLEEVE – MUZZLE THREED (NO R. REDUCER
[Underlined] No 2 MK I [/underlined] F.M.A. ([underlined MAG [/underlined] FEED GUN) ([underlined] BEAUFIGHTER [/underlined])
LONG TUBE – LONG [Diagram] DISTANCE COLLAR – MK II SPRING. SHORT SLEEVE + MUZZLE THEED -PRO.
[Underlined] No 2 MK II F.A. MOUNTING. BELT FEED GUN.
LONG TUBE – [Diagram] [underlined] SHORT [/underlined] DISTANCE COLLAR – MK II SPRING – SHORT SLEEVE MUZ THEED PROTECTOR.
SHORTER DISTANCE COLLAR, RELAXING TENSION ON RECOIL SPRING, ALLOWING FOR EXTRA UNIT OF RECOIL ON RACK OPERATING LEVER.
DIFFERENCE 6 3/4” – 8” IN LONG + SHORT DISTANCE COLLARS.
[Page break]
[Underlined] 20 M/M HISPANO SUIZA S.F.M. GUN [/underlined] A.P. 1641 (F)
[Underlined] FIRST SEE BARRLE IS CLEAN. MAINTENANCE [/underlined]
[Underlined] BARRLE PLUG GAUGE [/underlined] ACCEPTANCE 20.01 M/M
[Underlined] BARRLE PLUG GAUGE [/underlined] REJECT 20.12 M/M
[Underlined] FIRING PIN PROTUSION [/underlined]
(BEFORE GAUGING REMOVE EXTRACTOR)
MK I – 1.52 M/M
MK II LOW (ROCKS) – 1.712 M/M
MK I + MK II HIGH (PASSES OVER) 2.018 M/M.
[Underlined] STRIKER DIAMETER [/underlined] [Diagram] FOR DEPTH OF 4 M/M 3.355
[Underlined] STRIKER RADIUS [/underlined] FOR DEPTH OF 4 M/M 1.675
[Underlined] LENGTH OF UNLOCKING PLATE RODS [/underlined] 98.45 M/M (MINIMUM) 1 CAN BE 98.45 THE OTHER 98.50 (.005) NO MORE.
[Underlined] VARIATION OF CLEARANCE [/underlined] PERMISSABLE BETWEEN U.P.R + TAPPETS .005 THOU.
[Underlined] CLEARANCE [/underlined] BETWEEN U.P. RODS + TAPPETS .050 THOU .005 - .050 (ONLY .005 IN 2 RODS)
[Underlined] GAS PLUG SCREW, [/underlined] (2 SMALL HOLES) TEST WITH No 51 [inserted] [underlined] SHANK OF METAL DRILL [/underlined] [/inserted] DRILL SHOULD PASS. (No 50 SHOULD NOT PASS.
[Underlined] EXTRACTOR SPRING [/underlined] WEIGHT 10 – 15lbs.
[Underlined] CART HEAD SPACE [/underlined] USE CHEESE HEADED DRIFT BETWEEN BARRLE FACE + B BLOCK
PUSH BACK B. BLOCK, TAPPING ON LOCKING PEICE TO ENSURE IT IS ENGAGEDWITH LOCKING SHOULDER, TRY TO ENTER FEELLER GAUGE BETWEEN BARRLE FACE + B. BLOCK FROM UNDER SIDE. MAX. .012” THOU.
[Page break]
[Underlined] 20 M/M HISPANO SUIZA S.F.M.G. [/underlined] (A.P. 1641)
[Underlined] INSPECTIONS [/underlined] ON GUN.
[Underlined] GROUP. A [/underlined] BEFORE FIRING (ENSURE GUN IS UNLOADED.
1). COCK + DRY OUT BARRLE (6 PEICES OF 4” X 2”) OR 5-7 PEICES.)
2) CHECK SECURY OF GUN + CHECK FUNCTIONING. (BY FIRING MECHANISM.)
3) LOAD, + SET TO FIRE JUST BEFORE TAKE OFF.
(B) BETWEEN FLIGHTS.
1) ENSURE GUN IS UNLOADING.
2) OBTAIN FIRING REPORT.
3) CLEAN BARRLE + GAS AFFECTED PARTS WITH TYPE ‘A’ OIL
‘C’ END OF DAY AFTER FIRING:
SAME AS GROUP (B)
‘D’ END OF DAY GUNS NOT FIRED.
ENSURE GUN ULOADED – SET TO SAFE – COCK – CLEAN 10” -12” BY 4”
CHECK FOR RUST. – CLEAN OUT WITH TYPE ‘A’. – DRY + OIL BARRLE WITH A.F.
MOVING PARTS
‘E’ AT MAJOR INSP. GUNS NOT FIRED.
REMOVE GUNS TO ARM. STRIP. – CLEAN ALL PARTS. TYPE A -AF.
[Inserted] DRY [/inserted] [underlined] CLEAN [/underlined] MOVING – OIL WITH A.F.
[Page break]
[Underlined] INSPECTION. [/underlined] (CONT.) [Underlined] 20 M/M HISPANO SUIZA SHELL FIRING M. GUN. [/underlined] (AP. 1641.)
‘F’ [Underlined] MAJOR INSP. WHEN GUNS HAVE BEEN FIRED. [/underlined]
1) REMOVE GUNS TO ARM. – STRIP. – CLEAN ALL PARTS (TYPE A) – EXAMINE FOR BURRS ECT RUST. WEAR.
[Underlined] NOTE [/underlined] GREAT CARE TO PARTS SUBJECT TO WEAR.
USE ALL GAUGES.
[Underlined] AJUSTING RECOIL FREE RECOIL 30 M/M. [/underlined]
FREE RECOIL [underlined] NO MAG. [/underlined] (ROUND IN BREECH.) 30 M/M [underlined] FOR MAGAZINE ONLY [/underlined]
{WITH BELT FEED MECHANISM [inserted] (FULL) [/inserted] RECOIL 21 -23 M/M
{WITH BELT FEED MECHANISM WITH ONLY 2 ROUNDS IN= (NO TENSION ON SPRING) UP TO 28 M/M
[In Margin] B.F.M. [/in margin]
[Underlined] TO DECREASE RECOIL [/underlined] INCREASE TENSION OF R. SPRING BY INSERTING TYPE A WASHER(S) BETWEEN RECOIL SPRING + BARRLE SLEVE.
[Underlined] TO INCREASE RECOIL [/underlined] TAKE OF TENSION OF SPRING BY INSERTING TYPE B WASHER(S) BETWEEN TUBE + BARRLE SLEVE.
BOTH TYPES OF WASHERS ‘A’ + B ARE MADE IN 3 SIZES.
2.5M/M (THIN) 5.00M/M (MED.) 7.5 M/M (THICK.)
[Underlined] ALL RECOIL – DECREASE OR INCREASE [/underlined] IS FOR BELT FEED MECHANISM.
TO MESURE RECOIL DISTANCE PLACE ROLL OF CLAY OR PLASTESN BETWEEN GAS PISTON GUIDE + FRONT OF MAG. CARRIER - PUT OIL ON SURFACE SO IT WILL SLIDE
PUSH MAG – CARRIER THEN MESURE DISTANCE BETWEEN PLASTIRESN + MAG CARRIER FACE.
[Page break]
[Underlined] 20 M/M HISPANO SUIZA S.F.M.G. [/underlined] A.P. 1641.
[Underlined] FRONT MOUNING ASSEMBLYS. (F.M.A) [/underlined]
[Diagrams]
TO CHECK MAG. CARRIER AND GUN – (ALINE UP DATUM LINES) LOOSING MAG CARRIER STAY + F.M.A. – ALINE UP LINE + DO UP STAY + F.M.A. WATCH HARMONIZATION. OF GUN.
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
Albert Cluett's weapons notebook
Description
An account of the resource
Covers all types of fire arms and machine guns including Lee Enfield rifle, Colt automatic pistols, revolvers and flare guns, machine guns including Lewis, Vickers and Browning .303 and 0,5 inch as well as a variety of shot guns. Covers stripping and maintenance of weapons.
Creator
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Albert Victor Cluett
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1942-12
Format
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One notebook
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Text. Training material
Identifier
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MCluettAV120946-150515-12
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Temporal Coverage
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1942-12
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
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Anne-Marie Watson
ground personnel
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/84/9861/MCluettAV120946-150515-16.1.pdf
0886ef02288c79c8e6e2c55f0fb90b64
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
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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
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
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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
Transcribed document
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[underlined]1209045 AC2. CLUETT A.V.[/underlined] (Book 2)
27 COURSE 7 SQUAD
[underlined] HUT. 2.36 [/underlined]
[page break]
3RD. 3.41.P.M. [underlined] Pyrotechnigs [sic][/underlined]
[underlined] Signal Carbon Cartridge[/underlined]
TYPES SINGLE STAR. 3 RED. YELLOW GREEN
CHANGE ¨ 2 YELLOW-RED. YELLOW-GREEN
DOUBLE ¨ 6 RED YELLOW. GREEN.
RR. GG YY GY GR.YR
SMOKE PUFFS WHITE + BROWN
ILLUMINATING
[underlined] Action[/underlined] When the precussion [sic] cap is struck the flare ignites the powder charge ∴
[underlined] 120lb Smoke Bomb [/underlined] (2 in S.B.C.) 864 Fuze.
[illustration of a smoke bomb]
[underlined] 864 [/underlined] FUZE [/underlined] LIKE SMALL 38 FUZE FOR 30lb Mk1 INCD
[underlined] FUZING. [/underlined] 9x1oz. 1 DRAM GUN POWDER CHARGES IN POCKET
SCREW IN FUZE. – 20 MINS BURNING. SCREEN 250 YDS.
T.V. 900 FT.P.SEC. NOT DROP ON WATER BELOW 1000ft
IF HARD TARGET BELOW 300ft. ON IMPACK [sic] BOMB BLOWS BACK UP FROM 20FT TO 500FT (WITH CHARGE)
[underlined] MARINE MARKER MK II [/underlined] 19lbs (BOTTOM RED TOP YELLOW)
SMOKE & FLAME FOR 2HRS. (FOR MARKING SEA TARGET) ON L.S. CARRIER USE No. 17 SUP. BAND. [underlined] FILLED [/underlined] WITH CALCIUM PHOSPHIDE – MAGNESIUM ALUMINIUM PHOSPHIDE – POTASSIUM BISULPHATE – + SODIUM NITRITE.
[page break]
[underlined] 100lb SMOKE BOMB[/underlined]
854 Mk I FUZE [underlined]GROUP XI[/underlined]
100lb SMOKE BOMB SAME SHAPE & SIZE AS 65 L.C. BOMB.
COLOUR GREEN (TIN.) SMOKE WHITE
[cross section of a fuse]
[two parallel ruled lines drawn across page]
SMOKE GENERATORS.
Nº 5 MKS 1 & II ROUND TIN – MATCH IGNITER. A TO GROUND – G. TO AIR. [underlined] (GROUP XI)[/underlined] 6-8 MINS WHITE
Nº 6 MK II. (WITH FLAME TRAP.) AIR TO GROUND (ORANGE SMOKE) OVER 200FT. 2½ MINS.
Nº. 11 (WITH CAMERA OBSCURA) 3 ONLY ON L.S. CARRIER (JET. BEFORE LANDING) (ELECT.) 55SECS. ORANGE
Nº 15. (MOTOR BOATS) (ELECT) CAP & SCREW BOTTOM 8 MINS WHITE.
Nº 18 (LARGE ROUND TIN) MOCK WARFARE (PUT ON GAS MASK) 4-6 MINS. WHITE.
[page break]
Smoke Generators AP 1661 (E)
Nº s. 5 Mk. I. Nº 6 MKS I II III. Nº 11 MKS I II. Nº. 15.MKS I.
1. Remove lid. 2. Tear of [sic] match. Compo protecter [sic] and strick [sic] a match across the igniting compo. burns approx. 8 MINS. Precautions generators give of [sic] great heat when burning, so must not be use [sic] in or from A/C
No. 6. Mks. I II III its primary object is to indicate wind speed and direction or in cases of forced landing on drome. smoke [sic] emitted for about 2½ MINS. is visible [deleted] indecipherable word [/deleted] to 4,000FT. [underlined] Preparation [/underlined] before placing in A/C. The igniter cap should be removed and igniter fitted, the safety pin is removed only just before dropping overboard. [underlined] Action [underlined] on impact the striker pellet [sic] after breaking shearing wire strikes the cap of the cartridge base and fires it. The flash produced ignites priming match which in turn ignites the igniter and smoke compo. The Zinc disc is pushed up and the smoke [deleted] indecipherable letter [/deleted] is emitted. [underlined] Precautions [/underlined] it will not function on soft ground if dropped below 200FT. remove [sic] safety pin [deleted] before use, and drop overboard at once. Generators may be left in A/C if igniter is removed. Safety pins must be tested for ease of withdrawl [sic]. Mk II may be stored in A/C
No. 11 MKS I II used as an aid to show position of A/C on practice bombing.
[underlined] Method of use [/underlined] The generator is a cylindrical turned plate container, or cannister [sic] approx 9¨ long. 5¨ diameter, with a lid, it contains a Red smoke compo, the means of ignition is electrical (igniter).
[page break]
[underlined] Method of use [/underlined] it is carried on a EM./LS carrier which has been modified by putting a [sic] additional junction box, and rearrangement of the carriers [sic] wiring. The carrier [deleted] the [/deleted] takes 3 generators, the first 3 selector switches are used, the 4 [sic] is used for [underline] Jettisoning[/underlined]. [underlined] NOTE [/underlined] A great heat is generated when functioning so A/C must not land with these on, so before landing jettison all generators, (on waste land or sea) fired containers remain hot of [sic] 6 hours. Mk. II is similar in design and method but smoke compo is cheaper and burns for 55 Secs. compared with the 30 secs of the Mk. I.
No. 15. Mk. I. This generator is intended to be used on motor-boats for signaling [sic] to A/C, and can be used in place of the No 5, Whenever [sic] electrical ignition is required.
[underlined] Description [/underlined] it consisted of a turned plate canister containing smoke compo, ignited by an electrical igniter, [sic] a lid is provided to protect terminals in transit, it produces White smoke for 8 mins.
[underlined] A/C Reconnaissance flare [/underlined]
4.5¨ 5.5¨ MKS I II + MK I. The 4.5 is used for land reco. the 5.5 for sea.
MK.I 4.5 burns for 3¼ mins
Mk. II 4.5 [underlined] Mk.V [/underlined] ¨ ¨ 3 to 4 mins. 750,000 C.P.
Mk. I 5.5 ¨ ¨ 3¼ to 4¼ mins.
11ft. chute on 4.5 Reco flare, consists of container, No 28 Fuze, [deleted] ijector [/deleted] ijector [sic] charge, candle compo, 3 wood distance pieces, suspension rope dome [?] Can be fitted to L/S of Un.[inserted] 1 & 2, [/inserted] always use long end [?] adaptor.
[page break]
Mk VI 4 MINS DELAY
Mk V. 2 MIN. DELAY.
Fuze. No 35 for 4.5 Reco. Flare MKI. MKIV. 42 or 848 FUZE (860 FUZE).
[underlined] Fuzing test[/underlined] examine seal, then remove fuze, see safety pin is in and fuze set to safe, examine threads and screw locking ring tight to fuze body. Remove nose plug from flare, place leather washer on fuze threads, put thin coat of lutin [?] on, then place threads through hole in lanyard adaptor and screw into flare, ensuring all are in line with lug, holding with key No 123 tighten locking ring with No 89. Put lanyard through front hole of adaptor, through firing plug and up through rear hole, load onto carrier and fix cord to carrier or quick-release pin on Nº 1 ‘A’ attachment. (Fuze delay 3½ secs to 17 secs) set delay to time required then put closing plug into safety pin hole, (give the safety pin to bomb-aimer) now A/C is ready for flight.
[underlined] Action of Fuze:- [/underlined] on leaving the A/C the lanyard pulls the firing plug and two bearings [?] this compress the spring also pulling back the striker so far that the bearings fly free thus allowing the spring to push the striker onto the detonator. The flash from the detonator passes up the channell [sic] to lower time [?] ring, also blowing out gas escape hole disc, the lower ring burns round in a clockwise direction untill [sic] reaching the pellet which ignites the upper ring, [deleted] smudged word [/deleted] burning in an anti-clockwise direction, passing the flash across to the powder pellets in the spigot where it passes through the offset channel thus initiating the magazine, the flash from this passes through fuze bush and ignites the ejection charge which pushes [?] off closing dome, the candle and parachute at the same time igniting the candle. The fuze and case falls to earth.
[page break]
[underlined]Fuze Nº 28 nose of 5.5¨ Flare (Reco).[/underlined]
[underlined]Action[/underlined] on leaving the A/C the firing rod is withdrawn allowing the spring loaded detonator to strike against the striker. The flash from the detonator ignites the powder pellet which blows out the gas escape disc and igniting the upper timing ring which burns in an anti-clockwise direction, then igniting the powder pellet which blows out lower gas-disc and ignites the ring which burns clockwise direction, then igniting the magazine channel, while this taking [sic] place the two vanes have rotated drawing the valve of[sic] its seating so the flash can pass to the magazine (pellet igniting the magazine).
[page break]
[underlined]Smoke Curtain Apparatus Mk. III [/underlined]
S2.D Mixture. Nº 2 and Nº 3 Electric Detonators. Nº 2. RED & WHITE. Nº 3 [deleted] indecipherable word [/deleted] WHITE
[underlined] Preparation for use:-[/underlined] Remove transit covers, place No 2 detonator under clip on bakelite disc in the inlet valve, attach baffle case inlet cord [?], and secure red and white lead of C. Det. to terminals at rear of cord [?]. Secure No 3 C. Det. To bakelite disc with 3 strands of tape at emission tube neck, then attach emission tube, attach the two white leads from Nº 3Det to the leads from junction box. [underlined] Testing be-fore[sic] installation[/underlined] remove junction box cover and all fuzes except one, attach A/C supply leads to tester fuze and move handle, needle should flicker the circuit is not broken. Before fitting in fuzes they should be tested with tester fuze and [underlined] 30 ft [/underlined] of cable. Position of crutches and shoes[?], front inner position rear ‘B’ Type crutch in ‘A’ position. [underlined] To test on A/C [/underlined] put down selector switch and insert one fuze at a time, the Jettison lamp should light. [underlined] Action [/underlined] on pressing firing switch the current passes through junction box, then to each Det, which fires and breaks bakelite disc allowing mixture (S.2.0) [?] to be emitted and air to flow in. 250lb Mk III is similar except the inlet cawl [?] is at end of container also a tail fairing and a small emistion [sic] tube, nr saddle plate, crutches front ‘outer’ rear[?]. ‘B’ Type. A Position, 250lb [?] always carried externally.
When handling S.C. Apparatus always use No 5 protective clothing, also when cleaning out with warm water. Before storing coat threads with mineral jelly.
[page break]
[underlined]Apparatus A.L No 1.) [/underlined] (ANTI LANDING)
[underlined] Stores required [/underlined] operating pole 10’, steel disc, pin spanner & screwdriver (combined), arming tool (can be used as spanner). [underlined] At the station [/underlined] draw[?] for priming 4¾ oz. Gelignite Plastic, Detonator Commercial No 8.12 bore cartridge head, rectifier, and I.R washers:- Consists of Naval Mine B type. ‘C’ for [deleted] obstruction of Satellite and relief landing grounds. The frame work and operating pole 10´ fitted to mine, and when pole is deflected beyond 15º the mine operates, it will stand a 62m.p.h. wind. Frame-work consists of a cage, safety strap & hatch, preventer plates, spigot and operating plate. The mine consists of 20lb Amatol. [underlined] Assemibly [sic] at Depto [?][/underlined] ensure that spring functions between 90 and 100lbs load, lash safety rod in IN position with cord, fix steel disc with special adhesive, and fitting operating frame. 1/16¨ Clearance between operating plate and steel disc. Before dispatching mine for service ensure that (1) preventer plates are closed. (2) the safety pod in and safety strap closed and hook in place, (3) remove cord. (4) Put empty primer unit back in place.
[underlined] Priming Instructions. [/underlined] ensure that preventer plates are closed and safety rod in with safety strap shut and latched. Place mine on its side unscrew bung-nut and remove primer canister; remove inner-nut and insert 4¾ oz. Plastic Gelignite with wrapping, replace inner-nut, outter [sic] bung-nut; at the other end remove retaining ring and copper disc, then reamer [?] hole in gelignite for No 8 commercial detonator. Place det.
[page break]
and 12 bore cartridge cap on head, next I.R. washer, copper disc and finally screw in retaining ring; reinsert primer canister into primer guide tube and screw- up bung-nut.
[underlined] Handling Instructions for transport. [/underlined] ensure preventer plates and safety rod are in correct positions, carry by handles provided, poles [?] to be transported seperatley [sic]: [underlined] Laying out [/underlined] place mine on spot needed, open legs to fullest extent, insert pole and secure with pin and wire, open safety strap, pull safety rod to OUT position, open preventer plates.
[underlined] Collecting [/underlined] Close preventer plates, push in safety rod to IN position secure with safety strap and latch, take of[sic] wire and pin, remove pole 10ft., close legs and carry away by handles provided.
Nº 1 Mk II (Nº 41 PISTOL) KEY 172
20lb AMATOL (BIULT[sic] IN EXPLODER C.E.) OPERATES IN WIND OVER 62 mph – POLE MUST MOVE MORE THAN 15% BEFORE WORKING – 90-100 WORKING SPRING.
Nº 41 PISTOL WITH Nº 43 DET (KEY 172)
[cross section Nº41 A.L. MINE PISTOL]
[page break]
12/3./41.
[underlined] Inspection Forms[/underlined]
[underlined]Form 87.[/underlined] Flame floats & similar stores, inspect annually except when the stores are deteriorated and have been examined by O.C.’s.
[underlined] Form 87[sic] [/underlined] Empty bombs, bomb pistols and Det holders inspected every 3 years
[underlined]Form 1009[/underlined] Bomb components, fuzes, primers & Miscellaneous explosives except gunpowder (in triplicate ).
[underlined]Form 1010[/underlined] Pyrotichnics[sic] except signal cartridges.
[underlined]Form 1011[/underlined] [deleted] [A.S.S] [/deleted] S.A.A & signal cartridges (not incendiaries S.A.A.)
[underlined]Filled Bombs[/underlined] Filled Bombs.
[underlined]Form 1022[/underlined] Reports on failures & defects.
[underlined]Form 1023[/underlined] Returns on failures & defects as one [underlined]Form 1022[/underlined] previously reported and on repetitions.
[underlined]Form 1028[/underlined] Gunpowder & Guncotton (not cordite)
[underlined]Maintenance forms & Records[/underlined]
[underlined]Form 700[/underlined] Aeroplane maintenance form
Record of firing signal mortar. Memorandum & examination chart.
[underlined]Form 1610[/underlined] Report for examination of S. Mortar.
[page break]
[underlined] Explosive Regulations [/underlined] AP 2608.A.
The terms ‘Explosive’ or ‘Explosive Stores’ used in these regulations covers all substances, fuzes & components.
[underlined] Danger Area [/underlined] an enclosure with danger buildings.[sic]
[underlined]Explosive store house[/underlined] (condition rules) a building not under Magazine conditions or regulations. Groups 5 to 13 must be stores. [stored]3 & 4 can be, 1 & 2 must not be.
[underlined] Magazine [/underlined] a hanger[sic] divided into 2 parts, dirty & clean; clean, where stores are kept dirty, shifting lobby[?], 1 & 2 must be stored here, 3 & 4 should be.
[underlined] Fuzing and spare bomb area [/underlined] [deleted] [light [/deleted] buildings [deleted] used for temporary storage of fuzed bombs, plugged bombs can be stored, but bombs must not be fuzed or defuzed here.
[underlined]Fuzing shed[/underlined] (not site) hut or tent used for opening packets of explosives, stores got ready for action, or repacking.
[underlined]Ammunition[/underlined] an enclosed explosive substance designed [sic] to produce explosive effect for warlike purposes either by itself or components.
1 – 2 GROUPS. MAG. CONDITIONS
3 – 4 ¨ ¨ ¨ IF POSSIBLE.
5 – 15 ¨ EXPLOSIVE STOREHOUSES
[page break]
[underlined] Classification and Group of Explosive[sic][/underlined]
[underlined] Reason. [/underlined] Explosive[sic] are graded according to the relative degree of danger they present.
[inserted] considerations [/inserted]
1.[underlined] Difference [/underlined] in nature and sensitiveness, to respond to shock or friction.
2.[underlined] Difference[/underlined] in stability and liability to deterioration
3. [underlined] Convenience[/underlined] in [deleted] [storage [/deleted] storing, packing and issuing, especially under active service conditions.
4. [underlined] Additional precautions[/underlined] required by some explosives, e.g. White Phosphorous and Gas.
[page divided into two columns]
Group I Group III
1 [deleted] [Gunpoder [/deleted] Gunpowder ✓ [deleted] 1. Smokeless powder [/deleted]
2 Exploders (filled.) ✓ 2. CORIDITE [sic] IN BULK
3 Fuzes. Instantaneous. ✓ Group VI
4 Gunpowder Puffs ✓ 1. Wet Guncotton. AMATOL
5 Primers (torppedo[sic] Filled C.E. ✓ N.A Group 5 ------- SHELLS
6. Charges Propellant. ✓ Group VI
[deleted] GROUP II 1. All types of S.A.A. except Incendiary Smokeless Gunpowder 1. Guncotton 2 (Exploders. H.E. C.E. TROTYL. (IN EMY.)
2. Guncotton (Dry) 2. Puffs cordite [?] 3. Fuzes. safe and electric.
3. Coridite [sic] Puffs 3. Primer [?] [/deleted] 4. Fuzes. Bombs and [?] flares
DRY GUN COTTON – GELLIGNITE [sic] 5. Friction tubes. (if on its own)
Group III
[deleted] 1. Smokeless powder [/deleted]
2. CORIDITE [sic] IN BULK
[page break]
Group VII
1. All H.E.s (FILLED)
2. Anti landing Mines
Group VIII
1. Hand Grenades.
2 MORTOR [sic] AMMO.
Group IX
1. Bombs. (Practice). Flash.
2 Signal cartridges
3. Flares. ([underlined]Landing[/underlined]. Reco. Ground.)
4. Port fire
5 Projectiles. (Signal mortor [sic]) if packed together.
6. Rockets (Distress Marine)
7 ALUM. SEA MARKES [sic]
Group. X
1. All kind of Detonators.
Group XI
1. Smoke Floats & Generators
2 Incendiaries 4lb & 25lbs. T.I. MARKERS NOT CONTAINING PHOSPHROUS [SIC]
Group. XII
1. S.A.A - Incendiary & PHOSPHROS.[sic]
FLAME FLOATS. MARKERS MARINE.
Group. XIII
1. Gas, Genorators [sic] [indecipherable word]
NOTE. 11½ Practice Smoke, on its own.
stored in well ventilated building.
Group XIV
1. H.M.S SHELLS (SHIPS ONLY)
Group XV
1. INFLAMABLE MIXTURES, (25 INCEN). [?]
NOT PHOSPHROS [sic]
[underlined] MIXING GROUPS [/underlined]
1-2-4-MAG CONDITIONS
5-6-10&11 CAN BE STORED TOGETHER
7-8 " " " "
9-11 " " " "
[page break]
[page divided into three sections]
[underlined]Forms[/underlined] [underlined] where found[/underlined]
1003. Authorisation In all danger buildings
1004. Laboratories
1005. General of danger area + buildings[deleted] At each entrance of D. Area or buildings
1006. Grouping, Classification of Explosives in every Danger building
1007 Rules of (in & out) clearance Magazine inside every shifting lobby[?]
1008 Articles use [?] inside every danger building
[line across page]
[rough drawing of wet and dry thermometer]
[page break]
[underlined] Wet & dry Bulbs [/underlined]
Found protected from sun, wind and rain, in case of Danger Area, not in buildings; used to indicate moisture contents [sic] of Area; wet reading must not be highter [sic] when dry. The form is of 3 readings WET/DRY/RESULT/. Precautions ÷ ensure that it's protected, water pure, muslin bag not split and wick in order. Take temperature twice daily with 'A' Buildings; 'A' all four walls exposed [?] to open air [deleted] 'B' [/deleted] but [indecipherable word], position of thermometer 'A' building on any wall. 'B' Type building more [?] or 1 walls [underlined] not [/underlined] exposed to open air: or if building is artificially heated, (used for storing Cordite in bulk or likly [sic] to exceed 100OF) a maximum and minimum thermometer must be used, minimum reading at bottom of needle, maximum same, present at time Mercury top.
A TYPE BUILDING ALL WALLS EXPOSED TO AIR.
B. TYPE " [underlined] NOT [/underlined] ALL WALLS EXPOSED TO AIR.
USE MAX & MIN THERMOMETER WHEN BUILDING (A OR B) IS ARTIFICIALLY HEATED - CORDITE STORED IN BULK OR - TEMP LIKELY TO EXCEED 100 O/F.
READING TAKEN TWICE DAILY - & RECOEDED ON A.F.G [?] 944
[underlined] ATYPE [/underlined] { IF BELOW 40O F.
40O F { IF ABOVE - PROVIDING THERE IS AT LEAST 3O F DIFFERENCE ON WET/DRY BULB READING
[page break]
[underlined] Rules for Ventilation:- [/underlined] Danger buildings are not to be opened for ventilation when raining, snowing or hail is falling, owing to rapid drop in temperature.
[underlined] Class. 'A' [/underlined] buildings may be opened when external temperature is above or below 40o/F providing there is a difference of 3o/F between wet & dry bulbs.
[underlined]Class. 'B' [/underlined] may be opened for ventilation when internal temperature is equal to, or higher than the external, reading on A.F.G. 956 Hydrometric Tables; if the temperature of the outer air is less than 32o/F or higher than 100o/F; provided that
(1) Internal temperature is higher than reading of wet & dry bulbs.
(2) Difference between wet & dry bulbs more than 10o/F.
[page break]
[underlined] Rules Applying to Explosive Storehouses or Danger Area [/underlined]
1.) Before entering D. area all prohibited articles, (matches, frictional objects ect [sic]) must be handed over.
2.) Prohibited articles ect [sic], to be placed in [underline] Red [/underline] box provided for same.
3.) Form. 1005 to be displayed at enterance [sic] of D. area and outside every D. building.
4.) Authorised tools will only be used in D. buildings, being of copper not frictional.
5.) Form 1008 will be displayed in every D. building.
6.) Oily rags ect, [sic] taken into building for use must be removed as soon as job is completed.
7.) Windows will only be opened for ventilation purposes.
8.) During thunderstorms, electric lights to be switched off, doors locked, and building vacated.
9.) Lightning conductors must be inspected twice yearly.
10.) Packages to be examined before taken in building, ones with broken lables [sic] thoroughly examined.
11.) Packages must not be opened in D. building, bombs more [?] be unpacked, painted and [deleted] repainted [/deleted] repackaged inside.
12.) Empty boxes must not be stored where explosives are stored.
13.) All buildings must be kept very clean.
[page break]
[this page does not seem to follow on from previous topic]
[underlined] Demolition (Continued) [/underlined]
[underlined] Safety Distances, [/underlined] Provided the bomb is in a hole twice as deep as bomb length; the length of cable to be use [sic] are
20lb. H.E. or lesser weight 200 yds.
over 20lb. H.E. 600 yds.
if the bomb cannot be buried the length of cables are as follows
20lb. F. bomb. HE. 300 yds.
40lb. G.P. " " 600 yds.
250 G.P. " " 800. yds
500 G.P. " " 1,000. yds
250 A. S " " 1,000. yds
500 A.S. " " 1,200. yds.
For other distances look up A.Ps. 1245 Chapter 3. Section 19. Par.3 sub. paragraph 1 to 6. Blind H.E bombs which cannot be moved are demolished in or on site, a sand-bag ramp is to be put up around bomb; or if not enought [sic] bags on sand bag between bomb & firing point. Bombs which can be transported are to be carried on well sprung and rubber tyred veicle, [sic] which is to use routes last used by others; bombs to be stowed in or on veicle [sic] lying down, secured with sand bags; all bombs 3 feet apart [deleted] from [/deleted] in all directions.
[page break]
[underlined] Blind bomb H.E. Practice [/underlined] to be dealt with a [underlined] Blind [/underlined] H.E bombs. [underlined] Blind, [/underlined] Practice [underlined] Flash [/underlined] or [underlined] Smoke [/underlined] to demolish, use detonator and primer only; place both near to No28 DetBurster [?] as possible. [underlined] NOTE [/underlined] if in the open sand-bags are not necessary.
[underlined] Destruction of other Unservisable [sic] Explosives. [/underlined]
Exploders, Guncotton & Similar Explosives.
'A' by demolition as for H.E. Bombs with same precautions taken, most [deleted] apount [?] [/deleted] quantity at once not to exceed 4lbs.
'B' Unservisable [sic] Detonators and those over age, distroy [sic] 25 at a time; distroy [sic] by detonation in a pit 2FT. deep 1FT WIDE; using Electric [?] Detonator, the exploder being at least 100 feet from pit also under cover, danger zone 200 yds.
1. [underlined] NOTE. [/underlined] Detonators with fuzes between head & body will be separated with knife; the heads distroyed [sic] as 'Dets' and the body or fuze as for 'Fuzes'
2.) Any fragments remaining undistroyed [sic] will be covered with oil and burned in small quantities under precautions.
3.) Detonating Fuzes. (Pryos). [?] to be returned to equipment Pepto [?] and dealt with by the A.I.D Inspector.
[page break]
4.) [deleted] Gunpod [/deleted] [underlined] Gunpowder [/underlined] remove from bag and put in a bucket of water, deleted] stup [/deleted] stur [sic] well and pour in pit on waste land, unservisable [sic] bags and containers are to be burned under precautions.
5.) [underlined] Safety and Instanteous [sic] Fuzes [/underlined] burned under precautions or put in deep water
6.) [underlined] pyotechnics [sic] Ditto. [/underlined]
[underlined] NOTE. [/underlined] Flares (Reconnaissance) return to equipment store or depto [sic] to be dealt with by A.I.D. Inspector.
7.) [underlined] S.A.A. [/underlined] Provided it is safe to [deleted] handl [/deleted] transport from home station it will be returned to No.2 Equipment (Ammunition) Depto, [sic] and from abroad to the appropriate Depto [sic] within the command. Should the quanities [sic] not warrant the cost of transport it will be destroyed locally under precautions and instructions.
8.) [underlined] Incendiaries [/underlined] bombs are to be destroyed under direct supervision of an inspector.
[Page break]
[underlined] Pryotechnics [sic] [/underlined]
No. 1165.
MAGAZINE LOAN BOOK. (25)
FULL NOMECLATURE (sic)
[Hand drawn table set out as the one below]
SECTION. REF.No
DRAWN FROM STORE FLIGHT OR
SECTION QUANTITY RETURNED EXPENDED
DATE QUANTITY SIGNATURE QUATITY [sic] VOUCHER
No REMARKS
FORM 6.7.3 Internal Exchange Voucher 664B. REPAYMENT.
FORM. 6.7.4 " Demand. " 1087A. DEMAND ISSUE.
FORM 6.7.5 " Return " 605 STORES INWARD
FORM 2.1 " Conversion " 108 TEMPORY [sic] LOAN.
FORM. 2.9.9 Firing Point Register 658 TRANSPORT.
FORM 6.6.8 " Loan Card 600 DEMAND ISSUE.
FORM 1.0.1 Stock in hand.
" 37 INVENTRY [sic] OR STOCK BOOK
[underlined] 'A'. 'B'. + 'C'. STORES [/underlined]
'A' Stores over that issued and does not wear out.
'B' " " " " " does wear out.
'C' " " " " " consumable.
[page break]
[underlined] 1,000lb. S.C.I. MK.I. [?] [/underlined]
Contains 6 Electric Cartridge Valves
3 Bakalite [sic] Pires [?]
inside of containers is covered with a coat of bakalite [sic] contains 52 galls of S.2.D [deleted] 'A.B+C' have to be plugged in. [/deleted] carried in 2,000lb. bomb carrier.
[underlined] Wing Tip Flares (for landing) [/underlined]
For land planes use 'A' type bracket, see Electrician has signed Form.700. Test flare with (Tester Fuze) by connecting flare leads to tester fuze terminals, rotor arm and needle should flicker, this should be done in the open. Attach flare to A/C bracket, is now ready for flight.
[underlined] Action [/underlined] On presure [sic] of switch the current runs through the copper plates, so fuzing the Platium [sic] Silver bridge and igniting the dry guncotton dust, which ignites the quickmatch, [sic] the flash passes to igniter pellet which ignites primer compo and blows off dossing, [?] at same time igniting flare compo, this burns for 3 mins. This flare must be extinguished [deleted] by a jet [/deleted] by a soda acid extinguisher. MK.I. & II must not be used in dry weather, as they drop a burning residue.
[Page break]
[underlined] For Flying boats & Seaplanes [/underlined] use type B. & D. brackets which are similar to A but they [deleted] are [/deleted] have 'auto casts [?] off' acted by air presure [sic] plate, set to cast off at 30 M.P.H. The 'B' has a [sic] anti glare sheild. [sic]
[underlined] Explosives Regulations [/underlined] cont.
[underlined] Stacking Explosives [/underlined]
1. Packages must be securely stacked in bays and raised on battons. [sic]
2. A clear space must be left between any stack and the wall
3. Heights.
4. Wet guncotton packages should be stacked up to give access to vent plug.
5.Gangways should be left between lines of stacks, wide enough to permit easy extraction of single packages.
6. Packages will be stacked horizontally unless otherwise specified on outside of packages.
7. Explosives of the same nature are to be stacked together and away from [deleted] from [/deleted] other natures in the same store house.
8. Packages bearing lot numbers are to be stacked by lots, issues should be as far date as possible, the oldest used first.
9 Explosives stores that do not nave lot Nos. are to be stored according to their natures, marks, maker and date.
[page break]
10. Separate stacks of S.A. A should be made for each date of filling, except that old boxes may be stacked together.
11. Packages should be stacked so that lables, [sic] contents marks are visable [sic]. Retest lables [sic] ouS.A.A. [?] Packages must [deleted] not [/deleted] be visable [sic] without disturbing the stack.
12. NIL.
13. Stack cards should be attached to each stack, and date of last examination.
14. Inventory boards showing contents (of each danger building) should be hung in convenient position and kept up to date.
15. Units other than Equipment Deptos [sic] and Ammunition parks [?] will maintain Magazine Loan Books.
[underlined] Lables [sic] :- Goverment [sic] Classification Lables [sic] [/underlined]
1. Showing service and groups in which classified for storage purposes. is fixed to each box or package containing Gov. Explosives.
2. A.I.D. lables [sic] of must in denotes; packing of contents has been examined by an A.I.D. inspecting authority.
3. Station Monogram, lable [sic] of muslin denoted station which contents were packed.
4. Circular sealing lables [sic] on S.A.A. Boxes with sliding lids.
5. Distinguishing lables, [sic] large and small showing contents.
[page break]
6. Red lables [sic] on S.A.A. boxes, if contents are for use the [?] synchronised guns.
7. Retest lables [sic] on end od S.AA boxes, showing nature of test and date by which test should be concluding.
8. Descriptive lable [sic] showing maker and date of filling.
17/3./41.
[underlined] Alvis Straussler Bomb Trailer [/underlined]
Wheels held on by 6 Cadium [sic] nuts and 5 Red nuts; Carries 4 x 250lb. 2 x 500lb. 4 x 250 S.C.I: 2 x 500lb. SC.I. 1,000 G.P. 2 x S.B. Container. Air pressure in tyres 20ib. P.Sq.INCH., size 18x7. wheel lock 60%. Draw bar [sic] telescopic, extended for positioning under A/C. 5'-1". close. 3' [?]-2¼ ". clamped in to position; 3½ turns to extend it. Minimum ground clearines [sic] is 4 to 5 inches, loaded Maximum 15 to 16 inches, giving hydrolic [sic] 11 - 12" Elevation, when filling rams or jacks use Prices Hydrolic [sic] Jack oil (Ref No. 2391 10 grease points in front, 8 at rear, 30 cwt type jacks, [indecipherable word] Grease Gun used. Torpedo Trolly. [sic] has two throats, one for 1,000, & 1900 G.P. the other [deleted] for [/deleted] (small) for Torpedo, 2,000 AP. 1,000 S.C.I. Gear rotate [?] crown wheel, draws inwards thrust blocks, raising scissors & throats through central thredded [sic] tube or rod.
Type. 'B' Transporting Trolley used for single Bombs, 250. 500. 120.GP.
[page break]
[underlined] ANVIL TYPE MODERN DETONATORS [/underlined]
NO DELAY COLOUR [underlined]PISTOL [/underlined]
35 11 SECS BLUE [underlined] BLUNT [/underlined] STRIKER
43 INST WHITE NOSE 27 - 29 - 33 - 38
44 1 SEC YELLOW TAIL 28
47 .12 SEC BROWN
49 .025 SEC BLACK
[Hand drawn line across page]
SENSITIVE TYPE (1" [underlined] GREEN TAIL [/underlined].)
39 1 SEC YELLOW [underlined] SHARP [/underlined] STRIKER
46 2 SEC GREEN NOSE 42 - (44 & 45 DYAPHAM [sic]) - NOT USE WITH HP BOMBS
48 .04 RED TAIL 30.
50 .14 BROWN
51 .025 BLACK
*52 MKI INST. WHITE - 44 & 45 PISTONS
*52 MKS.(II & III) INST. WHITE - DITTO
53 .5 ALUMINIUM
54 3 SEC GREY
55 11 SEC BLUE
56 .05 FOR USE WITH. AP.2000. IV
[page break]
PISTOLS & FUZES.
38 MK III 20F. 40 GP.
44 MK I. ALL MOD BOMBS UP TOO [sic] 1,000 lbs.
44 MK II UP TO & 4000 GP & MP. (NOT HC)
45. 20F. 40 GP.
42. (MOD. 27) ALL MOND [sic] BOMBS
NOSE TAIL
GP MKS. I II III 250 500lbs. 19 22
GP. MKS. I & II 120lbs 19 21
GP. MKS. IV 250. 500 " 27- OR 42 - 44 - 28-30-37
GP. MKS I 1000 19000 " " " " " " "
GP. MK IV III 1,000 " TAIL ONLY " " "
M.C. 250. 500. 1,000 4,000 " 27 OR 42 . 44 - 28 - 30 - 37
S.A.P. MKS. I II 250. 500 " 30 FUZE.
S.A.P. MK. II 250 500 " 28 – 30
AS. MKS I II III 250 500 " 32 FUZE.
A.S. MKS. IV 250 500 " 30 PISTOL
A.P. MKS I II III 2,000 " 37 FUZE
AP . MK IV 2,000 " 30 PISTOL
H.C. 2,000 - 4,000 8,000 " 27 OR 42
SMOKE 100 854 FUZE.
" 120 864 "
[page break]
[cross section sketch of a trigger mechanism]
[hand drawn line across whole page]
250 LC. BOMB 36 MK I & 36. MK II FUZE & (GP CHARGE. NOT MK I. ORNo. MK II)
" Inc " 36 MK II. N. DELAY. (No2 MKI. CHARGE. (GROUP 15)
3O L.C [?] MK I. No 38 FUZE. (2 NUTS)
30lb. L.C MK II. No FUZE.
30 " INC. MK4. [?] No 38 FUZE. (M. TYPES FOR LUGS. L.S. CARRIER)
" " " MK3 II. 3.4. 846 FUZE.
45 PISTOL 20F. 40lb. G.P.
FUZES. 854 100 SMOKE BOMBS.
864 120 " "
848 MKV FLASH (ONLY)
860 T.I FLARES (AIR PRESURE [sic]) & CLUSTER BOMBS.
846 30lbs. INC. MKS. II III IV
849 FLASH (ONLY) (WITH CLOCK SETTING)
MIII FLASH. (15 TO 93 SECS.) YANK [?]
[page break]
[underlined] 250lbs. DEPTH CHARGE [/underlined] AP.2111A
250lbs. D.CHARGE. MK8. 8* &MK. II.
MK8 ROUND NOSE MK8* MOD WITH SPOILER ATTACHMENT ON NOSE.
MKXI (II) WITH READY MADE CONCAVE NOSE.
D.CHARGE HAS CENTRAL TUBE, TO FUZE UP PUT IN SPRING THEN MK8 PRIMMER [SIC] (2 C.E PELLETS). NEXT TAKE MK XIV (14) OR MK XVI (16) WATER PISTOL UNSCREW DET CARRIER INSERT MK VII (7) WITIGHT [?] P.CAP DET (RED + BLUE) SCREW DET CARRIER ON PISTOL. INSERT PISTOL INTO DEPTH CHARGE - SCREW DOWN VALVE BODY LOCKING NUT. PUT ON TAIL UNIT. (USE STRIKE GAUGE).
[underlined] MK XIV LASTEST [sic] PISTOL. [/underlined]
MK. XVI (16) PISTOLS MK. XIV (14)
FIRES @ 25FT @ A PRESURE [sic] OF 8 - 9 TO 10.6 lbs WHEN DROPPED 173 KNTS. (200MPH) FROM 500FT.
FIXED STRIKER ASSEMBLE.
GRUB SCREW
GO & NOT-GO [?] GAUGE TO BE USED
RED BAYONET RING
COPPER DISC WITH DET. HOLDER. FIRES @ 25FT @ A PRESSURE OF 6 1/4 TO 8 lbs. WHEN DROPPED @ 175 KNTS. OR 200 M.P.H. FROM 750 FT.
STRIKER ASSEMBLE FULLY FLOATING
NARROW DISTANCE RING PERMITS MOVEMENT OF FLANGES INCREASED DIAM. OF BODY & CENTRAL TUBE
4 STUDS ON BODY - JUBILEE CLIP
NO - GO TEST N/A
BLUE BAYONET RING - NO COPPER DISC.
[page break]
[underlined] 250 DEPTH CHARGE [/underlined]
[hand drawn cross section diagram of a depth charge]
[underlined] MAIN FILLINGS] [/underlined] (3)
2" GREEN BAND 40/60 = AMATOL
2" " " WITH XXX 40/60 FIRST GRADE - AMATOL FIRST CLASS
2" BAND BLUE RINGS = TORPEX [underlined] ALL WITH 1/2 RED BAND [/underlined]
RECO FLARE CAPSULE FLASH CAPSULE
Nos. 3 MKII 3,000 MK IV FLARE.
4 4,000
6 " 5-6,000
8 " 7-8,000
10 " 9-10.000
12 " 11-12,000
14 " 13-14,000
16 " 15-16,000
18 " 17-18,000
20 " 19-20,000 No 4 MKII 2 - 7,000 FT
P 7/9 9 - 9,000 "
P 10/12 10 - 12,000 "
P 13/15 13 - 15,000 "
P 16/18 16 - 18,000 "
P 19/20 19 - 20,000 "
[page break]
[underlined DEMOLITION AP 2608(A). [/underlined]
STORES REQUIRED
(1.) BOMB ECT [sic] (2.) 1lb WET GUN COTTON (3) 1oz DRY GUN C [?] PRIMER
(4) RECTIFIER. (5) ELECTRIC DET. 13 OR 33 (6) INSULATION TAPE.
(7) No7 DUEPROOF [sic] CABLE 23 Ω (8) DYNAMO EXPLODER (9) TESTER FUZE.
(10) SPADE - PICK - PLIERS. (11) 6 RED FLAGS. 1 BLUE. (12) STAKE.
[cross section illuminating flare]
CHANGE COLOUR STAR
[hand drawn line across the page]
2,500ft (10 SECS. BURN) 6-9¨ LONG ILLUMINATING CARTRIDGE
BROWN. 5-8¨ WS&D CLOUDY DAY
WHITE 4¨ WS&D CLEAR DAY (1½ SECS DELAY)
[page break]
[cross section white flare and cross section of red or green flare]
[page break]
[cross section signal distress marine]
12 RED STARS @ 4-5 SECS BETWEEN [illegible]
2 RED CANDLES
[double underline] SIGNAL DISTRESS 2 STAR RED [/double underline]
12-15 MILES @ NIGHT
Mk I 50FT BURNS 8-9 SECS 4-5 SECS BETWEEN
Mk II 100FT
[page break]
CA PADS ‘B’UN. OR LB. CARRIES[?]
150,000 C.P. 4.5 Mk I 3¼ MINS. Mk II 3-4 MINS. 11FT PAR
1000000 C.P. 5.5 3¼ to 4¼ UNY CARR ONLY 18FT.
28 FUZE 4.5. 5.5
25¨4.5 CLOSING PLUG. SPIN.2 TIME RINGS No 123 for setting
[cross section part of flare]
[cross section flare]
[cross section flare]
FROM SHOOT
TR. FLARE NOSE FIRST
4.5 TAIL¨
5.5 ¨¨ONLY SHOOT
[page break]
28 Fuze (104 89 KEYS)
[illustration and three cross sections]
[page break]
28 Fuze
[cross section]
[page break]
No 43 EMERGENCY FUZE. 5 SPARE CAPSULS
[cross section]
FOR USE ON RED FLARE ONLY
[page break]
[underlined]FLAME FLOAT NAV.[/underlined]
[two cross sections]
[page break]
SMOKE CURTAIN APP
500lb Mk III
500lb CARRIED ON UNIV. 1 OR 2
USE ADOPTER[sic] BOX FOR ‘H’ JETT
26 GALLS 32D [?] MIXTURE
TEST DET 30FT CABLE .02 VRTS [?]
[underlined](E Fuze 15ft)[/underlined] (CRUTCHES ‘A’ (REAR ¨O¨ TYPE)
OUTTER [sic] (FRONT)
250 Mk III SAME AS 500 Mk III
ONLY [illustration] PIPE AND INLET VALVE AT TAIL END
250 EXTERNALLY ONLY
[illustration and four cross sections]
[page break]
6 CARTRIDGE AND E2[?] VALVES
CARRIED INTERNALLY ON WELLTING [sic] AND STIRLING OR 2000 B. CARRIER
CLEAN THREADS WITH MINERAL JELLY. PACK GRAPHITE & M. TOIL[?]
[two illustrations]
[page break]
[underline] DEMOLITION NEW AP2608A.[/underlined]
[several illustrations]
[page break]
APPARATUS A.L. No 1 Mk I [underlined](ANTI LANDING) [/underlined]
[cross section of a mine]
[page break]
WING TIP FLARE
BURNS 3½ MINS.
[cross sections and illustrations of flare]
[page break]
WING TIP FLARE BRACKET ‘A’ [underlined] USED ON LAND PLANES [/underlined]
[two illustrations of bracket]
[page break]
[two illustrations marked ‘B’ and ‘D’]
‘B’ SAME AS ‘D’
ON[?] HAS ANTI GLARE DISC
‘D’ USED ON SEA/FLOAT PLANES
FLYING BOATS
SET TO CAST OFF AT 30 m.p.h.
[page break]
ROCKET SIGNAL Mk III 1lb
900 FT
[cross section rocket]
[page break]
ALVIS & STRAUSLER TROLLIES 1664 D
[underlined] TYPE B[/underlined] T.PRESSURE 40º 1,000LBS (CARRY)
LOADS 2 x 500 4 x 250 lb. 2 x 250 S.B.C.
[underlined] TYPE C[/underlined] T.P. 45º 3,000lbs (CARRY)
LOADS 1 x 2000 1 x 1900 2 x 1500 VEG 3 x 1000 6 x 500 8 x 250.
[underlined] TYPE D Mk II 60º 4,000 (CARRY)
[underlined] TYPE E [/underlined] TP. 75º 12000lbs (CARRY)
1 x 8000 HC 2 x 4000 4 x 1500 VEG 6 x 1,000 4 x 2000 AP 4 x 1900 9 x 250
500 – 2000 – 4000 lb [underlined] GYRAL[sic] WINCHES AP 1664 C[/underlined]
500lb WINCH. ALUMINIUM COLOUR. CLUTCH SLIPS @ 880 BREAKING STRAIN 35cwt.
REDUCTION GEAR 50-1 SAFTY[sic] LOAD 550.
[underlined] 2000 Mk I[underline/] (GREEN) CLUTCH SLIPS TO 3360- BREAKING STRAIN 4 TONS.
RED. GEAR 246-1. SAFE LOAD 2,100 lbs
[underlined] 2000 Mk II[underline/] GREEN WITH RED – CLUTCH SLIPS @ 5750 – RED. GEAR 246-1
MAX LOAD 2,100lbs
[underline]d 4,000[/underlined] YELLOW RED. GEAR. 448- 1 -SAFE LOAD 4,100lbs.
[page break]
3.3.41[underlined] 2000 lb. Bomb Carrier TYPE ‘A’[/underlined] NOW U/S
TYPE ‘A’ 1 Sling 9 [deleted]tons
TYPE B 2 Sling[sic]. 2 x 5 TONS
Description. ‘A’ consists of a sheet steel Girder with nose & tail crutches, strainer (hand), attachments, fuzing, release slip Mk. III. EM. Unit ‘C’
Fuzing attachments. P[?] & 18 INCH. 8¨ for. 1000. G.P. 18 . 2000. A.P. suspension hook, and hole for hoisting to a/c. Use adaptor crutch for 1000 G.P., Clearance between bomb & lorries. 50 thou.[?]
Dif.[?] ‘A’ type cables. [illustration] ‘B’ [illustration]
Stores Carried. Torpedoes. 2000 AP. 1000 GP. 1,900 NEW GP.
4.3.41.
Apparatus Supplied Dropping Mk 5. ‘B’ ÷ consists of 3 part. 1, Container, 2. Cylinder 3. Parachute bucket. Filled through[sic] removable lid at one end which can be soldered in position if required to contain liquids. [underlined] Precussion[sic][/underlined] [deleted] head hemispherical in shape and is fitted at the nose end of apparatus, it will be damaged on impact but can be used 2 or 3 times before repair is needed. [underlined] Parachute bucket[/underlined] is where parachute is filled and fitted at tail end, the parachute container is closed by 6 canvas flaps, a static cord is provided for releasing chute by fixing one end of cord to carrier crutch. [underlined] Loads.[/underlined] Universil[sic] normally 104[?]lbs + 20lbs over-weight. Parachute. 14 feet. Mk IV This apparatus is known as the Pack & Harness method, it is intended for use with packages or bales ect.[sic] which are to[sic] balky[sic] for the Mk. 5. ‘B’. Weights allowable on the Un. No 1 and No 2 is [sic] 160lbs a special attachment is fitted to go over case. Chute is hooked on side and cord tied to base of container.
[page break]
2,000lb CARRIER TYPE A Mk 1A
Mk 1A LIKE Mk 1 BUT WITH ADJUSTABLE CRUTCHES. WHEN HOISTING BOMB PLACE RACK ON BOMB – FASTEN CABLE – TIGHTEN UP TO ‘FEEL[?] OF BOMB’ – THEN PUT ON 25 – 30 MORE TURNS. (HALIFAX)
TYPE B (2¨ CABLES AND CRUTCH HOLDER FOR 1,000.) ADJUSTABLE CRUTCHES – ‘FEEL[?] OF BOMB’ THEN NOT OVER 35 TURNS (STIRLING)
Load SlingR. CrutchFuzing Unit
LOAD SLING R. CRUTCH FUZING UNIT
THICK
2000lb AP Thick Rear C Rear 26¨
9 ton
Short
Veg. Thick
Long ¨ ¨ ¨ 14¨
1000 GP Thin
Narrow
Long Aux. C F+Rear 14¨
1900 GP Long
Thin R. C F+Rear 14¨
2000 HC Long
Thin R. C Front 30¨
18¨ Torp Long FID
Thick R. C R. Atc. Torpedo
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
Albert Cluett's armourers training notebook. Two
Description
An account of the resource
Notes and diagrams on pyrotechnics, smoke bombs and generators, smoke curtain and anti-landing apparatus, armament documentation (forms), explosive regulations, demolition, detonators, depth charges, fuses, bomb carriers and flares.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Albert Victor Cluett
Format
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One notebook
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Identifier
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MCluettAV120946-150515-16
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
ground personnel
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/697/10100/ABassettFG180517.1.mp3
c76a4674418dcf52e322e714612bd4d8
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
Bassett, Frank Gerald
F G Bassett
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Frank Bassett (b. 1924 1860826 Royal Air Force).
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2018-05-17
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Bassett, FG
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FB: It was bloody hard work humping bombs out for them.
AC: Right.
FB: Good job though. Good old blokes.
AC: So, I’ve got to, I’ve got to do an introduction. I’m, I’m Andrew Cowley. I’m from the International Bomber Command Centre. I’m interviewing Frank Bassett.
FB: Yeah.
AC: And also here are his son Gary Bassett and his granddaughter, Helen Howard.
FB: Right.
AC: It’s, we’re at his [redacted] It’s the 17th of May 2018 which is the seventy fifth anniversary of the Dambusters raid.
FB: Christ.
AC: And it’s 10.32. So Frank, I’m going to put some questions to you, but before we get on to the RAF just tell me about, a bit, a little bit about your childhood, your family, where you went to school, how you came to join up.
FB: I went to school at Wood Street School, Woolwich. When I left there, I went straight to a firm that I was going to learn a trade with. That would be [unclear] case making and all that. From there, I stayed there until I done a silly thing. Decided that I’d join the RAF [laughs] I don’t know why because I was already in the Home Guard and things like that and I was only about sixteen then. I was about eighteen when I went in the RAF, and where? I can’t even think where. I know it wasn’t too long before, where you are down in, I can’t even think of the names. I couldn’t even tell you the names of the ‘dromes there. But I was in the bomb dump there, or in the armoury and unfortunately that was another silly mistake. Apart from where we did the most work and it was bloody heaviest too. And where were we talking? I couldn’t even tell you most of the ‘dromes I’ve been on. But when you think we’re talking about when I was eighteen and I’m now forty five [laughs] ninety four. So that gives you an idea, you know, but I have to say that. Well, I don’t know. I suppose I was a bit silly at the time, but I thought well both my brothers were in the Army and I thought well, although I’ve got a trade here that’s alright. They, when I, when I told them they said, ‘Oh don’t worry about it. You won’t have to.’ I said, ‘But I want to stay.’ ‘What?’ I was learning a trade there. So, I said, ‘Well, I aint going to.’ Cor, Christ. So, they said, ‘Well, it’s up to you.’ And I left there and I went in the RAF and when I came out although I’d still about three years to do they said, ‘That’s alright. You can come straight in as what you’d been trained in.’ So that was alright as far as that go. But I can only remember I was doing fire watching and in the Home Guard and when I think you know, what’s the matter with me? And when I came out I went back to my old job again. And when I was in the RAF, apart from doing my training, where was that now? One of those coastal places. Anyway, most of the time I spent in, apart from going abroad I spent in where you are now in, I’m trying to think. Was there just one ‘drome there? But it was a Bomber Command one. You know. And as far as I’m concerned I don’t think I was always, well I would be if I was in aerodromes and that, that’s where you’re going to be isn’t it? Humping bombs about. And bloody hard work I have to say but so, but I don’t know why. I suppose I went in there as a kid and as you know there’s AC1 and AC2 and all that lot and I was a corporal when I came out. So, I was still only twenty four. So that’s not bad going really I don’t think. And I have to say that to be honest I think they were a good lot really, you know. I wasn’t keen on going in the Army although I’d been in the Home Guard and that. But yeah, they was quite nice and I think 617 was a really good squadron. The only thing is that as I say as far as I was concerned it, it meant getting bombs out the bomb dump, loading them up and then getting them out of there and of course the squadron blokes put them on but that’s the easy part, wasn’t it? And then we’d have to unload more when they came in and if they was a bit late at night we wouldn’t get no dinner until, I don’t know about 8 or 9 o’clock at night so, but I was only young so it didn’t really worry me. But I think that as I say I thought 617 was a really, that was one of the strong ones, weren’t it? They were really good them blokes, I reckon. Very nice fellas. So was, aircrews and that. But as I say, perhaps ‘cos I was a bit young. Perhaps I should have chosen something a little bit better but there you go. I chose the RAF and that’s it.
AC: Was there a reason you chose the RAF?
FB: It was strange really because I was, as I say I was in the Home Guard, which was Army and no I never thought about it but for some reason or other. I don’t know. Perhaps it’s because it’s a young lot wasn’t it? You know. And somehow or other I took to a fancy to it. And I soon learned better of course, but I, I really believe that they are, so was the Army I suppose and the Navy but I mean when you look at some of these kids nowadays, or these idiots as I call them no wonder the Germans said, ‘Christ [unclear] the only good was the Army.’ No. I think I quite liked it and what did I do? About four years I suppose. So, but I can’t say as I’ve got any complaints. I didn’t get into any trouble but I also didn’t do silly things which I think was quite good. And I liked Lincolnshire. That was quite good.
AC: Did you have any choice about the job in the RAF?
FB: Well, yeah actually we did but I don’t know. Well, of course I’d experienced the bombing at home, but when I went to the recruiting place they said, ‘What do I want to join the RAF for?’ and I thought as a young, a young, that’s sounds alright. So I said, ‘Yeah, I wouldn’t mind the RAF.’ And to be honest I haven’t got a bad word to say about them. Not like some blokes do, you know. I quite liked it even though I got in the wrong lot. Getting in the Army, by Christ. I should have, have gone in the office or something like that. Doing nothing [laughs] But no, I think they were a good lot of blokes, and I think 617 Squadron really were a fine lot. Well, they all were really. But they were a nice lot of blokes, I think.
AC: Did, did you get a choice of about whether you wanted to be an armourer or anything else in the RAF?
FB: I was in the RAF.
AC: No. Did you get a choice about what you wanted to do in the RAF?
FB: I couldn’t tell you now. For some reason or other I can remember roughly going to one of the ‘dromes and they said, ‘Well, we need blokes in the bomb dump.’ So [laughs] if they’d have said, ‘We need blokes in the café,’ I suppose I would have been in the café. No. So I got used and I had a few friends there and that’s it. So, I thought it was quite good. I don’t think that was a bad I say. Well, I would say that but I do think they were a good lot. There was none of this you know like some blokes they don’t want to be. As a matter of fact, there must be because when I had my photo taken they wouldn’t allow. ‘Your hat’s not on right.’ [laughs] but I was about twenty something then, I suppose.
AC: So, can you, can you describe to me a typical day for you in the armoury?
FB: A miserable day?
AC: A typical.
FB: A typical day. Oh. Well, we come out from the billet. We’d go down to the armoury. We’d be told what had to be done. If there’s anything going out that day there could well be a couple of lorries coming in with bombs on board which meant of course you had to do that. So therefore, you didn’t have a nice little job sitting somewhere. You’d do that. You’d have to make sure everything was as it was and it was hard work. I mean, you probably know yourself you get those long sodding bombs and you get one bloke on each end. It’s not easy. And then you get the hard ones where you’ve got a crane. And to be honest we never used that crane. You see you’ve got a crane there, a lift there. Nobody ever touched it. All done, done by hand. And when I think about well, I don’t know get four or five of you on it. That’s not bad. But you have to remember I was only twenty or so if I was about forty something I might have had a different view. But I thought they was, I thought they was quite good. I liked the places, and I suppose in a way just because you was in the Army didn’t mean you didn’t have anything else to do. Oh yes you did. When there was other things there you might be, I don’t know, route marches, or, whatever else had to be done. But like, as I say I was only young then so it didn’t worry me.
AC: Good.
FB: And where I worked wasn’t a piece of cake so it never worried me. So —
AC: Just going, you mentioned your billet. What was that like?
FB: Well, I had various billets but I have to say even about that for a billet it’s not bad. I don’t know what the Army’s like but this wasn’t bad. I mean it wasn’t like a hotel but [laughs] but the billets were alright. And you had to keep the place clean but I think that’s a good thing because I even say it to the kids sometimes if you’re, if you’re not organised you’re just a rabble and I don’t think the RAF was a rabble. Or any of the other services. And I found that most of the blokes, providing you were sensible you was fine. None of this old [moaning] None of that. As I told these I do have to have to have a bit of a laugh sometimes because I remember a bloke coming along the road and he said, ‘Oh, I want to get a paper.’ He said, ‘It does fold up I suppose.’ There’s all these blokes coming along and he said, ‘Ah, just a minute mate. Where do you get a paper?’ ‘Mate? Mate,’ he said, ‘What do you think they are? Report to the guardroom.’ But I mean, they weren’t all that bad really but I mean as I said before I do believe if you don’t have discipline it’s just a bloody rabble. And apart from, I don’t like to say that, apart from the German Army the British Army is the best in the world. That’s my one. I’m sure the RAF is also [laughs] alright. But no. I did my bit quietly really. I was glad to get home mind you but I went to Palestine and Egypt and that but I don’t know, you know.
AC: Did, did you have any contact with the aircrew?
FB: Not an awful lot because you have to remember the crews are out there. Me and my comrades were down in the bomb dump, and it wasn’t just a question of, ‘Oh, well that’s alright then. We haven’t got anything coming.’ It wasn’t like that as you probably know. There was bombs coming in all the time for you to unload apart from doing the rest of your work and it wasn’t easy but, I don’t know. I suppose I was, as I say I was only twenty or so. It didn’t worry me. I didn’t worry about cranes or anything like that. And I think it was, I can’t honestly say, I can’t remember it all, the difference when I was up but I can’t honestly say I was disappointed in the attitude or anything like that, and no, I think it wasn’t always, hey up, stand to attention. But when you was off duty it was quite good. So, I don’t think there’s, I think personally, I suppose I would say that but I really think they are a good force. I don’t know what they’re like now of course but, you know.
AC: Were you involved with loading bombs actually on to the planes?
FB: No. Actually, what we, what we did we got the bombs out the bomb dump and done what we had to do with them. Got them on the trucks. Pushed them out the trucks, and the aircrew had their own blokes so really in a way amongst the armourers they were the easiest. They had to unload them, load them on and that’s it finished. But not us. We might have loaded them on, got them out there. And then go and have your tea. When you come back there’s three trucks coming in. And it was bloody hard. But that’s another strange thing because I know I’d never done an easy job when I was in civvy street, but they was never what I would call [pause] it wasn’t easy, and you know yourself when you get one of these with a load of bombs on it, it’s not that simple but I’d find it a bit harder now I suppose, but no. I think they were a good lot and I think, well I think all the British forces are good. I would think that. But I’ve, I have no complaint about which is basically, I know there are some blokes in there in a nice office jobs, I suppose but that’s just one of these things. But other than that, I think they were a good lot of blokes. And the crews were good and all, I think. They weren’t [unclear] they was good blokes. So, and I really think that in a way they had a very hard job. I mean it’s not easy flying over somewhere and so —
AC: In your bomb dump can you remember any particular smells or anything about it?
FB: Not off hand, I can’t. The thing is as I say, because I didn’t choose any particular, what I wanted to do I suppose they’d go, oh good another bloke for the bomb dump, and that’s why you know I always worked in bomb dumps but it didn’t worry me.
AC: Was it, was it particularly hot. Cold. Can you remember?
FB: Sometimes it would be when the weather was a bit warm, you know and you’re humping bombs around. Remember you might have had a crane to do some things but like most blokes, ‘I don’t want a bloody crane. Get hold there,’ you know. But I’m, I’m saying that I don’t really, I suppose I’m biased really but when I say the RAF is the best one. There’s not one as good as that in the world. Never mind. You know. So, perhaps I’m biased.
AC: And can, can you remember any of the mates who you worked with? Any personalities?
FB: Well, I worked with a few blokes [unclear] I can’t remember. I can’t remember their names. Not even, look you can see one here [paper rustling] but I couldn’t remember his name either. Not him, I mean he worked in the bomb dump. He’s not [laughs] That’s me. I know you shouldn’t have your photo taken like that but I did. No, I’m trying to think of. As I say once I came out the RAF that was it. I went back to me work and —
HH: [unclear]
FB: It’s a long while ago. A long while ago. Trying to think. Probably might have been, might have a lot of jokes about different things but basically I think when you hear people talk about oh bloody this, and that I can understand it but they were a good lot of blokes and we knew what we had to do and that’s it. And if you wanted the war to end as quickly as possible you did that, didn’t you? You didn’t do silly things. I can’t think of any complaints. Even with the NCOs and that. They were quite good blokes. So, I think [unclear] we did but they were quite good.
AC: I’m going to read four placenames where 617 Squadron were just to see if it jogs your memory about where you served.
FB: Christ.
AC: There’s Coningsby.
FB: Yeah.
AC: Scampton.
FB: Yeah.
AC: Waddington
FB: Yeah.
AC: Woodhall Spa.
FB: Yeah. I’ve done all of them at different times. I remember them clear as anything but if you’d have said to me who was the captain of so and so, Christ, who would that be now? You know. But no, I really thought that and I still think they were the best aircraft in the world.
AC: So, did, did, did you have a favourite place out of all those?
FB: Well, I liked Lincolnshire. I don’t know why but I did. I was up there. Quite good there. Used to get out you know when we wanted to and the camp itself was quite good you know I thought and even the grub wasn’t bad really.
AC: But which —
FB: I know you hear these people moaning about everything but if you were honest it’s a bloody sight more worse than that so but no I can’t even remember what ‘dromes I was on. I’ve been on all them ‘dromes. I was at the one when the Lincolnshire blokes come in. You know, the Dam ones. But I can’t, I can’t remember. There were other ‘dromes I was at and of course I’d done certain courses at times and things like that but I can’t honestly say that oh, bloody awful you know. I think, and I might be wrong but I think a lot of young blokes they got it bloody easy in the forces. You know. The kids these days look at you they wouldn’t have that for five minutes. But you know I’m a bit scruffy myself now I suppose. Mind you I’ve got some better clothes but no. No, I have to say that although I don’t know why I really chose them. Perhaps it might have been glamour but if I was of that age again that would be who’d I’d prefer to join. The RAF.
AC: You said you did some courses. Can you remember what those courses were?
FB: Oh, Christ. Now you’re asking. It’s about ninety years ago. Oh Christ. They must have been armament courses some of them I suppose. Various other ones what you do, you know. I don’t know. They would all be to do with war. It wouldn’t be dancing or anything like that. But no. I can’t think. I can’t even think of the names of the blokes. But you wouldn’t, all that time ago, would you? I was only twenty or so. In fact, I was only, I think I was eighteen when, when I went to join the RAF and as I said I might have been about eighteen and a half by the time I got in there. But no. I met some nice fellas and I thought the, you know it was better than just marching all day or something. I understand, I suppose the Army has to do that probably amongst the other things but I was always, I’m even trying to even think of some of the names of the squadrons. 617 of course. You don’t forget them. And as far as I’m concerned they were without doubt, I’m not saying all the rest of the crews weren’t. They were. But 617, well, you know. But it was hard work but what do you expect? So —
AC: I think you may have loaded some Dambusters bombs. Is that right?
FB: Yeah. Oh yeah. But as I say, as you probably know first of all they come in from wherever they’re made. We unload them there. When they go out we load them again and the only difference was the aircrews had their own blokes for putting them on board. Bloody lucky. That’s all I can say. But no, I have to say that I’m not like some people, bloody war. I mean it was a war and that’s it. You could be in the Army which would have been worse. Both my brothers was in the Army and it wasn’t too great for them. No. I think [pause] Yes, I could have stayed out. In fact, the governor said to me, ‘You are doing a job where you won’t get called up.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ve got no objections to being called up.’ [Unclear] But you wouldn’t ask that now. I know that. I suppose a bit silly at the time but I don’t regret it. Not really. You’ve got to do this and that’s it as far as I [pause] I wouldn’t do it now if I was, you know but I wouldn’t say no to anything like that and I realise you’ve got have to have a certain amount of discipline. I know that. But looking at it another way I think they was pretty good in lots of ways. So —
AC: Were, were any of your ‘dromes ever bombed while you were there?
FB: I think, vaguely, vaguely, I can’t remember, I suppose. I can’t even remember which ones it might have been. Why? I don’t think the damage if I can remember correct was too much. They were soon shushed up I think. But it must have been Lincolnshire, that’s where I was at, that’s where I spent most of my time before I went abroad, you know. And I can’t even think of the name until you mentioned the names of them ‘dromes. And I can’t even remember the commanding officers or anyone else. But as I say it’s ninety years ago. I’ve had nothing to do with the forces since then really, you know.
AC: Did you ever watch planes taking off or landing?
FB: Yeah. Yeah. I suppose I’m a bit biased but to me the RAF, there was no one like them. They couldn’t land like that and couldn’t take off and they couldn’t be like them but that’s how you’ve got to be I think. You’re not concerned with the enemy. Yes, I think there was some very good crews there. I was only looking in the paper the other day about their, what’s his name now. Apparently, he had short legs and he couldn’t get in to the RAF. But then he was a squadron leader with them. That just shows you. I met one or two blokes mind you but I suppose basically once you either go in to a trade or you gone in to whatever it was you stuck with that because as far as they was concerned that job was yours wasn’t it? And I think they were quite good blokes really. I don’t think there’s any real nastiness amongst them. They were quite all right. Maybe I was just lucky and most of the blokes were just good blokes. I never thought that sometimes you might go out to the ‘dromes but you never got any of these squadron leaders, ‘Oi you —’ and their weight you know and I thought that was bloody good really. They didn’t have to be like that but they were. Maybe I was just lucky and had lucky crews there.
AC: Did you know any aircrew? Did they tell you of any of their experiences at all?
FB: Christ, now I’m trying to think. I can’t think of any. I can’t even think of some of the raids they used to make. I know sometimes of course unfortunately they didn’t all come back. Sometimes they came back a bit, but I never, I never heard anyone saying, ‘Sod this,’ you know. Might have been one or two. I never heard anything like that and I thought they was all good blokes and certainly they never sort of laid the law down. As far as they were concerned they were aircrew and that’s it. And providing you was sensible it didn’t matter, you know. I thought they were good. Most of them crews. And yeah, there must have been something. A few of them shot up and that and various things. But as I said being in, it would be where you got Bomber Command. So of course most of my time was concerned with bomb dumps. I was getting bombs out, bringing them in, doing all this, doing all that so you didn’t get a lot of time really to, a bit of time off now and again and things like that but you worked. There’s no doubt about that. But I couldn’t think of any, I can’t think off hand that nobody liked. Obviously, I didn’t have so much to do with the aircrews but obviously when they weren’t training or anything they wouldn’t just stroll around the camp. But as I say if I had to join another force I know I’d, as I say I was in the Home Guard but they would be the ones that I would probably and it probably the same sort as I was with. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because I got used to it and there was some good blokes there, you know so, but no, sometimes the air raid would go off and but I can’t think of any real, real bad ones, you know. I can think of some being shot up a bit and things like that. Fortunately, when the crew weren’t in them [laughs] but I can’t really think of [pause] I suppose, in a way, thinking of it now working a lot of the time and you would be in the bomb dump wouldn’t you? Someone’s got to bring the bombs in. Someone’s got to arm them up, someone’s got to load them and get them out to, and the aircrew blokes, not them but their crew who had to do it for them. But they was a nice lot of fellas so, but no I can’t think off hand. If I was that young again and I wanted to join it would probably be the Air Force again. I don’t think it would be, perhaps I’m being biased but I’m being honest when I say I don’t [unclear] I didn’t find any of that providing you behaved yourself and dressed yourself properly. I think these blokes bellowing their heads off, a load of rubbish some of that is I think. But there you go.
AC: What did you get up to in your time off?
FB: Well, of course, being in London [laughs] you would be dodging bombs and things like that wouldn’t you because the raids was going on here just the same. And I don’t know. I suppose those blokes said, ‘Why the bloody hell did you want to join the Air Force when bombs come over here.’ But there you go. No. I didn’t do an awful lot. There wasn’t a lot you could do. And obviously I only had Air Force pay then. I wasn’t earning more than people on the outside. But I can remember, you know when I got demobbed as I told the kids once I went down to where I used to work, saw the manager, had a word and the bloke, I should have done a six, five or six year course. Actually, I’d done three of them when I went. I came in and one of the blokes said, ‘Hello.’ I said, ‘Hello.’ He said, ‘Are you coming back now?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Oh, can I find you a job on the bench.’ No. He’s not going to find me a job. I’ll tell you what. He’s been doing the same job you were doing but I don’t care about that. While you were still here I was somewhere else. So other than that, fine. So I’ve never had push here, push there. All those. And I’ve always considered I’ve done a job well so —
AC: So, when you were on the ‘dromes —
FB: Yeah.
AC: On your time off did you go to pubs or, what did you do with your spare time?
FB: I’ve never smoked except a very little when I was young. Never drank. Did I [unclear] I don’t think so. No. I used to go out with the lads and might go in one of the cafes down there or things like that but we didn’t have a lot of money did we so we didn’t you know. But no, I might go to the pictures now and again. It was only about fourpence I suppose. No. It was all right. But nice enough blokes. We never had every day off of course. [unclear] sometimes but I can’t really have any moans about it. You know, I mean you don’t go to war and expect to have strong wine and [unclear] and got plenty of money do you? And I never had plenty of money so I accepted. No. I liked Lincoln as I say. I don’t think I’ve been there since but I did, perhaps it’s because the RAF was mainly a lot of young blokes weren’t they? I think, you I know. I think so. But no, it was alright.
AC: What about RAF songs? Have you got any of those for me? Songs.
FB: Songs?
AC: From the RAF.
FB: Yeah. I can’t remember them off hand. There were a few of course. Some were a bit more than the others but basically as I say I think as one German bloke put it there’s only two real armies. The British Army and the German. He’s probably right. But no, we had some good blokes there. Obviously, we must have had a few blokes who were a bit, you know but judging by today I don’t think so. I mean even your hair cut. I can remember them saying, ‘Get your hair cut.’ It was no good saying you had it cut yesterday. ‘Well, they didn’t cut it right.’ No. There must have been some things I didn’t like. I mean I have to say at times I’d think, ‘Oh Christ, there they go. They are on a day off. We’ve got to go back and unload another load of bombs.’ But it might have been a bit of a moan. But wouldn’t be now though so —
AC: Did you get sent stuff from home? You know, parcels from home.
FB: A few. Some blokes might have got a few more but that never worried me but as I say I didn’t used to drink and I smoked very little which I soon packed up when I came out the forces. I haven’t smoked for I don’t know how long. And no, sometimes I would get bored and have a kick about. If you were a lucky boy you’d get in a team, you know. But I’m trying to think. Obviously, someone must have had a moan. It doesn’t matter what it is and who it is. Someone is going to have a moan, aren’t they? But I can’t think and I have to say by that and large I think most of the officers and people like that were quite good. They didn’t go out of their way to be bloody nasty to you or anything like that. Certainly not in the bomb dump. They’d got no time for that. So, you know. No. No. No. I’m saying that if I had to join the forces again maybe I’d have a different view now but they would be who I would join. Well, if you look in that what’s the name you’ll see a 617 Squadron plane there. That’s how, just on the top there. But no, I think, I can’t think [pause] I wouldn’t want to do it now of course. A bit older now [laughs]
AC: Did you ever think where the bombs were going?
FB: Oh yeah. We had an idea where they was going. We weren’t told but we had an idea by the load so we knew roughly where they was going and I have to say we never thought poor sods or anything like that. They didn’t think that about us and obviously we didn’t them. To us they were the enemy, that’s it. Unfortunately, I suppose the civilians weren’t. But I don’t believe our blokes were so any old how. I don’t think they were like that. I think they would, did what they had to do. I don’t think they just went and dropped bombs any how. I don’t think that. Apart from the photos they brought back. But no, I suppose, I mean when you look at some of these young kids today. Christ. I suppose they could be smart enough. No. I think [laughs] I don’t know why. When I, when I got posted, first one, you know for joining I don’t know why I didn’t think, oh Christ, fancy getting Bomber Command. Letting me in. But there’s no doubt about it Bomber Command did do a lot of work in spite of all the others. I’m not saying they didn’t but Bomber Command was bloody hard work and certainly for the crews. I mean, some were very unfortunate, weren’t they? But I think they were nice sort of blokes. So —
AC: You, you mentioned that you went abroad.
FB: Yeah.
AC: Was that with Bomber Command?
FB: Yeah. I went to Palestine I think it was. Probably a photo there. Palestine and Egypt. But I think by that time it would be about nineteen, I’d been in the forces about two years then and there were rather funny things with that at times. Very funny.
AC: What sort of funny things?
FB: Well, on one camp I was at we used to have a place about two, two miles from the camp and you’d go out and I went out there and by that time I had four blokes and I would be in charge of them. And somebody rang up one day and they said, ‘How many men have you got there?’ And I went, ‘You what?’ ‘How many men you got?’ I said ‘Well, you just tell me the code.’ ‘I’m an officer.’ ‘I’m sorry what you are but — ’ ‘Well, you tell me.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t.’ And he slammed the phone down. So, when we got back I told the blokes. They said, ‘Oh Christ,’ they said, ‘That’s one of the Stern Gang people.’ Them sort of people, ‘You were lucky.’ I said, ‘I know I was.’ Nobody would do it [unclear] And I think it was two months after that they done away with that. But so, considering we were bloody lucky really. So, I didn’t get too many of them, you know. We were —
AC: So, what was this place that was two miles away?
FB: Who I was with?
AC: No. You told me about a place that was two miles away from where you were.
FB: Oh, just a caravan. What it was for I don’t know but they used it for some reason or other. It was out there. Wasn’t out there much longer. I’m glad it wasn’t, you know. But obviously there must have been some nasty things going on at some places. We were lucky I suppose but there you go.
AC: And were you doing the same job in Egypt and Palestine?
FB: Mainly. But all to do with the armoury of course. Unless you wanted to do something else, I suppose. No point then. You were already in that sort of thing, weren’t you? But no. I was, I suppose from the time I finished my training basically that’s what I did. Armoury. I wasn’t asked [laughs] whether I wanted to of course. But, but as I say I don’t think it was all a bit of cake but I don’t think there’s a lot of people realise what they’ve got to thank these people. Particularly some of the air crew. There you go.
AC: So, after the war did anybody speak to you about what Bomber Command had done?
FB: I can’t think off hand, you know and I could have gone on. Strangely, I’d only been home about three weeks and I think I got a letter saying, perhaps you are fed up now being in civvy street and we, if you want to come back in to the Air Force you would get immediate upgrade, you know. Higher rank, you know. But I was home then. I’d got a couple of kids so I wasn’t interested in. I suppose I’m a little bit, you know. You never hear me making any complaint about what they were or even the ones that weren’t too good. If you was in the war you was in the war. And that’s it. Better than my brothers. They was in the Army. Well, I don’t know.
AC: Did, did you ever miss the RAF?
FB: I suppose I can’t really say yes because I was still only young. Back home, back in my job, I’d got two kids, earning good money and fairly, you know, no one saying what I got to do and if I wanted to go anywhere I’d go anywhere. But I still think that I know you get blokes saying you must have been bloody mad. But I really think that if you had to go, I didn’t have to I know but I think really by and large I think they were good lot of blokes really. There must have been some of the blokes that weren’t but by and large I think they were quite good and I can’t ever remember being in any real trouble, you know. I might have had my hat put on the wrong way but other than that I think they was quite good, you know and certainly the rest of the blokes and definitely the aircrew were. None of this, the aircrews that were in the station none of them [unclear] No. No. They’re all good blokes but perhaps we were just biased at the ones we chose.
AC: Did you stay in touch with any of your mates?
FB: No. Not now. I wouldn’t be. I did one or two. I saw one or two and then of course I went to visit one or two blokes who I was in civvy street with but that was a long while ago. I couldn’t even tell you their names now. So not, no as I say I married and got a couple of kids who have also got kids. So no, I don’t think and I stayed in the job I left right up until the firm closed down. And other than that, so I was still working when I was fifty eight so, you know.
[recording paused]
FB: To get to any reasonable rank you had four lots to get through there. AC1, AC2, AC1, LAC before you got to a corporal rank. So I, and I was, remember I was only young then but I did —
GB: You got promoted, didn’t you?
FB: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
GB: Was that a few things —
[recording paused]
FB: Really, what I told you. I don’t think I was deliberate. I’m just not that way. I’m not going to say I would like it. I might not like it but there you go. But for me you know but I’d like to think I did my best while I was in the force. I didn’t do anything really I might have done one, two or three silly little things but I didn’t do nothing that you shouldn’t do. So therefore, as far as I know I never had a bad word anywhere and I, as I say it takes you a while to get these promotions but when you think about it I was a boy in a sense but I don’t know if somebody said to me would you be proud to be in the forces? And I would say yes. The RAF. That’s what, I chose that. They didn’t put me in it. So, you know, and I’d sooner think I did the right thing even though I sometimes speak to people, ‘ Cor, Christ, I wouldn’t have liked to have been in that lot. Didn’t you have any time off?’ I said, ‘Time off? A bloody war on. What are you talking about? Time off.’ We did get a certain amount of time off but no I found most of the blokes and most of the officers and that, even the commanders I didn’t find them [unclear] I think if you behaved yourself they were alright. They don’t expect you to always, but they, they’re not nasty blokes like some of these people say. Bloody ridiculous. But there you go. But I’ve got a nice big one of those down at my daughter’s. That’s where that’s come from. But no —
AC: So, you came from quite a poor family.
FB: Yeah.
AC: Is that right?
FB: We were all poor in those days unless you were in work and had a job.
AC: And do you think you sort of built up your health and strength when you joined the RAF?
FB: Well, basically I must have done because I mean I had to leave school when leaving age was about fourteen, I suppose. Something like that. Because you needed to get out and get a job and I was fourteen and as far as I can remember to be honest now I don’t think I was, I’ve got a few things now but I was still doing things when I was eighty [unclear] And I think, I think the, I don’t know how bad the Army really is, or the Navy but I think the RAF was quite good and they were who we got the training from. They weren’t all mugs or anything like that but they were decent blokes. If you behaved yourself that was all they were asking for. So I’d already got, I don’t know perhaps I was just lucky. It might have been that.
AC: I’ve been told you did PT on Great Yarmouth beach. Is that right? Do you remember that?
FB: I don’t know whether I can. I must have done it. Must have done it. And route marches and things like that on a course like this, you know. Well, I mean I’d been in the Home Guard. I’d done a few. Not like that but it didn’t worry me. And I thought, by and large I still think if you’ve got to compare different countries I don’t think there’s one to [unclear] our country. Perhaps I’m just biased, you know.
AC: And when you were doing the Dambusters stuff.
FB: Yeah.
AC: Is that right you realised that there was something was going on? The bombs were a bit different.
FB: Oh yeah. I mean these were on a, weren’t like the ordinary bombs, you know. These were on a you know, on a [unclear] they looked like that but on a great big long what’s the name and you’d got up there. You’d got a crane but you’d no time for that. And so you’d dump them on as I say. Push the tray and then someone would take it over and take it out to the ‘drome and their blokes would put it on and they’d finish with it then. We weren’t of course because as soon as you got stuck down in would come a load more and you had a lot of work to do but so had lots of other blokes and some poor sods were in the front line so how can you, you know. I’ve never been that way. Just as now. I mean, lots of blokes now say, ‘Sod that,’ you know but I’ve never been like that and I like to think I behaved myself when I was in the forces. But yeah, I must have put some weight on. I think I must have been about, I don’t know eight or nine stone and a little while ago I weighed just on eleven stone. I don’t know. Twelve stone. Obviously, I don’t work now in that way. But no, I think when you talk about, we know it’s all rubbish about the grub‘s wrong but it’s not that bad and the cooks are not bad blokes either. So, I don’t think it was, it wasn’t like going to the Royal but I mean what do you expect? And I suppose we all had our little moans but I still think, I might be wrong but I think choosing the RAF was the wisest one. I think they were not so bad as maybe it’s different in the [pause] you know. I mean in the RAF you’re dealing with not only ground staff but you’re dealing with aircrew so I suppose perhaps don’t get so much, you certainly get some hard work but, you know. So —
AC: You mentioned the food there. I think sometimes you had to make do with sandwiches you weren’t keen on.
FB: Well, we did. Not the, all the camp didn’t. They were all right. 5 o’clock tea or whatever. We did because we had, as I say we got to get the loads out and you know talking about one lot, you’re talking about I don’t know could be ten or fifteen loads you got to get out and you’ve got to get them out and you’ve got to put them on there and you’ve got to send them out and the squadron armourer would take over then but their’s was not bad. They had a good job but I mean they didn’t have to get them out. They had to put them on. But that’s not, and that’s just them. You’ve got all the other bombs remember, even, you know for all kinds so you would be working all day a lot of the time and at times they’d say, ‘Well lads, we’ve got some nice grub for you coming out the line.’ [groan] Yeah. Because you’ll be working out here ‘til 8 o’clock. [laughs] So, but I don’t know. I suppose you must let them moan, isn’t it? I have a moan now sometimes. [unclear] I have to put him in his place. I don’t know. I don’t know how he’d have got on. I really don’t. Blimey, he’d been in the guardhouse and not come out for a long while I reckon. No. I think if you’re honest about it if you’re in the forces you’re in the forces and that’s that. There’s no good being [unclear] about it. You’ve got to [unclear] haven’t you up to a point so that’s it. I’ve never been in any trouble.
AC: Going, going back to your time in Palestine and Egypt I think there was some stuff going missing from your camp was there? Do you remember that?
FB: I can’t honestly say I do because we’re talking about ninety years ago nearly.
AC: In the latrines, was it?
FB: I thought basically where ever we were was not bad but I suppose I would say now, ‘Cor sod that. All that hard work,’ but like I say I was only twenty so, eighteen when I went in to the forces which I didn’t have to do but I did and so I don’t think, I still say that alright I’m biased I suppose but I still say the RAF is the best air force in the world. Whatever they say. Probably the other countries say the same but, you know.
AC: Is there anything I ‘ve not asked you about that you think might be of interest. Anything you can think of?
FB: Well, I can vaguely remember some. Vaguely, when there might have been some outside attack on the camp or something you know from outside. But I can’t even remember where they were or who they were. But they were nothing to them. Well, they were. They got in the way I suppose. But like as I said before there would probably be some things I wouldn’t know because like I said before if you was in the armoury that meant you had to work. There’s no doubt about that. Not like working in the office or some cushy little job. It wasn’t like that. You could be bleeding working hours all day. Grub brought out to you for your dinner. You know. Your dinner was, I don’t know 12 o’clock but about 8 o’clock at night. Get home by about often, where you was working at. You know. But no. I suppose in a way if I was one of these sort of persons that didn’t like [unclear] I’d probably say bloody [unclear] but I can’t say that. I’m not saying I would volunteer again. I’m a bit older now but you know. But no. I mean some of the times I went on was really good. Really good. But some weren’t so good of course. But there must have lots of things that went on that I can’t recall. I think I can vaguely, must have been something wrong with some, one or two aircraft got blown up somehow or other but I mean ninety years is a long while to think. I couldn’t even tell you the names of the camps I’ve been in. I couldn’t even tell you that and I liked that. We were there for a few years so I don’t know why. I don’t know and I don’t think [pause] I can’t say about today but I certainly don’t think it’s as bad as a lot of people would try and make out. If you’ve got to behave yourself you’ve got to behave yourself. So, I can’t say anything about simply because you know you think you’d go out when you liked and you can’t do that but I don’t think that’s myself. I’m not sure as I would do it again of course. I know better. But if we all thought that we’d all be marching along with the bloody Germans or something. You can’t do that. So, I don’t know.
AC: Well, that’s —
FB: Oh well. I’ll think. I could make it [unclear] When Gary’s, ‘What’s he on about. What’s he [unclear] I don’t know who they are?’ And I don’t know who you are of course, but I suppose I don’t know. I said, I don’t know [unclear] Bloody honour, I think. I don’t know but there you go, you know.
AC: Well, that’s, that’s been very interesting Frank and it will be very useful for our purposes so thank you.
FB: Well, as long as I’m only discussing things probably at one time I wouldn’t have bothered to answer it but I’ll try to be honest. I haven’t tried to pretend [unclear] several people or nothing like that. I haven’t done that. But what you really want it for I don’t know. But there you go, you know.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Frank Gerald Bassett
Creator
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Andrew Cowley
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2018-05-17
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ABassettFG180517
Format
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01:00:02 audio recording
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Language
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eng
Description
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Frank was brought up in Woolwich. He joined the RAF at the age of 18 and became an armourer. Frank describes the difficult physical work, loading and unloading bombs. He served 617 Squadron and loaded bouncing bombs, which were different. He remembers RAF Coningsby, RAF Scampton, RAF Waddington and RAF Woodhall Spa. He also went with Bomber Command to Egypt and Palestine. Frank expresses his pride in the RAF.
Spatial Coverage
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Egypt
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Middle East--Palestine
North Africa
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Sally Coulter
Carolyn Emery
617 Squadron
bombing
bombing up
bouncing bomb
civil defence
ground personnel
Home Guard
military ethos
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/717/10112/ABondsJA180702.1.mp3
36d84a4e75bb15dcf8ac8e3351f15fc5
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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Bonds, John Allbon
J A Bonds
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with John Bonds (b. 1920, 1388207 Royal Air Force).
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2018-07-02
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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Bonds, JA
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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AC: The date is the 2nd of July 2018, it’s 10.40am, I’m Andrew Cowley on behalf of International Bomber Command Digital Archive. I’m interviewing John Allbon Bonds at his address in Petwood Kent. Also present it his wife Ruth. So John, tell me about your early life, your family life, where you went to school, and the jobs you did before you joined the RAF.
JB: Well I went to school in a place called Blackheath Hill, you know Blackheath Hill? Well there’s a school there, and it’s a child’s school I went to there and I became top of the class at drawing. Anyway, after that when it was time to go, I went and then we moved to Blackheath Hill, Days Lane I think it was called, Days Lane, it’s on the left going up Blackheath Hill and from there I spent most of my life you know, when I was a boy. Now then, [background voices] from there, oh yes, as I grew up there, I couldn’t tell you exact date of birth or how long, I must have been something about twelve, something like that, and my father wanted to move out of there, so we moved out of there. He got a barrow, a long barrow, which was pushed, just for pushing, so we loaded our stuff onto where we were at the time and we put all of, most of our gear, which we had, and put it on to a barrow, and then we moved over to Downham, Downham Way. We had to shove, that was long way that was, wasn’t it, anyway, it took us a few hours [interference] and when we got there we stayed, it was near the railway and a cemetery and there I grew up a bit. I’m not sure about school, I don’t think I went to school, I’m not sure. Anyway, it was started, the war, then and I suppose I was going out one day and the aeroplanes were flying over the top and I looked round and they was ‘plop, plop, plop; they were just dropping bombs, smoke bombs, anyway I turned round and went back home again. And there, [sigh] I grew up from there and then, oh, I joined the Air Force. Yes, the war came on then, I joined the Air Force, and from there I was, I became an engine mechanic and I had to go to Blackpool, that’s where you learnt, I was three months there to learn the trade as I didn’t have a clue about aircraft. Anyway I learnt me trade there, and I was still over at Blackpool, and, oh god, Days Lane and [pause] from there I was called up. And I joined the Air Force, and while I was there I learnt the, tried to learn, the engines, which I did, and while I was still living over at, Downham Way again and my family and I went out for a drink to celebrate, and while I was there, there was a young girl kept eyeing me up. And eventually, after a few years, we got married and that was that. We had a child, just one girl, one girl, and she grew up okay, but she was a bit of a devil at times. Anyway from then onwards, I, she moved away, to somewhere, not sure about that, but anyway, and that just left my, oh that girl that I married, yes, where we had the baby, which was the girl that we, just moved away, and from then onwards I joined the, not sure what that was, oh, the Air Force. I was in the Air Force, that was it, I was on the way. [Sirens] Oh yes going from there I was on a, taken to an airport near Biggin Hill, that’s an air place there, that’s Spitfires, and we went up there and we, I did the engines on Spitfires. Anyway I was there for a few months, or maybe a year, I’m not sure, and they took me off there to, [pause] oh dear, can’t remember the place I went to. Anyway it was Bomber Command then, and it was all bombers, and they were, I’m not sure of the bomb machines, there were several names several of them there, bombers called, can you remember, name of bombers what we had?
AC: Well there was Lancaster, Wellington, Hercules, Mosquitoes.
JB: Yes. Wellingtons I think they were, I know it was a rotary one. Rotary, four engined rotary bombers and every now and again we used to get the siren sounded and course we all dived down the shelter, and sometimes the bombers just went straight over, and then one particular day they didn’t and they came over and we all dived in the air raid shelter, no, forget that, I’ve got to go, must remember something else. Ah, no that’s right, carry on, and anyway from then onwards I was on Bomber Command see and we all run for the shelter when they came over and then. [Pause] [Creaking]
AC: Can you remember what stations you were at?
JB: I can probably tell you if I saw a map. Think it begin with C. C.
AC: Coningsby?
JB: No. Not Cambridge is it? Is Cambridge round there? That’s probably where it was. Yes, there, that’s where one day I was working on the engines, and every now and again you had to take the sides off and then pull the propellers around to get, to make sure you had compression. Well anyway, I did this one one particular day and then suddenly bang! The engine went pop and it knocked me right up in the air, onto the floor. [Indecipherable] Lots of people came round to see what’s wrong and I said well, somebody must have switched the engine on! And we found out then that some silly so and so playing up in, it was an engine mechanic and there’s an engine [indecipherable] and something else, but they do all the, all the ins and outs, like well all things which the pilot uses, and anyway the stupid man there, he went, he pushed the wrong switch and it was on my bloody engine and it knocked me flying there. From then onwards I was in hospital and I was in there for about three weeks, and during that time the whole lot went abroad. They went to Egypt, where the war was, and from, after that I was back on the, when I was fit again I was on the aerodrome again, with the bombers and I was okay then. Then after that, if I remember correctly, very few people came back from Egypt, the ones that went, had to come there. That’s about it, that’s about all. I served me time on the, in the Air Force and that was it.
AC: You didn’t go to Egypt.
JB: No, cause I was in hospital, when they went, when they came back there was nobody on the aerodrome, well only a few people anyway. I was sent home and then I went just, I’m not sure I went to another aerodrome, I’m not sure, and I suppose I spent the rest of the time, my time just outside of Cambridge and I used to watch the bombers coming over and they used to come over to my aerodrome and try and bomb us [creaking] because we had bombers at that particular time. Yeah, they used to come over and our aerodrome was situated about twenty miles out and you see, when they came over to bomb London, I could see the flashes coming, from London, you know, where they dropped the bombs and from then onwards it was, and the war kept going on till it finished. Yes, and then I came out and that was it.
AC: What was your job before you joined the RAF?
JB: Nothing particular, I was just a normal.
RB: Builder.
JB: I had learned a trade, engines, that was in Blackpool. I didn’t have much of a trade, I was, ah, yes I did, I was a bricklayer, because when I left school I was a bricklayer and then I carried on after the war like, bricklaying.
AC: Did you have any choice as to what your trade would be in the RAF?
JB: No. Because they sent us to Blackpool, Blackpool was the centre of the particular bombers, I don’t know what it would be, because on engines then, not sure if they were rotary ones or just horizontal ones there, like the, our bomber. Er, gosh, makes you think doesn’t it, things you think of, things you don’t, can’t think of. Yes, and after that the war finished and I took up bricklaying again. I was good at it, I was one of the fastest and one of the neatest bricklayers going, I was wanted everywhere and they made me up as a foreman, and then I was, I just seemed to move around as a foreman and do bricklaying. Oh, there’s one particular one on the coast.
[Other]: Him and his partner built, were the ones, you know the Wembley Conference Centre. They were the head ones to do that, so then he sort of joined up with somebody on the same team and they became partners.
JB: Oh, Wembley Conference Centre, yes, we did, my partner and I, we did all the work inside and we were there a few, quite a few months, building up, and then they asked us to, when we finished they asked if we’d like to go abroad cause they were satisfied with our work, and we said yes, try it if you like and then we found out that it was the, was Dubai desert, right in the centre, and we stayed there working on, I’m not sure what it was, but we stayed there quite a few months and we had, when we went over there we took two or three people about what we knew, that we could, and we, the rest we used their people. They, supposed to go, every now and again, you know, their people would stop, go out, go ‘Allah, Allah’, hit the ground and anyway I used to go round and say get up you lazy sods! Anyway after that we came home, we finished the job, we came home, we were paid cause it was all you don’t know, no government takes any money off you, no and it was just the sheer money I got. From then onwards we, we got married and, three, three other, I mean first marriage, she died. Second marriage she died too, and then there’s Rose here.
AC: In, in your time in the RAF, can you remember things you did when you weren’t working? Where you went out, go to the pub?
JB: No, we were just walking round the fields, you know, and going on jobs. I can never remember going in the pubs or anything like that.
RB: No, he’s never drunk.
JB: And that was that.
AC: What about the living conditions on the aerodrome, what were they like: the food, that sort of thing?
JB: Oh, was quite good, quite good [creaking] specially trying to remember the airfield, yes, oh no, I can’t, but it’s the one, an airfield up -
AC: Is that in Lincolnshire?
JB: No. What’s the nearest airfield from here?
RB: Sorry? Cornwall? You never went to Cornwall.
JB: No, I said what’s the nearest airfield from here? Biggin Hill?
RB: Biggin Hill, you never went there. That’s just up the road. I really don’t know much more of his past life.
JB: I’m sure it was there.
RB: I think you were up country, you’ve always told me you were up country somewhere, but you never went to, you never came down to Biggin Hill. You never went to Cornwall. You did mention St Eval at one time, but I don’t know if that was just something, I don’t really know. I know my dad was at St Eval.
AC: But working on the engines, how did you find that? Did you take to it easily?
JB: Yes, yes. Not sure now.
AC: Did you get to know any of the aircrew?
JB: No.
RB: Yes you did, cause you said one was going to take you up! You used to go up after you’d done -
JB: On bombers yes.
RB: The pilots used to, after he was, worked on them, some of the pilots took him up.
JB: Yes. Some of them, just for safety’s sake for them [emphasis], they used to say well, do you want a trip? And I used [indecipherable] to sit by the pilot because then he felt happy because I, if it wasn’t for me and the plane crashed I’d go with him, wouldn’t I, that was the idea anyway! I’m sure it was Biggin Hill I was on for a while, there I packed up.
AC: So the flights you went on, were they just local or did you go on raids?
JB: Oh just all local, just trying the bombers out, they often used to do that – they would just “jump in,” just going to [indecipherable] then come down again.
AC: How did you find that?
JB: Oh, I loved it, yes, I loved that out there. Sit by the pilot, watching the pilot, seeing what he was up to, yeah.
AC: Can you remember what planes you went up in?
JB: They were bombers, I’m not sure exactly, they were English bombers, [clap sound] god help us. They were round engines. No, I just can’t go any further than that.
AC: Did you have to work on any planes that were damaged, in raids?
JB: No, no. I’m sure that we stayed on the bombers until I retired. They sent me, told me that I could go home then, and then I came home. I got something somewhere, I just can’t remember.
AC: Can you remember any of the people you used to work with?
JB: Well, the one that I did, when I was in hospital, he never came back, and that was about the only fellow that I knew, or used to talk about one another, you know, he was the only one I knew properly, as I say, never saw him again.
AC: What were your injuries you were in hospital for?
JB: Head. Head and shoulders. Yes, I think I was in there two, two, three weeks, something like that. It’s a bloomin’ job to remember.
AC: Was that a local hospital, or a RAF Hospital?
JB: I’m not sure, I don’t know, I’m not sure. It must have been a normal hospital, I remember a few people there which they had normal dressings on you know, like walking about. Apart from that just, my mind’s a blank. Except that I got married, [indecipherable] died, poor woman died, I got married again, and same thing happened, she went to hospital, didn’t come out. And the next one, she was a pest! [Laughter] No, she’s wonderful!
RB: [Laugh] Your coffee’s there, otherwise I won’t make you no more!
JB: Yes. She’s a real darling, she still is to me. Does everything I need.
AC: When you joined the RAF, did you volunteer?
JB: No, I was called up: twenty one. Yes, I was called up when I was twenty one. That’s when I chose the Air Force. I didn’t choose the type of aircraft, they told me I had to go, would I want to go on the working side, like engines, or airframes, well I said engines, cause it was happy work, it was good thing to remember when you came out. Anyway, as I say I had to go to Blackpool and learn the engines for about three months, and that was it, after that I had to, was put on to an airfield [cough] and went on Spitfires. After a time they took me off Spitfires and then put me on to the bombers, which I finally ended up.
AC: Were you working outdoors? Can you remember?
JB: On the airfield, when I was on the Air Force? Working there were houses which all the people --
RB: Hangars.
JB: Or hangars if you like, we used to sleep anywhere, mostly we slept on a bed, you know, empty hangar, you know, and that was that.
AC: Must have been a bit cold!
JB: Sometimes. No, you were well dressed, well warm, had plenty of stuff to put round you. It’s just that part I just can’t remember a lot of.
AC: Can you remember the names of any of the engines you worked on?
JB: No, if you knew any of the names I could probably tell you, but it’s such a long time.
AC: Do you still have any contact with anybody from the RAF?
JB: No, no.
JB: You can remember your call up number, can you?
JB: Something’s in my mind 1388217, but whatever that is I don’t know.
RB: Well it’s nothing I know of!
JB: 1388217, if that was, it might have been my number, I don’t know. Yeah, 1388217.
AC: Did you ever have any thoughts about what was happening when the bombers took off and went on raids?
JB: We just sat around waiting for them to come back again. Yeah, that was at the, main Air Force airfield just outside of Cambridge. That’s about all I can say really, just can’t think of anything else. It’s a long time ago to remember isn’t it. [Chuckle]
AC: Is there anything else you can think of that you believe we might be interested in about your time in the RAF?
RB: There’s something he’s talked about. Is there anything you remember that stands out, any particular time. Any particular time? Things you’d done when you were in the Air Force? You know, you were in there two years, it’s a long time. Places you went, things you done?
JB: No, just a normal LAC!
RB: He’s got quite a hold. Don’t upset that coffee.
JB: Well okay, right.
AC: Okay John, well it’s been interesting talking to you and thank you.
JB:L Sorry I can’t help you but it’s a long time ago.
AC: Of course. I understand.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with John Allbon Bonds
Creator
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Andrew Cowley
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2018-07-02
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
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Sound
Identifier
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ABondsJA180702
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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00:31:14 audio recording
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Fighter Command
Language
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eng
Description
An account of the resource
John Bonds was brought up in London and remembers bombs dropping near him. He joined the RAF as an engine mechanic and after training worked on Spitfires before being posted to bombers. He was injured in an accident in a hangar and spent some time in hospital before returning to work on engines once more, enjoying test flights with the pilots. After the war John returned to his trade as a successful bricklayer.
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Kent
England--Cambridge
England--Cambridgeshire
Contributor
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Anne-Marie Watson
ground crew
ground personnel
hangar
RAF Biggin Hill
Spitfire
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2563/44398/MParryWE1172401-220531-03.1.pdf
9c7a743718410b920ea1606373dcfa71
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
Parry, William Edward
Parry, W E
Description
An account of the resource
34 items. The collection concerns Pilot Officer William Edward Parry DFC (1912 - 1996, 1177401 Royal Air Force) and contains his decorations, documents and photographs. He flew operations as a pilot with 9 Squadron.
The collection was loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Frances Lee and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
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2022-05-31
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.
Identifier
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Parry, WE
Transcribed document
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Transcription
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[underlined] Notes of interview with William Parry IX Sqn. Ground Crew 11.8.94 [underlined] – Andrew Hobley.
Born 1912. left school 1928. Lived in Birkenhead.
Moved to Church Streton to work for G.W.R. Reserved occupation. Left job and joined R.A.F.V.R., intending to become air crew (1940) At Cardington failed as air crew as night vision insuffient.
Offered chance to return to job (as not conscripted) but asked for job to do with aircraft and flying. Sent to Halton on engineering course. On 2 week leave pass went through Coventry on day after raid with Fellow “Halton Brat” who came from Coventry.
Joined a Sqn. Dec. 1940 as L.A.C. After 4/5 months sent back to do conversion course at Cosford. Applied to go on flying boat Squadron (as Sunderlands always carried a ground crew member) Posted back to 9 Sqn
9 Sqn. had Wellingtons till June ‘42
Manchesters June 42 – Aug ‘42
Lancasters after.
Main fault of Lancasters tendency to swing to port on take off, due to airflow from stbd inner. Saw one pilot (new) swing to port, overcompensate to sbd, aircraft u/c. collapsed port wing ripped, fire started. Never saw crew leave a/c so fast! After fire & bomb load want off no need for crane to pick up pieces!
Sent on two short courses with A V Roe at Woodford, saw Lancaster assembly shop & test field. Came of [sic] line (three line, one a/c per day) oiled & fueled [sic], taken straight up by pilot and air-tested.
[page break]
As Sergt. Supervised maintainence [sic] of 3 a/c. towards end of war was acting F/Sgt in B flight, supervising 9 – 10 a/c. Not yet involved with repair work himself, but served air worthy Form. Normaly [sic] 3 men per aircraft, two engine fitters, one airframe fitter.
For ED656 – Engine fitters. Bob Taylor
Alan Willgress (from Kings Lyn)
Airframe fitter. ‘pop’ [deleted] Burckell [/deleted] Burcknell (from Bourne, Lincs) Aged 44.
Stayed with 9 Sqd. till demobalised [sic] 1946 Serviced a/c with “Tallboys” – beautifully engineered bomb, shame to waste such skill on a bomb! Held in b’bay by sling – would sometimes drop back on take-off or landing – tail would break through bulkhead at rear of b’bay, this evening drop [two indecipherable words] 14.1.44. [two indecipherable words]
After leaving R.A.F. – (would have prefered [sic] to stay in but wife preferred him out) G.W.R. did not want to know him. Finaly got job with local electricity board in [deleted]Salop [/deleted] Shropshire.
Enjoyed the wartime years, inspite of the dangers.
Little interfearence [sic] from higher authority.
1) Not normal to take off of both magnetos as each engine not working. All landed off base – went to check as crew said mag. not working. One mag. dead. Sqd. Leader with him decided to take off & did (Normal to take Sgt as F/Eng)
[page break]
2) A/C dropped in at half finished airfield, only half a runway – landed O.K. but take off problem. Took out all armament & ammo, minimum fuel load, picked up boost to engine and got a/c off.
3) [indecipherable word] A/C landed little Snoring. All gone bar two. Final one motors and airframe O.K. rest duff. Pilot W/op & Parry took off. No wireless, no IFF. Murky day went up to 2000’, above cloud, and flew over Wash. Pilot suddenly noticed little black puffs ahead – flak!! Dived through cloud to be seen – was Navy.
4) End of war – flew to little airfield (just liberated) to set up POW shuttle. Aim to get servicing party established, took two Lancs loaded with equipment spare wheels loaded into bomb bay. Got to take off – pilot found b’bay doors would not close because of load – took off with doors open – very draftty [sic] – landed with feet frozen.
5) Close shave with John Evans. Had problem with a/c. Parry asked for air test. Evans asked for Bill to come up too as F/Eng. Went to Wainfleet, droped [sic] six practice bombs. Had permission to return at low level – went down low over sea of Skegness, then over land 200’. Came over [indecipherable word] nr. Spilsbury [sic]. Evans dropped a/c right down low – on pull out at end of run, took 12’ off fir tree. Temp. in Std outer shot up. Parry cut & feathered as smoke coming out, rest of engines to full power took up to 2000’. Engine still smoking. Evans suggested may have to jump Parry not amused as not wearing harness (too uncomfortable) and ‘chute back by entrance door!
[page break]
Smoke died off – was in fact steam. Got back to base sbd outer u/s, main spar damaged. Evans faced Court Martial – but lost in action before this.
6) superstitious Fl Lght [sic] Jim Lawn (NZ) devout R-Catholic always had St. Christopher medalion [sic] on instrument panel. (flew later WS-V.) Parry had to make sure medalion [sic] moved if flew other a/c.
Completed tour & went to training command at Swinderby, killed in accident caused by ground crew. It severed [indecipherable word] line [underlined] never [/underlined] just blocked with rag. A/C. engine Caught fire. a/c crashed. 7 crew, Cairns & 2 ground crew killed. [indecipherable word] line had been plugged with rag and engine over heated. Buried at Newark war cemetery. (also 1/2 crew had no chutes). Crashed nr. Lincoln.
13.4.45 moved to Bardney. Paddy joined soon after outstanding pilot – Could turn Lancaster [indecipherable word] up. Close friends. Shared many drinks in Sgts Mess, Saraus [sic] Head Lincoln & pub by railway station.
Came from Waterford, Irish National and proud of it. Joined up to fly. Only captain of aircraft still Non-Com. Group [deleted] Commander [/deleted] Captain called him in & said should apply for commision [sic] Delighted to meet an Irishman who was still patriotic. Paddy told him what to do with Commission! Never less commissioned later.
Fearlessness probably killed him. Q F I given was 250’ too low, so crashed. Would let down of clouds till could see trees above clouds. Presumably pressing on, not holding back. Originaly [sic] told 2 crew survived, then only one (rear gunner)
PTO
[indecipherable line]
[page break]
Paddy’s opinion of war – no qualm Bomb as many as can!
Photo (ED656 & crew) taken after air test soon after crashed & killed)
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
Notes of Interview with William Parry 9 Squadron Ground Crew
Description
An account of the resource
A biography of Bill covering his RAF years.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Andrew Hobley
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1994-08-11
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Text. Memoir
Format
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Five handwritten sheets
Identifier
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MParryWE1172401-220531-03
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Steve Baldwin
9 Squadron
ground crew
ground personnel
Lancaster
Manchester
pilot
prisoner of war
RAF Cardington
RAF Cosford
RAF Halton
RAF Little Snoring
Sunderland
Tallboy
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
A name given to the resource
Dunn, George
George Charles Dunn
G C Dunn
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
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
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
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
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ADunnG150405, PDunnG1501
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.
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal 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
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sue Smith
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
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
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-08-17
1943-08-18
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
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
-
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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
Fellowes, David
David Fellowes
Dave Fellowes
D Fellowes
Description
An account of the resource
Eight items. Two oral history interviews with Flight Sergeant David "Dave" Fellowes (Royal Air Force), documents and a photograph. He flew operations as a rear gunner with 460 Squadron.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by David Fellowes 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
2014-11-25
2015-04-06
2016-08-08
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Fellowes, D
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AP: Ok.
DF: Why did I join the Royal Air Force? Well, we’ve got to go back in time. As a young lad my interest, or one of my main interests was in fact aeroplanes, my father was an engineer and he and I used to build model aeroplanes and fly them in the local fields. So I had this interest in aeroplanes, later I got, I had a bicycle, and when I had a bicycle I was able to ride out to various airfields, places like Brooklands, White Waltham, Cobham and see aeroplanes take off and land and I used to be this happy, happy little boy, well later on as I grew older the ATC was formed and I thought to myself, this is for me, so I joined the Air Training Corps and whilst I was in the Air Training Corps I did pass the air crew certificate of training and when I was seventeen I nipped up to the recruiting office and volunteered for the Royal Air Force. After a very short space of time I was sent off to a centre where I was given various tests and I was passed out as on a PNB course, they said, go home, oh and they gave me a VR badge and a number and that was it, I went home until the time I got called up.
AP: Right, so, when you were called up, can you go through the next bit?
DF: After having been called up I had this railway warrant, to send me to London to report to Lord’s Cricket Ground or somewhere very similar, to ACRC that’s the Air Crew Receiving Centre which were in fact large blocks of flats in the St John Wood area and also of course quite adjacent to London Zoo and it was here that we first got kitted out into uniform and one of the things I can remember about this uniform being kitted out, we went to Lords and we got our greatcoats and we were all standing in a long line with our greatcoats on and a corporal with a yardstick came along the back to make sure that every greatcoat was the same, bottom of the greatcoat was the same distance from the ground, this caused a little bit of a laugh really among some of us but anyhow we did it and then from there of course whilst we were at ACRC so we did various tests, night vision tests, various medical little tests to make sure that we were fit for aircrew.
AP: How about the next bit when you went to Crewe Station, how you managed to get into the RR, RAAF, Australian side?
DF: After I had passed out I was on, first of all let me go back, I was posted to an ITW down in Newquay and it was here that we did all our basic ground training for pilot, navigator, bomb aimer training, things like meteorology, how an aeroplane flies, everything appertaining to the Royal Air Force and aircrew. We learnt the Morse code, but not very well I might say. After ITW you passed out, you were sent then to a grading school and I went to number 15 flying Tiger Moths up at Longtown and it was there that I passed out and I went to Heaton Park outside Manchester, it was winter time, it was a horrible place, it was full horrible corporals, and we did nothing, there was a hold up on convoys going across the Atlantic or down to South Africa and whilst I was there a notice went up on a board and said, you can be an air gunner in four weeks or something like that, and I thought, that’s for me, if I want to get into this war, that’s what I’ll do so I did. I went to the orderly room, remustered and then I got sent down to number one AGS and it was here that I passed out and after passing out, sent home on leave, there I was, a sprog sergeant air gunner and I had a posting then down to 30 OTU at Hixon in Staffordshire. One of the places where we had to change trains was Crewe, to go then, go into Stafford, put on the train and in tumbled three Australian flight sergeant pilots, we got talking as one would and I said to one, whereabouts do you come from in Australia? And he said Sydney. I said, oh, I said, that’s a bit of a coincidence, but I have an aunt and uncle in Sydney they went out after the First World War, they have a sport shop. So he said, well, whereabouts do you know? I said, yes, they live in the district called Marrickville and the road is called Illawarra Road. Mh, he said, this is good, he said, what’s the name of your aunt? So I said, Mrs. Ivy Evans. Mh, he said, you wouldn’t like this, he says, my mother’s a chapel friend. So we had something in common, so he said to me, would I fly with him? And I said, yes, no problem, so there we were in a 30 OTU at Hixon, I was in his crew, the first one, then we set about looking for somebody else, we picked up an Australian wireless operator, Jack Wilson. We also picked up our bomb aimer, he was a Scot, from Glasgow, he was an apprentice telephone engineer, he was a handy lad cause they had a method of back dialling so we got cheap telephone calls, which was pretty good and our navigator, we looked for a studious looking lad, he was, he had a blonde hair, bushy eyebrows and he was a damn good trombone player, which was something else that we had in the crew. Then we found another gunner, after OTU, well, OTU lasted in two sections, first of all there is ground school and daytime flying, you go on leave for a week, come back and then we did night flying and more ground school. We did get into a bit of trouble there, I don’t think we were the best behaved crew, I know the worst case was our wireless operator, we were sitting in the Wellington waiting to take off and he was fooling around with his radio and he managed to pick up Glenn Miller playing In the Mood and of course he put it through to all our crew stations so we could hear it but alas also the authorities picked it up and oh well, we was in trouble for that but we got over it. And then from there we were posted up to 1656 I think it was, Heavy Conversion Unit on Halifaxes and there we converted onto Halifaxes and then from Halifaxes the skipper was told he was going to go onto Lancasters, so we did a three day course, I think it was the same place, could have been Finningley on the Lanc finishing and it was there that our skipper said, you boys had you like to come to an Australian squadron? And we all said, oh yes, that’s a good idea, why not? And so we were fortunate and we got posted to 460 Squadron at Binbrook. Now this was good because Binbrook was a pre-war station and had married quarters, all lying empty because you weren’t allowed to have your wives or families with you, so each crew was allocated a married quarter and ours was number 13, well, we weren’t superstitious so we settled in, you got a coal and coke ration, you went to the mess for your meals and otherwise you were just left to your own desert. The normal procedure when one joined a squadron was in fact that first of all the crew would be allocated to a flight, in our case we went to B Flight, Bob Henderson was the Flight Commander, he was a very nice chap, he then sent us on a, a nav-ex I suppose you could call it, we went on a long training trip, when we came back, what normally happened would be the captain, your skipper would go with a qualified crew on his Op to see what it was all about, but that didn’t happen to us, the Station Commander was a gentleman by the name of Group Captain Hughie Edwards VC DSO DFC and quite a character, and he turned round and said, oh, take Whitmarsh and his crew on their first trip on block, well, he did, the trip in fact that day was to Freiburg, down in South West, yes, South West Germany and away we went, it was very good, he was very good, he just called us by our Christian names and away we went, and we got just past the bombline, this was in 1944, and we were passing over an American sector, apparently, when all of a sudden we got hit by flak from the Americans, well somehow in those days there wasn’t such a very good feeling between the Americans and the Australians and also it upset us Brits too at the time [laughs], anyhow he did talk about dropping a bomb on them, keep them quiet but he didn’t. On we went to Freiburg but were warned that of course when we got there, you’d most likely do his usual trick, go down and have a look to see how main force were getting on. This he did and then of course, after he’d done what he wanted to do, we climbed back up and flew home. And that was my first introduction to operations. On 460 Squadron after you had kind of settled down, proved that you were up to the work and up to the job and you’ve done about five or six ops, you were given your own aeroplane. In our case our aeroplane was O-Oboe. Now the crew that flew Oboe previously came to see us off and we took it over on our first op in Oboe, when we got out there of course one of the things we were introduced to was the ground staff of which there were four, there was an Australian sergeant, he had lovely black, curly hair, he looked more like an Australian gypsy than anything else but he was in charge of the aeroplane, we also had an armourer, engine fitters and airframe fitter, now those boys were always there before we took off, they were always there when we got back and we were part of the team. They used to call themselves the dayshift, we called ourselves if you like the nightshift and it worked very well and of course the sergeant we used to see in the mess, no problem at all but the others, airmen, we used to take out, oh, every ten days or so, we used to take them down to the village pub and have a few beers together, we were part of a team.
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 David Fellowes. Two
Description
An account of the resource
David Fellowes tells of how he used to build model airplanes and fly them in the fields when he was a boy. The son of an engineer, he first joined the Air Training Corps and then volunteered for the Royal Air Force at the age of 17. Describes his training at various stations and converting onto Halifaxes at 1656 Heavy Conversion Unit and then onto Lancasters. Remembers being posted to 460 Squadron at RAF Binbrook, from where he flew his first operation as an air gunner, when they were targeted by friendly fire on their way to Freiburg. Emphasizes the sense of comradeship arisen between the air crew and the ground crew.
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
2016-08-30
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AFellowesD160830, PFellowesD1501
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Peter Schulze
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
England--Cumbria
England--Lincolnshire
England--London
England--Manchester
England--Staffordshire
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Freiburg im Breisgau
England--Lancashire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:13:55 audio recording
1656 HCU
30 OTU
460 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bombing
crewing up
ground crew
ground personnel
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
military ethos
military service conditions
Operational Training Unit
RAF Binbrook
RAF Finningley
RAF Heaton Park
RAF Hixon
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Temple, Leslie
Leslie Temple
L Temple
Description
An account of the resource
The collection consists of one oral history interview and one warrant related to Warrant Officer Leslie Temple (b. 1925, 1893650 Royal Air Force). The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Leslie Temple and catalogued by IBCC staff.
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.
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound. Oral history
Text. Service material
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Temple, L
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AS: Yes we are, we’re ready to go. Okay, this is, we’re ready to start. The machine’s running I think. Yes okay, so this is Andrew Sadler interviewing Les Temple, Mr. Leslie Temple, at his home in Ilford on Tuesday the 27th of September 2015 for the Bomber Command Archive. Thank you very much for allowing us to interview you Les.
LT: Good.
AS: Can I start by asking you about your date and place of birth?
LT: My birth date is 12th of January 1925 you see. Now I was born in the East End of London, and I had an older – my parents who – my father had come from Poland when he was fourteen and my mother as a young baby when she was born, she came over to England with her mother, and my parents had my brother Arthur. He was four years older than me, Arthur, and he went into the Army. When the war started, he was conscripted into the Army and in 1941 he was sent to France and there lo and behold in France, he was captured and made a prisoner of war. He was a prisoner of war for four years [emphasis] in Germany, and there’s quite a bit of history in his name obviously. But in the meantime, whilst he was away I reached conscription age and living in the East End of London at that particular time – when I was born, I was born and my brother was a bit older [emphasis] than me, so he didn’t sort of used to do the same, same things [laughs] together. He went into the services and then we moved at the beginning of the war to Leyton [emphasis], E10, and from there I was conscripted at the age of eighteen and I was conscripted for the RAF because I had spent four years in the Air Training Core [emphasis]. I was in the Air Training Core, I was conscripted, and in effect I was happy to be going into the RAF and for air, aircrew duties. And I went in initially as a radio operator, wireless operator and in that time, before that time I had been at school in Leyton, E10, at which I was sorted out there because I was always receiving first place in class – and my father was a tailor, and in effect he [laughs] couldn’t afford for me to go on to higher sort of class, school when I reached the age of fourteen and he, I had to go to work. But the fact was, is that I had my school reports there [laughs] of which I have first place in every one, and in that respect the school wanted me to go onto higher school, Leyton County High School, and, but my father I’m afraid in this respect he wasn’t earning much as a tailor and he couldn’t afford for me to go on in school, and I had to go to work. And strangely enough my first job was for the London County Council, Mr. Charles Leyton who I worked for in the office when I left school at the age of fourteen, he was the principle of the London County Council [emphasis]. So he took me into the London County Council and I was worked, worked there for a couple of years. And I found that I couldn’t earn enough to satisfy my parents who it was rather shame that they, you know, things weren’t all that good in those days in the, in the tailoring trade and so on and so forth. So it went on that I found various jobs to improve my mode of being able to live and earn money and I went into the insurance business [emphasis], and I started at a pretty young age in the insurance business, learning the office work and so on and so forth, and then I went into, into the Air Force because the war started and I was taken in as a radio operator, and in effect I had joined the Air Training Core during that period, and I was four years [emphasis] in the Air Training Core, which I did, did quite well, and as you can see here, the history is even in here about me being in the Air Training Core, and they decided it would be good for me to go in as a radio operator into, into the RAF.
AS: Why did you originally go into the Air Training Core, what inspired you?
LT: Well it inspired me because my brother [emphasis] was going to be conscripted in the Army, and I felt that I was capable of handling the things required in the, in the RAF, and I was pretty good at the Morse code and one thing and another in the Air Training Core, and so I applied to, to go into the RAF, and that’s how I was conscripted at that particular time for the RAF. And in effect [paper shuffles] let me see now [continued shuffling, pause]. Ooh, yes [shuffling, pause]. [Reading]: ‘confounding the enemy, the RAF Jewish Special Operators of 101 Squadron, Bomber Command.’ Now in the RAF I was, I did all the examinations and so, learnt the Morse code pretty quickly and so on, and as it got in the book here, [reading]: ‘much of the history of the secret telecommunication of war, against the Germans during the Second World War is still classified and shrouded in mystery, including the radio countermeasures of RAF Squadron 101.’ Now –
AS: So you were in 101?
LT: I was in 101 Squadron you see. Now 101 was a particular – [reading]: ‘it was a great history of the advancement made of telecommunications in the RAF because we were using the special Morse code details for confounding the enemy and also learning what they were transmitting, and we’ – the normal – I went, I went into various [emphasis] stations – I’ll show you, just a moment [pause, papers shuffle]. Well I had it here before, it’s all down here. [Reading]: ‘confounding the enemy in the RAF Jewish [unclear] 101,’ right. Right, my number was 1893650, would you like to make a note [?]. [Pause, continued shuffling].
AS: Good, carry on.
LT: Now, as it says here, [reading]: ‘1893650, Flight Sergeant Leslie Temple, born in 1925 to Jane and Solomon in Stepney, joined the RAF in January 1943 aged eighteen, but has served in the Air Training Core from the age of fourteen. He received initial air training at Bridgnorth in Shropshire, on De Havilland Dominies and Proctors. Radio training at Madley, acclimatisation on B17s at Sculthorpe in Norfolk and a Lancaster Conversion Course at Lindholme in Yorkshire, before being sent as a full flight sergeant aged nineteen to join 101 Squadron.’ I don’t know whether you’ve heard of 101 before, have you?
AS: No, not really.
LT: No, well – [reading]: ‘to join 101 Squadron at Ludford. He’d learnt German at school and spoke fluent Yiddish at home.’ Well you know Yiddish was the language which the foriegn Jews used when they came to London. They couldn’t speak English properly so they were able to speak easily to each other. [Reading]: ‘but the SO work was so secret that they had no idea until he arrived at Ludford,’ – I arrived at Ludford Magna, that was the station that I arrived at. They used to call it not Ludford but Mudford [laughs] it was so, so bad. [Reading]: ‘until he arrived at Ludford why he’d been sent there. He completed thirty missions between 22nd of June against the Reims Marshalling Yard and 28th of October 1944, Cologne.’ So I did my air operations between 22nd of June and 28th of October 1944, on Cologne.[Reading]: ‘other raids from his still prized logbook including Essen, Frankfurt, V1 [?] sites, through concentrations after D-Day, Cahagnes [?], Hamburg and Sholven. Special operators worked intensely on the journeys out and home for several hours, but over the target could only watch. Once the bombers were near the target, it was obvious to the enemy where they were going, so jamming [?] was superfluous.’ When you got near the target you stopped jamming [?] you see, only when you was coming to the target and listening, listening into what the Germans were saying. [Reading]: ‘Leslie Temple explained that the rear gunner in Able ABC Lancasters,’ ABC is you know, Airborne Cigar, that’s ABC – ‘had heavier machine guns than usual because the planes were particularly vulnerable transmitting over enemy bombers.’ Now did you see a thing, Lancaster Bomb, Lancaster Bombers –
AS: Yes.
LT: Ah it’s under, under this book there.
AS: Yeah.
LT: You see now, Lancaster Bombers – the compliment for a crew for a Lancaster was seven, a long was seven. But 101 was the only squadron that had eight [emphasis], and we had eight because we were a special aircrew, squadron which was trans, doing the special operators work, interfering with what the Germans were transmitting to their fighters and so on. Now, the fact that I had a knowledge of the German language , the fact that I had a knowledge of the German language made me that eighth member of the crew, because when I was, when I went to, what’s her name at the beginning, my first squadron at Ludford – I, I had this crew, I joined the crew which I joined because it was time they arrived and I arrived you see, to make up the eighth, eighth member. I did six operations with them, but the skipper, he used to mess about with ladies and so on and so forth, and what happened was he, the crew was disarmed and so on, and taken off [emphasis]. And there was I, left at Ludford without a crew [emphasis]. And I, I had done six operations with them. Well when I was there on my own it was lucky for me that Eric Neilson came in with his crew, and he had seven members of his crew who came to Ludford Magna, to 101, to start operations. So they said to me ‘right, you join him as a special operator.’ Now aircraft in 101, their machine guns were point five. The normal machine gun in a Lancaster and aircraft used by the RAF were 303s. We had heavier machine guns in 101, and it was a wonderful reason that we had [laughs] point fives, because they were very useful on many occasions, and I joined them as a special operator. Now I don’t know whether you know, the Lancaster was converted to a special operation aircraft because when you got into a Lancaster, behind the door on a normal Lancaster was a bed. Well on our Lancasters, 101 Squadron, the bed was taken out and the place was made for the special operators. I had my recording equipment and my equipment to listen, listen in to the German transmissions, and I could hear the German language and I could understand what was going on, and I would transmit that to my skipper when anything was happening that was useful to us. And so we had eight in the crew. Our Lancaster was converted from seven individuals to eight [emphasis], and I was the special operator, and the whole [emphasis] squadron was this way. We all had eight in the crew [phone rings]. Oh, excuse me a minute, is that –
[Tape paused and restarted].
AS: Okay, do carry on.
LT: Right, now I was up to this question – what, have you been over this question of why we had eight, eight members?
AS: Yes.
LT: You’ve been over this, and where they were situated and so on –
AS: Yep.
LT: And so forth. Now where were we up to –
AS: You just told me that.
LT: Yeah. Now when, when I had got my crew, Eric Neilson came in and I joined them. I had done six operations, you see when – you know the tour was at thirty, you were supposed to do up to thirty you see, so I did twenty-three with them, which is in my logbook and, for you to see, and in effect, we were getting on extremely well. I was, you know made[laughs], made right for them, but I couldn’t do the full tour that they were doing, you see. They would have to do the thirty and I would only have to do twenty-three to do. And in effect this, this situation developed where I did the twenty-three with them and I had to come off because I done thirty. I did six and I did another one with another crew, just one, to finish off my thirty [emphasis]. And Eric Neilson had to get another operator you see, so in effect as it says here in this history, that we got on very well together, we had a number of difficult situations to do, but the worst operation we had was on a raid on Kiel [emphasis], where we went to Kiel [papers shuffle]. We took off from Ludford just before midnight, at twenty-three fifty-five for the heavily defended German naval base at Kiel. The Lancaster was blown slightly off course over the North Sea so the bomb aimer had to ask that they, that they fly round for a second time over the target to ensure accuracy, which was always extremely hazardous. As we did not jam [?] over the actual target, I could watch everything from the astrodome. I used to go into the astrodome when we reached the target area, because I had to come off my, my equipment and we started doing our bombing [emphasis], and dropping, and dropping the bombs you see, and as it says here: [reading]: ‘there was a solid curtain burst and hellish flak, wall of searchlights across the sky. Other bombers all around waiting to release their bombs, and predatory German night fighters spitting canon fire. Finally we dropped our bombs on target, but were suddenly nailed by a master searchlight on the way out. Immediately, a dozen others combed us at twenty thousand feet.’ All these other searchlights, we got on a master searchlight caught us in its [laughs] light and the other searchlights came on and we were combed at twenty thousand feet. [Reading]: ‘extremely German flak opened up and we were scarred with shrapnel which simply passed through the airframe, over our two port engines and burst into flames. I feared the worst as I could not bail out over the North Sea at night.’ We were over the North Sea and we had these two engines caught [laughs] fire. [Reading]: ‘our quick thinking Canadian skipper, Eric Neilson, who was given the DFC from this operation, nose a Lancaster down and pulled out of the beam at five thousand feet. The pillar and flight engineer, the pilot [emphasis] and flight engineer managed to extinguish the flames over the North Sea using the internal extinguishers, and despite no power from the directional equipment because of the two cut engines, our skilled navigator used’ –. Now this is – he, our navigatior, he always carried a sextant. You know what a sextant is, for direction and so on and so forth, and [reading]: ‘stars trying to get us home on two engines. We crash landed at Ludford in Lincolnshire and our back at our aerodrome, a special crash landing base at about four a.m. with over a hundred [emphasis] holes in the Lancaster.’ We had over a hundred holes in it, and er – [reading]: ‘after debriefing, I laid on my bed and could not stop shaking for twelve hours. The MO said the best cure was simply to get back up again soon and of course we did.’ No counselling in those days, so that was a pretty difficult situation, which we [laughs], we got, we came back on two engines and crash landed [laughs] and so on and so forth. Now tell, I’ll tell you something that we haven’t written down. The way to get your wheels down in a Lancaster was through hydraulic tanks. Now, if you were out too long, or else [?] they were punctured, the tanks then you couldn’t get your wheels down. The only way you could get down was you had to crash land. So we couldn’t get our wheels down when we got back to our base [emphasis] and the pilot said to us ‘right boys, you’ve got to go and do business [laughs] to pee, to pee in the tanks, the hydraulic tanks.’ So we had to go and pee in the hydraulic tanks, and we managed to get sufficient water to get the wheels down, you know, and that was the only way we could get down safely [emphasis] by doing that. And we just [emphasis] got down, you know, it was a tremendous situation otherwise we were going to have to crash, crash land without any wheels you see, and that was, that thing on Kiel. And that really, on the 23rd of July 1944 was the worst possible trip that we had, and in my thirty operations that was the – because we got shot up and we had, you know, all the situations that developed, being involved with the Germans at that time, but anyway, we managed, managed okay. So is that quite clear to you?
AS: How many more trips did you have to do after that? Where was that in the –
LT: Er –
AS: In the order of them?
LT: That [papers shuffle] that was my twenty-third [emphasis] operation that was.
AS: So you got another seven to do?
LT: Another seven to do, yeah. And you know, it was very, very close. After serving in 101 I was told to take a long leave and thereafter working as ground crew, and [long pause] –
AS: So, so you did your thirty and after that you worked on the ground. You didn’t have to do anymore?
LT: I didn’t have to do anymore, no.
AS: Right.
LT: I worked on the ground –
AS: ‘Cause I read some people had to do another thirty and then –
LT: Oh well that is if you did a straight [emphasis] thirty you weren’t forced [emphasis] to go do a second operation, operational trip. They asked [emphasis] you if you wanted to go you could go, and you found a suitable crew you could go. But I’m afraid that doing thirty trips in a Lancaster at that particular time [laughs] it, it didn’t sit, make you want to go back and have another go [laughs], I can tell you that much.
AS: Were there many people who did thirty, I mean, I mean it was incredibly dangerous wasn’t it?
LT: Oh yes, oh yes.
AS: You must have lost a lot of comrades on the way.
LT: Well, I lost my best pal in the Air Force, a boy named Jack Whitely. We were on a raid going out, and we were circling off the coast, off the English coast, waiting to go out when we saw an explosion in the sky, and what happened was two aircraft had collided because when you were going out, you went to the coast and you all got into your positions. There might have been three or four hundred aircraft, but you all had certain times where you would take off for your target you see, which would put you in a certain position. Well, at some times you got there a little early, you couldn’t go, go off for your operation, so you had to wait. All you’d do is you’d go round and round and round, you see, waiting for your time to come up while you went on operation. Well, at times you were very, very close to other aircraft, especially at night and they were very much a number of collisions. And Jack, real name Jack Whitely who I went through radio school and everything, and as a matter of fact I’ve got information here from his family. They wrote to me, I think it’s in that file there. They wrote to me and you know, because Jack and I we used to be, go to each other’s homes and so on and so forth when we were on leave, and he got killed. They fished him out the, fished him out the sea. And this is the sort of life you had in the Air Force. You didn’t know where you – you made friends but you didn’t know what was going to happen on your next, on your next, next trip.
AS: Your thirty trips, how far, how far apart were they?
LT: Thirty – well in the winter they were further apart than in the, in the summer. A lot depended on, on the weather. I did my, my thirty took me about what, four, four, about five months it took me, yeah. And sometimes it took much longer, it took seven or eight months, and in the summer, if we were completely in the summer weather, well you were that much better off [laughs] as far as getting down quicker. But a lot of boys went back and did second, second tours. But I found myself that getting through one tour was heavy enough.
AS: You’d had your luck, and you were sticking with it.
LT: Yes, definitely [emphasis], definitely.
AS: So when you, then you became ground crew. What did you do with the ground crew, as a ground crew?
LT: Well, when I went back on ground crew I was teaching other boys, you know, carrying on, on various squadrons to teach other boys what you learnt when you [emphasis] were flying, and that’s, that’s what I did, and it, it was 1944 and we were getting towards the end [laughs] of things then. We were finding things that promised, made, we made promises [emphasis] to finish, finish the war then and it, it was a great life at the time because I’d never been abroad when I went into the Air Force. I’d never been abroad or anything like that, and it was a totally, totally different life. And since then it’s been seventy, seventy years [emphasis], seventy years since –
AS: Hmm.
LT: Finishing a tour.
AS: When you did the ground, when you were with the ground crew, was, where were you stationed then? Was that still in Lincolnshire?
LT: Oh yes, yes, Lincolnshire. I think I got [papers shuffle] something here [long pause]. Got here, [reading]: ‘there was little doubt that outside the small circle of 101 Squadron veterans, few knew, few know the important dangerous work of the special [emphasis] operators and their Lancaster crew comrades. Less still, the role of the Jewish SOs,’ special operators, ‘it is to be hoped that this study will bring deserved, if belated recognition to this brave band of brothers.’ Now where did I – [papers shuffle, long pause], hmm.
AS: So how long were you – was it ‘til you were demobilised at the end?
LT: What come off aircrew?
AS: Yes. I mean when you, when you left the RAF, when was that?
LT: I left the – well I was, what, in the RAF nineteen, nineteen, what – just a minute I’ll give you the details, are just here [papers shuffle, long pause]. Hmm, excuse me, looking this up. [Long pause] 24th [?] 1944 [long pause]. [Reading]: ‘from October 1943, Squadron 101 flew two thousand, four hundred and seventy-seven sorties with Airborne Cigar from Ludford Magna. They dropped sixteen thousand tonnes of bombs between January 1944 and April 1945 alone [emphasis], and flew more bombing raids than any other Lancaster squadron in Group 1, losing one thousand and ninety-four crew killed and a hundred and seventy-eight prisoners of war.’ Now, we lost more individuals in our squadron than any other RAF squadron –
AS: Mm.
LT: You know. [Reading]: ‘the highest causalities of any squadron in the RAF,’ 101 Squadron. It’s a good thing for you to have noted. [Reading]: ‘it dropped sixteen thousand tonnes of bombs between January forty-four and April forty-five, and flew more bombing raids than any other, than any other Lancaster squadron in Group 1.’
AS: Hmm.
LT: Yeah. [Reading]: ‘losing one thousand and ninety-four crew and a hundred and seventy-eight were prisoners of war. The highest casualties of any squadron in the RAF.’ It, we were a tough, a tough squadron.
AS: So what date did you, were you demobilised from the RAF?
LT: What date –
AS: Yes.
LT: Did I, excuse me [papers shuffle, long pause]. Well I finished my tour 23rd October forty-four. Now [papers shuffle]. Now, 28th of October forty-four – I started operations [continued shuffling] in June forty-four to October forty-four. That’s when, that’s my whole –
AS: That’s from your logbook.
LT: Yeah.
AS: But when did you actually leave the RAF?
LT: The RAF was in, in forty, forty-five I think. I can’t –
AS: Did you leave immediately after the war finished?
LT: Er, yes [shuffling]. I’ve got a note somewhere when I left the RAF.
AS: What did you do after, after you left?
LT: What did I do?
AS: Hmm.
LT: I became – I had one or two little business activities, but I went into insurance business. I was an insurance broker for many years. I had my office in The Temple. You know The Temple?
AS: Mm.
LT: Smiths [?], Selma [?] and Temple and Company, Temple Chambers, Temple Avenue, East E4, that was, that was what I was involved in –
AS: Did, did –
LT: When I came out the RAF.
AS: Did you find it easy to settle back into civilian life or?
LT: Well, the early days weren’t easy, the early days weren’t easy. But – because I did a lot of cold calling on businesses in those days, a lot of cold calling to build up a basic clientele. But then I, I got known quite well. I had an office in Shoreditch, and then I went up to Ludgate Circus, and then from Ludgate Circus we were doing well with the Norwich Union, and they said to me that ‘we’ve got offices in The Temple.’ They owned these offices in the Norwich Union and ‘we’d like you to come in there and operate [laughs] and we can do business together.’ So that’s the way – until my retirement at sixty-five. Really I retired too early [emphasis]. I could have gone on working and it’s, I mean when you look at it gently, I’m now coming up ninety-one. I’m retired, you know, twenty-six, twenty-six years ago [laughs], it’s, you know to fill in your time over those years it takes, it takes a lot of doing. And I’ve filled in a lot of my time with doing building for other people sort of thing, going, passing on my know how to other people, and that’s the, that’s the way it’s been.
AS: And tell me about your comrades in your crew. You told me you kept in touch with them.
LT: Yes. Well did you see that letter –
AS: I did yes.
LT: From my skipper?
AS: Yes I did. Your skipper Eric Neilson.
LT: Yeah.
AS: Tell me, tell me, tell us about Eric.
LT: Eric’s, Eric was a – well he had his own aircraft in Canada. He he had his own plane, and he wanted me to go out there but I missed it. I didn’t go out to Canada and then things, things happened that are just right. We were writing, phoning each other and so on, keeping, keeping in touch [emphasis]. I kept in touch with about four of my crew. The one you saw the card, just died, Stan Horne my navigator. Kept in touch with him, and with Eric, Eric died pretty early [emphasis] you know.
AS: Did he? And he was the one who was the deputy prime minister in Canada.
LT: In Canada, yes. And you can see in your, in the book there’s some very nice pictures of him.
AS: And this is his memories, his autobiography we’re looking at.
LT: Yeah [shuffling papers]. See there’s our, there’s our crew there –
AS: Oh yes [long pause, shuffling].
LT: Lovely man [shuffling continues]. Life moves very quickly.
AS: And after the war what – I mean how do you think that Bomber Command were treated? Have you got any opinion on that?
LT: On Bomber Command – well no not really. I haven’t got a lot of experience [emphasis] with Bomber Command.
AS: No.
LT: But I’ve kept together, yeah I’ve been going to the RAF club regularly. I still go there occasionally.
AS: In Pall Mall?
LT: In Pall Mall, yes.
AS: Yes.
LT: Opposite the memorial.
AS: Yes.
LT: And go up there and, you know, because it gets to the stage when you’re here, you know, you make friends with someone and then they’re gone, die [laughs] you see. And there’s a session, session, a procession [emphasis] of men dying now –
AS: Hmm.
LT: Because everybody, everybody will, we’ll all go. I don’t know when, how much longer [laughs] I’ve got, you see. But it’s been a great [emphasis] experience in one’s life, to have gone through, gone through all this. It’s – I could go on for, on for days [emphasis] going over, going over things that –
AS: Shall we, erm, well shall I stop the recording, and we’ll look at some of the –
LT: Yeah.
AS: Archival documents –
LT: Did you –
AS: Materials that you’ve got. The book that you’ve been reading from – can I just –
LT: Did you see this letter?
AS: I’ll have a look at it in a second. The book you’ve been reading from is “Fighting Back: British During Military Contribution in the Second World War” by Martin Sugarman isn’t it?
LT: That’s right, yes.
AS: Yes. Okay, thank you very much, I’ll turn the recorder off now, and –
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Leslie Temple
Creator
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Andrew Sadler
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-10-27
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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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00:49:39 audio recording
Language
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eng
Identifier
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ATempleL151027
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Type
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Sound
Conforms To
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Pending review
Description
An account of the resource
Leslie Temple spent four years in the Air Training Corps before joining the Royal Air Force as a radio operator. He completed a tour of 30 operations with 101 Squadron at RAF Ludford Magna, as a German speaking special operator. He describes how having an eight man crew and extra equipment affected the interior of the Lancaster bombers. He reads from “Fighting Back: British During Military Contribution in the Second World War” by Martin Sugarman throughout the interview.
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Katie Gilbert
101 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
B-17
Dominie
fear
ground personnel
Lancaster
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
Proctor
RAF Bridgnorth
RAF Lindholme
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF Madley
RAF Sculthorpe
searchlight
wireless operator