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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/159/1978/Harry Parkins.2.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/159/1978/AParkinsHW150605.1.mp3
de326ae070fd9023083e750133402e80
Dublin Core
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Title
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Parkins, Harry
H W Parkins
Description
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Five items. Two oral history interviews with Harry Parkins (891679 Royal Air Force), his logbook, identity card and one photograph. Harry Parkins was a flight engineer with 630 Squadron and 576 Squadron and flew 30 night time and 17 daylight operations from RAF Fiskerton and RAF East Kirkby.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Harry Parkins and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-06-05
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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DE: Harry, could you tell me a little bit about your early life?
HP: Yes, when I lived in London, I lived near Mare Street, Hackney and at the bottom of our street there was a building where they, actually they were faking antique furniture, and I got talking to the son of the owner, he said we’d like someone to come in and get tea and cakes for the workers to save them going out so I said OK I can do that on, after school hours and at the weekends whenever they were working and the owner was called a Mr Chiswell and he told me that the White Horse Inn was where Dick Turpin used to come when the police were after him and he’d gallop in through the door and down and there was a tunnel that, that went all over London, a secret tunnel and he said and that’s why they couldn’t catch him, and he took me down and showed me the tunnel which was quite creepy really, and I got on famous [sic] with Mr Chiswell, and he had a son that was in charge of the French polishing side of the furniture cos they didn’t have sprays in those days and I learnt quite a lot about French polishing and what they did with the furniture, and they gave me a piece of wire with some nuts, all different size nuts threaded round it, and my job was to run it up and down on the edges of the chairs to make them look old, and down the legs, which was interesting, and they had a little drill where they used to drill worm holes as well, it was marvellous what they could do.
An, an incident that they told me about was, a very rich family had gone on holiday and their son had had a rave up party in the big house and wrecked some of the furniture, and they got to know about Mr Chiswell and they sent their man with some of the chairs for him to bring back up to normal, and he used to get the cloth from theatres where those big curtains used to go across, they were never washed or anything and eventually they had moth holes and he used to buy these to replace the [slight laugh] chair covers and I used to go and watch the carvers who were very marvellous at carving the intricate things on the chairs that they did in those days and he said this man came with a wheelbarrow with these chairs on and Mr Chiswell said ‘OK leave them with me, come back in, probably a week and we’ll have them all ready for you’ so off he goes, and when they were ready Mr Chiswell liked these chairs, I think they were Baxondale or some famous chairs, that he decided to have a set made for himself, and when this fella came back for them he told the young man working in the shop that he had to go away on business so when the man came for the chairs, make sure he took them from downstairs, not upstairs, so when the fella came the young man forgot which was which [laughs] and he took him upstairs so they were loaded and off the fella went, well when Mr Chiswell came back he said ‘where’s my chairs gone?’ and the lad said ‘I thought that was the ones that belonged to the family’, he said ‘no, you’ll have to go round and tell them that you made a mistake and we want those chairs back and they can have the originals’, but they refused, the son refused to let them come back so he was landed with the real genuine antiques, so that was interesting, and then just round the corner there used to be, I don’t know if it’s still there, a big church, and my family were into going to Sunday school and the teacher there, she said to me, ‘one day you’re gonna [sic] have to start work or be called up, what do you intend to do?’ so I said well I’m very good at drawing and printing, so she said ‘my uncle has got an engineering firm near Kings Cross, she said when you’re ready I’ll put a word in for you’. Well in between that, my family moved because the council were going to knock all these houses down and build flats there so we moved near to Bethnal Green. There used be, a fella that sold everything, if you’ve ever watched, that show on the television, Arkwright? With all the stuff he had in the shop,
DE: Open all Hours?
HP: Open all Hours, it was very similar to that and he had a shop, which was really a house converted and all the stuff that was in there were pots and pans, paint, paint brushes, you name it, he’d got everything, and he used to go out where places were bombed and buy all the stock that had been damaged, and he, I got the job there after school hours again which was from about five o’clock up to ten o’clock every night ‘cause [sic] they were open as late as that, and he was teaching me how to sell this stuff and how to sort it out, and if there were saucepans, they would always be a set but some had chips on them because in those days they were all enamel, so the worst ones were put here, the next lot there, and those that were fairly good were the best ones so they all had different prices and I had to learn that [slight laugh] and how to do all this, and it was the same with cups and saucers, the same thing and I got very good at doing all this and when I used to go there, especially on a Saturday, he’d give me an an apron with two pockets, give me a few pounds in the pockets and he’d disappear out the back sorting things out and I was serving customers and taking the money and giving them change, so I felt really good doing this, and then the war was on and the German bombers decided to bomb the docks, well Bethnal Green is not far from the docks so they were shooting howitzer guns on wheels up and down the street firing them and you could hear the shrapnel coming down on the roof, and Bill said to me, ‘I think we better pack up’ he said, ‘because you need to get home especially with the bombing’ so I said ‘OK’ and I started bringing all the stuff in and he, he seemed to vanish, and a policemen come along and said ‘what you doing son?’ and I said ‘I’m taking all this stuff in to the back, can’t leave them outside’ so he said ‘you leave that be and get off home’, he said ‘where’s the boss?’, I said ‘I think he’s out the back making a cup of tea’, he said ‘well don’t forget as soon as he comes up tell him you want your cash and you’re going home’ so I thought OK and I carried on doing this, where the stairs were, he used to hang big galvanised baths, on hooks, I, I thought, well I got everything inside and I thought I wanted my money and get off home, and as I walked down to the back one of these baths was down and I was walking on top of it, on top of the bottom going down to the bottom to see if he was in the kitchen making tea but he wasn’t there anywhere and I thought where on earth’s he gone? And I kept shouting up the stairs, going up the stairs in to all the rooms, couldn’t find him and as I was coming down I saw this bath moving, he’d got underneath the bath [laughing] he didn’t know what to say to me, he said ‘here’s your cash, you go home son’. That was the funniest thing that happened to me.
And then of course it was nearly time I was going to get called up, so the Sunday school teacher said ‘I’ve made you an appointment to be at my Uncle who owns this business’, engineering business it was, so he said ‘I’ll tell you where it is’, I got on my bike and rode down to Kings Cross, found the street where the place was and this fella interviewed me and he said ‘I like you’, he said ‘you seem to be able to write fairly decently’, he says ‘so we could teach you draftmanship and engineering but first of all you’ll go on the tools’, which was a capstan operated machine where you are doing this sort of thing and I was making Morse code tappers, and I was getting on well with this and the bombing was still going on, and my father was a bit worried me going all that way, so he said ‘look after yourself and if anything happens you get off home quick or get down to the air raid shelter’, well the, the foreman, I found out was in charge of the other lads that were on these machines were all Barnados homes boys, so he used to swear and curse and god knows what at the, I felt sorry for them, ‘cause [sic] they couldn’t complain, at least they got a job. And then one day it was bank holiday and the foreman came up to me and he said ‘you realise you have to work all through the bank holiday?’, I said ‘no, I didn’t know that’ I said ‘I thought it was only a five day week’ so he said, ‘ you be here on bank holiday Monday’, well when I got home my dad was a great union man, he said ‘No way are you going in on bank holiday Monday’, so I said ‘well I’ll probably get the sack or put in prison or something’ [laughs] I didn’t know what would happen to me. Anyways, he stopped me from going and we went down into Epping Forrest while he went into the pub and he had a drink and we had a meal and played around and then came home. When I went in on the Tuesday, all hell had broke loose, I was going end up in jail because nobody was on my particular machine and the person they put on it did something wrong, the belts came down and stopped all the work going on, but anyways I got over that and then [short pause] I was riding into work one Monday morning, half way along Kings Cross road a policemen and an air raid warden came up to me and they said ‘where the hell do you think you’re biking to son?’, I said ‘Islington engineering’ and they said ‘well you bloody well go back home because it’s not there anymore’, it’d been blown up, been bombed so I went back home, just messed around, didn’t do anything particular, and usually I was always in for my evening meal after my father, this time I was in before him and he looked at me and he said ‘how is it you are in at this time? Have you got the sack?’ I said ‘No, firm’s been bombed’ so he said to me ‘I could see [emphasis] this happening, what you been doing? have you found another job?’ I said ‘no, I’ve just been messing around’, ‘Right, tomorrow morning after the air raid warning all clear goes, you are getting on your bike and you don’t come home until you’ve got a job’, and that’s how they were in those days.
So next morning, my Mum packed me up a little lunch and said cheerio to me and I went down one of the longest roads, actually I think it’s near where they put this Olympic business in London, and, all along this terrific long road there was all different industries, all the way along, so I thought all I can do is stop at the first one and go right the way to the end, I knocked doors, ‘how old are you son?’, ‘18’, ‘no, we can’t take you on’, this happened all the way right to the end, right to the end, I just sat on the curb stone more or less in tears that I hadn’t got a job, and ate my sandwiches, I didn’t have a drink so I thought I’ll start down the other side of the road, the same all the way along until the huge firm of transport and I looked through the gates and I thought well surely they can do with a van boy or something like that, but I couldn’t get in so I went a bit further and there was a little door, I pushed this door and it came open and there were some stairs going up so I thought I’ll go up the stairs, went up the stairs and there was a nice young lady there and she said ‘hello, what can I do for you son?’ And I told her more or less what I’ve told you and I was nearly in tears and she said ‘sit down and have a cup of tea’, so I sat down and she said, ‘what would you like to do’ and I said ‘anything as long as it’s a job because I can’t go home until I got a job’ [laughter] she said ‘really?’ I said ‘yeah my dad is very strict’ so she said ‘well we want an invoice clerk’, she said ‘so we need someone straight away, would that be alright?’ Well I didn’t even know what an invoice was [laughs] so I told her this so she said ‘well I’ll get an invoice out, I’ll write it out and I’ll show you what you have to do and you copy what I’ve done’, so I did this, copied what she’d put out and she said ‘Ooh you do write good, well done, can you wait until quarter past five?’ well it was five o’clock then so I said ‘yes, why?’ she said ‘well, I’ll give you a chance to see the manager’, she said ‘and when you go in, the first thing he’s going to say is would you write your name and address and he’ll look at it and then he’ll ask you have you any idea of writing out invoices and you can say yes can’t you? [laughs] So this is what happened and at the end of it he said right well we need someone straight away when can you start?, I said ‘tomorrow morning’, he said ‘Good, if you can get here at six o’clock in the morning, that’ll be just after the air raid warning said the all clear’, he said ‘you’ve got yourself a job’, and my dad had always taught me how much, what are we going to get paid so I said ‘well you’ve mentioned all these things but you haven’t said what I’ll get paid’, so he said ‘well it’ll be thirteen shillings a week, is that OK?, Monday till Friday, no Saturday’ so I said ‘yes that’ll be fine’ because I was only getting eleven shillings learning to be an engineer so that was all settled, and I got on well there and I got on well with some of the lads, and after a while one of the foremen happened to come into the office and he said ‘we need someone down on the bay’, so the manager said ‘why?’, he said ‘well we lost two people, they’ve been called up so we need someone to write out the delivery notes for the lorry drivers’, so on this side there was the lorry drivers from, east end, north, west, where drivers got stuff from the other side that come from up north on the big lorries that were opened in the night time and they wanted their deliveries all written out ready to shoot off when they came in, so the manager said ‘well this lad’s good at writing’, so he said ‘good, follow me’ and he took me down the bay and showed me all what I wanted to do, so I said ‘does that make any difference to my pay?’ so he said ‘yes, I think so, what do you get at the moment?’ I said ‘thirteen shillings a week’, he said ‘we’ll make that up to two pound, would that be Ok?’ [laughs] so I said ‘marvellous’ and that was the start of that, so I was working on the bay and in the office and then as lads were being called up, they had women coming in doing the trucking from the night shift to the day shift and they were getting all mixed up with the East End, the West End and where to put the goods, so I said to this foreman ‘if you get me some big cards, like they have on the underground I could write what these places were for each bay’, so he said ‘you think you could do that?’, I said ‘yes, easy’ so he got me all these big cards so I was doing some of that at home and my Dad said ‘are you getting overtime?’ [laughs] I said ‘no!’ [continues laughing] Dad said ‘when you see the foreman ask him what over time you getting’ so I cheekily asked him ‘do I get any overtime for doing all this?’, he said ‘certainly, haven’t we told you?’, I said ‘no’ he said ‘right, when you go to clock out, don’t clock out, bring me your card and I will enter so many hours each day for you’ so it ended up I was getting three pound fifteen a week which was more than my dad was earning as a scaffolder.
And then some of the girls used to come in late, which was booed [sic] upon. So I said, well, I do a bit of watch making in my spare time, I’m trying to teach myself how to repair watches and clocks so he said ‘Good’, he took me to this girl, I think she was a foreigner, and she couldn’t get in early, so he said ‘well you are going to get the sack so, what’s your problem, your real problem?’ she said ‘my alarm clocks broken’ so he said ‘would you bring it tomorrow, give it to this lad, he’ll take it home and he’ll mend it’, so I thought I hope I can mend it [laughs] and I mended this clock anyways and from then on she was never late. And this got to the manager of the place, and he called me in one day and said ‘I understand you can mend clocks, what about pendulum clock’? I said ‘yeah, I think so, as long as I can get the bits from somewhere’ so he said ‘right, I’ll send a van round with this clock’ [laughs] it was a great big clock ‘to your house’ so I took it in, had a look at it and I found there wasn’t really anything broken it was just clogged up with muck, only needed a real good clean and an oil and it worked perfect, so I kept it a few days so to make it seem as so it was a hard job [laughs] and when I went back I said ‘your clocks OK for your van driver to come and pick it up’, which he did, took it into his office and he says ‘set it up’, so I set it up and it was working perfect, so he said ‘what do you think I ought to pay you?’, well I had no idea what it’s worth so I said ‘maybe about a fiver’ and he said ‘there’s a tenner son, thank you’. And that was really good.
And then after I think about a year or eighteen months, one of the lads I got really friendly with, we used to be having our lunch ‘cause [sic] they had soup at the canteen, we were talking about the war and what was going to happen, both the same age, and I said ‘we are going to get called up any minute now’, so he said ‘what do you want to go in for?’ he said ‘because if you volunteer you near enough get what you want but if you are called up you end up in the army’ and I said ‘ooh I don’t want to go in the army’ ‘cause me [sic] Dad’s told about me stories of being in the army so he said ‘what about the navy?’ so I said ‘ooh I don’t know, I can only swim across the canal’ [laughs] I never tried any further, so I said ‘I know’, I said, ‘I think it is safer in the air than on the ground, I said ‘I reckon I’ll volunteer for the RAF’ he said ‘that’s a good idea, when we finish lunch we’ll go down the road and both volunteer’ and that’s what we did, and I ended up getting in the air force but he didn’t because he had something wrong with his down below and it wouldn’t except him but when we went through the medical and came out again I said ‘I’ve passed all OK’ and he said ‘so have I’, and his name was John Smith and I never saw him again, so I don’t know what happened to him.
But I ended up a week later being called up, I was, up to, where was it, where London Zoo is, and on the right hand side there was super flats where film stars used to stay, and that had been commandeered by the air force and we were billeted in them and it was fabulous, I thought this is good in the air force [slight laugh]. We had all the inoculations and all that done and the square bashing and at the time in the paper and on the radio there used to be a fella called Alvar Lidell and he used to sing out ‘This is Alvar Lidell bringing you news’, and in the paper it said this is “Alvar Lidell in the air force stamping out on the playground” and he was there when I was there, but I never actually met him, and I suppose we were there for about a month, six weeks or something learning all the things you had to do, then we were posted down to Saint Athan’s, and that’s where they said you can either be a gunner and I said ‘No way’, you go before some group captains interviewing you and one of them said ‘it’s got down here you can mend clocks, is that right?’ I said ‘yes, and watches’ so he said ‘well that sounds like a bit of engineering, so maybe a flight engineer will be Ok for you’, well I didn’t exactly [emphasis] know what it was but I said ‘yes, that’s far better than a gunner’, and I got all the training on a Stirling bomber and from there when you passed out we went to a conversion unit where you were supposed to meet your crew, well your crew were, flyers who had been on twin engine bombers and converting onto four engine bombers, well the idea was you went into the bar, and there was a big area there where you mingled with some of these bomber crews, and they didn’t like the idea of having an engineer coming onto their crew so the first thing they would ask you is how many flying, flying hours have you got, well you had none, so you didn’t know if you would be sick or anything, so I cottoned on to this so what I did, is I kept going to other pilots that were flying and said ‘could I have a lift’, and I got about 25 hours in, so when I went into this mixture, a fella came up to me and said ‘I heard you talking’, he said ‘you sound like us’, so I said ‘what do you mean, I sound like you?’ [laughs] he said, ‘well we are Australian, New Zealand crew and’ he said ‘you sound like an Australian, where do you come from?’ so I said ‘Hackney’, he said ‘Ackney [emphasis], A? Ackney?’ I said ‘yes’ he said ‘where’s that?’ I said ‘in London’ so he said ‘what’s your name, mate? I said ‘Harry’ he said ‘Hackney Harry, that sounds good, I’ll take you to meet the crew’, and they were all sat round drinking pints and introduced me to them all, introduced me to the pilot and he said ‘what you drinking, Harry?’ and I never drank at all, so I said ‘I don’t drink’ so the rear gunner who’s Australian, who, the one who’d picked me up, he said ‘you better have something Harry or else you’ll get chucked out before you’ve even joined’ [laughs] so I said ‘I’ll have whatever you’re drinking’, they were drinking black and tan, which was a pint of half Guinness and half mild, so that was OK. The mid-upper gunner said ‘do you want a fag?’ I said ‘I don’t smoke’ so the navigator said ‘what the bloody hell do you do on Sundays?’ [laughs] and that broke the ice and I was in with the crew.
So we did a few cross countries on Stirling’s, then they said we were being converted onto Lancasters, and that was good because the Stirling was considered the flying submarine and the Lancs could get up higher. So we did a couple of cross countries on the Lancaster and then we were sent to East Kirkby to be on the proper squadron, well when we got there, I said to the engineering officer, I said ‘I’ve been trained all this time on Stirling’s which is all electric, Lancaster’s are all hydraulic and I don’t feel 100 percent to go on ops’, ‘Leave it with me’ he said, and nothing happened for a few days and it was bank holiday Monday so, we were all lined up at the bus stop to go to Boston, it was our first day out to Boston, have some beers out there, and then, oh before that, this drinking business, the rear gunner said to me ‘our pilot has never been drunk in all the time we’ve known him so when, if you don’t drink and you don’t want to get drunk do what the pilot does’ so I said ‘OK’ and the pilot said ‘Cheers Harry’ [makes a sound of drinking] and he was nearly to the bottom of the glass, well I tried [drinking sound], I was only a finger nail down, by the time I had got through the pint I was more or less drunk [laughs]. Anyways going back to this, at the squadron, a group captain’s car came round and his man got out and he said ‘is there a Sergeant Parkins anywhere along here?’ I said ‘yes sir’, he said ‘come over here’, I said ‘I was just going into Boston, he said ‘you’re not, the group captain wants a word with you’ so I had to get in the car and he drove round the airdrome and nobody said a word and then all of the sudden the group captain said ‘I hear you wanted a bit more training on the Lancaster’s, is that right?’ I said ‘yes sir’ he said ‘good, I’m taking you down to briefing, he said ‘you are on ops tonight’, I said ‘but my crew are not ready’, he said ‘well this crew is and they’ve lost their engineer, he’s gone lack of moral fibre disappeared so they said ‘you’re on briefing with him’, and his name was Pilot Officer Jackson, so I met him and he said we are flying off at a certain time and he said ‘this is John, Bill, Jack whatever, the crew’ and off we went on ops. It was a French target, luckily we got there, got back OK and I felt chuffed because I’d done one more than the crew. The captain was supposed to do one to become a captain before the crew, well I’d beaten the pilot, so I felt, I felt really good, daft as it sound. But then the next couple of nights we were on ops again, my pilot was gonna [sic] do his, what they call the first sticky and this Pilot Officer Jackson came up to me and he said ‘the crew liked you, would you like to come with us again?’ and I thought that’s two I have in front so I said ‘Yes’ [emphasis], that’s a bit crazy, so I went off, got back OK and my pilot got back OK so then a few days after we were on ops again, Pilot Officer Jackson came over to me and he said, ‘you’re an experienced flight engineer on bomber command now, are you coming back with me?’ so I said ‘oh I don’t know, I like my crew, Australian and New Zealanders and they like me so I said ‘no, I’ll go with my own crew tonight’, so off we both go, he never came back so how lucky was three to me, and three has always been lucky, I was born on the third of October, I lived at 13 Churchill Walk, and it was the only house in all the street where a bomb had dropped in the next street and all the windows were shattered except ours, number thirteen, so I’ve always felt three and thirteen have been lucky to me. So that was the beginning of my bombing career and I ended up doing thirty six at East Kirkby, including a mid-air collision.
DE: Really?
HP: Yep. Where bomber pilots were coming back off ops, they should follow the circuit of another airdrome round, the circuit, not shoot straight across, well this particular pilot decided, we’d come back from Stuttgart, all safe and sound and he come shooting across, he took the H2S cupola off and the tail wheel off, and there was such a thunder to us, and I said ‘that was hell of a slip stream’ and it made the crew laugh and in all the fear we had it took it away and the other one went in and blew up, all got killed and we managed to land with sparks flying up all over the place.
DE: Did the rear gunner come forward for the landing?
HP: No, he stayed in his seat screaming blue murder, ‘I’m gonna catch fire’ and that’s where the saying was where the gunner shouted out ‘what colours blood skip?’ ‘cause [sic] he’d done it in his pants [laughing]. That’s seven days survivors leave.
DE: Is that what happened is it?
HP: Yes, and then after that as I say we carried on, we did, I think it was the fifth or the sixth op, was to go to Munich but we were briefed different to the other crew which were going to Munich, we were told to stay behind, we stayed behind and the squadron leader said, ‘well we’re keeping you behind because when you taxi round and we want you to stop the engines and have that little drop of fuel put in because if you’re lucky to get back, you’ll have to land down south because you wouldn’t have enough fuel to get back to East Kirkby so we said ‘why?’ he said ‘because you are not going straight to Munich, you’re going right down over the alps, right down to Italy, turning round and coming back up to fool the Germans. Well we did this, and luckily we were safe. On the way back the rear gunner shouted out ‘Harry’, he said ‘you know we are on leave tomorrow’, you got seven days leave, every six weeks if you were lucky, so I said ‘yeah, it seems a shame’ he said ‘work out the fuel’, ‘cause [sic] I was in charge of that, he said ‘see if we can get back to East Kirkby’ so I said ‘Ok’, and I worked it all out, no computers, and I said ‘if it’s a nice morning, a nice sunny morning, I think we’ll be OK’, and all the crew shouted ‘Go for it, Harry!’ so we did, and when we got to east Kirkby, it was a perfect morning , we went straight in to land and right at the end of the runway all the engines chopped. That took ten hours twenty five minutes, the longest op ever done in a Lancaster; we earned the record for that. So we had to go for briefing, and he was a bitch of a squadron leader, no, ‘well done lads you got back alive’, ‘who the bloody hell told you to come back here’, ‘who worked it out?’, ‘Harry’, he said ‘right mate, you are on a charge for causing probably damage to the air craft’, which it didn’t and damage to the men on board if it had crashed so I said ‘Oh’, he turned round to the crew and said ‘you’re not getting away with it neither’ he said ‘you are all on a bloody charge for being such stupid idiots’ just as he said that the group captain walked in, and he said ‘did I hear a plane landing?’ ‘cause [sic] nobody was supposed to be landing, so this squadron leader said ‘these bloody idiots here’ so he said ‘why, what, what you been doing lads?’ so we said ‘we’ve just got back from Munich via Italy’ and he said ‘really? and you got back safely?’, went round, shook our hands and the rear gunner said ‘we should be on seven days leave today’, he said ‘well done, go on leave’ and we never heard another word.
DE: Had the whole squadron done that route then?
HP: Yeah, so we were the only ones who landed back at East Kirkby
DE: Did you have to be extra careful with revs and working out wind speed?
HP: Oh yeah, yeah it was all interesting stuff, we had a lot to all make out but that was good. And then you finished your ops, it usually was thirty, but the crew had done thirty four, I’d done thirty-six so they said ‘right, you’ve finished, you can go on training other people now’ and the pilot was awarded the DFC for crew co-operation and the crew did not like that one bit, because we should’ve got something, we were doing the same job, but that’s how it worked, and then I was put back onto Stirling’s. When I got to this Stirling, I forget where it is, it’s all in my log back, when I got back to teaching on Stirling, I went to the pilot’s office, because you had to get a pilot who was trained in training pilots as well and he said ‘what’s your name and rank and everything?, what have you done?’, ‘well done’ shook me hand and he said ‘you’ve got two choices’, he said ‘we’ve got one pilot here that sticks rigidly to the rules, and we’ve got another one who’s come what may, happy go lucky’, so he said ‘who do you want to join?’, so I thought about it, I said ‘I’ll go with the happy go lucky’, he put his hand out and said ‘well done mate’, so I was with him, so we had to go and train a pilot and engineer on Stirling’s then, and it was getting near dusk, we’d done a few circuits but this pilot weren’t [sic] very good at all, so the pilot said to me ‘I think that this pilot is a bit jittery because I’m sat next to him’, so he said ‘I’m getting out, he says ‘you’re volunteering to stay in’ [laughs] I said ‘oh, thank you very much’ he said but ‘drum into him, the pilot, that if he’s got full flaps down, and the wheels down and locked, there is no way in this world he can overshoot’, well I knew all that so when I went up to the pilot, I said ‘you’ll be Ok but remember what we’ve just said’, so he said ‘OK’, we took off, we were just coming round the circuit, what happens, an engine goes, so feathered the engine and I said ‘not to worry, you can land just as easy on the three, no problem’, as I said that the flight engineer was rolling about on the floor shouting ‘I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die’, I thought ‘God’, whipped his mask off, so the rest of the crew didn’t hear the rest of what he was saying and I said ‘have you checked the wheels?’, ‘cause [sic] you had to check the electrics, so if it was a red light you’d have to give it a couple of turns that side, a couple of turns that side, say to the pilot ‘wheels down and locked’ and go right down to the rear wheel and do the same for that and shout out to the pilot ‘All OK, all wheels down and locked, go ahead and land’, then I heard a roar of the engines as I was walking up, he’d already told all the crew ‘brace, brace, brace’, because he’d decided to overshoot with the wheels down and locked and the flaps down so we crashed at Wigsley Woods?, do you know that, here?
DE: Vaguely, yes
HP: So I had momentarily been sort of knocked out and when I’d come to, I could feel we were on the ground and the plane had caught fire so I went to the door and jumped, I didn’t know if we were really in the air or not, but anyways the army were doing manoeuvres in Wigsley Woods and saw all what happened, came round, got us in their trucks, took us straight down to St. Georges Hospital in Lincoln, and I can remember being put on a stretcher ‘cause I couldn’t get up straight and seeing these bare entrance to St. Georges’ where the wind was blowing through ‘cause there was no windows or anything and going in to be examined, all the rest of the crew had just slight bruises, nothing really wrong with them, they thought I’d broke my back so they decided to lay me on boards and keep me that way for a few days, the whole time time I think I was in there was ten days. Then they put me in X-Ray and found I had just bruised my spine, not really done bad damage, so I was let out and another seven days survivor’s leave. I shall never forget that survivor’s leave, that second one because when I got to London, I was in civvies, got on the bus to Hackney, and a young woman got on the bus and I sat down and she looked at me and shouted ‘typical of these young scroungers not letting anybody have their seat’, so I got up and let her have the seat, I could have said something but I didn’t, but that was it. And then I had one of the pilots come up to me, and he, went back of course to do the training and one of the pilots come up to me and he said ‘it’s nearly the war’s over now’ he said ‘my engineers gone and disappeared, lack of moral fibre’ he said ‘so I don’t want to end up not being in the war, what would I tell my grandchildren if I got married and had any’ he said ‘would you fly with me?, on some more ops?’ I said ‘no fear, I’ve done mine’ so he pleaded with me, really pleaded so I said ‘OK then I’ll go with you’, so I went with him and ended up at Fiskerton and did three more bombing ops, the last one being Berchtesgaden, and, Hitler wasn’t there and on the way back is was, today like it is now, very clear, you couldn’t see any fighter pilots after you or anything so I got down ‘cause I was interested in H2S, do you know what that is?
DE: The ground radar?
HP: Yeah, you’ve got a screen and you can pick up things on the ground, and I was trying to teach myself how to do this and all of a sudden I thought something’s wrong and I looked round and the pilot had feathered one of the engines for no reason, the starboard outer and I knew there was nothing wrong, but I knew by sound that something had happened so I looked at the pilot and said ‘what the bloody hell are you doing, there’s nothing wrong with that engine?’ and he said ‘Ooo’ and he went like that and he feathered the second engine, so we were flying on two port engines and I said ‘you’re going bloody mad, you are’ and he was really mad because I was looking at the radar instead of looking at the engine, I said to him ‘I know by the sound, I’ve done so many bombing trips that I can tell by the sound if anything’s wrong’ so he said ‘oh bugger you’ and he went like that to unfeather but then he went and feathered the port engine so we were on one outer engine from twenty thousand feet we were down to seven, and I said ‘I think you’ve gone crazy’ I said, so he said ‘all right, you know it all you do it’ so I thought ‘what on earth can I do?’ so I said ‘OK, all the crew listen up’, I said ‘make sure you know where your parachutes are ‘cause we might have to bail out’, then I thought ‘what else can I do?’, switch of all your electrics, which I did ‘cause [sic] the port inner did the generator, so we couldn’t unfeather, so I was thinking to myself this is marvellous, you go through thirty nine ops and then this happens, what would they do if we crashed and found nothing was wrong, if we weren’t killed, we’d all end up in jail so I thought about it and thought ‘I know’, if you have a car and it’s a cold morning and you try to start it up and it don’t start you go ‘ooo ooo ooo ooo’ [makes sound as if trying to start a car] and in the end you run the battery down so you’re stuck but if you leave it for about five minutes just try it again it clicks over, so I said ‘right’ to the pilot ‘go into a slight dive’ he said ‘you bloody fool we’re at seven thousand feet already going into a dive’ I said ‘look you told me to get on with it so do what I’ve told you, go into a slight dive’ so he went into a slight dive and after a few minutes I thought right I’ll just try the port inner, try to unfeather the engine and it just started to tick round, not properly but going into the dive made the propellers go round and the engine started up, from that we got the generator working, I got all the other engines going and we never dared mention that to anybody till after, years after.
DE: I don’t blame you, how far away from home were you?
HP: Well we was [sic] halfway, we would’ve landed in Germany, and this Andrew Panton I told him about that as I was telling you and that’s when he said he was really interested.
DE: You’ve mentioned a couple of times other engineers that you took over from, who had gone LMF, can you tell me a little bit more about that?
HP: Yes, we never actually ever got finding these engineers at all [sic] but we did have a wireless operator who was similar to that, he disappeared, but they caught him, brought him back and that was terrible because we were all called out onto the square and this engine.., this wireless operator was put on like a trestle, stood there and the group captain called out that this man had disappeared, gone lack of moral fibre and I’m ordering him to have his stripes taken off, of course they were all loosened beforehand, and two squadron leaders came up, one on either side and ripped his strips completely off and then he wasn’t taken down, and I don’t know what really happened but I heard about a year later that he was put in the RAF regiment and went abroad on the ground, but it was terrible to see that happening, because, you could get frightened and scared and didn’t want to do it anymore and to have that done to you was terrible, but I think after the war ended they scraped doing that because it was too frightening, not only for the fella himself but also those people watching it being done, like watching someone being hanged.
DE: So you didn’t have any qualms taking over from that flight engineer who had gone missing then?
HP: Not really, [slight laugh] you could say that I was stupid, I were [sic] young and into it all, I did it all before I was twenty [pauses] when you see some of the lads today it makes you wonder.
DE: It does indeed yes, so was that the trip where you ended up on one engine for a while was that your last operation?
HP: Yes
DE: So what happened to you then?
HP: Well as I say, I met my wife on VE day which was a few days after that, so I decided I didn’t want to leave the air force, to keep into Lincolnshire but on actual VE day when it did come, I said to the crew, ‘I’m going into town because everybody will be celebrating’, and my second crew were all English and the rear gunner there said ‘I’ll come with you’, as we went along Monks Road there was so many pubs along there in those days that everybody was dragging us in, ‘have a pint with us, well done’, time we got into Lincoln we were just about kaylied and that’s when I stood at the Stonebow just thinking, I wondered what my Mum and Dad are doing in London, and there was two girls stood at the side, and an American officer came by and he said ‘we won the war for you’ and that annoyed me and there was a flag, you know these big streamers, one of the ends of it was hanging down as though it had fell down and I pulled it and the whole lot came down so I went up behind this American officer, I always had a pin in my lapel, I pulled this pin out and went behind him and pinned it on his uniform tail, because everybody was laughing at him and joking at him and he thought it was because he’d won the war for us [laughing] and one of these girls said to me ‘fancy doing that to our lovely Americans’, I said ‘well he deserved it, he didn’t win the war, it was all of us’ and I got talking to them and that’s when I met my wife, I said, I suppose it was about eleven o’clock then and they said ‘we’ve got to go now’ the two of them, so this particular one I said ‘can I walk you home’, she said ‘if you like’ [laughs] so I walked her home and that was funny because she lived on Grafton Street from Monks road, when we got to her door she said ‘Good night’ and she lifted the window up, I said ‘what’s the matter with the door?’, she said ‘we’re not supposed to be out’ [laughs] and they crawled in and I made a date to see her again and that was the start of us getting together, yeah, [pauses] that’s funny.
DE: So did you stay in the RAF then?
HP: Yes, first of all after VE day they decided that we were dropping food to the Dutch, I thought we were going to be civvies straight away but no we were on a mission to drop food to the Dutch, we did six of those and then I thought that’s it we’re off, then they said ‘no, you’re going out to Italy’ and I thought ‘what on earth are we going out to Italy for?’ but they didn’t say anything else and I said ‘ah well I’m going into’, it was VJ day then I think, ‘I’m going in to town, meet Mavis’ and again all these pubs, people were outside rejoicing, ‘come in and have a pint’, she worked in Lotus and Delta shoe shop at that time and when I got there, the manager was at the door, I said ‘is Mavis there?’ and he said ‘you’re drunk, bugger off’ [laughs], so I didn’t see her so I waited around for when the shop shut, I went there, walked her home, I had my bike, always had a bike with me, walked her home and her father came to the door and he said ‘you should be at camp’, I said ‘why the war is all over now’, I said ‘there’s no worries’, he said ‘you better ride on’ and as I say I was a bit drunk, and do you know the end of Monks Road going down to Fiskerton, it was a moonlight night, I got to the top on my bike I said to myself, ‘I’m gonna [sic] go down there and go round that bend, no hands [laughing] so I tried it, the next thing I remember was a big air men coming up to me, he says ‘excuse me sir’, ‘cause I was a warrant officer then, he said ‘did a van hit you or a car hit you?’ I said ‘no’, I said ‘I was biking down this hill’, I didn’t tell him I was going no hands [laughing], and ‘I must of fell off’ so he said ‘well where’s your bike?’ so I said ‘well it must be here somewhere’ and we looked all around and couldn’t see the bike at all, then I worked it out in my mind that what would have happened if I had going round, the bike would’ve gone that way and I went that way and it was over the hedge so picked it up and he said ‘where have you got to go back to?’ I said ‘ to Fiskerton’, he said ‘well I’m on that place’ he said ‘I’ll ride back with you and make sure you get there OK’ and he did, got me right to me hut and off he went and to this day I don’t know who he was or his name. When I got in, I had at the top end, the little room at the top and the crew were down the side, I got there and I just plonked myself on the bed, like that, just was nodding off and a navigator came in he said ‘where the hell have you been?’ he said ‘you know we are going to Italy’ I said ‘come off it, what are we going to Italy for?’ he said ‘well we’ve had briefing and we’ve been kitted out with KD equipment’, I said ‘What’s KD?’ well that’s khaki you know all the shorts and all that and I was still in me blue, and he said ‘we’re taking off in an hour’, so I said ‘you’re having me on’, he said ‘I’m not, ask the rest of the crew’, and they were all in the KD ready, so we went out to the aircraft, got in, on the way to Pomigliano. When we got there, we had to go, get off, and had briefing, and we went in for this briefing and the squadron leader spotted me straight away, he come up, ‘what the bloody hell you dressed like that for?’, I said ‘well I didn’t get a chance to go for my KD’, he says ‘you bloody fool’, he said ‘you’ll scorch’, so to get away from that I said ‘I’ve got an uncle in Italy’, he says ‘so what’, I said ‘well I’ll, I’d like to ring the nearest camp to here and see if he happens to be there’, he said ‘you bloody fool, there’s no phone’s here, there’s only the field telephone’ so I said ‘well, could I use that?’, so he had sympathy then and said ‘OK, I’ll let you have it by woe be told if you are having me on’ so he called the sergeant over and he said ‘get the field telephone and get through to which is the first camp nearest to us’, which actually was where we were bringing the troops back from, ‘so guard room’ so I picked the telephone up and said ‘is that the guard room?’ ‘Yes’, I said ‘you don’t happen to have a sergeant, quarter marshal sergeant or anybody of the name of Lenny Parkins?’, ‘speaking’, I said ‘what is that you Len’ he said why, who’s that?’ I said its ‘Harry, your nephew’; he said ‘where are ya?’ I said, I said, ‘I’m in Italy’, he said ‘why?’, I said ‘I’m in the RAF’, with that the squadron leader ripped the phone from me and said ‘if you are bloody having me on’ he said ‘is that right?’, he said ‘are you Len Parkins?’, he said ‘yes, I’m the Quarter Master Sargent Len parkins’ he said ‘I give up’ [laughing] and he put me back to me uncle and I briefly told him that how old I was and I was in the air force and he said ‘ I can’t believe it’ cause the last time he saw me, I was about that high, so he said ‘we’ll have to come and get you’ so I said ‘what do you mean?, ‘I better have a word with the squadron leader’, so I handed the squadron leader the phone ‘my uncle wants to have a word with you’ so it appeared that he wanted permission to come and pick me up and go and celebrate with him, VJ day the second this was, so the squadron leader said ‘OK, as long as you’re back here within three days’ so he said ‘that’ll be fine’, so that night, I forget what time it was but he came along with four of the biggest army blokes I had ever seen and all sergeants and he was in charge of them in this big van, and he looked at me and said ‘typical Parkins, what the bloody hell you dressed like that for?’, and I told him the story that I told you, so he said ‘you can’t go around like that’ he said ‘back to our store’ and he took me to the army store and I got kitted out with warrant officer in the army, so he said ‘right, we’re all kitted up now, we are going out, back to our camp’, which was the army camp, and he said ‘we’ve got a couple of things to do, we’ll sit you in the tent, then we’ll take you and we’ll celebrate’, so they did, and it was a place called Torre Annunziata where he took me, and it was like a little village with a big tavern, taverna there and there were some dancing girls, dancing round and that and me uncle sat down on a chair, there were chairs all around and there was a fairly elderly woman sat there and he could speak Italian by that time and he was chatting to her, and he said ‘what’s going on?’ and she said ‘they are picking out the best dancing girl and that’s my daughter there’ and he said ‘oh that’s interesting’ and he brought her a drink and it turned out that she was a famous film star later on in her life, can’t think of her name off hand, an Italian film star [pauses], no its gone out of my mind who she was, but we’d been introduced to her as a young girl dancer. And then the army bloke said ‘what do you want to drink, Harry?’ so I said ‘I’m used to black and tan now’, he said ‘you silly bugger, [laughs] you can’t get that out here, you’ll have to have something else, you’ll have to have a whiskey or gin or something like that’ I said ‘oh I can’t take that’ so one of them said ‘what about vermouth?’ well I had never heard of it, well I forget what you call it in English, it’s like a red wine so I said’ OK, I’ll have a pint of that’ [laughter] and they didn’t have glasses, where they had beer bottles they put a wire round it and tightened it very tight and then heated it and that broke off clean and then they just rubbed it on the stones to make it a bit smoother and that was filled up with this wine and when they said ‘cheers’ and we drinking it like beer and we ended up drunk as a newt with my uncle, sat on the fountain saying how we’ve found each other both alive. It was marvellous, so, I didn’t remember much after that but apparently they took me back to the army camp and there was a row of tents, right the way along with windows which were like strips of canvas down, and when I woke up in the morning, it must have been about ten o’clock the next day and I looked up and I saw what I thought were bars and I thought I was in prison [laughs] and I could hear talking outside, and there was two Italian prisoners of war, and actually they were sweeping up, but when I saw their sticks, it looked as though they had rifles and I thought I’m gonna [sic] be interrogated and you are always taught just give your name and number, don’t tell them anything else so I just sat there, I couldn’t see where my clothes were and I looked out and where they were sweeping, they went round the tent, so I thought right I’m escaping and I run like, stark naked, [laughs] I run like mad, right to the end of this, all these tents where there was a guard room and somebody came out and stopped me, with the rifles, took me inside and they started interrogating me, and I thought these are Germans disguised, ‘cause they tell you they used to do that and I wouldn’t say a word other than my name and number, word got round that they had captured either a spy or something but my uncle eventually heard about this, and of course he came chasing up to the guard room and saying all that had happened, so I got dressed [laughing]. And went, took me somewhere else to have a drink but I didn’t feel like having any drinks, and took me back to the camp, the RAF camp, and of course they looked at me being that in army with all my gear on, ‘how on earth had I changed into that’ and I had to explain that I was RAF and except that I had came out in my blue, and it was time then to pick up these soldiers and we used to pick up about twenty of them, and they had to sort of sit or lay all along the floor of the plane, and I’m always the last one in to check everything, I had to walk, actually walk on them, it was horrible really, and we did six of those and the last one, my uncle was one of the people coming back and he was getting married, when he got home and he said ‘where can I put all this stuff?’ and he’d got loads of stuff over the kit bag he was supposed to have, I think he had about five kit bags, gin, whiskey, rum, everything so I thought yeah why, let him have it all on the inside, outside of the aircraft in the bomb bay and I took some of it in with me, and didn’t say anything to the pilot. When we got back to Britain, the pilot said ‘I hope you lads didn’t bring anything back you’re not supposed to have because we might be inspected by the customs’ I thought ‘God, we’re gonna [sic] end up in jail’ but luckily, they just waved us on, and at the end my uncle had one of his army blokes in England, he’d got a truck and quickly loaded, loaded all this wedding stuff on this truck so we lucky again there but in between that, I had, I think it was the third time, we had the soldiers with the kit bags all loaded on, and an army officer came up to me and he said ‘who’s in charge of loading the aircraft?’ so I said ‘I am sir’ so he said ‘would you get all those kit bags off’, he said ‘over there is my yacht’ he said ‘ I’ve just taken all the measurements and it’ll just fit in there’, I said ‘you got to be joking’, he said ‘I’m not joking, warrant officer’ I said ‘well I’m not joking neither, no way is that yacht going on this aircraft’ and I said ‘none of those kit bags for the soldiers’, ‘cause they were all ordinary rank, ‘none of that is coming off’ so he said, ‘whose the pilot of this plane?’, so I rushed up to my pilot, quickly told him what was happening, so I said ‘he’s there’, so I took him up to the pilot and he said, ‘I’ve just had a word with your warrant officer and he’s refused to take my yacht with you’ so he said ‘well I’m afraid sir, he’s in charge, there’s nothing I can do’, so he came back to me and said ‘what’s your rank and number?’, he said ‘you are going to be on a charge when you get back to England and your feet won’t touch the ground, you’ll be out of the air force completely’, so I said ‘fair enough, do as you wish, I couldn’t care less’, well he was on our plane obviously so he said ‘I want the best seat on the plane as well’ so I said ‘ well there’s no seats on the plane’ I said ‘there’s the pilot, the navigator and the gunners, unless you want to be in the tail gunner?’ I said ‘I think he wouldn’t mind moving out’ he said ‘no fear, he said ‘I want a proper seat. Well the only other seat is the Elsan so I got all the soldiers on and put him on the Elsan, when we took off it, ‘cause it stunk like nobody’s business I said to the pilot ‘waggle the wings a bit’ and he did so it splashed all over him [laughs] I thought that’ll teach him, well I never heard anymore.
DE: Well that’s not where I’d choose to sit anyway.
HP: No, but there was another fella, he was Australian, he said ‘is there any chance that when you come into England you’ll go past the white cliffs of Dover?’ I said ‘yeah we go right over that, why?’, he said ‘well, I volunteered to help with the war, come to England’, he said ‘but on the way we got torpedoed and I ended up in a Japanese prisoner of war camp which’ he says ‘which was horrible’ he said ‘but that another mate and I managed to escape and we got to some English soldiers who took us into their camp and they said ‘well if you want to get to England we’ll have to take you to the docks somewhere and we’ll get you on the boat’ which they did and he said ‘and damn me and we got torpedoed again’ he said they ended up in the sea, fighting for my life and got picked up by life boats and eventually got to France and he said ‘and from there I managed to get to British air field where they were bringing back the troops and he said that was a trip to Italy and he said ‘here I am’ and I felt really sorry for him, I said ‘well when we come up to the cliffs of Dover, I’ll let you sit in my seat because I sit next to the pilot’ so when it was time, I called him up from where he was laying down and I said ‘there you are, there you can see the cliffs, the cliffs of Dover’ and he just cried his eyes out, really cried, to think that he eventually he’d got there and of course all the war was over, [pause] but that’s a few of the stories.
DE: That’s wonderful, thank you very much. So what did you do when you left the RAF?
HP: I didn’t know what to do exactly, so I looked in the Echo, ‘cause I was living with Mavis at her mum’s in Grafton Street, they always had the Echo and I saw a couple of adverts, one was for a sales man for Carabonham typewriters, not to sell the typewriters but to sell the carbon paper that they used to have, and that was an interview in town, the other interview was to, do you remember the chicken factory that used to be in Lincoln? Right down by the water side, a long walk right down, I got an interview for there and the other one was an interview, have you heard of Newnes? N, E, W, N, E, S publishers? Very famous publishers at the time, they were eventually taken over by the mirror group and then sold out again to some other big publishing company, I can’t remember their name off hand, so first of all I thought I’d go to the typewriter people, went to there and it was in an office just near where, I’ve forgotten what it was, near Marks and Spencer’s, up the stairs, went into there, there was about four or five other people there. Eventually I was called in, the man was sat at his desk and he said ‘put your hat on the coat hanger’, I said ‘I don’t wear a hat’ so he said ‘well if you work for us you have to wear a hat’ I said ‘oh’, I said ‘well I’ve worn a hat all this time in the air force, I don’t want to be wearing a hat again’ so he said ‘anyways give us a brief history’ which I did and he said ‘well if you wait outside we’ll let you know if you can come for a second interview and that’ll be the final interview’ so I said ‘OK’, well they interviewed the others and they all disappeared, there was only me there, so he came out and he said ‘yes, we’d like to have a further interview with you but we’d like to see you with a rain coat and a hat when you come next time so I said ‘oh,’ so I just said ‘oh and I walked away and ‘said I’d be there for the second interview’ well the next day was an interview with the chicken people, well walking down that long stretch of road, the stink of these chickens got worse and worse, I thought I could never work with that smell and I turned round and came back, so before this other interview, it was at Bradford for Newnes, the publishers, I thought well I’ll go back to this Carabonham people, went through and he said I notice you haven’t got an hat, I said ‘no, I haven’t got around to buying one and what is the exact position?’ he said ‘well you’ll be selling these carbon papers to various people that use typewriters, the pay will be seven pounds a week plus one percent commission and you make your own way around Lincolnshire, so I said ‘well thank you very much, I’m not interested, I earnt more than that in the RAF’ and walked out and when I got home my father in law was mad at me and my mother in law that I hadn’t got a job, well actually I had a month to go before I was officially finished with the RAF, so I said I’d go for this Bradford one and I hitch hiked, all the way to Bradford, got in for the interview and I saw a marvellous sales man who was the boss there and he said ‘what we want is a person who can sell publications that are in ten volumes, and it’s called pictorial knowledge’ he said ‘lots of people think its and encyclopaedia, it isn’t, its everything that an encyclopaedia could do but in pictures’, and he said ‘I got a specimen here which is what a sales man would use’, and he went through some of these pictures and what it did and what it said, and he said ‘contributors are Enid Blyton, have you heard of her?’ I said ‘oh yes I have heard of Enid Blyton, she’s famous’, there was, a fella who died not so long ago, Sir Edmond Hilary, he’s contributed to this and many other famous people and he said ‘there’s ten volumes to the set, and we would like a sales man who could go and sell these to parents to help their children with their education’, which sounded really good, so he said ‘would you be interested in that’ I said ‘yeah I think so, what is the wages?’, ‘well this is how we pay our people, for every set of encyclopaedias you sell’, not encyclopaedias, ‘pictorial knowledge’s you sell, ten volumes, we would give you a commission’, and I think it was about three pound fifteen, something like that, he said ‘most of our people, the minimum sales is about four a week’ so he says ‘that’s above the normal wage that you’d get if you went into a job’, so I thought well I’ve got a month of RAF pay still so I said ‘yes I’ll have a go’, that was it, so he issued me with a folder that opened out with the backs of ten volumes and also this small one where you showed all these pictures and what it did, right from five year olds to about fifteen year olds, so he said ‘there you are you are on your way, in Lincoln there’s a pub called the Saracens Head’, which was on the go then, he said ‘you’ll meet our supervisor whose name’s John’ whatever it was, he said ‘and he’ll take you out and give you a spin on what we do’, so I said ‘good’, he said ‘but before you go’, and he’d got a sheet of paper like that, with all names, of all occupations, he said ‘we sell these books, either by cash or by subscription, and subscription is a pound deposit and a pound a month’, so he said ‘that’s fairly easy for the average householder, but if they are in any of these occupations you can’t sell them other than cash only’, so I said looking down, I said ‘there’s no one left’, he said ‘you’ll find somebody’, so that was that, so I got home, hitch hiked again home, got home and told them what I was going to do and my father in law went [laughs] barmy.He said, ‘that’s not for you, commission only, I’ve never heard of such a thing, its extortionate’, mother in law was the same, Mavis didn’t say much at all, well I said ‘I’ve got a month to try it out’, so off I went, next day to meet this so called supervisor, I waited over an hour and a half, before someone came in with a briefcase, I thought, I wonder if this is him, I went up to him, I said ‘are you so and so with Newnes publishing?’ he said ‘yes’ he said ‘I’m bloody fed up with the job altogether’, he said ‘I’m leaving today so you are on your own’, I said ‘oh thanks very much’ and out he walked and that was it, so I had to figure out what to do, how to find where people lived with children because I didn’t want to be knocking on everyone’s door and gradually I worked out a system of getting names of people with children by going down a street, so if you can imagine that’s a street, people on that side, and people on that side, I’d go to the first one, knock on the door, go round the back door, often find it was an old dear who didn’t have any children, did she know of anybody along that way with children and I’d write it down, did she know the names, and possibly get four or five names which was good, then I’d say ‘I’ve lost my list so could you tell me the ones on the other side’ and often they could, a couple of doors along, then I’d go past those that I’d got, into the middle and do the same there, and then I figured out it was a bit daft going to the first house, this was after a while of doing it, that if I went to the middle house, I could get this way, that way, this way, and that way, and I ended up going round Sincil Bank, really poor sort of houses along there, and got a few names along there and that night I said ‘right I’m off out, see what I can do’, I knocked at the first house, got a spiel on how to get in and when I got in, I said ‘it’s in connection with Newnes the publishers’, ‘bloody encyclopaedia’s, bugger off’ and I got shut out the door, the next one wasn’t really interested at all, the third one, again three, always lucky to me, the fella said ‘come in, what’s it all about?’, and I told him and I went through the spiel that this manager had showed me and he said ‘yes we are very interested, we’ve only got one daughter and we’ll bring her out’ and I showed her this specimen for her to look through and she said ‘ooo Dad, can I have these?’ and she sold it for me, and they went in for the pound a month so that was good. Years later I saw this couple, in the town, I said ‘how did you get on?’ they said ‘the girl did wonderful, she’s at the high school, she’s getting on very well, all thanks to you’, it made me feel good, and anyways I did this and I thought where would be the most children, and that was off Boultham Park, can’t forget where that big housing estate, and I spent about two hours a day and ended up with about five hundred names of people with children and I did quite well, I started to getting four and five sets sold, doing well, and then Newnes got on to me and they said ‘if the people pay for three months that could never been counselled in your name but if they didn’t pay in the first three months, you’ve lost that sale and you’ve got to replace it, so I thought well how can I be confident that people were keeping up their payments, and I was in the Halifax at the time and the account in there and they were onto me about paying debits and credits and all that, but I didn’t know much about, but I got them to explain it to me and I said ‘what do you do?’ And they said ‘well you have a form and you fill it in and to pay whatever you want each month’, so I said ‘can I have a handful of those’ and they gave me a handful, so when I sold, I didn’t sell on the basis of a pound a month, I said to them ‘well you pay an initial deposit that gets you all ten books straight away so I’ll leave it to you, what would you like to pay as a deposit?’, some would say two pound, some would say what do you suggest?, I say ‘anything from five pound upwards’, so that got a lot of payments in and I said ‘do you happen to belong to the Halifax?, because if you do, save you trying to remember the date when you got to send off you can do it’ and I got them all signing up, so I didn’t get many bad payers at all, but you had to work your brain to figure out all these things and what to do, and then I was told that the manager of Lincoln branch was being promoted and going to a bigger branch which was in Leeds, near to Bradford area so they would be looking out for a manger for Nottingham, well I used to send all my stuff to Nottingham, so I went into Nottingham to see if I could have a word with the manager before he left but he’d already gone and the girl there said, well she was doing all the collecting payments, putting them down in the book and banking them and all that, so she said, ‘we’ve got some interviewees, that the other manager who’s gone should have been interviewing’, so I said ‘well I could interview them’, so I sat in the managers desk and I interviewed these people and I got a couple started and I got a note from head office to say, ‘we’re very pleased with what you did there, that was unexpected so we’ve promoted you to manager, a thousand a year plus expenses’, which was marvellous, so I used to have to go into Nottingham every day, and catch the train, ‘cause they used to have that train where it’s all the market place now, I used to chain me bike up to the gate, ‘cause I’d had an engine put on for when I used to go outside of Lincoln, I used to go to Boston on this little mini bike, Gainsborough, I used to do ever so well in Gainsborough, the big estate that that [sic] they built there, and one day when I was going round collecting names, a police car come up, came up to me and said ‘would you step over here sir’ so I stepped over there for him and he said ‘we’ve had complaints that you’re trying to get names of children’, and at the moment there was all this scare about children and weirdos, so he said ‘what exactly are you doing?’ so I explained it to him and I said ‘I’ve actually got me briefcase on me bike’ so he said ‘what do you mean?’, I said ‘well my briefcase has got me gear in when I go to these people to sell them Newnes’ pictorial knowledge’, so I said ‘do you live nearby?’ he said ‘why?’, I said ‘well have you got any children?’ he said, ‘yeah, two’, so I said, ‘well could I come and see you and I could explain exactly what I do?’ so he said ‘yeah that’s a good idea, and that’ll save you going into custody’, and he told me where he lived and after I finished doing a few more names, I thought I better not do many more so I went round to his house, he, he and his wife were there, went through the whole spiel, and I said ‘what do you think?, would you be interested?’, he said ‘yes I would’, he said ‘I reckon I could learn a lot out of those books’ so I signed him up, got his deposit and I said ‘you don’t happen to know any other people that might be interested?’ and he give me about a dozen names of people and everyone [emphasis] bought.
HP: Smashing yeah. And then another time I was going to Woodhall Spa, ‘cause I heard it was very rich people round there and I thought I could do some names round there then, so I got on me bike and chained it up, do you know that bridge which just before you get to,
DE: On the way into Woodhall? Yes.
HP: Chained my bike up there and walked in, and the first little housing estate I went in, well it wasn’t an estate it was a street, I went into a woman was giving me, me names and I never really told her what it was for, I just said it was to do with Enid Blyton, doing some research, so she said ‘come in, have a cup of tea’ she said ‘my husband’s a postman, he’ll be coming in shortly’ so I said ‘OK’ went in and had a cup of tea with her and she said ‘what really are you doing?’, then I said ‘well, I’ll be honest with you, seeing as you give me a cup of tea’ and I told her about it and she said ‘I think my husband will be all for this, could you come back at 5 o’clock?’ so I said ‘yes, that’ll be OK’ so I just went to, I think there was a little bar somewhere, where I could have a cup of tea, waited till quarter past five and went back and he was all for it, went straight into it, said he’ll pay a fiver deposit and he’d give me the names of everybody who he thought went to the same school as her and he said you should do well, and he gave me the names of those big houses where those driveways go down and I thought ‘God, I don’t know how I’m going to do here’. The first house I knocked on, a woman said ‘would you wait in the hallway, I’ll have to see the lady of the house’, so I said ‘why, who are you?’ she said ‘I’m the maid’ and I thought good God I’m trying to sell to people like that!
HP: She showed me into what she called the drawing room or the library, they got hundreds of books all around and I thought I’m not going to do any good here, and then the wife came out and said ‘what’s this all about?’, and I said ‘I understand you’ve got a young girl at such and such a school’ I said ‘I’m nothing to do with the school, I’m from Newnes publishers’ so she said ‘my husband will be interested in publishers’ so she said ‘I’ll go and get him’, he came in, sat down and I went through all the spiel and he said ‘that’s marvellous’ he said ‘I’ve called the daughter in and she can have a look at your specimen, if she’s interested we’re interested’, and it was a sale straight away, and I said there’s a method of paying which is on subscription where you can pay monthly or you can pay out right, and I think it was fifteen guineas if you paid outright, that’s fifteen pound, so he said ‘right, I’ll write you a cheque straight out for fifteen pound’, I said ‘well, I’m ever so sorry but Newnes wont except cheques, it would have to be cash or subscription’, he said ‘oh well’ and he went into a drawer, in the drawing room this was, pulled it out and there were stacks of twenty pound notes, piled it all out and that meant I had, fifteen pound, I had to give him some change, he said ‘you can keep the change’, [slight laugh] it were lovely. And every one of these houses that this fella had given me I got a sale, in one night I got seven sales from there, I was over the moon, I couldn’t go wrong at all.
DE: I think we better wind it up now; it’s been marvellous talking to you,
HP: I better say we had a son, a daughter and a son and then a little boy of six, well he had a virus that hit inside of his brain and he died, and it was terrible, Mavis’ never really been the same since, he would be about forty or so now, and it was hard for me to carry on doing this and in the end I said ‘I’d have to give it up’, and I gave it up and the next job I went for was Dymo tape writers, you know them?, they print out these tools, and it was with a director who was a manger of gothic electrical, have you ever hear of them?, well that was made into a home now, ‘cause that all, that faded away, and I was interviewed by this managing director and he said ‘yes we’ll very interested to you but you’ll have to wait for the Dymo manager came along ‘cause we would be doing it on behalf of Dymo through gothic’, so I said ‘OK’ he said ‘can you come back the next day?’ so I said ‘yes’ and this was in the afternoon, and I went in and when I explained what I’d been doing the Dymo bloke was over the moon, he said ‘yes we can take you on’, he said ‘it won’t be on any commission, it’ll, commission only, you’ll get a salary and you’ll get a commission but that would be up to the manager of Gothic’, he said ‘so I’ll leave you to him’ and off he went, so I said ‘well what is this salary and commission?’ he said ‘well the most we would pay you is seven pounds a week, I said ‘good God, I’ve been on more than twenty, twenty five, sometimes up to forty or fifty pound in a week’, he said ‘well I’m sorry but that’s the best we can do, he said ‘but we’ll give you one percent commission on all the machines that you sell, is that OK?’ I said ‘well I’ll say yes, and I’ll see how it goes because I’ve got to have a higher wage of some sort than that but if the commission brings me up then fair enough’.
Well when I went home they all wanted me to stay near home and it was only round the corner from Brant Road where we lived so I took the job on, so the first thing I did, was went all along every shop and business from outside of Bracebridge, right the way along that road into town explaining what Dymo was and I’d got an idea of getting a book with pictures on with different things that you could attach the Dymo label too, like electrical, you can put it on the meters, and put it on the switchboards and all sorts, so that was easy and another one was shoe shop where they could put it on the shoes and the price on the outside and then estate agents, it would look nice with a gold edge with gold lettering of the houses and the prices, that was dead easy selling them and I could also say to them and I could put your name as the manager on the door in gold letters which was really good and the first week I earned eighteen pound in commission so with my seven pounds,
DE: You were doing all right?
HP: Well the manager, the director of Gothic he nearly fell off his chair [laughs]. All on my own transport which was me little mini motor on the bike, well he said ‘I don’t know what to say’ he said ‘I can only pay you the wage this week and we’ll see how you go the next week’, and I thought ‘this sounds dodgy’, when I went in for my pay the next week, I had earnt nearly as much again, so he said ‘there’s your pay packet’ and I opened it up there and then and that just says seven pounds, he said ‘now I have to pay you your commission separate’ so I didn’t mind as long as he paid it, but that went on for a year, and I found with Dymo that if I went into place where they could sell the Dymo, I went to town for them to sell it with one that I’d sold myself I’d give it to them as their first sale and that went down really well because I’d got an order for not just one tool but several with the different types of tools they did, put in their shelves and that and so that went, went on really well until Dymo cottoned on to what I was doing because I was opening up shops to sell in Lincoln, in Gainsborough, in Spalding, which they could they get themselves so they took it over, and they took that away from me so all I could sell was to just ordinary shops not to sell for them to re-sell so that fell through and the manager director didn’t like that all and said ‘no we’ll have nothing more to do with it’ so as I say it all fell through and he said ‘we want a salesman because we’re losing one of our salesmen on electrical’ so I knew a bit about electrical but not all the intricate things that electrical dealt at a wholesaler so he said ‘and this would mean you probably could have a car’ so I said ‘when do I know about this?’, he said ‘well you’ll have to go to Birmingham and see the directors and owners there’, so I had to go there by train, got there and went before these directors and they were very interested in what I was doing in selling Dymo and also selling the books as well, they couldn’t get over that I could earn that amount of money so one of them said, ‘this is to do with selling Kenwood’ you know what Kenwood food,
DE: yes the Kenwood food processors and things?
HP: So I said ‘that sounds interesting, not to do with the electrical itself’ so they said ‘well in a way its electrical, we’ve just got the agency from Kenwood, so we’ve got full scale all around Lincolnshire’ so I said ‘well that sounds good’, so I said ‘well the main thing is I’ve got to earn a decent salary’ well my boss had offered me twelve pound a week from the seven so I didn’t tell them this and they didn’t know that from what I was talking to them about and they said ‘well initially we’ll give you twenty pound a week plus commission plus a car with all expenses’, so I was in.
HP: And I did that until Kenwood fell through, ‘cause Kenwood fell through because the boss of Kenwood, he did, he got this running right the way through worldwide even to Australia and him and his wife had got all the shares and he went to Australia to do a bit more business and it was in the Daily Mirror, when he got off the plane, there was these dolly girls all round and he’d got his arm round these dolly girls and his wife didn’t like that and she pulled all her shares out, they got a divorce, so that all fell through, then Kenwood just went through any shops, anywhere, not wholesalers so I lost that job so the director said ‘well you’ve been a good sales men with us’ he said ‘so, would you be prepared to be a sales man on electrical, on all the electrical stuff’ so I said ‘well I want a job, yes’ so I said ‘as long as I keep the car and expenses’, well head office said ‘yes’ and I got that job. Well that was funny ‘cause a lot of the people that I’d sold Kenwood to were people that were electrical shops, they would have them in the shops and selling them, and the first one I went to was funny because that was in Sleaford and it was a fella who every time I went in with Kenwood he said ‘you know where the kitchen is Harry, put the kettle on and we’ll have a chat’, about Kenwood and could he have a Kenwood girl in to do demonstrations which I organised as well and I said ‘I’m not on Kenwood anymore, I’ve lost that job because of certain things’ and I said ‘I’m on everything electrical now so I’m going to try and get an order off you for anything electrical’ so he said ‘well we’re have a cup of tea with the wife first because she run the shop’, so I looked round the shop what they had and we had this cup of tea and I got my order book out and I said ‘what is it that you mainly want at the moment?’, he said ‘I don’t think there is anything we really want’ I said ‘well I see you sell bulbs’ he said ‘no we don’t sell bulbs’, well I said ‘you’ve got boxes of them and there’s empty places there’, so his wife said ‘we don’t call them bulbs in Lincolnshire Harry, we call them’, what was it she said she called them, not bulbs, what do you call an electric light bulb?
DE: I would’ve called it a light bulb
HP: Light bulb that was it she said ‘we call them light bulbs we don’t call them bulbs’ she said ‘you want to be in Lincolnshire selling, Spalding selling bulbs!’, so I said ‘OK’ where we were in the kitchen he had these stacks of cables I know now, but then I said ‘I see you sell wire’, he said ‘we don’t’, I said ‘well what’s that?’ he said ‘that’s cable you silly bugger’, I said ‘well I’ve got a lot to learn’, he said ‘well I’ll tell you what to do’, he said ‘when you go back into Lincoln, go to BICC, because they are the wholesaler for cable and they’ll give you a card with all the cables that they sell all pinned to this card and you can write what they are then when you go round next time, he said ‘you know what they are, until you get to know them yourself’ he said ‘you say to them well I’ve got this card, which is the cable you want most of’ [slight laugh] and that’s how I started and I did well on that as well.
DE: Smashing, you’ve had a very wide and varied life haven’t you? and now you are sort of a professional interviewee
HP: [laughing] yeah, it’s been a good life, and I’m ninety, I shall be ninety one this year in October
DE: Well I think you’ve answered all my questions and many more
HP: Well I could tell you a lot more on the bombing trips
DE: Well I think perhaps we’ll have to come back and we can do this again if that’s all right?
HP: You’re welcome.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Harry Parkins. One
Description
An account of the resource
Before the war, Harry Parkins worked in furniture restoration in Hackney, before later selling bomb-damaged goods in Bethnal Green, working for an engineering firm in Islington until it was bombed and finally as an invoice and warehousing clerk before volunteering for the Royal Air Force. He trained as a flight engineer and flew on three operations with Pilot Officer Jackson before his own crew became operational at RAF East Kirkby. He survived a mid-air collision and later crashed in a Stirling whilst an instructor, at a Heavy Conversion Unit. He then returned to operations at RAF Fiskerton. In one incident, his pilot feathered three engines of his Lancaster on the return from bombing Berchtesgaden. He also discusses lack of moral fibre, his experiences of Victory in Europe Day and Victory over Japan Day celebrations in Lincoln and travelling to Pomigliano d’Arco to bring soldiers back from Italy. Post-war he was a salesman, selling ‘Newnes Pictorial Knowledge’, type-writers, appliances and electrical spares.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Dan Ellin
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-06-05
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Emma Bonson
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:52:21 audio recording
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AParkinsH150605
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Germany
Italy
England--London
England--Lincolnshire
Italy--Pomigliano d'Arco
Germany--Berchtesgaden
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-05-08
1945
aircrew
bombing
crash
crewing up
fear
flight engineer
H2S
Heavy Conversion Unit
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
mid-air collision
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Fiskerton
sanitation
Stirling
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/159/1992/LParkinsH1891679v1.2.pdf
276900754f39dfa9ed3aa80a655cd108
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
Parkins, Harry
H W Parkins
Description
An account of the resource
Five items. Two oral history interviews with Harry Parkins (891679 Royal Air Force), his logbook, identity card and one photograph. Harry Parkins was a flight engineer with 630 Squadron and 576 Squadron and flew 30 night time and 17 daylight operations from RAF Fiskerton and RAF East Kirkby.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Harry Parkins 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
2015-06-05
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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
Harry Parkins' flight engineer log book
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LParkinsH1891679v1
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Belgium--Antwerp
Belgium--Kortrijk
Belgium--Leopoldsburg
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Suffolk
France--Mimoyecques
France--Grandcamp-Maisy
France--Creil
France--Amiens
France--Annecy
France--Beauvoir-sur-Mer
France--Caen
France--Chalindrey
France--Châtellerault
France--Donges
France--Étampes (Essonne)
France--Givors
France--Joigny
France--Nevers
France--Paris
France--Pommeréval
France--Saumur
France--Tours
Germany--Braunschweig
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Munich
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Wesseling
Germany
France
Belgium
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.
1943
1944
1945
1944-04-10
1944-04-11
1944-04-18
1944-04-19
1944-04-20
1944-04-21
1944-04-22
1944-04-23
1944-04-24
1944-04-25
1944-04-26
1944-05-09
1944-05-10
1944-05-11
1944-05-12
1944-05-19
1944-05-20
1944-05-21
1944-05-22
1944-05-23
1944-05-24
1944-05-25
1944-05-27
1944-05-28
1944-06-01
1944-06-02
1944-06-04
1944-06-06
1944-06-07
1944-06-08
1944-06-09
1944-06-10
1944-06-12
1944-06-13
1944-06-16
1944-06-17
1944-06-21
1944-06-22
1944-06-24
1944-06-25
1944-06-27
1944-06-28
1944-07-12
1944-07-13
1944-07-15
1944-07-16
1944-07-18
1944-07-19
1944-07-20
1944-07-21
1944-07-24
1944-07-25
1944-07-26
1944-07-27
1944-07-28
1944-07-29
1944-07-30
1944-07-31
1944-08-03
1944-08-05
1944-08-09
1944-08-10
1945-04-18
1945-04-22
1945-04-25
1945-04-29
1945-04-30
1945-05-02
1945-05-03
1945-05-05
1945-05-11
1945-05-26
1945-09-12
1945-09-29
1945-10-01
1945-10-10
Description
An account of the resource
The log book covers the training and operational career Sergeant Harry Parkins from 20 December 1943 to March 1954. He flew in Stirling, Lancaster, Anson, C-47, Lancastrian, Valetta, Lincoln. Harry Parkins flew 47 operations - 30 night operations and 17 daylight operations - with 630 Squadron and 576 Squadron, including six for operation Manna, plus five for operation Dodge. Includes details on bombing on targets in France, Germany and Belgium: Paris-Juvisy, Paris-La Chapelle, Brunswick, Munich, Annecy. Burg Leopold, Amiens, Kiel, Antwerp, St Valery, Saumer, Maisy, Caen, Balleroy, Etampes, Beauvoir, Wesseling, Pommereval, Mimoyecques, Chalindrey, Nevers, Thiverny, Courtrai, Donges, Givors, Stuttgart, Cahagnes, Joigny, Trossy St Maximin, St Leu, Chattellerault. His pilots on operations were Pilot Officer Jackson, Flying Officer Lennon and Pilot Officer Fry.
148 Squadron
1657 HCU
199 Squadron
50 Squadron
576 Squadron
630 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
bombing
bombing of Helgoland (18 April 1945)
bombing of the Juvisy, Noisy-le-Sec and Le Bourget railways (18/19 April 1944)
bombing of the Pas de Calais V-1 sites (24/25 June 1944)
Bombing of Trossy St Maximin (3 August 1944)
C-47
flight engineer
Heavy Conversion Unit
Ju 88
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lincoln
mid-air collision
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Fiskerton
RAF Hemswell
RAF Scampton
RAF Shawbury
RAF Stradishall
RAF Sturgate
RAF Syerston
RAF Upwood
RAF Waddington
RAF Wigsley
Stirling
tactical support for Normandy troops
training
V-3
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/187/2536/SMarshallS1594781v10076.1.jpg
cc841d0db89d4310be72cd15719c77b6
Dublin Core
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Title
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Marshall, Syd. Album
Identifier
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Marshall, S
Description
An account of the resource
77 items. The album contains wartime and post-war photographs, newspaper cuttings, and memorabilia assembled by Warrant Officer Sidney Charles Marshall (1924 - 2017, 1594781 Royal Air Force). Syd Marshall was a flight engineer with 103 Squadron and flew operations from RAF Elsham Wolds.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Syd Marshall and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-05-08
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Tuesday, July 5, 1983
BOSTON CHOICE 3
NEW MUSEUM IN SPOTLIGHT
[Bold] County launches appeal for Bomber Command [/bold]
RAF Swinderby is leading the rest of Lincolnshire at the county makes it contribution towards the £2.5 million cost of the recently opened Bomber Command Museum at Hendon.
The station opened its account with £10,000 from last year’s open day – and has followed up with another £5,000, proceeds of the celebrity concert which followed the 1983 open day.
Says appeal director Group Captain Bill Randle: “We have had a marvellous support from Swinderby which is well ahead of the field.”
Opened by the Queen Mother in April, the new museum adjoining the RAF Museum has already collected £1 million towards its target, just 18 months after the appeal was launched.
And Bomber County people will have the chance to make their personal contributions when the appeal goes regional and visits Lincolnshire, probably at Christmas.
“This is the first time we have a regional appeal but we plan to spend three weeks in an area, basing ourselves at a local RAF station, mounting an exhibition and opening an office,” explains Bill Randle.
“We plan to contact local companies and organisations, Press, radio and TV. We shall also be selling Harris Certificates which commemorate Marshall of the RAF Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, the wartime chief of Bomber Command. They are issued to anyone donating more than £10.”
The new museum has added to the pulling over of the firmly established RAF museum, which records the history of the service from its earliest days, and the Battle of Britain Museum. And when the host RAF Hendon closes in 1985, it is planned the complex will become the largest national air museum in the world.
To sample the new display by the famous wartime command which made its “home” in Lincolnshire, LSG sent reporter Norman Bainbridge and photographer Bob Reding down to the North London Museums which attract 600,000 visitors a year.
Admission to the RAF Museum is free and the fee for the Bomber Command wing is £1 and 50p for pensioners and children.
[Heading] Quote [/heading]
“The focal point of Bomber Command was Lincolnshire. Geographically it was near to Germany, it was flat. That is why in Lincoln Cathedral you have the only true memorial to Bomber Command. Lincoln was the real centre of Bomber Command.” – Group Captain Bill Randle, Director of Appeals.
[Heading] The moment of terror… [/heading]
[Photograph of a bust of Sir Arthur Harris – inscription reads: A bust in the museum of Sir Arthur (Bomber) Harris, the wartime chief of Bomber Command, who attended the opening day before he celebrated his 91st birthday.]
IVOR [sic] Cole, was just 20 and a radio operator, was in a Lancaster bomber over Germany when he had his most frightening moment of the war.
“We were on a mining trip to the River Elb early one morning when we were jumped by a night-fighter.” he recalls.
“I picked this up on the fishpond (radar screen) and alerted the skipper. But the Junkers 88 came from below with his rigid guns and hit us in one wing.
“We opened fire almost simultaneously and although we never knew what happened, he made only one run at us and we got safely back to base.”
Base for Mr Cole, now a building trade representative living in Sturton Road, Saxilby, was the RAF Bomber Command station of Elsham Wolds.
During his raids on an ever-decreasing bombing area as the Allies pressed on towards Berlin, he witnessed some tragic mid-air collisions among the great numbers of Lancasters stacked at different levels.
He remembers; “I stood in the astrodome – the bubble of Perspex above my head – and suddenly I saw a Lancaster going along with one tail fin missing. Then I saw another with the propellers of two engines bent backward where they had sheared off the fin. The one with the fin damage was lost, the other got back”
“The Lancaster was a fine aircraft, the best I ever flew in and loved by everyone. It took a terrific amount of punishment,” he said.
[Heading] Lincolnshire legend lives on [/heading]
[Photograph of a Lancaster Bomber – inscription reads – A sight for Lincolnshire eyes… Lancaster S for Sugar which once stood guard at the gates of RAF Scampton.]
Press your nose against the plate-glass of the display window, shield your eyes and you can see why Lincolnshire became known as Bomber County.
Lining the back wall of the display at Hendon is a huge board listing Bomber Command’s order of battle and operation availability at 1800 hours on April 26, 1945.
Under No 5 Group (HQ, Morton Hall, Swinderby, near Lincoln) are the names of those war-time airfields, now indelibly imprinted in so many Lincolnshire memories: Bardney, Fulbeck, Metheringham, Skellingthorpe, Spilsby, Strubby, Wadington and Woodhall Spa.
The bottom line shows the groups strength that Spring evening 38 yars [sic] ago – 253 Lancasters, 14 Mosquitoes.
That, of course was only part of the country’s commitment to the RAF. To the north of Lincoln were the stations in Bomber Command’s No 1 group, based at Bawtry in North Notts, in other parts of Lincolnshire there were stations belonging to other commands.
Just a few feet from the order of battle are the uniform and decorations worn by Marshal of the RAF, Sir Arthur Harris. An accompanying panel traces his ride in the RAF to become Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command in July 1942 and his early command of 5 Group, then at Grantham.
At the opening ceremony, of the museum Sir Arthur (Bomber) Harris stood with the Queen Mother as she unveiled a commemorative plaque on a wall of the pavilion that records Lincolnshire’s all-important contribution to the war.
Cross a few yards of blue carpet space and the visitor stands below the floodlight gun turrets of Lancaster bomber S for Sugar, one of the RAF’s most famous aircraft.
Today she is for many visitors the most popular aircraft exhibit in the museum, still scornfully displaying Herman Goering’s boast: “No enemy plane will fly over the Reich Territory.”
Painted in white on its engine air intakes are the names of four R5868 pilots, all holders of the DFC: P/O Tottenham, P/O McClelland, F/O McManus and F/O Colpus.
Scampton is again massively recalled by the inclusion in the museum of another AVRO, the Vulcan XL 318 which proudly carries the 617 (Dambusters) symbol on its fin. The aircraft spreads its 111-ft of awesome wingspan above the white painted floor as visitor’s necks crane to glimpse the towering cockpit. A sum of more than £100,000 was needed to put it on public view.
“The Vulcan cost us more than any other aircraft in the museum,” says Group Captain Bill Randle, director of appeals, “and then the Ministry of Defence put VAT on the bill. We had to pay not only the basic cost but dismantling and re-assembly.”
Swinderby is another local station remembered in the display. It was the base for the museum’s DH Mosquito T Mark 3, built in 1946 and in service until 1963. Affectionately known as the “wooden wonder” because of its balsa/plywood construction, the plane was used in the film 633 Squadron.
The museum also houses the only known survivor of the 11,461 Wellingtons built. This aircraft was produced as a Mark X variant in 1944 and was modified later for training purposes which took it to Swinderby in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It is now being restored to original condition with the fitting of a Frazer Nash front turret which personally cost Bill Randle £600. “It was worth it – it’s a beautiful turret,” he enthuses.
Other aircraft on display range from a replica of the 1917- designed Vickers Vimy heavy bomber, built during 1967-69 and flown in 1969 to mark the 50th anniversary of the historic Atlantic crossing flight by Alcock and Brown, to the Vickers Valiant XD 818 which dropped Britain’s first H Bomb during the Christmas Island tests in 1957.
But a highlight for every visitor is the wreckage of Halifax S for Sugar, recovered by RAF sub-aqua divers from the bed of late Hoklingen, in Norway where she sank after attacking the German battleship Tirpitz in 1942.
Empty plinths are witness to the work still to be done in the Bomber Command Museum. More displays and mementoes will be installed to add to the already impressive displays of armaments, gun turrets, oxygen masks, bomb sights and other equipment.
One with special memories for Lincolnshire is the pavilion which includes a reconstruction of Dr Barnes Wallis’ office.
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
New museum in spotlight
Description
An account of the resource
Article 1 refers to funding for the Bomber Command museum at Hendon from RAF Swinderby.
Article 2 is a wartime memoir by Ivor Cole, 103 Squadron.
Article 3 describes some of the exhibits at the new Hendon museum.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1983-07-05
Format
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One newspaper cutting from an album
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--London
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.
1983
Identifier
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SMarshallS1594781v10076
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Laura Morgan
5 Group
617 Squadron
Halifax
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
Lancaster
mid-air collision
RAF Elsham Wolds
RAF Hendon
RAF Scampton
RAF Swinderby
Wallis, Barnes Neville (1887-1979)
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/221/3362/PCampbellKWP1601.2.jpg
46f4ce48d53bda56bbcf7a7e51feba7b
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/221/3362/ACampbellK160518.1.mp3
90a0845fe49fb6c55e3cebd57026cb8d
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
Campbell, Keith William
Keith William Campbell
Keith W Campbell
Keith Campbell
K W Campbell
K Campbell
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Keith William Campbell (1923 - 2019, 423220 Royal Australian Air Force) and a diary he kept as a prisoner of war.<br /><br /> A further collection about Keith Campbell <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2083">here.</a><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Keith William Campbell and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-06-04
2016-05-18
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
Campbell, KW
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DG: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. My name is Donald Gould and I am interviewing Keith Campbell of the Pacific Highway in Sydney. And you just speak from there and that’s fine. What is your name Keith?
KC: Keith Campbell.
DG: And how old are you Keith?
KC: Ninety two years, Don.
DG: Where were you born?
KC: Oh, in the city of Bathurst.
DG: That’s in the country of New South Wales. What, what did you parents do there?
KC: My father was an engineer in the railways.
DG: Right.
KC: Course in those days Bathurst was quite a large depot.
DG: It would have been.
KC: For steam trains.
DG: The railways.
KC: Yes.
DG: Yes. Yes, certainly. And where did you go to school?
KC: After a couple of years in Bathurst my father was transferred to the West Tamworth branch of the New South Wales Government Railways to take charge of the depot there and after, well, being about two at this stage I think aged five or thereabouts, it might have been a bit before I went to kindergarten. Preschool as it’s called now and subsequently went to junior school at the Tamworth School complex and subsequently went to high school where I spent five years and ended up with my leaving, leaving certificate.
DG: And that was in Tamworth.
KC: That was in Tamworth High School.
DG: Yes. Another country town of New South Wales.
KC: Well yes that was [?]
DG: Where were you when the war broke out?
KC: At school.
DG: In Tamworth.
KC: In Tamworth.
DG: And how, how old would you have been then? Around eight, er no about-
KC: Oh war broke out on -
DG: Sixteen. Something.
KC: 3rd of September.
DG: ‘39.
KC: ‘39. I was, what was I? My birthday was on the 18th of September so I would have been about seventeen, sixteen.
DG: Sixteen.
KC: Ahum.
DG: And at, and at that stage what, just as the war broke out and you were still at school did you have any thoughts that you might end up going, going to war? Or were you thinking that it might all be over in a couple of years or what was happening?
KC: I’m sure most of us thought we would be going to the war one way or another.
DG: Right.
KC: My father had been in the Australian Flying Corps during the first war so I immediately said, ‘If I go I’m going in the air force.’
DG: And you, you, you went into the air force because your father had been in the air force.
KC: Well that was one -
DG: And that was one of the -
KC: One of the main incentives and the air force appealed rather than the other services.
DG: Why was that?
KC: Flying.
DG: Oh right. Did you have, did you want to fly? Was it something you wanted to do?
KC: Well, ever since the mid ‘30s when Kingsford Smith was doing his barnstorming tours I had, my father gave me five shillings to do a circuit with Kingsford Smith in the Southern Cross and ever since then I’d been hooked on flying.
DG: And had you, although the war broke out had you or when you were at school had you any thoughts about what you might do? Apart from going to the war of course. Before that happened did you have any thoughts of what you might do when you left school?
KC: Oh. I wanted to be an analytical chemist.
DG: Right. Did you ever follow that up in the future?
KC: I followed that up, had an interview and I was told that if I took the position it was a reserved occupation so I abandoned it.
DG: Oh right. Ok. And how did you, how did you come to join the air force? When you decided you’d join and you went along to one of the recruitment centres I presume and -
KC: Well, I was eighteen in, whatever -
DG: Oh that’s alright. At eighteen you went along -
KC: And then I went. The nearest recruiting centre was at Newcastle.
DG: Right.
KC: So the 31st of December 1941 I was accepted into the reserve of the RAAF and duly received my Reserve badge.
DG: And what did they, what did they do with you then? Where did they, send you somewhere for training or -
KC: No. When you are on the reserve you just had to -
DG: Oh I see. Yeah.
KC: There was such a -
DG: Right.
KC: Oversupply of potential aircrew -
DG: Yes.
KC: That you just had to wait your turn.
DG: Right. Right. And then when you, when you were called up, where, where did you go?
KC: Well during the, about four or five months before I was called up a group of five of us who were also on the reserve in Tamworth and we used to do Morse code and aircraft recognition and similar things to that to prepare us for the possible future.
DG: Right.
KC: And in May I was called up to QITS at Bradfield Park in Sydney.
DG: Oh that, oh that seems to be a very popular spot.
KC: Well that was, all the New South Wales people started there.
DG: Oh did they? Oh I see. Right.
KC: They were put there as AC2s.
DG: And what, what did they do, what did you do there?
KC: You did some basic exercises. Training and indoctrination in to the air force. Discipline, laws and conduct and various assessment interviews to see what you would, to see what they would assess you as. Where you would go.
DG: And what did they assess you for?
KC: Initially they said I was going to be a pilot.
DG: Right. And that, did that eventuate?
KC: No.
DG: Oh right [laughs]. What happened?
KC: I was ready to go to be posted to a training centre but one morning on parade they announced that there was a shortage of observers in the schools in Canada and anyone that volunteered would go within the week.
DG: Right.
KC: Well the temptation for overseas trip was too great so -
DG: Oh right.
KC: I was one of the twenty or thirty that volunteered and we did go within the week or two.
DG: Oh right. So you weren’t at Bradfield for very long?
KC: Only a couple or three months.
DG: Right. And what happened when you got to Canada? Whereabouts, whereabouts did you go in Canada?
KC: Well we could be shipped from Hobart.
DG: Right.
KC: To San Francisco.
DG: Right.
KC: And we called in to Pearl Harbour on the way and saw the devastation.
DG: Oh right.
KC: The Japanese raid had made on the American navy.
DG: Yes.
KC: And then disembarked at San Francisco. Caught the train to Vancouver. Had a wonderful trip across the Rockies.
DG: Yes.
KC: To Edmonton.
DG: Right.
KC: And then we were put in the camp there for further assessment.
DG: And what, and what did they, how did they assess you there?
KC: I was, most days an observer. An observer consisted of navigation and bombing.
DG: Oh right.
KC: And by the time we got to Canada it had been re-categorised as a bomb aimer or a navigator.
DG: Right.
KC: And I was one of the ones categorised as a bomb aimer.
DG: Ok.
KC: And I went to the Bombing and Gunnery School at Lethbridge in Alberta.
DG: Do you know what they, you said they assessed you to be a bomb aimer. What did they, what did they do to judge your abilities or whatever to decide that that sort of thing would suit you?
KC: I think they -
DG: Do you have any idea?
KC: A to N were bomb aimers M to Z were navigators [laughs].
DG: Oh right. So -
KC: I don’t know.
DG: It was, no. No. Ok.
KC: I’m sure they just checked your records.
DG: Right. Yes. Not terribly scientific perhaps.
KC: I don’t think, not at that stage.
DG: And, and when did, have you, can you remember when you finished your training there and went to, to England?
KC: Well, spent about three months at Lethbridge Bombing and Gunnery School and then went to Edmonton to Navigation School and spent, I suppose, another three or four months there.
DG: I should, I should ask you that yes. The training there. I’d skipped over that. The training you, so you did some training in bomb aiming and some in navigation.
KC: Navigation. Yes.
DG: And how did you, what were your, what were your feelings? What? Regardless of what they asked you to do. What would, what did you like the idea of being? A bomb aimer or a navigator?
KC: I just wanted to fly [laughs].
DG: Oh right [laughs] and so how, how did they, they train you in bomb aiming. What did they, how did they do it, did they take you up and show you how to use the sights and all of this sort of thing I assume.
KC: Well, firstly, you had to learn how to use the bomb sight.
DG: Right.
KC: Which was the, the early bomb sight. Not the mark 14 and we went up, about four of us went up in an Anson and dropped nine pound practice bombs on the target and did that for oh however long it took and after about fifty or so bombs I suppose over that period and interspersed, interspersed with that was gunnery as well. We used to fly up in a Fairey Battle and -
DG: Right.
KC: Or something similar.
DG: So you did drop a few bombs.
KC: Oh well nine pound practice bombs.
DG: Oh that’s right. Yes, I missed, yes. Yes, that’s right. And what about the navigation? What sort of, what sort of training did you get with the navigation?
KC: Oh you had to do your star shots. Use of a sextant.
DG: Oh right.
KC: And how to operate the navigation instruments.
DG: Right.
KC: Sorry. Now, I’ve forgotten most of it.
DG: Yes. Yes.
KC: In the -
DG: Sorry.
KC: In the meantime we enjoyed the wonderful hospitality of the Canadian people.
DG: And how did you find that? They looked after you well, did they?
KC: Superbly.
DG: Excellent. And then when, when did you go to the UK?
KC: We -
DG: Any idea of what -
KC: We received our wings in, I think it was the end of May or June 1943.
DG: Right.
KC: We thought we knew everything.
DG: I bet you did.
KC: And after, I think it was two weeks leave, we ended up in Halifax waiting for a ship to go to UK.
DG: And where did they send you when you arrived?
KC: We arrived at Liverpool and after the bright lights and no restrictions in Canada it was a very different country we arrived at. It was blackout.
DG: Oh yeah.
KC: Everything was rationed.
DG: Right.
KC: And it was a country at war.
DG: Totally different.
KC: Totally different.
DG: And where did they, what base or centre?
KC: Well from there we all went to the RAAF centre at Brighton -
DG: Right.
KC: Which was a holding centre for air crew until they found space for them at the training stations.
DG: Right. Were you there very long?
KC: I was there for about two to three weeks I think.
DG: Right. And where did they send you after that?
KC: After that we went to, what was called AFU Advanced Training Unit at Pwllheli in North Wales where we just, we were acclimatised to the conditions in England.
DG: Right.
KC: For crowded skies, fog and -
DG: Ok.
KC: Aircraft everywhere you could see.
DG: Yes.
KC: And we thought we were, we were trained. We very soon found out we, what we didn’t know.
DG: And they gave you more thorough then in er, and were you doing that in bomb aiming or any navigation there?
KC: Well as a, mainly in bomb aiming.
DG: Right.
KC: And some navigation.
DG: And were you there very long?
KC: A couple of months I think.
DG: Right. And what happened after that?
KC: After that we were sent to Operational Training Unit.
DG: Right.
KC: Which was really the start of serious training.
DG: Yes.
KC: We all, I forget how many. it was probably about twenty of each category.
DG: Right.
KC: Pilots, navigators, bomb aimers, gunners and wireless -
DG: Ah.
KC: Operators.
DG: Yeah
KC: Put them all together in a hangar and said, ‘Right. Sort yourselves out as a crew.’
DG: I’ve heard that. And how did you go about finding a crew?
KC: It seemed a very haphazard way of doing things.
DG: Yes.
KC: But it turned out remarkably well. You just talked to people and if they seemed compatible –
DG: Yes.
KC: Said, ‘Well I’m looking for a pilot.’ And he said, ‘Well I’m looking for a bomb aimer. Let’s team up.’
DG: Right.
KC: And then you’d go and talk to someone else who might be a navigator.
DG: And did you did you pick up your whole crew at that stage?
KC: The five crew.
DG: What did that, while you were talking. Right, yeah.
KC: The five crew of a Wellington.
DG: Oh yes, of course. Right ok.
KC: A training station.
DG: Did the Wellington have a flight engineer?
KC: No.
DG: Right. Just had a, what crew did a Wellington have?
KC: Pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, signaller and gunner.
DG: Ah right ok. Were you all Australians?
KC: As it happened we were.
DG: Right.
KC: Lichfield seemed to be an Australian centre.
DG: Oh I see. Yes. Yes.
KC: There were other RAF people there and Canadians and -
DG: And did -
KC: New Zealanders.
DG: And then did you, did you, did you do your further training there at Lichfield with your newly found crew?
KC: Yes, you flew as a crew from then on.
DG: Right.
KC: And learned the responsibilities to each other -
DG: Yes.
KC: You soon learned that you had to be completely compatible and er because each one’s life depended on the other ones.
DG: Yes. Yes. And how long were you at Lichfield?
KC: From memory about three months.
DG: Right. And then did you go to a squadron? [or whatever?]
KC: No.
DG: Or whatever?
KC: We went from there to an advanced, to a conversion unit where we transferred from Wellingtons to the four engine aircraft which we’d be flying on a squadron.
DG: And what, and what plane was that?
KC: That was the Halifax. The Halifax mark ii at that stage we were flying at con unit.
DG: And you -
KC: There we picked up another engineer, another gunner and an engineer. Both were RAF.
DG: Right. And then after that did you go to a squadron?
KC: When we finished our conversion unit and passed out.
DG: Yes.
KC: We went to 466 squadron based at Leconfield.
DG: Where is that? What county.
KC: In Yorkshire.
DG: And did you stay at that, with that squadron all the way through the war? 466.
KC: I stayed with 466 but early June 466 transferred from Leconfield to Driffield. Also in Yorkshire.
DG: And then for the rest of the war? Was it from Driffield?
KC: For the rest of my war it was.
DG: From your, yes. Yes. From your - Ok. And did you only fly the Halifax?
KC: Yes. Driffield, 466 squadron had very recently traded in, for want of a better word, their Wellingtons on to the new mark iii Halifax.
DG: Right.
KC: Which was a superb aircraft. Was -
DG: Did you prefer to the Halifax to the other -
KC: Well you didn’t have a choice.
DG: I know but I mean just, did you, did you have any, did you, you felt, did you enjoy flying in that more than -
KC: Having flown in a -
DG: Halifax.
KC: Halifax it it, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t have wanted a better aeroplane.
DG: Oh right. Oh well that, that’s good to fly in something that, that you enjoy doing.
KC: Complete confidence.
DG: A plane that you enjoy.
KC: It performed well. Had, with the new radial engines their performance was outstanding.
DG: What sort of engine did the Halifax have? A radial?
KC: Four radial engines um oh Hercules.
DG: Are they, were they Rolls Royce?
KC: No.
DG: Oh, no. Do you know who made those?
KC: No.
DG: I had, oh well I -
KC: Rolls Royce made Merlins.
DG: Yes. Yes, no, ok. What was the daily life like on, on the base?
KC: Well the -
DG: Daily routines.
KC: Very relaxed. As much as you did what you needed to do. Attended every lecture, parade or things like that. Turned up at the bombing section every morning and compared notes from the people that’d flown previously on raids and generally acquainted yourself with the other crews.
DG: Did you, did you have any sort of roster in so far as did you have, were there times when you’d be on flying duty and then times when you’d have a little bit of leave for a few days or something like that?
KC: Generally after you flew for six weeks and then got a week’s leave.
DG: What did you do on your week’s leave? What sort of activities did you get up to?
KC: The whole of England to explore.
DG: And did you?
KC: As far as possible. Yes.
DG: And you enjoyed that?
KC: Oh very much.
DG: How did you get around?
KC: You had, we were given a rail pass to wherever we wanted to go. So I used to get a rail pass as far north in Scotland as I could which gave me unlimited scope.
DG: You enjoyed Scotland?
KC: Very much.
DG: And when you’ve, after leave, when if you were on flying, six weeks that you were on flying duty what was the sort of routine then?
KC: Well, you’d wake up in the morning and have a look, see whether you were on flying duty and if you were on, on that night you prepared yourself for going to briefing, getting your gear ready and going out to the aircraft.
DG: So, how much, how much of your day was taken up in that preparation from the time that you first started.
KC: Oh.
DG: Getting things to -
KC: Generally the raids were at night so the briefing was afternoon and by the time you got your charts in order and time for dinner and from there you just were taken out to the aircraft by the girls in the transport section and waited until take-off.
DG: Did you have to do any checking out in the aircraft earlier in the day or were you just pretty much just did those final checks when you got out to the aircraft then?
KC: Well, from my point of view there wasn’t much to check.
DG: No. No, we’ve, no, I see. Yeah. Yeah
KG: The pilot used to go out and make sure that everything was oh according to him it was ok.
DG: Yeah. What, how did you, how did you feel? What were your nerves like? What were you, what did you think about when you were going out on a mission?
KC: Oh.
DG: Did you, were you nervous? Were you worried or -
KC: No. No. I don’t think so. You knew what, you knew what you were doing. You knew the odds and, well, I accepted them.
DG: Yeah. And what, now, that was when you were getting ready to go. Did that, did you still feel the same way as during the mission. Did things change or did you just feel pretty much the same all the way through?
KC: I did.
DG: Yes.
KC: Didn’t have time to do myself. By the time I’d done map reading and one of my other jobs was operate the H2S which was a navigation instrument and I had a fairly full time job there.
DG: There was, there was a navigator on the Halifax isn’t there?
KC: Oh yes.
DG: But the bomb aimer operated the H2S did he?
KC: It was up to each individual crew.
DG: Oh right.
KC: The -
DG: I’d understood the H2S was a navigation aid -
KC: It was.
DG: So I presumed the navigator had done it.
KC: Oh it’s a navigation, Gee and H2S -
DG: Yes.
KC: Were navigation. We worked it out between them that I’d done navigation training in Canada.
DG: Right.
KC: So he would operate the Gee and the charts and do all the setting courses and I would operate the H2S.
DG: How many missions did you fly Keith?
KC: Thirty three.
DG: Crikey. So you did your, you did your tour.
KC: Well the tour in those days was flexible.
DG: Oh was it?
KC: Up to, probably up to forty.
DG: Oh I see.
KC: We started off, I arrived on the squadron at, I think it was just after Christmas ‘43 and we spent the next six weeks on the squadron doing training on the Halifax and becoming proficient as a crew.
DG: And did you have any, did you have any memorable experiences from your, from your missions or were they all pretty routine?
KC: No. Well, they were routine in as much as you had, you flew there, changed course to there and somewhere else and changed course on your run up to the target and -
DG: Did you have any interesting situations -
KC: Oh many.
DG: Arise? Could you just tell me about a couple of them? Some of the interesting ones.
KC: Well, going over the coast there was, first there was a belt of searchlights from Denmark to Spain and you had to fly across those.
DG: Right.
KC: And as far as possible avoid the concentrations where you knew there were flak guns and from the time you got over the coast which was the coast of the bombers be very aware that there were potential enemy fighters around.
DG: And did you have, did you, can recall any, any attacks by night fighters on your plane?
KC: Oh yes.
DG: Yes. You get -
KC: Fortunately most of them we, the gunners saw the plane.
DG: Right.
KC: And they gave it, well the gunners tracked the fighter in and then gave the pilot the order to corkscrew port or starboard as the case may be and hopefully discourage the fighter.
DG: And you obviously survived those.
KC: We survived those, yes.
DG: And what about flak? Did you get hit by flak at all?
KC: Every target was infested with flak.
DG: Yes. And not enough to bring you down.
KC: Oh yes. If you got coned over the target you were -
DG: Yeah.
KC: Hopeless.
DG: Well did you, did you come back from all missions ok? Or did you -
KC: From thirty three missions, yes.
DG: Right.
KC: The thirty fourth was a disaster.
DG: You didn’t ever have to bale out or anything exciting like that?
KC: Yes, on our last raid on Stuttgart in July ‘44 we were coming home and another aircraft ran, ran up our rear.
DG: Crikey.
KC: Which upset the whole scheme of things.
DG: And what, and what happened? Obviously the plane came down but what were you aware of. What, what was happening what were you aware of while this was happening?
KC: I was at the front of the Halifax, had just finished dropping the bombs and doing the check on the bomb panel and during the bombing run I used to lean on my parachute and sometimes it would [roll way out of it] the clips on the harness used to, clips on the harness used to connect with the ones on the parachute. On this occasion I was fortunate that the parachute was connected ‘cause I heard an explosion. I heard someone say, ‘Bloody hell.’ The next thing I knew I was about ten thousand feet underneath a parachute in the night skies outside of Stuttgart
DG: So you, you, you were out without really recognising it. You weren’t consciously trying -
KC: No.
DG: To find your way, working out how to get out. You were just out.
KC: I didn’t have a choice. I just went straight through the front.
DG: Right. And how high did you say you were?
KC: Oh about twenty thousand.
DG: Twenty? Oh golly. And it took you a little while to reach the ground.
KC: Well I came to at, I think, at about ten thousand where the oxygen level was sufficient.
DG: Oh yes. Yes.
KC: The force of the, I can only assume the force of the explosion opened my parachute because I have no recollection whatsoever of opening it.
DG: Heaven’s above. And did you, were you very cold? At that altitude you would have been cold. You’d have your flying suit I suppose.
KC: Yes.
DG: But you’d have been pretty
KC: I wasn’t
DG: Pretty chilly.
KC: I wasn’t conscious of being cold.
DG: Right. Yes.
KC: That’s, where I was and what I was doing there.
DG: Yeah, and you landed. Did you injure yourself or were you -
KC: Fortunately, no.
DG: Right.
KC: I landed in a field and rolled over a few times and took my parachute off and found a tree and hid it, hid it under that and assessed my situation.
DG: Did you see anybody else come out of the plane? Did you -
KC: No.
DG: Did you ever find out what happened to the others?
KC: They were all killed.
DG: Were, and, dear oh dear. That was tremendous luck for you.
KC: It was.
DG: Unbelievable. And you didn’t have a reception committee there when you landed.
KC: No. I took off for, at about 3, 2 o’clock in the morning and I looked up and saw in the sky aircraft heading for home [laughs].
DG: Oh golly. Yeah.
KC: Good luck to them.
DG: Yes.
KC: I could see them up there.
DG: Oh golly. What a lucky fellow.
KC: And I spent about three days sort of wandering around Germany with the ultimate aim of trying to get to the Swiss border but in Germany proper it was fairly hopeless.
DG: So you weren’t able to evade being captured.
KC: Well, eventually, I used to hide up of a day and walk at night with the aid of the compass we had.
DG: Right.
KC: And I think it was the third night I was starting out to walk at dusk and a truck came down the road. It was too late to hide.
DG: Yes.
KC: So I just kept on walking and he stopped to give me a lift and I tried to make out I was a French worker but he knew far more French than I did.
DG: Oh dear.
KC: At that stage I was, had very little to eat and wasn’t in particularly good shape.
DG: I was going to ask you, what did you do for food?
KC: Well you had your emergency rations.
DG: Oh right.
KC: Which were very basic but -
DG: Yes.
KC: Very necessary and if you saw a fruit tree you picked some fruit.
DG: Did you get any meat? Did you -
KC: No.
DG: Right. And what was this fellow that picked you up? Who was, who was he? Was he -
KC: He was a farmer.
DG: Oh right. And this, this was in Germany.
KC: In Germany. Yes.
DG: Yes. Yes. Of course. Yes.
KC: Three days walk out on the west side of Stuttgart.
DG: Yeah. And so, yeah, and so of course he had, well what did he do?
KC: He had his little daughter with him.
DG: Right.
KC: And they were going to market and at that stage I still had a few squares of chocolate left from the rations so I gave the little kid some chocolate.
DG: Right.
KC: And when she found out what to do with it she wanted more but I didn’t have any more and when we got past through the nearest village he stopped and went into the local hotel and brought back two bottles of beer and he gave me one of them.
DG: That was a very nice fellow.
KC: He was. And -
[Phone ringing]
KC: Excuse me.
DG: Just pausing the interview for a moment.
[Pause]
DG: We’re continuing again now. So, he bought you a bottle of beer and what did, what did he do with you then?
KC: He took me to the local police station.
DG: Oh right.
KC: And from then on I was a POW.
DG: And how did the police treat you?
KC: Reasonably well.
DG: Yes.
KC: I was taken over then by some army people who took me to the nearest, I think it was a RAF station, and there I met with about eight or nine other air crew who had been picked up. Presumably from the same raid.
DG: Yes.
KC: And from there we were taken to Stuttgart and put on a train to the interrogation centre at Frankfurt.
DG: Right.
KC: That was an experience too of course. The RAF were still raiding Stuttgart and we were on the platform waiting for a train and an air raid siren went and there was a raid and I think there was about four or five German guards looking after us and the civilian population were very, very hostile.
DG: Ah.
KC: The ones that were at the railway station.
DG: Yes.
KC: And the guards turned their bayonets outwards.
DG: Right.
KC: To, we were valuable property.
DG: Yes. Yes.
KC: And we were subsequently taken down to the, one of the cells of the station until the train came in.
DG: Right.
KC: And then we went by train from there to the interrogation centre at Frankfurt.
DG: How long did they interrogate you?
KC: I was there for about a week.
DG: Right. Was it pretty routine sort of questioning?
KC: Fairly routine. Yes
DG: Yes.
KC: Who you are. Yes. Can I have your name, rank and number? What squadron? I can’t answer that. And all these questions I can’t answer. He was a very, well I say, decent German.
DG: Yes.
KC: He’d spent four or five years in England pre-war and he knew, he knew very well we weren’t supposed to answer the questions.
DG: Yes.
KC: And he said well don’t worry about it. Pressed the button. A girl came in. He spoke to her in German. She came back with a file and he said your squadron is 466. You’re stationed at Leconfield. Your CO is so and so. Your flight commanders are, whoever they were and your local village is Beverley. The barmaid’s number in the Beverley Arms is so and so.
DG: Right.
KC: And there’s nothing you can really tell us.
DG: Yeah. Yes I suppose you couldn’t.
KC: I think a more, a more senior person would have been, had a much more severe interrogation.
DG: Yes. Yes. And you went to a POW camp after that?
KC: Yes.
DG: And how long, from, can you remember how long you were in the POW camp till the end of the war?
KC: We started off in the interrogation centre to go to the POW camp at a place called Bankauer in Poland. Near, quite near Breslau. The Red Cross were marvellous to us. They, what clothing we didn’t have they made up for us. They gave us food parcels.
DG: Right.
KC: Looked after us.
DG: And these were obviously getting through to you.
KC: Well, in those days -
DG: Of course.
KC: They were yeah. And they gave us a parcel between two of us for the train trip.
DG: Right.
KC: And subsequently after about three or four days travelling on a very slow train and we arrived at the POW camp.
DG: And how, how long were you there until the war ended?
KC: I arrived in the camp probably about, shot down on the 25th of July and by the time I got to the camp it would be about the middle of August.
DG: What year was that?
KC: ‘44 ’45.
DG: ’45.
KC: Yeah. No ’44.
DG: 44 Yeah ’44.
KC: 1944.
DG: July ‘44.
KC: Yeah.
DG: So you weren’t there for very long.
KC: I was there till after Christmas.
DG: Right.
KC: And the Russians were making their advance and we were right in the path of it.
DG: Oh right.
KC: So the German Command informed us we were going to be marched across Germany in front of the Russians.
DG: Right.
KC: Because we were apparently valuable personnel.
DG: When people were, there were some people who did have very bad nerves and they would perhaps refuse to fly or something and they’d perhaps be put out for LMF.
KC: Yes.
DG: How did you guys feel about that?
KC: It was a disgusting thing. A man had flown twenty missions and he lost his nerve and he was denigrated.
DG: So you had sympathy for them.
KC: More than sympathy.
DG: Yes. Yes.
KC: It was, I suppose using that as an example to the others, don’t do it.
DG: Yes.
KC: But you were stripped of rank and given the very minor duties to perform.
DG: And when the, how did you, how did you come to be released from the POW camp. What happened?
KC: Well we had to march across Germany from our camp at Breslau across to oh I forget the name of the town -
DG: You were freed by the Russians were you?
KC: No.
DG: I thought they were. Sorry I’m -
KC: We were kept ahead of the Russians.
DG: Oh, I see. Right, yeah. Ok.
KC: ‘Cause they wanted us. The Germans wanted us
DG: Oh yes, sorry. Yes.
KC: And subsequently after a march through the coldest winter in twenty years -
DG: Yeah.
KC: We arrived, I think it was about two or three weeks on the march and then they put us on a train and after spending three nights on a train with seventy people in a cattle truck with no amenities we would have rather been marching.
DG: Yes. Yes.
KC: We eventually arrived at another POW camp at Luckenwalde which was about fifty miles south of Berlin.
DG: That was in Germany now.
KC: In, yeah, Germany proper.
DG: Yes. Yes.
KC: Where we spent the next that would have been probably, March, April.
DG: Right.
KC: And we stayed there and the Russians eventually overran the camp and after considerable problems we were repatriated to, taken by American trucks to the American lines and flown back to England.
DG: And what happened to you after that? In England. When did you, how long were you there before you came back to Australia?
KC: Well there we were taken, taken to Brighton to the RAAF centre. Given medicals and re-equipped with our uniforms and given back the personal belongings that had been kept for us. Or -
DG: Oh right.
KC: Kept to send to, either if we came back, if not they were taken, sent to the relatives.
DG: How was your health when you arrived?
KC: I was reasonably good health.
DG: So you -
KC: Very, lost a lot of weight.
DG: Yes.
KC: And fortunately I was one of the ones that were healthy.
DG: Right. And when did you come back to Australia? Can you -
KC: We spent, we were given a months’ leave.
DG: Right.
KC: With a years’ pay.
DG: Oh right.
KC: And an open rail pass.
DG: Oh good.
KC: I went to stay with various people that I’d known in the UK.
DG: Yes.
KC: And eventually went back to Brighton and was transferred to Liverpool.
DG: Right.
KC: And caught the Orion back to Australia.
DG: And how, when you got back to Australia how, how were you treated? How was Bomber Command or veterans from Bomber Command treated in Australia at that time?
KC: We were taken off the ship, taken to Bradfield Park, checked in and all the administration things done and sent off on leave.
DG: Right.
KC: No tickertape parades. No walk down George Street. Just, off you go.
DG: Were they, they, were they trying to sort of keep it quiet or was it just, that just the way it was?
KC: Just the way it was I suppose.
DG: Right. Yeah.
KC: Being Australia they mainly concentrated on the Japanese war.
DG: Yes at that. Yes.
KC: In many cases Bomber Command weren’t highly regarded.
DG: I gather. Yeah, I gather they weren’t terribly well and did you, were there, were you was you conscious of any ill feeling or -
KC: Oh no.
DG: Was it just not, not terribly, just perhaps not quite as well regarded as much as others perhaps.
KC: Well why you weren’t here fighting for Australia?
DG: Oh I see. Oh. Oh golly.
KC: We didn’t have a choice where we were going.
DG: No, of course you didn’t. Oh, crikey.
KC: Actually, at one stage, I think it was ’44, a lot of, well some air crew received white feathers from people in Australia saying why are you enjoying yourself over in England, lots of leave and occasional exhilarating trips over Germany and that appeared in the Australian papers.
DG: I’ve never heard that. That would have been terribly hurtful to you. What you went through to, yes.
KC: Well the flying conditions over Germany compared to New Guinea and the Isles had very little comparison.
DG: Oh yeah. Totally different.
KC: The living conditions were infinitely worse.
DG: Yes.
KC: ‘Cause we did have reasonably good accommodation.
DG: Yes. Well, how, how long before you were discharged?
KC: Oh I think I got out just before Christmas ’45.
DG: And what did you, what did you do then about, what did you think about doing as your job after that?
KC: Well the first thing I thought of I’ve got all this deferred pay and gratuity. Let’s spend it.
DG: Right.
KC: So the three of us went up to Coolangatta and had a, spent our next two weeks in riotous living as far as riotous living could be -
DG: Yeah. Yeah.
KC: In the village of Coolangatta.
DG: Yeah. Yeah.
KC: It was a very pleasant seaside resort in those days.
DG: And what, and what happened when you got back to reality?
KC: Well, I went back to work.
DG: And what were you doing?
KC: Pre-war I had joined the Department of Main Roads as a cadet draughtsman and I came back and started off with them again. They transferred, transferred me from Tamworth to Sydney. To one of the offices in Sydney.
DG: Oh I see. Yeah.
KC: And I started off civilian life there.
DG: As a draughtsman?
KC: Ahum.
DG: And did you continue that?
KC: No. I had problems with my eyesight.
DG: Oh.
KC: And another position came up and I decided to go there.
DG: And what sort of work was that? In the same department?
KC: No. No, I resigned from there and -
DG: Right.
KC: We had been staying at a private hotel for about seventy to eighty people and my wife and I were offered a chance of buying into the freehold in [Romega?].
DG: Oh right.
KC: I always said if I got out of Germany I would never be hungry again.
DG: Yes.
KC: So the idea of a career in the food industry appealed.
DG: Where, when did you meet your wife?
KC: On our -
DG: Was this before the war?
KC: No. No.
DG: It was after the war. Yeah.
KC: Time in Coolangatta.
DG: Oh I see.
KC: She had been in the women’s air force there as a radio operator.
DG: Right.
KC: And she and a few friends had the same idea of -
DG: Oh right.
KC: Spending deferred pay in Coolangatta.
DG: So you obviously got on well there.
KC: Three years later we were married.
DG: And where were you were living? Oh sorry, in the hotel. Yes.
KC: We were in the accommodation.
DG: No. Of course. Where was that?
KC: At Neutral Bay.
DG: Oh right. And then how long were you there?
KC: Ten years.
DG: Right. And what did you do after that?
KC: Well, at that time we had our family. A boy and a girl and um we went out to, oh what’s the name? My wife’s sister had a, they were living at, oh I can’t remember the suburb.
DG: Oh it doesn’t matter.
KC: Around about the [?]
DG: Yeah.
KC: And we decided to go out there to be with them –
DG: Right.
KC: For a while to - We were having medical problems with one of our children and we needed her family to help my wife to cope with things.
DG: Yes.
KC: And I had been offered a job as a manager of a catering division of a company so I accepted that and spent the rest of my career in catering.
DG: Oh right. Good. Do you, do you keep in touch with any of your old comrades from your –
KC: Well –
DG: From your time in Bomber Command?
KC: In half an hour one is going to be here.
DG: Oh right. Oh good.
KC: That’s who I was on the phone to.
DG: Oh I see. Right. So yeah. Oh that’s very good.
KC: Every June, every first weekend in June the Bomber Command Commemoration Day Foundation hold a weekend in June. A formal commemoration of the Australian Bomber Command Memorial in the sculpture gardens at the memorial and that’s officially done by the Australian War Memorial.
DG: And that is in Canberra.
KC: That’s in Canberra.
DG: Yes.
KC: And the previous Saturday night we have what we call a meet and greet at the ANZAC hall of the war memorial where G George is and we’ve got about two or three hundred people there.
DG: That’s good.
KC: Veterans and friends.
DG: Yes.
KC: And family.
DG: Yes.
KC: And after the Sunday ceremony we have a lunch at the, one of the hotels.
DG: Right.
KC: That’s a very important occasion each year.
DG: Yes. I’m sure you look forward to that to see your old friends.
KC: Ahum.
DG: Yes.
KC: We’re in the middle of organising it now.
DG: Oh good. Good. Well thank you, Keith. I do appreciate the time you’ve taken to talk to me this afternoon.
KC: Well that’s -
DG: And I know there will be many other people in the future that will, will get a lot of pleasure out of being able to hear what you had to say.
KC: There’s a lot more to it but -
DG: I’m sure there is.
KC: You could waffle on indefinitely.
DG: Yes. Thank you very much.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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ACampbellK160518
PCampbellKW1601
Title
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Interview with Keith Campbell. One
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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00:56:45 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Creator
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Donald Gould
Date
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2016-05-18
Description
An account of the resource
Keith Campbell grew up in New South Wales and joined the Royal Australian Air Force when he was old enough. He flew 35 operations as a bomb aimer with 466 Squadron from RAF Leconfield and RAF Driffield before being shot down. He became a prisoner of war and took part in the long march.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Australia
Great Britain
England--Yorkshire
United States
Contributor
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Julie Williams
466 Squadron
aircrew
bale out
bomb aimer
bombing
crewing up
Dulag Luft
Gee
H2S
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
lack of moral fibre
memorial
mid-air collision
prisoner of war
RAF Driffield
RAF Leconfield
RAF Lichfield
Stalag 3A
Stalag Luft 7
the long march
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/221/3363/PCampbellKWP1601.1.jpg
46f4ce48d53bda56bbcf7a7e51feba7b
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/221/3363/ACampbellKW160604.2.mp3
4ec1a402c3e766446124357837dccd8a
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
Campbell, Keith William
Keith William Campbell
Keith W Campbell
Keith Campbell
K W Campbell
K Campbell
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Keith William Campbell (1923 - 2019, 423220 Royal Australian Air Force) and a diary he kept as a prisoner of war.<br /><br /> A further collection about Keith Campbell <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2083">here.</a><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Keith William Campbell and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-06-04
2016-05-18
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Campbell, KW
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AP: This interview for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive is with Keith Campbell, a 466 Squadron Halifax bomb aimer during World War Two. The interview is taking place at the War Memorial’s theatre in Canberra. We’re here at the War Memorial for a Bomber Command Commemoration that will take place tomorrow. It is the 4th of June 2016. My name’s Adam Purcell. Keith, we’ll start from the beginning if you don’t mind. Can you tell me something of your early life and what you were doing before the war?
KC: Before the war I went to school [laughs] Silly question. I finished my leaving certificate at school. And in 1939 the war had just broken out and like all youngsters of sixteen I couldn’t get in the Air Force soon enough. I wanted to get in the Air Force because my father had been in the Australian Flying Corps in the First War. So obviously I had to follow his footsteps. And when I became seventeen [pause while coughing] Excuse me. Sorry about that. At seventeen I applied to join the Air Force Reserve, which I did and for the next, oh six or eight months myself and [coughing] excuse me, got a sore throat. Six or eight others learned aircraft recognition, basic trigonometry which was all done at school anyway. And Morse. Somehow or other, we had to get up to ten words a minute in Morse. Initially it seemed an impossible task. The lines seemed to be a collection of dots and dashes. Every sign you saw you reduced it to Morse. However, in due course we obtained proficiency in Morse and the other things like the aircraft recognition. In May 1942 I was duly called up for service at Number 2 ITS at Bradfield Park, Sydney. ITS was an Initial Training School where all raw recruits came to be sorted out and hopefully made into something resembling an Air Force type. There’s also [pause] also the categorisation as to what you were going to be. Pilot, navigator, bomb aimer or whatever. I was selected to be a pilot and was looking forward to going to initial, Elementary Training School. And one morning in the end of, I think it was July or August [coughing] Oh dear. I’m sorry about that.
AP: That’s alright. Have another drink if you like.
KC: On parade the CO came out and said, ‘There’s a shortage of observers in the Canadian schools. Anyone that likes to volunteer will be off to Canada within a week.’ The temptation was too great so I volunteered and we were off to Canada in a couple of weeks. Went down to Hobart where we went aboard the French liner Ile de France which had been converted to a troop ship and sailed across the Pacific to New Zealand where we picked up some more Air Force people. And then our next stop was at Pearl Harbour where we stopped for a day. We weren’t allowed off the ship but we could see the devastation that the Japanese raid had caused to the American fleet. Things had recovered to a great extent but we could imagine just how great the attack was. There was one battleship upside down and it wasn’t a happy sight. Our next call was at San Francisco where [coughing] Oh dear.
[pause]
Where we caught the train from ‘Frisco to Vancouver. As it happened the train we took up was on Thanksgiving Day and on the buffet in the train we were entertained to a turkey dinner. Thanksgiving dinner. Which was a major occasion after the food in the, on the ship which was adequate but quite basic. Arrived in Vancouver and had three or four days to have a look around that beautiful city. Then off to Edmonton, over the Rockies. Caught the train and about four of us got on the back carriage where there was an observation platform. I think we spent most of the thirty six hours going to Edmonton just watching the magnificence of the Canadian Rockies.
AP: I’m just going to stop there for a minute.
[pause]
AP: Now. We were in San Francisco, I think. Catching a train.
KC: Going over the Rockies was a magnificent experience. Bright moonlight night and to see all that snow which we’d never, most of us had never seen before. It was a wonderful introduction to Canada. We arrived at the RCAF station at Edmonton where we spent another week being sorted out and see just where we were going. Who was going to be a navigator and who was going to be a bomb aimer? And subsequently I was categorised as a bomb aimer. And there were others, along with myself caught a train to Lethbridge in southern Alberta where the RCAF training station was situated. Lethbridge was quite a small Canadian town. Very pleasant. And we spent about five or six months there, I think it was, flying Ansons, and Battles, and whatever, bomb aiming and doing a bit of gunnery to fit us for the trials of squadron life. Having spent, finished the course at Lethbridge we were posted back. Back to Edmonton where the navigation school was. We spent another couple of months there flying over the vast expanse of Canadian prairies. If you got lost you just went down and the nearest railway station you read the sign and you knew where you were. We had a wonderful experience at Edmonton. It was a big Canadian city and the Canadian people were wonderful to us. The hospitality was outstanding and we made a lot of friends in Edmonton. After the, finishing our course we went to a Wings Parade. Apparently, this particular Wings Parade was quite an occasion publicity wise. An American colonel had been brought in to present our wings and we all duly lined up at the, in the sports centre. And after much ceremony we were all, each called out and given an Observer’s wing which we subsequently sewed on our uniform. Or if you had a girlfriend, she got the task. The next port of call was to be Halifax in eastern Canada. We had two weeks to get there and what we did in those two weeks was entirely up to ourselves. We had a leave pass, a pocketful of money, comparatively and myself and two or three others decided to go to New York. And we had a ball there. In Australian uniform it was impossible to buy a drink. If you went to a night club you were entertained by the top brass and it was a quite weary [laughs] After a week in New York we thought we’d better start going to Halifax. And on the way, we went to Niagara Falls and had the opportunity to see the Falls and go on the ride on the, oh, Lady of the Lake or whatever the steamer was called. And subsequently arrived at Halifax. Halifax was a very major port for Atlantic convoys and we had to wait there until a ship came that could take us to England. Spent about two weeks in Halifax and the people were very good to us but it was very much a service town. After a couple of weeks we were put on the French liner the Louis Pasteur which had been converted from a luxury liner to a troop ship and set sail for England. Having got out of the harbour I think they just pointed the ship at England, full speed ahead and off we went. Supposedly, and I’m sure it was, too fast for the submarines and we did a very rapid trip and arrived at Liverpool where we got off the ship and onto a train. It was evening. The contrast was dramatic. After the bright lights and plenty of everything in Canada here we were in England. It was dark, wet, foggy and crowded. And dark. Blackout was on. And we subsequently boarded a train and after many hours arrived at Brighton on the south coast where the RAAF had their accommodation for aircrew. Spent a couple of weeks in [pause] at Brighton waiting for a posting to the Advanced Flying Unit which gave us an opportunity to explore the countryside that’s around Brighton which was a very, very pleasant spot. And we availed ourselves of the opportunities to enjoy ourselves. And after a couple of weeks we ended up in a place called Pwhelli in North Wales where we did an advanced training course. Another pleasant spot. Quite a small town. And I think we were flying Ansons there. In due course we finished our training there and went to an OTU at Lichfield which was more, mainly an Australian OTU. They had a satellite station at Church Broughton which was quite nearby. And our course was posted to Church Broughton where we were to do our Operational Training Unit on Wellingtons. As a Wellington crew was five people and we were all bomb aimers a course of bomb aimers, roughly the equivalent number of pilots, navigators, wireless operators and gunners were put in this huge hangar and told go to it. Crew yourselves up. And fortunately, I happened to know one person there so we became a two, two part crew and within half an hour of talking to the other people we subsequently formed a crew. Seems a very haphazard way of selecting a crew for operations but oddly enough it worked out very well. Very few crews proved to be incompatible. We were very fortunate that we were all Australians and we had similar interests so we didn’t have problems. Spent some months at OTU and in our spare time we used to go to, the nearest city was Derby and patronized the local hostelries there. In due course we graduated and posted to the Conversion Unit where we converted from twin-engined Wellingtons to four-engined Halifax Mark 2s. And we spent about six weeks there and did a lot of flying around England which we found a very great difference to flying in Canada. There was fog. There was hundreds of other aircraft. There were, all over the countryside were aerodromes. And we just had to make sure we dodged the aircraft, found where we were and got back to base. Subsequently we did duly finish our training there and were posted to Number 466 Australian Squadron at Leconfield. Well, while we were at Conversion Unit the Halifax, being a four engine bomber, required an engineer and another gunner. The one, the engineer was a twenty four year old English chap and the gunner was a thirty three year old chap from Birmingham. He was the real grandfather of the crew. However, we all got on very well and went to Leconfield where we were allocated accommodation. We were very fortunate, Leconfield being a peacetime squadron and all the amenities that went with it. After living in Nissen huts for a considerable time it was pleasant to be in regular barracks. New Year in, at that stage it was New Year 1944 and we were the new ones on the squadron. We were flying, at that stage, the new Halifax Mark 3 with the radial motors and the rear designed tail plan which had eliminated a lot of the problems which the Mark 2 Halifax had. And after flying in the Mark 3s they were a magnificent aircraft from all points of view. From the pilot and the rest of the crew was very, well, not exactly comfortable but a lot, a lot less crowded than the previous ones we had.
AP: What was your position in the aircraft like? What did it look like? Can you, can you describe the bomb aimers area?
KC: Coming in the entrance to the aircraft near the tail you walked through the fuselage. There was a rest area. Bunks on both sides and two or three stairs up to the pilot’s deck where the pilot sat and there was a second dickie seat which we folded up and allowed us to go down four or five steps where the navigator sat, you know. Compartment. The, rather the wireless operator sat in a compartment just under the pilot. Next to him was the navigator and the bomb aimer was next to him. All the bombsights and everything else, the bomb panel was right at the front and that was my domain. The Mark 2 Halifaxes had a front turret which had been considered superfluous and in place of that there was a plastic front which gave a much better vision and also a Vickers guns which was really only a pop gun. On the squadron the navigational aids were the Gee and we also had H2S and between the navigator and myself he worked, had the Gee and did the navigation and I did the H2S. Which was a very compatible way of doing things. After a lot of local flying and getting used to operational conditions we finally did our first operation. I think it was the end of February, on a, on the first of what were called the French targets in France. This one happened to be at Trappes which was the rail junction outside of Paris. Subsequent operations consisted of quite a lot of trips like that to disable the communications such as bridges, rail junctions, road junctions and any other ways that would impede the ability of the German armies to get supplies both before and after D-Day. My first trip to Germany was to Stuttgart in southern Germany and we went, duly went to briefing and navigators and bomb aimers went off to a separate briefing to do their navigation. Draw up their charts and get things like that underway. And operational meal. Bacon and eggs. Then up with the rest of the crew and waited for the, drew our parachutes and waited for the trucks to take us out to the aircraft. Going to Germany for the first time was quite an adventure. We managed to keep on track and on time and in due course the target was a quarter of an hour away and I went down to the bombsight and set it up with the height, speed and did the bomb drop panel and got ready to direct the pilot. PFF had laid flares which we saw and I directed the aircraft through the bombsight to the flares. And a little to the left, a little to the right and we finally got on course, dropped our bombs and spent the next ten seconds, the longest ten seconds you’ll ever spend flying straight and level and waiting for the camera. As soon as that happened set course for home. And we had a fighter come in to say hello to us. Fortunately, the rear gunner saw him and we went off in a corkscrew and that discouraged him. He had easier ones to find. And we subsequently set course for England and the engineer said that we’d been using too much petrol. So we had to decide just what we were going to do. And when we got over the channel we decided it was much safer to land at one of the coastal aerodromes. So, we landed at, I think it was Ford, where we spent the night. Between us I think we had seven shillings so we went off for one round of drinks at the local pub. We went there and found everyone drinking cider at sixpence a pint. So that was wonderful. We had two or three drinks of cider decided to go home and we found out cider was a very powerful drink. However, we finally made it. We got, went back to the squadron and started on our trips together. I think there were two or three, without my logbook I don’t know who or what, just where we went but we did some more French targets. I think we did a trip to Happy Valley. Another one up to Kiel. And by that time it was the, in March and we were briefed for Nuremberg. And this was our first really major target. Well, Stuttgart was but Nuremberg was further. Further east. And it was, the briefing there was it was cloudy but the target would be clear and we were flying straight to the target from our crossing the coast which was most unusual and a lot of the navigators queried it because we were being too close to the German fighter ‘dromes. However, that was it and on. We pressed on and shortly over France we had a fighter attack and escaped from it but we found we were losing petrol at a very rapid rate. So, we had a conference and decided to turn back which we did and subsequently landed back at base with not a lot of petrol. Waited four or five hours until the rest of the aircraft came back and found what a disaster the night had been. The cloud cover that we were promised hadn’t eventuated. It was a bright moonlight night and all the fighters were up waiting. Flak was just aimed at us and subsequently it was a loss. I think it was ninety seven aircraft over Germany. Plus, the ones that were damaged and managed to stagger home. Fortunately, we did survive that one and I think the next one was to Happy Valley and more French trips and then where was it? Without my log book I don’t remember. But went to a Berlin trip but got to within ten or fifteen miles to Berlin and we were hit by a fighter and got badly damaged. So, we decided to, we decided to go home and, on the way back we lost an engine from fighter attack and we staggered back to base and lived to tell another day. That was another disaster raid. I think we lost seventy one aircraft on that one. That was [pause] but between there and June I did two or three trips a week. And with our six week, we got leave every six weeks which we enjoyed very much. And eventually came the big day. We didn’t, at the time we didn’t know it was D-Day but we were programmed to bomb a target fairly close inside the French coast. Coming back there was an armada of ships on the Channel. You could have jumped out of the aircraft in a parachute and not got your feet wet. There were battleships, row boats, destroyers, paddle steamers. Anything that could float was on its way to the beaches of Normandy. It was a [pause] we did fly over the same place again a few days later when the beach head had been established but it was a very major effort. After that we just continued on our tour. We had about twenty five trips up by then and looking forward to finishing. And on the 25th of July, 24th of July we were booked for a return trip to Stuttgart. So, all the usual briefings and instructions. Had a very uneventful trip into Stuttgart and did our bombing run successfully and kept our ten seconds to get the camera and set course for home. After about ten minutes we were happily flying on, anticipating a, an uneventful trip home when suddenly there was an explosion. At the time I thought it was a flak shell. Subsequently I found out that an aircraft had run into the back of us and the aircraft just exploded. I was in the front, in the bomb aimers position still. Doing the bombing check and as it happened, I had my parachute on. I always used to lean on my parachute but this night I was leaning on it and had inadvertently clicked on with the wriggling around. The next thing I knew I was flying, descending at about ten thousand feet with a parachute above me. And I have no recollection whatsoever of opening the parachute. I didn’t have the handle so somehow the explosion must have opened it and I landed in a field about twenty miles west of Stuttgart [pause] And took off my parachute harness and hid it under a tree with a parachute and took stock of things. I had all my usual escape kit and similar things and waited around to see if I could hear any, any of the other crew. But there was no sign of them at all. Seeing the way I got out I doubt very much if there would be any survivors. As it happened there weren’t [pause] It was about 3 o’clock in the morning. I could hear the other, the rest of the aircraft flying home and to a nice warm bed and a bacon and egg meal. Here was I stuck in a wheat field in, in the west of Stuttgart. Far from home. I spent the night in a forest and the next morning I checked up where I was on the map, or as near as I could. And the only nearest frontier was the Swiss border which was seventy or eighty mile away. So, I made for that. So, I spent the day in the forest and when the evening came I started walking and went through a village and there was a village pump. So I filled up my water bag and had a wash which was very acceptable and had a few Horlicks tablets from my escape kit. I walked. Walked all night and at dawn I found another wood and subsequently spent the day there having a sleep and working out what I was going to do next. I was fortunate in having the new flying boots that had been issued which were detachable leggings on a shoe which was much easier to walk with than the old flying boot. So, I removed all badges of rank and brevet and set off again. I think I covered about 20K that day. Not a long way but I wasn’t hurrying. Trying to keep out of everyone’s way. Even, even though it was night there was, there was still a few people around and the villages which I tried to walk around but sometimes it was much easier to walk through them. The next day I spent hiding up and set off again at nightfall and passed through a village. And a mile past the village a truck came along and passed me and stopped. And he came back and said, obviously he was going to give me a ride. Asked what I was doing there. Anyway, I tried to make out that I was, I was a French worker but he could speak far better French than I could. At that stage I was feeling well down on very little to eat and water bag was empty so I wasn’t too unhappy to be taken into custody. I had three or four bits of chocolate over from the, that I hadn’t eaten and in the truck was his, another man and his little daughter. So I gave this kid a couple of bits of, pieces of chocolate and he was most impressed. When we came through the village he stopped, went to the local pub and bought us all a bottle of beer. So, it was a very good investment with two or three blocks of chocolate. Subsequently I was handed over to the local police and they called in the army and I was officially a POW.
AP: Alright. That’s, we got up to that stage. Can we maybe backtrack a little bit? You were talking about an escape kit. You were talking about an escape kit that you had.
KC: Yes.
AP: Obviously when you found yourself ejected from the aeroplane it was with you. Whereabouts did you actually have it?
KC: Oh you just carried it in your battle dress pocket.
AP: Oh ok. So, it was only a little thing.
KC: Little.
AP: Yeah.
KC: Well, a box about five by seven inches and about an inch deep and, which fitted inside your battle dress.
AP: And what sort of things were in it?
KC: Horlicks tablets [pause] very basic food stuffs. Some chocolate, not to enjoy but to [laughs] to survive on. And [pause] I’ve forgotten now. It’s so long ago.
AP: Maps and things like that as well.
KC: Oh, maps and a compass.
AP: Yeah. Did you have one of those special compasses that were hidden in a button or hidden somewhere or — ?
KC: Had a button compass.
AP: Yeah.
KC: I also had a little hand compass which I always carried.
AP: Very cool. You were saying as well you, about fifteen minutes before the target you’d go down into where the bombsight was and set it up.
KC: Set it up.
AP: And all that sort of thing. What did you do for the rest of the flight?
KC: I worked the H2S machine.
AP: Where was that physically?
KC: That was next to the navigator.
AP: Ah.
KC: And as I had not a lot to do it was a lot more practical that I did the H2S and he did the navigation. Getting all the fixes. It worked out very well.
AP: What did you, what did you think? Can you remember much about the H2S and what it looked like? And —
KC: All the H2S was, it was a machine, a dial about eight or nine inches diameter and it gave a profile of what was underneath. It had a long range and a short range and once you learned how to read it, it was a very desirable navigation tool. Especially on coastal areas, of course. It had a very sharp delineation between the sea and the land. Flying over land such as southern Germany it could pick up any lakes. It also picked up cities and towns as a darker green on the lighter green of the screen. Once you learned how to interpret it, it was a very useful tool.
AP: You also mentioned a couple, or there was at least three times there you mentioned being attacked by fighters. What does a corkscrew feel like for a bomb aimer?
KC: A corkscrew, in a four engine bomber you’re thinking of a Spitfire. It just goes high, right or left as the case might be, nose straight down, and round and round and pull out and go the other way and hope you’ve lost him. And if you haven’t lost him keep on doing it.
AP: Keep doing it [laughs] It would be quite, quite strenuous for the pilot I imagine.
KC: Oh, it was. The [pause] where they was over the target area if you, if you saw the fighter and went into a corkscrew he’d go and find someone who hadn’t, or hopefully hadn’t seen him.
AP: They were looking for, for easier prey. How did you cope with the stress of flying on operations? What did you do to relax?
KC: It was stressful. I think I coped very well.
AP: What sort of things did you do to, to handle that, or to deal with the pressure? If anything.
KC: Went to the local. And the local dances. The theatre. The pictures. And any entertainment that was on at the squadron when we weren’t flying.
AP: Alright. You’ve mentioned pubs and the local a few times. What, for Leconfield let’s just say, or any other pub that you can remember what did the pub look like and what was in there? What sort of things went on?
KC: Well, the nearest town was Beverley which was a market town and it was quite a big town. We got to know a few of the locals and we used to go to the, the Beverley Arms. Found ourselves a corner and some compatible people. Had a few drinks. Sang a few squadron songs and enjoyed ourselves. At that stage most of us had bikes so it was quite an adventure getting from the local back to the squadron. Fortunately, we made it.
AP: Very good.
KC: A few spills here and there.
AP: Very nice. Were there any superstitions or hoodoos amongst your crew or amongst your squadron that you knew about?
KC: We had a thing about our little, one of us had a little fluffy rabbit. About six or eight inches high and every operation we took the rabbit. And every operation we marked it on the, on the rabbit. And our ambition was to cover the rabbit. We didn’t, [pause] Stuttgart was our thirty third operation so we were looking forward to finishing but unfortunately, we didn’t.
AP: What, how many operations did you need to do for a tour at that period?
KC: Well normally it was thirty.
AP: Yeah.
KC: But with the French targets being shorter and supposedly easier they increased it to up to forty. The first two or three French targets were quite easy. But as soon as the Luftwaffe found out what we were doing they moved their fighter squadrons in.
AP: They did. Yes. I think at one point I think a French target counted as one third of a trip.
KC: Initially it did.
AP: Yeah.
KC: But subsequently they scrubbed it .
AP: There was a 467 Squadron man who said you can’t go for one third of a burton. That’s the way he put it. What sort of things happened in the, in the mess at the airfield?
KC: We were fed. And again had a few drinks and played cards or sat around and talked and had a sing song. There was no shortage of suitable songs [pause] I’m just wondering where Fiona was.
AP: Behind you.
KC: Oh, she’s there is she.
AP: She’s been there for about forty minutes, I think. She’s crept in nice and quietly. Alright. Can we, can we talk a bit about your prisoner of war experience? What — where were you taken after you were, were captured?
KC: Well from the army camp where we were assembled with about another ten people from a Lancaster crew, or two Lancasters that had been shot down in the area and there were about ten survivors. And we were taken from there to Stuttgart and subsequently to be taken to the interrogation centre at Frankfurt. We got to Stuttgart under heavy army guard and put on the platform waiting for a train. It was about midnight and the RAF came over again in force. Sirens went and people started running for shelters, saw us there and [laughs] we were, we were not popular. But the German army protected us, fortunately, and we were taken down to the cells until the train came which was Stuttgart to Frankfurt where the interrogation centre was at Oberursel. Spent the first three or four days there in solitary and then was taken to an interrogation room where the German officer started off with cigarettes and, ‘How are you?’ And all the welcoming. ‘Welcome to the Third Reich,’ He could speak perfect English. He’d apparently spent four or five years in the early thirties in England. And he said, ‘What’s your name?’ So, I gave it to him. ‘Your rank?’ So I gave it to him. ‘Your number?’ I gave it to him. ‘What aircraft were you flying?’ ‘You know I can’t answer that.’ Five or six more questions and he said, ‘Well I know you’re going to say no but we know it anyway.’ So he pressed the button and a girl came in. He spoke some German to her. She came back with a file. A file on 466 Squadron. And he told us the CO’s name, the flight commander’s name, most of the other people. The group captain. What the, how the aircraft, or how many aircraft there were. The fact that we’d transferred from Wellington’s to Halifaxes in 1943. And he knew the name of the barmaid at the local pub. There was nothing I could tell him. So, he gave me permission to have a shave and a shower which was very acceptable. Then back to solitary again and after that three or four days there were enough POWs to make a contingent to go to a POW camp which we subsequently caught a train and three or four, about three days later we arrived at a place called Bankau which was near Breslau in Poland. A very uncomfortable train trip but we finally made it. We were taken in to the camp and searched, interrogated again and duly given our quarters. All the people in the camp welcomed us, wanting us, wanting to know the latest situation on, on the second front. And being new people gave us a welcome dinner. The camp at that stage was very very basic. It was just huts on a dirt floor and bunks. There was a new camp being built just next door and we were looking forward to moving into that which we did after about four or five weeks. They finished the, enough of the camp to move us in which was a very pleasant change and there were rooms rather than huts. A big, big, a big area converted into about eight rooms with a toilet block at the end which was a much more pleasant life than going on, getting in the huts which were very crowded. The Red Cross there were marvellous to us. Before we left the interrogation centre, they fitted us out with warm clothing, boots and any other supplies that we needed. At the camp we were getting, at that stage we were getting a Red Cross parcel every fortnight which was the difference between existing and surviving. The Red Cross did a fantastic job in Germany for the POW’s. And [pause] and when were we there? That was about the end of August, I think. September. October. We used to fill in our time there with games which the Red Cross supplied. And they supplied us with a good library. And we walked around the compound for our exercise. We had to discuss trying to escape but at that stage of the war we were advised not to because they thought it would be over by Christmas. How wrong they were. In due course there was a Russian advance to the westward and the Germans wanted to keep us so we were told we were going to move camp and in January ’45 we were turfed out of our comfortable quarters into the coldest winter that, in Germany for about forty years. Four or five feet of snow on the ground. Cold. About five or six hundred people heading eastwards. We were supposedly to be marching but it soon very, very soon developed into a straggle. Everyone had found they were carrying far too much kit so the non-essentials were abandoned and whatever you could carry was what you had. We marched all day and stopped for a cup of lukewarm soup about mid-day and came to a suitable village at night and found a farm and were billeted in the farm buildings and hopefully had something to eat, which was problematical. We did have a Red Cross parcel each before we started which we tried to ration. We didn’t know how long we’d be marching so we tried to keep as much as possible of that intact. That went on for about two or three weeks. Marching by day and hopefully finding a barn or somewhere covered at night. Fortunately, on most occasions we slept in the farmers barn and threw out his livestock. Food was a very basic problem then and with, with the German army rations and what we had from the Red Cross parcels we managed to survive. And after how long? Three weeks? We were told we were going to be put on a train to our next destination. We were put on a train, about sixty five people to a four wheel cattle truck and there was room to stand up. You had to take it in turns to lie down. We spent three days in that. It was not a happy trip. After about a day we decided we would have been far better, far happier, marching. We eventually arrived at a place called Luckenwalde, about fifty miles south of Berlin and were taken to some barracks there which had originally been barracks for the German army in the Franco-Prussian war. They were in a very decrepit condition. It was a very large camp. All, a lot of POWs had been transferred there and many other, other nationalities. Thousands of Russian prisoners. And conditions were very basic. We used to sit there with nothing, nothing to do. Watched the Americans come over Berlin in the daytime and at night Mosquitoes came over Berlin at night. Subsequently the Russian army overran the camp and we were under the control of the Russians. Initially they were very good. The army people. A couple of thousand Russian prisoners were given a rifle, they said, ‘Come with us which they did. They were very keen to get their own back on the Germans for the appalling treatment that the Russians had had. We stayed in the camp there and the Russian army moved on and the administration took over. And it was a very different story. We were under Russian control and we were so close to the American lines and couldn’t do anything about it. Subsequently an American war correspondent and about six trucks came along and, to take the American survivors out but they wouldn’t, a few got away but the Russians wouldn’t let us go. But the, we were told that if we could possibly get out the trucks would be at a certain position until about 4 o’clock that afternoon. Another four or five of us managed to escape from the Russians, literally, through a hole in the wire and we found our way to the American trucks where two or three trucks had already filled. And at about 4 o’clock in the afternoon they said, ‘Well we can’t wait any further,’ and off we went. And after about an hour or so crossing an emergency bridge over the Elbe to the American army camp which was the front lines. They gave us accommodation and apologised profusely because the ice cream machine hadn’t caught up. From there we made our way to [pause] well the Americans gave us any kit we needed and fed us well and we went to an aerodrome where we were subsequently flown back to England.
AP: And that was the end of it.
KC: So, taken back to Brighton. Re-kitted. Met all our, well a lot of the people that we’d known before but also had been in Germany and given a leave pass for two weeks, a year’s pay, said, ‘Come back when you’re ready.’ So, I was a survivor fortunately. I subsequently found out years later that what had happened was another aircraft, also from our squadron had collided with us and it must have been a collision in our tail because the, our rear gunner, mid-upper gunner and the engineer were never found. The front of the aircraft, the bodies were found. And all the other aircraft were lost. So that was it. And I endured a mid-air collision and I happened to be the lucky one.
AP: How did you find readjusting to civilian life after going through all of that?
KC: Oh, coming back to Australia we were, came through The Heads which was a magnificent sight. Taken off the ship, put on a bus, taken to Bradfield Park. Not interrogated but put on record again and given a leave pass and, ‘Come back in two weeks.’ No ticker tape parade. No marching through, through George Street. Back home and out which suited us fine. It was quite a readjustment getting back to civilian life after the discipline of service life but I went back to my old job and started off life again.
AP: My final question for you. What is Bomber Command’s legacy and how do you want to see it remembered?
KC: Seventy one years later. Well sixty eight years later in Canberra it was decided to build a Bomber Command Memorial which was subsequently unveiled. I think in 2007 or eight, something like that. And it was the first Bomber Command Memorial, as far as we know, that was ever made. And it still stands in the sculpture garden of the Australian War Memorial. We were going to have our ceremony there tomorrow but unfortunately due to the inclement weather we have to have our ceremony inside. But subsequent to that, in England there was a movement to have a Bomber Command Memorial constructed and it was taken up officially and very enthusiastically supported and in 2009 I was one of the fortunate official members of the Air Force, RAAF delegation that went to the opening of the Air Force Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park in London. That is a magnificent Memorial. It took seventy one years but it was worth it. We were one of the fortunate thirty people in the official delegation that were at the dedication.
AP: Any final words? Any last thoughts for the, for the tape?
KC: Well here we are today on what was the 4th of July.
AP: 4th of June. 4th of June.
KC: June rather.
AP: Yeah.
KC: For our annual Bomber Command Commemoration Day Foundation. Remembrance of Bomber Command. It’s a very major event.
AP: It certainly is.
KC: The War Memorial have done a lot of the organisation for us. Made the, made the ANZAC Hall available and the Hall of Remembrance for our ceremony tomorrow and we’re quite looking forward to that.
AP: Here’s to that. Well, thank you very much Keith. It’s been an absolute pleasure hearing your story properly for the first time.
KC: Sorry I was so —
AP: I very much enjoyed it.
KC: The coughing
AP: No. That’s gone, that’s gone really well I think. It’s good.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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ACampbellKW160604
PCampbellKW1601
Title
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Interview with Keith Campbell. Two
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Format
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01:11:55 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Adam Purcell
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-06-04
Description
An account of the resource
Keith Campbell grew up in New South Wales and joined the Royal Australian Air Force when he was old enough. He flew 35 operations as a bomb aimer with 466 Squadron from RAF Leconfield and RAF Driffield when, on their thirty first operation another aircraft from their squadron collided with them. All other crew were killed but Keith was thrown from the aircraft and parachuted in to a wheat field. He began to walk towards the Swiss border but was caught and became a poisoner of war.He was first sent to Stalag Luft 7 at Bankau but then was ordered on to the Long March and ended up at Stalag 3A at Luckenwalde from where he escaped the Russians and joined up with the Americans who sent him home.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
Germany
Great Britain
Poland
England--Yorkshire
Poland--Opole (Voivodeship)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939
1942-05
1943
1944-01
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
466 Squadron
aircrew
bale out
bomb aimer
bombing
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
coping mechanism
crewing up
Gee
H2S
Halifax
memorial
mid-air collision
military living conditions
military service conditions
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operational Training Unit
prisoner of war
RAF Church Broughton
RAF Driffield
RAF Leconfield
Red Cross
Stalag 3A
Stalag Luft 7
superstition
the long march
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/226/3371/AChapmanSCD171014.1.mp3
8bff133f32334472d8e8028f9868f9df
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
Jaques, Reg
Reg Jaques
Charles R Jaques
Charles Jaques
C R Jaques
C Jaques
Description
An account of the resource
17 items. The collection concerns Pilot Officer Charles Reginald Jaques (1913-1943, 136865 Royal Air Force) and contains a letter, his history, personnel document, items concerning his wedding, the names of the his crew's next of kin, condolence letter and nine photographs. The collection also contains an oral history interview with Susan Carol Doreen Chapman about her father, Charles Reginald Jaques. Reg Jaques was a navigator flying in Lancasters with 103 Squadron, RAF Elsham Wolds in 1943. He was killed along with his crew in a collision with another Lancaster on 16 December 1943. <br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Susan Chapman and catalogued by Nigel Huckins. <br /><br />Additional information on Reg Jaques is available via the <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/112003/">IBCC Losses Database</a>.
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
2015-10-05
2017-10-14
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
Jaques, CR
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
PL: Hello. My name is Pam Locker and I’m here at the home of Mrs Susan Carol Doreen Chapman nee Jaques.
PL: On the 14th of October 2017. And can I just start Sue by saying an enormous thank you on behalf of the Bomber Command Digital Archive for offering us your story. And I understand that you’re going to read a narrative that you’ve put together about everything that has happened. So, when you’re ready.
SC: Ok.
PL: If you’d like to start.
SC: Thank you. My mother related the story of how one day she heard me tell someone that I had been a lucky girl as I had had two daddies. This is their and my stories from memories — mostly from family and friends of those who knew and loved them. My name is Susan Chapman nee Jaques. I was born at the Mary Rodham Nursing Home in Newport, Shropshire on the 15th of November 1943. My mother was Gwendolyn Betty Jaques, known as Teg to her family and Betty to everyone else, nee Stokes. And my father was Charles Reginald Jaques, known as Reg. He was born on the 25th of March 1913 and brought up in Leeholme, County Durham one of six, and the second boy. He had one brother. Another died in infancy and his four sisters. Their father was a builder. Their mother died young and Reg’s elder sister brought up the family. He left school at aged fourteen or fifteen and went to work in the offices of the local coal mine but educating himself, I am told, by using the streetlight to read. He had an aptitude for maths and also played the violin. He moved to work as chief financial officer in the local authority offices of Newport in Shropshire — living in digs with a couple who I’m told thought the world of him. It was while working here that he and my mother met. She was born on the 1st of January 1920 being christened Gwendolyn Betty. She was brought up in Heath House, Gnosall, Staffordshire where her father was a builder and joiner. Along with her only sister, who has provided me with a lot of this family history, she attended Stafford Girl’s High School, travelling by train every day. She also had an aptitude for music and played the piano to such a high standard that she won a prize at the Eisteddfod in Wales. Latterly, at school she played for the daily assemblies. She left school aged fifteen years of age and initially went to work in the offices of Stafford Laundry and then to Barclays Bank in Newport. The consensus seems to be that they literally met in the street as both worked close to one another. The distance from Newport from Gnosall is approximately seven miles and my aunt recalls that Reg walked her home after work one Saturday morning, he pushing his bike. They got engaged around the time of Dunkirk. That would be May 1940. Her engagement ring is an art deco design. On this happy occasion for them my aunt was not left out and they gave her a brooch as her present which she has recently given to me. I’ve just found this out and I’m very pleased to have this as another keepsake. My aunt says this act is another indication of how thoughtful and nice Reg was as a person. Comments that have been made to me over the years from people who knew him or of him fully endorse this. They married on the 1st of January 1941. Mum’s 21st birthday at Gnosall Methodist Chapel and spent their honeymoon in Shrewsbury. Her parents gave her money out of which she had to buy her wedding dress and she also brought her piano. They set up home in an area of Gnosall known as Audmore as Heath House was in fact in Gnosall Heath. From comments made by mum I think that they initially rented a property and on being refused the right to purchase Reg was very unhappy. They both attended the local chapel and he taught in the Sunday School. They visited his family in the north east and on get togethers’ later in life my mother and sister would reminisce of these occasions. Although in a reserved occupation he joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve on August the 6th 1941 and told for the duration of the current emergency as an aircraftsman second class. He was recommended for training as a pilot or observer with the statement that he was not to be employed other than as a pilot or observer without reference to the Air Ministry. Early in 1942 he was transferred to Canada for further training in Moncton, New Brunswick, Ontario. He came back from Canada on the Queen Mary which was being used as a troop ship. By April of that year he was classed as being an observer. In December ‘42 he was at Air Navigation School. And in April 2nd 1943 he was undertaking ground instrument training and map reading in Tiger Moths and due for the first flight today. A letter sent by mum to his younger sister on the 8th of July 1943 said that Reg is stationed fourteen miles away and is using his bike to get home. From September that year he had completed his training and was changing stations mainly in the east of the country. He spent some time at Doncaster which was a Conversion Unit for Halifax and Lancaster bombers. On the 12th of November he was at 103 squadron. A navigator. Operational flying. And the same month he was posted to Elsham Wolds in Lincolnshire. On the 15th of December he sent what was to be his last letter to his younger sister to tell her that he had been shopping in Scunthorpe for Christmas presents for his nieces and that he was due for leave on the 22nd of December. He obviously had leave to visit mum and I, still in the nursing home as a letter from, from my mother to the same sister says he had visited us both and she had caught him giving surreptitious glances to Susan in her cot. He must also have registered my birth and I was given the names Susan Doreen. There had been an outbreak of influenza at the camp which he had had and recovered from. On the evening of the 16th December 1943 he was navigator in a scratch crew from both 103 and 576 Squadron flying in Lancaster JB670 of 103 Squadron which took off at 1637 hours for Berlin. There was low cloud that night and the crews at briefing had been told to circle the airport once and then peel away. Among the first flight to take off was Lancaster LN332 of 576 Squadron on their first operation. Soon afterwards they were followed by JB670. Eye witness accounts tell that as JB670 took off and climbed away LN332 appeared out of the cloud. The collision was inevitable and the machines crashed head on. This occurred just outside the village of Ulceby and wreckage fell over a wide area. So, aged twenty four, Betty was a widow with a newly born daughter. My aunt tells me that my mother was welcoming her cousin back from the army on leave when she heard the news and this has also been verified by the sister of a cousin who told me this several years ago as to how elated they were at having her brother home but having to also deal with the death of Reg. The family had expressed their wish that they could bury him locally but this was not allowed and he was laid to rest in a Commonwealth grave in Cambridge Cemetery. This was December and a very cold day. They had had to travel from Strafford by train and the family included Reg’s brother, his eldest and youngest sisters, my mother and her sister. They were in the cemetery grounds when someone shouted, ‘Elsham Wolds’s party,’ and they all gathered for the burial of six of the crew. I am told that my mother went to try to talk to one of the officers to try to gain more information but little was forthcoming. And as she said you had to take what was told you and you did not ask questions. It was only in the early 1990s that she read a letter in the Lincolnshire Life Journal from a gentleman in Australia asking for information on LN322 and the crash in which his brother died. They started to correspond and he acquired much more information which he then passed on to her. So at twenty four, Betty, a widow with a newly born daughter. I was christened at Christmas in the home of my grandparents by a close family friend who was a JP and local preacher. Carol, the female equivalent of Charles was included in my naming which I continue to use although it gets a bit awkward at times when I have to state the names that are on my birth certificate only. A white and blue rimmed china bowl was used which I still have in my family history box. We carried on living in the same house with mum becoming a nurse at Stafford hospital and me being looked after by my grandparents. A brass plaque was erected in Gnosall Methodist Church in memory of Reg and a cousin of my mother — the one she was greeting who was killed the following year in Northern France and is buried in Cannes. From what I’ve already related to you, you will remember that there were other RAF stations located not far from Gnosall. On Sunday evenings the men billeted there would come to the church and be offered refreshments by the congregation. I do not know the exact date when they first met but this is where mum met my stepfather. He was called Stanley Stubbins and came from Winterton in Lincolnshire. He had been born and brought up in this village and never left it except for his war service. His father was the local builder, joiner and undertaker. Romance blossomed and they were married on the 26th of May, 1945. The story goes that the photographer forgot to attend so they went on honeymoon, the bridal flowers were placed in the cellar and photos were taken when they got back. For a young man taking on a new family it must have been quite daunting. Again, my aunt tells me that my grandad received a letter from Stan’s parents stating that I would not be treated as other than one of theirs. This was true fortunately because on one of our first trips to Winterton I’m told I picked off heads of his prized tulips and threw them into the garden pond to float. We remained in Gnosall where the elder of my two half-sisters was born until Stan was demobbed and could find us accommodation in Winterton. When I was told that Stan was not my biological father I don’t know. He was very tolerant of the fact that Reg’s RAF cap lived in the wardrobe and he would say that Christmas was always a difficult time for mum. Ironically Winterton is only a few miles from Elsham Wolds. Remembrance services were held every year with flypasts by Lancasters which mum and I used to attend. She maintained contact with Reg’s family and consequently they came to visit us and we them on a regular basis. So I have thirteen cousins on Reg’s side and six on Stan’s side who come together on family occasions. They all held Stan in such high esteem that when he died in 1997 there was a large contingent of cousins plus aged parents who came to his funeral. My memories of Reg are all that have been told me in the past along with some tangible items that I kept in my family box. His bible that was given to him by Gnosall Sunday School on his volunteering for the RAF, his hat and medals. On the death of his youngest sister her daughter passed on to me the letters written by Reg during his time in the RAF. And I also have a copy of a letter sent to his second eldest sister which her daughter found in her handbag. From Stan I have my childhood, adolescence and adulthood to recall. As a family we loved him very much.
PL: That was just wonderful Sue. Thank you so much. Is there anything else that you’d like to add yourself?
SC: Well, not just me there must have been thousands of others like me and maybe I’m the fortunate one in being able to sort of put this on to an actual archive. When I was relating only yesterday to somebody about the fact that my mother and father had given my aunt a brooch they said, ‘You must write it down.’ So this a bit more than writing down. It means a lot to me but to other people it may be more insignificant. I don’t know.
PL: Well, thank you very much indeed.
SC: It’s my pleasure.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AChapmanSCD171014
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Susan Chapman
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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00:14:00 audio recording
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Pam Locker
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-10-14
Description
An account of the resource
Susan Chapman talks about her father, Charles Reginald Jaques. Reg Jaques grew up in County Durham and to improve his prospects for employment he studied by the light of the streetlight. He secured a job with a local authority in Shropshire. He met and married Betty and they set up home. He volunteered to join the RAF. He trained as a navigator and became a father. His last letter was to his sister telling her he’d been Christmas shopping in Scunthorpe. The next day his aircraft took off from RAF Elsham Wolds. The aircraft that had taken off just before reappeared out of the cloud and the two aircraft collided.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Staffordshire
England--Gnosall
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
103 Squadron
576 Squadron
aircrew
crash
final resting place
heirloom
killed in action
love and romance
memorial
mid-air collision
navigator
RAF Elsham Wolds
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/253/3400/PFellowesD1501.2.jpg
e88ffe00536dab58919683f9b4889b66
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/253/3400/AFellowesD150406.1.mp3
2e0bb6d3e178d0c61e40d54ef14a6507
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Fellowes, D
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 David Fellowes. Mr Fellowes was a rear gunner in a Lancaster aircraft. The interview is taking place at The Princess Marina House in Rustington, West Sussex on 6th April 2015. Apologies for the poor sound quality at the beginning of the interview due to static on a tie clip microphone.
(DF) [Static] I’d just passed out of gunnery school number 1 ATS at Pembury South Wales and we all went on leave as brand new young Sergeant air gunners. Whilst we were on leave, we received our postings where we were going to go and what was going to happen to us. In my case, I was posted to 30 OTU in in a place called Hickson in Staffordshire. So I left home [unclear]. The first stop was Crewe and I got to Crewe, we had to change trains to go to Stafford. On the train, there I was sitting alone and all a sudden three Australian Flight Sergeants pilots came bustling in. Well we soon made up a little conversation and I asked one of them whereabouts in Australia do you come from and he said: ‘Sydney.’ I said: ‘Oh yes.’ I said: ‘I know it’s a long shot I have an aunt in Sydney. She went out there after the First World War with her husband and have a sports business.’ ‘Oh,’ he said ‘Do you know what part of Sydney?’ ‘Yes in the district called Marrickville.’ ‘Oh,’ he said ‘That’s funny now I used to live in Marrickville. What road did she live in?’ I told him: ‘Illawarra Road and her name is Mrs Ivy Evans.’ Well he made a rather quick Australian [phone in background] good word and he said: ‘Well that lady happened to be my mother’s best friend. Chapel friend.’ So he said: ‘Well we also have something no much in common so will you be guarding me, we’re gonna be on the same course.’ So I said: ‘Yes, why not indeed.’ So when we did get to Hickson we were on the same course and, of course, I crewed up with him. We made the backbone of the crew. The two of us. Flying at 30 OTU, of course, on Wellingtons you didn’t require a Flight Engineer. When we were posted from Hickson, we went up to 1656 Heavy Conversion Unit to convert from the Wellington on course onto the Halifax. It was here up at Lindholme that we gathered the seventh member of the crew, our flight engineer. In this case we didnt have a choice, we were sitting on one side of the large room and the flight engineers were sitting on the other and names were rung out the captains name and then the Flight Engineer’s name and we were getting a bit close towards the end and there was this very old looking gentleman sitting down over there and I said to my skipper: ‘Hey Art I bet we get the old [unclear] over there.’ And, of course, what happened they called his name out: ‘Sergeant Shephard Flight Engineer you will fly with Flight Sergeant Whitmarshand crew.’ So we got this old gentleman. He was a family man already and, in fact, his trade was, in fact, a master baker, would you believe, but he was an excellent Flight Engineer. He really did know his stuff and we were very well pleased to have him but, of course, he was the daddy of the crew. If I remember rightly, he was about 38 years old. [Mobile phone ringing]. We passed out from the Conversion Unit at Lindholme and it was - we were destined to go to a Lancaster Squadron. So we had to go Lanc finishing school [mobile phone ringing] which was relatively a quick changeover from a Halifax to the Lancaster for the benefit of the pilot. Most of the rest of the crew especially the gunners had had experience on both kinds of turrets on each airplane. Anyhow, so it didn’t really worry us too much. Anyhow our skip did ask us if we could – how we felt going to an Australian Squadron, so we said: ‘Arh yes,’ because we knew there were advantages to going to Commonwealth or Colonial Squadron, and that was they were all on permanent RAF stations and had good quarters, married quarters so when you got there you never saw Nissan huts, wooden huts and things like that. You stayed in a married quarter. Married quarters, of course, were empty because wives weren’t allowed to be on the station during the war. When we got to Binbrook, we were allocated Number 13 Airman’s Married Quarters and it was there that we set up house. When one got to the Squadron, one of course had to check in, you went around with your arrival chit with all the different departments getting the signatures so they knew you were there. You reported and found out what flight you were going to and we went to B Flight which was in Number 1 Hanger. Well we were very lucky. It was a good flight. There was a lot of happy old people there and, of course, before we went on ops we did a training flight and then normally what happened was your skipper would go off with an experienced crew to see what it was all like. Well, low and behold that wasn’t going to happen to us. The Station Commander, Group Captain Edwards VC, DSO, DFC and bar said: ‘Oh, I’ll take Whitmarsh and his crew to Friesburg.’ Well ‘course word gets around the station about who you’re gonna fly with they say : ‘Dear oh dear oh dear.’ ‘Cause he had got a bit of a reputation. Quite a good one really but nevertheless he set off and took us to Friesburg. Coming up before we got to Friesburg , well way before Friesburg before we got to the bomb line we passed over an American sector. AnAmerican sector for some unknown reason didn’t care for us flying over their sector very much and opened fire on us and we did in fact got hit by flak. Well this rather upset the Group Captain [chuckle] which is quite understandable. He – no he wasn’t impressed with that. He did mention something about dropping a little bomb on them to keep them quiet but it didn’t happen. Anyhow the trip went on we did as we did – should have done and then coming home before we came home he had to go down and look at the target to see everything was alright and then, of course, we turned round and came home. My role in Bomber Command as an Air Gunner was to protect the crew from any form of enemy fighter attack. Now in the – I volunteered to go into the rear turret. I erh didn’t want to go in the mid upper turret, my other gunner fortunately did. He didn’t mind sitting up in the turret that would turn 360 degrees all the way round. I much preferred to sit in the rear turret by myself with four Browning 303 machine guns. It was a cold lonely place, yes, it was, it used to get very cold. It could be down to minus 14. Icicles would hang from your oxygen mask and erh – we were lucky though we did have an electrically heated slippers and we also had electrically heated gloves. These weren’t too good because it made your fingers too thick and bulky if you wanted to do anything but nevertheless I survived in the rear turret, though on one occasion while I was in the rear turret we’d gone to Stuttgart and as we were coming out there were two Lancasters signalling down, just behind us on the port side andthere was a Halifax on the starboard side. We did have wireless operator looking out through the astrodome checking on any fighter activity and also to make sure that nobody was going to drop any bombs on us which could happen. We had spotted a Wolfe 190 cruise over us so we thought hello there are fighters about. Then all of a sudden around the back of these two Lancasters, which were just a bit lower than us and on the port side, a JU88 came right in close. I opened fire, the mid upper opened fire and we gave the order to climb port but I can still sit here and see bullets and cannon shells ripping right alongside me into our aeroplane. Well, the tail plane was pretty well damaged and so was one of the fins and rudders, the - one of the fuel tanks was ruptured, the starboard wing fuel tank was ruptured and unfortunately our mid upper gunner got hit in the neck[?] which meant he had to be taken out of the turret, put onto the rest bed, given morphine and well looked after until we got back home. The fighter that I’d had the combat with I maintained firing at it all the time until all of a sudden it flipped onto its port wing nose went down and it went straight the way down and it looked completely out of control. Well we reported all this is our debriefing when we got back home. Made out a gunnery-you know - slip, and then, er, we did hear later that we had it confirmed that we got that JU88. The 7th of January 1945 is a day that I shall perhaps never forget in all my life but we were scheduled to fly to Munich in O-Oboe. Now O-Oboe was in fact our aeroplane. It’s a fact that on our squadron after you had proved yourself and you were doing your job properly and looking after things, you were given your own aeroplane to look after. That meant also you had a ground staff looking after that aeroplane as well. This particular night we were scheduled to fly to Munich which is a fairly long way into Germany. On the main sector down to the River Rhine we were scheduled to fly at 14000 feet so we stuck to the rules be flying at 14000 feet but when we got down to the area just prior to the River Rhine in Alzey[?] which, of course, used to be German territory we found ourselves in very thick nasty cloud and we were bumped around all over the place and you could feel the airplane being kinda damp. It wasn’t very pleasant. It wasn’t very nice at all. Our skipper said that he thought that we perhaps oughta climb and get out of this bad weather and also to get away from any icing up. Well the crew all agreed and so, I do remember him asking the flight engineer for climbing power. I can remember hearing the engines increase in power and away we went to climb up out of the cloud. As we came out of the cloud at the top, I don’t know what the exact height, it must have been about another 15 thou - to 15000 feet or more, there were other aircraft who’d already gone up there and it was quite clear but all of a sudden there was a great big thump – a bump. Well we - somebody said: ‘Christ, we’ve been hit.’ And we were, in fact, hit by another Lancaster coming out the cloud and as we were fly along just above the top of the cloud the other Lancaster came out and put his port wing into our fuselage. Er, our starboard wing we lost round about six foot and we think, we think it just went into their flight deck because that airplane just peeled off and went straight down and we can remember the explosion. Now our aeroplane had received this big thump. We went into a spin for 3000 feet and eventually the skipper got it out. He then ordered bombs to be dropped safe, so the bombs were dropped safe. That just meant that they wouldn’t explode when they hit the ground and from then we sorted it all out and climbed up to 20000 feet, above icing level and we took stock of what had happened. We had, in fact, possibly lost about six foot of the starboard wingtip, the starboard airline[?] was all chewed up and there was hole in the fuselage from the trailing edge of the starboard wing virtually back to the door and floor side of the fuselage and the floor had disappeared. Miraculously the mid upper gunner was still up in his turret. It was decided by the Flight Engineer and the Wireless Operator that they could get him forward ‘cause there was the possibility that the turret could have fallen through. They got him out and up to the front. Well that left me down in the back in my little turret which as still operational ‘cause it worked off number one engine and as I said we were going to go back to the UK to land at Lymonsea[?] Airfield, Manston and it was here on the way that the skipper said to me: ‘You know David that the tail’s swinging. Perhaps you oughta think about bailing out if you wish.’ ‘Cause otherwise, my chances of getting away would have been pretty slim but I declined this offer. I said: ‘No, I can’t do that and can’t leave you lot on your own.’ Besides that there was still the possibility that we could get jumped by a night fighter. So we flew on and flew on at a reduced speed until we got to the French coast. We could see Manston and there we made a long approach. A flapless landing at Man – at Manston. On landing at Manston, a follow me truck went out and we followed that down to where they wanted us to park the aeroplane. The crew in the front of the aeroplane couldn’t get out through the back because of the damage that had been done – the hole – so they had to forward the forward escape hatch. I, myself, was able to vacate my turret and just got out the normal way down through the rear door. They took us up to then the – to be debriefed, but had a look at the aircraft first and we thought Dear God. How did we get this aeroplane back? We were so grateful the fact that all the control rods of the aeroplane ran down the port side of the aeroplane. It was all the starboard side, of course, had sustained all the damage. So, yeah, we considered ourselves very very lucky. Went back up to flying control where we were debriefed, given somewhere to sleep and the next morning we had hoped that one of our own airplanes from the squadron would come down and pick us up. But, unfortunately, bad weather set in, both in Manston where it snowed and also at Binbrook. So, we were stuck there for a couple of days and we were playing snowballs larking about. Nothing to do. And all of a sudden, a voice called out: ‘Right you lot, you’re going back to Binbrook by train.’ So there we were all manner of dress. God, it was really terrible, really. And they gave us some money. We went down to Margate first of all. Got a transport down to Margate to get a train to London. When we got into Margate, we decided well – we hadn’t had a shave for about three days. So we hopped into a barbershop which was run by ladies. Their husbands were looking – had gone off into the army and these ladies were looking after the shop. Anyhow, we sat there and would you believe they gave us a reasonable shave with safety razors. Anyhow, after having a shave and bit tidied up, we went up to – we thought we better have a photograph taken of all this. So we went into a photographers and we got this photograph taken and we all signed it. We’ve all got one each and then got the train up to London. When we got up to London – oh dear oh dear – well you can imagine the state of us holding our parachutes, Mae-Wests, helmets over your shoulders still, flying boots some, some not. And, of course, there happened to be a service policeman and, of course, he stopped us and asked what he thought we were on. Well, our skipper Arthur Whitmarsh he really told him what we were on in good Australian language and we didnt hear any more about that. And from there, of course,then we back up by train up to Binbrook and we were – well, of course, they were pleased to see us again, but inside a week we were flying again. 23 of March 1945 we were briefed for a daytime raid on Bremen. Everybody thought we’re in for a straightforward flight. We were told that if anything went wrong we would have to fire off the colours of the day and the American fighter escort, of Thunderbolts and Mustangs, would come down and give us a close escort. We flew, no problem, through to Bremen. We then dropped our bombs right on target. We were running out of the target and all of a sudden, we were badly hit by flak between the two starboard engines number three and number four. Well they both stopped. They had to be feathered. Then, of course, we started to lose height and, of course, we weren’t so fast either. All the other aircraft were overtaking us. To – we then fired off the colours of the day which was done partly to alert the US fighter boys to give us fighter cover. Unfortunately we didnt see a thing. We were, if I remember rightly, flying round about 20000 feet and, of course, well we weren’t all that far from home anyway Bremen, so we set course back to back to base and well the poor old skipper up the front there, besides having full on rudder on to keep the aeroplane straight and he turned round and said when he landed, he said: ‘I’m sure I got one leg longer than the other.’ But we got back home alright. We made a good two engine landing at Binbrook again. No big problem. There was occasions particularly one unit we went to Hanover[?] when we discovered that the German ME262 was being used in operations against Lancasters. Now we did, unfortunately, have an occurrence where in the area of the raid the ME262, the German jet fighter, was quite prominent in action against Lancasters. Now, we had thought about the best way of combatting this, bearing in mind, of course, that the ME262 was a much faster aeroplane than the JU88, ME109 and the other aeroplanes Wolfe 190 and that we only had a 50 mile an hour overtaking speed gunsight[?],that the best thing to do was to take good avoiding action. But but we did this. The matter of fact if you’re flying straight and level and you spot an aeroplane, shall we say, on your port quarter high when he makes an attack he’s got to make a double back, like this, to get onto your tail and it was when he did that double back that you would then, if he was high, climb port therefore he couldn’t follow and so he’d have to break off the engagement. [Pause] This attack by the Germans JU88 was again, of course, at night time. It was - although it was night time it was very light because I can remember the cloud the way we looked down was covering the German countryside was quite still white and it was quite light up there, but soon as the attack started the JU88 open fire and his, his firing was more continuous. My reply was in short bursts round about four five seconds. This is done deliberately because a you don’t want your guns to overheat. You want to conserve ammunition, of course, as well if necessary. But I could still see the bullets from - well they weren’t bullets in his case, they were cannon shells whizzing past me and , damaging the aeroplane, where my 303 bullets which included tracer firing directly into him. One of the problems we had in aerial combat was that the enemy in German Luftwaffe aircraft they had far better and more powerful guns than we did. They had cannons point 5 where to us all we could offer was the ordinary 303 rifle bullet. Although, we - in our every three bullets that we fired there was one bore, one armour piercing, one err ahh incendiary –
(AP) Lets do that one again.
(DF) - one. Our bullets, we were set in a series of five. We had the ordinary ball bullet. We would have an incendiary bullet; we had an explosive bullet and a tracer. And there – that was repeated all the way along, this way you could see where your bullets were going and also, of course, if they were converged at the right angle at the right time, of course, they could do quite a little bit of destruction. Initially our gun sights was straight forward, ring and bead. That was a fixed ring that had a bead in the centre. This could be lit up at night time and when you rotated your turret, either way, of course, the gun sight went with it. Also, if you elevated your guns the gun sight, of course, went with it. We did later on towards the end had some experimental gun sights involving radar and gyros. We had the Mark 14 gyro sight which, of course, was a much improved version and it even guaranteed 98 per cent hits. So that was a big advantage to us. It – but unfortunately it all came in too late. It didn’t come into the beginning of 1945. [Pause] What did we did really do when we got out to our aeroplane? Well, normally we would have a chat with the ground staff crew and we’d have a last cigarette ‘cause we never smoked inside the aeroplane and normally wanted a quick pee. The usual place was against the tail wheel. Everybody eventually get into the aeroplane and take up their positions and carry out the checks that they had to do and there you’d sit until okay you were given instructions to taxi the aeroplane. The pilot would then taxi the aeroplane away down the taxiway onto the runway. He’d get a green from the runway controller and you’d open the throttles and you’d tear down the runway and Grace of God you got yourself airborne. Now from that onwards, that point onwards sitting in your rear turret well you did have a lot to do. First,you’d done all your checks before you’d take off. You’d done that. And you’d keep a watch out first all for other aircraft coming in towards the bombers stream. So you – you know you would try to miss any other aircraft that were flying around in the stream. Further than that you go on to occupied Germany and there then you’d have to keep your eyes open and look for enemy aircraft. We did this by basically turning the rear turret where search – where you’d turn from port to go right the way round starboard, lift up a little way and right the way back round again and you’d do a square search right up as far as you could see and then start all over again. This way, of course, then your chances of – well you wouldn’t miss any aircraft coming in towards you. Further to that, in our crew we used to roll the aeroplane a little bit to make sure that there was nothing coming up underneath. So you can see, you sat there and you were doing something all the time. This way, of course, prevented you feeling too cold. You were kept active all the time. Your skipper would call you up about anything around every 10 to 15 minutes. ‘Are you alright?’ The main thing being, of course, are you still getting your oxygen which was an important thing?
(AP) What about the bit about beneath the aircraft - the attacks – vulnerable?
(DF) Well –
(AP) Would you talk a little bit about that?
(DF) The - they started to use – the Germans started to use the JU88 – I can’t remember the name of it – something music.
(AP) Shraeder music.
(DF) Shraeder music. And, of course, they came up, to hit you not in the body of the aeroplane because if they did and the aeroplane blew up, they’d most likely get blown up as well. They really aimed at your fuel tanks in the wing and once they were really afire, well of course, your chances of doing anything about it were not very very good. Some aeroplanes towards the end did have armour piercing protection and have [unclear] so that the tanks wouldn’t catch fire – but, no, that music, we just used to roll the aeroplane just so we could see underneath.
(AP) I mean, the bit about removing the Perspex? And the flak, the flak must have been going off. Little pings.
(DF) Yeah but you didn’t think about it.
(AP) No.
(DF) You accepted it, you know. Part of life’s rich pattern. [Unclear] What you wanna talk about first?
(AP) Hang on.
(DF) To aid your vision we thought that it’d be a good idea to remove a lot of the Perspex from your rear turret. Now, there was good reason for this as well – as well as including good vision the Captain and the Flight Engineer used to clear their engines round about every 20 minutes to half and hour, that means they would take them up to full power and, of course, it burnt off carbon which used to fly out from the exhaust. Now, we didnt like this because it would give away that you was an aeroplane somewhere there and the other was those little specks of carbon would stick on your Perspex, and if you had a little dot on your Perspex you’d immediately think it was a fighter. An enemy aircraft. So, to get out of all of this we asked to have all the Perspex taken out. And they took the Perspex out and there it solved the problem. But also, yes, it was a little bit colder but the other good thing was you didn’t have a lot of Perspex to clean.
(AP) What about the noise and ping-ping?
(DF) When one was approaching the target I often used to think that, there was the Pilot, the Flight Engineer and the Bomb Aimer up at the front of the aeroplane they could see all what was happening. They could see searchlights up ahead penetrating the sky often in groups of three or more with blue and one which was a master searchlight and the others were attached to it. The akk akk often was a bit more fierce [unclear] as you approached the target and, of course, there was always the risk of other airplanes dropping bombs on you or you colliding with them. Flak in itself used to come up. You’d hear the bang. Then you’d often hear ping. Ping as the little pieces of the shrapnel casing penetrate the aeroplane. The ground staff used to count these when you got back home, but also you could sometimes smell all the cordite from the shells themselves when they exploded. I used to sit in my turret and, of course, I didnt see all of this until, as we had - the bomb aimer dropped his bomb we’d flown straight and level for the required length of time, so we got a photo flash and then, of course, I said to myself : ‘Good God. Did we go through all that lot?’ You know, say ‘Oh well. That’s it.’ But, of course, by that time the skipper dropped the nose down and we’re turning round and we’re off back home which – prior to going on any raid it was important that before you went for your briefing and crew meal before the flight that you got as much rest in as you can. So normally, you would go and have a good lie and a sleep before you went for your crew meal in the mess and then went to the debriefing. Now, of course, there was all of you together, the seven of you and you were chatting away. You weren’t – never showed any signs of fear or – can’t think of the real word – but they all felt quite pleasant, happy about what we got to do and you got into your aeroplane and you settled down and comfort relatively and away you went. I don’t think we ever thought about it. How long it was except you knew it would be good when you got back home and had another crew meal and, of course, the promise of a large glass of rum, which was an incentive. [Chuckle]. People wonder about why we did all this. Well first of all, of course, we volunteered for this kind of work. The RAF couldn’t make you fly as aircrew. So we knew what we were going into. We knew that there would be short trips, heavily defended; we knew there’d be long trips to do and it was part of the day’s work. We knew what – we knew what we were up to and people just didnt really think about the bad side of it. You just got on and did a job of work which we were paid for. In our particular crew, we did a lot of training. We made up our minds we were gonna survive and, of course, we did.
(AP) And you –
(DF) And I think a lot of that was due to the fact that our attitude to the job.
(AP) You you never felt that terror or fear? You just got on with it?
(DF) No, no but also one of the other things of course, some of us would have in mind, of course, that terrible thing called if somebody got to a stage where they didnt want to fly any more, they’d had it. They’d go LMF Lack of Moral Fibre, but, of course, the hardest part of that was going to the CO and admitting it, it was a big thing to admit.
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AFellowesD150406
PFellowesD1501
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Interview with Dave Fellowes
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
Language
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eng
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00:38:49 audio recording
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Pending review
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Andrew Panton
Date
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2015-04-06
Description
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Dave Fellowes flew operations as a rear gunner with 460 Squadron. He and his crew survived a mid-air collision with another Lancaster which resulted in an emergency landing at RAF Manston.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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Great Britain
Netherlands
England--Kent
England--Lincolnshire
Temporal Coverage
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1945-04
1945-05
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Gemma Clapton
1656 HCU
30 OTU
460 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bombing
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Ju 88
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
Me 262
mid-air collision
military living conditions
military service conditions
Operational Training Unit
RAF Binbrook
RAF Hixon
RAF Lindholme
RAF Manston
taxiway
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/316/3473/PPennLE1701.1.jpg
824abb2c2b7f455b204aa46be93d7f9a
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/316/3473/APennL170622.1.mp3
0620d580b7438a89e75829dd538816b6
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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Penn, Lawrence
L Penn
Description
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Six items. An oral history interview with Lawrence Penn (b. 1922, 413929 Royal Australian Air Force) his log book and photographs. He flew operations as a pilot with 226 Squadron part of the Second Tactical Air Force.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Lawrence Penn and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-07-05
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Penn, L
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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JM: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Jean MaCartney, the interviewee is Lawrence or Lorrie Penn. The interview is taking place at Mr Penn’s home in Mosman, New South Wales, on the 22nd of June 2017. Also present is Mister Penn’s wife June. Ok, Lorrie, I’ve look at some details on your background and I see you were born in Cremorne.
LP: Yes, I do.
JM: And indeed as we were having a little chat to start with before we started the interview, you mentioned you were born in Cremorne,
LP: Cremorne, yes.
JM: In Murdock Street,
LP; In Murdock Street.
JM: In what street, yes, so that was obviously at home
LP: It was a proper hospital in those days but not now of course
JM: A proper hospital back then, was it? Right. No, ok, and that was in December 1922?
LP: That’s right. 27th, two days after Christmas, it was a dreadful time to be born.
JM: Indeed, indeed. And, did the family live round here so that you then went to school around here?
LP: Yes, I did at Cremorne initially then we, after about six years of age we went to Adelaide and then we went up to Cairns and then down to Coffs Harbour so I had, it was after I came back from Coffs Harbour that I had a couple of years at Trinity College and then went to Shore for three or four years,
JM: Right.
LP: And finished my education there.
JM: Finished at Shore, ok. In moving around, quite a bit of the countryside there in just what you’ve said, how did you find different parts of Australia? Do you have any particular memories that stand out for you in your early years of going around the countryside at all?
LP: Oh, I enjoyed it all, perhaps that’s where I gave them my interest in overseas, finding out what was going on overseas.
JM: And did you keep any friends at all down the track from those early years or?
LP: No, probably, as a country down from the other states but from Shore School lifelong.
JM: Right, yes.
LP: Just about, I outlasted them all I was [unclear]
JM: Yes, I guess that would be getting almost to the case now and so you did your intermediate at Shore.
LP: Yes, I did.
JM: And then
LP: And then left Shore and went into a bank as a bank clerk there until the war began.
JM: Right. Did you do leaving certificate as well?
LP: No, no.
JM: Just intermediate.
LP: Just intermediate.
JM: Intermediate, right, ok. And so you left, well before we go into your banking role, were you involved in sports or?
LP: Usual things.
JM: School.
LP: Yeah. Football and cricket. The main, think I did a bit of tennis.
JM: Bit of tennis, yeah. And around where were you living with you going to Shore were you sort of in this area or?
LP: Yeah, yes.
JM: Yes.
LP: Still Cremorne, Southern Street. Cremorne.
JM: Cremorne, ok. And so, did you then go to scouts or Air League or anything?
LP: In the school cadets, school cadets and after I left school I didn’t join, I just did tennis club after school.
JM: Tennis club, right, ok. And then into, let me think, so then you would have been probably started work being then in the Depression years.
LP: It’s been about 1938, ’37, ’38 when I left school and went straight into getting a job with the bank.
JM: Ah, yes, that’s true, that’s true, yes, so you were still at school in the Depression years potentially.
LP: I was in Coffs Harbour I think during [unclear].
JM: Coffs Harbour, right. Ok.
LP: My father was a theatre manager.
JM: Oh, ok, so.
LP: That’s why we went from state to state virtually and then when he retired, he finished up writing The picture show man, his experience because his father was also started off producing, not producing films, but showing films all around the rural areas up the North Coast there.
JM: Right, right.
LP: And my dad wrote a résumé of what happened to his youth and so forth and they made a movie out of it, they called The Picture Show Man.
JM: That’s right, that’s right, indeed. Uhm, so that would have been, picture shows would have been very much a discretionary expenditure so with the Depression that would have been quite a tough going for your father.
LP: It was tough going, yes. He was educated mainly in Tamworth there, in Tamworth, lovely town up the North Coast.
JM: Indeed. So, then when you, the family, your father retired, then is that when you came back to Sydney?
LP: Yes, well, Dad entered the army when the war started out, entered the army as a private and finished up as a Major, going through Lieutenant Colonel when he was finally discharged and Dad had a bit of trouble, just trouble and he had, he was medically discharged then.
JM: Ok. And, so then you went into the bank when you left school?
LP: Yes.
JM: And which bank was that?
LP: It was called the English Scottish and Australian Bank then,
JM: Yes.
LP: But it’s the ANZ now.
JM: ANZ, yes, the Esanda, wasn’t it its original name, the Esanda?
LP: That’s right.
JM: Yes.
LP: Yes.
JM: Yes, that’s right. Ok, so, you were, whereabouts were you based in the bank? Were you in the city or just?
LP: The first job was at the Spit Junction.
JM: Spit Junction?
LP: Yes [laughs] Very handy.
JM: Oh, ok, very handy, very handy.
LP: And then I went to the hill office after a year and a bit, to King George Street in the city of Sydney and did a little bit of relieving going to different banks when they were on holiday, the South was on holidays. I wasn’t very high up in the bank at all.
JM: Oh, you were only fairly young at this stage, I mean, Goodness gracious!
LP: [laughs] But, no, it is a dreadful thing to say but it was a fortunate thing for me was that the war started really because it made such a, I wouldn’t have met June.
JP: No. [laughs]
JM: Well, I think there are a lot of
LP: Because I met June in New York in, June was a child evacuee from England and she was only seventeen when I met her and I was nineteen and I just got my wings in Canada and we went to New York on leave
JM: On leave, yes.
LP: And met her there. Well, she met me really, because she picked me out a crowd of
JP: I was having lunch in this Hotel Edison and they asked me, the management, who would I like from that group of airmen over there, who could just come and have lunch with us. And I looked at all the faces and I picked Lorrie.
JM: Oh my Goodness gracious!
JP: He was invited over to have lunch with us
JM: Oh my goodness!
JP: We were both [unclear] management.
LP: We had only about a week to leave in New York. Then I went over across to England on the Queen Elizabeth then and of course won the war [?] over there but of course we didn’t have any correspondence between us for two years. It was just by accident that I met June when they, [unclear] girls were brought back to England after being evacuated.
JM: Right. We will come to a bit more detail about that shortly let’s just, you’ve got a little bit of to, we’ve got to go from your, when you were with the bank and then the war started and so then you enlisted, in September ’41, I see,
LP: That’s right.
JM: So, where, at Bradfield Park, I can see this, so that’s the normal enlisting place for most people there?
LP: Yes.
JM: So, and you did nearly three months at Bradfield Park.
LP: That’s right.
JM: But perhaps before I go a bit further, what made, was there any particular factor that caused you to actually go into the, choose the Air Force to enlist into or?
LP: I was always interested in flying. I remember Dad showed me a free joyride trip to an aircraft that was doing some pleasure flights around Manly and we went up there and that
JM: Sparked your interest.
LP: Sparked my interest.
JM: So that would have been what, do you remember how old you were when that was? Fifteen or so? Maybe earlier?
LP: It would have been earlier than that.
JM: Earlier than that?
LP: It would be about ten, I would say.
JM: Oh my goodness! So that didn’t prompt you to join the Air League at all?
LP: No, because I was still in Shore, at the Shore Grammar School and in the cadets, the cadets were mainly interested in the uniforms and these rifles, they would take their rifles home and all that sort of thing.
JM: And did you do any sort of like officer training in the cadets or?
LP: Yes, but I didn’t advance [unclear], no.
JM: You didn’t advance. Ok. And so, you had, so when came time to join up, then obviously Air Force was going to be the one that you were going to.
LP: Yes, I was going, definitely wanted to join the Air Force.
JM: Right, ok. And so, off to Bradfield Park and then off to
LP: Narromine.
JM: Narromine for your Elementary Flying Training.
LP: That’s right. Went solo there.
JM: Yes.
LP: Twenty courses and there were fifty of us on twenty course and there was only two of us left.
JM: My goodness me, yes.
LP: And this, do you know Tony Vine at all?
JM: No, I don’t know Tony.
LP: Anyhow, he is an ex naval submarine commander actually and he does a lot of commentating on Anzac Day for the ABC over the year and he took an interest in me and he rounded up and got all the stories of the whole twenty, I will show you the book afterwards that he’s written, released that only a couple of months ago.
JM: Right, right.
LP: Down in Canberra.
JM: Right, very interesting, I’ll have a look at it afterwards, yeah. So, Narromine, then back to Bradfield Park for
LP: The Japanese just came in then.
JM: Ah, about 40, yes
LP: We were all ready to hop on the ship and go to San Francisco, the war came in, they didn’t know what to do with us at the time so we went back to Narromine.
JM: Narromine.
LP: Where we refreshed the course. Things got straight and out what was going to happen and we went back and joined the ship and went to San Francisco, as First Class passengers, wonderful [laughs].
JM: Yes. And you were actually in Sydney then when the Japanese came into the harbour?
LP: I think I was still in Narromine.
JM: Still in Narromine, right, ok.
LP: Yes, still in Narromine waiting the war, so.
JM: Right.
LP: With the Japanese.
JM: But when the submarines came into the harbour at [unclear], you weren’t in Sydney.
LP: I wasn’t here, still in Narromine, pretty sure, yes.
JM: Ok, so off you went to, uhm, to San Francisco and.
LP: Yes, and we went by train up to Vancouver, a lovely, quite an eye-opener how lovely it was that trip and then from Vancouver to Edmonton.
JM: Yes.
LP: And we were held there for oh, four to five weeks I think in Edmonton, Canada.
JM: Ah yes, about four weeks looking at the dates here in your logbook, here at the record of service, yes, it was 9th of May until the 6th of June.
LP: That’ll be right, yes, that’ll be right.
JM: So, so what were you doing, any training there in?
LP: No, no, we were just being held there to. We had the medical, the Canadians were very keen to get the medical condition of whatever arriving there so we had dental and all sort of things, x-rays and things like that. Sports.
JM: Yes, a bit of sports to keep you active, I suppose.
LP: Keep us fit, yes. Waiting on a posting to a service training school.
JM: Right.
LP: Which was Dauphin, Manitoba.
JM: Whereabouts?
LP: Dauphin was just north, northwest of Winnipeg.
JM: Right. And how, was that another train trip?
LP: Yes, it was. Over the Rockies and a wonderful trip.
JM: And that would have been quite an experience then to see some of that scenery.
LP: Oh, it was. It was then.
JM: Yeah.
LP: Jasper and up very, many thousand of feet we had to go through the Rockies to and then down on the plains, from then on east of there of course it was flatter than a pancake until you got to the East Coast of Canada pretty well.
JM: Yes, yes, and what training did you do at Dauphin?
LP: At Dauphin? That was a service training school, and that’s where I got my wings, we had to, we were there for [unclear] several months and it was quite hot in Canada in summer.
JM: Yes, that’s right, June through to almost the end of September, so, you’ve got peak summer conditions, so, I guess therefore it was not dissimilar to Australia in that regard.
LP: Yes, in that regard it was.
JM: And how, how did the training go over there, was there?
LP: Oh yes, It went very well,
JM: And there were Canadian instructors presumably [unclear]
LP: Yes, I had Canadian instructors, we were training on the [unclear] aircraft, twin-engine aircraft and very nice aircraft.
JM: Right, and so, you did, you were flying with the instructor and then finally I presume you did your solo flight to get your wings?
LP: Yes. That’s right.
JM: Yeah. And how was that experience? What was your?
LP: Ah, it was wonderful, it went very well, went very well.
JM: Good. And that completely confirmed for you then that you were doing what you wanted to do.
LP: Oh, just, they wanted to because I topped the flying amongst our group. Then they wanted to send me to Prince Edward Island to go onto Sunderland flying boats and I, cause I wanted to get onto Spitfires and I went and saw the CO and set my foot and he more or less agreed that, alright, we’ll take away the Prince Edward Island job and commission went with that too but when I went to the other, when I went to the other service training school, the commission didn’t go with that posting [unclear] but we were posted to the Saint John, to a near field, Pennfield Ridge it was called and that was near Saint John, near the East Coast of Canada onto Venturas.
JM: Right.
LP: Now, these Venturas were twin-engine, like a big Hudson aircraft.
JM: Right.
LP: And, they were a bit heavy handed [laughs], heavy to handle but did alright but in the meantime they were, can I go on to what happened to Venturas?
JM: Yes, you can.
LP: Because they started off on, in England they were sent across, on operations and the first sortie over the English Channel into France that was then [unclear] two boxes of six and one Ventura came back out of the tour. Now, what really happened was normally was daylight bombing and normally bombing between ten and fifteen thousand feet because we were after the V1 sites mainly then [unclear] hours but normally we had a fighter escort Spitfires and Hurricanes which would be up about twenty thousand, twenty five thousand feet looking after us but they, the escort didn’t turn up, so the German fighters had a pretty good
JM: Picnic.
LP: Pretty good go at the Venturas.
JM: Venturas
LP: And that’s why after we got to England we did a conversion onto Mitchells, B-25s,
JM: Right. Ok, so.
LP: We’re getting ahead of.
JM: We just try, I find it easier if we can sort of keep it in sequence in that way, bearing in mind sort of when other people are listening, you know, at other times, it makes it a little bit simpler for them. But that’s not say that if you suddenly think of something we can’t accommodate that because it’s better to get it all. But, so, the Venturas, so you were training on these Venturas and at Pennfield Ridge, and then, as well as that, you followed that on with some about a month and a bit at Yarmouth.
LP: That’s right, at Yarmouth, in, we had to cross the Bay of Fundy to go down to, Yarmouth was still in Canada. There is a Yarmouth in England too.
JM: Yes, that’s why
LP: That’s why my parents thought that’s we’re gone to.
JM: Yes, that’s why a bit, wanting to just clarify what that, yeah, so, there’s Yarmouth in Canada and so, what did you do down in Yarmouth, more Ventura training or?
LP: Yes, more Ventura training.
JM: Ventura training. So, did you actually crew up at this point?
LP: Yes, when we got to Pennfield Ridge we crewed up.
JM: You crewed up there. So, how many because I’m totally unfamiliar with the Ventura, how many were on your crew on a Ventura?
LP: I had to choose a pilot and an observer who was not a pilot, a navigator and bomb aimer. And wireless air gunner and straight gunner.
JM: So, in terms of a Ventura, is it like, did they have, was it like a mid-upper gunner or rear gunner or?
LP: Mid-upper gunner.
JM: A mid-upper gunner. Right, ok. And
LP: Oh, sorry, it was only the straight air gunner was on the Mitchell and he was on one of those gun positions [unclear] down below
JM: Oh, like, down below
LP: Down below and underneath
JM: A lower, right
LP: The Ventura didn’t, it only had the top turret.
JM: Top turret, right. So what did wireless operator run that as well as the radio?
LP: As a gunner
JM: As a gunner
LP: As a gunner, and
JM: Wireless
LP: Wireless man, too.
JM: Wireless, right, ok. So, you had one, two, three, four, five crew on your Ventura.
LP: Ehm, one, two, three, four, actually, three, four because we didn’t have the straight air gunner.
JM: So you had a pilot, observer, navigator
LP: Who was all, observer, navigator was all, all one
JM: All the one, ok. So, pilot, navigator, observer, bomb aimer and wireless air gunner.
LP: Yes.
JM: Yes. Ok. And so, how did you go about your selection of your crew? Did
LP: They were all brought into the hall and we’d just say, would you like to come with me and you’d pick somebody if they were agreeable and that was it.
JM: And were they all, what nationalities were they?
LP: My observer, who was also the
JM: Navigator
LP: Navigator, was a New Zealander.
JM: Right.
LP: There’s with him and the straight air gunner, no, not the straight air gunner, the wireless air gunner
JM: Wireless.
LP: Was a Canadian
JM: Right. And bomb aimer?
LP: That was the observer’s job also. The observer was a navigator and bomb aimer.
JM: And what was he? Ah, he was New Zealander.
LP: He was a New Zealander and the wireless air gunner was a Canadian.
JM: And, so, that was your crew, you went then as a crew to Yarmouth.
LP: To Yarmouth.
JM: And did your additional training
LP: Yes.
JM: In Yarmouth.
LP: Yes.
JM: So then you got after that, any particular memories that, any particular experiences any of these training flights that stand out, any near misses or any interesting visit, interesting side trips as a result of [laughs]?
LP: Not really. I was lucky, the Venturas had the most powerful engine going at the time in the Air Force at two thousand horse power, a radial engine, and had a habit of catching on fire. Luckily I didn’t have that experience myself but we did a lot of formation flying at Yarmouth too, and we’d go out, ehm, select one doing the [unclear] for about half an hour and then change over so. The [unclear] Grant-Suttie was the captain of the leading aircraft I was formating on him and he had an engine failure and we were on a steep turn at the time and I, because he reduced speed because of the engine failure, I pulled off, I suppose I could so but our, my left wingtip hit his tail plane and my left wingtip came up like that, bent right up
JM: Bent right up
LP: Bent right up and of course when I landed and they asked about the other aircraft, the other aircraft, alright, I said, as far as I know, yes, Captain, I’m [unclear], he’s still ok, and I saw him land then and never got into any trouble, I don’t know whether he got into any trouble enough but
JM: But still the engine failed, I mean.
LP: The engine failed and it was down that they weren’t very good engines.
JM: Gosh, well that was an experience to
LP: Yeah, that was an experience.
JM: And again sort of required your resources to manage your way out of it, so.
LP: When you’re in a [unclear] like that and he wants to bank further because the engine fails
JM: So, probably more than forty-five degrees you’re talking about, judging by the position of your hands there, yes.
LP: Is very, I couldn’t do anything except try and sort of get my speed behind his, and we were very lucky that all this more or less still kept together and my wingtip hit his tail plane and, well, it squeezed up against, you say, because there wasn’t any big collision, we were so close anyhow.
JM: Close anyhow.
LP: So.
JM: Gosh! So, that was that experience and that was probably about the only one that you had.
LP: That’s the only one I had.
JP: Bird strike. The bird strike.
LP: Oh no. That’s way.
JM: That’s further down the track, is it? Ok.
LP: Way down the track. This is in the Air Force, I’m still training in the Air Force [laughs]
JM: We’re still, we’re back in Canada here. But whereabouts to sort of go to Halifax and uhm, I presume that’s probably but some of your experiences that’s at Yarmouth and then. So you moved both to Halifax and [unclear] and that was
LP: That was like a holding.
JM: Holding.
LP: Holding spot there and then we actually went by train down to New York
JM: Yes.
LP: To get on board the Queen Elizabeth. Right next door was the French one that was caught on fire.
JM: Fire.
LP: What was the name?
JP: Oh, that French ship. Yes, I remember that.
LP: About the same size as the Queen Elizabeth. Huge French.
JP: It wasn’t the Normandy?
LP: Normandy. That’s it! Good one! Is the Normandy, yes.
JM: Yes.
LP: It spend quite a long time in the New York wharf area.
JM: But when you went down to New York is when you had a week’s leave and when you.
LP: We had the weeks’ leave from Dauphin. That was where I did the [unclear]
JM: Oh, from Dauphin, ok, so whilst you were in Dauphin that had you the week’s leave, right.
LP: That’s right, isn’t it?
JP: Yes.
LP: From Dauphin.
JM: Dauphin, so
LP: [unclear] I got my wings, it wasn’t [unclear], no, because we didn’t have leave and we came before we went on board the Queen Elisabeth. Some memory?
JP: I can’t remember.
LP: You can’t remember, I can’t remember.
JM: No, that’s alright, well that’s
LP: Got in touch with you when I went to New York. No.
JM: No, so was probably around August or something that you had your leave in ’42, went down from Dauphin down to New York so
LP: I don’t think we were allowed so when we were embarking or anything like that.
JM: Right, ok, so that and how did you find your week in New York?
LP: Well, initially.
JM: Yes, that initial.
LP: With June.
JM: Yes, with June.
LP: Oh, we had a lovely time. We saw
JM: So, you met June at the beginning of the leave as opposed to
LP: Yes
JM: So, you had the whole week together basically
JP: I was just having lunch and he was the guest of management and I was guest of management.
JM: Guest of management, yes, no, but it was basically towards the, more as at the start of his leave so you then had a week, more or less a week together. Oh, that was wonderful.
LP: No, not all the time. But I went down to this hotel called [unclear] and the other one, he got his wings too, and we both went to this hotel Edison in New York because we could have two meals for the price of one [laughs]. And, oh, we were looking forward to it, we weren’t flush then.
JM: Oh, that’s right. Exactly, you were payed.
LP: And that’s when June sorted a group of airmen and said, oh, I’ll pick him.
JP: Pick him [laughs].
LP: So it’s all her fault.
JM: It’s all her fault, that’s right. And so, I guess, how long had you been in New York at that stage? June, you had some idea?
JP: Oh, I’d only been in New York probably about a year.
JM: A Year. But still at least you had some knowledge, say you were able to take
LP: You were fifteen, didn’t you?
JP: Fifteen, going, closer to sixteen.
LP: Ah, were you?
JP: Much closer to sixteen. Yes.
LP: June was about the, she was more of us in charge of the other girls going over
JP: That’s right.
LP: And she did three years, they been and she’s been living in New York about a year.
JM: A levels, you did your A levels.
JP: I did the leaving that took everybody four years, I did it in fifteen months.
JM: My Goodness me!
JP: And how I did it was that, where I was as a like a primary school but we had, the older ones, we had a separate cottage and this cottage, these lovely ladies would come and
LP: The Gool [?] Foundation
JP: The Gool [?] Foundation and they’d come and you know they talked me up when I wanted to do my homework for night now where was I? Uhm, what was I about to tell you?
JM: Well, we were just saying that you had, you’d been there about twelve months so that you had some idea about, you know, where to take Lorrie and
JP: Where to take Lorrie and everything and they just sort of got somehow round that we got in touch with each other
LP: When? After.
JP: I don’t know how we did it, whether it’s through my mother.
LP: No, no, no, I happened to be, this is after a two year period after I got to England.
JM: England.
LP: When we first left each other, I think I wrote one letter saying how lovely
JM: [unclear]
LP: I got one letter back, nothing for two years, I happened to be on leave in London and [unclear] officer by then and reading the paper and there was a little part in the paper that said, a lot of these girls were returning as they had been evacuated and gave the address of the headquarters there and I thought, oh, I might go, see if June [unclear] maybe and maybe I might pop in and see and she happened to be there at the headquarters when I popped in.
JM: At that particular time that you went and visited. How a coincidence.
JP: I was getting my papers to get on entertaining the troops had to join ENSO, which was Entertainments National Service Association.
LP: Join the straight, part of a straight play.
JP: Part of a straight play. And, you know I just had this, getting all this information and when Lorrie walked into the building and here you go.
JM: Well, there you go!
JP: Meant to be.
JM: Meant to be, that’s right. And so you became part of the entertainment, troop entertainment.
JP: Yes, I was always in, so, I went to a theatre school as a child through [unclear] and then we went to New York and then I had a very good, I had the best drama teacher in the world at that time called Frances Robinson-Duff and she gave me a free scholarship to attend her school and from there, well, I went back to England, the best way for me to use what I knew in theatre was to join the Entertainment National Service Association, which was a group that entertained troops in straight plays and things like that all over England and Scotland.
LP: You went up to the Orkneys at that time.
JM: Gosh! Yeah, so you, well.
JP: Unfortunately everybody would have been in the newspaper and I would have been in the [unclear] but Noel Coward who was like in charge of us, he was very conscious of keeping our privacy, he didn’t want that for us so he stopped that otherwise I would have had, you know, newspapers galore on what I was doing. It’s a shame.
LP: If June had stayed on , Noel Coward would have made sure that she had a good part.
JM: Gosh!
JP: No, he was like a father to me. Was fabulous.
JM: Amazing, yeah. Ok, we’ll come back to that because that obviously fits in with the story a bit further down the track, uhm, at the moment we just got you into England [laughs]
LP: Queen Elisabeth [unclear], because no escort at all
JM: You had no escort for [unclear], no.
LP: And one night, the Queen did a very quick, one hundred and eighty, three hundred and sixty degree turn because they knew there was a submarine, they were told there was a submarine after them, so I’m glad they had plenty of speed.
JM: Yes, that’s right. So you just did a massive turn around, you didn’t go by, there was one, I must check that, yes, there was one trip that actually went via Greenland. But because again a submarine concerns so did you either on this, on the Elisabeth did you meet, some of the chaps did watchers, did you do any, bridge watches or?
LP: Not on the Queen Elisabeth. But going from Australia to San Francisco, they loaded up guns and [unclear] as well because the war, looked like the Japanese could have come down from there on our way.
JM: But you didn’t do any bridge watch, some of the chaps did bridge watchers from the bridge. But no, so you just did some gunnery work, gunnery preparations on that over to San Fran, right, ok. So you ended up, from Halifax you ended Myles Standish, Bournemouth.
LP: Myles Standish, wasn’t that?
JM: That’s the departure before you went to
LP: Boston, wasn’t it?
JM: That be Boston, yeah, when you got onto the Elisabeth.
LP: Boston, we were held there for a few days and then went to New York onto the Queen Elisabeth.
JM: Yes, just, and so then into Bournemouth.
LP: Yes, held there for quite a while.
JM: About nearly two months basically in Bournemouth, so what sort of things were you doing in Bournemouth?
LP: Mainly parade and get a sport but we were bombed here.
JM: Really?
LP: We were bombed from the low level Focke Wulf, they got under the radar, they just fly over the water and it was a Sunday. If it hadn’t been a Sunday, half of us wouldn’t have been here because the parade ground was bombed. [unclear] my friend there, he got, [unclear] damaged, one thing or another, quite a few killed, civilians were killed at Bournemouth. Sunday the hotel was bombed, they couldn’t, they didn’t rescue anybody out there for a couple of days or two but they were having a great old time down the cellars [laughs].
JM: Down the cellars, well, at least they were safe, I suppose. And so, did your crew that you had been with, your New Zealander, your Canadian, they were all, they came across with you together on the plane, on the boat to Europe? And you’re at Bournemouth together?
LP: Yes, yes, no, I may have, my memory, I’m not too sure now whether it was just my observer and myself together and the wireless air gunner and the straight air gunner, we might have got together after the conversion onto Mitchells, I can’t quite remember that now.
JM: That’s alright, that’s ok. And.
LP: So, after we went after to Bicester.
JM: Towards had, no had two western first?
LP: Sorry?
JM: Tour western? Two western?
LP: Yeah, that’s right.
JM: Two western?
LP: Close to Bicester.
JM: Yeah well, in your entry you had two western then Bicester.
LP: Conversion onto the Mitchells [unclear].
JM: Mitchells.
LP: Two Western.
JM: And how did you find the difference between the Mitchell and the Ventura?
LP: Ah, beautiful aircraft, compared to the Ventura there’s no, hard to compare, the Mitchell was a beautiful aircraft.
JM: It was.
LP: I got a good one too, no, the aircraft varied but mine
JM: There were still two engine, weren’t they?
LP: Still two engines, yes.
JM: Yes. And what, you say they were beautiful aircraft, in what way?
LP: Well, we did a lot of formation flying again there and they were very responsive, very steady, fully aerobatic, not that we did any aerobatics with a bomber but they were capable of doing it. And Liberator, do you know the Liberator at all?
JM: No, not really, no.
LP: That’s a four engine.
JM: Four engine. Had another American one.
LP: The same that made the Liberator
JM: That made the Liberator
LP: Made the Mitchell
JM: Mitchell.
LP: And they are very similar, very similar. Matter of fact, those that went on to Liberators first went on to Mitchells to get the feel. Must show you, there probably a bit out of order but.
JM: Well how about we come back to that later on.
LP: Yeah, we’ll getting a bit thirsty
JM: Oh, ok, we will have a little bit of a.
LP: I mean, you, you must.
JM: No, no, I’m fine but we will just pause while you. We shall just continue on now with Lorrie has just shown me the book that Tony Vine has written on the history of the group of
LP: Group 20
JM: 20 course at Narromine.
LP: There were 50 of us.
JM: 50, so I’ll come, so I’ve seen the chapter on Lorrie which I will come back to afterwards. So, you were at
LP: [unclear]
JM: At Bournemouth.
LP: Yes.
JM: Sorry, then you went to Two Western and you were onto your Mitchell training here now.
LP: Yes, conversion onto.
JM: Yes, so, do you remember your crew there?
LP: Same.
JM: Same. Did you pick up an extra chap now?
LP: That’s where I think where I got the straight gunner, which was Starkey, he was another Canadian.
JM: Another Canadian.
LP: So I finished up with a New Zealander and two Canadians.
JM: Yeah, right, ok, and so from there, any particular experiences that come to mind when you were doing your conversion to your Mitchells?
LP: No, I think they, just the instructors started climbing up to twenty thousand feet and he wanted to demonstrate without our oxygen masks on and most of the chaps sort of passed out but I was very whizzy but I didn’t actually pass out. But, that’s one of, just off the top of my head, [laughs] not worth mentioning really.
JM: Right. Still showed you what would happen if you
LP: If you didn’t have your oxygen mask.
JM: If you didn’t have your oxygen mask, that’s right. So from there, uhm, off to Fulsome
LP: Swanton Morley?
JM: No, Folsom, briefly to start only three days, so, it was just a transit by the looks of the dates and from there Swanton Morley, so, Swanton Morley was you first posting, that was your when you were posted to 226 Squadron.
LP: That’s right.
JM: Yeah, so this was.
LP: Which is an RAF Squadron.
JM: An RAF Squadron, yes, that’s right. And so from, so you arrived at 226 in August ’43.
LP: That’d be right.
JM: August ’43, August ’43, ok and that’s when you started your operational activities?
LP: Yes, from Swanton Morley.
JM: Yes, ok and so, uhm, so mostly your ops were over Northern France, sort of?
LP: Yes, northern France, Holland and, mainly on the V1 sites, we didn’t know, they didn’t tell us what we were actually bombing, cause a big secret at the time. It just what they called a V1 bombing and nothing else, other things too but because these launching sites were right on the coast, crossing over, the flak was very heavy, just hop in and hop out as quickly as you could, drop your bombs.
JM: And so here you had, how many, need to go back to your, we go to the
LP: Operations?
JM: Operations, here, what sort of missions, ops?
LP: Well, as I was saying, they were mainly V1 we were
JM: V1.
LP: We were doing daylight bombings.
JM: Daylight bombings, yes, good, ok, so, any, how many times, do you have?
LP: Thirty ops was a tour.
JM: A tour, yes, that’s alright.
LP: A tour and at the end of the thirty ops I was asked to, would I do another ten ops, which I volunteered to do.
JM: Yes. So, that’s your assessments there, September, yes, so your first ops, your first ops started on the 19th of September basically by the looks of that and through there, lots of flights in between time affiliation flying and then November you really started doing, you really started into the ops, that’s 20th, 23rd, 25th, 26th, yep, 40th operation cooling [?]. So, what’s, any particular ops stand out in terms of, uhm, where, you know, little bit of flak here, we see in January, cloud over target did not bomb, so, French coast, cloud, what sort of, what sort of memories do you have of those ops there?
LP: There, only the amount of flak that was put up to just like the black cloud [unclear]
JM: Black cloud.
LP: And I got hit quite, my observer got shrapnel in his knee from the flak and my straight air gunner, he was up in the top turret and he, quite a big thing hit him behind but luckily it was the flat end that hit him, if it would have been the sharp end the side of, he probably would have been
JM: He probably would have been into trouble.
LP: Yes. Luckily the captain’s seat had armoured plating about that thick [unclear] at the back
JM: Right, so you were reasonably protected from.
LP: Yes, and we always wore a normal helmet, not helmet, see, metal hat, you know, we called it, we didn’t wear a cap so
JM: No, no.
LP: But, the ordinary ground soldiers a metal thing because of the flak, it might help us if a bit of metal came in.
JM: That’s right, and the injuries of those two chaps sustained, were they?
LP: They were in hospital
JM: They were in hospital, I say, it didn’t cause them to miss any ops or one or two ops that you had a substitute crew for or?
LP: No. [unclear]
JM: No, they didn’t miss
LP: We kept the same crew all the way through.
JM: All the way through, right, ok. And, did you have escorts? You said there was lots of flak, so did you still have escorts to provide you a bit of protection or?
LP: Well, as I said, the escorts were [unclear] fighters up to twenty thousand feet, we were bombing between ten thousand and fifteen thousand feet. Daylight bombing and so the escorts could see us from, but that be about ten or fifteen thousand feet
JM: Between you
LP: Between us and if any German fighters showed up they, with the height advantage,
JM: They would be able to come in down over the top of them and try to pick them off
LP: Yes. Keep them. They were herding us along quite nicely. But unlucky with that first Venturas when they didn’t show up and they eleven out of twelve were shot down.
JM: That’s right. So, how bigger Squadron was 226?
LP: It was quite a big squadron and there were about three or four at different stations, airfields, and for instance this called Halliday, was when I met June at the hotel, he was at another airfield, I can’t remember the name of it now, about three or four, there was even a Polish squadron, they made part of our wing, what they called our wing, and they were dreadful in that, they didn’t believe in, they flew straight in and low [laughs] all the time, because, you know, we were told, and it’s pretty true, that if you kept on a straight level flight for ten seconds or a little bit more than ten seconds, without changing your course or your height, you‘re bound to be knocked down. So we did a lot of course changing and height changing.
JM: That’s right. And whilst you were at the base there, uhm, what, at Swanton Morley, you would have some leave, what sort of things did you do whilst you were on leave at Swanton Morley?
LP: We were lucky that there was an organisation that, I’m trying to think of the organisation there that offered to take you into different homes in different parts of England and myself and a good friend of mine, Jack Barrel [?], who is another pilot, we both decided on going up to the Lake District and we loved it, we met a magnificent family up there, he was a soldier from World War I and he at the Battle of the Somme he had a leg shot off and his wife was a lovely Hewardson missy, Hewardson.
JP: They were lovely people.
LP: And that’s where we went up for our honeymoon, up to Kendal, Lake District, and we went and visited them, we just stayed at that hotel at Kendal in Lake District.
JM: Right. Gosh! And did you get back to them a couple of times?
LP: Yes, yes.
JM: So whilst you were at Swanton Morley, so having made the contact with this family, the Hewardsons, did you say it was?
LP: Hewardsons.
JM: Hewardsons, yes. And they, so you then went back.
LP: Very much [unclear] like part of the family up there. Made us very welcome, looked after us magnificently.
JM: Yes, yes, it’s interesting how these bonds did form and how much someone else has commented to me that you know how what an unknown contribution those families really made because of the support and the care that they gave, the service chaps was.
JP: It was amazing.
LP: Of course, something like Miss Macdonald and something about [unclear] and somewhere on the [unclear], was quite nice people, didn’t know them at all but that’s what the organisation was called.
JM: Right, so then you continued to
LP: We left Swanton Morley and went down to Camberley in tents. We were just about to go, D-Day was just about to come up.
JM: Yes, that’s what I’m going to say. What about D-Day, yes?
LP: Well, actually I just finished my tour, they called it, there’s a tour and a half but they called two tours tour because it went on to the extra ten ones, so I was on leave on D-Day.
JM: Right.
LP: In London I think.
JM: Right.
LP: But I then went on to the second [unclear] communication Squadron from there.
JM: Right. Right. So, so you finished your tour at, in beginning of June, before June basically, wasn’t it? It’s the tour the eleventh, that’s May 23, was basically the last op you did there? That when you and then you had your, you’ve been given your assessment on the 11th of June, which of course is after D-Day, so that’s why you were on leave for, well, on D-Day, so, yeah. So, you went, where did you have your leave? Were you down in London or were you up, up north?
LP: London, London on D-Day.
JM: Right, right. And were you in London at that point, June, or?
JP: I think so.
LP: Must have been.
JP: I must have been, yeah. Yes, I must have been, yes. We must have been together.
LP: I don’t know whether you had come back from America at that stage, do you remember what month it was that you came back? It wasn’t, I think it was after June that we met up again.
JP: We had a patch of two years so we didn’t see each other.
LP: Yes.
JM: Right, right, ok. So, could have been as part of that time there. Yes.
LP: Because I know what I mean, we got married on January the 4th, I remember that.
JP: 1945.
JM: Right.
LP: 1945.
JM: January 4th 1945 we were married.
LP: And we weren’t, it took a while before I [unclear] enough courage to ask her to marry me [laughs].
JP: Yes. And we were [unclear] together like three months before that. And before that I was in, I must have been in America.
JM: Yes, yes, yes.
LP: And I was at, based at Northolt.
JM: Yes. Because you, in June you switched to Ansons so did you do a conversion course to the Ansons or was it similar to, from the?
LP: No, hardly necessary. Just another [unclear], the two on the Ansons, the Anson was twin engine, but is only used as a communication aircraft really.
JM: Right, ok, so this was the start of your other Squadron posting, was it?
LP: Yes.
JM: And what was that Squadron called?
LP: 2nd TAF communications squadron.
JM: Right, and so that was Northolt.
LP: They had [unclear]
JM: Yeah, ok. So, that was. So actually you were at 226 moved to Hartford Bridge from Swanton Morley.
LP: Yes, that’s right, yes, that’s right.
JM: So, you’re still flying there, you’re still flying ops at that stage.
LP: Yeah.
JM: It’s just that you change bases there.
LP: Yes.
JM: Yeah, ok. So, with the TAF on communication, what was that involving?
LP: Mainly, flying quite higher people from on aerodrome to the other. Ten days after D-Day I was flying across the Channel with generals and
JM: You were attached to Montgomery’s headquarters.
LP: Yeah, but [unclear] you’re getting too far ahead, June.
JP: Am I? Ah, but that’s what you were doing.
LP: But we were doing a lot of work based in Northolt, flying to different airfields in England, mainly carrying VIPs from one place to the other, carrying some mail from one place to the other, but I think I ran about the tenth, ten days after D-Day which would be, what, 16th? I was flying across the Channel with VIPs.
JM: Right.
LP: And then shortly after the whole communication squadron went across [unclear] and we were based in the beachhead, close to the beachhead, beachhead.
JM: Right. So, that was, yeah, so you were in France and then Belgium. So, from, in August, you had one month in France.
LP: Yeah.
JM: And then three months in Belgium.
LP: That’s right. Yeah. And during that three months, a part of, got three or four weeks, myself and two other pilots were attached to Montgomery’s headquarters and do take his majors up to frontline and get information back and bring that back too.
JM: Right, so. That, August, yes, so, looking at your logbook again, yes it doesn’t quite give us the details it, just tells that you went like in August you went to a whole pile of interesting, Elson [?], Chartres and in another flight you had Reims, Saint Mo [?] and return, so you were obviously visiting forward posts in there to pick up information and then drop staff and that sort of thing there, so, yes, how was that as an experience compared to your fighting operation shall we call?
LP: It is virtually called a rest period, rest period really but we were open to enemy attack at any time.
JM: Did you have any escorts at that time? How many of you were, you just a single plane?
LP: A single plane.
JM: A single plane, so didn’t have any escort or anything like that. You and your rescue were on your own resources in terms of keeping watch for anything.
LP: Yes, well, I didn’t have a crew then.
JM: Oh, ok, you were only.
LP: When I left the squadron, finished the operations, that was the end of the crew.
JM: Right, ok.
LP: So, it was just you.
LP: And other pilots, they were all.
JM: Just a mix of second pilots, just like a two, two men crew running.
LP: Well, wasn’t even a two men crew. We were flying lighter aircraft and it was the one crew flying the passengers virtually.
JM: Oh, ok, so you didn’t actually even have like a second pilot or anything, was just you as the pilot and the passengers that you were ferrying.
LP: Even the Anson which was twin engine thing, you just flew that by yourself. I even accepted that the time I had Prince Bernard [?] in Canada he, we were in Brussels at the time, and he wanted to go to Eindhoven and I was chosen to fly him there in the Anson and he and his couple of aids there and general, a couple of generals there and they sat down in the back and he wanted to sit up alongside of me and Prince Bernard [?] and took off and the old Anson in those days, you had to wind the undercarriage up and it took off and he said, oh, I’ll do that and he wound the undercarriage up for me [laughs]. Very nice chap.
JM: And did you ever meet Montgomery?
LP: I can’t say that I actually met him. No, it’s a wonder I didn’t because as I say there were three of us with these light aircraft attached to his headquarters and one Sunday morning, it must have been a Sunday morning and the English Townsend, Johnny Townsend, were having a bit of a rivalry amongst us and we went up, and we had a bit of a dogfight, you know, [unclear] treetop level and we were doing [unclear] and having a real good older, I won by the way because I and he admitted that I was coming inside him on the turns [unclear], we landed and very shortly after there was a VIP attached to Montgomery that came up and said: ‘What have [unclear] I had a lot of trouble, you’re in a lot of trouble because there was, Montgomery was very religious type of chap and he was carrying out the church parade and of course we were flying [laughs].
JM: The church creating a racket.
LP: And disturbed his church service and we weren’t very popular then [laughs].
JM: Oh dear, oh dear.
LP: So, that’s one incident that happened.
JM: And so, it was quite a different experience than for you to be doing.
LP: We [unclear] as a rest period, weren’t nearly in so much danger really, except we often had to keep our eyes open all the time because we were as far as the aircraft went, we were very much on top of the Germans, from D-Day on the German Air Force didn’t trouble us very much.
JM: So, what, you had quite a number of flights in that capacity. So you went through until December ’44 was the end of Belgium and then from there you were down to Brighton and obviously you had some leave at that point because if you then went and got married in January, beginning of January ’45, your time in Brighton was December ’44 to February ’45 so you had some leave and you got married. Where were you married, in London?
LP: Yes. West Hampstead, wasn’t it?
JP: West Hampstead.
JM: Right. Right. Very good.
LP: And then we had the honeymoon up in Kendal, in the Lake District [laughs].
JM: Back with the Hewardsons again.
JP: Yes.
LP: That’s right.
JM: Yes, so that [unclear] marvellous and so, then you came back on the Rangitiki.
LP: Rangitiki, New Zealand ship.
JM: And did you come, you wouldn’t have come as well?
JP: [unclear] travelled.
JM: Travelled together.
JP: It was terrible because English [unclear] was good. But not the Australians. It was terrible.
JM: No.
LP; A well, I can tell you something about that. The Australians they couldn’t take their wireless back with them, but the New Zealanders did and when we got on board, and the New Zealanders were there [unclear] I was very hurt about that. Yes, would have made a big difference.
JP: [unclear] went first, it was several months before I was pregnant which he didn’t know about.
LP: I didn’t know about [unclear].
JP: Until I saw him again and it was terrible for me cause I had to wait in England for months.
LP: And June was very lucky to be allowed to travel being pregnant.
JM: Yes, well, there was a cut-off time before they.
JP: I got
LP: June had the influence of her grandfather.
JP: My grandfather he was head of the [unclear] shipping company.
JM: Oh, ok.
JP: And only through him did a get a birth I mean cause they’d never allow somebody expecting a baby on the ship anyway during the war.
JP: There were a couple of others that I know of that came through as pregnant, when they were pregnant but yes.
LP: But June was, Richard was born in October.
JP: Several months when I came.
LP: By the time we landed in Sydney, you were what? Seven months pregnant?
JP: Yes, seven months pregnant.
JM: Yes, seven months. And so then you were finally discharged, so you came through on the Rangitiki and then you were discharged
LP: October.
JM: October ’45. Yes. Just saying a bit of note here that is going to sort of jump out of sequence here which but when you were in 226, so you finished up in June, June ’44 we said, wasn’t it? That was your last op, yes, that was last op ’44, so were you, which plane were you on one plane only when you were in 226 or did you fly two or three different planes?
LP: No, only Mitchells, I only flew the Mitchells there and I had my own aircraft.
JM: You had your own aircraft, yes. No, it’s just that I noticed when I was looking up 226 to try and find out a little bit about 226 because I’d never come across 226 previously and one of the notes there said that there was a P for Peter, was a distinguished plane in 226 because it was the only Mitchell that completed one hundred ops. And I didn’t know whether you had ever flown on P for Peter or whether you would, if you’d happen to remember any one who might have flown on P for Peter.
LP: I can’t quite remember either. Does it tell you the aircraft?
JM: It probably does if I actually go back and have a look.
LP: When I was on leave towards the end in my tour, while you are on leave somebody else couldn’t fly your aircraft.
JM: Yes.
LP: And somebody did and the undercarriage didn’t come down when it went in to land, so he landed without a nose wheel, because Mitchells had nose wheels, he did a, he got his crew to go down the back and he finished his landing alone and he kept the nose off the ground all the time, got the ground crew to come out to pull the nose wheel struck down and they did but they didn’t [unclear] and when they were towing it away it came down
JM: Collapsed.
LP: It crashed. Oh, I was so annoyed. I did get another aircraft, a newer aircraft with newer engines, but it wasn’t nearly as nice to fly as the, H for Harry, I’ll bet you’ll find those.
JM: Well actually no, you, all you got is numbers so, I haven’t got any letters unfortunately.
LP: I’m sure there’s H for Harry anyhow.
JM: H for Harry, was it, there you go, no, there’s no letters, there’s just numbers, so. But anyway that’s alright.
LP: H, I’m sure there’s H, wasn’t Peter.
JM: Wasn’t Peter, right. So, back in, you were discharged as we said in December.
LP: October.
JM: October ’45, sorry, and because you arrived, which is a long time after you arrived back, cause you arrived back in March ’45 so.
LP: Yes, we refreshed the course [unclear]
JM: Oh, did you?
LP: Yes, on Oxford and then we went down to East Sale to do a pre endorsement on Beauforts.
JM: Right, because I suppose at that stage they were concerned about, you might have been going off to Asia, were you? For
JP: Yes.
LP: Yes, but before that I was going to go from the Beauforts on to Mosquitos at Williamtown.
JM: Right.
LP: And then the war ended.
JM: Ended.
LP: I wanted to get on to Mosquitos to [laughs]
JP: Yes. That was his love.
JM: Right.
LP: Yes, well I, yes, initially it was Spitfires but at the end, towards the end Mosquitos were lovely aircraft.
JM: Right, right. So did you actually fly?
LP: Mosquitos?
JM: No.
LP: I didn’t even get the posting to Williamtown.
JM: No, no.
LP: East Sale, you know where East Sale is?
JM: Yes, down Victoria.
LP: Victoria. That’s where the beau fighters were.
JM: Beau fighters were.
LP: No, not beau fighters, Beauforts, Beauforts.
JM: Beauforts, Beauforts. Right.
LP: And I did finish the course there and as I say the war ended then. [phone ringing] Thanks June.
JM: So, yes, so, well, that’s interesting that you had all that extra training [unclear]
LP: Excuse me, I gotta, he’s gonna call me back.
JM: Go back, so, then having done all these extra bits of training it never came to anything as such and the war ended so you were finally discharged in October ’45.
LP: Yes.
JM: And by which time June had arrived I assume, yes, yes.
LP: Yes, produced our son.
JM: Yes, your son.
JP: I had him at October 9th 1945.
JM: Right, right, so that was just before you were discharged, ok, uhm, and you were in Sydney here at that point.
JP: Yes.
LP: No, no, you were up at Burrell.
JP: Up at Burrell? Oh, sorry, I, when you said Sydney I meant Australia. Yes, I was up at Burrell.
LP: No, my parents were retired in a place up at Burrell, near [unclear], Gloucester Way.
JM: Ok, right, so there.
JP: So basically I was when I had the baby.
JM: Right, right, ok, so, that would have been a bit of a shock to the system and the whole country town there.
LP: It was, no telephone,
JP: I got on the phone and said to people in England and New York, I said, well look I’m up here, there’s no phone, no electricity, no toilet inside [unclear] [laughs].
JM: Dunny is down the back.
LP: Was a bit of a shock.
JP: [unclear]
LP: But I had told her what to expect.
JP: Oh yes, I wasn’t, you know, [unclear], I did it with fun.
JM: Yes, yes.
LP: Was lovely, June settled in there beautifully.
JP: Oh yes, no, they were lovely to me. When I first arrived, of course being a little English girl, I was all white,
JM: White, that’s right.
JP: And just, they went, ah, [laughs], who’s this? Where does she come from? [laughs]
LP: And June could make up beautifully and she looked lovely anyhow but all the local girls [unclear]
JP: Who’s this? [laughs] Where did she come from?
JM: That’s right, yes.
JP: What planet? [laughs]
JM: Yes, exactly. And so, when did you start your chartered business? You showed
LP: The air taxi.
JM: Air taxi out of Bankstown.
LP: Yes.
JM: Was that the first thing you did after the war?
LP: The first job that I went into, organized setting up the air taxi. I met a chap, a country chap that he and his wife looking for something of interest, they were pretty well off and we got on very well together and we went down to Canberra and saw Dragford [?], who is a politician and he managed to get two light aircraft from the RAAF at Richmond. So we got hold of [unclear], picked one up, all [unclear] up nicely and start to operate from then.
JM: So did you, whereabouts in Sydney were you living at this point? Were you out near Bankstown or were you travelling out there?
LP: Yes, yes, there was another airport chap that I got to know, at Dauphin quite well, and his parents were living at Bankstown at the time
JM: Right.
LP: And they put us up there until their daughter was born and then
JM: Yeah, right.
JP: [unclear] was born.
JM: Right, right.
LP: Yes, very kind of them.
JM: Yes, yes. So, and you, I think you said three or four years did you have your charter business for?
LP: Ah, about a year and a half.
JM: Year and a half was it? Right.
LP: It was all, because before we went broke.
JM: Right.
JP: Did the guard man threaten to put out some cost, which would put us out of business?
LP: Yes, I said we’re gonna charge [unclear] in air mile
JP: And then they were gonna put it up. And that would have put us out of business. So we had to give it away.
LP: I interviewed [unclear] and Mr Butler, whose Butler Airlines at that stage, he thought we could combine quite well but as [unclear] couldn’t carry on. I even took a couple just to keep this going in, even took a couple of jobs with [unclear] I think it was and the other place, in George Street down the hill.
JM: Down the hill?
LP: Down the hill from George Street near central.
JM: Oh, Mark Foyes?
LP: No, in George Street.
JM: Oh, George Street.
LP: George Street, was a well known
JM: Hordens?
JP: Hordens? Anthony Hordens?
JM: Anthony Hordens?
LP: Anthony Hordens? Yes, I was in, I didn’t smoke, so I got a job in the smoking factory.
JM: Oh, in the tobacco section.
LP: Selling cigarettes and so. Because they always had their battered up tins of cigarettes, fifty, used to be the old fifty tins in those days. And any ones that got battered, they virtually sold them and at this stage I was keen to get into Qantas so I used to do, every week go down to the recruitment place in Qantas and with my tins, battered tins of cigarettes and the recruitment officer, he was a smoker and he bought these battered tins from me every week which is quite [unclear]
JM: Had a little bit of a discount.
LP: Yes, a big discount. So, I think that helped me get into Qantas.
JM: Nothing like a little bit of encouragement.
LP: Exactly, exactly.
JM: For favourable, to view your credentials favourably.
LP: Yes.
JM: Well I mean, you did have the right credentials, let’s face it, so, I mean, that, yes.
LP: There were so many ex Air Force men who wanted to get in
JM: Yes, but they had the pick of the whole field, really.
LP: They did, they did.
JM: So, yes, yes. So, you joined up into Qantas in?
LP: Yes, 28th of March I think it was, 1948.
JM: Right, ok. So, then you started, you were doing domestic or international?
LP: No, international. At the same I was applying to TAA at the same time and they both came and said, come and see us. But the idea of just flying up Sydney, Melbourne, Sydney, Melbourne didn’t really appeal to me.
JM: Taxi run.
LP: And Qantas sounded a lot nicer to me. Don’t say good for June I suppose. Because overseas
JM: Because overseas, periods of absence, yes.
LP: We got two, sometimes three up to Japan because the Korean War had started then. And we took on the Skymaster DC4 we used to fly up to there and the troops landed there and their air force up there, [unclear], and you’d be up to three weeks away, probably because you had to wait for [unclear] ex-service people.
JM: Right. And so how long were you with Qantas for?
LP: Thirty years.
JM: Thirty years. Gosh!
LP: Yes. Thirty years with Qantas.
JM: So, you would have seen quite a number of changes in that time. Obviously, with different planes and
LP: Start off on the DC3 and then went on to the Skymaster DC4, the Superconny, Super Constellation, wasn’t very long and then went on to the 707, Boeing 707 and then the last five years I was on the Jumbo 747.
JM: 747, yes. And have you flown on the A380s at all?
LP: Yes. I have, as passenger.
JM: As passenger. Yes, yes, well that would have been a change again. From the 747.
LP: Like going to [unclear] on the [unclear]. Amazing.
JM: That’s right. And so, once you retired from Qantas in ’78, anything, did you do anything in particular after?
LP: Oh yes, I bought a farm. [laughs]
JM: Bought a farm, right.
LP: Yes, that’s why we just sold, that’s why everything in the dining room down there is chock-a-block. My son also owns another property out in the country and he’s had a big shed that with nothing in there and that’s chock-a-block.
JP: That’s chock-a-block. We’ve got stuff out there that [unclear] what we’re gonna do.
LP: And my son also has a place at [unclear] that’s painting off
JP: That’s his [unclear]
JM: Oh, it’s beautiful.
LP: Two people there during the night.
JM: Oh my goodness!
LP: Great grandchildren.
JP: The artist just did that for us.
JM: Lovely!
JP: That’s the back of the house.
LP: We’ve got the others to go down there and paint it.
JM: Paint it, gosh!
LP: Oh, he’s got a beautiful place!
JP: Oh, it’s beautiful.
JM: And whereabouts is your farm?
LP: At Burrell, near [unclear].
JM: Oh, back in, family, back in where your parents were, so, right.
LP: What happened was in about 1977 [unclear], no ’74, was that Dad came, he said, why don’t you buy the land around us, it was off the sale but 160 acers all together and buy that and when we go, it looks like they were going to go fairly soon, we will leave you the little house and leave you, make a nice little property for you when we go. So that’s what we did. I’m just about to buy a lovely home at Lake Macquarie.
JM: Oh, ok.
LP: Wangi Wangi.
JM: Wangi Wangi, yes, yes.
LP: It’s a waterfront [unclear] a little pathway.
JM: Yes, yes.
LP: People like to use the pathway on the other side of this bay and Dad came up with this offer and I can see we could help them at the same time and we changed over.
JM: Lovely. Oh, that’s a beautiful area up there I mean.
LP: It is.
JP: Magnificent.
LP: My mother came from this little township called Burrell, [unclear] Newcastle.
JM: Yes, that’s right. So, you had a very varied and interesting life.
LP: Very much so.
JM: And during, from your wartime experiences would you say there’s any one sequence of events that stays with you perhaps more than others or? One event or?
LP: Can’t say, can’t say. No, can’t say anything. I, we, the CO just before at the end of the tour recommended me for a DFC and then when he left the new CO came in, he called me and he said: ‘Oh, look, here’s this recommendation for a DFC, he said, well, I don’t know anything about you, but can you tell me what you did so we can write up a citation with, I said, I couldn’t think of anything, really [laughs]. And he said: ‘You write what you think might be the best thing in [unclear] the DFC, I said, oh, I thought is not a war to go on yet and I said, just leave it. And he wrote in and I got mentioned a special [unclear] left at then. But an AFC, an Air Force Cross I could have written down something and then because, you know, in formation with head boxers and six, I don’t know if you had, one leading aircraft had one formation on this side and then another one over there and then another one down here with two chaps, you’d have six aircraft all in one box of six, you’d re following me there?
JM: Yes, I am.
LP: And if you went up through cloud then, the idea was everybody to alter course 30 degrees for [unclear] and then climb up through the cloud and break through the clouds up and open it all the aircraft all over the place there and form one again [?]. Well, we had one chap, a fairly high air force official came to our squadron, he said, you know, the fighters, they four made up the fighters coming a lot closer and they form up and they go through the cloud in formation so the CO heard about that and he got a flight Lieutenant and said, give it a try and I’d hear about this and so the next time this went up through the cloud and I stuck in and kept formation all the way up through there and the other chap, that, this flight Lieutenant, he couldn’t do at the end the breakaway so I came up, oh, I was the only one that kept in formation. Well, [unclear] I could have written up something about that, an AFC. That’s the only other experience I can pass on to you.
JM: And what about down the years, did you manage to stay in touch with your New Zealand and Canadian crew chaps or?
LP: Not the Canadians, the, we went to a holiday, a bit of a holiday over in New Zealand and I met up with my observer then. Oh, by the way that business of flying through the clouds, after they found out that it could be done, after that all the operations, that they went up through cloud, we all formed up and went through in formation.
JM: You stayed in formation.
LP: After [unclear]
JM: So you brought about a change of procedure so to speak.
LP: Yes.
JM: And so the chap, Dennis, Dennis
LP: Lez Witham.
JM: Lez Witham.
LP: Lez Witham was my observer.
JM: Right.
LP: He was at Duneaton [?].
JM: And so you managed to keep in contact with him a little bit.
LP: A little bit.
JM: Post war.
LP: He became a, bonds, he was a
JM: Stock broker.
LP: Stock broker, yes, he became a stock broker.
JM: Right. Interesting.
LP: [unclear] when you get old, you can’t remember names [unclear].
JM: We’re talking about so long ago and so many thing have happened in the years [unclear] that’s quite, But the fact is that, you know, those experiences, the nitty gritties of the experiences stay with you and while some of the finer details may not necessarily be there, the whole overall experience is very much still part and parcel of you.
LP: But names of people [unclear] I mean you can’t and June is even worse than I am, terribly [unclear]. I told you about five times I don’t take milk in tea and I like milk in my coffee and but she asks me every time [unclear]
JM: Ah well, she is always planning for a change of taste, that’s what it is. [unclear] And did you keep in touch with any of, like training type people that you were trained with or did you make up, come because of being in Qantas you would have met up with a lot of service personnel, did?
LP: Not Air Force,
JM: Not Air Force.
LP: But of course, except my wireless air gunner, he married and we had a few [unclear] from her and sometime years ago now and she used to correspond a bit [unclear] and as I say, the observer, New Zealand observer we but the straight air gunner, no, he didn’t, didn’t hear anything from him. He was a character, he was only a short stocky Canadian, he was a real toughy [unclear], he was a good air gunner, [unclear] I liked the chap, I liked him.
JM: Well, that’s what you want, you want someone who is good at, everyone had to be good at their own jobs. That was part and parcel of the survival of the crew, I think, wasn’t it?
LP: Yes.
JM: Yes, so, and that you may not necessarily be best of buddies but you were able to work together and have that cohesion that was required to be a good team, to survive.
LP: I never had any trouble with my crew at all so very good, very good.
JM: I know it’s hard work so I do appreciate you were sharing some memory, many memories with me.
LP: It’s hard work trying to remember [unclear] no, I enjoyed it because it brings to day sort of [unclear] quite a few [unclear].
JP: Lovely memories.
LP: I wish I had this Mitchell, we had the whole squadron in front of a Mitchell and where that photo is.
JM: It’s in one of your boxes. You’ll find it one day, it will turn.
LP: Tony Vine has got, he took a lot of photos
JM: Photos
JP: We’ve got a lot of boxes in there.
LP: Yes, but he took a lot of photos to
JM: To put into the book.
LP: Yes, to put into the book.
JM: Well, if nothing else, we might wrap up then if there is anything else, unless there’s anything else that you can think of, that you want to mention.
LP: Can you think of anything else, June?
JP: No, no.
JM: So, we’ll wrap it up as I say and I.
LP: June wants to bring up the bird strike business with the Qantas of course but.
JP: Oh, not really. We’ll leave it.
LP: Ok. You brought it up, you brought it up.
JP: I know, but, definitely yes.
LP: We had a bird strike on a Jumbo Jet taking off from Sydney and it looked like we lost two engines on one side, during take-off. Luckily, number 4 engine came good again, otherwise it looked we were going to ditch in Botany Bay.
JM: Interesting.
LP: We came good [unclear] jettison, we were going to Singapore at the time, with about 300 passengers on board. So, we dumped our fuel and while we were dumping our fuel, of course that takes some time, [unclear] on the ground and engineering and they prepared another aircraft while we were dumping to go on to London eventually and Philip, Prince Philip, he’s been a night.
JM: Have you been sick?
JP: Yes, he’s been in hospital. For two days.
LP: And actually in 1963 we had a basing with Qantas, a four year basing in London to fly from London to New York and in 1963 the Commonwealth Games were on and he opened them, but I flew from London to New York.
JM: Oh good!
LP: And there’s a photograph over there that he gave to me heading up on the flight deck landing into New York.
JM: Into New York, he was like that,
LP: Yes.
JM: Even though he was a naval man. But he, I think he was very interested in
LP: He had a helicopter, so I [unclear] fly a helicopter, I asked him, when I first saw him, was I asked him, how as it like to fly a helicopter, he said it was like rubbing your head in [unclear] or vice versa. He was very down to earth, very down to earth, Prince Philip.
JM: That’s interesting, yeah, so, obviously you landed successfully back in Sydney and by which time the plane, the new, the replacement plane was ready so you just walked off and did you then crew that, fly or did they say that you’d done enough hours, that you had exceeded your hours by the time?
LP: I’d flown him from, you’re right, I’d run out of flight time. Actually we’d flown from London to New York and then [unclear] arrival on the minute and they reported right back to the CO to London, couldn’t imagine, can’t imagine how I came from London to New York and arriving on schedule to the very minute.
JM: A feather in your cap then for managing to do that, yes, that was wonderful.
LP: So there’s one of the things that come to mind.
JM: Mind, yes, so, four years in London would have been an interesting experience, so you
JP: Ah, it was wonderful. It was really possibly one of the best times of our life, with young children [unclear] growing up.
LP: We had a lovely double story home in [unclear] Water,
JP: [unclear] Water.
LP: Near the park.
JP: Pardon?
LP: Near the park.
JP: Yes.
LP: What’s the name? Buckingham, not Buckingham.
JM: St James?
LP: Windsor Park.
JM: Windsor Park. Right.
JP: Near Windsor Park. Ah, it was absolutely beautiful. We had the most wonderful four year posting, and the kids were the right age, weren’t they?
LP: Yes.
JP: Just entering their teens.
LP: And we would take them on holiday, over to, over to Europe.
JM: Over to the continent. And around and they gave you a chance to see your family again, I presume.
JP: Oh yes. No, it was absolutely fantastic. Couldn’t have asked for a better posting than that. No, we loved that.
JM: Would have been a lovely time for four years.
LP: I could have extended that posting for another two years except that our son and daughter, our son was eighteen and our daughter was
JP: Sixteen or something.
LP: Sixteen or seventeen. I thought that if we stayed another two years, they’ve never gone back to Australia.
JP: Back to Australia. You know, they would have got [unclear]
JM: Yes.
LP: So we came back and of course my parents weren’t very well.
JM: Very well by that stage, so [unclear]
JP: We did the right thing because it was for your parents mainly. Yes, no, it was the right thing to do.
LP: Yes, so, all. No, could we offer you a bit of afternoon tea now?
JM: Thank you, we will just wrap up here though, and just formally say once again thank you Lorrie very much and June for your contributions, it’s been so thank you indeed.
LP: It’s lovely talking to somebody that’s interested.
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APennL170622
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Interview with Lawrence Penn
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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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01:48:11 audio recording
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Pending review
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Jean Macartney
Date
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2017-06-22
Description
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Lawrence Penn grew up in Australia and worked as a bank clerk before he volunteered for the Air Force. He flew 40 operations as a pilot with 226 Squadron. After the war he had his own air taxi company and also flew for Qantas.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
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Australia
Canada
Great Britain
United States
England--Norfolk
New York (State)--New York
New York (State)
Contributor
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Peter Schulze
Temporal Coverage
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1943
1944
1945
226 Squadron
aircrew
B-25
bombing
crewing up
love and romance
mid-air collision
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
pilot
RAF Hartford Bridge
RAF Swanton Morley
RAF Turweston
rivalry
Second Tactical Air Force
training
V-1
V-weapon
Ventura
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/348/3516/PWaughmanR1501.1.jpg
ea7d7d15f3b9f96826258b16ff6e1ae6
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/348/3516/AWaughmanR150401.2.mp3
55b93fe44cab5a19fbaf370e4af18862
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Title
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Waughman, Rusty
Russell Reay Waughman
Russell R Waughman
Russell Waughman
R R Waughman
R Waughman
Description
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Two oral history interviews with Russell Reay "Rusty" Waughman (1923 - 2023, 1499239 and 171904 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a pilot with 101 Squadron.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-04-01
2015-08-03
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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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Waughman, R
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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AP: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Andrew Panton. The interviewee is Rusty Waughman. The interview is taking place at Mr Waughman’s home in Kenilworth on the 1st of April 2015. Mr Waughman was a Lancaster pilot in 101 Squadron.
RW: The old Lanc was a remarkable aircraft to fly. On one occasion I was going on a transport plan target. We were going to Hasselt in Belgium, Northern Belgium, German borders and we were about ten minutes from the target when another aircraft crashed side wards into us and the, the engineer, Curly was looking out of his window. Of course, it was dark and night time, cloud was about and all he saw was this aircraft just closing in and approaching and clout, clouted straight into the side of us. His engines cut through our bomb, bombing position when he was just six inches behind his feet. It cut off our starboard wheel. The mid upper turret which sticks up on top of the other [unclear]. It was Another Lancaster, a mid upper turret carved just behind our bomb bays, cut right through the fuselage, cut a big hole in the fuselage. Most of our tail was damaged. All our electrics went. And there we were, we were sitting on top each other all very closely linked and my controls was just like sitting on the ground, like driving on ice. I had no control of the aircraft whatsoever. The controls just went limp in my hand. I just couldn’t, couldn’t respond at all. It seemed like for, long time but it was only for seconds, only for seconds really and then the other aircraft fell away in pieces. I didn’t see it but the bomb, the navigator and the wireless op said they saw that his top canopy is all gone and he was just falling to pieces. We didn’t see any parachutes opening. So he crashed on the ground. We found we could still — didn’t affect our engines, we found we could still fly. So we got Norman, the bomb aimer, to check the bomb bays and the bomb doors. He’d lost control of the bombs but, er, all the bombs were still there and we could open the bomb doors and seeing as we were only ten minutes from the target so he said we’d press on and we’ll bomb the target. Not realising that having lost our electrics the master bombers had said don’t go in and bomb so we, we [laughs] roamed off on our own. We did hit the bomb, hit the target all be it, it was 4 ½ miles north of where we should of gone. But anyway we hit it, we hit a railway line and of course we had to come back and we were in such a hurry we realised that the major damage had happened at the back end of the aircraft. We realised later that two of the main [unclear] were damaged and had we had to take evasive action we could well of broken up. So I said to Harry, the rear gunner, come up front Harry, bring your parachute just in case but he said ‘no I’ll stop here and keep a lookout.’ These are the sort of lads they are. Anyway we had to do a crash landing when we got back and there was a casualty sadly that night. It was skidding towards the control tower in the dark and all the people in the control tower came out on the balcony to watch this idiot land his aeroplane and one of the little girls jumped back and sprained her ankle and that was our casualty for the night. But the reaction of the crews, I gave the crews the chance to bail out but they said no they wouldn’t do it and they all stuck with me and you realise as a pilot, and a very young pilot for having that reaction from the crew, you know, they were wonderful. And I was so lucky with the crew, all from various parts of life. School boys, council workers, a gunner, myself as I was a little, I was student.
AP: And the age group, average age?
RW: Yeah.
AP: Your age?
RW: Yeah. Well many, many years later for our eightieth birthday we had a reunion in Lincoln. They were sitting in the pub and about four or five of us were sitting round and he said we’ve all had our eightieth birthday. When’s your eightieth birthday Alec and he said it’s not for another two years yet. So he actually joined us when he was seventeen and he was operating with us when he was eighteen. Mind you I was getting on a bit, I was twenty, the bomb aimer was nineteen he had his twentieth birthday, the engineer had just had his twentieth birthday. The navigator was eighteen, Taffy was nineteen, twenty. My mid upper gunner, he was the old man of the crew, he was twenty-six and Harry the rear gunner he was twenty and but you know, it’s, it’s as though we all gelled and we all got on so well together. So much so that we still meet even now. There’s five of us left, our two gunners and the special duty operator had died but there’s five of us left and we still meet every year. And we’ve kept this going all these years and it’s been a wonderful experience. And like most of the crews you end up like a band of brothers. Yes, when you, when you got up in the morning and had your breakfast which was fairly relaxed because most of our, well all of our operations were at night so we were either sleeping late or having a normal day but when you went up to the crew room and looked at the notice board, there on the notice board was pinned the battle order and that, you looked to see if your name was on the battle order. If you saw your name on the battle order you went and changed your underwear. It was a very, tense, tense little situation and just seeing your name there was quite something. But then of course you had to go and, the battle order told you that you were flying, what aircraft you’re flying, the crew you — the crews name and the time of the briefing and the time of the meal, the flying meal. So after you — going off late in the evening you had a flying meal late afternoon which was bacon and eggs, you know, and really had bacon and eggs and sometimes we had beans and they were not the best of things for when you’re flying at altitude when you’re not having any compression in the aircraft. So you, you had your flying meal and then of course you had to go and have a special time to go for briefing. So all the crew assembled, except the navigator went off on his own little special briefing drawing up his chart and then he joined us at the main briefing. And you all sat in a big room, it was smoky, you smoked like a chimney, it was just like, almost like a church with all the benches round about and a big high table at the front, where all the section leaders came and gave the information about the raid. The intelligence officer, the met officer the arms officer, all gave their instructions for what you’re going to do on the raid itself. So, and then on this particular raid the, the uncertainty of the whole thing left a little bit of a, a nervous tension. There was always a bit of tension anyway, so, but this was even more so and having just had to go out to the aircraft, not expecting to go at all you were a little bit tense. And of course you went outside and had the crew bus which drove you out to the aircraft and it was quite a contrast. in the crew room, sitting in the crew room waiting for the — to get onto the crew bus people were sometimes were just silent, just couldn’t talk, didn’t talk at all and others were just the opposite or a little bit hilarious and out of character completely. My little wireless operator said he was always going to come on operations drunk ‘cause he couldn’t stand the atmosphere in the crew room and this particular, a particular night we were waiting to go off and it was — we were all a bit on, on edge and he came up behind me pretending to be drunk he said [imitates someone slurring words] and I turn round and said a very rude word to him but he disappeared and left two little WAFs standing behind me. So this is the sort of thing that the atmosphere that it created. And that was quite a tense little period waiting, so some over expressing themselves and some absolute silence and going out on the crew bus you tend to be a little bit over excited and some over talked and when you got out the aircraft it was the usual system of some chaps had little ideas of getting over the stress and getting through the raid, whereby they’d have a little wee by the tail wheel and some used to sit, kneel down and have a séance, kneel down and have say a pray beside the aircraft. And the — all very, very tense. on this occasion we weren’t expecting to go so we weren’t really expecting to have to get onto the aircraft until the green [unclear] light went up and we had to get going and that was, that was a little bit stressful but you had a job to do and you went and had to go off to do it. The age of my crew we were all very young except one, my mid upper gunner, Tommy he was twenty-six and he was the old man of the crew and all the rest of the crew were nineteen, twenty. I was twenty years old. My navigator lied about his age to join up and he joined us when he was seventeen. He was operating when he was eighteen. But the tension didn’t relax everybody. Norman my bomb aimer, a very dapper little man, he used to come on operations with a crease in his trousers and he, he, he, he liked the sight of the aircraft and the dogs going off and the searchlights. He thought that was great, isn’t that lovely isn’t that nice, isn’t that nice and the crew used to go for Christ sake Norman shut up and this was on — the same effect on the Nuremberg raid where we saw him, mayhem and chaos going on all round about, and he, he wouldn’t say he thought it was nice but he, he thought it was quite spectacular and it was very spectacular and in reflection it was frightening. When you think of our ages, at that age for I was twenty, having been a very naive and sheltered youth, a sickly youth at that, how on earth I got in the air force I don’t know but we were very naive, most of us at that age were very naive. We didn’t have the background or experience of life so we were just doing a job. And it did become frightening. How, how I felt — my first recollection of this being so when you went to learn to fly in Canada it was a big gun hall and you came back and you went onto an Operational Training Unit and picked up a crew and then you went onto the squadron and we went to a Heavy Conversion Unit first and there, er, I was not getting on terribly well because I’ve got little short legs and I had a little bit of a problem keeping these black monsters straight down the runway. My friend who I’d trained with had been parallel for a long, long time he was posted to 101 Squadron and when my turn came a couple of days later when I’d mastered these beasts, er, I said can I go and join the squadron with Paul and the flight commander said well it’s a Special Duty Squadron we only send the best ones there. I said oh thank you very much and that was a bit of a come down but a couple of days later he said right Waughman off to 101 Squadron. So off I went to 101 Squadron. I said have you had a change of heart he said no, he said it’s a squadron with the highest attrition rate in the service and you’ve got the first call on the availability of aircrew. The day I arrived on the squadron my friend Paul had been killed the night before. Then it started to sink in, it really was quite an alarming experience. And, er, the first five raids, first five operations on raids that’s when I had the most casualties, causality rates for new crews, could be anything up to forty percent particularly on our squadron with the special duty operating. But it was, er, quite [unclear] you certainly realised this stuff was serious and of course when you went on operations people used to shoot at you, you know, and you used to think well this is, this is really, this is really something and most raids you nearly always had searchlight activity and on one occasion we were flying over, towards Hanover and we had, we were picked up by the searchlight, the cant really [unclear] control [unclear] searchlight and we were in the searchlight for something like twenty, twenty-five minutes trying to get out of it. With fighters flying all round the place and with the gunners we managed to get out but that was, that was quite alarming and the German night activities were brilliant they really were very, very good and particularly round the Ruhr area where the concentration of industry was and they had their Vicksburg radar which could, could get fighters into the bomber stream and we were attacking the Ruhr this particular night and as we approached the flak was so thick it looked as if you could get out and walk on it. This was one of the old expressions they used. And for the first time, you were always a bit apprehensive and frightened at times, but at this time I, I experienced terror and I’d never experienced terror before and I was, my knees were shaking, I was shaking, I think I was sweating with all that gear, which you did anyway but I really was terrorised. So I dropped my seat so I couldn’t look out and funnily enough, I don’t know why, but I said a little prayer that my mum and dad used to say when I was about six years old by the side of the bed, but I’d never ever said it before and I’ve never said it again until then. it was a little prayer that went ‘now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul will keep’ and the important bit is ‘if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul will take’ and I said this little prayer. I don’t know why, it just came to me and you know the terror disappeared. I was still apprehensive and frightened but the terror went. And I raised my seat and we carried on. And we had experiences like this later on the operations on the tours but I was never terrorised again so power of prayer, makes you wonder, but I’m sure this affected no end of aircrew like that and sadly some of the aircrew getting into these situations just couldn’t cope and the, one navigator just walked down to the back of the aircraft, he wanted to jump out and the crew had to strap him. He couldn’t talk, he couldn’t speak and when he got back he never spoke and he went to a psychiatric hospital at Matlock and eventually one of the nurses clattered a trio of instruments and he woke up and he said ‘oh Christ they’re shooting us, they’re firing at us, we’re on fire’ and they sorted him out. And that’s the sort of thing that used to affect some of the lads. Sadly the little engineer that I had first of all, he was like that and on our first raid he, he just couldn’t do a thing. He just sat on the floor and shook and sweat, sweated, and on our second raid we had our problems and he just couldn’t do a thing. On the third raid we had engines on fire, particularly the starboard outer, and he just couldn’t do a thing, he couldn’t do anything to help at all so I had to get out, half out of my seat because the [unclear] buttons were down on the left hand side, right hand side and operate them myself. He just couldn’t do a thing. So when I got back I reported it to the wing commander and he said you know he’s got to go and he left that day. we never saw him again. Whether he was made LMF, lacking moral fibre, we don’t know but he should never of been — and people who suffered like this but carried on operating, they were really the heroes of the aircrew ‘cause they knew they were frightened and they were frightened but they carried on. And it says a great deal of credit for them and there was no end like that as well. You see the experience of arriving at a target, you usually saw the target ahead because it had been marked by the Pathfinders and this was where about a couple of them before you actually dropped your bombs, the bomb aimer would take over control, not the actual physical control of the aircraft but you were still flying it but he told you what to do and where to do, and what to do and for that while you were flying pretty well straight and level , it was left, left, right, right, and then as you got up the target you had something like two minutes or a minute and a half dead straight flying with the bomb aimer controlling you and that was quite an alarming time because you are over the target with searchlights, fighters round about, bombs dropping round about you. You’d occasionally see the odd bomb drop past your aircraft with [unclear] and you couldn’t do a thing about it. Or you shouldn’t do a thing about it and you didn’t until the bomb aimer said ‘bombs gone’ but that wasn’t the end of it. To get a photograph of where your bombs burst you carried a photoflood, a multimillion [unclear] little explosive which dropped out of the flesh out of the back of the aircraft which exploded in the air when your bombs burst, so you had a picture where your bombs burst. And at one time they said well unless you got a photograph of where your bomb burst the raid won’t count, but that didn’t always apply. But you had that couple of minutes in the last bit of flying, straight and narrow [coughs] and you couldn’t, you shouldn’t take any evasive action at all and you were just sitting waiting and all round about you’d see all this activity going round about you because on the ground the ground was lit up and [coughs] the ground, ground was bright, quite bright and that’s one of the things the fighters liked because the fighters would get up above you and see your silhouette on the ground.
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AWaughmanR150401
PWaughmanR1501
Title
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Interview with Rusty Waughman. One
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
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eng
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00:21:05 audio recording
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Pending review
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Andrew Panton
Date
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2015-04-01
Description
An account of the resource
He discusses a mid-air collision during an operation with 101 Squadron. to Hasselt. He describes what it was like prior to a operation and the feelings experienced by the crew, from seeing the battle orders on the notice board, the pre-flight meal, the briefing and the tension and atmosphere on the crew bus out to the aircraft as well as the rituals that some of the crew undertook.
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Belgium
Great Britain
Germany
England--Lincolnshire
Belgium--Hasselt
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
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Tracy Johnson
101 Squadron
aerial photograph
aircrew
bomb aimer
bombing
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
briefing
coping mechanism
faith
fear
flight engineer
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
mid-air collision
military ethos
military service conditions
navigator
pilot
RAF hospital Matlock
RAF Ludford Magna
superstition
target photograph
wireless operator
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/348/3517/PWaughmanR1501.1.jpg
ea7d7d15f3b9f96826258b16ff6e1ae6
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/348/3517/AWaughmanR150803.1.mp3
4b20ad44c8f089eeec0544eae42cc539
Dublin Core
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Title
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Waughman, Rusty
Russell Reay Waughman
Russell R Waughman
Russell Waughman
R R Waughman
R Waughman
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Russell Reay "Rusty" Waughman (1923 - 2023, 1499239 and 171904 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a pilot with 101 Squadron.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-04-01
2015-08-03
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Waughman, R
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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RW: All wrote a little letter and signed it and sent it to the station commander who interviewed us and said, ‘This constitutes mutiny.’ So, with all our explanations of what went on he accepted that the fact that we’d been left off the draft and the corporal [?] corporal from West Kirby was actually charged for taking bribes to take, put people on, take people off drafts and put friends on. So, there we are. There we are. We’ve got no records, no kit, no nothing so we had to start again. So we didn’t do the, so we went and did our IT, initial training, again at Stratford on Avon which was rather nice, very fine. Nice place Stratford. I think I had my first girlfriend at Stratford. She was a very, she was a nice little girl. I often whatever happened to all these creatures looking back on all these times but there we are. We did our initial training again and from there of course we had to learn to start playing with aeroplanes and to start with we had to make sure that we were alright and worth sending overseas. We had to go to Codsall at Wolverhampton and er on a Tiger Moth just go solo. As soon as you got, went solo that was it finished until you were posted overseas and we went, went over to Canada on the Empire Training Scheme on the little ship called The Battery a converted Polish ship which was very comfortable, very nice. Very congested of course. And we landed at St John’s in Canada, down to Moncton which was the holding unit and then we travelled all across Canada on a public train to Calgary and the little aerodrome there was called Dewinton, which was just south of Calgary. We’d been there, back there since and Dewinton is now a suburb of Calgary which is incredible when you think of it. And that was nice and we were learning to fly on Tiger Moths and the Stearman. The Americans, the Boeing people had sent up sixty Stearman to the air force for people to learn to fly on. So we trained on both the Stearman and Tiger Moths and of course having finished the course I was a bit slow learning so I was, I think they were a little concerned about what the state of flying was. I was, I’ve always been a slow learner and I had a wash out check with the CGI on the station who very kindly allowed me to carry on and really from that time I never really looked back. It was really quite remarkable. And for some reason, I don’t know why, looking back I don’t know why they ever asked it but they said, ‘What do you want to become? What do you want to join? Fighter Command or Bomber Command?’ And you can imagine about ninety nine percent of us said Fighter Command so I was sent to Bomber Command which meant going down, back down on to the prairies to Medicine Hat and Moose Jaw learning to fly on the Airspeed Oxford and we had great times there. One thing we learned there which helped us later on in flying experience was the fact that we used to go off on a cross country with two pilots, no navigator, just one acting as pilot and one acting as navigator and switched over halfway through and we saw on a lake, which looked rather nice, we said, ‘Let’s low fly over this lake,’ which we weren’t allowed to do of course, which we did. Little did we know that there were ducks on the lake which rose up and we clattered through these ducks. I ended up with a duck wrapped around my face. We had six duck in the aircraft. Fortunately, they ended up in the engines nacelles, they didn’t damage the engines and of course when we got back we had a right old rocket from the, from the boss but the fact that we got the aircraft back between us and landed they allowed us to carry on. But I had to go to the dentist the next day on camp and the dentist said, ‘Oh you were the bloke who flew that aeroplane.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘We had duck for dinner.’ And then I sat back. And of course that was sort of an experience which helped us much, much later in life, in flying life, which was quite remarkable. And so of course having finished that course you took the little white flash out of your cap which was indicated that you were UT aircrew and took that out and you sewed on your wings in and then, oh, you were a pilot which was quite, which was quite remarkable. And of course you had to get back home so we forgot all about aeroplanes for quite a little while, travelled right back across Canada down to New York where we joined the Queen, Queen Elizabeth to come back home on the Queen Elizabeth and that was, wasn’t in convoy. We just pointed east and set off. It was quite, so new to us. We were so naïve and that was just a wonderful experience except on the Queen Elizabeth there were seventeen thousand others and we had a first class cabin along with eight other people which, you were sleeping in bunks with a chappie’s bottom above you rubbing on your nose, you know. But it was a wonderful experience. Two meals a day and it was wonderful. We lost two people overboard er but the boat didn’t stop they just threw life belts over and, poor souls. But there were Americans, nurses, Americans, Canadians, all coming back, back to the UK. Got back to Gourock up on the Clyde and then of course we had to find somewhere to go and be rehabilitated. We went first of all to Harrogate and then down to Whitley Bay and then back down to Oxford where we had a little rehab course on Oxfords just to get your hand back in again on Oxfords. That was at Kidlington, at Croughton, just outside Oxford. And the course, then of course you had to go to OTU Operational Training Unit and that was an amazing experience when we were flying the Vickers Wellington, the old Wimpy. When we got there of course you had to get a crew. You had a get a five man crew for the Wimpy and the system as I’m sure everybody knows was the fact that they got all the pilots, all the navigators, all the wireless operators a gunner and no engineer at the time and but the, and the navigator and put everybody into this big room and said, ‘Sort yourselves out into crews.’ And they used to go around and say, ‘I haven’t got a navigator. Are you a navigator? Can you fly? Do you want to fly with me?’ and this sort of system is amazing and the system worked. It really was incredible. And my crew had, you had no idea of the background of these people and my crew turned out to be the most wonderful collection of blokes and we flew really as a crew and not just a skipper and bods behind we just, and it worked out wonderfully well. Just to give an idea what they were my bomb aimer up front he was, had a little gypsy existence over in Manchester, a dapper little man, he used to come on operations with a crease in his trousers which was unheard of. My engineer, we had two engineers, I’ll relay about that a little bit when we come to flying. Les, my, I shan’t give his name because it so happened that he couldn’t cope on operations. He was just more or less a young lad working in an office. My navigator Alec, Alec Cowan, he was a real, he was a wonderful navigator, wonderful navigator. He lied about his age to join up. He joined up when he was sixteen and he was operational flying with us at eighteen. We didn’t know at the time. We didn’t find this out until sixty years later which was just as well. We were sitting in the pub at, at Lincoln at our reunion and we were saying, we had just had our eightieth birthdays and we said. ‘Oh we just had our, when’s your eightieth birthday Alec?’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s not for another two years yet.’ So that was the first time we, we found out what he was and he was just really more or less straight from school but he really was a most wonderful navigator. Taffy, a little wireless operator, he was a character. Oh, he was a mad little nut he was. We tried to find out where he was after the war and we discovered that his background was in Aberdare and his uncle had a pub and I think he was helping out in his uncle’s pub and I think he took that up for the rest of his life and I wouldn’t say he was a rebel, he was a wonderful character. His mischief, terribly mischievous bloke and we still keep in touch now. He’s a very, very close friend. A lovely little friend, Taffy. My engineer, I eventually had another engineer. A chap called Curly, Curly Ormerod and he was on the situation where he didn’t fly with his skipper who was shot down and killed and he didn’t fly that night he, because I had to get rid of my first engineer Curly was a spare engineer and he joined us and he was a, worked for the council in Oldham I think it was where he was a trainee engineer and just, only a young lad, he was twenty and my special duty operator because of the special duties he was my special duty operator, he was an Austin apprentice and he wanted to join the air force as a pilot but the waiting list for the pilot training then was quite long and he couldn’t wait that long so he volunteered to join as a gunner. We’ll explain a little more about Ted when we come to what they did in the aeroplane. Tommy, my mid upper gunner, he was a council worker in Rotherham and he was the old man of the crew. He was twenty six. The next one down was twenty. I was twenty at the time which was incredible when you think of our kids at twenty. You know, I’m sure if the same thing happened again now I’m sure the responses from the children, the young youth, would be the same but he was, he was married and he had a bit of leave on the station because his wife produced a baby. So, poor old Tommy, he had rather a tragic death after the war but still that Tommy. And my rear gunner, he was a Canadian. His father, an Englishman who had a funeral service, funeral service which he developed in Vancouver in America and Harry through his father’s English experience although he joined the RCAF he came over and joined the RAF as a Canadian. Again, these lads, you know although these vast different backgrounds we all gelled and we all worked together wonderfully well and what they did with us they kept us alive, you know and it really was wonderful. And I, myself, I couldn’t, I didn’t have any education at all. I went to school but because of my illnesses I went to school to start with at the age of five in Newcastle and then I became desperately ill and I was in bed for six months as a young teenager with TB so I couldn’t take place in sport or anything like that so when they came to doing exams when they did the scholarship in those days I went to school just before I was due to take the scholarship and of course I didn’t pass. So there I was. I was, I couldn’t go to a secondary school so I was sent to what they called a training school for the shipyards and it was a sort of engineering training school where at the age sixteen I started to learn about art and drawing, machine drawing and this sort of thing. It was, I enjoyed the school. It was nice but I had no exam, no exams at the end of it so when I, when I joined up I had no matric, no school cert, no exams at all. So how on earth I was ever passed. The only thing that helped I think when they were testing for the attestation was the fact that I became, I started off on the stage at the Newcastle Rep Theatre for a, for a year a bit while I got a position as a pupil surveyor at an architect surveyors office in Newcastle and there I used to do a lot of surveying work using angles and trade vectors and things which helped in the navigation exams and I think that helped me to pass the attestation exams in London. So there we are. There, you’ve got a crew. But we mentioned Ted, the special duty chap, Ted Manners, but he didn’t join the crew at OTU at all because we only had the five man crew and we didn’t know about, anything about special squadrons then of course and of course having finished at Operational Training Unit on Wimpies we were posted to a Heavy Conversion Unit which was at 1662 Conversion Unit at Blyton and of course with the demand for Lancaster aircraft and operational aircraft they had very few Lancasters available. The ones they had available were really the ones that weren’t fit for operational flying so we started to learn to fly four engine aircraft on Halifaxes, on ‘Halibags.’ A nice aeroplane to fly but not quite as amenable as the Lancaster from our experience later on but that was, that was nice, that was fine and of course on the station, on the same station they had what they called an LFS a Lancaster Finishing School so when we’d gone solo on the Halibag we went on to join this LFS, the Lancaster Finishing School and this was on Lancasters and they were a different aeroplane all together. It was a wonderful experience and experience we never expected to have in my life. But I had a little problem. Although my height was right I’ve got little short legs and when you’ve got twelve, four engines of twelve eighty horsepower all taking off with each engine, each propeller going around with three thousand revs you get a lot of torque, a lot of swing on take-off and with my little short legs I was having a hell of a job keeping these bloody black things straight down the runway on take-off so I was a little bit later finishing my training conversion than my friend Paul [Zaggy] who I’d trained with, been in parallel with for many, many months. And when we finished, when he’d finished his course he was posted to 101 squadron and when my turn came about two or three days later I asked the flight commander, ‘Can I go and join my friend Paul on 101 squadron because we’d been friends for a long, long time?’ And his response was, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘It’s a special duty squadron and we only send the best ones there.’ And I said Oh God that was a bit of a comedown. Anyway, a couple of days later he said, ‘Right, Waughman, 101 squadron. Off you go.’ And I said, ‘Well what’s this special duties thing?’ He said, ‘Oh you’ll find out when you get there.’ He didn’t know actually from what we found out later. And when we got to the squadron the day we arrived on the squadron my friend Paul had been killed the night before. And that, you suddenly begin to realise this is serious stuff, you know and you didn’t really think about it beforehand but then it became realistic. You did a couple of cross countries to get your hand in on the squadron experience and then we were given a special duty operator. An eighth member of the crew who spoke German, a German speaker operator and he was flying, was using this equipment called ABC. This ABC equipment started down on the south of England where there were fifteen stations with very fluent German speaking operators who could talk to the German night fighter controllers and jam their signals to their fighters, instructions to their fighters but it only had a range of a hundred and forty miles so that didn’t cover the deep penetration raids in to eastern Europe. So, Sydney Bufton, one of the air ministry boffins said well let’s put it in an aeroplane so they put, started putting them in. It took about three thousand hours to fit this equipment in to an aeroplane and quite an expense and this was allocated to 100 squadron. Now, 100 squadron were also having H2S which was a ground scanning radar and the power unit on the Lancaster mean you couldn’t cope with the ABC and the H2S so they chose the next squadron down which was 101 squadron. So 101 squadron became the special duty squadron flying this ABC and what they called the stuff on the ground station was called Jostle and it had a code name of Corona. Hence it became the Cigar and it was known as ground Cigar and of course when they got it stuck into an aeroplane it became ABC which was Airborne Cigar and Bufton wrote to the air ministry saying that in future correspondence all reference to Airborne Cigar aircraft will be known as ABC in future correspondence so hence 101 squadron became the ABC of the RAF which is remarkable. What Ted had, he had a little three inch cathode ray tube where he could pick up the frequency of the night fighter controllers and lock a little strobe on these, on these, on his screen, cover that with the aircraft’s, aircraft strobe, lock that on and he’d locked on to the frequency of the German night fighter controller’s instructions to the fighters. Having decided that on another little switch where there was German speaking because there were Poles, Czechs and things, once he’d decided that he pressed another little button which blasted engine noise out on that frequency and jammed the signals. And it was a wigwog noise woooooo oooo oooo and the Germans called that, they had a name for this and it was called dudelsack and I think it’s quite an appropriate little description ‘cause dudelsack means bagpipes. And so we had this ABC equipment which is wonderful stuff and this started operating in September, in ‘43. We didn’t join the squadron until November ‘43 and on the first raid the first, one of the first instructions that the special duty operator received from the German signals was, ‘Achtung. Achtung. English bastards coming.’ And that was one of the first instructions they had but sadly, one of our aircraft on that first raid was shot down and the Germans had the system right from the beginning but even the [telephones] people knew of the system but they couldn’t really work out all the technology of it at all so that was quite the thing. That was one of the things that added to the attrition rate on our squadron, the fact that the German night fighters could home on to our transmissions ‘cause we were using their frequencies so they could home on to us and the ABC aircraft were used on every major bombing raid that went out and the idea was that our aircraft were staggered every ten miles through the whole bomber stream. We acted as a normal bomber aircraft with a reduced bomb load, only slightly, well I suppose so I don’t think it ever happened actually but the equipment weighed something like [six or seven hundred pounds] plus another operator so it knocked our bomb load down a little bit and we had three enormous aerials transmitters on the aircraft. Two on the top and one under the nose and these were nearly seven foot long. It didn’t affect the aerodynamics of the aircraft whatsoever. We didn’t, we wouldn’t have realised they were there and we just there we were and our first raid, when we went off on our first raid my little engineer, there was something strange about him he didn’t seem really with it at all. Anyway, so we found we were getting in a bit of a mess and got in the way so, with experience I think we could have carried on but being so inexperienced we came back, we aborted the trip. So, we were, this was just at the very start in November of the Battle of Berlin and this was a trip to Berlin and the WingCo wasn’t too happy about it, WingCo Alexander. And our next operation a couple of nights later again was to Berlin and Les, my little engineer, nineteen year old, we had an engine on fire, a starboard outer went on fire and he just couldn’t do anything he just sat on the floor and just shiver and shake he couldn’t do anything, couldn’t do any of his work at all and I had to, the graviner button on the Lancaster is down on the right hand side of the instrument panel and I had to half get out of the seat to cover all this lot. He couldn’t do any of the fuel control systems at all. So, anyway when we got back I reported this to the wing commander who said, ‘Well you know I suppose you’ve done the right thing,’ and Les, this, my little engineer left the squadron that day, that afternoon. Whether he was made LMF which they usually do in those days we never did find out but he never should have been because he never refused to fly and this is what happened to a lot of Bomber Command aircrew who were literally shit scared. They really were and that was really a physical thing as well and these lads who knew what the conditions was never, they’d rather face the guns of Germany rather than have the stigma of LMF stamped on their documents and this LMF stamped on their documents followed them wherever they went afterwards and this information is kept by the record office and isn’t being released until 2035 so by that time none of the people will be alive to get any slur on their character. So we lost our little Les and this is when we got Curly who didn’t fly with Les the night he was shot down so we acquired Curly as an engineer. Wonderful character. Again, another great tease at the, he was a nice man though but we gelled as a crew and really in those days you did become slightly insular because you worked as a crew and trained as a crew and you played as a crew and I must admit we, we drank a lot. Eight pints a night wasn’t out of the way you know and this was part of the relaxation system for the, for the air force. Because of this Harris wrote to all station commanders, again we found out this much, much later, only fairly recently, the fact that a directive had been sent to the station commanders saying that no Bomber Command aircrew must be used on station duties unless it affected the running of the station and intimated that the relaxation activities must be condoned. Which, as far as that was concerned, was young lads full of testosterone was beer and women and it sounds a bit crude but the girls and boys on the station were really wonderful. They were really good companions. They knew what the system was and they complied and they were really lovely. We had one little girl who used to look after us in our little hut, in our little nissen hut which was, which was just a corrugated iron nissen hut and she was a little Welsh girl with a little doggie and she was known as the camp bicycle ‘cause everybody rode it, you know and these are the sort of the things that went but it wasn’t pornography it was just an accepted way of release of stress and one of my friends who I knew very well he used to say, ‘Well, thank God for sex. It’s kept me sane.’ And this was just a means of release of stress on the aircraft. And a lot of it did happen in Bomber Command sadly and it caused people to lose their lives which is rather a shame but you know those lads who flew and knowing their condition like that they were really the bravest of the brave, you know. They really were. Wonderful. And it kept Bomber Command going. But LMF, they didn’t have so many LMF. I think there weren’t a huge number cases of LMF but it was a rotten stigma and of course then having been on the on the, on the squadron with our ABC equipment we were involved very much with the German night fighter system and this was organised by a chap called, oh I’ve forgotten what they called him now, I’ll think of it in minute but he organised that the, all of eastern Europe, western Europe would be split in to five boxes. The Kammhuber. Kammhuber, the Kammhuber Line and this in each box each controller had control of their fighter system and they had a couple of systems there where they had, called Wilde Sau and Zahme Sau which is Wild Boar and Tame Boar and with the Wurzburg radar they could direct a fighter in to the bomber stream and nearly always ME109s and they were the Wild Boar who could go and find their own aircraft to attack and the Tame Boar was with Wurzburg and Freya aircraft systems whereby they could direct an aircraft almost on to an individual aircraft which was quite alarming as it turned out. We had experience of that and they developed a system called Lichtenstein whereby you see these aircraft with German aircraft they nearly all the ME109s with an array of aerials around the nose and they could actually home onto an individual aircraft and because of our ABC equipment we were very, very vulnerable. They could home on to the ABC equipment and the H2S and they developed the system called Naxos and SN2 which was very, very effective indeed and they could home directly on to aircraft and counter, counter measures for our broadcast so we had, they had a system where they could home on to our aircraft. We had a system where we would counter measure their counter measures, counter measure their receptions and they developed a [Frensburg] which counter measured our counter measures and we developed counter measures that would counter measured their counter measures and so on and the electronic wall we learned afterwards really was quite terrific but the German night fighter system was, really was very good. And they had with their, with their Wurzburg searchlights, radar controlled searchlights, radar controlled guns they had what they called predicted flak and predicted searchlights and when you were flying along you’d see this characteristic big blue searchlight appear which would wave backwards and forwards and as soon as it picked you up on the radar it flicked on to you and you were flying in their searchlights and all the searchlights roundabout would come on. You’d have perhaps forty, fifty, sixty searchlights flying with you and you were flying in daylight and of course the night fighters used to get in amongst you then but we had systems of flying. We flew the corkscrew pattern which flying a corkscrew pattern more or less like a horizontal corkscrew. It was bloody hard work when you’ve got a fully loaded aircraft. You lost a little bit of height doing it but it was really effective and the sad thing is when gunners, some gunners saw these things and gave instructions like say, ‘Dive starboard go’ and something like this some of the captains said, well, ‘Why?’ And of course by that time it was far too late but this corkscrew pattern did help enormously to evade the things and on the predicted flak it was quite a characteristic burst of flak. They usually put out a box system of flak where they just covered this area completely with anti-aircraft fire and you had to fly through this box of fire but they had this predicted flak whereby they could send up the shell which would burst in the characteristic sort of development and if you saw this behind you, if you were lucky enough, you knew this was predicted flak so, and you knew it’d take forty five seconds for the Germans to reload their guns, fire their shells and for the shell to burst so you turned off forty five degrees, and flew for about forty seconds then turned back ninety degrees and hope the next one burst behind you. This happened to us once and we nearly ended up in the system for twenty five, twenty minutes just doing this evasion all the time. Similarly with the searchlights, the searchlights I caused a bit of hilarity one night when we got back to debriefing saying that we were attacked by searchlights over Hanover but we were in searchlights for nearly half an hour trying to get out of them which, but with these sort of things happened on raids and so of course there we are we are flying on a squadron and it was daily life of being on the squadron. When you woke up in the morning usually late, after breakfast or early after lunch you went up to flights and on the wall you saw a battle order and could see your name on the battle order and all the battle order told you was A) you were flying, the crew you were flying with, the aircraft you were flying in, and the time of briefing, and the time of meal and when you saw that the first thing you did was go and change your underwear which is, which is, it really was. To say that you weren’t fearful, you know, it was very, it was very anxious, became very anxious because you had no idea where you were going. It was just you were on the battle order that night. So we used to go up to flights and check the aircraft, the serviceability of the aircraft, meet the ground crew, wonderful ground crew I had, and there you’d ask what the petrol load was and what the bomb load was and if you had lots of petrol, not so many bombs you knew you were going a long way. Vice versa if you had lots of bombs and not so much petrol you weren’t going so far so you had some idea what the thing was going to, what the raid was going to be about and then at briefing of course, on the wall, we were all in nissen huts by the way, little tin huts, on the wall they had a big map of Europe covered by a map, a curtain and when you all sat down and all got collected together they drew the curtain back and there was the red line which was a tape showing the route to and from the target and if it was a long distance target, Berlin, Munich, these groans used to go up right through the briefing and then you were briefed by the various section leaders, the met officer, the armament officer, navigation officer and there of course then you had to get out to the aircraft so we went in to the crew room, got our kit on and the girls in the parachute section, [collect your] parachute section, they were great. One little girl one day said, ‘Let me have your battle dress.’ And she took my battle dress off, took my wings off and sewed a lucky three penny piece under my wing. And these are the sort of things that went on. Wonderful characters. And you had a locker where you kept your kit in the locker and when you were flying the rear gunner had what they called a Sidcot suit which was an electrically heated suit but the rest of the crew you could really manage with just a thick jumper and battle dress. Some wore some form of overall but the costumes were really quite, quite ordinary. You had flying boots. We had, originally we had the brown fur lined flying boots and after that we had the escape boots, black escape boots, whereby they had a little knife concealed in the boot where you could cut the top off and leave a little, like a pair of shoes when you got shot down. There we are. We’ve got our kit, we’ve got our kit we’ve got to get out the aircraft so the crew buses arrived and we had to get out in to the, in to the aircraft but the atmosphere was quite electric, you know. They had sort of two sort or reactions. Some people were verbose and talked and over talked which was out of characteristic and some were just clammed up and just didn’t talk at all. So, when you got to out to the aircraft you just checked and went around and did a normal flight check for the aircraft, waiting for the signal to taxi out and of course once you got there, once you got in the aircraft there was no outside communication whatsoever ‘cause the Germans could pick up. In fact with their radar system they knew that the raid was going to take place and they knew the height you were going to fly at, they knew the course you were going to fly and the speed you were flying at but they didn’t know where you were going. So, we were waiting at the aircraft for the verilight to tell us to go and taxi out and of course the other little superstitions, you know the old tale of just a bit of luck you wee’d on the tail wheel. The lads used to wee on the tail wheel. We never did of course but er [laughs]. My rear gunner Harry, being stuck at the back he didn’t feel a part of this the bombing lark at all so he used to take a couple of empty beer bottles with him and when we were over the target his contribution to the bombing was to throw out a couple of empty beer bottles. This, this on one occasion when we were waiting to get on the aircraft the station commander, Group Captain King used to come around and just say, ‘Hello lads.’ Wished them all best of luck. Thinking of a man like that knowing, sending all these lads you know that a third of them aren’t going to come back, you know. What went through their mind must be, must be awful. Anyway, when the group captain saw Harry without his beer bottles Harry explained. ‘Oh I haven’t got my bloody beer bottles.’ He said, ‘Right. Get in the car.’ Dashed down to the mess, got a couple of beer bottles and drove him back again so Harry had them. Whether he drank them or threw them out full we never did find out but Harry had his beer bottles. I had a little, I wasn’t superstitious, touch wood but my cousin Mary, I’m very fond of Mary I think our parents were getting a little bit worried but Mary she gave me a silk scarf, a little RAF silk scarf which I wore on every operation I went on and I wore long johns, used to wear the long johns on the flying and I thought well if I change my long johns I’ll, you know, I’ll change my luck. We had two pairs. One for wearing and one for washing. I never had mine washed and I wore the same pair of long johns for thirty operations and the lads used to say, ‘Well you took them off and stood them up in your locker’ and you can imagine the odour on the aircraft with all this sort of thing going on must have been pretty awful. You didn’t notice it at the time. But another thing I had was my dad, one of the talismans for naval people was a caul and the caul is a sack a baby is born in and my dad was given one of these when he, when he first joined, when he started operations in the navy in the First World War and I was on leave just before I was joining the squadron. They knew I was going to go on an operational squadron and I was standing, I was standing by the stove in the kitchen and my dad came up and he wasn’t a very effusive man and he said, ‘Here’s this,’ and he gave me his caul in a little tin box which I’ve still got and that’s over a hundred years old and he said, ‘There you are. Good luck. I love you.’ And that was really a three hankie job, you know. A wonderful little man. But there we are I had my caul and I didn’t take it on operations but it kept me alive and these are the sort of superstitions you had but we weren’t on because of the job we were doing we weren’t allowed to take any sort of document, photographs or anything at all because of the very secret nature of our, with the work we doing. It was treated very, we weren’t allowed to take any photographs on the squadron at all. We did. And everything was kept very, we weren’t allowed to discuss it anywhere outside but A) our aircraft was parked at dispersal, we were W which was far end of dispersal just by a fence and the main road was just outside and I don’t know what guarding they had on the aircraft but anyway part of the secrecy thing was not having to take any documentation. When we got our sandwiches they were wrapped up in newspaper so they had a good, they could have had a good idea what was going on. So there we were, off on operations and operational flying became to start with you were so inexperienced that you didn’t really realise what was going on and the casualty rate in the first five operations was something like forty percent which was as high as that and it really was. It became quite an alarming thing. We didn’t realise at the time. We only found out this many years afterwards. So our squadron were very vulnerable and once we got past the five operations squadrons, five operations you really became quite fatalistic. You just, you were doing a job and accepted what you had to do and you expected you were going to die and it was quite a strange relationship that you had and you had a bit, a little bit of sick humour and I’m sure folk know of the grim reaper, the old skeletal figure with his scythe and with his scythe you got the chop and we used to say, when you were talking, standing by somebody, put your hand on his shoulder and you said, ‘Death put his bony hand on your shoulder and [live] chap I’m coming,’ you know and if you were in the mess and one of your comrades has been killed and gone you used to drink his health and you used to say, ‘Here’s to good old,’ so and so, ‘And here’s the next one to die.’ So this sort of atmosphere existed. Some people had premonitions you know and my mother, my mother was an old witch really she used to have dreams and things and she had a dream one night that things weren’t going to go right and she tried to contact the station to see what was going on and of course she couldn’t because the station was completely isolated and that was a night when we had an awful lot of trouble. But she had this idea. And one of the girls on the squadron one of the little WAAF officers, on the Nuremberg raid, said to her fiancé Jimmy [Batten] Smith she said, ‘You’ll be over the target about ten minutes past midnight.’ She said, ‘Right, I’ll set my alarm clock and I’ll think of you when you’re over the target.’ She woke up about 11 o’clock, half past ten, 11 o’clock and knew something wasn’t right and she switched on her light and listened and couldn’t find anything, anything about it at all and Jimmy, over the target, as soon as he left the target, just at the time, he was shot down and killed so he never got back. There’s another, our Flight Commander, Squadron Leader Robinson he was a wonderful, he had very, very rapid promotion because our previous flight commander was killed and he was promoted from flight lieutenant up to, straight up to squadron leader within a matter of weeks and he became our squadron commander er flight commander. Wonderful little man. And he had a rear gunner who was seconded from the American air force and this American chappie still had his brown overalls and American flying kit and they were in the mess and the lads were playing crib and poker and he, this Jones a chap called Jones, won the, won the kitty and I can see it now a little pile of ten shilling notes which he won which he when he picked it up he said, ‘Shan’t be needing this.’ And gave it all away. That night, on the raid, on the twenty ninth raid they were all killed. So whether they had these sort of premonitions, you know, it was quite remarkable and one of the bomb, when I came off leave one occasion we only had a short, a few days leave the bombing, the armament officer, only a young lad, he looked strange and I said, ‘Are you alright, Geoff?’ And he said, ‘Well, funny thing happened,’ an aircraft had crashed on take-off and hit part of the bomb dump and he jumped in his little wagon to go out and see what he could do out there and when he got on the perimeter track near where the bomb dump was there was a chap waiting and saying, ‘Don’t go down in there. They’re all dead.’ This chap was covered in blood and whatever. He said, ‘Don’t go down in there. They’re all dead.’ But he said, ‘I must.’ So when he went down to see the, what was going on he found the body of the man he’d been talking to on the perimeter track dead in the hut. So, and within a few weeks he was white haired. And these sorts of strange things happened you know it’s a, it’s a, you didn’t realise at the time all the significance of all these things but there we are. One of the things that happened, on one of the early raids when we went and poor old Bomber Harris, he didn’t like the idea at all but they developed what they called the transport plan whereby they were bombing railway martialling yards, [tank?] depots, station er station signal boxes and train stations to stop goods going down for the pre-invasion, for the German pre- invasion and so this was the transport plan and Harris didn’t like this but we went off on one raid to a place called Hasselt which was on the Belgian/German border, railway martialling yards and we got within about ten minutes of the target. This was all at night. This was all night flying of course in cloud, mainly in cloud and my engineer who was looking out the window said a very rude word, something about fornicating in hades and the next thing we knew this other aircraft hit us slap on the side and we just crashed into this, the two aircraft just crashed together and we were, he was slightly underneath us and his propellers cut through our bomb aimer’s compartment, just behind Norman’s feet. He was lying down ready to bomb. His mid upper, his canopy, the other aircraft canopy took off our starboard tyre, his turret, which was sticking up at the top of his aeroplane carved through our fuselage at the back, left a big hole in the back. We lost part of the tale plane. Lost all our electrics. Harry, the rear gunner was knocked unconscious, only temporary and we were a bit of a mess and thereby we, we were sitting, I didn’t see all this going on but the crew saw what was going on and when we hit this aircraft we were literally sitting on top of it and his propellers were churning through our little bits and pieces and we were in a bit of a mess and afterwards I was asked to write a little resume of what happened in the collision just for purely records sake and to give it a title of the most significant thing that happened, you remembered, on the trip and the most significant bit was sitting on top of this other aircraft with no control over your aircraft whatsoever. All the controls were just limp and wobbly. So, nothing. So, I called this the title of this thing, ‘It went limp in my hand,’ which was highly censored. I wasn’t allowed to do that. So this report went through and in consequence we had to do, coming back, we had to do a crash landing. We had Fido on the station and the Fido system was a sort of a little triangular system with the fuel pipe on the top and the gaps of about ten metre gaps within each section and unfortunately our dud wheel skidded between the gap and the thing and the other one bounced over the top of the pipes and just put a little dent in the top and there was a casualty that night sadly. We were skidding towards the control tower in the dark and we were getting very close to the control tower and all the staff on the control or most of the staff on the control tower and the little girls, came out to watch this idiot bend his aeroplane and as we were skidding towards it one of these girls jumped back and sprained her ankle and that was the only casualty that night but there were sort of talks of decorations and things but it never happened so I was very kindly given a green endorsement in my logbook and mentioned in despatches. That’s in the logbook now still but if it had been a red one it would have been an adverse report but a green one was a pat on the back sort of thing so that was, that was quite nice but there of course that aircraft was written off. As far as the squadron it was written off it had to be repaired and rebuilt but we discovered that two main longerons going along the back of the aircraft were badly damaged and had we to have taken evasive action no doubt the aircraft would have broken up and we realised that a lot of damage at the back because we had a big hole in the floor and I told Harry, the rear gunner, I said, ‘Harry, pick up your parachute, come up front just in case anything else happens.’ And he said, ‘No. I’ll stay here and keep a look out.’ And these are the characters that they were. Wonderful characters. And that wasn’t the only thing that Harry did. We went on one long trip and his electrically heated Sidcot suit failed. He never said a peep, never said a word and when we got back seven and a half, eight hours later getting out the aircraft they said. ‘Where’s Harry?’ ‘Oh he must still be there.’ So I popped into the aircraft, opened his door and there he was sitting with an icicle from his face mask as thick as my wrist down between his legs. He couldn’t move and he’d never said a peep he just kept on doing his job. He was in sick quarters for nearly three weeks and that affected him for the rest of his life. And this is what these poor lads got up to. It really was wonderful. I was so lucky with the lads I had as a crew. Wonderful and very conscientious lads. So there we are. We got back and of course the aircraft had to be taken away and we had to get a new aircraft. Our first aircraft was W with the squadron letters were SR and we had a W, W ABC all the way through. We had W, so we had W and there was a song of the day called. “Coming in on a wing and a prayer.” So I thought. ‘Oh lets,’ and there’s a P O Prune character so I painted on the front of the aircraft this P O Prune character with wings and “On a wing and a prayer” coming underneath and of course that was the one that we crash landed. That disappeared. That went. And we get a new aircraft almost immediately. Well, they got another aircraft almost immediately straight from MU and, ‘What are we going to put on the nose. What nose art were we going to have?’ And when we got out of dispersal to see the new aircraft Jock Steadman or Willy Steadman, Willy Steadman our Scottish in charge, NCO in charge of the aircraft he’d already painted on the aircraft Oor Wullie and Oor Wullie was the cartoon character from the Glasgow Sunday Post and that was the aircraft which gets all the publicity now and we did more operations in the other one than we did than we did in this one but they were wonderful aeroplanes to fly. Really, really were. So, anyway, there we are. We’ve got a new aeroplane and another operation we went on was to Hasselt which was another transport plant target whereby 5 group and 1 group were involved. A hundred and seventy three aircraft from each group. We were scattered all the way through the raid, just our squadron, so we were going to Hasselt which was French had been French military base which was the biggest military base in Europe at the time right on the edge of the village of Mailly and we were briefed to bomb very, very strictly. We didn’t want to kill anybody in the village so we had to be very precise, we were told to be very precise with our bombing so, and we were to assemble at a point just north of Mailly called Chalon whereby you waited there to get instructions from the master bomber, Cheshire who was the master bomber to go and bomb. He was really being very precise as well and he wasn’t satisfied with the marking so when the first group of a hundred and seventy three aircraft from 5 group arrived at Chalon, encircling the beacon, circling the area, it wasn’t a beacon as such but circling the area and being, the aircraft being delayed and delayed and delayed this second group caught up with the first group so there was something like nearly four hundred aircraft milling around waiting for instructions to go in and there just happened to be three German night fighter stations handy and they got in amongst us and it really was chaotic. There really were all sorts of awful things going on. The result of the raid was a very successful raid but the loss was over eleven percent. They sent just under four hundred aircraft and we lost forty two but there was only one aircraft crashed in the village where a French man were killed so that was compensation in a way. So when we were circling this beacon the RT discipline disappeared. You weren’t supposed to talk outside because the Germans knew where you were going, where you were coming from but the RT discipline just went that night and a voice came over the air to the pathfinders, ‘Pathfinders. For God’s sake pull your fingers out. I’m on fire. I’m being been shot at.’ And a very broad Australian voice came over the air, ‘If you’re going to die, die like a man.’ And this was the sort of thing that went on. The problem was that the American force [AFM?]were broadcasting on a similar frequency and it was the signals weren’t getting through as well as they ought to but anyway of course, when we got the order to go in and bomb it was just like Derby Day. All these aircraft ploughing down on the target. It was successful but we had a problem. We’d just dropped our bombs and we’d had an aircraft, something rattle us about with an updraft coming up and that. It was a bit rough but we’d just dropped our bombs and Norman, the bomb aimer, lying down in the front, he didn’t have time to say anything he just said, ‘Oh Christ’ and an aircraft blew up underneath us and turned us over. We were upside down and I can say I half rolled a Lanc [laughs]. So there we were, upside down at eight thousand feet and coming out you just couldn’t pull it out like that because the high speed stalled the aircraft so it took us a little while to come out and we were down to about a thousand feet by the time we sorted things out. Going very, very fast way beyond the [all up] speed of a Lancaster. We were doing nearly four hundred miles an hour. Four hundred knots as it was in those days and, but the aircraft just had scorch marks and a little bit of creaky stuff but there we are. Once you got sorted out you checked on the crew. ‘Alright, Harry?’ The rear gunner. ‘Yes skip.’ ‘Alright, Tommy?’ ‘Yes.’ Wireless op. ‘Alright, Taffy?’ And the response I got was, ‘Blood. Blood,’ and I thought, ‘Oh Christ, what’s happened?’ So I pulled the curtain back and there’s Taffy wiping his head and that’s all we knew and, ‘Oh God, what’s happened to Taffy,’ and Taffy, what happens when you’re flying at those, those temperatures, those heights, temperatures, the lowest temperature we had was minus forty seven and you had an elsan at the back of the aircraft which if you went and used that if you sat down on the elsan like that and you left a bit of your behind, behind ‘cause it was like you’d have an ice cube sticking on your fingers. You couldn’t do that so what the lads had they had a large [fuel] tin with the top cut off which they passed around the aircraft as a pee can and this pee can was kept down by the wireless operator which was the warmest place ‘cause it didn’t freeze when it was down there. And Taffy said now you can still see this pee can arriving with negative gravity and tipping all over him. When we were falling, coming out, recovering from the dive which we got in to and of course when you got back there was no question of going to get cleaned up. You had to go straight to be debriefed and of course he wasn’t exactly flavour of, flavour of the month which was, which was poor old Taffy. Still gets his leg pulled unmercifuly about that.
CB: I’m going to suggest we have a break.
RW: Yes fine.
CB: For a moment. So thank you very –
[pause]
CB: What it’s doing? We’re now recording again.
RW: Yeah.
CB: I’ve tried to do the playback but that didn’t work so we’re recording again now and I’m just hoping everything’s worked because it’s so good and I’m just looking at the numbers.
[pause]
CB: Right. So we’ve come to the point where you were inverted.
RW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Would you just like to describe before we go on to other things just how did you get the aircraft upright?
RW: Well -
CB: Because you can’t turn, roll it. Can you?
RW: Well we had to, to a certain extent with being upside down. You just imagine an aircraft being upside down you had to get it the right way up and the only thing you can do is turn it around so while we were plummeting, plummeting downwards and getting rather fast we sort of half rolled the thing out. Sort of almost like a very poor barrel roll that we flew. So, we were upside down and you turned over and came out sort of in that direction so you didn’t do a full roll. It was sort of almost like a half roll like almost like a half missing out the last bit of a barrel roll.
CB: Yeah.
RW: Coming out but because of the weight it was hard work but you didn’t think of it as hard, you didn’t think of it as work at the time you just sort of had to get out of it. Get it back.
CB: Yes, of course.
RW: Flying again but, and you just couldn’t pull the stick back and get the aircraft flying again because you could develop what they called a high speed stall cause the wing stalls at fourteen degrees and if you’re mushing down it increases the angle of attack very rapidly and you get what was called a high speed stall so this is where the training came in with these other flying, these little experiences we had in training. So, we just really tried to come, come out as gently as we possibly could. You certainly had to pull back on the stick to get control but trying not to mush it down so you really tried to fly it out which we did in the end, going very, very fast.
CB: You say we. Was the engineer helping you?
RW: Yes, well all he could do was pull the throttles back or push the throttles forward apart from being spread, spread across the floor. You know, the poor navigators instruments are all over the place. In that respect think of the navigators instruments all over the place my little wireless op oh he was a little terror and my navigator and he were chalk and cheese, vastly different characters and one occasion my navigator asked for a QDM from the wireless operator and Taffy said a very rude word telling him to go away and Alec looked back and found there was Taffy with his radio set, the old 1154 55 bits of the set on the floor trying to repair it and he couldn’t give him a QDM but he said [?] [laughs] so that was the atmosphere but they were a great crew, great crew. But there you are. We pulled ourselves out and we got ourselves out and we got back with having done the crash landing as I say. But the raid that I think affected us more than anything was the Nuremberg raid. The raid on Nuremberg. It was the raid that really should never have happened but we just discovered this afterwards reading books and things the fact that the, the uncertainty in Bomber Command headquarters about whether it should go on or shouldn’t go.
CB: It was to do with the fog, wasn’t it?
RW: Pardon?
CB: It was to do with the fog.
RW: Yeah. Yeah, well apparently there was a front coming up over Germany and the idea was that the route was going to be clear and the target was going to be er the route was going to be cloud covered and the target was going to be clear but the movement of the front wasn’t right and of course the, all the route was clear and the cloud over the target and the winds were wrong, all wrong.
CB: Oh.
RW: And all the hundred odd mile winds and this sort of thing were going on and nearly all in the wrong direction. Even the pathfinders, even the wind finders didn’t get the right places for the right system for the wind and so some of the pathfinders were marking Schweinfurt and different targets and Alec, my navigator, who was insistent on being a very precise little man he got us to the target and we actually flew to the target but by the time we were flying out the operation was delayed. Put back, put back and put back twice. So, we were going to bomb about five past twelve sort of thing like this. And we went off, a little bit in daylight taking off and we got, when we got to the French German border we’d seen sixteen aircraft shot down and to do what you used to do you used to report this to the navigator and he’d log it so they could get a record of where the aircraft went down and when he got to sixteen Alec said, ‘I don’t want to hear any more.’ So, we didn’t tell him anymore but we saw no end of stuff and coming across we were supposed to come south of the Ruhr which we did but a lot of people went straight over the top of the Ruhr and the carnage there. And just on the controversial long leg, what they called the long leg which was from the French from France right across to northern, north of the target, north of Nuremberg there was a two hundred and sixty five mile leg which was unusual ‘cause you usually had diversions and that sort of thing and it just so happened that there were two German night fighter beacons on the route Ider and Otto and it just so happened that their night fighters were assembling at the beacons all at the right time for them. So, there we were, we were ploughing along. We were very, very fortunate. We managed to keep out of trouble. We did have trouble but nothing drastic so we carried on and what we saw over the beacons was quite considerable. Lots of aircraft being shot at. We could see the tracers, German tracers going on, and this was a raid where the Germans first used the system called schragemusik whereby instead of having guns firing directly at the rear gunner they knew that there was no ventral armament on the Lancaster at all so this very astute German chap said, ‘Well, let’s have the guns pointing upwards,’ so they had two 20mm cannons pointing up, about sixty degrees. So, they used to fly underneath you and you knew nothing. You didn’t know they were there at all until the shells started to fly past. We, we were lucky. On one occasion we saw the shells coming upwards to us just on our starboard side so we managed to take evasive action but we didn’t know what it was, we didn’t know why they were coming up that way until many years later when we discovered they had this schragemusik and one German shot down forty two aircraft using that equipment. He did five in one night which was amazing so this added to the attrition rate of the raid at all. We were very, very fortunate. Alec, the navigation was spot on and we passed a target which we saw in the distance Schweinfurt which was being bombed which we didn’t know it was Schweinfurt then but we said, Alec said, ‘That can’t be right.’ So we carried on and actually arrived at Nuremberg which was cloud covered and we just, Norman had just happened to see a break in the little clouds so we bombed there. I think we bombed Nuremberg. We were certainly over Nuremberg. Whether we actually bombed Nuremberg you can’t really say because we couldn’t take a photograph because of the photoflood. It wouldn’t show anything on the photo apart from cloud but there was a massive explosion on our, on our left hand side which apparently somebody had hit a munition train just outside Nuremberg and this had this enormous explosion so we knew something had happened. And of course we had to come back when it was a long leg. There was some fighter activity on the way back but it was such and the lads when they used to go on these raids the lads, I didn’t get involved but the lads used to have a kitty. They put some pennies in this kitty and the ones who guessed the most number of aircraft shot down or most accurate number of aircraft shot down got the kitty and Curly my engineer got it that night because he said a hundred. He estimated a hundred and when we got back for debriefing the intelligence people were very sceptical about the thing. Oh it couldn’t have happened no its near going to happen but when our squadron records came in we sent twenty six aircraft that night and we lost seven which was nearly a third of the squadron that night. Sixty people, you know, all gone that night and it left it was really strange. It was. We were like zombies, you know. We just walked around. Not upset. Just mind blown and we went back we couldn’t sleep. We just walked around until daylight and the squadron didn’t operate for a little while after that. But what happened with the, when we got back used to go for a flying meal when we, when we got back and when we got back to the mess there were no waitresses there at all. All the meals were left on the counter and a little notice on the wall saying, ‘Please help yourselves.’ And all these girls had gone into the restroom and they were crying their eyes out ‘cause of the losses on the squadron. You know, they really felt the effect of that. Moreso than we did in many respects. Norman, my bomb aimer, who was always girl mad for the ladies wanted to go and console them but the WAAF officers said. ‘No. Leave them to it.’ And so we had to help ourselves to the meal and this was the atmospheres they had on the squadrons you know. The thoughts of the people working. When you think of a squadron where you’ve got something like anything a hundred and eighty, two hundred aircrew you’ve got something like two thousand, two and a half thousand ground staff who without them we couldn’t have kept flying, you know. So they, and they don’t get the credit that they justly deserve and our ground crew were wonderful. Little Willy [Severn] and Nobby Burke and they were part of the aircraft, they were part of the aircrew and I kept in touch with them for many, many years until he died just a few years ago at the age of ninety seven.
CB: Really.
RW: Lived up in Glasgow and Perth, near Perth and when I visited him and his lovely wife Annie he used to sit in his room all by himself just looking out the window and saying, ‘Aye. Och aye. Aye. Och aye,’ and remembering all the things that were going on. We were very, very fortunate on the squadron he was on the squadron for many, many months. He joined the squadron up at Holme on Spalding Moor and he only ever lost two aircraft so we so lucky to be with him. Mind you, we lost an aircraft for him which was, didn’t go down very well. So, but again, again these characters you’d come back with holes and bits missing and they’d be waiting for you when you got back and they’d get these things sorted out and repaired more or less for the, for the next night so, in all sorts of weathers. The, being a dispersed camp we didn’t have any hangars to work in. All the aircraft were stacked outside and, you know, in February ‘44 we had something like three foot of snow and sixteen foot snowdrifts and the station was cut off completely and these lads were working on the aircraft changing plugs, doing servicing on the aircraft. They worked, Willy said they worked in pairs. When one was working and his hands got frozen he went and warmed up. Another chap took over so they were working outside in all these sorts of conditions.
CB: There were hangars but they couldn’t put the aircraft in was it?
RW: Well, there were hangars when they had major things to do. Engine changes -
CB: Right.
RW: And these sort of things. They would take them in for major servicing. [Eight star] servicing, for a major servicing but apart from that they were just kept outside in the cold and the wet and in the war it could be anything.
CB: I’m going to stop there again because we are going to have a cup of tea.
RW: Yeah.
CB: Thank you.
RW: Oh lovely.
[pause]
CB: Right, so we’re back on again now.
RW: Yeah.
CB: And we’re just doing the -
RW: You finished the -
CB: Rerun of the Mailly but I think it’s useful because I’ve heard this, somebody mentioned before.
RW: Yeah.
CB: Of the attrition -
RW: Yeah.
CB: And because of the milling around -
RW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So why was it that the marking was so delayed causing the traffic jam?
RW: Well the again Cheshire was a brilliant pilot and a brilliant pathfinder and he was a perfectionist and again, forgive me if I’ve mentioned but the briefing that we had as the ordinary aircrew main force was to be very precise with the bombing because we didn’t want to hit any of the village. The village next door to the target. And he was being the same and he wasn’t satisfied with the markers that were going down and he said, ‘Well, don’t come in. We’re remarking.’ So he was re-marking the target to get in to the correct position for, for the [Mailly] raid and because of this it was delaying. It was, saying delayed you’re only talking about minutes. You’re not talking about hours, you know, but five minutes, ten minutes. An awful lot can happen in five, ten minutes and he was waiting until the markers got, really got them organised because there were two marking spots. One east and one west. One on the railway. One on the barracks because it was timed for midnight because this was the time when the people were coming back to their billets and were getting their, and they [wanted to kill the] troops.
CB: Yeah, of course.
RW: Troop concentrations so he was being as perfect as he possibly could and in consequence with the markers not being as accurate as he liked he stopped it and said we’ll remark again.
CB: Because it’s a French target?
RW: Because, well, not so much a French target. The target which was right next door to the French village.
CB: Yeah.
RW: And he didn’t want to kill -
CB: That’s what I meant. Yes.
RW: Didn’t want to kill, bomb the village. So, we were briefed and presumably they must have been briefed as well to be as perfect as they possibly could on their marking so as not to kill French people.
CB: Course.
RW: So this, and this came to light too, many, many years later here, by a little girl who was doing her degree at the Sorbonne in Paris relating to British and American efforts during the war and she came here and interviewed me here and stopped here for quite a little while and had a little chat about the Mailly raid and this sort of thing and she was quite concerned, you know. She was only what twenty, twenty one year old but she was only concerned about the fact that that attitude was taken to stop people, French people being killed. She got a first degree anyway which was rather nice.
CB: You obviously briefed her well.
RW: Yes, we still send Christmas cards to each other. I haven’t seen her for years and years and years. I wonder what she is doing now, whether she is married or what. But she was a nice little girl and I’ve got some pictures of her somewhere in there.
CB: Yeah.
RW: So, yes, so the, that was the result of the Mailly raid and the Nuremberg of course, raid, as well of course had although we’d had a lot of damage on other raids and quite traumatic things on other raids the Nuremberg raid left the biggest scar than any, mental scars was far, far greater than the physical scar and that really got sunk home when you realise what the attrition rates was. And the reports I think say there was ninety six, ninety seven aircraft shot down over the target but there were over a hundred wrecked completed so there must have been about a hundred and sixteen, a hundred and twenty aircraft written off altogether with all those, not all those aircrew but I think there was something like five hundred and sixty five, five hundred and five hundred and fifty aircrew killed that night, one night. The Nuremberg raid. And there were more aircrew killed on that one night then there was in the whole of the month of the Battle of Britain, which, you can’t compare the sort of flying that we were doing but the figures are quite remarkable when you think of what was going on. But being thickies as we were we knew it went on and we didn’t realise the implications of what was going on. We just got on with and had to do a job. But again, we had the trip, we had a little experience which was a trip to Munich. We were briefed for nine hours twenty five minutes petrol and we were given nine hours forty odd minutes petrol to fly on with instructions to land in the south of England if we had problems with getting back with the fuel consumption and it was again the weather wasn’t as forecast so we chugged off to Munich. Rather a long haul. A very long haul. Beautiful scenery over the Alps. We cross the Alps three times it was wonderful. Twice because it was twice the target and coming back we had problems. We lost part of a port wing, part of the leading edge of the port wing, we lost instruments, lost the pitot heads so that caused us little problems. Not exactly flying by the seat of our pants but -
CB: But you had no air speed indicator.
RW: So we were chugging back and as we say the leading edge of the port wing had disappeared somewhere and we’d had icing on the props. That was the amazing, we used to get icing on the propellers. And these were flying, the icing used to fly off and rattle against the side of the aircraft. It was just like flak for hitting the side of the aircraft and I’ve still got a bit of flak that came into my aeroplane. It’s on the table over there. Yes, so coming back it took a lot, lot longer than we anticipated and we were rather slow coming back to the extent that we were coming back over France in daylight and we were getting halfway across France and we saw these two little specks appearing flashing towards us and, ‘Oh Christ, what’s this going on?’ A couple of spitfires. They had been sent out to escort us back. So we were escorted back but with the engineers and navigation and fuel conservation we got back to Ludford having flown for ten and a quarter hours.
CB: Wow.
RW: But again the ground crew had that aircraft ready again for the next night which is, which is, what they get up to is wonderful. So they’re the sort of things that happened on raids. Another story, we came over Stettin one night. We lost two engines, two starboard engines. We managed to get one going half again so we came back from Stettin on two and a half engines.
CB: Was that flak damage?
RW: Yeah. Yeah. That was flak damage yes and when we got back Curly, he was a dreadful tease, he used to tease the WAAFs dreadfully and this poor little girl he teased her so much that when he was having his meal, operational meal she said, ‘I’m not going to serve you with your meal, cheeky bugger. I’m not going to serve your meal.’ He did get his meal of course but she wouldn’t serve him. And coming back off this trip we were so late we were, everybody, the committee of adjustment had been in and started to take our kit away. They didn’t think we were coming back but when we got back we got to the mess and this poor little kid was in tears, ‘Oh I shall never do that again.’ This was the atmosphere of these kids and girls. Wonderful. They were the sorts of things that happened. My last, very last operation was to again a transport plant target which was the original D-Day which was on the 4th 5th of June and like on the briefing we knew we were on the battle order but we had no idea where we were going and when we got out to the dispersal and asked what we were, what the petrol load and bomb load was Willy said, ‘Eeh,’ he said, ‘You’ve got full tanks and overloads and no bombs.’ And you were thinking, ‘Oh God. What’s going on? Are we going to Italy, Russia, whatever.’ No. What was happening we were flying a square circle around the invasion beaches giving false instructions to some of the shipping people imitate a convoy and also reporting on the fighter activity, German fighter activity to report back to help with the invasion and of course the invasion was put back twenty four hours because of the weather. So they took our overload tanks on, put a few bombs on board and we went off and we bombed Sangatte. Didn’t do a very good job obviously. So, that was our very last trip, Sangatte, and when we got back, because of the weather, very adverse weather we were diverted to Faldingworth which is only about thirty odd miles from Ludford, our base and we slept on a chair in the mess for the rest of the night and when we got up in the morning and having breakfast the station commander, Group Captain King arrived and he said, ‘Come on. I’m taking you back.’ I said, ‘Well I’ve got an aeroplane outside you know.’ And he said ‘You’re not touching another aircraft on the squadron. That was your last operation.’ So we just left the aircraft. How they got it back I don’t know but he took us back in his little hut, little, his little van. We went back and that was my last operation and mentioning our attrition rate on the squadron, in early 1944 our attrition rate was something like sixty two percent.
CB: Gee.
RW: Which was, you know, it’s unbelievable when you look.
CB: This is because they were targeted specifically.
RW: Yeah. Targeted. Very vulnerable. A) Because they could home onto our frequencies and B) Because we were on every bombing raid that went out. So there we are. The next morning I had to go and have a little interview with the station commander to give a pat on the back. He was a lovely chap Group Captain King. Curly, my engineer had finished because he’d done an operation with his previous crew he was finished the night before and he’d been out on the booze. Went down in to Ludford on the booze and when I had the interview with Group Captain King the following morning he said, ‘Your bloody crew.’ And, ‘Oh God. What’s going on?’ And he said, ‘Your engineer was down in the pub last night spouting about what he got up to and whatever and there just happened to be an intelligence officer there.’ And he just, no he was just pulling my leg really in a way but he said yes thank you very much for what you’ve done and I was given my green endorsement for the Mailly, for the raid where we had the mid-air collision and he had a curtain covering a chart on the wall which gave the crew statistics on the wall and he pulled the curtain back and he said, ‘There you are. You are the first crew that has finished as a crew for over six months’. Yeah.
CB: Amazing.
RW: And you didn’t even realise then. Appreciate what you -
CB: Yeah.
RW: What the attitude was but it really was remarkable and then of course I wasn’t allowed to touch a Lancaster again ever. Until 1977. Until the 101 squadron had a 60th anniversary of the formation of the squadron and they tried to get, I was asked. Martin Middlebrook was involved and he wrote a book and he was, he used to live not far away and then he was trying to get all of our crew together again and did I know where they were. And I had a few addresses so we managed to find 5 of us and we couldn’t find Taffy, could never find Taffy and we tried to find Taffy and we got in to contact with the people of his uncle who ran a pub and he wouldn’t tell us where he was and we assumed he was either in jail or in hospital but there, he’s still about but he never knew anything about it. But anyway, we had this meeting with five of my crew were there in 1977 in Waddington at 101. The Lancaster was there and at the dinner the previous night the PMC stood up and gave a little chat and said, ‘You’ve got the Lancaster here. It’s had an oil leak it needs an air test in the morning. We’ve got a crew here.’ So we flew in the Battle of Britain Lanc and did about a twenty, twenty five minute air test.
CB: Fantastic.
RW: In the Battle of Britain Lanc which was quite a thrill, quite a thrill.
CB: Amazing.
RW: And it’s wonderful that they’ve kept the thing going.
CB: Yes.
RW: It’s great. So after the war, I stayed in the air force after the war.
CB: Yes excuse me for interrupting but after the ops what did you do then because we’re not at the end of the war?
RW: Oh no. Yes. Yes.
CB: We’re still a year away.
RW: Yes. After the operations, yes normally you were, your crew tended to try and keep as much of the crew together and were posted away and most of the crew were posted to 28 OTU. And I was sent to 82 OTU. I never knew why or found out why. Typing error? Whatever. Anyway, I arrived at 82 OTU which was all Australian station and I was one of the very few Englishmen there as aircrew. One of the only aircrew there as an examiner, screen pilot, and they didn’t think much of this pommie bastard arrived in their midst and it wasn’t exactly a comfortable place to be but I’d only been there a couple of weeks when I had a bit of a problem, a symptom from the flying in the war. I had a perforated ulcer. Again, attributed to stress, whatever. So anyway, I had this haemorrhaging and I went sick, reported to the Australian doc, went sick and he didn’t think much of this whinging pommie bastard so medicine on duty. That was, that was, that was it. We just, and very shortly after that I was posted to Gamston where, which was a Wimpy OTU so I was flying in Wimpies there. Met my first fiancé there which was a lovely little WAAF in the camp. Audrey, Audrey Simms. Again, my luck held out, a lot of luck was involved on the squadron, tremendous lot of luck on the squadron and again my luck held out. My friend, Tommy Thompson, who’d been on operations, same as myself, screened and I was also the sports officer on the squadron and I had to do an air test as well and Tommy said, ‘Well you go and get the sports kit.’ On Wednesday afternoon the whole place shut down in those days for sport so I went to get the sports equipment and Tommy did my air test in a Wimpy and the Wimpy blew up and he was killed. Poor chap. Poor Tommy. And the only way we could recognise him when we found him was his ring on his finger. And he was a Geordie like myself and I was given the task of organising his funeral, went up to his funeral and because he didn’t get married during the war he got married very shortly after the end of his tour. He didn’t get married until after he’d finished his tour and his wife was expecting a baby, lived at Wallsend near Newcastle and of course I had to go to the funeral and there was this poor lass and it was rather sad. Yeah. So, these are the sort of things that happened and the luck you can achieve on these sort of things. So, anyway, because of my sins and flying I was due to go back on a second tour, supposedly on Mosquitoes, in early ‘45 but the attrition rate had dropped considerably at that time and there was a glut of aircrew coming though so they said, ‘Don’t come back on operations.’ So I was sent down to Lulsgate Bottom which was an instructor’s school. So I went down to the instructor’s school at Lulsgate Bottom which is now Bristol airport and I had a nice time down there learning to drink scrumpy which was, which was great. Lovely. Lovely. Lovely place down there. I enjoyed it very much. Again had little problems with the instructing. Flying with the instructor one night and the radial engine, the pot burst and the pistons were coming out through the through the canopy around the engine. So we had a little single engine landing there but that was fine. I ended up there and became an instructor. So the instructing I was sent to be a place called Desborough. I had the choice of going to Carlisle or Northampton so I chose Desborough and I was stationed there as a screen pilot and flying instructor, Wimpies. This story extends a little bit. A very good friend of mine who became my first fiancé her friend she was stationed, became stationed at Wyton, Cambridge and my friend and I used to go and visit her and he, Jock Murray, he was a married man. He had a girlfriend as well, a WAAF at Wyton so we used to go and stay at the George hotel at Huntingdon when she was there but sadly we were sitting on the banks of the river at Earith. I’d already bought the engagement ring and whatever and she said, ‘I’m sorry but that’s it’ and she went off with a married pilot on Wyton, pilot and that was it. I came back to Desborough rather tail, my tail between my legs sort of thing and my squadron commander, he knew what the situation, we were very good friends and he knew what was going on and one of the pilots who had been at Wyton on big stuff he was converting on to Dakotas and that’s what we were doing in Desborough and he came to Desborough to be converted on to Dakotas. He didn’t, I knew him but he didn’t know me and my flight commander, Lofty [Loader] he said, ‘You have him as a pupil.’ So I had this poor soul as a pupil. All the first details in the morning and all the last details at night. He complained to the boss and he said, ‘Nothing to do with me. Get on with it.’ But he was brilliant. He was a good pilot but he didn’t know anything about that at all. And again strange things happened at Desborough. When I was there another crew came through at, which er, yes this other crew came through whereby the pilot had a wireless operator who eventually joined the company I joined after, after the war as a wireless operator and I had to screen the crew on a cross country out over Wales. A claggy night. Not a very nice night at all and his skipper didn’t say, ‘I don’t think we ought to go. The weather.’ ‘Oh it’s all right,’ Well the weather we flew in the war we flew in all sorts of weather. They said, ‘Oh no it’s alright Alfie,’ So, off we went and coming back they asked to get a QDM and he couldn’t on his little set. He couldn’t get a QDM and fortunately I had been to the Empire Radio School and, and, and knew a little about electrics so I went back, got this bearing, give it to the skipper and when we let down there was Desborough the identification lights DE flashing, I said, ‘There you are. That’s how it’s done.’ And I had to give this wireless operator an adverse, not exactly an adverse report but not a very favourable one. He eventually became a director of the company I was working for and he didn’t, he didn’t, he didn’t like me very much at all because I was one of the lower minions in the works and he was a director of purchasing. Not a nice, not a very nice chap. Anyway, there we are so that was, that was little situation but Desborough from there I went and was posted to Transport Command, had to go into Transport Command and there I was flying Dakotas and doing mainly conversion work flying Dakotas. I had some very nice jobs to do and stationed at Oakington. This was in 1947 when I first went to work in Oakington and I was the flying wing training officer for four squadrons 10, 27, 30 and 46 squadrons and this was early ‘48 when the thought of the airlift came into being and this was quite an amazing situation because the squadron as I say had this four, the unit had the four squadrons on board and I was working with all the four squadrons. Then when you are going on the airlift all the aircrew had to be completely categorised and had to have a current incident rating so I was kept very, very busy. One night well one month one day I did something like ten and a half hours flying testing just to get them ready to go on the airlift. So, there we went and when we got them all, got them all off we, the WingCo said, ‘Right have a few days left, go on the airlift for a month and have a rest.’ So that was fine so I thought now do I go home and see my mum and dad or do I go and see my fiancé. I was getting married in October. And I said, ‘Hmmn I’ll go and see my fiancé,’ which I obviously did. Went back on the airlift and when I got to [Rumsdorf] which we were then I went to see the flight commander chappie in charge of the flying and I said, ‘Where do I go for briefing?’ And he said, ‘You don’t.’ He gave me a piece of, a sheet of A4, ten sheets of A4 with all the instructions on and said, ‘Go away and read those, inwardly digest. You’re flying in the morning.’ And that was it. That was it. And it was strange how the flying did, is it alright talking about the airlift?
CB: Absolutely. Yes. Yes.
RW: Yeah, because this is forty, a long time after the war but there we are. How the airlift came about was the fact that the Russians had taken over Berlin and they wouldn’t allow any people into Berlin for about eight weeks. So nobody was going in and they really split Berlin in half. They took over the east sector but they had to keep the airlift going, had to keep the situation going because the embassies of the French, British and American embassies there so they had to keep flying going in. They couldn’t stop the flying but they could affect the roads. There were originally six corridors going in but the Russians said you don’t need six. So they cut out, cut the north one out and the south one out and the east one out so they only had three corridors going in. The Americans were doing the, the southern one and we were doing the north one and we all came out on the centre one. But when they started the airlift all this happened in a very, very short period of time. The Americans, a chap called Lucius Clay was in charge of the system flying then in Berlin and he called every possible aircraft back from the states, even from Alaska, to come down to [?] which was the southern part of Germany and, to organise the thing properly he asked a chap called [Tupper, Tupper?] who was in charge of the Burma hump flying over the hump in Burma and he was asked to organise that. The first trip he went on, this was the very, very beginning all, all the Americans were there first and they’d gone off he went off on one of these very first trips and when he got to, got to Berlin there they were going to land at Tempelhof. He found there were aircraft stacked from five hundred feet to five thousand feet and everybody, all the Americans, were clamouring like mad to get permission to land and there was very little organisation at all. Two aircraft, two of the American aircraft had crashed on the runway. One crashed on the runway and was being repaired, and went on the fire and the other crashed and gone over the end of the runway. Nobody was killed but [Tupper Tupper] realised what was going on. He sent all the aircraft back to base even with their loads and got landed himself at Gatow at er [Wunsdorf] and at Tempelhof, landed at Tempelhof and he wrote out orders and all regulations for all flying on the Berlin airlift. Each aircraft had a different speed, different height to fly and all, all went, all went off and when we were at [Wunsdorf] at the time and when you went off you flew to a beacon north of Ber, we flew to a beacon at [?] just north of Berlin where you, when you arrive there you gave instructions, or you were given instructions of how to land and what your load off and we flew in everything. Literally everything in to Berlin because when the Russians took over they closed their frontier and they closed the, all the rail, road and water transport into Berlin and there was something like two million two hundred thousand West Berliners with twenty seven days rations of everything they’d left and they’d taken the generators from the power stations away, they’d taken the gas and that was all rationed and these poor Berliners were left with twenty seven days of nothing. I was very fortunate. I gave a little talk to some aircrew at Leamington and one of the chaps brought along a German lady who had been a little girl, a young little at the time the Russians took over and she was, she spoke English quite well but a very, very strong German accent and she of course she was quite an elderly lady then and she said she and her elder sister, she was young teenager and her sister was seventeen, eighteen and they were walking through Berlin and the Russians came along, a group of Russians came along and they herded all the girls and women they could possibly find into this building. The older sister knew what was going to happen and she hid this young lady, was a young lady, hid her and all the rest were gang raped for the rest of the day and she said, she was telling me that her sister never ever spoke of that again. She couldn’t talk about it. There was something like two million women raped. Two thousand committed suicide. You know, and these figures you know and the Berliners were so appreciative of what we did. We literally flew in everything. Naughty story. When we were on taking a few coal fuel and flour everything in and when you got to the beacon as I say you had to call to get landing instructions and declare what your load was so you could be directed to the correct unloading bay when you landed and the Germans were doing this and they could turn an aircraft around in eight minutes you know. Incredible. So there we were we were going towards this beacon and I said to the wireless op cause I didn’t have a crew I had the nav leader and the signals and I said to Jacko, ‘Call up and get us instructions.’ So he gave instructions and they said, ‘What is your load?’ And he said, ‘Medical supplies. Mainly manhole covers,’ and they were all sanitary towels. It didn’t end there because when we landed we were directed to the heavy unloading bay and we weren’t exactly flavour of the month. We didn’t half get a rocket but there again when you were flying in there was no question of doing an overshoot and going around again. If you couldn’t land you just had to go back to base and start again.
CB: Yeah.
RW: And when you were there they had all your aircraft lined up. Your day was split into three eight hour shifts and you were doing as many raids, as many sorties as you could in eight hours and then you had the next 8 hours off and then you flew in the next 8 hours and this went on seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Day and night. There was only one day it never happened and that was through extensive fog. So, and when the aircraft were lined up the ground crew had to do a pre-flight test on every aircraft and part of their equipment the wireless operators, wireless, ground wireless operators were a pair of bellows and when they got on the aircraft they used the bellows to blow this, the flour and coal dust off the instruments so they could check them. So this was the sort of thing that was going on. When we were at [Rumsdorf] they also had the York there and the payload of the York was something like what fifteen thousand pounds and the Dakota’s about seven and a half and one of our skippers said, Flight Lieutenant Sheehan, he went off in the Dakota and he said, ‘It’s like a brick. It’s like flying a brick.’ And he had an awful job getting it off the ground, an awful job getting it there, an awful job landing it and when they landed it they found they’d put a York load on the Dakota so he was flying at double his all up weight.
CB: Gee.
RW: And it says a lot for the skipper and the aircraft you know.
CB: Absolutely.
RW: You know, these sort of things went on. Amazing. But that was a long time after, after the squadron. And on the squadron looking back and talking to people on the squadron about the squadron about the air force in general they said, ‘Well you know in our group, in one group we were losing seventy aircraft a month.’ Every Bomber Command station lost nine hundred aircrew. You know, it’s amazing the figures that went on like that and a gentleman did some statistics working out how it affected a hundred air crew and of the hundred aircrew fifty one were killed. Twelve were shot down and badly injured, five were badly injured so they couldn’t fly again, three were, so three were killed on landings back at base, twelve became prisoners of war and one escaped to come back and of the remaining of that hundred aircrew only twenty four remained. Nearly all with some medical problem afterwards which, is you know, is -, I had my share. The sort of things that happened they said personally the sort of things that happened to me afterwards apart from this ulcer which affected me for most of my life until I was here at Desborough, at er Kenilworth when I moved in here and one night I had a massive haemorrhage. I couldn’t get upstairs and the doc came and it was a peculiar system he had. I was not allowed food, I wasn’t allowed to get out of bed, I wasn’t allowed to do anything with work and I lived on an ounce of milk and water for six weeks. Couldn’t do anything and I remember sitting down where we are now sitting now watching the television, watching the cricket with the doctor, chatting about what was going on and it was amazing. In consequence I can eat anything, anything at all doesn’t bother me but alcohol doesn’t like me. I can drink it but I can enjoy it for about a week afterwards so you know I don’t drink very much now. I’ve had my share. But this is the sort of thing that happened and what still happens now. One operation we were on going on to the Ruhr and the Ruhr, the old Happy Valley and we were approaching the Ruhr and it really it looked deadly and the flak, there was an old saying, the flak was so thick you could get out and walk on it and it was like that searchlights, fighters going on and the first time I ever experienced terror and it was most peculiar. I’d heard about it but I’d never experienced it and I literally was shaking and really I couldn’t do what I was supposed to do so I dropped my seat so I couldn’t see outside and funnily enough I said a little prayer that I hadn’t said since I was about six years old. Mum and dad used to sit by the side of my bed and say this little prayer which ended up, ‘If I die before I wake I pray the lord my soul will take.’ Why I said it I don’t know, no idea but I said this little prayer and the terror disappeared and I raised my seat and I could just carry on. You’re still frightened of course but all the terror disappeared. And we had similar situations again afterwards but no terror so whether the power of prayer you know whether this happens or not. Some of the lads we used to take the mickey a bit ‘cause they used to kneel down by their beds and say their prayers or kneel down by the aircraft before they got on and said their prayers and thought they were a bit sissy until you had this sort of experience yourself and then you realise there’s something in it. It’s all, I’m sure it was all mental you know. Some of these sort of things happened. When I laid my head down on the pillow even now, not every, if I’ve been reading a books like some of the air force books and service books that come out now, if I’ve been reading these books about aeroplanes and I put my head down on the pillow I can see flak bursting and little sparks flying about. It doesn’t affect me. I’m fine. No problem at all and this sort of thing, you know, just reminds you of the old days and now talking about it so much now it’s almost like a myth, you know. As if you’re telling fairy stories. Did I really do it, you know but yes it does once you’ve experienced those sorts of things you never forget them. They’re always there. And some, some fixed more than others. We had one navigator who, they were badly shot up and some of the, a lot of the crew were injured. The aircraft was on fire and he got out of his seat to walk back to the, the aircraft was still flying, he walked to the back of the aircraft to jump out the back. No parachute. Some of the crew stopped him and said, ‘No. Don’t.’ He couldn’t talk. He couldn’t speak. He was just a zombie completely. Couldn’t speak and when he got back, they got back alright he never spoke. Never spoke at all. Went to the sick quarters for a couple of weeks. Never spoke, could understand a thing and he was sent to the service hospital at Matlock, the psychological hospital at Matlock and he was there for several, a couple of weeks and he never spoke until one of the nurses dropped an instruments in a tin tray and he woke up. He said, ‘Oh Christ, they’re on fire. They’re on fire.’ And he got his speech back again. He was invalided out of the service as you know unfit for flying. He was alright but that experience he had of these weeks of not talking you know and this is the sort of thing that happened to these sort of folks and, you know, when you think of the experiences you had and how bloody lucky you’d been all these whiles. And, your luck. Yes, I think you bought yourself your own luck to a certain extent. In my crew, were such that although vastly different characters, we were all great comrades and great friends. Great friends. And you know this helped enormously the operational flying, in my instructing and examining after the war when Oakington was closed down and all the four squadrons dispersed 30 squadron was posted to Abingdon and having, me being flying wing training, I thought I was out of a job. 30 squadron had taken over a VIP element from 24 squadron and for my sins I was posted to 30 squadron at Abingdon to become the training officer on 30 squadron and to get our qualifications, to get my, I had to go to Central Flying School to be examined and that was quite the thing. The fact that I had an instrument rating and the fact that I had done something like fifteen hundred hours instrument flying I was allocated a master green instrument rating and I became examiner and when I went down to the Central Flying School to become an examiner and a tester, an instructor, the instructor there, Flight Lieutenant Walker, a lovely man, when we finished the [CGI], said ‘There is a book. Take it away. Read the chapters about training and it’s all about what you learn about.’ And it was a book called the “Psychological Disorders of Flying Personnel” and the chapter on training illustrated the fact that you know even experienced people when being examined had a little bit of panic. It’s a bit of the white coat syndrome of the doctor with his stethoscope and things and you couldn’t really operate as you normally could and this was a chapter about that sort of thing. And this psychological business he gave me this book to take back home. And when I got back of course I used to examine all the crews but each crew had to be examined completely once a month. They had to do certain training exercises. One per month and the VIP pilots had to do the same as well but the VIP pilots were like a class apart. They wouldn’t have a, they insisted on having a separate crew room from us roughies and strange things happened with them. One occasion one of the pilots a chap called Van Reinfeld had to do a VIP trip the following day and he hadn’t done a little night, night flying exercise and I said, ‘Well it’s alright. I’ve got a spare navigator. You can do your little trip tonight. I’ll put you on early, you’ll be alright for tomorrow.’ And he said, ‘Well I can’t do it.’ He says, ‘My navigator has gone in to Abingdon and I don’t know where he is.’ I said, ‘I’ve got a spare navigator. It’s alright. It’s only a training trip. It’s not a VIP trip.’ And this chap, the replacement, a chap called Baxter who was a coloured boy wouldn’t fly with him. Refused to fly with him and I said, ‘Well you don’t, if you don’t fly with him you don’t get your trip tomorrow.’ He went to see Squadron Leader Reese the squadron commander and he said, ‘It’s nothing to do with me it’s to do with the training.’ And he went back and I said, ‘Well if you don’t do it. You don’t fly.’ And he went into Abingdon and scoured all the clubs and pubs, found his navigator, came back, flew late in the morning, early in the morning the next day and went off to do his trip the next day and that’s the sort of atmosphere they were. And the principal job of the Transport Command at 30 squadron were again, like all transport was glider towing and paratrooping and there was a big operation called Operation Longstop which was going on at Old Sarum and all the crews had to go down and join in the exercise and of course every pilot had to have an aeroplane. There wasn’t enough aeroplanes to go around and I was given an aeroplane and a pilot to fly with me who was a VIP pilot called [Ria.] He said, ‘I’m a VIP pilot. I don’t fly second dicky.’ And he wouldn’t fly. Refused to fly with me. Again, he saw the flight commander down at Old Sarum and the boss said. ‘Well if you don’t fly you don’t fly at all. Go back to base. Get back to base.’ He sent him back to base and these sort of characters they were an elite apart, you know. Brilliant fliers no doubt about it brilliant fliers and as I say we had to go down to Central Flying School to be examined and when you’re examined if anything went wrong and you didn’t fail any one part of the exercise two of the exams you had to write, reply a hundred percent. Safety and regulations, these sort of things and when you were, one of the exercises you had it do you were given all the met readings from various stations and you had to plot a synoptic chart and give a forecast for the next day, until midnight the next day, which I did and I said possibly get some rain by lunchtime tomorrow and whatever down the south of England and he called a Met man in and he said, ‘Oh that’s not going to happen. That’ll never happen.’ So I didn’t pass that exam so I had to go back, wait another month before I was going to be examined again. Blow me, the next day it started to rain so I rang up old Walker at Central Flying School and said, ‘Have you looked out the window?’ And he said, ‘You jammy bugger,’ he said, ‘I’ll put it in the post.’ So it was a great atmosphere. A wonderful atmosphere and 30 squadron had a wonderful atmosphere. Still has now. Still does wonderful work now. But the flying it left a great character in my life but I was married by then of course and we had a wonderful life with my wife in peacetime air force. Sadly, she became terribly ill when we were at Oakington and she started having terrible haemorrhages and this sort of thing and the, our local doc said, ‘You’d better take her home’ so we took her to her home in Desborough near Kettering and my mother who was a state certified midwife, she’d nursed all her life said, ‘You know the prognosis of this isn’t very great,’ you know and discovered that she had what they called a [? deformed] mole which is a pregnancy like a bunch of grapes and indicative of cancer. And they did scrapes they didn’t do scrapes in those days but they couldn’t find it and it was the cancer was deep seated in the womb and my mum said, you know ‘She can’t live very long.’ She was only about six months, nine months perhaps at the most so I resigned my commission to come out to look after her. Haven’t been, my last posting just about this the time this happened found was AOC far east to go VIP pilot, the AOC in the far east which I had to keep delaying, delaying, delaying because of Pat’s illness and eventually that was cancelled completely so I didn’t go. So, I resigned to come out on the condition that I renewed my qualifications every year and stayed on the reserve until I was, 1960 um and came out and poor old Pat died about ten months afterwards and with my lack of education I couldn’t get a grant to do any, I was hoping for a grant to go teaching but I couldn’t get a grant because I had no certificates or educational certificates. Fortunately, Pat, my wife’s father owned a factory. A packaging factory. So he said, ‘Come and work for me.’ So I went and worked in his factory on the marketing and sales. I can say for twenty seven years I travelled in cardboard boxes which was very kind of him. I got along very well with the old man. He was quite an eminent military man himself. Thinking of that sort of thing when I was at Abingdon, Oakington, I was going to get married and I was told I had to get permission to get married otherwise I wouldn’t get my marriage allowance ‘cause I was a little bit too young. So I was told I had to have an interview with the station commander which a chap called group captain [Byte Seagal] so I went and had an interview with him and my dad because of his health couldn’t do any serious work and he used to work for the Coop looking after the horses for the Coop stables so when we went for the interview with group captain [Byte Seagall], a peacetime group captain trying to get everything back to a peacetime protocol he said, ‘Who are you marrying?’ I said, ‘Well, Pat.’ ‘What does she do?’ And I said, ‘Well she does typing and bit of filing in an office.’ ‘Oh that’s interesting.’ ‘What does your father do?’ And I said, ‘He looks after horses.’ He said, ‘Newmarket?’ I said, ‘No. Coop.’ And this didn’t go down very well at all. And he said, ‘What about your father in law then?’ And I said, ‘Well he was colonel in chief of the Northamptonshire regiment. He got the MC in Gallipoli.’ ‘Ah now isn’t that interesting.’ I said. ‘My mother, my dad was in the navy. He got the DSM in the navy. My mother got the Royal Red Cross.’ ‘Now isn’t that interesting.’ Yes, I can get married. So I got permission to get married. And they were trying to get things back to peacetime protocol but after the war people like myself were asked to go up to Cranwell which was a training, a major training school then for aircrew and just to meet the people, not to meet, just to chat to the students and pupils and met one young man called, oh dear [pause] His dad was the president of the Nuremberg raids. Oh, what did they call him? Anyway, he was, he was his dad was this very eminent gentleman. Martin, [pause] oh dear, old age and memory don’t go very well together. Anyway, this gentleman he was on the Nuremberg trials. He organised the Nuremberg trials for the post war Germans and his son was on the Cranwell course and he eventually came down to 30 squadron and I said to him, you know, ‘What’s the last thing they taught you at Cranwell then?’ And they said, he said, ‘Don’t get associated with wartime commissioned officers.’ Because, in February ‘44 the directive came about saying all captains of heavy bombers had to be commissioned and my commissioning interview was with the accountant who gave me a cheque for ninety quid to go and buy a uniform with. Yeah. What do they call the chappie on the Nuremberg trials? Very eminent man. Very eminent barrister.
CB: Yeah. I can’t remember.
RW: Pardon?
CB: I can’t remember.
RW: No. Can’t remember. Anyway Martin didn’t like this system in the air force at all so he resigned and came out. But that was the sort of thing that was going on in those days and I was very, very fortunate to be able to have a job to work. I stayed and played with cardboard boxes. For two years I had to go to Marshals and be re-examined for, just to keep your hand in that all it was part of the condition for resigning. I did that for two years and the first time I went the instructor there said. ‘Well go on and do the exams and, what did you do?’ I told him what I did. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Bugger it. Go on. Take a little chipmunk and take off. So I used to fly over Desborough and around the school where I was teaching and [laughs] no that, and I started learning, I taught myself aerobatics because the transport flying which is dead straight and level sort of stuff and I’d never flown aerobatics at all apart from slow rolling the Lancaster. It was great fun. Great fun. But they only did that for two years because they said it’s getting expensive and we’ve got squirty things now and so -
CB: Yeah.
RW: Just keep on the register.
CB: Yeah.
RW: And I was in the reserve until 1960 so really I had a wonderful career.
CB: Yeah, brilliant.
RW: Wonderful -
CB: Can I -
RW: Experiences I’ll never be forgetting and played an awful lot of luck and met some wonderful people and wonderful friends and with my crew when the squadron formed the association from flying together in 1977 the squadron chappie called Goodliffe formed the squadron association and from then on we found all eight of my crew and all eight of us used to meet every year.
CB: Fantastic.
RW: Until 1990 when we all met at Ludford in 1990 and the Coningsby, the Battle of Britain Flight said, ‘Would you come down and do a little exercise down here with a full crew.’ And Tommy, my mid upper gunner, wouldn’t go so we never went and a couple of months later he died so whether he had some sort of premonition, you know.
CB: Extraordinary.
RW: But anyway nevertheless all 7 of used to meet until, and then the rear gunner dies and all eight of us, all six of us used to meet and a couple of years ago my special duty operator died so all five of us -
CB: All five.
RW: Are still round about and very, very different states of health and all creaking a bit. I was being very lucky. I had open heart surgery.
CB: Oh, did you really?
RW: It was only three years ago and got a zip fastener up the front but if it hadn’t have been for again like the services, like with family if it hadn’t have been for family and my mum looking after me with diphtheria when I was a little boy and my daughters and family looking after me afterwards when, when I had when I had the operation for the heart I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat and my daughter Catherine who is, she is now the ward manager sister at the coronary care unit at Warwick Hospital she took me into hospital on her day off and did an ECG and a blood test and the cardiologist just happened to be walking past and he said, ‘What are you doing here?’ You know, and he took the blood away and came back and he said your bloods alright but it’s not, you’re not going anywhere. Don’t go home. So within just over a week I’d had open heart surgery.
CB: Gee.
RW: And I was back home again.
CB: Amazing.
RW: Yeah, it’s amazing.
CB: I’m going to stop you there.
RW: Yes, that’s about it I think, Ok.
CB: Because we both need a – [pause] right we’re restarting again after a brief comfort break and the bits I just want to ask you about, Rusty is first of all the ranking system. So you went in as an aircraftsman second class.
RW: I went in as an AC2.
CB: And how did the promotion system work until you were –
RW: Yeah. Well, usually after about six months you were promoted an AC1 and then after another short period of time you became an LAC, leading aircraftman. And I was a leading aircraftman when I went and did my flying in Canada and it was from then after you’d finished and completed your training successfully that was when you were ordered your flying brevvy and you became whatever grant, whatever grade you were going in to. Fortunately, and with a lot of luck involved I became a pilot. And having, became a sergeant pilot. Some, about three or four of the course that we were on we lost about forty percent of the course on washouts. You know, it was incredible because the training was very, very precise. I must say it was very, very good. Looking back it was remarkable. So there I was a sergeant pilot and promotion as an NCO was roughly six months and you got an increase and promotions so by the time I was, got on the squadron I was a sergeant pilot and then I very soon became a flight sergeant pilot and that was in ’43. End of ’43. And in early ‘44 the directive came from the air ministry that all captains of heavy bombers had to be commissioned so I was given the cheque for ninety quid by the accountant and told to go and buy a uniform so there was no formal interview at all. It was just a thing that happened. In consequence, the social class, in a sense, disappeared because there were people commissioned from training and they tended to be a little bit elitist and some of the crews had done previous tours and tended to be all commissioned and usually flight lieutenants and all this sort of thing so they were nearly all a little bit aloof but we were just the roughs. Not like the pathfinders. Gibson and the pathfinder force really didn’t socialise with the NCOs at all. Didn’t speak to them, didn’t talk to them but it wasn’t like that on the squadron. Really, apart from doing your job you were all the same. And the, the, our WingCo was a wonderful man in that respect. He knew everybody’s name on the squadron. Ground crew and air crew. Wonderful man. Old Alexander. Wingco Alexander.
CB: What sort of age was he?
RW: He, he’d be getting on about. He’d be early 30s I think [laughs] so. He died not such a long time ago. A little story about Wingco Alexander which, of course, a little bit about the war. His batman, Ward, a little chap called Ward turned out to be a homosexual and he was sacked from the service because in those days homosexuality was virtually a crime and he was sacked from the service and when I used to go home on leave and my brother was being in the army my mum was nursing a very eminent north country barrister called Lambert, Pop Lambert. Mum used to, got the job to nurse him because she could swear as much to him as he swore at her when she put him to bed and he used to love my, my brother and I and my mum to go down and have dinner with him and it was finger bowls and butlers and things like this so it really was quite out of our class altogether and when we were sitting down having dinner this night and the butler came in with the finger bowls and he looked at me and said, ‘Hello Waughman.’ And I said, ‘My God. Ward. What are you doing here? You were Alexander’s batman.’ And that went on, he went out and Pop said, ‘How the hell do you know him?’ And I said, ‘He was our WingCo’s batman. He was sacked because he was homosexual.’ And the poor soul. Pop gave him the sack a week later. He just wouldn’t have him around and this was the attitude about homosexuality -
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
RW: In those days. The lads used to go out queer bashing. You know.
CB: Yeah.
RW: Yeah. There was no gay business in those days at all, sort of thing. But that’s the sort of thing that happened. So, anyway, I was flying, became pilot officer and on the squadron I became towards the end of my tour I got promotion to flying officer and ended my tour as a flying officer and subsequently with the jobs I got as the training officer, again it was timed promotion really in a way. I became a flight lieutenant and most of the screening and examining and training I did then was as a flight lieutenant until I was posted to Singapore and never got there, flying as a VIP pilot AOC Far East. I never got there. Had I, had I gone I would have been promoted to squadron leader. No. I would have got the rank of squadron leader. Which would be temporary acting unpaid. So when I left that job I reverted to my previous rank again so that would be a rank mainly because you were socialising with VIPs but that never came about. So whether I don’t think I would have advanced very far in the air force at that time because I was a Geordie like, you know from up north, a very uneducated man, and I don’t think I would have advanced too far in the service.
CB: Ok.
RW: Although I got on very, very well with the people.
CB: Yeah.
RW: It was great but I think the social side, the social class system would have meant that I’d perhaps have made wing commander but I don’t think I would have got any great senior rank. Again, partly that’s my thought. Whether it would have happened or not. My navigator, he was an educated lad and very good lad you see he lied about his age to join up, operational at eighteen. He stayed in the air force after the war, did very, very well indeed did all sorts of very important flying. He ended up as a squadron leader and stayed in the air force after the war and he was very well thought of in the service. Most of the other lads left the service. Except Taffy. He stayed in the service. He became, he stayed as a sergeant I think all his life and I think he drank his way through the service but er -
CB: And he was always on the ground.
RW: Always on the ground, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yes he did, he did fly a second tour. Some of the crews did second tours. He was on the second tour and he was on the last bombing raid that went to the Nuremberg and the Buchenwald raids. And Manna, Operation Manna. Norman, my bomb aimer, he stayed in the air force. He stayed although he had some elevating jobs he never rose above the rank of flight lieutenant because he was out in Burma and he was on the squadron in Burma. This was very shortly after the end of the war and the war was still going on in Burma and he was duty officer one weekend and the Scotch troop was getting knocked about in the jungle so he laid on a strike which was successful and got back. I think they only lost a couple of blokes which was really remarkable. Got everything back and he had to see the CO the next day who said, ‘You don’t, you didn’t have the authority to lay that on’ and he was court martialled and in the, in the court martialling that was it you know but he went on and he eventually when he got back to the UK, got sent back to the UK and he didn’t have a job and he had a friend who knew somebody who knew somebody and he went to work down at, down in Halfpenny Green down Pershore way working on TSR2 and he did some work on TSR2 and then did an awful lot of flying in Buccaneers, err Buccaneers um Canberra’s flying all over America doing line over mapping and this sort of thing. Got himself an MBE. So Norman who now lives in the tax haven Andorra is MBE DFC AFC, yeah. But lovely guy.
CB: Ok so that’s a good intro thank you -
RW: Yeah.
CB: To the awards.
RW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So how did that come about for you and for him as well? How many of the crew were decorated?
RW: Well the sad thing is I’ve still got it but thinking about the decorations for crews and that sort of thing I’ve still got a got a bit of a conscience about the DFC because at the end of the tour of operations nearly every skipper got a decoration and I got a DFC but the crew didn’t get anything and the crew were doing half the work. They kept me alive, they kept us all alive they were doing exactly the same job as I was doing, under the same circumstances. Same risks. The same with all the Bomber Command crew but none of them got a decoration. My engineer Curly did eventually get a DFM.
CB: On the second tour -
RW: But none of the -
CB: Was it?
RW: None of the crew got any recognition whatsoever I think what Harry did was the rear turret and think what rear gunners did sitting watching shells flying at you having a little 303 gun to fire back at a 20 millimetre shell you know um and the casualty rate for rear gunners was, really was something and there was a lot of decorations which should have been. We had one crew which were very, very badly knocked about and from what I gather afterwards the station commander recommended the skipper for a VC which, and the crew did all sorts of wonderful things the skipper was hit three times and all sorts of things went wrong and got the aircraft back but this was turned down and we gather that the reason was that he wasn’t just getting the crew and the aircraft back he was getting himself back as well. So five of the crew got CGMs that night so the decorations system I’m sure it’s the same in all the wars that a lot of people who deserved them didn’t get them because it was unknown. One, one situation whereby unless an action was seen by an officer it didn’t count.
CB: Right.
RW: So -
CB: So the Queens Gallantry Medal.
RW: Yeah.
CB: The CGM.
RW: Yeah.
CB: Was a pretty good award.
RW: Well it’s the next one down from the VC.
CB: Exactly. Yeah. Absolutely. The whole crew got it.
RW: Yeah. Yeah. Five of the crew got it.
CB: Yeah.
RW: So you know the awards system obviously they have to have some rules and regulations, you know. I was told by, the by people afterwards after my crash landing getting the aircraft back the thought was the immediate award of the DFC but that didn’t come about.
CB: So when did it happen?
RW: That was in May, March
CB: When you came to the end of your tour.
RW: Oh, it was the end of the tour.
CB: Was it?
RW: Not at the time. Not immediately at the time. It wasn’t until anyway there we are. My DFC was given to me by the postman and there’s a nice little letter in there from King George saying I’m sorry, implying that he’s too busy too busy to see I’m sending it through the post but thank you very much. So, so that was given to me by the postman.
CB: Extraordinary.
RW: Subsequently, when I got I was very fortunate after the war I was awarded the MBE and -
CB: But you got the AFC. So what was that -
RW: I got the AFC.
CB: So what -
RW: I didn’t get the MBE I got the AFC.
CB: The AFC, yes.
RW: Yes, the AFC.
CB: So what was the circumstance of that?
RW: I’ve no idea. I’ve tried to find out but the only thing I’ve ever, people have been able to say meritorious service but I’ve no idea why. I think it was a brown nose job really you know, being in the right place at the right time. I can just imagine from what I’ve seen afterwards the air ministry would be issued so many medals to be issued to the command. Got down to group. Group allocated the medals out. Group was passed out to stations, stations allocated medals out, passed down to the squadrons and what was left for the squadron they had to find someone to give them to and I think I just happened to be at the right place at the right time. So, no reason why I -
CB: No specific event that you can -
RW: No specific event. Nothing -
CB: No.
RW: At all. No. So, it was again poor luck.
CB: What about this other man you talked about who’d been in your crew before who got DFC, AFC?
RW: Oh, Norman. The bomb aimer.
CB: Yes how did he get those?
RW: Well.
CB: Did he get the DFC at the end of the tour?
RW: Afterwards he, he -
CB: Was he commissioned by then?
RW: He eventually ended up on pathfinders.
CB: Oh right.
RW: Yeah, he did a second tour.
CB: Ahh.
RW: Didn’t do a full second tour but he did a lot of second tour on pathfinders and he got his DFC for that and he got his AFC for what he was doing in research down at Pershore down there and his MBE was for the work he did on TSR2 and the, and the work he was doing with the, with the Canberras.
CB: Yeah.
RW: Yeah and Curly my engineer he eventually got the DFM just after -
CB: On his second tour.
RW: After he left us he got the DFM and he from a very lowly back, we’re all from very lowly backgrounds, working class backgrounds his son Paul was at grammar school and there was a thing, a big trip they were going to do, which he could do which would have affected his career quite considerably from the school and Curly couldn’t afford it so he sold his medal.
CB: Right.
RW: To pay for his son to go through school. His son ended up as a very eminent statistician broadcasting, writing articles, touring the world doing this sort of thing and he still brings Curly to the reunions.
CB: Oh does he? So he feels that’s good value.
RW: Yeah. Yes, Yeah but poor old Curly he missed his medal a lot and a chappie called [?] it’s in there he bought Curlys medal.
CB: Oh.
RW: And there you are. He bought Curly’s medal. He was a medal collector and he also involved with [?] he’s a Frenchman working, working with the [6th airborne div] on the invasion things and he bought Curly’s medal and through the squadron he found out that Curly was on the squadron cause he got in touch trying to find out who’s it was and he invited Curly over for several years, every year to get his medal. Well the first year well he couldn’t get his medals back, well he didn’t, he was allowed to wear it but he very kindly let him wear his medal and showed him where his medal was and that’s the sort of thing, the sort of the lads they were. But -
CB: Can I go back to a particular experience -
RW: Yes.
CB: You describe -
RW: Yes, certainly.
CB: And that was the collision.
RW: Yes.
CB: So you’re on top of another Lancaster.
RW: Yeah. Yes.
CB: What happened to that aircraft?
RW: Well I didn’t see it at all. ‘Cause I was -
CB: No.
RW: A little busy keeping flying but apparently his propellers, as I said, chopped through our, just behind the bomb aimer’s feet and the bombing compartment up front. His mid upper, his canopy over the cockpit carved through our wheels and tore the canopy off.
CB: Yeah.
RW: And his mid upper gunner, his mid-upper turret was torn off as well and the boys said they saw Taffy who was looking out of his little window saw the aircraft falling away with the canopy falling off and the aircraft falling to bits so you can’t imagine what happened to the crew in the cockpit and the mid upper gunner sitting on top of the aircraft and they saw the aircraft falling away with no parachutes coming out. Of course it disappeared in cloud.
CB: Ah.
RW: And we were two thousand feet and then they saw the explosion on the ground.
CB: Oh.
RW: They found out afterwards that it was another Lancaster.
CB: Right.
RW: And they were able to identify what Lancaster it was and they were all killed of course. Unfortunately. How lucky can you be?
CB: Yeah and none of your boys saw it coming because you hadn’t got any view of it of underneath.
RW: No. Well the engineer was standing at his little window on the starboard side said he just saw it as it appeared and he didn’t see it at all.
CB: So you were flying straight and level.
RW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: And this came up from underneath you.
RW: Yeah. Hit sort of sideways.
CB: Oh sideways.
RW: Sideways underneath.
CB: Which is why you can’t -
RW: Yeah and that’s why he cut across us and we sat on top of him. And that was, and you never thought about it you never thought about disaster at the time you were thinking preservation.
CB: No.
RW: And keeping the aircraft flying. We’ve got to fly. Yeah. Which fortunately it did.
CB: And a different question each of the crew has a different recollection of what was going on because they had different jobs.
RW: Yeah.
CB: You’ve already mentioned the danger of being the rear gunner.
RW: Yeah.
CB: How many times did your gunners shoot at other aircraft? Attacking aircraft in other words.
RW: In a way not as many as the attacks that we had because the idea was you didn’t use your guns unless you had to because it gave away your position so about what a half a dozen times, perhaps.
CB: Yeah.
RW: On one occasion we in the going over Germany we had [five] fighter attacks almost one after the other and if it hadn’t been for the diligence of the gunners we wouldn’t have escaped out of it, you know.
CB: You did corkscrews to get away from it.
RW: Corkscrewed out of it. And once you’ve started corkscrewing it’s no good, no point flying firing your guns.
CB: No.
RW: What did happen I was very fortunate I flew in both the, two of the aircraft who did the, the ton up aircraft who did over a hundred operations. One was in H How which was one of our squadron aircraft and the reason why I flew it was because our squadron was allocated the first two Rolls Royce turrets with the 2.5 guns in the back instead of the four 303s mainly we were the first one of the earliest ones to get it because of the attrition rate on the squadron we were given this the 2.5 and we were, WingCo asked us, well he didn’t ask us he told us to go on this operation and get into a position where the special duty operator could attract the fighter to us.
CB: Right.
RW: So we could try the guns out so we’re stooging along and there we are and Harry called up, he said, ‘Attack starboard quarter coming up.’ So we waited there and he got, when he got in the position where he pressed the guns, pressed the tits to fire the gun it didn’t operate. It didn’t go and we saw sparks flying past but fortunately there were lots of contrails around about so we nipped into the contrails and got rid, got corkscrewing and got rid of the fighter but when we got back the old boss was a bit concerned.
CB: Yeah.
RW: And he said, ‘We’ve got to have to find out what’s going on here,’ he said. And they discovered that they’d changed the anti-freeze grease on the guns and because of that we were told to go out the next night and try them out the next night. Which we did and unfortunately there were ten tenths cloud all over the place but we fired the guns and they worked alright. So that we flew and that was one of the reasons why we had the .5 guns. Because of the attrition rate on the squadron.
CB: Were they also on the mid upper?
RW: No. No, just the 2.5s in the mid upper gunner.
CB: Yeah.
RW: But again you don’t hear much about the mid upper gunners.
CB: No.
RW: But they were just as vulnerable as the others really. They were attacked from behind.
CB: They were an important lookout.
RW: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. We were so lucky the diligence of my crew and we were good pals. It wasn’t the skipper sitting up front dictating things. They were telling you what to do.
CB: Yeah.
RW: You had to make the final decision obviously but you were just a crew.
CB: What was the, what was the signaller doing?
RW: [laughs] As little as possible [laughs] he was a wonderful character, very mischievous and he always swore he was going to come on operations drunk and towards one of our last operations we were in the crew room and we were talking and he crept up behind me and patted me on the shoulder [drunken talk imitation] and I turned around. He disappeared and I turned around and I said, ‘You bugger.’ And he’d left a couple of WAAFs standing behind me. [laughs] This is the sort of character he was.
CB: This is an eighteen year old lad was he?
RW: Nineteen.
CB: Nineteen.
RW: He was nineteen. No. He was twenty.
CB: Oh was he?
RW: Around then yeah and this was the sort of character he was and he used to get bearings when nobody else could and he when the skipper wanted a bearing, a particular bearing, he’d get one and there’s an emergency frequency which you had to keep off and he used to get right on the edge of this frequency and pick up bearings that you weren’t supposed to have.
CB: So in practical terms.
RW: Yes.
CB: He was giving bearings all the time.
RW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Was he?
RW: Yeah and again very different from, very different from the navigator and mischievous little devil and I always remember one of the occasions which we remember very vividly was at Waddington after the war when we had our squadron reunion and we’d all had quite a lot to drink and we were getting back into our taxi and we were going to drop him off at his pub, the Wheatsheaf in Lincoln and on the way back he was relating in his very drunken manner how Norman, my bomb aimer lost his virginity to Luscious Lill in Grimsby and there was a policeman walking past the car and wanted to know why. This was the sort of character he was. He drank like a fish and on one occasion we went into Louth to have drink and they used to run a crew bus to run us into Louth and pick us up at half past eleven when the pubs closed and we were coming back and Taffy disappeared. He didn’t know where it was until we had a call from the police station saying we have a wireless operator from your station. A chap called Arndale. He’s in prison. And what he did, he had a skinful, gone down a lane to have a wee and there just happened to be a policeman there and half wee’d on the policeman so they took him in. We were on operations that, had to be on operations that night so I had to into Louth and pay ten shillings to bail him out from the police station to get him back. This was the sort of, wonderful characters and we used to go down the pub and drink enormously playing Moriarty and again, it was a form of relaxation.
CB: Yes sure.
RW: Getting rid of stress.
CB: Just a couple of things about the flying, excuse me.
RW: Yes that’s -
CB: What were you doing when you weren’t on operations?
RW: Well occasionally you did an air test. And perhaps did a little bit fighter affiliation practice being attacked by a fighter but generally your, you were completely relaxed to do whatever you wanted. There was no, no station duties whatsoever. You’d perhaps go up to flight and see what was going on with the others. Down the pub.
CB: But were you doing bombing practice in The Wash?
RW: Yes, there were -
CB: Were you doing circuits and bumps?
RW: I think, I think it was a place called Wainfleet.
CB: Yeah.
RW: Somewhere about The Wash where we used to do practice bombing little eleven and half pound practice bombs you know, practice bombs. Used to drop those.
CB: What height would you be flying when you dropped those?
RW: Oh about eight, ten thousand feet. You weren’t flying at twenty odd thousand feet.
CB: No.
RW: In those days and yes we used to do little air tests and things.
CB: Cross countries?
RW: Pardon?
CB: Cross country for navigation practice.
RW: Err not so much. You did those when you first got on the squadron and you, when you got the feel of the squadron you did a couple of cross countries then but after that no we didn’t have to do any cross countries at all and your relaxation was really resting and down the boozer, down the pub and I used to get into trouble. When we used to live in a nissen hut, little corrugated iron nissen hut and when the condensation, used to get the condensation inside used to run down the ridges and in the winter used to form icicles.
CB: Cause there’s no insulation.
RW: Yeah. No.
CB: No insulation.
RW: No insulation. No.
CB: No.
RW: And all we had was a pot stove in the middle of the room a little cylindrical pot stove which we used to go and try and rob people of their ration of fuel and burn furniture and all sorts of silly things and of course there were no ablutions or watering inside. The ablutions were outside in another hut with a concrete bench with taps on and that was all you had. It wasn’t a, Wimpy built the station in eighty days completely and there were a main roads. There was a main road into the station, a main road with flights, a perimeter track and a runway and that’s about it. And all the rest we were walking around on grass and mud as a matter of fact being called Ludford Magna they nicknamed the place as Mudford which is a -
CB: It was that bad was it?
RW: It was that bad.
CB: Right.
RW: But it was, basically apart from the stress of what was going on it was a happy station and this was reflected on the senior staff. The group captain and the WingCos in that place.
CB: But with the high attrition rate -
RW: Yeah.
CB: How, the senior officers would get shot down as well.
RW: Yeah.
CB: So how did the replacements work? Would it be somebody from the squadron already or would they post in a squadron leader or wing commander?
RW: I think it depended on who was available. Perhaps one of the flight commanders would be promoted or could be promoted and our flight commander, Squadron Leader Robinson he was a fortnight before he was a flight lieutenant but the flight commander was killed and with rapid promotion he is made squadron leader. So he became a squadron leader and it has happened that when a station commander who’d gone on operations, well WingCo Alexander a wonderful man, he used to come and take on a crew that had just arrive on the squadron. Take them on operations. So if there were lost they’d perhaps try and promote somebody on the squadron, from the flight to become station commander or bring somebody in with experience.
CB: Squadron commander you mean.
RW: Yes, squadron leader.
CB: Yeah.
RW: Bring in one of the senior officers to take over the station which didn’t happen on our lot. I know it did, it has happened but then rapid promotion for whoever is on the flight.
CB: Yeah.
RW: Which Robinson was. He became from the -
CB: Yeah. So -
RW: Yeah so this rapid promotion business was well deserved but Robinson became the, the flight commander when he was twenty five, twenty six. Yeah. Well, look at Gibson. He was twenty six, he was a group captain and the group -
CB: Yeah.
RW: Group captain in the service, yeah.
CB: Well did sometimes the station commanders fly on raids?
RW: Not the station commander. I know some of them did. Ours didn’t. Old Group Captain King. As far as we know he didn’t because we didn’t know everything that was going on but the Wing Commander Alexander who was in charge of all the flying as I say a new crew would come on the squadron and he’d take that squadron, take that crew that night. Normally, he did a second dicky trip which was an experienced to get experience on flying but when we started at the end, end of of ‘43 started the Battle of Berlin when the operations were called Gomorrah which was maximum effort err old Squadron Leader Robinson flight commander called me in and said. ‘Right you’re flying tonight.’ I didn’t get a second dicky trip but thinking of that sort of thing we used to have jinx. People in the squadron. Used to have WAAFs, you know, somebody little transport driver if they’d been out with this particular WAAF nearly everybody who’d been out with her got killed so she became a jinx, you know.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
RW: And we became a jinxed crew.
CB: Yeah.
RW: We took three different pilots on experience operations and all of them were killed.
CB: Were they?
RW: So they wouldn’t send any more people with us.
CB: No.
RW: Yes. Which is remarkable. So these jinx things did happen.
CB: How many hours did you fly in your thirty by the time you’d finished your tour of thirty ops?
RW: Something like a hundred and eighty three. Something like that.
CB: On, on ops.
RW: On ops.
CB: Ok.
RW: Do you want to see my logbook?
CB: I do. Please.
RW: Yes. When –
CB: We’ll do that in a minute but overall how many by the time you left the RAF how many hours had you flown?
RW: Oh that’s getting on a bit. I did something like two and half thousand hours.
CB: Did you really?
RW: Which, when you compare people flying now are talking about thousands of hours. Thirty, forty, fifty thousand hours. No, two and a half thousand hours I ended up with which was quite a long bit for, for the -
CB: When the Canadian Lancaster came over last year -
RW: Yeah.
CB: The senior pilot there, he’s on airlines, had done twenty seven thousand five hundred -
RW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Hours.
RW: Yeah. Amazing, yeah.
CB: I’m going to stop there for a moment. Thank you.
[Pause]
CB: Right we’re starting again.
RW: Right from the beginning.
CB: And what I’d like to do is to ask Rusty just to talk about the time from his birth really to a point at West Kirby.
RW: Yeah thank you. Gosh. That’s, well at ninety two it’s a long story. No, it’s not really but I was very fortunate in my bringing up. I was born in a place called Shotley Bridge in County Durham and my dad worked as a handyman on a colliery owner’s estate and there I don’t know whether it was because of the situation or what was going on we lived in a tied cottage and I got diphtheria. I was, I had mucous diphtheria quite a chronic illness in those days and my mum who’d been a nurse in a military hospital nursed me at home with that and mum and dad had quite different careers. My dad was in the navy. He was orphaned as a boy, a two year old boy and brought up by an elder sister who when he got a bit older didn’t want them so he was put in the navy in 1905 as a boy entry and he went through and became a naval diver. And my mum who was a nurse in the, a sister, a matron, assistant matron at a military hospital in Darlington. Went through the war and got herself a Royal Red Cross, Associated Red Cross which was one down from the nursing VC which was a considerable award. She was a wonderful lady. And dad with his naval experience on the Q ships got himself a DFM and he is a leading seaman which was rather unusual in those days ‘cause not very many lower rank NCOs, he wasn’t even an NCO, got a decoration. He got a DFM.
CB: A DSM.
RW: Yes a DSM. DSM, yes.
CB: Yeah.
RW: Distinguished Service Medal and he, having been orphaned, he didn’t have a home to go to and my uncle Stanley was in the navy as well and he brought dad home on leave up north to Newcastle and there he met my mum and my auntie and he married my mum which is, which is lovely but because of his health he couldn’t do any really serious work and he used to do handyman work on the colliery owner’s estate and eventually when he moved in to Newcastle he used to do shift work looking after the stable and the horses for the Coop and in those day they had something like four hundred and sixty horses in the stables. And the nostalgic smell of all that leather was, when I used to go to night schools to try and get some education his stables were just a bit up the road and I used to go and meet him at, class would finish at 9 o’clock, the stables used to finish at half nine. I used to go and meet him at the stables and have a cup of tea by the big stove in the kit room. Smelled wonderfully. Wonderful. And then we had to walk home two and a half miles. No question of buses. Walk home. And dad was, really was a very quiet, unassuming man. Mum was a nurse all her life stayed nursing as her career all her life and she really saved my life on more than one occasion. Nursing me at home with diphtheria and typhoid and then the consequence because we, because we lived in, had no inside toilet, it was only a cold tap and no electricity, gas, paraffin lamps. We had communal toilets outside on The Green at the back I obviously picked up the typhoid from there so my mum went out and set them on fire and burned them down. So there we are. I came back to Newcastle and lived in the city for a wee while and then as a young teenager then I got TB, I had a TB [?] and that kept me down very much so and I was in a wheelchair when I was twelve so my mum nursed me at home with the TB and in consequence my health suffered to the extent that I wasn’t allowed to play sport, I wasn’t allowed to go swimming, couldn’t do all the exercises that my brother used to do and because of the family teeth which weren’t very good and because of the medication I was taking my teeth were in a very poor state so I had all my teeth out when I was sixteen and in those days they didn’t put teeth straight back in away again they waited until your gums got hard and then they put some china teeth in in those days. China porcelain things and that ruined my early love life that did. Mind you I didn’t know what girls were anyway. As far as I was concerned they were the ones that danced backwards, you know, so my upbringing in that respect was very, very sheltered. In consequence I started to go to school when I was about four and a half in Newcastle on the City Road but soon becoming ill I had to stop school and when I did go back to school I was just, just under eleven when you took the scholarship exam at twelve and of course I didn’t pass the scholarship and I didn’t, my brother went to a grammar school. I couldn’t go to a grammar school. I went to a school where you learnt ship working and work on the, work with the prospect of going perhaps in to the drawing offices of the shipyard. All the local stuff. But there again I wasn’t allowed to join the scouts or play sports and yet and yet my dad used to love watching football and we used to go to Newcastle United and watch the football there from an early age, from about eight, so I got quite a bit of fondness for Newcastle United. So, there we are I was a very sickly child with very little education and of course in those days to join the services at the age of eighteen you were called up and you were directed into any of the services that they needed. Even go down the mines and become a Bevan boy which I didn’t relish so I told mum and dad my friend he was going to join up at seventeen and have some sort of choice of services you went into and dad having been in the navy I said to mum and dad I said, ‘I’m going to volunteer and I’m going to join the navy. Volunteer to join the navy’ And they said, ‘Yeah. With your health record you’ll never get in.’ So off I went down to the recruiting centre which was a school and in the navy classroom there was the navy recruiting officer and my own doctor, Doctor Wright and I thought. ‘If I go in there I’ll never get in.’ So, I went next door and joined the air force. And really they were very hard up. This poor chap with no teeth and a heart murmur and varicose veins and covered in psoriasis and I think the air force must have been very, very hard up and much to my amazement after going to West Kirby to sign on where you were attested and signed on and joined the air force at seventeen. And poor old mum wept buckets her poor little lad, her poor little innocent lad going to play soldiers um and of course from then you had to go down to London to ACRC, St Johns Wood to be attestation and see what air crew you were going to be. When you were first signed up and joined up I was told I could train as air crew which was amazing ‘cause, in view of my health. Anyway after being signed on and got the kings shilling, not that I got a shilling but had to swear on the bible down to ACRC where you had attestation where you had medicals and exams. The medicals we used to have were in the Lords Cricket Ground and used to line up just with your underpants on and arms akimbo with your hands on your hips and they were at the side with the hypodermic syringe and pumping this stuff into you and the doc used to come and do what they called an FFI, free from infection, whereby you walked down the front, dropped your trousers and they used to go down and examine you with a little stick and the back, they went around the back, they went around the back and said bend over and made me wonder what on earth was going to happen but there you are if anyone collapsed when you were there or fainted there they just produced all the work on the ground. They just gave the injections on the ground. So we being, being at the Lords Cricket Ground you know and of course the result of that, much to my amazement, I was told I could train as a pilot because when you first went there you were trained as aircrew UT aircrew with a little white flash in your cap to show you were aircrew, trainee aircrew. So there we are I was told I could train as a pilot. And of course from there you had to start learning about the air force so I was posted to Newquay down in Cornwall at the ITW Initial Training Wing where you learned about the air force, square bashing, how to salute and all these sort of things. The admin side of the air force. So having completed that we were posted to, I was posted to South Africa and issued with the tropical kit and off to East Kirby, West, West Kirby at Manchester er at Liverpool to catch the boat to go out to South Africa. And in the billets there when the time came all the people left except eleven of us who were left in the room all Ws. All Walls, Walkers all the Ws left behind and we were left there and the camp disappeared. They took all the men off the camp, all the operating men off the camp and there were just the eleven, we lived off the NAAFI for a week and not knowing what on earth was going on until the next posting that came in and they were all WAAFs. All the WAAFs came in and seeing eleven blokes in their billet you know wondering what on earth was going on. So did we. Then the WAAF officer said, you know, ‘What are you doing?’ Well. ‘We were posted to South Africa and we didn’t go.’ Ah draft dodging. So we were posted down to the B course at Brighton. The bad boys course at Brighton because of the because we were accused of draft dodging and down there we were up very early in the morning and booking in at half past eight at night which we didn’t take very much enjoyment out of this sort of thing and the parades were very, very strict and doubling and running everywhere and we complained to the orderly officer one day at a mealtime telling him, you know we shouldn’t be here. We haven’t done anything wrong and he didn’t believe it and he said, ‘Oh you carry on.’ So the eleven of us, we wrote a letter and we all signed it and sent it to the station commander who had us in his office and he said. ‘This constitutes mutiny,’ which is a court martial offence and when we’d explained to him what had happened he did a bit of an investigation, he said, ‘Oh that’s alright he said, ‘Alright just book in in the morning and come in at night time.’ So we had a few days, four or five day holidaying in Brighton just walking about and spending all our time in [Sherry’s] Bar I think it was and of course then we had to start again. And when we were posted we were posted to another ITW at Stratford on Avon but all our kit and all our records had been sent out to South Africa so nobody knew anything about us so we had to start again so we did all our ITW again at Stratford on Avon and that was very pleasant. We took over most of the hotels for lectures and bedding and I can say I was on the stage in Stratford on Avon which is quite a, quite a thrill mainly as we used the theatre as aircraft recognition. We had to go on stage to point out aeroplanes but that was quite an experience and of course having completed the course successfully there you had to go and prove that we could fly and go overseas so we were posted to a place called Codsall, just north of Wolverhampton where there was a civilian aerodrome where we were, had to go flying Tiger Moths and once we’d gone solo that was it, forgot about aeroplanes. Some of the poor souls couldn’t go solo and they were re-posted. So, fortunately, I managed it and on the Empire Training Scheme where they used to send trainees to South Africa, some to Australia even, some to Arnold Scheme in America. I was posted to Canada on the Empire Training Scheme and this was at a place called Dewinton which is just south of Calgary.
CB: So this is, what date are we talking about here?
RW: This, this was in early ’42.
CB: Right.
RW: Early ’42.
CB: Can I just go back to what you said earlier?
RW: Yeah.
CB: You were selected for aircrew.
RW: Yeah.
CB: But you must have gone through some kind of process that suggested you were suitable for aircrew rather than -
RW: Yeah.
CB: A ground crew job.
RW: Yeah.
CB: So what was that?
RW: Yes. When you were first signed on, volunteered as air crew, when you went to Padgate to be officially sworn in to the service you did some testing there. You did some examinations there and with, fortunately with my experience as a pupil surveyor doing vectors and things on the ground is a similar sort of thing they did in the air with wind resistance and this sort of thing and that helped me enormously to pass the ground exams and having done that minor exams there you were then told you could train as UT aircrew.
CB: Right.
RW: Becoming UT aircrew PNB.
CB: Yeah.
RW: If you couldn’t succeed as a pilot you could perhaps become a navigator or a bomb aimer PNB.
CB: Yeah.
RW: And I was fortunate to say I could train as a pilot. So we -
CB: Just, just to put that into context. Earlier you talked about your experience of then getting to leave school.
RW: Yeah.
CB: How did you get in to bring the surveyor?
RW: Ah the well I -
CB: Which was the basis for your selection.
RW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: For aircrew.
RW: I had, the school I went to was a training establishment more than a school. Learning about draughtsmanship and this sort of thing -
CB: Yeah.
RW: To go on the shipyards and you had to leave there when you were fifteen, sixteen. So I left school, no idea of what sort of job I could get whatsoever. So my brother who was, he was a grammar school boy and very highly educated, a very clever lad, he used to work in his spare time at the Newcastle repertory theatre and this Christmas they were putting on a play called “The Circus Girl” and they were short of somebody to take the part of the monkey in the play and my brother said I’ve got a brother who is doing nothing maybe he’d be it so I became a monkey in the Christmas pantomime at the Newcastle rep which was great fun. The devils, they wore a uniform, skin monkey skin with not much else really. The devils used to put itching powder inside that actually. Not very nice. And of course then when the pantomime was finished they said, ‘What are you doing now?’ and I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I’ve got to look for a job.’ They said, ‘Would you like to stop on?’ So I stayed on the Newcastle rep for nearly a year as an assistant assistant assistant stage manager and with the girls doing quick changes at the side of the theatre you learned an awful lot about life but my aunt who had a very good friend who was, worked, had another friend who owned and ran an architect’s surveyors office said would I like to go and work for them. So I went and worked at the architect surveyor’s office and became a pupil surveyor. I was doing the exams for the Institute of Surveying, ISF, and I passed their preliminary exams but they didn’t count because I didn’t have a matriculation or school cert so I was going to night school four nights a week learning about mathematics and history and I wasn’t getting on terribly well. I don’t think I would have ever qualified completely but very fortunately the war came along and having volunteered to join up I left surveying and became, and joined the air force.
CB: So that’s how you effectively qualified for being air crew.
RW: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
RW: Yeah.
CB: Ok. Yeah.
RW: So the fact that I qualified for air crew, the fact that, not so much my health record although the medicals I had were very comprehensive medicals the fact that the mathematics I was doing for the surveying helped me enormously with the navigation exercises we were doing in the thing so that, I think, helped towards the fact that I was allowed to train as air crew apart from the fact that they must have been very short of aircrew and they wanted somebody [to fill the boots]. Yeah, so -
CB: Just a quick question about your initial training.
RW: Yeah.
CB: How many hours did you fly before you went solo?
RW: When we first went solo at Codsall in Wolverhampton it was about eight or ten.
CB: Right.
RW: Something like that. When we got out to Canada you really had to start again and you were doing sort of fifteen, twenty hours before you really were allowed to go solo.
CB: So I’m just interrupting now because this goes into the early part of the interview because it got missed.
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Identifier
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AWaughmanR150803
PWaughmanR1501
Title
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Interview with Rusty Waughman. Two
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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
Format
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02:55:47 audio recording
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Pending review
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2015-08-03
Description
An account of the resource
Russell (Rusty) Waughman was born in Shotley Bridge, County Durham. Due to serious poor health as a child his education was interrupted. He describes his training with the Empire Training School in Canada. He was posted to 101 Squadron which was a special squadron with the ABC system. He describes some of the unusual aspects of squadron life such as premonitions and the close connections between everyone on the station. He had many close calls including having to right the aircraft which was flying upside down due to being blown of course by a nearby explosion. On one occasion he managed to keep his Lancaster flying despite a collision with another aircraft. On another occasion the aircraft was again damaged during an attack on Munich. However, as they made their slow progress back they found themselves flying over France in daylight and were amazed to see from the distance two Spitfires which had been sent to escort them home. He also took part in the Berlin airlift.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Canada
England--Lincolnshire
Contributor
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Julie Williams
101 Squadron
1662 HCU
82 OTU
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
Bombing of Mailly-le-Camp (3/4 May 1944)
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
briefing
C-47
control tower
coping mechanism
crewing up
dispersal
entertainment
faith
fear
FIDO
forced landing
ground crew
ground personnel
H2S
Heavy Conversion Unit
heirloom
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
love and romance
Me 109
mid-air collision
military living conditions
military service conditions
nose art
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
perimeter track
pilot
promotion
RAF Abingdon
RAF Blyton
RAF Desborough
RAF hospital Matlock
RAF Ludford Magna
recruitment
sanitation
searchlight
Stearman
superstition
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/226/5634/MJaquesCR136865-151005-06.2.pdf
865aa04e6dfa7ec251a8c5b0865a59cb
Dublin Core
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Title
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Jaques, Reg
Reg Jaques
Charles R Jaques
Charles Jaques
C R Jaques
C Jaques
Description
An account of the resource
17 items. The collection concerns Pilot Officer Charles Reginald Jaques (1913-1943, 136865 Royal Air Force) and contains a letter, his history, personnel document, items concerning his wedding, the names of the his crew's next of kin, condolence letter and nine photographs. The collection also contains an oral history interview with Susan Carol Doreen Chapman about her father, Charles Reginald Jaques. Reg Jaques was a navigator flying in Lancasters with 103 Squadron, RAF Elsham Wolds in 1943. He was killed along with his crew in a collision with another Lancaster on 16 December 1943. <br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Susan Chapman and catalogued by Nigel Huckins. <br /><br />Additional information on Reg Jaques is available via the <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/112003/">IBCC Losses Database</a>.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-05
2017-10-14
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. 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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Jaques, CR
Transcribed document
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Charles Reginald Jaques
24th March 1913-16th December 1943
Born: Coundon, Bishop Auckland Co. Durham
Married: Gwendoline Betty Stokes 1st January 1941 at Gnosall Staffs.
Occupation: Chief financial officer, Newport (Shropshire) Local Authority (a reserved occupation)
Service WW11
1941
August 5th 1941 date of enlistment. Official number 1577665 Aircraftsman second class
August 6th 1941 Service commenced "for the duration of the current emergency"
Unit Birmingham Training Reserve
August 6th 1941 Recommended for training as Pilot/Observer 26 Air Crew School (statement says "not to be employed other than as pilot or Observer without reference to Air Ministry (M.7)”
November 3rd 1941 transferred to 1ACRC (Air Crew School)
December 18th 1941 graduated as a Sergeant. RAF NPO 106 Ontario
December 31st 1941 Rank noted as AC2 (Aircraftsman Second Class). Very good character and trade as Aircraftsman/Observer
1942
January 7th 1942 No 1 RAF Station Moncton New Brunswick
January 17th 1942 transferred to 3 ITW (initial Training Wing)
24th February 1942 transferred to Canada
Moncton New Brunswick, Ontario, Niagara Falls photograph (Pilot Officer)
Home on the Queen Mary used as a troop ship (Auntie Adge)
April 1st 1942 transferred to 1EAOS (Air Observer School) rank Observer
April 29th 1942 photograph Eastbourne. No 1 E.O.A.S (Air Observer School)
December 12th 1942 rank LAC (Leading Aircraftsman) . Very good character rank U/t/Observer
December 17th 1942 Para. 652(14) discharged on appointment to a temporary commission.
[page break]
Total service 1 year 135 days.
Total Qualifying service 1 year 47 days
December 18th 1942 31 A.N.S (Air Navigation School) unit on appointment ? sergeant
1943
30th March 1943 Granted a commission for the emergency RAFVR (Royal Air Force volunteer Reserve)
2nd April Kingstown Carlisle Pilot Officer. ground instrument training, map reading in Tiger Moths, "due for 1st flight today"
30th April 1943 Flying Officer with effect from 15th June 1943
May 25th 1943 ???? Navigator training No 10(0) AFU (Advanced Flying Unit)
June 4th 1943 Aircrew (Navigator) NO 30 OTU (Operational Training Unit)
June 30th 1943 Dumfries/Harrogate. Flying hours 35 days and 11 nights
8th July 1943 letter Mum to Auntie Edna, Reg stationed 14 miles away? Seighford or Hixon. "using his bike to get home"
????"? date No 30 OUT(Operational Training Unit}
September 6th 1943 New crew. He says has changed stations from Hixon to its satellite of Seighford 3 miles from Gnosall
September 14th 1943 No 1662 CU 1 Group Flying (Navigator)
September 15th to report to Lindholm Doncaster a conversion unit for Halifax and Lancaster
8th October 1943 -3rd November 1943 RAF Blyton undertaking ground studies
3rd November 1943 RAF Blyton
November 12th 1943 No 103 Squadron Navigator Operational Flying
November?? RAF Elsham Wolds
December 15th 1943 letter written to Auntie Edna. He had been shopping in Scunthorpe for Christmas present for Maureen, Val and Pauline. Parcels at PO. Due for leave 22nd December.
December 16th Lancaster JB670 took off at 16.37 hours for Berlin. Collide with Lancaster LM332 576 Squadron over Ulceby. He, Flight Sergeant Richter and Sergeant Plampton were attached to 103 Squadron from 576 Squadron. Told scratch crew as Flu in the camp
[page break]
December 23rd buried with the crews of both planes at Cambridge City cemetery (RAF Regional cemetery) Mum (Betty Stubbins),Widow, Auntie Adge(Marion Slater) sister in law, Uncle Jack(Jaques) Auntie Vera(Waters) Auntie Edna(Wilson), siblings, attended
Details from record of service in the Royal Air Force
Details from family, letters and photographs and diary of John(Jack) Jaques
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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Reg Jaques biography
Description
An account of the resource
Account of wartime service of Charles Reginald Jaques who joined the Royal Air Force in 1941 despite being in a reserved occupation. Includes training as a navigator in Canada and Great Britain, his commission, posting to 103 Squadron at Royal Air Force Elsham Wold and his death when his Lancaster JB670 collided with another Lancaster LM332 from 576 Squadron over Ulceby on 16 December 1943.
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Identifier
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MJaquesCR136865-151005-06
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Grimsby
England--Scunthorpe
Temporal Coverage
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1943-12-16
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
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Three page typewritten document
Contributor
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Peter Bradbury
103 Squadron
30 OTU
576 Squadron
crash
final resting place
killed in action
Lancaster
mid-air collision
Operational Training Unit
RAF Elsham Wolds
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/430/7761/PMartinaG1801.2.jpg
55babbaf3c6e1f992844dbeb6ac8dfa4
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/430/7761/AMartinaG180611.1.mp3
cdfe5eeee15d9a31294fc7af3f3a2cde
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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Martina, Gilberto
G Martina
Gilberto Martina
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Gilberto Martina who recollects wartime experiences in Chiusaforte and in the Carnic Alps.
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
2018-06-11
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Spatial Coverage
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Italy
Alps
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 Gilberto Martina
Creator
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Erica Picco
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-06-11
Format
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00:30:29 audio recording
Language
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ita
Type
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Sound
Coverage
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Civilian
United States Army Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Italy
Alps
Italy--Carnia
Italy--Chiusaforte
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-02-17
Description
An account of the resource
Gilberto Martina reminisces his childhood in Chiusaforte and in the Canal del Ferro area: disrupted schooling, fear of Germans, subsistence farming, saboteurs, and one of his mates being killed by a bomb found in a pile of litter. Stressed how the town was a strategic target owing to its position on a main Alpine railway, describes the regular sights of aircraft flying to Germany, and reminisces how villagers spent most of their time inside an underground shelter. Describes the 17 February 1945 bombing in which aircraft were so tightly packed that one was taken down by anti-aircraft fire, collided with another one mid-air and both crashed nearby: ten aircrews were buried in the local cemetery, two survived and visited Chiusaforte when the remains of their fellow crew members were later repatriated. Claims that Allied air forces were more hated than the Germans for inflicting widespread damage and senseless suffering; describes an episode when villagers spat on American and British troops at the end of the war; elaborates on the tormentors / liberators duality.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Lapsus. Laboratorio di analisi storica del mondo contemporaneo
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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AMartinaG180611
PMartinaG1801
Conforms To
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Pending OH transcription
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
childhood in wartime
fear
final resting place
mid-air collision
perception of bombing war
shelter
shot down
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/510/8413/ADunnGC170308.1.mp3
0bdeaf205e0caafc4a51fbc886e08f7f
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Dunn, George
George Charles Dunn
G C Dunn
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Dunn, GC
Description
An account of the resource
Six items. Two oral history interviews with George Dunn DFC (1922 1333537, 149315 Royal Air Force), a photograph a document and two log books. He flew operations as a pilot with 10, 76, and 608 Squadrons then transferred to 1409 Meteorological Flight.
There is a sub collection of his photographs from Egypt.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-03-08
Rights
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
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Transcription
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 8th March 2017 and I’m, I’m in Saltdean with George Dunn to talk about his experiences in life, and particularly in the RAF. So what are your earliest recollections of life, George?
GD: I think probably er, when I went to infants school, which was about five and er, that was at West Meads Infant School in Whitstable. From there I went to the Oxford Street Boys Council School and er, I was quite good at football and er, I played and was captain of the juniors, and then the seniors, and er, I did actually get picked for the county but that’s another story, because it happened just after I left school er, where did we go from there?
CB: What did father do? What did your father do?
GD: My, my father was a plasterer, I had two sisters er, one is two years younger than me, and the other one is er, twelve years younger than me, she still lives in Whitstable and the other one lives in er, New South Wales, Australia. I left school when I was fourteen and er, joined Pickfords the removal company as a junior clerk. I stayed with them in, in the, in the following years, I played football for various local sides, and er, I can remember the day that the war broke out. I was sitting round a little radio set that my father had bought with Black Cat tobacco coupons er, we weren’t very well off so that was one way of getting a, getting a radio set. I don’t know how many cigarettes he must have smoked to get it [laughs]. I can well remember, we were all sitting round this radio set on the day that war was declared, anxiously waiting for Mr. Chamberlain to er, make his announcement er, which he did at eleven o’clock I think it was, and it was a funny feeling ‘cos one minute we were at peace, and in the blink of an eyelid, we were at war and of course we were all wondering what it was going to mean, er going on a bit er, when the blitz started on London I used to stand on the er, cliffs at Whitstable and could see all these hordes of German bombers coming up the Thames Estuary. Because Whitstable is on the North Kent coast and er, it was er, it was an awful sight because you knew what was going to happen when they reached London. I also saw a lot of the Battle of Britain er, which er took place obviously mostly over Kent and Sussex, and I think possibly that might have influenced me in why I joined the RAF. The other reasons that I joined is, for one thing I have a fear of drowning, and I didn’t fancy the army ‘cos one always had a picture in the background, the trenches and er, the terrible slaughter that went on in the First World War so I thought well I’ll go for the RAF. When I went up to Chatham, er this, I would be eighteen at that time, this was in January 1941, I went up to Chatham and er decided that I would apply for wireless operator air gunner. We had to do a written, a written exam and er, when I went to the interview, I think there were three RAF officers there, and they said, ‘why have you applied to er, er for a WOPAG?’ So I said, ‘well I don’t really think that I’m sufficiently educated to er, go for anything higher like a pilot’, and they said, ‘well we’ve had a look at your results and we think you are qualified, so would you consider er changing to under training pilot?’ So I said, ‘well yes, I’d be quite happy to.’ I was quite elated to think that er, then er, National Registration Card was stamped U/T pilot, under training pilot. I wasn’t called up until June of that year 1941 and I went down to um, oh prior to that, of course, after I volunteered at Chatham, I did go to Uxbridge to be sworn in, going back to er, being called up, I went down to Babbacombe and spent a week there getting kitted up er, listening to er, lectures on Air Force Law er. and that sort of thing and doing drill, and at the end of that er week, we were then posted to initial training wing, which was number eight at Newquay. That was a six week course which involved er, going back to partially mathematics, basic navigation, Air Force Law, Morse Code, and then at the end of that, I was posted up to a transit camp at er, West Kirby in the Wirral. I had only been there a short while when I was strickened down with appendicitis and peritonitis and er, I was on the dangerously ill list, my parents were sent for to come up because I was not expected to live er, anyway fortune favoured me and I did recover. At the end of that, I was given three weeks, I spent three weeks in an RAF hospital, had two operations and er, at the end of that was given three weeks sick leave er, after which I had to go to RAF Holton for a, a full medical at the end of that they said, ‘we’re going to put you on six months home service, you won’t be able to go abroad.’ Which rather disappointed me because er, there was very little elementary flying being done in England at that stage, nearly all the flying was being done under the Commonwealth Air Training Scheme at Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia and er, lots of places in Canada When I got back to er West Kirby after sick leave, within about three days, I found I was on draft for Southern Rhodesia. Well, I’d always I’d always fancied Canada so I went up to the warrant officer and I said er, ‘can’t send me to Southern Rhodesia,’ showed him my card which said six months home service. So I was taken off draft, spent a few more weeks there just kicking the heels, and then was sent to another transit camp at Heaton Park in Manchester. There again it was a question of weeding gardens, picking up litter, literally didn’t know what to do with you. A few days before Christmas, I suddenly was told I was on draft for Canada, so this time I kept quiet and I was on tenterhooks right up until the day we set sail, which was Christmas Eve and er, on the ship, and we set off. It was a an awful ship er from Norway, it was called “The Bergensfjord” and the weather was atrocious across the Irish Sea, and for thirty six hours I was absolutely stricken down, along with many others, with sea sickness. We were, we were just, people were just laying all over the ship, in the toilets, absolutely prostrate, anyway we finally recovered and we got to, to Halifax Nova Scotia I think it was, er New Year’s Day or thereabouts. From there we caught the train down to Moncton, which was a Royal Canadian Air Force Base, and when we got there that evening, the dining table was a sight to behold. There was butter, sugar, milk, ice cream, steak, you name it, it was there, and we thought if this is what we’re going to get for the next nine months or so, it’s gonna be great. We then went on to er, I was posted to Saskatchewan, which took us three days to get there on, on the train, the seats were just slatted on this train so our backsides had got quite a few dents in when we got there er, it was snowing practically the whole way and quite deep snow at, at er a little place called Caron. There was nothing there apart from the RAF or the RCAF base and er a couple of grain elevators and two or three cottages, it was about eighteen miles west of Moose Jaw, so I did my er, elementary training there on Tiger Moths, which I think was sixty hours, and from there I was posted to a place called Weyburn, which was south east of Moose Jaw, and that was on er twin engine Avro Ansons. At the end of that course, we got our wings and after that we were posted back to Moncton, which included er a week’s leave which I spent with some distant relatives in Toronto, also called Dunn. From there we went up to Halifax again and er, we were shipped back to this country er, arriving here at Greenock, from Greenock we went down to Bournemouth to await a posting er, to carry on the further flying. I went to er Little Rissington and from there er, to Chipping Norton, which was a satellite of er Rissi, and did a er short course on Air Speed Oxfords, which was about I think forty five hours, that was to get used to er the flying conditions in this country because of course, Canada was well lit up, but this country was under blackout conditions so it was quite, quite a change. On completion of that course, I was sent up to er, Lossiemouth er, on er OTU on Wellingtons 1C’s and it was there that we formed our crew, initially of five people. Now the way a crew was formed was quite casual, we were strolling around in a hanger, in my case I um, met up with a chap from Ayr who was a bomb aimer, and he said, ‘are you crewed up yet?’ and I said, ‘no.’ He said er, ‘do you fancy crewing up with me or me with you?’ I said, ‘yeah fair enough.’ he said, ‘I happen to know another Scotsman called er Todd, Jock Todd, he’s a wireless operator. If you like I’ll have a word with him,’ so that was made three of us, we then met up with er, er a pilot officer [phone ringing]. Shall I take that?
CB: So you’ve got your wireless operator.
GD: And er, he said -
CB: And, your bomb aimer.
GD: And he said um, ‘oh I know um, I’ve also met up with pilot office and navigator from Belfast, he’s not crewed up with anyone,’ so we got introduced and er, that made four of us and um, I forget now we, we, we met up with a little Canadian rear gunner er, a little chap called Dixie Dean er, so he made up the five which was all you needed at um OUT. From there we did our, we did our course, and er were then posted to um, Rufforth, which was a Heavy Conversion Unit, Halifaxes er, near York. Whilst we were there er, Reg the navigator knew of another gunner, a mid upper gunner who was er remustered physical training instructor, and er so that made us up with six and then the flight engineer was the only one that was actually allocated. This chap came up to me, his name was Ferris Newton, and he said, ‘er are you George Dunn?’ I said, ‘yes,’ he said, ‘oh I’ve been allocated as your flight engineer,’ so I said, ‘fair enough.’ Well of course it was a bit of a bonus er having him, because it turned out that not only did he own a car but his wife and his mother ran a pub at Horsforth near Leeds, so we used to er get seven of us, if you can believe it, in a Morris 8, that was three in the front and four in the back, and we would go over to er Horsforth from er Rufforth, and er well now perhaps I’m jumping the gun a bit. We didn’t go there then, we waited till we got on squadron, anyway when we got to Rufforth, I’d hardly my feet had hardly touched the ground and they said, ‘you’ve got to go off to 10 Squadron at Melbourne to do your two second dickie trips,’ because a pilot, had to go and do two trips with an experienced crew before he was allowed to take his own crew on operations, but at that time I hadn’t even set foot in a Halifax, most pilots did a few hours flying and then they were sent off, but in my case I was sent off virtually straight away, and of course, of all of all trips, the first one was er Essen, which was probably the worst target that you could er imagine having to go to, probably the most heavily defended town in the Ruhr, so I did two I did Essen that night and Kiel the following night and then went back to um Rufforth to start the conversion on the Halifaxes. And of course, the first thing the others wanted to know, you know, ‘how did you get on George? What was it like?’ so I said, ‘well put it this way, when you go on your first trip make sure that you got a clean pair of underpants with you.’ [laughs] Anyway we, we got through our Heavy Conversion Unit and er we were then posted to 76 Squadron at Linton-on-Ouse. Now at Linton, there were two squadrons operating at the same time, 76 and 78. I did five trips, I think it was, from there with the crew and then sadly they said, ‘your um, your whole squadron is going to a place called Holme on Spalding Moor.’ What had happened was that the Canadian group, number six group, was being formed and they were given all the peacetime stations, and this applied to the Australians as well but both the Australians and the Canadians said, ‘look our chaps are not going in to Nissen Huts, if they go do operations on raids over Germany, there going to have something decent to live in,’ so we were shipped out to a Nissen Camp, and the Canadians and the Australians got all the peacetime stations so that’s where we finished. We carried on our tour from Holme on Spalding Moor, and of course during that during that period, when we got the nights off, we would pile in this Morris 8, three in the front and four in the back, and off to um “The Old Ball” at er Horsforth, and of course the locals were very good to us, we stayed overnight er, one or two of us stayed in the pub, the others were put up by some of the customers, they were very hospitable there’s no doubt about it, and of course, we’d go off back early in the morning, the following morning feeling a bit worse for wear. So where do we go from there?
CB: So when you came to the end, did you do thirty ops per tour?
GD: I did thirty, the rest of the crew didn’t because I had two in front of them.
CB: Yes with somebody else, with another captain did you?
GD: When I went to Number 10 Squadron.
CB: Yes.
GD: Yes.
CB: Right, so what happened then?
GD: Well when we finished our tour of course, we were all split up which was a bit emotional, and from the first morning, following our last trip, the following morning I was woken up by the adjutant and said, ‘sorry, but we’ve got a rather sad task for you. You’ve got to take four coffins containing two Mosquito crews which collided nearby, you’ve got to take them to um, York Station to go to their respective er, er towns where they were being being buried,’ er which was a little bit of an anti-climax because you know, there was only one er place beside the driver, the rest of us had to sit in the back with the coffins. So there we were, we were split up, and er I went to um er OTU at Finningley, Wellingtons again, 1C’s, er I didn’t stay at Finningley long because they had a satellite station at Worksop, and er there I was instructing. I did two instructors courses, one on Wellingtons at Church Broughton and another one, a month at the Central Flying School at er Lulsgate Bottom, which is now Bristol Airport. I carried on instructing until I think it was just before Christmas ’45, and er I saw a notice on the er on the board about er, they wanted er Mosquito crews, well I’d already become friendly with a, with a navigator who was in the navigation section at Worksop, and er I said to him, ‘how do you fancy going back on ops, on Mossis?’ He said, ‘I’m a bit fed up with instructing,’ I said, ‘yeah well so am I,’ so we volunteered to go back and er, we were posted to er, Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire, and from there to er, a satellite station at Barford St. John, which was just outside of Banbury. We did short, I did about four or five hours dual on a Mosquito before I went solo and from there we were posted to 608 Squadron, which was a main force Mosquito Squadron at Downham Market in Norfolk. I did a number of trips there, mostly to Berlin, and then a friend of mine who was on a Mosquito met flight at Whitton said, ‘there’s a vacancy come up for a crew with us on a met flight, do you fancy it?’ So we said, ‘yes,’ we weren’t, we weren’t all that happy at 608 Squadron, I don’t know why but the atmosphere wasn’t the same as when it was on Halifaxes, so we moved to Whitton on this met flight, and er I did er a few ops on that and then war, the war finished and then I stayed on er, I stayed on the met flight, we moved to er Upwood er near Peterborough, and then it was disbanded. It was the 1409, the met flight, and it was disbanded, and we went on to 109 Squadron which was being converted to a met flight, er from there, we had very three quick moves, we went to Woodhall Spa, Wickenby, and Hemswell, all within a month, and then whilst we were at Hemswell, there was a request, they wanted to start a met flight er Mosquitos, at er Malta. So they got ten crews together er and er I’d still got my navigator, and we flew out in a Stirling to Malta and when we got there, the er powers that be said, ‘what are you lot doing here? We don’t know anything about you,’ so we, we appointed, well most of the pilots were flight lieutenants, there’s no other rank above that, so we appointed a spokesman and he went and saw the CO, the Group Captain Station Commander, he said, ‘well I don’t know what’s going on,’ he said, ‘we’ve got no idea of what you are doing there, we, we weren’t told,’ so they gave us er, they gave us an old hut on the far side of Luqa Airfield, they gave us an old lorry to transport us so we just spent a lovely six weeks in Malta going to Valletta and Silema, they didn’t want to know us. Anyway they, whilst we were there, I did manage to get one or two ferry trips in er from Italy in Mosquitos, and er eventually they decided that they weren’t going to form a met flight after all, so we were split up, I went to um a, a, a transit camp at El Marso, which was er well, and my navigator which was just outside Cairo and er literally just kicked our heels. We went into Cario most days, sunbathing at er one of the hotels swimming pools, and then eventually I er got a posting to Ismailia and my navigator got a posting to Heliopolis, which is a suburb of Cairo, and when, and when I got to Ismailia, I reported to the er flight commander, who was er Flight Lieutenant Tommy Grace, I said, well told him the story that I’d been through Malta and we’d er we weren’t required after all and er I said, ‘I don’t know what I’ve come here for?’ I said er, ‘what aircraft do you fly?’ He said, ‘we fly Spitfires,’ so I said, ‘well I haven’t flown a single engine aircraft since I flew a Tiger Moth er when I first er started flying.’ ‘Oh,’ he said ‘I shouldn’t worry about it,’ he said, ‘you’ll soon get used to it,’ gave me the pilots notes on the Spitfire. In those days, there was no dual er Spitfires so er I just got in and went off, and what we were doing, basically we were renovating um aircraft, mostly Spitfires for er the Greek Air Force. We testing them and then there were two Greek pilots there and once we passed them, they had to pass them out and then when we got er about ten Spitfires ready, we used to take them over to Athens with a Lancaster escort to do the navigating and er refuel at er Cyprus, and come back to Egypt in a Lanc as passengers, and of course whilst I was there I managed to get a a trip in a Hurricane, a Mustang and various other training aircraft. Harvard, a thing called a Fairchild Argus, er an Auster, a Proctor. it was a free for all [laughs].
CB: How long were you doing that for?
GD: And then er this would be and then it got to um, it would be, I suppose about May and I had a phone call to say I was wanted over at a tented camp, everything was tents, the mess, the living quarters, everything was tents. There wasn’t a building there apart from the hangars and they said er, ‘we’ve got some Halifaxes here that er we want testing, and we haven’t got a, there’s not a Halifax pilot in the area anywhere that we can know of.' Well just a few weeks prior to that, an engineering officer had also been posted from Kasfareet where I was then, to this place at er Kilo 40, which was known as Gebel Hamzi and um, he’s gone to sleep look [laughs].
CB: He’s doing all right.
GD: [Laughs] and er there were some Yugoslav pilots there who er had never flown Halifaxes, so I had to take them up, test these Halifaxes and er pass these er Yugoslav pilots out to fly them.
CB: Where had they come from then?
GD: Don’t know where they come from, er and then of course whilst I, whilst I was there, I got the opportunity of flying a couple back to this country and er also in that time, I flew, I think it was a couple of Mosquitoes back here, er and my last flight in June ’47 was to bring a Halifax back here which I left at er Thetford.
CB: But what was your unit? If you were flying these things and ferrying them, what was the unit? Was it an MU or was it a squadron?
GD: No, no, no, it wasn’t a squadron. I’ll tell you what it was [opens a draw looking for something].
CB: So just get them. So your unit was at Ismailia still but it was actually an MU as well as flying base?
GD: Well that’s, that’s what it was called, 132 MU.
CB: MU yes.
GD: There was no squadron.
CB: No.
GD: No squadron or anything like that.
CB: What I meant was, MU didn’t normally -
GD: Just 132 and 132 MU
CB: Yes. [Pause] So when you, you delivered the aircraft, Halifax or Mosquito, how did they get you back there?
GD: I came back in used to come back in the York
CB: Ah.
GD: Yeah, where are we [flipping through pages of book] yeah came back in the York from Lyneham.
CB: Lyneham. So you’d fly all these planes into Lyneham would you?
GD: No, no er, one, once I went to Gosforth with one and then we’d nip home for a few days leave and er report back to Lyneham for for, ‘cos that was transport command.
CB: Right. So why were these planes being brought back, what had happened to their crews?
GD: I don’t know, you know, I don’t even know why they were there.
CB: Because the Yugoslav pilots were flying the Halifaxes.
GD: I don’t know where they went to, I was only there, when did I go there, October ’46 I went to Kilo 40 [looking through book], yes I was only there for, only there for a short period.
CB: Yes, but what was the reason for you going out to Ismailia in the first place?
GD: Well that was when, that was when we, we didn’t form the met flight er see.
CB: Right.
GD: When they split us all up at Malta, I don’t know where the others went to but my navigator and myself found ourselves at El Marsa, at this transit camp near Cairo.
CB: So when you returned the Halifaxes to Britain, was it just the two of you on the plane?
GD: Oh no, no.
CB: You had a full crew?
GD: No, no, no we didn’t have gunners, just er er wireless op, navigator, flight engineer, and pilot.
CB: Right.
GD: No, no need for gunners.
CB: No.
GD: And then of course we used to have to clear customs er when we got back here in those days.
CB: What were you bringing back - figs?
GD: [Laughs] Oh they were very hot the customs yeah. I brought a Mosquito back once and they were, they were quite thorough, went all through the fuselage and everything.
CB: What did people bring back then carpets or? I mean a serious point because in the Middle East they made carpets.
GD: Well I suppose people, a few people tried to get back cigarettes and booze, usual thing, but er it wasn’t worth it. No they were too thorough.
CB: So that’s October ’46, you didn’t leave until ’47 so what did you do the rest of the time?
GD: Well I was flying, um doing mostly flying Spitfires on testing.
CB: Because at the MU they’d been repairing them.
GD: Yes, yes.
CB: Any hiccups with that, when you were test flying?
GD: No, no they were, they were in pretty good condition, yeah, but I mean, see there’s one there, Halifax in January er I brought it back to Manston for customs clearance and then took it up to Scotland, to a place called Edsel, but for the life of me, I don’t know how I got back from there. Must have been by rail I think, then the next thing was coming back I, I delivered it to Edsel on the 17th January and flew back in a York a week later.
CB: How long did it take in a York to fly to Ismailia, you made a load of stops?
GD: Er fourteen hours, we went to er Castel Benito and then on to El Marsa, Palestine.
CB: Castel Benito.
GD: No Egypt, North Africa.
CB: Ah yes, in Libya, yes. So how did you find those ferry trips, were they exciting, boring or-
GD: Oh boring, nothing to do, I mean they weren’t comfortable.
CB: What sort of height would you fly?
GD: Oh no idea really.
CB: To keep cool I was thinking.
GD: Wouldn’t be, wouldn’t be that high I shouldn’t think.
CB: No.
GD: Probably around fifteen thousand, probably yes.
CB: So what was the most memorable point about your service in the RAF would you say?
GD: Are you talking about an operation? oh I think um, probably the raid on Peenemunde which er -
CB: How did that go?
GD: Well from our point of view, it went very well but er not so, because when we er, when we went to the briefing er that afternoon, the first thing we noted was that there was extra RAF Police on the door, which we thought was rather unusual and er of course when we got inside and everbody was there and they drew the curtains back, we saw the er the red ribbon going right the way up the North Sea across Denmark to keep us clear of the flak on the North German coast. But er when we were in the briefing, you know, they, they pulled the curtains back and when we saw this track and then it finished up at this vague point on the Baltic coast. I mean we were used to bombing from about eighteen, nineteen thousand feet on German cities you know, big areas, and this target and we weren’t told the precise nature of what was going on there, all we were told was that it was a research station connected with radar, but that it was a very important raid as far as we were concerned, as far as this country was concerned. Because we thought, well I mean, it was just five hundred and ninety six aircraft, what are five hundred and ninety six aircraft doing on a target not much bigger than about two football stadiums, where we were used to er, I mean huge areas. What could possibly be there that would warrant a maximum effort from Bomber Command and of course initially, it was gonna, the raid was gonna take place in three waves, two bomber, two bomber groups in each wave. Now initially, 4 Group which was Halifaxes, together with another Group, I can’t remember which one it was, was scheduled to go in last. Our aiming point was the living quarters where all the scientists and the technicians were, but the schedule was changed, we were moved from the last wave to the first, because they were frightened that our aiming point was gonna to be obscured by smoke from the smoke detonators, so they moved us to the first wave. Which as it turned out was very fortunate from our point of view, I mean we, we ran in on our final run in, er the flak was only light and we, we bombed and turned out and came away, but of course when the raid was halfway over, the night fighters arrived because what had happened in, in with the main force, there were about a small force of Mosquitoes I think it was, about eight that went on to Berlin because they wanted them to think that it was a raid on Berlin. So the Mosquitoes veered off to Berlin, we veered left to Peenemunde and of course, over the previous months Peenemunde had got a bit complacent, because at one time, when Berlin was bombed, although it was about um, I think it was about sixty miles away, the air raid sirens and that all went off at Peenemunde and everything was shut down so it interrupted their all their work. But then of course, Peenemunde was never bombed, it was always Berlin, so of course they got complacent, so when we got there that night, they had no idea that was there was going to be a raid, and over Berlin the Mosquitoes had been dropping window, you know the little slips of aluminium which had been previously used on Hamburg, and the night fighters of course were at their usual height, looking for the heavy bombers at eighteen, twenty, twenty one thousand, and they weren’t there and it was er the, the ground controllers were in turmoil they, the -.
CB: The German ones?
GD: Yeah the German ones. The night fighters were saying well where are they, and the ground controllers couldn’t tell them, and it wasn’t until one pilot happened to spot the fires at Peenemunde about halfway through the raid, that they realised that it was Peenemunde that was being bombed. So of course all the night fighters and I mean it was a perfect night, it was no cloud, er moonlight, we, we went in at seven thousand feet instead of eighteen, nineteen thousand, and er of course once the night fighters got there, they had a field day. We finished up losing forty aircraft, nearly three hundred men
CB: Amazing
GD: So that change from us going from the third to the first wave, I might not have been talking to you now.
CB: Yes yes, saved you. So how long was that flight?
GD: Well it was about seven hours forty I think.
CB: Right.
GD: Seven hours forty I think.
CB: Now going over the Baltic and then, first of all over Denmark and then over the Baltic, how close did you get to Sweden?
GD: Oh not that close the, the main place that we had to er miss if possible was Flensburg, that was a bit of a hot spot for flak, seven hours forty, and then we had er, we had a bad hydraulic leak, so when we came back, we were diverted to a place called Wymeswold in er Lincolnshire, we had to leave the aircraft there it was.
CB: Oh, did you.
GD: Yes, couldn’t fly it back.
CB: So you got the undercarriage down by winding it down did you?
GD: No, no we got the undercarriage down all right, we had no flaps.
CB: Oh I see.
GD: We didn’t have any flaps.
CB: Mmm, okay, so that was the most memorable event of your ops?
GD: The only other thing the, the nearest I suppose I got to getting the chop was um when I was instructing at er Worksop. I was in charge of night flying one night and I had a pupil by the name of Flying Officer Jennings, he was quite experienced, he’d come from flying training command, and he was down to do circuits and bumps, and the, it was a bit like this er, the weather was, it was a bit hazy, not bad not as bad as this, and I said to him, ‘well I’ll come with you on the first circuit, just to make sure that the weather conditions are okay for you to carry on.’ er and I’d arranged for, after we landed, for him to taxi round to the take off point where er transport, I got out, transport picked me up and he went off on his next circuit. When he came round and for some reason, he overshot. Now why he overshot I don’t know whether it was, whether he made an error on his approach or whatever I, I don’t know, anyway that was it, never saw him again. It turned out he crashed at er somewhere near Nottingham and at the, I had to go down to the, I had to go down to the Court of Enquiry and eventually it was found that a prop line had come off so -
CB: Was that the implication it destroyed the aircraft because of vibration or the blade hit the pilot?
GD: I don’t know, I didn’t get the full result, all I know a prop line had come off it would I mean er I don’t know whether he had a chance to feather it or so that was that was a bit of a near do [laughs].
CB: Yeah, How did you like being an instructor?
GD: Oh it was all right but it, it got a bit, it got a bit boring after a while, you know, when you were teaching somebody circuits and landings all that, and then you’d have to go on a cross country with them when they were doing there um, er navigation, they were doing their cross countries you had to er sort of sit there for four or five hours.
CB: Now what about the social life surrounding all of this, how did that work?
GD: Well squadron life was actually quite good because there was no er no bull at all, you know, we didn’t have, we didn’t have parades or anything like that. I mean a typical day would be, we’d go down to flights about nine, nine thirty, report to flight commander, have a look up when they decided whether there was ops on that night, you know, and look at the battle order and see whether you were on. And then er you might go and do an air test if er, there’d been something wrong with your aircraft might go and do an air test, or you might go down to the intelligence office, spend an hour down there, you might go on sometimes, we’d do what you call dry dinghy drill. We’d go out to the dispersal and practice, getting out if we had to ditch um, we might go and do a bit of aircraft recognition, go down the parachute section have a look at them packing parachutes. By lunchtime you were free to do what you want, I mean I played football, I played cricket, I played squash, tennis er it was quite um a sort of casual life apart from the er you know the operations and that the rest of it, was, was quite nice.
CB: Now the successful flight of an aircraft is partly based on ground crew, so how did they, what were they like.
GD: We had a smashing ground crew, you couldn’t, you couldn’t have done the job without them. I mean er we used to take them down to the pub for a beer every now and again, but er you know, you relied on them doing their job properly.
CB: And how many planes did they look after, one, two?
GD: Ooh. I would think, I mean the people that looked after our plane were, always looked after that one and they probably have another, maybe another one, another two.
CB: A topic that comes up occasionally is LMF. What experience did you have of that?
GD: Lack of moral fibre.
CB: Yes.
GD: Yeah we did have one chap that er got er turfed off, he was always turning back, flying officer, and always turning back for some reason or the other until they um they cottoned on to him er and he was shipped off to Sheffield, stripped of his rank.
CB: What did they do to make an example of him, at the station. Did they do anything?
GD: No, one minute they were, there the next minute they were gone, it was all very quick. That was the only, that was the only case that I remember that stood out er.
CB: But that was your squadron?
GD: Yeah.
CB: Was it, how many squadrons on the airfield?
GD: Only ours
CB: Only yours.
GD: Except for Linton.
CB: Yes.
GD: Before we split up with 78, 78 went to Breighton, we went to Holme on Spalding Moor.
CB: And how many aircraft would there be in the squadron?
GD: Er probably about thirty.
CB: So four flights?
GD: Three.
CB: Three flights.
GD: A, B, and C.
CB: Ok.
GD: Roughly ten aircraft a flight.
CB: Some of the raids were quite dicey, others were quiet. How many times did you get chased by fighters?
GD: We never got, we were lucky, we never got chased by a fighter. We got involved with flak quite a bit ‘cos the Ruhr, most of my er trips were to the Ruhr, and er that was pretty heavy for flak there.
CB: So on the run in, can you just talk us through how that worked, what was the timespan you had to settle down before on your way in, so how would that work?
GD: You tried, you tried to get on to your course, your final course for the run in, and then for say five minutes roughly, you were in the hands of the bomb aimer, completely in his hands, you know. He would say, ‘right, left, left, steady, steady, a bit more left,’ until he got to the stage when he would say, ‘bombs are gone,’ and then of course, you had to wait, you had to stay on course for your photo flash.
CB: So how was the, the time you had to stay on course depended on your height for the photo flash to drop, so who worked that out, was that prescribed before you set off?
GD: Yes I mean height, height didn’t really come into it because you knew you were going in at say er eighteen, nineteen thousand, I mean you knew that before you started.
CB: Yes that’s what I meant.
GD: That would be your bombing height so the er flash was er, would follow on from there, but you definitely, that was the worst part, making sure that you stayed until flash operated.
CB: So the bombs went, you were some way from the target when the bombs went?
GD: We were still, yes.
CB: Because of their parabola of the fall.
GD: Forward fall, yes.
CB: And photo flash went how soon after the bombs were released.
GD: Approximately half a minute.
CB: Right, so on balance, you’d have to be steady in order to take your picture, for how long roughly?
GD: About half a minute.
CB: Right, and who operated the camera the bomb aimer or -
GD: That was automatic.
CB: Oh automatic, and what did they do with that picture?
GD: Went to intelligence you might, I don’t think I’ve actually got any, any um somewhere, that’s the sort of picture, look that could be taken, that was probably, that was probably er er a flare.
CB: Yeah, blowing in the wind.
GD: Yeah, but you would, you would hopefully try and get ground detail if possible in the flash.
CB: So what about the smoke, to what extent was smoke over the target a problem for you?
GD: Well yeah, I mean basically, I mean, you bombed on the reds and greens put down by pathfinders.
CB: By pathfinders yeah.
GD: And it was, if it was um er, cloud of course, you did, they did air markings which was called whanganui, I think the air markers but of course, that wasn’t all that accurate.
CB: To what extent could you see other aircraft in the vicinity?
GD: You could see if they were close enough and of course, you did see aircraft being shot down as well.
CB: How did you feel about that?
GD: Hard luck.
CB: Yes.
GD: Not us, I mean my friend Dave at Balcombe we were talking about, they were involved in a mid-air collision.
CB: Were they?
GD: With another Lancaster, they lost six foot of their wing.
CB: And still kept flying?
GD: Managed to get back and land safely.
CB: What about the one that hit them?
GD: The what?
CB: What about the one that hit them?
GD: All went down, all killed.
CB: Oh were they.
GD: Yes.
CB: So effectively, the propeller sliced off the end of the wing but that completely jiggered the other aircraft?
GD: Yeah, well they’d got no aileron, you see.
CB: Right.
GD: The aileron went.
CB: Right.
GD: So he had a job, he had a job to er, I think they lost an engine as well I think on that, so they had yeah er, quite a job bringing it back.
CB: So as a pilot, how would you handle a three engine with bad damage?
GD: Well you’ve got, you’ve got trimming tabs which er would allow you to make sure that the aircraft would go the way you wanted it to, er the trimming tabs of course were actually on the ailerons, but of course on one side, they’d gone.
CB: Yes.
GD: Of course you could, you could feather the engine, you see, where the prop, where the prop blades turn, so you got the least wind resistance.
CB: Yes, so er your speed would normally be what?
GD: Halifax, about a hundred and sixty.
CB: Oh, was it knots or miles per hour?
GD: Knots.
CB: Right, so that’s a hundred and sixty, hundred and seventy five miles an hour. Now were the other bombers in the stream at different heights, so was there a level that the Halifaxes flew at, and a different one that the Lancasters flew at?
GD: Yes.
CB: Why was that?
GD: Well you obviously tried to er spread the raid out as much as you could, if you had everybody, if you had sort of six hundred aircraft, all flying at the same height, whereas Stirlings would be down here, Halifaxes would be there, Lancasters would be there, but er there was always a risk of course and it did happen, that er you would get hit by somebody else’s bomb.
CB: Yeah. Did you see any of that happening?
GD: No, well you saw an explosion but you wouldn’t know what caused it.
CB: No, and thinking of explosions, to what extent did you see aircraft shot down from underneath by Germans, German night fighters?
GD: They hadn’t got that when we on [unclear].
CB: Oh they hadn’t.
GD: No schlagermusic.
CB: Schlagermusic
GD: Yeah, no, that came a bit later.
CB: Okay, so I think we’ve covered a huge range of things but after you left the RAF, what did you do?
GD: I went back to Pickfords, I did my um er, B Licence in London and er went to London School of Air Navigation, but there were so many of us on the market and of course, I mean, in my digs alone, there were nineteen pilots and, and they had about five courses running at the same time, I mean the, the civil airlines hadn’t really got going, the people that scored were the RAF pilots that were seconded to British European Airways before they were demobbed, before the war finished perhaps, but er ‘cos they got in on the ground floor. I mean they’d, in fact I went into the gents, I think it was in was it in Malta, and I stood next to my flight commander at er Holme on Spalding Moor, he was with er British European Airways.
CB: Oh, was he, right.
GD: So, so I, I, I er, I tried one or two places to get a job, but er there was nothing doing, so I went back to Pickfords, because they had to keep your job open you see, all, all companies had to keep your job available for you and in any case, they were, they were half the people anyway, the company and I stayed with them until I retired.
CB: At sixty five.
GD: Sixty.
CB: Sixty. What was you doing at Pickfords then?
GD: I was a branch manager.
CB: Right.
GD: Mmm.
CB: Round here?
GD: And we had a travel business as well.
CB: So where were you operating from, from Pickfords?
GD: Well when I came out the RAF, I went back to Hearne Bay for a while um, for a couple of years, and then I was posted up to Lancashire, er stayed there for about six and a half years, and then down to Aldershot, where I was, I was there for eleven years, and then finally down to here, where I retired. I retired early because there was those were when the pressure started being put on people to produce more [laughs], I’d had enough of that, I did, I didn’t stop work, I, I found several, I used to work for other removal companies, doing estimating and er I went up to London, stood in for the training officer that suddenly went back to Australia. I was there for six months doing the, doing their training so er I didn’t actually pack up work.
CB: As far as associations concerned, was there a squadron association running for many years that you were associated with?
GD: No, not, not to start with, er 76 Squadron Association of course is still going today, um did go to one or two reunions and I also went to two Bomber Command reunions.
CB: Yes.
GD: Where the first one I think was run by the Evening Standard or it was at the Albert Hall.
CB: Oh the Albert Hall.
GD: And everyone was shouting, ‘we want butch, we want butch,’ [laughs].
CB: He’d gone to South Africa. So how do you feel about the, getting the position of getting the clasp now for Bomber Command but not having -
GD: Well I mean quite honestly, when you look at it and you see what it is, and it took all that time and all that argument and, and discussion, and when you finish up with not, I wasn’t bothered about it.
CB: Right, how did you feel about bombing?
GD: Oh I mean don’t forget that. What was I, was, I had my twenty first birthday two weeks after I’d finished my tour on Halifaxes and I mean in those days, an eighteen to twenty year old was a lot different to an eighteen twenty year old today. We were a lot more naïve and don’t forget, I’d seen a lot living at Whitstable, I’d seen all these hordes of German bombers going up to London, and of course places like Coventry and Plymouth and er Southampton, all those places got very badly bombed. And er er no I mean war is war, and women and children are going to get killed, it’s unavoidable. I mean if you take er factories, er take the Ruhr for example, if you’ve got factories, you are going to have people living near them, workers and er not all bombs are going to hit the factory. I, I’ve never felt any guilt about it and of course Bomber Command did get a bad press after the war, what with Dresden.
CB: So when the RAF memorial was unveiled, how did you feel about that?
GD: I thought that was something, it was well worthwhile, well worth waiting for.
CB: ‘Cos you were there?
GD: Yeah it was, it’s a marvellous monument, it’s a marvellous memorial. I mean the sculpture is beautiful. No I think it was, it should have happened a lot earlier, I mean not so much for the people that survived but for the fifty five and half thousand that didn’t.
CB: Yes.
GD: Was a lot you know I mean out of a hundred, what’s it, a hundred and twenty five?
CB: A hundred and twenty five thousand.
GD: Over five fifty five and half killed.
CB: Fifty five thousand five hundred.
GD: It’s a big percentage.
CB: Yes 44.4.
GD: Well take Peenemunde for example.
CB: Yes.
GD: You know fourteen aircraft, nearly three hundred men in one night, and that was only one raid in the war.
CB: Good. Thank you very much indeed, really interesting, fascinating actually.
CB: Just as a recap George, in your early days, when you were at OTU and then HCU and then on the squadron, er how did you go through training for evading fighters? Did you have fighter affiliation? How did that work?
GD: Well the only fighter affiliation we had was when we were at, not on the squadron. I didn’t do any on the squadron but on HCU, we’d just go off and then er we knew that somewhere, usually it was a spitfire who would er appear from nowhere, your gunners, your gunners would be on the alert and er give you the instruction you know, ‘corkscrew right, corkscrew left, dive,’ and er I think we only did about two when I was on HCU two fighter affiliations.
CB: But there would always be a corkscrew in the affiliation would there?
GD: Yes.
CB: And in earnest, how often did you have to use er, corkscrew?
GD: Only once, er I’m trying to think which raid it was, um we got, we got coned.
CB: Oh yes by searchlights.
GD: By one of the um, one of the radar patrolled searchlights, and of course, you were like a, like a, once you’re coned with the blue one, all the others come on and you’re like a fairy sitting on top of a Christmas tree and er straight away, you corkscrew out. We didn’t have to corkscrew because of a fighter but only because of the er getting coned.
CB: And that worked did it?
GD: That worked yeah, but um, er it’s not pleasant.
CB: No.
GD: You just sit sitting up there er, you know, as I say with a like a fairy on a Christmas tree [laughs], you know, you’re the focal point and you’ve gotta get out of it as soon as you can, but fortunately that was the only time we had to do it in combat. We, we were lucky on our tour, we had, I would say, I mean apart from the heavy flak which you got er most of the time um, we, we didn’t get attacked by a fighter and um we had probably a reasonably good tour.
CB: Much damage to the aircraft from flak?
GD: Yeah a few flak holes, yeah, nothing serious.
CB: Ground crew reaction to damaging their aeroplane?
GD: Yeah [laughs], what you bring it like that for [laughs], you ought to know better [laughs].
CB: Did it cost you a beer or two?
GD: Yes [laughs], yes.
CB: So with the ground crew, how did the liaison go?
GD: Oh very well, in fact I kept in touch with one of our ground crew after the war, er a fellow called Johnnie, Johnnie somebody, lived in Stoke Newington.
CB: Was he the chiefy?
GD: No, not the chiefy.
CB: And with the ground crew, who was the main, the person normally linking with them in the aircrew. Was it the pilot or would it be the engineer?
GD: Well both really er because you see, you had the engine fitter, the airframe fitter, the instrument fitter, the instrument man, the armourer, so er they were all they were all involved.
CB: Because you were on the fighting edge of technology in those days, so did you have Gee?
GD: Yeah.
CB: And how did you feel about the use of Gee?
GD: Very good, only trouble was you only got it to about five degrees east.
CB: And you didn’t have GH in those days?
GD: No of course, pathfinders of course came in with H2S and Oboe. I mean the marking the PFM marking was good, yes.
CB: And you’d know the colour of the markers before you set off, would you?
GD: Yes, I mean basically you bombed on the reds.
CB: Right.
GD: Or if not the reds, the green back ups.
CB: Would there always be a master bomber hovering?
GD: No the master bomber, there was a master bomber on Peenemunde, Group Captain Searby, and he directed the er he would say, you know, ‘ignore so and so, or bomb so and so, stop, stop the creepback,’ or whatever.
CB: Was the creep a problem?
GD: Pardon?
CB: Was, was creep much of a problem on targets?
GD: Well it wasn’t providing you stuck to bombing the indicators that you were supposed to, but of course there were some crews you know, that er got a bit hesitant, and er just get rid of them quick and of course if you’ve got fires showing up, you might have your red and green markers, but then you might have fires back coming back, but they weren’t marked so er yeah, there were, there was a bit of creepback sometimes.
CB: Did they have to remark sometimes?
GD: Well I don’t know because you see, you were once you’d done your bombing run.
CB: Yes.
GD: You don’t know what was going on other than that, but we didn’t have any, we didn’t have any master bomber, we didn’t have any master bombers apart from Peenemunde. On er the only other time I was involved with a master bomber was er when we went to er, I think it was Kiel er with a Mosquito, we had a, we had a [looking through book] a special camera.
CB: On the Mosquito?
GD: On that particular night we had a special camera, and we had to er report the um weather conditions to the er master bomber
CB: Right.
GD: On that I don’t know when that was, ‘46 [looking through book], and yeah must have been the last, must have been probably the last one, yeah, we were hit that one, there we were hit in, on both nose cones on er Mosquitos.
CB: By flak?
GD: On a Berlin, yeah, flak hits on both spillers.
CB: Oh, on the spillers.
GD: Yes.
CB: So you were lucky not to lose the engines?
GD: Well yeah because if they’d hit the, if they’d have hit the glycol tanks, that would have been it, there wouldn’t have been any time hardly to -
CB: Was there a particularly vulnerable point on the Mosquito?
GD: No not really, only the engines, ‘cos liquid cooled, so if you got hit with a, if your glycol got punctured, then that was it.
CB: So, you did thirty ops on your first tour.
GD: Yes.
CB: How many did you do on Mosquitos?
GD: Fourteen.
CB: And what stopped that?
GD: The war ended.
CB: Right, now you’ve got a DFC, when was that awarded?
GD: After the completion of the tour on the Halifaxes.
CB: On the Halifaxes, your first tour, do you have the citation for that?
GD: Mm somewhere [laughs].
CB: Only I’m just wondering how they worded it you see?
GD: Oh haven’t got it that I know of, it could be somewhere amongst the debris up in the loft [laughs].
CB: So when you were commissioned was that expected or unexpected?
GD: Unexpected I think, mind you, I think most pilots got commissioned round about halfway through their tour, I mean it was quite a, I was just told that I’d been recommended and went up before the group captain and that was it, it came through.
CB: What did he say?
GD: I can’t remember.
CB: You’re a jolly good.
GD: Funnily enough the next time I met him, he was a Group Captain Hodson, and er when I was at Ismailia, for my sins, I was Tennis Officer [laughs], and er the Group Captain there was a chap called Fletcher, and he called me in one day and he said, ‘I’ve got the Air Vice Marshall coming over from 205 Group in Cairo to play tennis with me, so I want you to make sure everything is tickety boo.’ You know, we had a, we had a pro, a pro, a civilian tennis chap there and he said, I want of course the AOC turned up, I don’t know what he came in, whether he came in an Oxford or not, turned up and Group Captain Fletcher introduced me and it was the same Group Captain that interviewed me for my commission.
CB: Small world. So he said?
GD: He did look at me and he said, ‘I’ve got an idea we might have met before.’ I said, ‘yes sir,’ I said, ‘you interviewed me for my commission,’ ‘that’s it,’ he said, ’76 Squadron.’ Air Vice Marshall Hodson.
CB: Thinking of senior officers and operations, how often did Group Captains and even Wing Commanders go on ops?
GD: It’s funny you should say that, we lost two fairly quickly.
CB: Two which?
GD: Two Group Captains, two Station Commanders.
CB: Did you?
GD: The first one was um er I can’t think of this name, I think his name was er, he got bombed in fact I think there might have been three There was one when the squadron was at Driffield and Driffield was bombed and the station commander was killed.
CB: Early in the war?
GD: Would be, yeah.
CB: Battle of Britain?
GD: And er Group Captain Whittley went as second pilot to a chap called um Jock, it’s in the, it’s in the [unclear] book, oops.
CB: The cups gone over, have you got a cloth.
GD: Group Captain Whittley.
CB: This is the squadron history, is it?
GD: Yeah, see the dawn breaking.
CB: Right.
GD: Er [looking through book] Group Captain John Whittley 1576, yeah, Group Captain Garaway was the one that lost his life in the um he was er
CB: In the bombing raid?
GD: Linton, Linton Station Commander, Group Captain Garaway OBE was struck and killed by fragments from an anti-personnel bomb whilst leading a team to extinguish a serious incendiary blade er blaze, and then of course Whittley followed him. Ah yes, another one 76 [looking through book], yes he flew with er a chap called Jock Cary er and er four were killed, Group Captain Whittley, Pilot Officer David and Sergeants’ Davis and Strange evaded capture and then there was a Wilson, just wondered what happened to him. I think there were three Group Captains in 76 who were lost.
CB: Who were Station Commanders?
GD: Yes.
CB: Were they were allowed to fly, encouraged to fly or how did it work?
GD: They were not encouraged to fly really, they would only do one trip, a trip every now and again.
CB: Yes.
GD: You see even the squadron commanders didn’t. I mean the squadron commander squadron leader, he could probably take up to a year to do his tour because he might only fly once a month.
CB: The wing commander.
GD: And the wing commander.
CB: He’d be the wing commander, the squadron commander.
GD: No that was the flight commander, the squadron commander again, he would only fly er our um, our er squadron commander was a chap called Don Smith, oh what’s a name, a squadron commander that left a week, a fortnight before I joined Cheshire, he was at 76 at Linton and he’d just gone when I joined, yeah.
CB: He had an American wife who used to play the piano in the mess.
GD: Yes, yes.
CB: That came from an earlier interview. Right I think we’ve done extraordinarily well.
GD: That was the code name for um, sky marking, nearly all the er code names for marking were New Zealand, you had Paramata um, what else Paramata.
CB: Oh right.
GD: Paramater.
WT: Betemangui here and how did you and I understand the pathfinders went in which were hugely Mosquitos?
CB: They were Lancasters.
GD: They were both.
WT: And they dropped flares?
GD: Yes
WT: On the bombing area on the area?
GD: Known as target indicators.
WT: How long before you, the bombers, followed them in to bomb, how soon after the flares or whatever it was that were dropped, did the bombers actually come in?
GD: Well I can’t answer that right, because er when we, every trip that I went on the target was nearly always alight when we got there, it would only be the people that were actually in the very first wave that would that would know that.
WT: Right.
GD: I wouldn’t think it wouldn’t be long because er you see once the indicators had gone down, the ground people would know that that was going to be a raid so they would want to get the bombs dropping er fairly quickly.
WT: But I mean were they actually flares that were dropped so they’d burn out fairly quickly?
GD: Oh no, no, they kept alight for a while.
WT: And when you couldn’t see the ground you mentioned sky marking.
GD: Sky marking. Whanganui.
WT: How does that work?
GD: Well they were coloured lights in the sky that would hover, which is why sky marking wasn’t all that accurate because you see they -
CB: They would drift.
GD: They would drift, a ground marker.
WT: Don’t flares drift ground markers?
GD: Oh no, because they’d be actually on the ground, they’d be burning.
WT: Yes.
GD: On the ground
WT: No I meant, sorry I’m being a bit pedantic, but if you’ve got quite a strong wind, and okay, they would allow for that, but I mean, they aren’t going to get it right all the time, you could find that the flares have moved away from the target but therefore?
GD: But that would only happen before they hit the ground,
WT: Right.
GD: Wouldn’t it? If you were dropping a target indicator.
WT: Yes.
GD: It could move before it hit the ground but they, they would know the wind and they would that would be allowed for.
WT: So the accuracy of the pathfinders, for what I’m really getting to, who dropped the flares not only was it critical, but they were very accurate.
GD: Yes because don’t forget, they had what they called Oboe which was er direction where the lines crossed and er they um, Oboe was quite accurate and they would, they would drop their target indicator according to the grat[unclear]
CB: This is transmitters sending out a signal in a line that would then converge in the point where the bomb was to be dropped, that was in the later part of the war.
WT: Very good.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with George Dunn
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-03-08
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Sound
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ADunnGC170308
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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.
Language
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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01:34:14 audio recording
Description
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George Dunn DFC joined the Royal Air Force in June 1941 and initially trained as a Wireless Operator/Air Gunner, before training in Canada as a Pilot. He flew aircraft such as Avro Ansons and Airspeed Oxford.
He tells of his experiences as ‘second dickey’ on trips to Essen and Kiel, before joining No. 76 Squadron at Linton-on-Ouse, flying Handley Page Halifaxes. He also spent time on 10 Squadron and was finally transferred to 608 Squadron based at Downham Market in Suffolk flying Mosquitos.
George tells of his trip to Malta, and flying Spitfires that were being renovated for the Greek Air Force.
George flew 30 operations flying Halifaxes and a further 14 flying the Mosquito.
After the war, George returned to his previous company, Pickfords, where he worked as a Branch Manager before retiring at the age of 60.
Contributor
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Vivienne Tincombe
10 Squadron
109 Squadron
608 Squadron
76 Squadron
Anson
Bombing of Peenemünde (17/18 August 1943)
crewing up
Distinguished Flying Cross
ground crew
Halifax
lack of moral fibre
Master Bomber
memorial
mid-air collision
Mosquito
Oboe
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
perception of bombing war
RAF Chipping Norton
RAF Downham Market
RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor
RAF Linton on Ouse
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Melbourne
RAF Rufforth
RAF Upper Heyford
Spitfire
target indicator
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/524/8758/AAn00202-150907.2.mp3
3a51154e9d6d6fcbea96557bce0d714b
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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A Navigator from 101 Squadron
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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An00202
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with a leader navigator from 101 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: So it’s rolling now and my name is Chris Brockbank and I’m conducting an interview with [name redacted] and he wishes to remain anonymous when the recording is lodged, and we are at his home which is near Scunthorpe and we’re going to talk about his career in general but specifically the wartime activities and today is the 7th of September 2015. [redacted] could you start by saying where you come from and what your early life was and how you came to join the RAF, and then your history from there please?
AN: I was born in London and after education I spent a time in the city of London as a clerk cum secretary initially to a Lloyds underwriter, and after that to a shipping company and from there I volunteered for the RAF. Didn’t like the idea of the army or the navy but as a Londoner I wanted to get into the war having experienced the Blitz. I was taken on, on the PNB scheme and went first of all to America for pilot training with the United States Air Force, which I failed as many people did, and I was given the option to re-muster to navigator. I went to Portage La Prairie west of Winnipeg and when we started there we were told the important thing for a navigator was to remain on track and we were also told that one important aim, rather one important aid, was astro-navigation using a sextant. I did the course at Portage La Prairie which I passed, came back to England having done a little astro-navigation in the air but on the ground we were required to take hundreds of shots and plot them out for the instructors to check to make sure we hadn’t cooked them and then after that I came back to England, went to RAF Melham? where I did more flying once again no astro-navigation because as newcomers to this aid we had to be precise and this took time, and if you’re flying around the UK it’s short legs, it’s short legs and you haven’t got time to do astro-navigation and so I had my course at Melham? and then with a lot of other newly qualified aircrew I went to Wymeswold where one important thing we were told was that a good aircrew was a good team and we then went into a big room where we were told ‘crew up’ and so we stood around whilst the pilots picked us out and Rusty picked me and then together we picked our bomb aimer, our wireless operator and a gunner. We did our flying from Wymeswold and Castle Donington and then after that we [loud crackling noise].
CB: Just dropped it, we’re okay.
AN: After this we proceeded to Blyton where we converted from the Wellington which we’d trained on at Wymeswold to the Lancaster, at the same time we also picked up an engineer and a second gunner so we were now a crew of seven. Having done our course, once again including night flying but very little navigation we were then posted to 101 Squadron. We knew nothing about the squadron and we arrived to find that instead of getting H2S, a map reading radar to help with the navigation, instead we’d picked up an eighth crew member who spoke German and so was able to jam the German instructions to their night fighters. Also, once again it was stressed to us about staying on track, there being safety in numbers, also the question of timing. Bomber Harris didn’t want aids to be, the bombing to be in bits he wanted a complete termination of the target if you like and so we had to keep to timing that we were given and at the same time this meant that we had, we were spaced throughout the attack and this gave coverage to every, the whole Bomber Force against the night fighters or so it was thought. The other thing we found was that while we were at Wymeswold and Blyton we were introduced to a lovely aid called Gee, where you counted blips on a screen and converted this on special charts to latitude and longitude, but when we got to 101 Squadron we found the Germans had found Gee equipment on crashed aircraft and they were jamming the signals so our last Gee signal, our last reliable fix, was going to be round about the French coast, so we needed to get to height as soon as possible so we got a chance of getting a reliable wind because when we went to briefing, the navigation briefing for an operation we were given the forecast weather, the forecast winds, but bear in mind the forecast winds were based on what the meteorologists knew about the weather in the UK plus information sent back by Coastal Command from the North Atlantic patrols which [laughs] didn’t give you much. So it meant that once we got flying and got past the Gee stage where we had long legs we had time to practise, to use astro- navigation. If there was cloud cover and we couldn’t use astro then the next fix we were going to get would be when the bomb aimer said ‘Bombs gone’ so we needed if possible to get a fix in between to get some idea most importantly of whether we were on track and secondly that things were, we were also on time. So it meant that when we got into the bombing area and the bomb aimer said ‘Bombs gone’ I had to work quick to reset my equipment to get an accurate wind to use on the way back. Now there is a funny story goes with this. As I say I was kept busy but on our first trip the skipper asked me to come up front to have a look at the target to see, and so I saw all these bomb flashes and the flak and everything and my comment was ‘Bloody hell’ and I went back into my office and I never came out to look at a bombing, as a target, until my last trip. The other job I also had to do was that the captain would report to me when he saw an aircraft being shot down which I recorded, and I think that all these reports were combined after the war to ascertain as far as possible where aircraft were lost. I’ll have to stop and think for a minute, yes, I’ve already said to you I don’t look upon myself as a hero, I was doing a job. These are my thoughts, also why did we survive a tour when other crews didn’t? Well I like to think my navigation helped but in all honesty we got through because of luck. We had an in-flight collision, we survived the other crew didn’t. Also we lost an engine on one occasion and Rusty had to decide whether or not we should go on. This is where we had a bit of a hiccup, at Blyton we picked up an engineer. When we flew round the UK he seemed okay, but he couldn’t cope with operational flying and on the occasion when we lost an engine instead of being able to give Rusty advice on whether we could carry on to the target or not he was lying on the floor and it was a case we had to get rid of him, and in his place we got a very good engineer which also helped. In the same way we survived fighter attacks, we had good gunners, the thing is we were a crew but we were a team. We relied on each other and we trusted each other. In the year that I flew with Rusty never once did he ever query a heading I gave him or a change of speed I gave him, he trusted me implicitly and this is how our crew operated, we relied on each other and this plus luck is why we were able to finish a tour. Right, after I finished my tour I went instructing back at Wymeswold and whilst I was there Wymeswold was taken over by Transport Command and I spent a lot of my years until I retired in Transport Command. I became an A category navigator which meant that I was qualified for up to royalty. I carried, in my capacity as a navigator, various persons like Field Marshal Montgomery, I was part of a back-up crew when the Duke of Edinburgh visited Borneo, this was it, I enjoyed Transport Command, it was hard work you did a lot of flying but you saw a lot of the world in bits. I say in bits because if you went somewhere you were allowed twelve hours on the ground which included sleeping, eating, briefing. Didn’t have time to see anywhere but when on Britannias we slipped crews so therefore you had about a twenty-four hour gap between legs so then if you wanted to you could go into the local area. Apart from my transport work I obviously had ground appointments like adjutants and things like that and also I finished up at Scampton where I was involved in the training of radar navigators for the Vulcan and also for, oh dear, the coastal fighter. Anyway can’t think what it was but we were training radar navigators and that’s where I finished my RAF career.
CB: Did you fly in the Nimrod?
AN: No, no, no it was the Buccaneer.
CB: The Buccaneer yes right, okay, we’ll pause for a moment.
AN: After the air force I spent six months playing golf then I got bored then I became a civil servant for ten years.
CB: Doing what?
AN: Clerical work and then I retired again. I think I’ve covered everything in a nutshell.
CB: You’ve covered it really well thank you. So shall we cover one or two other bits?
AN: Yes certainly.
CB: This business of LMF.
AN: Um hum.
CB: And the navigator, what happened to people, well first of all in the case of the navigator, what happened to him? I didn’t mean the navigator, I meant the flight engineer, your flight engineer what happened to him as a result of that?
AN: We never saw him again. He was off the station very quickly. I mean we don’t think he was LMF we think it was medical.
CB: Right.
AN: Now because if he’d been LMF, now I was, it was after I left the squadron, my wife told me about it the LMF parade where the person concerned is, marches on and his stripes are torn off his uniform and then he’s off the station. LMF, were they LMF? Who can tell? I mean that in all honesty I don’t think I ever worried about what would happen to us until I started going out with my wife. Then I had a reason for wanting to survive but until then, I can’t, I can’t speak for other crew members because that’s something you keep to yourself. We all, well I say all, we had little mascots, I had a little doll I had in my inside pocket of my battledress, you got, you got very, very, very how can I explain it, you, you, you things had to happen, people might fly in a silk scarf, these things went on. Now our Canadian rear gunner he always took two beer bottles with him so he could bomb the target himself. Now one night, the station commander used to come round and wish us all luck and the Canadian rear gunner told him he hadn’t got his beer bottles so the station commander went back to the mess and brought him two beer bottles so he went on the raid happy that he could bomb Germany.
CB: These little snippets are classic aren’t they but people were handling stress in different ways?
AN: Um.
CB: I think that the LMF bit one doesn’t want to overstate at the same time it is important to understand it and some people as you say perhaps had, weren’t feeling very well, and would react in a particular way and it wasn’t actually lacking moral fibre.
AN: Yes. You see, I mean in my case as a navigator, I was busy, I was busy all the time. I mean if I was in the middle of taking, I mean it was three astro sights to a fix. If I was in the middle of that and we hit bumpy weather or we were attacked by a fighter that was wasted time, had to start all over again so I was kept pretty busy, then had, I mean I hoped that when I took my three shots it would meet exactly in the middle, never happened you got a cocked hat. Provided this cocked hat wasn’t too large you could say ‘Right I’ll go for the middle of that cocked hat and I can trust that’ but I mean you had to take each case on its merits.
CB: But occasionally there would be a very high cloud top cover so what did you do then?
AN: Oh yes true, then all you could do was just hope.
CB: Um.
AN: You couldn’t do anything, and because I had no aids.
CB: But you were clearly skilled at using the equipment.
AN: Dead reckoning.
CB: Yes.
AN: But that was based on the winds the met office, the met can’t forecast weather now so. And of course one other thing when we talk about luck we were on the Nuremberg raid, the ninety-three aircraft.
CB: Yes.
AN: Well we lost a quarter of the squadron on that and amongst us the quarter of the squadron we lost was our most senior crew on their twenty-ninth or thirtieth trip. And how were they lost? They were shot down by a gunner in a Halifax aircraft who mistook the Lancaster for a night fighter.
CB: Crikey.
AN: Now the thing is.
CB: Savage irony.
AN: We were taught, right from the word go, that if the night fighter, if you saw a night fighter, if he wasn’t attacking you, ignore him, because if you fire on him you’re giving away your position.
CB: Yes.
AN: This is another bit of luck.
CB: Um, um. What happened to the crew in that case?
AN: They were all, one escaped, one evaded but the rest were killed.
CB: Um. Okay, now as I understand it from Rusty you had a curious experience of an explosion beneath the aircraft?
AN: Oh this was at Mailly-le-Camp.
CB: Yes. So that put you inverted?
AN: Well, I think Rusty is a little bit incorrect there.
CB: Right.
AN: Because if we had been upside down, or doing a slow roll I think he terms it, he tells everybody this, and I keep quiet. If we had inverted my sextant in its box would have been at the side of me. If he’d inverted the box would have gone up in the air and come down and clobbered me. I don’t recall a sextant clobbering me.
CB: Okay.
AN: That’s all I can say.
CB: Yes, okay. Now fighters chase you and the rear gunner says ‘Corkscrew’.
AN: Yes.
CB: How did you manage that situation as a navigator?
AN: Well as navigator I mean i just sat there and waited for all clear. I mean the thing is we had a, we had a number of attacks but only one where it persisted and we felt that the normal night fighter pilot he could have been new and if we took the correct action he’d go and find somebody else who was asleep. This particular one continued the attack and our gunner shot him down. [Chuckling] luck.
CB: Um. So you’re a special ops squadron, what was going on with your German speaker crew member?
AN: In what way?
CB: Well he sitting in the back?
AN: Yes.
CB: What was he actually doing and did you link in with it?
AN: Well the, as I say, our operators, who were ABC operators were spaced throughout the attack and I think they were given certain frequencies each to monitor. We didn’t know much about this because we only saw our special at briefing, he didn’t live with the rest of us, they were kept away from us in case they said if they talked in their sleep.
CB: Yes.
AN: And gave away secrets.
CB: Yes.
AN: So we knew nothing really of what he did, but he like me was lucky when we talk about being afraid. He, like me, was kept busy. The wireless operator was kept busy but all the rest were spending all their time looking out for fighters and seeing people shot down. I didn’t experience that, our special didn’t, the wireless operator didn’t ‘cause we were all kept busy doing our jobs and we were fortunate in that respect.
CB: And what was the wireless operator doing linking in with you?
AN: Well that he couldn’t help me as such but he was, he was listening out for, there were broadcasts at certain times, we had a classic case where it was, well Rusty was in London getting his uniform and we went to Berlin with the squadron commander, and this particular one we were going, we were coming in to Berlin from the north, from Denmark. The forecast wind was something like sixty-five miles an hour. They’d started then, certain aircraft were given the job of giving broadcast winds, which they were giving to us and so we were given something like eighty-five when I got a pinpoint on the Danish coast I reckoned it was a hundred and thirty, and we were coming into Berlin with the wind right behind us, and I had to say to the wing commander, ‘Do an orbit’, he did an orbit, I said ‘Flaps down, undercarriage down’, now normally speaking we had a system, when the bomber aimer said ‘Bombs gone’ the bomb doors were closed, Rusty put the nose down and we got the hell out of there. I had planned, I planned that, I loved that because it was a short run out of the target before you turned west. Too far, too short and you’re off track. In this instance the wing commander he was sitting down in his cockpit on instruments and we’re going through with nothing on the clock and I said to people afterwards, ‘How do I say to a wing commander for Pete’s sake let’s get the hell out of here?’ A bit of, looking back on it funny.
CB: Yes.
AN: But not at the time.
CB: No quite, because there’s a strict hierarchy?
AN: Um.
CB: So bombs have gone, then there’s the delay while you wait for the picture to be taken?
AN: For the picture to be taken yes.
CB: What was that like?
AN: It seemed a lot longer than it was but the thing is we had this short distance to run which took that into account, as I say and then we turned and by then hopefully I would have worked out a wind and the first thing I do, no sooner turned on a course, I’d give Rusty a new one to allow for where we were and what the wind was, or what I thought it was.
CB: So you’re over the target, you’ve dropped the bombs, the flash has gone and you’ve taken the picture. There are lots of planes around you so how do you take a new heading when there are so many, so close, how long before you change heading?
AN: Well, we wouldn’t change, we’d change heading when we got to the end of that particular leg out of the target.
CB: Right.
AN: It was a case in the same way we had our collision, it happened. Who’s to say how many aircraft collided with each other, and why did they? I mean the thing is this, that at night you can’t see much, this is what we relied on for our safety, the fact we were in the dark.
CB: Sure. Now you went on ops to do your thirty?
AN: Um.
CB: But you didn’t fly every night, so what did you do on the nights when you weren’t on operations?
AN: Well.
CB: And in the days?
AN: Well, the thing is first of all I mean we’d flown by night and we’ve come back at dawn, we’re ready for sleeping. It would all depend, I mean it might well be we were down for fighter affiliation or an air test or something, it could vary in the same way we might get back and they’d say ‘You’re on ops again tonight’ because being the special squadron we sometimes flew not with, we were 1 Group, but we might be flying with 5 Group, covering 5 Group from the fighters.
CB: So the attrition rate on your squadron was higher than the average of others?
AN: Yes, because I mean the thing is that we did our first op in November and finished our last op 4th June and in that we did thirty trips.
CB: Um. So in then extending, so when you were flying with the others then you’re doing a higher rate of ops?
AN: Yes.
CB: How did that go down with the aircrew?
AN: I don’t think we ever, we ever talked about it really. I mean we had a spell where the Bomber Command in its wisdom said ‘Oh, getting ready for the invasion we’re doing the French targets’ and because they’re French targets they’ll be a third of an op which would have taken us longer, but after Mailly-le-Camp where we lost a lot of aircraft they changed their minds. So all of a sudden we suddenly found we’d done more ops than we thought.
CB: [Laughter] Right.
AN: But once again my attitude changed when I started going out with my wife. Before then, before then it was the case that if there were no ops then right it was down to the village pub with our ground crew. We were very fortunate with our ground crew, we had a corporal in charge of our aircraft, he’s dead now unfortunately, but he lived in Scotland just near Perth, and if any of us were up in Perth area we’d always pop and see him and his wife, and he was a corporal he stayed a corporal he wouldn’t take promotion ‘cause he would be going away from his aircraft. He had a radio at dispersal and he heard us coming back, he was ready for us, and if we were going on an op I’d get in the aircraft and I’d unpack my stuff ready, my chart, and if one of the ground crew was coming up front he’d say ‘I’m coming up front cover your chart up’. Never asked us until we got back then they’d ask us where we’d been. In the same way that after we’d had our collision and the aircraft was a write off we came in the next day, not only did we have a new aircraft we had a new insignia, the insignia that’s on that picture there, ‘Our Willy’.
CB: So there was, in your case there was a very close liaison with the ground crew, what about other aircrew when their?
AN: Well this is the thing that the loss rate was so high you didn’t get to know people. I mean you knew the odd people for different reasons, I mean I didn’t even know all the navigators because I mean you go into briefing, you see we had a nav briefing then there was the crew briefing when we could see peoples’ faces when they saw what the target was, we’d already had that shock we’d got over it but it was the briefing and then after I’d finished, I’d finished doing my calculations I’m back as a crew member again, I’ve ceased to be an individual.
CB: Yeah.
AN: And so you did, I mean I’ve had people say to me ‘Did you remember so-and-so?’ I’d say ‘No, never heard of him’ whereas on the other, yesterday I was able to say to Rusty ‘Yes the aircraft next to us was x squared and the captain was McKenna’ why I don’t know I remember that but it’s, people change so much.
CB: When you took off you had to form up?
AN: Well.
CB: How place?
AN: Well not, no not necessarily, what we had, we had a beam and we would fly up and down the beam climbing and then once we reached a certain height we would then set off bearing in mind I wanted us to get to operating height so I had time to calculate a wind.
CB: Was the beam radio or was it a searchlight?
AN: No it was a radio.
CB: Right, and anyway you were interspersed in the stream?
AN: Oh yes, yes.
CB: So actually you didn’t go as a squadron?
AN: The ones going, the ones in our area would be from Knutford?
CB: Yeah.
AN: Wickenby would have their own system I assume.
CB: Right, okay. Now in the day time and you’re not sleeping after an op what are you doing?
AN: Well, it might be fighter affiliation.
CB: Could you just describe what fighter affiliation involved?
AN: Well fighter affiliation.
CB: How it works?
AN: It would be arranged that we would go to a certain point somewhere and a fighter would suddenly arrive and our job was to take evasive action the way we would have done if it were a German night fighter. It was just to make sure that the two gunners were on the ball and the reaction by the pilot was okay.
CB: Okay. Going back to crew and operations, the air bomber is up front doing in the run-in, how did you link with him?
AN: Well, the link with him is as we were getting near the coast I’d say to him ‘Can you give me a pin point?’ and I got the same answer every time, ‘I can’t give you a pin point but we’re dead on track.’ That was my link with him. His job before we got to the target was throwing out Window strips but you see the thing is that, as I said to you, we were told ‘A crew is a team.’ Now think of the composition of our crew. Pilot a Geordie, engineer Lancashire, bomb aimer Birmingham, I’m from London, wireless operator from Wales, mid upper gunner from Lancashire, special operator from Norfolk, rear gunner from Canada, there’s a mixture for you, but we clicked as a team in the same way that if we go back that when the squadron association was formed in 1977 for about two or three years we were unique we had eight crew members at the reunion, as time went on some of them didn’t make it but at the moment we still have five out of eight.
CB: Um. Your special ops man was Ted Manners?
AN: Ted Manners yes.
CB: After the war he could meet with you could he and tell you what he was doing? Or did you not get into that conversation?
AN: I met Ted in northern Italy when he was an intelligence officer.
CB: Still in the RAF, he was?
AN: Still in the RAF, yes.
CB: Right.
AN: I met Rusty at Cranwell in 1951 when he had taken some Canadian cadets to the graduation at Cranwell when Princess Elizabeth was the, the⸻
CB: Reviewing?
AN: Reviewing officer.
CB: Yes.
AN: Talking of that incidentally who is coming on the 2nd of October to bless the?
CB: Can I come back to that in a mo?
AN: Yeah.
CB: Yes, thank you, thank you. Now on the, there are some things that are less palatable to discuss but they were, they were the reality of life and it still is today in a different way but with aircrew there was a contentious different approach perhaps and that’s the sexually transmitted diseases challenge, how did you see that?
AN: I, I would say it would depend on the individual. I mean on the book about our crew they talk about Norman Westby, our bomb aimer, being taken to Grimsby by some of our crew where he met Luscious Lil [chuckling]. But, but, but we, apart from the nights when we went drinking to a degree we went our own ways. I mean if you weren’t going to the pub it was the case you got the bus into Louth you could go to the pictures, come out of the pictures, get your fish ‘n’ chips and get the bus back.
CB: Um. I was thinking of other crews and just in the RAF in general because you, it’s the sort of thing that isn’t a secret so.
AN: Well see once again we didn’t mix with other crews.
CB: No?
AN: We were our own little environment.
CB: Right, and I think that’s the point, yeah.
AN: But you see I mean the thing is that, that we have got this, I have got this connection with the rest of the crew. I, after the war I flew with many crews.
CB: Yeah.
AN: With many units but I never went to the associations, to other squadron’s associations meetings, it’s only 101. I spent the least time on 101 but it was the time when we were fighting for our lives.
CB: Um.
AN: And I think it’s a different attitude in the same way as I say that Rusty never once queried a heading. Now I had a case where I was flying with a flight sergeant and I was what’s known as the wing navigator, I was an examiner, and I was flying in the Middle East and I gave him an alteration of heading and he queried it. When eventually the beacon came up and we were dead ahead. Did he apologise? Not bloody likely, and that’s the difference. I mean I don’t know what was going through Rusty’s mind, he may have told you when I gave him an alteration, we had the joke in that I would tell him off for being one degree off, because if you’re going at sixty miles an hour every sixty miles you’re one mile off for a degree, but I mean this was it, it was a joke. Certain things we treated as a joke.
CB: Just going to pause there for a moment.
AN: Yes sure.
CB: Thank you.
AN: Now can I offer you⸻
CB: We’re on again now and just going to recap on one point which was the raid in France on the tank training school so what was the background to that then Jumbo?
AN: Well, the school was in two parts, the accommodation and the technical side. I can’t remember which was which but 5 Group went in first and we were told to orbit until we got permission to bomb and while this was going on aircraft were being shot down while they were orbiting, and Rusty said ‘Oh we’re not having any more of this’ and he moved away from the orbiting until we got permission to bomb, then we went in. But we had this flash and the tail went up in the air, the nose went down, what it was I don’t know but it put us into a steep dive and as far as I recall it was Rusty and the engineer were pulling at the control column to get the aircraft back on an even keel.
CB: Um.
AN: As far as I can recall.
CB: Um.
AN: Because the thing is things were going on but you see the great thing with our crew, Rusty maintained that only people who needed to talk on the intercom talked, and if for example we were being attacked then anybody else talking shuts up. On the bombing run Norman’s in charge.
CB: Um.
AN: And this seemed to work very well, I mean most of the time our intercom was quiet, now compare that with the intercom on the American aircraft.
CB: Um, V17?
AN: Yeah, on the film.
CB: Memphis Belle?
AN: Memphis Belle. The noise on that intercom, the yakking going on.
CB: Um.
AN: I mean you can only listen to one person and that didn’t happen in the Memphis Belle at all.
CB: Um. Now part of the challenge with the raid you’ve just talked about was interference, radio interference so what was that?
AN: Well it was an American forces network, dance music, which seemed to be on the same frequency. I don’t know the technicalities of it at all, how it happened, why it happened, but this was the case that er, and it’s responsible. I mean we lost four or five crews on that which is a lot.
CB: Um.
AN: Not as bad as Nuremberg but still enough.
CB: Um. Was the high attrition rate due to the fact that the Germans were able to lock onto your special ops operator?
AN: Well, well, all I know is what I’ve read is the fact that the Germans developed a new system in that they had pockets where the fighters would patrol and they covered certain areas and that way they cut down the amount of fuel that was being used and so I think to a large degree the ABC became superfluous.
CB: Okay.
AN: Only an opinion.
CB: Yeah. Now what about Scarecrow?
AN: Scarecrow, well you see once again, Scarecrow was a form of flak. I mean in fact on the Mailly one I put in my logbook ‘a scarecrow up the flare shoot.’ I don’t know.
CB: Because the notion is, or was, that Scarecrow was actually a spoof to overcome the fact that the RAF could do nothing about the upward firing guns in the night fighters.
AN: Well do you know?
CB: Causing blow-up.
AN: We never knew about the upward firing guns.
CB: Oh really.
AN: And I mean I read about it somewhere and I said to Rusty ‘Did you know about it?’ and he said ‘No’. So we were flying in blissful ignorance.
CB: Um, ‘cause the notion was that the explosion wasn’t a special type of shell called Scarecrow but was the explosion as a result of the Schrage Musik.
AN: You wouldn’t be able to tell unless you were close to the explosion.
CB: Quite.
AN: Because I mean, the thing is that it was, the flak was going on all around you.
CB: Yeah.
AN: I mean, the thing is that, I remember on one trip we did we went to Aachen two nights running. The first night we did at normal altitude, the second night we descended and dropped the bombs in the descent as I recall and our special said afterwards that he heard the Germans giving our height just as we passed it, so the stuff was going off above us not below us. But that’s only what I was told at the time.
CB: Yeah sure. Now after the war, the war comes, you finish your tour, you then go to instruction. What were you instructing on then?
AN: Well it was navigating, either self-navigation equipment or DR, dead reckoning navigation or flying as a screen with them.
CB: In what type of aeroplane?
AN: Well it was a Wellington.
CB: So this is OTU?
AN: At the OTU at Wymeswold. I went back to Wymeswold.
CB: Um.
AN: And as I say Wymeswold was taken over by Transport Command and I suddenly found myself navigating Dakotas.
CB: Oh right. So when did that start?
AN: Well that would be have been at the end of, at the end of, probably about the end of ’44.
CB: Right.
AN: Then at the end of the war I went overseas on ground appointments and then I came back and eventually I came back onto Transport Command again.
CB: What did you do overseas?
AN: I was a briefing officer or an adjutant. I was an adjutant at Treviso, unit adjutant Treviso, station adjutant at Udine and a wing adjutant at [indistinct]. Then I came home and did the staff navigation course.
CB: Right. What was the OTU number that you were at when you were training at Wymeswold?
AN: I think it was either 93 or 108.
CB: And then when you went back again same people were there were they?
AN: It had a different number then I think. That may be why I’m thinking of two numbers. Well I mean actually what happened was I was there at Wymeswold some people were posted out, new people posted in and I had to do the course that a trainee would do, because it was my first time I learnt about trigonometry.
CB: Which was important for Dakotas?
AN: [Laughter] Well it’s like the same thing that people say you’ve got to be a mathematician to be a navigator, that’s a load of rubbish. As long as you can get two and two makes four.
CB: What was the ACU number at Blyton?
AN: Dear me, now you’re asking something.
CB: Doesn’t matter. Okay so then after the war and you’ve finished your adjt job, what happened then as a sequence until when you gave up flying?
AN: Oh no, I didn’t give up. No, I came back from Austria and then I then went onto a reserve centre, teaching reservists’ navigation and then I went onto Hastings and did a few years at Hastings, then I spent a spell as an examiner of navigators, and then, that included tour in Singapore, then I came home from Singapore, um let me think, oh I did more examining and then after that I went to training command for a spell and then I went out to Borneo with the army, I was at the brigade headquarters. And I came home from that and I was on Britannia’s. After Britannia’s I was station navigation officer at Manby and then I went onto training radar navigators at Lindholme and then at Scampton.
CB: And those two were Vulcans or did you do Victors as well?
AN: No, no I did Vulcans because we were at a Vulcan station. But before then I did the navy, the navy, the Buccaneers.
CB: And why nav radar rather than the navigator?
AN: Well because the, the navigators used nav radar and it was a case that, it’s difficult to explain, if you can imagine that you’re flying along and you’ve got a hill coming towards you, you can get the, you can see that as a hill, but as you get closer to it the picture changes, and I don’t know what instruction they had because what happened was that we would take off in the Hastings with the radar navigator at the back with an instructor and they, the trainee, he would do the navigating but we were the safety crew, and I mean it was very interesting flying at five hundred feet.
CB: In a Hastings?
AN: In a Hastings. [Laughs]. And of course while we were doing that we also had a spell where we used to go round the, fly round the, oil-rigs to make sure they were okay. We then relieved the Nimrods periodically to do the Cold War patrols, so it was very interesting one way and another.
CB: Yeah. In the V Bombers there are three people at the back, so one’s the navigator, the other’s the nav radar and the third one’s the AEO?
AN: Yes.
CB: So how was the division of labour organised?
AN: I don’t know because I never flew in, I never flew in the Vulcan. The Vulcan chap flew with us because we had the equipment.
CB: So it’s purely dealing with the radar aspects of navigation?
AN: Yes, yes.
CB: Because he was also the air bomber?
AN: Yes.
CB: So then you give up doing that, then what?
AN: Well that was when I retired from the RAF in 1977.
CB: Aged 55? Close? Then what did you do? You did your time off?
AN: I played golf for six months.
CB: And how did you then get into a new career?
AN: Well I saw, well when before I retired from the RAF I went on a course and became associate member of the Institute of Administrative Management. I also took the Civil Service entrance exam and after six months of playing golf and getting bored I saw an advertisement in the paper that they were looking for people, civil servants. So I applied and I spent ten years, most of it at Kirton Lindsay.
CB: Oh right. On things we can’t talk about?
AN: Oh no, no. This was the Environment Ministry but we looked after military and public buildings and married quarters. And then after that when that, they then moved me from Kirton Lindsay to Scampton back where I used to be.
CB: And then you retired?
AN: I retired yes completely.
CB: Okay good, thank you very much. [Pause]. So how did, you were shut away in your office as you said how did you feel about the effect of what you were doing with your bombing, the effect on the ground?
AN: Well I mean we were told, no we were given bits of information about trips we’d done, about whether it was a success or not, um but to me bombing in Germany we were bombing the enemy. I was a Londoner, I lost relatives, not close relatives but I lost relatives. As far as I was concerned I, I had no feelings really about the poor Germans, to me at that time the Germans were our enemy. Now as far as I’m concerned that I could meet someone today and he’s a German, so what the war’s over. I mean the price has been paid and this is the way I think it should be but I mean I didn’t have any feelings about poor Germans at all because it’s no different, we were doing the same as two armies fighting each other. This was, we were one army and the civilians were the other army. Unfortunately reading books since the war a lot of the people who got lost achieved nothing, their lives were wasted.
CB: Um, um.
AN: In case of, as in the Nuremberg raid, I mean as Rusty would say ‘On the Nuremberg raid, we lost more people than the whole of the Battle of Britain’.
CB: We did, yeah.
AN: And I’m afraid I for one, I mean they did a wonderful job in the Battle of Britain, but I for one feel it’s about time we had our turn. I mean every time an aircraft was lost it was seven or eight people.
CB: Yeah, absolutely.
AN: But then that’s life.
CB: You’d given up operations by the, towards the end of the war so did the Dresden raid, were you aware of that?
AN: Well as far as I’m concerned the result of the Dresden raid made me have second thoughts about Winston Churchill because I feel that he did the dirty on us, that on what I’ve read about the Dresden raid it was asked for by the Russians because the troops were passing through Dresden. That is what I have read other people say it’s a lie but to me it was spite in particular that Bomber Harris didn’t get the decoration that the other service chiefs got, and that was small minded I feel.
CB: Um.
AN: But once again Dresden was in the war area. It was unfortunate.
CB: As was Chemnitz down the road? Okay thank you very much.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with a navigator from 101 Squadron
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-09-07
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AAn00202-150907
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
Format
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01:00:24 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
He was born in London and worked for some time as a clerk until joined up the Royal Air Force. He did not like the idea of serving in the Army or in the Navy but - as a Londoner - he was keen to take part in the war having experienced the Blitz. He trained in America as pilot, but failed and re-mustered as a navigator at Portage la Prairie, west of Winnipeg (Manitoba, Canada) where he learned astro navigation. Back in England, he crewed up RAF Wymeswold, then trained on Lancasters at RAF Blyton before being posted to 101 Squadron. They were joined by an additional crew member who spoke German and could disrupt night fighters radio communication. During his first operation he saw the target with all bomb flashes and exclaimed: 'bloody hell' - he never left his post to see the effects of a bombing until his last trip. One of his tasks was to note every aircraft shot down, as communicated by the pilot: these pieces of intelligence were then combined as to ascertain where the aircraft were lost. He remembered how they survived a mid-air collision, but the other crew did not; and another incident in which they lost an engine and his pilot, had to decide whether or not they should go on. Retells how the Germans salvaged Gee equipment from crashed aircraft and were able to jam it; the last reliable Gee signal was picked up near the French coast. He recollects that a flight engineer couldn’t cope with pressure when they lost the engine: he panicked and laid on the floor for the whole time. They had to replace him with another one. He ascribed survival to both camaraderie and sheer luck, which includes mascots. He had a little doll inside his battledress, and their Canadian rear gunner used to bring two beer bottles so that he could ‘bomb’ the target himself. One time, since he did not have the beer bottles, the station commander himself went back to the mess so that he could have his beer bottles with him, and he was happy that he could bomb Germany. He said that some reacted in different ways to operations: even if the opertions took a heavy toll on them, this did not automatically equate to lack of moral fibre. Their flight engineer wasn’t a case of that, if he was, he would have had his stripes torn off his uniform while being marched away. He himself, the German speaker special operator, and the wireless operator felt less stressed, being busy all the time inside the aircraft. On the contrary, the rest of the crew could see the operation unfold in front of their eyes. He mentioned an operation to Nuremberg in which they lost a quarter of the squadron. They lost the most experienced crews, who were at their twenty-ninth or thirtieth trip, because of friendly fire. He recollects a corporal serving as ground crew: he was very close to him and to the rest of the crew. He never wanted to be promoted as this would have meant being separated from ‘his’ aircraft. Losses were so high that he could not afford the luxury of befriending other crews. He stressed that he was ‘an individual only when he was attending briefings’, then he became part of his crew. While not on operational flights he took part in fighter affiliation exercises in which they simulate combat situations. He points out the sense of belonging despite individual differences: the pilot a ‘Geordie’, the engineer from Lancashire, the bomb aimer from Birmingham, he himself from London, the wireless operator from Wales, the mid upper gunner from Lancashire, the special operator from Norfolk and the rear gunner from Canada. He did not consider himself a hero, but merely did his job in an impersonal way - bombing Germany was bombing the enemy. Despite having lost relatives during the Blitz, he did not have hatred: that was war. In a total war, the distinction between civilians and combatants fades. After the war, he realised how many people achieved nothing and wasted their lives.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
Scotland--Perth and Kinross
England--London
Canada
Manitoba
Manitoba--Portage la Prairie
Germany
Germany--Nuremberg
France
France--Mailly-le-Camp
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Adalberto Di Corato
Carolyn Emery
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
101 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bomb aimer
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
briefing
C-47
coping mechanism
flight engineer
Gee
ground crew
ground personnel
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
mid-air collision
military ethos
navigator
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
pilot
RAF Blyton
RAF Wymeswold
Scarecrow
shot down
superstition
training
Wellington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/526/8760/AOrmorodJ170207.2.mp3
01f676b4e0d67a79cb82581d2cf6da36
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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Ormerod, John
J Ormerod
Curly Ormerod
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Ormorod, J
Description
An account of the resource
4 items. An oral history interview with Warrant Officer John Omerod (b. 1922, 1694577 Royal air Force) DFM, his log book and correspondence. He completed a tour of operations as a flight engineer with 101 Squadron from RAF Ludford Magna.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by John Omerod and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-04-12
2017-02-07
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is Tuesday the 7th of February 2017 and I’m in Rochdale with George er John Ormerod. 101 Squadron man. So John what are your earliest recollections of life?
JO: My earliest recollections. I can remember being, living in the house which was behind the grocer’s shop and therefore we had electricity which [pause] We lived behind the grocer’s shop and they had electricity and so therefore this house behind them where we lived also had electricity which in those days was, you know, for shops and all that kind of thing. Very few, you know, local houses had electricity. Very few. What? [pause]
CB: What did your father do?
JO: My father was a mule spinner in the cotton industry.
CB: And how many brothers and sisters did you have?
JO: I had two sisters.
CB: And where did you go to school?
JO: I went to school at Balderstone. Balderstone School. A Church of England school. I went there until I was fourteen and then after that the education was more or less three nights a week at night school and from there of course I started work as a, actually as a weaver on looms. Weaving. And from there I progressed into the engineering side of the, of the work and from there carried on learning engineering at night school. [pause] I can’t just —
CB: Okay. So you were born in 1922.
JO: That’s right.
CB: So the war started when you were sixteen.
JO: Yes. Around about.
CB: Seventeen.
JO: Yeah.
CB: What? You didn’t join the RAF then. Why not?
JO: Well of course we weren’t old enough in them days.
CB: Right.
JO: You had to be eighteen you know before you could but eventually when they were starting to recruit I decided I was going to get in and get in what I wanted and that was the RAF. So of course by pushing myself forward I managed to get in.
CB: Were you in a reserved occupation.
JO: [What for?]
CB: Because you were in engineering?
JO: No. Not really.
CB: Right. So why did you choose the RAF and not the army or the navy?
JO: It were just, just one of those things. You know. I preferred it to the others and it was the leading one as far as we were concerned where I lived, you know.
CB: What was the main attraction?
JO: The flying. That’s what I wanted to do. Not to be in the ranks you know. I wanted to be flying.
CB: Were you a fairly active youngster?
JO: Oh yes. Yeah.
CB: Keen on sport?
JO: Football [laughs] at one time. We were always playing football.
CB: So you pushed, you said, to get into the RAF. Where did you join up?
JO: A place called Poynton. Somewhere near Preston I think it was.
[pause]
CB: And then what? What happened at Poynton when you got there?
JO: We were allocated out to the various training units and I forget now where it actually was. The training unit. I can’t just remember.
CB: So when is this? This is — we’re talking about when? 1940? ’41?
JO: Nineteen forty — I think it was the beginning of ’42 I think.
CB: Okay. And what trade did you decide you wanted to follow and did they respect that?
JO: Well I wanted to go into engineering. And I got on as a mechanic to start with and of course I went up to, you know, up in the ranks until eventually I got to a warrant officer.
CB: Right.
JO: In the engineering.
CB: Right.
JO: Became a flight engineer of course.
CB: So what, so you became a flight mechanic on the ground.
JO: Yes.
CB: To begin with. And at what stage did you then get to be trained for aircrew?
JO: I would say after about six or eight months. Something like that. I started on that. Of course spent the rest of the time in there as a flight engineer.
CB: Yes. Did you do, you were trained in ground mechanic as a flight mechanic.
JO: That’s, that’s correct.
CB: Where was that done?
JO: I don’t know again now.
CB: And then when you volunteered to fly they sent you to St Athan did they?
JO: That’s right. Yeah.
CB: Right. And what did you do there?
JO: Well we did the training actually at St Athan and, for the normal you know —
CB: For the ground trades as well?
JO: But then it was, it was such a big station they were training all sorts of trades there and I actually went back again. You know what I mean. I went as a mechanic and then I later went back later as a, [unclear] for a flight engineer.
CB: Oh right. So after you’d trained initially at St Athan as a flight mechanic where did they send you? You were posted to, was it a squadron or were you sent to something else?
JO: To be quite candid I don’t remember.
CB: Doesn’t matter.
JO: No.
CB: So St Athan. That was —
JO: I’m ninety four now you know.
CB: Yeah. Brilliant.
JO: It takes a lot of remembering.
CB: It does. So from St Athan the course was quite long was it? Some months.
JO: Yes. If I remember correctly it was something like six months you know. Something like that.
CB: And do you remember what the process was because an aeroplane is a complicated machine?
JO: Do I remember what?
CB: What the phases of the training at St Athan were.
JO: Oh they were all about the engines and that to start with.
CB: Right.
JO: And then of course when you started to get working on the engines and that it became learning about the rest of the aircraft.
CB: Okay.
JO: And eventually of course that was what got me onto being a flight engineer.
CB: Yeah. So you’d do engines. Then what? Because the other things would be —
JO: Well the theory of flight. All the rest of it. You know
CB: Right.
JO: So —
CB: Hydraulics?
JO: Hmmn?
CB: Hydraulics.
JO: Hydraulics yes. Pneumatics. The lot.
CB: And what about the electrical side?
JO: Oh yes. Aye. We had to do that and the batteries as well, you know. Working off the batteries. Talking about that I was once working out in India, you know, with the Lanc and it wasn’t made for those climates. And I always remember we were flying along and our eyes started to prickle and it was the batteries that were boiling. You know from —
CB: The heat.
JO: From being in too hot a climate. And we had to disconnect them. [laughs] Oh it was, it was a right, a right game was that. Another thing out there of course, out in India was we had to get on our way early because if you wanted to test your engines it got too warm so what happened later on in the day if you were going to take-off you had to take off without testing or anything. As you were starting the last engine up you were more or less on your way, you know, because otherwise the first engine you’d started had been boiling. [Would have been boiling off coolant?]. So we had to be very quick. No testing. Just get all the engines going as quick as possible and away smartly. Otherwise it were having to get up early to test it.
CB: Yeah.
JO: Very very early.
CB: Yeah. So how high did you have to go before the engines would settle down?
JO: Oh you could settle them at any height. Up to, I think, if I remember correctly, somewhere around about twenty eight thousand was the maximum but we used to fly somewhere around about the twenty, twenty two. [pause] With normal flying you’d fly about ten thousand.
CB: Yeah. Right. So back to St Athan some of the equipment on the Lancasters was getting complicated in that you had Gee, H2S and other more sophisticated items.
JO: Oh yes.
CB: How did they train you on those?
JO: Well we weren’t trained on that stuff. That was the wireless operator that had those. In charge of those. No. The engineer was just on more or less the engines and the operating equipment for ailerons you know and rudders and so forth.
CB: Hydraulics. Pneumatics.
JO: Hydraulics as well yeah for going down.
CB: So if an electrical fault was to appear.
JO: Yeah.
CB: How would that be dealt with?
JO: Well you more or less knew lots of bits and pieces. Put it that way. But not a master of any particular trade really. You had to be, you had to be one that knew a bit of everything otherwise you were no use at all, you know. And you’d to be one who could quickly, you know, understand what had happened.
CB: Yes.
JO: You know. Have sufficient knowledge to deal with it.
CB: So how could you? You talked about disconnecting batteries. How do you disconnect the batteries in flight?
JO: Oh well just —
CB: Where are the batteries?
JO: Pardon?
CB: Where were the batteries?
JO: The batteries were on the starboard side about halfway down the aircraft.
CB: Right. So you could isolate them.
JO: That’s right. Yeah.
CB: Did they have a switch to isolate or did you have to literally.
JO: No. You had to disconnect them manually.
CB: Disconnect them. Yeah. So the generators on the engines were creating enough power whilst you were flying.
JO: That’s right.
CB: Okay. So from St Athan where did you go then? Because you didn’t fly at St Athan did you?
JO: No. I didn’t fly at St Athan. No. I can’t remember now.
CB: So the next step would be the Heavy Conversion Unit.
JO: That’s right. We went, we went first on Halifaxes.
CB: Right.
JO: And then off the Halifaxes on to Lancasters.
CB: At the Heavy Conversion Unit.
JO: That’s right.
CB: Yeah.
JO: And then we were sent to 101 Squadron and I couldn’t remember exactly where that was at the time but we finished up in Ludford Magna.
CB: Yes. Just before that. When you went to the Heavy Conversion Unit the crew had already been formed at the Operational Conversion Unit hadn’t they?
JO: That’s right. They picked the engineer up the last.
CB: Yes. Now how did you get selected for your crew at HCU?
JO: Well it was a matter of getting talking around the room. All the crews with the engineers kind of thing. Got talking with Rusty and stayed with Rusty. We seemed to get on quite well together and he was satisfied with me so that was it more or less.
CB: Was the rest of the crew with him or were the pilots making the selection?
JO: Well the pilot was making the selection definitely but the crew were there, kind of thing.
CB: They were.
JO: But not taking any part in it really.
CB: So how were you introduced to them?
JO: Rusty just introduced me to them as far as I can remember. And, well we seemed to get on together right from the beginning and of course all the years through we all kept in contact with one another which I think is very surprising really. But we were so happy together I think that was the real reason and then of course we went through quite a great deal together really. You know. On our nerves. [laughs]
CB: So your initial experience of flying was at the HCU. So just before we get to the squadron what did you actually do at the Heavy Conversion Unit as a crew?
JO: Well we went off Halifaxes onto Lancasters and then of course we did a lot of cross country runs and everything so that the navigator could use his knowledge and er to show he was proficient at doing these things. And the wireless op of course with his job. And mine of course was seeing that the engines were okay.
CB: And you —
JO: And the main thing really with the engineer as far as the ordinary flying was to, well for all the crew, was to get those engines all in unison where if you didn’t you were getting like a hell of a lot of noise. And on a long trip, on say an eight hour trip or something like that, you know, you’d be shattered with the noise which was enough you know but if you got them humming away together then they lull you to sleep rather than anything.
CB: So how did you synchronise the engines then?
JO: Well first of all you’d synchronise the two on one side by looking through the props and when the props started to look to go back, backwards then you got them two in unison but then it was getting the other two in unison. But then trying to pair them up with the others, you know, so that you got all of them going, you know, similar.
CB: So what did you do to get them to do that because it’s visual but you are controlling something to do it? What is that?
JO: Throttles.
CB: Right.
JO: Yeah. Throttles when you push them backwards and forwards gives the extra revs and so forth and they used to have a gate on it where you pull it down and it could only go so far. Now you only lifted that gate in an emergency. You were taking off or something and one of the engines failed. You lifted it up and got the extra on the field to get up. You know. Only in an emergency like did you ever lift that.
CB: So the, you talked about starting off on Halifaxes.
JO: Yes.
CB: And were they on radial engines or were they on Merlins?
JO: No. They were on the ordinary engines really. The Merlin.
CB: They were on the Merlin. Right. So what was the difference from your point of view between the Halifax and the Lancaster?
JO: I don’t think there was that great a difference really. But of course in those days the preference was the Lancaster.
CB: The layout was different wasn’t it for the —
JO: You what?
CB: The layout inside.
JO: Oh yes. Oh yeah.
CB: For the engineer’s position.
JO: That’s right.
CB: So how different was that?
JO: Well the on the, on the ones are Lancasters. The panel was down on the right hand side behind the pilot on the starboard side. He sat on the —
CB: On the port side.
JO: On the port.
CB: Yeah.
JO: And me on the starboard and that were behind me on the panel. And if everything was running as it should do all the, all the pointers on the gauge pointed to 12 o’clock. All of them. That was when they were all running as they should do. So you just glanced and if there was one that wasn’t 12 o’clock, you know, it hit you right away.
CB: But are these the rev gauges or are they pressure gauges or what are they?
JO: Pressure gauges.
CB: Right.
JO: All the lot. All the gauges on each engine they were there. You know, one below the other but if any one of them wasn’t reading 12 o’clock or near enough 12 o’clock when you were flying there was something wrong so you just looked at the panel and automatically one were out. It showed straightaway.
CB: Now what documentation did you have to complete in a flight?
JO: Oh you did the normal stuff but you got the air miles per gallon. You worked with the navigator and worked it out. How many air miles you’d got for a gallon which was normally one point one air miles per gallon. If you beat that you were doing very well.
CB: It depended on the headwinds.
JO: Oh yes. Well that automatic, you know. In other words the wind’s going back with you and you were trying to go forwards. [laughs]
CB: Now there were quite a few tanks in the wings of the aircraft how did you work out the transfer of fuel between them?
JO: Well the outer ones they carried about just over a hundred gallons each. About. I think it was a hundred and thirteen gallons and that had to be pumped into number two tank.
CB: Which was where?
JO: That was the tank next to it coming in-board. So as soon as you had available space for it you pumped it into the number two which you ran off. Ran off number two.
CB: So going back to this documentation. You were logging the readings at what interval?
JO: At what?
CB: At what interval were you logging readings from your gauges and tanks?
JO: Well, you were, you were logging them in your mind all the time more or less but if you had to make any changes then you put it down on your log.
CB: Right. So the second tank is in the middle of the wing is it?
JO: That’s right. Yeah.
CB: Between the engines. And the main tank. Is it called the main tank? Is it?
JO: The main tank. The one nearest —
CB: What number’s that?
JO: Well it would be number one.
CB: Number one. Yeah.
JO: And that nearest to the aircraft.
CB: Yeah.
JO: The fuselage.
CB: So where was the fuel being drained from first and was it the main tank and then you topped it up?
JO: You took, as far as I can remember all the fuel being taken to the engines was from number two.
CB: In the middle.
JO: Yeah.
CB: Right.
JO: And the number one filled number two up you know and of course the number three tank. A hundred and thirteen gallons was pumped in to number two.
CB: The one on the wing tip.
JO: Yeah.
CB: Right. Okay. So on a flight starting with take-off what would you be doing?
JO: What?
CB: In the aircraft.
JO: What?
CB: As your role. What would you be doing for take-off?
JO: Oh my role was to help the pilot. In some instances a pilot did like you to take over the throttles and like he’d say what he wanted you to do kind of thing but others would rather do it themselves. It just depended. You know.
CB: How did Rusty do this?
JO: Rusty. He did it himself. You used to follow him up kind of thing, just in case.
CB: Did you put your hand over his glove?
JO: Yeah. More or less.
CB: As he moved the throttles forward.
JO: That’s right.
CB: Yeah. And you talked earlier about going through the gate.
JO: Yeah.
CB: To do that you flick a bar out of the way do you and that enables you to go.
JO: Well it were like a piece of heavy wire.
CB: Yeah.
JO: Used to came out about a matter of about an inch and a quarter.
CB: Right.
JO: And what, that was like holding them and it couldn’t go any farther.
CB: Yeah.
JO: But if you wanted to go farther you had to lift that up to get that extra but if you used it it had to be reported because then you had to have a proper overhaul of the engines because they’d overgone what they should normally do.
CB: So on take-off how often would you need to go through the gate?
JO: Oh you wouldn’t. Never. Unless you really had to do if an engine failed or something like that and you needed the extra. Then you would do.
CB: So when you go through the gate what’s that doing with the engine? It’s doing something to create the power.
JO: It’s going over the normal power.
CB: How?
JO: Yeah.
CB: How is it doing that? Is it revs or is it boost? Or what is it?
JO: Well it‘s boost actually.
CB: Which is the supercharger.
JO: Yeah. That’s right.
CB: How many super —
JO: Plus four.
CB: Plus four. So that’s plus four atmospheric pressure. Four times atmospheric pressure is it?
JO: Yeah.
CB: Right. And did you have to do that occasionally?
JO: No, no. Normal speed like I say. It was only in emergency.
CB: Yeah. So on take-off you didn’t have, there wasn’t a second seat, you had a folding seat to sit on.
JO: That’s right. You leaned against it.
CB: You sat on that did you? Or were you standing?
JO: Well you leaned against it.
CB: On take-off.
JO: Yeah.
CB: Right.
JO: And used to have a bar across that you pulled out and you put your foot on it. I always thought it was a solid bar until one time we made a bad landing. My weight went against it properly and it just folded [laughs]. It was only a hollow, you know.
CB: A tube.
JO: Yeah. And as soon as it got all my full weight on it it just folded up and I finished up in front of the aircraft.
CB: Amazing. Just going back to synchronising the engines.
JO: Yeah.
CB: So revs, getting them right meant that the throttle position wasn’t necessarily the same for each engine. Is that right? Because you had different speeds.
JO: That’s true. That’s true.
CB: Were you also adjusting the pitch differently for each engine or not?
JO: No. No. That normally used you know as a normal setting. Well it did for everything really because you didn’t want messing about with two things on one prop. You know what I mean?
CB: How often did the engines play up?
JO: Oh. Very very seldom. Very seldom.
CB: So when you got to the squadron what happened then? 101 Squadron.
JO: 101 Squadron. Well we were the last. Engineers were the last to join the crew.
CB: At the HCU.
JO: Hmmn?
CB: You joined at the HCU.
JO: Yeah.
CB: Then you went. The whole crew. You went on to the squadron.
JO: That’s right.
CB: At Elsham Wolds.
JO: No. Ludford Magna.
CB: I meant Ludford Magna. Yes. Yeah. So in the squadron how many aircraft were there at that time?
JO: I have a feeling it was somewhere around about twenty two or twenty three aircraft.
CB: And what was the first raid?
JO: The first.
CB: The first op. Can you remember?
JO: No. I don’t know.
CB: Okay.
JO: My son has my logbook.
CB: Right. So, what you did. How many ops did you do altogether?
JO: Thirty one.
CB: Right. Why was it thirty one and not thirty?
JO: I’ve no idea. No idea whatsoever. No idea. But it finished up at thirty one.
CB: So in thirty one ops then some of them —
JO: There was some mix up at the end. What they did at the end they were starting to, they were doing some of the short ones over to France kind of thing you know and they were starting something of calling them a third of an op.
CB: Yeah.
JO: And it was only in this mix up at the end that like you had to do quite a distance to become a full op. Any road I don’t know what happened exactly but it was sorted anyhow. Each one became an op.
CB: Yeah. What were the most memorable ops you went on would you say?
JO: Well I suppose they were all memorable. They all, they all finished up with your nerves. [laughs]. I believe [pause] I don’t know who it was but one of the engineers he actually was down on the ground, well down on the floor in the aircraft scared to death. And of course they had to get him off the, the squadron right away. You know. Out of the way.
CB: What did they call that?
JO: Lack of moral fibre. LMF.
CB: What happened to him? Do you know?
JO: Oh they sent him off to be helped but he, funnily enough I always said to myself he wasn’t the kind of person to be doing the job. The ones that were doing that job kind of thing were [pause] they weren’t a master of any trade but they had a good knowledge of everything. Which, that were really what they had to have and but he, to me he should never have been in aircrew at all. To me he didn’t seem to mix. You know, he was an odd one out.
CB: In what way was he different?
JO: Well manliness and just generally he wasn’t that kind of person, you know. Too soft and that. Not a rough and ready kind of person.
CB: Was he highly educated or —
JO: No. I shouldn’t think so.
CB: But was he a very analytical person?
JO: We got, we got a bloke which we couldn’t, we couldn’t pronounce his name. We all called him Shenai. I think he was Indian.
CB: Called him what?
JO: Shenai.
CB: Shenai. Right.
JO: Yeah. But he was very well educated. Very very well educated and he was funny and all. Years after the war I’m walking through Manchester and going home from work and I turned to this bloke as he spoke and went past you know and he turned around and looked at me and finally we finished up walking back to one another and then I said, ‘Shenai.’ [laughs] And he came up. He was, he finished up on Sunderlands.
CB: Oh.
JO: He was a highly educated bloke. There were no doubt about it. And he went on the Sunderlands.
CB: And he was an engineer.
JO: An engineer. Yeah. Sunderland Flying Boats.
CB: Any other characters?
JO: Not as I can think of. No.
CB: Now what about raids themselves?
JO: Who? Raids.
CB: What, what significant ones stick in your mind?
JO: Well the Berlin ones were always when they were telling you where you were going to go you know. They pulled the curtain back and they’d say, ‘Well. The target for tonight,’ and they’d say, ‘Is the big city.’ Everything would go quiet because bombing Berlin — you can imagine. All the ack-ack guns that they could get from any part of Germany were around there to, to, you know, defend the capital which was funny really because they played ducks and drakes with one another. To get all their ack-ack to protect Berlin and then they’d go to that bombing the outer places. You know, other cities and when they got all the tackle moved to these other places then they started bombing Berlin again. You know it were just part of it. Part of the way they ran the war.
CB: Now in your plane you had the eighth man. The special operator.
JO: We had the special operator. Yeah.
CB: So who was he?
JO: Well he were called Ted Manners.
CB: And how did he fit in?
JO: He fitted in very well. Very well. We met, met his two daughters.
CB: After the war?
JO: Yes. After the war. Yeah.
CB: So what, what was he doing?
JO: He was monitoring all that he heard in German that was applicable to what, you know, what we were doing. Anything at all. Anything he could pick up at all he logged and then all of them from our squadron would later on, they’d be analysed you know and see if they could find anything out from what different ones had heard, you know.
CB: So where did he sit in the aircraft?
JO: He sat behind the wireless operator.
CB: That means behind the main spar.
JO: That’s right.
CB: And did he have a little cubby hole. What was it?
JO: Well more or less just a piece of panelling out from the side of the aircraft like the wireless op did, you know. The wireless op sat there and then he sat behind in the next corner.
CB: And was he screened off?
JO: No. Not screened off. Just —
CB: With a curtain?
JO: A divided position kind of. Partition.
CB: Right. And what equipment did he have?
JO: Well such, similar to the radio bloke. You know. The wireless op. I don’t know exactly.
CB: Yeah. And what was the difference in the look of the aircraft? What did it have on it for him?
JO: In what way?
CB: Well it had aerials did it?
JO: Oh it had. Yeah it had.
CB: And what were they?
JO: But when they were flying they had a trailing aerial.
CB: Oh.
JO: But that had to be pulled in and nine times of out ten they forgot and they lost parts of it by, you know, catching.
CB: Yeah.
JO: When they land but they had that trailing aerial that they worked on.
CB: And what fixtures were there in aerials on the aircraft?
JO: Just the, just the ordinary one. That were it. They could wind it back in, you know. That was —
CB: Yeah but then they have large aerial masts on the aircraft.
JO: Oh they had two special ones. I don’t know exactly how they worked.
CB: How big were they?
JO: A matter of about two foot. They’d two of them anyhow.
CB: So his role was to do what exactly?
JO: Well to log anything he heard appertaining to, well to anything really.
CB: Because he was a German speaker. That was the key wasn’t it?
JO: Oh yes. He could speak German. Yeah.
CB: Right. And what equipment did he have to use against the Germans?
JO: He didn’t use it against the Germans. He was just using it for logging. To sift out and find out anything about, you know, about what had been going on down below.
CB: Did he not have a jammer?
JO: No.
CB: Based on a microphone in the engines to broadcast.
JO: Well.
CB: Into the German night fighter.
JO: Actually nothing of that description was ever told to us you know. He probably had, you know. But I don’t know why but nearly all them fellows that were doing that was German Jews or something like that. And many times they didn’t just fit in. And one of them must have been for the other side because I remember them saying one of them had jumped out and he must have been, you know, not of ours. He must have been for them and somehow or other made his way.
CB: He deserted effectively.
JO: That’s right. Yeah.
CB: On one of the raids. So if they were German speakers what were they doing with that? That was the logging you talked about.
JO: That’s right. Yeah.
CB: But did they speak into their equipment?
JO: No. Not as I remember.
CB: Now thinking about accommodation on the airfield.
JO: Yeah.
CB: At Ludford Magna. Where were you accommodated?
JO: Well we were accommodated in Nissen huts.
CB: The whole crew.
JO: All the ordinary ones, you know. The ones that weren’t officers were stationed on one site and the officer material was in the officer’s mess and their living quarters.
CB: So the NC, was your crew a mixture or was it all NCOs?
JO: It was a mixture. Rusty was an officer. Alec. The navigator.
CB: The navigator.
JO: I was a warrant officer. Me. Made me up to a warrant officer.
CB: While you were still on the squadron?
JO: Hmmn.
CB: And the special ops man? So Ted Manners.
JO: Yeah.
CB: He was accommodated where?
JO: Well I think they were all accommodated together at one period but eventually of course they became part of the crew and was billeted with us you know but at the beginning they were all separate.
CB: How many crews would there be in a Nissen hut?
JO: Two. All down one side and all down the other you know like. Seven on one side. Seven on the other.
CB: And what about eating and enjoying yourself socially? How did that work on the airfield?
JO: Well again officer material all went to the officer’s mess and all the non-commissioned were in your sergeant’s mess
CB: And what happened in the sergeant’s mess?
JO: Well nothing much different at all.
CB: But it was for eating but was there a bar there or how did it work?
JO: Oh there was a bar. Yeah. Bar in the sergeant’s mess and one in the officer’s mess.
CB: And on the airfield did they run entertainments? How did that work?
JO: Entertainments. Yeah. They had various ones. And they had ones where the girls came in from the village. You know, for a dance or something like that.
CB: Where would that be on the airfield?
JO: That were, well it was the mess you know.
CB: Oh in was the mess was it?
JO: Yeah. I remember one time we lost seven aircraft in one night and when we came. When we landed to come back there was no breakfast for us. Nothing going on. All there was were a lot of girls weeping. They’d lost their boyfriends, you know and we were playing bloody hell we weren’t getting our breakfast. Oh I always remember that.
CB: So when you landed you’d always have a breakfast. What would that be?
JO: Oh the full breakfast you know.
CB: A good fry up.
JO: Oh yes. Definitely. Oh we did very well. And always when you were on ops you always had a good fry up before you went.
CB: And when you got back.
JO: Well same again. We did alright.
CB: So these girls were in a bad state because they were the people doing all the catering were they?
JO: That’s right. Yeah. But when we lost that seven one night. Seven aircraft. Of course all the girls had lost their boyfriends and oh.
CB: That was fifty six people.
JO: The station, the station were in a right — you see you never knew how many you’d lost because —
CB: No.
JO: As soon as they knew, they were, new crews were brought in and all the tables were full for breakfast again.
CB: That quickly.
JO: So that you never saw any empty tables. They had it all worked out. You know what I mean. Otherwise you’d have said, ‘Oh bloody hell.’ You know. Well they didn’t. They couldn’t do that because they filled them all.
CB: What was the loss rate of 101 Squadron compared with other squadrons?
JO: I believe it was very high actually in comparison. It was a special duty squadron. When we were flying I probably didn’t? you didn’t think of them as any different, you know. You just did the job as usual [coughs]. I was flying the Avro Yorks after the war. Lancasters during the war and then I was flying on the Avro York which was the first passenger carrying aircraft that was used after the war. You know the first one to be used and I was flying on the run out to Singapore carrying passengers. [pause] We used to do very well out of these VIPs. They always used to be wanting the prices of shares and all sorts and we had a wireless op who could take down commercial, commercial Morse. Well he couldn’t take it down. It came too fast but he could talk it. And he used to listen to it and he’d talk it and the navigator used to put it down in shorthand. And then of course they finished up sending a news-sheet around the aircraft, you know, for the passengers. And then of course when the passengers knew. Some of them would be on to us to get him to do this or get him to do that, you know. And we were always plenty of free drinks anywhere we stopped. [laughs]
CB: Going back to being on the squadron. What would you attribute the higher loss rate to be caused by?
JO: Well just by fighters. Ack-ack got some of them but fighters were the thing really.
CB: So what was it about your plane that attracted the fighters?
JO: Well the fighters nearly always used to try to come up from below because you couldn’t see down anywhere. Only from the tail. And then of course out of the pilot’s side and the engineer’s side they could look down on through that you know. On each side. But of course the pilot couldn’t really look through his side because of, you know, flying the aircraft. The engineer always had a good view of forward and to his starboard side. I always remember we had a crash in mid-air and the one who crashed into us of course with it’s propellers. It must have whipped the engines out. It went down through the clouds and that were the last we saw of him. But the, the damage was to the undercarriage but when I come to put them down, drop them to have a look actually speaking I wouldn’t do anything on the hydraulics until I had to do and then I dropped the undercarriage. And when I did I could see what looked like a pencil mark on the tyre and it was where this other aircraft, the props had gone through the engine nacelle and it had, it had cut the tyre. And I said to the skipper, I said, ‘When you land,’ I said. ‘Land on your starboard wheel.’ I said. ‘The other one,’ I said, ‘It’s flat.’ I said, ‘It’s cut.’ And of course he did do and when the, when the port side went down. Bloody hell it just went around in a circle did the aircraft. You know, nothing there really. Just the shape of the tyre.
CB: So in doing that did the undercarriage then collapse?
JO: No. I don’t think it did actually but we went, we used to have FIDO on our ‘drome and what happened was that we actually went over the top of it all and smashed it all up. You know.
CB: Lucky not to be set alight in that case.
JO: Yes. Aye.
CB: What did FIDO stand for?
JO: I can’t remember. No.
CB: It’s a fog dispersal.
JO: Oh was it?
CB: System isn’t it?
JO: Yeah.
CB: So how —
JO: Yeah, actually that, it were fantastic. It could be, it could have turned foggy down below you know but when they put this FIDO on it was three pipes down each side of the runway. Away from the runway. You know, quite a distance. They pumped this petrol it was like petrol that was suspect with water. Do you know what I mean? So it was like, had to be used up and when they used to light these three pipes down each side of the runway I always remember I only ever saw it once and we were up in the air and they were testing it and we, when we saw it come on it were fantastic. You couldn’t see so well you know, flying but you could see this down below. These flames, you know, and of course when you came down and entered this part it was as clear as a bell in that. It were like going into a big tunnel. Aye. Fantastic.
[pause]
CB: So you had to use it once.
JO: We only used it once but it was a way of getting them down safely you know. Aye. When you went down it was just like going into a tunnel. You could see the burning, you know, like and then when you entered it were just like the Mersey tunnel. You know. It cleared all that inside.
CB: Because the heat cleared the fog.
JO: Yeah. In the runway and it was like —
CB: But you could see it through the fog when you were flying above.
JO: That’s right. Yeah.
CB: Right.
JO: It was fantastic. They could always get you back in kind of thing.
CB: Yeah.
JO: Otherwise you’d have been flying blind, you know.
CB: So to what extent was it used by other squadrons at your airfield?
JO: Well I don’t know but it was probably were used on odd occasions you know with other squadrons. Well it would have to be, you know. If fog came down you know unexpectedly. I think it was the only one that had them.
CB: I was thinking of how there would be a traffic jam.
JO: [laughs]
CB: With all the aircraft coming down you see.
JO: Well there used to be a jam weather or not when we came back. We were given different heights to fly at and there was three aerodromes and the flying circle. We were all given different heights to fly and when he came to the centre of the triangle of three ‘dromes you’d to be at a certain height in the centre. When you’re flying you’d drop to another height on the outside of the circle just to keep everybody, you know, missing one another.
CB: This avoided collision.
JO: Yeah.
CB: So there must have been collisions occasionally. Or not.
JO: Or not. Not that I knew of.
CB: Right.
JO: No. No. They’d do that pretty good you know.
CB: You talked about the connection with the other aircraft and it cutting your tyre but what happened to the plane that was beneath you?
JO: Oh that went down. His propellers you see. Any damage to a propeller you just well it’d shake that much that it would rip it out of the wing.
CB: What happened to the aircraft immediately after that incident?
JO: Well of course we stopped in mid-air more or less until it chewed its way through. You know.
CB: So your plane chewed through the plane beneath.
JO: That’s right.
CB: What? Through the wing?
JO: No. No. They chewed at us with their propellers.
CB: Okay. Where else did they chew the aircraft?
JO: Underneath. That’s all.
CB: Just, no. No. Was it just that wheel?
JO: Just that one.
CB: Or elsewhere?
JO: Just that one nacelle with the wheel in it.
CB: Yeah. Right. Okay. But the engine continued running did it or did you have to shut it down?
JO: Oh no. The engines were alright. No, it was them like that would be in trouble.
CB: So what happened to him?
JO: It just went down through the cloud and that were it.
CB: Was it yours? Or —
JO: No. We, we stayed up.
CB: No. Was it your squadron? Or was it —
JO: Oh it was our squadron I believe.
CB: And did the plane, did they just jump out or did it explode? What happened to it?
JO: It just went through the clouds. We don’t know what happened. We never took, they never told us anything.
CB: No. I wondered if by coincidence you’d established what happened to the crew.
JO: Oh. No.
CB: So what was happening? You were flying straight and level were you?
JO: Yeah [pause] and this other one came underneath us.
CB: And was that because he was rising because of dropping his bombs or where in the —
JO: I don’t know how it happened really but it was so as he came across us and he cut the engine nacelle at the bottom.
CB: Yeah.
JO: Well it was where the undercarriage went in.
CB: Yeah.
JO: The nacelle and then his props would go, you know what I mean and then of course his engines. The main plane.
CB: So in the circumstance of losing a propeller what would happen to the aircraft?
JO: Oh well in the first place it’d, it’d rip the engine out of the main plane and well of course you’d be in trouble right away.
CB: Because the plane could fly on less than four engines. What could it fly on?
JO: It could fly on two. They reckon that if you used the overload that it could fly on one but you’d be coming down all the time you know. You wouldn’t have any choice of where you were going to land like. Really.
CB: So here you were flying. Was it towards the target or after you’d dropped your bombs?
JO: What?
CB: This incident.
JO: I can’t remember. I can’t remember.
CB: You would be standing behind the pilot at that time would you?
JO: No. I always stood to his right.
CB: You would. Right. And monitoring the gauges while you were at it.
JO: That’s right.
CB: What other incidents?
JO: We used to have Taffy and Alec. Alec was the navigator. Taffy was the wireless op. And many a time they used to get at loggerheads. Alec was a damned good navigator.
CB: Yes.
JO: And he used to say sometimes, he’d get information from London kind of thing and when he read it he just said, ‘Rubbish.’ In other words it wasn’t to what he’d calculated, you know. And anyhow him and Taffy, Taffy’d give him this thing and he’d say rubbish and Taffy would start arguing with him and then the skipper used to say to me, ‘Sort them.’ And I used to [yell?] at Taffy’s oxygen tube and I used to just disconnect it and when he started singing, “There’ll Be a Welcome in the Hillside,” [laughs] I used to put it back again and he didn’t know what had happened or anything. [laughs]
CB: So you’d say that was a distraction.
JO: [laughs] You know. Whatever like. You know. Rusty used to say, like, you know, ‘Sort it.’ Taffy would give Alec a wind or something what they’d sent and it wouldn’t be what he were getting and he’d just say, ‘Rubbish,’ you know and Taffy’d be saying, you know, ‘That’s what I got.’ You know. ‘That’s what I got.’ He’d say, ‘Well it‘s rubbish.’ [laughs]
CB: So we’ve talked about various crew members. What about the bomb aimer? What, what was he like?
JO: Who?
CB: The bomb aimer.
JO: The bomb aimer. Norman. Oh he was alright. Yeah.
CB: Because he was the one who was —
JO: He actually, I don’t know how it went but he was one who went over to Canada. Aircrew were at the front end of the aircraft. You know, they, they went to Canada, a lot of them to do their training.
CB: Oh originally.
JO: Yeah and [pause] Norman was one I think who was going for aircrew like and he I think he failed and that and finished as the bomb aimer.
CB: PNB. PNB.
JO: What?
CB: Pilot/navigator/bomb aimer.
JO: That’s right.
CB: That was the grouping. So he was originally trained in which?
JO: England.
CB: Yeah but, but in flying are you saying he was pilot trained to begin with but then moved to bomb aiming did he?
JO: Yeah. Aye. He failed so he went in. I was an engineer.
CB: Yeah.
JO: On the ground and finished up as flight engineer.
CB: And we haven’t talked about the gunners. So what did they do during your time in ops?
JO: Well they acted as the gunners but the rear gunner — I always remember they brought out a new turret. You see the ordinary turrets they were all Perspex.
CB: Yeah.
JO: With just slots where the guns could be lifted up and down and of course they could move the turret. You know what I mean. But the only place they could see was through the slots where the guns were because the other used to get frosted up. Well they started with another turret which was open. Open to, in fact the rear gunner he was the best of the lot if anything happened. He could just tumble out of his seat. Unfasten himself and tumble out of the back. So he was, he was alright you know. But this open turret of course didn’t get any frosting. Any frosting up and of course being out in the open like that he could see at any time.
CB: So did they like that?
JO: Hmmn?
CB: How well did they receive the idea of it being open?
JO: Well I just, they just accepted it but I do remember Harry, our rear gunner, he, what happened was his oxygen tube had a certain amount of condensation and it all froze and he got frostbite with it. But it, it didn’t happen very often but you see there were no other squadrons I don’t think that were using that rear turret like we did.
CB: And how often did they fire at other aircraft?
JO: Well normally speaking it was other aircraft that was doing it to us. Fighter aircraft were shooting at us rather than the opposite way around. We didn’t want to upset anybody.
CB: Right.
JO: We wanted to just go out there and bomb and come back and the fighters could only go out so far anyhow. You know, they couldn’t go past half their fuel, you know what I mean.
CB: The British fighters you mean.
JO: Aye. They couldn’t follow us very far because they had to get back again you know what I mean. So once it got to that distance we’d no cover at all, you know.
CB: So how often do you remember being attacked by German fighters?
JO: Oh we were very very lucky. I can only remember once and it, I don’t know why but whether he was short of fuel or what but he did the whats-its-name you know like the cheerio.
CB: Yeah.
JO: With the aircraft you know and left us and I think he’d no ammunition left or something. Or his petrol was down and he had to get back. And he just did that like.
CB: He hadn’t fired at you.
JO: Hmmn?
CB: He hadn’t fired at you first. Or had he?
JO: No. No. He hadn’t fired.
CB: He just came across you.
JO: But he was there you know.
CB: Yeah.
JO: And he just waved his wings and saying like — cheerio [laughs] But if you ever saw one we always used to say to all the others in the crew keep your eyes out on the opposite side you see. You know, if we were looking to port. We’d say like, ‘Keep your eye on starboard,’ you know, because often they used to show themselves. Acting the goat or something you know or doing something trying to attract your attraction so that the others could get in.
CB: They worked in pairs did they?
JO: That’s right. Yeah.
CB: So what evasive action did you have to take?
JO: Well there was, they used to call it corkscrew. It was a way of getting away with it you know but with a bomber you get a fighter and if you can time it at the correct time a fighter would, his guns and the bullets would be going together at about four hundred yards. You know, the guns were like pointing together and so that at four hundred yards if his bullets were hitting at four hundred yards it would rip it to pieces. But the [pause]
CB: So they’d close on you and fire at four hundred yards.
JO: Oh that’s right. Yeah. Now if you could time it at the correct time when they could, at four hundred yards, if you could manage to just start to turn before that time then the fighter’s going at such a speed —
CB: Yeah.
JO: If you start to turn he can’t get around with his guns and he starts to skid. You know he tries to do but he can never get them guns around to you.
CB: Right.
JO: And if it’s timed correctly he could do it all day with him. Let him get so far and then just start to turn but he was going so fast that he couldn’t bring himself around to get his guns on you.
CB: So who in the crew is making the call to the pilot to do the corkscrew?
JO: Well any member of the crew if he was the one who could see it was necessary, you know. The pilot would be ready to take anybody’s orders. You know. Usually it would be me mostly who would be up there with him and I’d be seeing the other side of the, you know, from what he was.
CB: So you are not in a seat and you are not strapped in. What happens to you?
JO: No. I’m standing. He’s sat in. In the pilot’s —
CB: Everybody else is strapped in but not you.
JO: No. Well I had to be free to be able to move anywhere if necessary.
CB: So how did the corkscrew work? It’s called by, let’s say the rear gunner. What does the pilot then do?
JO: Oh the pilot does this corkscrew whatever.
CB: But what is it?
JO: I don’t know exactly but it was a routine of if they had somebody on their tail kind of thing of getting the best way of getting rid of one.
CB: So he’s diving. So you go corkscrew left would be dive fast left.
JO: Yeah. Well he’d say that in the first place.
CB: That’s it.
JO: The one who was giving him the order would say, ‘When I tell you,’ you know, ‘dive port or starboard.’ You know what I mean?
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
JO: And so when it did happen he’d just be saying, ‘Dive. Dive. Dive,’ you know and of course the bloke had already got his own instructions which way you know.
CB: So how far would he go down? The pilot. Before he changed.
JO: What?
CB: Corkscrew.
JO: I’ve no idea.
CB: Because he’d got to get back hasn’t he? To where —
JO: Oh yeah.
CB: To the track.
JO: Yeah.
CB: That he was on in the first place.
JO: Probably stay at the same height more or less. You know. When he did it.
CB: Right.
JO: He wouldn’t be going down that far you know.
CB: Yeah but you had to practice this before going on ops didn’t you?
JO: Oh yes. He would. He would do. Yeah.
CB: But you were always standing up so for you it was a bit of a —
JO: I was standing up.
CB: You’d be holding on tight would you?
JO: I was standing up. The pilot was sat down. The navigator was sat down. Wireless op was sat down. Of course the gunners were sat up in their turrets.
CB: And the bomb aimer was always lying down was he?
JO: That’s right.
CB: Or was he in the turret at the front?
JO: He was in the turret in the front with his bomb aim.
CB: Right.
JO: His bomb aiming equipment. And he used to give the orders to the pilot. ‘Left. Left. Steady, hold it.’
CB: Yeah.
JO: You know and so on giving the instructions to be able to get his bombs in the correct place.
CB: So how often did the bomb aimer have difficulty in placing it and you’d have to go around again?
JO: Oh no. No. If you did that you were bloody well asking for it. I mean one aircraft going around turning back against all the others. No. No way. No. He’d be better to either go by and turn back, you know or go down and turn back. All them kind of things were automatic, you know.
CB: Just going back to this incident where you hit the other aircraft. What other dramatic events were there during ops for you?
JO: Nothing like that. Nothing else.
CB: What do you think Rusty’s view is of that incident?
JO: Well again Rusty, I mean I watched him. I actually saw on one occasion. I saw this wing. He couldn’t see very far many a time you know depending on the stars and everything.
CB: Because we’re in the dark.
JO: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
JO: But I remember the wing just going under ours you know and I forget exactly but it was so as I couldn’t tell him to do anything. If I had said to him like, ‘Climb,’ you know and if I’d said anything to get him up or down well I’d have put ourselves in trouble you know with this other one nearby and I just had to let it go kind of thing. Hope for the best because it was in such a position that if one or the other moved you know from where they were, where they were going they weren’t going the same way. That was going like that. The other one was slightly —
CB: You were going across each other.
JO: Aye. Yeah.
CB: How far away was it from you? Up. Below you. Below was it?
JO: Pardon?
CB: Was it below you? You saw this wing.
JO: Yeah. Going under. Under us.
CB: Yeah.
JO: Going under us. Well he couldn’t go either up or down because if he went down you know your tail went up in the air. If the tail went up before the nose went down kind of thing or vice versa. You’d got to work everything out in your mind you know.
CB: And Rusty didn’t see this wing coming.
JO: Well Rusty is on his instruments and that keeping level flight and everything you know. So he’s watching his instruments all the time. Keeping level flight and all that kind of thing.
CB: Was this close to the target or some way away?
JO: I can’t tell you now.
CB: The reason I ask the question is because the next question is was there an autopilot on this aircraft?
JO: Oh there was an autopilot on. Yeah.
CB: But how often was that used?
JO: Well if you was in a position where you thought there was nothing there you know happening in that respect then you could put it on autopilot which they would do you know because keeping an aircraft handling, you know, all the time I mean it tires them out. I mean they’re holding against it and turning it and all this like kind of thing you know. And using petrol and things like that you know. You’ve got to decide which tanks to use and so forth you know to help the aircraft because if you had to trim the aircraft in any way like to keep the tail up you had to trim it to fly with it up, you know, like then you were creating.
CB: There would be more drag as a result.
JO: Harder to fly. You know what I mean. So you’d use more juice if you did that. So lots of things to think about all the time.
CB: So which part of the controls did the autopilot manage?
JO: Everything.
CB: The throttles as well.
JO: Oh not the throttles.
CB: No.
JO: No. No. But when you put it in autopilot it just did it for them you know and then if anything happened just knocked it out you know.
CB: If he moved the stick that would disconnect it immediately would it?
JO: Yeah. Oh aye. Just knock it off you know.
CB: So after this incident what, the two incidents, what did you talk to Rusty about? So one is when you, after you get back with a punctured tyre. Did you talk through what happened in that incident?
JO: Oh we talked in the air actually.
CB: Right.
JO: I dropped the undercarriage and I could see this like, like a pencil mark you know.
CB: Right through the tyre.
JO: On the tyre. This mark. And of course the thickness of the tyres and that they just look as normal. You know what I mean? And I just thought bloody hell you know it’s hit the engine, it’s in the nacelle that the wheel went up in. I think it, I think it’s actually caught it you know. And so I had to say like, ‘Try to land on your other wheel and watch it for when it drops,’ you know.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
JO: Anyhow, I was right. When the other one did finally drop, when it went down, he couldn’t hold it any longer. We just went around in a circle.
CB: It bent the wing.
JO: Huh?
CB: Did it bend the wing or did the wing not hit the ground?
JO: Well we actually hit the pipes.
CB: Oh the FIDO.
JO: Yeah. We hit them.
CB: So you were lucky not to catch fire.
JO: Yeah. Very lucky.
CB: It went straight through did it? To the other side of the FIDO lines.
JO: More or less like kind of bounced over it.
CB: Oh right.
JO: And broke it.
CB: But the plane, the aircraft was flown again afterwards fairly quickly was it?
JO: Oh yeah.
CB: In the one where you’re flying and you see the other plane coming. How did you discuss that with Rusty? The pilot.
JO: Well he been looking forward just like, you know, I would. If anything was coming towards you it would have hit you before you knew what had happened. You know what I mean? It were that fast.
CB: Yes.
JO: You wouldn’t even see it. You would have just hit one another.
CB: So we’ve talked about those two things. Were there any instances where the plane went through extreme manoeuvres?
JO: There was one time when we were down at about four thousand feet I think it was and there was explosion down below and and it, what’s the name, it blew the aircraft in the air. There were no doubt about it. It nearly blew us over, you know, that —
CB: Did it actually turn over?
JO: No. No. No. No, it didn’t.
CB: But it blew it up in the end.
JO: It blew it out, aye, of its position, you know. I think it was the ammunition. An ammunition dump or something that had gone off.
CB: Oh right. On the ground.
JO: Yeah.
CB: What were you bombing that day?
JO: No idea. No idea.
CB: But it did, what did, the plane went up? Then what happened to it? Did it affect its flying?
JO: Oh no. It was alright, you know. It was okay but it really threw it out of its flight. You know what I mean.
CB: But it didn’t turn it over.
JO: No. Oh no.
CB: Do you know of any aircraft that were ever turned over in raids?
JO: No. I don’t. No. [pause] What time is it?
CB: Do you want a break?
JO: Twenty to.
CB: Yeah. We’ll finish shortly. So when you finished your tour what happened then?
JO: We just, we just stayed flying local you know. As far, as far as I remember.
CB: In your existing Lancasters?
JO: Yeah.
CB: But then you moved to something different.
JO: We moved to Ludford Magna.
CB: No. You were at Ludford Magna. So you’ve come to the end of —
JO: I can’t remember where we went to.
CB: But you sent you went to Yorks.
JO: Oh that.
CB: So that was Transport Command.
JO: Oh, Avro Yorks. Yeah.
CB: Was that immediately after that or did you go to something quite different first?
JO: No. No. We went to Yorks and we went on the Singapore run.
CB: Yeah. What squadron was that?
JO: I can’t remember now.
CB: Operating from?
JO: It was Transport Command then.
CB: Yeah. [pause] And from an engineer’s point of view how, what was that like compared with flying a Lancaster?
JO: Well for one thing you were carrying goods and you got to put the goods in certain positions so that as you use your petrol they kind of came more into balance you know.
CB: That was your job?
JO: Yeah. And sometimes even moving a load a little bit you know to try and get rid of that. Having to trim the aircraft.
CB: Now you had to calculate that.
JO: Yeah.
CB: Before loading.
JO: That’s right.
CB: Was that done with you and somebody else or was that your task exclusively?
JO: No. It was done with — I don’t know who it was actually but they always had a bloke there that did it and he’d be saying when you’ve used so much you’ll move this back. You know. Used to have levers to lever it and then fasten it down again you know.
CB: As you used fuel.
JO: Yeah.
CB: What sort of stuff are we talking about and what weight?
JO: What? In what way?
CB: What was the weight of the load?
JO: Well petrol was seven. Seven pounds a gallon I think it was.
CB: In weight.
JO: In weight.
CB: Yeah. But you were carrying petrol in cans were you?
JO: No.
CB: Or was it other things?
JO: No. No. Just in, just in the tanks.
CB: Yeah.
[pause]
JO: They could actually carry overload tanks out on the wing.
CB: Oh.
JO: But it was very seldom done unless, you know, it was really necessary.
CB: Where were they secured?
JO: Well on a long, a real long distance you know.
CB: On the wing. Where would they be attached?
JO: Oh at the end of the wing and they used to drop them, you know.
CB: Oh I see. Right. [pause] So seven pounds a gallon.
JO: Seven pounds a gallon. Yeah. Roughly. Seven point something it were.
CB: What were you carrying?
JO: Oh two thousand gallons, two thousand.
CB: No. No. I meant, I meant the load. What was the load that you were transporting?
JO: Oh I don’t remember now. I can’t remember. No use saying I can [laughs]
CB: I’m just thinking of how you can move that around inside safely you see.
JO: Oh. Well it’s like bars made specially. What they get. We could get them and pull, you know other things one way or another. Pass them down.
CB: So this was still wartime. No. This is after the war.
JO: This was after the war.
CB: So between, yeah. Between your ops and going there what did you do?
JO: I’ve no idea.
CB: Did you go instructing somewhere?
JO: Probably. Although I didn’t do a great deal of that.
CB: So you were demobbed when?
JO: I couldn’t tell you.
CB: Okay. And what did you do after the war?
JO: I’m trying to think about the demob. I think it was somewhere around ‘46 I think.
CB: And then after the war you returned home.
JO: That’s right.
CB: So you’re a warrant officer.
JO: Yeah. Talking about that I always remember a bloke called MacDonald. A pilot. And he, he’d been a butcher’s errand boy when he joined up and he finished up as a flight lieutenant pilot. He said, ‘What do I when I go back?’ He said. You know. In other words like how he’d gone up in the world and that and of course he said there’d be pilots but there’d be ten pilots for every one that was wanted you know. It must have been funny for a lot of them mustn’t it?
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
JO: A butcher’s boy and finishes up like a squadron leader or something.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
JO: And then he goes back in to Civvy Street. What does he do?
CB: I’m going to stop there just for a mo.
JO: Yeah.
[Recording paused]
CB: Carry on then. So the war is over.
JO: Yeah.
CB: What did you do then?
JO: I went —
Other: Hello.
CB: Oh we’ll just stop for a mo.
[Recording paused]
CB: Yeah. So the war finished and you’re a warrant officer without a job.
JO: I’m trying to think. I went bus conducting. I know that. To start with. And then I went bus driving. You know my mind’s not working at all. Mind you I’m ninety four now [laughs]
CB: You got tired of that.
JO: I can’t remember. You know. My brain’s gone dead.
CB: That’s alright.
JO: My brain’s gone dead.
CB: We’ll stop. Thank you very much indeed.
JO: Yeah.
CB: I really appreciate it.
JO: Yeah.
[Recording paused]
JO: Well yeah they more or less were you know.
CB: So the searchlights you got. Did you get caught very often?
JO: Well occasionally you did but you always, I mean, I know it’s a rotten thing to say but anybody down below them you flew over the top to hand the flare on to them.
CB: Yeah.
JO: You know.
CB: Yeah.
JO: The light.
CB: Yeah.
JO: That was on to you. You’d fly over somebody else and hand it over to them. As soon as you saw it going onto them you’d turn fast, you know, out of the way
CB: Yeah.
JO: On to them and they’d stay on the one below? you know.
CB: So when you turned but you changed height as well? Is that where you used the corkscrew?
JO: Oh no. You didn’t use that for that. But that, that was what you did as far as, you know, getting rid of it that way. Fun and games.
CB: So if you were in for how long did you say?
JO: What?
CB: If you were caught in the light how long did you have to get out?
JO: Well more or less the guns were on you as the light was on you. I think they followed one another, you know as the guns were following the light, the searchlight. You know. I think there must have been something like that between them.
CB: Yeah. Well you knew how long it took a shell to get from there to you.
JO: [laughs] Something and nothing.
CB: Did you come back with much flak damage on the aircraft?
JO: Oh little bits. Sometimes you’d hear it like rain.
CB: Oh.
JO: You know. Catching. Just catching you but the thing were if it went in to your air intakes or anything like that. Then you were in trouble with one engine or whatever you know. No. A lot was lady luck. You know. We were there at the right time. You know what I mean.
CB: What was the ground crew’s reaction to bending their aeroplane?
JO: Oh, [unclear] they loved their aeroplane and they loved their crew more. You know. They were very very good the ground crew.
CB: Were they?
JO: Yeah. And anything had happened to the aircraft well you know on a trip oh they were on the job rightaway fixing it up. Making sure you were ready for the next one if necessary. You know.
CB: Yeah
JO: Aye they were good.
CB: Did the chiefy come out drinking with you?
JO: Yeah. Well we used to drink on camp really mostly.
CB: Yeah.
JO: Only on odd occasions did we get, we got down in the village you know but actually going somewhere proper you know. No. We did it all in the village. In fact the group captain once, I forget now where he was, whether it was in the mess but he, he more or less said you could spout as much as you like in a Lanc in the camp but when you go down anywhere else you know keep your mouth shut. Somebody had said something he shouldn’t have, you know. Mind you when you get some beer down you it’s surprising what can happen.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. And how often did you get leave?
JO: I think it was something like about once every three months or so as I remember it.
CB: But when you went out what did you, they took you in a truck or did somebody have a car that took everybody?
JO: Oh no. Mostly a truck you know. A truck into town.
CB: How did you meet your wife? After the war that was was it?
JO: No. Well it was in a way but her brother was with me. He was in the RAF and he came, he came to my home for a weekend and then when I went over to theirs he had a girlfriend and of course I was at a loose end and they were going dancing at the Palais at Bolton and he said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Go with our kid. You’ll be alright.’ You know. So I asked her, I said, ‘Would you like to go to the Palais like, with us?’ And she said she would.
CB: This is Doris.
JO: Yeah. And it finished up of course that we got going together then from there and eventually got married
CB: When was that?
JO: Oh I’m trying to think. 1942 would it be?
CB: 1946.
JO: ’46. ‘46. Happy days
CB: Yes. Good. Thank you very much. Really good.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with John Ormerod
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-02-07
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Sound
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AOrmorodJ170207
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Description
An account of the resource
John Ormerod left school at 14 and worked in the textile industry before he volunteered for RAF. At first he trained as flight mechanic but later remustered to be a flight engineer. He talks about synchronising props and the German speaking eighth man special operator with 101 Squadron. He discusses the losses on his squadron and a crash landing with damaged undercarriage after a mid-air collision with another aircraft. He also discusses other members of his crew, one man's reaction to a lack of oxygen, and the corkscrew manoeuvre. He flew on flights with Transport Command to the Far East after the war.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Berlin
Singapore
Wales--Glamorgan
Temporal Coverage
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1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
Format
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01:35:36 audio recording
Contributor
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Carolyn Emery
101 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bomb aimer
bombing
entertainment
FIDO
flight engineer
ground crew
ground personnel
Halifax
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
mess
mid-air collision
military living conditions
military service conditions
navigator
pilot
RAF Elsham Wolds
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF St Athan
training
wireless operator
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/583/8852/PHolmesGH1604.2.jpg
134f273cd93e015a7d789b8e877b159b
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/583/8852/AHolmesGH161016.1.mp3
cc225552ec17450d62364d1a1b362db0
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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Holmes, George
George Henry Holmes
G H Holmes
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Holmes, GH
Description
An account of the resource
Nine items. An oral history interview with Pilot Officer George Holmes (b. 1922, 1579658, 187788 Royal Air Force) his log book, records of operation, newspaper cuttings and photographs of personnel. He flew operations as a wireless operator / air gunner with 9, 50 and 83 Squadrons.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by George Holmes and catalogued by Nigel Huckins
Date
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2016-10-21
2017-01-14
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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AH: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Anna Hoyles. The interviewee is Mr George Henry Holmes. The interview is taking place at Mr Holmes’ home [deleted] Lincolnshire on the 16th of October 2016.
GH: Yes. I had some very lucky escapes. We had, we were going to [pause] I’ve written it down. I’ve got a terrible memory.
[pause]
GH: Stuttgart in Germany. And of course they originated in France thinking possibly that there wouldn’t be many, many night fighters there but we got caught and we got shot and it took off the bomb bay doors. They fractured the starboard wheel, ruptured the main spar and left us with cannon shells stuck in the fuel tanks which is actually really instantaneous. And we did a belly landing when we got back and I was one of the first out and running. Somebody said, ‘Are you frightened?’ I said, ‘Have you seen a Lanc go up in flames?’ And the bloke said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well. Well, when you do you’ll run faster than I do.’ And actually they took these cannon shells away by the, if you handled the armament, whatever and emptied them they found out that the cannon shells actually had been filled with sand instead of explosives. Otherwise we would have gone up in one. And that was once. And another night someone on a circuit when we were coming, of course I was at Skellingthorpe at the time and there were about five or six airfields all around. And we had a bump and nearly got tipped over by the windstream of another aircraft. And when we landed there was about five foot off the end of the pit, of the end of the aeroplane gone. That was, I think we could call a very near miss. And all through my career they used to say you’ve got to get it right. The good crews survive and the bad crews don’t. But when you’re dealing with an aeroplane that’s attacking you at about between five and six hundred mile an hour you don’t have time to work out all the superlatives. You just learn how to, well you have to try to get him in to four hundred yards for the ammo to be, do any damage whatsoever. And these would wait about a thousand yards and pump these things in to you, you know. But, yes we lost a lot of young men at the time. Look back sometimes and I think how the hell did we get through it?
AH: How did you come to join the RAF?
GH: Mixed feelings. I was living in Kettering at the time and I would be about six years of age. I’d only just joined school which was a joining age in those days of about six years I think and I saw the R100 or the R101 in the sky. A most amazing sight. And of course everybody was reading Biggles books so I wanted to be a Biggles man. And my father wouldn’t sign any papers for me so when I was eighteen I went down and joined the RAF as an air gunner. But there were so many enlisting at the time it was over twelve months I think before I was called. And they wanted me to be a pilot or navigator. I said, ‘No. I want to be an air gunner W/Op.’ Anyway, I finished up there. They made me a wireless operator / air gunner. Well, up to going into the air force I’d hoped to be a semi-professional musician because I played the violin from seven years of age to when I went in the air force, eighteen. And I played the violin, trumpet and a mandolin. And the man who was teaching me he used to make instruments and he was going to teach me how to make them. And, you know when I went in the air force I was in the air force for just over five years. I couldn’t get back to the standard that I was in and work for a living at the same time because you’ve got to put about two to three hours a day in you know, to it. So I abandoned the musical stuff. And actually I was at an old miner’s school. A corrugated tin hut thing and when we moved to Leicester and I was a top boy at the school. The teaching, they taught us in that stinking little old tin hut was beyond their, what they were teaching us in there. They told me I couldn’t do joined up writing. We’d got to go back to scroll, you know. But I went to a school that was attached to the College of Art and Technology and I was studying textiles and hosiery. And I earned a very good living through the entire working life producing socks, stockings, knee socks and things like that. Of course you got paid in on production in those days. You didn’t get a standing wage. The more you made the more you got paid. And you were allowed ten needles per week and if you broke more than that you had to pay for them. Six pence each I think they were then. The unions would go bloody mad now wouldn’t they? [laughs] I had a very good education really. I was very fortunate. I was almost fluent in French. The French master said, ‘I can’t understand you, Holmes. You’re the worst pupil I’ve ever had. You’re always talking, take no notice, I can’t understand how you’ve got top of the class in French.’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s simple. You gave us a half an hour’s homework and I always got an hour. So I worked harder than anybody else.’ [laughs] But I had a very good — my parents were not wealthy. My dad was a manager of a, the management of a grocery shop. You know these, what they were before the war. Several strains of food, food retailers and I really thought I was going to be a semi-professional musician. But I abandoned that scheme altogether and I got my sleeves rolled up and got stuck in this hosiery thing. ‘Til the war of course and then I couldn’t get, I couldn’t wait to get in the air force. And I finished up as a wireless operator / air gunner due to the fact, I always presumed, I don’t know whether it’s true or not but the fact that I had learned music, got some dashes and all like that. Morse code came easy and I was a very good operator. But apart from that I had a very happy marriage. I’ve got one son. He’s sixty seven now. And a he’s a fourth [unclear] at Judo. But life is a wonderful thing. Not to be wasted. And when you look at the war and see the number of thousands of young people who were wasted in the war. And the building and the costs. At the end of the day you have to sit around a table and talk it over from the first day. Save a lot of trouble and strife. But of course in those days Bomber Command was the thing.
AH: So you wanted to join Bomber Command?
GH: Oh yes. But then when you say wanted to join Bomber Command I’d always worked shifts. Night shifts and three shifts and things. I thought if I go in to the air force I’d be alright. And what did they do? They stuck me on Bomber Command. It was night work. But it wasn’t altogether good so as you look in the book you’ll see I did quite a number of daylight operations.
AH: Where did you train?
GH: Pardon?
AH: Where did you train? Where did you do your training?
GH: Where did I do my training? It was wonderful really. I I went to Blackpool first of all. That was the Number 10 RS something it was called. Signals Reserve or something. And they were all radio personnel in the air force up there. And we had a bloke called corporal [pause] I forget his name now. Corporal. Used to take us to the arm drill and foot drill. And his stage name was Max Wall. Can you imagine a man like Max Wall teaching you? Amazing. And then I went down to Yatesbury for a radio course. And I was posted then to Manby in the ground wireless op ‘til they could fit me into an air gunner’s course. Well, Manby in those days was number 1 AS. Air Armaments School and they taught bomb aimers and air gunners. We kept going to see the groupie and saying, ‘Get us on the course for air gunners.’ ‘No. You have to wait until you come through officially.’ When it did come through we was at a place called Evanton. About forty mile north of Inverness. First time I’d been to Scotland. In June it was. And it was a wonderful summer. And it was the first time I’d seen the shaggy Highland cattle. And I was taken by Scotland ever after that. Then after that, the gunnery course, I was sent to Market Harborough which is now a prison. And I used to push off home every night. After being there about three weeks the CO said, ‘We’re getting rid of you. You’re never here.’ It used to take me an hour to get home from Market Harborough on the local bus through all these villages. Little villages. And I was posted to Silverstone. And at Silverstone if you went in and out by railway you could get a train called the Master Cutler which was a high speed train from Sheffield to London and back. It used to do that in forty five minutes. That was quicker than being in [laughs] And I got crewed up there then and joined the [unclear] so to speak but I suppose if you were young men you had to be in something. You had no objection. I mean, no one wanted you to be a conscientious objector or anything. There we were. I joined Bomber Command and I was very lucky because I got with some good crews and I must admit I was commissioned towards the end of the war as a wireless op and I got operational strain and one thing or another. I was a bit of a drunkard. The only way of overcoming some of the strenuous [pause] I mean the beer we were drinking in those days I think was 1.2 percent alcohol. The water you washed the glasses in was stronger than the beer.
AH: So did you drink mainly beer? Or did you drink other stuff?
GH: No. No. The doc said, our doc on the squadron, ‘Go out and get pissed. It’ll do you good. Don’t go on spirits.’ And I was based around here. Around Louth. One way or another. It’s so that when my wife and I decided to come and live here it was after I’d retired. It was a home away from home really.
AH: Where were you first based? Where were you based first?
GH: Where was —?
AH: Where were you first based? Which was your first base? Where were you sent first?
GH: Oh. At a place called Bardney. Just outside Louth. And we got there. The place was, looked vacant and we got out the transport and looked around and looked in the ditches and it was full of bodies. We said, ‘What are you doing down there?’ They said, ‘Bugger off, there’s a fire in the bomb dump.’ So we said, ‘Oh, we’ll leave you to it then.’ But anyway a guy put it out. And then we went from that place. I did six ops there. And then we went to Skellingthorpe where the pilot was made up to a squadron leader. And we were only allowed two or three operations a month due to the losses of experienced crews. And by the time we’d done twenty trips together he, the pilot and the navigator went over to Pathfinders as the rest of the crew did. And the, the crew got sort of crewed up but the wireless, he didn’t want a wireless. He brought one with him, the pilot. So I was a spare bod and I went with an Aussie crew. His name was Cassidy and he’d got it painted on the side of a Lancaster. “Hop Along Cassidy’s Flying Circus.’ And I finished up at the one near Boston. What is it?
AH: Coningsby?
GH: Pardon?
AH: Coningsby?
GH: Coningsby. Yes. Yes.
AH: What squadron were you in first?
GH: 9. And then I went on to 50 at Skellingthorpe and then I went on to 83 at Coningsby.
AH: And what planes?
GH: Lancs. Well, after the war, if you look in the book look I went on a tour to South America. They sent three what were called Lancaster Mark 21s I think. But in actual fact they renamed them to Lincolns. It was a bigger aircraft that the Lancaster. Especially built for the war against the Japanese. And we went right down the west coast of Africa and then across over the Atlantic to Brazil and then right down to Santiago. Flew over the second highest mountain in the world I think it is. Aconcagua. But by then I’d decided I would take a course, this course on radiography, radio operating and get on to the public airlines. And I’d met my lady who I married and I found out that to be on public airlines you were away for home for anything from six weeks to three months. I thought well that’s not right. So I docked that and as I say I stayed in the hosiery trade. Yeah. Had quite a varied existence one way or another.
AH: What did you do in South America?
GH: Demonstrated the aircraft. I think they’d got that many four engine aircraft they didn’t know what to do with them and they were trying to flog them to anybody who’d buy them. God knows where all the aeroplanes went to. They just suddenly disappeared.
AH: And what was it like there?
GH: Pardon?
AH: And what was it like? Were they interested?
GH: Interesting.
AH: Were they interested in the aircraft?
GH: Oh very much so. Yes. Yes. Whilst we were there there was an earthquake in Peru and they wished us to send someone who would take some supplies over to Peru for the earthquake. And the air force said they couldn’t be allowed to do that because although we’d get to Peru and land they hadn’t got an air force runway long enough to take off so we’d be stuck. But yeah. Funny thing was we all decided when we were going to Brazil we would get together and learn Spanish. And when we got to Brazil they didn’t speak Spanish. They spoke Portuguese [laughs]
AH: How long were you out there for?
GH: Oh not very long. I should think, well if you look in the book it’ll tell you how long. About four weeks I think. We did one leg of the journey per day. And —
AH: And when were you demobbed?
GH: When? I think it was June of 1945.
AH: And how long were you in 9 Squadron?
GH: Pardon?
AH: How long were you in 9 Squadron?
GH: Only a few weeks. Not very long.
AH: What was it like?
GH: Quite an eye opener really. Mainly we were supporting the invasion. In fact that was the first time I’d ever seen the white cliffs of Dover coming back from France on D-Day. As I say all the boats going over.
AH: How did that feel?
GH: Have I —?
AH: How did that feel?
GH: Satisfied I would think would be the only expression. That we were doing something. And of course that’s another point. I mean I don’t know whether you’ve watched it on telly but they give you films of the actual landings in France and they chuck the blokes out into the water that was about six foot deep. They were drowned. Never got to France at all. Instead of waiting for the tide to go out. Some damned idiots in this military attitude.
AH: What did you think of Bomber Command?
GH: Well organised. To a certain extent they were very well organised. Many actual Bomber Command crews packed up before they’d completed a tour of course because it was a great strain. I remember doing a daylight on, I think it was at one of the flying bomb sites when they were launching flying bombs. And of course Bomber Command never flew in the way the Yanks did. They had three people from leading in and everybody was sort of doing what they called a gaggle at the back. And we were close up behind this three Bomber Command [pause] well, leaders I suppose and I looked up and saw an aircraft above was opening his bomb doors. I thought it’s going to drop on him shortly. Anyway he did. He dropped them and then it just floated down. Hit the aircraft on the right hand side, the starboard, knocked his wing off and he spun over and tipped the wing of the other who went that way and he tipped the wing of the other and went that way. And there were bodies without parachutes floating around and everything. And it was Cheshire who was controlling the raid. Called the raid off because he said the chaps didn’t stand a chance if we bombed it. So we flew back to the North Sea and dumped the bombs and went home. But the things like that they were happening every day. You know, I mean I’m afraid you accepted it.
AH: Do you remember where you were going on that raid?
GH: Not completely. No. Because there were one or two launch sites for flying bombs. I mean at one time as far as I know they were, they were launching something like ten thousand pound. Ten thousand flying bombs in a matter of a month or whatever, you know. I mean they were really showering the south of England with them. And —
AH: And how did you feel when you saw the bombs coming?
GH: I hope to God it misses me. To be truthful. But it was a sight, you know. Their only, these aircraft which they hit and damaged were only about a hundred, hundred and fifty yards in front of us. A matter of three seconds or something isn’t it? The speed we were flying at it could have been us. But many of the young lads who joined up when I joined up never finished. They were killed. A great deal of loss of human youngsters. Many of them technicians and people we missed after the war finished because of their experiences. And if you take that you promise me I will get it back?
AH: Yeah.
GH: Because I applied for the Aircrew Europe Star which was allotted to everybody who did two or more operations before D-Day which I did and I was told I didn’t, I hadn’t done enough. So when they issued the Bomber Command medal at the end of the war they said I couldn’t have that either because I’d got the 1939-45 Star or something. I don’t know. I thought well that’s great. I did twenty one ops and I never got a bomber medal. It’s unbelievable some fairy in Whitehall who was domineering the life span of the one doing the work. But the main thing I need at the present moment is some backup somewhere to get, I mean I mentioned to you earlier how much it cost. I was only getting two hundred and ninety pound a month. That’s about seventy pound a week towards the cost of being here and it was costing [pause] what was it? Well, a monthly, the monthly cost here is three thousand and forty one which is quite expensive. I think it’s a very good. I get my monies worth. But I think the company, the government or whoever, the Department of Works and Pension allow me something to help me pay for it and they want [coughs] they just knocked off the pension credit. I’m about two and a half thousand pound a month worse off when I got a pay rise of two pounds and fifteen pence [pause] In other words hard luck isn’t it? You know I mean I’m not the sort of person who is laid back and you handed something but I’ve worked all, all my own life. What I’ve got I’ve chased the work of one kind or another. Whether it was in the air force or out. And I’m disgusted actually to think the money that gets wasted.
AH: Could I just ask you a few more questions about the war?
GH: Yes.
AH: What did you think of the way Bomber Harris was treated?
GH: Disgustingly. As I said earlier he was blamed for bombing the population whereas the targets were selected by the War Committee. And the two leaders of that were Lord Portal and Winston Churchill. Bomber Harris was behind his crews all the way. Next question.
AH: Where did you go after 9 Squadron?
GH: With 50 Squadron at Skellingthorpe. That was, it was so far to the sergeant’s mess from where we were displayed in Nissen huts we used to go into Lincoln for breakfast [laughs]
AH: What sort of squadron was it?
GH: What 83? Er 50?
AH: 50.
GH: Very very compatible actually. The man who was my pilot took his place as flight commander was Metham. He finished up deputy leader of some bomber group. Was it Metham? He’s a well-known, established leader of the Royal Air Force.
AH: Was that a Pathfinder squadron?
GH: No. No. They only had two Pathfinder squadrons. They were both at Coningsby. 83 and 97.
AH: Were you in them at all?
GH: I was on 83. I did, I think nine trips with 83 Squadron. They said that it was easy on Pathfinders of course. You, if you’re first flare leaders putting the flares down you went over and laid your flares and shot off home but they didn’t tell you when you started laying your flares you had to put it in automatic pilot and you couldn’t drift. So by the time you got to the end of laying the flares the Germans had got all the information of what you were doing [pause]
GH: And I have the greatest admiration of the German people and Germany itself. Moreso than any other European country. I have a great ideal, great ideals of them. They’re a wonderful people. We should never have gone to war against them. Well, should we?
AH: What do you think we should have done?
GH: Pardon?
AH: What could, what could Britain have done instead?
GH: Shot Adolf Hitler. It was a dictator. A man who believes beyond his experience. I think, well what’s happening in the world today? I mean we’re now fighting the, oh ethnic crowds that we were fighting in the days of Christ. For two thousand years we’ve been fighting. Still doing it and we’ll lose in the end. Of course people say they mean good. If you read the Koran as far as I remember the first rule is thou shalt now kill. And I think the fourth one is thou shalt kill all non-believers. So it leaves you in a sticky mess. And they’re gaining popularity all the while.
AH: When did you read the Koran?
GH: I haven’t read the Koran. I’ve read extracts from it. I’m quite interested in reading other people’s religions and of course in actual fact I believe in the bible which says when you die it’s ashes to ashes and dust to dust. I don’t think there’s a heaven up there. I don’t think there’s anything like that. I think it’s just, you’re just dead meat. Unfortunately. And many many people leave their readings, writings and paintings to be perused over and you get the benefit of their experience.
AH: Have you written anything?
GH: Written anything? Only rude things on the wall [laughs]. No. I wish I could have written things. I was too busy with music. As I said I went to a school where we had possibly an hour to two hours homework every night of various kinds and I didn’t really get out amongst other young fellas of my age because I was doing one to two hours music training as well. Now, the school I went to had started a school orchestra. Violin, banjo and drums. And I loved music. But as I say when I went in the air force I didn’t take a violin with me and I should have done I suppose. After being in five years my fingers were all stiffened up with, didn’t work. So I abandoned it straightaway and got on with earning a living
[knocking on door]
GH: Come in.
Other: Sorry to disturb you.
AH: I’ll just put this on pause.
[recording paused]
GH: They don’t look like reading my writing for a start. But there’s a cutting in there I think I mentioned it earlier on from Stalin who stated he wanted the Bomber Command to burn Dresden because they were using it to refuel the battlefield. And it wasn’t so because after the war I were working with some of the replacement Polish people and they said they’d been in Dresden and there were no army facilities there at all. There was no reason for them to bomb it.
[pause]
GH: And I have a younger sister who’s ninety in October. Laurie. So we’re quite a long lived family aren’t we?
AH: How old are you?
GH: Ninety four. Feel a hundred and four [laughs] some mornings. Yes.
AH: You’ve got a picture here of Squadron Leader Munro.
GH: Yes. He wanted to crew up with us. He’s just recently died you know. A New Zealander. That was when I was at gunnery school at Scotland.
AH: Which one’s you?
GH: How dare you say that [laughs] I haven’t changed that much at all surely. I’m the shortest one. Yes. And that’s my favourite photograph of myself.
AH: That’s nice.
[pause]
GH: Yes. It’s a wonderful world and I’ve met some wonderful people and I’ve had some wonderful friends and relatives. It’s been enjoyment. Mixing the good with the bad makes you appreciate it all the more. We came out of there as you go in.
AH: You talked about the strain of it. What was the worst strain?
GH: Being with Bomber Command? Well, naturally the, the operations themselves. They were well organised, I don’t mean like that but I mean they always taught us the best crews will get through. Did I mention to you before luck has a lot to do with it? And I mean a matter of seconds in some cases. I never flew as an air gunner though. I was in the Home Guard before I went in the air force. In Leicester. Well a little village outside Leicester called Narborough. And they used to send me out on a railway bridge defending the bridge at night time with a bayonet fastened to a broomstick with string. I don’t know what you were supposed to do with it. I had a few thoughts. But by the time I went into the air force I was fully trained and I’d got a Canadian Ross rifle that was in a cloth bag with about two inches of grease all around it. And I cleaned it up and the stock of it was beautiful. Lovely gun. And one of the chaps, he was a sergeant. I think he must have been a sniper. He said, ‘I’ll teach you how to fire a gun George.’ Because,’ he said, ‘Let’s face it. Who’s the last person that knows when you’re going to pull the trigger?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘Well you don’t pull the trigger. You squeeze your hand. And you don’t jolt it.’ And I could hit an eight hundred target, a bull at eight hundred yards. Which is quite good shooting I think. But I never did fly as a air gunner. I flew once as a tail gunner. And the tail one was like that. You knew all I got it I knew I wouldn’t have that for long.
AH: Did you get bombed yourself?
GH: Pardon?
AH: Did you get bombed yourself? In Leicester.
GH: Well, Leicester got bombed while I lived there. But we lived on the outskirts. And of course like most targets they usually go for the city centre first where all the main multiples are. And I was, I was quite happy in the Home Guard because we got very very good training. Initially it was useless. For the first two years. But when they got organised they got organised. And I sit and watch “Dad’s Army,” you know. And I I don’t know who picked the cast but it’s amazing to think [laughs] they look like real people [laughs] Anything else?
AH: Did you meet your wife during the war?
GH: No. I met her after the war. One of the boys who’s died in the last two years from Leicester was in training with me all the way through and he finished up at Coningsby on 97 Squadron and I finished up on 83. And his wife and my wife or future wife or his future wife, they used to go dancing Saturday nights together. And I met this girl one night in the RAF club. And I can’t understand that, I can’t explain the feeling but she was wonderful. And I said, ‘Can I see you again?’ And she said, ‘Well, I can’t see you for two weeks because I’m going up to Lincolnshire. To a town that you’ve never heard of.’ Well, I’d done all my training and everything here so I said, ‘Well, try me then.’ She said, ‘Louth.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve got news for you. I can’t go to Louth again [laughs] They’d shoot me.’ And she was always dying her hair. I think after the first two months I knew her she must have had about six or seven changes of colour. She was lovely though.
AH: What was her name?
GH: Barbara. And when we first got married we had to live in the front room of my mum and dad’s house until we could get somewhere. Everyone does I suppose. And her uncle was a butcher and he used to do all the joints of meat for Leicester. And this friend of his, a friend of his or someone in the trade he dealt with was the housing minister for Leicester. And in those days you couldn’t get housed if you hadn’t got a wood licence. You had to have a timber licence. And he mentioned to this gent that I was having trouble with my wife’s breathing because my mother and father had a dog and she was allergic to dog hair. And he said to this young gent, ‘He’s just come out the air force and he definitely wants a house but, and his wife is allergic to dog hairs and has to get out, you know of home and have his own place.’ And the fellow twiddled it a little bit and got me a timber licence and away we went. We bought a semi for nineteen hundred quid. And then after a while we bought, we bought a complete des res like, you know what do you call it? A house on its own at, in Oadby near to Leicester at the back of the racecourse and you got a full view of the racecourse. And I used to say to people, ‘I’ve got a nice place. There’s about four furlongs of grass at the back and they came and cut it, you know regularly,’ [laughs] But as I say we had this problem with this hooligan who was threatening her so that’s how we moved to Louth. But I mean moving to Louth was like going next door to the pair of us because we’d both been here so many times.
AH: Did you like Louth?
GH: I think it’s very nice. And I think once you get into Louth the people will do anything but they’re a little offish at the start. But it’s a lovely little town. I was born in Mansfield. In the Sherwood Forest. But I did like Louth there. Very much.
AH: What was your home like there?
GH: Where?
AH: In Mansfield.
GH: Well, I was brought up with my grandparents. I wasn’t brought up with my mother and father. They couldn’t get anywhere to live in, although my sister had been born. They wouldn’t accept anyone with two children so they farmed me off with my grandparents. My grandmother Holmes, when I was six or seven or eight years of age taught me how to sew and darn and knit.
AH: Did you have use of that later?
GH: Yes. Because I went into the hosiery trade and it was the machines that knit things make exactly the same loop as you do a knitting pin. And of course as I say I, I had a quite a few jobs. The job I had at Byfords. The other chap working next to me who was in his forties hadn’t been taken to the army. Hadn’t been called up. With a wife and two children. He always used to go down smoking in the toilets about once every hour and I used to run his machines as well as mine. And one day, you used to put your earnings under the table where they kept all the yarns and everything. He had a sneaky look and he found out I was earning more than him. So he went to the manager and he said he didn’t see any reason why someone’s underage that were in machinery should be earning more than he did. So they said, ‘Oh alright, we’ll give you two of his machines. They had me in the office and they said, ‘You’ve been bragging.’ I said, ‘What about?’ They said, ‘What you earn.’ I said, ‘I daren’t tell my father what earn. He’d go mad.’ I was earning as much or twice as much as my dad. And they said, ‘Well, we’re going to take two of your machines off you and you’ll run them for him.’ So I said, ‘I have an idea now. You can stick them up your arse.’ And they gave him the bloody lot. I got sacked for insolence. I got another job. I was never out of work. I got training that was necessary and I could go anywhere. I worked at Byfords. They sacked me three times after that incident and a very good job. The only snag is when I went into it before the war you were using cotton and well, wool and the machines were covered in like a white powder from the cotton in the wool, you know. And after the war when they started using synthetic fibres I think the synthetic fibres were so small you swallowed them. And I have a difficulty with breathing actually which is due to that I think. But nobody would say so because you then would jump then and say I want paid for being. I don’t think, I don’t think there’s more than one or two hosiery factories left in Leicester and it used to be the main city for hosiery. But that was all, that was all shift work. Night work and not very conducive for family life. I used to go to work because I mean you were busy. It didn’t bother you but my wife was stuck at home on her own you know and I didn’t realise until after I’d lost her that that’s what the problem was really. Basically. But we had a good life together. Yeah.
AH: Was your father or your grandfather in the First World War?
GH: Both my father and my wife’s father were in the First World War. My wife’s father was stationed at Louth here. In the Leicester, what did they call it? It was a mountain brigade. And he was only a little bloke. Smaller than me. And he looked like, well you just couldn’t imagine him sat on a horse.
AH: What he was called?
GH: Pardon?
AH: What he was called?
GH: His surname? Evans. Evans. Good Evans. I went to Edmonton for my gunnery course and we had a group captain called Group Captain Evans Evans and he got awarded the French medal. The Croix de Guerre. And he said, ‘Although I flew in World War One I’ve not flown in World War Two and I don’t think I deserved it. So I shall get a crew together and fly.’ So I went to my CO and I said, ‘Look, old Evans Evans is getting a crew together.’ We had a chance to get in because at that time I was a spare. And he said, ‘No, I don’t think so. My wireless op is covering that because he’s one behind everyone else in the crew and we all want to finish together.’ And off they went and they were shot down by the Americans before they got to the war. Before they got to the war line they were shot down by the Americans. And the only one that got out was the rear gunner. So that was another lucky escape. Just how the penny drops isn’t it? Am I boring you? Say so if I am. Anyway [pause] I am suffering really from the breathing quite badly.
AH: Shall we finish?
GH: Pardon?
AH: Do you want us to finish?
GH: Yes.
AH: Thank you very much.
GH: Quite all right. If it’s been of any —
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with George Holmes
Creator
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Anna Hoyles
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
2016-10-16
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AHolmesGH161016
Conforms To
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Pending review
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Contributor
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Cathie Hewitt
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
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Brazil
Chile
Germany
Great Britain
Peru
Chile--Santiago
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Stuttgart
Temporal Coverage
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1945
1946
Description
An account of the resource
George was born in Mansfield and was bought up by his Grandparents until he was seven when he moved back to his parents in Leicester where his Father ran a coffee shop. He was a semi-professional musician playing violin, trumpet and mandolin. He studied hosiery at college and worked in hosiery production his entire working life. He joined the Home Guard in Narborough, and recalls how he defended the railway bridge at night time with a bayonet fastened to a broom stick with string. After volunteering for the Air Force he was sent to Blackpool for training. The corporal who taught him foot drill went on to be the comedian Max Wall. He was then sent to RAF Yatesbury for his radio course, and then forwarded to the Air Armourers school. After completing the course, he was posted to RAF Evanton for a gunner’s course. His next posting was to RAF Market Harborough, but was only there for three weeks before he was sent to RAF Silverstone for crewing up. His first station was RAF Bardney with 9 Squadron for a few weeks. He remembers that when they arrived at Bardney it was deserted and they found everyone lying on the floor in the kitchen as the bomb dump was on fire. The crew were then posted to RAF Skellingthorpe in 50 Squadron and they completed 20 operations. George recalls a daylight operation on a V-1 site, and he witnessed the Lancaster that was above them blown up and seeing the bodies of the crew falling past their aircraft. The crew were then split up when the pilot and navigator joined the Pathfinders and he became a spare bod. He eventually joined an Australian crew in 83 Squadron at RAF Coningsby and completed a further nine operations. His pilot was called Cassidy and the nose art on the Lancaster was “Hop along Cassidy’s Flying Circus.” After the war he took part in a tour of South America and discusses an earthquake in Peru. He discusses his religious beliefs and how the war, Bomber Command, and Arthur Harris have been remembered. He met his wife Barbara after the war at a dance in the RAF club and they had one son.
Format
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01:08:02 audio recording
50 Squadron
83 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
bomb dump
bomb struck
bombing
civil defence
crewing up
faith
forced landing
Home Guard
Lancaster
mid-air collision
nose art
Pathfinders
perception of bombing war
RAF Bardney
RAF Coningsby
RAF Evanton
RAF Market Harborough
RAF Silverstone
RAF Skellingthorpe
training
wireless operator / air gunner
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/605/8874/PMatthewsEH1501.2.jpg
07bb41282e142374781bf2112f1129de
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/605/8874/AMatthewsEH151013.1.mp3
dc51483b34648765b1e7054ad5ee5c36
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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Matthews, Edward Harry
E H Matthews
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Matthews, EH
Description
An account of the resource
Five items. An oral history interview with Sergeant Edward 'Ted' Matthews (1925 - 2017, 1899046 Royal Air Force), his log book flight engineer's course notebook and photographs. He flew operations as flight engineer with 77 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff and Nigel Huckins.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-13
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: Today we’re in Haddenham and speaking with Edward Harry Matthews ‘Ted’ about his experiences as a flight engineer with 77 Squadron. My name is Chris Brockbank and I’m accompanied by Mr Edward Andrews as a witness. Ted, where did you — where were you born? How did life run for you in your early days and then right through to your retirement?
EM: I was born in Worthing. My father was a manager of a gent’s outfitter. We were fairly well off in those days but coming up to the war we — dad was made redundant and we had to move to South Norwood. When I was there the school I went to was Stanley Technical College which I went to until I was fourteen. From there I got a job with the Croydon Technical College as a lab assistant. But again, dad had to move his job and we came to Esher where I went to work for the Admiralty research as a lab assistant in the ASDIC and fire control of ships. It was from there I joined the air force. I was about coming up to eighteen so I would have had to have joined by conscription. I volunteered for aircrew and after the interview in — I think it was Euston Road they said, ‘Ok. You can be a flight engineer.’ I returned to my job for a few months and I was sent then, when I joined the air force, to St John’s Wood. The aircrew reception for the square bashing, more tests and kitting out. Three weeks there and I went to Newquay on ITW for six weeks. From there I went to Locking for introduction to aircraft engineering. It was Locking near Weston Super Mare. Having completed that course I was then sent to St Athans for the major course. I passed out there fairly well and I was, had a few weeks [pause] well flying training in Oxfords and even in Tiger Moths. From there I was sent to the Heavy Conversion Unit at Riccall. I met with my skipper at a rather different way from the usual. His flight engineer was taken sick and during a flight with him he had engine trouble and I managed to sort it out. And after that he decided I was going to be his flight engineer. Well, just after Christmas we were sent to 77 Squadron. The first raid being to mines, a daylight. A fairly busy sort of raid. Not too hectic. Nothing much. From there the next one –
[pause]
CB: Just looking in your logbook.
EM: The next one was Cologne. Another daylight. That was interesting because we were told not to hit the cathedral there. We were there to aim at the bridges over the Rhine. Our bomb aimer, as we were coming up said, ‘Oh I think I can hit those bridges. I can put my bombs straight through between the two spires,’ [laughs] but I don’t think we did hit the bridges. We missed them [laughs] but we shook them up I believe. After that we had a night raid to the Ruhr to Kamen which was an oil dump. Now, this one really got exciting. This was the one where we came back and when we were approaching landing — on the radio we were told there were intruders around. So, the skipper told the gunners to stay in place. It’s just as well he did because as we were approaching the circuit there was a JU188 coming the other way. And following that we had a dogfight from over Full Sutton all the way up to Croft where we’d been diverted. At Croft he disappeared for a while so we managed to land which was just as well because we were so low in fuel another — almost minutes, we’d have run out. We landed. I went back and locked the controls and while I was in locking the controls the others had got out and were sort of having five minutes. But while I was in there I heard this terrific noise. Bang and aircraft engines. I looked out and there they were running down the peritrack being chased by this JU188. They found a sort of dug out at the side of the runway and jumped into it and they were up to their knees in mud and water. Very unpleasant. Anyway, we were, we were lucky. We got away with it. This was the part of what the Germans called Operation Gisela. There was the three operations they did. About nine hundred aircraft flew in with us in the bomber stream. It was their last sort of major and during this time on that raid we’d lost seven aircraft but with these intruders they shot down another twenty eight. And they sent similar raids the following two nights but nowhere near as successful. They only got one or two but they never did it again. That’s one of the hair-raising ones.
CB: Why was it that they were less successful on the second raid? Were — were the gunners more alert? Or what was it? Why were they more —why were there less casualties on the second and third raids?
EM: Well, I think mainly because one — they did it for some Americans and they did it again but I think our people were a bit understanding and guessed it might happen again and we were warned. They did get one or two.
CB: Right.
EM: But it’s quite a bit of history that one.
CB: Yeah.
EM: Because one or two of theirs were shot down and one crashed into a farm near York killing the farmer and his family.
CB: What other excitements did you have?
EM: The next raid I did was to Helmstedt which was fairly hectic in the way of anti-aircraft fire but we got away with that one. Another nasty one was when I went to Dortmund and Wuppertal. Or was it? Yeah. The other night raid where it was dodgy was to a place called Witten where we got a direct hit into one of the outboard engines. The starboard engine. We were just coming into the target and it blew the engine to pieces with bits flying everywhere. As we had a full bomb load on it we were just about keeping height but we managed to attack the target and get home, nursing it a bit. We did find on the way back that the starboard inner engine had been damaged as well. So, we came back on two and a half engines if you like. But by nursing it we got back ok.
CB: When the engines were hit what was your job? Ted.
EM: Another one. We went to Recklinghausen. That was in, that was a daylight but I can tell an interesting story about this one. We couldn’t, we didn’t drop any bombs on it because we just couldn’t see a thing. But on the way back the bomb aimer was in the nose and in a space in the woods he saw some railway lines up near the Dutch border. So, thinks. We go around and have a look. So, the skipper says, ‘Oh let’s put one down there and see what happens.’ We did. We thought the earth had fallen in. Well, we didn’t know what it was. No one knew what it was. But when I was working at Westcott I had to go to Germany and I was looking at some of their rockets. I had to go to this ammunition dump near the Dutch border where they were still digging out bits and pieces then. And I was talking to one of the sergeants there. I said, ‘What happened?’ He said, ‘We had one single aircraft come over and drop one bomb and it hit a munitions train that was due to go to the Russian front.’ And he said, ‘There’s still bodies in there.’ It was enormous.
CB: Fascinating.
EM: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
EM: I — my next interesting one is Osnabruck which was to hit the rail line there. Evidently it was extremely accurate but it was a daylight and we got hit in the bomb bay with a load of shrapnel which cut our hydraulic line and we couldn’t open, couldn’t shut the bomb bay. But I saw where it was and with some of the bits of rubbish I’d picked up — namely a piece of rubber tubing and some wire. I managed to slip it over the cut and we managed to shut the bomb bay doors. When we got back I managed to get the undercarriage down but the flaps wouldn’t come down. So, we were diverted to Croft and made that ok so —
CB: What was the significance of Croft?
EM: Pardon?
CB: What was the significance of Croft?
EM: Oh Croft. Sorry. Carnaby.
CB: Carnaby. Ok.
EM: Yeah.
CB: So, what was the —
EM: The big runways and that. As a matter of fact, on one of our night trips we were diverted there because of fog. It was very thick fog. We couldn’t see a thing but they had FIDO and I can tell you landing on FIDO, it’s like, well, you came across the flames and the plane rose and you had to put the nose down. You had to dive through it. Anyway, it was quite hair raising. I think the skipper was saying a few words. There’s one [pause] and then we come to Heligoland and Wangerooge. Just about the last ones. Heligoland was a daylight. It was quite a doddle that one. But we went to Wangerooge which was on the islands. Now, that — they were really, it was a beautiful clear day and they were really letting us have it with anti-aircraft guns. And in front of us there were two Halifaxes probably about a hundred yards apart and suddenly one of these got a burst of anti-aircraft gun under one wing which floated it over right into the other one and they collided. Two got out. There’s one trip that I did which was a most spectacular I’ve seen. And that was to an oil plant. Now, this oil plant was enormous. It had a series of huge spheres all containing fuel of some description and they were all in huge lines. One after the other. And we were loaded up with a mixture of explosive and incendiaries and we went in lower than usual to make sure we got them in line and we went down each line. Dropping, you know, a skein of bombs, you know. Anyway, the spectacular. We were low enough that we saw these spheres collapse and then they opened just like a tulip and at the centre was a huge flame coming up. It was quite, you know, if it wasn’t such a destructive thing it was almost a thing of beauty. But when we came back all the paint was scorched underneath [laughs] yeah. That’s, I think most of my operation.
CB: Could you feel the heat? Could you feel the heat from that?
EM: Pardon?
CB: Could you actually feel the heat in the aeroplane?
EM: Hmmn?
CB: Could you feel the heat of the oil plant explosion?
EM: Sorry I —
CB: The heat burnt the paint. Could you feel it?
EM: Oh, I wasn’t exactly scared. I was kept too busy. Well, for instance, when I went on to the squadron. At that time I wanted to get myself a degree when I left. So therefore, I got a correspondence course and when I was in the early part, when I was flying on ops the, say up to the coast and that I used to do my homework. You know. English. Maths. You know the typical matric as it was then. It, it did me fairly well. But —
CB: So, what about the other members of the crew? What were they like? Starting with the skipper. Who was he?
EM: The wireless operator. He was a lad from Glasgow. The Gorbals actually. A bit of a rum sort and I won’t —
CB: Who was he? What was his name?
EM: Oh dear. Tom.
CB: Never mind. We’ll come back to that.
EM: No. I can’t. The skipper’s name was Bingham.
[pause]
CB: Right. A picture of the crew we’re looking at. Ok.
EM: Yeah.
CB: Ok.
EM: They — I can’t remember all their names. Our rear gunner, at that stage, was a Canadian. An ex-cowboy. How he got into that rear turret I shall never ever know. If I can put it bluntly he was built like a brick outhouse. You know.
CB: Yeah.
EM: But there’s a funny story about that if you want funny stories.
CB: Go on. Go on. Go on.
EM: On one of the raids. I can’t really put a finger to it. There was a sudden shout, ‘I’ve been hit. I’ve been hit.’ From the rear turret. So, I went down and there he was [groaning]. And the seat is a thick piece of aluminium with wood underneath. And there sticking up through it, about like that, was a piece of shrapnel. Gone right up between the cheeks. Well, anyway the funny part is the doctor gave him some ointment to rub in. Well he couldn’t reach it. So, we got the job of every night rubbing it [laughs]
CB: Amazing.
EM: Yeah. Is it stories you want?
CB: Yeah. Keep it going.
EM: Yeah. The bomb aimer. He came from Hersham. His wife was a hairdresser. I found he was — I didn’t get on well with him. The navigator. He was a Canadian. The mid-upper gunner was a bloke about my age. An ex-miner from Wakefield. We did lose one gunner. It was, he hadn’t even been on a raid. He went on a spare crew. My skipper was Flight Lieutenant Bingham. John Bingham. He’d been a training instructor out in America for a while before he came back and took over this job as, on Bomber Command. He could be a bit of a pompous so and so. You know. A real strict disciplinarian. But on the other hand, that made him a good pilot. He was a good pilot whatever anyone says. What else?
CB: So, the mid-upper gunner.
EM: Mid upper gunner. That was the lad from Wakefield.
CB: What was his name?
EM: His name was Mounty so we used to call him Lofty. And he wasn’t a big bloke [laughs] [pause] Somewhere or other — I don’t know if I’ve got their names.
CB: Well let’s come back to those later. Could you just go back a bit now? No. Sorry. How many operations did you complete in the end?
EM: I did — what was it? I did fifteen.
CB: Ok. And what stopped operations? Was it the end of the war?
EM: Pardon?
CB: What stopped you going on operations? Was it the end of the war? Or what was it?
EM: Well the reason I didn’t go for a commission — I was recommended. I went for an interview but I made a silly mistake. I told them, when they asked me what I was going to do after the war I said, ‘I want to go to university. Get a degree.’ That was it.
CB: They didn’t like that.
EM: Yeah.
CB: Right. So, you stopped flying when? When did you stop flying?
EM: Oh, it was around about September ‘45. Until then I was, we were engaged in taking all the old ammunition, bombs and that from the various airfields around and dumping them in the North Sea.
CB: Right. Where did you do that? Where? Where?
EM: Well we were stationed still at Full Sutton but we did places like Snaith and all the surrounding airfields that had got bombs. We used to, for instance, they used to put the bombs in the bomb bays of course but where it was machine gun ammunition they just piled it in the, by the back door and I used to go and kick it out. You know, open the door and out. But that was — we did quite a few of those.
CB: Ok. Now after you finished flying then on operations you dropped the bombs in the North Sea. Then what did you do?
EM: There was all sorts of jobs while I was waiting to take another course. Another business. But eventually I went back to St Athans and took a safety course. Mainly packing parachutes, safety equipment. That sort of thing. When I’d finished that I was sent to Germany. To Fassburg. Which was just outside Belsen. Which was unpleasant. It was there I managed to take the two exams I’d been working on. I got all sorts of jobs there. It was on a Maintenance Unit where we used to go around to various stations and re-pack their chutes or look at their — as well as advise them on safety equipment. And from there I was demobbed and came back to England. From there I was on leave for a while when I applied to go to a university but they said, ‘Oh you’re too late. The regulations have run out.’ So, what happens? I go back to evening class and get a job with Bayer Products as a lab assistant. At the same time, I managed to pick up on the government job I was working with and I got [pause] they took me on as a scientific assistant making chemical warfare agents.
CB: Where was that?
EM: This was up in Lancashire where I met my wife. At Sutton Oak. And then I was transferred. They moved the whole lot of us down in to Cornwall where I was in the research labs making nerve gas and such. When that closed down I came up to Westcott and became a rocket engineer on solid propellants. Working mainly, quite often, on air to air missiles like Red Top for Lightning, Sky Flash for the Tornado and working on materials for high temperatures. And that’s when I sort of became me and became retired afterwards.
CB: So how long did you work at Westcott for?
EM: Thirty five years. In fact, you might see my footprints somewhere around.
CB: Sounds interesting.
EM: Yeah. It was in solid propellant division.
CB: Right. So, did you work your way up there or what happened?
EM: Well, I ended up there as a senior scientific officer.
CB: Right.
EM: I did — I did some flight tests on a missile in a Lightning. I got taken up in a Lightning to do some tests from a valley.
CB: Oh, did you? Right.
EM: Oh, this would be — I can’t give you a date. It’s [pause] oh no, I can’t. I’d be [pause] I think I’d be almost be pulling your leg if I gave you a date.
CB: So, was this as a jolly or a practical observation you were doing? Was it an enjoyment flight or were you doing it as an observation?
EM: Oh no. it was busy. It was, they wanted, they wanted me to — they were doing some of the tests and I had to observe. Something strange was happening and they wanted me to have a look. See if I could sort it out.
CB: This is the rocket motors was it?
EM: It was the sort of thing — you see when you launch a rocket you get such a spread of strange mixture of gasses.
CB: Yeah.
EM: That as it goes out in front they go in to the air intake of the plane and they often cause a hiccup and we wanted to find out whether that was doing it. So apart from having instruments they needed someone to actually observe the instruments and see what was happening visually.
CB: Right.
EM: Yeah. It was rather funny. The pilots had a bet. Thinking I was a dumb scientist. They didn’t know I’d been on ops and they had a bet to find out whether they could make me airsick [laughs]
CB: So, you put them right in the end, did you?
EM: Oh yeah. Yeah. I was bought beer all night [laughs]
CB: How interesting. Can we go back now? Can we go back to your early training?
EM: Yeah.
CB: So, what happened when you were being trained to begin with? What did they do about training in St Athan?
EM: Oh.
CB: What was involved?
EM: Well basically you went through — for the first few weeks you were put through quite a concentrated course on aircraft engineering. Getting very close to what you were going to do. After that you took the exam. You were then selected for an aircraft. I don’t know how they did it but I’d done some time on Lancs and Halifaxes and most went on Lancasters. I was selected for Halifaxes. As you know.
CB: Yeah.
EM: I did fly once or twice in Lancasters. That was more I think by luck, by judgement. They just wanted a flight engineer, you know. To get experience. They also, the idea, I think was that if after we’d done our ops we might go on to Lancs or something. But I’m just trying — but it was really a concentrated course. In fact, I wrote it all up here.
CB: Oh good. Ok. We’ll come to that in a minute. Can we just go now — so you get to the HCU? So, in the HCU what are you doing there?
EM: Well, we still kept, how can I put it, an interest in all the engineering and kept up to date. You know. With anything new that comes on. We flew with all sorts of varying skippers and crews to get the hang of it. And then of course at the same time the skippers were looking for flight engineers and as I say that was the way it happened for me.
CB: Because normally crews had crewed up at the OTU and then added a flight engineer. But in your case, you went with several different crews.
EM: Yeah. Yeah. The lad I took over from. I don’t know whether he was glad to get away from the crew or not but he was terribly airsick. You know, it wasn’t a case of not liking it or not wanting it. He was so bad that after one flight they [hoist?] the ambulance out to him. He was actually, you know, really–
CB: What had happened to him then?
EM: Well he was so sick. You know. Terribly airsick you know. You know, he was absolutely useless once he got going and that was after, you know, just two or three flights. It steadily got worse.
CB: Did it? Yeah. So, when he was flying what did he do?
EM: Well he vomited a lot. He was very giddy and that sort of thing. As I say, this time he really collapsed. So, well they couldn’t have him. I don’t know what happened to him. Whether they had him lack of moral fibre but he just disappeared.
CB: Well, what do you think about the LMF matter?
EM: It was most unfair.
CB: Go on.
EM: It was. I mean of course you were blooming scared. It [pause] it made you work that bit harder and made you do the things properly and harder but looking back I’m sure that they were being very cruel in many cases.
CB: You say many cases. So how many people did you know about who were dealt with under LMF.
EM: I only came across really one. But he’d already done half a dozen ops and some nasty ones and had a bit of a rough time. I think that was a case that was a bit cruel because after all he had done some ops. He’d proved himself. They didn’t seem to realise this sort of thing.
CB: In what way had he proved himself on those operations would you say?
EM: Well, he, as I say he’d done a half a dozen ops. He’d done exactly what was asked of him.
CB: By whom?
EM: And it was only just [pause] well, the only other thing. He’d been married recently. Whether that? Yeah. Yeah. That might well have been the case but honestly, I wouldn’t like to judge anyone.
CB: What was the reaction of the crew to what he was doing?
EM: Well one or two of them were down on him but I can’t really be certain on that one but some, again some were with him. But it’s understandable if you had a bad time and you’ve got responsibilities at home. And there was — the thing is there was one case. On one of the night raids I was on I must admit it gave me the shivers. We were going into the target and the master bomber said, ‘Christ I’ve been hit.’ And up ahead, not far ahead, there was a little flash of flame and he’d left his mic on and he screamed all the way into the ground.
CB: Good lord.
EM: And I think that might have frightened a lot of folk too. I know it sent cold shivers up my back because you heard him screaming all the way down and suddenly there was a flash and it went quiet.
CB: But no sound from any other members of his crew.
EM: But that —I think there was always a little feeling that if you were going to go you prayed to God let it be quick.
CB: Yeah.
EM: I know that was always my feeling. It —
CB: What height were you operating? What height? How high up were you operating then?
EM: Well, often at twenty thousand. Occasionally we, like several of the raids we came down to ten. And I think the other thing that made you a bit creepy was when you were going into the target and the master bomber says, ‘Oh don’t bomb. Come down to twenty. Angels ten. Angels ten.’ And you’d have to circle right down.
CB: To get down.
EM: Going down through the bomber stream and then being in the target area for so long — that was a bit uncomfortable.
CB: Sounds a strange thing to do if everybody else is high. Why would he do that?
EM: Well quite often the target was obliterated for various reasons. And –
CB: By what?
EM: By perhaps smoke or something and the further down of course you could often see more. Or there was the other times you’d be told to circle over the target while they re-laid the markers. And you’d be over the target for two or three minutes at least.
CB: Really. Yeah.
EM: Again, something very nasty.
CB: Now, going back to in the aeroplane. What was your role? What did you do from when you got in the aeroplane to when it landed again? What were doing as the engineer?
EM: Well, basically when I first got in I’d have a check around over it. I’d start up the engines with the pilot. Then when we’d take off I’d set the, once we’d taken off I’d set the, reset the fuel tanks to — so that each engine — well let me put it this way. On take-off you had a tank for each engine. After you would take off and you were at level flight you just put one tank to two engines. The tank with the most in it. And then when you got towards the target you would then put one tank per engine. And then when you came out and you were coming back home steady you’d perhaps re-change the fuel arrangements. Perhaps fill up tanks one from another. Again put one tank per two engines. And then all that period you’d be logging what you were doing. You know. Where the fuel was going. How much fuel. Calculating it. Also, I’d be, I’d go around and inspect at regular intervals looking for things. And then the, as we were perhaps coming in towards the target we’d be dropping Window and it was my job to go and heave that out. Then the other thing of course was to go around checking regularly. I mean there was one case in the early part of a flight I went around and checked the [pause] what was happening and I found — you know the floodlight bomb.
CB: The flash.
EM: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. After the bomb, after the bombs had gone you sent the flash down.
EM: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. For the picture.
EM: The little propeller on the end was turning.
CB: Yeah.
EM: And, well, if it had gone on much further we would too. So, I got chewing gum on it and stopped it from going down. It worked out alright later but that’s the sort of thing. So much depended on you seeing it and noticing it. Flaws. Something I also did before we took off was to — when I knew we were going I used to go out to the dispersal and perhaps have a look. Go over the plane. Talk to the chiefy. Talk to the lads who were doing the repairs so that I had —well it was part of a good will mission and part of being certain that you knew that they knew the plane. That was the way it went.
[recording paused]
CB: Ok. Now, on take-off what was your role?
EM: I used to, some, on occasion I used to sit by the pilot but our bomb aimer, we took it in turns. But otherwise I just sat there and checked that the engines were operating correctly. And looking for trouble.
CB: When you came into land did you have a role there or were you in your safety seat?
EM: No. I used to just sit in my position and be there if I was wanted. There was not much I could do then except the odd time we had the — I was pumping like hell on the flaps and hydraulics trying to get them down but that’s about the only thing.
CB: Ok. And when you landed, when you eventually landed did you have to do some kind of check on the aircraft?
EM: Well, if I landed at my own airfield we’d just — the skipper and I would just chat with the chiefy. Tell him, you know, what we’d found. What had happened. But if it was to — we were sent to another airfield. Diverted. I’d speak to the ground crew. You know, give them the details and then if there was no, unless there was no one around I’d lock the controls and shut it up and then go and report to the engineering officer.
CB: So, could you describe why is it, why was it that you would lock the controls?
EM: Well.
CB: Once it was on the ground.
EM: Basically, I mean, if they weren’t locked if there was a breeze or a wind they’d flap and they’d damage. Otherwise you could be in trouble with them.
CB: As far as the ground crew were concerned what relationships did you have with them?
EM: Well with our own we had a very good one. We used to — I was in B Flight at 77 Squadron and we used to get together once a month or whenever we were free and take them for a beer and, you know, something to eat. It was fairly good relations. In fact, I can’t think of a better one.
CB: Good. And as far as debriefing was concerned. So, the aircraft is parked. You are all taken back to the intelligence officer for debriefing.
EM: Debriefing.
CB: What was your job to do there?
EM: What? Sorry?
CB: On debriefing.
EM: Yeah.
CB: What did you do?
EM: Well we just sit around with a mug of coffee. Smoking like hell. They’d just — everyone would have a little say of what we noticed or what we didn’t see. Anything strange. What had happened to us. What we’d seen on the — over the target. Anything new. Different. It was just standard report on what you’d done.
CB: How many times were you hit by enemy fire?
EM: Well, it was very rare that we didn’t come back with a hole somewhere. I believe, in ‘44 that people said, ‘Oh well you didn’t have night fighters.’ Well we did. But the flak was, I found on many occasions, was very heavy and what’s more it was pretty accurate. I’ve seen all sorts of reports but I’ve still got the feeling that on some of the more important targets it really was heavy and I can’t remember one where we didn’t come back with some hole or something there. You know, in fact there was one occasion there was a twang close to my ear and a piece of shrapnel had hit the hydraulics. The undercarriage lever. And the result was I got sprayed with hydraulic fluid before I could close it off. But that’s one problem. I must admit I stunk like heaven for weeks.
CB: Because?
EM: From the oils. Horrible smelling stuff.
CB: Yeah. Did you get attacked by fighters at any stage?
EM: Well, we, I did see some of, some of their jet fighters. There was one daylight where we saw one of their jet fighters. It came straight up through the stream. It wasn’t doing anything but it gave our gunners a wonderful bit of target practice. And it just went up and disappeared.
CB: What was that? Was that a twin engine was it? A 262. Was that a twin engine fighter? A 262.
EM: Yes. You didn’t get a good view of it that you could identify it but you could see the outline well enough and it sort of went through the stream more at an angle.
CB: And was it firing as it did it?
EM: Oh, it had fired. It didn’t hit anything.
CB: Was this in the daylight or at night? In the daylight.
EM: Daylight.
CB: Right. Ok.
EM: You know it was a clear day. You could see it easily.
CB: Yeah. Now –
[phone ringing]
CB: Ah. Changing the subject slightly. What about, hang on. What about Scarecrows? Did you get any of those and what did you know about them?
EM: Well, there were several discussions about that. I thought I saw one and I mentioned it. And they said, ‘No. Can’t.’
CB: Who did you mention that to? The debriefing or to the pilot?
EM: Well, I mentioned it to the pilot and I checked up at debriefing. And again, they said, ‘Oh. No.’
CB: What did you understand a Scarecrow was?
EM: Well, the way it was put to me and it’s why I thought it was one that it looked like a dummy aeroplane going down. But still today when I try to remember I’m not sure myself.
CB: So how did you identify what you thought was a Scarecrow? What did you see?
EM: Well, virtually it looked like a splash of flame and bits coming down from it, you know. It looked —
CB: So —
EM: But having seen planes in daylight being hit and going down. I mean, for instance there was one occasion where we were flying along and there was again a plane — say a hundred yards, two hundred yards away and it was surrounded by a massive shrapnel burst. Flak bursts. And the next minute he seemed to fold up and go down. Now, thinking back, I can’t be sure that that Scarecrow would look anything like.
CB: Right. So that was effectively because they bracketed.
EM: Yeah.
CB: So, what did you understand the term Scarecrow meant?
EM: Well I always got the feeling that the name itself described it. In other words, it was something they put up to make us think there were more being shot down then there was.
CB: Right. Did you ever find out what it really was? Ok. So –
EM: I’m curious if anyone knows.
CB: Right. So, the night fighters. A number of the night fighters were fitted with upward firing cannon. So, they would trace, they would follow the bomber having identified the one they wanted to track underneath from behind and then fire thirty millimetre or twenty millimetre cannon into the fuel tanks.
EM: Yeah, the musik.
CB: Schrage music.
EM: Yeah. Well there was an interesting thing about that too. On our squadron they cut the H2S blister in half. They removed the back half and inside the other shell they put a plank of wood and various other attachments and put a .5 Browning in. The gunner was held in by something like a climbing harness and a huge bungee that went to the back. I know this well because I was sat there and in fact on one raid I sat in it most of the way when I wasn’t pilot or flight engineering. And it was most cold and unpleasant.
CB: And the idea of that was to counter the night fighter.
EM: Yeah. But it didn’t last for long. They were — when, they certainly didn’t have them on the Mark 6 and the aircraft that did have them were [pause] well — put out to graze. They were [pause] they disappeared off the site. You know. I think that occasion was the last I saw of them.
CB: Right. Because it didn’t work? Or why?
EM: Oh, it worked because I believe there were a couple of blokes earlier in ‘45 ‘44 had used them and they did work. They — but I must admit I felt uncovered, uncomfortable when I was told I might have to sit there.
CB: ‘Cause the other gunners were busy as well.
EM: Pardon?
CB: The other gunners were busy.
EM: Oh yeah.
CB: So, they couldn’t sit there.
EM: Oh yes. Yes. We did, on — oh it was used again once but this time they put a proper gunner in there. Thank God. Talking of — there weren’t many fighter attacks in ’45 but I think there were the odd ones because I did remember seeing in the dark, way up there, one or two sights. It looked like fighters attacking but it was only once or twice at the most I saw that.
CB: What about corkscrews? Did you do many corkscrews? Did you do many corkscrews?
EM: Oh yeah. Yeah. When we would do – met the, well, the intruders we were corkscrewing all the way across Yorkshire.
CB: At low level.
EM: Yeah. Yeah. I was stood there. That was quite, yeah. Not long ago I was up in Yorkshire and I met the, I was introduced to the Lord Mayor of the County and I told him about this and I said, ‘Well they haven’t sent me the bill yet.’ He said, ‘Oh they will do.’ [laughs]
CB: Just changing to the crew really now because we’ve covered a lot of things. Thank you. What was the relationship with the crew? How did the crew get on together?
EM: A bit mixed. The Canadians got on well together. The one bloke I felt was a bit of a sore thumb was the bomb aimer. I think he thought he was a bit something different. I didn’t define. We got on. We did the job together. We did what we could together and we worked together. But the blokes I rather liked were the Canadians, the mid upper gunner and the wireless operator. In fact, the wireless operator — I visited him at his home on one occasion. But it was a very, it was friendly but occasionally remote. It wasn’t the sort of crew you would have, that people would always go on about on the radio. We tended to be a bit separate.
CB: Was it a mixture of commissioned and NCOs or all NCOs?
EM: Well the bomb aimer got a commission but the rest of us —oh the Canadian navigator —he was a flying officer. The skipper was a flight lieutenant. Later becoming a squadron leader. The bomb aimer became a pilot officer and he let us know. He was that sort of bloke, you know. But we all got on well as I say doing the job. Doing the job we was there.
CB: But not socially. Socially was different.
EM: Yeah. Outside we used to have an occasional drink together and, in the mess, we used to be quite friendly. And we were in the same nissen hut. So, it was good will. There was no bad.
CB: Right.
EM: Particularly when we had to deal with the rear gunner’s rear end.
CB: Right.
EM: But oh no it was [pause] you couldn’t have wished to have been worse. They weren’t, there was nothing wrong with them. It was just that I don’t think we gelled, you know, together that well. We were good friends but after that no.
CB: It wasn’t really a family.
EM: No.
CB: Which so many crews were.
EM: Pardon?
CB: Many crews were families. They were families of people weren’t they?
EM: No. There was no sort of family feeling.
CB: No.
EM: It was just friends.
CB: And did you –
EM: It was a team doing a job.
CB: Yeah. Did you socialise at all with the ground crew? Did you socialise at all with the ground crew?
EM: Well, nothing serious. I think the wireless operator was the only one. We went out with young ladies together. And he’d pinch mine more often. But he was alright. As I say I met his family and I got, had a very good weekend with them. I think he was the closest I got.
CB: So, was it a difficult situation to leave the RAF or did it not matter?
EM: Well —
CB: Or did you look forward to it?
EM: I didn’t really want to join the RAF. I had my own ambitions as to what I wanted to do after the war which was to go into research science. And I think that was the main thing.
CB: Why did you join the RAF in the first place rather than the navy or the army?
EM: Well, my dad had been in the First World War. Started out as — in the artillery. From there he graduated to observer in balloons. From there he graduated as an observer in RE8s. And towards the end of the war they selected him as a pilot and he ended, he ended up on the last day of the war sitting in the cockpit of an SE5.
CB: Oh. Did he?
EM: But having said that I’ve always been interested in flying. Whether it was model aeroplanes. And in fact, behind our house in Worthing there was a big field and Alan Cobham used to have his Flying Circus there. And occasionally I’d nip over there and join them and run errands for them. For the, for the treat they used to give me a flight in an Avro Tutor or something. Or one of their old planes. Occasionally they let me tighten up a nut and bolt [laughs] [unclear]. So, what else could I do? I mean it had to be. Apart from that I didn’t fancy marching all over the place. If I was going to do it I was going to do it in luxury. If you call it that.
CB: When [pause] when you were on operations how did you feel about what you were doing?
EM: Well, something else. When we were in South Norwood it was in the Blitz and we got bombed more times than enough because we, where we were living there was Norwood Junction right behind and there was anti-aircraft guns going up. There were loads of bombs going down. And the result I saw all the blitz so when it came my turn I wasn’t too [pause] but on the other hand the thing that I wasn’t happy about killing folk and things like that. I felt there was a bit of a conscience there but it was — but that all changed when the things I went and saw in Germany afterwards. Like Belsen. And I thought, I think basically my feeling was — ok it’s a job that’s got to be done and if we don’t do it they’ll have us in a most unpleasant way.
CB: Ok.
EM: But —
CB: The same for all of the crew or did they feel differently? What did the rest of the crew feel?
EM: I think they were much of a muchness. It was a job that had to be done. Not a very nice job. I mean like putting down a pet dog that’s got rabies. I mean you might like the dog but it’s got to go.
CB: That’s been really interesting and really helpful. It’s Tuesday the 13th of October. And thank you very much Ted.
EM: Oh well I hope it’s been interesting.
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 Edward Harry Matthews
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Chris Brockbank
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-13
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AMatthewsEH151013
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Format
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01:19:57 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
With an interest in flying after experiencing Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus, Ted volunteered for aircrew. He went to the Air Crew Reception Centre at St John’s Wood, followed by Newquay on the Initial Training Wing. Ted proceeded to RAF Locking for an introduction to aircraft engineering. He did a more concentrated course at RAF St Athan and flew Oxfords and Tiger Moths. Ted went to the Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Riccall. He replaced a flight engineer in another crew and joined 77 Squadron at RAF Full Sutton, flying Halifaxes.
Ted carried out 15 operations. The first two were daylight ones to Mainz and Cologne. The third was a night operation to Kamen on the Ruhr and they encountered an intruder JU188 aircraft when landing, as part of the German Operation Gisela. Other operations included Helmstedt with anti-aircraft fire; Dortmund; Wuppertal; Witten where they were hit on the starboard engine; Recklinghausen where bombs dropped on a munitions train instead of their target; in Osnabrück they were hit in the bomb bay by shrapnel; Heligoland and Wangerooge saw two Halifaxes collide mid-air. Ted describes the spectacle of lines of fuel on fire in an oil plant.
Ted discusses in detail his role as a flight engineer.
Ted stopped flying in September 1945. He dropped old ammunition and bombs in the North Sea and did a safety course at RAF St Athan. He was sent to a maintenance unit in Faßberg, near Belsen, and was demobilised. He became a government Senior Scientific Officer.
Contributor
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Sally Coulter
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Yorkshire
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
England--Somerset
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Soltau
Germany--Helgoland
Germany--Helmstedt
Germany--Kamen
Germany--Mainz (Rhineland-Palatinate)
Germany--Osnabrück
Germany--Recklinghausen (Münster)
Germany--Wangerooge Island
Germany--Witten
Germany--Wuppertal
Germany
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
1945-09
77 Squadron
aircrew
bombing of Helgoland (18 April 1945)
fear
FIDO
flight engineer
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Initial Training Wing
Ju 88
Master Bomber
mid-air collision
military service conditions
mine laying
Oxford
RAF Full Sutton
RAF Locking
RAF Riccall
RAF St Athan
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/651/8922/PTweenR1501.1.jpg
055b54dce19d8322e090e3b8902969b3
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/651/8922/ATweenRC150909.2.mp3
0e0c08e08a5872ea27e07a9c5ebb3ad2
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
Tween, Reginald
R Tween
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Tween, R
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Flight Sergeant Reginald Tween (b. 1925, 3005992 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a flight engineer with 514 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-09-09
Rights
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
GC: Right. This is an interview being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. My name’s Gemma Clapton. The interviewee here today is Reginald Tween who was flight sergeant.
RT: Sergeant.
GC: 514 Squadron. The interview is taking place at his home in Heybridge Basin on the 9th of September 2015. Right, how did you get started in the war? How did you join up?
RT: Well when we were youngsters, we were always interested in models, especially model aeroplanes, and we carried on from there. I joined the ATC, and that was my ambition, to join the Royal Air Force to fly. Being in the ATC as a top cadet, blowing my trumpet a bit, I had two flights at Hornchurch Aerodrome while I was in the ATC, so I knew what flying was like.
GC: So you wanted to fly. Not Army or Navy.
RT: No. No. No. No. No. Flying was the one interest, yeah [unclear]. Do you stop it?
GC: Yeah.
[recording paused]
GC: So you did the acc. Now, you’ve just —
RT: ATC.
GC: Act.
RT: ATC.
GC: ATC. You’ve got me at it now.
RT: Auxiliary training.
GC: Tell me a bit about before you joined up.
RT: Well we was always in to making models, making model aeroplanes and flying them. There was a group of us, a brother included.
GC: Did your brother serve? Did you —
RT: Yes. On — he failed the medical for flying so he had to serve in the Meteorological branch.
GC: Was he jealous?
RT: A bit, yes, because we’d both looked forward to flying so much.
GC: So, as a member of the ATC, what did you see of the war before you joined Bomber Command?
RT: Well, all the fighting going on overhead, and the oil works being set ablaze and all that sort of thing. The whole war was going on overhead, bombs dropping at the end of the garden where we lived and that sort of thing.
GC: Where did you live at this time?
RT: Chadwell, which was two miles from Tilbury, and we stood out at the back door, watching what was going — did like to see what was going on, even with the shrapnel pinging down. And an anti- aircraft shell landed in the back garden on the point of the house, blew half the garden into the front road. Another, another time, there was a land mine dropped a couple of miles away and blew the back door off of the house.
GC: So did these things make you want to serve more?
RT: Not particularly, no. We were, we were so keen to start with. I do remember one time, this is later, when I was on leave, I saw the V2s rocket being launched from Holland, saw the vapour trail of the rocket come up and over and then it landed in London. Because we had the report a couple of days later, that the rocket had landed so and so.
GC: So obviously where you were, which is Tilbury, which is not far from East London.
RT: It’s a direct line from Germany to London.
GC: Yeah.
RT: They used to fly right overhead. And the diesel engines — you could tell them a mile away, with a certain hum, hmmmmm, all the time, couldn’t mistake them. Then, when I was at work at Purfleet, West Thurrock, I’m cycling into the works entrance, and a Junkers 88 came over and dropped a bomb right over my head [laughs] which landed at the Van den Burg and Jurgens, where they were making all the margarine. Killed a couple of people.
GC: So did all the young men just want to serve? Did they believe it was their duty to serve?
RT: In the ATC?
GC: Yeah.
RT: Oh yes, all the youngsters. Yes. Yeah. And we said they started it, we’ll finish it.
GC: So, once you decided that you was going in to the Air Force, how did, how did your training start and where was you based?
RT: Oh, I joined up in London, St John’s Wood.
GC: Whenabouts? When?
RT: Oh I can’t remember. Forty, must have been ’43, and then we went from there to Torquay. Did lots of training there.
GC: When —
RT: Then —
GC: Sorry.
RT: Yeah, then to a station near — just south of Cambridge, Wratting Common. W R A T T - Wratting Common. Then from there we went to Feltwell, further training, near Cambridge, and Lakenheath. No, not Lakenheath, Methwold. Methwold.
GC: My granddad lived there. At Feltwell.
RT: Yeah. And then from there, we went to the squadron at Waterbeach and started operational flying from there. In August, August, I was looking at it, August the 3rd was my first flight. Operation.
GC: So, during your training, did you want to be a flight engineer or did your training just to lead you that way?
RT: I was also mechanically minded. Everybody wanted to be a pilot obviously, but my education let me down, so as soon as they knew, they asked me questions about engines and various things. They said, ‘Right. Flight engineer’, so that was that. I accepted it, no qualms. I wasn’t good enough for a pilot and that was it. Yeah. Everybody can’t be a pilot, obviously, and I had a — well, I won’t say a wonderful time but it was, something. Well it’s one of those things, I mean, a lot of lives were lost. But I never — the furthest I’d been from home was a week’s holiday in Clacton before I joined up. In those days, a Sunday School outing was to Maldon once a year.
GC: So we’ve gone as a flight engineer. Tell me about your first op then, if you can remember it. Can you remember?
RT: Yeah. The flying bomb sights, in — near the Pas de Calais, near, near Calais, just across the channel. Actually, I’ll go and get my logbook [pause]. Every, all the cricket matches. We flew from Cambridge, all the way to Cornwall at, say, four hundred foot, and everybody lay flat on their face. Three hundred Lancasters in one mass. And the cows were jumping the hedges, the farmers must have gone berserk after. Then the tail gunner saw everybody getting up again. We flew at a hundred foot over the Atlantic and it took us nine hours, there and back, and we bombed coming in from the south, to catch them unawares, they were only sweeping from the north. And on that trip, the skipper said, ‘Swap seats’, and I flew the plane for twenty minutes, down off the Channel Islands, coming back, and I had another flight at the controls on this second trip which was a day later, for twenty minutes. And the rear gunner, he’s saying, ‘Get him off there. I’m getting sick here’. because I was going up and down [laughs], oh dear. On one of those trips, I had to shut one engine down. We had trouble with the hydraulics and oxygen U/S, but we weren’t climbing very high, so that was ok [pause]. Our sixth operation was to Stettin, in the Baltic. We come back flying over Sweden, that was a nine hour flight also, and seven, eight and nine trips were bombing barges and troops in Le Havre. We were down to two thousand feet due to the weather. Two were shot, two of our aircraft were shot down. All baled out. That was daytime. Now, the tenth trip saw two Lancasters collide and blow up over France.
[pause]
RT: On the fourteenth trip, to Duisburg, we had two Lancasters following us which were to drop their bombs when we dropped ours, as we were the senior crew. As we approached the target, there was a stick of bombs coming down on the starboard side, so I nudged the skipper, he looked out and saw the same thing on the port side. So with that, he put the nose down slightly to get away from the bombs which were dropping just past our wingtips. With that, the radar picked us up. The next thing, there was a terrific thump and the aircraft stood on its nose, we were heading straight down. When I picked myself up and I looked back and the two behind had just blown up, completely disappeared. All I could see, was red flame, black smoke, nothing, just one huge bang. When I looked at the speedometer, we were doing four hundred miles an hour, more or less straight down, so the skipper yelled, ‘Give us a hand’, and we managed to pull it out of the dive and regain our height again. Then a couple of minutes later, the bomb aimer comes staggering up from the nose with his helmet off, torn off, his mask, and a huge strip of skin off his, I could see bare skull right across his head. Blood everywhere. Oh, a terrible sight. So I managed to bandage him up, took him back, laid him on the bed and then he said, ‘You’d better have a look to see if the bombs are gone’. So I had to lay down on the floor, amongst all the blood, looked in the bomb bay and half the bombs hadn’t dropped, so that was another shock. So the skipper then said, ‘Well you’d better, better drop them soon as you can’, so I went back with a special lever we had and I dropped the bombs as we flew back across Germany. That was, that was the most unnerving trip we had out of the whole lot. On that same trip, Richard Dimbleby flew with one of the other planes from our squadron, which was a very unusual thing, for a civilian to be allowed on to a plane to fly, but he did anyway. So that was that.
[pause]
RT: Oh, and the twenty fifth operation was to Dortmund. I’ve got here, ‘Jolly good trip. First kite to bomb. Tons of flack. Twenty five holes’, so that was that. On the twenty eighth operation, ‘Very good show. Tons of flak. Very accurate. A few holes. Two Lancasters shot down that we saw. Two five hundred pound bombs loose in the bomb bay’. When the undercarriage was selected down, there was two bangs and the two bombs were laid on the bomb doors, so we had to fly all the way out to the North Sea, open the bomb doors and just let them fall into the water. It didn’t explode and that was that. [pause] That’s it. Right. So my last, my last trip was on the 16th of the 12th ’44, Siegen. Distance, nine hundred and fifty miles. ‘Fairly good attack. Tons of flak en-route. None over the target. Ten tenths cloud all the way. Roads and rail. Hedge hopping on the way back as a last trip, with toilet rolls thrown out over the aerodrome as we celebrated our last operation’ [laughs].
GC: So how many ops in all did you do?
RT: Twenty-eight. I was, I was sick for one, had a cold, so you can’t fly with your ears blocked up. Yeah, so that was that. Then we went on indefinite leave after our operations finished [pause]. All told, I flew a hundred and forty-five hours in daylight, sixty six hours at night, so we had more daytime flights than we had night time flights actually.
GC: Was it safer day or night do you think? Was there a difference?
RT: I used to like to be able to see where we were going in daylight. It was, it was, because our navigator, he only saw one target, he was cooped up behind his curtain. We said, ‘Come and have a look at this, Les’, and he came out, took one look and dived back in [laughs], he wasn’t interested. But I used to fold, fold my seat up and be ready, looking out, around, up and down. On one trip, we were coned with searchlights. We had an awful job getting away from that because once you were in searchlights, usually that was curtains, because they could zone in onto you then, but we put it into a steep dive, or the skipper did, and we managed to escape, which was very lucky. I do remember it was so bright that I could fill out my log sheet with the petrol, without using a lamp. It was like daylight. Oh it was unnerving. Oh dear. Terrible.
GC: Someone told me that they were happier with the guns going, because the guns meant that the night fighters weren’t up. If the guns weren’t firing.
RT: Oh yes. Yeah. We only had two, bags of fighters, two MEs after us. That was at night. There was only one more when we were with, had fighters to contend with, but it was the flak. We was going into briefing and they would mention there might be six hundred light guns and maybe eight hundred heavy guns in the target area, so everybody started biting their nails, and [laughs] oh dear, yeah. See the black puffs, there was so many shells bursting, it was like flying into clouds at times, even though it was a clear sky. In the daylight, all these puffs filled the sky with smoke. Quite unnerving, yeah. Right, so that was it.
GC: I’ll turn that off for a second.
[recording paused]
RT: A Nissen hut down by the River Cam, away from the airfield for safety. We used to go swimming in the river when we weren’t flying. Oh, one special occasion, we were told not to leave the camp under any circumstances as there was a possibility of operations that night, so the pilot decided he wanted to go and see his girlfriend in Cambridge, and he went. Lo and behold, we had the call to operations, so we went to briefing, had our meal, had everything. In the meantime, we had to tell the squadron leader in charge of the flight that we were short of a pilot. So he gets in his car and goes off to Cambridge, one of the gunners showed him the address, and brought him back. He came back just in time to get in the aircraft and take off, otherwise he would have been court martialled. Oh dear. So we’re telling him where we’re going, what we’re going to do and everything else, as we’re flying there. Oh dear.
GC: So it was a close unit.
RT: Oh, he nearly had the chop there. Oh dear, he would have been thrown out, dereliction of duty and all the rest of it. Disobeying an order. Oh dear, yeah, but it all turned out right in the end. Good job they had a car handy.
GC: So did you [pause], can you describe what it was like to fly in a Lancaster?
RT: Absolutely exhilarating to me. That’s, that’s what I spent my youth dreaming about, flying, and I’d been up twice in the ATC, so didn’t have any trouble, sickness or anything. Lovely. Terrible thing you have to have a war to get flying in. But I was, I enjoyed every moment of it.
GC: And what was the Lancaster like?
RT: Cramped. Our parachutes were stowed under the navigator’s table, so you hadn’t a hope in hell of getting it if there was any damage to the aircraft, because once you turn over or something like that, you just can’t move. Because when we were training over the Thames Estuary, we had a Spitfire doing fighter affiliation with us, in other words, mock attacks, and I’m standing up alongside the pilot, and all of a sudden as we dived and pulled up, I went blind, with G forces, and it was a very strange feeling. Quite a few seconds and then my vision suddenly came back. And I wondered, I couldn’t move my hands or my feet, I was glued in place with the G forces. Oh, it was amazing. The only time I ever had that effect. It might have been better if I’d have been sitting down. It wouldn’t have happened because they have G suits now to stop that, stops the blood draining out of your head, yeah. But it was very peculiar, yes.
GC: Can you remember the sensations of, for example, a bombing sortie over a city? Can you remember the noise? The smell, those kind of things.
RT: Well you didn’t get anything outside because it was so noisy in the aircraft, but at night, I looked up on one trip and I could see a row of red-hot exhausts, just above our head. If I’d have stuck my arm out of the top, I swear I could have touched the plane. It was a big shock because there was no good in dropping down, we might have done the same to the one underneath. Oh, it was very, very dodgy, very dodgy, especially when we were flying in solid cloud. You didn’t know who was next door or above or below you or anything, and then when we flew through cumulus cloud, the bumping and the disturbance, oh terrible. It would shake your teeth out nearly, it used to [laughs].
GC: I suppose it must be a different kind of flying, because these days, we have a lot of technology and equipment. You literally did it on —
RT: Well on — instrumentation in those days was very basic, very basic, yeah. Nowadays they’ve got an instrument that tells them how many miles they’ve flown, because when I’ve been up in the cockpits, on foreign holidays, I’ve asked to see if I could go up in to the, on the flight deck, and I told them who I, what I’d done and that, and I said, ‘Well what’s that then?’ ‘Oh that’s how many miles we’ve flown’. Oh. Dead easy, yeah. GPS, global positioning these days, you can’t get lost, but we had to find our own way. Well when you were in a mass, you just follow the leader, but at night, it was different. Everybody had to navigate then because there was no lights at all. No, no.
GC: So, is there one operation that sticks out in your memory?
RT: Well, that one where the two blew up behind us. That was a sight, oh dear, terrible. Just there one second, gone the next, yes. But at least they didn’t suffer, they never knew anything about it. Just one big bang and they were gone. But that aircraft we were flying, that never flew again because it was so bad, it damaged our tail plane. They seemed to think that if we’d have flown much longer, it would have fallen off of ours, so we were lucky there, very lucky, yes.
GC: So the ground crew were as protective of the planes as we hear.
RT: Oh yes. Yes. Yes, the same crew for the whole period of flying. Actually, we flew three different aircraft. One was time expired, it had reached its maximum flying hours, and the next one was written off, didn’t fly again, and then we finished up with the third one, so we were quite lucky actually.
GC: Can you tell me a bit about life after the war? How did you hear that the war had ended? What was your emotion to that?
RT: Well everybody was very pleased because we were on six months leave, ready to go to the Far East, so that meant that we were finished flying for good, while I was on five weeks leave, and that was it.
GC: Would you do it again?
RT: If — if need be, yes. We were doing it for a cause, a good cause. He had to be stopped. And as Bomber Harris said they started it, we’ll finish it. I never had any qualms about dropping bombs on cities. They started it, I mean I used to see them flying up. Well they dropped bombs where I lived anyway, houses up the street, so we were only giving them back what they started. Oh yes.
[recording paused]
RT: It was like sitting in a bus, they just go up and your ears pop, but when we did our two low flying trips, that was flying. Two hundred and twenty miles an hour at four or five hundred foot, everything flashing by underneath you. That was when, when you had to be careful and watch what was coming up ahead, but when you’re up at thirty thousand feet, people go from A and B, they don’t know what’s on the way. I used to like to be looking out the window when we flew abroad, but other people would be either asleep, reading books. I had my head glued at the window to see what was passing underneath, night or day. Oh yes.
GC: So, you were a bit of an adrenalin junkie then.
RT: Oh, for flying. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We used to have a huge kite. We built a huge six-foot wingspan model and it used to run up the wire on a gadget we made. Hit stop at where the kite was and then drop and glide all the way back, because we had huge fields where I used to live, and we’d have to run like hell to retrieve the glider before someone else found it. I used to go cycle to Hornchurch Aerodrome, which was six miles from home, and we used to watch them testing the Spitfire’s cannons, firing at the railway sleepers. Wood, pieces of wood flying everywhere. They left the tail up so it was horizontal. Oh dear. Now it’s a housing estate where the aerodrome used to be. Hornchurch. Yes.
GC: So why, that brings the question, why Bomber Command and not Fighter Command. Why the bombers?
RT: Well I wasn’t clever enough as a pilot, so the only thing left was crew, and the fact that I was mechanically minded, obvious to us, was a flight engineer, which I quite enjoyed. Sitting there filling my petrol log out. Every time I altered the engine speed, I had to work out how much petrol we used from each tank, in case the instruments were damaged. Every quarter of an hour I think that was, yeah.
GC: So, it’s like we said. It’s not technical, it’s mathematical and instrument based.
RT: A lot of it, yeah. Actually, sitting alongside the pilot, he only flew it. I used to do the revs. Same as when we took off, he’d start it off, then he used to say, ‘Through the gate’, I’d put the throttles — the last bit, three thousand revs maximum, then you’d say, ‘Throttle back’. Once we were airborne, flaps, speed, all the controls I operated, which was like a second pilot on an airliner actually, yeah. And we were supposed to be able to fly it straight and level in case the pilot was injured. I think I could have flown it, but I don’t know about getting down. I’d have flown back, got them to bale out and then ditched it, I think, oh dear.
GC: They would have taken that off your weekend rations, would they?
RT: Yes. Oh dear. Yeah. Yes, but out of twenty-eight trips, I only ever saw three parachutes. Of all the planes that either blew up, a wing blown off, just spiraling down, nobody, nobody could get out, so having a parachute wasn’t much good a lot of the time. No. You had to find it, then clip it on and then try and bale out. It wasn’t on. Too difficult, no. And those that were spiraling down, they knew what they were heading for obviously. It wasn’t quick, they could see it coming. Yes, it must have been terrible.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Reginald Tween
Creator
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Gemma Clapton
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-09-09
Format
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00:36:27 audio recording
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ATweenRC150909, PTweenR1501
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Reginald joined the Royal Air Force in 1943, becoming a flight engineer with 415 Squadron, Bomber Command. He tells of his love of making and flying model airplanes, and that although he wanted to be a pilot, his love of anything mechanical, made him an easy choice for a flight engineer. Reginald tells of joining the Air Training Corps, watching the V-2 rockets coming over his home in Tilbury and their effects. His first operation was on 3rd August and it was to target the V-1 sites near the Pas de Calais, and he had operations to Stettin and Duisburg. He tells of two Lancasters that were shot down. Reginald flew 28 operations with Bomber Command (145 hours in daylight operations and 66 hours during night operations).
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Germany
Poland
France
England--Essex
England--Tilbury (Thurrock)
Poland--Szczecin
Germany--Duisburg
France--Pas-de-Calais
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
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1943-08-03
Contributor
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Vivienne Tincombe
514 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
flight engineer
Lancaster
mid-air collision
RAF Waterbeach
shot down
training
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/728/9287/PBrowningDJ1601.2.jpg
a9c58bb31d10b774e30abf2e361e3ba5
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/728/9287/ABrowningDJ160613.2.mp3
1ac6814e8f09ad26ce22db6bfcaf9534
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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Browning, Don
Donald James Browning
D J Browning
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Flying Officer Don Browning (1923 - 2020, Royal Australian Air Force). He flew operations as a wireless operator with 463 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Don Browning and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-06-13
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Browning, DJ
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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JH: This is John Horsburgh and today I’m interviewing Don Browning of 463 Squadron. He was a wireless operator in 463 RAAF. We’re at [ deleted] Warrawee in Sydney, New South Wales. And this is part of the IBCC Oral History Project. It’s Monday 13th of June 2016. So, good evening Don. Maybe we can start with when and where you were born.
DB: I was born in Strathfield, New South Wales on the 22nd of July 1923.
JH: So, Don was there any history in the First World War with your family in Sydney?
DB: Yes. My father was in the First World War. He was an officer in the 19th Infantry Battalion and he went away on the SS Ceramic. The 12th reinforcement or the, the 19th Battalion. He was in charge of the body of men that went over. I think there were a couple, it was rather unusual, I think there were a couple of twins I think on this trip on the Ceramic. And as far as I know they went to Egypt and then on to France.
JH: And I gather he, he was involved in some of the major campaigns in, in France.
DB: Yes. He was involved in the campaigns around Pozieres, Ypres, Billancourt, and I don’t know what the other one was now. I can’t think of it. But most of the ones that the 19th Battalion were involved in. In the — from Algeria.
JH: And I believe you went to school at King’s and that had a fairly strong army military background —
DB: Yes. First of all I went to a Burwood Public School. Up to fifth class at Burwood Public School. Then I went to King’s at, I think the age of about eleven. And because I had played the drum in Burwood Public School I became involved playing the drum at King’s. And consequently was in the cadets from the age of thirteen, eleven — sorry eleven or twelve and remained in cadets right through my schooling.
JH: And before you got involved in the RAAF presumably you left school before you joined up. What were you doing?
DB: I, when I left school in 1940 I, I went to Wentworth College which was a part of the Metropolitan Business College to do a business course. And then from there I went out in to the business world. I was employed as an auditor with quite a large firm of chartered accountants called Smiths Johnson. I was mainly out at the glassworks. Australian Glassworks which was part of Australian consolidated industries.
JH: What year was that Don?
DB: That would be in 194 —the early part of ’41. Possibly [pause] yes. Early part of 1941.
JH: So then you, you enlisted in the army I believe eventually.
DB: First of all I enlisted in the air force and was waiting for a call up to have my medical and so forth but then I got a call up for the army. And I went to the boss and told him that I was I had a call up for the army and he told me that I was employed in essential duties sort of thing because I was auditing companies that were involved in munition work and so forth and I needn’t go into the army. But I told him I had already enlisted for the air force and he said, ‘Well in that case you might as well go.’
JH: Don, what with your father, his history in the First World War and you obviously had some military training in the cadets what made you want to join the air force?
DB: Oh, I’d experienced the renown of Kingsford Smith and various aviators. Amy Johnson etcetera and those that were, were involved in the early aviation. And I had a desire to join the air force.
JH: Of course you got to know Rollo Kingsford Smith quite well and were —
DB: Not, not at that point.
JH: But we’ll come to that as we —
DB: Yeah.
JH: Go through your history in the RAAF. So, Don perhaps you could talk about when you went across to the RAAF. I think it was by now 1942 and I gather you went through some training courses in Australia and then set sail for the UK. Perhaps you could talk about your training in Australia.
DB: Well, yes I was. When I joined the air force it was the 17th of August 1942. I joined in army uniform because I’d been employed in the army right from ‘41 until then. And I went to what they called Initial Training School at Bradfield Park, Sydney which is, was down in the Lindfield area on the Lane Cove River. I was there actually for a period of [pause] I should have brought my torch light in here. I can’t see. From the 17th of August until the 1st of October. I think.
JH: What sort of training was that at Bradfield, Don?
DB: Well, that, that was initial training was a lot of square bashing drill. Morse code. [unclear] or electricity and magnetism particularly. A bit of mathematics and aircraft law — air force law, aircraft recognition and general matters to do with the air force.
JH: Yes. So, so from there you were posted to Parkes.
DB: Yes. Well, of course naturally everyone wanted to be a pilot as I wanted to be but a lot of us were made wireless operator air gunners. Particularly those who had done physics at school and I’d been there until leaving. Doing physics and that sort of thing. So quite a number of them were made wireless operators air gunners. I think at that stage the Empire Air Training Scheme were working on the fact that the four engine bombers and that sort of thing would be employed later in the war and they were preparing crews to go on these four engined aircraft. We were selected according to the exams and so forth that we did at Bradfield for training as either observers, wireless operator air gunners, pilots [pause] and I think that that was the general selection of categories. It was only later that the observers became a choice of navigators and bomb aimers and the wireless operators dropped the air gunnery to wear a signals wing. I think that happened in March ’43 if I remember rightly. But it was —
JH: But you still, you still had to do some gunnery training.
DB: Oh yes.
JH: And I think you went to Port Pirie.
DB: We had to do all the training for air gunnery because you could be used in the different categories depending on where you were sent. Whether you were sent to, up to the islands or over to the UK. And of course we hadn’t at that stage. I think that Britain had only been using Wellingtons and Whitleys.
JH: Yes.
DB: And the four engine planes hadn’t even been contemplated.
JH: Yes. Yes. So, so by then you’d passed probably with probably flying colours and you were selected to, to go to the UK.
DB: No. From there we went, we were sent on our various courses. I went to Parkes to do my wireless operation course.
JH: No. I meant, meant from Port Pirie. After Port Pirie.
DB: After Port Pirie where we did the gunnery. Yes. We were sent overseas.
JH: Yes. Yeah.
DB: We came back to Bradfield. That was number 2 Embarkation Depot.
JH: Yeah.
DB: We were there for about ten days.
JH: Yes.
DB: Or a fortnight. And then I remember being, marching down George Street waving to my mother on Farmers Corner. And caught a train up to Brisbane and I went on the Matsonia across to America.
JH: Yeah. So how many were in the contingent marching down George Street?
DB: I couldn’t tell you what the numbers were but there were pilots, there were navigators and or observers at this time.
JH: Yeah.
DB: As they were called then. And some of those did further training in Canada.
JH: Yes.
DB: But I was qualified as a sergeant wireless operator air gunner and I went after a short period in America. I went on the Queen Mary to Scotland and down to Brighton.
JH: What did it feel like marching down to the ship?
DB: Well, it was a bit [laughs] a bit of a surprise because I used to go home every night from Bradfield. And each night I’d go back or each day I’d go back to Bradfield. I didn’t know when I was going to go or anything or what was going to happen and the last night I can remember going home and I said, ‘Well, I think we might be going tomorrow. We’re doing a march down George Street.’ And my mother came in to watch us.
JH: Did she realise you were heading to the ship though?
DB: She didn’t realise what was happening but she might have had an idea.
JH: Yes. So what an adventure. How old were you then Don?
DB: Let me just have a look and see. I think I left on the [pause]
JH: This is in 1942.
DB: No. It was ’43 that I left. Sorry. I said ’43 for that signals wing. I think that was early ’44.
JH: Right.
DB: I think I was a month ahead of it. Twelve months ahead of myself. I left 2 I, Number 2 Embarkation on the 26th of May 1943.
JH: Ok. So, tell us how you got, I think your destination in the end was Brighton of all places.
DB: Yes. Well we first of all went on the Matsonia to America. We went into Auckland I think it was for about six hours leave we had there. And then we went.
JH: Did you pick up some New Zealanders there?
DB: We picked up some New Zealanders.
JH: Yeah.
DB: Certainly. And it was a, there was a lot of American wounded on board the ship as well. And we as aircrew we had to do gun duty on the various guns all around the ship. And the ship travelled on its own. It didn’t have any escort or anything because it was travelling at about twenty knots. We changed course every seven minutes all the way across the Pacific. We arrived at San Francisco and went by train across America. We were at Camp Myles Standish in America. And it was a very, very large camp. Much much bigger than the showground in Sydney when I was in the army. And it had four PXs. Which would be, well I would describe them as the equivalent to a small shopping centre that we know of today. They could come in a stock which covered everything from gold watches [laughs] the troops were able to buy. But one of the main things I used to think of was the enormous quantity of ice cream that we could get. We did a pass out parade in — on this proper station. And we asked the American band to play at a hundred and twenty paces to the minute because that was the pace that we were used to marching at. The Australians were very proud of the way they used to be able to do a stamp, eyes right. We really impressed these raw recruits in the American camp. We did a marchpast in front of the general and, who they greeted with the hottest version of “Tiger Rag” with this band with about six or eight trombones in the front row playing, “Hold That Tiger.” [laughs]
JH: So, before you headed off to the UK were you getting reports of the, and this would be in ’43, some of the heavy losses that Bomber Command were suffering?
DB: No. Not really. We didn’t get much, much reports about them but we knew that there were losses.
JH: Yes.
DB: It was a bit, it was a bit dicey over there.
JH: Yes.
DB: But my first night at Brighton gave me a surprise because we had an air raid. We were staying at the Grand Hotel in Brighton on the beachfront and all of a sudden the Bofors guns started up and there was aircraft coming in to drop bombs. But —
JH: So you had to —
DB: We had to go down to the basement.
JH: Into an air raid shelter or the basement of the hotel.
DB: No. We went down to the basement of the hotel actually but there were air raid shelters there. Although there were other air raid shelters elsewhere.
JH: Yes. What was the target do you think?
DB: Well, I don’t know but Lord Haw Haw used to say, ‘We know the Australians are in the, at the Grand and the Metropole at Brighton.’
JH: Did he?
DB: So they knew all about us coming.
JH: You may have been the target. So, Don after Brighton you started some more training. Was it at Lichfield?
DB: No.
JH: That you went.
DB: The first training was at the Advanced Flying School training. And I was, I was quite a while converting from the AWA material that we had been trained on to the Marconi equipment which was used in the UK. There was quite a bit of work on that. And then they put us out of practical work on the direction finding station. And finally we did training on Ansons. Avro Ansons. And we did cross-countries and various things on that as wireless ops. We went as number 2 wireless op and then becoming number 1 wireless op in the plane. We had navigators doing training there as well.
JH: Was that at Lichfield?
DB: No. That was at Millom.
JH: Millom. Ok.
DB: In Cumberlandshire.
JH: So after that you went to Lichfield.
DB: After that.
JH: OTU.
DB: That was about, oh three months I think that I was there. I then went to Lichfield which was an Operational Training Unit and it was here that we met the other categories of aircrew and we had to crew up. And this we did in a, in the sergeant’s mess. I remember it quite well because Alan Stutter was to be my pilot. He came and asked me if I’d be a wireless op in his crew. And I think at that stage he might have also had the navigator Paul Wilkinson who had been a schoolpal of his at Canterbury High School. Both of them were quite smart cookies I think. They both had eight A intermediate passes. And we also got the two gunners. A mid-upper gunner who was Malcolm Woodgate. He came from Queensland. I think he’d done his course at Evans Head on the north coast of New South Wales. The other gunner was Dick Holmes and he’d been at Parkes with me and was scrubbed as a wireless operator because the scrubbing for wireless operators was very high because we had to be very very competent in Morse. It was one of my worse subjects. However, I soon was able to conquer it eventually and I finished up passing out about oh I think it was 18 22 25 words a minute. But the minimum was 18 20 22. And following that we then went and did the gunnery at Port Pirie in South Australia.
JH: So, maybe we, we can just mention the crew a little bit more before we talk about operations.
DB: Well, the other members —
JH: This was an all Australian crew, Don?
DB: I was an all Australian crew.
JH: Yeah.
DB: The final member that we picked up at OTU was our bomb aimer. He was much older than the rest of us. I can’t actually recall what age Paul would have been but I think he would have been about twenty eight or so at that time. I think he was thirty one when we came home. But he was, he’d been involved in the radio on the ABC and he had done the early part of a legal course but I think that the Depression came in and stopped that. And he then worked for the ABC from then on.
JH: You — I believe you continued on with the crew and you completed a tour.
DB: Well —
JH: Of thirty six operations.
DB: Yes.
JH: Is that correct?
DB: We picked up — following Lichfield we went to a Conversion Unit where we flew Stirling bombers. That was our first introduction to four engine planes. And it was here that we picked up our flight engineer who was an English fellow in the RAF and he was [pause] his name was Harry Walsh and he came from Leeds. And then we were then a crew of seven. Now, all these fellas worked most assiduously and with their courses that they were, had to, had to accomplish. And I think most of them were given an above average assessment at Con Unit. The whole of our crew finished up with commissions. With the exception of the rear gunner. Dick Holmes was a warrant officer [unclear]. I don’t know just what went wrong there that he wasn’t commissioned. But everyone else was a flying officer in my crew.
JH: Perhaps we can talk a little bit about some of the operations. But before you went on operations by this time you were posted to 463 at Waddington.
DB: No. Before being posted to Waddington I did what we called Lanc Finishing School at a place called Syerston. Somewhere near Nottingham that was. And that was a short course of about I think of about a fortnight or three weeks perhaps. But prior to going there we had to wait until we got, had accommodation there to do that course. We went to Scampton and we did a sort of a commando course for about three weeks there. That was in, in command of a British major who was a pretty tough task to follow. He used to come around looking for the dust on all our [pause] Scampton was a peacetime ‘drome and it had very good accommodation. But he used to come around and he’d put, climb up on the stool to have a look and see if you had any dust on top of your lockers and this sort of thing. And if there was anything there he’d have your running around the with full gear on around the parade ground and so forth. Quite an education.
JH: I don’t suppose you got your own back and took him on one of the operations in a Lanc.
DB: No. We didn’t get our own back there. But I had some other altercation with some of the people when I’ve been in charge of courses at the Advanced Flying School.
JH: So, did you do some nickel raids? These dropping leaflets.
DB: The nickel raid we did —
JH: Propaganda. Yeah.
DB: Was in a Wellington and that was done from Lichfield.
JH: Yes.
DB: On that particular event we ran short of fuel and the navigator had to change over the cocks to the wing tanks.
JH: Yes.
DB: On our way home. Our nickel was to a place called Chartres in France.
JH: Yes.
DB: And we didn’t see any action or anything much but there might have been some searchlights and things like that.
JH: Why did they call them nickel raids?
DB: I don’t know why it was a nickel raid. I don’t know.
JH: This was dropping leaflets.
DB: They were dropping —
JH: Yeah.
DB: Pamphlets there to advise the French people what was going on.
JH: Yeah.
DB: Anyway, on our way back we couldn’t change these cocks on the petrol thing over to the wing tanks and we had to call up Darkie because we were running short of fuel. And we, we were in the vicinity of Boscombe Down. We knew that. And Alan tried calling up on his normal RT set but the range was rather limited with that to about five to ten miles and we didn’t get any response. So I said, ‘I’ll fix it. I’ll zero beam to the tower at 11.54,’ which was the transmitter that we had on to the Darkie frequency which I think was 6140. And anyway I did this and Alan called up on that. Of course we nearly blasted them off the air so they put the lights on and let us land. It was a grass runway or grass strip and they wanted to get rid of us pretty quick. But they came out. They said, ‘What’s wrong?’ We told them we couldn’t shift the cocks and so forth. So they sent the mechanics out. They fixed those and they said, ‘Right. You can go now.’ When Alan ran the motors up he wouldn’t take it off because we’d had a magneto drop so we stuck. We were stuck there overnight which somewhat aggravated the people at Boscombe Down because they had all these experimental aircraft and so forth there and —
JH: So what was Darkie? Explain what Darkie was?
DB: Well, Darkie was a, was a short range radio that [pause] that you could use anywhere in England. Call up, and people used to answer and say, they would be Darkie Derby or Darkie, well wherever they happened to be. So you’d know then where you were.
JH: So, I hope the skipper bought you a beer that night when you got back.
DB: Well, we didn’t. I can’t remember what we had there at the time. I think we went into the mess. They gave us something. Probably a flying meal of some description which was always an egg and a bit of bacon and [unclear] or tomato.
JH: Ok. So, Don let’s look at your first operation. Tell us a bit about that.
DB: Well the first operation I did was on the 1st of August. That was to a place called [pause]
JH: This is ’43. 1943 or ’44.
DB: That was, no that was 1944.
JH: Yeah.
DB: My first operation. The 1st of August 1944. It was after D-Day. And I actually went to the squadron on the 31st of July and the first thing they, we had to do was a cross country to make sure that we were capable of carrying out instructions etcetera. And my first op was to Mont Candon. It was a flying bomb site. And I got the feeling that we didn’t, we didn’t drop bombs on that occasion. We were recalled. But, but there were, I think that was the time that two of our friends went down in a collision over the target and fourteen members were lost.
JH: From 463.
DB: Well, no they were on 467 actually which was the other squadron that was on our, the same ‘drome as ours on Waddington.
JH: At Waddington. Yeah.
DB: But these fellas had been training with us at, on Stirlings at Swinderby only a matter of weeks before.
JH: And I believe after that you were on a raid to Calais.
DB: Well, I did four operations there that were daylights.
JH: Yes.
DB: They were all on French targets. Mostly on flying bomb sites. Then I, my next operation was to Chatellerault in France. That was a night operation. That was 6.45. The next operation we went to Brest. That was a daylight. And that we were down attacking shipping. We did the Clemenceau I think was the name of the ship that we hit. And that was in the Brest Harbour because the Americans were waiting outside. They wanted to use the harbour at Brest and they were waiting to try and get in. These two ships were shelling them and they were having a bit of a problem with them. So we went in and cleaned the two of them up.
JH: So you sank the ships. Or damaged them.
DB: We certainly hit it because we had photographs of all of our targets. At the time that I was operating we always had an automatic camera operating as soon as you opened the bomb door.
JH: Yeah.
DB: So, take pictures and this was I suppose designed so that people would not be dropping bombs willy nilly. But they should be showing their marking point.
JH: Yes.
DB: And so forth.
JH: What was the main worry there? Anti-aircraft fire or were there fighters operating.
DB: It was anti-aircraft was the problem over Brest. And in fact Alan made the remark that he thought that the Yanks might have been firing at us too.
JH: For good measure.
DB: The sky was black with anti-aircraft fire. We got hit in one of the motors on the way in into the target and we got hit coming out in the other motor and we actually came back on two motors. Although I got a [pause] when I spoke to base on the radio they said we should go to a crash landing ‘drome. Alan said, ‘No. We’re not going to,’ He didn’t like sleeping in a strange bed so we’d go back to base and, which we did. And he got a, made a quite a good landing on two motors but we just finished short of the bomb dump. But that would have given them hell of a surprise with a big bang if we’d gone a bit further. But anyway all of the hierarchy in the squadron — that is the group captain and the squadron commander and so forth, they all came out to the plane to congratulate him on coming home on two. I think we might have been one of the early ones to come home on two.
JH: Yes.
DB: And during the debrief, debriefing, the intelligence officer said to me that Alan had done a great job and he would be recommending him. Recommending him for an immediate decoration. Well Alan at that stage was a flight sergeant.
JH: Yes.
DB: And he would have got a DFM but he never got the DFM from the thing and it didn’t come through. He got a DFC at the end of the tour.
JH: Yes.
DB: The same as most pilots who had completed a tour of operations. That’s at Brest.
JH: Yes. What about the Calais raid?
DB: Now, well following Brest I went to Stettin. That was a night job. 7.49. Darmstadt, I flew with a spare bod as a spare bod with another crew. That was an eight, eight and a half hour trip.
JH: What was that like? Fitting in as a spare bod.
DB: Well, you didn’t like doing spare bod trips because you got used to operating with your own crew. But crews [pause] Roe’s crew was quite an experienced crew. And I don’t know what was the matter with their wireless operator but anyway I went with them on that raid to Darmstadt. And the next raid I was to do with them was to Königsberg which was probably one of the deepest raids of Bomber Command. That was, we were airborne for ten hours thirty two. And we, I actually went on the trip with my own crew but I’d been briefed to go with this Flying Officer Roe again and when I found my crew was available to fly I said, ‘No. I’d sooner fly with my own crew Roe. Thanks very much.’ And the signals leader went in my place on the trip to Konigsberg with Roe. They were shot down. So there was a case of being in the wrong place at the right time sort of thing.
JH: Did they survive?
DB: And that was the luck of the game.
JH: Did they survive, Don?
DB: No. They were all killed. Following that I went to [pause] there was — we were coming through fairly thick and fast at that time because this was in the summer period in England. And I did another daylight trip to Boulogne in France. I did Bremen. Dortmund. And then the first trip to Dortmund Ems was early in the piece. That was the 23rd of September.
JH: Was this bombing the canals?
DB: That was bombing the canal to let the water out because a lot because a lot of the transportation of goods and ammunition and so forth was done along the canals in France and Germany.
JH: And successful in creating havoc.
DB: Oh yes. Well, that was. They were always very good raids. It was one that we did on a regular basis. About once a month we went down over there and it took them approximately a month to fix it up again to get the water flowing in it. And we go and let the water out for them. I did some daylights in Wilhelmshaven and Walcheren Island. And I’m just trying to find this trip that I did on Calais which [pause] where was that? I think it was in September. Calais. Calais. Calais. Yes. There we are. This was an interesting trip. This one to Calais. It was the 24th of September and we were briefed to do this raid very early in the morning and we would expect to go in at dawn. But the weather was so bad it was to be an army co-op job because the army were outside of Calais waiting to go in but they were being held up by gunfire from a battery of guns that were down near the harbour in Calais. And anyway it was described as being a death or glory raid and we were [pause] and it was one of army co-op. Well we had, we went out to take off probably shortly after dawn but the weather was so bad they called us in. We had breakfast. We went out again to the aircraft and sat there in the dispersal area until lunchtime. Came in again and had lunch. And about, let me see what time it was that we took off. We took off at [pause] I can’t read this thing. 17.30. 5.30 in the afternoon.
JH: After waiting all day.
DB: After waiting all day to do this raid. And we were told that we had to clean these guns up. We were to bomb from eight thousand feet. Or ten thousand I think it was but, but we were to go no lower than twelve hundred feet or we’d go up with the bombs. And when, as we approached Calais we were, we were down at nineteen hundred feet. And my, our bomber aimer Paul O’Loughlin was a most meticulous bomb aimer and he wasn’t going to go in and drop his bombs willy nilly. He made us go and do an extra circuit to get himself on the right line to bomb.
JH: Were you first in?
DB: No. There were others there but I just can’t recall. I, I was busy trying to get radio communication because they had picked a frequency that was right on the BBC and all I could get was the BBC coming through strong and clear. And I can remember it quite well because the mid-upper gunner was a fella who liked to sing songs and he’d seen these dollops of light flak coming up six at a time and the BBC radio was playing, “God Save the King.” You can imagine what he said about the king wasn’t very good at all. But he was, he was singing his song about he’d, “Like to Buy a Paper Doll to Call His Own.” [laughs] Alan made some comment about that in the [pause] in an article he wrote about this raid later on. But it was rather frightening to see these red dollops coming up from the ground. And I had a particular friend there who’d been at, used in Kodak House with me when we were sorting mail. He was going to be a navigator on coastal patrol but we went out one night in London with some highly decorated Bomber Command people and he decided he’d come to Bomber Command instead. He changed his mind and came up there as a bomb aimer. Well, I think he was I’m not sure how many actually got out of his plane but it wasn’t many. It might have been two or three. And he was captured and held in German headquarters underground. And the British kept shelling and, and the junior officers had the white flag up but the senior officer there when the British kept shelling sent them up to pull the flag down. And this was going on for quite a while. It was about three hours difference evidently and Doug, he said they were all drinking Cognac and he thought he might as well be drunk as a way. He said, ‘They were going to kill me one way or the other. Either the shells were going to get me or your bombs from up above were going to kill me.’ Anyway, as it turned out the losses were very substantial but with the muck up of the radio there had been a recall sent out. The aircraft didn’t get it but they were —
JH: They didn’t get the signal. Yeah.
DB: There were fifteen aircraft that actually bombed it and eight were shot down. Seven were the Lancs and one Halifax.
JH: Well, you, I think your crew did thirty five or thirty six operations.
DB: Thirty seven. They did thirty six and I did thirty seven.
JH: Yes. And, and quite a few of those were with a very famous Lancaster.
DB: Oh yes.
JH: Do you want to talk about that?
DB: We were given Nick The Nazi Neutraliser as our permanent plane. And actually we had hoped to fly it on its hundredth operation but it, but it was involved in an accident with a Hurricane. It was doing fighter affiliation with the Hurricane and the two collided and the eight air force personnel were killed. The whole lot. So we got another to fly but I don’t know whether we, I can’t remember if we actually called it that but —
JH: So this was the nose art. There was a picture.
DB: Yes. It was ninety six operations and I’ve got —
JH: Yes.
DB: I’ve got every operation that it flew in this history that I’ve, you will scan. And all the crews that flew it. Those were all the skippers names.
JH: Yes. I think you told me you did nineteen operations. Nineteen on it.
DB: We did nineteen. We were the second highest. The first crew that got it brand new was Flight Lieutenant Ray Howden. He was the pilot. I’ve got his crew listed there and they did twenty nine trips in it.
JH: Don, so you completed the tour and I believe you actually did some extra operations.
DB: No. I only did the one operation extra.
JH: One more. Ok.
DB: One extra one which took me up to thirty seven.
JH: Yes. Yeah. So —
DB: Following that, following the operation I was on the squadron right ‘til the time the war ended, in Europe ended because I was employed as a analysis officer. Examining the crew members to make sure that they hadn’t lost any efficiency. My bomb aimer had the same job as a bomb aimer and the pair of us remained on the squadron until Victory in Europe Day. The 8th of May ’45. And I don’t know that either of us had a drink on that day because we were serving. Being all the airmen and all the crews around in one of the hangars it was a big party.
JH: I believe there were some parties in the mess on occasions, Don.
DB: Well, that’s it.
JH: Perhaps you — I heard about one or two things there from people. What about the pyramid and the, a few gunshots now and then?
DB: Oh yes. Well, they used to. Australians were a bit scallywags. They used to play up occasionally but they sort of took a blind eye to this because you know these fellows didn’t know whether this was going to be their last trip or whether they might finish a tour. They had no idea.
JH: Indeed.
DB: That was the way things were in those days and, but on one occasions they built or I think on several occasions actually they built a pyramid in the mess. They usually put it on four mini glasses with a table sitting on those and then they’d put the lounge chairs and various things and on one occasion they even had a motorbike on the top of the thing. Up near the ceiling. And this was in a peacetime ‘drome so the ceilings were pretty high and but the, the fellas climbed up and wrote their names across the ceiling with their cigarette lighters. It wasn’t very well received by the RAF people and the CO [laughs] he made them all go up, get up and scrub it down and clean up the mess. But on another occasion they mucked up a bit. We had one fella come in one night singing, “Pistol Packin Mama,” or something or other and he took his revolver out and put six shots across the ceiling. He was damned lucky he didn’t hit anyone up in the upstairs rooms.
JH: So, so let’s talk about, well obviously winding up there. And did you go down to Brighton. Waiting for a —
DB: Yeah.
JH: Embarkation to come back home.
DB: I went down to Brighton. We were there up ‘til, I think the 30th of August. We left to go to Liverpool to catch, and we got on to the Dominion Monarch which was quite a big ship. And we had a very long trip to Australia because we went down to Suez. We took on water and oil and so forth. And we weren’t allowed off the ship. So much so that they took us then down to the Bitter Lake and we spent the night in the Bitter Lake. Right out in mid-stream so there was no chance you could get off and go anywhere from there. And then we went straight non-stop to New Zealand. To Wellington. We got our first leave in Wellington. We had six hours leave I think it was. And they said well seeing you had New Zealand prisoners of war on and there was no ferry going down to the South Island for several days we had to go down to Lyttelton, the port of Christchurch with these New Zealand prisoners of war. And then we left Lyttelton and it was quite a long trip up into Lyttelton as I can remember. And I could actually see the relief on the skipper’s face when the pilot came on board of the ship and took charge of it up the [pause] Sound I suppose you’d call it, of Lyttelton. To the port where we let these fellas off. And following that we took off and we didn’t stop again. We came straight through Cook Straight into a tremendous sea. It was very very rough.
JH: Yes.
DB: In fact we had Royal Navy boys on board and they said a destroyer could not go through that sea. She’d just have to ride it out and shut down. Anyway, some of the fellas were in pretty high spirits and they were, they were shooting the waves across on A deck. Water had come in through port holes and so forth. And they were shooting the waves as they went across the loungeroom or whatever it was there on their lifejackets [laughs] Anyway —
JH: A long voyage. A long voyage. Yeah.
DB: We arrived home on the 14th of, the 14th of November.
JH: So, how long was the voyage, Don?
DB: Well, I thought I might have been wrong in my dates there but no. That is the date that I got off the thing. The 31st of August ’45 to the 14th of November ’45. I’ve got that down.
JH: Yeah. About six weeks.
DB: Yeah. Six week trip. Now, I would like to say about my crew that both Alan Stutter and Paul were schoolmates. They both had very good passes as I had already said. Paul O’Loughlin was a first class bomb aimer. He had an above average assessment of fifty one yards from twenty thousand feet. I was considered as an above average wireless operator. In fact all of the crew were commissioned with the exception of the rear gunner, Dick Holmes and he was a very [pause] well a very good gunner. Most particular in his work. He was always cleaning his turret, cleaning his guns and very, a very important member of the crew. I can’t see why he wasn’t commissioned as well but he was the only one of the crew who did not receive his commission and, but he, when he came back from the war he went to Sydney University and did Arts or an Arts course that he did and went teaching. Paul Wilkinson went and did dentistry. And Paul O’Loughlin became Director of Drama of the ABC. Alan Stutter became a Master of Science and he was, worked in fabrics and so forth. He was with Bradmill when they designed the material for the first Americas Cup Challenge with Gretel. So each one of them achieved quite a lot and I think as a crew we were considered to be an above average crew. And I think that it’s right that I should mention that they all worked very, were at the top of their ability when they were operating in our aircraft.
JH: That’s some very good comments and I think the fact that you did a full tour, the crew, certainly endorses how good you were as a crew. Now, what about you, Don? What did you do after the war?
DB: Well, I did accountancy. And then I did, I knew I was going to be involved with the family business so I went into a hardware business with an air force mate of mine. Had that for a while. Got a bit of experience in operating a retail hardware business and experiencing, well quite a lot of things apart from accountancy. But I did the books and everything for that. And then I became involved in the retail game and following that I ran a, I bought a run-down orchard and turned it back into a commercial proposition. Retiring at seventy two.
JH: Yes. I should point out that Don is the president of the 463 467 Squadron Association and he’s been very much involved in Bomber Command veterans for some time now. And also Don was one of the instigators of the Bomber Command Commemoration Day which now is, is, has grown quite a bit and we’ve just had the ceremony in Sydney. It’s in Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane and of course London.
DB: And South Australia.
JH: Yes. Do you want to say a bit about that, Don?
DB: Well, initially I was on the committee of 463 467 and I have been involved there for many many years and as the presidents retired or died off and so forth. The first one we had was Roy Crossman. He was the president for a long time. Then we had, following him Reg Boyes and Don Huxtable then nominated me as a vice president of 463 467 and eventually when Reg departed I was made president. But Rollo Kingsford Smith whilst he was involved initially with the establishment of the Association he then went to De Havillands and became managing director of De Havillands. So he was away from the Association for a while. But then towards the end he came to me and he said, ‘Look, I would like to see some commemorations for Bomber Command because we’ve now got this Memorial going up in Canberra and it should be utilised. Now, I realise that our squadrons represented only about twenty percent of those involved in Bomber Command. It should be [pause] it should be really taken over by Bomber Command because all these Squadron Associations will eventually fold up for the lack of numbers and so forth. And I would like something done to commemorate these people who I wrote I wrote so many letters of condolence to their relatives and so forth, and next of kin.’
JH: This was Rollo speaking.
DB: Yes.
JH: Yes.
DB: ‘And I would like to see something done. Can’t you do something about this?’ And I agreed with him that it was probably long overdue and something should be done. So he said, ‘Well, let’s call, get a meeting. You can bring them up to my place at Exeter and then we’ll have a discussion about it and see which way we go.’ So, I actually got Ross Pearson who I knew as a wireless operator who subsequently became involved in the law. He, and he actually worked for the ABC as well. I don’t know in what capacity but I know he had legal degrees. I suggested he might join this group that were going to meet at Rollo’s place. And as a result of this meeting and subsequent meetings that we had we formed a Bomber Command Commemorative Day Committee. And I think we were really instigators of, of the Bomber Command Memorial being commenced in Britain because it was only following our Bomber Command Memorial that we established in 2005 that people started to think again about Bomber Command. And now we have this wonderful Memorial in Green Park, London which really started from these meetings that Rollo had organised and I was actually the first secretary and Ross Pearson was the president of that group.
JH: That must give you a lot of satisfaction, Don. That something you instigated here has grown so much.
DB: Yes. Well, I’m very pleased to see that the recognition that has been given to Bomber Command. We’ve now been given a commemorative clasp that goes on the ’45 Star. And also those of us who were lucky enough to survive to be given the Legion of Honour from the French government.
JH: Don, that — I have to ask what from that what are your thoughts on the fact that there was no Bomber Command campaign medal?
DB: Well, there was an attempt earlier in the peace by Bomber Harris or Air Chief Marshal Harris. He was the commander of Bomber Command. An attempt to get a Bomber Command medal. I think it was actually struck by his — I think his wife might have had something to do with this. Lady [pause] she was, what was she? I’ve lost myself. Just a minute [pause] I can’t think what her first name was but she was Bomber Harris’ wife and there is a medal. A Bomber Command medal. But I don’t think it was officially recognised by the British government. But I have one but I’ve got a feeling that we had to pay something for that. I’m not sure.
JH: Yes. So, what, what were your thoughts on the treatment of Bomber Command after the war?
DB: Well, I suppose it must have been the change of government and Bomber Command was not terribly favourably received by those who received our bombs. Those people in Germany. And you know, there was quite a lot of antipathy as to the fact that we were, had bombed towns and so forth. But during the period that I was involved with Bomber Command it would seem to me that our objectives were more to do with war effort and so forth than actual bombing of cities. Our navigation had improved so much that we were able to put the bombs where we wanted them. And they had also put these cameras in the bomb bays so that the people didn’t put them in the wrong place. I believe you know that in certain instances of course if you, if you were in trouble you had to get rid of your bombs and there could have been accidents and so forth that might have happened over a period of time. But generally speaking the efficiency of the air force improved very much in the latter part of the war and of course it’s got to the stage now they can put it through a window and kill an individual sort of thing. So, and let’s face it war is war. Germany had already started bombing. Indiscriminately bombing cities in Britain.
JH: Yes. They started that type of bombing.
DB: They started the actual bombing of cities.
JH: Yes. That’s true.
DB: So, that’s what, that’s what happens.
JH: Well, Don I think we can wind, wind up the interview. It’s been a fantastic story and to come through thirty six.
DB: Thirty seven.
JH: Operations. Is something outstanding and, for you and your crew. So, thank you very much, Don, we’ll, we’ll sign off here.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Don Browning
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John Horsburgh
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-06-13
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
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ABrowningDJ160613, PBrowningDJ1601
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Pending review
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01:07:58 audio recording
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Description
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Don Browning volunteered for aircrew and began his training as a wireless operator in his native Australia. His arrival in Brighton in the UK coincided with his first experience of an air raid. Don was posted to 463 Squadron at RAF Waddington. He did an extra operation from his regular crew when he travelled as a 'spare bod' with another crew. He was briefed to travel with that crew again but when he discovered his own crew was operational he opted to stay with them. The other crew were all killed on that operation. After the war Don became very involved in the 463 / 467 Squadron Association eventually becoming the president. He was very involved in the establishment of the Bomber Command Commemoration Day in Australia.
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
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Australia
France
Great Britain
Atlantic Ocean--Bay of Biscay
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
England--Lincolnshire
France--Brest
France--Calais
New South Wales
New South Wales--Sydney
Temporal Coverage
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1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
463 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
crewing up
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
memorial
mid-air collision
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
perception of bombing war
RAF Lichfield
RAF Millom
RAF Syerston
RAF Waddington
Stirling
training
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/201/10044/BBaileyJDBaileyJDv1.1.pdf
3a146f510c94f18f8643a8ac43ad6772
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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Bailey, John Derek
John Derek Bailey
Bill Bailey
John D Bailey
John Bailey
J D Bailey
J Bailey
Description
An account of the resource
17 items. Two oral history interviews with John Derek "Bill" Bailey (b. 1924, 1583184 and 198592 Royal Air Force) service material, nine photographs, a memoir and his log book. He flew a tour of operations as a bomb aimer with 103 and 166 Squadrons from RAF Elsham Wolds and RAF Kirmington.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by John Bailey and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-12-07
2017-01-13
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
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Bailey, JD
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Transcription
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[centred] “WAS IT ALL A DREAM” [/centred]
[centred] The Memories of a Wartime Bomb Aimer Bill Bailey with No. 1 Group Bomber Command February 1942 to April 1947
These things really happened. I now have difficulty in remembering what I did yesterday but happenings of Fifty-odd years ago seem crystal clear, or
Was it all a dream? [/centred]
[page break]
Chapter 1. Enlistment – Royal Air Force Training Command.
The story begins on 2 February, 1942, my 18th. Birthday, when I rushed off to the recruiting office in Leicester and enlisted in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve as potential aircrew. Being a founder member cadet (No. 6) of 1461 Squadron Air Training Corps was a help. I passed the various medicals, etc[sic] and was sent to the aircrew attestation centre in Birmingham for the various tests for acceptance as aircrew. Like most others I wanted to be a pilot but on the day I attended I think they had that day’s quota of pilots. It was said my eyesight was not up to pilot standard but I could be a navigator. I was said to have a ‘convergency’ problem and would probably try to land an aircraft about ten feet off the deck.. I was duly accepted for Navigator training. The procedure was then to be sent home, attend ATC parades regularly and await further instructions. This was known as ‘deferred service’ and with it came a letter of welcome to the Royal Air Force, from the Secretary of State for Air, at that time Sir Archibald Sinclair, and the privilege of wearing a white flash in my ATC cadet’s forage cap which denoted the wearer was u/t (under training) aircrew.
So it was that on the 27 July 1942 I was commanded to report for service at the Aircrew Reception Centre at Lords Cricket Ground, St. Johns Wood, London. I was now 1583184 AC2 Bailey, J.D., rate of pay two shillings and sixpence per day. We were billeted in blocks of flats adjacent to Regents Park and fed in a vary[sic] large underground car park at one of the blocks or in the restaurant at London Zoo. Talk about feeding time at the Zoo!! A hectic three weeks followed, issue of uniforms and equipment, dental treatment, numerous jabs, endless square bashing - the ATC training helped. Lectures on this, that and everything including the dreaded effects of
[page break]
VD, the latter shown in glorious Technicolor at the Odeon Cinema, Swiss Cottage. Not that this was of much consequence at that time because we were reliably informed that plenty of bromide was put in the tea.
One day on first parade I and one other lad from my Flight were called out by the Flight Corporal, a sadistic sod, who informed us we had volunteered to give a pint of blood. Apparently we had an unusual blood group and some was required for what purpose I have never really understood.
Having completed the aforementioned necessities it was a question of what to do with us next.
The next stage of training was to be ITW (Initial Training Wing). but there was congestion in the supply line from ACRC to the ITW’s so a “holding unit” (this term will crop up from time to time) had been established at Ludlow and it was to there that we went.
Ludlow consisted of three Wings in tented accommodation and was progressively developed into a more permanent establishment by the cadets passing through, using their civilian life skills. We were allowed (officially) one night in three off camp so as not to flood the pubs, of which there were many, with RAF bods, and cause mayhem in the town.
Four weeks were spent at Ludlow. It was said to be a toughening up course and it was certainly that.
Next stop from Ludlow was to an ITW. Most ITW’s were located in seaside towns with the sea front hotels having been requisitioned by the Air Ministry. In my case I was posted to No.4 ITW at Paignton, Devon where I was to spend the next twelve weeks living in the Hydro Hotel, right on the seafront near the harbour.
Twelve weeks of intensive ground training. At the end of this period I was at the peak
[handwritten in margin] followed (needs a verb[?]) [/handwritten in margin]
[page break]
of fitness and having passed my exams was promoted LAC – pay rise to seven shillings a day.
One of the subjects covered at ITW was the Browning .303 machine gun and I well remember the first lecture on this weapon when a Corporal Armourer giving the lecture delivered his party piece which went as follows: “This is the Browning .303 machine gun which works by recoil action. When the gun is fired the bullet nips smartly up the barrel, hotley [sic] pursued by the gases …”. Applause please!
Another subject learned was the Morse Code and here again the training in the ATC stood me in good stead.
The next phase would be flying training, but when and where?
On New Years[sic] Day 1943 we were posted from Paignton to yet another ‘holding unit’ at Brighton. The move from the English Riviera to Brighton was like going to the North Pole. At Brighton we were billeted in the Metropole Hotel. More lectures, square bashing and boredom, until, after about three weeks, on morning parade it was announced that a new aircrew category of Airbomber had been created and any u/t Navigators who volunteered would be guaranteed a quick posting and off to Canada for training.
Needless to say, yours truly stepped forward and within a week had been posted to Heaton Park, Manchester which was an enormous transit camp for u/t aircrew leaving the UK for Canada, Rhodesia or America for training.
They used to say it always rains in Manchester and it certainly did continuously whilst I was there. Anyone who has seen the film “Journey Together” will have seen a departure parade at Heaton Park in pouring rain. I am told that on the day that film was shot it was fine and the fire service had to make the rain. Sods Law I suppose!
[page break]
Chapter II. Canada – The Empire Air Training Scheme.
Next, after a farewell meal of egg and chips (In 1943 a delicacy), and a few words from the C in C Training Command, it was off to Glasgow to board the “Andes” for our trip to Canada.
The ‘Andes’ was said to be jinx ship in port. She didn’t let us down. In the Clyde she dropped anchor to swing the compass and when she tried to up anchor a submarine cable was wrapped around it. After a couple of days we finally left the Clyde and I endured six days of seasickness before arriving in Halifax, Nova Scotia and then to yet another enormous transit camp at Moncton, New Brunswick where we enjoyed food that we had not seen in the UK since the start of food rationing. It was in a restaurant in Moncton that I had my very first ‘T’ Bone steak.
The first task at Moncton was issue of cold weather kit to cope with the Canadian winter and Khaki Drill to cope with the very hot Canadian summer. We were at this time in the middle of the winter and colder than I had ever experienced before.. The next stop should have been to a Bombing & Gunnery School but before that there had to be the inevitable ‘holding unit’. So it was off to Carberry, Manitoba, five or six days on a troop train, days spent seeing nothing but trees, frozen lakes, the occasional trace of habitation and the odd trappers cabin. At intervals on the journey across Canada, people were taken off the train suffering from Scarlet Fever. It was believed that this disease came from the troopships.
As we passed through Winnipeg on our journey, for the first time we were allowed off the train and as we went from the platform to the station concourse we were greeted with bands playing a huge welcome from the good people of Winnipeg. They had in Winnipeg the “Airmens Club” and an invitation to visit if there on leave. They
[page break]
had a wonderful system of people who would welcome RAF chaps into their homes for a few days or a weekend when on leave. This was to stand me in good stead as you will hear later.
Shortly after arrival at Carberry I fell victim to Scarlet Fever and spent five weeks in isolation hospital at Brandon after which I and a fellow sufferer by the name of Peter Caldwell had two weeks sick leave in Winnipeg and the Airmens Club arranged for us to stay with an English family. Wonderful hospitality. The Canadians were wonderful hosts to the Royal Air Force.
Carberry and Brandon were, of course, on the Canadian Prairies and whilst in hospital at Brandon, one night and day there was a terrible dust storm and despite the usual Canadian double glazing, everywhere inside the hospital was covered in black dust. This is probably of little interest but to me at the time was an amazing phenomenom.
Now it was back to reality and a posting to 31 Bombing & Gunnery School at Picton, Ontario. A two day journey by train around the North Shore of Lake Superior to Toronto and Belleville and then twenty plus miles down a dirt road to Picton. The airfield still exists, on high ground, overlooking the town on the shores of Lake Ontario. The bombing targets were moored out in the lake and air gunnery practice took place out over the lake.
The weather during this spell was very hot and flying was limited to a period from very early morning until midday. Canadian built Ansons were used for bombing practice and Bolingbrokes, which were Canadian built Blenheims, were used for air to air gunnery practice. The target drogues were towed by Lysanders.
Nothing outstanding took place at Picton except perhaps for our passing out party which we held in Belleville. In my case, being full of Canadian rye whisky of the
[page break]
bootleg variety I literally passed out and for many years afterwards could not even stand the smell of strong spirits.
Having recovered from the passing out the next stop was No. 33 Air Navigation School, RAF Mount Hope, Hamilton. Ontario. Mount Hope is now Hamilton Airport. Navigation training in Ansons was fairly uneventful and ended with us receiving our Sergeants stripes and the coveted “O” brevet. (Known to all as the flying arsehole) The “O” brevet was soon to be replaced with brevets more appropriate to the trade of the wearer, ie “B” for Airbombers, “N” for Navigators, etc. Next it was back to Moncton for the return to the UK.
The return voyage was on the ‘Mauritania’ where there were only 50 sergeant aircrew who were to act as guards on the ship which was transporting a large number of American troops. O/c. Troops on the ship was a Royal Air Force Squadron Leader. To our amazement when the Americans boarded the ship they had no idea where they were going. Most seemed to think they were going to Iceland and when we told them Liverpool was our destination they could not believe it. We were asked where we picked up the convoy and when we told them we did not go in convoy this caused a great deal of consternation. All the troopships going back and forth between the UK and North America were too fast to be in convoys and fast zig zag runs were made across the Atlantic. It was very long odds against the likelihood of encountering a U Boat..
Having safely arrived in Liverpool our next temporary home was yet another ‘holding unit’.
[page break]
Chapter III. Flying Training Command.
This time it was the Grand Hotel in Harrogate overlooking the famous Valley Gardens.
The RAF had taken over both the Grand and Majestic Hotels. Sadly the Grand has now gone. I rcall our CO at the Grand was Squadron Leader L E G Ames the England cricketer. Time at Harrogate awaiting posting was filled by swimming, drill, the usual time filling lectures, etc. We did, of course, get what was known as disembarkation leave. I went home and whilst there my granddad, with whom I had always had a very close relationship, took ill and died at the age of 85 and I was very grateful that I had been able to talk to him and to attend the funeral.
Christmas was spent at Harrogate, there being a ban on service travel during the Christmas period. On, I believe, Boxing Day, Maxie Booth and myself were in Harrogate, fed up and far from home, when we were approached by a chap who asked if we were doing anything that night, to which we replied “No”. He then said he was having a small party at home that night and had two Air Ministry girls billeted wit6h his family and would we like to join them. We readily accepted and when we arrived at the party we found that one of the girls was Maxie’s cousin. Small world! Still at Harrogate on my birthday 2 February, now at the ripe old age of 20. My room mates contrived to get me very drunk. I will spare you the details.
After a short time we were posted to Kirkham, Lancs to yet another holding unit, for a couple of weeks and then onward to Penrhos, North Wales, 9(O) Advanced Flying Unit for bombing practice. We were using Ansons and 10lb practice bombs. In Canada the Ansons had hydraulic undercarriages but at Penrhos they were Mk1 Ansons and it was the Bombaimers job to wind up the undercarriage by hand. A hell
[page break]
of a lot of turns on the handle – not much fun.
Next move was to Llandwrog, Nr. Caernarvon for the Navigation part of the Course. Same aircraft flying on exercises mainly over the Irish Sea, N. Ireland, Isle of Man, etc. Llandwrog is now Caernarvon airport with an interesting small museum. [handwritten in margin] museum since closed [handwritten in margin]. Llandwrog was unusual in that the airfield and our living site were below sea level, a dyke between us and the Irish Sea. Because of this there was no piped water or drainage on our site and it was necessary to carry a ‘small pack’ and do our ablutions at the main domestic site which was above sea level. I, and a pal or two went into Caernarvon for a weekend in the Prince of Wales Hotel to get a bit of a civilised existence for a change. However our stay at Llandwrog was quite brief.
The 1st. March 1944 was very significant in that it marked the move from Flying Training Command to Bomber Command. 83 Operational Training Unit at Peplow in Shropshire. Never heard of Peplow? Neither had I, it is a few miles North of Wellington. [handwritten in margin] Peplow was formerly Childs Ercall – renamed to avoid conflict with High Ercall airfield, nearby, I understood. [handwritten in margin] We arrived by train at Peplow, in the dark, station ‘lit’ by semi blacked out gas lamps. Arriving at Peplow were Pilots, Navigators, Bombaimers, Wireless Operators and Gunners from different training establishments.
Somehow, the next day, we sorted ourselves out into crews of six, Pilot, Nav, Bombaimer, W/Op and two gunners and were ready to start the business of Operational flying as a bomber crew.. We had never met each other before but were to spend the next few months living together, flying together and relying on each other, and developing a unique comradeship..
Peplow was notable for several things. From our living site, the nearest Pub was five miles in any direction. Having twice walked in different directions to prove the
[page break]
mileage we quickly acquired pushbikes. At that time there were no sign posts. One night doing ‘circuits and bumps’ in a Wellington we were in the ’funnel’ on the approach to the runway, skipper put the flaps down and the aircraft started to make a turn to port which he could not control. He ordered me to pull up the flaps and he then regained control. We then climbed to a respectable height and skip asked me to lower the flaps. The same thing happened again, an uncontrollable turn to port and quickly losing height. Flaps pulled up and normal service resumed. Skip then got permission from Air Traffic to make a flapless landing which he managed without running out of runway. We taxied back to dispersal and on inspection found that when the flaps were lowered only the port side flaps came down. Apparently a tie rod between port and starboard must have come apart. Could have been nasty!
On a lighter note, when cycling back to camp from Wellington one night I had a problem with the lights on my bike and was stopped by P.C Plod and booked for riding a bike without lights. Fined 10 shillings.
Another incident clearly imprinted on my mind was one day in class we were being given a lecture on the dinghy radio. I had heard all about the dinghy radio so many times I could almost recite it. I was sitting on the back row in class and I put my head back against the wall and must have dropped off. Suddenly a piece of chalk hit the wall at the side of my head. I awoke with a start and the guy giving the lecture (A Flying Officer) said, “I suppose Sergeant, you know all about dinghy radio”. To which I foolishly replied “Yes Sir”. He then said “In that case you can come out and continue the lecture”. Even more foolishly I did.
When finished I was asked to stay behind to receive an almighty bollocking for being a smartarse.
Finally whilst at Peplow a young lady I met in Wellington gave me a red scarf for
[page break]
luck and after that my crew would never let me fly without it.
We were now getting down to the serious business of preparing for actual operations and on the 24.5.44 we were despatched on an actual operation which was known as a ‘nickel’ raid, leaflet dropping over France, a place called ‘Criel’. 4 hours 35 minutes airborne in a Wellington bomber.
[Where is chapter IV?]
Chapter V. No. 1 Group Bomber Command.
On the 26th. June we were on the move again, ever nearer to being on an operational Squadron in Bomber Command. This was to 1667 Conversion Unit at Sandtoft where we were to convert to four engine aircraft ‘Halifaxes’. These were Halifax II & V which were underpowered and notoriously unreliable and had been withdrawn from front line service. In fact Sandtoft was affectionately known as ‘Prangtoft’ because of the large number of flying accidents. One of my pals from Harrogate days, Harry Fryer, got the chop in a Halifax that crashed near Crowle.
So that I do not give any wrong ideas, let me say, the Halifax III with radial engines was a superb aircraft and equipped No. 4 Goup.
It was here at Sandtoft that we acquired the seventh member of our crew, a Flight Engineer, straight from RAF St. Athan and never having been airborne.
We obviously survived ‘Prangtoft’ and then moved on the 22 July to LFS (Lancaster Finishing School) at Hemswell, which supplied crews to No. 1 Group, Bomber Command, which was the largest main force group flying Lancasters. We were only two weeks at Hemswell, the sole object being to familiaise[sic] with the
[page break]
Queen of the skies, the LANCASTER. A beautiful aeroplane, very reliable, able to fly easily with two dead engines on one side, and to withstand considerable battle damage and still remain airborne.
Chapter VI. The Tour of Operations. 103 Squadron.
Now for the real thing. On the 10th August we joined 103 Squadron at Elsham Wolds, in North Lincolnshire.
At this point I should like to introduce our crew:
P/O George Knott. Pilot & Skipper.
F/Sgt. Ron Archer. Navigator.
F/Sgt. Bill Bailey. Bombaimer.
F/Sgt. Gus Leigh. Wireless Opeator.
F/Sgt. Wally Williams. Flight Engineer.
F/Sgt. Jock Greig. Midupper Gunner.
F/Sgt. Paddy Anderson. Rear Gunner.
After a bit more training we eventually embarked on our first operation on the 29th,. August. I now propose to go through our complete tour of Operations as recorded in my flying log book and other documents.
Before doing that perhaps I should give an insight into Squadron procedure. We were accommodated in nissen huts on dispersed sites in the vicinity of the airfield, two Crews to a hut. The huts were sleeping quarters only and were heated by a solid fuel stove in the centre. Bloody cold in the bleak Lincolnshire winter. The messes were on the main domestic site. Every morning (provided there was no call out in the night)
[page break]
it was to the mess for breakfast, check if there was an Order of Battle and if you were on it. If not, we made our way to the flight offices and section leaders. I would go to the Bombing Leader’s office where we would review the previous operation and look at target photographs. Releasing the bombs over the target also activated a camera which took line overlap pictures from the release point to impact on the ground.. We would then return to the mess to await the next orders or perhaps take an aircraft on air test, although after ‘D’ day this practice was discontinued because the aircraft were kept bombed up in a state readiness. Temporarily at least Bomber Command was being used in a close support role to assist the Armies in France.
When a Battle Order was issued, the nominated crews assembled in the briefing room at the appointed time and when everyone was present the doors were closed and guarded. On a large wall map of Europe in front of us was a red tape snaking across the map from Base to the designated target. The length of the tape dictated the reaction of the assembled company.
Pilots, Navigators and Bombaimers did their pre-flight planning prepared maps and charts ready to go. Each crew member received a small white bag into which he emptied his pockets of everything. The seven bags were then put into one larger bag and handed to the intelligence office until our return. We, in turn, were given our ‘escape kits’ and flying rations. The escape kit was for use in the event of being shot down and trying to evade capture and return to England. We also carried passport size photographs which might enable resistance workers in occupied countries to get us fake identity documents. Phrase cards, compass, maps and currency notes were also included. The flying rations issued were mainly chocolate bars (very valuable at that time) also ‘wakey wakey pills’, caffeine tablets to be taken on the skipper’s orders. All ready to go. Collect parachutes, get into the crew buses and be ferried out to the
[page break]
Dispersals A visual check round the aircraft and then climb aboard. Start engines when ordered, close bomb doors, complete preflight checks and taxi to the end of the runway. The airfield controller’s cabin was located at the side of the runway and on a green lamp from him, open the throttles and roll. We were on our way. The Lancaster had an all up weight for take-off of 66000 lbs and needed the full runway, into wind, for a safe take-off. The maximum bomb load on a standard Lancaster was 7 tons but operating at maximum range the bomb load would be reduced to about 5 tons to accommodate a maximum fuel load.
On return from operations, after landing and returning to dispersal, shut down engines, climb down and await transport back to the briefing room for interrogation by intelligence officers. Hot drinks and tot of rum available and back to the mess for the customary egg, bacon and chips..
At this time were confined to camp because of the possibility of being of being[sic] called for short notice operations.
THE TOUR OF OPERATIONS.
No. 1 29.8.44 Target – STETTIN.
Checked Battle Order to find our crew allocated to PM-N.
Briefing for night attack on the Baltic Port of Stettin. Bomb load mainly incendieries.[sic] The route took us across the North Sea, over Northern Denmark, S.W. Sweden and then due South into the target, bomb and turn West to cross Denmark and the North Sea back to base. The force consisted of 402 Lancasters and 1 Mosquito of 1,3,6,& 8 Groups. It was a very successful attack and 23 Lancasters were lost. We suffered no damage from anti-aircraft fire and saw no fighters. Whilst crossing Sweden there was
[page break]
a certain amount of what was called friendly flak, shells bursting at about 10,000 ft whilst we were flying at 18000 ft
This was my first sight of a target and something I shall never forget, smoke, flames, bombbursts, searchlights, anti-aircraft fire. It was also very tiring having been airborne for 9 hours 25 minutes and flown some 2000 miles.
Used full quota of ‘wakey wakey’ pills.
No. 2. 31.8.44. Target .Flying Bomb launch site. AGENVILLE France.
Daylight attack, Master Bomber controlled This was one of several targets to be attacked in Northern France. Seemed like a piece of cake after the long trip to Stettin. Not so! We were briefed to bomb from 10,000 ft on the Master Bomber’s instructions. On approaching the target area there was 10/10 cloud and the call from the Master Bomber went like this: “Main Force – descent to 8,000ft and bomb on red TI’s (Target indicators). – no opposition” We descended to 8,000ft and immediately we broke cloud there were shells bursting around us, Fortunately dead ahead was the target and I called for bomb doors open and started the bombing run.. At the appropriate point I pressed the bomb release and nothing happened. A quick look revealed no lights on the bombing panel. Whilst I was checking the main fuse the rear gunner was calling “We are on fire Skip – there is smoke streaming past me” The ‘smoke’ proved to be hydraulic fluid which was vaporising. We climbed back into cloud and assessed the situation. Whilst in cloud we experienced severe icing and with the pitot head frozen we lost instruments which meant skip had no way of knowing the attitude[?] of the aircraft and for the one and only time in my flying career, we were ordered to prepare to abandon aircraft and I put on my parachute pack. However we emerged from cloud and normal service was resumed. We had no
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electrics, no hydraulics, bomb doors open and a full load of bombs still on board Skip decided to head for base via a North Sea designated dropping zone where I could jettison the bombs safely. This was accompanied by going back along the fuselage and using a highly technical piece of kit, a piece of wire with a hook on the end, pushing it down through a hole about each bomb carrier and tripping the release mechanism.
Having got rid of the bombs it was back to base, crossing the coast at a spot where we should not have been and risking being shot at by friendly Ack Ack gunners. We arrived back at base some one and a half hours late. Now for the tricky bit. The undercarriage, in the absence of hydraulic fluid, had to be blown down by compressed air. This was an emergency procedure and could only be tried once, a now or never situation. Now we have to make a flapless landing and hope that the landing gear is locked down and does not collapse when we land. Not being able to use flaps means the landing speed is greater than normal and then we have no brakes. Skip made a super landing but once on the runway could only throttle back and wait for the aircraft to roll to a stop. This it did right at the end of the runway.
On inspection after return to dispersal it appeared that a shell or shells had burst very near to the bomb bay and shrapnel had severed hydraulic pipes and electric cables in the bomb bay. I should think we were very close to having been blown to bits. This trip was a little bit sobering to say the least. The aircraft resembled a pepper pot but luckily no one was injured.
No. 3 3.9.44 Target Eindhoven Airfield, Holland. Daylight Operation.
Allocated to PM-X (N having been severely damaged on our last sortie)
A straight forward attack on the airfield, one of six airfields in Southern Holland
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attacked by.675 aircraft a mixture of 348 Lancasters and 315 Halifaxes and 12 Mosquitoes, all very successful raids and only one Halifax lost.
This was my first experience of the ‘Oboe’ target marking system now used by Pathfinders flying Mosquitoes.. A very accurate system – the markers were right in the middle of the runway intersections. Very impressive.
No.4 5.9.44. Target – Defensive positions around LE HAVRE.
Aircraft allocated PM-W. Bomb load 15,000 lbs High Explosives. Daylight operation.
This attack was in support of Canadian troops who were demanding the surrender of the German garrison. The first phase of Lancasters orbited the target awaiting the outcome. This was negative and the attack took place. In clear visibility our riming point was 2000 yards in front of the Canadian troops and the area around the aiming point was completely destroyed.
No.5 10.9.44 Target – LE HAVRE again. Daylight operation.
Aircraft allocated PM-E Bomb load 15000 lbs High Explosive. Daylight operation. 992 aircraft attacked 8 difference German strongpoints only yards in front of Canadian troops. All were bombed accurately. No aircraft were lost.
No.6 12.9.44. Target FRANKFURT. Night operation.
Aircraft allocated PM-G. Bomb load 1 x 4000lb Cookie plus incendiaries.
This was an unusual operation in that we were one of several crews who were briefed to bomb 5 minutes ahead of main force, identifying the aiming point ourselves. The
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object was to occupy the defences whilst the pathfinders went in low to mark the aiming point for main force. Our route to target took us South into France, near Strasbourg and then a turn North East towards Frankfurt. Our navigator Ron at some point realised we were well off track because he was getting wrong positions due to distortion of the ‘Gee chain’, wither by jamming or almost out of range.
As well as being bombaimer I was also the H2S radar operator and so I switched this on to try to verify our position I managed to identify Mannheim on the screen and was then able, with Ron, to fix a course to the target. As we approached the target there were hundreds of searchlights but instead of combing the sky they were laid along the ground in the direction of our track. It took a few minutes to realise that what they were doing was putting a carpet of light on the ground so that any fighters above us would have us silhouetted against the light. Gunners be extra vigilant! I dropped the bombs and we headed for base without incident. Intelligence reports said it was a very successful attack.
No. 7 17.9.44 Target Ammunition Dump at THE HAGUE, Holland Daylight.
Aircraft allocated PM-B, Bomb load 15000lbs Gen. Purpose bombs.
This attack by 27 Lancasters of 103 Squadron only and was carried out without loss.
No. 8 24.9.44. Target CALAIS. Close support for the Army. Daylight.
Allocated aircraft PM-B Bomb load 15000 lbs GP Bombs.
103 & 576 Squadrons were chosen to attack this target, gun emplacements, at low level (2000 ft) in the interests of accuracy. The weather was atrocious, almost as soon as we got off the runway we were in cloud. However we set course for Calais flying
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at around 1000 ft so as to keep the ground in view. As we approached the Channel the cloud lifted a bit and we were able to climb to 2000 ft but as we approached the target the cloud base lowered again and we had to descend again to 1000 ft for the bombing run. A we approached the aiming point, I was lying in the nose and could see everything on the ground. And being in the best position to see what was going on. could see where I thought the worst of the anti-aircraft fire, and indeed small arms fire was coming from.. I therefore ‘suggested’ to skip that when I say “bombs gone” you put her over hard to port and get down on the deck. Bugger the target photograph, we’ll have a picture of the sky! George did this and where we would have been if we had gone straight on whilst the camera operated, were shell bursts. We got out of that unscathed. Of the 27 aircraft that started that attack, one was lost, 8 landed away with various degrees of battle damage and of the remainder only 3 aircraft returned to base undamaged. “B” was one of them. As Ron recorded in his notes “Oppositions – everything”.
No. 9 26.9.44. Target Gunsites at Cap Gris Nez Daylight.
Allocated aircraft PM-B Bomb load 15000 lbs GP Bombs.
This was a highly concentrated and successful attack with very little opposition. Obtained a very good aiming point photograph.
No. 10 27,9,44.
We were briefed to bomb in the Calais area again on 27th. Sept but this operation was aborted due to the bombsight being unserviceable.
This ended our operational career at 103 Squadron. Only two of our operations had been at night.
Ourselves and one other crew from ‘A’ flight were transferred to 166 Squadron at
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Kirmington, one of the three stations forming 13 Base, to form a new ‘A’ flight at 166.Squadron.
As a matter of interest, Kirmington is now South Humberside Airport. Before moving on to the next phase I should explain that operational aircrew were given six days leave every six weeks which will explain some of the gaps in the story.
Chapter VII. The Tour of Operations. 166 Squadron.
166 Squadron, Kirmington, Lincs.
When we arrived at Kirmington we were allocated a hut on a dispersed site in Brocklesby Wood, about as far as could be from the airfield. Primitive living arrangements, but not too far from the Sergeants Mess.
By now we were no longer confined to camp and “liberty buses” were run from camp to Grimsby and Scunthorpe. Most of us used to go to ‘Sunny Scunny’ where there was a cinema two well known pubs, The Bluebell and The Oswald, the latter became known as 1 Group Headquarters. This establishment had a large function room with a
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minutes after other aircraft had set course. We took part on second aiming point and catching up 20 minutes on round trip landed No.3 back at base.
No. 14 28.10.44 Target COLOGNE
Allocated aircraft AS-D Bomb Load 1 x 4000 lb Cookie plus incendiaries.
Daylight operation. 733 aircraft despatched to devastate residential areas in NW of the City There was heavy flak opposition and our aircraft suffered some minor damage A piece of shrapnel came through the Perspex dome in front of me whilst I was crouched over the bombsight It hit me on the shoulder on my parachute harness but did me no harm.
This was a very good operation as ordered.
No. 15 29.10.44. Target Gunsites at DOMBURG. Walcheren Island, Holland. Allocated aircraft AS-M Bomb Load 15000 lbs HE. Daylight attack. 6 aircraft from 166 squadron together with 19 others attacked 4 aiming points. All were accurately bombed. There was no opposition.
No. 16 30.10.44. Target COLOGNE, Night operation.
Allocated aircraft AS-K Bomb Load 1x4000lb Cookie plus 9000 lbs HE.
No. 1 Group was assigned to attack aiming point which was not successfully attacked on 28th. October. Over the target there was clear visibility, moderate flak opposition. This was considered to have been a very good attack.
It was on this operation, whilst we were on the bombing run an aircraft exploded ahead of us. At least I believe it was an aircraft although the Germans used a device which we called a “scarecrow”. This was a pyrotechnic device which exploded to
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simulate an exploding aircraft. Presumable meant to put the frighteners on us!
On the 31,.10.44 we were again briefed to attack Cologne but having climbed to operating height a crew check by the Skipper revealed that Paddy our rear gunner was unconscious in his turret. Gus, wireless op went back and pulled him from the turret and onto the rest bed in the centre of the aircraft. He fitted him up with a portable oxygen bottle and skip made the decision to abort and return to base where an ambulance was waiting to whisk paddy[sic] off to sick bay. Apparently the problem had been a trapped oxygen pipe in the turret. We had been airborne for 2hrs 15 mins.
To depart for the moment from the tour of operations, it was about this time when I developed at[sic] rash on my face which turned to a weeping eczema which meant that I could not shave and I had to report sick. The Doc took a look and said, “OK You’re grounded”. I replied “You can’t do that Doc, my crew will have to take a spare bombaimer and I shall have to complete my tour with other crews”. After pleading my case Doc agreed to allow me to continue flying provided each time before flying I reported to Sick Quarters and had a dressing put on my face so that I could wear my oxygen mask. The Doc was treating me with various creams which had little or no effect until one day the WAAF medical orderly who applied the treatment said to the Doc “Why don’t we try a starch poultice”. The Doc suggested that was an old wives remedy. However as nothing else had worked he agreed to let the Waaf[sic] give it a try. I know not where this young lady learned her skills because I gathered she was a hairdresser in civvie street, in Leicester, my home town. She applied the said poultice and the next day I reported back to sick quarters where she removed the poultice and whatever was clinging to it. I went back to our hut and very carefully shaved. The starch poultice had done the trick. I thought frostbite had probably caused the
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problem in the first place but I was to learn some months later the real cause which I shall reveal later in the story.
No. 17. 2.11.44. Target DUSSELDORF. Night operation.
Aircraft allocated AS-C. Bomb load 1 x 4000lb Cookie and 9000 lbs HE.
“C” Charlie was now to become our regular aircraft, for which we developed a great affection and a very special relationship with the ground crew.
992 aircraft attacked Dusseldorf of which 11 Halifaxes and 8 Lancasters were lost. It was a very heavy and concentrated attack with extensive damage and loss of life. This was the last major Bomber Command raid of the war on Dusseldorf.
At about his [this] time friendships were struck up. In my case I was returning from leave and whilst waiting for my train at Lincoln Station to Barnetby (where I had left my bike) I met a Waaf, also returning from leave and who was, surprise, surprise stationed at Kirmington. I asked how she was getting from Barnetby to Kirmington and she said she was walking. No prizes for guessing that she got back to Kirmington on the crossbar of my bike. (No it was not a ladies bike). We became good friends and she along with others, would be standing alongside the airfield controllers cabin at the end of the runway to wave us off on operations.
Also at about his [this] time George and Gus acquired friends from the Waaf personnel, one of whom was a telephonist and the other a R/T operator in the control tower. When returning from operations George would call up base as soon as he was able, to get instructions to join the circuit. First to call would get the 1000’ slot and first to land. The procedure then was to make a circuit of the airfield around the ‘drem’ system of lights, report on the downwind leg and again when turning into the funnels on the
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approach to the runway. We would then be given the OK to land or if there was a runway obstruction, go round again. I understand that word was passed to those who wished to know that “Knott’s crew were in the circuit.”
No. 18. 4.11.44. Target BOCHUM. Night operation.
“C” Charlie. Bomb load. 1 x 4000lb Cookie plus 9000lbs HE.
749 aircraft attacked this target. Unusually Halifaxes of 4 Group slightly out numbered Lancasters. 23 Halifaxes and 5 Lancasters were lost. No. 346 (Free French) Squadron, based at Elvington, lost 5 out of its 16 Halifaxes on the raid. Severe damage was caused to the centre of Bochum, particularly the important steelworks.
This was the last major raid by Bomber Command on this target
It was about at this on return from an operation, I felt the need of a stimulant and so, instead of giving my tot of rum to Jock, I put it into my ovaltine, which curdled and I ended up with something resembling soup and a chastising from Jock for wasting ‘valuable rum’.
No. 19. 11.11.44. Target DORTMUND Oil Plant. Night operation.
“C” Charlie. Bomb load, 1 x 4000lb Cookie plus 9000lb HE.
.209 Lancasters, all 1 Group, plus 19 Mosquitoes from 8 Group (Pathfinders) attacked this target. The aiming point was a synthetic oil plant. A local report confirmed that the plant was severely damaged. No aircraft were lost.
No. 20 21.11.44. Minelaying Operations in OSLO FJORD Norway.
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Aircraft AS-E. Bomb load 6 x 1800 lb Accoustic[sic] and Magnetic Mines.
Six Lancasters from 166 Squadron and 6 from 103 Squadron detailed to plant ‘vegetables’ in Oslo Fjord. AS-E to mine a channel half a mile wide, between an island and the mainland. This was to catch U Boats based in the harbour at MANNS. The attack was carried out at low level and required a very accurate bombing run.. It was a major sin to drop mines on land as they were classified Secret This was a highly successful operation with no opposition and no aircraft lost. Time airborne 6hrs 45mins
No. 21. 27.11.44. Target “FREIBURG” S.W. Germany. Night operation.
“C” Charlie. Bomb load 1 x 4000lb Cookie plus incendiaries.
Freiburg was not an industrial town and had not been bombed by the RAF before. However. No. 1 Group 341 Lancasters, which was maximum effort for the Group, plus 10 Mosquitoes from 8 Group, were called upon to support the French Army in the Strasbourg sector. It is believed the Freiburg was full of German troops. The target was accurately marked using the ‘OBOE’ technique from caravans based in France. 1900 tons of bombs were dropped on the target from 12000 ft in the space of 25 minutes. Casualties on the ground were extremely high. There was little opposition and only one aircraft was lost…
On this operation we carried a second pilot as a prelude to his first operation. He Was Charles Martin, a New Zealander and he and his crew were to claim “C” Charlie as their own when Knott’s crew had finished their tour. Martin’s wireless operator was Jim Wright, who now runs 166 Squadron Association and is the author of “On Wings of War”, the history of 166 Squadron.
This crew completed their tour on “C” Charlie and the aircraft survived the war.
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No. 22. 29.11.44. Target DORTMUND. Daylight operation,
“C” Charlie. 1 x 4000lb Cookie plus 9000 lbs HE.
This was no ordinary operation, 294 Lancasters from 1 Group plus the usual quota of Mosquitoes from 8 Group. At briefing we were told that as Bomber Command had been venturing into Germany and particularly Happy Valley in daylight, and, unlike the Americans, had not been attacked by large numbers of fighters, there was concern that because of our techniques in Bomber Command, each aircraft making its own way to the target in the Bomber stream, we might be very vulnerable to fighter attack. We could not possibly adopt the American system of flying in mass formations and do some boffin somewhere had come up with the ‘brilliant’ idea that we should indulge in gaggle flying. No practice, mind, just – this what you do chaps – get on with it.. The idea was that 3 Lancasters would have their tail fins painted bright yellow and would be the leading ‘Vic’ formation. All other aircraft would take off, find another squadron aircraft and formate on it. Each pair would then pack in together behind the leading ‘vic’ and the lead Navigator would do the navigating with the rest of the force following. The route on the flight plan took us across Belgium crossed the Rhine between Duisburg and Dusseldorf then passing Wuppertal and North East into the target area. All went well until we were approaching the Rhine when the lead navigator realised we were two minutes early. It was important not to be early or we would arrive on target before the pathfinders had done their job. The technique for losing two minutes was to do a two minute ‘dog-leg’. When ordered by the lead nav, this involved doing a 45 degrees starboard turn, two minutes flying, 90 degree port turn, 2 minutes flying, 45 degree starboard turn and we were then back on track.
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Unfortunately the apex of the dog-leg took us directly over Dusseldorf, a town which was very heavily defended. All the flak in the world came up, especially among the three lead aircraft and suddenly there were Lancs going in all directions. I actually saw a collision between two aircraft which both spiralled earthwards. Once clear of this shambles we found we were now in the lead and so we continued to the target and there being no markers down, apparently due to bad weather, I followed standard instructions and bombed what I could see. We had suffered slight flak damage but nothing to affect “C” Charlies[sic] flying capabilities and we arrived back at base 5 hours 35 mins after take-off. Six Lancasters were lost.
This was our one and only experience of ‘gaggle flying’.
No. 23. 4.12.44. Target KARLSRUHE. Night operation.
“C” Charlie. Bomb load 1 x 4000lb Cookie plus incendiaries.
The railway marshalling yards were attacked by 535 aircraft. Marking and bombing were accurate and severe damage was caused. A machine tool factory was also destroyed. 1 Lancaster and 1 Mosquito were lost.
No. 24. 6.12.44. Target Synthetic Oil Plants “MERSEBERG LEUNA” Nr. Leipzig.
“C” Charlie. Bomb load 1 x 4000 lb Cookie 6000 lbs mixed HE.
475 Lancasters and 12 Mosquitoes were called upon to destroy Germany’s largest synthetic oil plant following numerous ineffective raids by the U.S. Air Force. This was the first major attack on an oil target in Eastern Germany and was some 500 miles from the bomber bases in England. “C” Charlie and crew were detailed to support pathfinder force (We were now considered to be an experienced crew). This meant we were to attack six minutes before main force. Weather conditions were
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very poor and marking was scarce and it was thought the attack was not very effective. However, post raid photographs showed that considerable damage had been caused to the synthetic oil plant and it was later revealed that the plant manager reported that the attack put the plant out of action and the second attack on 14.1.45 was not really necessary. 5 Lancasters were lost.
No.25. 12.12.44. Target ESSEN. Night attack.
“C” Charlie. Bomb load 1 x 4000lb Cookie 10000 lbs HE bombs.
This was the last heavy night raid on Essen by 540 aircraft of Bomber Command. Even the Germans paid tribute to the accuracy of the bomb pattern on this raid which was thanks to “OBOE” marking by pathfinder Mosquitoes.
6 Lancasters lost.
No. 26. 13.12.44. Target Seamining [?] KATTEGAT. Night operation.
“C” Charlie. Bomb load. 6 x 1800 lbs mines.
6 aircraft from 166 Squadron and 6 from 103 Squadron were detailed to lay mines in the Kattegat. This force took off in poor visibility but over the dropping zone the weather was good. On this occasion the mines were to be dropped using the blind bombing technique. I was to use the H2S radar which was a ground mapping radar. The dropping point was a bearing and distance from an identifiable point on the coast which gave a good return on the radar. On reaching the dropping point the pilot had to steer a pre-determined course and I had to release the mines at say, one minute intervals. The H2S screen was photographed so that the intelligence bods back at base could check that the mi8nes had been put down in the right place. In this case – spot on!! We then received a signal from base informing that the weather had
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clamped and we were diverted to Lossiemouth. We landed at Lossie having been airborne for 5 hrs 45 mins. At Lossie we were given beds and of course food, with the intention of returning to Kirmington the following morning.
The next morning we were given the Ok to return to Kirmington and went out to the aircraft. One engine failed to start and a faulty starter motor was diagnosed. A replacement was to be flown up from Kirmington. There we were dressed in flying kit with no money or toilet requisites and not knowing when the aircraft would be serviceable It certainly would not be today. We managed to secure a bit of cash from accounts and towels, etc from stores. That night Jock and I decided to go out on the town breaking all the rules about being out in public improperly dressed. However we got away with it. On the 17yth. “C” Charlie was serviceable and we were permitted to return to Kirmington. When we joined the circuit we could see Flying Fortresses on our dispersals having been diverted in the day before. The weather was certainly bad in the winter of 44/45.. The Americans crews allowed us to look over their Fortresses and we in turn invited them to look at our Lancaster. Their main interest centred on the Lancaster’s enormous bomb bay compared with their own.
21/12/44/ Seamining BALTIC Night operation.
Aircraft AS-H. Bomb load. 5 x 1800 lb mines.
This operation was aborted shortly after take-off due to the unserviceability of the H2S which was essential for the accurate laying of the mines. The visibility at base was very poor and we were given permission for one attempt at landing and if unsuccessful we were to divert to Carnaby in Yorkshire which was one of three diversion airfields with very long runways and overshoot facilities. We therefore
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jettisoned fuel to reduce the landing weight and made the approach. The airfield controller was firing white Very lights into the air over the end of the runway to guide us. We crept in over trees in Brocklesby Wood, trees which had claimed other Lancasters coming in too low, and made a perfect wheeled landing. It does not bear thinking about what would have happened if the undercarriage had collapsed, we were sitting on top of 9000 lbs of High Explosive. Good work skipper! Did not count as an operation.
The Squadron had a stand down at Christmas and on Christmas Day there was much merriment and a fair amount of booze put away and we went to bed a bit the worse for wear. It was therefore a bit upsetting to be got out of bed at 3am on Boxing Day morning, sent for an Ops meal and told to report for briefing at some unearthly hour. So to operation No. 27.
No. 27.. 26.12.44. Target “ST-VITH” Daylight operation.
Aircraft ‘B’. Bomb load 1 x 4000lb Cookie and 10000lbs HE.
“The Battle of the Bulge”, the German offensive in the Ardennes was in progress. A large force from Bomber Command was called upon to support the American 1st. Army trying to stem the German advances in the Ardennes. The attack was concentrated on the town of St. Vith where the Germans were unloading panzers to join the battle.
The whole of Lincolnshire was blanketed in fog with ground visibility of only a few yards. After briefing we went out to the aircraft, climbed aboard and waited for the time to start engines. Just before time there were white Very Cartridges fired from the
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control tower which indicated the operation was scrubbed. We returned to the mess and were given a new time to go out to the aircraft. Another flying meal.
We went out to the aircraft again and had a repeat performance. Third time lucky, we sat in the aircraft and although there was still dense fog, time came to start engines. This time no scrub. A marshall appeared in front of the aircraft with tow torches signalling us to start taxying and we were guided to the end of the runway. A glimmer of a green from the airfield controller and we turned onto the runway, lined up, set the gyro compass and we roared off down the runway at 1.15pm. Airborne and climbing we came out of the fog at about 200 ft and it was just like flying above cloud. We set course according to our flight plan and visibility across France and Belgium was first class. No cloud and snow on the ground. We did not really need navigation aids, I was able to map read all the way to the target. Approaching the target area there were a few anti aircraft shell bursts and it was apparent the Germans had advanced quite a long way. We bombed from 10000ft and the bombing was very concentrated and accurate. In fact it was reported that 80% of the attacking aircraft obtained aiming point photographs.
It was now time to concern ourselves with the return to Kirmington. The fog was still there and the only 1 Group airfield open was Binbrook, high up on the Lincolnshire Wolds, which stuck out of the fog like an island. The whole of 1 Group landed at Binbrook. There were Lancasters parked everywhere. Whilst we were in the circuit awaiting our turn to land, I was looking out of the window and noticed a hole in the wing between the two starboard engines. When we had landed and shut down the engines, we went to look at the hole. On top of the wing it was very neat but on the underside there was jagged aluminium hanging down around the hole. Obviously a shell had gone up and passed through the wing on its way down, without exploding.
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An airframe fitter looked at the damage and said the aircraft was grounded. This meant that after interrogation we were allowed to return to Kirmington by bus and proceed on leave.
Our next operation was not until 5.1.45 but some of us returned early from leave to attend a New Year party in the WAAF mess which was actually situated in Kirmington Village.
No.28. 5.1.45. Target HANOVER Night operation.
“C” Charlie. Bomb load. 1 x 4000lb Cookie plus incendiaries.
325 Aircraft of Nos. 1 and 5 Groups were briefed for the second of a two pronged attack on Hanover.
Nos. 4 and 6 Groups had bombed the target two hours earlier with bomb loads of mainly incendiaries. When we crossed the Dutch coast, the fires could be seem[sic] from at least 100 miles away. Our track took us towards Bremen and was meant to mislead the enemy into believing that was our target. However we did a starboard turn short of Bremen and ran into Hanover from the North. The target was well bombed and rail yards put out of action. I don’t know what we did right but “C” Charlie arrived back at base 4 minutes before anyone else.
No. 29. 6.1.45. Seamining. STETTIN Bay. Night operation.
Aircraft AS-D. Bomb Load 6 x 1500lb Mines.
Knott and crew started their third and final gardening trip (As seamining was known) 48 aircraft of Bomber Command were detailed to plant ‘vegetables’ in the entrance to Stettin Harbour and other local areas. The enemy was able to pick up the force 100 miles North East of Cromer because bad weather condition forced us to fly at 15000
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ft to the target instead of the usual 2000ft,. As a result of this early warning enemy fighters were waiting and the target area was well illuminated by fighter flares. It was believed that the enemy thought this was a major attack on Berlin developing. Knott and crew dropped their vegetables in the allotted area, securing a good H2S photograph and again returned to base first.
No. 30. 14.1.45. Target MERSEBERG LEUNA (Again) Night operation.
“C” Charlie. Bomb load 1 x 4000 lb Cookie plus 5500 lbs HE.
200 Aircraft attacked this target to finish off the job started on 6th December. A very successful attack.
No. 31. 16.1.45. Target Oil refinery ZEITZ Nr. Leipzig.
“C” Charlie. Bomb load 1 x 4000lb Cookie plus 6000 lbs GP Bombs.
This was the one we had been waiting for, our last operation. We went into briefing and were told by the intelligence officer that although we were being briefed the operation might be cancelled because a large force of Amercan[sic] Fortresses and Liberators had been to the target earlier in the day and a photo recce Mosquito had gone out to photograph the target and assess the results. Before the end of briefing it was confirmed that that[sic] the Americans had missed and our operation was on. At 1720 on the 16th January we took off on this operation. Over the target there were hundreds of searchlights, the markers were in the right place and we completed our bombing run. The target was well ablaze and there were massive explosions. At one point Paddy called out “We’re coned skip” meaning we were caught by searchlights.
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It was briefly very light in the cabin but the light was caused, not by searchlights but by the explosions from the target.
Of the 328 Lancasters that attacked the target, 10 were lost.
When we returned to base all of our ground crew, including one guy who had returned early from leave, were there to welcome us and join in a little celebration.
George Knott was awarded an immediate Distinguished Flying Cross, said to be a crew award for completing a tour of operations.
All seven of us were posted from Kirmington, on indefinite leave to await our next assignments.
Apart from activities in the Officers and Sergeants Messes, and trips into Scunthorpe where the “Oswald” was the central drinking point, the main point of activity was the pub in Kirmington village. The “Marrow Bone & Cleaver” or the “Chopper” as it was known, was the meeting place for all ranks. The pub is now a shrine to the Squadron, there is a memorial in the village, lovingly cared for by the villagers’ and memorial plaques in the terminal building at Humberside Airport.
There is also a stained glass window in Kirmington Church.
I have mentioned our off base activities but, of course, a lot of time was spent in the Mess and the radio was our main contact with the outside world. I think the most popular program was the AFN (American Forces Network). They had a program which I believe was called the “dufflebag program”. Glen Miller and all the big [inserted in margin] this sentence needs a verb! [/inserted in margin] bands of the day. The song “I’ll walk alone” was very popular and was recorded by several singers. The British one was Anne Shelton, an American whose name escapes me and another American called Lily Ann Carroll (Not sure about the spelling of that name). This girl had a peculiar voice but it had something about it.
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Since the war I have not been able to find anyone who ever heard of her but I did hear the record placed on one of the archives programs on BBC, two or three years ago. If anyone knows of Lily Ann Carroll I would love to know.
I can’t remember where it was but on one occasion when we were out together as a crew, someone asked what the “B” meant on my brevet. Quick as a flash Paddy jumped in “It means Big Bill Bailey the bastard Bombaimer”.
The completion of our tour of operations was of special relief to Gus Leigh, our wireless operator who incidentally had a few weeks earlier had[sic] been commissioned as Pilot Officer. Gus was married and his wife Enid was pregnant and lived in Kent. George our skipper had relatives who lived near Thorne which was quite near to Sandtoft and not really too far from Elsham and Kirmington so it was arranged that Enid would come to stay with George’s relatives and Gus would be able to see her fairly regularly. As we approached the end of our tour you can appreciate the tension. I was to hear later that after we had left Kirmington, Enid had a son and then suffered a massive haemorrhage and died. What irony, a baby that so easily could have been fatherless was now motherless.
Before leaving the scene of operations, so to speak, I would like to clear up one or two points.
I have often been asked the question, were you frightened? I can only speak for myself and maybe my crew. I don’t think ‘frightened’ was the right word, apprehensive, maybe but except for a very few, I believe all aircrew believed in their own immortality. It was always going to be the other guy who got the chop, never yourself. Had this not been the case then we would never have got into a Lancaster.
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Ron Archer used to tell me he thought we were the luckiest crew in Bomber Command.
There were, of course, a very few aircrew who lost their nerve and refused to fly. All aircrew were volunteers and could not be compelled to fly but if that became the case then they would be sent LMF (Lack of moral fibre) and would lose their flying badge and be reduced to the ranks.
Much has been said and written in recent years about the activities of Bomber Command and in particular our Commander in Chief, “Bomber” Harris. I believed then, and still believe that what was done was right. I did not bomb Dresden, but had I been ordered to do so, I would not have given it a second thought.
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Chapter VIII. Lossiemouth.
I was at home in Wigston, Leicestershire and my 21st birthday, the 2nd February was fast approaching. Parents and friends were trying to organise a party, meagre rations, permitting. They need not have worried because I received instructions to proceed immediately to 20 OUT Lossiemouth, At 9.30 pm the eve of my birthday I caught a train from South Wigston station to Rugby and then onto a train bound for Scotland. I arrived at Lossiemouth at 11pm and following day. What a way to spend a 21st birthday!
The next day having completed arrival procedures I duly reported to the Bombing Leader for duty. At the same time I discovered that George Knott had also been posted to Lossiemouth as a screened pilot. I flew with him ocassionally[sic] when he needed some ballast in the rear turret when doing an air test.
The role of 20 OUT was to train Free French Aircrew, again flying Wellingtons and my job was to fly with them on bombing exercises to check that they were using correct procedures. I used to say, “Patter in English please”, which was alright until they got a bit excited and lapsed into French. Bombing took place on Kingston Bombing Range, on the coast East of Lossiemouth. One of my other jobs was to plot the bombs on a chart using co-ordinates given by observers at quadrant points on the
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range. These were phoned through to the bomb plotting office. The student bombaimer then came to the office to see the results of his aiming efforts. 10 lb smoke bo9mbs were used for daylight bombing and 10 lb flash bombs for night bombing. In the summer at Lossie, night flying was almost impossible due to the short night in those Northern parts. It was quite common to take off after sunset and then see the sun set again.
After a few weeks I was attached from 20 OUT to 91 Group Airbomber instructors school at Moreton in Marsh for 3 weeks before becoming an official instructor. I returned to 20 OUT and shortly afterwards was again sent off on a course, this time to the Bomber Command Analysis School at Worksop. Here I became an alleged expert on the Mark XIV Bomsight.[sic] This was a gyro stabilised bombsight [sic] which was a tactical bombsight [sic] rather than a precision bombsight.[sic] It consisted of a computor[sic] box and a sighting head and obtained information of airspeed, height, temperature and course from aircraft instruments plus one or two manual settings and converted this information into a sighting angle. The only piece of vital information to be added was the wind speed and direction which had to be calculated by the Navigator. The bombaimer was then able to do a bombing run without the necessity of flying straight and level.. It took account of climbing, a shallow dive and banking. The sequence of events when bombing was, when the bomb release (hereafter called the ‘tit’ [)]was pressed several things happened, the bombs started to be released in the order set on the automatic bomb distributor, so that they were dropped in a ‘stick’. The photoflash was released, the camera started to operate and as the bombs reached the point of impact almost immediately beneath the aircraft, the photographs were taken. Having used this equipment for the whole of my tour of operations I can vouch for its performance. The Americans had their much vaunted Norden and Sperry Bombsights [sic]
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which were claimed to be very accurate but required the aircraft to maintain a straight and level flight path for an unacceptable time against heavily defended targets. The Mk XIV was so good that the Americans adopted it for their own aircraft and called it the T1 Bombsight. Many T1’s were used by the RAF in lieu of the MkXIV. A matter of production I guess.
On my return from Worksop, with glowing reports from my two courses, the Bombing Leader said “OK Flight Sergeant you had better apply for a commission.” This I did and after going through all the procedures was commissioned in the rank of Pilot Officer (198592) on the 5th June, 1945.
Of course ‘VE’ Day took place on the 5th May after which it was only a matter of time before the OTU’s were run down and in the case of Lossiemouth this was to be sooner rather than later. The Wellingtons were all flown down to Hawarden in Cheshire for eventual disposal, I must record one tragic incident which happened whilst I was at Lossiemouth. One Sunday morning a Wellington took off on air test and lost an engine on take-off and the pilot was obviously trying to make a crash landing on the beach to the East of Seatown. He didn’t make it and crashed on top of a small block of maisonettes killing most of the inhabitants who were still in bed. A tragic accident!
The question now arose as to where next we would all go. We were given the option of being made redundant aircrew, going to another OTU or going back to an operational Squadron. My problem was solved for me, ‘Johnnie’ Johnson, ‘A’ Flight Commander, came into the plotting office and said “I’m going back on ops, I want a bombaimer”. Thus I joined his crew and other instructors made up a full crew with the exception of a flight engineer, all having done a first tour. Johnnie had to revert
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from his Squadron Leader rank to Flight Lieutenant. All the other members of the crew were officers.
Chapter IX Tiger Force.
On the 6th. July we went to 1654 Conversion Unit at Wigsley, were not wanted there and were sent to 1660 Conversion Unit at Swinderby. It was necessary to do a conversion course becaused[sic] Johnnie had done his first tour on Halifaxes and needed to convert to Lancasters. We also picked up a Flight Engineer who was actually a newly trained pilot, who had also done a flight engineers course, there now being a surplus of pilots. He happened to be a lad I knew from my ATC days.
We were now part of “Tiger Force” which was 5 Group renamed and we were to fly the Lancasters out to Okinawa to join in the attack on Japan. The Lancasters would shortly be replaced by the new Lincoln bombers which were bigger, more powerful and had a longer range.
We commenced our training, for my part I had to familiarise myself with ‘Loran’ which was a long range Gee for use in the Pacific. I did say earlier in the story that I would tell you about my ‘rash’. At Swinderby I had a recurrence and immediately reported sick. The Doc took a look at me and said “Oh! We know what that is, it is oxygen mask dermatitis, when you sweat your skin is allergic to rubber. We will make you a fabric mask. Problem solved. The new mask was not needed, however,
[page break]
because the war ended and with it my flying career.
VJ Day was a wild affair, In the “Halfway House” pub at Swinderby my brand new officer’s cap was filled with beer when I left it on a stool.
In a final salute to the mighty Lancaster, Swinderby had an open day to celebrate the end of the war and the Chief Flying Instructor, the second on three, the third on two and finally the fourth on one engine. What an aeroplane! What a pilot!
Chapter X The last chapter.
There followed a strange period. First to Acaster Malbis, nr York where all redundant Aircrew handed in their flying kit. Then to Blyton, Nr. Gainsborough where we were given a choice of alternative traded. Seldom did anyone get their first choice and I was chosen to become an Equipment Officer and after a brief spell at Wickenby was posted to the Equipment Officers School at RAF Bicester. A four week course and I was meant to be a fully qualified equipment officer. I was posted to Scampton but not needed there and so was posted on to RAF Cosford where I was put in charge of the technical stores. The Chief Equipment Officer was fairly elderly Wing Commander who took me under his wing and kept a fatherly eye on me. The Royal Air Force was beginning to return to peacetime status and Wingco[sic] warned me that it was probably not a good idea to fraternize with my ex Aircrew NCO’s in the “Shrewsbury Arms”. If you must, get on your bikes and go further afield, was his advice.
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One Monday morning I was called up to the WingCo’s office to be asked “Where is F/Sgt. Brown (Not his real name) this morning”. “I don’t know sir” I replied. “Well I will tell you” he said. “He is under arrest at Shifnal Police Station”
This particular ex Aircrew NCO lived in a village quite near to Cosford and had permission to ‘live out’. It transpired that almost everyone in his village had new curtains made from RAF bunting and quite a few people were wearing RAF or Waaf shoes. I was ordered to do a stock check on my section and for his part he was charged by the Civil Police and at Shifnal Magistrates Court received little more than a slap on the wrist. No doubt his war service stood him in good stead. Because he had been dealt with by the Civil Courts he could not be charged and Court Martialled by the RAF and all that happened was that he was posted away from Cosford and released early into civvie street.
At the time, lots of POW’s were passing through Cosford on their way from POW Camps in Europe to their homes.
Monthly “Dining In” nights were also resumed in the Officers Mess. Due to officers leaving the station or being demobbed, at every “Dining In” we were “Dining Out” those departing., always ending in a wild party. I remember one night which was extremely boisterous ending with Bar Rugby, footprints on the ceiling, the lot. I had better leave to the imagination how the footprints on the ceiling were achieved. That night I went to bed at about 3 am and when I went in to breakfast the following morning the mess was immaculate. The staff had obviously been up all night cleaning up.
On the 4th. November 1946 I received my final posting from Cosford to Headquarters Technical Training Command, at Brampton Nr. Huntingdon to be Unit Equipment
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Officer. The Headquarters Unit consisted of a Squadron Leader C.O., a Flight Lieutenant Accountant Officer, a Flight Lt. Equipment Officer and their staffs. I had a hairy old Sergeant Equipment Assistant who I believe was a regular airman and probably looked upon me as not a real Equipment Officer. However, his knowledge and experience were invaluable.
I enquired as to the whereabouts of my predecessor to be told that he had already gone having been posted abroad. There was, therefore, no handover of inventories. The next surprise was even greater, I was told that I also had RAF Kimbolton to finish closing down. I took myself to Kimbolton to find a ‘care and maintenance party’ of three airmen and one Waaf. Two were out on the airfield shooting rabbits and the other two were dealing with some paperwork. The entire camp had been almost cleared, barrack equipment to a storage/disposal site, fuel to other sites and/or the homes of the local population. Legend had it that a grand piano from the Sergeants Mess had gone astray. One day a Provost Squadron Leader came into my office and said: “Bailey, I want you to come with me to St. Neots Police Station to identify some rolls of linoleum which they have recovered from a farmer”. We went to St. Neots and a police sergeant showed us several rolls of obvious Air Ministry linoleum standing in a cell. I examined the rolls and could find no AM marks so I told the Provost that I could say the rolls ere exactly similar to AM Lino but I could not positively identify them as AM property. The provost told the police sergeant to give the lino back to the farmer. Heaven only knows how many houses had their floors covered in Air Ministry lino in the Kimbolton area. No doubt this sort of thing was happening all over the country. The politicians were so anxious to get servicemen back into civvies street that establishments were seriously undermanned.
When I, a mere Flying Officer, did the final paperwork for RAF Kimbolton I raised a
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write off document well in excess of £1 million at 1947 prices and this only involved equipment known to be missing.
With regard to Brampton itself, the winter of 46/47 was extremely severe with heavy snowfalls. Even the rail line between Huntingdon and Kettering was blocked. When the snow thawed there was severe flooding. One weekend I went home and returned to Camp on Sunday afternoon to find that the previous night there had been a severe storm with gale force winds and Brampton was a scene of devastation. Trees had been blown down crushing nissen huts. The camp was flooded and the sewage system was completely useless. The following morning I located a stock of portable loos (Thunder boxes so called). A four wheel drive vehicle was despatched through the flood waters surrounding Huntingdon, to RAF Upwood to collect these things. Things gradually returned to something like normal but it was a terrible time. The Officers Mess at Brampton was in the large house in Brampton Park and the Headquarters Staff from the C in C Technical Training Command down, were housed in Offices adjacent to Brampton Grange. There were far more senior officers at Brampton than junior officers because of the very nature of the place.
The PMC of the mess was a Group Captain and one day he came to me and said “Bailey, we are going to have a Dining In and I thought it would be nice if we could have some proper RAF crested crockery and cutlery”. I informed the PMC that these items were not on issue whereupon he suggested that I use my initiative.
It just so happened that whilst I was a[sic] Cosford I learned that in the Barrack Stores the very things I was being asked to get were in store, having been there throughout the War. I spoke with the Wing Commander, my former boss, who
agreed to release a quantity of crockery, etc. I informed the PMC of my success and he arranged for a De Havilland Rapide aircraft from our communications flight at nearby Wyton to take
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me to Cosford to collect the two heavy chests of crocks. I am sure the Rapide was overloaded on the flight back to Wyton but the mission was accomplished and the PMC was able to show off his ‘posh’ tableware at the next Dining In.
I was shortly to have to make a major decision, the date was fast approaching for my release back into civilian life, I had agreed to serve six months beyond my release date and had made an application for an extended service commission which would have kept me in the Royal Air Force for at least another six years. However my civilian employers became aware that I had done the extra six months and were not amused. I, despite having access to ‘P’ staff at Brampton could not get a decision from Air Ministry and I made the decision to leave the service.
On 1st. April, how significant a date, I headed off to Kirkham in Lancashire to collect my demob suit. A very sad day.
This is the end of the ‘dream’ but not quite the end of my love affair with the Royal Air Force. But that, as they say, is another story ……
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Two photographs in RAF uniform; one in 1942 aged 18 and the other in 1945 aged 21.
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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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Was it all a Dream
The memoirs of Wartime Bomb Aimer Bill Bailey
Description
An account of the resource
Bill Bailey's wartime memoirs, from enlistment, training in UK and Canada and detail of each of 31 operation in Bomber Command. After completion of his tour he was transferred to Lossiemouth to train Free French aircrew. After successful progress he was offered a commission. Later he trained for Tiger Force ops at RAF Wigsley and Swinderby. When the Force was cancelled he became an Equipment Officer at Bicester then Cosford, Brampton and Kimbolton.
Creator
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Bill Bailey
Format
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45 typewritten sheets and two b/w photographs
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Text. Memoir
Photograph
Identifier
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BBaileyJDBaileyJDv1
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
United States Army Air Force
Free French Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
Germany
Great Britain
Norway
Poland
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
Atlantic Ocean--Kattegat (Baltic Sea)
England--Birmingham
England--Devon
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--London
England--Yorkshire
France--Domléger-Longvillers
France--Ardennes
France--Calais
France--Cap Gris Nez
France--Le Havre
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Essen
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Freiburg im Breisgau
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Leipzig
Manitoba--Carberry
Netherlands--Domburg
Netherlands--Eindhoven
New Brunswick--Moncton
Norway--Oslo
Nova Scotia--Halifax
Ontario--Hamilton
Ontario--Picton
Poland--Szczecin
Netherlands--Hague
France
Ontario
New Brunswick
Nova Scotia
Netherlands
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Warwickshire
Manitoba
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
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Sue Smith
David Bloomfield
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.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
1947
1 Group
103 Squadron
166 Squadron
1660 HCU
1667 HCU
4 Group
5 Group
576 Squadron
8 Group
83 OTU
Advanced Flying Unit
Air Observers School
aircrew
Anson
B-17
Bolingbroke
bomb aimer
bombing
Bombing and Gunnery School
briefing
Distinguished Flying Cross
flight engineer
Gee
ground personnel
H2S
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
Halifax Mk 5
Heavy Conversion Unit
Initial Training Wing
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lincoln
Lysander
Master Bomber
medical officer
memorial
mid-air collision
military living conditions
military service conditions
mine laying
Mosquito
Oboe
Operational Training Unit
Pathfinders
perception of bombing war
prisoner of war
promotion
RAF Acaster Malbis
RAF Bicester
RAF Binbrook
RAF Blyton
RAF Brampton
RAF Cosford
RAF Elsham Wolds
RAF Hawarden
RAF Hemswell
RAF Kimbolton
RAF Kirmington
RAF Llandwrog
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Paignton
RAF Penrhos
RAF Peplow
RAF Sandtoft
RAF Scampton
RAF St Athan
RAF Swinderby
RAF Worksop
RAF Wyton
Scarecrow
searchlight
superstition
Tiger force
training
Wellington
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/668/10072/AAllenWH170331.2.mp3
b7e86ee136f31e0cba975ebbd6344a9b
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
Allen, William Hubert
W H Allen
Bill Allen
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Sergeant William Allen (b. 1923, 1585749, 197351 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a wireless operator with 76 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-03-31
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
Allen, WH
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
MH: Ok. Good afternoon everybody. My name is Mark. I am a volunteer with the International Bomber Command Centre which is going to be located on Canwick Hill in Lincoln. I’m one of their volunteers that has the pleasure of coming to carry out interviews with veterans of Bomber Command. Today I have the great pleasure on the 31st of March 2017 of interviewing flight sergeant, as he was during his campaign time, Mr William Allen who resides in the fair country of Wales. And I have the pleasure in interviewing him this afternoon regarding his recollections both prior to the war and during it and then afterwards as well. But first of all we’ve managed to find out and to elicit from Bill some additional information from him regarding the service that his father undertook during the Great War ’14 to ’18. And I’ll get him to give us a brief resume of what he understands that his father’s service was in the Royal Naval Air Service. And then of a very romantic thing that his father got one of the personnel from the seaplane carrier the Ark Royal to do for him as a momento of his romancing what would have been Bill’s mother. So, good afternoon Bill. Thank you very much first of all for making yourself available for interview today. It’s greatly appreciated. So, I understand from your daughter, Wendy who’s given me a bit of insight into her grandfather and your father about where he served during the Great War. If you’d like to tell us about that first off.
WA: Right. As far as I know it his wartime service on the Ark Royal — 1914 he sailed from Lincolnshire to the Dardanelles. The Mediterranean. And the Ark Royal stayed there until she came back into home waters in 1918. During that time dad was courting a young lady from Surrey where he lived, or had lived at the time. And an engineer on the Ark Royal said to father to be, ‘What are you going to do with those letters?’ And father to be said, ‘Well, I suppose I’ll have to get rid of them.’ So this engineer said, ‘Let me have them and I’ll do something with them.’ And he made a walking stick which I’ve now still got. Which will be a hundred years old next year.
MH: Just for the people listening Bill has very kindly allowed me to see this lovely momento and to describe it for you. The best way to describe it Bill — would you just say it looks or it reminds me of a tree and the rings of a tree. It’s like somebody has done a cross carving across the plain of a tree trunk and you’ve got all the individual pages of the letters that you can see, and it’s a fabulous item. And it’s got a beautiful handle on top of it. And it’s such a fine momento of the Great War and of your parents courting, of course.
WA: Yeah.
MH: Of which you were then produced. So, tell us a bit more about yourself Bill. When were you born? Where were you born? A bit about your childhood. A bit about your interests before you saw service in the Royal Air Force.
WA: Well, I was born in Surrey, a place called Lingfield, on the 22nd of September 1923. Of course, I didn’t know much until about well four or five when you sort of realise things were going on. Dad was a head gardener on the estate in Dormans Park just outside Lingfield racecourse, but what shall we say? Nothing happened really. School was just normal. But in about 1937 things started going wrong. We thought well although I wasn’t, I was only what seventeen or sixteen. You think, well there’s a war coming. You could feel it. And I thought, well what am I going to do? And I thought well I know radio and I know Morse code so I think I’ll go in to Abingdon and volunteer for aircrew. So, I went to Abingdon, to the RAF Recruitment Centre and I said, ‘I wish to join up as aircrew.’ They said, ‘What as?’ So I said, ‘Well, radio. He said, ‘Well, go back. We’ve got your address. We’ll contact you when we can take you into the air force.’ So I went back, worked with dad on the estate until I got this call to go to aircrew selection. So I went to aircrew selection at Weston super Mare. I was passed as a wireless operator/air gunner, given a service number and they said, ‘The Army or the Navy won’t call you up. But,’ they said, ‘You’re a bit late getting here. What happened?’ I said, ‘Well, I left Abingdon this morning. Got a train to Oxford where there was an Aircrew Selection Board. I got a train to Didcot where there was another aircrew selection board. Another train to Bristol where there’s an aircrew selection board. And then on to Weston super Mare where I am now. And at the interview, and they said, ‘Right, you’re, you’re ok for wireless op/air gunner.’ And of course I found out afterwards the senior was a wing commander and he said, ‘Why did you go, why were you late getting here?’ So I told him why. All these stations. And he said, ‘Well, you’re not travelling back tonight. You’ll stay in a hotel tonight.’ So the next day I travelled back to Abingdon. The reverse direction. [laughs’] Stops all the way.
MH: So, you returned home having been selected. How long a period then between your selection at the aircrew selection and your eventual call up? How long a period do you think that was?
WA: So, as I, when I went for aircrew station I was sixteen and a half. I was finally called up just before my eighteenth birthday and I went to Padgate for initial kitting. From Padgate I went to RAF Yatesbury where it was the Number 1 Radio School. Of which there were funny tales about Yatesbury but never mind. We passed out at Yatesbury. I then went to North Wales for my gunnery. Passed out as an air gunner. Then I was posted back to Abingdon to crew up as, for a crew. Where I was crewed with a pilot, a bomb aimer, two gunners, and a navigator. But at the time because Whitleys only had two engines there was no [pause] excuse me my voice is going. There was no —
MH: Flight engineer.
WA: Flight engineer.
MH: Yeah. Yeah.
WA: We passed out at Abingdon. Then we went to Heavy Conversion Unit, Riccall in Yorkshire where we converted on to four engine Halies, or Halifaxes I should say. We passed out there. We were posted to 77 Squadron, Riccall in Yorkshire. We were there, well by the week because our skipper had to go as a second pilot on a raid in Germany. He never came back. So, we were a crew at 77 Squadron without a skipper. But at 102 Squadron, Pocklington was a squadron leader who wanted a crew. So we were posted to Pocklington. Crewed up with a squadron leader who was an excellent pilot because he he got shot in the tummy but he was an ex-Spitfire pilot. So he knew how to fly a Hali. And so we teamed up there. Got on well. And often we used to say on raids if it wasn’t for our skipper who knew how to treat the Germans we wouldn’t have got back. But of course sometimes we were damaged but the thing was coming back if the skipper, if the tail end, Tail End Charlie said, ‘Skipper, there’s a Mossie coming,’ We knew we were safe because the Mosquitoes had cannons and the Germans didn’t like that. But after we’d done about twenty one ops at 102 we, our skipper was made up to a wing commander so, we were then posted to Holme on Spalding Moor. 76 Squadron. And there we remained until the end of the war. And after of course 102 was then converted to Transport Command, onto the old Dakotas.
MH: Ok. Right. I’ve got a few questions for you Bill regarding your service. Ok. Going to take you all the way back then to your wireless operator training when you said there were a few tales that occurred at Wireless Training School. Are they repeatable, these tales? Or are they too naughty for the listener?
WA: Well, they’re a bit naughty.
MH: What happened? What did you get up to?
WA: Well, because on the, between Calne and Yatesbury on the big hillside there was carved a big horse. A white horse. And one day the boys, the RAF got blamed because the White Horse was a big stallion.
MH: Ah. Right.
WA: So, they were sent to grass it over a bit [laughs]
MH: Ok. Ok. And were you involved in that additional?
WA: No.
MH: No. Right. Ok. We’ll save the confession. So, basically they’d put an additional leg to the horse.
WA: Correct.
MH: Ok. So, you started your training on Whitleys. It’s not an aircraft people are very familiar with because not a lot of people know about the Whitley in all honesty. Can you give our listeners your impressions of the aircraft? How you found it. How you found it for the specific tasks that you had to carry out.
WA: Ok. She was a twin-engine. She was a main bomber before the Halies and the Lancs came in. Or the Lancaster was a Manchester before it was a Lancaster. But the dear old Whitley was, was always for us, a flying coffin. A job to get out of if there was any trouble.
MH: Right.
WA: She was slow. We did our first op from Abingdon to — on a leaflet raid into Germany but [pause] well we got back. The thing was that because my father, mum we lived at a place call Sutton Courtenay which was just outside Abingdon and of course I was back at Abingdon and I said, ‘Well, I won’t be able to see you tomorrow. I might be away.’ And all the aircraft, fourteen Whitleys went over our bungalow and dad said mum wouldn’t sleep until she counted fourteen back.
MH: Right. Ok.
WA: But [pause] well she was a, well I suppose what you’d call a medium bomber. Not much. But when we left Abingdon and got on to the Heavy Conversion on to Halies — a different aircraft. Four engines. But the Mark 1s and Mark 2s were a bit slow. But because the Hali was designed for Bristol radial engines she had to go, the Mark 1 and 2s had Rolls Royce and she wasn’t designed for those. But because the Hali couldn’t have the radial engines, the Bristols until the Battle of Britain was over because they were all wanted for the Hurricanes. But once the Hali got the radial engines Butch Harris, the boss of Bomber Command said, ‘Ah the Hali is now a better bomber than the Lancaster,’ and she was. She was a damned good aircraft. So, the only thing was with the Hali she was fast. She was faster than the Lanc. When the Tail End Charlie used to say, ‘Ah, there’s a Mossie coming up.’ A Mossie, for the listeners is a Mosquito. And that Mosquito aircraft was wooden but she had cannons and if we were coming, if we were damaged and the Mossie came beside us no German fighter would come within fifty miles of us because he could, that Mossie could blow him out the sky. And coming back the skipper always used to say to the mid-upper, ‘Make a note of the two, the marks, the letters on the aircraft so I can phone up the squadron when we get back.’
MH: So, thinking about when you did your first operation on the Whitley. It was a sort of postal run for leaflets. How did you feel about that? Instead of taking cargo that would have been of more use should we say.
WA: Well, we didn’t know. It’s a line of duty and that’s it. It was. As I say you put all these leaflets down the flare ‘chutes and that’s it.
MH: So, none of the crew had thoughts of — I’m putting my life on the line basically to be postie.
WA: No. No.
MH: Right.
WA: I can tell you about that later but it’s on. No. You didn’t.
MH: Didn’t think about that.
WA: No.
MH: Just saw it as part of service.
WA: I mean, we’re going on our first op so big deal. Big day. But when we got to our first, what we called our first operation with 102 with the new squadron leader, it was different, you see. Well, we did our first op over Germany. Come back ok. So, the next op one or two of us used to have a cigarette. So, we sat down and had a cigarette and we’d say, ‘Well, there’s ops tonight. Some are not coming back. But we are coming back.’ That’s the way you looked at it. You were coming back. You gave your packet of cigarettes to the ground crew. The old sergeant there and say who looked after our aircraft, ‘Here’s the cigarettes. If we don’t come back smoke them. Think of us.’
MH: So [pause] Now, I did some background reading in to Halifax Mark 3s. It’s not an aircraft that I’m very familiar or I wasn’t very familiar with but I am now. It quite surprised me I must admit that the wireless operator found themselves tucked beneath the pilot’s feet. How, how was that for you? Because they were above you. The flight engineer was above you. You had two other crew members technically behind you with the mid-upper and the tail gunner but there was yourself, the navigator and the bomb aimer all stuck in the front altogether. How did you find that because of being bulky, bulky aircrew kit and all the rest of it? How did you find that?
WA: We didn’t notice it because we thought this is, this is my cabin, here’s my wireless, that was it. You didn’t think about, well the skipper’s above us. The bomb aimer, as you say was sat at the second dickie until we were over the target and went up front to take the bomb aimer’s position. But the navigator was almost alongside of me. So, we didn’t bother.
MH: I was quite surprised also to find out, Bill that at the point where you sat in the wireless operation desk etcetera and where the pilot was, the aircraft was in fact nine foot tall at that point. So that’s quite an expanse when you think about it. A nine foot tall, you know at the side of the fuselage as such. I was quite surprised by that. But it was all comfortable for you at that time.
WA: Oh yes. Because from where the pilot was you went down steps. A couple of steps, and as you were going down the steps you hung your parachute because you each had a place to put your parachute. So you didn’t think about much about the cramp. You put your parachute on the clamp and got into your position.
MH: And in your position as well the way the radio set was set up was slightly different to other heavy bombers, I believe. In that the receiver set stood on its end. And then you had the main transmitter in front of you and then your Morse key was clamped normally on the right hand side.
WA: Correct. Yes.
MH: And then you had a small desk for keeping your radio log and everything.
WA: And of course you had a trailing aerial by the side of you.
MH: Right.
WA: If I was to unwind it.
MH: Right. How did you find, did you find that — was that a good set up for yourself being the, the receiver set being there to having a — are you a right handed gentleman? Were you having to reach across or, to change the various wavelengths as such?
WA: No, it was a — because I’ll show you the photographs later. Up there.
MH: Right.
WA: Of the wireless operator’s position.
MH: Right. Ok.
WA: The only lights you had for eight hours if you were on a night raid was the lights from the radio.
MH: Right.
WA: There weren’t no other light because the Germans could pick it up.
MH: And the operational ceiling I believe of a Mark 3 Halifax was about twenty thousand feet. How did you deal with the cold?
WA: Oh. We had three pairs of gloves on. And, but they were so soft. Silk gloves, a very nice woollen and then a leather. Soft leather that you could always, you could bend your fingers and you didn’t realise they were on. But most of the trips were ok over Germany. But if we were sent on mine laying up in the Baltic then it was mighty cold.
MH: Because the difference or I understand with the Lancaster the same sort of position for the radio op in the Lancaster. They were fortunate in having the heater by them. Did the Halifax not have any heating as such? And if so where would it have been? Was it by yourself or was it elsewhere in the aircraft?
WA: Well there was a little bit of heating coming through. So as long as you didn’t get iced up.
MH: Ok. When you went to Holme on Spalding Moor it’s not a station that I am familiar with. What can you tell us about it? How was it when you got there?
WA: Well, we got there because our skipper had been made up to wing commander. He was the CO then of the, of 76 Squadron flying. So everybody at [unclear] and at briefing, our first briefing it was funny because we were at our briefing table without a skipper. And some of the crews looked as us as to say, ‘Where’s your skipper?’ And of course the skipper did a briefing and said, ‘This is our target for tonight.’ And of course when he finished the briefing he came down and sat with us. And of course some of the crew looked at us, ‘Oh, you’ve got the wing commander have you?’
MH: Did that give you any privileges at all? Were you treated differently? Or —
WA: No. The one bad privilege. We could only do one op a month.
MH: So —
WA: So, we were slowed down.
MH: Right. Due to, due to your pilot’s rank. They didn’t want to lose him as such.
WA: Yeah. But the thing was that the AOC, God he was a rugby player for England before the war. He used to have to do a monthly flight to get his flying pay. And he always used to come to the wing commander and say, ‘I want your wireless operator.’ He didn’t want a navigator, nobody. He only wanted the wireless op.
MH: So, you found yourself with the AOC for 4 Group. Doing his monthly pay flight.
WA: Yeah [laughs]
MH: And that was just you.
WA: Yeah.
MH: When you went up. So, it was just you.
WA: And the, and the pilot, you know. He was —
MH: What aircraft did you do that on? When the AOC had to go up.
WA: That was the Mark 6s. They were good aircraft.
MH: Right. So he was, he was, the AOC was still —
WA: Yeah.
MH: Keeping up to the date on the, on the aircraft type as such.
WA: Yeah. That was the CO. Not me. Gus Walker.
MH: Gus Walker. Right.
WA: Everybody knows Gus. One night he’d had, because he went out to two aircraft. What they tried on one squadron where he was they decided to, to use two runways. So that one aircraft went that way. The other one went that way. And of course this time the two hit in the centre.
MH: Yeah.
WA: And he went from flying control to see what was happening and when he got there one of the bombs went off and blew his arm off.
MH: Oh crikey.
WA: His right arm.
MH: Oh dear.
WA: So, every time you saw him you always shook left handed.
MH: Right. Crikey. Oh poor chap.
WA: But his — but the first time, well no. The second time he said, ‘Do you mind flying with me?’ When he did his flying test. I said, ‘Sir, you are safer than some of the pilots I’ve flown with.
MH: With the one arm.
WA: Yeah.
MH: We’ll leave those. We’ll leave those dodgy pilots out of this interview then, just in case they happen. We’ll leave the names of the dodgy pilots out of the interview just in case.
WA: That was, well we had posts.
MH: So, you’ve now gone and you’ve reached into your cupboard. What have you brought out for us? What have you brought out from your cupboard? What have you got there? Ah. Right. Bill’s just bought out his form 1767 which for those of us in the know is his flying logbook. So we’re going to use this as a bit of a reference with you listeners as Bill’s going to take us into his logbook now. And we appreciate you can’t see it but in Bill’s neatest handwriting I’m looking at a page which is headed up Yatesbury. The 21st of May ’43 and he was flying on X7517.
WA: Dominie.
MH: And that was a Dominie. And that was up for air experience by the looks of things. I suppose, what was that? To check and make sure that you weren’t going to be sick.
WA: Yes.
MH: And that sort of thing. Ok.
WA: Then we went on to radio then. Direction finding loop, homing training, calibre training.
MH: But I look then, Bill. I look at the time that you were up and the actual flying times that Bill’s referring to during his training. They’re not very long are they? They’re only about an hour or so.
WA: Yes.
MH: And during that that allowed you time to go through thoroughly the training that you had to go through.
WA: That’s right.
MH: Or do you feel that it was rushed?
WA: No. No.
MH: To get, to get you through.
WA: No. It was ok. There was, you still carried on. This is when then they go to Mona, North Wales for my air gunnery.
MH: Right. Yeah.
WA: That’s my hits [laughs]
MH: And Bill’s now got in September sort of time 1943 he was at the Air Gunnery Course Centre and firing off approximately two hundred rounds at a time on his training. And that was, ah the aircraft type listed that Bill was flying in then was an Avro Anson during his training for air gunnery. With all different pilots by the looks of things. Yeah. But so how much training? What sort of weapon were you taught to fire? What was it?
WA: The 303s and the drogue which was being dragged behind the aircraft.
MH: So that was, would that have been a single 303 or would that have been a pair or —?
WA: No. A pair.
MH: A pair.
WA: That was on the old —
MH: Ah. Now, this is going to bring recollections to me. Halfpenny Green.
WA: Yes. That’s right.
MH: Yeah. Now, for listeners if you ever get the chance there’s a John Mills film that basically shows him in Bomber Command and then eventually this particular place called Halfpenny Field gets handed over to the American 8th Air Force. And it’s called, the film is called, “The Way to the Stars.” So, if you get the chance have a look at it because the gentleman I am sitting with actually served at a place called Halfpenny Green. So, this, this is where you did more wireless operation training. Yeah?
WA: That’s right. The training.
MH: And we’ve got cross country exercises and navigations and you were the second wireless operator. And again on Avro Ansons. How did you find that aircraft Bill to be in? Was it good?
WA: It was a good aircraft. The old Aggie as they called her. Aggie Anson.
MH: Was it a good training aircraft then?
WA: Yes.
MH: Yeah. Ok.
WA: This was Abingdon or satellite Stanton Harcourt.
MH: Right. Ok.
WA: Yeah. She was number 10 OTU.
MH: So, on Bill’s page now we’re up to the period now in his logbook and right at the top of the page is the 25th of January 1944. Bill was on wireless op duty and flying with Flying Officer Ford in a Whitley T4131. And on that particular occasion out of 10 OTU he was doing circuits and landings for an hour and a half. And then this was at Stanton Harcourt where Bill looks like he’s done a mixture of, he’s done the odd bit on an Avro Anson but the majority of it has been on the two engine Whitley. However, he has been the wireless operator duty for the whole of those. That’s lovely Bill. That’s a lovely book. And then we continue. And then I’ve got — you’ve got fighter affiliation there. Which is quite interesting because I found out later when you were with, when you were at Holme on Spalding Moor you had 1689 Bomber Defence Training which were Hawker Hurricanes doing fighter affiliation on the same, the same airfield. So you’ve continued that there. And that’s March ’44. And — right, here’s something I’m going to question. What’s Bullseye, Bill? What does that mean when you see that?
WA: A Bullseye was a six hour from Abingdon. We went through London. And then to another Birmingham. So it was across country. But the thing was at London they hadn’t informed, they hadn’t been informed that we were coming. So they thought we were Germans and we were fired at [laughs] So I had to flashback the Morse at them.
MH: Right. Ok. So, was that a specific? Is that why you’ve noted it as Bullseye? Or was Bullseye for a specific target?
WA: No. It was called a Bullseye.
MH: It was called a Bullseye. So —
WA: So, if you completed a Bullseye you were ok.
MH: You were ok. Ok. But on that particular occasion the anti-aircraft decided to fire on you. Ok.
WA: Because they didn’t know. But they, I think afterwards it was a bit better then.
MH: Ok.
WA: As a nickel operation.
MH: Right. So Bill’s showing me here, on the 14th of February which for us gentleman we all know is a rather painful day in pockets-wise, being Valentine’s Day. Back in 1944 Bill was doing a nickel operation to Laval which was a four and a quarter hour night operation. And then the following month looks like that’s when Squadron Leader Legatt, you did some fighter affiliation with him and the flight commander’s check. So that was good. Ok. Then you go to 1658 Heavy Conversion Unit.
WA: Riccall, in Yorkshire.
MH: Riccall, in Yorkshire. And that’s on a Halifax Mark 2. And Bill’s started in his logbook, he’s got that noted on the 10th of May 1944. And his first flight was at 0900 in the morning. The pilot was Flight Lieutenant Warren. And that was familiarisation for the Halifax Mark 2 of two hours and five minutes. And that was a daytime familiarisation flight.
WA: We were on three engines.
MH: Was that because the aircraft had a fault, Bill?
WA: No. Had to do it.
MH: Oh, you had to do it. Right. Ok. So that was a test of skill as such for the pilot. As Bill’s pointed out there whilst at 1658 HCU in his logbook he’s noted on the 18th and 19th of May ’44 that they did a three engine test on both of those days. And as you heard him say that was a requirement at those times. I see there you did another Bullseye operation as well. Down the bottom of your page. But one engine wasn’t working.
WA: No.
MH: So that made it even harder than. So, yeah. Crikey. Circuits and — yeah.
WA: That’s when it was.
MH: And then on the 1st line of Bill’s book for the 15th of June ’44 Halifax Mark 3. Circuits and landings with 77 Squadron at Full Sutton. And then —
WA: We lost our pilot.
MH: Was that Mr Ford?
WA: Yes.
MH: Mr Ford went so —
WA: Flying Officer Ford.
MH: At this time listeners we would like to note the tragic events that at this point we lost Flying Officer Ford. And he was your first pilot that went as a second dickie on an operation.
WA: So when he didn’t come back we were a crew without a pilot.
MH: A crew without a pilot. Yeah. Then you got your new pilot.
WA: So we went to 102 Squadron, Pocklington with a Squadron Leader White.
MH: Squadron Leader White. And your first operation with him was eighteen thousand feet. Foret de Nieppe. NE — sorry. N I E P P E and your bombing height was eighteen thousand feet. It was a day operation of three hours and forty minutes. And then your very next operation being routed but written over your shoulder you were hit by flak and that was — oh you were, oh V-1 launch site. But you were quite down low then.
WA: Yeah.
MH: At ten thousand feet. So, Bill’s next op was on the 8th of August. A Halifax Mark 3. Again, the pilot was Squadron Leader White. His new pilot. Bill was the wireless operator and that was [unclear] where the aircraft was hit by flak. And they were bombing a V-1 launch site. You seem to have quite a few trying to tackle the buzz bomb problem.
WA: Yes.
MH: Yeah.
WA: Still carried on.
MH: Still carried on. So, for those in the know or those that are new to this regarding knowledge to Bomber Command Bill with Squadron Leader White then carried out an operation on the 7th of September. Again in a Halifax Mark 3. On this occasion it was gardening to the Frisian Islands from fifteen thousand feet. Now, for those in the know the gardening sorties were to be mine laying. So, in and around the Frisian Islands Bill and Squadron Leader White and the rest of the crew would have been laying, doing mine laying around the Frisian islands. And you did some more then. You went off to Mecklenburg Bay in the Baltic. That would have been very cold.
WA: Yeah.
MH: That would have been a bit raw. Especially in September. Even in September wouldn’t it? So Bill then did one on the 15th of September as well. Gardening to the Mecklenburg Bay. And then you did some ferry flights.
WA: No. September ’44 the army was held up on going into Germany. So 76 Squadron was loaded up with 22 Jerry cans which, one Jerry can is mighty heavy but when you get twenty two. But the thing was that get to my position we had to crawl across all these petrol tank things to get. But we, what I can’t make out, we were given a parachute but we could never have get out if anything had happened. And if Germany knew that we were full of petrol they would have been after us. But the thing was we used more petrol in our engines than we were carrying.
MH: Carrying. Yeah.
WA: But they wanted, the army wanted this petrol so we had to do it.
MH: Now —
WA: It was quite a few.
MH: So, you were ferrying fuel at the time of Arnhem. But burning up more fuel in doing it.
WA: Yeah. That’s the, that’s the way it went.
MH: And then you went to Kleve in the October. Bochum on the Ruhr in November of ’44. And then again back to the Ruhr. Sterkrade.
WA: They had a —
MH: Oil plant.
WA: Box barrage, and you flew, they set their guns from ten thousand feet to twenty thousand feet and you flew through it.
MH: How did you feel about that because —
WA: Well, we didn’t know until later. But there you are. We knew it was somewhere close because you could smell cordite in the, in the aircraft and golly, that was through the oxygen masks.
MH: So, you were picking up the vapours.
WA: Yeah.
MH: From the exploding rounds. Then you went to Zoest. The marshalling yards. In the December. That would have been cold as well, Bill.
WA: Yeah.
MH: And then, just for fun in the January of ’45 they sent you back to the Baltic. They obviously didn’t think you’d been cold enough before. But —
WA: That’s where we went to.
MH: Holme on Spalding Moor. So, Bill —
WA: The wing commander there.
MH: Bill’s just showing me in his logbook now that Squadron Leader White had been made up to wing commander and they went to Holme on Spalding Moor. And the first noted operation come practice on that was the 3rd of February ’45 on a Halifax Mark 3 where you had a practice bombing session before going off and you were going to — is that Goch.
WA: Yeah.
MH: Yeah.
WA: In the Ruhr.
MH: Goch in the Ruhr on the 7th of February ’45. However, it does look like was that operation scrubbed by the master bomber at that time. And you were at twelve thousand feet and that was due to come in to contact —
WA: Heavy cloud. You couldn’t see the target.
MH: With the chemical plant. Oh, and then in March ’45 Bill, with Wing Commander White went to one of the big ones — Cologne where you were bombing from twenty thousand feet. So you were up. With the Halifax that’s towards its upper operational ceiling isn’t it? The twenty thousand. So, that’s quite high. And then Wuppertal in the March. And then practice bombing in the March as well. And then I’m going to pronounce, I’m going to pronounce this wrong, Bill. I’ll tell you now.
WA: Wangerooge.
MH: Wangerooge Island, from eight thousand feet on the 25th of April ’45. Again with Wing Commander White. And that was to assist in taking out a gun emplacement.
WA: And that was the last raid of the war.
MH: The very last one.
WA: Yes.
MH: Right. Ok. And that was for a gun emplacement causing problems. And that was a daylight operation on those occasions. On that occasion.
WA: Eight thousand feet.
MH: Eight thousand feet. That’s nothing. Eight thousand feet.
WA: And on that one was twenty four aircraft from our squadron. As we were going in two of our Halies collided. One [pause] one went straight down and with all the seven killed. The other one went down in the sea but only the skipper got out. The rest of the crew were killed. But he came, he was only a prisoner of war for a few days because the war was virtually ended. But when he got back to our squadron before we transferred to Transport Command he said when he came out the, out of the sea a German officer was waiting for him. And, but while he was marching him up to, to their office I suppose, to interrogate him a farmer came rushing up with a pitchfork and he was going to stab the RAF pilot. And the German pulled out his revolver and pointed it at this farmer. Told him to shoo off.
MH: Because you do hear don’t you of a lot of, a lot of parachuted aircrew that were turned on by the civilians. You do hear quite a bit of that having occurred which is very sad. But again fortunately then, we can actually say fortunately there was a German officer there to save him.
WA: That’s right.
[pause]
WA: That was the last one. The ops we did. Different pilots. Bombs had gone. Dropping bombs in the North Sea to get rid of them.
MH: What’s interesting, I’ve got to point this out to you, Bill. What’s interesting, Bill’s just pointing out to me a couple of entries in relation to May 1945 in his logbook. Now, you were in then the up to date Halifax Mark 6. Flying Officer Thrussel. It’s got here duty rear gunner. Did you go on that one there with the ferry flight because there was no other option? That was the only seat available or what took you to the rear turret on that occasion?
WA: It was just, you know because we lost all the air gunners because we didn’t need them. War was finished. So, when the Halifax went off and they said, ‘Well look, If you want to fly as a rear gunner, see what is happening,’ because when you’re a wireless op you couldn’t see much. So, you jumped in.
MH: Having changed your seat then for that particular time were you able to gain any sort of thoughts about what it would have been like to have been a Tail End Charlie as such?
WA: No. No.
MH: During your ops.
WA: No. You got Wingco, look [pause]
MH: Ah. So here, June, 5th of June 1945 in a Halifax Mark 6. The wing commander. Cook’s Tour. Ah, I’ve heard about these. Is that where ground personnel —
WA: Correct. We took them on.
MH: And they got to see the great, you know the work that you’d done. And the work that you’d carried out because they were unaware of it other than —
WA: That’s right.
MH: Movietone News etcetera. So, in August 1945 we appear to have an aircraft change.
WA: Transport Command.
MH: Transport Command. What, what made them— any ideas what made them change at that point? Was there more of a necessity for transport aircraft? I mean —
WA: Well, we didn’t need bombers. War was finished.
MH: The European one. But the war against Japan was, you know —
WA: Actually, what we were [unclear] we were flying to go to India to meet aircraft coming from Japan with Prisoners of War. And at Poona, India. And from that, the ones from Japan landed at Poona. The aircraft then flew from Poona to Cairo where they were put on York aircraft with a medical officer and a nurse. And from there they were transported back to England. And the pilots used to say, ‘Boys, we’re back in England.’ And I think they stopped it because some of the POW got so excited they expired. And we did hear afterwards that their, well their legs were like your arms. You know. Nothing.
MH: Yeah. I think, I think, I’d like to think that we’ve all, we’ve all seen the horrific photographs.
WA: Yeah. They used to come in to Hullavington which is now upgraded isn’t it? It’s Royal Hullavington. Is it?
MH: So, did you actually take part in any of those repatriation flights, Bill? Back to the UK?
WA: No. Because this is where I got this typhoid in Cairo. And also I found out that I’d been flying with a perforated ear drum.
MH: Oh dear. Oh —
WA: That’s why I’m completely deaf in my left ear.
MH: So, how long, how long did they think you’d had the perforated ear drum?
WA: Don’t know.
MH: Don’t know. Oh right. Ok.
WA: But that’s when they found out as I said. No more flying.
MH: So, that might have happened way way way way way back. Possibly on your first or second operation.
WA: Yeah.
MH: You’d gone all the way flying to the Ruhr and back with one ear drum.
WA: Well —
MH: Wow. That’s, that’s quite extraordinary. That, you know. That’s, you know. Because you managed to, you managed to hold down, you know the career that you had then. So what, when, what happened to you when you did your service Bill? What did you do post-service? What did you do after? What did you do after your service?
WA: I still carried on because I kept doing that, because when I came back to England up to Air Ministry, flying officer, he said, ‘Ah, Yatesbury. What do you know about medical?’ So, I said, ‘Not a lot. Nothing.’ They said, Right. You’ll go to RAF Yatesbury as a [pause] looking after transfers.’ Right. So, I goes down to Yatesbury for the third time. First of all as an airman. And later on. But I had quite a nice time at Yatesbury. Got into the football team. Got an injury. And one of the nurses looked after me who later became my wife. After a while they said, ‘Well, because you can’t fly and you’re only for a home,’ or they used to call it, France and Germany, ‘But you can’t go Far East because of your eardrum. We’ll have to transfer you to the MOD Air Force Department. But you won’t be in uniform. But they said we’ll help you out. We’ll count your service.’ So, that’s why when I retired at sixty I had a service commission, err pension.
MH: So, if I’m recollecting this correctly for our listeners you joined, you first of all went for air crew selection at the age of sixteen and a half. Got selected. And you retired from the Air Force technically at the age of sixty. Forty four long years of service to this country, Bill. That’s a long time.
WA: Yeah. But I enjoyed my time with the Royal Air Force. No regrets. My only regret is I had a perforated eardrum and I couldn’t carry on flying.
MH: What’s your, I’ve got to ask you an opinion, Bill. What’s your opinion on the way that Bomber Command have been treated?
WA: Grim.
MH: Grim. What makes you say grim?
WA: Because there was no medal for Bomber Command. The other services had something. I don’t think even Fighter Command had any much, you know. They saved us. The same as Bomber Command. They always said that Bomber Command was the only one of the three services that was operational. The poor old Navy couldn’t do much. Only look after home waters.
MH: Yeah. Yeah. How do you feel about the way that the young people of today view Bomber Command? With what we’re trying to achieve to bring it to their attention.
WA: I don’t think a lot of modern realise.
MH: Right.
WA: Because this what they’re building at Lincoln. The height of a, wingspan of a Hali or a Lanc. They had to ask for extra money but I don’t think they got much response from that. To me, a lot of people, well from once the war was ended things went quiet. It was forgotten.
MH: Ok. Right. I’ve got to ask you, going back to my list of questions. Your dad was in what would have been known during World War Two as the Fleet Air Arm. Why didn’t you choose the Fleet Air Arm, Bill over — what was it that turned you off the Navy and on to the Air Force as such?
WA: I don’t know. Aircrew to me was RAF.
MH: Right.
WA: That’s why.
MH: And you’d always wanted to fly. Where did that passion come from?
WA: Because I knew Morse. And I thought well there’s always a radio on bombers or aircraft.
MH: So was it your interest in radio at that time?
WA: Well, because Morse code was radio wasn’t? That was it.
MH: Leading on from that then I was reading about a particular aircraft the other day where they had a problem with the intercom on the aircraft. Got shot through during the war on a mission and they were using some sort of signal like Morse code tapping through the airframe so the rest of the crew knew what was going on. Because the pilot had designed a system where they knew that three taps mean bale out and all the rest of it. Did you have anything like that?
WA: No. No.
MH: So, when you went off you were basically reliant on the intercom system working all the time. Right. Right.
WA: And we, we knew what, alright we took off. Twenty four aircraft, we knew some of them wouldn’t be coming back but we were coming back. So that’s the way you looked at it. I’d think I know where my parachute is. I can soon grab it. And that’s it.
MH: Do you count yourselves as brave?
WA: No. Lucky.
MH: Lucky. Right. Ok. Alright. Because there would be a lot of us that would say what you did and your colleagues etcetera what you did and the young age that you were when you did it —
WA: That’s right.
MH: Was very brave.
WA: Twenty, twenty one, twenty two. That was it. And most of the names on that what they’re building at Lincoln opposite Lincoln Cathedral. They were all twenty, twenty one, twenty twos.
MH: People in the prime of their youth. Yeah. But it never worried you.
WA: No.
MH: Never scared.
WA: No. [unclear] that’s it.
MH: Positivity.
WA: Well.
MH: And you had a good pilot.
WA: Well, you’ve got, well yes. We had a damned good pilot. And it was the job. We had to do it. Someone had to do it.
MH: No, you’re right. Someone had to do it. Ok. Did you ever run across or come across Group Captain Pelly-Fry?
WA: No. I’ve heard about him.
MH: What can you tell us about him?
WA: Hi de hi Pelly-Fry.
MH: What can you tell us?
WA: Is that right?
MH: Yeah. What can you tell us about him?
WA: He was 76 Squadron before we got there. So, I don’t know. All I know that is he was known as Pelly-Fry. Wing commander.
MH: So, he then eventually went up Group Command didn’t he? Up to 4 Group.
WA: Yes.
MH: So, out of all the aircraft then that you served on and in, in what order would you put them as favourite to least favourite?
WA: My favourite. Well, it’s got to be the Hali. Damned good aircraft. She could take punishment and if she crashed she broke in to six pieces so you had more chance of getting out. Whereas the Lanc didn’t because the Lanc was an old aircraft. A twin-engined Manchester. Put two engines on it and called it a Lancaster. But it still had a thin fuselage and useless to get out of.
MH: Right.
WA: I suppose the worst aircraft was the old Proctor. With the single engine.
MH: Why? I’ve got to ask why.
WA: I don’t know [laughs] to me, so I say it didn’t have the guts like a Lanc, or a Hali I should say.
MH: Right. Yeah. So in all your time with Bomber Command you’d have seen sights that a lot of us wouldn’t want to see and would have lost friends, colleagues that sort of thing. But you were stoical throughout in your approach and you feel that you were lucky.
WA: Yes. Because often we used to say if it wasn’t for our skipper being an ex-fighter pilot he got us out of a lot of problems.
MH: After the war did you stay in touch with your crew or with your pilot or did you all go your separate ways?
WA: No. We all drifted away and that was it.
MH: Right.
WA: I met, the person who I kept meeting was Gus Walker, Air Commodore, who, he said, ‘I saw your old skipper in London last week,’ when he used to come on the station to the annual AOC. He’d say, ‘I met your old skipper in London. He’s still ok. Yeah.’
MH: Ok. That’s fabulous. Is there anything else, Bill that you’d like to add about your recollections?
WA: No. Just [pause] No. It was one thing I went through. No regrets.
MH: No regrets. Good. Lucky charms? Did you have any lucky charms that you carried about your person? Because I know a lot of aircrew used to have a teddy.
WA: A rabbit’s foot.
MH: And a rabbit’s foot.
WA: That’s right.
MH: And all that. Yeah. That sort of thing. Or a lucky coin, didn’t they? And that sort of thing. Clover leaf and what not. But no. What I’d like to do Bill is thank you very much for your time today.
WA: That’s nice. Thank you, Mark.
MH: I’m sure that people will thoroughly enjoy listening to this.
WA: I’ve got a bit of a throat, perhaps my voice doesn’t sound good today. It’s a bit throaty.
MH: It’ll be fine. It will be fine. But thank you very much for this afternoon. And I will be turning the tape recorder off.
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 William Hubert Allen
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Mark Hunt
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
2017-03-31
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
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AAllenWH170331
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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01:08:00 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
William Allen’s father had served with the Fleet Air Arm during the First World War. William also wanted to fly and so volunteered for the RAF at the earliest opportunity. He trained as a wireless operator. The crew arrived on the squadron and the pilot went as second dickie on a flight but was killed on the operation. William and his crewmates were now without a pilot and were transferred to 102 Squadron to continue operations. William and his crew were very conscious of the statistical chances that they would not come back but over cigarettes they would say that they would be coming back. However, they also left their cigarettes with the ground crew with the instruction that if they did not return to smoke them and remember them.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
England--Wiltshire
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
10 OTU
102 Squadron
1658 HCU
76 Squadron
77 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
Cook’s tour
Dominie
Halifax
Halifax Mk 1
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
Heavy Conversion Unit
mid-air collision
mine laying
Operational Training Unit
RAF Abingdon
RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor
RAF Pocklington
RAF Riccall
RAF Yatesbury
training
Whitley
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/583/10639/LHolmesGH1579658v1.1.pdf
bf036945795cfbfa29a4383912ff5c45
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
Holmes, George
George Henry Holmes
G H Holmes
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Holmes, GH
Description
An account of the resource
Nine items. An oral history interview with Pilot Officer George Holmes (b. 1922, 1579658, 187788 Royal Air Force) his log book, records of operation, newspaper cuttings and photographs of personnel. He flew operations as a wireless operator / air gunner with 9, 50 and 83 Squadrons.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by George Holmes and catalogued by Nigel Huckins
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-10-21
2017-01-14
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
[Partial transcription of page 60 - 61]
LUCKY ESCAPE – iii
One night on return – on the circuit we collided with another A/C on opposite direction – losing about 4-5 foot of the tip of main plane and nearly spun upside down – but recovered level flying – and landed – OK!!
On the night of July 24th in Lancaster VN-O. 50 Sqdn Skellingthorpe we were on route to Stuttgart when we were attacked by a german night fighter. Which shot away our bomb bay door. Damaged the starboard landing gear Fractured the main spar and put 5-6 cannon shells in the fuel tanks, on a 2nd attack the gunners shot the attacker down. We all agreed to carry on to the target, on arriving back at Base we were told to orbit until all the other A/C were down – On inspection we found that the cannon shells were still there. They were removed and were emptied. They were found to contain SAND instead of explosive – which saved all our lives. A very lucky escape. After a Belly Landing our first big escape.
15/3/2016 – G Holmes (aged 93)
[Page break]
RAF Coningsby 83 Sqdn 1945
Between Feb 1 to 18 March 1945 I flew with an Aussie pilot F/O Cassidy
His A/C was named –
“Hopalong Cassidy’s Flying Circus”!!
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
George Holmes' navigator’s, air bomber’s and air gunner’s flying log book
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
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Mike Connock
Anne-Marie Watson
Format
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One booklet
Language
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eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LHolmesGH1579658v1
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Chile
Czech Republic
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Atlantic Ocean--Bay of Biscay
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
Czech Republic--Plzeň
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Northamptonshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Wiltshire
France--Argentan
France--Beauvoir-sur-Mer
France--Brest
France--La Pallice
France--Le Havre
France--Limoges
France--Normandy
France--Orléans
France--Rennes
France--Saint-Pierre-du-Mont (Landes)
Germany--Bremerhaven
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Mönchengladbach
Germany--Siegen
Germany--Stuttgart
Netherlands--Vlissingen
Norway--Horten
Poland--Police (Województwo Zachodniopomorskie)
Scotland--Ross and Cromarty
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
1946
1947
1944-06-03
1944-06-04
1944-06-05
1944-06-06
1944-06-07
1944-06-08
1944-06-09
1944-06-10
1944-06-11
1944-06-21
1944-06-22
1944-06-23
1944-06-24
1944-06-29
1944-07-23
1944-07-24
1944-07-25
1944-07-30
1944-08-01
1944-08-02
1944-08-05
1944-08-14
1944-08-19
1944-09-10
1944-09-18
1944-09-19
1944-09-20
1944-10-23
1945-01-13
1945-01-14
1945-02-01
1945-02-02
1945-02-03
1945-02-07
1945-02-08
1945-02-09
1945-02-13
1945-02-14
1945-02-15
1945-02-24
1945-03-21
1945-04-08
1945-04-09
1945-04-17
1945-09-10
1945-09-29
1945-10-02
Description
An account of the resource
Navigator’s, air bomber’s and air gunner’s flying log book for G H Holmes, covering the period from 7 June 1943 to 23 May 1947. Detailing his flying training and operations flown. He was stationed at RAF Yatesbury, RAF Evanton, RAF Turweston, RAF Silverstone, RAF Swinderby, RAF Syerston, RAF Bardney, RAF Skellingthorpe, RAF Coningsby and RAF Hemswell. Aircraft flown in were, Dominie, Procter, Botha, Wellington, Stirling, Lancaster, Lincoln and Oxford. He flew a total of 31 Operations, 7 night with 9 squadron, 9 daylight and 4 night with 50 squadron and 11 night with 83 squadron. Targets were, Ferme D’urville, St Peirre du Mond, Argentan, Rennes, Orlean, Gelsenkirchen, Limoges, Beauvoir, Kiel, Stuttgart, Cahagnes, Mont Cadon, Bois de Cassau, St Leu D’esserent, Brest, La Pallice, Le Havre, Bremerhaven, Mönchengladbach, Flushing, Politz, Siegen, Karlsruhe, Ladbergen, Dresden, Rositz, Horton Fjord, Hamburg, Lutzkendorf, Pilsen. <span>His pilots on operations were </span>Squadron Leader Stubbs, Flying Officer Inniss, Flying Officer Cassidy, Flight Lieutenant Siddle, Wing Commander Osbourne and Flight Lieutenant Weber. He survived a fighter attack and a mid air collision. He also flew on a Cook's Tour, Operation Dodge to Bari and a goodwill tour to Chile. The log book has been annotated and also contains various pictures of the aircraft flown in, the squadron badges and a photo of himself in uniform.
1660 HCU
17 OTU
50 Squadron
83 Squadron
9 Squadron
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
bombing of the Normandy coastal batteries (5/6 June 1944)
Botha
Cook’s tour
Dominie
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 3
Lincoln
mid-air collision
military service conditions
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
Pathfinders
Proctor
RAF Bardney
RAF Coningsby
RAF Evanton
RAF Hemswell
RAF Silverstone
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF Swinderby
RAF Syerston
RAF Turweston
RAF Yatesbury
Stirling
tactical support for Normandy troops
training
Wellington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/809/10790/PEdmundsAE1702.2.jpg
7468243699cedaa8130696098e10bd0a
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/809/10790/AEdmundsAE170913.1.mp3
87de26978deba46cabce4d3a0e53ad91
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
Edmunds, Eddie
Albert Ernest Edmunds
A E Edmunds
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history with Eddie Edmunds DFC (b. 1917, 430709 Royal Air Force), his log book and one photograph. He flew operations with 106 and 608 Squadrons. The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Albert Edward Edmunds 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
2017-09-13
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. 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
Edmunds, AE
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
EE: What’s this for?
RP: This interview is being conducted on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Rod Pickles. The interviewee is Albert Ernest Edmunds. The interview is taking place at Albert Ernest Edmunds home in Bournemouth, Dorset on the 13th of September 2017. Doreen [unclear] is also present. Good morning, sir. I think we’ve established that you’d like to be known as Eddie so I’ll call you Eddie during the interview.
EE: Yes.
RP: If that is ok with you.
EE: Thank you.
RP: I think the best place to start is if you could tell us where you were born and your childhood and what led you to joining the RAF.
EE: I was born in Walthamstow which is now full of wogs but never mind [laughs] I was born in Walthamstow. I was educated with the Sir George Monoux Grammar School.
RP: Oh right.
EE: And when I left there at about seventeen or eighteen I joined an oil company in Aldwych, London. Just trying to think of the company. But anyway strangely enough the manager there was also educated by the people of my school.
RP: Oh right.
EE: But in Devon. So, we got on well. Then my mother, who lost — my father was killed in the ‘14/18 war. My mother got, was very good, she talked about superannuation which didn’t mean a thing to me. It was getting a, getting a [pause] when you leave work.
RP: A pension.
EE: A pension.
RP: Pension. Yeah.
EE: And she knew somebody in the electric supply company. London electricity supply. COLESCO County of London Electrics Supply Company which I joined and ultimately went off to war for four or five years and remained with them ‘til I retired. And her words were very good because I’ve got a pension. Not all that good but it’s good enough just to keep me going.
RP: Oh yes.
EE: And so that’s that part of it. So, I remained with the electric supply company working my way up. Studying at night school quite a bit. And became the sub area accountant for Essex and North Met which was, which I retired on. So that was my working life.
RP: Right. So what, when war was approaching then what made you think about the RAF?
EE: When I?
RP: When war was approaching what made you think about joining the RAF?
EE: I was always, always wanted to fly. And my next, had the war not occurred I would have joined up in the [pause] what was it? The Reserve.
RP: The Reserve. Yeah.
EE: Yeah.
RP: Yeah.
EE: Something like that.
RP: Yeah.
EE: But war, war took over and I obtained what I wanted to. I — flying was natural to me. I mean I soloed in four and a half hours.
RP: That’s very good.
EE: In the RAF.
RP: So where did you actually sign on? Where did you, where did you actually join the RAF? In Walthamstow? Where did you sign?
EE: No. I was called up.
RP: Oh right.
EE: Yes. I was waiting to join. I was called up and joined. I don’t know where I ended up. Blackpool I suppose.
RP: Yeah. So you started. I think you said you started as an air gunner for a while. Yes?
EE: I started as an ordinary aircraftsman. Wireless operator/air gunner. Because I did want to fly and that was it. As I couldn’t become a pilot at that time I wanted to be airborne. It was in me that I just wanted to fly.
RP: Yeah. So, can you remember your first operation as an air gunner then? Your first flight.
EE: No. I don’t because Stirlings were all electrical and so I was in the, in the globe at the top, you know. Cold. And don’t forget in those early days there was nothing like radar and all that. You just couldn’t find the bloody target. Or the pilot couldn’t. Not me. So I was just an air gunner. We were never attacked as such so I didn’t have much to say about being a wireless operator.
RP: Yeah.
EE: Air gunner.
RP: So how long were you an air gunner for before you went to pilot training then?
EE: I’d been —
Other: What do you want darling?
RP: Pause.
[recording paused]
RP: Ok, Eddie then, so you’re about a year as an air gunner and you go for pilot training which is obviously an ambition achieved for you.
EE: Yes.
RP: And you spent some time in Canada I believe.
EE: Service.
RP: Yeah.
EE: We went over there. Service.
RP: Yeah.
EE: To get to the elementary thing. Flying. Service training in Canada. Which was — which I enjoyed.
RP: What aircraft did you fly out there?
EE: Pardon?
RP: What aircraft were you flying in Canada then? What did they use?
EE: A twin. Twin engine.
RP: Was it, you got a Hudson?
EE: Must have been there.
RP: Hudson. Ventura. Wellington. Or an Oxford. You were on an Oxford.
EE: Oxford.
RP: Oxford. Yeah.
EE: Oxford.
RP: Yeah. I remember them.
EE: Yeah.
RP: They, so I mean that was a small aircraft so it was easier to fly I guess. Get used to flying.
EE: Yes. Got used to twin engines. For better or for worse I don’t know.
RP: Yeah.
EE: I just loved it.
RP: But the flight back from Canada to England, well to Scotland must have been interesting then.
EE: Well, I [pause] they were paying American pilots as captain. Which shook me rigid because I was RAF trained and the first, first time I met him he didn’t do any of the things we did. He just took off [laughs] And I was biting my fingers.
RP: Yeah.
EE: I thought he hasn’t checked this. He hasn’t checked. But he was very good. And so we flew. I was asked whether I’d like to be returned to England by boat or fly back. So I said I’ll fly back.
RP: So, what aircraft was that?
EE: Eh?
RP: What aircraft did you fly back in?
EE: Sorry. My mind’s —
RP: No. It’s ok.
[pause]
EE: Ventura.
RP: Ok. Was that an easy aircraft to fly? The Ventura.
EE: What?
RP: Was it an easy aircraft to fly?
EE: No. No. I I got to a point I could fly any aircraft.
RP: So it didn’t matter really. You just took to it.
RP: No. No. Yeah.
RP: Yeah. So you come back eventually.
RP: To Scotland.
RP: To Scotland. And then obviously down to —
RP: Bournemouth.
RP: Bournemouth. And you actually were here during your RAF career then. In Bournemouth.
RP: Sorry?
RP: You were actually in Bournemouth during your RAF career. You were actually here in Bournemouth.
RP: They posted me to Bournemouth because they were holding all, all aircrew. And my mother lived in Bournemouth so I thought good. I was in Bournemouth for about three days. And then I went off to service training.
RP: So, you joined. You were doing a lot of training between your return. So, when did you first fly a Lancaster? Can you remember that? Your first Lancaster flight.
EE: It’ll be in —
RP: Where were you when you first picked up a Lancaster?
[pause]
EE: There we are.
[pause – pages turning]
EE: There’s his signature. Oh, Manchester. There we are. December the 7th ’42.
RP: Oh right. So, were you on Lancasters from that point to the end of the war?
EE: They, they put me on Manchesters.
RP: Yeah.
EE: First.
RP: And then to Lancasters.
EE: And then on the 7th I started on Lancasters.
RP: So, then you were posted to 106 Squadron and —
EE: Ultimately.
RP: And that was under Guy Gibson. Yes?
EE: Yeah.
RP: So, there’s been many stories about Guy Gibson. But what can you tell us about him as the squadron commander?
EE: Who?
RP: Guy Gibson. What can you tell us about him?
EE: Well, I thought, in my lack of knowledge about the RAF as such because he was, to me he was, he was RAF. I was just a new boy. I liked him because he was discipline. You see, he said for instance every morning he didn’t want the aircrew to join in the, in the squadron before 10 o’clock. That sort of thing. He looked, he looked after people but woe betide you if you were late [laughs] That sort of discipline. Which I liked.
RP: And of course he was famous, famously a very, one of the best pilots of Bomber Command.
EE: Well, that’s another thing. I mean I used to come back from an operation full of sweat and what would you and he used to take his helmet off and his hair was all posh you know. He —
RP: He was very calm.
EE: He obviously was a fantastic pilot and he, you see he’d done a lot of ops before he was a night fighter. All sorts. And he used to give us a hint. His experience he’d pass on. For instance that when we were leaving a raid you flew for about a minute and then dived left or right to [pause] for about two or three thousand feet and that. Because his experience of night fighting was that he’d have somebody in the sights and they’d disappear.
RP: Because they’d gone up.
EE: That sort of thing.
RP: Yeah.
EE: So it was probably —
RP: Yeah. Because it confuses the opposition.
EE: So that’s what admired me because he was an experienced bloke but he passed it all on.
RP: Yeah.
EE: Yeah.
RP: So, how many sorties did you do with 106? How many sorties? Can you remember?
EE: How many?
RP: Operations did you fly?
EE: Thirty.
RP: You did the thirty which was the normal amount.
EE: Yeah.
RP: And you got through them. Can you remember any particular raids that you did that sort of stand out in your memory?
EE: Well, no. My, my, pretty awkward, and my engineer was saying, ‘We’re getting low on fuel.’ And I did the worst thing possible. I came down in a storm to see if I could pinpoint anything at all [coughs] After about half an hour — no, a quarter of an hour my engineer said, ‘We ought to go back east. We’re — ’
RP: Right.
EE: Because we were running short of fuel. So I said ok. But that moment I thought I’d hit, I thought I’d hit power lines.
RP: Oh dear.
EE: Because there was the most [coughs] most amazing flash. And when I got going after the flash I could see flames on my right. On my — so I said to the engineer, ‘Feather the starboard engine.’ He said, ‘There isn’t a bloody starboard.’ It had gone. Right completely. What I’d hit I don’t know. But —
RP: You were that low were you?
EE: And I was still flying [laughs]
RP: Oh right.
EE: So I climbed to three thousand feet on three engines and the missing engine and got the crew to abandon. So the two gunners went, the wireless operator went [pause] somebody else went. Which left me and the engineer and the navigator.
RP: Right.
EE: So, the navigator said, ‘I’ll bale out now.’ [coughs] And he disappeared down the steps to go forward.
RP: Yeah.
EE: And I was thinking, well the engineer will go and I’ll have to just try and land somewhere. The next minute the engine, the engineer, who always carried a bloody great knife in his flying boots appeared with a knife and I thought he’s gone mad [laughs] disappeared down the hatchway.
RP: Right.
EE: And came back with the navigator. The navigator trying to get out where it was damaged.
RP: Oh, he was caught. His —
EE: Caught. So he had to cut.
RP: Oh right.
EE: So that left three of us. And at three thousand feet I didn’t know where we were. All I knew there must be some high ground. So we came down about a hundred feet a minute. And in the meantime, in the meantime I was yelling out for aid and the, I got down under the cloud and there was Burn lit up. Which I landed.
RP: So, you think you lost the engine somewhere over France. Switzerland.
EE: Yeah. The engine had gone.
RP: So you could have hit a hill or something. Or the top of a hill.
EE: Well, the engineers I talked to when I got back they, they said they had to go miles to find the reduction gear.
RP: What?
EE: They found the engine. Reduction gear. But the thing is you see, Gibson. Gibson sent his car to pick us up.
RP: Really. That was good because obviously Switzerland’s neutral isn’t it?
EE: Pardon?
RP: So how did you get out of Switzerland then?
EE: No. I was in, I was in Yorkshire.
RP: Oh. I thought when you said Burn I thought you meant Berne in Switzerland.
EE: Yeah.
RP: Oh Burn in Yorkshire. Oh sorry. Right. Got you.
EE: Rather then get somebody to fly me back. And that’s, that’s what I admire about Gibson. He looked after us.
RP: Well, yeah he looked after you. Oh I see. So when you talked about Burn I thought you meant you were flying out of Germany and into, into France. So you’d crashed. You landed in Yorkshire safely. So, is this where you won the DFC?
EE: I don’t know.
RP: Is that?
EE: Don’t see that was anything.
RP: So, what, what were you awarded the DFC for? Because that was pretty good flying wasn’t it? Let’s just pause.
[recording paused]
EE: I was attacked by enemy aircraft twice and each time my two gunners who were eighteen years old just saw them. Told me to weave. And that was our discipline you see. When they said weave I didn’t say, ‘Why?’ or ‘What?’
RP: You just went. Yeah.
EE: I wove. And each time it was lucky. They, the enemy aircraft missed.
RP: Because that, that was part of the team work. That. You said you had a good crew.
EE: Oh yeah. Very good. But I got that from the illustration of [pause]
RP: Gibson. Guy Gibson had told you to —
EE: Yeah. His type of [pause] I used on my crew because lots of crew the few times I flew with another crew they were all joking and that whereas my crew were quiet.
RP: They, they just got on with the job.
EE: Yeah.
RP: Yeah. But you, I mean looking at this.
EE: And the same with the engineer. Because each time we were attacked the engineer, the enemy aircraft set fire to an engine and within five seconds my engineer had damped it down. Stopped it.
RP: And then.
EE: And the other crew.
RP: Just got on with it. Yeah.
EE: Yeah.
RP: Now, I’ve got an interesting entry here. You’d been to Spezia and you were short of fuel on return and you landed at Exeter. Do you remember that one?
EE: Oh yeah.
RP: Why? That was Italy wasn’t it?
EE: Italy. Yeah.
RP: That’s a long trip that?
EE: Took a group captain with me.
RP: Yeah. Group Captain Odbert.
EE: Odbert. Yeah.
RP: What was he? He was just a guest was he?
EE: Eh?
RP: Was he just flying for observation?
EE: He was, I don’t know why. He adopted me. And we got on very well and he was killed. Now, my rear gunner who was a little Irish chap.
RP: McCready.
EE: Yeah. McCready.
RP: Sound Irish. Yeah. Sergeant McCready. I’ve got him here. Yeah.
EE: McCready. Anyway, he, when he finished he went somewhere and he and Odbert and a lot of other high, high class RAF people were in a Wellington being demonstrated what weaving was.
RP: Right.
EE: And the bloody wing came off.
RP: Oh, my goodness.
EE: So, Odbert was killed, my rear gunner was killed. Yeah.
RP: But Wellingtons were a fairly strong aircraft wasn’t it?
EE: So somebody —
RP: Too much strain. Yeah. Oh dear.
EE: And they had four or five top, top men there.
RP: Yeah. But no, I mean that’s some of the things you’ve mentioned in here that are just amazing, aren’t they? The Wellington flying and —
EE: But strangely enough I had more trouble on the years I was training people. I had some really dicey turns there including a mid-air. Mid-air collision. Including, if you can imagine it we were training [coughs] pilots and air crew on to Wellingtons too. That was the score.
RP: Yeah.
EE: The one I had was quite good. We took off one night. Luckily it was clear as a bell. And we got to six hundred feet and I said, ‘It’s about time we took the coals off,’ to him, and he handed me the two throttles. And he said [laughs] and he locked it on and instead of unlocking it and of course I had duplicate things but they were fed by —
RP: Oh right.
EE: So I was, so I thought what do I do now? So I, this is on a Wellington, all the engines were going full blast. Couldn’t stop them. So I did a circuit and I said, a long one, luckily it was a lovely night. I could see. And came back on the, towards the aerodrome and I said to him, ‘When it comes switch off the engine.’
RP: Yeah. So, glide in.
EE: Glide down. And what happened? One engine cut and the starboard didn’t. It was so hot. So, I had to go all [laughs] all the way around again.
RP: Oh no.
EE: And I looked at the engine on my starboard side and it was red hot. You could see it. I could see it. I thought any minute now that’s going to blow. So I said the thing I hadn’t remembered. I said, ‘When you cut the engines next time would you pull the, the choke.’ And luckily it it worked.
RP: Right.
EE: So I was then about three hundred feet. And this is the RAF training because although there is a war on you had to have elementary flying. They went through the lot. And I remembered about emergency landing to keep it in sight. Not to turn around and lose it. So you side slip. So there I was in this aircraft side slipping.
RP: And you landed ok.
EE: Yeah.
RP: Yeah.
EE: Got down to about three hundred feet and I judged our distance it was from the runway and we landed. The thing is we couldn’t stop very well. But that’s one thing.
RP: That’s amazing.
EE: And what else was —
RP: You’ve got.
EE: Oh. Had a mid-air collision.
RP: Yeah. Who was that with? You had a mid-air collision?
EE: Yeah. We were designated to go air firing north in North Wales. And I went. I took the crew. A new crew.
RP: This is a Lancaster. Yeah.
EE: No. This is on a Wellington.
RP: Oh. This is a Wellington. Yeah. Fine. Ok.
EE: Still training.
RP: Yeah. Yeah.
EE: And I could see very stormy weather ahead and I said to them, ‘I’ll take over.’ Luckily I did because out of the clouds came a small aircraft. Hit my wing.
RP: Right.
EE: And came off and they, that was one of the instructors. And he had to have —
RP: Yeah.
EE: I’ve got it all there.
RP: Yes.
EE: And killed him. Anyway, they sent somebody from Air Ministry. An old, a really old chap. Wizened. Nice bloke. And he asked all the questions. And I was getting a bit perturbed because it looked as though he was saying it was my fault.
RP: Trying to blame you but you were in the right place. Yeah.
EE: And I really was worried. I thought well it wasn’t my fault. And then I mentioned to him about flying. I said, ‘I was only flying on the air, on the track that these, the people gave me.’ So, he, he left me there. Never saw him anymore.
RP: So, there was no, nothing.
EE: Obviously he was going to blame them for the fact that I was on the track.
RP: Yeah. Yeah. I was trying to find but that, that’s, I mean that shows one example was a Wellington lose a wing and crashing but there you’re hit but the Wellington stays flying so it shows you it was a fairly robust aeroplane.
EE: Oh yeah.
RP: Because that was another Barnes Wallis invention, wasn’t it?
EE: I did about eight hundred hours on Wellingtons.
RP: Yeah.
EE: And I got, got to like them.
RP: Which was your favourite aircraft?
EE: Oh, a Lanc.
RP: You still, you still like that. I’ve got one here if I could ask you about which sounds quite interesting. This was April the 9th 1943. You were at Duisburg and you were attacked by a Junkers 88 over the target.
EE: Yeah.
RP: And the port, the port outer engine was hit and on fire. Enemy aircraft broke off after two attacks and was seen losing height. Were your engines hit? Do you remember that? When you were coming back from Duisburg. You were attacked by a Junkers and the port outer was hit.
EE: Yeah. That’s [coughs] what date was that?
RP: This is the 9th of April 1943.
EE: April. That’s right.
RP: Are you ok?
EE: Yeah. That was, strangely enough that attack was made with the, with the moonlight which is unusual.
RP: Yeah.
EE: And I got attacked. After the panic died down and I got, the navigator recovered himself and gave me a track home. And it was moonlight and I couldn’t get more than sixteen thousand feet on three engines. And I could see everything. I could see the cows in the field.
RP: It all looked very nice.
EE: And I thought, I thought I will never make it. And nobody interfered and I just flew back.
RP: That’s amazing. Yeah.
EE: From Duisburg. All that time. All that way.
RP: And that was to Syerston. Yeah.
EE: And I thought —
RP: Yeah. Yeah.
EE: Where the? I warned the crew of course. I was sure that enemy fighter aircraft would pick —
RP: Yeah.
EE: Pick me off.
RP: But you were no trouble at all.
EE: No trouble.
RP: And you landed ok.
EE: It was a lovely moonlight night and I could see for miles.
RP: Yeah. That’s amazing. So, when you, why was there a posting from Lancasters to Wellington? Did you volunteer or did they just post you?
EE: No.
RP: Or were you told you had to go?
EE: I volunteered. My crew didn’t want to do another.
RP: But you’d done the thirty.
EE: Yeah.
RP: Yeah.
EE: So, I just let them go and I got posted as a, to the instructor’s school.
RP: Yeah. That’s flying the Oxford. Yeah.
EE: Yeah.
RP: Yeah.
EE: And then I spent quite a year or so.
RP: So, you became an instructor.
EE: An instructor.
RP: Well, they obviously recognised your qualities with bringing all these aeroplanes back.
EE: They said I got [pause] that I was —
RP: That was, that was Castle Combe. Yeah.
EE: Bomb aimer’s instructor.
RP: That was Castle Combe you would have been at. And then Lichfield. Yeah. So, you’re on the Wellingtons and you’ve done a few and then looking at this you moved to Mosquitoes. Did you volunteer for the Mosquito?
EE: Oh yes. Oh [coughs] that was my end. That was really good. I loved the Mosquito.
RP: Because you — that was a very fast aeroplane wasn’t it?
EE: Yeah.
RP: Yeah.
EE: You see, also Mosquito, I don’t think I recorded it but twice when it was foggy [pause] when it was foggy they used to line us up in the fog on the three points from wheel and the two wheels and I had to take off in fog.
RP: Oh right.
EE: Just on instruments. And of course when you got to about eight hundred feet the fog had disappeared. But —
RP: And looking at this you, you bombed Berlin a few times.
EE: Yeah.
RP: So, how long would it take you to fly to Berlin then?
EE: About two hours.
RP: Because that’s, that’s moving fairly quickly.
EE: The time. The time’s there.
RP: That’s down, yeah Downham Market. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
EE: Time.
RP: Oh right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You’ve got it. Yeah. Night fog. Two hours. That is an amazing statistic. And Flight Lieutenant Lamb. Was he always your, always your second pilot for most of the —
EE: He was, he was the navigator.
RP: He was the navigator.
EE: Navigator bomb aimer. Yeah.
RP: Yeah. Yeah. Because you have two people in it. Yes. But I mean did you — obviously you’re, you’re bombing from a certain height. Did you do much low flying in the Mosquito?
EE: No.
RP: No. Because I interviewed a navigator on a Mosquito can remember flying through Amsterdam very low and seeing the faces of the Germans shooting him. Shooting at him. Because it was a low reccy.
EE: Yeah.
RP: Yeah. But you were always bombing from a certain height.
EE: Yeah. We —
RP: And I guess fighters didn’t bother you because of your speed. Yeah?
EE: Well, we were always on the alert naturally and what they did was find some spare petrol tanks and —
Other: Rod, would you like another coffee?
RP: I’ll be fine thanks.
Other: You would. Yes. Are you alright, darling? Right. Did you say yes, Rod?
RP: Yes.
[recording paused]
RP: But looking at this, on June the 2nd you flew in a Lancaster in 1945. Did you — was that a trip just to celebrate or something?
EE: No. Where?
RP: Was that? Because obviously the war had ended.
EE: Does it say where?
RP: A Cook’s Tour. What’s a Cook Tour?
EE: Oh yeah.
RP: What’s a Cook’s? Sounds interesting.
EE: We called it Cook’s Tour because after the war we used to volunteer to take an aircraft full of —
RP: Yes. A lot of passengers then.
EE: Ground crew.
RP: Yeah. Yeah.
EE: Just to see.
RP: That was just a flight experience thing was it?
EE: What?
RP: A flight experience for the ground crew.
EE: Just —
RP: Yeah. Yeah.
EE: Just to see where the bombing took place.
RP: Yeah. Well looking at this it was a Cook’s Tour because it’s Gravesend. Boulogne, St Omer, Douai, St Vith, Kaiserslautern, Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Worms, Darmstadt — good grief.
EE: Yeah.
RP: And you end up at Dunkirk. And then you return to Remagen. You flew over. That’s amazing. So a Cook’s Tour was just taking people around.
EE: Yeah.
RP: So, you did a few of them here but then you took them in the Mosquito. And Flying Officer Cooke. Yeah. Yes. I can see AC Jones, AC Woods there. So this getting very close to, well there’s another Cook’s Tour. Different people. So, we’re getting towards the end here but you’re still, you’re still flying in the Lancaster aren’t you towards the end there? Where, where did you spend your last months then? You were at Snaith, Full Sutton, Gransden Lodge Warboys.
EE: I spent them on in 8 Group. Pathfinder group.
RP: Yeah. Lancaster.
EE: They were Mosquitoes.
RP: That’s lovely. So, if I could just take us — so at the end then. That’s 1945. You were taken up in a Mitchell by a flight.
EE: Oh yeah.
RP: Yeah. That was your last as a passenger. Yeah.
EE: He dropped us off in Belgium.
RP: Yeah.
EE: After the war.
RP: Yeah.
EE: But they didn’t make any arrangements.
RP: Oh right.
EE: So I had to find a bloke I knew who was flying back to England. It was a right mess up after the war.
RP: Yeah. Because you flew it to, you flew it to Brussels and somebody flew you back. Yeah. Your last flight then was October the 3rd 1945 —
EE: Probably. Yeah.
RP: In the RAF. And then you, but you still, you’ve still got a record here that you’re still —
EE: Yeah.
RP: Civil flying. Yeah.
EE: Yeah. In Bournemouth.
RP: Yeah.
EE: In the Flying Club.
RP: So that was flying the Tiger Moth. That was a different type of aeroplane.
EE: Anything. Yeah.
RP: Yeah. Compared to a Lancaster a Tiger Moth must have been a holiday.
EE: It provided a good variety.
RP: Oh, there’s a lot of —
EE: Yeah.
RP: But you’re still, out of all the aeroplanes we’ve got there the Wellington, the Martinet, the Ventura, the Hudson — the Lancaster is still your favourite you think. But I think we can, I mean looking at the citation for the DFC I think I can understand why you got it because you’ve had a number of incidents and brought every aircraft back and —
EE: Yeah.
RP: Never lost a member of crew, had you?
EE: No.
RP: And you did thirty sorties which is a remarkable statistic and I think I can understand why. Why you got it. But looking back then if we could Eddie. You had a very amazing time there. Would you do it all again?
EE: Oh yeah. I mean, I wouldn’t now [laughs]
RP: Not now. But I mean if you had your life again.
EE: Oh yeah.
RP: You’d do the same.
EE: Yeah.
RP: You’d do the same thing.
EE: Because flying to me was everything.
RP: Yeah.
EE: I don’t know why.
RP: Yeah. Can you remember the last time you flew an aeroplane then? How long ago was that? When you were last airborne.
EE: Oh, that would be —
RP: Is it part of this logbook is it?
EE: After the war.
RP: Yeah. Yeah. But you didn’t fly much after that then. You —
EE: No.
RP: You were just a passenger.
EE: We couldn’t afford it.
RP: No. No. There is that. So, you were just a passenger. So that would be —oh you’ve got 1986. You’ve got it. In a Grumman.
EE: Yeah.
RP: You were a part of the thing. The last one where you flew would be October the 12th ‘47 then. Local flying. But, but this, this logbook is — there are so many, so many incidents here. That I think I can understand why you were — and your assessments are really good aren’t they? I think you’ve been ,you were always assessed quite well weren’t you? And you, I think what has come out of this is that you just loved to fly.
EE: What amazed me was that after ops when I was instructing after being passed as an instructor me and many others spent a year at least training.
RP: Yeah.
EE: But we never got an AFM or anything like that.
RP: No. No. Despite — because that is hard work isn’t it? You’re trying to impart your knowledge but did you, I’m guessing you told them to make sure they weave from side to side occasionally did you? Passed on the Gibson, the Gibson method. So, Guy Gibson, I think obviously you have great respect for him sadly died before the end of the war. What was the view in the RAF of why he crashed? Do you know?
EE: Know what?
RP: Because Gibson crashed in a Mosquito didn’t he? What was the view of the RAF then?
EE: I don’t know.
RP: Yeah.
EE: I mean, I learned it and I was very sad because I think with all he did and he did a lot rightly or wrongly that was his thing but I didn’t think. I didn’t think they’d let him go on fighting.
RP: No. They wanted him as a PR man didn’t they? I mean the, what always surprised me was that he never, he was not promoted to group captain. Which given all he’d done, as you say, all he’d done I was quite surprised that he was never promoted. But I must, I’ll just pick one more out of here if I could. Let me have a look. Because early on in your training —
EE: I think, I think in a way he was like myself. That he’d do anything to keep flying.
RP: Well, yes I think that. We don’t know. He might have turned promotion down mightn’t he? He might have turned it down. Ok. Let’s have a look at this then. So [pause] yes, you, you mentioned the Ventura flight back.
EE: One of my worst experiences in flying, the only time I was frightened was when after when I was instructing on — the group captain had a [pause] I’ve forgotten the name.
RP: Odbert. No.
EE: No. No. The group captain of where I was stationed.
RP: Oh right.
EE: Had his own aircraft.
RP: Oh right.
EE: And he never flew it but the education chap and I got on very well and he had a, he had a son being educated somewhere in Birmingham. And occasionally he’d ask the CO could we borrow a little aircraft.
RP: Yeah. Do you want to have a look?
[pause]
EE: Martinet. A Martinet.
RP: Martinet. Oh right. Right.
EE: Which I loved because I used to use it occasionally.
RP: This was a small aircraft. Yeah.
EE: That’s, it wasn’t mine. It was the group captain’s. But whatever. Anyway, I used to fly him to Birmingham. Land at Birmingham. I’d go to the mess. He’d go and see his son for two or three hours. We’d fly it back. Piece of cake. One, one day when he was wanting to see his son terrible weather. So, I said, ‘That’s alright.’ Bighead.
RP: Yes.
EE: ‘I’ll fly you.’ So, we flew to Birmingham. When we got to Birmingham it was you name it was bad. And I landed. So, he went to see his son. I went to the mess. Came back. And the chap, this just shows how you can go wrong, the chap in charge of the aerodrome said, ‘You can’t fly in this weather.’ Bighead says, ‘Yes, I can.’ And we had quite a little do. And in the end I said, ‘Well, I’m Flight Lieutenant Edmunds. I’m in charge of this and I insist on flying it.’ So, he more or less shrugged. Rightly or wrongly. So, this chap, a friend of mine got in the aircraft. It was pouring with rain. You couldn’t see to the wall.
RP: Really.
EE: Bighead. Fly in anything. So, I flew. Took off. Got to six hundred feet and the engine stopped. It literally stopped.
RP: Oh right.
EE: And I didn’t know what to do because the only control I had was an on and off switch with the petrol. So, I put the nose down. Couldn’t, couldn’t see as far as Doreen. And I thought I hope I’m flying somewhere. It’s too late. And suddenly the engine started again so we flew home. But in, to have that stop because I was insisting I was right and I wasn’t.
RP: And you learned from that then.
EE: Yeah.
RP: I’ve just looked up your flight back from Canada. It was nearly a twenty hour flight wasn’t it? Amazing.
EE: Oh yeah.
RP: Deuville, Gander, Blue West One, Blue West One Reykjavik, Reykjavik, Prestwick.
EE: That was, that was an interesting.
RP: Oh dear. Twenty hours. That’s a long flight isn’t it?
EE: Yeah, but —
RP: And then you landed in Prestwick. Gosh.
EE: But —
RP: I mean, that’s — you could have come back by boat you know.
EE: Eh?
RP: You could have come back by boat.
EE: Yeah. Twenty days.
RP: Twenty hours instead of twenty days. But yeah, I mean this is a fascinating document Eddie and I think it’s, it’s a treasure trove really. Some amazing [pause] Did you ever meet up with your crew after the war? Did you ever meet up with your crew after the war?
EE: No.
RP: You never saw them again.
EE: No.
RP: Oh, that’s a shame. That is a shame. But I mean you’ve, some of the descriptions here are amazing. But all I can say is it’s been really fascinating to talk to you.
EE: Good.
RP: I’m so pleased to have been able to do this interview. It’s amazing. And I think we could probably talk about it for the rest of the day but I realise you need to rest.
EE: Yeah.
RP: So, my thanks to you and thank you to Doreen for having me here. And we’ll say, stop there and say thank you.
EE: Good.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Eddie Edmunds
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Rod Pickles
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-09-13
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AEdmundsAE170913, PEdmundsAE1702
Format
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00:47:57 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--London
England--Dorset
England--Bournemouth
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Duisburg
Canada
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Hampshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1943-04
Description
An account of the resource
Eddie Edmunds was born in Walthamstow and was educated at a grammar school, then joined an oil company. He eventually moved to the Electric Supply Company and became an accountant. Eddie had always wanted to fly so he initially joined the reserve and then the Royal Air Force as an air gunner for about a year. He then went to Canada to train as a pilot and was eventually posted to 106 Squadron under Guy Gibson, whom he quoted as being ‘a fantastic pilot, disciplined and looked after people’. Eddie carried out 30 operations.
He recalled an incident when they had been low on petrol and had to descend in a storm, the starboard engine on fire. The navigator bailed out, was caught up but the engineer released him with a knife and both came down safely.
In April 1943 his aircraft was attacked over Duisburg in the moonlight - he could see everything but landed safely. Eddie had done about 800 hours on Wellingtons but his preferred aircraft was the Lancaster. Eddie then got posted as an instructor and flew Oxfords and Mosquitos. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sue Smith
Julie Williams
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
106 Squadron
608 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bale out
bombing
Cook’s tour
Distinguished Flying Cross
flight engineer
forced landing
Gibson, Guy Penrose (1918-1944)
Lancaster
Manchester
mid-air collision
Mosquito
navigator
Oxford
pilot
RAF Downham Market
RAF Syerston
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/816/10798/PFarrAA1701.1.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/816/10798/AFarrAA170712.2.mp3
d49cec1a2dbe85a82d83be9b60eed25b
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
Farr, Allan Avery
A A Farr
Description
An account of the resource
Six items. An oral history interview with Allan Farr DFM (1923 - 2018, 1434564 Royal Air Force) as well as his flying logbook, a photograph, list of operations, a map, contemporary photograph and a song. He flew operations as an air gunner with 100, 625 and 460 Squadrons.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Allan Farr and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-07-12
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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Farr, AA
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 12th of July 2017 and we’re in Barnwood, Gloucester with Allan Farr, DFM to talk about his life and times. So, Alan what are your earliest recollections of life?
AF: Well, the earliest recollection that I, that I can think of is school. Although you had to be four and a half or five to go to the juniors, but I started off by going to, let me think now for a minute [pause] Benedict’s Road School. Which was in Small Heath. I can remember going each morning through Digby Park to get to the school from the place where we lived in Floyer Road, Small Heath. That was pretty well straightforward then. The only time I had any ruckus at school was when my teeth became bad and I had to go to the dentist and he took eight double teeth out. Now, for a child off five I can remember all of that. And I can remember my mother of course going with me and saying, ‘Now, you behave yourself.’ [laughs] As if somebody wouldn’t behave themselves in the, in the dental bloody trade. And of course they hadn’t got all the equipment then because what was I? Five and a half. Six and a half. All through eating sugary stuff. But my teacher was named Miss Walters and when she said, ‘Why were you away from school for two or three days?’ I forget what it was now. And I said to her, ‘It’s because I had some teeth out ma’am.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘You must let me see this. Open your mouth.’ And she ran her finger around the gums that I’d got now instead of teeth. See. And that at the age appalled me. And I went home. And I never went to that school again.
CB: Oh right.
AF: Simply because of the disbelief. And I, I went then to Somerville Road School which I think was the junior school. That was on the Green Lane. And funnily enough we moved home then to live in Palace Road which was sort of lined up, if you think of it as a gun barrel onto the school that I was going to go to. And that little thing is, that’s that one thing has remained in memory, oh forever you know. The school. I had good friends. One passed away a few years ago. Frank Aden. I could never understand why I couldn’t do my muffler up like him. He had a lovely wool muffler and it seemed to fill this area because he fluffed it up. And I had a thin scarf from my mother which used to tie around my neck and slowly encircle me you know, sort of thing. We used to do a lot of bicycle riding but only locally. But used to stay out well until half past eight, 9 o’clock, you know. Otherwise and that it was purely a child’s life. My father worked at the coal stores in town. He used to take me to work with him on a Saturday because I enjoyed, enjoyed being with the workers in the coal stores. You know. One of those things that other children hadn’t got, I suppose. But, and the Market Hall was very, very close to the [unclear] Mansel’s Coal Stores. And I liked the market, I liked the flavour of the market. Men and women altogether working away. Every sort of stall you could think, think of. Even to its, its own animal, little animal zoo which I thought was lovely to have in a town because Birmingham was a big place. But slowly grew up until my only, what can you say? My only sort of adventure left was to work actually in the Market Hall itself. Which I did do finally at Reg Johnson’s Fish Monger and Poulterer and I was there until unfortunately the Market Hall got bombed and became a wreck. But the council, what they did made sort of daylight stalls where people could rent either a fish and poultry shop or a flower shop or anything that would make a shop and you were given a stall. And that I stopped at until I was eighteen and a quarter when I joined up because my father was now in uniform as a second lieutenant. Regained his commission. And we saw him on regular sort of trips back home. And I thought he was quite magnificent [laughs] as a child you know. For getting on for twelve, thirteen, fourteen then. Left school at fourteen. Went straight to the Market Hall. Straight to Reg Johnson who was a friend of my father’s and I began work at fourteen in the Market Hall. And it seemed to me that my what, my finest dream had been recognised by somebody somewhere because now I worked in the market and that’s what I’d always wanted. Not much really but it was, it was a life on its own. The market was quite full of good people you know. Working class of course but they were at it all the time. And I had one or two little adventures in the market but nothing really much. One of them was I’d not long left them and I was in blue. In the RAF. And I was stationed in civilian lodgings in Blackpool but I was on duty this one day with a rifle and five rounds of ammunition and a whistle. And I was guarding Derby Baths. If you know perhaps of the size of it I had to walk around along the front with a rifle at the slope. And I was doing just that one day and something I remember is I could see from the corner of my eye even though I was walking up and down with a rifle outside the Derby Baths an RAF officer coming from my right to walk past me. So I thought, right I’d better recognise him somehow because of his rank. He’s an officer. I could tell by the quality of his overcoat. And as he came to me I got the rifle at the slope and I saluted him by putting my fingers to my right temple and he walked on a few paces. Then he stopped and came back and he said, ‘Do you know sonny, one of us has done wrong here and I don’t know which one it is.’ And he turned around and walked away again. All is forgiven sort of thing. I should have saluted him on the butt of course [laughs] But that was a small adventure that always stuck with me because he was so nice about it. And I thought I’ve joined the right mob for a start off, you know. They’re alright. They forgive you quickly. But otherwise than that I was stationed at Croydon and stationed at St Mawgan down in Cornwall until it came my turn to go for training for an air gunner which was about twelve months later because they were really filled up with all sorts of people wanting to do their bit. And the next thing we know, I think it was either twenty eight or forty of us all wanting training as air gunners finished up on the docks at Liverpool looking for a boat called the [pause] We were going to Canada anyhow. Can’t think of the name of the boat and it’s rather important because we were going to go through miles and miles and miles of the same sort of boat. A nine knot convoy it was. And I can’t think of the name of the boat now. Should be able to. But we were found jobs on board a lovely little ship. A nine thousand tonner, if you can say, you know a nice little ship but it was all the corridors down below decks were done with cedar and different named woods. It turned out to be an ATA boat which was an Air Transport boat, which was Air Transport Auxiliary and they would fly planes over, be sorted out and go back on a boat to fly some more planes over. So I thought that was very clever. So we had a good boat to go across to Canada. We landed at Halifax. But it was a nine knot convoy so I think it took us about fifteen days to do the trip across the North Sea. I hope I’ve got that right. Geography never was my good class. But anyhow we settled off. While I was being in England I’d become a member of the RAF boxing team with the very clever reason that because they wanted my name on the programme. Farr. Because Tommy Farr was the boxer then and he was getting ready to fight Joe Louis [laughs] That was another thing that my name sorted. Sorted me out. But that’s what it was. And what happened was of course when we got to Halifax in Canada immediately I was, I became another member of the RAF Canada apostrophe [pause] in the boxing team. I caught some very nice blows as well. I didn’t do very well. They all had more experience than me but I stuck to it. And there we did our training and we went back on the Elizabeth. It took us sixteen days crossing. Fifteen, sixteen days crossing in a nine thousand ton boat. And going back home we landed up north in Scotland and we had to be ferried by small boats across from where the Elizabeth lay to where the harbour was because the boat was too big for the harbour. So, that was another little adventure. And on one occasion going across I was in the small boat taking us to the harbour when it crossed in front of the Elizabeth where she lay and it’s amazing the size of that boat. And my job on board with a rifle and no ammunition, I don’t think I looked very trustworthy was to guard the foot of the stairs leading to the bridge in case of any trouble. But I suppose I was supposed to hit them with the rifle and not shoot them because I’d got no ammunition. I always felt wrong about that somehow or other. Still. And also we, we were given the location which we were to call the sergeant’s mess because we were sergeants now. Now we were trained aircrew. And the first meal I had or second or third meal I had on the Elizabeth was breakfast on a boarded up [pause] Oh, it was a boarded up swimming pool and that’s, with trestle tables and chairs, that’s where we had our sergeant’s meal twice a day. And one of the waiters coming out brought me my breakfast and it was a man I’d worked for in the Birmingham Market Hall named Jack Bickerstaff. And he never spoke to me and I’d worked for him as an employee for some time. And he never spoke to me. I never spoke to him except to say, ‘Thank you.’ But what I felt like saying was, ‘You sit down and eat my breakfast.’ It looked like he needed it. But I hadn’t got the pluck and I didn’t see him again. But I found out that he’d been passing communist literature around somewhere where he was stationed in Canada so they booted him back again on the Elizabeth. Back to be demobbed. Not wanted. That’s terrible for a grown man isn’t it? But anyhow it happened. Never saw him again. Joined [pause] went from there to Croydon. That’s from Chipping Warden to Croydon. Then we were warned off about going on a course to become air gunners. We’d already done the basic training in Canada. We were only there sort of three months but they asked me if I wanted to join the Canadian Royal Air Force because I knew more about aircraft recognition than they did. It had been my hobby and they wanted me to become an instructor in Canada. But I thought long and hard about it but what my father would have thought about it I don’t know. So I stayed as I was and went back home to win the war. That’s [laughs] all I can say about that period. He’d, my father unfortunately was becoming an ill man so he had to finish. He was demobbed and Ansell’s, the publican people gave him a pub in Wolverhampton for somewhere to live and to run. Which he did with my mother, Faye. And I was of course in the RAF and now I was doing circuits and bumps in a Wellington at Lichfield because that was the name of the aerodrome where they trained air gunners. And next thing we know we did our final trip which was to Paris where we dropped leaflets. And then we went to my first Squadron which was 100 Squadron. Used to be a fighter Squadron during the war 100 Squadron but it was bomber now and it was Wellingtons. In Canada we trained on Fairey Battles and I sat with a Vickers gas operated machine gun on a Scarfe mounting. But that was soon all over. They didn’t spend a lot of time with us with training. To go from a single Scarfe mounted machine gun to a turret with four automatic machine guns took some beating really. But times being what they were you didn’t moan. You just got on with it. And so I passed my air gunner’s test. The way they crewed us up they’d got seven different categories of crew at Chipping Warden. No. Not Chipping Warden. At Lichfield, which was our Operational Training Unit. We went there to train to be air gunners in turrets. And a daunting thing it was as well because all the turrets were so complicated and yet so basic. You know. You either loved it or left it. But I stuck it out. And then we were called together, the seven different categories of crew and we were all shepherded in to the officer’s mess and we were told to sort ourselves out in crews. They found this was the, the better way. That like would attract like, I presume. I don’t know. But we had, I think there was [pause] it takes a bit of figuring out. Seven in a crew. And then we had to form I think it was twenty crews all with seven in. And had to report to somebody at a desk as you are writing all our names down in lots of sevens because that’s what the crews were going to be. And that’s what they were doing all over England I presume to get crews together. They had to train them all. But of course pilot’s training was running to a year or more than that. And navigators was a long course. But I got my little air gunner’s brevet and I was happy as I was. My father was pleased. My mother was worried. But that’s how it all was at that time. And so we finished up on the Squadron, 100 Squadron as operational. Which I thought was great. I had worries. But as long as my mother and father didn’t worry I wasn’t going to worry. But I think they were good actors basically. Yeah. We were on the Squadron now.
CB: We’re going to pause just for a minute.
AF: As you wish.
CB: Yeah. Only —
[recording paused]
AF: Yeah.
CB: So just going back a bit the interesting thing is that you and your future wife joined the RAF together but how did you come to go to the bureau to sign up and —
AF: In Dale End.
CB: Yes.
AF: It was a Recruiting Office. And the three recruiting offices had taken over offices in Dale End. Navy, Army, Air Force. And the air force as far I was concerned was all that was needed because the flight sergeant who was the recruiting officer or sergeant when I said to him an air gunner he said, ‘That’s the sort of thing we want.’ he said, ‘Anybody else like you at home or anything?’ I said, ‘No, sir. Just me.’ He said, ‘Oh well, you’ll have to do. Good luck.’ I said, ‘Thank you.’ And my wife unfortunately was nine, eighteen months older than me and she went away quicker to be in the forces properly. And my mates. I was working at Mac Fisheries then because we’d been told that the coal stores was becoming a Reserved Occupation and we wouldn’t be able to join up. So we’d better get a move on and make up our minds and that’s why we went on that Saturday. She joined the RAF, the WAAF. I joined the RAF to train as an air gunner. And I was content with life. I can’t think of remembering anything absolutely wrong.
CB: How did they encourage you to join a particular specialty? So —
AF: Oh no. No.
CB: Did they ask you what you wanted to do?
AF: No. I said to the flight sergeant, ‘What’s the quickest way to get in to the RAF? What’s the quickest way to become useful in the RAF?’ He said, ‘Become an air gunner.’ I said, ‘Well, put me down for that please, flight sergeant. That’ll suit me.’ I didn’t know they were killing them off as quick as they were training them [laughs] So he’d earned his Kings Shilling for the day hadn’t he? Eh? Yeah.
CB: Did it well. You went out to Canada.
AF: Yes. For training.
CB: So how did that, so you landed at Halifax. Then what?
AF: Well —
CB: You had this long trip.
AF: Yes. And we were treated quite nicely and treated properly but they had, they couldn’t put us into an Air Gunnery School because all the schools they’d got were full. So we had to wait at Halifax. No. We went from Halifax to Moncton which was like another holding station if you like for trainees. And we were taught rudimentary air gunnery at Moncton. But the real training came back home in England. They hadn’t got the equipment. And in fact they asked me and this is true, they asked me to stay. There was an opportunity for me to stay as a trainee instructor on aircraft recognition at Moncton. And I said, ‘Oh, no. No. I want to carry on and work my way through. I want to become an air gunner properly.’ They said, ‘But you won’t be involved in the war and you’ll certainly get your ranks come automatically. You know, if you spend two or three years at Moncton you’ll, you’ll have the rank of whatever is awarded to you.’ No. No. It wasn’t what I wanted. I said, ‘My father wouldn’t like it anyhow. Let’s get back home and help them there.’ ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘Alright. If that’s your attitude.’ I said, ‘It’s not my attitude. It’s my feelings.’ And that’s exactly what it was.
CB: You’d got an urge to actually do something that you regarded as practical.
AF: And quickly.
CB: And contributory.
AF: Yeah. But it took me, oh another must have been ten months before I got through to my course. Then you had to go on another course to get yourself prepared for what a rear turret was. Or a mid-upper turret. They never told you about these things but you’d obviously have to use them so they put you on a course. Another separate course for the use of a turret with four guns or with two guns. So I was happy enough with a turret with four guns. I thought you’ve got twice as many as the other people on the mid upper turrets, you know. And I played my part and that was it as far as I can make out. Had a marvellous crew. I had a good crew. The first crew I had was one with the wireless operator in named Brockbank. Here’s the crew. As small as it is.
CB: Excellent. Yeah.
AF: That’s the first crew. And not much else we could do. And we did our training and our final bout of training was to, I’ll pass it to the gentleman here.
[pause]
AF: We had to go, not bomb Paris but to drop leaflets on Paris. You’ve possibly heard this story before.
CB: Keep going.
AF: Yeah. And it was in a Wellington and I was, there was no mid-upper so the wireless operator took over the part of the other gunner if was necessary. And his name was Brocklebank. He’d got an L in it for a start off. And if you think of coming up the fuselage of a Wellington. Not all that big but far bigger than a Spitfire or a Hurricane. And then when you came to where your shoulder would be near the pilot and you’d be down a step you’d be heading for the bomb aimer’s position. And we had a lovely bomb aimer because he had to be woken up to drop the bombs [laughs] I haven’t made that up. God honest. Because the pilot got used to the, to the habit of saying, ‘Give the bomb aimer a kick.’ [laughs] because he’d be asleep going to the target. He thought it was all a load of bunkum. This business of doing that there and the other. But [Noel Macer] his name was and he was a lovely chap basically but he did like his little, his little ways you know. A bit nutty if you like but he was genuine enough. And that’s what they used the Wellingtons for which were pretty useless for anything else actually.
CB: Just on your Paris trip.
AF: Yes.
CB: How many planes went with you and how many came back?
AF: Only, only, we only went on our own. We had to follow the navigational plot that they’d got for us to cross over the Channel. The western France. Follow their route because this was, this was a trip for the whole seven members of the crew. Navigator, bomb aimer, pilot, who was a beautiful pilot. No doubt about it at all. And we all hoped to stick together because that was the plan. Not to stick with other people.
CB: No.
AF: Your own men sort of thing. And we did.
CB: So, going back to your training in Canada you said it was quite short. So what bomb aimer training did you have there on the ground or in the air?
AF: Oh, no. We only had air gunners.
CB: I meant to say air gunner. Sorry.
AF: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. What air gunner training did you have on the ground?
AF: Well —
CB: And in the air in Canada.
AF: We wondered what a dome building was. Made of brick. The second or third day of our training they took us in there and I still don’t remember. I’ve got the photograph of this. It was experimental group that we were with. They were all air gunners. All training as air gunners. But we went in this domed building and what it was it was domed and also it was painted white inside and there was a moving platform as well with equipment like this sort of thing but much bigger which threw an enemy fighter on to the curved area of this dome. And you sat in a turret which moved about on a long sort of pole and you had two guns but it was a cinemata. A camera. And you actually, as you supposedly blazed away at this one aircraft that was being shot on to this dome interior of the domed building it was all being kept on film. And you were told what the lead was and how, how far you would have to fire in front of one of the planes to make a hit while you were doing it sort of thing. It was very, very clever in its way and it gave you the feelings of what you were doing were worthwhile. But you were glad to go home.
CB: This is called deflection shooting.
AF: Deflection shooting. Quite right. That’s right.
CB: Now, what about flying in the air. Because they were Fairey Battles in Canada. Did you get —
AF: Ah, well, I got into trouble. The only time in my service. But we were at an RAF station down south in Cornwall.
CB: St Eval or somewhere like that, was it?
AF: St Eval. Yeah, well St Eval was north of, of St Mawgan.
CB: Yeah.
AF: St Mawgan. We used to fly when, when you did fly you flew off a cliff into the great blue yonder sort of business.
CB: Yeah.
AF: We did our share of flying at Cornwall.
CB: But in Canada did you fly in a Battle in your training there?
AF: Yes. We did. We did flying in a Fairey Battle with a pilot in the cockpit and then you sat in the open cockpit at the back with the Vickers gas operated machine gun. But it was so cold and very often it was twenty and thirty below, and to fire your machine gun you had to jam it against the side of the fuselage with the rifle part sticking out over the side of the aircraft and you had, you fired the gun several times. That was to blew the interior to let it see, let it see that it had been fired. But what we were doing actually was using one, one case of, of machine gun bullets and when we thought we’d downed or blew the inside of the machine gun we held the rest. We knocked the spring off and held the rest over the side the fuselage and it spun all the bullets out into the River St Lawrence below because it was just too cold to aim.
CB: Yeah.
AF: And most of the pilots were either Polish or foreign. Foreign people who hardly understood us but they were flying us so we had to be nice to them. And when we’d finished unloading all the bullets we crawled up the interior of the fuselage and tapped the pilot on the left shoulder. That was the only way you could talk. He had no intercom at all. And they knew right away that that tap meant back home, land, breakfast or dinner, what was on and that was it.
CB: How did they tell you about your scores in your practice?
AF: Oh. It was all a bit ridiculous really. This is my logbook. It’s got everything in there that I did. And in the back couple of pages is the programme and proficiency assessments. Here we are, sir. Oops sorry. That’s it.
CB: Ok. But it didn’t last very long in Canada.
AF: Well, once we’d gone through all the manoeuvres and the air to air firing and air to, there would be a Fairey Battle would tow like a long stocking.
CB: A drogue.
AF: A drogue. And you had to wait until he passed you because obviously one or two got excited and started firing at the plane. Which didn’t help a lot, you know but [laughs] it was all in good, good sport. No doubt about that.
CB: How much damage did the planes get?
AF: No. Well, we had several talkings to. Let’s put it that way. What not to do and it was meant what not to do was to fire at that bleeding plane. ‘The drogue’s what you fire at, you bloody fool. You’ll never become an air gunner,’ you know. But you did. They needed them too badly. But that’s true that is. Yeah. I would have placed him in the same spot as the bloke who said I was wrong at Derby Baths [laughs] But they did their best. Everybody did their best then.
CB: So when you then returned as you said you went to the OTU.
AF: That’s right.
CB: And what did you do at the OTU?
AF: That was —
CB: At Lichfield.
AF: That was, to start off we did nothing else but circuits and bumps. And this was to get the pilot familiarised with his crew and what they’d got to do because you had, we had to sit at our positions. Mind you we only had six in the crew because they had no mid-upper turrets then. Those came later. But we had mock ups and we used to run around outside on the grass with people with rifles. And the runners were taking model aircraft of quite some size and we had to run with those so that the ones with rifles could work out what the lead was ahead of the flying aircraft. But they did their best. They did their best. That’s about all you can say. Because they were, this was done in groups of sort of thirty or forty. You know. And you didn’t get, have your bomb aimers with you or the pilots. They were away doing other courses. But it all came together in the end. We were all re-joined again and made into aircrew.
CB: But at the, at the OTU you formed the crew.
AF: That’s right.
CB: How did you do that?
AF: At the, we were told to go to the big lounge in the officer’s mess and we were given a pen, a pencil and paper and we sat around in chairs. We had a chat with people. They made us cups of tea. Who did you like? Who didn’t you like? Who treated you well? And who, blah blah blah. But the whole idea was for you to form a crew of six on your own which you did.
CB: Yeah.
AF: And you could always be told that for any reason at all you could leave the six at any time as long as you gave a specific reason. You know. But nobody did. Everybody stuck with who they’d got. And then we had the same number of crew forwarded in a few days time. And they were the engineers because we were going on to four engine aircraft and they would be needed, engineers to balance out petrol and all that when you were flying.
CB: This was going to the Heavy Conversion Unit.
AF: Heavy. That’s right. Yeah.
CB: So where was that?
AF: Blyton? I think. I think that name sort of sticks somehow or other.
CB: Ok.
AF: But we only stopped there a week. That was all. Just to get the crew together and to get the engineer to balance his petrol flows and everything else which was rather important.
CB: So you’re on a four engine aeroplane now. What is it?
AF: A Lancaster.
CB: Right. Ok. How did you like that?
AF: Thought it was great. Well, I did. Of course you had to stay in your positions. You had to take everything very seriously but as long as you could aim and use your turret. And you got your fair share of orange juice in the little tins. They used to freeze as well when you went on ops but you weren’t told about that. Bloody orange juice. You had to get it open with the cocking lever to a machine gun inverted and one hand on top of it and the other put the orangeade on the, well the orange juice on your knee and keep hitting it. When you got through you found the bleeding stuff was frozen. We had our disappointments as well but that’s true that is. Yeah. Yes. I had my eyes freeze up once. The wireless operator, Bobby Brockbank on instructions from the pilot had to come down, open my turret, rear turret, lay me down flat and put his heating gloves on my face because they’d had, we’d had instructions that they were going to take Perspex out of the turrets so they wouldn’t get dirtied. The surface of the turret. But they never thought about the wind bringing the bloody rain in on us. We used, we used to get soaked. And my eyes actually froze up where I couldn’t open them and I couldn’t speak properly. As though everything was frozen. Started to change our minds a bit then but once you got back home people talked you out of things. But it was scary that was. When you couldn’t see. What bleeding good’s an air gunner if you can’t see? Phew. It annoyed me I can tell you. But that was true that was. That was true.
CB: So, from Blyton, from the HCU, you went to 100 Squadron. Where was 100 Squadron stationed?
AF: White Waltham. Near Grimsby.
CB: Waltham.
AF: Waltham. Yeah. That’ll do.
CB: Yeah.
AF: When we’d done eighteen trips and believe it or not at eighteen operational flights in 1943, when you’d done eighteen trips you were experienced. There was Berlins. There was Colognes. There was Essens. There was all sorts of famous German towns that we must have caused awful wreckage at, you know. But it had to be done. It wasn’t a game and that was the end of that sort of thing. You went and you hoped to come back. That’s what we called our plane at [pause] what was the name of 100 Squadron? Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
AF: At Waltham.
CB: At Waltham. Yeah.
AF: Yeah. We’d go. We’d come back after the famous radio funny man.
CB: Oh, Lord Haw Haw.
AF: Hmmn?
CB: Lord Haw Haw.
AF: No. No. No. He was English.
CB: Oh, funny man. Right.
AF: Yeah. Funny man. A comedian. We go. We come back. He was talking to the natives of course.
CB: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
AF: But that’s what we called our aircraft. Oh, and I hope you don’t mind but when we did our first operational flight to Paris to drop the paperwork. The —
CB: The leaflets.
AF: It was to talk the Germans in Paris out of fighting the war. But of course that was useless but that was part of our training that was.
CB: Yeah.
AF: And there was a front bulkhead door which meant to say if the wireless operator, Bobby had to get in to the front turret there was a big door. Must have been like that and like that that was held by two locks. And that’s, the air gunner if he was going to do an air gunner job in the front turret he had to be locked in that because the air was so great coming through if it was open that the, the Wellington used to take the attitude of a, of a Whitley. And that was a nose down flight. They reckon there was that many Whitleys got away with it because the Germans aimed ahead of the apparent motion and they were firing here and the Whitley was flying above them if you like to think of it that way. And that broke away from its moorings. That bulkhead door broke away. We couldn’t even fasten it. We’d got nothing to fasten it with. There was two locks this side and hinges that side and it was the hinges that broke through constant use. And we just had to sort of sit and wonder you know what it was all about really. Nothing you could do about it but they soon repaired it. Didn’t destroy it.
CB: With —
AF: That was part of the other story.
CB: Yes. That’s ok. So you said with 100 Squadron after eighteen trips.
AF: After eighteen.
CB: What was the significance of eighteen trips?
AF: Well, we had to, we joined three more crews from four more Squadrons and we formed 625 Squadron with those extra men. Well, they weren’t extra. They were extra to the Squadron that was being formed. We thought it was quite an honour because now we’d got different mates and different people but we had psychologists and psychiatrists come along and taught us. Talk to us about how we felt about doing operations and losses and all that business. And they asked us not to make too strong friends of any of the other crews but to make friends of our own crew. Look upon them as brothers and all that. I thought it a load of cobblers but they tried it out and the idea was that you weren’t [pause] you weren’t affected, or you shouldn’t be affected by the loss of other aircrew. It’s your own aircrew you had to stand by sort of thing. Some enjoyed it and some disliked it but it was up to them. But I suppose to a certain extent it had to work because they didn’t want too many moaners. But we formed 625. And what happened then, we had Stan [pause] We had the navigator. I can give you his first name. I can’t think of his second. He lived, he lived in Lincoln. His father worked in the steel works. Course the one thing that people disliked but they were shot out in their hundreds I believe by the aircrew and that was a telegram. And of course Stan Cunningham. Stan Cunningham, he sent his laundry on a regular basis home to his mother in Lincoln because we weren’t far from Lincoln at Grimsby. And she used to send them back in about four or five days ironed and pressed and aired and great. None, none the rest of us bothered. We tried to wash our stuff or fancied a pretty WAAF and get her to do the washing if you could [laughs] I was lucky at times. Very nice. Dizzy, the WAAF hairdresser was allowed in the men’s area for cutting hair. She was the Squadron hairdresser, you know. A lovely girl as well. But you couldn’t do much about it. One of them things. Just get your hair cut and get out of it. A shame. Are you alright? Good. And we did, we were told by the, the weather people that when we came back that night, we were going to Stettin which was farther east then Berlin. So it was a long trip and a cold trip too because it was I think it was October, November, December, one of them months. And unfortunately Stan got hit in his little navigator’s cubicle and lost part of his, his leg. So of course we pressed on sort of thing and dropped our bombs but we remembered what the Met people had told us. And the, one of the Met men told the skipper, he said, ‘When you leave the French Coast,’ he said, ‘Lose height because you’ll be able to tell when you hit England just what the weather is like. See in the distance.’ And it was all the searchlights that were set up because every Squadron had its own searchlight pattern and you could see it for miles away and you headed for it because you wanted to get down. But [pause] I don’t know what. Oh, it got to the point where poor Stan was losing a lot of blood and we couldn’t do much about it because he’d lost the thick part of the left leg. And the skipper said to call up Mayday. He said, ‘It’s the last request but call up Mayday and let’s get Stan somewhere where he can get some treatment.’ We called up and we happened to be in [pause] there was thick fog. We called up Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. All the time until it got answered and we only, ‘We got you. We’ve got you on our — ‘
CB: On the radar.
AF: Hmmn?
CB: On the radar.
AF: Yes. ‘We’ve got you on the radar.’ On the H2S. Whatever it was, ‘And we’ll get, get you directed to us. And we’re also equipped with FIDO.’ Now, FIDO was the —
CB: Fog clearing system.
AF: Fog clearing system. Yeah. And we saw them. We more or less saw the FIDO switched on. And it sort of cut a long piece of cake out of the fog. And the skipper nipped in very very quickly and got the wireless op to call up that we had wounded aboard. One wounded aboard. Because we were quite lucky, you know. Over the trips. And we landed and the moment we landed they switched the flames off because all the flame burners were down each runway and they could switch them on. But we landed and I helped get Stan to the, helped carry him. We had to lay him out. We had no stretcher. We had to lay him out on a board of some sort we’d got and put him in the ambulance. And I heard from him sixty years later [laughs]
CB: How did that come about?
AF: Well, it was me that was dilatory. You’d think with flying with a brother that you’d want to know how he got on. But the world was moving on. We had to get another navigator. But we didn’t use him because they screened us to become instructors. So we lost that navigator and I had six months at Waterbeach where we had a demob centre of our own. And they were flying Liberators from Waterbeach to India. To aerodromes there where they were picking up I think it was fifteen or sixteen early army troops and they were bringing them to Waterbeach and they were demobbing them there. They’d got their clothes and everything. And we had our dip as well. The pilot used to leave us his carton of rations which had got sweets in and cigarettes and matches and all that. But at Waterbeach there was an officer by the name of Lancaster. You’ve got to remember his name, haven’t you? We were flying them. And also we was there at the time of my marriage to my wife. No. A year after my marriage to my wife. And she was due for demob because she was pregnant which I’m proud to say was all my doing [laughs] But a posting came through while I was getting married on D-Day. June the 6th ’44. With all the family and everything else at a, a white wedding at a church in Yardley, Birmingham. And when the marriage was over, was done and all that business we went all outside talking in groups. My father came to me and he said, ‘They’ve invaded son. You should be alright now.’ I said, ‘Well, it aint won yet, dad. Let’s face it,’ you know. ‘We’ve still got to fight them.’ He said, ‘Oh, well, yeah. I know.’ But he’d been demobbed out of the Army because his health wasn’t right. But Jean and I had a very nice honeymoon at the Lygon Arms, Broadway which was paid for by some Lord or other. Good luck to him. But this Lancaster unknownst to me was put in charge of the gunnery section because lieutenant Mussey was on leave. I was away. And so there was only a couple of instructors and this Lancaster. Unknownst to me he filled a form in for an air gunner to go back and he put my name down while I was enjoying my wedding. Well, of course when it came through the next time it should have been for Lancaster because he’d been away eighteen months. But it wasn’t. It was Farr for some unknown reason. I made no complaint because I was posted within two days and there’s quite enough to do when you’ve got to go somewhere else. I’d got to go to 460 Squadron, Binbrook and take my part there as an air gunner in a Lancaster. But I was only to do twenty trips. That was, that was the score then. Thirty and twenty. But why I put my name down, if a bloke was frightened and Lancaster was frightened to death then he’s a liability to his crew. And the only way they’ll find out is when they get in the aircraft. So I thought, ‘Well, I can do it. I’m strong enough.’ So I did. Mother and dad was upset, ‘Thought you’d done enough, son,’ and all that lark but there we are. My wife done her nut. But I had to do twenty more trips. Yeah. They said Farr was a devil for bloody punishment. They weren’t far wrong either because we were helping Pathfinder force on some occasions at Binbrook. Because Binbrook was Group Squadron. 1 Group Squadron. And we were always in sort of [pause] one of the things they did on us, I think it was the third or fifth trip, I forget now. There were too many trips. But they had fitted a small light to our Lanc and we were to fly it across the target, where ever it was, with this little light on. Well, of course a moving light at about twelve thousand feet is very obvious, isn’t it? And so we got plastered left right and bloody centre by the anti-aircraft fire. They knew very well we were going to bomb that place because we were attracting the attention of the anti- aircraft fire. That’s to deflect attention off the Pathfinder force.
CB: Oh right.
AF: But they soon stopped it because of losses. So, we were alright at Binbrook, 460. But it was still 1 Group and we were still flying Lancs. And I only had to do twenty because I’d done thirty. Well, leading up to thirty. So nobody said a word. But we had a haunting, haunting bloody trip. We went to Stettin. It was our seventeenth or eighteenth trip. We were flying a normal Lancaster. We were happy enough as a crew. But just as the bomb, the bomb aimer was about to open the turret doors the bomb, bombing doors where all the bombs were laid ready to drop the aircraft we were flying reared up like a stallion. Like on its hind legs. Just, just as it was. And then its nose dropped and down we went. Of course you’ve got to the right of the pilot’s seat a wheel and it’s called a trimming wheel. And that is connected to small ailerons on the wings and on the fin and rudder and on the tailplane. That’s the same. No, it isn’t. The tailplane’s the flat one. The fin and rudder’s the upright. It was connected by, it was connected to a smaller aileron on the bigger ailerons. And the whole idea was that if you went into a dive a Lancaster with its bomb load on or without its bomb load on was too heavy for one person to pull out of a dive. But if you got somebody standing by you who could slowly turn this wheel which was connected to the ailerons and the ailerons would move very slowly and they in turn would take the pressure off all the other moving parts and the skipper would be able to pull the aircraft out of the dive. But Stan was in a bad way. And we landed and we watched three of these big hefty sort of house building machines push the Lanc off the runway. Oh no. I’m sorry. I always get stuck on this part [pause] We made it and we shouldn’t have made it. We made it back to our aerodrome. 460 Squadron, Binbrook. I’m sorry.
Other: That’s alright.
AF: I’ve gone all wrong there.
Other: Yeah. From Stettin.
AF: Hmmn?
Other: From Stettin you came back.
AF: We came back all the way from Stettin.
Other: Even though she’d reared up and then gone into a dive.
AF: That’s right. Fortunately he had the bomb aimer there with him to ease the aircraft out of its dive.
Other: The wheel.
AF: That’s right.
Other: Yeah.
AF: With the wheel. And drew. We went over the target and the bomb aimer dropped the bombs. You can put your fingers through holes and pull away the hook. Bomb doors were open so we dropped our bombs because they were a bigger liability than anything else in the world there at the time. Turned around and we were at about six or eight thousand feet and of course [pause] we don’t know what had hit us but something burst into flame on our starboard side. We went into a dive so we were soon away from it. Then the skipper got her out of the dive, pulled her level and said, ‘We’d better have a look around our areas and see what damage had been done.’ If you can see it at all because you’ll find it all underneath. Another plane had hit us head on [laughs] it’s not, it’s not believable.
Other: A glancing blow.
CB: How did you know that? How did you know it had hit you head on?
AF: Because —
CB: The bomb aimer told you, did he?
AF: No. No. No. This thing on fire passed us on the right hand side but he must have hit us about three foot below our eye level because it skidded along the fuselage and then burst into flame and exploded. And that was it. His petrol went up. But it, I cannot tell it quick enough but that’s how it happened. It was all over and the next thing we know we were flying straight and level again at about six thousand feet because the wheel had worked. On the —
CB: What height was the collision?
AF: Oh, I don’t know.
CB: Roughly.
AF: May I read you a little, it’s only a small story because you had to put, we had put we had to put everything down but it might be in that. I don’t think so. “Operation Stettin. Collision with — “ [pause] I’ve got Lanc with a question mark behind it. “Ten miles before target area. Considerable damage to own aircraft. Carried on to bomb at twelve thousand feet.” There you are. There’s your thousand. Twelve thousand feet. We were on our way home and it was slowly getting light. We were in the air nine and three quarter hours. Nine hours and thirty five minutes. Skipper awarded Distinguished Flying Cross and [pause] no. We didn’t land with fog help. That was another trip. This trip, flying back from Stettin as soon as we cleared the English coast we went into Mayday. Mayday. All the time. Mayday. Until we were — no. No. No. Forget that. I’m sorry. But that that doesn’t apply to the raid on Stettin at all.
CB: I’ll tell you what. We’ll stop just for a mo.
AF: Yeah.
[recording paused]
CB: Right. We’re just reconvening now about the Stettin situation.
AF: Yeah.
CB: Because it was a serious event obviously and unexpected. So what was happening? You were ready on the run in to Stettin.
AF: Yes. Yes. And the fighter must have been coming away from Stettin and suddenly I think it was as big a surprise to the fighter as it was to us because a normal way for a fighter to attack a plane is to have a curve of pursuit attack. Which is the way they are trained. But he can’t do a curve of pursuit from head on.
CB: So what, what so this aircraft came on head on at you?
AF: Well, no.
CB: Is that what you’re saying?
AF: You see, we didn’t even know that.
CB: No.
AF: All we know is suddenly our aircraft reared up to the point where it almost became impossible to fly because the pilot would have been on his back. And then suddenly this, this explosion to our starboard so that’s that plane done with. And then we went straight into a dive. And it’s impossible that you can stand on your feet when you’re in a Lanc that’s diving but the bomb aimer dropped all his bombs and his, his —
CB: So, he regained control of the aircraft.
AF: That’s right. And we were at twelve thousand feet. We lost about eight.
CB: So when you dropped the bombs you were low.
AF: Oh yes. We were low for a Lancaster.
CB: Right.
AF: And —
CB: And you were flying by then.
AF: And they all went. Yes. We were flying level.
CB: On how many engines?
AF: Two.
CB: Right.
AF: The outer engines. But I wondered sitting in the mid-upper turret. I mean I should have seen something. I mean it must have come as close as I am to you. The pilot of that. Because there’s only one in a single engine plane. And even then that’s guesswork. But forget that. Suddenly your plane is flying again normally and the engineer is going mad trying to balance his petrol up because if it maintained, keep his petrol from the two inner engines he’s got that spare to fly on the outers you see. Now, I’ve got to think. I’ve got to think Stettin. We didn’t come across any other aircraft. We were able to maintain our way back home. The [pause] this is, this is chronicled by the way in the RAF 460 Squadron thing in the —
CB: Is it? Good. Right. So we can pick that up there.
AF: Yes.
Other: So coming back now.
AF: That’s right.
Other: To Britain.
AF: Yeah.
Other: Do you do you call Mayday? Because you’re on two engines —
AF: No. No. No
Other: No. That’s where you mixed it up with the other one.
AF: There was a discussion amongst the crew. We were only doing a very low —
Other: Speed.
AF: low speed. That’s obvious because he was trying to maintain, keep whatever petrol he’d got.
Other: Yeah.
AF: For the later journey.
Other: Yeah.
AF: Because you’ve got to travel the full width of France.
Other: Yeah.
AF: If we’re over Stettin.
Other: Yeah.
AF: We’ve got all that.
CB: The width of Germany. Yes.
AF: All the width to the coast. See. But anyhow we were over France in daylight and we could not understand. Not any of us. Couldn’t understand why nobody came up to poke their nose in. They just left us.
Other: Very nice.
AF: If, if anybody had have come up they must have seen that the damage was horrendous. But we couldn’t see it could we? There was no way we could get out of the aircraft and have a look around. So we just left it like that and kept our fingers crossed. And we made it. And this is hardly believable. We made it back to our squadron. Sigh of relief. Sigh of relief. We wanted to hug everybody, you know. They stopped us from landing because they said, ‘You’ll damage your [unclear] will land and it will put the aerodrome out of commission altogether. It’ll no doubt crash. So will you please use the emergency crash ‘drome at Carnaby,’ which is in Scotland, see. We’d had no petrol for an hour. Well, of course it’s not registering on all the dials because the petrol is being used up. But anyhow, we had to say alright because they refused us entry and we went to Carnaby and its five runways. Bigger than all the other runways we’d ever seen and its different surfaces to land on. We picked the middle one and its right from the sea. They said, when we got on to control at Carnaby, they said, ‘There’s no other aircraft in the vicinity. You can go out to sea as far as you like and come in as slow as you like.’ And we didn’t know what he was trying to tell us at all but they didn’t like the look of it. You know. Anyhow, we had a chat together because we could all link up with the intercom on the plane and the skipper said, ‘I’m going to go out to sea again. I’m going to come in as slow as I possibly can,’ and he said, he looked at the bomb aimer and he said, ‘I want you to have your face pressed against the starboard window in the cockpit. You others can look through the small windows there are,’ down each side of the fuselage in the Lanc, ‘And you can tell the skipper anything you want that is useful. But for God’s sake no idle chatter,’ he said, ‘ Because what I’m going to try and do, I’m going to try and put the weight of the aircraft, and the wheels down if they’re working. If they’re not working then I’ve got to think again but we’ve got to get the wheels down and locked. So you get your faces against the little windows and my gunner, engineer will see about what petrol we’ve got and if we’re alright.’ And we came back in again then on to the middle runway. I don’t know what surface it was but he came in with the tail down. The port wheel, it, it was swinging and it came forward and it locked at an angle. The starboard wheel was just swinging. So that was going to be the trouble. The right hand one. So the skipper said to the bomb aimer, ‘Keep your eye on that starboard wheel, he said, ‘’m going to bring it in in any case. I’m bringing it in as slow as I can and as low as I can and the moment it touches the earth I’m going to pull the joystick back and put the weight on it.’ He said, ‘That’s all I can do,’ You know, ‘God bless you all and thank you very much.’ And we had to take up our crash positions either side of the main spar and look through the little windows and sure enough the right hand wheel was flapping. But suddenly the plane lurched and it come down and the wheel snapped, locked. The right hand wheel. [laughs] I see it now.
Other: Yeah.
AF: I can see it now. Locked. I thought thank God for that. We pulled up [pause] A wagon came out to pick us up as members of a crew. And there is on board the plane, on a chute behind the navigator’s little hut if you like, there’s a seven million candle power photoflash that goes out the chute of its own accord. Activated by the first bomb. So that travels down to the height where the bomb explodes and the photoflash is set off at the same time so that they get exactly where the bombs have landed.
Other: Right.
AF: And the plane pulled to a standstill and the skipper said, ‘I want you all out as quick as you can. The plane may explode.’ We don’t know what might happen after this. And so we all hurtled out. And the photoflash had been shook loose by the collision and had started its travel down the chute to go out with the first bomb. But instead of that the plane had hit it so it must have been under the aircraft. The German fighter had hit it and bent it in to the Lancaster like a screw into wood. Yeah. That was, you know a five hundred pound bomb going off on its own. We had a look around. Oh. Now then. I’ve missed a lump out here. Oh. I’m sorry. But I’d said to the skipper after the collision and we’d dropped the bombs, ‘I’m going to remain in the mid-upper skipper because I can see more from there than anybody else.’ ‘Alright, son. Do what you like as long as you’re helping.’ So I waited in that plane and I said to the crew about half an hour later, I give it time to settle, I said to the crew, ‘It looks like the port fin and rudder,’ and they’re like elongated eggs on a Lancaster, I said, ‘It looks like it’s badly damaged and its starting to move.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry about this but it’s true.’ I said, ‘So, wherever you are get your parachute close to you so at least you can get out of the aircraft,’ I said, and, ‘I’ll stop here. I’ll just keep my eye on that fin and rudder.’ As it grew lighter the fin and rudder wasn’t moving. But the plane had grazed its way down our fuselage and released loads and loads of this white metal and that had wrapped itself around the fin and rudder. And it was that that was shaking. So I called up the crew. I said, ‘The fin and rudder appears to be safe but I don’t know. But it won’t stand a lot of shaking about I can tell you that,’ I said, ‘But I’ve got to tell you because you need your parachutes with you.’ You know. I said, ‘I’m going to get mine now it’s got lighter. We can see we’ve got a plane.’ As I went to jump down from the half turret of the mid-upper gunner I felt somebody hammering on this part of the leg because I’m sitting on sort of, this is part of the dustbin and the guns are here. So I looked down. I could see out there and it’s the wireless operator again. Bobby Brockbank. And he’s going like this to me, up. Eyes. So I leant right over and looked down [laughs] and there was no plane. The H2S equipment which is bigger than that table, far bigger and like a pear shape, that had been thrown against the rear turret of the rear gunner. So, of course we thought about him then. So I said to, I motioned to Bobby. I said, move out of the way and I was able to climb down the fuselage inside because it was all long lengths of metal. So I got down and we moved all that junk from behind the rear gunner so that he could get out and have his, drink his orange juice if he wanted to. But what we did then is we sat ourselves in the, in the spaces where the main spar is joined to the fuselage. We had four of us in there in holds. So that was better. And then yeah what a fool. What a bloody idiot. We had this, this bloke we were nearing the coast and you could see fog and we called up Mayday. Mayday. Mayday continually all the time. And finally they called us back and said, ‘If you go on to — ’ [pause] oh what do they call them? Bloody. ‘If you go, if you go on route — ’ such and such, ‘You’ll hit our aerodrome and you’ll see the fog lights are on. You can land. There’s no other plane about.’ And we did this and landed straightaway. He put the aircraft down plonk and the wheels shot forward [laughs] you know. How do you look at it? It’s nothing else but pure bloody marvellous. You know. We did a little dance. At least we were flying still. We landed, pulled up, and immediately they sent three of these bulldozers out to push the aircraft off the spot where we had landed to all, there was all crashed aircraft there. Piles of them. They sent a van out for us. None of us were hurt which is remarkable in itself. We were ferried back. Carnaby back to Binbrook. Twenty five minutes. That’s how far it was. So we were so lucky. It doesn’t bear thinking of. When I called up that lovely crew and told them about the strips of, not the strips, no that the fin and rudder was shaking. I honestly thought it was shaking. I wasn’t trying to enlarge upon our dilemma. That, that was all that thin strips of metalised stuff. You know. And to see the photoflash turned around and bedded in to the side of the aircraft. It was near miraculous it didn’t go off because it was supposed to go off. You know. And what do you do?
CB: Extraordinary.
AF: Did a little, oh and underneath the mid-upper turret where I was sitting you could see daylight straight through the fuselage [laughs] and I’m not building the story up. You know.
CB: So when you were first hit and the aircraft reared up what went through your mind?
AF: Well, I thought for a moment that, that the pilot had had a heart attack or fainted as some did and he’s, he wasn’t driving straight. You know. What do you do? What do you think of? You see all, all your relatives and hope that they’re all alright but you think to yourself don’t start thinking about them. Nothing to do with it. Mind you we were Stettin away from England which was a good two and a half to three hours flying at the speed we were going. So I thought to myself at the time I wish Lancaster had been here. Naughty. But there we are.
CB: We’ll just take a break there. Yeah.
[recording paused]
CB: We talked, you talked a bit earlier about the navigator getting his leg, Stan. Wounded.
AF: That’s right.
CB: So how, first of all how did he become wounded? What happened exactly?
AF: Anti-aircraft fire.
CB: Right.
AF: Coming through the fuselage.
CB: Right. So it was shrapnel.
AF: Shrapnel.
CB: Which took out a good section of his leg.
AF: Actually took it away.
CB: Yes. So then coming to the nearer time. Sixty years later what happened?
AF: The phone went. ‘Is that Allan Farr?’ I said, ‘Yes, it is. Who’s that?’ He said, ‘It’s Stan. Your lovely navigator. What are you doing this time of the morning?’ I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. I’d always expected him to have a very, very, very dicey leg and even to be in a chair and wheeled about you know. And I thought to myself then and he said, ‘Are you still there?’ I said, ‘Yes. I’m in shock you silly cow. I’m in shock [pause] Have you got any hobbies?’ He said, ‘Yes. My wife and I go fell walking.’
[telephone ringing]
AF: [laughs] Fell walking.
Other: [laughs] Without a leg.
CB: Amazing.
Other: Yeah.
CB: So, what did you say to that?
AF: I burst into tears.
CB: Oh, did you?
AF: He said, ‘You aint crying are you?’ I said, ‘Stan, thank goodness. Oh.’ I said, ‘The number of times I’ve been going to write to the RAF section which would look after anybody who, you know.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’m, I’ve got a job. I’m still working. I’m doing electrical stuff but only, only on paper,’ you know. ‘And I’m married. I’ve got a lovely wife.’ I said, ‘Well, you know this is great.’ And I was still crying. Funny isn’t it?
CB: Did you get to meet him?
AF: Yes. We went up to Lincoln. Stayed two nights. And really it was so very, very nice just to see him come in a room. Funny walk but he wasn’t putting it on.
CB: So what was his side of the story?
AF: Pardon?
CB: What was his side of the story that he told you? So after he’d been wounded what did he tell you had happened?
AF: He was put straight into an ambulance. And that was the aerodrome that had got the —
Other: FIDO.
AF: FIDO. That’s right. FIDO. The fog dispersal thing. And he got his old job back. But we went and saw him. We enjoyed their company. They enjoyed ours. We got talking about different things. We didn’t go again because it upset me too much to see him.
CB: But as a curiosity what about his wound? How did he describe —
AF: Well —
CB: How that had been dealt with?
AF: You have, you carry, I think it’s a half a dozen in the medical pack which is by the, in the, by the bomb aimer’s compartment. And they’re a tube like that with a very, very long spidery point. And what you have to do is, and it wasn’t me that did it. I don’t think I could have done. Now, who could it be? It could have been the bomb aimer [Noel Macer]. It couldn’t have been the skipper because he couldn’t leave his seat. But what it is you break the top off and it leaves a very jagged long sharp thing which now of course is laudanum or something coming out. And you stick that in the wound. I don’t know if I got it right. But I had to look away. I mean I’m a big brave bloody air gunner.
CB: It’s morphine is it?
AF: Hmmn?
CB: It’s morphine.
AF: Morphine. That’s right. Yeah. But dear Stan. He was a lovely fella. He was. I said to him, ‘You’re nearly good enough to be an air gunner.’ [laughs]
CB: We’ll stop there again.
AF: Yeah.
[recording paused]
CB: So in an aircraft we’re talking about here the Lancaster there’s a mid-upper gunner and there’s a rear gunner. Now, you did some time as a rear gunner but in this case you were sitting in the mid-upper.
AF: Yeah. I was.
CB: So what was the situation there?
AF: When I went on my second tour it was the mid-upper gunner that needed to be replaced so you take that position. You can’t mess about. Or if in the case of Stan they almost immediately put another gunner [pause] No. Put another navigator into his place so that the plane could still keep flying.
CB: Yes.
AF: Because I did, I think four or five more trips after that. Then I left the crew. Went around and shook all their hands. And one of them spat in my face. He said, ‘You could have stayed.’
CB: Gee.
AF: Because they get used to you. They get to trust you.
CB: It was that emotional was it? He felt, what did he feel to make him do that?
AF: Well, he felt the lack of a good gunner.
CB: So what did he say when he spat in the face, in your face?
AF: Well, ‘You can piss off as far as I’m concerned.’
CB: That dramatic.
AF: Well —
CB: Because you —
AF: They get to rely upon you.
CB: But you are all the family aren’t you?
AF: That’s right.
CB: You are a family.
AF: Yes. You see, even, even the plane is, I think it’s M for Mother isn’t it? Yes. M for Mother. Look. See. We go. We come back. You’re frightened of death but you don’t want it to happen to you. But where’s the logic in that?
CB: So you said that the specific training, for separate training —
AF: No.
CB: For the different positions.
AF: I have seen, a briefing is when all the crews of the Lancasters and we could put forty two up from Binbrook. You, when you attended briefing up on the dais was the commanding officer to tell you why this was taking place, what the target was, how they, possibly to do with a target. You know, what they’ve got to do. Other things that they wanted other planes to do. Really it was to keep you in tune with any equipment that was going to be used as well. I mean [pause] you weren’t allowed to go wild. You were supposed to respect the villagers but what used to upset me more than anything else there was an area where the villagers from Binbrook, because there’s a village of Binbrook come to wish you well by waving flags or anything they’d got that’s colourful. Scarves. And of course as the aircraft came on to the take-off area you were on solid ground. You’d come off the grass. And as the engines revved up you’d see the flags going quicker and quicker you know. And then you’d take off and they vanish out of sight. But again you find you’re crying. You don’t basically want to go. Who wants to take that job over anyhow? I wish I could see that bleeding sergeant major now sometimes [laughs] I’d make him pay for something. I don’t know. But all sorts of fears came at you. I don’t know. Yes.
CB: On how many occasions did fighters attack the planes you were flying in?
AF: I think, I think my limit was four. You see the only way a fighter can properly bring down a bomber is by the curve of pursuit attack. That’s drummed into you time and time again. They don’t make head on attacks. They did out east where the Japanese planes often just flew in the way they’d been trained. In straight lines. Which made it easier actually to sort of kill them off. But it was always a curve of pursuit and he couldn’t have been attacking us because that would have been the silliest way to commit suicide. I mean to ram yourself into a Lancaster. It don’t bear thinking of does it?
CB: No. So on occasions when the planes did attack, other than that one how many times did you shoot at them?
AF: Oh. You see. The psychiatrist told us. They said, ‘The Germans don’t want to die any more than you gentlemen want to die.’ He said. ‘So if they’re making an attack on you, you can be well prepared that they will fly away from you because they’ve had enough if only it’s you see if it’s only seconds.’ So they didn’t do much to help you. These psychiatric people. Whatever the names are. But in fact you had, you had a flying operation which were supposed to take you away from aircraft that were trying to knock you out of the sky. And that, that was if you had to, you had to identify your aircraft because if an aircraft has a thirty foot wingspan which is a fighter normally then you can’t hit him. You won’t hit him unless you open fire at six hundred yards. Then you stand a chance of hitting him. Or setting him on fire. Some of the blokes tried to get, some of our blokes tried to get maps of different German aircraft because what you were looking for was the oxygen bottle. If you could hit that you’d blow his head off because it would just disintegrate the plane you see. You haven’t got time to even look three times at the plane to work out whether it’s an ME109 or a Focke Wulf 190 or —
CB: And it’s in the dark.
AF: Hmmn?
CB: And you’re in the dark.
AF: Well, oh yes. Yes. I was put in front of the CO by the warrant officer in charge of the armoury. And he said he’d put me in front of the commanding officer because I’d, I’d not denied anything, I’d agreed with what he said but he, this is what he said to the commanding officer, ‘This man continually loads ammunition into his four guns in the rear turret. He loads them in an explosive, a cupronickel. Anything that’s not cupronickel, he’ll use again.’ He said, ‘He uses exploding bullets, incendiary bullets, different sorts of bullets, bar cupronickel which is supposed to use, sir. And it’s bending, the heat from some of them is bending the barrel.’ And the CO says, ‘Well, you’re entitled to have your say, Mr Farr. What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m trying to get the one that’s trying to get me.’ I said, ‘It’s only own back sir. That’s all.’ I said, ‘If I can get this bastard with an exploding bullet I’ll use it.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Stay out of the armoury. That’s an order. And that’s the order that’s going into the, into your record. So let’s have no more of it. You’ll treat this gentleman with respect and accept what he’s done to your guns. That’s what his job is. So don’t make it silly.’ I said, ‘Alright. Thank you very much.’ But that’s, that’s what I was doing. Putting incendiaries in. Anything that exploded. And of course didn’t do very well at it.
CB: How many did you shoot down in the end?
AF: Hmmn?
CB: How many did you shoot down in the end?
AF: No. No. No. You couldn’t. To claim a kill you’d got to have either confirmation from the French Resistance. They have got to see, actually see the battle take place and to see the wreckage. Now, who can do that? It really, it was to stop handing out lots and lots of medals I suppose.
CB: Now, in your case you did two tours.
AF: Yeah.
CB: And you had a distinguished flying medal.
AF: That’s right.
CB: So at what point was that awarded and what was the accolade that they attached to it?
AF: Um.
CB: So what did they do? On a time base or based on some experiences.
AF: No. They just, and they give a reason for it.
CB: That’s what I thought.
AF: It’s amongst some of these somewhere.
CB: Ok. We’ll have a look in a minute. So when did you get it?
AF: Oh. I got it in, I think it was January or February of ’45.
CB: Right.
AF: And I finished my last trip in October ’44.
CB: Yes.
AF: So obviously they were deliberating over it for some time. But also of course these things were really of no monetary value except for the, the twenty pound they slide to you. Which was good money in them days because we only got, I think it was eight and a six or eleven shillings a day flying pay. See. So you didn’t become an air gunner for the money [laughs] Give us a kiss and shut up.
CB: Did all the crew get the same flying pay?
AF: Oh yes. Yes. I think the pilot and the navigator were a higher, a higher grade because they had to shovel. They had to shoulder more responsibility. Their courses were really courses to make you sit up. Especially a navigator. You know. I was down as a wireless operator. A w/op ag. Wireless operator and air gunner. I soon crossed off the wireless operator off. I wasn’t sitting down at some poor lady’s diner at Blackpool where some of the crews who were training as wireless operator/air gunners were asking people to pass the sauce in code. That aint me. Tapping it out on the vinegar de de dit da da. Dit dit. They can stick that.
CB: Did you get any training in signal?
AF: Wireless.
CB: Yeah. In wireless.
AF: Yes. Oh yes. But I am not that technical. I just am not with it.
CB: No.
AF: You know. In fact, Mr Pretherick at St Benedict’s Road School. Friday afternoons we used to leave class at half past four. But he used to say, ‘Put all your books away. Happiness is about to descend upon you.’ Lovely teacher. He really was. He said, ‘I’m going to throw a question to the room and as soon as, if you answer it right you can go. But don’t hang about in the corridors.’ Half an hour later there would be him and me. He said, ‘Farr, we’re in the same bloody position again.’ Excuse the language. He said, ‘But why are you having this difficulty with just putting four or five numbers together and totalling it up?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, sir,’ I said, ‘I do try very hard. I do really. Can I go now?’ He said, ‘No. You aint answered your question.’ [laughs] He was as cute as me, I think. Yeah.
CB: So you finished in October ’44 on ops.
AF: Yes.
CB: What did you do after that?
AF: I was posted. I was sent down to Waterbeach where they were demobbing the first Army soldiers from Mauripur, India. And they were flying them back in Liberators. Fifteen or sixteen at a time. Big aircraft but they could only fit sling seats in them. And that’s all they could sort of fit in. And I was partly to do with that. I had to drive a little jeep around with, “Follow Me,” on the back in lights. That’s so that when they landed and got to the end of the runway control would tell them to hang fire. ‘Just keep your props going. The inners will do. We’ll send a jeep out to you to take out the demob centre which is the other side of the airfield.’ And they were whistled straight over to this demob centre and three or four days they were out because they had to do all this sort of thing. Obviously. What have you been doing sort of thing. And everything else, you know.
CB: But that was at the end of the war wasn’t it?
AF: Oh yes.
CB: So you went to, according to your logbook you went to 12 OTU after you finished at 460 Squadron. Did you? What did you do there?
AF: Can I have a look?
CB: Yeah. It’s on the summary at the back page.
AF: Oh yes. 12 OTU. Here.
CB: That was all ground work was it?
AF: Oh yes. The 2nd of October.
CB: 26th of October.
AF: It’s alright. No.
CB: ’44.
AF: Do you want to leave it there a moment?
CB: Yeah [pause] Yes. 26th of October it says.
AF: Yeah. I’m looking for my —
CB: Your glasses? What?
AF: No. I mean. Ah, that’s what I want.
CB: But you ended up, you stopped your flying by the look of it at —
AF: Oh yes.
CB: After 460 Squadron.
AF: Yeah. Yes. That was the end. Well, after I’d done forty odd trips they put that as a limit. And they wouldn’t let you go.
CB: No.
AF: I mean, we’ve had, we’ve had crews go off and get halfway to the target and they’ve discovered, ordinary, one of the —
CB: An airman in the —
AF: Yeah. Airmen in the Lanc.
CB: In the aircraft. Yeah.
AF: Yeah. He wanted to go for the experience of seeing what a raid was like [laughs] I mean, you’ve got to look after him. What could you do?
CB: Just keep going.
AF: Well, that’s right.
CB: Yeah.
AF: Just keep on going. Yeah. But I’m just wondering what it says here.
CB: It’s back on Wellington on the listing. But in here you haven’t got an entry.
AF: No.
CB: So it sounds as though you didn’t do flying from then on.
AF: 12. No. Obviously. No. I would presume that I gave them a blank.
CB: Yeah.
AF: There’s eight months work there.
CB: Thinking back across, of the war. What would you think was the most disturbing part of your experience?
AF: Seeing what it looked like from the air when hundreds and hundreds of houses were burning. Which is upsetting. You know. You can imagine what’s taking place down there. People screaming. People trying to get out of rubble and rubbish. Stuff that’s burning. A terrible thing really. But that’s what used to worry me was the condition of some of the towns. Well, you must have seen photographs of the towns afterwards.
CB: Absolutely.
AF: With just, well, it’s like a lot of vacant blind people walking about. A great thing. A great pity. You couldn’t get up an anger. I never found that easy. But it happened. When I was —
CB: Couldn’t get up an anger of what do you mean?
AF: An anger that it was all happening at all.
CB: Oh right.
AF: Not at Waterbeach. These books are never right. You skived off as much as you could. Although I enjoyed, I enjoyed instructing on aircraft recognition. But there again I’d been doing it as a hobby at eight. And they force you to look at aeroplane models when you’re twenty one or twenty you don’t mind.
CB: What was the high part of, for you in the war? The best thing that happened to you in the war.
AF: The only, the only thing that I can think of, sir with any honesty is when my leave came around and I could see my parents and my girl, then my wife. Same girl.
CB: Yeah.
AF: But didn’t have a lot of money. Never have had.
CB: It must have been difficult to keep in touch with her because she was posted to different places.
AF: Well, she was in a, she was in a [pause] they’d all got bikes so they could cycle where they’d got to go to. You could tell the pluck they’d got. But she was repairing aircraft. Wellingtons of course were made in a [pause] made in a linen which is then doped when it is on the frame of the aircraft. It’s doped and it tightens up so that it gives you a skin which will, a linen is very strong. And that’s what was used on Wellingtons to keep them flying. Because there’s no doubt it. They were useful aircraft for training. But that’s what she was doing.
CB: I’m just going to stop.
Other: Wonderful.
[recording paused]
AF: Just be glad you weren’t an air gunner.
CB: Yes.
AF: In all respects.
Other: You know.
CB: So, Alan Farr, thank you very much indeed for a most interesting conversation.
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 Alan Avery Farr
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-07-12
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.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AFarrAA170712
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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02:02:38 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
Allan Avery Farr was working at the market in Birmingham before he joined the RAF. He wanted to have the quickest entry to see action and so trained as an air gunner. He trained in Canada where he was offered a post as an instructor but he wanted to serve with an operational squadron. On one flight his eyes froze over and the wireless operator had to help him to recover. The navigator was seriously injured during one operation and when they landed the crew helped get him to the ambulance. Allan met up with him again sixty years later. On one operation they collided with a German night fighter and although the aircraft was very severely damaged they managed to return to the UK.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
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Canada
Germany
Great Britain
Poland
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Berlin
Poland--Szczecin
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
100 Squadron
12 OTU
460 Squadron
625 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
Battle
crewing up
Distinguished Flying Medal
FIDO
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
love and romance
mid-air collision
military service conditions
Operational Training Unit
RAF Binbrook
RAF Blyton
RAF Grimsby
RAF Lichfield
RAF Waterbeach
recruitment
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/837/10827/PGoldbyJL1701.1.jpg
a45bc6d8a3e3b396aa60a0e197184a52
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/837/10827/AGoldbyJL171025.2.mp3
eeb8f152cb68ea23e18042b8b5151712
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Goldby, John Louis
J L Goldby
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with John Goldby (1922 - 2020, 1387511, 139407 Royal Air Force). He was shot down and became a prisoner of war in December 1944.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by John Goldby and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-10-25
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Goldby, JL
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DM: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is David Meanwell. The interviewee is John Goldby. The interview is taking place at Mr Goldby’s home in Keston in the county of Kent on the 25th of October 2017. Ok, John. Well, if you’d like to perhaps kick off. Tell us a bit about where you were born and about growing up.
JG: Yes. I was born in Bexley, Kent in 1922. The next thing, the following year the family moved to Sidcup and my home until I joined up was in Sidcup. I went to what was then called the Sidcup County School before that was then turned into a grammar school and I went, started there in 1931 and I stayed there until the end of the summer 1939. From there on I, until I joined up I worked for a private bank, Brown Shipley and Company in the City of London. And I worked for them until I joined up in May 19 — 1941.
DM: What, when you, what prompted you to join the air force as opposed to going into another service?
JG: Well, my reason for the air force was I had a friend who was at the school who was about a year older than I was and as soon as he could join anything he joined the air force and became a Spitfire pilot. I thought that’s just the thing. One, one great advantage is if something happens to you when you’re at ten twenty thousand feet up there’s a chance of something might come to your rescue in those twenty thousand feet. Whereas if you are shot on the battlefield that’s where you’ll lie. And if you fall in the water in certain circumstances in the Navy that’s where you’ll end because the water is very cold. I stayed with the bank until such time as I, as I was actually called up because until I was eighteen I wasn’t allowed to go. But when the time came in 1941 I joined and I was, had been recorded as being fit for either pilot or navigator training. Because at that time it was the beginning of the expansion of Bomber Command to the four engine aircraft which meant there were now there was a bomb aimer and a navigator and as it happened the extra body and above that was a flight engineer.
DM: Where? When you say you signed up and then you were called up?
JG: Yes.
DM: To go and train. I assume that was the next thing.
JG: That’s right.
DM: Where did that happen? Where did you go for that?
JG: They were, the receiving wing as it was called was in Babbacombe in, in Devon and I went down there on the 31st of May 1941. After a couple of months or so then started ground, with air crew ground training. Morse code and all that sort of thing. Aircraft recognition. The sort of basic things which would then enable me to go on to flying training. In fact, some of my ground training was up here at Kenley which was a fighter aircraft airfield and was involved in the Battle of Britain or had been by the time I got there. And that was a number, there were quite a lot of these actual operational stations which housed training. Ground training for aircrew. Eventually, having done ground training I was then allocated a position in Air Observer School for training, as they were called then air observers. And the one, and then they were allocated on the basis of alphabetical order. And there were five of us in on the list whose initial was G. And the five of us who’d been looking forward to going to either South Africa or Canada or somewhere exotic like that found ourselves going to the Isle of Man. And I thought what a jolly place to be for the cold winter because that’s where I started training in October 1941 and I stayed there until May 1942. And then it was to Operational Training Unit. And in those days Operational Training Unit, the individual aircrew got together and formed a crew. It was virtually sort of go and find someone who you liked, feel you would like to fly with. It wasn’t mandatory as far as I know who you were allocated or I was and then people were added of course. A pilot who was in army uniform and in fact he had opted to change to aircrew which of course you could do if you wanted to go aircrew. And that’s another thing with the police. The police were allowed to leave and join up for aircrew duties. And so we had, we had a lot of police in our intake if you like who’d done all sorts of jobs in the police. And I flew, we used to fly in pairs on navigational training. And the extraordinary thing really for navigational training we were flying Blenheims which were actually operational aircraft. And it was the fastest aircraft I think I flew in the whole war. That’s — and I flew with a chap who had been a policeman in Glasgow. Actually, he was a mobile policeman. Anyway, the bombing training was from Hampdens, both of those aircraft were of course twin-engine. And then, and air gunnery we flew in, again in Blenheims firing at a drogue. And the training there lasted from the October ’41 to May ’42 and then back to this country. And then in the June on we went to [pause] can we stop it for a moment?
[recording paused]
JG: Still training. An Operational Training Unit which was at Stanton Harcourt which was a subsidiary to, or satellite to RAF Abingdon. When having or while we were there my pilot went on the first thousand bomber raid in, in May ’42 as a sort of, as a second pilot. Then in June, on the 25th of June ’42 we flew as a crew to Cologne in a Whitley. That was on the three days before my twentieth birthday which was the 25th of June 1942. We flew on the 25th. Did I say 25th? The 28th of June is my birthday.
DM: Right.
JG: Did I make a mistake there?
DM: That’s ok. So your birthday’s the 28th of June.
JG: 28th
DM: You flew on the 25th.
JG: The 25th
DM: A few days before. Yeah.
JG: Having finished there at OTU we then went to RAF St Eval. And the policy at that time was that crews that were now finished OTU, certainly from 4 Group went down to do a number, or several months’ worth of flying in Whitleys in, on an anti-submarine role. An anti-submarine role.
DM: So, St Eval is in Cornwall. Is that right?
JG: Cornwall.
DM: Yeah.
JG: That’s right. We, we used to fly ten hour sorties from there and when we came back the next day we were absolutely clear. We didn’t do anything that day. In fact we couldn’t probably hear anything that day but because the conditions of course in the Whitley are pretty cramped. But we had to do the ten hours and the following day was a free day. The next day we were briefed on what the flight was to be the following day. And that was the pattern. And you had a free day, briefing and then the next day you flew. I did, as far as I can recall — one of the problems I have is that my, I never retrieved my logbook following becoming a POW when all my stuff was taken and distributed. So, one way or another I didn’t ever get my book back and I’ll say a bit more about that later. Anyway, after that, after our period down there in Cornwall we came back up to Yorkshire to the, to a Conversion Unit on the four engine aircraft. And that was when I joined or after that period in a, in the Marston Moor was the Conversion Unit in Yorkshire. And we flew then with, now with the extra crew the [pause] I suppose we spent about a month there and then as a crew we went to RAF Linton on Ouse and joined 78 Squadron which was at that time commanded by Wing Commander Tait, T A I T. Known as Willie Tait and who ended his career, I suppose it would have been when he took on the final sortie against the Tirpitz. He, I don’t know — there was a programme on last night. Was of the 617 Squadron and the, and the nine aircraft that flew on this final sortie and demolished the Tirpitz, it was about the fourth or fifth time they’d done it. Had not had a big enough bomb which of course had to be designed by Barnes Wallis who was the author, if you like, of the bomb, the bouncing bomb. Anyway, Willie Tait was a bit of a frightening man. He was not popular because he was so blooming strict and didn’t fraternise really with other aircrew. And it was particularly noticeable because Linton on Ouse was shared between 78 Squadron with Willie Tait and 76 Squadron with Leonard Cheshire and they were so different it’s hardly true. So, we arrived there in October and we started operations. Starting with what we used to call, or was called gardening. That’s mine laying. Which counted for only one operation. People disappeared on those things so how they could justify going down for, on a half an op, I don’t know. And I stayed there with 78 Squadron until March ’43. That was, that was’ 42. ’43, I had gone down at the end of February ’43. I was commissioned and I went down to London to get kitted out. I came back and I developed a raging throat infection. It turned out to be an abscess and I was put into hospital and I never re-joined 78. I then went on sort of sick leave and eventually I had the tonsils out at the time of my 21st birthday before then going on to the sort of thing that one did at the end of a tour of operations which was as an instructor. And that’s when I went in that year down to Moreton in Marsh flying Wellingtons. I stayed there [pause] I’m getting a bit. Will you turn it off a bit?
[recording paused]
JG: My time at Moreton in Marsh lasted until the spring of 1944. Following that I completed a bombing leader course at the Armaments School at RAF Manby in January 1944. At the end of that I then went to RAF Riccall. This was another of the Conversion Units. Yeah. And from there, after doing the bombing leader course I went from the — to this. To Riccall. RAF Riccall which was the conversion [pause] I’d better have it off.
[recording paused]
JG: Riccall. RAF Riccall, on a refresher course before joining a Squadron. And that’s where I was on D-day. So, by the time I reached 640 Squadron it was the end of June 1944 and that’s where I went to take up the post of bombing leader.
DM: When you went — so you were on your new base.
JG: Yes.
DM: You were now a bombing leader. Did you have a crew?
JG: No.
DM: Or were you a sort of a spare bod?
JG: That’s right.
DM: As they said.
JG: That’s right. Yes. Well, I’ve got in my notes down here. In that position I was supposed to stay. Fly no more than two operations a month which was not very much. And I was the one who selected when I would go and with whom. Sensibly and logically really the ones I went on I was actually taking the place of somebody in the crew who was not able to go on that particular flight. Illness or whatever reason. And I was flying, we were coming up to Christmas and I am sure that I had by that time I had done, I’d flown twelve operations and the one that I was going on was to be my thirteenth actually of my second tour. I decided that I was going to have to do at least one anyway in December. So I selected one on the 6th of December because that was where the usual permanent bomb aimer was ill. So, I took his place. So I was flying with that crew for the first time ever. The only one of them, of the crew, commissioned was the pilot. I knew him because we were both commissioned. But the rest of the crew non-commissioned I hadn’t met before even. And of course I made the great mistake that I’d picked the wrong one. It was, shouldn’t have been a particularly dangerous one but anyway over Germany and this is now where there’s a bit of a gap in what happened because I see I’m actually have been recorded as being shot down. I always doubted that because the manner in which we crashed. There was, we weren’t attacked by anything. And what I believe and I’m hoping I will get one day confirmation of this, we collided with a German night fighter. And the reason I say that is because in the report that I got back from the Air Ministry things apparently a night fighter was lost that night in that area and reported a collision. And the circumstances of the accident lead one I think to conclude that it’s certainly much more likely to have been a collision because from going from the pilot completely under control to immediately losing control and I conclude, and most people think it’s much more likely I think that we collided with this thing and it took our tail off because in no time at all we were in a spin. And as we spun down it was impossible to get out of the aircraft because the, what do you call it force?
DM: The G Force.
JG: G. Yes. Really. You couldn’t lift a hand to get out. And then they, there was this crashing sound which I believed was we were hitting the ground. I thought well this is it but in fact within seconds I suppose it would be only I found myself outside in the fresh air on a dark December night. I had my parachute pack on because I’d already put that on as soon as there was an emergency and I opened that up and then descended by parachute. And there was not a sound or a sign of anything which was connected with the accident. So the aircraft had gone down. I was now floating down. Way behind it I suppose. And I don’t believe that was as a result of an actual physical attack. But being shot down it certainly wasn’t. The evidence points to that I think. I’ve tried to find out more about that. With a bit of luck my elder son who is coming down at the beginning of December is going to review records to see if he can find out any more about it. Or if there is any way one can get through Germany. I don’t suppose there’s anything anyway. They won’t have kept much of that sort of record. But we’ll see. But I’ve always had an open mind about this. So, how I came down I don’t know. But I came down in a flooded field. I didn’t realise at the time but I looked down and saw this expanse of water. I couldn’t make it out because we were nowhere near the sea or any large expanse of water. And I came down. I thought I had broken my right leg. I was holding my leg in both hands, both arms because of the pain and the trousers torn. Blood all over the place. And I went in left leg first and sprained my leg because it turned out to be a flooded field which was not very helpful. Fell over and got soaking wet. I spent a bit of time in some bushes trying to find out what was wrong with me if I could and then sort of get myself composed enough to move on. Eventually I did. I moved on in the direction of some houses. I knew by compass the heading of course. I had no idea where I was on the ground. How far I’d fallen before I opened the parachute. Anything like that. So, I eventually got into a farmyard and into an open cart and I examined my body to see what was wrong and also to get rid of my wet things which were very wet. The only trouble was I was going to have to sort of wring them out and put them back on again. Which I did. And while I was in the cart, presumably members of the farm came out, calling out, ‘Is there anybody there?’ Or what I assumed was what they were after. Of course, I kept quiet and they would go away and enable me then to start my escape. Eventually I got out of the farm. I realised I had just flesh wounds on my right leg. It was nothing really serious but my hands were cut, my face was cut. Anyway, off I went in the early hours of the next morning. The 7th. I was walking down a country lane actually with not a sound or sign of anybody when I was stopped by a guard, an armed guard who I believe to have come from the local Luftwaffe station. Anyway, by now I was a prisoner of course and from then on I spent a bit of time there while they organised my — oh no. What am I talking about? No. I was put into a hospital. It was a civil hospital run by nuns. And the four of us who had survived this accident which was me, the flight engineer, the wireless operator and the navigator we, we were not too far dispersed on the ground when we landed. So that they got us together and then planned, I presume what they were going to do with us. And fortunately for me the flight engineer and I were put into hospital where we were very well treated. The flight engineer was very badly injured. He’d broken all sorts of his body and the extraordinary thing is with him we were in this room together, we talked together all the time because there was no one else to talk to and he had not realised what had happened to him. Where he was. He could not remember anything following taxiing out to take off the night before. The 6th. And he never did as far as I know. But he was in a very bad way and he was still in hospital when I left which was somewhere towards the mid to I haven’t got the actual date of this. January. One day a guard appeared at my door and I was told to dress and follow him in about, at least six inches of snow outside and as this was going to be my first walk following the parachute descent I wasn’t too happy about it. But fortunately he had a bicycle and I was allowed to push it in the manner of the zimmer really while he walked beside me. We went to the local Luftwaffe station and then a few days later two guards arrived and started me on my way down to the Frankfurt. The Dulag Luft Interrogation Centre where I was, everyone was when you arrived there you go in to solitary and they liked to make it as unpleasant for you as they can. The bed was just two or three struts across the frame. A blanket and a pillow and that was basically it. If you wanted to use the lavatory you had to operate a little lever on the inside of the thing, of the room which indicated to the guard outside that you wanted to go. Whereupon they either came or they didn’t which was a bit, could be difficult. So you really had to plan in advance. And then of course once you were in there, you got to the loo as soon as you got there and if you wanted to sit down they shouted, ‘Come out.’ And made it, everything was made unpleasant. The food we had for breakfast we would have coffee, and [pause] I think that’s about it. But there would have been the bit of black bread anyway with nothing much on it. If anything. At lunchtime it would be a watery soup. And then an evening meal was the black coffee again and with bread and a bit of something on it. The heating, the room was heated by a radiator which was, made the room, when it was on it was unbearably hot. During the night they would turn it off so you would awaken frozen stiff. And that was where you stayed until they let, said they’d had enough of you in interrogation. There was nothing much really I could have told and everything that they had, they’d had members of my crew already through there so I was having to be careful about what I said. They said, ‘You were a flight lieutenant bomb aimer. You must have been the bombing leader.’ Which they knew quite a lot about but which I denied but whether they believed me I don’t know. But eventually I was on my way and the, we were after, yeah there was a spell while they gathered a number of people to make it worth shipping them off to a POW camp I suppose. But then we would go from there by train to the POW camp. We had no idea where it was going to be but we were led to believe it was somewhere in East Germany. And we then, we discovered eventually what our destination was and that we were going by train via Berlin. Which we were not looking forward to. But we were in ordinary carriages of compartments with ten in each. We took it in turns to sleep on the carriage rack. Luggage rack. Otherwise you couldn’t stretch out at all. After several days and I’m not quite sure how long actually but we arrived at Stalag Luft 1, and it’s address is Barth. B A R T H. In fact — will you turn it off again?
[recording paused]
DM: Ok.
JG: I’ll go from where we left Dulag Luft following interrogation at about 1 pm on Saturday 13th and arrived at Wetzlar at 6am on the Sunday. Where that is I don’t know but the distance between the two camps was a little over forty miles. Here we stayed until the following Saturday living twenty four men to a room and eating three times a day in the mess hall. It was at this camp we had Red Cross clothing issued. Two — what they were I don’t know, two packets of American cigarettes and a subsequent issue of ten a day while we were there. Most important was the shower. My first decent wash in Germany. On Saturday January the 20th 1945 of course we’re talking about here a party of eighty of us left for Stalag Luft 1 situated at Barth on the Baltic coast. The journey was expected to last anything from four to seven days and we were there and we were provided with a half a Red Cross parcel per men together with a ration of a fifth of a loaf of bread per day. We travelled in a carriage. Ten men to a compartment and the coach was hooked on to those engines and shunted back and forth in the manner of a freight car. We never actually left the carriage throughout the journey. We ate very well but sleep was difficult and we were relieved to hear that we were making good time. On route we passed through Berlin where we had to wait several hours for the next and last connection. It was a sigh, with a sigh of relief that we left the capital and continued on our way. On Monday evening at 4.50 or 4.30 we arrived at Barth. We spent the night in the railway carriage and on Tuesday morning marched to the camp some three miles north. On arrival we had a shower and our clothing was deloused. Later we were issued with mugs but also knife, fork and spoon and palliases and pillows. Once again we slept in rooms built to hold twenty men. The beds they arranged in three tiers. That evening we had a very welcome bowl of hot barley soup. And our first night’s sleep since we left Wetzlar. And that’s that. The rest of it is really conditions in the camp.
DM: Were you reasonably well treated in the camp?
JG: Oh yes. Yeah. They had sort of given up on us really I think. The only thing is one didn’t mess about. If you didn’t, if you came outside your hut after curfew you could be shot. They wouldn’t worry about it. And while we were there I think at least one person was outside when he shouldn’t have been and was shot.
DM: Did you get news of how the war was going? Was there a sort of —
JG: Oh yes.
DM: A bush telegraph or —
JG: Yes. Yes. Well, there were some parts of the camp had radios of course. Secret radios. I don’t think we were ever issued anything by the authorities but we knew exactly what was going on. And eventually we got the news that we — of course Hitler was declared dead at the end of April. And the camp commandant on our side, he was the senior allied officer was a chap, an American fighter pilot and he he came on the communications system and said that the Germans were going to evacuate the camp. And he had said to them, ‘What will you do if we refuse to come?’ And they said, ‘We’ll leave you behind.’ And of course we knew that the Russians were getting very very close and the Germans were of course terrified of these murderous people who they, ahead of the regular organised army came up and just did what they liked. And their behaviour was dreadful. And the population was pretty well scared stiff of them. At the beginning of May, I’ve not, I haven’t got the date of it I think. Or have I? [pause] Yes.
[pause]
JG: Yes. We were following Hitler’s death. Then things were collapsed on the German side quite considerably. But before that, in the March we had, we had the RAF prisoners had a briefing in which we were told that plans were afoot for us to break out of camp. The whole of the camp would break out. The RAF would act as armed guard to the main body of prisoners going back west who would have been American. And as we were going, ‘How do we break out of this place then?’ ‘Arms will be dropped to you,’ we were told. This was the sort of rubbish that came from Whitehall. You know, that sort of thing. Absolute, well as I say complete rubbish. And we came out of the briefing and we were flabbergasted. And I was, walked out with a pilot from 4 Group who had been the pilot of a Halifax which was involved in a head on collision over Cologne. I can’t imagine anything much worse than that. Having a aircraft — and he was the only survivor. But the fun, or interesting thing it was the first occasion he was wearing a seat parachute. Up until then the pilots only had the ordinary pack which clipped on. Whereas, they had, at the end of the war, a bit late, at the end of the war they were issued with a seat pack so that if something happened and the aircraft came adrift [pause] Is it on? Then they would get away with it and it was the first occasion he’d worn it. And of course this was the first occasion he really needed it. You know. He said, well he thought it was rubbish and we were a bit taken aback and alarmed. Because if people were going to the extent of dropping arms to us they obviously wanted us to use them and we, having got that stage in our lives having survived we didn’t want to stick out our necks much longer. Particularly now. It’s obviously at the end of the war. Hitler is now dead and things are going to move quite fast. Anyway, we, we sat waiting for news of our evacuation and it was, nothing seemed to be happening until a group captain from our own side got through to the lines in Lubeck to allied headquarters to find out what was going on. Only to find of course nothing was going on. But as a result of that arrangements were made for the US Air Force, 8th Air Force, the B17s to come and pick us up and take us home. Adjoined, quite close to the camp was a Luftwaffe base which by now of course the Russians moving in it was now part of Russia as far as they were concerned. And no way were they going to allow any aircraft, allied aircraft in there until Eisenhower got behind it when he heard that we were not. He wasn’t going to have for a start any idea that we should break out and march west. It was the last thing he wanted. He’d got enough people rushing around the place. And he didn’t sort of want gash POWs. And so we were to stay where we were. And as a result of that RAF chap getting through to our lines and getting some action how much longer we would have been there goodness knows. And then [pause] now, I’ve got here at the end of the war, our time in the camp with the Germans. Now, having gone that Monday the 30th of April 1945 the Germans have been demolishing detector installations and equipment in the flak school which on this airfield. By the evening most of the items have left the camp and it looks as though we shall be left here in the care of the senior administrative office. Many heavy explosions in the flak school and on the aerodrome around. There was no count on today, parade tonight but the Jerry major appeared to be tired. At 9pm the somebody [pause] Well, anyway, 9pm we were told that from 8am tomorrow, that’s the 1st we would no longer be POWs as the commandant was officially handing over. We had an extra biscuit, butter and marmalade to celebrate. Tuesday the 1st of May — today the guard posts are occupied by Americans wearing MP armbands. That’s Military Police of course instead of the usual old goons which was our name for the German guards. A white flag flies over the camp. The rumours are thick and fast and everyone is wondering when we shall get away. The Russians are supposed to be pretty close. The latest is that they are two kilometres south of Barth. The bürgermeister of Barth is said to have shot himself. At 1pm we heard the BBC news and now at 14.20 we are listening to, “Variety Band Box.” Tonight at 22.15 approximately a Russian lieutenant and either a civilian or Russian soldier arrived. Cheers echoed throughout the compound. We’d been awaiting this for some time. Good Old Joe. The main Russian body captured Stralsund, which is on the coast, tonight, today. Listened to the BBC news. Public House time it to be extended on VE Day. I hope we’re home for it. At 22.30 it was announced that Hitler is dead. I hope it was one of Berlin, was in one of Berlin’s sewers. Perhaps these will capitulate now. Lights on until midnight by order of Colonel Zemke. He was the allied commander I was talking about. Special cup of hot milk at 23.15. More Russians expected tomorrow. Water shortage. On the Wednesday the 2nd the Russians said we were to march out and be packed in preparation to leave at 6pm. One Red Cross parcel issued to each man for the journey. We ate several meals in quick succession to get rid of our [pause] this is the one [pause] yes. We had to get rid of [pause] Red Cross parcel stocks. Share out the ones that we had left. Then we were told to be ready to march in the morning and a little later we heard that the march was not definite. Most of us left camp in the evening to have a look around. Some even got into Barth. Rumours are flying out, hope it’s true, British and Russians are supposed to have linked up in the north. Chaos reigned all day. Poor water situation. German armies in Italy and Austria surrendered to Alexander. Monty’s boys in Lubeck. Russian. Russians in Rostock. Berlin has fallen. Hamburg declared an open city. I’ve been told the airfield is becoming clear of mines. We may be flown out. Hope it’s true and that the kites —
[pause]
JG: I heard earlier today that we’re in contact with London, Washington and Moscow to see what they intended to do. Or for us to do. A colossal [pause] comparatively speaking, announced all day. The water situation a bit better. From midnight tonight we use Russian time. An hour in advance of our present time. Friday the 4th — airfield expected to be clear by 2pm. All Germans in northwest Germany, Holland, Denmark, Heligoland were ordered by Admiral Doenitz to surrender unconditionally. This is to take effect from 08.00 tomorrow Saturday the 5th of May 1945. Saturday the 5th of May — a Russian general inspected our barracks in the morning. In the afternoon Marshall Rokossovsky to some [pause] oh no, came to report with Colonel Zemke. A very tough looking bunch. One of the generals made a speech to some of us in Russian. An American colonel arrived by jeep from our lines and made final arrangements for our evacuation. Wish they would get a move on. Listened to a radio recording of the signing of the unconditional surrender by the German staff. The commentary was by Monty. The 6th. Sunday the 6th — still waiting. The colonel repeated his former broadcast saying things were being done for our evacuation. Monday the 7th — a lieutenant colonel of the 6th airborne Division came to Wismar today to reassure us and we needed some reassuring too that we could expect to be flown out within the next few days. He could not say which day it would be but would definitely be only a matter of a few days. Question — how long or short is a few days? Apparently, we shall be flown back to England. Good deal. Other POWs are still being flown back by Lancs. [pause] Daks and Commandos are being used. Twenty five in a Dak, forty in a Commando. Most POWs have to be helped into aircraft. They were given a shock here. We shall run like stink when the kites come. I’ve heard that tomorrow is VE day and the following day a holiday. I’m bloody annoyed that we’re not going to, we’re going to miss the celebrations and so is everyone else. Saturday, Sunday the 6th of May — saw a Russian concert this afternoon and it was very good. No one or very few understood a word but what the hell. Monday the 7th of May — at the moment, 21.50 Russian time someone, I think it’s Alfredo Campoli, is playing a composition on the violin which I heard once at one of the St John’s socials. St John’s being the Parish church in Sidcup where I come from. It has just been announced that the BBC have broadcast a message to the effect that Stalag Luft 1, Barth, Pomerania has been liberated and the next of kin are being informed. Goebbels, his wife and daughters took poison apparently. War ends after five years and eight months. Unconditional surrender made at 2.41 French time today to Field Marshall Montgomery. Location Reims. Or Reims. Tuesday the 8th of May — I’ve just heard the prime minister’s speech declaring that the European war is at an end. The ceasefire officially takes place at 00.01 tomorrow. Wednesday, May 9th but fighting, except for some of the Resistance in Czechoslovakia ceased on Thursday morning. It is VE day and this morning I spent some time sun bathing on the peninsula north of the camp. I hope soon to be doing the same in England very soon. Listened to the King’s Speech. I guess the family were listening too. Do they know where I am? I wonder. And did they hear the announcement on the radio last night to the effect that we had been liberated by the Red Army. Lancs landed in Germany for the first time and flew back with four thousand five hundred POWs. Come on boys. Let’s get out of here. Wednesday the 9th of May— sunbathing again today. Allied parade this morning. A Russian officer made a speech to us. Same old story. Be patient for a few more days. Plenty of rumours floating around [pause] At 08.00 hours on BBC radio all men at Stalag Luft 1, Barth, near Stralsund, Pomerania, Germany are to remain in the camp and not make for the allied lines. Well, I don’t know whether anyone did. Thursday, the 10th of May — on KP again today. You know, that’s cleaning up the camp. Ten thousand more POWs flown out by five hundred BC aircraft and we’re still here. Colonel Zemke made an appalling speech again tonight. He’s going to get out all souvenirs. The rumour is that all British personnel are going to be taken by transport to Wismar and flown home from there. Also, that we should have been there yesterday. Group Captain Weir is said to have gone to try and get us out. He may have split with Colonel Zemke. I hope so as Zemke hasn’t a bloody clue. Listened to ITMA. Last time I heard it was on Wednesday the 6th December. I was changing in my room for the op and could hear it on someone else’s radio. That was of course the day on which I went down in Germany. Friday the 11th — sunbathed again today. There’s a meeting of the wheels, you know they were the top men, tonight. Final arrangements for our evacuation are said to be the subject of discussion. Group Captain Weir seems to have been arranging with the Russian commander of the area, Colonel General Batov for aircraft to land here to take us out. Colonel Zemke has just announced that aircraft expected here tomorrow or on Sunday. Russian passports are being signed up in preparation. It really looks as if we are going to move soon. Squadron Leader Evans had to fill in forms of interrogation which he signed. This gives us clearance, a clearance chit to be presented on arrival in England which should hasten our departure from the Receiving Centre. A cabinet order said that all POWs are to be with their families within twenty four hours of arriving in England. Length of leave is uncertain. Nearly eighty thousand POWs have been returned to England so far. There can’t be many more. Eisenhower has just repeated his, ‘stay put’ message. The 12th, Saturday the 12th — Group Captain Green on parade this morning said evacuation was to begin this afternoon. Sick quarters are first on the list. Then come the British personnel in the following order and its by blocks eight, nine, ten, eleven etcetera. So we were in a good position. What’s the betting I click for a cleaning job which would mean a delayed departure. At 2pm the first US aircraft arrived at Barth aerodrome. Two Daks for hospital cases and the rest Fortresses. Joe here is in charge, that’s me, in charge of operation [unclear] so I shan’t get away until tomorrow. The rest of the boys in the room buzzed at 3pm. Six lads and I stayed from 3pm until 9pm cleaning up. What a bloody awful job. Managed to get a shower at the end of it. Packed for the morning, nearly losing my fags as the Yanks still in the compound were on the prowl and almost swiped them. Saturday the 13th of May — paraded at 6.30am and after roll call we marched out to the airfield. At 7.30am the first Forts arrived. We were then split into groups of twenty five and as each Fort came around the perimeter track we embarked. That was Sunday the 13th. We were airborne at 8.30am and flew fairly low direct to England having a very good look at Bremen and Hamburg enroute. As we were using Russian time we had to put our watches back one hour to correspond with double British summertime. PBST. We landed at Ford in Sussex at 11.30. This completed the trip I set out on on December the 6th last. It took a bloody long time for my liking. Too long. I have recalled the following dream I had some time during my incarceration. Obviously, it was prompted by my fear that my family didn’t know my fate in the dream. I returned home to reassure the family that I was safe, in reasonable shape and in a POW camp. Having told the family this I prepared to leave, much to their puzzlement. ‘Why,’ they asked, ‘Did you, now home do you propose to leave?’ ‘Because I’m still a POW and my place is in that German POW camp,’ [laughs] I replied. And that took me to the end of the war.
DM: So, that was the diary you kept.
JG: Yes.
DM: When you were in the camp. Yes.
JG: That’s right. And that I didn’t much do much until the last days. Little point really.
DM: So, you obviously then had leave after you got home.
JG: That’s right.
DM: Repatriation leave.
JG: Yes.
DM: When did you actually leave the air force the first time?
[pause]
JG: I don’t [pause] I’m not sure that I’ve got it.
DM: It doesn’t matter precisely.
JG: Yes. It was —
DM: It was in 1945 was it?
JG: Yes.
DM: That you left.
JG: That’s right. Yes. What happened was that after the end of leave, which was extensive I did an air traffic controller course and I ended my days in the RAF as an air traffic controller at Henlow in Bedfordshire. And it must have been September I think. I’m trying to think when I got it [pause] Righto. Thank you.
DM: When you left the air force —
JG: Yes.
DM: What did you do in Civvy Street?
JG: I had a number of jobs. The last one was an, with an insurance company called Friends Provident. They’re still around. Quite a minor one I think. But I had, the first job I had was [pause] air freight. It was a company that dealt with arranging air freight in and out of the country. We were based in Victoria. It was a fiercely boring thing. And —
Other: You didn’t go back to Brown Shipley did you?
JG: No. I often wonder what would have happened had I because Brown Shipley’s still around.
DM: What prompted you to join up again in 1949?
JG: The fact that I was bored stiff and really and I was by now living in what we used to call digs in Reading and coming home to Sidcup at the weekends. And I didn’t really enjoy it much. And so it was when this announcement was made I thought, ‘Oh I can’t do worse than this.’ And if I’m going to go back on my terms because what I want now I want to settle down. If possible to get a house. I want to make some solid progress and get employment which I can guarantee until normal retirement age because I’ve not got much in the way of money. Certainly the RAF would provide the income that I was looking for and if I can get in with my flight lieutenant rank. And also, I actually had the nerve to talk about a permanent commission. And to my amazement that’s what happened. And I’ll never know whether the chap who was by now Air Marshall Sir John Whitley who had been the station commander at, at St Eval in 1942 when I was there and whom I was interviewed by him on the way to getting a commission and I wrote and reminded him of that. Whether it had any affect I just don’t know. I’d like to think it did and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he hadn’t sort of put a recommendation in on my behalf. Anyway, that’s in I went. And 31st of May 1949 and I — my first Squadron. I went having done a number of courses to 1949. Refresher navigation courses. I then went to a course where I went as a navigator to a pilot whose name was Wing Commander Oxley and this was a organised — I’m not sure what exactly it was called but it was at [pause] now —
[pause]
JG: I have to turn this off again. I’m very sorry.
[recording paused]
JG: Obviously then, this refresher training thing I was posted.
[pause – doorbell rings]
JG: To RAF Swinderby at an Advanced Flying School and where we flew Wellingtons and I flew with the pilot Wing Commander Oxley between September and November. In late December of ’49 I was posted to Number 236 Operational Conversion Unit at RAF Kinloss, Scotland flying Lancasters. Until April the 5th of April when I was posted to 38 Squadron Luqa, Malta flying Lancasters on maritime operations.
[pause]
JG: Apart from maritime operations which included various Naval and air force. Naval and air operations, training operations and also on air sea rescue duties.
[pause]
JG: At the beginning of 1953 where I was then posted to Number 1 Maritime Reconnaissance School. And that was at St Mawgan in Cornwall. And during my time there I found myself recruited to take part in the Queen’s coronation and I, for the spell which included the coronation I went up to Henlow. And we were trained in basically marching long distances. And I took part in the actual Review on the 2nd of June 1953. And then subsequently in the July I took part in the Queen’s RAF Review of the — at [pause] well I think it was the RAF Review. The Queen’s Review of the RAF took place at Odiham in Hampshire. And that was [pause] I haven’t got the actual date. Later in 1954 I was posted to headquarters, 64 Group Home Command at Rufforth, York as PA to the AOC. Non-flying apart from accompanying the air commodore and visits. From ’56, September ’56 to the 23rd of January I attended a Bomber Command Bombing School, Lindholme. Navigation training for the V force. In summer that year I was posted instead to Air Ministry, London Air Intelligence Branch. And in October 1960 I was posted as assistant air attaché, British Embassy, Paris. I retired from the RAF in May 1962 and in September I joined Shellmex and BP Limited soon to become separate companies. I stayed with Shell until retiring in June 1982. And that’s really leaves me coming out.
DM: The, near the beginning you were saying that because you were a POW.
JG: Yes.
DM: You didn’t have your hands on your logbook.
JG: That’s right.
DM: And you didn’t get it back. And that was one of the ones that was ultimately destroyed I assume.
JG: Yes. As far as I know if you want to record it.
DM: It’s going. Yeah.
JG: When I came back I made enquiries and I discovered that in October or November 1960 [pause] Either ’59 or ’60. When did I go? [pause] Yes. It would be October 1960. A decree had gone out earlier that year, no in that month, it was certainly while I was in Paris the Air Ministry issued a decree to say that the, there were a lot of logbooks unclaimed and unless you claimed the thing by whatever date it was, I don’t know, they would be destroyed. And so by the time I came back and I didn’t know that, I didn’t get that news while I was in Paris and I can’t, and I’m surprised they didn’t think to tell people all over the place. Or else I just missed it. But anyway the fact is then any enquiries I made just drew a blank. So, there’s no point really. It isn’t, doesn’t exist anywhere unless someone thought oh I’ll have this. But why they would do that I don’t know.
DM: No.
JG: I can’t imagine it’s of any interest to anybody but me. But it’s been a nuisance really because [pause] well just all I’ve got, I’ve got it here but the as soon as I rejoined of course I got another logbook and that’s the one I’ve got. But it doesn’t help looking back at things that happened during the war.
DM: No.
JG: The only one of interest that, it was an event which occurred while I was on 78 Squadron at Linton on Ouse and it’s documented actually in Bomber Command records. It — we took off from Linton on the 11th of December 1942 heading for Italy. So, we were virtually a flying petrol tank with one or two little bombs. Anyway, we took off and immediately one of the engines caught fire and the situation was such that we had to get out of it. Out of the aircraft. Fortunately, Linton is not all that distance from the North Sea, although it is the other side of Yorkshire. And so what we proposed to do, the initial plan was to drop our bombs in the sea or where they could be safely dropped and come back and land. But the situation was getting rapidly out of hand and so it was a question of dropping the bombs first thing and then, if possible to have a crash landing somewhere. However, and as I was a bomb aimer down in the front I had to get rid of the hatch so that we were going to drop out of it. That’s the way we were going to go. But I soon had to tell the pilot, ‘We’re going to be far too low to bale out.’ So, he said, ‘Well, I’ll see if I can crash land somewhere.’ But by this time it was getting worse than that. He said, ‘I don’t know. I think I can reach the sea.’ And that’s what we did. We ditched in the North Sea. Just a few miles out, three miles out from Filey and we all got away with it. There was no, had we stayed much longer of course we could very well have burned up. But we did, we got down in the water and we got picked up. Interestingly enough we were picked up by fishermen who had just landed in Filey and had looked back to see this aircraft going into the sea and turned their boats around and came out to pick us up. And, but some of those poor chaps got some stick because what they should have done because some of them were lifeboatmen they should, they should have gone, and gone out with the lifeboat. So they weren’t very popular when the lifeboat did come out and found out some of their men were actually there having done the job for them virtually. Because we didn’t need any help other than something to take us back to land. Now, I was recently, a few years ago now I was contacted by someone by the name of Paul Bright who had written or was writing actually, he hadn’t finished it — a book called, “Aircraft Activity Over the East Riding of Yorkshire,” which included not only RAF but Luftwaffe things. How he got it I don’t know. Anyway, he had got the records of 78 Squadron and this ditching thing and he [pause] he got in touch with me via the chap who wrote 640 Squadron history and as a result of that I was, gave this chap Paul Bright all the information and he’s included it in his book. There’s the thing, “On a Wing and a Prayer,” about what happened from my time in 78. And I’ve been in touch with him. We’ve been, both T and I have met a number of times when we’ve gone up that way and also because the — we’ve been going up there to the Memorial of 640 and at the same time met Paul Bright. But I don’t know what’s happened. A book which I’ve got a copy of I think. A member of the family must have it but it’s, it’s a most extraordinary detailed book of what happened in the air over the East Riding during the war. And including what’s happened to various air crew including German air crew.
[pause]
JG: And I’m in touch with him every time something significant comes up. Like today for example. I told him about the organisation that was going ahead on behalf of Bomber Command in that area. And I don’t know whether he has been in touch but of all the information I’ve had of course is via Carol and her visits up there.
DM: Ok.
JG: Right.
DM: In September 1944 whilst engaged on an attack on a synthetic oil plant the aircraft in which Flight Lieutenant Goldby was flying was severely damaged by heavy anti-aircraft fire. One engine was hit and rendered useless. Three petrol tanks were holed and a shell fragment entering the bomb aimer’s compartment damaged his equipment. Despite intense physical discomfort and shock Flight Lieutenant Goldby continued calmly to direct his captain onto the target. This determination and skill resulted in a successful attack. This officer has participated in many operations over enemy territory and among his targets have been such heavily defended areas as Essen and Duisberg. He is now engaged on his second tour of operations and in his capacity as bombing leader has been a source of inspiration to his section and has materially contributed to the high standard of efficiency attained. And therefore, the DFC was awarded.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with John Louis Goldby
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
David Meanwell
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-10-25
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AGoldbyJL171025, PGoldbyJL1701
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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01:30:05 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
John Goldby was born in Kent but the family moved to London the year after. He was inspired to join the RAF when a schoolfriend joined and became a Spitfire pilot. John believes that it was a mid-air collision with a night fighter that led to his crash. He became a Prisoner of War at Stalag Luft 1. He kept a detailed diary of events leading to his eventual liberation and return to the UK. After demob he was soon bored with Civvy Street and returned to the RAF. He had an interesting post-war career including time as air attaché to the British Embassy in Paris.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Barth
Germany--Berlin
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941-05
1942-05
1944
1945-01-20
1945-04-30
1945-05-05
640 Squadron
78 Squadron
aircrew
Blenheim
bomb aimer
bombing of Cologne (30/31 May 1942)
Distinguished Flying Cross
ditching
Dulag Luft
Halifax
Hampden
Lancaster
mid-air collision
observer
Operational Training Unit
prisoner of war
RAF Linton on Ouse
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Riccall
RAF St Eval
RAF Stanton Harcourt
Stalag Luft 1
training
Wellington
Whitley