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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1217/15048/BStoreyDPStoreyDPv1.1.pdf
fb6b9c6ed776948178bbf42f96b6d756
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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Storey, David Philip
D P Storey
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. The collection concerns David Philip Storey DFC (1919 - 2018, 1334123, Royal Air Force) and consists of his log book, a photograph and a memoir. He flew operations as a navigator with 51 Squadron from RAF Snaith and then became an instructor at RAF Kinloss. He was promoted to flight lieutenant in September 1945.
The collection has been licenced to the IBCC Digital Archive by David Storey and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2019-01-30
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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Storey, DP
Transcribed document
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Transcription
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Memoirs of D.P. Storey, Navigator on Halifax Bombers during World War 2
Crew: Pilot: John Morris (Sgt)
Navigator: Dave Storey (Sgt)
Bomb Aimer: Jim Binham (Pilot Officer)
Wireless Operator: Arthur Hebblethwaite (Pilot Officer)
Flight Engineer: Jock Russel (Sgt)
Rear Gunner: Paddy Boyd (Sgt)
Mid Upper Gunner: Paddy Flynn (Sgt)
We arrived at RAF Snaith, 51 Squadron, 4 Group, on 27th May 1943, fresh and green from 4 engine Conversion Unit RAF Rufforth, near York.
We were attached to C Flight, commanded by Squadron Leader Charlie Porter, a Navigator. The Squadron was commanded by Wing Commander Franks. The Station Commander was Group Captain Tiger Jordan.
Much to our surprise, we were immediately granted 14 days leave, although perhaps the reason for this was not very reassuring. A roster system was operated, each crew
taking its turn. Whenever a crew went missing, the crew next on the list took their place on the leave roster. Apparently the losses had been so heavy, that all remaining crews in C Flight having recently had leave, we were immediately placed at the top of the list.
We first flew Operations as a crew on the 22nd June 1943 having first completed 19 hours pre-ops training and Johnny Morris, our Pilot had flown one trip as Second Pilot
on an Operation to Wuppertot. Our first target was Kreffeld in the Rhur Valley, commonly known as Happy Valley.
22-6-43
Operation KREFFELD. Pilot Sgt Morris 5 hours 30 mins, Diverted to Pocklington on return owing to fog at Base. (44 planes lost)
25-6-43
Operation GELSENKIRCHEN. Pilot Sgt Morris 4 hours 40 mins. (30 planes lost)
During the next two days, our Pilot, Johnny Morris developed a large sty on one of his eyes, which completely closed it. Therefore, on the 28th June, when the Squadron was again operating, Johnny was unfit to fly. However, as several other crews were short of men for one reason or another, four of us were detailed to fly with other crews. I was detailed to fly with Johnny Garnham (I cannot quite remember which flight he was in but I believe it was B Flight). Our crews had been on the same course at O.U.T. (Operational Training Unit) Abingdon together, so I Knew Johnny Garnham very well.
He was a grand chap. However, while our crew were enjoying 14 days leave, Johnny Garnham’s crew had been piling up the Ops. By the time we had started our tour they had done about five very tough trips, all on Happy Valley, the Rhur. They had had a really rough introduction, having come back badly shot up from nearly every one of these raids. As a result, Johnny Garnham’s nerves had taken a pounding (not to be wondered at). This proved to be a thoroughly disastrous trip. Shortly after taking off, when testing the guns, the rear guns jammed. A little later, one of the turrets jammed. Not very long after, the Gyros compasses went completely haywire, leaving us with only
the magnetic compass. Later still, one of the engines caught fire and had to be extinguished, leaving us with only 3 engines. However, by this time we had gone too far to turn back. It would have been more dangerous to leave the main stream and try and make it home alone, so we carried on and bombed and somehow got home without further incident. Sad to relate, Johnny Garnham and crew went missing on their next trip (either their 8th or 9th) in the same aircraft, which I think was MH.J. What a terrible baptism they had suffered. The target of the operation I have just described was
Cologne (30 planes lost).
28-6-43
Operation COLOGNE. Pilot Sgt Garnham 4 hours 40 mins.
However plenteous were the blows we suffered that night, the worst was yet to come. Our rear gunner Sgt Paddy Boyd, who had been detailed to fly with a new young crew on their first operation, did not return. It was the crew’s first and last operation. I cannot now remember the name of the pilot, it was too long ago. As Paddy was my closest personal friend, I felt his loss greatly. We were immediately given a replacement
gunner, Sgt Allan Massey, who turned out to be a great gunner.
3-7-43
Operation COLOGNE. Pilot Sgt Morris 5 hours 35 mins. (25 planes lost.)
9-7-43
Operation GELSENKIRCHEN. Pilot Sgt Morris 6 hours 25 mins. (12 planes lost.)
Shortly after this, we again had 14 days leave, because we had reached the top of the list owing to the continuing heavy losses. In a matter of a very few weeks almost all the faces you knew would disappear and be replaced by new and strange ones.
29-7-43
Operation HAMBURG. Pilot Sgt Morris 5 hours 40 mins.
On the way back, we could still see the fires of Hamburg raging 180 miles from the city. (28 planes lost.)
30-7-43
Operation REMSCHIED (abandoned, engine trouble) Pilot Sgt Morris 2 hours 45 mins. (15 planes lost.)
Sometime during this month (July) a large part of the station bomb dumps blew up. It would be sometime between 1:30 and 2:00 pm, because we were all in the mess (Sergeants), having had lunch and standing around and chatting. Suddenly there was a tremendous explosion and the whole building rocked like a boat on the water.
Everybody made a dive for the floor. We thought we were being raided by the Jerrys. However, when we had recovered from the shock, we all rushed outside and saw this huge column of smoke coming from the area of the bomb dump across the other side of the aerodrome.
After the initial confusion had died down, we eventually learned that a 4000lb blockbuster had blown up and 21 men had been blown to bits. The fires raged for a week and bombs kept exploding at intervals throughout the week. Once it was certain
that all bombs in that section of the dump had exploded, volunteers went into collect the bodies, but there were no bodies to collect; only bits of rotting flesh alive with maggots.
It has been a blazing hot week and the flies had got to work with a vengeance. I don’t think anybody was identified, because the pieces found were so small. An odd finger, an odd foot etc. We heard that the smell was beyond description and that many of the volunteers were sick for days after and I could not eat.
Naturally, this posed a big problem to the operational ability of the Squadron. However, this problem was solved by bringing in bombs from other Squadrons, For a week or two these were transported by road, as the main railway line which ran close to the bomb dump was closed during this period and all trains diverted onto other routes.
We had to take off over the blazing dump on some of the trips, when the wind was in that direction. It was not a comfortable feeling.
2-8-43
Operation HAMBURG. Pilot Sgt Morris 5 hours 45 mins. (30 planes lost.)
This raid was somewhat of a disaster owing to the weather. Terrible electric storms were encountered over Hamburg, caused, so I have since read in descriptions of the raid, by the fires caused by this series of raids. I think five in all by the RAF within a week and daytime raids by the US air corps.
The weather was more terrifying than any enemy action. We were literally hurled 30 or
40 feet into the air at frequent intervals by the vast currents of air in the totally solid thunder cloud. Lightning flashed all around us continually and static electricity called St. Elmos fire covered the whole of the plane, making it appear that we were actually on fire. This static blue flame leapt from all the propeller blades covering the wings in blue flame and dancing all around the cockpit and the fuselage.
Just as terrifying as the vast up-currents and the static fire was the bombardment of the fuselage by huge chunks of ice being hurled from the propeller blades, hunks of ice the size of a leg of mutton. We could not get out of this vast cloud. We tried climbing above it but couldn’t because of the ever increasing weight of ice on the wings and props. We also tried to get beneath it but couldn’t; it was too vast in depth.
In desperation we flew in all directions to get free of the cloud and the ice, having dropped our bombs on ETA, which was all we could do, not having the slightest clue of our true position, especially as the magnetic compass was totally useless owing to the huge amounts of electric energy in the cloud.
All this was a total disaster for me, the navigator. I had to make guesses about our position (my experience was repeated in all the other bombers). I assumed a position somewhere to the north east of the target and when we finally got into slightly improved conditions, we set course for home from this assumed position.
The whole force was requesting QDMs (wireless position lines) two or three of which would fix your position. However, the demand was so great that priority was given to only those in dire trouble. SOS cases etc. of which there were many. All others had to
wait their turn. We eventually got a fix and were able to find our way more or less in the
right direction. Once we got within “Gee” range all our troubles were over.
I think without doubt this was our most frightening trip. The force of nature could out do anything man might attempt.
The vast proportion of losses that night (30 in all) were due to the weather and I have no doubt, many collisions in that impenetrable cloud.
It was on this series of Hamburg raids that we first used “Window”, strips of aluminium foil dropped from a special chute by the wireless operator at regular intervals. One or two bundles a minute generally, whilst over enemy territory and two to four bundles a minute in the target area. Each of these strips of foil showed up on the German radar screens as an aircraft creating complete chaos for the Jerry fighter control people. Especially as diversion raids were made on other targets at the same time, also using “Window” to create even more chaos. It would appear to the Germans on the radar screens that there were countless thousands of planes being used and it was impossible to distinguish the difference between the false and the true signals. It made interception impossible except by sheer chance. Altogether a great innovation as far as we were concerned.
9-8-43
Operation MANNHEIM Pilot Sgt Morris 4 hours 10 mins (9 planes lost)
10-8-43
Operation NURENBURG Pilot Sgt Morris 7 hours 45 mins (16 planes lost) Returned of 3 engines.
12-8-43
Operation MILAN Pilot Sgt Morris 8 hours 10 mins (3 planes lost) Returned on 3 engines, landed at Abingdon short of fuel.
17-7-43
Operation PEENEMUNDE Pilot Sgt Morris 7 hours 35 mins (40 planes lost)
This raid on the German rocket development base on the shores of the Baltic was one of the most successful raids of the war; completely destroying all three separate targets at the base, the living quarters, the laboratories and the technical work shops.
This base was where the V weapons were being developed; both the V1 flying bombs and the V2 rockets. The great success of this raid gained us a respite of at least a year to 18 months.
The bombing took place from 6,000 feet, very low for bombers. As a result we could see everything in great detail. The great variety of light and heavy flak, together with tracer, searchlights, explosions on the ground and in the air, the vast fires and chemicals
burning below, all combined together to create the greatest firework display one was ever likely to see. Terrifying but beautiful.
It was a very clear moonlit night and we could see other bombers all around us. The German fighters didn’t show up in any strength until we reached the target area. They had assumed we were going to attack Berlin and had therefore made for the big city, as we called it. They discovered their mistake too late, by which time we were arriving at Peenemunde. However, the return trip was a long running fight in bright moonlight. We were very very lucky and had no trouble, although we could see other bombers being attacked all around us, only a few hundred yards away. The sky was full of tracer and we could see bombers going down at fairly regular intervals.
We lost 40 bombers on this raid.
22-8-43
Operation LEVERKUSEN Pilot Sgt Morris 5 hours 5 mins (5 planes lost)
23-8-43
Operation BERLIN Pilot Sgt Morris 2 hours 15 mins (56 planes lost) Abandoned due to engine failure.
27-8-43
Operation WURENBURG Pilot P.O. Morris 8 hours 10 mins (33 planes lost)
31-8-43
Operation MUNCHEN GLADBACH Pilot P.O. Morris 4 hours 20 mins (25 planes lost)
We took off at 00:08 hours i.e. just after midnight on this trip. On our way to the target over enemy territory, we were attacked by a ME109 fighter, or rather we were about to be attacked, but thanks to our two first class gunners, we shot the fighter down before
he could open fire. Allan Massey, our rear gunner very quietly informed Johnny our pilot that a fighter was closing in on us dead astern and said he would give a count down on the range and advised Johnny to start weaving when he gave the word. Al started counting off the range – 1000 yards, 900, 800, 700, 600, 500, 400 start weaving, which Johnny immediately did, quite violently. Of course, by this time, Bob Kennedy, our mid upper gunner had also spotted the fighter who was closing in to point blank range, thinking he hadn’t been spotted. Both gunners had their guns trained on the fighter and as soon as Johnny started his weave, Al Massey opened up hitting the ME with his first burst. He was closely followed by Bob Kennedy, whose fire was just as accurate and went straight home. Within seconds the Jerry burst into flames, the combined fire from both turrets pouring into his engine. The fire was so bright and by this time, the action
so close, that the two gunners could plainly see the Jerry pilot pull back his canopy and jump, by which time they had stopped firing. The whole action was over in minutes and the Jerry hadn’t fired a shot. A case of smug over confidence on his part; he imaged he had us cold.
The coolness of our two gunners, Al and Bob, and Johnny our pilot during this action
was magnificent and reinforced the confidence we already had in them. Our elation was boundless and we were all cheering like mad, with congratulations coming from all and sundry. We completed the trip in very high spirits.
By 20:17 hours on the same day, we had taken off for Berlin.
Operation BERLIN Pilot P.O. Morris 8 hours 35 mins (47 planes lost)
5-9-43
Operation MANNHEIM Pilot P.O. Morris 7 hours 50 mins (34 planes lost)
On the 11-9-43 I was commissioned to the rank of Pilot Officer. Johnny Morris has been commissioned a week or so ahead of me.
15-9-43
Operation MONTLUCON Pilot P.O. Morris 6 hours 45 mins (3 planes lost)
16-9-43
Operation MODANE Pilot P.O. Morris 6 hours 30 mins (3 planes lost)
We encountered very heavy icing on this trip and one of the engines caught fire. Luckily, we managed to extinguish it.
It was on one of the previous two trips, either Montlucon or Modane, that we were fired on by an enemy aircraft which we did not even see. We suddenly heard bullets spattering the aircraft; it was only a short burst and then nothing more. It sounded like a handful of gravel thrown at a window pane, but much lounder. However, we got back to base without further incident. Next morning when we went down to dispersal to do an
air test, we were shown one of the tyres practically burnt away. The ground crew could not understand how we had landed without it bursting. They reckoned us very lucky to be alive.
22-9-43
Operation HANOVER Pilot Sgt Jackson 6 hours 00 mins (26 planes lost)
23-9-43
Operation MANNHEIM Pilot Sgt Jackson 7 hours 10 mins (32 planes lost)
Sgt Jackson (later Pilot Officer) and crew were without a navigator and at a later date my closest personal friend. Pilot Officer Frank Rohrer was attached to this crew as navigator. They were eventually all lost on a raid on the ball bearing factory at Swienfurt on 24th February 1944. I understand they were all buried in a common grave, owing to the fact that they were burned beyond recognition. Frank Rohrer, like so many others, was not yet 21 years old.
27-9-43
Operation HANOVER Pilot P.O. Morris 5 hours 15 mins (38 planes lost)
Diverted to St Andrews Field, Essex on return, due to fog at base. This was a US Army Air Corps base (near Braintree, Essex) accommodating 4 squadrons of Martin Marauder twin engine bombers. It seemed to us that every G.I. had his own jeep. Nobody walked anywhere. We were there until 29th September with engine trouble. They made us very welcome.
Another 14 days leave in early October.
Operation KASSEL Pilot P.O Morris 6 hours 00 mins (43 planes lost) Returned on 3 engines.
3-11-43
Operation DUSSELDORF Pilot P.O. Morris 5 hours 5 mins (18 planes lost) Exchanged fire with enemy aircraft.
18-11-43
Operation LUDWIGSHAFFEN Pilot P.O Morris 7 hours 20 mins (23 planes lost)
22-11-43
Operation BERLIN Pilot P.O. Morris 7 hours 5 mins (26 planes lost)
25-11-43
Operation FRANKFURT Pilot P.O. Morris 7 hours 10 mins (12 planes lost)
Sqn Ldr Charlie Porter O.C. C Flight screened and left Sqdr. C Flight taken over by Sqn Ldr Nick Simmonds, another navigator. Flight Commander keeping up the tradition of the Flight. Nick Simmonds was an ex Guards Officer and a Devonian of the Drake/Rayleigh stamp i.e. a typical buccaneer type. He used to have a photograph of himself on horseback in full Guard Officers uniform. This photograph always stood on his desk in C Flight Office.
No operations during December for our crew. By this time we were truly a veteran crew and our operations were becoming more and more spread out, this being a deliberate policy, as it was regarded as good for the moral of the younger crews of the Squadron to see it was possible to survive.
A new landing procedure was introduced during this month.
Also during December we took over several Halifax Mark IIs from 158 Squadron at
Lisset, as they were converting to Halifax Mark IIIs. We travelled to Lisset by road on
23rd December and ferried the aircraft back to base at Snaith the following day. We had to land in fog. This proved to be our most hazardous landing. When we finally hit the runway with great suddenness, we bounced the height of a two storey house. Men who were working on the runway were running in all directions!
I flew once during January 1944 with F.O. Love’s crew.
29-1-44
Operation BERLIN Pilot F.O. Love 7 hours 40 mins (46 planes missing)
F.O. Love was an Australian. I was airsick all the way to the target and back, owing to a massive hangover from the previous night, but it turned out to be one of my best trips from the point to view of navigation; spot on all the way. I had to constantly remove my oxygen mask to clear all the vomit. A very uncomfortable trip but it rather disproved the theory that alcohol lowers the efficiency. Although of course I had got all the alcohol out of my system by the time we took off and was merely suffering from the hangover in the stomach.
15-2-44
Operation BERLIN Pilot P.O Morris 2 hours 00 mins (43 planes lost)
This trip was abandoned very early on owing to engine trouble. We came back on 3 engines.
20-2-44
Operation LEIPZIG Pilot P.O Morris 7 hours 10 mins (78 planes lost)
We took our Flight Commander Sqdn Ldr Nick Simmonds with us on this trip as bomb aimer, owing to the fact that our own bomb aimer, Jim Binham, was in sick bay with lung trouble. Jim Binham was one of the coolest, most unflappable customers I ever encountered. One could not have wished for a steadier crewman to fly with. We missed him greatly. He never flew with us again.
However, this proved to be a very eventful trip. Nick Simmonds was one of the greatest characters I ever met. The sort of man one would go to hell and back with and on this trip we did. It was to be a hell of discomfort from the point of view of cold and a nightmare for all navigators.
The events started before take-off. Shortly before this trip all aircrew had been issued with service revolvers and ammunition. Quite a lot of crewmen took their revolvers with them on operations, although this was not officially approved of. Nick, being the man he was took his on this occasion and during the usual hour spent at the dispersal point before take-off, he drew the revolver and said “I wonder whether this bloody thing works?” and without further ado he fired a couple of rounds off through the adjacent hedge, aiming at a vague white blob, it being deep twilight by this time.
The next morning, a very angry and indignant farmer called in at Station Headquarters, demanding to know who had killed one of his sheep. Needless to say, nobody knew a thing about it!
Shortly after we became airborne, we discovered that the aircraft heating system had failed; this was the start of our troubles.
Once we reached our operational height of around 18,000 to 20,000 feet the cold was beyond description. The thermometer read -75 below. Although we were warmly clothed this cold penetrated everything. Unfortunately it is impossible to navigate with thick gloves on. All I was able to wear were my thin silk gloves with fingerless wool mittens on top.
The computers we used were plated steel, as were the dividers. These were so cold it was like handling hot metal. After the trip I discovered all my fingertips were slightly frost bitten also my heels, strangely enough. One would have expected the toes to be affected more than the heels. The skin was hard and shiny just like a mild burn.
We had to keep removing our oxygen masks to bash out the ice caused by condensation of the breath. We all carried thermos flasks of hot coffee, which were
more than welcome of this occasion, however, the cold was so intense that coffee which
I spilt on my navigation chart froze instantly on contact and had to be hacked off with a pen knife before I was able to continue with my plotting.
Nick Simmonds tapped me on the shoulder and shouted “Bloody cold up here Storey. I’ve got one heating pipe shoved down my front and another up my arse and I’m still frozen”, naturally as there was no heat coming through at all.
Shortly after this, I nearly jumped out of my skin to the sound of machine gun fire, virtually at my elbow. It was Nick, firing the front Lewis gun to warm his hands on the barrel.
However, the intense cold was by no means our greatest worry. The met forecast winds were exactly 180º out. Instead of flying into a headwind we had a very strong tailwind in the region of 80 to 100 mph. This meant we were very much ahead of time all the way along the route and had to constantly fly triangular dog leg courses (a manoeuvre to lose time). We flew 3 minute and 6 minute dog legs at frequent intervals, in a desperate attempt to lose time, but no way could we lose enough time with such a tailwind, the complete opposite to the forecast wind, on which the whole timekeeping of the operation had been planned.
The Pathfinder Force, with their more sophisticated navigational equipment, was more able to fix their position and ascertain the actual wind speed and direction. Therefore by this stage of the Bomber Offensive, a new technique had been developed. Each separate bomber of the Pathfinder Force transmitted their calculated winds back to Bomber Command H.Q. All these winds were then averaged out and transmitted back
to Main Force. This was done every 30 minutes over enemy territory, whilst Main Force was out of Gee range. The policy was, that the whole of Main Force should use these broadcast winds to rectify their position, should they find themselves off track and outside the 10 mile wide mainstream. It was a highly successful scheme and of course achieved a greater concentration.
However, on this occasion these broadcast winds appeared to cause more confusion to an already totally confuse Main Force. The vast majority of Main Force totally rejected these broadcast winds as being impossible and absurd, owing to the fact that they were
180º different to the forecast winds. I decided quite early on to use the broadcast winds, on the assumption that the Pathfinder Force with their superior equipment knew what they were doing.
We were flying on a northerly route, with the purpose of misleading the Jerrys into the belief that we were making for Berlin. The final approach to the target was to be made from a point well north of Leipzig. This turning point was to be marked with a red flare marker, dropped by the Pathfinder Force. When we spotted this flare we found ourselves south west of track and accordingly altered course visually for this marker flare and replotted our course for the target using the broadcast wind.
We duly arrived over Leipzig 20 minutes before zero hour despite of all our efforts to lose time and due entirely to these accursed contrary winds. I therefore decide that the only sensible thing to do was to fly a radius of action in the direction of the lightest flak area. This manoeuvre would take us away from the target area and bring us back
exactly on zero hour, a far better alternative to flying around the target area and being found by searchlights and pumped full of flak for 20 minutes.
We arrive back over Leipzig exactly on zero hour and just as the first marker flares went down. We dropped our bombs on the flares and immediately started on the long journey home, against these appalling head winds and still frozen to the marrow.
The vast majority of Main Force dropped their bombs in the Berlin area that night, as a result of rejecting the broadcast winds. The raid was therefore a flop, mainly owing to the met forecast winds being so totally in error.
We lost 78 planes on this raid. Although, touch wood, we did not suffer from enemy action ourselves this night, but we had already suffered enough from the indescribable cold.
1-3-44
Operation STUTTGART Pilot P.O. Morris 8 hours 10 mins (4 planes lost) Landed at Worksop almost completely out of fuel.
9-4-44
Operation LILLE Pilot Flt. Lt. Morris 4 hours 55 mins (1 plane lost)
We were screened after this trip, having finished our tour.
We finished our tour with only two of the original crew, all other members having been replaced for one reason or another, apart from Jock Russell who joined the crew at Conversion Unit. Of the original O.T.U crew there was only Johnny Morris, the pilot, and myself left. We lost Paddy Boyd, our rear gunner, on his third trip (with another crew). Paddy Flynn, the mid upper gunner, who had joined us at Conversion Unit, left our crew sometime during mid-summer 1943 and went to a Wimpy squadron. He was replaced
by Bob Kennedy, a Canadian and a grand chap. Bob has previously been badly shot up earlier in his tour with another crew; he had the top of one finger shot off and about 13 wounds in one leg and 3 in the other. He joined us to complete his tour and was a grand chap to fly with.
I forgot to mention that Paddy Boyd was replaced by Allan Massey, a superb gunner. He and Bob Kennedy made an excellent team in the turrets.
Arthur Hebblethwaite, our wireless operator eventually became Wireless Leader for the squadron and therefore left the crew. He was a first class wireless operator, hence his promotion. Arthur was replaced by W.O. Sparkes, commonly known as Sparky. Sparky was doing his second tour and was very experienced, a worthy replacement for Arthur.
Lastly, we lost Jim Binham, who developed lung trouble and never returned to the crew or flying duties. Jim was a very husky tough individual and nothing ever shook him. I often wonder whether the fact that he often moved about the aircraft whilst we were at operational height without the use of oxygen had anything to do with his eventual
trouble. He could remain without oxygen for quite long periods without it having any obvious effect on him. Most other fellows would have passed out or shown obvious signs of oxygen lack, but not Jim. Nothing ever seemed to shake him or affect him in any way; always calm cool and collected.
One could not have wished to have flown with a finer crew or a finer pilot. Johnny Morris was steady, unflappable and entirely efficient. One of the best pilots 51 Squadron ever had. I count myself lucky to have been a member of such a superb crew.
Johnny eventually became deputy Flight Commander and was promoted to Flight
Lieutenant.
Jock Russell and I kept together when we left 51 Squadron. We were both posted to Kinloss No. 19 O.T.U. Jock was an excellent engineer, always on the ball. I never knew him to be stumped by any problem.
It was with a sad and heavy heart that I left 51 Squadron and Snaith, where I had spent the most momentous and happiest year of my life.
D.P. Storey
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
David Philip Storey's operations
Description
An account of the resource
A memoir of David Storey's service from 27 May 1943 to April 1944. He describes his 32 completed operations as a navigator on Halifaxes and including details of incidents and aircraft losses.
This item was provided, in digital form, by a third-party organisation which used technical specifications and operational protocols that may differ from those used by the IBCC Digital Archive.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
David Philip Storey
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
11 typewritten sheets
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
BStoreyDPStoreyDPv1
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.
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
France--Modane
France--Montluçon
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Krefeld
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Leverkusen
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Munich
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Peenemünde
Germany--Remscheid
Germany--Wuppertal
Italy--Milan
Germany--Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
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
158 Squadron
51 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943)
bombing of Kassel (22/23 October 1943)
Bombing of Peenemünde (17/18 August 1943)
fear
Gee
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
Heavy Conversion Unit
Me 109
navigator
Operational Training Unit
Pathfinders
radar
RAF Abingdon
RAF Kinloss
RAF Lissett
RAF Pocklington
RAF Rufforth
RAF Snaith
RAF Worksop
training
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
Wellington
Window
wireless operator
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/571/10320/BFraserDKFraserDKv1.2.pdf
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Title
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Fraser, Donald Keith
D K Fraser
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Fraser, DK
Description
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12 items. Two oral history interviews with Warrant Officer Donald Keith Fraser DFM (1924 - 2022, 1566621 Royal Air Force), a memoir, his log book, photographs and service material. The collection also contains an interview with Sylvia Fraser, his wife. He flew a tour of operations as a flight engineer with 101 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Donald Keith Fraser and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
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2016-11-04
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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.
Transcribed document
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Transcription
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WO DONALD KEITH FRASER
DFM 1566621
101 SQUADRON
JULY 1943 – MARCH 1944
CREW NAME: WL EVANS
[photograph of Donald Fraser]
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[photograph of Bomber Command Memorial]
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Contents
Page
Chapter A Introduction. 1
Chapter B Prior to World War II. 3
Chapter C Joined RAF 23rd July 1942. 7
Chapter D 101 Squadron Base Ludford Magna. 11
Chapter E 101 Squadron Operation Dates and Targets. 15
Chapter F 101 Squadron Notes on Various Operations. 17
Log Book and Battle Orders. 34
Chapter G Christmas 1943 and Christmas Dinner Menu. 41
Chapter H After Operations posted to Heavy Conversion Units. 45
Lindholme. 45
Bottesford. 47
Cottesmore. 51
North Luffenham. 52
Chapter I Advances in Technology. 55
What if? . 57
Chapter J Aircrew Bomber Command. 59
Wartime Bomber Squadrons. 60
Bombing of Berlin. 60
A Day in the Life of a Squadron. 61
Clothing Worn on Operations by our Crew. 62
Contact made with Two Crew Members plus information on others. 63
Chapter K The Lancaster Story. 67
Further notes relating to Black Thursday including information given by Len Brooks our Rear Gunner. 73
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[four photographs of author and Avro Lancaster]
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INTRODUCTION
Over the past 50 to 60 years I have enjoyed reading many books about bomber crews who flew with Bomber Command during World War II especially during the period from mid July 1943 until the end of the war. These books contained many accounts of true grit and heroism carried out by crew members. There are, however, a few experiences recalled which appear doubtful, a number of reported instances which are far-fetched or quite ridiculous to have suggested could have occurred.
Crews of the heavy bombers normally consisted of seven crew members all of whom were well trained to carry out specific tasks and as a team made up a competent crew capable of carrying out the various operations asked of them.
Operations were normally carried out over Europe (mainly to Germany) targets being the main industrial areas, factories, railway junctions and yards and eventually towns and cities, such as Berlin, Hanover, Hamburg, Leipzig, Frankfurt to name a few, all of which by 1943 the inhabitants were heavily involved in production for the German war effort.
The Bomber crews objectives were to carry out the operations they flew on to reach the target, drop their bombs and return home safely with their aircraft undamaged. Remember all these young men were volunteers, highly trained with the Pilot usually the “Skipper” and Captain, this was not to say that he gave all the orders and that no crew member acted until he gave that order. The Flight Engineer and Wireless Operator were the most mobile within the aircraft, therefore, if a situation occurred within the fuselage either or both could intervene by giving a quick call to the “Skipper”, or should a fault occur with the engine, the Flight Engineer would usually be the first to notice and carry out the essential remedy while informing the Pilot of the situation with procedure carried out. For a crew to be efficient and confident they had to be alert at all times, watching, listening and acting immediately. Survival required a highly trained crew team with loads of confidence in one’s self and in the other crew members and in the aircraft, so giving them a very strong attitude to press on.
A dedicated, loyal and skilful ground crew, a strong reliance in the Almighty (or what faith one had) and with very importantly more than normal, good luck, having lady luck on your side.
I have therefore put on paper a few experiences which happened to our crew while flying over Germany during mid 1943 to mid 1944. The following are not from diaries – they are what I recall after a long time. The experiences are genuine, the timing may be a little out, but to the reader it will still show the excitement, the pressure, sometimes fear, but above all the confidence and determination the crew had to carry out the task involved and return back to base with a full crew still intact.
A question I have been asked many times “why did you enjoy flying and with such odds against staying alive?” My answer, I loved flying, I enjoyed the excitement and I volunteered. I also liked the thought of coming back to base to a good meal and I felt safe and secure in my sometimes cold bed with its nice white sheets, compared to the Army personnel who
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worked under much more difficult conditions not knowing when they would eat or sleep and under conditions just as dangerous as ours, in fact, in many, more so.
By the end of writing I hope that I provide you with some idea of what these then young crew members of Bomber Command endured when flying over Germany for 6 to 7 1/2 hours at a time in a Lancaster bomber with around 2,000 gallons of fuel stored in tanks in the wings and with up to five tons of bombs slung under their feet along the fuselage, travelling at 250 miles an hour in the dark at 20-21,000 feet in height with temperatures of from -10 to 20oC below zero and with German fighters trying to shoot them down and with anti-aircraft guns (which could be very accurate) also trying to blow them up, just to make our journey a little more scary at times to find that on returning when we reached the English coastline that it was covered in thick cloud and dense fog making it almost impossible to find somewhere to land. Some of the words most suited to express the emotions of the crew in certain situations could be excited, interesting, scary, fear, relief, apprehensive and difficult.
I think, however, that the Brylcream boys done a very good job all these years ago.
Happy days!
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CHAPTER B
PRIOR TO WORLD WAR II
1919-1939
The First World War ended in 1919 after four years of fighting and with a very heavy loss of life on both sides. Those who were lucky enough to survive and return home found it extremely difficult to find employment.
The Government had created some opportunities by forming the Forestry Commission with the role to establish over the coming fifty years a supply of timber sufficient to make the UK self sufficient in wood requirements. This was to be created by the purchase of large areas of land, mainly in Scotland and North England (cheap less productive land) then cultivating and planting this land with conifer species. To achieve this management had to be trained and forestry workers had to be recruited.
Forestry schools were established throughout England and Scotland to educate and train management staff. One such school was opened at Dunkeld in Central Scotland where a Mr Simpson received his training and he afterwards took up the post of Nursery Manager at Tulliallan Nursery, Kincardine on the Forth.
During the war the larger estates had suffered from the lack of gamekeepers and staff to carry out the maintenance and control of vermin etc, therefore there were many vacancies for people interested to fill these posts. My father and two of his brothers did just that, they became keepers on some of the very large estates in Scotland.
My father and mother were married shortly after the war and he took up an appointment as a game keeper on a large estate near Stirling, where my sister Jean and elder brother Sandy were born. In 1923 he moved to take up Keepering on Tulliallan Estate near Kincardine. The family lived in the East Lodge which was situated adjacent to the main road from Kincardine to Dunfermline and next to the land belonging to the Forestry Commission nursery. This is where I was born on 24th August 1923. Two years later the family again moved, this time to take on the position of head keeper on Donibristle Estate and lived in the small village of Auchtertool, Fifeshire where my two younger sisters, Betty and Mary were born. These were from what little I can recall, were happy times, the family did not have much spare cash but had sufficient to satisfy the family needs.
Mr Simpson lost part of his right arm during the first War and had an artificial part fitted. In 1949 I joined the Forestry Commission Research Branch and guess where I was stationed, at Tulliallan Nursery and Mr Simpson was still there. He told me that when my father left the East Lodge in 1925 he bought his hens and chickens from him. In 1950 the Forestry Commission built around 20 houses for its staff some 400 yards west of the East Lodge and Sylvia and myself were lucky enough to have one of them. Mr Simpson played an important role in our lives over the next 30 years, however this is another story.
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Moray estate during the winter months arranged a number of pheasant shoots to which a number of friends and associates of the Lairds (The Earl of Moray) were invited to attend.
The 29th January 1929 was one of those days and the shoot covered the area which my father was responsible for. The morning started with rain, however the shoot commenced and the guns and beaters started with good success. A good number of birds were raised and shot, as the day continued the weather became worse and by lunchtime, thunder and lightning had started so it was decided to call the shoot off. During the morning a few birds had been shot, but had not been collected by the dogs so my father with his two spaniels decided he would retrace the morning route and see if he could collect lost birds. The weather continued to deteriorate, while he was crossing a fence he was hit by lightning. As the day went on and he had not returned the other two keepers decided they would go and look for him. They found him where he lay by the fence with his two dogs nearby. This was a terrible and tragic day for all concerned, my mother with five children all under the age of 11, no house and little money coming in to support the family. My mother did have two sisters who stayed in Edinburgh and who visited fairly regularly and helped all they could with the family. The estate owner, the Earl of Moray and the Estate Factor were very helpful and within a week or two, arranged for the family to move to Aberdour where they gave us a house with a fairly large garden (this became quite a good asset especially when the War came).
I was told when I was much older that at the time there was much talk about what should happen to the family the suggestion being that the family should be split up with the three girls staying with mum and the two boys (Sandy and myself) being placed with other people possibly with a relative or with other people. Our mother strongly disagreed and said none of the family would leave they would stay together. I believe that my mother made the right decision, had the family been split up, our lives would have been totally different and not for the better in my opinion.
These were hard times for our mother (in those days there was not the same support or financial assistance available to call on as there is today) however somehow our mum managed to sort things out and keep all the family together. Unfortunately we as children were too young to contribute in the way of bringing in money to the home, our mum was a very likeable person and soon made friends and was extremely capable of working to earn money, she turned her hand to doing housework and helping people in their homes and for two days each week helping in Donibristle Estate house, which meant a fairly long walk to get there (one mile each way).
She and her sisters were always very happy smiling people always ready for a joke, this helped to make life much better for everyone. She still had friends on the estate and the whole family occasionally in an evening would take a walk of around three miles to visit Mr and Mrs Linton, he also was a gamekeeper on the estate.
Our mum was also a good Christian and attended church fairly regularly and also enjoyed attending some of the concerts and meetings held in the village hall, she also was a member of the WI.
The estate was very good to the family we received twice a year a load of fire wood, which myself and Sandy would chop up into suitable sizes to use on the fire. In the Spring the estate workers would come to dig over the garden and planted potatoes which helped greatly, this meant that all we (Sandy and I) had to do was keep the garden free from weeds and hill up the potatoes and plant some vegetables.
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As time moved on and we the children grew older all by the age of eight or nine years managed to find jobs. Sandy and myself delivering milk before going to school and then delivering groceries after school and at weekends Jean our oldest sister assisted in the Cooperative grocery shop. This of course all helped to bring in some money.
The school leaving age at that time was 15. We all attended Aberdour school initially. At the age of 11 the choice was either moving to Burtisland school which was a technical college or go to Dunfermline high school, both schools were a distance away from Aberdour and required travelling by bus. All the girls, Jean, Betty and Mary enjoyed Dunfermline High, while Sandy and myself went to the technical school. We all got excellent grades in the exams. I left school in 1938 at a time when the job situation was very limited with little choice. I had two interests, first to be a forester, my dream being to see all the high elevation land covered with trees as it was during much earlier times and take part in that operation. Secondly to become an Engineer.
I applied for two jobs, one on the Moray Estates to become a trainee forester, the other to become an apprentice mechanic with a garage company in Kirkcaldy.
Both replied and I decided to take up the forestry appointment. This proved very enjoyable and I loved the variety of jobs and gained volumes of experience working with two brothers, Bob and Will Ewan. Will Ewan was foreman and took a liking to me and gave me all the encouragement and opportunities to carry out everything which was available. The Second World War commenced on the 3rd September 1939 and when I was 17 1/2 years old I volunteered to join the RAF on flying duties and became a flight engineer. So in the end I got both my dreams to come true. After the war being demobbed in 1946, I took up an appointment to become a probationer at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh. In 1948 I joined the Forestry Commission Research Branch.
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CHAPTER C
JOINED RAF 23RD JULY 1942
The Second World War started on 3rd September 1939. I’m not going into details regarding the reasons why Britain thought it necessary to do so as I believe most people know the reasons.
Prior to the war during the summers of 1937 and 1938 the Territorial Army held their camps on the outskirts of Aberdour on grass fields owned by Mill Farm, which was situated adjacent to the Sheriff Road. To us as youngsters it was exciting and interesting to see double rows of horses tethered along a single rope and the troops living under canvas in large tents. To see the different tartans depending on which regiment was resident in camp at the time, such as The Black Watch, The Camerons or The Gordons.
They were the first troops to be called up for service followed by people from certain professions and the general public of different age classes, one had to be 18 years old before being recruited.
All three services required recruits and there was a certain agreement of allowing people to join the service of their choice, however, if one service was short of personnel then recruits had no choice but to go where sent.
I was sixteen years old when the war started and when my time came to be called up I wished to join the RAF and, if possible, to fly on reaching my 17th birthday. I decided I would volunteer for the RAF on flying duties. Volunteers usually were given the opportunity to serve in the service of their choice.
I recall discussing the war with a few of my colleagues and suggesting that this war would change the face of Europe, and would also change all our lives completely if we survived.
I was called up on 23rd July 1942; my orders were to report to Warrington Recruitment Centre. My stay there was for two days where I, along with many more of my own age were fitted out with uniform and all other necessities. We then travelled to Blackpool to commence our training and embark on a flight mechanics course.
Blackpool like many other seaside resorts had many private residences available (usually used as holiday accommodation or bed and breakfast), these were now being used to accommodate RAF recruits.
I with others was billeted in Montague Street, South Shore near to the South Shore beach. This turned out to be excellent, the landlady treated us extremely well, and we each had our own bedroom and facilities. She had to supply us with breakfast and evening meal, and normal washing facilities. In fact for all the time I was in Blackpool, which was just under a year I stayed there, the RAF supplied our towels etc. In fact two evenings a week we had what was called ‘shower parades’. In total there was near 10,000 RAF personnel billeted in
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the town, so through the town certain buildings such as baths or swimming pool areas were converted into showers, rows and rows of showers with dressing accommodation alongside.
The recruits such as ourselves were divided into groups of between 40 and 50 and each group had a corporal in charge, he was in charge of all our activities such as the shower parade. We had to assemble at a point near to our billet on certain evenings each week. The corporal would march us to the showers then afterwards march us back, he was also responsible for us on all other activities.
The course of flight mechanic was a very intensive course covering both theory and practical work. This was carried out at Squires Gate near St Anne’s, three miles east of Blackpool and was originally a small airport. The hangers were converted to workshops for training purposes.
We were transported in bus convoys daily, morning and evening to and from the base with our same corporal, Lofty Clark, in charge. We also carried out the usual training and skills necessary to be a good soldier including physical training, assault course, rifle drill and route marches. Most of these were carried out on the area around the South Shore pleasure ground. The mechanics course lasted for five months. At the end of each fortnight we had verbal exams and after six weeks written exams, each exam had to be passed before one could move on. If I remember all our group passed their exams.
After the mechanics course we were given two weeks leave and on return commenced on a fitters course, which lasted a further five months, the same routine as previously. What I forgot to say, we had a break in the morning and afternoon when the NAAFI vans arrived serving a bun and a cup of tea.
By the end of the further course we were capable of dismantling an aircraft engine and reassembling it with success. We also had a basic knowledge of the aircraft workings at this stage before moving onto the next stage of our training, the flight engineer course.
We were divided into those who would be flying on Halifaxs [sic] and those who would fly on Lancasters, fortunately I was selected to fly on Lancasters.
Blackpool was a fairly good place to be stationed at, as with its many parks there was always plenty of opportunity to play sport, which was very much encouraged by the RAF. I spent most weekends playing either football or rugby; in fact for the 1942‑3 season I played rugby for Blackpool’s third team. There was little time in evenings for anything, as I said two nights were taken up with shower parade, then most weeks a further two nights for other activities. Every Sunday there was a church parade, one had to attend the parade but not the service if it was not your religion. Most places in Blackpool were closed, however, the lower levels of the tower were still open and I remember the organ was still being played and the ballroom was open at certain times.
For the flight engineers course those of us that were to fly on Lancasters were transferred to St Athans, South Wales. The course was originally intended to last eight weeks however, on arrival we were told that flight engineers were in such short supply that the course was being crammed into two weeks. To enable this to happen we worked a 12‑hour day, seven days each week, however, the course was a success and we all knew the basics about the Lancaster workings, although we still had not flown in a Lancaster.
At the end of the course we were split up into groups of six and told to report to a certain Air Training Unit. I had to report to Lindholme near Doncaster, where other members of crew which included pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, mid upper gunner and rear gunner were already
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at Lindholme operating as a crew for a period of four weeks awaiting for flight engineers to become available.
On arrival we were introduced to our crews and the following day we were flying as a complete crew, however, not on Lancasters (Lancasters were too scarce to be used on training duties). We flew on Halifax, this was a heavy bomber and gave the pilot the opportunity and experience of flying heavy aircraft. We continued training and flying at Lindholme for a further week.
As a complete crew and along with one other crew from the same course at Lindholme we were posted to 101 Squadron which was based at Ludford Magna seven miles west of Louth Lincolnshire. This was a recently built airfield; the runways and perimeter roads were complete along with the aircraft stand pods. Accommodation was nissen huts as were the messes. Roads and paths around the areas were still not laid; Wellington boots were the order of the day.
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CHAPTER D
LUDFORD 101 SQUADRON
Ludford Magna
Ludford Magna, a small village situated on the main road between Louth and Market Rasen, was to change dramatically as the area was chosen to be the site for one of the new warfare RAF bomber airfields. Work commenced in spring 1943 and by May the airfield was ready for occupation however, as with many other war built sites, many buildings were far from being useable.
The airfield had three runways with the main runway, which was two thousand yards long from north to south. The other two runways were 14 hundred yards, one of which ran east to west. They were all connected by a narrow perimeter track of which there were 36 standing pods. All personnel accommodation was nissen hut type buildings and erected on the north side of the main road running through the village, some distance from the main airfield.
101 Squadron took over occupation of the airfield in late June but even then there were no hardcore paths leading to the billets or the ablution blocks. This meant that travelling to and from billets or airfield, the only serviceable footwear was rubber boots. We as a crew arrived in late July and I remember squelching in the mud around the base and when it rained circumstances were even worse, and it did rain quite a bit during the autumn and winter hence the airfield got the nickname of Mudford (instead of Ludford) and was well deserved.
On days when operations were planned the routine was briefing which was held at a certain time when all crew members met in the briefing room where the CO (Comanding [sic] Officer) addressed the crews stating which crews were flying and which if any were on standby in case any crew members were unable to fly.
The CO would then open the curtains on the wall covering the maps and the target, after which the various heads of section gave details of weather expected on route over target and on return, also bomb load, fuel load and any other relative information such as height levels expected to be flown at by the different aircraft. Lancasters usually flew at one or two thousand feet higher than the Halifax, which would be flying at around 19,000 feet.
It was most important for 101 Squadron to keep strictly to the timing and height levels as with ABC (Airborne Cigar equipment) on board, 101 Squadron crews task was to cover the rest of the bombers flying on the operation, along the route to the target, through the target and on the return route. Example, if the target time was 20 minutes for all aircraft to pass through the target and if 101 Squadron had 22 aircraft flying, each aircraft would be allocated a time through the target of one minute apart.
This put considerable pressure on the navigator and pilot, the route was always discussed among the crew members such as pilot, bomb aimer and engineer in order to help and assist the navigator to stay on course such as any landmarks, heavy barrage of ack ack or search
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lights, as these would usually mean certain industrial areas, towns or cities. Also if weather conditions were good possibly a certain bend on a river or railway, or road crosses, these markers were always very helpful to the navigator to keep him on course and on time.
All crew members had different personalities we all, however, accepted that we were professionals and some of the best in our trades, and that belief and the fact that we worked extremely well as a crew. We trusted each other’s judgement and carried out the requirements without question.
The crew (our crew) was organised similar to a football team we had a captain in our pilot Wally and with a few key team players who had the ability to carry out other members’ duties. They were Navigator, Jimmy, could act as bomb aimer, Eric our bomb aimer had sufficient knowledge of navigation to bring the aircraft home, and myself as engineer could in an emergency takeover and fly and land the aircraft. The gunners were the crewmembers most out of touch with the others. In my position I could watch their turrets for movement and could keep in touch with them, and if for any reason their turrets were not moving I could give them a call. I could easily see the mid upper gunner Bill and see the rear gunner guns Len when they turned to port.
Eric our bomb aimer lounged in the front compartment of the aircraft on lookout for other aircraft and to aid the navigator, his map reading was spot on, and he liked to give a commentary of what was happening leading up to the target – such sayings as men it’s bloody marvellous, we are bang on time over the target, then this was his time he was in control, he was very precise with his left slightly, right a little, hold it there, left a little. I would be watching for other aircraft and for fighters, and as he said on this occasion that it was over Berlin I said hold it Eric another Lanc is just passing immediately beneath us. He said: “I have missed the target we will have to go round again”. In this situation Eric was in control and Wally our pilot even with a few strong words said to Jimmy our navigator “give us a new course to bring us round again”. There were the occasional shouts from the gunners such as “fighter on port, eleven o’clock” or “watch that searchlight” or “collision between Lanc and Halifax – no parachutes, poor bastards”. The wireless operator Norman (Nobby) was good at his job he never panicked. Nobby could obtain bearings when others couldn’t. I think he did naughty things on the frequencies to get priority. He had the warmest place on the aircraft.
Jimmy our navigator was superb, conscientious, every course had to be accurate and everything he did he gave a reason for his decision. Wally our pilot would discuss with him the situation for the change of course and automatically changed course. Wally was an excellent pilot, steady and a good captain and we worked well together, we the crew called him our taxi driver. Taking off with a full bomb load and possibly two thousand gallons of fuel was the most nervous part of the trip, after receiving the green light he would taxi onto the runway, line up, test the engines remembering we had probably some waiting for five to ten minutes, with slow engine revolutions which could overheat the engines. We together would open up the four throttles when the engines were screaming he would release the brakes and the aircraft would start rolling along the runway. When we reached the 90+ speed he would require both his hands on the controls and I would push the throttle controls fully forward, keeping the port engines throttles slightly ahead of the starboard engines throttles, as I found that the Lancaster tended to veer to the port on take off or nearing the end of the runway. If we were still on the ground I would push all four throttles through the barrier, this gave the extra power we only used this in extreme cases, as it was hard on the engines and used extra fuel. Once in the air Wally would say “undercarriage up” then “flaps up” and we would start climbing on a spiral course until we reached the height of around ten thousand
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feet before setting course on our operation. I would adjust engines to obtain speed required with minimum revs.
As I previously said 101 Squadron operated ABC, which meant we carried an eighth member of crew. A specialist, his job was to jam German radio transmissions to the night fighters’ ground based controllers, his operating place was just behind the main part of the port side about 6 ft square with no external vision. It was said that these members had no one crew to fly with and were allocated a crew on an operation base, this maybe true however we were a very organised crew and this arrangement did not apply. We therefore were allocated Ken as a crewmember and he flew with us during the remainder of our tour.
101 Squadron radio call was for aircraft ‘Bookworm’, control tower ‘Bookshop’.
Returning to after briefing was completed we returned to the mess where a meal was always arranged which consisted of a main course of egg, bacon and chips. We then dressed into our flying kit, collected our parachute and made our way to the crew room where we collected our flying rations, these consisted of sandwiches, Horlicks tablets chewing gum and a flask of coffee or tea. If you wished wakey wakey pills to help keep you awake while flying (none of our crew ever indulged in these) we also collected a package containing money and maps of the countries over which we would be flying on the chance that we may be shot down.
After a few operations, the crew was allocated our own aircraft, for us X² the dispersal point was quite a way round the perimeter track and close to the road. The aircraft was parked facing away from the road and perimeter fence so when Mac our ground crew sergeant in charge of X² and his colleagues required to clean their dirty, oily boilersuits they would wash them in a can of fuel and hang them on the fence behind the aircraft, then when the engines were tested the slipstream would blow dry their clothes.
There was usually four or five technicians allocated to each aircraft with either a corporal or sergeant in charge. They were a grand bunch of lads, dedicated and had to work in the open under all various weather conditions from high summer temperatures to severe cold and winter weather conditions. They also had a remarkable collection of spare parts hidden away in their crew hut, which they built up over time from broken Lancasters. This enabled them to carry out repairs and patch up any enemy damage that had been inflicted on the aircraft. This meant that the aircraft could be kept serviceable and ready for action without delay and not having to ground the aircraft while waiting for spares from the stores.
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CHAPTER E
OPERATION DATES AND TARGETS
[photograph of author]
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Operations 101 Squadron 1943-44
Operation – Date - Place
1 - 20th August 1943 - Leverkusen.
2 - 30th-31st August 1943 - Munchen Gladbach.
0 - 31st Aug-1st Sept 1943 - (Abortive) Berlin. Starboard outer feathered, landed on three engines.
3 - 3rd-4th September 1943 - Berlin. Held in searchlights for five minutes.
4 - 23rd-24th September 1943 - Mannheim.
5 - 29th-30th September 1943 - Bochum.
6 - 2nd-3rd October 1943 - Munich. Shot up over Amiens landed Tangmere.
7 - 5th-6th October 1943 - Hanover.
8 - 20th-21st October 1943 - Leipzig. Electrical problems.
9 - 3rd-4th November 1943 - Düsseldorf.
10 - 10th-11th November 1943 - Modane. Fuel shortage, landed Tangmere.
11 - 18th-19th November 1943 - Berlin.
12 - 22nd-23rd November 1943 - Berlin. Rear turret frozen up.
13 - 26th-27th November 1943 - Berlin.
14 - 16th-17th December 1943 - Berlin. Heavy losses fog on return. Many fighter flares around target area.
15 - 20th-21st December 1943 - Frankfurt.
16 - 24-25th December 1943 - Berlin. Rear turret u/s starboard outer feathered.
17 - 29th-30th December 1943 - Berlin.
18 - 1st-2nd January 1944 - Berlin.
19 - 2nd-3rd January 1944 - Berlin. Mug passed out through lack of oxygen.
20 - 5th-6th January 1944 - Stettin. Best photo in bomber command.
21 - 15th-16th January 1944 - Brunswick.
22 - 27th-28th January 1944 - Berlin.
23 - 28th-29th January 1944 - Berlin.
24 - 15th-16th February 1944 - Berlin.
25 - 19th-20th February 1944 - Leipzig. Heaviest losses in group.
26 - 20th-21st February 1944 - Stuttgart.
27 - 24th-25th February 1944 - Schweinfurt. Best photo in group.
28 - 25th-26th February 1944 - Augsburg.
29 - 1st-2nd March 1944 - Stuttgart.
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CHAPTER F
101 SQUADRON
NOTES ON VARIOUS OPERATIONS
In late July 1943 after completing my flight engineer course and joining the other crew members at conversion unit Lindholme near Doncaster, with two other crews we arrived at 101 Squadron based at Ludford Magna. The crews were always known by the name of the pilot and out of the three crews that arrived, two crews had the name of Evans; W L Evans and A H Evans. I was the flight engineer assigned to W L Evans’s crew and had flown with them at conversion unit, however, the records had been mixed up and showed me as flight engineer to A H Evans’s crew. The simplest method of resolving the problem would have been for me to join A H Evans’s crew and the other flight engineer to join W L Evans’s crew. W L Evans, however, said definitely not, I was his engineer and in no way was I not flying in his crew, the records were therefore corrected.
For the next three weeks we worked as a crew getting to know each other and familiarising
ourselves with the aircraft. When we were told that we were to be on operations we had
flown 33 hours in total, 12 of which was night flying.
Both crews flew, our first operation was on 22nd-23rd August 1943, the target was Leverkusen. There was of course much excitement among us and especially when at briefing the curtains covering the maps on the wall were opened and we saw the target, we were the new bods not knowing what to expect. We listened carefully to what was being said by the various Heads of Section regarding the weather, hot spots to miss along the route, where fighters could be expected and where flak would be very heavy.
Leverkusen was a German town situated in the near proximity of the Ruhr Germany’s main industrial centre, where a high percentage of their heavy equipment was made. The Ruhr had been visited many times and considerable damage carried out which helped delay their war equipment this was an operation to attack specific targets, which would further upset and delay their war effort.
After briefing we returned to the mess for a meal, which usually consisted of egg, bacon and chips. Takeoff was scheduled for around 21:30 hours so before that we had to collect our parachutes rations and packet containing money, maps etc to cover the countries over which we would be flying in case we had to bail out.
We then changed into flying kit before catching the crew bus out to our aircraft. The next task was to carry out the pre-flying checks on the aircraft, then start the engines.
Wally then taxied the aircraft along the perimeter track towards the takeoff runway, waiting in the queue for the aircraft in front to obtain the green light to takeoff. Then our turn, green light given, we turn onto the runway, line up at the end, carry out the formal checks between pilot and engineer. Wally our pilot and skipper then holds on the brake as I open up the four
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throttles, pushing the port two slightly ahead of the starboard two, let brake off and feel the aircraft rush along the runway increasing speed rapidly (this was the most exciting part of the operation as far as I was concerned).
As the throttles are fully opened and as the end of the runway is nearing, the heavy aircraft laden with fuel and bombs leaves the tarmac behind. Relief. Pilot: “undercarriage up” engineer “undercarriage up, brakes on off”. Pilot “flaps up”, engineer “flaps up”. As the undercarriage and flaps are raised you could feel the plane sink a little before starting to climb. Pilot to navigator: “course and speed, and height”. I would then reduce throttle to minimum revs to produce power sufficient to keep climbing at the speed asked for, then as far as possible synchronise the four engines to cut out unnecessary noise. The noise from four Merlin engines was a noise that you never forget.
Taking off and managing to get this large aircraft off the ground safely while possibly carrying two thousand gallons of fuel stored in the wings and a full bomb load under your feet, as I said previous, was always the most exciting part of the operation as far as I was concerned and I always marvelled at Wally’s skills in achieving this without any mishaps. I was always relieved, happy and knew that everything would be all right until we had to do it all again on the next operation.
We had no troubles with our landing at base on return from Leverkusen, taxied to our parking space, caught a crew bus which took us to the debriefing room where we received a nice hot cup of tea or coffee with a spot of rum in if wanted. The debriefing consisted of an Intelligence Officer asking a number of questions about what we saw on route, anything unusual, searchlight positions around built up areas, flak, fighter activity. Did we see any planes being shot down and did we see any parachutes appearing and anything else, which may be of interest.
We were then able to return to the mess for breakfast. While having breakfast, A H Evans and crew arrived, we had a few words regarding the operation and made our way back to our billet for a few hours sleep, luckily it was coming up to high moon period so for the next ten days there were no operations.
The second operation, which both crews were on, was to Munchen Gladbach on 30th and 31st August, we had another fairly quiet trip without any problems and landed safely on time at Base. We heard that two planes were late, one of which was A H Evans, we held on at breakfast hoping to hear some news. News came through that a SR Lancaster had landed further south due to fuel shortage, it turned out not to be A H Evans and crew. The following day we heard the dreaded news that A H Evans’s crew was reported missing and presumably shot down. This was later confirmed.
This was a new experience for us to know that seven young men who we had been friendly with, even for a short time, were no longer around. The engineer had come through the same training as myself – mechanic course fitters course at Blackpool – followed by flight engineers course at St Athans, then crewing up at Lindholme. He was slightly older than myself therefore not in my squad although I did know him on the course to say hello, and as you know both crews joined 101 Squadron on the same day and I almost changed places with him.
The same routine was followed each time we took off and continued to be the most anxious time and possibly the most scary and nervous moments of each operation. We soon realised that each operation was different with its own hazards and that flying over Europe for however short or long a period, it was a very dangerous and frightening place to be.
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The normal procedure for all aircraft after takeoff was to start to gain height, circling the area until reaching a height of around 10,000 ft before setting course for the target. Around the Lincoln area there were at least 20 airfields, each with at least 20 aircraft flying on each operation, that was why the residents living in the area knew when operations were on by the noise of 400 planes all circling to gain height. Once a course was set we tried to reach a height of at least 15,000 ft before crossing the enemy coast.
There were certain things that we had no control over such as the weather, the conditions on route could be quite different from that forecasted. Increased wind speeds, a tail wind instead of a nose wind, these affected the navigator greatly who was trying to stay on route and be at a certain point within the time space of the operation. More so with 101 Squadron, responsible to give protection by using ABC over the full length of the operation. Thunderstorms and heavy clouds could also cause icing up of the engine air intakes and front edge of the wings (remember temperatures could be as low as -20°) and if not dealt with could cause engine failure.
Fog, however, was the most serious problem, thick fog in the UK on return. Blanket fog so thick it was impossible to see anything from the air or the ground, this caused heavy losses of aircraft as returning from flying with low fuel levels, trying to find a landing ground was impossible, for many resulting in heavy losses in aircraft and crews. Conditions improved slightly when FIDO was installed on some runways.
There were hazards from conditions which crews did not expect as the Met weather forecasts had given much more favourable conditions, otherwise we should not have been flying. As soon as we flew over the Dutch coastline we expected to be greeted by flak and if ground conditions were good by enemy fighters, depending on the operations route, flak could be very heavy and accurate especially round the towns and cities. Searchlights then also came into play especially those with the strong blue coloured lights. If caught by one of these it was almost impossible to lose them they were also radar controlled by anti-aircraft guns, which were especially accurate and many aircraft became casualties.
There was also a fair risk of collision bearing in mind that on the route to the target there were possibly between 400 and 600 large aircraft (100 ft wingspan) all travelling in the same direction at the same time, making for the same point and expected to be over the target all within the space of 20 minutes or less (granted there would be a range of heights between some, possibly within a band of 2,000 ft). Think of it as 600 cars travelling along a motorway all doing 70 miles per hour, all expecting to pass point ‘A’ at between 01:00 and 01:20 hours. If congestion occurred the car driver would see and would slow down, there was no way of changing lane or slowing in an aircraft. It was therefore very clear to us as a crew early on that flying over Europe was a very dangerous and frightening place to be and if we were to succeed we had to work as a team, be alert all the time whether for two hours or eight hours. This we managed fairly well, we recognised that the safest place to be was in the middle of the concentration along the route. It was usually those who had strayed off course that were picked off by fighters or became casualties by flak.
Our navigator Jimmy was therefore a very important member of the crew (he was an exceptionally good navigator) the rest of the crew could also help him which we did if conditions were clear telling him of certain markers, such as there is heavy flak ahead to 11 o’clock, or we are just passing over a river with a railway line and road alongside or such like information.
He could then take action if necessary and give a change of course to Wally our pilot, or if we had a strong tail wind ask me to reduce speed slightly. So we had two-way conversation
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between key members such as navigator, bomb aimer, pilot and engineer but only with reference to the operation in hand.
The rear and mid upper gunners role was to continually scour the sky by rotating from side to side in their turrets, with one turning to starboard the other turning to port, the bomb aimer controlled the front myself had the only view to watch the gunners and watch ahead and to the sides, while the bomb aimer carried out his other work such as dropping window or preparing for his bombing run, therefore we were fairly well covered. If another aircraft came close or overhead, or below us on our bombing run a crewmember could give the alarm. If a fighter was seen and showing interest then mostly the gunners gave the alarm “fighter starboard, 2 o’clock, dive now!”. Wally would dive immediately and carry out a corkscrew manoeuvre then return on to normal course, this usually worked. If for any reason I could see the gunner’s turrets not moving I would give them a call, only once was it necessary to take further action (this is recorded later) usually they were just having a short rest or such like.
Fuel was also a concern, petrol was rationed throughout the UK as most of the supplies had to be imported, therefore fuel for aircraft was also closely regulated on Lancasters to 200 gallons per hour flying time. Therefore if the estimated time for an operation was seven hours, fuel allocated was 1,400 gallons plus 200 extra, a total of 1,600 gallons.
The flight engineer therefore did have some control; it was dependent on how efficient he was in regulating the engines (similar to driving, there are good drivers and not so good drivers). The Lancaster had six fuel tanks, three in each wing with the small tank on the outside of the wing which could only be pumped into the middle tank, the other two on each wing could be used in tandem or individually to feed the engines.
It was the engineer’s responsibility to use the fuel distribution the most successful way so that whatever happened the maximum fuel was available to keep the engines running. To such ends I fully used the centre tanks each fuelling the two engines on port and starboard when sufficient was used pump tank fuel into tank two, then using fuel evenly from the other two tanks to supply the port and starboard engines.
If anything unforeseen happened such as a tank being damaged from enemy flak or fighter guns, the minimum fuel loss would occur and I could re-adjust my method of usage by opening and closing valves.
All engines could be run from one of the four tanks, this meant keeping a log and recording every ten or fifteen minutes. It was also necessary to record engine temperatures and oil pressure and with experience listening to the noise of the engines could give a good indication of how efficient they were running. Fuel could be saved by making sure that, when possible, the engine revs could be reduced and that other control on the aircraft such as flaps, etc were being used at optimum levels. This saving in fuel could be the difference between touching down safely or not, on the odd occasion when fuel loss occurred from a leaking tank or when on reaching the base area it was under thick fog and extra flying was necessary to find a suitable landing site.
Life on the base was very mixed, flying on operations was usually carried out during the dark nights of the moon and these two weeks could be hectic, operations could be on two consecutive nights resulting in our crew getting to bed at around 05:00 hours and then having to be ready for pre-briefing and head of section meetings, followed by main briefing at 15:00 to 16:00 hours and once again ready for takeoff by 21:30 hours. Other times operations could be scheduled and then cancelled because of possibly extreme weather
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conditions over the UK or over the target area. The dark nights were therefore a continual case of being ready to fly when called upon.
The period of high moon was more relaxing. Training and practice still had to be carried out such as bombing practice for Eric; this was carried out on targets set in the North Sea a few miles off shore. Gun practice for Len and Bill carried out on a moving target towed behind a small plane off the coastline.
The station had an excellent gym where one could keep fit which was essential and a very good library of general reading material and technical information. I also spent a considerable amount of time on the simulator improving my flying skills and landing procedures, also the period when crews could have some leave. I always travelled home on these occasions.
We were on base during the autumn (harvest time) as a crew we decided to help the local farmer with stocking and collecting his grain crops as our accommodation Nissen huts were situated near to the farmstead, in return he offered us a pile of fire wood to keep our stove lit during the colder nights as the coke ration was rather limited.
Ludford Magna was a small village supporting two pubs, a post office and a small but very nice church during the 11 months, which I spent at the base. I had never been in either of the pubs. I had attended the church service on a number of occasions.
The Women’s Institute also ran a small unit situated on the main street where one could obtain a nice cup of tea and a cake, also within a mile radius there were two small cafes which crew members frequently visited during the day for a tea and a bun.
During off flying periods we as a crew fairly regularly visited the Kings Head Hotel in Louth where we had a meal. Crewmembers also received generous leave, seven days approximately every 6‑8 weeks depending on weather and operation timing. We had extra rations of chocolate, vitamin tablets and cigarettes. On leave from Ludford I always travelled home to Aberdour in Fife, Scotland. It was a long, slow journey, going on leave we usually managed to go by transport from the base then catch a train at Louth to Grantham where we could catch the train on the main line travelling between London and Edinburgh. This was usually an overnight train and usually very packed by other military personnel doing the same. The train usually reached Edinburgh during the night or very early morning then another wait to catch a train to Aberdour. The conditions occurred on the return journey unfortunately the train reached Louth early in the morning when no such transport was
available; it was then a seven mile walk back to base.
Leave was a time to catch up with family and friends and especially to catch up with sleep and to chill out and rest. I said earlier that we did have good rations of sweets, chocolates and cigarettes which I usually was able to take some home.
During the winter 1943/44 we had several days of heavy snow and naturally this added to the mud when it melted, it also meant that to keep operational the runways and perimeter tracks had to be cleared of snow, every available person, air crews and ground crews, armed with spades and shovels turned out to clear the snow. We were treated with the odd drop of rum to keep the cold out and our spirits up, and to keep us digging.
Our billet nissen huts had snowdrifts around them, these Nissen huts were unlined and in bad weather there was considerable condensation inside and this used to run in the corrugations of the sheeting and if the temperature was cold enough, it would freeze. We did have heating in the form of a round pot stove with chimney from top of the stove up through
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the roof. Coal or anthracite was the main fuel, it was of course rationed and in short supply. There were raids between huts to obtain extra supplies. The odd chair went missing along with any spare pieces of wood to help out. If you were lucky and had sufficient supply to completely fill up the stove and get it and part of the chimney extremely hot then it would keep the hut warm until the next morning.
During the summer the problems were different, it was earwigs that would climb up the inside of the huts and occasionally drop into beds. I remember one of our crew members, I can’t remember who, while sleeping an earwig crawled into his ear and he had to pay a visit to the MO to have it removed. Field mice could also cause annoyance.
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NOTES ON VARIOUS OPERATIONS
Operation 3
3rd/4th September 1943
Target: Berlin
We had a reasonably quiet trip keeping clear of the various hot spots on route and staying well on course, searchlights were many on the approach to the target with some very powerful blue lights. As we prepared for our bombing run we got caught by one of these powerful lights and no matter what we did we could not lose it, and if we did a further light caught on to us. We were flying at 22,000 ft; Wally decided the best manoeuvre was to put the aircraft into a power dive and loose [sic] height quickly.
After four minutes we were down to 18,000 ft and still dazzled by its glare just then a Halifax, which was flying at a much lower altitude, drifted across under us and the light caught on to it, then the Halifax completely exploded. It had received the full blast possibly intended for us. These blue searchlights and guns were radar controlled and worked together.
We reached the target and bombed at the lower level then set for home and had a quiet trip back to base. We were a bit shaken up by what had happened to the Halifax and in future made a mental note to keep well clear of blue searchlights. The navigator noted in his log the position of this light so if possible it could be targeted for special attention.
Operation 6 (705 hours)
2nd-3rd October 1943
Target: Munich
Takeoff time for the operation was 18:45 hours. For us as a crew this was a quiet trip, we had no problems with enemy fighters, searchlights were few and by keeping strictly on course found no problems with ack-ack. We reached the target on time, bombed and started on our way home still without any troubles, then as we thought we were doing well without warning we were shot up by anti aircraft guns near the town of Amiens which caught the underside of the body of the aircraft and along the wings. From this we developed a fuel leak. In trying to evade further damage from the anti aircraft guns Wally put the aircraft into a power dive at around 21,000 ft, trying to pull it out took Wally and myself great strength pulling on the control column, we were down to 5,000 ft when we finally levelled out. On inspecting the aircraft at Tangmere we found that many of the rivets on the lower side of the wings had been stripped open owing to the strain on the wings caused by the speed in diving, and counted over 80 holes of various sizes along the body and wings however after refuelling the following day we decided the aircraft was airworthy and safe enough to fly back to base where we could have repairs carried out quickly. Mac was not amused when he saw the Lanc X not X² but was pleased that we had brought it back safely for his team to repair it.
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Operation 8
19th/20th October
Target: Berlin
During the week previously I had been told that more new Lancasters would be arriving at base and the one with X² as its recognition number would be allocated to our crew and from then on for our use on operations. Up until that date we operated on whichever aircraft was available. Mac, a ground engineer (Sergeant) had arrived on the station in July, until now he was a spare engineer, X² became his charge for all servicing and repairs. We struck up a great relationship between us and after each operation, as soon as possible I would contact Mac and tell him of any problems which we had experienced during the flight. I was thrilled to think I would be the only person operating these engines and I could nurse then [sic] whenever possible and be reasonably sure that they had not been misused for no good reason. Mac had warned me that because of the lack of time, the aircraft had been checked and was serviceable, however, he and his team had not yet had the time to check all electrical and hydraulic circuits.
Takeoff was 17:30 hours and all went well until I retracted the undercarriage, it appeared to lift ok but the warning lights indicated that it had not fully locked. We proceeded to circle and climb and as we reached the Dutch coastline Nobby, our wireless operator, was having problems with his equipment, I then had a temperature gauge on one of the engines reading an excessively high temperature. The engine appeared to be working satisfactorily, however, we were still only a short time into our operation. I was concerned what may continue to happen and without radio contact we could have a problem.
We still had a full bomb load on board and high levels of fuel, under these conditions we could not return to base and land without losing our bombs. Wally was in agreement with Jimmy our navigator, they decided that they would set course for Texel and drop our bombs on the installation there. This we did then returned to base. As we had no contact with ground control we landed without permission.
On return before landing, however, we dropped our undercarriage and as the lights were not showing we did do a shallow dive with a quick pull up, this jerked the undercarriage down and all was well. The problems were resolved, the pressure gauge was faulty, meaning the undercarriage was not fully engaging because of limited pressure on the hydraulics.
Operation 10
11th/12th November 1943
Target: Modane
Normally as we have said previously operations were usually carried out during the nights when there was no moon. This was full moon; a beautiful bright night with clear skies which meant that aircraft flying could be seen for great distances. We had no trouble in reaching the target with little or no opposition from enemy fighters, searchlights or flak. Even on the way home it was trouble free and we could see and watch the marvellous sights of the high mountains as we passed over them and then without notice flying over Amiens a blue searchlight ‘coned’ us, immediately followed by heavy and accurate ack-ack fire which burst very close to us, causing some damage to the underside of the aircraft and to one of the fuel tanks, luckily no crew member was injured.
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This was not a great problem it only meant isolating the tank involved, eventually causing a fuel shortage. I said we would not have sufficient fuel to reach base, so Jimmy (our navigator) gave Wally a course for Tangmere in South England where we landed. On checking we found that the aircraft was not too badly damaged around 50 holes of various sizes along the underside of the fuselage and two holes in the side and front window where a piece of shrapnel entered in and out again, as well as cutting a hole in the sleeve of my flying jacket. This I did not know until I was removing my jacket.
The following morning we refuelled and returned to base.
Operation 14 (Black Thursday)
16th-17th December 1943
Target: Berlin
This was supposed to be a very quiet trip as reported at briefing in the late afternoon. The weather was so bad over Europe that no fighters would be able to fly therefore the route would be straight to the capital Berlin, and straight back out – should be a very easy journey, unfortunately things did not turn out this way.
As we crossed over the Dutch coast the weather took a dramatic change and instead of cloud and thick fog, conditions were good for flying and the fighters which were supposed to be sitting on the ground were flying on strength and interrupting the bomber stream, and we noted a few running battles and a number of aircraft being shot down. Within a short time it was clear that this was going to be a night to remember. The attacks continued all the way to the target, fortunately we remained clear of any trouble except for seeing the odd fighter going in the opposite direction.
There was the usual heavy concentration of searchlights and heavy activity of ack ack over the target creating a heavy barrage. We bombed on target and set on our route for home, this proved uneventful for us although we did see a few fighter battles being continued.
The weather by this time was beginning to close in with much more low cloud as a result Wally decided to carry out a gentle decent, reaching the coastline at around 2,000 ft and by this time we knew that there would be trouble with low cloud and fog. We were alerted by base that Ludford was fog-bound and that we should proceed to Driffield, this was when it became very difficult. By now all the crewmembers were active in trying to find any ground markers all with little success, Eric who was still in his front position shouted “pull up Wally – I’ve just seen a barrage balloon”. Jimmy quietly informed us we must be over Hull, I’ll use this as a reference check.
By now we had been in the air for 7 1/2 hours and from my calculations our fuel was becoming in short supply. Nobby (wireless operator): “I’m picking up a signal” RT messages from Dishforth and Catfoss but they could see no lights through the fog.
Then Catfoss offered to put a light on for us, they, however, realised that we were very low and put the beam aimed parallel to the ground.
Presumably, because of the light what Wally and I saw was a farmhouse and buildings, we both acted simultaneously, Wally pulled the control unit full back, I slammed the throttle fully open, luckily I had been flying with the engine booster pumps on so there was no delay in the engines producing full power. As the power emerged we somehow managed to lift the aircraft over the buildings we must have been only feet away from the ground because as the
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aircraft pulled up the tail wheel clipped the farm entrance gate, I think that it must be true to say that the beam of light from Catfoss saved our lives.
Wally: “How much fuel have we left?” My reply, ”Very little, what should we do?” Jimmy: “Take course for base and try to land there”. We decided to return to base and as luck would have it Eric caught a brief glimpse of something he recognised followed by a few sodium lights of the outer ring lights and as we circled round Wally said “I think I will go round again as I will then have a better chance of landing”. “No” I said, “we do not have the fuel for that”. So with some quick manoeuvring he managed to bring the aircraft back on course. Unfortunately, as I have said previously there are so many airfields in Lincolnshire that the outer perimeter lights cross over each other and this is what happened to us because we were flying so low we managed to pick up the occasional light expecting it still to be the lights for Ludford. Unfortunately we had crossed over and unbeknown to us were travelling on the lights for Wickenby. On having a glimpse of the runway lights Wally turned in and asked for permission to land thinking it was Ludford, Ludford control said yes but we can’t see you. We landed safely part way down the runway the fog was still very thick. Wally to control: “We have landed but fog too thick to see”. Control: “You have not landed where are you?”. Wally and I looked at each other “Wally we have haven’t we?” Then a further voice came on, this is control Wickenby we think you have landed here “who are you?” Wally told them and asked them to give directions. Leave the aircraft where it is, we think it is still on the runway, we will send transport to collect you when we find you. After 20 minutes a crew bus collected us and eventually dropped us off at the mess where we had a meal and it was Wickenby.
Wickenby was a wartime base similar to Ludford and with similar living accommodation. We were given a nissen hut where we had a cold bed. As we were extremely tired after our ordeal we had a good sleep.
We woke up to a much better day and there on the runway was Lancaster X² just where we abandoned it. I arranged for fuel and a starter trolley to be delivered, prior to refuelling Wally and I started the engines, carried out the pre-flying checks.
The engines fired up and ran for 2 to 3 minutes then began spluttering and then stopped. We had run out of fuel, the decision not to go round again was the correct decision.
Mac our ground engineer and his staff were there to meet us on our return and gave hand signals in order to park up on our parking point. Mac said: “where have you been” and gave me a big hug. “I think I heard the old girl last night and we came running out hoping to see her, I’m sure it was her she has a noise all of her own, a sweeter, quieter noise”. However, when we checked the time we thought that we must have been mistaken because we were sure that she did not have the fuel to last that time. Then we heard that a Lancaster had crashed on the rising ground hear [sic] Louth so we then went to bed – none of our aircraft landed last night, apparently they are scattered across the east side of England as they are from all the other bases round about.
“Is she ok?” Mac asked. “Yes” I say. “You might however check over the engine booster pumps as they were used a lot last night”. Mac: “What’s happened to the cowlings around the tail wheel?” Me: “Oh, give the tail wheel mounting a good inspection Mac”. Mac “Why, what happened, surely Wally didn’t do this on landing, he usually lands on the main wheel first”. Me “No, we hit a gate”. Mac “You what? You hit a gate, why didn’t you open it first!” Mac: “Yes, will check her over and make her ready for tonight if required”. Fortunately the fog again returned with poor visibility, it was 4 days before we flew again and then the operation was Frankfurt.
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We found out later that out of the 483 Lancasters that flew that night 25 were lost over Europe from a combination of attack from night fighters, flak and collisions. Another 29 Lancasters from crashes, which occurred due to the thick fog conditions experienced around the airfield on returning home and trying to land.
Mac also confessed that he and his engineers were completely fed up with the time they had spent working on the carburetting on the engines, ensuring that the fuel taken up by the engines was the least possible and me insisting that they check the volume over and over again until no more could be done.
He now agreed that all the effort made now paid off as if not there was no way that she could have kept flying for that period of time (8 hours 30 minutes) and he said thank you.
Each aircraft carried seven crewmembers, 101 Squadron aircraft carried eight crewmembers. On the attached page there is a paragraph which Len Brooks, our rear gunner told his recollection of the night’s events due to the fog.
Considering the events of that night in a rational way it is difficult to believe what happened could have happened with a satisfactory ending.
We had travelled across Europe direct to Berlin and back escaping enemy fighters, flash lights and enemy ack ack fire without mishaps, only to arrive back in Lincolnshire to find all the eastern side of the UK that the cloud base had almost reached ground level. Base diverted us to Driffield and we found ourselves over Hull and among barrage balloons. We were flying low to try to find some marker which we could relate to such as outer ring lighting or runway lighting, as there were a number of airfields in that area.
Nobby our wireless operator said I’m picking up RT messages from Driffield, Dishforth and Catfoss but they could not see us because of the fog. Catfoss offered to put a light up for us realising we were so low, their beam was almost parallel to the ground. How was it that the beam came on at that precise moment? How was it that we acted so quickly with the control column and obtained such a quick response from the engines? The aircraft must have climbed at 40‑45% because as the power took over the tail wheel caught the gate leading into the farmhouse, meaning that the aircraft was at most four feet from ground (travelling at 150 miles per hour), this meant covering the ground at 88 ft per second. The time we had to clear the farmhouse and building was less than one second, how could that happen?
We know what Len Brooks said, he felt the power from the engines and looked down and saw the chickens in the farmyard scampering away from their coupes denoting that the aircraft had climbed exceptionally quickly. How did the aircraft pull itself up and over a two storey building in such a short distance? What would the consequences of been had the aircraft not made it? How many people were in the house; farmer’s wife and family? How many children? In fact what was their experience of it, did they sleep through it or were they very scared? We don’t know. How many animals were in the steading, was there a milking herd of 20 to 30 cows? The destruction could have been tremendous, as it was no one was injured as far as we know.
We gained some height; Jimmy gave Wally a course back to base. Why was it just at that precise moment that the fog thinned to allow Eric to recognise an object followed by the sodium lights of the base outer circle? Wally saying that he thought he should go round again, I say no we haven’t the fuel, Wally doing an unconventional manoeuvre to bring the aircraft back on course and immediately picking out further lights of the outer ring. However, by this time we had left Ludford outer ring and crossed over onto Wickenby outer ring. We kept on circling round very low to keep lights in sight and luckily spotted the runway lights
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and landing part way along the runway thinking we had landed at base surprised to find it was Wickenby we had landed at, then being told to abandon the plane where it was on the runway. Had we been directed to taxi off the runway and round the perimeter track to a conventional parking area I think the engines would have cut out on the way giving all the crew a complete shock. As it was it was only myself and Wally who realised the seriousness of the situation when we started the engines the following morning.
As I said earlier this was supposed to be a very uneventful operation, in and out of Europe. The average trip to Berlin was around 7 1/2 hours flying time, fuel 1,750 gallons, this I consider could have been estimated at around 7 hours maximum flying time, 1,700 gallons.
I realise that I was always considered better at conserving fuel than most engineers however, how did our aircraft manage to stay airborne for 8 1/2 hours and give out as soon as we touched down. This turned out to be a very exciting but frightening night, how was it that we managed to avoid the various objects we encountered and still managed to bring X² back safely. This was an episode that as a crew we never talked about.
Operation 16
24th/25th December
Target: Berlin
Takeoff time if I remember correctly was early evening in order that we should reach the target before midnight. On board each aircraft was a mix of various bombs, high explosive, incendiaries and delayed timed bombs triggered to explode on Christmas Day.
It was an uneventful night for us, keeping our place on route, seeing some ack-ack activity
aimed at those aircraft, which strayed off route and seeing the occasional night fighter gun tracers streak across the dark sky.
We reached the target on time and Eric was preparing for his bombing run when I noticed that the oil temperature gauge on the outer starboard engine was reading very high. I had to decide the best action, normally on the bombing run I would be on lookout watching for other aircraft approaching us from above or below us and was all the other spare members of crew, it was critical to have maximum look out because of the concentration of aircraft all making for the same point. Many collisions occurred in these situations; damage could also take place by aircraft flying above by dropping their bombs without watching what was below.
I said “Wally, feathering starboard outer”. Wally to Eric: “Cancel bombing run, engine feathered, have adjusted revs on other engine”. Jimmy: “Wally take course so-and-so and go round again”. This was a very difficult and dangerous decision to take as our aircraft would be on an entirely different direction from all other aircraft and exposed to enemy fighters.
We as a crew had previously discussed what we should do in the event of something like this happening, the conclusion was that after flying all this way to the target our first priority was to put our bombs on the target, so any distraction must be remedied first before the bombing run was made. Hitting the target was the only reason for being there. Eric carried out his bombing and the result was that the bombs scored a direct hit, this was confirmed from a self-operating camera situated in the bomb bay and rolled when the bomb doors were opened.
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Afterwards we set off on our return run on three engines but because of limited power instead of holding our 20,000 ft altitude Wally and I decided to make a gradual descent, passing over the enemy coast at 5,000 ft and making our way direct to base on the instruction given by Jimmy our navigator.
The engine proved to be suffering from a faulty gauge, this, however, we had no way of knowing and had it been an engine seize up and possibly resulted in an engine fire, we could have been in serious problems being an easy target for enemy fighters. Wally made a very professional landing on three engines, of course he always did make a good landing in the dark, it was during daylight that he always had a few Kangaroo jumps before rolling along the runway.
Operation 19
2nd/3rd January 1944
Target: Berlin
I would expect that everyone would experience fear on a number of times during their lifetime being frightened is nothing to be ashamed of. Fear can be brought on instantly by such things as an explosion, a fire or such like, then fear can turn to panic. Controlled fear can be felt when one expects that they are likely to die, on the motorway getting caught up in an accident when cars are travelling at speed.
Our crew experienced such emotions once when on operations over Berlin when our Lancaster was hit by ack-ack fire, which exploded very close to us and caused severe damage to the fuselage from shrapnel, also causing loss of all communication. After checking all engines and fuel supplies, and assessing for any further damage I realised that Bill’s (our mid-upper gunner) turret was stationary with no signs of movement from him. I knew that something must be wrong so I touched Wally gave the thumbs up and pointed towards the rear. I collected a portable oxygen bottle and on the way through the aircraft I touched Nobby on the arm and signalled him to follow me. True enough Bill was not in his turret, with the light from my torch we found him trying to open the fuselage rear door and in his panic he had no parachute with him. He seemed very strong and determined to leave the aircraft. The only way to prevent this happening was to hit him with the oxygen bottle. We were able to man handle him back to the rest bed. When giving him the oxygen bottle he began sucking
it like a baby, we made him comfortable with a blanket then returned to our positions.
This episode had taken over 30 minutes at probably the most dangerous period of any operation over the target with lights being shone from the torch and loss of lookout crewmembers (mid-gunner and myself). Luckily the aircraft was not too badly damaged between 40 to 50 holes along the fuselage.
In early January Bill reported sick, which meant that we required a mid upper gunner, Dave who had lost his crew was looking to join a new crew, so he joined our crew and flew with us until we completed our tour of operations.
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Operation 28
25th-26th February 1944
Target: Augsburg
I have little recognition of what happened on this trip, it however was of great importance because this was the first time on any operation that Lancasters had been fitted with 2 x 0.5 guns in the rear turret instead of the 4 x 0.303 guns. Furthermore it was only 101 Squadron who had them.
These turrets were made by a small local company from Gainsborough and designed in conjunction with 101 Squadron’s technicians; this gave the Lancaster a much greater firepower.
At briefing it was announced that six aircraft, which included our X², were fitted with 0.5 guns and that crews should take the initiative and attack fighters rather than take evasive action.
All I remember of what must have been relatively quiet was that the 101 Lancasters that were carrying the new turrets and firing at the fighters, it was the fighters that were taking evasive action and as the fighters were unaware that only a few aircraft were fitted with these much more effective guns. Over the next few operations there was much less fighter activity which was much less effective.
On a number of operations as well as dropping window we also dropped leaflets, the leaflets were typed in German and gave information as to how the war was progressing (propaganda information).
All operations were usually carried out at twenty thousand feet plus for Lancasters, other types of aircraft would bomb at slightly lower heights because of the thin air at above 10,000 ft. Oxygen had to be taken through masks and also because of the altitude temperatures could drop to as low as -20o, so much so if you touched any metal part of the fuselage with your bare hand it could stick to the metal and because of condensation one had to free the ice from your mask frequently.
Operation 29
1st-2nd March 1944
Target: Stuttgart (8 hours 10 minutes)
During the 1930s and 40s the winters could be very severe with long periods of frost and snow. March 1944 commenced with heavy and prolonged snowfall resulting in Ludford runway being covered in over 8 ft of snow which had to be cleared before flying could continue. At that time there was no heavy snow clearing equipment available, only the normal tractors that were on site, therefore to move the snow every person on the station not on duty was put on snow clearing. The aircraft standing points were cleared first so that ground crews could operate then the task of clearing the main runway commenced spades and shovels were the tools of the day. Generally I think everyone enjoyed it with plenty of high jinks and laughing, many snowmen being made along the runway edges.
Operations were ordered for that night 1st March therefore the runway had to be ready for takeoff by 16:00 hours. It was crucial that 101 Squadron was available because we were the only Squadron operating CIGAR a jamming device which prevented German radar from
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contacting their fighters to give them instructions. Bomber Command refused to fly without 101 Squadron’s aircraft.
It was determined that the runway would not be fully cleared, however, if four hundred yards were ready aircraft could take off with a light fuel load, fly to the neighbouring airfield Wickenby, fully fuel and bomb up there.
Briefing took place mid afternoon; flying was laid on for 16:00 hours. We were the first plane off without trouble, a further two followed, the fourth didn’t make it on the cleared runway part, ploughed into the snow and skidded off the runway closing it. This meant that four of 101 Squadron’s aircraft carrying CIGAR were available. On the operation the aircraft were spread out along the route covering the period of the raid. (ie approximately five minutes apart)
Our aircraft was fuelled and bombed-up at Wickenby and took off among the planes from Wickenby. The operation as far as we were concerned was quiet, with few fighters, no troubles. We bombed on time and returned for home crossing the Dutch coast at around 10,000 ft, then continued to base Wickenby, then de-briefed, had breakfast and then to bed. We stayed at Wickenby for two more days before we could return to Ludford.
On our return our Squadron Commander told us that we had completed our tour of operations and since the squadron moved to Ludford we were the only crew that had achieved that, so he didn’t want to test our luck any further.
The following two days were spent testing the new rear turret with the 2 x .5 guns under various flying conditions, including high level flying at 25,000+ ft and it proved to be equally good under all conditions.
Five days later we all went on leave, this was the break up of the crew after which none of us met again, during the war that’s how things happened.
Before going on leave I went to see Mac to tell him the situation. “Can’t you stay?” he asked “where are you being posted to?”. “I think I may be posted to Lindholme as an instructor”. “Why can’t you stay here then and instruct here? I will miss you, you’ve taught me more about carburettors and how they work. I know I told you you were a pain in the neck to my chaps, you demanding that they check and monitor the engines performance to obtain maximum fuel savings. I will continue to carry out your instructions and to see if I can help save other crew’s lives as we have just recently experienced on X²”.
“If you do a further operation tour, come back here and I will try to look after your aircraft again for you, all the best, good flying”.
Operation Highlights
I have highlighted only a few of our more exciting operations, many of which have been written about and described by other aircrew presumably because these were the operations which for some reason caught the headlines and probably they were the crew members which survived.
It must be remembered, however, that every operation had its dangers. The fact that the aircraft flew over enemy territory was a dangerous place to be, with it being usually in darkness and with anywhere up to 600 aircraft plus on many occasions, all making for the
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same target within a time limit of between 30 to 60 minutes alone had its dangers and problems.
When I say that we had a quiet trip this usually meant that our crew had no major problems and every member carried out his duties as an individual and as a team member. This did not mean that minor problems did not occur such as the rear turret freezing up causing problems for Len (rear gunner) from severe cold and lack of visibility or wireless operator loosing [sic] contact with base or even Wally and myself with ice forming on the wing edges from travelling through cloud. On one occasion the whole crew suffering because of being caught up in a thunderstorm, the aircraft being thrown about like a toy, falling immediately to 1,000 ft and back up again, something that no one had any control over.
Cold was a further concern; the temperature could fall as low as -20 to 30oC below zero. The metal of the aircraft if you touched it with your bare hand, the skin could stick to it therefore gloves had always to be worn. There was warm air circulated throughout the aircraft this was controlled from a duct situated near to the wireless operator’s station and at times should he become very warm would turn it down.
Oxygen masks were also worn as above ten thousand feet oxygen was necessary and it was a continual task to have to remove the ice from your mask, as it built up due to the moisture created from breathing. As you can imagine the gunner being isolated from the main cabin area suffered even more.
The enemy could also cause a few problems on route. Fighters had an advantage over the heavier, slower bombers and the fact that bombers had four engines creating a fair amount of exhaust flame and light made it easy for the fighters to see us. Generally if a fighter was spotted by the gunners in time it was safest to take evasive action.
The action would come say from the rear gunner ‘fighter 3 o’clock approaching’ following ‘dive, dive to port’. The skipper would immediately throw the aircraft into a dive and do a corkscrew manoeuvre, regaining back on his normal course. This generally worked; it was the fighter which was not spotted by the lookouts which caused the problem as they would normally attack from below the rear of the aircraft strafing the fuselage with bullets.
Search lights. The normal searchlight could be a problem for aircraft at lower levels and were situated around most towns, cities and industrial sites, however, there was another much more dangerous blue searchlight, much brighter which could penetrate to much higher altitudes and operated in conjunction with anti aircraft guns. Being caught by one of these was an unfortunate experience and usually resulted in severe damage or the loss of the aircraft. We on one occasion suffered this experience, the blue light locked on to us and no matter whatever we did it was impossible, after about three minutes Wally decided to put the aircraft into a controlled dive to loose [sic] height, as we did so a Halifax aircraft which was operating at a much lower height came across our track. The anti aircraft guns operating in conjunction with the searchlight opened up and the Halifax just blew up. We had a lucky escape.
As I said some anti aircraft guns operated in conjunction with searchlights, however, the bulk of them were situated around towns and cities and created a heavy barrack in order to keep the bombers from bombing at low levels, the result could be seen and occasionally heard, and on one occasion over Amiens felt.
Returning from Modane on a bright moonlit night without warning this small unit of guns opened up and a shell exploded very close to us, fortunately not causing any injuries to the crew. Shrapnel caused damage to the fuel lines causing a leak in the pipe and holes appeared
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in the fuselage, and along the wings and side windscreen of the aircraft. We made an emergency landing at Tangmere in South England and on inspection found over 100 various size holes along the length of the fuselage and wings.
The piece of shrapnel that hit the windscreen had entered through the starboard side unbeknown to me had ripped through my flying jacket sleeve and gone out through the front window, again, lady luck was with us.
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Log Book and
Operations Record Book
(Battle Orders)
Every crew member kept a log book showing every date, time and flying details carried out.
I have copied some pages which correspond to copies of the Squadron’s battle orders, referring to operations 14, 15, 16 and 17 as detailed in my log book.
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[page from authors logbook]
[underlined] TOTAL FLYING HOURS NOVEMBER 101 SDN [/underlined]
[underlined] DAY [/underlined] 3 hrs 30 mins
[underlined] NIGHT [/underlined] 39 hrs 45 mins
[underlined] TOTAL 43 hrs 15 mins [/underlined]
DECEMBER
16 – Lanc III X2 – WO EVANS – FE – 14 OPS – [underlined] BERLIN [/underlined] QUIET TRIP – HEAVY LOSSES – FOG ON RETURN LANDED AT WICKENBY – 8 hrs 30 mins.
20 – Lanc III X2 – WO EVANS – FE– 15 OPS – [underlined] FRANKFURT [/underlined] MANY FIGHTER FLARES AROUND TARGET AREA – 5 hrs 50 mins.
24 – Lanc III X2 – WO EVANS – FE– 16 OPS – [underlined] BERLIN [/underlined] REAR TURRET U/S STRB OUTER FEATHERED – 7 hrs 10 mins.
28 – Lanc III X2 – WO EVANS – FE– 17 OPS – [underlined] BERLIN [/underlined] 6 hrs 40 mins.
[underlined] TOTAL FLYING HOURS [/underlined]
[underlined] DAY [/underlined] 0 hrs 0 mins
[underlined] NIGHT [/underlined] 28 hrs 10 mins
[underlined] TOTAL 28 hrs 10 mins [/underlined]
[underlined] DECEMBER 101 SDN [/underlined]
[signature] OC ‘C’ FLT.
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[indecipherable page]
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[indecipherable page]
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[indecipherable page]
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[indecipherable page]
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CHAPTER G
CHRISTMAS 1943
I always thought of Christmas as a time for giving and receiving, a time of joy and happiness, a time for families to come and meet and join in the happiness of the event. It was of course a time to remember, to consider ones relationship with family, friends and others and how relationships could be improved. Christmas 1943 was different; it was a time of anxiety and many other emotions, anxiety not only for the crewmembers but more so for the folks at home.
Before joining the RAF we lived in a small village where everyone knew each other. There was three of us in the forces, my older sister Jean, my brother Sandy and myself, living at home with my mother our two younger sisters Betty and Mary. So quite often my mother would be stopped in the street and asked how one of us was getting along, furthermore she had received a telegram stating that I had not returned from an operation and that further information would be forwarded when received (one must remember that at that time (1943) telephones were a luxury so the only method of communication was by the Post Office. Christmas 1943 was also the first Christmas that we had not all been at home).
The ground crews also had similar feelings when waiting for their aircraft to return from an operation and then the relief when they saw the aircraft landing and taxiing in.
There was also a period of what today would be known as pressure, then it was just part of the job although some individuals did suffer from depression and for some this ended their flying career. All crew members had to be physically and mentally fit to survive.
It was early morning on Christmas Day 1943, we as a crew had just returned from an operation, the target Berlin. After debriefing we arrived for breakfast at around 6:30 hours, the atmosphere in the dining room was best described as noisy as you would expect from 150 young men aged between 19 and 23 years old, until you really looked around and saw one, two even three empty tables then the atmosphere changed to a more sober one.
Christmas dinner was being served at 13:00 hours, this gave us time for a few hours sleep before arriving back at the mess around 12:50 hours. The meal was good and all seemed in high spirits. We finished eating and were enjoying a cigarette when the duty officer arrived, he slowly walked up to the bar and turned the Toby Jug sitting there towards the wall, this was our first indication that operations may be on, slowly the mess began to empty as the air crew members began to leave.
It was a cold but pleasant afternoon as I hurried along the perimeter road thinking of past Christmases and remembering the simple things, the pink or white sugar mice, an apple and orange possibly a few sweets, we never had many presents, hand knitted socks or gloves, then my thoughts were interrupted by seeing coming towards me a tractor pulling a bomb trolley with a mixed load of bombs on board, and further to my left I could see a fuel bowser topping up a Lancaster. Normally the aircraft were filled with 1,200 to 1,400 gallons of fuel
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sufficient for a five or six hour trip, if the trip was going to be longer then the aircraft were topped up.
On arrival at our Lancaster X² Mac, our ground engineer, was there standing in front looking at the aircraft, I said ‘”what are you doing?” Thinking he answered “isn’t she beautiful, I don’t want her to fly tonight. I am the happiest sergeant on the Squadron. Before I arrived at Ludford I had been with 101 Squadron for 18 months and during that time I had lost seven aircraft under my control. Since being here and in charge of X² and you as the flight engineer after five months I still have the same aircraft. Do you know how many operations you have flown in X²?” “No I don’t “, I replied. “Eleven and six of which was to the big city Berlin and we are still going strong.” “Let’s go and carry out ourground checks”, I said.
We had just finished when Wally our pilot arrived. “I thought I would find you here” he said. “I thought we could carry out a test flight and check out the hydraulics on the undercarriage?” “Yes I have fixed them” said Mac. “Let’s go” said Wally, “coming” I said to Mac. He hesitated then said “I haven’t got a parachute”. “Neither have we” I said.
We fired up the engines, taxied out, got the green light from control and were airborne. I then vacated my seat and let Mac have it. As I checked all the fuel and engine gauges etc we climbed to around 300 hundred feet, flew in a south west direction and as we banked to starboard there standing on the ridge was the magnificent building Lincoln Cathedral with the city spread out below it. We were privileged to see it yet also very humbled and it seemed than that what we were doing was right and that this was a ‘just war’ and had to be won. I touched Mac on the shoulder and pointed down. I’m sure he was brushing a tear away.
Ten minutes later we had landed with everything ok including the hydraulics as we closed the rear door of the Lancaster X² we hugged each other and I’m sure we all said a short prayer, at least I did.
[inserted] [Christmas dinner menu RAF Ludford Magna Sergeants Mess 1943 [/inserted]
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Briefing was scheduled for 19:00 hours. All two hundred of us where [sic] there on time and the Group Captain arrived and slipped up onto the platform, the wing commander brought us all to attention. I noticed that the curtains covering the map on the wall stayed closed “I’ll be brief” said the Group Captain, “all flying has been cancelled for tonight because of severe weather conditions over Europe. I also wish to thank you all for the maximum effort and success, which has been put in during the past five months. Good show and good flying from now on. I will let you go to continue your Christmas celebrations, have a good time, good night and god bless”. Mac got his way and X² did not fly on Christmas night.
Briefing was scheduled for 19.00 hours and as I said all flying was cancelled, this only lasted for 15 minutes, after which all the members of the 25 crews that would have flown, along with all the other necessary ground staff support teams necessary to service such an operation (all in 350‑400 young people) were now free to do as they wished, however as by now it was around 19.30 the choice was limited, retire to the mess or the local pubs.
As we the crew were now making our way back from the briefing room, Norman (our wireless operator) announced that he was visiting the pub to see if they had any beer “Are you coming?” “No” I said “I’ll make my way back to the mess”. Bill (our mid upper gunner) said “I’ll join you for a beer”.
The technical section of the squadron was situated on the south side of the main road which ran from west to east through the village from Market Rasen to Louth. The living accommodation and messes were located on the north of the road.
On reaching the main road instead of crossing and carrying on up the lane to the mess for some reason I turned right and continued along the main road, as it was extremely dark walking in the centre of the road as this was the safest place. As I continued I heard music and singing coming from the pub on the right everyone seemed to be happy and enjoying themselves, further on and on the left was the other pub ‘The Black Bull’. I could hear footsteps coming and going, but could not recognise the people, here also was the sounds of people enjoying themselves.
A little further along the road on the left stood the small church, as I approached I could hear the organ music and the congregation singing carols. I remember thinking if I was thinking of attending church I should have dressed. I was in battle dress and should be in uniform, however to return to the billet and change it would make me too late for the service.
I found myself at the church entrance I looked through the entrance hall, I could see a chink of light coming from under the heavy door. I pushed the door open and heard the creaking noise, on entering I stood for a few seconds to allow my eyes to become accustomed to the light, a few members of the congregation hearing the door turned to see who entered, as I moved across to take a place in the pews an elderly gentlemen from the other side came across squeezed me on the shoulder gave me his hymn book “we are on verse three god bless” and returned to his place. The church was fairly full mostly of elderly people man and female with a few children, all were singing and appeared to be enjoying it, the service was not a format which I knew, however I felt good to be involved and somehow very pleased to be there. All those in church appeared to believe in what they were singing and doing and further more believed that all the service people on the base were doing what was right and that they all had their full support that the war was a righteous war and a war that had to be won.
At the end of the service I quickly left the church and made my way back along the main road. I was somehow excited so much so that I remember running all the way and turning
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right until I reached the mess. There were a number of people sitting around having a drink and/or reading. A colleague was reading the picture post magazine which had an article covering 101 Squadron. When I asked him if I could have a look, he said “I’ll keep it for you”. On the centre two pages was a photo of a Lancaster with staff standing around and on the wings etc, inspecting the photo closely I noticed that it was not a 101 Squadron Lancaster as it did not show the special aerials to work ABC. (The programme had been arranged unfortunately while we (our crew) were on leave and a Lancaster from Wickenby had been used).
I checked to see if the rations had come in and found a good selection of cigarettes were available Woodbine, Captain, Players and Gold Flake and there was also some chocolate.
The dining room was closed, on a trestle table at the end was a collection of bread, cheese and butter. I took a few rounds of bread and a chunk of cheese and made my way back to the billet, on arrival I found Wally, Eric, and Jimmy were there and they had a good fire going, making the chimney almost red hot. They were sitting reading and asked “where did you get to?” “Church” I said “you should have said I would have come with you” said Eric, “I didn’t know, I brought some bread and cheese for toast if you want it”. “Thank you” said Wally “have a mug of tea, the teapot will still be hot on the stove”. “I called in at the mess they have cigarettes and chocolate in. Only a letter for Bill which I have brought back. He and Norman were going to the pub. Where is Len (our rear gunner)?” “Oh, he has gone to try to hitch a lift home to Grimsby, remember if opps are on tomorrow give him a ring to let him know so that he can return, I have his telephone number” said Wally. “Do you want something to read?” asked Eric. “No” I said, “I think I will turn in and catch up with some sleep”.
This 1943 Christmas was at least different from all previous ones and part of my life which I will never forget.
The next time we flew was on 30th December and then again the following night on 31st December both operations were to Berlin. Mac continued to service X² and over the next 3 1/2 months we completed a further 13 operations to complete our first tour.
We didn’t always bring the aircraft home in the same condition as we started, however, we always brought it back and Mac and his crew always managed to repair it and have it serviced ready for the next trip.
We completed our tour in late April 1944 and the crew were all split up and we went our separate ways all as instructors. I joined the staff at Lindholme as a flight engineer instructor. In June D‑Day arrived, we were again temporarily called up as reserved in case the invasion went wrong, fortunately all went well. I was later transferred to Bottesford then Cottesmore and ended up at North Luffenham where by now VE Day had arrived in June 1945. We were again crewed up to join the Tiger Force to operate against Japan. Luckily for us VJ Day came much sooner than expected with the use of the hydrogen bomb being used on Japan, which stopped us from being posted to the Far East.
I stayed at North Luffenham until demobbed. Lincoln Cathedral played an important role in our lives as we used to use it as a landmark when returning early in the morning from operations and provided weather conditions were good, when we saw the cathedral we knew we were safely home again. Sadly Lancaster X² only flew two more operations after we finished and was lost over Mailly le Camp, France on the 3rd/4th May 1944.
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CHAPTER H
HEAVY CONVERSION UNITS INSTRUCTOR
LINDHOLME
BOTTESFORD
COTTESMORE
NORTH LUFFENHAM
After Operations
After completing our tour of operations with 101 Squadron in April 1944 the crew went on leave for around ten days and while on leave I received information informing me to report to Lindholme on such a date.
Lindholme was 1656HCU the conversion unit, which I had reported to prior to being crewed up and joining 101 Squadron. Ludford Magna as I had said previously was an airfield specially constructed as a utility base to carry on the war against Germany. All buildings, temporary constructions accommodation nissen huts were situated in small groups situated around the unit site.
Nissen hut accommodation for up to eight persons situated in the wilds half a mile from mess, flight units ablution block 20 yards away with washing and shower facilities, no heating (as you can imagine it was very cold in winter). The accommodation had a stove in the centre of the hut with a chimney, which went up through the roof, used coal or anthracite as fuel and required lighting daily. These huts were extremely hot in summer with regular visitors such as field mice, ants and earwigs. In winter they were extremely cold and damp with condensation running down interior sides and dripping on beds etc.
Lindholme was a peacetime permanent station which had all the niceties available, good roads comfortable, centrally heated one-person accommodation with all mod cons including dining room with waitress service. This to me was the biggest difference between Ludford and Lindholme.
Lindholme then was a conversion unit where pilots and crews had completed their initial training on smaller aircraft then upgraded to the heavy, four engine bombers such as Halifax and Lancaster. Lindholme trained Lancaster crews; it was here where additional crewmembers such as gunners and flight engineers joined in.
Having completed a successful tour of operations my role now was to introduce flight engineers who had completed their year long course, at possibly Blackpool and St Annes’s as up to this time these trainees had only briefly seen the interior of a Lancaster, far less done any flying.
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Unfortunately because of the shortage of Lancaster bombers arriving to the squadron, the conversion units such as Lindholme were still using Halifaxs [sic], this did not cause too much of a problem for the other six members of the crew (except the engineers) as it was a heavy bomber and the handling regarding flying and landing was similar to the Lancaster giving the pilot the experience of flying a large, heavy plane.
The engineer’s role was the same on all heavy bombers so the experience gained was still valid and it still gave him the necessary confidence. The difference being some of the instruments and dials on the Halifax were in different positions to that of a Lancaster. The crews would have a period of familiarisation on reaching the squadron before finally carrying out operations.
Life was so much more comfortable working on a base with all mod cons as expected for the 1940s.
My role along with others was to aid the trainee engineers to familiarise themselves with the aircraft inside and out, and when flying with their new crew, introduce the engineer to his role such as to the large number of switches and dials on the main panel and also the instruments on the engineer’s panel.
One of the main tasks was how to change flying on the various fuel tanks safely, the other how to feather an engine if required without causing any problems, how they as a person fitted in with the other crew members. Therefore while the pilot was under instruction with a pilot instructor mainly on what we called circuits and bumps, which was taking off, flying around and landing again. I would also fly and show the engineer and make sure he was confident and safe in his execution of his duties.
The time varied depending on how quickly the pilot took to prove himself capable and the instructor pilot was satisfied that he could safely fly and land such a plane, this could take anything from a few hours to many hours.
I used the experience, which I had gained over the past year of flying many hours in different conditions to make sure that these young operators had a better chance of completing a successful tour than I had. I tried to emphasise on them the need to be fully committed to their job of making sure they knew their role and capable of carrying out all the safety checks which should be carried out by themselves even although someone has said that they have done so, that they used the engines efficiently and monitored the fuel available as economically as possible. I had prepared a schedule, which if used in conjunction with the gauges and filled in every fifteen minutes in flight or so gave instant information if any problem had or were occurring to the fuel position, when action could be taken.
Lindholme being a permanent station was well equipped and had space available for each crew members to have their own section huts which proved most usual [sic] and I spent a good part of my time being available to talk with these trainee engineers, discussing any problems or whatever.
In any month I spent on average around 50 hours in actual flying time either day or night flying. This was made up of flying with possibly 10 different pilots on 26 to 30 different flights. The flights were generally around the airfield at fairly low altitude, up to two hundred feet carrying out circuits and landings with pilot, instructor and conversion crews. We therefore did not carry parachutes; this also gave the trainee crews a little more confidence to think that we had confidence in them.
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In June 1944 two days after D-Day I attended an instructors course at St Albans, South Wales lasting for four weeks, which proved most instructive, enjoyable and created confidence with ample time for self expression. After that I took the opportunity to attend any other courses, which became available such as a course on jet engines – something for the future, update course on the improved Merlin engines coming into service and a short course on Stromberg carburettors. The RAF at this time was looking to the future and on the levels and quality of staff they were likely to require once the war ended, but with the peace still to be kept for years on. At present most if not all of their engineers and a station or base engineer were all from senior ground staff, so when I was asked if I would wish to embark on such a course (the course was quite complex covering all aspects of engineering ground and in flight) I said I would.
After quite a lot of time on reading (time which I had) I eventually sat the paper and was very happy with the results 89% success, this was of course only part of the paper an oral examination was also required which up until I was released from the RAF I had not taken, however, these showed on my records.
1668 Heavy Conversion Unit,
Bottesford
After leaving 101 Squadron I spent a short period at Lindholme as a Flight Engineer Instructor before moving to Bottesford. Bottesford was another war time base similar to Ludford Magna and from where Lancasters also flew, however, in early 1944 it had become surplus to requirements.
The living accommodation instead of being Nissen huts were constructed of fabricated wooden framed units. Being available it was used as a holding base for American troops waiting for D Day resulting in the accommodation being left in a dreadful state.
During August 1944 1668 Heavy Conversion Unit took the base over and myself and few others were in the advance party. On arrival we found it difficult to find accommodation suitable to live in however, after a few days of hard work managed to make progress with repairs. Among the early arrivals were two air gunners both of whom had completed their tour of operations. Jock on Wellingtons and Jack on Lancasters. The three of us became really good friends for all the time we were on the base. In fact, Jack is still a good friend, he now lives in North Cirney Nr Cirencester and we have a card from him each Christmas.
The base was situated midway between Newark and Grantham on the left, half a mile off the main A1 road, walking or cycling were the only methods of transport for getting around the base or for travelling further afield.
We had been at Bottesford for just over a week when this night the three of us decided to have a ride around, on reaching the main road instead of turning left for Long Bennington and Newark we turned right towards Grantham. After cycling along the A1 road for about three miles we came across a signpost, which read Marston and Dry Doddington so we decided to go left and see where the lane would take us. After a mile we came upon a nice looking pub on the corner of the crossroads called the Thorold Arms where we decided to call and have a beer this being Friday evening. The pub was open, furthermore this was the first time that I had entered a pub since I joined 101 Squadron, as I had promised myself that so long as I was flying on operations I would not have a drink.
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Training at Bottesford got under way relatively soon and by early September crews for conversion to Lancasters were arriving in number. The routine was very similar to that at Lindholme.
Crews arrived without any experience of the Lancaster and it was our role as instructors to train the flight engineers to a standard where he was competent and safe to act on his own, and to pass on my experience which would make him feel more confident, while other staff members were doing the same for the pilots and the other members of the crew.
Bottesford as I said previously was a base built around 1942 to a standard sufficient to allow Bomber Command to carry the war to the enemy, where heavy bombers such as the Lancaster could operate from. Carrying a bomb load to most destinations necessary and to cause severe damage to their war effort.
From the staff viewpoint it was a complete change from the comfort offered by a peacetime base with all the mod cons, even including waitress service in the dining halls.
Bottesford was however a very happy unit where, so long as the training and flying was carried out on time to a very high standard, all was well.
It was becoming clear that with D Day over with the Allied Troops now moving across Europe as expected and on course, that victory in Europe was only a matter of time with the need for heavy bomber operations becoming limited. This meant that the training for crews could be relaxed and extended, therefore to ensure the trainee flight engineers interest and enthusiasm was kept alive. Two other instructors and myself introduced a short course on engine maintenance, this course lasted three weeks, the purpose of which was to strip down an engine completely, then reassemble it so that it would fire up and run. We had available to us a Lancaster, which had recently run off the runway on landing and was declared not airworthy. The four Merlin engines were still in good condition; this meant that with four engines and four trainees working on each we could entertain sixteen students.
The course proved a great success and it was felt that all those involved had afterwards a better understanding of the engines, which could possibly save their lives in the future.
As the weeks passed three of us, Jock, Jack and myself, had more free time and when on an evening we decided to leave camp we usually ended up at the Thorold Arms. By now we knew many of the locals as well as the family and were being brought into the evening events, such as playing darts. There were a number of really good dart players and eventually we, along with Sylvia, also became an excellent partnership.
Five months on. Christmas 1944 was a completely different Christmas to that of 1943, by now Sylvia and myself were seeing quite a lot of each other and I was still on duty over Christmas, I was asked to spend Christmas day with the family, we had a lovely time. A few days later I was on leave and travelled north to spend New Year with my family in Aberdour.
Our friendship blossomed and we were spending more and more time together and with Sylvia’s family and friends. Sylvia had a brother and three sisters; Roy was the oldest followed by Eileen then Sylvia, with Gert and Brenda the two younger sisters. Roy was also in the RAF on air-sea rescue and spent most of his time overseas.
Eileen was on munitions working in Grantham; Sylvia also worked in Grantham in ladies hosiery. Gert worked in a bakery with Brenda still at school.
In the evenings when the pub was open Sylvia helped serve in the bar with her father and mother Gert usually at weekends. During early 1945 flying at the base continued smoothly
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and generally without incident. We had one scary incident during night flying practise, an enemy light bomber managed to evade the radar controls and came in along the runway following one of the Lancasters and dropped cluster bombs along the length of the runway. This did cause some excitement as these bombs could explode from the vibration of the landing aircraft. Fortunately the runway was cleared without any injuries.
The other excitement was when one of the Lancasters, which we had just received from squadron required an air test to check its airworthiness before being put to use as a training aircraft. One of the staff pilots and myself as engineer was asked to carry out the test which we did, doing all the usual flying and checking the various instruments and controls. We decided to put it in a downward power dive, at first all was fine and the controls responded perfectly then it happened the port outer propeller began speeding up. No matter what we tried it continued to increase then it disappeared, the two on the inner engines seemed all right, the propeller in the starboard reached well above the normal speed but stayed in place. We quickly reduced our speed and dive, and made a quick return to base and landed on two engines, the aircraft did not pass its airworthy test. We found out later that it was a fault with the balance plates on the, then, new four paddle bladed propellers.
I, by now, had spent eight months as an instructor resting from the pressures of flying on operations and I knew that in the near future it may be necessary to do a further thirty operations, either across Europe or possibly against Japan. A few of us were thinking along the same lines and discussing the possibilities with others of forming crews.
There were two staff pilots on the base who were seriously thinking to the future, with whom I would have been happy to fly with and to this end we took every opportunity of carrying out test flights and then engaging in some low flying, which we expected would be necessary for the future especially if the enemy were the Japanese.
I increased my link training and spent considerable amounts of time keeping fit and up-to-date on all aspects of flying which could be beneficial to our survival. There was suggestion floating around that a new Tiger Force was being formed, which was likely to operate against Japan.
The river Trent gave an excellent corridor to practise low flying as there was at that time no obstacles such as power lines, telephone lines or high buildings to restrict flying. The river banks were relatively high with a river width in excess of 130 ft where the Lancaster wingspan was 101 ft and could easily be tucked in below the level of the banks, great flying, great excitement and very satisfying.
The war in Europe was progressing well, the need for heavy bombers was becoming less and with now limited targets. In mid April a few of us were informed that it was almost 12 months since we last flew on operations and it would now be necessary to do a further tour, more information would be available shortly.
On 8th May 1945 the Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, announced the termination of the war in Europe to the whole country and his speech was broadcast over the station Tannoy system at 3pm. The afternoon was then devoted to sports activities and there were parties in all messes during the evening.
I was not on base, this was the date selected on which I was to be presented with my DFM at Buckingham Palace by King George VI. My mum and Aunty Kate travelled down from Edinburgh on the overnight train in the early hours of the morning; I joined the train at Grantham. As usual it was standing room only so I met up with my mum and Aunty on the platform at Kings Cross station. If I remember correctly the investitures commenced at
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11am so we had time for breakfast then made our way to the palace. There were many RAF personnel there as well as family members to watch the ceremony and see their relatives presented with their medals. We were all greeted on arrival and then informed of the procedure.
The King seemed very thin and poorly, dressed in an Admiral’s Naval uniform. After shaking hands with him and him pinning the medal on my uniform he asked me which squadron I flew with. I told him 101 Squadron, he replied “One of the elite I believe, good flying”.
We were out of the palace by 1:30pm, by this time the news that the war in Europe was over was known and London was beginning to fill up with people. Everyone was in party mood, singing and dancing or just walking around. London had been under blackout conditions since the start of the war in September 1939. Today things were different all the dark days were over; the people of London were showing their joy. Every light possible, which could be lit, was lit and the streets looked most inviting, it was an amazing sight. My mother and Aunt Kate were booked to stay the night in London so I saw them to their hotel then I made my way back through the crowds to Kings Cross and caught the train back to Grantham. What a day to be in London, VE Day the 8th May 1945 celebrating the end of the war in Europe. There was a real sense of relief and everyone was there to have a good time and to party.
The train was again packed, mainly with service personnel making their way home on leave. I arrived at Grantham around 5pm and from the station phoned the Thorold Arms expecting to speak to Sylvia. She and Eileen had gone to the church service and not yet returned so it was Sylvia’s dad that answered, he said he would tell Sylvia on their return that I had arrived in Grantham. It was agreed that Sylvia would come and meet me cycling on one bicycle and pushing the second for me to ride back to Marston, however, on her travelling along the A1 road towards Grantham she met a person she knew cycling from Grantham. She stopped and asked him if he had seen an airman walking and he said no. Previously to this an RAF vehicle had passed Sylvia with RAF personnel on board, thinking that I had thumbed a lift and that I would be dropped off at the road end leading to Marston she decided to turn back. As I was not waiting at the road end she then thought that I must have decided to go back to Bottesford, collect my own bicycle and return to Marston later.
Sometime later Gert happened to look out of the window at the Thorold Arms and shouted to Sylvia “Jock is coming down the road”. Sylvia, thinking she was having her on didn’t believe her until she herself looked out the window. My other pals Jock and Jack had already arrived and all including the locals were having a great time. As the evening progressed and the drink continued to flow a game started where the aim was to collect as many possible pieces of other peoples [sic] ties by cutting off the ends, this was all taken in good fun until one person who had just been given a new tie for his birthday, that day, by his wife and she was not amused at seeing it being cut to pieces.
The end of the war in Europe sealed the fate of most of the war time built heavy bomber bases, they had completed their usefulness for which they were built, that in giving Bomber Command the opportunity required to take the war to the enemy, which they had accomplished very successfully.
Food on the stations was very good with a real selection most of the time. Sundays was the time when the menu suffered as most of the catering staff had time off and tea was usually laid out to help yourself, mostly cheese, bread and butter, and possibly a few cakes. This possibly was the reason why on Mondays the sweet was often bread and butter pudding, something I didn’t like then and even now when on a menu I still shy away from.
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This was the time that Petula Clarke was often on the radio, in fact every lunch time she recorded a song especially for RAF Conversion Unit 1668.
Bottesford was no exception for within six weeks the complete Conversion Unit was closed down and I, along with others, moved to new surroundings to the peacetime base of Cottesmore where all the staff enjoyed the luxuries of a permanent built unit. Working conditions within the base were very relaxed, with all enjoying a five day week when most weekends were free unless on duty. Flying hours, however, as far as I was concerned still reached between 33 to 44 hours each month.
During June onwards, now that the war was over in Europe, it was still most important that the peoples of Europe, friends as well as enemy, that Britain controlled the airspace and continued to show this by having continued aircraft flying in the skies around.
Certain trips were carried out in order to show ground staff, who had carried out such an excellent job in sometimes terrible conditions to keep the bases and aircraft serviceable along the last five years the opportunity to see for themselves what conditions across Europe looked like now. These trips were given various names: the Ruhr Express, Cooks Tour, Happy Valley Express, each lasted five to six hours flying time where up to 12 to 15 personnel were on board plus the crew of four.
I, as Flight Engineer, was on a good number of such trips. They were enjoyed by most and showed the devastation which had occurred to many of the towns and cities across Europe, in vast areas which had received attention from bombing by the RAF followed by the destruction caused by the Armies fighting their way to Berlin since D Day.
The destruction was terrible with many large areas just a pile of rubble or shells of buildings still standing. The thing which impressed me most was the number of churches and round towers such as commercial chimneys which still stood.
Such a trip would cover from a base to Ijmunden, Amsterdam, Arnhem, Nijmegen, Wesell Dortmund, Essen, Duisburg, Düsseldorf then back to base. Or base to Cologne, Bonn, Aachem Rotterdam then home.
Cottesmore
Cottesmore was situated between Grantham and Stamford, four miles west of the A1 road near the village of Ashwell and six miles north west of Oakham, so our move was only a few minutes flying time. There was much movement between stations, which gave the opportunity of visiting different locations which we heard about but not visited, such as Drem in East Lothian, Ternhill and Shawbury in Shropshire, and many others which helped to make life more enjoyable.
Being stationed close to Stamford and the main road north it wasn’t difficult to hitch a ride or at worst catch a bus or train to Grantham.
Our stay at Cottesmore was fairly short lived; we then moved on to North Luffenham another of the pre war built stations with all the usual mod cons. North Luffenham is situated south west of Stamford, one mile off the A6121 road. Before leaving Cottesmore I had confirmation that we were crewed up and to expect instructions shortly regarding a further tour of operations in the Far East but before that certain procedures would have to be carried out, such as doctors reports and certain jabs given. However, six weeks on and we were still waiting.
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The war against Japan was expected to last for some considerable time, however, the introduction of the Atom Bomb by the Americans and the use of them by the American Air Force brought the Japanese war to a very quick end. We had at the time just received our preliminary dates and instructions for flying out to the Far East. This announcement that the Japanese had surrendered cancelled this and we missed the opportunity of joining the Tiger Force. The use of the Atomic Bomb on two Japanese cities seemed, and was, a terrible thing to do and caused terrible casualties among the Japanese citizens in these two cities.
However, if it had been necessary for US troops to land and fight their way through all the various islands the casualty list was estimated that it could have been one million plus service people.
North Luffenham
The war in both Europe and Japan was over which meant that working conditions at North Luffenham changed as from now. There was less requirement for further training of Lancaster crews. There were a large number of service men and women in all three services hoping and wanting to get back to Civvie Street as soon as possible. The government also had a problem in that across the country there were not the organisations or jobs available to employ all those excess to requirements service personnel. Therefore a delaying action was in place to slow down the release. Lancasters were of course used for various operations such as dropping food supplies to the people of Belgium and Germany and for bringing home prisoners of war from Germany and elsewhere and from bringing to the UK survivors from the torture camps.
The top chiefs of all three services were of course now considering the future of the armed forces. The Air Force was no different, we had won the war but not the peace, the peace may be a lot more difficult and to that end the Air Force was trying to assess and ensure whatever happened they had sufficient of high quality personnel to carry out this purpose. Therefore as personnel were being demobbed, if they should have certain qualities they were being given the opportunity to stay on by being offered certain incentives.
While at Luffenham I took the opportunity of attending as many courses as possible, improving my knowledge and information regarding the services and of course continuing to add to my flying hours, something I enjoyed doing.
Our job on the unit was similar to any other staff member, flying still took priority, other duties such as Duty Officer and such like was also now part of our programme.
I recall an interview which I had with the Group Captain Section Leader arrived at the flight office and said “Jock, the Wing Commander wants to see you”. “What have I done?” “Nothing, it’s good news, make your way to his office for 11am.” “I’m flying at 10 o’clock”. “Ok, after that will do”. I arrived at his office next day around 9.55 am, his secretary showed me into his office. I saluted, he said “Good, come and sit down” then the interview went something like this: “I have been looking over your record and I see that you have carried out a lot of flying, almost 2000 hours. There are not many people who can live up to that, you must enjoy flying?” “Yes I do”.
“I also see that you have attained a pass, in fact an extremely high pass on the Chief Ground Engineer course, unusual for aircrew even although you are a Flight Engineer”.
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“Your flight commander also told me you were highly respected and thought of at Cottesmore because of your work with Engine Service course. You would seem to be going back to Civvie Street?” “Yes sir”. “Do you want that?” “Possibly”.
“Even with all your exceptional work the war is over so I can’t recommend you for a medal however, what I can offer you – you know that the Air Force is looking for people like yourself for its future success – therefore the offer I am prepared to put to you is stay on in the Air Force as a Chief Ground Engineer with Flying Officer on entry (permanent) with good promotional opportunities to at least Flight Lieutenant or even Squadron Leader. Think carefully about it, don’t make your mind up now, come and see me in one week’s time.”
The unit continued flying and with training. The war being over the RAF was keen to show off their aircraft such as the Spitfire and the Lancaster, which had been so brilliant during the war, to the general public so a number of open days throughout the UK were arranged whereby the public could come along and see over all these war time aircraft. These days proved very popular.
To show off the Lancaster we landed at the base involved, stayed for four to five hours opening the Lancasters up and allowing people to enter by the rear door, make their way up through the fuselage past the pilots positions and exit through the flaps in the bomb aimers compartment, at the front of the aircraft reaching the ground by ladder. Two of the open days I remember going to were Finningly [sic] and Haverford West.
During my time in the RAF I only met up with my sister Jean on one occasion and that was when I was at St Athans in South Wales, she was stationed at Bridge End and we managed to meet for an hour or two, where we met I cannot recall. My brother Sandy was stationed at Swinderby for most of his time in the RAF as a fitter servicing Lancasters, and even although we were relatively closely stationed to each other we never once met up and even when I occasionally landed at Swinderby we never managed to get together. Of course these plans were always last minute arrangements and we might only be there for an hour or so before taking off again.
After two weeks I made a further appointment to meet the Group Captain and told him that after serious consideration that I had decided to leave the RAF and return to Civvie Street. I believe that he was disappointed, he wished me success in whatever I decided to do, we shook hands and I left his office.
I was demobbed on 10th September 1946 at Uxbridge then travelled north to Stamford, Sylvia had earlier moved to Stamford to further her career as a shop buyer, by working in a much larger ladies fashion store, travelling to Stamford on a Sunday evening, returning home in the Saturday evening. This meant that we saw more of each other on my time off.
The other opportunity that was open to me on my demob, as I had over a 1000 flying hours, was to join BOAC. Unfortunately the base was Australia and the airline travelled between Australia and Ceylon. Also available because I had A‑level passes on RAF teaching courses gave me the opportunity to train as a technical course teacher.
Both of which I declined and decided to return to Civvie Street and continue in forestry, which was always my first choice and as my future notes will show.
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CHAPTER I
ADVANCES IN TECHNOLOGY
WHAT IF?
Advances in Technology
Most of the technology was designed to combat the increasingly efficient enemy night fighter’s control system, in July 1943 window was used for the first time. Window was made up of thin strips of aluminium foil (approximately 9" long) packed in bundles of approx 100. It was the bomb aimer’s responsibility to drop these down a small chute filled in the front compartment every 15 minutes along route. With all other aircraft doing the same, the concentration played havoc with the enemy’s ground and air radar sets, however, it could not deter the enemy fighter threat for a long period of time, as the Germans managed to overcome this problem.
During D-Day window was used with great success in fooling the Germans that a second landing area further east along the coast was to happen. 101 Squadron completely serviced this operation by dropping window, continually moving across the channel for 48 hours, which meant that German defence forces were stretched along the French coastline rather than being able to concentrate on the D-Day landing site. By the time they realised their mistake the landing had a strong hold.
Other new aids such as RDF (Radar Direction Finding) known as Monica was trialled by 101 Squadron, but was short lived simply because the enemy night fighter crews became efficient at tuning into the signals omitted by Monica.
In July 1943 another new system known as Ground Cigar was operating twenty-four hours a day from a site on the Suffolk coast, jamming the whole of the 38‑42 MHZ band known to be used by the German fighters.
It became obvious to the boffins that to be really efficient the system needed to be airborne, it was envisaged that a single Bomber Command squadron should be allocated the new RLM role and would operate within the main part of the bomber stream. This highly responsible task was given to 101 Squadron, the new system was known as ABC or Airborne Cigar. The ABC required an additional crewmember known as a Special Duties Operator; the area behind the main spar normally occupied by the aircraft emergency couch was converted to accommodate the new equipment. Externally, 7 ft long aerials were fitted to the aircraft, two along the spine and the third under the forward fuselage. The special duty operators were German speaking and became the eighth crewmember in 101 Squadron crews.
The role was to jam the radio transmissions made by the German night fighters ground based controllers. ABC equipment consisted of a panoramic receiver and three transmitters; the receiver could pick up all 24 different frequencies being used by the crystal controlled VHF sets. Its eight crystals each covered three wavebands used by the Germans’ night fighter
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crews to receive the necessary information about the bomber stream location. Once the operators were able to use their German language skills to find the active controller frequency he put down a key connected to one of his transmitters, which broadcast engine noise on that frequency effectively jamming it over a range of around 50 miles. He repeated the process until he had his three transmitters effectively jamming three German frequencies.
In theory, eight of the 101 Squadron Lancasters could cover all 24 frequencies in use during the night.
This equipment was quite weighty therefore so-called unnecessary equipment such as the steel plates behind the pilot’s head and the steel door behind the front compartment were removed to counter the weight increase.
ABC was very effective in jamming the German night fighter’s ability to connect quickly with the main bomber stream. The other downside was when the 101 Lancasters specials were operating their equipment these aircraft could be readily picked up by German night fighters and searchlights. With the squadron suffering much heavier losses than any other squadron in Bomber Command. There was a plaque in the middle of Ludford Magna remembering the 101 sacrifice, it read:
[border] 101 Squadron Lancasters based at Ludford Magna
from June 1943 with highly secret ABC radio and 8 man
crews flew on every major Bomber Command mission
suffering the highest losses of any squadron in World War II [/border]
Ludford Magna was also selected as one of the first airfields in the group to have FIDO fitted. FIDO (Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation) this was justified because of 101 Squadron’s key role within Bomber Command.
The equipment consisted of two pipelines running along the edge of each side of the main runway with perforated holes in the pipes. In extremely foggy conditions when aircraft were due to land petrol was forced along the pipes which was then set alight, this helped clear the fog sufficiently to allow aircraft to land safely. One of the disadvantages being should an aircraft with fuel leaking or swerving off the runway an explosion could occur causing loss of aircraft.
This equipment came into us in January 1944. The standard rear turret fitted to the Lancaster was the Fraser Nash with four 0.303" (rifle calibre) machine guns, which were always thought to be of poor quality in terms of armament. A new turret was built by Rose Brothers of Gainsborough after much discussion with personnel from 101 Squadron. The new turret was easy to control, had more room for the gunner and better vision. Six aircraft from 101 Squadron were the first to receive the new turret. Our aircraft X² was one of the six (2 x 0.5 calibre).
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On 25th/26th February 1944 when we visited Augsburg, operation 28, Len our rear gunner was excited about the possibility of using them against a German fighter and witnessing what effect it would have.
1943‑44 was an excellent period to join 101 Squadron. The squadron had just moved to a new base at Ludford Magna near Louth, Lincolnshire and was well placed to carry the war to the enemy. A highly rated squadron within 1 group, a squadron which was given every opportunity to prove itself as one of the best and we were so lucky to be part of it.
The squadron was involved in all that was happening. New equipment was becoming on stream such as ‘Window’, ABC, upgraded Lancasters, FIDO and the introduction of the more superior rear turret. As days and weeks passed our crew was becoming the most experienced so as a crew were very much involved, we flew on the operation when Window was first used. We were also on the operation ABC was first introduced into Bomber Command and our aircraft X² was one of the six aircraft fitted with the new turrets.
These were exciting times, sometimes frightening, anxious and tiring, however, as a crew we worked as a team. We were loyal to each other, dedicated in what we were doing and hence very satisfied with the results we achieved. On completing our tour of operations we were the only crew that had completed a tour of operations since the squadron moved to Ludford Magna. Statistics showed that if Lancasters lasted more than five operations they were exceptional.
All who served in the forces have memories, some good, some not so good. My memories of being in the RAF are of being good and exciting times not to be missed.
My memories of being part of 101 Squadron are also of exciting times, with plenty of different experiences, most when flying. Some exciting, some frightening, one or two horrific, others best forgotten, however, a part of life which I am proud to have been part of and on the whole really enjoyed.
On 12th June 1944 I received confirmation that I had been awarded the DFM.
What if?
The situation seemed very strange, here was seven or eight young men from various backgrounds and from different areas of the United Kingdom, who had for the best part of a year lived and dined together. Worked as a close team under very difficult and dangerous conditions and after completing a tour of operations went on leave a few days later, moved from base on to other jobs and from then until the end of the war had no further contact with each other. In fact until recent years I still had no contact. It was 2001 when I met up with Norman our wireless operator and then years after that out special operator Ken.
What if when I joined 101 Squadron Wally Evans, our pilot, had not insisted that I was his engineer and I had joined A H Evans’ crew as their engineer? A H Evans’ crew were lost on their third operation.
What if when our Lancaster was caught by the blue searchlights over Germany, if the Halifax which drifted a few thousand feet below us into the path of the searchlight at that split second and received the full impact of the guns had not done so? We would be just another statistic.
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What if when over Amiens we received only comparatively slight damage from exploding shrapnel which passed through the window, just caught my flying jacket sleeve and then went out through the windscreen? Had I been standing three inches to the right the result could have been very different.
What if on returning to base from operations over Berlin on 16th December 1943, when caught up in thick fog and was diverted, if the beam light put up by Catfoss had not been at that precise moment when we were flying at zero feet from the ground we would have ploughed into the farm house. Another aircraft lost on operations. Or when on reaching base Wally had not accepted my advice and decided to go round again on another circuit before landing, we would have crashed due to shortage of fuel.
What if I had decided to accept my commission and stay in the RAF as a Station Engineer probably reaching rank of Squadron Leader or had joined BOAC as a flight engineer possibly based in Sidney Australia, or had taken up the opportunity to become a teacher teaching technical subjects? Life would have been so different, however, I believe I made the correct decision, in fact I know I did. This however is for another time to discuss.
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CHAPTER J
AIRCREW BOMBER COMMAND
WARTIME BOMBER SQUADRONS
BOMBING OF BERLIN
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A SQUADRON
CLOTHING WORN ON OPERATIONS BY OUR CREW
CONTACT MADE WITH TWO CREW MEMBERS PLUS INFORMATION ON OTHERS
Aircrew Bomber Command
A typical description of a bomber crew at the time was provided by the ministry publication entitled Bomber Command. The men of Bomber Command are appointed to fulfil a special mission. Their life is not that of other men, not even those in the other branches of the service. It’s very physical conditions are different for them now; a day is much of the night, as much of the day is a time for sleep and repose. Discipline is constant yet flexible. Triumph and disaster are met with and vanquished together.
Air Marshall Arthur Harris, Air Officer Commanding in Chief Bomber Command 20th February 1992. He was known as Butch, the opinion of him varied in accordance with our losses, if they were heavy then his popularity (if that was the right word) suffered. You must remember that most aircrews never saw him when he visited Ludford, I thought he was stone faced, severe and even cynical over our effort. I disagree with those who dubbed him arrogant – he certainly was not. Nevertheless, if his crews did not see enough of him to love him they certainly appreciated what he was doing for them, he gave his command a much-needed sense of purpose. Up to the end of 1941 many people tended to regard strategic bombing as little more than a wasteful sideshow. It was Harris who proclaimed loud and long
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that Bomber Command was vital to the war effort and that his crews should be given the best of everything, because their efforts would be decisive in the final outcome.
After a successful raid the C‑in‑C would send a signal to the squadron saying good show keep it up this meant a great deal to men who knew that they stood a less than even chance of surviving a tour of operations.
Harris was also a great innovator, he called for better navigation and bombing aids, better lit flare paths and increased safety conditions on take offs and landings.
GEC was one of the aids which he had pressured for which enabled the navigator to plot his position relative to a ground station, this turned navigator from an art into a science.
Wartime Bomber Squadrons
People of the younger generation can get the impression that Bomber Command was one big, happy family. This was not so, squadrons were very much individual entities, we didn’t mix much with other squadrons and they assumed the character and charisma of the people who were on the squadron at the time.
As a result, few outsiders will ever appreciate what it was really like to serve on a bomber squadron unit. Not wishing to dwell on the dark side of squadron life I was twenty years old at the time, life was for living, we got on with the job. The higher direction of the war was for the older types – 25 years old and above. They were enjoyable days and of course we always expected to come back, suffice to say therefore that at least 277 aircraft were lost or went missing from 101 Squadron between July 1943 and 1945 and that the squadron lost 1094 crew members killed in action and 178 taken prisoner of war.
This was the highest casualty rate of any RAF squadron in World War 2.
Bombing of Berlin
It is difficult for ordinary citizens to visualise the effect of concentrated aerial bombardment.
Un Sangro front in Italy, often spoken of as the biggest land bombardment of the war, 1400 tons of shells came down in eight hours. Remember the front was many miles in length and mostly open country yet they smashed the German defence and prisoners spoke of the astounding paralysing effect of these heavy bombardments. Now compare the figures of the air assault, take as an instance only one raid in January 1944, 7300 tons of bombs went down on Berlin in 30 minutes. Remember too that the bombs fell into built up areas on a shorter front than a land attack. Remember too that tonnage for tonnage a bomb contains a much higher explosive charge than a shell. No city, no defence system could stand up to such attack for long delivered as Bomber Command was doing.
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War time Bomber Station – a normal day’s work load
The total number of personnel on the stations was around 2,500 including officers, male and
female personnel.
The station was equipped to perform as an individual unit like a small town with runways of sufficient length so that the aircraft could take off and land from where to attack the enemy.
It carried sufficient supplies of food, stocks of all the necessary maintenance supplies such as aircraft parts, tyres, turrets, engines and down to all the other small items like rivets screws everything necessary to keep the aircraft flying.
In every hour of the day people were working and with 2,500 staff on board the station could exist from the rest of the country for weeks. Time meant very little to staff and many would not know which day in the week it was or which date in the month it was. Sundays were just another working day.
The work was continuous, outside interests were possibly intentionally forgotten, all friends and family had to remain outside the airfield boundaries.
The best way of describing a normal working day is by eight am the bomb handling crews would already be hard at work sorting out the various bombs, such as the 4,000 lb (cookies) mounting them onto low engine driven trolleys, others would be packing the incendiaries into special cases, similarly all the other bombs likely to be used on operations. All these would be loaded onto special transports and dispatched around the airfield to the Lancasters which would be flying later that day if operations were on.
This operation would carry on well into the afternoon. Other staff would be doing the same with cartridges, feeding thousands of them into their ammunition belts and distributing them to the guns in the aircraft.
Other airfield staff would be filling the fuel bowsers which held 2,500 gallons of petrol and filling up the Lancaster fuel tanks which held 2,140 gallons. The fill up amount would depend on the time of the operation (Lancaster used an average of 200 gallons per hour). At the dispersal points ground crews would be carrying out their inspections on the aircraft under their control, engine fitters would be carrying checks on engine’s plugs and instruments, turrets and undercarriages and tyres, while others would be doing other pre-checks on the airframe wings, intercom and oxygen bottles etc., should any faults be found then an air test would be necessary to be carried out by the Pilot and Flight Engineer to make sure all was well. If a fault was still found and was connected with the flying ability of the aircraft further work would have to be carried out, a further air test would be required. Occasionally a complete engine may have to be replaced putting great strain on the ground crews.
While all this was happening other special staff would be working against time. The Intelligent Officer checking maps and up to date information regarding the target and route. The weather people checking the last minute weather conditions.
In messes the kitchen staff would have to prepare breakfast, lunch, tea and supper for around 200 people on top of that when operations were on a meal consisting of chips and egg had to be prepared and served approximately two hours before take-off time for the aircrews. In the locker rooms each flying crew had to have a parachute, flying helmet, safety aids, maps and money of the countries over which they would be flying, in case of being
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shot down. Sandwiches, extra rations prepared by the WAAFS and parcelled up to include chocolate, fruit, chewing gum and other items of refreshment.
The Station Officer and Flight Commander would be selecting the crew and working out the technical data for the journey.
Up until now the aircrews who may have been flying the evening before would be, during the morning, catching up on sleep (having got to bed around 4 to 5am), and in the early afternoon catching up with information etc. from their own Flight Officer or be visiting the aircraft to discuss with the ground crew, Sergeant-in-charge, any problems from the previous operation. Then probably the Pilot and Flight Engineer would have to carry out a test flight.
Once it was announced that operations were on, the aircrews had to attend briefing, have their meal then collect all necessary equipment from the locker room ready for being transported to the aircraft, to carry out the pre-flight checks ready for take-off. Only then after this could the ground crew relax, have a meal, a wash and have some time to themselves, if there was any time left, then be ready for the aircraft returning home anytime from five to eight hours later depending on the distance of the target.
Crews on return were interviewed by the Interrogation Officer, then have their meal and then to bed for hopefully a good sleep, to be ready for what were to happen the next day.
The Clothes Normally Worn on Operations by our Crew
In Bomber Command there was no laid down dress code for air crew to wear when flying on operations, every Squadron in fact every person had his own preference, all had to wear the RAF uniform, however what they wore under or over was entirely up to individuals (the RAF uniform had to be worn for safety reasons in case they landed in enemy territory, in uniform they became prisoners of war, in ‘civies’ they were most likely to be called spies and possibly shot).
Most of the operations carried out on Lancasters (in fact from all heavy bombers) were from heights of 20,000 ft or over where temperatures could drop to as low as -35 or -40oC below zero.
There was a certain amount of heating within the aircraft, this was heat which originated from the engines through ducts and entered the fuselage in the wireless operators compartment, therefore while the wireless operator and the navigator were roasting a little of the heat could be felt by the pilot and engineer, the bomb aimer who was in the front and the gunners in their turrets received no benefit, they had to source heat from other means.
As I indicated earlier it was an individual choice what clothing they wore, however I can tell you what our crew would normally wear, starting with the most comfortable.
Wireless operator: Normal RAF battle dress, heavy white jersey up to the neck, Mae West, parachute harness, flying boots and silk gloves.
Navigator: Normal RAF battle dress over silk underwear, heavy jersey, Mae West, parachute harness, flying boots, leather shoe foot with lamb’s wool tops (easily cut off), silk gloves plus leather gloves.
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Pilot and Flight engineer: There was much less heat reached the front of the aircraft therefore we wore silk underwear, long johns under RAF battle dress, heavy white woollen jersey up to neck, leather gloves over silk gloves. No Mae West, parachute harness, flying boots leather shoe base and leather flying jacket.
Bomb aimer: He usually flew in the nose of the aircraft which could be very cold, he wore silk underwear, long johns, RAF battle dress usually two heavy woollen jerseys and heavy over suit, Mae West, parachute harness, silk gloves, woollen gloves and a pair of leather gloves on top plus the normal flying boots.
The two crew members who suffered most from the cold were the gunners.
Mid upper gunner: he was still within the aircraft which gave some comfort. He wore two complete suits of silk underwear, two woollen jerseys, RAF battle dress, unheated over suit, heated over suit, Mae West, parachute harness, woollen scarf, woollen head cover under his helmet, three pairs of gloves, silk, woollen and leather, heated flying boots.
Rear gunner: This was the coldest place in the aircraft in fact he was actually outside the rear of the plane, so if it was expected that the temperatures would be around -20oC he would wear that similar to the mid upper gunner however if the temperatures were expected to drop to say -40oC he would add on extra layers of clothing and wear five pairs of gloves.
The gunners flying suits were electrically heated from a plug-in switch as were their helmet and gloves, their flying boots were also electrically heated, therefore if everything worked properly they were reasonably comfortable, this was however not always the case, a fault in the electrical system, possibly caused by enemy action, then they had problems and could receive severe frost bite, resulting in loss of fingers, toes or even more.
When the gunners were dressed up to ready to fly, it was difficult for them to walk and reach their position in the aircraft. The rear gunners especially looked like the advert for Dunlop tyres!
One of the main reasons for all crew members wearing silk gloves was if you caught the metal part of the aircraft with your bare hand it was so cold that the moisture from your skin would stick to the metal and leave you with severe injuries.
In the aircraft flying at over 10,000 ft oxygen had to be used which meant using masks attached to the helmets, which every few minutes you had to break the ice which had formed around the mask from just breathing.
The oxygen was also distributed through the aircraft from a single supply at each crew position there was a supply tap, there was also emergency bottles at each position, these would last for around 10 minutes.
We all also carried a whistle which was attached to the top left hand buttonhole of our tunic. The sound from a whistle carries much further than the human voice. It could be used to attract attention to one’s self in a dangerous situation or for making contact with others.
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Contact made with Two Crew Members after 60 Years plus information on others
Living in Scotland during the 1950’s and 60’s we had little choice of attending any of the activities which took place such as Airfield Open Days, Squadron reunions, or fly pasts, and it wasn’t until the early 1970s when we moved down to Shropshire that we began attending the occasional ‘open days’ (by this time Brian was old enough to be interested), Sylvia’s mum and sister’s home was in North Hykeham, Lincoln, only a short drive from Waddington RAF station, so this was our first visit of many which proved interesting and a good days entertainment.
We then in 1998 decided to revisit Ludford Magna (101 Squadron airfield) and the small church in the village where a Book of Remembrance was, the Book of Remembrance was of interest to me as it contained all the names of the aircrew that had been lost during the period which 101 Squadron had been there, as I said in my earlier notes that when we arrived at Ludford in July 1943 there was four crews two of which had the name of Evans, WL Evans and AH Evans, at Lindholme Heavy Conversion Unit. I was crewed up with WL Evans’ crew, and carried out my training with them, however when we arrived at Ludford somehow the paperwork was wrong and I was crewed up with AH Evans’ crew. It was suggested that as neither crews had been on operations the obvious thing was just to leave the paperwork as it was and for me to change over to the AH Evans crew, and the other Flight Engineer to take my place, Wally Evans would not agree, I was his Flight Engineer and that was how it had to be. All four crews flew on the same operations, on our first two, all returned, on our third AH Evans crew did not return, and by our fifth operation only our crew WL Evans were still operating. Checking in the Remembrance book sadly, I was able to read and realise how lucky I was that Wally had faith in me all those years ago.
While in the church we met a lady who looked after the church and was in fact decorating it with flowers, as she said this weekend coming was the 101 Squadron Association Reunion, when a service was held in the church followed by the laying of wreaths at the small memorial and afterwards the Women’s Institute laid on in the village hall tea and cakes for all, and if the weather was kind the Lancaster bomber would give a flying display.
In the year 2000 I joined the 101 Squadron Association and have attended the reunion every year since in early September, and in recent years Brian and Pauline have also joined us, joining the Association has proved very good as we have met many veterans who were flying during our time in the Squadron and other very interested people. It was through the Association Newsletter that I made contact with some of our crew members whom I had not heard from for nearly 70 years. They are Norman Ellison, our Wireless Operator and Len Brooks, our rear gunner.
In the summer of 2002 after writing a short article for the 101 Squadron Association Newsletter I was contacted by Chris, the son of our Wireless Operator (Norman Ellison) asking if I was the Donald Fraser who flew with his dad in 1943‑44 with 101 Squadron. After the telephone call Chris arranged for Sylvia and I to go to his home to meet his wife Christine and James his son, he lives in Exeter, his dad’s home was in Dawlish only a few miles apart. Chris then took us to meet his mum and dad, it was great to see him after 63 years and as such was quite emotional for both of us. It was so good to meet his wife Pauline. We stayed for around two hours before travelling on our way to Woolacombe. We met up again over the next two years, unfortunately Norman’s health deteriorated and he passed away on 13th February 2005. We attended his funeral, since then we exchange Christmas cards and the odd telephone call each year with his wife and Chris and his family.
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Norman also kept in touch with Wally Evans (our Pilot). After the war he emigrated to Australia where he lived for a number of years before returning to the UK in the mid eighties when he again contacted Norman, they then tried to contact all the other crew members, unfortunately the only member that made contact was Len Brooks, our rear gunner, Norman understood that Wally died in the late eighties.
Len Brooks, our rear gunner, we all knew that he lived in Grimsby for most of his life. During our time at Ludford whenever there was no flying on, he would take the opportunity to visit home which only took him over an hour to hitch a lift. If there was any change on flying one member of the crew would give him a telephone call and he would return to the Squadron very quickly.
During the 1980s and 90s there was a large number of books written covering the war and Bomber Command, I enjoyed reading many of them, even although as you know I did not believe all that was written, many of the books covered the time we were flying, as a result many of the operations we flew on were mentioned in them. There was a series of books written by Patrick M Otter on Bomber Command One Group, the group which 101 Squadron was in and operated throughout Lincolnshire. On reading one of Otter’s books called “Maximum Effort” I came across a picture of a number of air gunners while they were stationed at Lindholme as Instructors during their rest period. On a closer look I recognised one as Len our rear gunner. On contacting Mr Patrick Otter in 2004, he said it was 16 years since he spoke with Len at his home in Cleethorpes. However he could find no trace of him in the local telephone directories, he said he had left a message at the RAFA club in Cleethorpes to see if anyone knew what became of him, and if he had any response he would drop me a line. We thought that he had passed away around 2001‑2002.
I also made contact with Ken Lewis our Special Operator through the Newsletter, Ken also wasn’t in the best of health, however he arranged for his son in law to drive him from Reading (his home) to Lincoln. We had a great time at the Reunion lunch catching up with the past in September 2006, Ken’s profession was in Insurance which he spent all his working life in. Unfortunately he was unable to attend any more reunion meetings.
At the end of the war Norman had been in touch with Bill Blaynay, our Midupper gunner, who part way through our tour of operations after an unfortunate incident was released from flying. He told Norman that he had been reassessed and had his Sargents [sic] rank reinstated, other than that we have no other information about him.
There was still two more crew members still unaccounted for, Jimmy, our Navigator and Eric, our Bomb Aimer.
Shropshire during the war had a number of Heavy Bomber Airfields, Ternhill, Shawbury and Cosford which are still in service today. Prees, and Sleap, were both wartime bases flying Lancasters, at Prees the hangers are being used as storage units for commercial companies. Sleap is now the home of Shropshire Flying Club using part of the runway, a few buildings and the Control Tower. It is open to the public, where you watch the small aircraft flying and one can enjoy and a good cup of tea and a cake and have a good chat with people who are still interested in flying.
There is also a small Museum covering plane parts from World War II. In the last three years Sylvia, myself and friends occasionally drop in for a cup of tea, by now we know a few of the staff who are all Volunteers and very interested people.
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Jimmy Grant, Navigator
On one of our visits in 2012 I had taken with me the 1943 Christmas Dinner menu for 101 Squadron, all the crew members had signed it in the inside, most people looking at the menu thought that we had had an excellent meal considering there was a war on.
Mike Grant one of the longer serving volunteers at Sleap Museum, who aids in researching the items that are given to the Museum before they go on display to the public.
Meantime he is also tracing the history of the oil pipeline which carried the millions of gallons of oil from the ports, across the UK down to the Channel ports and on to the D Day landing sites and beyond. This will be a very interesting book to read when it is published, soon.
On seeing the menu Mike said “I know this signature, he is one of my family, see how he writes the ‘G’ and the ‘r’ in Grant, we all write our signature the same way, and we were all told off at school for not writing properly”. We worked out that Jimmy our Navigator was his uncle. After the war he said the family had gone their separate ways, as many families did, so he had no idea where Jimmy would be now – it’s a small world.
We still have no idea of what happened to Eric our Bomb aimer.
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CHAPTER K
THE LANCASTER STORY
It became clear reasonably early in the Second World War that if Britain had any chance of winning, Bomber Command had to take the war to Germany, deep into its industrial heart, which was not possible with the short range light Bombers.
It was decided by the War Council that a much larger aircraft which could travel further, with a much heavier bomb load into Germany was needed, hence the introduction of the four engined heavy bomber, the Halifax and the Lancaster.
1942 marked the turning point for Bomber Command, Marshal Travis Harris (later known as Bomber Harris) was appointed Leader of Bomber Command. He believed that Bomber Command given the necessary aircraft and equipment, could play an important role in winning the war by strategic bombing of Germany’s industrial towns and cities.
Harris ordered a 1000 aircraft raid on Cologne be carried out. Fortunately the operation was credited as a success, this persuaded the Government to allocate Bomber Command high priority for aircraft and more importantly navigation aids and radar which were vital for accurate delivery of bombs on targets.
The development of the Lancaster continued with a few prototypes being produced, the production of Lancasters increased slowly at first and gradually stepped up reaching their peak by the end of 1944.
The earlier two engine bomber had a second pilot to aid the captain with a crew number of five, however on the four engined heavies where crew members could move around the fuselage, a change was necessary. The heavies had a mid upper gun fitted requiring a mid upper gunner; because of pilot shortages owing to the increase in numbers of new squadrons coming on stream and the increased complexity of the four engine bomber, this called for a specialist engineer to replace the second pilot, so the flight engineer was created, the standard crew of the Lancaster comprised of seven specialists, Pilot, Navigator, Flight Engineer, Wireless operator, Bomb Aimer, Mid Upper Gunner and Rear Gunner. Each was an expert in his own field and each a vital cog in the overall crew, rank played no part in the airborne life of the crew.
The Lancaster was involved on most of the important operations, such as the Dambuster Raid on 16/17th May 1943, The Battle of the Ruhr, Battle of Berlin, (Overlord, the name given to the Invasion of Europe 6th May 1944) and Operation Thunder Clap, mass raids against supply and communication targets such as road and railyards continued, and against German naval shipping at Le Havre.
In late July a bombing campaign against the V-weapon sites commenced as there was fear that Germany had a new secret weapon, raids were carried out on launching and storage sites, these operations took much of Bomber Commands efforts throughout the autumn of 1944 as did the attacks against the French railway in support of Overland. In September the
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Navy believed that Tirpitz (the German Battleship) which was anchored in the Kaa Fjord in Norway was about to put to sea. Bomber Command was again given the task of destroying her. On the third attempt on 12th November 31 Lancasters attacked the Battleship. This time on arrival the weather was clear over the ship, no smokescreen obscured the target, during the attack several hits were seen by the Lancaster crews, followed by a heavy explosion, one of its magazines blew up, then the mighty Battleship rolled over and capsized.
By the end of 1944 the Allied Armies were approaching the Rhine, come the end of March 1945, they had crossed the river in strength and were advancing on Berlin.
Bomber Command’s role assisted by the United States Eighth Airforce was to support the Allies by bombing Military targets, and in supporting the Russian Army on their advance from the east on Berlin.
The last major attack of the war took place on 25th April 1945 by the bombing of the Bergholf (Hitler’s Eagles nest) and the SS barracks nearby.
The war in Europe ended on 8th May 1945 (VE Day), however just previous to that operation Manna was put into action, which was dropping vital food supplies to the starving civilian population of the Netherlands (the Germans agreed to the dropping areas) a similar operation dropped food parcels to the Dutch population. A large number of Lancasters were involved, these operations stopped on VE Day.
With the war in Europe over, plans were made for the repatriation of British and Commonwealth prisoners of war under the code name Operation Exodus, many Lancasters were converted to carry 25 passengers for this purpose. Flights continued bringing prisoners home from across France and Germany. Receiving camps were set up in the United Kingdom for the thousands of men returning home from Europe.
Although the war was over in Europe, many Lancasters were preparing for war in the Far East, known as the Tiger Force, it was agreed that 10 Squadrons of Lancasters would be used until the New Lincoln Bomber came on stream which had much longer fuel ranges. Fortunately the Japanese war ended sooner than expected (because of the use of the Atom bomb) resulting in Tiger Force not being required. Myself along with many other crew members were very relieved, because flying over Japan would have been very difficult and dangerous.
After the war the Lancaster continued flying carrying out various roles until the new aircraft came into service, of the approximately eight thousand Lancasters that were built only a few are left with only two airworthy aircraft, one in Britain and the other in Canada.
During World War II Lincolnshire was known as Lancaster County, because of the large number of squadrons scattered across the County (28 in total). Today most of the land then used is now returned to agriculture. It is still difficult to travel around without driving past the site of a famous airfield.
The airworthy Lancaster belongs to the Lincolnshire’s Lancaster Association, based at RAF Coningsby and is part of the Battle of Britain memorial Flight. Each year this flight performs at many air-displays entertaining thousands of people and serves as a living memorial to those air crew who gave their lives in the defence of their Country.
There is a second Lancaster which has its home also in Lincolnshire at East Kirby and belongs to two brothers, Fred and Harold Panton, the aircraft is maintained to a very high standard,
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where the public can have a taxi ride in the Lancaster, and enjoy the sound of the four Merlin engines.
The people of Lincolnshire were the first to know when the RAF were on operations, as with 28 squadrons based throughout the county and each squadron with at least 20 aircraft serviceable, the sound made from over 2000 Merlin engines, as they circled and climbed to reach a height of 10,000 ft before setting out across Europe was tremendous. People from the Netherlands told me (after the war) that during the war they lay in bed at night hoping to hear the special sound made by the British bombers, and as they passed over, they wished them success in their operation and prayed that the young men who flew in them returned home safely.
During operations I listened to the four Merlin engines purring away for five or six hours, the sound was magic and something I will never forget.
I am one of the thousands who have been entertained over the years by attending many of the fly pasts and open days, where the Lancaster has been carrying out the flypast, firstly to hear the sound of the Merlin engines which is music to my ears, then to see this superb aircraft flying towards you at around 200 feet nearly always brings a tear to my eyes for memories past.
Date: 30 Aug 1943
This picture was taken from the camera operated in conjunction with the opening of the bomb doors and Bomb Aimer releasing his bombs on our 2nd Operation to Munchen Gladbach. The picture plotted the bombs hitting the target.
[photograph of bombs hitting target]
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Lancaster Bomber
Specification
Length: 69ft 4ins (21.08m)
Wingspan: 102ft 6ins (31.00m)
Height: 20ft 6ins (6.23m)
Maximum Speed: 300+ mph
Range loaded: 2,600 miles app
Ceiling loaded: 24,000 ft
Internal payload: up to 7 tons
Full fuel load: 2,140 gallon
4 Merlin engines 1390 hp
(The latest Lancasters could be better in all specifications)
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[photograph of Avro Lancaster bomber]
[photograph of Avro Lancaster cockpit]
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[inserted] 16th December 1943 14th op. [deleted] Page 3 [/deleted] [/inserted]
Black Thursday
[inserted] Further notes on our 14th operation on 16th December 1943 [/inserted]
[crest]
AT A minute before midnight on the night of December 16. 1943 Lancaster LM395 emerged briefly from low cloud just north of Caistor. There was barely time for the pilot, Sgt Stan Miller of Scarborough to register what was happening before the Lancaster struck high ground near the town. When rescuers arrived they found no survivors among the crew of seven.
Crashes amongst Lancasters returning from ops or on night exercises had become an almost regular occurrence in Lincolnshire by the winter of 1943. But that night something awful was happening as the 1 Group aircraft returned from a round trip of eight hours to Berlin.
The raid that night had been specifically planned to catch the defenders fog bound on their nightfighter bases across Northern Europe. Instead, the mist came down and shrouded many of the airfields in Eastern England as the bombers were returning.
That night 483 Lancasters and 15 Mosquitos raided Berlin. Twenty-five aircraft were lost to a combination of night-fighters, flak and collisions over the German capital. At least another 29 Lancasters were lost in crashes when the bombers returned to airfields blanketed in fog.
1 Group suffered more than most with 13 aircraft being lost and 56 men killed in crashes on or around their bases. 100 Squadron was hit hardest of all, losing four aircraft, including two which collided right over the airfield at Waltham. 460 at Binbrook lost two as did 166 at Kirmington. And single aircraft were lost from 625 Squadron at Kelstern, 101 at Ludford and 12 and 626 lost a Lancaster each at Wickenby.
During briefings that afternoon, crews had been told that Bomber Command had been waiting to mount a raid on Berlin when the weather was so bad that the fighters would be grounded and they would have an easy trip. This was to be it.
The planned route was straight in and out again over Denmark. But the fighters, which were supposed to be sitting on fog-shrouded airfields across Holland, Belgium, Northern France and Germany, were airborne, and the first intercepted the stream of Lancasters over the Dutch coast and there were running battles, until the bomber stream turned for home across Denmark. Twenty one aircraft were shot down and four lost in collisions over Berlin itself.
The weather became progressively worse as the aircraft returned and by the time the 1 Group Lancasters began arriving they found the cloud base had almost reached ground level.
Crashes began to be reported from almost every airfield. Tired crews were unable to pick up the circle of lights which by then had been fitted around most of the dromes. Some came down in open fields, some, like LM395, simply flew into the Wolds. At Waltham, two Lancasters from 100 Squadron, O-Oboe and F-Freddie, collided as they circled looking for the funnel of lights that could guide them to safety.
One man who remembers that night vividly is Wing Commander Jimmy Bennett, who had arrived at Waltham three weeks earlier to form the new 550 Squadron which was due to move to North Killingholme in the new year.
Bennett. with two tours behind him already, chose to fly that with 'Bluey’ Graham and his crew.
"Our take-off was early, about 4.30 in the afternoon, and even then visibility wasn't very good and it was plain we were not going to be in for a very pleasant journey,” he said.
The bombers emerged from the cloud cover which was supposed to protect them over the North Sea. “There was no high cloud and at times we could see dozens of aircraft around us," Bennett recalled. "The clouds below cleared slightly over the city, we dropped our bombs and got away again. There was some fighter activity but we were not bothered.
"Coming back the cloud started to increase again and it was clear that by the time we reached England it would be almost right down to the deck. Bluey decided to come down through the cloud over the North Sea. In conditions like that it was always wise practice. Lincolnshire may have been fairly flat, but other places weren’t and there were always a few of what we called "stuffed clouds" around, clouds which contained something hard, like a hill.
"We dropped down into the mist but Bluey picked up the outer circle of sodium lights at Waltham, stuck his port wing on them and followed them round until he found the funnel and put her down.
“We rolled along the runway to the far hedge and we were already aware that planes were coming down all around us, landing at the first opportunity, so we decided it would be a lot safer to leave the aircraft where it was and walk the rest of the way.”
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Black Thursday
[picture of aircraft]
100 Squadron had suffered terribly that night. So had 97 Squadron at Bourn in Cambridgeshire. It lost no fewer than seven aircraft in crashes.
The 1 Group Summary, which was circulated to all squadrons at the end of December, recorded: “No opportunity for striking at our objectives must be lost. This being the case, it is obvious that, in addition to the enemy on the far side, the elements of this side still have to be mastered.
“As an illustration, after the raid on Berlin on December 16/17, a widespread and unpredicted deterioration in the weather at our home bases occurred.
"No diversion areas were available and many deplorable accidents resulted while our aircraft were endeavouring to break cloud and land."
The Summary continued: "An investigation has now been completed which shows the accidents cannot be attributed to a common factor. Some aircraft broke cloud too quickly, some broke cloud too slowly and continued to sink, whilst others ''slipped in” on a turn while endeavouring to keep the airfield lights in view."
It added: "Conditions were vile and unexpected yet 136 aircraft landed safely. We must continue to strive for better airmanship and more effective ground control.
But no number of investigations and changes to procedure could erase the memory of that wooden hut near Louth for Wing Commander Bennett.
One crew which narrowly escaped joining the casualties that night was one from 101 Squadron at Ludford. [inserted] X2 [/inserted]
Len Brooks, who was the rear gunner in a Lancaster flown by Sgt Walter Evans, remembers that they were diverted to Driffield because of the bad weather. Over East Yorkshire they were picking up RT messages from Driffield, Dishforth and Catfoss but could see no lights through the murk.
Then Catfoss offered to put a light up for them. " They realised we were very low and put the beam almost parallel to the ground right on us. I remember feeling the power go on. the nose lift and suddenly I saw under the turret chicken huts, a garden shed and finally chimney pots flashing by. That Iight had saved us.”
[inserted] This refers to the aircraft being suddenly given full power to lift itself over the farm buildings [/inserted]
Mr Brooks also remembers the first time Ludford's new FIDO fog dispersal system came into use. This consisted of a system of petrol burners the length of the runway, the theory being that the heat generated would drive the fog away. It worked, too, the only problem being that the hot air caused a great deal of turbulence over the runway.
He recalls that two aircraft ahead of them declined to land, despite the exhortations of the station commander, Group Captain Bobby Blucke. When it came to their turn they were so low on fuel they had no option and Evans virtually forced the Lancaster down onto the runway.
[inserted] [symbol] Len Brooks our Rear Gunner He was looking backwards from the aircraft therefore had a completely different view from the others of the crew [/inserted]
[photograph of the rear gunner, Len Brooks]
102. An unknown gunner standing by his turret. 12 Squadron, Wickenby, May 1944.
74
[page break]
Training the Crews
[crest]
BEFORE BOMBER Command could launch its projected expansion in late 1943 and 1944 it had to have a ready supply of crews. And that meant an increase in training establishments.
Changes in the training system meant that each Group became responsible for turning out its own heavy bomber crews. With Lindholme in South Yorkshire as the Base station, Heavy
Conversion Units were set up at Faldingworth, Blyton and Sandtoft with other training units being based at various times at Hemswell, Ingham and Sturgate.
Most of the1I Group crews were to go through these training bases and many felt that flying with operation squadrons was considerably safer than in the HCUs.
Until more Lancasters became available, their conversion to four-engined heavies was largely on Halifaxes, and in particular on the early Mark I and lls. They were underpowered aircraft which had already been discarded by operational squadrons in favour of either Lancasters or the much superior later marques of the Halifax. They also had some nasty habits, particularly when inexperienced crews tried one particular manoeuvre which effectively blocked the airflow over the tail and was responsible for the destruction of a number of these aircraft.
One ex-12 Squadron crew remember starting six cross-country exercises from Sandtoft and failing to complete one of them. There was little wonder that Sandtoft became known throughout 1 Group as Prangtoft.
Sandtoft itself was, like the other training airfields, originally intended as an operational station.
The site. which is alongside what is now the M180 between Scunthorpe and Thorne, was selected by Air Ministry surveyors in January 1942 as suitable for use by heavy aircraft and work started that October on the construction of the airfield. It was intended that it would come into use as a bomber airfield in January 1944 but in the meantime, it was decided to earmark the new station for a Heavy Conversion Unit.
It officially opened in December 1943 (although it was by no means complete, not unusual with newly-opened airfields in 1 Group at the time). The first unit to operate from there was A Flight of 1667 HCU which moved in from Faldingworth, followed by its other two flights. Later in the year a fourth Flight was formed and this became the Flying Instructors’ Flight which in turn provided the training for instructors within 11 Base which also included Lindholme and Blyton.
[photograph of gunnery instructors]
133. Gunnery instructor at Lindholme in 1944. On the extreme left is Bob Dunston, an Australian who had lost a leg while serving with the 8th Army at Tobruk and later volunteered for the RAF as an air gunner. The picture comes from Len Brooks of Cleethorpes, pictured second from the left.
[inserted] Second from left is Len Brooks our Rear Gunner [/inserted]
75
[page break]
[blank page]
Dublin Core
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Title
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WO Donald Keith Fraser
Donald Keith Fraser's memoir
Description
An account of the resource
Memoir describing his life and service career in the RAF. He also gives a list of 29 operations he participated in with notes on specific operations, and recounts a brief history of the Lancaster.
Creator
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Donald Fraser
Format
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80 typewritten pages
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Text. Memoir
Identifier
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BFraserDKFraserDKv1
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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France
Germany
Great Britain
Poland
England--Lincolnshire
France--Modane
Germany--Augsburg
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Leverkusen
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Mönchengladbach
Germany--Munich
Germany--Schweinfurt
Germany--Stuttgart
Poland--Szczecin
Germany--Braunschweig
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
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Tricia Marshall
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
1 Group
101 Squadron
1667 HCU
aircrew
bomb trolley
bombing
bombing up
briefing
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
Cook’s tour
dispersal
Distinguished Flying Medal
fear
FIDO
fitter engine
flight engineer
flight mechanic
fuelling
Gee
George VI, King of Great Britain (1895-1952)
ground crew
Halifax
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
memorial
military ethos
military living conditions
military service conditions
navigator
Nissen hut
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
perimeter track
petrol bowser
radar
RAF Bottesford
RAF Catfoss
RAF Coningsby
RAF Cottesmore
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Lindholme
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF North Luffenham
RAF St Athan
RAF Waddington
RAF Wickenby
runway
searchlight
service vehicle
Tiger force
Tirpitz
tractor
training
Window
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1912/36058/PHayhurstJM17030001.1.jpg
229425a1f7c48ca2b79f3fc379bbb8f0
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1912/36058/PHayhurstJM17030002.1.jpg
9365004b7f80fdc54a7c86d86fe33db3
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1912/36058/PHayhurstJM17030003.1.jpg
a7717db6d862128d72f1c9902cde138d
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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Hayhurst, Jose Margaret
J M Hayhurst
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-07-25
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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Hayhurst, JM
Description
An account of the resource
108 items. The collection concerns Sergeant Jose Margaret Hayhurst (2073102 Royal Air Force) and contains decorations, uniform, documents and photographs. She served as a radar operator in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Andrew Whitehouse and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Transcribed document
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Transcription
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[photograph]
[page break]
When Re-ordering, please refer to No. [inserted] CH13810 [/inserted] COPYRIGHT PHOTOGRAPH.
FOX PHOTOS LTD.,
6 TUDOR STREET,
LONDON, E.C.4
CENT. 7831
Gwen by The News of the World filing dept in Fleet Street one Sunday morning after hitching to London with Jeannie Lund from Hythe. July/Aug 44.
[page break]
[underlined] RELEASE DATE SATURDAY'S EVENINGS LOCALS [/underlined]. SEPT. 9th
BRITISH OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPH (AIR MINISTRY) [indecipherable letters] 13810.
CROWN COPYRIGHT RESERVED. XF
W.A.A.F. PLOT THE FLYING BOMBS
W.A.A.F. working at an R.A.F. post in Southern England were some of the first persons to plot the course of flying bombs leaving Northern France. They traced the course of the first flying bomb to attack England.
Picture shows - Left to right. Leading [deleted words] [inserted] Aircraftwoman, [/inserted] M. HARVEY, of Hampton Court, Surrey, and Leading Aircraftwoman J.M. Hayhurst, of Manchester plotting the course of flying bombs.
P.N.A. SEPT. 8th 44. Tel. No. CEN. 7831.
[underlined] FOR PUBLICATION IN SATURDAY'S EVENINGS LOCALS. SEPT. 9th 44. [/underlined]
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
Jose Hayhurst and M Harvey Plotting
Description
An account of the resource
Jose and another WAAF working on vertical boards. On the reverse 'Given by the News of the World filing dept in Fleet Street on Sunday morning after hitching to London with Jeannie Lund from Hythe July/Aug 44'. Stamped Fox Photos Ltd.
A note accompanying the photograph states 'WAAF plot the Flying Bombs'.
Creator
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Fox Photos
Date
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1944
Temporal Coverage
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1944-09-09
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--London
England--Hythe (Kent)
England--Manchester
England--Kent
England--Lancashire
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Language
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eng
Type
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Photograph
Text
Format
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One b/w photograph and one typewritten sheet
Identifier
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PHayhurstJM17030001, PHayhurstJM17030002, PHayhurstJM17030003
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
Contributor
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Sue Smith
aircrew
ground personnel
propaganda
radar
V-1
V-weapon
wireless operator
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/559/42906/BBlacklockGBBlacklockGBv1.2.pdf
1141bb2ce07d176fdab70288e3d24b89
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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Stephenson, Stuart
Stuart Stephenson MBE
S Stephenson
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Stephenson, S
Description
An account of the resource
20 items. An oral history interview with Stuart Stephenson MBE, Chairman of the Lincs-Lancaster Association, and issues of 5 Group News.
The collection was catalogued by Barry Hunter.
In accordance with the conditions stipulated by the donor, some items are available only at the International Bomber Command Centre / University of Lincoln.
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
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Half a Life, Half Remembered
An Autobiography by Group Captain GB Blacklock
Identifier
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BBlacklockGBBlacklockGBv1
Creator
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GB Blacklock
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
England--Skipton
Scotland--Bedrule
England--Northumberland
England--Yorkshire
England--London
England--Appleby-in-Westmorland
Egypt--Alexandria
Egypt--Aboukir Bay
England--Chester
England--Newmarket (Suffolk)
Great Britain Miscellaneous Island Dependencies--Guernsey
France--Marseille
Northern Ireland
Scotland--Montrose
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Helgoland
Germany--Wangerooge Island
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Borkum
England--Wisbeach
England--Weybridge
Norway--Bergen
Norway--Stavanger
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Netherlands--Rotterdam
France--Givet
Belgium
France--Saint-Omer (Pas-de-Calais)
France--Hazebrouck
France--Dunkerque
France--Socx
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Karlsruhe
France--Salon-de-Provence
Italy--Genoa
Germany--Essen
Germany--Lünen
Wales--Hawarden
Germany--Baden-Baden
England--Eastleigh
Scotland--Stranraer
England--Doncaster
France--Brest
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Emden (Lower Saxony)
Germany--Lingen (Lower Saxony)
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Magdeburg
France--La Pallice
Germany--Karlsruhe
Conforms To
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Pending text-based transcription
Description
An account of the resource
From his youth to the award of his DFC by the King.
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
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Text. Memoir
Format
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87 printed sheets
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
101 Squadron
115 Squadron
12 Squadron
142 Squadron
148 Squadron
149 Squadron
15 Squadron
2 Group
3 Group
311 Squadron
4 Group
5 Group
7 Squadron
9 Squadron
99 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
Anson
anti-aircraft fire
Blenheim
bomb aimer
bombing
Boston
Chamberlain, Neville (1869-1940)
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
Distinguished Flying Cross
Distinguished Flying Medal
entertainment
fitter airframe
flight engineer
Flying Training School
George VI, King of Great Britain (1895-1952)
Gneisenau
ground personnel
Halifax
Hampden
hangar
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
Harrow
Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945)
Hudson
Hurricane
incendiary device
Lancaster
love and romance
Magister
Manchester
Me 109
Me 110
mess
military living conditions
military service conditions
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
Mosquito
navigator
Navy, Army and Air Force Institute
observer
Operational Training Unit
Photographic Reconnaissance Unit
pilot
radar
RAF Benson
RAF Boscombe Down
RAF Catterick
RAF Cosford
RAF Cranwell
RAF Debden
RAF Duxford
RAF Finningley
RAF Grantham
RAF Halton
RAF Hendon
RAF Henlow
RAF Honington
RAF Leeming
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Manston
RAF Mildenhall
RAF Netheravon
RAF Newmarket
RAF Oakington
RAF Sealand
RAF Silloth
RAF South Cerney
RAF St Eval
RAF Stradishall
RAF Tangmere
RAF Upavon
RAF Upper Heyford
RAF Uxbridge
RAF Waddington
RAF Warmwell
RAF Waterbeach
RAF West Freugh
RAF West Raynham
RAF Wittering
RAF Wyton
Scharnhorst
shot down
Spitfire
sport
Stirling
Tiger Moth
training
Wallis, Barnes Neville (1887-1979)
Wellington
Whitley
wireless operator
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/502/8396/ACuthbertJ160507.1.mp3
85f4b9114692e4eb7f754f12301f44e0
Dublin Core
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Title
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Cuthbert, John
J Cuthbert
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Cuthbert, J
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with John Cuthbert (3006396 Royal Air Force) and two photographs. He flew operations as a mid-upper gunner with 189 Squadron from RAF Fulbeck.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-05-07
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
GC: This interview is being conducted on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archives. My name’s Gemma Clapton. The interviewee today is John Cuthbert and the interview is taking place at Ramsey in Harwich on the 7th May 2016. Also present is Sandra. I’d like to say thank you very much for talking to me today and could we start. Just tell me a little bit about life before the war and how you joined up
JC: Before the war. Yes. Well, I, I’d left school for some time and in fact had had a couple of jobs when I went with a friend of mine to Chelmsford, joined a radio course, a government sponsored radio course at the Chelmsford Technical College which I found a bit difficult at times although the radio side was ok. The idea was to train people up to take the place of technicians who had gone into the air force so it was a crammed four month course. In fact I came eleventh out of forty so I was quite pleased with that and some stayed on at Marconi’s at Chelmsford and others went on to Murphy Radio at Welwyn Garden City which I did. I went on to Welwyn Garden City where there was a very large ATC squadron. I was going to join the navy because it’s a naval port here and my friends were in the navy but I joined the ATC and we heard there was some flying going on at a little airfield called Panshanger, about five miles away and we used to hurtle off on our bikes and get a flight in a Tiger Moth. So that was the very first bit of flying I did in a Tiger Moth but I got ticked off for moving the wrong bit because you were sitting behind the pilot and he was a bit grumpy that day I think and subsequently I attended a summer camp with the ATC at RAF Westcott which was an Operational Training Unit with Wellingtons and we had the chance of flying on a cross country in one of those so I flew a four hour cross country in a, in a Wellington, which was great. Shared the crews flying rations. Chewing gum and barley sugar which we never had of course and I thoroughly enjoyed it and I volunteered for air crew at that time and you could go up for Cardington. You know it was RAF Cardington you attended for two or three days for medicals and all sorts of things and I didn’t think I’d pass to be honest. I didn’t think I’d pass the medical. On the train going to Cardington there were chaps sitting opposite me, rugby players and all this sort of thing and I felt about that size and I thought hmmn but in the event I did get accepted and some of the big chaps didn’t. Strange isn’t it? Yes, I got, I saw later on a document later on which said PNB material which is pilot/navigator/bomb aimer but I wanted to go in as a wireless operator because it was my trade and it was my hobby and so I duly got called up for training as a wireless operator/air gunner and completed all the initial training which incidentally didn’t get off to a very good start because the first Monday of the new course you were put on fatigues. Not a very good start for the course but, and there were various jobs from sweeping the NAAFI. The worst one was delivering coke to all the huts because there was hundreds of huts. Guess which one I got? I got the coke delivery with some other lads so we had to load up this flat truck lorry with sacks of coke and deliver them to the huts around the camp and half way through the afternoon it started to rain so you can imagine what state we were in and part of the route took us past station sick quarters and at the end, it was a lot of huts put together and at the end of one of the huts was a conservatory type affair and inside were two or three chaps in beds, white sheets, sitting up, reading books. I was wet, dirty and I said, ‘You lucky blighters.’ The next minute a lorry went around a corner, a sharpish corner and a load of sacks came over and propelled me on to the road and the medico came dashing out from sick quarters ‘cause they saw it happen and I wanted to get back on the lorry but they wouldn’t let me do that. They dragged me into sick quarters and laid me out on one of their nice clean beds, examined me, couldn’t find anything broken. They said, ‘Well you’ve got to be kept in in case you’ve got concussion,’ so I finished up in sick quarters, in a bed, in a room on my own feeling rather sorry for myself but I thought never wish anything on yourself. [laughs]. I thought that was very funny afterwards but of course I had to start a new course then because I’d missed, I was in there a week. Nothing wrong with me and they let me go. No, I didn’t get any sick leave. I was just discharged into the, into the course. So, anyway the rest of it went all ok. I got fatigues again of course the next Monday and I thought this is like Groundhog Day you know but it wasn’t. It was, I did some sweeping somewhere or other which was quite mild. I enjoyed the course though. We had to work hard. At the end of it we were to go on leave and then return or be posted to a radio school which was the bit I was looking forward to but instead of that we were called to the NAAFI for a meeting with a lot of top brass who came down and said, ‘Well, you chaps, you’ve finished this course,’ he said, ‘But I’m afraid that the radio schools are pretty full and you’ll be kicking about for some while,’ he said, ‘But what we do want is some air gunners. They’re fitting new turrets to the underside of the aircraft.’ This, well they did experiment with this but it wasn’t continued with. That was a lot of eyewash. There were no such thing during the war of mid under turrets. Not on British aircraft. They were just short of air gunners and they wanted the whole course to remuster. We would have been sent on leave, returned to Bridgenorth where we’d done our training. There was an elementary air gunner school there and on completion of that we would go to air gunners school and if we passed we’d be sergeant air gunners and the next move would be Operational Training Unit and then a squadron and this appealed to most of them. I didn’t particularly want to be an air gunner. I was good on the old keys you see and a friend of mine, I’d better not give his name but came from Brightlingsea said, ‘You’ll be the only one left here, John if you don’t remuster. You’ll be all on your tod,’ he said. So, in the end I agreed and remustered with the rest of the course and my friend Jack he later came in to the hut where we were getting ready to go on leave and he was a big chap, rugby player and he was crying. His eyes weren’t good enough for straight air gunner so he had to stay. Isn’t that strange? I met him after the war when I was on Transport Command down at Holmsley South. I met him in the sergeant’s mess and he’d got his signals brevvy up. I said, ‘Oh you made your signals course then Jack.’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘What did you do? Did you get on ops?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I was instructor on the Isle of Man.’ I said, ‘You got me flying over hunland,’ I said, ‘Getting shot at left, right and centre and you’re enjoying the fleshpots of Douglas.’ ‘That’s right, John,’ he said. [laughs]. I said, ‘Well if I’d got the chop I’d have come back and haunted you.’ [laughs] But anyway he did, he did do the course and, but he never got on a squadron. So there we are but the rest of it was quite exactly as the top brass said. We went on leave, we came back and did Elementary Air Gunner School at Bridgenorth. Went on leave, came back and we were posted, I was posted to number 3 Air Gunner’s School at Castle Kennedy near Stranraer in Scotland. We used to fly up and down Luce Bay shooting at a drogue towed by a Martinet with a very frightened pilot, [laughs] I imagine he was anyway. Although there was a long, a long cable between the towing aircraft and the drogue that we fired at but that was all good fun. The only trouble was that we that were on Ansons, flew Ansons there. There was the pilot, the instructor and three UT air gunners so you each took it in turn to go in to the turret and fire and the ammunition was tipped with different coloured paint so that you knew which gunner had made which holes in it or none whatever the case may be and it was a strange little, it was a Bristol turret. As you elevated the guns up you went down and vice versa so it wasn’t, it wasn’t a lot of room in it so if you did anything wrong you got, it wasn’t easy. There would be the instructor yelling at you from the astrodome further up telling you to get the seagull out of your turret and all this sort of thing but it was very enjoyable and I passed out third in the course which I was quite pleased with at that considering I didn’t want to be an air gunner to start with. There was one unfortunate, well one unfortunate incident while we were there. The pilots were all Polish and they all wanted to be Spitfire pilots so when we’d finished the exercise, whatever it was, it was a lot of very low flying which was all great fun but this particular day this one went into a farmhouse and they were all killed and the three UT gunners in it were the only Scottish lads on the course and they were the ones in Scotland. They were the ones that were killed. I had to attend the boarding ceremony on the station. So, so that was that. We duly went on leave as sergeant air gunners or most of us did anyway and I think we went, we went, yes we went to Operational Training Unit then at Upper Heyford but that was where the ground schooling was done there which was quite a lot of that as you can imagine. Then we went over to the satellite airfield at Barford St John near Banbury of Banbury Cross fame, for the flying in Wellingtons so I was back in the Wellingtons. That was good fun. We crewed up there of course. That was quite remarkable, the crewing up. It’s, I think we were the only country who did it. You were just all put in to a hangar and said get on with it. Gunners, pilots, navigators. Well, I was in, I had an air gunner mate so we were together so there were two air gunners and the skipper was looking for two air gunners and we sort of collided with him and that was that. He was a big tall chap. I’ll have to show you a photograph. Wore a moustache. In fact he was known as The Count on the squadron because he could have been a Count. He was a public schoolboy but he was one of the lads, you know. He wasn’t, he wasn’t at all snooty with it and we found a bomb aimer and a wireless operator, Bill. And we hadn’t got a navigator. There was one who we eventually had but he’d been on a previous course and the aircraft had crashed and he’d walked out of it. We thought that might have been a bit of an omen [laughs]. Some funny things you think of. Anyway, Frank Johnson was the navigator and he was a damned good navigator. Anyway, we were crewed up and the first flying was circuits and bumps, of course with an instructor. First time we’d all flown together and I always remember the first, after the first hour of circuits and bumps the instructor got up to get out down the old ladder and we all pretended to follow him [laughs] because the skipper would be taking us but he turned out to be a very very good pilot of course and we did our day circuits and bumps and then our night circuits and bumps which was a bit more difficult ‘cause you got in to a Wellington in the front, under the nose and the propellers were very close to the fuselage and you had to go dead straight to the aeroplane otherwise you’d rather lose your head. In more ways than one. But that was fun and then we went back to Upper Heyford for ground school. It had a very complicated fuel system the Wellington and more than one crew were lost because they’d thought to have run out of petrol and in fact there was another tankful somewhere but they’d opened the wrong cocks, you know. So this, I forget, I think his name was Fry, Flight Lieutenant Fry, he was a genius. He’d fixed up a ground replica of this petrol system with pipes and levers and everything and fans and we all had to learn it. We all had to learn the fuel system by doing this, you know, this model. If you did anything wrong the fans would stop. So we got quite good at that but we didn’t have any trouble with the Wellington. The only thing that concerned me a little bit about them was at night when you did a night cross country or any night flying. They’ve got fabric covered wings, the Wellingtons. They were made of a geodetic construction but it was all fabric covered and they filled the tanks up in the wing and invariably some got spilled all over this fabric and as you took off sparks would be flying past from the engine and if you were in the astrodome looking out you wondered why you didn’t catch fire but they never did of course. It was flitting past too quickly but that was, that was an interesting point about the Wellington but we used to have some good cross countries in those. Four hours as a rule and a nice meal when you, before you took off and another one when you got back so that was good. From there, we all passed out there with flying colours and the next thing, I think we went to a, kicked our heals for a week or two at a, some place waiting for, but the next move was to a Heavy Bomber Conversion Unit on Stirlings, big four engine things but we couldn’t go directly. We had to wait out turn and eventually we were posted to RAF Swinderby on these confounded Stirlings which were very, very fine aircraft but the ones we had were well past their sell by date and I don’t think we ever flew without something going wrong and we were jolly glad to see the back of Swinderby I can tell you. All sorts of things happened. I mean, one of the worst ones I was in the rear turret, we were doing night circuits and bumps, two hour detail and we’d done about half of it and we were doing a landing and I thought, hello the old runway is still whizzing past fast. The brakes had failed. There was a yell from the skipper, ‘Brace, brace.’ Well, I was in the rear turret. I couldn’t do much but just hang on. The runway finished, the grass started, we went through a hedge, across a field and finished up with the bombing hatch over the Newark Lincoln Road so we were out of there a bit smartish because they had a habit of catching fire, these Stirlings. We plodded back to the peritrack and the transport came around to pick us up and we thought we were back to the mess for a meal now. No. No. Around the peritrack to another Stirling to finish the detail so we did another hour of night circuits and bumps so that didn’t, didn’t encourage me at all with those things. On another occasion the, it had an electric undercarriage, not an hydraulic one and if there was any failure at all with it you had to wind it up by hand or the flight engineer did. Well, no we hadn’t got a flight engineer there. Or did we? Yes, we picked him up, that’s right, we picked a flight engineer up at Con Unit. We didn’t, we didn’t have a flight engineer at the Operational Training Unit. They were still learning about engines somewhere. But yeah this damned thing wouldn’t wind down so we were pealing around for half an hour trying to get the undercarriage down so that was interesting. But the worst things that happened to us in a Stirling was on a cross country. This was October, November time and it was over Scotland and we were on our way home, on the homeward leg and the starboard outer engine overheated. Apparently they get, the oil gets super cool and thick and doesn’t circulate so the engine gets, and it’s called coring apparently. Anyway, they had to switch the engine down but that was alright but what wasn’t right was the propellers wouldn’t feather. It wouldn’t feather and stop so it was windmilling so not only had we lost an engine it was still being driven by windmilling causing a terrific lot of drag. Fortunately, we’d got the screen flight engineer with us instructing our flight engineer and he assisted on the way back. We called up. It was a system during the war called Darkie. They wouldn’t allow it now but the posters was of a little black boy. ‘If you’re in trouble call Darkie.’ Well we called Darkie but he wasn’t in unfortunately so we called Group or got on the radio and called Group and they said that we should try and zigzag home going near airfields which we did. We eventually got back to Swinderby and came in to land and the skipper, he’d learned or heard in the mess that you took the trim off if you lost, you know, were in really serious trouble with an engine and it would, it would straighten, help to straighten it up but it didn’t. It had the opposite effect and we swung towards a group of trees and there was a, ‘Brace. Brace,’ from the skipper again and the navigator, one of his jobs when you were landing and taking off was give the airspeed and a Stirling stalled at ninety miles an hour and I can hear Frank’s voice now saying, ‘Ninety. Ninety. Ninety,’ and I was just waiting to crash and then suddenly it was, ‘ninety five,’ and apparently the screen engineer and the skipper were pushing on the rudder to keep it straight and we overshot, went around again and came in safely and landed and when we got back to the control room they said, ‘We didn’t expect to see you lot again.’ So, [laughs] so that was the dark humour I’m afraid but that put me right off Stirlings that did. We were very glad to see the back of them. We did finish the course and I think we lost about five crews while we were there. All crashing. Not altogether the crew’s faults. You know, just and that invariably happened on a Saturday night and that was a Saturday night when we did our little performance so perhaps we were intended to go in. I don’t know. But the next posting was to RAF Syerston. Number 5 Lancaster Finishing School and it was like going from a clapped out old banger to a Rolls Royce, flying Lancasters. Yeah, that was really good. We had some very enjoyable times there. We had to do quite a lot of flying. Practice high level bombing and fighter affiliation where you have a camera instead of a gun and a Spitfire makes attacks on you and that’s all good fun. It is for the gunners and the pilot but not for the rest of the crew. They’re being chucked about all over the place. There was one amusing little incident while we were at Lancaster Finishing School. We came across, one afternoon coming back from somewhere or other, we came across a Flying Fortress flying back to its base somewhere I suppose and we came up to it and we had to slow down to keep, not keep up with it but to keep station with it and to exaggerate this and to show off a bit we dropped the undercarriage and put some flap down to slow the Lancaster down and we did the usual thumbs up and all this sort of thing and then up with the wheels, in with the flaps and zoomed off. I reckon they thought, ‘Show offs,’ but there we are. I’m afraid the skipper did do that a bit. The one I didn’t like him doing though was, which he did quite a bit on the squadron if we had to do any air sea firing we used to chuck a flame float in the water and then we’d fire at it as we went around but if he spotted any ships he generally introduced himself, you know, by going very low but what I didn’t, what I was scared of, he was going to do this with Royal Naval ships ‘cause I know from my experience at home that anything that flew was fired at. I don’t think they’d heard of aircraft recognition. They just fired at everything that flew. In fact they did bring a Fortress down in the river here during the war. It was out, stuck in the mud for ages wasn’t it? So, I had visions of the skipper doing a show off beat up on a destroyer or something and getting a few rounds up our backsides but on one occasion there was a whole line of, it was a very nice sight, of destroyers in line of stern and we got down the same level as level as them and flew along and so I think they flashed good luck to him on the aldis lamp but I had visions of them opening fire on us. I thought, I hope they know what a Lancaster looks like but there we are. So we passed out there ok and then, yes the skipper was anxious to get on a Pathfinder squadron. They did one tour of forty ops if they survived that long and you had to learn each other’s jobs and all about marking and all that sort of thing which we did. We swotted it all up and we duly went for our interview. It was a wing commander, I think, took it and we were all gathered in front of him answering questions and the skipper, his name was Clem Atting, by the way, his name. He had a scarf on. Weren’t supposed to wear scarves like that and the wing commander said, ‘Are you warm enough, Atting?’ ‘Yes, thank you sir. Yes. Very well.’ ‘Well take that bloody scarf off,’ he said [laughs]. So our interview went downhill from then on and needless to say we did not get to a Pathfinder squadron. We were posted to 189 at Fulbeck-in-the-mud we called it. Well when we got there we were issued with gumboots and I’d never, never heard of that before. We were issued with gumboots. So there we were and we were in wooden huts there though. They weren’t nissen huts. They were wooden huts and I remember, you know, that’s right we went there with four other crews because we went in convoy with another truck. There were four crews ‘cause they’d lost four aircraft and when we piled out of the aircraft er out of the trucks waiting to go to some billet somewhere I was hailed by a resident air gunner from the other side of the road, ‘Hello John.’ He said, ‘You’re a chop replacement.’ [laughs] I thought, ‘Good afternoon to you too.’ Well, we know we were obviously or else we wouldn’t have been sent there but I thought what a greeting, you know. We eventually got in our huts and I can very clearly see it now. The beds weren’t made up obviously, it was just, I just laid the biscuits out, flopped on it ‘cause we were a bit weary by that time and I looked back and on the wall there were twenty eight ticks. Was it thirty or, thirty well I think I’ve got in my notes somewhere that it was reduced to thirty three but I don’t think it was thirty three when we were there. I think it was thirty. Anyway, I thought crikey if this crew who were in this hut had done twenty eight, they were on their twenty ninth and they were shot down what hope have we got, you know? We don’t know anything ‘cause it is, it’s luck though really. Its luck. Absolute luck. I know you’ve got to know all your stuff but it is really luck whether you go down on your first or your last. I mean there were very experienced crews who were shot down when we were on the squadron. On one, on our first raid to Horten Fjord in Norway the master bomber was shot down who was in charge of the raid but there we are. Yes, there was another crew in the hut and they were just finishing theirs. They were just finishing. In fact they did finish their tour while we were there but they left behind their flight engineer who was slightly bad I think. Leo Doyle, I think his name was. He had a revolver in his flying boot and he didn’t want to go on leave and have a rest like you did after a tour. He wanted to join 617 squadron, you know and carry on which he eventually did and I met him after he’d been on it for a while and he said, ‘They’re mad,’ he said, ‘They’re quite mad.’ He said, I think he said they were doing a raid on Flushing and they were in line of stern in daylight and they were just getting shot up as they went in, you know. They didn’t take any evasive action. They were just making sure they hit the target so I mean he was, he was a bit flak happy but that was almost too much for him I think [laughs]. Dear of dear. I always remember him. But yeah, we, we’d, as I say our first, first raid was to Horten Fjord. It was a U-Boat base for the North Atlantic and we duly did our stuff there. It was a long sea trip and the Pathfinders marked the coast where we crossed, where we should cross in case you got off course over the sea, made sure you crossed at the right place but we avoided that like the plague because there was a night fighter station just around the corner at Kristiansand and we thought they could well be buzzing around there so we crossed a bit further east but I think we sighted a ME109. I think that was the occasion I sighted an ME109 astern of us but it didn’t attack us and we kept quiet as well. The second one was not quite so clever. That was at Ladburgen on the Dortmund Ems canal. It was at a place where the water was higher than the surrounding countryside and so the banks were very important and 5 Group’s job was to go there periodically and knock them down and we were, fortunately or unfortunately, that was our second raid. That wasn’t the first time they’d been there but obviously that was our first one there and there was a terrific lot of flak. Naturally they wanted to stop us. They got a bit grumpy about us knocking all this stuff down but we got, we got back ok. I can’t remember. I’ve got some notes here about them but the next one was to Bohlen and that was an oil refinery. Most of our raids were on oil refineries because at that time the Germans were very short of oil towards the end of the war and no we didn’t do much of this flattening of cities and things. We only did a couple of those I suppose. But Bohlen, that was a long trip but uneventful. The next one was to Harburg which was eventful. It was a great big oil refinery on the River Ems. It was both sides. it was a huge, huge place and we were routed in past the Frisian Islands who all had a go at us as we went past which I thought it was a bit uncharitable and then we turned right smartly, right over the middle of Hamburg which again, I thought was a bit silly because they all thought we were going to bomb Hamburg and of course everything went off there and I could see from the turret that the whole place was well alight. It was like day. Flames and flares and everything. It was, it was like hell. You know. Like flying into hell and as we came in I noticed that there was a JU88 poking about. It was so bright I could see the markings on the wings. I warned the skipper. I said, ‘A JU88 starboard quarter up. Prepare to corkscrew starboard,’ and at the same time Eddie Jordan the bomb aimer was giving his, ‘Left. Left. Steady. Right a bit’ and at the same time as he said, ‘Bombs gone.’ I said, ‘Corkscrew starboard. Go,’ as this blooming thing came in and I opened fire and it broke away. I don’t know whether I, I think I must have hit it but he didn’t hit us. That was the main thing. The purpose was to evade it, avoid it. Not to shoot down German aeroplanes but to not get shot down yourself but obviously if you could hit him you would. But we dived out of there at a terrific speed and into the darkness and comparative quiet and the skipper got his, got the heading for home, you know, or first leg of going home and off we went . I think the rest of the, when we got back to Fulbeck we found that there were four, there were four missing. Four of our lads were shot down including some very good friends of ours who arrived on the squadron with us you know, when we arrived. Flying Officer Smith. I can’t remember his Christian name. It was D. It might have been David but I’m not sure now but he did a remarkable thing. He, whilst doing this fighter affiliation at Lancaster, at er when we first got to the squadron you think you’re all ready to go into ops but you don’t. You do quite a lot of training and the drill was when you’d finished the exercise was to take the Spitfire back to Metheringham where it came from because he wouldn’t know where he was and then you know, a guy would go down and well on this occasion a Spitfire formated a bit too close and took about seven foot off the wing off the Lanc and Smithy baled the crew out, one of whom always said he’d have time to do his bottom straps up on his parachute. Well he didn’t. He went straight through his parachute harness and was killed when he hit the ground of course and the Spitfire wasn’t damaged and followed the parachute out to see but there was nothing on the end of it. And Smithy landed the Lancaster safely and it had, you know he was on the Harburg raid with us and he got shot down.
GC: You talk about your crew. Tell us a bit about what they were like. What kind of characters they were.
JC: Well, the other gunner, he was a good friend of mine. Much the same sort of type. Bit shorter than me. The flight engineer was quite old. Bert Shaw. He, he must have been nearly thirty. We were, I mean, I was nineteen, eighteen or nineteen. Skipper was twenty two. The others were about that age. I think I was the youngest but Bert, he was very nice. He was married and he was, he drove a fire engine in civvy life but he was very domesticated and he ironed our collars and things for us. He loved doing them. It was just as well because we couldn’t do it and the bomb aimer, he was Eddie Jordan. He was a nice chap. Very well spoken and educated. Like the skipper. Not that we weren’t but you know, he, they were a little bit, I think, better than ourselves. The wireless op Bill Mobley he was a good mate of mine. Got into a few scrapes. They borrowed the, him and a mate of his borrowed the flight commander’s motorbike one night and pranged it. Finished up in Wroughton Hospital and the next day the skipper said, ‘I think we aught to give Bill a look,’ and I said, ‘Well are we going over in the car?’ ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘We’ll fly over and so we did a low level attack on Wroughton Hospital. How we didn’t get, well he did get caught eventually. He, he, when you take off in a Lancaster you climb steadily until you get a good height before you bank. The skipper thought he was in a Spitfire and used to go off like, unfortunately one day the station commander was in the control tower when this Lancaster flew just overhead and he said, ‘Who’s that?’ ‘Flying officer Atting, sir.’ So Flying Officer Atting was sent to the naughty aircrew school at Sheffield for a week or was it a fort, a week I think. Flight lieutenants and above, flying officers and above went there to the naughty boys school and they had great fun there apparently. The first night he was there they, it was in a famous old hall and they took the fish down from the cabinets, set fire to some furniture and were toasting them apparently [laughs] But we went on leave so we thought it was a jolly good idea this Sheffield business but when we got back off leave and Clem came back and he said, ‘I’ll show you where we were.’ So we hopped aboard our aeroplane and duly went over to Sheffield and he showed us at very close quarters [laughs] the school.[laughs] It’s funny we didn’t all finish up there to be honest but you know, we should get into bits of bother but some things we got away with and it will probably catch up with me when they hear all this but some of it, when we were on ops we dropped stuff called Window. You’ve probably heard all about it. Strips, well it was in packs, packages and they were put down the flare chutes, down the chutes and when they got in the slipstream they burst open and scattered. Well, the skipper and the bomb aimer had girlfriends in this village not too far from Fulbeck and one afternoon we were stooging around flying and they thought they’d give them a look and I mean a look. Dear oh dear. We, I remember looking up at the church tower as we came past and we Windowed the village and they must have known who it was because at that time, or hitherto the markings, we were CA 189 squadron, our squadron letters were CA in big red letters on the aircraft followed by the letter L or E or whatever and they decided to outline it in orange which I thought was a bit unfair really but anyway they were done and of course they stuck out like a sore thumb. I don’t know which raid it was.
[pause]
Ah yes I think it was a place called Lutzkendorf, another oil refinery job and we were diverted to Manston because of fog everywhere and the next morning we took off to go fly back to Fulbeck and again this Window stuff, dropped by somebody else before it had burst open hit all our aerials and took them away so we couldn’t contact anyone on RT and another one of the other squadrons said, ‘Well follow us, you know. We’ll take you back.’ So we did. What we did we didn’t know was that this other character was going to visit his auntie on the way back [laughs] which was down in a valley so we duly followed him down and saw his auntie and flew back to Fulbeck and later on in the day there was a complaint. The adjutant received a complaint from a wing commander who was having his breakfast looking down on two, two Lancasters. Reported us. And the adjutant thought it was great fun and tore the complaint up into the wpb. So that was that. He was really good at that. He looked after us very well, did our adj. I got caught at home on leave cycling without my hat by a snotty provo flight lieutenant who didn’t know the front, the back of an aeroplane and I had to show him my pass of course, 189 Squadron, Fulbeck. The next day when I got back from leave the skipper said, ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘The adj has had a complaint from the provo marshall about you.’ I said, ‘Oh?’ ‘Cycling without a hat.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘It was duly filed.’ Considering most, a lot of his time was taken up writing letters to the families you know so to get one about someone not wearing a hat I can only just imagine what he thought. Well there we are.
GC: Sounds like you had more fun than serious stuff.
JC: Well we did have a lot of fun. We, the skipper was always, I mean you’d be wondering what to do one afternoon and the door would burst open. ‘Let us leap into the air,’ he would say. I don’t know what sort of excuse he gave to anybody to get and so off we’d go. Mind you there were official high level bombing practices and fighter affiliation with a Spitfire. One afternoon we were coming back from a high level bombing exercise which we couldn’t do because there was cloud everywhere and this Spitfire came up, went like that. And I went like that. And I said to the skipper, ‘I think he wants to play games,’ so we sort of meant to play around a bit and he went off and started making attacks on us and for half an hour we chucked that Lanc around the fire, around the sky and it was great fun. Well, it was for the gunners as I say and for the pilot. The rest of the crew were groaning and moaning. Hanging on tight. And I think Eddie Jordan had a bit of tooth trouble so that as we dived down that started making his tooth ache. So they didn’t think it was very funny but at the end of it he got in right close and went like that as much to say, you did alright. So that was good fun. But it wasn’t all like that you know. There was some dodgy bits. Really dodgy bits. Yeah. One of the other daylights we did was to Essen. That was a thousand bomber raid and that was quite a sight and we never did see the ground. It was covered in cloud and we had to bomb on a sky marker. Can’t remember the name of it. Wanganui flare I think they called them but you had to bomb on a certain heading otherwise you’d be all over the place and when we left, I always remember this, when we left the cloud which had been all flat there was a big bump in, over Essen and we never even saw the ground. So that was one occasion where we did what you might call open bombing, didn’t have a specific thing to hit. After that came Wurzburg. Now this was the, we didn’t, we didn’t go to Dresden. I’ve got a note in my diary that the boys have gone to Dresden. We didn’t. We were obviously stood down for some reason. Probably been the night before because you didn’t get to do two consecutive nights ‘cause you couldn’t really ‘cause you didn’t get up till lunchtime. You’d have to get up, have lunch and go straight into briefing so there was generally a night free but we went to Wurzburg which was a big open city and I don’t know why we went there but after the war I read it was troop concentrations. The Russians wanted us to sort it out and that was the only time we carried incendiaries, carried a cookie which was a four thousand pounder like a huge big dustbin and incendiaries and when we left the place the place was alight but on the way back we got into a bit of a spot of bother we were diverted, well we were routed home between Karlsruhe and Stuttgart. Two places to avoid like the plague. And we were poodling along in the dark minding our own business, halfway home and suddenly bump, the radar searchlight went straight onto us. The blue one. So I thought, ‘Hello. We’re in trouble here.’ That’s hastily followed by five ordinary ones so we are immediately floodlit and that was smartly followed by all the ackack guns in what we found out later was Karlsruhe. We’d gone right slam bang over Karlsruhe. We’d been flying straight and level for ages so they must have had us tuned up a treat so how they didn’t knock us out of the sky I’ll never know. It felt as though someone was banging the aircraft with a fourteen pound sledgehammer all over it. You couldn’t hear the engines, you know. I thought they’d all stopped you know one of those funny sort of things that happen you see and the skipper did everything with that Lancaster that, things you would do in a Spitfire short of rolling it and eventually we emerged into the darkness. The lights went out, the guns stopped and it felt awfully silent and the skipper called us all up in turn to see if we were alright and then he sent the flight engineer around with a torch to see if there was anything, damage anywhere. He couldn’t see anything obviously bad and we continued home rather silently but at lunchtime the next day we went down to the aeroplane to do our daily inspections and things and it was like a pepper pot. It had got shiny new squares of aluminium all over it where the lads had filled up, covered the holes up and I thought, ‘Blimey,’ I looked up at the mid upper turret and there were two or three right, right under that. They went in one side, straight across the aircraft and out the other side. It’s only aluminium and these were red hot bits of steel and they were, well why we weren’t seriously hit, or the engines, none of the engines were damaged.
GC: Was there a, or what was the main difference between day and night? Was there, was there did you prefer to do day or do night? Was one more dangerous than the other?
JC: Well, daylight was dangerous in that you could be seen. On the other hand you could see. You could see fighters but the daylight, I don’t think we had a fighter escort over Essen because there was too many of us. There was another one over Nordhausen which I’ll mention next but on that we had a fighter escorts, Typhoons, and they went in front of us strafing all the airfields, keeping them on the ground and then escorting us but we didn’t have [pause], later on we went to Flensburg. We didn’t have a fighter escorts then so I don’t know. Sometimes we did. But it could be very dodgy. A friend of mine, Basil Martin, unfortunately he’s dead now but he was on a squadron in 3 Group and they did a lot of daylights over France leading up to D-Day and after D-Day and they had quite a lot of fighter trouble. In fact, they had, I remember him telling me once there were three of them flying to the target in broad daylight and an ME109 came after them and shot the back one down, then the next one down and his gunner shot that one, shot the ME109 down. They didn’t get a medal for it though. They just got to the target and back again but there were a lot of very short, obviously into France, so very short operations and at one time they, you had to do, or so I heard after the war, that you had to do two of those to count as one ‘cause most of our trips were pretty long you know, sort of ten hours, ten and a half hours. Quite a long while. Yes. Yeah, that was the incident at Karlsruhe. Strangely, the earlier time that 189 lost four aeroplanes was when they went to Karlsruhe. Lost four. We were replacements for the ones that were shot down over Karlsruhe so they were trying to have a go at us as well you see. It’s strange isn’t it?
GC: Did you get superstitious about things like that?
JC: Well, I don’t know. You do get a bit that way. I always put my right flying boot on first and if I didn’t I took them both off and put them on again and people had lots of silly things that you did [pause]. But then nobody queried it.
GC: You also, you also talked about quote ‘hijinks’ in this Lancaster. What was it really like because a Lancaster is a big plane to be throwing around quite so willy nilly.
JC: Yes. Indeed. Well, I’ll tell you something we did one day which, nobody believed us anyway, so I might as well tell you and I couldn’t put it in my logbook otherwise we would have all been court martialled but it’s in my diary. We’d been up for some high level bombing practice over Wainfleet range which is in the Wash. There was an area there where you dropped [prunes?] as we called them. They were smoke ones in the day and at night they were flash and a chap, or I think there were two of them, sat in concrete bunkers taking a bearing on your hits so they could tell you what you’d missed or hit. Well, we got over Wainfleet range and you couldn’t see a thing. We were up at about eighteen thousand feet so the skipper said, ‘Well we’ll do a bit of three engine flying,’ so feathered the starboard outer and that meant, I was in the rear turret that meant I couldn’t use my turret. Then he did the port outer which, I mean the Lancaster will fly quite happily on two engines and then he did the starboard inner and I thought, ‘Oh hang on.’ I wound my turret by hand on the beam so that if necessary I could open the back doors and go out because we had, we had a pilot type chute then for the rear turret. You didn’t have to get out the turret but in the mid upper turret you had to get out, go a few of yards down the fuselage, get your parachute out of a housing, clip it on and then go to the door and, you know it was a bit of a palaver which a lot of people never made of course but anyway we’re flying on one engine. That was the port inner left. And he said, ‘Feather port inner.’ And the poor old Bert Shaw, his voice was getting drier and drier you know, he said, ‘Feathering port inner, skipper,’ faithfully doing as he was told and that meant shutting the engine down and then feathering it so they wouldn’t windmill. So there were four fans stopped. Poor old Bill Mobley, the wireless op, he’d got all this gear on. He thought, ‘That’s gone a bit quiet.’ He looked out the astrodome and saw four propellers stopped. He said, ‘You bloody fool,’ he said, ‘I’ve got all my electric gear on here.’ Well they wouldn’t have had enough on the batteries to unfeather so he shut everything off in a hurry and then came the dramatic words, ‘Unfeather starboard outer,’ and fortunately there was enough power to turn the props and it windmilled and fired. There was a puff of smoke came past the turret and I thought, ‘We’re alright now,’ and all four were running but we weren’t diving down very fast but apparently the skipper had seen a photograph of a Lancaster with all four engines feathered allegedly beating up the control tower but of course that was a trick photograph but the engines were all feathered. They were all stopped and feathered so it must have been done. So he, being a very, if someone could do it he’ll do it, you know. He’ll have a go.
GC: I must admit I’d heard that and you’ve just confirmed ‘cause everybody went, ‘No it can’t be done.’ I had heard it so. You just, you just proved it.
JC: Oh yes. We didn’t have, we weren’t engineless for very long because as I say the wireless op exploded. He should have told him what he was going to go ‘cause he’d got his radio gear on and all the nav equipment and everything.
GC: Yeah.
JC: All draining from the batteries which we wanted for that initial restart but I did quietly tell the fitter engines once ‘cause we used to have a beer with them, you know and he didn’t believe us and I thought, well that’s fair enough. I know it was true, the rest of the crew knew it was true but no one dare breathe a word officially about it or we would all have been, well the skipper would have been court martialled. That’s for sure. So that was, I suppose, the silliest thing we did. Although, I did something very silly once. In the mid upper turret there was, they were electrically fired and there was cut out gear so that you couldn’t’ shoot your fins off or kill the rear gunner or people up in the front you know and there was taboogie which lifted them clear as you went around. Well, we were up one day. We put a, put a smoke float out to shoot at and the blooming things wouldn’t work and I thought, ‘Oh hell.’ So I thought, well I can still fire them ‘cause I can fire them manually by pushing the [sear in] underneath the screw with my toggle and I waited until we were clear and did it and I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ And your mind plays tricks then. Everything went silent and I thought, ‘I’ve shot the blooming aeroplane down,’ and I hastily looked around at all the wing tips and everything and everything was all quiet and I never said a word. I reported that the guns wouldn’t fire and they were all put right but a few rounds had been fired and they would know that but nothing ever happened. I was lucky there. I could have done some damage to the aeroplane just because I wanted to fire the guns. Well, you know all the trouble you go to go out there and do everything and then you can’t do it but the bomb aimer had a slight accident once too because he, he was in charge of the front turret although I don’t think he ever went in it but you had to go out and do a DI on your guns every day and I was in the mid upper turret and I heard a single shot and that was from the front turret and that was Eddie had done it. He’d, because you cock and fire but you have to have the the fire on safety not on safe of course but to get around that you’ve got fire to put a breechblock forward and pull it back and take a round out. Anyway, this single shot went across the airfield, I don’t know where it finished up. We looked anxiously ahead of the aeroplane because out in dispersal but it must have passed over the airfield somewhere but we never heard of anyone being shot so we, we didn’t say too much about that.
GC: There was probably a cow lying in a field somewhere shot by a Lancaster.
JC: That was a bit funny that but there we are.
GC: What was it, I mean you, you’re a upper gunner which was quite a unique place? What was that like?
JC: Well it was, you were very exposed of course. You got a very good view of everything. I mean you could look all around three hundred and sixty degrees whereas in the rear turret your vision was limited to dead astern and each side although there was bits of equipment and stuff in the way. You couldn’t really see properly. The only proper way to see was straight ahead and there the, it was a clear vision channel, clear vision panel where the Perspex had been removed so you could see out better but your visibility wasn’t as good as in the mid upper which was just all Perspex so you had to make sure that was really clean. It was, it was quite a good, quite a good position I suppose but as I say very exposed I suppose but you could see what was going on. Wasn’t altogether a good idea. One of the scariest things was, that I found and no doubt other people thought so too was they never seemed to notice them but you could be flying along at night, pitch dark and suddenly on the beam there’d be a sudden big flare like a full moon, a new moon hanging in the sky. It was a German night fighter. You knew it was, you knew it was a fighter there, it was a great temptation to stare at the damned thing but you didn’t know because he was going to fly across and see who was silhouetted against these flares so you had to look into the dark part of the sky to see what he was up to and in the meantime your aeroplane seemed to be illuminated. Although it was all matt paint it used to shine and I thought you know he must see us and you’d stare and stare and look around and try and, but that was the scariest thing because you knew that a German night fighter had just done that and just dropped that flare with the very intention of seeing who he could see silhouetted against the light because it was a brilliant like a new full moon and it seemed to hang there for hours but in fact it was only a few minutes but it seemed ages before it fizzled out and then you’d get back to darkness.
[pause]
Yes, Nordhausen, that was another daylight. That was, in actual fact it was the place where they were making these rockets underground so we weren’t, obviously couldn’t do anything about that but there was lots of barracks there. A lot of troops and we, apparently the SS was supposed to have moved in and had made their headquarters there and so it was decided to give them a visit for breakfast and there was about two hundred and fifty of us from 5 Group with fighter escort who’d gone in front, spraying the airfield and when we left the whole place was alight. Blew the whole place up, the railway system you know which blew it up but there was an unfortunate incident. This is something you’d see from an upper turret. I was watching an aircraft from 49 squadron who were with us at Bardney. There were always two squadrons on RAF stations. We were with 49 squadron and their letters were EA and I was watching this. It was EA F-Freddie and I saw its bomb doors open. It was behind us and down like that, saw its bomb doors open and the cookie just came out and then the whole lot blew up. It had been hit by, hit by flak and it just, I could feel the heat from it. Or I fancied I could. You know, it was, it just fell away you know. No one got out of it of course. They would have all been killed instantly and I looked it up, I’ve got a book showing all the losses, 5 Group, Bomber Command losses and that was set in there of course, Nordhausen EA F. All black cross against all of them. I looked up the one of Smithy’s crew that was shot down at Harburg and I think, I can’t remember exactly, some of them were killed. Smithy and another one of the crew were very badly injured and they were taken to a prisoner of war camp. Why they weren’t taken to hospital I don’t know. Perhaps it was easier to take them to a prisoner of war camp where they died a few hours later. So they must have been in a bad way. So they, they were killed. But I was really sad about that because they, we knew them so well. You know they’d been with us. They’d joined the squadron with us and he’d done that jolly good landing with a damaged Lancaster and then well I imagine that was their fourth trip. That was our fourth but but that was the only one I actually saw blow up in daylight but at night you see rumours abounded that the Germans were firing up a shell called a scarecrow which burst with a lot of flame and smoke. The idea being to put the wind up the aircrew that it was an aircraft going down but after the war the Germans said, ‘We never had any such thing.’
GC: You didn’t see one.
JC: So what we thought, what we thought was a scarecrow was an aircraft. They said, ‘We never had any such thing.’ It was a rumour that was very strong. Oh that’s a scarecrow gone off. Look. But it was, in a way I suppose it was a bit of comfort because you’d think that wasn’t an aeroplane that was a scarecrow but I’m afraid it wasn’t. We had to mark, I had to tell the navigator of any aircraft going down because he marked them on his chart for use after the war to track down the, which they did, of course, they tracked down all these people. And they even tracked down some aircrew who were unfortunately handed over to the gestapo and the SS and some of them were shot and I mean that’s completely against the Geneva Convention but wherever they knew who it was who did it they caught them and they were brought to trial at Nuremberg.
GC: What else can you remember about serving during World War 2? What was life like on and off the base as well?
JC: Oh, well it was strange really because on the squadron you were living a perfectly normal, peaceful life. You’d go to the pictures, go to the mess, have a few beers or if you were stood down you could go in to Nottingham or somewhere, stay the night, have a few beers and it was a perfectly normal life and then someone would stick their head around the door and say there’s a war and you’d have to go down to the mess or somewhere to have a look at the battle order to see if you were on and if you were well that’s, you went to briefing and had your flying meal. The last supper as it was irreverently referred to and away you went and so suddenly you were transported from a peaceful English village to the middle of a war and back again. If you were lucky.
GC: How did you, when, when you came back like from an op what was the plane like? Was it quiet? Were people chatting or -
JC: We didn’t chat. That’s the remarkable thing when you see these films of, especially American ones they’re all yacketing away. There wasn’t a word over the intercom unless it was necessary. There were certain navigation beacons and things during the war which flashed letters and I’d report those to the nav to help his navigation and in the rear turret you could take a drift so he could check the wind. That was a big trouble, not knowing the direction of the wind because Group would give you a wind but it wasn’t always, it wasn’t always terribly accurate and you only wanted to be a few degrees off and you’d be miles out. So that was the navigation was, I think we did remarkably well but you could see, I could see the target from miles away. You know, there was a glow in the sky for a start because everyone’s been there before you. The Pathfinders have been there, been down and had a look, dropped what they called primary blind markers, there’d would be flares dropped all over the place. Light the whole place up. There’d be searchlights on looking for the aeroplanes and the whole place would be full of activity so a good quarter of an hour before you got there you’d hear all this chatter over the VHF about putting the target indicators down and the master bomber would be controlling all this as though it was a picnic you know. It was quite remarkable and you were still a quarter of an hour away. So by the time you got there you knew everybody [laughs] everyone would be well awake but you could see it quite clearly and you’d think to yourself you’ve got to go through all that lot and hopefully out the other side and if you were early you had to drop your bombs between two very specified times and if you were early you had to do an orbit and come in again which was not a terribly good idea but you had to do it. We did that once. We did that over Komotau. We got there a bit early and I remember thinking I’ll have to have a, keep a sharp look out here going around for a meander around first but of course in daylight it’s nothing like that. There’s just smoke and fire. That’s all you see. There’s not the, I don’t know it’s not the darkness there. Strange. But, as I say, life on the, you know, it’s strange, you just carried on normally. You’d go down to the section in the morning see if any, see what was doing. Do the aircraft, do your DI on the aircraft and have your meals in the mess. You wouldn’t know where the boys were going if you weren’t on, you know. You wouldn’t know that till they got back. You’d say, I remember watching when I got, first got on the squadron I wanted to see. I stood down by the flights one evening as they took off and two squadrons of Lancasters so that was about what thirty odd aircraft all in line around the peritrack going slowly past, then turning onto the runway where there was a black and white chequered caravan and there would be a group of people there waving goodbye to their friends or whatever and you’d get a green from the caravan and the brakes would be on, the engines would be revved up and then the brakes would come off and you’d surge forward to give you an initial kick down the runway. There would be a wave from these people. I don’t know whether they were pleased to see us go or what I don’t know but there was always a crowd there. WAAFs and all sorts giving you a wave and away you’d go down the runway hoping you get off ‘cause they were heavy. You’d got ten tonnes of petrol and six tons of high explosive and if there wasn’t much wind and you were on a short runway it was a bit iffy. It was a bit iffy. You wouldn’t miss the village by much.
GC: Do you remember anything else from serving?
JC: About life on the -
GC: Just life or ops or the crew.
JC: Well, there was another. The next raid we went to was Komotau in Czechoslovakia. That was an awfully long way to go. That was another oil refinery and when we got back over the coast there was thick fog everywhere and we were diverted to Gaydon. We’d never heard of it and the nav said to the wireless op, ‘Are you sure it’s Gaydon?’ [laughs]. And we were getting a bit short of petrol and everywhere over the countryside was just grey and another advantage of being in the mid upper turret I saw in the distance on the port side they looked like bees around a honey pot. I said, ‘There’s some aircraft over on the port side, skipper,’ and we flew over and there they were. There was our squadron and another one all milling around. That was still thick fog and it was a Canadian Operational Training Unit with Wellingtons and the poor chap on the caravan at the end all he could do was fire white very lights to show where the runway started and you knew the heading ‘cause you could see that from your paperwork and we came in, descended through this murk and fortunately there was a runway at the other end of it and we landed safely but we left two or three of the squadron in the fields around. We brought the crew back. We were stuck there for ages and didn’t even get a cup of tea. We were just stuck with our aeroplanes and I thought I don’t think much of this and eventually we, the fog cleared and we took off and got back to, got back to base but that was a bit, a bit naughty that. There were no facilities there at all for a safe landing. It was a case of dropping down through the fog and hoping you were over the runway and in, pointing in the right direction and as I say a lot of them didn’t. The other daylight we did was a place called Flensburg which was on the Danish German border on the bit of land that sticks up and I think we were after some shipping there in the harbour. When we got there there was a hospital ship in the harbour too and when we got there it was ten tenths of cloud so we had to bring them back or we should have brought them back. There was an area in the North Sea for dropping bombs safe you know which shipping were advised of and kept clear of but unfortunately some of the idiots with us were just dropping them as soon as they got over the sea and our aircraft, I mean I looked up and said, ‘Starboard skipper,’ and he was on the, and there were these blooming bombs dropping down. We could have easily been hit, hit with a bomb and shot, you know, knocked from the sky. We religiously went to this area in the North Sea where you should jettison your bombs and even then that was ten tenths of cloud and skipper went down through the cloud in case there were some ships there, there wasn’t and there was splashes going on all over the place from people dropping bombs through the cloud but that was, it’s disappointing when that happened. You go there, done everything and then you bring them back or come back. Quite often, well reading my diary it happened three or four times, we got out to dispersal and the raid would be cancelled for some reason and you’d be all psyched up for it and it was disappointing not to go, you know. You had to unwind then and go back to being in a village again. I mean it was strange. It was, being out at dispersal was the worst time, I think. You didn’t know what to say, what to do and then a verey cartridge would go off. In we go. As soon as you got on board the engine started. You were alright. You were, you were there and you knew what you were going, you knew where you were going and you knew what you had to do and you’re perfectly, perfectly happy.
GC: Can you remember the moment you found out the war was over? Can you remember what that felt like?
JC: Yes. I could remember that fairly well because we went out to a pub and there was no beer and we cycled around for all afternoon and there was no beer anywhere. It was an anti-climax really. You were so used to doing that, that way of life that when it stopped you felt you’d missed it in some ghoulish sort of way. I can’t quite explain it but, I don’t know, it’s like anything that you’re doing regularly and then it suddenly stops. However horrible it was you still miss it and I did miss it, I must say but we were kept busy. We had to, well one of the nicest jobs we did was bringing back prisoners of war. We flew in a field near Brussels and twenty [emotional]. Excuse me.
GC: Do you want to stop?
JC: There was twenty four of them at a time with their little bags of stuff and one of them crashed unfortunately. I don’t know why. Whether they got, ‘cause you had to be careful where they, where they were put because of the balance of the aircraft and one of them took off and crashed almost immediately and killed everybody on board. There was twenty four POW’s and the crew which wasn’t a good sign. But that was the only action that I know of. We brought them back. I can’t remember where we brought them back to. [pause] It was a little airfield. Dunsfold. Dunsfold. And there were ladies there to see to, you know I thought there would be flags flying and all this but there was a tent and some ladies, you know Women’s Voluntary Services or something making them some tea and supposedly dishing out railway warrants and one thing and another. I thought what a homecoming. I thought they’d be all, it was strange really I, ‘cause the ones we had were all ex-aircrew, well air crew. I mean, I don’t know what they’d been through of course individually but they didn’t look at all happy about going into an aeroplane. Perhaps their memories of the last time they were in it weren’t very good and they’d left on fire or something. They didn’t look at all happy really. Tried to chat to them and then as I say when we landed they all trooped out into this tent. All very well, you know, I know I didn’t expect the band to be playing but you know, I thought there’d be -
GC: Yeah.
JC: Some officers there or something to welcome them back. Perhaps that had already been done at Brussels. I don’t know. I don’t think they’d been hanging about long. I think they, you know as soon as they were released I think they were sent to this airfield. There were a lot of them. I mean there were eighteen thousand aircrew injured or POW’s. There was about ten thousand prisoners. We were told that they had a file on us all over there. Well, a lot of us you know. We weren’t allowed to take, we had to empty our pockets completely. Not a bus ticket or a cinema ticket or anything and we had emergency pack with barley sugar and chewing gum and fishing gear. I don’t know if anyone ever did catch anything with that. Silk maps of the countryside you were going to try and get out of. A whole load of stuff in a plastic case and that’s all you had. You had to hand everything else in. That was put in a bag and you collected it when you got back. Well, people were, I mean we had lectures on all this and when you were interrogated they’d say, ‘What’s on at,’ and they’d mention your local cinema, you know, ‘What’s on at the Regal this week,’ and all this sort of thing and you’d think well if he knows that he must know this you know and it was just a way of getting information out of you but as I say we weren’t allowed to have a bus ticket or a cinema ticket or anything in your pocket. There was money in this thing as well by the way and a compass of course so you could attempt to evade. Oh that’s another thing we did on the squadron. There was escape and evasion exercises. You’d be taken out, this happened two or three times, we were taken out in lorries, there were no signposts anywhere, taken out in lorries and dropped and you had to make your way back to camp. Unfortunately, we were dropped quite close to Newark and Nottingham and places like that and a lot of people bombed off into the town [laughs] so they weren’t a hundred percent successful but I did my own evasion, escape and evasion one night. I was on the old pits not thinking of anything in particular and the skipper put his head around the door and said, ‘Anyone want to go into Newark for a pint? He said, ‘I’ve got to go in on the motorbike. I’ll bring you back.’ So no one else said, I said, ‘Yeah. Ok,’ ‘cause they had lovely fish and chips in Newark and the beer wasn’t bad either so I went on the back of the motorbike with the skipper into Newark. We arranged a rendezvous for the return, 11 o’clock I think it was or half eleven which I attended but no one else did unfortunately. He didn’t turn up. So, I’ve got a heck of a walk here, back to Fulbeck. About twelve miles I think from Newark and I didn’t know the way either. It was a network of little roads all around that part of Lincoln you know. There’s no big main road as such. Anyway, I struck off due east I think and I thought well I must eventually come across it and walked and walked and walked and eventually saw a familiar looking nissen hut and, which was the washrooms and things on the outskirts of the airfield so I knew that I was, I was home. So, I went and had a drink. I remember putting my, cupping my hands under the tap and I had a go at him the next day. He apologised. He said, ‘I’m sorry, John,’ he said, ‘Things got a bit out of hand,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t get back until later,’ So whether he did ever turned up at the rendezvous I don’t know but I walked home back to Fulbeck. That wasn’t our only walk. We walked from Nottingham to Syerston Lancaster Finishing School. That was a whole crew of us. We’d overstayed our leave a bit at, in Nottingham, missed the last train, ‘cause we used to cycled into a place, leave your bike against the wall, get on the train and I mean your bike was there the next day. Nobody pinched bikes in those days but on this occasion we had to walk all the way back to Syerston and when we got back to camp we were on the early morning flying detail. Couldn’t have been worse really. We got some breakfast and then got into the air and that was that. Oh dear oh dear. So that was, life had its ups and downs you see, Gemma. It had its up and downs. In more ways than one of course. The last raid, believe it or not, was the same place we went on the first one. We went to Norway again to a place called Tonsberg but this was another oil refinery and as we got closer, I mean we’d normally bomb at about eighteen thousand feet. Something like that. The master bomber told the force to reduce height to, I think it was fifteen and then down to ten and I thought this is silly this is and then to eight. Eight thousand feet which put you in range of all the light flak that they hose up at you and I thought, and I mean it was like, literally flying into a, you think well we’ll never get out the other side without being hit by something and as we went in a searchlight came on us and the skipper said, ‘Shoot that out, John,’ because we were so low, you see and he banked the aircraft and I fired and it went out so that was that. One searchlight less. But we went in and bombed and we came out alright but I don’t think we lost any but there were aircraft lost due to this flak but during briefing the thing came up about this searchlight and the interrogating officer said, ‘Fired at, what eight thousand feet?’ And I said, ‘Well it went out.’ I didn’t say well the skipper instructed me to fire at it but he didn’t say anything, the skipper. He should have said, ‘Well I instructed him to fire,’ but he didn’t and I thought oh well. It did go out. I thought to myself the range of these bullets is quite, quite a long way and there’s no, gravity’s going to help them on their way and if they just hear a few bullets scattering around they’ll probably put it out and they did you see. I don’t suppose I hit the light. I probably scared the living daylights out of the crew.
GC: I was going to say how aware of other squadrons were you or what else was going on in the war?
JC: Well of course you’d read the papers. You see, we were in 5 Group and people said there’s 5 Group and there’s Bomber Command and it’s true we did have our own sort of little things. We had our own corkscrew procedure which was different to Bomber Command and a lot of the raids were 5 Group squadrons like the one at Nordhausen. That was just 5 Group squadrons. But having said that I mean a lot of the raids were from everybody, you know and we all used 100 Group. They had Lancasters and Flying Fortresses and all sorts and they did all these trick things with radio to fool the Germans, you know. For two or three weeks the German night fighter force was controlled by a flying officer in Uxbridge. German speaking flying officer in Uxbridge before they twigged that, you know, they knew it was being done. There were all sorts of tricks there was, with strange names, strange code names and some aircraft had different equipment to others. 49 squadron who we were, we were with at Fulbeck had Village Inn which was a radar equipment fixed to the rear turret which showed when a fighter was coming after you which was quite handy but we never had it. But they didn’t lose any aircraft well apart from the one that I saw blow up. That was from flak. That wasn’t from fighters. They didn’t lose aircraft like we did. I saw the flight engineer from one of the crews who was shot down over Harburg and he met the German night fighter pilot who shot them down and he’d made, it was a head on attack and that’s something you don’t read in the books because you’d never get a head on attack at night cause you’d never see them quickly enough but there was so much, it was so light from all the fires and flares they were doing head on attacks. That’s remarkable isn’t it? Well the one that came after us wasn’t. It was a normal sort of attack but the sneaky thing they did they was they had a gun, an upward firing gun the JU88s musicschragge or something they called it and they used to creep under the, under you and then just fire a few rounds into your wing where your petrol tanks were. So we used to do banking searches quite frequently so you could look down and see if there was anything going on but even that they knew about of course and they’d follow you around so that wasn’t foolproof but at least they knew you were alert and you know we were having a go. Having a look. I think that helps. If there’s one that’s going straight and level and not doing anything he’d going to be an easier target than the one who’s manoeuvring about the sky. There was one, well it wasn’t amusing for the poor WAAF but we got back. I don’t know which, I can’t remember what raid it was but anyway we got back to dispersal, we’d got out of the aeroplane and we were waiting for the truck to turn up and pick us up and it duly arrived and just as she got out a JU88 came over the airfield strafing the runway and everybody and everything and we just sort of looked lazily, you know. It was just part of the night for us but she dashed in to the arms of the skipper and we gave him a cheer of course. Poor girl. She was scared out of her wits. Well it was a bit scary I suppose for her. It’s not something that usually happens and this chap was firing and doing all sorts of things and they used to drop these anti-personnel butterfly bombs all over the place which was a bit, a bit naughty I thought because they used to come in and shoot aircraft down when they were coming in to land which I thought was very uncharitable. On the coast at night there were two searchlights like that that guided you back in over Lincolnshire and we avoided them like the plague and you were supposed to put your nav lights on to avoid collisions which we never did. Never put our nav lights on so perhaps that’s the sort of reason you get away with it, you know. But collisions, there were a lot of aircraft lost through collisions. When you think of it, in the night, no lights. I remember in the mid upper turret, well I don’t know whether if we were going out or coming home but I think we were coming home and I looked up and there was another Lancaster just slowly crossing us, ever so close, I reckon if I could put our hand out I could have touched his blister, you know his H2S blister and I daren’t say anything to the skipper ‘cause if he’d have dived his tail would have come up and hit him and I thought if we just keep going we’re going to miss and so we went like that and I, just afterwards, when it had cleared, I said, ‘We just had a near miss skipper.’ Nobody else saw it. It was really really close. We were just on a slightly different course and nearly at the same height within a foot or two. So that’s another you know a bit near. If he’d been a bit lower or we’d have been a bit higher we’d have collided. Surprising how many there were when you read of the crews that were lost due to accident. A lot of them over this country. Not over there. Over this country which is a bit remarkable. You said what did we do? One thing I did do after the war we did this Exodus, Operation Exodus, bringing prisoners of war back and on another occasion the crew had to go to Italy, to Bari to bring people back from there but the gunners, for some reason, didn’t go because they wanted to get more people on board I suppose but they brought us back some cherry brandy and stuff so we didn’t mind but what I did while I got the hut free was something I wanted to do. I’d got, in the Mae West’s, you know the inflatable thing the thing that inflated them was a little CO2 bottle. It was a cast iron bottle with a little neck on and when you pulled a lever down it broke the neck off and filled the thing up with air or carbon dioxide or something. Anyway, I thought if I filled the thing up with cordite that would be an ideal jet. So I wanted to make a jet propelled glider you see because the Australians were letting stuff off. They’d got hold of something, fireworks and things and I got a, got a cartridge and emptied it and carefully fed the, because the cordite was a little, little tiny rods, put it through the hole until it filled up and then left a little trail to a safe distance of the hut, the nissen hut and this was on the concrete step aimed out into space you see. I’d made a glider out of a cornflake packet that I’d scrounged and I got this all fixed up, lit it and it sort of worked. It fizzed across the floor, lit the thing, zoomed off, the glider fluttered down a few yards away and the CO2 thing headed off towards the officers mess the other side of the airfield and so I thought it was time to pack up and go. I got on my bike and went down to the mess and read the paper.
GC: Has he always been this much of a rogue?
SP: Yes. Yes.
JC: And that was a bit of fun.
SP: Yes. You used to wave your handkerchiefs at the air you told me.
JC: The other thing we did what we found out was to if you want to evacuate a nissen hut is to get a verey cartridge and take one of the shells out of the stars and drop it down the chimney when their bogie stove was alight and that shoots the bottom out, most of the contents of the bogie stove and everybody goes flying out. It was great fun. Oh dear of dear.
GC: It’s nice to know you was taking yourselves so seriously.
JC: Pardon?
GC: It’s nice to know you was taking it all so seriously. [laughs]
JC: Well, you know you’ve got too really. Frank Johnson, we had some reunion, crew reunions after. Three or four. And Frank, the navigator said to me that he’d been approached by from some quite high authority in government with a big questionnaire about morale of air crew during the war and I and I thought about that I thought well no one was sad or anything like that. In fact we were generally up to hijinks and then Frank said, ‘I put down that, practical jokes mainly from air gunners,’ he said. [laughs]. I think we kept ourselves alive really by laughing down and of course we had quite a, beer was quite plentiful then. Not very strong unfortunately but that was a favourite pastime either in the mess or down at the local, you know the local pub in the village and we didn’t have a cinema at Fulbeck. We didn’t have very much there at all. That was a bit dead really apart from the odd pub but Bardney did. They had a cinema there and we used to see things, films there. I went back to, well a summer camp with the ATC and of course visited some of the old airfields and we were at Binbrook one year and one of the other officers wanted to go to a place that he was in during the war. Forget the name of it now. He said, ‘You were up this way John, weren’t you? I said, ‘Yeah. Bardney.’ He said, ‘That’s not all that far away.’ So we duly went to Bardney. There wasn’t much left of it then. There was the old hangars were still there and a control tower and a sad looking windsock and I said, ‘Well the pub down the hill,’ I said, ‘Was called the Jolly Sailor,’ which was known as the Hilarious Matlow when we were there and we went down and went in for a pint and it was, instead of being little rooms as it was it was one big bar which killed it really but anyway, I ordered a couple of pints up and an old boy sidled up and he said, ‘You’ve just been up at the airfield haven’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Do you want,’ I thought he was on the [earhole] for a pint you see so, ‘No. No. No,’ he said, ‘I don’t want a drink.’ He said, ‘I can always tell,’ he said, ‘When you come [that thing there?] he said. So I said, he said, ‘What flight were you in?’ I said, ‘A flight. Squadron Leader Stevens. Yes that’s right,’ he said, ‘I knew him,’ and he knew the wing commander. He knew. We used to rattle the stuff off his mantelpiece apparently when we took off. But he was, you know, he was a nice old boy. He was obviously one of the locals who was there during the war. He must have put up with us when we went in the pub. But it was different and I don’t even know if it’s still there now because I’ve had it up on google and I can’t even see the pub anymore. I think it’s been knocked down or something. Isn’t that dreadful?
GC: Dreadful.
JC: I don’t know. All the memories of these places. If they could tell a story.
GC: Ah but that’s what you’re doing at the moment.
JC: Yes. We, after the war we had to start on Tiger Force training for the Far East which I wasn’t looking forward to to be honest. Fighting the Japanese. They didn’t play fair did they? And it consisted of long cross countries as a squadron in a gaggle. We didn’t fly in formation. We flew in a gaggle right over France and Germany and around and home and to do that, to prepare for long flights we shared our poor old flight engineer Bert Shaw. He was due for retirement anyway I think and we got a pilot flight engineer. There were lots of spare pilots about at the time. Young lad. Never done much. They put them through a quick flight engineer’s course at St Athan and sent them to the squadrons and we had one. He was such a nice chap. I can’t think of his name. Isn’t that awful? I have a photograph of him in one of the books, war books I’ve got. Anyway, he flew with us as a flight engineer. Well on one occasion and I was now the official rear gunner by the way. I was in the rear turret. We were coming back over France and I was awake because I noticed smoke whizzing past the turret you see. So I thought, hello, something’s going wrong up front you see so I called up the skipper and said, ‘One of your engines is on fire, skipper,’ and he relayed the message to the flight engineer who was down in the bombing hatch cooking his logbook for four engine flying so when the skipper said, ‘One of your engine’s is on fire,’ he thought he was pulling his leg. He said, ‘Well you’d better put the kettle on.’ [laughs] I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘It’s getting thick here.’ And anyway he came up and shut it down and feathered the propeller and the smoke abated. Bits and pieces came past and that was that. Went home the rest of the way on three engines but that, that was funny that was. Very funny.
GC: I’m just going to stop it for a moment because I’ve just spotted -
[machine pause]
GC: Just looking at the battery. But go on.
JC: Right [pause] ok. Yes. Well we eventually poor old squadron was sent to RAF Metheringham to disband which was all very sad. We had to take our aeroplanes with us. The ground staff got there in about a quarter of an hour I suppose. We got over Metheringham and there was ten tenths of fog. Absolute thick fog and we poodled around for about half an hour. We got all our stuff on board. Bikes and things in the bomb bay and they eventually decided to light up half the Fido for us. You know the old fog intensive dispersal or something. They lit up one side and it really did work. It just burnt the fog off. We came in, landed and we were there till November kicking our heels. I only flew, I was the only one of the crew who flew again, who flew from Metheringham and I was the Squadron Leader Stevens’s rear gunner when he wanted to go somewhere and my services were called upon but that was the only time I flew from Metheringham and the crew dispersed. The skipper went flying somewhere, the bomb aimer was commissioned and went off somewhere in charge of a radar unit and we were sent to a place ‘cause I wanted to go on to Transport Command and we were sent to the MT section of a little OTU at Whitchurch. I forget the name of the RAF station but I couldn’t drive. I had to drive, I suddenly had to learn to drive because I was, I was up at the station and the billets were about a mile down the road in a disperse place and it was bitterly cold and I wanted to get some blankets for the bed so I took, I pinched a [fifteen underweight?] truck, went down to the domestic site, picked up my blankets and as I did some of the other lads came out and said, ‘Are you going back to the station?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I said, I said, ‘I haven’t driven before.’ He said, ‘Oh it doesn’t matter.’ He said and they all piled in and I got in the front bit and drove them back. That was quite, quite a bit of a laugh there. Anyway, eventually I got on to Transport Command. I was posted to Holmsley. RAF Holmsley South, near Bournemouth. Had some fun down there. Some friends of mine took a boat out at night off the beach and got out quite a way and they realised that the people had taken the plugs out so people wouldn’t pinch the boats and they just [laughs] they had to dry out in the boiler room when they got back. And then I got posted to, we flew to Lyneham. You’ve all heard of Lyneham. That was the big transport place. We were there about a week and then I was posted to Waterbeach. RAF Waterbeach which was the nearest I ever got to home, as an air quartermaster flying with different crews. There were two flights we did there. There was United Kingdom - Changi in a York. That was in Singapore. And to Delhi with the freight. Freight run. And that, that was great fun. I did quite a few trips. It took five days to get to Singapore and a days there and five days back but we never did it in eleven days. There was always something went wrong. We had more trouble with Yorks than we ever had on Lancasters. I mean we only had that just one engine fire but with the Yorks we had to fly from the passenger run was from Lyneham because we’d go, we went from Waterbeach to Lyneham, picked up the passengers and went through customs and everything and the first leg was down to Luqa, RAF Luqa in Malta and from there to Habbaniya in Iraq and then to Maripur in India, down to Ceylon as it was and then across to Changi in Singapore. That was five legs. Getting up earlier and earlier every morning because you were losing time you see and then you had a day off and then you reversed it coming back but as I say we never did it. We had various problems. One of the engines seized up over the Med coming across to Malta. So we stuck at Malta for a week which was great fun of course. The only thing else, oh I was often the only NCO in the crew. The rest were all commissioned you know and they’d be in the mess and I’d be in the sergeant’s mess but apart from that it was alright. We all used to meet up during the day. The first trip I ever did we went, we got to Malta and they said, ‘You’re coming with us, John.’ So changed in to civvies. They took me down to Valetta, sat me outside a café place, table and chairs and they brought out something I hadn’t seen, of course, since the beginning of the war which was a plate of fancy cakes, ‘There you are, John,’ they said, ‘Tuck in.’ So it was all things like that. Things we hadn’t seen let alone eaten. That was good fun though flying like that but they, it was a bit dodgy especially the last leg from Ceylon to Changi. It was around Malaya there was terrific cumulous clouds. I mean these days they just fly over the top but we couldn’t get up there so you had, you couldn’t go through it because they was too dangerous. They could just pick you up and chuck you all over the place and so you had to go underneath and that wasn’t always very practical so there were some dodgy bits. The other time we had a bit of trouble it was a freighting run and we were coming back across the Mediterranean to Lyneham from where was it? Castel Benito. That’s right, in Libya and I noticed, just freighting run this was and I noticed the port inner engine, the exhaust which I could see very plainly from the window didn’t look right to me. It was, it was the wrong sort of colour you know and as the flight progressed so it got brighter and brighter and I got the skipper to come down and have a look. Ivor Lupton. I’ll always remember his name and he had a look. He said, ‘Keep an eye on it, John and if it gets any worse tell me.’ Well it did get worse. Flames started coming out of it so the flight engineer shut it down, feathered it and we made an emergency landing at an airfield called Estree in France where they hadn’t got any Merlin engines and we were stuck there for a week and had great fun there. We were in the transit mess but it wasn’t too bad. The food was alright and I paid a flying visit to Marseilles with, I can’t remember, was it the navigator or the wireless op? Anyway, he’d obviously got some business going on in, where’s the name of the place. Oh dear isn’t that awful? I’ve forgotten the name of the place on the coast of France further east. I said, ‘How are we going to get there?’ He said, ‘We’ll hitch.’ So we got on the road and we hitched and an old French car stopped, got in the back and the driver complete with, he hadn’t got any onions but that was the only thing he hadn’t got. And we went hurtling off in this old car through little villages, chickens scattering, you know. It was like something out of a film and, Marseilles that’s where we went and we eventually got there and he did his, what he had to do, got some nefarious thing going on. I had a wander around just and then we came back by the same method, getting a hitch. The French were delighted to give us a lift but they were very old cars and very dangerous and they’d be talking to you with their head, and we thought yeah, have an occasional look [laughs]. So that was a very adventurous time we had on the, on the Yorks. There was one or two incidents where we had a bit of bother but you know it was exciting part. Nice. I was rather sad to leave it all really but I thought well they won’t want air quartermasters forever. They’re called dolly birds now aren’t they but I had to work out, even on the passenger run, I had to work out the weight and balance clearance and all that sort of stuff so that the centre of gravity of the aircraft fell between two points so I had to find the water, weight of water, petrol and everything and passengers and you know it was quite an important job but I enjoyed it so I was rather sad when the last, the last thing came which involved, not for me personally but involved a rather dramatic encounter with HM customs but I can’t go in to that now. We haven’t got enough battery left [laughs]
GC: [?]
JC: So there we are. My RAF career in a nutshell.
GC: Well can I just say it has been an absolute pleasure and a great honour. That has been beautiful. Thank you very much.
JC: Pleasure.
GC: Thank you.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with John Cuthbert
Creator
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Gemma Clapton
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-05-07
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ACuthbertJ160507
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Pending review
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Description
An account of the resource
John Cuthbert joined the RAF and initially trained as a wireless operator / air gunner but re-mustered as an air gunner. After training he was posted to 189 Squadron at RAF Fulbeck and flew operations as a mid-upper gunner. He talks about his light-hearted experiences with his crew as well as some of the tragedies he saw.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Germany
Norway
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Karlsruhe
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
Format
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02:06:23 audio recording
189 Squadron
49 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
Anson
bombing
crewing up
fear
Heavy Conversion Unit
Ju 88
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
military living conditions
military service conditions
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operational Training Unit
radar
RAF Bardney
RAF Fulbeck
RAF Swinderby
RAF Syerston
RAF Upper Heyford
RAF Wainfleet
Scarecrow
searchlight
Stirling
superstition
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
wireless operator / air gunner
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1252/16964/SCheshireGL72021v10042.1.jpg
f0102fb091ee9ea42a153352c06ecb6a
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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Cheshire, Leonard
Cheshire, Geoffrey Leonard
Baron Cheshire
Description
An account of the resource
374 items concerning Group Captain Leonard Cheshire VC, OM, DSO & Two Bars, DFC. Collection consists of photographs of people, vehicles, places, aircraft, weapons and targets; documents including, private and service letters, signals, telegrams, intelligence reports, crew lists and official documents. Cheshire served on 102 and 35 Squadrons and commanded 76 and 617 Squadrons. The collection includes details of 617 Squadron's precision bombing operations. Also included are two sub-collections: one containing 21 photographs of Tinian and Saipan, the other consisting of 37 audio tapes of speeches given by Cheshire after the war.
The collection has been licenced to the IBCC Digital Archive by The Leonard Cheshire Archive and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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This content is property of the Leonard Cheshire Archive which has kindly granted the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive a royalty-free permission to publish it. Please note that it was digitised by a third-party which used technical specifications that may differ from those used by International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive. It has been published here ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre.
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Permission granted for commercial projects
Transcribed document
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
617 Squadron, Woodhall.
28th. February, 1944.
Dear
Thank you very much indeed for the tracing, which is most valuable and helpful.
I went on leave the day you sent it off, and have only just returned, so please forgive my delay in writing. As soon as things settle down I will do my very best to call on you and enjoy your hospitality.
Yours
LC
F/L. N.J.T. Holland,
Type 16, R.A.F.,
Beachy Head.
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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Letter from Leonard Cheshire to Flight Lieutenant N Holland
Description
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To Type 16 at Beachy Head thanking him for radar tracings.
Date
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1944-02-28
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Text. Correspondence
Text. Service material
Identifier
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SCheshireGL72021v10042
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Sussex
England--Beachy Head
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-02-28
1944-02-12
Is Part Of
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Cheshire, Leonard. Correspondence
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
License
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Royalty-free permission to publish
Rights
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This content is property of the Leonard Cheshire Archive which has kindly granted the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive a royalty-free permission to publish it. Please note that it was digitised by a third-party which used technical specifications that may differ from those used by International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive. It has been published here ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre.
Creator
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Geoffrey Leonard Cheshire
Format
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One-page typewritten letter
Contributor
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Roger Dunsford
617 Squadron
Cheshire, Geoffrey Leonard (1917-1992)
radar
RAF Woodhall Spa
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/703/10103/ABeechingJB180118.1.mp3
47d4231ede11edc693eeebb6482fe40a
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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Beeching, John Benjamin
J B Beeching
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with John Beeching (b. 1923, 1339821 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a pilot with 169 and 627 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2018-01-18
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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Beeching, JB
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
GT: This is Thursday, 18th January 2018 and I am with Mr John Benjamin Beeching at his place of work, The Cawthron Institute, in Nelson, New Zealand. John was born 19 October 1923 in London, England and joined the RAF in August 1941, his service number 1339821, and as an aircrew pilot to be gained the nickname Curly. John’s flying career was from 1942 to 1946 and he flew more than twelve different aircraft types. John, thank you for inviting me to have a talk about your career today.
JB: I have to say [Indecipherable.]
GT: Great John. So how about you give me a bit of your history about a - where did you grow up and then why did you join the RAF and how, and so on, please.
JB: Well, needless to say I grew up in that time when, at the age of fifteen, sixteen, I was in the Blitz so I received bombing from both ends, [chuckle] not only receiving them but also delivered them! This was in 1939, when the war broke out, and at that stage I was working in an engineering workshop which axiomatically of course went from making arms and we were making bullet dies and things like that. After a year that got pretty boring and a good friend of mine, Billy Campbell said we’ve had enough of this, let’s go and join the Army and do some real war work. So we went to the Recruiting Office in Romford, which is also in Essex, and we had a very brief and cursory medical examination and a very dapper little sergeant said okay son, he said to Bill, we’ll tell you when we need you, and he said to me I’m sorry lad, your feet are flat for the Army, we can’t take you so go back to your engineering job, I’m sure you’ll be doing some useful war work. So, I thought no, rats to this and right across the alleyway there was the, you okay there? So I walked across this alleyway where the Air Force recruiting place was, and I said I’d like to join the RAF, and they said oh yes, what do you do son? I said well at the moment I’m an engineer, he said ah, that’s very good, we need engineers in the Air Force. He says don’t want to fly do you, with a very crafty look on his face. Now don’t forget this was 1941 when aircrew at a premium and we were losing lots, so I said yes I can, I’d love to do that, so he gave us another quick medical, he didn’t look at my feet in this particular case and he said we’ll let you know when we need you. So I think it was about a month later and I was sent to Weston Super Mare where we had a two day medical, a very, very strict medical and I was given my number, 1339821, and they said you are now in the Volunteer Reserve and will be called up in due course, which we were in actual fact, on April the 20th April 1942, which by a great coincidence, happened to be Hitler’s birthday. I was recruited at St Johns Wood where all aircrew were, Aircrew Receiving Centre, otherwise known as ACRC, and billeted in a very palatial hotel which was no longer palatial after we’d been in touch with it and we were there oh, a couple of weeks I suppose, and then sent off to a holding unit at Ludlow in Shropshire under canvas, which was a holiday, because they didn’t know what to do with us so we were building roads which went nowhere and all sorts of stuff. Anyway I think it was, must have been the spring of 1942, late spring, maybe June, I went to my Initial Training Wing at Stratford upon Avon, lovely place, where we did our square bashing at the front of the new Shakespeare Theatre there, which is a lovely place. We used to go punting on the Avon in the evening, it was really nice. And at the end of our ITW we did a ten hour grading course on Tiger Moths and I didn’t know how I’d come out of that one because I didn’t think I’d do too well, but apparently they must have thought it was sufficient to carry me on to, carry on training as a pilot. And from there we were given a couple of weeks’ leave and then from our leave we went to the massive [emphasis] holding camp at Heaton Park in Manchester, where all crew went, I think there were about thirty odd thousand went there, and some went to Southern Rhodesia to train as pilots and navigators and the rest of us went to Canada. And we went to Canada in December 1942, which was a bad year for u-boats, we were in a large liner called the Andes, which has been here to New Zealand a couple of times during the war, and we were way up among the icebergs we went, [swishing sound effect] due north for a couple of days I think, away from submarines or whatever, [cough] and we landed at Halifax, Nova Scotia on Christmas Day 1942. On the way to Monckton in this massive train, in the snow, we hit a car on the level crossing with seven Mounties in it and killed the lot. They was splattered all over, the blood, it was blood and guts all over the place: it was a lovely introduction to Canada. Anyway we went to Monckton, we weren’t there very long and then we were sent to the Prairies. I went to a place called Virden, Manitoba, Number 19 EFTS, and where we did our training on winter-clad Tiger Moths. In other words they were fitted with skis and a canopy and a very rudimentary heater which didn’t work very well, and did sixty hours on those although that was interrupted in my case because I had a punctured ear drum flying with a cold, and spent the whole month in hospital. [Cough] And at the end of that, that would be the spring of 1943 I suppose, I went to my Service Flying Training School at Brandon, Manitoba, which was east of Virden, about eighty miles down the road I suppose, and continued my training on Cessna Bobcats, which the Canadians called Cranes, well they were otherwise AT12a’s and finally wound up getting my wings in August 1943, it must have been. And [telephone] then from Brandon, sporting our pilot’s wings, which made us all as happy as Larry and very proud of course, and promoted to sergeant in my case, some were commissioned but they obviously divined that I wasn’t going to make very good officer material, which was probably quite the case, but I never was anyway, and went back to Monckton. We were there very briefly, and then back across the Atlantic, this time on the Queen Elizabeth! Which wasn’t exactly a luxury cruise because there was twenty one thousand others on board on the same sailing! Which is a lot of people, in fact it was half the population of Nelson, in numbers. And it only took us what, bit under five days to cross the Atlantic. Wound back up at Gourock and then back and then all the aircrew that went back from Canada, they went to Harrogate in Yorkshire, where we went for a selection board and they said John Beeching you are, been selected to be an elementary flying instructor. I thought oh my god, that’s the last thing on this earth I wanted to be, you know! So I had nothing to argue with of course, so we were pushed to Marshalls Flying Field in Cambridge, I forget the number of the Flying School it was, but I think it was number four I think. I hated it, absolutely, I’ve got to tell you, hate Tiger Moths, I still hate the rotten things. They were cold and draughty, I didn’t like aerobatics very much anyway, so. Anyway, short of becoming a real dyed in the wool malingerer, [laugh] I managed to get myself thrown off and they said don’t you tell anybody, you know, that you’ve been scrubbed off of an instructor’s course! Blah, blah, blah. And I got a below average rating for and so this is very close to Christmas 1943 and I got successfully scrubbed off this awful, awful instructor’s course. Back to Harrogate [cough] spent a few weeks there, had nothing to do with us for a while, so they sent us on these strange assault courses and so forth, and they made a mistake of issuing us with thunderflashes, which we all secreted and used to put under people’s beds and things, which was all good fun. Don’t forget we were only what, nineteen, twenty years old, so we were only kids anyway, so it was a small part of it. And another selection board and they said well, we’ve noticed that your night vision is acceptable so you’ll be selected for night fighter pilot training so thought that’s more my thing, [cough] so from there I spent about, oh, a month I think, at the, at Cranwell which in peacetime is an Officers’ Training College, but in the wartime it was just another flying field. And now I was introduced to the Blenheim I, which was a lovely old aeroplane to fly, very safe, very easy, and after an introduction on those I went to Spittalgate at Grantham, which was an advanced flying unit where we flew Blenheim Is and Ansons and Oxfords. Flew Ansons and Oxfords on beam approach training, things like that, so we did quite a few hours there. Following which, we went to Cranfield and did a conversion course from Blenheims via the Bristol Beaufort which is a terrible, terrible aeroplane cause the ones we had were the early ones with Bristol Pegasus engines. Don’t know if they were, but mostly underpowered, terrible aeroplanes, but we only had to do ten hours on those and then they graduated us on to Beaufighters which were lovely aeroplanes, I loved the Beaufighters, you know. They’ve got me sitting in the front with these two enormous great Hercules engines, one on either side with about sixteen hundred horsepower each side, and they were lovely and there I crewed up with my navigator, Fred Herbert, who flew with me for the next few years. He was the only navigator I had [cough] and it got so he refused to fly with anybody else. Whether that’s a recommendation or not, I don’t know, but that’s the way it was. If I went sick he went sick [laugh] and we flew together right through there and then at Cranfield we spent a fair bit of time at the satellite field which was a place called Twinwoods Farm, which received notoriety because it was where Glen Miller took off from and Fred and I were the last people to ever see Glen Miller alive. We saw him climb into that Norseman, in December 1943 and, no ’44, yeah, ’44, yeah, December 1944 and he vanished and was never seen again. He had a civilian pilot and there’s been all kinds of speculation and stories of what might have happened to Glen Miller, but nobody ever really knows about that. So he joins just another one of the thousands that we lost in the North Sea. So from there we went back to Cranfield and then we were given leave and I was going to enjoy leave over Christmas, but we got called to join 169 Squadron at Great Massingham in December and that’s where I started my operational flying, from there, on Bomber Support with 100 Group, which is 100 Group Bomber Command.
GT: And your aircraft type for there was?
JB: Hey?
GT: And your aircraft type, that you moved to, from the Beaufighter to?
JB: Oh to the Mossie, yes. Yes well my transit to the Mosquito was pretty quick, I had thirty five minutes dual on the Mosquito. That was all. I kid you, didn’t even solo the same day because the weather closed in and it was another day and a half before I got my hands on a Mosquito to fly, so, and we, they only had two Mark III dual Mosquitos there at Cranfield, so nobody got much dual anyway. But anyway, they were, after a Beaufighter I found an easier plane to fly and had to watch some of the swinging on take off and landing that’s all, like all tailwheel aircraft are, but okay, and so I flew, like I say, in my log book I’ve got the serial numbers of fifty seven different Mossies and I never scrapped one, so that’s something of a record. [Cough]
GT: It is. You brought them all home, that was the main.
JB: Yes, and anyway, at the end of the war ended up with sixteen operations over Germany and at the end of the war we thought oh well, we’ll have a nice rest now and they said no you’re not, you’re going to Okinawa. And so they transferred us from there to, being Mosquito people, to Woodhall Spa, 627 Squadron, where 617 [emphasis] Squadron was stationed at that time because the old Dambuster Lancasters was still parked there, at Woodhall Spa. Did you ever Woodhall Spa? And the Bell pub, you know and er, you know the old Bell there, lovely place.
GT: So, can we just, go back John, for you, much better about your sorties and your operations you did. What’s the targets, what did they give you as a role to do?
JB: We were very individual, we didn’t take off, all together, we were classified as bomber support, and it was bomber support, we’d normally take off after [emphasis] the bomber stream left, cause we were much, we were a hundred miles an hour faster than Lancasters, and our intention and purpose was to get to the target before them and keep and sweep the sky clear of German nightfighters really, which was very successful. The Germans were absolutely terrified of us because we had the legs on them and we had the radar on them so, and you know, we were really good. But 100 Group, they were loaded up with electronic gear, mainly to jam German transmissions, that’s, you know, German transmissions, which they did and if you read that book, ‘100 Group - the Birth of Electronic Warfare’, you’ll read, it’s really worthwhile, and it takes you through that much more precisely than I could ever do anyway, but the, they had the main, apart from the Mosquitos that were in about five different stations they had Halifaxes, and 100 Group, and B17s. Two of the B17 crew people they lived right here in Nelson, both dead now, bless ‘em, just died of old age. Though Doug was a prisoner of war, he did a whole tour then was shot down on his second tour. He was a gunner, tail gunner and he um, survived the war and lived here until about three years ago, when he died.
GT: So the Mosquitos you were flying and your operational sorties, what armament did you have?
JB: All right, the Mosquitos we had, initially they were converted Mark Vis with Mark IV radar in the nose, like a sort of spearhead, you might have seen pictures of them, and then we graduated to Mark 10s, was British designed, American built and we had a big bulbous nose on the Mosquitos - remember those - with the scanner, about the size of that fan over there I suppose, and they was really good because pick up aircraft twenty miles away, it was really superb radar probably as good as they’ve got today almost, I would say.
GT: So what guns did you have?
JB: We had, well we didn’t have the machine guns because we had the radar in the nose, but we had four 20 millimetre cannon, they could do an awful lot of damage, they would demolish a house you know, [laugh] they were big guns, twenty millimetre.
GT: In the nose or [indecipherable]
JB: Underneath. If you look at a picture of a Mosquito, you’ll see that, you know, they were clear of the propellors so they didn’t have to re-synchronise so when you fired them they all started together, then they’d all sort of break up the noise and swing the nose and plane about, it was quite a thing: but they’re good things.
GT: How many rounds a gun did you have?
JB: I think we carried about, I think we carried about four hundred rounds altogether, about a hundred rounds a gun, I think.
GT: And you knew how long you had, I suppose.
JB: I think the rate of fire was about nine hundred and something rounds a minute, so it wasn’t a very long burst. We never fired on Dutch people, we never had the chance to be quite honest with you, we used to strafe people on bicycles.
GT: So your sorties, you were strafing more than you were trying to shoot down aircraft?
JB: Oh no, we did low levels as well as the high stuff, we’d fly anywhere from thirty thousand feet right down to ground level almost, you know. And of course we also did a lot of spoof raiding which carried target indicators, and we’d drop those at a place where the raid wasn’t going to be, but it was, the idea was to get the Germans to think that’s where the main raid was going to be, so we dropped couple of tons of target indicators to get the Germans going and of course the main stream would turn off and go somewhere else, which was all part and parcel of the deceit, you know.
GT: Did you use Window at all?
JB: We didn’t. 100 Group, thousands of tons, the Liberator would carry about seven ton of the stuff., you know, they’d chuck it out in great bundles which was good , it certainly dumbfounded the Germans much of the time, although towards the end of the war they did sort of overcome it to some extent, [lighter noise] they did overcome it to a great extent, but it worked good and then we had, then they used, ringer operators, you know, to come up cause we were using operators who could speak German giving phoney instructions to German nightfighters. Course but they, the German nightfighters were active right till the end of the war. In March I think it was, ‘45, the Germans did a big night raid on England, in East Anglia, and it was called Operation Gisela and they clobbered quite a few of our blokes, some of our blokes were killed, right on the circuit, you know, so it was quite, so they didn’t give up. As you know, the Germans fought almost to the last day.
GT: So their fighters were a mixture of what, Messerschmitt 210s, 410s, Junkers.
JB: Operation Gisela they had were Me109s and Fw190s, which apparently were a difficult aeroplane to fly, and even harder to fly at night and their accident rate was much, was, better than ours, they killed themselves better than we could, and they had, of course, towards, right near the end they had these wonderful Henschel night fighters and stuff which was really, really good and also Messerschmitt 262s, which they used as night fighters and in fact the Me262s squadrons were shooting down Mosquitos, they shot down about thirty all together, so they were quite active right up to the few last days of the war.
GT: So did you know that when you were flying?
JB: No. Didn’t even know of the existence of an Me262 until after the war.
GT: You never saw one flash by and whatnot?
JB: Oh no, never saw. No, no.
GT: So they never gave you that kind of intel?
JB: Whatever intelligence I’ve been, by and large, we were kept right up with stuff like Me163s and that sort of thing that shot straight up in the air. But no, they never mentioned Me262s, whether they were keeping it from us on purpose, I’ve got no idea, but I don’t recall ever being told about the Me262, or it would certainly have stuck in my memory. I would think, anyway.
GT: So did you have the chance of using your guns in an aerial battle at all?
JB: No, only on ground stuff, factories and so forth on bright moonlight nights.
GT: I’m interested that Mosquito-wise, okay, you had the weaponry, did you actually do any training to do aerial combat as opposed to strafing?
JB: Oh yes. Yes, we did air to air gunnery. We had a range over the Wash, and they had these yellow painted Martinets on the squadron. I remember that because landed one on a foggy morning, he landed and floated into the side of the hangar. He wasn’t killed but the man in the hangar was. So that’s how I remember how we were, how the target was, load carrying [indecipherable]. We didn’t have enough practice on air to air shooting, or the ground shooting really for that matter.
GT: Did you shoot the banner at all? Did you get shots on?
JB: Oh yes, I good quite good at it, but it was, my percentage was very good.
GT: And you had a high percentage, sorry, did you say?
JB: Yeah, I was good at it, quite good. It was good fun. Course you had to turn, you know, deflection was the thing of course, that was the thing with, most of the time everybody wanted to get right behind somebody, up the bum didn’t they, and shoot them, which is what happened at night, because we could get right in, close, with our radar and we could see our prey, quarry, invariably a Lancaster or something, and they could never see us, but they were looking down against the dark ground, we were looking up, we could see the stars and we could see their blur exhaust stumps all glowing in the dark and you think if we’d been Germans. Of course the Germans had the Shräge musik, you know, the upfiring cannons, which we never knew about, and that was very, very bad news, because we lost a lot of Lancasters solely because of Shräge musik. And they, as I say, that, we often, we get so, we used to do what was, I used to like it actually, it was called night fighter affiliation and they’d take a Halifax off from Swanton Morley or somewhere and we’d meet them over Norfolk somewhere and go do runs on them to let the gunners see and often we’d get from here to that cross just about and they still hadn’t seen us. Cause I remember one night we got up close behind this Halifax and he was sitting there waiting, waiting for it to go into a corkscrew and he called up, he says hello Kaolin 26, he said, I think we’ve lost you so I turned on the landing lights from about fifty yards behind him! I bet that gunner still wakes up at night, two million candle power! [Laughter] So that was things we used to do, but it just meant how vulnerable our blokes were, cause we really were close and he knew that we were coming, and he still didn’t see us at all. So there we are.
GT: That’s something. Were your Mosquitos also able to carry bombs at all, and rockets?
JB: Yes.
GT: So you always took off with bombs and rockets?
JB: Not always, but sometimes. Some duty, if we wanted to do a spoof with bombs, we carried two five hundred pound bombs, or target indicators, one or the other. We didn’t carry anything big till we got to Woodhall Spa when we carried, when we had the Mosquito, the Mark IVs [indecipherable] the pregnant tadpole, you know, d’you see pictures of those? They would carry the four thousand pound bombs, but we weren’t allowed to, apparently the Mossies we [emphasis] had weren’t made to carry, although we had the bulging bomb bays, they couldn’t carry the four thousand pound bomb. To me, I don’t know why, we had a notice up in the cockpit: ‘Even PO Prune would not carry a four thousand bomb in this aircraft’. So whatever the reason was I never found out.
GT: I don’t expect the airframe could hold it. So something that’s always been touted was that the use of the Mosquito to bomb Berlin. Now if, for instance, the RAF managed to only produce Mosquitos instead of their four engined bombers, would they have done the business? What’s your position on that?
JB: Oh yes, absolutely. I mean don’t forget the Americans, those piddling little bombs they carried, they were only five hundred pound bombs: they were next to useless. I mean until they carried big bombs, those five hundred pound bombs, they just dug little holes in the ground. Incendiaries were the thing of course. What we carried was a great big blast bomb, blow a lot of buildings down then set fire to ‘em, and that was the point, after all, what we were trying to do was finish the war, you know, and Mosquito carrying two ton bomb, they would make two trips in a night. It was only what, about two hours to Berlin, two hours back, four hours, refuel, another bomb and go away again, you know, another crew and so that was good. There was only two men in a Mosquito, there was ten men in a B17, and they both carried the same bomb load.
GT: So, do you think perhaps that Bomber Command could have changed their philosophy to go to?
JB: I do now [emphasis]. Of course you didn’t know at the time.
GT: May have been better to switch strategies.
JB: We argued about what Bomber Command did and how valuable it was, it’s never going to be resolved. Harris said you could finish the war with bombers, but you couldn’t, without men on the ground, I think that was proved in the war anyway.
GT: Set fire.
JB: We certainly aided towards the quickness of it, with all of the stuff we did to railways and transport and goodness knows what we done. We were allowed, after the war, to fly over Germany and have a look and see what was done; it was awful, it really was, war. I don’t know, the whole thing was pretty bad I suppose, when you think about it. But it was, to me it was pretty distressing to see that, acres, square miles all these houses just the walls standing, you know, all scurrying about like ants, clearing up the mess, you know. Terrible, absolutely terrible. Your whole thinking was in those days, like I say, obviously in London during the Blitz I saw houses demolished then, so getting a bit of own back didn’t seem to be helping a lot. Which it wasn’t.
GT: It was the means of surviving and shortening the thing.
JB: Yes. Anyway come what may, the war’s end, they said you’re going, when we went there, we were going to go to Okinawa, on the Tiger Force. What I didn’t realise that the Americans didn’t really want us there because they had enormous [emphasis] Air Force on Okinawa. It was really [emphasis] enormous. They had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of B29s and Mustangs by the hundreds and they didn’t want the RAF there at all. It was their war and they wanted to keep it. Anyway, they dropped the atomic bomb so we didn’t go. So we thought ah! Finished! We’ve finished our flying! They said no you’re not, you’re going instructing, you’re going now and I was instructing on blind landing approach for the next twelve months almost. On Oxfords, on a mobile flight, 1552 BABS Flight: Beam BABS Beam Approach Beacon System. They evolved a very efficient and cheap beam landing system called BABS which used Eureka Rebecca system, beacon and homing and beacons and they just, yes, instead of killing everybody. Yes. [interference] Well BABS, it was, we had this mobile flight, of four Oxfords, which was very handy, cause they were all over England and we went to, we were teaching Transport Command pilots on how to land, on bad weather landings and as I say, it was a very efficient system, it just involved a little pickup Austin with a kind of shed on the back, and they ran it two little metal grooves at the end of the runway and shot it up and we could pick up the signal. Because, why we were chosen that job, it was the ideal job suited for night fighter crews because the navigator was at the back twiddling his knobs and he could tell you left, left, right, right, whatever, and that worked fine and so we were sort of involved with that for nearly twelve months, and we flew every day apart from bad wind. That’s how good it was. So fog didn’t stop us at all, in fact it took us longer to taxi out to find the runway than it did to fly and it was really that good. It was excellent, I thought, we had no shaky dos there. Like I say I flew nearly a thousand hours and never had an accident. The only thing ever went wrong was on an old Blenheim I, when one wheel wouldn’t come down, had to land on one wheel, but that wasn’t too bad, pretty harmless.
GT: And then you didn’t catch the [indecipherable].
JB: No, no. They said land on the grass, don’t land on the runway, you’ll score it up something, it was on Somerfield Track anyway, and landed on one wheel on two points, so one wheel and the wings slowly dropped down and then I was looking at the propeller with the ends all curled up, the wing had a [indecipherable] great big slow ground loop and just stopped and that was it. Plane was flying two days later, on the flat. That was about the only bad thing ever happened.
GT: So what aircraft were you doing all of this BABS training in?
JB: Oxfords. Which they, they were a good aeroplane for a trainer I think, ideal anyway. But Ansons were probably easier to fly, was Ansons. The queen of the sky as far as I was concerned. You could do no wrong in an Anson. They were just delightful.
GT: You and Fred [indecipherable] were friends with the gentleman who’s created the only Anson I still flying in the world.
JB: Oh, I don’t say I’m a friend, but I’ve spoken to him, in fact I loaned him my Anson pilots’ notes, I’ve still got them at home by the way, my pilots notes for the Anson. But I’ve got pilots notes on most of the aeroplanes I flew, Beaufighters, Mosquitos, even got one for Lancaster. You know, you collect these things and keep them. Seventy years later.
GT: Fair. So once you’d done your instructing piece there for these transport pilots, what happened to you then?
JB: Oh that was, I got out in about August 1946 I think.
GT: Did you want to go? Did you need to go?
JB: Yes, I’d had enough. Yeah, I thought, well, I was a mug in a way, I should have stayed I suppose, you know, the Air Force was no longer like it was during the war, you know. During the week you do what you like [cough], dress how you like, don’t care [indecipherable] the week, but they don’t like that in peacetime and so I wasn’t sorry to get out.
GT: Did you commission?
JB: No.
GT: So what did you retire as, rank-wise?
JB: Warrant Officer. Which was a good rank. Pay was the same as a Flight Lieutenant, without the mess fees, you know. You only paid six shillings a month, they were paying about six pounds a month, so that was good.
GT: So what was the last station you served at? Can you?
JB: Um, Fort Sutton. No, Melbourne, East Yorkshire. Either Melbourne or Fort Sutton – they’re both in East Yorkshire, I’m not sure which one, but I think it must have been Melbourne we went from there to discharge Wembley. They gave us a suit and money.
GT: What was your last Mosquito trips then? When was that?
JB: Well that was, actually the last one the squadron flew on I was on leave, so I didn’t go and that was the last raid of the war full stop. It was on May the 7th it was, and that was on Kiel and two of our blokes were shot down on that one. My mate Doug Waite and his navigator, Doug’s still alive. He lives in Somerset. There’s only him and another chap in Cromer, they were the last two surviving pilots for that squadron, who I know, are still alive, I don’t think there’s any others. And that was my last trip must been, what, March, April, be April 1945 I suppose. Can’t even remember where it was. The longest trip we made was on [indecipherable] which was six hours and ten minutes which is a long time. We carried a lot of fuel. We carried seven hundred and sixteen gallons, which is what, about three thousand litres.
GT: So what’s the total flying time in a Mosquito?
JB: Well, we carried seven hundred and sixteen gallons, and each Merlin burns a gallon a minute, so that goes seven hours and I say, we had six hours and ten minutes and we still didn’t run short of fuel. They were good on fuel, you had to be stupid run out of gas. We carried one hundred gallon drop tanks.
GT: Your concentration for that long in a very cold aircraft?
JB: Oh no! They weren’t, they were never cold. The Mosquito was made of wood and were well insulated cause they were made of wood, and had a nice heater and was quite comfortable. I flew in a battledress, I never flew in a flying suit, nor did Fred, it was really good. No, no there was no problem there, but it was, often you were flying in cloud for four or five hours and that was very taxing because you got this awful effect where you thought you were flying straight and level but in fact you were turning.
GT: So your navigator, where did he sit? Next to you or down below?
JB: Sat in the Beaufighter behind, in the Mosquito, to the side.
GT: And he was doing all of your navigating through the scopes?
JB: No, no, did that on his knee on the back of an envelope [laughter], well he had all this radar gear in front of him which sort of eased out, he had no room, had this great big visor like this, and used to go to sleep in there and stuff, I knew when he was going to sleep, I could hear his breathing getting slower. But I didn’t mind, I could find my way home all right, you know. We had very good navigational aid - Gee, which was excellent, Gee was really good and we had a very good VHS system and they would home you from England, if you were high enough, they would give you a course for home right from the UK, it was a piece of cake. Navigation was never a problem for us. Never.
GT: Thousands of aircraft in the air at once, that’s phenomenal to keep you all on track!
JB: Yes, it was good. You know, when you think the sheer logistics of that was absolutely mind-boggling, you know.
GT: And Fred was saying to you left, right, left, right, or was he giving a heading?
JB: No, no, he was just saying alter course to oh nine two, make three hundred on the way home, you know, and there was no problem, because had a nice big sort of compass thing, you know, electric gyro. No we never had any, the only time we did have a couple of, I remember we, coming back from Germany and we come over this, we come across the land and I said to Fred where’s that, and he said oh, that’ll be the East Anglian coast and all of a sudden we were over the sea again, I said that must be the fastest crossing of England you’ve ever seen. In in actual fact, it was the strong wind, it was the Friesian Islands, in Holland, so it took us another half an hour to get across there, you know. I said we’re lost! He said we’re not lost, he says, I’m just a little uncertain of our whereabouts. [Chuckle] So I said in that case, I said how high is Ben Nevis. He says four thousand four hundred feet, I said then we’ll fly at five thousand four hundred feet. Which I did. Flying into the high ground was not difficult being in the UK. The Mossie was pretty fast, and it would get lost pretty fast too [indecipherable].
GT: That was an achievement getting every one of your Mosquito aircraft back without scratching one. Pretty awesome achievement. So when did you last see Fred, when you?
JB: Ah well Fred, when, after the war, I went back to Canada. I lived there seven years actually. Fred followed me, but he joined the RCMP, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and rose to the rank of sergeant, and actually was Pierre Trudeau’s chauffeur for about three years, and we lost track of each other then and in actual fact we, Wendy and I, my wife, we have visited Fred a couple of times, in Canada, but he died about four years ago now. That was the last I saw of dear old Fred. He was from South Shields, he was, up in Newcastle, you know. He was two weeks older than me. His birthday was on October 5th.
GT: It was pretty awesome for you to team up with somebody that you trusted and trusted his life with you too. So once you’d done some work in Canada, how come you’ve ended up in New Zealand after all this time?
JB: Well, I was a keen motorcycle man, I was, incidentally that’s my dad there in that picture, believe it or not, and yeah, I went back to Canada, and there for seven years and I was a very keen motorcyclist and I was the national organiser for the Vincent Owners Club. You’ve heard of the Vincent, motor bike, I was the national organiser for the Vincent Owners Club for the whole of the United States and Canada. Towards the end of that time this chap Oscar van Dogen wrote to me from New Zealand, he said he wanted make a, do a working holiday in Canada, could I give him somebody to write to? I said yeah, write to me, and we corresponded with each other for the next sixty years! And he died about two years ago. [Laugh] So if you want the stories, I’ve got them, man!
GT: And that’s what you did when you come to New Zealand?
JB: Ah, when I came to New Zealand, this was in 1953, I landed the same day as the Queen did, on Christmas 1953. She was on the Gothic, I was on the Wanganella from Australia, and then, there was a dearth of people, of tradesmen particularly in New Zealand, you could do anything you liked and work where you liked, so I got this job in engineering place in Christchurch, A. R. Harris and they made washing machines, the Simplicity washing machines, and I worked there for a couple of years and then I got sick of that and went and got a job with the government. I was a weights and measures inspector, which was another little escapade you see.
GT: Whereabouts was that? In Wellington?
JB: No. In Christchurch. I was transferred to Wellington and then from Wellington I was transferred to Nelson, and from Nelson they was going to transfer me to Auckland and I said I don’t want to go to Auckland and they said you’ve got to go to Auckland and I said no I don’t – I resign! So I did and that was in, what, 1960 something, so I went to an engineering place in, down at Port Nelson, and I was there for sixteen years. So, one thing and another.
GT: Now you’re, there’s been in Nelson, New Zealand there, a very strong on Bomber Command group of people that used to get together.
JB: We had about twenty here when I first started with the local branch of the New Zealand Bomber Command Association, and we’ve got what three or four or something: natural attrition shall we call it.
GT: And only a matter of months ago, your group, you’ve decided just to have your last lunch together, and there’s been a bit of publicity about that.
JB: Yes. [indecipherable]
GT: Which is, I think really across the country, many Brevet Clubs are down to several chaps only.
JB: Yeah, well I fell out, we have no Brevet Club. We did have one and it closed and people joined the Christchurch one, but I fell out with the Brevet Club in Christchurch. Well we, I’m the patron of the local RSA Branch and we, also we have a Trust Fund and we also give the cadets a thousand bucks or two thousand dollars a year each, all the cadet units, and Christchurch are sitting on nearly a million dollars and they didn’t dispense any money to the cadet units at all, so I wrote and said you know, get off your backsides and give them some money and they came back all guns loaded - don’t you tell us how to spend our money blah, blah, blah! So I said stuff that and gave it away.
GT: Yeah, so.
JB: I don’t know, are they active? Did they have a Bomber Command Association in Christchurch? I don’t recall any of them going to the unveiling at Green Park.
GT: It’s the National Bomber Command Centre that’s based, sorry Association based out of Auckland and there is barely five Brevet Bomber Command chaps in Christchurch left, so.
JB: No Association as such.
GT: No, they’re part of the national, New Zealand one. They do have a Brevet Club however, that’s out at Wigram air base.
JB: I know they do. But I don’t belong to it. I resigned.
GT: No. It’s very small now.
JB: Well I hope they doing something useful with their money cause that really got up my snorter that did. Really did. I thought well what they going to do with all that money? Cause they wound up with about half a million and they had about a hundred and seventy members I think, and I thought well, for goodness’ sake, you know, put it to some use, where it’s going to do some good, what better use than the cadet units, you know, I thought. That was my thinking. [indecipherable]
GT: Now, before, recently, well 2012 I guess, where the Bomber Command Memorial in London there was something that for us, the New Zealand Bomber Command Association, were planning on moving everybody over there that could go, but the New Zealand took it away from us and planned their own trip and took their own thirty odd gentlemen that they deemed could go and they looked after them very well and their decision was only New Zealanders could go.
JB: We stayed in the same hotel.
GT: And then I understand that there were several of you RAF chaps that emigrated here that were.
JB: I was the only RAF chap on that particular trip.
GT: So you managed to get over there though.
JB: Oh well, the lovely people of Nelson, they raised twenty two thousand dollars. G J Gardner gave us ten grand, towards it. There were people all over the world sent money, so we said my wife Wendy could go too So Wendy and I went, with Air New Zealand stayed at the Acorn Hotel, at the, in London, in the same hotel as the people there, having said that.
GT: I helped a little bit with the organisation for 75 Squadron sort of thing, the chaps, and I was in the Green Park at the back. So I understand you managed to get a seat at the front!
JB: Wasn’t quite at the front, well was about two rows back. I didn’t quite shake hands with Queenie, but gave her the nod, you know.
GT: Definitely.
JB: Got quite, took a lot of pictures, wonderful pictures of the occasion.
GT: Fascinating day. My RAF colleague and I were at the pub and waited till about seven pm, then we went down to the Memorial after they’d had opening and we had throngs of people, cause we were in uniform, asking.
JB: We went to that pub called The Three Tuns, was just down the road, a really nice pub, people there. Lovely hotel, the breakfasts were marvellous!
GT: I’m pleased you got to go over there to see that because many had not that opportunity from New Zealand.
JB: Definity a must to see, gorgeous place for sure.
GT: For sure, and all credit to those folk who organised and got that there and to look up at the statues of the chaps.
JB: That, well to me it’s a shame that the people who actually cast those never got any credit at all. It should have said where that was, where the foundry was or something, because it’s some of the finest casting I’ve ever seen in my life: everything was perfect. It was really, really good. I thought well, what a shame, they’ve given the name of the bloke who designed it but they didn’t give any credit to the people who actually made it, you know. Anyway.
GT: You, on this recording have now just given them the kudos.
JB: Well I reckon, well they needed, they should get some kudos, because it’s so, there was things on that which people would never pick up. For example, I noticed in the, down the flying boot of one of the gunners was the toggle from the cord for cocking a Browning and I bet very few people would see that, you know, the wooden handle with the loop on the end for pulling back the breech, you know. I thought I wonder how many people will spot that? So whoever did it was very, very good on the design.
GT: I understand that they, each individual airman of that trade, or job, they had veterans model. Marvellous. That’s great to hear. Thank you very much for that.
JB: No, I was absolutely chuffed with that.
GT: Now I also note that you have been in some way been involved, or been able to see at least, the Mosquitos that have been created in here New Zealand for flying.
JB: Yes, I have. I’ve been close to them but unfortunately I thought they might have given me a trip round the circuit or something, but no luck, maybe the next one anyway. I think I’ve earned it, but they didn’t, wouldn’t ended up, wouldn’t say John you can sit in the right hand seat and we’ll give you a turn, no. Least they’d have done, but it wasn’t, they, oh we’ve got insurance problems, we can’t do this and can’t, but I notice that people like um, what’s his name, the 617 bloke who was here, his granddaughter worked the airport before, they gave him a ride in one of those.
GT: Les Munro. That is special.
JB: Yes, Les Munro. He got a ride in one, I didn’t. Anyway. A lot of the blokes, we, there’s a picture over there in my little corner there, all the blokes who’d flown the Mossie and supposedly people who’d flew Mosquitos and a lot of them never did fly Mosquitos: they were Lancaster people. Which a lot of them were 75 Squadron people and 75 Squadron didn’t have any Lancs, have any Mosquitos, so I know that they were sort of just getting in on the action.
GT: However, 75 Squadron RNZAF [emphasis] did fly Mosquitos from 1947 to 53 at Ohakea. That might have come from, I think -
JB: Oh yeah, they were talking about Second World War veterans here, so they couldn’t have done. Anyway.
GT: Well I think they, a lot of them did fly Lancasters World War Two and post war, when New Zealand then was given 75 number plate and then we, they flew seventy five Mosquitos from England to New Zealand, and I think those guys went on to carry on flying those then. So that’s might have been where it was.
JB: Anyway, doesn’t matter now.
GT: It’s a huge thing, only a couple left out of those whole seventy, they cut them up. But look John. Just one last little thing then. Where are we now? You’ve obviously got a morning job, and it’s now roughly approaching 1pm in the afternoon so I’ve intruded on your day, but it’s been fascinating talking to you, but please tell a little about where we are and what this Institute does, because it’s a very important job that New Zealand does.
JB: Well, the reason we’re here is many years ago, when they shipped wood to export to Japan, there was a team of all oldies that we used to do these eight hour shifts because we did a quality test every fifteen minutes when they were loading the ship, and they had to have people who didn’t rely on a full time job, we were called when we were needed, which was very good and when we had a midnight till eight, the morning, or no, I think it was eleven till seven and seven till three I think, and this carried on until the port got smaller cause the ships got bigger and they couldn’t load ships and also the MDF plants opened up in Richmond, so they didn’t need to send it away from Nelson any more, it could all be done from other places and they found out that old JB was still handy with his fingers, so can you fix this John, yes I can and so thirty years ago and I’ve been here ever since, [indecipherable] fixing things and I like them and they like me, you know, and it’s good, it's been lovely and that’s how I came to be with Cawthron Institute. Not because of my scientific knowledge I might tell you!
GT: So what do they specifically look after and look out for here? What is their main role?
JB: Well, they do scientific research of any kind. They test food, they do a lot of marine work here, there’s, you know, if you look at the history of the Cawthron in recent years you’ll see a lot of it’s tied up in marine work: fresh water, salt water, mussels, we do all the salmon testing, king salmon, you know, make sure there’s not too much mercury in the fish and goodness knows what, and all this sort of stuff. They do a lot of pure research as well, as I told [indecipherable] they inspect all the spats for mussels, so by and large I think it’s a good place. They’ve got the most, we’ve got the most diverse number of people you’ve ever seen. We’ve got Germans, we’ve got French, we’ve got Russians, we’ve got Chinese, we’ve got Japanese, we’ve got Lithuanians, we’ve got French, we’ve got Dutchmen, we’ve got Englishmen, everybody [emphasis] here and everybody gets on. It’s a wonderful place, the Cawthron, it really is.
GT: And you’re the go-to fix-it man of the building.
JB: Yes. Mr Fix-it, that’s me!
GT: Mr Fixit. And you are how old now?
JB: Be ninety five in October.
GT: There you go! There’s hope for all of us to know that we can get a great old age and still be working.
JB: I don’t know! I hope you sided going in the lift!
GT: Well John, it’s been such a pleasure to first meet you, but second to talk to you today because the International Bomber Command Centre, I know, is looking for the beautiful stories of you men that made some huge sacrifices for us, some the ultimate, and yourself, obviously, you fought for our freedom and I thank you very much for that and I think that we’ve kind of come to it.
JB: I suppose it’ll be okay. I didn’t tell you too much about my flying career when I think about it, you know.
GT: I hope you’ve written a book. [Laugh]
JB: It’s okay, whatever keeps them happy.
GT: I’ve been in worse. Thank you sir, and I certainly appreciate your time with me today and is there one last word you’d like to give? One last word on the recording you’d like to give me?
JB One last word. Well what do I say? It’s been nice meeting you, and certainly a surprise. I had a similar interview as this about three weeks ago from a man who is doing exactly what you’re doing for 100 Group because they have a reunion every year in England, in Norfolk, and he did exactly what you’re doing now, almost word for word what we’ve just said. If you can’t get that then, and also, I’ve also made a DVD of this same thing, just like you’re doing, about five years ago, which is on a DVD somewhere. if I can find it you can have that too if you want.
GT: See [indecipherable].
JB: Better leave me a card so I can get in touch with you.
GT: Okay John, well, thank you. We’ll end our interview there. That’s fifty three minutes that we’ve had a chat here, so. It’s been a pleasure.
JB: Chop it about, cut bits out you don’t like, or whatever.
GT: I’m sure they’ll like all of it, okay. So, thank you John, I appreciate your time. Thank you. Bye bye.
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 John Benjamin Beeching
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Glen Turner
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-01-18
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ABeechingJB180118
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:53:28 audio recording
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Description
An account of the resource
John Beeching was born in London and joined the RAF in 1941. His initial training was in Canada. After several escapades John joined 169 Squadron as a night fighter pilot and worked in electronic countermeasures as well as training crews in air gunnery. Post-war he saw damage in Germany and moved on to instruct in blind landings. John left the RAF and went to Canada then emigrated to New Zealand, working in a number of engineering based jobs. John came over to the unveiling of the Green Park Memorial and was active in the New Zealand Bomber Command Association. He gives his strongly felt views on these and other matters.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
Great Britain
New Zealand
England--Bedfordshire
England--Lincolnshire
Manitoba--Winnipeg
New Brunswick--Moncton
New Zealand--Christchurch
New Brunswick
Manitoba
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Anne-Marie Watson
100 Group
169 Squadron
627 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
B-29
Beaufighter
bombing
Gee
Mosquito
Oxford
P-51
pilot
radar
RAF Twinwood Farm
RAF Woodhall Spa
Tiger Moth
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/675/11902/MArrowsmithHL571013-160929-060001.1.jpg
30cbc3f7c4aa0dbe445b0fbc85169487
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/675/11902/MArrowsmithHL571013-160929-060002.1.jpg
29cd21d07f0d1c58e285bb4cf97d4a61
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/675/11902/MArrowsmithHL571013-160929-060003.1.jpg
51d18f9ff8c5ea7c19a2c050a145183a
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/675/11902/MArrowsmithHL571013-160929-060004.1.jpg
40ef2c651e32e5294a0cb68fdc2e6569
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
Arrowsmith, Les
H L Arrowsmith
Description
An account of the resource
14 items. The collection concerns Flight Sergeant Les Arrowsmith (b.1920) who flew operations as a bomb aimer with 576 Squadron from RAF Elsham Wolds until his Lancaster was shot down 21/22 May 1944 and he became a prisoner of war. The collection includes his prisoner of war diary, his log book, photographs, a scrap book and correspondence. After the war he continued to serve with the RAF and remustered to become a navigator.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Mike Arrowsmith and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-09-22
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Arrowsmith, HL
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
Navigator's Log Book covers
Description
An account of the resource
A log book issued to Les Arrowsmith. It contains handwritten notes and printed navigational data.
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
MArrowsmithHL571013-160929-060001,
MArrowsmithHL571013-160929-060002,
MArrowsmithHL571013-160929-060003,
MArrowsmithHL571013-160929-060004
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Achive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
aircrew
navigator
radar
RAF Wyton
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/496/19743/LCookeWH2220169v1.1.pdf
a7bbedefc460e05481466090e4aaa801
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
Cooke, William
William H Cooke
W H Cooke
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Cooke, WH
Description
An account of the resource
15 items. An oral history interview with William Cooke (2220169 Royal Air Force), log book and other service material, medals, photographs and memorabilia. He flew operations with 49 Squadron as an air gunner.
The collection has been licenced to the IBCC Digital Archive by and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. 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.
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
William H Cooke’s navigators, air bombers and air gunners flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
Navigators, air bombers and air gunners flying log book for W H Cooke, air gunner, covering the period from 3 November 1943 to 15 June 1945. Detailing his flying training and operations flown. He was stationed at RAF Bishops Court, RAF Upper Heyford, RAF Winthorpe, RAF Syerston, RAF Fiskerton, RAF Fulbeck, RAF Kolar and RAF Dhubalia. Aircraft flown in were, Anson, Wellington, Stirling, Lancaster and Liberator. He flew a total of 29 operations with 49 squadron, 8 daylight and 21 night. He also flew 2 operations with 99 squadron. Targets were, Givors, Trossey-St-Maxim, St Leu D’Esserent, Coquesville, Chattelerault, Brunswick, Ouilly, Deelan, Le Havre, Darmstadt, Stuttgart, Boulogne, Bremerhaven, Munchen-Gladbach, Munster, Karlsruhe, Kaiserslautern, Nurnburg, Bergen, Homberg, Dusseldorf, Ladbergen, Gravenhorst, Heilbronn, Geissen, Heinbach, Munich and Bilin. His pilot on operations was Flying Officer Parkin.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1943-08-06
1945-06-15
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
LCookeWH2220169v1
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.
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Oxfordshire
Germany
France
Norway
Burma
Great Britain
India
Netherlands
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
Burma--Mon State
France--Boulogne-sur-Mer
France--Caen
France--Châtellerault
France--Givors
France--Le Havre
France--Normandy
France--Oise
Germany--Braunschweig
Germany--Bremerhaven
Germany--Darmstadt
Germany--Düren (Cologne)
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Giessen (Hesse)
Germany--Heilbronn
Germany--Homberg (Kassel)
Germany--Hörstel
Germany--Kaiserslautern
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Mönchengladbach
Germany--Munich
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Steinfurt (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Stuttgart
India--Bengal
India--Kolar (District)
Netherlands--Gelderland
Northern Ireland--Down (County)
Norway--Bergen
Germany--Münster in Westfalen
France--Creil
Great Britain
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
1944-07-26
1944-07-27
1944-08-07
1944-08-08
1944-08-09
1944-08-10
1944-08-11
1944-08-12
1944-08-13
1944-08-14
1944-08-15
1944-09-10
1944-09-11
1944-09-12
1944-09-13
1944-09-17
1944-09-18
1944-09-19
1944-09-20
1944-09-23
1944-09-24
1944-09-27
1944-09-28
1944-10-19
1944-10-20
1944-10-28
1944-10-29
1944-11-01
1944-11-02
1944-11-03
1944-11-04
1944-11-05
1944-11-06
1944-11-07
1944-11-21
1944-11-22
1944-12-04
1944-12-06
1944-12-10
1944-12-11
1944-12-17
1944-12-18
1945-06-12
1945-06-15
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
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.
16 OTU
1661 HCU
49 Squadron
99 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
Anson
B-24
bombing of Luftwaffe night-fighter airfields (15 August 1944)
Bombing of Trossy St Maximin (3 August 1944)
crash
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operational Training Unit
radar
RAF Bishops Court
RAF Fiskerton
RAF Fulbeck
RAF Syerston
RAF Upper Heyford
RAF Winthorpe
Stirling
tactical support for Normandy troops
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1545/36135/LKennedyJL19210211v1.1.pdf
3f86ab857a9f2e2281142d6e63a322d1
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
Kennedy, J L
Kennedy, John Lyle
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-10-01
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Kennedy, JL
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. The collection concerns Flight Lieutenant John Lyle Kennedy DFC and DSO (1921 - 1998, Royal Air Force) and contains his log book and pilot's notes for Wellington. He flew operations as a pilot with 192 Squadron.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Campbell Kennedy and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
John L Kennedy’s pilots flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
Pilots flying log book for John L Kennedy, covering the period from 2 February 1942 to 30 November 1945. Detailing his flying training, operations flown and instructor duties. He was stationed at RAF Induna, RAF Kumalo, RAF Perth, RAF South Cerney, RAF Wing, RAF Feltwell, RAF Foulsham, RAF Lossiemouth and RAF Lulsgate Bottom. Aircraft flown in were Tiger Moth, Oxford, Wellington, Halifax, Mosquito, Martinet, Harvard, Fairchild, Anson, Master, Lancaster and C-47 Dakota. He flew total of 34 operations with 192 Squadron. Operations flown are listed as Special Duty operations, carrying out radar countermeasures but targets are not named.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Zimbabwe
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Gloucestershire
England--Norfolk
England--Somerset
Scotland--Moray
Scotland--Perthshire
Zimbabwe--Bulawayo
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
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LKennedyJL19210211v1
1660 HCU
192 Squadron
20 OTU
26 OTU
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
bombing
C-47
Flying Training School
Halifax
Harvard
Heavy Conversion Unit
Initial Training Wing
Lancaster
Martinet
Mosquito
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
radar
RAF Feltwell
RAF Foulsham
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF South Cerney
RAF Torquay
RAF Wing
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1502/36138/LNimanMA137571v1.1.pdf
fe40e9891138c779a2858ea73f4e9c1d
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
Niman, M 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
2016-04-24
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. 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
Niman, MA
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. The collection concerns Flight Lieutenant M A Niman (966637, 137571 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book and correspondence. He flew operations as a Wireless Operator/Air Gunner with 10 and 192 Squadrons.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by J Niman and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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
M A Niman’s RAF observer’s and air gunner’s flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
M A Niman’s RAF Observer’s and Air Gunner’s Flying Log Book, from 6th August 1941 to 2nd May 1945, detailing operations and instructional duties in the UK, Middle East and East Africa as a Wireless Operator/Air Gunner and “Special Operator”, including bomber transport, anti-submarine patrols and radio/radar counter-measures. The logbook starts with a note certifying flying hours (36 ‘trips’) contained in a logbook which was lost on the 16th July 1941 when a Bombay aircraft crashed into the sea at Gibraltar. It ends with a list of 31 ops flown with 10 Squadron obtained in 2002 from historical records, and a crew list. He was stationed at RAF Kemble (Overseas Aircraft Delivery Flight), RAF Heliopolis (No. 216 Bomber Transport Squadron), Wadi Gazouza/ Nanyuki (72 OTU), Kipevu, Mombasa (259 and 209 Squadrons), RAF Halfpenny Green (also known as RAF Bobbington) (No. 3 (O) AFU) and RAF Foulsham (192 Squadron). Aircraft in which flown: Bombay, Blenheim, Anson, Catalina, Short C-Class, Lodestar, Halifax and Whitley. Records a total of 14 night operations with 192 Squadron: some have no targets named, and some names are incorrectly spelled. These have been corrected where necessary by reference to the squadron ORB. Targets in Germany are: Augsburg, Bremen, Bremerhaven, Flensburg, Hamburg, Harburg, Kiel, Ladbergen, Langendreer, Nuremberg, Plauen and Stade. His pilots on operations were Flight Sergeant D T Witt, Squadron Leader K F Ferguson, Sergeant P Hickling, Pilot Officer Williams and Wing Commander V B Bennett, Flight Lieutenant Ford, Flying Officer Gray, Flying Officer Gilmour, Flight Lieutenant Helyer, Flight Lieutenant Dimant, Flying Officer Dutton, Flying Officer Field, Wing Commander Donaldson, and Flight Lieutenant Payne.<br /><br /><span data-contrast="auto" xml:lang="EN-GB" lang="EN-GB" class="TextRun SCXW246595534 BCX0"><span class="NormalTextRun SCXW246595534 BCX0">This item was sent to the IBCC Digital Archive already in digital form. No </span><span class="ContextualSpellingAndGrammarError SCXW246595534 BCX0">better quality</span><span class="NormalTextRun SCXW246595534 BCX0"> copies are available.</span></span><span class="EOP SCXW246595534 BCX0" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559739":200,"335559740":276}"> </span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1940-08-13
1940-08-14
1940-09-15
1940-09-16
1940-09-20
1940-09-21
1940-09-22
1940-09-23
1940-10-01
1940-10-02
1940-10-07
1940-10-08
1940-10-14
1940-10-15
1940-11-12
1940-11-13
1940-11-15
1940-11-16
1940-11-17
1940-11-18
1940-11-26
1940-11-27
1940-12-02
1940-12-03
1940-12-18
1940-12-19
1940-12-20
1940-12-21
1940-12-23
1940-12-24
1940-12-29
1940-12-30
1941-01-03
1941-01-04
1941-01-05
1941-01-10
1941-01-11
1941-01-16
1941-01-17
1941-02-03
1941-02-04
1941-02-11
1941-02-12
1941-02-23
1941-02-24
1941-02-26
1941-02-27
1941-03-01
1941-03-02
1941-03-03
1941-03-04
1941-04-08
1941-04-09
1941-04-10
1941-04-14
1941-04-15
1941-05-07
1941-05-08
1941-05-09
1945-02-23
1945-02-24
1945-02-28
1945-03-01
1945-03-02
1945-03-03
1945-03-04
1945-03-16
1945-03-21
1945-03-27
1945-04-03
1945-04-04
1945-04-05
1945-04-06
1945-04-08
1945-04-10
1945-04-11
1945-04-13
1945-04-14
1945-04-15
1945-04-16
1945-04-22
1945-04-23
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
Kenya
Sudan
Egypt--Cairo
Kenya--Mombasa
Kenya--Nanyuki
England--Gloucestershire
England--Norfolk
England--Staffordshire
Germany--Augsburg
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Bremerhaven
Germany--Flensburg
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Plauen
Germany--Stade (Lower Saxony)
Germany--Steinfurt (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Egypt
North Africa
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
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
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending temporal coverage. Allocated
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
David Leitch
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LNimanMA137571v1
10 Squadron
192 Squadron
216 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
Blenheim
bombing
Catalina
Halifax
Operational Training Unit
radar
RAF Foulsham
RAF Halfpenny Green
RAF Kemble
training
Whitley
wireless operator / air gunner
-
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0af3593dc8a5dbf76c8720fe05d8f3c2
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2557/45616/PBlamiresRG22010003.2.jpg
7d481a946283389c5bf79c30e4f81bd3
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2557/45616/PBlamiresRG22010005.2.jpg
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Blamires, Robert Geoffrey
R G Blamires
Description
An account of the resource
99 items. The collection concerns Robert Geoffrey Blamires (b. 1921, 139996 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, diary, correspondence, documents, charts and an <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2645">Album</a>. He flew operations as a navigator with 103 Squadron. <br /><br />The collection was loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Judith Coad and catalogued by Trevor Hardcastle.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2022-05-11
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Blamires, RG
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
Mining Stettin
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MBlamiresRG139996-220512-060001, MBlamiresRG139996-220512-060002, MBlamiresRG139996-220512-060003, MBlamiresRG139996-220512-060005
Description
An account of the resource
Four H2S returns for a mining operation to Szczecin. Captioned:
24/5 EWS 16/17.8.44// 11000 ? 30/30 L 0119 Mining Stettin. FL/T Josey. U103
24/3 EWS 16/17.8.44// 11000 185 30/30 M. 011530 Mining Stettin. Swinemunde 12 FL/T Josey. U103
24/1 EWS 16/17.8.44// 11000 168 30/30 M [deleted] Mining Stettin. FL/T Josey. U103
24/2 EWS 16/17.8.44// 11000 168 30/30 L 0114 Mining Stettin. FL/T Josey. U103. Swinemunde
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-08-16
1944-08-17
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-08-16
1944-08-17
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Poland--Szczecin
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
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Four b/w photographs
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.
103 Squadron
aircrew
H2S
mine laying
radar
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2557/45617/PBlamiresRG22010004.1.jpg
cfa4a7cc52c38fe69bae8e9d232178aa
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
Blamires, Robert Geoffrey
R G Blamires
Description
An account of the resource
99 items. The collection concerns Robert Geoffrey Blamires (b. 1921, 139996 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, diary, correspondence, documents, charts and an <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2645">Album</a>. He flew operations as a navigator with 103 Squadron. <br /><br />The collection was loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Judith Coad and catalogued by Trevor Hardcastle.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2022-05-11
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Blamires, RG
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
Mining Gdynia
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MBlamiresRG139996-220512-060004
Description
An account of the resource
H2S return for a mining operation to Gdynia captioned '27/2 EWS 26/27.8.44//13000. 250 10/10. M014010Mining Gydinia 190/8 HEL.PT. F/L Josey. U 103'.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-08-26
1944-08-27
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-08-26
1944-08-27
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Poland--Gdynia
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
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph
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.
103 Squadron
aircrew
H2S
mine laying
radar
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1015/11304/PLeedhamHJL1801.2.jpg
fdabc281256a5511e83607203749a467
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1015/11304/ALeedhamHJL181212.1.mp3
eca92a44a63ba05981df7098454718ac
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Leedham, Bob
Herbert John Lewis Leedham
H J L Leedham
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Squadron Leader Bob Leedham (b. 1922, 1183577, 160986 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a pilot with 90 and 57 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-12-12
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Leedham, HJL
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HB: This is an interview between International Bomber Command Centre volunteer Harry Bartlett with Mr Herbert, Bob, Leedham, who lives at Ashbourne in Warwickshire. He joined the RAF in 1940, but we’ll no doubt will come to that shortly. Bob, if I can just ask you what were you doing on, in the few years before the war?
BL: My family, my father was a skilled carpenter, but on my mother’s side, she had three brothers all of which were very keen engineers and one of which was exceptionally keen and he worked for a local motor company and he was involved in motor bike racing at Donnington, mainly, and it was him that inspired me with a heavy engineering interest, and consequently when I left school, I was educated in Burton on Trent, the dear old brewing place, I finished up there, I was, won a scholarship to be educated at the main system, which was the central system and the grammar school and so on in Burton and I survived that. And on leaving I decided my real choice was to follow my uncles as it were, into the motor trade, which I did. And I was trained fairly quickly as an apprentice in the motor trade and of course when the war started most of them were already on the reserve and they were the first people to be called up. So myself and a couple of my colleagues of my age, and at that time we are talking about an age of seventeen, sixteen to seventeen, I had already passed my driving test and was driving of course and we were left to run the very large garage very quickly after all the others had been called up, and so it was hands on experience with a vengeance. We were left to run the garage and carry on operations and consequently even a relatively short time I had a good engineering background. However, when I got to seventeen and a half, all my mates that I knew and went to school with and so on had all got into the air force, they’d volunteered in some way or other. In fact some of them were actually called up and I knew that sooner or later I would be called up as soon as I got to the age of I think it was eighteen or nineteen and the chances were that I would maybe put in to the Army. Well I had no interest whatsoever of going into the Army. My first choice was always the air force. Unknown to my parents, at seventeen and a half, I went over to the Assembly Rooms in Derby to the recruiting centre and signed up to join, but I had to give my age as eighteen. They probably accepted this with tongue in cheek knowing that I’d lied a little bit about my age. However, I was accepted and instructed to come for a medical a couple of days later. Very amusing and perhaps interesting thing was, that bearing in mind I had been brought up in a relatively conservative sort of area in Burton on Trent as opposed to big cities and so on, so we were living in a relatively closed environment, despite the fact we were all qualified, and highly qualified tradesmen then. So I went over to have the medical. There was about twenty of us lined up. The doctor came in, he says, ‘right, take your shirts off boys, I’m going to check your hearts.’ So he went along, checking everyone, all the way along, and when he got to the end he says, ‘Right, put your shirts on boys,’ then waited a few minutes, said, ‘drop your trousers then.’ I thought ‘drop my trousers!’, bloody hell! I’d never been exposed to anyone in my life before, you know! And I feel that at that moment I changed from being a boy to a man. That’s the way I felt about it, I couldn’t believe, having to drop my trousers and expose myself even to a doctor. That was the sort of background we were brought up in of course, in those days. It’s totally different now of course. So really from then on the next few days I was down at Cardington for the, attestation and so forth and then I was allocated for training. So initially because of my engineering background the RAF at that time were quite short of experienced engineering people, and they’d set up training units and so on but, they were very good from a theory point of view but nothing in the way of hands on. So I was immediately shuffled into training as a fitter 2E. But I wasn’t happy that, I wanted to fly. So it didn’t last long, and I managed to wiggle my way in to ITW at Blackpool, and found myself on a pilot’s course.
HB: ITW?
BL: ITW: Initial Training Wing.
HB: Right.
BL: Which was at Blackpool in those days and that’s where they carried out the tests as to whether you were suitable to fly in an aircrew capacity. So I was accepted to fly an aircrew capacity to be decided specifically by the selection board’s requirements. And the next thing was, at that time the pilot training was being geared up dramatically. The original pilots in the air force at the start of the war and going right up to probably about the end of 1941, were pre-war pilots, mostly people who’d come from quite wealthy backgrounds who could afford to train them as pilots and by the end of 1941, these were the people that the air force had to rely on in the early days. When I look back historically on some of the situations, bombing raids and that sort of thing using obsolete aircraft like Lysanders and stuff like that, it was dreadful really and by the end of ’41 most of these boys had disappeared: they’d either been shot down, been killed, they crashed or were POWs. Result was that there was a colossal demand for fully trained new aircrew. This was done from a pilot’s point of view in Canada, or America, or Southern Rhodesia as it was then, which is now Zimbabwe, of course. Those were the three, main three areas where the pilots would train from about 1941 onwards. And they set up very, very good systems. But there was a difference between Rhodesia trained and particularly American trained. The American instructors were extremely, quite different to us: they were very hard, very dedicated and they set up a system for training pilots, that if you didn’t go solo in twelve hours, you were thrown off the course. You were downgraded to either a navigator or a bomb aimer or anyone else that had any sort of background which would be useful to the air force, in my case an engineering background. And when you consider, you know, people, ex bank managers if you like, and people from a whole variety of trades in civilian life, there they were, shipped over to America to train as pilots and expected to go solo in twelve hours. Just dreadful really. However, that was the way the system worked. It wasn’t quite so severe in Canada, but nevertheless it was similar to the American system but the ones trained in Southern Rhodesia of course, it was very much more realistic, and they didn’t stick to any specific hours to go solo and things like that you see. So the result was when finely trained aircrew of any category then came back to the UK, the usual routine was Initial Training Wing and then on to type training unit and so on and find a way into things like Wellingtons and Hampdens and Lemingtons, er Wellingtons and things like that.
HB: Can I just take you back a little bit Bob? [Cough] excuse me. When you joined up, you started your initial training as a fitter.
BL: Yup.
HB: But you then went for aircrew training.
BL: Yes.
HB: Did you go to train as a flight engineer, or did you go to train as a pilot?
BL: No, I went to train as a pilot initially.
HB: Right. And where did, which you, where did you actually go train as a pilot?
BL: I went to 32 SFTS in Carbery Manitoba, Canada.
HB: Canada, right.
BL: But I didn’t make the twelve hours solo so I was downgraded, the same as three quarters of them. There were very few, at that time anyway, who were competent enough after twelve hours to go solo. So it was a very hard path really. I came back to the UK, together with many others, who’d been diverted then in to training as a navigator or a bomb aimer or a gunner – I’d forgotten that one – and, but in my particular case the fact that I had the engineering background, which they wanted, they downgraded me to co-pilot and flight engineer. So predominantly I was trained as a full flight engineer, despite the fact I was accepted that on aircraft for instance like the Stirling I had to act as co-pilot as well. So I had to take link training and all that. I was never allowed to take off and land, but I was there to relieve the main pilot and to act as co-pilot duties. And that applied pretty well throughout: Stirlings, Lancasters, Halifaxes and so on. So we were always virtually the number two so far as the mechanical operation of the aircraft was concerned. As opposed to the gunners who had their job to do, bomb aimer had his job to do and the navigator. A number of the early bomb aimers of course were also trained as type of navigators but very few of them flew as navigators, they flew mainly as usually as bomb aimer come front gunner. There was always a front turret, gun turret on the Lancs and the Stirlings and Halifaxes, so the bomb aimers were expected to man the front turret and also act as the bomb aimer so far as the targets were concerned. And the navigators of course, they did the actual navigation guidance to the pilots.
HB: So you came back to England and you went to do your flight engineer training for aircrew.
BL: Yes. At St. Athan.
HB: At, St Athan, right. So at the end of that training, where did you sort of stand in the scheme of things?
BL: I was at training, already I’d had my link training as a co-pilot as well, before I went to St Athan, when I left St Athan, fully qualified, the next thing then was to join a crew on either Lancs, Stirlings or Halifaxes. In fact in my particular case I was posted to Stradishall which was a main training base for Stirlings and then the crew of seven were created. There was nothing directed, they put us all in hangar and between ourselves we had to get to know each other and put ourselves together as a seven man crew, which is how it happened. Once that’s established as a crew then your flight training started, which we did at Stradishall of course, on the Stirlings in our particular case.
HB: Where did your, is it all in this hangar, did somebody come to you or did you think oh I like the look of him, I’ll go with him? Or? How did it work? What were the mechanics of it?
BL: It’s a variety really. Our captain, our skipper, was an ex Birmingham policeman and personally, personality was absolutely first class, but he was a strict disciplinarian being ex-police, of course, and so he was highly respected despite the fact he was definitely one of us, but very highly respected. And we got to know him, chatting away and he said well, he says ‘I’ve just come from OTU from Wellingtons,’ he says, ‘I’ve got a navigator and I probably have a bomb aimer.’ He says, ‘I’m looking for a couple of gunners and a flight engineer co-pilot to get the seven man crew together,’ and so from then on it was a question of who you knew and whether you thought they were capable, and see whether they were already in a crew or not that was how we all created seven together. It was done quite amicably, in various reasons, various forms, whether you knew each other or you say well I know old so-and-so, he’s a bloody good navigator, try and get him on our crew, you know, and that sort of thing. So we finished up as a very tight crew and it so happened, subsequently, that when we were doing our ops on the squadron, the camaraderie within the seven man crew was very tight indeed. The result was we found that we had seven first class crew members. Everyone worked together, helped each other and that was the way it went on the Stirlings. Unfortunately the Stirlings of course had a very bad reputation subsequently. The reason for this was because in its early days, [cough] it was built pre-war of course, a long way pre-war, and was a very good four engined heavy bomber when it was produced, extremely good, but unfortunately it came under the influence of the political decisions, the politicians came along and said that aircraft’s got a wingspan of a hundred and sixteen feet! We won’t get it in to the hangars at Cardington, they’re only a hundred feet, you’ll have to take sixteen feet off the wings. So, reluctantly, they put pressure on the manufacturers and the Stirling was modified to have sixteen feet, either, eight feet either side taken off the wings. Not only that by doing that they had to alter the structure quite considerably and raise the undercarriage very high in order to cope with this. Disaster so far as performance’s concerned, the result was the Stirling was always very, very much – what shall I say - the underdog as far as the heavy bombers were concerned. Result was the highest we could ever get to bomb was about twelve thousand feet. The Lancs and the Halifaxes were up above at twenty two thousand and frequently if your time was slightly out we were bombed by their bombs from above us. Frequently happened, there was a lot of aircraft were lost that way. Just one of those things. So really, although at that stage, when you think that the Lanc didn’t come in to service till towards the end of ’42, so in the early days the Stirling was the only heavy bomber and he was restricted in its performance by this political intervention and consequently it had a reputation of being something of a, I won’t use, I want to use the words death traps, but Bomber Harris had his own ideas on this and he was fully aware of it. In fact as ‘43 went on we were doing the Ruhr bombing and then of course Hamburg and then the start of the Berlin offensive which was in the autumn of ’43, and at that stage our losses were running on average seven, eight percent, we had one occasion when our losses were seventeen [emphasis] percent. And it got to the stage where Bomber Harris, he couldn’t stand it any longer, he was at war with a lot of the politicians himself of course by his insistence that Germany had to be bombed in order to minimise their war effort, and consequently it’s on record in one of, I think it was Max Hastings’ book Bomber Command I think he mentioned it in there, the extract of a meeting that Harris had with Churchill in round about October, I think, or maybe November ’43, and he was thumping the table and he said to Churchill, he says, ‘if I send my boys out [thumping] to get lost any longer in these bloody death trips, death traps called Stirlings they’ll call me a murderer.’ He says, ‘what I want is Lancasters, Lancasters and more Lancasters.’ there was a hell of a row went on and Churchill didn’t say a word. But finally he leaned across and said you’ll have your Lancasters. And it was then that the production on Lancasters was even, set up considerably higher than what it was already.
H: So when [cough] -
BL: So really, just interrupting,
HB: No, no.
BL: so going back from our training at Stradishall as a crew were posted to 90 Squadron to a little place called Ridgewell which was in Cambridgeshire, and not terribly well known and we were the first people in. A couple of farms that had been demolished and replaced with an impromptu quickly built runway. There was no, shall we say buildings, which were you might say were suitable for an operational squadron. There was mud everywhere, conditions were foul. They put a series of nissen huts up for us to live in and also for headquarters and the conditions there were not terribly good at all. However, there we were in the spring of ’41, er ’43, expected to use that as a base to operate, operationally against the various targets which were set out. We were at Ridgewell I think for no longer than about three months, four months, something like that and we moved then to a place called, it was West Wickham when we moved there but it was renamed Wratting Common, and consequently conditions there were far better. Again, it wasn’t a wartime, it wasn’t a peacetime airfield, but it was a good airfield and conditions there were far better airfield than Ridgewell. I don’t quite know what happened to Ridgewell in the end, whether it survived or not. I shouldn’t think it did: it was foul. But nevertheless we went to Wratting Common and we continued to fly our ops from Wratting Common on 90 Squadron, until, as I say, the autumn when the squadron was destined to change from Stirlings into Lancs and consequently they were moved to just outside Mildenhall at Tuddenham.
HB: How many ops did you actually fly in Stirlings for your tour?
BL: On Stirlings alone I think we did about twenty one I think it was, on the Stirlings, before we went on Lancs. As I say during that particular time conditions using the Stirling were very difficult, to make an understatement. Our losses were constant and it was amazing really, I mean for instance there was a Canadian pilot called Geordie Young. He was the senior pilot on the squadron, he’d got a lot of experience, and they went off on their last trip, their thirtieth trip, and they got blown up over Dusseldorf on their very last trip and that was, had a very, what shall I say effect on morale on the squadron, because they were regarded you know, the top boys on the squadron. One of the problems, in those days throughout Bomber Command, not just 3 Group which was a Stirling Group, but all the other groups as well, is that when Don Bennett set up the 8 Group, Pathfinder Group, he got old Hamish Mahaddie who he took on as his recruitment boss to collect all the very best crews off the different squadrons he could get hold of, to go into Pathfinders, and of course there was a colossal amount of opposition to this from all the squadrons. No squadron commander wants to lose their best crews, and consequently there was a war going on particularly on 5 Group, with Cochrane was the AOC on 5 Group in those days, based at Swinderby and he was very, very strongly opposed to it. There was open warfare going on the whole time, and despite the fact that 5 Group at that time of course, was the elite group which contained all the 617 boys and various other specialist crews for specialist bombing trips and he obviously didn’t want to lose any of those. And consequently he managed to get some political background particularly from Arthur Harris two of the Pathfinder squadrons in 8 Group would be transferred back to 5 Group. So he eventually had his own Pathfinder boys. Of course then when Gibson set up 617, that was also again from selecting top quality experienced crews. In the early days that was, but before the Dambuster raid, but not so much later on when they were really struggling to get replacement crews from the various crews they’d lost. So really Bomber Harris, Arthur Harris, he was very much supporting the 5 Group people, it was his elite group in Bomber Command and he always gave it sort of first preference on everything. There’s one, a very amusing aspect came at a conference they were having at Swinderby when at the time Princess Margaret was having this affair with Fighter Command Townsend and there was all speculation in the press about whether she’d marry him or whether she’d marry somebody else, and so on, and at this particular meeting, this conference of crews at Swinderby, it was a bit of a hilarious topic and someone was saying, ‘well it’s unknown who she’s going to marry, but it won’t have any effect on us here in 5 Group.’ And somebody stood up and said, ‘well there’s one thing for certain, whoever she marries, it’s bound to be somebody from 5 Group!’ [Laughter]
HB: Yeah. Can I just take you back a little bit Bob.
BL: Yes of course.
HB: I just noticed in some of your notes, I know this is jumping right back, it says you [cough] were posted to Coastal Command, 86 Squadron and flew on Sunderlands.
BL: Yes. That was when I was on 86. We were, we did a detachment down to Gosport actually.
HB: Oh right.
BL: And then to St, St Athan, when the two battleships Gneisenau and the Scharnhorst were at Brest and they were trying to get up the channel to get away and consequently we went down there with 86 Squadron to carry out operations against the two battleships. But for some reason or other, some of the squadron was detached to, in Coastal Command, to a flying boat squadron, which was 10 Squadron based at Mountbatten, at Plymouth. I don’t quite know why this happened, it was only a very short time, but I was one of the people that went on the flying boats for about three months.
HB: So you were there as a co-pilot engineer?
BL: Yes, on the flying boats. And again, bearing in mind our engineering background was what they wanted more than anything because we had to get involved with the maintenance schedules and so on as well. So I only had three months, I didn’t like it at all. Flying boats was not for me, and that was the main reason I thought that there must be a better way that I enjoy so I volunteered while I was there for Bomber Command. That’s where I started into Bomber Command
HB: Right. It’s all right, I was just trying to get the sequence of events into some sort of order.
BL: That was really how the sequence went through. Of course in Bomber Command, very lucky with our crew to survive a tour on 90 Squadron.
HB: What were the operations, you know, you’re flying operations into the Ruhr in the Stirling, and you’ve very clearly explained the shortcomings of the Stirling. What was it, you know, what was, what were your experiences of those, those individual sort of operations?
BL: Well it varied actually. But the Ruhr targets at that time I can remember them vividly. Dortmund, Dusseldorf, Duisburg, Krefeldt, Essen. And Essen was the one everyone hated [emphasis] because at that time that was the home of Daimler Benz, Krups and all the munitions factories, and they had a ring right the way round Essen, three thousand anti aircraft guns and radar controlled searchlights and when you’re flying towards Essen and you looked ahead, you think, ‘Christ you’ve got to get through that to get to the target point,’ and usually at briefing when the curtain was finally pulled back - we were never told what the target was until the very last minute of course - and when the target was pulled back you see Essen area, ‘oh Christ, not Essen,’ you know. However, going from what I say, first five trips Essen, then we went on to Gelsenkirchen, Wuperthal, Mulein, Bochum, Cologne, Munchen Gladbach. Now in my history of 90 Squadron book, there’s various aspects of the work that we did, and there’s a typical battle order printed there as an example. And that was August the 26th I think it was, on Munchen Gladbach and we were on the battle order for that particular night. I think the squadron was putting up something like thirty two aircraft or something that night. There was eight hundred and fifty on the, the full main force. And at that time the procedure on ops on the squadrons was that you didn’t do, as a pilot or co-pilot or anything like that, you didn’t go out with your own crew until you’d done a familiar flight with an experienced crew as a supernumerary and it just so happens that on that battle order I had one under supervision and there was one other crew with another one under supervision. It was on the 31st of August ’43. And these two chaps, I had one of them under supervision, and another crew had the second one. Out of curiosity, in the back of the book there’s seven pages of casualties on the squadron, and when I looked for the names down, both these boys’ names were down on the casualties, one, bear in mind, was on the 22nd of September bear in mind that was just 22nd, twenty two days after we had taken them on the supervision. One of them went on the 22nd, the next night the second went on the 23rd. So they only survived twenty three days on the squadron. And that was typical, absolutely typical. We used to live in a long nissen hut, seven beds each side, two crews in there. Three times we had a new crew come in, and three times we’d wake up after an op the night before, about midday, be woken up by the military police going through the, collecting the bits and pieces, belongings of the other crew who had got the beds on opposite. Three times we had new crews come in and three times we lost them very quickly, in two cases within the first three ops, and consequently we had, as a crew, we had a reputation of being a Jonah crew and nobody would move in with us. [Laughter] But in all seriousness that was the way it happened, you know and we lost some very quickly and didn’t even get to know them. There we were, soldiering on and finally got to the stage as I say, when the Stirlings were taken out of service and deployed on other work, mainly glider towing and things like that. Then the Lancs took over as the Lancaster production of course, got higher and higher.
HB: What do you put down to, I don’t want to use the word success, your ability to have got through those twenty something operations?
BL: A lot of people would say you must have been one of the lucky ones. Yes, to a point. But we had a very good crew; highly [emphasis] dedicated crew to the individual job they had to do and it was, there were various aspects of the operation that needed high concentration and dedication to execute that. I mean our rear gunner, Eddie, he’s still alive now in New Zealand, and he had eyes like a bloody hawk; he could spot these fighters coming in and he would control the operation immediately if he saw a fighter, to the pilot at the front, saying, ‘corkscrew, corkscrew,’ and instead of flying at straight and level from a to b to a target on our particular crew, we would fly perhaps just for a minute or so, then start weaving like that, so that there was no chance of the fighters beaming on to us in, as if we’d been flying straight and level they had a much easier job of coming in to us, and under from mid or something like that, shoot us down. But by weaving like that, was one of the things which we did continually, it was uncomfortable but it was very safe. But apart from the anti aircraft of course, it certainly kept the fighters at bay from us and I mean I think three times we were attacked by fighters and three times we got away from them. Largely due to Eddie in the rear turret. Who shot one of them down actually.
HB: Did he?
BL: Yup, He opened up, he waited till he got it in his sights, and let fly and it blew up in front of him, or behind him should I say. So really that aspect of it is the thoroughness of the type of flying and the operation which was necessary, but on the other hand of course, where anti aircraft was concerned it’s a different story. We, in the Stirling we were in the middle of it, weaving through it and if you had a direct hit or a hit which say damaged the aircraft severely you could say right you were just bloody unlucky like Geordie Young on his thirtieth trip, and that sort of thing, so. The worst night of for Bomber Command for all losses was the Nuremburg flight, you may or may not have heard of this, but it was on the Nuremburg trip when the met people made a complete balls of the forecast. They were forecasting plenty of cloud so that you could fly comfortably in and out of cloud and the fighters couldn’t detect you quite so easily. But on this occasion the weather didn’t turn out as they predicted and consequently it was a full moon clear, crystal clear night and the result was that the main force – there was eight hundred and fifty aircraft on that particular target. This was in the autumn of ’44, I think it was, and that particular night we lost ninety four aircraft on that night, and when you think there were seven men in each aircraft. Work that one out. That was the worst night ever [emphasis] for Bomber Command.
HB: And your crew were on that.
BL: No. We weren’t on that.
HB: You weren’t on that one.
BL: It just so happened that we were on leave at the time so we weren’t on it. But that was, that’s the hard statistics of it.
HB: Because I was interested in the, in the thing you were saying about the Lancasters and the Halifaxes going at twenty two and you know, the Wellingtons, obviously the Wellingtons were at eighteen thousand and the poor old Stirling’s down at twelve.
BL: Yeah.
HB: I mean that must have, that must have influenced your pilot and your crew at that point, when you were on, when you were on the bigger raids.
BL: Well, yes, to a point, but you had to admit it was one of those things. I don’t think, it was only when we got to grips with the Stirling and training and so on and realised what effect the modifications had had on the performance of the aircraft. It was not easy to get off the ground with a full load on. For one thing the inertia of the engines meant that it was, always had this sort of pull to starboard, to the right, which you had to maintain correction on, and not only that but the fact that the undercarriage had been raised quite considerably, very high up. There’s a picture here will show: that was our aircraft and the one that saw us all the way through our tour, and it was so high up it that when this sort of inertia from the engines, it was very difficult to keep it straight down the runway. In fact there was numerous occasions when the aircraft just couldn’t control it with a full bomb load on and it crashed or something and numerous messy situations like that developed. But this is why as I say, I meant occasionally that when I went from Stirlings up into 5 Group, I was posted up to the elite group. How that happened was, that at that time the Lancs were coming on stream and 5 Group at Swinderby was the training base for the Lancs, but again they needed them on the squadron so rapidly that they were pushing the crews through probably too fast, not quite enough training. And the result was that a lot of the crews had been trained on the twin engined Wellingtons and stuff like that, which didn’t give them any [emphasis] experience on four engined stuff. So in the, when we finished a tour on Stirlings, it was decided then by the powers that be as it were – Harris and co – they’d put a few Stirlings up to be based at Swinderby to get, be engaged on the Lancaster training programme so that we could give them experience on another four engine aircraft which was more difficult to handle than what a Lancaster was, and consequently I was one of the eight crews that were, instructors that went up there and that’s how I got in to 5 Group, posted up there on the Stirlings. And I always remember when we got up there about 7 or 8 o’clock in the evening. So we parked the aircraft went over to the officers mess, went in the bar straight away for a drink of course, and we were standing there and there was another group of the instructors and so on and amongst them was Dave Shannon and Mickey Martin – ex 617 – and quite a number of others who’d survived and they were curious as to who we were. And finally old Dave Shannon, who was a big Australian as you probably know from 617, came across and said, ‘who are you blokes then and what are you doing here?’ ‘Oh we’ve brought some Stirlings up to give you some help in the training programmes here.’ ‘Stirlings!’ he says,’ bloody hell!’ He said, ‘have you done a tour on Stirlings?’ I said, ‘yes’. He rubbed his hand over here, says, ‘Well where are your VCs then boys?’ [Laughter] And that was their attitude towards us.
HB: Yes. That tells the tale.
BL: But there again, life’s about winners and losers isn’t it, you know. And what we had we had went out to do the best you can, and as I say, it’s sad really that our losses were consistently high.
HB: So when you’d done, you did, you know, when was you last operation that you did with the Stirling? Can you remember?
L: It was on, I think it was either Hannover or Stuttgart, it was not the Ruhr, north of the Ruhr, but that was my, our last op. We did two Berlins on the Stirling, surprisingly, and relatively quiet trips too, long trips but relatively quiet, for us anyway.
HB: What was your feeling on, you know, you’re going to do your thirtieth or your last tour on the Stirling? What was going through your mind then?
BL: I don’t really think there was any feeling about it. I mean on our crew there wasn’t any suggestion of any feeling of stress or concern or the fact that you might be, the crew expression was – you might get the chop. No, we were a very good competent crew. We operated very correctly and safely as far as we could and I think that had a, that was the predominant factor in the crew. I mean a lot of people today often say to me well what about all the stress and everything? I said well the simple answer was we couldn’t even spell the word. You know, I mean the stress wasn’t there, it was concern. Admittedly we had one occasion when our mid upper gunner, Mick, suddenly went down with something, tonsilitis or something and he couldn’t, he had to go sick and consequently they stopped him flying that night and we were doing an op that night, on, I’ve forgotten where it was now, somewhere in the Ruhr, so we had to have a mid upper gunner, spare mid upper gunner who apparently for some reason or other he’d lost the rest of his crew, he’d done no ops at all, but he was spare, so they said oh you’re joining Cawley’s crew tonight because the gunner’s gone sick so he came to us and was a dreadful situation. He was absolutely petrified of the thought of going on ops, and halfway towards, over the Dutch coast on the way to the target, he suddenly started firing off indiscriminately at what he thought were fighters but they were clouds. And of course it immediately was bloody dangerous because if fighters around they see tracer bullets going out they home in on us. And Charlie was absolutely crackers, he went mad. What the hell’s going on? Go back and have a look!’ And this bloke was sitting in his turret there, absolutely terrified and it happened again, at a very dangerous point, he suddenly started firing off. Anyway when we, we survived the op, we got back and we landed, the crew bus was there to take us back to the base for intelligence and debriefing and he never said a word, wouldn’t speak, he wouldn’t get on the bus, he walked back and of course when he was interviewed by the Station Commander he said, ‘what’s the problem?’ The medical people there saw the condition of him and the RAF had a very cruel aspect of dealing with situations like that. They immediately used to braid you, used to name you as Lack of Moral Fibre which was dreadful really. You were immediately stripped of your rank back to basic and sent off to a unit which was down at Brighton to deal with these people who were so called Lack of Moral Fibre and that went on your records throughout your, a very cruel way of looking at it really. But that happened to us on this particular flight and as I say amazing really, the bloke was just absolutely petrified. Couldn’t face up to what he was asked to do, despite the fact he’d gone through training and managed to survive to train to become a qualified gunner, but there we are. Just one of those things.
HB: What did you do when you got back from your last op?
BL: [Laughter] Well I normally drink a gin and tonic but I think I had something a bit stronger than that that night! No. we had a, all went down to the pub locally and had a nice evening and then we knew the next day we’d be posted out, we’d all be posted to different directions and it was a question then where everybody went. It just so happened that in my particular case I was posted, for a very short time, to a place called Wilfort Sludge which is on the A1, but from there of course this deal came up to send some Stirlings up to 5 Group, so I was then posted out of 3 Group into 5 Group. And previous to that I’d, before I finished my tour I’d been recommended for a commission so my commission had come through so I was, and that came through six months late, so I went straight in as a commissioned Flying Officer then and went to Swinderby then as an instructor and it was, the rest of the crew: Johnnie went up to, he was the captain, he went up to near High Ercall, which is up near, in Shropshire somewhere, near Whitchurch to start training Stirling crews up there to tow gliders in anticipation, of course, of the Arnhem offensives and so on, so he went up there on towing gliders. The two rear gunner, the two gears, er gunners, the mid upper gunner and the rear gunner, they were posted to somewhere on special duties. Where they thought they were going on rest they suddenly found they were on ops again, on the special duties, doing, dropping these Resistance guys in France and so on. Harry our wireless operator, the navigator by the way, suddenly when I went to Swinderby I found he was already there and I was sharing a room with him in the mess for a while. Unfortunately, he’s the son of a clergyman in Cornwall, highly religious, he used to spend all his time playing the organ in the local church where we were down the pub having a drink, but he had a heart attack right at the end of the war and died straight away. The bomb aimer, little Barry, little short bloke, he went on rest for a short time and then decided he’d go on a second tour, But got shot down on the third trip of his second tour, but he was lucky. He managed to bale out and he was a prisoner of war for about the last six months. But Harry, our wireless op, his previous job in life he was, worked in the Metropolitan Police, on the vice squad and he was absolutely obsessed on flying against the Germans on Bomber Command, absolutely [emphasis] obsessed. His one aim in life was successful bombing Germany and when we were tour expired and they say, sent out as instructors or rested and so on, and what they called screened as they said, screened from operations. He refused point blank he says, ‘No, I’m not going,’ he said, ‘I’m going to carry on.’ There’s a little bit of discussion with the commanding officer about it and the adjutant and so on, but anyway he got his way was posted on to a Special Duties squadron somewhere, and he carried on flying. He did seventy four ops in the end. And in the end he got shot down over Denmark I think, on one these special, highly secret operations on his seventy fourth. If you go back to Lincoln his name is on the, one of the what do they call it, the metal -
HB: The walls.
BL: The walls.
HB: wall 118.
BL: That’s what happened to all of us in the end. And as I say, the two gunners they survived, despite the fact they were amazed to find themselves on this resistance dropping and that sort of thing. So that was where we all finished up.
HB: So you ended up at Swinderby as the instructor on, you know, giving people experience on four engines.
BL: Yes. So, when I went to Swinderby I was instructing on Stirlings and Lancasters at the same time.
HB: Right. So how did you, how would you relate to the engineering side of the ground crew?
BL: Well, very closely indeed, in fact the whole crew did. I mean our ground crew was our survival in many respects and we respected them, we had a very good ground crew. They kept our aircraft serviceable against unprecedented odds at times. I mean there’s numerous occasions we’d come back with shrapnel holes down the fuselage and that sort of thing, and there was one occasion when there was, we had a near hit, this was Dusseldorf again funny enough, the intelligence people used to say well when the anti aircraft batteries are shooting at you, if you can’t hear on, if you can’t hear any noise you know you’re safe, but if you hear a bang you’ll know it’s very close. We heard this bloody great bang over Dusseldorf and that was very close and it finished up with Norm Minchin, the mid upper turret, with the perspex turret round his head, a piece of shrapnel came up and cut right through the back of the perspex and cut the back of his turret off, and he didn’t know it! Without touching him at all! It just cut through this Perspex and the back, and after we had left the target we were flying back home and he came on the intercom and said, ‘Christ it’s bloody cold up here, have you got some heating on?’ Didn’t even know it had happened! Of course when we got back to base not only that but there was a hole in the side of the aircraft you could damn near crawl through. So the maintenance people had a pretty big job, you know, to patch up all the holes on it. And that sort of thing, but the, yeah, the ground crew were very much part of the team, very important and we had a very good ground crew, very good.
HB: And when you got to Swinderby, you would, you would continue that relationship as you do in the training of the crews.
BL: Well not with the ground crew, not at Swinderby.
HB: Right.
BL: No, I mean we were, at Swinderby all we were concerned with was training the new crews coming through, and the ground crew was general ground crew, not to with, nothing to do with individual aircraft whereas on the squadron each aircraft had its own maintenance crew and its own flight crew and that was our particular aircraft which took us all the way through.
HB: Ah right, yeah.
BL: That finished up by the way, when we handed that over to another crew, actually I read historically in one of the books somewhere it was listed, I forget where the, I think it was the Bomber Command Diaries, every aircraft that was lost they gave indications where they were lost and where they were found and so on and our particular aircraft, the other crew that had it and it finished up in the Zuider Zee!
HB: Oh right.
BL: It was recovered eventually, by the Dutch people, who were, the Dutch people were doing the archive details and so on and there was actually some photographs of it being pulled out of the sea, they’re printed in the Daily Mail I think it was actually, so I couldn’t believe it when I saw this, when I saw the number on the side BF524, that was its serial number. WPNN and it was just being pulled out the water and you could just see the name, the number BF524 on the side of it. Couldn’t believe it. Recovered it and there’s a bloke, a very elderly gentleman, he’s a semi historian based at Alconbury and he’s very much a Stirling enthusiast and he’s got a workshop there full of all the bits and pieces of crashed Stirlings and so on and he works hand in glove with the, his counterparts in Holland and one of the major museums in Holland loan him parts of aircraft which he’s, he’s rebuilt a complete cockpit of a Stirling.
HB: Has he!
BL: At this. Yes, Andrew found this out and took me over there and we had a morning with him. I was intrigued and he’s got this bloody old shed there, old hangar I think it is, a small hangar, packed with all these bits and pieces of a Stirling and in the middle he’s got a cockpit he’s already built. And when we went over there he was sorting out an undercarriage and he was showing us that the Dutch archive people were loaning him stuff out of their museum which he photographed and copied and so on and sent it back to them. He said he had a very good rapport with them. Very interesting this guy. I can’t remember his name. Andrew knows it, but it was at Alconbury where he is based.
HB: Well I think, what we might do, Bob, is we might just have a break now because I’ve just gone to check the battery and we’ve now been talking for over an hour! So if we have a quick five minute break. I’m going to have to change the batteries anyway. So we’ll just stop the interview for the time being.
BL: Yeah. Okay, fine.
HB: Well we’ve had a comfort break and we’re just going to, we’ve had a battery change. So we’re just going to resume the interview -
BL: Oh these bloody things! I hate these!
HB: Just having a problem with a hearing aid battery at the moment. [Whistling]
BL: That’s better.
HB: So we should be go, on the run now. So we’re all settled now for our second part of our interview.
BL: Yes. What I was going to say was, when we were talking about the losses on the Stirlings, the turning point I think, was when it was decided, when Goebbels was boasting that the German fighters and defences were quite adequate against the RAF Bomber Command, he made statements saying that they’ll never touch Berlin or our second biggest city, Hamburg, they’re quite safe with our defences and so on, they’ll never touch them. And that was the challenge which Bomber Harris took up, and decided in conjunction with the naval people, who were very concerned because all these u-boats and subs were based at Hamburg and they were going out into the Atlantic to pick off the convoys and so on, and naval people said we’ve got to get rid of these u-boat pens at Hamburg. So Bomber Harris decided we’d obliterate Hamburg; it’s in July ’43. And at that time, as I was saying, particularly on the Stirlings, our losses were very high indeed and morale was very low and they introduced for the first time this metal foil thing called window. That was these patches of metal things which we discharged through the flare hatch at the back of the aircraft every twenty seconds I think it was, or every thirty seconds, something like that, and these packs, when they went out into the slipstream, developed into a big screen of metallic which completely killed the German radar defences and those, radar, the German defences were based, anti aircraft, were based on the radar picking up the aircraft or picking up the target with a blue, bright blue light, searchlight and once it picked you up, it then brought all the other normal searchlights into a cone and you were in the middle of it, and once you were coned like that, it was curtains it just picked you off then because they had you, and the whole secret of their success was this radar control and when we used this window for the first time it killed their radar. The result was, the first time it was used on Hamburg, it could have been used very early in 1943 but the politicians and defence people were so concerned they thought that if we use it early the Germans will follow this, copy it, and use it against us. So they were very reluctant, but it was only that when our losses got so high they had to introduce it. And our losses immediately on Hamburg dropped to one percent: fantastic! I we went to Hamburg, we did the four nights out of six: I did all four of ‘em. The fourth one was a disaster in that the first three were completely successful and I can remember it now, looking down, a whole wave of fire throughout, it just wiped this whole place out, just like that. The fourth night we went of course the met people again, they were predicting storms, but nothing like as severe as we found. The result was I think of, the storms were so bad, we were struck by lightning and St Elmo’s fire which is on the windscreen, and goes down the fuselage, all the compasses were knocked out and our radar and Gee box was knocked out. We hadn’t the faintest idea how we were, how to navigate back again and I think out of seven or eight hundred aircraft there’s only about twelve or fourteen actually reached the target. All the others had turned back because of the weather, and we were icing up very heavily and on the Stirlings the oil coolers were slung underneath the engines and you know what happens to diesel vehicles in cold weather, the fuel starts waxing and clogs up the carburettors, and the engines stop and that’s exactly what used to happen to us. These coolers which start icing in the middle, and what we call coring, and you had to keep hot air flow going through them in order to keep them serviceable. We suddenly found that we’d got two engines with, suffering from this icing and then there was chunks of ice coming off the wings, battering against the side of the fuselage like, dreadful we had to abandon short of the coast. We jettisoned our bombs into the sea and the only way we could navigate back to the UK was star navigation, and Cyril, our navigator, he was particularly good, he could take star shots with his, with his, my blinkin’ names, what my memory’s going.
HB: Sextant.
BL: Sextant, yes, with a sextant. And a combination of that and following the stars he managed to get us going back in the direction of the UK. When we finally hit the coast instead of being, coming over the coast over Essex or somewhere, we were in the north of Scotland, over the Hebrides and that’s where we came in and of course we immediately identified where we were and we were able to fly back down to, in fact we made an emergency landing ‘cause we were running a bit short of fuel, at Wattisham, in Suffolk. That was on the fourth trip, but the first three were so highly successful, we absolutely wiped the place out, and as I say the losses dropped right down to one percent because of using this window. The rise in morale then was just fantastic, you know after that. Of course sooner or later the Germans found that they could, they changed their system and they found that they could nullify this window by using different types of radar and so on, so it didn’t last, obviously, but we were able to use it for some months actually, and it was very good. We’re just having a new kitchen put in at the moment.
HB: Ah right. That explains the banging.
BL: And the other thing about the ops on the Stirling, in ’43 when our losses were so high, when you counted the number of ops you’re doing, the way it was calculated by Group headquarters, it was decided that because when they analysed the losses and how it was happening and so on, they came to a system of doing thirty ops in a tour and the total would depend entirely on the type of ops. For instance when 90 Squadron went to Tuddenham on Lancasters in the end of ’44, or half way through ’44, their main job - they did very, very little main force bombing – but ninety percent of the jobs of their work and I’ve got it all listed in my history book of 90 Squadron, was on either, was mainly on resistance work dropping resistance and equipment for low level intervention into Europe, dropping arms and equipment to the French and the Dutch resistance movements and so on, and consequently this was done individual very low level operations and the result was that the ops compared with ’43 were very easy and the losses were very low and consequently because, and the short ops as well, and because of this to count one trip as an op they had to do four trips to count as one on the tour, and consequently this system which was introduced before we finished, was that because of the severity of a lot of our ops on the Ruhr operation were so incredibly high losses and so very difficult that they allocated that some of the ops, because of their severity, would count, you had to do one op was counted as two on your tour, because of the severity of the operation and the high level of losses. So it wasn’t, it didn’t always follow that you did a straight forward thirty trips, you could have done say twenty five trips but they counted as thirty on your log book and the severity of the targets.
HB: Did you ever do mine-laying, gardening?
LB: Mining? Yes. Gardening as they called it. Yeah. We did two actually. One off Le Creusot and one other, I’ve forgotten what it was now. We did, our particular crew we only did two mining operations, those were, they were easy ones too.
HB: Yeah. So. You got to Swinderby. You’re doing the training there. How did you move forward from there? So that would be 1944.
BL: Well it was the end of, Christmas, yes Christmas time ’43 when I went to Swinderby, and most of ’44 and as I said earlier I was a fully qualified instructor on Lancs and Stirlings then and towards the end of ’44, I think it must have been round about September, October, something like that, some of the Lanc squadrons in 5 Group were having very heavy losses and the analysis of those losses, was in many cases put down to the fact that, to inexperience, training not sufficient for them, because they’d been rushed through very quickly because squadrons, with their losses, need quick replacements and so on. The result was that at East Kirkby 57 Squadron and 630 Squadron were both there at East Kirkby, and 57 particularly although they’d been engaged on very difficult targets their losses were astronomically high and a hell of a lot of them put down to pure inexperience. So myself and Dicky, we were both instructors at Swinderby, we were seconded to 57 Squadron for three months to set up a revised training unit there, which we did, to give the training, give the operational crews quite a bit more familiarisation and training and so on to try and cut these, some of these losses down. So I had that period there. And it was whilst I was at 57 and about to go back to Swinderby, ‘cause I was still on the strength at Swinderby despite the fact I’d been loaned to 57 at East Kirkby to do this training programme, 463 Squadron at Waddington, the Aussie squadron, had been suffering a few losses here and there, and the, one of the leaders of the squadron, the co-pilot and flight engineer leader there had been lost, so I was posted to 463 as his replacement and I was lucky to stay there until the end of the war.
HB: So that was back on to operations.
BL: So, yes, so I went back on to ops. Of course when I was at 463, because I was the boss of A flight, I was the leader, I didn’t have a crew, so I could only put myself on to do ops when there was a, somebody had gone sick or something you see, so I did them with any crew, and by extremely strange coincidence, I said to you about Essen earlier, my very first trip on my second tour here was a low level daylight on Essen. [Laugh] I couldn’t believe it! But I’ll tell you what, it was so bloody easy, it was so different to 1943. But, so I stayed there really, and at the end of the war as I said earlier, I went to Skellingthorpe, just outside Lincoln when Tiger Force was set up. I was posted on to Tiger Force.
HB: And Tiger Force was - ?
BL: That was the equivalent to 617 to go to Japan to do the [cough] vital targets into Japan, very similar to what 617 had been doing, because the adjacent to 617 Squadron was 9 Squadron. They were both based then at Woodhall Spa and Wing Commander Cheshire was the, was one of the commanding officers at 617 at that time, amongst others. But so when I went to 463 as I say, I was there till the end of the war then, and doing ops from there, and because I was the leader there the flight engineer leader on 463, I was posted to Skellingthorpe to join Tiger Force and I was promoted then at Tiger Force to be in charge of that particular section to go to Japan and we were half way through their training when the bomb was dropped of course and it all came to a halt then. Consequently I found myself in civil flying.
HB: Yeah. You did tell me before the interview started, you were, you were made an offer by the RAF before you -
BL: Yes, offered a, I was a substantive flight lieutenant then, and for a very short time I was an acting Squadron Leader but only for four weeks! [Laugh] Because it all ended then. But I was offered a extended seven year flying, extended flying committee, er, commission and given the choice. I didn’t know much about, well I didn’t know anything about civil flying. I didn’t even understand what BOAC meant until I got there.
HB: But you were originally offered Transport Command weren’t you.
BL: Yes.
HB: What was your view on that?
BL: But I turned that down. I turned that down flat. But there’s a very, there’s another, a very ironic twist that I’ll tell you about. So immediately because we were then seconded from the air force to BOAC we had to get civilian licences. We had to get civilian licences and then they decided what they were going to train us on, so we had to go through the basic theory and all that sort of stuff to get civilian licences and we were allocated I think it was about either fifty or a hundred block licence numbers in the very early days. Once we’d done type training on, at that time on Avros produced the very first post-war airliner called the Tudor and the first dozen Tudors were just being built and they were destined to go to BOAC to start up to date pressurised passenger aircraft. They were quite nice aircraft actually, very good. So since we’d just, we were the first people to be trained on the Tudors. So we did our training on the Tudors and when they were just about to start to take, BOAC to take delivery of the Tudors, for some reason there was a political change and instead of coming to BOAC, they went to British South [emphasis] American Airways, and at that time was run by the old 8 Group Pathfinder chief, Air Marshal Don Bennett, who was a real press on type. [Cough] Highly successful with Pathfinders of course and he was the boss at British South American. They’d previously been running some converted Lancasters into what they called Lancastrians before long distance flying in South America and so on, and they hadn’t got a particularly good record they’d lost three or four of them I think, for different reasons and so they took delivery of the Tudors. Tudor 1s these were, Mark 1s. And I did quite a bit of flying with the, on the Tudors on the South American routes, down to Bermuda, and the Caribbean and so on, and I was put in charge of training at BSA as well. And then, as things went on, we got as far as 1948 I think it was, ‘46’ 47’ ’48 I think it was, yes, ’47 ‘48. Suddenly the Berlin Airlift comes up, and from nowhere I suddenly found BSA, because of their Tudors, the air force was already in force on the Berlin Airlift using mainly Dakotas, the old C47s and they couldn’t cope with, couldn’t make it that economical to cope with the heavy loads that was necessary so they asked a lot of the civilian charter companies and so on, if they could provide crews and aircraft to come on to the Berlin airlift to increase the load factors, and British South American got one of the contracts to, with two Tudors, to go on the Berlin Airlift and I was one of them selected to go on the first one. So I found myself flying over to Wunstorf near Hannover where we were based, to fly on the Berlin Airlift these two Tudors between Wunstorf and Gatow, Berlin. And ironically, I think, when I think that three years before, when I did my last operational trip with 463, there we were still bombing and knocking hell out of ‘em; three years later, there I was at Wunstorf flying into Berlin to try and keep the so-and-so’s alive. Ironic really, they were three years the difference. Anyway, I stayed at Wunstorf for nearly a year, I think it was. I did nearly three hundred flights between Wunstorf and, there were only three of us on board.
HB: What sort of things were you taking in?
BL: Well when I first flew out there, we were taking huge packs of canned meat and stuff like spam and all that sort of stuff, corned beef, and all that, which was fairly easy to handle, in big cases and so on. And then the RAF were getting a bit uppity about what they were going to do and what they were carrying and bear in mind that the US air force was also on the operation with their C54s and Skymasters and so on, they were based at Schleswigland I think it is. I’ve got maps showing all the different air bases that we used over there but we always used Wunstorf and because we were larger aircraft, they decided that instead of carrying packs of food and so on, we suddenly found ourselves carrying coal, huge packs of coal, great big sealed bags of coal, about a hundredweight apiece. So we spent some months then, this coal at Berlin. Landing at Berlin was quite something. It was the ground force of people doing all the unloading and so on was predominantly very elderly German ladies, old grandmothers and mothers and so on, and it was sad to see them. They were dressed, whatever they could find to wear, and they used to come on board. They did all the work of loading and unloading, all the heavy work and they used to come on board to us carrying these lovely family heirlooms like Leica cameras and stuff like that to exchange. They were desperate for two things: cigarettes and coffee, and you could get anything for a couple of packs of coffee, in fact I got a lovely Leica camera in exchange for two bags of coffee at one stage. They used to come up, had it all laid out on the nav table there when they were unloading and they’d bring these heirlooms up and do deals with us. Anything we could, anything they wanted we could give it to them, you know. Children we gave cigret – we gave sweets and chocolate to the children. The children loved it. The Americans set up, at one stage, when they flew into Gatow, over the Frohnau beacon flying on to finals for landing, all the children used to sit round the lake underneath waving to the Americans going over and the Yanks were throwing out chocolate and sweets to them. At one stage they set up, got large handkerchiefs which they tied up sort of like a parachute, and tied these bags of sweets to them, were throwing them out and in dropping them out and the kids loved it. Absolutely fantastic.
HB: Amazing.
BL: But anyway, as I say, another aspect came up then, some time after been carrying the coal, which was a very dirty operation, dust and everything in the aircraft and they suddenly decided that what they wanted desperately in Berlin was medicinal, what do you call it? Two things they were short of, one was straight run gasoline and the other one was, oh dear me, some large amount of some sort of medicinal fluids. I’ve forgotten what they were now, what they were called. But these were in great big packs but the hospitals were desperate for them. So when it was decided that they’d fly the stuff in, it meant that the aircraft that were going to do this had to be modified with huge tanks in the back to carry it. And the air force said point blank they wouldn’t do it, they refused absolutely point blank to carry straight run gasoline in bloody great tanks down the back of the aircraft, they said its far too dangerous, so they refused point blank to do it. So the civilian contracts were asked to do it and we had then replaced our two Mark 1 Tudors with two Mark 5s which had been built and never been put into service but they were much larger and so our two Mark 5s were then equipped with these bloody great tanks for straight run gasoline and this medical stuff and so for the last few months we were flying that into Berlin.
BH: How did you feel about that?
BL: Oh dear me. Well it was just a bloody big laugh I thought, we thought. Bear in mind we’ve still got this enthusiasm from Bomber Command which we’d brought from the air force to the civilian and it was such a big change, you know, but to us it was more of a bloody big laugh than anything else. But anyway, we settled down to it and it was a good operation, it worked extremely well. When you are turning on to final approach into Gatow, Berlin, you came in over the lake on the outskirts of the city and the final beacon was at a place called Frohnau, Frohnau Beacon, you had to call over the beacon which was virtually the outer marker for final approach and the timing was so accurately it had to be done. The timing of aircraft over Frohnau was every twenty seconds between aircraft.
HB: Blimey.
BL: When you think there was a variety of aircraft, everything from small Bristol freighters to Dakotas and converted Lancs and Halifaxes and anything the charter people could lay their bloody hands on. They buy them for peanuts and take them out there to take part because the airlift they pay very big money and we were no exception with our Tudors and it’s an amazing operation really.
HB: So you went through the Berlin Airlift. Just one thing just I’m just quite curious about. You started off I think, on particular kinds of aircraft as a fitter.
BL: Yeah.
HB: What was, what was the system for re-training you when you went to different engines and different engine management systems?
BL: Well there were various training stations set up. I think the initial one for fitter 2Es, or 2As, that’s the difference between fitter rigger and fitter engines was at Kirkham, Lancashire and that was the number one training base, apart from Halton of course which is still there and still doing it today! And Halton of course was always the base of the so called Halton Brats as they call them. They go there as small, young apprentices and three year training straight away and they’re still doing that today. Yeah, they’re still churning out young lads from Halton.
HB: Right. So when you were working with the Stirling –
BL: Yeah.
HB: And then you go on Lancasters, obviously you’ve got Merlin engines, you’ve got Hercules engines, you’ve got all sorts, you’ve got air cooled, liquid cooled. You’ve got all these different engines.
BL: Yes.
HB: So was there an element of self training or was it all formalised?
BL: Well it was to us, to a point where we were fully trained and fully experienced with a lot of hours in on Stirlings when we went up to Swinderby, the 5 Group elite Group., but we hadn’t been trained on Lancs. So we had, it was virtually self-training on the Lancs there by virtue of working on them and flying on them and training every day. So that part of it, yes, was to a large extent I think we did, there were short courses laid on for us. I did one at Cosford for instance, and places like that, but generally speaking more than anything you were self taught, and as instructors you were expected to be experienced and knowledgeable on all the different aspects, so that was how it worked. But go back to the Berlin Airlift though, when that finished, I came back, by that time British South American, there was a lot of demands because they had a very poor safety record. We lost Star Tiger and we lost Star Ariel, both in the Caribbean. Those were Tudor 1s, from the first Tudors that we trained on. The first one was lost over the Bermuda Triangle as they call it, up at twenty thousand feet, no idea what happened to him; it just disappeared. And the second one was, had flown out of the Azores which at that time was a very difficult operation, flying over the south Atlantic from the Azores to South America and weather conditions and very poor nav and all rest of it was very prevalent round the Azores; very difficult route to operate.
HB: How many passengers did the Tudor 1 carry then?
BL: It varied, on whether, the Tudor 1s, I’ve just forgotten. I think up to about eighty or ninety passengers, something like that. The Tudor 5s were much larger but they didn’t actually go into passenger service after the Berlin Airlift. I don’t know what happened. They were scrapped I think, in the end. But anyway, as I say, because of the loss of the two Tudors and the BSA had lost quite a few Lancs so Don Bennett was criticised very heavily and finally he was forced to resign. So he was taken over by BSA who was then taken over by one of the old traditional north Atlantic BOAC captains, Gordon Storr his name, and it was Gordon Storr who I was with, on the, we were the first two Tudors at Wunstorf when the Airlift started and then shortly afterwards after Bennett had left, they decided BSA would be would up so what was left of it came back into, it came into BOAC. But that stage I was still being paid as a flight lieutenant substantive from the air force, seconded to BOAC so I was paid by BOAC who in turn seconded me to BSAA so I was paid by three companies, very interesting situation. But then of course, having come back to BOAC then, BOAC were operating Yorks and converted Halifaxes called Haltons, and, oh there was still a few Dakotas being used, but generally they were waiting for the next civil airliner which came from Handley Page called the Hermes and that was a very good aircraft. I liked the Hermes very much. Performance wise it hadn’t quite got good altitude performance as such, but it was a very easy aircraft to fly, very comfortable, it was designed specifically for the comfort of passengers and so on. And it was after then that the Comet 1 came in from De Havillands, the DH106, which was designed and built by DHs and was at least twenty years before its time. And then of course to us anyway, a huge attraction to get on the first jet aircraft into service. So in no time at all I was, I joined the Comet 1 fleet. We were flying, first of all flying down to Johannesburg and then it was extended to the Far East and out to even as far as Tokyo and Hong Kong and so on. Then of course you know the story that Xray Kilo blew up over Elba on its way between Rome and London. They were immediately grounded, no one could understand why it had, how it had happened. There was a huge inquiry and after ninety-odd modifications they decided that one of them must have been the reason so they put it back into service. And in no time at all they lost a second one which blew up over Naples Bay. That was flown by a South African crew who were on loan to BOAC. We’d also got French crews flying them, and it, so it was then decided that because two of them had blown up, they couldn’t leave them into service any longer. Unfortunately a third one went. The third one was out of Calcutta and that had just taken over from Calcutta and was flying through heavy cloud and they put that down to the fact that it flew into a cunim cloud and the stresses were so great the aircraft just broke up. So then they were grounded completely and when Farnborough rigged up the test rig there, and put a whole aircraft on this water test bed, and they found out exactly why it had happened. The general opinion from the public and in aviation generally was that the pressurisation caused the windows to blow out but that wasn’t true at all. The fault arose through bad engineering practice on the design of the hatches in the roof. The hatches which covered the radio communication, adf system and these two hatches were like that square like that. Engineering practice is that if you design something that’s a square and it’s put under pressure, you see that little crack there, where that join is -
HB: Showing me on the photograph frame.
BL: That little crack there.
HB: In the corner. [cough]
BL: If a crack occurs, it will always come from a corner, and find its way across and finally disintegrate and that’s precisely what happened to the Comet. It was bad engineering practice because if you round the corners those cracks wouldn’t occur. Simple [cough]. Again, in fairness to De Havillands, they produced some very fine fighter aircraft, put in their own engine, the Ghost 50 engine in them, Vampires and stuff like that but they had no experience ever of high altitude pressurised aircraft, and so they built them to what they considered would be strong enough and so on. But I’ve got a book upstairs which Andrew’s been reading, of the whole story, the whole official story of the enquiry and the way they found out all the reasons for it at Farnborough. The summing up at the end of it, when they said officially you know, that the initial fault was the adf hatches that disintegrated because of the bad engineering practice, how it was designed. The general feeling was that the aircraft was twenty years before its time but it simply wasn’t strong enough, because De Havillands, or anyone else for that matter, had experience enough to build them strong enough, when you think that at forty two thousand feet the pressurisation equivalent in the cabin was only eight thousand feet. That was the highest the cabin pressure was ever taken up to give passengers comfort without having to go on to oxygen. So the difference between eight thousand and forty two thousand across the structure of the aircraft was eight and a half pounds per square inch which is massive [emphasis] from the outside to the inside, and it has to be extremely strong, the sort of structure, in order to withstand these pressures. So you can imagine that it was not only not built strong enough, but of course the fault occurred on the hatches which caused it to blow up anyway. The first one that went, Xray Kilo, I had flown that on quite a number of occasions, got it in my log book in a number of places prior to it blowing up. I think previously I’d, we operated it from Tokyo to Hong Kong only the day before I think it was, before it blew up at Elba, but that aircraft had only done seventeen hundred hours. The second one that blew up over Naples had done just over two thousand hours and the one that disintegrated at Calcutta had done less than two thousand hours. They were all going at the, virtually the same time. That was another factor that the inquiry of course dug up, when they said that, Tom Butterworth I think it was, that because of lack of experience at DHs on high altitude stuff the aircraft simply wasn’t built strong enough. You’ve got to go back to Con Derry who was the chief test pilot at De Havillands a few years before when he was doing demonstrations at the Farnborough air show in a, I think it was a Vampire, he was doing very, very tight turns demonstrating and on one of those tight turns the bloody wings came off. He crashed into the crowd there and killed a few people, including himself. That was another example that under extreme stress conditions, that DHs aircraft wasn’t strong enough.
HB: Yes.
BL: So all those factors, you know. So result was that going back to the Comet days, I was involved very heavily with the whole Comet story because then it was decided that they’d have to, they’d build the new aircraft much stronger and up to date. The other thing was, by the way, that De Havillands had their own engines, the Ghost 50 which only produced five thousand pounds thrust, which was quite adequate for the fighters, but for a aircraft like the Comet 4 Ghost 50 engines, they insisted on putting their own engines in and all the experts said no, we needed Rolls Royce Merlin engines, or Avon engines they were, but they refused point blank, they said no, its our aircraft, we’ll put our own engines in and they simply weren’t strong enough. We couldn’t even do a safe level cruise at altitude, you had to do a five degree climb the whole time to get to top of descent, largely because by continuing to fly like that you’re reducing your fuel flow and consequently you had adequate fuel to start your descent. It was because of the consumption levels and the lack of real thrust on these DH engines, it was extremely [emphasis] critical on fuel, extremely [emphasis] critical. They devised this method of five degree climb. You had to fly, when you flight plan you fly backwards starting at top of descent instead of top of climb and things like that, you know. So anyway, when it was decided then they’d build the new Comet 4 much stronger and it would have Rolls Royce engines of much higher quality and it had Rolls Royce Conway engines. So, they’d, after the 1s, they built some Comet 2s, which were destined to go to the air force. But of course after the crashes they never even got airborne, never even delivered, they were just stuck there at Hatfield. So they decided that they’d have to carry out a two year test flying programme to make sure that everything that was being put into the Comet 4 had been well proved, correctly and properly using these two Mark 2s which were used as test beds. So they modified these two Mark 2s, strengthened them up and made sure they were adequate to do the work. They put the standard Conway engines on the inboards and then the new big 524 engines on the outboards which were destined to go into the new Comet 4. So they hadn’t got any crews to fly these at De Havilland, so they asked BOAC if BOAC could loan them I think it was six, was six crews to fly a two year test flying for De Havillands on these Comet 2s, 2Es as they called them. So I was one that went on to those, on to test flying. The first year we, every day we flew non-stop to Beirut from London and back, every day for a year. The aircraft hadn’t got a certificate of airworthiness, of course it was experimental, so there was only three of us allowed on board, no one, none of the boffins were allowed on so they got all the, all the usual test equipment and everything was loaded all the way down the fuselage and it was all fed up to the cockpit where we were and we used to have, they used to give us a list of things we had to check and write the results down, the results of this stuff as we flew, and we had to fly at thirty two thousand feet and record all this stuff for them which was really interesting. I loved it actually. It was a bloody good programme and extremely well paid as well! [Laugh]
HB: Right!
BL: So the first year we did London Beirut every day and the second year they decided we’d have to do the Arctic North Atlantic trials to make sure it was adequate for very low temperature conditions so then we started a programme going from London to Keflavik in Iceland and then across to Goose Bay and Gander in to the Maritimes and then back to London. So we did that for six months. That was a very interesting programme, I liked that part of it particularly. And then of course decided to try and get permission to fly into America. So the Americans were very keen on noise abatement and the Comet did make quite a bit of noise on take off of course, and so they said yes you can fly in to America but not land there, and not do take offs and landings. So then we had a period where we were flying out to different places around America using the new VOR navigation systems and so on, and then eventually politically we got permission to do landings over there and it was at that time then when a lot of the American airlines were looking very enviously at the jet Comet to replace traditional old fashioned piston engine aircraft and we did a series, we were doing a series of demonstration flights when, at the time when Pan American, the number one American outfit had just received, they’d just taken delivery of the first of the civilian Boeing 707s and they were pushing out a lot of typical American bullshit that they were going to be the very first pure jet passenger flight on the Atlantic, transatlantic ‘Fly American. Fly pure jet’, and all that, you know. Anyway, at the time we were down in Detroit doing some demonstration flights for United Airlines, they wanted to buy some of these Comets, so we were doing demonstration flights there. And it was there when we suddenly got a call to fly back to New York and, for some reason, and we found we got to New York we were going to do the first transatlantic flight the next day. We beat the Yanks by sixteen days! And when the Yanks had put all this, all the usual stuff in the papers, and they got the big banners out: ‘Fly Pan American the first jet flight across the Atlantic’ and so on. And after we beat them like that they had to change it all and where it said, ‘we are the first,’ they had to put in: ‘we are one of the first.’ They never bloody forgave us for it! Amazing story! [Laughter]
HB: Oh dear.
BL: But anyway, as I say I was very, very strongly involved in -
HB: How many people were on -
BL: - the whole Comet programme from start to finish.
HB: How many people were on that first trans-atlantic flight?
BL: I think we had about sixty, sixty passengers, something like that, yes. You’ve seen the menu of course.
HB: Yes, yes. Got a copy of the menu there [cough]
BL: We got back to London and it was a very historic occasion. They gave us immediate take off at New York and cleared all the flights from London to give us number one priority to land. BBC and everyone were all were there in force to welcome us, and it was headed by Eamon Andrews on BBC.
HB: Oh right. Yes.
BL: They got our wives there and so on waiting. There was two aircraft actually. We did the eastbound New York London and the other one went the other way, London New York and we crossed over at about twenty degrees west I think it was and acknowledged each other, but you know, two of them, one going one the other. And when we went through all the procedure at London old Eamon Andrews said, ‘We’ve got a coach here for you, we’re taking you up to,’ um to, I’ve forgot where the studios were now, I’ll think of it in a minute, ’taking you up to, see we want to put you on TV tonight.’ They’d decided to put us on that programme ‘What’s My Line?’ And old, the panel at that time dear old, oh my bloody memory’s going, bloke who was extremely well known on the BBC, was the chairman of the panel there. Anyway we went on TV and on this programme and all that sort of publicity and so on; it was really interesting. And then of course the following year I was picked to go to, one of the flight crew to go to Ottawa, Canada to pick up Duke of Edinburgh, Philip. We went in the Comet; he was very keen to fly in the Comet, so we went there to pick him up. He’d been there doing a series of talks and so on. The Queen was at Balmoral at the time so we were to pick him up at Ottawa and fly him back to Leuchars in Scotland, which is quite close to Balmoral, drop him off there. But anyway, we picked him up at Ottawa and we were just, hadn’t been airborne very long when a signal came through to say there’d, a big mining disaster had just occurred at Monckton in the Maritimes and would we divert to Monckton and so the Duke could just put in a quick royal visit, two hours royal visit to the disaster area. So we dropped him off at Monckton and then we flew down, further down to Gander and we waited at Gander for him to come, come back and then we brought him from Gander and flew him to Leuchars, dropped him off there. Oh it’s here somewhere I’ve got a picture of it. On board on the way back he was fascinated with the Comet 1, he loved to fly in the Comet, oh the Comet 4 I should say and on the way back he got a lot of individual special pictures of himself and he signed one each for us, and a handshake.
HB: Oh lovely.
BL: I thought she’d got it up here, it’s been on the wall here somewhere. She must have put it away. But it’s personally signed: Philip.
HB: Oh lovely.
BL: Which is, very has, carried a lot of weight, in the years to come. It’ll be worth a few bob I should think!
HB: So when did you actually stop flying Bob?
BL: Well, from then on, after the Comet programme, first BOAC decided to buy the Boeings so they ordered these new Boeing 707s from Boeing of course, from America and in January 1960 the first delivery of, or first Boeing 707 was ready for us to collect. And there was nobody trained on it or anything at that time of course, since we hadn’t got any Boeings. But in America the military version of the Boeing was the KC135 and they’d already built eight hundred of those, they’d all gone to the American air force and the American navy and so on. So having had that number built, all the bugs and problems had all been ironed out, needless to say, unlike so many of our aircraft you see. So it was a well [emphasis] tried and well proven aircraft before it even went into service. So in January ’60 I was, one of the, I was, been an instructor on Comets for some time I’d always been instructing quite a lot and so there’s four instructors, myself and three others were sent out to Seattle to get trained on the 707 and the first Boeing 707 to come off was number hundred and eleven off the line, the production line, so we were still quite a way behind other airlines. Anyway, when we got to Seattle we were trained by the Seattle test flight crew. At that time there’s no civilian aircraft, aerodromes rather, in the UK that could take the 707 except Heathrow and obviously you couldn’t use Heathrow for training but they could use it for service, not for training. Shannon hadn’t got a long enough runway at that time anyway, but they were building a new one. So there was nowhere in the UK where they could train us. So Boeings decided, got permission to use Tucson, Arizona. So Tex Johnson was there, er Tex, not Johnson, Tex Gannard, Tex Gannard was the Boeing Chief Test Pilot at that time and he decided that we’d, he’d take us down to Tucson and we’d set up a training base there and he would train us as instructors and so on, to stay on at Tucson to train the BOAC crews as they were sent out from the UK. So we stayed there to run the training unit [cough] and the crews had come from London, we trained them and they went back and then flew the aircraft in service. So we had a very nice six months so, Tucson and the trainer, super that was. But hard work. I’ll tell you what impressed me more than anything else when I went to Seattle, to Boeings: the difference between the British way of life in [coughing] workload, dedication and that sort of thing in the British aviation industry, was so different to that of the Americans. Soon found the Americans are far ahead of us in their dedication to the work they were doing. It was a bloody eye-opener, believe me. Hard work, but they knew how to do it and it was an absolute revelation to us. For instance when we were doing flight training unit details at London they’re usually about two and a half to three hours at the most, something like that, and then the time we went to Tucson the thing that surprised us was that the minimum flights times were five hours! [emphasis] Bloody long details, oh Christ, but that was typical of the Americans and the hard work they put in. They had three of the test pilots at Tucson with us and a fleet to train us and certify us as being fully trained instructors on Boeing aircraft. And I’ve got a certificate to say that.
HB: Yes. That’s grand.
BL: And anyway, BOAC then got a bit hot under the collar about the cost of running Tucson and all the British bases, so they got permission to use St Mawgan at St Athan, at Newquay. They got permission from the aircraft, from the air force for us to move from Tucson to Newquay and used St Mawgan for training from then on so I then moved, as I say, from Tucson to the Bristol Hotel in Newquay. And being a typical seaside resort, very popular, they didn’t want any weekend flying Saturdays and Sundays, there’s all sorts of objections from the local authority and so on, so it was a bit of a doddle down there.
HB: Good grief!
BL: So it was on the 707 where eventually that was my last flying for BOAC.
HB: I see. There’s a good few years in the air there Bob!
BL: Forty years.
HB: Can I just –
BL: The reason I retired in the end by the way, I was very close to retiring at that time, but I was on training at Shannon at the time on the Boeing fleet. We were doing our winter training at Shannon and one of the details we had to do was to demonstrate the capabilities of the aircraft at high, high speed characteristics of the 707. The normal cruising in the 707 was point eight one mach, but the “never exceed” was about point eight eight, which you should never exceed on a Boeing and we used to have to demonstrate though as you got somewhere near the point eight eight the flight control characteristics changed aerodynamically and you had to be aware of this to happen should you ever stray up there in flight. So we had to demonstrate this and we used to fly at forty odd thousand feet from Shannon across to five degree west in the Atlantic then back again doing these high speed runs and I was doing one of those with two students and we suddenly hit a bloody air pocket – bang! It threw us up in the air and down again, hit it really hard, couldn’t, didn’t even realise it was there just clear air turbulence, and I got thrown up on the ceiling and when I dropped down I dropped right across the arm of the co-pilot’s seat with my hip like that and it buggered up something in my hip and I couldn’t even walk off the aircraft carrying my briefcase. So I had to go sick straight away. I went through all the usual palavers of different Harley Street specialists and lord knows what and all they could tell you, ‘oh you’ve slipped a disc in your back,’ you know and all this. They threatened to send me off for a laminectomy operation, but the BOAC doctor at Heathrow who looked after the flight crews, he was ex-RAF and he was bloody good doctor, Doc civil and liked gossip here with the boys, and he really looked after us, one of us, you know.
HB: Very much so yes.
BL: He says, when finally I got to the end of my tether, I couldn’t clear this up, the bloody pain was there, could virtually, almost couldn’t walk and he says, ‘I tell you what,’ he said, ‘I’ll pull a few strings for you,’ he said, ‘you’re an ex RAF officer’ he says, ‘I’ll get you in to Hedley Court.’ So a couple of days later he says, ‘I’ve managed it, you’re going off to Hedley Court they’ll sort you out there.’ So I went off to Hedley Court which of course is very famous today because all these guys from Afghanistan are going in there for amputainees and that sort of thing you know, so I went into Hedley for three months. Within three days of being there they found out exactly what was wrong with me. What I’d done when I fell down like that over this arm, I’d stretched what they call the sacroiliac joint in my hip, it’d stretched it and bent it and that was the cause of all of the trouble.
HB: Good grief!
BL: And they found that after three days there! All these bloody Harley Street specialists I went to see kept telling me all I’d got was a bloody slipped disc. But the outcome was that I spent three months there and they cured it ninety nine percent. And when I finally got to, they wanted to discharge me I went to see the old Group Captain medical and he says, ‘Well,’ he says, ‘we’ve cleared it up for you,’ he says, ‘you’ll be all right,’ he says, ‘there might be the odd occasions when you get a recurrence but the only thing is,’ he says, ‘I’ll have to put a four hour restriction on your licence,’ and of course BOAC wouldn’t accept that because I was on a world wide contract so they said no we can’t accept that but you’re very close to retirement we’ll give you an immediate retirement on pension. So that’s really how I finished. But it didn’t end there.
HB: Oh right.
BL: Another little facet came. I’d been very interested in act, different aircraft accidents and accident investigation. I was on the accident committee for a few years before that, while I was still flying and somebody at BOAC obviously realised that I’d got experience on them and they said well we’ll keep you on but not in a flying capacity, would you like to become a CAA FIA flight accident investigator. I said yes, so they said right. So they sent me off to the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, to do the full official FIA accident inspector’s course so I had a couple of months over there, and did the course in the university and I qualified, graduated and got my little badge and everything, as an official accident investigator. So I came back to London and I went on two of the accidents actually, one of which was a Boeing which landed with a wing on fire at Heathrow after one of the engines had dropped off into the Staines reservoir. I’ve got a photograph of that landing, with the wing on fire, amongst this lot here somewhere.
HB: Good grief. Yeah.
BL: And anyway after that I found it was a bit boring and of course by that time I’d got a farm in Surrey and I’d got, we were milking a hundred and twenty five Jersey cows, and I’d got thirty thousand chickens, got five vans on the road delivering fresh eggs and cream around London and it was taking up so much time I thought well I haven’t got bloody time to go in so I finally decided I’d quit completely and carry on farming and that really was the end of it.
HB: Yeah, it does bring it to an end, doesn’t it really.
BL: So, quite a lot of various incidents in my career.
HB: Just a few, just a few. Just going back, I meant to actually ask you this ages ago. When you were on 463 Squadron -
BL: Yes.
HB: With the old, the Australians, that would be towards the end of ’45. Did you ever, when you were there on operations did you ever come across the German jet fighters?
BL: Er, no. Not, not the jets, no.
HB: No. All right.
BL: Incidentally, talking about that, of course, when Peenemunde came up, it just so happened, we didn’t, on the Stirlings by the way, the Stirlings from the squadron, I think we put about a dozen Stirlings up on the Peenemunde operation and we’d been briefed from weeks and weeks and weeks that something very special was coming up, no one knew what it was except it was something very special operation but it was tied in very closely to the right weather. It had to be absolutely perfect on weather forecast and of course it turned out it was Peenemunde. And it just so happened that when the Peenemunde trip came up we were on two weeks’ leave. So we missed it.
HB: Yeah. Right.
BL: But it was from then on of course we were very active on bombing these flying bomb sites in France and various parts of Europe. But we never came across any of the jet fighters at all. No definitely not.
HB: Right. Well I think. I think Bob, we’ve come to a natural sort of end, and I just thank you very much. Absolutely fascinating.
BL: Well I hope I haven’t bored you too much.
HB: Oh no! Well I haven’t gone to sleep! [Laughter] No absolutely fascinating, absolutely fascinating.
BL: I’ve been lucky really in a sense, that you know, had all these different variants, military and civilian, I’ve very lucky to be on you know, these special products, projects. Rather like the as I said, the two years I was test flying with De Havilland, that was really interesting.
HB: Yeah. I’m going to, one of the things I forgot to do at the beginning, I didn’t actually say at the beginning: it’s Wednesday the 12th of December 2018. I forgot about that at the beginning, I got a bit excited! So I’m going to terminate the interview Bob and get on with the paperwork. Thank you very much again.
BL: Yeah.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Bob Leedham
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Harry Bartlett
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
2018-12-12
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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ALeedhamHJL181212, PLeedhamHJL1801
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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02:16:46 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
Bob Leedham was a flight engineer who carried out twenty-one operations on Stirlings. At the outbreak of war Bob was an apprentice motor mechanic, and along with other apprentices, was left to operate the garage when all the engineers were called up. In 1940 he enlisted in the RAF and following initial training, Bob was selected for pilot training but did not achieve the requirement of flying solo within twelve hours. His engineering background meant he was posted to RAF St Athan and trained as a flight engineer. A posting to RAF Stradishall followed, and conversion to Stirling aircraft. Now part of a crew and posted to 90 Squadron at RAF Ridgewell, operational flying commenced. Bob suggests political interference restricted the performance of the aircraft resulting in a higher casualty rate amongst Stirling crews, and explains how the introduction of Window anti-radar equipment improved this. In Spring 1943 the squadron moved to RAF Wratting Common and in Autumn, converted to Lancasters. With more Lancasters coming into service, there was a lack of experience on four-engined aircraft, and some Stirling’s were deployed to RAF Swinderby for crew training. This move coincided with Bob obtaining his commission and he became an instructor on both Stirling and Lancasters. Late in 1944, Bob was back flying operations with 463 Squadron at RAF Waddington, where he was senior co-pilot/flight engineer. Following peace declaration in Europe, Bob joined Tiger Force in preparation for moving to Japan, but the war ended before this materialised. Bob began a post-war career in civil aviation, initially operating the Avro Tudor, and flying approximately three-hundred operations during the Berlin airlift. He also gives an account of the development of the DH 106 Comet and details the faults which resulted in the aircraft being grounded. While undertaking demonstrations in America, Bob was recalled to New York, where his crew discovered they were to operate the first civilian jet flight eastbound across the Atlantic. In 1960, Bob was one of four certified to instruct on the new generation of aircraft, the Boeing 707. An injury sustained from clear-air turbulence curtailed Bob’s flying career, and he progressed into the investigation of aircraft accidents.
Contributor
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Ian Whapplington
Anne-Marie Watson
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Azores
Canada
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Netherlands
United States
Zimbabwe
Arizona--Tucson
England--Burton upon Trent
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Essex
England--Hampshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Suffolk
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Essen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Peenemünde
India--Kolkata
Italy--Elba
Mediterranean Sea--Bay of Naples
New Brunswick--Moncton
Ontario--Ottawa
Scotland--Leuchars
Wales--Glamorgan
Washington (State)--Seattle
England--Cornwall (County)
Arizona
Ontario
New Brunswick
India
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Staffordshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1943
1944
10 Squadron
463 Squadron
5 Group
57 Squadron
617 Squadron
86 Squadron
90 Squadron
aircrew
Bennett, Donald Clifford Tyndall (1910-1986)
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
C-47
flight engineer
Gneisenau
Halifax
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
Pathfinders
pilot
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921-2021)
radar
RAF Alconbury
RAF Halton
RAF Ridgewell
RAF St Athan
RAF St Mawgan
RAF Stradishall
RAF Swinderby
RAF Tuddenham
RAF Waddington
RAF Woodhall Spa
RAF Wratting Common
Scharnhorst
Stirling
Sunderland
Tiger force
training
Window
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/143/1366/AHawkinsDH151001.1.mp3
8b754798beb1912e8757ed38a3b0d408
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
Hawkins, Des
Des Hawkins
Desmond Hawkins
D H Hawkins
D Hawkins
Description
An account of the resource
Four items. An oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Desmond Howard Hawkins DFC (158602 Royal Air Force), one photograph, a diagram and notes about his service. Des Hawkins volunteered for the Royal Air Force in 1941. He trained as a navigator in Canada and flew 47 operations in Lancasters with 44, 625 and 630 Squadrons from RAF Waddington, RAF Dunholme Lodge, RAF East Kirkby and RAF Kirmington.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Des Hawkins and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-20
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
Hawkins, DH
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
IL: So we’re now talking. So this is — it’s Ian Locker conducting an interview with Des Hawkins at his home in Melksham. It’s the first of October 2015 and the time is about 3 o’clock. So Des, tell us a little bit about your early life and how you came to be in Bomber Command during the war.
DH: Well, it’s fairly simple. At my age at a rather special grammar school I was attending at Bradford-on-Avon, known as Fitzmaurice Grammar School, and we were very well-educated, supremely [emphasis] well-educated but, above all, we were naturally patriotic in those days, and when war came along I thought, ‘Right, the schoolboy’s aim is always to drive an engine locomotive.’ It had to be changed to, ‘ I want to fly?’. So I volunteered and eventually, in 1941, called to interview where we had very intensive medical examinations, and problems to solve, and be interviewed. I wasn’t particularly helpful when it came to the interviewing board. I didn’t think much of them and I don’t think they thought much of me actually but the fact is when they asked me why I wanted to join the Royal Air Force I said, ‘Well, that’s simple. I want to fly, obviously,’ and adding the word “obviously” put a bit of criticism into the questionaire and they suitably looked down a bit. [Background noise] Is it off?
IL: It’s switched on. It’s just you have quite a slightly quiet voice so I’m getting the recording level a bit higher.
DH: Oh, I see.
IL: But that’s fine.
DH: Well, the next question they asked me was, ‘ Have you any relations in the Royal Air Force?’ And I said, ‘Oh yes. Wing Commander A L Grice NC.’ Now that stunned them a bit because NC, as you know, is an army decoration basically and he had been a captain in the Great War, and had wing commander status in the last war, simply because he was a very positive research man. He had all the skills to conduct the sort of matters that needed to be put forward during wartime and at that point they all smiled, got up, came round the table and shook me by hand. They said it would normally be eighteen months you’ll be called up in — you were given a little badge, RAFER, and told to go back to civvy life but you’re sworn in, sworn in the Air Force, but you’re in civvies and they said, ‘Because you have someone in the RAF already, instead of waiting eighteen months you will wait only three months’, and that was the way it turned out. Thereupon, I was posted overseas, to Canada, down to the United States under the Arnold Scheme, the illegal [emphasis] scheme where we weren’t allowed to wear uniforms but they provided the RAF with flying training. But we had to wear lounge suits to settle the matters created by the Neutrality Acts but we were kicked out there. It wasn’t a very successful scheme. Even if you didn’t have your blankets, your sheets, at the corners of exactly forty-five degrees you were washed out. You got de-merits and when you had enough de-merits, like coming in under the fence at night like we did, you were washed out of the course. That happened to me and I went back to Canada where I decided that I’d no longer wait for a pilot’s course. I would be a navigator. I had all the satisfactory education necessary and that’s the way it transpired. Back to England and then they lost us at Bournemouth for about three months. They had to dump us somewhere, where we bathed and filled The Norfolk Hotel nightly, and had a whale of a time. And then they eventually caught up and I went to OTU at North Luffenham in Stamford, Stamford near Oakham, up that way, to be trained on operational training, rather different from just flying. Flying at night, in total blackness of course. Absolutely opposite to what it was like on the other side of the pond, and after that we then — we crewed up then. We selected each other for members of a particular crew. We then went to a conversion course from Wellingtons to Lancasters.
IL: So had you ever flown on that, Wellingtons, when —?
DH: Oh yes but not until we got to OTU. You had to learn to fly them there and do the night training there.
IL: So you learnt as a crew?
DH: Oh yes, absolutely. That was the idea, to weld together a fluid, effortless, satisfactory working group.
IL: Right.
DH: Then we had an intermediate stage before we flew the Lancs, we were flying Manchesters, because the layout of the Manchester, althought only two engines, was the same as in the Lancaster. It was easier for pilots. Then we were posted to number 44 (Rhodesia) Squadron which was the first squadron ever to have Lancasters off the production line. Althought that was some while before I joined them.
IL: Gosh.
DL: There afterwards, after a tour of operations, I went as anb instructor to OTU Chipping Warden in Oxfordshire. It was nearly as dangerous to be an instructor on the OTU as it was flying on operations [laugh]. At least that’s the view I formed. Ultimately, of course, time went by, the second front happened. I wasn’t involved with bombing operations then. I went back after [emphasis] the second front was opened to 625 Squadron and completed sixteen trips, not quite allowing me to complete a second tour, of twenty this time instead of thirty, simply because the war ended. And I can only say that’s a broad statement, chronology of events that happened.
IL: So your first, your first tour, you did thirty operations?
DH: Yes, that was the requirement.
IL: OK, tell me a little bit about — tell me a little bit about what happened on a tour of operations. Tell me about the places you visited. Tell me about the first tour.
DH: Well, that list I’ve given you has got it. Not that one. One of the others. Didn’t I give it to you? Didn’t I give you —
IL: It’s here.
DH: Oh yes, yes, the others. Now there are a number of people around who would say, ‘Forty-six? I’ve done ninety.’ But of course they couldn’t have done it unless they were in at the start of the war. Well, they didn’t contribute very much because very often, because they couldn’t find the targets on the continent so easily and, of course, many of the support second front trips were very small, maybe an hour and a half ,and some people have counted those as whole operations. You can knock up a fair number like that but if you look at my [emphasis] list you will see here that, whilst the first are all the Ruhr, measuring five or six hours each time, but when it got down to a bit later in that, when the winter came along, these hours were going up, 7.30, 7.55, ‘cause they were long trips, right, and then you can see here three Berlins. The shortest was 5.50. There was special reasons for that, the weather was thoroughly dud . None of the defences couldn’t get off the ground so we went the shortest way rather than the long way round. But here you see, on this second tour, these places: Misburg [?], Zeitz, Pölitz, Chemnitz.
IL: All much more East Germany.
DH: Yes. 8.25 hours. And there is one on here, we were at the very maximum, 10.55, a low level operational on a transformer station in Italy but because the night hours were insufficient to come back over enemy territory, too dangerous, we went on to land in North Africa, deliberately, it was planned that way, and then when we could get back (although the weather was bad for a week or so) we bombed Leghorn on the way back and taking off from where we were, in North Africa, Blida. And then again, so these all were fairly long trips.
IL: Absolutely.
DH: It’s not like a fighter pilot, going up for a maximum of half an hour and landing because he was either out of petrol, munitions or both. We couldn’t. The moment we entered over the continent the Germans were after us all the way out to the target and all the way back. It was a very, very, harassing situation altogether and very, very wearing, to such an extent that, when I first went to 44 (Rhodesia) Squadron they said, ‘You won’t be on operations for a couple of days. Get used to flying around the countryside, Lincoln countryside, see where we are.’ And we did that but at night, of course, there were empty beds, increasingly every night, and I suddenly realised there was absolutely no future in this at all. I wasn’t going to live more that two or three trips. That was my opinion and hence, postwar, when I came to write that book, that’s where the title “No Future” comes from.
IL: Absolutley. So, how did —? Just sort of describe that sort of —? How you came to terms with that sort of —? How does someone come to terms with ‒?
DH: Danger?
IL: With fatalism, you know —?
DH: You get used to it. It comes under a well-known phrase in the RAF, “getting flak-happy”. If you get a lot thrown up at you and you get through it to start with, and you always get through, so you acheive some kind of strange kind of optimism and the view that, ‘Whoever’s going to get shot down it won’t be me, it will be the other chap’.
IL: Right.
DH: Fatalism, yes, but rather a strange kind of optimism as well.
IL: And did you ever feel frightened? Did you ever — you know?
DH: Yes, yes. This North African trip we bombed Reggio there satisfactorily but we passed over an unknown defended area on the Italian coast, going across to Sardinia [?] across the Mediterranean, and they chewed us up a bit and on that occasion the pilot was throwing the airplane around like nobody’s business and all my navigational instruments slid off the table onto the floor, and the one moment that they slid onto the floor and I bent down to pick them up there was a horrid grafting bang right beside me or behind me, and shocked to find there was a great big hole in the fuselage. My own instrument board in front of me was smashed. If I had been in normal posture, sitting up at my table, it’d have taken my head off at the neck so that was the reason to be shocked. But having got over it I realised I’d got a guardian angel somewhere and forever after that I seized to worry about anything.
IL: Amazing. So how — how did you — you know? Obviously you mentioned earlier when you were chatting about that people couldn’t, you know, navigators, aimers, people couldn’t find targets and things in the early days of the war. What was different for when you were there? What were the improvements?
DH: 1943 when I went on the squadron they had already experienced Mark 1 GEE, a system of fixing your position on the ground by radar.
IL: Right.
DH: It was very unreliable and you often had to kick it to get it to work even but by the time I got on the squadron we got Mark 2 GEE which was much more reliable and useful. It helped us fix our position before we got to the enemy coast so we could recalculate as navigators the real [emphasis] wind velocity —
IL: Yeah.
DH: — and speed, and we were then able to adjust the forecast winds accordingly from there onwards, to give us more of a chance to get further into Germany accurately. And then, of course, later that year there was a new thing came along called H2S which gave you a plan of the ground. Rays were transmitted from the dome at the rear of the Lancaster under the — just under, near the mid-upper turret there’s a bulge. It transmitted from there, hit the ground, sent back pulses which would put a blip on your screen or a number of towns, must a blip. No names on them of course but in conjunction with dead reckoning navigation we were mostly able to decide which town that would be. In the Ruhr there were so many towns. That was where the problem was. You couldn’t tell which was which, right, because it was like one big industrial blob. But it did have its drawbacks. We went down to obstensibly to go to Pilsen, in Czechoslokavia, and we bombed and there was tremendous fires, a marvellous thing, suitable for the occasion, so to speak, but it turned out not to be Pilsen at all. It was this place here. Where the devil is it? Oh, I can’t find it. Pölitz.
IL: Oh, Pölitiz. Yeah.
DH: Pölitz. It seemed we’d done a wonderful job, nobody knew it was there, or at least all the armaments and that that were there. We did a good trick but we never found Pilsen. Why? Because it was the topography of woodland and hills and that masked the fact that Pilsen was there. So nothing’s perfect.
IL: No, absolutely.
DH: But it helped.
IL: Yeah.
DH: Considerably.
IL: So how, in terms of — when you were briefed on targets, what were you — what were the targets, you know? We’ll talk again about Dresden, you know, aftermath and things like that but were you always —? Did you think you were targeting always — it was, sort of, you were always targeting industrial complexes? Or was there ever a realisation that this was —
DH: They were mostly, as far as I know, industrial complexes and the fact that a lot of people got killed at the same time was unfortunate because they lived near their working space. So if their factory got blown up so does some of the people that lived around that area. It’s inevitable in war. You can’t do much else about that.
IL: OK, tell me a bit about some of the people who were part of your crew.
DH: Well, Burness is the star. A New Zealander who was a first [emphasis] class pilot. Considering the amount, small [emphasis] amount, of training you had before you had before you got onto operations, he was a first class pilot but he couldn’t accept anything that wasn’t acceptable. He was a shrewd, shrewd fellow but also quite a hard one. He once — we were doing some air-firing off Skegness on one occasion, practising, and he swept in over the coast and went right over a group of naval cadets on the forecourt and they all had to fall down, as they claimed they’d had been knocked down. We were pretty well at nought feet. Now he did that and when we got back there’d already been a complaint. Now they’d picked up the squadron letters but they hadn’t picked up the aircraft [emphasis] letter but the Squadron Leader Shorthouse, who was the flight commander then, said, ‘Bernie,’ he said, ‘That was you. The Navy is complaining,’ and he said, ‘Well, what’s the matter?’ He said, ‘They were forced to fall to save their lives, to fall to the ground to escape this aircraft coming in fast and furious over the top of them.’ He said, ‘Damn bad discipline, that!’ [Laugh] But he couldn’t be broke. He fell out with the group captain and he wouldn’t be told. He was strong, a first class pilot, but he knew that he had to defer to me. On one occasion we went down to one of these long trips, seven or eight hours, the weather was dirt, and it was the time when they broadcast from home, Meteology broadcast, revised winds, as they calculated them, but I said to him one day, I said, ‘They broadcast winds saying we’ve got to use seventy-five miles an hour.’ I said, ‘That’s rubbish. They’re a hundred and fifty miles. I know I got a proper fix.’ He said, ‘Well, what are you asking me for? You’re the bloody navigator!’ So I ignored the broadcast winds and went round. We found the target. There wasn’t much activity but it was the target. And we came back, hardly any aircraft anywhere. Usually you used to get a slip-stream, from an aircraft in front of you, absolutely nothing. We were an hour back before the next aircraft in Bomber Command simply because we hadn’t gone all over Germany, right, by false wind forecasts? And the group captain said to Bernie, he said, ‘You haven’t been to the target Burness.’ Because bear in mind they didn’t like each other. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘Come on chaps,’ he said, ‘ We’re going to get something to eat and go to bed.’ So we did. There was a hell-of-a shemozzle the next day because they hadn’t got any intelligence report from us. Right? So was the aircraft missing? Where’s the intelligence report? So it had to be explained and when asked by the commander at base, Scampton it was, ‘Why didn’t you go to briefing? Why didn’t you deliver an intelligence report?’ Bernie said, ‘Well, we hadn’t been to the target according to what the group captain, Sir, so no intelligence report was possible.’ That caused a storm. The offending officer was court-martialled as a result of it because we were able — . They back-tracked all my plots, couldn’t find anything wrong with it. They checked the engine consumption to see if we’d flogged the engines to get home quickly, nothing wrong with that. But above all things, the absolute wonder if the moment, we’d got an aiming point photograph of the target, which was taken automatically when the bombs went down and it wasn’t a good night but there wasn’t too much fire and flame, which very often obscured what could otherwise be a decent photograph, right, so we were totally exonerated, absolutley and completely, and the officer concerned was treated as he should have been treated. I believe he was court-martialled and sent to the middle east, taken down to wing commander but that’s a little bit private that bit , but I don’t care, I’m passed caring now anyway. But these were the sort of things that had to be contended with on some occasions. I never suffered like some did, any harsh reaction after I stopped operations, and when I went back to civvy life and worked for a good many years until I retired, only then did it come and smack me right in the face, all of a sudden I got all sorts of think-back feelings, I forget what the word is, looking back.
IL: Post traumatic stress.
DH: Post traumatic stress and that was terrible. And I thought, ‘Well the only thing I can do is put it down on paper,’ and that’s when I wrote that book after I retired from my civil job after the war.
IL: So what did you do as a job after the war?
DH: I was at Lloyds of London.
IL: Oh right.
DH: Yeah and er, but that didn’t solve the problem in itself because I started getting calls from the BBC to talk on radio, because we lived in Cornwall then. I’d retired and then they started asking me to do after dinner speeches. That didn’t relieve it, not a bit. Until the book was published, properly, it got around, all of a sudden it died away. I haven’t had anything since, just like that. Something spurred it, I don’t know quite what it was. Such are the frailties of human nature, one way or another.
IL: So what sort of things were happening to you just at the time when, you know —?
DH: Well, what sort of things why I might have been affected? Well, it’s quite something when you see an aircraft shot down in flames on your starboard beam or on —, you see one explode in the air right in front of you, all that kind of thing, you saw it so often and you began to think, ‘I’m going to get that one of these days.’ But we didn’t.
IL: So were there any other interesting people on your crew?
DH: Er, they all had their own facets, most notable I think is probably the popsies they chased in their off duty hours.
IL: This is the sort of thing we need to talk about.
DH: Yeah, but they were, of course, integrated thoroughly. They knew what to do and did it well and we didn’t — we weren’t completely ousted [?]. We did shoot down two or three night fighters which was quite something because you rarely saw a night fighter in total darkness, he saw you first . He could see your exhaust fumes from four engines. That told the Germans it was an English bomber so he could come up underneath and fire up. You couldn’t see underneath, right, so you just had to keep out of the way and that kind of thing.
IL: So would you have seen night fighters on most of the night missions?
DH: Yes, yeah.
IL: Gosh. Mm.
DH: Not in its full shape.
IL: No.
DH: But it was there, you knew it was there, and later in the war they did develop a radar thing operated by the radar operator, though I can’t think of it now, which showed if you were being trailed by an airplane, put it like that. But probably the most interesting thing about it all to me was how I got my commission.
IL: Yes, please tell me about it.
DH: Is that worth listening to?
IL: Yes, of course.
DH: Well, in those days, when you qualified in your particular trade, say navigator or pilot, you were made a sergeant, only a sergeant, and we took our sergeant’s rank to squadrons, and eventually to flight sergeant, but by then a number of the crews, straight from training, without experience, were coming in as commissioned ranks. They started commissioning by er, during, after training. We missed all that and it kind of rose up one night at a briefing, 44 Squadron, when Wing Commander Nettleton VC was briefing us for an operation and, like he always said, he drew attention by to the most senior crew by way of saying, ‘Look, if they’ve survived, why shouldn’t you?’ Right, now when they said “Flight Sergeant Burness” there was a lot of the new bods who looked up in a bit of astonishment, ‘Flight Sergeant Burness will lead the squadron tonight.’ It didn’t mean anything because you went indepentently. But sitting at the table, as it happened, were one or two of the big-wigs from Scampton, seeing how we were conducting our briefing, I suppose, or rather our management was. There were one or two covert chaps down the table when he said this. The next morning we were called to — yeah, the wing commander’s office. He said, ‘Do you want a commission?’ ‘Do you want a commission?’ We’d never thought about it really. He said, ‘Right.’ We did sort of hesitate for a moment because we thought well it won’t make much difference to the pay, though the mess bills would be bigger. He said, ‘Right, get into Lincoln. It’s been arranged with the tailors. You’re back in the mess, the officer’s mess, by tonight. You should be clothed properly in your new uniforms.’ And I think I —. The pilot didn’t achieve that because it had to go through the New Zealand Air Force pattern. So I had to attend at the mess that night and I wasn’t very happy about it, of course, but there it happened. And it made it easier for me when I went as an instructer, you know, it was a bit more listening went on, and it showed that whilst the operational features were first class, they were well planned, the administration wasn’t so good. Now why should they forget about those people, or were they hoping they’d all get wiped out before they needed to commission them, right?
IL: I suppose that’s true of a lot of them. Didn’t they? We talked about earlier about the lack of recognition that Bomber Command had. Tell me a little bit about your thoughts on — put your thoughts on tape.
DH: I’ve already said some, haven’t I? But that wasn’t on tape.
IL: But that wasn’t on tape.
DH: Well, it was my view we had Winston Churchill, as good a commander as he was during wartime, he was responsible for not giving Bomber Command the proper credit for its acheivements because he hoped to be the first peace-time Prime Minister, and he didn’t want to go looking for that position thought of as a warmonger or anything like that. Political, it was. So Arthur Harris, head of Bomber Command, got blamed for hitting the wrong targets, like Dresden, for example. Well, of course, it was never his decision. It had to come from the top. He, Arthur Harris, wasn’t allowed to bomb who he felt he should do. He had a pattern [?] from the Air Council and the Prime Minister. So we all thought in my area, although he’d been a good war commander, he let us down at the end because it should have been recognised that Bomber Command did, as it was expected to do, pretty well win the war because our troops and the American troops, being conscripts, were not up to the standard of the German army. They didn’t have much chance of getting on to the French [unclear] unless they were helped very very considerably indeed, and of course they were by Bomber Command, because we bombed all his supplies, so he couldn’t bring his troops up to — force us back into the sea as would in [unclear] have happened and he says, ‘my few.’ I’m firm about that. I’ve thought about it a lot and so, of course, he didn’t get his seat, as the Prime Minister. I would think all Bomber Command voted against him. Right, now then, what else was there to add to that do you think?
IL: Whatever. You were talking about Dresden as a target. That it wasn’t the innocent target that has been portrayed.
DH: No, it wasn’t.
IL: And you also mentioned, you know, your experiences of arguing with people on the radio. These are all useful things.
DH: Er, yes. Well, Dresden, of course, wasn’t the classic [emphasis] city that people like to think of it, as solely classic, and it’s a shame to break the buildings downs, but it housed the centre of the German Eastern command for fighting the Russians, and also had started making precision instruments that had been knocked out of the Ruhr by Bommber Command, and they built them down in Desden where it was thought it might be safe and also at Yalta, as I remember, this President Roosevelt, Josef Stalin and Churchill agreed to help the Russians and that was put in place by the Royal Air Force under the command of Winston Churchill, to bomb Dresden. So there isn’t much argument about this. That’s what happened but no one likes to think they couldn’t be stopped, like some of the people came on the radio after the war saying, ‘The war was nearly over. Why did we have to smash Dresden?’ Well, of course, it wasn’t known at that time that the war was nearly over. It collapsed rather sooner than expected and, in any case, her view, of this particular woman I’m thinking of, wouldn’t have been respected by those who lived in London with V2s falling all around them and smashing them to bits. So it was well justified and I think that’s about as much as I’d like to say about that, right?
IL: OK, but you’ve had some recognition recently.
DH: Oh, you mean the clasp. Well, yes, I was publicly presented with that by Air Vice Marshall Pat O’Reilly, retired, in the King’s Arms Hotel, Melksham. I didn’t really want to attend but the RAF Association thought I wasn’t doing the proper thing by opting out so I went along and, well, it was a social occasion which happened with a severe background to it, of course. It was a late [emphasis] recognition of Bomber Command without achieving much in the way of expense and that was, had a lot to do with it.
IL: Have you been to the new Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park?
DH: No. I’ve thought of it. I’ve been a very busy man actually. I haven’t really had time to do much. You’ve caught me at a time now when I’m tolerably free. I could go up tomorrow I suppose.
IL: You say you’ve been a busy man. What sort of things have you done after the war then Des, as well as obviously working?
DH: Well, a lot of book work. I did do some work for a City of London organisation after the war, by post. I done it for a fair few years. I’ve given it up now. It was taking up too much of my time and —. But in general mobility is not as good as it used to be though I get about alright. But I’m now more thinking where am I going to get a good meal next and which pub shall I go to?
IL: Sounds good to me.
DH: Yeah, well I find, and it’s not so silly as it sounds, but I go and I join a group of us oldies. We indulge in intelligent conversation over lunch and, in my humble view, that’s the only thing that’s really left for very elderly people. You can’t do much except use your brains, be friendly with people, discuss perhaps the situation in the world today, try and fight it’s battles without much success because the younger ones aren’t listening, right, or can’t listen, one or the other. And so we enjoy our food while putting the world to rights, in theory.
IL: What —? Tell us a little bit about how you socialised during the war. What sort of — what was the social life like between operations?
DH: At the bar. Briefly, that’s about it. Occasionally we would wallop off into Lincoln but you always did the same thing there. You went into The Snake Pit as they called The Saracen’s Head in Lincoln. It was known as The Snake Pit ‘cause it was thought there were more German spies in there than anywhere else in the country and so you could only have a drink. You didn’t drink too much generally but you did rather absorb a bit of it. It wasn’t bad. You didn’t do much except for one thing, one good thing, we used to get week’s leave every six weeks, phenominal, until it started getting down to three weeks because so many people in front of you had not come back from ops, you moved up the rosta. So we were getting a lot of leave by way of easing the situation.
IL: How did you cope with not — the people, how did you cope with people not returning? People that you — or were these people you didn’t know or you were just socialising with your crew or was this something that you just accepted?
DH: You accept it very quickly because you knew it’s inevitable, that this sort of thing will happen. The losses in — the worst part of the war in Bomber Command was ’43, ’44, as you know, were pretty fantastic. Of over 75,000 employed, 56,000 were fatal, er, casualties, and that doesn’t augur for a particularly friendly future. So you just have to accept it. ‘There’s a war on,’ was an old expression we used to use. It can be used in many circumstances, ‘There’s a war on.’
IL: Right, can you stop for a second?
DH: At the end of the war as the war ceased all our aeroplanes were grounded so there was nothing to do, utter boredom, ONUE [?] by the bucketful and one got fed up with getting up in the morning, breakfasting, walking down to the flights to see if there was anything, walking back because there was nothing, day after day. There was only one way to handle this, to get released. But of course, if you were relatively young, you were the later ones to be released. They asked, it was a combination of age and service, actually, carried out and so I, like most others, got released as soon as I could, went into Civvy Street, got going, but even in the City of London, the pay was pretty poor, and it was not as much as I needed. I’d been earning more in the services and so I rejoined the RAFVR, I resigned my emergency commsission and took on a reconstituted commission but I had to go in at a lower rank. So, instead of flight lieutenant, as I was, it was flying officer. But that was reinstituted, your original substantive rank, was reinstituted about a year later. And I did four years flying around at weekends, on Anson aircraft, of all things, and for a fortnight during the summer months, for which you duly got a day’s pay plus flying pay, which was substantial, which helped me with my reintroduction to civil life. And then at the end of that four years I felt I’d truly had enough and resigned again, finally, but before that I was granted, because I’d done all of that, I was granted my substantive rank of flight lieutenant for life. End of story.
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 Desmond Hawkins
Format
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00:46:44 audio recording
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Creator
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Ian Locker
Date
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2015-10-01
Identifier
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AHawkinsDH151001
Description
An account of the resource
Desmond Hawkins volunteered for the Royal Air Force and became a navigator. After training on Wellingtons and Manchesters, he flew Lancasters for 44 Squadron and completed a tour of operations. He was commissioned as flight lieutenant and after the tour was posted to an Operational Training Unit at RAF Chipping Warden as an instructor. He then completed a further sixteen operations with 625 Squadron. He talks about the development of radar. He also mentions some of the operations to the Ruhr, Berlin, Italy and Czechoslovakia as well as a particularly long flight that led to landing in Blida, North Africa. Then carrying out a bombing operation from there on Leghorn, where his aircraft was attacked and damaged. After the war he went to work in the City of London but rejoined the Royal Air Force for four years. He wrote a book called 'No Future'.
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Christine Kavanagh
Language
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eng
Type
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Sound
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Conforms To
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Pending review
Spatial Coverage
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Canada
Great Britain
Italy
England--Lincolnshire
England--Northamptonshire
Germany--Berlin
Italy--Livorno
North Africa
Slovakia
Czech Republic
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
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1941
1943
44 Squadron
625 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
coping mechanism
Gee
grief
H2S
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
Lancaster
Manchester
navigator
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
radar
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/249/3397/AEldenEA161205.1.mp3
237f3926f5d95e16bc374ac46e339e78
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
Elden, Emmanuel Alexis
Emmanuel Alexis Elden
Emmanuel A Elden
Emmanuel Elden
E A Elden
E Elden
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Emmanuel Alexis Elden. He served as an air traffic controller.
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
2016-12-05
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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Elden, EA
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
L: Ian Locker. I’m at [redacted] Norwood. I’m interviewing Alex Elden on the 5th of December. Alex. How, tell me a little bit about your early life. I understand you were born in Jamaica.
[pause]
IL: Ok. And when did you come to England?
EAE: In the RAF.
IL: Ok.
EAE: 1944.
IL: Right. And why? Do you know, why did you leave Jamaica?
EAE: [cough] Why did I leave Jamaica?
IL: Or why did you? Did you, did you come because you wanted to fight for the, for the old country?
EAE: Well, it was the thing to do at the time.
IL: Right. Ok. And why did you? Why the RAF? What attracted you to it?
EAE: It was, it was the best organisation I knew. That’s why I joined it.
IL: Ok. So did you join it in Jamaica, then come over to England or did you come to England and then join the RAF?
EAE: Joined in Jamaica.
IL: Ok. So how did you come across?
EAE: Well, they took us from there and brought us here.
IL: Right. So did you come via ship?
EAE: Yeah.
IL: You didn’t have any run-ins with U-boats or —
EAE: No. No.
IL: Ok. So what happened when you got to England?
EAE: Nothing.
IL: But where did you, where did you get sent to for your, as — when you joined the RAF what happened? Where did you go?
EAE: We came to Hunmanby Moor.
IL: Right.
EAE: Which is Yorkshire.
IL: Right.
EAE: That’s where we came to. And then it all started from there.
IL: Right. So what did they do at Hunmanby Moor? Was that your basic training?
EAE: Hmmn?
IL: So what did basic training involve?
EAE: Just was the ordinary basic training involved for the Englishmen.
IL: But, but what exactly did you have to do? Was it lots of marching and — ?
EAE: Yeah. We did march. And a lot of field training. Because it was a case of having a fit. A fit make up if anything happened.
IL: Yeah. And how long were you there for?
EAE: Hmmn?
IL: How long were you there for? At Hunmanby Moor?
EAE: How long?
IL: Yeah.
EAE: We was, we was in the army, in the air force and that’s where we did the training before you passed out.
IL: Right. So how long did it take you to do the training before, to pass out?
EAE: Well, a couple of weeks.
IL: Right. So it wasn’t a lot of training.
EAE: No. But you had to do that. It’s called the basic training. That was a couple of weeks. And we moved on and it was improved training.
IL: So was that the point you decided that you were going to do air traffic control? Or were you told that you were going to do air traffic control?
EAE: No. I selected air traffic control because it appealed to me.
IL: Right. And so where did you move to after Hunmanby Moor then?
EAE: Oh. It was with the RAF.
JE: Was it Filey?
EAE: Filey. Yeah. That’s it.
IL: Oh right. So stayed in Yorkshire.
JE: Yeah.
IL: Ok. And was that where they taught you to be an air traffic controller?
EAE: No. The point is that I liked the tag. I selected that because it appealed to me.
IL: Right.
EAE: As every man, every boy would. An aircraft flying up there and what have you. That’s how it appealed to me. Just something that is my own appeal.
IL: But you hadn’t had any involvement with any aeroplanes in Jamaica.
EAE: No.
IL: No.
EAE: No.
IL: So —
EAE: The planes in Jamaica were Pan American aircraft.
IL: Right.
EAE: Yeah. They were transport. Taking people backward and forward. Yeah.
IL: Right.
EAE: And, well, it was something that would appeal to a boy.
IL: Absolutely. So after, so when you went to Filey what sort of training did you do in Filey?
EAE: Basic training because now we are talking about uniform. The army.
IL: Yeah.
EAE: You see. Basic training. That’s what we did. And got acquainted with the rifle. [laughs] Because we might have to defend. Therefore —
IL: Yeah.
EAE: We learned that too.
IL: So how long were you in Filey for?
EAE: I don’t know.
IL: I bet the seaside in Yorkshire wasn’t as nice as the seaside in Jamaica.
EAE: No. I don’t know how long we were there for.
JE: You came in November.
EAE: Eh?
JE: You came in November didn’t you?
EAE: Yes.
JE: To England. You came in November. Remember?
IL: That must have been a real culture shock.
JE: Freezing.
IL: Absolutely. And certainly Yorkshire. I live in Yorkshire .
EAE: Yeah.
IL: So it’s, I know how cold it is. I live in east Yorkshire so Filey is just up the coast. So I know Filey very well.
EAE: Hunmanby Moor.
IL: I think that’s near Filey isn’t it? It’s actually quite close to the coast. How, so how did they train you to be an air traffic controller?
EAE: How did they train me?
IL: Yeah. How did you become. You know, you obviously said, ‘I’ve selected. I want to be an air traffic controller.’ They must have given you some training at that.
EAE: Yes. They gave me training but I didn’t know that was what I was getting it for.
IL: Oh right. So how did, how long did it take to train you as an air traffic controller?
EAE: Now, that’s something else now because I mean it depends. The training takes up different factions.
IL: Yeah.
EAE: Yeah. So you can’t say how long because you don’t know what you, you don’t know when you become an air traffic controller. You only have the name but you don’t know if [emphasis].
IL: Oh I see. Right. So did, can you remember when you became an operational air traffic controller?
EAE: Almost immediately. Almost immediately as I finished the training.
IL: Right.
EAE: And that training lasted four weeks.
IL: So where did, where did they send you as an air traffic controller? What —
EAE: Yatesbury.
IL: Yatesbury. Where’s that?
EAE: In Wiltshire.
IL: Oh right. Ok. So how did it work? What were you? As an air traffic controller did you, did you have to look after an area or was it just an airfield or a number of airfields or — how did it work?
EAE: It’s hard to say. As an air traffic controller the first you know about the force that you are in.
IL: Yeah.
EAE: Which is the RAF.
IL: Yeah.
EAE: You know about that force. And it starts from there. Build up. I mean it’s not a little force. It’s a big force.
IL: Huge.
EAE: Yeah. And there are people connected with flying which I wasn’t. I wasn’t a flier but everything to do with flying I had to know. That’s, that’s what it was all about.
IL: So when you were at Yatesbury working as an air traffic controller how did, how did, it’s difficult. What was the process by which you managed to control aeroplanes?
EAE: Yatesbury is an airfield.
IL: Right.
EAE: An aeroplane flies from an airfield.
IL: Yeah.
EAE: And that’s where our connection with the RAF is.
IL: Right. But in terms of how you control the aircraft is it you just nowadays obviously there’s, you know very, very sophisticated radar that can tell you where all these planes are in an area. And they can tell you how high they are, how fast they’re going. Whatever. How did you manage that?
EAE: The air traffic controller.
IL: Yeah.
EAE: The RAF have their training places.
IL: Right.
EAE: And immediately as we joined up with the RAF we were sent to one of the training places.
IL: And was Yatesbury your training place?
EAE: Pardon?
IL: Was Yatesbury your training place?
EAE: Yes.
IL: Right. Ok.
EAE: And from there on well it was like the elementary stage of air traffic control. Yatesbury.
IL: Right.
EAE: Elementary stage. Also the advanced stage but it started from the elementary stage. Improved to the advanced stage.
IL: How did you, even when you were doing your, you know when you were doing your elementary stage and the advanced stage how did you work out where aircraft were?
EAE: How did I work out what?
IL: How did you work out where the aircraft were? Did they, is it just, did they just talk to you by radio or did you have radar or did you —
EAE: I have all that connections. And advanced stages you go along. Yeah. The ordinary elementary stage when you start.
IL: How would you [pause] so did, as an air traffic controller were you telling planes to sort of fly at certain altitudes or at certain speeds?
EAE: It involved. It involved everything. Involved flying. Safety.
IL: Yeah.
EAE: And so on.
IL: How did you plot where these things were?
EAE: How did you what?
IL: You know, when you, you — if you’ve got more than one aeroplane you need to know where they are. Did you have like a map or little sticks or —
EAE: We had radar.
IL: Right.
EAE: Radar is like you having telephones. Right.
IL: Ok.
EAE: And you speak through the telephones.
IL: Ok.
EAE: Radar is an operator who sees everything miles away.
IL: Right.
EAE: Through the connection.
IL: Ok. So you did have, so you were, it was very, it was similar to modern air traffic control that you were using. You had a radar that covered a certain area.
EAE: It was. It was a modern concern.
IL: Yeah.
EAE: I mean, it was no foolishness.
IL: No. No. Absolutely. So it was quite sophisticated. The radar. Because certainly early in the war, you know when —
EAE: It was the thing that saved this country and the world. Radar.
IL: Absolutely.
EAE: Very important.
IL: Well certainly I know, you know obviously early during the Battle of Britain you know radar was relatively unsophisticated. They could say if there was a large formation of aircraft. They couldn’t exactly say how many but they could work out where it was going. So, but by the time in 1944 when you were in the RAF radar was such that you could pinpoint all the planes in your little area that you were controlling.
EAE: 1944 radar had gone well advanced.
IL: Right. Ok
EAE: Well advanced.1944.
IL: Did you ever have to deal with planes that were in difficulty?
EAE: Pardon?
IL: Obviously, during the, during the war, you know some of the planes that might be returning might have been attacked. Might have been damaged. Might not have been able to talk to you because radios and things might be damaged. Did you ever have to deal with any, you know planes in serious difficulties?
EAE: They came back here to be repaired or dealt with for operation.
IL: Right. But as an air traffic controller were you having to try and guide sometimes very damaged planes down to you know maybe not coming into the base that they were supposed to go to but the base that you were you know that you were helping to control.
EAE: Well, there was air traffic control and mechanical repairs and everything goes on. It was one big coverage. Each have their own department.
IL: So where did, so just come back to you working as an air traffic controller. Was that at Yatesbury or did you go somewhere else afterwards?
EAE: No. Air traffic controller is to do with the aircraft and the airfield.
IL: Right. So you were just looking after one airfield when you were doing air traffic control.
EAE: One airfield. One department.
IL: Right. You weren’t involved in a sort of you know covering a sector. You know Wiltshire was similar to Lincolnshire wasn’t it. There were a lot of bases in Wiltshire.
EAE: Look at it when they say RAF. Royal Air Force. Various departments.
IL: Ok.
EAE: It’s not just RAF and everything is grouped like that. No.
IL: So it wasn’t, there wasn’t a big each airfield would have its own air traffic control set up. It wasn’t a sort of big national centre.
EAE: It was national. Each airfield would have the same control.
IL: Right. Ok. And they’d overlap and cover the whole, the whole of the area. Ok. Ok. So I suppose it’s a little bit like Heathrow and Gatwick coming separate. So did you enjoy your time in the RAF?
EAE: Did I enjoy?
IL: Your time in the RAF.
EAE: You call it enjoy. You call it enjoy. Yeah. But it wasn’t like a dance.
IL: No.
EAE: It was reality.
IL: What did you do for social life?
EAE: Hmmn?
IL: When you were in the RAF what did you do for social life? How did you enjoy yourself when you were off?
EAE: I was just off duty.
IL: Yes.
EAE: And you go to your clubs and what have you. And when you’re on duty signed on. Come back.
IL: Right. So what sort of clubs did you go to?
EAE: Pardon?
IL: What sort of clubs? What did you enjoy doing?
EAE: What any young person enjoyed doing. They don’t want to go to church do they? No.
IL: Not many.
EAE: Good.
IL: Ok.
EAE: They’re looking for the young girls. Young boys. Enjoy themselves. They can’t see the danger. They can’t see the danger. They’ll join anything. Join anything. Take anything given without looking for the danger. Young girls, young boys don’t know nothing about danger.
IL: How, so how, what, so what how when did you leave the RAF?
EAE: When did I leave it? Long after.
JE: [unclear]
EAE: Long after.
IL: They call it demobbed don’t they?
EAE: Hmmn?
IL: They call it, you were demobbed. Demobilised at some point.
EAE: Yes. Yes
JE: 1950.
IL: So you stayed in the RAF for five years?
JE: He signed on after for more years.
IL: Oh. You signed, you carried on in the RAF. So what did you do? Were you still an air traffic controller?
JE: [unclear]
IL: Right. Ok. And where was, where did you work after the war then with the RAF?
EAE: England.
IL: Right.
EAE: Is a place that have branches all over England.
JE: Did he say?
IL: So did you move around?
EAE: No. No. I never move around as much as people would think.
JE: I think he’s forgotten now.
EAE: Pardon?
JE: You was a sergeant wasn’t you?
EAE: That’s right.
JE: Yeah.
EAE: But what I’m saying is you wasn’t moving around like that.
IL: No.
JE: No.
IL: No.
EAE: Yes. You see. I was at Yatesbury. I was at Compton Bassett.
JE: Ok.
EAE: But what I’m saying is, is one place at a time.
IL: Oh yes. But was Compton Bassett after the war or before or during the war?
EAE: During and after. Compton.
IL: Oh. You stayed. You stayed there. Ok. So you stayed there for about five years.
EAE: Five years. No.
JE: He was discharged in 1950. You signed on for three more years and you said you were going to go to, they wanted to send you abroad didn’t they? Where did they want to send you? But you were married by then.
EAE: Yes.
JE: Singapore.
EAE: Yes.
JE: He was married before you see.
EAE: Right.
JE: Yes. I’m second wife.
IL: You nearly went. So why did you not go to Singapore?
JE: Because he didn’t want to leave his wife.
IL: Oh I see. She wasn’t allowed to come with you.
JE: She was English.
IL: There are reasons.
JE: I don’t think she —
IL: That were not explained at the time and will not be explained after.
EAE: Yes. I was talking to Jayne earlier and she was saying you didn’t have a particularly kind experience at times and that you weren’t, didn’t feel completely welcomed into, into England.
EAE: Yeah. A lot of things that happened then that you don’t want opened up again.
IL: Ok. Ok.
JE: Ok.
IL: We won’t talk, we won’t talk about that.
EAE: Well I don’t know about you won’t talk.
IL: Oh no. If you wanted to talk I would be delighted to hear you. But I don’t want to sort of I don’t want to stir things up and upset you if that’s not what you’d, you’d like to talk about. But if you wanted to talk about it we’d be delighted because not only is your history part of the RAF but your history is part of the Caribbean. You know, Caribbean people coming to England. And it’s a very important part of history.
EAE: Yes.
IL: And it’s very important. I think it’s very important that young people learn the lessons and listen to, you know what, what.
EAE: What happened to the old ones.
IL: What racist. Well what racism —
EAE: Yeah.
IL: Sort of, you know the personal cost. So as I say if you want to talk about it I would love to listen but I don’t want to sort of ask you questions if they’re going to upset you.
EAE: Let’s talk about happy things.
IL: Good. So what, so after you left the RAF what did you do?
[pause]
EAE: What did I do?
IL: Yes.
EAE: Air traffic control.
JE: After that.
IL: After that. But after you left the RAF in 1950.
JE: You went on a course.
IL: What did you do?
JE: Do you remember? You went on a course. Do you remember?
EAE: Yes. I —
JE: Scientific glass blowing. Do you remember that?
EAE: Yeah.
IL: Gosh.
JE: Yeah. And you became the foreman didn’t you? Do you remember? Can you remember that back, far back?
IL: And then you ran a taxi, taxi training school.
JE: Yeah.
IL: And taught a lot of people The Knowledge. And I gather you were the second afro Caribbean man to get The Knowledge.
EAE: In civil life I’ll always be a taxi driver.
JE: Yeah.
IL: So did you ever get any famous people in your taxi?
EAE: A lot.
JE: Doris Day.
EAE: A lot.
IL: Right.
JE: Yeah.
IL: Is there anything else you’d like to tell me? Is there anything else you think, you think about. What did, do you have any views on how the people in Bomber Command were treated after the war?
EAE: You just don’t know who was treated how. You know. They got demobbed. They went to this section, that section. You can’t keep up with them. You’d have to view them themselves for them to tell you what’s happened.
IL: Ok. Did you, did you make friends in the RAF?
EAE: You would do that.
IL: Yeah.
EAE: Wouldn’t you?
IL: Of course. Did you, did you, did you keep in touch with them after the war?
JE: Yeah.
EAE: You do. Yeah.
JE: Do you, do you remember all your friends at the West Indian Ex-Servicemen. We used to go there. Do you remember? A lot of them there were in the air force and the army weren’t they? Mr Webb. Do you remember Mr Webb. Phil Potts was a great friend of yours wasn’t he? A lot of them have passed.
IL: Yeah. Absolutely.
JE: Use your tissue babe. In your pocket. Use your tissue. The other one. The other pocket. That’s good.
IL: Shall we just stop for a —
JE: Sorry.
[recording paused]
JE: Trying to jog his memory.
IL: So Jayne you were saying that Alex used to like to come down to London when he was on leave.
JE: Yeah. He used to like to go to the dances. I think all of them did. Most of the young Caribbean would come down to do. You know. They were all eighteen nineteen twenty. They were all young men. And I think, he did tell me that there used to be trouble like when they used to ask the English girls to dance because their ladies weren’t here. Their Caribbean ladies were all in the West Indies. So they ask a girl to dance and the other gents, the white population would object. And sometimes fights used to break out. He told me that himself. Because his first wife he met in the, he met in the Lyceum. Didn’t you Alex? You met Joan in the Lyceum. She lived in Carshalton and when they got married he went to live in her mum and dad’s house. They loved him.
IL: Yeah.
JE: They loved him. I’ve met the family. They loved him. His mother in law, Liz thought he was the best thing since sliced bread. Although he was, although he was black, you know them days were different. She loved Alex because she said he came to fight and help Britain.
IL: Well, of course.
JE: You know. The father wasn’t too happy. But Alex used to play cricket as well, you know, for Carshalton and that and his father in law used to go and watch him and people would say, ‘That guy plays good cricket.’ He might be the only black he goes yeah that’s my father in law er, ‘That’s my son in law.’ So they were very proud of him.
IL: Yeah.
JE: He was a very gentle man. You know. Good quality person. He had a very good education in Jamaica. From a middle class family. His father was Cuban and his mother was Jamaican. So he come from a very good family background and he was a very educated gentleman. I think that’s why he must have passed an exam to get in air traffic control. They didn’t just give it to him.
IL: No. No.
JE: So, they saw that he was bright. He was very, well he is an educated man. It’s just that you know his illness now has robbed him of a lot of it. But he’s still Alex underneath. Yeah. A good man.
IL: What did you do at cricket? Did you play cricket in the RAF?
JE: Yeah.
IL: Were you a batsman or a bowler or both? Oh you were a spin bowler.
EAE: All rounder.
IL: All rounder. Sorry.
JE: Yeah.
IL: Sorry. I thought you were showing me how you spun the ball. I was going to say because if you were a spinner you could probably get a place in the England team at the moment.
EAE: I wouldn’t want it.
IL: No. You wouldn’t. You’d want to play for the West Indies.
JE: Yeah. Viv Richards and all that. We used to watch that didn’t we? On TV.
IL: Absolutely.
JE: Yeah. I think he’s getting a bit tired now.
IL: Yeah. I think we, we’ll stop the interview just there.
JE: Yeah.
IL: And Alex and I will just talk.
JE: Yeah.
IL: And if there’s anything else we need to say.
JE: Yeah.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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AEldenEA161205
Title
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Interview with Emmanuel Alexis Elden
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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00:30:54 audio recording
Creator
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Ian Locker
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-12-05
Description
An account of the resource
Emmanuel Alexis Elden grew up in Jamaica. He joined the Royal Air Force and trained at RAF Hunmanby Moor. He served as an air traffic controller and when he was not on duty he used to enjoy travelling to dances in London. He stayed in the RAF until 1950 when he became a taxi driver in London.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Jamaica
Great Britain
England--Wiltshire
England--Yorkshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Carolyn Emery
African heritage
ground personnel
radar
RAF Hunmanby Moor
RAF Yatesbury
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1078/11536/APocklingtonAC171115.1.mp3
e7a0ce808c14a23b8955fb5033e305bc
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
Pocklington, Arthur
Arthur Clive Pocklington
A C Pocklington
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Arthur Pocklington (b. 1923, 1589794 Royal Air Force). He served as a radar mechanic at RAF Dunholme Lodge.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-11-15
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. 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
Pocklington, AC
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
IL: Ok. Ian locker. This is the 15th of November 2017. I’m at the home of Clive Pocklington and we’re going to start our interview now. Clive, you were born in, you were born in Hull so tell me a little bit about how you came to, you know your early life and how you came to join the RAF.
AP: Yes. I was born in Hull in 1923. And I was always mad on aircraft as most lads were in those days but my first association wasn’t with the Air Force. My family had always been associated with the Navy. And so I was, I think I was persuaded to apply for the Navy and the Recruiting Centre was in Jamieson Street in the centre of Hull. I would be seventeen or eighteen and I went there and they found that I had a heart problem.
IL: Right.
AP: I’d gone on my bike to that place. About four miles away from home. And surprising how I got on my bike after they’d rejected me. ‘You’ve got this heart problem. We can’t have you.’ I went home. It was about four mile. Went in and who was waiting there but my GP. They’d contacted my GP. Imagine that happening these days. And he, I remember he got me on the settee, took out his stethoscope. No. Nothing. Found no problem whatever. He was an enlightened GP because in those days if you had a sore throat they whipped out your tonsils in no time on the kitchen table. I had always had a sore throat but he would not take my tonsils out. I gargled with alum. Anyway, he went off and that was that. After that what happened? Oh, I was called up for the Home Guard.
IL: Right.
AP: And that was locally. I don’t remember much about the Home Guard. It was nothing like the TV programme believe me. All I remember was going on the rifle range which I rather enjoyed because I was a pretty good shot. And then —
IL: So what were you, so — sorry.
AP: Yes.
IL: Just come back a little bit.
AP: Yeah.
IL: To school days.
AP: Yeah.
IL: So you were at school here.
AP: Oh yes. I was at school. I was at Malet Lambert which was a school in East Hull. And when war broke out in September ’39 I was only fifteen. The school closed. Temporarily but we didn’t know that. But it closed. If you lived in the catchment area you were evacuated to Whitby if you wanted to go. But I lived just outside and so I wasn’t. And so that was my last association with school. I left school when I was late fifteen.
IL: Right.
AP: Never went again. But I did alright.
IL: Ok. So, what, so did you, so were you working at the time? Before you —
AP: I did, yes. My father was in the Water Department and he got me a job in the Hull Corporation Water Department for a few months. I didn’t like that very much and I went into BOCM. That’s British Oil and Cake Mill. In the laboratory.
IL: Right.
AP: You know, doing odd jobs and things. And I was there until I went in the RAF. Anyway, I was in the Home Guard and then I applied to go in the RAF. I went, the Recruitment Centre was in Doncaster. And it was a weekend. We went on the Saturday and we were due to come home on the Sunday.
IL: So, how old were you by that time then? Were you seventeen or eighteen?
AP: Eighteen I’d be.
IL: Right.
AP: I think. Yes. Eighteen. Had the interview. I’ll always remember we went before the board. Very intimidating it was. There were about six, to me high ranking officers. And the one, the chairman I presume he was, he looked at me and he said, ‘What’s seventeen thirty fourths of sixpence?’ I always remember that question. And I knew straight away. ‘That’s thruppence.’
IL: Absolutely. It took a while to think.
AP: Well, I don’t know how I did it but, because I was trembling I think. Anyway, I got in. Yes. Ok. We’ll accept you as a wireless operator air gunner. We had to stay overnight to be, for something happening. Oh, for medicals the next day. Overnight was, we had, we were in this huge hall of about eighty recruits with the beds about five inches away from each other. And there was one candlelight bulb in the, in the top here. And I always remember about two in the morning this poor fella was wandering. I think he’d been to the loo. Well, he must have been. And he couldn’t find his bed. This would be about two in the morning. He was still wandering around at half past three so I hope he still isn’t looking for it [laughs] Looking for his bed. Anyway, to cut a long story short we had a medical the next day and the same thing happened again. ‘You’ve got an enlarged heart. You can’t go aircrew. But if you like you can go on, you know a ground job.’ So, it wasn’t radar in those. It was a radio.
IL: Right.
AP: A radio course. So I accepted that. So I think probably looking back somebody was looking after me. I mean all they had was the stethoscope in those days and obviously it didn’t work too well [laughs]
IL: Yeah.
AP: And so I went on the ground. Ground staff. And went to Bradford, Bradford Technical College. Not far from home so used to come home quite regularly.
IL: So you were called. You were called up straight away. You went straight on.
AP: Yes. Yes. It wasn’t very long. I think they were pretty desperate for radio people. Based in Mannville Terrace in Bradford. I remember the trams going up the hill at night. Rattling away. And we were there about, well a few months and then we had this test. The examination at the end.
IL: So, how did, how did that work then? In terms of were you, you were in the RAF so you were in uniform. Were you based on, were you based at a, did you have a base or were you in digs or —
AP: No. We were in, we slept, we were in empty houses right in the centre of Bradford. There were about six of us in this house. The, we had the mess in the old church hall I believe and the RAF offices were in a little bungalow at the side. We used to do fire watching in there. And I remember I was pretty good in those days with my hands. We used to do. And there were some slips for weekend passes and I got one or two of those [laughs] and I made a very good lino cut of the station stamp. I shouldn’t be saying this but probably —
IL: No. They can’t get you. They can’t get you now.
AP: I would have been a very good prisoner of war because I could make very good stamps and came home a few weekends with that. Anyway, eventually we had the test and I came out fairly high so the top ones were sent on radar and the others were on ordinary radio.
IL: Right. So how did the training — how did, was it classroom based or was it actually —
AP: Yes. It was.
IL: Practical?
AP: Yes. Both.
IL: Right.
AP: Practical and theory. And it was in the technical, in the Technical College at Bradford. Yeah.
IL: Yeah. And they were all RAF people teaching you. They weren’t sort of civilians.
AP: I don’t know whether, no. I think it would have been civilian.
IL: Right.
AP: The teaching. Yes. He was quite good. White I remember his name was. Flight — oh yes RAF he would be. Flight Lieutenant White.
IL: Right.
AP: Came home once and, for the weekend, by train. And we were going home on the Saturday or would it have been the Saturday night? I don’t know. We got as far as Leeds in the train and Bradford is about six miles away from Leeds. And we couldn’t get to Bradford so we decided we would have to find somewhere to kip down for the night. And we found an empty carriage and slept in there. And about half past three in the morning the train was moving. It was the early morning milk train to Skipton. So luckily it stopped not far away from Leeds and we got off and eventually got back and got to Bradford and nothing came of that. Anyway, we passed, passed out fairly high on the radio and was posted to South Kensington, London.
IL: Right.
AP: We lived in luxury flats. I always remember marble bathrooms. It was, they’re still there. I did go in to see this place not long ago.
IL: Right.
AP: Near, near Hyde Park. We used to do PE in Hyde Park. And we used to eat in the, would it be the Victoria and Albert? I think so. I remember there were Ming vases all the way around the —
IL: Yeah. It’s south, well it’s South Kensington, isn’t it?
AP: Yeah. Oh, it was south Kensington all right.
IL: Museum Road in South Kensington is is the V&A and the —
AP: Yeah.
IL: Science museum.
AP: There were no raids while I was there because the Blitz, the earlier Blitzes had finished and the V-2s and 1s hadn’t started. So I don’t remember any raids at all when I was in London. We, I was there for about, oh and I missed out Padgate of course. Before, before I went to Bradford I went to the initial place at Padgate. But, you know, for square bashing.
IL: Oh, basic training.
AP: Yeah. Basic training. We were supposed to be there for ten weeks or eight weeks. Anyway, they cut it down to about five because they were desperate to get the skilled people really. So that should have come before. London I enjoyed very much. Had the test and passed out and was sent to Scampton.
IL: Oh right. How long were you in London? How long? How long? And how many people were there? And what were you, what were you actually doing in London?
AP: We were having lectures and practical work on, on the radar.
IL: Right.
AP: Gee sets, which was [unclear] and H2S hadn’t come into being then, I think. I’ll tell you about those later. And that, we just —
IL: Ok. And how long were you there? But how long did that take you?
AP: Oh. Three months.
IL: Right.
AP: Yes. Three months I think. And then we were, I was posted. Well, I didn’t know where I was going but I ended up in Scampton, and 44 and 619 Squadron. And for the next eighteen months, two years it was simply we used to go out every morning. We all had about five planes to service. Two of us would go together. One would go into the plane to test it. The other one would wait outside with a little van in case anything wanted replacing. Test the Gee and IFF. All those. There was the Gee set, chief one, Monica which was a rear facing radar which would give the bomb, the rear gunner a beeping sound. The faster, the closer the beeps the nearer the fighter was. Well, that didn’t last long because like all radar if it’s transmitting it could be homed in to.
IL: Right.
AP: Like Gee wasn’t. Gee was excellent. It was, gave them the position. It was only a receiver. It didn’t transmit at all.
IL: Right.
AP: So it was quite safe.
IL: Yeah.
AP: H2S which came in very soon was also a bit dicey in my opinion because it sent out, it gave a plan of the ground below.
IL: Right.
AP: But it transmitted and could be homed into.
IL: Yeah.
AP: I used to, occasionally in the morning when we were servicing the navigators would come along just to check things. And I would say, how would I say it? ‘I shouldn’t put this on unless you really need it.’
IL: Yeah.
AP: In my opinion it would have been better to do away with the H2S and use the Gee or there were other ones which we didn’t have and to have a rear facing gun. A gun underneath.
IL: Yeah.
AP: Because they used to come up underneath.
IL: Yeah.
AP: And there was no way of firing down on to them. Anyway, that wasn’t my, nothing to do with me. I just serviced it. We used to — H2S was also very heavy. It had about eight boxes along the side of the left hand side of the fuselage. It had a scanner underneath and it weighed quite a bit and the bomb load had to be reduced because of the equipment they were carrying.
IL: Yeah.
AP: I remember them bombing up. It didn’t bother me at all but I have heard of accidents happening. There were usually about three trolleys. One had a Cookie on. Like a big dustbin, you know. And then some five hundred pounders and then usually some incendiaries depending on how far they were going to go. Lisset, in Yorkshire I gather one did blow up and while they were bombing up. So it could happen. But being eighteen you never bothered about things like that. I used to go up in the morning occasionally. I wasn’t too happy about that though because the first time I went up they used to go on fighter affiliation. They would meet a Spitfire or a Hurricane. Well, the first time I went I didn’t know much. It was the first time I’d flown and we met up with this Spitfire and he did, he did a corkscrew.
IL: Yeah.
AP: Well, you became weightless [laughs] believe me. And I was airsick. Well, I remember staggering down to the elsan which was at the rear of the fuselage just in front of the rear gunner’s turret. And I was doing what I had to do in there and I remember the rear gunner turning around at that time and looked at me and I can still see the look of disgust on his face [laughs] And anyway he didn’t say anything but I don’t think he lived very long. I think, I think that plane was lost that night actually.
IL: Oh gosh.
AP: Anyway, I used to go up occasionally after that but I wasn’t sick any more. I think I knew what to expect.
IL: Do you think this, do you think this was a, an initiation for the, for the new boys coming in?
AP: I think, well, I don’t know. No. I don’t think anything to do with that. I mean, there was no — I mean when you think about these days you have to be strapped in and do that. But we just, there was nowhere to sit even. Well, there was for aircrew but I mean for anybody, anybody else, technicians going up you just sat where you had to and —
IL: Yeah.
AP: Yeah.
IL: So the airborne radar was mainly to give, the H2S was about more accurate bombing. It wasn’t sort of for self-protection really.
AP: Well I don’t, yes it used to work particularly well over coastline.
IL: Yeah.
AP: The reflections from the sea and the coast were totally different. But I mean as I say I think the Gee, Gee gave them a pretty accurate, but it could be jammed of course.
IL: Yeah.
AP: Which, yeah. And then there was IFF which was just a little, it wasn’t very big at all which gave out when they came back whether they were friendly or enemy, you know.
IL: Right.
AP: Identification. Friend or foe. And it had the little, I remember once it had a little explosive device in, in case they came down. It would destroy the crystal —
IL: Yeah.
AP: Which gave them their frequency. And to test it to see if the electric was, we used to undo the, unscrew the plug and put it into your meter and somebody would press the button to see if it was working. Well, once I don’t know if it was me, don’t think it was, didn’t take the plug out in time before the button was pressed. So the thing exploded and destroyed it. But I don’t remember any repercussions on that [laughs] These things happen. Oh, yes. For what I was, when I was going back to London I also, oh I shouldn’t come out with all these admissions. I had a bit of a scam on the, I used to, I wanted to get back to Hull to see my girlfriend. We were in London three months and I came home pretty regularly. I think I only bought one ticket [laughs] because the tickets in those days would last three months. You bought, you know your return ticket. So by various means I didn’t have it stamped [laughs] But I don’t feel guilty about that.
IL: Of course not. Absolutely not.
AP: Anyway, we left. Where am I up to? Oh, up to Scampton. And that was it really.
IL: So when, when were you at Scampton then?
AP: When I was at Scampton. Well, late ’43.
IL: Right.
AP: Yes. Oh, the winters in Lincolnshire believe me.
IL: So that would be just after the Dambusters wouldn’t it?
AP: Yes. It would.
IL: Late ’43.
AP: Yes. Yes. It would be. I remember we, well there would be about — oh, radar. The particular, for some reason majority were Canadians.
IL: Right.
AP: I don’t know why. So would be how many in a Nissen hut? Thirty? Twenty five? Something like that and about two thirds would probably be Canadians. We had one little stove in the centre and winters in Lincolnshire were cold in those days. I think we were issued with two blankets. No sheets. Hadn’t. I didn’t have a sheet for years. And with these two blankets you could arrange to have, well first of all you put your trousers down to get a crease in them. Slept on those. And with two blankets by some you could get five layers beneath and about six on top by surreptitious folding if you know what I mean. And then you put your greatcoat on the top. And it was alright. You’d be, just about cope. I don’t remember ever changing the blankets but they must have done [laughs]
IL: Once in a while. Yes.
AP: Well, yes it certainly was. And I was in Strubby and [pause] no, sorry. Strubby. Dunholme Lodge. And then I went to Strubby. 44 Squadron moved somewhere else and I went with 619. Just don’t know. Where am I up to? [laughs]
IL: You’re just moving to Strubby. But when you, how, so what was a sort of typical? You know you said in the mornings you would, you know pair up and go off.
AP: Yes. Mornings we would pair up and go around and service the kites. And probably about four or five each. Afternoons you’d be in the radar section repairing sets.
IL: Right.
AP: So it was because the all the kites. Oh, they’d all be all ok’d for flying you see and the afternoon was spent repairing things. Evenings in the NAAFI. Fish and chips. No. Egg and chips. No fish. We used to go around to the farms in Lincolnshire and the farmers were very good at selling you eggs which were worth their weight in gold in those days. Yes. So that was it really. We never, we didn’t get to know the aircrew very much because the fitters and the riggers they had their own aircraft.
IL: Right.
AP: And they got to know their aircrew very well and, but we didn’t. We were on different aircraft all the time really so I didn’t get to know any aircrew personally.
IL: Right.
AP: The fitters and the riggers, I don’t know whether it was true. They said when they, when they were coming back from a raid and they were circling around ready to land they would know by the sound which was their aircraft. They were all on, all identical engines. Merlins.
IL: Yeah.
AP: But they were so involved with their plane they would know, ‘That’s ours. It’s coming in now.’
IL: Right.
AP: Whether that’s true or not I’m not sure.
IL: So did you, were you aware of things like losses? And, you know, how did that sort of —
AP: Well —
IL: You know, what was the mood like in the station?
AP: To tell you the honest I don’t think we were. Because within a day if there were two or three — every night every time they went out, well every, most nights there would be one, two or three missing.
IL: Yeah.
AP: You didn’t know whether they’d been shot down or whether they’d been killed or escaped. But within, well a day that plane was replaced.
IL: Right.
AP: So there was usually a full, you know, eighteen planes there all the time.
IL: Right.
AP: Even though three were missing that night. They’d come. New ones would be there.
IL: Right. Were they sort of flown in or were they —
AP: They were flown in. Yes. Yes.
IL: Right.
AP: Yes. I don’t know. The ATA would do that presumably. Perhaps Amy Johnson. You never know.
IL: Absolutely. Well, not 1943 sadly.
AP: Amy Johnson. She was, she was an ATA pilot.
IL: She was.
AP: Yeah.
IL: But I think she was lost in 1941.
AP: Oh.
IL: That’s why I was saying.
AP: Oh, over the Thames wasn’t she?
IL: Yeah. I think that was.
AP: Yeah. Yeah.
IL: I think it was ‘41 that Amy Johnson was lost.
AP: Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. Oh, it was. You’re right. Yes.
IL: So, ’43, not ’43 sadly.
AP: Yeah.
IL: So that’s something I’ve found quite fascinating really. You know. That you would have thought that in terms of targeting aircraft it would have been the centres of production or the centres of storage would have been a very, you know it would have been very productive for, you know German bombing. Rather than —
AP: Yeah. Well, yes I suppose so but I think there was the, they were spread out.
IL: Right.
AP: They used to manufacture bits here and bits there and then send them to be assembled I suppose. There didn’t seem to be any shortage of planes.
IL: No.
AP: No. They were, they were replaced very quickly.
IL: So, what about social life? You know, you said, you know you spent your evenings in the NAAFI. Did you, did you become close to your, you know the other people you were with and —
AP: Yes.
IL: Did you, you know —
AP: Oh yes. I did. Yes. Yes.
IL: Presumably visits to the pubs or —
AP: I wasn’t a drinker in those days.
IL: Right.
AP: No. It was mostly, mostly NAAFIs and various canteens. No. I I didn’t drink ‘til I was well in my 30s.
IL: Right.
AP: Made up for it a bit now [laughs] Yes. And that was it really. And then the, the war. Oh, I didn’t see any action really. We weren’t involved in any raids. Quite, I had a good war really.
IL: Right. You weren’t, there were no raids on any of the bases you were at.
AP: None whatever.
IL: Right.
AP: No. No. I in the later in the war I did see V-1s. A couple over Lincolnshire. They didn’t have the range. They wouldn’t be land launched. They did fit them to planes and —
IL: Right.
AP: Release them and I remember I was cycling across somewhere or other and I saw this V-1 pass right over. That would be somewhere near Lincoln.
IL: Right.
AP: So where it went to I’ve no idea. I’ve seen V-2s. Not V-2s but the trails for when the Germans were sending out the V-2s later in the war. You know, the rockets.
IL: Yeah.
AP: From the, from the low countries even in Lincolnshire you could see the vertical vapour trails.
IL: Gosh.
AP: About eight, ten, seven, six all at the same time going vertically up. Presumably landing in the London area.
IL: Right.
AP: Yeah. Yes. That was quite fascinating really. And then of course the war, the European war finished and we were put on embarkation leave to go to Okinawa.
IL: Right.
AP: On Tiger Force it was called. And, but very shortly afterwards of course the bomb was dropped. The Japanese capitulated and that was cancelled. So we were put on embarkation leave to go to India.
IL: Right.
AP: I didn’t want to go to India but of course I had to. I’m pleased I did because I loved it when I got there. We went on the [pause] Oh, I went to Blackpool for [pause] waiting for the ships, you know.
IL: Right.
AP: The transport to go. We were in Blackpool about three weeks. A funny thing happened. Before we went, on the way to Blackpool we had to go through Sheffield to get to Blackpool. And it was August, I think. September. And we had to walk from one railway station to the other one to get to Blackpool and there were about six of us walking along. And it was a very very hot day so we took our forage caps off. And luckily or unluckily enough there was a car passing with two MPs in. they got out and came across to us. Took our names, numbers and everything else and where we were going and off they went. Well, the next day we were in Blackpool and we had an assembly in the Tower Ballroom. This huge hall it seemed to be. And they called out our names. There’d be about five hundred people. Air Force people. Well, you ought to have heard the noise. Off we went to the front and we were given a rollicking there. And we’d got, we were told we had to come back the next morning and clean the ballroom floor with a toothbrush. So, we spent about two hours the next morning messing around. They didn’t know what to do with us in other words. But I always remember that. And the time came we had to go. We went to Liverpool to get on the, went on the Samaria. The boat. And went three week journey. It takes three weeks now it takes what? Twelve hours? Which was fascinating. I mean, I’d never been abroad before. Went through Biscay. Calm as a millpond. Saw Gibraltar. The first place I’d seen abroad. Through the Med. Through the Suez. Bitter Lake. Flying fish. I wonder if there still are flying fish. And got to Bombay. Oh, on the boat we slept on a hammock. We had a mess deck it was called. About twenty chaps and a hammock. Morning came. You packed up your hammock and one of you had to go and bring back the food. You slept there and ate there and everything else. Crowded. Commissioned types, they had about two thirds of the ship. Non-commissioned had about one. I remember going where I shouldn’t have gone once and looked into this lounge. First class lounge. There they were all sitting in settees and lounges. And there was a fellow on the piano and he was singing, ‘Willow, did willow, did Willow,’[laughs] I thought well of course class distinction in those days.
IL: Absolutely.
AP: Absolutely awful. But anyway. And we used to, through the Red Sea it was pretty hot and once we, well occasionally we’d go on the deck and sleep on deck. But you had to be very careful to be up by about half past four because they, they swilled the decks down at half past four. And these sailors, they liked nothing better than swilling you out with those. So we did get caught out there more than once. Got to Bombay. Went to the transit camp. Worli it was called. And within five days I was smitten. I think if you go to, if you went to India in those days it wasn’t just the food. I think the air would kill you as well. And I was in hospital for a fortnight with, you know. I don’t know what. Diarrhoea.
IL: Yeah.
AP: And all the rest of it. I remember the drugs we had to take. Sulfonamide would it be? Something.
IL: Yes. Sulfonamide.
AP: And it came in a long strip about two yards long. Taking those. But I slept in sheets which was quite good. Recovered from that. And I was in India fifteen months after that and I never had another, anything else at all. But being delayed in Bombay for a fortnight I lost all the, my mates I’d made on the boats.
IL: Yeah.
AP: I was completely alone. I’ve never been so miserable in my life. Anyway, I got the train eventually when I’d recovered and went up to Kanpur which is a Maintenance Unit.
IL: Right.
AP: RAF Kanpur. In the United Provinces I think it is. Not far from Delhi.
IL: Right.
AP: And we were, worked in the electroplating shop because there was no radar. Radar had finished then. The electroplating shop. They still used to electroplate bearings for engines which were no longer needed or anything else. We didn’t do any use.
IL: Yes.
AP: Walked about. But we used to get, well the camp they used to go into Lucknow or Kanpur and buy cheap tea sets. Metal tea sets. You know. Electric. Cheap electroplated and they would bring them to us and we would electric plate them again. RAF silver. About a quarter of an inch thick we’d put on.
IL: Yeah.
AP: I remember the silver came in great plates. They’d come and they’d say, ‘Would you mind doing this for us?’ So we used to electroplate their teapots and various things. We used to play badminton outside in the, in the heat. Nobody told you the sun was dangerous. I enjoyed that. We had a swimming pool there which was great. And on the whole — oh, and we went up to, I’ve been to the hills. We went three times because the heat in, in oh dear me the heat in the pre-monsoon was a hundred and twenty. You just didn’t go out. You, you stayed under the punkah. The fan. You closed the shutters and you just stayed there. And you got prickly heat. My friend the other year, it was a hot summer here. She went to the doctor with a bit of a rash and he said, ‘Oh, you’ve got prickly heat.’ Well, she hadn’t got prickly heat because if you get prickly you know about it. Your pores all go septic and everything. It’s not nice at all. But we went up to the hills three times. I’ve been to Darjeeling, Ranikhet and Nainital. The most interesting one was the, when we went up to, well Darjeeling on the little railway which goes, you know. Very good. But it was just pre the end of 194 — let me get this right. Six. It was just pre-Independence. And we, to get to Darjeeling we had to leave Kanpur go to Calcutta overnight on the train. The air conditioning was a huge block of ice in the middle of the compartment which was about two feet cubed when you set off and by the time you got to Calcutta it shrunk to about [unclear] cube size [laughs] We changed trains and went up to Darjeeling. Had a holiday there. But when we came back through Calcutta to go back to the base all troops going through Calcutta had to stay. It didn’t matter whether you were Navy, Air Force or whatever. You were, stay there because there were riots going on in Calcutta. And they were riots. Believe me. Every night we used to go out on the on the lorries to patrol the streets. You’d walk around the block and when you came, in a circle sort of thing and there would be bodies stabbed in the streets. In the gutters. We had a Lee, I had a Lee Enfield rifle. First World War vintage and I always remember I was standing at this street corner and this Indian came up to me. He looked about a hundred but he was probably forty and a big long beard. He said, ‘You have not got bullets for that gun.’ I said, I said, ‘I have.’ But we hadn’t [laughs] I wouldn’t have shot them anyway because I really liked the Indian people. They were great. And that was my, well they weren’t, they weren’t antagonistic to us. It was the Muslims and the Hindus of course in those days. They were at each other’s throats. And it really was. There were millions slaughtered in that time.
IL: Oh absolutely. So were you, were you demobbed in India? Or did you —
AP: No. No.
IL: Brought back from.
AP: I came back in 194 — left in the late 1946. I came back on the Corfu ship and we weren’t in hammocks this time. We had little bunks. But going through the Biscay it must have been the biggest storm they’d had in years. I remember the waves looked to me tremendous but I wasn’t sick at all. But I think ninety nine percent couldn’t even keep down water. Anyway, eventually got back to Southampton and went to [pause] where was it? Somewhere near London. An old Air Force base. And it was the, 1947 was the coldest winter that’s ever been. So coming from the heat of India even in the winter to that was pretty rough. It really was cold. In fact where I live now when I was demobbed Bilton is a village three miles out of Hull. It was cut off for three days. The snow was so deep there was nothing got through at all. The snow was six foot deep. And I was demobbed, Finningley I think, somewhere there I think. I think it was Finningley which is now Robin Hood Airport.
IL: Yeah. Absolutely. Doncaster.
AP: Yeah.
IL: Yeah.
AP: And, and that was the end of my, my war. Which —
IL: So, so how long did it take from coming back from India to be demobbed? Were you still, or did you come straight up to Finningley or —
AP: It was just a matter of weeks.
IL: Right.
AP: Yes. Yeah.
IL: It must have been a frustrating, was it a frustrating time? You know.
AP: How?
IL: Because although obviously you enjoyed India. You know, I think I would find it, I think personally I would find it frustrating that you know, you’d signed up for the duration of the war and then there was almost like another.
AP: Well. Yes.
IL: Eighteen months, two years after.
AP: Yes. But I suppose it was understandable really because having thousands, thousands being put on the employment market there would have been — what would they have done?
IL: True. True.
AP: They had, they had to do it sort of slowly I think.
IL: Yeah.
AP: Yeah. We had a demob number depending on your length of service and your age. And I think mine was 48 and every time this list would come out who were going to be demobbed? You looked to see if you were on it [laughs] And eventually it came up.
IL: Right.
AP: And you went and got your demob suit and all the rest of it and that was it. And then I went back to me, oh I had a, to the BOCM. On the laboratory side. And then I applied for teacher training.
IL: Right.
AP: And in those days there was a one year teacher’s course which was quite short. And I was accepted for that. Went to Lancaster Training College for a year. Although it was only a year we used to work pretty long hours. There were no holidays. We started early in the morning. You finished about ten at night. I can’t say it did much good for me really because teaching is by experience and observing a good teacher.
IL: Yeah.
AP: Rather than being told all about Plato and all the rest of it. It didn’t work that much, but I didn’t like it very much but anyway I passed out and I came to Hull and I taught in Hull for thirty three years.
IL: So what did you teach?
AP: I was a primary school teacher.
IL: Right.
AP: Everything [laughs] Yes. Everything. I started at a place in Hull called Stoneferry which was a really lovely school. I had a little garden at the back. We used to have little plots for the, had three kids on one plot. I was there for ten years. And then I got in those days what was called a graded post and I moved to Thanet School which is not far from where I live now. And I, I had a craft post there because I was pretty good with my hands. And then after twenty years I applied for deputy and I got the deputy of Craven Street School. Well, Williamson Street School. And that closed and we moved to Craven Street School. So I finished my career as deputy head of Craven Street School.
IL: Gosh.
AP: And I left school at fifteen.
IL: That’s pretty, pretty good isn’t it?
AP: I still think you can teach yourself more by yourself than listening to people.
IL: Absolutely. Absolutely.
AP: And that, that’s really my, my story. I’m sorry if its —
IL: No. It’s been fascinating. It’s been fascinating. I’m just going to stop and then we’ll have a little
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 Arthur Pocklington
Creator
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Ian Locker
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-11-15
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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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APocklingtonAC171115
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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00:44:25 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
India
England--Lincolnshire
England--Yorkshire
India--Darjeeling
India--Kanpur (District)
India--Kolkata
Description
An account of the resource
Arthur Pocklington grew up in Hull and was hoping to join the RAF as aircrew but failed the medical. He trained as a mechanic servicing the radar equipment on the aircraft. He served at RAF Scampton, RAF Dunholme Lodge and RAF Strubby before being posted overseas. He finished his service at RAF Kanpur, India.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1946
44 Squadron
619 Squadron
civil defence
demobilisation
Gee
ground personnel
H2S
Home Guard
radar
RAF Dunholme Lodge
RAF Scampton
RAF Strubby
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1121/11612/PShakesbyFN1801.2.jpg
3d522f64f0b7c49430a9c1da120cc987
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1121/11612/AShakesbyFN180822.1.mp3
e604bfe604acb62ad2038ee02c983aa9
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
Shakesby, Norman
Francis Norman Shakesby
F N Shakesby
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Francis Shakesby (b.1924, 2207370 Royal Air Force). He worked on H2S and Gee as a member of ground personnel with 582 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
2018-08-22
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Shakesby, FN
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
IP: This is Ian Price and I’m interviewing Norman Shakesby today, the 22nd of August 2018, for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. We’re at [beep], Kendal. Also present is Pam Barker, a good friend of Norman’s. Norman, thanks ever so much for agreeing to talk to me today, it’s- I’m really looking forward to it. It is 10:37 in the morning, and we’ll start the interview now. I think, just to start off, can you- You were born on the 17th of May 1924, but you- Can you tell me where you were born and where you went to school?
NS: Barton-upon-Humber[?] if you know where it is? Where my life was dominated from the first [unclear] four years by the New Holland Pier where you went over on the river- On the train river Humber to Hull. Great excitement, when they built the- It’s a beautiful bridge but it’s taken all the excitement out of it. Don’t you want to- What was it next?
IP: Where did you go to school?
NS: Oh yes, well I attended my infant school for about one year and then we moved to Lincoln, and I went to the Lincoln St Giles junior school, took the, took the [unclear] scholarship and attended The City School of Lincoln.
IP: Ok, and were you an only child or did you have brothers and sisters?
NS: No, I have a sister who is younger, four years, and a brother who is older by four years.
IP: Ok, and what did you- I presume your mother sort of looked after you children and looked after the house, and what did your father do?
NS: Well, he came out of the army, I can- Yes, his grandfather had a- And I've got to explain how he came to have it. His family- Grandfather, was- And his Grandfather’s brother, ran a drapery shop in Hull and they sold mainly to the, to the seamen and they had a strike and they went bust, so they lost their- All the money. So, my father decided, he would follow his father, who was- Worked as a traveller for [unclear] Hopper, Hopper’s Bicycles. I’ve got them- I’ve got a catalogue about them, and he followed on, his father had retired, and he did all the Midlands and learnt how to drive by sitting at his side for miles and miles in the school holidays and, so that he- And then when he- The foreigners took over, and he lost his job. Well, it narrowed his area so much, he couldn’t have made, you know, he couldn’t make ends meet. So, he went into the brewery trading, he- When we got a- We got a pub. We got this public house in Lincoln, well just outside Lincoln, and then he got a pub right in the middle of Lincoln, and if you go now- This is an interesting thing, if you now go to Lincoln and walk down the high street, and you get to Barclay’s bank and you stop and look above where they usually look, you’ve got to look up in the air and at the top of that building it says Black Swan, and the one on the left window was my, my brother’s wind- Bedroom and his father and his mother, my mother on the other, and then when the war broke out they say it’s why he was gone, he was on the reserve list, and he was called in at Dunkirk and I still to this day remember him telling- Coming in, he said, ‘I’ve got to go, I just had the phone call and they said pin cushion or some ridiculous thing, that means that invasion is imminent and I've got to go and report immediately’, and they sent him up to Durham, to, to take on the role of keeping all the civilians in an orderly fashion if they’re evacuating.
IP: Ah right, so his, his reserve service was as a result of him having served during the First World War.
NS: Yes, yeah.
IP: So, what did he do during the First World War then?
NS: He was in the- First of all in the Hull friends which, you know, and then he, he was in the front- In line for about, oh about six months and they came down the line and said, ‘Would anybody like to volunteer going to the air?’, you know, he thought that’s a better thing than being on the Western Front. So, he said, ‘Yeah, ok’, and he came home and then he sort of spent a few months over here training to be an observer, which is at the front of the aircraft [unclear] on the- The pilot is behind him, and behind the pilot is the engine, and behind the engine is a propeller, propels hence, propeller and that was his- And then he was shot down and that ended it all.
IP: He flew FE2b’s I think didn’t he, yeah-
NS: Yes.
IP: So, so he was shot down about 1916, 1917 we think?
NS: Yes, the year before and then in 1918 armistice. Yes, he was- He did- Yes, I think it was just over a year. But it, it ruined his- He couldn’t bare to be in a shut door, room, you know, it does something to him. But one or two of his stories were interesting, how they had a- This is irrelevant, they had- One of the lads was very feminine and they got to work and back then they’d make all sorts of things with experts in the prisoner of war camp, and they would fit him out as an officer in the German army, and the block house had a partition in the middle of wood, and the German’s were one side, English the other side, and they took a panel out when the Germans changed at lunch time and put it back, and then they waited for the opportunity, they got him out as an officer, a German officer, ‘Yes it’s today, go quick’, out with the panel, and they’d also got this fella dressed up as a woman and the other one was a German officer. The two of them scrambled out, straight out through the main door towards the main gates, and they got to the gates and saluted, got a salute from the gate and they walked off, hundred yard or so down the road and he was watching them go, he thought there was- The pair of shoes that he’d got on, they would- ‘Halt’, caught him [chuckles]. It was an amazing story, so close, so close to getting-
IP: And, and his experience in World War Two then, did he stay in Durham? Did he- Was that- He was, he was just in the UK I presume?
NS: My mother was dying slowly with TB, so he put in for- Once he’d been there a week, they sent him home because he was forty-something, a lot of his- And he was very quiet and concerned, a lot of his oppos or friends, you know, the level- They’d done the same thing, signed in, they went to Middle East [emphasis] and forty-five or so. Well, he came out and he was, you know, discharged, so went back to the pub.
IP: Ah right. So, we’ll, we’ll step back a bit then to just before the war, you were- You would’ve started, what I might call grammar school, I know it wasn’t called a grammar school but this- Did you say it was the-
NS: City School.
IP: City School in Lincoln. So, you would’ve started there about 1935 I suppose, something like that, would that be right? Born in 1924, started when you were eleven?
NS: Yes.
IP: Ish, roughly.
NS: I’m trying to work it out.
IP: It doesn’t matter precisely. So you were, you were at City School when the war broke out?
NS: What happened, and it’s rather relevant in a way to what went later, Lincoln had a system whereby you can take your scholarship a year early, the bright lads, and then you could- When you got in- I got maths, so I started at ten, not eleven or what [unclear] and then as you get to the first year and second year, they pick out the top ones, who go straight through without ever a middle one. So, you did- Taking the-
IP: School certificate, was it? Yeah.
NS: A year before you should, and that mean- Can I tell you why it was awkward? Because, when the war broke out, I was nearly getting- We lost all our teachers, we ended- I was taking like languages, we ended with two teachers who- And they were both called up because they were interpreters, you see, and because of that it- We reached a position where everything was collapsing at Dunkirk, absolutely pandemonium, and we, we were told there was nothing terribly- Headmaster said, ‘I don’t think the universities are going to be functioning because everything, you know, and everything’, he said, ‘You better get something, get a job and now’. So, the two of us, there were only two doing languages, the- And I never knew what happened to the other physics people, whether they were kept on, but we were more or less, ‘You better go’, and so we both decided to go into a bank. So, at sixteen, I was whipped off to Alford because Barclays worked on the basis that you couldn’t work in your hometown, you might know that you earned too much and have a living, you know. Whereas my friend went into NatWest, and they let him stay home. I had to go into digs, so at sixteen I [unclear], she’s a lovely lady looked- There were two juniors, and she took us in both, [unclear] till I was called up. So that- And I was away from home, my brother had got- Qualified as a pharmacist and been called up, but it was, you know, plenty of sergeants and things, you only got a good payment. When I was called up, it was [chuckles]- Hadn’t got anything, there were no, no, you know, exams or an A to show for it, but I’ve-
IP: So, how did, how did you find working for Barclays then? Did you enjoy that?
NS: I did actually, yes, and I had to get there and it was the Tuesday of Dunkirk and that was the last to be- Took them out of the sea then, and there was no trans- Very little transport, I got a bus within three miles of Alford, sun and sun, you know, lovely day with a big suitcase tramping along and a fella came along in a milk float [chuckle]. He said, ‘Where are you going?’, I said, ‘I’m going to Alford’, he said, ‘Hop on’ [chuckles]. So, the horse went trotting along and I sat at the side of him. We got there and there was this very forbidding win- A big white door and it said Barclays, so I went round, I pushed a big spring and it went behind be bang [emphasis], you know. This little tubby fella came up behind the counter, he said, ‘Good Morning, can I help you?’ and I said, ‘I’m the new junior’, ‘Where the hell have you been? Dunkirk?’ [laughs]. I can remember that as clear [chuckles].
IP: Good stuff. So, so you were- Must’ve been at Barclays for a couple of years I guess then before?
NS: Oh yes.
IP: Yeah.
NS: And, I took ten of the- Six of the ten bankers' exams and in the last year at, what was I? Sixteen, seventeen by that time, seventeen yes. The- We’d lost our chief clerk, we’d lost the other junior, only in one junior and [unclear] curious one- We had ladies, two ladies and it was years later, she was, I’ve forgotten- She lived in a big house in the village and invited me one night to tea. She was about three year, four years older than me, invited me to a dinner and we played [unclear] tennis, and met her years later. I was listening to the radio in bed, and they said, ‘This is’- And I cannot remember her name, and ‘We’ll tell you how she came to be in Africa’, and she was the [unclear] right-hand woman, and it was because she had to be kicked out because they were saying she was, you know, telling him not what- What not to do, when he shouldn’t’ve been doing, and I thought, I’ll write a letter to the BBC and tell her I'm here, you know, to see her. He put it off, I then went to look for her and she had died. Anyway, that covered me the earlier times.
IP: Yeah, so you mentioned you were called up to the RAF, you didn’t volunteer, it was- You just got you papers?
NS: Yes, but while I was in the air force- While I was in the bank, I joined the ATC for Alford and I was a flight sergeant. I mean, that’s my flight sergeant’s uniform, and so, when I joined the air force, I made sure I got into the air force by doing ATC. They took people who were outstanding, took them into the radar and radio station, that’s how I got into it and they said- Curiously enough at any one time in the- [unclear] would you want to hear what, how, where, when?
IP: Yeah, well we’ll get onto that ‘cause I'm- The first thing that struck me about it was, I mean it sounds like you were quite well educated and that sort of stuff, so I was wondering why you didn’t end up as an officer? Do you know how that-
NS: Yeah, because a technician- I mean I was a- Totally without any knowledge of- Because the first thing they did do, we did six months in Leeds college of Technoloy to do all the radio and stuff, and then they took the top two to go into radar, and the top two, me being one of them, we went down to London, we were digs in the, what do you call? The prom place.
PB: [Whispers] Royal Albert Hall.
NS: The?
PB: Royal Albert Hall.
IP: Royal-
NS: Can’t hear [chuckles]
IP: Royal Albert Hall.
NS: Oh yes, Albert, just round the corner from Albert Hall is Albert Court and it’s a very posh- They said the [unclear] or somebody [unclear] had had it, so they covered everything with plywood and we were in there, and we prayed[?] the outside, which was at the time the front of one of the- The London, you know, university, and we- Say we went into 3 Squadron because we had a fellow army officer who’d come to make [unclear] in London and you had to say, ‘A Squadron, B, C Squadron’, and turn, where? ‘Left turn’, down Vickery and Grand Exhibition Road, what’s by all retired [unclear], how it is there, and you wheeled left at the V&A and there were laboratories with the V&A, and I came out as the top two in that, with the- Having done Gee and we didn’t- We’d done a bit of H2S at that point, and we did- How long was it there? About six months.
IP: So, you just- Sorry to nip back again. So, you were called up to the RAF in November- Was it December ‘42, wasn’t it? That’s right, and did you go straight to Leeds from there, or did you do basic training first, you did sort of square bashing?
NS: We went in- Yes, we went into [unclear]
IP: Into where sorry?
NS: We went in the west coast area there was an RAF training camp there.
IP: Ok, alright.
NS: So, we did that, and then we went up to Redcar
IP: Oh yeah, yeah.
NS: And a little aside that, years later I was teaching in Redcar new college and I was standing- Having a dinner at the [unclear] hotel and the last time I'd been there, I'd been standing out while the officers tell you to [unclear] [chuckles]. Anyway-
IP: How did you find- How did you find the basic training and stuff? The square bashing and all that sort of stuff?
NS: Oh rubbish. We got off very lightly because we were ATC cadets.
IP: So, you knew how to do drill, and you knew how to make-
NS: You were taught how to- In half an hour we had to- You know, what it- To arms, ‘Shoulder, arms’-
IP: Rifle drill, yeah.
NS: And they said, ‘Right’- One of the other corporals, ‘You’re gonna do it with the flag tonight’. Pull the flag down and that sort of thing, back to the hotel [chuckles] well it’s like Dad’s Army, we’re actually in fits, even he was laughing [unclear] [laughs].
IP: So, you did- So, you did that sort of basic training and then from there, from Redcar I guess, you went to Leeds to do your mechanic training. But, do you know how they selected you to be a, a mechanic? I mean, presumably you could’ve gone off to any training?
NS: Yes-
IP: Cooks, bottlewashers-
NS: Well, the only thing I knew, is they said, ‘You were a bank clerk, we found them very, you know, very good at this bank clerks’, I don’t know why-
IP: Maths and stuff maybe, I guess, I don’t know.
NS: I couldn’t say why it changed to-
IP: Ok, alright, alright. So, to Leeds, down to the Albert Hall, London. Do you remember how long you were in Leeds doing your-
NS: Yeah, six months.
IP: Six months, and that, that was- Sorry, just to- Sorry. So, that was- Was that radar mechanic training, or was it-
NS: No.
IP: It was just mechanical training?
NS: Yeah.
IP: And then they streamed you to radar, the top two as you say. So you were the top two of that, you then went to your radar mechanic training in London and you were the top two of that course.
NS: I was-
IP: Yeah.
NS: And I can tell you why I was never a corporal as well, which I should’ve been.
IP: Oh, we’ll come back to that maybe. But- So, right, so-
NS: [Unclear] say this about that-
IP: Yeah.
NS: The- We’d been [unclear] and- Oh I’ll tell you. In [unclear], we had a theatre with two rollers chairs- Stairs either side and you go up this one and you shove the needle in you and then take the needle our, or take the fridge out and the needle in and you walked across the stage and they’d put the next one on tight up to the other one [chuckles], and I had a fellow who’s six foot three in front of me and he started going like that [laughs] and jumped out of the [unclear].
IP: Went down like a sack of spuds, yeah.
NS: Right, so that’s the only reason that I was in the bank clerk, I suppose I’d got the fact that I'd done some extra work at the bank with- Banking, you know, banking law, nothing to do with it, but, we’re all- And the thing that struck me it was being push here, push there and we were in digs in Redcar and I'll never forget the porridge it was burnt every morning [chuckles] and- But we then ended in nice digs in Leeds, lovely widow and she looked after the two of us and we’d all [unclear] what’d be known [unclear] and we walked in the first morning, we sat in anticipation and this [unclear] walked in and said, ‘Good morning gentlemen, take a seat’ [laughs]. Gentleman [emphasis] [laughs] oh, what a change, yes.
IP: So, just trying to get this back where we are now. So, we’ve gone- Done your basic training, did you go to Redcar before you went to Leeds then, or after?
NS: Yes.
IP: Ok, so it was Redcar first, then Leeds and then you went down to London, The Albert Hall, and did your radar mechanic training there, came in the top two of your course there and then- So what- And how did you- I mean, did you enjoy- Did you enjoy it, was it, was it- How did you find that phase of being down in London and the training down there and what have you?
NS: In all the wave forms and things that we learnt, it’s fascinating [emphasis] and I really did enjoy that, yeah.
IP: Had you- So when you’d been growing up, I mean, had you, had you done any sort of electrical, electronics or electrical stuff-
NS: No, nothing.
IP: - sort of crystal radios or any of that sort of stuff?
NS: No, well they had a whiskers, you know the old, [unclear] whiskers [chuckles] those little- Yes, and- But, nothing further than that. I’d no, I'd no mechanical background.
IP: Oh right.
NS: No.
IP: Yeah.
NS: But it- They’d got a good volunteer [unclear] and I mean, they picked somebody who they- I did, I did very well.
IP: It sounds that way. So, what happened then after you left? Did you say you were about six months, you think in London?
NS: Yeah.
IP: So now we must be into 1943, I guess, something like that, or maybe, or maybe later than that I don’t know, do you remember?
NS: No, not- It wasn’t as long as that I don’t think.
IP: Ok.
NS: And then it was posted to Gransden Lodge.
IP: Right.
NS: Canadians.
IP: Yes.
NS: That was lovely.
IP: Yeah, 405 Squadron. So- And you were posted onto the squadron? You weren’t stationed personally?
NS: No, no.
IP: You were on the squadron-
NS: There were two of us, two Englishmen among the- All the rest were Canadian radar mechanics, because we hadn’t got them at that time
IP: Ah, right.
NS: I assumed that we were still training them, you know, but- And then, I wish I'd taken the names because there was just a gang, you know [laughs]. In fact, when I went to- I’ll tell you in a minute if you want to know why I moved to-
IP: Little Staughton?
NS: Yes, Little Staughton. What was I leading up to there? Oh yes, I'm in Little Staughton and Christmas I cycled over because it’s was only about eight miles and I had my Christmas with the whole gang in Gransden Lodge.
IP: Ah, ok. So, right- Just, just going back. So, I get the impression you were happy to be a radar mechanic, I mean you said you enjoyed it, you said you found it fascinating. So, and I supposed compared to some things you could’ve ended up doing, it was great.
NS: It was a, a marvellous piece of equipment.
IP: Yeah.
NS: And you’ll see I've got a [unclear] on the inside, and when I came out, I was then mending people’s televisions, but you see then you went all this funny business and that, nothing like mine, you see, [unclear] red tube and things.
IP: And so, you joined the squadron, 405 Squadron, it was- Well, your section, the radar mechanic section, how big- How many people were there in the section then? Do you remember, roughly?
NS: Um-
IP: I mean, are we talking ten? Fifteen?
NS: Well there was about the same as on that photograph which is at Little Staughton, it’ll be about fourteen in this I suppose
IP: Ok, alright, so- But, two of you were Brits and the other, the other twelve were Canadian, and how do you, how did you find them? Were they friendly? Were they a friendly lot?
NS: Oh yes, they would- Yes, marvellous [chuckles] and they used to, you know, mock limeys and that sort of thing, but they were great fellas. The [unclear] particularly a man called Moon Mullin, and he had shock of hair like an Indian and he was a real rover. They couldn’t touch them you see, because as soon as you got one step from the safe it said ‘Private [emphasis], no entry’.
IP: Ah yes, yes, so behind closed doors sort of thing, yeah, yeah.
NS: Yeah, we did no mucking about, flying drill or anything like that, we just looked after our own [unclear] you know, along that and that was [unclear].
IP: Ah, and did you feel that you were part of 405 Squadron? Were-
NS: Yes, I was very sorry to leave it and it wasn’t to my- Actually, I can tell you later, it wasn’t to my- It’s tied up with the corporal, it wasn’t my- It wasn’t to my best and it was all because the radar officer found out- When I went there, I went there as an AC1 and within two, three weeks he’d made me a LAC because I was so good, and they then wanted to form a new squadron at Great Staughton, or Little Staughton [unclear] and they’d taken the half from one English one and half from the other English one, but they needed the officer and they took the officer who was English, with the Canadian and he had- He said then, he said, ‘We want one more’, so he came to me and he said, ‘I’m going to move to- And I’m taking you with me’. I thought, well I'm gonna be alright here, he’d look after me. Did he hell [emphasis]. I got there, and of course, what happened was that after a few weeks it came to the idea of this new squadron getting there, getting there informa- Getting their [unclear] better, you know, going up to corporals, and they were- And I thought, well, the two- They’d already got theirs, two from one half and the other two, so no [unclear], and that was it, and nobody said anything, and I thought oh that’s a bit [unclear] and it dawned on me why. This half, ‘Oh we want this man’, this half, ‘We want this man’, and ‘I want this fella’, no way mate, you haven’t got any supporters there, and then didn’t have- That was my first time that I wasn’t made a corporal [chuckles] which I should’ve been because I was in- You know, he took me with him because he thought I was good [emphasis].
IP: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
NS: But, anyway I didn’t want the job, because at the [unclear] I start off by doing DI’s every morning in the cold-
IP: Daily inspections? Yes.
NS: [Unclear] and then I got into the- When I got to Great Staughton, I was put on the bench doing- We didn’t do Magnetron, I didn’t- Never got- Didn’t know how it worked but that was obviously a big secret. But I did the H2S and the Gee, putting the faults right on them. I always remember, I loved that, it’s like a detective model. You go through all the, the [chuckles]-
IP: The diagnosis?
NS: Yes, the- You’d got a big, a big book of all the info- The brown [unclear] that goes to that, and that- And you used an oscilloscope because you got a wave form, that’s [unclear] wave forms for television, they go quickly down and then slowly, quickly down because you’re putting it into the devalves[?] and you’re making it move, the dots, so you get that- It’s- It makes it move round on the screen and when I got to the other- Great Staughton they said, ‘Well you know quite a lot about H2S so we’ll do it on the Benson[?]’ and I was doing it one morning and I couldn’t find this damn fault and I thought, oh it’s lunchtime so I got on my bicycle, because you all had bikes then, and I'm cycling and I think, oh I didn’t try that one, I'll have to go, ‘Norman put your hat on’ [shouts] [laughs]. I’m trying to [unclear] a bloody war on, and you’re telling, put my hat on [chuckles].
IP: Have to get your priorities right.
NS: [Laughs]
IP: Hats are everything.
NS: [Unclear] a bit.
IP: Right, so just, just going back to- Was it 405 Squadron- Were they already on the pathfinder force when you joined them then?
NS: Oh yes.
IP: So- And was, was that one reason- Because you were top of your course were you particularly selected for the pathfinder force do you think? Or, or did it not quite work that way, or don’t you know?
NS: Well, I mean the thing was you went to Gransden Lodge and it was pathfinders and I don’t know whether I was chosen- I don’t know where the others went, you know, [unclear].
IP: Yeah, yeah, ok, yeah. Did you, did you understand at the time what the pathfinders were all about? Did you understand how the, how the bomber offensive was working kind of thing?
NS: Yeah, oh yes.
IP: So you, so you were- I mean this is, this is the whole thing that interests me of this whole- Being part of the squadron and understanding what was going on ‘cause as an LAC you might reasonably not know exactly what they were doing and what was required. Somebody turns up with a broken H2S-
NS: LAC is the highest technical thing you can get to.
IP: Right.
NS: So you’re bound to know, you know.
IP: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and you were well treated on, on the squadron?
NS: Oh yes, yeah.
IP: What did you, did you have any thoughts at the time about what the bomber crews were doing? About what they were going off to do, did you think about it at all?
NS: Oh yes.
IP: And what were your thoughts?
NS: Very, very traumatic, you know, and we used to see them off at that time it was like metrology[?] mare[?], eighteen aircraft one behind the other, and I'll tell you the story what I did- Happened to me on that line [chuckles] if you’re interested?
IP: Yeah, go on then?
NS: And- But- And we- At the front of it, it had the caravan with a dome and the red light and green light and they’re there in case a fault starts before they get off, so you can see them off, and then you see them back, and that was it.
IP: Yeah, so you used to watch them come in?
NS: And that’s three you’ve got.
IP: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you get to know the crews quite- Or
NS: No.
IP: I mean-
NS: Not a click.
IP: You didn’t meet the navigators or anything like that who are dealing with the equipment?
NS: Well, I did because I was put in charge of what was like a big toy. It was a huge tank- Well a tank, ten foot by ten foot, full of water with a little scanner and underwater you can have it at a pay low frequency, so it’s a mock-up of the H2S in- Underwater, and you had the controls at the side and they had to- Before they got their little badge, extra pay, they had to pass the test I gave them to get to Berlin underwater [chuckles] which is fascinating
IP: Yeah.
NS: I always thought it would do lovely for the kids, pathetic, this little thing buzzing under water, and had this arose because you asked me something-
IP: ‘Cause I was asking you how well, how well you got to know the navigators and that-
NS: So I did get to know some of them and one particular one, they were in- This was at- I didn’t do it at Great Staughton, I did it at Gransden Lodge and one I’d got friendly with and he- And his brother was also in aircrew, so there was another there and we all went out for a drink at times, and to put it short, we saw them right through to the end.
NS: Yeah.
IP: And we counted it [unclear].
NS: Yeah, no that’s ok, that’s I- I understand. So, you said you- That you went to see the Lancasters off and that sort of stuff, and that must’ve been eighteen I think you said on the squadron, that must’ve been quite- I mean it must’ve been really impressive seeing eighteen, eighteen Lancaster-
NS: Yes, they stopped it very quickly because one night [unclear] all 8 Group into [unclear] he was there from senior, saw them all there and went down the line, so they stopped it very fast.
IP: A German intru-
NS: Bomber.
IP: Oh bomber, or an intruder- Well, doesn’t matter really, does it but-
NS: Yes, it was a foreign air, aircraft. So now they used to wait to be pulled off the outlined positions, one at a time. But it used- It was quite a, you know, quite an occasion. Everybody was there, all the ground crew were seeing them off and it was quite a- Quite emotional.
IP: And did you have to deal with anything with the aircraft at that stage then, or?
NS: We would’ve done if there’d been an error because they’d run all aircrafts, all their instruments are put in through it as while they were waiting and if there were- No I didn’t- Never had one- That was my servicing during the day [chuckles].
IP: So you have to- So if there was a problem with the H2S or, or, well Gee, you had to jump on board the aircraft and try and do a quick, a quick fix?
NS: Oh, we had more that, we had to jump on anyway because the Germans had got the Gee and it’s a very accurate piece of information in this, in this country it was at one end of the runway to the other, and we didn’t want this happening so they decided we’ll delay the actual frequency until the last minute. So, it was- We had about ten boxes all with a different set-up and each one had another ten, so there was a hundred choice and that was only put in twenty minutes before take-off, and job of radar mechanic was to put them in the back of the van, get the [unclear] WAAF to drive at the end, starting and went jump in the first one, up to the eye[?], over the back, [unclear] room, ‘'scuse me’, get to the next [imitates vehicle]. Eighteen, one after the other and you’ve got seventy-two machineries in front of you, propellers [imitates propeller] noise and this particular- Next one, next one I got to, seventeen, eighteen, eighteen [imitates vehicle] right up to the front and the wireless op was there with his headset round his neck and I'm just screwing it up and hear- And on his, on his- In the earphones, ‘Are you ready for take-off [unclear]’ [imitates aircraft engine] and we were swinging onto the, ‘Me, me’ [chuckles]. So, ‘We’ve got a foreigner, stop, stop’. So, I had to say, ‘I’ll just finish this’, ‘Ok, cheers’. Go down into the mid-upper, ‘'scuse me, could you open the [unclear] door?’. ‘Cause I couldn’t open it from the inside, never had done that, I could open it from the outside. He’d have to get out- I delayed them ten minutes while I [chuckles] I don’t know whose fault it was. I mean I was going at a noble pace standard every time before, I think they were a bit ready that, bit-
IP: A bit keen to go?
NS: Yeah.
IP: So you nearly got a free ticket to Hamburg or Cologne or Berlin or wherever?
NS: On 405 Squadron they had brothers and such and occasionally they used to take the brother with them, very illegal.
IP: I know, I know that passengers used to go occasionally, and there’s some really sad stories of course about bombers being shot down with passengers on board who shouldn’t, who shouldn’t have been there really.
NS: They could shoot them.
IP: Yeah.
NS: Because Hitler’s spies.
IP: Mhmm.
NS: That’s why I-
IP: So you, so you didn’t- You never went on a, on a trip? Would you have liked to?
NS: No.
IP: No.
NS: I’m not a- I couldn’t have stood it. I used to think, how do those lads do it day after day? And I came to the conclusion the only thing that kept them going was the comradery between the crew. You can’t tell anybody now, so you keep going but- I know it's a bad day today but this could be a bright, summers afternoon and they climb in that bloody aircraft and go out and come back two having gun- Not coming back and then you got to go again two days later and it goes on and on for forty of them.
IP: Yeah, yeah.
NS: Which is amazing.
IP: Yeah, absolutely incredible, yeah, I take my hat off to them.
NS: I used to say to people, just before you start criticising them, just put yourself in their position
IP: Yeah.
NS: In the army, you have [unclear] bloody army and a fired battle and people getting blown to bits and then you pulled help and you have a rest. Those lads go every morning knowing they’re going, by the afternoon they’ll be off, maybe two days rest or what, you know, and I, you know, I admire them to the fullest.
IP: Mhmm, yeah, couldn’t agree more. Right, so we’ll- That’s, that’s- I think you’ve provided some really interesting information there. You moved onto 582 Squadron at RAF Little Staughton which is near Great Staughton I know that much. Was that- But you were working the bay then weren’t you, so you had less interaction with the aircraft and the crews I suppose but you were still doing the diagnostic stuff. Was, was that much of a change then, being on 582 after 405? Did you- I mean, it sounds like you missed 405 because you said went back for their Christmas dinner?
NS: Yes, yes.
IP: But, but was it a big change going to 582 or?
NS: Well, yes, I didn’t want to go but it [unclear] you know, orders is orders and he was gonna take me with him.
IP: That’s right.
NS: But of course, I- If I'd have stayed in 405, I’d have been a corporal. It was very sad that he was trying to do something good and it didn’t work that way, well I could’ve- And an interesting thing, I mean to prove it, we had to be on duty, one every night, one- And I was in this- I was in there and I walked into the office, looked around and there was a waste paper basket and pulled it out, it’s torn up and said ‘LAC Shakesby corporal’. So it’d got to the point actually putting it forward and they’d killed it
IP: Mhmm.
NS: And I went right through until [chuckles]- I can tell you that- I won’t tell you, but I can have so many- Every time- I had four other times when I just didn’t- Just missed it, and the last time was when I was being demobbed. The officer on- At Waddington, when I went to sign and get it signed off, he said, ‘You know, you’ve got an awfully good record here Shakesby’, he said, ‘You know, you should’ve been made a corporal’, I said, ‘Well, it’s just the way’, he said, ‘I’ll- Going to put it- I’ll put it in for you, I’m going on leave for three weeks’, and I was demobbed by the time he got back [chuckles], so it’s- Such is the world.
IP: Yeah.
NS: But it would’ve been nice because my wife, my wife would’ve got more money and I’d have got a bit more kudos.
IP: So you were married by then?
NS: Yes.
IP: When did you get married then?
NS: Pardon?
IP: When did you get married?
NS: 1946.
IP: Oh, I see, oh ok, so this was- Right, not during the war then, it was after the war that you got married. Ok, alright well-
NS: Yes, it was actually almost VE Day, V- No, no- Let me go-
IP: How did you meet your wife?
NS: I was- She was a girl in the digs we’re in in Leeds.
IP: Ah, ok. Right, so you kept in the touch all the time as you were moving round the air force and then- Oh ok, then you got married, wow. Yeah, ok.
NS: Too early, but [chuckles]-
IP: You did what you do don’t you?
NS: I got [unclear] I've got two boys.
IP: So, that kind of ties into my next- What was going to be my next question actually, which was how- What did you do for social life when you’re on the squadrons then? What, what social life did you have?
NS: Mainly in- The British Legion had a bar on the, on the drome and they had a special bitter and we used to end up there playing dominos and what not and every time, every few weeks or when- You had a day off and there was a bus to Cambridge and I well remember having been drinking the night before and getting on the bus the next morning and I was trying to keep upright [chuckles].
IP: Bit worse for wear?
NS: Yes.
IP: Ah yes, nothing changes. So, so it was- And, so you’re going to Cambridge with your mates and that sort of stuff and- So you’re going to Cambridge with your mates and what have you?
NS: Well, normally I usually was on my own, you were the only one off from there-
IP: Ah yes, yes of course, yeah, yeah, ok, and did you get any leave? What did you do- I suppose you’d have gone to see your girlfriend or whatever-
NS: Yes, we usually had weekends towards the end of- Later time until the, as I say, the bomb dropped in Japan and they- We all- Had to be sent back and they didn’t know what to do with us, so they sent us to the Middle East as- With the radio mines, and then because I got- I’m now jumping very quickly-
IP: Well, I was just gonna say. So, you, you did your time on 582 Squadron, I think- Yeah, we’ll cut that sort of stuff. So, you did your time on 582 Squadron and then were you on 582- So VE Day happened, were you still on 582 then?
NS: Yes, yeah.
IP: You got married around about that time as it happened, did you get- Where did you go- Did you go back to Leeds to get married or?
NS: Yeah.
IP: Ok, was she a Leeds girl then I take it?
NS: Yes.
IP: Ah right, ok, and- So, VE Day came, you were still kept in the air force ‘cause obviously they couldn’t demob everyone immediately and the Japanese war was still going on anyway, and then they dropped the bomb- So- But you weren’t up to then- ‘Cause I know numbers of the bomber command squadrons were, were ready to go to the Far East and some of them were converted to transport squadrons as well-
NS: Yeah, we, we were ready to go, we got the clearing and we were starting to, to convert onto Lincolns.
IP: As, as a transport squadron or as a bomber?
NS: Yeah.
IP: Ok, as a transport squadron.
NS: Well I thought- We thought as a bomber.
IP: Oh I see, ok, yeah, yeah. So- Right- Ah that’s interesting. So, so you’re waiting for that but then as you say, the bomb- The atom bomb was dropped-
NS: Fortunately, fortunately, weren’t looking forward to that bit [unclear]
IP: Yes- What- I suppose, just going back to VE Day, can you remember the- I mean this is just one of those general things if you were around at the time. Can you remember when the news came through that the war had ended?
NS: Yes, I think I- It was a morning I remember on the radio, and there was [laughs] great hilarity from everybody on the [unclear] as we can well imagine.
IP: Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say what was your reaction? What did you think about it?
NS: Oh, we wanted to go, it was an adventure [unclear]
IP: Yeah.
NS: [Unclear] we’d been- I’d been in the air force a length of time by then.
IP: Yeah. So, you were ready to go home?
NS: I was.
IP: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So- But as it turned out then, 582 was pointed out to go out to the Far East and- I mean from your reaction it sounds like you didn’t want to do that but-
NS: We were dispersed all over and we were sent out to the Middle East, and I was spent with- Two of us, two- Where a ground [unclear] team was operating for the Middle East and we had eight Nissen huts on this barren- Well it’s- I think there’s a photograph of it actually, and we, we went on AS[?] and then did a bit of overhauling then, and we got all the messages on the [unclear] screen in [unclear] morse code and I’d been there- And we used to go from there to Castel Benito, fifteen- Well you’ve seen them haven’t you, fifteen hairpin bends to get down to the flat plane and then the- It’s still an airport for Tripoli and they had two tents for us and we’d arrive this, you know, fairly dirty [unclear] and the white things on the [unclear] and you’d say, ‘AMES’, ‘Oh, that bloody lot’ [chuckles], air ministry experimenting, and they had two, two tents for us and we fed there and we stayed the day and then we went back, and then a day went with nobody and then the next one went and back, and we were doing this about [unclear]- About three months, it said, ‘Shut down, these are your orders, close [unclear] shut it off’. So, [unclear] won’t shut it off, we just carried on going down, nobody did a thing. We had two months where nobody did anything but play monopoly and go [laughs]- We had a- And there was a little village, we went through it to get to the set, there was one photograph showing the Nissen huts and they had little tin cans, the [unclear] smoke and they used to stop us and swap cigarettes for eggs, so we’d get eggs and then go, come back [unclear], and in that village there were two Italians, one was the electrician, he had an engine that he’d start by doing this [imitates engine] and they had electric lights but it went off at ten o’clock because that was the orders, and the other one was a bar and we used to go down to the bar, nobody else went except us and there’d be all liqueurs on, we used to drink our way down them [chuckles] and they had a little girl and she taught me to say [sings a tune]- Can’t I’ve forgotten the words now.
IP: The Italian national anthem it sounds like, was that the one? I don’t know but- So- Right- Because I was thinking you must’ve been desperate to get home but it sounds like you were having quite a good time in the Middle East really.
NS: Well, it wasn’t- Mixed feeling, I mean ok, I could’ve done without it. Then they sent us back to Cairo and they said to put us on then this, this- Well, dismantling these radar, because the- We’d only been the few, the rest were still doing that. So- And we had our tents in a little enclosure and guards at the gate, so and then we’d get garries[?] to go into the treble 1MU, that’s the- That’s the- What we did, called it, and I got there on my own, having flown and I thought well [unclear] I'll go on parade. ‘Airmen, get your hair cut, get that shined up’, and I thought bloody hell mate I haven’t been- And all the lads round me were eighteen and I was twenty-two, you know, and I knew the ropes a bit, ‘Oh righto, sir’, and I found out then that the guards at the gate were from some foreign, foreign empire, maybe- I’ve forgotten which one it was then, but they went off duty at ten to seven and the British got in- On at seven o’clock, gap of ten minutes, so I used to go out at five to [chuckles] because by that time [unclear] I had a severe stomach dysentery, or not as bad as that but when I came out the fella said, ‘You feeling better?’, I said, ‘Yes’, ‘cause he was being in the hospital. ‘Have your bowels moved today?’, ‘Yes’, ‘How many times?’, ‘Twenty-four’ [chuckles] and the toilets were the other end, you know [chuckles] that’s your fault from doing- Getting it. So, he said, ‘Would you like to do a misemployed?’, he said ‘You won't get any pay and you’re still on tread with 1MU, but there’s a hotel, Regina, which looks after all the posts in the Middle East, they have three offices in descending ranks, wing commander all this, and several women who [unclear] and I have to decide, the person is going is a corporal and he’s being demobbed, would you like to take his job?’. I said, ‘Yeah, that sounds ok’. So, I used to walk out every morning- This is why I got [unclear] going out early before the- And arrive at the hotel, and it was quite pleasant [unclear] the three offices used to have a bit of a [unclear] and then I'd watch the girls and, and- So when we- All the correspondence came through me, and this [unclear] oh, airmen with whatever they called it release over, under, sixty, home. Oh, I'm fifty-eight. The wing commander came in he said, ‘I see you’ve read that Shakesby’, I said, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Well, we’re going to make you a corporal and we’ll keep you’, and I thought, like hell you will [chuckles]. So, ‘Yes, thank you sir’. This is the next time I didn’t get it.
IP: Yeah, yeah.
NS: So I got on the bicycle and I biked out to treble 1MU, it was about four miles and went to the dis office and knocked [knocks], ‘Yes’, ‘Hello corporal, you’ll be wanting to see me soon’, ‘Why? What’, I said, ‘Well this, you know, people, I'm due for the re-pat’, ‘Oh god, we don’t know, it’s not’, I said, ‘I know it’s true because I've seen the-’. I said, ‘But, just remember I belong to this unit, not that hotel, I'm fifty-eight’, ‘No’ he said ‘I’ve got- Ok’.
IP: When you say you’re 58, what, what do you mean?
NS: That’s a number.
IP: What, as in your service number, or-?
NS: Just a number relating to your- Time you’ve been in.
IP: Right, gotcha, ok, yep.
NS: Well and the- Fifty-eight was- And it was up to sixty, you see. So, he said, ‘We’ll look after you’. So, I went back and several weeks went by, [unclear] to get moving, got to organise transport and everything to get the fifty to home, and then it came through, LAC Shakesby report back to M- 71 MU and [chuckles]- I still remember that face of that officer, ‘Oh’, he said ‘I see you are’, I said ‘Yes sir’ [chuckles].
IP: On the way.
NS; He said, ‘Pity we were going to make you a corporal’, I said, ‘Yeah, well I know which I prefer’ [chuckles]
IP: And that was you- So you were demobbed once you got back to the UK then?
NS: No.
IP: Oh.
NS: No. I had then- How long was it before I was demobbed. That was a different thing from being demobbed, it was just they were using it for this particular group who’d been sent overseas knowing nothing what else to do with them. You know, I can’t remember-
IP: So when you went back to the UK, where did you go to then?
NS: Waddington.
IP: Right.
NS: And I lived in the Black Swan, every night, I was there when I went to get my signatures [unclear] office and said, ‘Are you arriving or leaving?’, I said, ‘I’m leaving sir’, ‘I don’t remember seeing you’, so you know. Of course, the radar officer knew because I'd said to him- My parents lived down the road, he said, ‘I’ll get the sleeping out pass for-But I'm going on a- I’ve got to come back, I'll be back several weeks’, and of course it was just over weeks, I just went home and came back again. I thought that if I'd been in [unclear] too long.
IP: Knew how to keep your head down.
NS: I mean [unclear] looked around they were all bogs, you know, and- And he said to me, he said- And he was looking at that, he said, ‘This is an excellent report’, he said, ‘Why are you still not a corporal’, I said, ‘Well, there’s a story’ [chuckles].
IP: Yeah, ok. So- But Waddington was your last base?
NS: Yes.
IP: And then you were demobbed?
NS: Yes.
IP: Was that a good day?
NS: Yes [chuckles] the only thing was that, it had been all this snow and ice, which took me off my bicycle every morning and evening. They sent me to the west coast to be demobbed and there wasn’t a snow flake over here, they hadn’t had any snow, and by the time I got back we were flooded out, we couldn’t get into the village, the snow melted all this stuff and, and that was-
IP: And where, where did you go? Once you were demobbed, where did you go then? What, what happened? Where did you go to live and what did you do for work?
NS: This is when I went to the west coast to be signed off and-
IP: Yep, yeah, and given your suit-
NS: And then went back and they said ‘Cheerio’ on-
IP: But, where did you go? Did you go back to Lincoln? ‘Cause your wife presumably was still up- Was she still in Leeds at the time?
NS: No, she was living in Hykeham, where my parents were.
IP: Ok, right.
NS: So, yes I just walked out and I'd got my civvies over in the west coast, sent back on the rail pass, said- Went to see the radar office who said, ‘Well thank you, cheers’, pity about that, pity you were on gone leave, I might’ve been a corporal but never mind.
IP: And what did, what did you do work wise then? Once you left the RAF, what happened about that?
NS: My father was, being the pub, was great friends with a fellow who was one of the officers in the Russen Hornsby, they build- Built electric motors for the mines, and he said I could get a- And I had a- I applied then for the- I went to see my headmaster and he said, ‘Well, would you like to take up teaching?’, I said, ‘Yes’, he said, ‘Well there’s an emergency scheme for anybody who wants to, you’ve got the right- You’ve got matriculation’, he said, ‘But one thing, they’ll offer you twelve months’, he said, ‘Don’t- Go for the full time one which is still being used by everybody normally because it then, I think the others might be down paraded a bit by not being the full course’, and he said, ‘Apply to Leeds’. So, I applied to Leeds and I had to wait a year, and I was then working in this chaser in the, what you call them, [unclear]- Anyway they built these, this-
IP: Mhmm.
NS: And my job was to go around the stem[?] all and they had a- They had a foundry[?], they had a machine shop and they had, what’s the others? Anyway, there were three different processes and they used to get stuck with the bits at one of them, these can’t go ahead until that goes, so my job was to go and hurry it up you see.
IP: Trouble-shooter?
NS: Yes and just before I left, I found out where they kept all their information for each of the [unclear] each one of them in a Kardex system and if you looked at this Kardex system it shows what the- The number of the machine and where it was. Well, when the oddbod, boss at my office went to the weekly- Say, ‘Why aren’t we getting on with this?’, and they’d say, ‘Well, we can’t get, can’t get the thing out of the machine shop’, ‘Oh well’. So, I thought I’ll check this, so I went- Nobody stopped me and I pulled out, where is it? Oh, it’s in, it’s in the [unclear] oh, boilers, the boiler shop. So, I went back to my boss, I said, ‘That one, it’s in the boiler shop’, So he went [chuckles] to the next meeting, ‘It’s in the boiler shop’, ‘What, how did you find that out?’, and I thought this is a ridiculous English industry, they told [unclear] from where they want- Don’t want to be caught napping, that they deliberately don’t let people know what they should know.
IP: Yeah.
NS: Anyway, I thought I'm leaving after a fortnight, so I got a bad name, I can tell you, ‘Don’t do that mate, don’t tell them where we are, let them find out’, I said, ‘I have found out’, he said, ‘Well you’re out of orders, you can’t go in that place, it’s not your’- [Chuckles]
IP: So-
NS: Is this irrelevant? I don’t know-
IP: No, no, no it’s- No, it’s not at all. But you went to Leeds from there to do, to do teacher training?
NS: Yes.
IP: Whereabouts in Leeds were you doing that then?
NS: Brickett and-
IP: On Briggate?
NS: Yeah- No, not Briggate. It’s the-
PB: Beckett..
NS: Beckett.
IP: Oh, Becket college.
NS: Yes.
IP: Ah right, which is now- Which became Leeds polytechnic and is now-
NS: Well, it was polytechnic [unclear] when we were there-
IP: University of Leeds or Metropolitan or something, yeah.
NS: And the- I was there, the second [unclear] and they just had one more, there were three intakes of the men- And the girls were the- From school and so here was the men's dormitory and there was the girl's dormitory with the various names and there’s as [unclear] used to say, ‘There are two-hundred men chasing two-hundred women across the quad’ [chuckles] ‘cause we were behind them on the rotation and they were eighteen and we were almost twenty-six. It’s a bit- I mean I, I was [unclear] with my wife, I was true to her and, and because we’d got a baby by that time anyway.
IP: Oh right, ok.
NS: And- But the others had a whale of a time, the single men.
IP: Yeah, yeah, and was your wife back in Hykeham still-
NS: Leeds.
IP: In- Oh, she, she went with you to Leeds?
NS: Yes.
IP: Yeah, so what- How long did the teacher training last then?
NS: Two years.
IP: Ok and what were you, what were you going to teach?
NS: Well, it was all- They were all primary.
IP: Ah right, yeah, ok.
NS: And I'd got matriculation and, on the way back one day when we were going back to our own houses, there was a- One of the other fellows he said, ‘I’ve just appealed to London University for a degree’. Well, I didn’t want to do- I mean I'd been doing it ten years and [unclear] a reunion [unclear] and that’s- I was trying to [unclear]- Yes, we had a reunion and I'll put in for the training he said. Oh, so I wrote to the London University of course I wanted- I remembered that fellow on the Leeds, where we- In our training, ‘Good Morning Gentlemen’, I thought that’s fair fee for me, I want to be further education me, and- So I wrote to the London and they said, ‘Well you’ve got a matriculation so you get interview’, and of course there was no financial aid, I had to pay the lot and I had to do it at home. So, I did a- With a [unclear] two children and my wife, sorry I'm going to be working all night and I did it nearly every night for five years.
IP: To do a degree course from home? Distanced learning.
NS: Yes.
IP: I didn’t know they did that in those days
NS: It was- Well it’s- It’s called private and I've got the list of all- And there is a whole lot of people who were doing it at home.
IP: Oh right, ok.
NS: Then.
IP: Oh, what was your degree course in then?
NS: Mine was- I was in second- I was in economics
IP: Oh right, goodness, ok. So, and you were at that- You were teaching at that stage I presume?
NS: Yes-
IP: Which-
NS: In a small village which was- It was the only one left in Bedfordshire which went from five to fifteen and I used to take the juniors and all of the group for music. I got on quite well. I could play the piano roughly and I had to play for the hymns, and I had to take the- All the ones for music and, and I quite enjoyed it because I got them first of all in the juniors with- The music man came to see me he said, ‘You’re doing very well here’, he said, ‘Would you like to have a set of percussions, [unclear] for the juniors?’, said, ‘Yes’. So, we got tambourines and all sorts of things and a record player and they used to- And it- I taught them [chuckles] I taught them on tables because they used to say, ‘You’re the violins, you’re the flutes’, and I put the radio on and say, ‘Right [hums a tune] one, two, four, two, four, three, four’, and if it was a wet Sunday, a wet half-time, you know-
IP: Yeah.
NS: Playground. They’d say, ‘We’ll stay in, can we do the music?’ and they loved it.
IP: Yeah.
NS: And they learnt their tables by god.
IP: Which village in Bedfordshire was it, can you remember?
NS: Yes. Riseley.
IP: Oh, ok.
NS: It’s just off the main road.
IP: Yeah.
NS: Down, Bedford.
IP: Right.
NS: And it’s one of the best years in my life, but for my wife as well. That village was fantastic[emphasis]. We had a drama group, I'm into drama, we had [unclear] drama group with no end- We used to win trophies and we had the vicar who was- He used to say, ‘Oh Mr Shakesby, [unclear] bring Mr Shakesby a cup of tea’, and he could do everything [unclear] of comedy and the other fellow was a- He’d been Bedford, Bedford, what do you call it? Anyway, Bedford Modern. I don’t know whether you know, it’s a public school?
IP: I’ve heard of it.
NS: Yeah, and he- And his father was a big farmer but he’d been robbed by [unclear] and went- During the war, somebody had done him down and they were down in quite poor circumstances. They lived in a little cottage and when my wife and I went for tea they had a little girl who had look of [unclear] said- And her coat of arms, she was an Irish professional tennis player and Godfrey, he was mad about drama and he and I- Because he used to get the artistic side and I was the [unclear]- I’ll, I'll produce this one, and used to go to London, when the, what’s it [unclear] all the musicals, and he’d come back with the music and put different words to them, quite illegal, and we had a very good pianist and we used to do these and, and I've got all the photographs of them [chuckles] and he used to say, ‘Hello [emphasis] Norman’, and the people who had- The- In Bedford there was a factory which made chalks for the schools.
IP: Ok.
NS: And they used to come- They were also from Bedford Modern in their schooldays, and they used to come to the village and Godfrey was there and he’d say, ‘Hello [emphasis]’ [laughs]. Anyway, that’s not RAF [chuckles].
IP: No, no, that’s alright, but going back to the RAF, did you find it hard to adjust after the war? After you left the RAF then, or did you just slip into being a civilian again no trouble?
NS: I found it very easy.
IP: Very easy?
NS: Very easy.
IP: Yeah, you just put it all behind you and cracked on sort of thing? Oh ok. But what were your thoughts at the time about- ‘Cause obviously, by then Bomber Command people had turned their backs on what had gone on during the war pretty much, did you have any thoughts at the time about that? Or, or were you not concerned greatly?
NS: Sorry about?
IP: About how, how the world- Or how the country was starting to look on the bomber offensive and that sort of stuff and trying to forget all about that stuff.
NS: I wasn’t very happy, you know, and when it got worse and worse, when they had this old thing built and somebody knocked it down and, you know, in one of the parks and I thought, oh this- You know, but you can’t do anything can you? So- But I always had a great admiration for those lads and I pushed it whenever I could and say, ‘Hey, just a minute you saying that, just think this, they go on, you know, this eight, ten-mile- Ten hour and then they come back and have a cup of tea and go to bed and then they’ve got to go again in two days' time’. My friend, I met him up at Great Staughton, we’d been on- He was the other one of the two, and he came and he was on, on Mosquitos with what you call it, the Oboe and that was much easier. They used to be setting off at eleven at night, ours would’ve been in the air by eight, by then [chuckles] and they were back home and, [unclear] by night fighters, so if you want to go on ops, go on-
IP: Mosquiots.
NS: He was a little fellow and, and the radar, the Oboe was in the front and it was a thing like the front of a car, the lid lifted up and then he went- And one day he was in there, in the seat and somebody came along and pushed it and shut it up and the thing took off [chuckles]. I met him after and he was- He said, ‘I didn’t want that again’. He said, ‘Somebody came and shoved it, next thing I knew we were rumbling down the runway’, and the pilot came back because he felt there was a big weight on the front, something wrong with his aircraft, he wasn’t going on ops he was doing, you know, what are they called? When they do this-
IP: Yeah, just a, an engine test or whatever it-
NS: [Unclear] and lifted up the-
IP: Was he in the nose of the aircraft then?
NS: Sorry?
IP: He was stuck in the nose of the aircraft?
NS: Yes, yeah, you know, just room for a little fella in there, he was [unclear] like this and he’s sort of leaning over there and this [chuckles]-
IP: Good grief.
NS: Another funny story.
IP: Yeah, yeah ‘cause there are two VC’s won at 582 Squadron during the time you were there, but I don’t know if you would’ve- If you would’ve known about that, there was a South African captain won a, won a Victoria Cross and a chap flying in a Mosquito won one as well but- But that doesn’t ring any bells? I don’t know whether that news would’ve percolated down or not. ok. So, so you- Did you spend your whole working life as a teacher then? Was that how you- That was your career as it were?
NS: Yes, I got my degree, I got a job in a- Well I got a job in Bedford College because there was a job offering for business to them, accounts, accounting, which is my- One of my- And it was night- They had a night team there and a night school with- That with the adults and that [unclear]. The only thing was, the nasty part [unclear] was that I had to hand the [unclear], you know, apprentices and the plumbers on, what you call, general studies.
IP: Oh yeah, yeah.
NS: Absolutely back breaking, ‘Well what are we doing this here for ey mate?’ [chuckles] and I stuck it for a year and I couldn’t do it any more than that so- But I got into it, I got into FE, that’s my thing.
IP: Right.
NS: And so I went to Redcar, which was a new college and-
IP: And what did you teach there, at Redcar?
NS: Business studies, what I've just said.
IP: Yeah.
NS: And, commerce and all that side.
IP: Yes, yes.
NS: And I had a fantastic principal Joe Dunning and the- Is this irrelevant? [Chuckles]
IP: It’s all relevant.
NS: He- The- Redcar had been opened for one year for the engineers, business side and the general degree and A-level, O-levels were starting that time and there was five of us for the whole of the, that side and I remember sitting at the five with the head of the department [unclear] are we going to get anybody? ‘Cause we’d seen nobody yet, you know. When I left four years later, there were thirty-two [unclear] staff, from five and Joe [unclear]- I won’t go into that but that’s my sadness about missing- I found out only just recently that Joe Dunning had been here before he died.
IP: In- What, in Natland? Or in-
NS: Yes.
IP: Good heavens above.
NS: And I'd been in the same place, I desperately would’ve met him.
PB: And seen him.
IP: Yeah of course.
NS: ‘Cause I went to see him at one time, we went up Glasgow, ‘cause we went to Glasgow and I went onto the iPad and a glowing report of him in [unclear] he sorted all their technical colleges out and they’d given him this award and that award and he’d died in, well 2010 wasn't it? Or 5.
PB: Yeah, while we were here, yeah.
NS: And, it said- And his wife had retired to Penrith and there was an overlap of three, three-
PB: Years we were here.
NS: [Unclear] years, when we were both alive and he was- And he died by the time I got there. So- What some six weeks ago, I said I'd go and see the wife.
PB: Yeah we did, we met his wife.
NS: Delighted.
IP: Yes, yes, I bet, yeah.
NS: Of course, I got a programme because in my- I was only there for two years and that was because I fell out with a man in- Anyway, doesn’t matter. But- What, what he did, he’d seen one of my productions at Saltburn, so he’d been down to London and it was the Union of the Australia, New Zealand were having a technical week and then he went down to London, came back with- Full of [unclear] with Galileo and he said, ‘That’s what we’ll do with this, Galileo, and you are Galileo’. I’ve got the programme [chuckles] I’ve got it out there, and so I took part as Galileo and it was nice because after I'd seen his wife, his widow, she said [unclear] money, she said, ‘She remembers you in the, in the, that play’, I thought if you saw it, you should be ‘cause it’s a magnificent performance [chuckles].
IP: Did you, just- I think we’ll round it off- Oh blimey we’ve been going for a long time actually. Did you, did you keep in touch with any squadron members? I mean 405, they’re all Canadians so they would’ve gone off back to Canada I suppose, wouldn’t they, so you didn’t keep in touch with anyone after the war?
NS: No, no, no.
IP: Ok.
NS: No I lost touch with them all.
IP: Yeah.
NS: Once we came over from oversea because I kept meeting new, new bobs of people. I mean when we got to Tripoli with a ground [unclear] chain, that when we left there, we went to different places and then never met them again.
IP: Sure, ok.
NS: So I haven’t got a- Nobody.
IP: Well, we’ve been going for nearly an hour and a half-
NS: I know.
IP: -Norman, so I think, I think to save your strength we’ll call it- I’d just like to say, it’s fascinating listening to you, I mean I'm sure we could talk for hours more, but, but I think we’ll call a stop there, it’s been great. Thank you ever so much, I do appreciate it.
NS: Well, I’ve enjoyed it, it’s nice to talk about yourself.
IP: Exactly, exactly.
NS: You see, it’s the drama, dramatic in me [chuckles].
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 Norman Shakesby
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ian Price
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
2018-08-22
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AShakesbyFN180822, PShakesbyFN1801
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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01:20:01 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
Norman Shakesby was a radar mechanic on 405 and 582 Squadrons. Born in 1924, he was studying languages at The City School in Lincoln at the outbreak of the Second World War. His language teachers were quickly called up to act as interpreters, so on the advice of the headmaster, Norman left school and found employment as a junior bank clerk. He became a member of the Air Training Corps when it was formed, which paved the way for him to enlist in the RAF in November 1942. Having completed his basic training, Norman attended the Leeds College of Technology studying radio, from where he was selected to specialise in radar. Further training followed and he became proficient on both H2S and Gee radar. Posted onto 405 Canadian Squadron, Norman maintained the equipment on the aircraft. This also involved boarding aircraft before take-off to set the selected frequency for that operation. Care had to be taken with impatient crews, to ensure he wasn’t a reluctant passenger on operations. He had the greatest respect for the aircrew and witnessed the euphoria of them completing operations before going through the same emotions again a few days later. In 1944, a posting to 582 Squadron gave Norman a change, servicing equipment in a bay carrying out more detailed rectification. Following the ending of the war, a posting to the Middle East saw him complete his military service before returning to RAF Waddington and demobilisation. After meeting his old headmaster, he followed a career in teaching, initially employed as a primary school teacher at Riseley, Bedfordshire, before completing his degree and becoming involved in further education.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Ian Whapplington
Tilly Foster
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Libya
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Lincolnshire
Libya--Tripoli
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
405 Squadron
582 Squadron
Gee
ground personnel
H2S
radar
RAF Gransden Lodge
RAF Little Staughton
RAF Waddington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2573/44630/BUreILUreILv1.2.pdf
33ef94d4b6b42cee0b9e403dc49f120a
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Ure, Ivan Lochlyn
I L Ure
Description
An account of the resource
27 items. The collection concerns Ivan Lochlyn Ure (b. 1922, 1323004 Royal Air Force) and contains his memoirs, prisoner of war log, correspondence, documents, and photographs. He flew operations as an air gunner with 10 Squadron before he became a prisoner of war.
The collection was loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Tim and Heather Wright and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-08-15
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Ure, IL
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
... just ... Chapters in a Life .. and some History
Description
An account of the resource
A detailed autobiography by Ivan Ure.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ivan Ure
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1997
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Isle of Wight
Norway
Scotland--Argyllshire
England--Yorkshire
England--Sussex
England--Westbourne (West Sussex)
England--London
England--Hayling Island
England--Evenley
England--Somerset
England--Blackpool
Germany
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Nuremberg
France
France--Abbeville
France--Paris
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Poland
Poland--Gdańsk
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Lithuania--Klaipėda
Poland--Szczecin
Poland--Białogard
Poland--Pyrzyce (Powiat)
Germany--Lauenburg
Germany--Lüneburg
Germany--Rheine
England--London
Germany--Dresden
Ireland
Ireland--Dublin
Ireland--Cork
Austria
Austria--Vienna
Libya
Libya--Tripoli
Libya--Banghāzī
Egypt
Egypt--Cairo
Egypt--Jīzah
Egypt--Port Said
Kuwait
Bahrain
Iran
Iran--Tehran
Scotland--Oban
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
Polskie Siły Powietrzne
Royal Navy
Wehrmacht
Wehrmacht. Luftwaffe
Royal Australian Air Force
Royal Canadian Air Force
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending text-based transcription
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
Format
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140 printed sheets
Identifier
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BUreILUreILv1
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.
10 Squadron
4 Group
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
Anson
anti-aircraft fire
bale out
Blenheim
bomb aimer
Botha
Cheshire, Geoffrey Leonard (1917-1992)
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
crewing up
Defiant
ditching
Dominie
Dulag Luft
entertainment
flight engineer
Goldfish Club
ground personnel
Halifax
Hampden
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945)
Hurricane
Ju 88
Lancaster
Lysander
Me 109
Me 110
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
navigator
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
physical training
pilot
prisoner of war
Proctor
radar
RAF Barrow in Furness
RAF Brize Norton
RAF Cosford
RAF Hendon
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Madley
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Melbourne
RAF Padgate
RAF Sywell
RAF Uxbridge
RAF Yatesbury
Red Cross
Spitfire
sport
Stalag Luft 1
Stalag Luft 4
Stalag Luft 6
Stirling
the long march
training
Typhoon
Wellington
wireless operator / air gunner
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2200/40156/EDarbyCAHWellandJ450629.2.pdf
4bfec28f3401177bdf7ec73e80a5b36a
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
Darby. Charles Arthur Hill
Darby, CAH
Jack Darby
Johnny Darby
Description
An account of the resource
203 items. The collection concerns Charles Arthur Hill Darby (1915 - 1996, 154676 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, photographs, documents and correspondence. He flew operations as a bomb aimer with 186 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Richard John Darby and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-02-02
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Darby, CAH
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
Letter from Jack Darby to Jean
Description
An account of the resource
He writes that he has been flying to test German radar. He talks about their wedding plans, folk dropping out of the wedding and presents.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jack Darby
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1945-06-29
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
England--Suffolk
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Format
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Two double sided handwritten sheets and envelope
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending text-based transcription
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EDarbyCAHWellandJ450629
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-06
aircrew
love and romance
radar
RAF Stradishall
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2200/40157/EDarbyCAHWellandJ450706.1.pdf
f08686013753ebe92dbd8dcfc712a56c
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
Darby. Charles Arthur Hill
Darby, CAH
Jack Darby
Johnny Darby
Description
An account of the resource
203 items. The collection concerns Charles Arthur Hill Darby (1915 - 1996, 154676 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, photographs, documents and correspondence. He flew operations as a bomb aimer with 186 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Richard John Darby and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-02-02
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Darby, CAH
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
Letter from Jack Darby to Jean
Description
An account of the resource
He discusses their wedding plans then domestic news. They flew to Denmark to test German radar.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jack Darby
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1945-07-06
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
Germany
Great Britain
England--Suffolk
England--Hythe (Kent)
England--Claygate
England--Salisbury
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two double sided handwritten sheets and envelope
Conforms To
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Pending text-based transcription
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EDarbyCAHWellandJ450706
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-07
aircrew
love and romance
radar
RAF Stradishall
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1100/38439/MRobsonJ10589943-190327-04.2.pdf
4fd26b40cffe98268c7a71015a70a7df
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Robson, Jack
J Robson
Description
An account of the resource
11 items. An oral history interview with Jack Robson (b. 1923, 10589943 Royal Air Force) and his training notebooks. He was a searchlight and radar specialist.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Jack Robson and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-11-21
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Robson, J
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Jack Robson's Searchlight Control Radio Notes
Description
An account of the resource
Notes kept by Jack during his training.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jack Robson
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Training material
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MRobsonJ10589943-190327-04
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
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending text-based transcription
radar
searchlight
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1100/38445/MRobsonJ10589943-190327-08.1.pdf
7f101d63e5d563cb95818209433e211f
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
Robson, Jack
J Robson
Description
An account of the resource
11 items. An oral history interview with Jack Robson (b. 1923, 10589943 Royal Air Force) and his training notebooks. He was a searchlight and radar specialist.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Jack Robson and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-11-21
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Robson, J
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Jack Robson's Radar Notes
Description
An account of the resource
Notes kept by Jack during his training.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jack Robson
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Training material
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MRobsonJ10589943-190327-08
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.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Conforms To
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radar
training
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Title
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Watson, Peter
Peter Henry Clifford Watson
Peter H C Watson
P H C Watson
P Watson
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with Peter Henry Clifford Watson (182029 Royal Air Force), his log book and a photograph. He flew operations as an air gunner with 101 and 115 Squadrons.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-01-23
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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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Watson, PHC
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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JM: OK [pause] OK, this interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Jean MacCartney and the interviewee is Peter Watson. The interview is taking place at Mr Watson’s home in Clontarf, New South Wales on the 23rd of January 2017. Peter, you mentioned you were born in 1924 but I don’t know quite where. Where was it?
PW: I was born in South Wales, a very — in a little village near Cardiff.
JM: Right, and did you do all your education in Wales?
PW: I did part of it in Wales and then I went to King’s School, Worcester for four years. That’s a cathedral school in Worcester.
JM: Right and does that mean you were part of the choir there?
PW: I was. Well, yes, a little bit. I was what? I used to sing in the choir.
JM: Right, right and was that the, the latter part of your education?
PW: Er, well actually when the war started they evacuated the whole school to North Wales for one year and then they brought us back to Worcester, and then I finished my, er, matriculation in 1941, and left the school there and then started a training to become an engineer until I was old enough to fly.
JM: Right, OK, and so that was until 1943?
PW: ’43.
JM: When you enlisted?
PW: Yes.
JM: And whereabouts did you do your enlistment?
PW: We did it in London.
JM: Ah, the London Recruitment Centre?
PW: Yes.
JM: Right, OK.
PW: There were about a hundred of us in the, in the one intake and, er, I might mention every one of us wanted to be a pilot. We all wanted to fly Spitfires and shoot down Germans, and get Victoria Crosses, and then end up with a romance with the group captain’s daughter but it didn’t happen that way [slight laugh]. And after a couple days we were told, whether we liked it or not, we had to be trained as air gunners because there was a surplus of pilots and a shortage of air gunners, and that was the last thing we wanted, but we volunteered to do what we were told and that’s what we did.
JM: Yes, indeed and where did you do that? After you, you had your recruitment in London and then after that where did you go?
PW: Yes. We went to, I went to Bridlington in Yorkshire, just for ground training then flying training started at Stormy Down at South Wales for several weeks. And then we went to a thing called an OTU, um, Operating Training Unit, in Tilsbury [?] near Sal— , near Sal— near, er, oh dear, North Wales anyhow. And then we crewed-up and then finally went to a four — four-engine — you were trained on two-engine aircraft, then you finally became a crew member and a seven member crew was formed at the, er, four-engine training centre in Lincolnshire.
JM: Right.
PW: And then because we — when we were sent to our first squadron, er, it was known as a special duties squadron because we carried an eighth member of a crew. Instead or seven, we had eight. The eighth member being a German-speaking person, who had radio equipment, who was carried on board our planes to interfere with the German night fighter system.
JM: Right, so this is 101 Squadron?
PW: 101 Squadron.
JM: And this is in February ’44.
PW: Yes. Ludford Magna.
JM: Yes, yes and because that had the ABC equipment, um, is that right?
PW: Airborne Cigar.
JM: Yes, so that was, um, so you, you were in part of those flights there then?
PW: Yes, I did, I did I think it was thirteen or fourteen flights from Ludford Magna and then we were selected to go and form a new squadron, essentially with Polish airmen, at a place called Faldingworth, about twelve miles away, and we finished the rest of our tour with 300 Squadron.
PM: Right, so, um, how long, how — in the 300, 300 Squadron is the Polish Squadron is it?
PW: Yes.
PM: So how long were you in that squadron for?
PW: I think, I think it was about three months between the time that we’d — I think we’d done, I’m not sure, about fourteen or fifteen at Ludford Magna before we went to Faldingworth and we ended up doing the balance of thirty three trips with, with 300 Squadron.
PM: Right, OK. And so that took you through then to 1945?
PW: Well after, after we had finished our tour we had to be grounded for six months and I was selected for some reason or other to, to go to 460 Australian Squadron at Binbrook, in a non- non-operational unit, because they were doing a special — they were trying to introduce radar operated rear turrets in Lancasters and Halifaxes and’ um, I was part of that study to introduce that and it was called Operation Village Inn. But after that, after six months, I got orders to go back on operations so I went down to Number 3 Group in, in, um, Cambridge, and I forget the county’s name of Cambridge but it was Cambridge, and I did two daylight trips with, with 115 Squadron and then the war ended and then we went on to, er, taking food to Holland and then bringing back prisoners of war from France and Italy.
JM: Right, so that was all part of 115?
PW: Yes.
JM: Yes, right. So 115 was probably what? From about May, May ’45 was it?
PW: Yes, yes, 115, September ’45 until, er, September ’46.
JM: Right.
PW: And then, um, funnily enough I went to Leconfield for a two-week training course where your, your father was but by then it was just a post-war training and they were doing training for gunnery leaders, and then I was promoted to gunnery leader of Number 15 Squadron at Wyton. And that’s where I stayed until I was demobbed but I was a flight lieutenant by then. But then at the end, as a post-war economy measure, every war-time officer was reduced in rank from flight lieutenant to flying officer [slight laugh] so I was finally discharged as a flying officer.
JM: Mm, OK. So that was a little thumbnail sketch of, of your service there.
PW: Yes.
JM: Perhaps we’ll go back and, um, just take a look at each of those three sort of postings. What? You said you had about fifteen missions in 101, um, was that more over Ger— over Germany particularly or —
PW: Yes, essentially Germany and then —
JM: And was your, was your plane dropping bombs as well as jamming or —
PW: Oh yes. We were essentially a bomber but we just carried this extra man and we were honour bound never to talk to him about his job, even though he ate and slept with us, we were honour bound not to because of the secrecy but the aircraft were very obviously — you could tell which aircraft they were because they had big aerials forward of the mid-upper turret and, you know, they could pick us off easily and what we didn’t know at the time was that the Germans were able to hone in on our equipment. We didn’t know this until after the war. They were able to hone in on our equipment and pick us off and, er, hence our losses at 101 were much higher than the average. In fact, I think it was Nuremburg, which was the worst of all the night flights, when we lost 108 aircraft, 96 over Germany and I think twelve over England afterwards and, er, it was, it was a dreadful night but there we are. But yes, that was it.
JM: So, um, that meant, obviously, you were going into some pretty densely populated areas I presume?
PW: Yes, yes, yes. Places like Nuremburg, Munich, Augsburg, Schweinfurt, Brunswick, Berlin. I didn’t do Berlin but Berlin was one of the very populous, very common areas. Hamburg in particular, Kiel canal, where, incidentally we went to bomb the martialling yards but, er, accidentally dropped our bombs a little bit away and it, it landed on the German battleship the Admiral Von Scheer and sunk it. So, I mean how lucky were we? And when I say ‘we’ — the squadron. One of the planes from the squadron dropped its bombs in the wrong spot and sank the Von Scheer.
JM: It wasn’t your actual plane?
PW: No.
JM: Right, OK, well so instead of getting a bit of a bollocking they would — there was a bit of a cheer I suspect.
PW: Yes. Yes.
OK. Yes. Yes. So, um, OK. Then when you moved from 101 to 300 did your whole crew move together?
PW: Yes, yes.
JM: So your whole seven stayed together.
PW: The eighth member stayed at 101.
JM: Eight. OK and was your crew, were all of those eight people, er, English or did you have any other —
PW: We had one Canadian.
JM: One Canadian.
PW: Yes and our special operator later on was, was an Aussie, yes, called Beutel, B E U T E L, Graham Buetel. Yes.
JM: Aha and then in your — you had a number of missions in the Polish Squadron? What sort of — was the emphasis — was there any particular action?
PW: We were just, we were just part of the main force but we didn’t leave 101 Squadron at Ludford Magna until two weeks after D-Day, and D-Day was a particularly interesting project for us because we, we were put onto a special flight to try and imitate a naval fleet going from Dover to Calais to try and make the Germans think that that was where the invasion was going to take place, and we went round in, in sort of square circles for about six or eight hours to try to imitate — dropping window stuff to make the Germans think that that might have been where the invasion was taking place. Whether it succeeded we never found out.
JM: So that was still part of 101?
PW: No, er, that was part of 101 and it was the last but one I think before we left, yes.
JM: Right OK and then in, um, Polish Squadron just normal —
PW: Just normal.
JM: Normal routine flights there. Day and night or just —
PW: No, all night stuff and we took a lot of Polish people as extras on flights prior to them taking over the — on their own flights. You see, the Ger— the Polish airmen were complete for one air— for a particular aircraft. It would all be Polish, but before they did that we used to take them as second dickies and things like that, to get them trained and also to control them because they were a very uncontrollable lot, in the sense that their, their hatred for Germany was so great that there were rumours, and I think it happened, that after bombing in Germany they would go down at ground level and try and shoot at all the searchlights with the rear gunners but that was the sort of emotion that existed on that station and it was very prevalent.
JM: Yes so —
PW: But mostly I think of my flying is with 101 because that’s when the dramas started and I did have a couple of dramas.
JM: As in?
PW: Well, I was extremely lucky. In the first flight that we made we got attacked by a Focke-Wulf 190 over the, over the target, and we got hit a little bit and we hit him a little bit and he came back for a second attack on us. We fired at him again and we saw him — well, we saw him going past at the side of us after he flew to one side and another aircraft watching from the other side, flying parallel with us, saw the pilot bail out, so we were unofficially given the credit of having destroyed him, and it was a particularly nasty experience because we also got, we were hit in many places but none of us were personally hurt and we, we thought after that flight we wouldn’t last more than two or three more flights because it was so horrendous, you know. But then the second night, that was at a place called Schweinfurt. And we went to bomb Schweinfurt because they had a lot of production of ball bearings at factories which they needed for the for U-boats, and the U-boats were giving curry in the Atlantic at the time, and they thought if we could bomb the ball bearing factories the U-boats couldn’t go to sea and they couldn’t sink our ships. That was the sort of theory. But the second night was a night where I’ll always remember because over the target we were coned by searchlights. There would have been fifty of them at least and, er, an explosive, a shell, blew, blew us underneath us whilst we were on our bombing run and it completely destroyed all our hydraulics, and also we were hit with another bomb dropping from an aircraft above and we had about six feet of our wing tip broken off. And luckily our pilot, who was wonderful, managed to keep us stable and fortunately all our engines were OK, but we ended up with our bomb doors open with, with some incendiaries that we couldn’t release and, and we couldn’t come back and land normally. We had to come back and belly land because we had no wheels to put down, we had no flaps and we didn’t know even whether we’d make it because we, when we hit the ground we had all these incendiaries on board, but fortunately they dropped off and went off like fireworks while we skidded on the ground for about half a mile and then finally came to a stop, but we, we never thought that we would survive that night but we did. And, do you know, one of the first people to turn up afterwards while we waited for a crew wagon to pick us up was the Salvation Army canteen and they offered us cups of tea and cigarettes. Oh, they were wonderful and, er, but the emotional part of that is that I had to go into hospital for a short while and while I was there my crew went off with another gunner in my place and they never came back. Well they came back but they crash landed and were all killed so there was I, on my own, and the thing that, I suppose emotionally, and I never forget and it’s still with me, er, we shared a Nissan hut with two crews, our crew and another crew, so after my crew disappeared I was the only the one there with the other eight members of another crew. Two days later they disappeared so I was one, one person in a room of sixteen, in the middle of winter with nothing else to do, and the emotion, and knowing that all your crew were dead. And, er, you didn’t have group therapists in those days. You just had to put up with it and that’s sort of stuck with me ever since [sniff] mm.
JM: Goodness me and, and then they expected you to go off and just happily join a new crew and get on with it.
PW: Well, once, once you were — you were seen as a jinx. If you were a survivor of a dead crew nobody wanted you, er, but there were so many times when crews needed other people that I was eventually put with another crew and within a few days we were all good mates and I, we spent the rest of our tour as a crew very happily. Yes.
JM: And is that the crew — and that crew was also all —
PW: They were all English.
JM: English. Which crew was it that the —
PW: Well the pilot of my first crew was a Sergeant Roy Dixon and, er, I didn’t know until later that the night that he died his commission came through as a pilot officer. He was just a sergeant before and he also got the Distinguished Flying Medal. And I have a photograph here of our aircraft when it landed I could give to you if you like.
JM: That would be very interesting to see that.
PW: Incidentally, in the photograph because of security reasons they ob— obliterated the two aerials.
JM: Of course yes, yes.
PW: Yes. That was, er, that was life but it was tough because our losses and, in fact, at Nuremburg we lost five aircraft. That’s a lot of aircraft in one squadron.
JM: That’s a lot. That’s a huge amount, yes. At least from all those subse— those first two missions were the first two that really —
PW: Blooded us.
JM: Yes, well and truly, and then from there on in you, you and your crew stayed intact for the rest of the course of the — all your other subsequent missions, which is so pleasing given such a horrendous, horrendous start for you. Yes indeed. And, um, and then on that basis I guess nothing compared with those early experiences from 300 and 115 really?
PW: No, no, no, they were much easier. I mean, you couldn’t go on and you couldn’t get away with what we got away with there more than once I’m sure, but, er, and luckily by the time we landed from the flight, because we were flying with our bomb doors open and no flaps and so forth we landed when, after everyone else had gone, had landed. Sometimes, or very often, when you got back to your aerodrome there were twenty other aircraft waiting to land and you hung around for perhaps an hour before it was your turn to land but by the time we got home we were about an hour late —
JM: You were a straggler.
PW: And we went straight in but we weren’t allowed to land on the runway. We had to land on the grass which really was good because it was wet and soaking and —
JW: Made it slippery [unclear]
JM: And flame-wise it was good and we didn’t — we anticipated we might blow up because of the bombs we still had on board but they dropped off instantly, fortunately, and by the time we came to a halt — and I don’t think there was much left in the petrol tanks [slight laugh]. But on our first trip I might have mentioned that the — when we were attacked he hit one of our fuel tanks and set it on fire but we were able to extinguish it with an extinguisher system that they had in the aircraft, which is wonderful. And one of the big, one of the big loss reasons — there were two reasons we lost a lot of aircraft, one was collisions, because when you had seven or eight hundred aircraft all going within half an hour of bombing a place you had to be more, more careful than ever of bumping into anyone else and the only times you could see them was when it was moonlight. Other times, all you could see was the red, red exhausts. The exhausts of the Merlin engines are red hot and the only thing, that’s the only thing you could see on a flying, plane flying alongside you, but you had the rear gunner, the mid-upper gunner, the wireless operator and the bomb aimer all looking because they didn’t have anything else to do until they got to the targets, you see. I mean, the bombers would — the air gunners were looking for fighters but the others were also looking for fighters but as well to make sure you weren’t bumping into any aircraft and we had a couple of near misses. But that was the way things were.
JM: That’s right. Right and with, with this crew, um, you stayed together right through in 300 and 115. Did you stay together for the post-war stuff as well?
PW: Yes. Yes. The war finished in, well in May and then in August we were going to go out of the Far East because Japan was still, still active in the Far East but then in August of that year the war ended in Japan, so we never went but we were kept as a squadron. The Air Force kept a fairly strong force of Lancasters and Halifaxes for at least two years and one of the reasons, probably never written in history, but England was frightened of Russia coming west and we, I think the Government, decided we’d better stay powerful, so I didn’t get de-mobbed for two years after the war had finished. But by then of course I was a gunnery leader in 15 Squadron but we had very, very little to do and very boring in the end.
JM: Yes, so you were actually doing what? Training flights or —
PW: Training flights and things like that. And, er, when the immediate war finished in Europe though we were quite busy. We would fly to France and pick up released prisoners of war. The Americans flew them from wherever in Germany, and Italy, and around there to France and then the Royal Air Force used the Lancs and Halifaxes to fly them back to England. And I, I think we had seventy thousand prisoners we managed to get back. Then after that we flew out to Italy to bring similar prisoners of war who’d been stuck in Italy. We flew them back to England. And we loved those trips because we’d never been abroad and it was the first time we’d flown into a place where it was really hot weather and we could buy apricots and peaches. [laugh]
JM: Because again you were flying in, in spring summer sort of by this stage so —
PW: Yes and really the gunners were really only like only flight lieutenants, yes.
JM: Because you actually had no —
PW: Nothing to do except being sort of stewards for the people and of course it was very uncomfortable where they could sit down in the aircraft wherever they could find a spot.
JM: Well that’s right because I presume they tried to put as many people as possible onto those flights to maximise the, the value of each trip so to speak.
PW: Yes. That’s right. It took about five or six hours to get from Italy back to England and that’s a long time for people not in very good condition.
JM: Well because a lot of them would have had injuries, um, sickness and being in prisoner of war camps they would have been in pretty poor shape generally I would assume.
PW: And, er, quite a lot of them had been originally before the war out in India and they were on their way back to Europe in 1940, ‘41 I guess, and they got caught in North Africa and from there they were taken prisoner by the Germans and sent to Italy, so some of them hadn’t seen England since 1935.
JM: Goodness me.
PW: Yes and there was one, there was one old tough old fella there and we put him up in the nose so he could see the white cliffs of Dover and we flew — he started crying. He couldn’t, couldn’t resist. It was very emotional.
JM: He couldn’t not [emphasis].
PW: No.
JM: Goodness me. When you went did you — was it like a day trip for you in as much in that you went straight back in, loaded the servicemen, and then flew straight back out again or did you fly in and have a day off?
PW: Oh we always had a day off.
JM: Day off, right, OK. So you actually got to see the immediate surrounds of the airfields where you flew in then?
PW: Yes, yes.
JM: What memories do you — any particular experiences that stand out there?
PW: [laugh] Funnily enough, funnily enough, um, the first time we went in it was a place called Pomigliano and it was very much a basic aerodrome, and on the end of the runway was a local road, and when we went in the first time we saw a horse and cart [slight laugh] going across just as we were going in and we missed him fortunately. That’s one thing I remember. The other thing was that, you know, being young and, and flippant, we were only what? 19 or 20 years old. We all liked to smile at the local girls but they all had to be chaperoned and, er, they would always have a mother or father or a brother with them so we had to be very careful there. The other thing is that the fruit that we had never seen before, oh it was beautiful and, er, also, you wouldn’t believe it, but even then the, the Italians were flogging watches, you know, wrist watches, and we’d never seen, we’d never seen this sort of post-war stuff that the Italians were doing and, er, funnily enough, and I suppose it’s OK to say this, but our navigator had a girlfriend and he bought her a watch, and because of customs finding out, he put the watch inside a condom and then put it inside an oil filter in the aircraft until we’d got back to base. So whether, whether he got oil in the watch I don’t know but that was one of the funny things that happened. You were asking for unusual memories and that was one of them [slight laugh]
JM: Yes, gosh that’s — it would have been interesting to know whether he got it out in one piece or not undamaged. Yes and so you had those flights and then subsequent to that you had the Manna flights as well?
PW: Yes.
JM: And how many runs would you have done?
PW: I think we only did only about three.
JM: Right.
PW: Yes, and the first time we went over we had to come back because the airfield or the — I think it was a sports ground, where it had been arranged that we should go and drop, it was full of people and we realised that we would, we’d be bombing people with tins of flour and potatoes and things like that, so we came back and waited until the Germans cleared the thing and then we went in and dropped the food. We weren’t very accurate because we’d never been trained and one lot went into the greenhouses. That didn’t appeal to them very much. But you saw people on, on the roof tops waving sheets and clothes and things just to welcome us because we had to go in at ground level. And one thing that I remember one of the last trips we made was on the VE, er, VE night when there was to be a big celebration in the, in the mess, have a party to celebrate the end of the war, and we had flown so low that we evidently hit the branch of a tree because when we got back we found our bomb door, when we opened it, had a big scar in it and it was a piece of tree in it and so our ground crew were very upset because they were going to miss the party because they had to repair it overnight [slight laugh]. Isn’t it funny how you remember these little things.
JM: Yes, absolutely. And so were your trips there all to the same place in — when you were doing these drops?
PW: Yes.
JM: Which was where?
PW: It was Juvincourt in France and Pomigliano which is virtually I think Naples, in Italy. Yeah, they were was the only two places we went.
JM: The Manna drops I’m talking about.
PW: Oh, the Manna drops. No, I think, I think two were to The Hague. I think one was Amsterdam or Rotterdam. It’s very vague now, yes. I have a photograph of, of stuff being dropped whilst we were doing training in England. We did train for a few days to know how to do it and I’ve got a photograph if it’s any use to you.
JM: Yes, we’ll have a look at that afterwards. Thank you. That would be very interesting. And so then, um, with 115 I believe there were a couple of notable planes in that squadron. Were you ever, um, did you ever hear, were you ever close to any of those pl— notable planes or just —
PW: Well, it was an unusual squadron, um, because with the development of radar we were able to, we were able to go and bomb and have the bombs released from a ground station instead of ourselves and we were able then — I think our last trip, I think it was to Hamburg or somewhere and we were able to bomb half a mile from the front line British troops, and there was a bridge or something they wanted bombed and, and, er, I can tell you now. Can you just pause for a second? [pause] To The Hague and one to Rotterdam. That is food dropping. Then we went to Juvincourt to pick up prisoners, ex-prisoners or war, two trips there, and the last was to Brussels and then we went to Eng— to Europe after, to Italy, Operation Dodge it was called. We went to — oh, Bari but it was actually I think it was Pomigliano. Bari is, is the capital of — it’s on the Adriatic side of Italy. And, er, after that that was the end of our really useful work.
JM: But you were saying about [unclear] the, um, with the bombing with the — from the ground the — that’s using the G coordinates is it?
PW: It was called, um, it was called G2 I think. We flew in formation of three and, er, only one of the aircraft had the equipment on board and as soon as he dropped his bombs we, we dropped visually on his bombs. We saw his going. We knew they were due to go and as soon as he felt his go he pressed a button and we would release ours.
JM: Right and which —
PW: Hamburg I think it was.
JM: Hamburg. [background noise of pages turning] I’m trying to think back. ’45.
PW: Yes. 115. Just April ’45. Just one month before the end of the war. ‘Intense accurate heavy flak,’ I notice here. So that was at Bremen, not Hamburg, I beg your pardon.
JM: Right.
PW: Bremen and we were damaged by flak. It was very, very accurate. But sometimes, you know, you’d feel a bump then — well we didn’t knew where it came from but when you got back home you might find a few holes in your fuselage and, er, on one occasion, it’s rather amusing, the only bloke who got damaged was our bomb aimer and he got, he got damaged. He got a piece of shrapnel into his bottom [slight laugh], not seriously, but he was the only one who was hurt. But frostbite was a problem for the gunners and that was what put me into hospital, um, when they went off with another gunner. It was at Ludford Magna. I’d got a lot pain. It wasn’t severe but it was enough to stop me because you had to be one hundred per cent fit before they’d allow you to fly. If there was anything slightly wrong with you they used one of the spares to take your place. Particularly important was the breathing because, you see, up at above ten thousand feet you had to go onto oxygen, and one of the reasons why the losses were so great with rear gunners was it took so long to get out of a turret, if you had to get out quickly, because if he was on oxygen he’d have to disconnect, then find a bottle of, a bottle of portable oxygen, connect that up then [emphasis] get out of his — and what? He had four pairs of gloves on and, and trying to get out was hopeless. I would say two or three minutes at the earliest he could need to try to get out a rear turret and in the meantime, of course, by then it could be too late. And on that trip to Augsburg that I mentioned we got hit, as well as damaging our hydraulics, er, the bottom floor of the aircraft was blown out and the rear door, which we used for getting in and out of it, was blown out as well so how we, how we got back I don’t know to this day. And he, and Sergeant Roy Dixon, our pilot, he was all of twenty years old. You know, when you think of it —
JM: Amazing, amazing.
PW: So I, so I have a lucky star.
JM: You have indeed and were you a mid-upper gunner most of the time?
PW: Most of the time I was mid upper, on a few trips I was rear gunner. Most of the time I was mid- upper, yes, yes.
JM: So you would have been able to —
PW: Oh that’s an easier place to get in and out of. It doesn’t quite get so bitterly cold because you got a little bit of heat coming back. The people at the front were warmed by the engines. They had a warming system and so forth but the, the rear gunner was the coldest of all.
JM: That’s right.
PW: And I might mention one of the big losses was that the Germans introduced a very clever idea, instead of firing from wing guns, they put a forty millimetre cannon into the fuselage pointing upwards, forty-five degrees, and they would come up underneath and fire at us, and a forty mill— cannon you only need a few things to set the petrol on fire and that would be the end of the aircraft but, you see, we couldn’t see them because we couldn’t look down. The Americans had a belly gunner but we didn’t. We had nothing. We were blind. That’s right.
JM: So that’s why quite a lot of losses were due to that experience.
PW: Yes.
JM: Yes and with, um, your crew after the war did you maintain contact?
PW: No, no. Well you see we came out to Australia two years after I retired from the — well I was demobbed from the RAF and, er, they were all scattered all over the place. We sent Christmas cards but they eventually disappeared. I never kept up after I left, left England in May ’49.
JM: May ’49.
PW: With a three month old baby.
JM: Right. OK.
PW: And when we got on board, on board the migrant ship, the people at the top of the gangway they said, ‘OK Mr Watson you go down that end of the ship and Mrs Watson and the baby you go up that end.’ So three weeks of the trip we were separated. Of course we met during the day but at night — but of course instead of two people in the cabin we had four because they were — anyway we were very lucky to have got that migrant ship, very lucky.
JM: And that was May ’49, so coming, stepping back a little bit, so you were demobbed in, um, ’47 so between, er, from the time you were demobbed did you work or —
PW: Yes, I went back to the company that was training me as an engineer.
JM: Where was that?
PW: In Cardiff.
JM: Cardiff right.
PW: Yes and [slight laugh] I was earning, I was earning five shillings a week, would you believe it. It’s one of those things, like an apprenticeship. I think they called it an articled pupillage? Anyhow, my boss was a wonderful man because in the meantime I had fallen in love with a lovely girl and wanted to get married but on going back to getting back to getting fifteen shillings a week or five shillings a week I couldn’t do that and he smiled at me and said, ‘Look, you get married and I’ll see that you’re alright.’ And he did [slight laugh] and I was with that girl for fifty-eight years and she died in 2004.
JM: Right, right.
PW: Yes and her best friend had lost her husband, and she and her late husband, and Audrey my wife and I had been friends for forty years, and when Audrey died Ruth, the other, the widow, and I got together and we’re together now. And it’s been twelve very happy years.
JM: Very good.
PW: And that’s her there.
JW: That’s her there. That’s right. And so you got married and then made the decision to come to Australia. What prompted that decision?
PW: Er, well first of all I had developed asthma. I’d had a little bit of it as a kid but it came, it came back as a post-war thing I think and somebody said, ‘Why don’t you go to a warm climate?’ Not, not only that I was in an industry that was going to be nationalised, and everyone was very depressed, and even in 1949 rationing was still on. You still had to ration petrol and that sort of thing. And Audrey, my wife, had an uncle, who was very prominent in Australia, and he came to London on a conference and while he was there he came down to see his sister, who was my — was Audrey’s mother, and said, ‘Look if you come to Australia I can assure you we can get you a job and we need new migrants.’ That’s how it all started and never looked back.
JM: Never looked back. No, so obviously —
PW: And our three-month old baby is now sixty-seven and we produced as Aussie but she died in a car accident when she was sixteen. It’s one of those awful things that you have to put up with. So that’s my story as an air gunner.
JM: Yes and that’s — and when you came, when you migrated did you come here to Sidney?
PW: No, sorry, we migrated to Perth.
JM: Perth right.
PW: Yes. We were there for seven years and then I got a job with Caltex Oil as an engineer and I was there for thirty-two years. Not in Perth but a couple of years after I joined them, er, they promoted me to a manager of an installation in Adelaide, and so we moved to Adelaide and we were there for ten years, and after penny died ( she was killed in Adelaide) the company said, ‘Why don’t you come to Sidney and start again.’ And my wife was a very plucky mother and she was fretting terribly and though she resisted coming she knew it was the best thing to do, so we did it, and that was 1967 and we’ve been here ever since.
JM: And did you come here to Contagh or — straight away?
PW: No we were three months in — the company had a flat in Martin Place, Martin, no not Martin. Oh I forget the name of it. Anyhow, Win—
JM: Oh, OK.
PW: And we were there —
JM: Market Street.
PW: Market Street. That’s it, yes. Right opposite the park.
JM: A brilliant park there.
PW: Yes and whilst we were there Audrey was looking for a place. She was the searcher for a place to come and live and she was offered this place and it had been on the market for five months because, as you can appreciate, young people can’t afford to live here and old people don’t want it because it’s so steep but at the time you buy you never think you’re going to get old, do you? So anyhow we bought this place for, would you believe, thirty-five thousand dollars [laugh] but that’s how things were.
JM: That’s how things were back then. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right, yes. So right and as I say — well you just stayed with Caltex through to, until you finished?
PW: Well, I was sort of given a package. When computers came in and they wanted to get rid of numbers and all the oldies, I was fifty-nine by then, they said, ‘Would you please go.’ Sort of thing.
PW: So I retired from there and I started a business of my own which I’m still running.
JM: Oh OK, right. Oh very good, very good, and that’s just a sort of consultancy business I presume?
PW: Yes, yes. It’s to do with finance broking, yes, but for twelve years, the first twelve years after I retired, I actually had a pump agency for an American company and I eventually sold that and with the proceeds I started a broking company ,which I’m still running.
JM: Still running. Goodness me. And going right back to the very beginning when you enlisted, way back in ’43, what was the decision, was there any decision in particular that directed you to Air Force rather than Navy or Army?
PW: Yes, yes. I’d always, you know, wanted to fly and so you vol— put your name down as a volunteer and I guess they kept your name on until you were old enough to be called up. And, and they said, ‘Are you still keen?’ And I said, ‘yes’ and I went up to Birmingham for a test, a medical test, and back to Cardiff and they said, ‘You’re fit enough. We’ll call you up next week.’ And they did [laugh]. It was a great disappointed when we were told we had no choice.
JM: To be an air gunner.
PW: Nobody wanted to be an air gunner. They called it the lowest form of animal life in air crew. But still there we are.
JM: And what — you said you’d always wanted to fly. What was the attraction, of just being —
PW: Well I think, um, the Battle of Britain and the success of our, of our planes then inspired young people like myself and, you know, you were going through the romantic age of what do you want to be when you know you’ve got to go? And Air Force was more appealing than the Army or the Navy. Yes, my sister went into the Navy. Ruth, my partner, she was a WREN. Yes, so we were all in it. And, er, actually we were, before that, in 1941, it’s the only time that Cardiff ever got bombed badly. A few times, I remember there was one bad raid and I was stuck in Cardiff while the raid was on but it was OK. But then I had to walk back to my little village, which was seven miles away, in the dark because the power, all the power had gone off. When I got there I found all the windows and doors of my house had been blown in and what had happened was that a stray bomb, because I mean who would want to bomb a little village, a stray bomb the Germans had dropped about a hundred yards on the other side of the road, on the golf course that we faced, and it had blew it all in but my family had gone to the back of the house into an air raid shelter that they had there and they survived. But we had to evac— evacuate our house because it was unliveable until it was repaired. So we went down to a place called Llanelli, which is about fifty or hundred miles west of there, put up with some friends and eventually got back into our house.
JM: Right. And your family had built the air raid shelter in the garden?
PW: They actually converted the back veranda with steel and stuff and, you know, and when the raid was on it as only my mum and my sister. I was in Cardiff, and my eldest sister, and my elder sister sorry, and my two sisters and my mother and another cousin, who was expecting a baby, but she lived in London and came back to Cardiff, came down to Cardiff to have her baby because she thought it was safer and she ran into — but they survived.
PM: Yes, yes but even in Cardiff though and out, and I appreciate that you’re saying your village was seven miles out of Cardiff, but even then the, um, the normal procedure was to build some sort of — at that time was to build an air — some sort of shelter?
PW: Something safe. I think the main thing was with those sort of things was that falling beams from your house or your roof. You know, I mean, you hear of people hiding under the dining room table because that was protected but, um, and some people put an air raid shelter in their, in their garden, and the Government provided a galvanised iron sort of thing. It was a very easy thing to do but it was the safe, the safest thing you could do.
JM: Mm, yes. So that would have — that was just another sort of —
PW: And it was the only bomb that had ever dropped in the village. Because, you know, I would imagine the like, having the experience later on, you sometimes had the odd bomb that didn’t drop off and you went and released it and it didn’t matter where it fell so long as you got rid of it. So I think that’s probably what happened. But of course the local press said that they were after the, you know, they put all the experienced people have said, ‘Oh yes, well they knew something we didn’t.’ It was wonderful.
JM: Oh dear yes, yes, but as you say that was the only time that Cardiff was actually —
PW: Heavily, severely bombed as a city. Other times it had bits and pieces blown, er, thrown at it but this was the Baedeker [?] raid but it wasn’t successful in the sense that it wasn’t concentrated, it was spread out, but what had happened was that they — it had effected the power supply and everything was in dark and, you know, in January that’s really dark and when I had to walk home seven miles in complete darkness —
JM: And that was January ’43 was it or ‘42?
PW: ’43,
JM: ’43, yes.
PW: Sorry no, ’41, yeah, two years before I went — I was only a school boy.
JM: Right, right, so ’41. Mm, gosh. So that was a very, much of a little bit of a taste of what London was experiencing and all the other cities in England , so —
PW: Yes, yes. I think what had happened was that they stopped bombing London. I think they thought they couldn’t do any more with London and I think they were going to concentrate on shipping ports to try and starve England. That was — they really wanted to starve us into submission, you see, with their U-boats and they were very successful and very close to succeeding I think at times. But anyhow Cardiff is a port, you see. Cardiff is very much like Newport, our Newport here. They produce steel, they produce coal and about the same size but there you are.
JM: Yes, yes. That’s right. Yes, and in terms — you mentioned you didn’t maintain any contacts, er, long term ongoing contacts with your former crew members.
PW: No.
JM: Did you, were you aware of any associations, um, to link up with, you know, in Australia here at any time? Did you became a member of RSL or join in and then subsequently — about the only other organisation would have been the Odd Bods Association because you came here to Sidney in ‘67 I think so —
PW: Oh I’d been in the RSL right from day one and of course I joined 460 Squadron old boys here because although I didn’t operate from 460 I was sent to the Squadron and we used their aircraft for training on this thing called Village Inn. Yes, and actually for me it was six months of very easy living because I didn’t have to fly on operations. By then I was an officer and you were in — and Binbrook was a peacetime built ‘drome so the facilities were very, very good.
JM: Yes, so that was sort of a, a far more peaceful, less stressful, sort of period of time for you rather than the stress of the tour?
PW: Oh there was no stress at all whatsoever. In fact it was very easy living. That was the intention to try and defuse you and, you know, so — by the way my second pilot, who I joined after the raid when Roy Dixon was killed, we kept an association afterwards and he, he left Bomber Command and went into the Fleet Air Arm, and finally he was retired, and he came to my wedding in 1946, er, and but then he went out to North Africa doing something with the shipping company. We kept on for a little while but we’ve lost — I’d have liked to have kept — I regret now that I didn’t.
JM: But communication back then is not what it is today.
PW: No, I think that’s right.
JM: I mean between — only being able to post letters that took weeks to, to get anywhere and you couldn’t make phone calls back then because they cost so much money between Australia and, and the UK and, er, not everyone had a phone back then you know so —
PW: But I always felt though I’d like to have kept in touch with Roy Dixon’s family, you know, but, um, I mean I was — although I was in hospital I wasn’t serious in hospital but I was just not fit enough for flying because of this frostbite thing but, um, when Roy was killed in Norfolk he was able to be buried back in his home, near Doncaster I think it was, and but they wouldn’t allow me to go to his funeral because of the, ‘Oh, why you? Why are you alive and my son is dead?’ Sort of thing. I can understand that and of course you also had the problem with people who couldn’t take, couldn’t take it and they refused to fly after their first two or three missions. Their nerves went. And they were very, very severley treated by the Air Force. They were branded LMF, called lack of moral fibre, and they were sent off nasty jobs and got rid of.
JM: Very difficult times.
PW: Oh very difficult. I think fear, fear kept you together and, and doing the right thing by your mates, you know, kept you together.
JM: And I think, from what I understand, that’s what they used that glue to keep those crews together to, to ensure that moral support within the crew all the time.
PW: Well, one of the things that I haven’t mentioned but it is significant is, how do you choose your crew? And the simple answer is that, er, when you were, when you were — during training and you’d finished, everyone was ready to be put together as a crew, they put you all into a hangar one afternoon and there was probably hundreds of us, after we’d finished our training, the pilots, navigators, bomb aimers and so on and they said, ‘Listen boys you’ve got to form yourself into crews. Go and have a yarn with each other and see if you can match up friendships.’ And that’s all it was and it was the most successful system the Air Force had ever used because you were then with people who’d picked you or you picked them and, you mean, you might see one bloke and say, ‘I like that bloke. I wonder if he needs an air gunner.’ Or a pilot might say, ‘Have you got a crew yet?’ If he liked the look of you and I said, ‘No’ or ‘Yes’ and that’s how it went, and you ended up with seven crew, seven members of the crew. One or two of them might have been officers but it didn’t matter. You were all crew together.
JM: Yes, that’s an interesting approach to the way —
PW: Some didn’t like it. It was a very sensible thing to do.
JM: Yes, well I guess it was from the point of view that they knew they were going to keep the crews together so it was important for the crews to each like each other.
PW: Yes, exactly, yeah. And that also built a camaraderie I suppose so you never let your crew down. You were always aware that without you they could be in trouble and each one, perhaps less with wireless operators and bomb aimers, but with pilots and navigators — well, if they didn’t have a good navigator you were in trouble because you’d get picked off. If you didn’t have a good air gunners who picked up enemy aircraft when you should be shooting at him, you know, you realise how important each job was. And, er, and also I found that we were attacked many times but if they find out that you, if you fired at them quickly they would leave you alone because it was awful for them to come in from behind with — you’ve got four guns in the rear turret and two in the mid-upper and you’re firing bout twelve rounds a minute and he’s got to fly into that to shoot at you so he never came in behind you, he came in on a curve. Now, if, if you saw him coming in on a curve and you timed it right and then you turned the same way as he was going he couldn’t get around to shoot you, so if you, if you kept your nerve and did the corkscrew at the right time he’d never get you. Interesting.
JM: Very interesting.
PW: But of course doing a corkscrew when you’re in several hundred aircraft, right?
JM: It was a little bit difficult.
PW: Collision was awful.
JM: Yes. Again comes back to the skill of the pilot and to the lesser extent the navigator.
PW: And more often as not he still had his load on board, his bombs. Never mind. I don’t know how many tons, I suppose four or five tons. I’ve no idea but it was a very heavy load.
JM: It was a very heavy load to take but Lancasters and Hallies were all carrying at that time.
PW: Your husband would be on Hallies I would think?
JM: Not my husband, my father.
PW: Pardon.
JM: My father.
PW: Your father rather.
JM: On Hallies yes. So, yes. So that’s some amazing memories that you’ve shared with me now. I really appreciate your time and, um, your thoughts.
PW: Well, thank you very much.
JM: But there’s probably time to wrap up at this stage. I presume there’s nothing else that you, no particular thoughts that you want to mention. Any other things that you — you mention you do speeches for Probus Clubs so was there anything from those speeches we haven’t covered or —
PW: No I think what we’ve covered is what, what formed my thing. A lot of people ask questions because they had parents or uncles or brothers who said, ‘Did you know Sergeant Jones, so and so.’ You know. But it was a big force, the bomber force, we didn’t — but there we are. I’ve had a very lucky life, very lucky, and lucky in that sense, you know, but and also I was one of the luckiest — we’re not recording now are we?
PM: Yes.
PW: Oh. Well it doesn’t matter but, er, one of the fortunate things was that during the depression of 1935 to ‘38, ‘39 my father retained his job, which was pretty good in those days, which enabled me to be given a decent education and that’s held me in good stead all my life. And that’s why I, one felt that with the education that I had, to have to be an air gunner was a bit degrading because, you know, we were all pipe-dreaming at the time about it. As I said before we wanted to fly Spitfires, the glamour of that, being shot at [laugh].
JM: Yes, indeed, indeed.
PW: But we made wonderful friendships and some of the bravery of some of those fellas was quite incredible. You’ve probably read about it all.
JM: Did any of the — your pilot wasn’t awarded any, um, given any award for bringing that plane home in the way he did?
PW: Yes. He was awarded the DFM but he didn’t know it until he died, you know, when he died it was the same day that his commission came through. So he got the DFM not the DFC. DFM is for non-commissioned, DFC was for commissioned. I got a Polish, Polish award. I forget what it was called now, something, er, but I never bothered with it but it was just some sort of service medal, you know, but there you are.
JM: Very good. Aright well I think we’ll wrap it up if you’re happy with that?
PW: Yes. What’s the time?
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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AWatsonPHC170123, PWatsonPHC1701
Title
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Interview with Peter Watson
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:05:04 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Creator
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Jean Macartney
Date
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2017-01-23
Description
An account of the resource
Peter Watson was born in South Wales and joined the Royal Air Force in 1943. He wanted to be a pilot but there was a surplus of pilots so he became an air gunner. He crewed-up and flew with 101 Squadron initially, a special duties squadron, and he explains they took an extra crew member who had radio equipment, Airborne Cigar, to interfere with German systems. He describes the first two flights being memorable; on the first night his aircraft was shot by a Focke-Wulf. On the second night, during a bombing trip to Schweinfurt the aircraft was coned by searchlights and was badly damaged by a shell and bomb being dropped from above. He also describes the squadron’s role in D-Day. He later transferred to 300 squadron, a Polish Squadron, to help train the Polish crews. He completed 33 operations. He describes the Operation Manna drops and Operation Exodus, picking up prisoners of war. He was eventually de-mobbed in 1947, by which time he was a Flight Lieutenant gunnery leader. He talks about the discomforts of flying but also the camaraderie of the crews and his distress at losing a crew. They didn’t return when they went on a flight without him. After being de-mobbed Peter returned to a job in engineering but emigrated to Australia in 1949 with his wife and baby.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Yorkshire
Germany
Germany--Schweinfurt
Germany--Kiel Canal
Italy
Italy--Pomigliano d'Arco
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
Contributor
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Christine Kavanagh
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
101 Squadron
115 Squadron
15 Squadron
300 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bomb struck
bombing
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
crewing up
fear
Fw 190
Gee
grief
military ethos
military service conditions
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
radar
RAF Faldingworth
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF Stormy Down
RAF Wyton
searchlight
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2198/40324/EMartinESBatchelderHE20170502.1.pdf
12787de5ef5c24fdf5bc8711e1a6a0c7
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Royal Air Force ex-Prisoner of War Association
Description
An account of the resource
97 items. The collection concerns Royal Air Force ex-Prisoner of War Association and contains items including drawings by the artist Ley Kenyon.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Robert Ankerson and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-01-29
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
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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
RAF ex POW As Collection
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
John Martin's memoir
A Raid Over Berlin
Description
An account of the resource
The story of John Martin's last operation, how he was shot down, escaped the aircraft and was captured. He was interrogated at Dulag Luft in Frankfurt then transferred to various Stalg Luft camps. His story covers in his life until he was repatriated in 1945.
Creator
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John Martin
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--London
England--Lincoln
England--Huntingdonshire
England--Gloucestershire
Germany--Berlin
France--Caen
France--Normandy
Poland--Świnoujście
Germany--Dresden
Poland
Poland--Vistula River
Poland--Toruń
Italy
Europe--East Prussia (Poland and Russia)
England--Grimsby
France
Belgium
France--Ardennes
Netherlands--Arnhem
Belgium--Brussels
England--Dover
England--Wolverhampton
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Hannover
Europe--Elbe River
England--Newark (Nottinghamshire)
Netherlands
Germany
England--Sleaford (Lincolnshire)
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
United States Army Air Force
Royal Australian Air Force
Royal Canadian Air Force
Royal Indian Air Force
Royal New Zealand Air Force
Wehrmacht. Luftwaffe
South African Air Force
Wehrmacht. Kriegsmarine
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
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Text
Text. Memoir
Format
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71 printed sheets
Identifier
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EMartinESBatchelderHE20170502
Conforms To
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Pending text-based transcription
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945
166 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
B-29
bale out
bomb aimer
C-47
demobilisation
Do 217
Dulag Luft
evading
flight engineer
ground personnel
Halifax
Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945)
Lancaster
Lancastrian
mine laying
navigator
Operational Training Unit
pilot
prisoner of war
radar
RAF Cosford
RAF Cranwell
RAF Kirmington
RAF Wing
Red Cross
Resistance
sport
Stalag Luft 4
Stalag Luft 6
the long march
training
Typhoon
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
wireless operator
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force