Aircrew: The Story of the Men Who Flew the Bombers (21 page)

Because of bottlenecks in the system, although we had now been
in the service for a year, we had to endure a period of waiting. I was posted as a temporary ground wireless operator to 7 Flying Instructors School, Upavon, Wiltshire. This was a First World War aerodrome, consisting of well-built permanent buildings and a grass airfield with a dip in the middle. By a coincidence I had once flown as a schoolboy from this station on a brief trip in an Avro Anson. If I could avoid it, I was not going to spend my time in a stuffy signals cabin. I badgered every pilot in sight to let me fly with them in their Airspeed Oxfords. Soon I was being allowed to take over the controls in straight and level flight. On one occasion I flew with a Flight Lieutenant Mansell on a cross-country and, although only a cadet, was designated as the crew’s wireless operator.

My Signals CO, impressed with my keeness to fly, presented me with the Log Book of a dead airman. ‘Keep a record of your trips in there, Lewis, until you get your own Log Book at Gunnery School.’ At the time I prized that book above all other possessions.

It was while at Upavon that I saw my first crash. A poor old lumbering Whitley, lost and in trouble, tried to put down in the dark. It finished up in the sunken part of the airfield and burst into flames. The crew were reduced to charred effigies. Later, when it was all over, I remember staring at the melted money spread over the wireless operator’s hip-bone. It may be hard to believe, but a handful of General Duties types chose this occasion to look at us aircrew cadets with pitying contempt. One said, ‘What price aircrew now? Ten a penny! That’s all you’ re bloody worth!’

Among my happier memories of Upavon were my visits to the station library. The Sergeant ‘librarian’ would normally be sitting with his feet up on the anthracite stove, reading an American comic. He was the famous Freddie Mills, that most courageous of light-heavyweight boxers. Beating everyone in his own class, he was forced to take on the heavier guys and always gave a good account of himself. His cheerful face had become concave, like the moon, because of the bludgeoning received in many fights. We had many an amiable chat, little realizing that in years to come we would share a television news show together.

The time came to press on. In April, 1943, we travelled to
Madley, in Herefordshire, home of No 4 Radio Flying School. Combined with liberal doses of ‘ground tuition’, we also took to the air in what can only be described as ‘flying classrooms’. The DH Dominie was a ‘joke’ aircraft, originally designed as a biplane airliner. With a bored pilot flying round in circles, a harassed Corporal Instructor and four miserable pupils trying to tap out morse while on the point of throwing up, as the underpowered kite wallowed about the sky like a one-winged duck, it was all stiflingly claustrophobic.

I was mad about flying, but not in DH Dominies. Messages somehow got transmitted from air to ground, and from ground to air in spite of it all. It was a pity that the transmitter/receivers were obsolete, and bore little relation to the much more sophisticated equipment we were to use in Bomber Command. The station appeared to be run by corporals who laboured manfully to turn us into Wop/AGs. They were supported by a few senior NCOs, but officers, if there were any, obviously had something better to do than take part in the training function.

Again Pete Bishop and I made the grade quite comfortably, thanks to the Corporals, and along with other successful pupils we were promoted to Leading Aircraftmen. This time we did not stitch on our award – the LAC ‘propeller’. It hardly seemed worth the effort. We had confidence that in a little over six weeks, after our air gunner’s course, we would be sewing on our Sergeant’s tapes.

In fact we had overestimated the time it would take. We actually completed the introduction to our second trade in three weeks and five days. No 8 Air Gunnery School was situated in glorious Scottish countryside, at Evanton, north of Inverness. The camp had a backdrop of magnificent mountains, while the runways stretched almost to the edge of the Moray Firth.

Each morning at dawn we woke to the sound of pipes. The pipers, in a highland version of RAF uniform complete with kilt, would descend the mountainside or rise out of ditches and other mysterious hideaways and meet at the camp gate. During this period of coming together we cadets had to be up, washed, shaved and dressed ready to fall in behind them for a march down to the hangars. There, mounted on a rostrum, the padre offered a short
prayer, the RAF flag was broken to the sound of a bugle, the parade was dismissed and the day’s work began. It was unforgettable – the beautiful sunrises, the dark silhouettes of the aircraft, the skirl of the pipes.

If the DH Dominie was a joke, the Blackburn Botha was beyond a joke. Originally designed as a torpedo bomber, this high-wing, twin-engine, underpowered aircraft proved to be useless for its intended purpose. It was relegated to the role of flying back and forth over the sea, while trainee air gunners took pot-shots at canvas drogues towed by single-engine Martinets. The pilots engaged in these exercises were not among the most enthusiastic I had met. They took care never to stray far from base as the ‘Bloody Botha’ was unable to maintain height on one engine should the other fail.

It was a rule that the pupils had to wear full flying kit as if equipped for a night trip over Germany. This gear consisted of silk under-combinations, ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ flying suits, parachute harness, Mae West life-jackets, three pairs of gloves, flying helmet and oxygen masks. In the sweltering heat of a brilliant summer, four sweating pupils stood in the forward cabin, beside a non-communicative shirt-sleeved pilot, waiting their turn to crawl down a narrow tunnel which led to the egg-shaped Fraser-Nash turret.

It was bad enough for all of us, but for ‘Paddy’ it must have been purgatory. A 6 foot 3 inch giant of a man, ‘Paddy’ had transferred from the Irish Guards in order to see some action in the air. On one occasion he was scheduled to enter the turret before me. After an inordinate amount of time, during which no firing had taken place, the pilot impatiently told me to go and investigate. I found poor ‘Paddy’ in the pipe, near the upward bend into the turret itself. What with his size, and the amount of bulky clothing he was wearing, he had stuck fast, unable to move forwards or backwards. Similarly clad, I was almost too exhausted to return and carry out my own air-firing by the time I had managed to drag him backwards along the tunnel. As a weight-losing exercise I never found a better.

In the classroom we had some inspirational guidance in Aircraft Recognition from a tour-expired Flying Officer air-gunner. Armed
with a multitude of models he would zoom in and attack us from all angles, coming up from floor level, or standing on a desk and diving down unexpectedly. Using a projector, he would flash perhaps a head-on view of a Ju88 on to the screen for a split second. ‘Come on boys! What is it? Quick! Quick! Your life depends on it.’ He went to infinite trouble to cut out endless jigsaw puzzles, the pieces made up of characteristic features of a variety of planes. He was a natural teacher, always happy to answer our questions, and we learned a great deal from him. He turned what some of us had considered a dull subject into a topic of endless fascination.

We passed out on air-to-air firing, air-to-ground firing and night firing. It was perhaps strange, but at that school, night firing produced no worse marks than those achieved during the day. The answer was simple. During the ‘night tests’, which anyway took place during the
day
, cadets were ordered to don goggles fitted with dark lenses. Naturally, with no one in the turret to observe us, we all forgot to do so, that is, with the exception of my great pal, Pete Bishop, whose intrinsic honesty often put the rest of us to shame. He conscientiously wore his blacked-out lenses and drilled neat holes in the tailplane of the target-towing Martinet; the LAC in charge of the airborne winch applied for compassionate leave immediately afterwards.

For a time I feared for Pete’s future, but it was all right. All wireless operators passed out ‘Average’ on air gunnery as far as I could tell. Later on, because of greater specialization in aircrew categories, wireless types ceased to take the gunnery course and were re-classified as signallers, wearing the newly designed S brevet. We, however, were awarded our AG brevets, of which we were particularly proud, being among the last of a breed. We also became Sergeants.

It was a pleasure to go on leave, although it took a long time and several changes of train to travel from Inverness to my home in Aberystwyth in West Wales. To my misfortune, 6 ITW was stationed there. So cadets with white flashes in their caps abounded. Previously, when I had come on leave as a cadet myself, I had frequently suffered the irritation of being stopped in my own home town by Service Police and asked why I was not on parade.
Now, as a Sergeant, for the first time I was spared this embarrassment. During the war servicemen were forbidden to wear civihan clothes on any occasion.

But training was by no means over. Next stop was 2 Operational Advanced Flying Unit at Millom in Cumberland. Here we flew on cross-country exercises in friendly old Avro Ansons. The Anson was the workhorse of the RAF, the ‘Flying Greenhouse’, and, as its nickname implied, offered superb visibility all round. It was so beautifully balanced, with its low wing and twin Cheetah engines, that it was confidently believed the ‘Annie-bag’ could take herself off, and then come back and land, even if the pilot forgot to turn up. She was designed by Roy Chadwick, the man who gave us the Lancaster.

In such a plane it was easy to concentrate on really learning our job as wireless operators. We navigated our way round Britain by obtaining bearings from ground stations situated all over the country – each one with its individual call sign. We developed the knack of distinguishing where a call was coming from by the note of the morse signal. No two stations sounded exactly the same, just as each operator had a slightly different rhythm when tapping out a message. We progressed from the conscious, deliberate approach to an instinctive level where sending and receiving became second nature. We communicated in morse as in speech, no longer hampered by an awareness of the technique. It was remarkable how we became adept at winkling out faint, distant signals, although they were almost obliterated by crackling static and overriding ‘mush’.

At last we were using up-to-the-minute equipment – powerful transmitters and receivers, with dials and switches cleverly colour-coded to indicate the different wave bands. The course lasted less than a month, but, guided by ex-operational wireless operators, it could not have been more valuable.

It was in mid-September, 1943, that I arrived at 30 Operational Training Unit, Hixon, in Staffordshire. For the first time we Wop/AGs were to go our separate ways. After spending our leave together at his parents’ place in Carlshalton, Pete Bishop and I parted. He was posted to a different OTU. I missed his company very much.

I have a vivid memory of standing in a room full of aircrew of all categories. We were holding mugs of tea and large sticky buns, so, although this was an introduction exercise, it was physically impossible to shake hands. Apart from the RAF types, there were several Canadians, a few New Zealanders, and some Australians in their darker blue uniforms and enviable black buttons that required no polishing. Not surprisingly, we had formed into distinctive groups, pilots speaking with pilots, bomb aimers with bomb aimers, and so on. Each cluster was comfortably talking their own brand of ‘shop’.

It was some while before a young-looking, fresh-faced Sergeant pilot, of medium height and slight build, came over and introduced himself as Jack West. He asked most politely if I was already ‘crewed up’, and when I replied that I was not, he invited me to join him. He seemed a serious and steady sort of chap so I agreed. Anyway it would have been rude to refuse. From then on, for some time, his fate was my fate.

He led me across the room to meet a stocky little Canadian bomb-aimer. This was Jimmy Hutchinson, who wore his fair hair well over regulation length, and sported a single wing brevet of nearly twice the standard size. He appeared nervy and anxious to make an impression. The other man was a gunner, Stan Wright. Tall, thin, of a shy retiring nature, but with a wry sense of humour, Stan, like our new skipper, appeared to be a responsible type, not likely to panic in an emergency. But who could really tell how any of us would make out? Jack and I were 19 years old, while the other two were only 18. We must have looked like schoolboys in comparison with some of the bewhiskered flyers forming groups in other parts of the room.

At some stage, either then or later, we acquired an equally young navigator. What he looked like, his personality, even his name, has long since gone from my memory. All I remember is that after we had completed a couple of cross-country flights, our first as a crew, he turned out to be incapable of doing the job properly and was removed from the course.

Jack, who had previously flown nothing bigger than an Oxford, settled in happily enough with the Wellington. It was a unique aircraft. Built to a criss-cross geodetic construction, covered in
canvas, it heaved its way through the sky creaking and groaning like an old-fashioned schooner – a schooner fitted with exceptionally noisy engines. I remember standing in the astrodome watching the wing-tips flexing as the ‘Wimpy’ wallowed up and down. Yet this very flexibility was shortly to save our lives.

We acquired another Sergeant navigator. He was not chosen, he was detailed to join us. It was difficult to know what to make of him. Most of his training, he told us, had taken place in South Africa, where ‘things had been different’. Communication was not easy, and as the member of the crew who would work most closely with him, I tried hard to find subjects of mutual interest, but without much success. He gave an impression of being listless, and seemed bored with our company. This we thought we understood. While we were a bunch of irrepressible teenagers, he was an old man. Slow in his movements and speech, a hollow haggard face, receding hair, no discernible sense of humour, he appeared to have nothing in common with the rest of us.