Father's First World War service
My dad was gassed in the First World War, discharged at the end of the war with gas poisoning, suffered from severe bouts of bronchitis for the rest of his life. Burnt the skin off the inside and outside of him, you know, mustard gas. He and his mates apparently were on duty, on sentry duty, the night that it happened and they didn't leave the flap of their dugout open long enough so they went in and they got poisoned. I went in three weeks before I was twenty-one. I went in on the 30th of January '43, I was back on the streets before Christmas '45. Interviewer: But you tried to sign up earlier, and your dad wouldn't let you? Oh, he was incensed because of his service, you see, but I got there.
Bomber Command navigation
You were told it was on not where you were going. You were told the briefing would be a certain time, so you'd go down to the briefing room and all the crews that were going were in there. Whoever's in charge of the squadron would show you on a plan up in front what was on, which route you were taking and then you'd have the weather report and everything so that you had all the information you needed and then the navigator would then go and sit down, draw up his chart as to where we were going with the information you got, work out your courses because when you're flying, you're not just going from one point to another, the wind, which ever way it comes, is knocking you off course.
If you don't allow for the wind, you want to go this far and the winds coming this way, you're going over this way so you have to make a fix every so often to make sure that you're going to the right place. If you find that the wind has changed, well, then you've got to get the skipper to alter course so that he's heading back to where he has to got to go.
Radio beams in various parts of England but they were never really reliable. They had what they called a G-Box in the aircraft. Lot's of time it didn't work properly but it was like a small screen which came up with calibrations on it that you could read and transfer and tell you where you were on the map, so that was one and later on we got what you call a H2S which, underneath the belly of the aircraft behind the bomb bay was a bubble, and that was a radar thing that sent a beam to the ground and when it hit the ground the beam would come back.
It showed you the exact shape of towns. If it hit water, it wouldn't come back so you could see where shorelines were. It was later in the war that we got that. We used that extensively on mining trips mainly, where, if you dropped your mines more than half a mile from where they were supposed to go the whole mission was aborted because they reckon a half mile would allow a big ship to get through.
Shooting down an ME 109
If I got up and stood behind the pilot I could see what was going on but you see, the navigator, sitting in the kite, you've got your pilot and engineer there, and then you've got a curtain which you can pull across to keep the navigator and wireless operator without, it was night time so you'd have your light on to work by, so the light wouldn't go on and reflect the windscreen, the skipper, it would show outside. If there was fighters up above you, they'd see it.
Our rear gunner shot down an ME109. They used to get up above the bombers and some of them would drop a flare and see, and dive down into you, in amongst the mob to try and shoot them down and that's what happened when the rear gunner got the plane. He just come straight down, and the rear gunner got him as he went by. So, one way or the other, it all works.
Dresden on fire
The longest trip I was on was just on ten hours to Dresden and another night out to a place called Chemnitz. They've changed the name of that town now which was ninety mile west of Dresden and Dresden was nearly all on fire when we got there, the first of a second wave of 500 bombers.
The first wave of course they'd missed most of it because, the first ones anyway, they would only see the aftermath of the target when they turned to go back home. They had a route to go in and a route to come back. You had a job to do so you did it.
