Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945

by Patrick Bishop

  The ability to play the piano was a great social advantage. Before he was killed, an Australian sergeant, J. A. Bormann, left behind a list of eighty tunes he could bash out in mess and pub. It includes ‘Over the Rainbow’, “Till The Lights of London Shine’, ‘Blackout Stroll’, ‘South of the Border’, ‘Beer Barrel Polka’, ‘Rose Marie’ and ‘Lily of Laguna’. These songs are old and new, sentimental and rousing, upbeat and slow but they all have one thing in common – a melody that even the tone-deaf could sing along to.

  The men clustered around the piano were doing a job that would harrow the most hardened veteran, but in many ways they behaved like the adolescents they had so recently been. George Hull reported that he and the crew had ‘discovered a wizard pastime … we call it “scrub riding”. On our way to and from the mess we miss the road, turn into a muddy barren field, dive into ditches, over the plank crossing a stream and crash the wire-netting into the mental home for aircrew. Funny isn’t it what you have to do for a bit of excitement. Tonight we did it in the dark – most of our cycles returned safely, but ditchwater dun half taste peequleeah.’25

  Writing from his training camp at Yatesbury, Wiltshire, Edwin Thomas described to his mother the evening’s entertainment. ‘The main attraction in the ENSA concert tonight in the camp theatre is George Formby. Tomorrow night we are all going on a binge to celebrate the end of the course – and I expect it will end with a terrific pillow fight about eleven o’clock.’

  At this time Thomas was a few months past his twentieth birthday but still rooted in the pleasures of childhood. ‘I had fun last Wednesday at our Wing Dance which Tony and I gatecrashed,’ he reported home. ‘We buttonholed a cross-eyed LAC who was standing outside the NAAFI canteen, and he advised us to try to make our entry by a door at the back of the building marked “Corporals”. We took this advice but the door wouldn’t budge an inch. We battered at the bally thing for ages then it finally “gave” with a noise that seemed almost to bring the building down. It had been held fast with a chair. We entered a small room in pitch darkness, barking our shins, laughing and crashing into one another. We found another door leading into the Sergeants’ Cloakroom. We plucked up courage, put on a bold front and simply walked through into the dance-hall. Of course, most of the WAAFs were bagged by then … but we enjoyed ourselves. We drank cider and NAAFI beer. The latter is as flat as a pancake, and doesn’t deserve the name beer.’ Edwin’s innocence appears to have survived untarnished until he was killed.26

  It is easy to imagine what lay behind all the drinking and the boisterousness. The crews, as Harris had pointed out, were facing imminent death. It was natural that they should want to fill their lives to the brim during whatever time was left to them. The privations of air force life meant that the opportunities for sensual enjoyment were limited. This was particularly true of sex. Wartime had loosened the strict limitations on sexual behaviour imposed on most of society by the mores of the 1930s. But the number of women who were willing to engage in brief, non-committal encounters was still very limited, especially in the provincial, unsophisticated towns where the airmen went to unwind.

  At work they were surrounded with females, the women of the WAAF, who made up a large proportion of the ground staff of the bases. The fact that they had joined up rather than being drafted for war work suggested an adventurous nature. But their tendency to independence did not necessarily indicate a free-and-easy moral approach. Most of the WAAFs were women of their time. They believed in love and found it hard to imagine sex without it. If they succumbed, it was in the expectation that marriage would follow.

  There were, of course, exceptions, who earned the disapproval of their more strait-laced peers. Pip Beck, a radio telephony officer at Waddington had little time for a colleague called Jane who was ‘a different type entirely’ from the other WAAFs. She had ‘short bleached-blond hair and eyebrows plucked to a thin line and pencilled black; deep blue eyes with black mascared lashes; eyes, as rapidly became evident, wise in the ways of men.’ It was her habit to bring her embroidery to the watch office and work on it on a quiet evening. She would spread her ‘hanks of coloured silk about the desk – and wait. Sooner or later an aircrew officer would appear, and Jane would add a stitch or two to her pattern and flash her blue eyes in his direction. After a brief word with the FCO [Flying Control Officer] – his excuse for the visit – he would slip into a chair beside her and chat for a while, then leave. This was followed by a discreet exit on Jane’s part – and no Jane for a while.’

  One night an exasperated senior officer had had enough. Pip was startled to hear a senior officer ‘say, in great indignation, “what does she think this is – a bloody knocking shop!” I hadn’t heard the expresssion before but was wary of asking what it meant. I had the glimmering of an idea.’27

  The best hope for those seeking casual sex lay with the ‘saloon bar sirens’ who frequented the pubs of Bomberland. Some were bruised women whose husbands were away at the war or dead or imprisoned. They offered the prospect of a few free drinks and some laughter and companionship. ‘A few of the ladies were pretty but most were just acceptably plain,’ Brian Frow wrote. ‘All were out for a good happy time with the chaps, whose days in most cases were numbered. Some did, some didn’t and many just teased.’28

  There was another category of females, much disapproved of by clean-living young men like George Hull, whom he came across in the pubs of Lincoln, ‘young girls of seventeen and eighteen, offering themselves for the price of a dance ticket or a glass of port.’29

  The desire not to die a virgin was very strong. Willie Lewis, despite many dates, had yet to lose his innocence when he was informed by a Canadian gunner that an ATS girl who Lewis had spotted him with in a Lincoln pub the previous night was ‘a certain bang’. When he ran into her a week later he decided to act. ‘Plump and slothful in her brown uniform she sat with a companion in the corner of the snug sipping a half-pint of bitter.’ Lewis’s target was called Betty. He complimented her on her hair even though it was ‘fuzzed about her ears in an untidy fashion’ and offered her and her friend Eva a drink – a short, he insisted, because he hated buying women beer.

  They accepted two gins. It turned out that Betty’s husband, like Willie, was a flight engineer. Fortunately he was thousands of miles away in India. As the small talk dwindled Lewis asked Betty if she wanted to fit in a dance at Bridgen’s dance-hall before it closed. According to his slightly fictionalized account, Betty was enthusiastic.

  “‘Yes,” she said. “I’d like a dance. You don’t mind, do you, Eva?”

  “‘You’re always doing this to me, Betty,” snapped the other girl. “This is the last time I’m going to come out with you.”

  ‘As soon as they got outside they started kissing. When they finally reached Bridgen’s it was full up. “What shall we do now?” she said. It was an idle question, answered as she spoke, for they had already started in the direction of the East Gate, and were under slow progress, kissing, and cuddling, every few yards, towards the town playing fields.’

  It was drizzling and the fields were sodden. They took refuge in an air-raid shelter. Lewis gallantly spread his coat on the dank concrete floor. After it was over they lay there ‘locked together, dozing, until the clock struck twelve in the main square.’

  He walked her back to her ATS billet where they hugged for a final time. “‘Wait here a moment, Willie,” Betty whispered. “I’ve got a photograph of my husband in my room. I’ll go and get it. It’s quite possible you might know him.”’

  Lewis was appalled at the thought. He hurried away before she returned. He knew he ought to feel ashamed. Instead the experience had ‘filled his thoughts with joy. “I am a man at last,” he said to himself. “I am a man at last.” And those words danced a pulsing, happy, feeling in his mind on the journey back to the ‘drome.’30

  This was perhaps not the most sophisticated introduction to sex. If you were in search of something more refined it was better to v
isit London. Jack Currie took advantage of a short leave to go there with his rear gunner, Charlie Lanham. They lunched at Australia House and took the train to Maidenhead where they stayed at Skindles on the river. The following day Currie played cricket for his old boys’ side, then they took the Metropolitan Line into town for an evening of fun. Lanham had laid on a couple of girls for the evening. The first came to meet them at their Sloane Square hotel. ‘She walked into the … bedroom, swinging her wide hips and her long, coarse hair. Lanham introduced us, and her soft, cool fingers rested in my hand. She raised her pencilled eyebrows and looked me up and down, still undulating slowly.

  “‘So you’re his skipper, that I’ve heard too much about. OK let’s see you skipper something, like a drink maybe?”

  “‘What will you have?”

  “‘A fainting fit if I don’t sit down soon. And Scotch on the rocks …”’

  This vampish repartee delighted Currie as Lanham was quick to notice. “‘What did I tell you Jack? Isn’t she a beaut? Come on, let’s hit the town.”’31

  It took considerable courage to flaunt sexual differences in this fiercely heterosexual society. ‘Rory’, a mid-upper gunner at Wickenby felt strong enough to do so, perhaps because his toughness was never in doubt. Currie described him as ‘neat and well-groomed, with a face like that of a contented cat. He spoke with a lisp and a lilting, feminine diction, and he used scented soaps and lotions.

  He occasionally dabbed his nose with a small, silk hankerchief. However he was well advanced on his second tour of operations, and he wore a DFM ribbon and a wound stripe, so his manner escaped the abuse which it might have otherwise attracted, in the aggressively masculine society in which he moved.’

  One night in the mess Rory was describing the damage a German bomb had done to the objets d’art in his London flat during the Blitz. Among the listeners were ‘several robust Australians whose aesthetic interests it would not be too harsh to term philistine, embracing as they did little beyond the world of sport and “Sheilas”.’

  Rory’s usual good humour collapsed under the weight of prolonged Australian mockery. He threw himself at his two biggest tormentors and had to be restrained. Peace was restored after the philistines apologized and Rory allowed them to buy him a gin and lime.32

  Gay airmen were more likely to keep their preferences to themselves and pretend to be heterosexual. Drink, though, had a way of dissolving the deception. Willie Lewis remembered an occasion when an American crew that had been rescued from the Channel after ditching spent the night with his squadron on their way home. ‘The three officers were made very welcome in the officers’ mess, and we stood shouting, and howling, through the usual list of nice songs, and then filthy ones, and back to nice ones again. And then the incredible happened. One of our chaps continued to keep holding the hands of one of the Americans. And yet I’d never thought he was a nancy boy before … The American was terribly distressed … We grabbed our man and took him back to his bedroom and said “Don’t come back.” And that was that.’33

  The British airmen may have had the good fortune to be fighting from their own country. But that was not the same as being at home. In Bomberland, the natives were not always friendly. Some of the locals resented the influx of airmen and women, and the disruption that they had brought in their wake. Farmers complained about the damage to their crops and disturbance to their flocks caused by the arrival of Bomber Command. This attitude was resented by the men who were risking their lives on their behalf. Returning to Wigsley from a night-time cross-country training flight Hull and his crew ‘got the wind under our port wing and and ran off the runway at a hell of a pace, passing the end of the runway lights at a fairly good speed and finally leaving through a vegetable field near a farmhouse to come to rest with about sixty yards of fencing wrapped around the fuselage. We were a bit shaken but soon hopped out. A few short minutes later out came the farmer and grumbled that we had made a mess of the vegetables. “Next time,” he said, “someone will hit the farm.” My God! The damn audacity. We could easily … have been seriously injured at least if the ‘plane had turned over, yet all he could think about was his measly cabbage patch.’

  This was not his first run-in with ungrateful civilians. ‘Yesterday evening,’ he wrote to Joan on 17 November 1943,

  we got a rare evening off and cycled into Lincoln … a garage attendant … as good as told me to get the hell out of the way while I was fixing a flickering rear lamp. The hate I’ve been storing up for the last fortnight came to the boil. I rather let rip with my opinion of Lincoln and his garage in particular … Admittedly we are a little boisterous in Lincoln on occasions – it’s a case of letting off steam or bursting – but I think a little toleration on the population’s part is required. Would you believe that in certain cafés the RAF are pointedly refused service when the place is crowded or civilians are waiting also? I’ve experienced it often, but rowing with the staff has little effect – they tell us we should only use the canteens.34

  The aircrews often had a fractious relationship with local policemen who seemed to take a perverse pleasure in picking on them for petty infringements of the blackout.

  For most of the British airmen, joining the RAF was their first experience of spending a long time away from home and when leave was granted, home was the first place they headed. The question of leave caused more frustration than almost any other aspect of RAF life. It was supposed to come every four weeks or after every six ops but the rules were often altered. It was granted, then snatched away, wrecking carefully-laid plans and nascent romances. When it finally arrived it was often disappointingly short. A ‘48’ in most cases left barely enough time to go anywhere given the snail’s pace of wartime transportation. When the opportunity to return to the world they left behind did come it was a strangely disconcerting experience. By the time they reached their squadrons they had spent around two years in a parallel society that duplicated many of the functions of family life. The small minority with wives and children could plunge into a brief, blissful respite of love-making and domesticity. For the rest, re-entering the past could be dislocating. The comforts and rhythms of civilian life seemed odd and the old, familiar faces seemed altered. They found themselves talking about comrades whom those at home had only read about in letters and places they had only heard of from the radio. The confusion wore off eventually, but usually just before the return to base loomed.

  The question they asked themselves, as they walked the familiar streets to their front doors, was how much to say of what they had seen and done. Granted a welcome seven days’ leave after completing eight ops, Harry Yates made his way from Wolverton station to his home in Stony Stratford and decided he would tell his mother nothing. ‘She would not have thanked me if, in the quiet of the evening when she was alone in the house, she had cause to ponder corkscrews and scarecrows, flaming onions and blue master beams.’ His father, however, was anxious for every detail, as were the regulars in the local pub, The Case is Altered. There, he discovered, he was a celebrity, not least for having flown low over the village, a ‘beat up’ in RAF parlance, on a couple of occasions to show off his piloting skills. The ‘regular clientele of crib and dart players and grizzled old characters who would nurse a pint of mild for an entire evening was a bit short on recent operational experience. They gave us no privacy or peace …’ They were proud of their local hero and bought him drinks all evening.35

  Bernard Dye left a laconic account of a six-day leave in February 1944, detailing the homely pleasures that after the dreadfulness of operational flying must have tasted as sweet as anything the peacetime world could offer. On Friday the eleventh he recorded he ‘had tea at Arnold’s with Trevor, Charlie and Jimmy. It was like old times.’ The next day he ‘went to the pictures with Mum, Dad and David. Went to the ATC social. Had a good time.’ On Monday he ‘had a good day in Yarmouth.’ On the fourteenth he ‘went to the pictures with Geoff and Grace.’

  Then it was back to Mi
ldenhall and stark reality. Four days after returning from leave and his crew were chalked up on the battle order for Stuttgart. ‘Navigator and bomb-aimer refuses to fly,’ he wrote. ‘We were all ready in the kite to take off. [They] were then put under armed escort & put into clink, expect it will mean a court-martial for them.’ The crew was subsequently reformed and posted to 622 Squadron at Lakenheath.36

  The overseas crews had no homes to go to. Some of them were taken under the wing of kindly locals or invited back to the families of their British colleagues. Others drifted to London where places like the Kangaroo Club offered homesick men a whiff of Australia or at least the chance to get drunk with different fellow-countrymen. The Canadians had the Beaver Club in Trafalgar Square. Ralph Wood would start his London leaves there before setting off to pubs like the Captain’s Cabin and a favourite RCAF watering-hole in Denman Street in the West End called the Crackers Club. Then there were afternoon dances at the Hammersmith Palais where ‘young girls were plentiful … too young to work, but not too young to dance.’ Nightlife for all servicemen was centred on Piccadilly Circus where ‘about the only civilians you could see were the prostitutes, and they were numerous. They were called the Piccadilly Commandoes.’37

  Leave was unsettling. The airmen were desperate to reconnect with the world they had left. Harry Yates, back home in Stony Stratford, took comfort in ‘discussing the (for me) entirely irrelevant goings on along the street or in McCorquodale’s print works or the church, the hostelries or any of the odd corners that blessed our town with its singular character and its sense of continuity.’ Coming home after the manic world of the bomber base was ‘like taking a four-weekly moral bath and I was ever sorry when the moment came to leave.’38

  Contact with home could induce a desperate nostalgia for a universe that, even if they survived, had gone, banished by the annihilation of innocence that went with their work. George Hull reminisced in a letter to Joan of departed bank holidays, ‘good old Hampstead on a Whit Monday, gay colourful caravans and sideshows with their bedlam of cries, steam organs and laughter. Brass bands murdering overtures in the distance, couples strolling arm-in-arm through leafy lanes, picnics in the woods with cold chicken salad and bananas and cream, tongue sandwiches with sliced, sugared tomatoes, honey and biscuits, flasks of tea and coffee. Good days taken so much for granted.’39