by Bruce Lewis
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.
Jack, exercising his right as the skipper, went to the office to glance through our new navigator’s records. He came back looking worried. ‘Do you know, boys, this chap is 27 years old!’ I think, more than anything, we felt a sense of pity that someone so advanced in years should be exposed to the perils of life in Bomber Command.
The following day was my birthday. I started celebrating early, when at 10 minutes past midnight, we began a series of circuits and bumps that went on for most of the night. At one stage we were following another Wellington round the circuit. As he came in to land the pilot must have misjudged his height, because he overshot and crashed beyond the runway. Almost immediately the aircraft burst into flames. As we flew over the funeral pyre, consuming five young men and an instructor, I thought how different this birthday was from any I had experienced before. In sensible OTU tradition, the flying exercises continued as if nothing had happened.
Next night our crew was rostered for our first cross-country in the dark. This was to be a trip where we would fly from one well-known location in Britain to another – Base, Conway, Douglas, Mull of Kintyre, South Rock, Land’s End, Bardsey Island and back to Base: that kind of thing – wonderful experience for the pilot, wireless operator and particularly the navigator. A veteran pilot was to fly with us, Warrant Officer Rothschild, and our Wimpey, A-Able, BK821, was brand new from the factory.
We took off at 1800 hours and climbed for height. We were soon in thick cloud that persisted for the rest of the trip. At 10,000 feet we set course on our first leg. I hoped that this exercise would establish a good working relationship between the navigator and myself. A forlorn hope. Every time Rothschild called the navigator over the intercom to ask for a position, the man gave a vague answer and told him to ‘hang on a bit’. I obtained a series of radio fixes and passed them to the navigator. On each occasion he would look at my figures, then screw up the paper and drop it on the floor. To my astonishment, after we had been flying for some time, he threw his instruments down on the chart with an air of resignation, pulled off his oxygen mask and lit a cigarette – a daft thing to do, fraught with danger in an aircraft reeking with petrol fumes and freshly applied dope. Desperately, I leaned forward, snatched it from his mouth and tweaked it out. After this he took no further interest in the proceedings, sitting as if mesmerised.
From my own estimates we had wandered east across England, at some point done a U-turn, and were now back in the vicinity of our own base near Stafford. By this time we were flying through an electrical storm which played havoc with radio reception. There was no response from Hixon to my urgent calls. Fortunately, I managed to make contact with the people at RAF Cranage [see Leslie Biddlecombe’s story], and when they gave us a useful radio bearing we were able to head straight for them.
As we entered the circuit and Jack got through to control on R/T, I went aft to wind in the trailing aerial. This was 300 feet of wire with a row of lead balls on the end – not an object to leave dangling when coming in to land. Having completed my task, for some unknown reason, I sat down on the deck with my back against the bulkhead and plugged in the intercom instead of returning to my radio position. We were on the point of landing when I realized things had gone wrong. Someone was yelling that the throttles had stuck – it seemed they had locked in a position that meant the aircraft was travelling too fast to land, but was left with insufficient power to overshoot and make another circuit. We were going to fly straight on into the unknown – into the darkness beyond the airfield.
Remembering the drill, I linked my hands behind my neck and braced my back against the bulkhead. A vivid image of a Wimpey being consumed by flames engulfed my mind. ‘This is it!’ I thought. There was no shadow of doubt that the end had come. Oddly, I had no feeling of fear, only a deep sense of sadness. I mourned for my poor parents who would tomorrow receive a telegram. I felt pity for myself – to die so soon after my 20th birthday, having achieved nothing in life. No chance to prove myself on ‘ops’. No chance to see if I could stand up to enemy fire as my Dad had done in that last Great War.
There were metallic grinding and crunching and tearing noises that went on for an eternity – but no human sounds. Then oblivion.
I first became aware of smells – petrol, dope and oil; but there was, too, the scent of something else that for the moment I was unable to identify. Lying there in the darkness, gradually recovering consciousness, it struck me that heaven was a strange place. It must have been some time before I gathered my wits sufficiently to realize I had not departed this world after all. Slowly getting to my feet I had no idea that the bomber had broken in half just to the rear of where I had been sitting.
Suddenly it struck me that the kite might explode at any moment. I had to get out as fast as possible. But my training made me pause. First it was essential to climb up front and remove the crystals from the TR9 R/T radio – we had been told that these pieces of equipment were particularly valuable and must never be left in the aircraft when it was on the ground. I unscrewed the retaining cover from the set and lifted them out. I also undipped an inspection lamp from its bracket and stuffed it into my battledress blouse. Then I climbed out of the ‘Wimpey’ and walked down the sloping starboard wing.
The crew was standing in a semi-circle as I approached. Someone shone a torch on me. There was an exclamation of horror: ‘My God! Poor old Bruce has been hurt!’ I put a hand to my head and felt sticky rivulets running down my face. ‘Blood!’ I thought, ‘I’m a hero!’
In fact it was not blood at all, and what had happened could hardly have been less heroic. Just opposite where I had been sitting when the aircraft crashed was the crew’s Elsan lavatory. This essential feature was attached to the deck with strong rubber bands. On impact the bands had broken, the steel-drum convenience had taken off, hit the roof, turned over and crashed down on to my head, knocking me out and covering me in its contents. Later, after we had been medically examined by Cranage’s MO, who was amazed that we did not have an injury between us, apart from the bump on my head, the rest of the crew retired to bed. But I had to stay up and endure several baths treated with a special stain remover. As I explained to my disbelieving companions the next day, because the aircraft was new, the contents of the Elsan were not what they would normally have been, but only a potent, creosote-like chemical.
When we inspected the route we had taken the previous night, we could hardly believe our eyes. Our plane had shot over a main road beyond the airfield’s boundary fence, flown through a gap between a copse of trees and a farmhouse, gone straight over a quarry half-full of water, hit a stone wall which tore off a wheel and one leg of the undercarriage, ploughed into a field and spun round and round breaking its back in the process. An engineering officer said it was probably this spinning, caused by only having one wheel, which had saved our lives.
‘Normally,’ he said, ‘on heavy impact the fuel is thrown forward over the hot engine nacelles, and the Wimpey goes up in flames. In this case, the petrol was flung clear because of your gyrations.’ I tore a foot-square piece from the aircraft’s tattered side and wrote on it: ‘The age of miracles is not dead. 7/11/43.’ That brittle piece of canvas, and the little copper inspection lamp, are still in my possession.
Jack noticed a long, low, modern-looking factory over to our right. ‘Lucky we missed that,’ he said. ‘What do they make there?’ The engineering officer looked at us with a quizzical expression. ‘You’ re not going to believe this,’ he said. ‘That’s a Wimpey repair factory!’
There was the usual inquiry, of course, and it was fortunate W/O Rothschild had been with us. His word carried more weight than that of a ‘sprog’ crew. Navigator No 2 disappeared from sight in no time at all. We sighed with relief when No 3 came along. Let’s call him Tim. He was a pleasant, fair haired 20-year-old of athletic build and, as we soon discovered, a ‘gen’ man at navigating accurately. 48 hours after our crash we were in the air again and feeling much happier.
I had a friend at Hixon. He was really old in years, yet vitally young in spirit. We called him ‘Carstairs’ because, with his drooping grey moustache he looked like a colonel in the Indian Army. He had told the RAF he was 38, the maximum age permitted to scrape in as an air gunner. We were convinced he was over 60! Whatever his age, unlike the rest of us, he had already ‘lived’. A fund of stories about big game hunting, fishing with the inventive genius Marconi in Cornwall, and taking glamorous ladies to dinner in Hollywood kept us enthralled.
‘Carstairs’ and I entertained the crews while waiting to fly. We played ‘snooker tournaments’. The table was imaginary, so were the cues, the balls, the chalk, even the score-board on the wall. We sustained this elaborate mime either until the match had been ‘won’, or we were called to our aircraft. The silent concentration of our audience was a great spur to our improvised performances.
One morning a few of us visited a barber in Stafford. ‘Carstairs’, who had been flying the previous night, fell deeply asleep in the chair. The proprietor managed to cut his hair without disturbing him, then asked us if the Sergeant might like his moustache trimmed. The magnificent grey growth was his pride and joy – he enjoyed demonstrating that when the drooping ends were pulled out horizontally, they could be seen either side of his head when viewed from behind.
The temptation was too great. We told the hairdresser that our friend had recently seen a film starring Clark Gable. He had much admired the actor’s ‘toothbrush’ moustache and intended having his own wild bush cut down to similar proportions. In fact this was the main purpose of his visit. We stressed that he must avoid waking him as he was very tired. The kindly barber snipped and snipped, and trimmed and trimmed, until there was only a slim shadow of bristle under his nose. As a finishing touch he applied a subtle shading of mascara to add emphasis to the masterpiece. We thought ‘Carstairs’ looked years younger.
At this point we left. Later, we learned there had been an ugly scene when ‘Carstairs’ woke up. Glimpsing his new image in the mirror, the old air gunner had gone berserk. Grabbing the poor barber, he threatened him with his own cut-throat razor and demanded immediate reparation. It was only when the man explained how he had carried out the work by ‘special request’ that our infuriated friend relented. As for the rest of us, we tended to move about in threes for some time after that incident.
According to his crew, ‘Carstairs’ hated wearing his helmet. Because of this, he would sometimes sit in his rear turret in a state of incommunicado, sucking his empty pipe. On one occasion they were obliged to land at a strange ‘drome to check their position. Having established where they were, they taxied to the end of the runway in preparation for take-off. ‘Carstairs’, believing they were back at base, reversed his turret and jumped out, making for the nearest hedge. He suffered a little from bladder trouble.
Having finished what he had to do, he was surprised to see his aircraft roaring down the runway and then climbing into the sky without him. Back at base we were all in a state of semi-shock, thinking that our old mate must have fallen out over the Irish Sea. We were immensely relieved when he turned up the next day having returned by rail. He had had no money on him, and when the train’s ticket collector came round, ‘Carstairs’ had to pretend he was one of our brave Polish allies, unable to speak a word of English. Friendly people in the compartment contributed towards his fare. He noticed, however, as the journey drew to an end, that a fellow passenger was eyeing him a little suspiciously. He was puzzled by this ‘Pole’s’ obvious absorption in an E
nglish copy of Reader’s Digest.
I salute ‘Carstairs’, and all the characters of Bomber Command, who made life fun in spite of it all.
There is no accounting for the ways of officialdom in times of war. It was mid-November, 1943. Men like Harold Chadwick were engaged in the Battle of Berlin. Losses were to mount all through the coming campaign. It seemed certain we would soon be rushed to a squadron to fill the ever-widening gaps. But not a bit of it. Having finished at OTU we did not fly again for the rest of November, or December, or January. It was the second week in February before we continued our training at 1667 Heavy Conversion Unit, at Lindholme.
Meanwhile, apart from generous doses of leave, we, as a crew, were sent to Dover on an ‘inter-services PR exercise’. This turned out to be a week on a destroyer, HMS Southdown, patrolling the Channel in rough winter seas. Being Sergeants, we took up quarters with our naval equivalents, the Petty Officers. The Ward Room had been made as un-ship-like as possible. It even had a non-functional fireplace complete with mantelpiece. Most of the POs looked old enough to be our grandfathers. It was just before the festive season, and they reminded me of a bunch of benevolent Father Christmases sitting around in long-johns, sewing teddy bears and dolls for youngsters back home. They were amiable men, showing us every hospitality and plying us with more than regulation quantities of rum. A memorable week, different from anything we had struck before. The on-duty aspect left us full of admiration for the way the Royal Navy went about its work. Even so, I came away content that I had chosen the air rather than the sea.