TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL HISTORY RECORDING

Accession number S00568

Title (408794) Charlwood, Donald Ernest Cameron (Flight Lieutenant)

Interviewer Bowden, Timothy Gibson (Tim)

Place made Melbourne VIC

Date made 11 April 1989

Description Donald Ernest Cameron Charlwood, 103 Squadron Bomber Command RAAF and RAF, interviewed by Tim Bowden for The Keith Murdoch Sound Archive of Australia in the War of 1939-45

Discussing reasons for joining Air Force; elitism of Air Force; Empire Air Training Scheme in Canada; training on Ansons; bombing and gunnery course at Lethbridge and astro-navigation course in Manitoba; assignment to Bomber Command; training casualties; crewing up process; crew camaraderie; squadron discipline; attributes of Lancasters over Halifaxes; crew superstitions; lack of moral fibre; charges; level of stress; role of Pathfinders; bomb loads; flight procedures; navigational duties; dangers of bombing run; evasive techniques; post-operational interrogation; relationships with WAAFs on base; morality of bombing civilian targets; medical care; value of saturation bombing.

DON CHARLWOOD Page 2 of 47

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Australian War Memorial GPO Box 345 CANBERRA ACT 2601 DON CHARLWOOD Page 3 of 47

TAPE 1, SIDE 1

Identification: This is an interview recorded with Don Charlwood, in Melbourne on 11th April, 1989. End of identification.

Don, can we begin with what might loosely be called some ... some personal background. Your ... did you consider yourself brought up in an upper-class, middle-class way or ...? Can one be ... (Laughter).

I really didn't give it much thought at all, but I think my father's family would like to have considered themselves slightly upper-class, they still had a lot of the English outlook and habits which had come over to him. My mother's family on the other hand were Scots, they were Camerons from around Glen Nevis. And her father was a ... was a blacksmith, but upwardly mobile, he ... he became a vet, and he employed quite a number of men. They didn't have any of the pretensions that my father's family had. But my father's family were very bookish, and had a marvellous collection of books, so that I think I derived something from both sides, Tim.

And you're a Melbourne boy?

Yes, I ... I was born in Hawthorn, but from the age of eight brought up in Frankston, which was my mother's old hometown, she was born there, and that's where her ... her father went in 1872. So I felt it a very familiar place when we went to it, and I thoroughly enjoyed my ... my boyhood there.

A happy boyhood?

A very happy boyhood. Except that at the end of it we ran into the depression, and I found trying to get a job a very tough business. My mother was intent upon my going out to try to beard Keith Murdoch in his den, on a Sunday of all days, at Langwarrin. I went out there three successive Sundays in a row, until at last I did get an interview with him. This was in an attempt to get onto a newspaper. But the best I could do was to get onto the waiting list of messenger boys, and instead of that I ended up going to a cousin's sheep property at Nareen, where years and years later Fraser lived. And I remained there until the outbreak of war, jackarooing. Or I think jackarooing is putting too good a name to it, I was just a farmhand there.

Well I think for a lot of young men at that time the war did offer some sort of an alternative, employment alternative if nothing else, but what were your motivations for joining up?

I had a detestation of war, and I ... I saw the approach of it all through the thirties with ... with ... really with horror. And when it came I think I was one of those who thought that - during the `phoney war' - that it might all be called off. But of course it ... it wasn't, and when France fell I was one of the many who had been thinking about it and wondering what to do. One of the many that then joined up at that time.

DON CHARLWOOD Page 4 of 47

And I went to the air force, really because my cousin up at Nareen wanted to go in as a pilot, and I ... I was interested in navigation, and I thought we could crew together. In point of fact he went to Coastal Command, I went to Bomber Command, so we only saw each other on leaves over there.

I think you wrote somewhere that you were a more unquestioning generation in those days, that ... that ...?

Yes. Yes, I'm sure we were an unquestioning generation. When I go back over our schoolbooks and school songs and so on, we did follow the precepts set out in the declaration, you know, `I love God and my country, I honour the flag, I serve the Queen' - or the King then - `and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers and the law.' We didn't really question very much at all.

Though at high school we had a very good history teacher who insisted we read leading articles in the paper and dissect them and so on. But even so we ... we knew what our duty was. We were a very dutiful generation, and very empire-conscious. And it ... it was quite unbelievable that ... that England could fail. (Coughs). Excuse me.

(5.00) Just do that whenever you want to, by the way.

Yes, yes.

You would have, as indeed your parents would have, and, to a certain extent, I did in my generation, called England home?

Well I never did, but my parents did. They ... they referred to England as home. Not that they really believed that it was home, Australia was certainly home, but it was just the habit that had been handed down from their parents.

So you didn't call it ...?

No, no, no, I didn't. I never heard anyone in my generation call it home. No.

Well thinking back on my own statement then, I mean I'm ... my parents' generation called it home, I perhaps thought of it ... I don't ever ...

Yes, yes, yes.

Just putting myself back ...

No.

I don't think I ever said that either.

No, no. No, my generation didn't.

But then again, there was the feeling that ... well what was the feeling that you had about England and Europe? DON CHARLWOOD Page 5 of 47

Well the feeling was, I think, that Australia was a kind of slightly inferior camp, and that things were properly done in ... in England, and that our ... their standards were much superior to ours in many, many fields. And of course at school we learnt so many ... so many English poems and studied so many English novels that I think that inculcated the same kind of attitude. But certainly we felt that, except in cricket and war, we were slightly inferior. We were the best in the world in cricket and war, but ... (laughs).

Did you choose the RAAF through a sense of ... did you feel you were joining an elite?

I saw ... (coughs) ... I saw the RAAF as an elite. So much so that I didn't think I'd be acceptable to them, and ... I was quite overlooking the fact that they'd be needing such vast numbers. And when my cousin and I went along for interview I thought it might end there, but I was surprised when we were sent on then for the medical examinations. And they lasted all day, and ...

Where were they?

They were held here in Melbourne, and there were long queues at the beginning of the day, everyone very keen, and I remember thinking, `What a first-rate lot of chaps', but the queues were whittled away, and whittled away, and by the end of the day those of us who got through were a relatively small group.

So I realised then that, yes, it was an elite and somehow or other I was one of them. I was quite surprised, all I had was the intermediate, but I found later that there were plenty without the intermediate there. Their education had been completely disrupted by the depression. And anyway it wasn't expected in those days by the parents of most of us that we go on to tertiary education. Even to go to a high school was something new in Frankston. A lot of people, the local people down there, thought that was too much education.

So you think it was probably your education that got you through?

I don't know. I suppose it must have been. That and a certain appearance of keenness. I don't know that I felt all that keen underneath, because I ... I think I saw the end from the beginning fairly clearly, the sort of thing that would perhaps come about, and I was very keen to get into Coastal Command, partly because my cousin was called up ahead of me, and that's where he went. Partly because they were ... their war was against U-boats, which was fair enough. I ... I had a repugnance about the bombing of civilians, and I could see that if I went to Bomber Command that would be it. I didn't really know much about the casualty rates, which would be the worse. Of course when I got to England I - or when I got to Canada - I found out what the odds were if you went to Bomber Command.

(10.00) We'll get back to that. So you find yourself on your way to Canada, when you hadn't even been to Sydney?

That's right. (Laughs and coughs). I'd never been ... yes. Yes, I had never so much as been to Sydney. I knew some people who had been, which was quite something in those days. (Laughs). I ... I volunteered for Canada, because my cousin had gone there ahead of me, and I DON CHARLWOOD Page 6 of 47 thought we still might ... I still might catch up to him and be able to crew together. But that didn't work out at all.

And we went over on ... we were the first troops, the first Australian troops, to go on a ship of neutral America. And when we got to Hawaii we were well looked after, but we were surprised to find that the people there who cared for us - they ... they drove us around and - that they were very concerned that they might be bombed by the Japanese. And we all compared notes when we got back to the ship, and we wrote this off as Yank panic, and we thought, `Well, if the Japs do do anything funny, we're okay in Australia, because we've got Singapore to look after us.' So we rather dismissed that from our minds and ...

What year ... what date approximately are we now?

That was September, '41.

So then onward to ... to the United States?

We ... we landed in ... in San Francisco. We were marched rather furtively through some of the back streets, and the people who did see us marching by clearly looked at us askance. They ... they didn't want to know about us, we represented a war that they didn't want to be involved in. And we were put onto a train, they called it a `sealed train', we weren't allowed off it, and ... and sent up to Vancouver.

Once we were in Canada it was a very different matter, the people were absolutely marvellous, took us into their homes. In fact the very first day I was in Canada, my flying partner - we were ... we were split up for navigational training into pairs - my flying partner, a twenty-year old, much younger than I was, he ...

You were ...? Then, you were ...?

I was then twenty-five, was I? Just let me think. I had just turned twenty-six. And he was ... he was twenty, so that he looked on me as a fatherly figure, all the way ... all the way through. But he was brilliant, and later became commissioned, whereas I only just scraped through the course.

But on this first day he happened to be passing a telephone that was being answered by an officer, and the officer said, `Hey, Aussie, I've got a lady here who wants two of you guys to come out to supper.' We didn't know what supper was, we wondered if we ought to eat first. And anyway we ... we went out and found this place, and they lived in an upstairs apartment, and I looked up and I saw a girl looking over the banister, and I thought, `There's the girl I'm going to marry.'

Really? Just like that?

And that's her you met ... (laughs) ... met a while ago. That's right. It just hit me, and I thought, `Well that's absurd', and my ... I did quite well on that course, until things became pretty serious with that girl, and ... and I was bottom of the course after that. And I was spending much more time when we left Edmonton writing to her than attending my studies. So I was really pretty fortunate to ... to get through the course. DON CHARLWOOD Page 7 of 47

But that's an extraordinary thing, that flash you ... you ...

It was. It was extraordinary, but it's lent more point by the fact that when we eventually married, which was a ... an amazing thing in itself - I didn't think I'd ever get back then, the chain of events that got me back there was amazing - we came out to Australia, and Nell's mother was a Melbourne woman who had married a Canadian, she was a Melbourne nurse. And we found that our grandfathers had been friends in Melbourne in the '60s. And our great-grandfathers had been in business on opposite sides of Bourke Street in ... in the '50s, so they undoubtedly would have known each other.

I'm sure parapsychologists would make much of that.

(Laughs). I've never known what to make of it, but that's the way it worked out.

Getting back to training though, I think the figures on training are rather awful. The RAAF suffered, I think, 2832 major casualties, meaning ...

Yes, yes.

... terminal casualties ...

That's right. Now ...

(15.00) ... during training.

Yes, but not in ... not in Canada. What the casualties were in Canada I don't know, but our course didn't lose anyone, and I didn't see anyone lost. The ... all our pilots on our navigation exercises were the famous Canadian bush pilots, and they were first-rate men, they knew the country very well. It's a very stable climate, you can have white-outs with ... in the winter- time, but it was most unlike the flying conditions in ... in England.

Now, yes, in England the casualty rate was appalling.

Well I'll ... we'll move onto that in a ... in a moment.

Yes.

Because I was not quite ... fully aware of just where that ...

Yes, yes.

When you think about it of course, it was the multi-engine stuff, and training in England.

That's right, that's right.

DON CHARLWOOD Page 8 of 47

Well we'll get back to that, but just before ... before we leave Canada. So you were training ... what sort of aircraft were you training on?

On old Ansons in Canada. And then, when we left Edmonton, we did a bombing and gunnery course at Lethbridge, and we were on pretty badly worn out Fairey Battles. They used to say you could see the bulletholes in them from the Battle of France, but I ... I don't think it was quite as bad as that, but it was ... they were really not much chop.

And then we went back to Ansons, at a place called Rivers in Manitoba, a very isolated place, where we did our astro-navigation. And again these were flown by pretty experienced pilots. So by and large the training in Canada was pretty safe.

By this stage you're not grouping into future crews?

No. No. In Canada, at Edmonton all our training was done in pairs, and we resumed those pairs in Rivers for our astro-navigation. At the bombing and gunnery school we used to go up two at a time, but they could be two different fellows from the course, and our ... our course came to know each other very, very well. Any esprit de corps was between that group, and we were like members of a family who would all go out and marry into ... into crews, but you would always feel very much for that course that you trained with, and constantly be asking, `How's so and so going, is he through his ops, or has he got the chop, or ...?' It was a very familyish kind of feeling with that group.

You wrote of the ... `the twenty men', are they the ones you mean?

That's right. Yes, they were the twenty men, yes, yes.

And you kept in ... in contact as much as you could?

As much as possible I kept in contact with them, but then they ... most of them were killed fairly early on, and I kept hoping against hope that men like Max Bryant, my flying partner, Johnnie Gordon, a marvellous fellow, schoolteacher in New South Wales, I was hoping against hope he'd get through, and particularly a fellow named George Loder, who hadn't wanted to come on our contingent on the Monterey, because his wife was pregnant. And he finally ... he was an outstanding fellow, finally went to the Pathfinder force, and had to do a minimum of forty-five operations, which mathematically was almost impossible, and he was lost on his forty-fifth. And he never saw his daughter. She is Elizabeth Webbie, who is quite well-known at Sydney University. I think she's a professor, or under-professor, in Australian literature. And he never knew her, never saw her, she received his DFC.

Of the twenty men, how many made it?

Five made it. If you look at the larger group, there were about twenty-five of us, and the figures are really worse for that twenty-five. Some were put back a course. We had what they called a `scrub test', and some were put back a course, and they went on and were lost. But, of the men I knew best, those twenty men, I think five of us survived. One fellow did ninety-six operations, though most of them ... sixty-six he did on Mosquitos, which had a much lower loss rate. One did seventy-six ... seventy ... seventy-seven on Lancasters, which was pretty phenomenal. One did fifty. One was a prisoner-of-war. And I did thirty. DON CHARLWOOD Page 9 of 47

(20.00) So of the twenty-five then, how many lived through it?

Of the twenty-five, five of us.

Not good odds.

No, no.

But, at the time, did you know you were going to Bomber Command at that stage?

No, I didn't, no, I didn't know. I hoped all the way along I'd go to Coastal Command. In Edmonton I heard that the course the year ahead of us, there were two men left alive. That's when I first realised the odds. And when I got to England, because my cousin was on Coastal Command, I put in a plea to be sent to Coastal Command, and was in fact listed to go to Coastal Command, and someone became ill and I had to take his place, and go into Bomber Command. And, yes, I ... so I certainly knew the odds.

What did you think about that? I mean when you ... when you were posted to Bomber Command, were you thinking positively?

At first ... at first I was thinking negatively I think, that there's no hope in this. I think I must admit that. And then I ... I became much more philosophical about it, and I think I learnt to ... to live a day at a time, and I somehow had the feeling that things would be alright.

Now in saying that I don't mean that I thought I would survive. I ... I don't want to philosophise too much on this, but I was in, briefly in, not in hospital, in the sick quarters at Lichfield when we were training, and there were bad losses going on at that time, though not among our own men, on courses ahead of us there were bad losses. Those were the losses you were talking about earlier. And while I was in sick quarters, I had a kind of conviction, which I expressed in No Moon Tonight as `when all is known, all will be well.' I don't know that I can put any other words to it.

A girl once said to you, `I know you'll survive.'

Yes, I ... I was fairly well on with the tour when that happened, yes. And Geoff, my pilot, Geoff Maddern, he ... he had a similar conviction, that he was going to come through. But a few shaky occasions and you were apt to forget that.

There were some remarkable people. Arthur Doubleday in Sydney, who became a wing- commander, the only Australian to command a ... an RAF squadron. He just regarded life as a bonus, he wrote himself off from the beginning. And ... and this is apparently what some of the ... the outstanding men did. Micky Martin, I believe, had the attitude that the worst enemy was hope. The worst enemy of morale was hope. That you had to write yourself off as it were, and then take it a day at a time. Now that was completely beyond me to do that. I ... I think I was older than most, and I was at the age when men are looking forward to ... to marrying, and I'd met someone I wanted to marry. I wanted to live very much. And I think most of those around me had a similar attitude. I don't think too many of them could write DON CHARLWOOD Page 10 of 47 themselves off. It was a remarkable thing to be able to do, but I don't think many, really, could do that.

Well we'll come back to that, but getting back to the ... to the training, and the ... I think the statistics that I have are for the RAAF alone, I think it's 5000 in Bomber Command, wasn't it?

Lost? Yes, yes.

In training!

I think that's high for training, I'm not ... I do have the figures somewhere, but ...

I mean for everybody, the British and the Australians alike?

Oh yes, oh yes. Oh there'd be more than that I think. Yes, yes. I thought you were quoting Australian figures.

(25.00) So what was ... what was happening?

Well we came from Australia, Canada, Rhodesia, and crewed up in Britain. Now we crewed up as five individuals, we weren't crews, we were just somewhat bewildered individuals learning to become crews. We came from very ... from countries with very clear skies, wide distances, to a very smoky, close-packed country, with crowded skies, and we were desperately inexperienced. And one didn't have to stray very far before you were over enemy territory anyway. So, given all those circumstances, plus the fact that the planes on which we were training were worn out - they were all that Britain could afford at the time, we trained on Wellington 1Cs, with wooden air-screws, and we actually did our first operations on those - and, if you take all of those circumstances, it's no wonder the casualty rate was so high.

What of the instructors, what ... talk a bit about them.

Well the instructors, in one respect they were outstanding. They were outstanding in that they could pass to us their remarkable, I suppose you'd say morale. In fact, in retrospect, I think they were high on their own adrenalin. They had been through a tour of ops and survived. Now when you get toward the end of a tour of ops you're on top of the world. You mightn't get through, but the odds are you will get through. And when you suddenly stop, you complete your thirty ops, you suddenly stop, you ... you have the feeling you must go on, that it's been just exhilarating. And so it was exhilarating at that stage. But so many who were led by that exhilaration and went on were later lost.

Now the instructors were a group of men who were tremendous enthusiasts for getting back to the squadron. Getting away from instructing. Nevertheless they ... on the whole they were quite good instructors, and they did inculcate this great verve for the squadron life. And we came ... although we were pretty chauvinistic Australians, we came to admire these mostly RAF men tremendously. They were very ... they had great ... great flair, and were very laid back about the whole thing, yet enthusiastic at the same time. So that I thought they were very good instructors in that respect.

DON CHARLWOOD Page 11 of 47

But time and again I did observe that some of them were more frightened flying with us than they would have been back on operations. (Laughs). Now I could hardly blame them, when I later on became one of them myself, it really was almost as dangerous as being on operations. It was supposed to be a rest.

[Recording ends on Side One of Tape One, Don Charlwood]

Tape 1, Side B

Just continuing with the dangers of the training.

Yes, these old Wellington, or Wimpeys, as we called them, Wimpey 1C's, I remember one of our West Australian pilots - we were with ... all our pilots were from the West - and this chap, Ted Lang, came back after a flight, and he was shaking his head, he said, `We were somewhere near Chester, and there was a helluva ... a noise', and he ... he said, `I looked out and the starboard prop had gone, and', he said, `my mouth fell open, and', he said, `the screen', - they used to call them screen pilots, they screened you, they kept you from gross errors, that was the idea, the instructor in other words - he said, `the instructor', - a chap, a Welshman, named Puggie Pugh - he said, `he looked out and he said to me, "I say old boy, I believe we've lost a prop."' (Laughs). And just neatly put ... put the aircraft down and that was that. So it was that sort of sang-froid that really rubbed off on us after ... after a while. And ...

How many props did it have anyway?

They only had two, yes. (Laughs.) Yes. And they wouldn't have got very far on one.

I saw one take off with an instructor on board one night, and it ran into a flock of birds of some sort, and one air screw shattered, and it wallowed round in a circuit, and they crash- landed it, and they all ... they all got out of that one.

But they ... they did burn very badly. They were made of geodetic construction, with ... they were designed by Barnes Wallis, but they burnt very badly. There was a magnesium alloy in this criss-cross geodetic construction, so that the men were trapped inside a ... like a burning basket in a way. And getting out of them was quite terrible. A lot ... a lot of fellows never ... never did get out.

Our worst experience was when we went on one of them to a raid on ... on Bremen. They certainly weren't fit to take for that. And one of the Western Australian pilots taking off somewhere behind us - we didn't learn about it until we got back - lost an engine on take-off with a full bombload, and he crashed and everyone was killed. That was the first of the twenty men went in that aircraft. But it wasn't really fit to take, I don't know what went wrong, why ... why the engine cut. And they put a guard on the wreckage that night, and it was glowing hot, and these chaps tended to move in for the warmth, it was so very cold, and more of the bombs blew up, and it took four of the guards as well.

How did you ... did your group do in terms of casualties during training, better or worse than others?

DON CHARLWOOD Page 12 of 47

We did ... we did much better. We ... until we lost one man on the crash taking off for operations to Bremen, we didn't lose anybody.

Was that, in a sense, a training trip?

That, yes, that ... that marked the end of your training one way or the other. (Laughs). They were what were called on the Operational Training Unit `flaps', because everyone flapped about and ... for a day or two before, until the day after. Because the ... the Operational Training Units weren't really geared up for carrying out raids. This was something that Butch Harris - or Bomber Harris as he's more politely called - that he brought about, they started off as thousand bomber raids, the first being to Cologne. But they kept on after that, using the Operational Training Unit crews. That was the last part of your training, in a word, a sort of a graduating thrust. (Laughs).

(5.00) I guess that one's engraved fairly well in your memory?

Yes, yes, yes. You felt that if you could survive that you could survive almost anything.

Just going back a bit to talk about the way crews were chosen, because that's quite interesting?

Yes, now I can only say how choose ... crews were chosen at Lichfield, which was the main Australian training unit. You were left to your own devices. You were all told that you must form into crews of five - later on two more men were added for the four-engine bomber crews. And there was a tendency for - in our case anyway - for the navigators to take the lead. And I noticed that the most promising looking West Australian pilot was very quickly snapped up by one of the fellows on our course, whom I regarded as a very mature fellow, a school teacher, and I thought, `If anyone's going to get through, this pair will get through.' But at the same time I felt that the ... it was beyond all human forecasting or prediction to ... to be able to say with any degree of certainty who was likely to get through. And I held back. I was also holding back, because I ... I still hoped to get to Coastal Command, I was still considering my case with Coastal Command.

There was a pilot who had the same feelings as I had, that you just couldn't predict who was going to be a good navigator and so on, which really hinged a great deal on this pair. And so in the end everyone had crewed up and we were left. And of all those pilots he was the only one to come through. So that in a sense it was left to chance with us.

But the system designed it that way, presumably? The sort of osmosis, that people who felt that they could work together sort of gravitated together?

Yes, that's right, yes. I would ... I would never have chosen Geoff Maddern, because we were very different types. He ... he was pugnacious, stood up for his rights. I tended much more to tow the line. I was rather bookish, and a bit introverted. And yet we crewed marvellously well.

And, once we had decided to fly together, we then set about getting the others. And I often look back on ... on that time, and on all those outstanding fellows, who went for the man who ... who looked best ... DON CHARLWOOD Page 13 of 47

One of them, a very good friend of mine, Harry Wright, he selected a young twenty-year old, Sid Cook. Now Sid Cook was a fellow who went from sergeant to squadron-leader in six weeks. Partly because he was very capable, partly because of loss rates. But it's a strange thing, I ... I used to say to Harry, `No wonder ... no matter what blunders you commit, you'll get through. It's a pushover for you.' I just had that intuitive feelings, he was one of those fellows. And I ... I didn't feel ...

And did he?

He did. He did seventy-eight.

But I didn't have that feeling about Sid. And it was a very strange thing. They did fifty-two together. Harry was sent off to sick quarters with some minor thing, and without him Sid went that next night, on the eve of his twenty-second birthday I think it was. He was ... he was lost with all ... all his crew. So he was ... but Sid Cook was one of that group of pilots and none ... only Geoff Maddern came through from that group.

(10.00) Getting back to picking your own crew, so you and Geoff, who sought each other ... who sought who out?

Well, as I remember it, I was just coming out of a toilet and he was just going in, and he said, `You flying with anyone?', I said, `No', he said, `What about flying together?', I said, `Okay.' And that was it. (Laughs).

And that was a ... that was a marriage. I mean you ... it was very much until death us do part. You were taking on ... well you were taking on a much greater risk than marriage, and you had to be utterly loyal to each other, and we were. And as a crew you all became very, very close. And then came the moment, if you did get through thirty operations, there came the moment when you were closest of all on your last operation, next day you were all scattered. And you could hardly believe it. And all you wanted to do was to get back together again.

Was it difficult to choose the other members of your crew, or did that just happen?

Well Geoff and I chose one or two each. He chose our rear-gunner, and he was an absolute gem, our rear-gunner, and I chose our ... our bomb-aimer, who was completely unflappable, a bit ... Geoff used to say to him, `Don't be so bloody specific', when he was pinpointing, try to ... trying to spot where we were from the nose of the aircraft. But the main thing was he was unflappable. In fact as a crew they were very, very steady. Mid upper-gunner we didn't get until we got to the squadron.

Our wireless operator I think I selected, and he was a mistake. He ... like a lot of wireless operators, his great disappointment was that he hadn't become a pilot, and he ... he was just uncooperative. Now he ... he had a great deal of courage, and on about our fifth operation he was badly wounded in the arm, not ... not badly wounded anywhere else, it was just the arm and a few minor scratches, but he lost a lot of the muscle in his arm, and his morse arm, and consequently we lost him as a wireless operator, and we got another fellow, an RAF chap on his second tour of operations, who was already decorated. A sergeant. And he was first-rate. DON CHARLWOOD Page 14 of 47

And the fellow who had lost the muscle from his arm, he fitted himself to get back again, and he was lost with another crew. We came to admire him very much, but he just couldn't settle to ... down to being a cooperative wireless operator with ... with us. I think that night probably taught him a great deal, but sadly he then ... he then was lost.

This didn't happen in your case, although you had one crew member, who, although he was doing his job, there were other aspects of his personality that ... that weren't fitting in. What about a situation, and you must have known this in other crews, where somebody was actually not performing up to ... ?

Yes.

What did you do about that?

Well we ... we had an in-between wireless operator, after we lost our first one and before we got our ... our final one, we had a flying officer, an RAF flying officer, who very clearly looked down his nose at our all sergeant crew, and was trying to even give us orders. Well Geoff Maddern took orders from ... from practically no one. (Laughs). He just went to the squadron-leader, said, `I want to get rid of this man', and get rid of him we did.

But then, by contrast with that, Max Bryant's crew - Max Bryant was my flying partner - and he ... Max was the only officer in his crew, and this is the disadvantage of being commissioned, or of having different ranks in the one crew. They had an unsatisfactory bomb-aimer, and Max and the pilot thought they ought to change him for someone else, he was uncooperative, lazy. And it tended to be left to Max, because he was the commissioned officer in the crew. Now that's not the way it ought to have been at all, with ... with Geoff that wouldn't have been the case, he wouldn't have given a damn who was commissioned in the crew, he was the captain of the crew.

(15.00) Max did eventually get backing from his pilot, but the attitude in their case was, `Oh just try him a bit longer, he might come good.' And this process went on, `Oh look try him a bit longer', until the knot of ... bonding him to the crew was so tight that it was very difficult to undo it. And although they'd ... they'd spoken to him of their intention, that they'd have to drop him, the end result was he was just more unhappy, less cooperative, and they went on into operations, not only into operations, they went on to the Pathfinder force, still with that chap, and he was still a problem right ... right to the end. And they ... they never got a change. I regarded that as the fact that Max was not experienced enough of life, and his pilot wasn't forceful enough. They ought to have got rid of him.

Fairly quaint situation, that business of having a sergeant pilot perhaps, and a ... and a navigator who was a commissioned officer. I gather that it came out DON CHARLWOOD Page 15 of 47

of the course, it was dependent on how well you did in the course, whether you ... you were commissioned or not?

Yes, they ... they commissioned in Canada, I think it was about a fifth, something like a fifth, and they did it all on top marks. There was no inclination, as there was, I believe, in Australia, to be ... be led by social considerations, what school you went to, who ... who you knew and so on. I believe that crept in in Australia. It was very democratic in Canada. But I must say that some of the chaps who were commissioned tended to be scallywags who were by no means officers and gentlemen in the English way of thinking of things. And I think the whole thing was folly, I think everyone should have been of the same rank.

But of course while ...

Either commissioned, or non-commissioned.

... while in the air, the pilot's the boss, isn't he, I mean?

That's right. Though we had this ... this flying officer who had done over forty operations, so he was no slouch, we had him telling us one night, when we'd had to turn back from a target, he was telling us where we should now drop our bomb. Well Geoff just put him in his box straight away, he wasn't going to accept that. But a lot of young pilots might have been over- awed by ... by the bit of rank that he had.

Was this also an element of an English colonial mentality as well, or ...?

With him it was. We didn't run into much of that though on operations. Some of the wing- commanders certainly had that attitude. And of course higher up the ... the tree in England I think that was quite ... quite the case, that they regarded us as ... as colonials. But not the men who were on ops together.

Do you think that the dominion aircrews in any sense carried an unfair burden? You know what I'm getting at, obviously?

Yes, yes. No, I don't really. You see it ... perhaps you could specify what you mean by ...?

Alright, I will. It seems to me that if you have troops ... if a country has troops of its own, the worst thing it can do is to put them under the control of somebody ... of some other nation's leaders, because immediately they'll thrown them into the meatgrinder, you know, perhaps ahead of their own. I mean that ... that ...

Now those thrown into the meatgrinder were mainly RAF people. There was no differentiation. It's ... it can be said, however, that ... it is often claimed that Australia and Canada should have had much more control over their own men, and that we were pretty much at the mercy of the RAF and where they wanted us to go. But I think it's got to be borne in mind that Britain was really up against it. And the main purpose of war is to defeat the enemy, and they were using up our men and their men, quite impartially, but throwing us all in to the ... an appalling meatgrinder. DON CHARLWOOD Page 16 of 47

But it wasn't like troops in the field, the shocktroops, the ... the first AIF being used up, and the Canadians too, in the breakthrough of the German lines and all that kind of thing. It couldn't be. The ... the Bomber Command war didn't lend itself to that sort of thing. After all, ours was a mixed crew, and there were lots and lots of mixed crews where you'd get Norwegians and Frenchmen and Dutchmen and Australians and Canadians all in together.

(20.00) The Canadians ... the Canadian government attitude was much better than our government attitude, in that they did insist on having more control over their men, and in the end they got their own group. Now the ... I don't think the Brits much liked this, they ... they thought that they would be forming a separate air force, somewhat like the USAF, but in fact it didn't work out that way at all. They were very loyal.

Would you have rather been in an all-Australian group, do you think, or didn't you mind?

No, I would definitely not have. I found the RAAF petty, compared with the RAF. The RAF were ... at our level, was very democratic. The RAAF I thought were much more inclined to be petty. And I think it was very broadening to get into ... get onto a mixed squadron. Mind you they were all mixed, in that even on squadrons like 460, the main Australian squadron, and some of the other 46 squadrons, the crews had to be mixed, the engineers were mostly RAF, and very few crews were all Australian.

But I think it was a very broadening experience, when you were serving on a squadron of many different nationalities, to realise that Australia alone didn't produce all the brave men, or New Zealand either, that every nation had its quota of courageous men, and I think that was an inspiring aspect of being on a mixed squadron. Some of the men I admired most were RCAF, and RAF especially, some of the fellows who'd been in the RAF for a long time and had come through so much, they were ... they were superb.

Okay, it works okay then, at that level?

Yes.

Do I gather that at senior levels they had toffee-nosed attitudes about Australians or something?

Yes, some of the ... some of the senior people did, and they couldn't accept our attitudes toward discipline. But I felt that aircrew discipline was very easygoing anyway. You got your snags in the upper echelon, but if you saw our daily parade you wouldn't mistake us for the Coldstream Guards. Now that didn't just go for Australians, that went for the whole ... whole lot. We always looked ... looking over our daily parade, I thought, `Well all these chaps look as if they're here under sufferance', but you put them in the air and their self-discipline was splendid. They were remarkable when they got in their group of seven on ops, but just to see them on the parade-ground, they weren't parade-ground stuff at all.

But there you have ... I mean what about one member of the crew, say the navigator, who's a commissioned officer, and the rest are sergeants, does that mean they can't go into the same mess? DON CHARLWOOD Page 17 of 47

It does. It does. And that ... that was a great mistake, that should never have been allowed to have come about, and the RCAF put up very strong objections to that, but unfortunately didn't win. But then they began commissioning a much higher quota of their crews, and the RAF were ... were aghast at ... at this. But Australia never backed us up in the way that the Canadians were backed up by their government. Mind you, I dare say the RA ... RAAF had its hands full with the Pacific war.

But you did have this absurd social situation, where ... ?

Oh utterly.

... crews were split?

Absoulutely absurd. And it split up friends. Max Bryant and I, he ... he would go to the officers' mess, and I to the sergeants' mess. But Geoff Maddern, my pilot, was intent upon having an all-sergeant crew, so that we'd be together all the time. And I'm very glad that that's the way it was.

Talking of discipline and service life and so on, what were the niceties? When I say the niceties, I mean did you run into people who were pettifogging about how one ... how you were supposed to behave to officers and vice versa?

Not on a squadron. In ... in training you sometimes ran against that kind of thing. Men who were fussy about saluting and so on. [Break in recording].

(25.00) Slight canine interruption there. (Laughter). But talking about the way in which discipline was observed on the station?

Yes, discipline on a squadron, or on our squadron anyway, was pretty casual. There was an attempt to enforce parades, and Geoff Maddern I remember was on a charge for not having been on parade for some considerable time. But by and large things were pretty easygoing, as long as you were there to fly in the evening. But in training command they insisted on a bit more discipline. But even there I didn't ... I didn't think it overbearing in any ... any way. I didn't find it hard to take. And one or two of those who were unpleasant weren't ... not all of them were RAF people. One of the most obnoxious, I remember, was a South African. So by and large I didn't ... I didn't find it ...

So commonsense broke through I suppose?

Yes. Well the fact of the matter was that the men began to realise what the chances of survival were, and what could you threaten them with? Certainly there were some pretty ugly corrective institutions, the `glasshouse' and so on. But I don't know too much about them, men were spirited away to them, after particularly bad blacks, but - you know, the term `black', you know, just `putting up a black'. But for the rank and file of the fellows I think it was a very casual sort of life, but then of course once you got into the air it was anything but casual. You were depended upon to have your own self-discipline and cohesiveness as a crew.

DON CHARLWOOD Page 18 of 47

The ... excuse me. In your book, Don, you talk about the importance of the first five missions, as a kind of blooding or settling down?

Yes, I think for about five you were particularly vulnerable. You were not really a crew. You had trained together, but the last two members of your crew you'd only gained a few weeks earlier. That is your flight engineer who worked very closely with the pilot, and your mid- upper gunner. You'd only had a limited time as a seven man crew, and you had never operated together. You had to learn on the job as it were, learn in the real ... the real thing. And you were in a job in which even efficient crews were being knocked off, and there was very little hope for inefficient crews. You had to learn extreme watchfulness, the gunners, particularly the gunners, the paths. The navigator had to learn to concentrate on his ... his chartwork, to the exclusion of all else. I mean if a ... if the navigator started to go out and watch the target coming up, he was likely to get himself excited and give a wrong course home or something like that. That ... we were warned that that had happened in some cases, and people had ended up in the Ruhr instead of on the ... coming home.

I think you quote a case, don't you, on one of those early trips, where the pilot got a bit excited about you, and you had to pull your plug out and ...?

That's right, yes, yes. The ... the navigator, if they thought things were going wrong, that ... to all appearances outwardly that you weren't ... the plane wasn't where it ought to have been, they all started asking the navigator, making observations, saying, `There doesn't seem to be anyone else around here', and `There's not a sign of the target', and ... or, `The Pathfinder marker flares haven't gone down.' It was very disturbing when you're trying to work accurately on a chart. And one of the old-time instructors, Taffy Davis, said to us, `Just pull out your microphone plug.' (Laughs). And ... or your headset plug, and so ... well that's your microphone as well, just pull them out. So I did that, and in the silence I was then able to regain confidence. Then all of a sudden they say, `Well there go the flares', and you think, `Well you bastards', you know, (laughs), `you've demoralised me and ...'. (Laughs.)

And this was an early trip, though, you're talking about?

Yes. Well that was apt to go on well into the tour. I've just been reading in Geoff Maddern's diary where I apparently called him for everything, because I was working very hard.

Sorry, I'm going to have stop you, we're about to run out ...

[Recording ends on Side Two of Tape One, Don Charlwood]. Identification: Tape Two, with Don Charlwood, recorded on 11th April, 1989.

Don, if you wouldn't mind picking up that story again, we were talking about tensions that can develop between pilot and navigator, and I said, `Was that in the early stages?'

There ... there were ensions all the way through, in that the pilot, who had a good view of what was happening outside, could gain the impression that you weren't where you were supposed to be, and was apt to begin making demands of the navigator, and the navigator in turn would be trying to work accurately from his chart.

DON CHARLWOOD Page 19 of 47

I had a ... a fairly minor experience of this, coming home from Dusseldorf with Geoff Maddern, and all the way, on all our operations, he would corkscrew. That is, it's an evasive technique, he would fly round and round the course that I gave him. Under it, over it, and try to average out the course.

And that used to make me feel pretty sick at times, and on this particular night my oxygen became disconnected, the bayonet-type clip caught on the edge of the navigator's table and became undone. And when I found the trouble I ... I was left with quite a headache into the bargain. And Geoff was really pestering me, and I see in his ... his diary about that night, he said, `Don tore me off a glorious strip. He said we'd make landfall down in Norfolk. I hounded him about a convoy down that way' - and the convoys used to fire on us mercilessly. `He was up to his eyes in work, turned on me and said, "You fucking bastard, what do you think I'm doing? I'm going South to dodge the fucking things." I was dumbfounded. He's usually so quiet. Trouble was, we were going so fast that it was all he could do to keep up with the machine.' So no wonder I blew up.

But still the ... the degree of confidence that the ... that the skipper and the navigator, they'd have to ... they'd have to ...

Oh yes, yes, we did have a great deal of confidence in each other, and even all these years later it's ... it's warmed my heart to read Geoff's diary - I didn't read it for forty years - to see just how confident in me he was. And he's read ... well he hasn't read mine yet. I'm going to send ... send it to him, because I ... I had great faith in ... in him.

Were you as confident about yourself in the early days?

No, I wasn't. He had more confidence in me than I ... (laughs), I had in myself. And I think if I had known that I had that confidence it would have added to my own.

But after about ... I suppose after about ten ops I was ... I was confident then. I was never over-confident. You could have it shattered in a ... in a night.

I think you do describe one ... one incident where, for whatever reason you couldn't - I think it was Northern Europe somewhere - that you couldn't work out whether you were heading back to England or where you were.

That's right. And it's only recently that I've worked out what happened. We were on a minelaying operation up in Danish waters, on the East coast of Denmark. And we had to make a low-level approach to ... to drop our mines. Now we ran into misty conditions, it was low cloud and a lot of islands, and it was pretty well impossible to differentiate between islands and clouds. And we were searching around, with no lights of any sort of course on the ground to guide us, we were searching around for our gardening area - they used to call mining `gardening', and you sowed your `vegetables.' And the fact of the matter is we were uncertain where we sowed those `vegetables', they went into the sea alright, but just where they're not ... we're not too sure.

(5.00) I took them to the ... to the area. Well then it was up to the ... the bomb-aimer and the pilot to identify below just where the things should be dropped. And this ... this wasn't possible to do. The consequence of that was, not being certain of our spot, we weren't certain DON CHARLWOOD Page 20 of 47 of our departure point heading back to England. And I realise now we must have been well south of where we were supposed to have been. And, as a result, we ran into Esbjaerg on the ... on the way home.

Now we didn't know where it was, we worked out later on that it was Esbjaerg. And we were caught very low indeed. In fact I remember the bomb-aimer calling out, `Pull up, Geoff, we're nearly into trees.' And the gunners were exchanging shots with the anti-aircraft guns so that the light flak guns were brought down almost horizontally, and they could see men running out of their billets, manning extra guns. And we ... we ... that's when our wireless operator was wounded and we had a hole put in the aircraft. I just ... I saw a flash, it appeared to be right in front of me, and it was the shot that wounded the wireless operator, who was very close to me.

But we ... we got home ... we got home alright. We were very, very fortunate we did get home. We had no intercom, we couldn't speak to each other at all, and not much by way of radio aids, the radio-set had been blown out, a shot went right through it. So, yes, that was a ... a fairly shaky sort of an occasion, when we really didn't know where we were.

Was there a time where you wondered in fact whether you were heading inland or back to sea?

No, what I was afraid of was that we might be on a heading that was taking us up through the North Sea, and missing Britain altogether. That didn't really make sense, but that's the sort of thing that'll leap into your mind at that sort of moment.

There was a ... an extraordinary sequel to that ... that night. Many years later, I suppose twenty years later, our bomb-aimer met a ... a Dane, and was talking to him, and this chap came from Esbjaerg, and had witnessed this happening that night. And he ... he thought that this Lancaster had really had it. We were nearly on the ground and getting an awful pounding, and they ... he and our bomb-aimer were able to compare notes and that was us. (Laughs).

You ... we were speaking of the minelaying expedition. I gather that some of your assignments that you were sent - and others - were sent on, were, looking back with hindsight, were less than practical, and sometimes quite silly?

Yes, there ... there were operations like that, though I think most of them were ... were scrubbed. We were sent one night, or we were going to be sent to mine the mouth of the Garonne River. Now in theory that sounds easy, you go away down south and you ... you find this big river mouth and put your mines there. But there's nothing whatever to tell you that you're at the Garonne, there's likely to be cloud over the scene. So it's a most impracticable sort of thing to attempt. And the weather was very, very poor all over Europe, and at our ... our base, we could hardly see the roof of the nearest hangar. And there was a ... quite a ... there was almost, well not open rebellion, but a feeling of rebelliousness against that.

We ... we were ... I think on the whole though most of our targets were ... were pretty reasonable ones. We ... you see we did a large amount of our tour to the Ruhr, which you ...

DON CHARLWOOD Page 21 of 47

I didn't mean that ... that sort of mainstream one, but I think in The Wings on the Storm there was reference to, was it Bob Iredale, had to circle over ...?

Oh yes.

... for some arcane reason, what was ... what was that?

Bob was in a different section of Bomber Command, they used to do low-level jobs, they ... they broke open Amiens prison and so on. So really I'm not quite acquainted with what it ... what it might ...

I think he said he had to ... he was told, for some reason, to circle for an hour, either ...

Oh that's right, yes, yes.

(10.00) Either to attract attention, which he certainly did of course. (Laughs).

Yes. That's right. He had to, I think, draw the fighters from a particular `drome, somewhere ... somewhere near Phillips' works in Holland I seem to remember. Yes, it sounded more like a bait than anything else.

Came back with eighty-five ... eighty-five holes in [inaudible] ...

Yes, yes, yes.

So I shouldn't really be, you know, imposing my own ideas on this, because I got a wrong impression that some of the missions that you'd been sent on were questionable.

Not ... not many of ours. The minelaying ones, which Butch Harris was never in favour of anyway, they were done for the navy more than anyone, they were a bit foolish, because it was impossible to be precise. And I think some of them were pretty much a waste of time, the minelaying exercises.

With your aircraft, talk a bit about the differences between the Halifaxes and the Lancasters?

Well the ... both aircraft were pretty robust aircraft, but the ... the Lancaster was very, very much more manoeuvrable, more easily handled, more vice-free. The early Halifaxes had a bad rudder-stall. Now I don't know enough about aerodynamics to know just what ... how that affected the aircraft. I know that the end result was a flipping over as you were coming in to land. And the day we arrived on our squadron the most senior man in the sergeants' mess, a warrant-officer, DFC, with a tour of ops behind him and back on a second tour, he had his own crew with him and a second crew, and they flipped over just like that, and thirteen of them were killed in the one aircraft. That was our introduction to ... to the squadron.

I might just go on there. That had happened, we didn't know it had happened until we got into the mess, and we didn't hear about it for a little while. But we went into the mess that DON CHARLWOOD Page 22 of 47 first day, we'd just arrived in the evening, it was dark, we went up to the mess, we found everyone very ... more than light-hearted, a bit high. They weren't drunk, they were all going out with that object, I think with that objective. Because the ops were scrubbed, and they were going on a bus to Barnetby. And we ... we were absolutely new to the whole thing. We knew that a lot of us were going to be killed, but we did wonder how long, if ... if you got through, how long it would take to do thirty ops.

And so we ... we asked a few fellows this, `Well how long does it take, usually, to do thirty?', and no one wanted to talk about it. And so then someone said, `Well when ... when did someone last get ... complete their thirty?' And we found that on Halifaxes no one had. And that for two or three months no one had reached thirty. And we ... we related this to the crazy sort of high spirits around us. And then we heard that that very day the most senior man of that mess had been killed with ... with all those other fellows aboard the aircraft. And we ... we thought, `Well these high spirits don't make sense.'

But within a few weeks we'd be like that too, and it was the only way to ... to cope with it. Just to not exactly make light of the whole thing, but just shut something off in one's mind. And just be, I don't know what the word is, I ...

If you mourned and grieved in the conventional sense ...

Yes. You couldn't allow yourself to be like that.

Don, I'd like to talk to you a bit about, well I suppose superstitions in a way. But let's talk first about a particular aircraft. You flew in B Beer, I think, was it not?

That's right, yes.

(15.00) And what did you feel about having to fly some other aircraft?

You felt very uneasy about it. You became very attached to your own aircraft, even though there might be something wrong with it. You'd prefer to fly it than fly someone else's. We had an experience in that regard with an aircraft called L London. We'd been badly shot up in L London over Esbjaerg, and we found ourselves put down to fly in L London again, and I think the wing-commander who listed us in this way really had our best interests at heart, because he knew that one of our own aircraft, one of B Beer's motors was not functioning well, so he gave that to a strange crew, who for some reason or other were flying from our squadron that night. They were really 12 Squadron people, but they'd come to 103 that night.

Anyway Geoff Maddern went in to him and said, `Look we're just not taking L London, we want our own aircraft', and, as Geoff said in his diary, which strikes me a little comic, it was sergeant to wing-commander, `He came round to my way of thinking.' (Laughs). And so they allowed us to take B, and the other crew took L, which was really the better aircraft.

Well on take-off the duff engine on our aircraft caught on fire just as we were lifting off, and ...

DON CHARLWOOD Page 23 of 47

Full bomb-load?

Full bomb-load. I think if there hadn't been a valley at the end of our take-off run we'd have had it. But he dipped down a little bit into the valley, got up a bit of speed, and managed to stagger out to sea, and we dropped the bomb out to sea. A piston went right through a crank- case and fell out onto the runway. But it was marvellous aircraft handling.

And we got back all a bit shaken. And I think we stayed up that night for some reason, and the people who had taken L London didn't come back. And we felt rather badly about that, and then had to remind ourselves that either way they would have got it. They wouldn't have been ready for that sick engine in the way Geoff was ready for it. So that was a case of being superstitious about it.

What about ... did you have a series of charms or rituals, or what did you do?

(Laughs). Geoff carried a little, small rabbit, which he called Nunk-Nunk, and he and the flight engineer, Doug Richards, religiously kissed the backside of this thing before and after every operation.

Now another crew had a gremlin painted on the ... down near the tail turret, called Yohodi. And they insisted that when we borrowed their aircraft, as we were obliged to one night, that we must each rub Yohodi's belly before we started. And I had the task of rubbing the horseshoe over the navigator's table. So I got in and here was this horseshoe hanging over the table, and I undid all this wire and rubbed it on the table, which was completely incorrect, because the navigator told me afterwards I was supposed to rub the horseshoe that was hanging over the table, not take it down and rub the table with it. And he was most uneasy as to what I might have done to their ... their aircraft.

There were all sorts of superstitions like that, and one even tended, if ... if the crew had had a good trip the previous time, then you were inclined to leave your bicycle just where you'd left it that time, and to carry out everything as closely as possible to your lucky trip, hoping that the luck would continue.

Yes, I think everybody had their ... their little practices. I always took my family photographs with me. Oh there ... there they are in that folder up there. But I ... I had, apart from my mother's photograph, I had one of all our family. I always took that. Never go without it.

Some people took it extremely seriously, didn't they, the ... the ritual kind of elaborate ...?

Well we might all have laughed at it a bit, but we all would be uneasy if we didn't carry out these little procedures.

It was appalling arithmetic, wasn't it, I mean ...?

Oh it was, yes, it ... it was. We ... we saw the whole squadron change over, it must have changed over a couple of times. You'd see fellows arriving, and some of them didn't even unpack before they had gone. Once you got up to, I suppose, eight or nine or ten, you became someone recognisable around the squadron, and you tended not to look at all these DON CHARLWOOD Page 24 of 47 newcomers who were just flowing through, and getting up maybe five operations. Your ... your gaze was concentrated on those who had managed to survive to fifteen or twenty, twenty-five. But then we saw them ... saw one fellow go on his twenty-ninth.

(20.00) But these are ... these are relatively low numbers. If you read the more gung-ho books, they concentrate on the legendary figures who got up into very high numbers. But the average chap must have gone at fifteen or sixteen. Because the replacement rate of the Lancaster was ... they reckoned they were good for fifteen or sixteen, before they met their end. So, consequently, the crews must have had about the same length of life.

Are you suggesting they made them for that amount of service?

No, no, they didn't make ... oh no, they would have lasted well over the 100, in fact a few did last that long. No, what I'm saying is that they regarded them as replaceable after fifteen or sixteen. Simply because by that time they'd be ... they'd be shot down.

The young faces passing through, you didn't get to know them for ... by almost an act of will, or ...?

You couldn't let yourself get to know them too well. It was ... it would have been too nerve- wracking really to be considering men that closely. You ... you looked at the lucky talismans, the ones who had ... who were way ahead of you, and you thought, `Yes, it is possible', you didn't dare look too much behind at the ones coming on. It wasn't ... it wasn't actually ... I suppose will came into it to a degree. You tried not to think of that.

Without wishing to be morbid about it, I mean what would happen? So you'd be ... have somebody sleeping in the next bed, or ... or wherever ...?

Oh yes, yes, and they'd go out on operations, and then in the morning, perhaps before you were awake, you'd hear people beside their bed, and this would be the men of the Committee of Adjustment taking their belongings. They used to take them into RAF care, and then they'd be sent back to the next of kin.

For that reason, as soon as possible, I think it was after about six weeks, Geoff managed to get us out of barracks and into rooms, which was much easier on morale. Because it ... it was quite harrowing to come back to half-empty barracks. You might go out for a night in ... in Scunthorpe and come back in the morning, and there'd be a whole row of beds empty. With all the belongings still ... still around them. And you'd just have been speaking to the fellows yesterday.

It ... it was most unlike any other form of ... of war, because we were living a ... a fairly normal sort of life. We were having better meals than the general run of civilians in Britain. We were sleeping between sheets, going to the pictures, life was, to all outward appearances, fairly normal. But just faces vanishing all the time. We never saw them killed. Not like men going into battle together and seeing one another killed. We ... we never saw how they met their end. Most of the time we never did know how they met their end.

So what was the mechanism for coping with the emotional strain of that?

DON CHARLWOOD Page 25 of 47

I don't really know.

Going out and getting drunk?

For a lot it was. But I think ... I think a lot of men, or the men who coped best, learned a kind of detachment. It wasn't ... it seemed outwardly callous, but it really ..it really wasn't. You had ... you just had to detach yourself from it. I found that my main loyalty was to my crew, and I think most of us probably found this. We knew we wanted to see Nazism defeated, but over and above that was this loyalty to one's crew, and you couldn't allow yourself to become too ruffled by what was going on around you, in case you let your crew down.

(25.00) I once had a ... a question asked me, just a few years ago, by BBC York, and right out of the blue this chap said, `Did you ever pray?' And I suppose everyone probably did at some time or other in a sort of a way. And I said, `Well yes, I did, but never for survival. More a kind of groping prayer for integration. Not to disintegrate. Just to hang together, so you wouldn't let the others down.' And I ... I think that ... that's what our crew managed to do, and I think that's what most managed to do, they held themselves together.

Of course, if you didn't, if you went to pieces, you would be charged with lacking in moral fibre, which I thought was a horribly British kind of thing. Now where that term came from I don't know. Manning Clark told me he remembered that term being used at Melbourne Grammar School, so it does seem to me that it's come from the British public school system, `lacking in moral fibre'.

But what happened to these men who were found lacking in moral fibre we never quite knew. They were spirited away from the station. There were cases where we saw them given menial tasks to do. They could never take their flying brevet from them, but they could take their sergeant's stripes from them. But most of them we just ... we just never knew what happened to them. I often think that instead of being called lack of ... `lack of moral fibre' it should have been called onset of commonsense.

Bu once you had one little outbreak of `lack of moral fibre', that was it, was it? You weren't allowed to have two?

No. That's so, you were got off the station, because it could be contagious. But we had a remarkable medical officer, named Robert Henderson, and Doc Henderson, if you said to him, as I once did, `I feel very weary', stomach upset, whatever it might be. Probably signs of stress, you mightn't recognise them yourself as such, he'd ... he'd immediately put you in sick quarters for a few days. And you'd go back refreshed. And I think that way he saved innumerable crews.

Not only that, unknown to me, he was secretly operating himself. He went first with the excuse that he wanted to study aircrew stress, and he went on operations. And a bit after our time he completed sixteen ops before they took him off. So he was lucky to ... to survive. And just this ... this year, 1989, he ... he's visited us here in Melbourne, and we were talking about those days.

[Recording ends on Side One of Tape Two.] Tape 2, Side B DON CHARLWOOD Page 26 of 47

Continuing the interview with Don Charlwood. What ... in what ways did `lack of moral fibre' manifest itself. I mean what was considered to be LMF?

Well if ... if a man said that he was unwell enough to fly, he was immediately ...

Sorry, `unwell enough'...?

To fly. That he just couldn't ... couldn't face it any more, he would be very suspect for lacking in moral fibre. But Doc Henderson managed to keep such men away from the RAF psychologists, whom he regarded as the end. (Laughs). They knew very little about operational life, and they rather liked to get their hands on LMF cases, but he shunted our fellows away from them.

But as to how it would manifest itself, I've read that various COs reckoned that they could see it coming, that men got very quiet, and other men became very blinky and jumpy. I knew a case at Lichfield, I only recently found out about this fellow, now he'd done a tour of ops. He was an outstanding squadron leader, and he ... he was very well-known for his ... his laugh. And I said recently to a fellow who had known him much better than I had, `Oh what happened to Nipper?', his nickname was. And he said, `Oh you remember his laugh? There came a time he was back on ops and he couldn't stop laughing. And he was taken off.' Now whether he was declared lacking in moral fibre or not, I don't know, but he ... certainly his nerve just suddenly went.

So there's a man who's done a tour of ops ...

That's right.

Thirty operations, and is he then ...?

He'd done more than thirty I believe.

And is he then disgraced?

I don't know what became of him.

Theoretically though, I mean you're ...

Theoretically, yes. There were cases where men had done a tour of operations and they were disgraced by being declared lacking in moral fibre.

So they don't go to reunions and ...?

I don't know, you wonder about such people. On our squadron there was a crew - now I knew this crew, and I didn't know the particular individual in the crew who was declared lacking in moral fibre - this crew, on return from ops, after having been shot up, they force landed in the ... in the North Sea, and the chaps down in the nose, one or two of them nearly drowned before they could get them out. And that aircraft floated a long time, and they were all rescued. Now they were well on with their tour, and I believe that ... that one of that crew DON CHARLWOOD Page 27 of 47 who said he couldn't face it again, one of the fellows who nearly drowned, they declared him lacking in moral fibre.

Now I was on leave when that happened, so I don't know the details of it, but it has been told me by one of the men who was on the squadron with me at that time.

What was the feeling of the people who were keeping on keeping on about that? Did they feel it was unfair, or ...?

Oh yes, they did. The Australians ... the Dominions' men particularly thought it was unfair. There was no such thing in the RAAF in ... in the South West Pacific. There was no such thing in the American air force, it was a peculiarly British attitude I think. One of those surviving things like flogging that went on for so long, and ... and being spreadeagled to gun carriages and all that. Number one field punishment, all that kind of thing, that died out so late in the ... in the British army. I think it was a sort of semi-barbaric hangover from that kind of thing.

(5.00) I think you wrote about a case of somebody who screamed over the target?

Yes, I remember we heard about that very soon after we got to our squadron, and there was great speculation on what would happen to him.

I heard of another case, now this is where the whole situation is ... is reversed. A crew went on operations, the mid-upper gunner for some reason or other lost his nerve, I think during an attack. They found him out of his turret and in a very disordered state of mind. And later on they were attacked again, and the rear gunner shot the aircraft down. They didn't hear a great deal out of the mid-upper gunner during the rest of the journey, and when they got back the crew loyalty forbade them to say, `This man lost his nerve.' They didn't have an opportunity anyway, because he very much found his voice, and described at the interrogation - what would now be called debriefing - how he had shot down the plane. And no one spoke to give him away. And that man got an immediate DFM out of that, which really belonged to the other gunner.

And he continued flying?

And he continued flying.

Yes. You'd wonder that you could ... you could declare anybody with a `lack of moral fibre' who even stepped into one of those aircraft.

Well that's true, yes. Yes, but there ... not much room was allowed for compassion. Except by men like ... like Doc Henderson.

Your ... your pilot, Geoff Maddern, was once ... well I don't know whether you'd go as far as to call it `lack of moral fibre', but of not pressing home an attack because of a faulty instrument panel, is that not mentioned in your book?

DON CHARLWOOD Page 28 of 47

Yes. I've forgotten whether it ... what the fault was now, but Geoff would not go on against his better judgement. And we had a wing-commander who did declare him `lacking determination', which was coming very close to saying `lack of moral fibre'. But he had a bit too much moral fibre for the wing-commander to be able to cope with him. And he ... he spoke up very firmly, said that we were running sufficient risks, without taking faulty aircraft, and that he wasn't going to do it.

Now I ... I saw crews lost, I think because of just giving way before that kind of attitude. I should say that wing-commanders had a very difficult job to perform, great pressure was on them to get as many aircraft into the air as possible. So that they were caught between that and between men turning back. Now some men did turn back without legitimate reasons for doing so. In ... in Geoff's case I think he ... he made very good udgements, and our engineer, who was a very cool customer, the pair of them, if it was something to do with the engines, they would have quite a discussion before they would turn back.

But I'm ... I'm sure there were cases where men went on when they ought not to have gone on. Our best friends, Lang's crew, Lang was a close friend of Geoff Maddern's, the navigator, Keith Webber, was a friend of mine, the whole crew were very close. And they had been reprimanded after a failure to ... to get off at all, when the wing-commander believed they ought to have got off. And the result was they left half an hour late one night. Just changing aircraft and so on. Well they were picked off. A straggler didn't stand a very good chance at all, and they were picked off. And the irony of it was, they were supposed to have gone on leave that day, they were only pressed into going on that particular operation because we were a bit short of numbers.

I think there was a case in the Eighth Army where 200 planes, I think it was, kind of landed in Switzerland, I don't know ... (Laughter).

Is that right, no, I don't know, I didn't know that.

Yes, an enormous number of planes developed faults and ... and landed in Switzerland.

And landed in Switzerland?

(10.00) And I just wondered whether ...?

There was never anything like that that I was ... I was aware of. But certainly wing- commanders were in a difficult situation, because they were under tremendous pressure. But it was a real test of leadership, as to whether you could reconcile the demands being made on ... on you with what you were making on your men.

What ... how important was the squadron leader to the efficiency and safety of ... of aircrews?

Well now, a squadron leader didn't command a squadron, a squadron leader commanded a flight, and a ... a squadron generally consisted of at least two flights, each with a squadron leader over them, and over them again was the wing-commander. And the squadron leader operated like the rest of us, but not with the same frequency. They ... DON CHARLWOOD Page 29 of 47

Understood. So he's in the air with you.

Yes.

And I'm just wondering what ... how important was ... was his role in terms of operational safety?

I don't think it was very great, except by word of mouth on the ground, setting a good example.

Now we had a chap named Jake Kennard, who was outstanding, he was not much more than a schoolboy, but he flew a Spitfire as well as he flew a Lancaster, and we ... we had a great regard for Jake Kennard. But when Geoff Maddern had run-ins with the wing-commander, Jake sided with Geoff, not with ... not with the wing-commander, because he knew Geoff was a very courageous man.

Jake, on the other hand, I think, was one of these chaps who took too many risks. The term was in those days, he was a `press-on-regardless' chap. Now our friends, Lang, Lang and Webber, the crew I mentioned before who were eventually shot down, they went out on an operation one night in F-Freddie, and their oxygen failed and there was some engine trouble as well, and they turned back, and they were ... that's when they were torn apart by the wing- commander. Jake Kennard took their plane the next night. They had oxygen enough for the pilot and navigator, I ... I can only think that he flew at low altitude, because they couldn't have flown at 20000 feet, with no one else getting oxygen. The ... the engines were so poor that they had to turn back anyway, and it came to a point where they were discussing putting down on the sea. Well he'd gone on much further than Lang had gone on. Lang had ... had turned back, because he felt it was wise to turn back. Jake pressed on and almost put himself beyond return.

But he did get back, and of course I suppose he regarded that partly as the function of the squadron leader, to set an example.

Was ... were wing-commanders tended to be like that, or not?

Well the ... the situation they were in sometimes made them like that, but some of them were ... were much better leaders, and could inspire men to keep on going instead of bullying them. I think an excellent wing-commander was Arthur Doubleday, of Sydney.

I'd like you to talk about him a bit.

Yes, well Arthur once made the statement to me, this was long after he was out of the ... the air force, `I'd sooner lead men to defeat than kick them to victory.'

Nice.

But he ... he was quite an exceptional man. And he was asked to take over a demoralised squadron, a mixed squadron, an RAF squadron with mixed nationalities in the crews, and he built them up to one of the best squadrons. Simply by passing on to him ... to them the skills DON CHARLWOOD Page 30 of 47 that he had learnt himself, about evasive action, about very close look-out the whole way. And he built ... he built this squadron up until it was a highly regarded squadron, and I read the commendation he got as a result of that.

But that was a ... our man was a very different type altogether. He was permanent RAF, and just couldn't understand anyone not being rigidly obedient. I think he rather overlooked the fact that we were fairly independent thinking, reasonably intelligent human beings. And he just didn't really know how to lead us.

(15.00) Whilst ... right I ... I'd like you to describe, if there is such a thing, a typical operation, from beginning to end?

[A pause]. The programme for any day depended of course on whether or not you were on operations, and we generally heard first thing in the morning, usually from our flight engineer, who used to be up and out of the aircraft very early, and he would generally come back and say, `We're on tonight, I've seen what petrol-load's going on, it's going to be a long trip or a short trip.' So that we knew we were going well before the announcement being made. And really from that moment on, for the rest of day, right up until take-off, there was a kind of gnawing at the ... at the stomach, a tension that never really left you.

And the ... the first ones to be called in would be the ... the navigators and bomb-aimers - they had a separate navigators' briefing. And at that we learnt what the target was, and we drew in the tracks to the target. The bomb-aimers were with us, because they had to coordinate their role very closely with the navigators, in that they watched for pinpoints on the ground as to where we were. It was ... the announcement was generally made with the words, `The target for tonight, gentlemen, is Berlin', or Essen, or wherever it might be.

We then went from that briefing to the main briefing, and it was in a large, claustrophobic room, no windows to it, and it would be packed with air-crews, and with cigarette smoke drifting over us. And on the end wall there was a ... a dominating map of Europe. And the officers would come in, the senior officers, and we would all stand. And it used to remind me of school assembly with the ... the teachers and the principal coming in. And our squadron leader, Kennard, would call each captain by name, asking if all members of their crew were present. This was sometimes a bit of an embarrassment for us, because we had a mid-upper gunner who was a bit of a poacher, and there were a couple of times when he and the ... the two gunners just weren't there, which was a bit awkward.

And we would ... we would be told the target there. Of course the navigators would have heard it before. But you could sense an intake of breath, and muttered comments, and I do think there was a certain smell of fear in the room.

And the first people to speak at that briefing, after the target had been announced, were the meteorological people. The forecaster would have a picture put up. Epidiascope we used, an overhead projector, showing the synoptic chart, which really had isobars, they always seemed to be knotted as tightly as our stomachs. And then he would show a cross-section of the ... of the fronts that we were going to fly through, with high cloud, and an icing level shown, and always looked a very daunting picture. Or usually did. In the winter anyway. And quite often they ... they'd also say that conditions at base might be failing on your return, but there'll DON CHARLWOOD Page 31 of 47 be aerodromes open to the west, and you'd wonder how far west, and whether your fuel was going to ... to last.

And following the weather forecaster they'd have the intelligence officer, and he'd give a ... a detailed picture of the target, an actual projected picture on which he would comment. And there you'd see it, there'd be the streets and the buildings and the river. The point of aim was always marked in red. At first I used to think about people that were down there, but you couldn't afford to go on like that, you had to shut that out of ... out of mind.

(20.00) And he would tell you the tactics, that you were to climb, usually, to 15000 feet over base, and then rendezvous at point A, as it was called, on the coast, usually round Sherringham on the Norfolk coast, or it might have been the Lincolnshire coast, and then set course from that rendezvous point to point B, usually on the Dutch coast, and then across to Germany, and if you were going to the Ruhr it was probably just to one other point, point C, and then they'd say in a comforting kind of way, `And then it's just a short run into the target.'

The ... he would run through with you what the Pathfinders' marking technique was going to be, what ... what coloured flares they were going to use. Warn you about any dummy targets, because they used to have a lot of dummy targets around the actual target, and very often those dummy targets were the things that we bombed. And warn you about fighter tactics.

And every now and again during all this I'd hear Geoff saying, `Oh Gawd', and you'd hear other exclamations going on around you.

The bombing leader would come next. He'd tell you that ... probably you were carrying a load of a 4000 pound bomb, which was always called a `cookie'. A fine euphemism that was. And usually about ten cans of incendiaries. And he'd always remind you to approach the point of aim in straight and level flight, and the value of getting a good photograph, and of course that was the hardest part of it, though admittedly we sometimes photographed fields, and quite often cloud covered everything anyway.

And then we'd have the signals leader, and flying control, and so it went on, until the wing- commander would announce the time of the operation's meal, and give us a few exhortations, and I remember every now and again they would somehow ... I remember having Butch Harris' voice amplified, and one night it was, `We will bomb the black heart out of Germany', but that sort of talk didn't go down very ... very well.

But our ... our group captain who was a survivor on Fairey Battles during the Battle of France, and to us that seemed about as far off as Mafeking, he wished us good luck in a way we ... well we felt that he meant it, that he knew what it was all about. We thought of him as an old fellow, and I suppose he was probably thirty-five when I think of it now.

And we would go to our ops meal, this was when we had bacon and eggs. Sometimes they said, `You can have them before you go or after you come back', and usually there was a DON CHARLWOOD Page 32 of 47 shout of `Let's be sure of them', (laughs). I was always conscious in the mess that there was a pervading kind of affection in the air from the cooks and the serving staff for our transient, motley sort of group that would soon be going out into the dark.

And then there might be an hour or two hours, there might be long enough to go to the pictures, to go to the cinema. But it had to be a helluva good film to hold your attention. And comedy didn't go down too well, you just couldn't ... didn't laugh very easily. And every now and again you'd hear announcements being made, `Would a fitter please come to such and such an aircraft', and you'd know that they were getting ready for you to ... to leave.

So, if we didn't go to the flicks, we would linger round the mess, or playing snooker. And also someone, not only one person, it must have been several persons, used to play records at that time. And it always seemed to me that the music reflected our moods, it was heavy stuff. The Warsaw concerto. Something of Tchaikovsky's.

The Pathetique?

Was it `Tell me the Story of a Starry Night'?

That's the Pathetique, the theme from the Pathetique symphony.

Yes. It all sounded ... there were imploring crescendoes and so on, and I always found that it was ..rather than cheering us, that it was reflecting the way we ... we felt.

And at the end when it was about time for us to go down to the crew room, invariably we ... we'd each visit the ablutions section of the mess, and the men would be quite engagingly frank - `Well, better have my nervous pee.' And that sort of drew you together, you knew you were all feeling much the same.

And I remember in one of the cubicles there, there was a little bit of RAF graffiti on the wall, and one bit of advice was, `Don't come to 103, you'll either crash or go missing', which wasn't awfully comforting to read.

(25.00) And so then we'd ... we'd push our bikes through the blackout round to the crew-room. Well first of all to the ... to the locker rooms, because we had to change into flying clothing. They had white polo-necked sweaters we used to wear under our battledress. I just flew in battledress and just loosened my collar and tie, in case you went ... went down into the drink, so it didn't tighten on your ... on your neck. The wireless operator also was in a warm part of the aircraft, but the rest of the crew had to dress in warm clothing. The gunners were in electrically heated suits, because they were of course very, very exposed.

So we got our clothing on, and then we went into the crew-room, and there might be last minute changes to the ... to the route. And the navigators would be frantically busy incorporating these changes on their chart, and into their flight-plans. And one of the final things we did was to synchronise watches. And by this time we would ... we navigators would have our gear, we had big green canvas bags with our chart and log, and we had our sextant in the other hand, and our ... our parachute under our arms.

DON CHARLWOOD Page 33 of 47

And we were then called up for the transports out to the aircraft. Now these transports, they could either be one per crew or larger vans would take two crews, and some very large vans would take more than that. But I do remember that three times in a row the crew that went out with us didn't come back, and the fourth time a chap named Burton, above all other names, because `Go for a Burton', was to get the chop, or to be killed, and that night we heard Burton call up on his return, and we just all cheered in the ... in the aircraft. And young Sid Burton, he was twenty-one, and an equally young crew, he went on to a second tour and a career as a ... as a captain with British Airways.

And there ... there's no accounting for the metings and dolings of fate. Three crews in a row went missing, and then he goes on like that. And his navigator went on in the same sort of way.

[Recording ends on Side Two of Tape Two]. Tape 3, Side A

Identification: this is Tape Three of the interview with Don Charlwood, recorded in Melbourne on 11th April, 1989, continuing with the description of an op.

We ... we always went out with the same driver, a girl named Peggy Forster. Peggy eventually came to live in Australia. But Peggy, whether ... whether she was having a day off or not, she'd always come to drive us, because she was one of our totems. Without her we felt we might well be ... be lost. And we always went through the procedure of singing the same song. Geoff used to sit beside her in the ... the front. There was a bit of a ritual struggle for the front seat, but it was always surrendered to Geoff, and then we all sang from the back, `Do not trust him, gentle maiden, though his voice be low and sweet, he's a bastard' and so on. (Laughs). And we ... there was a kind of religious fervour that ... that we sang that with. And it was always led, I remember, by the ... the wireless operator, and if we still hadn't arrived out at the aircraft, we'd start on the WAAF song, `This is number one and the fun's just begun.' But we never ... it never went on long enough to reach `number seven, when we're both in bloody heaven', we usually had arrived at the aircraft, and the mid-upper gunner would always shout out, `Back her up, Peggy, we're not walking', and ... and then, `Back, back', and then he'd be shouting, `Wo, don't run into her.' And there would be B, with the ... our aircraft, B Beer, with her ground crew around her. And they kept her immaculate, and they ... they were a very dedicated group, and I think this was ... was generally so on the squadrons. And they fussed round us, helping us get our stuff out and into the aircraft.

I always remember that one of the things at that time that we used to carry was the pigeon. I had a pigeon in a little container, and the idea was that if you were down in the sea you released your pigeon. I only ever heard of one pigeon ever being released on our squadron, and that was when a crew got sick of waiting for transport, when they got back from ops, and they put a message on the pigeon's leg, and it turned up back in the pigeon loft. (Laughs). I imagine it's the only Elsham pigeon that ever did return.

But our mid-upper gunner, who was such a tough poacher, and a character, I always remember him stroking the pigeon's head, and saying, `Pigeon wants to know where ... why we're going out on this stupid business', and he said, `I don't know pigeon.' (Laughs). He always thought the pigeon had a bit ... bit more sense than ... than we had. And I ... I often DON CHARLWOOD Page 34 of 47 wondered what ... whether the pigeons at 20000 feet, whether they used to pass out and later on come around. Because I don't know how they'd manage without oxygen. Perhaps their brain was so small it didn't suffer too much damage.

They survived the trip though?

They survived the trip, yes. But they cut them out after ... shortly after that time. I don't think there was ... they were really awfully useful.

But waiting there, out at the aircraft, we had about an hour, and there was a kind of solemnity to it. Different ones would come out to wish us well. I remember one night the Roman Catholic padre came out and wished us good luck, and after he'd gone Bill [Birchall?], the corporal in charge of B Beer, said, `He ... he gives you holy wishes to do your un holy work.' (Laughs). And ... and I thought it was a bit too close to the truth to be funny.

And the ... during that time the gunners would put their guns into place, and I'd pin my chart down, and the bomb-aimer would go right down into the nose. Now he spent most of the trip prone in the belly of the plane. So he was ... he was belly down, face down to the ... the inferno that we'd come to later on.

(5.00) It was a ... a pretty tight fit, getting in past the mainspar. Not much room, you could just squeeze through. And I think we all must have thought, at different times, what a business it would be if we had to get out that way.

But my own quarters were ... were good. Quite a large table with a swivel chair, and an airspeed indicator across the table, and an altimeter, and a compass. And so I'd get out my instruments and ... and be ready to go.

So we would wait there until it was time to begin taxiing out. And that was always rather a tricky business - or time to start up of course would come before that. And you would ... you'd hear, for the starting of the first engine, you'd hear the call from Geoff and the reply from the ground. But once that engine was started, with that ... even one Rolls Royce Merlin going, you wouldn't hear the orders for starting the others, it would all be done by ... by signs.

And then all your communication from that point on would be through your intercom, you'd just be like disembodied voices, and you were going to remain that way for the rest of the ... the night. And I used to hear the taxi ... well there wouldn't be any taxi instructions, it would all be done by lamps, because Germany was monitoring us so closely that there couldn't be communication, except on the intercom in the ... in the plane.

And so you'd begin taxiing out in a long line, and sometimes there were problems. An aircraft might start overheating, and have to turn into wind. Well that would mean everyone behind them would be in difficulties, and could start overheating. Or they might try to pull a ... pull out of the way, and get bogged. So it was always a bit of a problem, getting everyone safely off.

When we got to the end of the runway in use, it was a ... a matter of waiting for an individual green light from a van at the end of the runway, and we had the same take-off procedure every ... every night. Within the plane I'd hear Doug Richards, our engineer, saying, `You've got DON CHARLWOOD Page 35 of 47 your green, skipper.' And Geoff would invariably say, `Everyone okay?' And we'd each say, `Okay', and then he'd say, `Right, here we go.'

And that was really the moment, when you faced down that runway, wondering where that runway was going to take you that night. Whether you'd ever be back on that ground, or any ground, again. And a lot of the time it was a ... it looked like a long wet road, and they'd ... there'd be flares of course to either side of it, and you'd see the ... the aircraft ahead of you vanishing. And then you'd pound down, with this enormous load, sometimes you'd wonder if you were ever going to get off.

And I suppose we all felt ... felt at our ... not at ... not by any means our lowest ebb at that point, you were just coming up to a ... almost a high level as it were. You were ... there was a ... it was a tremendously bonding moment.

I remember one navigator I knew who told me that he always said the twenty-third psalm over to himself on that run down the runway.

And then you'd ... you'd lift off at the end, and I'd hear Geoff say, `Undercarriage', and Doug'd repeat, `Undercarriage', from having lifted up the ... the undercarriage and flaps. And then we would ... we'd just very dimly, usually, see the villages down below, and then you'd be into cloud. Nearly always the cloudbase was just a few hundred feet.

And then you'd come through eventually, you'd come through the cloud, you'd be climbing all the time. Usually climbing on basebeam. That had dots on one side, dashes on the other, which the pilot'd pick up in his headphones, it was a ... a Lorenz beam system. And I remember Geoff saying, `Baa, baa, baa, it's like a bloody sheep this thing.'

(10.00) But with us all climbing on basebeam I don't know how we didn't run into each other, but we would have been separated at time of takeoff, and I suppose roughly that separation lasted. I know we would break cloud, and quite often it would be daylight when you got up above the cloud. Up there the sun ... from that level the sun wouldn't have set. And you'd see other aircraft breaking through behind you, and you'd be close enough to be able to read their identification and know what crew was in that particular aircraft.

And then time would come when I would tell Geoff, `Setting course time, set course for Sherringham', or Cromer, or whatever, depending on what the target was. Sometimes if we were going away down to Italy it would be somewhere like Dungeness on the south coast, or Beachy Head. And we would start off for this rendezvous point. And we wanted to reach there as precisely as we could, because that was our true setting course point.

And then, still ... still climbing, we'd go out over the North Sea, up to 20000 feet, sometimes more than 20000.

But over the North Sea there were always inexplicable lights down below. Sometimes there was firing from convoys. Usually there'd be ... you'd be warned about convoys. But their ...

They fired at anything did they?

DON CHARLWOOD Page 36 of 47

They fired at anything, yes. Understandably they were pretty trigger happy. But, once ... once you got across the North Sea, you could be sure that you'd be under very close fighter surveillance, and there'd be searchlights and flak all the way, but it was usually in ... concentrated at places like Rotterdam and so on. So after a while you got to know the pattern of it, and you ... you crept around a lot of it, just by your knowledge of the ... the flak dispositions, and searchlight dispositions.

Speaking as a navigator, your main job was to find out what wind was actually blowing. You would be ... have been given a forecast wind, but nearly always it ... it couldn't be depended upon to get you to the target on time. We had Gee, which was a ... a radar aid, but by the time you got to the enemy coast they had it jammed. You couldn't get ... very seldom get beyond the enemy coast and still be able to read this radar screen, which was a little ... a little bit like a mini-television screen, and it became impossible to read. So that, as you were going over the North Sea, it was a race to try to find out your actual position from your Gee, and to link it up with what was called your air position, where you would be if there were no wind blowing, and you linked these two up, and that was the prevailing wind. And then, using that, you had to plot ahead. And sometimes you had to ask the pilot to slow down, sometimes to speed up, depending on whether the wind was causing you to run early, or run late.

And you were doing this in coordination with all the other aircraft. They would bomb in phases. You might be in the first wave to go out with phase one, or you might be in phase two. If we were in phase one we aimed to be toward the back, if we were in phase two we aimed to be near the front. Rather than be at the ends of either of them.

Now, if it were ... if the target were in the Ruhr, and we ... we did a dozen trips there, and you were, say, in phase two, you could ... you could see ahead of you the Pathfinder flares go down. And you could see all hell blow ... break loose, and I think the ... the thing that struck most fear into people was the ... the criss-crossing searchlights. Absolute forest of searchlights. And the same with the hose-piping of the light flak. It ... it came up like water out of a garden hose, but ... but coloured, and you'd look at this whole thing and you'd think, `Well it's impossible to come through that.' But the most lethal stuff really was the heavy flak which was bursting around you and above you. And when that burst very close you could ... you could smell it.

We couldn't hear anything from all of ... all of this. Unless it ... a shell burst close to you, you didn't hear anything. It was more like seeing an inferno on a silent screen. The ... because of the noise of the engines, it shut out all the enormous ground noise that must have been going on.

(15.00) But, anyway, you knew you had to go into this. I remember the story of a very experienced navigator friend of mine who said that he took a new crew over, and they pushed his navigator's curtain back and said, `What's this going on in front?' They couldn't believe the ... the scene of the target, and he said, `That's the target, and that's cost a lot of money, that show that's being put on for you, and the sooner you get in there the better.' (Laughs).

So once you were in there your task was to fly straight and level to the aiming point, to drop your bombs and to get your photograph.

Excuse me, Don, could I just [inaudible]. Would you just go on. DON CHARLWOOD Page 37 of 47

It was important to run straight and level, both to bomb with a ... as reasonable degree of accuracy as ... as possible, and to get a photograph of the spot that you were bombing, because these photographs were later on plotted by the intelligence people. But those moments, I think it was ten seconds running straight and level - though with one bomb-aimer we had, we had a relieving bomb-aimer one night who was very enthusiastic, and we did it for thirty seconds which was a ... seemed like an eternity - that was the ... that was the most vulnerable part of the ... of the trip. Or you felt it was.

Now before we went in there, before we started that bombing run I always gave Geoff Maddern our course out. Because, in the excitement of the ... the attack some navigators made mistakes in giving a wrong course out, so Geoff always set it before we went in, and then ... then turned on it. Once he got onto his bombing run ... well I might be at error there, he probably had a bomb on a particular heading, but I ... he always asked for it before he went in, before we were all shaken up.

Very often I didn't go out. I ... I always remembered the warnings of an old-time navigation instructor who sa d that navigators made some disastrous errors if they got fascinated by the scene of the target and then went back to try to work on their chart. But I do remember being behind Geoff during an attack on Cologne, and it really was a hellish sight, the city seemed to be on fire from end to end. Even then I remember seeing a German fighter trying to fasten onto us, an ME 109, over their own target, in amongst all that flak.

And quite often Geoff ... Geoff's words would be, `Well let's get the hell out of here', and we would wheel away to get out.

Now there were times when we were either coned, or very close to coned. By coned I mean that a master searchlight, a bluish-tinged searchlight would fasten on you, and then numerous other aircraft ... searchlights, would ... would all pinion you. It was ... it was like a cone, you were at the apex of a cone, brightly lighted. And then they would pour the flak into that cone, until they'd finished ... finished you off. The accepted way of getting out was a ... a diving turn, and Geoff was certainly very adept at it.

But also, going into the target, if Geoff saw the searchlights occupied in this way with ... with another unfortunate fellow, he'd ... he'd quite, almost callously, say, `Okay, we'll go in while they're occupied with that chap', and we'd get our attack in and get out before they'd blown the other one up.

But I do remember one night on Wilhelmshaven standing behind Geoff and seeing a ... a Lancaster, not far from us, coned, and then hit, and then starting to burn, and then parachutes appearing from her. And I kept saying to Geoff, `So many parachutes', and he was telling me to be quiet, let the bomb-aimer do his run in. And I found this almost more than I could take, to watch this going on. And then the whole thing just blew up, and our bomb-aimer still saying, `Left, left, steady, hold her there, Geoff. Bomb's gone.' And this is going on while this fearful drama, which ... I was the only one paying much attention to it, because I was the only one unoccupied at that moment.

(20.00) Anyway nights over targets varied a great deal. Some targets, like the Italian targets, there was a tremendous display as you approached, and then the gunners and the men on the DON CHARLWOOD Page 38 of 47 searchlights apparently just ran away, and they were left pointing up in the air and the guns stopped. Quite frankly you began to feel you wished there was some opposition. It was quite eery, and felt very ... quite horrifying that you were bombing and they weren't defending.

But most times our ops were to the shorter targets, and we'd start the run home. Now when you got out of the target and started on the way home, especially if it was a distant target, like Munich or Stuttgart, you would become very tired, and you were very vulnerable then to attacks by fighters. And the fighters were well aware you'd be tired. And they were always watchful for the unwatchful crew. Geoff kept up corkscrewing the ... the whole way, even though every now and again I'd vomit into a tin under the table. Because the navigator rode side on, and you had this glaring chart that you were working on, and you were trying to see if the signals were coming through on the radar screen, all of which wasn't very conducive to a ... a settled stomach.

But you would become very weary on that long trip home.

Until I was able to say to the crew, `We've crossed the enemy coast', and usually Ted would be able to confirm that, he'd get a pinpoint. And then Geoff would say, `I'll ... I'll shoot off some height', and we'd begin to descend, and a ... a marvellous feeling of reassurance would come over you. You were still vulnerable to attacks by fighters, but you did have the feeling, `There's every chance that we're going to make it.'

And as we got near the English coast you could see the English searchlights, and you could still see ... if it was a near target, you could still see the glow of it in the sky behind you.

And the wireless operator, who was in charge of the ... the victuals, he would say, `Who wants coffee?', and quite often he'd put a damned flask of coffee on my chart where I was working. Now I couldn't let up, I wanted to be very careful of ... of crossing the coast at the right point and so on.

And anyway we'd ... we'd get round to drinking our coffee, and I would ... I know I'd always raise my coffee-cup to my family photograph, and think, `Well I might see you yet.' And there would be a marvellous camaraderie between those seven men, and I'm sure it was the same in every crew.

Geoff would begin working very hard as we approached base, because he had to concentrate, first of all on finding the ... the place. We'd be going by beacons, they were the only identifications, there was a complete blackout, and each aerodrome had its own beacon, and we had a list on rice-paper of what the beacons were flashing that night. And they would be called out to me, the identification would be called by the bomb-aimer, and I'd identify it from the flimsy that I carried.

Was this a sound identification, or a visual?

No, a visual identification. They were called `pundits', the codename was `pundits'. You ... if you were shot down you were supposed to eat this ricepaper. (Laughs). I don't know whether anyone ... anyone did in fact.

DON CHARLWOOD Page 39 of 47

And then we ... we would see the aerodrome, and we would hear different ones calling up, and we would listen for the crews, to see who had got back and who hadn't got back. We knew that Ken Berry was in K-Kitty, and Ted Lang in F-Freddy. Bunny Austin in U-Uncle, and ... and so on. And we'd listen for these people. And it used to be ... there used to be a great feeling of elation in the ... in the crew, and it was always a race to try to get number one to land, instead of being stuck up there waiting, because it was quite a ... a long wait at times.

And when we finally got our turn to land, Geoff 'd be and me calling for quiet, we ... throughout the trip we would be very quiet, except over this last part, there would be a bit of exuberance, and sometimes the wireless operator even turned on dance music for us, which I think was ... was asking for it a bit, because you could get intruder aircraft coming in over the aerodromes.

Anyway, Geoff would touch down. He was a marvellous pilot, but he often bounced his landings after a long trip, and you'd hear from the rear turret, `Bloody awful landing, Maddern', and I remember writing down one night, at five second intervals, `Landed, landed, landed.' (Laughs).

(25.00) Anyway, we would taxi to the point from which we'd started, and engines would be shut down. And then we ... there'd be the marvellous feeling of just hearing each other without helmets, we'd take our helmets off. And sometimes there'd be a few congratulations, if anyone had done anything particularly well. Of course sometimes crews came back with people wounded, and the ... the first into the aircraft on those occasions would be the two MOs. There'd be ambulances there on those occasions.

But we were both tired and relieved and tremendously exhilirated to have done it successfully. We ... in those moments you'd feel you could take on anything. And our ... our watchfulness and our ears would be for those whom we didn't know whether they were yet back.

Peggy would come out and pick us up. She might have more than one crew on, and there'd be exchanges of, `How was it ... did you find it over the target, Ken?', or Bill, or whatever. Be a bit of discussion. All in the dark of course, the only light were the ends of cigarettes. Of course it was no smoking during the operation.

And then we'd be taken in for interrogation. We always aimed to be interrogated by a particularly attractive WAAF officer named Lucette. I remember we took her out flying once. And Lucette'd ask quite penetrating questions about the flight, and what action we'd seen, anything shot down. And we'd tell all we could.

There was always a bit of rum available to put into your tea or ... or coffee. There was a marvellous feeling in that ... in the room, to see all these grimy fellows, and to know what they had been through. And you'd think there were no ... no other men quite like them.

And that would go on ... that interrogation would last, I suppose, the better part of an hour. And you'd go from that to another meal. That'd be your ... your breakfast. But you'd go to that meal, usually with the knowledge that there was one crew missing, or two crews missing. Some nights no crews missing. They had a board up in the operations room.

DON CHARLWOOD Page 40 of 47

The room we came back to, incidentally, was the room in which we'd been briefed. And I should say that the doctors were always there. They'd move about among the crews. `How you feeling, Maddern?', or `How you feeling, Richards?', they were very watchful of their crews. The padres'd be there. It seemed that these people never ... never slept, they were ... they were there when you le t and they were there when you came back, which was awfully good for morale.

And you ... you knew that you were ... you were on a peak. You ... you'd done what you set out to do, you'd done the most ... you'd carried out what that squadron existed to do. That ... that whole population of that little squadron village as it were existed just to get you over that target and you'd done it. And so then you went and ... in for your breakfast, and you could fall into the conversation of most absurdly mundane things.

I'll just stop you there.

[Recording ends on Side One of Tape Three]. Tape 3, Side B

It's a bit like the chaff card. Just, say, take us into breakfast again.

Over ... over breakfast, although you'd be wondering about the missing crews, and lamenting a bit about them, you'd also begin talking about the most mundane things. `Oh must have a haircut tomorrow', or `I must take some photos in to be developed.' And it was this weirdness of the existence that I look back on in a mesmerised kind of way, that you could be one moment talking about the men missing that night, and the next moment whether you shouldn't draw a new pair of shoes from stores. One with fellows with no feet left them that you were with a while ago, and you're talking about getting new shoes, or taking photos to be developed.

And then you would ... the meal over, you would just ride back to your billets, and often Geoff's and my final words to each other would be, `Oh, poor old so-and-so, I always felt he had it coming to him', or `So-and-so who went tonight was too young.' And ... but we ... we just fell sound asleep, I always slept well. And then in the morning you'd be woken by Doug Richards' voice, `We're on again tonight.' So that was the ... that was the kind of merryground.

The unreality of that, kind of being over Germany one minute and then down the ... into the village the next, with, you know, dancing and ... and whatever, that ... that must have ... you must have thought about that at the time?

Yes, yes, I ... I did. It wasn't at all like being with men in, say, the navy, onboard ship, and standing side by side exchanging salvoes, or in a bayonet charge, or anything like that. No, it was a weird mixture of extreme danger coexisting with an almost normal kind of life.

Talk a bit about the role of the women at the base, the WAAFs and other girls in the village, because you ... as I ... as I understand it, there was a kind of group solidarity about?

DON CHARLWOOD Page 41 of 47

Tremendous solidarity between the girls on the station, the WAAFs, and the ... and the men. It ... it was a kind of group relationship, and I often thought that the women to me were somewhat like the ... the country. I always found the countryside very reassuring in its permanence and beauty, and likewise the ... the WAAFs represented the permanent. Their lives were going to go on, just as the countryside was going to go on, and I felt buoyed up by both the countryside and ... and the women. Of course we each had our personal relationships among the girls, but there was this ... this kind of group relationship as well.

They were very young a lot of those girls, some of them had not long left school. And they ... they were in an extremely difficult position. Here were men about the same age as they were themselves, and many of them must have really been finding it difficult to cope with ... with men urgently wanting to make love to them and so on. But their ... some of them, quite wisely I suppose, just felt, `No, I mustn't become involved.' After all contraception wasn't all that good in those days, as compared with later times. There were always a few pregnant WAAFs being hustled off stations. So it was a real ... a problem to them in ... in that way.

(5.00) And yet they were ... if they became very much attached to a fellow it was a dreadful business for them when he went missing. I remember one night seeing a ... a WAAF keeping the record in the operations room, on the blackboard, of all the crews. It had down every crew, what time they took off, what aircraft they were in, and the landing times. And the only landing time not entered, and it was obviously getting too late for them to get back, was one on which her fiance was flying. Well that was a fearful ordeal there, I remember that girl standing there with chalk in her hand, and he just ... that plane just didn't come back, her fiance didn't come back. So ...

You ... you spoke at some stage about ... it was probably a previous interview, probably the one you did for the television documentary, Wings on the Storm, about the girls representing a ... being a kind of a pool of life, the life-force.

Yes, yes.

Could you re ... redo that?

Yes, I ... well I think on that occasion I ... I likened the girls and the countryside to providing a ... a life-force, whereas we represented death. We were ... we were dealing out death and we were dying. But they had this ... they were a continuity of life-force, and I think they ... they recharged us as it were. Oh yes, I ... I did feel that of the girls.

And also that it was a kind of a, in a loose sense, a group marriage?

Yes, that's quite right. It was as if we were all married to that ... that's ... yes, that's correct. Very often if we were taking off in daylight a lot of them would line the ... the runway and wave us off. But so did quite a lot of the men too, the ground-crew as well.

Did you see much of them off ... when I say off the station, I mean away from the actual operational flying?

We would ... we would often call in and yarn with them at their various jobs, and would be frowned upon by their NCOs or officers, for interrupting their ... their work. There ... there DON CHARLWOOD Page 42 of 47 was a degree of envy among some of the ... I think more the permanent officers and the permanent NCOs. I always remember the drill sergeant who ... whose job it was when we got there to take the names of our next of kin. But his ... his way of doing this was just to say, `Who do you want informed?' No preliminaries, no, `In the event of your going missing, who do you want informed?', just, `Who do you want informed?'

Back to operations, and your own perceptions. What was your greatest fear of what might happen to you on an operation? Night fighters, flak, navigational error, what ... what?

A gross navigational error would have been my greatest fear, because I always thought the worst you could do was to let the others down. Insofar as enemy attack was concerned, night fighters. The flak was more terrifying to look at, the night fighters sneaked in undetected in a lot of cases, but Geoff always gave the gunners a ... a good look down below. He'd roll it one way and then the other way.

Later on they ... they forbade this corkscrewing which allowed this kind of thing. I think the reason was there were so many aircraft taking place that collision risk was raised by ... by doing that.

Did you have any near misses with collision?

Oh yes, yes, we did, yes. You'd just catch a glimpse of them. Sometimes another Lancaster, occasionally a Mosquito, flying much faster than we were. Yes, that'd give you a tremor for a while. But, as a man who worked later on in air traffic control, I ... I remember how we used to be comforted by the feeling of slipstreams, the bumping of slipstreams. We thought, `Oh that's good, we're in with the mob.' You didn't think about the collision, you just thought there were a lot of you. (Laughs).

(10.00) And some planes were downed, were they not, with bombs falling on them?

That's right, that's right. We lost one of our squadron leaders in just that way. Another aircraft above dropped bombs on them, yes.

We spoke a little bit about this earlier, but I'd like to speak about it again. The ... when you looked down on these burning cities and so on, although you tried to put the morality of it, if you like, out of your mind, could you?

Most of the time, while it was going on, I could, simply because I was hanging onto life. I wanted to get back. But back in the mess thinking about it I found I had to dismiss it from my mind, you couldn't think about it too much. And I used to ... I don't know whether I ... I would say rationalise about it, I've thought a lot about it since, it's very difficult now to determine what I've thought since, and what I thought then. But I've thought if the RAF could have said to us, `Well look chaps, we're making it easy for you tonight, all the people you would have bombed, we've managed to get them over here and you're to shoot them with rifles', I don't believe we could have done it. The thing was remoteness just sealed us off from ... from those people. We weren't ... we weren't like concentration camp guards, looking into the faces of the people we were ... we were killing. In fact you didn't know whether you were killing anyone or whether you were bombing fields. And when I look back now over DON CHARLWOOD Page 43 of 47 the ... that remarkable book, The Bomber Command Diaries, the ... I find that sometimes there were more casualties in the air than on the ground. There might be a lot of burning buildings, and you read, `Twenty-one people killed, twenty-six aircrew killed', so that ... like that night on Cologne, when it looked a frightful raid, there weren't all that many deaths.

But, yes, I've thought a lot about the morality, and of course there's a lot of feeling in ... in Britain that it ought never have been done. But when one looks at it, how can you possibly have rules to war? I think that the Brits, with their attachment to games, and particularly to cricket, think that you can have rules to war. Now in war men have got to become barbarians, because wars are fought to defeat the enemy, and anything goes. Now if ... if you're not willing to accept that, well you should keep out of it. It's impossible to have a civilised war.

And when you look at the situation, that Germany was so strong on the ... on the Continent that the army couldn't possibly have got at ... at her, there was no way of the navy getting at her, what other way was there than ... than bombardment? Now, fortunately, she'd let he self fight in ... in Russia, but at the same time she was greatly demoralised by the bombing we carried out on ... on the Fatherland.

There was a certain amount of tit-for-tat, too, wasn't there? I mean I think the first sort of mass destruction of a city came from the Germans didn't it? Was it Coventry?

Well chronologically I'm not too sure of it, but the ... they always argue, the Germans always argue that the ... for example the Rotterdam bombing was part of the advance of the infantry, it was a support operation. And that the ... the first bombing of cities came ... was by the British. And I think some of the RAF records do support this. But I don't know that it matters very much who started it. I have no doubt at all that if the Battle of Britain hadn't been won, if Germany had managed to conquer Britain there'd be ... there would have been the same concentration camps set up. I don't think that the ... the critics of today, a lot of them, have a real appreciation of how much against the wall Britain was at that time.

This is leaping about a bit, but just something I forgot to ask you about the operational side of things, what provender did you carry on the boat ... on the ...?

Oh very little. We carried ... we carried a few sandwiches and coffee, that was all. Very often, I don't know if it was the altitude, the coffee curdled, quite frequently. Oh, and we carried orange juice. But in our crew we pooled some of the orange juice, because the rear- gunner's wife was pregnant, and we used to refer to this as the crew baby, and we'd send her some of our orange juice. But I think that the tension that she went through at that time cost her the baby and they never had another one. She lost that one and never had another one.

But, yes, that was the provender we ... we carried.

(15.00) Did you ever have to take any ... any drugs to stay awake or anything like that?

I was given ... well quite often we were given caffeine tablets. You avoided taking them until it looked certain that you were going to take off. Because there were occasions when we had DON CHARLWOOD Page 44 of 47 made the mistake ... mistake of taking them, and then the operation was scrubbed and you were left wide awake. So that you'd be doing more harm than ... than good.

But sometimes Doc Henderson would say, `Oh well here's something for last night's sleep', and `Here's something to keep you awake', so he had great ... (laughs), his great uniform pockets filled with pills.

But they ... as I said earlier, they were very watchful of our ... of our general health. And he insisted that ... that '42/'43 winter, that we go in for ray-lamp treatment, to make up for the lack of sunshine, because I assure you there wasn't ... wasn't much sunshine in Lincolnshire that winter, or I suppose any winter.

Did they send you out unreasonably into the weather sometimes, do you think?

Well yes, you often ... it was seldom ... the conditions were seldom such that an airliner would be taking off. Airliners today would, but not airliners of those days. Given the ... the aids we had, the radio aids, they were very limited indeed. And some nights if you got off and, say, lost an engine, and it was essential you got back, there mightn't be much chance of it. You might be able to make it off, but it wouldn't have been very ... it would have been very dicey making it back in again.

Simply seeing where you were?

That's right, yes, yes.

But the quality of the met forecasts was apparently very good?

On the whole it was. Because the weather of course moves from west to east, and they would be able to get reports from ships out in the Atlantic, and from Northern Ireland. And then they had a high-flying meteorological flight of Mosquitos, and they'd go out over Europe, and they would report back as to what conditions were.

But then they could change quite drastically, and operating at the levels we were operating at, I think the highest wind I remember blowing up there, and it was forecast and it was pretty right, was 110 miles an hour. So that ... you know, you get that behind you, you're really ... you're really moving along. And it's difficult not to get to the target too early.

[Break in recording.] Just picking up again, Don, I think Max Hastings of Bomber Command was once quoted as saying, `Bomber Command was very well served by its aircrew, with ... and with few exceptions very badly served by its senior officers.' Do you think that's a bit extreme?

I think it probably is. I think it's one of those judgements that it's so easy to make with hindsight. Had Max Hastings been a senior officer at that time I don't know what his steps would have been. I ... I think most of them were doing the best they could with the intelligence available to them. I think their ... some of their thinking was probably unimaginative. And I think Bomber Command toward the end became a juggernaut with a momentum of its own. Certainly he was right in saying they were well served by ... by their aircrew. And there ... there was a ... an immense gap between those who operated, or even DON CHARLWOOD Page 45 of 47 knew what operations were like, and those who were deciding policy. I ... I haven't ... I haven't thought a great deal about the hierarchy, they were rather a faceless crowd when you were in the ... the mob below.

You mentioned earlier, it may have been off tape, that Bomber Harris, `Butch' Harris, didn't ever actually come to the station?

No, no, no, he never did come to the station. I think that was a ... from what I've heard, that was a conscious decision on his part. Maybe it was a bit like me not looking too long at the target.

(20.00) Or not getting to know the new faces?

Not getting ... that's right, that's right. It could have been something like that.

Was there ... what did you ... did you have any thoughts about Harris at the time, or what was the talk about Harris?

He ... to me he seemed more like something than somebody. He was just the force at the top that was driving us on, and I didn't imagine him too much as a ... as a human being at all. I suppose we had too much else on our ... our plates.

Well, alright looking at ... at sort of the ... as time has gone on you've lived long enough to see a reaction against - quite an extreme reaction against actually - that whole policy of saturation bombing, the destruction of all those cities. Does this surprise you, or ...?

Well I ... I saw some evidence of it coming then. Some of the men I was with expressed their doubts about it. But the ... the fundamental fact was that we could not achieve accuracy. Even with the Pathfinders and Bennett's remarkable contribution, and Oboe, which pinpointed Ruhr targets accurately, the fact is that a high-flying bomber is not a very good aiming platform. It's ... it's about as good as trying to hit someone on a railway platform in an express train by flinging a bomb ... a bun or something at them.

Sorry go back.

Yes. It's about as accurate as trying to throw a bun or some object at someone on a railway station if you're passing on an express train. It seems to me that it was evident right from the first of our training in Canada, our first practice bombing, that bombing from the air just wasn't accurate. We weren't even accurate in practice bombing, and sometimes we wondered just what we would be like with enemy guns firing at us.

And this, I believe, is what the RAF came to recognise. You see they started the war off by bombing during the day. The losses were quite insupportable. So they had to switch over to night. Then they found it was impossible to be accurate at night. So that, having found that, what was ... what was their choice, did they give up bombing altogether and ground all the aircraft on moral grounds, when they had nothing else with which to hit Germany? Or did they go on, as they did, and accept inaccuracy, and that became area bombing. `Okay, we can't be accurate, therefore we'll ... we'll just accept bombing of whole areas.' And then they DON CHARLWOOD Page 46 of 47 began to see a kind of insane virtue in this, that you were dehousing workers and demoralising people. But they always over-estimated the degree of their demoralisation. They tended to think that the Germans would break where the British wouldn't. Well the German fighter, I think, was even tougher than the ... the British. I think it was remarkable the way they held on, though they had a pretty tough force keeping them in ... in order.

But from what I've heard since the war, by observers who were there, it shook them probably more than anything else about the war, that Germany was penetrated and was bombed, and for the first time modern war was brought right home to the people. And though it mightn't have been our aim in setting out, I think it had that salutary effect in the end. I don't ... I don't think Germany'd ever want war again, and I think probably that's the main reason.

But that wasn't why we were doing it, I think that ... that was the way it worked out though.

Curious thinking, that they thought, `If this is stiffening up the British backbone, it's going to break the Germans.'

Well that's right, yes. (Laughs). No, well it was very similar to their attitude about the Japanese. They completely underestimated the ... the Japanese. They believed that their eyesight wasn't good enough for ... for flying. And they sent the Repulse and the Prince of Wales in up there without aircover. They probably didn't have aircover to send, but they ... even had they had aircover to send, they completely underestimated the divebombers' capabilities.

(25.00) Talking of the Japanese war, this effectively brings you back to Australia. When you came back, talk a bit about the ... the attitude that you ... that you discovered, that after having gone through all this incredible survival exercise in ... in Europe, you came back to find a ... what sort of attitude?

Well we ran into a kind of bewildered envy I can only call it. I think there was a realisation that we'd been into a bloodier war than the air force had been here. But I think we got a taste of ... of that Australia which must be well-known to the ... the reffoes and the Balts and the ethnic groups that come out. We didn't quite belong, we ... we'd become too British. The fact of the matter was we were as Australian as ever we'd been, but we had ... we had flown with not only RAF people, but also of course with people from the occupied countries, and I think we were ever so much more broad-minded than those we were coming back to.

But I personally was very fortunate, because I married in Canada late in the war, and we were lucky enough to travel out together to Australia, on a Swedish ship. So the newly-married man, with a family who did understand, and then I ... I started work within a few months of arriving, with air-traffic control, where the men were ex-aircrew, so that it was like a bit of a club, in a ... in a way. Except that there were a few of the men who had flown in the Pacific, who said, `Oh tourists eh?', they ... which was an extremely irritating kind of attitude.

Particularly after thirty missions in ... (Laughs).

Well yes. And some of the fellows had done so many more than that, yes. But yes, you did see that other face of Australia, that kind of ... yes, there was a degree of ... of envy, perhaps a DON CHARLWOOD Page 47 of 47 bit of under-confidence under it, or a kind of cultural ... like the ... the counterpart of the cultural cringe perhaps.

[Recording ends on Side Two of Tape Three and interview ends].