Despite the relative absence of awkwardness about class in the RAF, there was plenty of evidence to suggest that being educated at a public school was no handicap when it came to obtaining a commission. Arriving at Brize Norton Flying Training School in April 1941 Brian Frow and his fellow-trainees were addressed by the chief ground instructor, a squadron leader aged about fifty, with First World War medals on his chest. After a welcoming speech he told his charges he was going to select flight commanders and deputies from among the cadets who would act as leaders and principal contacts between students and staff.
We were all sitting in the hall and he started. Stand up all of those who were in the OTC (Officer Training Corps) at a public school. About twenty stood up. Any of you who failed to pass Cert A, sit down. This left some ten standing. Sit down those who failed to reach the rank of corporal. Two more sat down. Failed to reach sergeant. Three more sat down. (He) then said, You five airmen report to my office for interview.
When Frow arrived, The first question was Do you have any close relations who were commissioned in the Royal Air Force? I had two brothers, and when I said that one was a squadron leader that was sufficient. He was amused and somewhat embarrassed by this method of selecting the cadet flight commanders and their deputies By a process of elimination, he had dismissed all cadets who had not attended public school, who had not been in the OTC, who had failed to pass Cert A and who had no close relations commissioned into the RAF. Frow was duly appointed commander of A Flight.
At the same time as they were graded by rank, the cadets earned the right to wear the brevet appropriate to their aircrew category. To outsiders there seemed something unformed about the single wing and circle insignia. It prompted an article by Godfrey Winn, a star writer of the day. Dont ask the man with one wing when he will finish his training and get the other half of his wings, he advised. Dont ask him anything. Just shake his hand and offer him a drink.
Aircrew members were proud of their trades. Many had started out hoping to be pilots. Few of those who were reassigned resented for long the new roles they had been allotted. It was the crew that mattered more than ones individual part in it.
Flying a big bomber was entirely different from flying a Spitfire or a Hurricane. It was the difference, it was sometimes said, between a sports car and a lorry. A four-engined bomber was an immensely complex machine, whose systems needed constant checking. It was a responsibility rather than a pleasure. Tony Iveson who flew Lancasters with 617 Squadron believed that bomber pilots needed a steady personality, and you could tell that from what you heard about how they behaved off duty I was a natural bomber pilot. I was patient. I liked precise flying.13
Fighter pilots wrote about flying in the language of love and passion. There are no descriptions in letters and memoirs of the joy of flying a Halifax or a Lancaster. In fighter squadrons it was considered disrespectful to refer to your aircraft as anything other than an aeroplane. Bomber Boys called theirs kites. Operational flying over Germany could mean trips of seven, eight, nine hours. These journeys involved high drama at take-off and landing and intense fear over the target area. But between these peaks of feeling there were long passages of boredom and fatigue, especially on the journey home, even though the danger was far from over.
Crews were organic entities and the prevailing atmosphere was egalitarian. Nonetheless, there was no doubt that it was the pilot who ultimately was in charge. He was responsible for the lives of the other six members of the crew, to the extent that if the aircraft was irretrievably damaged or on fire and about to explode he was expected to stay at the controls until the others had baled out.
The pilot, together with the navigator and the bomb-aimer, were essential for a bomber to be be able to bomb. It was extremely desirable to have a flight engineer, wireless operator and mid-upper and rear gunners. But a sortie could succeed without them.
The pilots concern was to reach the target. The navigators job was to find it. Don Charlwood, a navigator himself, felt that as a group [they] tended more to seriousness than the men they flew with.14 The job, and the training it required, were demanding and exhausting. Noble Frankland, like many navigators, had started off wanting to be a pilot but failed to make the grade. Despite his high intelligence he found the course at his elementary navigation school academically the most difficult thing I had ever tackled. Astronavigation required an ability to think in three dimensions, a very, very difficult concept for somebody who is not mathematically gifted or trained.15 In the early days navigators had no radio aids to guide them to targets. Even with the advent of Gee, Oboe and H2S, which used radio and radar pulses to direct aircraft on to targets, the navigators job was the most mentally testing of aircrew tasks, requiring constant alertness at every stage of the journey.
Once the navigator had guided the aircraft to the target area the bomb-aimer took over. As the aircraft went into its bombing run, he became the most important person aboard. He lay face-down in the Perspex nose, exposing the length of his body to the flak bursting all around. Pressing his face to the lens of the complicated bombsight, he called course corrections to the pilot as they went into the final run, ordered the bomb doors open and, when he was satisfied, pressed the button that sent the bombs tumbling into the night. In those final moments, every man aboard was clenched in expectation, pleading with him to finish the job and let them head for home. Good bomb-aimers possessed an almost inhuman sangfroid which allowed them to divorce all feelings for their own safety and that of the crew from the necessity of getting their bombs on the target, or the colour-coded pyrotechnic markers dropped by the leading aircraft to highlight the aiming point. On his debut trip with 49 Squadron to Hagen, in the eastern Ruhr, Donald Falgate, who had defied his parents wishes to join up, was determined I was going to get my bombs slap-bang on the target and there was no way I was going to release them if I couldnt get the markers in the bombsight.
The pilot weaved to avoid the bursting flak as they went in, toppling the gyroscope that kept the bombsight level, making it impossible for Falgate to aim accurately. He ordered the bomb doors closed and insisted on going round again. I wont repeat what was said over the intercom by various crew members, he said when telling the story later. It was only on the third run that Falgate was satisfied and pressed the bomb release. I was unpopular, very unpopular, he recalled many years afterwards.16
The complexities of four-engined bombers created a need for an extra crew member to assist the pilot. Many flight engineers were ex-groundcrew airmen who already had mechanical skills. Their training included a spell at an aircraft factory producing the type of bomber they would fly in to ensure that they were fluent in all the systems of the huge new machines. In a Lancaster they sat next to, and slightly behind the captain. Their duties included monitoring the panels of dials and warning lights, one for each engine, which were situated on the side of the fuselage out of the pilots line of sight. This left him to concentrate on his flying instruments. Their most important responsibility was nursing the fuel levels to ensure there was enough petrol to get home. Engineers received elementary flying training and could theoretically fly the aircraft in an emergency. In practice, if the pilot was dead or too badly hurt to function, the engineer was likely to be in a similar condition.
The wireless operator had, according to Bruce Lewis, who served as one, a lonely existence, mentally isolated from other members of the crew for long periods of time while he strained to listen through the static in his headphones for faint but vital signals. These told him the aircrafts position which he passed on to the navigator. He also manned the radar monitor which warned of the approach of night-fighters.
The gunners had what appeared to be the worst job of all. They lived in metal and Perspex turrets that poked out of the top and the back of the aircraft, washed by whistling winds that could freeze them to their guns. They carried the huge responsibility of defending their mates, constantly scanning the night for flak and fighters. Yet the long hours of staring into darkness meant it was all too easy to lose concentration, even fall asleep. If a night-fighter was spotted a decision that could mean the difference between life or death had to be made. You had seen him, but had he seen you? There was one sure way of ensuring he had, which was to pour glowing tracer fire in his direction. If you got it wrong, your end was particularly lurid. Everyone had a story of seeing the rear gunner being hosed out of a shot-up bomber that had hobbled back to base.
Yet some chose the job. It was the quickest way to an operational squadron with the actual gunnery course taking only six weeks. The training, though, was thorough. By the end, many could manipulate the turrets so well they could trace their names on a board with a pencil wedged in a gun barrel. Cyril March had seen an RAF recruiting poster in the window of Stantons furniture store in his native Durham appealing for Tail End Charlies and decided there and then that I would become an air gunner, none of the other trades appealing to me. For all the privations and dangers of the job it was possible to get used to it or even enjoy it. In the end you learned to love it, strangely to say, said Edward Twinn, who had abandoned a safe job in a reserved occupation to join up. You were the king of your own castle, right back there on your own. You never spoke to anybody unless the pilot gave you orders, so there you were sixty feet from the rest of the crew, all together at the front of the aircraft. They could see each other, they were near each other and they had that bond of being together. But the rear gunner, no, he was right out on a limb, down the other end looking the other way. Many of the raids lasted seven, eight, eight and a half hours you never left your turret at all. It was lonely but you got used to it. And you were there for the crews protection and they were a lovely crew.17
After finishing their specialist training pilots, navigators and bomb-aimers had a further spell at an advanced school before finally arriving at an OTU. Wireless operators and gunners went there directly.
At the OTUs the British came together with their Australian and New Zealand counterparts from the Empire schools (the Canadians formed their own, separate group of squadrons). It was here that one of the most crucial processes in the training programme took place, the welding of individuals into crews. For each member, the crew would from now on be the centre of his existence. Life beyond the base, the world of parents and family and home, drifted to the margins of their thoughts. The six men you would share your bomber with were now the most important people in the world.
The process of selection was called crewing up. In devising it the RAF departed from its strictly utilitarian selection and training methods and took an enormous leap of faith. Instead of attempting a scientific approach to gauge compatibility they put their trust entirely in the magic of human chemistry. The crews selected themselves. The procedure was simple. The requisite numbers of each aircrew category were put together in a large room and told to team up. Jack Currie, who reached his OTU at the end of 1942, hadnt realized that the crewing-up procedure would be so haphazard, so unorganized. Id imagined that the process would be just as impersonal as most others that we went through in the RAF. I thought I would just see an order on the noticeboard detailing who was crewed with whom. But what happened was quite different. When we had all paraded in the hangar and the roll had been called, the chief ground instructor got up on a dais. He wished us good morning and said: Right chaps, sort yourselves out.
Currie stood among the other sergeant pilots and, trying not to stare at anyone in particular, looked around him. There were bomb-aimers, navigators, wireless operators and gunners and I needed one of each to form my crew. I didnt know any of them; up to now my air force would have been peopled by pilots. This was a crowd of strangers. I had a sudden recollection of standing in a surburban dance-hall, wondering which girl I should approach. I remembered that it wasnt always the prettiest or the smartest girl who made the best companion for the evening. Anyway, this wasnt the same as choosing a dancing partner, it was more like picking out a sweetheart or a wife, for better or for worse.
Like most pilots, the first thing Currie looked for was a navigator. He saw a knot of them standing together. But how was he to pick one?
I couldnt assess what his aptitude with a map and dividers might be from his face, or his skill with a sextant from the size of his feet. I noticed that a wiry little Australian was looking at me anxiously. He took a few steps forward, eyes puckered in a diffident smile and spoke: Looking for a good navigator? I walked to meet him. He was an officer. I looked down into his eyes, and received an impression of honesty, intelligence and nervousness. He said:
You neednt worry. I did all right on the course!
I held out my hand. Jack Currie.
Im Jim Cassidy. Have you got a bomb-aimer? I know a real good one. He comes from Brisbane, like me. Ill fetch him over.
The bomb-aimer had a gunner in tow and while we were sizing each other up, we were joined by a tall wireless-operator, who introduced himself in a gentle Northumbrian accent and suggested that it was time for a cup of tea. As we walked to the canteen, I realized that I hadnt made a single conscious choice.18
At some OTUs new arrivals were given up to a fortnight to team up. Harry Yates, having got over his disappointment at not being posted to a fighter squadron, arrived at Westcott with the ambition to skipper a well-drilled crew, the best on the squadron, every man handpicked, utterly professional at his job and dedicated to the team. He started his search in the officers mess where he found himself at the bar next to Pilot Officer Bill Birnie, a stocky New Zealander navigator who seemed to be the sort of tough-minded chap who knew the score. During the evenings socializing he noticed a young pilot officer wearing a wireless operators badge. For a wireless operator to be commissioned so early in his career suggested exceptional ability. So Rob Bailey, tall, slim and blessed with the dark, aquiline looks that women tend to admire, was in.
The following day the 220 men of the intake assembled in a hangar to finish off the process. They were mostly formed into twos and threes now and there was a lot of movement and noise, as they scrambled to complete their teams. Bill Birnie disappeared into the crowd and returned with a bronze-skinned giant in tow. This was Flight Sergeant Inia Maaka, the first Maori Id ever met and I knew the bomb-aimer for me. Mac, as he immediately became known, was a stranger to the inner tensions and vanities that make liars of the rest of us. He had wanted to fight the war as a pilot and had won a place at elementary flying school but had not been selected to advance and been reassigned to bombing school. He clearly loved the job, Yates recorded, there wasnt a hint of second best. It was Mac who found the gunners: Geoff Fallowfield, an extrovert eighteen-year-old Londoner and Norrie Close, a taciturn Yorkshireman, who was a month younger still. So there they were, Yates marvelled later, my crew: a straight and level Kiwi, a ladykiller; a Maori warrior; and two lads as different as chalk from cheese.19