Lancaster Men

by Peter Rees

  In June 1943, Perc, now a sergeant, arrived at 460 Squadron at Binbrook, Lincolnshire. Morale on the base was low, and he decided to do something about it. Elected secretary of the Sergeants’ Mess, he discovered that his predecessor had been pilfering from the till and approached the station commander, Group Captain Hughie Edwards, VC, about the matter. It was the start of a firm friendship between the two cricket fans. Later, according to Perc, Hughie told him,

  ‘Well, I know all about flying and very obviously you don’t, but then equally obviously you would know that I wouldn’t know much about administration whereas you do. I want you and I to work together for the benefit of the Australians on the station because there is trouble.’ I said, yes, I was aware that there was trouble. I hadn’t got to the bottom of it but I would. He said, ‘What we’ll do is we’ll start this cricket business off with an inter-squadron match. You can start getting a decent side together to challenge in the [local] competition.’

  A competitive team was formed. The lanky Perc was a fast bowler, and Hughie, despite continuing problems with a severe leg injury from his 1938 crash, proved to be a useful off-spin bowler, even though he had to shuffle up to the crease to bowl. Perc soon discovered that, as 460 Squadron Warrant Officer Ken Baker put it, the men regarded Hughie as ‘God’ and would follow him anywhere. ‘Hughie would take a new crew on their first op, and I remember the night his son Tony was born, Hughie was flying over Germany,’ Baker said later. (Hughie in 1942 had married Cherry ‘Pat’ Beresford, the widow of a friend, Flight Lieutenant Hugh Beresford, who had been killed in the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940.)

  Not only was Hughie a fearless leader, he was also prepared to extend some leeway to the men when they were off duty. One night, some partying airmen dragged a piano into the mess and propped it up on beer crates, breaking off one of its legs. Hughie told them it was a court-martial offence. This time, though, he would let it go, provided they fixed the piano and didn’t do it again! Perhaps to minimise the risk to pianos in future, Perc Rodda bought records and pushed for Binbrook’s WAAFs to attend parties. But the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) hierarchy opposed the idea.

  They were well aware of course that unofficial parties were going on. But the majority of the WAAFs were not allowed to fraternise with sergeants or officers. So I had a talk with the group captain again and I suggested that one way of helping the aircrew forget their troubles, because there were plenty of them, was to turn on an occasional dance in the mess where the couth and culture aspect of it would be maintained. [Games and pranks] in their place were necessary but there did appear quite ample room for having decent parties to which the girls could be invited.

  Hughie Edwards agreed, and instructed the WAAF officers to cooperate. Monthly dances began, an early one of which was held at the Palais de Dance, on the pier in the nearby town of Cleethorpes. Perc recalled the night:

  Unfortunately for the local publicans the truck which was bringing glasses to the hall had not arrived by the time the beer barrels were tapped. This proved to be some challenge to 460 bods the majority of whom could not bear to contemplate all that free beer standing unused for the want of a few hundred glasses or jugs. So they descended on the surrounding pubs had one drink and walked off with the glasses back to where the beer was free. That caused some trouble but that was a pretty good old party. Perhaps in some ways it wasn’t quite as couth and culturish as the ones we had in the mess. I remember very distinctly fishing airmen and WAAFs out of the water, the sea at Cleethorpes, at four o’clock in the morning and running tenders up and back to Binbrook.

  Most sizeable Bomber Command stations had a large complement of women cooking, cleaning, typing, driving, repairing advanced radio equipment on aircraft, working in the meteorological office, taking charge of maps, and giving intelligence briefings. To the surprise of RAAF aircrew, some WAAFs were even assigned to them as batwomen. Inevitably, with sex never far from the minds of recruits, there were problems involving relationships.

  RAAF airmen developed their own language for this fraught subject, and recruits were acquainted with it long before they arrived in England, as this 1941 RAAF ‘dictionary’, contained in the archives of a future air commodore, shows:

  Adolescence: An intermediate stage between puberty and adultery.

  Adultery: The wrong people doing the right thing.

  Angel: A female spirit who probably spends most of her time wishing she could swap her harp for an upright organ.

  Aviatrix: A pilot who cannot fly upside down without having a crack-up.

  Baby pacifier: A bust in the mouth.

  Brassier [sic]: An ingenious device that makes mole-hills out of mountains, and mountains out of mole-hills.

  Cannibal: A fellow who is apt to ‘pass’ his best friend.

  Castrated dinosaur: A colossal fossil with a docile tassel.

  Chivalry: A man’s inclination to defend a woman against every man but himself.

  Complication: A confused situation that makes it hard to get at the works. For example: a knock-kneed virgin.

  Cow: A creature with four hanger-downers, four stander-uppers, and a switcher and two hookers.

  Dancing: A naval engagement without the loss of semen.

  Dead-stick: A pipe in pants pocket.

  Divorce: What happens when two people can’t stomach each other any more.

  Father’s Day: Nine months before Labor Day.

  Glamour girl: A much publicised girl, who is occasionally full of oomph, but more frequently full of other things.

  Horse show: A lot of horses showing their asses to a lot of horses’ asses showing their horses.

  Kept woman: One who wears mink all day and fox all night.

  Kiss: Uptown shopping for downtown business; or, shopping on the third floor for merchandise you want in the bargain basement.

  Minute man: A person who double parks in front of a house of ill-repute.

  Mistress: Something between a master and a mattress.

  Moron: A person who cuts the toilet seat in two when his half-arsed relatives come to visit him.

  Mother’s day: Nine months after Father’s day.

  Nurse: A pan-handler.

  Old maid: A girl of advanced years who has gone through life with no hits, no runs, no errors.

  Outdoor girl: One with the bloom of youth in her cheeks, and the cheeks of youth in her bloomers.

  Pajamas: Item of clothing that newly-weds place beside the bed in case of fire.

  Papoose: Consolation prize for taking [a] chance on an Indian Blanket.

  Passion: A feeling you can feel when you feel you are going to feel a feeling you never felt before.

  Pregnancy: A woman all swelled up over her mate’s hard work.

  Psychiatrist: One who tries to find out whether an infant has more fun in infancy than an adult in adultery.

  Sob sister: A girl who sits on your lap and bawls, and makes it hard for you.

  Spring fever: When the iron in your blood turns to lead in your pants.

  Triplets: Taking seriously what was poked at you in fun.

  Weakling: A girl who means ‘No’ but can’t say it!

  Whether relationships were with WAAFs or civilians, Perc Rodda often had to deal with the consequences.

  We had a sergeant who was married in Australia with two children, he also had a de facto wife in Scotland and she wrote to the station and asked why wasn’t this sergeant sending her money. The letter landed down on my desk to determine why he hadn’t made an allotment to her. Of course he had already, there was an allotment operating in Australia. I then had to take up the matter with overseas headquarters and I pointed out that she was a de facto wife, she had a couple of kids by him, she was expecting a third and irrespective of the morals involved, something had to be done. For once the bureaucracy came to the party and he had to make a further allotment in her favour and they matched it with the wives’ and dependents’ allowance.

  Not long after this
novel problem was resolved, a WAAF officer phoned Perc and asked him to meet her because ‘I think we’ve got a problem.’ When he arrived he was told, ‘One of your corporals has impregnated one of my WAAFs.’ Perc replied, ‘How did that occur?’ and was informed; ‘By the normal procedure.’ Perc wanted to know why it concerned him, since presumably the incident had occurred off-base. However, as Perc was reminded, corporals had their own rooms at Binbrook. ‘This bloke had managed to smuggle a girl into his single bed and they played high jinks for quite some time and she eventually became pregnant. So, “Shanghai Lill” said, ‘There’s only one way out of this, we’ll arrange to have her aborted but you people have got to pay for it.’

  Perc replied that the Air Force was not going to pay for it. However, when he spoke to the Australian ground staff,

  they said, ‘On the basis that she gets posted away from the station after the abortion is done, we’ll cough in the hundred quid necessary.’ So she was sent off to London to have the abortion. She was posted away from the station and about five weeks later she turned up at the main gate with an old pass, came back through the main gate and was in bed with the corporal that same night, fortunately not impregnated this time. One of the airmen dobbed him in and we landed on him like a ton of bricks and we gave him a walloping actually, a good old Australian way of tackling it.

  The young woman was posted to Wales.

  Bill Olley, a 460 Squadron pilot, thought he was the victim of an angry WAAF when he came in to land at Binbrook one night after returning from a raid. Bill had established such a reputation for getting back to base quickly that his mates nicknamed him ‘First home’. As he prepared to land his Lancaster, the WAAF operations officer instructed him to ‘overshoot’—do another circuit of the air base before landing. ‘That allowed two aircraft to land before us,’ Bill recalled. ‘It transpired that one of the crew who was friendly with the WAAF officer had refused to take her out the previous evening. She certainly taught us a lesson.’

  Some airmen had liaisons with married civilian women whose husbands were away at the war. Warrant Officer Alex Robb, from Melbourne, who was posted to 460 Squadron as a twenty-one-year-old in June 1944, remembered one airman ‘older than most of us who used to concentrate on getting married women with their own homes and no husband around. Very successful he was, too.’

  Flying Officer Geoffrey Williams, the Myer Emporium employee, who arrived in England in late 1942 to join 514 Squadron RAF as a rear gunner, was soon flying over Germany, wondering ‘how the bloody hell’ he was still alive while so many around him failed to return from operations. But he soon looked forward to his six days’ leave every six weeks. He and his friends would go to London ‘for a binge of drinking and sex to block out what was behind—and ahead . . . On leave, you’d find women first, then get on the piss . . . On one memorable leave I enjoyed spending six glorious days in London, staying at the Strand Palace Hotel, which was close to our Australian boozer, “Codgers”. I was competing for the favours of the publican’s daughter with an Air Marshal.’

  Once, just before another leave, a friend asked Geoff if he was flying that night; he wasn’t. His friend then asked Geoff if he could meet a girl in Cambridge with whom he had arranged a date. He was on duty but did not want to stand her up.

  Being a nice, accommodating fella, I agreed to stand in for him. After about two weeks he noticed that I was scratching my private parts. ‘You know what?’ he said, ‘You’ve got crabs.’ ‘How do you know?’ I asked. He answered, ‘Because I’ve got them too.’ We felt we were on borrowed time and lived only for today and suffered the consequences.

  Geoff and his friend paid a visit to the medical officer in Kodak House, who shaved off their pubic hair and slathered their genitalia with an ointment.

  Reflecting on his experiences, Geoff concluded that bombs and bullets didn’t destroy the airmen’s morale, but the shared sense of mortality did overturn many of their ideas about morality.

  Threatened by death, everyone lived for the moment. Once, a friend and I were picked up by two well-to-do women who’d come to London from the Home Counties in search of distraction while their husbands were fighting in the Middle East. The four of us spent five days in the Strand Palace, leaving the bedrooms only to eat and drink. Especially drink.

  Eric Silbert came to a similar conclusion. He had a WAAF girlfriend, Cathy. She was the first English girl he had taken out, and he was entranced. Like many of his peers, he was keen to experience sex before his expected death. Cathy was short, nicely rounded and good fun. ‘I struck up a pleasant relationship with her. Not only was she musical but she was extremely good at literature and I often received letters that were written in verse, a little corny but very clever,’ Eric recalled. Cathy found Eric a willing listener to her advice that it was unwise for a ‘bull virgin’ to go into battle. They remedied the situation at the Strand Palace Hotel on a forty-eight-hour pass. Taken with Cathy’s charms, Eric asked her to write to his parents in Fremantle to say that he was fit and well: during the next few weeks he could be flying on operations, and anything might happen. ‘Cathy wrote the letter and not long afterwards I received a letter back from home telling me quite pointedly why it was good to marry a Jewish girl! I naturally never knew what Cathy had written to them but could only assume that Mum and Dad thought I was going to become engaged.’

  In Brighton, bomb aimer Bill McGowen was entranced by a young blonde he met while walking along the street with three mates: ‘Some girls invited us in for a drink. Naturally we obliged and I headed for a really cute little blonde. We stayed there until mid-night cementing our relationships. I took my blonde out several times until one of the other girls told a friend she was fourteen years of age. This was the end of our relationship. I never saw her again.’

  In early February 1944, with the weather freezing and the drizzle seeming to seep into their bones, Bill and the rest of his crew reported to No. 1654 Conversion Unit, at Wigsley, Lincolnshire, where they learned to fly Stirling bombers. On one exercise, a motor cut out while a second overheated, forcing an emergency landing on another station. After being interrogated about the incident, the crew were taken to the sergeants’ mess, where a party was in progress.

  What a party! As we were in flying gear and still had a parachute harness on, everyone thought we were operational aircrew who had made an emergency landing and gave us a marvellous reception. A very attractive young WAAF grabbed me around the neck and then burst into tears. Sobbing, she said I was the image of her brother who had been killed. She was also pretty full, but I didn’t mind. She wouldn’t let me go even when a couple of the crew tried to pinch her from me. I remember Ned dancing in flying boots and falling over and unable to get up from the floor. The new girlfriend eventually passed out and had to be helped back to her hut by her quite unsteady friends. In the wee small hours of the morning the party finally finished and we rolled off to our huts. There were a lot of Americans at this base and as we passed their huts we saw them cart two unconscious girls inside. Dear, dear. [Rear gunner] Colin Allen disappeared at this stage and an hilarious search was made for him. We finally found his clothes spread all over the parade ground and him in his underpants, sound asleep in the toilet.

  The crew flew the next morning after the aircraft was repaired. On full oxygen, they recovered from their hangovers.

  Some trysts had unforeseen consequences, as Flight Lieutenant Dan Conway, a 467 Squadron pilot, observed. An accomplished tennis and hockey player from Perth who had been studying accountancy before he enlisted, Dan received a call from the Wing Commander’s office one day asking why he and his crew had allegedly gone missing. Dan was nonplussed until he saw a signal from the Air Ministry requesting details. Dan traced the false report to an evening when there had been a stand-down and the crew went on a pub crawl in Lincoln. At the end of the night there were long queues for the bus back to base.

  In this confusion our mid-upper [gunner], Jack, managed to find me. He sai
d he had met a WAAF from another ’drome and would like to take her home. I did not have the power to give him that leave but told him it was OK if he guaranteed to report to me 8 am next day. It was a pleasant surprise when he did so. Jack and his WAAF had reached her station and had taken refuge from the weather in the coal-hole where that fuel was stored. They had the company of other couples but at least it was warm. The rest of the crew were highly amused when he returned with his uniform covered in coal dust.

  The relationship continued, but Jack was less than thrilled when his new girlfriend told him she was pregnant. Her family were insisting on marriage, but Jack was not keen. After some heavy thinking, he came up with a solution—he would go missing! He sent a telegram to the girl in the standard format, ‘The Air Ministry regrets to inform you that, etc.’ But as Dan recalled,

  What he had overlooked was the invariable and natural response of the recipients to such a cold message. In their grief they wanted to know what and how it happened. Generally there is no such information, as Air Ministry well knew. The Ministry was not in the business of speculation and did not promise further news until, if and when available. But rules can be bent in any organisation for insiders. Such a one was the girl’s uncle, a Group Captain who worked at the Air Ministry. A signal to our CO had been sent at his request.

  The ruse was soon unmasked, but Jack was not charged with an offence. He became uncommunicative about his ‘problem’ until he returned from his next leave to say that he was married. The crew all wished him well. Soon after, their tour ended and they went to new postings. Much later, Dan heard the news that Jack had been killed on his second tour. ‘It was upsetting then, and even nowadays I sometimes wonder how that widow and her infant, now a mature adult if surviving, managed. My hope is they coped along with the many other families who lost their men in the mincing machine that was Bomber Command.’