They Spread Their Wings (34 page)

De Havilland Tiger Moth with full canopy, as used by BCATP flying schools in Canada to cope with severe winter weather. (Author’s Collection)

At Trenton the authorities offered Arthur a choice: he could be discharged from the service and return home as a civilian or he could re-muster for training from scratch in another trade. Making the best of his misfortune, still very keen to fly and quite liking the idea of handling weapons too, Arthur re- mustered as an air gunner – and harboured no regrets about doing so. As a keen game- and wildfowl-shooter back on the farm, he had been used to handling guns and felt going for air gunner was a good move. It took about a month for the new paperwork to be sorted out and then – sometime around September 1942 – he was posted with eight others to No 9 Bombing & Gunnery School at the RCAF station Mont-Joli close to the bank of the St Lawrence Seaway in eastern Quebec. Mont-Joli was one of eleven bombing and gunnery schools in Canada that operated the Fairey Battle IT, a variation of the Mks I, II and V with its glasshouse cockpit reduced in length and a rotating Bristol gun turret mounted in the vacant space. Of the 739 Battles used by the RCAF, 212 were converted in this way for aerial-gunnery training because the original open gunner position was unsuited to the severe Canadian winter climate. The course lasted about six weeks and divided into two phases: theory and practice. Ground tuition concentrated on the maintenance and operation of Browning machine guns and Bristol turrets, as well as aircraft recognition. Gun turret handling was practised both on the ground and in the air. The budding air gunner spent between fifteen and twenty hours in the air, shooting at towed targets and taking part in other exercises, such as firing at targets along the river shore.

Trainee air gunners of Class 12, Course 38A, No 9 Bombing & Gunnery School, Mont-Joli, Canada, in April 1942, in front of a Fairey Battle IT. Arthur Edgley is in the back row, third from the right. (Arthur Edgley)

Newly qualified, LAC Arthur Edgley proudly wears his air gunner flying badge in 1942. (Arthur Edgley via John Reid, Stirling Bomber Research Society)

Promoted to sergeant on completion of his gunnery training – he passed out second in his course – Arthur was sent back to Moncton in preparation for a return to England. Two or three weeks later he was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for embarkation on the
Queen Elizabeth
, and four and a half days later he docked in the Clyde. Arthur was sent immediately to Harrogate RAF receiving centre where he was given leave. Ever since he had joined up, he had been corresponding with Joan Lawson, his childhood sweetheart from his own locality, and he spent his leave with Joan and her family. As always, his father let him borrow his car for the duration of his leave and this was a happy time for both Arthur and Joan. It was December 1942; the war soon beckoned once more and all too soon he was summoned to report to No 12 Operational Training Unit (12 OTU) at Chipping Warden in Oxfordshire.

Chipping Warden was a Wellington OTU; a place where embryo bomber crews were formed and received flying training that would prepare them for operations with front-line squadrons. Arthur recalled that ‘crewing up’ was a pretty informal process:

They put bomb aimers, air gunners, navigators, wireless operators and pilots – about eighty of us – all in one hut, closed the doors and said ‘sort yourselves out’. I, not being backward in coming forward, mated up pretty quickly with a bomb aimer from Holt in Norfolk. Then I shouted: ‘does anyone want a bomb aimer and a rear gunner?’ This good-looking Aussie pilot walked over and said: ‘You two look OK to me.’ We all shook hands and that was three of the five sorted. We then picked out a wireless operator from London and finally the pilot said: ‘I’m going off to the officer’s mess to get a navigator.’ He came back after a little while and said we were all complete now.

That crew was:

‘Tail End Charlie’, a Stirling rear gunner. (Author’s Collection)

Dressed for action. Arthur Edgley, on the right, with his crew (from left to right): Maxted, Arnott, Wilson (pilot) and Cooper, of No 12 OTU, Turweston, February 1943. (Arthur Edgley)

The new crew left Chipping Warden for its satellite airfield at Turweston in Northamptonshire where they were introduced to the Vickers Wellington Mk III, the version powered by two 1,675hp Bristol Hercules radial engines: ‘They never let us down,’ recalled Arthur. Initially their training consisted of daylight ‘circuits and bumps’ with an instructor pilot alongside Sgt Wilson to show him the ropes. Then Jack went solo and the process was repeated in darkness until again, in quick time, Jack Wilson was adjudged competent enough to go solo at night with his crew. In Arthur’s opinion, 20-year-old Wilson was ‘a wonderful pilot’. Arthur, at the grand age of 22, was the oldest among the crew:

We then flew many training sorties, some up to six and a half hours in duration such as from base to the coast of Ireland, up by the Isle of Man, on to Scotland, then down to Liverpool and back to base. Imagine, six and a half hours cramped up in the rear turret – although it was at least warm being wrapped up in an electrically-heated ‘Teddy Bear’ flying suit. But I was not the only one doing it …!

He chuckled when he recalled the old rear gunner’s tale: ‘Did you know that us rear gunners were the only chaps that went to war backwards? And another thing that we could claim was because the tail lifted off first, we got more flying time in than the rest of the crew!’

Christmas 1942 was spent with his sweetheart Joan at her home: ‘Her parents were so kind to me they treated me like their own.’ Back at RAF Turweston, after numerous training sorties lasting many hours and flown over the length and breadth of the country, Arthur’s crew passed out successfully in March 1943. During their time at OTU, he recalled there was only one occasion when his crew was put on standby for operations – a raid on Dortmund – but it was called off.

They were due to join No 115 Squadron which was in the process of re-equipping with the Avro Lancaster, but instead they were given three weeks’ leave and never actually joined No 115. Arthur said:

I spent that leave with Joan and her family, and of course Dad had let me have the car again so we visited my Mum and Dad often, too. While I was on leave I received a telegram ordering me to report for duty at RAF Stradishall, Suffolk, when my leave was over.

It came as quite a shock to the system to arrive at No 1657 Heavy Conversion Unit (HCU) at Stradishall that April day and be confronted with the four-engine Short Stirling, which made it necessary to acquire a flight engineer and a mid-upper gunner to bring the crew up to the required complement of seven. Arthur’s crew was allocated Sgt Ron Pittard, a Londoner, as flight engineer and Sgt Eddie (‘Bud’) Seabolt, a Canadian from British Columbia, as mid-upper gunner:

We all hit it off well and we were then taken out to one of the Stirlings to have a closer look. Oh dear! What a sight. This four-engine monster was 22 feet tall, 84 feet long and had a wingspan of 100 feet. The instructors had all done a tour of operations – some more than one. Over the next month we did daylight cross-country sorties and once or twice we had one engine pack up on us. However, Jack Wilson soon soloed on this monster and then we began instruction on night flying which culminated in a final check flight for Jack under the watchful eye of an Air Commodore no less. Then we were declared to be an operational crew and on 1 May 1943 were posted to No 15 Squadron at RAF Mildenhall.

No 15 Squadron operated the Short Stirling bomber within No 3 Group and when Arthur arrived, it was committed to what became known as the Battle of the Ruhr. This phase of Bomber Command operations would come to be perceived as covering the period between 5 March and 24 July 1943, when thirty-one major night raids were mounted against towns and cities in the Ruhr valley and adjacent industrial conurbations, for the loss of 981 RAF aircraft. Not for nothing did the crews euphemistically refer to the Ruhr as Happy Valley! The Stirling bomber’s poor altitude performance under full load, struggling to reach operational heights of around 14,000ft, put it very much at the mercy of the awesome concentrations of flak and searchlights in the Ruhr valley. It was during this phase that its performance was finally recognised as being inadequate to take on the ever-improving ground and air defences that would be encountered all over Germany. Rear gunner Sgt Arthur Edgley was about to find out just how deadly that barrage was.

Pilot Sgt Jack Wilson did three operations with an experienced crew, flying as ‘second dicky’ to get to know what it was like under ‘shooting war’ conditions. Arthur was also ‘commandeered’ to fly an op as rear gunner with a different crew because its own gunner was ill, but he didn’t complete that trip because the operation was cancelled and the gunner returned to duty. During early May, main force operations were not laid on during the moon period, although the first op for Arthur’s crew came on the night of 13/14 May 1943 when, by way of ‘getting their hand in’, they laid five magnetic mines off the Frisian Islands. They flew out as far as Terschelling, turned over its shoreline, then headed out to sea, dropping the parachute mines crossways to the coast from 600ft altitude at intervals of a few seconds each. Arthur said:

I was the only one to see the splash as they hit the water, which I had to watch out for and report they had all gone. We then flew back over Norwich and were fired on by some machine guns. We were only at 1,500 feet when tracer rounds shot past my turret but fortunately they were some distance from us. Later we heard that there had been an enemy air raid on the city a little earlier.

A few days after our first operation my pilot asked me where my sweetheart lived. I told him Sutton Bridge [only 30 miles north-east of Mildenhall]. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘we’ll give her a visit.’ We took off and flew to Sutton Bridge, passing over her parents’ house at 600 feet. Four times we flew over from different directions. On the last pass, my fiancée and her mother were outside, waving a tablecloth. I, being in the rear turret, saw it all. I let my handkerchief go but they told me they hadn’t seen it. About two minutes later one of our engines stopped and we had to fly back on just three. That was the last time I saw Joan for two years.