大象传媒

The following text is a verbatim transcription of a recording financed by the Home Front Recall Veterans Reunited Lottery Programme, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War to ensure that new generations can learn from their experiences. Wilf鈥檚 son Andrew Jepson narrated the story. In the following text, interjections by Wilf, who was present at the recording, appear in parenthesis.

My name is Andrew Jepson. I鈥檓 speaking for my father Wilfred Jepson who was born on 9 November 1907. Immediately before the war, and for the first year of the war he was working as a technical manager for Radio Rentals and during 1940 he was managing a branch of Radio Rentals in Westcliffe on Sea, near Southend. It was a closed area and the only reason he was allowed to live there with my mother was because Radio Rentals was supplying radio sets to a great many of the anti-aircraft batteries and searchlight batteries in the area and he had a great deal of trouble keeping track of who had what set because they would keep constantly moving around.

In October 1941 he was called up and went for an interview, asked to go in the RAF, was given basic training in Morecombe and then went for technical training to Cranwell. He found that the Technical Officers and the Technical Sergeants running the technical side of the things were very reasonable but the General Duty sergeants responsible for discipline, well, you just had to keep your mouth shut, and grin and bear it.

My mother, at the same time, was living in her home village of Rottingdean, working in Brighton Town Hall, and cycling backwards and forwards and spending evenings on the roof of the Town Hall fire-watching. Dad quite often got weekend leave to come home. On one occasion my mother went up to visit him and he booked a room in a hotel in Sleaford. In theory the hotel was reserved for officers, but he booked a room and they had a weekend together in any case, and nothing was said. He went through his technical training and the technical trainers said 鈥淵ou already know more than we do鈥�, so we鈥檒l familiarise you with the equipment, and then he was posted to Middle Wallop, which was a fighter station from which night-fighters were flying. One of the most noted pilots was Captain 鈥榗at鈥檚-eyes鈥� Cunningham.

Dad鈥檚 first duty was in an Ops room, having to maintain the headsets for the controllers and the clerks who made a note of all the operational orders that were given but then he was put in charge of a radio truck, which carried a remote transmitter. That was stationed much further south, nearer Southampton. Sopling, up a country lane, and connected to the main control room by landline, and he just had to maintain the transmitter and the generator. The idea was that they could then transmit further out into the Channel, and also having the transmitter away from the control room, the Germans couldn鈥檛 use the signal to find where the control room was. He found that a very pleasant posting. He had a good billet with some farming people. He listened to lots of dogfights and actions that went on over the Channel. He remembers one of the code words, the main radar would home the night-fighter in on the German planes and then they鈥檇 say 鈥淟et your cockerel crow鈥� which was a code word, and the night-fighter would switch on its own radar, and home in for the attack. That posting came to an end and he was then sent to Honiley near Birmingham where 135 Squadron was being formed under Wing Commander Carey. They didn鈥檛 know at the time that it was being prepared for service overseas.

Towards the end of 1941, dad鈥檚 father-in-law, my mother鈥檚 father, went into his final illness. Dad was given compassionate leave, came back home to Rottingdean, saw his father-in-law in Brighton hospital, had one night with my mother and then had to get back to the squadron. As soon as he got back to the squadron, he found that the whole station was shut off under lock and key. Nobody was being allowed out, no telephone calls out, no letters to be sent because they were under orders for service overseas. All he could do was write one letter with a British Forces Post Office number, which would be forwarded to my mother after they鈥檇 gone. They were put on a train and the whole squadron went to Liverpool, and every station they went through there were Military Police on the platforms to make sure that nobody went absent without leave. In Liverpool they embarked on the Duchess of Bedford, and they left Liverpool on a miserable November day, went out into the Irish Sea, joined up with a convoy, and off they went. Nobody knew very much about where they were going to, except that dad had a pocket compass that he used for lining up aerials, so he had a vague idea that they鈥檇 headed west, and then south. The first place they arrived at was Freetown in Sierra Leone where they took on fresh water but nobody was allowed ashore because of the danger of yellow fever and malaria. Shore boats came out, natives in canoes, selling fruit and diving for pennies and things, and after they鈥檇 taken on fresh water, off they went again, heading for the Cape. Twenty-four hours after that, practically the whole ship went down with dysentery. Dad didn鈥檛, and to top it off they went through a tropical storm. Not only did everybody disappear but they were being sick as well. Things got worse because the officers had the large cabins on the upper deck, and all the other ranks had the lower decks. The Duchess of Bedford had been designed for the North Atlantic with shallow draught for going up the St Lawrence Seaway so she rolled like anything, and the ventilation system wasn鈥檛 up to service in the tropics, and the men practically mutinied. So when the officers came round for an inspection below decks, they laid into the officers and jam-packed the companionways and wouldn鈥檛 let them out again and made them feel exactly what it was like. After that they were allowed to sleep on deck provided they didn鈥檛 smoke. No smoking and no talking after dusk. Kapok lifebelts were for pillows, couple of blankets. Water was switched on for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, so there was a rush to wash and shave and fill your water bottle. The toilet was a sloping trough across the stern with a hose in one end and then it sloped down and went outside the ship on the other. So that was life on a troop ship. He ended up going round to Durban.

A few days before they arrived in Durban a big rumour went round the ship that the Germans had invaded England and landed. The ordinary enlisted men had no access to radios; the officers, who did, or the wireless hands, and the technicians, picked up a message and it got out of hand. In fact what was saying was that the Japs had bombed Pearl Harbour and America had come into the war.

When they got to Durban, the convoy split up. Most of the convoy, dad thinks, all went north up the east coast of Africa to Egypt to make up the numbers for the 8th Army to begin the El Alamein campaign. But the Duchess of Bedford was sent without convoy to Bombay, and they immediately went from the ship to a train and sent across India; three or four days non-stop sitting on hard sacks to Calcutta. It would stop and start but whenever they came to a station or halt or the signals went against them, they used to get out of their carriages, run up to the engine with a kettle and draw hot water off the engine to make tea! A couple of packets of tea with condensed milk and that鈥� Then people go sick all the time because of changes of climate and the sanitary conditions, but there鈥檚 no point in reporting sick because there are no sick parades. You just had to put up with it. The toilets on the train were just holes in the floor basically.

When they got to Calcutta, they were fed. Women issued tea and bread and cheese. I suppose it was the Indian version of the Women鈥檚 Voluntary Service. Anyway, they were taken out to the Urania and I think she was anchored in Garden Reach, which is where the river runs down past Calcutta. They had to board her by going up scramble nets with rifles and鈥� two kit bags on your back. Down to the mouth of the Hooghli and promptly ran aground. And of course everybody was sitting around for twenty-four hours waiting for the tide, hoping that the Jap bombers didn鈥檛 turn up.

The 16th January 1942 they arrived in Rangoon. When they got there they found the situation was chaos. The central airfield outside the city, no billets, no food, had to wait around for a field kitchen to turn up and boil some vegetables and rice, and then they were put into tents for the night. In the middle of that the Japanese came over and bombed them. There were no planes. The squadron had arrived without its planes to fly. The only ones that were down there were the Flying Tigers鈥� which is why the Flying Tigers had come down from China. It must have been General Wavell at that time commanding the army, had requested Chiang Kai-shek to send some of his Air Force to provide air cover for Rangoon. But they were Mercenaries.

Now, this needs some explaining. The Chinese had tried to form their own Air Force in the war against Japan before the main Second World War broke out, and they weren鈥檛 very successful. The Chinese weren鈥檛 really up to flying fighter planes. So Chiang Kai-shek went to the Americans and there was quite a lot of political intrigue about this. Before the war the American Navy and the American Army were very, very, very suspicious and jealous of people who suggested that aircraft would become the main weapon of war. The Generals and the Admirals didn鈥檛 like it at all. They didn鈥檛 want to see it funded. One of the officers who pioneered bombers in America, Billy Mitchell, was court-martialled. But somebody of similar ideas about fighter aircraft was named Claire Chennault. He avoided court-martial and was allowed to retire on grounds of ill health. In effect, what they were allowing him to do was to go to China, and become a military advisor to Chiang Kai-shek.

Chennault decided that the Chinese weren鈥檛 up to flying fighter aircraft, so he went back to America, obtained some very high-level support in the White House, got President Roosevelt鈥檚 ear, and was allowed to go and recruit Americans. What he did, he got all the ne鈥檈r-do-wells and discontents, brilliant flyers but absolutely mad, absolutely unable to accept military discipline, and they were shipped out to China. They were paid very big money. They were Mercenaries; they were genuine soldiers of fortune, and the Chinese really looked after them very well but they were expected to fly against the Japanese Air Force. It was 500 dollars gold if they shot a Jap fighter down. They got all their keep, housing, food; they were very well looked after.

Anyway, General Wavell asked for a squadron of the AVG (the American Volunteer Group was what they were called; their nick-name was the Flying Tigers) to come down to Rangoon in January of 1942 to provide air cover. When they arrived in Rangoon, they found that their radios were on a different frequency to the British Control Towers. Dad was about the only radio technician in the entire country who had the skills to deal with the situation, so he was lent to the American Volunteer Group. The first month or so I spent wiping crystals to match the Control Tower, and that鈥檚 how I became attached to the Flying Tigers. I was lent, but unofficially by Wing Commander Carey. But he was a man of action; if something needed to be done, he overlooked all these things to do it. Dad鈥檚 Squadron Commander was an ex-Battle of Britain pilot. He was one of the aces of the Battle of Britain. He was a great pilot.

All sorts of things were going on with a risk. It was a dodgy situation. It was a very dangerous situation indeed. The Burmese weren鈥檛 at all in favour of the British. They were going out in the jungle lighting bonfires in a circle round the airfields, so the Japanese just had to come over and drop their bombs in the middle of the circle. When a few Hurricanes did arrive, with British pilots, these pilots just weren鈥檛 up to flying in those conditions. There were bomb craters all over the airfield and they crash-landed them. (They lost four. I know that the first four that came over in about the first four or five days, because they had to land on runways that had been bombed during the night and there were craters and big chunks鈥�)

The Yanks were expert flyers I agree, with lots of experience. They were stunt pilots and all that you see. They could zigzag and land anywhere, but most of our pilots had only had a few weeks training. Dad鈥檚 duty every morning was to go out and help walk the airfield and look for unexploded bombs. (Well, most of our chaps, if we saw a big hole, and you鈥檇 see a fin sticking up with an unexploded bomb, was to stick a flag in it. When the pilots came in they could zigzag all over the place. Sometimes these bombs would go off during the day. The Americans had a very poor opinion of the British pilots).

The defence of Rangoon was based on Sittang River which ran sort of north-south 80 miles east where the sort of Malayan peninsular comes up into Burma, and there was one railway bridge across it which had to be defended at all costs. The King鈥檚 Own Yorkshire KOYLIs and the Gloucesters were sent out to defend this river. Half the troops that went looking for the river never found it. They never had any maps. From reading other histories of the campaign I鈥檝e found out that the troops who went across the river, helped defend the bridge, were stranded because General Wavell had ordered the bridge to be blown up while they were still on the wrong side, and got captured. The Japanese crossed the river anyway and began filtering round north of Rangoon, setting up roadblocks and infiltrating. So General Wavell ordered a retreat.

2510 words

End of part 1 of 3 parts

For part 2 see A8119064

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