大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Liz Andrew of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Peter Haworth and has been added to the site with his permission.

I was an apprentice fitter on Aircraft engines at Squires Gate in Blackpool. I worked on Cheetah 10s for Avro Hansens - before the Lancaster bomber period. We saw planes arriving in bits - but we'd patch them up and replace the engines and off they'd go again. They had to be right.

I met my wife during the War at the Blackpool Tower or the Winter Gardens - there was always dancing there and there were crowds of people. I remember the Joe Loss Big Band came. Blackpool was full of servicemen and the Yanks were posted here too - one of them, a flight engineer from Dallas, married my wife's sister.

RAF navigators were trained on flights in this area and after I became a flight engineer, I had to take chaps up for tests
to check they were going to be satisfactory for operational service. These chaps took chances - I was too young to worry but no doubt should have been scared. A lot of them got into trouble later in the war - some of them were shot down and never came home.

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