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This story is submitted by Helen Hughes of the People's War team in Wales on behalf of Frederick Jones and is added to the site with his permission.

I was in Manchester when the war started and I signed up in Manchester….all air crew were volunteers — there wasn’t one pressed man. I was a gunner on the mid upper turret of a Lancaster and did 30 operational flights over Germany…the Ruhr and all the rest of it. I have good and bad memories.

At the end of the war we did fly over Holland on a goodwill mission with food for the Dutch people and we went in at very low height and the people stood on the road waving their hands at us as we went past…and it’s marvellous to think those people thought we were wonderful because we’d taken food to them. The Lancaster was full of food ready for them, and we dropped it to them. Food was very scarce at that time in Holland.

The bad memory is when we took off and we were going to a place called Trondheim which was up the top of Norway and the German fleet was supposedly anchored in the Trondheim fjord …and as we flew towards it, all we could see was a box of what we called flack….but its anti aircraft fire. It was like a solid block….and this was the only time really that I’ve been very very very scared. Being in a mid upper turret I could see what was going on as we flew towards it. Fortunately, as we got to it, the master bomber, a Mosquito said don’t go into it…its too dangerous to fly into, and we turned back from that. But I think that was the only real operation that I was really, really scared — most of them you were frightened — most of them you got the feeling that maybe you wouldn’t come back….because at this time one in four was the survival rate. And fortunately we were the one in four crew that did survive. Sat up there in the gun turret you could see the target coming up …you could see the flack around the target. The searchlights were the most frightening thing I think on a mission….because if one of them got you — if the blue one got you, that was it. They had one master searchlight and it was a blue one. If that searchlight hit you, you could say you were down….but with an ordinary searchlight, if that hit you you could usually do what they call a corkscrew manoevre, which is a dive, to get out of that thing… nine times out of ten you got out of it. But with a blue one, no….it would just stay on you…they’d follow you and follow you and follow you — how it was controlled I don’t know but we always feared the blue searchlight — that was the one thing we did fear. Sitting in a mid upper turret with the target coming up you were more interested in what was going on around you in the air. You would see the fighter coming towards you and you’d have to protect yourself by firing back at him. If it was an ME109…JEH08 or whatever it was going past you, you didn’t bother, let him go….but nine times out of ten this fellow would attack you and fortunately we weren’t attacked that often. Fortunately the war was just about to finish when I came to the end of my thirty missions…so they sent me to a gunnery school to train air gunners. Really they weren’t necessary, because the war was over so you didn’t need a gunner. We had what was known then as an automatic gun laying turret which was a turret which fired itself and laid itself off to the aircraft — where we used to have to sight the thing with a gun sight…this thing just went round with radar and fired at the aircraft. This was the sort of thing I was supposed to run as the instructor…but I was only there about six weeks then I went back to flying. I was on the Lincoln, a slightly larger Lancaster and I flew that until they found I had a DVT in my leg, and I had oxygen — something to do with being on oxygen most of the time we were flying and it affected this lung. I haven’t got a lung here now and my ribs have gone, because they put a plastic bag down, to close the lung down, to rest it…and it burst! About ten years ago….and I’m fine now. There’s lots of other people of 81 who are far worse than I am and went through a lot more than I did.

My father was in what they call the Look, Duck and Vanish, the LDV before the Home Guard — the Local Defence Volunteers. And talking about that the Air Training Corps at one time was called the Air Defence Cadet Corps and at 14 years old I joined the Air Defence Corps and I was in it until it became the Air Training Corps ….then I went into the service. My father was that….my mother had something to do with the ARP….but I don’t think they were ever scared for me. I think it was a different feeling….I think mainly the people on the ground…the people in Normandy and the people in the Burma forest, they’ve gone through more than ever I did.
(see also Christmas Day with the Lancaster)

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