大象传媒

This account was given by Gordon Winstanley Jones at the volunteer training day in Denbigh and is contributed to the People's War website with his permission.

I left school at 16 and began working on my uncle's farm in Ruthin. I volunteered for air crew duties at 17 years of age and was accepted, but sent home until I was 18.

I was trained in London, Bridlington, Weston super Mare and St Athan and qualified as a sargeant flight engineer in 1944.

I joined a 6 man Wellington crew when they converted onto 4 engine bombers. The role of the flight engineer was to assist the pilot and to be ready to fly the plane back to safety if required, in an emergency.

Our crew took part in 18 bombing operations over Germany. Most of them took place by day and most took 6 - 7 hours. About one third took place at night and these were far more terrifying.

In the last week of the war, the same crew flew on two Manna operations over Holland to drop food for the starving Dutch people.

Days later we were sent to Northern France to bring home British soldiers who had been prisoners of war for up to five years. This was a most rewarding mission.

Soon after war had ended we were able to take our ground crew from RAF Chedburgh on a low level flight over Germany so that they could see for themselves the devastation that had been caused.

Even though war was over, we continued to fly on training exercises until the Squadron was disbanded in August 1945. I still had another eighteen months or so to serve, and had to retrain as ground crew.

I was being trained as a wireless operator in flying control in Lincolnshire at the time when the atom bomb was dropped in Japan.

Although I was sent out to India as part of Tiger Force, we all knew by then that the war really was over.

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