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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by a volunteer from Oxford ´óÏó´«Ã½/CSV on behalf of Bill Rush and has been added to this site with his permission. Bill Rush fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

PEOPLE IN STORY: Bill Rush, born in 1920
LOCATION OF STORY: England, India
MAIN AREA OF INTEREST: Royal Auxiliary Air Force
TITLE: BUTCHER’S BOY JOINS THE RAAF

Bill worked as a butcher’s errand boy, riding his bicycle and delivering his meat until war was declared in 1939, when he was 19. He soon became a member of the Local Defence Volunteers, then the Home Guard, then in 1940 he was called up to the Royal Auxiliary Air Force. He went to Uxbridge for the medical, his civvies were taken away, he was kitted out with his uniform, given a number (933179) and sent to RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire, where he trained for 18 months.

One day during PT training (in their shorts and vests) someone looked up and noticed a speck of silver in the sky which stayed there for a while and then disappeared. A spy plane, they thought. Sure enough, four days later the camp was bombed, land mines were dropped, some of which damaged nearby Aylesbury.

After Dunkirk and the Fall of France 615 Kent and Surrey Squadron came back to Swansea Common, and it was there that Bill joined them. After several months training Bill and his colleagues were kitted out in tropical uniforms, the plan was for them to go to West Africa on convoy patrol. Sent to Scotland to embark on the convoy, Bill spent his 21st birthday on board ship.

Sailing south to the tropics their ship developed engine trouble, so the convoy had to leave them behind with two corvettes for protection. Despite the fact that a U-boat was now following them, the corvettes had to leave them on the second day as they were needed elsewhere. Bill’s ship managed to continue to Freetown where they picked up the remnants of the original convoy and sailed on to Cape Town. By this time Singapore had fallen, so plans had to be changed and the group became some of the first troops to arrive in India. They arrived in Bombay and transferred onto a troop train — the whole train being especially for them. The line was single track, so every so often they had to pull into sidings to let a train coming the other way pass them. It took two weeks to get to their intended base, Jessore, where they were billeted in an old school, bedded out on the verandah.

To start with it was quiet in Jessore and they had to fill in time as best they could, but soon the airplanes started coming and then they were busy. Bill was involved in maintenance and unpacking of cases, etc, on B flight (there was also A flight and HQ, plus MT [Motor Transport] section). The air strips were made by draining the water out of the paddy fields and building up the air strips on the dried out ground. During this time Bill had no home leave, though he did have some free time in India and was able to go to Darjeeling. Over the next few years Bill moved around quite a lot. In 1942/43 he was based in Jessore, Fenny, Alipore and Chittagong; 1943/45 saw him at Isharazi, Nazair, Silchar, Palel, Chara and Guttack.

Then came August 1945 and the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of the war in the Far East. Bill is in no doubt that the dropping of these bombs brought the war to an earlier end. He and some colleagues had been ready for some further intensive training but this was immediately stopped. The squadrons were split up and the people who had been there the longest were repatriated first. The troops left so quickly that some equipment, too difficult to move, such as tankers and other transport, had to be left behind to rot and rust.

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