大象传媒

When I was old enough I wanted to join up and make a difference, I think most people my age wanted to do something to help out but flying had always interested me so I ended up joining the RAF. I was stationed in several places during the initial stage of my training but I eventually ended up joining a training scheme involved with America. We were told that it was because the Americans had good training schemes as well as the available resources to help train extra pilots but I wouldn't be surprised if there had been public realtions motives behind it as well. Although it didn't bother me as I was still getting trained to fly whilst having an amazing experienec out in America, at that time it was very rare for people to get to travel to America and I didn't know many people who had, so this made it all the more exciting. What happened was that four hundred trainee piolts were shipped over to America and were split into four different groups, one to Texas, one to Florida, one to Canada and one to Minnesota. I was part of the group that went to Texas. We went over by boat with a lot of American wounded, but it took us a while to get there as we had to zig zag across the atlantic to avoid German U boats. We used to joke about it because you could see multiple waves zig zagging into the distance and it seemed a bit of a joke but really it was one little precaustion which might have just made the difference between getting there in one piece and not getting there at all. When we eventually arrived there was a huge fanfare because all the people were glad to see their American boys coming home. It was quite funny because the Americans at first took us for German POWs because our uniforms were different. However when they realised who we were they took us in and made us feel really welcome, we were given free cigarettes, tickets to shows, got invites to parties and were made to feel at home, at least as much as that was possible.
One of the few dissappointments which I had when in America was the train ride to Texas, for some reason we travelled passed Niagara falls and although we had all wanted to see it it none of us expected to go that far west so all of us slept through it as we passed it in the middle of the night and no one got to see it.
When we arrived in Texas many us were billeted with civilians as there wasn't lots of room available so I ended up staying with a local family the "smiths", who were a really nice family with three young daughters and we got on really well as they enjoyed hearing stories of flying and home and I like finding out how different America was compared to Britain. Even though it was a lot of fun we were still worked very hard, we were up early every morning and when we weren't practicing pulling out of tail spins, or doing barrel rolls and loop the lopps we were working in classrooms studying weaponry and armaments. Plus our officers were very strict, if you broke any rules you were sent home in disgrace, you only got one chance and out of the hundred who went to Texas, twenty eight were sent home. One of my friends was sent home because he had been messing about whilst flying and had been low flying, when he came it to land they found four hundred foot of telephone wire attached to his tail. It is funny to think of it now but it must have been a terrible disappointment to get sent home after working so hard. Anyway we continued working hard and with less than two months till we got our wings we heard that the war was over. Whilst we were all ecstatic we still felt bad because after everything we had gained it had all been for nothing or that was how I saw it at the time. I was offered the choice of completing my training but I had to sign of for another two years, I wanted to but felt guilty because I had been away from my family for so long when I could have been at home helping them out. So I decided to leave and get a job. When I look back at it now I am happy to say that I don't view it with the same pessimism, it was an amazing experience which in those days few people could have gone through and I was one of those few, in reality it is something I will always treasure.

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