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Ground Crew Also Served

When war broke out I was living at Wembley and I was evacuated all the way to Gerrard’s Cross! I used to cycle home at the weekends until one of the boys was killed in an air raid and that put a stop to that! I was moved on to a very smart house at Iver Heath in Buckinghamshire, where the lady still had two maids to look after us. It was quite something for a young lad at that time.

When I was called up, I applied for aircrew but was told that my eyesight was not good enough and they suggested that I might like to become an air gunner. I failed to see the logic in this as I would have thought it was even more important to see the enemy coming at you! In any event, I subsequently became ground crew, working on aircraft instruments.

I started out at the County Hotel Skegness, where we were trained for eight weeks before moving on to an electronics course at Dudley near Wolverhampton. This was followed by a RADAR course in Albert Mansions in S. Kensington. When I passed out from this, I was posted to 460 Squadron at Binbrook in Lincolnshire. This was to be an Australian squadron until the concern of the Japanese moving down from New Guinea to Darwin put a stop to Australian aircrew being posted over here. One of the few Lancaster aircraft to reach 90 operations was our ‘G for George’. This was flown to Australia in April 1945 and is now housed in the Australian War Museum in Canberra, which I visited about five years ago.

I worked on servicing airborne RADAR, that is GEE, H2S, Fishpond and IFF. IFF caused a few problems as it was fitted with a detonator device to enable aircrew to blow it up rather than it fall into enemy hands should the aircraft be shot down. I feel more IFF units may have been lost by ground crew (not by radar mechanics who knew what would happen) pressing the buttons to see what would happen whilst servicing them!

I was next moved on to Kelstern which was a satellite unit near Louth in Lincolnshire doing much the same thing, before moving on to Scampton but I got there after the famous Dam Buster Raid took place. My next move was to Coningsby, fitting out vans with electronic equipment so that repairs could be done in the Far East. We were due to go to Okinawa, but the Japanese surrendered when the first draft was four days out from Liverpool and this draft returned to Coningsby.

My next posting was to 78 squadron which was flying Dakotas for transport command and was based at Almaza which is now Cairo airport. On our trip out we stopped at Bari in Italy and whilst all the permanent staff were equipped with mosquito nets, we were only there for one night and had to fend for ourselves. It came as a bit of a surprise when a few days later people started to flake out in Cairo, until the local doctor established that most of us had malaria!

We were based four miles outside of the town and used to get a lift into Heliopolis where we caught a tram into Cairo. We next moved to Cairo West, which was 30 – 35 miles away where we had to live in tents. Whilst there, we had an outbreak of typhoid and the queue of troops for innoculation must have been half a mile long. It transpired that an Arab who was working in the cookhouse cutting up bread was the carrier and had said nothing about being sacked by the Army when he applied for a job with the Air Force.

The war was now over and we were all given our demob numbers but it was about this time that the RAF strike took place and they had to fly out Members of Parliament to try to cool things down!

I was then posted to Palestine with a Halifax squadron at Aqir. It was here that we suffered terrorist attacks when sticky bombs were attached to the aircraft, destroying a number of them. The armoury was also raided on another occasion, but the guns were recovered when the terrorists’ truck overturned whilst attempting to cross the airfield. This was at the time of the King David Hotel incident.

We were kept waiting at Kasfareet, by the Suez Canal in Egypt, before our return to the UK where I was sent to 4MU unit at Ruislip while my family were living at Wembley. My demob number, No.52, which is engraved on my heart, came up and when the CO asked if we wished to sign on, you can guess my reply!!

Mr. Desborough

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