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Leading Air Craftsman Alan Frederick Chapman 1737663

My personal trail to Mauripur started when I was 17 ½ and volunteered to join the RAF in March 1942. As a result I was called up only a week after I was 18. My first joys of service life were at Cardington, and followed by various RAF watering holes — Blackpool, Sealand, Locking for FME training and Unsworth, now covered by a TAP car factory. Then Melbourne in Yorkshire, 4 Group Bomber Command, 10 Squadron. The first few hours at Melbourne I was told 10 Squadron was known as the Shiney Ten, and that I would need a bike which was most essential as it was a wartime dispersal station.
It was May 1943, and for the next two years I helped in a small way in the demolition work Bomber Command did in Germany. In 1944 one of our Halifax’s G-George returned safely from ops. I brought her into dispersal, turned her, put the chocks up against the wheels, went up to the cockpit with the form 700 as the skipper did an engine run to do a mag check. As soon as the engines stopped, an armourer outside shouted ‘open the bomb doors skipper’. As they opened there was an almighty crash and there before our eyes was a 250lb bomb lying on the ground with the fins broken off. G-George had brought an egg back and laid it on my dispersal. ‘ The armourer and I moved the bomb to the side of dispersal. Whilst doing this he told me that he had only just finished his armourer course. My God, I thought. Here I am at 2.30 in the morning, holding a torch, whilst this guy unscrews the plastic cap off the tail end of the bomb.’ ‘Its an instantaneous fuse’ he says. ‘I need a special tool to get it out, but you can get the fuse out with your fingers’. ‘There I am holding the torch, a sprog armourer with his grubby fingers diving into the intimate innards of a bomb. After about ten minutes of this, I decided I did not want to be a dead hero, only a living coward, so I told him to leave the bomb in peace, which he did. It lay there for about three weeks, and every morning until it was moved, we used to give it a friendly kick — not too hard, I must say.’

Five days after VE day I flew Melbourne to Germany, taking in the demolition work which had been done to Duisburg, up the ‘happy valley’ (Ruhr valley) to Essen for an arial tour of Krupp’s factory all bombed out, which covered about a third of Essen….a huge factory! After this trip we took delivery of Douglas Dakotas and we then became a transport command squadron.

On VE Day, 10 Squadron went to Transport Command, converted to Dakotas, and I flew out to India arriving at Belaspur in September 1945, moved to Poona and started flying our lads who had been POW’s in Jap hands to Mauripur. By the end of 1945 that was completed. We did a big rice drop operation from Mektila, Burma in March and April ‘46. Then in May ’46 Shiney 10 arrived at Mauripur. I wonder if anyone there at the time can remember 20 Dakotas arriving?

We were based in the transit camp that our lads who had been POW’s used before flying to the UK. Our part of Mauripur was self-contained and our only contact with Mauripur base was when one of our Daks had a major inspection in the hanger area.

We were always busy, doing detachments. I did two to Rawalpindi and one to the North West Frontier. Early September ’46 my 49 demob number came up and I cleared out early November. In the early hours of the day I was due at Worli I was still at Mauripur. That was because 10 Squadron had laid on a plane load of happy souls and flew us down to Santa Cruz, Bombay. We were, in the end, the first arrivals at Worli. All the passengers on that flight were not from 10 squadron, so a number must have been from Mauripur base. Anyone remembering will know most of us came home on the Georgic and arrived Liverpool about mid-December ’46. The Georgic was an interesting ship. She had been bombed at the South end of the Suez canal, burnt out but still afloat, so she was towed from there, round the Cape, across the Atlantic to Baltimore where the Americans fitted her out again as an American troopship. No hammocks, canvas sheets slung between steel pipe frameworks. When we arrived at Liverpool the Georgic was carrying the most bods she had ever carried….over 5,500! Believe me we were on short rations the last few days, I think for about a week we could not get a packet of biscuits to have a snack.

We were demobbed in time for Christmas.

All in all I enjoyed 4 years of good memories, good mates and comradeship, especially on Bomber Command.

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