大象传媒

I served in many RAF stations but the worst one was at Credenhill, west of Hereford and it is where I served my second advanced course on aircraft instruments. I was there from November 1940 to April 1941. There were about 30 or 40 of us on the course and we were lined up as the WO was to inform us of our posting. He started off by saying 鈥淎ll married men step forward one pace.鈥� I stepped forward as I was married at Tettenhall Church June 1940. He went on to say: 鈥淭he remainder of you will be posted to the Far East.鈥� Little did we know then that most of them would later most likely be prisoners of war under the Japanese. I have often wondered how many survived the war. I was very lucky as I was posted to RAF Hendon in London. There were about 50 of us, no aircraft and for two weeks we did nothing until one day a General from the War Office came to inform us we were to be a secret unit of photo-reconnaissance aircraft - spitfires flying at 40,000 feet - and were to operate where the second front was to be 鈥� the Normandy peninsular. We worked on this and gradually built our different sections up for three years. By then the original 50 had built up to 2,500 and we were a wing of 3 squadrons of aircraft. Spitfires, Mosquitoes and Wellington bombers for low-level night photography. I had built my own section up to 70 technicians. And our aircraft had taken millions of photos which the cartographers had made into maps. All the 30 odd countries fighting used them on D-Day June 1944. We were the largest aircraft unit to go over to the Normandy beaches as soon as an airstrip could be provided for us. We followed the armies up through France and up to Brussels early September 1944. we stayed there until the following February and after the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes was won we then moved on to Eindhoven in Holland and I came back to England in the Autumn of 1945 and was de-mobbed after serving almost three years in December 1945. Six months later I received a letter from King George VI informing me I had been awarded the British Empire Medal for services rendered. I interpreted that as being my building-up of the instrument section from scratch.

[This story was submitted to the People's War site by Wolverhampton Libraries on behalf of Harry Reade and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions]

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