大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War website by Julia Shuvalova for GMR Action Desk on behalf of Mr Derek Jackson and has been added with his permission. The author is fully aware of the terms and conditions of the site.

My name is Derek Jackson. I was born in Manchester in 1925 and am now 80 years old. I always say that I saw the war of 1939-1945 from two sides.

At the outbreak of war I was 14 years old and had just got a scholarship to the Manchester School of Art where I would attend until I was 16. So by end of September 1939 I was evacuated with the school to Macclesfield in the country, about 20 miles from Manchester from where I used to cycle home at weekends.

I was at home for the Christmas "blitz" of Manchester in 1940. My uncle owned a pub in Salford, and I remember going there next day to see if they had survived. I saw the rows of houses completely flattened in the road next to my uncle's, but he and his family were ok. As I was going through the city centre, many warehouses were still on fire.

After leaving school in 1941, I was working at a printers. Then I joined the air training corps and on becoming 18 I joined the RAF, for aircrew training. This was in late 1943, when they were wanting many air gunners (not pilots), as the big four-engined bombers, like Sterling, Halifax and Lancaster, were now in service with the RAF.

Six months later I had finished my gunner training, and passed out as a sergeant air gunner and awarded my flying wing by August 1944.

I was at an operational training unit, where I joined a crew flying the old Wellington bombers. My pilot, a flight lieutenant, had a plenty of flying experience that he taught to other pilots, but had never flown on bomber operations. After 3 months of training we went on to a conversion unit flying four-engined Halifax bombers, our crew now being 7 men, i.e. pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, flight engineer, wireless operator, and two gunners.

After a month's training we were finally posted to a Lancaster bomber squadron (149 squadron 3 group bomber command) in November 1944 to start operations bombing Germany. The base was near to a small village in Norfolk called Methwold which consisted of a church, 3 pubs, and about 90 houses. It was a very rural area, specialising in farming and forestry. The bomber station consisted of about 2000 people, with 400 flying personnel.

After 2 weeks of further training, we went on our first operation bombing Germany. This was a day-time raid on a rail junction at a small town called Seigan in the Ruhr. The Ardennes offensive had started the battle of the Bulge at Christmas 1944, and the Germans were transporting troops and tanks by rail to the South.

I should point out at this stage that bomber command mainly flew night raids on the cities, but at this later period of the war (last six months) our bomber group also did many daylight operations, during which we always had a strong fighter escort, the British with Spitfires or Americans with Mustangs.

I did up to 25 operations up to the end of war in May 1945. The tour was 30, about half of these were at night bombing cities like Cologne, Nuremberg, Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart, Koblenz, and Dresden. The daylight raids targets were mainly oil plants, munitions factories, air fields, troop concentrations and industrial targets in the Ruhr area. The flack(anti-aircraft guns) was always very heavy 鈥攖hey never ran out of shells, but there was a big shortage of pilots and fighter aircraft. As in the later stage of the war the British and American Air Forces completely dominated the skies over Germany. Of course the Germans at this time had the V-weapons , the Jet Fighter ,the Flying Bombs and the V-2 rockets but these came out too late. If we had not invaded when we did in June 1944 the Germans would have had these six months earlier and it would have been touch and go as to whether the invasion would have been successful. When we had done 15 operations our pilot had been promoted to squadron leader and was responsible for leading the raids that we flew on and the squadron then consisted of 30 Lancaster Bombers. At that time we were losing more aircraft through bad weather, collisions, and bombs dropped on them from above with anything 500-1,000 bombers over a city target in 30 minutes. This was in the winter of 1945, which was very hard with a lot of snow and freezing, fog particularly in the flat open land of the fens in East Anglia.

At this point I must mention the famous or infamous Dresden Raid which I flew on. This was on the night of 13th February 1945. At the time to us aircrews this was just another operation, the main worry being the distance, very deep into Germany and a nine hour flight. We had been asked to bomb Dresden as the Russians were only 150 miles away and German troups and tanks were being rushed to the east through Dresden which was a main rail centre. There were 800 bombers on this target and a fire storm was started which killed 30,000-50,000 people and on leaving we could see the fires 200 miles away. Only six aircraft were lost as the Germans had moved all the flack guns to the Russian front.

This raid was very much criticised after the war but there were at least 50-60 war factories in Dresden. When the war finished on May 9th 1945, we were quickly organised to drop food supplies to the Dutch people in Northern Holland as the Germans had cut off many areas by flooding and the people were starving in their thousands. We were also engaged in flying back our prisoners of war from Germany to see the faces of men who had been in the camps. When they landed in England this was quite an experience. I was flying in the RAF for another two years and came out in 1947.

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