“So, this was all at Daedalus. What was Daedalus like then? Was it the same as it is now?”
“It hasn’t changed much in the field and the buildings all are as they were then. And the runways as well.”
“So what was your involvement with the rest of the war? Did you continue flying to France?”
“During the rest of the war? One of my junior pilots said to me: ‘We keep going across to France to all these things. It would be better if we kept a flight in France.’ I said: ‘Yes, I agree with you entirely. You’ll be in charge of it.’ And he was Anglo-French, French mother and an English father. He was completely bilingual. I’m still in touch with him, in France. So he had charge of a flight, which followed the armies through - his first posting was up the Seine. First big town you come to. What is it?”
“Rouen?”
“Rouen? Yes, that would be it. And right into Germany in the end. And here was another very emotional thing. As my flight moved forward taking stores and aircraft parts and people, I went over there too. If I could go, I took them. I loved going. And as Germany was being beaten and they had prisoner of war camps, as the prisoners of war were released, the freed personnel were collected by my flight and brought back to Daedalus”. Here he documented them and sent them on their way “in two hours”.
“On D-Day itself [does he mean VE Day?], celebrations were terrific and a message from the Admiral came that, ‘there were three German POWs; would I get them away home by air as usual?’ It was virtually impossible. I said, ‘Yes, I think I can do that.’”
There was difficulty finding a serviceable aircraft. Also he was told, “‘Wherever you go in the country, you can’t land at any aerodrome with permission, you can’t take off with permission, and you’ll get no assistance whatever. You break down, they might have a fire crew, they might not. The whole country will be drunk!’ [Laughs] Well, certainly I was, in the morning. I was carried home and put to bed to recover and I had permission to take my two boys aged 12 and nine with me. My older boy, before the war he, at age five, had flown with me always. The ex-POWs were interested and I just expounded myself with all their questions. It was quite something. And having done all this I took my two boys over the invasion beaches to see what had been going on there. I was flying till after VJ day. Right up to 1946.”
“When did you actually learn of the invasion?”
“On D-Day. Mind you, we knew something was up, because every road from beyond Winchester, every minor road was full of army vehicles. And on the front at Lee-on-Solent, both sides, you could just drive one car at a time. A few gaps to let other people pass. All along there, full of vehicles. Gallons, vans, shell carriers, little vehicles. In fact, something big was happening here and we knew it.”
“So how did you feel when you knew it would actually happen?”
“Oh, terribly thrilled. It’s what we’d been aiming at, all the four years we’d been thinking of it and at one time, in the Orkney Islands, with seven weeks’ expectation of life, we had no hope of life. We thought Germany was going to win the war and we’d be killed anyway, so why bother. That was the attitude.”
“So the invasion was a great morale booster?”
“Ooh, terrific.”
“On the 6th of June, could you run through your first sortie of that day?”
“Well, we took off in pairs. Number one was the spotter pilot, number two, that was me, was the fighter pilot behind him, to keep enemy aircraft away from him. And while we were in France, we notified a ship, name of Sunshine: ‘We have arrived in France, What target, please?’ and it said to us ‘Target Number 1’. We’d been briefed as to what this target was, we both had maps, and as soon as my number one had found it - he was called Skylark and I was Skylark 2 - he called ‘Sunshine, I’m over the target now, what instructions?’ So the ship said: ‘Flash, 17 seconds.’ That means that in 17 seconds a pair of shells will hit the target, or miss it. Five seconds before it was due to hit the target, he says: ‘Flash, five seconds.’ That gives the spotting pilot time to tip his aircraft on the side and look out of the window at the target and look where the shells hit. The first shot he said, as best as I remember, ‘About 200 yards overshoot but direction good’. So Sunshine said, ‘Right. Stand by. We’ll try again.’ His next shot landed. And I wasn’t watching the shells until after they had burst. I could see from the smoke. Skylark 1 said, ‘Jolly good shot. Right on the target! I’ll go down and investigate.’ And he went down to investigate at a very low level … and, ‘Bloody Hell, they’re shooting at me. I’ll go up again. Give them some more!’ That is very literal. I think we had two more targets and after that we go home. I’ve no idea what the targets were. A farmhouse on the map. We were all good at map-reading.”
“Now, you were flying over the invasion fleet, so what was that like?”
“Oh, the Channel was full of ships going back and going forwards and anchored near the shore. The Mulberry harbours and the ships sunk along with them - we had full vision of all that. And tanks - a hell of a movement on the ground, we could see. But it wasn’t our job to look at that; our job was to do [what] we were told to do, and we did it. We were frightfully, frightfully, conscientious - and thrilled. We flew only one sortie that day, because an ex-CO’s squadron had been shot down and he decided that, as they’d been cannon fodder for the Germans, he’d not let the experienced pilots go in. And I was experienced fully in what I was doing. I mean, had I met a German aircraft - I did see a group of three but I shot at them a long way away, they would have seen the tracer bullets going past them. But they just didn’t swerve, they just go shshsh - gone. I didn’t think of chasing them either.
“I was on communications, taking people to and from France and landing in France. The Americans were all ready for it. They had little carpets they put down on the fields. There were metal carpets on which you landed. That was very clever. And then I was taking people and stores there and back and that sort of thing.”
“You actually flew to France?”
“Oh, yes, a lot. Two days after going there, a most extraordinary thing happened. They had WAAFs and Wrens and Army females and nurses, and they threw a dance in a big marquee, with floorboards and band and we were dancing there and shells were screaming overhead. All lights on and no thought of any danger, just dancing and - happiness.”
The navy was another service which saw the war transforming the lives and prospects of women recruits. At the beginning of the war, it seems that those called up for the WRNS were mostly used for traditionally female roles - as cooks, stewards, typists and to look after other people. As time went on, it becomes clear that a number of very young girls were given key jobs of strategic importance and coped. The first of these interviews are by the author, with later short extracts from interviews from ‘The Vital Link’ exhibition at the Royal Naval Museum by Dr Chis Howard Bailey, used courtesy of the Royal Naval Museum.
One such was Wren Patricia Balfour, born 1919
“On 3rd September, the day war broke out, I was on Portsdown Hill with my boyfriend and we heard the 11 o’clock news and within a few minutes there was an awful noise and we thought ‘My Goodness, they’d got here quickly!’ But it wasn’t [the enemy]. It was a thunder storm!
“I applied for the Wrens and they didn’t have a place for me at first, so I did VAD training at the Cottage Hospital in Emsworth. Then they called me up for the Wrens so I went to HMS Vernon in Portsmouth. I lived at home with my mother, so I had to travel in by train every day. They had the Hayling Billy then [steam train] to Havant. There was a bomb on the line once, Hitler bombed the Portsmouth line, you see, but I managed to get in to work, because somebody I knew from Hayling came along with a car, which was full but I managed to squeeze