The Bournemouth
Reception Centre comprised several resort hotels on the south coast of
England and hundreds of us were crowded into them; lots of men, not enough
girls. There was a beautiful view of the ocean but rolled barbed wire
separated us from it. Some of the names I remember there (from snapshots)
are Bill Stovin, Harold Jones,
Scott Reid, Doris and Joan (Pinky), but after 50 years the memories begin
to fade. We spent most of April and May of 1943 in the Bournemouth
resort area before we were sent off to work.
My first posting was to RAF RHUDDLAN in May of 1943 to serve as
technical officer in charge of a ground installation at GREAT ORMES HEAD near LLANDUDNO,
North Wales, which was set up high on the bluff to provide surveillance
over the Irish Sea. Before I arrived, the station was being run quite
efficiently by a seasoned RAF Flight-Sergeant and I, a green inexperienced
Pilot Officer, was sent there to take charge. I had to become a fast
learner. The Flight Sergeant had put one of the men on charge for some
offence he had committed prior to my arrival and I, as the only officer on the
station, would have to hear the case in a week, reach a verdict and pass
sentence. I recall I read military law manuals quickly and frantically
before the week was out.
I also remember that the station was armed with a Browning machine gun (left
over from World War I) mounted at the top of the cliff pointing out toward the
Irish Sea. We fired it once a week to make sure that it remained
operational, (it kept jamming) but we never had to fire it in anger. My
only other recollection of that station was when the radar antenna, a large
rotating bedspring-sized device, became U/S (Air Force jargon for
unserviceable). We all went up on the roof in a blinding rainstorm to
work on the antenna and find the fault, and it was after this incident that I
first heard the frightening rumour that exposure to radar waves could make a
man sterile. It ain't so, and that's pukka gen (more Air Force
jargon). I don't recall that we picked up any enemy aircraft on the
tube while at that station but most of the friendly trans-Atlantic flights came
over from the direction of Iceland and we monitored them on their approach to
their destinations in the United Kingdom.
In the fall of 1943 several radar officers from different locations were
collected together at PEMBROKE DOCK in south Wales for a refresher and
update on some of the latest radar equipment. That course turned out to
be almost like a class re-union and I still have a snapshot from there with
names scribbled on the back: Hal Eagen, Chas Browning, "Doc",
Ernie Shortliffe, Tom Pound, Birnbaum, Parish, Hal
Moreau. I remember them all but I have not run into any of them since
the war ended.
In September 1943 I was promoted to the rank of Flying Officer and
attached to 60 Group, 70 Wing for duty on the Outer Hebrides
in Scotland, as Technical Officer in charge of the ground radar installation at
RAF ISLIVIG on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis. (Lewis
is adjacent to the Isle of Harris where Harris Tweed comes from.)
To get there I had to take an over-night boat from the Kyle of Lochalsh in
northern Scotland to Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. Crossing The
Minch was rough and I recall waking up in the dead of night and being
seasick.
RAF ISLIVIG
was a ground installation monitoring the arrival of trans-Atlantic flights approaching
from Iceland. However we did see enemy action: one German aircraft
appeared on the tube regularly every day, on the same route, at the same
time. We called him Weather Willy since he must have been taking
meteorological readings along the way. He came from one of the occupied
Scandinavian countries, Norway perhaps, flew due west until he got over the
North Atlantic, and then turned around and flew back. He did not bother
us and we did not bother him.
In the HEBRIDES in the winter of 1943-44 we lived in Nissen huts (a.k.a. Quonset huts, a large half-cylinder of corrugated metal with closed ends, lying on its flat side). These accommodations were much better than those of most of the civilian residents on the island, some of who shared their shelter with their sheep. Scotch was scarce in those days so we had to settle for Drambuie, a Scotch liqueur made on the Isle of Skye nearby, not too much of a hardship. There was no snow there but it rained horizontally almost every day, like living on the deck of a large ship. In those critical years hundreds of American-made airplanes were being delivered from the U.S. to the U.K. and they were ferried across the ocean by A.T.A. (Air Transport Auxiliary) pilots. I remember getting to know several of these pilots in later months when I was serving at Maintenance Units in England, and I recall spending some pleasant hours with them. While still at Islivig in the Hebrides the signals officer took sick at RAF BENBECULA, a smaller island nearby, and I was sent there on temporary duty. Shortly after that I was transferred to 41 Group, and from then until the end of the war I served on RAF maintenance units as technical officer in charge of installation of radio and radar equipment into aircraft of the RAF and the Royal Navy.
Our family back in
Canada had food rationing along with other shortages. They worried about
us suffering the hardships of war and the German bombs. We in the U.K.
were well fed with our meat ration and even on rare occasions
strawberries. We carried on our more or less normal lives worrying more
about being posted to some far off unknown destination (where some of my
colleagues were sent) rather than about being hit by a bomb. The only time
I was exposed to enemy fire during the two and a half years I was overseas was
when I chose to go to London on leave, but that did not deter any of us from
choosing to do so as often as possible to meet with friends and enjoy the
amenities of London for every leave we could get. In 1943 in
London we would still experience air raids that were the tail end of the London
Blitz. I recall once eating a steak dinner at the Orchard Club that
was a watering hole in the basement of a building on Wigmore Street behind Selfridges,
and when the air-raid siren went off we all came up to street level to see the
fireworks. Later in 1944 the V‑1 buzz bombs had begun
and they were more terrifying than the enemy aircraft. The buzz bomb was
a small-unmanned aircraft with just enough gasoline to get it to its
destination. When it ran out of gas it fell to earth and its bomb load
then exploded on impact. In the summer and fall of 1944 I was
stationed at #15 Maintenance Unit RAF- WROUGHTON near Swindon, Wiltshire,
where we were outfitting the Royal Navy's Barracuda, an aircraft-carrier
based bomber. Once each month as Signals Officer I went into London to
attend a meeting at Air Ministry offices on Lower Regent Street to discuss with
the Navy brass which pieces of radio and radar equipment they wanted installed
in their Barracudas, and they usually wanted everything. The standard
joke at the time was that if they asked to have one more piece of equipment
added, the Barracuda would not be able to keep up with the aircraft carrier.
I recall at these monthly meetings in mid‑1944 that on a few
occasions when we were all sitting around the conference table talking
business, the buzz-buzz of a V‑1 would be heard approaching.
Everyone would try to be nonchalant and continue with the business of the
meeting even as the noise grew louder, but if the noise should suddenly stop,
all would dive for shelter under the conference table until the explosion was
heard; and fortunately it was never too close.
The V‑2 rocket attacks began several months later and their terror was quite different from that of the V‑1 since the V‑2 was silent as it approached. You heard nothing until you heard the explosion. (The V‑2 was not unlike the scud missile used against Israel in the 1990 Gulf War.) The one incident that stands out in my mind was eating dinner one evening with a lady friend at Isow's Restaurant on Brewer Street just behind Piccadilly Circus when suddenly there was a loud explosion and we froze in our seats gripping our fork and knife. It seemed to us that the explosion was next door but we learned the next morning that it had occurred at Marble Arch more than a mile away and had blown out all the windows on the west side of the Cumberland Hotel.
The hotel of choice in London for the RCAF radar technicians tended to
be the Strand Palace, although we (I think it was Bill Stovin and I) did
try the Savoy across the street one time but were made to feel not
welcome when they did such things as add corkage to our bill, and object to our
having guests in our room. London in general was good to us, with its
concerts and its plays and its service clubs. We went to the Royal Albert
Hall and heard the London Philharmonic play Beethoven's Fifth, which had become
the V‑for-Victory symphony with its dit-dit-dah motif. We went to
the West End Theatres to see the new plays of Noel Coward and others. And
we went to the service clubs. The Lord Tweedsmuir Canadian Officers Club
in Winfield House on the Outer Circle at Regents Park was one of the better
service clubs: Winfield House with its gold-plated plumbing fixtures was owned
at the time by Barbara Hutton the Woolworth heiress, but after the war it
became the residence of the United States ambassador. There were also the
Balfour Service Club on Portland Place, and the Jewish Service Club in Woburn
House near Russell Square, all providing general hospitality and tea dances for
the servicemen and servicewomen on leave.
Our daily
routines were frequently mixed with surprises, sometimes pleasant, sometimes
not so pleasant. In late 1943 I received a signal from Air Ministry
informing me that my cousin Norman Shnier
(Navigator) had been shot down over Germany and was a prisoner-of-war at Kriegefangenen-lager
der Luftwaffe Nr.3, Deutschland. Although I was not next-of-kin I
was “to-be-notified”; and I was also notified a year or so later when
the war ended and he was released and we met soon afterwards in London.
This story had a happy ending. Other stories did not. His brother Clifford Shnier, a close pre-war friend of
mine was shot down over Hamburg July 30, 1943 while piloting Lancaster EE173 on
a night-bombing raid. Thumbing through my war-time little black book I
find other friends of my youth who did not make it back to become friends of my
middle age: Gerald Gordon of Regina, and R.(Bert) Sirluck
of Winnipeg
Being an
Air Force officer in the U.K. carried with it privileges; it was like belonging
to a national club with branches everywhere. One story that I have told
many times is about meeting a friend in the summer of 1945 (after VE‑Day)
in London where we were to board a train north to catch a boat to the Isle of
Man for a brief vacation. The friend was a Canadian Army captain named Abel Schwarzfeld (now gone), a bon
vivant type who had been a close chum of mine in our hometown of
Regina. On the train north we shared a compartment with an RAF pilot who
was going up to Manchester to pick up an Avro Anson at Ringway aerodrome
to deliver it to another location. (The Avro Anson was the workhorse of
the war in the early years; in the later years it was replaced by the DC‑3 Dakota,
(a.k.a. C-47 Skytrain). When he learned that we were on our way to take a
boat to the Isle of Man, an island off the west coast of northern England, he
suggested that he fly us there and drop us off at the RAF Station.
Needless to say we accepted. The most exciting part of the trip was
taking off from Ringway when the pilot asked me to hurry and pump up the
undercarriage (no hydraulics); he then proceeded to buzz his girlfriend's house
in Manchester before we headed west and landed at the RAF Station on the Isle
of Man. Our hotel reservations were not until the next day so we
requested accommodation at the RAF station; and the two of us spent a pleasant
evening in the officers' mess enjoying the food, the beer, and the camaraderie
of the RAF officers there.
In the early part of the war until the end of 1943, most RCAF radar
officers were assigned to ground installation stations at the seashore to
provide early warning of approaching enemy aircraft. As the tide turned
in the winter of 1943‑44, after Italy signed a secret armistice
with the Allies and the Russians had broken the siege of Leningrad, it appeared
that the British made a move from a defensive mode to an offensive one in
preparation for D-Day (the invasion of Europe on June 6, 1944).
Many of us were moved from ground installation stations to aircraft
installation duty on stations called Maintenance Units. An aircraft
arrived at one of these stations for modifications to its engine, its airframe,
and its complement of electronic gear. Once the modifications were
completed a test pilot would take the aircraft up for a test flight checking
out all the work that had been done. As Signals Officer I would
frequently go up on those test flights in the co‑pilot's seat, checking
out the radio and radar equipment. Exciting, but also profitable.
Each time I did I collected $2.00 per day flying pay.
It was in early 1944 that I was posted to my first Maintenance Unit as
Signals Officer at #12MU RAFMAIN KIRKBRIDE, near WIGTON, Cumberland in the
north of England near Keswick in the Lake District. Since there were no
officers’ quarters there I was fortunate to be billeted with a very pleasant
and hospitable family (Mr & Mrs Tom Raine), and to have had the
opportunity to spend some of my leisure hours in the Lake District,
which was within cycling distance of the station.
In the summer of 1944 I was transferred to #15 Maintenance Unit at
RAF WROUGHTON near SWINDON, Wiltshire. Again there were no
officers' quarters at the Unit and I was billeted in a pleasant home (Mr and
Mrs E H Young and family) in Swindon. Mr Young was editor of the
local newspaper. Billet hosts and hostesses loved to have servicemen as
guests in their homes since we brought with us our meat-ration coupons, and meat
amongst other things was a scarce commodity. At RAF Wroughton we shared
facilities with the Royal Navy. For the Air Force we serviced the B‑25
Mitchell bombers, and for the Navy we serviced the Barracuda bombers,
which were intended for aircraft carrier use. The B‑25 Mitchell
bombers were made in the United States and then flown across the Atlantic by A.T.A.
pilots; for this purpose they were equipped at the factory with radio
navigational equipment to help them find their way. Once they arrived at
our station we stripped virtually all the American electronic gear from the
aircraft and replaced it with RAF radio and radar equipment required for
operational use. The A.T.A. (Air Transport Auxiliary) personnel
were a congenial bunch of Americans, mostly seasoned pilots a little too old
for operational duty. They kept us informed of the important things that
were going on in the United States, such as what was the top ten on the hit
parade. They would bring us the latest phonograph records and other scarce
American consumer goodies. Number one on the hit parade that year was Mares-Eat-Oats-And-Does-Eat-Oats-And-Little-Lambs-
Eat-Ivy, and we were the first on our street to have it! I have
some snapshots from this location showing F/O Lewis, F/O Killick,
F/L Robertson, F/O Ward, F/O Bud Sugarman, S/Lt Bob
Robson, and F/O Johnny Morgan. Bud
Sugarman [middle] with whom I had trained at U.B.C. showed up at this
maintenance unit while I was there and we served together for a while.
[Bud a.k.a. Budd Sugarman, now gone, owned an upscale antique establishment in
the tony uptown Hazelton district of Toronto.]
In January
1945 I was promoted to the rank of Flight Lieutenant and assigned to RAF BOURTON‑ON‑THE‑WATER,
#8 Maintenance Unit, a station near LITTLE RISSINGTON, Gloucester,
just south of Stow-on-the-Wold if you know where that is. The location is
about halfway between Oxford and Cheltenham and these two big
cities were well within striking distance for R&R. The WELLINGTON
bomber was the predominant aircraft that we serviced. I had my
longest tenure there, close to nine months. As the war wound down the
station received more and more Wellingtons for mothballing and by the time I
left one could look in any direction and see fields and fields of Wellington
aircraft parked one beside the other. I often wondered afterwards what
became of them.
I still
have a Post Office telegram dated 15 SEP 45
sent to me when I was on leave at the Montpellier Hotel in Brighton, a resort
town on the English Channel: = YOU ARE DUE FOR REPATRIATION ON 21ST
SEPTEMBER STOP REPORT BACK TO UNIT NOT LATER 18TH SEPTEMBER = RAFMAIN
BOUTONONTHEWATER+. This was the beginning of the end of my RAF
attachment. A month later I was at #1RD TORQUAY, the
rehabilitation depot at a resort town on the south Devon coast. After
about a week of leisure there I boarded the same troopship I came over on, the Queen
Elizabeth I, sailing from Southampton for my return to Canada in
October of 1945.
The
300-page transcript of my military records from the National Archives of Canada
included a concise summary of my war service: "Enlisted in RCAF
as radio mechanic in January, 1942. Commissioned on graduation at
Clinton in February 1943. Went overseas. Officer in charge of
ground radar stations for 1st year. Officer in charge of radar (Airborne)
installations after that. Overseas for 31 months."
In 1946 the British Air Ministry issued a Certificate of appreciation to all Radar personnel who served during the war, and some years later the Secretary of State for Air presented them to each of us on behalf of the RCAF.
A World War II RCAF Radar Personnel History Project was organizes in 1994 by some personnel in Calgary and Ottawa. Radar personnel were asked to submit their memoirs so that they could be used in books that were being written at the time for the 50th anniversary of the end of the war. Much of this chapter is taken from Reminiscences Of An RCAF Radar Officer Attached To The RAF. Excerpts also appear in the book Radar Reflections, the Secret Life of Airforce Radar Mechanics in World War Two, by Michael Cumming, 2000.
![Bud Sugarman [middle]](./RCAF.Budd.jpg){kind=link}
