REMINISCENCES OF AN RCAF RADAR OFFICER ATTACHED TO THE RAF.
Allan E Paull,
C.24099, Toronto, Ontario, ©May 11,
1994.
INTRODUCTION
Comedian
George Burns once said that if he knew he was
going to live so long he would have taken better care of himself. As I sit down to write this, I say that if I
knew that I was going to live so long I would have kept a diary during
my salad
days, days when I was young and inexperienced.
Without that, I have had to struggle to dig deep into my memory. However, with help from a little black book,
an old snapshot album, a transcript of my military record and an
ordnance
survey road atlas of Great Britain, I have managed to reconstruct in my
mind
some of my wartime experiences of 50 years ago.
The
transcript of my military records from the National Archives of Canada
summarized my war service very concisely:
"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
what follows I go into a bit more detail.
When war
broke out I was living in Winnipeg and my friends and I were at a stage
in our
lives when we had just finished University, and we had not had the
foresight to
join the ROTC (Royal Officers’ Training Corp).
We were looking for our first job during the great depression
and were
already frightened by that prospect, when the outbreak of war
terrorized us
even more with the realization that we were the perfect age for
cannon-fodder. In retrospect those of
us who survived now look back on our war service as being some of the
happier
more carefree years of our lives; unfortunately we didn't know it then.
I did
not rush to join up in 1939 although some of my more loyal or
enthusiastic
friends did. I managed to get a job as
Statistician at the Grain Research Laboratory in Winnipeg and waited
for
developments. In January of
1941, I received orders from Ottawa to report to the
Royal Winnipeg Rifles army depot in Brandon for 30 days of basic
training as a
foot soldier in ‑30?F weather, and that was character building and
rugged. It made us start thinking
seriously about what part we might play in this war before we would
again be
told what to do by orders from Ottawa.
If we were drafted we would stay in Canada.
If we volunteered they could send us anywhere.
A friend (David Baker) and I started shopping
the different branches of the
service to see if our university degree counted for anything towards
getting a
commission, but we soon discovered it did not.
About that time we learned of a programme in the RCAF (Royal
Canadian
Air Force) to train radar technicians (and we had previously heard that
in the
Air Force even the `other-ranks’ slept with sheets on their bunks) so
we
decided to apply there. We volunteered
and joined as AC2’s (Air Craftsman 2nd Class) in December
1941 and were sent off a month later to Manning Depot to
await posting for training.
At Brandon Manning Depot in January
1942 my friend and I, probably
because we had university degrees, were fingered by the padré to teach
elementary
mathematics and physics to the air crew recruits, which filled in our
time
nicely while we were awaiting posting.
But a mumps epidemic put several including me into hospital, and
my
friend was posted away without me. As
it happened, I spent five months in Manning Depot before being sent to
U.B.C.
for basic radio training.
At the University of British Columbia the
three month radio course with a group of 50 or more congenial
AC2's
in the springtime of 1942 in
Vancouver was certainly no hardship: indeed it was enjoyable and
friendships
were made there. However one soon
learned that in the service, friendships cannot be long-lasting since
the Air
Force did not leave a radar technician in one place for longer than
about four
or five months. Of all the friends I
made at Manning Pool and at U.B.C. and at Clinton, I can count on the
fingers
of one hand the ones with whom I subsequently crossed paths with again
during
or after the war: David Baker of
Winnipeg (now gone), Bud Sugarman of
Toronto, Bill Stovin of Saskatoon,
and if I try hard I may come up with another.
At the end of September 1942
we were all promoted to LAC (Leading Air Craftsman), and sent to Toronto Manning Depot (the Horse Palace
at the C.N.E.) to await posting to Clinton for further training.
The RDF School at Clinton was the very
secret high-tech school of its day. RDF
stood for radio-direction-finding but it was in fact a radar school. The word RADAR came from RAdio Direction And
Ranging. Radar was Britain's
state-of-the-art secret weapon that had already been used successfully
to track
attacking aircraft during the London Blitz in the winter of 1941‑42. At Clinton we were taught the principles of
radar and we were given hands‑on training; all fascinating stuff during
five months of winter in the snow belt of Ontario.
When we graduated in February
of 1943, I was one of the lucky few who was commissioned and, as a
Pilot
Officer without any officer training, I was given a 10-day leave to go
home and
visit my parents, then quickly shipped overseas to the United Kingdom
and
attached to the RAF (Royal Air Force).
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. 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 Bournemouth 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, an
inexperienced Pilot Officer, was sent there to take charge. I had to become a fast learner.
Prior to my arrival the Flight Sergeant had
put one of the men on charge for some offence he had committed and I,
as the
only officer on the station, would have to hear the case and reach a
verdict
and pass sentence. I recall I read
military law manuals quickly and frequently before the first 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 bed-spring-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. (This 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; and crossing The Minch
was rough and I recall being seasick in the dead of night. 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 whom
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.
BOMBS
IN LONDON
I should
add at this point that I did not get the 1939‑45 Star medal that is
awarded for serving in an operational theatre of war.
Serving in the United Kingdom per se
did not count. The only time that 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
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 each 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.
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.
Our
daily routines were frequently mixed with surprises, sometimes
pleasant,
sometimes not so pleasant. In mid-1944
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 he
had put me down “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
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 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, now Budd
Sugarman, runs an upscale antique establishment in a tony uptown
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.
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 school 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.
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.
Postscript:
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.
Allan E
Paull, Professor Emeritus, University of
Toronto
[Rotman
School of Management
<http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca>]
39 Fenn
Avenue, Toronto ON, M2L1M7, 416-445-6050
paull@rotman.utoronto.ca