Advanced Training In England

Heroes Remember

Advanced Training In England

Transcript

There was additional training to be done in England. Here in Canada we had basic trainers and basic uh, but once there we found there was, we had to update our training because of the equipment and air craft that were in use over in England. As far as my trade was concerned, I needed additional navigation training in England because of different country side. Our Prairies are quite easy to map read, come to England it's not. A group of us, bomb aimers I think, the class was about, there were about 30 of us in a class, were sent to Dunphreys, just on the border of Scotland and England to obtain this additional navigation training. We were sent to what they call a heavy conversion unit and that is when you convert from a twin engine bomber to a Lancaster for engine power and there at that unit you acquire two more crew members and then you become a bomber crew of seven. Now, so all of us had to do initial training to become familiar with the Lancaster bomber. You were only trained to be familiar with your machine guns in case if you needed them, you would know how to operate. Your turrets were hydraulically operated so you could operate them to elevate them or to rotate as required. We have here in our museum practice bombs that were in use for training and they were only 11 pound bombs and what happened when you dropped it on impact with the ground there would be just a puff of smoke. There would be spotters around the range who would record the location and then assess our accuracy. But the size of the bomb doesn't really matter because a falling object attains its acceleration whether it's the size of a practice bomb or the one that we dropped from a Lancaster which was four thousand pounds. The month of August in ‘42 we had completed our training and was sent to 100 Squadron at... close to the city of Grimsby in England on the East Coast.

Description

Mr. Kondra discusses the additional training necessary to become crew on a Lancaster bomber.

William Kondra

On January 14, 1922, William Kondra was born in Prudhomme, Saskatchewan. He finished Grade 8 at his local school, and, with difficulty, finished high school through correspondence. He was working on local farms for a pittance, so he decided to enlist in the Air Force, where he trained as a bomb aimer/front gunner. Mr. Kondra's tour of duty was completed with his original crew members aboard a Lancaster Bomber, and primarily consisted of air strikes on industrial Germany. Mr. Kondra offers many insights into the technology, strategy and stresses of flying in a bomber.

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