G-Box Navigation

You see on the TV where the crews all meet and so on but prior to that the navigators meet and they have the course, courses plotted out for you, at least show you where you’re supposed to go. So you take the meteorology forecast from the winds and everything and you plot whatever courses your supposed to fly. You don’t fly say, from, if you’re going to bomb a certain place, you don’t fly straight there. They’d fly up this way and down this way to try and throw the Germans off from where that your target is, you see. So you maybe have two or three different legs on your trip so you have to be at these places at a certain length, at a certain time. We had a circular side route which we used to call a computer and this was converting miles to knots and temperatures, Fahrenheit to centigrade and that sort of thing. Also then we had what they called the G box and that was the biggest help for us. And how it worked this is what I mentioned earlier, it looked like a TV set. But there were two stations, one in northern Scotland and one in southern England each transmitting a signal. This box would pick up these two signals. So you’d turn on your machine and you’d see two lines, two little blips. One running along each, just like you see on these monitors in hospital. You see these things running across, well these look just like we were watching and the top blip was the signal from Scotland and the bottom one, say was from England. Ok, these two blips, if you got them together like that, once you got them together you’d what they call, “freeze the machine.” You’d flip it down, freeze the machine and take the time. Then immediately after you do that, the numbers would appear along each of those lines. Ok, you got a number for this one and a number for this one and then you had a chart that spread out with the map of England on it and a bunch of lines. The lines were circular lines from this station and circular lines from this station and on those lines were numbers. The numbers from the Scottish station were on the green deal and the numbers from the English station were the red ones and whatever numbers... so you’d follow those two numbers and that’s where you were at the time you took. So those two things were together, that’s where those two lines crossed. That was the theory. That’s how it worked. So all of a sudden you got a fix. You look on your map, “Oh, there we are.” So you take those readings every so often so you’d plot an idea of how these winds are going... whether they would change or not. If they stayed in a line then you know you’re on the right course. That’s basically how it worked. But it would only go so far because the Germans would jam it. Once you got so far close to Germany you’d run out because the stations were jammed. Then you were on your own. Every plane was blacked out and you flew individually but in a bunch and unfortunately what happened was there was lots of collisions. Fortunately we, the odd time you felt a bump and here that was the slip stream from somebody that’s just in front of you. But you don’t see them because they’re blacked out. So that was the... we flew individually. Say you got a thousand- plane raid, everyone’s flying by themselves. In the American runs in the daytime, of course, they flew in formation to protect each other and they could see but we didn’t. We amazed them when we dropped. We were diverted to their airdromes sometimes and they couldn’t believe it. “Where’d you ... how’d you people get here?” Just couldn’t believe it. I said, “Well, it’s what we were trained for!” And they weren’t. They couldn’t do it.

Mr. Wickens describes the use of the G-box for navigating.

Donald Wickens

Mr. Wickens was born in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan. Despite the scarcity of jobs during the depression, he took employment with the Bank of Montreal, where he worked for two years prior to enlisting. Although not initially eager to do so, Mr. Wickens decided to join his friends who had preceded him into the service. Unlike many of his friends, however, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force with the intention of becoming a navigator, and completed his training in Portage La Prairie. Once overseas, Mr. Wickens became a member of 434 Blue-Nose squadron and took part in 37 bombing and mine laying missions over Northern Europe. He and the rest of his aircrew were decorated after surviving two air attacks in which their aircraft was disabled. After leaving the service, Mr. Wickens returned to the Bank of Montreal. He currently resides in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.