Wellingtons
Heroes Remember
Wellingtons
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And then we went to Northern Ireland for an operational training
training unit. And this is where, at the operation training units
they train you for combat. You're gonna be flying the type of
aircraft you'll be on, you know, until they change new ones and
this is where you get your crew. We had an all Canadian,
all sergeant crew. They were from Salmon Arm, B.C., Toronto,
Winnipeg, two from Winnipeg, me, and the navigator was from
outside Moncton. We were flying Wellingtons.
They were England's, at the outbreak of the war, they were
England's heaviest bomber. The thing, the aircraft was around
60 feet long and a wing span of 85 feet. They were twin engine.
They were geodetic construction which is a diamond shaped
construction, metal, with a fabric cover.
So there wasn't too much places to hide when the bullets started
to fly, it didn't deflect too much ammunition.
Interviewer: No armour?
No cloth doesn't stop too many bullets.
The armoured plate we had, I had, the pilot was there
of course and there was an armoured plate
then behind me and the navigator that was it.
There was none where the radar because the radar
was an extra thing they put in the airplane.
There was no radar, no armoured plate between the
navigator and the radar operator.
As far as radio went you're listening all the time for
information from home. If you got in trouble or you found
a target then it had to be coded. I did the coding, sent it
out by Morse code to the home base.
Radar, you're always looking for ships and the guns.
Your neck was always on the swivel because you were lookin'
to see whose with you and who isn't.
You took turns in the turret because there was three of us
as a rule that were "WAGS" as we call them,
wireless operator air gunners. So when we had three
WAGS in the crew, you would spend, you normally
were out for eight, sometimes nine hours.
So you spent time on the radio, time on the radar and
time sittin' back in the tail on the guns.
We carried torpedoes sometimes, we carried
depth chargers and bombs and ammunition of course.
There were, originally, there were four guns
in the tail, they were all 303's, and two in the nose,
but because of the torpedoes, and then they decided that they
were gonna put a search light in the old aircraft, and this was
to go in on a submarine and drop the search
light and you'd blind the crew that's running guns.
So they took out the guns in the nose, we didn't have any.
Then we had two what we called scare guns, one on each side.
But they were hanging on the wall like they do at home
and when you needed them you unhooked them and shoved them out.
You didn't expect to hit anything, but you'd scared them.
You'd scare them off, you'd never hit anything.
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