Transportation on the airbase
Heroes Remember
Transportation on the airbase
Well, there were few vehicles, there were vehicles to transport
equipment and occasionally pick up crews. But the people,
generally, were all issued with a bike. It was a single speed,
pretty basic bicycle. But everybody on the base, including the
aircrew, had bikes to transport. The living quarters, and the
eating quarters, and the headquarters, were dispersed on most
bases, the newer ones, so that they couldn't be all wiped out
with a set of bombs. The living quarters, Nissen huts had to be
over here, the mess hall, would be in another location,
the work site would be another location. But the airdromes,
the majority of them, in fact all of them, were, had a perimeter
around, a taxi perimeter, where airplanes taxied. But there were
dispersal points went off, just a big pad was what it was,
that they parked the airplanes and they were dispersed all the
way around this airplane, airport I should say. For the ground
crew, like my staff that worked out of the instrument repair
shop had to go back and forth to get spares and go out,
and back and forth two or three times. The only way they could
get out there was with a bike. And so they rode a bike out and
maybe on any given day, they would ride twenty or thirty miles,
by the time they were back and forth, maybe to the different
aircraft dispersed around. By the time they rode from their
sleeping quarters to the mess hall, to the work site, and back
again. And then at night, if they weren't on duty, perhaps it was
a five mile trip or a ten mile trip out to some pub, and the bike
rides coming back were sometimes a bit dicey, but there was
another ten or fifteen miles at night. And I estimate I rode
between ten and fifteen thousand miles in the years I was over
there. Maybe a bit generous, but on any given day it wouldn't be
hard to add up twenty-five, thirty miles a day, just going back
and forth on dispersal. Get up in the morning, go to work, go
back to the mess hall for dinner, back to the site, back again,
back out for take off at night. Which brings me up another point
that I'll come to in a minute. But just the fact that we were
continuing on our bikes, it didn't take long to add up a lot of
miles. It was quite a common thing too, you'd want to bike into
a pub someplace from the adjoining village or wherever, you had
to make darn sure it was locked because somebody'd come
out that didn't have a bike and it'd be gone.
Not that the people were thieves, that just they
needed the transportation to get back and forth.
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