Forming the Crew

Unusual way to form a crew, they took the pilots, bomb aimers, navigators, gunners and they turned us loose in a great big air hanger, shut the doors and before shutting doors, they said, “Form your crews!” And as I was standing there, an Australian gunner comes up to me and says, “Hi lad, would you like to join our crew? ” And I said, “Sure!” and he said, “My name’s Frank Tight.” So I said, “Good.” He says, “I got another gunner, he’s an Aussie.” I said, “That’s fine.” So he said, “There’s a pilot over here,” and they took us over, a chap by the name of Jack Griffith, he was a pilot and we decided we could meld together and they said we need a navigator, and I said, “There’s a tall thin guy over there, he looks rather studious type, he might be a good navigator.” So we picked him, it’s pretty scientific, eh? And this is the way we formed our crew and we trained together and then eventually had a flight engineer came along another Brit. So, I ended up on the crew, I was the Canadian, two Aussies and the other four were all Brits. And I now discovered that I’m now going to 158 Squadron, it’s an RAF Squadron for bombing group and I never had any chance to say I wanted to go Canadian or anything else. You just sort of went where you were sent, you did what you were told and that was the way the air force operated in those days.