Originally Posted by
pulse1
A few years ago I was given a cassette with the recorded life story of a local man who I never met and who is probably dead by now. He joined the RAF in 1940 and was part of the ground crew for a Hampden bomber. In this role he was given some rudimentary training in the use of the machine gun used in the top turret of the aircraft. To his surprise, he was then frequently used as a gunner on bombing raids, mostly on leaflet raids. His career as aircrew came to an abrupt end when his aircraft crashed on landing after a raid. He was the only survivor and he reckoned that he only survived because he was still sitting in the gunners position. Apparently, he was not supposed to be in that seat for landing. He spent the rest of the war being a pain in the neck to the authorities. After the war he became a diamond cutter and seemed to know a lot about some of the infamous crimes involving jewelry.
Pulse - have you considered contacting the Bomber Command Memorial folks up in Lincoln? They had a spoken history project going iirc with lots of spoken testimonials