By Pilot Officer Sam Brooks, London. Special operator, 101 Sqn Royal Air Force.
CREWING UP was to follow shortly, but on our first evening in the officers' mess we had met two Canadian pilots, Pilot Officers Daniel Meier and Gordon Hodgkinson, newly arrived on the squadron with their crews and eager to find their extra ABC wireless operators. Our decisions were made that night. I got on well with both of them, but perhaps had marginally more in common with Gordon Hodgkinson than Meier. Keith felt perhaps closer to Meier and so our choices were made, almost by the toss of a coin: me for Hodgkinson, Keith for Meier.
I started flying with Hodgkinson who, as it happened, did not find it easy to settle down to the conditions over a hostile Germany. Our first operational flight was on 30 June 1944. 'Hodge' managed seven operations, but remained unsettled and had turned back unwell on two occasions. He was finally taken off flying and went back to Canada. I was re-crewed with a succession of other crews and completed my tour of 30 operations on 6 January 1945.
Keith started flying with Meier about the same time as I started. Our other two sergeant colleagues from Yatesbury also joined crews of their choice. One of them, Englehardt, died I believe in a raid on Stettin in August and was buried where his aircraft crashed in Sweden on the way home. The fourth of us, Auer, survived like me.
Like most Bomber Command airfields, aircraft were serviced at dispersals in all weathers. Despite the howling gales across the Lincolnshire Wolds, and the highest airfield in Britain, a team of unsung groundcrew service a 101 Sqn Lancaster with its triple ABC aerials. Note the sea of mud around the concrete standing – they had good reason to retitle their base as RAF Mudford Magna.
When we were flying on raids to the industrial Ruhr the route for the bomber stream was often from base to Reading; Reading to Beachy Head; Beachy Head to Le Treport; then east across France and into Germany. This was our route to attack the Homberg/Meerbeck oil refinery in the Ruhr on the night of 20 July, 1944
Meier's Lancaster did not return and the crew were posted as missing. We learned later that they were homebound when they were hit by Flak at 8000 feet north of Lille, crashing a little to the south of Cambrai. It was less than a year since Keith and I had joined up on August Bank Holiday in 1943 at Lord’s Cricket Ground.
Keith's mother Florence knew that we had been friends and wrote to me. There was little I could do to help or advise her as to what had happened. For a while I hoped that we would hear that Keith had been taken prisoner but it was not to be.
It was some months before I heard the story of the crew's fate that night, and strangely enough it came from Florence. The flak had caused Meier's Lancaster LL862 K for King to lose a wing and break up. By the best of good fortune two members of the crew had parachuted down into occupied France. The other six, including my pal Keith, did not escape.
All this information was vouchsafed to Florence in a letter from one of the survivors who had felt obliged to write to the relatives of each member of the crew when he was released from a POW camp. Florence had wrongly thought that it was Meier the pilot who had survived and she could not understand how the captain of the aircraft could have survived when six of his crew had died. She quoted the naval tradition that a captain should be the last to leave his sinking ship.
I had seen our bombers shot down in daylight raids, and knew that once an aircraft began to break up there was absolutely nothing that anyone could do except try to save himself. I tried as gently as I could to get this across to Florence. We continued to exchange letters but our correspondence petered out in mid-1945 when the German war was over and I was posted to India to prepare for the attack on Japan.
Of course the bomb in August made that unnecessary and I spent two years in various parts of the Far East, waiting to be demobilised. When I came home again I never forgot my friendship with Keith, but I did not feel inclined to re-open an old wound for Florence by trying to get in touch again. Maybe I should have done so, but I didn't.