how you were lucky and didn’t go down in flames. How you didn’t have to jump into the darkness. How you didn’t get blinded, shot or injured by the flak or the night fighters.


Before it all starts again.


We’ll thankfully never experience this for real and reading things like this are just the memories of someone else. Vivid, sharp. Like the faces of the six other members of your crew – your band of brothers – people who will become closer than your brothers. But still memories. Shared by chatting in the beer garden of a pub in the Surrey countryside, enjoying a nice lunch and a couple of beers. Answering the odd and daft questions posed by the modern generation.


And I was the lucky lad asking the questions. And Mr Ron Thrope, a remarkably sprightly man in his very late 80’s, and former Lancaster Air Gunner, was the man answering them. To meet him, one of ‘The Many’ according to RAF history and called ‘Bomber Boys’ at the time... it’s almost impossible to say how much of an honour it was to be there.


How lucky I, to have asked him the questions. Just to be in his company. I am slightly in awe of him. At 18 I was sitting in a classroom dreaming of the day I might be a Radar Technician... at 18 he was in the turret of a


Lancaster. All volunteers. Every one of them volunteered to be in the air, often choosing to go up there because it would bring them into the fight sooner. The choice was often wait for your call-up, or else volunteer for the fight in the air now.


And the time we had for a chat that lunchtime went by so fast. One moment we were ordering a plate of scampi, the next the pub was closing and we were forced to leave. Writing here I can’t do it justice.


I was told so much. Unlike popular media portrayals of flying on a bomber mission the crew didn’t chat, or have time to tell a joke or to read poetry... they were on constant watch. Total concentration for ten and a half hours at the worst. Jammed into an aircraft that would conspire at one moment to be their saviour – power, manoeuvrability and ability to take a lot of damage – and one moment to be their end – cramped, cold, difficult to move about in. They would be totally focussed on the job they had to do. It was all they had time to think about. Flying to the target, working out their position, watching for the enemy, this is what they spent their time doing.


They even had little time to think about the target. The idea was to concentrate on the factory, the train yards. Not the people. Maybe one of the reasons that it has taken so long for the Bomber Boys to be properly honoured with their own monument and memorial is because of the nature of their task. Bombing the enemy. Taking the war to the German heartland. And in an age of area bombing and all that ‘area’ means that is difficult ground.


www.raf-ff.org.uk Envoy Autumn 2012 13


Nowadays we discuss collateral damage and we try to minimise the chance of injuring ‘innocent’ civilians. But back then in the 1940’s..in an age of ‘Total War’ it could be argued that everything is part of the war- effort. And in an age when your own cities and town had been levelled by bombing trying to weaken the will to fight, the urge for revenge must have been incredible. After all it was an age of ‘sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind’. Time, sensibilities, dogmas were all different. It’s difficult to criticise what young men did then, with the morals of today.


They are all heroes to me. They are all greats. If they won a gallantry medal, or if they just did their job mission after mission after mission. They did what they had to do, and they all, particularly the 55,573 who died doing it, deserve to be honoured with a memorial. They deserve to be remembered and we deserve to hear their stories. We MUST hear their stories before they are all lost to time.


Even if that monument is overdue... a permanent memorial to the 55,573 who died has finally been built. It’s about time. 


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