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make their own decisions about the ultimate membership of a bomber crew of pilot, navigator, wireless operator, bomb aimer, flight engineer, rear gunner and mid-upper gunner. The pilot, who would be in command of the aircraft in which he and his crew would fly, had the last say in selection. But selecting each other was not easy – the majority of the boys were indeed just boys, many of them young men fresh from school with less than 300 hours of exercising their particular skills in the air. A small number were back at OTU having already done a tour of operations, not necessarily with Bomber Command, and they knew their way about sufficiently well to seek out those they thought would be the most experienced colleagues, especially the most experienced pilots. I formed a crew which included one of these. F/O L J Ward (Jimmy as we always called him) was a wireless operator who had done a tour with Coastal Command, when he had finished up in the sea, and already had either 61 or 64 (I cannot now check) operational trips to his credit. He was coming up for another tour and seemed glad to team up with a pilot with close on 2,000 hours of flying in his logbook. He had left Portsmouth Grammar School at the age of eighteen, volunteered to fly, and had known no other way of life since finishing with his schooldays. I was equally glad to have one experienced officer by my side.


The other crew members were all young and completely without operational


or, indeed, much of any other sort of experience. My navigator was Sgt Alf Green, a nineteen-year-old who had been starting his college training to be a schoolteacher and who hailed from Barrow-in Furness. F/Sgt Henry Sheridan was my bomb aimer, a tough-looking youngster who happened to be a Jew. Sgt Paddy O’Connell was an immature young Irishman from Cork and he was destined to stand behind my pilot’s seat as my flight engineer. The rear gunner we absorbed was Sgt Ken Rodgers from Sheffield, another nineteen-year-old who had worked in a rerolling mill in the steel city. I am now both sorry and ashamed to say that I have forgotten the name of my other gunner. That sounds like a terrible thing to have to confess. But he was an unattractive piece of work, who fitted in with the rest of us less than we would have wished, and I think I have just put him out of my mind for that reason.


That was the crew of seven which came together by some process of selection


or osmosis. With two commissioned officers and the other five being denizens of the Sergeants’ Mess, we were not as cohesive socially as we could have been. But most crews had the same sort of composition. My logbook shows that, although arriving at 10 OTU on April 25th 1944, I did not take to the air with my new crew until May 30th. There may have been a bit of leave in that interval, but I think the time was mainly devoted to crew selection and then a series of lectures about the real War, which only Jimmy Ward in our crew had so far experienced. But eventually we got on with the flying. It was in the Whitley,


93


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