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MEMOIRS OF JOHN PHILIP HASELDINE DOB 12iv1926

From early 1940 I was going to the A.T.C. every evening and at weekends. We were shown how to recognise aircraft from all angles by black silhouettes - plus we did the normal square-bashing, of course. We used to be taught how to set a course allowing for wind speed and variation etc. and I was pretty good at all this sort of thing. Of course, nights in the winter especially were pitch dark and I remember two occasions in the black out. The first happened as I was riding my bicycle home when suddenly I flew through the air. For some reason a manhole cover in the road had been left off and my front wheel had gone into it. Luckily, being young, I was not badly hurt but my bicycle was a complete wreck. We used to have very bad smogs caused by all the coal fires, virtually the only kind of heating in houses. Added to the black out these smogs made it impossible to see even a yard ahead of you. On this one evening a group of us were going to A.T.C. training at a different venue than our usual place. We got completely lost, when a man bumped into us with his bicycle and said he lived in the road where we were going. He said if one of us held onto his bicycle and the rest joined in a line behind, he would walk there with us. We did this for a little way but then came to a dead stop as he had walked off the street into an air raid shelter. After this we groped about most of the evening and to this day I cannot remember whether we arrived.

Early in 1944 I went with other of the A.T.C. to a test centre in London. I cannot recall where it was but we were given medicals and things I remember we had to do was to blow into a tube that raised mercury to a certain level and hold it there for one minute; also a Japanese book which had numbers in it made up of all different colours. We were asked what numbers we saw when the pages were turned over. Then we were interviewed separately and asked questions, most of which I thought were crazy, by three R.A.F. officers. The only one I can remember was how a combustion engine works, which I knew.

I would have been coming up to 18 at this time. Some months later we were taken in R.A.F. trucks to airfields; we were not told where. I remember one we were taken to. There was a very large building with a ballroom-type floor, at one end of which was a dais with a seat and an aircraft joystick, in front of which was a flat board which you could lie on, with a bomber’s teat by the side. A map of Germany was projected on the whole of the floor which moved as if you were flying over it, both pilot and bomb-aimer were about 20’ above. Whoever was pilot was given a target on the map and as the map moved and you approached the target to get into the right position the bomb-aimer would give directions left or right of it until he thought you were in the the right position. Then he would press the bomb teat and release the bombs. This was not as easy as it seems as you had to allow a time lag for bombs to drop. A bright spotlight would then show where your bombs had landed and the map would stop.

One airfield I remember where we had flying lessons with old Tiger Moth aeroplanes using soft helmets, goggles and large flying-gloves with long cuffs as these aircraft were open cockpit. They were dual-control planes with an instructor. The first time I went up I was told not to touch the controls until the instructor told me. This was done through some sort of voice-pipe as these old planes had no other means of communicating. Then with the joystick and foot controls I had to follow his movements by lightly holding the joystick and feeling the foot control movements. After flying a number of times I was allowed to take over the controls. One of the things that took fine judgement when you were new to it was the use of the throttle, a little lever to your left which you pushed or pulled backwards or forwards. This controlled the speed of the engine and therefore the speed at which the propeller revolved. If you pulled back on the joystick to climb you had to up the revolutions of the engine so that the propeller gripped the air and pulled you up. Conversely, the opposite was done to descend - you throttled back. This is where there was a fine line between flying and stalling. I remember taking off from the airfield a few times ( always with an instructor) and flying the plane myself but never landing.

Whenever we went to airfields we were billeted with sergeants in large huts. At this time one of the airfields where we were training they were also training soldiers to fly gliders for the invasion. They started in Tiger Moths and while we were there I saw two fatal crashes with great spurts of flame, but this was all taken as just one of those things that happen in wartime.

Once when we were in the sergeants’ hut we heard a doodle-bug and told them what it was but none of them had been bombed in any air-raids and had never heard a doodle-bug. They all laughed at us. Suddenly the engine cut out and we waited for the explosion, which would take a few minutes as they glide around a few times before plunging to the ground. When it eventually did blow up a mile or so away the sergeants were quite shaken and rather sheepish.

There were large huts in which we would eat our meals and to wash our eating utensils after outside were two large tanks full of water into which you plunged them. You can imagine the colour of the water and all the floating bits of food debris after some hundreds had used them.

I was once or twice given instruction on a Link trainer, which was like a small aircraft 6’ long. It had little stubby wings. How it actually worked I am not sure but some sort of hydraulics which when you used the controls simulated flight. You sat in the cockpit and the lid was shut up on you and you had to fly blind by instruments only, trying to keep a level course. I remember I crashed every time as did others who used it. I felt very distraught but the instructor told us you needed some hundreds of hours flying time before you could control flying properly by instruments only. I also remember there was a small map attached to the outside on which needle moved like a graph. This was used for training experienced pilots to fly set courses blind.

We went to numerous airfields during the war and flew in quite a few different aircraft - Lancaster bombers, Baltimores and either a training Spitfire or Hurricane, I am not sure, which I was taken up in, which was a great thrill. I never took over the controls, of course. At another airfield we were taken to a large gantry with an open parachute above it. You were strapped into the parachute lines and stood on a little dais which was about 30’ from the ground. You jumped off the dais and, so we thought, floated to the ground. We were never trained and we went down with our legs and bodies stiff, not realising you hit the ground as if you had jumped off a 10’ high wall. Thankfully I was not badly hurt but some of the other fellows were.

From one of these trips I returned home to find that my father had got me six months deferment from being called up for the Air Force as he was so short of staff because they had been taken for war service. I was very annoyed at the thought I would not be able to continue and become a pilot. At my age now I realise that I may have been killed, so perhaps in the long run he did me a good turn.

I had three uncles who lived in Pendine in Wales and one was a rear gunner in a Lancaster. He used to visit us when he was on leave and I remember towards the end of the war when we were doing thousand bomber raids over Germany he was telling us that he had done two tours of duty and he should not really be doing any more. His superiors insisted that he should be going on these large raids. When he came to us he said then that he had a feeling that this would be the last one. The only thing they know is the nearest Lancaster to him reported that suddenly over the target his plane blew up into a sheet of flame, and that is the last we ever knew.

For quite a time when my father was short of men I used to pull a barrow, rather like one you would harness a horse to only not as big, full of bread to local customers. I did this for quite some time between other jobs. Right toward the end of the war when the V!s (‘doodlebugs’) were coming over, we had a lot of them around our way. Their engine would stop and we would watch them glide round and round, wondering where they would land. When they reached stalling point they would plummet to the ground. There was one particular doodlebug when I was out with the bread barrow which was shot down by a Hurricane virtually overhead. Bits of it were coming down on top of my barrow and I wish I had kept some as souvenirs. I was lucky I suppose because I hadn’t any sort of headgear on and if anything had hit me it would probably have killed me. Anyway I carried on and went to the top of Willesden Junction hill. We used to have trolley-buses at that time - before the war we had trams on lines. These had all been done away with and the trolley-buses were quite like modern buses are today, but they had two arms which went up to electricity cables above, when they needed to turn round. The conductor would get out and take a long pole from under the bus, hook it onto one of the arms first and pull it off, put it into a clip, and then the other one, so they could turn the bus round. I don’t know how this worked but the same day I was passing a trolley-bus when one of the arms slipped out of the hook the conductor was using and hit the wire, which snapped. Of course it was one ling piece of wire and it came down just past my shoulder and my barrow. There were sparks from the electricity and I often wonder if it had hit me whether I would have been electrocuted.

My bedroom window looked out over the railway. When we were getting a lot of the V1s I would often stand and watch them fly past one after the other. It seems amazing when you think a bout it today.

After that we had lots of ‘gas main’ explosions which everyone would talk about. There were terrible explosions at different places in London and I think we all knew at the time there was something more to it than the Government was trying to make us believe. In the end we found out these were the V2s, the first rockets. One of these fell about half a mile from us and the whole place shook rather like an earthquake - it was awful.

Towards the end of the war I was walking up towards Willesden Junction Station when I met one of my old friends who had been in the A.T.C. with me. He had become a navigator on bombers and was a Flight Lieutenant. I always felt rather sore that I had never had a chance of doing anything like that, but there you are, that’s how life is.
One day I went up to Parliament Square and I bumped into Mr Winston Churchill. He gave me a beautiful smile and the V-sign, and I always think how marvellous to have bumped into such a great man.

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