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21st December 2005

[Bryan Williams] "Apprehension was never ever discussed in our crew at all. The only thing, I was sure, first crew that I flew with, the pilot was a really, really nice guy, I remember thinking; “This guy isn’t gonna last too long” and, sure enough, the first time I didn’t fly with them on operations they got shot down — What’s the date today?"

[Alan Brigham] "21st December 2005"

[Bryan Williams] "They got shot down on the night of the 21st/22nd of November 1943*, Frankfurt, and what happened was; the day before, the 20th, I was walking from the flight office with Joe Paine (the navigator) and he said; “For Christ’s sake Bryan, you really can’t carry on like that” — I really had the flu (except we only ever called it a cold in them days” — and as we were passing the sick quarters he said “just go in and get something for your cold”. So I went in and this very officious WRAF Corporal said “Oh you’re too late, the sick parade’s over.” So I sneezed, fortunately, and the young MO [Medical Officer], who eventually became the ‘Quack’ at Patrington, said “Come in, I’ll have a look at you”. He took my temperature and he called the male Corporal and he said, “Take this Sergeant and put him into bed”. My temperature was somewhere over 100, I don’t know, and I was in hospital from then until Christmas Eve. He only let me out on Christmas Eve because he said “You can go home if you want to” because I had chatted to him and I’d told him I only lived in Hull, that was Holme on Spalding Moor, and I’d also told him that my crew had been shot down so I was on my tod.

When I came back, there was this crew who, the wireless operator and navigator had left them, the pilot was called Slade - built like a brick-shithouse — tough, hard, not very pleasant but he was going to survive if anybody was! So I joined them with this Flight Lieutenant navigator - the navigator was more important than the pilot really, and he was brilliant. I’d done six operations then, as a crew, but not with this navigator. The crew of five, on a Whitley, had finished at OTU [Operational Training Unit] and been posted to St Athens where they were still flying Whitleys and they used to do anti-submarine patrols over the Bay of Biscay. They were shot down by a submarine. The submarine would have been armed with a 3 inch gun and probably a 12 pounder as well — and of course, they would have had machine guns. The Whitleys had four depth charges, but they only used to fly at about 5 or 600 feet. They went in to depth-charge this submarine and, normally, they crash-dive. This one didn’t, it stayed there and boom-boom-boom; it was a sitting target at 100 miles an hour, straight in the drink! The submarine dived and left them, which was the right thing to do, and they were picked up later that day by a Spanish fishing boat and taken into a Portuguese port to start with. The fishermen were doing better out of rescuing RAF crews than they were at fishing!"
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*The official record of this event offers the following information:

Halifax LK 732 operating with number 76 Squadron took off from Holme-on-Spalding Moor at 1518 hours on 20 December 1943 to attack Frankfurt. Nothing further was heard from the aircraft and it was later learned that it had crashed through enemy action at Dachsenhausen (10 miles SE of Koblenz) at approximately 2000 hours.

The three crew members who were killed on impact are laid to rest in the Rheinberg British Military Cemetary. The remaining four were taken prisoner of war and later repatriated to the UK. The details are as follows:

Mid-Upper Gunner: Sergeant N M E Blatch (killed)
Pilot: Pilot Officer W D V Cable (killed)
Bomb Aimer: Flying Officer J Blair (killed)
Navigator: Flight Lieutenant J O Pakeman
Wireless Operator/Air Gunner: Flight Lieutenant I G Evans
Flight Engineer: Flight Sergeant G J Castleton
Rear Gunner: Flight Sergeant L H Rollingson
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Added by: Alan Brigham - www.hullwebs.co.uk

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