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Part three of an edited oral history interview with Mr. John Crawley conducted by Jenny Ford on behalf of Bedford Museum.

“The B17, the Flying Fortress was the only active aeroplane that they had at Thurleigh that went over Germany. The nearest Liberator Base was at Harrington just outside Kettering that was the B24, the Liberator. But Thurleigh was all Fortresses. When I first went over there they were B17, they had a B17E and then they had B17Fs and the later ones would be B17Gs which had a machine gun, like a turret mounted under the nose to help combat the head-on tactics which the Luftwaffe had developed. They soon found that attacking a formation of Fortresses head-on was the easiest way because there were less forward firing guns so this chin turret it was called was put on under the aeroplane to give it more forward field of fire and that helped a lot.

Well I don’t think it was ever necessary as such to keep up morale on the Base, it was always pretty strong but I must admit they really took punishment. Being in formation they were so easy to attack and they flew in daytime. They never flew formation at night. They were in daylight and they were easily located and easily seen. I think the RAF suffered equally by losing complete aircrew in one go but the Americans, as I saw it, they’d come back with perhaps four of the crew, perhaps two would be shot and killed and two or three perhaps would have lost an arm or a leg or were bleeding badly. I know some aeroplanes looked like the inside of a butchers shop on some occasions, it was pretty gruesome, pretty gruesome. I mean the thickness of the metal skin of an aeroplane is not much thicker than a cocoa tin so there is no protection. Any protection would come from armour plating behind the pilot and unless there was armour plating and sometimes the plexi-glass or perspex windows could sometimes stop a .303 bullet but not stop a cannon shell. And of course the Germans were increasingly using cannons as against the smaller bullets. So I think the Americans did suffer tremendously from getting injured rather than complete write-offs, fatalities.

But when the Americans first came over here, when I first started flying, the aeroplanes had just started doing their operations. I think the first raid was over to some French port. Eventually one thing they learnt, the green lining they had in the fuselages were prone to catching fire from an incendiary bullet. I well remember seeing this lining being stripped out because they were made back in the States, they weren’t war wise and didn’t realise they were making a fire hazard. I remember seeing piles of this material being dumped at the side of the aircraft when they were stripping it out.

It wasn’t a matter of how many aeroplanes being in a Squadron it was how many they could put up that were serviceable. Sometimes they’d put up 20 perhaps 25, other times they’d perhaps only put up a dozen, it just depended. They would all form up. They would take off and they’d perhaps circle around the extremities of Bedford, a radius of perhaps 15 miles, circle round for perhaps an hour and then that group would then move off and form up with other groups over the coast. By the time they got to enemy occupied territory they’d be at an altitude of 29,000 feet or whatever altitude they were going to fly at and then all the groups would come together into this one large formation.

When a raid was due to return a whole crowd of Officers would assemble on the balcony of the ‘Tower’. The RAF called it the ‘Flying Control’. Then back at Dispersal there’d be the various mechanics and crew chiefs and any of the other lads that were involved. They would all be standing around awaiting the return of their machine. Some of the Officers with binoculars would cry out, ‘Here they come!’ They’d fly over and as they flew over three or four would peel off to port while the main body kept flying. They’d circle round and come in and land. The priority went to those that had got wounded on board or were crippled.

If the aeroplane was flying alright and it wasn’t damaged they would come in and land. But if there were injured on board, as he was doing his finals and coming in he would fire off two red Verey lights and then the ambulance and fire brigade would track him down the runway. If he was under complete control down the runway he would turn off at the first intersection and would make his way back to Dispersal. But if he had to do a wheels-up landing the fire engine would have followed him so that when he came to a stop the fire engine would be there to douse any fire with foam. The ambulance would also stop a short distance from the aeroplane and the casualties lifted out. As I say sometimes if they’d done a wheels-up landing they’d do it parallel off the runway on the grass. Then the main formation would go round and then coming back another three or four would peel off and those would come into land. By the time the last one had landed they’d been round again and another three or four had peeled off so there would be a continual succession of aeroplanes, one behind the other coming in to land. When you look back on it sitting here talking to you, it was quite a sight! But at the time it was like everything else you didn’t think anything of it, that’s the way it was.

The ‘A’ Club at Thurleigh
Over on the Base I’d met Bob Hope, Francis Langford and Gerry Colona. I saw Bing Crosby and all the others that came over. I was invited by my Colonel friend to ‘A’ Mess and had the pleasure of joining them for lunch. Why Bob Hope ever needed to pay ever needed to pay scriptwriters I don’t know because he was ab libbing the whole time through the meal, absolutely fantastic! Everybody was in stitches laughing at him, absolutely wonderful! The Messing arrangements for the Officers there were that there was the ‘A’ Club or ‘A’ Mess and the ‘B’ Club. ‘A’ Mess was for Captains upwards and ‘B’ Mess was for Flying Officers, First Lieutenants, Second Lieutenants and so on.

Every evening there would be trucks that would take the lads into Bedford where they had got girlfriends or they’d go to the cinemas. My family, through me befriended two or three Americans. One in particular was Captain Danzig, he was one of the leading Surgeons on the Base. I know on one occasion there was an aeroplane accident and he was recalled to Base, because they had to leave their phone numbers where they could be located. He used to come and spend part of his leave with us. I know this happened right at the beginning there was a very young pilot, Lieutenant Sugg, who became a Group Leader and he really didn’t look any older than me at the time. He came from Alabama, down in the South and when he was having a meal on one occasion he was a bit slow. I know we were having some cold salmon, that was pretty good for wartime, but of course we had friends up in Scotland who had brought one down and we even had some ice cream which was home made and I remember he hadn’t quite finished his first course. ‘Don’t wait for me’ he said, ‘you’ve got the ice cream served, go ahead!’ So mother did and she put his down by him and he promptly tipped it onto his dish with the salmon which of course to us rather conservative English it was quite an eye opener to see strawberry ice cream and pink salmon! The ways of the world vary!

Bicycles on Base 111
It always amuses me, you see all these war films about the American Bases and that but one thing that I have noticed on more than one base and Thurleigh was a classic example that the bicycles were quite bizarre really. You’d perhaps see a pink bicycle there might be a yellow one with black spots on it, painted the most hideous colours. The reason for this was of course that one of the chaps might live in his room and it might be half a mile from the hangar where he worked on engines. And then from the hangar to where he went for chow which is the Americanism for going to Mess and having lunch, that might be another half a mile in a different direction so a bicycle was an absolute necessity. And of course what happened, they pinched each other’s bikes. So the habit developed of painting them these hideous colours so that if a bike was stolen by one of their mates they could get in a jeep and ride round the base and spot it and recover it. Well, I have never seen that on any of the wartime films but I saw it first at Thurleigh, I saw it at Bovingdon and many of the other American Bases I flew into.

‘Wings for Victory Week’
The Government, to encourage saving money for the war effort organised National ‘Weeks’ - the Army had ‘Salute the Soldier Week’ I think it was or something like that. The Navy had ‘Naval Week’ and the Air Force had ‘Wings for Victory Week’ and of course everybody ran different events to raise money and all the shop keepers were encouraged to put on displays of either pictures or aircraft, anything to do with the particular themes. Well in our case because I was most interested in the ‘Wings for Victory’ and we had the largest showrooms in town - which in peacetime could accommodate goodness knows how many cars - I managed to persuade father to let me have one of the large showroom windows. I got onto Colonel Schmidt, the Engineering Officer at Thurleigh and like everything the Yanks do you’d only got to ask and the next minute three lorries turned up. They’d brought gangs of men, aeroplane engines, empty bombs, all the bits and pieces associated with aircraft and put a display in the window. It was like a veritable Fortress museum! Wonderful co-operation!

Radar came in 1942/1943 and the night fighters were the first to be equipped with it. I know I got into trouble because in this particular ‘Wings for Victory Week’ I displayed 40 or 50 of the many model aircraft that I had made. We used to see Beaufighters from Twinwoods doing circuits and bumps around Bedford and they’d come over quite low and they all had like a double arrow head aerial fitted on the nose with various little stalk aerials on the wings. So of course I had an all black Beaufighter model — it was a 1/48th scale that I’d made in wood and it was very accurate as I used to go out there to the Base and I’d put these aerials on it. One day our Receptionist phoned me saying, ‘There is a RAF Officer down here who would like to see you.’ So I went down and he was jumping up and down saying ‘You can’t have that!’ I said, ‘Have what?’ he said, ‘the aeroplane in the window it’s got radar aerials on it’ he said, ‘where the hell did you learn about those?’ I said, ‘Well if you’d like to stand here and look out of the window about every ten minutes you’ll see one go over where you can photograph it if you’ve got a camera and you can see the aerials as plain as that’. I couldn’t see it was breaking any regulations because they were so obvious the fact that they were going over Bedford under a 1000 feet doing circuits and bumps from Twinwoods. Anyway I had to remove the aeroplane, I wouldn’t pull the aerials off, I just removed the aeroplane. But he was very upset about it yet it was very easy for anybody to see it. But the Beaufighters were the first ones to have radar for night fighting.�

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