I was living in Vienna when, in March 1938, Austria became part of Nazi-Germany. Within 48 hours my father was arrested by the Gestapo and was to spend 13 months in the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. He had been a prominent and well-known anti-Nazi journalist. Although just 13 years of age, I was fully aware of the perils all Jews would face under this new regime and I did not expect to see my father again.
In December 1938 I was on the first of several children’s transports, a trainload of some 600 Jewish children which would take most to the safe haven of England. There I had the good fortune to be taken, along with three others, by a Quaker school in Yorkshire where, as day boys, we lived with families in the village. This experience turned out to be the foundation of my development which helped to make me the person I am now.
By the summer of 1940, having reached school-leaving age and funds for my maintenance run out, my formal education came to a sad and premature end. I was offered a place at a training centre in Leeds where the likes of myself could learn a trade. I qualified as an electrician and in March 1942 I joined my father in London. My mother had got his release from the concentration camp by subterfuge and I shudder to think what might have happened to her if she had been found out. My father had arrived in England two weeks before the outbreak of war, but before my mother was able to follow him, hostilities had put a stop to all civilian travel. She was en route in Italy and remained there for the duration, unable to re-join my father until 1947.
My father was living in a bed-sitter in the basement of a large block of flats in Bayswater and similar accommodation was found for me there. I soon found a job with a small telephone company specialising in office and factory intercom systems. I had become very interested in aircraft while still at school in Yorkshire, first on the design side; but by now I had decided that what I really wanted to do was to fly. I, and others like me, were legally classed as enemy aliens, as such could not be called up and any volunteers limited to the Pioneer Corps, the so-called ‘Pick and Shovel Brigade’, a far cry indeed for a would–be bold aviator.
One day in January 1943 I noticed a recruiting office while passing along the Euston Road. On the principle of if you don’t ask, you don’t get, I marched boldly in where I was greeted by a very friendly Sergeant (would they all be so nice?) who asked what he could do for me. “I want to volunteer for aircrew,” I replied. “Oh, you’ve come to the right place, sign here.” On explaining the problem he said that all that had changed, there were no longer any limitations for the likes of me, but each case would be treated on an individual basis. I would have to write a letter to the Secretary of State for Air, explaining who I was, and I would get a decision in about six weeks’ time. I did just that, was accepted, and in mid- March I presented myself at the aircrew selection board. I wanted to be a pilot of course, but in the end I had to settle for wireless operator. This was very disappointing, but in fact turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Pilot training was a lengthy business and, much of it being done in kinder climes such as America and Rhodesia involving extensive travel with its inevitable delays and bottle-necks, I may not have qualified before the end of the conflict had brought it all to an end. As it turned out, I left the Service with useful experience for entering civil aviation.
Many well-wishers chided me for sticking my neck out instead of staying safe at home, to which I would reply – where is safety? How many housewives lost their lives in their own kitchen? There were still bombs dropping on London, I used to take my turn fire-watching on the roof of the block of flats and the buzz-bombs and V2s were still to come. Years later someone said to me – “If there’s something you really want to do, go ahead and do it” and “the only things I have ever regretted are the things I have not done!”
I have always found these to be very good principles indeed.
The end of June 1943 found me at ACRC, the Aircrew Reception Centre at St. John’s Wood, then on to Initial Training Wing at Bridgenorth in Shropshire and at the end of September at No. 4 Radio School Madley, near Hereford. This was a dismal place, the usual widely dispersed camp where we seemed to spend as much time marching from one instructional site to another as actually being instructed in one of them. I found the technical part of our training interesting, but as for the practical – 4 hours a day, 6 days
a week for 6 months getting our Morse speed up to requirements felt like being chained to an oar in a pirate’s galley. About mid-October, a call went out for German speakers. This seemed like a call for a more congenial existence and I lost no time putting my name down, but then nothing more was heard of this and I continued minding my dits and dahs.
My course should have finished at the end of March, but by the beginning of the month the previous intake were still struggling to complete their flying and there was no sign of us even starting. Then out of the blue Johnnie Hereford and I were told to report to the Chief Instructor’s office who informed us that we had been posted with immediate effect to a Squadron. We were told to do our tests, then we would have priority to get our flying done. A couple of days later, it was Wednesday 15 March, six years to the day since my father had been arrested by the Gestapo, that we received our Signaller’s wings and Sergeant’s stripes and two days later we joined 214 Squadron at Sculthorpe near Fakenham in Norfolk.
214 Squadron, having been transferred from 3 Group to 100 Group, was still converting from Stirlings to Flying Fortresses to operate in its new role of radio countermeasures. While the British bombers’ underfloor bomb bays were ideal for carrying the largest bombs, the American mid-wing fuselage ones were better suited for the installation and maintenance of the radio equipment we were to carry. Our tasks would be the disruption of enemy radar and radio transmissions, especially those which were used for the direction of night-fighters to our bomber stream. These would be operated by Special Duty Operators, of which Johnnie and I were among the first to arrive on the Squadron and it was all so secret that even the Commanding Officer had not been informed what it was all about. So that call for German speakers had not been in vain and I was pleased at the prospect of getting at least some of my own back to that Nasty MAN Adolf. In fact, the Squadron’s first operational flight was on 20th April, Hitler’s birthday, and I revelled at delivering my worst regards in person.
The equipment we carried was ABC, Airborne Cigar, which consisted of a small cathode ray tube covering the German night-fighter frequency band. Any transmission would show as a blip, we would tune one or more of our three transmitters to it to drown it in a horrible cacophony of sounds. This had been pioneered by 101 Squadron in October 1943, hence that call for German speakers, and they continued this as a side-line to the end of the war. In time, more sophisticated and powerful equipment came into use, but that was after my time on the Squadron.
For quite some time there were not enough Specials to go round, we had not yet received our full complement of aircraft and so we had to fly with whoever happened to be on the battle order. Towards the end of July we were at last able to continue with a crew of our own, I had become particularly friendly with Jackson’s, when Johnnie and I were posted away to 101 Squadron in Lincolnshire. We struggled and fought to remain with our friends, but it was to no avail and we had to go. Apparently 101’s need was greater than 214’s and we had been picked to fill the gap. In fact this probably saved my life, for Jackson’s crew were shot down on their very last flight of their tour.
I’d flown 10 operational flights with 214 and completed my tour of 30 with 101 towards the end of October. Though my Lancaster had suffered occasional damage by enemy flak, none was of a really serious nature and I came through it all unscathed. In fact the nearest I ever came to losing my life was on my very own doorstep while on leave in London, when a V2 exploded prematurely a few hundred feet directly above my head. Just goes to show – sticking out my neck by volunteering might have turned out to be the safest way after all.
Early in the New Year I was posted to Transport Command, first to a Dakota Operational Training Unit near Carlisle, then in September to the Far East. First to a supply-dropping course in Baroda, then to 215 Squadron, soon to be renumbered 48, in Singapore. Here fortune had again favoured me for our job was the carriage of Service personnel throughout the area as far as Rangoon and Hong Kong in the north, and Java and Sumatra in the south. Here my work as Wireless Operator was the same as I was to find later in
civil aviation and the 800 hours I logged there the very experience I needed for my later career.
I left the Service in May 1947, flew as Radio Officer with several companies, qualified as commercial pilot in 1954 and got my first command three years later. But that’s another story.
by Gerhard Heilig - November 2013
This article is from the Spring 2014 issue of Confound and Destroy
