Reminiscences of WW2 of Nev Robinson, my friend.

Over seven years ago a chance remark by someone on a website about where my father worked, led in short order, to a lovely friendship that continues to this day. Nev has been in New Zealand since the 1950s in fact, and over the time I have known him, I have been asking him to write down his memories because he must have so many and every person's memory is unique to them. Sure, they have experience in common, but no two people have common memories. Rather like looking into a mirror, every person looking in, even standing side by side, sees a slightly difference reflection to the other.

I asked Nev for permission to publish this particular memoire on my blog, because he joined the RAF the year I was born. Consequently, 1942 is special for very different reasons to two friends who will never meet, but who share so much fun and both care enormously about the other. He is my knight in shining armour, ready with his (t)rusty sword to defend me when I am stupid enough to allow someone to break my heart. He is the shoulder I cry on because I know that he will never let me down when other men have done. He is wonderfully articulate, and for me, and I hope anyone else reading this chapter of my blog, paints a very vivid picture of what it must have been like to be 17 and volunteering for the forces when this country of ours was in greatest danger and young men like him wanted to come to our defence - but in actual fact, saw it as a chance to see the world and get a slice of whatever action was out there to be enjoyed or otherwise.

Most of us have been fed a diet of every Soldier, Sailor or Airman being some sort of superman hero, riding with the single thought to defend us. We overlook the plain fact that many of them were conscripts, who would have much preferred to have stayed at home in their 'proper' jobs living in the bosom of their families, or simply escaping the bleak unemployment which the 1930s depression had brought in its wake. Instead the conscripts were whisked off to some of the most horrendous battlefields that the world had seen since 1918, and they were scared - they were, after all, still kids in the main. You cannot, in all conscience, call a 17 or 18 year old a man. Yes, they became men very quickly, but on that first week, they were kids wondering what on earth was going to happen to them.

My own father was in the First World War, and joined up aged 15 in 1914, and I have enormous regret that I didn't ask him far more questions than I did. I knew he was a dispatch rider behind enemy lines, and that he was taken prisoner and was sent to Russia, but details to fill out the picture were never filled in simply because I never asked. At least, through Neville's writing, I can imagine what some of our now fast disappearing veterans of World War 2 experienced a little. Bear in mind, though, this is only one man's unedited view.

So, here, in his own words, are the Reminiscences of Neville Robinson, a man I am very proud to call a friend.

Young Neville with the world at his feet.

'You know the old crap about those who were in the forces never speaking about their experiences? As though being tight-lipped showed some sort of continuing valour, or as though speaking of it would revive some sort of horrific memories and turn the divulger into a babbling idiot. I can tell you why those involved with armed conflict don’t talk about it. No-one is interested. No-one I’ve ever known including my kids has ever said ‘What did you do in the war?’ Well, maybe Lis did once when she was about 12. I was in the RAF. Oh, right, yeah’.

Anyway, for the record, here is the Never Before Told Story of Neville’s Heroic Wartime Exploits. If you’re wondering what brought this on, put it down to some reading I’ve done lately. Firstly a pictorial history of the ill-fated airship R101 in the 1930’s, then to a book by Duncan Campbell about the India/Pakistan war in 1971 (The Paradise Trail). Puzzled? Read on.

!942 – I’m working for JS Engineering at Wortley Road in Croydon. I’d always fancied being a bomber pilot, so I went to the recruiting centre and signed up. I signed up as an 18 year old – no-one questioned that sort of stuff. Three weeks later I had a railway warrant for Cardington RAF where the four-day selection process was held in the giant hanger that was built for the R101 Airship in 1929. Significant to me in a way, and a year later, because I can still remember, having been banned to my bedroom for some misdemeanour or other I was called outside by my mother to watch the R101 droning overhead on what was its maiden overseas flight to India via France. Hard to realise I was four years old. Harder still to realise how stupid our engineers were in that age. The R101 was a floating incendiary bomb made of hand sewn leather bags of hydrogen gas and powered by suspended pontoons with petrol-engines with their red-hot exhausts. It never did have the lift to combat even the least grade of bad weather, and extending the thing by fifty feet made the situation worse. Not many hours after I saw it floating over Croydon it was forced down by bad weather in the south of France. 48 of its 54 on board were burned to death.

So for the keen reader, that is the first link in the story. The mooring mast for the airship was still there. Maybe the mast and the hanger are still there for all I know.

But the selection process was a great adventure. There was the deliberately imposed discipline by drill-corporals, coupled with foul weather and crack-of-dawn mess hall meals, stripped medical exams (complete with the balls-held ‘cough’ test) Gunnery tests with primitive CRT screens (true), breathing endurance tests, steady hand tests, writing in the dark tests, maths tests, -- actually all the sort of stuff you watch on the ‘Cube’ TV show (as at Jan/Feb 2011)

All devised to determine if you were fit enough to be killed. But at 15 I thought only of the blue uniform, and the status of the sergeant’s stripes and the magic ‘Aircrew’ brevet.

Alas. The following interviews revealed that, yes; I had the aptitudes required for aircrew, but not the education or the attitude to become an officer or a gentleman as a Pilot, or even an Observer (navigator), but YES! I could become a WOP/AG. The lowest of the low. Maybe a sergeant, but never to enter the Officers Mess. Bugger.

So then I back to work to await call-up

But unbeknownst to me the brothers at JS Engineering had applied to have me deferred from service. At this time I was working night shift, fabricating and welding huge structures that I learned much later were components of the Mulberry Harbour to be used at D Day.

So, it was not until August 1943 that I received my call-up papers to report to St Johns Wood in London. Not that we were there for long. The V1 weapons were at their height, so the decision on high was to evacuate the whole flight to Babbacombe in South Devon.

All of the seaside hotels had been commandeered by the RAF. Our Flight was in the ‘White Hotel, where the only concession to its preservation was planks nailed to the staircases. To stop wear and tear from boots I assume, but everything else had been stripped, and we were billeted 5 or 6 to a room. (Went back there in 1975). Nothing changed much, but didn’t get to see inside)

This was a time of indecision. The war was almost won, but with thousands of embryo aircrew in various stages of training. The Air Gunners in our flight were offered training in Canada. The whole flight volunteered, but about six were chosen. The rest of us were split. What happened to the others I had no idea, but I was sent to ITW at Bridgenorth to learn wireless operation, gunnery, Morse code, aircraft recognition, medical emergency procedures, parachute drops and survival and all the rest. But without OT (Operations Training) the Sergeant’s stripes eluded me.

Someone above must have made some sort of decision, because suddenly, trainee aircrew were presented with choices to re-muster. Like, what else could they do with us? They obviously didn’t have a clue.

So, from memory, the choices were: (believe it) Re-muster to:

Dispatch rider

Bomb disposal squad

War gasses experimental

So I re mustered to driving a motor bike. That was at Weeton, near Blackpool. An eight week course that seemed much longer, but I learned all about the Otto Cycle, side valve and overhead valve engines, blah, blah, blah, and also a little about driving the bloody things, with and without a sidecar. Pass out, then a posting to London War Office, passing meaningless documents between meaningless departments.

Only one episode stands out. I landed a job to act as rider escort for a sound-detector truck being driven from Uxbridge to Salisbury. These things – probably invented by some mad scientist - were a huge bow-shaped horn on a truck base, with a small office-like compartment alongside, where talented sprogs listened through headphones. Supposedly, they could detect and differentiate between the various types of enemy bomber aircraft, where they were, and other stuff. What they did with the information is a mystery. Especially as radar was in full use by then. But not to reason why etc. This 12 tonne contraption had to go to Salisbury. I’ll skip the detail – the interesting thing is that the Fleet Air Arm depot consisted of a wire perimeter fence, a guardhouse and a small office-like building, to which I was escorted with my delivery papers. And surprise! This building turned out to house an elevator, which descended 200 ft. to a huge complex labyrinth of tunnels and command Centre’s. And obviously they must still be there. Actually, I’ve searched the WEB, but yes, there are tunnels below Salisbury Plain, but not a word about their origin or their purpose

But I digress. Hey! I could re muster again and join the Police Force. So why not? The Old Man had been in the job for nearly thirty years. Maybe that had an influence, but I don’t think so. It was something different to do, so anyway just a short time later, demob suit done and dusted and I’m at Peel House along with 20 other aspiring plods, nearly all of them ex-service of one branch or another. So we were used to discipline and rote. Mostly it was a lot of fun, especially the staged accident and confrontation exercises, but some of it was hard yacker – mentally that is, like having to learn very long legal passages from the IB word for word. I got a slap on the wrist for not getting some 500 word passage on bail incorrect, and told I would be retarded for a month should I not have it right the next day. I did get it right, but not without some midnight oil. But one of our intake got so stressed that he became constipated for three weeks and had to be hospitalised.

So, come the pass-out date and disclosure of where in the Met we would be posted for our two-year probation period. I don’t think anyone got the division they had requested. Certainly no-one was posted with another of the intake. A deliberate move by some sort of inverted psychology I suppose. As for me, I was posted to H Division at Bethnal Green in East London. In those days, coppers still walked the beat, and new recruits were assigned to a senior constable. And because all the young cops were in the forces (like we were) these guys were all approaching retirement and couldn’t care less. Certainly the one coaching me told me where to get a free supper or lunch, and where to sleep on a parked bus during night shift, but I never saw him again after the first week. Over the next six months I ticketed one motorist for an obscured number plate, arrested (sort of) a 17 year-old girl escapee from Borstal and dealt with a sudden death in the street of a man with a burst aorta. Detective Robinson strikes again with lightening precision. I’m living in a half bomb-destroyed Section House on 47/6 pence a week, doing three alternative shifts and trying to sleep among the noise. Just like the NAAFI, if those of you can remember the organisation. It was the Navy, Army and Air Force Institution, but better known to the forces as ‘No ambition and fuck-all interest’.

So I thought what the hell am I doing here?’ And then, ‘I’m out of here’. And so I was. And I went back into the engineering trade, and would you believe, it took the labour department another six months to tell me I had not fulfilled my demobilisation commitments, so it’s back in the Air Force for you laddie !!

And do I care? Not at all. Like thousands of other ex-aircrew I’m milling around at Uxbridge dispersal unit. What a totally senseless business that was – but hey, here’s a thing, I could volunteer for overseas service (although why the RAF would be needed overseas now the war was finished – who knows?)

Right. Fill in the waiver forms, choose Singapore as preferred posting, because I had a mate serving there, and after 3 weeks at a new dispersal centre I’m aboard the troopship Mooltan out of Liverpool. Great stuff. Always fancied cruising. Then on day 2 (too late to jump off) I learn I’m going to Bombay. Oh well. At least it will be warm weather.

So after six weeks of lazing around on hot decks and even hotter below deck, here we are in Bombay, or Mumbai as it is called now, marching (sort of) through the Bombay Gate and into trucks and off to Tintown. So called because of the rusty iron shacks that passed for the souvenir shops that lined the road into the dispersal camp.

And have to say, if all the info I’ve seen in the press and on the net, and in films like Slumdog Millionaire, nothing has changed in India in 70 years. The same slums, the same stinks, the same squalor, the same inequalities. Maybe they never will, but that’s another story.

Now, off we go again on a pukka tourist trip from Bombay to Calcutta by rattling jostling steam train. Too much detail for here. Overnight laybys in sidings, Stop offs at remote tented camps, lousy nights on wooden seats. We get there in twenty days. The WO says ‘What the fuck they send you here for? ’ Good question, better answer: three days later we’re on a DC3 flying to Karachi. Don’t ask.

But this is the final point in this endlessly stupid marathon, and now we are in Karachi, what is now known as the capital of Pakistan. But then, it was in India.

And our final home is MU 263 Drihg Road. A huge area on the edge of the Sind Dessert, encompassing an RAF airfield, a fully tooled Maintenance Unit, a separate Transport Unit and the huge, never used hangar built in the thirties for the Airship R101. Full circle.

I suppose the question is, what were we supposed to be doing there? Or anywhere for that matter. Part of the answer was in the pending partition of Pakistan from India. Military action may have been anticipated? Who knows? We are a transport section. Just driving around and maintaining vehicles. I needed to learn very quickly how to drive a Chev 15cwt waggon instead of a motorcycle. Apart from that it was a very lazy and congenial life. Six of us in a spacious stone built, full verandahed room. We had the daily services of a bearer to clean our billet, a dohbi wallah to do our laundry, a pani wallah to supply our daily chilled water, a char wallah to supply twice daily tea. And a fruit wallah to deliver fruit. We lived like Rajahs at one rupee a week. Worth about 1/6d. Working hours were 6.00 am to 1.00 pm. Weekends were usually spent playing cards or travelling into town to browse Elphinstone Street for American cigarettes at 3 Rp for 200, or a 2 hour haircut, massage etc, or an Indian meal, all for peanuts. The only interesting things to happen were when a mate got a bullet through the windscreen for failing to stop at the camp gate (well, it was only a bloody wog on duty), and I got picked as armed escort for Mountbatten when he drove to Government House for the partition ceremony. Well, I say armed’ I was given a Sten gun to wear across my back, but no bullets in the magazine. Somehow or other a pair of Harley Davidsons was found, so two of us preceded his lordship in his Bentley and got shown on Movietone News. Big deal all round.

Now we have a new incentive to look at DROs. Demobilisation is under way for the forces in India, and in Pakistan. New groups appeared weekly, and after just a few months, there’s mine. Group 62, must be ready to embark in two weeks’ time. Like, do I have a choice? Not in this Air Force. I’ve only just begun to settle down and quite like it here, but back on another troopship to Liverpool, thence to Uxbridge and yet another demob suit, shoes, tie and overcoat, rail pass. 14 days paid leave, goodbye, good riddance, served your country, now get lost.

Did feel lost actually. All I ever wanted to be was a bomber pilot. Or a navigator. Or a Gunner. Or a WOPAG. Came close though. Common theory that war is 23 hours boredom, one hour excitement. Never got the exciting bit.

Now you know why us veterans remain tight-lipped and inscrutable heroes.'