Aviation was a passion of Tony’s from a very young age. He was always keen on joining the RAF and enlisted with the volunteer reserve. He has happy memories of the training and the thrill of flying, especially his first time in a Spitfire. Tony recalls in tense detail his first encounter with the Luftwaffe and how he survived a miraculous landing in the sea, something for which he was never trained. At the age of 21 Tony travelled to Durban to become a flight instructor. He remembers this time of adventure in a new country with great fondness although it comes to a somewhat sticky end when Tony is lucky to escape a court martial for crashing a Tiger Moth. More luck is on Tony’s side when his restlessness at being sent back to the UK threatens to see him in trouble again but an amenable Station Commander looks out for him and recommends Tony join the Bomber Command. Tony does so and volunteers for 617 Squadron, aka The Dambusters. Tony was well aware of the squadron’s reputation and, seeing it as a great honour to join, works incredibly hard to maintain those standards. He talks in detail about his training and the mission to take out the German Bismarck-class battleship Tirpitz. Tony dedicates this interview to Bomber Command and reflects on the airmen whose lost lives are now commemorated with a memorial in London, a fitting tribute which means the cost of war should not be forgotten.

Dick joined the RAF in 1942, aged 19, and flew allied transport aircraft in the Far East, supplying Allied troops in the jungle. After the war he was in Transport Command, operating in Germany and Poland. He was due to go on leave, but the Soviets had just blockaded Berlin, and instead he began flying Dakota transports into Berlin from western Germany. Initially only two transports were involved but this built up rapidly despite the ‘organised chaos’ of the early days. Soon the pilots were working 18-hour days, flying three to four return flights to Berlin daily. During the winter the weather was bad, although not as severe as Dick had experienced during the war. A wide variety of cargoes were carried, from coal to disassembled bulldozers and hay for the Berlin Zoo. On the return flights light export goods and unwell German children were carried. Later he flew the Avro York, a larger aircraft with greater capacity than the Dakota. On at least two occasions there was a mix-up, and a Dakota was loaded with a York’s cargo. They managed to get to Berlin but only with the engines running at maximum power. The Soviet air force harassed the Allied aircraft, sometimes firing their guns over the planes, other times buzzing them as close as twenty feet. On one occasion Dick got tired of this behaviour, turned his plane around and flew directly at the Soviet aircraft, which took evasive action. He thinks that the Airlift prevented another war.

Joyce experienced bombing in WW2 and her mother had a narrow escape. At nineteen, in 1947, she joined the WAAF and trained in air traffic control and radar. The Airlift started the day that Joyce was posted to Germany, and she was initially ambivalent and apprehensive about helping the Germans, due to wartime events. She had never been abroad before and found the experience quite daunting. When she arrived in Germany she became aware of the deprivation that the population were experiencing and how they too were bombed. At the RAF HQ in Ahnsen she worked as a ‘Hoe Girl’ using a table-top hoe to plot the movement of aircraft during the Airlift and this task demanded a high level of accuracy. As well as this duty she worked in communications, relaying messages from aircraft to officers. There were three air ‘corridors’ to Berlin differentiated by height, with an aircraft landing every three to four minutes. The work was hard and constant, with leave once a month, when she and her colleagues were sent to a hotel and during this period she met her husband to be, who was also working on the base. During her time overseas she met Germans of her age and spoke to them about Nazism and the Hitler Youth. They said it was like the British Scouts and tried to explain their enthusiasm for Hitler. These young Germans professed to have no knowledge of the Holocaust, partly because they lived in the countryside.