Crew Selection

I ended up in 426 Squadron. That was the Canadian, Canadians were the only ones that had their own group in Bomber Command and we had a whole group there, No. 6 Group was a Canadian group and we had different squadrons spread around England in 6 Group and mine happened to be 426 Squadron, on wings of fire!

Interviewer: So can you tell us a bit about forming your crew, it’s often been said that the pilot, the position that you held, made a lot of the choices for his crew.

Yes, we had a group meeting with different members of air crew and not for all of them but for
four or five of them and we’d just go around the room and talking to different ones and the ones I spoke to, they seemed willing to come with me. They obviously didn’t know I could fly and so they came with me, really a nice bunch of fellows. I got my wireless operator, my navigator and I think I got the two gunners then. And then later I got my bomb aimer and I got my flight engineer. I was lucky with my flight engineer because he had been to Canada to take some pilot training and he got washed out as a pilot and back to England and he remustered and became a flight engineer and it was then I got to know him and I was glad I got him because he at least had a bit of an idea how to steer an airplane if you had to, you know.