My father's war: I keep on tracking

For the centenary of my father Leonard’s birth, on 15 September, I spent some time trying to piece together his experiences in World War 2.

The way I left things then, he’d not long turned nineteen, and was living in London after having escaped Brussels, where he’d spent his childhood, just ahead of the invading army of Nazi Germany. In London, he’d witnessed the great air battles of the Blitz from the ground, while waiting to be called for service in the Royal Air Force, for which he’d volunteered. That only happened “after November 1940”, according to records of the War Office (yes, the euphemistic term “Defence Department” wasn’t yet in use).

He was young and he’d watched planes dogfighting over London. Fighter pilots were glamorous and flavour of the month. “Never in the field of human conflict,” proclaimed Winston Churchill in tribute to the pilots who’d defeated the Luftwaffe’s attacks, “was so much owed by so many to so few.” It was probably inevitable that my father would set his sights on flying fighters himself.

First, however, he had to get through basic training. That wasn’t easy. Brought up in a French-speaking environment, his English was sometimes a little stilted and eccentric. Queuing for his uniform with other recruits, he gave his build as “slender”.

The sergeant in front of him turned to the next one along. 

“Did you hear that? We’ve got a young gentleman here who’s ‘slender’. How are we going to cope with him?”

Slender in uniform
Miserable in basic training

It was the start of several hellish weeks for Leonard as, in his own account, the air force deliberately broke down his personality and then rebuilt it in its own image. The process brought him close to suicide.

There was some light relief. He registered himself as an atheist, even though in truth he was more of an agnostic. It meant he’d never be bothered about attending Sunday services. Four of his fellow recruits, however, thought they’d be clever and registered themselves as Muslim. They were woken at dawn the next day and marched out into the freezing cold where four prayer mats had been laid out.

“Mecca’s that way,” a sergeant told them, “get on with it.”

Four of the swiftest conversions to Christianity took place immediately afterwards.

It surprises me that basic training took so long, but it isn’t until 22 February 1942 that Leonard makes an entry in the RAF ‘Pilot’s Flying Logbook’ I inherited from my mother. It records initial training at a flying school near Cambridge, in a Tiger Moth, the iconic biplane still in use for training in the forties.

On 19 April, he took his first solo flight.

Then there’s another long gap, but one that’s easier to explain. The US had joined the war following the Pearl Harbor attack the previous December. Where before US support to Britain had been limited and discreet, now it was open and rapidly scaling up. Leonard was sent to the US Naval Reserve Aviation Base at Detroit. 

I wish I’d asked him about his crossing of the Atlantic, where undefeated German U-boats still prowled. At any rate, I know he made it safely.

Joane Nowiaki from Detroit

There was, inevitably, a girl in Detroit. Joane Nowiaki, a winningly appropriate name for a part of the US with a significant Polish population. She sent him a picture of herself with best wishes for Christmas and the New Year, so clearly however deep or not the relationship had been, it at least survived even his departure from Detroit.

For by the autumn of 1942, Leonard was gone. He told me he fell ill at Detroit. I don’t know what he had, but it kept him out of action for several weeks. When he asked to restart his pilot training, he was told that he was too far behind. Instead he was transferred to a course for bomber navigators.

“I was disappointed,” he told me, “but I think they were right. They realised before I did that I’d be a far better navigator than I’d ever be a pilot.”

The last entry in his ‘Pilot’s Log Book’ is dated 24 August 1942. His new ‘Flying Log Book’, for navigator training, has a first entry on 20 September. By then he was in Canada, at London, Ontario.

It was there that he and and a group of fellow airmen, returning from a training mission, decided it would be fun to bomb a car driving across a frozen lake. Not with live bombs, of course. The plane had no toilet so the men relieved themselves into cardboard cylinders. They lent out of an open door on the plane and flung urine-filled cylinders at the car, as the pilot brought them down as low as he dared. 

I suppose that’s what one might call young men pissing around. An interesting object lesson in one of the lesser-known dangers of warfare: what happens when you give young men powerful weapons to play with. Leonard was 21 at the time, and I’m sure his fellow trainees would have been of much the same age.

There is, by the way, no record in his log book of this event.

There was, of course, another woman. This was Leslie Lister. Leslie and Joane: either would have made his existence profoundly different, and denied both my brother and me ours.

Leslie Lister from London, Ontario

The front page of the log book records Leading Aircraftsman LAM Beeson’s certification as a navigator on 30 December 1942. That’s a little over two years after his service started. Is that a tribute to the care the RAF took training its personnel, even in wartime, or a sad example of British slowness in reacting to a national emergency? You decide.

In any case, training was far from over. There’s another long gap, part of it covering his return to England. In May, training starts again. He’s now with 196 Squadron. So Leonard is flying large planes, Stirling bombers, though bombing was a small element of his training. Instead, it focused on the squadron’s main task: dropping supplies to resistance groups, ferrying paratroops or towing Horsa gliders. 

A key event occurred on 20 July: Leonard’s first flight with Flight Sergeant (later Pilot Officer) W L Marshall as pilot. He was in the Royal Australian Air Force, seconded to the RAF in England (“they had dark blue uniforms, which went down really well with the girls,” my Dad told me, a little wryly, I felt).

Royal Australian Air Force men in 196 Squadron
(Australian War Memorial photo)
Posing in front of one of the Stirling bombers
W L Marshal is third from the right in the back row

He told me how crew selection had gone.

“They brought a bunch of us together,” my father explained, “pilots, navigators and radio operators. ‘Sort yourself into crews’, they told us. Eventually, there were just three of us left in the room. I walked over to Marshall and said, ‘it looks like we’ll be flying together’. Then we went across to the radio operator and told him the same.”

The crew worked well despite that inauspicious start. Only Leonard’s and one other completed the war without a loss.

Training flights went on into 1944. Then, on 5 February 1944, they got really serious. “No I” reads the log book entry, for his first mission, . “Low level op. – France”. They took off at 20:40, so it was the first of many night missions.

Bombing cars with urine-filled cylinders was a thing of the past. Finding girlfriends in Detroit or in London, Ontario too. It had taken over three years, but now things had become very real.

But that’s caught me right up. That’s as much as I can reconstruct of his war time life before going into action. 

The rest of the story of Leonard’s war service I’ve told before.