Thanks for everything, Tobe

Once again I find myself apologising to older bloggers for repeating myself, but what with Father's Day coming up and the nice post on this blogger's father, I thought that this image of mine and the story that goes with it was worth repeating, if only to show what an easy life my generation have had - so far.

When my father joined the RAF during WW2, he really wanted to be a pilot, but - for some reason - didn't get picked for that and ended up as a gunner in Bomber Command.

As I'm sure you know, the life expectancy of the crew in a bomber over Europe was the lowest of any of the armed forces, and the life-expectancy of a rear-gunner was even lower than the rest of the crew's. On his last mission, his plane - a Wellington - was badly shot up with flak, but they made it back to the southern coast of the Kent airfield before the pilot (being unable to lower the undercarriage or control the plane properly) radioed through a command to bale out.

The radio cable which went through to the tail where my dad was positioned had been severed by flak, so the first he knew of the command was when he looked out to see his comrades gently floating to ground on parachutes as the plane flew on with only him on board, at a height of a few hundred feet. He sat back and waited to die.

When the Wellington hit the ground, almost all of it was destroyed except the gun position of the tail, as you can see from theses pictures, and from being the most dangerous position on the plane, the tail-gunner's suddenly became the safest - not that safe though, he was pulled from the wreckage with every bone broken in both legs in more than one place.

I don't know how long he spent in hospital after the crash, but I do know that he spent the rest of his life applying bandages to his legs as a result of some complication of the injuries, and I never saw his legs at all when I was a kid.

When he was finally released from hospital, he was given an office job in the Ministry of War (now the Ministry of Defence) in Whitehall, London, and before long, he suspected one of his fellow workers of being a German spy. Spies were everywhere during WW2 - some known about, others not - and they all had impeccable English accents with fake school records, etc. to go with them. It was quite common to settle a vendetta by falsely accusing someone of being a spy, so my dad did a bit of checking up on this one before blowing the whistle.

He never got a chance to blow the whistle, because the German was alerted to his investigations and quickly left the office. The last thing he did before leaving was to put poison in my father's tea.

It seems that this spy was as bad a poisoner as my father was a detective, because he over-dosed him, and dad threw most of it up and survived. My earliest memories of my father was visiting him in hospital, where he was having pieces of artificial stomach-lining sewn in, about 6 years after the war was over.

He ended up surviving my mother and died aged 84, about 20 years ago.

Thanks for everything, Tobe.