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FJP in the RAF: Joe Pidgeon talking about his time in the RAF
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My father, Frederick Joseph ‘Joe’ Pidgeon, had told me bits and pieces about his flying career during the Second World War, but I wanted to know more. I recorded this interview with him in October 2002.

When did you develop your interest in flying?

In the 1920s flying was a bit of a romantic thing, but I remember my first flight. My father was working at the Bristol Aeroplane Company and we were having a holiday in Weston-super-Mare, as we often did, that’s my mother and myself. My father did auditing for the Air Ministry at firms like Bristol and during my school holidays he would arrange to go and do audits at places like the Bristol Aeroplane Company and we would go and stay at Weston-super-Mare. On this occasion, and I suppose it was highly improper in a way, but the Bristol Aeroplane Company used to do training for the RAF, and my father knew that I was keen to go flying and I was offered a flight in a trainer – a Bristol Lucifer. I remember that well. One of the early Bristol engines was a three-cylinder radial and it powered an aircraft called the Bristol Lucifer, and I had a flight – I suppose then I was about seven or eight – which impressed me enormously. But I suppose, generally speaking, flying was just a rather romantic, exciting thing at that period.

When did you fly again?

When I went to college in 1934 or ’35, I joined the Imperial College Gliding Club and did a little bit of training, then the University of London Air Squadron opened. The University Air Squadrons initially were not intended to provide pilots for the RAF, but they were an attempt to counter the fact that university students often had opportunities to join the Officer Training Corps, so when people left university, those graduates would only have experience of the Army. So this was an attempt to produce people from universities who had some orientation towards the affairs of the RAF, but we were taught to fly by the RAF and we had our annual camps, then about 1937 or ’38 they changed the policy and decided that they would like us to join the RAF Volunteer Reserve. (In the Reserve) we were trained on Avro Tutors, but during our summer camps we also had Harts and Hart variants. The Hart was a late design from the First World War. It was a bi-plane and that design had been the backbone of the RAF until somebody jogged them into coming up to date and producing a monoplane like the Spitfire and the Hurricane.

That was with the threat of war?

That was with the threat of war coming along, yes. I was torn between wanting to fly and wanting to be an engineer, and I managed to do both.

How big was the University Air Squadron?

I suppose we had about forty members.

When war broke out were you immediately seconded into the RAF?

When war broke out, which it did somewhat unexpectedly, all the members of the Volunteer Reserve were instructed to report to a certain room in the Air Ministry on a certain day. They had no idea how many they had, and absolute chaos reigned, but in my case I was on holiday and I got back to find this instruction waiting for me, so I rang up the Air Ministry and they said, ‘Don’t come, we’ve got too many people to deal with,’ and then they said, ‘If there’s anything more you can do, we’ll get in touch with you,’ so I went back to university – that was in 1939 – and I enquired what was going on, and they said I should complete my year at university, which I did. I had already been commissioned in the RAF VR and I went into the RAF in July 1940.

I received my instructions to buy a uniform and to report to the flying training unit at Hatfield, which was attached to the De Haviland aircraft factory, where I would be joining a course which was going on to Cranwell. But although we were members of the RAF VR, we had received no training other than to learn to fly. So I walked in my new uniform into the office of the RAF unit at Hatfield, and got immediately blasted by the adjutant, because I didn’t know how to salute. When I explained that I had no experience of that sort of thing, he was astonished. Most people went to a preliminary training course where they were taught which way you passed the port at a mess dinner, how you greeted a Group Captain, how you marched people up and down, and so forth, but I didn’t have any idea of those sort of military requirements at all.

I arrived at Hatfield, got ticked off for not saluting, and the adjutant said, ‘Well, we shall have to find somewhere for you to stay. I’ll give you a billeting order and we’ll find someone who will take you.’ So I said, ‘Could you find me some petrol?’ And he said, ‘Yes, possibly, do you know somewhere where you could stay?’ So I went off to Hatfield that morning and arrived back at my mother’s that evening with an order that she had to billet me while I was at Hatfield. So I lived at home for those twelve weeks and drove to Hatfield daily in my Trojan.

Did you ever fly over your house?

Not from Hatfield, but before the war we used to fly from Northholt and I remember beating up the house – diving on it – and getting told off.

Of course, pre-1939 we used to have an annual camp, and various summers we went to Duxford and Thorney Island and Holton for two weeks’ annual camp. When we got onto flying these Hart Variants, the great thing was to take off, particular in the early morning – we’d have a six o’clock pre-breakfast flight – and I remember going off from Thorney Island, in particular, in a Hart, and we’d climb up to about 25,000 feet with no oxygen, but we didn’t know we needed oxygen, so we were all right. I suppose we must have been a bit stupid by the time we reached that height, but we’d fly up to 25,000 feet, and from Thorney Island, which was near Portsmouth, you could see right down the south coast and over to the coast of France. It was wonderful.

Did pilots ever come unstuck showing off or doing silly things?

Yes, one man who came unstuck was Geoffrey Page, who subsequently became a Wing Commander, but he had a girlfriend at Roedean School near Brighton, and he went and did a slow roll in front of the school, but it didn’t quite come off and he managed to crash himself on the cliff tops right outside, which impressed the girls enormously. He was doing it in an Avro Tutor, which was fairly slow, and survived without any trouble, but if it hadn’t been 1939 with war about to break out, I think that would have finished his flying career. But he went on to be a very distinguished fighter pilot and survived the war.

I should add that the course that I was supposed to have joined to go on to Cranwell for multi-engine training had not even arrived at Hatfield when I got there, so I had some twelve weeks to wait at Hatfield, while they did their initial training, and there we flew Tiger Moths. Because I was already solo, I wasn’t given anything in the way of tuition, but I sometimes went out with one of the instructors collecting mushrooms. We would fly to a farmer’s field where we knew there were mushrooms, and land. My job was to sit in the aeroplane keeping the engine running, while my instructor picked the mushrooms. If a gesticulating farmer was seen approaching, we’d take off again. This was in 1940.

What else did you do in these Tiger Moths?

I was sent off usually at lunchtime to fly somewhere for an hour or do something, but it was a waste of twelve weeks, you might say. At that time the threat of German invasion was still taken very seriously, and some of the Tiger Moths at Hatfield were equipped to drop four 25lb bombs. The idea was that if the Germans tried to land on the east coast of England, we would fly to Newmarket, which I did in practice, and there we would ourselves load these four 25lb bombs onto this Tiger Moth. They were just on the ground on Newmarket race course, there were little areas where they kept the bombs. So you arrived there, you taxied to the area to which you’d been allocated, and you put these 25lb bombs onto the Tiger Moth. Then you took off and flew to an area on the east coast - the area allocated to me was somewhere near Aldeburgh - and, as the Germans were coming ashore in their landing barges, you dropped your bombs on them. The Germans might not have liked that, though that never seemed to dawn on us very seriously.

Presumably, in a Tiger Moth you would have been within range of German guns.

Oh, very much so. I remember we did a little bit of practice bombing somewhere. You used the Tiger Moth as a sort of dive bomber, but it was a nonsense really.

After those twelve weeks I went on to Cranwell, where we trained on Airspeed Oxfords, which were twin-engined aircraft. Cranwell was another twelve-week course, at least. This was getting towards the end of 1940. Christmas 1940 I was still at Cranwell – I think I got home for Christmas.

At the end of Cranwell we officially got our wings, and it was winter, it was cold, but, having got my RAF wings, I was going to display the fact to everybody. I think we were treated with a certain amount of respect as RAF pilots in 1940-41. I remember walking down Regent Street, very cold indeed, but I wasn’t going to wear my RAF greatcoat, because it would have covered up my wings.

Some of us – I think it was university graduates, in particular – were then selected for a navigation course. There was a two-year navigation course, which they condensed into three months at Squire’s Gate, Blackpool, at the beginning of 1941.

I’d always wanted to go on flying boats and, after the navigation course in Blackpool, which was very pleasant indeed, I was very happy to be selected for flying boat training. I was sent to Invergordon, where we were trained on Supermarine Stranraers. I was one of the last three pilots to ever train on them, because just after that they became unserviceable or somebody crashed one and they didn’t have enough, but there we trained on bi-plane flying boats, and from there I was posted to 201 Squadron, which was a flying boat squadron. We were instructed to go to Sullom Voe in the Orkneys, and then we were given ten days’ leave or so before we joined the squadron. But in fact the squadron then moved from Sullom Voe to Loch Erne outside Enniskillen in Northern Ireland. So at the end of the leave, we went to Castle Archdale, that was the name of the station.

Quite early on I was sent to Pembroke Dock, where I joined a crew to go out to the Middle East to reinforce one of the squadrons in Egypt or Aden or somewhere, but while I was at Pembroke Dock with this crew, we were in a pub one night, and there was a woman there telling fortunes. She told the fortune of one of the crew and said that he was expecting to go on a long voyage, but he would be disappointed and wouldn’t go on this voyage as he expected to. Then came the second one, and after a time she said, ‘No, there’s something wrong with the cards, I can’t do this one.’ Then there was a third one and again she said, ‘No, I can’t do this, I can’t do this,’ and then she said, ‘There’s something wrong with the cards tonight,’ and that was it. We all went off to Mountbatten in this boat that we were about to take out to Egypt, and when we were at Mountbatten, we received an instruction that our squadron had lost some pilots, so instead of taking three pilots on this plane to the Middle East, we were to take two, and the third pilot, which was me, was to be sent back to the squadron on Loch Erne. I was very disappointed. The crew went off to Mountbatten, where they loaded up. They were grossly overloaded and trying to take off that night to Gibraltar, which would have been the first stop, they got into the air, but far too late, and flew into this island and crashed, and they were all killed except for the one who’d had his fortune told at the beginning. He survived, mentally deranged. Some time later, when I was at Pembroke Dock, we went to this pub again, and the landlady, who knew what had happened, said, ‘I felt dreadful that night. I asked the fortune teller what was wrong with the cards, and she said, “I couldn’t tell them that, apart from the first, they were all dead.”’

Was there ever a sense that we were losing the war?

No, I don’t think we ever felt that we were losing the war. There was a distinct feeling, especially after the Americans joined in, that we were not going to lose it. So there was never a lack of confidence or feeling of defeatism, but we had no signs of how we were going to win it. We were not going to be defeated, but there wasn’t any feeling that we were winning in 1940-41. 1940, with the collapse of France, was a very traumatic time, but, as I say, once the Americans joined in – and the Russians, of course. We realised talking to people in the German forces, they realised that they were never going to win, but they were determined not to give in. But in 1940, among quite senior people in British political circles, there was a feeling that we ought to be suing for peace, but Churchill was going to have none of that. Not that we knew that at the time. It wasn’t known that some realistic politicians in 1940 were thinking that we ought to try to come to some agreement with Hitler.

Did you have a sense that there was a plan?

You could say that in 1940, in particular, there was no feeling that we were getting anywhere. I suppose the first real feeling of hope was provided by El Alamein. Every other encounter had been one in which the British or the Allies had lost, so El Alamein was an enormous boost to the morale, and I suppose, from El Alamain, there was a feeling that we might win. I don’t ever think we thought we were going to be defeated, but we didn’t see how we were going to win.

Did people have a sense that they were quite likely to die? Or didn’t you think about it?

You got into a mental state that I suppose you expected to die. You didn’t think of anything beyond the next day or the next operational flight. It was a very interesting mental state, very peaceful and happy. You didn’t look forward to going on leave, you just looked forward to the next afternoon, when you’d go for a walk or – the squadron having acquired a sailing boat - you’d go for a sail. You lived from day to day. You enjoyed the immediacies of life. Perhaps you enjoyed things more because it might be the last time you did them, but it didn’t get you down, it didn’t depress you.
I think that there were so many losses that you almost wrote somebody off if they went into the RAF. I remember the end of the war in 1945. I remember in particular VE Day, I suppose it was, because as far as we were concerned that really was the end of the war, and the enormous jubilation going on at this RAF station, and I had a sort of emotional collapse, and all I could think of was what a dreadful waste. I felt no jubilation, it was just a waste, and I think that’s when I really had my first attack of guilt consciousness, when I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’, when all these people I knew and had been very close to, and they’d all died, and I’d somehow survived, I don’t know why. And that haunted me for years, that feeling of a guilt complex.

What would bring on those thoughts?

Usually some reminder of the people I’d known. I suppose my feelings of my time in the RAF were always tinged by that feeling. My six years in the RAF were a very formative time, more formative than any other experience in my life, I suppose, but it’s not an experience that I would relive happily, chiefly because it recalls all my friends I lost. I made some very good friends in the service, and many of those were lost, of course, so…

Did that affect the kind of friendships you had with people?

No, I don’t think it did. But the RAF was very peculiar for a fighting service in a way. In Ireland quite a few of the officers, in particular, had their wives over there, and were not living in the mess, they were living outside, perhaps in local farms, with their wives and families, and I remember a dreadful experience where on one night we lost two flying boats, which was twenty or twenty-five people, including three officers who were married, and their wives and families were there – one in particular had a child, a baby – and one tried to give some kind of comfort or support to these girls who’d just lost their husbands. Most of them were very courageous, but that must have been a dreadful experience for them, and, of course, wouldn’t have happened in the Army or the Navy. You would never have a family unit in which the husband was going off to fight and coming home that night, if he came home. That was an aspect of the RAF which I don’t think has ever been seriously explored, but it did happen.

Was discipline different in the RAF?

Oh, quite different, yes. There was much more self-discipline. The relationships, particularly between airmen and NCOs, you had crews of flight sergeants, sergeants and officers, but there was no difference between the commissioned and non-commissioned ones, because you were all literally in the same boat in a Sunderland squadron.

And there wasn’t the same spit and polish?

No, there was not the same emphasis on spit and polish. In fact the RAF were generally regarded as a bit of a scruffy lot.

Did people customise their uniform?

Yes. In our case, in flying boats, you didn’t wear a helmet, you wore an ordinary RAF peaked cap, but then over it you wore your headphones, so your peak became rounded as the headphones went over it, and also in the case of a flying boat squadron the brass RAF badge on your cap was traditionally green, because it had got salt water on it. So if you had a new hat, the first thing you did was to take the band out of it, so that it would bend, and then you took the brass badge off the front and hung it on a piece of string in sea water so it became green, and that was then the mark of a Sunderland pilot, or some Sunderland pilots. His hat was bent from the headphones and his brass badge was green from verdigris.

At one stage we were issued with battledress, and battledress came with ordinary black buttons. We didn’t think much of ordinary black buttons in the RAF, and people would put brass buttons on instead. Then there was an instruction that brass RAF buttons were not to be fitted to battledress uniforms. Well, I happened to find in an antique shop in Enniskillen a set of railway buttons, so I had these put on my battledress. One day the Group Captain saw me and called me over. ‘You know perfectly well,’ he said, ‘that you’re not allowed to wear RAF brass buttons on your battledress.’ I said, ‘Sir, these are not RAF brass buttons. These are buttons from the Great Northern Railway of Ireland Ltd.’ He was duly astonished, but I had those buttons on my battledress all during the war. I don’t think you’d have got away with that in the Army.

At the end of the war did you think, ‘I don’t want to fly again’?

No, I didn’t. I wanted to fly again. But at one stage I’d had various medical ups and downs, and I suppose I’d been to too many medical boards. I think I had a full medical for flying, I don’t think I had any qualifications, but I applied to join the RAF Reserve after the war and I got through all the medical exams to go back into the Reserve, but the last interview was with a doctor who said, ‘Mr Pidgeon, I’m going to turn you down. Okay, you’re marginally fit, you’ve passed the tests, but in view of your past medical history, I have to decide whether you’d be a good bet for the RAF to train you to fly on jet aircraft (which were just coming in). I don’t think with a clear conscience I could say that you would be a suitable person to fly for the next seven or eight years or whatever.’ So I was turned down on medical grounds.

Anything specific?

No, general psychology and medical history. In fact, I didn’t do the full hours on the squadron. I had done 850 hours operational flying and the normal tour was about 1000 hours, and we had a couple of incidents. We’d got virtually shot down on one occasion by a convoy. We’d flown out to a convoy in atrocious conditions, and the convoy had been warned of a possible attack by German aircraft, and they opened fire on us and put one of our engines out of operation and filled the Sunderland with holes, although we managed to get out of the range of fire and just made it back to our base in Ireland that night. The radio was still working, so we were able to tell them what had happened, and we landed the boat and taxied straight onto the slipway, because it was sinking rapidly, so we all survived that one.

Then, a few days later, I took off in very bad conditions and at about 100-200 feet, as we went into a cloud, one of the engines caught fire. I was at the controls and we were climbing through this cloud on three engines, with the fourth on fire, and my second pilot turned off the fuel to the engine that was on fire, and I remember thinking straight away that, with a full load of bombs and a full load of fuel, we couldn’t climb on three engines, so I turned the thing on again and the engine restarted, and we continued to climb until we eventually came out of the cloud about two thousand feet, where we jettisoned all our depth charges somewhere over the Free State, I think. I always have a memory of the possibility of those depth charges, although it wouldn’t have happened because they were all fused, landing in an Irish bog and slowly sinking and when they got to the appropriate depth exploding and blowing the bog into the air. But anyhow we got rid of all those and then miraculously and surprisingly the fire extinguisher on the engine that was on fire worked, and the fire was put out. Then we flew round and jettisoned most of our fuel. Fortunately, by this time dawn had broken and we were able to find our way back to the Irish coast, because by then we were over the Bay of Donegal and into the Atlantic, and land. At this stage I’d done 850 hours flying, and the station medical officer decided that as a result of these two experiences, I’d finished my operations, and he put in a recommendation that I should be given an inter-operational rest, so at that stage I left the squadron and, after a few other things, I became a test pilot at a maintenance unit, partly because, of course, I was an engineer. A somewhat inglorious end, but still…

Joe Pidgeon died, aged 90, in 2007. To the end of his life he remained racked with guilt that he had survived the war, when so many of his friends had not.