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At Betty's. L to R: Alice, Susanne Pescott and I in York,
England. During WW2, Betty's Shop had a bar favored by
airmen from many countries.
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Edinburgh, Scotland, April 21, 2018 – As noted
a few weeks ago, I have been eagerly anticipating my first visit to the base from which my uncle Willem van Stockum flew six missions for RAF 10 Squadron during the ten days surrounding D-Day, 1944.
The sixth mission, on June 9/10, 1944 took his life and that of the other six crew members on their Halifax Mark III bomber. (Willem trained on the
Mark II bomber.)
They had completed their mission when they were shot down. An eye witness (who was then a small child) said that the plane was in flames but steered away from the French farmer's home and into the pear orchard.
I've been three times to
Laval, France where the 14 crew members of the two RAF planes hit that night are buried. But this was my first visit to the site from which the planes left.
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Scratched on the Mirror. V/C Poulin, at
bottom right, scrawls "Canada"...
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Two More Names. Sgt. Alex Trench from
Glen Cove, N.Y, USA and Sgt. Redlin
from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
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Another. J. N. Fletcher, Royal Canadian Air
Force, from Vancouver.
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Alice and I took the train from Oxford (we should have taken a faster and cheaper train from London) to York, and there met Susanne Pescott, a dedicated volunteer from the 10 Squadron Association, for lunch at Betty's.
The Mirrors at Betty's Bar
Susanne showed us the mirrors in Betty's Betty's, where during World War II was a popular bar for airmen from all over the world – Canada especially, but also the United States and New Zealand.
The crew members scratched their names in the mirror – 600 of them according to a notice at the location. Unfortunately, no one so far has written down the names and indexed them alphabetically. It would be helpful if someone did that, so that the place could become even more of a destination for families of the airmen. I couldn't find my uncle's name anywhere; the lighting is difficult.
What these young men may not have known, or had time enough to even think about, is that the killed-in-action rate of the Bomber Command was 46 percent. For every 400 men who showed up to fly, 46 died.
For every ten airmen scratching their names in the mirror, five would never come home...
...And many of those who counted as survivors came back wounded or were taken as prisoners of war by the Germans and were delayed returning...
My uncle Willem was a mathematician and he knew about probability. This was also clear from his letters to his mother. He was at peace with his decision to fight for his occupied native country (Holland), but he warned his mother that it was unlikely he would ever see his mother again. The knock on the door at 3728 Northampton Street in Washington, D.C. came for her and my mother in June 1944, when U.S. military officials came to report that Willem and the rest of the crew were missing.
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In front of the door that Uncle Willem went through
in 1943 or 1944 when he reported for duty at RAF
Melbourne. |
Checking In
Here at the right is the doorway where the flight crews, who would have had their basic pilot, navigation or gunnery training elsewhere, would show up for their assignments.
My uncle Willem wrote to his mother about the satisfaction he had about being chosen by crew members as their pilot. The
Time Bomber book by Robert Wack devotes a lot of attention to Willem's time as a pilot trainee, and the paces he had to go through (at 32 years of age, which was old for a pilot).
The door knocker has the badge of the 10 Squadron on it.
The motto at the bottom of the badge is "Rem Acu Tangere," which has nothing to do with Tangerines. It means "To touch the thing with a needle," "Hit the target precisely" or "Hit the nail on the head".
Prime Minister Margaret ("Iron Lady") Thatcher had her own version in her
presentation of a new standard to 10 Squadron at Brize Norton:
Over nearly ten years as Prime Minister I have come to know many of the Squadron's members and their aircraft. We have flown together to the most far-flung lands and continents. You have brought me safely to my destinations through ice and fog and sand-storms, with unfailing punctuality. Indeed I am living proof of your Squadron motto, Rem acu tangere, which might be loosely translated as “we land even when the Prime Minister can't see the runway”.
Why Were So Many Bases in Yorkshire?
To reach Germany and Occupied Europe, the RAF bases needed to be on the Eastern half of the country. Yorkshire is a likely place just because it takes up so much space on the East Coast. It has some hills that are called "peaks" such as "Three Peaks" in northern Yorkshire, but these "peaks" are more like foothills, averaging 700 meters in height. Roseberry Topping is called "Yorkshire's Matterhorn" because it looks a bit like the original, but it is only one-thirteenth of the height of the real Matterhorn (4,500 meters) on the Swiss-Italian border.
By the standards of England's 48 counties, Yorkshire is enormous. Its 11,900 sq km area constitutes 9.1 percent of England's total 130,000 sq km. Even after Yorkshire was split into four separate counties in 1974, the North Yorkshire component was
still England's largest county. The wide-open spaces in Yorkshire offered the RAF a chance to spread out its personnel and keep the equipment away from civilian residences. The county is relatively underpopulated, with only 7.5 percent of the English population in 9 percent of the area, and the countryside was under no building pressure.
When the RAF was requisitioning farmland to create runways for military aircraft, Yorkshire had other advantages over, say, Norfolk, which was the site of RAF Hethel. The Vale of York offered not only ample flat agricultural fields and plateaus, but easy access from the central railway hub of York. So that is where the RAF concentrated its intensive training programs for flight crews.
Here are 38 sites of former air bases in Yorkshire. They include the one from which my uncle set off six times and returned to five times,
Melbourne. His sixth flight took him and his crew to Laval, France where they still rest.
What Was at the Melbourne Air Base?
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RAF Melbourne, view from the air. To support the heavily
loaded Halifax bombers, the runways were made of concrete.
They remain, to be used occasionally for drag races.
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The main feature of the air bases was a runway for take-off and landing, a "tower" (usually a two-story building) and living quarters for the flight crews and other staff.
At the beginning of the war, grass runways were common, but heavily loaded bombers required concrete and asphalt strips.
To allow for variation in wind direction, airports typically have a triangular configuration. They are therefore easy to spot from above.
Besides the control tower and barracks, an airbase would include a briefing room for crews heading, and hangars for repairs.
The lengths of the runways at RAF Melbourne were (see numbers on photo):
01-19 1,350 yards
06-24 1,900 yards
15-33 1,400 yards
Camp sites for base personnel were dispersed to the north. The base accommodated 1,901 men and 382 women. Women were deployed on communications and reporting functions as well as food and housing tasks.
The Halifax III Crews and Their Motivation
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Willem van Stockum, Captain, front center, with six other
members of the crew of the Halifax III. They are all buried
in Laval, France.
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While awaiting duty, the Halifax III crews would practice their takeoffs and landings.
They were anticipating action at the end of 1943 and the beginning of 1944. Willem writes to his mother that they crews are eager to go into action.
He reacts with disbelief when Dorothy Thompson, a popular news columnist, wrote that American soldiers needed postwar goal to fight for, a vision of a new society after the war.
He wrote a response to his mother that was eventually published as "A Soldier's Creed". It was written in June 1944 and was published in
The Horn Book in its Christmas issue and reprinted at the end of
Time Bomber, by Robert Wack.
A SOLDIER'S CREED By A BOMBER PILOT
I didn't join the war to improve the Universe; in fact, I am sick and tired of the eternal sermons on the better world we are going to build when this war is over. I hate the disloyalty to the past twenty years. Apparently people think that life in those twenty years, which cover most of my conscious existence, was so terrible that no-one can be expected to fight for it. We must attempt to dazzle people with some brilliant schemes leading, probably, to some horrible Utopia, before we can ask them to fight.
I detest that point of view. I hate the idea of people throwing their lives away for slum-clearance projects or forty-hour weeks or security and exchange commissions. It is a grotesque and horrible thought. There are so many better ways of achieving this than diving into enemy guns. Lives are precious things and are of a different order and entail a different scale of values than social systems, political theories, or art.
"Why are we not given a cause?" some people ask. I do not understand this question. It seems so plain to me. There are millions and millions of people who are shot, persecuted and tortured daily in Europe. The assault on so many of our fellow human beings makes some of us tingle with anger and gives us an urge to do something about it. That, and that alone, makes some of us feel strongly about the war. All the rest is vapid rationalization. All this talk about philosophy, the degeneration of art and literature, the poisoning of Nazi youth, which the Nazi system entails, and which we all rightly condemn, is still not the reason why we fight and why we are willing to risk our lives.
Here, let us say, is a soldier. He asks himself, "Why should I die?" You would tell him: "To preserve our civilization." When the soldier replies: "To Hell with your civilization; I never thought it so hot," you take him up wrongly when you sit down and say to yourself: "Well, after all, maybe it wasn't so hot," and then brightly tap him on the shoulder and say: "Well, I've thought of a better idea. I know this civilization wasn't so hot, but you go and die anyway and we'll fix up a really good one after the war." I say you take him up wrong because his remark: "To Hell with your civilization" doesn't really mean that he is not seriously concerned about our civilization. He is simply revolted by the idea of dying for ANY civilization.
Civilization simply isn't the kind of thing you ever want to die for. It is something to enjoy and something to help build up because it's fun, and that is that, and that is all.
When a man jumps into the fire to save his wife he doesn't justify himself by saying that his wife was so civilized that it was worth the risk! There is only one reason why a man will throw himself into mortal combat and that is because there is nothing else to do and doing nothing is more intolerable than the fear of death. I could stand idly by and see every painting by Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo thrown into a bonfire and feel no more than a deep regret, but throw one small, insignificant Polish urchin on the same bonfire and, by God, I'd pull him out or else. I fight quite simply for that and I cannot see what other reasons there are. At least, I can see there are reasons, but they are not the reasons that motivate me.
During the first two years of the war when I was an instructor at an American University in close contact with American youth and in close contact with the vital isolationist question in the States, I often felt that there was much insincerity, conscious or unconscious, on our, the Interventionist, side of the argument. We had strong views on the danger of isolationism for the United States. We thought, rightly, that for the sake of self-interest and self-preservation the United States should take every step to ensure the defeat of the Nazi criminals. But however sound our arguments, our own motives and intensity of feeling did not spring from those arguments but from an intense passion for common righteousness and decency.
Suppose it could have been proved to us at that time that the participation of the United States in the stamping out of organized murder, rape and torture in Europe could only take place at great cost to the United States, while not doing so would in no way impair her security. Would we not still have prayed that our country might do something? And would we not have been proud to see her do something?
There is an appalling timidity and false shame among intellectuals. The common man in the last war went to fight quite simply as a crusader. I am not talking about politics now, I am not either asserting or denying that England declared war from purely generous and noble considerations, but I am asserting that the common man went and fought with the rape of Belgium foremost in his mind and saw himself as an avenger of wrong.
After the war the common man went quietly back to his home. The intellectuals, however, upon coming back, ashamed of their one lapse of finding themselves in agreement with every Tom, Dick and Harry, must turn around and deride the things they were ready to give their lives for. As they were the only vocal group, the opinion became firmly established that the last war was a grave mistake and that anyone who got killed in it was a sucker.
And now, in this war, these intellectuals are hoist with their own petard. They lack the nerve and honesty to represent the American doughboy to himself for what he is. They do not give him the one picture in his mind which would stimulate his imagination and which would make him see beyond the fatigues, the mud, the boredom and the fear. The picture is there for anyone to paint who has a gift for words. It is a simple picture and a true picture and no one who has ever sat as a small child and listened with awe to a fairy story can fail to understand. The intellectuals, however, have made fun of the picture and so they won't use It.
But some day an American doughboy in an American tank will come lurching into some small Polish, Czech or French village and it may fall to his lot to shoot the torturers and open the gates of the village jail. And then he will understand.
There is a lot of talk among our intellectuals about our youth. Our youth is supposed to want a change, a new order, a revolution or what not. But it is my conviction that that is emphatically NOT what our youth wants. Have you ever been in a picture house on a Saturday afternoon, when it is filled with children and some old Western movie is ending in a race of time between the hero and the villain? Have you seen the rapt attention, the glowing faces, the clenched fists? What our young men really want is to be able to give that same concentrated attention and emotional participation, this time to reality, and this time as heroes and not as spectators, that they were able to give to unsubstantial shadows, before long words and cliches had killed their imaginations. Killed them so dead that they can no longer see even reality itself imaginatively.
It is up to the intellectuals to rekindle the thing they have tried to destroy. It is as simple as St. George and the Dragon. Why not have the courage to point out that St. George fought the dragon because he wanted to liberate a captive and not because he wanted to lead a better life afterwards? Some day, sometime, my picture of an American doughboy in a Polish village will become true. Wouldn't it be better for him then to have the cross of St. George on his banner than a long rigmarole about a better world?
As long as our intellectuals and leaders do not have the courage to risk being thought sentimental and out-of-date and are not willing to stress that nations as well as individuals are entitled to their acts of heroism and chivalry, they will never be able to give our youth what it needs.
It is true that every fairy story ends with the words: "and they lived happily ever after." How irritating a child would be, though, if it interrupted its mother at every sentence to ask: "But, Mummy, will they live happily ever afterwards?" It simply isn't the point of the fairy story and it isn't the point of this war.
Presumably we won't live happily ever after this war. But just as a fairy story helps to increase a child's awareness and wonder at the world, so this war may make us more aware of one another. Perhaps we shall learn, and perhaps some things will be better organized. I hope so. I believe so. But only if we engage in this war with our hearts as well as our minds.
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The windmill was a landmark for flyers returning to the
RAF Melbourne base. Source: Excerpt from unidentified
RAF reference book on air bases in WW2, 208-209. |
For goodness' sake let us stop this empty political theorizing according to which a man would have to have a University degree in social science before he could see what he was fighting for. It is all so simple, really, that a child can understand it.
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| After the war, the arms of the windmill were removed. |
The Record of 10 Squadron at RAF Melbourne
The only bomber squadron based at Melbourne was 10 Squadron.
While in residence, 10 Squadron lost 128 Halifaxes in 300 raids.
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This is what I saw. The base of the windmill is still there.
Photo by JT Marlin. |
That would be 896 crew members. It began its work in early 1944 and its last sorties were on April 25, 1945.
What Happened to the RAF Bases after WWII?
Some of the RAF air bases were retained for postwar military needs. The Cold War with the Soviet Union was still on, and the US Air Force needed some bases to implement its participation in NATO and U.S.-British agreements.
Many air bases were converted to industrial or other civilian uses. Some just fell into disuse.
Most of the air bases that had been agricultural land were returned to this use. That was the case with RAF Melbourne. Some buildings were converted to farm use. Others were left as they were at the end of the war, and have been opened up once a year on Remembrance Day, November 11 with the cooperation of the 10 Squadron Association, which is membership-based.
Besides farming and occasional drag racing on the runways, part of the base is used for private flying. There is interest in establishing a museum at the base. A memorial to 10 Squadron has been placed near the wartime entrance to the Melbourne air base.
Remembrances in France
The two crews that were downed on June 10, 1944 are remembered in France. A French website on the RAF effort includes details on the crew of the Halifax plane that Willem van Stockum piloted:
Flying Officer (Pilot).
VAN STOCKUM, WILLEM JACOB, 33 ans. 10 Sqdn. Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve.
E. Sub-Sec. D. Row 1. Joint grave 42944. LAVAL (VALFLEURY) COMMUNAL CEMETERY.
Flying Officer (Bomb Aimer).
MARSHALL, ROBERT KEITH, 30 ans. 10 Sqdn. Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve.
E. Sub-Sec. D. Row 1. Joint grave 42949. LAVAL (VALFLEURY) COMMUNAL CEMETERY.
Sergeant (Wireless Operator).
PERKINS, ALFRED CHARLES, 22 ans. 10 Sqdn. Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve.
E. Sub-Sec. D. Row 1. Joint grave 42945-42946. LAVAL (VALFLEURY) COMMUNAL CEMETERY.
Flying Officer (Flight Engineer).
ELLYATT, JOHN, 27 ans. 10 Sqdn. Royal Air Force.
E. Sub-Sec. D. Row 1. Joint grave 42943. LAVAL (VALFLEURY) COMMUNAL CEMETERY.
Flying Officer (Navigator).
DANIEL, GILBERT, 22 ans. 10 Sqdn. Royal Air Force.
E. Sub-Sec. D. Row 1. Joint grave 42947. LAVAL (VALFLEURY) COMMUNAL CEMETERY.
Pilot Officer (Air Gunner).
BEALES, FRED, 20 ans. 10 (R.A.F.) Sqdn Royal Canadian Air Force.
E. Sub-Sec. D. Row 1. Joint grave 42945-42946. LAVAL (VALFLEURY) COMMUNAL CEMETERY.
Sergeant (Air Gunner).
MASON, ALBERT. 10 Sqdn. Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve.
E. Sub-Sec. D. Row 1. Joint grave 42948. LAVAL (VALFLEURY) COMMUNAL CEMETERY.
The Dutch Ministry of Defense knew who van Stockum was. They identify the pilot as
Prof. Dr. Willem Jacob van Stockum.
Postscript – Poem
A 10 Squadron veteran returned to Melbourne and wrote the poem at right.
See Related Posts:
RAF Centenary and 10 Squadron
