Growing up in New Zealand 1925-1950, Part 16

Part 16 – Serving overseas in World War 2 Roydon Harrison – 30/03/01

Growing up officially ended at age twenty one in the 1925-50 period. The war brought a rapid change to adulthood for many people, especially the young men who volunteered for war service. Editor

Roydon Harrison

Roydon Harrison Photo source Roydon Harrison

My experiences after enlisting There was a good deal of ‘war fever’ going on in late 1938 and early 1939, so I joined the Territorials. I was seventeen. I became a member of the 19th Medium Battery Howitzers. At the end of 1938 we went to a camp in Waiouru to further our military training. I wanted to go for a short service commission, but my parents would not allow me to do this.

The Second World War started on 3 September, 1939, by which time I was eighteen and as a member of the Territorials I thought I would be called up into the army almost immediately. Such was not the case. They asked young men to volunteer for the New Zealand Expeditionary Force but they would accept only people over twenty one.

I was a bit disappointed as I was getting a bit sick of office work. Within a month or so the Air Force was calling for volunteers to be pilots, navigators and air gunners, so in October 1939 aged eighteen I fell in that trap and put my name down. My mother had died recently, so I didn’t need her permission. I needed my father’s permission which he gave.

They called me for an interview in February 1940 and accepted me subject to one or two health problems. I needed my nose straightening as it had been bent, probably from playing rugby, and my eyes needed exercise to get the focus correct, so I had to go to the Wellington hospital. I had an operation on my nose and was given eye exercises at the eye department. After that I was finally accepted and went into camp at Wereroa, Levin, on 2 July 1940 aged nineteen.

After four week’s basic training there – marching, discipline, etc. – I was transferred to Ohakea where I then underwent three and a half months’ training as a navigator bombardier. I had originally suggested that I be a navigator as they said that they would take people in more rapidly for that training. Had I put my name down as a pilot I might have had to wait a year. This is the way one felt at the time – get in as quickly as possible!

I finished my training at Ohakea at the end of November 1940 and had final leave for three weeks plus, leaving Wellington for overseas on 18 December 1940. While I was on final leave down in Christchurch I was informed that my father had died which left me with no parents, just two brothers.

I was on No 10 Observers Course and we had to wait in New Zealand for No 11 course to graduate, and then the two courses were combined for overseas service. Prior to that all RAF people going into the Air Force had gone to England and the Canadian scheme started immediately after the eleventh course graduated. In our case we headed to Sydney where we arrived on 22 December and found that we were to stay on the ship for Christmas. About 27 December we set off in a large convoy for an unknown destination, but the next stop was Fremantle, and then Colombo and then up the Red Sea to Suez. Our ship, The Dominion Monarch, went through the canal and we were discharged at Port Said.

We were put on trains and sent half way back down the Canal to a place called Ismailiya which was a big peacetime RAF base. There we were operationally trained to fly Blenheim aircraft. This took about two months and by the end of March I had been crewed up with two Englishmen, a pilot and gunner. We were then posted to 55 Squadron which at that time was situated in the western desert on a desert airfield at Bagush.

We were attached to the RAF from the day after we left New Zealand. We stayed as members of the RNZAF and got RNZAF pays which were higher than RAF pays, but we were members of the RAF from that day on.

We operated with 55 Squadron for two or three months, bombing such places as the perimeter of Tobruk which had been surrounded by the Germans, various aerodromes further up the desert past Tobruk, and other places in Libya. We also flew to Crete and bombed the Maleme airfield which was being used to land the German aeroplanes. This was maximum range for our planes.

Shortly after that my crew volunteered to go to Malta to be lead aircraft bringing back fighter planes. We flew to Malta on a Sunderland acting as a member of the crew on the seven or eight hour trip and each had to man a gun, but in the event we were not intercepted by any enemy aircraft. On arrival in Malta we found the island was clamped down because of an air raid which we later found we had caused by arriving!

We landed at a place called Calafrana and stayed for four days during which time the island was bombed thirty five times, though this was a year before the intense bombing occurred. We left after four days leading twenty one unarmed Hurricane fighters which had arrived off aircraft carriers. We were the navigating plane and we had to get them to Egypt. Right through the war the British aircraft carriers would come through the Straits of Gibraltar and half way up the Mediterranean they would shoot off the aeroplanes which would arrive in Malta for servicing. We were one of the early planes which led a flight of Hurricanes to Egypt. We got them there and returned to our base at Bagush.

When we went to 55 Squadron in the Western Desert we lived on bully beef and tea made with salty water. The bully beef was served in variations – fried, stewed, fried with batter. The bully beef came in tins some of which had been put up for World War I. Water was always short and rather saline. Although it was unappealing the RAF mechanics drank tea continually all day long in the heat.

Shortly after that I went into hospital to have a hernia operation and also found that I had amoebic dysentery which I had picked up in Malta. Then I went to convalescent camp in Palestine for three weeks and was allocated ground duties at Aqir, an aerodrome near Tel Aviv, and stayed there until mid-December as an aerodrome controller or duty pilot as they were called then. The Greek Air Force was converting to Hurricanes at that aerodrome and there were lots of crashes.

In mid December I was put on a train to Alexandria in Egypt which took a couple of days. Then I was put on a small ship called The Prince Baudoin, a Belgian cross-Channel express steamer. We left about 3 p.m. for Tobruk which had to be approached in the dark because of the submarine activity. The Prince Baudoin was quite fast – about 25 knots, and we eventually arrived without incident at Tobruk at about 11.30 p.m. The ship was full of French soldiers and had to discharge its cargo and be out of the place in an hour and head back to Alexandria. At Tobruk I found myself temporarily second in command of a transit camp which slowly filled up with RAF air crew in anticipation of ‘attrition of war’ – in other words planes down and casualties . These camps were called ‘pools’.

We moved the camp about three or four miles outside Tobruk and that is where I had my twenty first birthday on 7 January 1942.

When we left New Zealand in 1940 there were thirty of us – six officers and twenty four sergeants. To my knowledge about six or seven survived the war – none of the officers. Most of them were killed in the first year, 1941. Our planes were so inefficient compared with what the enemy put up.

After Tobruk Roydon was sent to Kenya, where he trained with the South African Air Force, but a difference in the system of ranks meant that he was sent back to the Suez area to a reconnaissance squadron and eventually repatriated. His war experience had meant a rapid end to his growing up. Editor.

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