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An edited oral history interview with members of 582 No.8 (PFF Group), Little Staughton (officially formed on 1st April 1944) and Mr. Harry Hughes, Navigator of 692 Squadron, Graveley which was part of the Light Night Striking Force.

Interviewees - Mr. Edward ‘Ted’ Stocker, DSO, Air Commodore Gerry Bennington, Mr. Reg Cann, Mr. Harry Hughes, Mr. George Hall, Mr. Roy Pengilley, and Mr. Howard Lees conducted by Jenny Ford on behalf of Bedford Museum. The interview took place at the Moat House Hotel, Bedford on 18th June 2005. This was on the occasion of the final re-union of RAF personnel and their families of the No.8 PFF Group.

A discussion about the process of marking a target between Reg Cann, Navigator 582 Squadron; Harry Hughes, Navigator 692 Squadron, Graveley; Roy Pengilley, Pilot 582 Squadron; Air Commodore Gerry Bennington, Flight Engineer 582 Squadron; Ted Stocker, DSO Flight Engineer 582 Squadron and George Hall, Pilot 582 Squadron.

“My name is Reg Cann, Navigator 1. First of all I was with 625, 625 Main Force and I was on 582 PFF at Little Staughton. It’s probably worth saying that one of our most important functions was to be ‘on time’, in other words the target indicators had to go down at the right time. Otherwise you’d have a few hundred bombers milling around saying, ‘Where do we drop our bombs?’ And in order to get the timing right we would save, we would add on another three minutes for every hour of flying time because you can always lose time but you can’t gain it! You can’t sort of put up the rev, go faster — you just cannot get there any faster. So we always started off with this time and you lost time by doing a dog leg, equilateral triangle, 60º, 120º, 60º back again. And if you did three minutes on each leg then you lost three minutes, so you would be working out how your timing was going with the wind velocities that you were calculating as you went along. And you would be dog legging in order to lose time or not as the case may be and dog legging was not very popular with the rest of the crew, they were never very happy about it.

Harry Hughes “When I did my first tour, when I first started if we wanted to lose time we used to do an orbit, now that was dangerous.�

Reg Cann We did it once and we were in and out of slipstreams all the time.

A.C. Gerry Bennington “If you were ‘Master Bomber’ you did quite a few orbits.�

Reg Cann Ah, that’s a different matter, yes. We did a number of Deputy Bomber trips and Master Bomber and you would circle the area but that is a different thing.

A.C. Gerry Bennington “That was to direct the attack of course.�

Roy Pengilley “We all take as normal what the outside world would find very difficult to take on board that without today’s modern aids we would fly to plus or minus 30 seconds anywhere in Europe. It’s taken as norm here by these young men but plus or minus anywhere in Europe and Reg’s point about losing time is absolutely valid.�

Reg Cann “Also of course, I’ll say here, it also required, we weren’t ‘gung ho’, it required very, very accurate flying by the Pilot. And we had a gyro compass at the back and we had repeaters through the aircraft and I would know if my Pilot was not doing it well. And so it required very, very accurate flying and also accurate navigation. We worked to 10ths of a minute and we even had to allow for the fall of the bomb in the timing to the target to allow for the fall of the bomb, so it was an extremely meticulous thing by everyone concerned. Now this is a bit of a nonsense, we calculated what time we would set course over our airfield, I’m talking about night time, we might not see another aircraft and you were going to be on your own, all quiet - pretty boring really. We would carry on without seeing another aircraft. So we weren’t sort of conscious of leading anybody and the Main Force were not conscious of being led, all we were doing was marking the target. We were putting down target indicators that they could load their bombs on. That’s what we were doing and that was our job. And to do it, it required absolute meticulous flying and navigation.�

Harry Hughes “The marking went on throughout the raid you see, a raid might last 25 or 30 minutes and the marking actually went on throughout. You had to have different types of Pathfinders - depending on what type - you had the ones you marked with H2S then you had the ones who actually sighted the target if it was sightable. And then you had the ones who were the backers-up, who bombed the Oboe marker or the concentration of the greens.�

Reg Cann “And a visual - where flares were dropped and a visual assessment of the Aiming Point. A Bomb Aimer would try to put his TA’s on from the light of the flares and identifying something on the ground, that was ‘New Haven’. There was then Parramatta which was a first of all TI’s dropped by Oboe from Mosquito and the Main Force would be backers-up.�

Harry Hughes “The Ruhr was always in range of Oboe.�

George Hall “But if you were going to Frankfurt or Berlin or Stettin or something like that it was out of range of the Oboe.�

Ted Stocker “After ‘D’ Day the Oboe stations moved onto the Continent and the Oboe range moved forward.�

A.C. Gerry Bennington “Well most of the time of course, a lot of the time was over friendly territory to the target, now we were moving forward.

Reg Cann VE DAY
It was totally uneventful. We were operating the next day very early bringing back prisoners, so it was an early night to bed, that was it! That was my VE Day! We went to Lübeck and brought them back to somewhere or other. We brought them back over the cliffs of Dover.�

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