Bruce Underwood (Primary Source)

Transcript

I had tried to join the [Royal Canadian] Navy because they accepted people who were under 18 but never ever heard from the Navy. So I went down to Hamilton [Ontario] and said I wanted to join the Air Force and naturally like everybody else I had air crew in mind. But the recruiters down there, they said, “Oh we’ve got something, a top secret job here called RDF that we want people to sign up for. Would you be interested?” And so I said, “Yeah, I’m interested in learning anything new.” And that was it. RDF was Radio Direction Finding and it was a means of detecting the enemy aircraft coming into Britain, what today we call radar. Well when I was posted in my first station in late January of ’42. It was a place – they took ten Englishmen and ten Canadians and sent us to this station to work for the people who were designing the radar equipment. Of course they’re all civilians. And the place was in the south coast of England, a little village called Worth Matravers not too far from Bournemouth. We had our drawings and all the rest of it. I happened to be standing at the filing one day. Of course I was very green as to what the war was like and the Germans had a Messerschmitt come over and it fired on us. And all I heard was a zip type of thing and the bullet went over my right shoulder and past my right ear and buried itself in the printed material in the filing cabinet that I was standing at. I still have that bullet along with my medals down in my room here because I dug it out. And then the buzz bombs [V-1 flying bomb] were what, ’44, late ’44. By that time I had gotten up through the ranks and I was an officer on a station east of Eastbourne, Sussex, a little place called Pevensey Bay and we were inland about a mile, a little village called Wartling. And the station that we were at was controlling night fighters and so there was – it was a brand new station, pretty well bomb proof, which was a system that pressurized the inside of the building, drew in air through a large, huge panelling arrangement. It was like a gas mask full of carbon. I happened to step outside and there was a break one time. The fellows were doing their maintenance on the equipment so the station was down and there was not really anything to do and it was a nice bright summer day. And I stepped outside. We were right in the middle of ‘Buzz Bomb Alley’ as they called it. And the fighter aircraft were bringing these aircraft, these bombs down by tipping the wing of the bomb and it crashed and they didn’t worry about where it crashed. And one happened to crash about a half a mile away from me and I was standing there watching this explosion like a real novice and seeing the big ball of flame that went up when this thing crashed. All of a sudden the shock wave hit me and I couldn’t hear for two days.