Doris Weeks

I had three brothers and they were all in the army and that, and the air force, so I decided it was time for me to go too. I was living in England at the time, you see, yeah. My job was operations intelligence, worked down under the conning [reconnaissance] tower and I was in No. 5 Group, Bomber Command. And I used to have to take all the messages regarding where they were going to be bombing that night, times and all that sort of thing, yeah. Yeah, that’s what I was doing.

I moved. I was in [RAF] Coningsby and then I went to [RAF] Woodhall Spa. And the, what do you call it, the ‘Dam Busters’ were in [RAF] Stanton [Harcourt], that’s where they did their thing from and then they were posted to Woodhall Spa, where I was. So that’s where I was with the [No.] 617 Squadron [Royal Air Force], Dam Buster Squadron, yeah.

It was a hard job because on the walls, we had all the crews listed and everything like that, with their times of takeoff and everything. And then we would have the ones that didn’t come back, missing in action. Yeah. It was sad that part of it. Yeah, because I knew them, we knew them all, you know and that. Yeah. In fact, the thing I got most pleasure out of, we used to have a speaking system that went out to everywhere and that; and it was always my greatest pleasure to be able to get up there and say, operations for tonight are cancelled. Yeah. That was one of my highlights, that’s for sure.

Interview date: 19 October 2010