Robert Cottingham

In 1941 I had a friend of mine that joined RCAF and went overseas and I guess they were going to ask us to join or not join and I eventually – when Dad needed help on the farm – but I decided that if I had to join I wanted to learn to fly so I joined the RCAF. Oh there were members of the ground crew and that were sent in a convoy down to New York [New York, United States]. We got on a South Seas pleasure boat, which we were treated very nicely but we I think spent seven days and seven nights on our own going across the Atlantic and for a prairie boy that was a little different. You had to go out in the middle of the night and watch for periscopes and telescopes and submarines. See sometimes you had to land at night. Sometimes you had to land in the fog and England was always very foggy. And that’s why you took what’s called a beam approach training. You had to go by beams that sent signals up. They had so many signals when you get over the first beacon, then the second beacon when it signals you knew you were in line to hit a runway. You had a pilot beside you so he could see what was going on but we were covered up, our windshield. That’s where you picked up most of your crew and my youngest member of my crew at that time – I was 22 years old. I was the old man of the crew. My youngest member was a cockney from England. He was 18. My navigator was the only Canadian I had and he was 19. So I had a mixture of Scotsmen, Yorkshiremen, Welshmen. You had to adapt to the different lingos. We were supposed to go on to [Avro] Lancaster – on advanced Lancaster and then all of a sudden told us no, you’re going to [No.] 3 Group [RAF] on [Short] Stirlings. My air crew almost had a mutiny. I wasn’t quite sure. I never heard of a Stirling but they – the Squadron 218 had lost three complete squadrons there of aircraft and crews in three months, so that’s where we were sent. Well they heard more about Stirlings than I had and they had apparently been shot down a bit more than the Lancaster and other aircraft. And they had four air-cooled motors whereas the Lancaster and the other ones had inline Merlin which were liquid cooled. That’s probably one of the reasons why one trip where I froze my feet pretty good. I froze my leg. I didn’t get, well when you’re flying at 18,000 feet at 180 miles an hour and it was -47 Celsius. You’re up there for seven, seven and a half hours and there’s only one pilot. Most of the time you get colder than you know you got. One of the worst times over on your mission is when they’re over their target area, they had to fly straight and level and they took instructions from the bomb aimer. And I'm sitting in the second pilot’s seat and out of the corner of my eye I saw three of our own aircraft go down in three minutes. So that was a little bit different. My crew, before we start off – they knew about it, so they said, “Well I’ll have your bike, I’ll have this, I’ll have that.” I came back and the next trip when I took them with them, then they had their eyes opened. When you get near a city and you get 100 or 200 types of aircraft lighting up you know that you’re in for a little bit of trouble. And on this particular trip, we had been there before to lay mines, sea mines, and we laid them from 400 feet above the water. This time our operational control said we’ve designed some that you can drop from 10,000 feet,” and they gave you where you’re going to drop them. So we dropped them and then we headed back for home. I climbed up 11,500 feet and all of a sudden the aircraft stalled and it went into a spin and all four engines quit. So that puts you in a rather a… So you’re doing everything you were taught to get out of a spin and then I guess from 11,500 we were near two a half, three miles up, the engines caught and we’re about 300 to 400 feet off the water. So I – they said to – my crew stayed on here – see another thing they didn’t tell us though, we were finished briefing, before we took off, they said, “You won’t be coming back here, it’ll all be closed in. We don’t know where you’re going to land but we’ll give you a wireless later on.” About an hour, a hour and a quarter they phoned up and said you’re going to [RAF] Lossiemouth which is the north end of Scotland, which was 700 miles north of where we were stationed. So when we leveled out, I said to my crew – now there was silence for a minute or two. I said, “We’re going to stay down here. There’s no ice down here.” I had friends that came back, like my chum that I had going to high school. He was over there first and I met him in London and he says, “I got on a squadron, I done two trips. They called me back.” I never talked to him again. He never came back from his third trip. So as I was saying, this is how the odds were.