Working behind enemy lines

Such was the sensitive nature of what he and his colleagues got up to during the war, that not even he was told where he was going until he got there and, perhaps, the Australian navigator let slip their location. And you never, ever spoke about it, not even over a drink with the chaps back at base.

Shot at by Germans, almost crashing over Poland and Germany, and kept in the dark about details by those higher up the chain of command, flight engineer Furness frequently boarded the aircraft to find secret agents were the cargo to be dropped off on a low level flying raid over enemy territory.

Heady stuff it may have been, but there was no room for complacency or an inflated ego - those sorts of things cost innocent lives. That said there were a few ‘up sides’ to the job; Ken and his colleagues were ‘Brylcreem Boys’ and that made them popular with the ladies...

“We were not bomber command, we were special SOE, Special Operations Executive. What it was, was we were in charge of people going across to Europe to back up the local resistance . We were supplying local people and our boys with stuff dropped from the air, people going in by parachute and that sort of stuff. Cloak and dagger stuff. Special ops. We were dropping ammunition - anything that they needed,” said Ken.

Matter-of-factly, Ken says he got into that line of work “by pure luck”.

“I knew before the war started that if it did start I would go for the Air Force. I couldn’t stand this land fighting business, and I thought ‘Well, at least I’m going to have a bed to come back to if I’ve had a rough time, and I can have a nice sleep’. I joined the Air Training Corps when I was about 16 or 17 and it stood me in good stead, because I went straight through when they saw my record,” said the former Londoner, who ended up in coming to Northern Ireland in the mid-1960s when he was transferred here with Goodyear which had opened a depot in Craigavon.

After he trained as a flight engineer, work began on crew training before he was airborne with a Squadron, and so it was that Ken was hand picked for his first posting.

“The man who chatted to me about what it was all about, he said ‘Right I’m very happy to have you as my flight engineer.’ So the next thing after that was the posting to the various Squadrons and when it came up, all the others were getting places in the main bomberdromes in the east of England, and when ours came up we were all on tender hooks as to what it was going to be and it turned out to be RAF Tempsford, and everybody was ‘RAF Tempsford? Where’s that?’ They said we would find out when we got there.

“We moved that dame day and we got there and the first thing that happened there was we were ushered into the Wing Commander’s office and we were given a straight talk, a really straight talk, and he said ‘While you are here anything you do in this place is completely and utterly for this place only and nobody else, it doesn’t matter who it is they are not to know.’ He said ‘If you break that rule you will find yourself in prison for five years’. In actual fact, the following day, there was another chap on another Squadron apparently went down into the town and he had a few jars, and of course he was blathering like mad about what he was doing and two RAF Special Police went down and lifted him and he got five years.

“When we realised what we were supposed to be doing we thought ‘This is serious’ but up to that point we didn’t have a clue what we were going to be doing. So then we started training, because we needed special training for that particular job, because a lot of it was low level, and all sort of things happened, like we would be carrying people in the aeroplane which we would have to drop off in parachutes and all sorts of weird things. We had to go where we were sent, whether it was in Germany or Austria, or wherever else...The German and Austrian runs were not so often as those to France because France was covered with agents. What we used to do was fly out and drop containers and we had people actually jumping out as agents to replace somebody on the ground...” he said.

Asked if he found his work exciting, Ken said you were better off not getting worked up about it, because they needed a cool head on their shoulders to carry out their duties: “If you started getting to airy-fairy about it you started making mistakes. You had to concentrate exactly on what it was you were doing.”

Operations were conducted at night time, but they were not without their scary moments. I remember the very first trip we did was to France and we crossed the Channel and crossed the coast and veered off to head south and we were approaching a big river...there was an astrodome in the aeroplane, like a blister, and you could stand up and see what was going on, and as I was standing there suddenly some trace started coming up, and they pulled my leg about it afterwards, but I said ‘Engineer to Pilot: Flack to starboard’. Immediately he knew what way to throw the aeroplane and afterwards when I apologised and said I was a bit ‘stuffy’ he said to me ‘You could not have done it better. It gave me time to decide what to do.’ What he did was he dropped the plane into a dive as hard as it would go and the aeroplane just dropped like a stone getting the plane out of the trace before they could follow you. That particular trip was uneventful after all that...”

There were, however, what Ken called “all sorts of variations going on” once they flew into the south of the country, not least because the drop off points were away from urban areas.

“On some occasions it happened once with us where the people on the ground were giving Morse Code letters on a torch and of course, what happened was the Germans had found out, somebody must have done some talking, and they knew the drop was going to happen, so they were there waiting and had taken over the site virtually. They had forced the contact to tell them the call sign on the torch and they were taken away and were shot. Generally speaking if you were doing something which was your job as a Flight Engineer, they respected that, they just put you in the POW Camp and that was the end of it. They tried to get as much out of you as possible. Luckily they never got me.

“There was one colleague who got as near to captured as may be. About two months before I arrived in the Squadron, one man had been out on one of these trips and they had a problem of some sort, because he bailed out and it was right down in the South of France, near the beginning of the mountains between France and Spain and he managed to walk over the top down into Spain, got to Madrid, saw the Ambassador and they flew him back. You had to get to the Embassy, once he got in there they claimed privilege and they could not do anything about it,” he said: “I think I had done two operations by the time he came back, and, funny enough, my first job was in shipping when I came out and there were some special samples of silk and goodness knows what had turned up and had to be delivered to a place in the West End. So, the boss asked did anybody know the West End and I said I did, so he said it had to be delivered did I mind taking it. I said not at all as it would give me a chance to look around. I went across, went into the place, a silk merchants, and I walked in and blow me down, there’s the man who made his way back from France. Just like that.”

If nothing else it was another instance of ‘pure luck’.

Recalling his own near misses, Ken goes quiet for a moment before relating this hairy tale: “There is one incident that does stick out in my memory. It is a trip we did to Poland. That was at the time when the Russians had moved down and had stopped short of Warsaw. What they were doing was just letting them do the dirty work in killing off the Germans. The British Goverment, apparently asked the Russian Government to allow two or three aircraft to land to refuel, but they refused. So, we knew we had to go there and back to Warsaw. There were three aircraft involved. There were two Polish crews and ourselves and the two Poles took off first, ahead of us, at minute intervals, and up we went and off we went, normal routine. They got as far as Danish coast and we were looking to see where we were going to go to actually cross, knowing that these other two chaps were just up ahead of us by about a minute. I had no sooner thought that thought and suddenly I was looking down to the coast when two streams of trace came up and they hit the two Polish crews. Normally they would have got away with it, but they were like ourselves, in that they were also overloaded with petrol. They had to do that to make the journey. Not only in the bomb bays were there tanks there, but there was also another big tank inside the aircraft, which, of course, was an unheard of thing. These things just blew up like a firework. Terrible. As you can imagine that made us even more determined to get over there and do what we had to do.

“Anyway, we sort of skirted round where we knew there were guns and then turned in again to the coast, coming down in a shallow dive, at high speed. I don’t know what speed it was but it was considerably more than we would normally do, and then half way down they must have had a bead on us, suddenly a search light went on and it went straight onto us. SO they must have known exactly where we were. The first thing the pilot said was ‘I can’t see. I can’t see’. The bomb aimer was down below where he usually was and he was able to see something, he shouted out ‘Climb! Climb! Climb!’ I was standing behind the skipper and he pulled the control right into his stomach like this,” Ken says, telling the tale at full throttle.

He continued: “What actually happened was we levelled out. We knew we were pretty close to the ground and when they switched on the search light we were still going down, but it took time to start levelling it out, but we were nearer to the ground than we thought. Once the skipper had pulled back there was a thump and a shaking and scraping sound, and I thought any minute it was going to blow and we would be burned to a crisp and not only us, but the German gun crew as well because that’s what we were heading right into. It sounds ridiculous, but what we were taking out is what they really, really needed in Warsaw was a printing press to get their paper out to give information to the people who were defending the place. When we got to the drop zone there was nobody there, so there may have been picked up. They just shot them out of hand. Went down into the sewers and shot them down there. Terrible.

“Going back to the point where we levelled out, and got this rumbling and shaking, and then there was a shuddering noise starting at the nose and going down to the tail, and I walked through into the aircraft down towards the tail, and I could feel all this under my feet, the shaking, but whatever it was it reached the tail and stopped with a jolt, and I thought ‘Dear Lord we’ve had it, we’ve had it’. If something got hold of us and stopped us we would just go down. The long and the short of the story was that when we finally got back to base, we had been flying for 11.5 hours and we were getting out of the aircraft and the ground crew were waiting for us for a report. The Sergeant-in-charge of the aircraft (back row in the b/w picture on the extreme right), his name was Chambers, and i reported what happened and said he better look under the aircraft and he looked and shouted ‘What the hell’s this?’ There was half a tree stuck in the back of it. Looking at it, if it had been another inch in diameter it would probably have brought us down, as it was the power of the engines was probably sufficient was sufficient to snap it off.”

Ken and his colleagues were acutely aware that they were close to the ground as they could see land outside, but acknowledge that they were lucky to escape with their lives that night.

“Then of course, the problem started again, because the following night we were told to stand by for another go to Warsaw. The next thing it dragged on and it wasn’t to the next night and then the next night, and then a full week went past and the Squadron Commander called everybody in and said everybody who was on standby for going back to Warsaw can breathe again as they were doing it from somewhere else; I think it was North Africa, or somewhere,” he said.

Relieved he did not have to make the run again, Ken admitted that he understood the need for the printing press: “The Polish people were being shot like flies. Terrible.”

High importance was placed on secrecy so that the enemy was kept in the dark, and that meant Ken was never in the loop as regards where he was being sent.

“There were three members of the crew, three officers: The pilot, who was a Flight lieutenant, the navigator, who was a flying officer and the bomb aimer, who was also a flying officer. One was a Canadian, that was the navigator and the bomb aimer was Australian. The three officers were the only ones who used to go to a briefing before we took off, the idea being that they were the only three as it was essential to navigate where we were going. We didn’t have to be told, so we weren’t told, so if you got shot down they could kill you, but they still would not tell them anything because you did not know. We took off assuming that it was maybe Denmark, Holland maybe, or France, and we had been flying for some time, and I noticed we were flying north for some time, so I thought well it doesn’t seem like France...and I ran out of places thinking where it might be. Then suddenly, the bomb aimer, who was lying prone in the aircraft, map reading the whole way, to make sure the navigator’s assessment of our location was correct, suddenly he said ‘Well there’s one thing I’m sure about, we are definitely over Vienna’. So you can imagine it was like a bombshell, what on earth were we doing there? There was no fighting going on and as far as the Germans were concerned, they occupied the country. Anyway, we had two men in the aircraft who had to go our and the next thing it was ‘Tell the men where we are and ask them if they still want to go out’. They hummed and ‘aaahed’ for a couple of minutes and out they went. We turned round and came back to base. We said nothing to anybody. Except for the briefing officers it was kept under wraps. We were the only people who knew what was going on,” said Ken.

Asked if ‘the girls liked the uniform’ Ken does not hesitate: “Oh yes! We were known as the Brylcreem Boys. I never lived that one down. There was a photograph of us in their advert and everywhere we went it was ‘The Brylcreem Boys are here’. The Army hated it, they hated it! In the Army you trained in England and got shipped out whereas in the Air Force even if you were based abroad, you could still get back home from time to time to England. The Army never got the opportunity. If they got shipped out to the Far East, or wherever, that was their lot until the end of the war.”

Ken finishes by paying tribute to his crew: “As I said, I was extremely lucky in the pilot I got, John Vaugan Perrins, DFC. As a matter of fact, the pilot, the navigator and the bomb aimer were all awarded DFC and I think it was because of the job to Austria, because the man that started that was Churchill. It was his offer to the Austrians.”

Ken did not get the DFC at the time because he was not a Commissioned Officer, but what he did get was an offer to be Commissioned in the Air Force. “Next to the DFC it was as good as anything else. I took it,” he said: “I started as a Pilot Officer, went up to Flying Officer after a year and half and after that to Flight Lieutenant, and that is as far as I got, which is equivalent to a Captain in the Army, ” he said.