Air Force Blue: The RAF in World War Two – Spearhead of Victory. Patrick Bishop

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      The Squadronaires (© Imperial War Museums, CH 15079)

      For aircrew, the progress to a squadron was long and jerky and there were many obstacles to overcome before you finally got into action. Edwin Thomas was eighteen and a half when the war started. Like many, probably most, who aspired to fight in the air, he wanted to be a pilot. He was summoned to the combined recruiting centre in Romford on 29 October 1940 for assessment for the RAFVR, by now the conduit for most wartime entrants. Edwin had the benefit of a secondary education at Canterbury Road Senior School and Snaresbrook College in east London but his reports marked him down as a plodder. ‘He is a thoroughly honest and trustworthy lad,’ declared his head teacher, T. H. Moore. ‘He has shown earnestness and painstaking ability in his work. In manner he is quiet, serious and gentlemanly.’32 Thomas’s weekly letters home to the family’s semi-detached mock-Tudor home in the east London suburb of Wanstead describing his life as a trainee provide a detailed account of the rigours and disappointments of the process, as well as a touching picture of youth, innocence and devotion to duty. The meeting with the selection board went well. A week later he was installed at the Babbacombe Hotel near Torquay, about to begin a fortnight’s drilling with forty-nine other novices before being sent off to a two-month course at an Initial Training Wing (ITW).

      They were starting on the lowest rung of the ladder, classified as Aircraftmen 2nd Class (Group V) and receiving 2s. a day pay. From the beginning cash, or the lack of it, looms large in the correspondence. ‘It is amazing how much money is spent on necessities such as copying ink [and] the VR badges that aren’t on the uniform and cost 6d a pair,’ he wrote on 13 November. There were no complaints about the food, though. ‘For breakfast yesterday we had porridge, fried egg and mashed potatoes, bread and butter, marmalade and a terrific mug or two of tea,’ he reported. ‘For dinner: a lovely stew with potatoes and veg: for sweet an apple conglomeration with custard and an apple: for tea plenty of liver and gravy, bread and butter, jam and a piece of fruit cake. Cake every day. Supper: jug of milk, liver between two crusts and a slice of cake.’ In the evenings there were trips into town ‘to play billiards snooker or table tennis and end up with a glass of Devonshire cider … we are too broke to get tipsy.’

      By mid-December he was at the Initial Training Wing at Pembroke College, Cambridge, one of five colleges requisitioned by the Air Ministry to house about a thousand trainees. The course was a mixture of gruelling classroom work – navigation, signalling by Morse and Aldis lamp, armaments, maths, law and administration, hygiene, ship and aircraft recognition – combined with large doses of PE. Like all the armed forces the RAF was keen on the noble art, believing it cultivated a fighting spirit. ‘I put my name down for boxing,’ he wrote, ‘and in the afternoon had three rounds with a fellow of my own weight.’ His partner ‘had never boxed before and his defence was an opponent’s dream’. Later the PE instructor, a corporal called Harry Mizler and a celebrated East End Jewish bantamweight who represented Britain in the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, ‘bounced medicine balls on our stomachs to strengthen the muscles’. They then set off on a two-mile run.