Why a Free State boy joined the RAF

This story is taken from an interview with Patrick Whelan at the Dublin WW2 Commemoration, and has been added to the site with their permission. The authors fully understand the site's terms and conditions. The interviewer was Neil Graham, and the transcription was by Bruce Logan.
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I was born in 1935, so I was 4 when the war started. Everything was rationed. We had no white bread — you name it, anything you hadn’t got in the UK, we hadn’t got it either. I reckon I was 11yo in 1946, or near it, 10yo at least, before I saw an orange. A real orange. Nothing like that came into the country. Foreign fruit and bananas, and all that type of thing. We didn’t know what they looked like.
Clothes. We had the same problems you did in the north. The very same. Dublin was actually bombed — you know that, of course?

[it was mistaken for Belfast or liverpool]

Dun Laoghaire was bombed. Wexford was bombed. So it was … kids had nothing. There was about 5-6 in the family, but the eldest boy, you took the clothes off him. Hand-me-downs. It was rough enough now.

[you were aware at that age the war was going on?]

Oh god yes. You’d see aircraft, you’d see dogfights over the Irish sea. You know Dun Laoghaire? You’d see spitfires.

[was it exciting?]

it didn’t mean a whole lot to you at that stage. You wouldn’t really know the whole awareness of it. And I can vaguely remember now, towards the end of the war, hearing news reports on the radio. But they didn’t mean — you just heard them, and your father would be listening to the radio - “such a place, troops have moved into such-and-such” …
It all finished then.
I went to join the forces myself in 1954. I was in the RAF. I finished in the RAF, done my time, then joined the TA here. I served for 33 years afterwards. I spent nearly 3 years in the Middle East. Cairo, Aden, and a place just outside Nairobi in Kenya.
There was just an emergency thing in the Canal zone. There was a huge garrison protecting the canal. We moved out. Out of the frying-pan, into the fire.

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