About the contributor

I was called up in 1943 and, as trainee aircrew, was sent to St Johns Wood (London) where the RAF had requisitioned blocks of flats. There was room for several hundred would-be airmen to sleep, but not to eat - so we were marched each day for our meals to.....London Zoo! Oh, how my children laughed when they discovered!
With the war moving towards its end, the need for aircrew was diminishing, so I remustered as a Radar Mechanic and, after training in Lincoln, was sent to Burma. I joined my unit - RAF 181 Signals Wing - at Imphal and we progressed down through Burma to Rangoon, then on to Malaya and Singapore, and finally to Java and Sumatra.
My job as a Radar Mechanic was to service the Rebecca/Eureka equipment which enabled our planes to supply, in darkness, our troops behind the Jap lines.