1

I was a serving officer with RAF Bomber Command from the beginning of the Second World War. My entry into the service was by way of the University Air Squadron at Oxford, where I was a rowing blue at Brasenose College. In those early years I had two passions: one was rowing, the other was flying. I had no interest in war, no premonition that I might ever become involved in one. The events of the world went on beyond my restricted area of awareness, as they had done for most of my life. I know I was naïve and therefore badly prepared for the immense war in which we were all eventually caught up.

I should have known better. My father was a registered consci­entious objector during the Great War, as the First World War was still called in the 1930s. A reserved and private man, my father would never have tried to force his own convictions on his children. Nevertheless, my brother Joe and I were brought up to believe that war was evil, something to be avoided at all costs. During the Second World War and the years after it, the prewar British policy of appeasing the Nazis became discredited and despicable, but my father would never have that. He maintained that the beginnings of appeasement lay in a humane and pragmatic economic policy, of not forcing Germany to meet her crippling reparations under the Versailles Treaty. Practically every member of the British govern­ment of those days had fought in the Great War and felt themselves under a duty to go to any lengths to avoid another. They sensed, perhaps, what Adolf Hitler always claimed: that it was the iniquities of Versailles that led to the second war.

The naïveté was therefore my own fault, because my interest in sport, in rowing, overshadowed everything else. I lived only for the moment and was totally focused on the sport I loved. During the years 1935 and 1936 I concentrated on a single aim: to qualify for the British team that would compete in the Olympic Games. My brother and I trained and practised with an almost obsessive energy.

To anyone who had seen us training, or who saw us competing, it might have seemed a foregone conclusion that we would be selected for the team. We were consistently on form and easily won most of the races we entered, but when you are there at the centre of the obsession you feel you can take nothing for granted. When Joe and I were finally selected, at the beginning of June 1936, it felt that this was quite simply the greatest news we would ever receive. We celebrated with friends in a number of Oxford pubs that night, but afterwards returned with single-minded dedication to our training.

My story of what happened to me during the war therefore begins in July 1936, when Joe and I set off together for the Berlin Olympics.