Bomber Command - International Bomber Command Centre

Desmond O’Connell was a founder member of the Guinea-Pig Club. He was interviewed for the IBCC Digital Archive. The team have also scanned his memorabilia, including his collection of photographs of the Guinea-Pig Club.

Born in 1919, Desmond was one of eight children. He joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve and was called up in December 1939. After his training he was posted as an observer to RAF Limavady in Northern Ireland as part of 502 Squadron, Coastal Command.

Tasked to find and attack the Bismark, he took off with the crew of Pilot Officer John Dixon at 3 am on 27 April 1941. Overloaded with extra fuel tanks and bombs, their Whitley Mark V was unable to gain height and it crashed into the mountains that surround the airfield. The fuel tanks had fractured in the crash, and as he crawled out of the rear of the aircraft his clothing was soaked in petrol. Outside the aircraft the grass was burning and Des was “set alight.” He had recently been issued with American leather flying jacket and boots which protected him somewhat, but his face, hands and the back of his legs were badly burned. His crew mate, wireless operator, Stan Dorney extinguished the flames and helped him to run over the brow of the hill before the bombload exploded. Seeing the explosion people at the RAF station recoded the whole crew as killed in action.

The crew then walked several miles over peat cuttings down the hill to the nearest farm house to ask for help. Des remembers “I had a lot to thank the weather for… It was very cold and we were all frozen. There were strips hanging off my hands and I thought they were my gloves, but I knew I hadn’t put my gloves on… The shock numbed any feelings.”

Transport arrived eventually and Des was sent to Roe Valley Cottage Hospital in Limavady. Once there his parents were called for. Lying in bed, Des overheard the medical officer tell his mother “You can either have him buried here… or we can send his body home.” She “kicked up a stink” and Des was flown to RAF Hospital Halton in England. Sometime later Sir Archibald McIndoe, the RAF burns consultant, arranged for Des to be transferred to Ward three of East Grinstead’s Queen Victoria Hospital. At first there were only a dozen beds there.

Des explained: “It was early on in plastic surgery and they were finding out what to do.” He became a founder member of the Guinea-Pig Club.

Ward three “was a great leveller… nobody was rank conscious there.” There was a piano in the ward for a while and McIndoe used to come and play it. Des remembered: “The patients there did a lot for themselves psychologically and physically by not giving in… The nurses were very, very, attractive and you wanted to show off how tough you were… and the people in East Grinstead helped a lot because they didn’t cringe… If you went to a pub… you never had to buy a drink. After a while it became embarrassing to refuse it.” However, Des did not recall ever seeing a beer barrel on the ward. “I can imagine the beer was brought in for one occasion but it is always that that was remembered… I can’t believe it.”

Des was McIndoe’s patient for over two years and underwent 29 operations. When he was eventually discharged from hospital, Des became an airfield controller at RAF Ossington, a Bomber Command OTU in Nottinghamshire. He was later commissioned and posted to the Far East. He was in Cairo when the war ended, and he left the RAF in 1946.

Desmond’s Collection can be viewed here

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I am Squadron Leader Stanley Davis MBE RAF and I was born on 8^th June 1943. My parents, Leonard and Connie Davis, were reticent talking about themselves and their past, to their children. I knew at a young age from my family tree that I had a cousin, Flt/Sgt Stanley Davis WOp/Ag. Stanley had been lost over the sea whilst returning from a bombing mission. I blindly assumed that the raid had been over Germany and that his aircraft came down in the North Sea.

How wrong I was. I eventually joined the RAF in June 1965 and my first posting was to 1 Group Bomber Command, Bawtry during the V bomber era and the Cold War. After a couple of years, I was accepted for Airman Aircrew (AEOp) training and was posted to RAF Topcliffe. On graduation, I was posted to RAF St Mawgan for conversion training on the maritime Shackletons and eventually to 120 Squadron RAF Kinloss in August 1969.

On my first day, I was assigned to a crew on 2^nd SAR (Search and Rescue) which was a 4 hour standby done from home; this also doubled as the Operational Standby crew. At about 2100hrs there was a knock on my door and I was told to pack a bag and to get a move on as we were called out and would be deploying; location unknown. We were bundled in to a Hercules and eventually found ourselves disembarking at Oerland at the mouth of Trondheim Fiord in Central Norway. My first operational mission was on 29^th August 1969 out of Oerland against a Russian submarine tender escorting 6 Foxtrot class submarines.

My second was two days later on the same mission but landing back at homebase, Kinloss. During this mission, we spent a time patrolling between the Orkneys, Shetland islands and around Fair Isle. My first and second missions in an aircraft on which I was qualified as a radio operator and air gunner as well as a radar operator. I must have flown a few hundreds of my 10,000 flying hours in both Maritime Shackletons, Nimrod MR1s and AEW Shackletons over this same patch of water.

Many years later at the RAF Waddington Air Show I was browsing the bookstalls and found a book of Bomber Command losses in 1942 which I took home to do some research. Sure enough, there was my cousin Flt/Sgt Stanley Davis WOp/Ag on the night of 30/31 March 1942. He was on 76 Sqn based at Middleton St George flying Halifax II aircraft. He was flying R9453 MP-K with a mixed Commonwealth crew captained by a New Zealander Sqn Ldr A P Burdett https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/203813/ on operation Tirpitz up on Faettenfjord inside Tronheim Ffjord. 76 Squadron along with 10 and 35 squadrons moved forward bases around the Moray Firth, to mount the mission. The aircraft were due to be over target between 2145 and 2230hrs. The mission failed due to lack of visibility, sea fog and 8/8 low cloud. Several of the aircraft jettisoned their loads; 6 of the 34 aircraft failed to return to base.

R9453 MP-K was last heard of with a radio report passing over Sumburgh Head at 0210hrs and is believed to have ditched in the sea very soon after. It is not known whether this was due to battle damage, engine failure or running out of fuel. An extensive search was mounted by two RN destroyers and some twenty aircraft but no trace was found. The Burdett’s body was washed up on Shetland and buried in Lerwick New Cemetery in September 1942. The remainder of the crew are remembered on the Runnymede Memorial, Surrey.

Ironic that I joined the RAF as an AEOp, the equivalent of my cousin and spent many hours patrolling the area where he was lost.

I was the first child born in the family after Stanley’s death. One of his sisters, Betty, remembered my father phoning her mother, Harriet, asking if I could be named after him.

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