Chapter Two, Part One: The Stamp

~ Adam Purcell

The first place I went in my journey to follow Jack Purcell was less a place and more an experience. It traced its beginnings to something in Jack’s logbook that I thought was pretty special. It took up fully one-third of an otherwise blank page, stamped in slightly smudged, dirty purple ink.

CERTIFIED THAT I UNDERSTAND THE PETROL, OIL AND IGNITION SYSTEMS OF THE TIGER MOTH,

it read,

…AND THAT I HAVE BEEN INSTRUCTED IN PROPELLOR SWINGING IN ACCORDANCE WITH FLYING STANDING ORDERS.

Then there was a line for the date – 23 March 1943 – and next to it, Jack’s signature, in uncertain running writing, inked in with a wide-nibbed fountain pen.

In light of what comes later, the story that the stamp told wasn’t the most dramatic or tragic or emotional one in the logbook. It was just a straightforward record of the fact that Jack was once qualified to swing the propeller – yes, the stamp spelt it differently – on a Tiger Moth. But for me, this simple stamp was one of the most significant parts of Jack’s logbook. And it was all because of where it led me.

Three weeks after I finished high school, many years ago, I was at Wollongong Airport, south of Sydney. It was a Thursday morning, a light southerly breeze blowing straight down the runway, and I was sitting in the left-hand seat of a little Cessna 152 training aeroplane. I looked over the top of the instrument panel, through the bug-splattered Perspex of the windscreen. Looked past the spinning disc of the propeller. Along the dashed white line marking the centre of the runway. To my right, for the first time ever, was an empty seat. My instructor Marty, only a few years older than me and later to fly big jets with Qantas, had just unbuckled his seatbelt, slipped out and closed the door and walked around the back of the aeroplane, waggling the elevators as he passed. The control yoke correspondingly bucked forward and aft in my hand in encouragement. I was a few months past eighteen years of age, and I was about to fly an aeroplane all by myself.

It was, I discovered, true what they said about your first solo. Without the weight of your instructor the aeroplane really did leap into the air. And you really were so busy in those first few moments that it was not until you climbed to height and turned to fly the circuit back to the top of the runway that you settled down enough to look at the empty seat next to you, and savoured what it meant. And then, after allowing yourself a brief moment of exhilaration, you got right back to business, working through the mental checklists you’d been taught as you slowed the aeroplane and turned to start the gradual descent back to the runway. A tiny float, maybe a gentle bounce, and then with a thump you were on the ground again.

Afterwards, back at the flying school, I proudly wrote into my logbook my first six minutes of solo time. Then I watched Marty as, with reverence, he placed a stamp on an ink pad and then pushed it firmly onto the page.

It was only a small stamp, but there it was, in slightly smudged, dirty purple ink:

I CONSIDER ADAM PURCELL COMPETENT TO FLY SOLO BY DAY IN C152 TYPE AEROPLANES.

  It was only when I got home that afternoon that I realised the connection. I went to the cupboard where Jack’s logbook was stored, opened the tattered cardboard box and pulled out the little blue book. I turned straight to the page with the Tiger Moth stamp, then laid my own logbook open next to it. Now I’ve got a stamp in my own logbook, I thought.

This post is part of a series, publishing writing originally completed as part of my now-discontinued book project. Find an explanation of the series and an evolving table of contents here.

(c)2025 Adam Purcell

Chapter One, Part Three: Meeting the Pilot

~ Adam Purcell

It turned out that Phil Smith, Uncle Jack’s old pilot, lived with his wife, Mollie, in an old house perched on the side of a steep hill in the well-to-do North Shore suburb of Mosman. After exchanging letters for several months, my entire family – Mum, Dad, two sisters and me – found ourselves walking, slightly nervously in my case, up a short steep driveway that led past a carport to a set of steps up to the front porch. Though a few months off 80 years of age, the man who opened the door when we knocked was a surprisingly sprightly-looking chap.

Over the next couple of hours, and over a dining table groaning with breads, cheeses, salad and cut meats, we slowly got to know this remarkable but modest old fellow. He was a reserved sort of chap, quietly-spoken but with an unmistakable air of authority about him. He played down his experiences, telling us that he wasn’t sure how much he could help because he couldn’t directly remember our Uncle Jack. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell us much about what happened on that final flight. The only tales I distinctly remember him telling us was a rather astonishing one about his troop ship hitting an iceberg mid-Atlantic on the way to England, and how he once, after the war, walked accidentally and unsupported all the way to the top of Mount Fuji in Japan. But Mollie persuaded him to retrieve a small wooden box from a drawer that was otherwise chock-full of papers and documents. Inside was the coloured ribbons and medals awarded for his service, including the polished silver decoration of the Distinguished Flying Cross. Even at the age of 12, I could tell that despite his modesty, Phil had been no ordinary pilot. And when Dad brought out a photo from Uncle Jack’s box, Phil immediately turned it over and pointed to his own handwriting on the back.

I wasn’t imaginative enough at the time to realise it, but this was just the first in what would become a series of connections that reached down through history, from that time to this. Ordinary items and moments, on the surface, that despite their very ordinariness somehow carried with them the weight of years, in a way more profound than you’d expect from the image on a simple photograph. Here was something that Phil himself had held, and had considered important enough to write on and send home, more than six decades previously. It was photograph of the inside of a briefing room, with Phil himself sitting in the middle of the crowd. Three other members of his – and Jack’s – crew sat in the back rows. The photo had been sent to my great grandfather, and then passed on down through the family to us, and on that summer’s day in 1997 it came back to Phil Smith.

After lunch, we went outside to the backyard, where the hill continued, covered in a verdant oasis of lush green ferns and mossy rocks. A photograph was taken to record the occasion.

Adam Purcell with Phil Smith – 1997

There’s me, the gangly pre-teen, with my polo shirt tucked badly into my shorts and my arms hanging awkwardly at my sides. And there’s Phil, the wizened old man, wearing a pair of thongs with his shorts pulled up high and a spectacle case hanging from a piece of cord looped around his neck. He has white hair and gazes steadily into the lens, but there’s a certain melancholy about him.

As he was at the time, and as in that photograph, I suppose, he somehow still is, Phil was the final living link to Uncle Jack’s crew. He was the only person still alive who had, in several senses of the phrase, “been there”.

He alone knew what it was like to be a member of the crew of B for Baker as it flew over Lille.

He alone had known Uncle Jack while he was in the Air Force.

He alone had survived.

And somehow it didn’t matter that he couldn’t tell us much directly about Uncle Jack and that final flight to Lille. Just being in the presence of this bloke, this one person who was there, was to feel a connection to the time. To see his deep-set eyes under a slightly furrowed brow was to wonder what else he’d seen, how life had treated him.

There’s a story there, I thought.

And I wanted to find out about it.

After that first meeting with Phil Smith, I was hooked. What sort of war had he experienced, I wondered? What sort of war had Uncle Jack experienced? Why were they – two Australians – flying for the British Royal Air Force? What, for that matter, was Bomber Command, and what sorts of things did it do?

I began reading books voraciously. I wrote letters to Phil, and a couple of times a year we’d journey to Sydney to spend a few precious hours in his and Mollie’s company. The conversation was rarely about his wartime service, though. An intensely private and reserved man, as we came to discover, he preferred to dwell on current things like how we were going at school and how the rest of the family was. On one wonderful occasion he took me down into the depths of the garage under the house, a cluttered space jam-packed with old tools and bits of wood accumulated over a lifetime, all the bits of junk  that ‘might be useful someday’, to share with me his collection of hand-made wooden propellers and electronics and old radios. Clearly Phil had a very technical and practical sort of mindset. But I could always detect a hint of gentle sadness in his eyes. Why had he, the captain of the aeroplane, survived, when the others did not? I suspect that question was never far away, though I can’t recall any direct mention of it. Nevertheless, we became friends. I kept writing him letters and I still have many of his replies.

But then, one day in 2003, we received a phone call from his son, telling us that Phil had died. He’d gone to bed as normal one night, and simply did not wake up the next morning. No fuss. A death befitting the quietly straightforward man he was. The final living link with the crew of B for Baker was no more.

This post is part of a series, publishing writing originally completed as part of my now-discontinued book project. Find an explanation of the series and an evolving table of contents here.

(c)2025 Adam Purcell

Chapter One, Part Two: A Logbook By The Fire

~ Adam Purcell

At the time, it was one of those moments that did not seem all that significant.

In mid 1993, I was a not-quite-ten-year-old boy who was interested in things like astronomy, science and space travel. I lived with my parents and two sisters in a big brick veneer house in a semi-rural village in the Southern Highlands region of New South Wales.

On this day, the sun was not yet above the horizon when, for once the first in the family to wake up, I opened my bedroom door and walked out to begin getting ready for school. Outside it was cold, the kind of cold where when it’s raining the freezing drizzle sticks to your face, and when it’s not raining, thick white frost  covers the lawn and crunches underfoot. In the corner of the family room was our old wood-burning fireplace, which was lit around Easter each year and which we usually kept burning all the way until my mother’s birthday in October. It was normal in our household for Mum and Dad – who were both teachers – to leave important things at our respective places on the dining table, for us to find the next day. Normally they were boring but necessary things like lunch money or signed permission slips for school excursions, but this time I found something different. On that morning, by the glow of the fire’s smouldering embers, I first saw the box.

 Of the old-fashioned foolscap size, the box was made out of rather tattered green and black cardboard. It might once have held overhead transparencies or some other tool of the teachers’ trade, but on this chilly morning, as I curiously opened it I found it now held very old photographs.

There was one of a man in uniform who, I thought, if I squinted a bit and looked at it from just the right angle, bore a startling resemblance to my dad.

There was one of several dark and indistinct figures, dramatically backlit, standing in front of a big aeroplane.

There were several photos that showed what looked like graves, marked with white crosses and covered in flowers.

I found a small blue notebook in the box, too. Tucked into a hand-made cover of blue felt, the book was clearly old, its pages yellowed and brittle. It was filled with columns of numbers, times and unfamiliar place names, all inked in with a wide-nibbed fountain pen.

Nhill. Llandwrog. Lichfield.

Munich. Nuremberg. Berlin.

And on the final line, in red ink and different handwriting:

“OPERATIONS. Lille,” I read.

“MISSING.”

I had many questions for my father when he emerged from bed a short time later. Who was the man in the photograph? Why was he missing? And why did he look sort-of like Dad?

The man, it turned out, was “Uncle Jack”, and he had been a relative of ours. Dad told me that he had been in the Air Force , and that he’d been killed during the Second World War. The photos, and the logbook, were all that were left of him.

This post is part of a series, publishing writing originally completed as part of my now-discontinued book project. Find an explanation of the series and an evolving table of contents here.

(c) 2025 Adam Purcell

Chapter One, Part One: A Beginning, Of Sorts

~ Adam Purcell

From the very first day of the war, right up until the final week of hostilities in Europe more than five and a half years later, Royal Air Force Bomber Command operated on nearly every date in the calendar. It fought an exceptionally long war.

It was an exceptionally dangerous one, too. More than 125,000 aircrew served in Bomber Command; of those, at least 55,573 were killed in action or training. Thousands of the bombers that took off on bombing raids failed to return; from the majority of bombers that were lost there were no survivors.

Bomber Command fought in a way war had never been fought before, and in a way in which it will never be fought again. It was the biggest, most powerful aerial armada the world had ever seen – right up until the moment the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and rendered the whole operation instantly obsolete. There are several experiences that most veterans will mention when you ask them about their time in Bomber Command, things that together made the force a unique product of its time, place and context.

Some of these things might be the way you formed your own crew, for example, and the extraordinarily strong bonds that typically developed between the airmen thus joined. The high tension of the briefing room, with the collective gasps as the curtain was flung aside to reveal a long red ribbon stretching into the very heart of Germany. The ‘operational egg’, a genuine treat in severely rationed wartime Britain, and the predictable jokes about who would get yours if you didn’t come back tonight. The female drivers who ferried you out to your aeroplane, and the dread of waiting before take-off, with nothing to do except think about the upcoming operation. The sudden churning of your stomach as you heard the rear gunner’s voice in your headphones saying “corkscrew port, go!” The bomb aimer over the target, calmly guiding the pilot: “left left, steady, steeeaaaady… OK bombs gone, let’s get out of here!” The sudden silence and palpable sense of relief as the engines shut down after landing, and the dog-tiredness as you fell gratefully into bed as the sun came up. And then doing it again and again, all the while watching others simply disappear and knowing full well the high probability that you, too, would join them on the list of the missing well before you reached the magic number of thirty operations that entitled you to a rest.

It’s hard for anyone today to fathom just how dangerous a job it was. Consider this: in very rough numbers, your chances of dying by accident or some other external cause, on any one day, is approximately one in a million. The average RAF bomber aircrew, on the other hand, faced the same level of risk of violent death that you or I face in an entire day – one in a million – each and every second that they were in the air during an operation[1].

The longest operation in Jack Purcell’s logbook is a raid to Munich in April 1944 that lasted for a little over ten hours, or more than 36,000 seconds. That’s 36,000 times the daily risk of death for the average man on the street. Or, to put it another way, it would take you or I close to 100 years to be exposed to the same risk of death by external causes that a bomber crew faced on that single raid. And that was one raid, on one night, of a very long war.

This is something that still astonishes me, every time I think about the aircrew of Bomber Command. They were volunteers, every last one of them. They saw other bombers blowing up, they saw the empty places at the table the next morning. They could do the maths: five percent loss rates from every operation. 30 operations required for a tour. As one of them said, “we sort of end up owing them something…”[2] They knew the danger – and yet they went anyway, night after night.

What was it like, I wondered? What was it like to be a member of a bomber crew during the Second World War? What was it like to go to the other side of the world? To live on a wartime airfield? To knowingly face that level of risk, night after night?

What happened to these men happened within a unique and very specific intersection of place, time and context. Those things all combine with individual experiences to make what we call history. I suspect we cannot ever truly know wer es eigentlich gewesen – how it actually was – if we weren’t there, at that time, in that place, and influenced by that context. But any historical event leaves echoes that can be heard if you listen closely enough.

We can’t travel back in time. But nowhere, perhaps, are the echoes of the past stronger than in the places where the past happened. And that is somewhere to which we can go.

This post is part of a series, publishing writing originally completed as part of my now-discontinued book project. Find an explanation of the series here, and an evolving list of contents here.

[1] Taken from Blastand & Spiegelhalter (2013), The Norm Chronicles: Stories and numbers about danger. Profile Books Ltd Great Britain. p.17. They base the “one in a million” calculation on 18,000 recorded accidental deaths out of a population of 54 million in the UK in 2010. The RAF calculation is based on 55,000 deaths, 364,000 sorties and an average crew size of six. The figure is necessarily an approximation, but it’s a vivid illustration for our purposes.

[2] Charlwood, Don (2002), Australians at War Film Archive #0666. Accessed from http://www.australiansatwarfilmarchive.gov.au/aawfa/interviews/1767.aspx 13SEP12

An Announcement

~ Adam Purcell

“My ultimate aim with this research is to write a significant piece of work – a book – to tell the story of the crew of B for Baker.”

So starts a post on this blog that was written in March 2012.

That’s now more than thirteen years ago.

After I wrote that post, I spent a few years thinking about the idea of writing a book, then a bit of time thinking about actually writing it, and then maybe two more years organising and manipulating sources into something that I thought I might be able to turn into a coherent story. And finally, in July 2017, I started actually writing.

I wrote several thousand words, and then I pretty quickly realised I wasn’t getting anywhere useful, so I re-started my draft. And then I re-started it again, and again, so that the current file is version 5.

Ha, ‘current’. My laptop tells me the last time I opened my draft, before tonight, was on 6 June 2022.

I’ve not been able to prioritise this project enough to do something about it for more than three years. Heck, I’ve barely even posted on this blog.

Life has intervened, and other priorities have come up (not least of which, my partner and I are expecting a baby in a few weeks). I’m simply unable to make the time needed to finish a draft, edit it, and do all the other work that’s needed to get a book printed and promoted.

So, I’ve made a difficult but necessary decision. It’s time to stop kidding myself: the book about B for Baker that I was planning and working on is no longer going to happen, and I have accepted the need to abandon the project in its originally imagined form.

All is, however, not yet lost. I do still have that draft: all 56,000 words of it. And some of it, even if I do say so myself, is pretty good, actually. It seems a shame to just chuck that out without giving anyone else the chance to read it, without sharing the story of B for Baker, and what it was like for her crew, with a wider audience.

Like, say, the audience who reads this blog…

So though a book in the traditional sense is not going to happen, I’ve decided to share the guts of the story with you, right here. Over the next little while, I will turn each chapter of my draft into a series of posts, and then publish them one at a time. There will be no set posting schedule: you’ll get them as they come. The important thing is that the story will be out there, and seven more members of Bomber Command won’t be forgotten.

Because that, at the end of the day, is what I’ve been trying to achieve the whole time.

Let’s see how it goes!

An Evolving Table of Contents:
  • Chapter One: Beginnings
  • Chapter Two: Learning to Fly

(c) 2025 Adam Purcell

Primary sources

~ Adam Purcell

Primary sources are the gold standard when it comes to researching historical events. Sources that were created, in real time, when the events were happening, they are the real deal, the good oil, the oracles of truth.

But what if they’re wrong?

I was contacted recently by Paul Jörg of the village of Denklingen in Germany, regarding a post in my 467 Postblog series from about a decade ago. Paul, who rather delightfully describes himself as his village’s ‘local chronicler,’ had identified a couple of errors that he wished to bring to my attention. In my post covering the Augsburg raid on 25 February 1944, I’d referred to the fate of 467 Squadron Lancaster PO-M LL756, flown by P/O HW Stuchbury. It crashed, I’d written, in a place called Deufringen. Paul wanted me to know that the bomber had in fact crashed in a field a couple of miles from his village – Denklingen, not Deufringen – and his sources showed that it was LL746, not LL756.

Looking at my notes from when I originally wrote the post, I found that I’d taken ‘Deufringen’ from Alan Storr’s otherwise excellent research on 467 Squadron losses. I don’t know what Storr’s source was, but the only primary document I could find was in the A705 casualty file for F/S JW Wood, Stuchbury’s navigator (NAA:A705, 166/44/108), where several pages clearly refer to Denklingen. On the basis of that I changed my post.

Sorting out what was the correct aircraft serial number was less straightforward, however. When I wrote my Postblog piece, I got my information from the 467 Squadron Operational Record Book, which states that Stuchbury and crew failed to return in LL756. And now, in Wood’s A705 file I found a copy of the original casualty signal from Kodak House in London to RAAF HQ in Melbourne. This signal also records the missing aircraft as LL756.

Two independent documents, sourced from different places, agreeing on a basic fact: that seemed pretty definitive. Primary sources over secondary, right?

But something was still unsettling here. The reference to LL746 had to come from somewhere. Was it a simple typo? Or did something more unusual happen?

To get to the bottom of it, the first thing to do was to establish that both serials had actually existed. I checked the lists in the back of my copy of Bruce Robertson’s Lancaster: The Story of a Famous Bomber (1964), and found entries for both aircraft – which revealed something very interesting:

LL746: “467 Sqn 1Jan44, Missing 26Feb44. 87hrs.”

LL756: “101, 467 Sqns. Missing (Augsburg) 25/26Feb44. 261hrs.”

Well look at that. Not only did both aircraft exist, but apparently they both served with 467 Squadron and, almost unbelievably, both went missing within a day of each other.

Hmm.

Back to the 467 Squadron ORB: could I find both serials there? I closely checked the Form 541s for January, February and March 1944. Between 20 January and 15 February, LL746 appears on six operations, including five to Berlin. The 15 February raid (coincidentally Jack Purcell’s first operation)[linky Postblog] was with Arthur Doubleday’s crew. But then LL746 vanishes from the records. On 19 February, Doubleday is recorded flying to Berlin in… you guessed it… LL756, and that second serial then appears on three more operations, including the 25 February Augsburg raid with Stuchbury. Neither serial appears in the ORB after that – and what is more telling, I think, is that the two serials never turn up flying on the same raid.

That, to me, strongly suggests that all those ORB entries refer to the same aircraft. The aircraft that Doubleday took to Berlin on 15 February was the same one that he flew there on the 19th. One of the serials is incorrect – but which one?

The clue was in Robertson’s list. The entry for LL756 carries an innocuous-looking reference to 101 Squadron. It wasn’t totally unknown, but it was highly unusual for a Lancaster to be transferred to a different squadron. If I could find LL756 in the 101 Squadron records, I thought, that would strongly suggest that it never flew with 467 Squadron at all.

The 101 Squadron Operational Record Book is available to download free of charge from The National Archives in the UK. Searching through these documents is a very laborious process –  they’re not often searchable digitally, so you have to go through them manually – but a simple Google search turned up a post on the RAFCommands forum, which referred to LL756 and a runway accident in September 1944. Knowing that, it was then a simple matter to download the documents for the correct date range; I then found LL756 listed on several operations with 101 Squadron.

If LL756 was still flying in September 1944, it clearly could not have been shot down in February. That means that it was not the aeroplane that crashed near Denklingen on 25 February 1944. It’s therefore most likely that the crashed aeroplane was indeed LL746, and both the 467 Squadron Operational Record Book and the RAAF’s casualty notification are incorrect.

How can two independent, contemporary, primary sources both be wrong? I think it’s because they’re not as independent as they might first appear. Operational Record Books were compiled by the staff in the squadron’s Orderly Rooms. And the very first casualty signals – supposed to be sent to Group HQ within an hour of an aircraft becoming overdue – were sent from the same rooms, by the same staff.

This is how I think it happened: at some point between 15-19 February 1944, someone in the 467 Squadron Orderly Room at Waddington mistakenly typed a ‘5’ instead of a ‘4’ when referring to PO-M. That simple error rolled on for the next three operations, too – and then, when the aircraft failed to return from Augsburg, it made its way into the casualty signal to Group HQ, and then into the next signal to RAAF HQ at Kodak House, and then into the signal sent to Melbourne – and from there, into the historical record.  

Primary sources over secondary, any time. Except when they’re wrong.

Thanks to Paul Jörg in Denklingen for the information that started this search.

© 2025 Adam Purcell

What’s your earliest memory?

~ Adam Purcell

At one stage I was beginning my oral history interviews with what you might think is a fairly simple question.

“What’s your earliest memory?”

The idea was that this sort of open-ended question might act as a sort of portal to the past; a way to get my subject talking and kick-start their brain into thinking about their life and memories. It didn’t always have the desired effect, though; after a few such openings I discovered a tendency to take my question literally and try to work out which, of a thousand early memories, might be the actual earliest one. The interviewee spent so much brain power trying to choose which story to tell me that we were never able to dig beyond the superficial. We never quite achieved the ‘flow’ that might reveal the thoughts and memories that hid underneath.

In later interviews I ended up changing the wording to a more general ‘tell me about your early life’ sort of question, and that more often than not had the desired effect (I think the record was Arthur Atkins, a Lancaster pilot who started talking and didn’t stop for nearly two hours). But during the time I was asking other people about their earliest memories, I couldn’t help but try to answer the question myself.

So what is my own earliest memory?

Well, it’s very clear in my mind. I’m about four years old, and with my Dad, I’m standing next to some train tracks just outside Bowral in New South Wales. I hear the whistle of a train, and then it bursts out of the tunnel, pulled by not one, but two green steam locomotives: one is the famous Flying Scotsman and the other, the big streamlined NSW passenger engine known as 3801. For a young boy, the smoke, steam, speed and sounds are absolutely thrilling. I’m particularly amazed to see that the wheels of 3801 are taller than I am!  

This story has always been at the heart of who I am. Green remains my favourite colour and I still have a soft spot for 3801. The story gets trotted out every so often and I tell it easily and fluently.

There’s just one problem:

That’s not how it actually happened.

My long-cherished memory is wrong.

I only realised this in the last couple of weeks, when I received a package of old photographs from my parents. In amongst the collection was one particular photo. It shows me, it shows my Dad, and it shows 3801 hauling a train. So far, so good.

But where is Flying Scotsman?

Yes, the British locomotive was out in Australia in 1988, on a tour for Australia’s Bicentenary. Yes, in 1988 I was four years old. But despite the image that is still in my mind, I did not see it go past that day. My memory is incorrect. (Oh, I’d always thought it was just me and my Dad who were there, but the photo clearly shows my two sisters as well, and I imagine the photo was taken by my mother.)

What happened here?

In the photo, 3801 carries a headboard that says ‘Bicentennial Train’. The back of the photo carries a caption in my dad’s handwriting, saying the photo was taken in December 1988. Now knowing something about the Flying Scotsman tour, I suspect that the train was probably on its way to Moss Vale, not far to the south of where the photo was taken, to meet up with Flying Scotsman and then run together, in parallel, back up to Sydney.

I might have been too young to properly comprehend that. But there’s another photo in an old album that might hold an explanation; it was sent to me by my grandfather (a lifelong train enthusiast), who lived in the Blue Mountains. It shows Flying Scotsman, in a double-header with 3801, on tracks close to Grandpa’s house. Yep, both locomotives. I was not there.

I think I’ve simply conflated my own memories of seeing a train going past with that photo from Grandpa, and put Flying Scotsman in my mind somewhere it never was. And once the false memory was seeded, by telling the story I’ve reinforced it. If you tell yourself something is true often enough, eventually you’ll believe it.

But it’s still a foundational memory for me. I remember the thundering noise, the smell of the oil, the sound of the whistle and the shaking of the ground. I remember the excitement as this big, green monster went past, and it inspired a lifelong love of steam trains – especially big green ones. That is all true. The important bits of what was it like remain intact in my memory, even if I don’t have all the details spot-on correct.

Human memory is an unreliable source. Oral histories probably aren’t very useful for exact details of the what and the when. But goodness, can they paint a picture of what it was like to be there.

Just make sure you check the records before relying on the details.

Oh, and those train wheels? Many years later Dad and I went on a heritage trip on 3801.

They’re still taller than me.

© 2024 Adam Purcell

Bomber Command Commemoration – Shrine of Remembrance, 2 June 2024

~ Adam Purcell ~ 1 Comment

The first Sunday in June has been the traditional day for Bomber Command commemorations at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra for more than 15 years now.  Sadly, getting up there was one interstate trip too many for me this year. But that did mean that I was able to go to the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne for the Victorian ceremony instead.

It was a good day. By my count, about 70 people were there; a reasonable turn-out, while still being small enough to enable the ceremony to be held in the Sanctuary, the main commemorative area of the Shrine. My understanding is that this is the first time this ceremony has been in the Sanctuary, and that, combined with the presence of a uniformed member of the Shrine Guard, gave the event particular solemnity.

The guest speaker was Squadron Leader Steve Campbell-Wright, a cultural historian and Shrine Governor. His address reflected on the act of remembrance itself, and how it’s changed over time. While it doesn’t actually appear In Laurence Binyon’s original poem For the Fallen, the phrase ‘Lest We Forget’ came to prominence in what’s now known as The Ode (which is actually the third and fourth stanzas of Binyon’s poem). The ‘Lest’ in Lest We Forget actually means ‘in fear of’. And as Campbell-Wright said, it’s the words that come immediately before it in The Ode that give ‘Lest We Forget’ that true meaning.

We Will Remember Them.

Without those preceding four words, Lest We Forget becomes meaningless.

We Will Remember Them – because we are fearful of what happens when we forget.

As I walked into the Sanctuary before the ceremony, a Shrine volunteer handed me a small red poppy. I placed it in a button hole on my coat. At the end of the ceremony, after the laying of wreathes and the singing of anthems, members of the public were invited to place their poppies into small vases next to the Stone of Remembrance, in the centre of the room, as their own tribute. But I kept mine on my coat.

And after mingling with a few people – including Marg McBean, daughter of the late veteran Lancaster pilot Lachie, who I met at one of these ceremonies in 2015 and later interviewed for the IBCC, and my good friend Robyn Bell – I went out the back door of the Shrine, to the first tree on the right.

Underneath it is the plaque for 463-467 Squadrons, to my knowledge the only specific memorial to the two Squadrons in Melbourne.

And that’s where I left my red poppy.

We Will Remember Them.

Lest We Forget.

© 2024 Adam Purcell

Ordinary Letters

~ Adam Purcell

At its heart, the story of the crew of B for Baker is one about fairly ordinary people caught up in quite extraordinary circumstances. It’s their very ordinariness, I think, that makes the story so fascinating. There are a lot of surviving primary sources about their flying careers when they were on the squadron – Operational Record Books, Night Raid Reports, logbooks and the like – but these, in the main, are official documents. Much less remains about their personal, ordinary lives: the letters and diaries and photographs that really bring the story to life.

I’m betting that when they were sitting in their rooms, pens in hand, airmen would have had no idea at all of how interesting the missives they created would be to people like me, so many decades later. Many of the wartime letters that I’ve read are fairly ordinary: enquiring about family members and favourite pets, asking for news of the local cricket team, benignly commenting about the weather. Wartime censorship necessarily limited what aircrew could say about their ‘work’ in Bomber Command, and a lot of them simply weren’t great writers in any case. But every now and then I’ll find a little nugget of information that I didn’t know: what they did on leave in London, for example, a mess song from the squadron or a description of the local pub. They might even reveal the name of their English bomb aimer’s wife or child; in at least one case like this, that little gem led directly to me tracing and contacting descendants of the family.  

Nearly eight decades later, those letters have assumed an entirely new significance. Newspapers have been called the ‘first draft’ of history; there’s a good argument for giving that description to personal correspondence as well, albeit on perhaps a smaller scale. Reading wartime letters can fill in gaps in the story, revealing what aircrew were doing and thinking when they were outside the remit of official records. They were never intended to be historical sources – but now they are.

I started writing in a journal again in March 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic first began to impact life in Melbourne. And a couple of months later, I began writing regular letters to my dad, who lives interstate. Why did I feel compelled to do that? What did I want to record? Something about the pandemic made me stop and think: here was the first time that I’d lived through a big, truly global, universal event. I suppose I wanted to preserve something of my experience of it, as an otherwise very ordinary citizen in Melbourne. It started something nice, too, a correspondence that we continue to this day – I received his latest just this week.

I’ve drawn deeply, in my Bomber Command work, from personal sources from ordinary people, so I realise the value of letters and diaries for future historians. The ordinary helps to make sense of and give human scale and dimensions to otherwise unfathomably complex events. But how will those future scholars find stuff about the coronavirus pandemic, for example, when in the modern digital world there’s not many personal communications that are saved in a form that someone might find in a dusty box in the attic?

A lot, if not all, of our personal communications these days take place via digital means – text message, WhatsApp group, emails – and these are typically not archived in any physical form the way a box of letters can be. I had more or less continuous WhatsApp messaging throughout the pandemic with two friends overseas, one in Scotland and one in the Netherlands. The transcripts of those conversations and the accompanying photos would be a useful personal source for a historian comparing responses to the pandemic in different countries. But that correspondence lives on my phone; it won’t be put away in a box somewhere. That’s a potential source that won’t be available to a historian in the future.

And so there, I think, was the motivation for me to start writing things down in some sort of physical form. But that brings up problems of its own. I wrote those letters at least partly intending that it could be packed away and found someday, by persons unknown, in the future. They are contemporary sources alright, being written at the times they describe. But can they truly be considered primary sources of and about their time, if the very purpose for which they were written was to archive that story?

That might be a question for a future post.

© 2024 Adam Purcell

Just far enough removed

~ Adam Purcell

My sister Jennifer, when visiting Uncle Jack’s grave in Lille, once described the man as the ‘Shadow in the Corner’: someone we were always aware of while growing up. We were told stories about him, we leafed through his little blue felt-covered logbook, we looked at fading black and white photographs of a young man in uniform and on Anzac Day, we pinned medals on the right-hand side of our chest and we marched in our village’s parade. During the minute of silence, Jack was the person we thought about.

We felt, and I think still feel, a personal connection to this man, despite never having met him and despite being, really, only distant relatives of his. Through this blog, I’ve been contacted by people who are more closely related to Jack than I am; he was one of nine children and there are many branches of the family tree. I’ve learned that there are many other people who think of him during their minute of silence, too.

That is no bad thing, and it’s partly why almost thirty years ago I dove into finding out more about Jack: so I can help to tell his story. But I’m not a direct descendent of his – to our knowledge, he never had any – and he was my grandfather’s uncle, not my grandfather. I didn’t grow up with him around, like the sons and daughters of the veterans I once knew. I didn’t see the effect that war had on him; I didn’t have to live with the person he might have become as a result. And I was far enough removed, in time and in family connection, that I didn’t experience how news of his death affected those he did live with. For those people, the shadow isn’t just in the corner on Anzac Day, the ‘one day of the year’, but it’s always there.

In my case, though, the extra level of removal from the story helps, I think. It allows me to look at things a bit dispassionately, and so perhaps more honestly. 2024 will see the 80th anniversary of the Lille operation from which Jack and his crew failed to return. That makes it a very very long time ago: it’s now almost (but not quite) outside of living memory. For me, that helps the thrill of the hunt for more information to outweigh the sheer horror of what might be found next. The official records, for example, contain some quite gruesome details of what happened to the bodies of the crew, for example. The distance in time makes it a lot easier to be pragmatic about that: this really happened, this is what war does to people.   

That makes me lucky in a way. I’m a close-enough relation to a member of Bomber Command – to the point that I share a surname – to feel a personal connection to that person and his story. But at the same time I’m far enough away that any emotional response to it can be tempered somewhat. And perhaps that allows me to get a little closer to the real story.

© 2024 Adam Purcell