The Ient Family: Family History

The RAF & The War

In June 1940, I was in the RAF and did my initial training and finished being posted to RAF Sutton Bridge in Lincolnshire for further training, on old Hurricanes. This was a training squadron, and I was there til about that April. One evening we went to Wisbech, about 7 or 8 miles away on the border of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. There was a dance. It was Christmas time. I had no transport of course, it's pitch black. Luckily, a civilian chap offered to loan me his bicycle, so I says great. So I cycled all the way down to this dance at Wisbech, and had a great time. I locked the bike up and took me greatcoat off and put it on the bike and went into the dance and had a great time. I came out of the dance and found somebody had stolen me greatcoat. Inside me great coat was the lamp for the bicycle, my scarf, my hat and the keys to the bicycle. The back wheel was locked. So I got that off and picked up this bike. It was freezing, perishing cold I remember, and I walked across the fens back to the camp. I had to walk all the way back to the camp rolling the bike along on front wheel. Without any greatcoat on, I was blue with cold when I got back. I reported the fact that somebody had taken my greatcoat to the sergeant, and he says, 'Well, you know what to do.' I says, 'No.' He said, 'Well, go back and pinch somebody else’s!'  That was the advice I got in the RAF [laughs], which I never did. I had to go to the stores and draw a new coat. In those days, you paid for the one that you lost and you had to pay for the one that replaced it! They deducted six pence a week off my pay until they were both paid for! My pay was three shillings & nine pence a day [about 19p in today's money] by this time because I was a rigger. So I learnt a lesson there. After that everything was nailed down!

They wanted riggers in the Middle East, so I volunteered for the posting. So they gave us a week’s leave and we reported to Liverpool. When we got there, our draft had gone. So then we were milling about waiting for a ship. Anyway, eventually we got on board this ship and the convoy sailed from Liverpool, and we joined a convoy to South Africa. Our first shore leave was at Durban. We had a good time there. After this, one part of the convoy went north straight up to the north to the desert, and the other half of the convoy, which I was in, that finished up in Singapore. Well this was about June, July time in 1941, which was before it was attacked by the Japanese.

Eventually war broke out in the Far East and I was captured in Java. We stayed in Java for about six months, then we were sent back to Singapore, put on another ship and were transported up to Japan. We finished up on a small island on the Inland Sea of Japan called Innoshima, which was 30 miles away from Hiroshima where the first atomic bomb was dropped. At the end of the war, we were taken to Tokyo and we were put on an aircraft carrier and taken down to Sydney in Australia, and from there we went home by ship. We were home in time for Christmas, 1945. When we arrived in England, they gave us our ration cards and a railway warrant to travel to Sunderland.


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