My name is Richard Edwin Boyd.
I served in the Royal Air Force.
I was a pilot.
This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note,
Stating that unless they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland,
A state of war would exist between us.
I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received,
And that, consequently, this country is at war with Germany.
September 3rd, 1939, I sat with my parents and listened to the Prime Minister declare war.
My father burst into absolute anger.
He was a five-year World War I veteran.
And he said, “We can’t do it!
We don’t have the money!”
So, we went on, and for the next six months or so, we weren’t seeing anything.
They used to call it a “phoney war”.
And then, Dunkirk occurred.
The British Expeditionary Force had been assisting France in their defense
against Germany’s relentless onslaught.
But by May of 1940, the remaining French and British forces
found themselves pushed back to the shore, trapped between their enemy and the sea.
A miraculous evacuation at Dunkirk saved the lives of some 300,000 Allied troops.
But the defense of France was a failure, and only the English Channel
now stood between German forces and Great Britain.
We lost our army.
At that point, the government formed the Home Guard.
This was a civilian battalion to defend Great Britain.
I volunteered.
I was issued a uniform and a rifle.
I attended drills.
Now, all that time, people were building bomb shelters,
People were going to volunteer for the military.
If you didn’t volunteer, you got drafted anyway.
So, the whole of Britain went into war mode.
Before the war, I was a very good soccer player.
And I was a member of a very well-known club in London: Dulwich Hamlet.
It was September 7th.
I had just finished a soccer game with my mates in the soccer stadium,
When one of the members looked up and said, “Hey!
The R.A.F. is putting on a good show.”
And there, coming up the River Thames, you could see this giant fleet of airplanes.
It wasn’t the R.A.F.
It was the Luftwaffe making its first entry to bomb Britain.
This was the beginning of the Blitz.
And they came sometimes by daylight, but primarily in the evening and night,
When it could be most disruptive.
In my first real incident there, the alarms went off,
and I went to hide in a tunnel under the railroad.
And unfortunately, a bomb dropped on one side or the other of the tunnel entrance.
We got blown back fifteen or twenty feet from the blast.
That was my first introduction to the war.
You learned to live with that.
But England was determined that they would fight to the very end.
Fearing he would be placed in the infantry, realizing the draft was imminent,
Richard took matters into his own hands, and turned his attention to the skies.
On April 21st, 1941, I went into a Royal Air Force recruiting center and volunteered for air crew.
And I became 1443828 Airman Boyd, Pilot Trainee.
I did eight weeks ITW: Initial Training Wing.
The aircraft was the Tiger Moth, a wood-canvas, single engine airplane.
I was about to solo in the Tiger Moth, and to my surprise, I was told to stop flying.
Then I was told that I had been selected to go to America to finish training in the Army Air Corps.
Richard and 4,000 other British pilots were selected for a training program in the United States,
where they could safely train with the US Army Air Corps, far beyond the Luftwaffe’s reach.
On arrival at Turner Field, we embarked on the eight-week course, learning to be a pilot.
At that point, I was selected for multi-engine advanced training.
You either went single-engine and ended up with fighters and other things,
Or you had multi-engine and you went to Bomber Command.
Eight weeks passed very quickly.
I officially passed the American course for pilots.
On graduation, I received American wings.
Not only that, I received a commendation that I become an instructor in the Army Air Corps.
Right away, we started our professional life as flight instructors.
Training courses, lectures, flying, every day, six days a week.
Finally, there came the day when the colonel called us back in again,
And told us that the Army Air Corps now had sufficient members of their own
to carry on the training program, and that we would return to England.
I then reported for duty in England.
I was assigned to Bomber Command.
Now, when I moved to that point, that was where we were ordered to form a crew.
Now, you would think forming a crew is a very serious business, right?
Okay.
They put seventy air crew into a large room:
pilots, navigators, radio people, and twenty-or-so air gunners.
And then, the commanding officer addressed the pilots and said, “Choose your crew.”
So, we went around, talking to these different crew members.
My job was made somewhat easy.
Two air gunners came up to me and said,
“Sir, I want to be your mid-upper gunner, and Barry wants to be your rear gunner.”
“Why?”
He said, “Well, Sir, we checked the flying hours of all the pilots here,
And you have more flying hours than anybody, so we want to fly with you.”
So, that was a good indication.
But in very short order, we had a whole mixed crew,
and it was my job to make them work together.
Shortly thereafter, we received our orders to start operation.
The aircraft we were flying were Lancasters.
We were then ready for business.
Late October.
I did some five trips.
A mix of daylight and night trips.
The targets that we were assigned were fuel facilities and marshaling yards.
That was the targets that we attacked most of the time.
At the very beginning, we were attacked by a fighter.
It came in from the rear, and we got some fuselage damage.
But he only made one pass,
because my two guys made it unhealthy for him to come back again.
Much of our problem was the anti-aircraft.
November and December were the most difficult months.
I flew a total of twelve flights.
In the meantime, I rose to be the deputy of the squadron commander, there.
And my crew were very good.
They all were excellent in their profession.
I did a total of about eleven day fights
and some twenty-two night flights over various parts of Germany.
In the briefing room, there was a very large blackboard
to which they attached the strafing routes when they did the briefings.
But on one side, there were other maps.
And they were the maps of Cambridgeshire.
Those maps showed all of the pubs, the hours they were open,
and when they had liquor - all on this map.
The reason for that was, there was rationing in England.
And each place quite often ran out of supplies.
So, we all went to celebrate after a trip, so we would consult the map.
“It’s Thursday.
It’s such-and-such time.
We’ll go and celebrate at this place because they’re going to get delivery today.”
So, we managed to stay human after all.
But returning from a mission did not always result in celebration.
Over the course of the Second World War,
the Royal Air Force Bomber Command suffered a 44% death rate.
Over 55,000 crewmen never returned home.
About the eighth trip - a daylight raid.
It was on the Rhine River somewhere.
My wingman took a direct hit and blew up right next to me.
On one of my trips, I was leading a group of three Australian crews.
And on the way back from Remagen, where we had said, “No bombing.”
Somewhere to the east of Calais, one of the Australian captains said,
“I’m going to bomb Calais.”
I said, "Negative. No. No.
You stay where you are.”
“Nope.
Why should I carried damned bombs all over the place?”
So, he peeled off and he went and flew over Calais, dropping his bombs.
He didn’t reach the other side of Calais.
The German ack-ack took him right out.
He was blown to smithereens, out of the sky, which cost him his life and his crew.
There was one day we got an emergency call
that the American troops had reached the borders of the River Rhine.
They were trying to get across, but the Germans were on the other side.
So, we were detailed to remove the Germans from the other side.
As we approached the Rhine, the leader of the formation called out to me and said,
“Hey, Dick.
Have you got a signal?”
He said, “I’ve lost my signal.”
And just as he was speaking, I lost the signal.
Now, if we lost the signal, we were not allowed to bomb.
That meant something was wrong.
So, we overflew the River Rhine, made a circle, and all headed back to base.
We found out on return, that in the time it took for us to get there,
The American troops had managed to find a way to cross the river,
and get the Germans away from that protected area.
If we’d bombed, we probably would’ve eliminated a division of the U.S. Army.
We finished the thirty-odd trips and I got a telegram, telling me
that I was no longer a member of bomber command.
I had been reassigned to transport command.
I took the train north and reported to Leconfield.
When I went to the airfield and reported to the guard,
the guy said, “Sir, the commanding officer isn’t here.”
I said, “What the heck.
What’s going on?”
He said, “Sir, it’s VE Day.
Everybody’s celebrating.”
So, I was directed to the downtown pub, where all the officers of the airfield
Were celebrating the great victory.
That’s how I started my transport command.
In May of 1945, a battered and disillusioned Germany finally surrendered,
and the war in Europe came to an end.
Richard would spend the remainder of the ongoing war against Japan
transporting Allied troops and supplies to India.
In the years following the war’s end, Richard would be highly decorated and honored.
He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross at the Queen’s birthday celebration,
and in 2018 was made the guest of honor at a ceremony in Washington D.C.
celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Royal Air Force.
But perhaps the greatest honor of Richard’s military service
is the knowledge that he was able to bring his entire crew home safely.
As a matter of fact, that’s one of the things I got after the war:
Correspondence and praise from the families of all the crew members,
That I’d brought their husbands, or whatever it was, through without injury.
I had a good, solid crew.
We all came back in one piece.
Throughout the Second World War,
Great Britain was the very picture of resilience and perseverance.
Having stood alone in the face of destruction,
its people pressed on and brought the fight back to their enemy.
Everybody was determined to make certain that England survived.
I would say that there was some sort of grim determination that they would get through it.
That’s all I can say.