Your everyday working life is, or was if you’ve retired, getting up out of bed, getting dressed for work and then heading off. At the end of the day you’d come home. It would be a shocking experience if you, or any of your work mates suffered some sort of reasonably serious work place accident. That would really throw you.

But if you were a crew member of a Lancaster bomber flying regular bombing missions over Germany, you would have been surprised if you went on even a couple of missions without seven men that you knew, crew of one of the bombers in your unit, didn’t return from a mission, probably dead. Captured if they were lucky.

Even today having a job in the Australian Defence Forces, the Police, the Fire Brigade, their work contract has a clause you won’t find in your employment contract. They are required to lay down their lives, if needed, in carrying out their duty.

I remember an eye witness during the September 11 attack on the twin towers saying something that he saw that staggered him. The man said that he watched people running from the buildings. That’s what you’d expect. He also watched the fire brigade and the police arriving at the buildings and running into the buildings, and almost certainly to their deaths. The Christian ethic of loving your neighbour, that these firefighters were putting into effect, couldn’t be further from what a lot of people promote today as the ideal – the ‘me’ culture. No way would a ‘me’ person be laying down their lives for others – for complete strangers.

And these men grew up in a society where death at childbirth, from disease, accidents etc were taken as part of life. Prince Philip made a speech on the 50thAnniversary of VJ Day in 1995 – the victory over Japan in the Pacific. Today we more modestly call it VP Day, Victory in the Pacific, so as not to offend the Japanese. Personally I think the Japanese are made of stouter stuff than that. Prince Philip, in his speech, told one of his truths about what it’s like to be a fighting man in war – a truth that still holds true today.

“It was part of the fortunes of war. We didn’t have counsellors rushing around every time somebody let off a gun, asking ‘Are you all right – are you sure you don’t have a ghastly problem?’ You just got on with it.”

In this programme I’m going to tell you about what it was like getting ready to fly a bombing mission over Nazi occupied Europe.

Tag words: Lancaster bomber; VJ Day; Thermite bombs; Rolls Royce Merlin engines; Don McNaughton; Vic Trimble;