One of the fascinating parts of The International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive is its Oral Histories Project.

Here you will find a large collection of interviews with those involved in the Bombing War, on all sides of the conflict. Those who served on the ground and in the air. The people who live near the airfields, also those working in the factories feeding the war machine, and those whose homes were in the target cities.

In their own words you will hear the men and women relate their memories of a difficult and contentious period of their lives. Their stories are told with great pride and often a wonderful sense of humour, tinged with sadness and loss.

The interviews usually take place in the comfort of the interviewees own home, with a third party present. The aim is for a relaxed, stress free interview, where the subject takes the lead. The interviewees are free to say as little or as much as they are willing.

Irene Howard

ARP Warden Irene Howard was interviewed in 2017. She told the story of the night she, aged 19, was off duty at home when Salford was bombed. Everyone was still in their homes, as the air raid siren had not been sounded. Whilst she described the destruction, horror, and loss, she also tells the hilarious tale of what happened to three Christmas puddings during the bombing.

Flight Lieutenant Reg Woolgar DFC

49 Squadron air gunner Reg Woolgar DFC was interviewed in 2016 when he paid a visit to the archive team. He spoke at length and in detail about his service with Bomber Command, and the experience of ditching in a Handley Page Hampden in 1942.

The interview with, aircraft factory worker, Susan Jones is a great testament to the role of many women in during the war. She relates her story with great wit and frank honesty.

Annie Moody interviewing Freddie Ball

When the archive team was formed in 2015 the goal was to conduct 100 interviews a year. Thanks to the dedication and determination of the archive’s volunteer interviewers around the world, we have conducted over 1000 interviews to date. More than half of these have been transcribed and over 300 are available on-line. The work continues.

Many of the people interviewed are sadly no longer with us, but their voices and stories are preserved for generations to come.

Peter Jones, Archive Assistant

Handwritten transcriptions

The IBCC Digital Archive is unusual in that its collections are described at item level and sometimes page level, and many are fully transcribed.

It is our aim to transcribe all our oral history interviews and written documents, and so far around one third of the items published in by the IBCC Digital Archive that contain text or spoken word include transcriptions.

This enables users of the archive to use ‘keyword’ or ‘exact match’ searches to find people, places, events, and all manner of things of historical interest far beyond what the cataloguer may have deemed worthy of including in a brief abstract or description of a document.

For example, where names have been written on the reverse of a photograph these will be discoverable through a transcription.

Each of the 81 aircrew in the photograph will now appear in searches of the IBCC Digital Archive.

Letters and telegrams have also been transcribed.

Sergeant Spencer Lewis Belton flew as an observer/ bomb aimer with 144 Squadron from RAF Hemswell. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal after an operation to Wilhelmshaven in July 1940. In this letter to his father, he discusses his radio interview with the BBC about his award.

Memoirs have been transcribed.

Betty Bascombe’s memoir includes information about her first husband, Ron Jones, who was killed in action 25 April 1944. Betty met her second husband, Bert Bascombe, when she was serving with the Auxiliary Territorial Service in Hamburg.

Betty Bascombe’s memoir includes information about her first husband, Ron Jones, who was killed in action 25 April 1944. Betty met her second husband, Bert Bascombe, when she was serving with the Auxiliary Territorial Service in Hamburg.

Some service documents have been transcribed.

This page from 44 Squadron’s Operations Order Book lists the duty personnel and crews and aircraft for operations and training for 2/3 June 1944.

As well as military and aviation historians, these transcriptions should make the IBCC Digital Archive of interest for people researching family history, and for social and cultural historians.

This level of detail would not be possible without our teams of dedicated volunteers. All have attended training sessions as it is important that different documents transcribed by different people are transcribed consistently. Training covers how to deal with spelling mistakes, insertions, underlining’s and the like. Some historical knowledge is required to recognise cultural references to people, equipment and events, and faded handwritten documents in 1940s cursive script can be hard to read until you learn to recognise the writer’s individual style. Transcribers can spend a long time trying to decipher a particular word, and they are among the first people to read these documents since the 1940s. Thanks should go to all our transcribers, but particularly to Tricia Marshall who recently transcribed 110 items in one month, and to Anne-Marie Watson who transcribed over 10,000 words over a single weekend.

Log books

Log books record aircrew flying hours, and during the war the RAF produced different types of log books for pilots, for navigators, air bombers and air gunners, and for observers and air gunners. They contain a record of every flight a single person undertook including training and operational flights. Day time flights were usually written in green ink and night time flights in red. Many aircrew numbered their operational flights to keep count of their tour of 30 operations. Although they were an official document, they are frequently annotated with comments such as ‘good prang’ or ‘attacked by night fighter’, and some also now contain photographs and newspaper cuttings.

A page from Leonard Dorricott’s Royal Canadian Air Force observer’s and air gunner’s flying log book from 27 November 1942 to 21 January 1946. It details his training schedule, instructional duties and operations flown. Len Dorricott trained as a navigator in Miami, Florida and completed 32 operations on tours with 460 and 576 Squadrons.

Log books are valuable historical sources and sometime change hands for large sums. However, the content of log books in the IBCC Digital Archive is searchable and available to download for free under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0).

The IBCC Digital Archive has already published over 30 log books, including a South African Air Force log book and several Royal Canadian Air Force books.

We have taken a slightly different approach to how log books have been included in the archive. Rather than transcribing the whole document, which would be very time consuming, they have been ‘data-mined’ for their content. Log books in the archive can be searched for aircraft flown, stations served at, squadrons, targets and operations using tags, keywords, and geolocation.

A page from Peter Bellingham’s log book. His log book covers his training and operational career as a of bomb aimer from 10 March 1943 to 21 February 1946. After training in South Africa he flew in Halifaxes and Stirlings with 138 Squadron, taking part in 30 night operations over Denmark, France, Germany, and Norway before becoming an instructor. As he flew operations with the Special Operations Executive, dropping supplies and agents into occupied Europe, his targets are unspecified. The outcomes are recorded as either as ‘Joy’ or ‘No joy’.

Unlike the majority of scans of historical documents available on the Internet, ours are published with an uninterrupted margin. This margin acts as an integrity check; users can verify for themselves that the scan has not been cropped, even if the original is no longer available for comparison.

Dan Ellin, Archive curator

Alfonsino ‘Angiolino’ Filiputti was born in 1924 at San Giorgio di Nogaro, a small town in the Friuli region of Italy. A promising painter from childhood, Angiolino was initially fascinated by marine subjects but his parents’ financial hardships forced an end to his formal education after completing primary school. Thereafter, he took up painting as an absorbing pastime.

When the war broke out, Angiolino depicted some of the most dramatic and controversial aspects of the conflict in a style characterised by frankness, flat rendering style, bold colours and a rudimentary expression of perspective. Events reported by newspapers, broadcast by the radio or spread by eyewitnesses, became the subject of colourful paintings, in which factual details were embellished by his own rich imaginings and sometimes intertwined with fictional details. Each work was accompanied by long pasted-on captions, so as to create fascinating works in which text and image were inseparable.  Many visual elements of his work alludes to the time-honoured tradition of cantastoria (lit. ‘story-singer’), who would tell stories in public places to whoever gathered around, while gesturing to a series of images produced by the ‘story-singer’ for this purpose.

20 August 1944. Big formations of RAF aircraft en route to Bavarian targets, hindered by batteries based at Grado. San Giorgio di Nogaro, Udine province. Tempera on paper. Four aircraft have been coned by searchlights amidst scattered bursts of shells. The countryside is an indistinct mass of darkness, highlighted by sparse yellow highlights.

20 January 1945. Early night attack on the city centre of Udine, as seen from San Giorgio di Nogaro. Tempera on paper
In striking contrast with the serene and peaceful night sky, the composition is dominated by an ominous yellow glow with red dashed lines of anti-aircraft fire. Ghoulish mulberry trees, a common feature of the Friuli rural landscape, are silhouetted against the fires.

10 November 1944. RAF bombers attack the Latisana Bridge guided by target indicators.
Tempera on paper.
The slow, inexorable descent of target indicators is skilfully contrasted with bursts of the first explosions amongst buildings illuminated by a sinister reddish light. The bridge is merely hinted at, and the Tagliamento river is barely discernible in the bottom right corner.

This corpus is an extraordinary account of how the war was translated into images by a young man of Friuli, who allows us to tap into the popular society of wartime Italy. He explored a broad range of subjects, including the sinking of the SS Conte Rosso by HMS Upholder (P37), the Laconia incident (a series of events surrounding the loss of the eponymous British troopship) and well-known Bomber Command operations such as the bombing of Dresden and the attacks of the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams led by Victoria Cross recipient Guy Gibson. Other works focus on Nazi brutalities, the deeds of the resistance movements, as well as civilian life in wartime Europe: bomb disposal units and British evaders being helped by civilians. The emotional intensity of the events depicted emerges strongly from each image, in striking contrast with its simple, unaffected and unsophisticated treatment.  After the war, however, interest in his work declined and Angiolino grew increasingly disenchanted as he lamented the lack of recognition accorded his art, of which he was proud. He died in 1999, resentful and embittered.

The aestheticisation of violence has been the subject of considerable controversy and debate for centuries. On top of that, Angiolino’s art was never intended a mechanical translation of reality into a durable medium – his temperas where intended to engage society and to influence it. For instance he translated into rich images the actions of Partisans, in doing so preserving the memory of the struggle for liberation and protecting it from misrepresentations, downplaying or illegitimate appropriations. The temperas may prompt further exploration of the complexity of our attitudes toward war and conflict and may offer historians and sociologists new perspectives on the meaning of violence in the context of the mass conflicts of the 20th century, indicating that what may be unproblematic in one victorious country was difficult and controversial elsewhere. The collection is probably unique in Italy and there are few comparable examples in other countries in continental Europe.

The IBCC Digital Archive would like to express gratitude to Anna and Stefano Filiputti, the children of Angiolino Filiputti; Alessandra Bertolissi, wife of the late Pierluigi Visintin the art critic who rediscovered Angiolino’s work; and Pietro Del Frate, mayor of San Giorgio di Nogaro, where the temperas are now on permanent display.

Alessandro Pesaro, Digital Archive Developer

Laura Morelli is a contemporary artist who started her journey building relational machines: from deconstructing electronic toys for children to applying robotic technology. Since 2003 she has taken a keen interest in social issues working with people whom she shares the creative process with. In 2006, Laura founded and became president of the cultural association Di +, a charity whose core mission is promoting and delivering relational artistic projects.Laura has been officially invited to visit the IBCC Digital Archive on 5 September 2018, to addend its official launch. The interview was conducted by Alessandro Pesaro.

Laura, when your interest in aerial warfare started?

In 2005 I was shown a photograph taken inside a shelter in Dalmine, a little town in the Bergamo area. That image set something in motion and I soon discovered a host of stories of people who found themselves at the receiving end of the bombing war in Italy. I was instantly fascinated by the memories of bombing survivors in my family and determined to turn them into an art project. Thus “Bunker” was born in 2006.

Was it a one-off experience?

Quite the opposite. Bunker is part of a lifelong interest in some interconnected topics, namely human destructivity, violence, how people cope with suffering and grief, and the transformative power of art. My interest in social exclusion and silenced voices did the rest.

Is there a gender issue in the memorialisation of the bombing war?

Absolutely. While researching the bombing war in the Bergamo area I became aware of an obvious male / female inbalance: the predominant narrative is about male experiences narrated by male voices. Needless to say, women were those who bore the brunt of the war. The impact on their lives was multifarious because they found themselves in different roles: mothers, wives, widows, sisters, housemakers and caregivers. Despite the length and intensity of their suffering, their grieving process remains largely unrecognised.

How did you address this issue?

Contemporary art is all about suggesting new way of thinking, challenge preconceptions, force reflection, disrupt certainties, and explore the contradictions of the contemporary wold. On the other hand, crocheting is a time-honoured traditional craft, imbued with nurturing and protective connotations. Babies’ clothing is traditionally crocheted at home, thus resonating with motherhood, family, new life, and future. On top of that, this is a craft most women are already familiar with, hence regarded as natural and non-intimidating. Here my relational approach to art came into play: working with someone rather than for someone. So, why not crocheting a bomb?

Firstly, we carefully researched Allies’ weaponry. Size and shape of the bombs match those of the actual devices dropped on Italian targets but this was the only constrain: all patterns and textures have been devised by the women involved in the project, who have chosen colours and decorative motifs according to their own taste. Some women started from paper patterns, others used polystyrene templates. The craft is practiced according with the woman’s preferences, someone alone, others else in small groups, by women chit-chatting or simply enjoying each other presence. The rhythm of crocheting is slow as to suggest a thoughtful, healing experience even when the ‘offensive shape’ of a bomb was taking place. Lastly, fibres were impregnated with a synthetic resin strong enough to preserve the shape of the bombs without obscuring their delicate needlework texture. Once the resin has set, the bombs become free-standing structures which can be put on a pedestal or hanged.

Communal crocheting at Scuola della nonna, Bergamo. Photo Giovanni Diffidenti / Di+

A crochet bomb is a subtle visual play and gender allusions are transparent: by using a quintessentially feminine craft, women give shape to an object which has an obvious masculine overtone. Creation and destruction are inextricably intertwined. The delicate, fragile, almost ethereal substance of the bomb contrasts with its heavy metallic substance and ominous shape, the latter universally understood as a symbol of death, suffering and destruction. The result was stunning and the artworks resemble more hot air balloons than bombs. Lightweight and colourful, they suggest playfulness; on the other hand, they can almost be carried away by the same air through which real bombs hissed down in wartime. In this sense, they have a poetic quality.

Crochet bombs on display at Dalmine, Biblioteca Comunale. 2006. Photo: Giovanni Diffidenti / Di+

Installation at Milan Hippodrome. 2014.

What about the women who were involved in the project?

Women came on board for different reasons: some were at the receiving end of the bombing war, others have family ties with survivors, others were keen to explore new ways to reconnect with their past, like the group of nuns belonging to the same religious order which gave shelter to those who were orphaned as consequence of the raids. What struck me most is the fact that all the 70 women who partook in the project showed up at different official openings and took a tremendous sense of pride in their work. People in the 50 to 70 age group do not seem to be the standard patronage of contemporary art exhibitions, but their response was overwhelming and the sense of community palpable.

Where are the crochet bombs now?

After the end of the 2006-2007 delivery phase, some bombs were bought by collectors, other toured various locations, one is on permanent display inside the “Bunker Breda” a network of underground shelters now used as educational facility. In 2016 a group was on temporary display at the Milan Catholic University: bombs were hung inside the university chapel, suspended along the nave as to suggest a descending line toward the altar. Putting the bombs on display inside a Catholic church amplified the message of the installation and added a new dimension to it, especially at a juncture when catholic priests were killed by terrorists.

Installation at Milan Catholic University. 2016. Photo: Mattia Rubino

Bombs are currently on the display at the “CONTEXTO” collective art exhibition (Edolo, 14 July – 9 September).

A final thought, please…

Silence is rooted in many reasons: art can find the right words to say it.

Alessandro Pesaro, Digital Archive Developer