Squadrons

Dear Sue,
My Dad (Cpl. Dickie Carter) was also at Manston August 1940. He also did not really invite long discussion about it. I was born in 1947,and My Dad passed on in 1983. I can’t help you much, but I will pass on to you what I remember my Dad’s telling me. BTW My Dad never took himself at all seriously. He used to tell us that some “men” had disobeyed orders by hiding “in the woods” and refusing to come back to the base (which was being bombed incessantly). He never said anything about “caves”. When some of the “disobedient” men did in fact return to camp, My Dad was told to lock them up in a sort of jail that they had there. My Dad used to tell us how this was a very difficult order for him to follow because he didn’t know where the cell door keys were kept. He told us about one man, who he was supposed to be locking up, actually helping him out “they’re on the top of the filing cabinet, Dickie” the punished man told my Dad helpfully, from inside the cell – and he was quite right~ the keys were there! I was only very young at the time so of course my understanding was pretty limited. I asked my Dad why “the men were scared” and my Dad told me, pretty ruefully, “Oh, if you had been there, you would have been pretty scared too, I think!” My Dad actually worked on radar, but he had had RAF security rammed into him so firmly that he never even used the ‘R” word with his own children – instead, he would tell us that he was involved with “direction finding” and “mass observation”
Another of my Dad’s vivid stories may have happened somewhere other than Manston (because he was also posted at Birchington for a while, and may be other bases as well). But equally, it may have been Manston. The story stays in my mind because it illustrates so well a sort of love-hate schizophrenia that my Dad and his buddies had about officers. they certainly didn’t love their officers – but they did greatly admire them. My Dad was often involved with NAAFI-type ad hoc entertainments. He used to tell us about one performance that was interrupted by a screeching air raid. All the men in the audience leapt up and ran for the doors – there were four doors in each of the walls of the hall where the entertainment was taking place. The men were in such a panic that there could eaily have been a jam around one of the doors. My Dad remembered one officer “with a voice of thunder” who just got up and said “Sit Down!” and the men meekly did so, while bombs were falling all around. The officer then proceeded to organize their hasty exit from the hall, as they had been previuously trained to do, in single file. This story was told me as a sort of object lesson along the lines of “You must listen to the voice of authority” – not a very winning sentiment in the 1960s!
My conclusion is that there was extreme panic and, for a good few days, a general indifference to orders issued – but nothing along the lines of an organized mutiny, no. Things were going in that direction perhaps, but the reality was never more than a sort of petrified and terrified disobedience. I notice that neither my Dad nor his buddies had a very positive idea of MI5 and MI6 – quite the reverse – they were the men who could easily have caused {my Dad’s} death simply to satisfy some scheme of “disinformation” to confuse the Germans. My Dad has long since passed on, but I would (now) have loved to have asked him whether he believed that the RAF was maintaining Manston purely and simply to throw the Germans off the scent of Biggin Hill and Bentley Priory (which would, for the Luftwaffe, have been very much more valuable targets than poor old Manston)!