Pilot’s Memoirs – Geoff Bibby

Question: Geoff, what were you doing when war broke out, and how did you join up?

Well, in 1939 I was down at university in Christchurch, and then in 1940 I went teaching for a year and a half before I did my initial training up at Waiouru for the army. After that I was called up and we went down to Greytown with 12th Field Regiment of the New Zealand Artillery, where I was classified as a specialist. Now a specialist is one of these people who work out all the angles for the gunners, and eventually they decided that I was to be a bombardier. And from there I was sent off to OCTU, [Officer Cadet Training Unit] and strangely enough qualified as a 2nd Lieutenant. This was the beginning of 1943, I think it was, or ‘42 … end of ‘42. And after that with the Japanese threat receding, I was offered the chance of staying with the army or transferring to the RNZAF [Royal New Zealand Air Force] and I chose that as I’ve always wanted to go flying.

And so in 1943 I went over to Canada and trained as a navigator at Portage la Prairie, which is about seventy or eighty miles west of Winnipeg. At the end of my training there I went over to England; did the normal initial training. And then after a while, with a lot of training and crewing up and so on, with three other New Zealanders and three RAF boys I was posted to 101 Squadron, which is one of the famous squadrons of the RAF; and at that particular time it was the Special Duties Squadron where we carried an extra operator who was a German speaker. He listened in to the transmissions from the ground for the German fighters, and either jammed the frequency or altered and issued extraneous alternative instructions, I’ll put it that way. Everything went well on the squadron, nothing untoward happened. We went on ops [operations] of course after a lot of training, and we had some very interesting experiences.

But one I’d like to mention was a trip to Potsdam [in Germany] which was on 14th April 1945, almost at the end of the war. Going out everything was fine … perfect conditions, and I was able as the navigator to calculate the wind directions and speed. And I thought everything could not have been better all the way from England right through to Potsdam. But over the target there was a big explosion at the back of the aeroplane, and we thought. ‘Uh oh, we’ve been hit’, but we checked everything but no damage at all. But we’d lost all electrics in the plane including all NAVAID. [Navigational aid] And we thought, ‘Well how do we get back?’ And I said, “Well it doesn’t matter – we know exactly what the wind is all the way out; absolutely steady from about three-thirty degrees for about twenty knots.” I said, “We’ll just use those winds going back.” And after about … oh, three or four hours I said to the pilot, “Well base should be down below.” And much to my amazement, there was base; and we just could not believe it, and I thought I was an absolutely shit-hot navigator. But we then went down into interrogation and debriefing, and they said, “Did you find that huge wind change coming back?” I said, “What wind change?” He said, “Well coming back, instead of being three-thirty degrees at about fifteen knots it turned out to be about a hundred and eighty degrees – almost reciprocal – at about fifty knots.” I said, “Oh … I don’t know. I can’t understand this because we just used the wind speeds and direction from the outward trip.” He said, “Well basically, you should be ditching well north of Scotland at this particular time and running out of fuel, because if you’d applied the normal navigation you would’ve gone slightly to the right of track; but then with the wind coming from the other direction everything would’ve been magnified.” So I said, “Well – here I am.”

So we thought, ‘Well I wonder what did happen?’ So next day we did a compass swing. Now when you do a compass swing the aeroplane is physically moved around and they check the known headings and so on, and note what the direction is on the compasses. Well when we did this we found that the compass was exactly twenty-three degrees out, but in my favour, and so therefore going back, automatically the compass error had compensated for this terrific wind change. And so I have always said, on the particular trip I had another chap sitting alongside me.

Yes, it would be most amazing to get one compensating the other.

Exactly. And that’s exactly what did [happen], and we ended up exactly over base as we should’ve done, so it couldn’t’ve been a better ending to the trip.

Have you got any more tales like that?

I have, but I’m not going to tell you them. [Laughter] But no, I’m not going to tell you how I took the aeroplane across the stream one night – I’m not going to tell you about that. Again, there were about three people sitting alongside me that night.

Well, you’ve whetted our appetite … why can’t you tell us?

My crew would kill me. [Chuckle] Yes – but anyway, we got away with it, I’ll put it that way. It was a very interesting experience for me, the whole lot. We had four New Zealanders in the crew as I said before, and three RAF boys. One of the New Zealanders has died now, and one of the RAF gunners has died, but we still keep very closely together; it’s a very closely knit crew still. And without a doubt … especially the two New Zealanders left behind … are my greatest friends, obviously.

That’s something the young people of today don’t understand, the camaraderie …

That’s exactly right, of the Forces generally. You had to rely on your mates, and they relied on you.

That’s right. Well – you obviously finished the war and came home …

I finished the war – or the war finished me – and I came home. But in the meantime I had been captured by an English girl, and she came out and we were married out here. She never really settled, so we went back to England where I joined the RAF, and had another twenty-two years with the RAF on Air Defen[ce]. And that was very interesting too, because with the Cold War on, we naturally had to be very closely watching the skies over Britain, and intercepting any Russian ‘bears’ as they were called … reconnaissance aircraft that were coming close to Britain at that particular time.

The technical, logical part of the Force would’ve been changing … rapid growth at this stage?

It was, yeah. An interesting time of course; this may be away from the actual brief that we had, but I was in charge of a radar unit overlooking the air corridors going into Berlin at the time of the Cuban crisis. We had to monitor all the aircraft flying into Berlin because we had to ensure that the Russians did not interfere with the aircraft that had already been cleared to fly in there. But not only that, we were there because if they had’ve, it was decreed that we would be fighting our way back into Berlin, which probably would’ve meant the start of World War III.

And when your twenty-two years with the RAF ended, what did you do?

After the twenty-two years I came back, and between the war and going back to the RAF I trained as a teacher, so went back teaching, and was teaching in this area mostly, although I did have a stint down in Wellington.

Thank you, Geoff – anything else you’d like to tell us of?

No, [chuckle] is that all right? Okay?