Thread by @AdamWagner1

On #DDay75 and I want to share a story of how my maternal grandpa Fred Balcombe played a small but significant role in the events of 5 June 1945.

Here is a handsome picture of him from his RAF ID Card

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I have copies of many of his original documents which I will post to the tweets.

The information comes from interviews I did with him for a school project when I was 13. He found it difficult to talk about his war experiences. He lost many friends.

A quick precis of Fred's war story. At 29 he was relatively old when the war started so he volunteered.
Although he was born in the East End, being Jewish and having close foreign relations he was a "nationality case" so it took until Nov 1940 for him to be accepted into the RAF

He wasn't the only member of his family to serve - in fact six of his eight siblings also did. Here is a newspaper story to prove that!

Fred started as an Air Raid Warden in Bury and then trained as a wireless operator, he said in the Palace Theatre in Blackpool Tower.

He was posted as to Bomber Command Station No. 5 Group under Airmarshal (later 'Bomber') Harris

Fred was stationed to HQ15 in Liverpool, which suited him as his pregnant wife was back in Manchester. This was the operational base of the Battle of the Atlantic. He then went down to Devon for a commissioning course. Now 31, he found the training tough and became known as 'Pop'

Here is a copy of a Christmas menu he kept from Liverpool!

As a new officer, he was posted on a flying boat squadron in Northern Ireland at Loch Erne, then to the Hebrides from 1942-1944 - moving around the islands particularly Benbecula and Tiree. During that time, an air crew containing his best friend Johnny Bacon was killed.

Here is the crew that was lost, all of them were his friends. Also a letter from a friend saying that what he had heard "is only too horribly true".

Why the Hebrides? Here comes the bit which is relevant to #DDay75.

518 Squadron, of which Fred was the Adjutant, were flying Meteorological flights 700 miles due west to get the weather at 20,000 feet.

This is how they predicted the weather in the English Channel in June 1944

Weather obs from Tiree led to D Day being postponed, from 4 to 6 June. Bad weather would have compromised the operation, and changed the course of the war.

Fred remembered the report for 6 June being of a "slight clearance" but Eisenhower took the chance
aniodhlann.org.uk/wp-content/upl…

After Tiree, Fred was posted to Gibraltar (he is marked as "me" on the photo on the right)

Fred was eventually decommissioned in January 1946 and remembered getting a "paltry" sum of £86 "even in those days".

Many people played a role in #DDay75 and Fred's was a minor but significant one. I share this as he died almost 19 years ago today. I was always proud of his and my other grandparents' contribution.

Happy ending: he went on to be Mayor of Manchester - here he is in his pomp 🙂

He's a nice pic which my mum just sent to me - Fred is fourth from the left on the top row. Great moustache, wish I could grow one like that 😊

And of course it wasn't just the men who served, though all of the pictures above are of men. Here is a wonderful picture of my grandma Rhoda Jaffe (later Balcombe, when she married Fred) who also served in the RAF

A further reflection on #DDay75 and war in general. My grandparents' generation understood the true meaning of war - the overwhelming sense I got from hearing Fred's story was of painful memory and loss, certainly not heroism (he didn't in any way see himself in this way)...

... One thing which also came through was the profound gratitude his generation of British Jews had to the Allies for defeating Hitler. It's easy to look at smiling pictures and forget that if D-Day had gone the other way these people would have been in death camps within months

... Fred's story was remarkable - from London's East End (his father grew up in an orphanage) to mayor of one of our major cities, but I think that tradition of civil service and giving back was one which many people who lived through WW2 emerged with. True heroes in my book.

... And when I say heroes, I don't mean in a jingoistic sense, but in a very personal one. They did what they had to do, what was necessary, and in the end it changed them and our world's future. I almost certainly wouldn't be around today if they didn't. So thank you.

And if there is a lesson for today, it must be to do everything we can to prevent this happening again, but also to build a society where the hatred which led to WW2 can never gain the foothold it did across Europe in the 1930s. Let's get to work!

Whilst you are here (and because I'm getting insistent text messages from my family) here is a story from Fred's later legacy, of playing a role in changing the law so the Sikhs were exempt from the new rules about wearing motorcycle helmets. I love this story

Oh and here we are together I guess when I was about 2/3. Fred died when I was 19 - he was 89.