I began work in the Operational Research Section (ORS) of the British Royal Air Force's Bomber Command on July 25, 1943. I was 19 years old, fresh from an abbreviated two years as a student at the University of Cambridge. The headquarters of Bomber Command was a substantial set of red brick buildings, hidden in the middle of a forest on top of a hill in the English county of Buckinghamshire. The main buildings had been built before the War. The ORS was added in 1941 and was housed in a collection of trailers at the back. Trees were growing right up to our windows, so we had little daylight even in summer. The Germans must have known where we were, but their planes never came to disturb us.
I was billeted in the home of the Parsons family in the village of Hughenden. Mrs. Parsons was a motherly soul and took good care of me. Once a week, she put her round tin bathtub out on her kitchen floor and filled it with hot water for my weekly splash. Each morning I bicycled the five miles up the hill to Bomber Command, and each evening I came coasting down. Sometimes, as I was struggling up the hill, an air force limousine would zoom by, and I would have a quick glimpse of our commander in chief, Sir Arthur Harris, sitting in the back, on his way to give the orders that sent thousands of boys my age to their deaths. Every day, depending on the weather and the readiness of the bombers, he would decide whether to send their crews out that night or let them rest. Every day, he chose the targets for the night.
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