TOO MANY TO FORGET
by Roy Buchanan
If the RAF Fighter Command became immortalised as The Few, Bomber Command should be immortalised as The Many. During the war 55,573 members of Bomber Command were killed, that is more than the entire RAF today. Their average age was 22. These young men showed supreme courage and top-quality flying skills protecting our country from one of the most potently wicked regimes the world has ever known.
Helped by his daughter Caroline, John Meller has written a wartime memoir, The Boy With Only One Shoe. He was only 18 when he joined the RAF and volunteered for Bomber Command. The image on the front cover shows a Lancaster bomber struggling to return from Germany, badly damaged with an engine on fire. The author was on that plane. Now 96, he lives with his wife Barbara in South Wales. They have been married for 71 years. He admits he was lucky; he survived the war. Those who didn’t are too many to forget.
He came from Warrington where his mother owned a tobacconist’s shop and his father was in the Lancashire Fusiliers. His story will tell you of family harmony in the 1930s before moving onto the comradeship of service life, the banter among the aircrew that he enjoyed so much but disturbs the reader when he describes the horror of aerial warfare. Eating with friends before a night raid but counting the empty places at the breakfast table.
John was young when he suffered these emotions. They never left him. They revisited him with a vengeance on 28th June 2012 when he attended the unveiling of the Bomber Command Memorial in London’s Green Park. “Sixty-five years overdue.”
Although John reminds us what the nation suffered during winter of 1946/47 when very heavy snow brought the country to a standstill, he recalls the good times too. We smile at hearing of his first car, an Austin, followed by an MG. RAF lads liked sports cars. John goes into the dewy-eyed romantic mode explaining how he met his wife. Love at first sight is a hackneyed expression that some believe only happens in Hollywood. Not so, it happens in real life and John and Barbara are the living proof.
This book is multi-faceted. It looks at people and the society in which they live. It portrays the regret of an unavoidable war and describes the unpleasantness of European politics during post-war redevelopment.
Published in 2020 and available from Amazon at £9.99, the proceeds are donated to the Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund.
Having read John’s book, it will remain on my shelf because it is far more than a wartime memoir. Please buy it.