Wings Over Wick
1939 - 1945
Airfield And Aircraft Defence

Roy Jack, Crosby, Liverpool
My unit was 2749 squadron RAF Regiment and our main job was airfield defence (probably against enemy invasion - which, as we now know, never materialised!).

I can remember us being on gun posts on the North Road. The guns were all rusty and impossible to fire and we never even had any ammunition for them, it was more or less, just like being on sentry duty.

I also remember the planes taking off from Wick for operations against German U-boats and German bases in the Norwegian fjords. The RAF planes at Wick which I remember, were Lockheed Hudsons and Whitley bombers and quite a lot were lost on operations, some of them even made it back almost to Wick, but crashed just short of the runway on the rocks around the coastline.

One incident I can remember, happened in the Autumn of 1942, when our Flight was detailed to be a search party to locate a Sunderland Flying Boat which was reported to have crashed somewhere in the hills of Sutherland.  We located the plane (with the help of a local shepherd).  All the crew and passengers were killed apart from the rear-gunner who miraculously escaped and managed to get to a farmhouse to raise the alarm. The reason it stands out in my memory is that one of the passengers who was killed in that case, was the late Duke of Kent (father of the present Duke).  We had to bring all the bodies down from the scene of the crash and they were transported back to Wick. The Duke's body was later transferred to Dunrobin Castle before it was taken by train to London.

My wife comes from Wick, we met in the YMCA canteen on the aerodrome, my wife's maiden name is Lorna Corbett and she lived locally near Wick and attended Wick High School. We were married in Liverpool in 1943.