F/Lt. Fred Spackman, Croft Control Tower 

The following biography and memoirs were graciously submitted by Daphne, daughter of Flight Lieutenant Fred N. Spackman, who worked in the Control Tower at Croft.

My father's first love was flying.  When he was grounded due to sinus problems at high altitude, he was devastated, but was sent to Officer training.  I know when those crews went up, his heart was with them.  He didn't talk much about the war.  Of the 5 good buddies he had in flight training, 3 were shot down and killed. 

Fred with Tiger Moth, High River Alberta, 1942

He enlisted in July 1941, at Camrose, Alberta. His training and assignments took him too many parts of Canada. He left Halifax on The Empress of Canada and arrived in Liverpool in July of 1944. He was assigned to Croft in the RCAF Sixth Group Bomber Command in Yorkshire and served in the flying control office there until V.E. Day on May 8, 1945.  At that time he volunteered to go to the Far East.  Squadron training was to commence back in Canada, so he sailed on the Ile de France back to Halifax at the end of June 1945. While awaiting training in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, the US bombed Japan bringing an end to the war.  He was discharged in September 1945.

Flying suit 1943

My father had the heart of a healer, and went on to become a physician, church leader, mayor and community leader.  He had 2 children at the end of the war.  He and my mother went on to have 5 more.  He accomplished so much in his life after the war that I have sometimes wondered if, in some small way, he was trying to live the lives that others would never have the chance to live.  He passed away in 2008 at age 90.

I suppose one of the most exciting experiences was in March of 1945.  We had had all of our planes got out and came back and the airport at Croft was safely tucked in, until 2 am, when Bomber Command called over the scrambler telephone that they were sending RAF planes north and to land as many as we could. After a big raid in Germany, several German fighters had joined the stream of aircraft as they came back to England and the Germans were shooting them down as they attempted to land. The idea was that the German planes would not have enough fuel to follow the RAF planes up to Yorkshire and still have fuel to return to Germany. 
But they did have enough fuel and they managed to strafe the towns and airports during the landing of the planes. One German fighter flew directly toward the control tower from across the field at low level spraying 20 mm. cannon shells. The only way we could see them was because they had tracers. We could hear the planes and see the tracers. The Group Captain knocked us all down to get us on the floor because it appeared that the plane's target was the control tower. 
One of the main concerns was that a small bomb might be dropped or that the huge ammunition dump might be shot up. It had many incendiaries and small bombs and 2,000-pound bombs in it. That didn't happen. 
Those who had been sleeping were sent into some above ground, slit-like trenches, where they stayed until the raid was over. One of the sergeants went back to his bed and found that a 20 mm. cannon shell had gone right through his pillow. At the station at Middlesbrough, not far away, one of the WAC drivers was hit and killed by a cannon shell as she was going out to pick up the aircrews. 
That was an exciting night.

Fred on left, Montreal 1943

There were also some very sad times, in that we had to watch the blackboard at the back of our office and check in all of the pilots as they came, and it was always sad when one crew would turn up missing or more crews sometimes.  Once in a while we would find that they had landed at another airport, because their aircraft had been damaged, or once in a while at one of the big emergency airdromes along the coast that were set up to take damaged planes.  But many of the crews went missing. 

The wing commander who had been at Fort Macleod came to our station.  His name was Davenport.  He was leading one of the squadrons on a bombing raid over Europe and did not return.  I had come to know him quite well when I had been stationed in Fort Macleod.

At our station living conditions were not very great, even for officers.  I became a Flight Lieutenant while I was there.  We lived in an unheated hut and we were given a ration of coal, about five or ten pounds once a week, so that we got warm in our room once a week.  Other than that we had to either be on duty or up at the officers' mess in order to get really warm.  The winters were quite cold and damp in Yorkshire.

I spent my spare time writing letters, playing squash, playing table tennis, chess and getting books out of the library in Darlington, which was the nearest city to us, and reading.

In England, on the Bomber command stations, we took complete control of the airport, under the direction of the group captain in charge of the two squadrons.  He was usually not in the flying control office.  We had radio operators that controlled the aircraft, under our direction.  We had to insure that they knew the right runway, knew the wind direction, and we had to make sure that they were spaced properly as they cam in to land and of course spaced properly as they took off.

This was a big responsibility and sometimes a rather scary one. On the take-offs the planes were loaded with gasoline and with bombs and they sometimes used every inch of the runway to scrape up over the end of the runway and the fences and the trees to get into the air.  But landing was really the problem, because they were short of fuel and tired after an eight or nine-hour flight and sometimes were shot up a little bit.  It was important that we have the planes spaced just right, so that they were not landing too close to each other.  On the other had, when you have thirty-five or forty planes to land, you don't have hours to do it, because of the limited fuel.  So it meant that we had to get those planes down as rapidly as we could.

The pilots were excellent and the all cooperated very well, and if there was an emergency, then of course we made way for whatever emergency it was.  Often we were landing those planes at three or four o'clock in the morning.

"We had another exciting day (March 1945) when our thirty-five or thirty-six aircraft, which were Lancaster bombers at that time, were taking off for a daylight raid, and one of the aircraft blew a tire and skidded, wiped out the undercarriage, and caught fire.  Of course the crew escaped, running as hard as they could.  The fire truck went out to try and put out the fire, but they were recalled very quickly, because of the danger of an explosion.  We all took cover and waited until the fire got to the 2,000-pound bomb and blew up the plane.  Of course pieces were scattered all over the airport, and a house, not far away, had its slate roof completely demolished by the force of the explosion".

Our code name was "Big Tree", and so they would call Big Tree.  Then each squadron had a code name and each plane had a number.  So our radio operator would call back and give directions as to which runway we were using. Only the runway that we were using was lit up, and the lights were hooded so that you could only see them (if you were going in the direction that you were to land).  The pilots had to be very familiar with the airport and very knowledgeable, and our radio operators had to be on the ball in order to get these thirty-five or forty planes down in thirty-five or forty minutes.

 P/O Francis Murphy from 434 squadron (Ecclestone crew 106) snapped this photo of Fred, the two were close friends - spring 1945.

I think that was the big thing that I learned, to take responsibility and be responsible for my own actions.  Sometimes a decision had to be made to tell a plane not to land, but to put on the power and go around again.  And we got dressed down if the pilot thought we shouldn't have done it.  It didn't happen very often that the pilots would be upset, because our concern was always for their safety and they realized that. 

Spackman, Fred N. Oral History.  Interviewed by Charles Ursenbach.  Cardston, Alberta, 1983. Typescript.  The James Moyle Oral History Program, Archives, Historical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.
(Spackman Oral History, excerpts p. 13-17)