70th Anniversary of the Battle of Britain - ladies and gentlemen I give you the music of the Rolls Royce Merlin

There are few sounds to compare with the music of the Rolls Royce Merlin engine. Check out this link featuring a Supermarine Spitfire and an Avro Lancaster, put a pair of cans on and crank it up a bit. Fantastic noise. You can keep heavy metal - this is real rock 'n' roll.... If anyone finds something with better sound quality - let's have a link to it, huh?

My wife's father was an wireless operator in Wellington and Lancaster bombers during WW2. He was shot down over Germany in 1941 and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp (Stalag Luft). 5 of the 7 or 8 crew were killed when the plane bought it. He bailed out and got away with a bullet wound in his ear. We have his ID etc from the POW camp - complete with photo of him taken shortly after capture looking pretty beat up and with the bullet wound clearly visible. I can't begin to imagine the terror he went through.....a very brave man. We have his medals proudly displayed at home - featuring the comparatively scarce Air Crew Europe Star. RIP Flt Sgt Harold Williams RAF

posted by MajorDundee (5 comments total)

That's quite a story, Major! My grandfather was the quartermaster at RAF Scampton, where 617 Squadron (the Dambusters) flew from, and used to look after Guy Gibson's dog when he flew. He told me the hardest part of the job was laying out breakfast for the crews returning from a night mission, as he never knew how many places to set. Every unused setting was another airman either killed or captured. His house was in Waddington, which was another Lancaster base. In 1940 a German bomber raid missed the airfield and dropped a bomb right down the tower of the church next to his house (which was also a bakery). The thatched roof collapsed on my mother's crib (she was an infant at the time) and she still remembers watching the thatch burn as she lay there waiting to be rescued. They spent the rest of the war living above the nearby pub.

You are absolutely right about the Lancaster noise. It's an amazing thing, those four engines beating against each other. I can still tell one without even looking up (although I think there's only one Lancaster still flying).

After the war, Waddington went over to Vulcans, which was what was still there when I was a kid. The noise they made on take off was absolutely mind-buggering.
posted by unSane at 6:22 PM on September 19, 2010

The vast majority of people over here in the colonies seem to think that it was us that single-handedly won the War. Bullshit. Had your dinky little island not stood up and said "NO" so soundly, we'd all have been RAF--Royally Ass-Fucked. You lot really were the last bastion of the free world for longer than you should have had to be.

We tend to think of WWII as happening 'over there,' as there was no fighting whatsoever in the US proper (Hawaii wasn't a state at the time). I can't imagine how it must have been, anywhere else in the world. My grandfather and his brother both were in the military during the war (my great uncle was in Battlefield Illumination under George Patton), and it still felt like a war between "them" and the other "them," rather than us and them (if you know what I mean).

That said, I also know precisely fuck-all about planes, other than that the Spitfire is one of the most outstanding bits of human mechanical achievement, short of the Saturn V rocket. This is a truly great noise.
posted by askmeaboutLOOM at 8:40 AM on September 20, 2010

And that's quite a story too unSane!

I don't think, LOOM, that anyone over here really resents that the Yanks stayed out of both wars for so long. I mean, why the hell should you have felt obliged to join in unless your way of life was threatened? All that "special relationship" stuff is a load of sentimental cobblers.

There is, actually, a little bit of mythology about the Battle of Britain in terms of it all being down to "the Few". Those of "The Few" that are left alive will all quickly point out that it was a joint effort by all sorts of services. Not least of which was the Royal Navy. We had total supremacy over the Germans at sea - at least on the surface. If they had launched "Operation Sealion" (the plan to invade the UK) they would have had to get troops and heavy equipment across the Channel, and the Senior Service (as the Navy's known) would have made short work of them.

Anyway - I went back and checked his records last night. He was actually shot down in a raid over Berlin on the night of 30th/31st January 1944 (not 1941 as I erroneously reported). Some of the entries in that record are just mind-blowing. Check these out:

28/11/43 Halifax JP119 '0' (the plane - a Handley Page "Halifax" bomber) Ops - Mannheim. Very poor trip. Had total i/c failure but coped ok.

28/11/43 Halifax JO459 'Q' Ops - Leverkusen - very heavy flak. Barrage from some reaching 30,000 ft. Hit 3 times.
posted by MajorDundee at 12:54 PM on September 20, 2010

Yes, what Major says is right. There was no resentment for the supposed lateness of the entry into the war from anyone I have ever spoken to who lived though it, just relief. There WAS resentment against American airmen nicking everyone's girlfriends because they had access to hard-to-obtain things like nylons ('oversexed, overpaid, and over here' as the saying goes) but it was pretty good natured.
posted by unSane at 7:27 PM on September 20, 2010

Ah, great stories. Well, sad but great. I don't have any good stories about that era of military aviation, but I do work on a military airfield and just every once in a while some folks (presumably retired admirals) will arrive flying in restored corsairs and other war birds from that era. There really is nothing like hearing the sound of those high performance machines in person. I sometimes wonder if they were intentionally tuned to sound powerful and menacing.
posted by snsranch at 6:56 PM on September 22, 2010