colin bell raf...

 We had a special visitor to the Navy Wings heritage hangar today, Veteran Colin Bell.

Flt Lt Colin Bell served in the RAF in WW2 as a Mosquito Bomber Pilot. During his tour of operations, he carried out 50 bombing raids - all over Germany- 14 of them over Berlin, a boiling cauldron of anti-aircraft defences.

For his outstanding service as a Pathfinder pilot at the vanguard of Bomber Command’s raids over Germany, Colin was awarded the DFC. When he was stood down from his front-line role in March 1944, having defied the odds of survival, he had just turned 24. Colin was born on 5 March 1921, and is now over 100 years old.

Colin started his career by volunteering for the Royal Air Force towards the end of 1940. After six weeks of initial flying training at Scarborough, he was posted to the US in 1941 for further flight instruction under the ‘Arnold Scheme’ at airbases in Florida and then Georgia.

He successfully completed his flying training and was commissioned into the RAF albeit he was still in the US; his return to England was delayed when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and America joined the war.

Colin Bell was retained by the American Army Air Corps as an advanced single-engine flying instructor responsible for training American and British pilot cadets. The main aircraft types he flew at this time were Stearmans, Vultee and Harvard.

In 1943, he returned to the UK , and converted to twin engine Mosquito Bombers. This training was at RAF Warboys and RAF Wyton. At Wyton, he teamed up with an experienced navigator, a Canadian named Doug Redmond. It was a partnership that remained together throughout their 50 operations in Bomber Command, and the professionalism they generated together was undoubtedly one of the factors that helped them survive the war in the face of brutal attrition rates in Bomber Command.

They were assigned to the recently created 608 Squadron (Pathfinder Group) based at RAF Downham Market in Norfolk. 608 Squadron was part of Bomber Command’s No 8 Group’s Light Night Striking Force.

Flying as a Pathfinder in Bomber Command

Between 5 September 1944 and 3 March 1945, Colin flew 50 operations over Germany, including strategic targets at Hannover, Hamburg, Cologne, Nurnburg, and Magdeburg. But none compared to the hellfire of Berlin, where prolific radar guided anti-aircraft guns, and hundreds of German night fighters, in airborne stacks, ferociously defended the capital of the Third Reich. As if to tempt fate, 8 out of Colin’s last 11 flights were over Berlin. Unbelievably, Colin survived the fiery cauldron of Berlin 14 times.