The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Retracing steps of pilot who defied all the odds
The son of Fife war hero John Robert Mills has retraced his father’s footsteps from a Fife farm to the “thousand-bomber raids” on Germany in 1942.
Today would have been John Robert Mills’s 100th birthday.
He passed away aged 90 but his chances of living so long must have seemed unlikely when he was under fire during the Second World War.
John’s son Iain has used his time during lockdown to research his father’s life and military service, retracing his footsteps from a farm in the Great Depression, to years spent in Canada, to the bomber raids in summer 1942.
“My father was a quiet hero and did not accept that he was any different from the thousands of other men from Scotland who served during the Second World War,” said Iain, 70, a retired teacher and lecturer.
John was born in 1921 at Rosemount of Callange, a farm just over a mile east of Ceres.
His parents were John Mills and Alice Morrow and he had two younger sisters.
Their house was basic – water needed to be carried from a well 50 yards away.
“He claimed that one of his abiding memories of his childhood was being cold: He often went into the blacksmiths for a heat on his way home from primary school,” said Iain.
“He had just left Bell Baxter High School in Cupar when war broke out and he volunteered to help deal with evacuees, mainly from Edinburgh.
“When they arrived at Cupar Station they had to be united with the families they would be staying with.
“He described them as being somewhat bemused by their new, more rural surroundings and it wasn’t long before a number of them started drifting back to Edinburgh.”
Around this time, John’s family moved from
Callange to Letham, near Cupar, where they stayed in the first house in The Row.
Although John enlisted in the RAF at the start of the war, he was not called into action until early 1942, by which time he had completed two years of a teacher-training course in Dundee.
For his first RAF posting, he had to make the hazardous crossing of the Atlantic by ship and continue over the Canadian Prairies by train.
He arrived at an airfield near Calgary, Alberta, where he began his pilot training at the age of 21.
“Not all pilots survived the training course, but my father’s only injury was frostbite on one ear from the bitter Canadian winter.
“On completion of training, he returned to
Britain to report to a Bomber Squadron for active duty.
“In those days, the casualty rate for bomber crews was very high and their life expectancy alarmingly short.”
John was posted to Lincolnshire, from where many of the air raids to the continent were launched.
He flew various types of bomber, including Wellingtons but most of the planes he piloted were Lancasters or Avrolancasters.
These were often slower than the enemy aircraft and many aircrews would not return.
“He was one of the pilots in the ‘thousand-bomber raids’, which were perhaps good for British and American morale but came with a high mortality rate. a bomber crew from 1942; and above, John’s home in
“Every time he returned safely to base, he was aware of friends who hadn’t made it back.
“Although he rarely spoke about the war, he once described flying into German flak over the Ruhr and feeling it was very unlikely that he would survive that mission.
“That he did was partly down to his skill as a pilot but also, he claimed, sheer luck. He felt that the bombers were often ‘like sitting ducks’.”
The “thousand-bomber raids” were attacks on Germany by massed allied aircraft, beginning in 1942.
They were largely for propaganda purposes – a show of force.
Towards the end of the war, John was transferred to RAF Wigtown in Galloway and his role
changed to troop transport, including flights home from the Middle-east.
He met his wife, Irene Moore from Gourock, who was a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. They married on August 6 1945 – the day the nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
John was presented with an inscribed photo frame by the parish within which Letham lies – Monimail Parish – for his role in the war.
Once demobbed, he finished his teacher training and taught at secondary schools across Fife and Renfrewshire.
Later, John and Irene had two children, Iain and Ailean and went on to become grandparents to five children.
“It’s hard to imagine
what my dad went through on bombing missions,” said Iain, also of Largs.
“He must have displayed enormous courage under extreme and terrifying conditions.
“It wasn’t just his personal survival that concerned him. He felt a responsibility for getting his crew home safely as well. “He was always a very caring person.
“However, he had serious misgivings about the bombing of civilian targets in Germany, and never gloried in what he had achieved.
“He was only 21 when he started his pilot training, and 22 when he flew on missions over Europe.
“He must have been incredibly strong mentally to keep a clear head in those circumstances.”
Aclosurethreatened Perth school will stay open for several months longer than planned, despite claims it is already unfit for purpose.
Councillors voted to shut Balhousie Primary in 2018, after hearing about a catalogue of structural problems including dry rot, leaky windows and broken heating.
Despite calls from SNP councillors to save the school and have it refurbished, Perth and
Kinross Council’s lifelong learning committee voted for permanent closure and to transfer all pupils to a new multi-million-pound school planned for North Muirton.
The local authority then received permission from the Scottish Government to close the school at the end of July 2022.
However, it has emerged that progress on the replacement school has been delayed by pandemic restrictions.
A planning application for the development, lodged this week, has revealed that the building is not expected to be finished until 2023.
Perth and Kinross Council confirmed that Balhousie School would stay open until the new building is ready.
And that has prompted calls by independent councillor Xander Mcdade to have pupils transferred into temporary accommodation.
He said: “Having advocated in January 2018
that the children at Balhousie should be temporarily moved to a decant building until the completion of the new school due to the poor the state of the building, I’m appalled to hear this administration is going to keep children in the building for even longer.”
Mr Mcdade had spoken at the original committee
meeting about a tour he received at the school just days earlier.
“There is damp, the windows don’t close properly, paint peeling off the walls, heating doesn’t work and dry rot,” he said.
“I don’t consider that an acceptable environment for children. I don’t think a building with damp is safe.
“It is not possible to
bring it up to a conducive learning environment.”
The planned £16.5 million school, which has still to be named, will replace both Balhousie and North Muirton primaries.
Perth and Kinross Council confirmed that Balhousie will be kept open until the new building is ready, but declined to comment further.