Harold Ernest Anzac (“Buck”) Price left school in December 1929, at fourteen, because he was needed on the family farm in Waianiwa, Southland.  He earned a pound a week as a labourer and eventually became a partner in the farm with his father and brother.  When, by mid-1940, it became clear that the war in Europe would not end quickly, he volunteered for the Royal New Zealand Air Force.  He does not record in his post-war writings why he chose the Air Force over the other services.  With no secondary schooling, he had much to learn before he could qualify, and spent many nights working through correspondence lessons until two in the morning.  He knew how much he had missed at school, but was determined to get through.

Buck took the oath to serve on 17 June 1940 and was formally called up and enlisted on 22 December, three days before Christmas.  He arrived at Levin Ground Training School after what his diary called a “very tiring trip” from Invercargill: twenty-seven and a half hours of travelling.  At twenty-five, he was older than many recruits and unused to being one among a crowd.  Having mixed in only a small social circle at home, he kept himself “in a low key”, listening and watching, a habit that would serve him well on his travels.

Life at Levin took some getting used to.  Reveille came at an hour Buck thought indecent, beds had to be made in the approved manner, and buttons, boots, shaving and dress were all inspected.  Meals were taken communally, with a “dirty big jug of milk” at the end of the table, and the days were filled with drill, mathematics, Morse, anti-gas instruction, Air Force law and the stripping and operation of machine guns.  Sergeant Robinson, red-haired and red-faced, seemed to roar every order at the top of his lungs and took particular pleasure in catching men who cut across the corner of the parade ground.  For all the sergeant’s bluster, Buck later recognised the purpose behind it: by the end of their training, the men bore little resemblance to the unruly civilians who had arrived.

The leave allowed a final trip home to Southland and a farewell to family and friends.  Soon he was saying goodbye to his girlfriend Kath and his brother Davie at Invercargill station, then to his brother Nelson at Woodlands, as he made the journey back north to Auckland and the ship that would take him abroad for the first time.

He embarked from New Zealand on 30 January 1941 aboard the Aorangi, where travel still retained something of its peacetime comforts, with four men sharing a cabin and four sitting at a table for meals.  His diary places him ashore at Suva, Fiji on 2 February, in heat quite unlike the Southland summer he had left.  He and two companions hired bicycles and rode along the beach road, past vivid green mangroves in the tidal water, tiny crabs on the exposed sand and orchids beside the road.  They were given green coconuts to drink by the locals.  Back aboard even the fans and open ventilators did little to make sleep easier. Any movement brought on a sweat, yet within a fortnight they would be introduced to the Canadian cold.

At Vancouver Island an RCAF band welcomed the draft with a lively “Roll Out the Barrel” before the men began the long train journey across Canada.  They had come from a New Zealand summer into a northern winter, and were not really supplied for the elements.  The scale of the country astonished Buck.  Railway carriages were so tall that porters carried a stool to help passengers reach the bottom step; beyond the windows were the snow-covered Rockies, wapiti standing near the line and prairie that seemed to go on for days.  At Winnipeg, where the temperature was thirty-three degrees below zero and a blizzard drove along the platform, the New Zealanders held their ears in their hands to stop them freezing.  In the days afterwards, many ears peeled. 

No. 3 Wireless School was still being built, with covered walkways crossing deep frozen snow and men slipping as they tried to follow the ruts left by lorries.  Inside, the barracks were overheated to a degree Buck never became used to.  Training meant as much as six hours of Morse a day, week after week, until he began to hear messages as language rather than separate dots and dashes.  This time he passed the fifteen-words-a-minute examination at his first attempt and earned his “sparks” badge.

There was time to enjoy Winnipeg too.  Buck roller-skated, ate in town and accepted the hospitality of local families, who offered more Sunday invitations than the New Zealanders could manage.  Winter eventually gave way to a summer hot enough to reach one hundred degrees in the shade, but for all its extremes, the city left him with pleasant memories.

He watched wedges of geese moving north across Winnipeg in the spring and heard their calls drifting down through the darkness at night, though the trees seemed slow to bud after the ice broke up.  By the time he left on 5 July, five months at wireless school had begun to feel a long time.  The train took him through hundreds of miles of northern Ontario bush and lakes, through Capreol to Toronto and onward to Mountain View, giving him still more reason to marvel at the size of Canada.

At No. 1 Bombing and Gunnery School at Mountain View, Ontario, the training came closer to the work he wanted to do.  He studied Browning machine guns and practised following targets on a screen with a turret-mounted spotlight until the movements became automatic.  Air firing took place from the open cockpit of a Fairey Battle, aiming at a drogue towed by another aircraft.  On one flight the aircraft struck a large air pocket and Buck nearly went over the side, leaving him hanging on to the machine gun with his shins scraping the cockpit edge and Lake Ontario directly below.  Only then did he understand the purpose of the loose strap and metal clip in the cockpit.  Shaken, he fastened it to his parachute harness, where it should have been all along.

On leave he travelled through Toronto and Hamilton to Niagara Falls, taking photographs and finding the falls well worth seeing despite the crowds.  He also recalled seeing something of Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec before reaching Halifax.  He had now crossed Canada from the Pacific to the Atlantic, watching mountains give way to prairie, then bush and lakes, and finally the broken country near the eastern coast.

On 15 August 1941 he embarked for Britain aboard the California.  The ship passed small icebergs off Newfoundland, while boat drill, lookout duty, meals and sleep divided the days.  Buck’s bunk was above that of Ben Gates, a Cockney gunner who would wake him with half a rum ration and the instruction, “Here, get it down you.”  Before sailing, Buck had been overpaid by twenty-six pounds, which he lent to other men in dollars, recording each loan in a notebook.  He later recovered the money in sterling at Bournemouth, turning the overpayment into a useful way of saving for his arrival in Britain.

In his diary he remembered ships forming long lines as the convoy assembled, and having to keep his life jacket beside him when he slept.  Eleven days out from Halifax they landed in Iceland, still bound for Britain but with no say in the route or how long they would have to wait.  Four hundred airmen were put ashore, among them New Zealanders, Australians, Canadians and Americans in RCAF uniform.  Rumour offered various explanations for the delay: packs of U-boats lay between them and England, or their ship had been recalled for convoy work.  They were taken to Alafoss, where Nissen huts were anchored against the violent winds by heavy hawsers set in concrete.  Buck explored the surrounding black lava country on foot, wearing out a pair of boots in the process.

The shores were lined with ducks, and the streams held trout large enough to tempt men armed with bent pins and, less sensibly, revolvers.  Buck watched the rough-coated sheep and explored the bare lava ridges, but daily life offered few comforts.  He balanced on a rock in a stream to shave in bitterly cold water, and at night spread the contents of his kitbag beneath him to soften the hard floor of the hut.

Buck found inactivity more tiring than work, so when volunteers were requested to dig a trench for a telephone cable, he stepped forward.  At first he was the only one, until he called Hori Freestone to join him; once they had finished their allotted section, they helped the men on either side.  He had found similar ways to occupy himself in Winnipeg, going out with the rubbish lorry for a reward of apples and helping clean a canteen in return for a cup of tea and a sandwich.

In Iceland he attended his first service funeral, watching an Australian airman, sewn into a blanket, being buried far from home.  The sight stayed with him, particularly because, as he later reflected, airmen in Bomber Command attended few funerals.  Most of the dead simply failed to come back.

The draft reached Greenock aboard HMS Leopoldville on 15 September 1941, nearly eight months after Buck had sailed from Auckland and almost nine since his call-up at Levin.  From the ship he could see roofless houses, barrage balloons, warships and shipyards on the Clyde, along with masts rising from sunken vessels.  The journey through Fiji, Canada and Iceland had seemed interminable, yet there were still months of training ahead before his first operation.

From Greenock, Buck travelled south to Bournemouth and then to RAF Cranwell, where the “eternal Morse” resumed.  He had entered wireless training only because it offered a route into aircrew; what he really wanted was to be a rear gunner.  When he admitted as much during an oral test, he had the opportunity to leave wireless work behind and went to No. 1 Air Gunners School at Pembrey in South Wales.  There he returned to Browning guns, turret work in Bristol Blenheims and live firing at drogues.  Despite all his earlier instruction, his performance in the formal Browning examination had become worse, and he passed with a recommendation for further training, although his shooting in the air remained good.  He spent Christmas 1941 at Pembrey, playing badminton in the evenings and visiting Welsh pubs, where rugby gave him a common language with the locals.

On leave he went looking for distant family connections around Merthyr Tydfil.  He knew too little about his great-grandfather to pursue the search properly, but a sign above a draper’s shop stopped him: H. E. A. Price.  When he went in and introduced himself, the people in the shop were interested to hear that his grandfather had come from nearby and invited him to morning tea.  He found no proven relation, but the unlikely sight of his own initials over a Welsh shop door earned him a welcome.  

At Bassingbourn, a chief instructor selected Buck as class senior after taking what seemed an age to look over the men standing to attention.  Buck thought he could not have been very impressed with the choice before him.  The appointment meant wearing an identifying band on his right arm and getting his squad to the right classroom or parade at the appointed time.  With different aircrew trades being sent to different rooms, there was plenty to keep track of, and the men did little to help.  Buck was answerable if they arrived late and got into trouble himself for not wearing the band.  He remembered it as a thankless job, made harder by the lack of cooperation from the dozen or so New Zealanders in his charge.  Having spent much of his own training trying to keep up, he was now responsible for keeping other men in order as well.

Buck first agreed to crew with Wireless Operator Morris Watson (“Morrie”) Egerton, a fellow Southlander from Winton, and then approached another Southlander, Jack Gow, to be their pilot.  Gow did not remain with them and was later killed in a crash in the Mountains of Mourne.  The crew that eventually formed was led by Richard Stansfield Derek (“Terry”) Kearns, who struck Buck as unremarkable at first but proved to be a good pilot, if sometimes overconfident and in need of a forceful correction from his rear gunner.  Andrew John (“Jack”) Moller joined as forward gunner, while William John Muir Low (“Hone”) Barclay became their navigator.  Hone initially appeared hesitant, but earned Buck’s deep respect as he repeatedly guided them between defended areas while aircraft were destroyed on either side.

The crew trained on Wellingtons, practising circuits, cross-country navigation, turret work and live firing.  Buck learned that firing from a moving aircraft sometimes meant aiming behind a ground target to curve the stream of bullets onto it.  Even seeing another aircraft at night took practice, and he learned to watch for the short straight line that first betrayed a silhouette.  While lying on his bed he would imagine possible attacks, then test the crew’s responses during air trials.

Some preparations were more practical.  At the OTU Buck began collecting bottles so that he would not have to leave his turret to use the on-board Elsan toilet.  He picked them up on his wanderings, tying them together with string to carry them, and guarded his supply once other men discovered their usefulness.  The collection provoked plenty of laughter, and its explanation provoked even more.  After using a bottle in flight, he would drop it from the aircraft and wonder what kind of din it would make on its way down.

At RAF Pershore in late May 1942, there were signs that something unusual was being prepared.  Worn training aircraft were brought up to operational condition, equipment that had previously been unobtainable suddenly appeared, and instructors with combat experience became animated.

At briefing on 30 May, the crews learned that Bomber Command was sending everything that could be made to fly against Cologne in what would become the first Thousand Bomber Raid.  Although still at an Operational Training Unit, Buck’s crew would be taking part.

They lifted off at 11.20 that night and returned at 5.30 in the morning.  More than a thousand bombers were dispatched, yet Buck, still inexperienced at picking out aircraft in the night sky, did not see even one, although he knew they must have been all around him.  What he could see was the glow of Cologne burning, visible from some 150 miles away.