Tony Cunnane's RAF Years

This anecdote was written on Friday 22 November 2008

Today is another of those anniversaries that I remember vividly. From 7pm I was in my room in the Officers’ Mess at the RAF V Bomber training school at Gaydon near Stratford-upon-Avon, getting dressed for a formal Dining In Night. As usual I had the wireless on in the background. Suddenly the programme was interrupted for a news flash, as they were called in those days, to say that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.

I remember being only mildly interested in that first news flash. 1963 was long before instant news and that first brief report did not elaborate on the incident and had not indicated that it might be serious. I hadn’t known that the President was in Dallas and indeed, I had only the vaguest idea of where Dallas was on the map (the eponymous TV series had not even been thought of in 1963). As a member of the RAF V Force I, like all my colleagues, worked with and regularly visited USAF Strategic Air Command bases in UK and in the States. I continued dressing, struggling as always to tie the single-ended bow tie properly. The official time for arriving in the Mess and formally greeting the President of the Mess was 7.30pm and arriving late was a sin. Further news flashes during the next few minutes caused me to take a greater interest in the event. Just before I left my room to walk the short distance to the Mess, the BBC was reporting that some US radio stations were already confirming that President Kennedy was dead and by then I felt a mixture of emotions: sorrow, anger, and apprehension. I realised something momentous that might have world-wide repercussions had occurred in far-off Dallas.

As the 100-plus officers gathered for the pre-dinner drinks (that's me in the image above, later in the evening - with a half-pint glass!!) all the talk was about the assassination and whether or not the dinner should go ahead. In the end, and apparently after telephone calls to Bomber Command HQ for advice, it was decided by the senior officers that the dinner would go ahead, ‘because all the food was already prepared’, but that we should tone down the usual high jinks post-dinner.

Whispered conversations during dinner concentrated on the possibility that the V Force alert state could be advanced, as it had been in the 1961 Cuban Crisis, because the Soviets might decide to launch a nuclear strike while the Americans were preoccupied. Others opined that the Soviets had probably carried out the assassination with just that objective in mind. There was a certain amount of black humour on the lines of, ‘Let’s get drunk now while we can so that we’re not fit to fly’.

In the event, the alert sirens did not sound during dinner, or later, but most officers retired to their homes, more or less sober, within minutes of the dinner ending at about 11pm. By that time Vice-President Johnson had already been President for three hours. There was no late night television in those days so I tuned into the BBC World Service on my short wave radio to listen to the latest news but I must have fallen asleep almost as soon as my head touched the pillow.