Extra Episode - SEX, SPIES & LIESMy father’s suspicions about the aircraft crash that killed the grandfather of award-winning historical author Jessie Childs, echoed her family history.She contacted me to discuss the re...

The ‘Blighty Thank God’ podcast and website could not have been produced without expert help from webman Geoff Paddock of GP Media and podcast producer Sam Pauly of Summi...

After a relatively peaceful war, the Italian port of Bari suffered a terrible bombing raid in December, 1943 that led to a poison gas release killing many in mysterious circumstances that the Allies tried to cover up. My father’s diary desc...

The revelation, after he died, that my father was involved in secret missions to drop supplies to civilian resistance fighters during the war came as a surprise to our family.It took many decades to finally unravel the full story behind wha...

In Baghdad’s sweltering heat of the summer of 1943, my father helped run the city’s airport for the RAF - managing the arrival and departure of VIPs. Two he mentions were playwright/singer Noel Coward  and Lord Louis Mountbatten. Not e...

Few vaccines were available to protect Allied troops sent overseas during WW2. After West Africa, where he likely caught malaria, my father was posted to the Middle East where he encountered lice-borne typhus and then rabies, just two of a long...

A ‘gold racket’ my father casually mentions in his diary wasn’t the only surprise on the Takoradi Route, along which he was a ferry pilot moving planes between West and North Africa 1941-42. Leo the Lion was also a surprise awaiting first t...

My father mentioned a plane crash that killed 2 of his colleagues - the first of two fatal crashes within two weeks of each other that left 33 airmen dead.  I discovered that the two Hudson planes that crashed at Khartoum, Sudan in June, 1...

Flt Sgt Jimmy Eden was a friend of my father’s, killed outright doing the same job as him - ferrying fighter planes to the North African front. A nine-word entry in his diary on the anniversary of Jimmy’s death set me on a journey to discov...

Researching 2 Bisley aircraft that my father helped recover after both force landed (Listen to ‘A New Goolie Chit’ episode), I discovered numerous other, similar incidents, some w...

My father and other RAF airmen were issued with a ‘Goolie Chit’ to help protect them against natives who might harm them if they crashed their plane.Armed with a new one, he was tasked with rescuing 2 downed Bisley aircraft, a notoriously d...

Throughout 1943 my father had problems with his dentures, having lost his teeth in a plane crash in Sudan that happened within weeks of him being posted to West Africa in November-December, 1941 as a ferry pilot. Even though he was lucky to be ...

January, 1943 my father had recently arrived at RAF Habbaniya, Iraq as a member of the Communications Flight based there. But settling in wasn’t easy. It’s here that he started his diary, which very quickly highlights death is ever present ...

'Blighty Thank God' tells the stories uncovered in the 'lost' diary of WW2 RAF pilot, Flt. Sgt. Ron Chapman, who served in Africa, the Middle East and Europe. It is hosted by his son, former journalist Neil Chapman, who resear...