In November 1940 two Americans arrived in the United Kingdom. They were employees of the Sperry Gyroscope Company, and with them they carried their company’s latest, highly secret product: a new piece of bomb-aiming equipment. It would be their job to train RAF aircrews to use this equipment, and to evaluate its performance in combat.
The two Americans, Fred Vose and Joseph Sailor, also brought with them a movie camera. The equipment for which they were responsible was too secret to appear on film, but they were able to film what they saw as they travelled around England, including London street scenes and several RAF airfields.
In London they recorded scenes of buses, taxis and piles of rubble from bombed houses. Outside London they captured vivid colour footage of wartime airfields, off-duty RAF officers and a wide variety of aircraft types, including a captured German Messerschmitt Bf 110.
Some of the rarest footage produced during their stay in England came from their time with No. 90 Squadron at RAF Polebrook. No. 90 Squadron was the first RAF unit to operate the American Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, making several high-altitude daylight raids on German targets during the summer of 1941.
On 2 September 1941, Fred Vose became the first American to fly in a B-17 raid over occupied Europe during the Second World War, while the United States was still officially neutral. He flew as bomb-aimer in an aircraft captained by Squadron Leader Alex Mathieson, during a raid on Bremen.
The film shows B-17s on the ground and taking off, and footage taken on board Mathieson’s B-17 as it climbed to high altitude for its attack on Bremen.
Fred Vose and Joseph Sailor returned to the United States, where Vose continued his work for the Sperry Gyroscope Company until he was tragically killed in a civilian flying accident in Utah, late in 1942. Joseph Sailor sadly also died in 1942, killed in action while flying with the US Marine Corps against the Japanese during the Battle of Guadalcanal.
But their amateur film survived, edited into an account of their time in the UK. Fred Vose provided the narration, and it appears that copies of the film were sent to people in Britain who had helped them during their stay, perhaps as a form of thank-you present. It is one of these copies that was donated to the RAF Museum, after being forgotten for many years.
With its striking colour scenes of wartime life and the RAF, Experiences in England is a very significant addition to the RAF Museum’s film archive, and one that will be preserved for many years to come.