Armageddon (64 page)

Formation-flying was an intensely demanding discipline, requiring relentless commitment by every pilot, and above all from the lead aircraft. Returning from bombing oil refineries in Rumania on 13 September 1944, Arthur Miller’s squadron were appalled to find themselves flying headlong towards a mountainside. They pulled up steeply, prompting a storm of abuse over the radio, directed against their leader. “You fucking bastard,” shouted a pilot, “trying to kill us all for shoe shines.” After a shocked pause, the colonel commanding the formation said: “This is Red Leader—plane making comment, identify yourself
now
.” There was another silence, then laughter, snickers, and an outpouring of fearful anger from other aircraft: “Red Leader, why don’t you go and sit in a corner and play with yourself and shine your balls, if you have any”; “You turd-eating son-of-a-bitch, you almost had your day of reckoning”; “If you had marched today and your uniform was on straight, you wouldn’t be flying into mountains, you cocksucking motherfucker.” At last, they landed in Italy to refuel. Miller was surprised to see only five planes fire flares to indicate casualties aboard—fewer than he had expected, after meeting heavy and accurate flak over the target. As they taxied in, they were amazed to hear the voice of their deputy leader: “I apologize to you all. I almost killed the whole squadron. I should never let up until we touch down. I am sorry.”

Staff-Sergeant Delbert Lambson, a gunner, was a nineteen-year-old small farmer from New Mexico. A deeply religious young man, Lambson was married to a seventeen-year-old girl, and had a baby son. He once hit a man who said in the mess that there wasn’t a woman in the world who could be trusted. He pitied those who found the job unbearably hard, including their own ball-turret gunner: “Soldiering and especially combat never did agree with him. Before each mission, even on cold winter mornings, the sweat would be running down his face. I liked him because he was uncomplicated, honest, and made few demands. He seemed grateful to be with me, and that made me feel at ease.” On one trip, Lambson found himself assuming the job of a gunner who was found mentally unfit to fly.

Over Regensburg with the 390th Bomb Group, his plane was badly hit, and a 20mm cannon shell struck Lambson in his turret: “Streaks of fire shot through my brain. My hands shot up to my face. Blood trickled through my fingers and down my chest. My left leg was numb and my left shoulder felt as if a hot branding iron had been thrust into it. The left leg and arm of my padded flying suit was ripped to shreds, and was soaking up the blood that poured from my wounds.” On escaping from his turret, he made the alarming discovery that the rest of the crew had already jumped without him. He bailed out, and pulled the ripcord of his parachute at 5,000 feet, terrified of bleeding to death before he reached the ground. He lost consciousness, and awoke to find a group of unsmiling German soldiers peering down at him. He had lost an eye, and remained comatose for a week. In the air, Lambson had never thought much about the nature of the task he and his comrades were performing. Yet in hospital he was tended with wonderful solicitousness by Marie, a German nurse. She went on leave to visit her mother in Berlin. Lambson was shocked to hear that she had been killed on the train by strafing Allied fighters.

While the heavy bombers attacked Germany from fields in England, their medium counterparts flew missions from strips in France, where they enjoyed nothing like the comforts of fighter and bomber crews stationed at English bases. The French grass fields, overlaid with pierced plank runways, offered accommodation not much less cold and dirty than those of rear-area ground troops. Yet Lieutenant Robert Burger, a B-26 navigator based near Cambrai, found his job in the last months of the war almost routine: “I can go out on a mission now wondering what we are going to have for dinner.” Major Jack Ilfrey said: “Whenever I heard any griping about food and living conditions, I always reminded the men they were better off than most of the other boys scattered around the world. They had places to go and things to do. It wasn’t like home, of course, but it wasn’t Africa or sleeping in tents in Italy, or fighting in the South Pacific. We all had a hell of a lot to be grateful for.” Yet life in tents alongside the French strips was always dreary and cold. Robert Burger experienced a stab of envy when he landed at a fighter base near Brussels one day and found the pilots sitting down to eat “on cushioned chairs, covered tables and pitchers of lemonade, Belgian girls waiting on table. The pilots ordered a cocktail from the nearby bar as a string quartet played soft music. It was unbelievable—shangri-la to us!”

Most of the medium bombers’ short-range operations were carried out at the request of army commanders. Each day, the crews stood by, waiting upon the pleasure of the generals. “Nice day, but nothing for us. Played horseshoes all afternoon. Big bull session round the fire at night,” Captain Marvin Schulze of the 397th Bombardment Group wrote in his diary one typical autumn day of 1944. As the weather worsened, there were many days when flying was impossible: “Stood down early. Big drunken brawl that lasted till early morning. Major Hamilton got two broken ribs out of the deal . . . Pretty foggy all day long. Sawed wood for about three hours. Peeled potatoes and made French fries. No mail in over a week now . . . A beautiful raid this morning. Target a railway road bridge at Prayen, Germany. No flak, no fighters. Flew number four.” But then there were the days when the enemy intervened, sometimes ferociously. On 23 November, “two ships blew up before we got to the target . . . two more were lost to fighters. The whole of Capt. Stephenson’s flight went down, with the exception of Lt. Neu, who landed the most shot-up plane I ever saw . . . It’s a pretty sad outfit tonight.” Schulze’s B-26 Group lost fifty-one men in two days. The big picture, of overwhelming Allied dominance, masked the intimate reality, of some bad days which maintained the tempo of fear.

The people who fight wars are customarily referred to as “men.” Yet in truth, irrespective of their ages, most of those engaged in combat behaved, thought and talked as boys—exuberant and emotional, careless and naive. “Dear Mom,” a pilot of the 95th Bomb Group, Harry Conley, wrote home.

No air battle manufactured in Hollywood can approach the thrills and sights of the real thing. They rarely last over half an hour, but the thrills of a lifetime are contained in that short space of time. It’s a funny reaction. I sit there flying my airplane and I can hear and feel all my boys’ guns going off. The only enemy planes I can see are those coming from the front or side, and I can see whatever flak appears in those regions. You sit there quite calmly and watch the flak explode around you in little puffs of black smoke . . . as if it were a movie. Then a couple of hours after you are back on the ground, it begins to dawn on you, and it is then that you get properly scared. The German boys are marvellous pilots and really have guts.

On 4 November 1944, the crews of 408 Squadron Royal Canadian Air Force prepared to fly from Linton-on-Ouse in Yorkshire, on one of Bomber Command’s great night raids against Germany’s cities. A force of 384 Halifaxes, 336 Lancasters and 29 Mosquitoes was to attack Bochum. The 408 Squadron was scheduled to take off at 1600, but to the bitter frustration of the crews bad weather caused repeated postponements. David Sokoloff’s crew were specially tense, because it was the thirteenth trip of their tour. “We had to hang around the Halifax,
F-Freddie,
checking and re-checking for something to do, smoking cig after cig in the clammy half-dark of the English winter evening,” wrote the nineteen-year-old bomb-aimer, Alan Stables from British Columbia. Dave Hardy, the rear gunner from Saskatoon, felt nervous and gloomy. Jon Sargent, the navigator, an accountant from British Columbia, said: “Why the hell don’t the bastards scrub it in this weather?” Their spirits were further depleted by a friendly visit from the base’s Catholic chaplain.

The planes finally took off at 1930, carrying fourteen tons of fuel and bombs, slipping into the familiar routine: “Lock throttles—adjust pitch on the starboard outer—wheels up and locked—synchronise engines—adjust trim tabs—throttle back to climbing boost.” “Sok,” the pilot, always worried about putting his chocolate too close to the heating outlet, where it would melt. He was a twenty-four-year-old Londoner who had been studying architecture at Yale in 1939. He went north to Montreal to join up, which is how he now found himself captaining a Canadian crew. He was dismayed to find the aircraft struggling to reach operational height, a familiar problem with Halifaxes, whose ceiling was 2,000 feet below that of the Lancs. Sok told Stables to ditch part of their bombload, a practice which infuriated Bomber Command’s senior officers, but was commonplace in some squadrons.

F-Freddie
gained 1,000 feet, but the plane was still 5,000 feet below the bomber stream’s designated altitude and ninety minutes short of target when Hardy in the rear turret yelled, “Fighter port—go!,” and they pitched into violent corkscrew evasive action. When they resumed their course, the gunner said he had seen a Ju-88, but it was gone. A nervous, jocular voice on the intercom said: “How many engines did it have?” Sok said briefly: “Cut the chatter.” They saw other aircraft around them catching fire and falling through the sky. Then oncoming tracer streaked up to meet
F-Freddie
and lashed into the wing. Stables, in the nose, closed his eyes and prayed. The engineer yelled: “Port engine on fire, skip, let’s get the hell out.” Sok said coolly: “Feathering port inner, hit the graviner switches, Dick, prepare to abandon aircraft everyone. Bomb doors open. Drop your bombs, bomb aimer.” The graviner switches released CO
₂
on to the engines, but this failed to extinguish the fire. The crew left their stations and went to the hatches. Sok threw the aircraft into a steep dive, to put out the fire. This was a terrifyingly risky manoeuvre. Sometimes it succeeded. Often, however, it created a blowtorch effect which melted the wing off the aircraft. The seven men in
F-Freddie
were lucky. Levelling off at 4,000 feet, they found that the fire was out.

The crew returned to their positions—except Hardy, the rear gunner. His turret was traversed sideways, and empty. He had bailed out—a wise move, for it was notoriously difficult for rear gunners to escape from a stricken aircraft. They set a course for home, hampered by the loss of all their maps and logs, which had been sucked out into the slipstream by the great blast of air that swept through the fuselage when the hatches were ditched. The main fuse panel had been destroyed by German fire. The fuel gauges and radar were gone. They suffered another moment of terror when the mid-upper gunner reported seeing two fighters, provoking Sokoloff to corkscrew again.

By late 1944, bomber crews possessed one huge asset for survival: if they were badly hit, they no longer had to struggle home across the North Sea, where so many met their ends earlier in the war.
F-Freddie
crash-landed on the flarepath at Brussels without flaps or brakes, bouncing so violently that the undercarriage collapsed. The aircraft skidded rasping on its belly past the end of the runway and over a ditch, earth exploding upwards into the fuselage through the shattered nose. It lurched to a stop seventy yards short of a cluster of houses. There was a mad scramble to get out before the aircraft caught fire, though mercifully there was no blaze. They counted a hundred holes in the aircraft. Later, Sok’s mother asked anxiously if the pilot would have to pay for the damage.

The exhausted and traumatized crew were taken by truck to the Imperial Hotel in Brussels. In addition to their own aircraft, twenty-nine others were lost by Bomber Command that night. A thousand people died in Bochum, where the steelworks was badly hit. After three weeks’ survivors’ leave, David Sokoloff’s crew returned to operations from Linton and flew a further twenty-three trips. Among every hundred RAF Bomber Command aircrew in the course of the war, fifty-one died on operations, nine were lost in crashes in En-gland, three seriously injured, twelve were taken prisoner, one was shot down and escaped capture, and just twenty-four completed a tour of operations. One night just before Sok’s crew were due to take off again, they found their new rear gunner drinking beer. If he ever did such a thing again, they said, they would kill him. Survival depended on luck, but also upon relentless vigilance through each minute of every hour that men braved the airspace over Germany.

From the autumn of 1944 onwards, Bomber Command conducted a growing number of daylight operations, alongside its night attacks. As the Luftwaffe’s powers declined, and with France and Belgium now in Allied hands, daylight “ops” offered a chance of more accurate bombing and reduced casualties. Daylight raids were initially conducted against easy targets. Most groups committed their less experienced crews to them. Yet this bred resentment among those who were still flying long, dangerous night sorties to eastern Germany. Eddie Lovejoy, a navigator with the RAF’s 75 Squadron, was one of a crew serving their second tour. They were exasperated to see others racking up several trips towards their quota of thirty operations on short daylight “milk-runs,” while Lovejoy’s men were flying through the darkness for nine or ten hours to targets such as Stettin. In September, their pilot formally protested to the commanding officer, who duly rostered them for some daylight ops against German V-weapon sites in Holland. “It was thus that I saw the enemy coast approaching in full daylight for the first time in the war,” wrote Lovejoy wonderingly. After flying so often over Europe in darkness, he found it strange now to do so in sunlight, and was even more amazed when he saw a German Me-262 jet fighter streak past them. At the end of October, his crew took part in a tactical raid on German gun positions near Flushing. The neighbouring Lancaster was a wingspan away when Lovejoy, in the astrodome, saw a 105mm shell strike its bomb bay. The ensuing explosion caused the entire formation to lift in the air. Lovejoy was hurled against the side of the astrodome by the force of the blast, “and to my utter horror was gazing at a few dark pieces of debris drifting down to earth . . . By flying at night, we had missed the spectacle of horrors like these, but seeing it happen close to was an experience to shake one clear down to the soles of one’s shoes . . . It was a rather silent and melancholy journey home.”