Bomber Command (14 page)

‘Atty’ Atkinson went on to become a legend in 2 Group, the only man to survive two anti-shipping tours from Malta. When he finally came home at the end of the year, the seventeen survivors of his command fitted comfortably into a single Catalina. Dusty Miller, after his escape from Spain, boarded a merchant ship at Gibraltar to find that it was carrying 82 Squadron ground crews on their way home from the Mediterranean.

‘How’s the old squadron, then?’ he asked eagerly.

‘The old squadron? There’s only one left, and he’s been sent home “Lacking moral fibre” . . .’

It had been a futile, ghastly year for 2 Group, unredeemed by any sense of technical advance or strategic success. The Blenheims were thrown into the battle because they were there. Little tangible achievement was expected. It merely seemed vital that Britain be seen to be continuing the fight with every instrument at her command, however feeble. For the most part, the crews went extraordinarily uncomplainingly. One of Atkinson’s pilots wrote to him from a German prison camp:

Dear Atty,

I’m sorry I failed to return on the 26th, but a destroyer picked me off going in to attack, and the merchantman got my second engine, which complicated matters a little. This left me no choice but to fall in the drink about three miles from the convoy . . .

Much has been said and written about Fighter Command in 1940. Yet the sacrifice of 2 Group of Bomber Command was also the stuff of which legends are made and the scale of their losses far exceeded those of the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots. It was their tragedy that few of them were left to tell of it.

3 » 10 SQUADRON

YORKSHIRE, 1940–41

‘I wish Jim had joined the RAF,’ said Mrs Leonard. ‘I’m sure it could have been managed. You know where you are with them. You just settle down at an RAF station as though it was business with regular hours and a nice crowd.’

Evelyn Waugh,
Men at Arms

Bomber Command launched its first attack of the war against a land target on the night of 19 March 1940, when twenty Hampdens from 5 Group and thirty Whitleys of 4 Group attacked the German seaplane base of Hornum, on the island of Sylt, a few miles west of the German–Danish coast.

Seven of the Whitleys came from 10 Squadron at Dishforth in Yorkshire, led by their flamboyant squadron commander, Bill Staton. The crews were full of excitement and apprehension to be carrying a live bombload at last. There had been so many months of dreary ‘nickelling’ – dropping propaganda leaflets over Germany, an exercise which they heartily agreed with Arthur Harris had done no more than ‘provide the enemy with five years free supply of lavatory paper’. They might grudgingly have admitted that it also provided Bomber Command with an insight into the difficulties of navigating at night over blacked-out Europe, without great hazard to themselves. They lost one crew. In the mood of the day, these men were commemorated by the unveiling of an oak plaque in the station church at Dishforth. Henceforward,
they would be expected to do their dying with rather less ceremony. But in those first months 10 Squadron were allowed to adjust themselves very gently to war.

‘Bombs my foot!’ said Good King Wence, ‘them to be leaflets, Stephen!’

as
Punch
put it that Christmas of 1939. For the night bombers, there were no Gembloux or Aalborg operations, no sudden slaughters or sunlit dramas. Instead, there was only the beginning of the long, slow escalation of the bombing war to its terrible crescendo in 1943 and 1944. The Whitleys, the Wellingtons and the Hampdens, blundering blindly through the night skies over Germany in 1940 and 1941, were the pathfinders for all that followed, for good or ill.

The only pilot in 10 Squadron with any notion of the reality of war was their CO, Bill Staton. A huge, burly rhino of a man, still indecently fit at forty-two, he had flown Bristol Fighters with the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War, become an ace and won the Military Cross, and still bore the great scar across his head where a chair was broken over it at a mess party in 1917. Everything about Staton was larger than life. The squadron called him ‘King Kong’ because of his size. He was destined for a brewer’s engineer if the First War had not intervened, but for more than twenty years now the RAF had been his life, and he threw himself into it heart and soul. A former captain of the air force shooting team, he spent his off-duty hours combing the hills for pheasants and grouse for the mess. He scoured the country houses of the area borrowing portraits and furniture to make the officers’ quarters the best-appointed in 4 Group. Muscular Christianity personified, he presided every morning at a ten-minute voluntary service outside the hangars. Pipe between his teeth and black labrador Sam at his heels, he loped inexhaustibly from squadron offices to dispersals, mess binges to aircrew funerals.

Above all, this enormous, bombastic figure seemed to his crews to regard the war as a marvellous entertainment laid on for his
benefit. He flew at every possible opportunity. He seemed to have no understanding of the meaning of fear. After so many months of ‘nickelling’, he was first into the air on take-off for Sylt at 7.30 that evening of 19 March 1940, equipped as usual for every possible contingency, a canvas bucket beside his seat filled with shaving tackle and his private escape kit.

As his Whitley approached the target, the German flak began to hose into the sky, red, yellow and white – even the ‘Flaming Onions’ Staton remembered so well from the First War, wads of wire-linked phosphorus. His novice crew hung tense in their seats as Staton cruised blithely into the barrage. There was a rumour that the Germans possessed a beam capable of cutting the magnetoes of British aircraft, and Staton had made up his mind to test this theory by circling for fifteen minutes to see what happened. Scorning evasive action, he drove the Whitley bucketing through the gunfire over Sylt with its terrified crew. Donaldson, the navigator, shouted to his CO after one burst: ‘Can’t get the rear gunner to answer, sir!’

‘He’s probably dead!’ said Staton cheerfully. At last, to the other men’s great relief, they dropped their bombs and turned for home. On the ground they found that 10 Squadron and its commander were heroes. The press had been summoned to Dishforth and the next day’s
Daily Mirror
told the story of ‘Crack ’Em’ Staton and his leadership of the raid on Sylt. In the squadron record book it was recorded confidently that ‘From Captains’ reports it is very evident that considerable damage has been done to Hornum.’ A day later a Whitley from 77 Squadron at Driffield flew over Dishforth and inundated the station with leaflets: ‘Congratulations to CRACK ’EM AND CO (the heroes, and leaders, of Sylt) – from an admiring Driffield.’ The four other squadrons which had sent aircraft to Hornum were somewhat put out by the epidemic of publicity that had descended on Dishforth.

Yet in the days that followed, Bomber Command was compelled to assess the reality of the raid on Sylt. Of the fifty aircraft which took part forty-one, including all those from 10 Squadron,
claimed to have bombed the target, and only one had been lost. Many pilots at debriefing had given circumstantial details of hits on slipways, hangars and workshops. Yet the two photographic reconnaissance Blenheims from 82 Squadron that examined Hornum with the utmost thoroughness after the raid were unable to find evidence of any damage whatever to the base installations. The staff at Bomber Command considered every possibility, including that of the Germans having done an astonishing overnight repair job. But on 10 April the Command report on the Sylt raid concluded with stilted but inescapable dismay: ‘The operation does not confirm that as a general rule, the average crews of our heavy bombers can identify targets at night, even under the best conditions, nor does it prove that the average crew can bomb industrial or other enemy targets at night . . .’ An entirely untruthful communiqué was issued to the press, announcing that the reconnaissance photographs of Sylt were of too poor quality for proper damage assessment.

Neither the Air Staff nor Bomber Command had any ready answers to the very serious problems revealed by the Sylt raid. Instead as the tide of war rushed over them in the weeks that followed, they were compelled to launch their forces where they could, as best they could. In April 10 Squadron was sent to attack the Norwegian airfields, which few of its pilots proved able to find, and fewer still to bomb effectively. In May they were thrust into the Battle of France, seeking railway junctions and bridges behind the lines with negligible success. Then the order came to commence bombing Germany itself – the oil installations and marshalling yards whose names like Gelsenkirchen and Hamm became bywords and eventually wry jokes in that first year of the bomber offensive. In the morning the crews who had felt their way through the German sky in the darkness awoke and turned on the radio in their huts to listen to the urbane voice of the BBC reporting that ‘Last night, aircraft of Bomber Command . . .’, and they were touchingly delighted to hear themselves spoken of. If the BBC said that they had attacked the marshalling yards at
Hamm, well, they couldn’t be making quite such a mess of it as they sometimes thought.

Bomber Command possessed seventeen squadrons of aircraft suitable for use as night bombers in September 1939: this slowly expanding force of Wellingtons, Whitleys and Hampdens would constitute the backbone of the bomber offensive until well into 1942. The Hampden was the most urgent candidate for replacement: cruising at only 155 mph, 10 mph slower than the other two, this grotesque-looking flying glasshouse could stand little punishment, lacked power-operated turrets, and could carry only a 4,000-lb maximum bombload. The Wellington, with a 4,500-lb bombload, would never carry the weight to compare with the later heavy bombers, but after modifications to improve its speed and ceiling, it continued as a sturdy makeweight with Bomber Command until 1943. Both the Wellington and the Whitley were exceptionally strong aircraft – later wartime design sacrificed structural strength to load and performance. Early in May 1940, 10 Squadron thankfully exchanged their Whitley IVs – equipped with the grossly inadequate Tiger radial engine – for the Whitley V, powered by the excellent Rolls-Royce Merlin. The new model cruised to Germany at 165 mph and could carry 8,000 lb over short distances, but coming home against the prevailing westerly wind often took longer than the loaded outward trip. The Whitley looked for all the world like a rather pedantic middle-aged pipe-smoker, with its jutting chin mounting a single Vickers K gun, and its extraordinary tail-high attitude in flight. On its debut in 1937,
Flight
magazine wrote: ‘The Whitley is as kind to its crew as it is likely to be unkind to any enemy down below.’ Yet in reality the essential weakness of all Bomber Command’s early wartime aircraft was their mass of inadequate ancillary equipment prone to technical failure and their utter lack of basic comfort for crews compelled to live in them for ten hours at a stretch. Each aircraft carried a crew of five:
⁷
two pilots; a navigator (the old classification
of observer was abolished and by the end of 1940 a bomber navigator was recognized as one of the most important members of every crew); a wireless operator, who usually spent much of the trip with his 1155 set in pieces in front of him, or struggling to coax more power out of the Whitley’s inadequate generators; and a rear gunner, who nursed his four Brownings in a power-operated turret mounted between the twin booms of the tail.

The cold was appalling. They flew layered in silk, wool and leather, yet still their sandwiches and coffee froze as they ate and drank, vital systems jammed, limbs seized, wings iced-up for lack of de-icing gear. The navigator gave the pilot a course on take-off, and then relied absolutely on being able to establish pinpoints from the ground below at intervals in the six-or seven-hour flight – ‘groping’, Staton called it. On a clear night it was possible to shoot the stars with a sextant if the pilot was willing or able to fly straight and level for long enough. It was sometimes possible for a skilled wireless operator to pick up a loop bearing from England, but a novice could put an aircraft on a 180-degree reciprocal course if he misjudged the signal, and the Germans frequently jammed the wavelengths. On rare occasions the weather report before take-off was accurate, and it was possible to allow for the wind strength when navigating in the air. More often, the predictions were quite wrong, and the winds were blowing the aircraft off course and speed. Checking drift by dropping a flare or incendiary was a chancy business, and impossible in cloud. In these nursery days of the offensive, efforts were made to send out the bombers in moonlight, to assist navigation and bombing. In the event, cloud often blanketed the ground for part or all of the operation. Approaching a target wreathed in cloud, there were only two possibilities: to descend to recklessly low level to seek visual identification – which cost many crews their lives – or to bomb on
ETA – Estimated Time of Arrival over the target, judged from the last pinpoint, perhaps hundreds of miles back. This was the commonest course among mediocre crews, who had their own saying: ‘He who bombs on ETA lives to fly another day.’ It was a practice that created errors not of yards, or even miles, but of scores and hundreds of miles. ETA attack was the subject of a savage Bomber Command memorandum to all Groups on 14 June 1940, reiterating that ‘bombs are not to be dropped indiscriminately’. But again and again at this period, Germany was genuinely unaware that Bomber Command had been attempting to attack a specific target or even a specific region. There was merely a litter of explosives on farms, homes, lakes, forests and – occasionally – on factories and installations from end to end of the Third Reich.