Bomber Command (15 page)

Peter Donaldson, the navigator who had flown with Bill Staton on the night of the Sylt raid, took off at 8.30 pm on the evening of 27 May to attack a German aerodrome in Holland. His pilot was a 10 Squadron officer named Warren. They were on course, flying steadily across the North Sea, when they encountered a sudden magnetic storm. Flashes of lightning danced on the wings. The aircraft rocked and bucketed as the pilots struggled to maintain control. After a few minutes Warren asked Donaldson for a new course to escape the weather. The last light had gone now, and as their ETA at the Dutch coast came and went, they began to search the sea below for a pinpoint. At last, they saw the Rhine estuary below. Flak curled up towards them. They tracked steadily up the thread of the river, then turned to starboard and began to search for the German airfield that was their target. Suddenly Rattigan, the second pilot, called from the nose: ‘This is it! I’ve got it!’ The Whitley lifted as the bombs fell away. ‘Give me a course for base,’ said Warren.

At first light as their ETA Dishforth approached, they dropped through the cloud. They saw below them a city, and the sea beyond. They were obviously on the west coast of England. Two Spitfires suddenly wheeled curiously across them. They identified the port of Liverpool below. Warren turned to the crew and said
flatly: ‘According to my calculations, we can only have bombed something inside England. Christ, what are we going to do?’ They flew miserably home to Yorkshire. Their magnetic compass had been thrown hopelessly out of true by the storm. They had picked up the Thames estuary in place of the Rhine, and dropped a stick of bombs with unusual precision across the runway of Fighter Command’s station at Bassingbourn in Cambridgeshire. Their captain was demoted to second pilot, and known to the mess for ever after as Baron Von Warren. The ordnance experts were dismayed to discover that a stick of Bomber Command bombs had done scarcely any damage at all to Bassingbourn, and thus presumably would have done little more to Germany. Two Spitfires flew over Dishforth and dropped Iron Crosses. It had been a comic episode that might easily have been a tragedy, yet in the context of those days and the equipment with which they were operating, it was astonishing that it did not happen more often.

And beyond navigation problems, they were increasingly aware of the imperfections of their bomb-aiming. During an attack on oil installations at Bremen, Bill Staton organized one of the first attempts to mark a target with flares and Very lights in the hands of his best crews. He himself made six runs over the city at less than a thousand feet, while one of his sergeant pilots tried to decoy the searchlights. Staton’s aircraft was riddled. As the battered Whitley crossed the North Sea, he offered his crew the option of ditching rather than attempting a forced landing. When they somehow reached the end of the runway at Dishforth, they counted 700 holes in the aircraft.

They were still deeply concerned about the risk of hitting civilians. The Government’s ‘Revised Instruction’ to the Air Ministry in June 1940 insisted that ‘the attack must be made with reasonable care to avoid undue loss of civil life in the vicinity of the target’. Their orders emphatically stated that if they could not identify their target they were to come home with their bombs. Crew after crew crashed attempting the difficult landing with an explosive load aboard, and it was months before they introduced
the concept of ‘last-resort’ targets – those bizarre creatures SEMO and MOPA, ‘Self-evident Military Objective’ and ‘Military Objective Previously Attacked’, to be bombed if the primary and secondary targets could not be located. One of 10’s pilots, Pete Whitby, found a bomb hung up over an oil plant they were attacking one autumn night. It freed itself a few moments later to fall in the midst of Hanover. He and his crew flew home deeply worried by the thought that it might have landed on women and children. One night over Coblenz, a flight commander named Pat Hanafin made four runs and then called to his second pilot to drop the bombs. ‘No, no, we’re too near the hospital,’ the man shouted from the nose. In these days when only a fraction of crews could find a given city, hospitals were still individually marked on every navigator’s maps.

That idyllic summer of 1940 they were driven out relentlessly night after night, orders and bombloads being changed at a moment’s notice, briefings and cancellations falling over each other as crisis followed crisis. In the wake of Dunkirk, relations between the British army and the RAF plumbed bitter depths. Two of Pat Hanafin’s crew rash enough to walk into a Harrogate pub full of soldiers fell out again shortly afterwards, badly beaten up. The incident was repeated everywhere that soldiers and airmen met. The weather mocked their confusion. ‘Temperature 85 degrees. Another glorious summer’s day,’ recorded the squadron operations book on 9 June. The next day Italy declared war, and Bomber Command was ordered forth in the hope of making Mussolini regret his decision. 3 Group’s Wellingtons, taking off from staging points in France, were eliminated from the operation when the French drove lorries across the runway to prevent them from taking off – they feared Italian reprisals. 10 Squadron flew from Guernsey in the Channel Islands, to bring Turin just within range.

Pat Hanafin was a Cranwell-trained regular RAF officer who had asked to be posted from his staff job to operations when the invasion of Norway began. He requested Group to send him
anywhere but to 10 Squadron, because his bull terrier had once savaged Staton’s labrador Sam, and he did not think Staton was the sort of man to forget it. But to his surprise, Staton requested him as a flight commander. The trip to Turin was his seventeenth in less than two months. The cold was murderous. They were fired on by French flak. A few miles short of the Alps, they flew headlong into black cumulus clouds. The lightning eddied around them until suddenly there was a great flash which ripped through the Whitley. It blew the rear gunner backwards out of his turret into the fuselage with the left side of his body paralysed. It burned the wireless operator’s hands, cut both engines, and put the aircraft into a vertical dive, laden with ice. Somehow Hanafin regained control before they reached the ground, but they lacked the fuel to climb the Alps once more, even if they still possessed the will. They turned back for Guernsey.

Those of 10 Squadron who reached Italy that night looked down at the great pale ghosts of the Alps in the moonlight with wonderment that would strike so many Bomber Command crews following their course in the next four years. Most were numbed by the relentless cold, for they had little experience of the hazards above 10,000 feet. The Whitley’s oxygen supply was inadequate for long flights at high altitude. The exactor controls, which enabled the pilot to vary the engine pitch, were chronically prone to freezing, leaving the engines trapped in fine pitch and the aircraft unable to climb. When the lines froze, the fluid inside them began to leak through pinpoint holes until pressure was gone. Crews learned to unscrew the exactor system and refill it with coffee, urine – anything to restore pressure. Only a handful of pilots claimed to have found Turin that night, despite the indifferent Italian blackout. One aircraft failed to return. The others had strawberries and cream for breakfast in the summer sunshine of Guernsey, then flew home, a little thawed, to Yorkshire.

They were now operating from the new station of Leeming, although until its buildings and tarmac runways were completed they were obliged to fly before each operation to nearby Topcliffe
or Linton for briefing and bombing-up. Shortly after the fall of France, Sid Bufton arrived to become their commanding officer. Bufton had been transferred from a staff job at the Air Ministry to the Advanced Air Striking Component a few weeks after the outbreak of war. One May morning he was having a haircut in a French barber’s shop when the Luftwaffe appeared overhead and began to rain bombs upon them. He escaped from France on 17 June at the final French collapse, and came home looking for command of a fighter squadron. Instead he was sent to Leeming, where he astonished the adjutant by making his first appearance crawling through the hangar window, having been unable to find the door. He was a former Vickers engineering pupil who had learnt to fly with the RAF in Egypt in 1927. A quiet, earnest, thoughtful man, in sharp contrast to Bill Staton, he inherited Staton’s preoccupation with the problem of marking targets at night, which would become the major concern of his war.

The strain of constant operations was telling on them all. Night after night they forged out into the blackness, over the flakships off the Dutch coast where they knew that the German night fighters had begun to fly standing patrols, on towards the empty darkness of Germany. Each captain chose his own route. In the moonlight they could sometimes see the silver thread of a river, and on clear nights the finest ground detail. Once Peter Donaldson picked out a German riding a bicycle. His new pilot, Ffrench-Mullen, was one of those who often flew the outward leg at a thousand feet or less, in his determination to find the target. The searchlights would flick on suddenly: first one, two, three then perhaps a dozen until the night sky was cut open by a great tent of light visible for miles. These were mere gestures compared with the great cones of seventy or eighty lights defending the cities of Germany two years later, but they were quite frightening enough. The flak would start to come up, in all the colours of the rainbow. Cold-blooded captains stooged around the target area until they saw another aircraft pinned by the lights and gunfire, then made their run, but this was too callous for most. Some pilots like Pat
Hanafin fired recognition cartridges in the hope of bluffing the defences into silence. Peter Donaldson would man the forward Vickers K gun and lie behind the perspex screen in the nose, blasting off pan after pan of ammunition at the lights or simply at the German countryside to relieve the tension. The smell of cordite filling the cockpit made the crew feel that at least they were hitting back. Some pilots made run after run over the target before bombing, or like Sid Bufton dropped only part of their load on each attack. There was a vogue for making a silent approach, gliding in with the engines cut from 10,000 to 5,000 feet, but most crews were too nervous about being unable to start up again to risk this. Some, hazy about their position, bombed the blazes below in the hope that their predecessors had been on target. In reality, these were usually the decoy fires that the Germans were already setting nightly.

10 Squadron’s operations that autumn took on outlandish overtones at the behest of Bomber Command. In August, for the first time, the Whitleys carried in addition to their bombload a clutch of ‘Razzles’, phosphorus-coated strips that they dropped on the fields of Germany, allegedly to set fire to the ripening crops and summer-dry woods under the terms of Western Air Plan 11. ‘Razzles’ had to be transported in milk churns of water in the fuselage to avoid spontaneous combustion in the aircraft, then released down the flare chute at suitable moments. ‘Razzling’ ended abruptly after a few weeks when there proved to be no great blazes in the fields of Germany, but Whitleys had repeatedly come home damaged by ‘Razzles’ which lodged in their tails and caught fire. The next extravagance was the ‘W’ mine, a small explosive device which was also carried in a milk churn, this time to be dropped in Germany’s rivers, to drift down and explode against locks and small craft. ‘W’ mines were also short-lived. Instead, for some months aircraft carried quantities of tea bags, to be thrown out over Holland as a propaganda exercise to demonstrate that beleaguered Britain still possessed sufficient comforts to be generous with them.

Bomber Command’s losses were still less than 2 per cent of sorties dispatched, perhaps one aircraft every two or three nights of operations from 10 Squadron, a fraction of the casualties that would become commonplace in 1942 and 1943. But as the old sense of a familiar and well-loved flying club faded, as each squadron saw its pre-war personality vanish and die, the pain was acute. A pilot from 10’s sister unit at Dishforth, 51 Squadron, wrote to a former colleague in July:

I’m afraid you wouldn’t know 51 if you went back now. Of the pilots at the beginning of the war, only Gillchrist, Otterley and Murray are left in A Flight and Bill Emery in B. Baskerville, Fennell, Gould, Birch and Johnny Crampton are missing – have been for months. Turner, Peach, Milne, Hayward and Johnny Bowles are prisoners. Teddy Cotton is in dock with a compound fracture of the thigh, having run out of petrol and hit the Pennines coming back from Oslo in dirty weather. Marvin is at Torquay recovering from a broken leg acquired by baling out two nights later, also out of petrol coming back from Oslo. But I expect you have been watching the casualty lists . . .

It was the same at 10 Squadron. The excitement of flying over Germany in the innocent days of ‘nickelling’ had been overtaken by new sensations: fatalism, callousness, reluctant intimacy with the mingled smell of burning paint, fabric, rubber, petrol and human flesh from a crashed aircraft. Above all they had learnt the reality of fear.

In a matter of seconds we were in a box barrage, the first warning of which was a heavy thump underneath our tail. [Wrote a Whitley pilot after a winter night of 1940 over Kiel
¹
] Almost instantaneously black puffs of smoke materialized around us. Plainly visible, like clenched fists against the faint light of the night sky, they crowded in upon the aeroplane from all the sides. I had just time to think that this was how the hero comes in to bomb on the films, before fear broke its dams and swept over me in an almost irresistible flood. Concentrating all my energies, I forced myself to sit motionless in my seat next to the pilot, fighting back an insane impulse to run, despite the fact that in an aircraft you cannot run because there is nowhere you can run to, unless you can take it with you. As the gunfire got heavier, light flak joined in and I gazed fascinated, as if at a deadly snake, when a stream of incendiary shells came up in a lazy red arc which rapidly increased speed as it got nearer and at last flashed past a few inches above the wing on my side, two feet from the window. As the shells went by, they seemed to be deflected by the air flow over the wing and to curve round it, describing a fiery red line round its upper contour. By now the aircraft was becoming filled with the fumes of cordite from the bursting flak shells. It seemed each second must be our last, and that we must surely disintegrate in a blinding flash at any moment, or come tumbling down flaming from a direct hit. We sat the aircraft in that box barrage for ten minutes, and did not get out of it until we had flown out of range . . .