Bomber Command (18 page)

We attacked Lorient from the north [wrote a novice Whitley pilot, Denis Hornsey
⁵
]. Having taken over the controls just beforehand I throttled back the engines and began a glide towards the target at 12,000 feet. My intention was to drop the bombs at 8,000 feet. Richards, who had gone forward to map read, guided me in to the target, the rough position of which I could detect myself from a cone of searchlights and a smattering of light flak immediately ahead. Nearby the Germans were shooting at some parachute flares dropped by previous visitors, and somewhere underneath lay our objective, four submarines reputedly lying close together in the dry docks.

‘Steady, steady,’ came Richards’s voice. ‘Keep as you are going, Skipper,’ he added, dropping the official bombing patter in his excitement. ‘The docks are right ahead.’

‘OK,’ I said. Then remembering my duty, I called up the rear gunner. ‘Skipper calling rear gunner. Skipper calling rear gunner. Keep your eye open for fighters.’

‘OK, Skipper,’ the rear gunner replied. ‘There’s some searchlights after us,’ he went on laconically. ‘Bang on our tail.’

He had no sooner said this than the searchlights were upon us and the inside of the cabin was suddenly illuminated as by an arc lamp. I sat motionless at the controls for a moment, wondering whether they would flick over us or not, and while I did so Richards’s voice came through again.

‘Running up! Running up!’ he was saying imperturbably. ‘Bomb doors open! Bomb doors open!’

I repeated the patter and concentrated on the bombing approach. I had opened the bomb doors as directed and was now gliding the aircraft at a steady speed down to our bombing height of 8,000 feet. The searchlights were still on us, and it could not be long before we received attention from fighters or anti-aircraft guns if we remained in them.

‘Drop the bombs in one stick,’ I ordered Richards. ‘We’re still in the searchlights.’

The last statement was redundant, for Richards could scarcely be unaware that we were now coned by about twenty beams with others swinging across the sky to join in. It was high time we took evasive action.

‘Skipper calling bomb-aimer. We’ll have to let the bombs go. Can’t hold out much longer,’ I said breathlessly, feeling more and more apprehensive as the seconds ticked by.

‘OK, skip, we’re coming on the target now.’

‘Let the bloody things go then,’ I said.

‘OK. Bombs gone,’ Richards replied.

I thankfully closed the bomb doors and opening up the engines, pulled hard back on the stick to go into a steep climb. Climbing steadily for a few minutes, minutes which seemed like an age, I felt as naked in that bright light as if I was standing unclothed in the middle of Piccadilly. Then I tried some diving and climbing turns to left and right, but we were still held relentlessly in the beams as if impaled by twenty or thirty silver lances. All this having availed nothing, it was essential to get out of the searchlights with no more delay, for every second increased the risk of being shot down. Certain that our course and height must have now been accurately plotted by the enemy, I put the aircraft into a dive. I did this automatically and instinctively, without conscious thought, but as the needle of the air speed indicator crept round its dial I watched it without comprehension. I was in a muck sweat and almost exhausted by my efforts.

‘Shall I fire at the searchlights, skipper?’ came Richards’s voice.

‘Yes, have a go. You too, rear gunner.’

‘No, no,’ cried Barney, ‘you’ll give away our position.’

The noise of the guns came over the intercom.

‘Got one,’ said Richards triumphantly, ignoring the wireless operator’s protest.

My intense concentration during these manoeuvres was interrupted by Franklin tapping my shoulder. He leaned over me from behind and pointed to the altimeter, which was showing only 3,000 feet. We were still going down fast in a steep dive at 260 mph, very fast indeed for a Whitley. I had become so engrossed in trying to get out of the searchlights that I had forgotten how near we must be getting to the ground. Nodding as if to indicate that I was fully aware of our position and that everything was going to plan – I was enough of a Captain to remember such necessities – I pulled hard back on the stick to flatten out of the dive. We shot out of the beams like an orange pip squeezed from one’s fingers, into blessed darkness and relative safety. My unintentional dive had taken us across the headland north of L’Orient and out over the sea.

‘Hurrah!’ said Richards. ‘We’re out!’

Night after night that spring and summer of 1941, 10 Squadron and the rest of Bomber Command poured their bombloads into the smokescreens shielding ‘Salmon’ and ‘Gluck’ – the
Scharnhorst
and the
Gneisenau
at Brest – and the U-boats at Lorient and Bordeaux from the eyes of the bomb-aimers. Peirse protested to Portal that his pilots were wasting hundred of tons of explosives on a task for which they had never been intended and were not trained or equipped. Yet air attack on enemy warships had always been an obvious, vital strategic role for Bomber Command. If this, too, was beyond its capabilities, to what was it suited? For what was it equipped and prepared?

10 Squadron spent the early spring bombing Germany during occasional breaks in the weather and standing by for hours, acutely bored. By the end of February there had been only two nights on which the sky was clear enough to attack oil targets – just 221 sorties had taken place of the 3,400 estimated to be necessary to have decisive effect on German oil supplies. Often aircraft taxiing out from the dispersals had to weave a path through a sea of mud, becoming bogged down and having to be towed out at predictable cost in temper and tiredness. One day in March an ‘oil expert’ came down from Group to lecture at Leeming on the importance of what they were doing. His talk merged into the haze of information and misinformation that was crowded into their idle hours: lectures on escaping, on evasive action in the air, on searchlights and the growing defensive belt reaching down across northern Germany into Holland, on the significance of the appearance of the first radar-equipped night-fighters over Holland. One day Trenchard came, a charming, paternal old, gentleman, who endeared himself at once. Listening to him lecturing them all in a great semi-circle outside a hangar was like hearing Moses himself, after so many years in which they had learned to think of him as the exalted prophet of bombing.
⁸

Most of their operations were simply very monotonous. But difficult though it may be to grasp today, many aircrew still enjoyed the business of flying an aircraft, and managed to gain great pleasure from what they were doing operation after operation in these days before the odds against their own survival became overwhelming. Pilots revelled in the occasional clear, bright night when they sat in their cockpits watching the shooting stars, with an overwhelming sense of the vastness of the universe. They knew nothing of the intense debates about their own doings that were taking place at Group and at High Wycombe. They would have been dismayed if they did, for they believed that they were doing a good job. It had taken eighteen months of war for High Wycombe to grasp a simple but remarkable truth about night bomber operations, that the airmen themselves were the last people to know what they had or had not achieved. They were not wantonly dishonest – perhaps sometimes a little optimistic, but generally gauchely frank about their own efforts. In a memorandum to the Air Ministry at about this time, Trenchard made the point that the level of debriefing was still abysmal, usually left in the hands of staff officers who had no idea how to ask crews the right questions, and who invariably overstated their claims. In the years to come, skilled interpretation of night photos and improved debriefing enabled the Command to form a somewhat more accurate image of what had taken place on operations. But throughout the war, part of the unique character of the bomber offensive was that the men who carried it out were totally dependent on their commanders for information about the success or failure of what they were doing. An infantry platoon commander, over a period of weeks or months, could achieve some notion of his army’s gains or losses by noticing whether he himself was moving forwards or backwards. A convoy escort officer could judge a great deal from the rate of sinkings around him. But a bomber pilot, with rare exceptions such as the great firestorms of Hamburg and Dresden, had to wait for the next bulletin from High Wycombe to learn whether his comrades were dying to good purpose or in vain. It
was absolutely necessary for him to believe that his commanders’ view of the bomber offensive was accurate. For if it was not, then he was flying out each night to risk his life and the lives of his crew for nothing.

The men who survived those primitive operations of 1940 and 1941 would look back on them afterwards as almost lunatic in their crudeness compared with what came later. The little clusters of boys around the Whitleys and Hampdens in the photographs still look like young ‘Clubland Heroes’: hair plastered down, breathing health and willingness and energy from every pore. The superb propaganda films made about Bomber Command at this time had perhaps captured their imagination as well as that of Britain. They themselves were secretly rather impressed by
F for Freddie
and
Target for Tonight
. At briefing, they were given their target, perhaps a post office or power station, and solemnly handed street maps of the relevant city to guide their way. They drew their flying rations and parachutes and boarded the truck for the dispersals. Two airmen waited with the battery cart. For fifteen minutes they ran up the Merlins, then began the long bumpy journey to the taxi lamp at the end of the runway, among the seagulls in the dusk. They waited for the green flash from the control caravan then rumbled away down the runway. The undercarriage came up and the wireless operator signalled briefly: ‘G-George on course,’ then lapsed into silence. They picked up Flamborough Head below them, and settled back for the long haul across the North Sea to the Zuider Zee. Bob Dodd of 10 Squadron described a typical night
⁶
:

The weather was ten-tenths cloud and we had navigated on Dead Reckoning to ETA target. We broke cloud (
hoping
there was no high ground) so as not to waste the trip, and found a river. After following it for a while we decided we had found our position on the southern border of Germany. We bombed a small town and our incendiaries set fire to the church, which appeared to have a wooden spire and burned fiercely. Houses were also burning. Since we had come down to about 1,000 feet, we had a clear view. When we returned to base and were able to evaluate the wind direction and speed, we calculated that we had attacked Epinalle in Vichy France. This was later confirmed by our Intelligence Officer. Our Dead Reckoning position with no wireless fix was so far out that we were attacked by flak over Birmingham. Our Dead Reckoning position was over the North Sea. I entered in the log: ‘Base-Mannheim-Base. Village bombed ten miles south of Epinalle’.

One night in March 1941, in his Whitley high over the North Sea on the way to Germany, a navigator named George Carter settled down to pass the trip writing a letter to his girlfriend on sheets torn from the log. ‘Dear Nicole’, he wrote, putting ‘2020 hours’ in brackets after her name, then ‘Bound for Berlin’:

As you can see from the address, I am on the job. It is the first time I have been to the ‘Big City’ and as I have nobody else to tell the great news, I tell you. We are at present sixty-four miles off the English coast, a lovely night, moon as near as dammit full. We are punching the old kite along at about 8,000 feet to get full benefit of a favourable wind over this long sea crossing (three hours) and I have not a lot to do. I started to write this note in ink but the reduced pressure up here has forced it all out and the pen won’t work, so I’m reduced to pencil now.

I shall have to break off for a while now as I have to work out some wireless bearings and switch on one of the auxiliary tanks, and check our drift by flame float. It’s getting cold – 0° on the clock now, and a cold white moon lighting up the plane . . .

2137. Here I am again after getting drift, about two dozen loop bearings and three sights on astro (I think my sight must be wrong, it gave our position about 180 miles south of where we ought to be, maybe dropping it last night had something to do with it).

I hope we knock the blazes out of the target (which incidentally is the post office in the centre of the city). Before, I have always felt sorry for the people down below, but the other night I came over Portsmouth on the way home and saw it afire. I saw an explosion about 2,000 feet high. So now I feel different about it, and I shall not be too careful to hit the post office. I have got one bottle, one brick and one piece of concrete to throw out with some personal messages to the Hun.

0120. Well, that was Berlin that was. Their AA was mustard – shook me rigid. We appear to be doubtful about our position so some work must be done . . .

0330. I managed to get back on track and now we’re in the middle of the North Sea going home. The wind changed from the met forecast and I found myself well to the south of my track, and with a bit of wangling we are OK, touch wood! You see, we have only just enough juice to get us to Berlin and back . . .