Bomber Command (28 page)

‘OVER 1,000 BOMBERS RAID COLOGNE,’ proclaimed
The Times
. ‘Biggest Air Attack Of the War. 2,000 Tons of Bombs in 40 Minutes.’

Bomber Command lost forty aircraft on the Cologne operation, an acceptable 3.8 per cent of those dispatched, all the more astonishing in view of the number of OTU crews involved. Two of 50 Squadron’s Manchesters failed to return, one of them piloted by a quiet, diffident young man named Leslie Manser. His aircraft
was badly damaged over the target, and he faced a long, difficult struggle to bring it home. At last it became clear that he could no longer keep it in the air, and he ordered the crew to bale out, waving away the parachute his flight engineer offered him as he fought to hold the Manchester steady while they jumped. He was killed with the aircraft, but was awarded the Victoria Cross for his sacrifice, which was in no way diminished by the fact that it was so frequently required from the pilots of Bomber Command aircraft.

Harris staged two further massive raids, on Essen and Bremen, before it became necessary to dismantle his ‘1,000’ force to avoid serious damage to the training and logistics of the Command. Neither was a significant success. The weather frustrated the Essen raid by 956 aircraft on 1 June – an experiment with the
Shaker
marking technique, German radio did not even recognize Essen as the target, and reported ‘widespread raids over western Germany’. 31 aircraft, or 3.2 per cent, were lost. On 25 June 904 aircraft attacked Bremen, doing some damage to the Focke–Wulf plant at the cost of 44 aircraft, or 4.9 per cent, missing, and a further 65 more or less seriously damaged.

Bomber Command settled to spend the remainder of the summer pounding Germany on a wide front, at less spectacular intensity and with results that could not compare with the dramatic devastation of Cologne. But Harris could bide his time now. In four months as Commander-in-Chief, he had established his own reputation; delighted the Prime Minister whose sense of drama matched his own; and made an immense contribution to British propaganda at a time when the nation’s fortunes in the Middle and Far East were at their lowest ebb. The British public and their politicians had been almost universally awed by the scale and vision of power presented by the ‘1,000’ raids. The Prime Minister proclaimed after the bombing of Cologne: ‘Proof of the growing power of the British bomber force is also the herald of what Germany will receive city by city from now on.’ Harris said: ‘We are going to scourge the Third Reich from end to end. We are
bombing Germany city by city and ever more terribly in order to make it impossible for her to go on with the war. That is our object; we shall pursue it relentlessly.’

Amidst the terrible scars of the Luftwaffe’s blitz on Britain, there is no doubt that the nation derived deep satisfaction from Harris’s words and deeds. Unlike some of his service and political masters, he was never a dissembler or a hypocrite. He gave unequivocal notice of his intentions. Whatever criticism may be made of the strategic substance of Harris’s campaign, it is essential not to underestimate the power and value to England of his remarkable military showmanship at this, one of the grimmest phases of the war for the Grand Alliance.

2. Operations

In July 1942, to the relief of 50 Squadron the Manchesters were retired after their brief and alarming months in service. In their place came the four-engined Avro Lancaster, indisputably the great heavy night-bomber of the Second World War. Pilots have a saying about an aircraft: ‘If it looks right, it is right.’ The Lancaster looked superb, its cockpit towering more than nineteen feet above the tarmac, the sweep of its wings broken by the four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines with their throaty roar like a battery of gigantic lawnmowers. The green and brown earth shadings of the upper surfaces gave way to matt black flanks and undersides, the perspex blisters glittering from the ceaseless polishing of the ground crews. The pilot sat high in his great greenhouse of a cockpit, the flight engineer beside him – second pilots had been scrapped in the spring of 1942 to economize on aircrew. Beyond sat the navigator, bent over a curtained-off table in almost permanent purdah in flight, his work lit by a pinpoint anglepoise lamp. Behind him was the wireless operator, his back to the bulk of the main spar between the wings, a waist-high barrier in the midst of the fuelage. The space beyond, in the rear of the aircraft, was clear and roomy when the aircraft left the production line, but as the electronic
war intensified, the interior became more and more crowded with equipment: the big, squat case of the
Gee
equipment, linked to the receiver beside the navigator; the Distant Reading Compass, wired to a repeater on the pilot’s windscreen; the Air Position Indicator gear; the flare chute; the rest bed for a wounded man; the ‘tramlines’ carrying the long linked belts of machine-gun ammunition to the rear gunner’s four Brownings and the two in the mid-upper turret; the Elsan toilet which most crews used with much caution after a 50 Squadron gunner left most of the skin of his backside attached to the frozen seat one icy night over Germany. Beneath the fuselage, the bomb bay lay long and narrow. In the nose, the bomb-aimer stretched behind the forward blister searching for pinpoints to assist the navigator until they approached the target, or occasionally manned the twin front guns to frighten the light flak gunners on low-level operations. Gunners trained the power-operated Brownings to the right and left with a twist of the grips to which their triggers were fitted. The British hydraulic turret was one of the outstanding design successes of the bomber war; although unfortunately it was fitted with the inadequate .303 machine-gun. The last hopes of equipping Bomber Command with .5s, as Harris had demanded for so long, vanished when America entered the war and her own needs eclipsed British hopes of .5 imports from American factories.

The Lancaster inspired affection unmatched by any other British heavy bomber. The Stirling was easier to fly, a gentleman’s aircraft, according to Stirling pilots. But its lamentable ceiling made it the first target of every German gunner and night-fighter pilot, provoking the callous cheers of the more fortunate Lancaster crews when they heard at briefings that the clumsy, angular Stirlings would be beneath them. The Halifax was a workhorse of no breeding and alarming vices in the air. The British never took to the American Flying Fortress, although Bomber Command experimented with a handful in 1941 and 1942; its virtues only became apparent in the hands of the Americans with their lavish supplies of aircraft and men, when the day-bombing offensive came into its own at the beginning of 1944.

But the Lancaster, cruising at 216 mph, intensely durable and resistant to punishment by the standards of the lightly armoured night-bombers, beautiful to the eye and carrying the bombload of two Flying Fortresses at a ceiling of 22,000 feet, ranks with the Mosquito and the Mustang among the great design successes of the war. 50 Squadron, like the rest of Bomber Command, took to it at once. Throughout 1942, while the numerical strength of Harris’s forces expanded scarcely at all, the effectiveness of his aircraft and equipment was being steadily transformed. In May 1942 there were 214 Wellingtons, 62 Halifaxes and 29 Lancasters among the front line of 417 aircraft. By January 1943 there were only 128 Wellingtons left, and 104 Halifaxes and 178 Lancasters among the total of 515 first-line aircraft. In the interval the bomb-carrying capacity of the Command increased by more than a third.

The mood of this new Bomber Command was utterly different from that of 1939. Most squadrons were no longer billeted amidst the solid brick comforts of the pre-war airfields, but were learning to live with Nissen huts and chronic mud, to fly from hastily concreted strips now carpeting eastern England, as the island was transformed into a gigantic aircraft-carrier. The old spirit of the officers’ mess as home, the idea of the squadron as a family, had been replaced by that of a human conveyor belt, a magic lantern show of changing faces. Bomber Command dickered briefly with committing crews to tours of 200 operational hours, but this stopped abruptly when it was found that some men flew home with their wheels down in order to prolong ‘ops’ to their limit. Now there was a thirty-trip standard before men were posted to notionally less dangerous instructing jobs. Operational aircrew might fly six or seven times a month, unless the weather was very bad. A first-class CO could create a squadron spirit, but the aircrew had become passing three-or four-month guests on their own stations, leading a parallel yet utterly different life from that of the
huge permanent ground-support staff, who remained at one base year after year, drinking in the same pubs and servicing aircraft in the same hangars.

The aircrew, as befitted men who were statistically not long for this world, spent their last months fattened with whatever comfort wartime England could provide for them, unheard-of luxuries such as extra milk, fruit juice, sugar and real eggs. They were warmed by sun-ray lamps in the medical quarters, dosed with halibut-oil capsules and protected from all but the most essential duties when not flying. The former pressure on non-commissioned aircrew had been lifted. Now they usually occupied their own mess separate from that of non-flying NCOs, and enjoyed much the same comforts and privileges as their commissioned counterparts. A crew drank, womanized, often even went on leave together as a close-knit entity, regardless of individual rank. A commissioned navigator called his sergeant-pilot ‘Skipper’ in the air without a hint of resentment. They were all too close to death to trouble about formalities over Germany now. Throughout 1942, the loss-rate, including fatal crashes in England, seldom fell much below 5 per cent, one aircraft in twenty on every operation. A crew faced thirty trips. It needed no wizard of odds to read the chances of their mortality, even if each man deep in his heart believed that it would be another’s turn until the instant that he plunged headlong out of the night sky, the flames billowing from his aircraft.

But unlike the days in France a generation earlier, when these men’s fathers queued below the red lamps before they went over the top, brothels seldom flourished around the bomber stations. Many aircrew preferred to relax with drink and each other rather than with women. For those who craved female company, local girls, lonely soldiers’ wives and station WAAFs found it difficult to refuse boys who were likely to be dead within a month. It was chiefly remarkable, in the almost frenzied celebrations that accompanied a ‘stand-down’ or a ‘good prang’ or the end of a crew’s tour or somebody getting a ‘gong’, that so many aircrew went to their fate as innocent as they had emerged from the cradle. A nineteen-
year-old who was given his opportunity by a sentimental WAAF still blushes to recall that he turned her down because he had been warned by the medical officer to keep his strength up for operations. A survivor from the crew of a pilot who was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross for his efforts to save his aircraft over France never forgot that on their last night together, the boy admitted sheepishly that he had never kissed a girl in his life.

By that summer of 1942 the strange inverted timetable of night-bomber operations had become a routine. The crews awoke in their huts as the Lincolnshire ground mists slowly cleared from the runways, and wandered across to the mess for a late breakfast in the patchy sunshine. By 11 am, they were playing cricket or lounging on the grass around the flight offices, waiting to hear if operations were ‘On’ for that night. Some days – the good days – they were at once ‘stood down’. They dashed for a bus to Nottingham or piled into their cars, illicitly fuelled with 100-octane aviation spirit. Often – very often – they were ordered to prepare for an ‘op’ that was cancelled at five, six, seven o’clock after they had dressed and been briefed and their aircraft bombed-up. This they hated most of all, because by evening they had already been fighting the battle against fear and anticipation all day, and they had overcome the worst. ‘Ops scrubbed’ was only an illusory reprieve, because if they did not fly their first or fifth or twentieth trip that night, it would only be waiting for them tomorrow. More often than not, it was the prospect of bad weather over England in the early hours that caused cancellations, rather than cloud over Germany. There had already been some appalling nights when bombers crashed all over East Anglia in impossible visibility, and exhausted crews were compelled to abandon their aircraft and bale out over their own bases rather than risk descending to ground level.

If ‘ops’ were ‘on’, the armourers began the long, painstaking routine of bombing-up the aircraft. Knowing their fuel and bombload in the morning, crews could quickly assess the rough distance and perhaps the nature of their target. That summer, Harris was
still unwilling to commit his force headlong against Berlin or the Ruhr amidst the stiffening German defences. As he waited for more aircraft and the new generation of navigation and bomb-aiming devices, he advanced with caution. 50 Squadron and the rest of Bomber Command made spasmodic trips to Duisburg, Düsseldorf and other Ruhr targets, but generally bombed less perilous and more easily located ones: Bremen, Osnabrück, Kassel, Nuremberg. They were burning thousands of houses and not a few factories, but Harris was biding his time for the punishing attacks on the industrial heart of Germany.

After taking their aircraft for a brief air test before lunch, gazing down at the chequer board of airfields visible in every direction around them in the naked light of day, some crews tried to sleep on the afternoon of an ‘op’. Many never succeeded. It was these long hours of preparation and expectation that ate into men’s courage and nerves as much as anything that was done to them in the air. Many felt that it was the contrast between the rural peace of afternoon England and the fiery horror of early morning Germany that imposed much greater strain on bomber crews than the even tenor of discomfort and fear on a warship or in a tank. They had time to remember vividly each earlier trip. They gazed around them at the familiar hangars; the ‘erks’ – the ground crews – pedalling their bicycles round the perimeter track to the dispersals; the fuel bowsers beside the distant aircraft, silhouetted against the flat horizon. The panorama took on a strange unreality. They were called upon to fly over Germany in the midnight hours when human enterprise and resistance is naturally at its lowest ebb. The very young, under twenty, and the older men over thirty, seemed to suffer most, although the latter were often invaluable ballast in a crew. Those in their early twenties proved able to summon up remarkable reserves of resilience.