Bomber Command (3 page)
Within the year, attrition would destroy the continuity and character of 9 Squadron’s officers’ mess as inexorably as it attacked that of every other unit in the RAF. But in these days before the slaughter began in earnest, Honington’s welcoming leather armchairs and white-jacketed mess servants knew their thirty-odd brash young men as intimately as any public school prefects’ club or university junior common room: James Smalley, big and untidy, bringing showgirls down from London to their parties and bewildering colleagues on idle evenings by sitting quietly knitting on a sofa: Parrot, who had been a ladies’ hairdresser; Bill Macrae, a wild, brave, passionately alcoholic Canadian short-service officer who delighted in stunting his lumbering Wellington over the churches of Norfolk, lifting his wingtip at the last second before crashing into the spires; Peter Grant, fair-haired and elegant, almost a Hollywood caricature of the sporting young English public school boy, a general’s son who joined the RAF after failing to get into Cambridge. Half the mess secretly envied his stylish approach to life on the ground and in the air. The previous winter he drove in the Monte Carlo Rally in his own Talbot 10 with Appleby, a fellow-pilot chum from 37 Squadron. Everybody remembered the squadron CO standing roaring with laughter outside the mess as Peter’s Wellington came in at nought feet over the rugger pitch, scattering players to all points of the compass. Spirited flying, the CO believed, bred spirited fighters. There was less interest in education for war. Charlie Vann, another squadron pilot, took his leave in
Spain in the midst of her civil war, to see what real fighting looked like. He ended up in front of the Group AOC for going abroad without permission. Vann was an exception. Most officers were happy to let Command dictate the leisurely pace and nature of their training and showed little professional curiosity.
They were, on average, three or four years older than the twenty-and twenty-one-year-olds who would be the mainstay of Bomber Command at the height of its offensive five years later, but then that later generation was older by so many seasons’ experience of war. These young men of 9 Squadron and their kin were the innocents. Even their faces in the inevitable squadron photographs look somehow different from those who followed in 1943, 1944 and 1945: Challes, Fordham, Lines, Allison, Bailey – these were young men who cut their hair short and cultivated rakish little moustaches, precursors of the later handlebars. They drank at The Angel in Bury St Edmunds and The Bell at Thetford – always beer. Once a month they climbed into formal messkit for Dining-In nights, and when they were paid they cashed a cheque for five pounds and sped off to London crammed into somebody’s car for a night of noisy, gauche wickedness that usually ended unconscious on a bed at the Regent Palace Hotel. In the early summer of 1939, 9 Squadron represented the RAF at the Brussels International Air Exhibition, where they exchanged warily chivalrous compliments with their Luftwaffe counterparts, and were then sent to stage a ‘Show The Flag’ flight the length of France and back. Even since the outbreak of war, there had been plenty of social diversions. That autumn the Duke of Grafton did his bit for the war effort by inviting the whole of Honington officers’ mess to Euston, his stately home near Thetford. Then, one winter morning, the first contingent of Women’s Auxiliary Air Force girls, the WAAFs, arrived at the airfield, creating unprecedented excitement and causing the Station Commander to make one of his rare public appearances to supervise the rigging of barbed-wire entanglements round their quarters. The only discordant note, forerunner of many
more social upheavals to come, was struck when the most glamorous and sought-after of the girls ended up, of all places, in the arms of a non-commissioned sergeant pilot.
Even by the standards of the other two services, the young prewar RAF pilot was the least long-sighted of warriors. At least a few of the young men who joined the British army and the Royal Navy did so because they aspired to end up as generals or admirals. Those who came to the RAF did so because they passionately, single-mindedly, unashamedly wanted to fly. The Hendon Air Displays, the barnstormers of the 1920s and 1930s, the hugely publicized exploits of Lindberg, Hinckler, Amy Johnson, all these had seized the imagination of their generation. Above all, perhaps, they captured that of young grammar-school boys, of modest, conventional lower-middle-class backgrounds from which they yearned to escape. Some day there is an intriguing essay to be written on the social origins of senior British airmen of this period, and the effects of these on their attitudes to the other two services. It is enough here to say that pre-war RAF officers’ messes offered young men a unique opportunity to be paid for living the life of gentlemen fliers, and yet public school boys seemed slower to take it up than Lord Trenchard and his colleagues had hoped. There was a rueful prewar air force chestnut about the young man who told his mother he had become a pianist in a brothel rather than reveal that he had joined the RAF.
But they behaved as English public school boys of the period were expected to behave. One messnight, they locked a racehorse in James Smalley’s bedroom, and bravely faced the difficulties the next morning when it was found impossible to get it out again. They were woken in the morning by civilian batmen who had already run their baths, and who uncomplainingly collected the debris of the previous night’s revels, ironed the clothes while their owners soaked, then made the beds while the pilots strolled to the mess for ham and eggs. There was usually some flying in the morning, then after lunch squash and tennis and time to clean up before tea. They spurned the vulgarity of a bar – drinks were
brought to the ante-room by a waiter summoned by the bell, and signed for by chit (only in the sergeants’ mess was it necessary to pay cash). The pre-war stations had been built to standards of spacious solid comfort that ate deep into the RAF estimates even when aircraft design and production were being cut to the bone.
That December of 1939 the war had still made very little impact on Honington. Three armoured cars arrived to take over the station’s defence against invasion, and slit trenches had been dug everywhere. The hangars were draped in huge camouflage nets. Dining-In nights in full messkit had been abandoned. Blue bulbs were substituted for the white ones in every socket, a lurid contribution to the blackout. Every morning aircrew spent an inordinate amount of time hanging around the hangars waiting for orders that never came. Peter Grant and a handful of others had been sent on one abortive operation against the Kiel Canal at the very outbreak of war, from which they had returned almost drained of petrol and utterly exhausted, with a bleak inkling that operational flying would be at best very dreary and at worst terrifyingly dangerous. They had been ordered to bomb at extreme low level to avoid risking hitting the neighbouring land, and had lost two aircraft. Since September, however, operations had been ordered again and again, only to be cancelled before take-off. These were the months of the ‘Bore War’.
At the evening briefing of 17 December nine captains were detailed. Guthrie, Pett and Macrae, and Allison, Challes and Lines, would fly in two vics – V formations – of three, on the left of the big diamond formation led by six aircraft of 149 Squadron. Peter Grant, with sergeants Ramshaw and Purdy, would fly on the right of the diamond with three aircraft from 149. 37 Squadron would bring up the rear. Wireless silence was to be observed, although leaders would maintain a listening watch on 3190 Kilocycles. The only communication within the formation was to be by Aldis signal lamp. Each aircraft would carry three 500-pound Semi Armour-Piercing bombs.
At 0930 on the morning of 18 December they took off on
schedule from Honington at two-minute intervals. They rendezvoused according to plan with 149’s aircraft led by Kellett, and took up formation over the coastal town of King’s Lynn. Then, mostly in silent apprehension, they settled to keep station on the long haul across the North Sea.
Feltwell’s six aircraft were late taking off, and caught up the formation over the sea. Some of 37 Squadron were lucky. An observer, Sergeant Butcher, had been found the previous day to be suffering from mumps. His crew was withdrawn from the operation. Others were less fortunate. LAC Jack Greaves was in bed in his barrack room when an NCO put his head in to call: ‘Come on, you lucky lads, you’re “On” this morning!’ As the sleepy gunners roused themselves and dressed, Greaves, a wireless operator/gunner who had been posted to Feltwell only a few days before and was not yet attached to a crew, made himself busy in the accumulator charging room. He had heard enough about daylight sweeps to know that this was not a good morning on which to make his operational debut. Then he heard the Tannoy calling ‘LAC Greaves to “A” Flight Office’. A stocky, sharp little flight-lieutenant, ‘Cheese’ Lemon, had a sick wireless-operator. Greaves was to replace him.
Sergeant Herbert Ruse, the pilot of Harry Jones’s aircraft, joined the RAF as a technical apprentice at Trenchard’s famous Halton school at the age of sixteen, in 1930. A Suffolk butcher’s son, he decided that the air force could not be worse than sweating for school certificate at Sudbury grammar school, and discovered too late that the discipline at Halton exceeded that of the most remorseless civilian establishment. In 1936 he was a metal rigger when he was offered the chance to train as an NCO pilot under the ungenerous scheme of the period which allowed selected ground crew to fly for five years before returning to ground duties in their original ranks. But Herbie Ruse thought that if he became an experienced bomber pilot, there might be a career for him in civil
aviation. He qualified and was posted to Feltwell in September 1937. That December Sunday of 1939 he was at home in Long Melford when he was telephoned to return to the station: ‘Some practice do,’ they said. At briefing he was surprised to learn that they were to bomb above ten thousand feet, for he could never remember any crew scoring hits in bombing practice on a target as small as a ship from that height. Enemy fighters were an unknown quantity. In fighter affiliation exercises, the gunners would call exultantly: ‘Got him, skip!’ But neither he nor they had any scientific means of judging whether they were right. They had seldom fired live ammunition in the air, and on exercises they trained to attack in succession in pairs, making a series of runs over the target to judge their own errors. On this occasion, plainly there would be no opportunity for these refinements.
As Ruse’s Wellington climbed slowly over Norfolk, Harry Jones in the rear turret tested his twin guns, while Corporal Fred Taylor the wireless operator/gunner fired a few rounds from the front turret. 37 Squadron had been practising a new formation, flying ‘stepped-down’ in pairs above each other, rather than in the vics customary in other squadrons. Herbie Ruse’s only concern was to keep station with Flying Officer Thompson in the Wellington beside him, to bomb when he did, to change course as he did. Sergeant Tom May, in the second-pilot’s seat beside Ruse, had no need to trouble himself with dead-reckoning navigation on this trip. It was simply a case of follow-my-leader. 37’s aircraft were over the North Sea before they took up station at the rear of Kellett’s formation, and throughout the flight they lagged some way behind. As the day grew around them, they noted with concern that the broken cloud over England had cleared completely. It was now a bright, crystal-clear morning with visibility approaching fifty miles, ideal conditions for an enemy interception.
They had climbed to 15,000 feet, and were becoming acutely conscious of the numbing December cold that was spilling through the draughty turrets, blowing relentlessly down the unheated
fuselage, seeping into their hands and feet, closing its grip on their tautening limbs as the hours went on. They could now see the island of Heligoland before them. They were approaching German waters, the familiar naval battle grounds of the First World War, where Beatty’s battle-cruisers and the Royal Navy’s dashing submarine captains had played tip-and-run with the German High Seas Fleet for so long. They would be making a landfall close to the Danish–German frontier, then turning on a long leg southwards, down the German coast, searching for enemy naval units. In the leading aircraft some miles in front of them, Wing-Commander Kellett, who had made his name before the war chasing long-distance flying records, was for the first time carrying as a member of his crew a naval officer, Lieutenant-Commander Rotherham, to identify suitable targets.
In his lonely turret in the tail of Ruse’s Wellington, Harry Jones tightened the twenty-foot scarf Mary had knitted for him as close as he could around his throat, to fight the dreadful cold. The turret was even more cramped than was usual in Wellingtons, for after acute difficulty with the ammunition feeds, 37 Squadron had improvised a system of canvas trays to hold the folded belts beneath the guns, and in consequence the gunners were hemmed in by .303 rounds up to their knees. Herbie Ruse was not one of those captains who tried to enforce silence on the intercom on long flights. Jones chatted for a few minutes to Fred Taylor, at the front gun, gazing down at the dirty grey sea below them, occasionally traversing his turret. It was moving sluggishly, the hydraulic oil already thickening at the unaccustomed height and temperature. Jones stamped his feet on the ammunition below him as he struggled to keep circulation moving.
Two hours out from Mildenhall, in the midst of the North Sea, Flight-lieutenant Duguid of 149 Squadron, leading the second vic of the forward section, began to have trouble maintaining the revolutions on his starboard engine. Accurate formation flying was no longer possible as his speed dropped. His observer signalled his two wingmen by Aldis lamp to close up on Kellett’s vic just ahead,
when he himself dropped back. His no. 2, Riddlesworth, obediently closed up on Kellett. His no. 3 apparently failed to see Duguid’s signal, and with what can only be described as remarkable lack of imagination, followed the ailing Wellington down and on to the homeward track. The two aircraft landed at Mildenhall at 1.25 pm that afternoon. There were now twenty-two aircraft remaining in the formation.
