Bomber Command (30 page)

Micky Martin and other highly skilled pilots almost cartwheeled their Lancasters, banking savagely on to one wingtip as
they raced the upper engines and cut the lower. They knew that the bomber’s gunners had precious little chance of shooting down a well-armoured German fighter, that almost their only hope of survival lay in escape. Some crews believed that it was best not to fire their own guns until they were certain the fighter had seen them, lest they betray their position. The true value of the gunners was as look-outs. If they saw the German first, they could survive. If they did not, they were probably dead men. Gunners smeared lanolin on their necks to fight the aches and soreness of constantly scanning the sky. They were taught never to gaze into the flames of a target, which damaged their night vision. They took caffeine tablets to stay awake and faced instant dismissal from most crews if they were caught dozing. Yet boredom, monotony, the corrosion of cold and fatigue were deadly enemies. Again and again, a bomber was surprised.

One night in December 1942, 50 Squadron were out on a harassing raid over north Germany, part of a drive to force the Germans to spread their defences more thinly by launching pinprick attacks on scores of small towns, an assignment which uncharacteristically troubled some crews. Norman Goldsmith’s crew were armed to the teeth – the flight engineer was carrying a Thompson gun – because they had been ordered to go in low and beat up anything in sight. ‘Mitch’ Mitchell, the wireless operator, was enjoying himself playing the new game of ‘
Tinsel
’ – tuning to German night-fighter frequencies and then blasting the ether with engine noise from a microphone specially fitted in one of the Lancaster’s nacelles. He was bent over his headphones listening to the rage of the German controller when he was hammered on the shoulder by the mid-upper gunner. He looked out of the astrodome to see the starboard wing on fire. A German fighter had slid up beneath the fuselage and fired one deadly burst, badly wounding the rear gunner and injuring the mid, mortally damaging the aircraft, ‘Bale out,’ ordered Goldsmith. Mitchell and Jim Farrell, the Australian navigator, were the only survivors who reached the sodden fields of north Holland alive.

As they cruised across Europe, most pilots worked to gain height, bouncing the aircraft upwards in precious thermals, winning every foot of sky they could put between themselves and the enemy, so often invisible far below the cloud layers. Martin was exceptional in that he preferred to go in low, skimming the waves so that his Lancaster came home coated in salt spray and dirt, running along roads and railway lines to dodge the enemy balloon barrage, although on one notable night on the way home from Kassell, he flew with a balloon cable streaming from his wing. Little Toby Foxlee blazed the front guns at German flak the moment the enemy opened fire; his belts were loaded with continuous tracer instead of the usual one in five, as a simple ‘frightener’ to throw the gunners’ nerve. Martin liked to operate at around 4,000 feet, because this was just beyond the maximum height at which German light flak could be effective, and yet was low for the heavier 88 mm flak. He would climb to bomb, then slip back to deck level for the long run home. For most crews, however, height represented safety, and they valued every foot of it. They had learned that it was vital to stay in the stream. If they were a minute or two early approaching the target, they flew a dogleg to lose time. If they were late, they pushed up their revs as much as they dared. A lone aircraft was instantly vulnerable.

Every pilot responded differently to sudden crisis. Martin found that he became ice-cold. He and his crew had achieved an almost telepathic mutual understanding and instinct for danger. Others were less fortunate. Tolley Taylor had a flight engineer who became literally paralysed with fear on his first trip to Essen, and clung motionless to the window-catch from the enemy coast to touch-down, compelling Taylor to cope with the fuel system as well as flying the aircraft. Stewart Harris, a navigator, fought down his terror during a bad flak barrage over Wilhelmshaven by gobbling his flying rations; the following night he collapsed, in delayed reaction, at a pub in Lincoln, although he operated again the night after. ‘Are you hurt, Phillips?’ ‘King’ Cole asked his flight engineer,
as the man sat pale beside him after a near-miss. ‘No, sir, but I’m very frightened . . .’ Even some pilots were known to become numbed into momentary paralysis by a sudden night-fighter attack, unable to move the controls. Every good captain checked his crew every few minutes of every trip: ‘Rear gunner OK?’ ‘Yes, skip.’ ‘Mid-upper OK?’ ‘OK, skipper’, and so on. But there were many bad captains and bad crews, and they died still ignorant of the folly of omission that had killed them.

At the climax of every trip came the long run-up to bomb, through the dazzling web of lights, the flicker of flak, the curling, twisting pattern of tracer, the glow of fires and incendiaries in all the colours of the rainbow. The bomb-aimer lay in the nose over his Mark XIV bombsight, wired to the primitive grey computer box beside him. The navigator and wireless operator frequently abandoned their cubbyholes to join the gunners searching the sky for fighters at this most vulnerable moment of all. The whole crew held their breath as the bomb-aimer called off ‘Left . . . left . . . right a bit . . . steady.’ Then there was the sudden ‘twang’ from beneath them, and ‘Bombs gone’ from the nose. ‘Was this fighting?’ V. M. Yeates asked himself as he released his bombs over the German lines in France a quarter of a century before. ‘There was no anger, no red lust, no struggle, no straining muscles and sobbing breath; only the slight movement of levers and the rattle of machine-guns . . .’
¹²
For a few seconds they held course until the photo-flash fell from the aircraft and exploded to light the sky for their aiming-point picture, without which the trip could not count towards their tour. Then they swung away from the glowing, splitting shambles below and thanked God once more, unless there had been some heart-stopping hang-up, the bomb-aimer had been dazzled at a critical moment, or they were compelled to bank sharply to avoid a converging aircraft. Then they would hear an unhappy voice announce: ‘We’re going round again.’ With the exception of a few phenomena like Martin, no man circled a target more than once in 1942 unless from dire necessity. By that
summer, one crew in three was bombing within three miles of the aiming-point. It was not enough, yet it was a considerable improvement on 1941.

1942 was the year in which the dominant threat to a bomber over Germany became the night-fighter rather than the flak gun. The British computed that there were now 12,000 heavy antiaircraft guns and 3,276 searchlights defending Germany. The Luftwaffe’s flak units had almost doubled their strength from 255,000 men in 1940 to 439,000 in 1942. Flak damaged many aircraft and drove the bombers to fly high, but it destroyed few. Fighters, on the other hand, seldom sent a damaged victim home. The overwhelming majority of British bombers attacked were shot down. In 1942, German night-fighter strength rose from 162 to 349 aircraft, almost all Ju88s and Me110s. Over the target the bomber crews had learned to welcome heavy flak, for it indicated that the fighters were elsewhere. Creeping fear grew on the nights when the target was lit by scores of searchlights, yet the guns were silent. On these nights, the British knew that somewhere in the darkness fighters were searching the sky for a hapless Lancaster, or tuning their
Lichtenstein
radar sets to catch one in their electronic grasp.

Crews cherished some strange illusions about protecting themselves. One was that switching on their IFF – Identification Friend or Foe transmitter, controlled by a six-position dial above the wireless operator’s head and designed to provide a recognition blip for British radar on the way home – somehow jammed the German searchlight control system if an aircraft was coned. Since late 1941, Dr R. V. Jones and his colleagues of Scientific Intelligence had been urging Bomber Command that not only was IFF profitless over Germany, but like all transmissions which could be monitored by the enemy, its use represented a positive threat to bombers’ safety. Yet High Wycombe remained unconvinced for years to come, arguing that if pilots believed IFF benefited them, their illusions should be cherished for the sake of morale. 50 Squadron’s signals leader was still teaching the technique in 1942, and most aircrew accepted it implicitly. It was the same with ‘Scarecrows’, the shells
the crews believed that the Germans fired to frighten them, resembling exploding bombers. There were no such projectiles as ‘Scarecrows’. What the men saw were indeed exploding British aircraft. But to this day many aircrew will not accept this. The truth was sometimes too frightening.

The occupants of a stricken aircraft had a one-in-five chance of escaping alive. Fighting the G-forces of a diving or spiralling, uncontrollable descent, they had to ditch the hatches, reach their parachutes and somehow struggle clear before the bomber struck the ground. They tried desperately to avoid baling out in the immediate target area, for they had heard too many stories of bomber crews killed by enraged civilians or soldiers, a fate not unknown to Luftwaffe airmen in the London blitz. Luftwaffe men on the ground in Germany often showed astonishing fellow-feeling for baled-out RAF crews, saving them from mobs, treating them with real kindness. When Stewart Harris of 50 Squadron became a prisoner, he was forced to travel through Düsseldorf with the three men of his Luftwaffe escort. The city had suffered appallingly at the hands of Bomber Command. The mother of one of the escort came to meet them at the station. Her own home and the factory in which she worked had already been destroyed. Yet she brought four packed lunches.

It was not unknown for Bomber Command crews to take occasional passengers on operations. Some were authorized – station commanders or reporters. Others were quite illicit – members of ground crew and in extremely isolated cases, WAAFs. The Germans sought to make propaganda capital out of an episode early in 1942 when they claimed to have found a dead WAAF in a shot-down Stirling.
¹³
It was often far more frightening to be a passenger, without the pressure of duty to suppress fear, than to be a crew member. One night Micky Martin took Group-Captain Sam Patch, Swinderby’s station commander, on a trip to the Ruhr. Patch stood behind Martin’s seat. Crossing the Belgian coast, Martin scented night-fighters – the searchlights were wavering uncertainly, a sure sign that they were seeking to avoid their own
aircraft. He saw a line of tracer curving across the sky to port. ‘If you turn round and look now, you’ll probably see an aircraft blow up,’ he said to Patch. Sure enough, on the German’s third burst a few seconds later, a Wellington exploded. Every crew became hardened to seeing others go down, and felt that guilty surge of gratitude that it was another man’s turn to die. Martin changed course to fly south of Liège and avoid the night-fighters. The diversion brought them late over the target, which was already burning fiercely. Martin circled three times at his customary 4,000 feet, terrifying yet fascinating Patch. When they came home, he said that he had never before understood how a crew could be frivolous, drunken, apparently irresponsible on the ground, yet utterly close-knit and professional in the air.

In those days, they still came home in their own way, by their own routes, instead of being locked into the stream all the way out and back, as they were a year later. Crews were tired now, aching and stiff and stale. They drank their coffee and ate their flying rations, but those who wished to remain alive did not relax in their cockpit or turrets. If the pilot could not resist the urge to urinate, he did so into the tin below his seat – he could never leave the controls. The wireless operator, in his shirtsleeves by the heater, might read a book or filter music from his radio down the intercom if the captain allowed, but the navigator was still checking fixes and peering into his
Gee
scope, which from August 1942 began to flicker with the green ‘grass’ of German jamming as soon as the aircraft crossed the enemy coast. The flight engineer juggled the fuel tanks, computing consumption constantly to check the notoriously inaccurate petrol gauges. Some captains allowed crews to smoke, puffing out of the edge of their oxygen masks: Tolley Taylor got through a steady forty cigarettes on every outward trip, twenty more coming home. Most pilots rigidly discouraged the practice, and rear gunners who dragged surreptitously to ease their lonely vigil came home with their boots stuffed with fag-ends to conceal the evidence.

By now, approaching the Channel homewards, some pilots
were nursing damaged engines or flak-torn controls, losing height over France and struggling to get across the sea before forced landing at Manston or Woodbridge, the bombers’ emergency landing strips. In some aircraft, in the darkness of the fuselage a bomb-aimer or wireless operator struggled over the body of a wounded gunner on the rest-bed, doing his pathetic best to repair terrible wounds made by shrapnel or cannon fire with morphia and sulphanilamide, in the feeble light of a torch. Others had thrown out everything movable, yet were still drifting helplessly downwards towards the North Sea or the Channel. They had a good chance of surviving ditching, a fair chance of being spotted if their navigator could still take a fix and their wireless operator still tap out a Ditching signal. But often a crew could not give their position, and lingered for hours or days in their dinghy before rescue or death overtook them.

The lucky crews, those whose aircraft were still unwounded, glimpsed other bombers going home, and thought about the girls or the wives with whom they might be drinking that night, at the Black Bull or the Baron of Beef. They droned on towards Lincolnshire, hoping that for once they would not be stacked waiting to land for half an hour or more, or diverted because a damaged aircraft had crashed on the runway. An aircraft that crashed in England was never included in Bomber Command’s official casualty figures, however many of its crew were killed or wounded, and these added at least 15 per cent to the published loss figures for most of the war.