Bomber Command (36 page)

Yet it was characteristic of the bomber offensive that each squadron, cut off on its lonely airfield somewhere down the length of eastern England, lived in its own private world and knew little of what went on outside except from the bulletins of Group and High Wycombe. Bomber Command could sometimes have a disastrous night, losing scores of aircraft, yet a squadron came home unaware of anything amiss, having attacked in a wave that missed the night-fighters. Conversely, on one trip a squadron for no definable reason could lose four, five, six aircraft – far above Bomber Command’s average.

76 Squadron, one of 4 Group’s Halifax units stationed at Linton-on-Ouse in Yorkshire, lost a steady one and occasionally two aircraft a night throughout the Battle of the Ruhr. In 1943 as a whole, its crews operated on 104 nights and lost 59 aircraft missing, three times their average operating strength. Sometimes weeks went by without a crew successfully completing a tour.

Harris’s assault on the Ruhr began where he had skirmished just a year before, when he took command at High Wycombe:
Essen. Led by eight Pathfinder
Oboe
Mosquitoes, 443 aircraft began their attack at 9 pm on the moonless night of 5 March 1943. 76 Squadron’s aircraft were among the first wave, attacking from Zero plus two minutes to Zero plus twenty. The Wellingtons and Stirlings followed from Z+15 to Z+25, and last came the Lancasters, from Z+20 to Z+40. They carried a bombload of one-third high explosive to two-thirds incendiaries, for by now it was conclusively established that fire was an infinitely more effective destroyer of towns than blast. The HE was intended only to open up the city, literally to blow apart its windows and walls and doors to make way for the fires. At Bomber Command, the attack was considered an extraordinary success. 153 aircraft bombed within three miles of the aiming-point. 160 acres of Essen had been laid waste for the loss of only fourteen aircraft. But one of the fourteen came from 76 Squadron, and after debriefing a young WAAF Intelligence officer, Pam Finch, noted in her diary: ‘They all seem rather badly shaken up.’

Three nights later, they were over Nuremberg, where the markers went down two minutes late, and as they exploded a great mass of bombs deluged them, as aircraft that had been lingering nervously overhead thankfully unburdened themselves. The night after, they were at Munich. The squadron operational record book noted coolly: ‘Opposition not up to usual standard.’ Then the losses began to creep up. Flight-Sergeant Gallantry baled out over the English coast on the way home from Stuttgart. An aircraft was lost over Essen and another crashed on landing. Two crews were missing after the raid on Berlin on 29 March, one of them that of Sergeant Cursley, who had been a pre-war ‘erk’ in Singapore, and was on his twenty-ninth trip. It was a night of heavy rain, icing and low cloud, and only three of eleven crews claimed to have attacked. Just three of Bomber Command’s 481 aircraft dispatched bombed within three miles of their aiming-point.

On 7 April, Pam Finch, the WAAF Intelligence girl, went to a cocktail party at the house of Linton’s station commander with a Canadian pilot named ‘Morty’ Mortensen. He claimed to be awed
by the honour of ‘Groupie’s’ hospitality: ‘Now I’m sure to get the chop!’ A week later, the squadron went to Pilsen. Pam Finch looked out at the moon and made a wish for ‘Morty’ to come back. The raid was a failure. The Pathfinders mistook a lunatic asylum for the Skoda works, and a rain of bombs descended on the empty countryside around it. The ‘missing’ rate was 11 per cent, the highest of the Battle of the Ruhr. ‘Being that the raid was carried out in perfect moonlight, heavy losses were to be expected,’ noted the Squadron Record Book. Three new crews failed to return from 76 Squadron. One of them was Mortensen’s.

On 10 April, Group-Captain John Whitley, Linton’s popular station commander, was himself shot down on a trip to Frankfurt. It was uncanny how often senior officers were lost when they made their rare sorties as passengers in bombers. Whitley’s successor was lost over Mülheim only two months later. But Whitley himself astonished and delighted everybody by reappearing at Linton large as life only weeks after he was ‘Posted Missing to No. 1 Depot Uxbridge’, as records put it. A prudent man, he always carried a set of civilian clothes with him on operations, and when his aircraft was shot down by a night-fighter over France, he was well-prepared both mentally and physically for the epic adventure that followed. Many aircrew were understandably dazed and disorientated in the first, vital hours after being blown from the sky. But if they were fortunate enough to land in Occupied Europe rather than in Germany itself, those with the will and the luck to survive the first hours on the ground uncaptured often made it to England. With the help of the Resistance, Whitley walked and bicycled across France to the Pyrenees, and came home to receive a well-earned DSO.

On 20 April they went to Stettin. It was a test of new tactics. They flew at sea level across the North Sea in the moonlight, then swept across Denmark low enough to see the windows opening as astonished Danes craned to watch the great stream of bombers roar overhead. One aircraft crashed into a windmill on almost the only hill on the route. All 76’s Halifaxes came home. But the next
trip they lost a crew over Duisburg, and another over Essen on 30 April. This was a chaotic night, demonstrating the havoc that weather and ill-luck could wreak upon schedules. A Halifax became bogged on the runway, and the three aircraft behind were unable to take off in time to reach the target on schedule. Two of those who got airborne returned early, and only six of those dispatched from 76 Squadron claimed to have attacked.

May began with an attack on Dortmund, one of the most severely punished targets of the battle. On the 11th they went to Duisburg again, another highly successful operation. 572 aircraft were dispatched, and 410 bombed within three miles of the aiming-point. All that early summer, Harris’s squadrons seldom bombed less than 300 aircraft strong, often 600 or more. By a characteristic twist of fate, all 76’s twelve aircraft came home safe from Duisburg that night, yet 78 Squadron with whom they shared Linton lost three Halifaxes. The mid-upper gunner of one aircraft suddenly parachuted over the target for no evident reason. Pam Finch noted in her diary: ‘The Group Captain thinks the man was temporarily insane.’

On 27 May they were bombing on ETA through ten-tenths cloud over Essen. Two nights later, they went among 719 aircraft to Wuppertal. It was a most effective attack, marked by
Oboe
. Intelligence estimated that 118,000 people had been made homeless. Yet some of 76’s crews were unhappy about the trip, because they were told by their own Intelligence Officer, ‘The Colonel’, at briefing that part of their purpose was to catch thousands of refugees who were believed to have poured into Wuppertal after the Dambusting operation a fortnight earlier temporarily flooded areas of the Ruhr. Somehow, bombing refugees didn’t seem quite what they thought they were there for. But they all went and came home safely except one aircraft which crashed on force-landing at Watton.

There was a brief respite in June, when they moved from the pre-war comforts of Linton to the wartime austerity and Nissen-hutted mud lakes of Holme-on-Spalding Moor. Their bitterness
about the transfer was heightened by the knowledge that it was caused by a political decision to give the most comfortable pre-war North Yorkshire bases to the newly formed Canadian 6 Group. At Holme, the winter cold sometimes induced NCOs to sleep on sofas in the mess rather than in their quarters, and men hoarded coal under their beds in the fierce contest for warmth. It was from Holme that they fought the last action of the Ruhr battle, flying to Krefeld and Gelsenkirchen, Cologne and Aachen, although this last operation became another fiasco for 76 when a pilot crashed on take-off, his Halifax blocking the runway and compelling the eleven aircraft behind him to return wearily to their dispersals.

76 was an exceptionally international squadron even by the standards of Bomber Command. Its little group of Norwegian aircrew added a distinctive character and an underpinning of fierce determination. They were drawn from the steady trickle of escapees from occupied Norway. They had come to England to fight, and unlike, for instance, some of the Free French, they were single-mindedly dedicated to doing so. ‘The Norwegians never cared about the economic importance of a target,’ said one of 76’s COs in 1943,
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‘they just wanted to know how many Germans per acre . . .’ They lived in their own private world not because they were unfriendly, but because their experience set them a dimension apart from their young English colleagues. The Norwegians were more serious, less playful in the mess. On evasion exercises on the moors, they were always back first, while the others idly allowed themselves to be captured. They flew with Norwegian flags pinned in the cockpits. They clustered together in their strange forage caps, sharing avidly the occasional letter from home. They seldom turned back early from an operation, whatever technical trouble their aircraft developed. Hulthin, one of the Norwegians who was later killed when his aircraft collided with a night-fighter en route to Kassel on his twenty-sixth trip, was notorious for his calm readiness to circle a target until he was certain of his aiming-point.

‘Target ahead, skipper,’ said his navigator, as they approached Hamburg one night.

‘I see it, navigator.’

‘Rear gunner here, skip. What’s it look like?’

‘Remember the last time?’

‘Yes, skip.’

‘Well, it’s ten times worse.’

Hulthin and two other Norwegians, Lindaas and Goertz, were known to the squadron as ‘Pip’, ‘Squeak’ and ‘Wilfred’ after the cartoon characters. ‘Squeak’ – Lindaas – was a charming, fair-haired, blue-eyed 21-year-old. All the Norwegians were well-off by RAF standards because they received flying pay of eight shillings per hour operational in addition to their £28 a month salary. Lindaas told his crew when they joined him that since they were all in it together, he would divide his flying pay between them. They became the richest crew on the squadron.

At twenty-four, Fred Beadle the rear gunner was the oldest man in Lindaas’s aircraft. One night they were on their way home from Frankfurt when the cloud thickened dramatically. The aircraft suddenly started to ice up, and within minutes the pilot lost control. Weighed down by their great frozen burden, they fell through the sky. The intercom had iced up, and Beadle knew nothing until he realized that they were plunging steeply for the ground. He pulled himself out of his turret and slid forward to the cockpit. Only Lindaas and the flight engineer were left – the rest of the crew had already baled out. The flight engineer tried to buckle a parachute on Lindaas. The Norwegian pushed it away. Beadle and the other man jumped. Only when they came home after two years in a prison camp did Beadle learn that Lindaas’s brother had already been shot by the Gestapo. Lindaas considered that he himself was a dead man if he landed alive in Germany. He preferred to crash with the aircraft.

As the intensity of Bomber Command’s raids on the cities of Germany grew, so did the hazards of parachuting over enemy
territory. Many men reached prison camp with terrible stories to tell. A gunner who landed near Kassel was held for five days in a pigsty without food or water by a civilian policeman. Another was attacked by a mob in the streets of Frankfurt, and only saved by a Luftwaffe patrol who pulled him into a basement and later smuggled him out in one of their tunics. Fred Beadle was lucky. He landed near Frankfurt in a snowstorm. Knowing that he had no hope of escape, he hid his parachute, walked into a nearby village, and sat on a doorstep in the early morning darkness, watching the flames of his wrecked aircraft in the distance, until a woman emerged from a door opposite. ‘Morgen,’ he said, straining his knowledge of German. ‘Englander!’ she shouted in horror, and ran inside, slamming the door. Eventually soldiers appeared and took him to the local civic office. Children had found his parachute. Villagers fingered his fleece-lined flying clothes and the cigarettes and chocolate emptied from his pocket. ‘Churchill propaganda!’ said a girl scornfully. Late in the afternoon a truck came to take him, none the worse for wear, to Dulag Luft for interrogation and on to prison camp.

In the opinion of much of 76 Squadron, John Maze should have been an early candidate for ‘the chop’. Immensely tall, easy and languid, he proved a remarkable survivor. Night after night, he lifted his Halifax, the long-suffering T-Tommy, off the runway with a sudden wrench as if it was a fighter. Then he set his auto-pilot for the long haul across the North Sea, chatting on the intercom, singing ‘I like coffee, I like tea’ or some such little ditty, until they approached the German flak belt. Maze’s greatest problem on operations was his height, crammed into the Halifax cockpit, until he managed to get hold of a high Lancaster seat and had it fitted in his aircraft. Then Hulthin borrowed T-Tommy while Maze was on leave, and wrecked it on take-off for Aachen. Maze flew the rest of his tour in acute discomfort, and his chief memory of bomber operations was constant exhaustion. But blessed with that gift of luck which was a pilot’s most priceless possession, he lived.

He was the son of the distinguished French-born painter Paul
Maze, and indeed his real name was Etienne – he only called himself John in the RAF. He had been educated at Stowe and Oxford, where he joined the Air Squadron. In November 1941 he was sent to America for flying training. Like so many pilots of the period, he found when he came home that nothing he had been taught prepared him for the reality of operations. In Georgia they were drilled like Marine Corps recruits, and three of every five trainees were rejected. But they flew only in clear skies, and night-flying practice consisted of cruising between beacons. Maze reached Linton and began operations in April 1943.

Rather than weaving constantly on the way to the target, he used his auto-pilot, because he concentrated on flying accurately in the midst of the stream, hoping thus to avoid exposing his aircraft. He was always experimenting in the air: opening and closing the radiator flaps, increasing speed and losing height coming home. Despite the discomfort, he valued his six feet six inches flying the Halifax, notoriously the most heavy-handed of all the wartime heavy bombers. In an emergency, he had the reach to throw the aircraft fiercely across the sky. The only crisis that Maze encountered in his first twenty trips came when they were coned on the way home from Wuppertal, and his drastic evasive action tore them free.