Bomber Command (38 page)

On the night of 29 July, 777 aircraft went to Hamburg again. Thirty of them were lost, including one from 76 Squadron. The casualties were creeping up as the Luftwaffe recovered from
Window
. On the night of 2 August, the fourth and last of Bomber Command’s great attacks of the battle, 740 aircraft were dispatched in appalling weather to Hamburg. A further thirty were lost.

Yet Harris had already gained his triumph in the Battle of Hamburg and this last operation was all but redundant. Twenty-two square kilometres of the city had been engulfed in the fantastic firestorm that began on the night of the 27th, the second raid. This was the harbinger of Dresden, Darmstadt and other, lesser infernoes of 1944 and 1945. As the fires reached incredible temperatures – 1,000 degrees centigrade and more – they sucked in air and bellowed themselves into hurricanes of flame and smoke that tore through the heart of Hamburg amidst winds of 150 mph. Private hoards of coal and coke in the cellars fuelled the fires from every house. Thousands suffocated, then their bodies were incinerated in the cellars in which they had perished. Air-raid shelters became vast crematoria. 42,000 Germans were estimated to have died. A million refugees fled the city. In one week, Bomber Command had killed more people than the Luftwaffe had achieved in the eight months of the blitz in England in 1940–41. In Hamburg, 40,385 houses, 275,000 flats, 580 factories, 2,632 shops, 277 schools, 24 hospitals, 58 churches, 83 banks, 12 bridges, 76 public buildings and a zoo had been obliterated. Goebbels said that it was ‘a catastrophe, the extent of which simply staggers the imagination’. For the first time in the war, Bomber Command had profoundly shaken the Nazi leadership. Since 24 July, Harris’s aircraft had flown 3,095 sorties, and poured 9,000 tons of explosives and incendiaries on to Hamburg for the loss of 86 aircraft.

If other cities were to be pounded as relentlessly as this, the consequences for Germany must have been appalling. No industry, no urban area could stand repeated punishment on this scale. By dawn on 3 August 1943, Hamburg seemed an empty city, ‘sunk in a great silence of death’. But Bomber Command was not to repeat the severity of its attack on Hamburg against the other major cities of Germany until 1945. Harris’s staff never appeared to grasp the full significance of their success in July 1943, that it was repetition which made possible the climactic destruction. High Wycombe was always nervous about sending aircraft again and again to a target in a manner which allowed the Luftwaffe to anticipate them. Hamburg was in north Germany, and thus required a relatively short penetration inside night-fighter range. But those cities which lay deep in enemy territory – most notably Berlin – could always put up formidable resistance if the Germans correctly predicted the target or were aided by clear skies. To Harris’s staff, it seemed more profitable to strike a target at intervals of some weeks rather than to return immediately. Barnes Wallis was deeply frustrated that Bomber Command never sent a high-level bombing force to hit the Mohne dam while repairs were being carried out in the weeks after the attack of May 1943. He argued that extreme precision would have been unnecessary – even a few hits by conventional HE bombs would have prevented the Germans from making the rapid repairs which they in fact completed, and thus would have helped to justify the great sacrifice by 617 Squadron.
⁶
Whether or not this is true, High Wycombe never gave enough attention to the importance of reinforcing the successes of Bomber Command.

From August until the Battle of Berlin in late November, Harris’s aircraft embarked upon the series of deepening penetrations that came to be known as ‘The Road to Berlin’, although many of the targets – Mannheim, Nuremberg, Munich – lay far from the German capital. At the end of August, they went to Berlin itself: from the first day of the bomber offensive to the last, the most terrifying target of all to the crews.

This was our first raid on Berlin [a 76 Squadron flight engineer named Ferris Newton wrote in his diary]. As we had all heard such stories about the place, we were not at all happy about going. Everyone sat around the kite waiting for start-up time, and nobody hardly spoke a word.

We were first wave in. Berlin’s 35-mile area was dotted with light, so that it was hard to distinguish the burst of anti-aircraft shells below from the coloured markers dropped by the Pathfinders. First thing we have to do is fly through a wall of searchlights – hundreds of them in cones and clusters. Behind that all is an even fiercer light. It’s glowing red and green and blue, and over that there are myriads of flares hanging in the sky. There is flak coming up at us now. All we see is a quick red glow from the ground – then up it comes on a level – a blinding flash.

There is one comfort, and it’s been a comfort to me all the time we have been going over, and that is that it is quite soundless. The roar of your engines drowns everything else. It’s like running straight into the most gigantic display of soundless fireworks in the world. The searchlights are coming nearer now all the time. There’s one cone split and then it comes together again. They seem to splay out, then stop, then come together again, and as they do there’s a Lancaster right in the centre. We start weaving. George puts the nose down and we are pelting away at a furious rate. As we are coming out of the searchlight belt, more flak is coming up from the inner defences.

‘Hello, skipper.’

‘Hello, navigator.’

‘Half a minute to go.’

‘OK. Thanks for reminding me.’

‘Keep weaving, George, there’s quite a lot of light stuff coming up as well – falling off a bit low.’

‘Hello, engineer, will you put the revs up?’

‘Engineer to pilot. Revs up, skipper.’

‘OK. Keep weaving, George. A lot of searchlights and fighter flares left.’

‘Hello, bomb-aimer. OK when you are. Bomb doors open.’

‘OK, George – right – steady – a little bit longer yet . . . – right a little bit – right – steady – bombs still going . . . OK, bombs gone.’

‘Keep weaving, there’s some flak coming up. I can actually see ground detail, skipper . . . Oh, it’s a wizard sight!’

‘OK, Andy, don’t get excited – keep your eyes open.’

‘Engineer to pilot. Jerry fighter just passed over the top of us port to starboard.’

‘OK, engineer, keep your eyes open, gunners.’

‘Hello, skipper, will you turn on to Zero 81.’

‘Zero 81, right navigator.’

We are out of it and now we are through. I turn and get a glimpse of that furious glowing carpet of light and explosions, that’s all I can see of Berlin.

As we approached England we got a diversion message to Catfoss, of all places. Flying time for the trip, 8 hours 50 minutes. This raid had been the heaviest on Berlin up to date, at a cost of 58 aircraft out of 700 (this does not include two aircraft which collided on the circuit at Catfoss: damn hard luck, that, all the way to Berlin and back, then get it on your own circuit . . .)

On the night of 18 August, 597 aircraft were sent to Peenemünde on the Baltic, the German V-weapon research establishment. The crews were sobered to be told at briefing that this was a visual ‘Radio-location laboratory and aircraft testing site’, and that if they failed to destroy it, they would be sent back again and again until they did so. They bombed after a timed run from an offshore island to the target, and the concentration was exceptional. Widespread damage was done to the workshops and scientists’ living quarters. The night-fighters, diverted by a Mosquito ‘spoof’ raid on Berlin, were slow to grasp the British intentions, but caught up with the last stages of the attack on Peenemünde. Forty aircraft
failed to return. For once, however, 76 Squadron was lucky. Its twenty Halifaxes went in with an early wave, and all returned unscathed except a navigator wounded by a shrapnel fragment. Afterwards, there was some doubt how seriously the raid had delayed the V-weapon programme, but fortunately for the crews, High Wycombe was satisfied. It was decreed there need be no return visit.

Some nights they were fortunate, and were sent to Italy, which was reckoned to be a pushover unless one had a technical failure or very bad luck, and the crews had their awe-struck view of the Alps in darkness. One night over Turin, Group-Captain John Searby presided for the first time as ‘Master Bomber’, a technique first employed by Guy Gibson on the Dams raid, guiding the crews by radio-telephone as they approached the target, pointing out the best markers and attempting to concentrate the attack. The Master Bomber never commanded a raid in the fullest sense of being in charge of the huge force of aircraft – Leonard Cheshire was among those who believed that there should have been an airborne commander of every operation, empowered for instance to send everybody home if the weather was hopeless. But the Master Bomber’s calm voice across the ether, directing aircraft as he circled above them, could be enormously helpful in keeping an attack on course or preventing a fiasco when markers fell in the wrong place.

76 Squadron was still losing a steady one or two aircraft a night against the German targets, and Hanover now inspired almost as deep a fear as Berlin. The behaviour of bereaved families often seemed strange to the men on the stations. Relatives would conduct a long and savage correspondence with a squadron CO about the absence of, say, a fountain-pen from their son’s personal effects, returned to them by the RAF Central Depository at Colnebrook. Sometimes a family became deeply embittered by their son’s loss, and sought to attribute blame.

Death drifted through the huts and hangars in the most erratic fashion. An aircraft code letter, P-Peter or R-Robert, would suddenly
become deadly for a succession of crews who owned it. A certain bunk would take on the deadly properties of the Black Spot. Alf Kirkham and his crew found that throughout their tour at Holme, the next-door hut was doomed. Every week, new faces arrived to occupy it, and at once vanished.

Kirkham was one of 76 Squadron’s stars, a sergeant pilot who completed a distinguished tour on Halifaxes, was commissioned and twice decorated before doing a further tour on Mosquitoes. He was unhappy about 76’s enthusiasm for flying operations with the auto-pilot locked in, which he believed was a formula for disaster. Always a ‘press-on type’, he had gone round three times at Peenemünde as converging aircraft forced him to bank at the critical moment of each bomb-run. On the ground, he cut a swathe through WAAFs, the girls of York and occasional senior officers’ daughters. His crew was one of the few to shoot down a night-fighter, apparently a Luftwaffe novice who was so intent on stalking another aircraft that he did not notice Kirkham’s Halifax beside him until the gunners blew him apart, a sitting duck. But at the end of August, over München-Gladbach, as they turned out of the target a fighter fell on them. It was Kirkham’s turn to struggle for his life.

We were hit by cannon shells and tracer immediately. The navigator was badly wounded, a bullet hit me in the right leg, the starboard inner engine was knocked out, the RT packed up completely and we caught fire. I feathered the damaged engine, but another attack knocked out a lot of my instruments and also my call lights so that I had no communication with the gunners. I took violent evasive action, so much so that if anyone had baled out I wouldn’t have blamed them, as they could have thought that we were out of control. The control column worked well but I had little rudder control, and my right leg did not seem to be much help. By juggling the throttles and using a lot of bank I was able to corkscrew, but maintaining height was out of the question. I remember seeing the engineer being violently sick and using the fire-extinguisher at the same time . . .

The steep dive blew out the flames, but I was getting pretty desperate. Eventually we did a stall turn with a very nearly 90-degree bank, and fell out of the sky. We lost the fighter. We set a rough course for home and checked our damage. I could hold height, but the aircraft was very difficult to fly. The navigator could not possibly bale out, so I decided to crash-land and offer the crew the chance to bale out over England. We encountered flak and searchlights a lot of the time, and at 8,000 feet they were quite accurate.

We eventually hit the coast at Bradwell Bay in Essex, and I saw two searchlights indicating an aerodrome. I found I had fair control at 105 mph, but I couldn’t hold the aircraft at speeds below this. There were no flaps available, and the undercarriage didn’t work, and it appeared that I would have to fly the plane onto the ground at a very high speed . . . By this time all the crew had vanished to their crash-landing positions behind the main spar, and it seemed very lonely.

As we hit the deck, I throttled back and switched off. We ran along for a long time on our belly, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was no sign of fire . . .
⁷

Yet although many crews suffered nights as terrifying as that of Alf Kirkham, there were also a surprising number who went through a tour without any incidents at all. Ferris Newton, the flight engineer who described his first trip to Berlin, was in a crew captained by twenty-year-old Sergeant George Dunn. They endured a series of frightening experiences at OTU, where they were forced to bale out of a doomed Wellington over Scotland, and four crews out of sixteen in their course were killed. But on 76 Squadron their gunners never fired a shot in anger; they were only once hit by a small piece of shrapnel; and only once suffered a mechanical defect, a hydraulic leak on the way home from Peenemünde. This in no way made flying operations less frightening or less difficult, but is an odd aside on the flukes of war.