Bomber Command (40 page)

A CO who flew the most dangerous trips himself contributed immensely to morale – some officers were derisively christened
‘François’ for their habit of picking the easy French targets when they flew. Cheshire did not have his own crew – only Jock Hill, his wireless operator. Instead, he flew as ‘Second Dickey’ with the new and nervous. Perhaps the chief reason that ‘Chesh’ inspired such loyalty and respect was that he took the trouble to know and recognize every single man at Linton. It was no mean feat, learning five hundred or more faces which changed every week. Yet the ground crews chorused: ‘We are Cheshire cats!’ because the CO spent so much of his day driving round the hangars and dispersals chatting to them and remembering exactly who had sciatica. It was the same with the aircrew. A young wireless operator, who had arrived at Linton the previous day, was climbing into the truck for the dispersals when he felt Cheshire’s arm round his shoulder. ‘Good luck, Wilson.’ All the way to the aircraft, the W/Op pondered in bewildered delight: ‘How the hell did the CO know my name?’ They knew that when Cheshire flew, it was always the most difficult and dangerous operations. He would ask them to do nothing that he had not done himself. It was Cheshire who noticed that very few Halifax pilots were coming home on three engines. He took up an aircraft to discover why. He found that if a Halifax stalled after losing an engine it went into an uncontrollable spin. After a terrifying minute falling out of the sky, Cheshire was skilful and lucky enough to be able to recover the aircraft and land and report on the problem, which he was convinced was caused by a fault in the rudder design.

Handley Page, the manufacturers, then enraged him by refusing to interrupt production to make a modification. Only when a Polish test-pilot had been killed making further investigations into the problem which Cheshire had exposed was the change at last made. His imagination and courage became part of the folklore of Bomber Command. He left 76 Squadron in April 1943 and later took command of 617, the Dambusters squadron. By the end of the war, with his Victoria Cross, three Distinguished Service Orders, Distinguished Flying Cross and fantastic total of completed operations, he had become a legend.

Yet at 76 Squadron, from the spring of 1943 onwards, there were a substantial number of LMF cases, matched by an ‘Early Return’ rate from operations which by autumn sometimes exceeded 25 per cent of aircraft dispatched, and which caused Sir Arthur Harris to make an almost unprecedented personal visit to Holme in October to remind aircrew in the most forceful terms of their duty. 76 Squadron’s morale had slumped. They felt neglected by the promotion and commissioning authorities, bruised by the transfer from the comforts of Linton to the gloominess of Holme, generally disgruntled with the Royal Air Force. It had been an impossible task to find a successor as CO to match Cheshire when he left in April, but it was unfortunate that he was followed by an officer who had difficulty making himself liked or respected. On his occasional operational sorties, the new CO’s aircraft was jinxed by repeated bad luck. When he went to Stuttgart, he was obliged to return early with a glycol leak, having lost an engine. Three nights later he had to come home with an engine failure, and crashed at Linton. On a subsequent occasion, the CO committed the oldest crime in the pilot’s book by flying a ‘red on blue’ – a 180 degree Reciprocal Course which took him northwards towards the Atlantic for thirty-two minutes before he realized his error and was obliged to return to Linton and abort the operation. A month later he ran out of petrol on the way home from Montbéliard, and crashed in a potato field near Scunthorpe. Although the CO completed a number of operations without incident, two of them to Berlin, his troubles were a matter of some mirth to most of the squadron. He was a regular officer who had flown fifty-eight Blenheim operations out of Aden but had no previous European experience. But by 1943 no one was disposed to make any allowances. The crews were not sufficiently afraid of his anger or sufficiently interested in his good opinion to complete an operation if they felt disinclined to do so. His appeals to their courage and determination were treated as cant.

Yet whatever the quality of leadership and morale on a squadron, there was seldom any Hollywood-type enthusiasm for take-off
on a bomber operation. One summer evening at Holme, 76 Squadron’s crews were scattered at the dispersals, waiting miserably for start-up time before going to Berlin, the most hated target in Germany. The weather forecast was terrible, and the CO had been driving round the pans chatting to crews in an effort to raise spirits. Then, suddenly, a red Very light arched into the sky, signalling a ‘wash out’. All over the airfield a great surge of cheering and whistle-blowing erupted.

A 76 Squadron pilot who later completed a second tour on Mosquitoes said that his colleagues on the light bombers ‘simply could never understand how awful being on heavies was’. Some men found the strain intolerable. There were pilots who discovered that they were persistently suffering from ‘mag drop’, so easily achieved by running up an engine with the magnetoes switched off, oiling up the plugs. After two or three such incidents preventing take-off, the squadron CO usually intervened. One of the aircrew at 76 Squadron returned from every operation to face persecution from his wife and his mother, both of whom lived locally. ‘Haven’t you done enough?’ the wife asked insistently often in the hearing of other aircrew. ‘Can’t you ever think of me?’ In the end the man asked to be taken off operations, and was pronounced LMF.

A 76 Squadron wireless operator completed six operations with one of the Norwegian crews before reporting sick with ear trouble. He came up before the CO for a lecture on the need for highly-trained and experienced aircrew to continue flying, and was given a few days to consider his position. At a second interview, he told the CO he had thought over what had been said, but he wanted a rest. He felt that having volunteered ‘in’ for aircrew duties, he could also volunteer ‘out’. He was reduced to the ranks, stripped of his flying brevet, posted to the depot at Chessington which dealt with such cases, and spent the rest of the war on menial ground duties. So did Alf Kirkham’s rear gunner:

After our first few trips together, which were very rough indeed [wrote Kirkham
¹²
], he simply did not like the odds. He decided that he wanted to live, and told me that nothing anyone could do to him would be worse than carrying on with operations. He was determined to see the war out, and as far as I know he was successful.

Marginal LMF suspects, along with disciplinary cases who had broken up the sergeants’ mess, been discovered using high-octane fuel in their cars, or been involved in ‘avoidable flying accidents’, were sent to the ‘Aircrew Refresher Centres’ at Sheffield, Brighton or Bournemouth – in reality open-arrest detention barracks – where they spent a few weeks doing PT and attending lectures before being sent back to their stations, or in extreme cases posted to the depot, having been found ‘unfit for further aircrew duties’. They were then offered a choice of transferring to the British army, or going to the coal mines. By 1943 the ‘Refresher Centres’ were handling thousands of aircrew. One 76 Squadron rear gunner went from Sheffield to the Parachute Regiment, and survived the war. His crew was killed over Kassel in October. A pilot who joined 76 Squadron in the autumn of 1943 wrote:

There was something lacking in the atmosphere . . . The camaraderie between the aircrew was there just the same, and between aircrew and groundcrew too. But the atmosphere of a squadron, like that of a ship, is hard to define. There are happy ships and happy squadrons. Our squadron was not happy, I thought . . .

This officer, F/Lt Denis Hornsey, was among very many men who spent their war in Bomber Command fighting fear and dread of inadequacy, without ever finally succumbing. At the end of the war Hornsey wrote an almost masochistically honest and hitherto unpublished account of his experiences and feelings.
¹³
At thirty-three, he was rather older than most aircrew and suffered from poor eyesight – he wore corrective goggles on operations – and almost chronic minor ailments throughout the war. He hated the bureaucracy and lack of privacy in service life, and was completely without confidence in his own ability as a pilot. After flying some
Whitley operations in 1941, he was returned to OTU for further training, and his crew were split up. He then spent a relatively happy year as a staff pilot at a navigation school. He felt that he was an adequate flier of single or twin-engined aicraft and repeatedly requested a transfer to an operational station where he could fly one or the other. But by 1943 it was heavy-aircraft pilots who were needed. Everybody wanted to fly Mosquitoes. Hornsey was posted to Halifaxes. He knew that he was by now being accompanied from station to station by a file of unsatisfactory reports. He began his tour at 76 Squadron with two ‘Early Returns’, which made him more miserable than ever. Fear of being considered LMF haunted him almost as much as the fear of operations.

Each operation, in my experience, was a worse strain than the last, and I felt sure that I was not far wrong in supposing that every pilot found it the same. It was true that it was possible to get used to the strain, but this did not alter the fact that the tension of each trip was ‘banked’ and carried forward in part to increase the tension of the next. If this were not so, the authorities would not have thought it necessary to restrict a tour to thirty trips.

There were men who were stronger than Hornsey, even men who enjoyed operational flying, but his conscious frailty was far closer to that of the average pilot than the nerveless brilliance of a Martin or Cheshire. The day after 76 Squadron lost four aircraft over Kassel and George Dunn’s crew completed their tour, Hornsey recorded a conversation in the mess:

‘What chance has a man got at this rate?’ one pilot asked plaintively. ‘Damn it all, I don’t care how brave a chap is, he likes to think he has a
chance
. This is plain murder.’

‘Better tell that to Harris,’ someone else suggested.

‘You needn’t worry,’ I said, ‘you represent just fourteen bombloads to him. That’s economics, you know.’

As it transpired, operations were cancelled at the eleventh hour, when we were all dressed up in our kit ready to fly. It was too late then to go out, so I went to the camp cinema and saw ‘Gun for Hire’, a mediocre film portraying what I would have once thought was the dangerous life of a gangster. Now, by contrast, it seemed tame.

That night, I found it difficult to settle down. There was much going on inside my mind that I wanted to express. I felt lonely and miserable, apprehensive and resigned, yet rebellious at the thought of being just a mere cog in a machine with no say in how that machine was used.

But I was getting used to such attacks, which I had learned to expect at least once in the course of a day, as soon as I found myself at a loose end. As I could now recognize, without fear of it adding to my mental discomfort, they merely signified an onset of operational jitters. So composing myself as best I could, I went to sleep as quickly as I could.

Hornsey’s tragedy was that he was acutely imaginative. He pressed the Air Ministry for the introduction of parachutes that could be worn at all times by bomber aircrew, so many of whom never had the chance to put them on after their aircraft was hit. He made his crew practise ‘Abandon aircraft’ and ‘Ditching’ drill intensively, and protested violently when he found the remaining armour plate being stripped from his Halifax on Group orders, to increase bombload.

The men who fared best were those who did not allow themselves to think at all. Many crews argued that emotional entanglements were madness, whether inside or outside marriage. They diverted a man from the absolute single-mindedness he needed to survive over Germany. When a pilot was seen brooding over a girl in the mess, he was widely regarded as a candidate for ‘the chop list’. Hornsey, with a wife and baby daughter, was giving only part of his attention and very little of his heart to 76 Squadron.

Cheshire argued emphatically that what most men considered a premonition of their own death – of which there were innumerable instances in Bomber Command – was in reality defeatism. A man who believed that he was doomed would collapse or bale out
when his aircraft was hit, whereas in Cheshire’s view if you could survive the initial fearsome shock of finding your aircraft damaged, you had a chance. Yet by the autumn of 1943, many men on 76 Squadron were talking freely of their own fate. One much-liked officer came fresh from a long stint as an instructor to be a flight commander. ‘You’d better tell me about this business, chaps,’ he said modestly in the mess. ‘I’ve been away on the prairies too long.’ After a few operations, he concluded readily that he had no chance of survival. ‘What are you doing for Christmas, Stuart?’ somebody asked him in the mess one day. ‘Oh, I shan’t be alive for Christmas,’ he said wistfully, and was gone within a week, leaving a wife and three children.

‘The line between the living and the dead was very thin,’ wrote Hornsey. ‘If you live on the brink of death yourself, it is as if those who have gone have merely caught an earlier train to the same destination. And whatever that destination is, you will be sharing it soon, since you will almost certainly be catching the next one.’

On the night of 3 November 1943, Hornsey’s was one of two 76 Squadron aircraft shot down on the way to Düsseldorf. He was on his eighteenth trip with Bomber Command. It is pleasant to record that he survived and made a successful escape across France to England, for which he was awarded a DFC perhaps better deserved and more hardly earned than the Air Ministry ever knew.