Bomber Command (5 page)

As the rear section of the Wellington force, 37 Squadron were the first and easiest targets for the German fighters. The experiment with the ‘stepped down’ formation in pairs must be considered a failure, by results. Lemon had been flying as wingman to S/Ldr Hue-Williams. In the chaotic nightmare of the battle, as each bomber struggled for its own survival, men could spare only momentary glances for the plight of others. Peter Grant glimpsed Hue-Williams’s aircraft diving for the sea, starboard wing on fire. Hue-Williams’s second pilot was the same Appleby who drove so gaily to Monte Carlo with Grant that spring. There were no survivors.

Just north of Wangerooge a second pair – Wimberley and Lewis – broke away westwards in an attempt to make a low-level escape for home over the sandbanks. They were at once spotted by Lieutenant Helmut Lent in his Me110. Lent had scrambled from Jever with his armourer still lying on the wing loading cannon shells into the magazines – the man was scarcely able to roll to the ground before Lent accelerated to take off. After one abortive beam attack on the blindspot of Wimberley’s Wellington, the impatient Lent closed astern and abruptly silenced the rear gunner. His second burst set fire to the aircraft, which dived and crashed in the sea close to Borkum Island. ‘Pete’ Wimberley was picked up by a German patrol boat, the only survivor. Lent turned in pursuit of Lewis, now struggling ten feet above the sea to escape in the same style as Lemon. The fighter pilot, unlike his colleague in the Me109 which attacked Lemon, made no mistake. After a single burst, the Wellington caught fire and broke up as it hit the water. There were no survivors. Lent later became one of the most celebrated German aces of the war.

Herbie Ruse, concentrating on keeping formation with F/O Thompson as the middle pair of the 37 Squadron section, was one
of the few British pilots to drop bombs that day. Thompson opened his bomb doors, apparently on his own initiative, as they approached a German vessel a few miles west of Schillig Point. Ruse followed suit, and Tom May, himself a former seaman who had joined up during the Slump, took position forward by the bomb release. ‘He’s going for that ship!’ called May. ‘He’s going to overshoot!’ ‘Are you sure it’s naval?’ asked Ruse, as he struggled to hold the aircraft steady amidst a new surge of flak. Then as Thompson’s bombs fell away, May released their own. The aircraft rose as the weight vanished. They saw the sticks splash harmlessly into the sea at the same moment that Herbie Ruse spotted a German fighter underneath them ‘climbing like a lift’. Thompson put his nose down and dived steeply northwestwards, Ruse close behind him. The pilot of the leading Wellington had obviously decided that they must make a run for it on their own. Although Ruse instinctively regretted breaking away from the formation, 37 Squadron’s section was a straggling litter of aircraft. This might be their only hope.

The Wellington was racing downwards at an incredible 300 mph, shaking in every rivet. Harry Jones was irrelevantly startled to see red roofs on the coast to port of them: ‘The roofs can’t be red!’ he muttered. ‘Those are German houses. We have red roofs in England.’ Then he saw a German fighter streaking towards them at a closing speed of more than 100 mph. ‘My God, isn’t it small!’ he thought, as so many thousands of air gunners would think in their turn in the next five years as the slim silhouette of the fighter swung in, guns winking, to attack. At 600 yards Jones touched his triggers. The Brownings fired single rounds and stopped. They were frozen. He tried to traverse the turret. It was jammed by the cold. Fighting with the cocking handles, he glimpsed Thompson’s Wellington sliding by beneath them, its tail shot to pieces. Its rear turret had simply disappeared, and with it Jones’s friend Len Stock, a little instrument-repairer from North London. There were no survivors from Thompson’s aircraft.

Jones was still wrestling with his guns when the fighter came
in again. There was a violent explosion in the turret and a savage pain in his ankle and back. ‘Skip, I’ve been hit!’ he called down the intercom. ‘Can you do anything back there? No? Then for God’s sake get out of the turret,’ answered Ruse. Jones dragged himself up the fuselage towards the rest bed, half-conscious, with his back scored by one bullet, his ankle shattered by a second. The Wellington I was equipped with a bizarre mid-under turret known to the crews as ‘the dustbin’. Because of its fierce drag on the aircraft’s speed in the firing position, it was lowered only in action. Now Tom Holly, the wireless operator, was struggling to bring it to bear as the Messerschmitts raked the Wellington yet again. Fred Taylor bent over Harry Jones, morphia in hand, trying to lift his leg on to the rest bed. A burst smashed through the port side of the fuselage, shattering Taylor’s head and back. Jones had persuaded the quiet northern boy to put aside his wartime scruples and get married only a few weeks before. Now Taylor collapsed on him, dying. The next burst caught Tom Holly as he struggled to pull himself out of the dustbin turret, jammed and useless. Hit in the face and side, Holly fell dead, draped half in, half out of the gun position.

Herbie Ruse could smell the cordite from the explosions in the fuselage, and feel the Wellington being cut to pieces as he laboured to keep it in the air, still diving towards the sea with the revolutions counter gone mad and the engines in coarse pitch. Calmly, he wound back the actuating wheel controlling the aircraft’s trim, so that if he himself was hit and fell from the controls, the Wellington should automatically seek to recover from the dive. Then the elevator controls collapsed, and he knew that the aircraft was doomed. Beside him Tom May fought to help pull back the control column. Jones, lying behind them, was astounded to see a burst of fire tear up the floor between May’s legs as he stood straddled in the cockpit. May was hit only once, slightly wounded in the buttock. They saw the sand dunes of an island rushing up to meet them. It was Borkum, just a few miles east of neutral Dutch waters. With a grinding, wrenching, protracted shriek of metal and whirlwind of sparks from the frozen ground beneath, Ruse
brought the Wellington to rest. There were a few seconds of merciful silence. May jettisoned the canopy and jumped down. Ruse was about to follow when he heard Jones’s painful cry: ‘I’m trapped!’ As flames began to seep up the fuselage, Ruse hoisted Jones off the floor. ‘My God, you’re heavy, Jonah,’ he complained. Then he half-dragged, half-carried the gunner out of the wrecked aircraft. The three men lay silent, in pain and exhaustion behind a dune in the sandy, frozen waste as their aircraft burned. At last a German patrol arrived to greet them with the time-honoured cliché: ‘For you the war is over!’ The rear section of the Wellington formation had ceased to exist.

It is a measure of the fierceness of the struggle that continued for almost thirty minutes around Kellett’s Wellingtons that of those aircraft which survived, 9 Squadron claimed six certain ‘kills’ and six ‘probables’ among the German fighters, 149 Squadron the same, and Lemon of 37 Squadron a single. Their turrets were strewn with cartridge cases, their wings, tanks and fuselages holed repeatedly. Almost all had jettisoned their bombs in the sea. Three aircraft remained of the leading section under Kellett. The port and rear sections had vanished entirely. On the starboard side, Sergeant Ramshaw was still tucked in underneath, streaming fuel, while immediately ahead of Peter Grant, Briden of 149 Squadron was also heavily damaged and losing fuel fast.

Then, perhaps ninety miles west of Wilhelmshaven, Grant glanced up for a moment to find that ‘quite suddenly, there were just a few Wellingtons flying alone in the clear sky’.
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The German fighters had reached the limit of their endurance. They retired, to claim thirty-four victories, twenty-six of which were confirmed by the Reich Air Ministry. They had lost two Me109s, a further one which was written off after crashlanding, and almost all the Me110s which took part in the action were more or less damaged. In reality, ten British aircraft had already been totally destroyed out of the original twenty-four. It was not an impressive
performance by the Germans. Even after their belated interception, they made repeated ineffectual long-range attacks. If their tactics had been better, it would have been remarkable if any British aircraft survived at all. But for the British, by any objective assessment, it had been a disastrous day.

As the remnants of the formation lumbered home, the Wellingtons of Briden and Ramshaw were steadily dropping back. There was no longer any merit in radio silence. Briden called Harris, his section leader: could they take the shortest possible route home, because he was losing petrol very fast? Forty miles out from the English coast, a few minutes after 3 pm, Briden’s engines spluttered and died. The Wellington glided smoothly down towards the icy sea below, cartwheeled to starboard as it touched, then settled. Harris circled above it, watching the crew struggling around their dinghy. He ordered his own crew to throw out their dinghy to assist. After a struggle, they set it free. But it inflated as it fell away from the aircraft, struck the tail and jammed there. With his rudder controls crippled, Harris with difficulty flew on to make a forced landing at Coltishall. Lifeboats put out from Cromer and Sheringham to Briden’s last reported position, but the North Sea in December is not a welcoming refuge. Like so many men who ditched in her waters in the next five years, neither Briden nor his crew were ever seen again. They had been warned in training that they might expect to survive for fifteen minutes under such conditions.

Sergeant Ramshaw of 9 Squadron was more fortunate. His engines died at last just short of Grimsby. Lilley, his rear gunner, was already critically wounded when they ditched and was lost with the aircraft. Ramshaw and the remainder of his crew were picked up by a trawler and by nightfall lay in Grimsby hospital.

Thus the twelve surviving aircraft – ten, discounting the two which had not attacked – came home. Soon after 4 pm, after almost seven hours in the air, the eight remaining in the formation touched down. At Honington, only Peter Grant and Sergeant Purdy landed. Grant told his tale to the CO and the Adjutant in the
officers’ mess, then went exhausted to bed. An officer who put his head into the mess a little later found it deserted but for the CO, who sat bowed and old, alone by the fireplace.

Slaughter of these proportions at this, still squeamish, moment of the war provoked an unprecedented upheaval and post-mortem both at 3 Group and at Bomber Command. Ludlow-Hewitt, a C-in-C already well known for his sensitivity to casualties, flew in person to Norfolk to hear first-hand accounts of the operation. Group-Captain Hugh Pughe-Lloyd, a 3 Group staff officer who had commanded 9 Squadron until a few weeks before, said in one of a mass of reports inspired by the disaster: ‘I dislike the course taken to the target. On this occasion we make a landfall near the German–Danish frontier and run the whole way down it, giving the enemy all the warning he can get.’ This was almost the only instance of open criticism of the planning of the operation.

Most senior officers studied the events of 18 December and drew much more hopeful and face-saving conclusions. They readily accepted that Wellingtons must be provided with beam guns and self-sealing tanks. But granted these measures, it seemed to them that the elements of Kellett’s formation which stuck rigidly together as ordered had fared astonishingly well. Only one of Kellett’s own section of four aircraft had been lost, and an impressive list of enemy fighters destroyed was accepted. Of the six aircraft on the starboard side, it seemed reasonable to assume that all would have survived the battle had they been fitted with self-sealing tanks.

Why therefore had the port and rear sections of the formation fared so badly? Air Vice-Marshal Baldwin’s report to Ludlow-Hewitt contained no breath of criticism of the strategic and tactical concepts underlying the operation:

I am afraid [he wrote firmly on 23 December] there is no doubt that the heavy casualties experienced by 9 and 37 Squadrons were due to poor leadership and consequent poor formation flying. Squadron-Leader Guthrie is reported as being almost a mile ahead of his formation. For some unknown reason Hue-Williams, who, I thought, was a very sound leader, appears to have done the same thing . . .

I have not by any means given up hope of being able to drive home the lessons learnt . . . I have already taken steps to prevent a repetition, but I was allowing a certain period to elapse before pinning results on to individual actions, although instances of bad leadership have already been pointed out to all units.

3 Group’s summary of the lessons to be derived from the events of 18 December concluded: ‘There is every reason to believe that a very close formation of six Wellington aircraft will emerge from a long and heavy attack by enemy fighters with very few, if any, casualties to its own aircraft.’

3 Group’s Operational Instruction No. 21 of 23 December 1939 stated: ‘With the intention of combining useful training and operations, sweeps will continue to be carried out . . . If enemy aircraft are encountered, gunners will be able to practise shooting at real targets instead of drogues . . .’

On 2 January 1940, Air Vice-Marshal A. T. Harris, the future C-in-C of Bomber Command, then serving as AOC of 5 Group, told HQ at High Wycombe that so long as three bombers were in company in daylight, the pilots ‘considered themselves capable of taking on anything’.

Peter Grant was sent to lecture to a Bomber Command gunnery school on the realities of facing fighter attack in daylight. On his return, he was reprimanded for having given ‘an unpatriotic talk likely to cause dismay and demoralization’.

The Germans at Wilhelmshaven were unaware that Ruse had dropped his bombs in the sea before crashing, and were therefore bewildered to find that his Wellington had apparently flown the operation unloaded. The only logical conclusion that they could
reach about the behaviour of Kellett’s formation was that the British had been carrying out some suicidal form of exercise, which was indeed not far from the truth.