Bomber Command (54 page)

There was now an extraordinary profusion of marking and aiming techniques: visual; by
Oboe
; by H2S; by a new device called G-H, of the
Oboe
family but with greater range and capable of use by a hundred aircraft simultaneously. Often a combination of more than one of these would be employed. Sometimes the Pathfinders would decide only on the run-up to the target whether to mark visually or by radar. They were equipped with multi-stage Target Indicators which changed colour through the attack to defeat German decoys. At 97 Squadron, the bomb-aimer’s vital function had become that of ‘Set Operator’, manning the H2S from a seat beside the navigator as the aircraft ran up to the target. Flight engineers had been retrained as ‘Visual bomb-aimers’, and it was they who customarily handled the Mk XIV bombsight on a visual attack. Almost every squadron aircraft carried its own individual combination of Target Indicators, flares, ‘Wanganui’ sky-markers, high-explosive bombs and incendiaries, according to its place in the attack.

At a crack Pathfinder unit there was intense professional dedication to improving technique. Gordon Cooper, the H2S leader at 97, had devised a range of new methods of handling the set. The squadron engineering officer discovered that by applying a high polish to the bulging H2S dome below the fuselage, it was possible to add 5 mph to a Lancaster’s speed. Each radar set was individually tuned. Highly-skilled
Gee
operators found that they could use their equipment almost to the Ruhr despite the German jamming,
getting the vital blip at extreme range by calling on their pilot to waggle his wings.

But it is important not to allow admiration for the sophistication of Pathfinder techniques at this stage of the war to obscure one central fact: Bomber Command never overcame the problem of the weather. Until the very end, there were failed attacks and unsatisfactory marking when the cloud-base was low. The weather remained almost as central an element in the bomber offensive in April 1945 as it had been in September 1939. Despite the FIDO burners that were established at key airfields to clear runways of fog, crashes on take-off and landing remained a major cause of lost aircraft. With the approach of winter, the sortie rate declined severely even in the last year of the war.

One of Cochrane’s most intensely held convictions was that training must never stop, even when crews were operating constantly. Heward kept 97 Squadron in the air by day and night all that summer. They dropped bombs at Wainfleet, practised H2S technique on blind ‘cross-countries’, tested their gunners in the air against drogues and targets. Some of the crews resented the pressure when they felt entitled to relax between operations. Most were sufficiently dedicated to improving their art to accept it with reasonable good grace, although somebody wrote an acid note in the operational record book at the end of June: ‘The Group “Exercise” which was laid on for tonight was once more cancelled at a late hour. One gets the impression that these “Exercises” are laid on and cancelled at such late hours to prevent the aircrews ever having an evening out of camp to themselves.’

Operations reached a peak of intensity in August, when they sortied by day or night on eighteen occasions. Some men found the daylight trips a pleasant change, forging across France in a great loose gaggle, gazing down at the unfamiliar sunlit scenery. Most, however, were deeply wedded to the night. They hated the sense of nakedness in daylight, the horror of watching aircraft fall from the sky in slow motion, of being able to identify each man’s
funeral pyre, to see the collisions, the bursting flak and attacking fighters, seldom though it was that they now encountered the Luftwaffe.

On 18 August, they were ordered to the U-boat pens at Bordeaux. They took off that morning in uncommonly easy mind. They had had little trouble with French targets for weeks, and this trip had been laid on at short notice, almost as an afterthought by High Wycombe. Then as the group of Lancasters curved in towards the town and the vast, unbroken concrete mass that housed the U-boats, a terrifying blanket of flak opened before them. Instinctively, pilots edged outwards to skirt it, their course widening away from the pens. Arthur Ingham, in 97’s lead aircraft, drove unswerving onwards, calling furiously down the radio-telephone: ‘Come in, come in. Support me. Support me.’ The flak began to kick and rock the aircraft. Ingham locked his arms on the yoke and said grimly to his crew: ‘We are going through.’ There was intense nervous chatter between aircraft on the R/T, somebody calling in bewilderment: ‘There are some Germans down there pushing out what looks like a wheelbarrow.’ The ‘wheelbarrow’ erupted as its crew brought their quad AA guns into action. Beside Ingham sat Pat Turner, a flight engineer who had volunteered for Bordeaux because he was a few trips behind the rest of his usual crew, and ‘this one sounded dead cushy’. The flak bracketed them in earnest as they came in to bomb, tearing through wings and fuselage, wrecking the electrics and flaps, holing five tanks, wounding the navigator and mid-upper gunner. They came home through the bright sunshine with the wind rushing through 160 holes in the aircraft, two engines gone, Pat Turner bent over the bleeding squadron navigation leader with a morphia syringe. They crashed at Fighter Command’s airfield at Tangmere, where their survivors were grudgingly found sleeping space on the mess floor.

Bill Clayfield, 97’s signals leader, came home in an aircraft with a badly wounded bomb-aimer. The ambulance met them as they landed, and rushed him away. Only when the others reached the mess did they realize that they were a man short. They raced back
to the Lancaster, to find their mid-upper gunner slumped unconscious over his guns. He had been hit in the backside by shrapnel, but when he recovered later he said that knowing of their difficulties in the cockpit with the bomb-aimer, he had not wanted to add to these by reporting his own injuries.

It was, inevitably, a dangerous business using heavy bombers with a mean aiming accuracy of three miles to support ground operations. But that summer the Allied armies called repeatedly for assistance from Bomber Command and 8th Air Force to blast open the German lines in advance of an attack. Until the end of the war, many airmen and some thoughtful soldiers argued that it was counter-productive to send in Bomber Command, for the devastation caused serious problems for advancing armour, and bombing was not accurate enough to pinpoint German positions. And even with good marking, there were fatal errors. In an incident on 14 August during the battle for Falaise, Bomber Command hit Canadian troops, causing several hundred casualties. This was largely a failure of liaison, because the men on the ground fired Colours of the Day unknown to the airmen, but closely resembling Target Indicators. There was also some careless bombing, however, and on most ground-support sorties thereafter, there was a ‘long stop’ controller to ensure that no aircraft bombed beyond a certain point near the Allied lines. Tactical support bombing became a central part of the summer’s operations, as the army called repeatedly for preparation by heavy bombers, if only to boost the morale of the Allied assault troops.

On 16 August, 97 Squadron carried out their first operation against a German target since June. Bomber Command dispatched 461 aircraft on a deep penetration to Stettin. While the Main Force attacked the city, 97 and 83 Squadrons went to mine the nearby Swinemünde Canal. This was an exceptionally difficult low-level operation, and before they left Coningsby they had long consultations with Guy Gibson, drawing on his dam-busting experience. Gibson recommended that the three marking aircraft make one low-level run down the canal before turning to drop
their flame-float markers. At tea in the mess, there were some gloomy jokes about Heward’s refusal to allow crews to take part in swimming exercises at the local baths, on the grounds that the chlorine might damage their night vision. Ed Porter, approaching the end of his second tour, was Master Bombing with a scratch crew. He would mark the middle of the canal, Parker the south end, Reid the north. Then somebody remembered that Reid could not swim. To their intense dismay, for it was to be the last trip of their tour, Harry Locke’s crew were detailed instead.

Locke’s aircraft lost its
Gee
on the outward run, but approached the canal dead on time at 300 feet, to find the five flak ships moored beside the channel already hosing up fire. On their second run, their flame floats had just fallen away when they were hit by ground fire, and plunged towards the water. ‘Pull out,’ yelled the wireless operator, Tony Boultbee, as he glanced from his window to see the water rushing up at them. They called Porter on the R/T as they climbed away: ‘Permission to break off?’ Porter assented. They turned for home. Crossing Denmark at 6,000 feet, they reached the English coast with leaking hydraulic fluid swamping the H2S, and all radar aids out of action. Locke belly-landed at Coningsby with the crew huddled behind the main spar, haunted by the usual terror of fire on impact. Somehow they all walked away. Locke was awarded an immediate DSO.

But the furious flak caught Porter’s aircraft as he hung over the canal, coned by a dense knot of searchlights. With an unshakeable calm that every crew listening remembered for the rest of their lives, he said on the R/T: ‘I’m afraid we have had it. I shall have to leave you now. Bailing out. Good luck everybody.’ But they were too low for parachutes. Going home that night, one of 97’s crews looked down on the bright lights of neutral Sweden, and for several minutes they talked seriously among themselves about the possibility of parachuting into internment. Later, they felt ashamed and never mentioned the conversation to each other again. But that night fear had sunk deep into their reserves of courage.

In August 1944, 97 Squadron carried out 193 sorties for the loss of only three aircraft missing. Faces that came to the squadron were now lingering long enough to become familiar. There were often more crews than aircraft for them to fly, and with an establishment of twenty, on some ‘maximum effort’ nights, they sent out twenty-four Lancasters, some of their novices carrying bombs with Main Force. But the declining graph of losses, the rise in the fortunes of Bomber Command, were more readily apparent to the statisticians at High Wycombe than to the aircrew on the stations. The unending exhaustion, the dirtiness; the stink of aviation spirit and the lonely ride through the darkness to the dispersals; the monotony of the air broken only by moments of intense concentration or fear, felt the same in the summer of 1944 as in 1943 or 1942. It is only to historians that it is so readily apparent that the nature of the battle changed profoundly in this last year of the war.

With such a strong contingent of Colonials on 97 Squadron, Coningsby’s senior officers fought a losing battle to enforce discipline on the ground. These men were not career airmen. Whatever dedication they brought to operational flying, they had no patience with rigid restriction away from their aircraft. Elsewhere in Bomber Command, disgruntled Canadians had been known to ring up their High Commission in London when confronted, for example, with official efforts to prevent NCOs from addressing officers by their Christian names. ‘No bullshit!’ said the Canadians defiantly, and when all aircrew at Coningsby were confined to camp in punishment for the sawing-down of the base flagpole by a crew completing their tour, general impatience came close to explosion. Gordon Cooper slept with a pistol under his pillow to protect himself from the two New Zealanders with whom he shared a room, who were utterly careless whom they assaulted after a few drinks. In the early hours of one August morning after an operation, all 97’s crews were hauled out of bed to take part in a post-mortem about the failure of the attack. They listened to
Bobby Sharpe’s incisive questioning for a few minutes, then Harry Locke, one of the Australians, called in disgust: ‘This is a heap of horseshit.’ They were allowed to go back to their beds.

Heward, the CO, was known as ‘Smiler’ in deference to the chilly mask that he presented to the world. It was said that in his days at 50 Squadron, a pilot interrupted one of the base WAAFs who said how much she would like to do something special for the war effort: ‘Marry the CO, then, because he’s giving us absolute hell.’ Heward’s crew reported for duty one morning in severe pain after a heavy social night at a local American base. His face cracked into a frosty smile: ‘Fighter affiliation for us this morning, I think.’ For the next hour he hurled the Lancaster through the Lincolnshire sky until the cockpit floor was awash with rebellious breakfasts. But unknown to the squadron, Heward was conducting one exercise that was quite out of step with the character they had drawn of him: laying siege to Clare Wainwright, a general’s daughter who was Code and Ciphers Officer at Coningsby, and by common consent the most beautiful WAAF on the base. There was little opportunity for going out together in the town, but instead they went for long walks across the flat Lincolnshire fields. They were married late in 1944.

Coningsby had all the facilities of a pre-war station, but was grossly overcrowded with aircrew. Officers were sleeping in double-banked bunks, eating at long tables in a self-service mess, sharing a batman between six. Discomfort that would have been tolerable for men working regular hours in undemanding jobs became insufferable to aircrew permanently weary, coming and going at all hours of day and night. They discovered that the mess funds had accumulated enormously in five years of war, and threw them all into two massive parties. It was always possible to laugh and find the war funny when you were amongst a mass of apparently exuberant colleagues. But once they left the throng, most men’s faces relapsed into that mask of mingled earnestness, tiredness and strain that is apparent in so many photographs of wartime briefings. On Stand Down evenings, they lounged on the grass
outside the Leagate Arms in the village, conducting inter-crew drinking contests in which victory was measured by the length of each team’s line of beer bottles stretching down the lawn, or dashed into Boston and Lincoln, or drank around the mess piano.