Bomber Command (55 page)

Coming out of briefing,

Get into the kites,

they sang, to the tune of
Lili Marlene
,

Down the f---ing runway,

And off into the night,

We’ve left the flarepath far behind,

It’s f---ing dark but never mind,

We’re pressing on regardless

For the Wingco’s DFC . . .

Often that summer, targets and bombloads were changed at short notice, and operations were laid on and cancelled at a few hours’ warning. They played cricket in the sunshine outside the flight offices, or joined the high poker school in which Tony Aveline was a monotonously steady winner. Fewer men were dying, but the tension and discomfort of night operations were unchanged. Fred Hendry, one of the navigators, suffered chronically from air sickness, but was haunted by fear that he might be considered ‘Lacking Moral Fibre’. Trip after trip, he flew with his topographical map folded into a sick-bag, throwing up his heart despite all the pills that he took before take-off, at last completing his forty-five amidst the admiration of ‘the Navigators’ Union’. One night Bob Lasham’s flight engineer fell unconscious in the aircraft when he accidentally unplugged his own oxygen. When he was reconnected and brought round, he tried to attack the wireless operator with a fireaxe. He thought that they had crashed, and that the man bending over him was a German soldier.

Billy Russell was a Scots rear-gunner, who had come to the RAF from the mines. One night on the way to the target, his electrically-heated suit failed. On his return, he had to spend two days in
hospital with frostbite. Russell flew with Noel Parker, an intensely professional Australian of much experience. On the trip to Mailly-Le-Camp, with the sky lit by tracer and exploding aircraft, Russell suddenly saw a shape in the darkness behind him, and swung his guns. He hesitated for a moment until he could see clearly, then sagged with relief, for it was another Lancaster. Back on the ground, he told Parker about the near-disaster, and was astounded by the Australian’s explosion: ‘You stupid bastard – you thought it was an Me110 and you hesitated. You should have fired the second you saw it!’

‘But I was wrong,’ said Russell in confusion.

‘Next time you may not live to know that,’ said Parker curtly. ‘Fire every time.’

Some crews took chances and got away with it. One night, a 97 Lancaster landed back at Coningsby ahead of the Mosquitoes. At the ensuing inquiry, it emerged that its crew had ignored the stream’s dog-leg route home, and flown a direct course in order to get to a mess party. Some men fell asleep in their aircraft on the way back. Others smoked, used torches carelessly to read the instruments, switched on IFF or even landing lights over enemy territory without noticing. A few came back but many of these men lie in the cemeteries of France and Germany. Billy Russell was appalled one night, coming home from a trip to Germany with a novice captain, to hear the man say: ‘OK, we’re over our own lines now. You can come out of the turrets and have a smoke.’ Survivors of Bomber Command needed luck, but also sanity, discipline and utter concentration.

One of the saddest episodes at Coningsby that autumn concerned the station commander, the huge, popular teddy-bear figure of Group-Captain Evans Evans. Evans Evans felt a deep respect for aircrew. At Bourn, there had been a superstitious tradition that no one ever came to watch the aircraft take off, but at Coningsby 97 were surprised and at first alarmed to see Evans Evans saluting by the runway at the head of a crowd of waving WAAFs and ground staff. He was there without fail, every trip. Then one day in August,
Evans made up his mind that it was his duty to fly an operation himself. He was a man of such enormous dimensions that he had difficulty getting into a Lancaster cockpit, far less controlling the aircraft. Bob Lasham’s crew went to the squadron CO and flatly refused to fly with the station commander after a hair-raising cross-country flight in his hands. Instead, Evans took a scratch crew, flew to Caen and somehow came back to tell the tale. He was awarded a DFC. But instead of delighting him, this played on his mind. He felt that his ‘gong’ had been easily earned by comparison with those of the aircrew. He decided that he must fly another operation. He took off for Germany one night with all 97’s specialist ‘Leaders’ in his crew, including Jock Wishart, the navigation leader, who was on his eighty-fourth trip. They somehow drifted into a ‘Diver’ area, where the Allied gunners had orders that any flying object must be treated as hostile. The aircraft was blown to pieces by American flak. Only the Australian rear gunner baled out in time to survive and tell the tale. Coningsby was torn between regret for Evans Evans, and sympathy for those who had been obliged to die with him.

But war on a bomber station was always a cruel business, in which the laws of natural selection were pushed to the limit. Throughout the offensive, the majority of casualties were novice crews on their first six trips. Yet because they were new to their squadrons, they found their inexperience compounded by the fact that they had to fly the aircraft nobody else wanted, the oldest and most vice-ridden. Beyond even this, by 1944 the best crews were concentrated overwhelmingly in the crack units – 8 Group, 5 Group, the Mosquito squadrons. ‘Main Force’ had become a term of condescension. New and mediocre crews in other Groups lacked a sufficient leavening of knowledge and experience in their flights and squadrons. It was a situation that Harris had anticipated with the formation of the Pathfinders in 1942, but which there was now no momentum in Bomber Command to reverse.

The experienced had little pity to spare for the newcomers in the mess. Statistically, seven or fourteen or twenty-one of us have
to die tonight, so please God, let it be the nervous young face in the corner whom I do not know, rather than Harry, or Bill or Jack laughing at the bar, who are my friends. Thus their jokes: ‘Killer’ Booth walking over to the new crew having their pre-op meal in the mess at Coningsby, looking them up and down and declaring with cold certainty: ‘You’re for the chop tonight.’ Or the familiar chestnut of putting a chopper cut out of perspex into a navigator’s mapcase, for the man to find as his pilot ran up engines at dispersal. It was part of their defences against their own fear, of the schoolboy immaturity that was always close to the surface among so many young men of eighteen, nineteen and twenty, who still thought it the greatest sport in the world to pull somebody’s trousers off after dinner. It was this same feather-light tread of youth that enabled so many thousands of their generation to fly for Bomber Command through six years of war, amidst the terrible reality that, statistically, most of them were dead men.

The early autumn of 1944 was the last false dawn of the war for the Allies, before the crushing disappointments of Arnhem and the German counter-offensive in the Ardennes, followed at last, belatedly, by victory. After months of delay, the armies had broken out of Normandy, sweeping across France and Belgium. It seemed perfectly possible to end the war in Europe by Christmas.

For Bomber Command, the path into Germany that had been fraught with such loss and disappointment only five months before, suddenly reopened. It was a remarkable twist of war that
Overlord
, which the airmen had sought to supplant as the key to victory, now made possible the reopening of the strategic air offensive with devastating results, at vastly reduced cost:

The Combined Bomber offensive as planned in the spring of 1943 was . . . primarily a campaign to defeat the Luftwaffe as a prerequisite to
Overlord
[wrote Craven and Cate]. Ironically enough, it was not until the Allies had gained a firm foothold on the continent . . . that the bombing of Germany’s vital industries, originally considered the purpose of a strategic bombing offensive, was systematically begun.
⁶

The German early-warning radar and observer stations, together with their vital forward airfields in France, were gone. The attrition of the summer against the American strategic and the Allied tactical air forces had destroyed much of the Luftwaffe’s remaining corps of trained aircrew, and wrecked its aircraft at the rate of 500 a week. The German air force continued to inflict loss on Bomber Command until the very end of the war, but Harris’s casualties fell to 1 per cent of aircraft dispatched. In January 1944 he lost 314 aircraft for 6,278 dispatched. In September, losses fell to 96 missing for 6,428 night sorties, in October to 75 in 10,193 night sorties. Casualties on daylight operations were negligible.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is remarkable how much Allied nerves relaxed after the Normandy bridgehead was secured. D-Day had been the climax of so many hopes and fears. By 11 July, Portal found time to preside over a meeting at the Air Ministry to discuss, of all things, means by which the Royal Air Force might gain more publicity in the Press. The Chief of Air Staff opened the discussion himself:

In the second stage of the war, RAF operations might be to a large extent overshadowed by army and naval operations and by the Americans, and so would receive comparatively little national publicity. There was accordingly a genuine danger that the part which it had played in the earlier part of the war would be forgotten by Ministers and by the public.

The Director of Public Relations said that the Admiralty were obstructing publicity for Coastal Command. The Chief of Air Staff said that he would take this matter to the highest levels if necessary . . .

In August the Air Ministry issued a long memorandum to all Commands concerning preparations for the end of the war. They were anxious that there should be no destructive or extravagant
celebrations, and thus pointed out that it was advisable to ensure that when the time came, personnel had no unauthorized access to firearms, explosives or pyrotechnics. There was expectancy in the air at the highest levels of command: The Russians had seized great areas of Poland and Rumania including the vital oilfields, and seemed to be driving all before them. On every side there was a feeling that one more push could suffice to topple the Nazi edifice.

This impatience contributed significantly to the Allies’ failure in the last nine months of war to devise and prosecute a consistent strategic-bomber strategy, with the enormous resources now at their command. Had they but known it, Spaatz’s oil offensive was succeeding beyond the Americans’ wildest expectations. By the end of September, German fuel supplies had fallen to less than a quarter of their January total, and a fatal crisis was threatening the German armed forces. But once again, as throughout the bomber offensive, a failure of Intelligence led to tragic misjudgements. For four years the airmen had exaggerated the achievements of bombing because they possessed no satisfactory means of assessing them. Now, Spaatz’s dramatic prognostications of impending victory fell on sceptical ears, because he had no conclusive means of proving what he had done. Generals might gain ground, admirals might sink ships, but the airmen were forced back on the measurement of success or failure by aerial mosaic and mathematical projection. The Allied leadership did not dispute Spaatz’s progress, nor the potential of his attacks. But they were by now far too well-versed in the apparent realities of the bomber offensive to accept that the oil attack offered a chance of early and absolute victory. Spaatz continued his campaign – with the support of Portal, of which more will be heard later. But at no point did it seem likely that the undivided weight of the Allied strategic-bomber force would be committed to the assault on the German oil industry.

By late summer many of the Allied leaders behaved as if the German military collapse was so close that it no longer mattered greatly what the bombers attacked, as long as they provided tactical support for the advancing armies on demand. In July, the
British Chiefs of Staff had produced the minute to the Prime Minister which sowed the seeds of Operation
Thunderclap
, ultimately executed in a modified form against Dresden:

The time might well come in the not too distant future when an all-out attack by every means at our disposal on German civilian morale might be decisive [they wrote] . . . The method by which such an attack would be carried out should be examined and all possible preparations made.

The importance of this minute was not that it resulted in any immediate drastic action, but that it confirmed that the candle of support in high places for area bombing, which had all but expired in March 1944, was once again flickering by July. The fact that it was signed by all the Chiefs of Staff is a reminder that the concept of inflicting mass death and destruction on Germany’s cities was not a unilateral air-force enthusiasm. The Directorate of Bomber Operations did some calculations about the possibilities of
Thunderclap
:

If we assume that the daytime population of the area attacked is 300,000, we may expect 220,000 casualties. 50 per cent of these or 110,000 may expect to be killed. It is suggested that such an attack resulting in so many deaths, the great proportion of which will be key personnel, cannot help but have a shattering effect on political and civilian morale all over Germany . . .