Книга - The Red Line: The Gripping Story of the RAF’s Bloodiest Raid on Hitler’s Germany

The Red Line: The Gripping Story of the RAF’s Bloodiest Raid on Hitler’s Germany
John Nichol


More men from Royal Air Force Bomber Command died on one single night of the Second World War than the total RAF aircrew losses during the whole of the four-month-long Battle of Britain. 30 March 1944 was the night when everything conspired against bomber command.This is the story of that terrible night, the air raid intended to be the climax of Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris’s relentless campaign to defeat Nazi Germany. 795 aircraft set out, nearly 700 men did not return. Piecing together the dramatic stories of these young fliers – the fledgling crews and the veterans, the survivors and the fallen, former RAF Flight Lieutenant John Nichol has interviewed the few surviving veterans, British and German, in the air and on the ground, to record the voices of a diminishing generation.While the airmen of Bomber Command were among the greatest heroes of the conflict, their contribution and sacrifice has, until recently, been sidelined in the face of post-war criticism of Bomber Command’s tactics. Yet they were among the best of their generation. John Nichol’s dramatic tribute to the men who flew on the RAF’s bloodiest raid has provided the surviving veterans with the chance to tell the story of that terrible night – the night they flew to Nuremberg.













For Sophie


This book is dedicated to all members of Bomber Command, on the ground and in the air, who served during the Second World War with such incredible courage, dedication and fortitude.




Contents


Dedication (#u6cba6fb7-589b-5e76-8383-18df916229f3)

Epigraph (#uba80c1a4-02f1-50d2-80b5-db0a90ea7bb0)

Foreword

1 The Home Front

2 Sowing the Wind

3 The Fine Line

4 In the Face of Death

5 30 March 1944

6 The Red Line

7 Enemy Coast Ahead

8 Jazz Music

9 The Long Leg

10 One Hour of Death

11 The Turning Point

12 The Bombing Run

13 Homeward Bound

14 A Terrible Dawn

15 Disaster

16 The Reckoning

17 ‘I’m Quite Prepared to Die …’

18 A Charmed Life

19 A Wing and a Prayer

20 Scars and Ghosts

21 Journey’s End

Epilogue

Postscript

Map of The Nuremberg Raid (#litres_trial_promo)

Picture section (#litres_trial_promo)

Bibliography

List of Searchable Terms

Acknowledgements

Notes

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher


‘In Bomber Command we had to lay on and, more often than not, carry through, at least one and occasionally more than one major battle every twenty-four hours. That was a situation which no naval or military command has ever had to compete with. Navies fight two or three major battles per war. Armies, maybe a dozen. We had to lay on, during my three and a half years, well over a thousand.’

SIR ARTHUR HARRIS




Foreword (#u53a9eb68-f6a9-53ab-8181-475e92330010)


They had waited 67 years and journeyed from every far-flung corner of the world for this day. A lifetime ago, young and idealistic, they had come together to battle against the Nazi scourge which threatened to engulf their homelands. Once sprightly, upright figures were now stooped by age or confined to wheelchairs, but medals were polished to perfection and trousers pressed to a razor-sharp crease, and nothing would prevent them from gathering to witness the closing chapter in their extraordinary and controversial story.

The sun shone down on London’s Green Park on 28 June 2012 as more than 800 Royal Air Force veterans paraded to witness the unveiling of the Bomber Command Memorial – their memorial. Some came from as far away as New Zealand, Canada and Australia, some just a few minutes’ bus-ride from nearby suburbs of the British capital. They were joined by widows, families, celebrities, political leaders and royalty. I was incredibly proud to be part of their day.

My association with the men of Bomber Command began in 1991. As a young Tornado navigator, I had been shot down over Iraq during the first Gulf War, captured, tortured and paraded on television screens around the world. My short but deeply unpleasant experience of captivity entitled me to join the RAF Ex-Prisoner of War Association.

Until that point, I had known little about my forebears who had flown the early bombers into the heart of German-occupied Europe during the darkest days of the Second World War. I’d watched the classic films like The Dambusters and The Great Escape, of course. I’d met veterans at various military functions, chatted politely and listened to the occasional war story. But I’m ashamed to admit I hadn’t got to know these men; I understood little of their personal stories, their astonishing sacrifice and their incredible bravery.

Now I was able to join their illustrious gatherings – some raucous, laughter- and beer-filled, some poignant and sombre, when awe-inspiring stories of survival brought the occasional tear at the memory of lost friends, or moments of stillness at the recollection of life-threatening danger. Men like Lancaster navigator Harry Evans invited me into their homes to ‘share a brew’ and talk about wartime memories. Harry was just 18 when he joined up. ‘I’d seen the fighter pilots in the skies over London and wanted to be part of it all; it looked so exciting. I wanted to be one of those Brylcreem Boys who were fighting back against the Germans.’ He got his wish – and went on to be part of one of the most deadly chapters in aviation history.

Over the years, their reunions have become fewer and the numbers attending have diminished to the point where many Second World War old-comrade associations have now disbanded. At last year’s Remembrance Ceremony, only four surviving WWII prisoners-of-war managed to join us on parade at London’s Cenotaph. The eldest, Alfie Fripp, shot down in 1939, died on 3 January this year, aged 98. And so it was with a mixture of pride, pleasure and sorrow that I took my seat amidst the crowd of nearly 7,000, gathered around the memorial to honour and remember a truly extraordinary group of people.

I chatted with Lancaster pilot Rusty Waughman, who had come down from Coventry, the scene of a massive German blitz. Alongside his navigator, Alec Cowan, and bomb aimer, Norman Westby, who had travelled from Andorra in the Pyrenees, they relived experiences few could comprehend. Rusty spoke for so many when he told me, ‘We have waited a long time for this … The memorial is not a celebration of our work, it is recognition of the sacrifice so many of our friends made. We are proud to have been part of it all, to have made just a small contribution towards winning the war. I wasn’t an educated lad with a brilliant mind. You just did your job to the best of your ability. Luck played the major part in it really. We knew so many who were lost.’

Rusty and his crew truly understood the ‘luck factor’; they had witnessed those terrible losses at close quarters.

Every one of the 125,000 men who served with Bomber Command was a volunteer and their average age was 22. If the names and ages of each of the 55,573 who gave their lives had been read out at the unveiling ceremony, the roll of honour would have taken two full days – 48 hours – to complete. Yet the furore surrounding the RAF’s bombing of German cities and the lack of moral fibre of successive generations of politicians meant that they were denied the recognition their brethren in Fighter Command had been swiftly granted for their outstanding achievements in the Battle of Britain – and many of the survivors of the bomber war suffered downright hostility instead.

Some trace the roots of this invidious state of affairs back to that icon amongst British heroes, Winston Churchill. In the final year of the war he pressed Bomber Command to crush German resistance with ‘carpet bombing’ raids on cities in eastern Germany; his wish was to deliver a ‘basting [to] the Germans in their retreat’. When the Air Ministry demurred, he told them in no uncertain terms to get on with the job. ‘I asked whether Berlin, and no doubt other large cities in East Germany, should not now be considered especially attractive targets,’ he wrote. ‘I am glad this is “under examination”. Pray report to me tomorrow what is going to be done.’

Bomber Command was issued with a clear and unambiguous instruction to execute ‘one big attack on Berlin and attacks on Dresden, Leipzig, Chemnitz, or other cities where a severe blitz will not only cause confusion in the evacuation from the east but will also hamper the movement of troops from the west’.

The horrific loss of life in Dresden in particular came to epitomise the strategy, and perhaps prompted his astonishing U-turn six weeks later. ‘The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing,’ he told the Chiefs of Staff in a briefing paper, laying the blame for the death and destruction of which he was the architect squarely at the open bomb doors of Sir Arthur Harris and his ceaselessly loyal aircrews.

It remained there for many years.

No memorial was granted them; no campaign medal. But the survivors would not let their fallen comrades be exiled to the margins of history. A small but stubborn group finally determined to right this wrong. It took them five years and cost some £7 million – money raised by the men themselves, through newspaper appeals and personal donations that ranged from a few pence of a child’s pocket money to many thousands of pounds, and in one case an incredible £2 million. Alongside such luminaries as Bee Gee Robin Gibb (who sadly did not live to see the culmination of his incredible work), I joined their campaign. It was now my privilege to witness its outcome.

Just after midday, Her Majesty the Queen pulled aside the drapes to reveal Philip Jackson’s stunning sculpture, the centrepiece of architect Liam O’Connor’s beautiful Portland stone memorial. There were gasps of pleasure and admiration from the front of the crowd, and cheers from those of us further back who, for the time being, could only imagine the sight.

The bronze statues depict seven members of a bomber crew, recently returned from yet another sortie through enemy skies. Exhaustion and relief are etched on their faces. Five of the figures gaze skywards, praying for a glimpse of friends destined never to return; two stare downwards, perhaps reflecting on the ordeal they have just endured – and knowing they must do it all again before the sun rises tomorrow.

The sacrifice of thousands of young lives is woven into every fibre of the monument. A stainless steel lattice in its ceiling depicts the geometric fuselage construction of the early Wellington bombers. Aluminium from a crashed Halifax lines the roof; eight young men were killed when she was shot down over Belgium in May 1944, and three were still at their stations when she was discovered in 1997. Even the rivets connecting the pieces are scale replicas of those used in the aircraft. And as a symbol of generous reconciliation, a yew tree donated by the people of Germany grows alongside the memorial.

The verdict amongst those who shared the day was unanimous. Andy Wiseman, a Halifax bomb aimer, echoed the thoughts of many as he gazed at the bronze faces of the crew. ‘I understand just how they feel,’ he said softly. ‘This was us, every single night. My only sadness is that it took so long to get the memorial. It would have meant so much to the mothers and fathers who lost so many sons.’

The service of dedication was dignified yet simple. The Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Dalton, promised the relatives of the dead that ‘they will now know that their service and raw courage has been recognised’. He spoke of the collective heroism of the men, highlighting the story of Canadian Air Gunner Charles Mynarski, who fought through the flames of his burning aircraft in an attempt to save his rear gunner. Mynarski died of the injuries he sustained during the rescue while the tail gunner survived. Mynarski was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross for his valour.

As the Venerable Ray Pentland, RAF Chaplain-in-Chief, began the dedication, four Tornado bombers roared overhead, to a chorus of cheers from the crowd and a wail of protest from a handful of car alarms. And then came the moment we had all been waiting for: ‘May this memorial commemorate the lives of all who have served and died in Bomber Command, as we acknowledge their sacrifice and service to others.’

As we reflected upon his words, the familiar drone of four Merlin engines filled the crowded park. And here she was, overhead: Britain’s last surviving airworthy Lancaster bomber. Many of those in wheelchairs struggled to their feet as our tear-filled eyes turned skywards and her massive bomb doors opened – to scatter thousands of blood-red poppies in a timeless Act of Remembrance.

We cheered and clapped in both celebration and sorrow, and in an instant she was gone.

‘You’ve waited a long time for it,’ the Queen had told Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Michael Beetham, himself a distinguished wartime pilot and one of the leaders of the campaign. ‘Well done.’

As the service ended, thousands queued to file through the memorial, to offer a quiet prayer or remember a fallen friend or loved one. The Royal Family wandered amongst the crowd, chatting to old and young alike; children played amidst the drifts of fallen poppies, and the bar began a roaring trade.

On stage in the entertainment area, TV presenter Carol Vorderman interviewed Rusty Waughman and his Lancaster crew about their experiences. Although more than a little uncomfortable about being singled out, Rusty was delighted with the day and its highlight: ‘Shaking hands with Prince Charles and being kissed by Carol Vorderman … twice!’

Although it was now late afternoon, bomb aimer Norman Westby had arranged a special feast at a local hotel. They were to be served bacon and eggs, the meal they had all enjoyed on the successful completion of each operation over enemy territory nearly 70 years before.

As Rusty and his crew departed for their own private Act of Remembrance, I have no doubt they reflected on the morning of 31 March 1944, when so many of their friends and fellow crew members had been absent from Bomber Command’s traditional ‘survivors’ breakfast.

JOHN NICHOL

Hertfordshire

13 January 2013




CHAPTER 1 (#u53a9eb68-f6a9-53ab-8181-475e92330010)

The Home Front (#u53a9eb68-f6a9-53ab-8181-475e92330010)







Cyril Barton

There is nothing out of the ordinary about Joyce Voysey’s semi-detached house in New Malden or the quiet suburban street on which she lives. The garden is well kept, the house immaculate and neatly furnished. Joyce and her sister, Cynthia Maidment, are two white-haired ladies with kindly faces and easy smiles, eager to welcome their visitors, especially those who have come to talk about their beloved brother, Cyril Barton.

His portrait, an oil-painted copy of his official RAF photograph, gazes from the wall of the sitting room. His broad, boyish grin is equal parts innocence and mischief and his eyes shine with pride. While Cyril looks down, his sisters serve tea in china cups and saucers on a polished mahogany table. At one end is a large scrapbook, filled with papers and cuttings, and a stack of files, all of them focused on Cyril’s service in Bomber Command. The scrapbook is well thumbed, its pages now faded and yellowing. At first glance there is nothing to suggest that they contain one of the most extraordinary stories of the Second World War.

Cynthia, Joyce and their three brothers and sisters idolised Cyril. They always looked forward to the week when he made the long journey home from his RAF base in Burn, North Yorkshire. Cyril was the oldest, wisest and most confident of the six Barton children, and life at their semi-detached Edwardian house seemed more fun whenever he was there. He was mischievous and playful but also like ‘a little father to us’,


Cynthia remembers, who often put them to bed at night when their dad, an electrical engineer, worked late shifts. He and their brother Ken, who was two years younger, had also taught the girls to sew, knit, draw and read.

Cyril flew with 578 Squadron. He and his crew had been operational since August 1943. Becoming a pilot had been a lifetime’s ambition. As a five-year-old he had once stuffed feathers from a recently plucked chicken into the sleeves of his pullover and jumped off a wall, flapping furiously, determined to defy gravity. The family had little money, but whenever funds allowed he was bought model aeroplanes, which he would build assiduously. Sometimes he would even allow his little sisters to help finish off the wings with yellow tissue paper. He was always willing to give them a ride on the back of Ichabod, his trusty bicycle, named after the son of Phineas in the Book of Samuel, and loosely translated from the Hebrew as ‘The Glory has departed’.

When they were teenagers, Cyril and Ken had heard the distinctive rumble of a Vickers Wellesley in the night sky. They went out into their quiet suburban street for a closer look. The light bomber had lurched into an uncontrollable spin, and the pilot had parachuted out. Seconds later, there was a world-shaking bang. Cyril and Ken shoved Cynthia into their younger sister Pamela’s pushchair so they could get to the crash site quicker than Cynthia could run. A few streets away the tail section of the plane jutted from a tiled roof. No one had been injured, but the house’s pregnant inhabitant gave birth earlier than expected. Cyril’s only regret was the absence of debris which he could claim as a souvenir.






Cyril Barton

His dream of flying seemed to have been dashed when his late childhood was blighted by serious illness. Severe bouts of meningitis and peritonitis hospitalised him for months, interrupted his schooling and at times threatened his life. His parents were twice summoned to the hospital to see him for the last time.

Each time he recovered, he managed to catch up at school, and throughout his ordeal he remained typically selfless; a diary entry from his sickbed recorded his principal concern: ‘I don’t know what to get Dad for his birthday.’

His love of aviation never wavered. At the age of 14 he went to work at Parnall’s, a manufacturer of military and civil aircraft. They had recently taken over Nash & Thompson in Kingston, who designed gun turrets for RAF bombers, and it was here that Cyril started as an apprentice draughtsman, taking one day a week off to study at college for his National Certificate in Aeronautical Engineering. His early apprenticeship was as blighted by illness as his schooldays had been, but he managed to complete it, and when war broke out, though he might have claimed the protection of a reserved occupation, he knew his chance to fly had finally arrived.

The minute he reached enlistment age in 1941 he asked his father if he could volunteer for the RAF. The family had moved to the safety of the countryside, leaving Cyril lodging in Surrey with his Sunday school teacher, so parental permission had to be sought by letter.

Mr Barton couldn’t hide his reluctance to agree to Cyril’s request; he had survived the horror of the trenches in the Great War and was in no hurry to see his much-loved son follow in his footsteps. ‘Dear Cyril,’ he wrote,

After all these … forms, the phone calls and so on, I weighed up your position and feel that the matter should rest entirely with you. Naturally your mother and I are not too keen on your “joining up”, more especially as I know by experience what such a step entails, but in view of what you have said regarding your present state at Parnells [sic], I rather grudgingly give my consent …

I am writing as requested to both the Air Ministry and Parnells and in doing so I wish you every success and a happy ending to your enthusiasm. Stick to your principles and faith (this will be very hard in the RAF) and I am confident that you will win. We at home will be waiting and watching in all that the future may hold for you.

I’ll close now and may God bless you and help you in the days that lie ahead. That is my greatest wish and hope …

Goodbye and ‘happy landings’.

Dad

Unsurprisingly, Cynthia and Joyce’s parents worried constantly about Cyril’s frequent and serious ill health, and their concern made his homecoming even more precious. Most of those serving an operational tour with Bomber Command were given one week off in every six. Cynthia, Joyce and Pamela, then aged seven, would wait eagerly for him to return to New Malden – the family had grown bored with country life and moved back to Surrey by then – wondering what new skills he would pass on, what practical jokes he might pull and what words of wisdom he would impart.

Their house always reverberated with laughter during these visits, and even when he was away in the United States, completing his pilot training in Albany, Georgia, he wrote streams of letters, including one to his sisters in May 1942, enclosing photos of the young daughters of the family he was staying with, but promising, ‘I’m not going to stay and be their big brother … I’ll try and come home for Christmas!’

That February visit of 1944, the ground was still blanketed with snow. Without even changing out of his uniform, Cyril headed straight to the garden shed. He pulled out an old tea chest and attached some metal runners to it. His three sisters screeched with delight as he dragged them up and down the street on their makeshift sleigh.

But once the excitement had died down, Cynthia noticed a change in her brother’s usually gregarious nature. He still found time to teach Joyce how to conjure up a watercolour sunset by wetting the paper and then blending in the paints, but much of the time he was withdrawn and silent. Their mother told the girls that Cyril had ‘grown up’, but it concerned them to see him so distant and preoccupied. He had always possessed a serious side and a strong religious conviction, but the Cyril they knew best was a playful extrovert.

One morning, as he sat quietly on the sofa, staring into space, Cynthia was unable to contain herself for a minute longer. There had been talk of a girl he had met, and she felt a surge of jealousy that there was someone else on the scene who might share his leave. Was that bothering him?

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

Cyril remained silent for a few seconds. Then he nodded. ‘As you’re a young lady now, I’ll tell you.’ He patted the empty space on the sofa beside him. When she sat down, he turned to face her. ‘You know I’m having to bomb people in Germany?’

Cynthia did know, even if she didn’t fully understand. Cyril and his crew had completed more than a dozen ops. Their parents rarely mentioned the dangers he faced, especially in front of the younger children, but as they heard the drone of engines overhead and stood in the garden counting the bombers in their droves, his mother couldn’t help saying plaintively: ‘Oh, I hope Cyril’s not in one of them.’

It was the same story in thousands of other homes across the country; the worry was never voiced, but it hung in the air like mist. Most evenings the Barton family gathered in the kitchen and switched on their Consul Marconi wireless. Sitting around the table, warmed by a Triplex oven, they listened to their favourite programmes, whilst their mother and father waited anxiously for the latest news bulletins from the front.

‘Well, I don’t like doing it,’ Cyril said, ‘because it means I have to bomb other people’s children.’

Cynthia had never known him speak so seriously to her.

‘I’m a Christian and I find it difficult to cope with bombing innocent people,’ he continued. ‘But I do it because of you three young girls. I don’t want Hitler to ruin your lives. He has some terrible plans for the human race. He has to be stopped. So that’s why I’m having to do it. For you, Joyce and Pamela.’

Cyril remained subdued for the remainder of his stay, but at least Cynthia now understood why. She was grateful that he had spoken to her so openly; she was only 13, but he was treating her like an adult. And the next time they went for a stroll, he took her arm. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘you don’t hold my hand any more. You’re a young lady now.’

Cynthia still remembers her feeling of pride as he escorted her down the shopping parade.

Then the day came that the whole family dreaded: the day of Cyril’s return to active service. Joyce always walked him to the station hand in hand. As they stood awkwardly outside the entrance, Cyril noticed the state of her nails. ‘I think you ought to use that manicure set more often, don’t you?’ He smiled. When he had arrived back from the USA two years before, he had brought Cynthia a gold watch and Joyce a gold-plated manicure set in a green leather case. It was one of her most treasured possessions.

The Pantons’ small stone gamekeeper’s cottage in Old Bolingbroke, Lincolnshire, was less than a mile away from RAF East Kirkby, the home of two Bomber Command squadrons, so the deafening roar of 3,000 rpm Merlin engines provided the soundtrack for 13-year-old Fred Panton and his younger brother Harold’s everyday life. The boys ran down the hill with rising excitement whenever they heard them, and stood with the other onlookers on the main road adjoining the runway as the lumbering machines, fully bombed up, strained to get airborne.

The pilots and flight engineers at their side always stared straight ahead, eyes fixed on the task of getting the aircraft safely off the ground, but the mid-upper and tail-end gunners often wiggled their guns to acknowledge the crowd.

Fred and 10-year-old Harold watched and waited until the bombers had gathered above them, and would not go home until they were just grey dots in the distance. Much later, the shadows of the returning planes would flit across their bedroom wall. Sometimes they were so close that Fred could make out the eerie glow cast by the instruments in the cockpit.

When the sky was silent once more, they wondered whether their big brother would be joining that night’s raid. Nineteen-year-old Chris was a flight engineer with 433 Squadron at Skipton-on-Swale, part of a maverick crew that included a Danish-born volunteer from the USA called Chris Nielsen and several Canadians. Despite his youth, Chris was already well on his way to becoming an officer and nearing the 30 ops that signalled the end of a tour. He still had dreams of being a pilot. There had been some close calls. On one trip the hydraulics on their bomb- and fuel-laden Halifax had failed on take-off, so the undercarriage and flaps would not retract. They were struggling to gain enough height to clear an oncoming hill, so Chris pumped furiously on the manual controls. They regained enough hydraulic pressure just in time to ensure the bomber cleared the hill. All on board were stunned into silence. Except for Nielsen. ‘It’s OK,’ he said in a bored American drawl. ‘I’ve got it.’

The two boys lived for the times he came back on leave. With eight children in their cramped cottage, Fred and Chris had to share a bed. Fred was always bursting with questions as they lay there, listening to the bombers return, but Chris would only talk about his experiences to their father, a veteran of the First World War. Fred sometimes heard the rumble of their conversation, but could never make out what they were saying.

Fred and Harold joined their older brother on rabbit-hunting expeditions (Chris had trained as a gamekeeper, aiming to follow in his father’s footsteps), but what he had seen and done in the skies above Germany was never discussed then either. For a few precious moments the war seemed a lifetime away, and they didn’t want to bring it rushing back. Watching the planes come and go, wave after wave, night after night, Fred knew the dangers they faced. He and Harold often visited crash sites once the bodies of the crewmen had been removed, and just stared, transfixed, at the twisted, smoking metal carcasses.

But finally, that winter’s evening, he could contain his curiosity no more. ‘Don’t you worry about crashing?’

There was a pause. ‘Not really,’ Chris replied casually. ‘It’d just be further experience.’




His brother’s insouciance astounded Fred. He longed to know more, but didn’t dare ask. He didn’t dare ask his father either. Their late-night chats were man’s talk, to be shared only by those who had experienced the realities of war.

Once, when Chris had been home on leave, Fred had slipped on his big brother’s RAF jacket, trying to imagine what it was like to be him. His father caught him red-handed. ‘Don’t you be going out that door with that on,’ he’d said sternly. In his dad’s eyes, Fred hadn’t earned the right.

The questions would have to wait for another time, hopefully not too far off, when Chris’s tour – and the war – were over.

Alan Payne, a bomb aimer with 630 Squadron, was part of one of the crews Fred and Harold had seen straining to take off at East Kirkby. On the early evening of 29 March, Alan was preparing to leave his parents’ home in Wendover. He gave his mother a final cheery wave before putting on his helmet and climbing on to his motorbike.

For the entire week they had not spoken once about his experiences with Bomber Command. They never asked and he never told them, and that suited him just fine. He knew the truth would only upset them and cause them to worry even more than they already did.

The rain started to pour as he saddled up. It was going to be a long ride back to East Kirkby in this weather. While he felt the usual sadness of leaving his loved ones, at least he was returning to his surrogate family. Alan and his crew, like so many others in Bomber Command, were tight. They spent all their time together, more often than not at The Red Lion in nearby Revesby. And while they sank their pints, their conversations, like those with his real family, rarely turned to war. They knew all too well that young men like them were being lost every night, in ever-increasing numbers, during the winter of 1943–44. But they kept those thoughts at bay as they laughed and joked around the bar. The prospect of death never weighed heavily on Alan. He always felt there was a gap in the sky where he and his crew would find safety

The rain hammered down and the wind howled around his ears as Alan tore up the A1. He headed straight for the Peacock Hotel in Boston, where, sopping wet, he found time for a couple of pints before catching a bus to the camp, where Pat was waiting for him. She was a young Geordie girl who served the crews’ meals in the mess, and they had been courting for a few weeks; she had joined him and his crew at the pub so often she had almost become their eighth member. They had a quick chat and then it was time to get out of his wet clothes, unpack his bag and get some sleep.




Tomorrow was 30 March. Yet another day at the cutting edge of Bomber Command.




CHAPTER 2 (#u53a9eb68-f6a9-53ab-8181-475e92330010)

Sowing the Wind (#u53a9eb68-f6a9-53ab-8181-475e92330010)







Rusty Waughman

On a Sunday evening in December 1940, in the middle of the Blitzkrieg, Sir Arthur Harris, then the Air Ministry’s Deputy Chief of Air Staff, stood on the roof of his Kingsway HQ. Around him, German aircraft rained incendiaries on the nation’s capital. The City was a sea of flame; only the luminous dome of St Paul’s Cathedral rose from it untouched.

He called for Air Marshal Charles Portal, Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, to share the terrible sight. As the two men watched London burn, oblivious to the threat to their own safety, ‘Bomber’ Harris felt the first stirrings of vengefulness. ‘They are sowing the wind,’ he muttered.




By March 1944, at least according to Harris, the German forces, and their civilian population, were reaping the whirlwind. He was now Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command and a fervent believer – along with Winston Churchill – in the effectiveness of area bombing. Harris believed the most efficient path to victory was to raze Germany’s biggest cities to the ground, obliterate the enemy’s capacity to equip its forces, and destroy the morale of its people.

He believed that the long-range bomber had fundamentally altered the nature of warfare. He had flown over the killing fields of the Somme and Passchendaele during his service in the Royal Flying Corps and had no time for those whose outdated views he remained convinced would lead to a reprise of the mass slaughter of the First World War.

‘If the ancient and ivory-headed warriors are permitted to have their way, another one to six million of the flower of the youth of this under-populated country, and of America, will be unnecessarily massacred in proving for the second time that these Ancient Soldiers and Mariners were wrong. It is but cold comfort to realise in the circumstances that not only is the Bomber the only thing that can win the War for us, but that it is going to win the War for us eventually, in spite of all the procrastinations and futile diversions which the old battle-horses are determining to stage in the interim.’




Harris acknowledged the many dissenters: those who believed it was morally wrong to bomb strategic cities rather than focus on purely industrial and military targets. He was also acutely aware of the toll his strategy was taking on his young crews. But he knew too that since the Luftwaffe had killed thousands of civilians and destroyed vast swathes of London, Coventry, Liverpool and Bristol, the opposition to area bombing had become less strident.

Even though Harris’s tactics were by no means universally popular, and despite the enormous losses they were suffering on a daily basis, the remarkable young men whose duty it was to carry out his orders had great faith in their Commander-in-Chief. To them he was always ‘Butch’ and never ‘Bomber’ Harris. Dick Starkey, a Lancaster pilot, remembers a lecture he gave at a local school after the war: ‘One of the children asked me if I regretted what I did. I said that I was proud of my contribution. I regret the death and the suffering, but I’m not sorry. I think the criticism of Bomber Command is terrible, because we were doing a job that had to be done at the time and there was nobody else to do it. We were fighting the Nazi enemy when no one else could.’




Ever since Dunkirk, aerial bombardment was one of the ways Britain could signal to its allies and its own citizens that she intended to stay in the fight and carry it to the Germans. But by the winter of 1943 Harris was no longer interested in sending signals. He finally had the technology and fire-power at his disposal that he believed would bring hostilities to an end, in the shape of an aircraft designed to transport vast amounts of explosive over long distances while offering its crew hitherto unavailable levels of protection: the Avro Lancaster.

In 1942 Harris had inherited 400 front-line bombers, nowhere near enough to carry out his planned offensive. He increased production immediately and within a few months could call on a new range of four-engine heavy bombers such as the Stirling and Halifax, with a far greater range and ordinance than their twin-engine predecessors. But it was the arrival of the Lancaster that convinced Harris he could now press for a decisive victory.

The Lancaster boasted a 33-foot bomb bay which enabled it to carry the 4,000-pound ‘cookie’ bomb, capable of creating a shockwave that could devastate large areas of buildings. With further modifications, it would hold the 12,000-pound ‘Tallboy’, capable of penetrating 100 feet into the ground before exploding, and, by the latter stages of the war, the 22,000-pound Grand Slam, the most destructive weapon available before the invention of the atomic bomb.

The Stirling, in the process of being phased out of frontline service, could only carry a 14,000-pound bomb load. After overcoming some early concerns about its performance, the destructive power of the Halifax was still hampered by its sectional bomb bay. And despite its huge payload, the Lancaster handled much more easily than its unwieldy predecessors, a telling advantage over heavily defended targets or when evading night fighters, especially for inexperienced personnel.

Lancaster crews felt they could rely upon their aircraft more than any other. The Mark I and Mark II Halifax had a tendency to go into uncontrollable spins at low speeds through a lack of rudder response, and though the Mark III was a fine aircraft, much loved by those who flew it, a new Lancaster was definitely a step up. The Lancaster offered reassurance. ‘It was a beautiful aircraft to fly,’ Dick Starkey says, ‘a pilot’s aeroplane. It handled very lightly, could reach 22,000 feet fully loaded, and even maintain height on two engines … It had no vices, except for a slight swing to port on take-off, and was nearly impossible to stall.’

Rusty Waughman, a pilot with 101 Squadron, called the aircraft the Queen of the Sky. ‘If the Lanc looked somewhat menacing and clumsy on the ground, she was quite a different picture in the air. Compared with modern machines she was rather crude, but efficiently laid out … Aircrew, particularly the pilots, had every faith in the Lanc; very seldom did anything go drastically wrong due to faulty design. In fact, she was often flown in states of damage that were, I’m sure, beyond imaginable limits.’




They were also equipped with the latest navigational aids, essential for deep, penetrative raids over heavily guarded German territory. Before the introduction of the Ground Electronics Engineering (GEE) system, navigators had to depend on ‘dead reckoning’ – following a set course and compensating periodically for the disrupting effect of the wind. But as wind speed and direction were often inaccurately forecast and fluctuated wildly during an operation, they regularly found themselves some distance from their intended target. The GEE system picked up electronic signals pulsed from England and displayed them on a small, black cathode-ray screen on the navigator’s table. Though the curvature of the earth rendered the reading less accurate the further they got from base, interpreting these blips and entering them into specially created GEE charts allowed a navigator to fix their current position with greater accuracy.

At the briefing before his first operational flight with XV Squadron Mildenhall, Chick Chandler was told to ‘throw out Window one-a-minute, then two-a-minute 40 miles from the target’. When he asked what ‘Window’ was, one of his engineers showed him the thin strips of foil designed to ‘bugger up the enemy’s radar’.


The metallic strips were designed to reflect German radar signals, disrupting the picture the operators received on their screens and making the bombers more difficult to track.

Once his Lancaster was high above the channel en route to Mannheim, Chick started to carry out what he took to be his instructions, but didn’t realise that ‘one a minute’ meant one bundle. Instead he threw out one solitary strip – not even enough to register a single blip on the enemy screens, let alone turn them into an incomprehensible snowstorm, under cover of which the bomber stream could approach the target without detection.

And in order to concentrate the maximum amount of firepower in the shortest possible time, the bombers would leave their bases across eastern England and form up over the North Sea. They were each given a height and a time slot designed to minimise the chances of collision. The entire stream, once assembled, could be anything up to 70 miles long.

As January 1944 dawned, despite only having completed a third of their tour, flight engineer Jack Watson’s crew was the second most experienced on XII Squadron. This was a bad omen: on recent raids the crew with the second highest number of ops to their name had gone missing. This sense of foreboding might explain why, as the snow crunched beneath Jack’s feet on his way to a briefing in Wickenby for a raid on Stuttgart, he experienced ‘the most uncanny feeling I have ever experienced in my life. I knew that if we didn’t leave XII Squadron, we wouldn’t survive. We went into the briefing, we did the trip, we got back and the next morning we were called into the flight office. The Flight Commander said, “You have got two options: you can either volunteer for the Pathfinder Force or we will send you,” so we volunteered. From then on I was quite convinced that all the time I was with that crew we were safe.’




To enhance the accuracy of the bomber stream, a special force had been created to find and mark the target. Manned by crews of the calibre of Jack Watson’s, the Pathfinders flew ahead of the main force in Lancasters and Mosquitoes. Their very existence was initially a source of tension within Bomber Command. Harris feared that they would drain his squadrons of their best men, and thus also drain their morale – and he believed his bombers were accurate enough without them. His protests, however, failed to dent the determination of the forthright Australian, Air Vice Marshal Donald Bennett.

Bennett was a former operational pilot who had been shot down while trying to bomb the Tirpitz, the iconic German warship, but had escaped from Norway and returned to England to continue his war. His desire to be in the thick of it never deserted him. Even when he was appointed the Pathfinder chief, he sometimes waved his crews off and then took to the skies himself to orbit the target. When they returned from a raid to be debriefed, he would be waiting for them, often more aware of what had happened than they were.

Bennett’s candour was as renowned as his brilliance as a pilot and navigator. Harris, who knew a thing or two about blunt speaking, once said of the Australian: ‘[He] could not suffer fools gladly, and by his own high standards there had been many fools.’


As his campaign wore on, Harris reassessed his earlier scepticism; the Pathfinders became a much-valued part of his strategy, and Bennett a loyal if perennially outspoken member of his command.

By March 1944 the Pathfinder Force under Bennett’s control consisted of seven Lancaster squadrons, five Mosquito squadrons and the Meteorological Flight. Many aircraft had been fitted with two bespoke items of navigational equipment. Oboe, like GEE, was fed by electronic signals transmitted from England to guide the aircraft to the aiming point; H2S was a radar set that gave the navigator a rough picture of the terrain over which they were flying, giving the crew an even greater level of accuracy in position fixing and target location.

Emboldened by these technological and tactical advances, Harris launched an all-out attack on Hamburg in August 1943. During the course of four raids over 10 nights, Bomber Command dropped nearly 11,000 tons of bombs on Germany’s second largest city and biggest port: 22 pounds of explosives for each of its 1.75 million residents. The last operation, codenamed Gomorrah, caused a firestorm so severe that it was reported to have melted glass in windows, while ‘sugar boiled in bakery cellars and people escaping from underground shelters on to the streets were trapped in quagmires of molten asphalt’.


The death toll was more than 40,000, and approximately a million people fled the city. Albert Speer, the Minister for Armaments, advised Hitler that another six raids of similar scale and destructive power on other major cities would lose them the war.

Harris was unaware of Speer’s assessment, but he knew the raid had struck a severe blow to German morale. He increased the number and the intensity of their attacks, and turned his gaze in November 1943 towards Berlin. The series of raids he launched on the ‘Big City’ marked the start of a relentless onslaught designed to crush German resistance once and for all. He was so confident that a winter of ferocious bombing would bring the Germans to their knees that he set a date for victory: 1 April 1944.

The night of 18 November 1943 saw the first raid of what became known as the Battle of Berlin. It was swiftly followed by two more before the end of the month. Their combined death toll was 4,330, and more than 400,000 people were forced from their homes. ‘Hell seems to have broken loose over us,’ Goebbels wrote in his diary.

The Germans were forced to reorganise their defences and alter their tactics. On the first Berlin raid, 2 per cent of the bomber stream had been lost, only nine Lancasters. A month later, on 16 December, that figure rose to 9.3 per cent, a total of 55 bombers. Some crews began to dread the afternoon briefings – the revelation that the evening’s target was to be the Big City. As the losses mounted, so did the demand for replacement crews. On 23 December, Harry Evans, a navigator with 550 Squadron, was sent there on his first operation. He was initially stood down that evening while his crew was shared across the squadron as stand-ins for members of other crews who had fallen ill or were unable to fly. An hour before take-off that plan was scratched; Harry and his crew were told they were going together. ‘I’d missed briefing so I had to rush to get my pre-flight log and chart prepared. I raced to the aircraft, which was waiting at the end of the runway with its engines running.’


Harry tried to run across the tarmac, but his flying suit and boots, ‘Mae West’ lifejacket and parachute harness, large satchel, sextant and flying helmet (complete with oxygen mask and intercom lead) meant that he could barely walk. He was almost blown over by the slipstream, then ‘the pilot throttled back the two starboard engines and the mid-upper gunner helped to haul me aboard and we roared down the runway before I even had time to get to my desk’.






Harry Evans (front left) and crew

When they were finally airborne, one of their gunners saw a blinding flash of light to one side of them. Two aircraft from their squadron had collided – the two that most of Harry’s crew would have been on if the original plan had remained in place. The margin between life and death in Bomber Command was small, and luck and chance were often the defining factors.

Harry and his crew flew on to Berlin. ‘It was as black as black. The only light came from the odd flash of machine-gun fire as gunners tested their weapons, or the red-hot glow of an exhaust stub from one of the other bombers around us. Up front the phosphorescent dials on the engineer’s panels cast a glow so bright that I feared it might be visible to enemy aircraft. No chance of that with the green blips on my GEE set. There were none. It had been jammed by the enemy.’

Few words were said as they flew over mainland Europe. All eyes apart from Harry’s and his pilot’s were scanning the night sky for fighters. Around 50 miles from Berlin a bank of searchlights swept across the sky, aiming to ‘cone’ a British bomber, so that it was caught in the beams of all the searchlights in a battery below. For the men on board it was as if they had moved from a dark room into blinding sunshine. The brightness over the target was intensified by the Pathfinders’ marker flares and the fires rampaging where the leading aircraft had already dropped their bombs. Harry thought: ‘This is like going down Regent Street at night.’

Their Lancaster started to tilt and vibrate, throwing the crew around ‘as though we were travelling over a cobbled road at high speed’. This was the effect of flak – the relentless barrage of fire from 50,000 anti-aircraft guns which protected the skies around the major German cities. Often guided by radar, these ground defences blasted thousands of explosive shells skywards at the bombers as they flew towards their target. A direct hit could destroy an aircraft, and shells that exploded nearby caused them to veer and lurch as the murderous shrapnel smashed against – and often through – the fuselage. Harry thought of the 4,000 pounds of high explosive in the bomb bay just inches beneath him, and wondered what would happen if the flak scored a direct hit there. A few minutes later he had his answer: a nearby bomber erupted in a shower of flame. He watched, awe-struck, as the aircraft spun to the ground leaving a corkscrew-shaped trail of smoke behind it. Looking down at the city, Harry could see that the streets were burning too.

Once over the target, their bomb aimer gave a series of instructions to the pilot to ensure their bombs were dropped as accurately as possible. For the rest of the crew ‘the next few minutes were agony’ as they flew as straight and level as possible, desperate to give him the best chance, but feeling they were easy prey for the guns down below. The seconds felt like minutes, until the bomb aimer announced their load was gone and the aircraft lifted, freed of its burden. The pilot then brought the nose of the aircraft down and they turned and fled back into the welcoming darkness.

The New Year came and went with no pause in the offensive; there were six operations on Berlin in January alone. The only respite came when the moon was full; training exercises took the place of providing the enemy night fighters with little-needed target practice.

By February 1944 the RAF was averaging two heavy – 550 aircraft – raids per week. Their losses were beginning to increase, leading to renewed criticism of Harris’s tactics. On 19 February Bomber Command experienced its worst night thus far during a Leipzig raid.

Rusty Waughman, with 101 Squadron, took off at 11.44 p.m. The first indication that things were not going as planned was when his navigator told him they were 20 minutes ahead of schedule. The wind was much stronger than forecast, blowing them towards the target before the allocated bombing time. There would be no Pathfinder markers, nothing to aim at, so they decided to ‘dog-leg’, flying in a zigzag fashion, to bleed time.

When they arrived, the sky was a riot of searchlight beams and flares dropped by enemy night fighters. Rusty watched as a Lancaster in the distance blew up in mid-air: another direct hit. Corralled by the winds, hundreds of their comrades had arrived prematurely over the target and started to orbit, waiting for the Pathfinders to arrive and illuminate the target. ‘Like fish caught in an ever-shrinking net, the bombers were being picked off one by one.’ There was a sound like a clap of thunder as they started their bombing run. Two circling bombers had collided and were now just shards of burning metal falling from the sky.

Rusty was able to drop his bombs, leave the danger area and head back to England without damage, but 79 others were lost that night. The brunt of the blame was borne by the Met Office, but their job – to predict the weather on the way to and over a target hundreds of miles away, based on very little data – was unenviable.

Leipzig was a major setback and yet, even as criticism of the campaign, both in the press and within the Air Ministry, started to mount, Harris remained defiant. His critics claimed there was no sign of deterioration in the mood or morale of the German public. They remained ‘apathetic’ about the bombing of their towns and cities. On 25 February, in a combative internal memo, Harris challenged his critics in typically robust fashion, giving those around him no doubt that his faith in the heavy bombing of German cities securing an Allied victory was as robust as ever. If anything, he was even more determined to intensify the attacks. Under the heading ‘Reactions of German Morale to the Bomber Offensive as described in official documents and the Press’, he wrote:

1. I have the honour to refer to numerous accounts now current both in official documents and in the public Press on the reactions of German morale in heavily attacked areas to the Combined Bomber Offensive and to state my conviction that these reports seriously misrepresent the state of mind of the German populace at the present time.

2. I understand that incontestable evidence derived from Most Secret sources exists to show that the continuance and probable intensification of the Offensive is regarded in the highest Nazi circles as something which, in the absence of unpredictable errors by the Allies, will certainly ensure a German defeat comparatively quickly by producing a collapse of morale as well as production on the Home Front.

3. To my mind this belief, which is certainly confirmed by the efforts of the German propaganda machine to divert our bombing by any means from industrial targets in Germany and to convince the Germans that these efforts will shortly be successful, is inconsistent with the widely and officially disseminated view that the prevalent attitude to bombing in Germany is ‘apathy’…

4…This view is manifestly false…There have been a vast number of indications that the attitude of the German population to the bombing, so far from being apathetic, is one of the utmost despair, of terror and of panic not always held in control by the authorities.

5. It is a depressing fact that this slogan as to the “apathetic” reaction of the German population should receive as it does the widest publicity in official documents and statements, whereas any impartial interpretation of the mass of information coming out of Germany, if it was properly weighed up, would inevitably show a condition of affairs such as I have outlined above and certainly no condition of ‘apathy’.




Despite his convictions, the brutal losses of that winter caused a change in attitude within the Air Ministry. The faith they had shown in Harris and his Combined Bomber Offensive was starting to waver. Harris was handed a new list of targets, centres of industry rather than of symbolic significance – Schweinfurt, Leipzig, Brunswick, Regensburg, Gotha and Augsburg – that should assume priority over any others. However, his obstinacy remained: there would be no immediate raids on any of the targets suggested to him. Harris still believed that his main offensive would bring the victory he had promised, even if the date by which he had predicted ‘a state of devastation in which surrender was inevitable’ was rapidly approaching.

The raids continued on his favoured targets – the largest so far on Stuttgart, with 116 sorties. On their return, Thomas Maxwell, an 18-year-old rear gunner on his sixth mission with 622 Squadron, was forced to bale out after his Lancaster was hit by enemy fire. He feared the flames would start licking at his turret, the most cramped and claustrophobic part of the plane, with only a Perspex shield between him and the 20,000-foot abyss below him. Like all rear gunners, he had to crawl into his ‘cold hole’, where there was so little room to turn that another crew member had to shut the doors behind him.

‘I didn’t have time to exit by the main door. I had to get my wits together quickly. First I needed a parachute. It was in the fuselage, an arm’s length away. So I opened the turret doors and hoped they didn’t jam. Then I dragged the ’chute carefully into the turret in case it deployed. Then I rotated the turret 90 degrees, otherwise I’d have baled out into the fuselage. But there was no room to put the ’chute on! With the turret now at right angles to the fuselage, the slipstream gale was grabbing, tearing and tugging at the flapping parachute backpack, the spewing fuel whipping past me. There was nothing now but Hobson’s Choice: go back into the pitch-black fuselage or stick your rear end into this growling 120-knot wind.’




Thomas managed to clip one parachute hook on, but as he was contorting his body to fasten the other he fell backwards into the night, his parachute under his left arm. ‘I pulled the rip cord: Long John Silver managed with one hook, and one was better than none. Life is simplified when there are no options. There was a crunch as the drag-chute came out and the parachute woofed into its canopy above.’

Somehow, falling through the sky from 8,000 feet, Thomas managed to attach the other hook and within a few seconds was floating securely down to the ground. ‘There was just a bit of moonlight now, and instead of landing on the spire of some French parish church, or drowning in somebody’s swimming pool, I was dumped unceremoniously into a ploughed field and a relatively soft landing. The field was full of piles of manure. There is a saying: “It matters not whether you’re in the s**t or out of it, it’s only the depth that varies.” At this point, I was quite happy to be in it.’

Following Stuttgart there were two huge raids on Frankfurt, and a final onslaught on Berlin on 24 March, during which the weather forecast proved inaccurate once again. Chick Chandler had a ring-side seat once more. ‘By some dreadful mistake we arrived early over Berlin. The rear gunner said we had no option but to circle. Circle over Berlin! What a disaster! We were only at 13,000 feet, so we had a bird’s eye view of the whole thing. We saw at least four Pathfinder bombers blow up as they were going round. Seeing all those aircraft going down made me realise what we were doing. Although I was the baby of the crew, I knew just what the dangers were, and how easy it was to be shot down and killed.’

Strong winds had scattered the stream across a wide area and pushed many of them towards heavy flak defences they would otherwise have missed. Seventy-three aircraft were lost, an estimated 50 from flak. It was another bad night for Bomber Command.

By 30 March the Battle of Berlin was about to end, but Harris was determined to make one last attempt to score his decisive, symbolic victory. ‘Yet, the March that had entered like a lamb was destined to go out like the proverbial lion. The ill-wind of death had still to be sated.’







CHAPTER 3 (#u53a9eb68-f6a9-53ab-8181-475e92330010)

The Fine Line (#u53a9eb68-f6a9-53ab-8181-475e92330010)







Ron Auckland

The average member of a Bomber Command crew had a 30 per cent chance of being killed before they completed their first 30-op tour. Of a total of 125,000 aircrew, 55,573 were killed: an overall death rate of 44.4 per cent; another 8,400 were wounded and some 10,000 taken prisoner. In no other branch of the armed forces were the chances of dying so high, or the combatants called into action night after gruelling night. Yet every one of the 125,000 recruits who took to the skies to wage war by night was a volunteer.

There were those whose fathers had fought in the First World War and who wanted to avoid the gruesome grind of trench warfare. There were others who were seduced by the glamorous modern image portrayed by the RAF, given added lustre by the glorious victory of ‘The Few’ in the Battle of Britain. For many, such as Ron Auckland from Portsmouth, who had experienced the damage wreaked by the Luftwaffe earlier in the war, there was an element of revenge.

Ron had witnessed the first German raid on the docks of his home town, where he worked as a civil servant. On duty as a fire officer, he had carried out the dead and rescued the injured after an enemy bomb fell down the air vent of a crowded air-raid shelter. During another, he and his family were bombed out of their home. That was enough; he signed up. ‘I’d seen a lot and knew just what the Germans could do. I was in a reserved occupation but I still wanted to join up. I wanted to be part of the war effort.’




George Prince grew up in New Malden, Surrey, the son of a garage owner. He left school at 14 to work for his father as a mechanic, a job in which he learned many skills that would prove useful when he became a flight engineer. He coveted a green, four-seat 1934 MG PA in his father’s showroom and was mortified when a German bomb shattered the windows and riddled the car body with shrapnel. George was only 15, but his father told him that if he repaired the MG he could have it.

‘I mended the bodywork lovingly, and filled the holes in the radiator with putty. I couldn’t drive it, but it became my pride and joy.’


George, like his near neighbour Cyril Barton, dreamed of being a pilot, but when he signed up his superiors decided that his experience in his father’s garage was too valuable to sacrifice, so he became a flight engineer. The MG would come into use later, when he was operational and old enough to drive it. ‘The whole crew would get in: two in the front, and the rest would squeeze in the back and hang out over the side.’

As a 16-year-old Londoner, Harry Evans had watched in awe as the night sky above his home city glowed red during the Blitz. That image and the sound of the Heinkel 111s were imprinted on his soul. One day a German bomb landed on his street. ‘It demolished the house just to our right. The whole house shook like there had been an earthquake; all the windows were blown out and the ceilings came down. Some of the neighbours were killed. Once you’ve experienced something like that you never forget it. Shortly after my 18th birthday I volunteered for the RAF. My father had been in the Navy on submarines in the First World War and it didn’t sound very appealing to me. I wanted to be one of the Brylcreem Boys!’

Bomber Command recruits also came from far-flung corners of the Empire. Ron Butcher grew up in Middle Sackville, a village near New Brunswick in Canada. He joined the RAF because all of his friends were doing it, even though there was no pressure for them to volunteer; just a sense of duty towards their ancestral home and ally. Britain needed their help against the Nazi terror, and to stand idly by seemed like an act of cowardice.

Andy Wejcman did not come from any corner of the Empire. He was born in Berlin in January 1923. When Hitler and the Nazis gained power in 1933 and revealed their virulent brand of anti-Semitism, his father, a politically active lawyer and intellectual Polish Jew, moved the family to Poland. In 1939, just before the German invasion, Andy was sent to England to learn the language. Despite having an American mother, the only English phrase he knew was ‘Stick ’em up!’ – from watching a cowboy film. Ironically, she insisted that he travel by train and boat because she believed flying to be too dangerous. On the day he left, his entire family came to wave him off at the station. It was the last time he saw his father.

Andy learned English at a school in Hampshire and proved to be such a good student that he was offered a place at Oxford University. He turned it down, even though he knew his mother would be appalled. ‘I decided I would join the Air Force, and if you’re going to join the Air Force you might as well fly. I knew what the war meant; I heard the bombs and I’d seen the results of bombing and the destroyed buildings. I certainly wanted to help overthrow Hitler. I felt it was my moral and physical duty to do so.’




Being a member of Bomber Command had benefits the Army and Navy couldn’t offer. Even though most nights were spent dodging fighters and flak, the crews slept in a bed on British soil. It was a shorter journey home on leave. They could also enjoy their familiar comforts: pubs, dances, the cinema, and, for those who were single, local girls whose eye might be caught by a young man in uniform.

Once they signed up, the mundaneness of day-to-day training dispelled any notions that RAF life might be any more glamorous. Harry Evans joined in the summer of 1941, at the Yorkshire Grey pub in Eltham, where the ballroom had been converted into a recruiting centre. It was the end of the year before he was summoned to the Air Crew Selection Centre on the Euston Road, where he was tested, interviewed and given a thorough medical. Eventually he was accepted and kitted out as an Aircraftman 2nd Class, the lowest rank in the entire Air Force. When he was sent to digs near Regent’s Park his spirits lifted; the airmen were billeted in luxury flats overlooking the park, where businessmen, bankers and diplomats once lived before the Blitz. Once inside, it became clear that this was just an accident of geography; it was the middle of winter, there was no heating, the interior doors had been removed and, despite the expensive tiles and fittings, nothing worked. The flats had become filthy and neglected, and the meals served to the airmen were in keeping with their surroundings.

A few days later, Harry was asked to report to another prestigious address. The Pavilion at Lord’s Cricket Ground had been turned into a reception centre where new recruits were issued with uniform and equipment. There was one other test, of which few were aware. In the hallowed Long Room, with the great ghosts of the summer game looking on, each man was ordered to drop his trousers to be inspected for venereal disease by a medical officer. This was not the sort of thing Harry had in mind when he signed up to be one of the Brylcreem Boys.

The wait between signing on, being processed and starting training was interminable. Sam Harris,


a young Scotsman, had signed on in January 1941 at the age of 17, but his training in London did not start until November. He wanted to be a pilot, but his scores in the maths test were so good that he was earmarked as a navigator. Later that month he was sent to Babbacombe in Devon with 47 other trainees.

The life of a new recruit was no more exciting in the West Country than it had been in London. He shared a room with three others in a small boarding house with only enough hot water for a bath once a week. Every morning they paraded outside in their PT kit, ‘gargled with some bluish purple mixture’, and then went for a 30-minute run, followed by a splash of cold water, a change into uniform, and another parade before breakfast.

Their lectures were held in the windowless basement of what used to be a garage. ‘There we wrestled with the mysteries of air navigation, including the triangle of velocities and the fact that straight lines on a Mercator navigation chart are not straight lines on the earth. In another building we learned to tap out Morse code and to send and receive messages by Aldis lamp. There were drill periods, a sports afternoon – which meant a long march to playing fields where we played football – and a long march back. We certainly became fit.’




The recruits were free to spend Saturday nights as they pleased, as long as they were back at their digs by 10 p.m. Sam and his friends used to visit a pub in St Mary’s, drink a few half-pints, go to the town hall dance and sprint back to their digs to beat the curfew. ‘There were other perks – a bath on Sunday morning, Church Parade, and an afternoon walk to Cockington, followed by a free tea at a church in Torquay. Well, not quite free; we had to listen to a bit of a religious service first. Such was the glamorous life of the navigator under training …’

Harry Evans was fortunate enough to be stationed at Ponca City, Oklahoma – a world away from what he had left behind. ‘We were all volunteers and keen to learn to fly and there were no disciplinary problems – it was the life of Riley. Instead of a mess there was a cafeteria where we all queued to be served and rank was of no importance. The food was exceedingly good, especially compared to wartime Britain, and we tried such strange and exotic delights as peanut butter, sweetcorn and unusual mixtures such as bacon, griddle cakes and maple syrup.’ But an ill-advised low-flying stunt over the local swimming pool to impress his fellow trainees and some local girls landed him in trouble. He and two other airmen were thrown off the course and sent to Canada to remuster. Harry chose to be a navigator.

After 28 weeks abroad – and a year since they had volunteered – the recruits were sent back to the Advanced Flying Unit in the UK, where they were taught to fly at night, and then to Operational Training Units, where they finally became part of Bomber Command.

Few of these young men – the average age in Bomber Command was 22 – would get near the aircraft they would eventually fly in combat until they graduated to a Heavy Conversion Unit. Even when the production lines were running at full capacity, the Lancasters were all needed for the main offensive. Raw, inexperienced crews were forced to learn on the older Stirling, Halifax and Wellington bombers, and even the lucky ones were only introduced to the Lancaster in the final moments before they became operational.

Harry Evans recalls acting as a pall-bearer at the funerals of fellow trainees three Mondays running. ‘The crash rate was high, but this was bound to happen when you were training on old aircraft under operational conditions. I remember one of the most spectacular: a Canadian pilot flying a Wellington hit the runway hard, the aircraft bounced, he lost control and went straight into the side of the control tower, about 15 feet above the ground. It was still stuck there the next day. Four of the crew and three flying control personnel were killed, including two WAAFs. Only the rear gunner survived.’

The members of a crew risked their lives together, slept together, ate together and socialised together. The ones that gelled quickly were the lucky ones, and forged friendships that would last a lifetime. Those who failed to get along, or whose camaraderie faltered under the strain, often met with fatal consequences. Arguments or disagreements put the aircraft at risk. Total discipline was required on board; it was a fundamental rule of survival, and yet the process of ‘crewing up’ was surprisingly haphazard.

In July 1943 Sam Harris was nursing a pint with Sandy Clarkson, an Edinburgh-born fellow navigator, at The Golden Fleece in Loughborough. It was like the first day of school, but instead of making friends they and their fellow recruits were forming crews. As the afternoon wore on the number of unattached airmen grew fewer; it was time for Sandy and Sam to make a decision.

‘What do you think?’ Sandy asked.

Sam shrugged. ‘Only two pilots left. It’s a toss-up.’

Whilst Sandy’s clannish instincts led him to opt for the Glaswegian of the pair, Sam and a bomb aimer who seemed to be at a loose end approached the remaining pilot, Ken Murray. Ken said that he had a wireless operator ‘around here somewhere’, and had spotted a couple of spare gunners lurking in a corner. A few minutes later the six of them stood at the bar, mugs of beer in their hands, toasting their new partnership.

Both crews were sent to Castle Donington. On 28 July, an eye-popping summer’s day, Sam climbed aboard a Wellington, S-Sugar, a real bomber, for the first time. They were only practising circuits and landings, but Ken proved so capable that when they landed their instructor told him he could fly solo.

Sam sat behind his curtain, working on his charts, listening to Ken going through the checks and drills before they took off once more. Then he heard Ken’s voice on the radio. ‘This is S for Sugar. Aircraft in front has just gone in. Taking off …’ Sam wondered what the hell he meant. He got up from his navigator’s desk as they rumbled into the air and looked over the flight engineer’s shoulder. The Wellington ahead of them had buried its nose in a tree. It looked like a nasty one.

As he watched, there was a vast explosion. The stricken bomber was engulfed in flame and choking black smoke billowed into the sky around them. Sam knew immediately that Sandy – his best friend for the past two years – and everyone else on board were dead. No one spoke. Air Traffic Control gave the order for Ken to land, and he circled the airfield, passing on the details of what he could see to the ground. The shattered bomber was still burning fiercely. Sam turned away.

Rusty Waughman’s crew came together in a similarly haphazard fashion.

Idris ‘Taffy’ Arndell, a wireless operator, and his friend, Colin ‘Ginger’ Farrant, had fixed to meet two local girls in Loughborough the night they were supposed to find a crew. Knowing they would be expected to have a drink or two with their new mates, they decided to hide in the pub toilets until the selection process was over; they didn’t want to miss their double date. Making for the exit as soon as they thought they were in the clear, they bumped into two pilots, one of whom was Rusty Waughman.

‘Are you two crewed up?’ Rusty’s companion asked.

‘Yes,’ they lied.

‘We don’t believe you, and we’re both short of a wireless operator. We’ll toss for it.’

Rusty lost, and the other pilot chose Ginger; he appeared the more intelligent and dependable of the two, or as intelligent and dependable as you can appear when you’ve been caught hiding in a pub toilet. They were posted shortly after to XII Squadron at Wickenby and went missing on their first operation – a long haul to Stettin on the night of 5 January. It later emerged that Ginger had lied about his age; he was only 17 when he joined up.

Of the 55,573 men of Bomber Command who died during the Second World War, 5,723 were killed in training, and a further 3,113 were seriously injured. Like much bad news, these losses were downplayed at the time, in line with Charles Portal’s decree that ‘Statistical information regarding the chances of survival of aircrew should be confined to the smallest number of people; this information could be distorted and dangerous to morale.’




The casualties also included men who had completed the full 30 mission tours and were then posted for six months as OTU instructors. It was often as hazardous to sit beside a nervous young pilot in a bomber he had never flown before as it was to be at the controls of a Lancaster in the night skies above Berlin.

Roger Coverley was a pilot with 76 Squadron at Holme-on-Spalding-Moor in March 1944, after completing 30 ops with 78 Squadron. He had been a pilot instructor on Halifaxes in the interim. ‘I didn’t enjoy it. It was boring and much too dangerous because you’re teaching young kids how to fly. I was sitting in the right-hand seat, unable to get at the controls if anything went wrong. I had some very close shaves. I couldn’t wait to get back on operations.’







CHAPTER 4 (#u53a9eb68-f6a9-53ab-8181-475e92330010)

In the Face of Death (#u53a9eb68-f6a9-53ab-8181-475e92330010)







Members of Rusty Waughman’s 101 Squadron kit up prior to take off

Sam Harris and his crew travelled by train to Elsham Wolds, home of 576 Squadron, in early January 1944. They pulled up at a small rural station and Sam leaned out of the window to ask the lone porter on the platform if it was Elsham. He nodded and they lugged their bulging kitbags off the train.

As they looked around, wondering what to do next, the porter approached them. ‘Are you boys after the airfield?’

Sam raised his eyebrows and surveyed the featureless Lincolnshire countryside. They were in RAF uniform, they were laden with kit. Did the man think they were here to enjoy the scenery? There wasn’t any scenery.

‘Yes,’ one of the crew replied wearily.

‘In that case, you need the next station. They’ll pick you up from there.’

The train had sounded its whistle and was starting to pull away, but they managed to grab their stuff and climb back on board before it was too late. They flopped back into the seats they had left a few moments earlier. No one said a word.

Finally Ken spoke. ‘Six bloody months to get here and we get off at the wrong bloody station.’

Though operational crews had little say in their immediate future, Rusty Waughman asked to be posted to 101 Squadron; Paul Zanchi, who had become a friend during training, was based there. He was told by a Flight Commander that 101 was a ‘special’ squadron, where only the best pilots were sent.

By the time Rusty arrived at Ludford Magna he discovered that Paul had become yet another casualty of the Battle of Berlin. On the night of 26 November, one of his first ops, he had been sent to bomb the Big City and never came back. ‘It was a real shock, an eye-opener, an awakening; a realisation of what it all meant. I felt a sense of real sadness and I knew then that things weren’t going to be as easy as they seemed to be in training.’

In November 1943 Reg Payne, a young wireless operator, had crewed up with two Pilot Officers, Michael Beetham (later Sir Michael Beetham, Marshal of the RAF and the Chief of Air Staff in ultimate command of the legendary Vulcan 607 bombing of Port Stanley runway during the Falklands War) and Frank Swinyard, and been posted to 50 Squadron at Skellingthorpe. Shortly after he arrived, he was told that his mother had sent a telegram asking him to come home. His brother had been shot down. His new Wing Commander initially refused him permission to do so. He feared that Reg’s parents, after losing one RAF son, would make him promise not to fly; they did not want a new crew of such promise to be broken up.

His boss relented when Reg promised that he would return regardless of his parents’ pleas. ‘As it was, my mum and dad didn’t try to dissuade me. They just said, “Reg, whatever you do, just be careful.”’ A few months later they discovered that his brother was alive and being held in a prisoner-of-war camp; he was one of the lucky ones. ‘We were always losing crews. There was a Canadian crew in our hut and they all got the chop. They used to have loads of cookies, cakes and biscuits sent to them from Canada. They would leave boxes open and say to us, “Just help yourselves to anything you want.” One morning they didn’t come back and we were left with all the cookies. A crew came and took all their personal stuff away. They didn’t exist any more.’




The introduction to squadron life was less sobering for others, but still disconcerting. On the advice of the Squadron Adjutant, Andy Wejcman had changed his name to Wiseman. His identity disc said he was Church of England. When Andy asked why, he was told that most recruits were C of E; changing the religious denomination to Catholic or Jewish meant stopping the machine that stamped the letters, a process the Women Auxiliary Air Force members found unduly laborious.

‘I can get it changed if you want,’ Andy was told.

‘What’s the difference?’ he replied.

‘You’ll be buried in accordance with Christian rites when your charred remains are found on the continent of Europe.’

Andy didn’t want to be labelled as difficult, and decided it didn’t matter; he would be dead. The denomination remained.

He was posted to 466 Squadron Royal Australian Air Force at RAF Leconfield in Yorkshire – ‘A Polish Jew, flying with the Australian Air Force!’ – as a bomb aimer. ‘I really enjoyed squadron. The camaraderie was lovely and the Australians treated me as an equal. If we argued, my pilot used to say, “Don’t give me any airs just because you went to unifuckingversity!’ But he didn’t mean it seriously.’

When Sam Harris and his crew finally made it to Elsham Wolds on that icy January Sunday they were pointed in the direction of a Nissen hut in the corner of a field. Their living quarters was a room with 14 beds, six of which were surrounded by piles of clothes and books which two NCOs were putting in freshly labelled kitbags.

‘What’s going on?’ Ken asked.

The men stopped what they were doing. ‘We’re the Committee of Adjustment,’ one of them answered. ‘We’re collecting the property of the crew that were here. They’re listed as missing; we look after their belongings in the meantime. If you give us some time we’ll get the hut cleared and you can move in. I hope you have better luck than they did.’

The crew stood silent for a few seconds, watching as the two men cleared away the lives of their predecessors. Ken suggested they head to the mess for a stiffener.

The first crew member to experience the fire and fury of an operational raid was normally the pilot. As part of his training on base he was required to tag along with an experienced crew on a watching brief, a routine known as flying ‘second dickie’. Some did not survive those flights; many a fledgeling crew lost their skipper before they had even started a tour.






Ray Francis (front row, far left), end of tour

Ray Francis, a flight engineer with 622 Squadron at Mildenhall in Suffolk, barely slept a wink the night their pilot, an Aussie named Ray Trenouth, went on his first op as second dickie. His crew just lay on their bunks praying for his return. Eight hours later, to their great relief, he walked back into the married quarter which was their home on base. He said nothing, kicked off his boots, sat on his bed, pushed his cap to the back of his head, lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. His silence was more than the others could bear.

‘What was it like, Ray?’

He blew out a cloud of smoke and chuckled. ‘Just wait until you blighters go!’

Ray Francis had joined up after seeing his home city of Birmingham suffer under the weight of the Luftwaffe bombing. He wasn’t going to be easily deterred. ‘In the early days on the squadron we knew that people were being shot down and killed. But we never talked about it. We never related casualties to deaths. If 20 aircraft went up and two got shot down, you never said to yourself at that time, “That’s 10 per cent gone, so we’ve got to do 30 ops, therefore we’re going to get the chop three times.” We were just keen to get in and take part. You never expected to finish a tour, but then again you always thought it’ll happen to the other fellow and not me. Now that’s a bit daft, isn’t it?’




Norman ‘Babe’ Westby was the youngest member of Rusty Waughman’s crew. As a bomb aimer his role was to guide the pilot over the target and release the bombs at the right time. He spent most of the op next to or behind the pilot, but moved down into the nose during the bombing run, the point at which the aircraft was running the gauntlet of the enemy’s most focused flak defences. He would lie down and look through the bombsight as shells exploded and shrapnel flew around him, to usher the bomber calmly into position.

It was not a job for the faint-hearted. In Norman’s opinion, it guaranteed him the best view of the unfolding drama: the searchlights scouring the sky and the fires burning on the ground; the kaleidoscopic ‘target indicators’ released by the Pathfinders to mark his aiming point – or, when visibility was poor, the skymarkers, coloured flares attached to parachutes. And to round off the show, as he thought of it, were the ‘fireworks’. ‘Isn’t it pretty?!’ he would cry, surveying the flak-blasted stage. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?!’

‘For Christ’s sake, Norman, shut up!’ the rest of the crew would chorus. They just wanted to hear that the bombs were gone and they could head for safety.

When another crew went missing, ‘It wasn’t worth thinking about,’ Rusty Waughman says. ‘We would raise a toast to them: “Here’s to so-and-so, he’s dead, and here’s to the next one to die.” Or: “Death put his bony hand on your shoulder and said – Live, chum, I’m coming.” We were young and naive. We didn’t have the mental capacity to truly understand the reality. The chaps who suffered most were the highly educated ones, who understood what was happening and knew they were likely to die.

‘If the other crews in your hut didn’t return, then the Committee of Adjustment arrived to remove all their personal belongings. One minute they were, the next minute they weren’t, and then a new crew arrived to replace them. People just disappeared. You didn’t see dead bodies, even though thousands of my colleagues died. People simply weren’t there any more.’

Alan Payne remained an irrepressible optimist. He always thought there was ‘a gap in the flak’ where he and his crew would find safety under the heaviest fire. Roger Coverley was a fatalist. ‘I knew I was going to get the chop because all my mates around me were getting it. So many aircraft were being lost that it felt inevitable. But it did not affect me. I thought, whatever happens, happens. No one shed any tears about it. We laughed at it really. We thought, let’s get on with it and then have a drink.’

Drink was not discouraged. Even Bomber Harris believed his men needed a release. ‘I have always considered that the strain imposed by sustained bomber operations requires that aircrew personal should enjoy the maximum amount of freedom from restraint, and should be relieved, as far as can be done without loss of efficiency, of routine station duties.’ He added: ‘The last thing I would wish to do would be to impose on aircrew personnel an irksome regime of inspections, parades and spit and polish.’




The focal points of the men’s life became the pub and the mess. Any entertainment was welcomed which might take their minds off what lay ahead, whether it was the cinema or just a good sing-song in the mess.

Sam Harris and his crew were regular visitors to the Oswald pub in Scunthorpe on their free evenings. It had a gramophone; the barmaid would put on Bing Crosby singing ‘Cow Cow Boogie’, and on Saturdays there was a large back room where ‘some of the aircrew would go on stage and do their party piece, usually when the night was well advanced and a quantity of beer had been consumed. A favourite was a Flight Sergeant from 576 Squadron who was in charge of “discipline”; he sang a rude song about a woodpecker. It was always greeted with applause and the crowd joined in the chorus.’

Not everyone could use these diversions to escape the feeling of impending doom. Chick Chandler’s pre-war job – manufacturing parts for anti-aircraft guns – was a protected occupation, but everyone he knew had joined up and he didn’t want to be left out. ‘I can’t say I really enjoyed life in Bomber Command. It was always in the back of your mind that tomorrow might be the day that you might die. Even when you were going out, there was always the thought that it might be the last time: that this would be your last pint, or this might be your last dance. I wanted to join up and be part of the war effort, but the reality wasn’t quite as I imagined. Nobody told me they shot back!’

The other release was female company. The objects of their desire were the girls in the local town who might have an eye for a young man in uniform. There were also the WAAFS, members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force who worked alongside the men on base, doing clerical jobs in operations and control rooms and working in technical, electrical and mechanical roles to free the men for flying duties.

Norman ‘Babe’ Westby had been a virgin when he joined Rusty Waughman’s crew. ‘Taffy, our mischievous wireless operator, took it upon himself to introduce him to the ways of the flesh. He knew of a full-bosomed woman in Grimsby called “Luscious Lil” with a penchant for revealing outfits, who’d be the ideal target for Norman’s first operational sortie with the opposite sex.’ He organised a pub crawl. ‘By the end, Norman was rubbing his hands with excitement. The sight of her black stockings with the thin black lines at the back made it almost impossible to bear. Needless to say, the evening concluded satisfactorily as far as most parties were concerned, and Taffy took great pride in his achievement of turning a boy into a man.’

The married men worried about those they had left behind, and might leave behind permanently. When they were bombed out of their home in Portsmouth, Ron Auckland’s family moved to Porchester. Another family who had also suffered the same fate lived two doors away, and Ron became friendly with Sheila, a friend of their daughter. ‘As soon as I saw her, I knew she was the girl for me.’

She was equally smitten. ‘I felt safe with him.’

They became engaged in 1942, shortly before Ron was posted to America for his pilot training. A year later they married. Ron’s best man was Alan Barnes, another pilot whom he had met during the recruiting process at Lord’s Cricket Ground. Their group had been assembled in alphabetical order and the two men ended up next to each other in line – it was the chance start of a great friendship. They were soon stationed together as trainee pilots and became inseparable. Posted to different squadrons, they vowed to try and meet up every time they were on leave.

In January 1944 Ron called Alan’s base to put a date in the diary for a pint. He was told Alan had gone missing on a raid over Berlin. ‘I knew he was dead. It really brought home what we were all facing.’

Alan’s body was never found.

Sheila had only met him at their wedding, but his last words to her were: ‘If anything happens to Ron, I’ll always look after you.’






Ron and Sheila Auckland’s wedding

‘It was a great shock,’ Ron recalled. ‘Of course people you knew were dying all of the time. In Portsmouth I went to a lot of the Navy dances and we lost many of our friends when one of the ships got torpedoed. We knew the war. We understood it.’

She and Ron never discussed the dangers. ‘Sheila obviously knew what I was doing in Bomber Command but I didn’t speak to her about the operations or the losses. I never wanted to worry her. She just expected me to turn up when we’d agreed.’

Sheila also did her best not to distress him. ‘I cried every time he left but I never let him see me cry. When I saw him off at the railway station, he kept opening the door to say goodbye one last time. The porter shouted out, “Close that door and put that light out!” But Ron kept on opening it. In the end I said to him, “You’ve got to go, you’ve got to go.” It was so hard. My sister’s husband was in the Navy, so we both used to cry together.’

They ended up living together. ‘I could talk to my sister about it. We would listen to the radio and some bad news would come on and we’d end up crying. She’d say to me, “Let’s sleep together tonight,” for comfort. But the men never knew about any of this.’

On one occasion Ron came back to the house unexpectedly to find Sheila in tears. ‘I was upset because he saw me crying. I tried to be the brave girl because I didn’t want him to worry. That was the wartime attitude. But it affects people on such a personal level – the fear that I had was being replicated by hundreds of thousands people across the country night after night, day after day. But you never showed it. No, we went dancing to take our mind off it.’

Each day Ron was away, Sheila lived in fear of the ‘telegram boy’ and what he might bring. ‘One day he arrived with an envelope and I didn’t want to take it. I thought it was telling me Ron was missing or dead. My aunt opened it. It was from Ron. He was telling me he’d won the Distinguished Flying Cross. The silly man sent me a telegram!’

The unceasing tension took its toll. Rusty Waughman was forced to replace his first flight engineer. ‘He was fine in training, but as soon as we were on operations he would just sit on the floor and quiver. He was incapable of carrying out his duties. I stuck with him for a couple of ops, but during one our starboard engine was on fire and the poor guy was unable to do anything about it. I had to take all the emergency actions myself. It reached the point where it was affecting our safety, so I reported him to the CO, and he left the station that afternoon so as not to affect the morale of others. I don’t know if he was made LMF or not, but he should never have been because, although he knew of his condition, he never refused to fly on ops.’

LMF – shorthand for ‘Lack of Moral Fibre’ – was the label given to those deemed to have lost the will to fight, branded as cowards and removed from operations in disgrace. The threat of it was the sword of Damocles that hung over every airman’s head. During the operation in which Chick Chandler had become confused about how much Window to throw out of the plane, their Stirling bomber developed a technical fault. The crew began to argue over whether they should turn back or continue to the target. ‘We were facing mortal danger, but we were more worried about what would happen if we returned. I knew we didn’t have a chance of surviving, but someone said: “They’ll say we’re LMF.” It was an ever-present fear in Bomber Command. They were more scared of being called a coward than they were of flying. People were willing to risk their lives to avoid being branded LMF.’

Any early return from an op came under the kind of scrutiny that induced many to press on regardless. One can only speculate upon the number of aircraft which might have perished because the crew decided that dealing with any mechanical problems was a less daunting prospect than the disgrace of being labelled cowards. Bomb aimer Campbell Muirhead recorded an account in his diary of the treatment of a sergeant who had refused to fly: ‘There he was standing out in front, all on his own, in full view of every person in the unit, to be stripped of his wings and then his sergeant’s tapes. They had all been unstitched beforehand so they came away easily when they were ripped from his uniform. He was immediately posted elsewhere.’




Alan Payne was sent to find and bring back his mid-upper gunner, who ran away after two operations. On the return journey, once he had assured them he wouldn’t try to escape, they attempted to lighten the mood by taking him to a dance hall in Nottingham. It only provided a temporary respite, however; once they got back to Lincolnshire, the gunner was stripped of his stripes and brevet and posted to a camp in Sheffield to be ‘retrained’.

Alan and his crew were sympathetic, but didn’t dwell on his fate. Once gone he was barely mentioned; there was always another operation, and life in Bomber Command was hazardous enough without having someone on board who might be incapable of carrying out his job at a critical moment.

Andy Wiseman had the misfortune to see what went on in an ‘LMF camp’, though as a visitor and not an inmate. ‘I remember seeing one of the bases they used for people who were branded LMF. They were allowed to be drilled for 55 minutes, and they had cold showers in the morning in winter. It was terrible. LMF was one of the great unfairnesses of the war. Though I suspect that some of the LMF people were cowards, most of them were just deeply affected by their experiences and couldn’t cope any more. I think it took more courage to admit you were afraid and couldn’t go on. Bravery only lasts for so long …’

Men could serve on so many operations before the bank of courage from which they had drawn was empty. Some found the will to carry on regardless, perhaps because they were too ashamed to admit to their fear and dreaded the accusations of cowardice that might follow. Harry Evans served his early ops with a mid-upper gunner, ‘a proper Jack-the-lad’, who soon found it difficult to cope. ‘The crew didn’t tell me till much later, but he went to the Gunnery Officer and asked to go. The officer talked him out of it. On ops he would have panic attacks, especially if we were being shot up. He’d start shouting: “We’re all going to get killed!” or “There’s holes in the tail!” We’d just say, “Shut up, you …” But he got stuck in from then on. I look at it in two ways: he wasn’t the best mid-upper gunner because of the panic. On the other hand, he was too scared to doze off at his position …’

Rusty Waughman believed the mental scars were worse than any physical wounds. ‘I know one airman who pressed on. When they were damaged by flak during an op, he blacked out, left his seat and wandered to the back of the aircraft. The rest of the crew tried to talk to him, but he couldn’t speak and he had no further recollection of the op. He was transferred to the hospital at Matlock, where he was unconscious for several days until a nurse dropped a metal dish. He woke up screaming, “There’s another poor sod going down. Look at the flames! Look at the flames!”’ The man was eventually invalided out of the service.

When men suffered a nervous breakdown because of the stress and exhaustion of incessant ops, they were given medical and psychiatric treatment rather than punishment – and given the relentless nature of life in Bomber Command it is surprising that so few men suffered psychological problems. Only 0.3 per cent of aircrew were officially classified as showing a Lack of Moral Fibre, though countless more suffered from a spectrum of what we would now term post-traumatic stress disorders.

Jack Watson’s crew was joined by a Mosquito squadron on base at Upwood. Jack was in his room in the old married quarters when a Mosquito which had become lost in the fog careered into one of the adjoining buildings. ‘The house was ablaze, and as we were running towards it we could see three of our lads who had just come back from a raid sitting on the bed. We could see them sitting there; they still had their uniforms on. They couldn’t get out and we couldn’t get in to help them – and there wasn’t a thing anybody could do about it. Suddenly the house crashed down and collapsed on them and they disappeared into a cloud of flame and smoke. One of our mates tried to get in to help them out, but he got badly burnt and in the end he had to jump out.

‘At the end of the terraced houses there was a little brick wall and I went down there to find the navigator and pilot of the Mosquito. They had come straight through the top of the aircraft canopy and had hit this wall. They were just lying there. That’s something which shook me. They were a real mess, but they were still completely in their flying kit, which virtually held them together. And when they put them in a blanket it just folded up into a ball … I have never seen anything like it.’

The next morning was warm and sunny. A group of airmen sat on the lawn ruminating on the events of the night before. Jack Watson was among them. One of the men turned to another. ‘You know, I could see you sitting there in that house burning like that last night.’ It was crass thing to say, but it had been meant as a joke. ‘We used to say stupid things like that,’ Jack explains.

They were young and gauche, and gallows humour provided another release. But the recipient of the comment did not see the funny side; he stood up and walked away. They never saw him again.




CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_d3fd905c-57c9-5c19-81d3-5dab89ede1ab)

30 March 1944 (#ulink_d3fd905c-57c9-5c19-81d3-5dab89ede1ab)







Sam Harris (front row, right) and crew

At the end of March 1944 Britain had yet to emerge from a long and harrowing winter, but the newspapers were still trying to kindle optimism in any way possible. The front page of the Daily Mirror led with the story of the Russian Army’s progress across southern Poland under the headline ‘Soviet Racing for Czech Border’, while ‘“Eat Your Words” challenge to MPs’ reported a piece of political brinksmanship by Winston Churchill on the home front to help shore up his coalition government. The Daily Express also found time to report the story of Harry P. Mclean of Windsor, Ontario, who threw $1,000 into the street from his fourth-floor window. ‘I like to see people happy,’ he said.

Happiness on the home front was still in short supply. The British people were enduring their fifth year of war, and rationing had bitten deep. Londoners had just come through a ‘Baby Blitz’, Hitler’s attempt to repeat his terrorisation of the capital four years earlier by dropping 2,000 tonnes of explosive, and feared further attacks. One story that was not reported was the recapture of 73, and subsequent execution of 50, of the 76 Allied prisoners-of-war who had escaped through a tunnel at Stalag Luft III.




Against this backdrop, Sir Arthur Harris made his way to his operations room in an underground bunker at RAF High Wycombe just before 9 a.m. on 30 March. As he did each day, he greeted the officers of Bomber Command’s Air Staff with a brisk ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’


sat down at his desk and lit the first in a chain of cigarettes. Peering over his half-moon glasses, he would then growl, ‘Did the Hun do anything last night?’ before taking his opening drag. He would occasionally substitute ‘Boche’ for ‘Hun’, but his dislike of the enemy was never less than clear.

Harris was driven; he took his responsibility so seriously he never dreamt of delegating it, and didn’t take any leave in three and a half years. He was determined to carry out his job to the best of his ability and bore the enormous strain that accompanied it without complaint. Those who worked with him lived in fear of his thunderous roar whenever they were late or failed to answer a question, and he made frequent enemies of politicians and Air Ministry civil servants. But he did not care. Winning the war was what counted.

The three children from his failed first marriage might have found him similarly uncompromising. They were cut from his life – or at least the version of it he gave to his biographer, Henry Probert. Yet the man who made the most combat-hardened Wing Commanders tremble melted at the sight of his five-year-old daughter. Jackie was a regular visitor to High Wycombe, and Joan Dally, a WAAF Corporal in the HQ Met Office, was occasionally asked to look after the little girl when her mother went shopping. ‘Others might have been in awe of him, but I saw a different side of Harris – a kindly father of a little girl. I would sometimes go into his famous office and Jackie would be playing there. I could see by the way he looked at her that he adored her.’




Once his question about the activities of the Germans had been answered, the morning conference followed a set pattern. Harris read out the report of the previous night’s operations. That March morning there had been no major raids for three nights because of poor weather conditions, so it was brief.

He was followed by Magnus Spence. Making predictions about the weather over a distant patch of Europe based on scant information was a challenge that Spence and his meteorologists faced daily. Harris took a special interest in the forecasts. Joan Dally remembers his frequent visits to the Met Office. ‘He would come in and say things like, “Now, when are you chaps going to find me some decent weather so I can send my boys out?” He always referred to the aircrew as “my boys”. You could tell by the way he spoke about them how much he cared for them. He’d say, “I don’t want my boys to run into bad weather tonight.”’

Spence’s report encouraged Harris to believe in the possibility of some cloud cover towards the south of Germany, and a half moon at its height between an hour past sunset and the small hours of the morning – when the bomber stream would be reaching its target.

Next to speak was a representative of the US Eighth Army Air Force. At the beginning of this offensive Harris had promised a decisive victory with the help of US bombers, but the Americans remained committed to daytime raids and, in public at least, rejected the concept of area bombing. Their heavily defended B-17s – each had six gun ports – flew in tight formations and sought to destroy the Luftwaffe on sight rather than hide from them in the dark. And they boasted that their Norden bombsight was the best in the world.

Though it also brought heavy losses, daylight – in theory – would allow them to locate their targets without the need for Pathfinders. Even though cloud cover regularly obscured their objectives, they steadfastly ignored the facts and maintained that their methods were more accurate, and that their only targets were military sites, factories, docks and other strategic industries. The reality was very different, though; as historian Anthony Verrier points out, precision bombing was a myth, ‘an aspiration which some crews in certain conditions occasionally achieved’.




After hearing the morning’s reports, Harris’s conclusion was swift: there would be a major raid that night. The target would be an industrial city which had not been bombed for seven months, with factories producing tanks, armoured cars and diesel engines, a large engineering works, two Siemens electrical factories and an aircraft repair facility on the outskirts. It was also a major administrative and communications centre, and the iconic location of huge pre-war rallies filmed by Leni Riefenstahl and screened across Germany. Triumph of the Will both charted and enhanced the rise of the Nazis and the creation of the personality cult around its leader, imbuing the city with symbolic as well as strategic importance.

Nuremberg was a beautiful city with a rich history. Its medieval quarter still boasted an imperial castle which dated back to the twelfth century. Its darker side was reflected in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which formally reduced the status of Jews in Germany to that of non-humans. Hitler had described it as ‘the most German of German cities’, and championed the building of a host of monuments there, designed by Albert Speer, to celebrate the Thousand Year Reich. Destroying these, the railway lines and army barracks, scrambling the lines of communication and obliterating the factories where many of the 426,000 population worked, would strike a uniquely damaging blow.

Harris presented his plan to his senior staff and advisers in the operations room at High Wycombe later that morning, advocating a straight run to Nuremberg. His Deputy Commander-in-Chief, Robert Saundby, kept his concerns to himself until the meeting was over. His boss was not a man to cross in public; many even questioned the wisdom of doing so in private. ‘He was generally acknowledged to be a grim man who could freeze an Eskimo with a look; a man of explosive temperament; a man of few words – all of them forceful.’


Saundby also knew that Harris did not take his decisions lightly, only too aware that each time he signed off on a raid it meant thousands of men would be risking their lives.

When they managed to speak, Saundby expressed his reservations about the ‘straight run-in’ to Nuremberg, though whether this refers to the long leg or the bombing run after the turning point is unclear. Harris ‘thought for a moment, then grunted – and those knowing him will appreciate how effective those grunts could be. He said he would wait to see the result of the afternoon’s Met Report.’

Saundby remained uneasy, but on his shoulders fell the task of finding the best route to and from the target. A straight route meant easier navigation, shorter flying time, less fuel and more bombs, though it also gave the Germans a better chance to plot their course and ambush the bomber stream. An indirect route increased the chances of aircraft going off course and meant more time in the air and a lighter bomb load.

Air Vice-Marshal Donald Bennett, chief of the Pathfinder Force, was also concerned. He called Saundby to propose a more deviating course. Saundby listened carefully and canvassed the opinions of the other group commanders before coming to a final decision: the direct route it would be. The order was sent to Harris for approval, and once that was gained it was transmitted by telex across 39 air bases throughout eastern England, from North Yorkshire to East Anglia. Approximately 1,000 aircraft and 6,500 men would be part of the operation, which had been given the codename Grayling.

The bombers would take off at approximately 10 p.m. to make use of the forecast cloud cover and avoid being caught in moonlight. The stream would assemble over the North Sea, then fly over the enemy coast and into Belgium, going west of Brussels. Charleroi marked the start of the perilous 265-mile straight leg south of the Ruhr.

Four ‘spoof’ raids involving 162 aircraft would be launched as diversions, and to camouflage the primary target for as long as possible. Fifty Halifax bombers would head for the North Sea, to give the impression of a much larger force threatening Hamburg or Berlin, then drop mines in the Heligoland Bight, a bay at the mouth of the River Elbe. Three separate forces of Mosquitoes would head for Aachen, Cologne and Kassel, where they would drop target indicator flares as if for a full-scale attack, designed to draw the enemy fighters away from the main stream.

At the end of the straight leg, the stream was to take an abrupt southerly turn 79 miles north of Nuremberg. Within 19 minutes of altering course it would be over the target, giving the Germans little time to react. Until then, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, even Munich, might still be the target.

The aiming point was a railway goods depot south of the centre of Nuremberg, to compensate for any ‘creep back’ – the fires started by the first bombs to be dropped were often used as the aiming point by subsequent crews; they would release their load as soon as the blaze below came into their sights, and as each successive wave bombed the nearest ‘edge’ of the fire it crept further away from the target. The setting of the moon would give them the cloak of darkness for their five-hour return journey against the forecast headwinds.

Zero Hour was set at 1.10 a.m. on 31 March. Five minutes before that the Pathfinders would start marking with flares to illuminate the area, so their fellow Mosquitoes and Lancasters could release their target indicator bombs on the aiming point, and the last bomber would drop its load at 1.22. The entire 68-mile-long stream, arriving in five waves behind the opening Pathfinder force, would have 12 minutes to carry out the attack – at a rate of 57 aircraft per minute. If the winds en route held up the progress of the stream, Zero Hour could be adjusted.

In those 12 minutes the objective was to drop 2,600 tonnes of explosives on Nuremberg, half of which were incendiaries. In later raids the bomb load increased – 3,900 tonnes would be dropped on Dresden in February 1945 – but it was still significantly more than the 500 tonnes the Luftwaffe had rained on Coventry in November 1940.

As Sam Harris woke that morning in Elsham Wolds, a warm spring still seemed a distant promise. Two of his crew, Eric and Mac, had already gone for breakfast. He and the others sat in bed smoking cigarettes, summoning the will to exchange the warmth of their beds for the chilly floor of the hut and the freezing dash to the ablutions hut to shave with cold water. No one had lit the coke stove around which they had chosen their beds on their arrival in January. The stove usually warmed the whole hut; they even used the outside of it to toast bread ‘obtained’ from the mess. One night it got so hot that it ignited Chalky’s blanket.

Their hut nestled in the corner of a field, down a narrow dirt track, a bike ride away from the mess and the other squadron buildings. This seclusion had its benefits; nipping under the coke compound fence to steal extra supplies for the stove was one. Otherwise, their meagre ration only gave them an hour or so of heat. But on mornings like this the squadron office and the NAAFI wagon with its delicious sticky buns and steaming mugs of tea seemed a long way away.

Eventually they climbed on to their bicycles and set off, their breath billowing in the cold air as they pedalled. The morning cuppa and bun had become an essential part of their routine over the course of the last three months and 10 completed ops. That morning Ken Murray decided they should practise a few drills aboard their aircraft. The idea was not universally popular, given the weather, but they all knew that preparation was as important as luck in determining their chances of survival. They cycled grudgingly across to their Lancaster, G-George, eager to get back to the warmth of the mess before all the newspapers had been claimed and the crosswords completed.

Lancasters were never warm, and as they went through their drills that morning it felt even more arctic inside their plane than it did outside. They had come a long way with G-George since the January morning when they first encountered her. First impressions had not been promising. Someone had painted 84 yellow bombs beneath the pilot’s position on the port side to mark each completed trip, and the rest of the ageing veteran’s outer skin was crisscrossed with patches covering the plethora of holes, gouges and scrapes from the flak. Inside it was dirty, scruffy, unkempt and unloved. She had been inherited from 103 Squadron, who shared Elsham, because no one wanted her.

As a member of the ground crew first showed them around, he announced with a grin that because they were a new crew no one expected them to last long, so there was little point in wasting a new aircraft on them. No one laughed. Ken had bristled. ‘We’ll show you what a new crew can do,’ he said.

Their first couple of ops hadn’t endeared the plane to them. She was slow to climb, her auto-pilot was unreliable and she needed a longer take-off distance than any other Lancaster on the squadron. Mac called her ‘horrible, ancient’, and Ken was so fed up that he complained to their Commanding Officer. The response was similar to the line they got from the ground crew, minus the humour: ‘A sprog crew doesn’t expect to get a new Lancaster. You’ll be lucky to last five trips.’

Against the run of the dice they had survived the ill-fated raid on Leipzig; they overshot the target because of the winds and flew back with bombers being shot out of the sky all around them. At that point it occurred to them that, for all its discomforts, this old girl knew how to get back from an op, and from that moment they started to love their creaking but reliable Lancaster. They lived with the constant awareness that an aircraft could be their coffin, but they knew a good one could be their saviour.

While the night veiled many of her flaws, G-George always looked older and more frayed in the cold light of dawn, and this morning was no exception. She looked like a blown rose next to the sleeker machines alongside at dispersal. They climbed aboard via a small ladder to an entry hatch forward of the tail. Prior to an op they had to squeeze along the fuselage, trying to avoid banging their heads on the roof, their flying suits and kit snagging and banging on the sides of the cold metal frame. It was less of an obstacle course on a drill, but they missed the warm gear. The smell of fuel hung heavy in the air, together with the mustiness that attested to the bomber’s age, and at times like this they still envied crews who had been treated to one fresh off the production line, its cockpit pristine, without the slightest hint of a scratch on the Perspex or the dials, a complete absence of oily smears or dust, and the delicious, leathery scent of factory goodness in the air.

They took up their positions for the drill. Bert Winn, the rear gunner, turned left, the only man on board to do so. He crawled through the tail on hands and knees and slid his legs through the doors to his cramped Frazer Nash turret. Once in, that was it: facing away from the direction of travel, he would barely move for the rest of the flight, his gloved fingers gripping the twin triggers of his four Browning machine-guns.

The rest of the crew made their way through the fuselage. Eric Page, the mid-upper gunner, took his station just forward of the main entrance. His ceiling turret was armed with two Browning machine-guns. When he and Bert swung into action the staccato rattle of their weapons could be heard throughout the aircraft, and the lingering smell of cordite would mingle with the Lancaster’s perpetual cocktail of hot oil, glycol and sweat.

Roland Luffman took his position at the wireless operator’s desk on the port side of the cabin, forward of the wing. Next to the inner engine, it was the warmest part of the plane, and so where the crews often kept their ‘pee can’. On one raid, Rusty Waughman, of 101 Squadron, remembers a bomber below them exploding, ‘which rolled us a half roll over’. As he fought to regain control of the plane, Taffy, his wireless operator, started to scream ‘Blood! Blood!’ over the intercom. He thought he had been hit. In fact the pee can had been turned over during their dive and emptied on his head.

Sam Harris eased himself behind the navigator’s table, hidden behind a curtain on the starboard side, just behind Ken and flight engineer ‘Mac’ Mackenzie, and lit by an Anglepoise lamp. Chalky White, the bomb aimer, slid down the steps into the nose and lay flat on the ice-cold floor. Things would get a damn sight hotter for him when the flak crackled around him and the aircraft lurched and veered its way on the final run in to the target.

Once at their posts, they went through the usual drills. After cries of ‘Prepare to abandon aircraft’, then ‘Abandon aircraft! Abandon aircraft!’ they threw open the escape hatches and slithered over the wings to practise a ditching at sea. Nothing could mimic the real challenges of trying to escape a bomber in a vertiginous spin, pinned to the sides or the roof by massive g-forces, unsure which way was up and which way was down. But it was something – certainly better than surrendering their fate entirely to chance – and it might buy them the precious seconds that could separate life from death.

They paused for a smoke and a chat, ran through a final crash landing drill, and headed back to the mess for those newspapers. After lunch there were no rides into town because there was no definitive word on whether there would be an op that night. No word meant staying on camp, idling away time, catching a nap, playing cards, stealing some coke for the stove or writing a letter home.

Then the base Tannoy sprang to life.

‘All crews to report to their squadrons.’

The poor weather had seen three successive operations cancelled, which meant that Rusty Waughman and his crew had just enjoyed their third good night’s sleep in succession – all except their rear gunner, Harry ‘Tiger’ Nunn. The previous night’s op had been scratched just prior to take-off, and by then Harry had taken a ‘wakey-wakey’ pill, the methamphetamine cocktail intended to make sure he would be alert for the whole flight. As his mates got their heads down, he had spent the whole night pacing the floor of their hut, talking to himself, too manic to even lie on his bed.

Rusty Waughman, the 20-year-old son of a Durham colliery worker, had worked hard to become a pilot. Like Cyril Barton, he had been a sickly child. He had suffered bouts of diphtheria and tuberculosis and had a heart murmur, and his mother, a Royal Red Cross-winning matron at a military hospital during the First World War, constantly had to nurse him back to health. He missed out on many things as a result, football and swimming amongst them, so he always felt an outsider – and when he was old enough to join up he seized his chance to be part of something rather than feel left out once again.

Like the Bartons, his parents worried about him constantly, but when he told them about his plans to follow his father into the Navy they weren’t unduly concerned, confident that his childhood illnesses would render him unfit to serve. When Rusty filled in the medical form at the recruiting centre, he omitted to mention his tuberculosis but included everything else. Then, on the spur of the moment, he decided to try his luck with the RAF instead. Their medical examination was less stringent and he was accepted immediately.





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