Aircrew: The Story of the Men Who Flew the Bombers (7 page)

But it was not all right. It proved quite impractical to try to control the aircraft in an efficient manner when perched so precariously. Those in authority were very sorry; they admired this man who had voluntarily forfeited a safe post in order to go to war. They did their best to allay his bitter disappointment, and offered him a variety of alternatives: either to join a long queue of cadets waiting to complete their pilot training on Oxfords – aircraft in which the seats were adjustable, and where the pilot sat in a cabin with all-round visibility, rather than a small confined cockpit, or train as a navigator, or forget the whole thing and return to his ground trade as an administrator.

Reg had made up his mind to fight in the air in some capacity, so his answer to the last alternative was a brief, ‘No thanks.’ Yet he knew for sure that the other two offers would lead to delays and extended periods of further training. Navigators particularly, unlike in the earlier years, were now receiving a long and comprehensive
course. The war might well be over by the time he quali-fied.

After a moment’s thought, he asked: ‘Any vacancies for air gunners?’

‘Always.’

‘How long to wait?’

‘Immediate acceptance.’

‘Duration of course?’

‘Six weeks.’

‘That’s for me,’said Reg.

His erstwhile mates safely back in the office must have found his behaviour quite incomprehensible. Reg, on the other hand, was perfectly happy to be moving positively in the direction he wanted to go – back to England to see some action.

Gunnery School at Gwelo Moffat was stimulating enough. Flying in Oxfords fitted with turrets, he blasted away at drogues, long sausage-shaped canvas objects towed by intrepid airmen in airborne tugs. He studied the mysteries of ‘deflection’, dismantled Browning.303 machine guns, and re-assembled them until he could do it in his sleep. He fired at targets on the ground and studied film of fighters approaching from all conceivable angles. Mentally he absorbed the shapes of models, representing friendly and enemy planes, which hung from the ceilings of every classroom.

After the six-week intensive course he had qualified. Proudly sporting his new air gunner’s brevet above his left breast pocket, a single silvery-white wing and the letters AG surrounded by oak leaves, he arrived in Cape Town, South Africa. He was billeted in a vast transit camp crammed full of servicemen waiting to board ships bound for many destinations. There were two parades each day at 8am and 6pm. After roll call the names of those who were to sail that afternoon, or the following morning, would be read out.

Reg, who had found himself a girlfriend, soon became fed up with this monotonous routine. He got into the habit of staying overnight at the girl’s home on the other side of town. After all it was safer – he might well have been mugged returning to camp
late at night! Each morning and evening he telephoned the camp for the latest shipping news.

When his turn did come it was actually his girl, working in a shop, who first broke the news. She told him he would be embarking on the troopship
Staffordshire
the following day. So much for wartime security in Cape Town.

But no one had told him where he was going. He assumed, and hoped, that the voyage would end in an English port, but having experienced the vagaries of posting procedures during his years in ‘admin’, he was prepared for anything, or almost anything. What actually happened was outside his wildest speculations.

Reg’s group was made up of forty aircrew, all senior NCOs. These airmen had learned their specialized skills at great expense to the British taxpayer. Even in those days it cost thousands of pounds to train a flyer in any category. The idea was that, once they were qualified, they should then fight the enemy in the air.

So how were they employed? As soon as the
Staffordshire
put to sea they were signed on ship’s articles to carry out ‘trooping’ duties. This involved calling at small ports along the West African coast collecting native ‘troops’. The military knowledge that had been imparted to these unfortunate blacks was limited. They had been told which end of a rifle the bullet emerged, and very little else. They had not the remotest idea who the enemy was, and their desire to fight anyone was less than enthusiastic.

This unhappy complement of ‘passengers’ was shipped up to Freetown and disembarked. Then Reg and his boys sailed back for more ‘recruits’.

He celebrated his 20th birthday on 15 September, 1942, in Lagos. Having regard for his years of service in the RAF, he was the senior man of his group. Occasionally he had to act as policeman, both on and off the ship. Once, with an Askari escort he went ashore to round up 150 native deserters. After scouring several unsavoury locations he returned to the
Staffordshire
with a handful of deserters. Unfortunately, the compliment of prisoners was outweighed by the number of escorting troops who had disappeared!

Another time, perhaps not surprisingly, three of his fellow aircrew sergeants had gone ashore and got drunk. They were reported
to be causing a disturbance in a hotel and Reg was detailed to bring them back to the ship. With a revolver strapped to his waist he strode into the hotel, determined to restore peace and order. At that moment the local Gendarmerie arrived. Mistaken for one of the revellers, Reg received a smack on the back of the head from a truncheon. He woke up later in a gaol from which he was released the following day.

Matters came to a head when they again docked in Freetown with another two or three thousand troops. Orders were issued to take the troops north to Bathurst, in readiness for an assault on the German U-boat base at Dakar. Reg, with the wholehearted support of his comrades, felt the time had arrived to lodge an official complaint.

He explained to a Flight Lieutenant that he, and many of the others, had been in Africa for two and a half years. They had trained to do a job that would help Britain’s war effort, yet their services were not being utilized in a proper manner. The effect of this protest was dramatic. Coded signals sped back and forth between RAF Freetown and the Air Ministry in London. An indignant Group Captain came on board.

This is all wrong,’ he protested. ‘You boys are desperately needed back home. They are crying out for aircrew. Why the hell are you wasting your time here?’

It had worked! In double quick time they were ferried from the
Staffordshire
to the SS
Orion
, a one-time P&O luxury cruise liner. Within the hour the small contingent of flyers had set sail for England with an escort of eight warships.

Reg was impressed by the promptness in which matters had been arranged. Especially comforting was the presence of their formidable naval protectors, who ranged around them like watchful sea-dogs. His astonishment, therefore, was all the greater when one morning he woke to find the ‘navy’ had disappeared. The warships had ‘turned right’ into the Mediterranean, leaving the
Orion
to face the troubled ‘home waters’ alone.

They rounded the northern coast of Ireland in a tremendous gale. At one point a large four-engine aircraft was spotted. A high ranking ‘brown job’ [RAF term for an army type] called to everyone within hearing, ‘It’s all right, it’s a “friendly”!’ Reg, who
knew better, headed for the nearest machine gun. The Focke Wulf Kondor flew over the liner at a safe height and dropped one small bomb. It splashed into the sea, missing them by about 200 yards.

Within hours they had docked in Liverpool and were soon away on disembarkation leave. After this Reg was sent to 15 OTU at Harwell. Flying under training as rear gunner in Wellingtons, fate intervened before he really had a chance to get to know his new crew. Taking part in a cross-country exercise, the bomber, for some unknown reason, began to lose height rapidly. The bomb aimer, bracing his feet against the instrument panel, assisted the pilot in heaving back on the control column. To the relief of the crew an airfield was spotted through the darkness. Attempts to contact the control tower on R/T met with no response. However, someone on the ground was operating an Aldis signal lamp. It was flashing a welcoming ‘Green’. With the Wellington behaving unpredictably they wasted no time in preparing to land.

Unknown to them, the airfield was at that time in use for training glider pilots. They were learning to fly the giant troop-carrying Horsas which were constructed almost entirely of wood.

Invisible without identification lights, a Horsa was coming in to land at that precise moment. The green ground-light was flashing for
its
benefit. Reg’s bomber was immediately overhead, the crew unaware of the glider’s presence. At about 150 feet the Wellington crashed down on to the Horsa.

The Horsa disintegrated in a flurry of flying wood splinters, the impact killing both the glider pilot and his pupil. The Wellington hit the concrete with tremendous force, slewed off the runway, crushing a Jeep and injuring its driver. Every member of Reg’s crew, the bomb aimer, pilot, navigator and wireless/operator, was injured. Only Reg, in his rear turret, escaped unhurt. Facing backwards, he had felt the initial impact when the bomber hit the glider. Believing they had landed, he relaxed completely. It was this lack of tension, he believed, that saved him from injury when they hit the ground.

In the well-proved RAF tradition Reg was detailed for flying again almost immediately – this time joining a crew made up mostly of Canadians. He was pleased to discover that his skipper, Squadron Leader Piddington, was an experienced pilot about to
return for his second tour of operations. It was good luck, he thought, to team up with a man who had flown so many times against the enemy. A surer guarantee of survival than flying with a ‘sprog’ pilot, anyway.

Back on night cross-country training flights, it was not long before Reg had a bit more excitement. Crews had been warned to keep an eye open for enemy night intruders – the all-too-potent, twin-engine Junkers 88. On this particular night they were flying over the Bristol/Taunton area when a twin-engine fighter suddenly dived at them. It did not fire, but as it broke away Reg raked its belly with his four Brownings.

On landing back at base all hell was let loose. The attacking aircraft had not been a Ju88, but a ‘friendly’ night fighter – a Bristol Beaufighter. The shaken pilot landed at his squadron and filed his report immediately. Angry messages were exchanged between Fighter Command and Bomber Command. Each blamed the other for the incident. In the end Reg was exonerated. It was established that the fighter pilot was guilty of an error of judgement in swooping in at night on an RAF bomber – especially the easily identifiable ‘Wimpey’, with its characteristic ‘Wellington boot’silhouette.

Most OTUs were now equipped with Wellingtons, on which crews came together for the first time. This gave them an opportunity to work as a team practising by day and night on crosscountry navigation and wireless exercises, fighter affiliation, circuits and ‘bumps’, and, on the ground, ditching and crash procedures. Meanwhile individual flight leaders continued to polish up their own skills within their particular categories, either on the turret firing ranges, in the signals cabin, or at the flight, bombing and navigation simulators.

By this time, with the bomber offensive building in strength and effectiveness, and with the new four-engine bombers taking over more and more from the earlier two-engine types, an extra phase had been introduced into aircrew training. This was the establishment of HCUs – Heavy Conversion Units, in which crews converted to four-engine aircraft.

They also took two additional members on to the team, a flight engineer to look after the increased demands imposed by the extra
machinery, and a second gunner to man the mid-upper turret. Unpardonably, the extra turret, in common with that at the rear on these new generation ‘heavies’, sprouted nothing more effective than the derisory.303 with which RAF bomber crews had tried to defend themselves since the start of the war, and which would remain as their sole protection until the end. How many bomber crew lives could have been saved, given adequate defensive firepower, can never be estimated.

Arriving at the RAF’s HCU at Topcliffe, after completing their course at Harwell, Squadron Leader Piddington’s crew converted on to the four-engine Handley Page Halifax. It was, of course, considerably bigger than anything they had flown before, but as Reg remarked at the time, ‘The gunners still sit in their turrets, the navigator at his desk, the wireless operator in front of his radio, the “driver” behind his controls, the bomb aimer stretched out in the nose. The only real difference is that we now have an extra “bod”, the engineer, to help keep us up in the air – and, we all have a bit more room!’

Not unexpectedly they finished up in a Halifax Squadron – a Canadian one. 427 (Lion) Squadron was stationed at Leeming in Yorkshire and had recently converted from Wellingtons to Halifaxes. By the end of the war no squadron in 6 Group had carried out more raids. The squadron was rather pleased with itself because it had been ‘adopted’ by MGM Studios in Hollywood. One star in particular, Greer Garson of
Mrs Miniver
fame, kept in close contact with them, sending letters and food parcels at regular intervals.

They completed a few operations without serious incident, but had an unusual experience when returning from Düsseldorf on the night of 11/12 June, 1943. A large raid this, and the first in which more than 200 Halifaxes had taken part. Suddenly they were attacked by a Messerschmitt 109. It was the usual situation – an agile fighter, armed with lethal 20mm cannon, against a lumbering bomber whose guns, as often as not, lacked the range even to reach the fighter, let alone cause it damage.

There was only one defence – to ‘corkscrew’ out of danger. Reg had that moment shouted over the intercom telling his skipper to do just that when an amazing thing happened. A burst of tracer
hosed out of the blackness towards the Messerschmitt and sent it plummeting towards the earth. For a bare instant Reg spotted the aircraft that had come to their rescue – a twin-engined, well-proportioned aircraft with pointed wings and a single fin. He recognized it at once. It was the incredibly fast RAF De Havilland Mosquito out on night intruder patrol. Its task was to seek out and destroy enemy fighters over Germany. But to do this at the very instant when the fighter was attacking a bomber must have been rare indeed. After that Reg was convinced they were a lucky crew!