Bomber Command (12 page)

The short, savage encounters with the enemy, lasting perhaps two or three hours, seemed to create a quite different atmosphere from that of the night bomber stations later in the war, when crews were flying over Germany for eight, nine, ten hours or longer. Bodney in 1940 was more akin to a Royal Flying Corps field in France in the First World War, with its frightful losses and carefully contrived callousness. All these men were still pre-war regulars or reservists or auxiliaries, not yet the wartime volunteers from every corner of civilian life. Afterwards, it was the very squandering of relatively experienced crews in the first year of war that left some men with bitter memories. But at the time they gave themselves willingly enough. There was still a dogged amateurishness about their approach to war that would not survive many more months. It was ‘not done’ to think too much about personal safety, and dinghy drill always developed into a party. For a long time parachutes were seldom worn because they were uncomfortable, and the use of oxygen was thought rather ‘sissy’ until a crew passed out at 20,000 feet. There was only one neurosis common to aircrew throughout the war. Rather sheepishly, some met it by installing a piece of armour plate under their seat; others by putting a steel helmet beneath themselves as they approached the target. There is no evidence that this ever saved life or even manhood, but it made them feel better.

On the ground, ‘Uncle Duggie’ – Flight Lieutenant Douglas, the intelligence officer – was their confidant. A greying veteran of the
Royal Flying Corps twenty-five years before, he worried about their fortunes far more than they did themselves, and felt the pain more deeply when losses mounted. The adjutant of a neighbouring squadron had already cracked under the strain, and spent his time writing poetry and drinking a bottle of whisky a day. At Bodney, the villagers counted the aircraft taking off and coming home each day, and profoundly pitied the aircrew. The landlord of The Flying Fish at Watton gave a party one night for the NCOs (who still lived rigidly segregated from their officers). He played his favourite Caruso records for them, and was a little disappointed by their indifference. They preferred to sing their own songs: ‘Craven A’, ‘Moriarty’, ‘Eskimo Nell’, or the simple ditties they made up for themselves round the mess piano:

Keep the home fires burning,

While the props are turning,

Keep the beacon flashing bright

Till the boys come home.

Then when ops are over,

We shall be in clover,

Keep old Duggie up all night,

Till the boys come home
. . .

One night they would glimpse a new face, and the next day it would be gone. Somebody would ask: ‘Who on earth was that?’ There was Gadsby, who arrived and was shot down within twenty-four hours. Spencer came with his crew, saw his observer volunteer to fill in for a sick man that afternoon, and vanish for ever before unpacking. One officer terrified his crew by flying with a Bible open in his lap, and on the ground sought to convert his colleagues before it was too late. The pilot’s father wrote to the CO and said that he was beginning to think that his son was unsuited to operational flying. The CO agreed. The boy disappeared. ‘Mac’ McFarlane, who had been with the Squadron since October 1939, at twenty developed a chronic tic on the side of his face. The squadron landed after an operation and walked to the ‘Green
Goddess’ aircrew bus past a Blenheim whose gunner stood slumped against the fuselage, sobbing helplessly. One pilot was remembered as ‘Ten Minute’ Jenkins, because he came to the squadron, took off on his first operation, and was dead within ten minutes of crossing the Belgian coast. A few pilots went on month after month, untouched and apparently invulnerable like the gentle, red-haired Rusty Wardell, who was studying medicine in his spare time. But Wardell would not see August out.

The transition from the prejudices of peace to the harshness, the intrinsic vulgarity of war was taking a long time. When the first WAAF was posted to the Operations Room at Watton, the station commander felt compelled to make a blushing apology for the language of his staff. ‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ she replied indifferently. ‘Before I was here I worked in a racing stable.’ ‘Atty’ Atkinson was sent to instruct at the Blenheim Operational Training Unit at Upwood. He devoted himself to trying to winkle out some instructors with immense flying experience, who made it clear that they had no intention of venturing anywhere near an operational squadron if they could avoid it. Word had already gone round that a posting to 2 Group was close to a sentence of death. At the OTUs, the routines of peace seemed uncharged. The day came when senior staff were asked for recommendations for decorations. Atkinson put in a name. Station headquarters threw up their hands in dismay: ‘Oh, you can’t possibly ask for a gong for him! He’s got one already!’ The list was rewritten on the time-honoured principle of Buggins’s Turn.

August 1940 at Bodney started badly, with a succession of aborted operations in the face of cloudless skies, while over southern England Fighter Command fought for its life against the massed assaults of the Luftwaffe. On the 8th, three crews were detailed ‘to make a photographic reconnaissance of the Dutch and Belgian and French coasts with or without the assistance of cloud cover’. Two of them were lost. Another aircraft was shot down on the 10th.
On the morning of the 13th, the squadron was ordered to mount a ‘maximum effort’ formation attack on the German airfield at Aalborg in northern Denmark.

It remains a mystery why the Blenheims were this day ordered to carry out an operation known to be suicidal, with negligible prospects of inflicting significant damage. As far back as 24 April, Portal had minuted the Air Ministry in the most forceful terms about the hazards of attacking the Scandinavian airfields: ‘It seems to me the height of folly to throw away the experienced . . . crews on the bombing of aerodromes which, I think you will agree, shows the least result for loss of equipment expended on it.’ 82 Squadron would be operating at the very limit of their endurance. They were warned not to try to get back to Bodney, and to put down wherever they could in northern England. But they knew that if they used 9-lb boost for even a few minutes under battle conditions, they would be quite unable to reach the English coast. More seriously, the navigator of the leading aircraft was an inexperienced newcomer.

‘Mac’ McFarlane and his crew were deeply disgusted that after so many months of operations they were ordered to fly again on an outing such as this. But by one of those freaks of remission sometimes granted by the gods, as they were in the very act of running up their engines for take-off a mechanic ran out waving his arms in the ‘Wash Out’ signal. They had been stood down from operations and transferred to instructing duties. Another crew took their aircraft. In the radio hut beside one of the hangars, the wireless operators invariably tuned to Lord Haw-Haw’s German news broadcasts in English. Later that morning, McFarlane was in the hut when the bulletin came through: ‘This morning eleven aircraft of the Blenheim type approached Aalborg in Denmark. Six were shot down by anti-aircraft fire and five by fighters.’ The airmen burst into noisy laughter. It was only towards tea, when
the empty airfield still lay in silence, that the terrible reality sank home to them.

Bill Magrath, the young cynic who had warned a new arrival not to bother about his quarters, was navigating for Sergeant Donald Blair that morning. Magrath was a country solicitor’s son from Northern Ireland who joined the RAF in August 1939. Like all the other young men given immediate NCO rank in the air force at this time, he had to suffer the fierce hostility of the old sweats in the sergeants’ mess, whose attitude was ultimately responsible for the creation of separate Aircrew NCOs’ messes on so many stations. When Magrath first walked in and ordered whisky, there was a dead silence. Then a senior warrant officer announced witheringly: ‘We don’t serve whisky to boys.’ New NCOs who were foolish enough to take off their jackets to play table tennis were ruthlessly crushed for their impropriety. For some months, NCO aircrew were still obliged to ask to be excused ground duties by the senior warrant officer before taking off on operations. One station CO in 2 Group was so enraged when an NCO pilot arrived late for briefing that he sent him out of the room and refused to let him fly that day.

By 13 August, Magrath had completed six sorties – three against invasion barges, the usual targets for ‘freshmen’, and three against oil installations. On one of the latter night trips, over Amsterdam, anti-aircraft fire turned the Blenheim on its back and blew a hole in the perspex through which all their navigation equipment was sucked out. Somehow they regained control and found their way home through the balloon barrage up the Thames estuary. On the morning of the 13th, Magrath was called for operations in the spacious former married quarters at Watton where he had been living alone since his room-mate was killed the previous week. In the operations room each of them was handed the usual buff envelope containing details of their target and the relevant maps. They took off into a cloudless sky, although at briefing it had been stressed that if there was less than five-tenths cloud the operations
would be aborted. They took up station in the midst of the formation of four stacked vics of three aircraft, and set out across the North Sea, towards that very killing ground which had proved so fatal to 3 Group eight months before.

They were approaching the Danish coast when Greenwood, in the rear turret, said: ‘Hello, he’s off again.’ A sergeant pilot had suddenly dropped his aircraft out of the formation and was turning for home. It had been noticed on previous operations that this man’s aircraft was jinxed by repeated problems requiring his return to base. On this occasion, he would claim at his subsequent court-martial that he discovered he had insufficient fuel to complete the operation and get home, and he would be acquitted. The remaining eleven aircraft cruised on. Magrath perceived to his consternation that his fears about the observer of the leading aircraft were justified – he had brought them across the North Sea on a course that crossed the southern rather than the northern coast of Denmark. They were now faced with a run up the entire length of the country to attack.

They crossed the shoreline at 8,000 feet in clear sunshine, and flew steadily northwards. They were still twenty miles short of Aalborg when the first Me109s attacked. The fighters raked the formation continuously until they broke away to allow the flak to open fire as they neared the airfield. Half the Blenheims jettisoned their bombs as soon as the fighters engaged. Don Blair dived for the ground with an Me109 on his tail, and levelled out over the sea with one engine on fire. Bill Magrath was knocked unconscious by the shock of their ditching, and woke to find himself floating in the North Sea in his Mae West. Greenwood, their gunner, had three bullet wounds in his legs. Blair had vanished. They were picked up by a Danish fishing boat. Every single aircraft in the formation was shot down. For once Lord Haw-Haw reported the literal truth. Nine aircrew out of thirty-three survived as prisoners, one of whom, Sergeant Johnnie Oates, almost died of his wounds. Oates was hedgehopping to escape the German fighters after bombing when his port wingtip touched a fence post and the
Blenheim cartwheeled into the ground. His navigator was thrown clear with shock and a broken wrist. When the ambulance came, Oates insisted that the navigator be put on a stretcher. He himself sat on the floor. Only when they reached the hospital did he learn that his own back was broken.

Bill Magrath had a smashed hip, a broken shoulder, a broken leg and was blind in one eye. Yet on 20 November 1941 he escaped from a transit camp in Rouen where he had just learned that plans for his medical repatriation had been cancelled, and began an extraordinary journey across France via Paris and Marseilles, to the Pyrenees. Still as lame as he would remain for the rest of his life, he walked across the freezing January cold of the mountains into Spain and thus home to England. He was awarded the Military Medal for his escape, but he also discovered that having been passed ‘unfit for further aircrew duties’, he was automatically reduced to sergeant’s rank, and lost the warrant officer’s pay he would have retained for the rest of the war had he remained in a POW camp. He remained a sergeant until he was later commissioned as an Air Traffic Control Officer.

The Aalborg operation was a disaster reflecting almost Crimean stupidity on the part of those at Bomber Command and Group who ordered it. At last, however, the staff were being compelled to accept the futility of daylight deep penetrations beyond the range of fighter cover. For 82 Squadron, the Aalborg raid did not signal the end of daylight operations, but a change in the pace of their war that lasted most of that winter. The losses had been too savage for any force to continue on its course unchecked. Night after night, aircraft flew against the barge concentrations along ‘Blackpool front’, the invasion coast west of Dunkirk. Even after the Germans began to disperse their fleet on 20 September, following the indefinite postponement of
Sealion
, the attacks went on. Bomber Command flew southwards across the Channel while their counterparts of the Luftwaffe droned north towards London. Some
nights, 82 Squadron had to provide crews for the oddly-named ‘Cheadles’, nuisance raids on a triangular course against selected Luftwaffe airfields in France. They dropped empty beerbottles, for like most of the RAF for the rest of the war, they thought these made a noise that upset bystanders beneath. They shot up any targets they could see, and frequently came home more shaken than the Junkers and Dornier crews in their billets below.