Bomber Command (13 page)

New faces came to replace the ghosts of Aalborg: Sam Elworthy, a polished, brilliant New Zealand-born barrister and graduate of Trinity, Cambridge, to command ‘A’ Flight with instant distinction; ‘Messy’ Messervy, an Australian who took over ‘B’ and enlivened mess parties by setting fire to his long fair hair and then pouring beer over it. Messervy would later be transferred abruptly to Photographic Reconnaissance – where he would die – when it was discovered that he had no night vision. John McMichael, a coal merchant’s son from Bedford who had joined the RAF during the Slump, was not amused to notice, as more and more crews ditched in the sea, that it was still left to personal initiative to supply dinghy rations. After an 82 Squadron crew came down beside a convoy off Yarmouth and floated impotent in a dinghy while their gunner, with a broken arm, drifted away to drown, McMichael wrote to the Air Ministry suggesting that every dinghy should be equipped with a quoit on a rope that could be tossed to a drifting man. A civil servant wrote back to say that this was impossible, since it would cost the service 12s 6d for every aircraft.

The even tenor and less dangerous atmosphere of the squadron’s winter operations were shattered abruptly on the night of 4 December, when they were sent in appalling weather to attack Essen steelworks. At briefing it was suggested jovially that if the fog continued to close in, on their return crews could bale out as a last resort. In the event, Messervy force-landed at Mildenhall, grazing the mess chimney. Two crews crashed in the fog, killing everybody aboard. One crew was lost without trace in the North Sea. McMichael baled out over King’s Lynn, suffering the disconcerting experience of descending with his own abandoned aircraft
circling round him. His gunner came down on Marham cookhouse, where for some minutes the occupants mistook him for a mine. One sergeant pilot retained sufficient fuel to circle until dawn, when he landed safely at Bodney.

It is difficult to exaggerate the dedication with which most crews strove to complete these ill-conceived operations. Sergeant Ted Inman and his observer, Ken Collins, spent New Year’s Day 1941 circling Ostend for an hour in a snowstorm in a vain effort to locate their target. Peter Tallis in a few weeks on 82 Squadron developed an extraordinary reputation for completing attacks when everybody else had abandoned them, pressing on to the Dutch coast in broad daylight when others had returned for lack of cloud cover. One day early in January Tallis was halfway across the Channel when his aircraft suffered an electrical failure. He simply went home and immediately set off again in a spare one. A few men, not surprisingly, cracked. On one trip a cannon shell took off the head of an observer. The gunner crawled forward to drag the body down the fuselage so that the pilot would not be compelled to sit behind a headless corpse all the way home, but it was to no purpose. The pilot never flew an operation again. The steady drain of losses continued. Moller crashed on take-off, one of several pilots who suffered the fatal consequences of oiling-up their idling engines during the interminable wait on the flarepath for the signal to go. One night Ju88s followed 21 Squadron home to Watton next door, and shot up a succession of Blenheims as they landed. Those of 82’s aircrew who survived a few weeks became accustomed to duty with burial parties: ‘You soon got the knack.’

The spring of 1941 brought the onset of one of the most horrific phases of 2 Group’s operations, the anti-shipping strikes in the North Sea and the Channel. At a moment when Britain stood passive on almost every front, the Prime Minister was determined that she should assert herself at the very gates of the ‘island fortress’. The Royal Navy sent out its torpedo boats night after night, and fought convoys through the eastern Channel Narrows
at terrible cost not because this was the only possible route for British shipping, but because it had become a matter of national prestige to keep the way open. Bomber Command’s Hampdens took off every night to mine the approaches to Germany’s harbours – ‘gardening’, as it was called, would become one of the undisputed successes of the RAF’s war. Finally, it fell to 2 Group’s Blenheims to attack enemy shipping in daylight wherever and whenever targets could be found. In the spring and summer of 1941, at terrible cost, the pilots did so.

Day after day, sometimes in formation and sometimes in pairs, 82 Squadron took off in search of German convoys, invariably bristling with light flak and guarded by a screen of flakships. The Blenheims came down in a slow dive from 5,000 feet, through the flickering hail of fire to the very tips of the waves. As the ship raced up before them, the pilot called: ‘Now!’ to his observer in the nose. Away went the aircraft’s 250-lb bombs with five-second delay fuses. The Blenheim lunged upwards to avoid the ship’s masts and climbed away for home. This at least was the theory. In reality, again and again the attacking aircraft never recovered from its dive, but plunged into the sea streaming smoke from a score of cannon hits. Sea-level attack was not a figure of speech. Blenheims were known to come home with propeller tips and even the entire airframe bent by contact with the water. One 82 Squadron pilot misjudged his run and smashed into the mast of a German ship, ripping open the perspex nose of his aircraft and the body of his observer who had been staring through it. Another was so appalled by the spectacle of his wingman diving through the barrage to bomb that when the time came for him to follow, he froze at the controls and circled, paralysed. Eventually he came home, never to fly an operation again.

2 Group’s squadrons were detailed in rotation for the notorious ‘Channel Stop’ duties, attacking German coastal convoys. On average, a unit lasted a fortnight before being withdrawn, decimated. As the shipping strikes intensified, the usual crop of passengers from Bodney who flew on occasional operations died away
abruptly. The orderly room clerk was joyriding in one aircraft that vanished into the sea. When Ken Collins asked Caesar, the engineering officer, if he would like to come on a trip one day, Caesar shook his head decisively: ‘All my previous chauffeurs have gone for a burton . . .’

One day in April the squadron was attacking a convoy off the German coast in formation, led by Sam Elworthy, who had now become CO. He and a sergeant pilot hit two 3,000-ton tankers before the Me109s swept in, slashing at the Blenheim of a new pilot on his first operation. Somehow they escaped, but the novice was nursed home by Elworthy with his gunner dead, having had the unnerving experience of watching one of his propellers fall off. In the middle of April, the squadron was suddenly transferred to the RAF station at Lossiemouth on the north-east coast of Scotland, to attack shipping off Norway. They took off in formation and then as they approached the enemy coast broke off in pairs, each sweeping a sector of sea for a few dangerous minutes before turning hastily for home whether they had bombed or not, in the hope of anticipating the scrambling Messerschmitts. A crew which ditched on these operations knew that their slender hope of survival in the Channel was extinguished altogether in the North Sea. It was on one of these sorties that the dedicated Tallis, on his last operation with the squadron, vanished without trace and defied all efforts to find him. Elworthy was especially depressed by his loss. A few days later Ian Spencer, on his first trip with the squadron, came home hours late with his aircraft shot to pieces and somehow dragged it into a bellylanding at Lossiemouth. As he sat exhausted in his cockpit in the midst of the runway, the station commander’s staff car raced up. The furious group-captain jumped out and began berating Spencer for making a mess of his airfield. Sam Elworthy arrived at this moment, and did not mince words about the station commander’s sense of priorities. Only when Spencer checked the wreck later did he find that one 250-lb bomb was still hung up in its bay, and the aileron was held on only by the Bristol Aircraft Company’s name tag.

One day, under the leadership of a somewhat reckless flight commander, the squadron strayed hopelessly off course on a daylight operation and missed Norway altogether. Fumbling their way home, they broke cloud a few feet above the Firth of Forth, rapidly approaching the Forth Bridge. As they blundered into the balloon barrage around Edinburgh the formation broke up, every man for himself. They landed all over eastern Scotland, on airfields or farms according to where their fuel ran out. Around Lossiemouth snowstorms were common, and more than one crew became detached from formation, and was obliged to feel its way home, sheepish and lonely.

In May they returned to Bodney. Elworthy was promoted to a staff appointment at Group headquarters, where he continued his efforts to persuade Air Vice-Marshal Donald Stevenson, AOC of 2 Group, that his command was being slaughtered to no purpose on the anti-shipping operations. Many wartime Bomber Command officers attracted controversy, but few such universal dislike as Stevenson. He was christened ‘Butcher’, not with the rueful affection with which the name was later attached to Harris, but with bitter resentment. An arrogant, ruthless man with no apparent interest in the practical problems facing his crews, Stevenson seemed to regard 2 Group’s operations solely in the light of their value to his own advancement. ‘A ship hit is a ship sunk!’ he declared emphatically, as he compiled wilfully and grossly exaggerated statistics of his Group’s achievements. Losses did not disconcert him at all. When Paddy Bandon tried to convince him that morale was suffering severely from the futile attrition over the Channel, Stevenson seized an inkwell and hurled it at the wall, ‘Churchill wants it!’ he declared incontrovertibly.

Yet for all his commitment to the struggle, the Prime Minister was greatly disturbed by 2 Group’s losses. In August 1941, for example, of 77 Blenheims that attacked shipping, 23 were lost. In a total of 480 sorties, 36 aircraft were gone in a month. In one of a series of ‘Action This Day’ minutes to the Chief of Air Staff about Bomber Command casualties, Churchill wrote on 29 August:

The loss of seven Blenheims out of seventeen in the daylight attack on merchant shipping and docks at Rotterdam is most severe. Such losses might be accepted in attacking
Scharnhorst
,
Gneisenau
or
Tirpitz
, or a southbound Tripoli convoy, because, apart from the damage done, a first-class strategic object is served. But they seem disproportionate to an attack on merchant shipping not engaged in vital supply work . . . While I greatly admire the bravery of the pilots, I do not want them pressed too hard.

The next day Churchill drafted a message to the crews: ‘The devotion of the attacks on Rotterdam and other objectives are beyond all praise. The Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava is eclipsed in brightness by these almost daily deeds of fame.’ From the pen of a man with the Prime Minister’s profound sense of history, it could have been no accident that he compared 2 Group’s achievements with another futile British sacrifice. Yet Stevenson was unshakeable. One day while Elworthy was still commanding 82 Squadron, he was appalled to be ordered by the AOC to prepare his crew for a daylight attack on Krupps of Essen. It was the only occasion of the war on which Elworthy wrote a ‘Last Letter’ to his wife. He felt compelled to make one further effort to remonstrate with Stevenson. ‘Oh well, if you feel that strongly about it, you needn’t feel you have to fly yourself,’ replied the group commander blithely. To Elworthy’s overwhelming relief, the operation was later cancelled on higher authority. To Bomber Command’s overwhelming relief, in December 1941 Stevenson was at last removed as AOC of 2 Group.

On 9 May, 82 Squadron flew down to St Eval in Cornwall. They were briefed that evening for a dawn attack on La Rochelle. As darkness fell, the crews were dismayed to see all the ground crews quit the airfield. ‘Where are we going? God, you wouldn’t catch us here at night if you paid us. Didn’t you know? The Stukas never miss this place.’ The Blenheim crew wrote it all off as a ‘lineshoot’ and were sleeping soundly when the pandemonium of an air raid
alarm descended. They were in the shelter when a voice called down: ‘Any 82 pilots here? You’re wanted to disperse the aircraft.’ Amidst the hail of falling bombs, nobody moved. The Blenheims were neatly lined up beside the hangars for the German bomb-aimers. At dawn there were four serviceable aircraft to go to La Rochelle. The rest of the crews went home by train.

They were back in the West Country only two days later, at Portreath this time, for a low-level daylight attack on U-boats alleged to be tied up alongside the quays at St Nazaire. That morning of 13 May they passed over a German convoy minutes before they reached the French coast. Their spirits sank, for they knew that now they would be expected. They were not mistaken. King, their new CO, flew into the curtain of flak and dived straight into the sea before they reached the docks. He was not leading the formation because he was still gaining Blenheim experience. He had been with them barely a week. From all over the harbour light flak hosed up. Sergeant Dusty Miller suddenly found holes appearing all over his Blenheim. He pulled away over the cranes with his port engine on fire, released his bombs above the ships tied up alongside the quays, then bellylanded in a field just outside St Nazaire. He and his crew set fire to the remains of the Blenheim, and started walking. They were on the road for three weeks, until they reached unoccupied Vichy France. There they were rash enough to assume that they would be given help, and gave themselves up. They were imprisoned in St Hippolyte fort near Nîmes for their pains, and it was from here that Miller and his gunner made successful escapes and walked across the Pyrenees into Spain. They were back in England within two months of being shot down.

On 29 May, 82 Squadron’s new CO, Wing-Commander Lascelles, led three crews on an operation over the Heligoland Bight. None returned. He was the squadron’s seventh commanding officer in eleven months, and the third to be killed. ‘Atty’ Atkinson, back on operations, took over 82 with orders for Malta. Ken Collins, the observer who had been with 82 since Christmas Eve 1940, looked around at the ghosts of all those who had gone in those five
months and said in astonishment to Ted Inman, his pilot: ‘We’re invincible!’ But Inman shook his head: ‘I’m surprised we’ve lasted as long as we have. We’ve got to go some time.’ Less than a week after arriving in Malta, Collins said ‘Bombs gone!’ over an Italian convoy, and the next thing that he remembered was awakening on the deck of an enemy destroyer. His aircraft and crew had exploded in mid-air. It was his thirty-ninth operation. He had always said that he did not mind being killed, but dreaded capture or the loss of a limb. Now, he had a leg amputated in Tripoli Hospital. He was just twenty.