Bomber Command (16 page)

Some men cracked, and were treated much more generously than their successors a year or two later. Three able and experienced pilots who had been with the squadron since before the war proved thoroughly unhappy on operations and were quietly transferred to instructing duties elsewhere. One or two members of ground crew, who had volunteered for aircrew duties before the war, applied to remuster in their original earthbound trades. Tom Sawyer, one of the flight commanders, found his navigator literally frozen with fear one night over the target, unable to move a muscle or speak a word for more than an hour.

Every trip was fraught with some kind of incident. Pat Hanafin’s Whitley was peppered with holes from the rifles of nervous Home Guards as he crossed the English coast on the way home from Turin early one morning. He was then beaten up by Hurricanes, to whom he could not identify himself because 4 Group had run out of two-star recognition cartridges that were the colours of the day. Hanafin decided to forced-land at White Waltham, a little Berkshire airstrip that he knew well. But as he made his approach,
he found the runaway blocked with derelict cars to forestall a German landing. He eventually got down with his fuel tanks all but dry. Others were less lucky. Smith crashed in Norfolk on his way back from Amsterdam. Parsons ditched in the sea off Lympne, and only three of his crew were picked up. Cairns overshot the runway at Leeming on the way back from Ostend and crashed in the middle of the Great North Road. He was pulled from the burning wreck by his wireless operator. A few nights later he climbed out of his aircraft after a trip to Hamburg and turned cheerfully to Sid Bufton: ‘Well, sir, that was my thirtieth “op” and I’m nineteen tomorrow!’

They were very young and they took their fortunes very lightly. Few were drunken neurotics, most were rather conscientious boys striving to fulfil that eternal maxim of the English public school: achievement must be apparently effortless. It is a crime to be
seen
to
try
. That autumn, Sid Bufton’s 23-year-old brother wrote a letter to his girlfriend from Scampton, where he was flying Hampdens with 83 Squadron. It is worth quoting at length, because it reflects so perfectly the mood of so many young men of Bomber Command, that first year of the strategic offensive. ‘Jenny darling,’ wrote John Bufton,

At last, a spot of time to sit back and answer your last two letters! I can hardly read one of them ’cos I was reading it in the bath after a hard day’s work on Friday and I was so tired that it fell in the water and got badly smudged!

I wonder if you were very disappointed at getting my telegram and letter about the weekend? I was mad at having to send them, but there was no way out. Maybe we’ll have better luck next weekend. Trouble with us here is that weekends are precisely the same as any other time now.

Poor Jenny, I’m so sorry you were so upset by my last letter. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so blunt in what I wrote, but I only wanted to put things to you as fairly as I could. You’ve got such wonderful faith, dear, in my chances and I mustn’t upset you by being pessimistic. Anyway, I’m not pessimistic – I’ve rarely felt happier and more set on a job in my life, and my chances are as good as anyone else’s. But I’m not ass enough to assume
I’m
going to be okay and everyone else will be unlucky, as it’s a sheer gamble in the game, but damn good fun while it lasts.

Way back, Jen, my idea of the future was pretty idealistic. We’ve talked about it so often in peace time, and were agreed on what we wanted out of life, and it was a grand outlook. But now it seems such a myth! Like one of those dreams that can’t possibly come true. We’ll get married and be awfully happy – I know you’ll do everything to make it seem what we both want – there’ll be a cloud over it all for both of us, dear, a cloud that we can’t hope to brush aside. For you, it will be the realization that you’ve given everything in your life to give me a fleeting happiness, and that in accepting it I’m condemning you to great unhappiness ahead, when you could have been
almost
as happy elsewhere, otherwise, with a future both safe and bright.

If the chances were very good, I wouldn’t dream of writing like this, but I’m no dreamer, Jen, and the facts are that immediately ahead is the winter, with all the danger that filthy weather invariably brings to flying (your pullover will help immensely there!). Despite this, our bombers are bound to become even more active than they have been in the summer months, and we’ll hit harder and wider and more often than ever before. We’re the only active force operating against Germany, and as it’s the only way of striking directly we’ll be exploited more and more, especially as the force grows. The RAF, fighters and bombers combined, will undoubtedly win this war in time, but the end isn’t nearly in sight yet, and before it’s all over the losses will be enormous. I wonder how many people ever wonder what the average flier’s outlook on life is in these times? In most cases it’s vastly different from what it was a few months ago. It’s almost entirely fatalistic. There seems no point in making any plans about the future. The present is all that matters, and in this day-to-day existence there are three things that occupy one’s energies most of all:

(1) Intensive attention to one’s machine and equipment, ready for the next trip, so that nothing is left to chance.

(2) Getting enough sleep and exercise.

(3) Getting ‘social glow’ in the Saracen’s Head and keeping mentally fresh!

Doesn’t sound very ambitious, but I’ll bet anything that 95 per cent of the RAF take these as their guiding principles, because only by doing so can they have the most chance of hitting the target and getting back OK . . .

Why am I writing all this, Jen? Well, it’s the answer to what you asked in your letter: you say ‘Do I really want to marry you?’ Yes darling, ‘course I do, and we’ll go through with it in that spell of leave that may come through when I’ve done enough trips to qualify. But I don’t feel much of a man taking you up on such a bad bargain, lovely tho’ it’ll be for me. In the meanwhile, darling, you’ll make me easier in mind if you’ll promise this – until we’re married, if I should be unlucky enough to go up as ‘missing’, don’t wait too long . . . If I could only be sure, Jen, that your future was assured I’d be content, whatever happens.

If
anything happens to me, I’ll want you to go and have a perm, do up the face, put the hat on and carry on – it’ll take a lot of guts but I know you’ll tackle it in the right way. And remember that I’d be wanting you to get happily married as soon as you could. And don’t worry for me these nights more than you can help. It may buck you up to know that I’m feeling bung full of confidence in my own ability, but if I’m to be unlucky, well, I’m prepared for anything. Over the last three months I’ve got used to the idea of sudden accidents – they’ve happened so often to friends and acquaintances that the idea doesn’t startle one much now. Realizing fully what one is up against helps one along a lot. I’m not really windy about anything now. Anyway, there’s too much to do to get windy. I’m longing to see you again, Jenny, and we must make it soon! Keep writing, and when you come up, wear your hat, please, and the smile that cheers me up!

John Bufton never married, for he was killed a month later.

At 10 Squadron, Peter Donaldson, the navigator who had survived Sylt and the bombing of Bassingbourn, was shot down in the sea and taken prisoner with the rest of Ffrench-Mullen’s crew on 9 July. The steady drain of casualties continued. On 16 August they were sent to the Zeiss works at Jena. ‘This place has never heard the sound of gunfire since the Napoleonic War,’ declared Staton in his usual ringing tones at briefing – he was now station commander at Leeming. ‘Make sure it hears it tonight. I don’t want to see anybody back who bombs above 4,000 feet!’ Pete Whitby was flying as a second pilot. His Whitley was approaching Jena at 6,000 feet when the searchlights seized it. They broke away amidst intensive flak, and turned to try again. On their second run at 10,000 feet, shortly after midnight, they had just bombed when their port engine was hit and burst into flames. The fire died, but so did the engine. They settled down to a long struggle home against the headwind, throwing out everything ditchable down to the guns and ammunition.

Tall, fair, lazily good-looking, Whitby had worked in the wool trade in Europe until at the age of twenty he decided to go into the RAF. He was over-age for a short-service commission, but his father wrote to their local MP, Winston Churchill. Whitby got his commission. Since he joined Bomber Command, he had divided his energies between flying and horses, which he loved. He kept an old steeplechaser at Thirsk to ride in off-duty moments in the occasional point-to-point race, and a mare named Myrtle Green at Catterick.

Their ailing Whitley was hit again by flak as they staggered towards the Dutch coast. The wing caught fire and they jettisoned the hatches and leaned out into the slipstream, struggling to suppress the flames. At 3 am they crashlanded in a field just west of Breda. After walking and hiding from German patrols for twenty-four hours, they were taken prisoner. Pete Whitby’s father received a telegram, then a note from 10 Squadron:

Ref 105/6/41/Air

Dear Mr Whitby,

It is my unhappy duty to inform you that your son, F/O Whitby, is missing. The aircraft of which he was Second Pilot failed to return from operations over enemy territory on the night of 16th/17th August.

S. O. Bufton

Pete Whitby remained a prisoner for the duration, and came home in 1945 to find that his mare Myrtle Green had bred him four foals and run up a bill for £600 for fodder while he was the guest of the Third Reich.

One was attuned to getting the chop [said Bufton
²
]. You were resigned to dying every night. You looked round your room before you went out, at the golf clubs in the corner, the books on the shelves, the nice little radio set, the letter to one’s parents propped on the table . . .

One night I saw a Whitley coned by dozens of searchlights on the way back from Cologne, and then shot down in flames. I came back and found that Sergeant Hoare was missing. He was the only 4 Group casualty that night, so I knew that it must have been him that I had seen go. But all that night I kept thinking that I heard the beat of his engines approaching the airfield.

Then I realized that it was only the hot-water pipes in the hut . . .

On 12 December 1940, 10 Squadron sent ten aircraft among 134 from Bomber Command to attack Mannheim. It was a clear night, and most of them came home to report that they had found the target without difficulty. Yet the significance of ‘Operation Rachel’, as the raid was codenamed, lay in the fact that this was the first occasion on which an entire city was the deliberate target of an attack. It was planned on the direct orders of the Prime Minister as a reprisal for the formidable German raid on Coventry a month earlier that had laid waste the centre of the city. The
Mannheim operation was an isolated episode that winter, but it was a foretaste of much that was to come.

The Battle of Britain and the German blitz on British cities had changed the mood of the war in the air. To the fighter pilots on both sides, it might sometimes have seemed a chivalrous ‘duel of eagles’. To those below on the ground it was the very rain of sudden death and terror that they had awaited and feared for so long. Both sides had accidentally bombed each other’s city centres on several occasions since September 1939, and sought to make maximum propaganda capital out of their sufferings, but now it was no longer a matter of accidents. After the first bombs fell on central London on 24 August, the Prime Minister ordered Bomber Command to Berlin on the night of the 25th. In November the Luftwaffe’s Kampfgruppe 100 marked Coventry for devastation using the
X-Gerat
beam system more than two years in advance of any comparable British technique. 400 German aircraft followed in the main wave. Their attack totally destroyed 20,000 houses, killed almost 600 people and injured a thousand more.

At Leeming, Staton pinned photographs of blitzed London, Coventry, Southampton on the wall of the operations room and stabbed a finger at them as he briefed the crews: ‘Go now and do likewise to the Hun!’ The night after the 14 November attack he turned to the crews and asked who lived in Coventry. Bob Dodd put up a hand. He was invited to choose his own target from the four the squadron were detailed to attack that night. Instead of Hamburg or Cologne, however, young Dodd chose Eindhoven aerodrome in Holland, simply because he thought it would be the cushiest. For the most part, these were boys who flew out over Europe, pressing the bomb release as they were ordered without anger, and with little thought for what lay far beneath in the darkness. But as the rage of the Press mounted, and with it the conviction of the Government that the British public demanded vengeance, so Bomber Command’s anxiety about the avoidance of civilian targets in Germany diminished.

Sir Charles Portal, the C-in-C, was one of the earliest and most important advocates of Bomber Command’s offensive against the synthetic oil plants on which Germany was overwhelmingly dependent. In twentieth-century war, cutting off a nation from its fuel supplies would clearly be a decisive blow, and this had long been recognized in Western Air Plan 5(c). But as the nights of 1940 went by and the results of Bomber Command’s sorties were examined, Portal’s doubts about the feasibility of ‘precision’ bombing mounted.