Bomber Command (2 page)

As for those who flew, it was deeply moving to sit through long evenings in suburban bungalows, listening to very ordinary middle-aged men describing the quite extraordinary things that they did as young aircrew over Germany. I am grateful that my generation has been spared the need to discover whether we could match the impossible sacrifices that they made.

Max Hastings

Jerpoint House

Co. Kilkenny

January 1979

PROLOGUE

NORFOLK AND HELIGOLAND BIGHT, 18 DECEMBER 1939

On Monday, 18 December 1939, Leading Aircraftsman Harry Jones of 37 Squadron, Bomber Command, ate his last breakfast in England for five and a half years at home in Feltwell with his wife Mary. The war was already more than three months old, yet the Joneses’ lives still possessed the tidy discipline of suburban commuters. Feltwell was a tiny Norfolk village on the edge of the empty horizons of the Fens, where they rented a small flat. Every morning, LAC Jones kissed Mary, boarded his squadron bicycle, and pedalled for ten minutes down the road to the airfield where 37 Squadron was based. A rigger by trade, he spent his working days tending the airframes of the twin-engined Vickers Wellington I bombers with which Feltwell was equipped. The previous day, Sunday, he was in the hangars carrying out a routine sixty-hour check on his aircraft, and sorting out some trouble with an oleo leg. Today he would be home again at lunchtime for steak and chips with a poached egg on top. Mary, a pretty, jolly, bespectacled farmer’s daughter who defied her family’s direst warnings about servicemen by marrying Harry fourteen months before, was spending the morning putting the finishing touches to her Christmas pudding.

Harry Jones loved the Royal Air Force. The son of a Birmingham brewery worker, like so many other boys of his generation he had yearned to be a pilot. The day in 1935 that he reported to the recruiting office just short of eighteen years old, this first ambition was brought back to earth with a bump: ‘You’ve got to be a
gentleman to fly, my lad!’ So Harry Jones did the next best thing and became a rigger. In 1938 he was posted to Feltwell.

For sixpence a day extra pay, however, ground crew could volunteer for occasional flying duties. After five weeks training on drum-fed Lewis guns at North Coates, LAC Jones qualified to wear the brass winged bullet of an air gunner on his arm and to fly when required in the rear turret of one of the squadron’s Wellingtons. The privilege of flying had to be fitted in with routine ground duties, of course. Noncommissioned aircrew volunteers were invariable targets for persecution by a station’s senior NCOs, who regarded them as ‘spoilt brats’ trying to escape fire drill, guard details and other real airman’s business. It was not unusual for Harry Jones and his kind to return from a six-hour exercise and find themselves rostered for a 24-hour guard duty while their pilots adjourned to bed or the mess. The Other Ranks’ cookhouse closed according to ground duties schedules, and remained impervious to special pleading from aircrew late for breakfast after a night flight. The Royal Air Force was a young service, demanding technical flair, imagination, initiative. Yet its hierarchy and routines were still those devised for the armies, and the baser human material, of an earlier age. It was a frustrating paradox, but one which didn’t trouble Harry Jones. He loved to fly, he loved 37 Squadron and the Wellingtons and the smell of high-octane fuel and, yes, perhaps even the bull and brass-polishing and cracking discipline of a prewar RAF station.

37 was one of 3 Group’s six operational squadrons at the outbreak of war. Like the rest of Bomber Command, none of them had so far been permitted to attack any land target on enemy territory, while the British Government cautiously debated the future of aerial bombardment. When it was suggested that the RAF might bomb the Ruhr, Whitehall declared with affronted decency that factories were private property. Even after the German
blitzkrieg
on Warsaw, Allied politicians still fervently hoped to avoid provoking such an assault on their own civilians. Since 3 September, 3 Group had flown, and bled, in three ineffectual attacks on
naval targets off the German coast and a number of other minor sorties. But 37 Squadron itself had yet to engage the enemy for the first time. The squadron’s only casualties since the outbreak of war had been the crew of an old Harrow, which crashed while lost on an exercise. After the first fortnight, when the squadron was shuttled round England in a fever of panicky diversions to avoid an expected German attack, they came home to Feltwell and stayed there. The war, and even the training for it, returned to its usual gentlemanly pace. Once or twice the squadron took part in desultory affiliation exercises with Fighter Command’s Spitfires. After the most recent, in November with a flight from Tangmere, the fighter pilots reported that they could have wiped out 37 Squadron in ten minutes. Nobody believed them. Rivalry with Fighter Command and ill-concealed disdain for its flamboyant habits precluded close co-operation in training. Bomber Command was full of pride in itself, one mess of the most delightful flying club in the world. Tangmere could save their line-shoots for the Luftwaffe. A Wellington could take care of itself. 37 Squadron settled back into Norfolk village life, marching on Sundays to church for the sermons of the local vicar, ‘Jubilate Joe’. An official request was sent to the station to make less noise on take-off, because an aged local resident was dying in a cottage close to the flight path.

But at 8.15 am on that 18 December, as Harry Jones cycled up to ‘A’ Flight hangar, Feltwell’s usual disciplined Monday morning calm was already shattered. Six aircraft had been taxied in from their dispersals and were being warmed up on the stands by the ground crews. Armourers were traversing turrets and checking bomb loads. ‘Come on, Jonah, you’re flying!’, somebody shouted. Jones hurried into the hangar and checked the roster in the Flight Book on the table. He was down for duty as rear gunner with Sergeant Ruse.

Amidst the hustle of aircrew pulling on flying clothes and seizing maps and equipment, they drew flying rations of sandwiches and chocolate, to be returned intact if the exercise was for any reason uncompleted. Jones had no time to talk to the other
four members of the crew before he swung himself into the turret of Ruse’s aircraft behind his twin Browning .303s. The Wellington began to move forward across the grass, past the squadron commander Joe Fogarty, standing as always beside the runway, saluting as ‘A’ Flight rolled past one by one. They bumped towards take-off. At last Jones called to Ruse on the intercom: ‘What’s going on, skipper?’

‘They’ve found the German navy, and we’re going to Wilhelmshaven to attack them . . .’

The operation of which 37 Squadron was about to become a part had been conceived months before the war, by the Air Ministry’s Directorate of Plans. Among the thick file of alternative attacks to be carried out by Bomber Command, Western Air Plan 7B called for the bombing of the German fleet in or around its base at Wilhelmshaven. In the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of war, while the Government shrank from authorizing an assault on German industry, it seized enthusiastically upon WAP 7B. The German navy was obviously a legitimate target, surrounded by water and therefore safe from the risk that ill-aimed bombs might fall on civilians. Bomber Command was impatient to flex its muscles. On 4 September, fourteen Wellingtons of 3 Group and fifteen Blenheims of 2 Group carried out the first of a series of attacks on the German navy in its bases. The Blenheims attacked the pocket-battleship
Admiral Scheer
in the Schillig Roads with great gallantry at low level, hitting the ship four times. None of the bombs exploded. Five Blenheims were lost. The Wellingtons, bombing the
Scharnhorst
and the
Gneisenau
in the Elbe at higher level, scored no hits on their targets, but lost only two of their own number.

The concept of the self-defending bomber formation, fighting its way over enemy lines to attack vital targets miles behind any battlefield, lay at the core of the theory of strategic air power. The power-operated gun turrets now fitted to the Wellingtons and
Whitleys of Bomber Command represented a major British breakthrough in armament technology, and it was believed that they gave the RAF’s bombers a decisive margin of protection against an attacking fighter. Group and Bomber Command headquarters studied closely the reports on the events of 4 September, and professed themselves very encouraged by the failure of German Me109 fighters to close with the Wellingtons. Although in reality one Wellington and one Blenheim were destroyed by fighters, it was believed at Bomber Command that enemy antiaircraft fire – ‘flak’ – had accounted for all the RAF losses. Tactics were adjusted accordingly. Henceforth attacks would be carried out at higher levels.

On 3 December, after a prolonged lull provoked by digestion of the lessons of September, by lack of suitable targets and weather, and by the general lack of urgency about prosecuting the war that characterized all British activities at this period, a formation of twenty-four Wellingtons from 3 Group carried out a second abortive operation against German cruisers off Heligoland and returned without loss, despite a series of German fighter attacks. These relatively large British forces had failed to damage the enemy, but Bomber Command was encouraged by their very survival. Even when a third ‘armed patrol of the Schillig Roads’ by twelve Wellingtons on 12 December ended in tragedy, with the loss of half the force, there was no weakening of confidence at the top. It was believed that most if not all the losses had been inflicted by flak and not fighters, despite repeated attacks by Me109s.

‘The failure of the enemy’, noted Air Commodore Norman Bottomley, Bomber Command’s Senior Air Staff Officer and the future Deputy Chief of Air Staff in 1944, ‘must be ascribed to good formation flying. The maintenance of tight, unshaken formations in the face of the most powerful enemy action is the test of bomber force fighting efficiency and morale. In our service, it is the equivalent of the old “Thin Red Line”, or the “Shoulder to Shoulder” of Cromwell’s Ironsides . . .’

There can be no doubt that these raids were deliberately
conceived as a means of testing Germany’s defences and Bomber Command’s tactics, rather than as a serious assault on German sea power. There is no other way to explain the Command’s lack of concern about the failure of its aircraft to sink or damage a single enemy ship. Even after the experience of 12 December – which he himself compared to the Charge of the Light Brigade – 3 Group’s AOC, the cheerfully energetic and popular Air Vice-Marshal, John ‘Jackie’ Baldwin, was impatient to get his squadrons once again to grips with the enemy.

At 3 pm on the afternoon of 17 December, Baldwin telephoned on the scrambler to Air Commodore Bottomley at Bomber Command HQ at High Wycombe, to urge a further operation against the German fleet:

The Group Commander pointed out the importance of seizing the very first suitable day in view of the few such occasions which were likely to present themselves under winter conditions. He stated that from the point of view of preparation, the details of the plan had been thoroughly considered by all concerned, and he was satisfied that if Monday the 18th of December were given as zero day, there would be no undue haste in planning and preparation right down to the crews engaged.
¹

Air Chief Marshal Sir Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt, C-in-C Bomber Command, concurred. He approved Baldwin’s proposal to mount a new attack on the German fleet at Wilhelmshaven on the 18th, subject only to a proviso that the Wellingtons bomb from at least 10,000 feet, which should take them above effective flak. Group-Captain Goodwin, SASO at 3 Group HQ drafted orders for the operation to be carried out by twenty-four Wellingtons. Nine aircraft would come from 149 Squadron at Mildenhall, including that of the formation leader, Wing-Commander Richard Kellett, who had also led the 3 December sweep; nine would come from 9 Squadron at Honington; the remaining six from 37 Squadron at Feltwell. ‘Task: to attack enemy warships in the Schillig Roads or
Wilhelmshaven’, began the Operation Order. ‘Great care is to be taken that no bombs fall on shore, and no merchant ships are to be attacked. Formations shall not loiter in the target area, and all aircraft are to complete bombing as soon as possible after the sighting signal has been made.’

‘Not only did I have all the leaders into the Operations Room the night before the mission went out,’ wrote Baldwin to Ludlow-Hewitt a few days later, ‘but I personally explained to each of them my ideas on formation flying and what I meant by mutual assistance, and they all professed that they agreed and understood.’

Late in the afternoon of Sunday the 17th, the order went out to the squadrons taking part in the operation to stand-by at two hours’ notice for take-off from 0730 hrs on the morning of the 18th. Pilots and observers were briefed by squadron and station commanders. Part-time crew members such as Harry Jones were thought to need no enlightenment beyond their time of take-off, and many of them learnt this only the next morning.

Before dawn on the 18th, a Whitley of 4 Group, from 78 Squadron at Dishforth in Yorkshire, flew out across the North Sea, approaching the island of Heligoland at 0800 in patchy cloud, ideal cover for a daylight bomber operation. The crew signalled their weather report, and turned homewards towards England. 3 Group HQ passed the final readiness order to the Wellington squadrons: take-off would be at 0930; squadrons would take up formation over King’s Lynn before crossing the North Sea. The attack against Wilhelmshaven was on.

Most of 9 Squadron’s officers were out playing rugger on their home pitch at Honington the previous afternoon, when word reached ‘Donkeydrop’ Horsefall, the adjutant, that nine crews would be required for operations the next day. 3 Group’s young pilots probably had fewer illusions about the likelihood of their own survival than their senior officers. It was an affectionate cliché of Bomber Command since long before the war that it was a club
of which a member landing at any airfield in England would meet someone he knew. 9 Squadron had heard all about the losses of 12 December. They perceived that this would be a hard war, in which it was unlikely that those who were in at the beginning would remain to see the end, and of course they were perfectly correct. Perhaps the very uncertainty about the nature of the battle that they would be called upon to fight made duty harder for these young men of December 1939 than for those who came after them, to whom at least the reality was brutally apparent.