Bomber Command (26 page)

5 Group had always been considered – not least by 5 Group – Bomber Command’s crack division. 50 was one of its outstanding squadrons. In 1941 its commanding officer was one of the legendary leaders of Bomber Command, Gus Walker. By early 1942 Walker had been succeeded by Wing-Commander ‘Beetle’ Oxley, a rather more pedestrian figure. The corpulent Oxley was an excellent and forceful administrator, but flew only a minimum of operations himself. At his briefings, crews would sometimes shout that half-serious, half-mocking taunt at groundlings: ‘Get some in!’ Oxley would say, ‘Piece of cake tonight, chaps. Last time I was over Mannheim it was only defended by two men and a dog’, which caused a good deal of derisive laughter, since everybody knew that he was harking back to some primeval date in 1940. But Oxley knew how to drive men, and he detested the enemy. Every new crew at 50 Squadron was given a CO’s pep-talk on ‘the need to work up Hun-hate’. Oxley’s passionate dedication to the business of killing Germans had become a sort of legend in 5 Group, and not only there. A 50 Squadron gunner shot down early in 1942 was astonished by one of the first questions put to him by a fascinated German interrogator at Dulag Luft: ‘Who is this man Oxley?’

50 Squadron in 1942 bred and trained a long succession of outstanding pilots and crews, including many who went to form the Dambusters a year later. Henry Maudslay, the quiet, gentle Old
Etonian son of a rich West Country family, was a former Coastal Command ‘Kipper Fleet’ pilot. Like his 50 Squadron colleague ‘Hoppy’ Hopgood, he would die over the Mohne Dam. Les Knight, a little Australian, completed his tour with 50 and burst the Eder dam before his luck ran out over the Dortmund–Ems canal one night in 1943. The rumbustious ‘Trev’ Trevor-Roper, with his Oxford accent and Billingsgate vocabulary, was a sergeant gunner at Swinderby before he was commissioned and became Guy Gibson’s rear gunner.

Micky Martin, who with Gibson, Willie Tait and Leonard Cheshire would be regarded as the four great RAF bomber pilots of the war, transferred to 50 from the Australian 455 Squadron when 455 were posted to Coastal Command. The son of a well-established Australian medical family, Martin was sent to England early in 1939 to sow his wild oats before settling down to train as a doctor. Single-minded in anything he attempted, he managed to get through a thousand pre-war pounds in eight weeks, much of it on horses – he rode in amateur races himself. He then applied to join the RAF as a fighter pilot, and after some bureaucratic problems he was accepted and abandoned his flat in Mayfair for initial flying training. By early 1942 he had completed part of a tour of operations in 455 with his all-Australian crew. Foxlee and Simpson, his gunners, Bob Hay, his bomb-aimer, and Jack Leggo, his navigator, eventually became almost as famous as Martin himself. Aweing English colleagues with their reckless life-style on the ground, they made a reputation for brilliance and utter determination in the air. In 1942 Martin was one of a select band of like-minded spirits. By 1945 this wild man was a rare phenomenon. He lived.

Like every squadron in the RAF, 50 also had its private celebrities, known to every man on the station but few outside it, and mostly destined for unmarked graves in Germany. There was Charlie Stone, the tough, flippant former architectural student who was their tame cartoonist; Drew Wyness, cheerful and handsome, married to an enviably beautiful model; Jock Abercrombie, who once flew Ed Murrow to Berlin and brought him home a
shaken reporter; Paul Crampton, who suffered every possible mishap and near-disaster as he lurched through his tour; Flash Southgate; Micky Moores; Hughie Everitt, with his unnaturally flawless uniform and crisp salute; the three American gunners in Canadian uniforms who each earned more in a week than ‘Beetle’ Oxley – Swinderby knew them all intimately.

It is important to stress the extraordinarily high calibre of the human material that came to Bomber Command. The majority had matriculated and would have been at university or working in one of the professions, if they were not in the RAF. Their imaginations had recoiled from the prospect of trudging through the war in the infantry, and they had been captured by the vision of flying, the glamour that only faded from the blue uniform as they climbed into their lonely cockpits at dusk.

Ken Owen was a 50 Squadron navigator, one of almost half his sixth form at Pontypridd Grammar school who volunteered for the RAF at the outbreak of war: ‘We tended to be the gilded youth of our generation: we belonged to the local tennis and cricket clubs, and our fathers knew the local bank manager . . .’
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Owen had reached Swinderby after the usual tortuous paperchase through service bureaucracy. He left university at the end of his first year when he was summoned to attend an aircrew selection board at Penarth, outside Cardiff. There was a prolonged, searching medical examination which eliminated many of the queue on the first day as colour-blind, slightly deaf or slow-reflexed. The next day they sat an intelligence test which emphasized spatial judgement. In the afternoon they went before an interview board. A few days later, Owen was among the successful candidates who found themselves summoned by letter to St John’s Wood reception centre in north London. Here, like so many RAF volunteers through the war, he spent a dreary fortnight among men falling asleep in rows at lectures on cricket and similar time-fillers until they were packed off to Elementary Flying Training school near Carlisle. Owen was washed out of pilot training within a fortnight, and posted to learn to be a navigator. At an OTU in Shropshire, he
joined a crew and graduated on the old Blenheim. They reached Swinderby bursting with enthusiasm to get into the air, and were deeply crestfallen when the flight commander said off-handedly: ‘Oh, nobody’s going to let you near an operational aircraft yet’, and made them fly day and night training exercises for a fortnight before they took off on a trip to Germany.

They flew their first operation to Kassel in a curious daze, almost euphoric in the sense of unreality. It was bright moonlight and the flak was intense, but excitement somehow numbed apprehension. It was only afterwards, remembering, looking ahead to the next time and knowing what was to come, that fear began to seep in. Over the North Sea their feet froze while they sweated profusely under their arms. A few trips later, over the Dortmund–Ems canal, their rear gunner Jackie Smith suddenly shouted: ‘Corkscrew port!’ and the aircraft shook as the cannon shells hammered home from the German fighter. When they pulled out of the dive and found themselves alone, there was still silence from the rear gunner. Owen felt his way aft. Jackie Smith with his curly hair and big black eyes lay hunched over his guns, dead.

For the rest of the crew, there was no more excitement in flying operations, only the grim sense of a job to be done from which there was no honourable escape. The early weeks of 1942 passed in a round of mining sorties, blind groping over Germany in impossible weather, and the abortive efforts to find and sink the
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
in the Channel on their break-out from Brest on 12 February. It was a routine of its own with no sense of the days of the week or any punctuation beyond the next leave or the end of the tour. To a post-war generation, the bomber offensive may conjure up images of terrified German women and children huddled in their shelters as distant British aircraft rained down death from above. To the crews of Bomber Command, Germany was not a place of innocent
gasthausen
and beer cellars where buxom girls smiled and drinkers stamped their feet to the accordion music, but a terrifyingly hostile environment where British airmen died in their hundreds every night. If they thought
at all about what lay far beneath them, they imagined the flak gunners and searchlight crews in their coalscuttle helmets pumping up 88 mm shells and those deadly beams of light that made a man feel ‘as if reproving fingers were pointing at him, as if he himself were a naughty boy suddenly discovered in the dark of a larder’. Even the most sensitive young Englishman found that ‘he felt no guilt or dismay at dropping bombs, simply because his fear entirely submerged any more noble or humane emotion’.
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A fascinating anonymous report in the Air Ministry files dated 21 June 1942 analysed aircrews’ letters opened by the censors: ‘They illustrate the effect of airmen’s remoteness from their attacks on human beings. Expressions of satisfaction that the Germans are having to undergo the punishment they have hitherto meted out to others are found in almost all letters, but there is an absence of vindictiveness or fanaticism in the phrases used . . .’

Their own nation’s propaganda had been perfectly effective in making them visualize the Germany below them as the arsenal of Nazi Europe, the cradle of the Gestapo and the Luftwaffe’s pioneer
blitzkriegs
, of Hitler himself and his thousands of hysterical arm-raising followers. The opening of Bomber Command’s area offensive came at a moment when 30,000 people in Britain had already been killed by German bombing, when vast areas of the City of London, of Coventry and Southampton and a score of other towns lay in ruins. The crews of Bomber Command were very young, and sprung from a generation accustomed to defer to authority. They had been trained and ordered to fly to Germany and release their bombload at a given point. They were told that by doing so they were making a vital contribution to the war effort. With great fear in most of their hearts, they went out each night to do no more and no less than they were ordered. The notion of killing German civilians individually or in bulk troubled only a tiny handful.

One of the first proposals to reach Sir Arthur Harris in the days after he took up his post at High Wycombe in February 1942 came
from the Foreign Office. It wished to revive the old idea of proscription: to name publicly, on the radio, twenty German towns that would be subjected to saturation attack by Bomber Command, and hope for panic among the population, a mass exodus of refugees, and a rising tide of terror across the Third Reich. But whatever Harris’s long-term plans for Germany’s cities, he understood that Bomber Command as yet possessed quite inadequate resources for the sort of wholesale destruction that the Foreign Office wanted. He needed time, and he had no intention of encouraging the Germans to concentrate their defences around a limited number of preordained targets. In the months to come, Bomber Command’s most useful purpose would be to divert resources from Germany’s offensive war effort to the defence of her own cities. To bring this about, Harris proposed to skirmish across the widest possible front.

But as Bomber Command fought off its critics, and most especially the demands of the Royal Navy for transfer of aircraft that would have caused its virtual dissolution, Harris also understood that his forces needed some spectacular successes. In his early months at High Wycombe, he stage-managed a succession of operations which, whatever their strategic shortcomings, were brilliantly successful public-relations efforts for the bomber offensive. On 9 March he sent 235 aircraft to hit the Renault works at Billancourt, which produced 14,000 trucks a year for the
Wehrmacht
. They attacked in a new pattern, led by a wave of flare-droppers, followed by a wave of bombers carrying maximum incendiary loads to fire the centre of the target, followed in turn by the main force with high-explosives. It was another step towards evolving a target-marking routine, shortly to be followed by a development codenamed
Shaker
, which exploited
Gee
as a blind-marking aid in the leading aircraft. 470 tons of bombs were dropped on Billancourt. When the photographs of the Renault works came in the next morning, they were hailed as a triumph. ‘All aircraft bombed the primary,’ exulted 50 Squadron record book. The concentration of bombs around the aiming-point was
judged exceptional. Immediate post-raid euphoria was dampened somewhat when the final damage assessments were in a few weeks later, suggesting that the plant had lost less than two months’ production and that French civilian casualties had been high. But by then Harris’s forces had moved on to greater things.

On 28 March, 234 aircraft attacked the old north German Hanse town of Lübeck. In the weeks following his arrival at High Wycombe, while Harris sent his aircraft to grope through the haze over Essen and other cities of the Ruhr in obedience to the February Air Ministry directive, he had been searching for an area target that they could find, strike and utterly destroy. ‘I wanted my crews to be well “blooded”, as they say in foxhunting, to have a taste of success for a change,’
⁴
he said. Lübeck was on the coast and thus a relatively simple navigation problem. It was lightly defended and had not even been incorporated in the major German civil defence schemes because it seemed an unimportant target. But it was on the Air Ministry’s February list. Above all, as had been pointed out by Bomber Command’s town-planning advisers, it was an old, closely-packed medieval town that would burn far better than the spacious avenues of any modern metropolis. Lübeck was built ‘more like a fire-lighter than a human habitation’, to quote Harris. ‘The inclusion of such a relatively unimportant place as Lübeck, which happened to be especially inflammable, in the target lists’, remark the official historians, ‘showed the extent . . . to which a town might become a target mainly because it was operationally vulnerable.’
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Lübeck, then, did not attract the attention of the bombers because it was important, but became important because it could be bombed.

The attack was led by ten Wellingtons equipped with
Gee
, who laid flares over the city. They were succeeded by a wave of forty fire-raising aircraft loaded with incendiaries. Then came the main force, armed with incendiaries and the huge 4,000-lb high-explosive ‘cookies’ that were to become the heavy weapons of the new generation of heavy bombers. They struck at very low level, in clear skies. The raid was an overwhelming success. The
Gee
aircraft found the target, the incendiaries created huge fires, and the old town of Lübeck was no more. 1,425 houses were totally destroyed and 1,976 badly damaged. 312 people were killed. 12 aircraft were lost of 191 that claimed to have attacked. Of the six aircraft that took part from 50 Squadron, apart from one which returned early with technical trouble, the squadron record book noted almost unprecedentedly that ‘all aircraft were successful in the task’. The Ministry of Economic Warfare in London estimated that Lübeck would take six or seven weeks to resume full industrial production. The bombers’ achievement was hailed as a personal victory for the leadership of Sir Arthur Harris.