Bomber Command (29 page)

After the traditional bacon and eggs in the mess, they went to briefing. The old informality of Hampden days, when a cluster of pilots and navigators assembled around the central table in the
Ops Room, had vanished with the coming of the ‘heavies’. Now each specialist was independently briefed by his respective squadron chief: signals leader, navigation leader and so on. Then they gathered together, more than a hundred young men, arrayed crew by crew on the bench seats of the Briefing Room facing the central stage, the map still hidden by a curtain until the heart-stopping moment when the CO walked forward and pulled it away to reveal the target. ‘Funf’, the Swinderby ‘Met’ man, talked to them about the weather. The Intelligence Officer briefed them about the importance of the target from notes sent down to him by High Wycombe. He gave them the latest information on the German defences. The ‘Kammhuber line’, named by the British after the German general who had created it, now the coastal breadth of Germany, Holland and Belgium. It was almost impossible for a British bomber to avoid. But within its network of interlocking radar-controlled night-fighter and searchlight zones, each ‘box’ could control only one fighter to one interception at a time. Bomber Command’s constantly intensifying ‘streaming’ technique, pushing the British aircraft along a single course through the defences in the shortest possible time, sought to defeat this outer line of German defences by saturating them. Little was as yet known about the new
Lichtenstein
radar mounted in the fighters themselves, although Scientific Intelligence at the Air Ministry was working towards an astonishingly comprehensive picture.

The station commander stood up to wish them luck, and strode out trailing his attendant staff officers. The crews shuffled to their feet, chattering and gathering up maps and notes.

They were a queer conglomeration, these men – some educated and sensitive, some rough-haired and burly, and drawn from all parts of the Empire, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia . . . Some of them were humming, some were singing, some were laughing, and others were standing serious and thoughtful. It looked like the dressing room where the jockeys sit waiting before a great steeplechase . . .
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They stripped themselves of personal possessions and gathered up parachutes, escape kits, mascots. Swinderby’s station commander chatted easily to them as they prepared. Sam Patch was a popular ‘station master’, at his relaxed best talking to crews, never above stopping his car to offer a crowd of NCOs a lift as they walked back from the local pub on a stand-down night. Waiting for transport to the dispersals was one of the worst moments. Stan Gawler, one of the rear gunners, was always loaded down with dolls and charms with which he decorated his turret. One night he forgot them, and his crew endured a nightmare hour over Hamburg. Peggy Grizel, a young WAAF Intelligence Officer, never failed to be moved by the ways in which each man fought down his fear. Henry Mossop, a Lincolnshire farm boy, lay calmly on the grass looking out into the dusk, smoking his pipe. A young New Zealander sat down with anybody who would listen and talked about his home. Macfarlane, one of ‘Beetle’ Oxley’s successors as CO, insisted on having ‘The Shrine of St Cecilia’ played on the mess gramophone, and after the record was broken one afternoon, dashed into Lincoln to buy another copy before operating that night.

At the dispersals, they lay smoking on the grass until the time came to swing themselves up into the fuselage. There was a familiar stink of kerosene, with which the erks washed out the dirt of every trip. As the sky darkened around them, the pilot and flight engineer ran up the great Merlins one by one. The pilot slid back his window and gave ‘thumbs up’ to the ground crew by the battery cart. Port-outer: Contact. He lifted the cover from the starter button and pressed it down, waiting for the puff of grey smoke shot with flame, the cough and roar as it fired. At last, with all four engines running, he checked the oil pressure and tested the throttles, checked revolutions and magneto drop. The navigator spread his maps. The gunners crammed themselves into the turrets they could not leave for the next six or seven hours.

The rear gunner faced the loneliest and coldest night of all. Gazing back all night into the darkness behind the aircraft, he
often felt that he inhabited another planet from the tight little cluster of aircrew so far forward in the cockpit. Even after electrically heated suits were introduced, they often broke down. Many gunners cut away their turret doors to dispel the nightmare of being trapped inside when the aircraft was hit – they were wedged impossibly tightly in their flying gear. It was difficult even to move freely enough to clear jammed guns with their rubber hammers. There was no chance of wearing a parachute – it was stowed beside them. Some carried a hatchet to give themselves a forlorn chance of hacking their way out of a wreck. The cold was intensified by the removal of a square of perspex to provide a central ‘clear view panel’ to the night sky, a refinement pioneered by Micky Martin’s gunner, Tammy Simpson, among others. Behind the cockpit a powerful heater system had been installed, but there was a perpetual war in most crews about the temperature at which this was maintained, the wireless operator by the hot-air outlet being permanently roasted, the bomb-aimer shivering amidst the draughts through the front gun vents.

At the dispersals, the flight-sergeant fitter handed his pilot Form 700 on his clipboard, to sign for the aircraft, then slipped away to the ground. The flight engineer reported: ‘Engineer to pilot. Rear hatch closed and secure. OK to taxi.’ The pilot signalled to the ground crew to slip the chocks, and closed his window. The wireless operator made a test signal to the airfield Watch Office. ‘Receiving you loud and clear. Strength Niner.’ All over the airfield in the dusk, the Lancasters broke into movement. Twenty tons of aircraft, perhaps five tons of fuel and five more of bombs, bumped slowly round the perimeter to the end of the runway for take-off.

The control officer flashed a green ray for a split second, which was the signal that this plane was designated for take-off [wrote an American spectator as he watched for the first time a Bomber Command take-off for Germany]. Its roaring grew louder and louder as it dragged its heavy tail towards the starting point like a slow, nearly helpless monster. About twenty yards away we could just discern a vast dinosaurish shape; after a moment, as if stopping to make up its mind . . . it lumbered forward, raising its tail just as it passed us, and turning from something very heavy and clumsy into a lightly poised shape, rushing through the night like a pterodactyl. At this instant, a white light was flashed upon it and a Canadian boy from Vancouver who was standing beside me, put down its number and the moment of departure. It vanished from sight at once and we stood staring down the field, where in a few seconds a flashing green light announced that it had left the ground . . .

A great calm settled over the place as the last droning motors faded out in the distance and we all drove back to the control room where a staff hang onto the instruments on a long night vigil . . . I went to sleep thinking of the . . . youngsters I had seen, all now one hundred and fifty miles away, straining their eyes through a blackness relieved only by the star-spangled vault above them.
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A critical measure of a squadron’s efficiency was its rate of ‘Early Returns’, aircraft which turned back over the North Sea with technical trouble. It was always a matter of nice judgement whether pressing on with a jammed turret or malfunctioning oxygen equipment represented courage or foolhardiness. Every crew could expect an Early Return once in a tour. To come home more often suggested accident-proneness or something worse. 50 Squadron had a tradition of pressing on: one night, for instance, an aircraft hit a servicing gantry on take-off. At Swinderby control, they waited for the pilot to request permission to land. Instead there was silence. He simply flew on to complete the trip. Some captains took a vote among the crew whether to turn back. Bill Russell, Oxley’s successor as CO, had no patience with the hesitant. One night a sergeant pilot reported from dispersal that he was suffering magneto drop on one engine and could not take off. It was the man’s third attack of ‘mag drop’ in a month. Russell ran down the control tower steps, drove furiously to the Lancaster, and
ordered the pilot out. He flew the aircraft to Cologne himself, in his shirtsleeves. The pilot was court-martialled and dismissed from the service.

Every night over the North Sea, after the gunners fired their test bursts and they had climbed slowly to cruising height and synchronized their engines, the crew would hear the immortal cliché of Bomber Command down the intercom: ‘Enemy Coast Ahead.’ The flight engineer checked the aircraft black-out. Henceforth, each man became only a shape in the darkness, each part of the aircraft only recognizable by feel or momentary flash of a penlight torch. The instruments glowed softly. The engines roared distantly through the helmet earpieces. Stale air pumped through the constricting oxygen masks. They watched the gunfire lacing the sky from the flakships off the Dutch coast, the brief flicker of explosions and the pencil cones of searchlights sweeping the darkness. From here to Germany, each pilot had his own conviction how best to survive. Some captains on 50, like Jock Abercrombie, flew straight and level all the way to the target. Some changed their throttle settings constantly or desynchronized their engines. Others, like Micky Martin, weaved or changed course repeatedly every moment that they were within range of the defences.

To fly a heavy bomber called for quite different skills from those of a fighter pilot. Airmen say that contrary to popular mystique, there was no special temperament that equipped one man to fly a Spitfire and another a Lancaster: the job made the man. Pilot trainees who showed outstanding virtuosity in handling an aircraft were generally sent to Fighter Command. Only a handful of men in Bomber Command could throw a four-engined bomber through the sky with absolute assurance, or indeed wished to. Most wartime pilots, even after two years’ training, found it a strain coping with the technical problems of taking off, flying and landing a heavy aircraft in one piece, before they began to come to terms with the enemy. Handling a machine as big as a Lancaster required a good measure of brute physical strength. Hundreds of crews were lost in mishaps in which the enemy played no part:
freak weather, collision, bombs falling on friendly aircraft below, botched landings by tired young men. The first six trips accounted for a disproportionate share of casualties. Those who survived that long became statistically slightly more at risk again in mid-tour, when they began to think that they knew it all, and on their last trips when they had grown tired and stale.

To survive, brilliant flying was less important than an immense capacity for taking pains, avoiding unnecessary risks, and maintaining rigid discipline in the air. Canadians were highly regarded as individual fliers, but incurred intense criticism as complete crews, as squadrons, as (eventually) their own No. 6 Group, because they were thought to lack the vital sense of discipline. A 50 Squadron gunner who was sent one night as a replacement with an all-Canadian crew came home terrified after circling the target while they sang ‘Happy Birthday To You’ down the intercom to their 21-year-old pilot. Later in the war, 6 Group became notorious for indifference to radio-telephone instructions from the Master Bomber over the target.

A pilot such as Micky Martin was daring in the air, but also very careful. He and his crew checked every detail of their own aircraft before take-off, far more meticulously than routine demanded. Martin personally polished every inch of perspex on his cockpit canopy. At 20,000 feet over Germany at night, a fighter was no more than a smear at the corner of a man’s eye until it fired. Martin studied the techniques for improving his own vision, moving his head backwards and forwards constantly, to distinguish between the reality and the optical illusion beyond the windscreen. He taxied the aircraft to the butts before each trip so that his gunners could realign their Brownings. Every man who survived Bomber Command agrees that luck was critical: however brilliant a flier, he was vulnerable to the Russian roulette of a predicted flak barrage. But a careful crew could increase their chance of survival a hundred per cent.

It was difficult for so many young men who flew perhaps a dozen trips without a glimpse of a fighter, without being struck by flak, without becoming lost: operations began to take on the tedium of an eternal drive on a darkened motorway. Reflexes numbed, vigilance flagged, because this was human nature. Careful pilots banked gently every few moments to enable their gunners to search the sky beneath the aircraft. No good captain tolerated chatter on the intercom: it was sacred, reserved for the paralysing second when the rear gunner shouted: ‘Fighter port! Corkscrew port – now!’ Then they would heel into the mad, stomach-churning routine of fighter evasion, the gunner who could see the enemy directing the pilot who could not, the aircraft screaming in torment, the smell of vomit so often wafting up from a navigator or bomb-aimer overcome by fear and the violence of their movement, the fuselage shuddering as the gunners fired. The first seconds were vital: so often, if the fighter was observed he would break away to seek easier meat. A pilot’s confidence in throwing his aircraft through the sky was critical. Some, in their fear of causing the bomber to break up, banked cautiously and died. Others – the ones who lived – recognized that the danger of a wing collapsing was nothing to that of a fighter’s cannon. Steep bank to port, full left rudder, fall sideways for a thousand feet, wrench the aileron controls to starboard, soar into climbing turn to the right, then opposite aileron and dive again . . .

Anyone who had not done plenty of practice flying by instruments might well have been terrified by the result of all this. The speed varied between 200 and 90 mph, the altimeter lost and regained 1,000 feet, the rate of descent and ascent varied between 1,000 and 2,000 feet a minute, the horizon level just went mad and the rate of turn and skid needles varied from a maximum to port to a maximum to starboard every half minute. The physical exertion for each pull at the bottom of each dive was about equal to pulling on a pair of oars in a boat race.
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