Bomber Command (37 page)

On their twenty-first trip, a normally cushy run to Milan for which the ‘erks’ threatened to paint an ice-cream cone on the nose of T-Tommy instead of the usual bomb in the morning, they were crossing the French coast at 20,000 feet when they saw a sudden streak of tracer, and an aircraft fell in flames in front of them.

‘Good God! That was a fighter in front,’ shouted the astonished Maze. ‘Keep a sharp lookout, chaps. Somebody’s bought it just ahead. Keep looking down, Rammy’ – this to the rear gunner. ‘They can see us perfectly in this light.’

Maze was acutely sensitive to the difficulty of seeing another aircraft in darkness. One night when the entire crew were keeping a sharp lookout, he was horrified to glance up and see another bomber glide across them only feet above the cockpit. The two Halifaxes had been quite oblivious of each other. But on this night he still declined to unlock T-Tommy’s auto-pilot. The first that the crew knew of the fighter attack was a cannon shell bursting in the rear turret, putting the guns out of action. A second smashed into the controls in the tail, a third into the bomb bay. Maze snatched the controls and flung the Halifax into a dive amidst the appalling din in the fuselage. The tracer fell away to starboard, then they were corkscrewing.

‘Can you see him, Rammy?’ asked Maze urgently.

‘Get weaving, skipper, he’s coming in from the port,’ shouted the rear gunner.

They straightened out at last and Maze ordered the bomb-aimer to jettison their load. ‘Give me a course for home, Dave,’ he said to the navigator. ‘Have a look aft, will you, Willie. The elevator is almost impossible to control.’ They had lost the trimming tab control, and the rear gunner was lying slightly wounded on the rest bed in the darkness of the fuselage. They were back over the sea now, heading towards England. The flight engineer knotted the dinghy rope round the control column, then he and the bomb-aimer joined Maze’s straining efforts to force back the stick and maintain height. The Halifax lurched and bucked across the sky, losing height with every lunge. The rear gunner, slightly cut in the leg, began to apologize down the intercom for failing to spot the fighter more quickly.

‘Shut up, Rammy!’ snapped the preoccupied Maze. ‘I’ve no time to listen to you now.’

‘Is that an aerodrome coming up, Dave?’ he asked the navigator, as he hung with fierce concentration to the yoke.

‘It could be Ford, skipper.’

Maze began to talk urgently into the R/T: ‘Hallo, Ford, hallo, Ford, I am in difficulty, may I have permission to land?’

There was an eternity of silence, then: ‘Hallo, hallo. You may land.’

There was no chance of circling to make an approach. Maze merely plunged for the runway. After a final heave on the stick
with half the crew straining at the dinghy rope, they lurched on to the tarmac, bounced and steadied. The Halifax’s cargo of frightened, exhausted young men stumbled out on to the tarmac in the darkness to face an angry Control Officer who berated them for landing without permission. They had touched down not at Ford, but at nearby Thorney Island, miraculously avoiding three training aircraft which were simultaneously practising circuits and bumps.

Maze’s crew had one more bad night. They lost an engine over Munich, and for several minutes feared vividly that they could not remain airborne, while Maze put them into a steep dive to extinguish the flames. Sometimes this tactic succeeded, sometimes it bellowed the flames into melting off the wing. Somebody muttered urgently over the intercom: ‘Let’s bale out and walk home over the Alps.’ But Maze said: ‘For goodness sake – it’s a hell of a lot worse down there than it is up here!’ No one baled out. After eleven hours in the air, they came home. John Maze, just 21, became one of the few 76 Squadron pilots to complete a tour in 1943. He was posted to become ADC to Sir Arthur Harris.

At the end of the Battle of the Ruhr, Bomber Command had flown 18,506 sorties, and lost 872 aircraft missing over Germany – 4.7 per cent – plus a further 16 per cent damaged. On some nights, 30 per cent of all aircraft dispatched came back damaged or failed to return at all. They had poured 58,000 tons of bombs on to Germany, more than the Luftwaffe dropped on Britain throughout 1940 and 1941, more than Bomber Command dropped on Germany in the whole of 1942. The photographs of cities that they had attacked revealed thousands of acres of industrial and residential devastation. High Wycombe computed that up to the end of 1942, 400 acres of urban Germany had been razed by bombing. In 1943, this figure would rise to 26,000 acres. Crews were coming faster and faster from the training machine, as were aircraft from the production line. Harris’s daily availability of bombers rose
from 593 in February to 787 in August 1943. Yet which was being punished more severely, Germany or Bomber Command? Who was winning the extraordinary contest between bombs and concrete? The rate of attrition on both sides was becoming awesome, yet the struggle seemed as far as ever from any decisive conclusion.

2. Hamburg

Holme-on-Spalding Moor was a bleak, unfriendly sort of place, where it was widely felt by the aircrew that the village had turned its back on the war. The locals resented the RAF’s domination of their bowling alley. Wives and girlfriends who lodged nearby were treated with ill-concealed disdain, scarlet women from the cities. Every six weeks or so, for those aircrew who survived there were seven days’ leave. Some men went home, others hastened with their crews to the blacked-out joys of London. They were crestfallen to discover how little they knew about how to be sinful. Most ended their evenings at the RAF Club or the YMCA. On evenings off from Holme, there were cheap taxis to York and the pleasures of Betty’s Bar and The Half Moon. In the officers’ mess, more often than not they would merely drink a few pints and go quietly to bed after a game of darts. Only a few relentless spirits went to the village every night and drank themselves to oblivion like a gunner, ‘The Pommified Aussie’, who had to be retrieved with monotonous regularity from the police station. Most men waited until there was some excuse for a binge, and then threw themselves into the traditional excitements of wartime bomber stations: great choruses of ‘Do You Know the Muffin Man?’, as one by one they tiptoed across the mess floor with a pint of beer on their heads; frenzied games of ‘Flarepath’, diving across the floor between two lines of human beacons clutching flaming newspapers. But, often in 1943, they were too tired for games.

In the morning they hung about the Flight Office playing with the station’s stray mongrel, ‘Flak’, or perhaps teasing somebody about ‘Calamity Kate’, the decorative WAAF clerk who was widely
believed to be a passport to ‘the chop’ for any man who took her out.

Then despite a very gloomy picture painted by the Met Office, we learned that the raid was ‘on’. Our system for finding this news in advance was for all the pilots to put a penny in a box, the contents of which were given to the Wing Co’s confidential clerk. In return for this small consideration, we were given ‘the gen’ and could make our plans accordingly.

The atmosphere in the Flight Office would be very tense until the news came through. Completely contrary to the popular impression given in books and films, there would be a relieved cheer, loud laughter and a babble of excited talk if we were not to operate that day. If we were to do so, the pilots would merely make some casual remark and quickly slip away to get themselves, their aircraft and crews ready. Later we would return to learn what the target would be – not without some secret dread in our hearts that it might again be Berlin or the Ruhr.
³

On the evening of 24 July 1943, they were briefed to take part in the most effective attack of the war by Bomber Command, on Hamburg. They had been to the great north German port before. But this time, they were told, it would be different. First, 791 aircraft would be taking part in ‘Operation Gomorrah’. Second, and much more important, this time it would be easy. They were to be equipped with a brilliant scientific device that would fog the radar screens of Germany – guns, night-fighters and all. It was codenamed
Window
, and consisted simply of bundles of narrow metal foil strips, to be pushed down a special chute by the wireless operator and flight engineer at intervals during the run over Germany. It is a measure of the crews’ faith in the scientists that they were at once excited and delighted by the vision of chaos among the defences, convinced that they were being given a weapon that would turn the odds dramatically. ‘Why haven’t we had it before?’ asked Bamber, one of the flight commanders.
‘Er . . . good question,’ said the man from 4 Group Operational Research.

Window
had been devised and reported effective by the spring of 1942, but at a meeting to discuss its future, Lord Cherwell made one of his periodic baleful interventions. If it would work against German radar, he pointed out, obviously it would work against our own. What happened if the Germans launched a new blitz against Britain? Cherwell’s remarks threw Fighter and Anti-Aircraft Commands and Herbert Morrison’s Ministry of Home Security into confusion. They successfully opposed the introduction of
Window
by Bomber Command, despite a belated effort by Tizard, from the wilderness, to have them overruled. But by the autumn of 1942, the Luftwaffe had become a negligible threat to Britain. The official historians remark tartly on the curious failure of Sir Arthur Harris to ‘exert himself to secure the introduction of a measure which was expected so greatly to favour the offence at the expense of the defence’.
⁴
Once again, Harris had been slow to respond to technological possibilities. Only in the summer of 1943, when the losses of his force to radar-directed night-fighters had become intolerable, did he move at last with real urgency to press for the introduction of
Window
.
⁵
The Prime Minister personally overruled Morrison and Fighter Command’s objections. ‘Let us open the window!’ he declared majestically. On the night of 24 July, Bomber Command did so with remarkable results.

76 Squadron was now a three-flight unit with an establishment of thirty aircraft. On the night of the 24th, twenty-four crews were briefed for Hamburg. Despite the clear night, three returned early. The remaining twenty-one approached the target dazzled by the vision before them. Searchlights wandered lost across the sky like drunken men. The city’s fifty-six heavy and thirty-six light flak batteries were firing desperate blind box barrages, helpless in their inability to take radar predictions on the aircraft above. The night-fighters had failed utterly to locate the bomber stream.

It was a brief moment of triumph for the bomber in its ceaseless duel against the fighter, and the crews savoured it, as
they had the great thrust against Cologne more than a year before. The attack on Hamburg was the most perfectly orchestrated since the war began. Two minutes before zero hour at 1 am, twenty Pathfinder aircraft dropped yellow Target Indicators blind on H2S, under ideal conditions since Hamburg’s coastline gave the city an exceptionally sharp radar image. They were followed by eight Pathfinders carrying red TIs, which were aimed visually. A further fifty-three Pathfinders backed up visually with green TIs. The Main Force, bombing from Zero + 2 minutes to Zero + 48, were ordered to overshoot the markers by two seconds, in an effort to reduce the ‘creepback’, a pronounced feature of recent attacks.

The raid was an overwhelming success. 306 of the 728 aircraft which claimed to have attacked dropped their bombs within three miles of the aiming-point. Vast areas of Hamburg were devastated for the loss of only twelve bombers. The next day, north Germany awoke to find a bewildering array of metal-foil strips littered like errant Christmas decorations over hedges and houses and farmland, being chewed by cows and draped whimsically over telegraph wires. But the Luftwaffe scientists were not puzzled. They had understood the principles of
Duppel
, or
Window
, for as long as Bomber Command, but had flinched from employing it for the same reasons. They knew no antidote.

One of the twelve aircraft lost on the night of the 24th came from 76 Squadron, and another, piloted by a rather wild young man named Mick Shannon, crashed on landing back at Holme. Shannon was having a terrifying tour. The next night, when they went to Essen, his aircraft was hit by flak, shearing off a propeller which spun smashing into the fuselage. In the mid-upper turret was Waterman, a professional poacher in civilian life, and one of the finest shots on the squadron. He normally flew with ‘A’ flight commander, Bamber, but was filling in for a sick man. Now, Waterman baled out over Germany before Shannon decided that he could save the aircraft, and staggered home to bellyland at Holme. Such incidents, in which part of a crew baled out in the immediate crisis following an aircraft being hit, were not
uncommon. If a man did not jump within seconds, he knew that he might never have the chance to jump at all. Ten days later, Shannon was hit yet again over Mannheim. But this time no one jumped. Neither he nor his crew ever came home.

In daylight on 25 and 26 July, Ira Eaker’s 8th Air Force flew 235 sorties to Hamburg to stoke the fires lit by Harris. On the night of the 25th, Mosquitoes staged a nuisance raid on the city, further to exhaust the defenders and the air-raid services. Then, on the 27th, Bomber Command went back. This was an entirely new technique: absolute devastation by repeated attack, saturating the fire services. 787 aircraft were dispatched, by a different route from that taken on the 24th. 722 bombed Hamburg, and of these 325 were within three miles. Fires were still blazing from the earlier attacks. Now these were redoubled by the new wave of flame and smoke, crashing masonry, roaring conflagration.

But the Luftwaffe responded to
Window
with remarkable speed and flexibility, assisted by their scientists’ instant understanding of the crisis. They knew that, overnight, the ground-controlled interception of individual bombers had been eclipsed. Only weeks before, they had created the first ‘Wild Boar’ squadrons, of single-engined fighters which were vectored into the bomber stream over the target by radio running-commentary, as information seeped in from observer posts all over Germany about the bombers’ direction and changes of course. Now, these ‘freelances’ were rapidly reinforced. The ‘Wild Boars’ became the basis of the Luftwaffe’s immediate counter-attack, and formidably effective they proved, although costly in fighter accident losses. British ‘spoof’ raids by small forces of aircraft ‘windowing’ in a manner that suggested the Main Force, together with deceptive routing to the target, often held off the fighters until the bombers had attacked. But then, even amidst their own flak and searchlights, the fighters came in. A handful of Me109s piloted by experts proved capable of shooting down a succession of bombers each in a single night once they had locked into the stream. Until the very end of the war, the Luftwaffe maintained their counter-offensive with all the energy
and brilliance that their supplies of fuel and trained pilots allowed. Some airmen argue that in defeating the German radar network with
Window
, Bomber Command showed the Germans the way to a much simpler and deadlier means of controlling fighter defence.