Bomber Command (39 page)

They were an exceptionally close-knit crew both in the air and on the ground. Ferris Newton himself owned a little pub near
Leeds named The Old Ball, run by his wife Catherine, and at every spare moment they piled into his battered Morris 8, with bodies protruding from its sunshine roof, and dashed away to ‘The Ancient Knacker’ on petrol bought with stockpiled cigarettes. Reg McCadden, the commissioned navigator, was a Northern Irishman who had been dive-bombed on an auxiliary cruiser in August 1940, and decided that henceforth if there was going to be any bombing done around him, he would be doing it. Andy Maitland, their young bomb-aimer, was passionately enthusiastic about bomber operations. He became a compulsive ‘hours chaser’, one of the few who survived, completing more than ninety trips and ending the war with a permanent commission in Pathfinders.

‘I can see the streets! I can see the streets!’ he shouted in excitement as he lay over his bombsight on their first trip over Germany.

‘F--k the streets, just bomb and let’s get out of here,’ said a furious and much more typical voice down the intercom.

In October 1943, just before the Halifaxes entered a period of even more appalling losses in the Battle of Berlin, reaching a climax in January and February 1944 when they were losing 11 per cent of aircraft dispatched to Germany, Ferris Newton wrote in his diary:

The target was Kassel with a spoof attack on Hanover . . . This being our last trip, we got a really marvellous send-off by everyone. A whole crowd of people on the officers’ mess site waving like mad . . . At the ACP caravan at the end of the runway, S/Ldr Bennett and others all giving us the thumbs-up sign . . .

Needless to say we were first back, for the only time. As we touched down we all gave a loud shout through the intercom, and as George had it on ‘Transmit’, all and sundry heard what we said, not that anybody cared.

After debriefing I gave Catherine a ring, just to tell her I was back and finished. That was about three o’clock in the morning . . . Back at Holme we were having our second breakfast in the officers’ mess kitchen, so we could be with the rest of the crew. There were only three of us who were not commissioned by this time . . .

Completing a tour on Halifaxes in 1943 was a matter for unusual celebration. That early morning of 4 October, as Ferris Newton and his crew rejoiced in their personal victory over the percentages, a WAAF in the operations room at Holme was deleting four missing 76 Squadron aircraft from the list of nineteen crews who had taken off a few hours before – twenty-eight more of Harris’s men gone. In Kassel, they were counting the bodies of 5,200 people.

3. Courage

Throughout the war, morale on British bomber stations held up astonishingly well, although there were isolated collapses on certain squadrons at certain periods – for example, during the heavy losses of the Battle of Berlin. Morale never became a major problem, as it did on some 8th Air Force stations in the face of the terrible losses of 1943 and early 1944. An RAF doctor seconded to study fliers’ spirit at one American station reported in dismay: ‘Aircrew are heard openly saying that they don’t intend to fly to Berlin again or do any more difficult sorties. This is not considered a disgrace or dishonourable.’ Partly the Americans found the appalling business of watching each other die on daylight sorties more harrowing than the anonymity of night operations. Partly also, they were far from their homes, and many did not feel the personal commitment to the war shared by many Englishmen.

But most of the crews of Bomber Command fought an unending battle with fear for most of their tours, and some of them lost it. Even today, the Judge-Advocate General of the Forces is implacably unhelpful on inquiries relating to the problems of disciplinary courts-martial and ‘LMF’ – ‘Lacking Moral Fibre’ – cases among wartime aircrew. I believe that around one man in ten was lost to
operational aircrew at some point between OTU and completing his tour for morale or medical causes, merely because among a hundred aircrew whom I have interviewed myself, almost all lost one member of the crew with which they served at some time, for some reason. Few of these cases would be classified by any but the most bigoted as simple ‘cowardice’, for by now the Moran principle that courage is not an absolute human characteristic, but expendable capital every man possesses in varying quantity, has been widely recognized. But in 1943 most cases of men relieved of operational duty for medical or moral reasons were treated by the RAF with considerable harshness. There was great fear at the top of the service that if an honourable path existed to escape operations, many men would take it. ‘LMF could go through a squadron like wildfire if it was unchecked,’ says one of the most distinguished post-war leaders of the RAF, who in 1943 was commanding a bomber station. ‘I made certain that every case before me was punished by court-martial, and where applicable by an exemplary prison sentence, whatever the psychiatrists were saying.’
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Command was enraged when stories emerged at courts-martial of doctors in Glasgow or Manchester who for five pounds would brief a man on the symptoms necessary to get him taken off operations: insomnia, waking screaming in his quarters, bed-wetting, headaches, nightmares. Station medical officers became notoriously unsympathetic to aircrew with any but the most obvious symptoms of illness. The Air Staff faced a constant dilemma about the management and treatment of aircrew, who were intensively trained to fly, yet for little else. Regular officers were exasperated by the appearance and off-duty behaviour of many temporary officers and NCOs. In their turn, the relentless pursuit of ambition by some career airmen even in the midst of war did not escape the scornful notice of aircrew, especially when they observed some regulars carefully tucked into Flying Training Command or staff jobs rather than flying with operational squadrons.

The Air Ministry considered that morale and disciplinary problems were closely linked. In a 1943 report which attacked the
practice of holding All Ranks dances at bomber stations, which noted that Harris’s men had the highest rate of venereal disease in the RAF and No. 6 Group’s Canadians a rate five times higher than anyone else’s, the Inspector-General of the RAF noted with displeasure:

Aircrew are becoming more and more divorced from their legitimate leaders, and their officers are forgetting, if they ever learnt them, their responsibilities to their men. Aircrew personnel must be disabused of the idea that their sole responsibility is to fly . . . their leisure hours must be more freely devoted to training and hard work . . .

The Air Ministry never lost its conviction that gentlemen made the best aircrew, and a remarkable staff memorandum of late 1942 expressed concern about the growing proportion of Colonials in Bomber Command and suggested: ‘There are indications in a number of directions that we are not getting a reasonable percentage of the young men of the middle and upper classes, who are the backbone of this country, when they leave the public schools.’

When Ferris Newton was interviewed for a commission, the group captain had already noted without enthusiasm that he owned a pub, and inquired whether this catered to the coach trade. Yet the Commonwealth fliers, especially, believed that it was their very intimacy with their crews, their indifference to rank, that often made them such strong teams in the air. An Australian from 50 Squadron cited the example of a distinguished young English ex-public school pilot who was killed in 1943. This boy, he said, was a classic example of an officer who never achieved complete cohesion with his crew, who won obedience only by the rings on his sleeves and not by force of personality: ‘He simply wouldn’t have known how to go out screwing with his gunners in Lincoln on a Saturday night.’ In his memoirs Harris argues that the English made the best aircrew, because they had the strongest sense of discipline. This was a matter of opinion.

To the men on the stations, the RAF’s attitude to their problems
often seemed savagely unsympathetic. One day on a cross-country exercise before they began operations, the bomb-aimer of Lindaas’s crew at 76 Squadron fell through the forward hatch of the aircraft, which had somehow come loose. The rest of the crew thought at first that he had fallen out completely. Only after several moments did they realize that he was clinging desperately beneath the aircraft. Only after several more moments of struggle did they get the dinghy rope around him, and haul him back into the aircraft. When he returned to the ground, he said flatly that he would never fly again. He was pronounced LMF, and vanished from the station. Normally in such cases, an NCO was stripped of his stripes, which had been awarded in recognition of his aircrew status, and posted to ground duties. Only in incontrovertible cases of ‘cowardice in the face of the enemy’, as at one 5 Group station where one night three members of a crew left their aircraft as it taxied to take-off, was the matter referred to court-martial. A further cause of resentment against Permanent Commissioned Officers was that if they wished to escape operations, they could almost invariably arrange a quiet transfer to non-operational duties, because the service was reluctant to instigate the court-martial that was necessary to strip them of rank.

It was very rare for a case to be open and shut. The navigator of a Whitley in 1941 ran amok and had to be laid out with the pilot’s torch over Germany. The man disappeared overnight from the squadron – normal procedure throughout the war, to avoid the risk that he might contaminate others. But the pilot recounting this experience
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added: ‘Don’t draw the obvious conclusion. The next time I saw the man’s name, he was navigating for one of the Dambusting crews.’ Many men had temporary moral collapses in the midst of operational tours. The most fortunate, who were sensitively treated, were sent for a spell at the RAF convalescent home at Matlock in Derbyshire. A post-war medical report argues that many such men sincerely wanted to be rehabilitated and return to operations to save their own self-respect, while genuine
LMF cases proved on close study to be those who should never have survived the aircrew selection process.

But the decisive factor in the morale of bomber aircrew, like that of all fighting men, was leadership. At first, it is difficult to understand what impact a leader can have, when in battle his men are flying with only their own crews over Germany, far out of sight and command. Yet a post-war 8 Group medical report stated emphatically: ‘The morale of a squadron was almost always a direct proportion to the quality of leadership shown by the squadron commanders, and the fluctuations in this respect were most remarkable.’ A good CO’s crews pressed home attacks with more determination; suffered lower losses; perhaps above all, had a negligible ‘Early Return’ rate. Guy Gibson, the leader of the Dambusters, was one kind of legendary Bomber Command CO. Not a cerebral man, he represented the apogee of the pre-war English public schoolboy, the perpetual team captain, of unshakeable courage and dedication to duty, impatient of those who could not meet his standards. ‘He was the kind of boy who would have been head prefect in any school,’ said Sir Ralph Cochrane, his commander in 5 Group.
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For the first four months of 1943, 76 Squadron was commanded by Leonard Cheshire, another of the great British bomber pilots of the war, one of a quite different mould from Gibson, but even more remarkable. Cheshire, the son of a distinguished lawyer, also read law at Oxford, then joined the RAF shortly before the outbreak of war. In 1940 he began flying Whitleys over Germany. By 1943, with two brilliant tours already behind him, he was a 26-year-old wing-commander. There was a mystical air about him, as if he somehow inhabited another planet from those around him, yet without affectation or pretension. ‘Chesh is crackers,’ some people on the squadrons said freely in the days before this deceptively gentle, mild man became famous. They were all the more bewildered when he married and brought back from America in 1942 an actress fifteen years older than himself.

Yet Leonard Cheshire contributed perhaps more than any other single pilot to the legend of Bomber Command. He performed extraordinary feats of courage apparently on impulse, yet studied the techniques of bombing with intense perception and intelligence, later pioneering the first precision marking of the war as leader of 617 Squadron. At 76 Squadron there was a joke about Cheshire, that ‘the moment he walks into the bar, you can see him starting to work out how much explosive it would need to knock it down’. He was possibly not a natural flying genius in an aircraft like Micky Martin, but, by absolute dedication to his craft, he made himself a master. He flew almost every day. If he had been on leave and was due to operate that night, he would go up for two hours in the morning to restore his sense of absolute intimacy with his aircraft. He believed that to survive over Germany it was necessary to develop an auto-pilot within himself, which could fly the aircraft quite instinctively, leaving all his concentration free for the target and the enemy. As far back as 1941 he had written a paper on marking techniques. He was always an advocate of low-level bombing.

Cheshire himself wrote, ‘I loved flying and was a good pilot, because I threw myself heart and soul into the job. I found the dangers of battle exciting and exhilarating, so that war came easily to me.’
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Most of those he commanded knew themselves to be frailer flesh, and he dedicated himself to teaching them everything that he knew. He had never forgotten that Lofty, his own first pilot on Whitleys, taught him to know every detail of his aircraft, and he was determined to show others likewise. He lectured 76’s crews on Economical Cruising Heights, Escape and Evasion techniques, and methods of improving night vision. They knew that he was devoted to their interests. On a trip to Nuremberg they were detailed to cross the French coast at 2,000 feet. He simply told Group that he would not send them at that height. It would be 200 feet or 20,000. He made his point.