Bomber Command (4 page)

At 12.30 pm, three hours out from Norfolk, Kellett sighted the north German coast, a smudge fifty miles ahead across the gin-clear sky. For the next one-and-a-half hours, his force would be within range of German fighter aircraft. The long run southwards brought them over Wilhelmshaven as far as possible from the concentration of flak ships among the Friesian Islands. But the price of the dog’s leg was that the German defences had maximum warning of their coming.

Yet, in the event, it was German flak which saved the formation from the first fighters into the air. Six Messerschmitt Me109 single-engined night-fighters scrambled to approach the Wellingtons as they closed the Jade Roads. But as the fighters made their first attack, the antiaircraft batteries on shore opened a furious bombardment on the Wellingtons. The Me109s
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broke away, and hung off the flanks of the formation, expecting the barrage to stop. In fact, however, as the Wellingtons approached Wilhelmshaven, the ground fire intensified. The fighters waited for their turn.

To Harry Jones in his turret, the black puffs hanging in the air around them looked like buckets of coal that some madman was hurling into the sky. Ruse’s aircraft bucked in the concussions, but the formation was too high for effective flak, just as Ludlow-Hewitt had hoped. Jack Greaves, in the front turret of ‘Cheese’ Lemon’s aircraft, thought that if this was German flak, there was nothing to it. He was relieved, for there was no room in the turret for his
parachute, and he felt acutely vulnerable to any sudden disaster to the aircraft.

The most serious consequence of the flak was that it caused the formation, and especially 9 Squadron, its port section, and 37 in the rear, to open ranks and lose their delicate cohesion. Both Squadron-Leader Guthrie of 9 and Squadron-Leader Hue-Williams of 37 were some distance ahead of their sections, and those at the rear were straggling. As Kellett in the leading aircraft opened his bomb doors on the approach to Wilhelmshaven, many of his crews were already dangerously scattered across the sky.

The fact that the Wellingtons had now survived an hour inside German fighter range without loss was the result of an extraordinary series of lapses by the Luftwaffe. The British pilots were only sketchily aware that their own country possessed the capability to detect the approach of enemy aircraft by radar, and certainly had no notion that the Germans did also. In the upper reaches of Bomber Command, it was known that the Germans had been carrying out radar experiments parallel with those of the RAF, but there was a widespread tacit reluctance to believe that Hun technology could already have matched the British achievement. In reality, on this 18 December, at about the same time that Kellett sighted the north German coast fifty miles ahead, the Wellingtons were picked up by the Luftwaffe’s
Freya
radar station among the sand dunes of the offshore island of Wangerooge, and by the naval radar station on Heligoland. Yet it was an hour before the fighters made their first effective attack. 53 doomed men among the 114 in the British formation were granted that much extra life because of simple disbelief on the part of the Germans that the Royal Air Force could flaunt itself in the face of the Luftwaffe on a brilliant winter’s day that promised only a massacre.

Despite the adequacy of their technology, the Germans had failed to match the British in marrying radar to an effective fighter direction system. The naval radar report was only hesitantly passed
through their own HQ exchange to the Luftwaffe at Jever. When the young lieutenant commanding the air-force’s own radar station telephoned Jever direct, he was caustically dismissed: ‘Tommies approaching in weather like this? You’re plotting seagulls or there’s interference on your set!’
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The Luftwaffe officer then tried to telephone the CO of the neighbouring Me110 squadron direct, only to learn that he was absent at headquarters. Kellett’s men, now cruising majestically down the coast of Schleswig-Holstein, had gained a few more minutes. Only after a visual sighting report by German naval observers, whose message was duplicated in transmission and reached HQ as a warning of forty-four approaching enemy aircraft, did the Luftwaffe at last grasp the reality of attack. Belatedly the fighters began to scramble.

Even as the Messerschmitts were climbing to engage the Wellingtons, the Germans suffered another moment of bewildered astonishment. The bombers came high over Wilhelmshaven, over a battleship and cruiser lying in Bau Haven, with bomb doors open. Yet not a bomb fell. As the flak still splashed and blackened the sky around them, the British aircraft turned slowly westwards towards the North Sea and home. The formation’s orders not to bomb if there was any danger of hitting the shore gave Kellett no discretion. He concluded that the warships were too close to land to risk attack. As an operation of war against the German navy, the Wellingtons’ mission was thus a total, indeed a grotesque failure. Yet as the bombers cruised away from Wilhelmshaven and emerged from the flak barrage, a few minutes before 1.30 pm, the destruction began.

In the Luftwaffe’s previous encounters with Wellington formations, they had probed the bombers’ strengths and weaknesses with some circumspection. Two important conclusions emerged from the fighter pilots’ reports. First, although the Wellington’s rear turret could be very effective against attacks from astern, the guns were incapable of traversing to a full right-angle with the aircraft, and Wellingtons were thus unable to make any reply to an attack from the beam. Second, through a criminal omission on
the part of the Air Ministry, the aircraft lacked self-sealing tanks. If hit in a fuel tank, especially that in the port wing, a Wellington could be transformed within seconds into a flying bonfire. Even if the tanks did not ignite, rapid loss of fuel would almost certainly bring down a crippled aircraft on a long run home. The Luftwaffe fighter squadron commanders urged their pilots to knock out the Tommies’ rear turret at long range, where the Wellington’s .303s were useless, then close in for the kill.

Many of the men flying the bombers had joined the RAF in the early and mid-1930s, before the era of the 350-mph cannon fighter. As they lumbered westwards at less than 200 mph over the north German island towards the open sea, a succession of stabbing, slashing assaults by the Me109s and 110s began. P/O Speirs of 149 Squadron was flying no. 3 in the leading section behind Kellett, when a twin-engined Me110 dived across the formation hosing fire that suddenly lanced into the fuselage of Speirs’s aircraft. There was an explosion to the rear of the cockpit close to the wing root, almost certainly in a fuel tank. The Wellington fell away from the formation, flames pouring from the fuselage, to plunge headlong into the sea 10,000 feet below. There were no parachutes. Riddlesworth, the only survivor of Duguid’s vic after the other two aircraft turned back, now closed up to take Speirs’s place behind Kellett. The three Wellingtons began twenty minutes of desperate fighting against a procession of Messerschmitts. The 109s seemed to follow the 110s into attack. As they flew over Schillig Point, to their dismay the British could see a further squadron of fighters taking off to join the battle.

‘The enemy pressed home their attacks in a splendid manner,’ wrote Kellett in his report, striking a curiously gallant note in describing an ill-matched slaughter. But at last an Me109 gave the British their chance. Tiring of beam attacks and difficult deflection shots, the German swung in to attack Riddlesworth from dead astern. This was the situation for which the RAF had developed ‘mutual supporting fire’. All three Wellington rear gunners in the lead vic ripped into him. Spuming smoke, the fighter curled away
to the sea. The pilot escaped from his sinking cockpit only to drown under the weight of his flying gear. Kellett’s three aircraft, with the advantage of being in the van of the formation and aided by some disciplined and determined flying, pressed on towards England.

But behind them, the bomber force was crumbling. In 9 Squadron’s section on the port side of the formation, the fierce little Canadian Bill Macrae cursed his gunner as he twisted and banked the Wellington under attack and heard no sound of answering fire from his own rear turret: ‘I’m trying, skip, but my fingers are too stiff to get the guns to bear!’ shouted the frozen, desperate gunner, who was wounded moments later. Fabric was flapping from great gashes torn in the wings and fuselage, and fuel leaking from the tanks. In Pett’s aircraft nearby, the first burst from a Me109 wounded the rear gunner. Heathcote, the second pilot, scrambled down the fuselage and dragged the gunner out. He emptied burst after burst into the attacking fighters until at last the guns clicked dead. The ammunition trays were empty. Heathcote crawled forward to the front gunner, wounded in the thigh, and took over his turret instead. Sergeant Pett threw the aircraft into a tortured dive to sea level to shake off the Messerschmitts. Miraculously he succeeded. With his bleeding gunners and his rudder controls partly jammed, he nursed the Wellington home to a forced landing at Sutton Bridge in Lincolnshire. Macrae made an emergency landing at the coastal airfield of North Coates.

These were the only two aircraft from the port section to reach home. S/Ldr Guthrie, whom Baldwin was to charge with ‘lack of interest’ in his report, flew his blazing aircraft headlong into the North Sea. Douglas Allison, a quiet, serious Londoner, dropped away with his port engine on fire, and no trace of himself or his crew was ever found. The Wellington of Challes, beside him, broke up in mid-air after being hit amidships by fire from an Me110. Lines, the last of the section, vanished shortly afterwards, probably at the hands of an Me110 of the Luftwaffe’s 2 Squadron ZG 76.

The starboard section of the big diamond – two vics of three,
led respectively by S/Ldr Harris of 149 and F/Lt Peter Grant of 9 Squadron – held formation under attack better than their counterparts on the port side. Grant had just given the order to close bomb doors after leaving Wilhelmshaven when the first wave of fighters fell on them. It was the first time that they had seen an Me110, and as they droned steadily west they were shocked by the ruthless ease with which the Germans took station abreast of them, and hammered fire into the bombers with impunity, the Wellingtons’ turrets traversed to their impotent maximum of 80 degrees. Glancing out of the cockpit, Grant was dismayed to see fuel spuming out of his holed tanks. He began urgently pumping what remained into those that seemed unhit: ‘There was absolutely nothing that we could do except sit there being picked off one by one . . .’
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On Grant’s port side Sergeant Ramshaw, his aircraft hit repeatedly by attacks which came almost certainly from the Messerschmitt of Gordon Gollob – later to become a famous ace with 150 alleged victories – was appalled to find all his turrets jammed and his rear gunner mortally wounded. Defenceless, he dropped his Wellington under the rest of the section and flew on homewards, clinging beneath the shelter of their guns, fuel pouring from his tanks. In Harris’s aircraft in front of them, fire cut into the front turret, one round smashing through the sole of the gunner’s boot, another burst damaging sections of the geodetic frame and an elevator. Behind Harris, Briden was staggering onwards in an aircraft heavily damaged and losing fuel fast.

It was the performance of this starboard section and that of Kellett in the lead which later caused one of the German fighter squadron commanders to note in his report the ‘tight formation and excellent rear gunners of the Wellington bombers’. One Me110 had already been compelled to pull out of action and make an emergency landing with its crew wounded by turret fire from a Wellington. The German squadron CO himself forced-landed with a badly damaged aircraft, and most of his fighters had been hit by the British guns. But the fact remained that none of the 110s was totally destroyed, and as the German also stated in his report: ‘The
Wellingtons’ maintenance of formation and rigid adherence to course made them easy targets to find.’

While the leading sections of the British force fought a savage battle for survival, it was at the rear, among the aircraft of 37 Squadron, that disaster became almost absolute. Even before Kellett’s formation closed Wilhelmshaven, the second pilot of ‘Cheese’ Lemon’s aircraft reached down to open the bomb doors. On a Wellington, the appropriate control was set beside the flap lever. He accidentally put on full flap. The results were dramatic. The Wellington soared abruptly upwards, causing chaos among the crew and uproar on the intercom. The aircraft then stalled and began to dive steeply towards the earth, as Lemon and his second pilot struggled to regain control.

By the time they had done so, they were alone, very low, over the sea. ‘Christ, we’ve lost everything now. We’re on our own,’ thought Greaves. It was at this moment that the rear gunner, Kidd, shouted: ‘109s!’ Lemon clung desperately to the waves as the gunner called out the attacks: ‘They’re coming in . . . now . . . left! Now, right, right! He’s overshooting!’ They were hit repeatedly in the fuselage, the aircraft still streaking along with spray breaking on the perspex of the front turret, where Greaves tried in vain to bring his gun to bear. ‘If we go down now, we’ve had it,’ he thought, struck by the ghastly vision of the aircraft plunging unhesitating to the sea bottom if Lemon lost control for a moment. The observer in the astrodome was commentating on the German attacks. Suddenly, as one of the fighters closed again, there was a cry of choked astonishment from the rear turret: ‘Christ! He’s gone straight in!’ The German’s wingtip seemed to have touched the water, and in an instant vanished. The other fighter broke away. They were alone. There was an outburst of nervous hilarity on the intercom about the German’s sudden collision with the North Sea. Then Lemon cut in: ‘Come on, cut the chatter, we’ve got to get home.’ Silent, exhausted by fear, they settled for the long run back to Feltwell, flying all the way almost at sea level. Greaves swore that he could taste the salt. After their half-hearted debriefing on
landing at 3.30 pm, they waited for the next Feltwell aircraft to return. Yet by evening, none had come.