Bomber Command (52 page)

But they were not a picked elite. 97’s crews, like the rest of the Group, reached Pathfinder Force by remarkably varied routes. Some were novices who had shown exceptional promise in training. Some were on their second, even third, tour of operations, men who had become supremely proficient bomber pilots and sought only to exercise their skills as long as ‘The Reaper’ allowed them. The majority of recruits had done ten or fifteen operations with a Main Force squadron, then volunteered or been drafted to Pathfinders when word came down to Groups that five or ten crews were required. Bob Lasham, for instance, was a pilot at 9 Squadron when he decided to go to PFF. His bomb-aimer and wireless operator were keen – the glamour and the temporary step in rank and pay appealed to them. His gunners acquiesced without enthusiasm. His navigator would have nothing to do with a 45-trip tour, and left the crew.

Pat Turner was a 44 Squadron flight engineer when his crew heard that they were being posted to Pathfinders. They did not mind going, but were conscious that they were not outstandingly talented fliers. It was only later that they discovered that they had been ‘volunteered’ by station headquarters as a simple solution to their pilot’s passion for the base commander’s WAAF driver.

Charles Owen, after leaving public school, was working at the Supermarine aircraft factory as a boy of seventeen in 1940, when he was badly injured in an air raid. He spent the winter in hospital, and came out at last old enough for the RAF. An exceptional pilot trainee, he was posted as an instructor, and served a year before transferring to operations with 97 Squadron, where he proved an outstanding operational captain. By 1944 he was a squadron leader, celebrating his twenty-first birthday one January night over Stettin. He ended the war as a Master Bomber with a string of decorations.

Tony Aveline left France through Dunkirk with the British army in 1940, and after an eternity at training camps in Scotland, volunteered for the RAF in 1941. He was washed out of pilot training in Florida, but qualified as a navigator in Canada. On his first operation as a passenger with an experienced crew, they were coned over Berlin and attacked by a fighter. They lost two engines and caught fire in one wing. The hydraulics failed and their wireless went dead. Blaspheming continuously in their fear, they staggered across Holland and the North Sea to crash in a field in Lincolnshire. They crawled out of the wreck and Aveline asked: ‘Is it always like this?’ But when his pilot volunteered for PFF, Aveline went with him, and flew the rest of his tour with 97 Squadron in a mood of cynical fatalism: ‘I never thought about the value of it all. I just hoped it would end.’

Pathfinder recruits went from their Main Force stations for a two-week course in marking techniques at Warboys before they were posted to a squadron. They concentrated on the use of H2S, and much of the new responsibility fell on the bomb-aimer. Bennett addressed every new intake personally. Most Bomber Command aircrew were indifferent to which Group they nominally belonged. But Bennett’s men shared with Cochrane’s 5 Group an intense sense of identification, loyalty, and rivalry. At the beginning of April 1944, when 97’s crews were abruptly informed that they were being transferred to 5 Group, their anger and resentment were unbounded.

Sir Arthur Harris had always mistrusted the concept of a single
elite Pathfinder Group in Bomber Command. As his force expanded and its range of operations widened, he was increasingly impressed by Cochrane’s insistence that given the chance, 5 Group could attempt targets and techniques that 8 Group could not. To Bennett’s undisguised scorn, Cochrane forcefully advocated low-level marking. The Australian argued that it was impossible to map-read flying below a hundred feet, and above a hundred feet the marker aircraft would be annihilated by light flak. But Cochrane persisted. It was his 617 Squadron which had carried out the greatest precision-bombing feat of the war, breaking the Ruhr dams from a height of sixty feet. Despite their subsequent failure against the Dortmund–Ems Canal, during the winter of 1943, 617 carried out further experiments in bombing accuracy; on 16 December, nine of their Lancasters using the Stabilized Automatic Bomb Sight achieved an astounding error of only ninety-four yards against a V-Weapon launching site at Abbeville. On 8 February 1944, Leonard Cheshire marked the Gnome and Rhône engines factory at Limoges from a height of 200 feet, supported by Micky Martin, and the rest of 617 then demolished the works with extraordinary accuracy. They failed against the Anthéor Viaduct in February, but both Cheshire and Cochrane were convinced that there was enormous scope for precision bombing guided by low-level marking, especially if Mosquitoes were available to do it. At the beginning of April, in one of his more imaginative decisions, Harris decided to give Cochrane the chance to prove his point. He ordered Bennett to transfer 627, one of his cherished Mosquito squadrons, together with 83 and 97 Lancaster squadrons, to 5 Group. They remained administratively responsible to 8 Group and retained their PFF badges and ranks. But they were to operate under Cochrane’s command.

Bennett fought until the last moment to retain his squadrons, in his most bitter clash of the war with Harris. He rang Saundby at High Wycombe to demand furiously where 8 Group was to get more Mosquitoes when Cochrane’s had all been shot down. Some of his staff urged him to resign, but he pointed out grimly that he
had no intention of vacating his chair in order to let Cochrane move into it. In the end he swallowed his pride, but the enmity between 5 and 8 Groups was redoubled. ‘I’m afraid I was rather tactless with Bennett,’ admitted Cochrane afterwards.
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But each was a dedicated man, convinced of a point of view.

97 Squadron’s Movement Orders were issued and cancelled three times before they finally flew their Lancasters to Coningsby in Lincolnshire, a pre-war permanent station at the heart of a web of 5 Group airfields. There was friction at the outset: the Tannoy summoned all aircrew to the cinema, where the base commander gave them a terse talk about shedding their 8 Group habits and learning that they were in 5 Group now. A plaintive voice called from the back: ‘We’re fighting the Germans, you know, sir, not 5 Group.’ The base commander announced that they would begin training immediately. Jimmy Carter, 97’s CO, stood up and said: ‘I’m sorry, sir, but my chaps were operating last night, and they’re not going out to train now.’

It was weeks before the first tensions relaxed. On 17 April two pilots, one of them Charles Owen, went to the Juvisy marshalling yards with 617 Squadron, to study the 5 Group technique: ‘It seemed to work well enough against no opposition,’ Owen wrote presciently in his diary, ‘but I decided it might not be so much fun against a heavily-defended German target.’ The essence of the 5 Group method was that no aircraft attacked until the Master Bomber was satisfied with the placing of the markers, and gave the order by radio-telephone. The hazards were that this was only practicable in clear visibility, and that it entailed delay for the bomber force in the target area. Both these difficulties would become unpleasantly apparent as summer went on.

8 Group’s prestige undoubtedly declined in the shadow of 5 Group’s achievements in the last year of the war, so much so that a medical officer at one of Bennett’s stations considered that morale suffered.
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He reported a conversation in the mess one day, when a group of officers were discussing whom Princess Elizabeth might marry. A voice in the corner muttered gloomily, ‘It’s bound
to be somebody from 5 Group . . .’ But Cochrane was fortunate in his timing. Had he embarked on his low-level marking operations during the Battle of Berlin, or against heavily-defended German targets, he would almost certainly have met disaster. On 24 April 1944, Cheshire and three other 617 Squadron pilots carried out their extraordinary roof-level marking of Munich in Mosquitoes, for which Cheshire received the Victoria Cross. But Harris has remarked that ‘any operation which deserves the VC is in the nature of things unfit to be repeated at regular intervals’.
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The Munich exercise was proof of the extraordinary determination of Cochrane and his pilots, but not of the possibilities of regular low-level marking against heavy defences.

5 Group’s luck was that their breakthrough came at exactly the right moment to meet the unique problem of the French invasion targets, where accuracy was vital not only to destroy the objective but to save civilian lives, and where ground defences were generally negligible. In the first month of their independent operations, 5 Group almost halved the normal 680-yard aiming error for effectively aimed bombs dropped on
Oboe
ground marking. In May, when Cochrane introduced 5 Group’s famous ‘offset’ technique, the average error fell to 285 yards. Cochrane was the most imaginative of Harris’s Group commanders, probably the man who should have occupied Harris’s chair at High Wycombe in the last phase of the war. He created ‘offset’ marking to contend with the problem of markers obliterated by smoke and flame in the midst of an attack. The principle was to mark a clearly visible point some distance short, beyond or wide of the target. Crews were anyway required to feed an allowance for wind into their bombsight computers. By adjusting this allowance to compensate for the markers’ distance from the aiming-point according to radio-telephone instructions from the Master Bomber, the bomb-aimer could hit the aiming-point without obscuring the brilliance of the marker.

Although 5 Group continued frequently to bomb with the rest of Main Force, and although 8 Group continued to mark targets
with considerable success, Cochrane had made his point. In the last year of the war, his ‘Independent Air Force’ became a rueful focus of controversy among those of Bomber Command who were restricted to a more pedestrian role. Cochrane introduced ‘the 5 Group corkscrew’, his own variation of the defensive manoeuvre against night-fighters (and compelled all his station and squadron commanders to go into the air and experience it), and ‘the 5 Group quick landing scheme’ to cut the delay in bringing down squadrons on their return from operations. He waged remorseless war against all that he considered undisciplined in the air and on the ground, checking navigators’ logs, seeking to purge smoking on operations and intercom chatter in which crews referred to each other by their first names rather than the proper ‘Captain’, ‘Navigator’, and so on. He insisted that aircraft captains should be commissioned, to have the authority over their crews that he thought essential. This able martinet fumed when, after the introduction of ‘Secretary aircraft’ carrying wire-recorders to monitor radio-telephone conversation over the target, he heard the informality and unprofessionalism (as he considered it) that sometimes broke out in the stress of an operation.

But Cochrane’s outstanding virtue was his receptiveness to ideas and innovations, from whatever source they came. He could behave arrogantly, but he had no professional conceit. 5 Group’s unique broadcast link-up between headquarters and the squadrons made a real contribution to briefings, with flight and squadron COs encouraged to offer suggestions and tactical changes. It is hard to believe that it was coincidence that Cheshire, Gibson, Willie Tait
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and Micky Martin were all 5 Group officers who came to the fore under Cochrane’s command. He has a good claim to be considered not merely the outstanding Group AOC, but the outstanding British bomber commander of the war.

In April, 97 Squadron lost only two crews in ninety-eight sorties. After Bomber Command’s early experiences against the French
targets, the success in hitting the marshalling yards and the weakness of the Luftwaffe response, the spring brought lengthening odds on each man’s survival. Berlin and the winter were behind them. But their spirits plunged when word came that High Wycombe planned to recognize the ease of attacking French targets by making each sortie count only one-third of an ‘op’ towards a man’s tour. Crews with only three or four trips left were appalled by the prospect that these might stretch to nine, twelve.

Then, on 3 May, they went to Mailly-Le-Camp.

Bright moonlight night [wrote Charles Owen] and Gerry pilots had a field day. Went in at 8,000 feet, but circled outside target at 4,000 feet waiting for order to bomb. Saw several fighters but was not attacked until on the bombing run at 5,000 feet. Luckily he was a rotten shot and we were able to carry on and drop our markers. We were attacked again coming out of the target, and he shot away our mid-upper turret and made a few holes elsewhere. The mid-upper gunner, miraculously, was only slightly wounded, but had to leave what was left of his turret. The fighter came in again, but the rear gunner drove him off and claimed him as damaged. I came home at 0 feet.

Of 362 aircraft that attacked, forty-two, or 11.3 per cent, were destroyed, overwhelmingly by night-fighters. One of them came from 97 Squadron. On 10 May, 5 Group sent eighty-nine Lancasters to Lille. There was a prolonged delay in the midst of the attack, when the Target Indicators were blown out and the target had to be remarked. Twelve aircraft, 13.5 per cent, were destroyed. 97 lost two out of eight dispatched. There was no more talk of French targets counting a third of an ‘op’. These were two exceptionally bad nights, but they were a brutal reminder of what the Luftwaffe could still do, given the chance. Lingering around a target for accurate visual marking could be fatal.