The Dam Busters (16 page)

And then, so soon after the invasion, the V1 “buzz-bombs “started to fall on London. The V2 rockets would follow soon… . Intelligence was sure of that.

CHAPTER XVI SMASHING THE SECRET WEAPON

CHESHIRE was dragged out of sleep to find his batman tugging at his shoulder.

“Phone, sir.”

He took up the phone and heard the Base Intelligence Officer’s voice: “Can you please come over to the ops. room right away. It’s urgent, sir.”

He was there in ten minutes, and the intelligence officer greeted him with a few words that shook the last of the sleep out of Mm: “The secret weapon has started, sir. They’re landing missiles on London and the invasion ports. Don’t know how serious it is yet, but you’re to stand by to take off as soon as the weather clears. This is your target,” he passed over an aerial photograph, an enlargement that showed an enormous square concrete building. “We don’t know how thick the concrete is,” the intelligence officer was saying, “but as far as we can gather from agents over there it might be up to twenty feet thick… roof as well as the walls. It’s near a place called Watten, just behind the Pas de Calais.”

Air Commodore Sharp, the base commander, bustled in. “You know about these from the A.O.C.,” he said. “I gather the rest of Bomber Command is cracking at the mobile sites, but they think the worst: trouble will come from these four blockhouses, and your ‘tallboys’ are the only things with a hope of touching them. You’ll have to go in daylight to see your aiming points properly and mark them with smoke bombs. We’ll give you fighter cover.”

Cochrane had a word with him over the phone a little later, brief and to the point: “We’ve got to knock these out somehow, and we’ll have to go on until we do. Whitehall is all set for the evacuation of London and we don’t know yet whether these things might wreck the invasion. You’ll have to work hard.”

To lay on a raid, plan it, brief the crews, bomb and fuel the aircraft took at least two hours. This time it was more difficult, because the “tallboys” needed special handling, but they did it inside two hours that morning. The crews were briefed and they all went down to the flights, pulled on their flying kit and waited. Over the Pas de Calais a sheet of ten-tenths stratus cloud stretched for miles at 2,000 feet, making it impossible to bomb. They could not have seen any aiming point from above, and they would have to bomb from at least 15,000 feet for penetration. The idea was to get near misses as much as direct hits. A direct hit might not pierce the concrete roof, but near misses would bore into the earth by the foundations and shake the structure with earthquakes. Wallis thought that a near miss up to 40 yards away would do more damage than a direct hit.

The crews stood by all day at the flights. It went on for three days like that till bed was only a memory. They lived down by the aeroplanes while the low cloud lingered over France and the buzz-bombs kept falling, ate cold food brought from the mess and tried to sleep curled up in blankets on the floors.

On the morning of the third day, exhausted, they were stood down and went off to bed, and in the early afternoon the clouds over France rolled away. From Group came the instant call ordering a “time on target” which gave them a bare ninety minutes to get airborne. By some sort of miracle the eighteen Lancasters, headed by two Mosquitoes, were climbing away from Woodhall on the scheduled minute.

Cheshire flew over Calais at 8,000 feet and searched the area for several minutes before he was able to pin-point the camouflaged mass of concrete in the ground haze. The earth for a mile around was torn up by the fruitless bombs of other raids, so that nothing stood out clearly. As he flew over it seventy guns opened up and black puffs stained the air all round him.

He felt reluctantly that there was only one thing to do: ten miles away he peeled off, held the nose steeply down and came in straight and fast on high power, so the engines were screaming in his ears and the plane shaking like a live thing. He let his smoke bombs go at 2,000 feet (as it was daylight the smoke would show more clearly than red flares), pulled steeply out of the hail of fire, marvellously untouched, looked back and saw no sign of smoke. The markers had failed to ignite.

Shannon dived the other Mosquito in the same way, and as he pulled up smoke puffed on the ground near the target. In the haze it seemed near enough, and there were no markers left anyway, so Cheshire called the Lancasters and saw them wheel in at 18,000 feet, open bomb doors and track stolidly through the flak. Fascinated, he saw the “tallboys” for the first time falling in daylight, the sun glinting off them as they streaked down, picking up speed till they were moving faster than sound, and then they vanished in a wisp of dust in the moment of impact. They had eleven-second delayed fuses and the seconds dragged till the ground burst in the shadow of the concrete and tens of thousands of tons of earth reared up in a climbing mushroom. Cheshire gaped, and beside him, dumbfounded, Kelly muttered, “God help the Jerries!” The target was hidden.

Recce photos later showed the bombs had circled Shannon’s smoke markers, but also showed the markers had been about 70 yards wide. Some of the “tallboys” had fallen some 50 yards from the concrete target and, in the hopes that they had done the job, Cochrane sent 617 next day to Wizernes, where a huge concrete dome, 20 feet thick, lay on the edge of a chalk quarry, protecting rocket stores and launching tunnels that led out of the face of the quarry, pointing towards London.

The squadron reached the spot but found it hidden under cloud and brought their “tallboys” back. Cheshire landed with a new idea forming in his mind. If a Mosquito was better for marking than a Lancaster, then an even smaller and faster aircraft should be better still. He took his idea to Sharp, and the base commander said : “The American fighters have got the range you want. How about a Mustang or a P.38 ? “Cheshire said he thought that either would be ideal, and Sharp promised to try and get one.

Meantime Cheshire took 617 to Wizernes again but once more the cloud hid it. On the 24th they tried again and this time located the camouflaged dome dimly in the ground haze. Cheshire dived through brisk flak but his smoke bombs “hung up,” so Fawke dived and laid his markers on the edge of the dome and the bombs fells spectacularly round the markers. Three of them exploded next to the tunnels in the side of the quarry, one sliced deep under the edge of the dome, and Dicky Willsher, who had just had his twentieth birthday, sent one right into the mouth of one of the tunnels. The face of the quarry seemed to burst open.

The flak got Edwards’s plane on the run-up. A shell ex-poded in the port wing and the tanks caught fire. The others saw the Lancaster lose height slowly for a few seconds and then the nose dropped into a steep dive and she went over on her back. Two parachutes came out before she hit and the “tallboy” blew up. It was the first crew the squadron had lost for several weeks. Several men had been wounded in the air and a few aircraft written off, but for some weeks death had taken a holiday, the longest holiday it ever took in the squadron.

When he landed back at Woodhall, Cheshire found a Mustang waiting. Sharp’s American friends had promptly said, “Sure,” and an American pilot had flown one over. The pilot explained the cockpit to Cheshire, bade him a cheerful farewell and left him inspecting his new toy. It was only then he began to realise fully what he had taken on. He had never flown an American aircraft before; in fact, had not flown a single-engined aircraft since his early training days five years before. He had never flown a single-engined fighter at all, nor had he had to do his own navigation for years.

Cheshire decided that before he took it for a practice flip he would try and learn a little more about it, but those prudent hopes crashed in the morning when Cochrane ordered the squadron off for the Siracourt rocket site. They found then that the smoke markers would not fit in the racks under the Mustang’s wings, and the armourers worked like furies rigging a makeshift wire contraption to hold the markers on. One of the navigators helped Cheshire work out his courses, and he wrote them on a piece of paper and strapped it to his knee. He took off in the Mustang half an hour early to get the feel of it, but did not try any practice landings; there was too much chance of breaking it on his first landing, and if he was going to do that he preferred it to be after the raid had been done.

It is unlikely that a pilot has ever before or since done an operation—particularly such a specialist one—on his first flight in a new type of plane. The change in his case from multi-engined to single-engined fighter makes the feat all the more remarkable. It bristled with difficulties. His timing had to be within thirty seconds over the target to co-ordinate with the bombers, and the Mustang cruised about 90 m.p.h. faster than the Lancasters. He could not very well work out changes of wind as well as map-read and fly. He had to be his own navigator, bomb aimer, gunner and wireless operator as well as learn to fly a new type well enough in an hour to be able to dive-bomb through thick flak.

From the start the Mustang delighted him and inside half an hour he felt he had the “feel” of it. She was lighter than the Mosquito and there was no comparison at all with a Lancaster. From 7,000 feet he spotted the concrete slab that protected the underground Siracourt rocket dump, and when the bombers reached the marshalling point he dived to 500 feet, revelling in the way the Mustang picked up speed, and put his smoke bombs within a few feet of the concrete. Someone put a “tallboy” through the middle of the slab, and it pierced 16 feet of ferro-concrete before it exploded. Another hit the western wall and blew it in, and another erupted deep under the rim of the slab.

Night had fallen when they got back from Siracourt, and Cheshire’s first Mustang landing had to be a night landing, which makes it about twice as difficult. He remembers little about it (in the same way that a man who bales out never remembers pulling the rip-cord) except that suddenly the little fighter was rolling smoothly on the runway, to his mild surprise and relief.

Grey cloud still hung over the Pas de Calais; it was forming over the North Sea and blowing over the land, and 617 stood by at dawn every day waiting for it to lift while the buzz-bombs fell on London. To the south the invasion was locked in the bridgehead, and even if they broke out the Seine still barred the way to the rocket sites. In London the nation’s leaders (though not the unaware people) waited anxiously in case the mystery sites should start up. They guessed they must be nearly ready.

At last, on July 4, the weather cleared. Not a moment too soon. London was taking a beating. As the clouds rolled away over France 617 took off to hit back, target this time being the big store of rockets and buzz-bombs hidden in a cave at Creil, near Paris. It ran deep under a hill—at least 25 feet of chalk and clay over it—and the idea was both to collapse it and seal it up. Fawke went ahead in a Mosquito to get weather and wind information in advance. Cheshire flew his now beloved Mustang, and seventeen Lancasters carried the “tallboys”.

Cheshire dived to 200 feet and aimed his markers so accurately that Fawke did not have to back up. Several “tallboys” then smashed through the cave roof with great ease; others collapsed the entrance and wrecked the railway that brought the rockets into the cave.

Next afternoon to Mimoyecques, where the Germans were sinking the fantastic gun barrels 500 feet into the ground to fire 600 tons of explosive a day on London. War Cabinet still did not know this; they only knew it was one of Hitler’s secret-weapon sites. From above it was nearly invisible, a 30 by 20 yards square of camouflaged concrete shielding the gun tunnels beneath.

An hour before dusk Cheshire, in the Mustang, found the spot in the chalk hills behind Calais, dived and lobbed his markers on it. When the “tallboys” came down he saw one direct hit, and four were “very near misses,” which were probably more effective.

A message summoning him to Cochrane met him when he landed and he drove straight over to Group. Cochrane said when he walked in: “I’ve been looking at the records and I see you’ve done a hundred trips now. That’s enough; it’s time you had a rest. I’ve got hold of Tait to take over.” Cheshire opened his mouth to argue and Cochrane said, “It’s no use arguing… . Sorry, but there it is. A hundred is a good number to stop at.” He went on and thanked him, quietly and with no flowery nonsense, and dropped another bombshell: “Shannon, Munro and McCarthy will come off too. They’ve been going continuously for about two years and it’s time they had a rest as well.”

There were, as Cheshire expected, protests from Shannon, Munro and McCarthy, but from that moment they were changed men, gayer, but in a less violent way, and only then he realised that the strain had been telling on his three durable flight commanders.

They had earned a rest; all of them had D.S.Os., D.F.Cs. and Bars. The squadron gave them a send-off at which one or two (prodded perhaps by alcohol) were near tears, but before the hangovers had subsided Wing Commander Willie Tait had arrived to take over. He put Fawke up to flight commander and brought two veteran pilots, Cockshott and Iveson, as his other lieutenants. Tait was a Welshman, belonging; to no recognisable type but with a unique Celtic streak of his own. Smoothly brown-skinned and slim, with straight black hair, he had his own brand of introspection and dry wit. He was twenty-six, had two D.S.Os. and a D.F.C.’

The cloud was back over France, so that for ten days there was no bombing; a lucky reprieve for the rocket sites, but at least it gave the squadron a chance to settle down under the new leaders, and Tait a chance to learn the marking technique in the Mustang.

On July 17 Met. reported the clouds rolling away, and a couple of hours later 617 was on the way to Wizernes. For this, his first marking effort, Tait flew one of the Mosquitoes with Danny Walker as navigator. Thick haze lay over the ground and they circled a long time in the flak before they could faintly pick up the great blockhouse merging with the torn earth. Tait dived from 7,000 to 500 feet before he let his smoke marker go accurately, and Fawke backed up. A few minutes later both Knights and Kearns got direct hits with “tallboys “, and several more “tallboys “sent up awe-inspiring eruptions 40 to 50 yards away, more or less where Wallis preferred them.