Heroes of the Skies

by Michael Veitch

  A little south of Frankfurt, Darmstadt had almost completely escaped the attacks meted out to larger cities nearby and its population, knowing the Allied armies were just a hundred miles away and sensing the war was nearing its final months, had become complacent, believing themselves, and their lightly defended city, to be somehow immune. But by late 1944, the list of targets still intact and worth Bomber Command’s attention was shrinking, and Darmstadt, a 900-mile round trip from Lincolnshire, lay within easy reach of 5 Group’s heavies. As was the case with many of the places targeted by Bomber Command, Darmstadt was most likely attacked simply because it could be.

  That night, 226 Lancasters operated using a new type of bombing technique, attacking along several lines emanating from the central aiming point, spreading the destruction across the entire town. Fire rather than high explosive would be the principal weapon. The weather was predicted to be clear; the target indicator flares were to be dropped; the 4000-pound ‘cookies’ would blast down the walls; the clouds of cascading incendiary sticks, with their sizzling, white-hot magnesium cores, would set fire to everything they touched. The wind, and the flames, would do the rest.

  Up to 12 000 people – a tenth of the town’s entire population – were killed, incinerated in the 1500-degree, mile-high firestorm or asphyxiated huddling below in the inadequately prepared air-raid shelters, listening to the ghastly reverberating thuds of falling masonry and collapsing floors above, too terrified to try their luck and make a dash through the crashing inferno before the voracious fire sucked the oxygen from their lungs. Animals went mad; human beings of all ages and conditions combusted, melted, perished. Darmstadt, which had stood intact for 600 years was, in a single night, two-thirds gone. And David, from the mid-upper turret of his Lancaster on this, the most dramatic trip of his tour, saw it all.

  He mentions it almost casually, in a rush, shifting slightly in his pale-blue RSL club shirt as we both pause to let an interminably long announcement about menus and lucky competition winners pass without comment. ‘Yes,’ he says, almost as a mumble, his head tilted, glancing at a line in one of the old documents in front of him. ‘Darmstadt . . . coned, bombed . . . firestorm . . . five Junker 88 attacks, one claimed – probably destroyed . . . wounded and awarded an immediate DFM.’

  ‘Well . . .’ I ask hesitantly, ‘just take me through that if you could.’

  He begins slowly. ‘You know it wasn’t . . . pleasant going through flak barrages,’ he says. ‘There were three big belts of them defending the Ruhr. We flew through them on the way in, and we flew through them on the way out.’ This, he tells me, is how the Ruhr earned its grim epithet, ‘Happy Valley’. Hun­dreds of guns – both the light as well as the heavy 8.8- and 10.5-centimetre calibre weapons – and searchlights, often aimed by radar, created aerial defensive zones half a mile wide and a thousand feet deep, each one presenting a gauntlet taking six or seven terrifying minutes to fly through. ‘So added all up,’ David tells me, ‘it lasted about an hour.’ Even above the engines, he says, you could hear the explosions: ‘woomph-woomph, muffled, like a distant door slamming’. The smell of the cordite, ‘pungent, like you’ve been letting off firecrackers’, seeped its way inside the aircraft and into his oxygen mask.

  I ask him what he was doing in the turret during all this.

  ‘Trembling,’ he answers. ‘I kept it moving, all the time, not just looking out for fighters, but other Lancs that might be on a collision course. One of the pilots only had to be off by a couple of degrees. There’d be a sudden whoosh and two aircraft had gone in – it happened all the time.’

  This is the atmosphere David paints for me on the run-in to the target that night over Darmstadt: flak rocking the aircraft, buffeting his large frame against the cloying confines of the clear Perspex turret; fighters, he knew, were lurking, but ‘we weren’t worried about them at that stage’. Then, six minutes after they had dropped their bombs, added their contribution to the inferno below and turned for home, a radar-controlled searchlight beam – the distinctive cold purple-blue of the ‘master searchlight’, upon whose cue dozens of other lights acted instantly – picked them out of the ink, holding them like an insect in a torch beam.

  ‘Suddenly, dozens of lights were on us and we were surrounded by this big circle of light a couple of hundred metres across. There was nothing we could do.’ Blinded, the beams of light clinging relentlessly to the black undersides and flanks of the aircraft as it attempted to struggle free with a series of violent corkscrew turns, David worked the bicycle-like hand grips of the turret, eyes straining against the glare. The Lancaster was passed from one searchlight to another as it made its way across the night sky. ‘We were up there and in that light for about twenty-two minutes,’ he says. ‘You could actually see clearly inside the aircraft.’ As terrible as the flak was, David dreaded the moment it would, as he knew it would, suddenly cease. ‘Once it stopped,’ he tells me, ‘you knew a fighter was in the area.’ And then it stopped.

  Moments later, a volley of cannon shells from somewhere out in the stygian gloom sprayed a bright yellow stream over his head. ‘That first attack came from the starboard quarter, but we were corkscrewing and it missed us completely.’ Now acting as fighter controller, David gave urgent instructions to the pilot, Gordon Stewart, to avoid the German’s fire. ‘Down starboard, now!’ he would shout, and as Gordon repeated David’s instructions, the Lancaster would drop like a stone to the right. The flight engineer’s voice was also heard in David’s headphones, reading out the speeds of the aircraft, ‘250 . . . 270 . . . 300 . . .’ giving him a chance to calculate where to land his bullets in the helter-skelter of the battle. Here now was the pay-off for all the tedious hours spent studying, the endless stripping of the Browning .303 machine guns, the poring over the calculations of speed and height and deflection, the foregoing of the pleasures of youth – all that time spent rehearsing for a moment as terrible as this. But he was acting, literally, in the blind. ‘Until I could see where the German’s fire was coming from, I didn’t know where he was, just out in the dark somewhere.’ The aircraft braced for another attack. ‘On the second pass he got us with three shells. One went through the starboard tailplane, one through the starboard wing, and one got my turret.’

  At this I gasp rather foolishly, ‘Your turret?’

  ‘Yes,’ he assures me. ‘It left a pretty big hole.’ Tearing through the thin Perspex, the invisible German’s shell had struck the mounting of David’s twin guns, peppering him with shrapnel. ‘Down starboard!’ he yelled and the aircraft plummeted to the right. Still coned in searchlights, David knew he had no more than three or four minutes before the German pilot would complete another circuit, line up and attack again. The cannon shell had missed his body by inches but steel fragments had torn through his thick flying suit and boots, puncturing him from foot to thigh. It had wrecked the right-hand machine gun and put out of action the hydraulic operating system, rendering the turret moveable only by way of a small manual crank-handle to his side.

  I feel compelled to ask, ‘Did it hurt?’ and he studies the question carefully.

  ‘You know, in all honesty I think my major concern was, I can’t let the blokes down. It’s me or we go down in flames and burn to death. You’ve got no bloody options,’ he says. Some nagging missing element to this story prompts me at this point to ask him about his fellow gunner, Frank Skuthorpe, under the Lancaster’s great tail, armed with four guns as opposed to David’s two. Was this not a coordinated defence? ‘Ah yes,’ he tells me with the grimmest of chuckles, ‘Skuey’s guns had completely iced up. Couldn’t get any of them to operate. He tried hard but he couldn’t move them.’ In temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees, the hydraulics and electrics of these battle-worn aircraft frequently failed.

  In front of him, David saw his right-hand gun was wrecked, and with the ammunition belt feeding through to the left gun, it too was also quite useless. The Lancaster and its crew of seven were now defenceless.


  But now the most extraordinary part of the story unfolds: with the seconds ticking down until another attack and a burst of shells blasted from the dark, David, in sub-zero temperatures, encumbered by no less than three sets of silk gloves, another standard pair, and yet another electrically heated pair, all encased in thick leather gauntlets, still virtually blinded by searchlights and being thrown about the sky by his pilot’s evasive actions, somehow managed to detach the right-hand ammunition feed, reroute it to the left and get his remaining gun working, giving himself and the aircraft at least some hope of defence.

  ‘It was like the Michelin Man trying to thread a needle,’ he says. ‘You couldn’t touch the metal with your bare hands, your skin would freeze to it instantly. It wasn’t easy, but what were the options?’

  Twice more the German attacked, and missed. In David’s headphones, the pilot’s voice relayed his instructions the moment they were given, throwing the aircraft around the sky like a great black toy, frustrating the night fighter’s aim. Then, on the fifth attack, the stalking German pilot, amazingly, made a fatal mistake. He emerged into the light.

  ‘Down port!’ David yelled, as suddenly, there on the port quarter, a hundred or so yards away, a twin-engine Junkers Ju 88 was now exposed as starkly as the Lancaster itself in the light of the search beams. ‘We dived down to increase his deflection, making it more difficult for him to fire his cannon. I think he realised what he’d done and began to break away.’ Leaning the weight of his bruised shoulder on the breech blocks to give his remaining gun some elevation, David, wounded, his blood soaking into his flying suit, fired off a long burst which tore into the German for a hundred yards as it passed over the aircraft. ‘Fortunately, I managed to just land everything into him,’ he says. Full of incendiary ammunition, the Junker burst into flames above his head and fell to the side.

  ‘With the holes in the aircraft, we’d slowed down to about 280,’ he says. ‘He was moving fast and just overshot. I had to put him down as a “probable kill” but he was definitely all in flame.’

  Flak bothered them again on the two-and-a-half-hour trip home, but they made it back to Waddington in the early hours of 12 September. ‘They had to carry me out of the aircraft it was hurting that much,’ he says. Taken to hospital, his blood-soaked flying gear removed, the medicos began digging pieces of metal out of David’s legs. ‘They probed it without anaesthetic, digging for bits, picking out bits. I actually passed out a few times,’ he says.

  David remembers two things very clearly from the next day in hospital: the pain at attempting to go to the toilet, and the image of the burly warrant officer standing beside his bed.

  ‘You’ve caused a fine bloody to-do,’ he glowered.

  ‘What have I done?’ asked David.

  ‘They’re arguing whether to give you a CGM [Conspicuous Gallantry Medal] or a DFM.’

  David thought this over for a moment. ‘DFM would be nice.’

  Upon hearing this the warrant officer’s visage lightened. ‘Oh, that’s good,’ he said and turned away to begin the paperwork.

  ‘Actually,’ says David, ‘I didn’t even know what a CGM was.’

  A few days later, summoned to collect his new DFM ribbon from the same warrant officer, David was overcome by that time-honoured Australian reluctance to say or do, under any circumstances, anything that might possibly be construed as ‘big-noting’ oneself. ‘Jeez, I dunno,’ he mumbled to the big man seated in front of him, fingering the blue-and-white ribbon awkwardly in his hands. ‘I feel a bit of a jerk wearing this. I mean . . . it was the whole crew that went through it after all.’

  The warrant officer looked at him unmoved. ‘Put it on your tunic or I’ll charge you,’ he said.

  David did what he was told. ‘Actually, I was scared of him!’ he says.

  Assuming David’s injuries may well have spelled the end of his tour, being honourably discharged and decorated for his not inconsiderable troubles, I ask him how long he was taken off flying.

  He turns a page in his logbook. ‘Twenty-four hours,’ he says. I am disbelieving.

  ‘You’re not serious?’ I exclaim.

  ‘Darmstadt, 11th/12th – Stuttgart 12th/13th,’ he reads. ‘Yes, we went to Stuttgart that next night. That’s what happened. If you could walk or be carried, you went. And they carried me to the aircraft. I could sit, I was fit. That was the way it was done.’

  So, on David flew, completing an extraordinary tour that could fill a book on its own. Once, an incendiary over a yard long dropped from another Lancaster above and lodged in his Lancaster’s wing between the engines. ‘There was nothing we could do but watch it and hope it didn’t burn the wing through,’ he says. At the end of October 1944, during the final attack on the strategic German-held island of Walcheren at the mouth of the River Scheldt, light flak exploded near the nose, all but blinding bomb aimer Bob Calov with shards of Perspex in his eyes, requiring pilot Gordon Stewart to complete up to five circuits of the heavily defended island at increasingly low levels until Bob could pick out the aiming point of the large-calibre German naval guns. At a near-suicidal 2000 feet, David at last heard him speak down the intercom.

  ‘I see it, I see it! Steady, steady, left a bit . . . bomb’s gone.’ They took out one of the last remaining big guns on the island and both men were immediately decorated, adding another DFM and a Distinguished Flying Cross to David and his crew’s total. Walcheren fell the next day.

  On a daylight trip, it all nearly ended when another Lancaster cut across their flight path from above, shearing off their starboard rudder and elevator with its port wingtip. ‘It was over in a flash,’ says David. ‘Their pilot was weaving in the middle of a tight formation in daylight. Madness. His prop missed my head by a couple of feet.’ But they survived.

  Walking away from their aircraft (X–X-ray), after their last trip, an officer approached them with the news that they’d been invited to join the Pathfinder Force, an undoubted honour, but after an awkward silence among the crew, David spoke up for all of them. ‘I think we’ve done enough,’ he said, to the solemn agreement of everyone. ‘It was the first time I had the courage to say no,’ he says today.

  I ask him if he thought he’d make it through, and he laughs.

  ‘No, not at all! When we arrived, we were told we had just four trips in us. Four. Then that was it. But you know, being killed didn’t worry me, not ever. Being burned or disfigured and having to be a burden on others, that’s what I dreaded.’

  Returning to Australia in late 1945, David says he didn’t really ‘come back’ for a couple of years after that, remaining still in that strange airman’s nether world between life and death, with alcohol a ready companion. ‘For a couple of years, nothing seemed quite real,’ he says of it. ‘I suppose I just wanted to write myself off. I hit the grog pretty heavily and went back to the PMG [Postmaster-General’s Department] as a clerk. How I didn’t get sacked I’ll never know. I never talked about it. Not ever. Inside you felt that people couldn’t really understand anyway.’

  As was so often the case, it was the love of a good woman which guided him back to the land of the living. ‘I felt I was coming to grips with life for the first time,’ he says. ‘Before that, nothing seemed real. One of the first things she said to me was, “If you want to be with me, you’ll have to give up the bottle.” It was the best thing I ever did.’

  Pieces of metal continued to come out of David’s body up until the mid-1950s, but he healed, and is now able to look back on his extraordinary tour with amazing clarity, although, he says, he can really only remember it in fragments, with whole sections simply wiped from his memory. I assure him his account seems anything but fragmentary.

  As David sees me off at the front door of the roomy, noisy club, I catch him as he turns back inside, on his way to prepare himself for the evening session and the company of the community of friends he has made here. I thank him and wish him well, but something prompts me to ask, only half-seriously, if he held on
to those fragments of German shell he carried inside him for so long.

  He laughs, surprised. ‘Actually I used to have them. In a jar. But my wife threw them out. “You can’t live in the past,” she said. Very sensible,’ and he waves as the big glass doors close.

  David Morland and his crew beside their 467 Squadron Lancaster ‘X-Xray’ LM686. From left to right: Stewy, George, David, Bill, Skuey, Bob, Blue. Each man poses holding a 17-pound practice bomb. (Picture courtesy of David Morland)

  David Morland at 21 000 feet in the mid-upper gun turret of his Lancaster, taken en route to Bremen, October 6, 1944. (Picture courtesy of David Morland)

  The personal touch. Bomber Command boss Air Chief Marshal Harris congratulates David Morland on his DFM, which he earned the hard way, over Darmstadt, September 11, 1944. (Picture courtesy of David Morland)

  STAN PASCOE

  Role: Wireless operator / air gunner

  Aircraft: Bristol Blenheim

  Posting: 82 Squadron, RAF

  You have a different slant on life when you’re fighting a war.

  Late one Sunday September morning, Stan Pascoe was sitting on the ground in the wireless operator’s compartment of his twin-engine Avro Anson trainer, picking up what he could on his radio set, when an announcement came over the air, giving him one of those moments in life which remain indelibly sealed inside the memory – the smell, the colour, even the taste of the moment forever time-locked, remaining as real and immediate as the day it happened, even when recalled decades on. It was 3 September 1939. The war clouds he had watched gathering for a year or more had burst, and it was on. For Stan, there was no sense of urgency to join up and get into the war lest it all be over before he was ready to do his bit – at twenty-one, he was already trained up, in uniform and ready to go.